Category: News

Raw milk yogurt is a sort of holy grail for traditional foods enthusiasts, coupling the enzymatic and probiotic components of both fresh milk and fermentation in one glorious, creamy, lovely food.  Served over baked oatmeal or soaked oatmeal porridge, on its own or as a basis for savory dipping sauces, a good yogurt can find its way to nearly every meal if you let it.

Raw milk yogurt, thanks to the effects of food enzymes, has a tendency to be a touch runnier than the stuff you find in grocery stores or what you might make in your own kitchen from boiled or pasteurized milk.  For this reason some of the very best raw yogurt is prepared using a combination of fresh cream and fresh milk rather than milk exclusively.  If you follow the fermentation process with straining, as you would for labneh, the resulting product would be even thicker and creamier and you could, in turn, use the accompanying whey in properly preparing grains and flours through soaking or even as an addition to your morning smoothie.

In preparing a classic, or thermophilic, yogurt at home with raw milk, you do need to heat the milk slightly and culture it in a warmed environment.  We heat the milk only to 110° Fahrenheit (about 43° Celsius) which keeps food enzymes and naturally occurring beneficial bacteria intact and thriving. Other cultured dairy foods ferment at room temperature and can also be made with raw milk.  I also recommend culturing with Bulgarian or Greek starters which are available online (see sources) and which produce a rich, tangy and super creamy product.

Raw Milk Yogurt Tutorial(…)
Click here to read the rest of How to Make Raw Milk Yogurt (639 words)

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Post tags: agriculture, bulgarian cuisine, bulgarian yogurt, cheese, dairy, dairy farming, dairy products, desserts, food and drink, food enzymes, fresh milk, greek yogurt, heat source, milk, pasteurized milk, Raw Milk, raw milk yogurt, smoothie, starters, thermophilic yogurt, yoghurt, yogurt, yogurt cheese, yogurt starter

by Larry Shapiro

Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) decision
to withdraw from discussions with his Senate colleagues regarding climate
legislation has been greeted by some well-meaning environmentalists as a reason
to bash President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)
for their alleged lack of commitment to climate legislation. I think this is a mistake. Instead, the environmental community should examine
its own limitations in trying to make sense out of this situation.

Graham blasted what he described as “a
decision by the Obama administration and Senate Democratic leadership to move
immigration instead of energy.” Instead of reflexively agreeing with Graham
and thereby placing themselves at odds with supporters of immigration reform,
environmentalists should reflect upon the reasons why immigration reform is at
this moment a far more politically compelling issue than climate for Senate
Democrats to tackle.

There is actually a social movement associated with immigration
issues. Perhaps even two movements—one on each side. I don’t think
those of us focused on climate issues have anything similar that we can point
to.

Four years ago, when there was a huge wave of pro-immigration
rallies, I was in Columbia,
S.C. There was a rally of
at least 5,000 people, overwhelmingly Mexicans and Central Americans, outside
the state capitol. As a New Yorker who grew up believing that New York is the center
of the immigrant universe, I was quite impressed by two things. First,
there are lots of immigrants everywhere now. Second, people who have a
lot to lose by demonstrating in public were willing to do so in one of the most
conservative states in the Union. 

Immigration reform divides Republicans and helps Democrats energize
their political base. Big businesses that depend on cheap immigrant
labor have a very different orientation from that of the Lou
Dobbs crowd. So Republican efforts
to pander to the anti-immigrant portion of their party come with significant
risks.

Not so for the Democrats, especially in the Senate. There are likely to be competitive Senate
races in any number of states this November in which Latinos form substantial
portions of the electorate. Nevada is one of those
states, and even a politician who is often as principled as Reid is driven in
large part by self-preservation.

But it’s not just Nevada. Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, and Illinois
all have large Latino populations and races that may be close. The immigration issue will energize a portion
of the Democratic base in each of those states. 

Is there a single state with a contested race in which the Senate
Democrats will truly be helped by a climate bill? I can’t think of one.

So the Obama/Reid political calculation that immigration should go
before climate makes sense for them. The vast majority of politicians—and I have no reason to think Obama and Reid are exceptions to this rule—operate in the world of practical politics. By developing a vibrant movement that is backed up by electoral power,
immigration-reform supporters have given leading Democrats a reason to believe
that action on immigration reform will be politically helpful to them. We haven’t done the same on climate.

Environmentalists who complain about this misunderstand the nature
of politics. Moreover, they are morally
wrong. 

All four of my grandparents were immigrants. I would like to make sure that people looking
for a better life in the 21st century have the same opportunity to flee poverty
and oppression that my grandparents had.
I hope my environmental colleagues feel the same way. 

So complaining would be futile.
We would be asking practical politicians such as Obama and Reid to place
a higher priority on a policy that may be politically dangerous for them than on
one that aids their political prospects. There may be many reasons why
doing something worthwhile on climate is a political problem for many politicians,
but one reason is the fact that we have not developed a true movement that
could support them if they go down that road.

Finally, with no movement capable of forcing a
robust response to the climate crisis, the only way Sens. Graham, John Kerry
(D-Mass.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) could have gotten the Senate to pass a
bill would have been to appease the special interests at the root of the
problem. All indications were that the
proposed bill would have propped up the coal and power industries with billions
of dollars while forcing low and middle-income Americans to pay higher energy
costs. The bill also would have stripped
EPA and state governments of much their legal authority to implement innovative
climate solutions. In short, I’m not
sure we’re missing much.

If we really believe that addressing climate change requires a
massive social change, it is naive to believe that we can make that change in
the absence of a massive social movement.
The beginnings of that movement are visible. We see it in the tremendously successful
efforts to stop development of coal plants and in the enthusiasm for green jobs
in many communities throughout the country.
But this movement has not yet been built.

Those of us working to address climate change can learn some
important lessons from supporters of immigration reform. We should take this opportunity to learn
those lessons, rather than merely express our frustration. 

Related Links:

‘Green tea party’ closes out U.S. Earth Day celebrations

Obama climate agenda in turmoil after Republican pulls out of compromise

Graham says he’s going to bail on the climate bill

Samsung and Yahoo have teamed up and extended a "Strategic global partnership for mobile" that will effect Android phones as well as phones running Samsung’s bada OS. What does this mean for you? Well if you’re planning on buying an Android-powered Samsung phone you might be in the same shoes as Motorola Backflip users on AT&T. Samsung phones may replace standard-on-Android Google services with Yahoo services for search, email, contacts, calendar, news, and weather. Yowza. So for those of you thinking of purchasing a Samsung Galaxy S, would this affect your decision? Let us know in the comments! [via BusinessWire]

As everyone in the tech-savvy world knows, Gizmodo scored a major media coup earlier this month when it obtained a prototype of Apple’s next-generation iPhone 4. The fancy piece of hardware had been left behind in a bar by a hapless Apple engineer (his last Facebook post before his fateful memory lapse: “I underestimated how good German beer is”), and Gizmodo paid $5,000 to the person who found the phone. Apple officially reclaimed its phone last week, but that may not be the end of the story. Now reports have surfaced that Silicon Valley police are investigating the incident, as purchasing the lost property may have violated criminal statutes. CNET heard it from an a law enforcement official:
Apple has spoken to local police about the incident and the investigation is believed to be headed by a computer crime task force led by the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office, the source said.
Since the phone wasn’t stolen, it isn’t immediately obvious what laws may have been violated. But CNET reports that several old state laws may give prosecutors the grounds they need:
Under a California law dating back to 1872, any person who finds lost property and knows who the owner is likely to …

Though it resembles the Tour 9630, the BlackBerry Bold 9650 is a whole new bag of tricks. If you count more memory, a trackpad, and Wi-Fi as a “whole new bag of tricks.” Aaron takes it for a spin at WES 2010.

[JURIST] Chinese authorities have arrested a prominent Tibetan writer after he signed a letter critical of the Chinese government’s relief efforts following the recent earthquake in the western Qinghai province, a family friend said Monday. Tra Gyal, who writes under the pseudonym Zhogs Dung, was reportedly arrested while working at the Nationalities Publishing House in the provincial capital Xining. Tra Gyal helped organize private donations for those left homeless in the remote Yushu county, a Tibet Autonomous Prefecture, by asking Tibetans not to send donations through official channels but rather to travel to the county themselves to guarantee their donations reached those in need. It is unclear whether Tra Gyal’s detention is related to his criticism of the earthquake relief efforts.
In February, a Chinese court sentenced human rights activist Tan Zuoren to five years in prison on subversion charges after he documented the lethal consequences of substandard construction in the Sichuan province’s 2008 earthquake, which left some 90,000 dead. A Chinese court sentenced another earthquake activist, Huang Qi, to three years in prison in November on the charge of illegally holding state secrets. Huang was a critic of the Chinese government’s handling of the 2008 disaster. After the quake, he posted articles online criticizing the government’s response and talked to foreign media outlets about how some children’s deaths were the result of poorly-built schools. Amnesty International issued a statement in July urging China to drop the charges against Huang and release him from custody.

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BlackRock Vice Chairman Bob Doll was on CNBC this morning talking about the power of this recovery. While he sees a correction coming, he doesn’t think its going to hit markets too hard, with the way fundamentals look right now.

• 0:20 We are due for some sort of correction, but with numbers looking good, we will continue to be up
• 1:04 Energy and industrial growth is where to be; look for materials stocks
• 1:50 Concerned about Greece credit, China tightening, and U.S. government, but fundamentals still too strong

Join the conversation about this story »

The big story of the day in the world of financial stocks is that they’re all getting hammered, and the idea is that it might have something to do with the fact that strong derivatives reform seems to be coming down the pike.

Now there was a report earlier in the day that perhaps Berkshire Hathaway might somehow get a fat exemption, but now according to WSJ that’s not the case. The Democrats have killed that provision.

So you’d think that Berkshire might be getting pelted, but it’s not.

It’s actually up about 0.4%.

That’s not a huge move, except in comparison to other financials, in which case it’s significant?

So what’s going on?

The markets are probably figuring that the hit to Berkshire will be one-timey in nature — basically that it will cause the company to post collateral, but that derivatives aren’t central to how it makes money.

With the financial firms getting whacked, strong regulations may go at the heart of what they do, and actually hurt future profitability, thus the falling shares and blowout in CDS.

Join the conversation about this story »

Google set out to revolutionize or at least disrupt the mobile phone market with its Nexus One smartphone which it only made available online. The idea was to create an online marketplace for mobile devices to be sold contract-free, something that doesn’t happen in the US. Several months later and after disappointing sales, Google seems to be sweetenin… (read more)

Royal Bank of Canada was upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at BMO Capital Markets. Analyst John Reucassel also hiked his price target on shares of Canada’s largest bank to $67 from $63 after strong results from U.S. banks suggest credit conditions and the business environment are improving faster than expected.

In a note to clients, Mr. Reucassel pointed out that when bank stocks are upgraded in between quarters this often suggests some particular insight into the next set of earnings. But that isn’t the case this time around. In fact, Royal Bank came up shy of the Street’s expectations in the past two quarters, which might explain why the stock has
underperformed the Canadian bank index in 2010.

Instead, the analyst’s conviction comes from a belief that Royal Bank has a number of franchises that should benefit from an improving business environment beyond the cyclical recovery in provisions for credit losses. He said its wealth management, insurance and domestic retail banking businesses will provide good earnings leverage beyond this year.

“In 2010, a better environment should lower losses in U.S. retail banking,” Mr. Reucassel said, adding that strong trading results from the large U.S. banks could increase expectations for Royal Bank’s second quarter 2010 trading revenue. However, the analyst left his trading estimate for the quarter unchanged at $1-billion.

“Looking past the recovery in loan losses, we believe that Royal has amongst the most attractive potential earnings growth rates in the group due to large asset management and insurance operations as well as consistent results from domestic banking,” Mr. Reucassel said. “Regulatory and government actions (in response to the recent crisis) should be the biggest risk to Royal investors, particularly vis-a-vis wholesale banking.”

While the timing of acquisitions is unknown given the uncertainty surrounding new capital rules, regulatory rules should become more clear by fall 2010. Given that economic conditions continue to improve, the analyst expects the regulator to provide banks with more flexibility in decisions on how to fund acquisitions. “This could be a major catalyst for Royal Bank.”

Jonathan Ratner

Gregory T. Huang wrote:

Engineering has an image problem. Sure, it’s the technical backbone of many things people use every day, from airplanes, cars, and buildings to new medicines, mobile devices, and the Internet. But it doesn’t always attract the best and brightest young people interested in solving society’s biggest problems or changing the world. That’s because people often have a narrow view of what engineering entails, or think it’s too boring, geeky, or technically difficult to pursue.

Enter the “grand challenges summit” organized by the National Academy of Engineering, which is coming to Seattle next week on May 2-3. This is part of an ongoing series of six NAE events around the U.S. this year that are meant to inspire students and rally faculty, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors around some of society’s most important problems. The plan is to concentrate on big ideas like improving healthcare, producing clean energy, providing access to clean water, restoring urban infrastructure, preventing nuclear terror, and making computer systems secure.

The Seattle event features an all-star cast of speakers, including Bruce Montgomery from Gilead Sciences, Larry Smarr from Calit2 and UC San Diego, Ed Crawley from MIT, former NASA administrator Mike Griffin (now at the University of Alabama), and former NASA astronaut Bonnie Dunbar (now CEO of the Museum of Flight). They will be joined by engineers from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and General Electric, as well as prominent scholars from the UW, including Matt O’Donnell, dean of engineering, Ed Lazowska from computer science & engineering, and Suzie Pun from bioengineering. The sessions will focus on how engineers can make better medicines, as well as better tools for scientific discovery in computing and aerospace.

O’Donnell, who helped bring the summit to Seattle, says the number of students interested in engineering has been declining for the past couple of decades—in particular, the percentage of U.S. students (compared with international students) enrolled in the nation’s graduate programs. “Engineering ain’t too sexy in society,” says O’Donnell, a biomedical engineer with expertise in ultrasound and other diagnostic imaging technologies. “A lot of folks in engineering are worried.”

He says the idea behind the grand challenges is, “Let’s excite people about what engineering can do for society. It’s not just about having your startup and making money—which is cool, and we all love that. But it’s not just the next PDA or iPhone app.” The goal, he says, is to “sexify” engineering and show that “it’s a way of thinking and analyzing systems, integrating quantitative [methods] with real-world concerns. You can build a bridge or PDA, but you can also think about sustainable systems, urban development, or how you put markets together.” (The NAE summits strike me as an adult complement to the FIRST Robotics competitions for middle-school and high-school kids, which are also about inspiring a new generation of engineers and changing the popular culture around engineering.)

The first grand challenges summit took place in early 2009 and was the brainchild of Tom Katsouleas, the dean of engineering at Duke University. O’Donnell was invited to moderate a panel on engineering new medicines. “It was absolutely a blast,” he says. “But then the kids and professionals in …Next Page »

UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

Looking more Fisher Price than Nintendo, the guts of an N64 have been squeezed into the bright red handheld case by modder Bacteria, who spent four months slaving away on it devotedly. There’s a 5-inch screen, built-in speakers…and rumble pak! More »

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that Americans overwhelmingly approve of financial regulatory reform, with two-thirds of respondents supporting the measures. Half approved of how President Barack Obama has handled the issue, with an equal number disapproving. Additionally, and not surprisingly, respondents approved of easier-to-understand measures, regardless of the partisan politicking surrounding them. For instance, the people polled approved of creating a bank-funded liquidation pool — derided by Republicans as a “permanent bailout” fund — more so than derivatives reform, a complicated measure with bipartisan support.

Introduction:

Under the Geometry section of the SOL’s for kindergarten there is a focus on plan figures. Within this category students k.11) should be able to identify, describe, and trace plan geometric figures (circle, triangle, square and circle).  Being able to identify these shapes is an important aspect when students begin to learn more advanced geometric terms. Students need to be able to identify theses shapes when they begin to learn about area and perimeter. In addition, having the knowledge of the shapes characteristics will help students in their everyday lives. Shapes is an important aspect that begins at an early age.

These literature connections will help children improve their shapes knowledge:

Mouse Shapes: a very first bookby Jim Arnosky is  a great reference tool for students to have. The book demonstrates what all of the shapes that kindergartens must know look like. In addition, there are various other shapes that students can begin to look at. Even though these shapes are not part of the core four, it provides an opportunity for students to expand their knowledge. In addition, this book could be used as an extension for those students who are surpassing grade level expectations.

There’s a Square: A Book About Shapes by Mary Serfozo, illustrated by David A. Carter takes children are an adventure of what the different shapes look like. First they are introduced to a description of the shape then they several forms of a the shape; they see what the shapes looks like in different sizes. Finally the readers are asked to find the shape in a picture. This would be a great way to introduce shapes to students or could even be used as a review. With the picture look, student are given an opportunity to practice their skills. At the end, students are given time to review what the shapes look like. They are shown again what the shapes look like with the shapes name underneath the shape. This is a book that could be read to the class and be available to students if they would like to learn about other shapes other than a circle, square, triangle, and rectangle.

Shape Capersby Cathryn Falwell is kind of laid like a game. Each shapes begins with a “shake, shake, shake” then the shape is introduced. Following the introduction of the shape there is a brief description of what the shape looks like, with various examples of the shapes in different colors and sizes. After all shapes have been described the reader is introduced to the shapes again with various forms of the shapes appearing near the name. After that, the readers are taken on a tour of various things that can be made by the shapes such as a car, spaceship, dinosaur, and ship. This allows the reader to see that shapes are in our everyday lives. At the end of the book, students can look at the pictures they provide and see if they can identify the triangles, squares, circles, and rectangles. This is a great book to introduce the concept of shapes and can also be used as a review with the ending of the book. In addition, it allows those students who are excelling at the concept to explore other shapes, furthering along their knowledge. The last page provides a brief explanation of an activity that can be completed using shapes.

Mouse Shapes by Ellen Stohl Walsh takes students on a journey through the world of shapes.There are mice that are being chased by a big cat. When running from the cat, the mice come into contact with a cluster of different looking shapes. They are now learning what these shapes look like. In order to fool the cat, the mice begin to make objects with the various shapes.
Students see how the shapes can be used in real life while also seeing what the shapes look like.

A Circle Here, A Square there: My Shapes Books  by David Diehl is a beginning book for students to use. Students see what the shapes name look likes in big letters then they see what the shapes look like in various forms. These various forms based upon what children would see in their real lives, such as a present for a square and a scoop of ice cream for a circle. This book would best used as a reference for students if they need a reminder on what the shapes look like. Also, it provides a spelling opportunity for students by having the name of the shapes in big print.

Web Annotations for Students:

In I Spy Shapes students are shown various pictures and asked to find all the triangles, etc in that picture. There is a number counter at the top of the page to help students keep track of how many of the shape they have found.  Students are allowed to keep going until they have found all the shapes.

Fun with Shapes is a webquest that studnets can complete after learning about shapes. In this webquest students are first review what each of the shapes look like. With this story, there is a desciption of what the shape looks like with a picture following. In addition, the story allows the students to review the colors. After reading the story, they have various activities that they are to complete relating to the shapes they read about in the story. With this webquest, the teacher can read the story aloud with the student then pair students up to complete the webquest.

Story of Shapes is an online story of shapes that students can either read or listen to. The storyteller describes the shape and sometimes provides an example of what it may look like. This a visual and oral story for the students. They are seeing the description as it is being said. It provides an opportunity for students to see other ways that the shape can be formed and other descriptions that might make it easier for them to remember the shapes.

Buzzing with Shapes is a two player game that has studnents pick the shape that matches the description that is given to them. If they chose the wrong shape they are given an explanation of why that shape is wrong ( a desciption of what their shape looks like). This could be used as a review game and can even be used as an expanding on the knowladge allowing studnents to explore other shapes besides the circle, square, triangle, and rectangle.

Identify Shapes I students are given a description or picture and asked to choose the correct answer.

Additional Resources for Teachers:

ABC Teach provides various coloring pages for the different shapes that will be taught to our studnets. Other shapes are included but these can be used as an extra thing for students when they are all done with their work.

DLTK’s Growing Together provides different activities that teachers can used during shapes lesson. to help enhance students knowladge.  There are different games, a poem and various worksheets to help children understand the topic.

 Hummingbird Educational Resources is a great tool to find different lesson plans and activities that can be used in the classroom. In addition, there songs that can be recorded that teachers play to their students or place at listening stations. All of the activities are grade appropriate and it is a great tool to use if having trouble coming with a cute way to introduce or teach the concept of shapes.

Shapes is a great site for various worksheets, ranging from extra practice to assessments. These sheets are great tools to have available in the classroom if students are done with an assigment and would a little extra practice. In addition, there are tracing pages that can be used to help students grasp one part of the SOL which is being able to trace the shapes.

The University of Connecticut police, along with the state police, arrested 100 people over three nights in the annual Spring Weekend.

In addition to the arrests, 20 people were cited by the state police on Saturday night for violations of liquor laws.

http://www.courant.com/community/storrs/hc-spring-weekend-0426.artapr26,0,4217584.story

Hartford Courant columnist Rick Green’s take is at http://blogs.courant.com/rick_green/2010/04/who-pays-for-uconn-spring-week.html

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that debt collectors can’t use a “bona fide error” defense to avoid being sued for misinterpreting the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA). In other words, if a debt collection agency makes a demand that’s in violation of the Act, it can’t say it didn’t know any better. Well, it can, but you can go right ahead and sue.

Collection agencies don’t like this ruling because they say the FDCPA contains vague language that can easily be misinterpreted. In a New York Times article about the ruling, debt collectors say websites like debtorboards.com just show people how to abuse the fuzzy language of the FDCPA to avoid paying debt they legitimately owe. But the founder of the site, former bill collector Steven Katz (who was not involved in the Supreme Court case), says he started the site after a collection agency damaged his credit history with a “bogus bill,” and that he’s only teaching consumers that they can use the law “as both a shield and a sword” against sketchy collectors.

[Highlands Today]
“Learning How to Fight the Collector” [NYTimes]

For those who are interested in a syncretism of competing sex ratio theories (an elite audience, I’m sure), Jason Malloy sent me an email responding to my ‘Sausage Fest‘ post, and responding indirectly to Peter Frost whose quote I used in that post:

Roissy,

Hey, I just came across your sex ratio post from several weeks ago. I’m surprised I missed it at the time, because I read fairly often.

Just to clarify a few issues:

A common misunderstanding which I kept addressing on Dr. Frost’s blog was that I was claiming that women have some absolute preference for Dads over Cads. This was not my argument. My argument was that: “Females are never as promiscuous as men (as a group) prefer, therefore when male scarcity puts females at a sexual market disadvantage, females give in to male sexual pressures more easily.” And this innate differential preference is the ultimate basis for sex ratio dynamics.

Peter Frost’s claim that I “ignored”  some crucial wisdom from Guttentag & Secord isn’t true. I left numerous comments on his blog explaining to him why Guttentag & Secord’s social constructivist understandings about sex differences were wrong. Frost is suggesting that, sans social pressures, women are just as oriented towards low investment mating as men. This is wrong. Sex ratio dynamics are based on biological differences between men and women, not on gender politics. The wider society will likely never be as libertarian towards women’s sexuality as a college campus, but even there we see that more women = more male “misbehavior”; because even on college campuses men want lower investment sex than women: ”Think of it as a game of chicken that men will always win. In an environment where women are ok with one night stands, men will push for the glory hole.”

I realize your primary interest is in how gender dynamics shift with male quality, but on this issue I don’t think I’m missing much. e.g. The number of top quality males increases on a male-biased campus, but female promiscuity still decreases. There are, no doubt, many hidden dynamics to sex ratio, but they don’t seem to monkey wrench the general predictions.

Jason

Sounds intuitively correct to me. What I’ve witnessed in social venues where the sex ratio is skewed in favor of women: when men outnumber women, the women set the terms of the courtship, and this is true regardless of the number of alpha males in attendance. They flit about soaking in the attention of all the male suitors, act bitchier, and play harder to get. Shit tests are locked at maximum deflection. The men are more animated and become agitated toward the end of the night, which sometimes spills over into (literally) pushing and shoving the male competition aside, and getting blotto once they realize the odds will not work in their favor.

Of course, more alpha males is always better than fewer alpha males from a women’s perspective, because alpha male attention is almost as good as alpha male sex (though not as good as alpha male love). In fact, for most women, alpha male attention is better than beta male sex and love. So while women may be less promiscuous in male-skewed environments, they are going home happier in their chasteness if the male attention they lapped up came from higher quality men.

In contrast, those heavenly times when the women outnumbered the men, pickup up could not not have been easier. I sometimes had women approach me.

It’s like shopping for a TV in a store that has an abundance of TV choice. You might very well walk out of there empty-handed because you figure you can afford to take your time deciding which brand best suits you, and that there are so many brands there’s bound to be an even better value in there next week.

The part where sex ratio dynamics gets interesting is what influence it has on rates of male violence. As I mentioned in my previous post on this subject, when I’ve been in bars that skewed male the drunkenness and rowdiness hit a fever pitch. Male friendships temporarily sundered when a target was in sight: hos before bros. It’s sad watching a bunch of angry dudes squabble over the few remaining fat chicks at garbage hour. I suppose it helps in sex ratio discussions to define what we mean by male “misbehavior”. Maybe it should be divided into two categories: male violence and male caddishness. They overlap, but they aren’t synonymous. This accounts for the observation in some contexts that more men = more male agitation but not more male caddishness, whereas more women = more male caddishness but less silverback posturing and fighting over the abundance of women.

A lot of what I write about on this diaryetic outpost is based on personal experience, and only second-hand do the forces of science get summoned when I feel like putting in the extra work to buttress my steely-eyed observations of reality. If you want (mostly) hard science and bursts of numerical flavor, GNXP is a good place to go.

In general, I find that about 80% of what I observe in real life is eventually corroborated by scientific evidence. The remaining 20% left with question marks can be explained either by experiences peculiar to some subset of my life circumstances, or idiosyncratic personal observations insufficiently examined by science. My belief is that most people go through life lying to others, and to a lesser extent to themselves, about 90% of the nature of reality. Everything from the finality of death, to the horrors of aging, to the pitiless churning of the sexual market, to the true costs and benefits of human diversity is sheathed in a velvet scabbard of pretty lies. Pessimists would argue the excalibur of truth-examination is best left sheathed, for some truths bring nothing but distress. Optimists would argue the sword is a figment of negative minds, a weapon of the haves to dispirit the have-nots. Chaotics such as yours truly revel in the paroxysms the unsheathing of the sword causes those who stumble into the id monster’s lair.

It is possible to make it to the endgame having avoided the worst travails while refusing to acknowledge 90% of reality, as long as you don’t act in accordance with your stated beliefs. For example, a fat woman looking for love may console herself without consequence that it’s what’s on the inside that counts as long as she pays the lie to her beliefs by dieting and exercising. Her hypocrisy, from her point of view, is win-win — her psyche is soothed by her lies while her love life is invigorated by her sexier body. Similarly, a single mom anxious for love can tell herself she is choosier than her single female counterparts without bastard baggage, but when the quality of suitors willing to commit to her and her child by another man predictably degrades she will ignore her little lies and act like a woman with fewer options, smartly offering more concessions in the zero-sum race to settle for Mr. Better Than Nothing. If, however, she insists on living by her lies she will likely spend the rest of her dreary years half-nourished by a child’s love instead of fully nourished by the added romantic love of a male partner.

Despite evidence of hypocrites acting in ways contrary to their lies and in accordance with the reality of the mating market, in the double helical arena of all against all, it is those who acknowledge more of reality who will win out over those who acknowledge less of reality. Hypocrisy costs mental energy, and when incentivized enough and fully internalized can lead to bad decisions. The few who can look the chaos in the eye and not flinch will best those whose ego-assuaging lies act to divert them from the path of personal happiness. A downwardly spiraling feedback loop can result when hypocrisy is allowed to run rampant, as one bad decision after another coaxes ever more contorted pretty lies to stave off the chilling self-realization that creeps up in the deep black of night when solitude enshrouds.

There is one truth that will always be heard. The shiver down the back of your neck late at night never lies.

Filed under: Biomechanics is God, Pretty Lies, Ugly Truths

Brendan Nyhan has a great post about Charles Krauthammer and his claims about the mental illness of some of his political opponents. This is notable, and somewhat more than standard political misbehavior, in that Krauthammer is actually a psychiatrist. Some examples:
-“Now, I cannot testify to Howard Dean’s sanity before this campaign, but five terms as governor by a man with no visible tics and no history of involuntary confinement is pretty good evidence of a normal mental status. When he avers, however, that ‘the most interesting’ theory as to why the president is ‘suppressing’ the Sept. 11 report is that Bush knew about Sept. 11 in advance, it’s time to check on thorazine supplies.” (Washington Post, 12/5/03)
-“Well, it looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again.” (Fox Special Report, 5/25/04) And yet at other times, Krauthammer has disavowed precisely this sort of stuff, writing:
As a former psychiatrist, I know how difficult it is to try to understand the soul of even someone you have spent hundreds of hours alone with in therapy. To think that one can decipher the inner life of some distant public figure is folly. Even the experts haven’t a clue. Remember that group of psychiatrists, …