Category: Informative

Unless you’re trying to fill out your bullpen for a post-season run, the evolutionary usefulness of left-handedness may seem a little puzzling. But it turns out that southpaws may remain in the gene pool because they’re good to have around in a fight. A study by two French academics tracked the prevalence of left-handedness across a variety of traditional societies, and found that the more violent ones tended to have a higher percentage of lefties. Among the Dioula people of Burkina Faso, for instance, the homicide rate is just 0.013 murders per thousand inhabitants per year, and left-handers make up only 3.4 percent of the population. In contrast, the more warlike Yanomamo of the Venezuelan rain forest have a homicide rate of four per thousand per year, and southpaws compose roughly 23 percent of their population. What’s advantageous in baseball, it turns out, may also be advantageous in a jungle knife fight.

The Atlantic Online: Primary Sources (April 2005)

Jesus taught Christians to “love thy neighbor.” According to a recent survey by researchers at Cornell University, however, the more religious the American, the less likely he is to love (or at least trust) his Muslim neighbors. For instance, 42 percent of the highly religious (versus only 15 percent of citizens who are “not very religious”) believe that American Muslims should have to register their whereabouts with the government; 34 percent (versus 13 percent) say that U.S. mosques should be monitored; and 40 percent (versus 19 percent) look favorably on government infiltration of Islamic civic and volunteer organizations. The highly religious are also more distrustful the more attention they pay to TV news.

The Atlantic Online: Primary Sources (April 2005)

From The New York Times:

Since 1990, according to immigration figures, more [Africans] have arrived voluntarily than the total who disembarked in chains before the United States outlawed international slave trafficking in 1807. More have been coming here annually – about 50,000 legal immigrants – than in any of the peak years of the middle passage across the Atlantic, and more have migrated here from Africa since 1990 than in nearly the entire preceding two centuries.

Albloggerque reviews elementary school furniture. Also here.

It’s not a pretty sight.

Of course, it is good prep for crappy jobs.

To most people, that Wisconsin quarter jingling in our pockets or purses is worth exactly 25 cents.

But to coin collectors, it could be worth $500 or so if there is an extra leaf – or a flaw that looks like a leaf – on the cornstalk pictured on the tail side of the quarter.

Report in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has photos.

Link via Kottke

The Baby Name Wizard. (Requires Java)

Mark A. R. Kleiman has an ethics problem. What would you do?

Link via Discourse.net.

From The New York Times, Sudden Stress Breaks Hearts —

Sudden emotional stress – from grief, fear, anger or shock – can cause heart failure, in a little known and poorly understood syndrome that seems to affect primarily women, researchers are reporting today. The victims are generally healthy, with no history of heart disease.

A death in the family, an armed robbery, a car accident, a biopsy procedure and a surprise party were among the events that sent 18 women and one man to coronary care units in Baltimore with chest pains and weakening of the heart, according to an article in The New England Journal of Medicine.

NewMexiKen turned 60 last Friday. Sixty is a cooler number than 59, so for that reason alone I was OK with it. But official daughter Jill helped put it into even sharper focus. Noting that famed Reggae singer Bob Marley also would have been 60 (on Sunday), Jill pointed out that 60 was much better than, like Marley, dying in 1981.

Yet another in a series of occasional household tips based on NewMexiKen’s personal experience:

When unable to locate a small kitchen utensil such as the stainless steel coffee scoop, a good place to check is the garbage disposal.

Previous hints here, here and here.

From The Washington Post:

Strolling to the bus stop, fidgeting during a meeting, standing up to stretch, jumping off the couch to change channels, and engaging in other minor physical activities can make the difference between being lean and obese, researchers reported yesterday.

The most detailed study ever conducted of mundane bodily movements found that obese people tend to be much less fidgety than lean people and spend at least two hours more each day just sitting still. The extra motion by lean people is enough to burn about 350 extra calories a day, which could add up to 10 to 30 pounds a year, the researchers found.

What You’ll Wish You’d Known, a possible talk for high schoolers by Paul Graham. Interesting reading.

I’ll start by telling you something you don’t have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you’re supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.

Like Paula Poundstone, I thought adults asked kids what they wanted to be because the adults were still searching for ideas.

… If you’d asked me in high school what the difference was between high school kids and adults, I’d have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong. It’s that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it.

… It’s dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it’s not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart.

… If you think it’s restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.

… What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college.

Does $4 a square foot (for carpet, pad, installation, moving furniture and removing old carpet) sound like a good value?

Update: Apparently so, for good quality. I’ll let you know once it’s installed.

Kottke has found an older interview with the ever insightful writer Malcolm Gladwell at ESPN.com. Well worth reading on baseball and drugs, including this, the best description of choking I’ve seen.

For example, if you gave me a picture of blank keyboard and asked me to write in appropriate letters in the right places, I’d have to think really hard before I could do that accurately. My conscious knowledge of a keyboard is pretty weak. But right now I’m typing at perhaps 40 words per minute, and I’m having absolutely no trouble finding the right letter on the keyboard without thinking at all.

That’s my unconscious knowledge system at work, and in that mode I’m a great typist. These two systems are quite separate. And on tasks that we are good at — like typing, in my case, or throwing a baseball in, say, Derek Jeter’s case — our unconscious systems are way better than our conscious system. But sometimes under pressure, we get forced out of unconscious mode. And what are we left with? We’re left with painstakingly going over the keyboard, trying to remember what button goes with what letter. This is what choking is. It’s when you get jolted out of unconscious mode. You start thinking too much.

From Scientific American —

Why is normal blood pressure less than 120 over 80? And why don’t these numbers change according to a person’s height?

But modern epidemiologic studies have confirmed with a great deal of certainty that risk of a heart attack or stroke begins to increase in adults when the usual systolic blood pressure is 115 or higher and/or the usual diastolic blood pressure is 75 or higher. The risk steadily increases with higher and higher readings, so the traditional 120/80 level remains reasonable as a threshold for getting a doctor’s attention.

It does in fact increase with height, which ensures that the brain, located at the highest point of the circulatory system for most of the day, gets sufficient blood flow and oxygen, despite the pull of gravity and other forces. But the effect is fairly small, which is why the 120/80 figure is not adjusted for taller people.

Answers excerpted from fuller explanation.

Dan Neil profiles 10 of the great cars of the year, but begins with this commentary:

Think of our relationship with the internal combustion engine as a roller coaster ride. We’ve had our ups and downs, but 2004 was the first year most people could see, clearly, that the tracks were out ahead. Californians saw gasoline hit $3 per gallon and not for the last time. American foreign policy is bloodily fixated on a region of the world whose single strategic value is oil. Even the Bush administration had to concede this year that there was something to all this talk of global warming. But automakers, suing to stop California’s new carbon-emission standards, are in greenhouse denial.

Whose air is it, anyway?

The future belongs to automakers who embrace change.

We often read about the state of the American economy in terms of averages. As David Cay Johnston points out in his book Perfectly Legal however, averages can be misleading.

When Bill Gates walks into a café where a dozen people are already eating, the average wealth in the room rises to billions of dollars, hardly a reasonable picture of the situation.

As requested, this is a cropped close up from the photo posted yesterday.

Thomas D. Mangelsen photo

From CNN.com:

After Babs the gorilla died at age 30, keepers at Brookfield Zoo decided to allow surviving gorillas to mourn the most influential female in their social family.

One by one Tuesday, the gorillas filed into the Tropic World building where Babs’ body lay, arms outstretched. Curator Melinda Pruett Jones called it a “gorilla wake.”

Babs’ 9-year-old daughter, Bana, was the first to approach the body, followed by Babs’ mother, Alpha, 43. Bana sat down, held Babs’ hand and stroked her mother’s stomach. Then she sat down and laid her head on Babs’ arm.

Read more.

The always delightful Dan Neil of the Los Angeles Times reviews the new Honda Accord Hybrid. He begins:

Forget Ferrari and Lamborghini. For those of certain sympathies and convictions, the Honda Accord Hybrid may be the sexiest thing on four wheels.

Are you one of them? Take this simple test to find out:

Do you think Ralph Nader a villain or a secular saint? If the latter, give yourself one point (if you think Ralph is sexy, give yourself two points).

Do you believe global warming is pseudo-science trumped up by alarmist researchers enriching themselves on research grants, or do you believe it poses an imminent threat to life on Earth? If the latter, give yourself three points. Sports talk radio or NPR? If the latter, four points. Hummer hater? Five points. Do you know your Starbucks barista by name? Six points.

Do you believe the secret Cheney energy task force was not unduly influenced by oil and coal lobbyists? Deduct 10 points and check your watch. It might be time for your meds.

In some ways, the Accord Hybrid, which is available starting Friday, is extraordinary in its ordinariness.

Click image to enlarge.

Kindergartens in Boston will begin issuing report cards this year, evaluating children on three dozen skills. “I want to give my son the mind-set to get into first grade,” said one father, “rather than the traditional kindergarten fare: milk and cookies, taking naps, reading stories.” A school official said today’s 4-year-olds no longer had time to waste. “Kindergarten,” he said, “should be about preparing them to be 5-year-olds in the real world.”

From The Week Newsletter

Soon we should begin to see Saturday morning reality television programs.

How about health insurance? 91.3% of the people in Minnesota have private or public health insurance. 90.5% are coverd in Vermont; 89.9% in Hawaii.

At the other end, 20.4% of the people in Oklahoma are not covered. 20.6% of the folks in Louisiana lack coverage; 22.1% in New Mexico; 24.6% in Texas.

All states listed here.

The thinest states (by percentage not considered obese) are Colorado (84.0%), Hawaii (83.6%) and Massachusetts (83.2%).

The fattest (by percentage that are considered obese) are Indiana (26.0%), West Virginia (27.7%), Mississippi (28.1%) and Alabama (28.4%).

All states listed here.

Obese is defined having a body mass index (BMI) of 30.0 or higher. BMI is equal to your weight in pounds divided by your height in inches squared and then multiplied by 703. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a BMI Calculator.