Back in 10th grade I wrote a paper for english class trying to explain why things are funny. Recently there's been some interesting research into the origins of laughter: the 'ha-ha' of human laughter evolved from the 'pant-pant', the laboured breathing, of our primate ancestors during tickling and rough-and-tumble playSocial animals need ways to ( Read more... )

Dunbar's number represents the largest number of social connections that an animal can maintain at one time. Some of those limits are cognitive and some are practical. If you live on an island with five people, the number of people in your monkeysphere can be no more than five ( Read more... )

Last month I was talking to DW about emergent behavior. For example ants have extremely simple programming. "If you see this chemical follow it. If you find food start dropping this chemical while you take it back to the nest. If you find water in the nest start digging this way." What emerges from every colony is an extremely complex, ( Read more... )

There's an aspect of fashion which is purely aesthetic. Some clothes and jewelery make you look nicer than other clothes and jewelery. But there's another aspect that seems a bit more biological. Wearing expensive clothes advertises that you have the financial resources to raise your offspring to adulthood. "I have so much money that I have no ( Read more... )

A while ago I read a psychology paper* about why cults are appealing and addictive. (I wish I could find the link again. My google-fu is weak today.) The paper explained that people have an intense need to be social. As Joe Rogan explains "For punishment in prison you get taken away from rapists and child molesters. If being social wasn't such ( Read more... )

dr_strych9 once told me his wife "really, really doesn't get how furries are supposed to be so damned creepy" about furries.

I've got a few explanations. I'm not trying to argue that this makes it morally justifiable to ridicule or discriminate against furries, this is a tentative theory for how and why people are inclined to do this.

In my problem with ( Read more... )

A friend just got a call from his mom:

mom: "they were evacuating the newspaper building because the Muslims called in a bomb threat."
kcin: "which Muslims?"
mom: "oh, you know...the uh, international Muslim community...they're upset because the newspaper published--"
kcin: "so the international Muslim community issued a bomb threat?"Every so ( Read more... )

Between renders this evening I started watching The Power Of Nightmares, availiable at Netflix, Google video, or a BitTorrent node near you. The documentary starts its history of middle eastern terrorism with Sayed Kotb, an Islamic Egyptian who came to tour and study American schools in Greely, Colorado in the summer of 1949. In Truman's America ( Read more... )

My father was a paleontologist/anthropologist before going into medicine. He once told me about a problem inherent in political interaction. I don't mean "Democrats vs. Republicans" or even "American politics", or "formal politics". This applies to a greater or lesser extent in almost every occasion when two or more humans interact. Every time I ( Read more... )

A while ago I wrote a post about the Goatse cake that matrushkaka "made" for me, the subsequent theft/redistribution/humorous forwarding (pick one), and the resulting brouhaha. It turned out to not be a big deal at all: within a few hours the problem had been resolved, and in the process I learned not only that filmgoerjuan is a lunch buddy of one of my ( Read more... )