Category: Informative

Michael Bierut gives us architect, writer and teacher Michael McDonough’s “The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School.” It seems to NewMexiKen, however, that the lessons apply everywhere. Worth the click.

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.

Harper’s Magazine publishes its Index each month, putting it on-line the first of the month following publication in the magazine. Some items from the January 2004 Harper’s Index:

Percentage of Americans who say they would prefer a universal health-care system to the current one : 62

Estimated number of times a one-year-old was bitten by his peers at a Croatian day-care center one morning last fall : 30

Days in 1970 that northern Alaska was cold enough to operate oil-drilling machinery without damaging the tundra : 213

Days in 2002 that it was cold enough : 106

Number of cast members of the movie Predator who have run for governor : 3

Number who have won : 2

Minimum amount boxer Mike Tyson earned in the nine years before filing for bankruptcy last August : $300,000,000.

Buffalo Robe.com

From the Scientific American

Below, and in no particular order, are 25 of the stories that most impressed us here at Scientific American.com. Some are included on the basis of their significance, others for sheer fun.

Skulls of Oldest Homo sapiens Recovered

Gecko-Inspired Adhesive Sticks It to Traditional Tape

SARS: Caught Off Guard

China’s Great Leap Upward

Four-Winged Dinosaur and the Dawn of Flight

New Drug May Mitigate Peanut Allergy

The Infant Universe, In Detail

The Cold Odds against Columbia

Pet Prairie Dogs Suspected in U.S. Monkeypox Outbreak

New Study Finds Agent Orange Use Was Underestimated

Large Fish Populations Imperiled

Harvesting Hydrogen Fuel from Plants Gets Cheaper

Mare Gives Birth to Own Clone

Electronic Paper Speeds Up for Videos

Number of Threatened Species Tops 12,000

Autopsies, No Scalpel Required

100 Years of Flight: The Equivocal Success of the Wright Brothers

Ink Analysis Smudges Case for Forgery of Vinland Map

Scientists Discover New Frog Family

E-mail Study Corroborates Six Degrees of Separation

Celebrating the Genetic Jubilee: A Conversation with James Watson

Astronomers Find Most Ancient Planet Yet

Decaf Coffee Plants Developed

Claim of Nonhuman-Induced Global Warming Sparks Debate

NASA has a web site dedicated to the Mars Exploration Rover Mission.

The U.S. Mint will release quarters honoring Michigan, Florida, Texas, Iowa and Wisconsin in 2004. That’s the 26th through 30th states.

Last year’s quarters were Illinois, Alabama, Maine, Missouri and Arkansas.

According to a study by the Brookings Institution

[T]he true size of government has grown by 1.1 million jobs since 1999. Although military personnel and postal employment inched up during the period, almost all of the growth has occurred in two categories: contract and grant-generated jobs….[C]ivil service employment actually fell by almost 50,000 jobs from 1999 to 2002. During the same period contract-generated jobs went up by more than 700,000 jobs and grant-generated jobs by 333,000.

Total Civil Servants………………1,756,000
Total Contractors…………………5,168,000
Total Grantees……………………2,860,000
Total Military Personnel…………1,456,000
Total Postal Service…………………875,000

TOTAL TRUE SIZE
OF FEDERAL GOVERNMENT…….12,115,000

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day — Close up of the Face on Mars — isn’t particularly appealing, but the narrative accompanying it is both amusing and informative, particularly if you follow the links.

SoYouWanna.com

From Slate, What’s the best way to treat acid reflux?, a fascinating if somewhat unorthodox survey of the drugs. Fun and informative reading for any who suffer from this malady.

NewMexiKen takes two Kirkland 75mg Ranitidine, per doctor’s direction. That proved to be one of the most successful remedies in the “trial.”

Panda Cam

Consumer Reports has a Consumer Checklist for Cell Phone ‘Independence Day’

According to the U.S. Census there were 26,549,704 veterans in the U.S. and Puerto Rico in 2000.

The United States Mint

David Frum’s Diary on National Review Online

Without disputing Charles’ main theory, his challenge makes for an interesting parlor game. So here’s my list, in no particular order, of 10 things from 1950 to 2000 that will still matter two hundred years hence:

1. A. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
2. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao.
3. The paintings of Jackson Pollock.
4. The Godfather I & II
5. C. Milosz, The Captive Mind.
6. West Side Story.
7. M. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
8. The collected “I Love Lucy.”
9. VS Naipaul, A Bend in the River.
10. Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA.

Also (and in honor of Virginia Postrel) almost the entire corpus of mid-century decorative arts: the Concorde jet, the UN building, and the 1959 Cadillac Coup de Ville.

NewMexiKen would be glad to post your list.

About Daylight Saving Time – History, rationale, laws & dates

There were 639 homicides in the workplace in 2001, making homicide the third-leading cause of fatal occupational injury in the United States. 280 of the homicides were at retail businesses.

Transportation incidents were the big work-related killer (2,517 fatalities); contact with objects and equipment was second (962). There were 5,900 total workplace deaths in 2001, not including the 2,886 work-related fatalities of September 11th.

If last October 1st Congress had abolished the Departments of State, Justice, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, and Education, and it had abolished NASA, EPA, and OSHA, and it had abolished itself and the federal courts — or at least if it hadn’t funded these — the U.S. Government would still be $110 billion in arrears this fiscal year.

Of every dollar the federal government spends ($2.14 trillion in all):

• 11 cents go to Medicare
• 22 cents for Social Security
• 4 cents for other disability and retirement programs

  37 cents for senior and disabled Americans

• 10 cents for health in all its forms other than Medicare (research, Medicaid)
• 2½ cents for unemployment compensation
• 3½ cents for housing and food assistance
• and another nearly 5 cents for other income security programs

  21 cents, mostly for the unfortunate

• just more than 17 cents go to national defense
• and nearly another 3 cents go for veterans benefits

  20 cents for national defense and veterans

• 1 cent goes for international affairs including foreign aid
• 1 cent goes to science and space
• a little less than 1 cent is for farm subsidies (80%) and other agricultural programs (20%)
• nearly 1½ cents go for parks, dams, forests and other environmental programs including EPA
• 3 cents are spent on transportation (59% on the ground, the rest for air and water transportation)
• 1 cent is for community development and disaster relief
• 2½ cents are for education
• and another 1½ cents for training programs
• not quite 2 cents go for justice and law enforcement
• and 1 more cent for the President, Congress, personnel, printing money, property management, archives, etc.

  less than 15 cents for most federal “government” programs other than defense

• and lastly 7½ cents for interest on the debt

The 2003 federal budget (according to the July White House Mid-Session Review) is estimated to be $1.77 trillion in receipts and $2.21 trillion in outlays (expenditures). That means a deficit of $440 billion. (The actual numbers will be available after the 2003 fiscal year ends this coming Tuesday.)

For every dollar the federal government spends:

• 36 cents come from individual income taxes
• 32 cents come from Social Security, Medicare and other retirement taxes
• 6 cents come from corporate income taxes
• 3 cents are generated by taxes on alcohol, tobacco, fuel, telephones, air transportation, etc. (excise taxes)
• 3 cents come from estate taxes, custom duties and government fees (such as $50 for a National Parks Pass)
• and 20 cents are borrowed from our children and grandchildren

Revised September 26, 2003

From The Harvard Crimson: “Breaking records and shattering stereotypes, Harvard alums made a glittering double appearance at the Miss America competition last Saturday when two recent graduates made the top ten….Competing as Miss Virginia and Miss Rhode Island, respectively, Redd and Gray were seeking to follow in the footsteps of outgoing Miss America Erika Harold, who plans to enroll in Harvard Law School…in fall 2004.”

Five other Harvard alumnae have been in the Pageant in the past decade.

• More than 146 million Americans age 16 and over are in the nation’s labor force. That includes more than 78 million men and more than 68 million women.
• The annual median earnings for male and female full-time, year-round workers in 2001: $38,275 and $29,215 respectively.
• Average annual pay in the San Jose metropolitan statistical area: $65,926. San Jose has led all metro areas in this category since 1997.
• More than 16 million workers across the country belong to a labor union. That amounts to 14 percent of all wage and salary workers. The rate, of course, varies a lot by state — New York having the highest rate at 27 percent; North Carolina having the lowest rate at 4 percent.
• Growth this decade in the number of people employed as computer applications software engineers: 100%. Forecasters expect this occupation to grow at a faster rate than any other.
• Projected increase in the number of combined food preparation and serving (e.g., fast food) workers during this decade: 673,000. This occupation is expected to add more positions than any other.

U.S. Bureau of the Census

Writing in The New York Review, biologist H. Allen Orr has a lengthy review of Matt Ridley’s Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human.

If, by magic, I could make a single interminable debate disappear, I’d probably pick “nature versus nurture.” The argument over the relative roles of genes and environment in human nature has been ceaselessly politicized, shows little sign of resolution, and has, in general, grown tiresome. This is perhaps most obvious in the bloodiest battle of the nature–nurture war, the debate over IQ: How much of the variation that we see in intelligence (at least as measured by standardized tests) is due to heredity and not upbringing? From Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869) through Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981) to Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994), the battle has raged one way and the other, with no clear victor emerging.

It’s good to learn, I suppose, that I’m not the only one who finds the argument annoyingly long-lived. The dust jacket of Matt Ridley’s new book, Nature via Nurture, features statements from a number of scientists and science writers admitting that they had thought it impossible to produce an interesting new book on the subject. In such a climate, if you’re going to attempt yet another work on nature–nurture, you’d better have something truly new, something really big, to say. Matt Ridley does.

Ridley…has produced a volume that ranges over a vast number of topics, from the genetics of mental illness to the mystery of free will. But at its core are Ridley’s ideas on how to break free of the conflict between nature and nurture.