Josie Ford
New year, new you
Welcome to 2025, everyone. No doubt many of the people you know have announced their New Year’s resolutions – you may have done so yourself.
Feedback is inherently wary of the New Year resolution phenomenon, for a number of reasons. First, we live in England, so January is a time of grey skies and near-constant rain. It seems utterly counterproductive to launch a life-changing endeavour that usually involves a degree of further suffering at such a miserable time.
Feedback also remembers some dispiriting statistics on the proportion of people who manage to stick to their resolution until the end of January, let alone until the end of the year.
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In a bid to refresh our port-fogged memory, we trawled the internet and uncovered a raft of articles claiming that only 10 per cent of resolutions made in January will survive until December.
So we were going to talk about how the social pressure for endless self-improvement is probably driving unhealthy levels of perfectionism, and just generally encourage readers to relax a bit. But first we tried to verify that 10 per cent figure, just to be on the safe side, and we fell down an internet rabbit hole. Several dozen browser tabs later, we have re-emerged with our findings.
The 10 per cent figure seems to be an approximation. The “true” figure (for a given value of true) is 8 per cent and apparently comes from a paper out of the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, published in December 2012 in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. However, we looked in that issue and there is no such paper.
At this point, we were starting to get a little twitch in our right eye, but resolved to plough on. Deep in the Google results, we found a discussion on the Stack Exchange Q&A network about the 8 per cent figure, posing the question: “Is this statistic made up?” In the comments therein, we finally found a source, a paper entitled “Auld lang Syne: Success predictors, change processes, and self-reported outcomes of New Year’s resolvers and nonresolvers“. It was indeed written by authors at the University of Scranton and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, but in March 2002.
Eager to finally reach the end of our journey, Feedback read the abstract – and found no sign of the 8 per cent figure. The paper’s main claim is that people who made resolutions were more likely to claim success six months later than people who didn’t. At this point we screamed internally, read one more paper, didn’t find a satisfactory answer, and gave up.
At any rate, Feedback has made a New Year’s resolution: we are going to fact-check every unsourced statistic that we see before we restate it.
Watching the skies
Like many others, Feedback has been mildly bemused by reports of mystery drones whizzing around over the eastern US. We aren’t quite sure what to make of it.
However, we are extremely sure what to make of an X post by Larry Hogan, who was governor of Maryland from 2015 to 2023. On his @govlarryhogan account, he posted a video of the night sky “above my residence in Davidsonville, Maryland“. At first glance, the clip seems to show lights whizzing around in the sky. However, after a few seconds it is apparent that this is because he is filming it handheld and is moving the camera around. All the video actually shows is some stars, notably the constellation Orion.
Feedback has a long-standing interest in the UFO phenomenon and the ways anomalous lights in the sky can be misinterpreted as alien spacecraft. Plenty of skilled pilots have struggled to determine what’s what, which inclines us to cut Hogan a little slack. However, on the other hand, how can you not know what Orion looks like?
Feedback is wary of claims that society is decadent and in decay – it always seems to be a prelude to someone suggesting using violence to fix the problem. But how on Earth did we get from hunter-gatherers who could read the stars in incredible detail – to the point that ancient Aboriginal Australians may have had some ability to predict lunar eclipses, to say nothing of early Polynesian navigators using the stars to find their way across the vast expanses of the Pacific – to someone in a position of authority confidently posting a video of one of the most well-known constellations in the northern hemisphere and claiming it is something malign?
What’s in a name?
Feedback was surprised to learn that virologists are trying to change the naming conventions for viruses. According to a story in Science magazine, the US National Center for Biotechnology Information is adding “about 3000 new, Latinized names to its databases in spring 2025”. The new names have been chosen using a system devised by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses.
The idea is apparently to systematise an inconsistent mess. But in the process, virologists are trying to change the names of some rather well-known viruses. Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is now to be called Lentivirus humimdef1 and covid-19’s SARS-CoV-2 is to be Betacoronavirus pandemicum. Researchers quoted in the story said the new system “makes my job harder, not easier” and that reading the new names provided “a much-needed laugh”.
Never let it be said that scientists can’t squabble over tiny things.
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