How small are The Donald’s hands? It turns out that Mr Trump’s hands are smaller than average. Now, via the Hollywood Reporter, you can find out how you measure up to Mr Trump. (For your ready reference, here is a printable, life-size look at one of Trump’s hands.)
So, Marco Rubio was right, after all.
Is this the same reason why so many college textbooks in a given field are so similar? On balance, is this convergence trend a good thing or a bad thing?
Check out the full report by Allee Manning and Kaitlyn Kelly here.
While we brace ourselves for NBC’s excessive coverage of the venerable sport of beach volleyball at the 2016 Olympics, we want to second the snobbish sentiments of Paul Lewis, who wrote the following wisecracks during the 2008 Olympics: “The cynic in me says that beach volleyball is simply there for the TV and for grown men to slobber over the sight of scantily clad women throwing themselves about in the sand. I mean, why don’t they just go the whole kahuna and make the beach volleyballers play naked–because that’s what this is about, really. I’m assuming no one watches the blokes. Women generally have more sense. *** What next? Beach cricket? Speed sandcastle building? Beach tennis?”
Clarification (8/8/16): As starchildluke notes in the comments section below, a game like beach tennis might actually be of interest to many people. We agree. So, after further reflection, we would like to restate our position: we do not object in principle to beach volleyball as an Olympic sport (or to the inclusion of other new sports into the Olympic pantheon), what we object to is NBC’s obsessive fixation with beach volleyball. Our post should thus be retitled “Why does NBC devote so much air time to beach volleyball?”
image credit: picturescafe.com (image 3898)
image credit: mrmbuceta (hat tip: digg)
As faculty editor of the UCF Undergraduate Journal, we are constantly on “passive voice search & destroy missions” when we edit manuscripts: hunting for awkward sentences written in the passive voice and converting them into simple and straightforward active voice sentences. We thus found this short essay (hat tip: Eugene Volokh) on when to use the passive voice quite helpful. It was written by Geoffrey Pullman, a professor of general linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. [By the way, did you like how we snuck in the passive voice in the previous sentence?] In brief, Prof. Pullman identifies two situations in which it’s not only perfectly acceptable but also desirable to use the passive voice: (i) the trouble-saving passive and (ii) the pussyfooting passive. In the first case, the writer doesn’t want to get bogged down in minor details, while in the second, the writer needs to purposely avoid having to point the finger at someone or something. Here is an extended excerpt from Pullman’s essay explaining this taxonomy (edited by us for clarity):
And when is the passive more compact and direct? One class of such cases comprises [the] “trouble-saving passive.” If you were to take a sentence like Smith was arrested, indicted, and found guilty, but the money was never recovered and try to wrestle it into the active voice, as so many writing guides insist you should, you would have to find subjects for all the active verb phrases. You’d need subjects for arrested Smith (the police department? the county sheriff?), and indicted him (a grand jury, as in the U.S.? the Crown Prosecution Service, as in Britain?), and for found him guilty (a judge? a trial jury?), and for recovered the money (the detectives? some bank or post office? the people whose cash had been stolen?). Implementing this pointless and clumsy elaboration would make the sentence nearly twice as long. [By contrast, there is] “the pussyfooting passive,” which … “is essential in journalism” because “often the writer does not know who did something or is not free to say who did it, but he wants to say it was done.”
Image Credit: Maria Baez
Check out this fascinating actuarial analysis of the life expectancy of popular musicians (broken down by musical genre) prepared by Dianna Theadora Kenny, a professor of music and psychology at the University of Sydney. According to Prof. Kenny, accidents are one of the main causes of death among musicians, especially for men: “For male musicians across all genres, accidental death (including all vehicular incidents and accidental overdose) accounted for almost 20% of all deaths. But accidental death for rock musicians was higher than this (24.4%) and for metal musicians higher still (36.2%).” The table below provides an even more comprehensive statistical picture:
Image Credit: Dianna Theadora Kenny
That is the title of this excellent empirical study by Darrell Worthy, Arthur Markman, and Todd Maddox. In case you’re wondering, their data set was comprehensive: it consisted of all free throws attempted during the last minute of all regular-season and playoff games in the three seasons of 2002-03, 2003-04, and 2004-05. The authors conclude that players tend to shoot worse than their career average when their team was behind or ahead by one point. (By the way, their elegant paper is only six pages long–five, if you exclude their bibliography! But if you’re pressed for time, fellow blogger Phil Birnbaum wrote up this helpful overview of the paper as well.) On a more personal note, although the paper was published way back in 2009, we stumbled upon it for the first time late last night while we were playing on the Internet during a bad bout of insomnia. Sometimes it pays to stay up late!)
Although we haven’t seen the new Star Trek movie yet (Star Trek Beyond), in today’s post we want to pose the following question about the fictional world of Star Trek: who pays for Starfleet? According to Wikipedia, “Starfleet is a service maintained by the United Federation of Planets [in the fictional universe of Star Trek] as the principal means for conducting deep-space exploration, research, defense, peacekeeping, and diplomacy.” But this definition begs the “who pays?” question. Who pays for this expensive “service”? Our friend and colleague Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, offers this intriguing conjecture: the men and women of Starfleet are interplanetary tax collectors. To put it less politely: Starfleet operates an interplanetary protection racket! In the words of Professor Somin: “The human-dominated Star Fleet military is the only visible Federation military force, and is perhaps tasked with collecting tribute from the nonhuman planets for redistribution to Earth. But as long as they pay their taxes, which subsidize Earth’s welfare state and Star Fleet itself, they are largely left alone to govern their domestic affairs as they see fit. The Federation is essentially a big protection racket. Like the Mafia, it provides ‘protection’ in both senses of the word: external security, and also ‘protection’ against its own depredations.” (If you want to do further research on this question, you can find links to additional conjectures here.)
Who pays?
Roy Lugasi and Hod Gerlitz co-founded a new dating app called Weepo that allows users to monitor the male-to-female ratio at a bar or nightclub. According to this fascinating report by James Covert, writing for the New York Post, “The big idea … is mainly to cut short the prolonged chats that have long plagued other dating apps—ending, too often, with no date at all. ‘With all those other apps, you have to go through a conversation where it takes two or three days to meet up,’ [Roy] Lugasi told The Post. ‘With this app, you’re practically guaranteed to meet somebody tonight.'” In other words, finding someone to date is a time-consuming task. Most dating sites don’t really reduce the search costs of dating by much because finding a match on a computer or smart phone does not substitute for going out on a date. Thus, from an economic perspective, the main purpose of a dating app like Weepo is to significantly reduce the search costs of dating by actually bringing like-minded users together in the same place in one step. For what it’s worth, we also found this statement of interest from the N.Y. Post story: “’A lot of girls are going to the more high-end clubs’ like Tao, No. 8 and Marquee, which typically require stiff drink prices and steep covers, according to [Hod] Gerlitz. Young guys, meanwhile, gravitate toward no-cover bars—particularly those with cheaper drinks.”
image credit: embarrassingtreasures.com
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