Bullshit on fear of strangers.

I am glad there seems to be a backlash against the ultra-protective parental viewpoint. Finding this article on the top of reddit shows someone is waking up. Kids in the United States are the safest they have ever been in its history. We should be celebrating how much safer the world is than it was when we were children, rather than letting the media scare us into living in fear.

Bullshit episode on the subject:

Not many graduates landing jobs.

This paragraph from this Businessweek article would really scare me if I had not managed to get a good job:

The job market is particularly bad for young people because companies, which now have their pick of candidates, are favoring experience. Companies say they plan to hire 22% fewer graduates from the Class of 2009 than they did from the Class of 2008, according to a recent study by the National Association of Colleges & Employers. Only about 20% of 2009 graduates who applied for jobs have gotten one. (By comparison, 51% of college students had a job by the time they graduated in 2007, the group said.) In some cases, employers are able to fill entry level jobs with experienced people.

I am a Giant!

I just walked something like six miles through Alhambra, near where I will be moving. Out of at least fifty people I passed on the street not a single one was taller than me. This is rather an unusual experience for me, at 5' 11" I am only about a half inch taller than the mean for white males of my age. Since I am taller than the vast majority of women that means I am usually one of the taller people in a room but I don't stand out as such.

Now, it is general knowledge that Asians are shorter than white people on average so this was only a little surprising to me. However after several years out of state I hadn't realized how few Hispanic people are taller than me.

I went and looked at wikipedia numbers on average height, sure enough Mexican American males average only 5' 7", and the Asian nationalities range from about 5' 3" for Vietnamese to 5' 8" for Koreans. So in a neighborhood where there are not many white or black men I am practically a giant!

Following Harvard Graduates

This is a neat article from The Atlantic about following a few hundred harvard graduates from the late 30s until today. What seems to be interesting is how much people change over the course of their life. Many people who seem to be together in early life degenerate, while others who don't seem to be doing well in life get their act together.

What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old? By the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement, Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter century, had identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.

Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Of the 106 Harvard men who had five or six of these factors in their favor at age 50, half ended up at 80 as what Vaillant called “happy-well” and only 7.5 percent as “sad-sick.” Meanwhile, of the men who had three or fewer of the health factors at age 50, none ended up “happy-well” at 80. Even if they had been in adequate physical shape at 50, the men who had three or fewer protective factors were three times as likely to be dead at 80 as those with four or more factors.

What factors don’t matter? Vaillant identified some surprises. Cholesterol levels at age 50 have nothing to do with health in old age. While social ease correlates highly with good psychosocial adjustment in college and early adulthood, its significance diminishes over time. The predictive importance of childhood temperament also diminishes over time: shy, anxious kids tend to do poorly in young adulthood, but by age 70, are just as likely as the outgoing kids to be “happy-well.” Vaillant sums up: “If you follow lives long enough, the risk factors for healthy life adjustment change. There is an age to watch your cholesterol and an age to ignore it.”

The study has yielded some additional subtle surprises. Regular exercise in college predicted late-life mental health better than it did physical health. And depression turned out to be a major drain on physical health: of the men who were diagnosed with depression by age 50, more than 70 percent had died or were chronically ill by 63. More broadly, pessimists seemed to suffer physically in comparison with optimists, perhaps because they’re less likely to connect with others or care for themselves.

Self Control

I rather like this New Yorker article about self control. It makes a lot of sense to me that self control would be a better predictor of success than things like intelligence:

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

"She found that the ability to delay gratification—eighth graders were given a choice between a dollar right away or two dollars the following week—was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. She said that her study shows that “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control.”"

Second Congo War.

We seem to pay attention to wars based on how politically important they are rather than how objectively bad they are. I just took a look at the wikipedia page on the Second Congo War. It was in fact the war that killed the most people of any since World War Two, and judging by the lingering chaos may as well still be going although it officially ended in 2003. I had known this for a long time, but even knowing that I had never really read up on it. Looking at the Wikipedia page is pretty disturbing. It includes such quotes as:

"During the war, Pygmies were hunted down like game animals and eaten. Both sides of the war regarded them as "subhuman" and some say their flesh can confer magical powers."

It really is amazing to me how so many people fixate on minor atrocities such as those in Israel, while completely ignoring much worse ones.

Looking at the wikipedia list of wars in order of how deadly they are is rather interesting. It seems to be full of conflicts that I have never heard of despite how many millions whose lives they altered. China in particular has a pretty crazy history.

Surfing, mini boom or dead?

It always amuses me to catch contradictions in the media. About a month ago there was this LA times article talking about what a rough time surf shops have been having. I guess in the economy people aren't wasting a ton of money on surfing.

Then today I run into this SF gate article about a surfing boom that is leading to fights in the water around San Francisco.

My money is on the LA times article. Surfing has always been crowded around big cities and there are always assholes, I doubt the SF gate article is talking about anything that hasn't been happening for decades. Perhaps it has even been getting better.


Either way, I will only be like 20 miles from the Ocean, so I finally have no excuse and should be able to learn to surf. While I have probably gone 20 times before they were never in a short enough time frame for me to get very good.