(PHOTO: Mark Larson.)

Using data collected from Amazon.com book reviews of titles relating to true crime and war and written by members with gendered usernames, researchers at the University of Illinois concluded that women are far more likely to want to read about horrible, violent things (rape, murder, serial killings) that really happened, to ordinary people like themselves. Men, on the other hand, like reading about traumatic injuries and death occurring as a result of gang violence or wars.

Coding usernames for gender, the researchers found that women wrote 70 percent of the reviews of books about true crime, while men wrote 82 percent of the reviews of books on war. The gender of the author appeared to play no role in women’s preference for true crime books.

A second study gave participants summaries of two books...a “true account” of the murder of two women in Hawaii (and) either a true story of two female soldiers who died in a Gulf War army unit, or a true account of two female members of a Los Angeles gang who were killed. Women overwhelmingly chose the true crime books over the books about war or gang violence, even when the main characters of all of the books were female.

The researchers suspected that women prefer true crime stories in part because such stories provide information that the readers feel could help them avoid or escape from a potential attacker. Previous studies have shown that women are much more likely than men to fear becoming crime victims, and there may be an evolutionary benefit to learning from others’ negative experiences, Fraley said. Perhaps the fear of an attack and the desire to avoid becoming a victim drives many women to read true crime stories, he said.

To get at this question, the researchers conducted three more studies in which the summaries of the books included details that might help explain the choices women made. They found that women were much more likely than men to choose a book if it included a “clever trick” the would-be victim used to escape from an attacker, or a psychological profile of the attacker. And women, but not men, were much more interested in books with female victims.

You can read the entire report here.

We received a note from Johannes Wiebus, a senior producer at Jynx Productions, this morning. He’s working on a documentary about Arc Attack, an Austin, Texas band whose members regularly perform with electrified Tesla coils, using them to make strange, resonant music. Johannes writes of the video above, “A guy in a chain mail Faraday suit is getting hit with 500,000 volts, generated by a home made Tesla Coil.  Lightning is shooting out of his hands, right over our camera’s lens. We had mounted the camera in its own Faraday cage to protect it—and to attract the sparks.”

More on Arc Attack here.

Are you fans of the Science Creative Quarterly? They’re a sort of small Canadian McSweeneys, only they’re all about science. One thing they’re doing this year, to celebrate the International Year of Biodiversity, is something they call their Phylomon Project. They’re soliciting designs for what they envision as being a Pokemon-type card set, as well as ideas for what sorts of games one might play with such a set.

If you’re interested, you can submit illustrations to their Flickr group.

(COLLAGE:elio m. and M. Sethi)

What will make people respond to a holiday card—even if they’ve never heard of the person who sent it?

I’ve just come across two different studies, conducted twenty years apart, in which researchers sent Christmas cards to people they’d never met, then waited to see what they’d do. To make things more interesting, the scientists made some cards look as if they’d come from senders of high status. (In case you were wondering, they accomplished this via the time-tested method of inserting “Dr.” into the sender’s name.)

In both studies, a significant number of people actually responded by sending cards, letters, or photos back, often with a personal note saying how much they missed their old acquaintance. (A relatively small number of the respondents did admit, rather embarrassedly, that they had no idea who the sender was.)

Also in both studies, cards from senders of higher status were far more likely to receive a card in return.

Here’s the published response that I found the most poignant.

Dr. ____, It was good to hear from you again. I was diagnosed with asthma in 1985 by Dr. _____ who has a medical clinic with his Dad, ________M.D. On November 7, 1983, I had a bad asrhma attack at 5:00 am. I went to the V.A. Hospital. They changed my inhalers and medicine and then they took me off both. We sold the house in January in three days. I’m doing A.O.K. Please visit sometime. Thanks for the card, good luck and God bless- Jim

And here are the papers. 

(PHOTO:Wikimedia Commons)

This article, written in 1969, is one of the most fascinating anthropological papers I’ve ever read. In it, Canadian ethnographer Richard Borshay Lee describes a very strange Christmas Day he spent with the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in the late 1960s.

Wanting to thank his subjects for their helpful cooperation with him over the past year of study, Lee decided to gift the tribe with a magnificent ox, to be slaughtered on Christmas Day. Though not Christians, the !Kung had heard of Christmas through British missionaries, and held a celebration around that season. The festivities were mostly filled with local traditions like trance dancing—and cooking and eating an ox.

The animal Lee bought, he writes, “was solid black, stood five feet high at the shoulder, had a five-foot span of horns, and must have weighed 1,200 pounds on the hoof.”

Yet when the iKung saw the beast, they all—to a man—expressed immediate shock and dismay that Lee had purchased such a poor specimen; they complained that it was skin and bones, asserted that it would hardly be worth eating or dancing over at all, and even said the lack of meat to go around might cause fighting amidst the crowd on Christmas!

Utterly baffled, Lee waited and watched on the day of the big feast as the animal was cut open. As he’d known, it was beautiful: fatty and full of meat. What was going on?

Hey /gau,” I burst out, “that ox is loaded with fat. What’s this about the ox being too thin to bother eating? Are you out of your mind?”

“Fat?” /gau shot back, “You call that fat? This wreck is thin, sick, dead!” And he broke out laughing. So did everyone else. They rolled on the ground, paralyzed with laughter. Everybody laughed except me; I was thinking.

There’s an elegant and totally surprising explanation for Lee’s bizarre Kalahari Christmas, one that reveals the !Kung’s marvelously pragmatic approach to gifts and may hold a lesson for ostentatious gift-givers in more familiar societies. I’ll leave you to read it.

(PHOTO: The Field Museum of Chicago)

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I volunteer at the bird lab in the Field Museum of Chicago, making bird study skins once a week. It’s essentially a (very) simplified form of taxidermy, and sometime I’ll tell you more about it, maybe. In the meantime, I wanted to share this fabulous video of the museum’s bug room, which is housed in the bird lab and is one of the star attractions of any behind-the-scenes tour of the Field. The bug room contains glass tanks full of Dermestid beetles, also known as flesh-eating beetles, also known as the coolest thing since sliced bread. They help to clean, more cheaply and efficiently than chemicals, bird and mammal skeletons. Check it out!

Edited to add a clearer link to the video.

The venerable but still, apparently, quite sprightly Royal Society of London—the world’s oldest scientific academy—has just started to release a number of brilliant interactive widgets to celebrate its 350th anniversary. These images are from its photo gallery Moments of Seeing Further, “striking images (that) represent the original moments of discovery of scientists who were able to ‘see further’ to change the world around them.”

They’ve also put together an interactive timeline in which you can read the original manuscripts and see accompanying images for 60 trailblazing scientific papers, including these gems:

• The gruesome account of an early blood transfusion (1666)
• Captain James Cook’s explanation of how he protected his crew from scurvy aboard HMS Resolution (1776)
• Stephen Hawking’s early writing on black holes (1970)
• Benjamin Franklin’s account of flying a kite in a storm to identify the electrical nature of lightning – the Philadelphia Experiment (1752)
• Sir Isaac Newton’s landmark paper on the nature of light and colour (1672)
• A scientific study of a young Mozart confirming him as a musical child genius (1770)
• The Yorkshire cave discovery of the fossilized remains of elephant, tiger, bear and hyena heralding the study of deep time (1822)

It’s a bonanza for anyone interested in science and history, which pretty much defines us here at Inkling. Wonderful news indeed. Happy Birthday, RS, you old fart.

Gapminder is a nonprofit organization dedicated to using statistics to change the world for the better. I just used its online graph-creating software, Trendalyzer (acquired in 2007 by Google), to create a chart of how per capita sugar consumption has changed in the U.S., India, China, and Germany over time (guess who wins?).  It’s neat to look at even in the static version you see above, but what’s even cooler is the fact that Trendalyzer makes statistics move! Woah! To see it in action, go here and click “Play.”

WARNING: This shit is addictive. I also made graphs showing how increasing gender equality smacks down poverty, how access to water swirls infant mortality down the drain, and how cellphones exploded onto the globe beginning in the 1980s. (That last one isn’t terribly revealing, but it’s fun to watch.) I also tried to graph the correlation between the number of billionaires in a country and the number of disasters of various kinds, but sadly there was insufficient data on this point to prove a clear causal relationship.

It’s all pretty amazing—and just plain pretty. And, of course, much of the available data reveals—in a fashion that’s dramatic and hard to ignore—facets of global inequality, those gaps the site is minding.

Last time we wrote about an interactive graph it was a even little more morbid.

IMAGE: Vincent Leemans and Marie-France Destain

I was just doing a Google Scholar search for “cheese” (because why not?) and came across an article published in the February 2009 issue of the Journal of Food Engineering which describes a new method—why yes, previous research on this topic has been done—of identifying unwanted objects accidentally buried in cheese. I wasn’t aware that cheese often came with unwanted objects buried in it, but the writers of the article contend this is a major problem in the food industry, so maybe I’ve just been lucky.

You can read the abstract of the paper here, but I’ll sum up. The scientists stuck the inner plastic core of a ballpoint pen through the crust and about halfway into a block of Belgian cheese, which in case you are interested (I was), they describe as the following: “an enzyme coagulated, surface ripened, semi-soft cheese of Trappist type."*

Then they blasted the cheese with a high-frequency sound, checked how loud it was when it came out the other side, and measured the echo, if any, that came back to the original sensor. Comparing these results with those produced by a block of cheese lacking in foreign bodies, they were able to conclude that the ultrasonic device was, in fact, a relatively robust means of detecting the pen core. I know! How awesome is that?

Also awesome: the list of concerns the researchers expressed with this method of internal defect-detection, which include “the high attenuation of the signal due to the cheese texture (and especially the crust),” and the fact that “the raw signal was dependant on the temperature and on the maturity of the cheese.” Tell me food engineers don’t have the best jobs in the world.

*You will be glad to note that the ultrasonic cheese testers confirmed this classification by consulting a scholarly work entitled Cheese Rheology and Texture.

We here at the circus are big fans of parasites. Really really big fans. I mean I have been considering infecting myself with a tapeworm for years - lose weight and fight allergies! But in case that’s a little too extreme for you, why not just buy this delicious gummy tapeworm. It might not help with the belly or the sneezing, but it will surely taste better. Not to mention it will also breakdown and actually exit your body after consumption. (Thanks Debby).