Lifestyle & Culture
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Feeling Down? Think Positive!
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 3, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Monday, August 3rd, 2009But research suggests you may be wasting your time. Maybe you should just go shopping.
Probably one of the dumbest things you can say to someone when they’re unhappy is “Cheer Up!”. So why would we think it would work on ourselves? It only takes a little common sense to realize that the reason Al Franken’s Stuart Smalley character was so funny, or that Demotivator posters became so popular, is that we instinctively know that telling ourselves to feel good isn’t necessarily going to make it so. In spite of millions of copies of books like The Power of Positive Thinking
If Beef Is So Bad For Us, Why Are Aliens Always Stealing Our Cows?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on July 28, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009Some say you can’t beat the meat for nutrition. I disagree. To quote Rutger Hauer’s character in Blade Runner: It’s not only irrational, it’s unsportsmanlike!
I haven’t been much of a meat eater for a long time, but I think I’m going to finally commit to a rule that will make me more or less vegetarian: I won’t eat it unless I kill it myself. When you take an objective look at eating meat, there’s virtually no rational reason to do it. Even if you don’t care about the brutality of “harvesting” it, it doesn’t offer nutrients that can’t be found elsewhere, it’s arguably unhealthy, it has multiple negative impacts on the environment including deforestation and habitat destruction, excessive water consumption, pollution and greenhouse gas production, and on top of all that, it contributes to starvation worldwide. Not a very good scorecard. I’m even finding it hard to justify eating fish; as I joked with a friend the other day: Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll be starving in 50 years. So why have I suddenly decided on the change in diet? It’s not really so sudden. I’ve avoided corn-centric food and gone light on meat proteins since the 80′s, because of Diet for a New America
Just Who The Heck Do You Think You Are?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 27, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Monday, July 27th, 2009Whatever your answer is, I hope you’re happy with yourself. Find out who you are with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. And then get happy!
I am absolutely fascinated with people’s fascination with personality quizzes, which is why I’ve written about the topic before. I don’t need a multimillion dollar study to tell me that clearly, people take them because they either truly want to understand themselves better, or they simply want to reaffirm whatever they already believe about themselves (or in the case of Facebook quizzes like “Which Old-School Obscure Seasame Street character are you?“, do neither, while entertaining their friends). If you answer a well-designed test honestly and with self-awareness, they can be very helpful, but obviously a poorly-designed test leaves a lot of room for “Self-Report Bias”. So. If you really do want to to get to know yourself better, there are only a few credible methods on line to do so. And you can trust me, because according to this simple Jungian word pair test, I’m an ENFJ. Which means I’m a “Persuader. An outstanding leader of groups. Aggressive at helping others to be the best that they can be, and represent only 2.5% of the total population“. Hmm. I always suspected I was an outsider somehow. But my low self-intelligence result on this Multiple Intelligence Quiz prevented me from figuring it out. But now that I know, and since I do want to help you be the best you can be, here’s a whole page of these tests. After you’ve spent most of the day coming to a better understanding of yourself, ask yourself: are Read the rest of this entry »
Dick Butkus Was Joe King When He Said Ben Dover & Stan Still
[ Comments Off ]Posted on July 22, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009What’s in a name? A lot, if your parents named you something like Barb Dwyer or Barry Cade, or if the web guys at Experts Exchange buy the domain ExpertSexChange.com.
 Meet Doctor Fear |
When I was a kid, I and a friend of mine spent hours thinking up strange names that might actually exist, looking them up in the phone book, and then prank calling them. The best ones we ever came up with in our town were “Otto Graf” and “Iona Appl”. When I had my wisdom teeth extracted, I went to Dr. Fear (I highly recommend him!), who shares an office with Dr. Hitchcock (there are apparently lots of others with awkward names for their profession). Later in life, when I thought about what I would name my kids, I thought that with the last name Gray it might be fun to name them after paint chits. I decided on “Gun Metal” for a boy, and “Ash” for a girl. I’d never do this of course, but I’ve always wondered whether it was cruelty or obliviousness that leads people to give their kids the kinds of names discussed in this BBC News article, or collected in lists like this. And then there are business names and web addresses. I wonder if the web person over at the non-profit “Childrens Laughter” was laughing himself as he bought ChildrenSlaughter.com? This kind of thing is a little less surprising when there’s a language barrier, but this list of brand launch mistakes in other countries is still kind of amusing. Have any amusing name stories of your own to share?
Are You A Porn Addict?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 19, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, July 19th, 2009If you’re an American male, this is almost a stupid question. But why don’t you take the quiz anyway.
Here’s Some Good Porn |
As a moderately computer-savvy person, I often get calls for help when someone’s computer gets infected with a virus that hijacks their homepage or causes porn site popups. As a joke, when I get a call like this my first question is: “Is there a male between the ages of 13 and 75 in your house“? Because without fail, the caller is either male themselves or is a woman with male children, a husband, a dad, or a boyfriend in the house. Although I have no formal research to back this up, I’d feel comfortable saying (although if you’re a woman, you’ll be uncomfortable hearing) that 3 out of 5 American males have seen more Internet porn than they’d like you to think, and of the other two, one is an asexual ascetic, and the other has seen more than the first three combined but doesn’t care what you think. So is Internet porn bad? Unfortunately, the people that seem to ask this question the most do it out of their own morality-based discomfort with it, rather than a balanced look at how it really impacts current attitudes. Much like substance abuse (or anything else fun in life) studying sexuality in a scientific fashion is beset with a lot of obstacles. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that clinical research, surveys, and direct observation are all problematic. For an example, look at these PBS Frontline survey results and note not only the basic figures, but the fact that the vast majority of respondents are males, 21-30 years old. A classic example of “volunteer bias”. I thought I was alone amongst my more open-minded friends in my perception that Internet porn has been having a serious negative impact on our culture until Read the rest of this entry »