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Enjoy!

Don't Quote Me on This

Play it again, Sam.
Elementary, my dear Watson.
Houston, we have a problem.
Beam me up, Scotty!

It's rather easy. You know exactly where all those famous lines come from. Of course, they're from Casablanca, Sherlock Holmes (pretty much any book, right?), Apollo 13 (both the mission AND the movie), and the classic Star Trek series.

Well, not really. All of those are misquotations. At no point in the movie Casablanca does Humphrey Bogart say "Play it again, Sam". He does say this: "You played it for her, you can play it for me. ... If she can stand to listen to it, I can. Play it." The wrong quote sticks mostly because it's the title of the 1972 homage film by Woody Allen. Sherlock Holmes never utters the phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson!" in any of Arthur Conan Doyle's books; the closest he gets to that is by saying "My dear Watson" and "Elementary" in two different lines of dialogue in the same page. And Jim Lovell, commander of the Apollo 13 mission, stated the following to mission control: "Houston, we've had a problem here. We've had a main B bus undervolt". Pretty dull. But in the movie, Tom Hanks misquotes it in the fashion that we all know. And finally, Captain James T. Kirk never pronounces the words "Beam me up, Scotty!" in any episode of Star Trek. He does, though, repeatedly say "Beam me aboard," "Beam us up home," or "Two to beam up" and other variations thereof. Yet James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty, titled his 1996 memoir precisely Beam me up, Scotty!

There are many more blatant examples. Wikiquote has a handy list that saves me a lot of work. It's easy enough to see why this happens. For an idea to stick, it has to be concise, simple, and strong. Beam me up, Scotty! is an immortal line, Beam me aboard is just a request. The You played it for her... speech might work in a movie, but it's no T-shirt material. The interesting thing is that people become absolutely convinced that these quotes are correct, to the point that most will swear to remember them, in their exact form, from the source material. It's one of the many tricks that our memory plays on us.

This is a very common practice anyway. You might have heard of the recent case of the New Yorker journalist who resigned after evidence emerged that a number of Bob Dylan quotes in his bestselling book about creativity were completely made up. To no one's surprise, the media do that every day. It's more than enough to catch the gist of what someone said if it needs to be put in a fancier, stickier form. There is an ongoing battle on the subject, with the New York Times on the forefront of media outlets that forbid quote approval.

But I digress. Here's what I thought was, until five minutes ago, my favorite misquotation of them all. For years I have been reading a line attributed to Bugs Bunny, the cartoon hare famous for walking off cliffs in a straight line, unhindered by gravity: "I know this defies the law of gravity, but you see, I never studied law". Too perfect, too clever, I thought. Conveniently made up, for sure. But see for yourself. Bugs Bunny's PR representatives are the best in the business.

Don't Let the Elevator Bring You Down

I don't like elevators.

The clip above shows the agony of one Nicholas White, a former production manager at Business Week, who went down for a cigarette on a friday night in a Manhattan office building in 1999. As he finished, he got in an express elevator to reach his floor, number 43. But midway up, the car jolted and the lights went out. The elevator had been erroneously stopped for maintenance and workers, still attending to others cars, would not hear the alarm bell. When they left for the weekend, Nicholas White was the only person in the building. He somehow endured this ordeal for 41 hours. On sunday afternoon he was finally rescued, he took his jacket and went home. He subsequently sued the company and the building for 25 million dollars, but after four years of litigation he settled for much less. He never returned to the job, and eventually lost his apartment and all his money. He is still unemployed.

Elevators don't routinely ruin people's lives, but they can still give you trouble. Claustrophobia is a strange form of anxiety because it's the fear of having fear. People who suffer from it anticipate the possibility of being trapped or having a panic attack. I can manage myself, but I will gladly avoid an unfamiliar elevator when the social cost of doing so isn't too high. I will also intentionally skip an elevator ride when leaving for the airport or some other important endeavor, on the odd chance that I might get stuck and miss the flight. This might be OCD territory, or a brilliant rationalization of fear, I'm not sure.

Even if you're not claustrophobic, a ride in an elevator full of strangers is likely to make you uncomfortable. The violation of your personal space is difficult to tolerate, the banter is usually cringe-worthy, and the mirrors do not help at all. You might have heard of the fact that men position themselves according to very rigid rules in bathroom urinals (if you think that's a trivial issue, check out this study on the matter - it even has mathematical equations), maximizing the distance from others. The same happens in elevators, with people conquering corners first and shifting around as more passengers embark, moving about like atoms in a crystal to conserve the maximum amount of personal space. It's a non-written social contract but its rules can be easily changed by engaging group behavior. This classic experiment is so hilarious it even has a laugh track, but it doesn't hurt its brilliance:

So you see how hard it is to know what to do. No wonder elevators lead us to engage in pointless behaviors such as obsessively pushing the call button or the 'close door' button, which - I hate to break it to you - often doesn't do anything at all. It's one of those pesky placebo buttons, and in many elevators, especially in the US, it can only be activated with a key.

Yet for some reason there's a class of elevators that don't bother me at all: those in hotels. I suppose they give me a stronger sense of security, or maybe the social pressure of people coming and going cancels out the fear. My favorite hotel elevators are the ones in the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. They have quotes engraved inside them, following the theme of the establishment (the front entrance bears Stevie Ray Vaughan's immortal words: If this house a-rockin', don't bother knockin', come right in). The middle one says Don't let the elevator bring you down (Prince). It's not even a verbatim quote, you will find, but I always hoped that the middle elevator would ding every time I pressed the call button (the other two said Love in an elevator (Aerosmith) and She's buying a stairway to heaven (Led Zeppelin), which are far less inspiring).

The most awkward elevator ride I've ever had was in Rasputin Music, a famous used records store on Powell Street in San Francisco. It has five floors and it smells like pizza (there's a Blondie's right next door), and to move around you ride a rickety old elevator with an employee standing in it, pushing the buttons for you. It's a bit weird to get in and declare which floor you want to go to. My operator, a girl, was bored so stiff by the miserable job that she was doing crosswords between floors. But go check on Yelp, the elevator gimmick is mentioned in every other review (mostly unfavorably).

Still, nothing beats this:

It never stops: you just swiftly hop on and off. It moves sufficiently slowly, but it's no wonder its use has dwindled in recent years and it's nowhere to be found in lawsuit-happy America. This type of elevator is called a Paternoster, after the first two words from the Lord's Prayer in Latin (meaning "our father"), because the looping compartments resemble the beads in a rosary. Or maybe because you might say a prayer while boarding, hoping the thing won't kill you.

Nasazzi's Baton

Who are the current football world champions? North Korea.

Well, let me explain that. After England won the 1966 World Cup, they went undefeated for nearly a year unitl they lost to Scotland in a British Home Championship match, on 15 April 1967. Scottish fans jokingly said that they thus were the 'unofficial world champions'. Someone took this way too seriously and decided to start calculating this alternate title from the very first officially recorded international match, which again was played by Scotland and England on 30 November 1872. It was a draw, so the first match that assigned the title was their next friendly, in 1873, when England won 4-2.
The Unofficial Football World Championships (UFWC) were born.

For thirty more years the title would only be swapped between Scotland and England, until Ireland snatched it in 1903. This was largely a British internal affair until 1931, when England lost it to Austria. It first travelled overseas during the 1950 World Cup, when England again lost it to the United States. Nigeria first got it for Africa in 2004 and now, after expanding to Asia in 2011, it is held by North Korea, who won it from Japan in a World Cup qualification match last November.

There's also another informal world football title called Nasazzi's Baton, named after José Nasazzi, the captain of the Uruguay national team that won the first FIFA World Cup in 1930. Aside from starting with the first friendly match after that tournament, it has slightly different rules in that it only considers the result of matches after the regulation 90 minutes. In case of a draw, the title doesn't swap hands.

The current holder of Nasazzi's Baton is Spain, but interestingly the two titles were unified up until the latest World Cup final: the Netherlands had them both and thanks to a draw after 90 minutes they kept Nasazzi's Baton, but lost the UFWC after conceding a goal in extra time. Nevertheless, the Baton is still held by Spain, who regained it from Italy in the UEFA Euro 2012 final.

Wikipedia even has a chronology of UFWC title matches. The next defence? A friendly between North Korea and Iran, to be held in Tehran next 9 October.

The Misery Index

How does climate affect how you feel?

Well, you don't want to be 'left out in the cold'. And you like to feel all 'warm inside'. Figures of speech offer many clues about our aversion to cold weather and our love for sunny days. But, as always, there's more to it: physical and interpersonal warmth are related. A Science article points out that the area of the brain that senses temperature, the insular cortex, also lights up when we feel empathy toward somebody. So if you're physically warm you'll tend to be emotionally warm, whereas if you're cold your shoulder will be too. That's why people who feel lonely tend to linger in the shower for longer, or take frequent hot baths. It's also why raising the thermostat just a few degrees in an office environment will increase productivity. This is related to our ancestral need for warmth, because as mammals we can only afford to sway just a few degrees away from our ideal core temperature before our metabolism shuts down.

But weather can affect us in unpredictable ways. One of my favorite obscure psychological studies shows that admission rates at a Canadian medical school are lower for people who sustain their interviews on rainy days. And Campbell has done something that comes straight out of pure, unadulterated genius: they have created a Misery Index, which links the airing of their radio ads to cold, damp weather. Exactly when you're longing for hot soup.

Sunny days are not all good, though. There seems to be a statistical correlation between hot weather and an increase in crime rates. Common sense dictates that we spend more time outside when it's nice, creating more possibilities for incidents. But it also seems like a modest increase in the temperature of the brain can mess with our fight-or-flight instinct, generating aggressive behavior.

The Eyeglasses of the Beholder

WE'VE MOVED!

the post is now here:

The Eyeglasses of the Beholder

The Psychology of Apple Haters

WE'VE MOVED!

the post is now here:

The Psychology of Apple Haters

A bold thing to say so early in the morning

So this is now my new playground. Please note all posts before this date back to 2008 or earlier, and not all of them might have been translated.