Month: February 2013

In his famous essay “Politics and the English Language”, Orwell claims that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words.” Ed Smith takes issue with this thesis:

Using plain and clear language is not a moral virtue, as Orwell hoped. Things aren’t that simple. In fact, giving the impression of clarity and straightforwardness is often a strategic game. The way we speak and the way we write are both forms of dress. We can, linguistically, dress ourselves up any way we like. We can affect plainness and directness just as much as we can affect sophistication and complexity. We can try to mislead or to impress, in either mode. Or we can use either register honestly.

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You want to look away. More beard coverage – of how religions have shaped the male face for aeons – here.

Former NASA material scientist Ray Cronise believes cold temperatures can spur weight loss. Steven Leckart reports on the research:

Cronise got the idea back in 2008 while watching a TV program about Michael Phelps. The coverage claimed that, while training, the Olympic swimmer ate 12,000 calories a day. At the time, Cronise was on a diet of 12,000 calories per week. (He was carrying 209 pounds on his 5’9″ frame and wanted to get back down to 180.) Something didn’t add up. Even if Phelps had an exceptionally high metabolism and swam three hours a day, he still should have turned into a blob. Then it hit Cronise: Phelps was spending hours every day in water, which was sucking heat from his body. He was burning extra calories just to maintain his core temperature of 98.6.

That fall, Cronise grew obsessed. He avoided warmth altogether: He took cool showers, wore light clothing, slept without sheets, and took 3-mile “shiver walks” in 30-degree weather wearing a T-shirt, shorts, gloves, and earmuffs. In six weeks he shed 27 pounds, nearly tripling his weight-loss rate without changing his calorie-restricted diet.

The science is still uncertain:

Scientists are racing to separate the real science from the pseudo. They’re investigating the precise mechanisms by which the body adjusts to cold temperatures and reaching new insights into the ways our bodies burn fat. They’re even trying to come up with a new kind of weight-loss pill—a longtime ambition of the pharmaceutical industry—that can mimic those processes and make us thinner faster, with less effort.

Andy Cush applauds a new project that catalogues our gadget  habits:

There’s the “Security Blanket” (checking your smartphone for no particular reason when faced with the slightest discomfort in a social situation), the “Halfway Courtesy” (taking one earbud out in order to show a person you’re listening to them), the “Haunted Interface” (performing actions an interface can’t react to, like shaking a video game controller), and many others. All of the actions are collected in a free ebook called Curious Rituals. 

Mark Wilson nods:

“It’s actually a chicken-and-egg situation where both the design of the object and the way we look in public influence the gesture,” researcher Nicolas Nova explains, and he would know. Over five years of studying gesture interfaces at Near Future Laboratory, Nova began to notice trends–”common threads”–in how people postured themselves in response to everything from laptops to VR goggles.

Check out more great images from the book (PDF) and blog here.

Bryan Caplan recently praised Jonathan Last’s What To Expect When No One’s Expecting, as “the best-written, most engaging, and funniest book on the social cost of low birth rates and population decline.” But, in a follow-up post, Caplan takes issue with some of Last’s facts:

Contrary to popular opinion, children have never been a remunerative retirement plan. In pre-modern times, people rarely lived long enough to collect their “pension.” This has been verified by anthropologists and economic historians alike; see Ted Bergstrom’s excellent review in the JEL. Long before the birth of the welfare state, buying land and money-lending (and even hiding money under your mattress!) made far more financial sense than having kids.

Indeed, as I argue in Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, kids are a better deal in modern societies than in traditional societies.  In purely financial terms, they’re still a money pit.  But at least nowadays you’ll probably live long enough to collect two or three decades of non-financial assistance and companionship.

Ruy Teixeira recently tackled Last’s prescriptions for how to increase America’s fertility rate:

He argues instead that we should make it easier for people to have all the children they want by reducing the costs of child-rearing. Fair enough. In this cost-cutting spirit, how about paid family and medical leave, flexible work schedules and, especially, affordable, quality child care? Expanding government programs to make college more affordable would also bring down the higher education costs of child-rearing and encourage parents to have as many children as they desire.

But these obvious proposals are rejected out of hand by Last. His solution is to exempt parents from part or all of their payroll taxes. (Have three kids and you pay nothing at all!) The resulting funding shortfall for Social Security and Medicare, not to mention inevitable political conflict arising from the creation of two classes of taxpayers, could kill off both programs pretty fast. But those possibilities do not seem to bother Last.

Last responds to Teixeira here.