When milk arrived on the doorstep

    When I was a boy growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, we had a milkman delivering milk to our doorstep. His name was Mr.Basille. He wore a white cap and drove a white truck. As a 5-year-old boy, I couldn't take my eyes off the coin changer fixed to his belt. He noticed this one day during a delivery and gave me a quarter out of his coin changer.

    Of course, he delivered more than milk. There was cheese, eggs and so on. If we needed to change our order, my mother would pen a note-"Please add a bottle of buttermilk next delivery"—and place it in the box along with the empty bottles. And then, the buttermilk would magically appear.

    All of this was about more than convenience. There existed a close relationship between families and their milkmen. Mr. Basille even had a key to our house, for those times when it was so cold outside that we put the box indoors, so that the milk wouldn't freeze. And I remember Mr. Basille from time to time taking a break at our kitchen table, having a cup of tea and telling stories about his delivery.

    There is sadly no home milk delivery today. Big companies allowed the production of cheaper milk thus making it difficult for milkmen to compete. Besides, milk is for sale everywhere, and it may just not have been practiced to have a delivery service.

    Recently, an old milk box in the countryside I saw brought back my childhood memories. I took it home and planted it on the back porch. Every so often my son's friends will ask what it is. So I start telling stories of my boyhood, and of the milkman who brought us friendship along with his milk.

    Why Do People Blink Their Eyes?

    People blink(眨眼) their eyes tens of thousands of times every day. Scientists have long believed blinking was an involuntary movement and served mainly to keep the eyeballs wet. But a new study suggests it has a more important purpose.

    An international team of scientists from the University of California at Berkeley studied the blinking of human eyelids. The journal Current Biology published their findings. The team said they found that blinking “repositions our eyeballs so we can stay focused” on what we are seeing. They said that when we blink our eyelids, the eyes roll back into their sockets--the bony area that surrounds and protects the eyes. However, the researchers found the eyes don't always return to the same position. They said this causes the brain to tell the eye muscles to reorganize our eyesight.

    Gerrit Maus is the lead writer of the report. He serves as an assistant professor of psychology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Maus says: “Our eye muscles are quite sluggish(迟缓的) and imprecise, so the brain needs to constantly adapt its motor signals to make sure our eyes are pointing where they're supposed to. Our findings suggested that the brain measures the difference in what we see before and after a blink, and commands the eye muscles to make the needed corrections.” The researchers said that without such corrections our surroundings would appear unclear and even jumpy. They said the movement acts “like a Steadicam(摄影稳定器) of the mind.”

    The researchers said they asked volunteers to sit in a dark room while staring at a small dot on a flat surface. They used special cameras to follow the volunteer's blinks and eye movements. After each blink, the dot was moved one centimeter to the right. The volunteers did not notice this, but the brain did. It followed the movement and directed the eye muscles to refocus on the dot. After the dot was moved in this way 30 times, the volunteers' eyes changed their focus to the place where they predicted it would be.

    Professor Maus says “Even though participants did not consciously register that the dot had moved, their brains did, and adjusted with the corrective eye movement. These findings add to our understanding of how the brain constantly adapts to changes, commanding our eye muscles to correct for errors in our bodies' own hardware.”

    It was close to midnight and it was unusual to see vehicles on the road. However, several trucks pulled over and workers silently unloaded camera equipment and cardboard boxes, and then carried them inside the Morgenson family home.

    What took place over the next eight weeks was inspired by a Hollywood movie called The Joneses about a family of marketers who move into a local neighborhood to sell their products secretly to their neighbors. The idea was to test the power of word-of-mouth marketing. By filming a 'rear' family in unscripted (无剧本的) situations, my team and I would document how the Morgensons' circle of friends responded to brands and products the Morgensons bought into their lives.

    With the help of 35 video cameras and 25 microphones hidden inside the furniture, the operation done secretly showed something shocking. The most powerful hidden persuader of all isn't in your TV or on the shelves of your supermarket. It's a far more important influence that's around you almost every waking moment: your very own friends and neighbors. There is nothing quite so persuasive as observing someone we respect or admire using a brand or product.

    Our analysis also found that the brands the Morgensons used went faster. About one third of the Morgensons' friends began promoting these same brands to their friends. We also found that the brands their friends were most likely to buy at the Morgensons' suggestion were the bigger and better-known ones. This proved my thoughts that traditional marketing and secret marketing work well together. The most persuasive advertising strategies are strengthened by word-of-mouth advertising.

    Whenever I meet with company managers, I tell them that the people who hold the real marketing power are mouse-clicking consumers and their wide circles of real-life friends. In other words, the people who hold the real power are us.

Beethoven is a giant of classical music. And the most influential, too—at least, when it comes to piano compositions. That's according to a study in the journal EP J Data Science.

If you're wondering how data analysis could determine something as abstract as cultural influence, it's worth remembering this: Music is the most mathematical of the art form, a lot of which is symbolic. The music is written in symbols that are connected in time.

Juyong Park is a theoretical physicist in South Korea. Park and his colleagues collected 900 piano compositions by 19 composers from 1700 to 1910. Then they used that mathematical quality to their advantage by dividing each composition into what they called "code words", in other words, a chord. They then compared each chord to the chord or note that came after it, which allowed them to determine how creative composers were at coming up with novel transitions.

The composer with top marks for novelty was Rachmaninoff. But when the researchers looked at those chord transitions across all 19 composers, it was Beethoven who was most heavily borrowed from—meaning at least among the composers in this analysis, his influence was the largest.

Their study comes with some drawbacks. For example, the researchers only considered piano compositions in this work, and by only studying chord transitions, so their conclusions wouldn't relate to artists who were influential in other ways like Bach or Mozart. Park explained, "It's well understood that Mozart's contribution to music comes from the musical forms that he designed. That was not very well reflected by our mathematical modeling."

As for Park, the results convinced him he has some listening to do. "Of course I listen to music. I like Rachmaninoff's music, but I have to say I have listened to Beethoven way more than Rachmaninoff. So after this work came out, I ended up buying his whole complete collection.

Dear Max,

It must seem a little odd to get a letter from your own mother who m you see every day, but I hope you will read this and take what I have to say seriously. 

I bought you a phone for your 12th birthday because you wanted one so much, and all your friends have one. I know you love your phone, but I wonder whether you are aware of just how much you use it. 

From my perspective, it seems that you are constantly checking your phone for notifications（通知） or messages. You even do this when we're having a family meal in a restaurant or when I'm talking to you. You may not realise this, but whenever you feel even slightly bored, you check your phone. You never seem to relax. You're constantly on alert, and I don't think this is very good for you. We all need to switch it off every now and then. And if I ask you to leave your phone at home when we go out, you sulk（生气） and get twitchy, almost as if you're suffering withdrawal symptoms（戒断症状）. It's like your phone is a drug.

I have tried to talk to you about this, but whenever I ask you to put down your phone and look at me, you say "in a minute". Unfortunately, "in a minute" never comes, and we never talk. I can't actually remember the last time we had a proper face-to-face conversation. I even have to message you to let you know dinner is on the table! That's why I decided to put my concerns in a letter to you.

Please don't think I am writing this letter to punish you or to nag（唠叨） you. I know you are a good boy. I don't think you want to hurt me or be rude intentionally. However, I recently heard about something called "nomophobia"—the fear of being without a phone. It's a real illness and I'm worried whether you have it. I really think it would be a good idea if we all went to see an addiction expert together so we can all have a discussion about this serious problem. I know you won't want to, but I'm very concerned about you. Please take some time to think about what I have written. Then let's talk.

Mum, 

On August 1, 2023, new rules went into effect in the United States thạt make it against the law to sell most incandescent (白炽的) light bulbs.

Incandescent light bulbs have been common since the late 1800s. They use electricity to create light by heating a metal wire, which glows. Over 90% of the electricity used by the bulbs goes into making heat — not light.

Since 2005, countries around the world have been banning incandescent bulbs. That's what's happening in the US. The new rules don't actually make incandescent bulbs illegal. They just say that light bulbs that are sold must be able to create a certain amount of light (45 lumens) with a certain amount of energy (l watt). Most incandescent bulbs can only create about 15 lumen s with I watt.

These days, the best way to replace incandescent bulbs is with LED light bulbs. These bulbs can create about 75 lumens with 1 watt of electricity. And they can last 25 or more times longer than incandescent bulbs.

Though the rule just took effect at the beginning of August, it was first created in 2007. Since then, the rule has been delayed many times, usually for political reasons. In the early 2000s, LED bulbs cost more money than they do today, and weren't nearly as good. But in recent years, people have been switching over to LED lights, even without the rule. The lights have become more and more popular, since they use less energy and save people money by lasting longer.

The new rules will also help the environment. Over the next 30 years, LED bulbs are expected to help prevent a huge amount of pollution in the US — about as much as would be used by 28 million homes in one year. That will be an imperative step in tackling the climate crisis.