Superstition may work if you think it works.   If only voodoo were so easy, we'd love to have an army of zombies at our command.

But people, and certainly athletes, maintain any number of superstitious rituals, so Lysann Damisch, Barbara Stoberock and Thomas Mussweiler of the University of Cologne designed a set of experiments to see if activating  people's superstitious beliefs would improve their performance on a task.  Their research says that having some kind of lucky token can actually improve performance – but by increasing self-confidence and not any magical mojo.

Arctic Ice July 2010 - Update #2


Something strange is going on.  Arctic watcher blogs are abuzz with talk about the behaviour of graphics which are supposed to show ice extent, area or volume.  many of these graphics seem to show that the Arctic melt has stopped.  Which it hasn't.

Historically, the main pack was always thick multi-year ice.  Ice would be lost at the edges in summer, and the new winter ice would be pressed into the main pack by the various drift motions.  As ice motion opened a new lead it would rapidly freeze over - even in summer.  As the ice expanded by cracking it actually made new ice.  Summer melt would nibble at the ice margins, but the losses would be made good in winter.

Funny. While dozens of online media are abuzz with the (non)-news, and while Fermilab Today tweets that there is no Higgs in store for us and a blogger in search of fame is just spreading unconfirmed voices which have no foundation, Lubos Motl over at the Reference Frame gets more detailed rumors on the same thing, and that does make things a bit more interesting.