Chaos Theory

Guys with guitars make girls drool

"The French researchers attribute these findings to the fact that playing a musical instrument is a sign that the man is intelligent, can learn, or is willing to learn, new skills and has independent hobbies.

They believe there may also be a link between how musicans are portrayed in the media, and that holding a guitar is a sign of wealth and status. "

Also:

"A biological theory points to "a link between musical prowess and testosterone," due to connections between the hormone and development of the right brain. Sociological theories point to cultural associations between musical talent and celebrity, intelligence, athleticism, and success."

California Is the Place to Get Laid, Survey Says

"Californians tend to be among the most sexually liberated people in the nation. We have the second-highest sex drives, with 56 percent rating their sexual appetite as "high," compared to the national average of 49 percent.

Only the couples in Illinois are satisfying their needs more, where 60 percent report having high sex drives, the survey says.

Listen up dudes, because this is news you could use: California women tend to be sexually charged, and by sexually charged we mean she's boss. According to the study, California women are the most dominant in bed. More than half of the 3,000 California women surveyed said they like to take the lead in the sack.

"There is definitely a battle of the sexes when it comes to leadership in bed in the Golden State," the study concluded.

That might explain why Californians generally have some of the healthiest sex lives in the nation, with 17.5 percent of couples saying they get it on at least once a week. Almost half of those couples say they are getting laid on Saturday night. In fact, more sex happens on a Saturday night in California than anywhere else in the nation -- that factoid ought to bolster tourism here."

Metafilter posting about penises

• Bringing up duck genitalia again!
• Deep Inside the Biggest Little Dildo Factory in America

Hey, another method of male birth control we still don't have yet

JQ1 sounds promising.

Scientific proof of psi

"Critics are fond of saying that's there is no scientific evidence for psi. They wave their fist in the air and shout, "Show me the evidence!" Then they turn red and have a coughing fit. In less dramatic cases a student  might be genuinely curious and open-minded, but unsure where to begin to find reliable evidence about psi. Google knows all and sees all, but it doesn't know how to interpret or evaluate what it knows (at least not yet).

In the past, my response to the "show me" challenge has been to give the titles of a few books to read, point to the bibliographies in those books, and advise the person to do their homework. I still think that this is the best approach for a beginner tackling a complex topic. But given the growing expectation that information on  virtually any topic ought to be available online within 60 seconds, traditional methods of scholarship are disappearing fast.

So I've created a SHOW ME page with downloadable articles on psi and psi-related topics, all published in peer-reviewed journals. Most of these papers were published after the year 2000. Most report experimental studies or meta-analyses of  classes of experiments."

Cool!

Why immortality is bad, mmkay?

"Look around us now. Boomers are freaking out over millenial values, just as their Greatest Generation parents freaked out over theirs. I have people working for me who've never even seen a dial telephone.  Change hurtles ever onward, and the only thing more corrosive than the fact that the future isn't evenly distributed is the fact that there are plenty of humans who don't want this future at all.  It's all too much change, it may be literally too much change to process for human hardwiring. Many older humans are living future shock, right now. It was ever thus.

But the difference now is that those people are alive.

A functional lifespan of, say 200 years.  Working with people who owned slaves.  Trying to negotiate international trade treaties to deal with global warming by reconciling voters who watched their brother's head get spun into a fine red mist by a Boston infantryman or a Georgian cavalryman. Getting funding for stem cell research from voters who grew up believing not only were black people a genetically inferior race, but other versions of white people were, too."

Good point. I concur.

Quake alert!

We're working on it?!

Jane Austen Game Theory

Oh, to live in the modern era where people come up with this. (NYT)

"In 230 diagram-heavy pages, Mr. Chwe argues that Austen isn’t merely fodder for game-theoretical analysis, but an unacknowledged founder of the discipline itself: a kind of Empire-waisted version of the mathematician and cold war thinker John von Neumann, ruthlessly breaking down the stratagems of 18th-century social warfare.

Or, as Mr. Chwe puts it in the book, “Anyone interested in human behavior should read Austen because her research program has results.”

First among her as yet unequaled concepts is “cluelessness,” which in Mr. Chwe’s analysis isn’t just tween-friendly slang but an analytic concept worthy of consideration alongside game-theoretic chestnuts like “zero-sum,” “risk dominance” and “prisoner’s dilemma.”

Most game theory, he noted, treats players as equally “rational” parties sitting across a chessboard. But many situations, Mr. Chwe points out, involve parties with unequal levels of strategic thinking. Sometimes a party may simply lack ability. But sometimes a powerful party faced with a weaker one may not realize it even needs to think strategically.

Take the scene in “Pride and Prejudice” where Lady Catherine de Bourgh demands that Elizabeth Bennet promise not to marry Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth refuses to promise, and Lady Catherine repeats this to Mr. Darcy as an example of her insolence — not realizing that she is helping Elizabeth indirectly signal to Mr. Darcy that she is still interested.

It’s a classic case of cluelessness, which is distinct from garden-variety stupidity, Mr. Chwe argues. “Lady Catherine doesn’t even think that Elizabeth” — her social inferior — “could be manipulating her,” he said. (Ditto for Mr. Darcy: gender differences can also “cause cluelessness,” he noted, though Austen was generally more tolerant of the male variety.)"

How often should miracles happen?

Statistically, about once a month. Huh?

This would indeed be a freaky-ass novel to horrify everyone

"What if the state really decided to force you to live healthily? The results would be a horrifying dystopia, in which everybody lived to be 120."

There's some really interesting details in this. For example, where you live in a perfect health dystopia:

"That means mile-high birthing centers. People who spend a significant part of their lives well above sea level tend to live years longer than people who live farther down. Scientists believe that this is due to the relative scarcity of oxygen. It turns out that very, very mildly asphyxiating people for significant portions of their lives can help fight heart disease and even cancer. The body engages processes that allow it to more effectively use oxygen.

Granted, oxygen deprivation is not a solution forever. As people get older, or get respiratory illnesses, they need more oxygen on tap. Not to mention, high altitudes often have hot summers and cold winters, which aren’t good for the elderly. So in our perfect dystopia, people would be born and live their youth in centers on the top of mountains, and gradually move downhill to milder climates and richer oxygen sources as they aged.

That would probably be all the traveling they ever did. Air travel not only spreads infections from one population to another, it doses people with radiation. In flight, people's bodies play catch with more cosmic rays than they do on the ground, where the Earth’s atmosphere shields them. An occasional flight isn’t going to hurt you, but then there are the pilot and crew to be considered. Some worker’s rights groups are pushing to have flight crews classified as radiation workers, and given more frequent check-ups to maintain their health.

What’s more, every eleven years, the sun kicks solar radiation into high gear, and flights dose people with even more radiation than usual. Forget passports. Anyone leaving the country would need health permits and quarantine periods. During flu season and for one year out of every eleven, the country would simply be closed to air travel."

And marriage isn't guaranteed good:

"For one thing, studies generally claim that marriage is good for people’s life expectancy, when actually marriage is good for men’s life expectancy. Women derive little benefit from marriage in terms of life-extension, and sometimes aren't even included in the studies.

Peppy articles selling marriage also don’t make any mention of the fact that most studies put divorced people in the same category as those who have never been married. It turns out that nothing runs down your life expectancy like divorce. The stress is incredibly hard on people, and it shows in their actuarial tables. When being divorced is no longer counted as never having been married, it’s shown that permanently single and permanently married people have comparable life expectancy.

On those grounds, the government should ban marriage entirely. Why expose people to the perilous risk of divorce and early death, for so little gain? When a person’s familial needs are met with disappointment, the consequences are disastrous."

And then there's retirement:

"One Greek study showed that people who took retirement at fifty-five tended to die much earlier than people who retired later. A study of workers at an oil refinery turned up the same result — leaving work at fifty-five means death.

While some critics pointed out that retirees and workers often get different health care benefits, and that might skew the results of the study, others pointed to something more basic: self-selection. If a person is fifty-four and knows they’re in terrible health, they have no reason to try to save up for a long life after retirement. They want to enjoy the little time they have, so they take early retirement. Someone who’s in good health has to save up because they have a long life to look forward to.

Meanwhile, other studies show that early retirement, taken by people in good health, tends to extend life. Overall, health and enjoyment of the job make the difference. People who are stressed out and sick will benefit from an early retirement. People who enjoy their work and are healthy enough to do it can keep working."