Last week we posted a nice theory about daylight savings time, in particular, that its dates were chosen to reduce variance in the time of sunrise. It looked plausible from the graph.
We were talking to our Microsoft Research colleague Jake Hofman who suggested “why don’t you just find the optimal dates to change the clock by one hour?” So we did. We got the times of sunrise for New York City from here, threw them into R, and optimized.
The result was surprising. The dates of daylight savings time do not come close to minimizing variance in sunrise.
How did they decide when and by how much to make the “daylight savings time” adjustment?
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A friend recently asked us what to do with his large and unintentional collection of foreign coins left over from many international trips. He was surprised to learn that currency exchanges won’t take them. Since hanging onto coins between foreign trips is annoying (*), we recommend the following two practices for putting small change to purposeful use.
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In response to last week’s surprisingly popular “How to tell which side the gas cap is on”, we received a number of emails, one by our friend and co-author Preston McAfee, who shares a tip that also helps driving by letting you know in advance on which side your exit will be.
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At Decision Science News, we rent a lot of cars. Somewhere along the road of life (ha), we learned that the little triangle next to the fuel gauge points to the gas-cap side of the car. Guess you’ll need to find some other occasion to practice your backing-up-while-turning skills.
We’ve written before about using information grids when communicating risks to the general public. We like them. Turns out they are also called pictographs and, as we learned from an email from Brian Zikmund-Fisher, icon arrays.
Daniel Kahneman issued an open letter to researchers doing social priming research, which has become the subject of skepticism after some studies were found to be fabricated and others were not able to be independently replicated. His letter offers advice to scholars about how to address the situation, and we at DSN like the approach: Simply find out the truth and announce it.
How to cut a mango tutorial video with subtitles.
TRICKING PEOPLE INTO THINKING YOUR SCIENTIFIC SHOTS NEVER MISS You visit the farm of a Texan, Joe, who claims to be a sharpshooter. When walking past his barn, you see a chalk target drawn on the wall with a bunch of tightly-grouped bullet holes in the bullseye. After observing that Joe can’t shoot well at […]
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In response to last week’s post, my mother sends along this passage from the story “Can I just sit here a while” in Ron Hansen’s Nebraska: Stories. In the story, the salesman it telling an acquaintance that he “discovered a gimmick, a tool which handn’t failed him yet. It was called the Benjamin Franklin close.”
