european roller

His Cheating Brain

Sensation seekers crave novel and intense experiences more than other people do, and, as part of that, they tend to have many sexual partners. “They get a bigger kick out of things,” says Marvin Zuckerman, a pioneering psychologist and author of the 2006 book “Sensation Seeking and Risky Behavior.” There’s chemical evidence: sensation seekers have lower levels of monoamine oxidase A, which regulates the brain’s levels of dopamine, the “pleasure” neurotransmitter.

Fair enough. Boredom probably contributes to  problems in long term relationships and powerful people are already have personalities that are generally driven, sometimes not in a good way. One thing they clarified that many people speculate about is the self destructive element, especially among public figures. Its not about tempting fate in the eyes of the adulterer. The same drive, ego, need for a thrill that drove him or her to have the affair also told them they they’d be the exception and wouldn’t get caught.

zen fountain

New coastal submarine concepts get ready to break the surface

….four of Europe’s leading submarine design houses have now all sought to craft compact, highly automated ‘entry-level’ submarine concepts specifically engineered to reduce capital cost and support overhead and manning requirements.

Do they come in yellow and can you get  the financing for 48 months no money down.

Intel Germany ‘Confirms’ Apple Tablet

If we take a statement from Intel Germany’s CEO, mix in a little internet rumor and season with a salty sprinkling of speculation, we come up with an Apple Internet Tablet.

I don’t usually do Apple rumors, there are plenty of sites to get them, but I thought that if anyone can do a good mini-computer it would be Apple. They say the screen would be twice as wide as the IPhone at 720 x 480 pixel resolution.

Jonah Goldberg’s Shining (Liberal Fascism with LOLcats)

Apparently, Goldberg unearths for the first time shocking similarities between Nazis and liberals. For example, Nazis wanted to clean up the environment. So do liberals! Nazis wanted to cure cancer. So do liberals! Nazis liked organic food and many were vegetarians. So are many liberals!

If you go to a public school in the U.S. there is a basic path that your writing will be required to follow. An opening statement followed by supporting paragraphs in which you present your evidence. Unfortunately the quality of logic used in those supporting statements at the secondary level is inconsistent at best. One thing you shouldn’t be able to get away with (Goldberg is a Goucher College graduate) in trying to make your case to readers is a logical fallacy called the missing middle. - *All reptiles are exothermic. All lizards are reptiles. All lizards are exothermic. - Notice how all the terms are in agreement. Reptiles agrees with exothermic. Reptiles also agrees with lizards. Lizards agrees thus agrees with exothermic. Not that difficult and by the time you’ve reached your sophomore year in college you probably have all your terms lined up out of habit. Why Goldberg’s arguments missing their logical agreement. In a book length examination of a topic there are a couple of possible explanations. One is just intellectual laziness. The author didn’t want to be bothered with doing their research so they just wrote down some assertions unsupported by research to fill the page or in this case possibly his publishing contract. Goldberg has openly, if inadvertently admitted that he doesn’t like to be bothered with some research (Jonah’s working title is “Great Thinkers I Have Skimmed, or Dragging My Lazy Ass to the Computer One Mo’ Time”). The other reason in Goldberg’s case is that he has emotionally and or ideologically invested into a falsehood and is lying to support the false premise. Goldberg seems to be attempting to do with liberalism what Ben Stein is trying to do with science.

blue cafe wallpaper

While Mike Myers talents are debatable he hardly seems worth all this trouble, The British Film Institute Refuses to Screen ‘The Love Guru’

Well, for a tempest in a teapot the controversy over Mike Myers’ comedy The Love Guru seems to be heating up by the day. CJ Report confirmed that the British Film Institute has responded to Hindu protests, and has issued a statement that the prestigious institution will “not be screening this title nor will be involved with a possible release of it.” Now this doesn’t mean the film will not be shown in the UK, but the BFI’s refusal to support the film must come as a blow to Myers, a committed anglophile.

In ‘Cannery Row,’ a Preserved Simplicity from An occasional series in which The Post’s book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.

I decided to do so with “Cannery Row.” It was first published in 1945, and I read it no more than six or seven years later. I already had read, and delighted in, Steinbeck’s first popular success, “Tortilla Flat” (1935), and was thrilled to discover that “Cannery Row” marked a return to Monterey, the coastal California town whose ordinary people Steinbeck loved and portrayed with sympathy and humor. I remembered that in these two books Steinbeck mostly had set aside the preachiness to which he was susceptible and simply had had fun; he was a long way from a humorist, but I remembered these as good-humored books and wondered if I would find that this quality had not diminished over the years.

The short answer is that the good humor is still there, but the book itself now seems strained, dated and not really very funny. This is disappointing if not surprising, but it leaves unanswered the question about Steinbeck that for years has vexed me and innumerable others: Why is it that the work of this earnest but artless writer continues to enjoy such astonishing popularity?

I like Cannery Row and still have to admit that Mr. Yardley is probably right. I think it deserves a little more credit for the humor  then Cannery gets, but that so subjective its not worth picking a fight over. Then I do think he is too quick to dismiss Of Mice and Men which is a very good introduction into the messy details of modern ethics. Like most students who were forced to read  Of Mice and Men I would have much rather have been playing baseball or reading a comic, but the characters  were compelling and I found myself upset at the end. Issues of culpability and intent are still rigorously debated as legal matters and as dinner table table issues. Can you be held accountable for doing wrong when you were not mentally capable of distinguishing right from wrong. If we decide as a society that you can be fully held to account should your punishment be as severe as someone that acted with full knowledge of their crime and malicious intent.

ellison bay wall

Rape victim pushes for expanded DNA database

On Tuesday, Maryland starts expanding its DNA database, collecting samples from people arrested for murder, rape, and assault instead of just collecting DNA from convicted criminals.

[   ]…Fredrickson added that there are already too many examples of racial profiling and innocent people being rounded up in police dragnets. “Our privacy is a critical factor and we can’t assume that everybody is guilty until they are proven themselves innocent,” she said.

Proponents say that it is like your finger prints from your arrest ( even if later found innocent) being kept in a national database. I can see some merit to that argument. On the other hand DNA reveals an awful lot about you as a person and as research progresses even more so. Thus the potential for abuse is larger then fingerprints. One can steal fingerprints in the sense of taking impressions and tainting a crime scene with fake prints, but using stolen DNA and tainting a crime scene is even easier.

green sea turtle. this comes from vista’s standard wallpaper package.

whats attractive

The female ideal pushed by laddie magazines has become as smooth and lifeless as an iPhone

Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth complained that women in the media were “mock-ups of living mannequins, made to contort and grimace, immobilized and uncomfortable under hot lights, professional set-pieces that reveal little about female sexuality.” She was right and she’s still right. But the women in FHM are an equally false representation of male desire. FHM is not a men’s magazine like GQ or Esquire. It’s a magazine for lads – for 15-year-olds. It serves adolescent boys with the fantasy that there is something or someone out there who is the “sexiest,” a comforting norm of male desire which does not exist and has never existed.

Most of us would probably agree with the statement in bold. The odd part is, the writer having said that still rants about how these women look. The women seem “manufactured”? Suppose that you look similar to one of the women that is on one of these attractive lists ( there are ones for men ) does that mean you’re plastic or artificial because by no fault, or credit for that matter of your own your genes made you look a certain way. So only people that wouldn’t win a reader’s poll on looks are real people. Aren’t we back to that saying about don’t hate me because I’m beautiful - while we all know that some attractive people can be incredibly narcissistic it is probably just as wrong to judge someone harshly because of the public adoration of their looks as it is because they’re don’t look like that ideal. There is the concern that these images raise unrealistic expectations in men. They probably do in some teens sometimes. Probably as often as sci-fi stories raise the possibility of being beamed across the galaxy. Most males grow up and realize that they’ll probably meet and have a relationship with a person that is approximately equal in looks to themselves and that they will not be beaming across space. Forget magazines, the movies and look around. Look at all the shapes, sizes, colors, dispositions, religions, height etc of couples. Obviously a lot of people are not sheep, at least when it comes to trying to live according to the rules of the slick paged beauty police. This is one of the few instances where the anecdotal evidence is a pretty good indicator of how people actually behave. Frequently author and teacher Camille Anna Paglia takes water, sugar and some lemons and somehow ends up with cranberry juice, but in her book Sexual Personae she was right about men being very visual in their take on the world. From cave walls to oil paintings to digital images men have liked to create and look at representations of women. Some women have enjoyed all the attention, some not. On the other hand just because men have a history of being so visually oriented doesn’t mean they don’t take other qualities into account.

steam train 1920s

Steampunk Moves Between 2 Worlds

Yes, he owns a flat-screen television, but he has modified it with a burlap frame. He uses an iPhone, but it is encased in burnished brass. Even his clothing — an unlikely fusion of current and neo-Edwardian pieces (polo shirt, gentleman’s waistcoat, paisley bow tie), not unlike those he plans to sell this summer at his own Manhattan haberdashery — is an expression of his keenly romantic worldview.

It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

To some, “steampunk” is a catchall term, a concept in search of a visual identity. “To me, it’s essentially the intersection of technology and romance,” said Jake von Slatt, a designer in Boston and the proprietor of the Steampunk Workshop (steampunkworkshop.com), where he exhibits such curiosities as a computer furnished with a brass-frame monitor and vintage typewriter keys.

My impression of steampunk was that is was mostly about architecture and industrial design from the around the 1890s to 1930 or so. That the NYT has tried to define it makes me feel a little better about maybe not getting it completely. It seems even the people really caught up in steampunk to some degree make it up as they go along.