Taller people seem to have a number of social advantages, from increased earnings to (for men) increased desirability. It’s also an advantage in negotiations.

Various explanations for this have been posited, for example the fairly plausible idea that height correlates greater physical development earlier in life and hence to greater self-esteem.

A study cited in The Body has a Mind of its Own, however, suggests that we deal with height in a way that is both more ingrained and more shallow than that.
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I’ve been falling behind somewhat in keeping track of my tasks. That’s not to say I haven’t been productive, it’s just that most of my productivity has been focused in things I’ve been working on obsessively, like preparation for the roleplaying campaign I started running last week, Vim customization, and Python workflow coding.

It would be good to track other things better than how I’m doing it right now, but somehow returning to TiddlyWiki for my task management wasn’t appealing. I used it for quite a while, but a bare install of it doesn’t seem to quite work for task management, even though it’s still really good for keeping notes about things in general. I’m going to try d-cubed, a TiddlyWiki-based tool, instead.
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Or so our brains are trained to believe, apparently:

[S]tudies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process—even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it—can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities.

—Drake Bennett. “Easy = True: How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel”. boston.com, 31 January 2010.

If it’s easier to read and easier to remember, we think it’s more likely to be true.
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Recently Clay Shirky wrote “A Rant About Women”, a piece essentially claiming that women needed to act more confidently, even or especially in situations where confidence would be unwarranted, in order to be more successful. There’s more to it than that, but that was what I took as the core message. I think there are some valid points in there, but I also think that Shirky radically underestimates the ways in which women are frequently punished for acting confident, and and that he appears to assume that a system which promotes self-aggrandizers is something that we all (not just women) should accept as the natural way of things.

I might write up a longer response to “A Rant About Women” at some point, but right now I want to bring some attention to a piece that’s probably more important than my response.
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I was loving this article from The Economist until the final paragraph, and specifically the final line.

The article reports on a series of psychological experiments which strongly support the idea that power corrupts. The interesting wrinkle is that some people are corrupted less—and these are apparently the people who don’t feel deserving of their powerful position.
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This post at Yes Means Yes! is an excellent overview of how the profoundly unhealthy culture of American high schools socializes boys to have negative and domineering attitudes towards women. The post is a review of Dude, You’re a Fag, an academic study of student ethnography and behavior at a Northern California high school. While the degree to which the behavior in the school is typical can be debated, it certainly seems to me that it’s certainly not a total aberration. I think a key paragraph is this one:

[Male sexual aggression in this context] has little to do with sexual orientation or desire and everything to do with a gender performance that positions the boys in relation to other boys.

—Thomas. “Compulsive Heterosexuality And Rape Culture”. Yes Means Yes!, 13 January 2010.

I don’t think this is all that controversial, but I do think it’s important.
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I found this architectural/sociological (sociospatial? psychospatial?) analysis of modern urban warfare, Die Hard, and cinematic portrayals of urban movement to be entirely fascinating. Tactics, psychology, Jason Bourne, parkour, and late-capitalist nonplaces—how can you go wrong with that?

Upon typing that title, I realized that it sounds quite like a modern fairy tale or children’s story. Of course, if it were a fairy tale, then the faithful sponsors would stick with Tiger as he attempted to slay the foul beasts of public opprobrium and frenzied media—but instead at least one major sponsor, Accenture, is walking away.
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I’ve come across what feels like another wave of articles related to bullying recently. I previously wrote about my thoughts on institutional responses, but this time my focus is on some of the causes, as well as how technical rules are unlikely to eliminate the problem.
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According to this article, rats’ brains produce neurons when they exercise that are functionally different from those produced by non-exercising rats, and the identified functional difference is that the neurons have less of a response to stress.

It’s not a huge leap to think that this applies to other animals as well, including ourselves. So at an even more fundamental level than previously thought, exercise can help prevent stress.

A recent University of Philadelphia study apparently shows that people in possession of guns were significantly more likely (4.46 times as likely) to be shot in an assault than people without guns. I’m particularly curious about some things that the study can’t really address—namely whether it’s causation or correlation. Is it the presence of the gun that increases the danger of confrontation? Is it that the presence of the gun makes the gun possessor more belligerent? Or is it that the kinds of people more likely to be belligerent are the kinds of people more likely to be carrying guns?

Another question is one of morality—if (as is strongly suggested by the study) resisting robbery or borderline situations leads to a higher likelihood of injury or death (on either side), does this imply that offering no resistance is the more moral act?

The following is a short clip of news footage from the Pittburgh G20 protests:

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Apparently in response to increased public interest in eating better, the American food manufacturing industry has put together a campaign called Smart Choices. This is essentially a marketing effort masquerading as a health information campaign, as demonstrated quite well by the fact that Froot Loops qualify as a “smart choice”.

To defend this, the president of the Smart Choices board, Eileen T. Kennedy, gave the New York Times one of the most egregious pieces of dodgy rhetoric I’ve seen in quite some time:

“You’re rushing around, you’re trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal,” Dr. Kennedy said, evoking a hypothetical parent in the supermarket. “So Froot Loops is a better choice.”

—William Neuman. “For Your Health, Froot Loops”. The New York Times, 04 September 2009.

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Emily Yoffe has a Slate article about our compulsion to acquire new information—and how it means we’re extremely susceptible to addictive behaviors around Internet use. Critical points: we have drives for both pleasure and for “seeking”, and it is this latter drive that the modern always-online environment feeds. Or overfeeds.

I don’t know how accurate this journalistic take on neuroscientific discoveries is, but I do think that this would be a good article to have printed out, and highlighted, next to my computer.

Apparently the story about the crow using stones to raise the water level in a pitcher was no fable. I already knew about crow tool usage being pretty impressive, and this just reinforces that notion.
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This was on BoingBoing, but I can’t resist posting about it: NPR have a story about crows recognizing human faces, holding grudges, and passing related information to other crows.
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I can be a terrible correspondent. I go through patches, some of them years long, where, unless I respond to an email immediately (which is essentially a function of chance), I might not respond ever. This becomes cumulatively worse very quickly, because I become more and more overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff in my inbox, and this makes me less willing to engage with older emails.

Recently, I’ve figured out some methods for dealing with it better.

(To those of you who are owed email from me who are still reading this: you might receive long-overdue replies in the near future, even if they’re to messages that could be classified as “ancient”.)
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I know this has been on BoingBoing already, but it seems so ridiculous that I can’t resist posting it here too:

[The City of Bozeman]’s background check policy … states that to be considered for a job applicants must provide log-in information and passwords for social network sites in which they participate
(emphasis mine)
—“Bozeman City job requirement raises privacy concerns”, Dan Boyce, montanasnewsstation.com, 18 Jun 2009

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In a recent MetaFilter thread about some more expanded Taser us after a judge ruled it was okay to Taser an uncooperative suspect in order to get a DNA sample from them (with passing mention of some grandmother tasering thrown in), I came across a comment that I thought was fantastic:

Remember when you could tell that Spock’s political system was eeeevil because of his willingness to use the agonizer?
—mwhybark, comment on ‘Niagara County Judge: tasing a suspect into compliance with DNA test = okay’, metafilter.com, 05 Jun 2009

Via Bruce Schneier comes news that four American states have banned smiling while having your driver’s license photograph taken. Yes, really. Because facial recognition software that they’re apparently using to try to cut down on fraud doesn’t like it:

Dull expressions “make the comparison process more accurate,” says Karen Chappell, deputy commissioner of the Virginia DMV, whose no-smile policy took effect in March.
—“Four states adopt ‘no-smiles’ policy for driver’s licenses”, Thomas Frank, USA Today, 25 May 2009

Sure, the explanation that they need to do this to prevent fraud sounds rational, but really, preventing people from smiling? I think it’s hard to find a better metaphor for “soulless bureaucracy”.

I recently started playing the daily Set puzzle again, and was thinking about other ways to play the game without other players.
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The title of this post is hardly original, but it’s been a favorite of mine for many years. Underneath the smartass exterior, however, the aphorism packs a fairly significant punch that’s not necessarily merely a variant on solipsism.
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I’ve been using Twitter for about three months now. I was fairly skeptical about it, but decided to try it out, and while I don’t think it’s now a completely essential tool, I do find it useful.
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