Thank you, NASA. (screengrab)

Tonight the moon will come 15,000 miles closer to the Earth and will be full. This combination of proximity and brightness results in a phenomenon known as the supermoon--by far the brightest and largest full moon we'll see all year. As we are still primitive beasts loping madly across the plains and will surely be at each others' throats as soon as the moon is closest to us (11:35 p.m. E.T.), the Associated Press has taken it upon themselves to soothe the cresting tides of madness to come--with science!

But no matter how far away a full moon is, it's not going to make people kill themselves or others, commit other crimes, get admitted to a psychiatric hospital or do anything else that popular belief suggests, a psychologist says.

Studies that have tried to document such connections have found "pretty much a big mound of nothing, as far as I can tell," said Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University.

Professor Lilienfeld, who addressed the myth of the maddening moon in 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology, told the A.P. that moon-related strangeness is a singularly intractable legend because those who believe it can so easily confirm their bias by attaching any coincidence that occurs under a full moon to the phenomenon.

NASA has also published a helpful video explaining away myths surrounding the moon here.

So with all your moon-related fears dismissed, feel free to head out for a moon dance.

Which, if spotted, will surely confirm the still-uninformed viewer's idea that the supermoon is making someone super-crazy.

The Oprah-approved author of harrowing, sparse-prose mastery such as The Road, No Country for Old Men, and Blood Meridian has taken on a special project in editing the paperback version of last year's well-received biography of famed scientist Richard Feynman, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science.

As it turns out, Mr. McCarthy was a huge fan of the book, and offered his services to Quantum Man author Lawrence M. Krauss unprompted. With them, however, he also offered some distinct, Cormac McCarthy-esque adjustments.

Via Pageview:

"To start with," Krauss writes, "he made me promise he could excise all exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature." The novelist, he adds, "went through the book in detail and made suggestions for rephrasing in certain points as well."

And so it was. Question, though: For what it's worth, Richard Feynman was an exclamation point of a scientist. For example, would McCarthy have taken out the exclamation point in the title of Richard Feynman's most famous work?

In the mean time, as a biography of Richard Feynman becomes a tribute to the minimal elements that the man may have lived, that distant tapping sound you hear is the furious deletion of the aforementioned punctuation marks by many an MFA candidate. Previously: Cormac McCarthy, playwright, brute-force killer of euphemistic racial-tension in theater. Hopefully he'll next emerge on Madison Avenue and tell every menswear fashion buyer in the world why non-effeminate bracelets have no place in their stores.

[Via ArtsBeat]

The Wall Street Journal reports that the results of University of Southern California assistant professor Alexandra Michel's ten-year long study of "roughly two dozen" entry-level bankers at two anonymous investment banking houses (who participated on the condition that they remain anonymous) will be released later this month in the next issue of Administrative Science Quarterly, with evidence explaining that conclusion.

Not a few, or a majority, but all of the bankers apparently exhibited the aforementioned stress-related ailment within a few years on the job.

If you think camping out in Zuccotti Park is hard, try this on for size:

By the fourth year, however, many bankers were a mess, according to the study. Some were sleep-deprived, blaming their bodies for preventing them from finishing their work. Others developed allergies and substance addictions. Still others were diagnosed with long-term health conditions such as Crohn's disease, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis and thyroid disorders.

Also:

One vice president described work as a never-ending nightmare, waking up every morning and wishing the day before "was just a bad dream." Another vice president said he was so worried others might notice his drinking problem that he would "keep losing half of what they are saying." By the sixth year, the participants, now in their mid-30s, had split into two camps: the 60% who remained "at war" with their bodies, and the remaining 40% who decided to prioritize their health...

And of course:

Some are addicted to prescription drugs like Adderall or Ritalin. To cope, they resort to "depersonalization," a feeling of numbness toward the rest of the world. A few have been suicidal.

Maybe the Occupy movement's next strategy could just be some kind of counter-intuitive mind game encouraging investment bankers to work harder than ever, at which point they'll just sputter out and collapse. Of course, this could easily go the way of Michael Douglas in Falling Down. In which case, please don't color that an endorsement.

Do you know any investment bankers who have lost their minds and their bodies on the job? Do you have any particularly great war stories from those trenches? Are you an investment banker currently in the throes of total, REEEDDRUMMMM-like psychosis? Were you part of the study? If so, we'd love to hear some of your fun anecdotes. Give us a shout!

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The Waterfall Swing

The New York Hall of Science was home to the 2nd Annual World Maker Faire this past weekend, which is like a grown-up version of your middle school science fair, but much, much cooler. Robot drummers! Super-fast dancing crutches! Glasses that let you visualize sounds as double rainbows! DIY comfy wheelchairs! Most importantly, there was a Waterfall Swing, created by Dash 7 Designs. Watch it in action:

We were a little dubious about this invention, since who among us didn't break a leg trying to hook up a water hose to a swing set when they were a kid? But the coolest part of the Waterfall Swing is that motion sensors activate the stream of water to keep you from falling off. This is Dash 5's technical explanation, for those who understand such things:

Towering steel swing set holding arrays of mechanical solenoids that create a water plane falling in the path of its riders. Formed from a tangent of ideas raised from the study of interactions of water as space, the swing is the first in a series that play with interaction in rides and installations. Riders pass through openings in a waterfall created by precisely monitoring their path via axel-housed encoders, creating the thrill of narrowly escaping obstacles.

Hopefully this project will be more successful than New York's last waterfall-related experiment.

The Grand Design has, in one day, gone from a science book only of interest because of Hawking's far-reaching name recognition to the hottest book on Amazon. It's currently ranked number one in sales among every book on the site, sitting above the three Steig Larsson books, Freedom, and all the other heavy hitters. To put its meteoric rise in perspective, let's compare these recent sales of Hawking's book to those of Mockingjay, the publishing phenomenon that has now been demoted to the number two spot on the Amazon bestseller list. Suzanne Collins' young adult novel has been in the top 100 for 220 days. The Grand Design, on the other hand, has been in the top 100 for two days. Mockingjay has 393 customer reviews. The Grand Design has 8.

The excerpts from the book prompted a response from religious figures from all parts of the world as they attempted to discount Hawking's logic and reaffirm God's importance. Jonathan Sacks, British Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregation, slammed Hawking's argument in an essay that ran beside it in The Times of London (though the article is still locked behind Rupert Murdoch's paywall). Dr. Rowan Williams — the Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Church of England — said "physics on its own will not settle the question of why there is something rather than nothing," CNN International reported. As these attacks made the rounds, others spoke to The Times about how their faith could not take claims such as Hawking's seriously.

With hubbub not yet dying down, the number of copies of The Grand Design shipped will probably surge up until its Sept. 7 release date and after. If you only read one book this year in which physics explains the meaning of life, read this one!

In previous works, such as A Brief History of Time, Hawking played coy on the subject. He's noted his personal thoughts regarding God's lack of existence, but instead of treating his beliefs as hard facts, he simply said creation theories did not need to name God as an agent. But these new opinions mark the first time Hawking has deemed a God-less conception of the universe the correct one.

Where did he get this idea from! There's some new evidence, the book states, that calls the idea that God made the galaxy in his image a bit presumptuous. The 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star other than our sun, for instance, indicates that our setup isn't that special. Hawking said this other example of celestial orbit "makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions — the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass, far less remarkable, and far less compelling evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings."

Most who subscribe to a monotheistic religion will probably find themselves in stark disagreement with Hawking. Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregation and a believer in God, is already on the warpath. In a piece that's in today's Times of London, Sacks calls Hawking's claim a "misinterpretation" and works the old approach of arguing for the separation of science and religion. 

Most of the Sacks essay, however, is stuck behind Rupert Murdoch's paywall.

Entomologist Colin S. Brent, who practices professional bug-ology for the Federal Department of Foods and Agriculture. "My first response as a scientist would be bafflement as to why Pogonomyrmex was chosen." He is not baffled by the long and complicated-to-pronounce name of the ants, which are more cutely known as "Pogos." He is baffled because, in the wild, these ants live off seeds. Desert seeds. "They might enjoy the sesame seeds on the buns, but that would be about it."

Combination-style paleo-entomologist Michael S. Engel, who went a little easier on the artist. "If I had to toss in a particular group of ants into an enclosure to see how well they were going to thrive off junk food. I'd throw in generalist carnivores and omnivores like army ants."

Bert Hölldobler, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning pröfessor who knows so much about ants that he cö-authored a book... called The Ants. "I have been asked repeatedly to help artists to fill their creations with ants. Some of the proposals were quite mind-boggling." You shut 'em down, Hölldobler.

The artist behind the piece, Elizabeth Demaray, works at Rutgers as an Assistant Professor, but was unfortunately "out of the office," and could not return requests for comment. By the way, all of the ants in the exhibit are dying. But the ones that are surviving are really loving those tasty little seeds with which McDonald's so graciously sprinkes their buns.

The Guardian's John Harris talked to the scientists who study such problems. Dr. Gary Small of UCLA, for example, said that he sometimes tries to "retrain" his technology-addled students:

"When I go to colleges and talk to students, I have them do one of our face-to-face human contact exercises: 'Turn to someone next to you, preferably someone you don't know, turn off your mobile device.' One person talks and the other one listens, and maintains eye contact. That's very powerful. One pair of kids started dating after they'd done it."

Dr. Gary Small apparently does not realize that avoiding conversations is a carefully honed skill, not a disability. 

Courtney Cox will be so disappointed.

[Sydney Morning Herald]