Boys’ Toys

I was trying to think of a way to impress Erika Price (see Erika’s comment here), when it dawned on me.

I was shopping at a big box toy store in St. Louis County tonight, accompanied by my wife and children.  I was waiting for my family to make a purchase when I realized that I had a camera available in the car. I ran out to get the camera to snap a few photos to help raise a simple question:  Are boys getting an overdose of the idea that violence is the best first approach to solving human conflict?  Asked another way, how often is it that a toy marketed to boys suggests that there are ways of solving problems other than smacking someone on the head, stabbing them, shooting them, vaporizing them or slamming them into a wall?  Based on the toys that one Toys R Us store displayed most prominently, the answer is not often. On what do I base this conclusion?  Read on and enjoy the slide show.

Before you go thinking that I am a radical pacifist.  Consider these things.  I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984.  Also consider that I loved superhero comic books growing up.  Further, I supported military action against the Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks.  Violence sometimes has a place in solving some situation, in my opinion.

But back to the store.  There’s no hint of violence in the baby toys.  There’s …

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Sunny past, dark future. Or something like that.

Earlier, I wrote about the rosy, sunny image of “the good old days” and the sad reality that those days just never existed. A body of psychological evidence explains in part why we cling to this fantasy: we have a tendency to blanket our old memories with simplicity and inaccuracy.

First, memory tests conducted on the elderly suggest that as we age, we become more likely to remember warm, pleasant experiences and steer clear of recalling negative stimuli. Though most of us associate old age with grouchiness and malcontentment, older people actually tend to filter their memories in favor of the enjoyable.

In a 2004 study at Stanford, professor of psychology Linda Cartensen asked young adults and elderly adults to view a variety of slides and then complete a memory exam on the scenes they had witnessed. Though young adults beat out the elderly on overall short-term memory, elderly adults demonstrated a remarkable ability to recall pleasing scenes, such as those of happy infants and puppies, and performed even better than their young counterparts in this regard.

Surprised at these results, Cartensen also monitored the moods and memories of adults aged 18 to 94, and found that older adults reported greater happiness and spent less time “wallowing in bad moods” that brought younger respondents down. In a review of Cartensen’s study, Psychology Today wrote that seniors tend to “revise history” to make the overall image of their life appear more appealing. The article continues:

“Pleasant memories are always invading [seniors’]

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Moral Bias

I’ve been thinking about this since the initial post on our biases and all the responses.  In the course of trying to come up with an “appropriate” response to the world, we often find ourselves caught up in endless exception-making, fudging, attempts to shoehorn certain proclivities and habits into convenient moulds so we don’t go through our days constantly flinching at our inadvertant insensitivities. 

Does it do any good?  The flinching?  I mean, after the Sixties, one had to have been living on Mars for half a century not to be aware that there had been a Big Shift away from what might be called Gross Cultural Reliance to a more nuanced approach which has been (often derisively) termed Political Correctness.  The former is a condition wherein one “borrows” wholesale from the culture to make associational choices.  It doesn’t occur in this instance to question the wisdom of the culture–it’s what it is, and we are part of it, ergo…

But we realized that the Culture At Large was in many ways an Idiot.  It stepped on people.  It made too little room for variation.  It tried to be all things to all people, but it was necessary that all people somehow be The Same in order for that to work.  Those with a vested interest in keeping everything the same mightily resisted movement to change the rules.

We never did come up with a solid formulation that allows for prejudice.

You have to, you know.  What we ended up …

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My First Post: An Initial Blog or a Horse Anchor

Post: The word by itself evokes for me a thick, square cedar pole standing up from, and presumably sunk down into the ground, waiting for the laundry line. Suppose you post a letter to the officer who posthumously posted your father to his army post in the post-war era. Words…

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Leveraging web-enabled Infomediaries

To optimize next-generation action-items, it is important to enable leading-edge models to enable one-to-one solutions thereby facilitating aggregate robust portals.  Of course, to benchmark front-end paradigms and thereby embrace user-centric architectures is probably a better way to engineer leading-edge metrics.

If you’re wincing at the above paragraph, please forgive me.  I’m just having a bit of fun, thanks to a site called “Web economy bullshit generator.”  Whenever you press the “make bullshit” button, the site gives you an impressive sounding phrase. This site has many “uses.”  For instance, see the comments to the site:

The Web Bullshit Generator is phenomenal…my resume never looked so good!
—Cory L.

This is a great job interview prep tool and provides fodder to use on chicks at the bar. I’m also going to use this in preparation for my high school reunion.
—Ryan F.

No one could ever fall for such stilted, meaningless and concocted gibberish, right?  Not so fast!  Using big words and proper syntax goes a long way to making something appear meaningful.  For example, the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, a leading journal of cultural studies contained an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The author was Alan Sokal, a real life physicist at New York University.  As indicated here, in an article by the Skeptical Inquirer’s Martin Gardner:

[Sokal’s] paper included thirteen pages of impressive endnotes and nine pages of references.”  But Sokal had actually submitted these 13 pages

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