- Last night we went to the grand opening reception for Sab’s salon, Primp, which coincided with First Thursday. It was nice. He hired a little group to play jazz standards and a nice crowd assembled outside to partake. The requisite cheese and wine was there, which one tallish hippie-dude with smelly hair was particularly enjoying. He would walk up to where Phillip and I were talking and impale three to four cubes of cheese, refill his wine glass and stand there making small talk. His usual response to anything was ‘right on, right on’. All told, he probably ate a pound of cheese cubes. He had to be there for the free booze and music since his personal style seemed to refute any notion of things like cutting hair or shampoo. Why would you go to a reception for something you have no interest in?
- Today, during a 5-6 mile walk we spotted an enormous snapping turtle paddling in the clear water beneath the pedestrian bridge in Zilker Park. It looked positively prehistoric.
- Some neighborhood kids (I assume they’re kids) tagged the SBC box in front of our house again. This is the third time in a couple months. The first time I called SBC and had them come and spray paint over it. That took a few days. The last time I just got pissed and went to buy a can of spray paint to do it myself. That was last weekend. When I went outside today it was tagged again and this time the writing was much larger. I spray painted over it again. Let’s see if we can go for number four. I may set up my webcam to take a snapshot everytime there is movement outside in that direction. We’ll see. It pisses me off. I hope I can catch someone doing it. I’d like to talk to them.
Science
08
Oct 04
The semi-noteworthy
04
Oct 04
Mommas and babies
Momma pangolins carry their babies on their backs. Doesn’t this just make you smile? GIS for pangolins.
16
Aug 04
Odds and ends
- Brain diseases treble in 20 years, says new report: Deaths from brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease have soared in the past two decades, a study has found. Researchers are blaming the increase on higher levels of pesticides, industrial chemicals, car exhaust and other pollutants.
- Tecumseh’s curse
29
Jul 04
Untitled
New species of worms discovered in ocean:
“Vrijenhoek, of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif., said the worms, ranging from 1-inch to 2 1/2-inches long, have colorful, feathery plumes that serve as gills and green “roots” that work their way into the bones of dead whales. Bacteria living in the worms digest the fats and oils in the whalebone.”
“Initially we were puzzled why every worm was a female,” Vrijenhoek said in a telephone interview. He said Rouse took some worms to his laboratory for study and discovered tiny male worms living inside the females.
There were as many as 50 to 100 males within each female, Vrijenhoek said.
The males still contained bits of yolk, as if they had never developed past their larval stage, but they also contained large amounts of sperm.
The female worms, regardless of size, were full of eggs, the researchers noted….
“These worms appear to be the ecological equivalent of dandelions – a weedy species that grows rapidly, makes lots of eggs, and disperses far and wide,” Vrijenhoek said.”
21
Jul 04
Only children
Jody sent me this link about a “study” on only children done by Dr. Toni Falbo, an ed-psych professor at UT, Your One and Only:
Educational psychologist dispels myths surrounding only children.
I’m not impressed with any of her conclusions here, although I have not had the opportunity to read the actual study itself. There’s just nothing compelling about them, at least as described by this article. There are also a number of weaknesses in Falbo’s approach. For one thing, Dr. Falbo makes it sound as if the entire field of psychology was against only children and families who have only children. As an only child herself and as the mother of an only child I get the sense that she has too much at stake personally to achieve anything of real value here. It’s almost as if she went into her project looking to overturn certain assumptions she found personally negative. She mentions the work of G. Stanley Hall and Freud and puts the blame on their heads for spreading negative assumptions of only children into the easily influenced mass of society:
19
Jul 04
Two cultures of Piracy
Japan and America, Two “Cultures of Piracyâ€:
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Following the logic of the Japanese companies, Condry asks his students whether there are some forms of music they would always pay for and finds that many of them cite music which struggles to survive in the marketplace or where they have a strong identification with the artists. He suggests that like the Japanese fans, American college students are swayed by loyalty and recipricality rather than legality. The solution to the music industry crisis, he argues, is cultural not legal or economic and it involves changing the relations between music producers and consumers to emphasize shared interests rather than economic exploitation. Imagine that!
06
Jul 04
Personality bits
Beyond mess: Cluttering, anxieties linked:
“One of the feelings in states of depression is that you feel lethargic,” Huntley said, “so picking up after yourself or straightening up is way too much.”
Likewise, people with ADD know they have to sit down and pay the bills, but they are easily distracted and that keeps them from completing tasks. “People with ADD also have to keep their stuff out where it’s visible; otherwise, they forget it.”
The knowledge that the task must be tackled or the item must be tossed is lost on people with OCD, who cannot determine what to keep and what to eliminate. “They can’t remove it,” Huntley said. “There’s a great deal of difficulty about decisions: ‘Am I going to need this or not?’ It’s really labored. So they keep the stuff around while they’re making the decision.
My own feeling is that much of this is caused by a lack of purpose and a lack of sense of place. Human beings in this country have become too fragmented and overstimulated. It is harder to recharge and gain quiet and peace.
Personality Profiling: Shrink to Fit?: As more entrepreneurs use psychological testing to screen hires, psychologist Ben Dattner warns against putting too much weight on the results:
Ample research has shown that organizations are “strong” situations, and that situational variables — like, for instance, the demands of a person’s role, incentive structures, team norms, and organizational culture — are much better predictors of behavior than are individual attributes. In order to add explanatory value, tests should explain the impact of personality or style on behavior, and also the impact of behavior on performance. Establishing the link between personality or style and behavior is difficult enough — many studies are unable to establish any link between personality or style and actual performance. …
I think, in general, people have a predisposition to make personal, rather than situational, attributions for behavior. We are all susceptible to “the fundamental attribution error,” meaning that we discount situational factors when trying to explain why other people behave as they do. Personality tests therefore confirm what we have a natural tendency to believe — that individuals create and influence situations, not the other way around.
These tests are also memorable, simple, intuitive, and often confirm what we already know about ourselves and others, even if that knowledge is, to some extent, built on simplified, stereotype-like categories of personalities and styles. This type of classification of people is an integral part of American popular culture, marketing, and politics. Just as many of us use movie and television stars as points of reference when describing others, marketers have well-developed “psychographic” categories that they use to target advertising, and pollsters segment the electorate and tailor candidates’ messages accordingly.