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Why I would believe in God if I wasn't an atheist.

I have often made the argument that religiosity, a personal belief in god, spirits, the supernatural, etc., would emerge in human societies on its own if it wasn't there already. Imagine taking an entire generation of people in a geographically isolated region, and wiping out their memory of religion, and also, removing all references to religion that they might ever encounter. They would be religion free for a while, maybe even for a number of generations, but eventually, they would reinvent it. Everybody has a theory of why religion exists, what purposes it serves, etc. etc. Until proven…

Attacking Climate Science and Scientists

You are a scientists and you are doing two things. First, you have finished a preliminary study and submitted a grant proposal based on your evolving idea about something, and you have just submitted a related paper to a peer reviewed journal. Well, OK, that's a bunch of things, but they are all related to the temporal stream of the research you are expected to do as a member of the academic community. Second, you are having conversations with your mentor, your colleagues, others, about this research in which you are traveling up and down various alleyways searching for answers to…

Osama bin Laden 1; Railroads 0

The terrorists have defeated the railroads, and by extension, the people. Well, not totally defeated, but they won a small but important battle. We have a problem with the wholesale removal of petroleum from the Bakken oil fields, and the shipping of that relatively dangerous liquid mainly to the east coast on trains, with hundreds of tanker cars rolling down a small selection of tracks every day. I see them all the time as they go through my neighborhood. These trains derail now and then, and sometimes those derailments are pretty messy, life threatening, and even fatal. There has been…

How to Eat the Earth

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." -Winston Churchill Ever wonder what will happen to the Earth once the Sun dies? Although it's happening very slowly, the Sun is burning through the nuclear fuel that powers it, giving off a tremendous amount of energy all the time as it happens. Image credit: NASA's STEREO A spacecraft. Like all stars, the Sun burns progressively hotter as it ages. A few billion years ago, solar output was 10% less than it is today, and a few billion years from now, it will burn so hot that our oceans will boil, something that only…

Makeblock mBot Add-on Pack-Six-legged Robot

The Makeblock mBot Add-on Pack-Six-legged Robot V1.1 is an add on for the Makeblock DIY mBot 1.1 Kit (Bluetooth Version) - STEM Education - Arduino - Scratch 2.0 - Programmable Robot Kit for Kids to Learn Coding & Robotics - Pink or any of its variants. The makeblock robot is an arduino technology robot. It can be controlled with a supplied controller, or operated from any of several different kinds of computing devices (such as your cell phone) using an app. It can be programmed using the Arduino interface (from a Mac, Windows or Linux computer), but the robot comes with built in…

Very Smart Birds, Very Smart Bird Book

Crows are smart. Anyone who watches them for a while can figure this out. But that is true of a lot of things. Your baby is smart (not really). Your dog is smart (not really). Ants are smart (sort of). It takes a certain degree of objective research, as well as some serious philosophy of intelligence (to define what smart is) to really address this question. But when the research is done and the dust settles, crows are smart. We were all amazed (or not, because we already knew that crows are smart) to find that New Caledonian crows made and used tools. Now, we know (see my most recent…

UN Absurdity on Danish Caricatures

I've never been an anti-UN guy. I've always had a realistic view of the UN as an organization that can be effective at things like small scale peacekeeping operations, refugee aid and moderating minor conflicts between nations. When it comes to major conflicts between the world's powers, the UN is terribly ineffective because it was designed to be - the world's great powers all have permanent veto power over the security council, so they can prevent any action they choose. So when I've heard the often-fevered anti-UN rhetoric from the right, I've pretty much laughed it off as more paranoid…

Weekly StopTheACLU Absurdity Update

The latest nonsense at StopTheACLU is this post written by "Jay" about a high school student in Florida who is suing because he says he was berated by a teacher for refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance. The hyper-patriots have been fuming at this student for weeks, calling him a "punk kid" a couple weeks ago, but now they've upped the ante to saying the kid should be physically assaulted for not pledging allegiance: If I had been one of his classmates, I would have made him see some stars he would respect. If I were his parents, he wouldn't want to sit down after I showed him after…

Alabama Judges

I don't know what the deal is with Alabama judges, but Tom Parker of the Alabama Supreme Court seems to want to follow in Roy Moore's footsteps. After a recent case that he had recused himself from went against what he'd hoped, he wrote an op-ed piece blasting his fellow justices for "surrender[ing] to judicial activism." It was a death penalty case where the man convicted was a minor at the time of the crime, and Parker was the state prosecutor in the case so he had to recuse himself. On appeal, the Court changed his sentence to life in prison because the US Supreme Court had ruled in the…

Merry Christmas and Happy Festivus

Merry Christmas and Happy Festivus to all of the wonderful people who have made this blog a success by reading and sharing your thoughts with me. And in the spirit of Seinfeld, a Happy Festivus as well. One of the great Festivus traditions, of course, is an airing of the grievances. Many bloggers have put together some of their grievances and complaints and a lot of them are really brilliant. Here a some of my favorite samples. From John Cole: The Republican Party- I will never forgive the shameless display during the Schiavo affair, elevating a personal family tragedy into a cruel farce…

Tornadoes: Safety is all about attitude.

Do you hear that loud, repeated smashing sound coming from the general direction of the Upper Midwest and Plains? That's us. Here in Minnesota, we have been breaking high temperature records left and right. Most of the TV weather reporters are wearing slings, eye patches, and bandages around their heads, it's been so intense. And, on Monday night, we had the second earliest tornado recorded in the state. It was a baby; it messed up some trees and damaged some sheds down in Elysian, in farm country. I remember taking a stroll a few years back with a distant relative in the Ozarks, Arkansas…

A List Of Lisp and Emacs Books

Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time! is a book about lisp programming. If you are into programming for fun, artificial intelligence, role playing games, or an emacs user, you should take a look at this book. I've got some info on this book as well as a few others for the budding emacs enthusiasts. Land of Lisp teaches the lisp programming language using the development of games as a focal point. Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages, and occurs in numerous dialects. The standard form that is taught in Land of Lisp is Common Lisp. The teaching style in…

H5N1--does it live up to the hype? Redux

Okay, one more quick post. I've talked quite a bit on here (and over on Panda's Thumb) about the importance of surveillance, and how the current death rates from H5N1 influenza ("bird flu") are likely to be artificially high, since we're more likely to diagnose the very ill cases than the mild or asymptomatic ones. (See here and here for the relevant posts). Indeed, that first post linked discusses a study carried out here at the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the U of Iowa, which found that swine workers were much more likely to be infected with swine influenza viruses than those…

On the Helpfulness of Numbers

Anybody who has taught introductory physics has noticed the tendency, particuarly among weaker students, to plug numbers into equations at the first opportunity, and spend the rest of the problem manipulating nine-digit decimal numbers (because, of course, you want to copy down all the digits the calculator gives you. Many faculty, myself included, find this kind of maddening, as it's pretty much the opposite of what professional physicists do-- we tend to work primarily with equations in abstract, symbolic form, and plug numbers in only at the very end of the problem. Thus, very few people…

Scientific Commuting: When Does It Make Sense to Take Alternate Routes?

I am an inveterate driver of "back ways" to places. My preferred route to campus involves driving through a whole bunch of residential streets, rather than taking the "main" road leading from our neighborhood to campus. I do this because there are four traffic lights on the main-road route, and they're not well timed, so it's a rare day when I don't get stuck at one or more of them. My preferred route has a lot of stop signs, but very little traffic, so they're quick stops, and I spend more time in motion, which makes me feel like I'm getting there faster. That's the psychological reason, but…

Outreach vs. Education

An angle I had hoped to get to in last week's broader impacts post, but didn't have time for, was this piece questioning meet-the-scientist programs by Aimee Stern at Science 2.0: Over the past several years, a growing number of trade associations, foundations and science and engineering companies have started major efforts to get scientists into schools and hopefully inspire students with what they do. The goal, of course, is to get kids interested in pursuing careers in scientific fields, by showing them just how cool science is. But I wonder - no matter how well meaning, how much do these…

Mildred Wedel, 1914-2012

Yesterday was the funeral for my great-aunt Mildred, known within the family as "Auntie" (first syllable "ont" not "ant"), who fell and bumped her head last Friday, and just never woke up. On the one hand, she was 97, so this shouldn't be too surprising, but a few years ago she moved out of a retirement community, because she preferred to be on her own. We always assumed she'd outlive us all, through sheer orneriness, so this was a nasty shock. She had a really interesting life. Born a month before WWI, as a teenager during the Depression she got a job for the telephone company and moved out…

Back to School!

Classes start on Monday. I knew that intellectually, of course, but I had it brought home to me a few days ago when I innocently drove onto the campus, only to find a traffic jam and crossing guards directing the cars. Students were moving into the dorms, you see. Higher education is beset with problems nowadays, and I can recite the litany as well as any faculty member. But for all the legitimate complaints, the bottom line is that I still think I have the best job in the world. I get out of bed in the morning excited to go to work, and the upsides of my job vastly outweigh the downsides…

Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism

As it happens, I've been thinking about mathematical anti-evolutionism a lot lately. Sometime over the summer, though I can't find the exact post, I mentioned that I had been working on an article about mathematical arguments against evolution. I finished it in the fall, and it has recently been accepted for publication in the journal Science and Education. The article is currently in production, but I don't how long the process will take. The main point of the article is that while anti-evolutionists deploy mathematics in a large variety of ways, ultimately all of their arguments are just…

AP Misreports Haiyan as Category 4

While reading an AP attributed article on Huffington post about Super Typhoon Haiyan (also known as Yolanda), I did a double take at this paragraph: Weather officials said Haiyan had sustained winds of 235 kilometers per hour (147 miles per hour), with gusts of 275 kph (170 mph), when it made landfall. By those measurements, Haiyan would be comparable to a strong Category 4 hurricane in the U.S., and nearly in the top category, a 5. Hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are the same thing. They are just called different names in different parts of the world. It struck me because "nearly in the…

More Pro-Slavery Nonsense from the League of the South

I'm still reading this stuff, and it's just unreal. It's like I've overturned a rock and all these southern nationalist whackos are streaming out. How about this story about a book called Southern Slavery, As It Was, written by League of the South board member Steve Wilkins: Students at one of the area's largest Christian schools are reading a controversial booklet that critics say whitewashes Southern slavery with its view that slaves lived "a life of plenty, of simple pleasures." Leaders at Cary Christian School say they are not condoning slavery by using "Southern Slavery, As It Was," a…

Fish has faith; I have confidence built on experience

Stanley Fish is complaining about atheists again. As you might guess from the last time we went through this, his arguments are poor, and worse, are the same tired apologetics for religion we've all heard a thousand times before. Come on, Fish, I expect better from the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor than a warmed-over platter of scraps left by creationists! In short, Fish's argument is that if religion has no evidence, then evolution doesn't have any either; if the religious rely on a Holy Book, then so do the biologists in Darwin's Origin of Species; and everything is built…

Idiot of the Week: Bruce Walker

This week's Idiot of the Week is Bruce Walker. It will come as no surprise that I found this cretin through a link from the WorldNutDaily. His article, published in the American Daily, is entitled The Case for America Divorcing Its Haters. In it, Mr. Walker tosses out the old "if you don't love this country, why don't you leave it?" line, original thought apparently being beyond his capability (paranthetical aside: funniest answer to that question ever comes from Barry Crimmins - "Because I don't wanna be victimized by its foreign policy."). This thought is no more rational when it's put down…

Weekend Diversion: Chess is Almost Solved!

"There are some things we do much better than computers, but since most of chess is tactically based they do many things better than humans. And this imbalance remains. I no longer have any issues. It’s a bit like asking an astronomer, does he mind that a telescope does all the work?" -Vishy Anand It used to be no contest. Even if a computer could perform million, billions, or trillions of calculations per second, a game like chess surely got too complicated too quickly for a computer to compete with humans. At least, that's what we used to think, but some things just don't stay the same, as…

The Appeal of Poker

In a thread below, Tim asks this question: I wonder if you could explain the allure of gambling, in general. I have no religious, moral qualms against it, but I just don't understand the attraction (or is it a psychological compulsion?). I guess I can see that poker has some aspects of skill involved, blunting the razor-sharp edge of absurd, irrational chance; otherwise, the whole staking of money on hopes of somehow outfoxing blind chance (being lucky) strikes me as a pasttime more fitting for the asylum recreation room (no personal insult intended -- just wondering out loud). I thought I…

An Indecorous Plea for Perspective

Mike Dunford didn't like my previous post, and says that it's important to talk about gun control right now: But we also cannot forget that people are dead. We cannot forget that people have been murdered. We cannot forget that many - too many - lives have been brought to a sudden, random end. We cannot forget that these deaths were not necessary, that they could have been avoided. [...] How, in good conscience, could we possibly be expected to shut up right now? I managed to edit all the f-bombs out of yesterday's post, but this annoys me. I'm not sure exactly which straw caused the fatal…

Science Escape 2008

Chris Mooney visited Union on Wednesday, talking to two classes (one Environmental Studies class, and one class on presidential politics), and giving an evening lecture titled "Science Escape 2008." He's an excellent speaker, so if you're looking for someone to give a talk about science and politics, you could do a whole lot worse. I enjoyed the evening talk quite a bit, in part because it echoed a lot of things I said in my talk at the Science21 meeting last month (video, live-blogging), thus reassuring me that I'm not a lone crank on these issues. He talked about his experience with…

Job Search Criteria: Fit Matters

Over at Terra Sigillata, Abel has a post on the limiting of job searches that is an excellent example of the problems with the academic mind-set: The short summary: postdocs and other academic job candidates are disqualifying themselves from even applying for certain positions because: 1. they don't feel they meet the job description in the ad 2. the job is at a "lesser" institution or department 3. the job is in a place (they think) they'd never want to live 4. they'd feel bad about turning down a position at a place they know they'd never want to be. First things first: in this climate,…

Inception

We haven't yet gotten to the point where we're comfortable leaving SteelyKid with a babysitter, so seeing the movie everybody's talking about took a while. Since she's off at Gammy's, though, we got a rare night to ourselves and went to the movies. My immediate reaction is that it's great to see a movie that's kind of smart and not based on anything dominating the box office. If this helps break us out of the endless cycle of re-makes and comic-book movies, I'll be as happy as anyone. This is an extremely well-done movie, with everything shot, acted, and choreographed very well. There was…

Baghdad Update: That's It For Now

As you know if you've been reading these occasional updates, my friend Paul has been working as a reporter in Baghdad for the last year. He's based in Cairo, but has been spending six weeks at a stretch in Baghdad, with breaks of a week or two at home. His Iraq shift has come to an end, and he's moving back to Egypt full-time. This is the final dispatch from Iraq, in which he reflects on his year as an interpid war correspondant. ----------------------------- So that was it. The plane took off, we did the familiar stomach churning spin and I looked out and watched the airport dip in and out…

I, for one, will welcome our Cyborg Insect overlords

Nah, I thought this has got to be a joke: The Pentagon's defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions. But no…there is actually a DARPA call for proposals. DARPA seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects, during their early stages of metamorphoses. The healing processes from one metamorphic stage to the next stage are expected to yield more reliable bio-electromechanical interface to insects, as…

Genome Size and Flight in Bats

The best of last June Continuing with our discussion of the Evolution 2008 conference, I was hoping to meet T. Ryan Gregory yesterday. He is listed on the Evolution 2008 program as an author of a talk on genome size. Goodnews/badnews: Gregory did not show, but the talk, given by his coauthor working in his lab, was excellent, so we didn't need him. The research was done, and the paper delivered, by Jillian Smith. The title of the paper was "Genome size evolution in mammals" but it was more focused on specific results Jillian had come up with regarding bats. source The bottom line is…

Grapefruit juice might boost cancer drug's effects

photograph of some grapefruit Grapefruit juice contains enzymes that break down common types of compounds of which pharmaceuticals are made. This means that if you drink grapefruit juice along with some drugs, the effect of the drug will be enhanced. (That was a slight oversimplification.) So great, you say, why not just take all drugs with a glass of grapefruit juice? Well, I can think of two reasons. One, grapefruit juice tastes like ape-piss, so why would you ever drink it. Two, drug experts feel that they have more control over your dosage if you just leave the grapefruit juice…

Elephants and Horses

In 1833, Darwin spent a fair amount of time on the East Coast of South America, including in the Pampas, where he had access to abundant fossil material. Here I'd like to examine his writings about some of the megafauna, including Toxodon, Mastodon, and horses, and his further considerations of biogeography and evolution. reposted In the vicinity of Rio Tercero... Hearing ... of the remains of one of the old giants, which a man told me he had seen on the banks of the Parana, I procured a canoe, and proceeded to the place. Two groups of immense bones projected in bold relief from the…

Is the OJ Simpson Verdict Racist? Almost certainly.

Getting sentenced is a drag. One time, when I got sentenced, a conjuncture of highly unlikely events occurred that made the whole thing rather more scary, and more of a circus, than usual. My sentence was unfair, of course, as I was innocent. I was convicted on the strength of planted evidence. The fact that my arrest involved a high speed chase and that I was arrested along with a convicted felon didn't help either. But that's another story, for another time. But nonetheless, I ended up standing in front of the judge in the courtroom listening to a sentence of probation. Routine, no…

The Truth Is In There

According to a widely disseminated story (see this) the Large Hadron Collider broke only hours after it started operations last week. This is an atrocity and an example of something seriously, endemically wrong with science more generally. Why is the fact that the LHC broke right away an atrocity? Well, actually, that it broke is not the atrocity. The atrocity is that you are only hearing about it now, a week after the fanfare linked to the startup. There are only three possible explanations for this: 1) They forgot to mention it . Slipped their minds. Oops, sorry, I guess I didn't think…

Genome Size and Flight in Bats

Continuing with our discussion of the Evolution 2008 conference, I was hoping to meet T. Ryan Gregory yesterday. He is listed on the Evolution 2008 program as an author of a talk on genome size. Goodnews/badnews: Gregory did not show, but the talk, given by his coauthor working in his lab, was excellent, so we didn't need him. The research was done, and the paper delivered, by Jillian Smith. The title of the paper was "Genome size evolution in mammals" but it was more focused on specific results Jillian had come up with regarding bats. source The bottom line is this: Genome size…

No One Needs A Moral Philosophy

Here's something that happened this week: David Brooks wrote a bad column about secularism. In fairness, it gets off to a decent start: Over the past few years, there has been a sharp rise in the number of people who are atheist, agnostic or without religious affiliation. A fifth of all adults and a third of the youngest adults fit into this category. As secularism becomes more prominent and self-confident, its spokesmen have more insistently argued that secularism should not be seen as an absence -- as a lack of faith -- but rather as a positive moral creed. Phil Zuckerman, a Pitzer…

Emily's Big Day

This is Emily: She sure does look comfortable, doesn't she? And why shouldn't she be? In a tour de force of inductive reasoning she figured that today would be like the previous 364 consecutive days, at least to the extent that I wouldn't even consider stuffing her into a box and bringing her out to my car. But she was wrong. “Why is God angry?” she asked. I explained that while this sudden intrusion into her happiness may seem incomprehensible form her limited, feline perspective, she should remember that I can see the big picture. I understand, in a way that she cannot, that…

The Fermi Alternative

Given the recent Feynman explosion (timeline of events), some people may be casting about looking for an alternative source of colorful-character anecdotes in physics. Fortunately, the search doesn't need to go all that far-- if you flip back a couple of pages in the imaginary alphabetical listing of physicists, you'll find a guy who fits the bill very well: Enrico Fermi. Fermi's contributions to physics are arguably as significant as Feynman's. He was the first to work out the statistical mechanics of particles obeying the Pauli exclusion principle, now called "fermions" in his honor (Paul…

On "Excessive Technical Detail"

I've seen a few links passed around to this Tom Siegfried post about science literacy, which is mostly a familiar story about how polls show most Americans giving incorrect answers to science questions. The sort of stuff you find in the NSF's Science and Engineering Indicators report. What's getting the social-media attention, though, is this paragraph near the end: In fact, I’d contend (and have contended) that the problem with science education is not that it fails to inculcate enough facts, but that it tries to inculcate too many. Science classes in high school and intro classes in…

Cosmos Reboot, Episode 2

This week's Cosmos was all about the evolution of life, and was viewed by millions of people outside of Oklahoma, where they presumably got an hour-long local news promo, or analysis of the Oklahoma State's chances in the NCAA Tournament. As such, it was a bit outside my area of expertise, but that never stopped a blogger before... There were a couple of things about this that I thought were great, and two things that bothered me. The episode opened with a very nice discussion of the history of dogs and humans, demonstrating how dramatically untold generations of human selection have modified…

Sheldon Cooper and Alfred Nobel

Last week, before we headed out for the weekend, I had a brief exchange with Ben Lillie on Twitter, prompted by the following set of tweets: OK, here's a thing. I'll often hear people complain that Hollywood gets science wrong because there's *1* scientist who does everything 1/3 — Ben Lillie (@BenLillie) September 27, 2013 But in reality, science is massively collaborative. So why can't storytellers get that right? 2/3 — Ben Lillie (@BenLillie) September 27, 2013 *BUT* at the same time we have, and wildly celebrate, the Nobel, which embodies exactly that myth. 3/3 — Ben Lillie (@BenLillie…

PNAS: Raymond Wagner, Systems Engineer

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Raymond Wagner, an engineer and technical fellow for a defense contractor.) 1) What is your non-academic job? Chief Engineer for an initiative to enable users of a system-of-systems to concurrently train or…

Links for 2009-08-01

CHART ATTACK!: 8/1/92 | Popdose "I just read the following in their Wikipedia entry: "In 2009, Boyz II Men announced plans for a new cover album, that covers 'artists I don't think people would expect us to cover!' according to Shawn Stockman." Can Popdose get in on this? Can we make a list of songs for Boyz II Men to cover? Because I want to start with "Detachable Penis" and just go downhill from there." (tags: music silly nostalgia culture) Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / The Perennial Hugos Ballyhoo "There's also a lot of weird disrespect going on every which way,…

Uncomfortable Questions: Physics Curriculum

Johan Larson asks: How would you change the requirements and coursework for the undergraduate Physics major? This is a good one, but it's a little tough to answer. I have ideas about things I'd like to change locally, but I'm not sure I really have the perspective I would need to be able to say how much of what I see is a problem with physics education in general, and how much is due to local quirks (our trimester calendar being the biggest such issue) that don't generalize well. That said, my feeling is that most of the problems we have are with the introductory classes. I went to an…

Lab Visit Report: Cavity QED

While Kate was off being all lawyerly at her NAAG workshop, I spent my time visiting my old group at NIST, and some colleagues at the University of Maryland. This wasn't just a matter of feeling like I ought to do something work-like while she was workshopping-- I genuinely enjoy touring other people's labs, and hearing about the cool things they're working on. I figure that, having spent a day and a half talking about hot new physics experiments, I may as well mine them for blog fodder. I've managed to scrounge up papers related to a lot of the experiments in question on the arXiv, but the…

Usability Tips: How to read blogs more efficiently

Usability Tips: How to read blogs more efficiently I can tell that people are clicking on my "add to Bloglines" button, but few are actually completing the process.  I can only surmise that people are clicking on it in order to find out what it does.  But if you click on it and you do not already have a Bloglines account, the page you go to might not be too inviting.  I've decided to write this explainer to help. I think that more people will get involved in reading and writing blogs, if someone takes the time to explain a few things that make it easier, and more fun.   Continue reading…

Setting goals for a course on Experimental Design and Data Analysis (Course design 1.2)

As introduced yesterday, I'm blogging my way through the SERC tutorial on course design, for a new graduate-only course on experimental design and data analysis. Yesterday, I explained the context and constraints on the course, and today I'm mulling on the course goals. I'm supposed to identify 1-3 over-arching goals for the course and 1-2 ancillary skills goals. Below the fold, I'll share my overarching goals and how I got to them. But I'm struggling with the ancillary skills goals, dear readers, and I'd love your help. Task 1.2c: Set one to three overarching goals for your course. The SERC…

Infants remember more by 'chunking' groups

Which of these strings of letters is easier to remember:  QKJITJGPI or BBCITVCNN? Chances are, you chose the latter string, where the nine letters are the combined names of three television networks. This neatly illustrates a fundamental property of human memory - that we remember long strings of information more easily if we can break them down into bite-sized chunks. In this case, a nine-letter string can be divided into three lots of three letters. You probably use similar strategies for remembering telephone numbers, credit card details, or post codes. Now, Lisa Feigenson and Justin…