Journal of No. 118

The display of leap years calls for as much ingenuity as their calculation. On the large calendar ring, an open space between December 31 and January 1 bears the legend Commencemcnt de l'annee commune ("start of common year") ... Shortly before midnight on the December 31 before a leap year, a sliding flange that carries the first sixty days of the year ratchets backward by the space of one day, covering up the word commune at one end of the flange and at the same time exposing February 29 at the other end. The flange remains in that position throughout the year, then shifts forward again to cover up the twenty-ninth and reveal commune just as the following year begins.

Kanazawa mentions several times that his data on attractiveness are scored "objectively". The ratings of attractiveness made by the interviewers show extremely large differences in terms of how attractive they found the interviewee. For instance the ratings collected from Waves 1 and 2 are correlated at only r = .300 (a correlation ranges from -1.0 to +1.00), suggesting that a meager 9% of the differences in second wave ratings of the same individual can be predicted on the basis of ratings made a year before. The ratings taken at Waves 3 and 4 correlated between raters even lower, at only .136-- even though the interviewees had reached adulthood by then and so are not expected to change in physical development as strongly as the teenagers. Although these ratings were not taken at the same time, if ratings of attractiveness have less than 2% common variance, one is hard pressed to side with Kanazawa's assertion that attractiveness can be rated objectively.

The low convergence of ratings finding suggests that in this very large and representative dataset, beauty is mostly in the eye of the beholder.