"An expert is a person who avoids small error as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy." - Benjamin Stolberg

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Overcoming Bias: What Signals What? - "Conspicuous displays of consumption and benevolence might serve as "costly signals" of desirable mate qualities. If so, they should vary strategically with manipulations of mating-related motives. The authors examined this possibility in 4 experiments. Inducing mating goals in men increased their willingness to spend on conspicuous luxuries but not on basic necessities. In women, mating goals boosted public-but not private--helping. Although mating motivation did not generally inspire helping in men, it did induce more helpfulness in contexts in which they could display heroism or dominance. Conversely, although mating motivation did not lead women to conspicuously consume, it did lead women to spend more publicly on helpful causes. Overall, romantic motives seem to produce highly strategic and sex-specific self-presentations best understood within a costly signaling framework."

Berkeley's homeless plan: a new smoking law - "Berkeley figures it's found a way to get homeless people off the streets. Keep them from smoking there. As Mayor Tom Bates sees it, the alcoholics, meth addicts and the like who make up a good portion of the homeless population on Shattuck Avenue downtown and Telegraph Avenue on the south side of the UC Berkeley campus "almost always smoke." And because smoking bans are the hot ticket these days for California cities, why not meld the two as part of a "comprehensive package" for dealing with the street problem that Bates says "has gone over the top"?"

Ship of fools: Johann Hari sets sail with America's swashbuckling neocons - "The Iraq war has been an amazing success, global warming is just a myth – and as for Guantanamo Bay, it's practically a holiday camp... The annual cruise organised by the 'National Review', mouthpiece of right-wing America, is a parallel universe populated by straight-talking, gun-toting, God-fearing Republicans."

The Straight Dope: Have federal automobile fuel safety standards increased the number of automobile deaths? - "The reason weight reduction leads to more deaths is a matter of common sense and simple physics. Heavier cars tend to be larger, and larger cars contain bigger "crush zones," which give passengers more time to decelerate as the car crumples in an accident. And all else being equal, the larger and heavier a car is, the stronger it's likely to be structurally. But even if two cars in an accident are the same size, the heavier one generally fares better because it's more likely to damage the lighter car or shove it into harm's way than vice versa. People who buy SUVs often cite this reasoning — they're looking out for their own safety. Problem is, they're doing so at the expense of those riding in the lighter vehicles they crash into."
Another libertarian fantasy pierced.

Finally, I’ve decided to take the plunge. I’m coming out . . . - "I’m coming out as a post-homosexualist... I have finally become bored with the whole damn thing. Bored, not with being gay, but with talking about it... Do cats witter endlessly on about being cats? Do redheads drive us to distraction with their thoughts on being ginger? How many serious comment columns in the editorial pages of newspapers are devoted to the musings of straight men on what it is to be a heterosexual? No, they just get on with it – with being cats, redheads or straights. Such things are for the lifestyle sections of weekend magazines, not rubbing shoulders with the debate on global warming, housing or the terrorist threat. Fellow-queers: stop moaning. How interesting is any of this to the rest of the world any more?"

A.S. Byatt and the goblet of bile - "Kids suffer loss in the great works of children's literature and then find that they have the strength to cope. They don't forget their losses, but they learn to live with them. And that's as true of the young heroines in Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden" and "A Little Princess," or the boys in Walter Farley's "The Black Stallion" and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' "The Yearling" as it is of Harry Potter... Nothing deserves our respect (or scorn) simply because it's popular, no matter how popular. But literary critics almost never concern themselves with what people actually read... the literary novelists who get themselves worked up over popular fiction never stop to consider what it is that readers are responding to except, like Byatt, to put it down to the stupidity of the masses. It would be disingenuous to claim that literary fiction has altogether abandoned narrative and character. But enough literary fiction seems to have so little connection to the reasons people began reading -- and keep reading -- that it has to bear at least some of the blame for its own marginalization... the excesses of cultural studies (and she's right that some of it betrays an unseemly preoccupation with crap) was a direct response to the academics who deemed any study of popular culture inappropriate at the university level. And it's worth remembering that at one time, that bias would have prevented the study of Shakespeare, Dickens, Mozart or Griffith (or any movies, for that matter)."