The Lindy Effect is a concept where ideas, inventions, scientific developments and other items/events that are non-perishable have a longer anticipated lifetime as time moves forward. This may seem pretty simple, but it’s the inverse from what is expected.

In layman’s terms, the longer the concept or item has survived or is popular, the longer, it is believed, that the concept or item is to last. Or, that life expectancy is proportional to current age. This goes against our normal expectation that mortality increases with age (for example, the probability that I will die incrementally and eventually approaches 1 as time progresses; it’s a certainty that I will die.)

The Lindy Effect has some truth to it. The wheel, for example, is a concept that’s still around today, despite having been invented many years ago. However, the effect has been deemed a simple heuristic in order to popularise an idea in the hopes of a self-prophecy. The cryptocurrency community frequently utilises the effect in order to entice potential buyers to dive into the market.

“It’s been around this long, it has to have a few more years left in it!” Whether you choose to believe the effect or not, is entirely up to you.

Goldman (1964)

The origin of the term can be traced to Albert Goldman and a 1964 article he had written in The New Republic titled "Lindy's Law'.

The term Lindy refers to Lindy's delicatessen in New York, where comedians "foregather every night at Lindy's, where ... they conduct post-mortems on recent show business "action". In this article, Goldman describes a folkloric belief among New York City media observers that the amount of material comedians have is constant, and therefore, the frequency of output predicts how long their series will last:

... the life expectancy of a television comedian is [inversely] proportional to the total amount of his exposure on the medium. If, pathetically deluded by hubris, he undertakes a regular weekly or even monthly program, his chances of survival beyond the first season are slight; but if he adopts the conservation of resources policy favored by these senescent philosophers of "the Business", and confines himself to "specials" and "guest shots", he may last to the age of Ed Wynn [d. age 79 in 1966 while still acting in movies]

Mandelbrot (1984)

Benoit Mandelbrot defined a different concept called the Lindy Effect in his 1984 book The Fractal Geometry of Nature.

In Mandelbrot's version, comedians do not have a fixed amount of comedic material to spread over TV appearances, but rather, the more appearances they make, the more future appearances they are predicted to make: Mandelbrot expressed mathematically that for certain things bounded by the life of the producer, like human promise, future life expectancy is proportional to the past. He references Lindy's Law and a parable of the young poets' cemetery and then applies to researchers and their publications: "However long a person's past collected works, it will on the average continue for an equal additional amount. When it eventually stops, it breaks off at precisely half of its promise."

Taleb (2007)

Nassim Taleb furthered Mandelbrot's idea in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by extending to a certain class of non-perishables where life expectancy can be expressed as power laws.

With human projects and ventures we have another story. These are often scalable, as I said in Chapter 3. With scalable variables ... you will witness the exact opposite effect. Let's say a project is expected to terminate in 79 days, the same expectation in days as the newborn female has in years. On the 79th day, if the project is not finished, it will be expected to take another 25 days to complete. But on the 90th day, if the project is still not completed, it should have about 58 days to go. On the 100th, it should have 89 days to go. On the 119th, it should have an extra 149 days. On day 600, if the project is not done, you will be expected to need an extra 1,590 days. As you see, the longer you wait, the longer you will be expected to wait.

Taleb (2012)

In Taleb's 2012 book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder he for the first time explicitly referred to his idea as the Lindy Effect, removed the bounds of the life of the producer to include anything which doesn't have a natural upper bound, and incorporated it into his broader theory of the Antifragile.

If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not "aging" like persons, but "aging" in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!

Mandelbrot agreed with Taleb's expanded definition of the Lindy Effect: "[Taleb] suggested the boundary perishable/nonperishable and he [Mandelbrot] agreed that the nonperishable would be power-law distributed while the perishable (the initial Lindy story) worked as a mere metaphor."

[The following excerpt from Wikipedia should be handy for who are not acquainted with the concept of Lindy Effect :

“The Lindy effect is a concept that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy. Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time. In contrast, living creatures and mechanical things follow a bathtub curve where, after "childhood", the mortality rate increases with time. Because life expectancy is probabilistically derived, a thing may become extinct before its "expected" survival. In other words, one needs to gauge both the age and "health" of the thing to determine continued survival.]

Buddhism may be taken as an example to portray evidence of Lindy Effect.

The current age of Buddhism is approximately 2600 years. How long will this phenomenon further live? That is to say, what is the further life-expectancy of Buddhism?

Assuming that Buddhism is a non-perishable thing isn’t quite accurate, isn’t quite plausible, is premature. Had it been so, the concept of Lindy Effect would suggest that Buddhism’s remaining life (future life) is proportional to its current age (the past life). To wit, Buddhism could live another 2600 years or so, by a crude estimate, say.

There is a need for comparing Buddhism to an organism whose future life depends on current “health” and “mortality rate” (mortality probability). Lindy Effect may be deemed to be applicable only if current health is nearly perfect to make mortality rate nearly zero. An organism enjoys this status during its childhood and loses it after childhood. So, Lindy Effect would apply to Buddhism provided it is in its childhood, with nearly perfect health, with nearly zero mortality rate.

Our concern is now narrowed down to determining whether Buddhism is currently on the incline or on the decline. If on the incline, Lindy Effect would readily apply to Buddhism, predicting a long future life. If on the decline, Lindy Effect couldn’t really apply then, as its extinction could come before time.

A quick short global survey of Buddhism would readily reveal the fact that Buddhism could be on the rise and so, the length of future part of its life expectancy is quite promising.

The Balassa-Samuelson effect is why I always get a haircut when visiting a developing country. Goods that can be easily shipped sell for roughly the same price everywhere--there are differences due to taxes and transportation costs and such things, of course, but there is no reason to expect that say an iPad will sell for substantially less in a poorer country than in a richer country. Goods that are hard to ship, however, most notably services will sell for substantially less in a developing country. Thus, it's much cheaper to hire a driver or a house cleaner in India than in Denmark.

The Balassa-Samuelson theory tells us that we should buy haircuts or other services when visiting a poorer country and also that using currency exchange rates to convert GDP per capita statistics will incorrectly suggest that developing countries are somewhat poorer than they actually are. Exchange rates are mostly determined by the buying and selling of tradeables. (Due to arbitrage, the exchange rate will adjust so that tradeable goods sell for roughly the same price everywhere as noted above.) But the price of labor and thus of services is lower in developing countries. Thus, if we want to get a better measure of the standard of living in two different countries we should ask how much would a similar basket of goods and services cost in each country's currency and then use that exchange rate to convert GDP per capita statistics--this is called the Purchasing Power Parity exchange rate and statistics converted in this way are called PPP adjusted.

You can find out more from two videos at MRUniversity. Here is a video about Bela Balassa

MRUniversity: Bela Balassa

and here is one about GDP and PPP adjustments which goes into a bit more detail.

MRUniversity: GDP and PPP

One last point. Part of the IT revolution is an attempt to take advantage of the Balassa-Samuelson effect. If you can make services tradeable, for example, you can buy low and sell high. Most famously, for example, it's not uncommon for X-rays of US patients to be evaluated by Indian doctors! The more this happens the more the Balassa-Samuelson effect goes away but it's going to be a long time before we can import haircuts.

When electrons move through a metal, they repeatedly encounter obstacles. These are often foreign atomic nuclei that have entered the solid from outside and from which a tiny magnetic field emanates. It deflects electrons and therefore increases the electrical resistance of the material. But thanks to quantum physics, electrons can react to it: At low temperatures and in certain materials, many of them join together to form a collective of entangled particles that wrap around the contaminant like a protective cloud. The spins of the individual electrons - which turn each of the charge carriers into a mini-magnet - are oriented in the particles in such a way that the impurity is shielded. Other electrons can then fly around the obstacle without any problems.

Physicists have known the phenomenon as a theoretical prediction for a long time; they speak of the "Kondo effect". Among other things, it could play a role in the still puzzling field of high-temperature superconductivity, in which electrons move through a material without any resistance. But so far, researchers have not been able to observe a shielding Kondo cloud beyond doubt in a laboratory experiment, despite many attempts over the past 50 years.

A team led by Ivan V. Borzenets from the University of Hong Kong now hopes to have succeeded. The researchers took advantage of advances in nanoelectronics, thanks to which it is now possible to produce a kind of artificial atom, a so-called quantum dot. By combining it with an artificial impurity in a semiconductor, the expansion of the Kondo cloud can be measured. According to the measurements, the shielding electron collective extends over several micrometers, which corresponds to the prediction from theoretical work.

Ha, wonderful question that will probably be on your midterm exam (if you're in school that is).

So you stick two metals next to each other so tightly that there is no air between them, except at that interface you also put a set of totally non-reactive pylons.
We will call metal A the brass and metal B the copper. The pylons are the molybdenum wires.

Now, over time zinc atoms from metal A will move into metal B. This happens due to a difference in concentration (ie a gradient) or more specifically due to the difference in chemical potentials of each of these states.

HERE'S THE CRAZY PART. Those pylons move too!! Why? Because you have a net flux of atoms moving from one direction to the other. Atomic motion exerts a force on those pylons causing them to actually move in one direction or another depending on the gradients. The rate of motion and the distance moved will tell you things like the relative rate of diffusion, solubility limits, etc.

What is the riffle effect? In the early days of firearms, the usual projectile or bullet was a spherical (roughly!) piece of lead, iron or even stone. The bullet did not accurately fit the bore of the gun so wadding in the form of old rope or leather patches for small weapons was used to improve the fit. This worked to some extent but did little for the accuracy of the aim. Eventually someone had the idea to make the bullet spin in flight, as some arrows always did. This best way to achieve spin was to machine spiral grooves inside the bore, this is the rifle effect. To make best use of the rifling, the bullet had to be a good fit in the bore, so much so that it took a considerable amount of force to insert the bullet down the bore with muzzle-loaded weapons, which most were. Opening breeches did exist but were generally distrusted, probably for good reasons. Good quality steel is needed to allow reliable removable or screwed breeches. Most cannon were make from brittle cast iron or better, bronze but you can’t beat steel for this application. Breech loading meant that the projectile did not have to be forced the wrong way down the bore, saving a great deal of time & effort. Another, much later attempt to impart spin was employed in the Whitworth cannon (c 1850), which used a hexagonal projectile in a hexagonal barrel. It was thought to be easier to manufacture that a rifled barrel but it proved unsatisfactory in service due to rapid wear.

Have you ever thought why the sky looks blue in colour?

If you haven't just give it a thought.Actually this is the beauty of chemistry. Whatever you observe around is related to one or other chemical phenomenon.

So basically the sky looks blue because of Tyndall effect only.

Now lets discuss what actually is Tyndall effect.

Tyndall effect is the scattering of light by colloidal particles.

In the air there are a lot of dust particles (colloidal particles) which can scatter light.

So these particles first absorb light and then scatter it at right angles to the path of incident light. Since blue light has shorter wavelength and shorter wavelengths are scattered more than the longer ones and the colour of sky looks blue.

I hope now you also know why the sea looks blue in colour!

Note:

If you ever need responses to your problems immediately, you could also post your doubts on the platform RUBEX (aimed at providing personalised attention to students). Then, one of the subject experts there will provide you with a detailed solution in some time.

You could also schedule a live online class with one of the expert teachers at RUBEX for the topic you wish to learn!

Gerald Irving Ratner (born 1 November 1949) is a British businessman and motivational speaker. He was formerly chief executive of the major British jewellery company Ratners Group (now the Signet Group). He achieved notoriety after making a speech in which he jokingly denigrated two of the company's products. He currently speaks around the world at corporate and promotional events.

This caught media fancy. It had a field day. The company’s shares dropped £500 million in a matter of days. Gerald lost his playboy lifestyle as well as his job, and the company had to do a Phoenix and rename themselves ‘Signet Group’.

The cataclysmic fall of the company from grace due to an honest and frank comment of its owner has been termed as Ratner Effect.

Haldane effect is a property of hemoglobin where increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) will displace oxygen from hemoglobin (Hb) and binding of oxygen with hemoglobin in turn will displace carbon dioxide from blood. In other words, deoxygenation of the blood increases its ability to carry carbon dioxide.

The Haldane Effect describes the effect of oxygen on CO2 transport. The Haldane Effect (along with the Bohr Effect ) facilitates the release of O 2 at the tissues and the uptake of O 2 at the lungs. This is represented by a right shift of the oxyhemoglobin dissociation curve and a left shift of the oxyhemoglobin dissociation curve.

In addition to enhancing removal of carbon dioxide from oxygen-consuming tissues, the Haldane effect promotes dissociation of carbon dioxide from hemoglobin in the presence of oxygen. In the oxygen-rich capillaries of the lung, this property causes the displacement of carbon dioxide to plasma as low-oxygen blood enters the alveolus and is vital for alveolar gas exchange .

Picture for Haldane Effect:

Everyone knows about the Flynn Effect, but very few about the Woodley Effect.

When Woodley was working on his paper in 2013 “Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence estimated from a meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time” I wrote to Charles Murray about his findings, and in his reply he asked: “So when are we going to get a reconciliation of the Flynn Effect and the Woodley Effect?” Thus, Murray has named both the apparent environmental rise in intelligence, and the possible fall in underlying genetic intelligence.

By analogy with agriculture, we could say that the Flynn Effect is about adding fertilizer to the soil, whereas the Woodley Effect is about noting the genetic quality of the plants. In my last post I described the current situation thus: The Flynn Effect co-exists with the Woodley Effect. Since roughly 1870 the Flynn Effect has been stronger, at an apparent 3 points per decade. The Woodley effect is weaker, at very roughly 1 point per decade. Think of Flynn as the soil fertilizer effect and Woodley as the plant genetics effect. The fertilizer effect seems to be fading away in rich countries, while continuing in poor countries, though not as fast as one would desire. The genetic effect seems to show a persistent gradual fall in underlying ability.

Woodley’s claim is based on a set of papers written since 2013, which have been recently reviewed by Sarraf.

The review is unusual, to say the least. It is rare to read so positive a judgment on a young researcher’s work, and it is extraordinary that one researcher has changed the debate about ability levels across generations, and all this in a few years since starting publishing in psychology.

The table in that review which summarizes the main findings is shown below. As you can see, the range of effects is very variable, so my rough estimate of 1 point per decade is a stab at calculating a median. It is certainly less than the Flynn Effect in the 20th Century, though it may now be part of the reason for the falling of that effect, now often referred to as a “negative Flynn effect”.

You can now see that calculating the rate of decline is somewhat difficult. Perhaps a median would be “less than 1 per decade”. The time spans vary, the measures also, though the latter variance is an advantage, in that it suggests a general underlying cause. However, the range of estimated decline is very large, from 0 to 4.8 per decade.

Here are the findings which I have arranged by generational decline (taken as 25 years).

Colour acuity, over 20 years (0.8 generation) 3.5 drop/decade.

3D rotation ability, over 37 years (1.5 generations) 4.8 drop/decade.

Reaction times, females only, over 40 years (1.6 generations) 1.8 drop/decade.

Working memory, over 85 years (3.4 generations) 0.16 drop/decade.

Reaction times, over 120 years (4.8 generations) 0.57-1.21 drop/decade.

Fluctuating asymmetry, over 160 years (6.4 generations) 0.16 drop/decade.

Either the measures are considerably different, and do not tap the same underlying loss of mental ability, or the drop is unlikely to be caused by dysgenic decrements from one generation to another. Bar massive dying out of populations, changes do not come about so fast from one generation to the next. The drops in ability are real, but the reason for the falls are less clear. Gathering more data sets would probably clarify the picture, and there is certainly cause to argue that on various real measures there have been drops in ability. Whether this is dysgenics or some other insidious cause is not yet clear to me.

Sarraf ends on a glowing note:

Ultimately, I cannot give “Historical variability in heritable general intelligence” a higher recommendation. Not since The Bell Curve (Herrnstein &Murray, 1994) has a single work offered such immense psychometric revelations about advanced human societies and their pasts and futures.

My view is that whereas formerly the debate was only about the apparent rise in ability, discussions are now about the co-occurrence of two trends: the slowing down of the environmental gains and the apparent loss of genetic quality. In the way that James Flynn identified an environmental/cultural effect, Michael Woodley has identified a possible genetic effect, and certainly shown that on some measures we are doing less well than our ancestors.

How will they be reconciled? Time will tell, but here is a prediction. I think that the Flynn effect will fade in wealthy countries, persist with fading effect in poor countries, and that the Woodley effect will continue, though I do not know the cause of it.

This is how ….

The question is more … If I can look it up for you in 5 seconds flat, rather than be bothered to explain it … Why did you not simply look it up?

There is a strange reality coming about in the opinion of my Dr of Psychology wife and myself … That younger people, Millennials, Gen Z and the latest Gen A …. They have to ask, no matter what, they have to ask … They need approval form the group …. they seem to lack the self starting drive to find out for themselves.

My wife on occasions lectures and marks work …. Even at MSc level, people are writing the most awful guff, often plagiarising when they have absolutely no need to, it is not even difficult work .. These are apparently natively intelligent people who simply cannot do anything for themselves …. They need constant permission from the group …. it is extremely strange behaviour to we Boomers/Gen X people.

Every day though, this attitude is helping the world to become an ever more controlled place … Because the younger generations, they actually crave control.

I quote from Wikipedia:

F. W. Meredith was a British engineer working at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), Farnborough. Reflecting on the principles of liquid cooling, he realized that what was conventionally regarded as waste heat, to be transferred to the atmosphere by a coolant in a radiator, need not be lost. The heat adds energy to the airflow and, with careful design, this may be used to generate thrust. The work was published in 1936.

Air flowing into the duct meets drag resistance from the radiator surface and is compressed due to the ram air effect. As the air flows through the radiator it is heated, raising its temperature slightly and further increasing its volume. The hot, pressurised air then exits through the exhaust duct which is shaped to be convergent, i.e. to narrow towards the rear. This accelerates the air backwards and the reaction of this acceleration against the installation provides a small forward thrust

Full article: Meredith effect - Wikipedia

The Spitfire and Hurricane were the first aircraft designs to make use of the Meredith effect. The Bf 109 and the Mosquito also made use of the effect.

The Tyndall effect, also known as Willis–Tyndall scattering, is light scattering by particles in a colloid or in a very fine suspension. It is named after the 19th-century physicist John Tyndall. It is similar to Rayleigh scattering, in that the intensity of the scattered light is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength, so blue light is scattered much more strongly than red light. An example in everyday life is the blue colour sometimes seen in the smoke emitted by motorcycles, in particular two-stroke machines where the burnt engine oil provides these particles.

Under the Tyndall effect, the longer wavelengths are more transmitted while the shorter wavelengths are more diffusely reflected via scattering. The Tyndall effect is seen when light-scattering particulate matter is dispersed in an otherwise light-transmitting medium, when the diameter of an individual particle is the range of roughly between 40 and 900 nm, i.e. somewhat below or near the wavelengths of visible light (400–750 nm).

It is particularly applicable to colloidal mixtures and fine suspensions; for example, the Tyndall effect is used in nephelometersto determine the size and density of particles in aerosols and other colloidal matter (see ultramicroscope and turbidimeter).

The Tyndall effect in opalescent glass: It appears blue from the side, but orange light shines through.

The Tyndall effect is the scattering of light as a light beam passes through a colloid. The individual suspension particles scatter and reflect light, making the beam visible. The amount of scattering depends on the frequency of the light and density of the particles.

The visible beam of headlights in fog is caused by the Tyndall effect. The water droplets scatter the light, making the headlight beams visible. It is often seen from the dust in the air when sunlight comes in through a window.

Tyndall effect is easily observed when a fine beam of light enter a room through a small hole. Tyndall effect happens because of scattering of light by dust and smoke in the air.

PS: TRY FLASHING A TORCH LIGHT IN A COMPLETLY DARK ROOM. YOU MAY SEE DUST PARTICLES FLOATING IN THE AIR AND YOU CAN ACTUALLY SEE THE BOUNDARIES OF THE FOCUSED LIGHT BEAM. THIS IS DUE TO TYNDALL EFFECT OR TYNDALL SCATTERING OF LIGHT.

The Haldane Effect describes the effect of oxygen on CO2 transport. The Haldane Effect (along with the Bohr Effect) facilitates the release of O2 at the tissues and the uptake of O2 at the lungs.The Haldane Effect results from the fact that deoxygenated hemoglobin has a higher affinity (~3.5 x) for CO2 than does oxyhemoglobin.

Deoxygenated hemoglobin has a higher affinity for CO2 because it is a better proton acceptor than oxygenated hemoglobin. Therefore, when hemoglobin is deoxygenated (i.e., at tissues) there is a right shift of the carbonic acid-bicarbonate buffer equation to produce H+ which in turn increases the amount of CO2 which can be carried by the blood back to the lungs to be exhaled. Then, with oxygenation at the lungs CO2 dissociates more readily from hemoglobin.

CO2 + H2O ⇆ H2CO3 ⇆ H+ + H+CO3-

The following is the general equation of the Haldane Effect

H+ + HbO2←→ H+Hb + O2

In the end, the Haldane effect allows for approximately 50% of the CO2 excreted by the lungsand is physiologically much more important than its reciprocal counterpart, the Bohr effect (the effect of carbon dioxide on oxygen transport).

The Tyndall effect or the Tyndall scattering is the phenomena of scattering of light by colloids. This is named after the physicist ‘John Tyndall’, who discovered it.

Tyndall effect have similarities with the famous Rayleigh effect, which is responsible for the blue sky.

When a stream of light having different wavelengths is subjected to Tyndall effect, the light with longer wavelength is transmitted and light with smaller wavelength is reflected by scattering.

In other words, as taught in schools, “When a light beam is allowed to pass through a colloidal solution, the path of the light is visible in the medium through which the light is passed”

In essence, the Barnum-Forer effect is the observation that people tend to apply to themselves generalities, general descriptions, that they take as attributes referring specifically to themselves. For instance, “you are such a wise one” is not specific, could be meant as satire, but can be accepted as a compliment. Similarly, “some of your decisions show remarkable sensitivity” is completely non specific, yet is likely to be interpreted as indicative of a sensitive disposition, a positive trait, or turned into an excuse, or explanation, for some errors in personal relationships. It is an effect conducive to the acceptance of flattery , as well as of deception by practiced confidence tricksters.