Urban Legends with Karl Mamer

This week I’m joined by Karl Mamer to discuss the data behind three well known urban legends.
Did a large blackout in New York and surrounding areas result in a baby boom nine months later?
Do subliminal messages affect our behavior? Is placing beer alongside diapers a recipe for generating more revenue than these products in separate locations? Listen as Karl and I explore these claims.

Karl is host of The Conspiracy Skeptic Podcast and also can be heard on the completed Seoul Survivors about time spent living in Korea and the great comedy podcast Ask a Canadian.

Before getting into the topic, we take a moment to close out a nearly 10 year old innaccuracy on a webpage (indeed, the internet still has a few pages with errors on them), specifically, a minor tweak to former guest Louis Zocchi’s everything2 page.

As mentioned in the intro, Karl’s yrad.com has a wealth of great essays well worth looking through.

We first explore the claim that the large 1965 blackout centered around New York City resulted in a birth boom 9 months later. Below is the data reported by Richard Udry in his 1970 investigation of the black out baby boom claims

Year	Mean births per day	Mean births per week	# of births on the 267th day of the year
1961	478.7	3350.6	475
1962	467.2	3270.1	497
1963	476.2	3333.7	431
1964	470.2	3291.3	406
1965	457.7	3203.7	468
1966	434.5	3041.6	431

While discussing subliminal advertising, we mentioned a few of the claims made by Wilson Bryan Key, notably the “clam plate orgy”: