Plato, Socrates, Thucydides, Herodotus, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Aristophanes are thinkers that invented western civilization as we know it. And they all lived in the same time period. What causes genius to cluster in this way? Jonah Lehrer took a look at the features of society throughout history that have led to talent ‘clotting’:

• Human mixing. Clusters of geniuses are generally found in commercial trading areas where people can mix and merge their ideas. In the contemporary world, studies suggest that a 1% increase in the number of immigrants with college degrees can lead to an 18% rise in the number of patents.
• Education. Geniuses come from places where knowledge, expertise, and experience are effectively passed on.
• Risk-taking. To find that one genius idea that defines a century, you’re likely to go through many failures. Cultures that support and encourage risk-taking (and the failures this produces) see the rise of geniuses.
• In the United States today most of these conditions are found in the world of sports – thus the rise in the number of athletic geniuses.

To read more about other clusters of geniuses throughout history, how Shakespeare benefitted from a society that embodied some of these values, and why peace doesn’t really matter, click here.

Source: Wired

In 1865 one British economist pointed out that energy efficiency didn’t reduce energy consumption – it increased it. As energy became cheaper people used more of it for a broader array of applications. Clive Thompson writing about a new book titled The Conundrum points out some of the ways this backlash effect has occurred in recent history:

• The increase in the efficiency of automobile engines brought about demand for larger cars with more electronic sensors.
• The decrease in the cost of lighting meant that we just stuffed lights into damned near everything, including sneakers.
• The increase in the efficiency of air-conditioners just made air-conditioning the norm.

To read other examples, what this says about sustainability, and why this might be more of a critique on growth rather than a critique of energy efficiency click here.

Source: Wired

In Slate, Charles Duhigg writes that before the advertising efforts of one man, Claude Hopkins, brushing was not a daily ritual for most people. What did Hopkins do to make brushing your teeth so ubiquitous?

• In his advertising campaigns he focused on the plaque that developed on people’s tongues, inviting readers to “run your tongue across your teeth” to feel the film.
• He sold Pepsodent as a solution to that plaque. However the genius was the tingly sensation that the toothpaste created in people’s mouths after brushing. The sensation was created by an irritant that was originally added as a preservative.
• People began to associate that tingling feeling with cleanliness. This is the reason why toothpaste makers continue to add additives to paste to reproduce that sensation.
• Duhigg was unknowingly capitalizing on the way that humans form habits. First there is a cue – in this case it was the feeling of plaque on teeth. Then there is the behaviour – the act of brushing. And then the reward – the tingling sense that consumers felt. Using these three principles it is possible to create any habit.

To read more about Duhigg’s marketing genius, how you can use these principles to lose weight, and the neurological details of what this process looks like in our brains, click here.

Source: Slate

Jon Bois writes about an emerging trend that is threatening to undermine the very fabric of sports: athletes don’t call themselves Bob anymore.

• At one point the number of “Bobs” in major league sports numbered in the hundreds. Now there is just one. Bob Sanders.
• The decline in the number of Bobs hasn’t been slow or gradual. It has been short, sharp, and alarming.

To read the rest of a hilarious post with gems such as: “The Bobs arrived, didn’t like what they saw, and left. Maybe they’re off in another land, playing a sport superior to any of ours, with a ball that kicks straight and never bounces off the post. I hope they’re enjoying themselves, wherever they are. But they should know that we miss them” click here.

Source: SBNation

Via: Newmark’s Door

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Stephanie Hegarty at the BBC reports on a growing body of research that suggests an eight hour block of unbroken sleep is abnormal and counter to natural human behaviour. Some of the things she found include:

• Evidence suggests that the natural human sleeping pattern is an eight hour sleep phase broken up into two parts by a period of wakefulness that lasts for up to two hours in between periods of sleep.
• Before the 1500s the phrases “first sleep” and “second sleep” were part of the common lexicon suggesting that it was once the norm for people to sleep in two distinct phases.
• In this two hour period of wakefulness people were moderately active, using the time to read, write, smoke, talk, pray and have sex.
• There are several theories as to why this changed. Most of them involve the increasing popularity of using the night for ‘productive’ purposes, meaning that staying awake doing ‘nothing’ was considered a waste of time. The rise of street lights, all-night coffee shops, and legitimate night-time activities made staying up at night – and thus compressing your sleep schedule into one monolithic block – fashionable.

To read about other practices that individuals engaged in after first sleep, expanded theories into why this all changed, and the implications this has for how we handle our sleep click here.

Source: BBC News

Via: Austin Frakt at The Incidental Economist

Why do we pay so much attention to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, commonly referred to as The Dow? Adam Davidson writes that it’s because: “In the postwar boom of the 1950s, the economy was growing so fast, and the benefits were so widely shared, that following 30 large American companies was a solid measure of most everyone’s personal economy.” But he argues that it has now become an outdated measure because:

• The way the Dow is calculated focuses on share price rather than company size. This means that ExxonMobile, one of the largest companies in history, has a smaller effect on the Dow than Caterpillar, a company that is less than a fifth of ExxonMobile’s size.
• The Dow does not adjust for inflation.
• In a globalized world, where companies are increasingly making their profits abroad, what’s good for companies on the Dow is not necessarily what’s good for the United States.
• Charles Dow, the individual who created the index in 1896, himself only checked it infrequently. The Executive Director of Dow Indexes believes that the Dow should not be checked more than once a month.

To read about better alternatives, the history of the Dow, and more of its weaknesses click here.

Source: The New York Times

The American Academic of Pediatrics released a statement in 2001 supporting the mandatory use of Car Seats for infants on airplanes. Aaron Carroll writing for The Incidental Economist explained why that would be a very bad idea:

• Such a policy is estimated to prevent 0.4 infant fatalities per year
• But the cost of an extra airplane seat for infants (currently parents are allowed to carry them on their laps) would encourage more people to drive instead of fly. Since driving is more dangerous than flying a policy of Car Seats on airplanes would increase the number of child deaths by 5-10%.
• Overall requiring Car Seats on airplanes would cost $1.3 billion per life saved.

To read more about the implications of such a policy, and some better (and significantly cheaper) ideas about how to prevent child deaths, read the full argument here.

Source: The Incidental Economist

One behavioural economist who works with primates says that his experiments make the monkeys “statistically indistinguishable from most stock-market investors.” Some of the things he has found include:

• Monkeys were trained to use money. They demonstrated a healthy knowledge of the laws of demand, substitution, and utility maximization. When prices for one good went up, they bought more of other, substitute goods.
• One monkey managed to set up a bank heist and a jail break and escaped with a lot of the tokens the experimenters were using for money. Whereas the currency had been contained in a controlled environment up until then, once the money was freely available to all of the monkeys in the cage with no rules about what they could spend it on, chaos ensued.
• One male monkey gave a token to a female monkey, and then had sex with her. The female monkey used the money to buy food. This is thought to be the first case of money being exchanged for sex in a non-human species. In other words it is the first recorded case of non-human prostitution.

To read more about the similarities between humans and monkeys, why selfless and selfish monkeys face similar outcomes, and the irrational behaviours decisions that both monkeys and humans make click here.

Source: The New York Times

On Pileus, Marc Eisner takes a look at the argument that tuition costs have risen too much, too quickly. He argues that students are getting something in return for the higher fees:

• The most striking thing about the evolution of the university experience over the years is the change in the services provided.
• Not too long ago university students were given fairly limited support and complete freedom. They were expected to come to their own decisions and adjust their own schedules. Course catalogues had to be picked up, and advisors were rare. Moreover the living facilities were basic with community television rooms and bland food the norm.
• Now students have PhDs helping them through every step of the university process. The advisor’s approval is seemingly necessary for every little decision. Living conditions have also significantly improved with personal televisions and computers the norm, meaning that the university has to provide cable and internet. The quality and variety of the food has also significantly increased.

Eisner concludes by noting that the inflation adjusted $5,500 tuition he paid for a year of education reflected the quality of service that he received. To read more about the differences in the college experience between the past and present, the political implications of this change, and how this is interpreted from the university’s perspective, click here.

Source: Pileus

Via: Newmark’s Door