If you encounter a Swiss on the road this month, and you’re not driving in Switzerland, please exercise appropriate caution.

Czechoslovakia:
“The man, a 33-year-old from Lucerne, was arrested after an 80 kilometre police chase. Police only succeeded in stopping him when his car ran out of petrol. [. . ] The paper said he had a mix of stimulants and other drugs in his blood, which likely caused him to be confused and dizzy when he drove his car onto the wrong lane. No one was seriously injured in the five accidents he caused along the highway, the paper said.” (link)

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The facility where I work received a new captain a few days ago, and this one is addressed as “ma’am.” Before returning to Navy assignments from NASA a couple years ago, she performed five EVAs totaling 34 hours. (link, link)

Line-by-line analysis of the following work:

17 MOUNT
RAINIER/IKEA
(NORTHBOUND)
HAVE A
NICE DAY
DRIVE SAFELY
(repeats)

The Social Security administration informs us that the name Elvis has dropped from the top 1,000 boys’ names for the first time since 1954. (link) The immediate post-war years were actually a bit of an anomaly in that respect. The SSA database shows that name ranking somewhere in the top 1,000 from 1909 through 1947 reaching a high at number 623 in 1922. When I was a small boy I would let people know that Elvis was my uncle whenever his name was mentioned. More precisely, he was my mother’s uncle, my grandfather’s youngest brother. At some point I caught on that the Uncle Elvis I saw at family reunions was not the same as that Presley fellow that everyone else thought that particular name referred to.

Driving home, the interview linked below came to mind, connected somewhat with my last entry. (“Spirit of Elijah Strikes Again!”) Something about the mellowness of age looking back fondly on the extravagances of youth. Is it with satisfaction or regret that Alan White tells us, “I never wore a cape”?

“But the most striking findings revolved around parenthood and age. Whether it is a function of exhaustion, bickering over diapers or something inherently unpleasant about raising little children, the data doesn’t say, but parents under 30 are decidedly less happy than their child-free peers. Then, once parents hit 40, the relationship reverses and people with children are cheerier than those without.

“The more, the merrier, too — at least for older parents. For people under 30, happiness declines with each additional child. Young parents of two are unhappier than young parents with one, and young parents of one child are unhappier than young people with no children. But with parents between the ages of 40 and 50, the number of children has no impact. And after 50, each child brings more joy.” (“Older Parents Find More Joy in Their Bundles,” New York Times)

Belated best wishes to Ken Mattingly, who turned 75 last week. Admiral Mattingly, Command Module Pilot for Apollo 16, is the youngest lunar astronaut.

“On January 25, 2010, the National Archives announced in the Federal Register that filming, photographing, and videotaping by the public will be prohibited in all exhibition areas in the National Archives Building, Washington, DC, beginning February 25, 2010. [. . .] In spite of a more than 30-year-old regulation explicitly stating that flash photography was prohibited, prominent signs stating the policy throughout the exhibition areas, and security guards reminding the public, Archives staff estimated that the documents were subjected to approximately 50,000 flashes a year. While enforcement of this policy has always been a National Archives priority, new cameras with automatic flash have made the policy almost impossible to enforce.” (link)

From the Washington Post:

“The first thing Frederick County Commissioner Paul Smith does when explaining his controversial views about a woman’s proper place is to hand out a pamphlet from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

Yesterday morning afforded a lovely coincidence of a crescent moon, Venus, and my southbound drive under a dawning sky. There is something about a crescent with Venus close by on the concave side that looks just right. (Islamic flag designers the world over agree.) It seemed that there would be one more waning crescent in this cycle, and there it was this morning, much thinner than yesterday and no longer in intimate proximity with Venus.

I wondered how long it would stay visible. Twenty minutes before sunrise, it no longer stood out in the sky. I had to use the line between Venus and the coming sun to find it. Ten minutes before sunrise, it faded from view, sometimes seeming to be part of my perceptions, sometimes not. The moon is up there now, as big as the sun, but completely invisible to me.
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Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel as played for priesthood meeting by a convert aunt of Sally DeFord who played piano for silent movies: link.

“This brief research note aims to estimate the magnitude of the association between general intelligence and physical attractiveness with large nationally representative samples from two nations. In the United Kingdom, attractive children are more intelligent by 12.4 IQ points (r = .381), whereas in the United States, the correlation between intelligence and physical attractiveness is somewhat smaller (r = .126). The association between intelligence and physical attractiveness is stronger among men than among women in both nations.” (link)

Lacking a compensating trade-off between looks and smarts, many of us will have to make do, as Elwood Dowd recommended, with being oh so pleasant. Also, those who selected a looker for a spouse weren’t so shallow after all.

“When U.S. civil affairs teams (and other special forces units) quietly investigated the problem, they quickly discovered a common denominator. Virtually all of the younger men who beat their wives (over their inability to become pregnant) had been former ‘apprentices’ of older Afghan men, who used them for their sexual pleasure. Upon entering marriage, whatever the men knew of sex had been learned during their ‘apprenticeship,’ at the hands of the older man. To put it bluntly, some of the younger Afghans were unfamiliar with the desired (and required) mechanics for conception.

“To remedy this situation, the Army called in its psychological operations teams, which developed information campaigns in Pashtun areas, explaining the basics of heterosexual relations and their benefits, in terms of producing male offspring. It may be the only time in the history of warfare that an army has been required to explain sex to the native population, to curb the abuse of women and young boys–and retain U.S. influence in key geographic areas.”

(link)

As seen at Marginal Revolution, a study of turning the hearts of the children to their fathers:

An initial study involved 80 undergrads spending five minutes thinking about either their fifteenth century ancestors, their great-grandparents or a recent shopping trip. Afterwards, those students in the two ancestor conditions were more confident about their likely performance in future exams, an effect that seemed to be mediated by their feeling more in control of their lives.

Three further studies showed that thinking or writing about their recent or distant ancestors led students to actually perform better on a range of intelligence tests, including verbal and spatial tasks (in one test, students who thought about their distant ancestors scored an average of 14 out of 16, compared with an average of 10 out of 16 among controls). The ancestor benefit was mediated partly by students attempting more answers – what the researchers called having a ‘promotion orientation’.

Agatha Christie’s Christmas Story Star Over Bethlehem starts out sounding like a piece of mid-priced sentimentality, but then it gets really good, really quick. All is not as it seems. (more…)