Football and Memory

Memory is imperfect at the best of times, but certain physical activities have immediate deleterious effects. Apparently the research shows the effect to be temporary.

No one is average

Another great podcast from 99 Percent Invisible. This one talks about the evolution of the concept of the average and how it serves a purpose, but is also very misleading, because none of us is average in every respect. It led to WW2 planes not having adjustable seatsfor fighter pilots, for example - with fatal results. This programme touches on Human Sciences, Mathematics, Science, History and Ethics

You can't predict the future, but Science tries all the same

I found this blogpost hiding in my old Google + posts. It's from 2012, and the writer even uses an example of Hurricane Sandy which was approaching but hadn't made land yet. A few days later it would turn out to be second only to Katrina. In Italy, following an earthquake, scientists who, it was claimed, had not predicted it, were jailed.

Every day we behave on the assumption that what happened in the past will pertain in the future. Science has codified a sophisticated version of this process of inference (though my previous blogpost was about occasions where repeatability was not demonstrated).

As ever, Ethan Siegel (Starts with a Bang blog) dissects the arguments, illustrates them very well and explains them for a ToK audience.

Many experiments are not reliable

The middle segment (from 23 minutes) of this great Slate discussion considers findings that many experimental results in the Human Sciences, and also in some branches of medicine, have proven not to be reproducible. One of my favourite results, about the reduction in willpower when short-term memory is in use, was not repeated when other experimenters tried it. The panel discusses sample size, experimental methods and the cultures of different scientific and social science disciplines.
I can embed the audio. It's at this link (click below the picture). Start at 23 minutes.

Slate podcast link

Cultures are more alike than they differ

From fire-walking to opera, humans do some very strange things.

It is more than 20 years old (you can tell by all the people smoking indoors), and this final episode in Desmond Morris' series The Human Animal has a great ToK attitude. We see people all around the world being creative and playful and realise that this happens in every corner of the world. It's a great way to see that even the most apparently mundane of our own habits is exotic.

And no-one knows that the Internet is right around the corner!