When I look into your eyes, I get butterflies in my stomach.
Ah c'mon, you know it's funny dammit. [same girl as below and here]
July 16, 2006
Such large eyes
When I look into your eyes, I get butterflies in my stomach.
Ah c'mon, you know it's funny dammit. [same girl as below and here]
The most beautiful Catalan girl ever
I saw a girl exhausted from studying, whose hair had fallen in front of her face like a theater curtain. And still, her eyes broke through her tresses as if two full moons of some undiscovered planet shone through the twilight sky.
[same girl as here]
July 10, 2006
Group differences in cognitive profile & musical style
Can a group's cognitive profile predict what type of music its members will excel at? Broadly, looking at just two aspects of cognitive abilities and two aspects of music: probably. Narrowly, focusing on subtle differences: probably not. Still, that a rough prediction is possible at all is news and suggests that the two central aspects of music may be parasitic off of more fundamental cognitive abilities rather than forming an independent music module, though of course music requires unique skills like sensitivity to pitch.
First, I'm discussing music composition -- not performance or criticism. The two central features of music I examined were were melody (roughly, how a "voice" develops through time) and harmony (roughly, how separate melodic voices interact with each other or how they're stacked on top of each other at any given moment). These are thus often referred to as the "horizontal" and "vertical" aspects of music, respectively. The two central features of cognitive ability I examined are the verbal and spatial "shadows" of g (different particular shapes cast by a single general factor), as measured by standard IQ tests. I noticed a similarity between melody and verbal skills, which deal with mostly serial processes, and between harmony and spatial skills, which deal with more parallel or simultaneous processes.
In fact, I'd been scooped on noticing that: in Steven Pinker's explication of evolutionary psychology, How the Mind Works, he argues that music is largely not an adaptation but a pleasurable co-opting of more basic adaptations such as speech processing (melody) and visual scene analysis (harmony). However, Pinker wrote HTMW years before he took psychometrics seriously, so he missed out on a good empirical test for his hypothesis -- that is, do populations whose cognitive profile favors verbal compose music that is driven more by melody than harmony, conversely for those whose profile favors spatial, while balanced groups compose music equally driven by melody and harmony? Good guess -- that's what I thought before I looked at any data -- but it seems that cognitive profiles are more necessary than sufficient conditions for developing a certain style of music.
First, a couple of graphs to help visualize what the hypotheses are. The first shows spatial IQ plotted against verbal IQ, while the second shows emphasis on harmony plotted against emphasis on melody. The diagonal line does not represent data points -- it is there to partition the space into three equivalence classes: V, where verbal IQ is greater than spatial IQ, S where spatial IQ is greater than verbal IQ, and the line B-iq where verbal and spatial IQ are balanced. (In reality, B could also be a two-dimensional region, essentially a thick stripe defined as the points on or +/- some small distance from the line B. We treat B as a line for ease of presentation.) For the music graph, the classes are M where melody is given greater emphasis than harmony, coversely for H, and B-mu where both are balanced (again, simplifying B-mu into a line). Data points on the graphs would represent the population mean for the given traits.
The initial guess is that there is a one-to-one correspondence between equivalence classes in the two graphs: i.e., that Verbal and Melody map to each other, as do Spatial and Harmony, and B-iq and B-mu. In reality, it appears that all regions of the IQ plane map to Melody, while Harmony is mapped to only by Spatial and the B-iq line, not by Verbal.
We now consider populations whose Verbal:Spatial ratio (V:S) is +/- balanced, lopsided toward verbal, and lopsided toward spatial: respectively, Germans; African-Americans and Ashkenazi Jews; and Arctic peoples. (See here and here for reviews of Richard Lynn's work on the cognitive profiles of the world's populations.) Do the musical styles in which these groups creatively excel reflect V:S? For each group, we've selected a "high" form of music native to the population: for Germans, Baroque music; for African-Americans, Jazz; for Ashkenazi Jews, Klezmer; and for Arctic peoples, throat singing. So, the relationship between cognitive profile and prominence of melody vs harmony is in line with the prediction.
Note that Klezmer was developed during the 15th to 19th centuries, and is not found in Sephardi or Mizrahi Jewish groups, suggesting that this musical style followed after the Ashkenazim's change in cognitive profile which favors Verbal but not Spatial skills. Incidentally, we could also have used Jazz for assessing Ashkenazi musical style, since they have contributed many seminal figures in that genre as well. They have also contributed Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, and Mahler to Western classical music, though they are not as well represented here as in Jazz, and the classical figures are less central to the tradition than their Jazz counterparts (e.g., Gershwin or Stan Getz) are to their tradition. On a more popular level, we note that these groups largely dominate the verbally driven hip hop genre -- most of it by African-Americans, but one of the seminal groups is composed of three Ashkenazi Jews (the Beastie Boys), and current sensation Matisyahu is also Ashkenazi.
As for the music of the Arctic peoples, throat singing is actually most associated with Central Asia (Tuva in particular), but I could not find studies assessing the cognitive profile of Central Asians. Therefore, the model makes the prediction that a large survey of Central Asians would show their V:S ratio to be lopsided toward spatial. We would also expect this on evolutionary grounds, given that this population underwent recent, strong pressures for superior spatial skills -- namely, during the era of the Central Asian horseback empires where the ability to accurately hit a moving target from hundreds of yards away, while moving oneself by horseback over rough terrain. Plus, lopsidedness toward Spatial is typical of East Asian groups.
Also, the only Native American groups (aside from the Eskimo) who have developed the sort of harmony found in Western classical music -- polyphony, or independent voices that interact, rather than variations on a common theme -- are those of the Northwest US and British Columbia. Perhaps not coincidentally, these groups are closest in geographical and genetic proximity to the Eskimo, as compared to other Native American groups' distance from Eskimos. In general, the languages of this region form a family, Na-Dene, which is separate from Eskimo-Aleut and Amerind. Curiously, the Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut speakers arrived in the New World much later than the earlier large wave of Amerind speakers, and these later waves originated from the rough region of Mongolia and Siberia. So, it could be that whatever combination of alleles that allow throat singing and polyphony became frequent only after the first wave of New World colonizers left East Asia for the Americas.
Lastly, though, there are several data points which call for tempering the bold hypothesis that a certain V:S is a necessary & sufficient condition for a certain kind of music. On the one hand, the world's musical styles that employ harmony come from groups whose V:S is either tilted toward Spatial or more-or-less balanced. At the same time, plenty of groups with this V:S profile have produced no such harmony-based music -- most of Western high music before the discovery of polyphony in France in the late Middle Ages, as well as the rich traditions of China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. At best what is found in these latter areas is heterophony -- variations on a single voice. So, it appears that melody is common to all musical traditions, and no special cognitive profile is needed for it, although lopsidedness toward Verbal seems necessary to develop the emphasis on melody into the electric energy that characterizes Jazz and Klezmer. The ubiquity of melody, assuming it is parasitic off of more basic cognitive structures, may reflect our species' typical use of language for expression. On the other hand, harmony is rare, such that special skills are needed as scaffolding to hoist oneself up; by hypothesis, harmony is parasitic off of spatial skills, making a balanced or Spatial-favoring V:S a necessary -- but not sufficient -- condition for developing a musical style that emphasizes harmony.
First, I'm discussing music composition -- not performance or criticism. The two central features of music I examined were were melody (roughly, how a "voice" develops through time) and harmony (roughly, how separate melodic voices interact with each other or how they're stacked on top of each other at any given moment). These are thus often referred to as the "horizontal" and "vertical" aspects of music, respectively. The two central features of cognitive ability I examined are the verbal and spatial "shadows" of g (different particular shapes cast by a single general factor), as measured by standard IQ tests. I noticed a similarity between melody and verbal skills, which deal with mostly serial processes, and between harmony and spatial skills, which deal with more parallel or simultaneous processes.
In fact, I'd been scooped on noticing that: in Steven Pinker's explication of evolutionary psychology, How the Mind Works, he argues that music is largely not an adaptation but a pleasurable co-opting of more basic adaptations such as speech processing (melody) and visual scene analysis (harmony). However, Pinker wrote HTMW years before he took psychometrics seriously, so he missed out on a good empirical test for his hypothesis -- that is, do populations whose cognitive profile favors verbal compose music that is driven more by melody than harmony, conversely for those whose profile favors spatial, while balanced groups compose music equally driven by melody and harmony? Good guess -- that's what I thought before I looked at any data -- but it seems that cognitive profiles are more necessary than sufficient conditions for developing a certain style of music.
First, a couple of graphs to help visualize what the hypotheses are. The first shows spatial IQ plotted against verbal IQ, while the second shows emphasis on harmony plotted against emphasis on melody. The diagonal line does not represent data points -- it is there to partition the space into three equivalence classes: V, where verbal IQ is greater than spatial IQ, S where spatial IQ is greater than verbal IQ, and the line B-iq where verbal and spatial IQ are balanced. (In reality, B could also be a two-dimensional region, essentially a thick stripe defined as the points on or +/- some small distance from the line B. We treat B as a line for ease of presentation.) For the music graph, the classes are M where melody is given greater emphasis than harmony, coversely for H, and B-mu where both are balanced (again, simplifying B-mu into a line). Data points on the graphs would represent the population mean for the given traits.
The initial guess is that there is a one-to-one correspondence between equivalence classes in the two graphs: i.e., that Verbal and Melody map to each other, as do Spatial and Harmony, and B-iq and B-mu. In reality, it appears that all regions of the IQ plane map to Melody, while Harmony is mapped to only by Spatial and the B-iq line, not by Verbal.
We now consider populations whose Verbal:Spatial ratio (V:S) is +/- balanced, lopsided toward verbal, and lopsided toward spatial: respectively, Germans; African-Americans and Ashkenazi Jews; and Arctic peoples. (See here and here for reviews of Richard Lynn's work on the cognitive profiles of the world's populations.) Do the musical styles in which these groups creatively excel reflect V:S? For each group, we've selected a "high" form of music native to the population: for Germans, Baroque music; for African-Americans, Jazz; for Ashkenazi Jews, Klezmer; and for Arctic peoples, throat singing. So, the relationship between cognitive profile and prominence of melody vs harmony is in line with the prediction.
Note that Klezmer was developed during the 15th to 19th centuries, and is not found in Sephardi or Mizrahi Jewish groups, suggesting that this musical style followed after the Ashkenazim's change in cognitive profile which favors Verbal but not Spatial skills. Incidentally, we could also have used Jazz for assessing Ashkenazi musical style, since they have contributed many seminal figures in that genre as well. They have also contributed Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, and Mahler to Western classical music, though they are not as well represented here as in Jazz, and the classical figures are less central to the tradition than their Jazz counterparts (e.g., Gershwin or Stan Getz) are to their tradition. On a more popular level, we note that these groups largely dominate the verbally driven hip hop genre -- most of it by African-Americans, but one of the seminal groups is composed of three Ashkenazi Jews (the Beastie Boys), and current sensation Matisyahu is also Ashkenazi.
As for the music of the Arctic peoples, throat singing is actually most associated with Central Asia (Tuva in particular), but I could not find studies assessing the cognitive profile of Central Asians. Therefore, the model makes the prediction that a large survey of Central Asians would show their V:S ratio to be lopsided toward spatial. We would also expect this on evolutionary grounds, given that this population underwent recent, strong pressures for superior spatial skills -- namely, during the era of the Central Asian horseback empires where the ability to accurately hit a moving target from hundreds of yards away, while moving oneself by horseback over rough terrain. Plus, lopsidedness toward Spatial is typical of East Asian groups.
Also, the only Native American groups (aside from the Eskimo) who have developed the sort of harmony found in Western classical music -- polyphony, or independent voices that interact, rather than variations on a common theme -- are those of the Northwest US and British Columbia. Perhaps not coincidentally, these groups are closest in geographical and genetic proximity to the Eskimo, as compared to other Native American groups' distance from Eskimos. In general, the languages of this region form a family, Na-Dene, which is separate from Eskimo-Aleut and Amerind. Curiously, the Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut speakers arrived in the New World much later than the earlier large wave of Amerind speakers, and these later waves originated from the rough region of Mongolia and Siberia. So, it could be that whatever combination of alleles that allow throat singing and polyphony became frequent only after the first wave of New World colonizers left East Asia for the Americas.
Lastly, though, there are several data points which call for tempering the bold hypothesis that a certain V:S is a necessary & sufficient condition for a certain kind of music. On the one hand, the world's musical styles that employ harmony come from groups whose V:S is either tilted toward Spatial or more-or-less balanced. At the same time, plenty of groups with this V:S profile have produced no such harmony-based music -- most of Western high music before the discovery of polyphony in France in the late Middle Ages, as well as the rich traditions of China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. At best what is found in these latter areas is heterophony -- variations on a single voice. So, it appears that melody is common to all musical traditions, and no special cognitive profile is needed for it, although lopsidedness toward Verbal seems necessary to develop the emphasis on melody into the electric energy that characterizes Jazz and Klezmer. The ubiquity of melody, assuming it is parasitic off of more basic cognitive structures, may reflect our species' typical use of language for expression. On the other hand, harmony is rare, such that special skills are needed as scaffolding to hoist oneself up; by hypothesis, harmony is parasitic off of spatial skills, making a balanced or Spatial-favoring V:S a necessary -- but not sufficient -- condition for developing a musical style that emphasizes harmony.
July 9, 2006
Project Runway new season starts Wednesday
[Spoiler added 7/13]
Season 3 of the fashion design reality show Project Runway begins this Wednesday at 10pm on Bravo. Judging from the trailers, it looks to be just as good as the previous seasons. And as one of a tiny handful of reality shows that actually has a threshold of brains to compete, it's good nerd TV. Not long ago, I got curious about the make-up of the fashion design world, and found out that like any other creative field, it was mostly dominated by males of Eurasian descent, not a few of them gay. This likely has nothing to do with irrational discrimination, but rather group differences in cognitive abilities (namely, visuospatial skills) -- and, though I didn't explore it then, personality traits.
I first became interested in fashion because of -- you guessed it, girls. My family and I were on a week's trip to Rome four years ago, and at the time I dressed like your ordinary non-descript indie nerd. Then, once we landed, I had three revelations there in the airport:
Throughout our week's stay, what I saw only strengthened this initial impression. The girls were also very approachable compared to Americans -- though that could reflect their being used to getting hit on by Italian male strangers at all hours of the day. In any event, I never would've dreamed that there were hot girls who preferred not the Viking warrior physique in their boyfriends but rather that of the adolescent Greek male statue (not even the super-buffed ones). I was convinced I was going to return after graduation (I ended up going to Barcelona instead), so I figured I'd better look the part if I was to stand a chance. In Rome I only bought a pair of those bowling-inspired shoes that everyone had in 2002 but since seem to have vanished. I also ended up finding my comfort zone not in the generic Mediterranean Eurotrash "dirty look," but in a mix between Italian peacockish sensuality and Japanese cerebral sobreity. Ennio Capasa, who founded Costume National, apprenticed under Yohji Yamamoto after graduating from fine arts school, so he tends to be my favorite designer.
Back here in the US, showing even minimal put-together-ness immediately raises the red flag in girls' minds that you're gay, not a terribly irrational assumption since we're not as flashy of a culture as the Italians. And even among those who are cool with you dressing so, their interest is piqued only insofar as they view it as an honest signal of high status. As it happens, I'm definitely not high status (I have my ways of getting good stuff, though it requires work), so once such a girl found that out, she'd shoot me a disgusted look much as a guy would if he found out a girl stuffed her bra or something. But someday, I'll run into an Italian girl, or a Spaniard, or a Brazilian, and it will be my foot-in-the-door. And in the meantime, it keeps me looking professional enough so that I'll never be reprimanded for violating the dress code. Plus, deciding what to wear is something that's easy to have some simple fun with before having to be surrounded by jerks on the metro and snots in the library (the kids at work are fine, of course).
Spoiler 7/13: So the first to be eliminated was a female businesswoman. In the second episode of the second season, a female lawyer was eliminated. In sum: verbal smarts (the businesswoman had a BA from Stanford & MBA from Harvard) don't count for squat in the world of visuospatial art. Good for persuasive bullshitting, yes; for designing and executing 3-D wearable sculpture, no.
Season 3 of the fashion design reality show Project Runway begins this Wednesday at 10pm on Bravo. Judging from the trailers, it looks to be just as good as the previous seasons. And as one of a tiny handful of reality shows that actually has a threshold of brains to compete, it's good nerd TV. Not long ago, I got curious about the make-up of the fashion design world, and found out that like any other creative field, it was mostly dominated by males of Eurasian descent, not a few of them gay. This likely has nothing to do with irrational discrimination, but rather group differences in cognitive abilities (namely, visuospatial skills) -- and, though I didn't explore it then, personality traits.
I first became interested in fashion because of -- you guessed it, girls. My family and I were on a week's trip to Rome four years ago, and at the time I dressed like your ordinary non-descript indie nerd. Then, once we landed, I had three revelations there in the airport:
1) Roman girls are damn hot. Look no further than Sophia Loren. Curvy, dark, petite (well, Sophia Loren's 5' 8.5").
2) Their boyfriends were short (compared to Americans) and skinny -- oftentimes downright scrawny.
3) Both they and their boyfriends dressed with style, even if unable to afford the ridiculously expensive stuff.
Throughout our week's stay, what I saw only strengthened this initial impression. The girls were also very approachable compared to Americans -- though that could reflect their being used to getting hit on by Italian male strangers at all hours of the day. In any event, I never would've dreamed that there were hot girls who preferred not the Viking warrior physique in their boyfriends but rather that of the adolescent Greek male statue (not even the super-buffed ones). I was convinced I was going to return after graduation (I ended up going to Barcelona instead), so I figured I'd better look the part if I was to stand a chance. In Rome I only bought a pair of those bowling-inspired shoes that everyone had in 2002 but since seem to have vanished. I also ended up finding my comfort zone not in the generic Mediterranean Eurotrash "dirty look," but in a mix between Italian peacockish sensuality and Japanese cerebral sobreity. Ennio Capasa, who founded Costume National, apprenticed under Yohji Yamamoto after graduating from fine arts school, so he tends to be my favorite designer.
Back here in the US, showing even minimal put-together-ness immediately raises the red flag in girls' minds that you're gay, not a terribly irrational assumption since we're not as flashy of a culture as the Italians. And even among those who are cool with you dressing so, their interest is piqued only insofar as they view it as an honest signal of high status. As it happens, I'm definitely not high status (I have my ways of getting good stuff, though it requires work), so once such a girl found that out, she'd shoot me a disgusted look much as a guy would if he found out a girl stuffed her bra or something. But someday, I'll run into an Italian girl, or a Spaniard, or a Brazilian, and it will be my foot-in-the-door. And in the meantime, it keeps me looking professional enough so that I'll never be reprimanded for violating the dress code. Plus, deciding what to wear is something that's easy to have some simple fun with before having to be surrounded by jerks on the metro and snots in the library (the kids at work are fine, of course).
Spoiler 7/13: So the first to be eliminated was a female businesswoman. In the second episode of the second season, a female lawyer was eliminated. In sum: verbal smarts (the businesswoman had a BA from Stanford & MBA from Harvard) don't count for squat in the world of visuospatial art. Good for persuasive bullshitting, yes; for designing and executing 3-D wearable sculpture, no.
July 8, 2006
Happiness and assortative mating for personality
Shameless plug for a post I just wrote for GNXP. I figured there were enough posts here neurotically puzzling over the weird world of women. Short and sweet of it: no assortative mating for any personality traits, substantial assortative mating for social / political attitudes (taxes, military, etc.), and happiness of marriage depends far more on similarity in some personality traits (especially Agreeableness) than on similarity in social attitudes.
June 30, 2006
Musings on interracial preferences
Background on potential effects of interracial mating, from GNXP archives: here, here, and here.
I got my hair cut yesterday and something crystallized in my brain: I am not only not attracted to Northeast Asian girls, but being touched by them in a sensual way actually makes me somewhat uneasy. Normally the girl who shampoos my hair will be a curvaceous Latina, who I don't mind massaging my scalp at all, but yesterday it was an Asian girl -- an attractive one, if you'd asked any other red-blooded male. When I receive the shampooing, rinsing, conditioning, second rinsing, and towel drying from one of the curvier, duskier girls, it feels like my hair is a scoop of espresso ice cream being licked lazily by ten tongues. (Have I mentioned that my dream girlfriend would be a hair stylist?) But yesterday felt like being confined to a dentist's chair while she poked and probed. Again, this wasn't due to technique, but rather just knowing that it was an Asian girl. Strange, I know: some males would drive across town for a haircut if they knew they'd get to have their skin caressed by an attractive Asian girl.
But, as I have mentioned before, my grandmother is Japanese, and I tend to be more non-conformist (or novelty-seeking, or whatever) in my preferences and behavior. Now, I only saw my grandmother once, maybe twice a year when I was growing up, so it's not that I'm going against what I was exposed to during development, or deciding "Well, I've been around those females for long enough now; time to see what else is out there." And though I tend to seek out the exotic, this rarely results in latching on to someone of a different continental race -- mostly within the broadly defined Caucasian group, but the ethnic groups more visibly distinct from my Caucasian background (French, Irish, Welsh). Ground zero for hotness would be Persia, decreasing somewhat in intensity as you move just outside (though still w/in the Caucasian group) -- Semitic groups, the assorted swarthy southern European groups (and their white or mestiza descendants in Latin America), and to a lesser extent South Asians.
What's strange is how reciprocal this is. My only real girlfriend in high school was half-Persian by descent, though phenotypically she could've passed for 100%. (My first encounter w/ the discrete, rather than blending, nature of inheritance was when I met her younger sister, who had uber-pale skin, invisibly blonde hair, and blue eyes.) The other "relationship" I had in high school was really more of a mutual crush that never took off, but she was South Asian (from Kerala, though so light-skinned that I first thought she was Greek). Before that, in middle school, my first girlfriend (who actually asked me out) was Salvadorean, and another mutual crush was Italian. (My biggest regret so far in life is not asking her out, despite her friend confessing that this girl had a huge crush on me).
College was a gauntlet of rejection -- hence the reminiscing just now about better times -- but the one enjoyable date I had was w/ an Equadorean international student (which is to say, ethnically Spanish). Of all the girls I'd describe as good-looking who've ever shown interest in me -- not that I'd need to grow another hand to tally them up -- all have been from the geographical area whose inhabitants I'm most attracted to, w/ Persians being overrepresented here as before. I've shown no interest in Northern or Eastern Euros or NE Asians, and neither have they shown interest in me. Ditto for other continental races (not that I've met that many New Guineans...).
I promise there's a point to my navel-gazing and thinking out loud. The question is: why this reciprocity? Do I and girls from the region I described unconsciously recognize that we'd make babies that would enjoy hybrid vigor, and so we both seek each other out? I could imagine a visual and/or olfactory mechanism whereby we ascertained that the other was exotic but not too exotic: inspecting facial geometry, skin / hair color & tecture, etc., as well as inhaling info about their HLA profile. Perhaps we both have an ideal set of physical features in mind, and I happen to met their checklist and they mine -- yet Asian girls actually fit quite a few of my criteria (skin color, hair color / texture, eye color, amount of body fat, etc.), but I still don't feel the same spark, not even a glimmer.
Now, I don't believe that only one factor accounts for the whole story, but of the three above, I'd say just hybrid vigor holds water. But there's also a positive assortative mating angle to it as well (that is, the opposite of hybridization), namely for whatever personality traits that dispose one to seek out partners who are exotic but not too exotic. Though many such genes are doubtless involved, one that's received lots of attention is the dopamine receptor gene DRD4 (updated here), which has 3 alleles of interest: 4R, the ancestral one which is most common around the world; 7R, a derived one which is associated most w/ ADHD and to a lesser extent the trait of "novelty-seeking," which varies greatly in frequency across populations, from roughly 0% among East Asians and African hunter-gatherers to near fixation in the Amazon, and at in-between levels in Europe and Africa; and 2R, another derived one which is associated w/ trait values between those of the mellow 4R and wild-child 7R, and is found mostly in East Asia (though still at low levels).
To the extent that two wanderlustful [1] wild child types will assortatively mate for such traits, then all else equal, I'd be more likely to be drawn to an individual from a population in which the 7R allele was more frequent than where it was not. Hence, the near aversion to East Asian girls. Don't get me wrong, I don't see this sobreity as an across-the-board defecit -- it's great at the tutoring center where I work, where a mellow mien will place someone on my good side. Indeed, as Harpending & Cochran suggest in the above link, the 7R allele probably never rose to appreciable frequency in East Asia due to elaborate social structures requiring stability and evenness of temperament. And obviously there are other guys who prefer Asian girls precisely b/c of their more composed demeanor (which others incorrectly interpret as a desire for "passive" girls), so it's an advantage in this sense as well.
In any event, my online "learn Farsi" journey awaits!
[1] Chen, C., Burton, M. L., Greenberger, E., & Dmitrieva, J. (1999). Population migration and the variation of dopamine D4 (DRD4) allele frequencies around the globe. Evolution and Human Behavior, 20, 309-324.
I got my hair cut yesterday and something crystallized in my brain: I am not only not attracted to Northeast Asian girls, but being touched by them in a sensual way actually makes me somewhat uneasy. Normally the girl who shampoos my hair will be a curvaceous Latina, who I don't mind massaging my scalp at all, but yesterday it was an Asian girl -- an attractive one, if you'd asked any other red-blooded male. When I receive the shampooing, rinsing, conditioning, second rinsing, and towel drying from one of the curvier, duskier girls, it feels like my hair is a scoop of espresso ice cream being licked lazily by ten tongues. (Have I mentioned that my dream girlfriend would be a hair stylist?) But yesterday felt like being confined to a dentist's chair while she poked and probed. Again, this wasn't due to technique, but rather just knowing that it was an Asian girl. Strange, I know: some males would drive across town for a haircut if they knew they'd get to have their skin caressed by an attractive Asian girl.
But, as I have mentioned before, my grandmother is Japanese, and I tend to be more non-conformist (or novelty-seeking, or whatever) in my preferences and behavior. Now, I only saw my grandmother once, maybe twice a year when I was growing up, so it's not that I'm going against what I was exposed to during development, or deciding "Well, I've been around those females for long enough now; time to see what else is out there." And though I tend to seek out the exotic, this rarely results in latching on to someone of a different continental race -- mostly within the broadly defined Caucasian group, but the ethnic groups more visibly distinct from my Caucasian background (French, Irish, Welsh). Ground zero for hotness would be Persia, decreasing somewhat in intensity as you move just outside (though still w/in the Caucasian group) -- Semitic groups, the assorted swarthy southern European groups (and their white or mestiza descendants in Latin America), and to a lesser extent South Asians.
What's strange is how reciprocal this is. My only real girlfriend in high school was half-Persian by descent, though phenotypically she could've passed for 100%. (My first encounter w/ the discrete, rather than blending, nature of inheritance was when I met her younger sister, who had uber-pale skin, invisibly blonde hair, and blue eyes.) The other "relationship" I had in high school was really more of a mutual crush that never took off, but she was South Asian (from Kerala, though so light-skinned that I first thought she was Greek). Before that, in middle school, my first girlfriend (who actually asked me out) was Salvadorean, and another mutual crush was Italian. (My biggest regret so far in life is not asking her out, despite her friend confessing that this girl had a huge crush on me).
College was a gauntlet of rejection -- hence the reminiscing just now about better times -- but the one enjoyable date I had was w/ an Equadorean international student (which is to say, ethnically Spanish). Of all the girls I'd describe as good-looking who've ever shown interest in me -- not that I'd need to grow another hand to tally them up -- all have been from the geographical area whose inhabitants I'm most attracted to, w/ Persians being overrepresented here as before. I've shown no interest in Northern or Eastern Euros or NE Asians, and neither have they shown interest in me. Ditto for other continental races (not that I've met that many New Guineans...).
I promise there's a point to my navel-gazing and thinking out loud. The question is: why this reciprocity? Do I and girls from the region I described unconsciously recognize that we'd make babies that would enjoy hybrid vigor, and so we both seek each other out? I could imagine a visual and/or olfactory mechanism whereby we ascertained that the other was exotic but not too exotic: inspecting facial geometry, skin / hair color & tecture, etc., as well as inhaling info about their HLA profile. Perhaps we both have an ideal set of physical features in mind, and I happen to met their checklist and they mine -- yet Asian girls actually fit quite a few of my criteria (skin color, hair color / texture, eye color, amount of body fat, etc.), but I still don't feel the same spark, not even a glimmer.
Now, I don't believe that only one factor accounts for the whole story, but of the three above, I'd say just hybrid vigor holds water. But there's also a positive assortative mating angle to it as well (that is, the opposite of hybridization), namely for whatever personality traits that dispose one to seek out partners who are exotic but not too exotic. Though many such genes are doubtless involved, one that's received lots of attention is the dopamine receptor gene DRD4 (updated here), which has 3 alleles of interest: 4R, the ancestral one which is most common around the world; 7R, a derived one which is associated most w/ ADHD and to a lesser extent the trait of "novelty-seeking," which varies greatly in frequency across populations, from roughly 0% among East Asians and African hunter-gatherers to near fixation in the Amazon, and at in-between levels in Europe and Africa; and 2R, another derived one which is associated w/ trait values between those of the mellow 4R and wild-child 7R, and is found mostly in East Asia (though still at low levels).
To the extent that two wanderlustful [1] wild child types will assortatively mate for such traits, then all else equal, I'd be more likely to be drawn to an individual from a population in which the 7R allele was more frequent than where it was not. Hence, the near aversion to East Asian girls. Don't get me wrong, I don't see this sobreity as an across-the-board defecit -- it's great at the tutoring center where I work, where a mellow mien will place someone on my good side. Indeed, as Harpending & Cochran suggest in the above link, the 7R allele probably never rose to appreciable frequency in East Asia due to elaborate social structures requiring stability and evenness of temperament. And obviously there are other guys who prefer Asian girls precisely b/c of their more composed demeanor (which others incorrectly interpret as a desire for "passive" girls), so it's an advantage in this sense as well.
In any event, my online "learn Farsi" journey awaits!
[1] Chen, C., Burton, M. L., Greenberger, E., & Dmitrieva, J. (1999). Population migration and the variation of dopamine D4 (DRD4) allele frequencies around the globe. Evolution and Human Behavior, 20, 309-324.
June 29, 2006
World Cup popular among kids?
So at the tutoring center I work at, we work w/ K-12 students, and quite a few of the middle & high school kids have been talking about the World Cup as if it were something they actually paid attention to, even if they didn't treat it like the Super Bowl. Sure, there are several first-generation immigrants from Mexico and Iran cheering on their home team, but even a fair amount of those who have no dog in the fight -- even ordinary white kids -- have been talking about it. Who knows if it'll catch on or not. I doubt it: even if interesting enough now, no American sports channels feature soccer as prominently as native sports. I remember feeling the same way in 2002 -- since we got so far, we actually took notice and thought soccer was cool for awhile... and then when there was no chance to wach it anymore, we stopped caring.
Who should I cheer on? Allowing good ol'-fashioned ethnic chauvinism to be my guide, I'd have to go w/ France, as I'm 1/4. I'm also 1/4 each of Welsh & Irish, who don't have a team (England doesn't count), and 1/4 Japanese, but they're already out. I mean, all France has to do is make it through Brazil!
As a sidenote, I really don't enjoy soccer that much. I'm much more into Mixed Martial Arts -- they're the only sport I don't find mind-numbingly boring (and they require some degree of brains). Basketball & soccer are fast-paced, but to me it looks like back-and-forth over and over from one end of the field to the other. Football & baseball feature interesting variety -- when there's anything going on at all. They're the athletic version of punctuated equilibrium.
Who should I cheer on? Allowing good ol'-fashioned ethnic chauvinism to be my guide, I'd have to go w/ France, as I'm 1/4. I'm also 1/4 each of Welsh & Irish, who don't have a team (England doesn't count), and 1/4 Japanese, but they're already out. I mean, all France has to do is make it through Brazil!
As a sidenote, I really don't enjoy soccer that much. I'm much more into Mixed Martial Arts -- they're the only sport I don't find mind-numbingly boring (and they require some degree of brains). Basketball & soccer are fast-paced, but to me it looks like back-and-forth over and over from one end of the field to the other. Football & baseball feature interesting variety -- when there's anything going on at all. They're the athletic version of punctuated equilibrium.
June 23, 2006
What makes a good teacher?
Razib makes a good point in his response to the ScienceBlogs question: "What makes a good teacher?" I think he could make the #1 reason more inclusive by modifying it to say: "A semester's worth of psychometrics, covering individual differences in intelligence and personality." So, even if you have to teach students who aren't bright nor highly conscientious, you know how to relate to them, exploit whatever motivations / interests they have, etc.
The only two popular takes on students who are bettered by awesome teachers are: 1) the elite prep school group Razib mentioned, bright & enthusiastic, for whom the gardener-teacher supplies the necessary extrinsic stimulation to allow the full flowering of their minds (Dead Poets Society); and 2) children of tragedy, whom the alchemist-teacher transforms from would-be dead-enders to knowledgeable captains of their own ship (Dangerous Minds).
In reality, most students are bored to tears by school, since most of it is geared to promising students (i.e., bright & enthusiastic). The average or below-avg students get frustrated b/c the material is over their head -- often ridiculously so w/ Constructivist or Socratic methods that require the student to figure out the pattern themselves & then state it explicitly or apply it elsewhere. Such progressivists are unaware that they've just administered something like the Ravens test, the most highly g-loaded one out there. Four years worth of such pupil-dilatingly frustrating instruction is enough to turn off anyone. Here in Montgomery County, MD, the current public high school geometry textbook is all but devoid of formulas for the students to memorize or refer back to, w/ only question marks where the budding Einstein should have figured out the formula on their own and stored it in memory -- since writing it down over top of the taunting question mark would not only be destruction of school property, but would forever ruin the self-discovery journey for all future owners of the defaced book.
The same is true of "learning for learning's sake" approaches -- not everyone scores high on Openness to Experience on the "Big Five" personality scale. Pleading -- and then badgering -- Closed students to explore the abstract beauty of math, rather than giving them practical tools they can use (like calculating rate of increase/decrease of prices), is like struggling to bring out the inner Extrovert from an inveterate Introvert in acting classes.
Kids are not all easily tutorable fledgling conquerors of the fields of life, nor are the remainder mere lumps of clay awaiting transformation by the teacher's Abracadabras and waves of the hand. Most students can sense who the idealistic teachers are, and they eat them for fucking breakfast. While not as Oscar-level inspirational as other methods, I prefer to relate to kids on their own level -- occasionally that means playing the gardener-teacher role to a promising student, but more often that means breaking the awful truth to them that life isn't fair, that there are some things you have to learn in order to function as a job-holding adult, and that large parts of formal schooling should just be viewed as their day job that they tolerate until they get to do what they really want. And for most of them, these visions of the future don't include more academics -- quite the opposite.
So, you motivate them by stop lying to them that all of this material will be vitally important further on. Still, regardless of where they end up, better grades and completion of high school will demonstrate one's work ethic. And a larger vocabulary will always be worth more than a miniscule one -- whether to impress whoever's interviewing you, to deal a delicious diss to someone who's annoying you, or to stand out from the crowd when trying to talk to girls (although brains don't necessarily make a girl more desirable). The same is true of other subjects, especially foreign languages. No student will take a teacher seriously who suggests that there's an inherent beauty and intrinsic merit to studying foreign languages -- perhaps for the teacher, but not for the typical student. Again, a more realistic approach is called for: knowing even rudimentary Chinese will help in a future where China will be a big global economic player; or for the blue collar, learning Spanish if immigration trends continue. More, your average high school boy would rather clip out his own tongue w/ rusty gardening shears than master a second tongue, but once Spring Break in Rio approaches, he's suddenly engrossed in a Teach Yourself Brazilian Portuguese book. The two greatest motivators: survival and reproduction.
In sum, whatever other commendable qualities a good teacher may have, foremost must surely be an honest, hard-headed approach to one's noble calling. Steve recently voiced a similar opinion on how to best utilize male-typical & female-typical talents for good government. The fundamental error of those striving to be good teachers -- and god knows I was one of them! -- is the two-part belief that: 1) all students are inherently the same in intelligence and motivation, so all apparent variation is due to environmental variation; and 2) moreover, all students are like the teacher in intelligence & personality, so what appeals to and would motivate the teacher would transfer easily to the case of the students, if only after some minor adjustments for age differences, etc. Alas, both of these hypotheses have zero empirical support -- and after all, that's what really counts in judging a good teacher: who effectively leads the kids toward the brightest future that each is capable of attaining and in the least painful way possible? Quasi-religious beliefs that serve more to make teachers feel good and pure about themselves, rather than serve the needs of the students, are the very antithesis of good teaching. In light of a century of psychometric research on personality & intelligence, honest reflection on the part of good teachers requires that we abandon the fallacy that all students are equally above-average blank slates.
The only two popular takes on students who are bettered by awesome teachers are: 1) the elite prep school group Razib mentioned, bright & enthusiastic, for whom the gardener-teacher supplies the necessary extrinsic stimulation to allow the full flowering of their minds (Dead Poets Society); and 2) children of tragedy, whom the alchemist-teacher transforms from would-be dead-enders to knowledgeable captains of their own ship (Dangerous Minds).
In reality, most students are bored to tears by school, since most of it is geared to promising students (i.e., bright & enthusiastic). The average or below-avg students get frustrated b/c the material is over their head -- often ridiculously so w/ Constructivist or Socratic methods that require the student to figure out the pattern themselves & then state it explicitly or apply it elsewhere. Such progressivists are unaware that they've just administered something like the Ravens test, the most highly g-loaded one out there. Four years worth of such pupil-dilatingly frustrating instruction is enough to turn off anyone. Here in Montgomery County, MD, the current public high school geometry textbook is all but devoid of formulas for the students to memorize or refer back to, w/ only question marks where the budding Einstein should have figured out the formula on their own and stored it in memory -- since writing it down over top of the taunting question mark would not only be destruction of school property, but would forever ruin the self-discovery journey for all future owners of the defaced book.
The same is true of "learning for learning's sake" approaches -- not everyone scores high on Openness to Experience on the "Big Five" personality scale. Pleading -- and then badgering -- Closed students to explore the abstract beauty of math, rather than giving them practical tools they can use (like calculating rate of increase/decrease of prices), is like struggling to bring out the inner Extrovert from an inveterate Introvert in acting classes.
Kids are not all easily tutorable fledgling conquerors of the fields of life, nor are the remainder mere lumps of clay awaiting transformation by the teacher's Abracadabras and waves of the hand. Most students can sense who the idealistic teachers are, and they eat them for fucking breakfast. While not as Oscar-level inspirational as other methods, I prefer to relate to kids on their own level -- occasionally that means playing the gardener-teacher role to a promising student, but more often that means breaking the awful truth to them that life isn't fair, that there are some things you have to learn in order to function as a job-holding adult, and that large parts of formal schooling should just be viewed as their day job that they tolerate until they get to do what they really want. And for most of them, these visions of the future don't include more academics -- quite the opposite.
So, you motivate them by stop lying to them that all of this material will be vitally important further on. Still, regardless of where they end up, better grades and completion of high school will demonstrate one's work ethic. And a larger vocabulary will always be worth more than a miniscule one -- whether to impress whoever's interviewing you, to deal a delicious diss to someone who's annoying you, or to stand out from the crowd when trying to talk to girls (although brains don't necessarily make a girl more desirable). The same is true of other subjects, especially foreign languages. No student will take a teacher seriously who suggests that there's an inherent beauty and intrinsic merit to studying foreign languages -- perhaps for the teacher, but not for the typical student. Again, a more realistic approach is called for: knowing even rudimentary Chinese will help in a future where China will be a big global economic player; or for the blue collar, learning Spanish if immigration trends continue. More, your average high school boy would rather clip out his own tongue w/ rusty gardening shears than master a second tongue, but once Spring Break in Rio approaches, he's suddenly engrossed in a Teach Yourself Brazilian Portuguese book. The two greatest motivators: survival and reproduction.
In sum, whatever other commendable qualities a good teacher may have, foremost must surely be an honest, hard-headed approach to one's noble calling. Steve recently voiced a similar opinion on how to best utilize male-typical & female-typical talents for good government. The fundamental error of those striving to be good teachers -- and god knows I was one of them! -- is the two-part belief that: 1) all students are inherently the same in intelligence and motivation, so all apparent variation is due to environmental variation; and 2) moreover, all students are like the teacher in intelligence & personality, so what appeals to and would motivate the teacher would transfer easily to the case of the students, if only after some minor adjustments for age differences, etc. Alas, both of these hypotheses have zero empirical support -- and after all, that's what really counts in judging a good teacher: who effectively leads the kids toward the brightest future that each is capable of attaining and in the least painful way possible? Quasi-religious beliefs that serve more to make teachers feel good and pure about themselves, rather than serve the needs of the students, are the very antithesis of good teaching. In light of a century of psychometric research on personality & intelligence, honest reflection on the part of good teachers requires that we abandon the fallacy that all students are equally above-average blank slates.
June 15, 2006
Utopian public transit
I live in the Maryland suburbs of DC (though "outside the Beltway," as they say), and the public Metro system is just plain retarded. Unlike pretty much any other metro system I've experienced, the DC metro has a "spokes of a wheel" design -- the logic is that most folks live out in the 'burbs and pour into DC to work for the Fed or whatever. It's as if the Fed were a whirlpool-beast that takes a great huff every morning, sucking the suburbanites in from all directions, chews them over for 8 hours, and then in a shrieking vomit, sends them back to where they came from. Now, to an extent, this is true, but most people need to go lots of other places, which are also largely located in the suburbs -- so, if you need to get from one 'burb to another, you have to feed into the center of the wheel and get whipped back out through some other spoke to get there, wasting plenty of time. The only 'burb-to-'burb channel is the dreaded Beltway, a loop-way that orbits DC like a Mobius strip of busy misery, a centipede plunging its head into its own asshole. And this is the public transit utopia our tax dollars buy us, this the great leveler of class boundaries? It's true, though: on the Beltway, everyone's a jerkoff.
However, that's not my main gripe -- we're just saddled w/ the way the damned thing was designed, and nothing short of complete rerouting will improve things. But what about the easy changes that no one bothers to make? For example, when the city center is doing most of its sucking and vomiting, the Metro runs trains very frequently, often one train two minutes after the other. This sounds nice, but what typically happens is that one backs the other up, so you creep along and stop dead quite a bit. But in between rush-hours, while the Fed & co. are languidly digesting their feed, the trains are only run once every 13 minutes (on a good day). So, if you miss the Metro by even 15 seconds, you're hanging out for a good while until the next one arrives. This wouldn't be so bad if no one rode it during the daytime, but of course lots of folks work atypical hours, not to mention tourists visiting our nation's capital. Some genius at the Metro authority finally figured out what any 2nd grade drop-out already knew: just run the trains every 5 minutes throughout the day, aside from late at night. Unfortunately, the news told us, this modified schedule won't be put into effect until next year... your brain will hurt less if you don't try to imagine why it would take that long.
So, here's my vision of a public transit utopia, to be installed when I become Emperor. Sure, a train arriving every 5 minutes is nice, but still, if you miss it, you'll have to wait around (even if not for another quarter of a fucking hour). Wouldn't it be great if the trains ran continually, no starting and no stopping? I propose we turn the Metro system into one of those Lazy River rides they have at water parks, at least during the summer when it's so ungodly humid in the DC area. Think about it: you just show up and presto, you're on your way! One side of the river would be for boarding, the other for departing. I'm no engineer, but I'm sure there'd be some way to speed up the current in between stations, while slowing it down in the immediate vicinity of the stations to facilitate maneuverability. If you wanted to get to your destination more quickly, we could designate one lane the swimming lane -- cheap transit and daily exercise! You'd wear bathing attire of your choice -- a baggy t-shirt if you're overweight and want to hide it, or a skimpy bikini if you're a nubile intern, as the case may be. Your day-uniforms would be stored at work -- where they belong -- and you'd simply change in & out of them there.
True, it would cost money to keep the water sufficiently clean, and to provide a strong enough current to the still water. But think of the savings in labor costs from the ultimate automation of running trains -- no trains at all. Actually, we could just reassign the workers to administer the cleaning agents, unchoke any clogs during downtime, and so on, so they wouldn't lose their jobs. And think of how less stressful their new tasks would be compared to always keeping a vigilant eye on the guy who's trying to dart into the Metro while the doors are closing! We'd also enjoy savings from: no crashes, no repairs or maintenance of trains, nor of the tracks & rails, no cleaning ladies to clear up trash, etc etc etc. Hell, even if we had to raise taxes, who wouldn't choose this option?
The only trouble we might face would be getting everyone on board, abandoning travel by gas-guzzling, smoke-spewing automobiles. So here's what we do: we reach out to a historically underprivileged and at-risk population -- say, pulchritudinous 20-something females -- and hire them as lifeguards. This demographic group is particularly at risk of poverty due to squandering their money on expensive fashions for the career-minded gal. To deal w/ this problem, we simply supply their entire work wardrobe for free: they could choose their uniform from among a full-length burlap sack, a woolen three-piece suit, or, you know, a white cotton monokini. Then just watch the public transit patrons roll in.
I realize that most of this model is mere daydreaming, but a first approximation could realistically be reached by selecting the hottest of the environmental NGO interns to pose in Metro trains dressed in white linen and bra-liberated. Or if few such girls were staffing such NGOs, then they could farm the work out. Hey, would you rather live on a feminist planet that had no viable ecological future, or on a planet whose environmental sustainability was secured by sexualizing female bodies? If Al Gore's new movie is any guide, the time may soon be upon us when we may have to make that difficult decision. And so, I'll end on that hopeful note.
[Though I shouldn't have to say it, if I've offended anyone (is that possible anymore?), then simply remove the pole from your butt. That ought to help matters.]
However, that's not my main gripe -- we're just saddled w/ the way the damned thing was designed, and nothing short of complete rerouting will improve things. But what about the easy changes that no one bothers to make? For example, when the city center is doing most of its sucking and vomiting, the Metro runs trains very frequently, often one train two minutes after the other. This sounds nice, but what typically happens is that one backs the other up, so you creep along and stop dead quite a bit. But in between rush-hours, while the Fed & co. are languidly digesting their feed, the trains are only run once every 13 minutes (on a good day). So, if you miss the Metro by even 15 seconds, you're hanging out for a good while until the next one arrives. This wouldn't be so bad if no one rode it during the daytime, but of course lots of folks work atypical hours, not to mention tourists visiting our nation's capital. Some genius at the Metro authority finally figured out what any 2nd grade drop-out already knew: just run the trains every 5 minutes throughout the day, aside from late at night. Unfortunately, the news told us, this modified schedule won't be put into effect until next year... your brain will hurt less if you don't try to imagine why it would take that long.
So, here's my vision of a public transit utopia, to be installed when I become Emperor. Sure, a train arriving every 5 minutes is nice, but still, if you miss it, you'll have to wait around (even if not for another quarter of a fucking hour). Wouldn't it be great if the trains ran continually, no starting and no stopping? I propose we turn the Metro system into one of those Lazy River rides they have at water parks, at least during the summer when it's so ungodly humid in the DC area. Think about it: you just show up and presto, you're on your way! One side of the river would be for boarding, the other for departing. I'm no engineer, but I'm sure there'd be some way to speed up the current in between stations, while slowing it down in the immediate vicinity of the stations to facilitate maneuverability. If you wanted to get to your destination more quickly, we could designate one lane the swimming lane -- cheap transit and daily exercise! You'd wear bathing attire of your choice -- a baggy t-shirt if you're overweight and want to hide it, or a skimpy bikini if you're a nubile intern, as the case may be. Your day-uniforms would be stored at work -- where they belong -- and you'd simply change in & out of them there.
True, it would cost money to keep the water sufficiently clean, and to provide a strong enough current to the still water. But think of the savings in labor costs from the ultimate automation of running trains -- no trains at all. Actually, we could just reassign the workers to administer the cleaning agents, unchoke any clogs during downtime, and so on, so they wouldn't lose their jobs. And think of how less stressful their new tasks would be compared to always keeping a vigilant eye on the guy who's trying to dart into the Metro while the doors are closing! We'd also enjoy savings from: no crashes, no repairs or maintenance of trains, nor of the tracks & rails, no cleaning ladies to clear up trash, etc etc etc. Hell, even if we had to raise taxes, who wouldn't choose this option?
The only trouble we might face would be getting everyone on board, abandoning travel by gas-guzzling, smoke-spewing automobiles. So here's what we do: we reach out to a historically underprivileged and at-risk population -- say, pulchritudinous 20-something females -- and hire them as lifeguards. This demographic group is particularly at risk of poverty due to squandering their money on expensive fashions for the career-minded gal. To deal w/ this problem, we simply supply their entire work wardrobe for free: they could choose their uniform from among a full-length burlap sack, a woolen three-piece suit, or, you know, a white cotton monokini. Then just watch the public transit patrons roll in.
I realize that most of this model is mere daydreaming, but a first approximation could realistically be reached by selecting the hottest of the environmental NGO interns to pose in Metro trains dressed in white linen and bra-liberated. Or if few such girls were staffing such NGOs, then they could farm the work out. Hey, would you rather live on a feminist planet that had no viable ecological future, or on a planet whose environmental sustainability was secured by sexualizing female bodies? If Al Gore's new movie is any guide, the time may soon be upon us when we may have to make that difficult decision. And so, I'll end on that hopeful note.
[Though I shouldn't have to say it, if I've offended anyone (is that possible anymore?), then simply remove the pole from your butt. That ought to help matters.]
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