Now Playing
Recently Written
Blogroll
Archives
Categories
- A little pissed…
- Amazed
- Amused
- Boo-ya
- excited
- exhausted
- housekeeping
- Huh?
- Jet LAgged
- Miffed
- monday
- ouch
- Oxygen Deprived
- Politics
- pondering…
- random
- Rockin' Out
- sad
- Seriously?
- Smiling
- stupid
- Terrified
- Theology
- Uncategorized
- Whatever floats your boat
- wide-eyed
- You'll Thank Me Later
Admin
- Log in
- Wordpress
- XHTML

Top 10 April Fools’ Pranks for Nerds

I don’t know what’s worse… the fact that I’m referencing this, or the fact that I found it hilarious…

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/news/2008/03/pranks08

The Job Market in 2009

Bumper Plate Bingo

About the same time every day while on my way to work, I drive down a two lane road that is roughly 3-4 miles long and has a fair amount of traffic. I probably pass 100 cars every morning.

My theory is that because I’m always traveling the same direction at the same time, others must be too. Surely I pass the same cars going East every day, but I just don’t realize it. So, in order to pass time during my 30+ minute commute in the mornings, I’ve invented bumper car bingo along this one section of road in Alpharetta. The game goes like this: if you see a car that you recognize, you win. However, in order to remember cars, they have to stand out. This is where the front license tag comes in and differentiates the cars.

Right now, I’m looking to spot a white volvo S80 with a University of Alabama tag, a gray volvo with a Georgia “G”, a gray toyota with a really strange looking UGA tag, and a black BMW with an Australian flag.

First hand knowledge

I saw a car today with the bumper sticker: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”.

It was on the back of a car delivering Domino’s Pizza.

Shocker

No one needed a scientific study, but it is interesting…

Clueless Guys Can’t Read Women

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080320/sc_livescience/cluelessguyscantreadwomen

Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com Thu Mar 20, 10:32 AM ET

More often than not, guys interpret even friendly cues, such as a subtle smile from a gal, as a sexual come-on, and a new study discovers why: Guys are clueless.

More precisely, they are somewhat oblivious to the emotional subtleties of non-verbal cues, according to a new study of college students.

“Young men just find it difficult to tell the difference between women who are being friendly and women who are interested in something more,” said lead researcher Coreen Farris of Indiana University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

This “lost in translation” phenomenon plays out in the real world, with about 70 percent of college women reporting an experience in which a guy mistook her friendliness for a sexual come-on, Farris said.

Some might think the results come down to “boys being boys,” and so even the slightest female interest sparks sexual fantasy. But the study, to be detailed in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, also found that it goes both ways for guys – they mistake females’ sexual signals as friendly ones. The researchers suggest guys have trouble noticing and interpreting the subtleties of non-verbal cues, in either direction.

The study’s funding came from the National Institutes of Mental Health and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Flirting or not?

To unravel it all, Farris and her colleagues examined non-verbal communication in a group of 280 undergraduates, both men and women with an average age of 20 years old.

The students viewed images of women on a computer screen and had to categorize each as friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting. Each student reported on 280 photographs, which had been sorted previously into one of the categories based on surveys completed by different groups of students.

Overall, women categorized more images correctly than men did. When it came to friendly gestures, men were more likely than women to interpret these to mean sexual interest.

More surprising, the researchers found guys were also confused by sexual cues. When images of gals meant to show allure flashed onto the screen, male students mistook the allure as amicable signals.

So ladies trying to brush off a guy at work or the gym may need to be, uh, more direct. Men in the study also had more trouble than women distinguishing between sadness and rejection.

Programmed for sex

The results help to tease out the underlying causes of guys’ flirt-or-not mistakes. One common explanation for reports of men taking a friendly gesture as “she wants me,” is based on men’s inherent interest in sex, which is thought to result from their biology as well as their upbringing.

Following this idea, men and women would be aware of the same behavioral cues, but men would have a lower threshold for what qualifies as sexual interest. In contrast, women would wait for compelling evidence before labeling a behavior as sexual interest.

However, Farris and her colleagues didn’t find this to be the case. Rather than seeing the world through sex-colored glasses, men seemed just to have blurry vision of sorts, overall. For instance, the college guys sometimes mistook sexual advances as pal-like gestures.

“I would say that there are many factors that could relate to men demonstrating insensitivity to women’s subtle non-verbal cues,” said Pamela McAuslan, associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, who was not involved in the current study. These factors would include socialization, gender roles and gender stereotypes, she said.

For instance, “women are supposed to be the communicators, concerned with relationships and others … men are supposed to be less concerned with communication and to be constantly alert for sexual opportunities,” McAuslan said. “This could mean that men in general may be less sensitive to subtle non-verbal behavior than women.”

That doesn’t mean such men can’t learn to read cues or that all men are clueless decoders of women’s gestures.

“These are average differences. Some men are very skilled at reading affective cues,” Farris told LiveScience, “and some women find the task challenging.”

Let’s Be Friends

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but heck, not many people read this as it is… let alone people I know…

I’ve received numerous friend requests on facebook where I can honestly say that I have absolutely no clue who the person is, or how they fit into my life. Now it’s not that I’ve never met the person… I’ve gotten some friend requests that after some (or lots) of thought I have a vague idea of who they are, but generally I still can’t remember ever having a specific conversation with them.

In my defense, a large problem with facebook for me is that it wasn’t around while I was in college. Therefore, I have many friends I knew in college who maybe are just now getting on facebook… …who I don’t remember… Keep in mind I graduated… uhh.. we’ll say over 5 years ago…

Now, in case anyone reads this and starts to wonder.. I don’t actually accept friend requests if I don’t remember the person. Though I sure hope some of these requests are spam…

Cement Jungle

After spending 12 days in New York for work, I can not put into words how happy I was to come back to Atlanta. I couldn’t imagine living up there. Practically spending the whole time in one hotel, after a while, it felt like I was living up there.

I saw Rent for the first time there… it was good… but very strange. I wasn’t expecting that. I also saw Curtains with David Hyde Pierce – it was fantastic. Since I spent two weekends up there, and because I’ve been to New York several times before, after a while, I just ran out of things to do. It got so bad that I ended up going to the top of the Empire State Building…

My brother lives in New York too, but he was working a lot while I was there… that’s good for him (as he does a lot of contract work), but meant I didn’t get to see him all that much while I was up there.

In 12 days I visited all five boroughs of New York City – Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island.

Great place to visit, but there’s no place like home.

Tagged

I got tagged in Melissa’s blog about two weeks ago, but I’ve been out of town just about ever since. So, I’m just now responding… I was tagged to post ten random facts about myself.. so here they are, in no particular order..

- When listing calendar dates, I can never remember if the month or the day gets listed first. Americans do it one way, Europeans do it the other. The reason why I can’t remember? I was born on 10/10.

- I was accepted to Auburn and got my official notification of becoming an Eagle Scout on the same day. (July 7, 1997… I think)

- Even though I’m an Eagle Scout, I really don’t like hiking/camping.. at all. Probably because I did it so much when I was younger… I’m over it. (I’ve probably hiked 125-150 miles in total over my lifetime) Interestingly enough, in 2004 I hiked the Inca Trail into Machu Piccu (Peru). Roughly 26 miles in 4 days at altitude. I did it with my brother and 60+ year old father only because doing that was the only way to get my brother to go with us. Of the two week trip, it was probably the highlight. (Sidebar 2… My brother thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail over 5 months in 2005 – started in Georgia, ended in Maine – 2,000+ miles)

- Never have I ever….. Taken a single drum lesson (I’ve played for 15+ years). Consumed even a sip of alcohol (and it’s not for religious reasons…)

- My (not so) professional work history: I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt, Bagel Boulevard (I think that was the name of it.. later bought out by Einstein’s), Mailboxes Etc (now the UPS Store)

- I grew up in the same house that my parents bought 35+ years ago, and they still live in it today.

- I’ve seen Mt. Everest with my own two eyes. Though, I have no intentions of climbing it.

- Places I’ve traveled… Peru, New Zealand, India, Nepal, China, Russia (alone for one week), Most of Western Europe (alone for a month after graduating Auburn)

- I love Hockey. …but I didn’t grow up playing it, or watching it, or anything. One summer in Auburn I was doing an internship and every night I would come home and want to watch tv, but nothing interesting was on. However, the Stanley Cup Finals were going on. So I decided since I’m a sports kind of guy and hockey wasn’t one that I particularly knew much about, I would start watching it until it made sense. After about three games of being utterly and completely confused, it suddenly clicked. I’ve been in love with the game ever since.

- I can thank Edwin McCain’s appearance and wit on VH1′s Rock and Roll Jeopardy one random Saturday morning in 2000 for the majority of my musical influence. After that appearance, I bought his album solely because I thought he was funny on the show. After about three weeks I bought all of his albums, and started going to his shows, where I heard people open for him who were amazing. Then I’d go to the new person’s show and see someone else who was fantastic… David Ryan Harris, Teitur, Angie Aparo, Willy Porter, Vienna Teng are all from that chain.

Now Playing

Recently Written

Blogroll

Archives

Categories

Admin