Japanese demographics professor Hiroshi Yoshida has warned that by 2531 everyone in Japan will have the last name 'Sato'.
Why? Because a) Sato is the most common last name in Japan, and b) Japanese law requires that married couples use the same last name. Because Japanese women almost always take their husband's name, this means that the surname 'Sato' is slowly crowding out all other names.
According to Yoshida’s calculations, the proportion of Japanese named Sato increased 1.0083 times from 2022 to 2023. Assuming the rate remains constant and there is no change to the law on surnames, around half of the Japanese population will have that name in 2446, rising to 100% in 2531.
The Think Name Project is promoting Professor Yoshida's research as a way to gain support for ending Japan's law requiring couples to have the same surname.
It suggests that our universe has been swallowing "baby universes," and that this eating habit is the cause of the observed accelerating rate of expansion of our universe.
The article, authored by researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, quickly veers off into mathematics that's incomprehensible to me. But I can extract a few interesting ideas. For instance, what if the initial "Big Bang" of our universe was caused by us (when we were still a baby universe) being swallowed by a larger universe?
the fact that the universe has expanded from, say, a Planckian size to 10−5m in a very short time, invites the suggestion that this expansion was caused by a collision with a larger universe, i.e. that it was really our Universe which was absorbed in another "parent" universe.
And what would happen if, now that we're an adult universe, we collided with another adult universe? The researchers don't answer this question, but I'm guessing the outcome wouldn't be good.
While a continuous absorption of microscopic baby universes probably can be accommodated in a non-disruptive way in our Universe, it is less clear what happens if the "baby" universe is not small, since we have not suggested an actual mechanism for such absorption.
Researchers at the University of Michigan have been studying people shaking boxes in order to shed light on "epistemic action understanding." Or rather, "Can one person tell, just by observing another person’s movements, what they are trying to learn?"
In other words, as you watch someone shake a box, can you figure out what information they're trying to gather about the contents of the box (i.e. the shape or quantity of things in it)?
1965: Two eye doctors published an article in the journal Science detailing what appeared to be a form of telepathy found in two sets of twins. The brainwaves of the twins seemed to be linked. When the brainwaves of one changed (by having him close his eyes), the brainwaves of the other twin would change also, even though the two were in separate rooms.
The doctors examined 16 sets of twins, but only found the linked brainwave phenomenon in two of them. Why these two? The doctors speculated that they were "serene" whereas the other twins demonstrated "impatient anxiety and apprehension about the testing procedure."
It's surprising the doctors got their article published in Science, since that journal doesn't usually consider anything that smacks too much of parapsychology.
We posted recently about "misdirected amplexus," which is the phenomenon of male frogs attempting to mate with inappropriate objects (different species, fish, inanimate objects, etc.).
Turns out that the weird frog sex behaviors don't end there. Male frogs, in their excitement, will occasionally form "mating balls" — "several male frogs cling to a single female – often killing her in the process."
Some German researchers have now found that female frogs, in turn, have developed defense strategies to protect themselves from over-excited males. They rotate to try to escape the male's grasp; they emit "release calls"; and if those strategies fail to work, they play dead:
to protect themselves against swarms of sexually aroused male frogs, the female frogs stiffly extend their arms and legs away from the body, keeping incredibly still until the male releases them from its grasp.
We posted recently about some odd sexual behavior demonstrated by frogs (their frequent attempts to mate with inappropriate objects). Male rats also display an odd behavior. When they need to rest from mating, they sing an ultrasonic "leave me alone" song.
In one of our recent posts, there was a reference to the Chimpomat, a token-operated vending machine for chimpanzees created at the Yerkes Laboratories in the 1930s. Here's more info about it.
"Subject Kambi is shown about to drop a token into the slot of the chimpomat to 'purchase' food."
Info from The Ape People (1971) by Geoffrey H. Bourne:
The Yerkes Laboratories eventually developed a device known as a Chimpomat. This Chimpomat would receive either metal or plastic disks and would dispense some form of food reward in return for the insertion of a disk. Animals were eventually taught to pull the box of weights up to the cage in return for plastic or metal disks which they could then take and put in the Chimpomat to get their reward.
By the process of lengthening the time between which they could earn the reward and when they could actually receive it by using the Chimpomat (by making the Chimpomat available only certain times of the day), the animals could be trained to collect plastic disks, in other words, to work for money. They would store up this money until the time came for them to spend it. Eventually they were trained to earn the money one day and spend it in the Chimpomat the following day.
On these occasions the animals used to walk around clutching their earnings to their breasts, sleeping on them at night so they would not be stolen, and getting very hysterical if any other animal came near their earnings or tried to take any of them away—a very human side of their actuvity and the dawn of ownership of private property and capitalism, a thought that has intriguing implications.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.