In this Weekend’s Review: Feb 19-20

Why Are Men Today Such Losers?by Kay S. Hymowitz

Two Cheers for the Maligned Slacker Dude by Nathan Rabin

and more…

At the End of the Day: 2/18/11

Endnotes:

• A handy primer on Bahrain
• That zombie-game trailer everyone’s talking about
• A plea for software “with opinion and attitude”
• If you say, “It’s 3 p.m.,” and it’s technically “3:01,” are you correct?
• How people split the rent (although an auction for rooms would be fairest)

Why Egypt Needs a Two-Round Presidential Election

In the coming months, it appears Egypt will be rewriting its constitutional laws, which will include rules for conducting elections.  If Egypt retains a presidential system of government, then the rules for electing the Egyptian president will be of paramount importance.  Outside of the United States—which uses a convoluted indirect system of electing its president—most countries with presidential systems employ one of the following two direct ways of electing their president….

Woodpecker Skulls: Ultimate Shock-Absorbers

What do woodpeckers have to do with cell phones? In a few years, lessons learned from woodpecker skulls may be helping protect the delicate electronics inside your smartphone and other devices.

As you may not be surprised to learn, the woodpecker’s head is astonishingly well-adapted for dealing with shock: The birds strike trees 20 times a second, each time with an impact of 1,200 g’s, and they fly away without brain damage. Several biological features make this possible, as a new paper notes: An oversize, somewhat elastic beak absorbs some of the impact. It connects to spongy bone that drains off yet more. Then harder bone arrives as a final brain-shield. What’s more, a tendon-like filament called the hyoid encompasses the woodpecker’s skull and helps dissipate vibration, while also supporting the tongue and throat.

The authors of the paper, in the March issue of Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, first analyzed these characteristics then did their best to reproduce them….

Re-imagining How We Interact With Computers

Steven Poole’s manifesto against “chrome,” at 3 Quarks Daily, is one of the most thought-provoking pieces I’ve read this month, though he raises more issues than he resolves, I think. Chrome, for the uninitiated (which included me), refers to the graphical user interface on your computer: buttons to open and close windows, the browser frame that’s supposed to look like metal or translucent plastic, a “save” icon that looks like an old-school floppy disk. “Me, I hate this stuff,” he writes. “I think it’s not only useless but pernicious and sometimes actively misleading.”

Among the worst offenders, he suggests, is the iBooks app, for the iPad, which lovingly recreates the look of a physical book, down to animated page turns that mimic what you’d see if you were flipping paper. (Here’s the “actively misleading” part: you can see the “edges” of the “pages” you haven’t read yet, but they look the same no matter where you are in the book.)…

At the End of the Day: 2/17/11

Endnotes:

• America not that exceptional when it comes to drinking
• Spray-on tans, okay. But spray-on solar panels?
• Technology has changed the geography of prostitution
• How difficult is the theory of relativity?

A Creative Solution to the Ticket-Scalping ‘Problem’

LCD Soundsystem, which vies with Arcade Fire for the title of Band Most Beloved By Hipsters, recently decided to add more shows in New York, after scalpers started charging thousands of dollars for its April 2nd performance at Madison Square Garden.

The band’s frontman, James Murphy, seemed to find the very existence of scalpers to be a moral abomination. But Matt Yglesias, taking the view of an economist, says the problem is mainly, and simply, that most bands price their tickets below what the market will bear. Of course, indie bands don’t want to come across as price-gougers, so they balk at selling $500 seats, with the result that scalpers end up earning the difference between face value and market value. Yglesias sees a way around that obstacle:

We Lost on Jeopardy

It was on the second night of the Man vs Machine Jeopardy match that the Sony nightmare appeared to be coming true.

Throughout all of the negotiations between IBM and Jeopardy!, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, each side had been obsessed with its own disaster scenario.

IBM, of course, worried that its computer, Watson, would lose and look foolish, embarrassing the company and the team.

Jeopardy, meanwhile, worried that Watson would grow too smart and too fast, and steamroll the human competition. This would be demoralizing and, worse, bad entertainment.

Bullying: Not Just for the Maladjusted!

Contradicting the notion that bullying is done by a scattered bunch of maladjusted youth, a new study finds that it’s an “instrumental” tactic that many moderately popular students make use of as they climb the social ladder—until they reach very the top, where it’s cast aside as no longer necessary.

The study drew on surveys of 3,722 students in North Carolina, at 19 middle schools and high schools, conducted in 2004 and 2005. The students named their five best friends—helping researchers to calculate their “network centrality,” or popularity—and up to five students they picked on, or who picked on them (or both).

The rate of hostile verbal and physical acts was low, with the average student picking on .63 other students, and two-thirds doing no bullying. But it rose steadily from the lowest level of popularity (a large group: 17% had a social-network score of zero) to the 98th percentile, when it began to decline. Students at the 98th percentile were 38% more aggressive than the least popular kids, yet they were also 40% more aggressive than students at the absolute pinnacle, who seem to view themselves as above the scrum….

Female ‘Vocalization’ During Sex

Men hear an enthusiastic homage to their efforts. But many women are actually thinking: “Hurry up please, it’s time.”

A study has identified what it refers to as a “dissociation” between the timing of female “vocalizations” during sex, to use the scientific term, and female orgasms. …