How about smoking?
Not too surprisingly, the fewest smokers are in Utah (11.9% of the population over age 18 in 2003). California is second (16.8%), followed by Hawaii (17.2%), Colorado (18.6%) and Connecticut (18.6%).
States with the most smokers are Alaska (26.2%), Louisiana (26.5%), Missouri (27.2%), West Virginia (27.3%) and Kentucky (30.8%).
New Mexico’s 22.0% places it 23rd (fewest).
Complete rankings here.
All this talk today. Well let’s see who’s as logical as they think they are. Take the test: So you think you’re logical? (It will take a few minutes. Read carefully.)
Thanks to dangerousmeta! for the link. There are a number of other games and activities here (untested by NewMexiKen).
From AP via Yahoo! News:
ATLANTA – Heavy suitcases aren’t the only things weighing down airplanes and requiring them to burn more fuel, pushing up the cost of flights. A new government study reveals that airlines increasingly have to worry more about the weight of their passengers.
America’s growing waistlines are hurting the bottom lines of airline companies as the extra pounds on passengers are causing a drag on planes. Heavier fliers have created heftier fuel costs, according to the government study. …
Dallas-based Southwest Airlines requires large people to buy a second seat for passenger safety and comfort.
It sounds too incredible to be true, but this is not a hoax. A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago.
Researchers have so far unearthed remains from eight individuals who were just one metre tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people, nicknamed ‘hobbits’, made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area.
From Nature.com, which has a number of articles, photos, etc.
Seemingly there’s now more evidence for Middle Earth than for the Garden of Eden.
Sending a weak electrical impulse through the front of a person’s head can boost verbal skills by as much as 20 percent, according to a new study by the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
In the study, researchers at the institute asked 103 volunteers to recall as many words that begin with a particular letter as possible. The researchers then passed a 2-milliamp current — one-tenth of what is needed to power a small LED (light-emitting diode) light — through electrodes attached to the surfaces of the volunteers’ foreheads. When the volunteers were quizzed again while the current was still on, this time with a different letter, they were able to come up with 20 percent more words on average.
Now they will have to test Boggle players to make sure they’re not getting an illegal boost.
President Bush scored 1206 on the SAT (566 verbal, 640 math)
John Kerry scored 1190; Al Gore 1355.
Bill Gates scored 1590, but Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen aced it – 1600.
Source: Various places on the internets; several grains of salt required.
Also from The Atlantic Online, November 2004, Primary Sources:
Driving while talking on a cell phone can be more dangerous than driving drunk. A recent study ran a driving simulation comparing the response time of drivers conducting cell-phone conversations and drivers who were legally intoxicated (they drank “a mixture of orange juice and vodka”—in more technical language, a screwdriver). Although the intoxicated drivers tended to follow other cars more closely and brake more violently, the drivers conversing on cell phones exhibited a greater delay in their response to events on the road, and were more likely to be involved in a collision. (Interestingly, it made no difference whether the cell-phone drivers were using handheld or hands-free equipment.) The intoxicated drivers actually drove more slowly, and had a better braking response, than the study’s control group (participants who were neither drunk nor talking on a cell phone). But before you toss away your phone and reach for another shot of tequila, it’s worth noting that the screwdriver-drinking participants had a blood-alcohol level of only .08—drunk, but not that drunk.
“A Comparison of the Cell Phone Driver and the Drunk Driver,” D. Strayer, F. Drews, and D. Crouch, AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies
From The Atlantic Online, November 2004, Primary Sources:
If you feel that the opposite sex isn’t giving you the attention you so richly deserve, maybe you should consider making a change—a name change, that is. According to a preliminary study by an MIT cognitive scientist, the vowel sounds in people’s names may have an impact on how others judge their attractiveness. Specifically, when the men in the study were assigned names with a stressed front vowel (a vowel sound spoken at the front of the mouth), they were rated as more attractive than when they were assigned names with a stressed back vowel. (In other words, good news for Dave, Craig, Ben, Jake, Rick, Steve, Matt; bad news for Lou, Paul, Luke, Tom, Charles, George, John.) In women the effect was reversed, and a stressed back vowel (Laura, Julie, Robin, Susan, Holly) boosted sex appeal, whereas a stressed front vowel (Melanie, Jamie, Jill, Tracy, Ann, Liz, Amy) had the opposite effect—to the author’s disappointment, no doubt.
“What’s in a Name? The Effect of Sound Symbolism on Perception of Facial Attractiveness,” Amy Perfors, MIT
Catholics and Protestants number the Ten Commandments differently. NewMexiKen wrote about it here last year — The n Commandments.
In other words, there could just as easily have been nine commandments or eleven.
Chalmers Roberts, age 93, has written a very special essay about life and dying in The Washington Post.
Brought to You By the Sweat Experts at Old Spice (2003 rank)
1. El Paso, TX (28)
2. Greenville, SC (43)
3. Phoenix, AZ (1)
4. Corpus Christi, TX (–)
5. New Orleans, LA (10)
6. Houston, TX (2)
7. Miami, FL (3)
8. West Palm Beach, FL (6)
9. Fort Myers, FL (5)
10. Las Vegas, NV (12)
11. Waco, TX (8)
12. Tampa, FL (7)
13. Dallas, TX (11)
14. Orlando, FL (13)
15. San Antonio, TX (4)
16. Mobile, AL (20)
17. Savannah, GA (15)
18. Austin, TX (9)
19. Shreveport, LA (14)
20. Tulsa, OK (16)
21. Charleston, WV (19)
22. Honolulu, HI (23)
23. Jacksonville, FL (21)
24. Tucson, AZ (24)
25. Jackson, MS (22)
Source: Press release from Procter & Gamble via Yahoo!
was signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt on this date in 1935.
I’m 35 years old. If nothing is done to improve Social Security, what can I expect to receive in retirement benefits from the program?
Unless changes are made, at age 73 your scheduled benefits could be reduced by 27 percent and could continue to be reduced every year thereafter from presently scheduled levels.
I’m 25 years old. If nothing is done to change Social Security, what can I expect to receive in retirement benefits from the program?
Unless changes are made, when you reach age 63 in 2042, benefits for all retirees could be cut by 27 percent and could continue to be reduced every year thereafter. If you lived to be 100 years old in 2079 (which will be more common by then), your scheduled benefits could be reduced by 33 percent from today’s scheduled levels.
Should I count on Social Security for all my retirement income?
No. Social Security was never meant to be the sole source of income in retirement. It is often said that a comfortable retirement is based on a “three-legged stool” of Social Security, pensions and savings. American workers should be saving for their retirement on a personal basis and through employer-sponsored or other retirement plans.
Is there really a Social Security trust fund?
Yes. Presently, Social Security collects more in taxes than it pays in benefits. The excess is borrowed by the U.S. Treasury, which in turn issues special-issue Treasury bonds to Social Security. These bonds totaled $1.5 trillion at the beginning of 2004, and Social Security receives more than $80 billion annually in interest from them. However, Social Security is still basically a “pay-as-you-go” system as the $1.5 trillion is a small percent of benefit obligations.
More informative Q&A about Social Security.
Paraskevidekatriaphobia — fear of Friday the 13th
So where does it come from — the fear of 13? Its origins can be traced to Norse mythology and a dinner party at Valhalla, home of the god Odin, where Odin and 11 of his closest god-friends were gathered one night to party. Everyone was having fun, but then Loki, the dastardly god of evil and turmoil, showed up uninvited, making it a crowd of 13. The beloved god Balder tried to boot Loki out of the house, the legend goes, and in the scuffle that followed he suffered a deathblow from a spear of mistletoe.
From that mythological start, the number 13 has plowed a path of devastation through history. There were 13 people at Christ’s Last Supper, including the double-crossing Judas Iscariot. The ill-fated Apollo 13 lunar mission left the launching pad at 13:13 hours and was aborted on April 13. Friday hasn’t been much kinder to us. Friday was execution day in ancient Rome — Jesus was crucified on a Friday. Put it all together, and Friday the 13th spells trouble for triskaidekaphobics. It’s a testament to the phobia’s prevalence that Hollywood was able to parlay our fear into a hugely successful series of slasher movies starring a hockey-masked guy named Jason.
But triskaidekaphobia isn’t an exclusively American affliction. Italians omit the number 13 from their national lottery. There is a hush-hush organization in France whose exclusive purpose is to provide last-minute guests for dinner parties, so that no party host ever has to suffer the curse of entertaining 13 guests.
— Excerpted from Jon Bowen, writing at Slate.
About.com has five pages of background on the superstition.
were down slightly in 2003 to 42,643; motorcycle fatalities were up 12% to 3,661.
56% of those killed in car crashes last year were not wearing seat belts.
Rollover crashes account for 3% of all accidents, but they represent one-third of all highway fatalities.
Report from the Los Angeles Times.
What do Wayne Gretzky, Yo-Yo Ma, and a brain surgeon have in common? Malcolm Gladwell tells us in a truly remarkable article published in The New Yorker in 1999. Three excerpts:
Wayne Gretzky, in a 1981 game against the St. Louis Blues, stood behind the St. Louis goal, laid the puck across the blade of his stick, then bounced it off the back of the goalie in front of him and into the net. Gretzky’s genius at that moment lay in seeing a scoring possibility where no one had seen one before. “People talk about skating, puck-handling, and shooting,” Gretzky told an interviewer some years later, “but the whole sport is angles and caroms, forgetting the straight direction the puck is going, calculating where it will be diverted, factoring in all the interruptions.”
*****
On his days in the operating room, at the height of his career, [neurosurgeon Charlie] Wilson would run his morning ten or twelve miles, conduct medical rounds, operate steadily until six or seven in the evening, and, in between, see patients, attend meetings, and work on what now totals six hundred academic articles.
*****
The most successful performers improvise. They create, in [Yo-Yo] Ma’s words, “something living.” Ma says he spends ninety per cent of his time “looking at the score, figuring it out–who’s saying this, who wrote this and why,” letting his mind wander, and only ten per cent on the instrument itself. Like [Michael] Jordan, his genius originates principally in his imagination. If he spent less time dreaming and more time playing, he would be Karl Malone.
Link via Baseball Musings.
From Robin Marantz Henig in The New York Times:
In the last few years, 30 states have considered legislation to outlaw the use of hand-held cellphones while driving. Most have failed. But three states now have such laws. The most far-reaching, New Jersey’s, which went into effect this month, prohibits drivers from doing anything else – not just talking while holding a cellphone but restraining a pet, reading a map or eating a Krispy Kreme doughnut on the way to work. The ultimate antimultitasking law.
*****Still, in the long run, multitasking is what wastes time. Last year, psychologists at the University of Michigan reported that when they asked subjects to perform two or more experimental tasks – solving arithmetic problems, say, at the same time they identified a series of shapes – the frontal cortex, the executive function center of the brain, had to switch constantly, toggling back and forth in a stutter that added as much as 50 percent to the time it would have taken to perform the tasks sequentially instead of simultaneously.
From an article in Sunday’s New York Times on Smith remaining the most popular surname in America.
For the first time, more Americans now describe their ancestry as African or African-American than English, more as Mexican than Italian and nearly as many Vietnamese as Cuban. But no group grew more in the 1990’s than those who described their ancestry only as “American” – up to 20 million in 2000 from 12 million in 1990.
The BBC has a short test to see if you can determine fake smiles from the genuine item. There are 20 smiles to judge after completing a short questionnaire. It’s fun and challenging and will take 6-7 minutes.
NewMexiKen managed to get it right 15 out of 20 smiles.
NewMexiKen has mentioned the TCCI twice already but has decided, like other prominent bloggers, to post it directly with my choice (and a few I didn’t know or couldn’t decide).
Don’t forget to check out TCCI, mentioned here Tuesday. It’s a list of 100 pairs. You chose one of the two. It doesn’t reveal any particular personality traits or anything (I don’t think), but it’s still kind of fun.
From the first three, NewMexiKen picks Kelly, The Sun Also Rises and Duke Ellington.
Want to make some choices (just for the fun of it)? Choices like Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? Count Basie or Duke Ellington? There’s 100 choices in all at the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index.
The background is here.
Link via Crooked Timber.
From New Scientist:
Senior citizens played an important role in the dramatic spread of human civilisation some 30,000 years ago, a study of the human fossil record has shown.
…Anthropologists have long suspected that older people may have played an important role in the development of early human societies by providing extra care for children, helping to accumulate useful information and strengthening kinship bonds.
The so-called “grandmother hypothesis”, based on studies of African hunter-gatherer groups, suggests that infertile women are vital for successful child-rearing despite being unable to produce children themselves.
From Reuters:
Two ingredients commonly used in cough syrup are no better than sugar water in suppressing night-time coughing in children, according to a study published on Tuesday.
Yeah, but can we still do as Chris Rock’s father did and pour some ‘Tussin on it?
From Slate, a hot dog taste test:
The Fourth of July is not only America’s most patriotic holiday, it’s also the holiday during which we consume large quantities of the foods the writer H.L. Mencken once described as “rubber, indigestible pseudo-sausage” — that is, the hot dog.