heh:
In a report on their findings the researchers said: ‘We conclude men’s cognitive functioning may temporarily decline after an interaction with an attractive woman.’
They call it “reproductively focused cognition.”
Rest at the Daily Telegraph
Zack Venable, my old roommate from Mercyhurst, made the Times-News in Lehighton, PA this past week. He gave a presentation on Forensic entomology at the Carbon County Environmental Education Center this past weekend.
By far the best quote in the article:
“It’s not so much the sight, it’s the smell that can get to you very quickly.”
The smell also tends to stick with you the most, too. I remember my mom was canning beef a few years ago and the canner ran dry, scorching some of the meat. I just about couldn’t eat the beef after that. It smelled exactly like one of the cases that we had in the lab where a lady’s skull had been scorched. It wasn’t something that I had thought about in years, but the smell from the canner instantly brought that memory back. Anyways, read the rest of the article. Go Zack!
Zachary Venable, a forensic entomologist turned educator, presented a workshop for environmental educators on forensic entomology-using insects to help determine what has caused an animal’s death and how long since an animal died recently at the Carbon County Environmental Education Center.
I’m on a posting binge this morning. I caught up on some old Planet Money blog posts, and I saw this one TED presentation.
The speaker was introducing gapminder.org, which is a new online service to visual trends in the types of statistical data that governments and NGOs have been ferreting away since the 1960s. The idea is to be able to see the changes that have happened, and challenge many of the myths that define how we think about the world. This stuff is seriously awesome.
Interesting news release about a study of contemporary homelessness that will be published early next year in Historical Archaeology.
In the study Larry Zimmerman and Jessica Welch of IUPUI studied the material culture of homeless populations. Material culture - the clothing, utensils and other “stuff” that helps people live.
Some of their findings and even what they did not find surprised them. “We found a large number of food cans. Most had been opened, often not very successfully, with knives or by banging them against rocks or even by heating them until the contents exploded. We rarely found cans that had been opened by a can opener. That made us realize that they didn’t have can openers, which must have been very frustrating to them,” said Zimmerman.
“We also found a lot of hotel-size bottles of shampoo and conditioner, deodorant and toothpaste. Only the toothpaste was used. This tells us that giving things like shampoo and conditioner to individuals without access to water doesn’t make sense. It would be better to send these kinds of things to shelters and not distribute then to people living on the streets. When we try to deliver aid to the homeless we tend to give them what we think they need. A much better way to deliver aid is to target what they actually need, and our work on the material culture of the homeless may help us find out what that really is,” said Zimmerman.
I never realized that passing men were a part of traditional Albanian society. Although, I guess they wouldn’t really be passing men, since their families know they aren’t biological males and they have to remain virgins. But other than that, they are biological females who chose to live as men, and were treated as such by their surrounding society. It’s the type of thing you read about in the anthropological literature, for some small, obscure tribal group that stopped practicing it around about the time of western contact. Still, it goes to show the deep and profound isolation that Albania has been in for most of it’s history.