] Aron also noted that the research answered the "historic
] question of whether love and sex are the same, or
] different, or whether romantic passion is just warmed
] over sexual arousal." He said, "Our findings show that
] the brain areas activated when someone looks at a photo
] of their beloved only partially overlap with the brain
] regions associated with sexual arousal. Sex and romantic
] love involve quite different brain systems."

In other news: The sky is blue.

Jello: Yes, sorry hon... I can never speak to you again because I want to do you, but you're not into me. This causes me acute anxiety[1].

Source it so you're not a pig.

Science proves Billy Crystal (Harry) was right?

Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.

] One provocative hypothesis that might account for the
] rise of spectrum disorders in technically adept
] communities like Silicon Valley, some geneticists
] speculate, is an increase in assortative mating.
] Superficially, assortative mating is the blond gentleman
] who prefers blondes; the hyperverbal intellectual who
] meets her soul mate in the therapist's waiting room.
] There are additional pressures and incentives for
] autistic people to find companionship - if they wish to
] do so - with someone who is also on the spectrum. Grandin
] writes, "Marriages work out best when two people with
] autism marry or when a person marries a handicapped or
] eccentric spouse.... They are attracted because their
] intellects work on a similar wavelength."
]
]
] That's not to say that geeks, even autistic ones, are
] attracted only to other geeks. Compensatory unions of
] opposites also thrive along the continuum, and in the
] last 10 years, geekitude has become sexy and associated
] with financial success. The lone-wolf programmer may be
] the research director of a major company, managing the
] back end of an IT empire at a comfortable remove from the
] actual clients. Says Bryna Siegel, author of The World of
] the Autistic Child and director of the PDD clinic at
] UCSF, "In another historical time, these men would have
] become monks, developing new ink for early printing
] presses. Suddenly they're making $150,000 a year with
] stock options. They're reproducing at a much higher
] rate."
]
]
] Genetic hypotheses like these don't rule out
] environmental factors playing a role in the rising
] numbers. Autism is almost certainly not caused by the
] action of a single gene, but by some orchestration of
] multiple genes that may make the developing child more
] susceptible to a trigger in the environment. One
] consequence of increased reproduction among people
] carrying some of these genes might be to boost "genetic
] loading" in successive generations - leaving them more
] vulnerable to threats posed by toxins in vaccines,
] candida, or any number of agents lurking in the
] industrialized world.

Really interesting. Really interesting. Really interesting. Really interesting. Really...

Wired 9.12: The Geek Syndrome

I am not worried about the rise of the cultural conservatives. I am worried about the disappearance of an internationalist, pro-American business elite.

C.E.O.'s, M.I.A.

] "The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the
] radical right of the Republican Party gets," he
] explained. "That's because the one thing they loathe more
] than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be
] damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth."

After reading this I got the feeling he's more than a little pissed off at these guys.

Bill Moyers Fights Back

] One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues
] and I at NOW didn't play by the conventional rules of
] Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into
] democrats and republicans, liberals and conservatives
] and allow journalists to pretend they have done their
] job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news,
] they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the
] news.

...

] Hear me: an unconscious people, an indoctrinated people,
] a people fed only partisan information and opinion that
] confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in
] mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less
] inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical.
] And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind
] of orthodoxy can kill us, too.

This is quite a rant...

Democracy Now! | Bill Moyers Responds to CPB's Tomlinson Charges of Liberal Bias:

] But George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley,
] denies that academic institutions are biased against
] conservatives. The disparity in hiring, he explains,
] occurs because conservatives are not as interested as
] liberals in academic careers. Why does he think liberals
] are like that? "Unlike conservatives, they believe in
] working for the public good and social justice." That
] clears that up.

I think it does. You can't get any republican street cred without doing something tremendously lucrative and capitalist.

] Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations --
] except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor
] about their ideological monopolies. In contrast, American campuses
] have more insistently proclaimed their commitment to diversity as
] they have become more intellectually monochrome.

] They do indeed cultivate diversity -- in race, skin color,
] ethnicity, sexual preference. In everything but thought.

Thats because it is not possible for people of a variety of races, skin colors, ethnicities and sexual preference to converse in an open manner unless the spirit of liberalism dominates. Conservative thought is not tolerant of such a varied group of people. In fact, the reason that colleges have been moving farther to the left, is that they have become so diverse. Exposure to diversity kills conservatism by dispelling the prejudices, stereotypes and myths that contemporary conservatism is founded on.

Academia, Stuck To the Left

] Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder
] it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant
] nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of
] breeding children.
]
] Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and
] nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately
] designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things
] that could endanger children.
...
] Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are
] tormented. So why don't they do something about it?
] Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so
] unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new
] chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their
] bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing
] wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids
] will be miserable at that age.
]
] This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it,
] which probably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet
] naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the
] possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.
]
] I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids
] are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it
] should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at
] thirteen?
. . .
] The mediocrity of American public schools has worse
] consequences than just making kids unhappy for six
] years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids
] away from the things they're supposed to be learning.

To a great extent, the sleeping American populace has woken up to the fact that there is a problem with the way that they operate their society. Littleton style mass murders are both new and unique enough to indicate that something has changed, but also common enough to indicate that this change is not an aberration. People want to do something about it. Unfortunately, by all accounts, the dialog even years later is wanting.

People seem to grasp onto oversimplified solutions. They blame access to firearms, violent video games, industrial music, etc... These things are easy to attack, but the people attacking them can never seem to explain why their presence doesn't consistently produce the problems they are concerned with, nor why the problems they are concerned with sometimes exist without the presence of the specific cause they cite. This demonstrates a lack of understanding of the scope of the issue.

I have always felt that these problems were systemic and structural rather then limited and specific, and that we are unlikely to be able to see them, understand them, or address them as a society because we do not want to change the things that we would need to change.

Part of the problem is that we see teenage suicides and mass mur... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Why Nerds are Unpopular (Long, and worth it.)

Eastern Europe and Asia -- the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Siberia -- were a moment-by-moment challenge, even with the authors riding top-of-the-line BMW cycles.

This show is good. Man, did they get pwned in Mongolia!

Long Way Round : Chasing Shadows Across the World

] Reasonable critics of the expansive provisions of the
] Patriot Act, on both sides of the aisle and in both
] Houses, have introduced legislation that would implement
] these modest changes. Far from gutting the Act, these
] would secure the important powers of the law, but place
] modest limits on their use. For most of us who voted for
] the Act, what sealed the deal was the inclusion of
] provisions that would require us to take a sober second
] look at the most contentious provisions in the Act by the
] end of 2005, before reauthorizing them. That time is
] coming, and the Justice Department does not want to lose
] the emergency powers it won in the aftermath of 9/11. But
] Congress should resist its overtures, move forward on the
] sunsets, and enact additional Patriot fixes if it
] believes them needed.

www.bobbarr.org: Patriot Act fixes

] Asked whether helping sub-Saharan African countries gain
] a bigger share of the globalization pie was in the best
] interests of the West, he said there was indeed an
] overriding interest on the part of the West despite the
] expected shift of jobs from the West to those developing
] markets.  The outsourcing of jobs from the United States
] to India had resulted in a near-doubling of bilateral
] United States-India trade, contributing to economic
] growth.

Thomas Friedman at the United Nations