Last Friday night (yes, this is how we spend our weekends) Morgan asked Robin and me a question: is it true that hot water will freeze faster than cold water? Apparently, he had gotten into an argument with someone who pointed to the obvious absurdity of the statement, and Morgan couldn’t remember exactly why this is true, but did remember reading somewhere that it is in fact true. In a manner superior and smug enough to indicate my superior knowledge of physics, I informed Morgan that he was wrong, and as a reference, told him that I remember Cecil Adams tackling this silly myth in The Straight Dope column some years ago. Sure enough, a quick search of The Straight Dope archives revealed this:

Dear Cecil:

I have a friend who insists that filling an ice cube tray with warm water will cause the cubes to form more quickly than they would if you started with cold water. He said it had something to do with the air circulation around the trays being affected by the temperature.

Not knowing much about frigidity myself, but being contrary, not to mention skeptical, by nature, I expressed doubt. Cecil, was I right, or is there indeed some basis in fact for this foolishness? –Mary M.Q.C., Santa Barbarba, California

Cecil replies:

You were smart to let me handle this, Mary. God knows what would happen if you tried to experiment with ice cubes on your own.

Needless to say, I conducted my research in the calm and systematic manner that has long been the trademark of Straight Dope Labs. First, I finished off a half a pint of Haagen-Dazs I found in the fridge, in order to keep my brain supplied with vital nutrients.

Then I carefully measured a whole passel of water into the Straight Dope tea kettle and boiled it for about five minutes. This was so I could compare the freezing rate of boiled H20 with that of regular hot water from the tap. (Somehow I had the idea that water that had been boiled would freeze faster.)

Finally I put equal quantities of each type into trays in the freezer, checked the temp (125 degrees Fahrenheit all around), and sat back to wait, timing the process with my brand new Swatch watch, whose precision and smart styling have made it the number one choice of scientists the world over.

I subsequently did the same with two trays of cold water, which had been chilled down to a starting temperature of 38 degrees.

The results? The cold water froze about 10 or 15 minutes faster than the hot water, and there was no detectable difference between the boiled water and the other kind. Another old wives’ tale thus emphatically bites the dust. Science marches on.

However, a reader wrote in to say that Scientific American had an article about why hot water freezes faster than cold, and old Unca Cecil had to revise his conclusion:

I know it must unnerve you to find that a supposedly infallible source of wisdom can make mistakes, so let me hasten to reassure you: Scientific American did not screw up. My results and theirs (specifically, those of Jearl Walker, author of SA’s “Amateur Scientist” column) are consistent–we were just working in different temperature ranges.

I found that cold water (38 degrees Fahrenheit) froze faster than hot water out of the tap (125 degrees F). I chose these two temperatures because (1) they were pretty much what the average amateur ice-cube maker would have readily available and (2) I couldn’t find a mercury thermometer that went higher than 125 degrees.

Jearl, who is not afflicted with penny-pinching editors like some of the rest of us, was able to get his mitts on a thermocouple that could measure as high as the boiling point, 212 degrees F. He found that water heated to, say, 195 degrees would freeze three to ten minutes faster than water at 140-175 degrees. (There were differences depending on how much water was used, where the thermocouple was placed, and so on.)

Jearl suggested that the most likely explanation for this was evaporation: when water cools down from near boiling to the freezing point, as much as 16 percent evaporates away, compared to 7 percent for water at 160 degrees. The smaller the amount of water, of course, the faster it freezes.

In addition, the water vapor carries away a certain amount of heat. To test this theory, Jearl covered his lab beaker with Saran Wrap to prevent water vapor from escaping. The freezing rate difference was greatly diminished. Conceivably convection (motion within the water) also plays a role.

Fascinating as all this no doubt is, all it basically proves is that very hot water freezes more slowly than very VERY hot water. The ordinary fumbler in the fridge, on the other hand, is dealing with temps more like the ones I was measuring, in which case cold freezes faster than hot. I rest my case.

You can see the Straight Dope page here. However, this is not the whole story either. Apparently the phenomenon in question is known as the Mpemba Effect after a Tanzanian high school student who discovered it in 1969. There is more to the story, and the possible mechanisms behind this anomalous effect here, here, here, here, and from Scientific American’s “Ask the Experts” column here.

My apologies to Morgan. (But I did double check. Can I get partial credit?)

Reuel Marc Gerecht in the New York Times Book Review:

Could the administration have chosen a different course in Iraq that would today have the country farther down the road to popular government and cost fewer lives? Two new books — among the first ”insider” accounts by former Iraq advisers — find the White House guilty of an incompetent occupation. Representative government may, just possibly, still take hold in Mesopotamia, but neither Larry Diamond, a researcher at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who was called by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to temporary service in Baghdad in early 2004, nor David L. Phillips, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as an adviser to the State Department before and after the fall of Saddam Hussein, are at all optimistic.

More here.

The London bombings came as the G8 came together to discuss poverty in Africa.  Attention to that very serious issue also suffered as a result.  Jeffrey Sach’s blogged the G8 (and unexpectedly the bombing) for the FT.

“We have recently heard much, and much wrong, about the question of whether aid can actually deliver benefits to the poor. The sceptics claim that vast amounts of aid have gone down the drain. They cite alleged huge numbers, approximately $500 billion of total aid to Africa over 50 years, as “proof” of the failure of aid. They don’t recognize that a sum of aid flows added over 50 or more years will sound large though the annual aid per African has actually been quite small.

Just do the arithmetic. Aid to Africa has averaged perhaps $10 billion per year during the past half century ($500 billion divided by 50), shared among an average African population of roughly 400 million during this period, or approximately $25 per African per year in aid. Of that annual flow, well over half would typically come as emergency food aid and salaries of US and European consultants, rather than as actual investments in Africa. In recent years, another part of the “aid” has been exaggerated headline figures on debt cancellation, which greatly exaggerate the cash flow relief per year. Actual investments supported by the donor aid might have averaged say $5 to $10 per African per year, or even less.

This has not been nearly enough to address a continent profoundly vulnerable to deep and widespread drought, pervasive disease, huge overland transport costs with many landlocked countries, and a legacy of a century of colonialism that left a disastrously poor physical infrastructure and a shockingly low level of literacy and higher education at the time of African independence. Small aid flows per African per year ran up against uniquely large developmental needs.”

From Science:

Great cases, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes suggested a century ago, may make bad law. But great questions often make very good science. Some great questions get bigger over time, encompassing an ever-expanding universe, or become more profound, such as the quest to understand consciousness. On the other hand, many deep questions drive science to smaller scales, more minute than the realm of atoms and molecules, or to a greater depth of detail underlying broad-brush answers to past big questions. In 1880, some scientists remained unconvinced by Maxwell’s evidence for atoms. Today, the analogous debate focuses on superstrings as the ultimate bits of matter, on a scale a trillion trillion times smaller. Old arguments over evolution and natural selection have descended to debates on the dynamics of speciation, or how particular behaviors, such as altruistic cooperation, have emerged from the laws of individual competition.

Science’s greatest advances occur on the frontiers, at the interface between ignorance and knowledge, where the most profound questions are posed. There’s no better way to assess the current condition of science than listing the questions that science cannot answer. “Science,” Gross declares, “is shaped by ignorance.”

More here.

From Science:

The research field Eva Barroso chose for her Ph.D. is so new that even she had never heard of it before seeing the job posting on the Internet. “I was interested in human genetics, but not especially in this field,” she says. What the Ph.D. project was proposing was the opportunity to try and track down genetic markers in order to predict an individual’s susceptibility to diseases that involve more than one gene.

The impact of such research could be huge. In the long term, Barroso says, “the idea is to have your DNA checked for [predisposition] to breast cancer, and every [other known disease].” Not only does she find it fascinating, she also finds it easy to grab the interest of her family and friends when she explains what she does–a rare quality in a scientific job.

More here.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in the weekend’s installment of “Freakonomics” in the New York Times Magazine:

“Although motor-vehicle crashes are still the top killer among children from 2 to 14, fatality rates have fallen steadily in recent decades — a drop that coincides with the rise of [child safety] car-seat use. Perhaps the single most compelling statistic about car seats in the NHTSA manual was this one: ‘They are 54 percent effective in reducing deaths for children ages 1 to 4 in passenger cars.’

But 54 percent effective compared with what? The answer, it turns out, is this: Compared with a child’s riding completely unrestrained. There is another mode of restraint, meanwhile, that doesn’t cost $200 or require a four-day course to master: seat belts.

For children younger than roughly 24 months, seat belts plainly won’t do. For them, a car seat represents the best practical way to ride securely, and it is certainly an improvement over the days of riding shotgun on mom’s lap. But what about older children? Is it possible that seat belts might afford them the same protection as car seats?

The answer can be found in a trove of government data called the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), which compiles police reports on all fatal crashes in the U.S. since 1975. These data include every imaginable variable in a crash, including whether the occupants were restrained and how.

Even a quick look at the FARS data reveals a striking result . . .”

From Scientific American:

The bursting blooms of many types of flowers herald the onset of spring. New research is helping scientists unravel the cellular signaling that prompts the plants to blossom after their winter slumber. According to a report published in today’s issue of the journal Science, the action of one protein that responds to daylight starts a chain reaction that allows flowering to commence. 

More here.

From the Australian Broadcast Corporation Online:

“The movie gives two examples of experiments which have shown the power of the mind affecting reality. Neither of them convincingly achieve this. . .

John Hagelin, PhD, describes a study he did in Washington in 1992. 4000 volunteers regularly meditated to achieve a 25% drop in violent crime by the end of summer. He claims the drop was achieved.

But Hagelin’s use of the term ‘achieved’ for the drop in crime is a bit strong. He announced in 1994 (one year after the study) that violent crime had decreased 18%. You might think that meant there were 18% fewer violent crimes than in the previous year, but the decrease was actually relative to his predicted increase based on some fancy statistical footwork. Regular indicators of violent crime told a different story – the number of murders actually went up.

The meditation may not have helped the victims of violent crime, but it did win Hagelin the 1994 Ig Nobel Peace Prize.”

Via Political Theory Daily, Paul Erlich and Simon Levin outline some first steps in developing an integrated evolution theory of norms as a first step towards understanding cultural evolution.

“There is a long-recognized need both to understand the process of human cultural evolution per se and to find ways of altering its course (an operation in which institutions as diverse as schools, prisons, and governments have long been engaged). In a world threatened by weapons of mass destruction and escalating environmental deterioration, the need to change our behavior to avoid a global collapse has become urgent. A clear understanding of how cultural changes interact with individual actions is central to informing democratically and humanely guided efforts to influence cultural evolution. While most of the effort to understand that evolution has come from the social sciences, biologists have also struggled with the issue. . . [B]iologists and social scientists need one another and must collectively direct more of their attention to understanding how social norms develop and change. Therefore, we offer this review of the challenge in order to emphasize its multidisciplinary dimensions and thereby to recruit a broader mixture of scientists into a more integrated effort to develop a theory of change in social norms—and, eventually, cultural evolution as a whole.”

In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, a college graduate named Shea Zellweger began a journey of wonder and obsession that would eventually lead to the invention of a radically new notation for logic. From a basement in Ohio, guided literally by his dreams and his innate love of pattern, Zellweger developed an extraordinary visual system – called the “Logic Alphabet” – in which a group of specially designed letter-shapes can be manipulated like puzzles to reveal the geometrical patterns underpinning logic. Indeed, Zellweger has built a series of physical models of his alphabet that recall the educational teaching toys, or “gifts,” of Friedrich Froebel, the great nineteenth century founder of the Kindergarten movement. Just as Froebel was deeply influenced by the study of crystal structures, which he believed could serve as the foundation for an entire educational framework, so Zellweger’s Logic Alphabet is based on a crystal-like arrangement of its elements. Thus where the traditional approach to logic is purely abstract, Zellweger’s is geometric, making it amenable to visual play.

more here.

Compared to Mark McGowan’s previous performance pieces, his latest enterprise seems relatively harmless. For an artist whose three-year career has included an attempt to catapult a 76-year-old pensioner into space (to highlight the way in which the young mistreat the old), walking backwards for 11 miles with a 27lb turkey on his head while shouting at fat people (to draw attention to the obesity epidemic), and scratching 50 shiny cars with his keys and photographing the evidence (for reasons that have never been entirely clear), his decision to leave a tap running for a year sounds almost anodyne. But McGowan’s latest stunt – wasting water in the backroom of a south London gallery – has caused the kind of publicity he can only have dreamed of. It’s a Shangri-la scenario for a man whose art doesn’t really exist unless people take notice of it.

more here.

From The New York Times:

A SWEDISH diplomat recently announced that he was nominating Rudy Giuliani, New York’s famously bellicose former mayor, for the Nobel Peace Prize. My first thought was: He won’t accept! But then, even better: If he wins, he could use his speech to denounce peace. Or Swedes. Or New York liberals. We miss Rudy; even some of the people who could barely stand him at the time miss him. The administration of the current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has turned out to be, as Fred Siegel puts it in this very insightful and very argumentative book, a ”moderately competent muddle.” The Giuliani years were neither moderate nor muddled.

Two biographies of Giuliani appeared during his tenure, but in ”The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life,” Siegel has produced the first book-length reckoning with Giuliani’s philosophy, achievements and legacy.

More here.

From MSNBC:

A parrot has grasped the concept of zero, something humans can’t do until at least the toddler phase, researchers say. Alex, a 28-year-old African gray parrot who lives in a lab at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, has a brain the size of a walnut. But when confronted with no items on a tray where usually there are some, he says “none.” Zero is thought to be a rather abstract concept even for people. Children typically don’t grasp it until age 3 or 4, Brandeis researchers say. Some ancient cultures lacked a formal term for zilch, even as recently as the Middle Ages.

More here.

“The adventures of a hot-tempered and impetuous Scottish pirate named Alexander Selkirk inspired one of literature’s greatest adventures, as our author, himself a member of the family, recounts.”

Bruce Selcraig in Smithsonian Magazine:

Three centuries ago an impetuous Scottish sailor known as Alexander Selkirk was languishing off the coast of Chile in a battle-scarred, worm-eaten British ship called the Cinque Ports when he began to argue with the captain that the leaky, disease-ridden vessel was a deathtrap. Selkirk, a skilled navigator, and the ship’s sickened crew were privateers—in effect, legalized pirates for the British Crown—who had spent a year at sea off South America robbing Spanish ships and coastal villages. Selkirk had already been on a similar voyage. He knew all the risks. But by October 1704, as the Cinque Ports anchored off a deserted archipelago 418 miles west of Valparaiso, Chile, he had made a life-changing decision.

Selkirk demanded that his 21-year-old captain, Lt. Thomas Stradling, whom he regarded as arrogant, leave him on the largest island, a wish that Stradling was only too happy to oblige.

More here.

Sandy Szwarc in Tech Central Station:

It has been well documented that dieting virtually always fails long-term — about 90 to 95% of the time — and that dieting drop-out rates are high. But this study also poignantly illustrated that improvements to health and health behaviors with dieting are not maintained and in the end dieting actually worsens women’s health and quality of life. The dieting group which had significantly increased their physical activity right after the treatment period, had returned to their initial levels by the end of the study. And most remarkably, there was nearly 200% more bulimia and eating disorders among the dieters compared to the nondieters. The dieters’ self esteem and depression had also significantly worsened, which isn’t surprising given most dieters are left with an overwhelming sense of failure. And the psychological and physiological effects, as well as eating problems, resulting from calorie restriction itself have been clinically documented.   

The nondieters, on the other hand, enjoyed extraordinary improvements in their self esteem and feeling good about their bodies, and less depression.

More here.

Leonard David at Space.com:

In his new book, Teleportation – The Impossible Leap, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., writer David Darling contends that “”One way or another, teleportation is going to play a major role in all our futures. It will be a fundamental process at the heart of quantum computers, which will themselves radically change the world.”

Darling suggests that some form of classical teleportation and replication for inanimate objects also seems inevitable. But whether humans can make the leap, well, that remains to be seen.

Teleporting a person would require a machine that isolates, appraises, and keeps track of over a trillion trillion atoms that constitute the human body, then sends that data to another locale for reassembly—and hopefully without mussing up your physical and mental makeup.

“One thing is certain: if that impossible leap turns out to be merely difficult—a question of simply overcoming technical challenges—it will someday be accomplished,” Darling predicts.

In this regard, Darling writes that the quantum computer “is the joker in the deck, the factor that changes the rules of what is and isn’t possible.”

More here.

Ben Adler in The New Republic:

Pressure to temper the teaching of evolution in public schools has come overwhelmingly from conservatives; the Kansas board’s re-examination of its evolution standards resulted from Republican gains last November that put an anti-evolution conservative majority on the board. So we were curious: How do leading conservative thinkers and pundits feel about evolution and intelligent design? We asked them. Here’s what they said.

William Kristol, The Weekly Standard

Whether he personally believes in evolution: “I don’t discuss personal opinions. … I’m familiar with what’s obviously true about it as well as what’s problematic. … I’m not a scientist. … It’s like me asking you whether you believe in the Big Bang.”

How evolution should be taught in public schools: “I managed to have my children go through the Fairfax, Virginia schools without ever looking at one of their science textbooks.”

More here.

Bookforum throws 19 or so authors into a discussion of Pynchon and his legacy for no particular reason at all. It’s nice, and not entirely un-Pynchonesque, when magazines do things like that.

From Gerald Howard:

In 1973, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow landed on my brain and exploded there like, well, a V-2 rocket. It was precisely the book I needed at the time, which tells you something about my mental and spiritual condition. Hey, it was the ’70s. The country was low in the water and so was I. Tar-black humor, crushing difficulty, rampant paranoia, accelerating entropy, jaw-dropping perversity, apocalyptic terror, history as a conspiracy of the conjoined forces of technology, death, and sinister Control—it was all good. I preferred having my spirit crushed by a great American novel to the everyday humiliations of my first year of postcollegiate life and the cultural and political demoralizations of the era.

The revival of interest in Land Art, and the new projects that seem to have emerged from that tradition as it first manifested itself in the early 70s, is pretty interesting. Artforum’s summer issue devotes a fair amount of space to the greater Land art phenomenon.

Land art and subsequent site-specific work therefore share a deep structure. Belonging to a period of unprecedented media expansion (the television era), both sets of practices center on the mutual delimitation of virtuality and presence. In Land art presence is associated with remote territories, while virtuality inheres in mechanically reproduced documentation. In site-specific art, it is the artist as diagnostician or itinerant consultant who signifies presence in materializing a hitherto-virtual discursive site, as when Christian Philipp Müller actualizes an unmarked international border by crossing it on foot (Green Border, 1993) or Andrea Fraser ventriloquizes the entire dramatis personae of the art world while undressing (Official Welcome, 2001). In one set of practices it is the land, and in the other, the body, that serves as the material limit of representation.

From Science Daily:

Sometime, when you are out on the road and looking for something to occupy you, try this little experiment: If traffic is heavy, pick out another vehicle. It can be anything, from a cute little Mini Cooper to a humongous Hummer, just as long as its driver is doing one thing: trying to get ahead of everyone else. After you have selected your subject, over the course of, say, the next 20 minutes, keep track of where that vehicle is in relation to your own. If the traffic is really solid, or if you are proceeding along a strip dotted by traffic lights, chances are that other vehicle will not move substantially ahead, and whatever energy that driver has been expending will be for naught.

Somewhere along the line, in the American driving culture, pushing to get ahead became the norm.

More here.