The Informavore

Ah…the untamed wild of our neighbors to the north. When our Canadian brethren aren’t busy dousing french fries with gravy, savoring ham-like bacon or enjoying universal health care, they sometimes engage in a leisurely game of hand-to-jaw combat with wildlife that preys on the family pet. While taking her puppy out, Marie Simon noticed the pup kept trying to run back into the house. She turns to see a coyote lunging for the dog. She grabs the coyote, tosses the puppy out of danger and PUNCHES THE COYOTE IN THE JAW. It runs away. The puppy is safe. The woman gets treated for minor scratches and a rabies vaccine.

Marie Simon, you are woman and I hear you roar.

I too, am the owner of a small dog that probably looks like a T.G.I.Friday’s Puppetizer to most large predators. Usually when I come home I’m greeted with bounding energy and a wellspring of affection. But not yesterday.

When I returned home to a lethargic dog that preferred to lay on the frozen ground than run around outside, I grew concerned. I called the vet’s office. Nothing says good times like, “Wait around for vomit or diarrhea, then call us.” Still, she’s lumbering around looking pathetic. Corey pointed out that perhaps the giant Busy Bone I gave her for her birthday the day before was a bad idea. I waited her out. We sat on the couch, mostly motionless until Corey returned from class at 9 p.m.

Naturally, the little monster ran like a toddler on a 5-hour energy drink binge to the door when Corey returned home, catapulting off the side of the couch and acting like nothing had been wrong. I gave her the side eye for making me sound crazy. She’s been all over Corey over the past few months. Go figure. I’d still punch a coyote for her. But when it comes to the rabbits that taunt her during the summer? She’s on her own.

In other canine related news, I ran across this poem by Jack McCarthy the other day and it made me melt. Read through to the end…and try not to drip on your computer. He’s wonderful. If you agree…go buy his stuff. Support the arts!

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BoingBoing posted a link to the online game Pick the Perp. You’re posed a question, such as “Who was charged with Robbery?” then you pick from a series of 5 photographs who you think the perp is.

According to the site:

Booking mug shots and related information is gathered from arrest records from open sheriff’s web sites in the United States of America. Those appearing here have not been convicted of the arrest charge and are presumed innocent. Do not rely on this site to determine any person’s actual criminal record.

What’s interesting (that BoingBoing and Pick the Perp don’t point out) is how quickly this game goes from amusing to slightly stomach turning. Whenever you find yourself staring at five complete strangers and wondering, “Who looks like a heroin user? Which one of you look like you’d be involved in a domestic dispute?” only to guess wrong (or sadly, right) you can’t help but wonder if it’s an educated guess or a profile in socio-economic/racial/gender profiling. I secretly started to wonder if this was an elaborate ruse being conducted by psychology or communication scholars to test how people associated crimes with certain demographic factors in photographs…that would prove very interesting when discussing profiling and jury bias, perhaps?

In defense of educated guesses though, look for orange jumpsuits on serious offenses and wonky eyes for those who were charged with being under the influences.

Burger King thinks so.

Adweek:

“The fast-food chain has released the Whopper Sacrifice application on Facebook. The app rewards people with a coupon for BK’s signature burger when they cull 10 friends. Each time a friend is excommunicated, the application sends a notification to the banished party via Facebook’s news feed explaining that the user’s love for the unlucky soul is less than his or her zeal for the Whopper.

The effort crafted by Crispin Porter + Bogusky came about after agency creative staffers confronted the too-many-friends scenario themselves on Facebook.

“We thought there could be some fun there, removing some of these people who are friends [but] not necessarily] best friends,” said Jeff Benjamin, executive interactive creative director at Crispin, and friend to 736 on Facebook. “It’s asking the question of which love is bigger, your love for your friends or your love for the Whopper,” he said.

The app also adds a box to user profile pages charting their progress toward the free burger with the line, “Who will be the next to go?”

Really, Burger King? REALLY?

Now – I can buy the sacrificing part. In a way – it’s kind of clever. But sending a message to the sacrificee about their “less-than-Whopper-like” status among the sacrificer? REALLY? Most folk I know take that shit PERSONALLY.

On the bright side, when you’re laid up in the hospital from your coronary from consuming too many Whoppers – that’s ten less people crowding up the place during visiting hours.

Then again – this is all the King really wants. Free advertising and publicity. (Shakes fist in air) I’ll get you next time – marketers!

I figure that the universe must be nudging me toward this nugget if I found the article on the New Scientist while hearing about it on G4′s coverage of the CES. Apparently – not only was Tetris useful in treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – but has also been shown to help treat head injuries. So – let this be a lesson to you – keep a Tetris app on your iPhone in the event you find yourself in a bar fight, spontaneous street hockey game or nasty Vespa accident.

Emily Holmes and colleagues at the University of Oxford theorised that Tetris would work like a “cognitive vaccine,” and immunise patients from future haunting memories of wars, crimes or accidents.

This isn’t the first time video games have been used to treat PTSD. Psychologists and computer scientists have successfully deployed virtual reality scenes to treat Iraq war veterans, months or years after their tours ended.

What’s different about Holmes’ approach is that patients play the game within minutes of a traumatic experience. Tetris is so engrossing and mentally taxing that geometric shapes replace images of exploding grenades, car crashes and human carnage, her team hypothesises.

This seemed to work, according to a preliminary study published today in the journal PLoS ONE. Forty volunteers, aged 18 to 47, watched graphic 12-minute clips of a surgery, fatal car crashes, and a drowning. A half-hour later, twenty of the participants played Tetris for just 10 minutes. The other half sat quietly for the same time period.

Volunteers kept a diary of their thoughts for a week and returned to the lab for a follow-up visit. Overall, the Tetris players experienced fewer traumatic flashbacks than the control group — three versus seven, on average.

It’s too bad ‘Bejeweled’ doesn’t have the same effect.

As a lover of all things internet, I just wanted to direct more attention to Boing Boing’s post about the Ada Lovelace Day pledge that’s going on for March 24th this year. Put yo’ bloggin’ pants on and git to goin’!

From the pledge via BoingBoing

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Over 300 people have already signed a pledge to publish a blog post, video blog or podcast episode about a woman they admire on 24th March 2009. We need 700 more people for the pledge to be successful.

Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. But in the tech world women’s contributions often go unacknowledged and role models are hard to find. Ada Lovelace Day is a chance for us to sing the praises of the women who make tech tick: entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants… The list of tech-related careers is almost endless and we want to see examples from all of them!

Of the many things my mother admittedly regrets about my formative years – one of them was our lack luster dietary habits. She openly acknowledges the fact that she wasn’t a pro in the kitchen and I have spent years despising even the sight of Hamburger Helper Beef Stroganoff. Just typing the words conjures the smell of the boxed meal and brings my gag reflex up to attention. We drank Diet Coke all day (to the dismay of our dentists) and threw saltines with spray cheese in our bags for lunch. I reminisce over a long summer week spent with a grandfather who indulged us in meals of macaroni and chocolate ice cream. Mmmm. Now – some twenty odd years later – I’m unlearning those bad habits.

That’s not to say that I long for the other end of the pendulum swing. Not for one minute would I have wanted to live under the scrutinous eye of a microbiotic mother.

This is why I really enjoyed Laura Bennett’s commentary on “Food Nazi Moms” on AlterNet. Apparently – in conversation with a fellow parent – the other mother went on a tirade about her ex-husband’s gross negligence in packing their children’s lunches. Specifically:

He had packed a non-organic lunch for her sons. Seriously. She went on to describe the brown bags loaded with Cheetos, Go-gurt, and a sandwich that was made with white bread.

[...]She went on and on about the dangers of food additives and how they had exacerbated one of her boys’ ADHD. She talked about how each morning when her boys are in her care she takes the time to poach Amish-raised, free-range chicken and then stuffs it into a whole-grain pita with hydroponic tomatoes and micro-greens and that her ex was obviously not fit to spend time with the kids because he was willing to put their health in such grave danger.

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girltalk.blogs.com

Consider yourself global? Intercultural? Worldly? Think you could be plopped down at any international table for a meal and blend in with the locals? Or are you just struggling to not repulse your fellow diners each day?

If so – test your knowledge on this quick flash quiz on international dining customs and see how your manners stack up.

Don’t Gross Out the World

If you’re a smoker, drinker, over-eater or frequent drug user – you know all too well how the arguments go. Usually – they start with an innocuous yet well-meaning observation: “You’ve had how many packs/drinks/servings? Don’t you know how bad that is for you?” which is frequently associated with the claim, “I’m just concerned about your health.” You, on the other hand, feel as though they’re just butting in and treating you like a child. You’re capable of making your own decisions without their intervention thankyouverymuch.

If you’re a non-smoker, non-drinker, non-user of an appropriate weight – you also know all too well how the arguments go. You watch someone you know and care about begin to slip out of control. They seem to get sloppy too much too often. Their waistline continues to widen despite proclamations of being on a diet, weaning off nicotine or not having had a drink in a while. They’re blowing more literal smoke than a politician’s figurative. It’s frustrating because it’s so obviously harmful.

Inevitably – both arguments boil down to key factors: genetics, environment, willpower or addiction.

And most of the time – the arguments never really come to a satisfactory conclusion. One side may submit (with an exasperated, heavy sigh) to change for the better, yet only for the short term. The other, may reluctantly retreat from the subject matter until a later date.

Psychology Today published a list of the seven hardest addictions to quit. While love topped the list (because swooning is a natural high) and cigarettes, alcohol, heroin and cocaine also made the list – the second most difficult addiction to break was food.

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Religion and science have oft been likened to a pair of polarized and combative siblings in the family known as “Human Understanding”. While both are very distinct and definitive ways of understanding the big hot mess around us known as the world – neither of the two seem all too quick to embrace the other side, let alone shake hands with some shaky assertions. Evolution, shmevolution – the stereotype held by many is that religious folk are superstitious and oblivious to facts while scientists love carrying on godless works of arrogance in their laboratories. It’s like West Side Story but with crucifixes and lab coats – frankincense and mercury.

However – for those in the middle that cannot deny the existence of either – the blogs at Psychology Today point out that we’re not alone. While many of us understand the scientific reasons behind how things occur – we simultaneously believe that a higher power influences why those events initiated.  As Dr. Jesse Bering points out:

University of Michigan psychologist Susan Gelman and her colleagues have been exploring people’s causal reasoning about illness. These researchers have found that, at least when it comes to what goes on in our own heads, there’s not much of a conflict between religion and science. Sure, that bad case of strep throat your kid got right before your scheduled vacation to Barbados was caused by her chewing on a virus-laden pencil she’d borrowed in math class. And of course, waking up to that enormous zit at the end of your nose on the day of your big interview was caused by that new moisturiser you took a chance on. You’re not delusional: you know your basic science. But that doesn’t mean God’s not trying to tell you something by—what’s the best word here—‘authoring’ these events. Perhaps He didn’t want you lounging on that sundrenched beach because you’d have stepped on an HIV-infected needle half-buried in the sand. Or maybe God didn’t like the fact that you’d been so boastful about landing that job interview and thought you could do with a bit of humbling, so he turned you into Rudolph for a few days.

Gelman refers to this way of thinking as “co-existence reasoning,” where natural, scientific forces are viewed as directly causing a certain event, but supernatural forces are perceived simultaneously as somehow blowing life into this science. Another way to say this is that science and God often co-exist harmoniously in the same mindset, with science acting ‘proximally’ and God acting ‘distally.’ Working out the mechanical intricacies of precisely how they’re related to one another is another matter. In the case of the blemish that ruined your career prospects, did God whisper in your ear to pick up that particular brand of moisturiser while you were standing in the store aisle, perhaps seducing you to try something new by making just the right soundtrack come over the store’s speakers as you stood there deliberating between products? did He cause the manufacturing technician in Singapore to glance down at her wristwatch and put one grain too many of a certain chemical in that particular jar of moisturiser, a grain that subsequently lodged into an unfortunately placed pore?

The post does mention that while co-existence reasoning can exist – the extent to which an individual prescribes more causal power in a higher power than in science is a whole ‘nother can of intelligently designed worms. So – should you be privy to any cocktail parties that break out into a religion vs. science melee – assure folks that the rationales have been shown to co-exist without anyone spontaneously bursting into flames. Easy as that.