Quotulatiousness

May 17, 2011

The Freakonomics approach to sexual research

Filed under: Economics, Randomness, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:56

Inspired by the Freakonomics team and their “let the data lead the way” methods, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam talk about their new book A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire:

Since we’ve written a book offering new ideas about a very intimate and politicized subject — sexual desire — you may be wondering about our identities and ideologies. We’re both heterosexual males. Ogi is 40 and half-Latino, Sai is 30 and all Indian. We kicked off our controversial research project with one overriding principle partially inspired by Freakonomics: no agenda, no ideology, just follow the data wherever it leads.

And the data led us to some very strange places. Here are some of our findings: heterosexual men like shemale porn, large-penis porn, and fantasies of their wives sleeping with other men. Gay male sexuality is almost identical to straight male sexuality. Women prefer stories to visuals, though women who do prefer visuals tend to have a higher sex drive, exhibit greater social aggression, and are more comfortable taking risks. Men prefer overweight women to underweight women. Heterosexual women like stories about two masculine men sharing their tender side and having sex. Porn featuring women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s is popular among men both young and old. For women, online erotica is often a social enterprise, while for men it’s almost always a solitary one. Most men are wired to be aroused by sexual dominance and most women are wired to be aroused by sexual submission, though a large minority of straight men (and a majority of gay men) prefer the sexually submissive role, and a small minority of women prefer the sexually dominant role.

They then answer a series of questions posed by Freakonomics readers, some of which are quite hostile in tone.

Matt Welch: BHL is a “national embarrassment to France”

Filed under: France, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:42

Actually, I understate in the headline what Matt actually wrote:

And since we don’t want to reprint the whole quavering bag of apologia (“Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; a friend to women and, first of all, to his own woman, naturally,” etc.), let’s close with perhaps my favorite line:

     What I do know is that nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to the dogs.

I’m guessing what BHL really means here is that no worldly rape can justify Strauss-Kahn’s treatment. Since if the accusations are true, a 62-year-old man known by every French person I’ve asked to have the sexual manners of a primate lunged nakedly at hired help half his age, grabbed her breast, knocked her to the floor, and chased her around his expensive hotel suite attempting with some success to thrust his penis into her body and discharge DNA evidence.

I don’t know if he’s guilty, and it would be imprudent not to consider the conspiracy theories in a case involving someone who until this week was the single biggest political threat to the sitting president of France, but the only decent way you can arrive at “nothing in the world can justify” Strauss-Kahn’s treatment is if you oppose all perp walks equally. Short of that, it’s just special pleading for a powerful dick. And another reminder that BHL is 10 times the national embarrassment to France than Jerry Lewis or even Johnny Hallyday ever was.

Final legacy of the “Cash for Clunkers” program: higher used car prices

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

Remember the “Cash for Clunkers” program? It was supposed to give the auto industry a shot in the arm by buying up older vehicles, giving the owners vouchers toward (certain) new vehicles, then destroying the traded-in clunker. Even at the time, economists tried to point out that this was just an elaborate “broken window” fallacy.

Today, use car prices are indeed soaring:

As news outlets around the country are reporting, the price of used cars has lately soared to a modern-day record, with some cars commanding more used than they sold for when new. News accounts commonly finger the Japanese earthquake and high gas prices as reasons, but there are some problems fitting either reason to the case. While the earthquake affected the supply of new cars, it’s the previously driven kind that has scored the more impressive price jump. And while the rise in gas prices would explain a relative shift in buyer demand from SUVs and trucks toward smaller vehicles — which has indeed happened — the strength of the used-vehicle market lately has been such that even the thirstier vehicles have advanced in price, $4 gas or no.

No doubt there are multiple reasons for the price spike, including the severe general slump in new-auto sales in recent years, which has reduced the volume of newer cars coming onto the resale market. But — as Washington scrambles to take undeserved credit for whatever passes for normalization in the auto business these days — it’s worth remembering that an artificial scarcity of used cars isn’t just bad for the poor as a group: it’s bad in particular for the upwardly mobile poor, since in most of the country landing a job means needing to line up transportation to get to that job. When it suddenly costs $6,000 instead of $3,000 to get wheels, the move from unemployment to a paying job faces a new and discouraging barrier.

Who’s going to feed Fluffy if you get taken up in the Rapture?

Filed under: Media, Randomness, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

Sorry, of course I mean when you leave for your seat at the right hand of God. For a small advance fee, you can be (relatively) certain that Fluffy or Rover will be seen to by After The Rapture Pet Care:

In case you hadn’t heard, Judgment Day is pencilled in for 21 May and any Christians among you who hadn’t made provision for your pets’ wellbeing after the Rapture had better pull your fingers out before you take your place at God’s right hand and your poor moggy is left stuck here on Earth staring at an empty bowl.

Make no mistake, this is serious. Harold Camping, the 89-year-old founder of Family Radio, has spent years scouring the Bible for evidence of just when it’s time for believers to pack their celestial suitcases. True, they had to unpack again back in September 2004 following Camping’s first shot at naming the big day, but he assures that this time it is “absolutely going to happen without any question”.

So, you’re ascending to eternal glory and your cat’s litter needs changing. It’s an upsetting thought for any true follower of Christ, but help is at hand in the form of another creature absolutely guaranteed to be left behind by the heavenly mass exodus: the atheist.

Memristor breakthrough

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

A report at The Register talks about HP’s new leads in the development of the “memristor”:

HP scientists have made a breakthrough in the development of memristors, a fundamental circuit type that looks increasingly likely to replace NAND flash and possibly DRAM.

Essentially, they’ve figured out the physical and chemical mechanisms that make memristors work.

“We were on a path where we would have had something that works reasonably well, but this improves our confidence and should allow us to improve the devices such that they are significantly better,” the leader of the HP research team, R. Stanley Williams, told IDG News.

Memristors are the fourth fundamental type of passive circuitry, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor. Like flash, memristors are nonvolatile — they “remember” their state when power isn’t applied to them.

The core advantage of memristors is that they can theoretically achieve speeds 10 times that of flash at one-tenth the power budget per cell. They can also be stacked, enabling exceptionally dense memory structures.

Of course, this is all still in the research lab, so don’t expect to see memristor technology show up in your next tablet or smartphone. It could be several years before the new tech becomes widely available.

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