A friend asked me how to strike up conversations with strangers. I told her what I’ve said many times. Three things make it easier:

1. Recognition. If you recognize someone (and presumably they recognize you) it will be easier to start a conversation.

2. Real question. If you have a real question — a question to which you really want the answer — it will be easier to start a conversation.

3. Shared suffering. If the two of you (you and the person you wish to speak to) have suffered together — bad weather, stuck in a long line — it will be easier to start a conversation. Living in Beijing and not speaking Chinese is another example of what I mean by “suffering”; another name for this factor could be shared predicament.

Those are the main factors that matter. In everyday life, they vary a lot. Another factor is minor:

4. Forced proximity. If you are forced to be near each other — in an elevator, say — it will be easier to start a conversation.

If none of these factors are true, it will be very hard to start a conversation. If one is true, it will be somewhat hard. If two are true it will be easy. If three are true it will be inevitable.

In my experience, local culture makes a small difference, somewhere between zero to one on this scale. Most places are zero. A place where people are really friendly would be worth one.

A new report has come out that says that cell phones probably do cause cancer, as several people, such as David Servan-Schreiber, have argued. But the news is not all bad:

The design of the study is fundamentally flawed, as well-documented by “Cell Phones and Brain Tumor.” For example, users of cordless phones only were treated as unexposed. But, two independent studies found users of cordless phones had an increased risk of brain tumors. So, excluding such users underestimates the risk of brain tumors. This flaw suggests either ignorance or dishonesty on the part of the researchers running the Interphone Study. Then, there’s the suspicious finding from some parts of the Interphone Study which concluded the use of a cell phone for less than ten years lowers your risk of brain tumors. This suggests the bias was so strong it eliminated enough tumor risk to show decreased incidence. The Interphone studies did find more brain tumor risk after more than ten years of cell phone use. The report notes that the risk was so great it could not be camouflaged even by the bias of the study.

Emphasis added. The person who wrote that hasn’t heard of hormesis.

This site (myshoppingsun, myshoppingsun.com) is a scam. See here for details. If you want to make this harder for them, simply click on one of their Google ads (which you can find with a Google search). Each click costs them.

. . . you should have your thyroid level checked. There’s a strong correlation:

Nineteen patients (73%; 31 hands [68%]) displayed symptoms of CTS; of these, 16 patients (25 hands) had clinical examinations consistent with CTS. Only 6 of the 16 patients with clinical CTS (7 of 25 hands) had electrical studies that supported a diagnosis of CTS. All these symptomatic patients were biochemically euthyroid. All control subjects had normal electrical study results and normal sensibility testing. Two [control] subjects had positive clinical [CTS] examinations, giving a [CTS] false-positive rate of 4%.

Apparently treatment of the thyroid condition can make CTS — often treated with surgery — go away, speaking of misguided operations.

Hypothyroidism is so common I suspect an environmental cause, just as the fact that acne is common suggests an environmental cause. One kind of evidence for such a thing would be finding a group of people living unusual lives (e.g., New Guinea highlanders) with unusually low or unusually high rates.

Via Natural News.

I’ve been in about 15 subway systems. Only in the Tokyo system have I seen these helpful features:

1. Walking distances. The signs within a station that show where to go to get to Line X (the platform where you catch Line X trains) include distances (in meters). How far you have to walk to get there. A nearby platform might be 100 m; a distant one 250 m.
2. Station-to-station distances in minutes. In several places you are told how many minutes (on the train) it takes to get to each station. Most stations are about 2 minutes apart. The nearest station is 2 minutes away, the next is 4 minutes, etc.
3. Letter-number names for each station. In addition to the usual names for each station (e.g., Ginza) each station has a letter-number name. The letter is the line; the number is the position on the line (1, 2, 3, etc.). For a north-south line, for example, the southmost station is 1, the station just north of it is 2, and so on. On the Akususa Line, for example, the stations are named A1, A2, A3, etc., in addition to the usual names. This makes it easy to figure out how far you are from your destination. If you’re going to Station A15 and you’re now at Station A12, you have 3 stops to go.

The old scamming website was gamesinwelt.com; the new one is gamesingate.com. More details. If you are pissed at them please recall that when you click on their ad they pay Google.

1. Three-dimensional TV. Via polarized light. Not for sale yet
2. Pens with erasers. You can erase the ink.

I believe that books for tourists are filled with inside jokes. A booklet for tourists called Welcome to Tokyo published by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government says the following about a place called Nakamise:

Both sides of the 250 m street from [A] to [B] are lined with about 90 stores dating from the Edo Period.

The Edo Period ran from 1603 to 1868, which few readers will know. The street is actually lined with stores selling the usual tourist stuff.

Did you know that a certain math proof runs 15,000 pages? It’s about the classification of finite simple groups. A shorter version should be about 5,000 pages. It began when someone proved that the number of simple groups was finite. Such a proof is more like a railroad network than a book. No one verfies the whole thing, just as no one rides the entire railroad network.

Cafes are discouraging laptop use, says the WSJ:

At two of three Café Grumpy locations — one in Brooklyn and the other in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood — laptops are never welcome.

But is this a change in policy?