Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature
List posts are bad*, but this is a good article—the points are all very well elucidated, so don’t lynch me.
- Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
- Humans are naturally polygamous
- Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy
- Most suicide bombers are Muslim
- Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce
- Beautiful people have more daughters
- What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals
- The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of
- It’s natural for politicians to risk everything for an affair (but only if they’re male)
- Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist
So the next time your girlfriend catches you gaping at an attractive, blond bombshell on the street, just remind her that you can’t help it—it’s just human nature. That will dull the pain from the slaps across the face you’ll likely be receiving. Science is awesome.
Romance and Love? Not the Same Thing
NPR’s Laura Lorson:
Love may be patient and love may be kind, but really, love’s not at its best in the middle of February. February is kind of the dark night of the soul of cohabitational relationships. February is when even Tristan and Isolde are getting on each other’s nerves. Isolde finds herself saying things like, “I really wish you wouldn’t leave your snowy, salty boots to drip melt water all over our living room carpet,” and Tristan fires back with, “Wow, you really sound like your mother when you get angry.” And then someone ends up sleeping on the couch with the dogs—hypothetically speaking, of course.
In my world, romance and love are very different things. If love is a diamond, romance is rhinestones. Love abides; romance is a squatter on the run from a collection agency. Romance likes that it has a holiday where it’s the center of attention. Love isn’t all that interested; love’s got bigger fish to fry. Romance will ply you with whispers and compliments; love is busy fixing your leaky roof and taking out the trash.
I don’t understand all the fuss behind Valentine’s Day either. It’s my birthday—shoutout to all my other 1988 Valentine’s Day babies!—but otherwise it’s a fairly gloomy day, a day in which the winter hasn’t released its grip, trees are still bare, and scarves still wrapped around necks. I can’t think of a worst time to celebrate ‘love’, or even the fake, forced ‘romance’ the article talks about.
Fantastic article.
Early Risers Crash Faster
An hour and a half after waking, early birds and night owls were equally alert and showed no difference in attention-related brain activity. But after being awake for 10 and a half hours, night owls had grown more alert, performing better on a reaction-time task requiring sustained attention and showing increased activity in brain areas linked to attention. More important, these regions included the suprachiasmatic area, which is home to the body’s circadian clock. This area sends signals to boost alertness as the pressure to sleep mounts. Unlike night owls, early risers didn’t get this late-day lift. Peigneux says faster activation of sleep pressure appears to prevent early birds from fully benefiting from the circadian signal, as evening types do.
Personally, I can stay awake 16 to 20 hours a day whether I wake up at 7 AM or 12 PM. But I do notice I’m considerably more tired at the end of the day when I wake up early than the times I wake up later.
Too bad most of the article is hidden behind a pay wall. And if the Financial Times’ editor Lionel Barber is to be believed, this will not be the only instance—in fact, he predicts that “almost all” news organizations will be charging for online content within a year. While I understand and accept news corporations’ reasons for doing so, I have to side with John Gruber on this issue, who claims it is “a fundamentally flawed strategy” to charge for online content:
A dollar for a newspaper or a few bucks for a glossy magazine feels like a fair price for a copy. Trees have been cut, presses have been rolled, trucks have been driven to get that copy into your hands.
What feels like a fair price for a copy of a web page, on the other hand, is nothing. They’re just ones and zeroes.
Let’s hope Lionel Barber is wrong and Gruber is right, and that we should never see too many ridiculous pay walls blocking online content.
Edit: Uh oh. The Wall Street Journal today announced that it will begin charging for mobile access to its news content starting October 24th. As Gruber-Yoda would say, “Not victory, Obi-Wan. The shroud of the Dark Side has fallen. Begun, this News-corporations-paywalling-online-content War has.”
Welcome to Your Quarterlife Crisis
Imagine a day in the life of a couple you probably know. He’s 27 years old, and she’s 26. They wake up beside each other in his downtown bachelor apartment and have sex that neither of them particularly enjoys. They’ve been sort-of dating for a while now, but they’re not willing to commit to each other: he likes her, but doesn’t know if he always will. She can’t decide if she likes him more or less than the other two guys she’s sleeping with.
He bikes to work at an advertising agency, where he uses his master’s in English to proofread ad copy, and spends several hours reading music blogs and watching movie trailers, periodically Twittering updates about his workday to his 74 followers. He doesn’t really hate his job, but feels as if his skin is crawling with vermin most of the time that he’s there, so he has a plan to move to Thailand, or to maybe write a book. Or go to law school.
Interesting feature on the “Quarterlife Crisis”, the feeling of ennui and listlessness among urban, middle-class, well-educated twentysomethings.
I haven’t quite made it to my mid-twenties yet, but I can already relate to several issues mentioned in the article. Well worth your time to read.
![Darth Vader Jesus – “I find your lack of faith disturbing”
[via friendlyatheist»heavingdeadcats]
Started following Friendly Atheist for the laffs. I have no problems with others following their own religious beliefs and keeping it to themselves, but what I can’t stand are those that preach and spread their religious beliefs as if non-believers are just waiting for people like them to ‘save them’.
I was raised in a secular household in New York City where religion and intelligent design are rightfully kept out of classrooms—unlike in other parts of the country—and attended a high school that specializes in mathematics and science, a place where I’d estimate 75% of students are agnostic or atheistic. I truly believe proper education and modern scientific discoveries completely nullify religion and any ‘higher being’ beliefs, a theory which sadly seems to indicate much of the United States is poorly educated.](http://13.media.tumblr.com/xYXG04Tarozvxefa6Nq3pdLSo1_400.jpg)
Darth Vader Jesus – “I find your lack of faith disturbing”
[via friendlyatheist»heavingdeadcats]
Started following Friendly Atheist for the laffs. I have no problems with others following their own religious beliefs and keeping it to themselves, but what I can’t stand are those that preach and spread their religious beliefs as if non-believers are just waiting for people like them to ‘save them’.
I was raised in a secular household in New York City where religion and intelligent design are rightfully kept out of classrooms—unlike in other parts of the country—and attended a high school that specializes in mathematics and science, a place where I’d estimate 75% of students are agnostic or atheistic. I truly believe proper education and modern scientific discoveries completely nullify religion and any ‘higher being’ beliefs, a theory which sadly seems to indicate much of the United States is poorly educated.
7 Mistakes that Prolong the Misery of a Breakup
by Shine from Yahoo! [via dearmary]
- Why can’t we be friends? This sounds nice but in reality an ex does not make a true friend, especially immediately after the breakup.
- I must have closure. Closure can be difficult to obtain no matter how many conversations one has. The best closure can come from resisting the urge for dialogue and moving on.
- I just need to make sense of it all, and I just have one more thing to say before you go. Another version of closure and another reason to stay in contact when in reality this just gives your ex another opportunity to hurt you. Not fun.
- I want to be available for reconciliation. Wanting to get back together is a fair feeling to have. Even if you do end up reconciling, the relationship will undoubtedly be different. It is still important to take some time without speaking in order to mourn the relationship and contemplate how you really feel.
- I just need to give their stuff back. Do it quickly, in the first couple days. After that, use one of our many mail services.
- I miss the physical intimacy. And your ex is familiar because you know them (and it won’t increase your “number”). But again, this is just prolonging the inevitable and will keep you stuck in the past. Time to cut off the ex and find someone new (or maybe even just yourself) to get jiggy with.
- We run in the same circles. If this is the case, you won’t be able to help running into your ex, but that does not mean you need to get in touch afterward. Keep your conversations polite, brief and away from anything that can bring up negative feelings from the past. Obviously easier said than done.
What does it say about the world today when shows about love and hope and magic can’t survive? I’m sorry, but it can’t be argued that [Pushing Daisies] wasn’t sharply written, well-acted, [or] well-produced. It’s not about time slots or preemptions or ABC’s failure to promote. The real issue, I fear, is that the core values of these shows just didn’t connect with viewers, which is maybe the saddest part of the whole story.
“Nick” in TV Guide’s Ask Matt rant/rave/questions roundup on Pushing Daisies’ untimely cancellation on ABC.
I highly recommend reading the whole roundup because it contains possibly the most fair, levelheaded, and reasonable discussion of show-canceling politics I read anywhere.
“Nick”—no last name given—doesn’t blame the low-brow nature of today’s TV series and reality shows, but rather the stupid people who choose to watch, and thus support, these inane, juvenile ‘other’ shows. It isn’t the fault of the networks if they’re just producing and greenlighting reality shows and other forms of cheap entertainment when that’s exactly what are attracting viewers and their valuable eyeballs. You can’t blame the networks for canceling our great but hardly watched shows to make room for dimwitted but eyeball-friendly shows when we the viewers—as a whole at least—actually seem to prefer the latter? And as Nick so succinctly writes, that’s what’s saddest and scariest of all.
The Potential of Web Typography
[via df]
A beautiful demo page for @font-face, which is part of the upcoming CSS3 official spec and available now in Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4.
I have wished for embeddable typefaces and advanced web typography control [1] since Mac OS X brought typeface anti-aliasing into the 21st century, freeing us from the crisp-at-small-sizes but shitty-at-any-size-bigger-than-14pt Windows ClearType.
ClearType fans who think Mac OS X’s anti-aliasing engine produces blurry type at small sizes don’t realize that’s because Mac OS X honors the typeface’s design and shape over strict adherence to the LCD pixel grid, as OpenType does. So yes, at small sizes and with well-tweaked fonts [2] OpenType produces crisper type, but at the detriment to larger type and custom typefaces with little or no OpenType-specific font hinting. Which, in turn, will make @font-face typography look pretty shitty for Windows users not running OpenType.
Unfortunately, since @font-face (and the rest of the CSS3 spec) is only implemented in WebKit and the latest builds of Gecko, Internet Explorer users are shit out of luck, and will be served plain-jane versions of @font-face using pages, which may affect its adoption amongst mainstream web programmers aiming for the largest audience. Here’s to hoping Microsoft gets their shit together and realize the web needs standards, and that they should start following some.
@font-face would render sIFR and Cufón obsolete and greatly improve performance (not to mention aesthetics) on webpages, because no Flash replacement will need to take place. I have been looking into implementing Cufón into this tumblelog layout but decided it’s not currently worth the effort. @font-face looks good enough to convince me to wait.
For what it’s worth, I think it looks pretty good on Windows XP with OpenType on Firefox 3.5 [3] but obviously looks way better in Safari 4 (on both platforms) and on Mac OS X. Check it out, and let me know what you think!
1. The page mentions baseline-shift, hyphenation, numeral selection, and OpenType contextual alternates. ↩
2. Calibri (and all of the other Vista “C” fonts), Segoe UI, Georgia, Arial, and Trebuchet MS come to mind. ↩
3. No doubt largely thanks to the usage of Underware’s excellent Auto for body text, which has great OpenType hinting. ↩
My High Line photos from our recent trip are finally up. Pick your poison: Facebook or Flickr.
We went on Friday June 12th, apparently right before the ‘elevated human zoo’ situation over the weekend. They were at maximum fireproof capacity, people were issued wristbands and all sorts of ridiculous nonsense was happening. I’m very glad we beat the Manhattan rush.
It was semi-overcast when we arrived so we thought our hopes of sunny photos of the High Line will be dashed, but the sun thankfully shone through not long after. Still, I had to do some pretty aggressive Photoshopping to fix the photos, and admittedly went a little over the top on some, so excuse the sophomoric photo enhancements. I think the album as a whole came out pretty good, especially since I don’t do much photography and the Panasonic DMC-TX3 I was wielding isn’t exactly the world’s best camera, not to mention not even a dSLR.
And if you can’t stand my futile attempts at photography, check out this much better set over at the Gothamist of the High Line at night. Breathtaking.
If you live in the city, you have no excuse not to visit the High Line! It’s a wonderful new park and it gives the city a much needed dash of green in the concrete jungle. Just don’t go on a weekend.
One last thing from Josh Friedman
Josh Friedman, the creator of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, pens a wonderful last entry on FOX’s TSCC explaining the cancellation without pointing any fingers or stirring any negative sentiments.
What a class act.
While I am truly saddened that TSCC was canceled—I’m halfway through the second season and haven’t even gotten to what are widely considered the best episodes—I take solace in the fact that exceptional shows are canceled all the time, including The Wire and Arrested Development. It truly is a wonderful show and a must-see for anyone who considers themselves a Terminator fan.
The first two Terminators were iconic and landmarks in film history when they were released but it wasn’t until a recent rewatching inspired me to give TSCC a try, along with Terminator Salvation. Salvation was decent, but definitely pushed the envelope on CGI and action choreography more than good old-fashioned story-telling and plot. TSCC, while it lacked the CGI budget of the films, fully made up for it with great writing and terrific casting.
Josh Friedman, thanks for the wonderful series and I look forward to seeing your new work.
