Where Is Joel?

Every year the U of A seems to have some kind anti-drinking campaign. They often are based around some kind of questionable social norming. AKA. “The average number of drinks a student has on a night out is 4.6.” or something. Usually the number presented is so laughable that you know there is something fishy about the statistics.

This year though the campaign is the worst. There are several posters involving the outcome of the evening as you drink more. And in every case they involve worse and worse outcomes as you drink more until you reach the “worst” outcome, which is always something ridiculous, but can also often be construes as the best possible outcome.

Poor advertising

Here at the most drinks the outcome is “walk of shame”.  This is college!  For many college students the best possible outcome for the night is walk of shame.  Basically the message this poster sends is if you are too drunk and having a shitty night drink more and something good will happen.  Not that I actually believe these posters really ever accomplish their goals, but still.  This is horrible.

Something you may or may not have all noticed of late is that the new cool thing for girls to wear this year is tights. (Leggings??? I’m not really sure…) There are girls running around everywhere in knee high boots, leggings and a tee shirt. Wearing this around two years ago would have looked ridiculous and totally out of place. Then 3 years ago girls were wearing around those pregnancy shirts which would have looked ridiculous two years before and…. Well you get it.

For men however there are no such similar rapid paradigm shifts in what we wear. One year big lapels are in, the next year small. One year big ties are in the next year small. Nothing game changing. Why is it that women’s fashion changes so much faster and more dramatically than men’s?

A while ago I read a study about the effects of clothing on male and female perception of the opposite sex. What it boiled down to was that how attractive men found women was primarily correlated to the woman they were looking at regardless of what she was wearing. How attractive women found men was strongly correlated to what the men were wearing and how they were groomed. Men can tell if a woman is good looking even if she is disheveled and wearing sweats and can tell they don’t find a woman attractive even when she is dressed to the nines. A below average looking man can, however, look very attractive by wearing properly fitting nice clothes and doing their hair. This puts moderately attractive women at a greater reproductive disadvantage with respect to their more attractive peers than moderately attractive men.

When a rapid paradigm shift in fashion occurs for a short period of time men are exposed to clothes on women they have not experienced in a long time or ever and are thus unable to evaluate how attractive a woman wearing the new clothes are. Women who are fairly attractive might then be evaluated by a man as being extremely attractive thereby closing the gap caused by men’s ability to generally to evaluate a woman’s attractiveness irrespective of what she is wearing. Because of this for all but the most attractive women it is reproductively favourable to frequently cause rapid fashion changes in order to break down the borders between them and the most attractive women. For men this need does not exist as we can already increase our attractiveness without having to break through social stigma of totally new clothes.

…
Just a theory, but I think it’s because of the way men and women react to how each other are dressed.

I have in the past complained about transparency in science in light of the whole Scott Reuben disaster which I seemed to be the only person in the entire world who got really mad about. This is about something different, the accessibility of science to the public.

It seems to me that over the last 50 years scientists have done an excellent job of alienating themselves. Just over half of a century ago people like Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr were celebrities. Thomas Edison was reshaping the face of the world. Galileo was so controversial and interesting in his time that we *still* talk about his life. People put fish on their cars with Darwin’s name in them. What scientists alive now so stir the imaginations of the public?

Stephen Hawking perhaps. David Suzuki?? People aren’t as captivated by science as they once were. In my opinion there are two primary reasons for this.

1) In an age of access to access to information, access to scientific information is still lacking. Status in academia is entirely based on publishing in reputable journals and reputable journals always charge to read the papers that are published.

2) Works that are published are often incredibly boring. I’m not sure when someone mandated that scientific writing needs to be dry. Obviously some disciplines like control theory are not very interesting and not much can be done but, seriously, if you did something worthwhile then you should at *least* be able to write an interesting abstract.

Given that I believe these are the problems what can be done? First we need to open up science. With many disciplines opening up via social media and sharing information more openly science needs to follow suit. PLOSone is a good start. Lets keep it up. I’m not sue what else needs to be done. Imma ponder this for a while.

Suggestions??

As much as I love Edmonton, for a few months in the winter it does become a very unpleasant place. It’s cold every day for months and the sun is up after I leave for school in the morning and down before I go home at night. I usually kind of spend these few months as a grumpy hermit with the only upside being grumpy hermits seem to get a ton of work done and I need to get said ton of work done! I was thinking yesterday as the sun ended it’s daily trek across the sky at shortly before 5 o’clock and the days were showing signs of not returning to warm for another 4 months, “This is really a very marginal climate”.

In economics there is a concept that when some sort of business is operating in a “marginal” environment, the profit it is able to make is what determines the profit of businesses in more prime environments. Let me do a simple quick glossy explanation. Say there are two Starbucks stores, one at the exit to a busy LRT stop where people are getting off for work wanting coffee and one on a quiet street corner where the occasional patron stops in on their way to whatever they might be doing. If the quiet street corner is the worst location a Starbucks can operate and make a reasonable profit then this is the marginal location. Now if the costs of operating the Starbucks in the train station are low enough that it makes more money than the Starbucks on the quiet corner it would make sense for the owner of the Starbucks on the corner to try and acquire the more profitable location hence driving up property/rent/other costs at the more profitable location until it is once again on par with the less profitable. Obviously not all Starbucks are equally as profitable, but the concept is still valid, economies just aren’t perfectly fluid.

This made me think about whether there was some such similar concept with regards to where we live and the happiness we derive from that location. If people in Los Angeles, where they don’t have as ludicrously short days or cold winters as Edmonton, were happier in general than Edmontonians then it would make sense for Edmontonians to leave Edmonton for Los Angeles. Is there some mechanism whereby the influx of people to the happier locations causes more pollution/crime etc. so that on a generational level the happiness of humans in all locations is determined by the happiness of the humans on the margin? Is there perhaps on the other hand some restrictive force causing human relocation and happiness to not be a fluid enough economic system for the balancing to occur? I can see that the latter might be the case if you were a starving farmer living day to day in a third world country, but on a generational level I can’t imagine a similar mechanism preventing relocation between countries of at least medium wealth? Immigration laws?? Hard to say. Interesting to think about though.

I received another interesting blog comment the other day:

“I’m going to be doing some anal on my site, just for you.”

Ok, this seems like pretty standard porn spam. What makes the comment interesting is that it links back to what actually looks like some kind of russian design blog. What a weird way to advertise your blog!