This doesn’t look like an ad, but it is:

It points to a website where the product — a Samsung mobile phone — is more obvious. Watching the video a second time I can see something is fake about it — it’s too generic — but that wasn’t obvious the first time I watched.

Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories is overall a very good book, especially in its description of evidence. But there is also this:

Life is dependent on homeostatic systems that exhibit the same relative constancy as body weight, and none of them require a set point.

How does he think body temperature is regulated? Taubes continues:

It is always possible to create a system that exhibits set-point-like behavior or a settling point without actually having a set-point mechanism involved. The classic example is the water level in a lake, which might, to the naive, appear to be regulated from day to day or year to year, but is just the end result of a balance between the flow of water into the lake and the flow out.

No, lakes do not “appear to be regulated” because they do not exhibit anything like hunger or feeling cold. When the water level in a lake is lower than usual, nothing happens to push the level back up. Taubes continues:

When Claude Bernard discussed the stability of the milieu interne and Walter Cannon the notion of homeostasis, it is was this kind of dynamic regulation they had in mind, not a central thermostatlike regulator in the brain that would do the job rather than the body itself.

Michel Cabanac would not enjoy reading this. Whatever Bernard and Cannon had in mind, there is a “central thermostatlike regulator in the brain” that controls body temperature. It makes us seek warmth — take a warm shower, drink hot drinks, put on a jacket — when our body temperature is too low and do the opposite — such as drink cold drinks and eat ice cream — when our body temperature is too high. When our body temperature is too high, we find a warm shower more pleasant than when our body temperature is too low. These changes are obvious — at least, once you look for them — and imply a thermostat in the brain.

Thank you, j n kalhan, for your comment on a post of mine that speculated that Joyce Hatto and Ranjit Chandra might be twins separated at birth:

It is not true. I have personal knowledge. Dr. Chandra has no twin brother.

At a recent party, I met a brand manager for a very large company. He explained how advertisements are designed. You do a focus group to find out the real reason people buy your product — what they really want from it — then you make your advertisements reflect that reason. For example, people do not buy [Product X] because it does [the stated function of Product X]. They buy it because they want to feel confident. So the ads for [Product X] show people appearing confident.

I had heard this before, but never so clearly. A NY Times article about Western Union provides another example:

Having once stressed efficiency (“the fastest way to send money”) [in its ads], Western Union now emphasizes the devotion the money represents. One poster pairs a Filipino nurse in London with her daughter back home in cap and gown, making Western Union an implicit partner in the family’s achievements. “Sending so much more than money” is a common tag line.

A fascinating post by Stephen Dubner — with help from Gwenyth Cravens — says that our perceptions of the danger of nuclear power have been warped, and not in a good way. Years ago I saw a scatterplot that showed perception of risk versus actual risk for many possible dangers: auto accident, being hit by lightning, and so on. Nuclear energy was a whopping outlier. Its perceived risk was much greater than you’d expect from its actual risk. From that outlier, a book with a great title: Power to Save the World.

When I was an undergraduate, I came up with an idea about why people laugh: Laughter is triggered by sudden pleasure. Not pleasure alone, it must increase quickly. Sudden pleasure is the necessary and sufficient condition for laughter. The threshold goes up and down — easier to make someone laugh if they’re nervous or cold, for example — but the basic rule never changes. (Tickling is an exception, of course.) Two old friends unexpectedly encounter each other, they embrace, laughing.

Humor is a subset of what causes laughter. Obviously we enjoy humor and jokes have punchlines — the necessary conditions are met. Maybe humor can tell us something about evolution: What is funny reveals what we enjoy, which may have a genetic basis.

I figured out that many jokes derive their pleasure from more than one source. These sources include:

1. Something forbidden. We have something we want to say or would enjoy saying; humor lets us say it.Insults, sexual stuff, scatological stuff (for children), swear words. Political jokes, a much bigger deal in the former Soviet Union than in America, tell forbidden truth about the government.

2. Something clever. Connecting two things that are quite different.

3. Something incongruous. Many New Yorker cartoons involve animals talking or children talking like adults.

Many jokes are clever insults, for example. Maybe the “did somebody say something” joke that I was puzzled about is an example. The speaker is saying “I don’t care about what you care about” (an insult of sorts) in a clever way.

I suspect this list is incomplete — but now that I’ve made it I can test it.

Paul Meehl, a famous clinical-psychology researcher, once said that when he was a student he was taught “the general scientific commitment not to be fooled and not to fool anyone else.” Yes, the. I’ve heard a dozen variations of this: “In graduate school I learned to think critically,” for example. How weirdly unbalanced. Isn’t it just as important — or more important — to figure out what can be learned from evidence? Not just what can’t?

The bias shows up in language. Skeptical is good, credulous is bad. There is no word that means too skeptical, no word that means under-credulous, no word that means the right amount of credulous.

When I hear comments like Meehl’s — when someone says “correlation does not equal causation,” for example, and does not stop to wonder what can be learned from the particular correlation being discussed — I think: You’re only using half your brain.

1. I meet one of Leonard Syme’s students at a party.

2. I learn about Syme’s unusual teaching methods (and later interview him about them).

3. One of Syme’s students, Michael Marmot, writes a book called The Status Syndrome (2004).

4. Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, writes an excellent review of The Status Syndrome:

You are a hot shot in a company, though not the boss. You are paid extremely well, but, again you have plenty of bosses above you (say the partners of an investment firm). Is it better than deriving a modest income being your own boss? The counterintuitive answer is NO. You will live longer in the second situation, even controlling for diet, lifestyle, and genetic predispositions.

5. I quote Taleb’s research ideas approvingly.

The BBC has a most intriguing radio show (on Radio 4) that they are curiously hiding from potential listeners. It is called “ The Preposterous Files” and is about “cases that show up Civil Service bureaucracy.” It was on their Listen Again page yesterday but was taken off yesterday. Its Listen Again button (pre-disappearance) replayed a segment about fiddling, alas.

So far there have been 5 shows. Perhaps that’s all there will ever be. (How unfortunate!) Here are their topics (taken from the show’s archives):

1. Deciding on the design, location and function of the police telephone box proved a dauntingly complex process. One difficulty was that most of the public had never used a telephone.

2. In 1900, the North of England press began to report a mysterious epidemic that was affecting thousands of beer drinkers. The medical profession declared that it was an outbreak of peripheral neuritis provoked by excessive alcohol consumption, but a sceptical chemist, working alone from a makeshift laboratory, thought otherwise.

3. In 1912, cost-conscious HM Customs replaced Falmouth’s steam launch with a former sailing boat fitted with an auxiliary motor. Unfortunately, the motor proved unable to cope with the strong currents off the Cornish coast.

4. In 1954, stevedores reported finding an unconscious young man on board a Polish ship berthed at Bermondsey Docks. Was he an asylum seeker or a stowaway?

5. The transcript of the court martial of Flying Officer DR Kenyon, who retracted his plane’s undercarriage whilst still standing on the runway prior to taking off for a bombing mission during the 1956 Suez crisis, makes extraordinary reading.