Neuroscience
In Chinese numerology, the number eight is associated with prosperity. It's such a lucky number1 (as everyone knows by now), that the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will begin at 8:08PM on 08/08/08.
In My Mascot Only Gave Me Sex Appeal, Kylie of PodBlack Cat covers Chinese superstitions about numbers...
To be continued...
Footnote
1 Not for Lene Lovich, however. Her lucky number is 2 (WATCH, and be sure to select high quality).
Something tells me my lucky number's gonna be changing soon
Something tells me lucky number's gonna be oweoweoweoweoweowe...Lene Lovich, Lucky number
- Gender Differences In Superstition - Men Are Influenced By Good Omens, Women By The Unlucky
Imagine taking a seat for a university exam and seeing that your seat number is unlucky. Would it bother you? A new study by Maria De Paola and her colleagues explored this question in a field study with over 700 Italian students. Sixty-one of the students...
- Lucky Number Plates Go Up In Value When Times Are Bad
The basis for many superstitious beliefs may be little more than fantasy but their economic effects are all too real. According to Travis Ng and colleagues at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, casual estimates suggest that between $800 and $900 million...
- Extras
Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut: The paradox of declining female happiness (pdf). The cardiovascular toll of stress. Neural correlates of paedophilia. Ghost writing in the medical literature. "...because signs of their actual production...
- 655,000 Excess Iraqi Deaths
An estimated 655,000 more Iraqis have died as a consequence of the March 2003 military invasion of Iraq than would have been expected in a non-conflict situation, according to an article in The Lancet: Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional...
- Game Theory
From the Scientific American website: May 20, 2007 The Traveler's Dilemma When playing this simple game, people consistently reject the rational choice. In fact, by acting illogically, they end up reaping a larger reward--an outcome that demands...
Neuroscience
080808 (god is a number part 1)
In Chinese numerology, the number eight is associated with prosperity. It's such a lucky number1 (as everyone knows by now), that the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will begin at 8:08PM on 08/08/08.
In My Mascot Only Gave Me Sex Appeal, Kylie of PodBlack Cat covers Chinese superstitions about numbers...
A manifestation of Chinese superstition in Hong Kong is the common desire to avoid certain numbers and to engage others. Hospitals, along with most hotels and many other buildings, often do not label “fourth” floors and sometimes “fourteenth” floors because the number “4” and the word “death” sound almost identical in Cantonese and Mandarin…...and ghosts...
As for giving up on the architecture altogether due to superstitious beliefs, some of you may be familiar with the pictures of San-Zhr pod village - closed due to belief in ghosts of workers who were killed on the site, leaving unfinished buildings decaying in a rather attractively futuristic-apocalyptic fashion....and “Belief in ghost month can help prevent drowning deaths: a natural experiment on the effects of cultural beliefs on risky behaviours” (Yang et al., 2008):
Studies have suggested that cultural beliefs, such as those underlying religious social occasions and superstitions, have both positive and negative effects on mortality rates. Many people in Southern China believe that there are wandering ghosts who were released from hell during the lunar month of July ... people therefore avoid unnecessary risky activities during ghost month. The aim of this study was to examine whether unintentional drowning deaths decreased during ghost month, using a matched control design and mortality data of Taiwan between 1981 and 2005. ... The mean number of deaths in ghost months was lower than that in the matched controls... The differences were more prominent in men than in women. ... Possible mechanisms are that people who believe in the ghost month might either decrease their exposure to water-related activities or involve themselves less in risky behaviours during ghost month, as a kind of risk compensation, consequently resulting in a reduction in the number of drowning deaths.
To be continued...
Footnote
1 Not for Lene Lovich, however. Her lucky number is 2 (WATCH, and be sure to select high quality).
Something tells me my lucky number's gonna be changing soonSomething tells me lucky number's gonna be oweoweoweoweoweowe...Lene Lovich, Lucky number
- Gender Differences In Superstition - Men Are Influenced By Good Omens, Women By The Unlucky
Imagine taking a seat for a university exam and seeing that your seat number is unlucky. Would it bother you? A new study by Maria De Paola and her colleagues explored this question in a field study with over 700 Italian students. Sixty-one of the students...
- Lucky Number Plates Go Up In Value When Times Are Bad
The basis for many superstitious beliefs may be little more than fantasy but their economic effects are all too real. According to Travis Ng and colleagues at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, casual estimates suggest that between $800 and $900 million...
- Extras
Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut: The paradox of declining female happiness (pdf). The cardiovascular toll of stress. Neural correlates of paedophilia. Ghost writing in the medical literature. "...because signs of their actual production...
- 655,000 Excess Iraqi Deaths
An estimated 655,000 more Iraqis have died as a consequence of the March 2003 military invasion of Iraq than would have been expected in a non-conflict situation, according to an article in The Lancet: Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional...
- Game Theory
From the Scientific American website: May 20, 2007 The Traveler's Dilemma When playing this simple game, people consistently reject the rational choice. In fact, by acting illogically, they end up reaping a larger reward--an outcome that demands...