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Today was sport, against Northmead and they were an ‘awesome team’, as agreed by all of us. Even though they were a new team and not very experienced as a whole, they were still very nice and friendly to us, and enthusiastic and encouraging towards their teammates. Just thought I’d mention it because everyone thought they were really nice, and not every team is like that.
Also, there was a redhead in their team. She had ‘flame-red’ ringlets (Ringlets! Ringlets! Perfect round ones…) and pale (alabaster?) skin and her features were pretty too and yeah I just thought she looked beautiful. ><
Which also got me thinking about this article I read in Sunday Life the attractiveness of males and females, and a conversation I overheard on the bus once. Females spent equal amounts of time looking at previously-rated-attractive photos of males and females, whereas males only focussed on the female photos, and gay men on the male photos.
Females check each other out. I’m not saying they all do, but yes, it’s not a weird or uncommon thing. It’s one of the reasons why gossip magazines are so addictive. I like looking at hot people, regardless of their gender. I don’t think that’s a reflection on my sexual orientation. But I never really hear guys talking about checking other guys out.
I’m just hypothesising here that this difference is a biological thing? Along with environment, I guess, because we still don’t treat male and female sexuality equally. Anyway, I’m saying that back in the cavepeople days, men were ‘spreading their wild oats’ while women tried to find the strongest, fertilest looking man, females probably had to check out the competition, whereas there was no need to do that as a man as males could just wander off to the next impregnable woman.
Or maybe it’s due to environment afterall…
New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.
For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.
It’s unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs — but as Nyhan dryly put it, “It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.”
Is geophagy an illness or an affirming cultural practice? Experts disagree. Even the NEW YORK TIMES can only conclude, “Why hundreds of millions of people and dozens of animal species consume earth remains a mystery, and information about the health effects is contradictory and incomplete.” Every expert I spoke to disagreed with the others, but there are, to my count, five main theories.
The mystery of depression is not that it exists — the mind, like the flesh, is prone to malfunction. Instead, the paradox of depression has long been its prevalence. While most mental illnesses are extremely rare — schizophrenia, for example, is seen in less than 1 percent of the population — depression is everywhere, as inescapable as the common cold. Every year, approximately 7 percent of us will be afflicted to some degree by the awful mental state that William Styron described as a “gray drizzle of horror . . . a storm of murk.” Obsessed with our pain, we will retreat from everything. We will stop eating, unless we start eating too much. Sex will lose its appeal; sleep will become a frustrating pursuit. We will always be tired, even though we will do less and less. We will think a lot about death.
The persistence of this affliction — and the fact that it seemed to be heritable — posed a serious challenge to Darwin’s new evolutionary theory. If depression was a disorder, then evolution had made a tragic mistake, allowing an illness that impedes reproduction — it leads people to stop having sex and consider suicide — to spread throughout the population. For some unknown reason, the modern human mind is tilted toward sadness and, as we’ve now come to think, needs drugs to rescue itself.
The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer — we suffer terribly — but we don’t suffer in vain.
company of three, black peppermint tea 