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Secrets of the Phallus: Why is the Penis Shaped Like That? →
If you’ve ever had a good, long look at the human phallus, whether yours or someone else’s, you’ve probably scratched your head over such a peculiarly shaped device. Let’s face it—it’s not the most intuitively shaped appendage in all of evolution. But according to evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany, the human penis is actually an impressive “tool” in the truest sense of the word, one manufactured by nature over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.
(thanks, Nostrich)
Ahh, the semen displacement hypothesis (that the “coronal ridge” on the end of the penis was evolved to remove semen from previous partners during intercourse).
When we talked about this paper in my Paternity, Fidelity, and Parenting class last semester, I think I dropped the best line of my discussion section career. We had just read about the study (described in this article as well), where college students males were found to “thrust deeper and faster, in the wake of allegations of female cheating.”
I argued that this wasn’t really a new discovery, rather it was a commonly held notion. To back up my claim, I quoted R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet Part 4.” Kelly is suspecting his wife of cheating (“And a man picked up the phone…”), but has sex with her as soon as he gets home. But not just any sex, “And that’s when I started going crazy / Like I was trying to give her a baby.” I’m not sure my professor enjoyed the reference.
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Momzilla Attacks!
Well-educated, conservative mother Karin Morin writes a piece in the National Review about her family’s “adventures in gender-neutral housing.” According to the article, the daughter gets “stuck” by her co-op in a room with two guys and a girl and is unable to switch out of the room. When Stanford refuses to move her to a new room, the parents withhold tuition payments (“If Stanford had informed us that it was allowing such housing, we would have required her either to transfer out or to find another source of funding.”).
Nutty parent overreacts to liberal college policy is old news, though. It’s the “web two oh” that makes this story interesting.
First, the NYTimes’ college admission blog links to the article. The comment responses devolve into easily predicted chaos - but a two gems stand out among the flames.
Both Mom and Daughter have left detailed comments, explaining their positions. Mom claims she “take[s] no particular pleasure in putting my family situation into the public eye” (then why personalize the story?).
Daughter, on the other hand, summarizes the situation perfectly:
This conflict has very little to do with Stanford and gender-neutral housing. Is has everything to do with my parents having a hard time adjusting to the fact that I’m out of the house (I’m the oldest), I’m 3000 miles away, and -especially- that I’m a liberal agnostic while they are conservative Catholics. The NR really should have looked into this situation a little bit before publishing that article.
I can’t believe I’m having to write this in the NYT blog. This is ridiculous.
What’s a loony parent to do, when even your best attempts at turning your family drama into a conservative uprising can get shot down by your liberal daughter on the Internet?
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Office 2010 Screenshots Preview What’s to Come
And… I’m glad I’m over here in Mac-webdev-land, not over there in Windows-Office-world. It’s amazing that anyone over there gets anything done at all. (Do they?)
They’ve come so far…
Marco’s right in a sense - it is impossible to get anything done in Windows-Office-world because of the countless feature design meetings, security/globalization/localization/compatibility/performance committee reviews, and so on.
That said, I think a lot of his snark is off-base; Office 2007 is a great app (Steve Sinofsky exercised some top-down control and a ton of bloat got cut out as a result). It’ll be interesting to see how 2010 shapes up, now that Sinofsky is over running Windows development now (I’m actually typing this on a Win7 machine - and it’s a huge improvement over Vista).
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savage inequalities live on →
(via kathychoi)
Tumblr-dilemma: What do you do when you like a post about an unpleasant topic (i.e. this one)? Is a “like” appropriate?
What about when someone writes something personal and mildly depressing? Sometimes I want to “like” the post, as sort of a “pat on the back, i’m with you” statement. But I’m afraid it will come off as “that jackass 2arrs2ells is basking in my misery.”
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Disposable blogs?
What do you call the genre that contains the following?
- thisiswhyyourefat
- mymomisafob
- fuckyeahsharks
- scanwhiches
- sadguysontradingfloors
- dailypuppy
- awkwardboners (the latest to land on my Dashboard)
- And at least hundreds more, I imagine.
The best I can come up with is disposable blogs (or maybe single-serving blogs, with a nod to Fight Club).
Is there already a term for these kinds of humorous (or adorable) photo blogs (usually hosted on Tumblr)?
Photo reblogged from Daily Meh with 8 notes
This is the frequency of the “happy” and “happiness” keywords on Tumblr, from Tumblr’s trends interface. Interestingly, there are significant peaks on March 17 and April 1. Let’s hopscotch over the methodological errors and assume that this means people, or at least people on Tumblr, are actually significantly happier on those days. What does that mean?
Well, as far as I can tell, the most significant thing about those days is that they’re St. Patrick’s Day and April Fool’s Day, respectively. If you compare with Google trends, there are also peaks at these days, but they are local peaks, they’re not as significant as on Tumblr, and they are overtaken by larger peaks on other days. I think happy people are more likely to write blog posts with “happy” as a keyword than they are to google “happy” — after all, they shouldn’t have to, when they’re already happy, but they might very well want to share that with their blog readers — so let’s ignore that inconvenient nugget. With overconfidence to match the silliness of this whole exercise, what can we conclude? Well, it appears that to make the world a happier place, we need more informal holidays. Nothing like a day of drinking or pulling pranks on your friends to lift the global mood, at least among tumblrs.
Before making that proposition to your favorite politician, though, consider this: isn’t it true that too many holidays would diminish their value? If you have ten days a year dedicated to having fun, chances are you will. But if every other day was a Fun Day, then — even without considering the practical consequences of spending that much time on hedonistic pursuits — you’d just end up sweating it and overlaboring and getting bored, not having fun at all.
Clearly, as our
anecdotal evidencescientifically valid trend data suggest, there’s a causal arrow Informal Holiday → Happiness. But what’s the optimal number and spacing of informal holidays?
I love this analysis. A few random thoughts I had:
- Assuming that holidays do increase happiness (or average utility), do they diminish productivity? I know absenteeism is rampant on St. Patrick’s day (not to mention Guiness pushing to make it a national holiday) — and we could probably think of cases where April Fools’ Day causes distractions as well. What sort of a GDP hit would we tolerate for a happiness boost? Is this a more or less efficient than mandatory vacations or enforcing shorter workweeks?
- Is it possible that the optimal amount of happiness comes with zero holidays? Maybe without short bursts of happiness from external forces, we’ll all come to find happiness in our daily routine? (Or maybe my Buddhism class is just causing me to spout incoherent thoughts?)
- It seems that Tumblr Trends is pretty intelligent (or really stupid, but my money is on the former). Check out a search for happy, sad, happiness, sadness. It seems like the lines for “happy” and “happiness” are the same — Tumblr is combining synonyms (or similar words) in its searches.
- On a similar, but stranger note, the graph I’m getting for “happiness” isn’t the same as dailymeh’s - mine shows a hangover effect after March 17th that makes it seem like St. Patricks’ day is happiness-decreasing net on net. April Fools Day doesn’t have the same problem.
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GetOutofCambridge.com
Background
A couple of Harvard students started Get Out of Cambridge (GOoC), a pretty simple site that lets you share taxis (and car rides, eventually) as well as book flights (with Harvard vacation dates baked into the date picker).
Controversy
Today the UC decided to “endorse” GOoC, as well as contribute $200 towards GOoC’s publicity (facebook ads, door-dropped banners, etc). As far as anyone can tell, this seems to be the first time the UC has given money to a for-profit student business.
My Take
GOoC is a pretty smart idea, with a few nasty flaws in execution.
It’s definitely a pain in the ass to look up vacation dates (this iCal subscription helps). Mashing up this info with a date picker for flights is a solid idea, and the taxi/ride share platform could become a great way to generate traffic. But, the site’s date picker is sort of broken (riddle: try to modify your departure date after choosing your return date). And I’ll be sticking with kayak because GOoC has no way to search for flexible dates, multiple airports, etc. Not to mention the whole taxi/ride sharing thing has failed in the past…This could be pretty profitable (aka I’m kicking myself for not doing it myself).
GOoC affiliates pay between $0.25/click (kayak) and $7/ticket (studentuniverse). If the site gets some traction, I could see it bringing in anywhere from ~$4k/year (10% of students booking 2 flights/year) to ~$25k/year (40% of students booking 3 flights/year).I can’t believe the UC funded this.
Admittedly, the amount was pretty trivial. That said, on principle the UC shouldn’t be funding for-profit student ventures with termbilled funds. And even if the UC wanted to play venture capitalist, it should “invest” in startups that actually need the money! GOoC is already up and running, it has next to no costs, and (as Joyce Zhang pointed out on UC-open) there are countless ways to publicize that are both free and more effective than doordropping + facebook ads.
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Sid and I got into a discussion earlier today about keyboard shortcuts for switching to the next tab, and this chart (high-res version) was the result.
The first takeaway is how absurdly non-standardized this is… could you imagine how difficult things would be if “Next Window” or “Next Application” were this different from application to application?
Next, it seems like Cmd-} is the winner, at least on the Mac side of things. It doesn’t conflict with Tumblr’s next/previous page (and TextWrangler’s shortcuts are easily customized - unlike Firefox’s).
Finally, I’m blown away by the subconsciousness of keyboard shortcuts. I can switch tabs in all of these applications, but I was entirely unable to list any of the shortcuts from memory.
A few random notes:
* I tried to sort my chart top->bottom by frequency of use, and left->right by popularity of the shortcut.
* Safari’s support for Shift-Command-Right Arrow is very strange (it doesn’t work for empty tabs or when focus is in a text field). Gruber has a good explanation.
* While researching, I stumbled across a great page on OS X System Key Bindings (plus handy guide to defaults)
* There’s been some speculation (although I can’t seem to find a link now), that the new tabs in Safari 4 will be system-wide in Snow Leopard — and possibly available as a Cocoa control for developers to use. I’m not sure if this would solve the keyboard shortcut problem at all, but it would lead to more standardization in tab appearance + behavior.
* Making classy-looking tables is easy in Numers.
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Extreme Beer Fest: The Morning After
Last night was the Extreme Beer Fest - my first taste of hardcore beer geekdom (but more of that ahead it seems).
Disclaimer: I got a bit sloshed by the end of the night, so take my opinions with a grain of salt (or, better yet, a couple Tylenol)
Some particularly noteworthy brews:
Allagash - Gargamel
My favorite beer of the fest. Great fruit and wood flavors, and amazing feel. I think I’m making a trip to Maine to buy some and tour the brewery. (Also got to meet Allgash’s owner again, what a cool guy).
Rogue - Chipotle Ale
This left my mouth tingling (and my taste buds happy). Harpoon had a similar chili-infused brew, which wasn’t quite as good.
Founders - Canadian Breakfast Stout
Stouts tend to have delicious names (“chocolate”, “oatmeal”, “coffee”) but always leave me disappointed with a generally bitter taste and only hints of the named ingredients. Canadian Breakfast shocked me with its genuinely sweet (but not overpowering) flavor, thanks to the maple syrup it’s brewed with.
Shmaltz - Freaktoberfest
Bright red (colored with “zombie blood” according to the brewer I talked to), 6.66% ABV, and tasty. I’d never heard of Shmaltz before the fest - they’re hilarious! They brew kosher beer, have some hilarious names (“Jewbilation” “Genesis Ale”), and great design.
Foothills - Pappy Van Winkle Seeing Double IPA
You know how biracial children are often incredibly beautiful? This is just like that. A great, hoppy IPA had a one night stand with an amazing bourbon, and this beauty came nine months later. (The mixing comes from aging the beer in old bourbon barrels).
Boston Brewing Company - Imperial White
This beer scares me. It’s probably not going to be too hard to track down (Sam Adams has crazy distribution). It’s incredibly drinkable and delicious. And it’s 10% ABV. (At least they’re selling it in 4-packs, not sixes). T-Boz will love this.
Okay, because I could easily spend the rest of the night musing on beer, I’m going to be a bit more concise for my “honorable mentions”
Lost Abbey - Phunky Duck (Can’t wait for the Duck Duck Gooze)
Tröegs - Mad Elf
Captain Lawrence - Rosso e Marrone (Best aftertaste of the fest)
Dogfish Head - World Wide Stout (18% ABV!)
Short’s - PB & J (tasted like pb&j…)
Stone - Dry-Hopped 2009 Old Guardian Barleywine (Reeked of hops)
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If Tumblr ran the Internet (part 2)
Twitter would keep “page breaks” consistent as you read through tweets.
Twitter always shows you the 21st-most-recent tweet at the top of Page 2. This is frustrating if you’re reading through old tweets as people are twittering - because the new tweets will “push” old tweets to the next page, and you’ll end up seeing tweets multiple times.
Tumblr is much smarter about this, and “freezes” your dashboard as you read through it. When you navigate to the next page, you see the next group of posts without repeats. New posts don’t show up (and “push” everything down) until you refresh the dashboard home.
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