You’ve probably heard before that the mo money we come across, the mo problems we see (Wallace 1997).  While that may be the case when mo money is acquired posthumously, statisticians and economists now have evidence that your happiness is proportional to the logarithm of your wealth (see chart below).  In other words, sadness is for poor people!  The corollary is that the more money you currently have, the more you would have to acquire in order to attain an additional happiness unit.  Much like crack cocaine.

See also a more formal paper about this topic.  I didn’t read it because it looked super boring, but the charts at the end are interesting.  For instance, did you know there is a “U-shaped life satisfaction in rich English-speaking countries”? (Figure 5)

Scientists in Japan have succeeded for the first time in experimentally reproducing traffic jams.  You can read about it here or you can read about it here (both articles say basically the same thing).

You can also see a video of the experiment on YouTube.  It is pretty interesting, but I wish they had done more work to figure out how many cars it takes to cause a traffic jam.  Clearly, two or three cars on the track wouldn’t produce a shockwave.  Ten cars might produce one but it would take longer, for example.  Then maybe they could come up with a general equation to predict the capacity of a section of road.

As you probably know, there was a total lunar eclipse last night, visible from most of the continental United States.  I tried my hand at photographing this event, and I think I got reasonably decent results, given my lack of a telephoto lens.  I used a tripod and the delayed-shot feature on my camera1.  I got half a dozen photos out of the event, which you can find on our photos page.  You can also see in all the pictures Saturn (down and to the left of the moon) and the star Regulus (above and slightly to the left).

While I was looking for information on the eclipse yesterday, I found NASA’s solar eclipse website, which has maps of every solar eclipse from 2000 BC to 3000 AD, in 20-year blocks.  It looks like I only get three chances to see a solar eclipse in my lifetime, assuming 1) I live in this general area of nation for my whole life; 2) I don’t want to travel more than 3-4 hours to see one; and 3) I live to be at least 96 years old.  There was a partial solar eclipse on May 30, 1984 which passed right over my hometown, but I guess I was too two to care at the time.  (See the map of 1981-2000 eclipses.2)  However, on Monday, August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will pass by very close to where I currently live.  I’m thinking on that day I’ll take the day off work and head out to somewhere in the western North Carolina mountains to see the eclipse.  If anyone wants to join me then go ahead and mark your calendars.

The third opporutunity for me to see an eclipse will be May 11, 2078.  I will be 96.5 years old then, so I’m not sure if I’ll still care (assuming, of course, that I’m still alive, which is statistically improbable).

One last thing that I couldn’t think of a way to segue into: there is an interesting story about how Christopher Columbus used a lunar eclipse to save his life.  Proof once again that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Last week I posted a late-night rant on ocular dominance, and since then I’ve read some Wikipedia pages that were kind of interesting.  It seems I was right that there is almost no correlation between dominant hand and dominant foot; however, there is a weak correlation between dominant eye and dominant hand.  I also determined that I am right-eyed.  This makes me like about 60% of the population, in that I’m right-handed, right-eyed, and right-footed.

The ocular dominance test I took before was some variant of the “Dolman” method, which doesn’t work for me because I am too conscious of what is being tested.  But the following test worked for me:  Look at something far away with both eyes open, and then point at it with your index finger extended at full length.  Obviously, you’ll see two index fingers, but you’ll naturally use one of them for pointing.  Once you’ve done this, if you close your eyes one at a time, the one that sees the finger lined up with the object you are pointing at is the dominant eye.  For another variation, if you find that you are pointing at the object with the index finger on the left, you are right-eye dominant, and vice-versa.  When I first did this, I thought that I was favoring my right eye just because I was pointing with my right hand, meaning that lining up my right eye won’t leave the other image of my hand blocking my view.  But when I tried the same test using my left hand, it was still more natural to line up with my right eye.

There were several interesting theories as to why left-handedness would develop in right-handed populations.  Most of them focus on the advantage the left-handed person would have in combat, since the right-handed opponent would be less practiced against left-handed combatants (and for that same reason left-handedness is more common in boxers and baseball players than in the general population).  But there isn’t a good theory as to why we aren’t all ambidextrous, or why there aren’t any isolated left-handed populations.

So back to my original hypothesis: when you go quickly from dark to light, you instinctively close the dominant eye and squint the weak eye.  Yesterday Stephanie and I were leaving a restaurant with some friends in the middle of a sunny day, and as we walked outside I noticed everyone except Stephanie was closing their right eye, but Stephanie was closing her left eye.  I later had her do the test to determine dominant eye (without saying why exactly) and it was indeed her left eye, which is consistent with my theory.

Now for more hypothesizing, Stephanie and I both have weaker vision in our dominant eye.  Is that a coincidence, or is it because the dominant eye is stressed more?

It’s nearly midnight and I am tired but having trouble sleeping, so I decided to get up and do something other than try to sleep.  When I opened the fridge to get something to drink, I thought about the fact that whenever my eyes are adjusted to the dark and I suddenly expose them to light (turning on a computer screen, opening a refrigerator door, turning on a light), I always completely shut my right eye, and squint my left eye.  I’m not sure why this happens—is it related to one eye being the dominant?  It could be that my right eye is the dominant eye and I am instinctively protecting it from the damage of bright light.  Or it could be that my left eye is dominant, and I am instinctively using the better eye.  I’m not sure because I don’t know how to tell which eye is dominant.   (incidentally, my vision in my left eye is much better than the vision in my right eye, but I don’t think that is related to dominance).

I’ve read descriptions of how to test yourself to identify your dominant eye, but they never seem to work for me.  As I recall, they all say something about looking at something far away and then covering up one eye, and if you still see that object you are looking with your dominant eye.  That may not be exactly right, but the problem I always had with the test was that I got the same result for either eye, so either I didn’t understand the test, or I have ambidextrous eyes.

I think I’ve read that dominance in eyes and feet are in the same ratios as hand dominance; about 10% left and 90% right.  I think there’s also no correlation between them (i.e. being left-handed doesn’t make you any more likely to be left-footed).  But this is all coming from memory and may be completely incorrect.

Or maybe the test doesn’t work because my refocusing abilities are just good; I am one of those people that can look at a Magic Eye image and see it almost immediately, without having to hold the book to my nose or anything.  It’s a skill I remember realizing when I was around seven or eight, and I would look up at the the bottom of the top bunk which was supported by cross bars and by something resembling stretched out steel wool, in a very regular pattern.  I found that by adjusting how far I thought the top bunk was from me, I could adjust how far it looked like it was.  By crossing my eyes a little I could make it get closer to me, and stick out my hand until it was “touching” the bunk, even though I wasn’t touching anything.  The bed would be in focus, and my hand would be blurry.  Then I could push my hand even further, “through” the bed.  It also worked in the other way, if I loosened my eyes as if to look through the mattress, it would get farther away, and I could stick my hand out to it but my hand would bang into the “real” mattress before it got to the place where I could “see” it.  Not that I think this is some elusive skill for which I should be praised.. I mean it’s only slightly more useful than being able to roll your tongue.

Well, if any of this has made sense to you.. I am surprised.  This is the kind of random crap that goes through my mind when I can’t sleep:  when I’m tired, but I just can’t shut my brain off.  And what you’ve just read is kind of a stream-of-consciousness exercise.  Well I left out the thoughts that are just ruminations of everything that I have done or said to anyone in the last week or two and whether or not there was something else I could have reasonably said or done that would have led to more desirable outcome for any or all parties involved.  But no one wants to read those thoughts anyway.  I’m going to try to get some more sleep now.

same old decent lazy eye fixed to rest on you (aim free and so untrue)

About a year or so ago I came across a link to this paper (warning: PDF file) in the comments to a blog.  I found it very interesting, and since reading it I’ve been able to recognize this phenomenon “in the wild” so often that I figured I should share.  I’ll warn you that the paper is a 14-page academic paper from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology... and it reads like one.  After the first page or so it gets pretty tedious to read.

Even so, here’s the gist of it:  Often times, someone who is unskilled at something is unaware that they are unskilled, because they don’t have enough skill to evaluate their own skill.  If you ask students how they think they did on a math test after taking it, for example, the students who performed poorly will grossly overestimate their performance.  They usually have some idea that they didn’t perform well, but they aren’t good enough at math to realize just how badly they did.

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen a surprising number of times.  Like someone a few years ago that claimed to have a “heavy graphics background”, then showed me something he made in Flash that was a bumpy model of 3D text, with a glaring shading error on one edge.  I remember someone I went to high school with, who would typically say “I didn’t miss any questions on that test” after taking a test, which would have me worried because I thought I might have missed one or two.  Then we’d get the test back and he’d get a seventy-something.  But he never quite caught on that maybe he was judging his own performance poorly.

Long before reading about this behavior, I learned to distrust confident people.  Upon reading this paper, I realized why most advice you receive is bad:  most people who feel entitled to give advice are not at all qualified to do so.  The great irony is that for most people confidence is a desirable quality in a leader, misinterpreted as an indicator of competence.  You needn’t look far into the world of politics to find dozens of examples of this principle at work.

So to conclude, I ask that my readers (all ten of you) watch for examples of this in your life.  It happens way more often than you might expect.

maybe if we’re loud we’ll stay alive

I haven’t made a blog post in a while.. I guess I’ve been busy at work and I haven’t really been inspired to write anything.  To help keep something fresh on the site, I’ll share some interesting canine survival instincts I have noticed when taking our dog out:

1.  When she is sniffing around exploring, and sticks her head up to sniff the air (as opposed to following a scent on the ground), she will always face directly into the wind.  This makes sense, as that is where she’d be most likely to find a scent of something to hunt (or avoid).

2.  When she is pooping, she always faces downwind.  I’m guessing this instinct allows her to see any predators that might have been alerted to her presence by the new scent.  In addition, she often (but not always) sniffs into the wind (see observation #1) first, which means she has to do a 180 just before pooping.

I don’t consider yesterday’s post to be a real post, just a few questions for the world.  Feel free to keep responding to it, but I’m going to go on with a more typical post.

So my grandfather does not wear a seat belt in a vehicle.  This is something that drives me crazy.  When my dad was driving the van from Oak Island down to Myrtle Beach one day during our vacation, my grandfather was in the passenger seat with no seat belt, while we were going down Highway 17 at 60+ miles per hour.  I’m not sure why he does this.  I’ve been told something about needing to be able to get out of the car if there is an accident.  I’m not really sure if that’s true or not though.  But then I got to thinking—why is it illegal to not wear a seat belt?  I mean, the government can require that cars have seat belts, and it can make sure that people are educated about them.  Buy why is it the government’s responsibility to make sure that we use them?  If I don’t use a seat belt, I am not harming anyone else.  I mean, there is no law requiring that I eat three servings of fruits and vegetables a day, although that probably has a similar statistical effect on my life expectancy.  All that being said, I still don’t understand why anyone would opt to not use a seat belt, and I would probably use much harsher words to describe such a person were I not closely related to one.

I just learned something about human behavior while exploring this topic:  there is a phenomenon called risk compensation, which was “discovered” when researchers were trying to figure out why laws requiring seat belts to be worn didn’t reduce the injury or fatality rates from traffic accidents.  It seems that if you give people a safety feature—say, seat belts, air bags, or anti-lock breaks—they will drive more recklessly, so that the level of risk stays more or less the same.  So my grandfather being in the passenger seat without a seat belt may have made the rest of my family safer, by causing my dad to drive more cautiously.  And it may actually be true that you drive better after one or two beers, because you are being extra careful.  However, I wouldn’t recommend explaining that to a police officer.

Stick shifts and safety belts, bucket seats have all got to go
When I’m driving in my car, it makes my baby seem so far

Today I figured out a way to avoid getting shocked all the time at work.  I actually applied knowledge from PY 208 too!  All I have to do is hold a straightened paper clip in my hand (touching as much skin as possible) and touch the other end to metal.

For background information- one of my cubicle walls is mostly metal.  Everytime I get up to go do something and then come back and sit in my chair, I’ve accumulated a static charge.  This means that the number of free electrons in my body is either higher or lower than the number of free electrons in the metal wall of the cubicle.  When contact is made with this metal, the body with excess electrons tries to reach equilibrium with the other body by giving it more electrons.  This results in a flow of electrons (a.k.a. electricity).

So the Physics 2 knowledge that I applied was this: charges collect around sharp points.  This is why lightning rods are most effective when they have very sharp points at the top.  Okay so the article on lightning rods says that my statement about them is false.  Regardless, there is some mathematically provable reason that charges collect around sharp objects, and my application of this rule was effective.  So when I touch the paper clip and the wall, electricity arcs between them, but since the paper clip is in contact with my whole hand, the shock is distributed evenly across all of the skin it is in contact with.  Since this constitutes the opposite of a sharp point, the charge is very small (so small, in fact, that I don’t feel it).  If I were to hold the paper clip between two fingers, I would still feel the charge, as it would be distributed across much less skin.

Take that, Zeus!