‘The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war.’ –John Lyly, Euphues, 1578.
All’s fair in love and war, we hear at a tender age. Though this is tempered by schoolboy concepts of fair play and never hit a man when he’s down. Fair play is reasonable if you don’t mean to win at any cost and the other guy doesn’t mean to kill you, but all that goes by the board in any genuine confrontation.
Many entrepreneurial and driven bros aspire to be members of the billionaires club. However, we all know that “pimpin’ ain’t easy.” Billionaire bachelors and captains of industry can’t just date or marry an everyday simpleton when there’s the risk of losing ten figures of wealth and power to a money-hungry gold digger. There’s simply too much on the line when your annual income is higher than the gross domestic product of some third-world nations. Perhaps this is why there are so few billionaire bachelors in the world. According to the personal wealth arbiters at Forbes magazine, there were only 72 single and ready-to-mingle bachelors and bachelorette with billionaire status in 2009.
photo { Mirage magazine/Facebook page | Mirage magazine }
related { Dating study: women prefer ‘men who are kind’ }
I used to think feminists had a lot of things to worry about, such as the fact that even the most educated and capable of women still make 78 cents on a man’s dollar, that women are still subject to many more crimes of physical and domestic violence than men, and that hard-won reproductive rights are in danger of being systematically withdrawn without our consent. (…)
Who knew? Facial hair is, apparently, a feminist issue.
Armand: Don’t you believe in love, Marguerite?
Marguerite: I don’t think I know what it is.
Armand: Oh, thank you.
Marguerite: For what?
Armand: For never having been in love.
photo { Thomas Ruff, Nudes ez14, 1999 }
Erotomania is a type of delusion in which the affected person believes that another person, usually a stranger, is in love with him or her.
The illness often occurs during psychosis, especially in patients with schizophrenia or bipolar mania.
Erotomania is also called de Clérambault’s syndrome, after the French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934).
The term erotomania is often confused with obsessive love, obsession with unrequited love, or hypersexuality (hypersexuality replaces the older concepts of nymphomania (furor uterinus) and satyriasis.).
The Reagan assassination attempt occurred in Washington, D.C. on Monday, March 30, 1981.
President Reagan and three others were shot and wounded by John Hinckley, Jr. with a .22-caliber pistol.
Reagan was the first serving United States president to survive being shot in an assassination attempt.
{ Reagan assassination attempt | Wikipedia | Continue reading | Google Images | Related: In a 1982 speech, President Ronald Reagan declared illicit drugs a threat to America’s national security, putting a too-literal gloss on the phrase “war on drugs.” }
The motivation behind Hinckley’s attack stemmed from an obsession with actress Jodie Foster due to erotomania. While living in Hollywood in the late 1970s, he saw the film Taxi Driver at least 15 times, apparently identifying strongly with Travis Bickle, the lead character.
Hinckley arrived in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, March 29, getting off a Greyhound Lines bus and checking into the Park Central Hotel. He had breakfast at McDonald’s the next morning, noticed U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s schedule on page A4 of the Washington Star, and decided it was time to make his move.
Knowing that he might not live to tell about shooting Reagan, Hinckley wrote (but did not mail) a letter to Foster about two hours prior to the assassination attempt, saying that he hoped to impress her with the magnitude of his action.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | The Trial of John Hinckley, 1982 | Hinckley bought two identical .22-caliber revolvers in Rocky’s Pawn Shop in Dallas on Oct. 3, 1980 | Photos: John Hinckley, Jr. | Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. }
The aim of the present paper was to evaluate the current state of knowledge on the perception of facial attractiveness and to assess the opportunity for research on poorly explored issues regarding facial preferences. (…) In spite of thousands of studies conducted, facial attractiveness research may be regarded as rather poorly progressed, although prospects for it are good. (…)
1. The meaning of attractiveness. A researcher may tell a judge how to interpret the notion of “attractiveness,” or the judge may him- or herself explicitly or implicitly define the meaning of the attractiveness. Qualities of attractiveness are able to be distinguished in terms of a spouse, a lover, a friend, or a co-worker, etc. People may judge FacA in individuals of their own sex in order to estimate their competitiveness on the mate market, or they may make a judgement about their own facial attractiveness (FacA) to estimate their own competitiveness, or they may assess FacA of their children so as to decide about how much should be invested in them, etc.
2. The characteristics of the judge. Many factors influence an individual’s pattern of facial preferences (FacP): genes, cultural norms and fads, lifetime experience, biological, ecological, physiological and psychological state of the judge, his knowledge or idea about the owner of the face examined, and the perceived similarity of the examined face to his own face [Kościński 2008].
3. The face’s category. The perception of the judge as to affiliation of the face to a category (e.g., sexual, age, racial) may influence their assessment of the face and, thereby, the judgement of FacA. For example, a face of androgynous appearance may be taken for male or female one, which can influence its perception [Webster et al. 2004].
Thus, the assessment of FacA is the method by which a person maps a facial image onto various evaluative judgements about the “imagined” owner of a face. The scope of research on FacA should comprise all biologically and socially significant forms of facial assessments (i.e., various senses of attractiveness and various facial categories) made by judges having diverse traits.
{ Krzysztof Koscinski, Current status and future directions of research on facial attractiveness, Anthropological Review, Vol. 72, 45–65 (2009) | PDF | Continue reading }
If I call you, will you call back? The study of reciprocity between mobile phone users reveals surprising insights about the flow of information in society.
What do your mobile phone habits say about you? Probably more than you might imagine.
At least, that’s the suggestion from Lauri Kovanen and pals at the Aalto University School of Science and Technology, Finland. These guys have studied the 350 million calls made by 5.3 million customers over an unnamed mobile phone network during a period of 18 weeks. The primary question they ask is whether mobile phone calls are mutually reciprocated: in other words, does somebody who calls another individual receive in return as many calls as he or she makes, a phenomenon known as reciprocity.
Mobile phone calls are a particularly good way to study reciprocity because they are directed in a way that sms messages and email are not. In a mobile phone call, the caller initiates the conversation and then both parties invest a certain amount of time in the event. But afterwards there is usually no immediate reason for the recipient to call back. So it’s clear who initiated the event.
But SMS messages or e-mails are entirely different: here a conversation usually means sending a sequence of reciprocated messages and this makes it much more difficult to study reciprocity by simply counting the number of messages.
Why are people so blissfully ignorant of certain aspects of their personalities?
Take an everyday example: there are some infuriating people who are always late for appointments. A few of these people explain it by saying they are ‘laid-back’, while others seem unaware that they’re always late.
For laid-back people, their lateness is a part of their personality, they are aware of it and presumably not worried about appearing unconscientious. For the unaware it’s almost as if they don’t realise they’re always late. How is that possible?
It’s probably because they’ve never noticed or paid attention to the fact that they are always late so they never learn to think of themselves as lacking conscientiousness. Or so suggests a psychological theory describing how we think about ourselves called self-schema theory.
This theory says that we have developed ’schemas’, like internal maps of our personalities, which we use to understand and explain our current and future behaviour to ourselves, e.g. I’m always on time for meetings so I’m a conscientious person.
However schema theory also suggests that these maps have uncharted areas, leaving people with certain blind spots in their self-knowledge.
Why do some clubbers shake it like a Polaroid picture while others prefer to perch on a bar stool? British psychologist Peter Lovatt, who has conducted rigorous field work in nightclubs, believes he can explain why some booty shaking is hot — and some is not. It’s all about your hormones. (…)
“Men can communicate their testosterone levels through the way they dance,” said Lovatt. “And women understand it — without noticing it.” (…) In women, the link between dancing style and testosterone levels were similar — but the reaction of men was just the opposite.
photo { Arseni Khamzin }
Swinging has taken on a key role among contemporary sexual customs, consequently constituting the subject matter of various contributions in the fields of psychology, sociology and other social sciences. However, in spite of the constant increase in the number of couples involved and in the economic relevance of this phenomenon, to the best of my knowledge no article on the topic has yet appeared in economics journals. The aim of this paper is to cast light on swinging, both empirically and theoretically.
On the empirical side, the paper describes what swinger is, discusses the economic relevance of the phenomenon and singles out the main characteristics of swingers’ behavior. To this end, the Italian situation has been considered as a type of case study. On the theoretical side, the paper proposes some preliminary assessments of the causes and consequences of swinger couples’ behavior. In this respect, some contributions on two-sided markets, hedonic adaptation approaches and equilibrium matching models have proved particularly useful.
{ Fabio D’Orlando, Swinger Economics, 2009 | via Perfect Substitute | with link to PDF }
polaroid { Dash Snow }
A study that’s in press at Social Cognition has shown that women rate men’s photos as more attractive when they’re placed near the top of the screen. By contrast, men rate women’s photos as more attractive when they’re located near the bottom of the screen. (…)
The results could help explain why, in even more cases than you’d expect based on sex differences in height, the man in a heterosexual couple is taller than the female. ‘Height could be a cue to power and hence attractiveness,’ they said.
Ferdinand: Why do you look so sad?
Marianne: Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.
Ferdinand: I can never have a real conversation with you. You never have ideas, only feelings.
Marianne: That’s not true. There are ideas in feelings.
A fundamental mistake we often make when judging other people is assuming that their behaviour mainly reflects their personality. Unfortunately this ignores another major influence on how people behave staring us right in the face: the situation.
Our personalities certainly have an influence on what situations we get into and how we deal with them, but situational factors — even relatively subtle ones — can completely obliterate the effects of personality. (…)
Often people’s behaviour, and our own, may say very little about our personalities and much more about the complexities of the situation in which we find ourselves.
photo { Richard Kern }
The burning question is why same-sex behaviour would evolve at all when it runs counter to evolutionary principles. But does it? In fact there are many good reasons for same-sex sexual behaviour. What’s more, Zuk and Bailey suggest that in a species where it is common, it is an important driving force in evolution.
{ NewScientist | Continue reading }
I do not undertand why historians and academics, including many gay ones, refuse to believe that homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of human history.
related { Beirut’s gay community }
photo { Mark Heithoff }
{ Botticelli, La Derelitta, c. 1495 } La Derelitta, ascribed first to Masaccio, then to Botticelli, then to that amiable fiction L’Amico di Sandro, and recently regarded as part of a series of cassone panels executed by the young Filippino Lippi after designs by Botticelli, is a source of discomfort not only to the connoisseur, but also to the student of iconography. The subject is as enigmatic as the authorship. A young woman, shut out of a palace, sits ‘derelict’ on the steps before the gate and weeps. This is the sort of pathetic scene which appealed to nineteenth-century novelists by arousing reflections as to what had happened before and what would happen after. In the mind of a fifteenth-century painter such a response would be, to say the least, an anachronism. At that time the themes of pictures were not meant to prompt flights of the imagination. They formed part of a precise set of ideas. An attempt to reconstruct the correct connotations of the picture called La Derelitta may help to dispel the false sentiment which the false title, most certainly of fairly recent invention, suggests. A decisive step towards finding the clue to the picture was made by Horne and Gamba when they discovered that it belonged to a set of six panels representing the story of Esther, which originally formed the decoration of two marriage chests. { The Subject of Botticelli’s Derelitta by Edgar Wind, 1940 } |
{ Collier and Higgs, I Married An Artist, 2008 } The work is a ’straight’ photograph of a book both artists purchased in Toronto. The book is the autobiography of a woman (Billy Button) who was married to a prominent mid-20th Century Canadian artist. The image has not been digitally altered in any way. { Re-title } |
vaguely related { The frescoes Ambrogio Lorenzetti executed for the city council of Siena in 1338–1339 mark what may be a unique achievement in the history of art: making Heaven, (or at least Heaven on earth), look infinitely more interesting than Hell. | NY Review of Books | Continue reading }
While there is a tendency to think that only men treat women in a sexist way, a new study shows that both men and women participate in maintaining a gender hierarchy in our society. Sexism has been discussed in the professional literature for decades as an issue of social hierarchy.
However, only a few researchers have directly tested the role that social hierarchy plays in sexism on a day to day basis.
Some of the motivation for supporting the gender hierarchy is the widespread belief that social hierarchy is of general importance.
The study, which explores the role of men and women in maintaining the gender hierarchy in society, was conducted by a researcher from the University of Miami and his daughter. (…)
The two most significant findings are that both men and women respond in a more hostile way to a woman who violates sex-role expectations, than to one who adheres to them. Secondly, that the more an individual supports social hierarchy in general (that some people should have more power and resources than others), the more hostile they responded toward a woman who violated sex-role expectations.
A 17-year-old boy, caught sending text messages in class, was recently sent to the vice principal’s office at Millwood High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The vice principal, Steve Gallagher, told the boy he needed to focus on the teacher, not his cellphone. The boy listened politely and nodded, and that’s when Mr. Gallagher noticed the student’s fingers moving on his lap.
He was texting while being reprimanded for texting.
“It was a subconscious act,” says Mr. Gallagher, who took the phone away. “Young people today are connected socially from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until they close their eyes at night. It’s compulsive.”
Because so many people in their teens and early 20s are in this constant whir of socializing—accessible to each other every minute of the day via cellphone, instant messaging and social-networking Web sites—there are a host of new questions that need to be addressed in schools, in the workplace and at home. Chief among them: How much work can “hyper-socializing” students or employees really accomplish if they are holding multiple conversations with friends via text-messaging, or are obsessively checking Facebook? (…)
While their older colleagues waste time holding meetings or engaging in long phone conversations, young people have an ability to sum things up in one-sentence text messages, Mr. Bajarin says. “They know how to optimize and prioritize. They will call or set up a meeting if it’s needed. If not, they text.” And given their vast network of online acquaintances, they discover people who can become true friends or valued business colleagues—people they wouldn’t have been able to find in the pre-Internet era.
{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }
In this era of media bombardment, the ability to multitask has been seen as an asset. But people who commonly have simultaneous input from several types of media—surfing the Web while texting and listening to music, for instance—may in fact find it harder to filter out extraneous information. “We embarked on the research thinking that people who multitasked must be good at it,” says Clifford Nass, a psychologist at Stanford University who studies human-computer interaction. “So we were enormously surprised.”
illustration { Richard Wilkinson }
A Buddhist Koan says: “The master holds the disciple’s head underwater for a long, long time; gradually the bubbles become fewer; at the last moment, the master pulls the disciple out and revives him: when you have craved truth as you crave air, then you will know what truth is.”
The absence of the other holds my head underwater; gradually I drown, my air supply gives out: it is by this asphyxia that I reconstitute my “truth” and that I prepare what in love is Intractable.
{ Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments }
Roland Barthes died almost 30 years ago, on 26 March 1980, but his works continue to engage new and old readers with remarkable consistency.
photo { Bersa }
