On Saturday, I went to what could have been a Pearl Jam secret show. The Showbox here in Seattle was advertising a show featuring “Harrybu McCage, featuring Matt Cameron of Pearl Jam”. A quick Google search revealed that Harrybu Mccage didn’t really exist, though the opening bands did, so we hoped it was actually a Pearl Jam secret show.
Walking in, the venue was nearly empty. Apparently it was a very secret secret show. As the night went on, though, some hardcore Pearl Jam fans did begin to show up, as hopeful as we were.
As it turned out, Harrybu Mccage did in fact exist, and played a strange jazz-electronic-drumming-noise set that was very very much not Pearl Jam. And in my humble opinion, was very much not… good. The high point of the evening was the palpable air of disappointment and the crestfallen looks on every single person’s face. It’s not often that I get to see so much disappointment in one place.
The night ended well, though, as we headed to friend’s birthday party, where I happened to run into other people I met at the Bellevue Fashion Week event I snuck into (three months in Seattle and my social circles are already intersecting?!), through whom I met the guy (Bay Raitt) who coded Gollum’s face for Lord of the Rings who also happens to be both friendly and hilarious and thus I finished the night eating chocolate ice cream cake at 3am with a bunch of strangers.
Today was beautiful. I can see the mountains, far off in the distance from my living room window. Went downtown to pick up some books on PHP, swung by the Dahlia Bakery for the world’s greatest coconut cream pie, stopped at Kerry Park for an incredible view of the Seattle skyline with Mount Ranier looming in the distance, and now it’s off to steel drum practice.
The one drawback is losing feeling in my fingers and toes when I go biking, but I’m reasonably certain that’s solvable.
I’ve got an idea for a Facebook app, so it’s back to my programming roots. I haven’t done any serious programming since high school. PHP, be gentle.
I put together a “Hello world” Facebook application with the assistance of Facebook’s tutorial. It only took about four hours, though a bunch of the time was due to discovering the hard way that my webhost’s online document editor is buggy. Damn you and your GUI, siteground.com! I think I’ll be switching to bluehost eventually…
The recent talk about pairbonding at the Pacific Science Center made me reread an even better article, Is There Anything Good About Men? by Prof. Roy Baumeister of Florida State University.
Though DNA analysis (for example, comparing the genetic variability in the Y chromosome – inherited from the father, vs. mitochondrial DNA – inherited from the mother), scientists have found that we’re descended from about twice as many women as men.
In other words, historically, the reproductive situation was vastly different for women and men. While the average women will have the opportunity to have children, men had to do much more to differentiate themselves to end up in the select group of “reproducers”.
For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed or whatever, but then again if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky).
So high variance in male traits and behaviors is much more highly rewarded than high variance in female traits and behaviors. And this is where statistics makes things interesting:
A pattern of more men at both extremes can create all sorts of misleading conclusions and other statistical mischief. To illustrate, let’s assume that men and women are on average exactly equal in every relevant respect, but more men at both extremes. If you then measure things that are bounded at one end, it screws up the data to make men and women seem significantly different.
Consider grade point average in college. Thanks to grade inflation, most students now get A’s and B’s, but a few range all the way down to F. With that kind of low ceiling, the high-achieving males cannot pull up the male average, but the loser males will pull it down. The result will be that women will get higher average grades than men – again despite no difference in average quality of work.
The opposite result comes with salaries. There is a minimum wage but no maximum. Hence the high-achieving men can pull the male average up while the low-achieving ones can’t pull it down. The result? Men will get higher average salaries than women, even if there is no average difference on any relevant input.
I went to the Pacific Science Center’s monthly Science with a Twist nerdfest today. $15 gets you a free drink, a bunch of food and chocolate, a chance to run around a children-sized museum, a lecture on the evolutionary aspects of pairbonding, and a nausea-inducing KISS laser show. Sweet.
The lecture on pairbonding was the most interesting part. Apparently men go into hormonal cycles that synchronize with the women they’re living with. I disagreed with the researcher’s conclusions (he begins from the assumption that monogamy is a cross-cultural human trait – dubious, to say the least) but it was fascinating data.
