Of course, this site is also 62% good (there's no in between), but my purpose here is to avoid getting sued for inadvertently converting people to the dark side.
Also, it turns out you can reduce your evil intake by only reading the text (while ignoring headings and the right-side bar), which reduces the evil percentage to 35%. Also, you could stop reading Neal's posts, since it turns out they are 36% evil, while mine are only 25% evil. (I'm not sure how the math here works. I post a larger fraction of the material on this page, so the overall number should presumably be closer to my percentage than Neal's. But evil works in mysterious ways.)
Check out the Gematriculator for yourself.
Friday, May 14, 2004
Full Disclosure
Sign Me Up
Is it just me, or do the new enhanced MPAA movie ratings sound more and more like advertisements? Here’s the rating for Van Helsing:
Rated R for Non-Stop Creature Action Violence and Frightening Images, and for SensualityDude, I am so there! And here’s the rating for Mean Girls:
Rated PG-13 for Sexual Content, Language & Some Teen PartyingYeeeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!
And the Creep Goes On
Cigarettes, guns, fast food, and now booze. Alcohol is the next target of the nanny lawyers, as reported in USA Today. Here’s the wedge: they’re suing alcohol companies for “using slick advertising to sell products to underage drinkers.” Is there a connection to the previous lawsuits? Of course:
The plaintiffs' attorney in that case [against Miller and Anheuser-Busch], Steve Berman, represented Washington state in the tobacco settlement. Berman says his alcohol lawsuit "wholeheartedly" borrows reasoning used in tobacco cases.I won’t rehearse all the usual arguments against holding firms responsible for the voluntary choices of their customers. I have a different question this time: how can you distinguish between a marketing campaign that targets young people and a marketing campaign that targets older people who want to feel young? Marketing compaigns assuredly portray young and active lifestyles, but marketing images are often not about what people are, but what they want to be.
The lawsuits say that alcohol companies market to underage drinkers by running ads in magazines like Highlights and Teen People… wait, no, that’s not what they say. They say the companies market to underage drinkers by advertising in Maxim, FHM, Stuff, and Glamour. But, says an article from DIRECT (a marketing journal), the average age of Maxim and FHM readers is 27, with an income of $70,000; the average age of a Stuff reader is 25, with an income of $50,000 or more. I’m sure there are men under 21 reading these magazines, but they are not the center of the distribution. Assuming a normal distribution, for every 20-year-old reading Maxim, there is a 34-year-old to balance him. Admittedly, if the distribution’s not normal, then the median or modal reader might be closer to 21 years. But the point is that these magazines capture a range of ages that clearly goes far beyond the under-21 crowd.
Oh, and there are probably some 15-year-olds reading Maxim, too; should the auto companies pull their ads? Since when does the fact that people of a particular age cannot legally use something mean that they can’t legally be exposed to images of it?
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Evolutionary Question Begging
According to this article, handsome male features like high cheek bones may have evolved because of a shift in female mate-selection strategies. As the importance of physical dominance waned, females began choosing handsome males over aggressive males. Interesting, but also, I think, question-begging. The story assumes the attractiveness of high cheek bones. What makes high cheek bones inherently more attractive than sloping brows and enlarged canines? When aggressiveness was more important for survival, I’ll bet females found the large canines pretty hot. For a good evolutionary story, we would need to know what shaped perceptions of attractiveness.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Friendster vs. Fiendster
Last week, I finally got around to joining Friendster, after several friends told me it was worth checking out. Can’t say I’m blown away, but it is moderately interesting. It was probably more interesting back in the early days, when lots of people were trying it out for the first time and trying to expand their “friend networks” as much as possible. I sense that there is now a lull, except perhaps for whole groups of friends who are all just trying out Friendster for the first time.
Anyway, I was thinking about the mathematical properties and assumptions underlying the Friendster system. The implicit assumption is that friendship is a quasi-transitive operator: if A is friends with B and B is friends with C, then A is (sort of) friends with C. But the extent of friendship attenuates with the degrees of separation. We could imagine a friendship function F(n), where n is the degrees of separation. F(n) might have a form like so:
F(n) = k^nwhere k is some real number in the interval (0, 1]. If k = 1, then friendship is perfectly transitive: a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend is just like a friend. On the other hand, if k < 1, then friendship attenuates with distance.
And then I thought, what if someone started a new website called “Fiendster”? On this website, you would create a network of your enemies. You’d send your enemies Fiendster invitations: “Glen has invited you to be his enemy. Do you accept?” And then you could check out your enemies’ lists of enemies to find potential allies, working on the theory that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Mathematically, in this case k lies in the interval [-1, 0). For instance, we might have F(n) = (-.9)^n. This would mean that my enemy is my enemy to an extent of -.9, my enemy’s enemy is my ally to an extent of .81 (notice the sign change), my enemy’s enemy’s enemy is my enemy to an extent of -.729, and so on. Mathematical difficulties might arise if someone were both my enemy and the enemy of my enemy, because that person would be assigned both a positive and a negative number. In such cases, perhaps you would have to choose which of your enemies is the greater enemy. Or not – maybe the mathematical contradiction maps a real contradiction in human relationships.
Monday, May 10, 2004
Weighty Considerations
The comments on my previous post on obesity and overweightness got me thinking more about the issue. Specifically, Tim noted:
Obesity and anorexia are both bad things. People should have reasonable expectations for their body weight, and for an average-height woman, 100 pounds and 200 pounds are both unhealthy. The people prone to obesity are typically different from the people prone to unhealthy dieting. They have different problems, and therefore need to hear different messages.Fair enough, although I wonder if the messages are reaching the intended targets. Maybe the anorexics are hearing the anti-fat messages, while the obese people are hearing the anti-skinny messages.
Tim’s point also made me wonder about the prevalence of the different problems. In the previous post, I said the average American woman is 5’ 4” and 140 pounds. I assumed, given the recent reports that 60%+ of Americans are overweight or obese, that 140 pounds was too much for a 5’ 4” woman according to the new government standards. But I just plugged the numbers into a Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator, and it turns out that 5’ 4” and 140 pounds is in the government-approved range.
So what’s going on here? How can over half the public be fat, when the public still has an average weight that’s just fine? I can see a few possible explanations.
• First, the mean and median are not the same. It could be that, once the anorexics in the bottom 40% of the population are taken into account, their extreme underweightness balances out the top 60%’s overweightness to create a “healthy” mean, even though the median person is still overweight. But this strikes me as an unlikely explanation. It’s easier to be 200 pounds overweight than 200 pounds underweight; therefore, I would guess the weight distribution is positively skewed (much like the income distribution), leading to a mean that’s higher than the median, not lower.
• Second, a gender difference could resolve the paradox. Perhaps men are overrepresented in the overweight/obese category, meaning that a smaller percentage of women are overweight/obese. However, this fact sheet says that 61.9% of women over 20 years old are overweight/obese, so the paradox remains. (The percentage of men who are overweight/obese is indeed higher, though.)
• The comparison between the average woman figures and the percent overweight/obese figures is confounded by the latter being calculated based on BMI, which considers height as well as weight. Maybe there are a lot of short and fat women who still have relatively low weights compared to women of average or greater height, and their weights pull down the average even though they are overweight. I haven’t fully worked through the logic on this one, but my instinct is that it means short women must be more likely than tall women to be overweight.
• The “average woman” is not really an average woman, but an ideal woman according to the government’s standards.
Anyone who has the answer is invited to email it to me or put it in the comments box. Incidentally, nothing I’ve said here should be taken to mean I agree with the government’s standards for healthy BMI. Read this article to find out how the government actually changed the criteria, yielding a sudden jump in the number of people classified as overweight.
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