Things That Surprised Me in 2009

• A flipped coin is more likely to land with the same side facing up as before the flip -- at least 51% and 55-60% depending on the flipper   (Stanford study,)
• Smart people use less brain power for mental tasks -- i.e. they learn brain efficiency.  (One exception is for solving math problems -- smarter males (but not smarter females) use more of their brain to solve mathematical problems than males with less math abilities.)  (Scientific American Mind - Nov/Dec 2009)
• There are no accounts of any traditional people who survived on raw foods alone (NYRB 10/22/09); The human body is adapted to eating cooked food -- small mouths, weak jaws, small teeth, small stomachs, small colons -- less than 60% of expected for a primate our size (ibid)
• People and dogs have come out fine after several minutes in a room at 230 - 240 F (boiling point of water = 212 F)  (Krulwich on Science 7/23/09)
• Heat does not rise and you don't lose 45% of your body heat through your head. The amount of heat your body loses is proportional to the surface area. Hotter air rises, but "heat" doesn't rise. (SGU 12/27/08)
• We used to think that stress and too much stomach acid caused ulcers; now we think a bacterium causes ulcers.  (EBM) 
• It's not illegal to change lanes under the monorail.  (Seattle PI)

Things That Surprised Me in 2008

• "The claim that "almost all mutations are harmful" is false. In fact, most mutations have no noticeable effect, mainly because most mutations do not occur within coding or regulatory regions of the genome. One study gives the average number of mutations that arise in a human conception to be around 128, with an average number of harmful mutations per conception of 1.3. However, most mutations that have an effect on phenotype are indeed detrimental to the organism" WikiPedia List of Common Misperceptions
• "The notion that goldfish have a memory of only three seconds is completely false. They have been trained to navigate mazes and can recognize their owners after an exposure of a few months." WikiPedia List of Common Misperceptions
• Arbitrary Coherence, e.g. Having people write down the last two digits of their social security number, and which of a number of items they'd be willing to buy for that much in dollars, has a large effect on prices given when you follow by simply asking what is the most they'd pay for each item. (Ariely blog)
• Beer tastes better to most people if you add a bit of balsamic vinegar -- and do not tell them before they taste it
• People who lie more are happier, better at business, and better at athletics. (RadioLab 2/29/2008)
• 'Simply removing the cork to allow the wine to "breathe" has no effect whatsoever. APPLICATION: The waiter, sommelier, or "expert" is wasting your time by simply removing the cork without decanting the bottle. It has been scientifically proven2 that the narrow space of the bottle neck where the wine can contact air is inadequate to produce any change within a period of even 24 hours, let alone a few minutes.' WinePros
• Dizygotic twins (about 1/125 pregancies) will sometimes have different fathers
• Most cells inherited from your mother are not genetically transfered
• Christmas songs written by Jews: "White Christmas" (Irving Berlin), "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)," "I'll be Home for Christmas," "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day."
• Bill Miller - Fund manager beat the S&P 15 years in a row (by chance, likelihood about 75% given 6,000 fund managers over 40 years) ( DW p186,188)
• To have a 75% chance of the better team winning when one team is ten percent better than the other (i.e. the probability is 55/45 for better/worse team to win), they would need to play a 45-game series. (Leonard Mlodinow, Town Hall lecture 5/14/2008)
• Rats outperform humans in guessing whether a red light or green light will flash in random ordering of 75% red and 25% green. Rats will simply go with more common color every time whereas humans will try to detect pattern. In split brain patients, the isolated right brain will emulate rats. ( DW p6)
• If a woman has two children and one is a girl, the chance that the other child is also female has to be 50-50, right? But it's not. Cardano again: The possibilities are girl-girl, girl-boy and boy-girl. So the chance that both children are girls is 33 percent. (Mlodinow)
• Coin flip trick based on Benford's Law: Tell students to either flip a coin 200 times or just fake the results; any series that doesn't have a run of 6 is declared a fake.

Things That Surprised Me in 2007

• Color/Number synesthesia has been clearly demonstrated and exists in approximately one in 200 people - SynesthesiaNotes
• 95-98% of people pick the same shapes to fit the names BoobaAndKiki
• The relative effect of genes upon intelligence and personality grows as you get older. I would have assumed the opposite -- i.e. that the relative effect of environment would grow, since your genes stay pretty much the same but you get more and more input from your environment. Instead, using IQ as an example, genetic differences account for 20% of IQ differences in infancy, 40% in childhood, 50% in adolscence, and 60% in adulthood (non-shared environments accounts for 30%). (Segal, p49)
• You can't get the flu from the flu vaccine (inert/dead)
• Throwing a bowling ball from a canoe into the water makes the water level go down.
• Experiments show that scientists can detect with high accuracy where a person has a cancer that has metastacized just by looking at their hand. (They use lasers to look for cancerous cells as blood flows -- ergo more accurate than blood samples.)
• There are millions of different ways that DNA sequences could encode exactly the same protein (EvolutionDna)
• Jimmy Carter did not see a UFO (in the extraterrestrial sense) (see 7/25/2007 interview on SGU)
• Yawning has nothing to do with respiration and is not a result of being tired
• Adding a scientist critiquing the belief to a television show about a paranormal claim increases the extent that people believe the claim ( Glenn Sparks - SGU - 10/12/05 )
• DNA researchers believe that Ghengis Kahn has 16 million identifiable descendents
• Study finds that 74% of Chinese children had perfect pitch (tonal language)
• If a sound comes into the brain as a regular electrical signal (e.g. a perfect 5th), it is pleasing, if it arrives as an irregular, jagged electronic signal (e.g. a minor 2nd) are displeasing
• The more you recall a specific memory, the less accurate that memory becomes
• There was no standard time or time zones in 1880. Each town, each clock would be set by the owner's assessment of when the sun was straight overhead. (See also Sanford Fleming)
• In the oldest existing version of the verse containing the number of the beast, an Oxyrhynchus fragment, the number is 616.
• Woodland Park = birthplace of the modern zoo revolution; locals warned by zookeepers from around the country against creating a natural setting for gorillas (RadioLab)
• Most animals (with exception of terrestrial mammals) sleep with one brain hemisphere at a time

Things That Surprised Me in 2006

• Most cells in your body are not human cells. Most cells from your mother were not transfered genetically. There are 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells in the human body. If all human cells were removed from your body, you would still look very much the same and remain recognizable.

Previously

• Primary colors do not exist. Color Questions
• We can conclude with high confidence that we perceive the same colors as most other human beings. (Ibid)
• 18% of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth ("As far as you know, does the earth revolve around the sun, or does the sun revolve around the earth?") Gallup