Is it surprising to learn there is a Marked Rise in Intensely Sexualized Images of Women, Not Men? It’s funny we live in an age where we’ve learned so much that enriches the traditional understanding that men and women are shaped to their different roles in reproduction and we fail to transfer any of that … [Read more…]
About 20 years ago, a Ph.d. psychologist working for an executive placement firm told me that, out of all the people he’d ever tested or interviewed, I was the one least suited for life in a corporation. Some might say that to be good news in terms of the potential for good moral character, but … [Read more…]
Slowly do I move forward in my efforts to develop words and grammatical structures and concepts adequate to describing the social and moral setting of man as he learns to shape himself, his societies, his technologies, to better reflect and take advantage of the richness and complexity of God’s Creation. This richness and complexity can … [Read more…]
I’ve drawn some insight from Norman Cantor’s Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization on the subject of the destruction by Catholic philosophers and theologians of respect for the mind. There’s still more to be said on that topic but I’m commenting on another topic where Cantor had some views which would not … [Read more…]
The so-called World War I, was actually the beginning of a war not yet over in this year of 2011, though now consisting of the hugely expensive American military bumbling about in a number of countries as our political leaders dance and speak their chosen roles of blood-soaked buffoons. That first phase of the ongoing … [Read more…]
Families with tendencies towards autistic traits tend to cluster in regions with opportunities for the exercise of ‘systemizing’ skills: see the article Diagnosed Autism Is More Common in an IT-Rich Region, Study Finds for a discussion of this interesting yet less than surprising discovery. Specifically: The researchers predicted that autism spectrum conditions (ASC) would be … [Read more…]
I shudder a bit at the results of the study discussed in Breaking Rules Makes You Seem Powerful. We learn: What happens when people interact with a rule breaker? Van Kleef and colleagues had people come to the lab, and interact with a rule follower and a rule breaker. The rule follower was polite and … [Read more…]
In this article, Steady Relationships Reduce Amphetamine’s Rewarding Effects, Animal Study Suggests, we learn: Long-term relationships make the commonly abused drug amphetamine less appealing, according to a new animal study in the June 1 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings suggest that social bonds formed during adulthood lead to changes in the brain … [Read more…]
This is a very important line of thought and research which underlies this short article: The Ties That Bind: Grandparents and Their Grandchildren. Knowing that research in traditional societies in the undeveloped world had shown that children’s health and longevity were improved greatly when they were under the care or supplemental care of grandparents — … [Read more…]
You have weight when you’re not in free-fall, that is, you have weight when you are kept from traveling the shortest path, or geodesic geodesic, from your current location to the center of gravity of whatever system you’re in. When you’re weighed down, by your own bodily mass or that of other entities you are … [Read more…]