1. Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
2. Humans are naturally polygamous
3. Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy
4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim
5. Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce
6. Beautiful people have more daughters
7. What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals
8. The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of
9. It's natural for politicians to risk everything for an affair (but only if they're male)
10. Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist

Brought to you by Psychology Today magazine.

Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature

John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, muses about the Sopranos, books, and America.

From coast to coast, from white-wine sipping yuppies to real life mobsters, The Sopranos has had Americans talking - even those of us not familiar with the difficulty of illegal interstate trucking or how to bury a body in packed snow. While the New York Times called upon Michael Chabon, Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly to resurrect the serial novel in its Sunday Magazine, critics were calling Chase the Dickens of our time. The final episode roped in some 11.9 million viewers. One major question, though, remains. Has Tony Soprano whacked the American novel?

A snippet:

In truth, the novel has been whacked by a number of things, starting with the decline of public education, where standardised tests stand in for cultural (and actual) literacy. Also in America, to a far greater degree than in Britain, the corporation and the language of advertising reigns supreme. To buy or not to buy, that is the question that defines these people's outlook on the world.

A spot of truth:

The eye has been trained to scan, and to receive, and less and less to read.

More and more, Americans don't have the time to think, let alone to read.

Has the novel been murdered by the mob?

We proposed a new search heuristic using the scuba diving metaphor. This approach is based on the concept of evolvability and tends to exploit neutrality in fitness landscape. Despite the fact that natural evolution does not directly select for evolvability, the basic idea behind the scuba search heuristic is to explicitly push the evolvability to increase. The search process switches between two phases: Conquest-of-the-Waters and Invasion-of-the-Land. A comparative study of the new algorithm and standard local search heuristics on the NKq-landscapes has shown advantage and limit of the scuba search. To enlighten qualitative differences between neutral search processes, the space is changed into a connected graph to visualize the pathways that the search is likely to follow.

Scuba Search : when selection meets innovation

Discovery Systems (DS) can be considered as entry points for global loosely coupled distributed systems. An efficient Discovery System in essence increases the performance, reliability and decision making capability of distributed systems. With the rapid increase in scale of distributed applications, existing solutions for discovery systems are fast becoming either obsolete or incapable of handling such complexity. They are particularly ineffective when handling service lifetimes and providing up-to-date information, poor at enabling dynamic service access and they can also impose unwanted restrictions on interfaces to widely available information repositories. In this paper we present essential the design characteristics, an implementation and a performance analysis for a discovery system capable of overcoming these deficiencies in large, globally distributed environments.

A Multi Interface Grid Discovery System

"This Time, This Place" is many things -- and at times, nothing much -- but it is foremost a historical salvage operation on behalf of that "awesome engine of a man . . . terrifying, kind, hyperenergetic, ruthless, loving." The adjectives keep rolling in until Valenti throws up his hands. "Almost anything you could say about Lyndon Johnson, good or bad, had at least a hint of truth to it."

...

"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

Such over-the-top language may be expected from the man who once declared, "I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently because Lyndon Johnson is my President," and who recalls his first encounter with JFK in this fashion: "He reminded me of a Plantagenet royal, a wise, brave, splendid king who would save a lady in distress." (Wait for it.) "Or a nation."

This hyperbole appears to be the bastard offspring of Lord Macaulay and advertising copy, and yet beneath it lurks a kind of deliberative drabness. Valenti was a lobbyist through and through, and any lobbyist worth his salt knows better than to bite the hand that may one day feed him.

Jack Valenti's Memoir, Rated L for Loyal

An article last week about inexpensive dresses misstated the name of a clothing store on Broadway. It is Yellow Rat Bastard, not Dirty Yellow Bastard.

See also, from last month, Angelina Appreciates a Good Discount.

Correction: Just Don’t Call Them Inexpensive

From Publishers Weekly:

From the world's first car bomb in 1920 (actually a horse-drawn wagon, exploded by anarchist Mario Buda in downtown Manhattan), to those incessantly exploding in Iraq, Mike Davis shows how these "quotidian workhorses of urban terrorism" are responsible for "producing the most significant mutations in city form and urban lifestyle."

At its best, this is a gripping supplementary history, full of surprising, often contrarian facts and voices behind some of the most spectacular acts of violence on record.

Packed with horrific and heartrending details, the book goes beyond the statistics to portray the human and moral costs of this gruesome political lever.

From TLS:

For all its gripping “noirish” flourishes and “cool” asides, this is a serious, disturbing and pessimistic book that resonates with widespread contemporary terrors. Above all, it is an excellent analysis of the arrogant miscalculations, cruelties and sometimes wanton stupidity of various governing elites.

A Brief History of the Car Bomb

If you can't be a good example, serve as a warning. What can others learn from your mistakes?

For example:

Do not double dog dare your sometimes-inappropriate coworker to demonstrate ...

You'll have to click through.

Words to live by | Salon

WSJ is afraid of dragons, but they make an interesting point ...

In an age of abysmal science literacy, with fantastical technological distractions a mere mouse-click away, what does the museum's decision to focus on make-believe monsters tell us about this venerable institution?

In a culture where old-fashioned fantasy has been replaced by the television and video-game industries, and scientists create real human-animal chimeras for experimentation, perhaps there is something reassuring about exhibiting the quaint beliefs of previous eras. It reinforces the conviction that ours is a more sophisticated and scientifically literate age. It flatters our belief that the rational study of the natural world and its inhabitants will somehow inoculate us against the all-too-human urge to exploit nature and one another. But this is wishful thinking on par with a belief in unicorns.

...

Most people are unaware of the museum's eugenic past; and officials there understandably are in no hurry to enlighten them. For decades the museum hosted international eugenics congresses and joint sessions of the Eugenics Research Association and the American Eugenics Society.

I wonder what Richard Dawkins and Michael Behe think about this exhibit. For now, I'll have to be content to know what Michael Behe thinks of Dawkins:

I believe his new book follows much less from his data than from his premises, and yet I admire his determination. Concerning the big questions, the Bible advises us to be hot or cold but not lukewarm. Whatever the merit of his ideas, Richard Dawkins is not lukewarm.

Of course, that was before Dawkins reviewed Behe's new book:

I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe’s second book as by his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him.

I'm just waiting for this to descend into farce:

Vicious name-calling has accompanied these events, much of which is chronicled on both men’s Web pages. Mr. Finkelstein has called Mr. Dershowitz a "raving maniac," "hoodlum" and "evil." On normanfinkelstein.com there is a recent Finkelstein article titled "Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for Assassination?" On Mr. Dershowitz’s Web site (alandershowitz.com), he has had students compile lists of "The Most Despicable Things Finkelstein Has Said," "The 10 Stupidest Things Finkelstein Has Said," and so on.

Bleak Mythology

Innovation begets risk, almost by definition. When something is truly new, only so much can be predicted about how it will play out. Proponents of a discovery often see and believe only in the benefits it will deliver. But when it comes to innovations in food and medicine, belief can be dangerous.

A Challenge to Gene Theory, a Tougher Look at Biotech