Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?
Apparently not. Because the potentially violent people are at the violent movies, rather than out on the street. And they aren’t drinking during that time, too.
Our estimates suggest that in the short run, violent movies deter almost 1,000 assaults on an average weekend. Although our design does not allow us to estimate long-run effects, we find no evidence of medium-run effects up to three weeks after initial exposure.
Missed Kicks Make Brain See Smaller Goal Post
The researchers used a small, adjustable replica of a goal post to test players’ perception before and after attempting 10 kicks. While standing in front of the real-life goal, participants were asked to adjust the width and height of the model to scale.
The players’ pre-performance estimations didn’t correlate at all with their subsequent success rate. But after 10 field goal attempts, their perceived goal size was highly correlated with peformance.
Interestingly, the change in players’ perception didn’t just depend on how many goals they missed — it also mattered how they missed their goals. Folks who failed because they didn’t kick high enough perceived the crossbar to be taller, while those who kicked to the side viewed it as more narrow.
The New Yorker: Offensive Play
Scary, scary discussion of concussions and chronic brain trauma, cast in the context of the brutality of Michael Vick’s dogfighting conviction/suspension.
[L]ate last month the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research released the findings of an N.F.L.-funded phone survey of just over a thousand randomly selected retired N.F.L. players—all of whom had played in the league for at least three seasons. Self-reported studies are notoriously unreliable instruments, but, even so, the results were alarming. Of those players who were older than fifty, 6.1 per cent reported that they had received a diagnosis of “dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or other memory-related disease.” That’s five times higher than the national average for that age group. For players between the ages of thirty and forty-nine, the reported rate was nineteen times the national average.
More than 500,000 Brazilian free-tailed bats, emerging to forage at night, light up the pitch black darkness of New Mexicos Carlsbad Cavern in this thermal infrared video.
If you have no cat, use a virus instead. probably not said by Erwin Schrödinger
Schrödinger’s intention was to illuminate the paradoxes of the quantum world. But superposition (the existence of a thing in two or more quantum states simultaneously) is real and is, for example, the basis of quantum computing. A pair of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, now propose to do what Schrödinger could not, and put a living organism into a state of quantum superposition.
Note that they are not attempting to put the virus in an alive/dead superposition.
sciencegeekgirl: If a boy pees on the floor and there’s nobody there to see it
The boys’ urinals were often surrounded by a puddle of “liquid.” Were the urinals weeping water? Or were the boys purposely urinating on the floor (as the janitor believed)? And, most importantly, how can we use our good friend SCIENCE to solve this mystery, the teacher asked?
Is there a powder I can sprinkle on the floor that will turn a particular color?
A UV light to shine on the puddles that will fluoresce?It turns out that, yes, there is such a device!
Note that I have not deigned to confirm this effect with my own UV light.
However, I had read about the etched fly “targeting system” discussed; I had charged a friend of my brother’s with the task of finding one of these when he was in Europe. I had read they had been installed in the Amsterdam airport, but he didn’t see any there. This was taken at a restaurant in Berlin
An assassination attempt, with emphasis on ass: the bomb was concealed in the orifice of choice for concealing items. I’d say convenient orifice, but it’s probably not all that convenient.
The bomb couldn’t be that big, and water (being a large fraction of the human body) isn’t very good shrapnel.
While the assassination proved unsuccessful, AQAP had been able to shift the operational paradigm in a manner that allowed them to achieve tactical surprise. The surprise was complete and the Saudis did not see the attack coming — the operation could have succeeded had it been better executed.
We know this wasn’t The Onion because there is no remark about how hindsight is 20-20, mention of a thorough probe of the incident, or talk of a push for new security measures. Or discussion of market penetration of security technology. (Oh, strike that last one. They say it here)
Via Schneier, who cautions us not to tell the TSA.
A very thoughtful, and thought-provoking, chapter from an upcoming book.
If I’d had cancer, people would have rallied around, but because I had schizophrenia, few wanted to know.
They were afraid.
To give it its full mathematical description, a Gömböc is a three-dimensional, convex and homogeneous object with exactly one stable point of equilibrium and one unstable point of equilibrium. Requiring it to be homogeneous amounts to saying that you’re not allowed to cheat: the material from which the Gömböc is made has to be uniform throughout, so you’re not allowed to use weights, as those found in roly-poly toys, or other irregularities to get the Gömböc to self-right. Convexity means that the Gömböc is not allowed to bulge inwards, in other words, the straight line connecting any two points on the Gömböc has to lie entirely within the Gömböc. It’s easy to create a non-convex shape with one stable and one unstable equilibrium point, hence the restriction to convexity.
I have this mental image of Dieter describing the Gömböc. I don’t know why.
Your three-dimensional, convex homogeneity has grown tiresome. Now is the time on Sprockets vhen ve dance!
