And here’s another post I meant to write up from last year! Dan Ariely also came with us to the 2008 festival. Dan, along with his co-authors, won the 2008 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine. (And his book, Predictably Irrational, is a wonderful read.)

So we were at one of the parties that local folks throw for the visiting speakers and their own friends, and I mentioned to Dan, as I did here, that I tend to feel inferior to European women in terms of style. Dan suggested that this was merely the placebo effect in action: that because I knew they were European, I attributed greater panache to them than might be objectively determined. (Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize winner Brian Wansink has shown that people rate a “fine California wine” higher than a “fine Nebraska wine,” despite nothing changing but the label.) “What would you think of that woman’s dress if you saw it in America?” he asked.

Now this was a move of some rhetorical cleverness. It flattered or reassured the other person (i.e., me), invoked the awesome explanatory power of the speaker’s research, and gave the conversation somewhere to go afterward. Quite the hat trick. We can’t always speak as productively as Behavioral-Economist Dan, or listen as productively as Sword-Swallower Dan, but it’s something to aim for.

(Since it is the name of his book, I’m tempted to refer to Dan Ariely as “Predictably Irrational Dan,” but that doesn’t sufficiently distinguish him from Sword-Swallower Dan, as what could be more predictably irrational than a person who swallows a sword whenever someone asks them to? So “Behavioral-Economist Dan” it will have to be.)

This is something I meant to post about after our trip to the Genoa Science Festival last year. Alas. At any rate, this year was the third time Mr. Improbable has been to the festival, and both this year and last, our sword-swallower friend Dan Meyer has come with us to be part of the show.*

Dan, who used to be happy just speaking Danish and feeding his wallaby, is fairly good with languages. Last year, when he came down to join us, he’d taken a nine-hour train ride from one of the northern countries. And he experienced the situation we all dread being caught in: nine hours next to a loud, dysfunctional, argumentative family.

So many times we can’t change the situation that we are in, but can only control our response to it. Dan decided that since the family was Italian, and he was bound for Italy anyway, he’d take the opportunity to eavesdrop himself into linguistic competence. Whenever he could identify a discrete word, he’d look it up, make a note of it, and practice it. By the time he arrived in Genoa, he had enough of a working vocabulary to be able to acquire more. I’m sure Dan might have preferred peace and quiet on his train ride, but if the opportunity to learn some Italian was on offer, he wasn’t going to turn it down.

*Dan won the 2007 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize along with Dr. Brian Witcombe for their report, “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects.”

When we got back from Italy last week, we returned to a surprise: a power outage. There was about an hour of daylight left, so we were able to dig out some tea lights and flash lights and get ourselves set up. And fortunately, we have a gas stove, and were able to get some tea going.

It was all very London-during-the-blitz, as we sat around drinking our tea by candlelight for a couple of hours before the power came on, and it wasn’t half bad. Normally, when we get home, we pounce right online and back into our normal work lives. It was rather nice not to have that as an option, to simply relax with tea and candles, however involuntarily, for a few hours before resuming everyday life. I wonder if we’d have the discipline to do that without a power outage. I suspect we wouldn’t.

Are there any American women alive who are comfortable with their own fashion sense when they are in Europe? I’m certainly not; it’s really quite sad. Eventually I suppose you just give up trying to look good while you’re actually there, and simply take notes on interesting looks to attempt to replicate when you get home. Here are a few major trends I noted:

1. Big wrappy things in chunky knits and constructed of various hybrid forms of shawl/cardigan. Like your grandmother started knitting you a sweater (using needles the size of dowel rods because her hand/eye coordination isn’t what it used to be), but forgot halfway through and made it a poncho instead. Should look rather like a large, unraveling fishing net. Usually in grey, because

2. Grey. In every hue from pale dove to charcoal. Grey is very, very big in Genoa. Also,

3. Purple and blue. Specifically, deep, neurotic blues: midnight, peacock, cobalt.

3. Colored tights or leggings. Purple, pink, green, occasionally orange. Worn with

4. Short dresses, and

5. Boots. Every height, every style.

So the iconic Genovese outfit is a short dress worn with a roughly knit grey shawligan draped around the top, leggings, and boots. For a handy reminder, here’s an annotated picture I took of the interior of a dress shop in Corniglia, one of the Cinque Terre. Corniglia is at the top of a mountain (you have to climb 382 steps to get to it!). As you can see by the rock wall, the dress shop is cut right into the side of the mountain:

After the Science Festival in Genoa, we went to Cinque Terre for a few days. The Cinque Terre are five small villages nestled along the coastline. You can walk from one to another; the walks range from mountainous hikes on narrow trails to a kilometer’s stroll across a paved walkway (with a pub halfway between). We did one of the mountainous hikes last time; this year’s visit was less strenuous. We stayed in Monterosso, the largest of the villages:

(More after the jump)

… is online here. I particularly liked the first question, from a person who doesn’t know how to get off the phone gracefully.

I don’t have that problem, but I do have a problem ending online chats, because you can’t hear the other person’s tone of voice, and slow timing might be the result of declining interest or multitasking. So it’s hard to get a read on whether the other person wants the conversation to go on or not.

How do you end an online chat in a polite and upbeat way? Is there any way to do it besides feigning some excuse that one’s attention is needed elsewhere?