It would be suicide not to follow my dreams.

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First, men find thin, seductive women to be the most attractive (that should have been their headline!)

Led by Dustin Wood, the Wake Forest team surveyed 4,000 men and women ages 18 to 70-plus and asked them how attractive they found people of the opposite sex who were depicted in photographs, reports News.com. The subjects in the images ranged in age from 18 to 25.

What men like: Men defined a woman’s beauty by her physical attributes. Women who appeared to be thin and seductive received the highest ratings. Men were also particularly attracted to women who appeared to be confident. Men were very similar to each other in the body type they preferred.

What women like: Women had a more diverse range of responses than men, with some rating particular men very attractive while other women found the same men not attractive at all, reports News.com.

Well, that should be pretty obvious. The sexual market never has been, nor will it ever be egalitarian. Youth and attractiveness are de facto indicators in choosing a mate for men.

Proof with some humor thrown in? Eat it up. (Blogger is refusing to upload the image I want right now. Damn.)

But for women, it’s very different: physical attributes count for some, but not all of their discretion in mating. Personality, confidence and dominance are likely to rate higher for all women. Which is at odds with the modern feminine movement.
The men transforming into female hybrids (and dab hands at dusting)

Mrs Kaye says many women return from the office and bully their husbands into doing the housework.

She added: ‘It’s not entirely our fault, because the demands of the workplace have changed us, and brought out our more masculine side.

‘But unfortunately we’re taking that home with us every evening into the domestic sphere, and often bullying our men into submission.

‘Many of us are so focused, decisive and assertive, that the only role left for our husbands is one where they comply and let us take charge – traditionally feminine traits.

‘But the irony is, we don’t actually want men like that, and we end up eventually resenting them for not being more dominant and fearless.’

Well, no shit. Despite what we might want to think, we are still very much governed by instinct and evolutionary wiring.

That’s the good stuff – you may not like it, but you know it’s true and I’m not worried about whether or not the truth hurts.

And now for a few amusing bits.

He Said: Guys Advice to Girls

I think if life were like high school, dating would actually be a lot simpler and more straightforward: “You wanna go out?” “Sure.” Cut to the lovers holding hands. (It still beats internet hookups, that’s for damn sure.)

At 26, that’s more or less how it boils down for me, still. I don’t know what you’re doing.

She Said: Guys Advice to Girls:

3. And last, but not least: don’t give a cute older guy a blow job in the cab of his truck after the party because you think it will make him like you. It won’t. Plus, he probably has some sort of STD.

Yes it will, and no he doesn’t.

This was written in the nicest way possible. And says virtually nothing of interest or value, but it does say it very nicely, doesn’t it?

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The way people see me and the way I see myself have never really been the same. And when they tell me what they think of me, I get this weird sense of leading a phoney life.

Regardless of what level of success they may have achieved in their chosen field of work or study or what external proof they may have of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced internally they do not deserve the success they have achieved and are actually frauds. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they were more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.

I am manipulative and intelligent. And a hell of a fun guy. But it’s not me.

Also, I need to start smoking again to balance my damn emotions, I think. The lack of nicotine is wrecking my ability to act like I’m not schizophrenic. Maybe tomorrow I’ll pick it up again.

I found my passport the other day, tucked away in the glove compartment of my car. It’s been renewed and lacks any stamps. I have the memories and can recommend good restaurants in places you’ve never heard of, but I can’t advertise it or sneakily leave it laying around my bedroom to be stumbled upon. My foreign birth certificate and box full of survival gear will have to suffice. Shakespeare said something along the lines of Life is a stage and we are all actors playing our parts. I never see myself as more than a supporting role – but who is the star of this play?

Seneca said, “Life’s like a play; it’s not the length but the excellence of the acting that matters.” Which goes back to the whole seize the day, enjoy every moment as best you can deal. In order to make portions of our life seem grand, don’t we need something to contrast them to? Misery and melancholy, or at least sadness and unpleasantness would seem to be absolutely necessary. I’m in one of the happiest segments of my life to date, right now, and I suspect that if I hadn’t been in some rather shitty places before now, it wouldn’t mean fuck-all to me.

Also, gauging a girl’s reaction to the word cunt has got to be one of the easiest qualifiers of all time. Having dated both women who would say it more often then me and those who would display embarrassing amounts of offense to the very utterance, it seems to be a good way to separate the feminazis from the feminine.

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Like most psychological questions, the effects of self-affirmation are complex and not completely understood. It seems that they have a negative effect on people with low self-esteem. For people with average to high self-esteem, there is a slightly positive effect which can make people less defensive and more open, but also more likely to use confirmation bias to dismiss esteem-threatening information. And, the effects of self-affirmation on actual behavior seems debatable.

I’ve always seen this as a ridiculous thing to do, but upon further thought, it makes a whole lot of sense.

Confidence has a lot to do with not believing you can fail. Being ignorant of possible obstructions can certainly assist to this end. Standing in a bar, telling yourself that you are I am the fucking man and that women love you works.

The same, it turns out, is true of daily affirmations. A recent study published in Psychological Science finds that for people with low self esteem saying positive self-affirmations actually lowered their self-esteem. For people with high self-esteem at baseline, affirmations has only a slightly positive effect. Seem counter-intuitive at first, but researchers Wood, Lee, and Perunovic believe that for people with low self-esteem the self-affirmation just makes them consider how untrue the contrived statement is, lowering their self-esteem.

Which makes sense if you have a problem with over-analyzing and second-guessing your every move – things I know I am certainly guilty of when my self-esteem is down.

They liken this to excessive praise. If a parent tells a child that that they are the most wonderful child in the world, they are likely to just role their eyes. Unrealistic praise is not as effective as more targeted and realistic praise.

Which seems like a bit of the science behind this gem – and more advice from the same blog. Not that knowing why it works makes it any more effective.

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A little office discussion the other today turned alarmingly funny when my bosses (who are an older couple) mentioned that the husband had learned what a “cougar” was.

All I could respond with was, “yeah, they’re in season right now, too.”

Living smack dab in the middle of the downtown, I have been witness to more cougar attacks than I should think is reasonable. I have been attacked on several occasions, but have always managed to escape (my wits: they are useful). MILFs on the other hand, boy-howdy, are they some fun, or what?

I digress; the point is that my job is awesome because our office knows few to limits to humor.

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To date myself, I was 16 at the time and came out of the theater utterly energized. I wasn’t the only one. William Gibson dubbed it “an innocent delight I hadn’t felt in a long time.” Darren Aronofsky raved that it heralded a new age in sci-fi. Neil Gaiman and Poppy Z. Brite wrote stories to fill out the movie’s universe.

It became a phenomenon, immensely successful and influential beyond anyone’s expectation. Hell, conservative scolds even blamed the movie’s anarchistic heroes for the Columbine massacre.

The Matrix worked because it managed to blend philosophy, allegory, action and fashion into one glorious, fun package.

and XKCD:

I watched it last night. I don’t really ever get the same rush from a movie twice, but it was still as good as I remembered it being. I’ll attempt to highlight a couple of movies that I would rank as being just as good/better despite having substantially smaller budgets/box-office sales:

• eXistenZ – Eerie and creepy and psychologically thrilling (disturbingly so) as well as science-fiction-y.
• The Thirteenth Floor – Nearly more discouraging outlook regarding the nearly solipsistic outlook presented by The Matrix.

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WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. “It’s not that religion is not important,” says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, “it’s that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress.”

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society (New Scientist, 28 January 2006, p 30)

I’ve mentioned it before, but this is a much more in-depth piece. From my rudimentary knowledge of psychology, the brain interprets and pieces together sensory information, even using imagination to weave a cohesive reality together (which is also why memories are so often wrong and why we can’t ‘get’ something we have zero knowledge/context from which to understand it). This is a protective mechanism to shield us from how shitty the cold, uncaring universe really is. There are probably more mechanisms like this than we realize (morality would be a good example of this). Previously, I’ve mentioned the brain’s aversion to non-existence.

Part of it might simply be the brain’s way of exhibiting dissatisfaction with the mere physical existence it has. This is why you should feed it.

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Scientists have been searching for years for naturally occurring compounds that trigger activity in the protein, the sigma-1 receptor. In addition, a unique receptor for the hallucinogen, called dimethyltryptamine (DMT), has never been identified.

The UW-Madison researchers made the unusual pairing by doing their initial work the “old-fashioned,” yet still effective, way. They diagrammed the chemical structure of several drugs that bind to the sigma-1 receptor, reduced them to their simplest forms and then searched for possible natural molecules with the same features. Biochemical, physiological and behavioral experiments proved that DMT does, in fact, activate the sigma-1 receptor.

“We have no idea at present if or how the sigma-1 receptor may be connected to hallucinogenic activity,” says senior author Arnold Ruoho, chair of pharmacology at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. “But we believe that the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) may be interested in biological mechanisms underlying psychoactive and addictive drug action.”

In addition to being a component of psychoactive snuffs and sacramental teas used in native religious practices in Latin America, DMT is known to be present in some mammalian tissues, and it has also been identified in mammalian blood and spinal fluid. Elevated levels of DMT and a related molecule have been found in the urine of schizophrenics.

Ruoho speculates that the hallucinogen’s involvement may mean that the sigma-1 receptor is connected in some fashion to psychoactive behavior. When his team injected DMT into mice known to have the receptor, the animals became hyperactive; mice in which the receptor had been genetically removed did not.

“Hyperactive behavior is often associated with drug use or psychiatric problems,” says Ruoho. “It’s possible that new, highly selective drugs could be developed to inhibit the receptor and prevent this behavior.”

The study revealed an additional neurologic link by confirming that the sigma-1 receptor and some compounds that bind to it inhibit ion channels, which are important for nerve activity. Work by many researchers — including some from UW-Madison — initially showed this relationship in earlier studies.

Some studies have also linked the receptor to the action of antidepressant drugs, and National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists recently found that it appears to serve as a “chaperon,” helping proteins to fold properly.

This is very exciting stuff if you have any interest in the psychedelic experience or the brain. Or living, for that matter. We are now another step closer to figuring out how Eris speaks to us.

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When King Pyrrhus invaded Italy, having viewed and considered the order of the army the Romans sent out to meet him: “I know not,” said he, “what kind of barbarians,” (for so the Greeks called all other nations) “these may be; but the disposition of this army, that I see, has nothing of barbarism in it.” As much said the Greeks of that which Flaminius brought into their country; and Philip, beholding from an eminence the order and distribution of the Roman camp formed in his kingdom by Publius Sulpicius Galba, spake to the same effect. By which it appears how cautious men ought to be of taking things upon trust from vulgar opinion, and that we are to judge by the eye of reason, and not from common report.

Man, now that’s an introduction. The whole thing is quite enlightening and can shed some light on aspects of sociological and philosophical differences you may be at odds with. If you have any interest at all in the cannibalistic tribes of the Pacific rim (or any sort of interest in savages in general) or a taste for well-written essays, then read it.

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