Neat article from my sister about what the different colors of vegetables mean as far as nutrition goes and why they're good for you. It's really neat and the gist is that you should eat more blueberries because they will make you smart and thin.
Yet another article stolen from the Disinfo email list: it sums up our curent state of knowledge as it regards brain scans. SO fascinating, the extent to which we can tell things about people's thought processes by watching the blood flow in the brain.
"They" can now tell if you are racist, if you're an extrovert, all these amazing things you might not even know yourself. The article goes over some potential misuses of the technology, especially for advertising as this firm of completly godless assholes has chosen to do. Please send an email to the aforementioned assholes at Brighthouse Neurostrategies Group to tell them to get the fuck out of our brains: neurostrategies@brighthouse.com. Thanks.
This is a neat site my brother sent me of links to various quirky web museums, as the title suggests.
Some of the best ones:
Airline Safety Card Museum
(I actually have been collecting these for years and was sort of dissapointed by this...)
This one is the best: A Circus Sideshow Museum!
This is a *great* article about red sea urchins and how they can live for 200 years! In fact, a sea urchin who is 100 years old is *more* likley to reproduce than a sea urchin that is 10 years old. Apparently they don't seem to die of natural causes.
Plus they seem to keep growing forever, only very slowly. AND this biggest one ever (19 cm) was found off my very own Vancouver Island.
This guy actually used a legitimate social anthropology degree to figure out human behavior while shopping. Sort of evil but totally interesting:
* If a woman is brushed on the behind while examing something, she will bolt from the store.
* When people enter a store, the *always* do a quick turn to the right to see what's there. (I'm going to test this one)
* Human beings walk the way they drive, which is to say that Americans tend to keep to the right when they stroll down shopping-mall concourses or city sidewalks. This is why in a well-designed airport travellers drifting toward their gate will always find the fast-food restaurants on their left and the gift shops on their right: people will readily cross a lane of pedestrian traffic to satisfy their hunger but rarely to make an impulse buy of a T-shirt or a magazine.
* The human downshift period to be anywhere from twelve to twenty-five feet, so if you own a store, he says, you never want to be next door to a bank: potential shoppers speed up when they walk past a bank (since there's nothing to look at), and by the time they slow down they've walked right past your business.
* The downshift factor also means that when potential shoppers enter a store it's going to take them from five to fifteen paces to adjust to the light and refocus and gear down from walking speed to shopping speed.
* People increasingly want to touch clothes when they look at them. This is why Banana Republic and Gap have their clothes on tables more and more. They have a manaquin with the "look" then a table for "petting."
* The chances that a shopper will buy something is directly related to the amount of time they spend shopping. Supermarkets will often put dairy products on one side, meat at the back, and fresh produce on the other side, so that the typical shopper can't just do a drive-by but has to make an entire circuit of the store.
* Generally, dads are not as good as moms at saying no.
* Men tend to be more impulse-driven than women in grocery stores. They tend to shop less often with a list. They tend to shop much less frequently with coupons, and they can be marching down the aisle and something will catch their eye and they will stop and buy it.
* Women don't get spooked navigating through apparel of the opposite sex, whereas men most assuredly do. Men like to feel comfortable that they will not buy women's clothes by mistake.
* Store put "destination items" in the back so you have to walk all the way through. That's where Gap keeps denim.
This article from the NYT reports on a study claiming men are attracted to women who are less powerful, smart, and gainfully employed. They keep falling for their secretaries and maids and such.
"The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise. "
The study likes to imagine it's all biological. They say it's because evolution has selected for men who like lesser females so that there's less of a risk of infidelity and they won't have to raise other men's children. Which is dubious at best. I seriously doubt we could find a correlation between powerful women and infidelity. Although it would be an interesting study.
I think a better sociobiological hypothesis would be male's subconscious desires to marry women who would raise offspring well rather than be their partner in crime. I consider this tragic but it seems to be a complete trend in my life that my smart male friends go out with hot dumb girls who don't make them think and might even suck in bed. I call this the "pet girl" scenario. And do the men care? no. Why? because they suck. And they also might be inclined that way biologically.
But that is only part of the picture. To deny there are social influences on a dynamic like this in a society like this would be absurd. American society was/is patriarchal, or at least there are impressions of it still floating around. And feminism was a huge ball buster for so many men. You could totally read this as a backlash. A retreat into cozier times and paradigms. You can see it on TV with all the fat ass dumb ass guys married to hot women who treat them like babies - the Homer scenario.
Also no one mentions that perhaps smarter women are choosing themselves not to marry. Maybe they consider their carreers before having kids. This seems like an obvious omition.
Although in reality, I totally understand it. I just don’t think a pet boy would entertain me for long enough to sustain a long term relationship. I guess it just means I have to date brilliant men....sigh....
Full article in "more"
January 13, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Men Just Want Mommy
By MAUREEN DOWD
ASHINGTON
A few years ago at a White House Correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful actress. Within moments, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women."
I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.
Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it, they look upon the men they work for as "the moon, the sun and the stars." It's all about orbiting, serving and salaaming their Sun Gods.
In all those great Tracy/Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. Moviemakers these days seem far more interested in the soothing aura of romances between unequals.
In James Brooks's "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, as a Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid. The maid, who cleans up after Mr. Sandler without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman. The wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm. Picture Faye Dunaway in "Network" if she'd had to stay home, or Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" without the charm.
The same attraction of unequals animated Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," a 2003 holiday hit. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson falls for his sultry secretary. A writer falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.
(I wonder if the trend in making maids who don't speak English heroines is related to the trend of guys who like to watch Kelly Ripa in the morning with the sound turned off?)
Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection, rather than affection.
As John Schwartz of The New York Times wrote recently, "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame."
A new study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggests that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors.
As Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, summed it up for reporters: "Powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less-accomplished women." Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them.
"The hypothesis," Dr. Brown said, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own." Women, by contrast, did not show a marked difference in their attraction to men who might work above or below them. And men did not show a preference when it came to one-night stands.
A second study, which was by researchers at four British universities and reported last week, suggested that smart men with demanding jobs would rather have old-fashioned wives, like their mums, than equals. The study found that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to get married, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.
So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to - unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don't have to talk to.
I asked the actress and writer Carrie Fisher, on the East Coast to promote her novel "The Best Awful," who confirmed that women who challenge men are in trouble.
"I haven't dated in 12 million years," she said drily. "I gave up on dating powerful men because they wanted to date women in the service professions. So I decided to date guys in the service professions. But then I found out that kings want to be treated like kings, and consorts want to be treated like kings, too."
This is from an article in London, where cell phones are insanely popular. The results from this study made one company cancel its plans to market a phone at 4 to 8 year olds....good lord.....
Acoustic neuromas are benign tumours of the acoustic nerve
A study in Sweden has shown that they are twice as common in mobile phone users
They were also four times as common on the side of the head where the phone was held
Acoustic neuromas occur in 100,000 people a year and can cause deafness
They can be treated by surgery. In most cases the patient’s hearing is saved
Brain tumours affect about 4,700 new patients a year in Britain
They are becoming more common — the UK Brain Tumour Society says that incidence has increased by 45 per cent in 30 years
The causes of primary brain tumours are unknown, so it is hard to identify specific risk factors
This article is making a lot of sense of ex boyfriends:
"But in a series of experiments over the past decade, psychologists have identified a larger group they call repressors, an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the population, who are adept at ignoring or suppressing information that is embarrassing to them and thus well equipped to keep secrets, some psychologists say.
Repressors score low on questionnaires that measure anxiety and defensiveness - reporting, for example, that they are rarely resentful, worried about money, or troubled by nightmares and headaches. They think well of themselves and don't sweat the small stuff.
Although little is known about the mental development of such people, some psychologists believe they have learned to block distressing thoughts by distracting themselves with good memories. Over time - with practice, in effect - this may become habitual, blunting their access to potentially humiliating or threatening memories and secrets...
In a famous paper on the subject of double lives, published in 1960, the English analyst Dr. Donald W. Winnicott argued that a false self emerged in particular households where children are raised to be so exquisitely tuned to the expectations of others that they become deaf to their own longings and needs.
"In effect, they bury a part of themselves alive."
Bush administration paid a journalist $240,000 of tax payer money to tout it's views in the media and convince other journalists to do the same. Please keep in mind that this is totally illegal.
This is a great article from ALterNet on how this is one part of a very vast puzzle:
"While Democrats are still debating whether John Kerry was likeable enough or whether the Party ought to change its position on gay marriage and gun control, they are failing to see the big picture. What they were up against wasn't a poor debater, his Machiavellian consultant, and a portfolio of privatization policies, but a well-established, conservative movement with media outlets, think tanks, foundations and advocacy organizations as well as a host of pundits, journalists, consultants, and politicians all working collaboratively to advance their right-wing agenda (and many of the latter, like Williams, working the double shift as "entrepreneurs" and getting mighty rich)."