Scientists Discover What Everyone Knew About The Lottery -- More Importantly, There Is Something Called The 'Journal of Behavioral Decision Making'

A new Carnegie Mellon University study sheds light on the reasons why low-income lottery players eagerly invest in a product that provides poor returns.

In the study, published in the July issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, participants who were made to feel subjectively poor bought nearly twice as many lottery tickets as a comparison group that was made to feel subjectively more affluent. The Carnegie Mellon findings point to poverty's central role in people's decisions to buy lottery tickets.

"Some poor people see playing the lottery as their best opportunity for improving their financial situations, albeit wrongly so," said the study's lead author Emily Haisley,a doctoral student in the Department of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. "The hope of getting out of poverty encourages people to continue to buy tickets, even though their chances of stumbling upon a life-changing windfall are nearly impossibly slim and buying lottery tickets in fact exacerbates the very poverty that purchasers are hoping to escape."

 Okay, so now we know what we already knew -- but we also know that there really is a magazine for everything.  Be sure to pick up your copy of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making for the full results.
DKK
Science Daily

Foolish Choices Endanger Our Superiority In Space

NASA has to buy used spacecraft.


The next president will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first landing of man on the moon. There will be great self-congratulations by a generation that has squandered a two-generation lead in space and aeronautics.

The truer tale is not that we landed there first, but that it has been 35 years since we last landed on the moon.

Instead of advancing science, we wasted billions if not trillions on welfare payments and other social programs that have undermined society.

Like Eric the Red visiting Nova Scotia 1,000 years ago, we came, we saw, we shrugged our shoulders and went home.

Now we are reduced to this:

The US space agency, NASA, is reportedly negotiating the purchase of unmanned Japanese transfer spacecraft to replace its own aging shuttles.

DKK
Don Surber -- Space Disgrace

Wow -- A Thousand Year Old Supernova Shock Wave

Around May 1, 1006 A.D., observers from Africa to Europe to the Far East witnessed and recorded the arrival of light from what is now called SN 1006, a tremendous supernova explosion caused by the final death throes of a white dwarf star nearly 7,000 light-years away. The supernova was probably the brightest star ever seen by humans, and surpassed Venus as the brightest object in the night time sky, only to be surpassed by the moon. It was visible even during the day for weeks, and remained visible to the naked eye for at least two and a half years before fading away.

It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that radio astronomers first detected a nearly circular ring of material at the recorded position of the supernova. The ring was almost 30 arcminutes across, the same angular diameter as the full moon. The size of the remnant implied that the blast wave from the supernova had expanded at nearly 20 million miles per hour over the nearly 1,000 years since the explosion occurred.

Today, SN 1006 has a diameter of nearly 60 light-years, and it is still expanding at roughly 6 million miles per hour. Even at this tremendous speed, however, it takes observations typically separated by years to see significant outward motion of the shock wave against the grid of background stars. In the Hubble image as displayed, the supernova would have occurred far off the lower right corner of the image, and the motion would be toward the upper left.

DKK

NASA Image Of The Day