Science Saturday: Looking for Love

Romantic Boys Are Not An Oxymoron

These are not the sort of lines you hear in movies aimed at this particular demographic segment, which tend to be heavy on explosions, grossout humor and airborne serpents. But having once been an adolescent male, I can attest that high school boys can fall prey to romantic impulses that would make Anna Karenina look about as passionate as Alan Greenspan. And my experiences as a father don’t make me doubt the findings, either.

But wait a minute—aren’t these hearty young males, raised in our overly sexualized culture, supposed to be perpetually on the prowl for fleeting conquests in the back seat of a car? In fact, fewer than half of male high school students have lost their virginity. The number of womanizers, Giordano told Time magazine, is “smaller than everybody believes.”

Some guys take pride in resisting the pressure to behave that way. “I’d rather focus on one girl than a whole bunch because I don’t think that I’m some player or something,” one said. Few boys, however, are inclined to share the hearts-and-flowers stuff with their buddies, fearing they are the only ones cursed with tender feelings.

Up In The Air

There is a new featurette about Jason Reitman up at Apple.

Mordecai Playing Fetch

Mordecai would play fetch along this hallway for hours.

He’ll never be that small again.  And now I’ll never be in that apartment again.

Palo Alto

Verbs and Violence

This is a diavlog between two of my favorite scholars.  It reminds me of how much I love moral psychology.

Observations:

1. Note that Steven Pinker just assumes that free will implies lack of causation.  Most compatibilists would challenge that assumption.  But Pinker’s comment just shows that the incompatibilist, lack-of-causation conception is commonplace.  The compatibilist conception is a creation of the ivory tower, and I think the masses would discover it to their horror.
2. Pinker reveals that he is halfway through his book on violence.  I’ll start reading that book the day it is released (even if I have not read, and am not interested in, at least not yet, Pinker’s work on language).  Pinker mentions Singer’s idea of the moral circle and Rawls’ notion of the veil of ignorance.  As I’ve mentioned before, I believe that all of these ideas are important to understanding the progressive no-free-will view that I defend (following Einstein, Spinoza, and others who said that free will does not exist).

Thanks to Kyle for bringing the diavlog to my attention.  I added Bloggingheads to my RSS list in Google Reader.

 

Stealth Device

From page 302 of Googled:

Referring to smart phones as “the stealth device of this planet,” Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon painted a blue sky: “Your phone will replace your credit cart phone, your keys.  It will become your personal remote control to life.”

Meeting In The Aisle Over The East River

Avatar director speaks

Avatar director speaks.

Lurgee

One of my absolute favorite Radiohead songs.