inkbluesky

What’s in a name? Maybe an unconscious trend toward failure

-Students whose names begin with C or D get lower grades than those whose names begin with A or B; major league baseball players whose first or last names began with K (the strikeout-signifying letter) are significantly more likely to strike out, according to the report published in the December issue of Psychological Science.

-The researchers’ work supports a series of studies published since 2002 that have found the “name-letter effect” causes people to make life choices based on names that resemble their own. Those studies by Brett Pelham, an associate professor of psychology at SUNY University at Buffalo, have found that people are disproportionately likely to live in states or cities resembling their names, have careers that resemble their names and even marry those whose surnames begin with the same letter as their own.

“If this is an unconscious preference, it suggests we don’t really have free will about certain important decisions,” Pelham says. “We don’t really make those decisions for the reasons we thought we did.”

The free will aspect of this study is probably what disturbs me most. Remember the episode of Seinfeld where George decides to henceforth make all his decisions contrary to his first inclination. He may have been on to something. How strange that we can go to great effort to make the best decisions in life and the outcomes may have a tendency to be negative or positive regardless of the conscience choices we make.

this old old house

Pasta monster gets academic attention

An Oregon State physics graduate named Bobby Henderson stepped into the debate by sending a letter to the Kansas School Board. With tongue in cheek, he purported to speak for 10 million followers of a being called the Flying Spaghetti Monster — and demanded equal time for their views.

“We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it,” Henderson wrote. As for scientific evidence to the contrary, “what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage.”

The letter made the rounds on the Internet, prompting laughter from some and vilification from others. But it struck a chord and stuck around. In the great tradition of satire, its humor was in fact a clever and effective argument.

Between the lines, the point of the letter was this: There’s no more scientific basis for intelligent design than there is for the idea an omniscient creature made of pasta created the universe. If intelligent design supporters could demand equal time in a science class, why not anyone else? The only reasonable solution is to put nothing into sciences classes but the best available science.

“I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; one third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence,” Henderson sarcastically concluded.

Last I checked there are approximately 3000 religions represented in the U.S. Imagine if everyone one of them demanded equal time for their suppositions about how the universe and the earth were created. Many creation myths are appealing on the imaginative literary level, but without rational empirical evidence to support them, whatever they are they are not science.