This is Improbable Too Page 29
First, they tested for hypermasculinity, using a survey technique that ‘gauges macho personality’. They verified their findings ‘unobtrusively’, by doing an analysis based on the relative lengths of each person’s second and fourth fingers.
Then they used a standard test to measure each person’s self-esteem. They double-checked by having each individual rate ‘the likeability of all letters of the alphabet’, bearing in mind that ‘letters appearing in individuals’ names, especially their initials, are rated more favorably than the remainder of the alphabet’.
All told, the researchers ‘found little evidence for the factuality of’ hunters or butchers having great masculinity, aggressiveness or self-esteem.
Rigg, Robin, Salvomír Findo, Maria Wechselberger, Martyn L. Gorman, Claudio Sillero-Zubiri and David W. Macdonald (2011). ‘Mitigating Carnivore-Livestock Conflict in Europe: Lessons from Slovakia’. Oryx 45 (2): 272–80.
Voracek, Martin, Daniela Gabler, Carmen Kreutzer, Stefan Stieger, Viren Swami and Anton K. Formann (2010). ‘Multi-method Personality Assessment of Butchers and Hunters: Beliefs and Reality’. Personality and Individual Differences 49 (7): 819–22.
Research spotlight
‘Digit Ratio (2D:4D) and Wearing of Wedding Rings’
by Martin Voracek (published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2008)
Wedding rings, diminished or dismissed
A gold wedding band symbolises permanence, but bits of it disappear as a marriage endures, scraping against the marital skin every moment that metal and finger convene. Georg Steinhauser, a chemist at Vienna University of Technology, calculated how much goes missing, how quickly and at what cost.
Figure 1: ‘The author’s wedding ring’ from Steinhauser (2008)
Steinhauser’s study,’ Quantification of the Abrasive Wear of a Gold Wedding Ring’, appears in a 2008 issue of Gold Bulletin, a quarterly journal published by the World Gold Council, whose stated goal is ‘to stimulate desire for gold by articulating core truths and discovering new opportunities’.
Steinhauser got married. A week later he weighed his wedding ring. He weighed it every week over the next year. The report shows a graph of the weight, revealing an average loss of about 0.12 milligrams per week.
Figure 2: ‘Extraordinary events (potentially) influencing the abrasion are noted’.
Steinhauser estimated that, every year, the city of Vienna, with slightly more than 300,000 married couples, suffers an aggregate loss from its rings of about 2.2 kilograms of eighteen-carat gold, worth (at the time) approximately 35,000 euros.
Steinhauser says: ‘Due to abrasion of metal particles, human fingers wearing gold rings leave a trace of gold almost everywhere.’ He warns his fellow scientists to ‘not wear gold rings in analytical laboratories that are dedicated to the analysis of traces of metals, because a gold ring or the skin that has been in contact with the ring are possible sources of contamination’.
So it is important to give some thought to where you wear your wedding ring, a fact brought bleakly home, and then to an infirmary, in 2002. The urology department of the University of Bonn in Germany received a visit from a fifty-nine-year-old man who had slipped his wedding band from its habitual home on a knuckled digit on to a different, non-knuckled digit, to which it became tightly attached. Too tightly.
After a period of questioning and photograph-taking, the medical staff brought out a small machine called a metal-ring cutter. They snipped the ring asunder, freeing it from the withered post that had come to inhabit it in a fashion known medically as ‘strangled’.
A quartet of medicos published a graphic study about this in the journal Urology. ‘To our knowledge’, they write, ‘this is the first report of a wedding ring used as [a] constriction device.’
Steinhauser, Georg (2008). ‘Quantification of the Abrasive Wear of a Gold Wedding Ring’. Gold Bulletin 41 (1): 51–7.
Perabo, Frank G.E., Gabriel Steiner, Peter Albers and Stefan C. Müller (2002). ‘Treatment of Penile Strangulation Caused by Constricting Devices’. Urology 59 (1): 137.
Call for submissions
If you know of any improbable research – the sort that makes you laugh and think, and that you think will make other people laugh, too – I would be delighted and grateful to hear about it.
Please email me at marca@improbable.com with an improbable subject line of your choosing.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my wife, Robin, our socially challenged yet ever-helpful dog Milo, my parents, my ever-astounding editor, Robin Dennis, and equally stout-hearted agents, Regula Noetzli and Caspian Dennis (who is still, as far as I know, not related by blood or marriage to Robin Dennis).
Thanks to helpful friends/colleagues at The Guardian, especially Tim Radford, Will Woodward, Claire Phipps, Donald MacLeod, Alice Wooley, Ian Sample and Alok Jha.
Thanks to each of the many people who told me about things that wound up in this book, some of whom are named: Richard Akerman, Gábor Andrássy, Claudio Angelo, Catherine L. Bartlett, Yoram Bauman, Sandra Betar, Tommy Burch, Jim Cowdery, Sofia Dahl, Kristine Danowski, Tommy Dighton, Martin Eiger, Stefanie Friedhoff, Martin Gardiner, Eric Geigle, Tom Gill, Jessica Girard, Diego Golombeck, Richard Gustafson, Stephen Hale, Andrea Halpern, N. Hammond, Silvia Haneklaus, Kathryn Hedges, Mark Henderson, D.E. Hepplewhite, K. Kris Hirst, Torbjörn Karfunkel, Geoffrey Kendrick, Maarten Keulemans, Greg Kohs, Erwin Kompanje, C. Lajcher, Frederic Lepage, Mark Lewney, El Lisse, Shelly Marino, Pedro Marques-Vidal, Benno Meyer-Rochow, James H. Morrissey, Ernst Niebur, Mason Porter, Hanne Poulsen, Tim Reese, Achim Reisdorf, G. Jules Reynolds, Felicia Sanchez, Ewald Schnug, Ivan Schwab, Sally Shelton, Derek R. Smith, John Troyer, Kurt Verkest, Marcy Weisberg, Greg Wells, Anna Wexler, and quite a few more whose names I apologize for not listing here.
Thanks also to the following individuals who have helped in delighful, and sometimes improbable ways, in recent years: Siobhan Abeyesinghe, Dany Adams, Henry Akona, Faraz Alam, Kendra Albert, Deborah Anderson, Helen Arney, Amar Asher, James Bacon, Richard Baguley, Robin Ball, Chris Balliro, Matthew Battles, Bob Batty, Jackie Baum, Alice Bell, Jim Bell, Michael Berry, Monica Berry, Stephan Bolliger, Tina Bowen, Jim Bredt, Ryan Budish, Estrella Burgos, Heidi Clark, Brian Clegg, Charlotte Burn, Mary Carmichael, Rita Carter, Sarah Castor-Perry, Sylvie Coyaud, J.V. Chamary, Stuart Clark, Julie Clayton, Brian Clegg, Stevyn Colgan, Michael Conterio, Mo Costandi, Ian Day, Charles Deeming, Neil Denny, Judith Donath, Nick Doody, Gary Dryfoos, Chris Dunford, Stanley Eigen, the family Eliseev/Eliseeva, Steve Farrar, Lucy Feilen, Maria Ferrante, Melissa Franklin, Hayley Frend, Andrew J.T. George, Jean Berko Gleason, Ray Goldstein, Alain Goriely, David C. Green, Katherine Griffin, Boris Groysberg, Jenny Gutbezahl, James Harkin, Margaret Harris, Hunter Heinlen, Jeff Hermes, Dudley Herschbach, Arthur Hinds, Jens Holbach, Adam Holland, Andrew Holding, Fariba Houman, Jonnie Hughes, Gareth Jones, Terry Jones, Susan Kany, David Kessler, Sandra Klemm, Bart Knols, Eliza Kosoy, Peter Lamont, Frederic Lepage, Maggie Lettvin, Henry Leitner, Julia Lunetta, Georgia Lyman, Mark Lynas, L. Mahadevan, Alice Martelli, Lauren Maurer, Chris McManus, Xiao-Li Meng, Thomas Michel, Kees Moeliker, Lauren Mulholland, Gustav Nilsonne, Ivan Oransky, Amanda Palmer, Rohit Parwani, Charles Paxton, Bruce Petschek, Johan Pettersson, Tacye Phillipson, Mason Porter, Thomas Povey, Aarathi Prasad, Tim Radford, Gus Rancatore, Ros Reid, Rich Roberts, SciCurious, Sid Rodrigues, Santi Rodriquez, the family Rosenberg, Steffen Ross, Michael Rutter, Faina Ryvkin, Molly Sauter, Helen Scales, Dan Schreiber, Margo Seltzer, Wolter Seuntjens, Alom Shaha, Annette Smith, Chris Smith, Alicia Solow-Niederman, Volker Sommer, Graham Southorn, Hari Sriskantha, Naomi Stephen, Richard Stephens, Brian Sullivan, Geri Sullivan, Wolter Suntjens, Vaughn Tan, Peaco Todd, Patrick Warren, Simon Watt, Magnus Whalberg, Corky White, Tony Whitehead, Anna Wilkinson, Stuart Wilson, Jane Winans, Richard Wiseman, George Wolford, Thomas Woolley, Helen Zaltzman, Jonathan Zittrain, Eric Zuckerman, and quite a few more whose names I also apologize for not listing here.
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Extra Citations
Research spotlight
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Brase, Gary L., Dan V. Caprar, and Martin Voracek (2004). ‘Sex Differences in Response to Relationship Threats in England and Romania’. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 21 (6): 763–78.
Di Noto, Paula M., Leorra Newman, Shelley Wall and Gillian Einstein (2012). ‘The Hermunculus: What Is Known about the Representation of the Female Body in the Brain?’. Cerebral Cortex 23 (5): 1005–13.
Einstein, Andrew J. (2010). ‘President Obama’s Coronary Calcium Scan’. Archives of Internal Medicine 170 (13): 1175–6.
Einstein, Gillian, April S. Au, Jason Klemensberg, Elizabeth M. Shin and Nicole Pun (2012). ‘The Gendered Ovary: Whole Body Effects of Oophorectomy’. Canadian Journal of Nursing Research 44 (3): 7–17.
Einstein, Shlomo Stan. (2012). ‘An Ode to Substance Use(r) Intervention Failure(s): SUIF’. Substance Use and Misuse 47 (13/14): 1687–721.
Manning, John T., and Peter E. Bundred (2000). ‘The Ratio of 2nd to 4th Digit Length: A New Predictor of Disease Predisposition?’. Medical Hypotheses 54 (8): 5–7.
— and Frances M. Mather (2004). ‘Second to Fourth Digit Ratio, Sexual Selection, and Skin Colour’. Evolution and Human Behavior 25 (1): 38–50.
Romans, Sarah, Rose Clarkson, Gillian Einstein, Michele Petrovic and Donna Stewart (2012). ‘Mood and the Menstrual Cycle: A Review of Prospective Data Studies’. Gender Medicine 9 (5): 361–84.
Trinkaus, John W. (1980). ‘Preconditioning an Audience for Mental Magic: An Informal Look’. Perceptual and Motor Skills 51 (1): 262.
— (1980). ‘Honesty at a Motor Vehicle Bureau: An Informal Look’. Perceptual and Motor Skills 51 (3): 1252.
— (1990). ‘Queasiness: An Informal Look’. Perceptual and Motor Skills 70 (2): 1393–4.
— (1997). ‘The Demise of “Yes”: An Informal Look’. Perceptual and Motor Skills 84 (3): 866.
Van den Bergh, Bram, and Siegfried Dewitte (2006). ‘Digit Ratio (2D:4D) Moderates the Impact of Sexual Cues on Men’s Decisions in Ultimatum Games’. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 273 (1597): 2091–5.
Voracek, Martin, and Maryanne L. Fisher (2002). ‘Sunshine and Suicide Incidence’. Epidemiology 13 (4): 492–4.
— and Gernot Sonneck (2002). ‘Solar Eclipse and Suicide’. Americna Journal of Psychiatry 159 (7): 1247–8.
Voracek, Martin A., Albinas Bagdonas, and Stefan G. Dressler (2007). ‘Digit Ratio (2D:4D) in Lithuania Once and Now: Testing for Sex Differences, Relations with Eye and Hair Color, and a Possible Secular Change’. Collegium Antropologicum 31 (3): 863–8.
Voracek, Martin (2008). ‘Digit Ratio (2D:4D) and Wearing of Wedding Rings’ Perceptual and Motor Skills 106 (3): 883–90.
— and Stefan G. Dressler (2010). ‘Relationships of Toe-length Ratios to Finger-length Ratios, Foot Preference, and Wearing of Toe Rings’. Perceptual and Motor Skills 110 (1): 33–47.
Westerhof, Danielle (2005). ‘Celebrating Fragmentation: The Presence of Aristocratic Body Parts in Monastic Houses in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England’. Citeaux Commentarii Cistercienses 56 (1): 27–45.
In brief
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