(This is an actual screen capture from the actual form.)

Unless I select one of the options, I am unable to submit the form.

I find myself at a loss for snarky words. What ought to have been the title of this post?

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Well, I was pretty young in 1963, probably too young to think about such matters. I remember having little interest in the Beatles, but being being very aware that they were something very big. Everyone was aware of that. But unless I am mistaken, pretty much nobody realized that we were witnessing something really big and lasting. More generally, I doubt that anyone at the time had any inkling of the long-term significance of rock ‘n’ roll. We knew it was popular, but we had no idea it would change the world. I’m not sure that in 1963 anyone knew that it was possible for music to change the world.

This led to the more general question: How quickly are great cultural watersheds recognized for what they are? In the few areas I know something about, I think the answer is “usually pretty quickly”. I remember 1910 even less vividly than I remember 1963, but I am pretty sure that it wasn’t long between the appearance of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and the realization (at least among people who care about this sort of thing) that poetry had changed forever. In mathematics, at least in the past century (and I’m pretty sure for several centuries, or even millenia, before that), major paradigm shifts have generally been recognized very quickly. When a Serre or a Grothendieck upends the mathematical world, the mathematical world quickly knows it’s been upended.

On the other hand, it took people remarakably long to catch on to the significance of the Internet. I remember trying to tell people in 1992 that this Internet thing was going to be very big someday, and meeting a lot of blank stares. And even I, who was a very early adopter of email, Usenet, FTP and IRC, initially dismissed the World Wide Web as a passing fad.

So here’s the (extremely vague) question of the day: How often are cultural watersheds widely and quickly recognized, and what characterizes those that are and those that aren not? I’m not talking about fads here (so LOLcats don’t count); I’m talking about real lasting world-shaking changes. Feel free to interpret the question in any way you please, and have at it.

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(Larger and more easily viewable version here.)

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2) This weekend marks the anniversary of a world-changing event — an event that might be of particular interest to readers of The Big Questions, both the book and the blog. Who can tell me what event I have in mind? (Hint: It’s an anniversary ending in zero.) I’ll blog the answer on Monday.

3) The discussion of the Allais paradox rages on in comments on multiple posts. For the few of you who have not yet tuned this out, my latest comment is an attempt to cut through the fog and identify the locus of some commenters’ confusion, or disagreement, or both. I think it will very much help focus the discussion if the dissenters could tell us where they stand on these questions. (My answers are all “yes”.)

4) In view of my travel schedule, I’m unlikely to blog on Friday (unless, of course, something either delights or annoys me so much that I can’t resist). I’ll be back on Monday with the big anniversary post.

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Data from 9,785 users of the dating site OKCupid reveal that iPhone users have 50% to 100% more sex partners than Android users, at every age.

This graph combines men and women, but the same pattern holds for each gender separately.

Explain this to me!

More info here (if you scroll down a couple of screens).

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1. All through 2008, then-Senator Obama kept telling me that “America’s reputation in the world is critical, not just to our security but to our prosperity”, and therefore American policies should be set with a decent regard for world opinion. Now, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, he keeps warning me that it will be disastrous if foreign interests are allowed to express their opinions in our political campaigns. How are we supposed to have a decent regard for foreign opinions if we don’t listen to them?

2. Am I the only one who finds it a little unseemly that the regulatory response to Toyota’s recent problems is being formulated by the owners of General Motors?

3. There are something like three million non-human species on earth and so far we can’t communicate with any of them. So why would anyone think it likely that we’d be able to communicate with extraterrestrial species, even if they’re capable of sending signals through space?

4. Anyone my age or younger has probably encountered Highlights for Children in a dentist’s waiting room. Recurring characters like Goofus and Gallant or The Timbertoes have respectable web presences (and Goofus and Gallant are even cited in The Big Questions!). But Aloysius the Wolf, who appeared in Highlights for decades, is, for all practical purposes, completely absent from the Web. How can this be? How can a major recurring character from a popular children’s magazine come in for approximately zero mentions on as all-encompassing a medium as the World Wide Web? All I’ve found is a single blog mention from about a year ago. (Note: Aloysius comes in for a brief mention on the Wikipedia Highlights page, but this doesn’t count since I’m nearly sure this paragraph was recently added by a dinner companion of mine to whom I’d expressed this puzzlement.)

5. I’ve just starting drinking SoBe Lifewater, which advertises itself as naturally sweetened, with zero calories. How can a natural sweetener have zero calories? Well, the natural sweetener in question is erithrytol, which I’d never heard of before this week, but it’s apparently a naturally occurring sugar alcohol that pretty much passes right through you without harming your teeth, your digestion or your waistline. The stuff is delicious. Why hasn’t erythritol taken over the market for low calorie sweeteners? Has capitalism failed?

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