I recently read an unusual article in The Economist about a controversial phenomenon known as ball lightning. Basically ball lightning is a rare and unpredictable phenomenon where lightning forms a glowing ball which can persist and move around for several seconds rather than the normal flash.

Ball lightning appears to be inconsistent in color (pale blue, yellow, green, red and white), size (pea sized to several meters) and behavior (dropping form the sky, moving along the ground, and sometimes nailing people).

Yeah it sounds like bull, but they have been seen thousands of times by thousands of witnesses over the last few centuries. Several scientific groups are working on explaining ball lightning. Hell, even The Economist (normally very skeptical) has written a detailed article about the studies attempting to explain them.

Wikipedia has a detailed article on lightning balls which mentions that they were often sighted by fighter pilots during World War 2. Now we need a little aside: early in the war poorly trained Japanese pilots often flew erratic trajectories and the Allied pilots developed a derogatory term for them – foo fighters. The name came from a comic strip popular at the time, Smokey Stover, which often made use of the nonsense word foo.

So when the pilots repeatedly saw the erratically moving balls of fire they became known as foo fighters. Because lightning balls (foo fighters) were/are largely unexplained a lot of people think that they are UFOs (rubbish). Someone who is fascinated by UFOs is Dave Grohl who therefore chose the name for his band the Foo Fighters.

It’s like the whole 6 degrees idea but for concepts instead of people. Awesome.

The Economist recently published an article on private schools. It focuses on schools and data from Britain, but I think that a lot of what is said is generally applicable.

The first part of the article discusses how extremely expensive private schools are getting (this is something that is true in South Africa too). However in Britain it seems that there are good returns on paying for private education:

• Those who left private schools earned on average 35% more than those who left public schools
• Only about half of this gain was attributed to a better background (contacts, intelligence, etc)

The researchers used some more analysis and research to figure out how private schools achieve this benefit: better exam results. When they compared graduates from private and public schools with equal exam results their earnings were the same!

So it seems that if you can get your kids to achieve good exam results, it doesn’t really matter what school they went to. Perhaps there is a cheaper way of achieving those results?

The end of the article discusses a survey of parents who sent their bright kids to ordinary schools with excellent results:

• The more average schools paid special attention to their talented students, going out of their way to extend and assist them
• However, this result does appear to depend on parents playing an active part in their children’s education

National Geographic Magazine has an interesting article on some of the smart animals that are being used to learn about intelligence and cognition. Most people who have had a pet ‘know’ that animals can think because of the way that they react to us – they sometimes seem almost human.

But for a long time this idea was seriously out of fashion – experts agreed that people were projecting human emotions and thoughts onto animals (known as anthropomorphism). For instance at school I had a friend who claimed that her goldfish was embarrassed – surely a case of anthropomorphism.

However, the view that intelligence and emotions are purely human is simplistic and a little arrogant. Intelligence (and emotions) has obvious evolutionary advantages for social and long-lived animals. Humans are also just animals – we arrived through the same evolutionary processes. Isn’t it more plausible that there are levels of intelligence with some species showing more or less?

Plenty of scientists agree with me and have been working with animals to show that many of the qualities supposedly unique to human intelligence are shared by animals. The article goes into a lot of detail with awesome examples involving dogs, chimps, bonobos, parrots, jays, crows, dolphins and others. I thought that I would extract a few of the stories about clever animals.

Alex the parrot was taught to pronounce English words and could understand several concepts. He was able to count, and distinguish shapes and colors. For instance when shown a group of toys and asked how many yellow ones there were he could tell you – ‘Five’. Alex even got impatient with other parrots who were getting their pronunciation wrong – calling out ‘Talk clearly!’ when they made mistakes.

Betsy the border collie understands more than 300 words and is able to learn new ones easily. One test involved putting several new toys (which Betsy had not seen before) in the kitchen. Betsy was then shown a picture of a Frisbee and told to fetch it from the kitchen. That she was able to do so shows that not only does she understand words like fetch and kitchen (something the testers already knew) but that she understands that a picture represents something in the real world.

Betty the New Caledonian crow was able to create and use tools. In one test Betty was shown into a room in which there was a treat in a basket down a tube – out of her reach. There were also two pieces of wire in the room, one with a hook and one straight. The researchers had expected Betty to use the hooked wire to get the basket out, but another crow had already removed it….

“Betty is undeterred. She looks at the meat in the basket, then spots the straight piece of wire. She picks it up with her beak, pushes one end into a crack in the floor, and uses her beak to bend the other end into a hook. Thus armed, she lifts the basket out of the tube.”

When I was a teenager I used to enjoy testing my ability to hold me breath. My eventual record was 2 minutes and 8 seconds. I was pretty happy with that but I was aware that pros like Houdini and pearl divers could do that same for 4 or 5 minutes.

Then I read this report about what seems to be a bogus claim to have set the record at 15:58! It might be true, but there are some definite doubts cast in the comments attached to the article.

A more accepted record is 13:42 set by a guy named Robert Foster in 1959. That one was included in the Guinness Book of Records until they stopped reporting records that may tempt dangerous attempts.

This is the text from the 1978 edition of the book:

The world record for voluntarily staying underwater is 13 min 42.5 sec by Robert Foster, aged 32, an electronics technician of Richmond, California, who stayed under 10 ft 3.05m of water in the swimming pool of the Bermuda Palms Motel at San Rafeal, California, USA, on 15 March 1959. He hyperventilated with oxygen for 30 min before his descent. The longest unprepared record is 6 min 29.8 sec by Georges Pouliquin in Paris on 3 Nov. 1912. It must be stressed that record-breaking of this kind is extremely dangerous.

These are incredible records – even 5 minutes is a very, very long time to imagine not breathing. 2:08 is more than enough for me!

Here is a weird and interesting page showing pictures from an exhibition of portraits of people before and after their deaths. It’s pretty haunting to see – one of those things that gets you to think about things differently. Clicking through to the pictures enhances the effect because there are little excerpts about the people before and after death.

This is the text from the guy on the left above:

Peter Kelling, 64
First portrait: November 29 2003
Peter Kelling had never been seriously ill in his life. He was a civil servant working for the health and safety executive, and didn’t allow himself any vices. And yet one day he was diagnosed with bowel cancer. By the time I met him, the cancer had spread to his lungs, his liver and his brain. “I’m only 64,” he muttered. “I shouldn’t be wasting away like this”

Second portrait: December 22 2003
At night he was restless, he told me, and kept turning things over in his mind. He cried a lot. But he didn’t talk about what was troubling him. In fact he hardly talked at all and his silence felt like a reproach to those around him. But there was one thing that Peter Kelling followed to the very last and that was the fortunes of the local football team. Until the day he died, every game was recorded on the chart on the door of his room

The associated blog says that a lot of people are offended by these pics. Bollocks… Death is a fact of life and these guys all consented to being part of the exhibition. Facing mortality might be distressing but instead of getting offended you should explore your feelings and thoughts. Hard thoughts should be faced not hidden behind outrage.

Today is my birthday – an event that is becoming increasingly scary! Quarter century down…

Anyway, graphs always cheer me up so here we go:

From today I am closer to 30 than 20!

But I still have 1 year to publish a paper like Einstein’s relativity or 21 years to beat Obama to a presidential nomination!

The Economist has this article about a study recently published showing that when blood sugar levels are low, people use more intuition to make decisions. You know, when you have been thinking hard about something for a while and then there is one last decision that you just can’t be bothered with? That is what the scientists were studying.

The scientists got a bunch of students to do a mentally taxing task and then gave half of them lemonade with sugar and half lemonade with another sweetener. Using a psychological trick (read about it in the article if you want) the scientists were able to show that those who had been mentally worked and not given sugar were more likely to make decisions using intuition instead of reason.

So it turns out that you really should take food into exams and that you really shouldn’t make important decisions on an empty stomach…

This is actually the philosophy of a remarkably high percentage of the world!

Link from Photo Basement

National Geographic has this article saying that Islam has now overtaken Catholicism as the world’s largest religion. According to the article this is the current breakdown (percentage of world population):

• Islamic: 19.2%
• Catholic: 17.4%

That said, Christians as a whole are still by far the largest religious group comprising 33% of the world population.