The Olympics are coming to a close and now the British get to reflect on what, if anything, has changed in the world due to a gaming event designed to make the world a smaller and better place.

It's easy to get depressed reading the criticisms of self-loathing types who demand a zero-defects culture.  If some weirdo neuroscience PhD student shoots up a movie theater, well, that is reason for a whole bunch of people to want to run out and ban neuroscience.

And if you read anti-science people, the world is a scarier place than it was when we were huddled in caves, starving.  We have to ban Big Gulps and goldfish and golf and genetically modified food and vaccines; everything but triclosan, which actually may be bad for you. In their world, everyone in science is out to kill us, despite the fact that they have allowed more of us to live better and longer than ever.

Researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden recently set out to test the unwritten rule of the sea that, during maritime disasters, women and children are first in the lifeboats.

What they found was that, factoring out a big disaster like the Titanic, sailors don't much care about gender these days.  Women are no more likely than men to survive any wreck where at least 100 people were on board. And they don't care about anyone else; the Captain and crew generally survive at a significantly higher rate than passengers. 

Afraid of flying?  Maybe there is something to that.  Dogs?  Okay.  But fear of buttons?  Puh-leeeze. The phobia business - legitimizing irrational quirks - has become Big Business and life change consultant Mark O'Donoghue of Purple Smarties in Stoke-on-Trent is ready to believe you.



In all, he has helped 99 people since he set up his business in 2008, he says. It isn't just your fear of buttons he can fix, he has also helped with more mainstream things like helping fat people eat fewer pizzas and helping dumb people smoke fewer cigarettes.