Despicable People

I thought about posting something substantial about this, but there are just too many top-class quotes to pick from. You'll have to see for yourself.

(Pointer: iSteve)

P.S.: Feeling a bit tired, ay, luv?

"Don't Throw Your Vote away"

When elections are coming up here in Germany, it is not unusual for political figures to urge people to vote. With local elections scheduled for February 24th, the government has decided to go one up and start an actual advertising campaign sending out that message. I don't just think it's a waste of taxpayer money, it's actually hurtful: I don't want my government to be decided on by people who can't be bothered to vote unless the government tells them to.

I'm sure Bryan Caplan would agree.

P.S.: If you brought this girl home, your mother'd be delighted.

A Question for Evolutionary Psychology

Men all over the world tend to find younger women sexually more attractive than older women or children. Evolutionary psychologists tell us that the reason for this is simply that it does not make any sense in terms of inclusive fitness to have sex with non-fertile females. They also tell us that what men perceive as beauty signals a woman's fitness, which increases the fitness of the offspring a man has with that woman. A third thing they tell us is that the fitness-maximizing strategy for a man is to have sex with multiple women every day - which accounts for men's greater taste for casual sex compared to women. So far, so good.

But the same reasoning leads us to the following hypothesis: Unattached men should always prefer sex with any willing reproductive-aged woman to no sex at all - at least if there's no one around to "protect her sexual integrity". (Getting your head kicked in decreases your inclusive fitness.)

Empirically, this is clearly not the case. Why not?

P.S.: Lots of fitness signaled here (SFW).

Film Review: The Queen

It is a pretty original idea to make a feature film about how Buckingham Palace and Downing Street handled the death of Princess Diana - you don't see a movie in which Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth have a row over Diana's character every day. It is a pretty weird idea to make it sort of a comedy. The Life of Brian it is not, but when Tony Blair is rehearsing his speech commemorating Diana, he is donning a Newcastle United shirt with his name on the back. (Blair is known as a Newcastle supporter.) The Queen is quoted as saying that Diana "is even more of a nuisance dead than when she was alive".

The film's acting is excellent. As you may know, Helen Mirren won the Oscar for Best Actress, yet in my view, Michael Sheen as Tony Blair would have deserved it at least just as much - but getting an Oscar for a comic role isn't exactly easy. All other parties involved also did a very good job. If you're looking for something unusual but not too high brow, this is the way to go. (8/10)

P.S.: Natalie, a nice girl like you shouldn't pose like this. (If you work in a very conservative place, this may not be SFW. No nudity, though - sorry, John.)

It Seems That Hot Pics of Natalie Portman Week Is Turning into Recep Erdogan Bashing Week

What's a crime against humanity? "Ehtnic cleansing"? Sure. Torture? Yeah. Assimilation?

Wait a minute, that's not quite in the same league, is it?

According to Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan, who spoke to thousands of fellow countrymen in Cologne recently, it is (my translation):

"Assimilation is a crime against humanity," he said (...). "You should not be expected to assimilate."

Ah, the world! It just keeps on giving. There is a reason I have a label called "I'm Not Making This up".

(Pointer: The Shield of Achilles. And of course, Hot Pics of Natalie Portman Week continues. A stroll by the river, completely SFW.)

Sociologists: No Better Than Biologists

(Update 04/04: People, I don't know why you're all being directed to this post by google when looking for pics of Natalie Portman; when I click on the referring link, I get an error message. Anyway, feel free to look around this superduper blog; a link to a very nice pic is at the bottom of each of these posts. But generally, this is a much better resource for pics of Natalie than this blog. And remember: Never use a vacuum cleaner to please yourself; that's dangerous. I don't want to go into details.)

At gnxp, Razib writes:

In The Altruism Equation Lee Alan Dugatkin notes that it's rather obvious that in the scientific literature the citation for many of Hamilton's two papers where he outlined the nature of inclusive fitness were blindly based on the verbal summary in Sociobiology and The Selfish Gene; errors in the bibliographies of both books are replicated in a substantial portion of the cites after 1975. That's pretty sad

I agree that it's sad, surprised I am not. In my own field, it is easy to tell that most people who cite Shaw and McKay's Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas, which lays out the final version of what has come to be known as Social Disorganization Theory, have never read the book. The usual summary is along the lines of "lotsa disorganization mean lotsa crime", which is not exactly a fair rendering of this rather complex theory. My guess is that most people's account is actually based on the famous 1989 Sampson and Groves paper (abstract) that simplifies the theory extremely without explicitly saying so.

Wait a minute, didn't I promise you "links to hot pictures of Natalie Portman"? I did! (Link safe for work, which probably means it's not that hot after all.)