Salon.com > Ryan O'Hanlon

You are how you sneeze

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Are you one of those people who just sneezes out into the open air and then goes about living your life like nothing disgusting just happened? If so, you are sick, and it needs to stop. It also tells me that you are a germ-spraying bio-warhead who either does not concern him/herself with the health of others or delights in the pleasure of other people’s immune systems breaking down.

But, what does your actual sneeze—the sound, the volume, the frequency—say about you? A Chicago neurologist is trying to figure that out:

“Sneezes are like laughter,” says Dr. Alan Hirsch, a neurologist, psychiatrist, and founder of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. “Some [laughs] are loud, some are soft. And it’s similar with sneezing. It will often be the same from youth onward in terms of what it sounds like.”

Hirsch says he doesn’t know of any studies that have been conducted on various sneezing styles and what they might mean, but says he does believe the way we sneeze reflects some component of the personality.

“It’s more of a psychological thing and represents the underlying personality or character structure,” he says.

What’s the Eiffel Tower doing in China?

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Hallstatt, Austria, is in China. So is the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, Christ the Redeemer and a soon-to-be-completed Manhattan. There are others, too, and it’s all part of this weird (at least to us Westerners, or this one Westerner who is writing this) proliferation of what are being called “copy towns.” They’re villages and buildings and cities in China that are being constructed as replicas of non-Chinese places from around the world — and people are living in them. Hallstatt, China, has an artificial lake, and they imported doves to make it more Hallstatt-like.

How to survive a plague

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:11:00 +0000

As you’ve surely seen, the East Coast is preparing for a pending cicada invasion. And by “preparing,” I mean “hyperventilating in front of a computer screen.” Sure, everything happening remotely close to New York always gets blown out or proportion—that big gray cloud you just Instagrammed is going to release water, which is called “rain”; everyone will be fine—but, I mean, there are going to be a lot of cicadas, like multiple-hundreds per person. Despite the pending invasion of these mutating alien-shrimp pods, you’re all probably going to be fine. Probably. To get the low-down on what the upcoming cicada onslaught will be like, I exchanged some emails with Dr. Angie Shelton, a biology professor at Indiana University. Here’s what she said.

Formula for a Hollywood blockbuster

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:08:00 +0000

There is a relatively uninteresting story in The New York Times today. Or, at least, it’s a story that’s been told before. Long-standing people in an industry are getting annoyed by an outsider who’s trying to change the way they do things with a scary new tool: statistics. It’s seemingly happening everywhere, and that it’s now happening in Hollywood—a place where “making money” is pretty high on the list of priorities—isn’t all that surprising.

This is how it works:

A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese—“the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,” in the words of one studio customer—has started to aggressively pitch a service he calls script evaluation. For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

How safe can a marathon be?

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:41:00 +0000

The marathon-as-spectacle is, more than any other sporting event, built on the responsibility and rationality and general non-wickedness of other human beings. You’re at this long, winding, sweeping thing—event really is the best way to put it. It’s a stadium 26.2 miles long. And you’re allowed to be up close to the competitors—cheering them on, handing them water, sneaking onto the course and claiming you’ve won—at any point.

Is my cellphone giving me hemorrhoids?

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:37:00 +0000

Cellphones can be wonderful things. You might even be reading this on a cellphone. And today is the 40th birthday of the first mobile phone. That phone—look at how cute the antenna is!—could call other people at a somewhat successful clip and not fit in your pocket, but that’s about it.

Over the last 40 years cellphones have developed the ability to do so many different non-phone-call things, making calling more of “feature” or, oh no, an “app,” rather than a vital method of communication upon which this device’s existence is based.

So, 40 years on, it’s time to take stock of and ask yourself—as others have already done—what Your Cellphone can actually do.

Is your cellphone…

Killing you?