Monday Miscellany
The travel season starts soon. Instead of posting Public Service Announcements about when I'll be gone, I'm just going to pre-program my posts. The posts will be sundry passages from my reading and short essays that aren't tied to any current events or news stories. They'll stand out. When you see them, you'll know I'm just throwing out some filler for awhile.
__________
Yeah, this is going to go well: Many women at the Los Angeles County jail where Paris Hilton is expected to arrive any day are already angry at the socialite, a former inmate said.
__________
Speaking of PH, here's a good (albeit Canadian-angled) op-ed about narcissism. Excerpt:
Early in the 20th century Havelock Ellis named intense self-love after Narcissus, the mythic Greek who adores his own reflection. Ellis turned a familiar human failing into a medical condition, which in 1980 was recognized (under the name “Narcissistic personality disorder”) by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Ever since, narcissism has played a steadily larger part in discussions of psychology. It seems to be the dominant emotional malady of our time, spreading through the population like a 1918 influenza virus.
Dr. Michael Crow, a social psychologist in Dallas, knows where to place the blame: On parents, of course. (Who else?) To encourage self-esteem, parents may lie to children, telling them they can do anything they want, which of course has never been true of anyone in history. Nursery schools extend this fiction. One psychologist claims to have found a place where kids sing (to the tune of Frère Jacques), “I am special, I am special. Look at me.” If that doesn't do it, YouTube and MySpace will soon finish the job. While checking on the number of visits to their Web sites, teenagers can listen by iPod to Whitney Houston singing “Learning to love yourself/It is the greatest love of all.”
If we live in the golden age of narcissism, there's no reason to think we have yet reached its limits. Five American psychologists have applied the Narcissistic Personality Inventory to 16,475 college students, asking them whether they agree with statements such as, “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place.” Added up, their answers indicate that youthful narcissism has been rising since 1982, when testing began.
__________
Larry the Cable Guy debuted a new stand-up routine last night. I typically don't follow such things, but my 14-year-old was going to watch it, so I joined him for some father-son time. It was pretty funny. Larry is crude, but he's clever and politically incorrect. He mentioned the incident where a one-year-old wasn't allowed to board an airplane because his name was the same as a man whose name was on the no-fly list. Larry: "You know how to tell the difference between a terrorist and a one-year-old? The terrorist has the diaper on his head."
__________
Looking to win friends and influence people? Touch them on the arm. But be careful if you happen to be night-clubbing in San Francisco:
A good-looking man approached 120 women in a night club over a period of three weeks, and asked them to dance. It was in the name of science ”“ the man was an assistant to the psychologist Nicolas Guegen. Remarkably, of the 60 women who he touched lightly on the arm, 65 per cent agreed to a dance, compared with just 43 per cent of the 60 women who he asked without making any physical contact.
__________
Looking to save money on food bills? This guy has advice. It's mostly common sense, but just in case . . . link.
__________
Academia has become so obnoxious, I can't figure out if this is a joke, though the sub-title of the journal indicates it is, and I don't even know what "trembling-hand perfect" means (this link didn't help much, and I refuse to spend any more time looking into it; if someone can explain it in English, please leave a comment):
In this paper, we internalize the cost of yelling and model the conflict as a non-cooperative game between two species, males and females.We find that the social norm of leaving the toilet seat down is inefficient. However, to our dismay, we also find that the social norm of always leaving the toilet seat down after use is not only a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies but is also trembling-hand perfect. So, we can complain all we like, but this norm is not likely to go away.
