A student from China projected his sexy Azur Lane wallpaper - "A publication made on Twitter by the user recently became a trend.Weiner 白毛控 (@Weiner__ivansia)“, showing a team of students from a College of Veterinary Medicine (动物医学院) in China, who were apparently going to hold an exhibition. The photograph shows that the computer of one of the members (apparently from the boy) had an illustration of the character in the background Shoukaku from Azure Lanewhich was shown to everyone through the projector."
Japan's art 'cloning' technology set to revamp global museums - Nikkei Asia - "Researchers have gone beyond just precisely duplicating works of art. Now, using cutting-edge technology and the fruit of their research, they are able to make them look exactly as they did when they were first created. Their "super clone cultural properties" recreations include a Buddhist statue -- designated as a national treasure -- as it would have appeared 1400 years ago. Their works, in which digital technology and the artists' craft are merged, are now attracting attention as a new form of art in their own right. The "super clone" of the Shaka (Sakyamuni) triad statue, a national treasure at the Horyuji temple, was first publicly displayed on Apr. 10 at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum. There the replica now has the same shiny gold appearance as when it was created in 623. Lost or chipped curls of hair on the head of the statue's central figure -- as well as a small ball of hair on its forehead -- have been restored and appear on the replica. The position of the two smaller figures flanking the main one has been reversed in the replica, a decision based on how contemporary works were designed and other art history research findings. Flying heavenly maidens were also added around the halo behind the figures."
Thomas Edward Friedrich's answer to What is it about Canada that American liberals are not getting? Suppose I'm an American liberal, and I successfully and legally move to Canada, what would be my first unexpected, and biggest surprise? Why? What is the biggest distortion about Canada? - Quora - "Canada chooses 65% of its immigrants based on their economic value to Canada. America takes 65% of its immigrants for humanitarian reasons - family reunification... she twists an ankle and needs emergency room care. She will discover that she will have to pay out of pocket. Unlike the US under Medicaid, Canada doesn’t provide free emergency care to illegal immigrants. Huh?... half of Canadians feel Canada should decrease the number of immigrants allowed into Canada. Huh? By American standards these Canadians are liberal, but back in America her liberal friends pretty much all feel that more immigrants should be accepted, and even some of her conservative friends were OK with current levels of immigration, and most favour Trump’s proposal to give amnesty to 800,000 illegal immigrants, with a possible one million more through the DACA program. And wasn’t it President Reagan who gave amnesty to 3.2 million back in the 80’s? Per capita that would be like giving amnesty to 340,000 illegal immigrants in Canada. No way, nobody up here is in favour of that!... she starts her own business in Canada, and is relieved to discover that the corporate tax rate in Canada is 21% - not higher than the US. She remembers evil plutocratic Trump giving those tax cuts to the rich, one of the reasons she became so disgusted with America and chose to leave. Well, she now realizes Trump lowered America’s corporate tax rate from 38% to 21% to match Canada’s corporate tax level, which is still higher than the European average of 18.5%. Why are all these socialists giving these tax cuts to the rich! WTF!!!"
Scientists reveal the colour that makes you more attractive - "Scientists have revealed that wearing the colour red will make you more attractive to the opposite sex. Studies reveal that red is the most attractive colour to both men and women but, curiously, the two genders are attracted to the same colour for different reasons. Women are attracted to men wearing red because, according to one study, it sends signals of status and dominance... Men, on the other hand, are attracted to women who wear red for more primal biological reasons, a separate study found."
How Important Is Breastfeeding, Really? - Freakonomics - "OSTER: When we look at the sort of better studies of this, I would say there’s two categories. There’s one large, randomized control trial, run in Belarus in the 1990s called the PROBIT Trial. And the PROBIT trial uses what’s called an encouragement design. They encourage the treatment group to breastfeed.They didn’t do as much encouragement with the control group. They have differences in breastfeeding rates at three months, at six months. And if you dig down into that data, you actually see some impacts on eczema and allergy kind of reactions, on gastrointestinal illness in the first year. But you don’t really see anything in terms of long-term health, in terms of long-term cognitive development. So, that is one piece of the better literature. And the other piece, is sibling studies. So, those are a bit easier to run. It’s not a randomized trial. You want to think about — there’s two siblings, same family. One is breastfed, one is not. Those kinds of studies tend to show quite limited impacts of breastfeeding. Again, sort of maybe something on the gastrointestinal illness, maybe something on ear infections, but not these kind of long-term impacts on cognitive development or weight or height or the kinds of things that are often cited when people are told, “Breast is best, don’t you want to give your kid the best start?” Those are the two types of studies that I would pull out most consistently as this is where we want to look to the literature, in terms of impacts...
JENA: What’s the pushback that you get about these views?
OSTER: I don’t get as much pushback about this as I thought that I would. I think that there is an increasing recognition in the world that some of the ways we have been pressuring people to breastfeed have been counterproductive. And can actually be quite harmful, particularly to maternal mental health. You know, to the extent there is pushback, I think it’s absolutely around the idea of, well, what if there are benefits or what if there are small benefits or what if we’re missing something or what if there could be some benefit for a small number of people and we’ve kind of missed out on it, and so we should, you know, get everybody, to do this? And I don’t find that surprising. I don’t agree with it."
Is Facebook Bad for Your Mental Health? - Freakonomics - "JENA: So, you look at universities that have similar trends of mental health issues prior to the introduction of Facebook and show that in those sets of colleges, in which Facebook is introduced, there’s an increase in mental health issues compared to universities that looked very similar before in terms of mental health issues, they don’t experience that increase.
MAKARIN: Yes. We observe that after the introduction of Facebook, the student mental health at colleges with Facebook worsens relative to students at colleges that did not get Facebook... The most affected conditions are depression and anxiety...
MAKARIN: We believe that Facebook users, engage in unfavorable social comparisons, and that’s what’s driving the negative impact of Facebook on mental health. And the fact that we study Facebook at its inception, it automatically rules out a lot of stories that you might have about, for instance, the like button, the newsfeed, the political news on social media. All of that is non-existent, right? So the fact that we observe that Facebook had a negative impact all the way in 2004, 2005, 2006, that suggests that something in the nature of social media leads to worse mental health outcomes. And in our case, we believe that it’s due to unfavorable social comparison."
Who Gets a Heart Disease Test? - Freakonomics - "REDBERG: There are a lot of ways that a test can hurt. Of course, some tests are needed and helpful, and I fully support those tests, but it’s important to look at before ordering the test: what is the information you’re going to get from this test and how will it be helpful, in the care of the patient? And if you can’t come up with a good answer, or if you could have made the same decision or choice without the information from the test, then I would consider not ordering the test.And then the harms that can come from a test are — depending on the kind of test, of course, any kind of C.T. scan or nuclear scan has radiation and there is a cumulative effect of radiation, and there is an increased cancer risk. And in fact, the Institute of Medicine report a few years ago on breast cancer identified medical imaging as the No. 1 preventable cause of breast cancer. And then there’s – well, the tests are never perfect. So, you could get a result from the test that isn’t accurate and could be a false positive.And then you’ve gone down some rabbit hole of figuring out, is there something really wrong with you or not? Particularly, I think it’s a problem for screening tests. It’s tests for people that feel perfectly well, but just want to be reassured that they’re perfectly well. And so, then you’ve taken someone who really did feel fine and now they’re worried. They’re not sleeping that well at night, they’re worried about that calcium in their coronary artery, for example...
I’ve had colleagues who will remain nameless that I know got a coronary calcium test, for reassurance, and their score was zero and gained like 10 or 20 pounds in the next year. And I think that’s because you get this kind of feeling, well, my score was zero, so I don’t have to worry about what I eat or exercise every day...
YEH: Patients for whom they have no chest discomfort, even those who have risk factors, but no chest discomfort whatsoever, nothing to tip you off to think that they have cardiac disease — continuing down the pathway of testing certainly will lead to a lot of potential unnecessary testing. You know, you find somebody who has no chest discomfort, but you’re worried for whatever reason. You do a stress test — these are not perfect tests. They have false positive rates. It shows up as a positive test. And now, this patient is sent for coronary angiogram. Now, on the angiogram, it is not a benign test. It’s an invasive test that has complications associated with it. Maybe you find there’s a 30 percent blockage or 40 percent blockage in the heart artery. In all likelihood, that 30 to 40 percent blockage won’t actually lead to a heart attack. If you did angiograms on everybody over the age of 60 or 70, you’re going to find a large number of people with these 30, 40 percent blockages that may never actually affect the patient in any way. And then, you’re left with a question. Well, should I stent that 30 to 40 percent blockage? By and large, our answer is no. Because our evidence suggests that stenting those blockages actually doesn’t prevent heart attacks. So, the right treatment for those blockages to prevent future heart attacks is actually giving statins and controlling cardiac risk factors. But that was the treatment that we would’ve recommended at the start before we went down this cascade of diagnostic testing. What you ultimately find is really unlikely to change your treatment decisions, unless you were to find something that is quite extreme...
Rita told me about a case study that was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2011. A 52-year-old female patient with a history of high blood pressure and mild obesity went to the hospital because she was having chest pain after starting a new diet and exercise routine.
REDBERG: She noticed the sharp pain. And she went to her doctor because she had heard that women can have, you know, funny pains and that could be heart disease. And the doctor examined her and it was normal. But then the doctor said just to reassure you, we’ll do a coronary, C.T. test. Well, the C.T. had calcium, so they couldn’t really see her coronary arteries and they decided, to take her to the cath lab and do coronary angiography. So, they did the cardiac cath and had the unfortunate, but known complication of a left main dissection. So, she had a dissection, a tear in her coronary artery, which required emergency surgery, because that is a life-threatening complication. By the way, her coronary arteries were normal. But now she had to have bypass surgery to repair that tear that happened during the invasive test. And the story got even worse. The bypass graft went down, it closed. She had to have a stent. She was on dual antiplatelet therapy. So, all the risk of bleeding and the stent closed. And she ended up with a heart transplant. And it all started from that C.T. scan that the doctor ordered just to reassure her."
The Most Valuable Resource in Medicine - Freakonomics - "In cancer care, meaningful gains are often measured by time. How much did a drug or therapy improve survival? Did a patient live longer, or not? Longer can have different meanings. If a patient with advanced cancer gains a few extra months as a result of treatment, it’s important to also think about how and where they’re spending that time...
BOOTH: There’s an example that we used in one of our recent papers for advanced biliary cancer where treatment improved overall survival by about two months. And what we showed is the number of days that the patient would spend seeking treatment to get that care — it could potentially take away every added day of survival, what would be one extra day in the hospital or in the chemotherapy unit. And I think that’s important information for patients to know...
I think one of the issues, Bapu, is that the narrative in oncology for many years has been: every treatment is a step forward and an advance. And we’ve gotten ourselves into a bit of trouble — and, I say when I lecture students that we have a value crisis right now in oncology, whereby we have an explosive number of new medicines. Some of them are very useful, but most of them are pretty modest with their benefits. They have very real side effects, and only a handful of these medicines have actually been shown to even improve overall survival. We’ve become obsessed in oncology about tumor measurements on a C.T. scan — something called progression-free survival. Many new cancer medicines that are now approved and used every day, there’s no proven benefit that they help people live longer lives or better lives. What they’ve been shown to do is delay growth of a tumor on a CAT scan... when we describe the tumor measurement paradigm, the vast majority of patients say, “Actually, I wouldn’t want that treatment. I wouldn’t take that treatment for just tumor control if it’s not going to help me live longer, and it’s going to have side effects.”...
Not only is there no relationship between the magnitude of benefit of a cancer medicine and its drug price; if anything, there’s an inverse relationship, whereby the drugs that have the smallest clinical benefits have the largest price tags."
Trainers galore . . . if you really have two left feet | News | The Times - "A consignment of Nike trainers is arriving on British shores after a transatlantic voyage but beachcombers looking for a wearable pair are unlikely to have much luck. Even if salt water has not corroded the tens of thousands of shoes that fell off a cargo ship on the east coast of America, a quirk of currents means that they will probably only find trainers to fit one of their feet. Oceanographers have discovered that the different shapes of left and right shoes mean that they often take different routes because their asymmetry affects how they respond to wind and currents."
Our Legal Heritage: James Macpherson – hung for being an ‘Egyptian’ - "In 1609, the Scottish Parliament passed an act against Romani groups known as the “Act against the Egyptians”, which made it lawful to condemn, detain and execute Gypsies if they were known or reputed to be ethnically Romani."
Meme - Dog Apu @loneargos: "How did someone capture this pic of Ben Shapiro!" *rubbing hands*"
Engage your Audience, Even on Mute. - Promote your podcast, radio show or blog with video - "Be engaging, even on mute. 80% of videos are watched with the sound off. Add captions, be heard."
Why Did You Marry That Person? - Freakonomics - "GOÑI: Of course measuring love and how happy a marriage is is very difficult. But we have to try to find ways to do it. One thing that I have used to proxy how happy a marriage was was the number of children that were born to the marriage after the production of an heir, which would be the duty of the marriage... if you look at the fertility of the aristocrats that were married within their own group, especially in earlier periods, it was much lower than what a love-based, happy marriage would suggest.
DUBNER: You write that the interruption [of the "London Season"], “increased peer-commoner intermarriage by 40 percent and reduced sorting along landed wealth by 30 percent.” So those are really big numbers. “Eventually,” you write, “this reduced peers’ political power and affected public policy in late-19th century England.”...
GOÑI: So one important policy that was implemented in the 1870s was an expansion of state education. And this was done at a very local level. The aristocracy was powerful, and they managed to push down the taxes for education. This is a really old-school elite, especially in the 19th century. Their wealth is derived mostly from land. And there are some indications that they did not like so much the expansion of education because they were afraid that the labor force, if they become educated, could emigrate to the cities to work in higher-paid jobs. Now, in places where the aristocratic family suffered from the shock of the interruption to the Season, this happened less... the existence of the London season marriage market for such a long time did help the British peerage to consolidate as an elite and that probably helped to consolidate this very high inequality...
SHAPIRO: Shakespeare lived in an age of entrepreneurship, of exploration, of London merchants accumulating fabulous wealth, but they didn’t have status. So their job was to marry their daughters to somebody who was a gentleman or higher up the scale. I’ll take a play and follow this line of argument — in Romeo and Juliet.
Juliet, you may recall, is from the Capulet family; Romeo is a Montague. They are in love, but their families hate each other. Why?
SHAPIRO: Juliet and Romeo are both children of rich merchants. And in a way, for audiences of that play, it was attractive to have the consolidation of two wealthy, middling-class households. That’s fine. But that was not fine with Juliet’s father. He had one surviving child, and his great ambition was to move the family up a notch in the social scale. And in order to do that, he had to marry her to County Paris.
County Paris is an aristocrat, and is Romeo’s archrival for Juliet.
SHAPIRO: Now, why would County Paris want to marry a rich guy’s daughter? As the nurse says, whoever gets Juliet’s going to have the chinks. And it’s both a sexual allusion and, let’s face it, there’s a lot of money there. And aristocratic men burned through money quickly.
Romeo and Juliet are teenagers. Shakespeare gives Juliet’s age as 13, and Romeo is repeatedly described as “young.” This was not typical for the time.
SHAPIRO: Men and women did not marry in Elizabethan times until they were, on the average, 25 years old. One of the things that people have a hard time wrapping their head around is a lot of people never got married in Shakespeare’s day. We think of everybody in the old days getting paired off, but that’s not the case. Sometimes one in six, even in some areas one in four, never married by their forties.
Why did so many people go unmarried in Shakespeare’s day? The answer has to do with, once again, marriage markets. When Romeo and Juliet had its premiere less than 10 percent of the British population lived in cities. Even if you were an aristocrat, there weren’t a lot of balls to attend — and of course most people weren’t aristocrats and most people lived on farms or in villages. And the fellow residents of that village pretty much were your marriage market. To be fair, that’s how it had been for nearly all of human history."
Tolstoy Cup - Wikipedia - "The Tolstoy Cup is an annual football match played between the students of the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford and the Department of War Studies at King's College London since 2007, though the match was first played in 1994"
In a Job Interview, How Much Does Timing Matter? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: You know, in those Israeli parole studies, the criticism has been raised that the order in which parole cases come isn’t random. The cases might become more complex at the end of the day, because they just put the easy ones first. But I think, on balance, there is collective evidence that, yeah, when people get tired over the course [of] a day, or they get hungry over the course of a day, or they just get distracted by other things that they were thinking of over the course of the day, that that can influence decision making in reasonably consequential ways. That’s why, I think, with Nana, it’s hard to make really clear, you know, like, “Oh, Nana, you should definitely do this.”
DUBNER: There’s also the weather effect. Do you know the study? I bet you do. It was our buddy Donald Redelmeier up at University of Toronto and Simon Baxter, a colleague of his there. They looked at the data on medical-school applicants and being interviewed on a rainy day versus a non-rainy day. So, Redelmier and Baxter write, “Overall, those interviewed on rainy days received about a one-percent-lower score than those interviewed on sunny days. This pattern was consistent for both senior interviewers and junior interviewers. We used logistic regression to analyze subsequent admissions decisions. The difference in scores was equivalent to about a 10 percent total lower mark on the MCAT, the Medical College Admission Test.” So, don’t interview on a rainy day!...
The gambler’s fallacy... the economist Toby Moskowitz, who’s at Yale, did some research looking at judges who grant asylum to immigrants. They either get asylum or they get deported. And so this was incredibly high-stakes decision making. And he found that, even in that high-stakes setting, that what would happen is that when an immigration judge would have, let’s say, two deportations in a row, that the third one was much more likely to be granted asylum than if you were to base it solely on the merit. And vice versa and so on. In other words, we seem to look for patterns everywhere and to correct patterns that seem like they’re a bit askew...
Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse about blind auditions in orchestras. I think it was mostly in service of exploring why female musicians were being hired much, much less by good orchestras than they should have been. In this research paper — here, I’ll, I’ll read a little chunk: “A change in the auditions procedures of symphony orchestras — that is, adoption of, quote, ‘blind auditions’ with a screen to conceal the candidate’s identity from the jury — provides a test for sex-biased hiring. Using data from actual auditions, we find that the screen increases the probability that a woman will be advanced and hired.” So, that was a case where there appears to have been a bias that was erased by erasing the visual component.
DUCKWORTH: I think there’s even more non-intuitive research, recently, by Chia-Jung Tsay... she wondered whether the visual information that some of these musicians would — you know, they’re kind of like Lang Lang, you know, the most famous pianist in the world. He’s always, like, throwing his head back, 00:41:35 and they’re, like, sweating. And you’re like, “Oh, my God, they’re so passionate. They should win.”
DUBNER: So, her theory is that the visual performative aspect was making up for some deficiencies in actual musicianship?
DUCKWORTH: Was dominating the auditory signal. And so it was a pretty provocative thesis, which is that: it’s so strong, the visual information, that it can actually make us worse judges of who’s the better musician. And that was a paper that she published called “Sight Over Sound” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences"
In other words, maybe women were less successful in non-blind auditions not because they were discriminated against for their sex, but because they were less showy
Sight over sound in the judgment of music performance - "Social judgments are made on the basis of both visual and auditory information, with consequential implications for our decisions. To examine the impact of visual information on expert judgment and its predictive validity for performance outcomes, this set of seven experiments in the domain of music offers a conservative test of the relative influence of vision versus audition. People consistently report that sound is the most important source of information in evaluating performance in music. However, the findings demonstrate that people actually depend primarily on visual information when making judgments about music performance. People reliably select the actual winners of live music competitions based on silent video recordings, but neither musical novices nor professional musicians were able to identify the winners based on sound recordings or recordings with both video and sound. The results highlight our natural, automatic, and nonconscious dependence on visual cues. The dominance of visual information emerges to the degree that it is overweighted relative to auditory information, even when sound is consciously valued as the core domain content."
How Can You Avoid Boredom? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: This prominent, highly published psychologist. When I asked the psychologist, “How are you so productive? How have you had so many brilliant ideas over such a long time?” Swore up and down it was from getting high every day...
DUBNER: One difference, I think, between Americans and others, is that a lot of our risk assessment is driven by the media we consume. And American media is really, really, really good at hyping risk. Back in our first Freakonomics book, we did write a bit about how most people are pretty terrible at assessing risk. And one example we used is: let’s say that you have a child, and the neighbor has a child, and you send your child to play at your neighbor’s house. Which should you be more scared of: if your neighbor has a swimming pool or a gun in their home? Now, this is a hard measurement, because, first of all, there are a lot more guns in America than there are swimming pools... one person can easily own more than one gun. Not many people have more than one swimming pool. But there are estimates that there are between maybe three and 500 million guns in America... the risk of a child tragically dying in a swimming pool accident is substantially higher than a child dying in an accidental shooting. Now, think about it though: if a child were to die tragically in an accidental shooting at the neighbor’s house, it would make the news, typically...
There is a fellow named Peter Sandman who, at the time we wrote about him, was a risk-communications consultant... he made the argument that risk — in the public perception of it — that risk equals hazard plus outrage, but that outrage and hazard aren’t equally weighted in this equation. He said that when hazard is high but outrage is low, that people under-react. So, you could say heart disease. The hazard is really high. People don’t get mad at their hearts for betraying them. And so, they tend to not have the lifestyle, and diet, and exercise that they perhaps should. But when hazard is low and outrage is high — like, a mass shooting, or a terrorist attack, or a child kidnapping, they tend to overreact. So, that goes to your point about how emotion drives the way we receive it."
The same people who say you're more likely to die in a swimming pool than due to terrorism and if you worry more about the latter you're racist, claim that schools are so dangerous that American children get shot up in them all the time
Are Women Really Less Happy Than Men? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: This is a survey from the Pew Research Center. It was an open-ended survey asking participants to name the traits or characteristics that they believe society values most in men and women. Here are the five most common traits that are thought to be valuable for men. No. 1: honesty and morality. Number two: professional and financial success. Number three: ambition and leadership. Four: strength and toughness. And five: hard work or a good work ethic. That’s what we think is valuable in a man. Here’s what we think is valuable in a woman. No. 1: physical attractiveness. Number two: empathy, or nurturing, or kindness. Number three: intelligence. Number four: honesty and morality — which was no. 1 on the male list. And number five: ambition or leadership — which was number three on the male list."
Is It Weird for Adults to Have Imaginary Friends? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: “Knowledge About Others Reduces One’s Own Sense of Anonymity.” And I should say that Anuj did this in collaboration with a postdoc named Michael LaForest. They say: “Social ties often seem symmetric, but they need not be. For example, a person might know a stranger better than the stranger knows them. Here we show that, when people know more about others, they think others know more about them. Across nine laboratory experiments, when participants learned more about a stranger, they felt as if the stranger also knew them better. As a result, participants were more honest around known strangers. We tested this further with a field experiment in New York City in which we provided residents with mundane information about neighborhood police officers. We found that the intervention shifted residents’ perceptions of officers’ knowledge of illegal activity, and it may even have reduced crime. It appears that our sense of anonymity depends not only on what people know about us, but also on what we know about them.” So, Stephen, getting back to parasocial relationships: I think one of the reasons why somebody listening to a podcast like ours, or watching Friends or, you know, Cheers —which is something I watched a lot growing up — is that when we feel like we know a lot about Norm, or about Seinfeld, or about Stephen, or about Angela, we have this almost reflexive assumption that this is a two-way relationship. And I think it’s probably because, in most of human history, relationships were not possible in this parasocial sense. Relationships were just relationships."
Meme - "Control your cock, man *cock*"
Xaviaer DuRousseau on Twitter - "I spent 23 years as a Liberal. I had dozens of debates with Conservatives and NEVER ONCE felt silenced or belittled. I became a Conservative 2 years ago. Now I deal with more hate, censorship, character attacks and lost relationships per month than the prior 23 years combined."
The liberal cope is that conservatives are evil (or the code, not decent human beings) so they deserve it
Is Gaming Good for You? - Freakonomics - "MCGONIGAL: My favorite definition of a game comes from a philosopher, Bernard Suits, who said that a game is the voluntary effort to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Golf is a great example. Your goal in golf is to get a small ball in a small hole. If you wanted to just achieve that in everyday life, if it were your job, you would walk right up to the hole, you would put it in, and that would be it. But because it’s a game, we agree to some really arbitrary and ridiculous constraints...
LEVITT: Another little gem that I loved from SuperBetter was the idea of playing what you call “worst-case bingo”. Could you describe that?
MCGONIGAL: Yeah. So, oftentimes we have to do things that we are not looking forward to, and this is kind of a mind hack that allows your brain to look forward to something that you would otherwise dread or try to avoid. So, you actually make your own bingo card. You create a game where you write all of the things that could possibly happen — all the bad things you can think of. Let’s say I’m not looking forward to getting on a plane. And I have all these ideas in my mind about things that might happen. Like, I’m sitting next to somebody who wants to talk the whole time and is annoying. Or there was turbulence or we’re delayed at the gate. Just write it all down. And then when they happen, you’re marking it on the bingo card. And it’s just like a way of bringing humor and mindfulness and acceptance to maybe things we can’t control, but we can, I don’t know, feel a sense of ownership over even the things that we dread. And again, it sounds trivial or silly, but I always say, try it before you judge it the way you would play a game, before you really know if it’s fun or for you.
LEVITT: I had my own little version of this. I do it sometimes in parenting — like whining. When my daughter whines, each time I make a judgment about exactly how high pitched it was, and is the pitch going up or down? Again, just another way of taking something that’s inherently unpleasant and by quantifying it, and by putting it into a different context — finding a way to make something that’s inherently not fun, more fun than it was. It’s a simplified version of bingo.
MCGONIGAL: The thing about games, of course, is you can invite other people to play. And I would think if you’re thinking about the pitch of the whine — and I have kids who whine all the time, so I can relate to this — you want to invite them to play with you. Not just to judge the pitch, but to be like, “Hey, can you get that a little bit higher? Come on, let me hear that in a high C. Say that again?” Maybe whine back and, “Here, O.K., but can you whine like this?” And then you transform it into play and it’s something you’re doing together. It’s important that when we play these games, we invite people to play with us or we’re not playing games with other people’s lives like in our own mind. But that there’s a transparency and an openness and an invitation to play along... Hm. I’m a big introvert too, which is one reason why I love games because they provide a structure for social interaction. So, if I have to just figure out like, “Oh, how do I talk to somebody?” To me, that’s stressful. That takes a lot of mental energy. But if we’re playing a game together — we’re on a scavenger hunt, we’re doing an obstacle course. There’s such a formal structure for our social interactions. For many introverts it’s relaxing. For people with autism, the same thing, because there’s such a clear structure for rules of interaction."
