Indeed, lawyers and financial advisers have reported a 50 per cent increase in the number of divorce inquiries since the financial markets collapsed in September. A recent survey conducted by community website makefriendsonline revealed that a third of 10,000 respondents believe that financial hardship will cause a relationship to fail, while matrimonial law specialists Mishcon [...]
Posts from ‘November, 2008’
Technology was supposed to set you free
Since the 1950s we have had a 400% increase in productivity as a result of manufacturing technologies. In just 11 hours of labour today we can produce the same amount of goods as somebody working for 40 hours in the 1950s. Today, for the economy to function we must consume 400% more than we did [...]
The Universe recognized its emptiness, and created somethingness And From That, Life
Astronomers have detected a building block of RNA floating within the hot, compact core of a massive star-forming region in the Milky Way. The molecule appears to have formed with all of the other stuff that makes up planets, suggesting that many other worlds are seeded with some of life’s ingredients right from birth. { [...]
Bring back the Aristocracy
From the Prince of Wales: Gandhi realised that humanity has a natural tendency to consume and that, if there are no limits on that tendency, we can become obsessed simply with satisfying our desires. The desire grows ever more potent as we consume ever more, even though we achieve very little of the satisfaction we [...]
Social media is the crowd: impulsive not sensible
As blogger Tim Mallon put it, “I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets. “During the hour or so I followed on Twitter there were wildly [...]
Repeat after me: individualism is good
They found that places where individualism is valued over the collective good also tend to be places where a lot of beer is consumed. The researchers also found they could take a group of college students and manipulate those individualist-versus-collectivist impulses a bit, which in turn influenced how thirsty those students were for beer. “Previous [...]
Are you third world or first world, in bed?
She found that men who were judged to be more “masculine” and women who were considered more “attractive”, were likely to be seen as more inclined towards casual sex – and to actually be so (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 29, p 211). { snip } It also raises the more fundamental question of why [...]
How propaganda works
Implicit attitudes on race are assessed by tests like the Implicit Association Test. (You can take the test here.) Subjects are presented with photos of blacks and whites in succession and asked to pair positive or negative words (e.g., “intelligent,” “law-abiding,” “poor,” “success”) with the photos. Eighty percent of whites take longer to associate positive [...]
Addiction: not a disease, a social pathology
Ninety per cent of the young people who seek treatment for compulsive computer gaming are not addicted. { snip } But the clinic is changing its treatment as it realises that compulsive gaming is a social rather than a psychological problem. Using traditional abstinence-based treatment models the clinic has had very high success rates treating [...]
It’s official: America provoked her own entrance into World War I
The American government sent a ship full of civilians to carry weapons to the Germans, knowing they’d sink the ship, knowing it carried munitions: The British passenger ship Lusitania was carrying small-arms ammunition in its hold when it was sunk by a German torpedo in 1915. An Irish dive team Tuesday recovered a sample of [...]
