You are the ammunition

Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything, Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base and ready to fly. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. The day’s fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington. Penney, one of the first two combat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it.

The one thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.

Except her own plane. So that was the plan.
Battling suicide with suicide. One of probably hundreds of amazing stories I hadn't yet heard about 9/11.

(hat tip to Daring Fireball)

Constants in language, lifetimes

A study in the journal Language finds that even though different languages sound like they run at different speeds, the average information conveyed by each over a constant period of time is more or less equivalent.

I wonder if this is constant is a result of the transmission limits of the speaker or of the processing capabilities of the listener? Or both?

This finding reminded me of the odd fact that the average lifespan of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals, reptiles, and humans all cluster around one constant: the total number of heartbeats. That is, while all those animals live different life spans in terms of years, all average about 1 billion heartbeats. Animals that live for fewer years, on average, tend to have really high average heart rates, while animals that tend to outlive humans have slower heart rates. The mass of the animal seems to play a role. In the animal kingdom, larger species tend to have slower pulse rates and longer life spans.

While there isn't complete consensus around why this is, one oft-cited explanation is Kleiber's law. The theory is that the internal networks needed to distribute nutrients across an animal's structure achieve certain economies of scale. Mathematical models have found the same scaling efficiency as has been measured in the animal kingdom.

Those interested in the topic should definitely read this article.

 

Pronoun usage: a psychological tell

Psychologies James Pennebaker has unearthed a hidden code in the way we use pronouns, and he shares some of the more intriguing findings in this interview. 

Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust and, naturally, I wanted to test this on myself. I always assumed that I was a warm, egalitarian kind of guy who treated people pretty much the same.

I was the same as everyone else. When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached -- hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.
More:

One of the most fascinating effects I’ve seen in quite awhile is that we can predict people’s college performance reasonably well by simply analyzing their college admissions essays. Across four years, we analyzed the admissions essays of 25,000 students and then tracked their grade point averages (GPAs). Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students’ major.

To me, the use of nouns -- especially concrete nouns -- reflects people’s attempts to categorize and name objects, events, and ideas in their worlds. The use of verbs and pronouns typically occur when people tell stories. Universities clearly reward categorizers rather than story tellers. If true, can we train young students to categorize more? Alternatively, are we relying too much on categorization strategies in American education?
Ben Zimmer reviews Pennebaker's book, The Secret Life of Pronouns, and offers one cautionary tale of note. Many political pundits excoriate Obama for using I/me/my too often in his speeches, but using statistical analysis, Pennebaker determines that Obama uses those words less frequently than any modern U.S. President (post Truman).

But Pennebaker warns that this doesn't mean Obama is less confident than past Presidents. In fact, it's a sign of his self-confidence that he uses first-person pronouns with such low frequency.