Atheist Hell

Thank You SMBC

And here is the afterthought

The Beta-Male (or Why I want to bone Kat Dennings)

I just saw Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (seven hour plane ride - don't ask), a low budget Columbia flick that came out October last year. Verdict: it was extremely mediocre, but somewhat watchable. The highlite of it was probably when Michael Cera gave Kat Dennings an orgasm in Electric Ladyland Studios. I wouldn't say that it was particularly bad, but that's because the movie didn't venture into any risky territory. So why am I talking about it? It has three interesting points that are worth discussing: the film's unintended value, Cera, and Dennings.

On a budget of $10 million (grossed $31 million according to boxofficemojo), this was an obvious ploy by Columbia to accomplish a couple of things. They chased the pseudoindie-teen psychographic by reprising Cera's Paulie Bleeker role (Juno), while simultaneously gave some underdeveloped young actors some experience and screen time.

The more subtle point here is that N&N, for better or for worse, did a good job of capturing the attitude of the average American teenage moviegoer. By creating a movie that does such a good job of blending in with the rest of Hollywood, neither exceeding nor failing any expectations (and turning a profit to boot), Columbia has captured the zeitgeist in the same way that only the shoestring budget film noirs (think Detour 1945) could of its respective era. In the past few years it appears that Hollywood is making an active effort to create what many call "beta-male" movies. Judd Apatow is, of course, one of the founders of this movement (if you can call it a movement); everything he touches, starting with The 40 Year Old Virgin, is both a money maker and has a distinctive style and attitude.

It's hard to categorize the type of film I'm talking about, and one runs into the same problem when trying to distinguish film noir. Is it a genre? Is it movement? Is it just a style? I'd say that it's more of an attitude than anything else. These movies include: The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshell, Pineapple Express, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, and Juno (maybe Step Brothers, Little Miss Sunshine, and Talleganda Nights). It isn't hard to find overlapping directors, actors, and producers in this list (i.e. Judd Apatow, Seth Rogan, Michael Cera). It seems to have basically stolen the audience of the Ben Stiller/Will Ferall (another comedy stable) early 2000s comedies. I'd say the typical audience would be the non-jock, second rung on the social ladder, boy from Long Island (or California, or New Jersey) in his senior year of high school with a healthy taste for indie-pop. I'd also say that this psychographic/demographic has a slightly higher intellect than their early 2000s predecessors, to their credit. The second group would be those that watched the Ben Stiller/Will Ferall comedies of the early 2000s. Basically, this is a late Generation-Y fanbase.

This pattern also took place, to some extent, in the 90s with the rise of the high school teen-comedy, best characterized by the first American Pie movie, targeted at early the early Gen-Y. I'd even go so far as to say that Michale Cera is the Jason Biggs of this decade. But as far as themes go (namely, the underdog male trying to get laid and find purpose in life), it goes back a little farther. Kevin Smith's Clerks, the 80's teen comedies (the begining of the modern teen movie, taking us beyond surfing and beaches), and even IMO Woody Allen in the 70s.

The nagging question here is why have these movies gotten so popular, espescially in the past few years? Movie production works in a very similar fashion to the economy (and evolution, for that matter); many different things are thrown against the wall, some stick, and the ones that stick are replicated. The studios just try in cash in on the success of other movies. The point I'm getting at is that beta-male movies stuck, they kept sticking, and they stuck for a reason. The reasons can be speculated, but it is probably wortt noting that these movies were made in times of tremendous economic booms, which undoubtadly influenced our culture.

I also think that an interesting, and implicit, motif in the modern beta-dog movies is the prevelence of alcohol. Booze always played a big part in teen movies, but was largely a prop or a MacGuffin. Nowadays you see these high school kids really getting trashed, espescially in N&N and Superbad. Now I'm no puritan, but its still relatively new to see underage kids getting hammered in a Hollywood movie. Is this also reflecting a cultural shift, or is it just the result of higher social tolerence?

Michale Cera, previously mentioned as one of the archetypal beta-males, is screwing up his career. He played the awkward loser very well in Arrested Development, and showed promise as a young actor. He even did a prety decent job doing it in Super Bad. But isn't it getting a bit much? Look at his last 4 major roles: awkward loser (4 in a row), awkward loser in his senior year of high school (3 in a row), awkward loser in his senior year of high school that listens to indie music (2 in a row). When the beta-bubble pops, he's going to find himself out of work, as he has yet to show that he can play another character.

To wrap this up with the original intention of this post, Ket Denning is a fucking hottie in N&N. She was probably the only reason I finished watching the damn movie. I'm not sure if it was her looks, or her sarcasm (I have a thing for sarcastic, witty women). She was a more confident, funnier, and better looking version of Juno. Her Wikipedia picture doesn't do her justice, but her IMDb one does. I would probably put her right up there with Scarlette Johanson (circa Lost in Translation) around the top of my Hollywood boning list.

Why women are fat

Actually, French women are absolutely gorgeous, but a good chunk of American women are pigs. Regardless, maybe the feminist blog community will pick this up and be the first to actually read MY blog *hope hope*

Regardless, this is an interesting article on behavioral economics and resisting urges.

Men may find it easier than women to just say no to their favorite foods, according to a study of the appetite-control centers of the brain.

I'm sure I wouldn't last 5 seconds with a delicious slice of pizza sitting right in front of me.

Maybe people aren't as stupid as I thought

Outsourced Chores Come Back Home

All of these consumers could praise themselves for their newfound frugality in the midst of an economic downturn. But every step they take toward self-reliance — each shrub they prune themselves, each cupcake they bake from scratch — hurts the people and small businesses that have long provided these services professionally.

I think that this is great. It's one thing if you are paying someon 20 dollars to clean your house for an hour so you can go to work (and make 40 dollars) for an hour, but a lot of Americans would rather take the extra hour to watch TV. From the idiot Keynsian (as opposed to the intelligent Keynsian) perspective this is killing a lot of jobs, but in actuality this is only killing the jobs that were based on the demand of our consumer culture. If people can color their hair by themselves, then it may subtract 198 dollars from GDP, but the same benifit is had. Over time the hair stylist will have to shhift her services to a more productive line of work. This is how creative destruction works; in times of economic recession, people have to cut back on their spending - namely the least productive spending. First and foremost, this eliminates the most wasteful spending.

Another benefit - this sort of thing will most likely increase social capital. If I don't want to spend the money to hire a nanny for the evening so I can go out and have a good time with my wife, that means we will be forced to spend the afternoon together as a family. It means that I'll have to cut my childrens hair (undoubtedly a bonding experience) instead of paying someone else to do it. It means car pooling, and thus spending time with other people.

The end of the article states:

As their former nannies, stylists, landscapers, dry cleaners and maids languish, consumers report mixed feelings. They say they sometimes feel guilty about the ripple effects their penny-pinching is having on the livelihoods of others, but at the same time they feel unexpectedly empowered by their rediscovered self-reliance.

But I see absolutely no reason to feel guilty about something like this.

Are stupid people happier?

Are stupid people happier, on average, than intelligent people? You'd think so: intelligent people usually have higher stress jobs, tend to overthink things, and probably deal with ore existential crisis than the average Joe Schmo on the street. The Freakonomics blog, however, begs to differ.

Is Ignorance Really Bliss?

Despite her [Lisa Simpson's] formidable unhappiness, I don’t think Lisa is right on this one. My reasoning is simple: more intelligent people tend to earn higher incomes, and we know that people with higher incomes are more likely to be happy.

He continues to crunch some numbers to find that there is at least a weak correlation between intelligence and happiness.

Kiddie Porn

Two teen girls are charged with trafficking child pornography.

Two girls from Greensburg, who police say are "14 or 15" years old, allegedly sent nude photos to two boys who are slightly older than them (16 or 17) using their cell phones. The photos were discovered in October after one of the youngsters was caught using a cell phone during school hours—a violation of school rules—and had the phone taken away. The photos were discovered at that time—I didn't know teachers could go snooping through your cell phone, either—and turned over to police.

The general argument against child porn is that the child cannot consent to pornographic pictures of themselves being taken, which is valid. But this is going a little too far on a few counts

1) Teachers took the phone from one of the girls and looked through it without her consent (I assume she did not consent to a teacher looking on her phone, one with nude pictures of herself saved). This is a blatant invasion of privacy and, regardless of who is right, the evidence should be thrown out.

2) The girls may need a stern talking to, but you cannot charge them with anything. If they are not old enough to consent to making the porn, then they are not old enough to bare responsibility for it. Conversely, if they are old enough to bare responsibility for it, they are old enough to consent to it.

3) The recipients of the porn were teenagers, as well. Personally, I wouldn't refuse porn from a 15 year old if I were 16; hell, I would have gone out of my way to attain it (and probably tried when I was that age). Besides, there is a big difference (in my book) between a 16 year old looking at "kiddie" porn (I'm not 100% sure the girls should be classified as "children" or "kiddies") and a 50 year old looking at kiddie porn.

Overall, there was no coercion involved in this. More specifically, there was no coercion from a legal adult.

This all, of course, brings up the related question of "when should minors be considered legal adults?" Obviously society has deemed the answer for the average citizen at 18 (and 21 to drink), but this is unfair for many people. There are plenty of responsible, informed citizens under the age of 18 that are not allowed to vote, and even more who are older that have no business stepping foot in a voting booth. Generally, I'd say that people are stupid and that most of them aren't what I'd call 'adults' until they are well into their 40s.

In fact, I'd say that there are an abundance of immature 18 year olds who will sleep with anything that moves. If someone of a similar age group (16-25) picks a 16 year old over an 18 year old, there is a good chance that she (the younger one) is the more mature one. There is also the possibility that the 16 year old is just more likely to 'put out', but that brings me to my next question: what about our genetics?

After puberty, believe it or not, people want to fuck. A lot. There are a plethora of horny teenagers out there. If genetics dictate that an individual is old enough to fornicate, who's to say that they aren't? Historically, marrying a teenagers isn't super outrageous! If two teenagers give in to their horomones is it a crime? It might be if a 50 year old takes advantage of that, but not if a 17 year old does.

Tying yourself to the mast

Interesting article from the NY Times a while back

In the new issue of Nature, the neuroscientist Larry Young offers a grand unified theory of love. After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding — and, not incidentally, explaining humans’ peculiar erotic fascination with breasts — Dr. Young predicts that it won’t be long before an unscrupulous suitor could sneak a pharmaceutical love potion into your drink.

I don't know what to make of this. When taken to its logical conclusion, the debate over so called "love-potions" breaches the debate over free will. For example, if I slip a love potion into Scarlett Johanson's drink at a bar, and she falls madly in love with me, and comes home and fucks my brains out, would it be considered rape? One could argue that she technically consented to it (it didn't impair her logical judgement) and probably wouldn't regret it (I'm flattering myself), so it isn't really rape. On the other hand, she didn't consent to the love potion in the first place, which in turn, altered her perception of the world through the use of horomones.

Even without a love potion, we would like to think that we are in control of our thoughts and impulses. But if one is not in control of their impulses, then it must come from somewhere outside the self. Metaphysically, this can be unsettling. Even from a cognative psychology approach, love brings up some interesting questions. What sort of mental construct can include impulsive, lustful desires? It's not that hard to account for basic desires in a mental model (just list proirities like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs), but how do you throw in strong impulsive desires?

How do drugs affect the mind? (or, what is the nature of consciousness?) pt.1

The other day I stumbled upon (via erowid) a pretty interesting online book about the psychological effects of marijuana:

"On Being Stoned" by Charles T. Tart Phd.

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but so far the chapter on vision is of particular interest, as it brings up larger questions of how the mind works. In the summary of Chapter 6 Tart writes:

In general, the specific changes in visual perception brought about by marijuana intoxication may be seen as particular manifestations of a general change in what we might call the visual pattern-making process. It is common to assume that we passively "see" what is out there, that the qualities of the visual world are inherent in the physical properties of objects and space. Modern psychological investigations have made it clear that seeing is a very active and complex process in which we construct the visual world from the flux of visual sensations reaching us. That is, patterns, forms, objects, recognizable people, etc. exist in our minds as a construction from visual data. We are so used to doing this automatically that it seems as if the visual world were given. This active nature of visual perception is true of all sensory modalities.
The patterns that are formed from visual data are organized into a degree of complexity and familiarity that is optimal for surviving in the world around us. Detecting a potential predator concealed in some bushes has survival value; seeing a potential predator in every ambiguous visual input is not conducive to survival of the organism. Thus we may conceive of some optimal level (actually a dynamic range) of patternmaking activity, of organization of ambiguous (and not so ambiguous) visual data into meaningful percepts. Raise this level too high and we have illusion or hallucination. Lower this level too much and we have stupidity.

In my opinion this is a highly accurate description of the visual experience while high, but is also an accurate description of the experience as a whole; the same logic can be applied to the other senses and, more importantly, the mental state. Since marijuana is a "conscious-altering drug," I think that such an apt description may help describe what, exactly, consciousness is.

Neuroscientists and philosophers separate the mystery of consciousness into two problems: the easy problem and the hard problem. The former has to do with the specifics of the brain (i.e. how consciousness is possible) and deals with the hard science of describing how consciousness can arise in living organisms. It's just a matter of time before it is figured out from the mounds upon mounds of data that has been (and will be) collected regarding the brain. The latter is a bit trickier (hence the name "hard problem"). How do we define - or explain, for that matter - the subjective experience of consciousness? All we know about it is that it exists. It exists, and we are experiencing it. You know that you're conscious (or, at least I hope you do), but the second you try and describe it you can see why it is so problematic for scientists.

Jeff Hawkins (author of "On Intelligence") proposed an interesting model of consciousness that, coincidentally, ties in with Tart's observations of altered consciousnesses. Hawkins proposes that the mind is really a hierarchical temporal memory (HTM) processor. In English: the brain works by processing memories of previous experiences and uses them to predict the future.

To put this in neural terms, a certain stimuli (light) may strike the eye, causing the the rods on the cornea to fire, sending an impulse to the brain; this is known as sensation. Perception occurs when the brain puts all this together into something that it can understand. According to Hawkins, the mind is organized into layers of complexity. The layers are metaphorical, but the connections of neurons that they represent exist in the brain. Keep in mind that when I say connections, I mean many connections. One neuron, for example, has somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand neural connections. The layers representing simple constructs (such as lines) are on the bottom of this hypothetical hierarchy and get more and more complex as you go up the hierarchy. I won't explain how action potentials work, but when the eye presents the brain with stimuli of a line, the connection of neurons that represent the line star firing.

If three lines are presented (representing the letter F) then the three connections will will trigger another network of connections on a higher layer that represent the letter F. Since the brain is extremely connected, the simple concept of the letter F may trigger other ideas, especially if the letter F is significant in some way. If it is presented with other letters, for example r-a-n-z-K-a-f-k-a, then it elicits the mental representation of the author and his work, perhaps more. The interesting thing, as far as Hawkins is concerned, is that you would still think about Franz Kafka if we took the last a out. All this is, of course, simplified, but the basic idea is that the mind works as a hierarchy, with the simple ideas on the bottom and the more complex ideas around the top. Furthermore, the entirety of the simple ideas are not needed to stir up the complex idea.

This is all an unconscious process that relates to perception of senses, specifically. But I see this is being applicable to abstract thought as well as concrete perception. If our minds are arranged in this fashion, then who's to say that we don't organize our subjective universe in the same way? As we start to get more and more complex with categorizations, we eventually reach the level of abstract concepts.

More on that in the next installment...

Black stereotypes crack me up

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1896242

This is quite possibly the funniest thing I've seen in months. It's too ridiculous to be fake, but I have a hard time believing that anyone can be this whack

ed out, but still coherent.

No title

Well, I ain't sure if I'm going to continue blogging, but now I can, if I feel so inclined.