It's probably obvious that I'm sometimes a bit "out there" and that I'm probably a poster child for the perversity of nature. But this guy Richard Wiseman has written a book on the subject of Quirkology:
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John Trinkaus of the Zicklin School of Business in the City University of New York studies ordinary people going about their everyday lives - a rich seam for quirkological research, as you might imagine. One of his specialities is the study of minor acts of dishonesty and antisocial behaviour. In his 25 years of research, one demographical group has come to stand out above all others as being most likely to push boundaries and break rules. These are not disaffected teenagers nor Italian football hooligans. They are women van drivers.
Trinkaus's important sociological finding is perhaps best illustrated by his extensive work covertly monitoring a supermarket's "10 items or fewer" checkout over a span of nine years. As many of us may have seen for ourselves, Trinkaus found that some shoppers using this lane had more than 10 items. Some cunningly placed their items in groups of 10 and paid for each group separately. Trinkaus found that about 80 per cent of all the supermarket lane cheats were female van drivers.
This is by no means the only time that these women have been linked with small-scale social transgressions. Trinkaus has also shown that 96 per cent of women van drivers break the speed limit, compared with 86 per cent of male ones, and in one study, a staggering 99 per cent of female van drivers failed to come to a complete stop at a T-junction with a stop sign, compared with 94 per cent of the total.
I don't know that I entirely agree with everything said above (my wife drives a van and I don't think she would ever drive weird or take a cart with more than 10 through that lane at the supermarket) but I think it probably should be studied. This is in the New Scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-...ky-species.htmlOn the subject of the funniest joke:
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In 2001 I joined forces with the British Association for the Advancement of Science in a search for the world's funniest joke (see World's funniest joke revealed). The experiment involved people from all over the world posting their jokes onto a website and rating the submissions of others. Early on in the study, someone entered the following:
"There were two cows in a field. One said: 'Moo.' The other one said: 'I was going to say that.'"
We decided to enter this joke into the archive several times, using different animals and noises. Two tigers said "Grr", two dogs "Woof", and so on. Would one animal and noise be rated better than another? The joke rated the funniest was:
"Two ducks were sitting in a pond. One of the ducks said: 'Quack.' The other duck said: 'I was going to say that.'"
Interestingly, the "k" sound (or the "hard c"), as heard in "quack" and "duck", has long been seen in the comedy world as especially funny. Why? It may be down to a rather odd psychological phenomenon known as "facial feedback". When people feel happy they smile, but some evidence suggests that the mechanism also works in reverse: smiling makes people feel happy.
In 1988, psychologist Fritz Strack of the University of Würzburg, Germany, asked two groups of people to judge how funny they found some cartoons. In one group, each person held a pencil between their teeth without it touching their lips, which forced a smile. The other group were asked to hold the pencil with their lips (not using their teeth), forcing a frown.
The results revealed that people experience the emotion associated with their expressions. Those with a forced smile felt happier, and found the cartoons funnier than those who were forced to frown. The hard "k" often forces the face to smile (say "quack"), which may explain why the sound is associated with happiness. Whatever the explanation, if you want to make someone feel happy, offer them a cookie, not a sandwich, and a Coke, not a Pepsi.
More on the subject of Quirky people! This other guy (Chad Orzel) is apparently trying to explain Quantum Theory to his dog:
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2007/05...many_treats.phpQUOTE
"What do you mean, decoherence?"
"Well, say I did have a piece of steak here-- stop wagging your tail, it's a hypothetical-- quantum mechanics says that if I dropped it on the floor, then picked it back up, there could be an interference between the wavefunction describing the bit of steak that fell and the wavefunction describing the bit of steak that didn't fall. Because, of course, there's only a probability that I'd drop it, so you need both bits."
"What would that mean?"
"Well, the steak would probably produce some sort of interference pattern. I'm not really sure what that would look like. The point is, though, it doesn't really matter. The steak is constantly interacting with its environment-- the air, the desk, the floor--"
"The dog!"
