Sunday 6 December 2009

Superfreakonomics by Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Another compendium of mad statistics from the Freakonomics people. I discovered:
  • It is more dangerous to be a drunk pedestrian than a drunk driver (so don't confiscate those car keys!)
  • Prostitutes practise price discrimination which is possible because they can easily identify which customers are likely to pay more and they can prevent resale of the product
  • Pimps add more value than estate agents
  • Every year the shoe bomber costs the US 1,065 years of extra security checks at airports
  • You could mask the effects of global warming by attaching long hoses to power station chimneys: pumping the sulphur dioxide high into the atmosphere would create a blanket that would cause global cooling
  • And you could prevent hurricanes using big rubber rings
  • An experiment to see whether monkeys could understand money not only had the monkeys trading coins for treast but also engendered the first observed case of monkey prostitution (a male monkey gave his coin to a female, they had sex, the female then used the coin to buy a treat!)

Even with all this it wasn't as good as the first one!

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