Isegoria

This Colorblindness Test consists of five color plates filled with colored dots.

In some cases, the dots form a number invisible to colorblind viewers. In other cases, it’s the opposite. Do you see 29 or 70?

Jill Ann Spaulding — no, I’d never heard of her either — tells What Really Happened In Hef’s Bedroom during her stay at the mansion:

I thought I was going to get to play dress up and go out partying and just have a great time looking like I’m [Hef's] girlfriend. I had no idea it was the real deal.

This Colorblindness Test consists of five color plates filled with colored dots.

In some cases, the dots form a number invisible to colorblind viewers. In other cases, it’s the opposite. Do you see 29 or 70?

Jill Ann Spaulding — no, I’d never heard of her either — tells What Really Happened In Hef’s Bedroom during her stay at the mansion:

I thought I was going to get to play dress up and go out partying and just have a great time looking like I’m [Hef's] girlfriend. I had no idea it was the real deal.

Techdirt cites a passage from Robert L. Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers — which I’ve been meaning to read — that explains How The RIAA Is Like 17th Century French Button-Makers:

The question has come up whether a guild master of the weaving industry should be allowed to try an innovation in his product. The verdict: “If a cloth weaver intends to process a piece according to his own invention, he must not set it on the loom, but should obtain permission from the judges of the town to employ the number and length of threads that he desires, after the question has been considered by four of the oldest merchants and four of the oldest weavers of the guild.” One can imagine how many suggestions for change were tolerated.

Shortly after the matter of cloth weaving has been disposed of, the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people’s homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods.

(Hat tip to Mike.)

In Great Dane, Great Pain, Henrik Rasmussen counters recent Denmark-as-Utopia thinking with “a dose of reality from someone who has actually lived in Denmark”:

Taken together, these numbers indicate that the 10% poorest in the United States have roughly the same standard of living as their Danish counterparts while the remaining 90% of Americans are better off than the Danes.

Anecdotal evidence and hard numbers concerning material goods support this conclusion. If we look at housing, the Heritage Foundation estimates that Danes have an average of 558 square feet per person available compared to a US average of 721.2 — almost 30% more living space. The difference is even more striking if we look at cars: According to Eurostat, America has 759 cars per 1000 people compared to 354 in Denmark — a difference of more than 100%. In particular, large passenger vehicles such as SUVs are extremely rare in Denmark.

In addition, Danes tend to have fewer household amenities than Americans. A case in point: my wife and I recently hosted a Danish friend at our home in Virginia. During the clean up after dinner, our guest was astonished by our garbage disposal, having never seen one or even heard of one before in her life.

Ironically, the taxation system, which is designed to redistribute income for the benefit of the poor, is one of the main reasons poor and lower middle class Danes are not doing better than their American counterparts. For instance, Denmark has a value-added tax (VAT) of 25% on all goods and services, which increases prices for everyone regardless of their income. Furthermore, certain goods such as cars and gasoline are taxed at even higher rates. The sales tax on cars is 180%, and the price of gasoline is currently $6.50 per gallon due to taxes. Since the poor tend to spend a larger percentage of their income on consumption than the rich, the high VAT and special sales taxes hit the poor relatively hard.

A “mass exodus is already taking place”:

For instance, estimates of Danes living in London vary between 35,000 and 70,000, which is roughly 1% of the total Danish population of 5.4 million. According to the leading Copenhagen business daily Børsen, the average income of these Danish Londoners is more than $100,000 per year.

New research shows that Peyote Won’t Rot Your Brain:

In the first study of its kind, researchers have found that peyote — for now, the only legal hallucinogenic drug in the United States — doesn’t rob regular users of brain power over time.

While the findings don’t directly indicate anything about the safety of psychedelic drugs like LSD and mushrooms, they do suggest that at least one hallucinogen is OK to use for months or even years.

“We really weren’t able to find any (mental) deficits,” said Dr. John Halpern, associate director of substance abuse research at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and co-author of the study, released today in the Nov. 4 issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry.

Art De Vany examines Sun Exposure Variation, Modern and Ancient:

One of the odd things about modern life is that we have dampened the routine exposure we get to sunlight through our use of shelter, clothing, and (now) avoidance of sun and sunblocks. This lessened daily exposure to sun causes our systems to down regulate vitamin D and melatonin production. Both are known to be protective of cancer.

Then we take the family to Cancun and lay in the sun for a week. Or, we hike in bright sun and thin air. Or, spend a week on Palm Springs golf courses. Or, run a marathon or two. This is quite a shock to a body that is adapted to low sun exposure. This kind of low-level exposure with intermittent big shocks may paradoxically be far worse than a higher level of more routine exposure. The protection thought to be provided by routine avoidance sets us up for greater shock and damage when we take the plunge of high exposure. This highly discontinuous variation in sun exposure is far from a natural rhythm of more constrained variation that would have been true in evolutionary times and even in the recent past.

Constrained variation dampens adaptive capacity. Discontinuous variation then becomes a potentially damaging shock to a system that has reduced adaptive capacity. I have made this argument before about exercise and eating and even alluded to the need for temperature variations too. All challenge and expand our adaptive capacity and are protective.

The pill may raise odds of having allergic kids — after the mother-to-be goes off the pill, of course:

To investigate, the researchers studied 618 asthmatic children aged 5 or 6 years and compared them with 564 similar but unaffected children.

The team found that, compared to children whose mothers had not used oral contraceptives, those who had taken the pill within a year of becoming pregnant had a 67 percent greater likelihood of having a child with allergic rhinitis, or nasal allergy.

This was particularly the case in families where the parents had allergies, and this association was stronger in boys.

There was no association between mothers’ use of the pill and the occurrence of asthma or eczema in their offspring.

Recent research shows rats, not men, to blame for death of Easter Island:

Almost all of the palm seed shells discovered on the island were found to have been gnawed by rats. Thousands of rat bones have been found, and crucially, much of the damage to forestry appears to have been done before evidence of fires on the island. Evidence from other Pacific islands also confirms how devastating rats can be.

Exactly how rats got on to the island is not known, although one theory is that they arrived as stowaways in the first canoes of Polynesian colonists. Once they arrived, the rats found palm nuts offered an almost unlimited high-quality food supply.

Under ideal conditions, rats reproduce so rapidly that their numbers double every 47 days; unchecked, a single mating pair can produce a population of nearly 17 million in just over three years. Research in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands shows that when available food is taken into account, populations can reach 75 to the acre.

“At 75 rats per acre, the rat population of Easter Island could have exceeded 3.1 million,” says the report. The Hawaiian research demonstrates that rats were capable, on their own, of deforesting large lowland coastal areas in about 200 years or less. “In the absence of effective predators, rats alone could eventually result in deforestation.”

Dr Hunt says the environmental catastrophe of Easter Island has been masked by speculation about the intentions of people cutting down the last tree: “Indeed, the last tree may simply have died. Rats may have simply eaten the last seeds.

(Hat tip to Todd.)

Leonardo Maugeri, author of The Age of Oil: The Mythology, History and Future of the World’s Most Controversial Resource, asks, What Lies Below?:

How much oil lies beneath the Earth’s crust? The only thing we know for sure is that history is littered with estimates so far off the mark — usually below the mark — that they border on the comical. In the 1920s, for instance, the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. (now BP) refused to take a stake in Saudi Arabia, thinking that the country didn’t hold a single drop of oil. In 1919, the U.S. Geological Survey predicted that the United States would run out of oil in nine years. Yet by the time nine years had passed, huge discoveries, topped by the Black Giant field in Texas, had created a massive oil glut that almost destroyed the industry. In the 1970s, the consensus turned grim again: oil production would peak in the mid-1980s and then drop precipitously. A famous CIA report predicted the “rapid exhaustion” of accessible fields, while President Jimmy Carter warned that oil wells were “drying up all over the world.” Instead, in 1986, oil prices collapsed in the midst of a huge supply boom, as they had done many times before.

One reason for the underestimates is that the technology for recovering oil keeps improving:

Today the average recovery rate for oil is about 35 percent of the estimated “oil in place,” which means that only 35 barrels out of 100 may be brought to the surface. And only a part of those 35 barrels is considered “proven reserves,” which means they are immediately available for production and commercialization. The role of technology is critical. Over the decades, technology has greatly expanded the quantity of oil that can be extracted — through the injection of water and natural gas as well as horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and more. All this progress has boosted the average recovery rate, which was only around 20 percent as late as 30 years ago, and less than 15 percent 60 years ago. In the future, further gains are expected from technologies that are still in their infancy.

Simply put, new exploration methods have increased existing reserves over time, even without any new discoveries. The oil literature is full of examples. A most astonishing one is the Kern River field in California, discovered in 1899. In 1942 its “remaining” reserves were estimated at 54 million barrels. Yet from 1942 to 1986 it produced 736 million barrels, and still had another 970 million “remaining.” The one thing we can be certain about is that our knowledge of oil reserves is subject to constant revision, usually upward. That’s why, over the decades, all attempts to evaluate our planet’s oil endowment have proved too conservative, even when those estimates have included probabilistic assumptions about future discoveries and increases in recovery rates.

On the French version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, Qui veut gagner des millions?, a player was asked, What revolves around the earth?, and he wasn’t sure if it was the sun (le soleil) or the moon (la lune). So he used a lifeline and asked the audience:

This really happened on July 13, 2006, on the top French television channel, watched by millions of people, and it’s frightening.

Even if you speak no French, you should watch the video — and perhaps feel better about our American school system.

In an instant, retirement savings can vanish — and you may have no legal protection:

One moment Dave DeSmidt had $179,000 in his 401(k) retirement account, the next he had nothing. In an instant, 25 years of savings had disappeared.

With a few clicks, someone raided DeSmidt’s retirement account with J.P. Morgan & Co and ordered a full disbursement to a private checking account.

Then came the really bad news. While credit card and online banking accounts are legally protected in the event of fraud, DeSmidt’s brokerage account came with no such insurance. Two months after the theft, his balance still read $0.

Did Muhammad Really Say That? looks at the hadith, the stories surrounding Muhammad and the Koran:

Muhammad commanded followers not to record what he said to guard against the possibility that they would confuse his words with God’s. Instead, Muslims kept the sayings alive orally.

By the early 9th century, about 200 years after Muhammad’s death, as many as 700,000 sayings were circulating across the Muslim world. Many were of questionable credibility and some were even fabricated to support political or economic policies.

Leading scholars decided that the sayings should be collected and verified. Using a painstaking process, they traced the chain of narration and scrutinized the character and memory skills of the individual reporters.

The two preeminent hadith scholars, Muhammad ibn Isma’il al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, collected 2,602 and 9,200 hadith, respectively, all of them considered sahih, or “sound,” authentic and indisputable. Other collections exist, but they include sayings with weak links or other defects.