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Showing posts with the label Julie Parsonnet

Just my thoughts #0792

Space and Gravity: We understand intangible values like price or worth using spatial and physical metaphors: high or low, rising or falling. Although intangible value has no physical properties, we mentally map it onto ideas of space and gravity. For instance, we imagine a lowest point for value, equating a price drop with a sharp fall and a rise with a slow climb, as if gravity is at work. This illustrates that our thinking applies the rules of space and gravity to even the most abstract concepts. - Joseph’s “just my thoughts”

Just my thoughts #0049

The "normal human body temperature = 37°C" standard was established in 1851 by the German medical doctor "Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich", who took millions of temperature readings from about 25,000 people and reported "36.2°C to 37.5°C". However, surveys in the United States in 1992 and the United Kingdom in 2017 found 36.8°C and 36.6°C, respectively. So in the past people deemed that the discrepancy was due to errors in old measuring equipment or methods. But Julie Parsonnet and her colleagues at Stanford University's School of Infectious Disease Epidemiology found a common thread in the temperature databases: People are cooler now than they were then. It wasn't just a measurement error. They speculated that medical advances had reduced inflammation and lowered the average temperature. We don't question the obvious. - Joseph’s “just my thoughts”