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A celebration of the mind with Martin Gardner

Today we celebrate the birthday of Martin Gardner. Gardner, born in 1914, was a science writer specialising in the field of recreational mathematics, but also covering topics like magic, literature, scientific scepticism, philosophy and religion.

His most famous contribution to the popularisation of science and mathematics was the ‘Mathematical Games’ column he wrote for Scientific American for 25 year, between 1956 and 1981. Many of these columns have been collected and published as a series of books starting with ‘Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions’, first published in 1956.

So popular was Gardner (who passed away recently in 2010) that, in honour of his life and work, his birth date of October 21 has come to be known as the ‘Celebration of the Mind’. The Gathering for Gardner Foundation aims to use this day to “celebrate Martin’s life and work, and continue his pursuit of a playful and fun approach to Mathematics, Science, Art, Magic, Puzzles and all of his other interests and writings.” They encourage people to get together on the day to share mathematical or logic puzzles, paradoxes, illusions and magic tricks, or just in general engage in activities that gets the logical side of your brain buzzing.

One of the classic Gardner puzzles. Rearrange a triangle made up of six coins into a hexagon, by moving one coin at a time, with each move leaving every coin touching at least two others, as seen in the pictures.
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Examples of Gardner’s puzzles are readily available online. To immerse yourself in his world of puzzles, start with the classics on puzzles.com. There’s also an edition of the College Mathematics Journal dedicated to Martin Gardner available for free from the Mathematical Association of America.

As a teaser, here’s a few from the Gathering for Gardner website:

  • A woman either always answers truthfully, always answers falsely, or alternates true and false answers.  How, in two questions, each answered by yes or no, can you determine whether she is a truther, a liar, or an alternater?
  • You are in a room with no metal objects except for two iron rods. Only one of them is a magnet. How can you identify which one is a magnet?
  • Mr. Smith has two children.  At least one of them is a boy.  What is the probability that both children are boys?  Mr. Jones has two children.  The older child is a girl.  What is the probability that both children are girls?

Besides his interest in recreational mathematics, Gardner was an outspoken scientific sceptic with an uncompromising attitude towards pseudoscience. In his books he commented critically on a range of ‘fringe sciences’, from creationism to scientology to UFOs and the paranormal. This earned him many fans, but also many antagonists, particularly individuals operating in these fringe domains. While critical of conservative Christianity, Gardner considered himself a ‘fideistic deist’, believing in a god as creator, but critical of organized religion.

Gardner was also a leading authority on Lewis Carroll. He published ‘The Annotated Alice’, an annotated version of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass’, where he discussed and explained the riddles, wordplay and literary references found in Carroll’s works. He also produced similar annotations of GK Chesterton’s works, ‘The Innocence Of Father Brown’ and ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’

Yet his most enduring contribution remains in the field of recreational mathematics and puzzles. It has famously been said that, through his writings on puzzles, tricks and paradoxes, he “turned thousands of children into mathematicians, and thousands of mathematicians into children”.

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Information overload, social media and the Internet

Today is Information Overload Awareness Day, the day attention is focused on the crazy state of information overload existing in the world, thanks to ‘the Internet’ (a concept that is becoming more abstract and hazy by the day), social media, blogging, cloud computing, you name it.

And, by writing this blog entry about it, I am of course adding yet another drop to the ocean of information, contributing knowlingly to the ever rising levels of useful and useless information that is threatening to engulf every remaining bit of ‘dry land’ of the world.

It was estimated as long ago as 2008 that information overload is costing the US economy around $900 billion a year, through lowered employee productivity. When numbers get that big, I’m always unsure what they’re called – that’s almost $1 trillion, right? And that number is probably a lot higher by now. The average ‘knowledge worker’ (itself a term that didn’t really exist before the unbounded proliferation of data and information) is said to spend at least 50% of his day ‘managing information’ – sifting through emails, finding and validating ‘facts’, etc. And that is just the productive side of things – even more time is spent lost in the bottomless depths of facebook, twitter, youtube and the like.

If you can’t beat them, overload them…
While we complain about information overload, we all contribute to the problem – me possibly more than many. But at the same time, social media can be an important and effective tool for marketing and communication. I guess it will always be a careful balancing act between too much and too little.
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The sad thing, of course, is that among the dirt there are some real diamonds. There are blogs and opinion pieces, both online and in print, that I try to read on a regular basis, and that I really feel poorer for not having read for a few days due to some work deadline or other crisis. But finding these among the thousands upon thousands of blog posts generated daily can be a real challenge. Even just trying to keep up with WordPress’ daily Freshly Pressed list is an almost impossible task.

I’m sure no amount of awareness creation about the problem of information overload is going to change things – we have gotten too used to having pages upon pages of information on any and every topic we can possibly think of, at our fingertips. And in many ways it’s good. There’s no way I would have been able to do this blog if there wasn’t all kinds of arbitrary facts floating around to tap into. But at the same time, I guess the responsible thing to do is to at least try and limit the amount of data we push out on a daily basis. Which is one of the reasons I prefer blogging to twitter, for example – in compiling a blog post, I like to believe people at least invest a little thought. Tweeting is just too easy and immediate, resulting in the masses mindlessly excreting an ever-growing pile of data-dung (my personal view, of course).

On the topic of excrement – when did Facebook change from being a place where people actually sort-of talked to each other, to a platform where all people do all day are to share ‘cute’ photos and cartoons, and resend arbitrary ‘amusing’ status updates? Facebook used to be a platform I found quite useful to keep in touch with friends and family when we moved to another country, but over the last couple of years the signal to noise ratio has fallen so low that it is hardly worth facebooking anymore.

Oh well…  There I go – one rant about information overload, and I’ve contributed a few hundred more words to the problem.  I think for the rest of this Information Overload Awareness Day I should just switch off all computers, smartphones, TVs and radios, and go mow the lawn or something.

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‘Get the girls out’ on Mammography Day

Today, in the USA, is National Mammography Day. While it is primarily a US-based observance, I thought it apt to dedicate this day’s post to the subject, seeing that October is Breast Cancer Awareness month or Breast Cancer Action month in many parts of the world.

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of death among women, with current estimates in the US being that about 12 percent of American women will develop breast cancer at some point during their lives. To address this, steps for early detection is recommended, with one of the most important being an annual mammogram and clinical breast exam for women aged 40 and above.

Mammograms are very low dose breast tissue x-rays, used to pick up breast changes, and breast cancers in particular. Mammograms are critical because they can detect breast changes (lumps/thickenings) which are so small they cannot be felt. As a result, they increase chances of survival through early detection of possible cancer.

Additional tools and techniques that can be used as complimentary to mammography include ultrasound and MRI scanning.

It’s October, so to use the message of New Zealand’s amusing ‘BreastScreen Aotearoa’ campaign, “it’s time to get the girls out” and go for a screening check-up.
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Being a male, I can obviously not comment on the discomfort involved in receiving a mammogram, but my wife assures me that its not nearly as painful or uncomfortable as people make it out to be. The statistics agree – in general less than 5% of women experience a mammogram as painful. However, as with most things in life, bad experiences tend to receive most ‘air time’, hence creating the impression that many more women have bad experiences with mammography than is actually the case.

Despite any discomfort, there is no argument that it is a procedure worth doing – mammograms have a success rate of between 80 and 90%, and this rate gets higher in older women with less dense breast tissue. Thus detection accuracy increase with age, which is great, as the chance of getting breast cancer shows a similar age-related increase.

In closing, a word of advice from the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation:
“The best way to ensure early detection of breast cancer is to supplement screening mammograms with general breast awareness – know your breasts/know the changes to look and feel for – and see your family doctor without delay, if you notice any changes that are not normal for you.”

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Alfred Binet, the father of the IQ test

Today we have no big, UN-sanctioned observances. While there have been a few notable births on this day, none of it really caught my fancy. So instead, let’s commemorate the work of Alfred Binet, who died on this day in 1911.

Alfred who?  Well, Alfred Binet was the guy who, together with psychologists Victor Henri and Théodore Simon, developed the Binet-Simon Test – a test for verbal abilities in children. The test was later adapted by Lewis Terman at Stanford University, resulting in the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, published in 1916, which was the most popular intelligence test for decades in the US, and formed the basis of IQ testing over the past century.

Yes, Alfred Binet is the father of the IQ test.

For the past century, IQ testing has been used as a measure of future educational achievement, special needs, job performance and income.
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Mention the concept IQ testing, and you are very likely to get some really strong opinions. Some people (especially those treated favourably by the IQ scale, I guess) probably consider it a pretty accurate measure of their mental superiority. Many, however, seriously question its validity as an absolute measure of intelligence. Even Binet himself felt strongly that his tests had significant limitations, stressing that he saw extreme diversity in intelligence, and felt the result of the tests only had qualitative value, and should not be used as a quantitative measure.

It is exactly this diversity of intelligence that forms the basis of much of the criticism against IQ testing, with detractors insisting that it fails to accurately measure intelligence in its broader sense, pointing to the fact that it is not an adequate measure of creativity and emotional intelligence. It does not even come close to testing physical intelligence (hand-eye coordination, ‘ball sense’, etc).

Some critics go further, not only critisizing the scope of IQ testing, but disputing its validity entirely. Paleantologist Stephen Jay Gould, for example, in his book The Mismeasure of Man (1996), equated the tests to scientific racism, saying “…the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups—races, classes, or sexes—are innately inferior and deserve their status.”

The above criticism rings quite true when you read about the early days of intelligence testing at the start of the 20th century. To quote wikipedia, “The eugenics movement in the USA seized on it as a means to give them credibility in diagnosing mental retardation, and thousands of American women, most of them poor African Americans, were forcibly sterilized based on their scores on IQ tests, often without their consent or knowledge.”

Given that, despite the criticisms of IQ testing, these tests have been performed extensively around the world for the past century, there’s obviously a lot of IQ data out there, which has been the source of some very interesting analyses and practices. Here’s some of my favourites:

  • Musical training in childhood has been found to correlate with higher than average IQ. As has listening to classical music (but you have to do your listening directly before the test – apparently it only serves as a 10-15 minute mental boost!). So I guess my years of listening to rock, folk and blues wouldn’t have helped much.
  • IQ has been used quite extensively in human resource evaluations, when hiring new employees etc. What’s interesting is that it’s not only a too low IQ that can count against you. Apparently some US police departments have set a maximum score for new recruits (example: New London, CT has set an upper limit of 125), the argument being that those with higher IQs will become bored to soon, resulting in a too high job turnover.
  • In terms of income, it seems that there is a general correlation between IQ and income up to a certain level of IQ, but there’s no correlation between very high IQ and very high income. Top incomes are dependent on so many factors that IQ doesn’t really feature at all.
  • As far as criminal tendencies are concerned, being very clever or very stupid (in IQ terms) generally speaking seem to keep you from pursuing a life of crime. Most criminals fall in the 70-90 IQ range (i.e slightly below average), with the peak being between 80 and 90. There is, of course, the argument that only the dumb ones get caught, so maybe criminals are much smarter than the statistics suggest.
  • Politically, studies in the UK and USA have found that young adults who classify themselves as very liberal have a higher than average IQ, while those who consider themselves very conservative tends to have slightly below average IQ scores.

There are many more interesting correlations, but let’s leave it there for now. What do you think – do you believe in IQ tests, or do you think its a load of hogwash?

I personally think that the best comment on intelligence comes from Albert Einstein (he really did leave us with the greatest quotes, didn’t he?), when he said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

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Getting the message out on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

17 October is the date selected by the United Nations for the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

The day dates back to 1987, when more than a hundred thousand people gathered in Trocadéro in Paris (where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in 1948), to honour and acknowledge the millions of people around the world who are victims of extreme poverty. At this event, extreme poverty (currently defined as living on less than US$1.25 per day) was proclaimed a basic violation of human rights, and the urgent need to combat this violation was reaffirmed. Through the establishment of the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, the UN formalised the commitments of the 1987 gathering, urging governmental and civil organisations to take action in addressing the problems of extreme poverty.

People living in extreme poverty are forced into desperate living conditions.
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Think about it for a minute – US$1.25 a day. Or US$37.50 a month… Convert that to your local currency, and imagine that being the grand total amount of money you have to live on. Not just for basic needs such as food, shelter, clothing, heat and sanitation, but for all your living expenses including medical care, education and transport.

That is not poverty – it is extreme poverty. The number is incomprehensibly small.

And now think about this: 920 million people. That is the amount of people that will still live under the international poverty line of $1.25 per day in 2015 in the best case scenario if the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set by the United Nations is reached. In 1990 that number was almost 2 billion, and the stretching target set by the UN MDGs is to halve the 1990 extreme poverty rate by 2015.

At the moment, there’s still significantly more than 1 billion people living in extreme poverty. The number is incomprehensibly large.

And despite a general positive trend in the eradication of poverty, there are some severe setbacks that can derail the progress towards reaching the above goals. In 2010 alone, for example, it is estimated that the global economic crisis pushed an additional 64 million people into extreme poverty.

At the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, held in June of this year, leaders from around the world declared that poverty eradication is “the greatest global challenge facing the world today.”

The UN Fact Sheet on poverty eradication details some very positive programmes that have worked well in different regions of the world – subsidy programmes in Malawi and Ghana, investments in agricultural research in Vietnam, innovative finance schemes in Nigeria and Bangladesh, employment programmes in Argentina. In addition to these, the UN is currently coordinating many additional initiatives across the world focused on agriculture, rural employment, food provision, local cooperatives and more.

Community feeding schemes helping those living in extreme poverty, need all the support they can get.
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While the global eradication of poverty feels like one of those vague, hazy ideals that we fully agree is important, but really have no idea what to do about as individuals, there are things we can do. Simply sharing the message and creating awareness among your peers of the various initiatives that are currently running to address the problem, can already help. The UN “End Poverty 2015 – we are the generation that can end poverty” awareness campaign makes it easy to identify and share specific messages related to the challenges that remain in the fight against poverty.

Go on – go to “#endpoverty”, find those initiatives that are close to your heart, educate yourself about them and start sharing with a simple click of a button. Knowledge is power, and sharing that knowledge is half the battle won.

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Give us this day our daily bread

Today is World Bread Day. While it coincides with the United Nations’ World Food Day, it’s a much more lighthearted celebration.  For the past seven years, 16 October has been the date that bloggers and other social medialites the world over have baked bread, and shared their experiences with their friends and followers.

A steaming, freshly baked bread must be one of the most basic culinary pleasures in life.  When you’ve been away from fresh food for a few days, there are few things better than a thick slice of bread, hot out of the oven, generously spread with melting butter.

Ahh, bread and olives. Add a glass of wine and life is good.
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In a way it is fitting that World Bread Day falls on the same day as World Food Day, given the role of bread as a basic source of nutrition the world over.  Bread is one of the oldest prepared foods, with evidence of bread-making dating back some 30 000 years. Earliest breads seem to have been a form of flat-bread made from starch extract from the roots of plants, while ‘modern’ grain-based bread appeared around 10 000 BC.

Considering it’s prevalence, bread plays an understandably important role in culture and religion. In Christian religion, bread is a symbol for the the body of Christ, while Jewish religion uses different types of bread for specific religious ceremonies and events. Bread is often equated to our general daily necessities (‘Give us this day our daily bread’, ‘putting bread on the table’). Around the 1950’s, ‘bread’ started to be used as a slang euphemism for money – a figure of speech that is now common the world over. Aligned with this comes terms like ‘bread-winner’ as the main income-provider in the family.

Bread is such an amazingly versatile food – once baked, it can be eaten warm or cold, or toasted. Eat it with dipping liquids like gravy, olive oil or soup; spread it with sweet or savoury toppings; stack it as a sandwich with your favourite fillings including meats, cheeses and more – the options are limited by your  imagination only.

All this talk is making me peckish – I think I can do with a slice of toast with homemade marmelade!

Which leaves me with just one question: Whatever was the greatest thing before sliced bread?

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Teaching a generation to wash their hands

Each year on 15 October, people worldwide celebrate Global Handwashing Day. It sounds almost too simple to be true, but properly washing your hands with soap and water is the most affordable and effective way of preventing a range of health problems including diarrhea and respiratory infections – problems which currently are the cause of death of millions of children, particularly in the developing countries of the world.

This is one of those astonishingly simple and obvious things to promote – if we can foster a generation of youngsters for whom handwashing is an integral part of their lives, it could “save more lives than any single existing vaccine of medical intervention, cutting deaths from diarrhea by almost half and deaths from acute respiratory infections by one-quarter.”

Wash your hands with soap and water before eating and after going to the toilet – it couldn’t simpler.
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2012 is the fifth anniversary of Global Handwashing Day. In celebrating this fact, the theme for this year is “Help More Children Reach Their 5th Birthday”.

The reason why Global Handwashing Day is focussed on children is simply the fact that they represent the segment of society that is most enthusiastic and most susceptible to new ideas. If the current generation of children can be convinced of the value of washing your hands before eating and after going to the toilet, the habit can be entrenched in future generations, which could result in literally millions of lives being saved.

So if you have kids, do your bit and teach them the value of regularly washing their hands. Even if you don’t have kids, you can help by sharing the idea with friends, promoting it at local schools, etc. It may not feel like it, but it could really be the simplest and most significant intervention you can contribute to in your lifetime.

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My dream of a single power plug on World Standards Day

World Standards Day is celebrated internationally each year on 14 October.

The idea of this day is to remind people of the importance of standards, and to honour the efforts of all those involved in the development and maintenance of various standards within the different standards organisations such as the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Development of standards is a detailed, precise and often thankless job, that is usually done on a voluntary basis. And unless you run into a situation where your life is complicated as a result of a lack of standardisation, you may very likely not even be aware of the important roles standards and interoperability play in our daily lives.

The theme of this year’s World Standards Day is “Less waste, better results – Standards increase efficiency.” As explained by the World Standards Cooperation (WSC), international standards help to harmonize manufacturing and other processes across the globe, which allow components etc from different manufacturers to ‘fit together like pieces in a puzzle’. Standards support interoperability and compatibility and facilitate market access to new products. And all this do indeed contribute to a more efficient and less wasteful world.

Non-standardised power supplies must be one of the most frustrating headaches facing anyone endeavouring to travel internationally.
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I guess as someone who has travelled to a few countries, and who has lived in more than one country, I personally find one of the most frustrating examples of non-standardisation being the absurd range of different electrical plug and socket standards in different countries. Having to replace plugs, buy various country-specific adapters, or replace power cables, is an excellent example where a lack of standards leads to less efficiency and more waste. How this disparity came about I have no idea. And why, in this day and age, have things not progressed to a single standard (at least among countries working on a similar voltage and current rating) makes even less sense. Surely it cannot be that difficult – just go for the most pervasive standard, or better still, choose the one that actually works best, and go with that?

So, like Martin Luther King of old, I also have a dream. It is not a very big dream, but it is a dream that can, in its own small way, change the world. On this World Standards Day my dream is to travel the world with a single, universal power plug that fits the sockets of all countries across the globe. Is that too much to ask? 🙂

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Dress sharp and look the part on International Suit-up Day

Today, 13 October, is International Suit-up Day, the day to get out your smartest suit and ‘look sharp’. With the day falling on a Saturday this year, I guess sporting a formal ‘black tie’ look at work won’t really be an option for most people, but there’s nothing wrong with a night on the town dressed up like someone who just stepped off the set of the Godfather.

Mention the word ‘suit’, and a couple of images involuntarily pop into most people’s minds.

  • First and foremost, you cannot help thinking about the classic mob movies such as the Godfather series, where the characters look as dangerous as they do smart, and you just know you don’t mess with a guy in a suit.
  • Then, of course, there’s the sharp dressed singers of old; Frank Sinatra (OK, perhaps he belongs to the first category above), Leonard Cohen (who has famously proclaimed that he has simply never felt comfortable in a pair of blue jeans) and the younger contenders like Michael Buble and the like.
  • For the twenty-somethings, suits will probably be synonymous with Barney Stinson, the sharp-dressed character from the hit TV series How I Met Your Mother, who refuses to be seen in anything but a suit and tie, even when he’s in bed. I am sure Barney deserves an award for making suits cool again to a new generation.
Suits are synonymous with sharp dressed dudes smoking fat cigars and playing poker.
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On the topic of suits, it is interesting how the way you dress influence the way you are perceived by others. Whether it’s dressing in a suit, or a scientist’s lab coat, or a pair of torn jeans and a t-shirt, your choice of clothing goes a long way towards determining people’s opinions of you before you’ve said a word, and before they’ve even met you.

Suits in particular can have a strong impact – numerous behavioral science studies have shown how dressing sharply can increase your perceived status among peers, boost self-confidence, and even make you more productive at work. For a mini-masterclass on suits and sharp dressing, look no further than the US TV show Suits. When Ross (a young lawyer who passed the bar but didn’t go to law school) asks, “What does it matter how much I spend on suits?” Harvard graduate Specter replies, “People respond to how you dress so like it or not this is what you have to do.”

It turns out what you wear may even influence how you feel about yourself, and how you act. You’ve probably all heard the advice to people who work from home, that says you should dress as though you’re going to work, as it will influence how professional you come across on the phone etc. (Apparently wearing a singlet and underpants won’t do the trick if you’re planning to spend some quality phone-time with your clients.) Beyond this amusing fact, research reported in the New York Times has shown how people wearing lab-coats actually become more attentive and precise in their actions. Researchers got a group of people to wear white coats (said to be scientists’ lab coats) and then perform mental tests. These were compared to a reference group wearing their normal attire, and the ‘scientists’ did significantly better in the test. Surprisingly, when the test was repeated with new groups, but the overcoat-wearing group were told they were wearing artists’ coats, they did not perform any better than the reference group.

If you extrapolate this to suits, wearing a suit may well influence how you perform at different tasks. The problem is, however, that your opinion of suit-wearers will colour the impact the suit will have on you. If you consider suit-wearers to be important, responsible, trust-worthy people that you look up to, wearing a suit may well result in you ‘stepping up to the challenge’ and acting more responsibly yourself. If, however, you see suit-wearers as sharks and underhanded crime lords, donning a suit may perhaps not do your personality any good…

Whatever your normal daily attire, today is a chance to go all out.  Dig out your best suit, heck, rent one if you don’t have one, and live like Ol’ Blue Eyes for a day.  Here’s to a dashing International Suit-up Day – have fun!

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Analysing your personality on World Egg Day

Today, the second Friday of October, has been proclaimed World Egg Day by the International Egg Commission (IEC) [], to raise awareness of the nutritional value of eggs, and has been celebrated annually since 1996.

As an affordable source of high quality protein, eggs do indeed play a vital role in feeding people around the world, both in developed and developing countries. According to the IEC, eggs contain just the right mix of amino acids required to build human tissue, and is second only to mother’s milk as a protein source for human nutrition. Egg yolks are also an abundant source of Vitamin D.

Considering the different ‘egg personalities’, I wonder what a preference for double yolked eggs might signify?
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OK, so here’s an interesting egg story. According to a recent report on research performed by Mindlab International, a person’s preferred way of eating eggs may have a lot to say about their personalities, jobs and even sex drive. Applying data mining techniques to a sample of just over a thousand British adults, they searched for statistically meaningful relationships between people’s characters, lifestyles, social class etc, and whether they preferred their eggs boiled, poached, fried, scrambled or as an omelette.

Here are a few highlights from the Mindlab findings:

  • Poached egg eaters are mostly women, and tend to be outgoing, energetic extroverts. They prefer brighter clothing, livelier music and tend to be happy.
  • Boiled egg fans are also mostly female, and they tend towards the upper working class. They are likely to be disorganised, careless and impulsive, and run a higher than average risk of getting divorced.
  • Fried egg eaters tend to be younger males, and from the skilled working class. They are more open to new experiences, creative, curious and imaginative. They apparently also tend to have a higher sex drive.
  • Scrambled eggs is the preferred choice among those in their twenties and thirties, who tend to be in managerial or senior level jobs. They were also found to be less neurotic, but at the same time more guarded and less open.
  • Finally, the omelette is a middle class favourite, and omelette lovers tend to be reliable, organised and disciplined. They also tend to have tidy homes, live longer, and are less likely to get divorced.

So there you have it…

If the above ‘research’ does not sound enough like pseudoscience yet, the Mindlab findings go further and relates egg-eating habits to star signs. Apparently Aquarius, Leo and Taurus prefers their eggs poached, Cancer, Capricorn and Libra are fans of fried eggs, and Aries, Gemini, Pisces, Sagittarius, Scorpio and Virgo opt for scrambled eggs.

Still reading?  Well, even your position in the family pecking order may influence on your egg preference – first borns are said to prefer scrambled eggs, while those who were born third or later would rather eat their eggs fried. Second borns apparently have no marked preference.

What exactly the value of these results are, is beyond me. But then again it did give me something to write a blog post about, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. 🙂

Happy World Egg Day, everyone!