Writing about values improves relationships — “According to a study published in this month’s issue of Psychological Science, writing about values you hold dear can conjure feelings of love and connection that may help strengthen your social bonds and decrease defensiveness.”

Court rules lesbians are not just from Lesbos — “A Greek court has dismissed a request by residents of the Aegean island of Lesbos to ban the use of the word lesbian to describe gay women, according to a court ruling made public on Tuesday.”

Too much gloom and doom — “Short-term troubles notwithstanding . . . the ‘data points add up to steady, continuing progress for average Americans.’ So no, everything is not spinning out of control. Alarmist headlines notwithstanding, America is doing all right.”

New Study Shows Age Brings Happiness — “In recent months, however, several studies have produced a stream of evidence that mostly points in the same direction, and also happens to overturn one of the most stubborn American stereotypes: the belief that this is a land whose gifts, charms and joys flow mostly to young people. The studies show that when you check on how happy people are at various ages, the elderly generally come out ahead.”

Magic Tricks Reveal Inner Workings of the Brain — “A science of magic . . . could take both cognitive science and magic to new heights — and that’s not all. It could help people defend themselves from the tricks of advertisers. ‘A magician’s force relies on the spectator being unaware that his or her choice is being manipulated . . . A science of magic could provide us with valuable ammunition in this regard.’”

Mona Lisa mown into suburban garden lawn — “An art-obsessed gardener has mown the Mona Lisa — complete with mysterious smile — into her lawn.”

Superstar CEOs aren’t

BusinessWeek recently reported a study showing that ‘ordinary CEOs’ who didn’t hit the headlines or get awards from various media out performed those who did — even though the superstar CEOs were given greater rewards by their organizations (”Superstar CEOs Don’t Equal Superstar Performance“). As the Wall Street Journal remarked, this may even been a useful indicator to investors that it’s time to seel the company’s stock, just like those other indicators of forthcoming corporate troubles: a huge HQ building with flagpoles and a landscaped entrance, and the purchase of private jets for executives.

Help for the obsessed

It was a good week for snippets from Canada’s Globe and Mail. The first of these offers Holiday help for the CrackBerry crowd: the addicts who can’t even get away from their ‘fix’ of electronic contact with their office during vacations. Amongst the suggestions: A theme park in England as a PDA-free zone to encourage parents to pay more attention to their children and less attention to their hand-held devices, complete with “PDA police” pointing parents to drop-off areas, where they could safely leave electronics for the day; and an ‘Isolation Vacation’ in Anguilla that bans visitors from all technology — no televisions or phones in the rooms, and confiscation of laptops and personal digital assistants upon arrival.

Preparing for a new career? We hope not!

The same paper reported on a growing community of amateur lock-pickers who pit their wits against anything locksmiths come up with. There are, of course, web sites to swap techniques and competitions to prove your skill. Not surprisingly, professional locksmiths view the whole ‘hobby’ with alarm, fearing that those taking aprt could be training a new generation of more sophisticated thieves.

A blow to the stereotype of librarians everywhere

Also from the same source comes this report of a study showing that bookworms have exceptionally strong ‘people’ skills. The article reports that: “readers of narrative fiction scored higher on tests of empathy and social acumen than those who read non-fiction texts. And follow-up research showed that reading fiction may help fine-tune these skills: People assigned to read a New Yorker short story did better on social reasoning tests than those who read an essay from the same magazine.” The next time someone sees you with your head in a book and tells you to “get a life,” you may perhaps smile and tell them that’s exactly what you are doing.

When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you

The Boston Globe’s web site reports that humor at work is a precious commodity that’s in short supply these days. A new book, The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up, argues that having fun while you work or working at a company that values humor can provide a competitive advantage, help attract and retain employees, and spark creativity. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be too much to laugh about at the moment. Perhaps we could try laughing at the way we take the economic speculations of media types so seriously?

Man tries to sell advertising space on his leg

It seems that a silly gimmick is something that few people can resist, whether they’re producing it or reporting it. According to Britain’s The Guardian, New Zealander James Stewart is selling tattoos as advertising space on his leg in a bid to raise NZ$1m. Sponsors can choose any artwork from the art community website ArtKlick.co.nz. he’s even committed to wearing shorts as often as possible to make sure the tattoos stay visible (“Man in £380k bid to sell ad space on leg”).

Getting your point across without concealment

Reuters reports that a disgraced Colombian former lawmaker, Yidis Medina, convicted of taking favors from government officials to allow a dubious re-election process, posed naked on the cover of monthly men’s magazine SoHo. She claims to have given up politics. Medina spoke out about her experience of taking part in corruption, she says, after the government failed to produce the favors they promised her. What her new career is to be isn’t stated.

French ingenuity helps spread wine drinking

A French couple claim to have invented the perfect way to relax while still staying close to your computer: the USB Wine Tap. The tap plugs into your computer’s USB port and is PC and Mac compatible. You choose your wine from a web site that offers a vast virtual cellar, pay by credit card and the wine is delivered directly through the tap into your glass or bottle.

The British swear by it too

Faced by a thief waving a knife, a Japanese woman saved herself and her six-month-old baby by calming him down with a cup of tea and a chat. Both were unhurt. The robber pushed into her apartment and demanded money, but after she made him a cup of tea, he put his knife away and spent about 20 minutes telling her his problems. Eventually, she gave him a small amount of money and he ran away before the police arrived (“Woman overpowers thief with tea and sympathy”).

The ultimate in convenient purchasing of late gifts

Guests invited to wedding at a wedding hall in Israel can put a credit card into a machine like a bank ATM at the entrance and make a gift. The machine prints out a slip showing the amount given and provides an envelope and blank note of congratulations. Guest fill in the note and drop the envelope into a slot in the machine. Later, the happy couple can retrieve the envelope and bank the money. This isn’t quite as odd as it sounds, since the custom in Israel is to give wedding gifts of money that they leave in a special safe at the door of the wedding hall (”Do you take this credit card?“).

When productivity goes to your head

TheGrowingLife blog offers pictures and descriptions of what it calls five winners from “the productivity loony bin” (”Five Ways Productivity Can Turn You Into a Real Nutjob“). You can choose between making yourself into a part-human, part-robot cyborg, have someone make you a video resumé, become a “Law of Attraction Megalomaniac,” parade the number of geekish ‘life hacks’ you have, or get into “that Asian spirituality stuff” and add the word ‘Zen’ to everything you do.

It seems that you can make money out of anything

According to Reuters (“Beirut restaurant makes meal out of war”), at ‘Buns and Guns’, a fast food restaurant in Beirut’s southern suburbs, you can order a ‘Kalashnikov’ sandwich from a bullet-shaped menu, prepared by chefs in military fatigues with the roar of explosions as background music.

And it’s never too young to begin that financial career

The Wall Street Journal reported on a new kind of summer camp. At Finance Camp, children learn about stocks, bonds and risk, while paying bills with ‘Cow Moola’. They will also, “take excursions to a local bank or delve into budgeting and investing simulations. Rather than singing around the campfire, they will chant personal-finance mantras like these sung at Camp Millionaire in Santa Barbara, Calif.: ‘Financial freedom is your choice’ and ‘Assets feed you, liabilities eat you.’” (“Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, My Portfolio Is in the Gutter”)

It also pays to diversify

An American career diplomat, currently the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, has become that country’s newest singing sensation. He learned the obscure Paraguayan Guaraní language, recorded a music album of indigenous folk songs and sold 1,000 tickets to a concert in a downtown theater. The Miami Herald adds: “Though he does not leave his post until the fall, he is already planning his life in Miami, where he hopes to sell his album and perform with visiting Paraguayan musicians, possibly inviting local Cuban bands to jam.” (“U.S. diplomat now a music star in Paraguay”)

Get each day off to a good start

Canada’s Globe and Mail explains that, according to researchers, a big breakfast packed with protein, carbohydrates — and even something sweet — can actually lead to weight loss (“Start your day with a square of chocolate”). Researchers tested two low-calorie diets to see which one did a better job at helping people drop pounds and keep them off. The “big breakfast” diet had more carbohydrates and provided 610 calories for breakfast, about half the day’s calorie allotment, by including milk, lean meat, cheese, whole-grain bread, added fat and even a little chocolate.

At four months, women on the low-carbohydrate diet lost, on average, 28 pounds and the big-breakfast dieters shed 23 pounds.

After eight months the situation had reversed. The low-carb dieters regained about 18 pounds, while the big-breakfast eaters continued to shed weight, losing a further 16.5 pounds. The end result: Women in the big-breakfast group lost 21 per cent of their body weight versus 4.5 per cent for the low-carbohydrate group.

Always look on the bright side too

According to Britain’s New Scientist magazine, thinking happy thoughts could help dampen cravings. Volunteers in a study, placed under an fMRI scanner, were told to to associate blue cards with a real $4 payoff, and yellow cards with nothing.

Before either a yellow or blue card flashed onto a computer screen, the volunteers received an instruction to either concentrate on their prize or instead on some calming, natural object — a blue ocean, for instance [. . .] thoughts of clouds and oceans slightly lowered activity in the brain’s reward centre — the striatum — compared to thoughts of money, but only when the card promised a payoff.

The researchers hope that making addicts think about something truly dear to them could make them more resistant to desires to satisfy their addiction (“Happy thoughts may dampen cravings”).

Technorati Tags: humor, tidbits

Related articles by Zemanta

• Eating a big breakfast may a good way to lose weight

According to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Adolf Hitler took time out from running Nazi Germany to make jokes at the expense of his henchmen. That’s the claim of a new book by the last surviving member of his bunker anyhow (“Adolf Hitler told bad jokes about Nazi friends”). His favorite victim was the Luftwaffe chief Herman Goering; a notoriously vain and pompous bully even by Nazi standards. On this showing, Hitler made about as good a job of being a comic as he did of winning the war.

Anti-corruption investigators in China city have taken to questioning the mistresses of suspected corrupt officials to get compromising information, according to a report by Reuters (“Corrupt officials betrayed by pillow talk”). The report doesn’t explain what questioning techniques are used — or why these ladies are so willing to betray their lovers. Perhaps it’s another case of “Hell has no fury . . .”

Also from Reuters comes a report on a distinctly low-tech means to satisfy the cravings of prison inmates for drugs and cellphones (“Drugs, phones wing their way to prisoners”). It seems that inmates of a Brazilian prison were using carrier pigeons to smuggle in goods in pouches on their backs. The scheme came to light when guards on the prison walls saw some pigeons struggling to fly under the weight of smuggled goods.

Police in Australia have charged a man for drink driving in a motorized wheelchair after he was found to be six times over the legal alcohol limit (“Man in wheelchair charged with drunk driving”). He was so drunk he fell asleep in a turning lane of a major highway. Under the state’s laws, wheelchairs, bicycles, horses and skateboards are all considered to be vehicles.

Finally, a report from Canada says researchers have found participants suffered memory lapses one to three hours after consuming a high-fat, high-sugar meal. It’s believed that the problems are caused by an excess production of ‘free radicals’ — unstable molecules that damage tissue and trigger inflammation — when the unhealthy meal is digested. Maybe we now know what our leaders choose for their favorite food?

Slate Magazine has a fascinating article summarizing research on the brain power of the octopus (“How Smart Is the Octopus?”). Why, I’m not sure, but it makes for more fun reading than all the articles at the moment prophesying doom and collapse for the economies fo the Western world. Besides, on this showing, an octopus seems smarter than a good many people I’ve met.

Not only can octopuses learn, they can process complex information in their heads, and behave in equally complex ways. On available evidence, a good many people seem incapable of learning quite simple things, like not taking on debt they can never pay off or investing their life savings in some get-rich-quick scheme pushed by a slick salesperson. If you look at the media, it’s quite evident that they assume their mass audiences aren’t able to absorb or process complex information of any kind, and are willing to exist on an endless diet of simple lies and titillating trivia. As for complex behavior, the banks — who claim to employ the best and brightest — seem to have learned their business strategies from watching sheep and lemmings.

As long ago as the 1950s, a researcher showed octopuses could learn how and what to learn to get a reward. Impressive stuff, especially compared with the US automobile industry that stayed frozen into the production of gas-guzzling SUVs as oil prices soared; and, even now, seems bemused by what it should do to get out of the mess, while other companies are bringing out a mass of hybrids and electric cars.

Octopuses have proved to have an excellent memory. They are clever and unpredictable . . . need I go on? Business leaders and government regulators forget the lessons of each boom-and-bust cycle the minute it’s over, sleep-walking into the next one with total predictability. One researcher even claims octopuses can combine their perceptions with their memories to have a coherent feel for what’s happening to them at any moment. Now that ability would transform industry, if only it weren’t so rare.

Here’s the clincher:

Octopuses escape from predators not just by hiding quickly but by deceit. One of the most impressive examples of this deception is what marine biologist Roger Hanlon calls the moving-rock trick. An octopus morphs into the shape of a rock and then inches across an open space. Even though it’s in plain view, predators don’t attack it. They can’t detect its motion because the octopus matches its speed to the motion of the light in the surrounding water.

On second thoughts, maybe people have learned that trick. I’ve met come across executives, politicians and who scarcely seem to move at all. Perhaps they’re playing the moving-rock trick as well . . . or not?

Technorati Tags: learning, corporate incompetence, dim-witted bosses, financial crisis, animal behavior, corporate stupidity, animal intelligence

First from The Guardian (“Gentlewomen prefer Bonds”). It seems it has now been “scientifically proven that being a bit of a bastard is simply a natural evolutionary strategy.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that while gentleman prefer blondes, women prefer bastards. But just in case anyone was fretting that the old adage was just a hoofed-together cliché, the brains at New Mexico State University have surveyed 200 college students and clinically proven that men with serious personality flaws always get the girl.

In the same vein, “All Men Are Liars” from the Sydney Morning Herald offers The four rules of masculinity:

No Sissy Stuff: Masculinity is based on the relentless repudiation of the feminine.
 
Be a Big Wheel: Masculinity is measured by the size of your pay cheque, and marked by wealth, power and status.
 
Be a Sturdy Oak: What makes a man a man is that he is reliable in a crisis. And what makes him reliable in a crisis is that he resembles an inanimate object. A rock, a pillar, a tree.
 
Give ‘em Hell: Exude an aura of daring and aggression. Take risks; live life on the edge.

Maybe this is an example of that kind of masculinity at work? Reuters reported that an Italian man was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping his ex-girlfriend from a pub, taking her home and forcing her to iron his clothes and wash the dishes (“Guy kidnaps ex-girlfriend to get ironing done”).

The 43-year-old man dragged the woman out of a pub in the port city of Genoa, shoved her into a car and took her to his home where he made her iron and wash dishes after threatening her.

I suspect many people would say this is more typical of much macho ‘thinking’ (“Escaped thief asks police to open handcuffs”).

A man caught breaking into a German supermarket late at night escaped despite being handcuffed to railings — only to be arrested after he ran to a nearby police station to get the cuffs removed.

Then, The Boston Globe reports that gender stereotypes like these may be all in the mind (“Surprising insights from the social sciences”).

Researchers conducted experiments on students at Harvard University, Temple University, and the University of Michigan to see if prompting people to consider their own identity changed their thinking about time and risk. [. . .] When gender was primed, men and women tended to conform to whatever stereotypes they held about their own gender.

Financial Infidelity, it seems, is the new extra-marital activity. “There’s no such thing as an innocent financial fib,” says Bonnie Eaker Weil, PhD, a New York–based psychotherapist, whose book Financial Infidelity: Seven Steps to Conquering the #1 Relationship Wrecker is [now out]. Whether you hide shopping bags, abominate price tags, or lie about how much you paid (or owe), you’re being financially unfaithful, she says. (“Financial Infidelity: A type of cheating so subtle; you may be straying without knowing it.”)

If you want reasons to justify the old-fashioned type of infidelity, this article from The Guardian may help out (”30 Reasons People Cheat“). It begins: “Affairs are no longer the preserve of Bad People. I know this because there’s a book out called When Good People Have Affairs, by Mira Kirshenbaum. Just because you find something on the internet don’t make it so, but when it arrives in actual print, you have to sit up and listen.”

Another relationship killer is Internet addiction. There’s help to recognize it in yourself and find a cure from Stepcase Lifehack, via The Huffington Post (”11 Ways To Cure Internet Addiction“). The author gives six tips and others are provided via the comments.

Reuters: Oddly Enough always offers a great selection of the wild and wacky stories from around the world, though Australia and New Zealand seem unusually prominent this week. You can choose between a woman who attempted to escape from jail in Sydney, Australia, and had to be rescued by police after she became stuck in an air conditioning duct (“Jail break foiled by air vent”); Drivers in New Zealand’s largest city of Auckland using inflatable dolls to try and beat transit lane rules (“Drivers turn to blow-up dolls to beat traffic rules”); an Italian couple caught having sex in a church confessional box while morning Mass was being said (“They had sex WHERE?”); an Australian drugs trial lasting more than three months and costing taxpayers over A$1 million ($947,000) that has been aborted after a number of jurors were found to have spent up to half the time playing Sudoku puzzles (“Sudoku addicts halt drugs trial”); and an Australian politician who told a pregnant rival that her baby could be born a demon and was ordered to seek anger counseling after a string of allegations about her caustic behavior (“Politician ordered to anger counseling”).

A study in Brazil has found a link between declining family size and the nation’s passion for soap operas (“Are soap operas a form of birth control?”). Seventy-two percent of leading female characters age 50 or below had no children at all, and 21 percent had just one child. Hence, the authors hypothesized that the soap operas could be acting as a kind of birth control by persuading Brazilian women to emulate them.

This report from England may not be the cutest animal story of the week, but it’s likely the oddest (“Baby pig’s owners give her the boot: Swine was scared of getting feet dirty”). Debbie and Andrew Keeble discovered a newborn piglet on their farm with a highly unusual character trait — she’s scared of mud.

Technorati Tags: oddball stories, wacky news, funny news items

Here’s part of what he writes:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer to the question of how to be comfortable in one’s skin, to enjoy moments of fleeting contentment, is not to be found on a campus or even in the pages of the Journal of Happiness Studies but in the world of ordinary, everyday experience. When a former bra-fitter in Colchester said this week, “It’s best not to dwell on the past”, she was on the right track.

     The past for Eve Graham included being the lead singer of a group called the New Seekers, whose song “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing” sold 12 million records. At one point during the 1970s, Eve and her band had five singles in the American charts. The work dried up and so, because of a legal dispute, did the royalties. Eventually, she ended up in the lingerie department of Debenhams. “I don’t earn a penny when a New Seekers record sells, and that can be irritating, but you can’t let it rule your life,” she says now.

Letting go of what might have been, but wasn’t, isn’t a new idea, but it’s an important one. Too many people waste time and energy on regrets, allowing the unchangeable past to ruin their present and future.

But, as Blackler concludes:

There will doubtless be earnest analyses of what lies behind the decision of a young champion to give up on glory, fame and money. The truth might just be that she opted for happiness – and good luck to her.

Now there’s a profound thought. Maybe that’s why bras were once known as foundation garments.

Technorati Tags: happiness, contentment, letting go of the past, facing reality