Markets in Everything - even homelessness, in this case. The link goes to an interesting article about an internet marketing specialist who helped a homeless man double his begging takes with clever marketing.
The connection with this earlier post - about a “homeless” man near my day job who seems likely to be a huckster - may not be obvious, so here it is. I don’t know anything about this man (”Keith”) that our marketing expert helped out, so no comment on whether he did a good, bad, or merely interesting thing by helping him double his intake. The comment is merely that this highlights what should be obvious: homeless people ARE selling something. This is a market too. I won’t say it’s a market “like any other,” since what you get out of helping a homeless man isn’t very tangible. But the point remains: homeless people have to entice people to donate to them on some basis, which in turn implies that people don’t donate unless they think they are getting something in return - presumably a feeing of having proven that they are “good” or “caring.”
The way I see it, there are three things at work here.
(1) Put your money where your mouth is. The betting culture is ubiquitous (I recently posted a $1000 bet on Facebook as a way to prove to myself that supporters of the healthcare bill privately don’t actually believe most of the crap they say in public) - and in this case the implication is that if you care about homelessness, you need to be willing to help pay for it. So people who like to think that they care about homeless are willing to part with some money to help out - they just need to be given a nudge to do so.
(2) The illusion of fair exchange. It’s interesting that including a squirt of hand sanitizer with donations was effective. People are uncomfortable with charity, but they nevertheless understand that it is necessary. Actually, I think a lot of the motivation for support of welfare state programs comes from our awkward feelings about charity. Conservatives are happy to trumpet statistics that show that they are more generous with their money than leftists - and rightly so: giving to the needy is not only good, but necessary, as some people really do fall hard on their luck. At the same time, I think conservatives make too big a deal out of these numbers. It’s probably true that conservatives are slightly more generous, but this isn’t the whole story. Also playing a role is that a lot of leftists are distinctly uncomfortable with the implication of inferiority involved in giving someone a handout. Handouts come with strings attached, and let no libertarian pretend otherwise since one of the major reasons we prefer charity to government programs, after all, is that we trust individuals to be more perceptive in discerning who is deserving of their handouts and who is simply freeloading than government. Not all leftists are covertly scheming to make us wards of the state: many are simply trying to take the obligation out of the relationship by shifting it to an “entitlement” that the government gives, rather than something that is given or taken away at an arbitrary whim. They consider it an outrage that someone who has already fallen on their luck should be obligated to anyone to get back up on their feet. It’s a sentiment that we libertarians can understand, if not exactly share. And I think the hand sanitizer gimmick works on precisely the people who are uncomfortable with the implied power relationship between hander and hanout-recipient. They want to donate because they like to think of themselves as the kind of people who can make sacrifices (never mind that it’s actually just a nominal amount - whatever’s in pocket) to alleviate suffering, but they feel awkward about it, and the illusion of fair exchange helps them get around it. They’re not actually fooled that they’ve bought a service, mind you - the hand sanitizer just acts as a nudge, a pretext.
(3) The realization that the “homeless” are often frauds. Notice how the improved sign says “support the homeless,” rather than including any details about Keith’s personal life. It doesn’t get a comment in the linked article, but I don’t think I’m out of line in suggesting that the litany of details about Keith’s personal life on the original sign, true or not, read like a list of ad hoc excuses - the kind of thing that someone thinking of how to sell a fraudulent homelessness situation to passers-by might come up with. After all, the first question that comes to anyone’s mind in a society as historically affluent as ours is “how does anyone come to this? Surely he can get a job at McDonald’s if nothing else!” Honestly, it kind of stetches the imagination to think that with all the opportunities out there there isn’t already in place some solution to the problem of homelessness. We all suspect that people begging on the streets could get off their asses if they wanted to. So Keith started out with what looked like the right approach: address this head on. The problem, though, is that addressing it head on raises too many uncomfortable questions in our minds, calls attention to the wrong lines of thought. When you depersonalize it, however, make it about homelessness in general, as the marketing advisor does for Keith on his improved sign, then people can safely tuck these questions away. It isn’t about Keith personally anymore, it’s about homelessness in general. EVERYONE can agree that we’d like to help hard-luck cases, and the new sign neatly sidesteps the issue of whether Keith actually is one of those cases.
Of course the one question that’s burning in everyone’s mind by the end of the article doesn’t get answered: 100% increase in ROI over what? We’d all like to know what a standard-issue bum makes begging, but our marketer isn’t telling. Which rather raises the suspicion that it’s a greater number than most of us probably think it should be, and that a condition for being featured on the blog imposed by Keith was that no such disclosures should be made. Fair enough even if Keith didn’t actually impose the condition, actually: our interpid reporter probably doesn’t want to stand between legitimate beggars and their takes by giving information fodder to those who are looking for an excuse not to give. But it seems to me that that’s what he’s done nevertheless. I think if there is to be real social change on matters like this, it will need to start with an honest assessment of just how much fraud is at work here, and on giving we innocent bystanders ways to detect it when we see it. Far from hurting the homeless, I think such an endeavor would end up benefiting them: people would be more willing to donate if they could rely on their money going to an actual good cause. Proving that you can play marketing games with homelessness, obvious though it be in retrospect, doesn’t do much to inspire confidence here.
I love learning languages. That’s the main thing that made me aware of Linguistics in the first place, actually - because I always wanted to be a polyglot. It was related, I think, to my love of boardgames as a child and programming languages now. I enjoy learning, and learning to apply well, new rule systems.
A pitfall of this type of personality, though, is that you tend to get fixated on gimmicks. Because really, artificial rule systems like programming languages and boardgames contain a lot of them among their sets of distinguishing features. To be interested in these things, you almost have to be overly fixated on surface features of systems that don’t have as much ultimate signifance as you invest into learning them.
When I lived in Japan, I had lots of freetime and little contact with other English speakers, and I tried every gimmick in the book. I would sit in the office and make endless hoardes of flashcards, and the Japanese teachers would make fun of me, telling me that I was anal. In one sense, I had the last laugh, because by the end of my stay there I spoke Japanese quite well - much better than any of the other foreigners in our program, and certainly much better than their best expectations. But in another sense, they did, because I don’t think any of my gimmicks really accounts for my accomplishment. In the end, the only reason I spoke Japanese well and the others didn’t at the end of three years was sheer dogged determination. I invested a lot of time in it - and that’s really what made the difference.
And I can’t claim ignorance as an excuse. Early on in my self-prescribed studies, I ran across a remarkable series of books for learning Kanji - Remembering the Kanji I: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters - now apparently in a 4th edition. And in the preface to volume 3, Heisig, the author, warns against exactly the kind of gimmickry that his system can lead to. I don’t have the actual quote, but it’s something along the lines of how only a “sustained devotion to the language” can really take you to mastery. There are no shortcuts.
I’m writing this because Mr. Tweedy is making me nostalgic. He’s learning Finnish right now via Harry Potter - a method that I used a lot in Japan (though in my case I read Star Wars and Agatha Christie books; Harry Potter was still brand new back then). Basically his plan is to read a chapter a week - first going through it in Finnish, writing down all the words he doesn’t know, looking them up and (I presume) making flashcards to help him memorize them. Then he’s listening to it in Finnish (he has a CD version), and of course he has the advantage of having the English original right there with him - something I didn’t for my books in Japan (I could’ve gotten them, of course, but since they weren’t easy to find in Japanese bookstores, I just didn’t).
All in all, this seems like a GREAT system - but I’ve been there and I know what the flaw is. It’s the schedule.
What always tripped me up doing this system in Japanese was that I put myself on a fixed schedule - a chapter a week, x number of words a day, what have you. And it just never worked - because it’s just inevitable that you need a day off, and you get behind, and then you get stressed out about catching up, and eventually you just give up. I learned Japanese without ever, as far as I can remember, FINISHING a complete novel in Japanese, just because I started and stopped this process so many times. Ultimately, I think I learned by picking up words in novels here and there and then hearing them in a different context on TV.
The one book that I DID finish using this method was Heinrich Böll’s Der Zug war pünktlich, which I read my first couple of weeks in Germany to learn German. I highlighted and looked up all the words I didn’t know, and I actually kept this up through to the end of the book. And I know that I only managed it because this was the first time I’d tried this, and I had no fixed schedule. Actually, as I recall, the book has no chapters, so it would’ve been easy not to split it up in any case. It’s just something that I did when I had free time - I just doggedly kept at it until I was all the way through. And since I was never “behind,” I actually did get all the way through.
I rate Mr. Tweedy’s chances of finishing Harry Potter in Finnish high IF he ditches the schedule. Just making a commitment to finish the book in a reasonable amount of time, and making sure that you do a reasonable amount of review and a reasonable amount of building looking up new vocabulary, should be enough. Better, in fact, than trying to set deadlines.
But the real point of this entry is just that it’s high time I started reviewing my German and Japanese. I haven’t been abroad in nearly a decade, and I’m getting rusty, and I think Mr. Tweedy has the right attitude about this: I DO have the time, I’m just not making it.
I never had a freshman 15, at least, not as a freshman. I DID gain a lot of weight in my last two years of college, but not enough to worry about. In high school I was a steady 145; by the time I graduated university I was a steady 154. It wasn’t worth exercising or giving up drinking about.
Grad school, however, has been a completely different beast. In response to stress my second year here at IU I gained a huge amount of weight (about 10lbs.) that I never quite got rid of. That was in Fall 2004. I made a pretty successful stab at it Summer 2007, but then I started dating, and then school started, and I soon ended up back where I was. I’ve been making steady trips to the gym the whole time, but school things tend to get in the way.
That was until one day this past spring when I looked at the scale and found myself 79.7kg. That’s 175lbs. for the metric-challenged. And hey, I’m metric-challened too - but I do body weight in kilograms because (a) I started measuring/worrying about my body weight for the first time while living abroad (Japan) and (b) it’s cruder as a scale (1kg = 2.2lbs), and so better-suited to the slow pace of exercise-based weight loss. (When you measure in pounds you bounce around all the time - kg seems more consistent.) That really put the fear of God in me, and so since then I’ve been making an all-out effort. It’s a two-year plan (I try to be realistic about how long it really takes to lose weight via exercise - dieting is not really an option for me since I LOVE to eat!): I originally wanted to get down to the 75kg range this year and then down to the 72 range next year - i.e. about 10lbs. this year and another 6-7 next year. However, I’ve been doing so well that it’s been revised to 73kg by the end of this year, to drop to 70kg (i.e. back to my post-undergrad 154 weight) next year.
So I’m pleased to report that over 88 days at the gym I’ve lost down to 75.1kg - almost exactly 10lbs! I’m calling success here because I posted two consecutive days at 75.1. No doubt that will go back up again when I weigh again tomorrow. Indeed, I graphed and did a regression analysis on my weight trend, and the regression line suggests I “should” be more like 75.8. Maybe I should actually wait until the regression line calls my average weight 75.1, but whatever. I’ve lost 10lbs. since spring and seem to be on track to keep it off. That means another 2kg/4.4lbs before Christmas to meet my revised goal. It seems quite doable!
The moral of this story is that losing weight is a real bitch without fad diets, which I refuse to do. Which is huge incentive not to let myself get back up into the 77-79 range again EVER. Once I sunk below 77, I swore I would never be that heavy again. The plan for next year is to reset the limit at 74. Once I’m in the 70-71 range that I’m ultimately aiming for, I’ll do light exercise 3-4 times a week only (right now I’m putting in 6 days a week at the gym, and recently going sometimes twice a day), and use 74 as a kind of tripwire - going back up to the 5-6 day regime if that happens.
Here’s the progress graph. Weights are only for days I went to the gym, so it’s 88 trips to the gym rather than 88 total days. The actual timespan is something like the last week in April to last Friday.
TOWM quote of the day comes from John Scalzi, who has a laugh-out-loud funny rant about the anachronism of the “Big Three” science fiction - SCIENCE FICTION - rags refusing to accept electronic submissions here at the end of the second decade since the internet went mainstream. It’s a general takedown of the feeble arguments one of them posts, actually.
Fantasy and Science Fiction Mag: In our office, it’s very inconvenient to pass around an electronic submission from one reader to another. Scalzi: Why? Because you’re trying to lift a CRT from one desk to another?
Right.
I refer you to the original post for the play-by-play; it’s worth your time for sheer entertainment value. Let me just say for my own part that in addition to Scalzi’s excellent arguments, I think there comes a time, whether or not it’s directly in your narrow interest to do so, when you just adapt to change - just ’cause humans keep up with the Joneses. Just ’cause doing anything else will say something about you. Growing up, for example, I had a next-door neighbor who used to special order Neil Diamond albums on 8-track. Back in the 80s, you could still do that. They didn’t sell them in stores anymore, but you could write the record company and get one of the limited supply that had been pressed for albums that were popular enough. But WHY? It’s just pig-headed. Ostensibly it was because he had a beat-up old Aston Martin that he loved working on that came equipped with an 8-track. But this had to have been an excuse for a quirk, really. If your hobby is tinkering with this old car, then surely an obvious “tinker” you might indulge in is getting rid of the bloody dinosaur tape player? Sure, if all you like is Neil Diamond (stop and ponder for a second…), and Mr. Diamond comes out with an album every year (in the 70s and 80s, anyway), maybe skipping a year here and there, then I guess it technically doesn’t pass cost-benefit muster to replace all your 8-tracks with CDs. I just think … well, you just kinda do it anyway at some point. If you wake up in 1983, take a look around, and notice that absolutely noone is using 8-tracks anymore, then it’s just polite to chunk your collection and start over.
And that’s how I feel about people who don’t like email, electronic documents, etc. There’s a whiff of rudeness - as in lack of consideration - about it. If you wake up in 2009, and correspondence is all done with bits and bytes, then you need to correspond that way too - if for no other reason than it’s a dick thing to do to make the world play with paper and pens for you when it clearly doesn’t want to. And in some strange way that goes even for things that don’t directly matter to anyone else. My advisor, for example, keeps a paper-and-pencil date calendar, and every time we make an appointment he gets out a pencil and flips in his datebook and then writes down by hand when the appointment is. And I realize this is in some sense unfair, but my honest emotional reaction to watching this every week is not too different from if he’d just grabbed a handkerchief, honked his nose, and sat there looking at it for a bit before stuffing the wad back in his pocket. He can do what he likes, of course, but … well, it’s 2009, they’ve invented the iPhone, he’s a Mac person, can’t he just buy one and use iCal like the rest of us? (Or some equivalent contraption if the admittedly steep monthly fee gets in his way?)
Like it or not there is a kind of collective sensibility about things. That’s why, for example, walking around with a pocket watch is a fashion statement. They’re rare now, and more convenient alternatives have been invented and embraced - so if you’re walking around digging in your pocket and flipping the top off of a wind-up toy to tell time, then that’s a conscious choice made because you want to influence how people think about you. It’s no different from wearing a fedora, or suspenders, or speaking in hip-hop slang, etc. We all adopt affectations for reasons of flair - to mark ourselves off from everyone else. (And actually, the pocket watch thing used to be one of mine in high school - I love old clocks!) The point is just that it’s no use pretending that there is utility in these choices. Saying “I just can’t get used to this email nonsense” is about as plausible as saying “I just never could get the hang of these silly wristwatches.” Or “but there’s just something special about an 8-track.” Or “no, dog, ‘dis jus’ how I talk.” It’s affectation - all of it - and you’re either around people who think it’s cool, or you’re not.
And I’m just one of those people who doesn’t think getting flustered by electronic documents is cute. It’s exasperating, actually, it just makes you look retarded, and I’m all for Scalzi’s refusal to submit stories to the “Big Three” until they get with the program.
Via Arts and Letters Daily, I came across this photoessay on East Germany. According to the captions, they were taken by Karlheinz Jardner - a West German photographer - during a trip through the DDR in the spring of 1990. This technically places it before official reunification (3 October 1990), but only barely. The border was officially open as of 9 November the year before, Honnecker had been deposed, discussion of monetary union was already mostly finalized, free elections had been held in March replacing Egon Krenz and the SED government with a new Western-cooperative coalition government, etc. etc. By whatever they mean by “Spring 1990,” East Germany was rapidly disappearing - at least as a political entity. So it’s kind of startling how normal most of these pictures look. There are shots of nice-looking houses, comfortable restaurants, well-maintained landscapes, and so on. Generally speaking, what you would expect the west to look like in 1990 more or less, minus the advertisements.
I understand that East Germany was considerably better off than the rest of Eastern Europe (though facing a potentially insurmountable foreign debt crisis by 1987, it must be added, so it’s somewhat uncertain how long this would have lasted), but my memories of East Berlin ca 1994 were that it was a noticeably different place from the western half - even four years after reunification. There were construction projects everywhere, but in general the city was grey and rundown - a quiet and depressing place. And in 1996 I had a chance to travel by train through the East - and there again, the differences in the countryside were even more noticeable. It was certainly emptier than the west German countryside, and while there were old buildings here and there in comparatively good repair, the town centers were dominated by drab government-built monstrosities - train stations and town halls and apartment blocks and such.
In that spirit, there are some pictures here that, forgive me, seem a bit suspicious. For example, I have two problems with this one:
Yes, the scene is appropriately drab, but the green house just barely visible in the background seems in unusually good shape. Perhaps it’s just been restored? More interesting is the “PDS” graffiti on the wall. That’s the acronym for the Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (Party of Democractic Socialism) - the reformed version of the old SED that stood in elections in the united Germany as recently as 2 years ago (they’ve since renamed themselves simply “The Left” after merging with another western left extremist party). If this is April or May 1990, did the PDS exist? I guess it must have - but it would have to have been a very new thing. According to the German Wikipedia entry on the SED, the party officially renamed itself to SED-PDS in December of 1989, and dropped the SED bit altogether in February of 1990. So there you go. It still seems very West German for some schmuck to spraypaint PDS on the side of a building - in red, no less. I guess this was for the recent election?
“Skins verpisst euch” - anti-Nazi graffiti - seems kind of unlikely for 1990. Certainly it wouldn’t be long after that the far right started gaining traction - especially in Berlin - but as early as 1990? And in Eisenach?
A shop showing all the horrible East German “fashion” on display. Note the sticker in the corner - a political sticker from the recent election probably nowhere to be found in Germany anymore urging people NOT to vote SED-PDS.
None of this, of course, is to cast doubt on the authenticity of these photos - just mostly to express surprise at how close the two countries already were by 1990 in retrospect. There has been a lot of griping in Germany about how difficult the transition supposedly was, but all things considered it was comparatively easy considering how it might have been without the maintenence of close ties, and the consequent relatively openness of the East.
The US has something of an analogous situation with Cuba. Well - go to Miami and tell me if you don’t agree. We in Indiana might not feel much comraderie, but lots of people living in Florida have relatives in Cuba, regularly visit Cuba, etc. - and certainly before the Castro Revolution ties between the US and Cuba were quite strong. Cuba isn’t the long-lost half of our nation or anything - at 11million people it’s about 4% the size of the US, and US occupation only lasted for about 3 years a century ago - but the histories are intertwined, and people in the past could have been forgiven for thinking that Cuba might someday be one of the United States. The Castro Regime can’t last; it’s inevitable that new ties will be forged sometime in the near future. Fortunately, we don’t have to worry about dragging Cuba into modernity the way that West Germany did with the East in 1990. Still - all said, it’s better for everyone if economic development in Cuba takes off sooner rather than later. President Obama seems to be taking the right steps. Will it continue?
I believe in native cognitive gender differences. With due apologies to the politically correct crowd, men are, on average, better at some things, and women better at others. One thing that women are better at is learning foreign languages. This is especially true of getting the pronounciation right. Here’s some evidence:
And even more so this - for which embedding was disabled.
This person is a native speaker of neither Japanese or Korean, but her pronounciation in both is simply astounding. Of course there are hesitations and slips in the Japanese video, and no doubt native speakers have little trouble hearing that she’s foreign. It’s the Korean video that’s really amazing to me. If we take her at her word that she’s just aping stuff that she heard on he internet (i.e. at the time of filming, she had had only about a couple of hours of intro Korean), this is stunning, as she sounds completely native.
Yes, yes, I know she’s just one person, and no doubt anyone reading this can easily find some girls who flat-out suck at foreign language pronounciation. This is just one data point that supports an impression I’ve had for a long time. I taught English in Korea and Japan for 5 years, and the pattern there was quite clear. The best student in the class was invariably female, and of those students who stood out for me and the other teachers at the schools I taught at as “cream of the crop,” I would say well over 70% were girls. I think the pattern gets clearer when you start talking about people who have learned multiple languages. That is, of those students who, in addition to English, had learned some other language that I knew and could talk to me fluently in that language (German and/or Japanese), nearly all were female.
There isn’t really a point to this - I just wanted to say that I’m impressed by this person’s Korean pronounciation - speaking as someone who enjoys learning foreign languages and finds Korean pronounciation a bit difficult himself.
I am a sufferer from mild arachnophobia. It was much worse when I was young, though never anything serious enough to see a doctor about. As I’ve gotten older, it’s subsided a lot, but it’s still here - as I was reminded yesterday when I got a shock from seeing a larger-than-usual spider sitting on the wall next to my bathroom door. It used to be that I could barely make myself go into the (spider-infested) garage to get the lawnmower out. It took a lot of mental preparation, and often several trips (because I had to run in and out - and if there was something blocking the lawnmower I had to throw it aside, run back out, rebuild my courage, and then run back in, etc.). Now going in there would make me distinctly uncomfortable, and I still wouldn’t want to stay very long, but I don’t think I’d have to do the running in and out thing. Likewise, I didn’t have to kill the spider yesterday. I didn’t like it being there, but I can suck it up and deal now. When I was younger, I couldn’t have - not for a spider that big, anyway.
Arachnophobia is apparently the most common animal fear - at least in the Anglosphere - and is especially common among people of northern European descent. Since I’m pretty damn white, I’m what you might call a typical case. And sure enough, over the time I spent in Japan people weren’t very sympathetic about it. Over there, it’s comparatively rare for people to be afraid of spiders, though nearly everyone is afraid of snakes to some degree. I have no traces of that fear: snakes are cool, and I like playing with my friends’ pet snakes. I don’t think I could even be friends with someone who had a pet spider. I just wouldn’t trust them. The same way I mistrust people who don’t like cats, I would be really uncomfortable around someone who kept and regularly fed a spider.
Arachnophobia turns out to be a lightningrod for bad evolutionary psychology reserach - such as this pile of steaming poo. The link goes to a National Geographic article about a study done in Sweden in which reserachers showed people pictures that might or might not contain any of the following: flowers, mushrooms, spiders and snakes. Participants had some kind of remote control switch contraption thing in the hands and had to press a button if they saw any of these things. The findings: reactions were faster for spiders and snakes than for flowers and mushrooms. Likewise, the position in the picture of the flowers and mushrooms had an effect on reaction times, but the spiders and snakes could be just about anywhere and get the same rapid response. Furthermore, people who reported having a fear of spiders and/or snakes were faster at spotting the objects of their fear than normal people. (I’m sure somewhere there’s some dude who shits his pants at the sight of flowers. He wasn’t a participant.) All of which makes perfect sense and fails to surprise me in any way. And all of which apparently enables the researchers to conclude that:
“Evolution has equipped mammals with a readiness to easily associate fear to recurrent threats in their evolution,” said Öhman. “Thus, given that fear is activated when a snake is around, they condition fear to the snake much easier than to other stimuli that are around.”
I really want to poll whatever association is responsible for Rhetoric to include the “Evolution Fallacy” in the list of common logical rhetorical fallacies. This is as distinct from the established genetic fallacy - which is just bad association logic (Hitler built autobahns, Eisenhower built highways, ergo Eisenhower was a closet Nazi - that kind of crap. You see it almost without exception in every political speech made these days. President Obama clocks about 1 every two minuts in his speeches, for example, fond as he is of “conclusion by pun.”). The “Evolution Fallacy” is different - essentialy “from the fact that evolution occurred, conclude anything” - allowing any researcher to connect any pair of facts he likes.
There is absolutely nothing so counterintuitive about the fact that people who are unusually afraid of spiders are faster to spot them in pictures than those who aren’t that we need evolution to explain this to us. I’m willing to bet that we could induce an irrational fear of coathangers in Dr. Öhman Clockwork Orange style and then observe the fact that he was faster at spotting coathangers than people we hadn’t similarly fucked with. Nothing about this would lead to the conclusion that he had evolved according to a different path than the rest of us well-adjusted non-coathanger-fearing citizens of the planet. It would just be that he’d had some unpleasant experiences with coathangers (which I’ll leave to your imagination) that the rest of us hadn’t.
This whole “genetic memory” thing is particularly far-fetched in the case of arachnophobia anyway - since it completely fails to explain how (a) there are more female than male arachnophobes, (b) arachnophobia is far from universal in the first place, (c) spiders aren’t now and have never been particularly threatening to humans, (d) intense phobias seem more maladaptive than adaptive in the first place and (e) arachnophobia is largely concentrated in Northern Europe and virtually nonexistent in some other parts of the world (esp. in indigenous cultures in South America, apparently, where people actually like spiders).
Not that the alternate explanations ring very true for me either. One Graham C. L. Davey wants to chalk it up to the Black Plague. You see, the spiders lived in the same places rats did, so people misunderstood the source of the disease and misattributed it to spiders. But that seems rather unlikely to me too. Granted, it’s much more plausible than the evolutionary theory - but I’d still like to know why rats, then, aren’t the biggest object of fear for white people? Is it maybe that rats also suffered from the plague, and so people thought the evil spiders were causing it and the rats just spreading it? But then, doesn’t that sort of rest on a preexisting feeling that spiders were creepy? What in particular makes it hard for me to buy this one is his apparent reliance on associations between spiders and germs to bolster it.
t is not immediately clear how spiders might have become associated with this response, although examination of the relevant historical literature does indicate a close association between spiders and illness in European cultures from tenth century onward.
Alright, I know I don’t speak for arachnophobes everywhere, but the internal quality of my spider fear has nothing to do with disease or illness. Actually, I think of spiders as pretty clean - an unlikely source of infection - compared to, say, rats or mice, where I’m afriad of getting sick if I even see one. The content of my fear is much more abstract than that. When I see I spider, especially if it’s big enough that I can see its features, I get an overwhelming sense of evil. They just strike me as really malicious creatures. That’s not rational, I know (my scientific side is pretty certain that there’s not a whole lot of anything in the way of thought - let alone commitment to evil - going on in a spider’s “brain”), but phobias never are. I’m just describing how they make me feel - and it has nothing to do with fear of disease. It’s fear of malice.
Of course, I suppose Plague-era Europeans probably equated disease with demons, so maybe the culture just jettisoned the disease association but kept the demonic when germs were discovered.
In any case, in the same way that the “Sleep and Dreams” class was filled with insomniacs when I was an undergrad, I’ve always been a bit curious about arachnophobia: where it comes from, why I have it, and what it means psychologically, if anything. Identity comes as much from our flaws as our merits, after all. And these things do play a role in identity - even if they’re ultimately meaningless. As I said, I don’t think I could ever be friends with someone who liked spiders. Certainly I’d have trouble sharing office or apartment space with one of those psychopaths who keeps them as pets. The same way that - while liking cats isn’t exactly a sine qua non for me to get along with someone, it is a sine qua non for being really close to them. I’ve noticed in the past that there are subtle trust issues between me and “dog people” - namely, I can be friends with them, but I never completely trust them (dogs themselves, for their part, certainly don’t like me - though there are exceptions). In any case, people who actively dislike cats are pretty much out.
It’s whiteboard pong - apparently from Eness, an Australian “interactive experiences” company. They don’t give anything in the way of details on how it works, but the programming mechanism is fairly obvious. It’s how it’s reading the information on the whiteboard that’s the mystery.
Cool as this is, it also struck me as a particularly boneheaded presentation. For an “interactive experiences” company, they don’t seem to have too much grasp on human (a) attention span and (b) curiosity. The video is only a minute and a half long, demonstrates a bit of cool, mind-blowing technology, and I was already dozing off by the end. There’s just really only so long Pong can fascinate anyone who’s not playing, ESPECIALLY when it’s going this slow and the mechanism is this dumb (honestly - you have to erase your paddle each time???). I think 10-15 seconds would’ve been sufficient to get the point across. And speaking of “the point,” these people also seem to have little appreciation for human curiosity. I mean, fine, watching people play pong on a whiteboard with a projected dot is neato skeeto, but then you want to know what else the thing can do. Obviously there’s no point playing Pong with this kind of mechanism when anyone with a healthy dose of Python can write one of these games in half an hour these days. So you start to naturally wonder - well, what else can it do? What if I drew a box around the ball with a little slit. Would it bounce around until it found its way out? Does it do mazes? Can we program it to understand “gravity,” such that one side of the screen is “down?”
So - Eness gets a gold star for cool device skills, but not for presentation skills.
This looks like fun. The link goes to Steve Winters‘ (formerly here at IU in Pisoni’s lab) presidential picks page. It works like this: the page shows you all 50 states, and you call each one either for Obama or McCain. Then, you rank each state from 1 to 51 (because DC gets to vote too!) based on how confident in your pick you are. So - for example, I gave Wyoming 51 - because I’m really, really sure that one’s going for McCain - and I gave Virginia 1 - because I JUST DON’T KNOW what to think about that one. Your score is the sum of the ranks you gave each state you called right on election day. And if you win you get … an ego boost. And out of a pool of what looks like as many as 6 participants at the moment, it’s some pretty heady bragging rights, let me tell you what.
My general strategy is to rank all the states that seem solid for one candidate or the other high, and then call a couple of states for McCain that probably aren’t really gonna break for him. For example - Ohio, Nevada, Florida. At some point the day before, I switch one of those iffy calls to a really high ranking and hope for the best. Officially, it seems I’m calling the overall election for Obama, though: 286ev for Obama, 252ev for McCain. You need 270 to win, so that means Obama by a hair. I guess the actual spread will be a little bigger than that (since not all of my McCain states will really go for McCain - that’s just a strategy to win the game) - but I do think the election will be closer than current polls suggest, even if there’s not much ground to doubt at this point that Obama’s going to win. That predicted landslide just ain’t comming.
