Facebook just announced the new Lexicon feature, which allows one to search for terms in the wall posts of all users. I thought I might as well give it a try.
As you can see for yourself, people don’t seem to talk much about philosophy. That’s not news, but what is surprising and revealing, is that people talk a lot more about shopping than they do about sex (always, and especially before the merry season).
The SciFi London Film Festival is only a month away, and there are some very interesting screenings on offer.
I hope to go (at the very least) to the Blink of an Eye Shorts Programme, La Antena, Dante 01, Babeldom and La Creme (but can be persuaded to go to other movies too).
If you’re interested in joining me give me a shout - I’ll be arranging tickets at some point next week (probably).
For the past few months I’ve been beta-testing a new webservice called FriendFeed.
Do you publish information in many different web locations? Perhaps, like me, you have blog or two1, an account with a photo hosting service, music updates on LastFM, updates on Twitter or an instant messenger, a collection of links on del.icio.us, Google reader, Reddit or StumbleUpon, a wishlist on Amazon … you get the point. As a friend of yours, I’d love to be able to follow all of those, but I am unlikely to be able to subscribe to all of them and even less likely to follow all of these feeds.
Enter FriendFeed. FriendFeed lets you gather all of these feeds under one feed to which you friends can subscribe, and gives you the opportunity to subscribe to feeds from your friends. The site looks great and is incredibly easy to use2, integrates beautifully into Facebook and other services, and in the time since I first started using it has seen continuous improvement3 with new features appearing on a daily basis.
I have had nothing but joy using FriendFeed, and I hear the same from anyone else using the service. FriendFeed is now open to the public, and I’d like to encourage you go and give it a try. When you do, don’t forget to add me - my username is, of course, intellectronica.
1. Yes, LiveJournal is a blog too. Anything that publishes feeds in Atom or RSS format is, for that matter, actually.
2. The FriendFeed team includes, among others, some of the key developers of GMail, and it really shows!
3. FriendFeed is a commercial service, but the developers aren’t making a secret of their work - they even publish a feed of all the changes they make to the code running the application for your geeky pleasures.
Over at the new Psychology Today blog, Satoshi Kanazawa is writing about the The paradox of polygamy II: Why most women benefit from polygamy and most men benefit from monogamy.
Evolutionary psychology is exciting, and polygamy doubly so. Kanazawa reminds us that once we begin to look at things through the lens of evolutionary psychology and biology, they start to look quite different. Something that we previously thought was quite bizarre and morally wrong, like polygyny, begins to look quite natural and common. Go Satoshi! But wait just a second … what is it exactly that makes women benefit so much more from a polygamous society?
Contrary to popular belief, most women benefit from polygynous society, and most men benefit from monogamous society. This is because polygynous society allows some women to share a resourceful man of high status.
Thought Kanazawa is being radical? Well, think again. Human societies comprise of (on average) an equal number of men and women. No statistical manipulation you make can result in the understanding that any of the sexes would benefit more from any kind of arrangement, unless, of course, you assume a priory that some arrangements are asymmetrical. That is precisely what Kanazawa suggests, though he doesn’t make it explicit at any point in the post - a polygamous society is one in which a man can have more than one female partner, but women cannot have more than one male partner. In such a society, men are more likely to end up without any female partner at all, and so, we learn, such a society benefits women, who are not only more likely to have a male partner, but also increase their ability to score a highly desirable partner. That such a society, where it exists, denies women the rights it grants men, is not relevant to the discussion, apparently.
Usually I try not to buy tickets from that particular online vendor1, but this time I had to. And when my Autechre tickets arrived in the post today, I was a bit suprised, because when I took them out of the envelope all I could see was a writing in block capitals:
Aha, I thought, what a progressive and cool ticket shop they are, now they are making surrealist references. Well, turns out they simply print the receipt on the same paper as the ticket, and want to make it clear that this particular card isn’t a ticket - the other two attached cards are. Still, I wonder if anyone else noticed.
1. See Tickets (no link since I don’t want to needlessly increase their page rank). They are shameless spammers, sending advertisements for shows I have absolutely no interest in several times a week and providing no obvious (or working) opt-out link. The spam gets handled by my filters, of course, but what’s worse is whenever I am forced to buy tickets from them, I end up having to fish for the receipt in my spam folder. beh.