Whenever I have bought a car, I tend to choose the color purely on the basis of how it looks and, of course, on my personality. Given the dullness of the latter, it should be no surprise that my choices in the past have been either steel gray or more recently dark gray. I had never considered the issue of how color relates to crash frequency. It appears that white cars are the least prone to accidents while black cars are the most.

Black cars are notably more dangerous to drive than white cars for reasons of visibility already. A study by Monash University Accident Research Centre in Australia, which studied crash data across the country from 1987 to 2004, found that compared to white cars as a baseline, crash risk was higher for just about every other common color, including red, blue, silver, green, gray, and, yes, black. Black performed the worst by every measure: In daylight, the chance of crash is 12% higher than that of white cars. At dawn and dusk, that jumps to 47%—though your relative risk of getting into an accident at that time is lower at those hours, the authors point out. Monash’s study was consistent with at least one other, from the University of Granada, which determined that yellow was a safe alternative to white.

I was surprised that black was worse even in daytime.

My dark grey car looks black at night which means that my choice was not good as far as accidents go. To be frank, I just do not like white or any of the other colors so I may just have to stomach the increased risk and hope that careful driving partially compensates.

According to a large-scale longitudinal study, people who are optimistic tended to live longer than those who are not, and it even increased the chances of ‘exceptional longevity’, the term used for people who live to be 85 or more.

The team split about 70,000 women into four equally sized groups, based on their scores for optimism. They then compared lifespan for the most optimistic with the least, taking into account factors including age, sex, race, education, depression and other health conditions present at the outset.

The results show the most optimistic group of women had a lifespan almost 15% longer than the least.

Similar results were seen in men, even though optimism was measured slightly differently. When the team compared the fifth of men boasting the highest optimism scores with the least optimistic, they found the most positive men had lifespans almost 11% longer.

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Recently it seems to have become fashionable among some scientists, mainly physicists, to harshly disparage philosophy in general and the philosophy and sociology of science in particular. This was not so in times gone by, especially during the time of ferment at the dawn of the twentieth century with the development of theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. While they were developing various successful computational techniques, people struggled to figure out what these theories meant because they seemed to defy our intuitions of how matter behaved at very small scales and when it was traveling very fast.
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Tom Scott explains what is known as the Two Generals problem in computer information theory, something that I had never heard of before, and how it can have real world implications, such as a recent case where the lack of awareness of the need to address this problem led to a food delivery company sending multiple orders to the same addresses.

All life on Earth is carbon-based which of course makes this molecule of considerable interest for scientists. A carbon atom has 6 electrons which means that it has four electrons in the valence shell and results in it being able to form different kinds of chains and combinations, such as buckminsterfullerenes (often shortened to just ‘fullerenes’, more popularly known as ‘buckyballs’) that consists of 60 carbon atoms in the shape of a geodesic sphere.
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Anyone who has ridden the bicycle knows how hard it is to learn to do so. I learned to ride in the time-honored way, with my father holding the seat to keep it from falling to the side and running behind me as I pedaled, and then after some time slowly letting go without my knowledge, while still running behind to catch me if I fell. After a few such attempts, I was able to ride alone. The feeling of exhilaration at not toppling over is something I still remember. I used the same method to teach my younger daughter but my older daughter learned to ride on her own, pedaling a bit and putting her foot down when in danger of falling over, until the pedaling parts got longer and longer and suddenly she was off.
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It is generally recommended that people get 7-9 hours of sleep per day but it is not clear that the benefits that accrue from sleep are lost if those hours are not in one block. Like many people, I often wake up very early morning before it is light outside and try to go back to sleep immediately, usually with some success unless something is on my mind that prevents me from falling asleep for some time. I used to think that this pattern of two blocks of sleep per night with a brief break was an aberration and that ‘normal’ sleep should consist of roughly eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.
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