AbouBenAdhem

Take the horseshoecrab, or the tardigrate or even the cockroach.

None of those are species—they’re a family, a phylum, and a (partial) order, respectively. While those clades have been relatively stable morphologically, species within each clade still come and go.

English makes perfect sense—it’s all the other languages we keep stealing words from who can’t agree on a common spelling system.

No species lasts forever—and the faster their environment changes, the sooner their expiration date.

Did Charles and Ray have a connection to the Bay Area? I thought they were based in Santa Monica.

Sure—but notice that the US, UK, and many other places converged on the same behavior—which in most cases arose as a consensus among local schools that hit on similar practices without any central coordination. Which suggests that the behavior is more than a historical accident.

That’s a bit of a myth:

The history of summer holidays is clouded with myths. One popular idea is that school children have a long summer holiday (six weeks for most pupils in the UK) so that they could help work in the fields over the summer. But the current school system was developed over the course of the 19th century, when English farms were increasingly mechanised and having children helping with the harvest would only have been necessary for a small percentage of the population. Besides which, a brief glance at the farming calendar tells you that a holiday that ends at the start of September is not going to be much use for bringing in the harvest in the early autumn. So whatever the origin of six weeks off at the height of summer is, it’s not for the sake of farmers.

We should also distinguish between two types of historical explanation: people do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons, but they tend to keep doing the things that create good results. However, they may not know what’s causing those results, and it may have nothing to do with why they initially decided to engage in that behavior. So you can have people all over converge on a certain behavior without a consistent explanation for why they’re doing it—and popular explanations (even if historically informed) may have nothing to do with why the behavior actually persists.

Is that not why schools in many places take a break over the summer?

Assuming there are some law-abiding pedestrians as well as measure-flouting ones, we would expect to see some reduction in pedestrian deaths if all else remained equal. If we don’t see that, it suggests that something else is actively changing to offset the expected benefit.

“The initial spark of the idea for this research arose when someone asked me if I believed in horoscopes. It got me wondering if there could potentially be a biological basis for them, in terms of how a person’s birthday could be associated with physiological or mental features.”

Hmm... the seasonal differences in diet and environment are probably greatly reduced in modern times, compared to when astrology developed. So maybe trends like this used to be even more pronounced.

My first guess would be that pedestrian improvements are inducing more people to walk, and the increase in total pedestrians is offsetting the improvements in per-pedestrian safety.

I suspect it’s a difference between the sell-by date (AKA shelf life) and the expiration date—most contraceptives would be expected to be good for at least a few years after purchase.

How about Monaco and Morocco?