The Nobel Prizes are generally considered to be one of the most prestigious awards in the world but depressingly few people are able to name the winners of the various categories. Compare this to the likelihood of people being able to name past and present Oscar Award winners or how readily sports fans can recite the entire histories of major sporting events. When it comes to the Nobel however, even experienced bloggers who write frequently about economics can get the name of the Nobel laureate in economics wrong, as Steven D. Levitt pointed out recently.
So I thought that listing this year’s winners and summarizing their accomplishments would make for a worthy blog post. We’ll start with the Nobel Peace Prize, which despite being the least objective and most disputed of the different categories, is easily the most well-known among the public. It is also the only one of the prizes to be judged by a Norwegian committee instead of a Swedish institution. Whereas the other Nobel prizes are traditionally awarded only many years after the original breakthrough to ensure that it is real and confers genuine benefits to humanity, the Peace Prize is occasionally awarded only to send a political signal or to encourage someone who is deemed to be on the right path but hasn’t really done much yet, as last year’s award to Barack Obama demonstrated.
I guess one good thing to be said about the M. Night Shyamalan’s version of the story is that it got me and my wife watching the original series. The reviews for the film were uniformly horrible, so we had no desire to watch it. But its release prompted plenty of discussion about the cartoon series and more than a few QT3 posters wistfully reminisced about how great it was and how far short the film fell in comparison. As we had just finished watching Naruto Shippuden and were looking for something new to watch, she agreed to try a few episodes. We ended up watching all three seasons.
For the benefit of those who have no idea what it’s about, here’s a quick overview. The series is set in a fantasy world composed of four separate nations, each representing one of the four elements of Air, Water, Fire and Earth. Certain people from each of the nations are capable of bending their respective elements, manipulating them with a combination of concentration and martial arts moves. The four nations are supposed to co-exist in harmony but the Fire nation has become aggressive and has embarked on a war of conquest against the other nations.
Three articles this month and all of them have something to do with biology. The first one is about how some chimpanzees in Africa have learned to recognize and disable traps laid by humans. The second is a statistical analysis of divorce rates sorted according to occupation. The last one is less of a formal article and more of a blog post. It’s about the unexpected benefits of being exposed to, well, human semen, of all things.
The chimpanzee article is from the BBC and talks about a groups of chimpanzees in the rainforests of Guinea who appear to have learned how to identify traps laid by human hunters and safely disable them without getting hurt in the process. They appear to be aware of how the different components of a snare trap come together and know which parts are safe to touch and which parts are dangerous. This has explained the observation that chimpanzees in that area rarely get injured by traps.
A lesser light once asked Ummon // Please deliver this learner from darkness and illusion quickly \\// Ummon answered // What is the price of fiberplastic in Port Romance]
– Dan Simmons in The Fall of Hyperion
Over two years ago, I ended my post about Hyperion with a note saying how unlikely it would be for its sequel to be worthy of the standards set by that excellent novel. Having stumbled across the book in a store in Kuala Lumpur and having devoured it over the course of my holiday, I am sad to report that this is indeed the case.
The Fall of Hyperion is a much more conventional space opera tale than the original was. It does away with the frame story device that made the original so memorable and tells the story in a more straightforward manner. There are now two narrative threads, one continuing the story of the six remaining pilgrims as they finally reach the Time Tombs. The other focuses on the government of the Hegemony as they respond to imminent war with the Ousters while trying their best to keep track with what is happening with the pilgrims on Hyperion.
So I’m back from my six days holiday trip to Vietnam. Overall, it was a very worthwhile trip for surprisingly low cost. We had one night in Hanoi, one on Cat Ba Island in Hai Long Bay, two nights on the train going and coming back from Sapa and one night in Sapa itself. This isn’t a travel blog and I don’t see myself as much of a travel writer, so I’ll just jot down some general observations grouped by location. It’s easy enough to find real tourist information on other websites anyhow.
I’m on holiday for a while and getting last minute stuff done is taking its toll on my time, so here’s some links for stuff that you may or not may not find interesting. I won’t be updating this blog or Knights of the Cardboard Castle while I’m gone.
This article has traveled widely around the Internet so I’m guessing that most people will already have seen it. It’s about a tourism campaign organized by the small resort town of Atami in Japan. What’s unusual about this one is that the target demographic are players of a dating-simulation game known as LovePlus+, available on Nintendo’s hand-held DS system. This is a game targeted at males in which the object is to woo a girlfriend from a selection of virtual women. Accordingly, many businesses in the town are playing along with the fiction, checking hotels guests in as couples even though there is just one physical person for example and providing toiletries and towels for two persons. The same thing goes for restaurants who offer special themed sets. One QT3 posted noted that the game actually makes use of the device’s built-in microphone to oblige players to say “I love you” to the virtual girlfriends.
Are you tired of television executives’ ever more ridiculous ideas for reality shows? Well, no matter how much you hate them, you probably can’t match the Iraqis’ bile for this new show. The concept is that the producers invite local celebrities to the studio to conduct an interview but they’re actually secretly working with the Iraqi Defense Forces to plant fake car bombs on the celebrities’ vehicles. Then the army stops them at a checkpoint and accuses the celebrities of being terrorists and threatens them with imprisonment in American-operated prisons. All the while, hidden cameras are filming the celebrities’ shock and terror. Needless, this has provoked a withering storm of criticism.
Ever thought that garish carpeting and casinos go hand in hand? Well, I did. This article from Gizmodo claims that it’s deliberate and the purpose is to obscure the gambling chips that fall onto the floor so that it’s hard to retrieve them. Apparently, the casinos are supposed to rake in a significant sum of money whenever they sweep their floors, turning the carpets into another source of money. Other readers have written in to pour cold water on that theory however and explain that it’s meant to hide the wear and tear on the carpeting from so many people walking about and constantly moving machines and tables. Yet others claim that the garish designs make it easier to hide vomit stains. Whatever the real reasons are, it still makes for a fascinating line of inquiry.
This installment will be a little light with just three short articles. One is about how having dogs around seems to improve cooperation between humans, one about using a powerful computer to find every possible solution to the classic Rubik’s Cube puzzle, and the last one looks at how people get trampled to death in large crowds.
Dogs make people more social
The first article is from The Economist and covers research by Christopher Honts and his colleagues at Central Michigan University who wondered if having dogs around in the workplace improved collaboration among people. This was because previous research has indicated that dogs help their owners forge intimate relationships with other people.
