Of these three songs, two are from Halo 3 and one is from Santana. Using only sound (i.e. without watching the video, or their titles), try and guess which is which. It might be easiest to have a friend administer this test, less you accidentally see the title of the YouTube page, which reveals the solution.
Microsoft’s advertising campaign is to get people to host “Windows 7 Launch Parties” in various countries across the world. I don’t want to get into the details, but basically you get a bunch of your friends to come over and you show off Windows 7 to them. The motivation is that Microsoft will send you a bunch of free stuff to help host your party, including a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, and sort of grab bag goodies to give to your guests. I’m one of the hosts.
As a host, one of the things Microsoft provides us with are notes on how to host the party (ideas for activities, answers to questions that guests might ask you about Windows 7, etc.) and instructional videos. Here’s one of those videos.
The video is pretty terrible. They shake the camera too much, and have too many cuts; I guess they were trying to get an informal “reality TV” look. The actors sound too fake, and their dialog is unbelievable.
At 5:50, it would have been a lot funnier if everyone became silent, and the black guy was staring at the nerd like “And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” The nerd is like “No, I just meant, uh… ‘cause like, you know, you were… you told me how… um… like, when you tried to set up your iPod last time, you uh… you got this error message… and uh…”
Don’t bother reading this post if you don’t know how to play Magic the Gathering. You won’t understand much. I had an epic battle on Xbox Live where I took a totally unleveled deck and battled four player free-for-all and pretty much “won”, even though their decks were leveled up.
So the way Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers on Xbox 360 works is that there are pre-built decks of around 60 cards, but you only gain access to around 45 of them at first. You have to grind through the single player campaign to “unlock” the last 15 or so cards of each deck. So if you don’t grind, your deck is playable, but often those 15 cards are the most powerful cards of the deck, and so you’re generally better off doing the grinding.
So I go online and do a ranked matched “any game”, and end up in a 4 player free for all. Note that I didn’t know the decks at the time, but now in retrospect I’m able to identify them. I was using a completely base “Ears of the Elves” (literally 0 cards unlocked), and played against 3 players, at least one of whom had fully unlocked his decks.
The guy to my left was playing a pure-white deck heavily based upon flying creatures, so probably it was “Wings of Light”. The guy across from me was using some sort of super-monster green deck, so I’m thinking it must have been “Teeth of the Predator”. He’s the one who had fully unlocked his deck. Finally, the guy to the right of me was playing a pure-red deck, though nothing stood out to me, so I’m guessing he was using “Hands of Flame”.
I’ll reiterate that although I played the single player campaign, this was the absolute first time I played online, and the first time I played with the deck I was using. I didn’t even know what kind of deck I had until maybe the 5 or 6th turn where I realized it was elf-themed (I didn’t bother reading the name of the deck). All I had noted was that it was a green + black, so I was expecting a swarm deck (due to green) with some sort of “sacrifice creature to do something cool” kind of thing (due to black). Turns out my deck was a pure swarm deck, but whatever.
So the first few turns we’re all bringing out our creatures, but nobody is attacking. The game starts to drag on, and it’s quickly becoming clear that no one is going to attack. I get the sense that a “cold-war” kind of vibe is coming up: Nobody wants to unleash the first strike, because then they’d receive retaliation.
With this realization, I take a look at the number of cards in each of our deck. This is developing into a game of attrition, and so whoever has the least number of cards is going to lose first. That turned out to be me (in retrospect, this was kind of obvious, since I had zero unlocks), so I knew I had to break the peace. The guy with the most amount of cards was the green deck across from me.
Unfortunately, that bastard had brought out three, I repeat, three fucking Wurm’s Tooth’s, and so he was getting 3 health every time someone cast a green spell. Add to the fact that he and I are both playing green decks, and he was currently at 50+ health. This guy had a strong chance of being the winner, which was both good and bad for him. It’s good because if this game of attrition went too long (i.e. if the other players were stupid), he can just coast to victory. It’s bad because his position was too visible. In other words, it was clear that he was way ahead of everyone else, which risked having the other players form an alliance against him. Then again, this being my first online Magic game, I wasn’t sure how easy it was to form an alliance. There was no text nor voice chat system, so I couldn’t ask the other players to rally with me.
Not 100% sure, but I think at this point, I could already see that themes of the green deck across from me was “giant creatures”. I forget what he had exactly, but we’re talking like 5/5s being his weakest, and maybe he had an 8/8 in there too. The white deck to my left, probably also clearly became a “flying deck”. He probably brought out a couple of weak flyers (1/1) early, but he I bet he had a 5/5 or two out by now. The red deck, on the other hand, I had no idea what the heck he was doing. He hard hardly brought anything out. He brought out a Raging Globin moderately early (not first turn, but before the green guy and possibly the white guy had any monsters), but he was too chicken shit to actually attack anyone with it.
On my side, I was spamming out elves. I brought out Gaea’s Herald (who, BTW, is considered an “elf”) early on the off chance that someone had counter spells (despite nobody playing blue) (and in the end, nobody had ever cast any counter spells the whole game). Then I had a couple of Elvish Warriors out (plain 2/3 monsters) and probably some other miscellaneous elf cards like Farhaven Elf and one Elven Riders. I got Lys Alana Huntmaster out pretty late unfortunately, so I think I ended up with only something like four or six 1/1 tokens.
This is where the game got interesting. Up until now, it was just a cold war build up. But then, the green bastard across from me brought out Verdant Force. At first, I thought this guy only created a 1/1 every time it was his upkeep, but it turns out it’s a 1/1 creature for every player’s upkeep, which meant that by the time the turn came back to him, he’d have four 1/1 creatures out. Definitely too fucking powerful. So I was the first one to go on the offense. I cast Eyeblight’s Ending taking out his Verdant Force, after it had spawned a 1/1.
I think I broke the ice here, because after my spell, the white guy on my left attacked with about half of his force, trying to hit the green guy. Since all of white’s creatures were flying, quite a few got through. Unfortunately, some were blocked, and this is what happened:
The green guy had Vigor out, and if you don’t know that card, you should definitely read it, because it is total bullshit. Vigor makes all your creatures invincible, and every time you try to damage them, instead they get a permanent +1/+1. Also, any time Vigor goes to the graveyard, he’s instead shuffled into your library. PURE BULLSHIT. Imagine a spawn deck + Vigor + Earthquake. Anyway, so one of green’s creatures got a permanent +1/+1.
While I’m at it, I might was well mentioned that green also had Elvish Piper which essentially let him cast any creature he wanted for 1 mana, which is just adding insult to injury, because by this point we all had like 10+ or 15+ lands.
The green guy got pissed off by this, and essentially sent a horde against white. Basically, at this point, white looked like he was screwed. If white did not block, you’re very easily looking at 20 damage this turn, AKA instant death. Probably he was doing 30 or 35 damage in fact. White could have blocked just fine (he certainly had enough creatures to do so), but because of Vigor, all of green’s blocked monster would not only take 0 damage, but they would gain a permanent +1/+1 due to the blocking.
I already knew what card I wanted to play… the only issue is I wasn’t sure when I wanted to play it. I was considering playing it last turn when white attacked, but I didn’t. But I saw here and now that if I didn’t play it, essentially green would completely overpower white, and no matter whether white blocks or not, I’m not sure red and I could have handled it alone. So I played my card.
I cast Eyeblight’s Ending on Vigor.
This instantly completely changed the whole battle. With Vigor out of the picture, white blocked the shit out of that force, devastating them. Then red did nothing, then the turn came back to me. I brought out Elvish Champion which gave all my creatures +1/+1, and best of all, forestwalk. I declared my attack phase, and the green player quit the game. I didn’t even have to actually tap any creatures for the attack. One down, two to go.
The red player tried to fuck me over here. He used some sort of creature ability on the white player (I forget what) and cast some sort of 3 damage instant on my Elvish Champion, trying to kill the 2/2 creature. I fucked him right back by doing Essence Drain on his creature, and then Giant Growth on the Elvish Champion. At this point, the red player said fuck it, and disconnected too.
Unfortunately, when the red player disconnected, the game ended, saying that the host has left the game. I’m sort of relieved that I didn’t have to fight the white player, because I had established a sort of camaraderie with him.
If the game had kept going, would I have won? It’s very hard to tell, not because we were evenly matched or anything, but because I couldn’t remember what my remaining cards were.
Basically, after the red guy, it’s my turn, then the white guy’s turn. And the white has all flying monsters, and I have zero flying monsters, so unless I can kill white this turn, he would kill me next turn.
I’m pretty sure that I had Overrun, so I definitely want to use the trample ability. But what I can’t remember is whether or not I had Coat of Arms. If I did, that’s an easy +10/+10 to all my creatures, combined with trample means I win (unless he had Wrath of God or something like that). If I didn’t have that card, then he could probably block enough to ensure that I don’t kill him, and then he’d kill me.
A lot of people hate Microsoft. I don’t. If you do hate Microsoft, here are some things to consider, which may make you reconsider your hatred for Microsoft.
First one is a “bonus” reason, because it really isn’t related to Microsoft at all, but instead has to do with Bill Gates. It’s included in this list because a good portion of people who hate Microsoft seem to mix up the company with its former CEO. So if you’re one of those people, this reason is for you. Gates has donated more money to charity than any other one person. He founded the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, one of the biggest philanthropic organizations in the world. Not only has he donated almost all of his own money, he regularly campaigns for other rich people to donate their money to help the less fortunate as well. Since retiring from Microsoft, he has become a full time philanthropist. He doesn’t just throw money at the problem, but actively gets involved in understanding the problem of poverty and finding the best way to fix it in the long term. As a result, most of his donations are in the form of investing in education and healthcare in impoverished countries so that future generations can prosper, as opposed to buying and giving away food to the hungry, which only treats the symptoms. In terms of actual results, and assuming you value human welfare and negatively value suffering, Bill Gates has probably done more good to the world than any other person who has ever lived.
If you hate Microsoft because they are “evil”, first, think about what the word “evil” means. To me, “evil” implies raping babies. It implies torture. It implies genocide. It implies chaining people up. I don’t mean the figurative chaining of “Oh, I have to use Microsoft Word because everyone else uses it, so I’m chained” while drinking $5 starbucks coffee and reading RSS feeds on your iPhone. I mean literally having chains made of metal oval links, in some damp basement with no light sources, and suffering some sensory deprivation, and needing several years of therapy to overcome. Microsoft is a corporation and corporations don’t have morality. It’s common to try to anthropomorphosize corporations, but it leads to logical fallacies like concluding that a corporation can be “evil”. Corporations seek money. They don’t have any morality, good or bad. If you’re confused about this, read The Corporation (or if you’re lazy, watch the movie instead).
If you hate Microsoft because they are monopolistic, then take a look at Google. What search engine do you use? You don’t need to e-mail me, or write a response. I already know the answer: You use Google. If I could go up to a random person and bet $100 that they use Google as their search engine, I’d make a very comfortable living. “Google” is now a verb. Google appears in acronyms (JFGI, GIYF, etc.) Google’s monopoly is much more difficult to dethrone. Microsoft doesn’t black list programs: You can run any program you want on your Windows computer, including programs which crack and disable the activation process of Windows itself. Google black list pages. If Google doesn’t like your webpage, it will simply not show up in any search queries. And since nobody uses any search engine other than Google, your page essentially has ceased to exist on the web. In other words, Google basically has censorship power over the entire web.
If you hate Microsoft because they use lock-in tactics, then take a look at Apple. You can’t use iPhone without iTunes. If you’ve been using WinAmp all your life to organize your mp3s, and built up a database of song ratings, playlists, and so on, too fucking bad. Start over from scratch in iTunes. Oh, so you’re installing iTunes now? Well, to use iTunes, you have to also install QuickTime, one of the shittiest movie players ever made. Oh, and now that you’ve got those two installed, for “high priority security” reasons, you should get rid of whatever browser you were using (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, whatever), and use Safari instead.
The cable I use to connect my iPhone to my computer is wearing out. When it break’s, all I have to buy is a new USB cable for 88 cents, right? Yeah, sorry, but the iPhone basically uses USB technology, but they changed the shape of the plug, and no one makes these cables except Apple, so you’re looking at $19.
If you hate Microsoft because you think they’ll do the minimum they can get away with without getting sued, consider these two tales. Wal-Mart experimented with selling DRMed music. DRMed music, in case you’re not familiar with the concept, are like mp3 files, except every time you want to play the song, your computer needs to connect to Wal-Mart’s servers to verify your credentials to make sure you’ve paid for the right to listen to that song. It turned out that this wasn’t profitable enough, so Wal-Mart shut down the servers which meant that your computer could no longer connect, and thus you lost all the music you’ve paid for. And the music execs argued that this is perfectly normal, and you should expect to lose access to music you’ve already paid for.
In contrast, Microsoft opened up a service called PopFly. It was a site designed to allow non-programmers to create their own games, and upload them and share them with the public. It was like YouTube, except instead of contributing amateur videos, you contributed amateur games. Microsoft decided that there wasn’t enough demand for this service, so they decided to shut down the server. The difference between this and Wal-Mart is that Microsoft then specifically hired programmers to write a “downloader” program that lets you download the games off of PopFly and play them offline before they finally disappear for good. In other words, Microsoft put money and effort to ensure that nobody lost access to anything they’ve put on PopFly.
If you hate Microsoft because they’re anti-open-source, consider that Microsoft has contributed several open source projects under their Shared Source License, and have even contributed to the Linux Kernel under the GPL. Those who argue that MS only contributed to the Kernel for selfish reasons (the contribution makes Linux work better in a VM environment running under Windows) needs to recall the core of the open source philosophy, which is every programmer improving the underlying software by contributing patches which scratch their specific itches. Linus made Linux for “selfish” reasons, in that he wasn’t satisfied with any of the other OS kernels out there. Those who argue that this contribution is some sort of “trap” seem to simply not have much faith in the open source software (OSS) methodology at all: If anyone can submit code to an open source project to destroy it, and there is no maintainer who will verify the submission before it gets integrate into every copy of Linux all over the world, then wouldn’t that imply OSS is a pretty crappy way of developing software? If Microsoft can do some legal magic to somehow screw Linux over while licensing code under the GPL, doesn’t that imply that the GPL is fundamentally broken and flawed?
Finally, here’s a bonus story: in the movie 2002 Minority Report, there’s a scene where someone is using a desk with a built in touch-sensitive monitor. In 2007, Microsoft announced essentially exactly that type of computer, called the “Microsoft Surface”. People complained that Microsoft was unable to innovate, this device clearly being a rip-off of the computer from Minority Report. It turns out that the computer used in Minority Report was a prototype of the Microsoft Surface which Microsoft left to the producers of the movie. (It’s quite easy to verify that Microsoft was closely involved in the Minority Report movie, given how often the MSN logo appears all over the place).
Note that there are basically only two “famous” multitouch devices: the Microsoft Surface and Apple’s iPhone. Note that Microsoft essentially (stealthily) demoed the Microsoft Surface in 2002, via the Minority Report movie. Note that the iPhone was first announced in 2007. Note how nobody whines about how Apple is unable to innovate, simply copying ideas from sci-fi movies.
I linked to this video of a primate being surprised by magic tricks on my Twitter (I had referred to him as a “monkey”, but perhaps he’s a chimpanzee). Several people were astonished by the Pan-kun’s intelligence. If you were one of those people you will probably want to see Pan-kun attempting dog-training (part 1, part 2).
In the magician video, Pan-kun is demonstrating an understanding of object permanence. Having a theory of object permanence means being able to model the existence of objects in your mind, even though there is no direct sensitorial evidence for that object. For example, Pan-kun expressed surprised when the magician filled up an opaque glass with milk, and then tilted the glass over, but no milk came out, showing that Pan-kun’s model of the world was such that there should have been milk in the glass (even though he couldn’t directly see, hear, smell, touch, etc. the milk). In the dog-training video, you also see some problem solving (e.g. the scene where the dog escapes from its leash). You occasionally see Pan-kun seemingly nodding in response to questions, but I strongly suspect this latter part is “faked”. After watching several of his videos, what seems to happen is that the human asking the question nods at the end of the question, and Pan-kun nods in response to the nodding. There’s no evidence he actually does understand the questions being asked of him.
As I’ve mentioned previously, Microsoft is exploring Software as a Service (SaaS) both in their Office and Windows series of products. I’ve recently linked to some screenshots of the SaaS version of Office in my Twitter, so here’s my analysis of their SaaS version of Windows.
So first, to dispel any misconceptions before they have a chance to spread: Windows Azure is not Windows 7. Windows Azure is not intended to be used by directly end-users (yet). Windows Azure is intended to be used by programmers and businesses.
ArsTechnica covers Microsoft’s recently announced pricing structure. In brief, you’ll have to pay 15 cents per gigabyte of storage used, 12 cents per hour of CPU usage, and 1 cent per 10K of bandwidth. This hints towards the future I had mentioned earlier, where you would no longer be paying for software (which would instead be distributed for free), but instead for services.
What this means for you today as a end user: not much. You probably won’t ever directly rent any space nor time on Windows Azure, because it’s not compatible with any of the programs you’ve currently got installed on your computer, and nobody (not even Microsoft) is campaigning people to switch over from XP/Vista/7 onto Azure. So what’s the purpose of Azure?
It’s intended for businesses and programmers. The easiest way to explain it is via an example use-case. Let’s say I’m a programmer, and I’ve got this great idea for a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). I’ve already got most or all of the labour done (I’ve programmed the game, got the art drawn, the music composed, etc.) The only issue now is that I need a server to host the game on. The problems: I don’t have business-quality internet connection stability; I don’t have amazing bandwidth; I don’t have a super computer with backup servers.
ISPs charge businesses a much higher rater per month for an internet connection than they do for residential connections. The reason (ostensibly) is that there are much more stringent requirements for business internet connections. If once a year, your home internet dies, you’re kinda upset, but you can just read a book, or go to your friend’s house, or an internet cafe. But a business that relies on the Internet (e.g. Google, Amazon, etc.) needs to be up 24/7 or they will lose a ton of money and customers. Even if they only lose connection for on average 1 hour every 3 years, this is still an unacceptably unreliable connection for these types businesses. If I’m going to run a serious MMOG, I cannot rely on residental quality internet connections, or I will lose paying customers when they can’t log into the server.
Let’s say my MMOG gets successful, and I start getting hundreds, if not thousands, if not tends or hundreds of thousands of players. I’m going to need bandwidth. Now plenty of residental users have pretty decent download bandwidth, but upload bandwidth is pretty rare, and that’s the kind of bandwidth an MMOG server needs. If I publish a patch to fix some bugs in my game, I need to send these patches out to the players. Typical game patches can be anywhere from 1 meg to 300 megs. Even if you take a middle ground of 20 megs, with ten thousand players, that means you need to upload 200 gigs. But you can’t dedicate your entire upload bandwidth to publishing these patches, because you still need some bandwidth leftover to actually let the players connect to the game.
If you MMOG has thousands of players, you’re going to need a pretty powerful computer to actually be able to perform all of the calculations necessary to ensure the rules are being followed, and that the world reacts in the appropriate way to the player’s behaviour. You’ll actually need many such computers, because as a business, you need backup servers. If something fails (your harddrive breaks, your CPU overheats, etc.), you can’t just tell all your customers that your game is going to be down, and you’re not sure when it’ll be ready again, because FutureShop or BestBuy still haven’t contacted you yet with an estimate on how long the repairs will take, or the replacement harddrive you ordered online is stuck at customs.
In other words, the second biggest hurdle for developing your own MMOG (besides actually developing the game) is the cost of setting up all the required infrastructure. This is the problem that Azure sets out to solve. As a business person, you would determine how much computing resource you expect to need per customer (how much CPU, bandwidth and storage an average customer would consume per month to play your game), add a bit of margin on top of that, and charge that much as your monthly fee. Let’s say each customer costs you $10 per month. So charge them $25 per month, expect to pay $10 to Microsoft per month for usage of their Windows Azure platform, and pocket the rest. You don’t need to invest in buying expensive hardware or internet connection.
SaaS very much looks like it will be the future of computing, but it’s still in its infancy, so it’ll be a while still before consumers directly rent computing resources. Windows Azure is akin to how a couple dozen years ago, computers indirectly affected your life, even though you probably didn’t own one (and possibly didn’t even know it existed); instead, you interacted with organizations (like banks, and the government) which used computers. Today, you’ll interact with organizations that are using Windows Azure, perhaps unaware of its existence, and in a few dozen years, perhaps everybody will be renting computer resources instead of upgrading their hardware.
In trying to argue this position, I’m going to reduce the genders to their stereotypes — namely that women want power (and note that money indirectly leads to power) and stability of that power; and men want sex with many different women. I’m going to ignore “love”, except by pointing out that marrying for love is a fairly recent phenomenon. The “normal” (in the sense of statistically more common) reasons for marriage were convenience, and establishing family alliances. Even today, arranged-marriages are still… well, arranged, based on what will likely give the couple a comfortable life, regardless of whether they love each other. Also for simplicity, I’m going to ignore homosexuality, bisexuality, etc. and assume everyone is heterosexual for this analysis.
According to evolutionary psychology, the reason men today want to have sex with lots of women is that this was one of the most effective survival strategy for their genes. Simplifying a great deal: Men with the “try to have sex with lots of women” gene tended to have children with more women than men with the “stick with one woman” gene, and thus the “try to have sex with lots of women” became more common, and dominant, in the gene pool. In contrast, no matter how many men a woman slept with, she could only be pregnant with one man’s child at a time, and thus the “try to have sex with lots of men” gene did not end up dominating. Instead, the “make sure the child is well taken care of” genes became dominant, because they tended to increase the probability that the child would survive long enough to be of reproductive age, and “well taken care of” children were more likely to recursively express the traits that attracted mate (power, beauty, etc.)
So what happens when a society becomes polygamous? We already know the answer from history: A few very powerful men (pharaohs, emperors, etc.) get the vast majority of the women, and the rest of the men get very little. In other words, most men get less sex than they would in a monogamous society, and most women get a more powerful partner than they would have.
To take an extreme example, consider a village with 100 men and 100 women. If that village were monogamous, you would imagine there being 100 men-women couples. Note that some poor woman is stuck with the least powerful man in the whole village. Another woman is stuck with the second least powerful, and so on. If the village were polygamous, then one of those men, the most powerful one, would be the “emperor” and get all 100 women, while the other 99 men get nothing. One woman has a partner equally powerful as she would have had in a monogamous society, and every other woman has a more powerful partner. One lucky lady went from the least powerful man in the whole village to the most powerful man. You can actually observe this directly today: in many cults, the cult leader (invariable male) will forbid any male other than himself from having sex, and he will have sex with all the female cult members, including the daughters and wives of other cult members.
David Koresh (1959-1993), the Seven Seals leader of Branch Davidians only in Elk, Texas, greatly restricted the sexual activity of his followers, while marrying wives as young as twelve because puberty was an accepted age for marriage in Old Testament times. A former member described Koresh as “fixated with sex and with a taste for younger girls.” He began to teach that all the women in the world belonged to him, only he had the right to procreate, and he fathered children with his plural wives.
OvercomingBias, a blog I frequent, notes that women seem to be realizing the benefits of polygamy, mating with the most sexy male (from an evolutionary viewpoint, the women are using “sexy” as a proxy for “genetically fit”), and then directly gathering the power themselves by becoming (since now, women can enter the workplace and earn a salary comparable to men’s). I’m not sure what to make of these observations, except to state that the blog’s author, Robin Hanson, is a lot smarter than I.
The new equilibrium we are moving toward seems a very different world. Women free to pick a dad without needing him to stay as a long term helper probably pick sexier men. This should create more inequality in male access to women for sex and kids, and give men more free time to compete to be the few super-sexy super-dads.
Women would get to have kids fathered by sexier men, but at the expense of raising those kids with less male help. More men would be sex-failures with more free time to pursue long-shot plans to reverse their fortunes, and without wives to moderate them. How many of those plans will be peaceful?
I guess this helps somewhat to explain the explicitly sex-aggressive men I see more of these days. When I wrote:
If you don’t signal your continued love she may well conclude that your love has in fact changed.“Master Dogen” responded:
Hanson … seems to be thoroughly trained in thinking that the best way to long-term health in a relationship with a woman is to signal “caring more than everyone else” and “giving gifts,” etc. This, of course, is the constant position of a supplicant. … I advocate a very different way of dealing with a woman … So let’s assume you are an alpha, and you’ve trained your woman to supplicate you rather than the other way around. … You must continue signaling your dominance: gently pull her hair when you go in for a kiss, raise you voice sternly when she steps out of line, flirt shamelessly with other women in public.I might not like it, but I can’t argue that the future doesn’t hold a lot more of this.
A true rationalist, Hason encourages all hypothesis to be testable, less they be dismissed as meaningless. The test here would seem to be more (sexual) aggressiveness in men. If present, it supports Hason’s hypothesis; if absent, weakens it. So in your immediate environment, have you tended to notice more male sexual aggressiveness? For me, on the one hand, shows like “The Pick-up Artist” seem to signal higher social acceptance of such practice, but on the other, it seems like men were much “worse” pre-1960s before feminism. Is this just a cyclical occurrence?
From GameGirlAdvance:
If you’re not sure which of your friends is secretly Canadian, try this simple test: Announce, “I’m going to Tim’s, want anything?”
If they reply, “Who’s Tim?” they are American.
But if they say “Oh, get me a donut,” they are TOTALLY CANADIAN.
I’ve claimed that Americans tend to assume that everyone else is also an American. At first glance, it might seem this quote is an argument against my claim, but actually it’s an argument for it. Notice how the author assumes that given “Tim” is a Canadian-only piece of information, anyone who speaks English and doesn’t know about Tim must be American. As opposed to being British, Australian, African, Chinese, German, Arabic, etc.
Apparently, picking a good name for your child is more important than I had initially assumed, because a person’s name will affect almost all their decisions, including what career to pursue, which spouse to pursue, which city to live in, etc. People tend to prefer the decisions that resembles their own names, with “Dennis” and “Denise” being statistically significantly overrepresented in dentists (PDF link).
Another blog does a much better job of summarizing the findings of the paper than I ever could, so here’s their summary:
The paper’s first few studies investigate the relationship between a person’s name and where they live. People named Phil were found more frequently than usual in Philadelphia, people named Jack in Jacksonville, people named George in Georgia, and so on with p < .001. To eliminate the possibility of the familiarity effect causing parents to subconsciously name their children after their place of residence, further studies were done with surnames and with people who moved later in life, both with the same results. The results held across US and Canadian city names as well as US state names, and were significant both for first name and surname.
In case that wasn’t implausible enough, the researchers also looked at association between birth date and city of residence: that is, were people born on 2/02 more likely to live in the town of Two Harbors, and 3/03 babies more likely to live in Three Forks? With p = .003, yes, they are.
The researchers then moved on to career choices. They combed the records of the American Dental Association and the American Bar association looking for people named either Dennis, Denice, Dena, Denver, et cetera, or Lawrence, Larry, Laura, Lauren, et cetera. That is: were there more dentists named Dennis and lawyers named Lawrence than vice versa? Of the various statistical analyses they performed, most said yes, some at < .001 level. Other studies determined that there was a suspicious surplus of geologists named Geoffrey, and that hardware store owners were more likely to have names starting with ‘H’ compared to roofing store owners, who were more likely to have names starting with ‘R’.
Some other miscellaneous findings: people are more likely to donate to Presidential candidates whose names begin with the same letter as their own, people are more likely to marry spouses whose names begin with the same letter as their own, that women are more likely to show name preference effects than men (but why?), and that batters with names beginning in ‘K’ are more likely than others to strike out (strikeouts being symbolized by a ‘K’ on the records).
If you have any doubts about the validity of the research, I urge you to read the linked paper. It’s a great example of researchers who go above and beyond the call of duty to eliminate as many confounders as possible.
It’s worth emphasizing some of the comments from that blog as well:
If you haven’t already, read the part of the paper where they talk about hardware and roofing stores. They ran some clever analyses to see whether the effect was caused by a love of alliteration (for example someone named Herman decides to go into hardware so he can call his store Herman’s Hardware) and the results suggested this wasn’t the explanation.
And:
The “Players whose names start with K tend to strikeout more” study, is, I believe, flawed. It’s true that K names struck out more historically, but that’s because K names (Kyle, Kevin, etc.) are much more common now, when strikeout rates are high, than they were in previous generations, when strikeout rates were low.
Remember that call I got from Microsoft? Well, the next business day, I get 3 e-mails in rapid succession. The first one says they received my console and will notify me about the progress of my repair. The second says my console repair has complete and they will let me know when it ships. The third says it’s being shipped via express air mail. I guess someone got their ass in gear.