Time to retire
How to spur clear-thinking and sophisticated after-dinner conversation? Here is one approach Feedback is considering.
Step 1: Serve tea and cigarettes. (NOTE: Cigars are permissible, if anyone demurs about puffing cigarettes for 鈥渉ealth鈥� reasons.)
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Step 2: Dramatically recite a brief passage from a new paper called by Zhongbo Chen at Ningbo University in China and colleagues. This is the passage to declaim: 鈥淭he relationship between smokers who consume tea, engage in mental activities after dinner, or both (drinking tea and engaging in cognitive activities after dinner together), and daily cigarette smoking or nicotine addiction must be clarified.鈥�
Step 3: Hand each guest a sealed envelope containing a printed copy of that study. Instruct your guests to open the envelope.
Step 4: Then, sit back and watch the conversation inevitably flow downhill to the sea.
Enhanced version: If your salon gathering is large, you can augment the intellectual depths by following a recipe in the study: 鈥淪mokers were divided into four groups according to behaviors: 1) no drinking tea and no mental activities after dinner group; 2) only drinking tea; 3) only mental activities after dinner; and 4) combination behaviors (drinking tea and mental activities after dinner together).鈥�
Finally, send your guests into the night all abuzz. Announce that, next time, you will savour a paper published in 1995 in the journal Nature. It is called .
Will it ever fly?
Mathematical formulae look impressive. But as most scientists know, it is easy to create a new formula (much as it is easy for an author to write a new sentence). What is difficult is to adjust a formula (or a sentence) so it accurately describes what you hope it describes.
It would be easy, for example, to write a formula that specifies how many bugs to substitute in place of butter, if you want to produce entomologically fortified butter. Easy, that is, if you don鈥檛 much care about the satisfaction of those consumers who will eat the butter made according to your formula.
Reader Sonya Taafe informs Feedback of a study that goes in pursuit of such accuracy. The paper is called 鈥� perception of bakery products with insect fat as partial butter replacement鈥�. Claudia Delicato at Ghent University in Belgium and her colleagues published it in Food Quality and Preference.
The research was explicitly meant to 鈥渆xplore the potential of bakery products containing black soldier fly larvae fat (BSF LF) as an ingredient鈥�.
Using three varieties of butter (ordinary butter, butter that is 25 per cent BSF LF and butter that is 50 per cent BSF LF), the researchers baked cakes, cookies and waffles. They served the treats to 344 volunteers. 脌pres-meal surveys, they say, show that black soldier fly larvae fat can replace 25 per cent of the butter in baked goods and maybe up to 50 per cent in waffles 鈥渨ithout influencing鈥� consumers鈥� acceptance.
This dab of maths might ease what 鈥渢he need of information campaigns to emphasize positive sensory attributes of edible insects鈥�.
Watch your language
Your name, whatever it is, may have depths of meaning undreamed of by your parents 鈥� exuberant meaning in one or more of the world鈥檚 7000 or so currently spoken languages.
The compiles a list of most of those languages, some of which have names perhaps surprising to anyone who speaks or reads only English. Languages notable in that way include Ache, Anus, As, Bun, Chug, Ding, Dong, Eton, Fang, Fur, Goo, Gun, Hermit, Ha, Ho, Label, Libido, Loo and Sop.
A website called to keep track of the languages, estimating whether each is in good shape or threatened, moribund or extinct. Glottolog鈥檚 tally suggests that Ethnologue鈥檚 list includes some languages that are kaput. Reckoned Glottologically, we, the people of Earth, currently speak about 6300 languages, all told.
Then, there is the separate matter of secret languages. One can鈥檛 say too much about that, for obvious reasons. David Prager Branner says 48 pages鈥� worth, though, in an essay in a book published in Chinese by the University of Hong Kong Press in 2010. The essay is called 鈥淢otivation and nonsense in Chinese secret languages鈥�.
Branner says the existence of a language called Faho is puzzling: 鈥淭he ordinary local speech of S铆bao 鈥� not Faho 鈥� is notorious across the whole of Li谩nch茅ng county because everyone claims to find it incomprehensible. Why would people whose neighbors already cannot understand them need an extra layer of secrecy in the form of a secret language?鈥�
Perhaps even more puzzling is an . Krueger spelled aloud 2183 nonsense syllables to 586 college students. He asked the students to write down each syllable on paper and to try to immediately suggest a meaning.
Krueger reported, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, that DOC, DOL and GAP inspired the greatest number of responses, while XOJ, XIW and XEJ generated the fewest. That is Krueger鈥檚 entire report.
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