Tag: linked news

From: The Independent.

Why do beautiful people have more daughters? Because beauty is more important for a woman than a man, according to evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa. Why are most suicide bombers Muslim? Because they don’t get enough sex. Why are liberals more intelligent than conservatives? Because liberalism is “evolutionarily novel.” The London School of Economics researcher and author of Ten Politically Incorrect Truths about Human Nature is accustomed to defending his provocative assertions against outraged critics.

He acknowledges that some of his ideas may seem “immoral, contrary to our ideals or offensive”. But he insists they are true and supported by scientific evidence that he has continued to collect since his book was published in 2007. “Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct,” he says.

Now, in a study to be published in Reproductive Sciences, he has adduced new evidence for what he describes as one of the most celebrated principles in evolutionary biology which explains why attractive people have more female children. So how does the research stack up?

1 Beautiful people have more daughters

Known as the Trivers-Willard hypothesis this states that if parents have any traits they can pass on to their children and that will be better for one sex than the other, they they will have more children of that sex. A man’s value as a mate is largely determined in evolutionary terms by his wealth, status and power, according to Dr Kanazawa, whereas a woman’s is largely determined by her youth and physical attractiveness.

“Physical attractiveness, while a universally positive quality, contributes even more to women’s reproductive success than to men’s. The hypothesis would therefore predict that physically attractive parents should have more daughters than sons,” Dr Kanazawa writes.

Figures from the 1958 National Child Development Study of 17,000 babies who were rated for attractiveness by their teachers at age 7 and were asked at age 45 for the age and sex of their babies bears this out. The unattractive children were more likely to have sons, according to the Reproductive Sciences study.

2 Liberals are more intelligent than conservatives

A study by Dr Kanazawa, published in Social Science Quarterly in March, based on the same data showed that young adults who identified themselves as “very liberal” had an average IQ of 106 while those who identified themselves as “very conservative” had an average IQ of 95.

“The ability to think and reason endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions. As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognise and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles,” Dr Kanazawa said.

Humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends. Being liberal and caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.

3 Most suicide bombers are Muslim

Suicide missions are not always religiously motivated. But when religion is involved it is always Muslim, Dr Kanazawa says.

Why? The surprising answer is that it may have nothing to do with Islam or politics, culture or race. Rather, it has to do with sex, or in this case the absence of sex.

Writing in Psychology Today, Dr Kanazawa said the distinguishing feature of Islam was that it tolerated polygyny – men taking two or more wives at the same time. By allowing some men to monopolise all women other men were left out. The prospect of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr to Islam then created a potent cocktail. “It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim suicide bombers,” he says.

4 Men like blonde bombshells (and women want to look like them)

Blonde hair is unique in that it changes dramatically with age, Dr Kanazawa says. Typically, young girls with light blonde hair become women with brown hair. So blonde hair is a signal of youth and men who attempt to mate with blondes are unconsciously seeking younger (and hence healthier and more fecund) women.

5 Humans are naturally polygamous

Polyandry (one woman married to more than one man) is rare but polygyny has been widely practised throughout most of history.

In societies where rich men are much richer than poor men, women and their children are better off having a share of the few wealthy men than having an entire poor man to themselves. In practice, most industrial societies tend to be monogamous because men tend to be more equal in their resources than their ancestors in medieval times.

6 Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce

A man’s value as a mate is largely determined by his wealth, status and power whereas a woman’s comes mainly from her youth and physical attractiveness. A father is important to his son in ensuring he inherits wealth status and power but he can do little to keep his daughter youthful or beautiful. His continued presence in the family is important to the son but not as crucial to his daughter.

7 What creative geniuses have in common with criminals

The tendency to commit crimes peaks in adolescence and then rapidly declines. But this curve is not limited to crime – it is also evident in every quantifiable human behaviour that is seen by potential mates and costly (not affordable by all sexual competitors). In the competition for mates men may act violently or they may express their competitiveness through their creative activities.

8 The myth of the male mid-life crisis

Many middle aged men go through a mid-life crisis but not because they are middle aged. It is because their wives are. Dr Kanazawa says: “From the evolutionary psychologist’s perspective, a man’s midlife crisis is precipitated by his wife’s imminent menopause and end of her reproductive career and thus his renewed need to attract younger women.”

9 It’s natural for male politicians to risk everything for an affair

Powerful men have always married monogamously but mated polygynously. Men strive to attain political power, consciously or unconsciously, in order to have reproductive access to a large number of women.

10 Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist

Men always subjected each other to abusive, intimidating and degrading treatment at work. It is part of their reaction to competitive situations. Men are not treating women differently when they harass them. They do it because they are not discriminating, Dr Kanazawa says.

This isn’t some fancy Photoshop trick, these are real human footprints ingrained in a hardwood floor.

70 year-old Buddhist monk Hua Chi has been praying in the same spot at his temple in Tongren, China for over 20 years. His footprints, which are up to 1.2 inches deep in some areas, are the result of performing his prayers up to 3000 times a day. Now that he is 70, he says that he has greatly reduced his quantity of prayers to 1,000 times each day.

The footprints have become a source of inspiration to younger monks at the temple. “Every day I come here and every day I look at the piece of wood, and it has inspired me to continue to make the footprints myself,” Genden Darji, a 29 year-old monk in the monastery, notes.

Anthony Bourdain: From rebel chef to doting dad

The bad boy chef is now an ex-cook who tells stories.

Anthony Bourdain reluctantly embraces the label at first, saying “you can call me anything you want, I’m just glad that anybody cares.” But then he wavers. That’s why he named his new book Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook.

“It’s a deliberate non sequitur — you can’t be both medium and raw,” Bourdain says Tuesday in Toronto. “I’m not a chef. I’m not a writer. I’m not the angry, snarky — what is it? — bad boy of cuisine. I’m somewhere else now. The book is about second-guessing myself, and conflicting emotions and elements that don’t exactly fit together for me.”

It has been a decade since Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly — which he calls “that obnoxious but wildly successful memoir” — changed the trajectory of Bourdain’s life.

It got him A Cook’s Tour (the book and Food Network show), followed by Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations on the Travel Channel and now Medium Raw (his 10th book). It got him out of the kitchen after 28 years of hard labour. It hastened the breakup of his first marriage, which paved the way for his second marriage and fatherhood.

That’s right. At 54 Bourdain is the blissed-out father to 3-1/2-year-old Ariane, who just started pre-kindergarten.

“I had a top-of-the-line Bugaboo (stroller) — pink,” admits an animated Bourdain during an interview at Mercury Espresso Bar in Leslieville. “I pushed it with pride. And I will tell you, with pride, that I was the star pupil in my Lamaze class. I’ve totally gone over to the warm, fuzzy side.”

Maybe he dabbles in the fuzzy side, but the lanky New Yorker still dresses in black (jeans, T-shirt and blazer) and still exclaims “nice choice” when the coffee shop blasts a song by the Stooges.

In Medium Raw, the former heroin addict admits to owning a couple of suits. He wears one of them on the cover, though it’s offset by the pockmarked brick wall behind him, the knife in his hand and the wedding band on his finger.

“I certainly didn’t want to wear a chef’s coat,” says Bourdain. “(The suit is) the uniform of my traditional enemy, who I’ve become. I just thought it was the opposite of a working hero, which I am not.”

Okay, so he lives on the Upper East Side, feeds his daughter organic food, and calls himself a “jaded, overprivileged foodie.”

He slings that at himself before anyone else has a chance.

“I think it would be hideously dishonest to not remind people of that constantly.”

Still, when given the chance to act like a world-weary foodie with an exacting coffee order, he’s downright casual, requesting only “some jumbo-sized latte with sugar.”

But speaking of jaded, Bourdain — who’s giving a public talk Wednesday night at Massey Hall — admits Monday’s sold-out show in Houston didn’t go so well because the audience simply knew too much.

“Three minutes into it, I realized they’d heard it all, between interviews, articles, blogs and the books. It was an awful moment for me. This audience was very wired in and this is the world we live in now. If you write about food too long, you run out of adjectives and, more importantly, you lose the sense of wonder. It’s a terrible thing.”

China, Bourdain figures, is the next food frontier. Even if he devotes the rest of his eating life to figuring it out, he expects to “still die knowing relatively nothing.”

Bourdain’s sense of wonder makes multiple appearances during the interview.

He worries about being that idiot who tires of foie gras and truffles, and then slides into a spirited discussion about how he and his chef friends love yakitori – Japanese, charcoal-grilled chicken parts.

Then there’s the care and feeding of his daughter. She gets hot dogs (organic), grilled cheese and pasta with butter, but she’s also well-travelled (already) and exposed to everything.

“She likes pecorino (cheese), anchovies, sardines, tuna, olives and risotto,” says Bourdain, who never forces her to eat what’s put in front of her. “And she loves raw oysters.”

Bourdain hasn’t cooked professionally for over a decade, and admits to eating out with chef friends and ordering in a lot like most New Yorkers. When he cooks at home, it’s “in one pot” and it’s probably stew, beef bourguignon, steak, calf’s liver, pasta or risotto.

Still, in Medium Raw, Bourdain advocates cooking at home whenever possible and calls basic cooking skills a virtue that should be taught as soon a child can be trusted with a knife.

It has been eight years since Bourdain visited Toronto. Back then, we got 90 minutes together for Vietnamese iced coffee, Salvadoran pupusas and Chilean corn pie in Chinatown and Kensington Market, but came up empty on his search for raw milk Canadian cheese.

This time I bring four Canadian cheeses, including two raw ones, for our 45-minute coffee interview.

Guidi predicts he’ll go for the Bleu D’Elizabeth from Quebec, “because big personalities like big blues.” She’s right.

“If I were to be a cheese it would be a really funky, slightly overripe blue cheese,” says Bourdain, breaking apart a baguette by hand and diving into the cheese. “In a perfect world, I’d be a Stilton.”

Source: TheStar.com

Accordionated – being able to drive and refold a road map at the same time

Blogish – a variety of English that uses a large number of initialisms, frequently used on blogs

Dunandunate – the overuse of a word or phrase that has recently been added to your own vocabulary

Earworm – a catchy tune that frequently gets stuck in your head

Freegan – someone who rejects consumerism, usually by eating discarded food

Fumb – your large toe

Furgle – to feel in a pocket or bag for a small object such as a coin or key

Griefer – someone who spends their online time harassing others

Headset jockey – a telephone call centre worker

Museum head – feeling mentally exhausted and no longer able to take in information; Usually following a trip to a museum

Nonversation – a worthless conversation, wherein nothing is explained or otherwise Elaborated upon

Optotoxical – a look that could kill, normally from a parent or spouse

Peppier – a waiter whose sole job is to offer diners ground pepper, usually from a large pepper mill

Percuperate – to prepare for the possibility of being ill

Polkadodge – the dance that occurs when two people attempt to pass each other but move in the same direction

Pregreening – to creep forwards while waiting for a red light to change

Smushables – items that must be pack at the top of a bag to avoid being squashed

Stealth-geek – someone who hides their nerdy interests while maintaining a normal outward appearance

Vidiot – someone who is inept at the act of programming video recording equipment

Whinese – a term for the language spoken by children on lengthy trips

Wibble – the trembling of the lower lip just shy of actually crying

Wikism – a piece of information that claims to be true but is wildly inaccurate

Source: The Telegraph

Food expert holds doctorate in noodle lore

OSAKA–A food expert, who has re-created dishes enjoyed by the nobility in the Nara period (710-784), was so taken with the 1,300-year history of noodles in this country that he wrote a book about it. “I simply wondered why ramen and soba noodles always rank high in Japanese favorite food surveys,” Ayao Okumura, 72, said.

His book, “Nihon men-shoku-bunka no 1,300-nen” (1,300 years of noodle culture in Japan), won the Tsuji Shizuo Shokubunka-sho food culture prize in spring. The book was the culmination of two years of fieldwork. Although he is a well-known expert in traditional foods, Okumura believes a person can always learn something, no matter how old he or she is. So he entered Mimasaka University’s graduate school in Okayama Prefecture shortly before turning 70 and chose noodles for his doctoral thesis.

He sampled noodles not only in Japan but also overseas, such as in Italy and China, and learned various ways to cook them. He sometimes ate noodles six times a day, raising his blood sugar level so high that he wound up in a hospital. In his sickbed, Okumura read 45 books from the Kamakura period (1192-1333) and later compiled a paper based on the books.

He began his culinary career at a relative’s delicatessen and studied under food culture giant Osamu Shinoda (1899-1978), who always said, “Visit the places where dishes originate.” Okumura devoted himself to studying noodles at his own research kitchen in Nara. “The reason Japanese love noodles is because of the way we cook and eat them,” Okumura said. “Now I’d like to study the aesthetics of color and the presentation of food.”

Source: Daily Yomiuri