Teen Pregnancy -> Poor Pregnancy

I think we should start referring to teen pregnancy as poor pregnancy, as being poor/black/hispanic/latino is far more likely to result in you getting teen pregnant than being a teenager is.

Also as babies of women that are 40+ have more birth defects than babies of teenage women, i have to conclude that crusades against teen pregnancy aren't about helping society as much as it is just tabloid fodder.


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Super Macdonalds Toy

All the glory and amazingness! Only a few days behind on the trend, but, it's still good.



wtf am i looking at you ask? Well, apparently the newest Macdonalds toy can balance an enormous amount of weight on its head. If that isn't amazing, just think about how much coverage such a silly thing is getting!


http://loghima.soup.io/post/78228642/Sasuke-Figurine-from-McDonald-in-Japan-Taiwan

youtube video (chinese/taiwanese) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp5rPNJ5_zA

Wait, recent American Hero was gay?

Think back to two weeks ago. Remember that airline worker that yelled at a rude customer over the plane intercom, took two beers and then left the flight through the safety doors via inflatable raft? Ya know, hero to dissatisfied, trapped American laborers everywhere? When the police showed up at his house he was having sex? (Source: Steven Colbert) Okay, according to that edition of Bloomberg Businessweek, flight attendant Steven Slater "was lounging in bed with his boyfriend when police came to arrest him at his-

WAIT. BOYFRIEND?!


America, this hero was gay (or bisexual). God I love this country. (also male flight attendant should have totally been a tip-off)

anyway if you totally missed this story you can relive the forum wars here http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100810/bs_yblog_upshot/rogue-jetblue-flight-attendant-being-hailed-as-a-modern-american-working-class-hero

Record heat not quite reached

I kept hearing that Boston beat its old-new-record-breaking-record this summer but i couldn't find any articles to back it up. Well, here's something similar then:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/nyregion/02heat.html

Last day of August, friends. Summer 2010 is ending. Hope it went well for everyone!

price anchoring

I've been reading Priceless recently, by William Poundstone (or something) and jeez is that book bad at things. As a psychologist i have to say that i know pretty much everything it mentions, as a normal person i have to say the book is balls hard to understand and terrible at conveying concepts to laypeople when the concepts are hard and spend too much time on it when the concepts are easy. Well, i'm still reading it, so if you're going to get it for free you might as well give it a flip through - it's told in many many short chapters so you won't get bored.

One of the concepts in Priceless is Price Anchoring, which can be thought of as a fun thing stores do when they put up an expensive item in the window and then relative inexpensive items next to it. Think of a luxury store, with a $8000 handbag on display and some $2000 handbags nearby. The $2000 handbags are only a little lower quality than the $8000 one. Well, they don't expect to sell the $8000 one, maybe ever, but they're putting it there so you think the $2000 one is a bargain.

Okay, maybe you'll never buy a $2000 handbag, but what about this? A gift store is selling things in the $40-$60 range. .. a bit too much for you. But all of a sudden that $7 keychain is looking pretty good.

You've been sent out to buy milk, but you have no idea what milk is supposed to cost anymore. There's a sketchy store brand for $2.39 and a popular brand out for $2.69 and a possibly organic one for sale at $2.99. Well, better go for one in the middle! Stores know you think like this. When they make cheap store brand milk, they don't expect you to buy it, they just want to drive up sales for the other two. Also, you just paid $7 for a keychain and felt like it was a bargain, didn't you?

What i thought was really interesting was that someone in the book called the handbag example "anger-happy reaction" or something. People are angry they can't afford the $8000 celebrity handbag, so they try to make themselves happy by buying the $2000 one. Hey, it's still brand name isn't it? And i saved $6000 here!

"look this one is only $160! Isn't that amazing?"
"Hey Lily what's Breloom's base attack?"
".. uhm, 130 or 135 or something?"
"Isn't that really good?"
"Yeah it's awesome"
"What pokemon has 160 attack?"
".... Slaking and Regigigas?"
"Pretty awesome huh?"
"But they're too slow"
"...You still going to get that handbag?"
"Guess not."

POKEFANS HAVE RESISTANCE TO PRICE ANCHORING - get around it by re-anchoring. DO YOUR BEST, FRIENDS!


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The Atlantic magazine explains the end of men and the rise of women

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/

the tl;dr - we're going to need some menimists soon, once they realize they're being screwed over by gender norms too.



"The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true. Women in poor parts of India are learning English faster than men to meet the demands of new global call centers. Women own more than 40 percent of private businesses in China, where a red Ferrari is the new status symbol for female entrepreneurs. Last year, Iceland elected Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, the world’s first openly lesbian head of state, who campaigned explicitly against the male elite she claimed had destroyed the nation’s banking system, and who vowed to end the “age of testosterone.”

Yes, the U.S. still has a wage gap, one that can be convincingly explained—at least in part—by discrimination. Yes, women still do most of the child care. And yes, the upper reaches of society are still dominated by men. But given the power of the forces pushing at the economy, this setup feels like the last gasp of a dying age rather than the permanent establishment."


Somewhere along the line, someone screwed up. Guys, the point of being in charge is keeping yourself in charge. ..lol.

Though, the way I see it, women have been in charge the whole time (not that i've seen anything before the 1990s). Even if they didn't have the physical strength to get themselves bear meat for dinner, making someone else do it seems even more skillful. Yeah, sounds like something John Adams would say, huh? From the era of women-are-too-good-for-power-games-and-the-real-world...
If you're an honorable woman though, you know that the only way to make someone get a bear for you is to know how to get a bear yourself. Making someone do something for you because you can't is weak - making someone do something for you because you don't want to do it yourself is being in control. Thanks to the feminist movement in the 70s, women learned how to take down bears by themselves! .. or something.

yes, bears is a metaphor.




"Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer"


well... fuck. women will never dominate computer engineering, unfortunately, even if they are the ones buying the computers. I guess Geek Squad is about to be the new plumber-role. On janitors... i'm not sure it's male dominated, with cleaning conglomerates like One Source around, just hiring mostly young Mexican ladies to do everything.



One ironic thing about this article: It starts by saying apocalyptic predictions from the past are never true (now that couples can pick the gender of their baby, there will no longer be female babies..) but ends by making one of its own (now that the economy is better suited for women, men are going to be a thing of the past)


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gamers may be better at controling their dreams

http://www.livescience.com/culture/video-games-control-dreams-100525.html

the tl;dr - People who play videogames have a higher rate of lucid dreaming and think aggressive nightmares are fun to mess around in.

While i don't think that applies to any of my friends, it's definitely true for me, haha. This whole time i thought i was just super-lucky.. well, now you too can have fun ninja monster truck pokemon assassin battles in your high school!

"Update (March 22): I’m pretty sure the ratio of Haibaos to Shanghai residents is something like 5:1."

http://johannayueh.com/blog/2010/03/17/world-expo-is-really-only-about-china/

is it? maybe it is... and that's better than the alternative
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"New Age Terrorists Develop Homeopathic Bomb"

satire from some other site (British)

http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2010/04/20/new-age-terrorists-develop-homeopathic-bomb/

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internet super heroin g with facebook

Facebook has quietly updated recently. First of all, in the Info section you're only able to add "real" activities/interests/books/movies/etc... Typing in something it doesn't recognize gets it deleted once you push the Save button. (This may change in the future)

Now, how does facebook know what's real or not? Well... it scours wikipedia and also... facebook statuses! Once there's enough matching words throughout the vast realm that is facebook, it decides that it's worthy of its own 'Page'. (find out how many other fb users are using the phrase 'internet super heroin', go ahead, try anything.)
Yup, your activities/interests all get linked to one page, presumably so that EVERYONE that put down Lord of the Rings in some section can all gather together (new layer of security needed for everyone!) instead of gathering in the 5000+ "official LOTR" fan pages. Honorable intentions, facebook.

Also, seems like the totally legit Mertado Social Deals lives only on facebook (how this is helping them make money, i have no idea). and Pandora can now show you what your friends are listening to! I don't know when i authorized this (or how to opt out) but it's pretty cool to see that Eric hasn't been on since March 09 and James has the amazing ability to misspell his favorite songs and still hit legit titles.


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Update: Facebook used to let me search through (yup, the global pages thing again) which users put down the same employer and position as me. Now it won't. I wonder if some anti-union forces played a role in this...


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new side blog to be added

for Pokemon pillows to be sold at Anime Boston, if they're magically a big hit, then i want a website for them.

good

life is good

how the Google/China thing happened

the tl;dr - According to some guy, the US government made Google leave backdoor access on all Gmail accounts, letting Chinese hackers in.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.hacking/index.html#cnnSTCText

numbers on google.cn

Yeah, so, some numbers to back me up. In China, Google has about 35% of the search engine market share, Baidu has 60%. Similarly, Ebay finds it hard to compete against local Alibaba's Taobao and AIM/MSN with Tencent's QQ. My guess is that Google pulling out of China is

1. Likely
2. No big deal.

Especially since Chinese people love their "patriotic hackers".


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Google and China

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

the tl;dr, if an unbiased one is possible: Google blames the Chinese Government for cyberattacks against human rights activists and plans to pull google.cn out of China if things don't change.

what's interesting to read is the "links to this post" on the bottom, some of which give this article "A new approach to China" a different title and spin. On one of these sites, there sits a lone comment about how Google, like the rest of America, thinks that its duty is to show other countries "the light" until they mature into capitalists/democracies/Christians.

Unfortunately there's no way I can talk about this without being personal or unbiased. It is very hard for a Chinese person to let someone criticize the Chinese government. Most Chinese people believe that the western media has an anti-China bias and that censorship by the Chinese government is fine (though a bit overboard). However, I trust google not to pull any stupid shit.

Google doesn't have much to gain from an anti-China message; since it's 2006 entry into China the controversy has really died down. People seem to have accepted Google's "greater good" rhetoric. All was going well until Google decided hacking into the gmail accounts of human rights activists was too much. There no longer exists the "greater good" and I will applaud Google for having the courage to say 'I was wrong'. They could have tried to hide this from the public, pretend nothing was wrong and deny all knowledge... But they made the right decision. For truthfully presenting me with this deep moral dilemma, I will say

thank you

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Cell phones minus the phone

Well, this was already obvious to anyone that's paying attention, but people aren't using their cell phones to make phone calls anymore.

So here's the numbers, oddly from Fortune magazine.

In the last two years, average number of text messages sent per month has doubled from 218 to 584. The average number of calls has decreased 15%, I'm guessing to under 200 calls a month.

Combined with the data from this 2008 article, the number of cell phone calls made per month peaked at 228 in the middle of 2007 and has been slowly falling since. The average amount of time spent talking on a cell phone per month seems to be 13 hours.

In other news, it's hard to find any statistics on cell phones that aren't about how cell phones cause car accidents


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