By VANESSA GERA, Associated Press Writer Vanessa Gera, Associated Press Writer – Sat May 22, 11:43 am ET
FROMBORK, Poland – Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero on Saturday, nearly 500 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave.
His burial in a tomb in the cathedral where he once served as a church canon and doctor indicates how far the church has come in making peace with the scientist whose revolutionary theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun helped usher in the modern scientific age.
Copernicus, who lived from 1473 to 1543, died as a little-known astronomer working in what is now Poland, far from Europe's centers of learning. He had spent years laboring in his free time developing his theory, which was later condemned as heretical by the church because it removed Earth and humanity from their central position in the universe.
His revolutionary model was based on complex mathematical calculations and his naked-eye observations of the heavens because the telescope had not yet been invented.
After his death, his remains rested in an unmarked grave beneath the floor of the cathedral in Frombork, northern Poland, the exact location unknown.
On Saturday, his remains were blessed with holy water by some of Poland's highest-ranking clerics before an honor guard ceremoniously carried the coffin through the imposing red brick cathedral and lowered it back into the same spot where part of his skull and other bones were found in 2005.
A black granite tombstone now identifies him as the founder of the heliocentric theory, but also a church canon, a cleric that ranks below a priest. The tombstone is decorated with a model of the solar system, a golden sun encircled by six of the planets.
At the urging of a local bishop, scientists began searching in 2004 for the astronomer's remains and eventually turned up a skull and bones of a 70-year-old man — the age Copernicus was when he died. A reconstruction made by forensic police based on the skull showed a broken nose and other features that resemble a self-portrait of Copernicus.
In a later stage of the investigation, DNA taken from teeth and bones matched that from hairs found in one of his books, leading the scientists to conclude with great probability that they had finally found Copernicus.
In recent weeks, a wooden casket holding those remains has lain in state in the nearby city of Olsztyn, and on Friday they were toured around the region to towns linked to his life.
The pageantry comes 18 years after the Vatican rehabilitated the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was persecuted in the Inquisition for carrying the Copernican Revolution forward.
Wojciech Ziemba, the archbishop of the region surrounding Frombork, said the Catholic Church is proud that Copernicus left the region a legacy of "his hard work, devotion and above all of his scientific genius."
Saturday's Mass was led by Jozef Kowalczyk, the papal nuncio and newly named Primate of Poland, the highest church authority in this deeply Catholic country.
Poland also is the homeland of John Paul II, the late pope who said in 1992 that the church was wrong in condemning Galileo's work.
Jacek Jezierski, a local bishop who encouraged the search for Copernicus, said that he considers Copernicus' burial as part of the church's broader embrace of science as being compatible with Biblical belief.
"Today's funeral has symbolic value in that it is a gesture of reconciliation between science and faith," Jezierski said. "Science and faith can be reconciled."
Copernicus' burial in an anonymous grave in the 16th century was not linked to suspicions of heresy. When he died, his ideas were just starting to be discussed by a small group of European astronomers, astrologers and mathematicians, and the church was not yet forcefully condemning the heliocentric world view as heresy, according to Jack Repcheck, author of "Copernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began."
The full attack on those ideas came decades later when the Vatican was waging a massive defense against Martin Luther's Reformation.
"There is no indication that Copernicus was worried about being declared a heretic and being kicked out of the church for his astronomical views," Repcheck said.
"Why was he just buried along with everyone else, like every other canon in Frombork? Because at the time of his death he was just any other canon in Frombork. He was not the iconic hero that he has become."
Copernicus had, however, been at odds with his superiors in the church over other matters.
He was repeatedly reprimanded for keeping a mistress, which violated his vow of celibacy, and was eventually forced to give her up. He also was suspected of harboring sympathies for Lutheranism, which was spreading like wildfire in northern Europe at the time, Repcheck said.
Copernicus' major treatise — "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres" — was published at the very end of his life, and he only received a copy of the printed book on the day he died — May 21, 1543.
Investment Chart Kondratiev Wave
Sunday, 23 May 2010
Wednesday, 19 May 2010
Blush, Babble, Cringe: The Shy Social Butterfly?
By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN May 18 2010
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703315404575250350893404916.html?mod=WSJ_hp_us_mostpop_read)
Most people who know me believe I'm really outgoing. I've held hands with strangers who were nervous on planes, made a friend while shopping for ties at Saks and once called a wrong number and chatted away—for 10 minutes.
Cocktail parties? Interviewing someone important for work? Speaking in public? Not (typically) a problem for me. As my best friend helpfully pointed out recently, "You could talk anyone under the table."
So why do I get tongue-tied, back up into a file cabinet or blurt out something inappropriate every time I run into one particularly talented colleague? Why do I dread simply walking across a restaurant or room full of people? Why did I dribble wine down my chin at a party recently when I noticed a man checking me out?
Andrew Roberts
Here's a hint: I was voted Most Shy in high school. And while I've successfully exorcised much of my bashfulness—partly with determination, partly by simply racking up more life experiences over time—I still suffer from what psychologists call "situational shyness." In other words, certain circumstances, or people, can make me unexpectedly, uncontrollably shy.
While about 40% of Americans actually consider themselves shy, a whopping 95% of people say they experience temporary timidity from time to time, according to studies from the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast, in New Albany, Ind. In other words, almost everyone—even the people you think are most confident—experiences shyness sometimes, and this can negatively impact their interactions with others. (As for the other 5% who say they have never, even once, felt shy? The researchers think they're lying.)
In general, shyness is a personality trait that is partly biological (experts can't say how much) and partly environmental. We become shy when we are excessively self-conscious, self preoccupied or self-critical.
"Think about being in front of a mirror. You don't typically think about how fantastic you look. You find the fault and primp and tweak," says Bernardo J. Carducci, a psychologist and director of the Shyness Research Institute. "Shyness is people walking around as if they are in front of a mirror all the time."
And there's the crux: Shyness can hold people back. Unlike introverts, who prefer to be socially withdrawn, shy people want to be social. Making matters worse, shy people are often misunderstood—thought to be snobby or aloof.
There's an additional problem with situational shyness: It can pop up at the most inopportune times. Just ask Jim Dailakis. He's a comedian and actor from New York who says he is never nervous getting up in front of an audience. "I've even been involved in love scenes, and thanks to the writing on the page I'm a total stud," he says.
But recently while renting a car, Mr. Dailakis struck up a conversation with the woman behind the counter. He flirted. She flirted back. Then, before he could stop himself, he started to mumble and blush—and fled out the door and straight into the bushes. "I felt like a little boy hiding behind his mother's skirt," says Mr. Dailakis, 41 years old.
Overall, the biggest causes of situational shyness, according to Dr. Carducci, include strangers, people in authority and people we find attractive. But there are plenty of others: transitions to a new job, parties and famous people, to name a few. (Surprisingly, he says, many people who find themselves sometimes-shy have no trouble speaking in public or acting, in large part because those activities are scripted and practiced.)
Funny, when I asked people what makes them temporarily shy, almost every straight man I talked to mentioned women: "Loud parties, boisterous laughter and beautiful women," "very tall girls who are very pretty," "Colombian women." (The exception? My sportswriter friend, who said that meeting the New Yorker writer Roger Angell literally made him shake.)
Yet few women said men brought out their shyness. Instead, women said that other women often left them tongue-tied. "I get shy if I think people are much more attractive, well-dressed, thin, etc., than I am, and the combination is deadly," said one female friend. (Other triggers for women? Parties, loudmouths, unexpected gifts.)
What else makes us shy? For Cosgrove Norstadt, 46, it's talking to younger people, which can make him feel uncool. ("I express my excitement over my new cellphone only to find out that I am already outdated," says the actor from San Francisco. For Leigh Shulman, 38, a social media consultant who lives in Salta, Argentina, it's running into other parents while dropping her 6-year-old off at school. ("The idea of being judged in my job doesn't bother me as much as being judged as being a bad parent," she says.)
And Arnold Schwarzenegger did it for Judy Sable. She met the California governor very briefly 20 years ago when he was an actor and she was trying on a ski jacket at a shop in her hometown of Fremont, Calif. "A man's voice said, 'Thaaat looks raaally cool,'" says the 61-year-old retired human resources manager. "I can still remember exactly what went through my mind: He's so big, he has orange spiky hair and he's married to a Kennedy. All I wanted was to get out of there before I said anything dumb."
So how do we cope with situational shyness? Well, I tend to react by babbling and sharing too much. Some people whip out their BlackBerrys or iPhones and start reading or typing furiously. One friend sometimes excuses himself to use the restroom at cocktail parties, then flees without saying good-bye.
Alice Cunningham, who says she has a hard time approaching strangers at parties or work events, wears Italian leather shoes with famous works of art reproduced on them. "I had a psychiatrist once who said shy people need great clothes so they can walk into a room and let the clothes do the talking at first," says the 69-year-old, who owns a hot tub company in Seattle. "My shoes act as a publicist and bring people to me. Then I am OK."
—Write to Elizabeth Bernstein at bonds@wsj.com and follow her column at www.Facebook.com/EBernsteinWSJ.
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703315404575250350893404916.html?mod=WSJ_hp_us_mostpop_read)
Most people who know me believe I'm really outgoing. I've held hands with strangers who were nervous on planes, made a friend while shopping for ties at Saks and once called a wrong number and chatted away—for 10 minutes.
Cocktail parties? Interviewing someone important for work? Speaking in public? Not (typically) a problem for me. As my best friend helpfully pointed out recently, "You could talk anyone under the table."
So why do I get tongue-tied, back up into a file cabinet or blurt out something inappropriate every time I run into one particularly talented colleague? Why do I dread simply walking across a restaurant or room full of people? Why did I dribble wine down my chin at a party recently when I noticed a man checking me out?
Andrew Roberts
Here's a hint: I was voted Most Shy in high school. And while I've successfully exorcised much of my bashfulness—partly with determination, partly by simply racking up more life experiences over time—I still suffer from what psychologists call "situational shyness." In other words, certain circumstances, or people, can make me unexpectedly, uncontrollably shy.
While about 40% of Americans actually consider themselves shy, a whopping 95% of people say they experience temporary timidity from time to time, according to studies from the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast, in New Albany, Ind. In other words, almost everyone—even the people you think are most confident—experiences shyness sometimes, and this can negatively impact their interactions with others. (As for the other 5% who say they have never, even once, felt shy? The researchers think they're lying.)
In general, shyness is a personality trait that is partly biological (experts can't say how much) and partly environmental. We become shy when we are excessively self-conscious, self preoccupied or self-critical.
"Think about being in front of a mirror. You don't typically think about how fantastic you look. You find the fault and primp and tweak," says Bernardo J. Carducci, a psychologist and director of the Shyness Research Institute. "Shyness is people walking around as if they are in front of a mirror all the time."
And there's the crux: Shyness can hold people back. Unlike introverts, who prefer to be socially withdrawn, shy people want to be social. Making matters worse, shy people are often misunderstood—thought to be snobby or aloof.
There's an additional problem with situational shyness: It can pop up at the most inopportune times. Just ask Jim Dailakis. He's a comedian and actor from New York who says he is never nervous getting up in front of an audience. "I've even been involved in love scenes, and thanks to the writing on the page I'm a total stud," he says.
But recently while renting a car, Mr. Dailakis struck up a conversation with the woman behind the counter. He flirted. She flirted back. Then, before he could stop himself, he started to mumble and blush—and fled out the door and straight into the bushes. "I felt like a little boy hiding behind his mother's skirt," says Mr. Dailakis, 41 years old.
Overall, the biggest causes of situational shyness, according to Dr. Carducci, include strangers, people in authority and people we find attractive. But there are plenty of others: transitions to a new job, parties and famous people, to name a few. (Surprisingly, he says, many people who find themselves sometimes-shy have no trouble speaking in public or acting, in large part because those activities are scripted and practiced.)
Funny, when I asked people what makes them temporarily shy, almost every straight man I talked to mentioned women: "Loud parties, boisterous laughter and beautiful women," "very tall girls who are very pretty," "Colombian women." (The exception? My sportswriter friend, who said that meeting the New Yorker writer Roger Angell literally made him shake.)
Yet few women said men brought out their shyness. Instead, women said that other women often left them tongue-tied. "I get shy if I think people are much more attractive, well-dressed, thin, etc., than I am, and the combination is deadly," said one female friend. (Other triggers for women? Parties, loudmouths, unexpected gifts.)
What else makes us shy? For Cosgrove Norstadt, 46, it's talking to younger people, which can make him feel uncool. ("I express my excitement over my new cellphone only to find out that I am already outdated," says the actor from San Francisco. For Leigh Shulman, 38, a social media consultant who lives in Salta, Argentina, it's running into other parents while dropping her 6-year-old off at school. ("The idea of being judged in my job doesn't bother me as much as being judged as being a bad parent," she says.)
And Arnold Schwarzenegger did it for Judy Sable. She met the California governor very briefly 20 years ago when he was an actor and she was trying on a ski jacket at a shop in her hometown of Fremont, Calif. "A man's voice said, 'Thaaat looks raaally cool,'" says the 61-year-old retired human resources manager. "I can still remember exactly what went through my mind: He's so big, he has orange spiky hair and he's married to a Kennedy. All I wanted was to get out of there before I said anything dumb."
So how do we cope with situational shyness? Well, I tend to react by babbling and sharing too much. Some people whip out their BlackBerrys or iPhones and start reading or typing furiously. One friend sometimes excuses himself to use the restroom at cocktail parties, then flees without saying good-bye.
Alice Cunningham, who says she has a hard time approaching strangers at parties or work events, wears Italian leather shoes with famous works of art reproduced on them. "I had a psychiatrist once who said shy people need great clothes so they can walk into a room and let the clothes do the talking at first," says the 69-year-old, who owns a hot tub company in Seattle. "My shoes act as a publicist and bring people to me. Then I am OK."
—Write to Elizabeth Bernstein at bonds@wsj.com and follow her column at www.Facebook.com/EBernsteinWSJ.
Doomsayers Beware, a Bright Future Beckons
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: May 17, 2010 (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/science/18tier.html?src=me&ref=general)
Long before “sustainable” became a buzzword, intellectuals wondered how long industrial society could survive. In “The Idea of Decline in Western History,” after surveying predictions from the mid-19th century until today, the historian Arthur Herman identifies two consistently dominant schools of thought.
The first school despairs because it foresees inevitable ruin. The second school is hopeful — but only because these intellectuals foresee ruin, too, and can hardly wait for the decadent modern world to be replaced by one more to their liking. Every now and then, someone comes along to note that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering, but the notion is promptly dismissed in academia as happy talk from a simpleton. Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list. Have you read Julian Simon’s “The State of Humanity”? Indur Goklany’s “The Improving State of the World”? Gregg Easterbrook’s “Sonic Boom”?
Good books all, and so is the newest addition to this slender canon, “The Rational Optimist,” by Matt Ridley. It does much more than debunk the doomsaying. Dr. Ridley provides a grand unified theory of history from the Stone Age to the better age awaiting us in 2100.
It’s an audacious task, but he has the intellectual breadth for it. A trained zoologist and former editor at The Economist, Dr. Ridley has established himself in previous books, like “The Origins of Virtue” and “Genome,” as the supreme synthesist of lessons from anthropology, psychology, molecular genetics, economics and game theory. This time he takes on all of human history, starting with our mysteriously successful debut. What made Homo sapiens so special? Dr. Ridley argues that it wasn’t our big brain, because Neanderthals had a big brain, too. Nor was it our willingness to help one another, because apes and other social animals also had an instinct for reciprocity.
“At some point,” Dr. Ridley writes, “after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object.”
The evidence for this trick is in perforated seashells from more than 80,000 years ago that ended up far from the nearest coast, an indication that inlanders were bartering to get ornamental seashells from coastal dwellers. Unlike the contemporary Neanderthals, who apparently relied just on local resources, those modern humans could shop for imports.
“The extraordinary promise of this event was that Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz,” Dr. Ridley writes. People traded goods, services and, most important, knowledge, creating a collective intelligence: “Ten individuals could know between them ten things, while each understanding one.”
As they specialized and exchanged, humans learned how to domesticate crops and animals and sell food to passing merchants. Traders congregated in the first cities and built ships that spread goods and ideas around the world.
The Phoenician merchants who sailed the Mediterranean were denounced by Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Greek intellectuals like Homer. But trading networks enabled the ancient Greeks to develop their alphabet, mathematics and science, and later fostered innovation in the trading hubs of the Roman Empire, India, China, Arabia, Renaissance Italy and other European capitals.
Rulers like to take credit for the advances during their reigns, and scientists like to see their theories as the source of technological progress. But Dr. Ridley argues that they’ve both got it backward: traders’ wealth builds empires, and entrepreneurial tinkerers are more likely to inspire scientists than vice versa. From Stone Age seashells to the steam engine to the personal computer, innovation has mostly been a bottom-up process.
“Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment,” Dr. Ridley writes. “This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialization and the invention it has called forth, the ‘creation’ of time.”
You can appreciate the timesaving benefits through a measure devised by the economist William D. Nordhaus: how long it takes the average worker to pay for an hour of reading light. In ancient Babylon, it took more than 50 hours to pay for that light from a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, it took more than six hours of work to pay for it from a tallow candle. Today, thanks to the countless specialists producing electricity and compact fluorescent bulbs, it takes less than a second. That technological progress, though, was sporadic. Innovation would flourish in one trading hub for a while but then stagnate, sometimes because of external predators — roving pirates, invading barbarians — but more often because of internal parasites, as Dr. Ridley writes:
“Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the expense of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers.”
Progress this century could be impeded by politics, wars, plagues or climate change, but Dr. Ridley argues that, as usual, the “apocaholics” are overstating the risks and underestimating innovative responses.
“The modern world is a history of ideas meeting, mixing, mating and mutating,” Dr. Ridley writes. “And the reason that economic growth has accelerated so in the past two centuries is down to the fact that ideas have been mixing more than ever before.”
Our progress is unsustainable, he argues, only if we stifle innovation and trade, the way China and other empires did in the past. Is that possible? Well, European countries are already banning technologies based on the precautionary principle requiring advance proof that they’re risk-free. Americans are turning more protectionist and advocating byzantine restrictions like carbon tariffs. Globalization is denounced by affluent Westerners preaching a return to self-sufficiency.
But with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, Dr. Ridley expects bottom-up innovators to prevail. His prediction for the rest of the century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”
If you’re not ready to trust an optimist, if you still fear a reckoning is at hand, you might consider the words of Thomas B. Macaulay, a British poet, historian and politician who criticized doomsayers of the mid-1800s.
“We cannot absolutely prove,” he wrote, “that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason.”
A version of this article appeared in print on May 18, 2010, on page D1 of the New York edition.
Published: May 17, 2010 (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/science/18tier.html?src=me&ref=general)
Long before “sustainable” became a buzzword, intellectuals wondered how long industrial society could survive. In “The Idea of Decline in Western History,” after surveying predictions from the mid-19th century until today, the historian Arthur Herman identifies two consistently dominant schools of thought.
The first school despairs because it foresees inevitable ruin. The second school is hopeful — but only because these intellectuals foresee ruin, too, and can hardly wait for the decadent modern world to be replaced by one more to their liking. Every now and then, someone comes along to note that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering, but the notion is promptly dismissed in academia as happy talk from a simpleton. Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list. Have you read Julian Simon’s “The State of Humanity”? Indur Goklany’s “The Improving State of the World”? Gregg Easterbrook’s “Sonic Boom”?
Good books all, and so is the newest addition to this slender canon, “The Rational Optimist,” by Matt Ridley. It does much more than debunk the doomsaying. Dr. Ridley provides a grand unified theory of history from the Stone Age to the better age awaiting us in 2100.
It’s an audacious task, but he has the intellectual breadth for it. A trained zoologist and former editor at The Economist, Dr. Ridley has established himself in previous books, like “The Origins of Virtue” and “Genome,” as the supreme synthesist of lessons from anthropology, psychology, molecular genetics, economics and game theory. This time he takes on all of human history, starting with our mysteriously successful debut. What made Homo sapiens so special? Dr. Ridley argues that it wasn’t our big brain, because Neanderthals had a big brain, too. Nor was it our willingness to help one another, because apes and other social animals also had an instinct for reciprocity.
“At some point,” Dr. Ridley writes, “after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object.”
The evidence for this trick is in perforated seashells from more than 80,000 years ago that ended up far from the nearest coast, an indication that inlanders were bartering to get ornamental seashells from coastal dwellers. Unlike the contemporary Neanderthals, who apparently relied just on local resources, those modern humans could shop for imports.
“The extraordinary promise of this event was that Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz,” Dr. Ridley writes. People traded goods, services and, most important, knowledge, creating a collective intelligence: “Ten individuals could know between them ten things, while each understanding one.”
As they specialized and exchanged, humans learned how to domesticate crops and animals and sell food to passing merchants. Traders congregated in the first cities and built ships that spread goods and ideas around the world.
The Phoenician merchants who sailed the Mediterranean were denounced by Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Greek intellectuals like Homer. But trading networks enabled the ancient Greeks to develop their alphabet, mathematics and science, and later fostered innovation in the trading hubs of the Roman Empire, India, China, Arabia, Renaissance Italy and other European capitals.
Rulers like to take credit for the advances during their reigns, and scientists like to see their theories as the source of technological progress. But Dr. Ridley argues that they’ve both got it backward: traders’ wealth builds empires, and entrepreneurial tinkerers are more likely to inspire scientists than vice versa. From Stone Age seashells to the steam engine to the personal computer, innovation has mostly been a bottom-up process.
“Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment,” Dr. Ridley writes. “This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialization and the invention it has called forth, the ‘creation’ of time.”
You can appreciate the timesaving benefits through a measure devised by the economist William D. Nordhaus: how long it takes the average worker to pay for an hour of reading light. In ancient Babylon, it took more than 50 hours to pay for that light from a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, it took more than six hours of work to pay for it from a tallow candle. Today, thanks to the countless specialists producing electricity and compact fluorescent bulbs, it takes less than a second. That technological progress, though, was sporadic. Innovation would flourish in one trading hub for a while but then stagnate, sometimes because of external predators — roving pirates, invading barbarians — but more often because of internal parasites, as Dr. Ridley writes:
“Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the expense of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers.”
Progress this century could be impeded by politics, wars, plagues or climate change, but Dr. Ridley argues that, as usual, the “apocaholics” are overstating the risks and underestimating innovative responses.
“The modern world is a history of ideas meeting, mixing, mating and mutating,” Dr. Ridley writes. “And the reason that economic growth has accelerated so in the past two centuries is down to the fact that ideas have been mixing more than ever before.”
Our progress is unsustainable, he argues, only if we stifle innovation and trade, the way China and other empires did in the past. Is that possible? Well, European countries are already banning technologies based on the precautionary principle requiring advance proof that they’re risk-free. Americans are turning more protectionist and advocating byzantine restrictions like carbon tariffs. Globalization is denounced by affluent Westerners preaching a return to self-sufficiency.
But with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, Dr. Ridley expects bottom-up innovators to prevail. His prediction for the rest of the century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”
If you’re not ready to trust an optimist, if you still fear a reckoning is at hand, you might consider the words of Thomas B. Macaulay, a British poet, historian and politician who criticized doomsayers of the mid-1800s.
“We cannot absolutely prove,” he wrote, “that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason.”
A version of this article appeared in print on May 18, 2010, on page D1 of the New York edition.
Monday, 17 May 2010
Griekenland haircut minstens 50%
50-75% zou normaal zijn gezien de ervaringen van andere landen aldus Deutsche Bank
Chuck Norris
Chuck Norris doesn't target inflation. He roundhouse-kicks it until it begs for mercy.
The Chuck Norris dollar buys 3 Canadian dollars, and trades at parity with the euro.
Chuck Norris doesn't supply collateral, only collateral damage.
The tears of Chuck Norris would supply enough liquidity to solve the credit crisis. Too bad he never cries.
When the yield on a Chuck Norris bond goes up, the price also rises.
Chuck Norris trades on fear and greed simultaneously.
Alan Greenspan calls Chuck Norris ``The Maestro.''
Chuck Norris has already banked his dividend payment from Northern Rock Plc.
Chuck Norris funds at Libor flat.
Chuck Norris Asset Management made 50 percent on its subprime mortgage-backed bond fund last month.
Chuck Norris doesn't borrow at the Fed's discount window. Chuck Norris LENDS at the Fed's discount window.
Chuck Norris's curves never invert.
Net income at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. rose 79 percent in the third quarter; profit at Chuck Norris Securities Inc. climbed 80 percent.
There is no market regulator. Just a list of securities Chuck Norris allows to be traded.
Chuck's iPhone never needs recharging.
Chuck Norris doesn't buy gold to hedge against inflation. Gold buys Chuck Norris to hedge against inflation.
Chuck Norris charges the Bank of England a penalty rate for borrowing. And guarantees its deposits.
Chuck Norris is the pilot Ben Bernanke calls when he wants to shower the economy with dollar bills. Sometimes, Chuck refuses to fly.
Chuck Norris gets ALL of his funding from the asset-backed commercial paper market.
Chuck Norris doesn't mark-to-market. The market marks to Chuck Norris.
When the U.S. economy sneezes, the world catches a cold. When Chuck Norris sneezes, the U.S. economy catches pneumonia.
When Chuck Norris makes you a price, it isn't an offer; it's an obligation to buy.
Chuck Norris isn't a market maker; he IS the market.
Chuck Norris can still get a 125 percent mortgage on a $2 million condo without providing proof of earnings.
Chuck Norris subprime collateralized debt obligations still trade at 100 percent of face value.
Chuck completed Halo 3 on his Microsoft Corp. Xbox 360 on the day before the computer game went on sale.
Chuck Norris has a trade surplus with China.
The Chuck Norris dollar buys 3 Canadian dollars, and trades at parity with the euro.
Chuck Norris doesn't supply collateral, only collateral damage.
The tears of Chuck Norris would supply enough liquidity to solve the credit crisis. Too bad he never cries.
When the yield on a Chuck Norris bond goes up, the price also rises.
Chuck Norris trades on fear and greed simultaneously.
Alan Greenspan calls Chuck Norris ``The Maestro.''
Chuck Norris has already banked his dividend payment from Northern Rock Plc.
Chuck Norris funds at Libor flat.
Chuck Norris Asset Management made 50 percent on its subprime mortgage-backed bond fund last month.
Chuck Norris doesn't borrow at the Fed's discount window. Chuck Norris LENDS at the Fed's discount window.
Chuck Norris's curves never invert.
Net income at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. rose 79 percent in the third quarter; profit at Chuck Norris Securities Inc. climbed 80 percent.
There is no market regulator. Just a list of securities Chuck Norris allows to be traded.
Chuck's iPhone never needs recharging.
Chuck Norris doesn't buy gold to hedge against inflation. Gold buys Chuck Norris to hedge against inflation.
Chuck Norris charges the Bank of England a penalty rate for borrowing. And guarantees its deposits.
Chuck Norris is the pilot Ben Bernanke calls when he wants to shower the economy with dollar bills. Sometimes, Chuck refuses to fly.
Chuck Norris gets ALL of his funding from the asset-backed commercial paper market.
Chuck Norris doesn't mark-to-market. The market marks to Chuck Norris.
When the U.S. economy sneezes, the world catches a cold. When Chuck Norris sneezes, the U.S. economy catches pneumonia.
When Chuck Norris makes you a price, it isn't an offer; it's an obligation to buy.
Chuck Norris isn't a market maker; he IS the market.
Chuck Norris can still get a 125 percent mortgage on a $2 million condo without providing proof of earnings.
Chuck Norris subprime collateralized debt obligations still trade at 100 percent of face value.
Chuck completed Halo 3 on his Microsoft Corp. Xbox 360 on the day before the computer game went on sale.
Chuck Norris has a trade surplus with China.
The Pajama Game Closes in Shanghai
ONE hundred thousand fireworks lighted the sky over Shanghai on April 30, marking the grand opening of the 2010 World Expo. For the city’s many pajama wearers, it also signified the start of a nightmare.
After pumping $58 billion into staging this mega-event, which is expected to attract more than 70 million visitors over the next six months, city authorities started a campaign to suppress one of Shanghai’s most distinctive customs: wearing pajamas in public. Just as Beijing discouraged men from going shirtless during the Olympics, Shanghai wants everyone to wear “proper attire” for the Expo.
Catchy red signs reading “Pajamas don’t go out of the door; be a civilized resident for the Expo” are posted throughout the city. Volunteer “pajama policemen” patrol the neighborhoods, telling pajama wearers to go home and change. Celebrities and socialites appear on TV to promote the idea that sleepwear in public is “backward” and “uncivilized.”
But many residents disagree. Pajamas — not the sexy sleepwear you find at Victoria’s Secret, but loose-fitting, non-revealing PJs made of cotton or polyester — have been popular in Shanghai since the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping, then China’s leader, sought to modernize the economy and society by “opening up” to the outside world. The Chinese adopted Western pajamas without fully understanding their context. Most of us had never had any dedicated sleepwear other than old T-shirts and pants. And we thought pajamas were a symbol of wealth and coolness.
Shanghainese began wearing them to bed — but kept them on to walk around the neighborhood, mainly out of convenience. At that time in Shanghai, people lived in crammed, communal-style quarters in shikumen — low-rise townhouses in which families shared toilets and kitchens. Through the 1980s and ’90s, the average person had less than 10 square meters of living area. To change out of one’s pajamas just to walk across the road to the market would be too troublesome and unnecessary.
Besides, as a retiree told a news reporter: “Pajamas are also a type of clothes. It’s comfortable, and it’s no big deal since everyone wears them outside.”
Mr. and Mrs. Wang, who lived on the street where I grew up in Shanghai, used to stroll after dinner in their pajamas — nice matching costumes for a loving couple, now that I think about it. Then Mr. Wang would go out to buy cigarettes. In the mornings, Mrs. Wang, still in her pajamas, would dash to a street stall to pick up sheng jian (fried buns) for breakfast.
My own family, a little particular about clothing and slow with fashion, happened not to be part of the pajama troupe. But even those of us who never wore PJs in public are unhappy about the ban.
Two journalists from Hong Kong’s Weekend Weekly magazine have already challenged it. They marched in their silk pajamas along Nanjing Road, a major shopping area in central Shanghai, and sat down in a restaurant. They met only one pajama-wearing comrade, and many people made fun of them (maybe because on a rainy day they were wearing silk jammies rather than the quilted or heavy flannel styles normally worn in cool weather). It wasn’t what they expected in Shanghai.
Yang Xiong, the executive vice mayor of Shanghai and a director of the executive committee for the Expo, has acknowledged the “practical limitations” that led to pajama wearing, but still insists it is now “inappropriate.” The Expo, the logic goes, offers a perfect opportunity to kick the habit; with a large influx of foreigners in town (though, in fact, they are expected to account for only 5 percent of all visitors to the Expo), we don’t want to ruin our cosmopolitan image.
Yet even foreigners are disappointed about the pajama ban. Justin Guariglia, an American photojournalist who showcased Shanghai’s lively pajama scene in his 2008 book, “Planet Shanghai,” says the fashion adds to the city’s character. A British friend of mine told me last winter, before traveling to Shanghai for the first time, “I want to see the Bund, the Jin Mao Tower and Shanghainese women in pajamas!”
The historic buildings along the Shanghai Bund will be there for a long time to come. So will the 88-story Jin Mao Tower. But street pajamas may disappear as everyone moves into modern, spacious apartments. By then, some Chinese fashion designer might, as Dolce & Gabbana did last year, send models down the runway wearing pajamas — and how the audience will applaud!
Gao Yubing is a recent graduate of the Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 17, 2010, on page A23 of the New York edition..
After pumping $58 billion into staging this mega-event, which is expected to attract more than 70 million visitors over the next six months, city authorities started a campaign to suppress one of Shanghai’s most distinctive customs: wearing pajamas in public. Just as Beijing discouraged men from going shirtless during the Olympics, Shanghai wants everyone to wear “proper attire” for the Expo.
Catchy red signs reading “Pajamas don’t go out of the door; be a civilized resident for the Expo” are posted throughout the city. Volunteer “pajama policemen” patrol the neighborhoods, telling pajama wearers to go home and change. Celebrities and socialites appear on TV to promote the idea that sleepwear in public is “backward” and “uncivilized.”
But many residents disagree. Pajamas — not the sexy sleepwear you find at Victoria’s Secret, but loose-fitting, non-revealing PJs made of cotton or polyester — have been popular in Shanghai since the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping, then China’s leader, sought to modernize the economy and society by “opening up” to the outside world. The Chinese adopted Western pajamas without fully understanding their context. Most of us had never had any dedicated sleepwear other than old T-shirts and pants. And we thought pajamas were a symbol of wealth and coolness.
Shanghainese began wearing them to bed — but kept them on to walk around the neighborhood, mainly out of convenience. At that time in Shanghai, people lived in crammed, communal-style quarters in shikumen — low-rise townhouses in which families shared toilets and kitchens. Through the 1980s and ’90s, the average person had less than 10 square meters of living area. To change out of one’s pajamas just to walk across the road to the market would be too troublesome and unnecessary.
Besides, as a retiree told a news reporter: “Pajamas are also a type of clothes. It’s comfortable, and it’s no big deal since everyone wears them outside.”
Mr. and Mrs. Wang, who lived on the street where I grew up in Shanghai, used to stroll after dinner in their pajamas — nice matching costumes for a loving couple, now that I think about it. Then Mr. Wang would go out to buy cigarettes. In the mornings, Mrs. Wang, still in her pajamas, would dash to a street stall to pick up sheng jian (fried buns) for breakfast.
My own family, a little particular about clothing and slow with fashion, happened not to be part of the pajama troupe. But even those of us who never wore PJs in public are unhappy about the ban.
Two journalists from Hong Kong’s Weekend Weekly magazine have already challenged it. They marched in their silk pajamas along Nanjing Road, a major shopping area in central Shanghai, and sat down in a restaurant. They met only one pajama-wearing comrade, and many people made fun of them (maybe because on a rainy day they were wearing silk jammies rather than the quilted or heavy flannel styles normally worn in cool weather). It wasn’t what they expected in Shanghai.
Yang Xiong, the executive vice mayor of Shanghai and a director of the executive committee for the Expo, has acknowledged the “practical limitations” that led to pajama wearing, but still insists it is now “inappropriate.” The Expo, the logic goes, offers a perfect opportunity to kick the habit; with a large influx of foreigners in town (though, in fact, they are expected to account for only 5 percent of all visitors to the Expo), we don’t want to ruin our cosmopolitan image.
Yet even foreigners are disappointed about the pajama ban. Justin Guariglia, an American photojournalist who showcased Shanghai’s lively pajama scene in his 2008 book, “Planet Shanghai,” says the fashion adds to the city’s character. A British friend of mine told me last winter, before traveling to Shanghai for the first time, “I want to see the Bund, the Jin Mao Tower and Shanghainese women in pajamas!”
The historic buildings along the Shanghai Bund will be there for a long time to come. So will the 88-story Jin Mao Tower. But street pajamas may disappear as everyone moves into modern, spacious apartments. By then, some Chinese fashion designer might, as Dolce & Gabbana did last year, send models down the runway wearing pajamas — and how the audience will applaud!
Gao Yubing is a recent graduate of the Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 17, 2010, on page A23 of the New York edition..
Friday, 14 May 2010
exile on main street
Rolling Stones vluchtten vanwege de fiscus (93% belasting onder Wilson) uit het VK naar eerst Zuid Frankrijk en daarna LA. Het was een teken van de tiidgeest wat ze deden: sex, drugs & rock & roll inderdaad. Eindeloos veel drugs, eindeloos muziek maken totdat ze al vluchtend uit Frankrijk genoeg materiaal hadden om in LA eea af te maken: hun grootste album. Het kwam niet aanwaaien. De villa van Keith Richards in Villefrance Nellecote stond centraal. een hele groep mensen kwamen hier bijeen om in de kelder ook midden in de nacht luidkeels muziek te maken. De stones woonden toen overigens flink ver uit elkaar. Mick Jagger was vaak in Parijs bij zijn Bianca waarmee hij in st tropez ineens trouwde.
Een tijdbeeld, alles mocht: heroïne, luid muziek maken, experimenteren. De gastvrijheid van Keith Richards. Het plannen van Mick Jeggar.
Post naar aanleiding van de reportage in het uur van de wolf op 14 mei.
Een tijdbeeld, alles mocht: heroïne, luid muziek maken, experimenteren. De gastvrijheid van Keith Richards. Het plannen van Mick Jeggar.
Post naar aanleiding van de reportage in het uur van de wolf op 14 mei.
Tuesday, 11 May 2010
The Science of a Happy Marriage
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/tracking-the-science-of-commitment/?src=me&ref=homepage
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Why do some men and women cheat on their partners while others resist the temptation?
To find the answer, a growing body of research is focusing on the science of commitment. Scientists are studying everything from the biological factors that seem to influence marital stability to a person’s psychological response after flirting with a stranger.
Their findings suggest that while some people may be naturally more resistant to temptation, men and women can also train themselves to protect their relationships and raise their feelings of commitment.
Recent studies have raised questions about whether genetic factors may influence commitment and marital stability. Hasse Walum, a biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, studied 552 sets of twins to learn more about a gene related to the body’s regulation of the brain chemical vasopressin, a bonding hormone.
Over all, men who carried a variation in the gene were less likely to be married, and those who had wed were more likely to have had serious marital problems and unhappy wives. Among men who carried two copies of the gene variant, about a third had experienced a serious relationship crisis in the past year, double the number seen in the men who did not carry the variant.
Although the trait is often called the “fidelity gene,” Mr. Walum called that a misnomer: his research focused on marital stability, not faithfulness. “It’s difficult to use this information to predict any future behavior in men,” he told me. Now he and his colleagues are working to replicate the findings and conducting similar research in women.
While there may be genetic differences that influence commitment, other studies suggest that the brain can be trained to resist temptation.
A series of unusual studies led by John Lydon, a psychologist at McGill University in Montreal, have looked at how people in a committed relationship react in the face of temptation. In one study, highly committed married men and women were asked to rate the attractiveness of people of the opposite sex in a series of photos. Not surprisingly, they gave the highest ratings to people who would typically be viewed as attractive.
Later, they were shown similar pictures and told that the person was interested in meeting them. In that situation, participants consistently gave those pictures lower scores than they had the first time around.
When they were attracted to someone who might threaten the relationship, they seemed to instinctively tell themselves, “He’s not so great.” “The more committed you are,” Dr. Lydon said, “the less attractive you find other people who threaten your relationship.”
But some of the McGill research has shown gender differences in how we respond to a cheating threat. In a study of 300 heterosexual men and women, half the participants were primed for cheating by imagining a flirtatious conversation with someone they found attractive. The other half just imagined a routine encounter.
Afterward, the study subjects were asked to complete fill-in-the-blank puzzles like LO_AL and THR__T.
Unbeknownst to the participants, the word fragments were a psychological test to reveal subconscious feelings about commitment. (Similar word puzzles are used to study subconscious feelings about prejudice and stereotyping.)
No pattern emerged among the study participants who imagined a routine encounter. But there were differences among men and women who had entertained the flirtatious fantasy. In that group, the men were more likely to complete the puzzles with the neutral words LOCAL and THROAT. But the women who had imagined flirting were far more likely to choose LOYAL and THREAT, suggesting that the exercise had touched off subconscious concerns about commitment.
Of course, this does not necessarily predict behavior in the real world. But the pronounced difference in responses led the researchers to think women might have developed a kind of early warning system to alert them to relationship threats.
Other McGill studies confirmed differences in how men and women react to such threats. In one, attractive actors or actresses were brought in to flirt with study participants in a waiting room. Later, the participants were asked questions about their relationships, particularly how they would respond to a partner’s bad behavior, like being late and forgetting to call.
Men who had just been flirting were less forgiving of the hypothetical bad behavior, suggesting that the attractive actress had momentarily chipped away at their commitment. But women who had been flirting were more likely to be forgiving and to make excuses for the man, suggesting that their earlier flirting had triggered a protective response when discussing their relationship.
“We think the men in these studies may have had commitment, but the women had the contingency plan — the attractive alternative sets off the alarm bell,” Dr. Lydon said. “Women implicitly code that as a threat. Men don’t.”
The question is whether a person can be trained to resist temptation. In another study, the team prompted male students who were in committed dating relationships to imagine running into an attractive woman on a weekend when their girlfriends were away. Some of the men were then asked to develop a contingency plan by filling in the sentence “When she approaches me, I will __________ to protect my relationship.”
Because the researchers could not bring in a real woman to act as a temptation, they created a virtual-reality game in which two out of four rooms included subliminal images of an attractive woman. The men who had practiced resisting temptation gravitated toward those rooms 25 percent of the time; for the others, the figure was 62 percent.
But it may not be feelings of love or loyalty that keep couples together. Instead, scientists speculate that your level of commitment may depend on how much a partner enhances your life and broadens your horizons — a concept that Arthur Aron, a psychologist and relationship researcher at Stony Brook University, calls “self-expansion.”
To measure this quality, couples are asked a series of questions: How much does your partner provide a source of exciting experiences? How much has knowing your partner made you a better person? How much do you see your partner as a way to expand your own capabilities?
The Stony Brook researchers conducted experiments using activities that stimulated self-expansion. Some couples were given mundane tasks, while others took part in a silly exercise in which they were tied together and asked to crawl on mats, pushing a foam cylinder with their heads. The study was rigged so the couples failed the time limit on the first two tries, but just barely made it on the third, resulting in much celebration.
Couples were given relationship tests before and after the experiment. Those who had taken part in the challenging activity posted greater increases in love and relationship satisfaction than those who had not experienced victory together.
Now the researchers are embarking on a series of studies to measure how self-expansion influences a relationship. They theorize that couples who explore new places and try new things will tap into feelings of self-expansion, lifting their level of commitment.
“We enter relationships because the other person becomes part of ourselves, and that expands us,” Dr. Aron said. “That’s why people who fall in love stay up all night talking and it feels really exciting. We think couples can get some of that back by doing challenging and exciting things together.”
Tara Parker -Pope’s new book is “For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage.”
May 10 2010
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Why do some men and women cheat on their partners while others resist the temptation?
To find the answer, a growing body of research is focusing on the science of commitment. Scientists are studying everything from the biological factors that seem to influence marital stability to a person’s psychological response after flirting with a stranger.
Their findings suggest that while some people may be naturally more resistant to temptation, men and women can also train themselves to protect their relationships and raise their feelings of commitment.
Recent studies have raised questions about whether genetic factors may influence commitment and marital stability. Hasse Walum, a biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, studied 552 sets of twins to learn more about a gene related to the body’s regulation of the brain chemical vasopressin, a bonding hormone.
Over all, men who carried a variation in the gene were less likely to be married, and those who had wed were more likely to have had serious marital problems and unhappy wives. Among men who carried two copies of the gene variant, about a third had experienced a serious relationship crisis in the past year, double the number seen in the men who did not carry the variant.
Although the trait is often called the “fidelity gene,” Mr. Walum called that a misnomer: his research focused on marital stability, not faithfulness. “It’s difficult to use this information to predict any future behavior in men,” he told me. Now he and his colleagues are working to replicate the findings and conducting similar research in women.
While there may be genetic differences that influence commitment, other studies suggest that the brain can be trained to resist temptation.
A series of unusual studies led by John Lydon, a psychologist at McGill University in Montreal, have looked at how people in a committed relationship react in the face of temptation. In one study, highly committed married men and women were asked to rate the attractiveness of people of the opposite sex in a series of photos. Not surprisingly, they gave the highest ratings to people who would typically be viewed as attractive.
Later, they were shown similar pictures and told that the person was interested in meeting them. In that situation, participants consistently gave those pictures lower scores than they had the first time around.
When they were attracted to someone who might threaten the relationship, they seemed to instinctively tell themselves, “He’s not so great.” “The more committed you are,” Dr. Lydon said, “the less attractive you find other people who threaten your relationship.”
But some of the McGill research has shown gender differences in how we respond to a cheating threat. In a study of 300 heterosexual men and women, half the participants were primed for cheating by imagining a flirtatious conversation with someone they found attractive. The other half just imagined a routine encounter.
Afterward, the study subjects were asked to complete fill-in-the-blank puzzles like LO_AL and THR__T.
Unbeknownst to the participants, the word fragments were a psychological test to reveal subconscious feelings about commitment. (Similar word puzzles are used to study subconscious feelings about prejudice and stereotyping.)
No pattern emerged among the study participants who imagined a routine encounter. But there were differences among men and women who had entertained the flirtatious fantasy. In that group, the men were more likely to complete the puzzles with the neutral words LOCAL and THROAT. But the women who had imagined flirting were far more likely to choose LOYAL and THREAT, suggesting that the exercise had touched off subconscious concerns about commitment.
Of course, this does not necessarily predict behavior in the real world. But the pronounced difference in responses led the researchers to think women might have developed a kind of early warning system to alert them to relationship threats.
Other McGill studies confirmed differences in how men and women react to such threats. In one, attractive actors or actresses were brought in to flirt with study participants in a waiting room. Later, the participants were asked questions about their relationships, particularly how they would respond to a partner’s bad behavior, like being late and forgetting to call.
Men who had just been flirting were less forgiving of the hypothetical bad behavior, suggesting that the attractive actress had momentarily chipped away at their commitment. But women who had been flirting were more likely to be forgiving and to make excuses for the man, suggesting that their earlier flirting had triggered a protective response when discussing their relationship.
“We think the men in these studies may have had commitment, but the women had the contingency plan — the attractive alternative sets off the alarm bell,” Dr. Lydon said. “Women implicitly code that as a threat. Men don’t.”
The question is whether a person can be trained to resist temptation. In another study, the team prompted male students who were in committed dating relationships to imagine running into an attractive woman on a weekend when their girlfriends were away. Some of the men were then asked to develop a contingency plan by filling in the sentence “When she approaches me, I will __________ to protect my relationship.”
Because the researchers could not bring in a real woman to act as a temptation, they created a virtual-reality game in which two out of four rooms included subliminal images of an attractive woman. The men who had practiced resisting temptation gravitated toward those rooms 25 percent of the time; for the others, the figure was 62 percent.
But it may not be feelings of love or loyalty that keep couples together. Instead, scientists speculate that your level of commitment may depend on how much a partner enhances your life and broadens your horizons — a concept that Arthur Aron, a psychologist and relationship researcher at Stony Brook University, calls “self-expansion.”
To measure this quality, couples are asked a series of questions: How much does your partner provide a source of exciting experiences? How much has knowing your partner made you a better person? How much do you see your partner as a way to expand your own capabilities?
The Stony Brook researchers conducted experiments using activities that stimulated self-expansion. Some couples were given mundane tasks, while others took part in a silly exercise in which they were tied together and asked to crawl on mats, pushing a foam cylinder with their heads. The study was rigged so the couples failed the time limit on the first two tries, but just barely made it on the third, resulting in much celebration.
Couples were given relationship tests before and after the experiment. Those who had taken part in the challenging activity posted greater increases in love and relationship satisfaction than those who had not experienced victory together.
Now the researchers are embarking on a series of studies to measure how self-expansion influences a relationship. They theorize that couples who explore new places and try new things will tap into feelings of self-expansion, lifting their level of commitment.
“We enter relationships because the other person becomes part of ourselves, and that expands us,” Dr. Aron said. “That’s why people who fall in love stay up all night talking and it feels really exciting. We think couples can get some of that back by doing challenging and exciting things together.”
Tara Parker -Pope’s new book is “For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage.”
May 10 2010
fabulous fab in LA Times
What Should Have Been Said At The Goldman Senate Hearing
The LA Times – Senators, start your questions
SEN. KAUFMAN: Sen. Levin would now like to verbally assault the former trader, Mr. Fabrice Tourre, who once referred to himself as — and I am quoting here — the Fabulous Fab. I should note that he is French, although that in no way will prejudice this committee, except for the fact that it will prejudice this committee in large part because we can’t stand French people.
SEN. CARL LEVIN: Good morning, Mr.Tourre. Let me start by saying that I would like to slap your accent.
MR. TOURRE: Good morning, senator. And may I say that if you were food, you would be a boneless breast of chicken.
SEN. LEVIN: Your e-mails to your girlfriend make me laugh.
MR. TOURRE: Your salary makes me laugh.
SEN. LEVIN: May I call you the Fabulous Fab?
MR. TOURRE: I wish you wouldn’t.
SEN. LEVIN: Fabulous Fab. Your now infamous e-mails to your girlfriend, in which you wrote about betting against CDOs and predicted the fall of the housing market and yet continued to sell complex financial instruments to unsuspecting clients, to widows and orphans as you said in your e-mails.
MR. TOURRE: Is there a question in your future, senator?
SEN. LEVIN: My question is this. What’s it like to have a French girlfriend?
MR. TOURRE: It’s not terrible.
The LA Times – Senators, start your questions
SEN. KAUFMAN: Sen. Levin would now like to verbally assault the former trader, Mr. Fabrice Tourre, who once referred to himself as — and I am quoting here — the Fabulous Fab. I should note that he is French, although that in no way will prejudice this committee, except for the fact that it will prejudice this committee in large part because we can’t stand French people.
SEN. CARL LEVIN: Good morning, Mr.Tourre. Let me start by saying that I would like to slap your accent.
MR. TOURRE: Good morning, senator. And may I say that if you were food, you would be a boneless breast of chicken.
SEN. LEVIN: Your e-mails to your girlfriend make me laugh.
MR. TOURRE: Your salary makes me laugh.
SEN. LEVIN: May I call you the Fabulous Fab?
MR. TOURRE: I wish you wouldn’t.
SEN. LEVIN: Fabulous Fab. Your now infamous e-mails to your girlfriend, in which you wrote about betting against CDOs and predicted the fall of the housing market and yet continued to sell complex financial instruments to unsuspecting clients, to widows and orphans as you said in your e-mails.
MR. TOURRE: Is there a question in your future, senator?
SEN. LEVIN: My question is this. What’s it like to have a French girlfriend?
MR. TOURRE: It’s not terrible.
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
.A Sampling of Chinglish
For the last two years, the Shanghai Commission for the Management of Language Use has been trying to clean up English-language signs and menus to rid them of their malapropisms, like these examples.
Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish
SHANGHAI — For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”
Those who have had a bit too much monolithic tree mushroom stem squid could find themselves requiring roomier attire: extra-large sizes sometimes come in “fatso” or “lard bucket” categories. These and other fashions can be had at the clothing chain known as Scat.
Go ahead and snicker, although by last Saturday’s opening of the Expo 2010 in Shanghai, drawing more than 70 million visitors over its six-month run, these and other uniquely Chinese maladaptations of the English language were supposed to have been largely excised.
Well, that at least is what the Shanghai Commission for the Management of Language Use has been trying to accomplish during the past two years.
Fortified by an army of 600 volunteers and a politburo of adroit English speakers, the commission has fixed more than 10,000 public signs (farewell “Teliot” and “urine district”), rewritten English-language historical placards and helped hundreds of restaurants recast offerings.
The campaign is partly modeled on Beijing’s herculean effort to clean up English signage for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which led to the replacement of 400,000 street signs, 1,300 restaurant menus and such exemplars of impropriety as the Dongda Anus Hospital — now known as the Dongda Proctology Hospital. Gone, too, is Racist Park, a cultural attraction that has since been rechristened Minorities Park.
“The purpose of signage is to be useful, not to be amusing,” said Zhao Huimin, the former Chinese ambassador to the United States who, as director general of the capital’s Foreign Affairs Office, has been leading the fight for linguistic standardization and sobriety.
But while the war on mangled English may be considered a signature achievement of government officials, aficionados of what is known as Chinglish are wringing their hands in despair.
Oliver Lutz Radtke, a former German radio reporter who may well be the world’s foremost authority on Chinglish, said he believed that China should embrace the fanciful melding of English and Chinese as the hallmark of a dynamic, living language. As he sees it, Chinglish is an endangered species that deserves preservation.
“If you standardize all these signs, you not only take away the little giggle you get while strolling in the park but you lose a window into the Chinese mind,” said Mr. Radtke, who is the author of a pair of picture books that feature giggle-worthy Chinglish signs in their natural habitat.
Lest anyone think it is all about laughs, Mr. Radtke is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Chinglish at the University of Heidelberg.
Still, the enemies of Chinglish say the laughter it elicits is humiliating. Wang Xiaoming, an English scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, painfully recalls the guffaws that erupted among her foreign-born colleagues as they flipped through a photographic collection of poorly written signs. “They didn’t mean to insult me but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable,” said Ms. Wang, who has since become one of Beijing’s leading Chinglish slayers.
Those who study the roots of Chinglish say many examples can be traced to laziness and a flawed but wildly popular translation software. Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, said the computerized dictionary, Jingshan Ciba, had led to sexually oriented vulgarities identifying dried produce in Chinese supermarkets and the regrettable “fried enema” menu selection that should have been rendered as “fried sausage.”
Although improved translation software and a growing zeal for grammatically unassailable English has slowed the output of new Chinglishisms, Mr. Mair said he still received about five new examples a day from people who knew he was good at deciphering what went wrong. “If someone would pay me to do it, I’d spend my life studying these things,” he said.
Among those getting paid to wrestle with Chinglish is Jeffrey Yao, an English translator and teacher at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation at Shanghai International Studies University who is leading the sign exorcism. But even as he eradicates the most egregious examples by government fiat — businesses dare not ignore the commission’s suggested fixes — he has mixed feelings, noting that although some Chinglish phrases sound awkward to Western ears, they can be refreshingly lyrical. “Some of it tends to be expressive, even elegant,” he said, shuffling through an online catalog of signs that were submitted by the volunteers who prowled Shanghai with digital cameras. “They provide a window into how we Chinese think about language.”
Multimedia
Slide Show A Sampling of Chinglish.He offered the following example: While park signs in the West exhort people to “Keep Off the Grass,” Chinese versions tend to anthropomorphize nature as a way to gently engage the stomping masses. Hence, such admonishments as “The Little Grass Is Sleeping. Please Don’t Disturb It” or “Don’t Hurt Me. I Am Afraid of Pain.”
Mr. Yao read off the Chinese equivalents as if savoring a Shakespearean sonnet. “How lovely,” he said with a sigh.
He pointed out that this linguistic mentality helped create such expressions as “long time no see,” a word-for-word translation of a Chinese expression that became a mainstay of spoken English. But Mr. Yao, who spent nearly two decades working as a translator in Canada, has his limits. He showed a sign from a park designed to provide visitors with the rules for entry, which include prohibitions on washing, “scavenging,” clothes drying and public defecation, all of it rendered in unintelligible — and in the case of the last item — rather salty English. The sign ended with this humdinger: “Because if the tourist does not obey the staff to manage or contrary holds, Does, all consequences are proud.”
Even though he had had the sign corrected recently, Mr. Yao could not help but shake his head in disgust at the memory. And he was irritated to find that a raft of troublesome sign verbiage had slipped past the commission as the expo approached, including a cafeteria sign that read, “The tableware reclaims a place.” (Translation: drop off dirty dishes here.)
“Some Chinglish expressions are nice, but we are not translating literature here,” he said. “I want to see people nodding that they understand the message on these signs. I don’t want to see them laughing.”
Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish
SHANGHAI — For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”
Those who have had a bit too much monolithic tree mushroom stem squid could find themselves requiring roomier attire: extra-large sizes sometimes come in “fatso” or “lard bucket” categories. These and other fashions can be had at the clothing chain known as Scat.
Go ahead and snicker, although by last Saturday’s opening of the Expo 2010 in Shanghai, drawing more than 70 million visitors over its six-month run, these and other uniquely Chinese maladaptations of the English language were supposed to have been largely excised.
Well, that at least is what the Shanghai Commission for the Management of Language Use has been trying to accomplish during the past two years.
Fortified by an army of 600 volunteers and a politburo of adroit English speakers, the commission has fixed more than 10,000 public signs (farewell “Teliot” and “urine district”), rewritten English-language historical placards and helped hundreds of restaurants recast offerings.
The campaign is partly modeled on Beijing’s herculean effort to clean up English signage for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which led to the replacement of 400,000 street signs, 1,300 restaurant menus and such exemplars of impropriety as the Dongda Anus Hospital — now known as the Dongda Proctology Hospital. Gone, too, is Racist Park, a cultural attraction that has since been rechristened Minorities Park.
“The purpose of signage is to be useful, not to be amusing,” said Zhao Huimin, the former Chinese ambassador to the United States who, as director general of the capital’s Foreign Affairs Office, has been leading the fight for linguistic standardization and sobriety.
But while the war on mangled English may be considered a signature achievement of government officials, aficionados of what is known as Chinglish are wringing their hands in despair.
Oliver Lutz Radtke, a former German radio reporter who may well be the world’s foremost authority on Chinglish, said he believed that China should embrace the fanciful melding of English and Chinese as the hallmark of a dynamic, living language. As he sees it, Chinglish is an endangered species that deserves preservation.
“If you standardize all these signs, you not only take away the little giggle you get while strolling in the park but you lose a window into the Chinese mind,” said Mr. Radtke, who is the author of a pair of picture books that feature giggle-worthy Chinglish signs in their natural habitat.
Lest anyone think it is all about laughs, Mr. Radtke is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Chinglish at the University of Heidelberg.
Still, the enemies of Chinglish say the laughter it elicits is humiliating. Wang Xiaoming, an English scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, painfully recalls the guffaws that erupted among her foreign-born colleagues as they flipped through a photographic collection of poorly written signs. “They didn’t mean to insult me but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable,” said Ms. Wang, who has since become one of Beijing’s leading Chinglish slayers.
Those who study the roots of Chinglish say many examples can be traced to laziness and a flawed but wildly popular translation software. Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, said the computerized dictionary, Jingshan Ciba, had led to sexually oriented vulgarities identifying dried produce in Chinese supermarkets and the regrettable “fried enema” menu selection that should have been rendered as “fried sausage.”
Although improved translation software and a growing zeal for grammatically unassailable English has slowed the output of new Chinglishisms, Mr. Mair said he still received about five new examples a day from people who knew he was good at deciphering what went wrong. “If someone would pay me to do it, I’d spend my life studying these things,” he said.
Among those getting paid to wrestle with Chinglish is Jeffrey Yao, an English translator and teacher at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation at Shanghai International Studies University who is leading the sign exorcism. But even as he eradicates the most egregious examples by government fiat — businesses dare not ignore the commission’s suggested fixes — he has mixed feelings, noting that although some Chinglish phrases sound awkward to Western ears, they can be refreshingly lyrical. “Some of it tends to be expressive, even elegant,” he said, shuffling through an online catalog of signs that were submitted by the volunteers who prowled Shanghai with digital cameras. “They provide a window into how we Chinese think about language.”
Multimedia
Slide Show A Sampling of Chinglish.He offered the following example: While park signs in the West exhort people to “Keep Off the Grass,” Chinese versions tend to anthropomorphize nature as a way to gently engage the stomping masses. Hence, such admonishments as “The Little Grass Is Sleeping. Please Don’t Disturb It” or “Don’t Hurt Me. I Am Afraid of Pain.”
Mr. Yao read off the Chinese equivalents as if savoring a Shakespearean sonnet. “How lovely,” he said with a sigh.
He pointed out that this linguistic mentality helped create such expressions as “long time no see,” a word-for-word translation of a Chinese expression that became a mainstay of spoken English. But Mr. Yao, who spent nearly two decades working as a translator in Canada, has his limits. He showed a sign from a park designed to provide visitors with the rules for entry, which include prohibitions on washing, “scavenging,” clothes drying and public defecation, all of it rendered in unintelligible — and in the case of the last item — rather salty English. The sign ended with this humdinger: “Because if the tourist does not obey the staff to manage or contrary holds, Does, all consequences are proud.”
Even though he had had the sign corrected recently, Mr. Yao could not help but shake his head in disgust at the memory. And he was irritated to find that a raft of troublesome sign verbiage had slipped past the commission as the expo approached, including a cafeteria sign that read, “The tableware reclaims a place.” (Translation: drop off dirty dishes here.)
“Some Chinglish expressions are nice, but we are not translating literature here,” he said. “I want to see people nodding that they understand the message on these signs. I don’t want to see them laughing.”
The Talents of a Middle-Aged Brain
By TARA PARKER-POPE http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/the-talents-of-a-middle-aged-brain/?src=me&ref=general
After we hit 40, many of us begin to worry about our aging brains. Will we spend our middle years searching for car keys and forgetting names?
The new book “The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind,” by Barbara Strauch, has the answers, and the news is surprisingly upbeat. Sure, brains can get forgetful as they get old, but they can also get better with age, reports Ms. Strauch, who is also the health editor at The New York Times. Ms. Strauch, who previously tackled teenage brains in her book “The Primal Teen,” spoke with me this week about aging brains and the people who have them. Here’s our conversation:
Barbara StrauchQ.After exploring the teenage brain, why did you decide to write a book about grown-ups?
A.Well, I have a middle-aged brain, for one thing. When I would go give talks about “The Primal Teen,” I’d be driven to the airport or back by a middle-aged person, and they’d turn to me and say: “You should do something about my brain. My brain is suddenly horrible. I can’t remember names.” That’s why I started looking into it. I had my own middle-aged issues like going into an elevator and seeing somebody and thinking, “Who are you?”
Q.So what’s the bad news about the middle-aged brain?
A.Obviously, there are issues with short-term memory. There are declines in processing speed and in neurotransmitters, the chemicals in our brain. But as it turns out, modern middle age is from 40 to 65. During this long time in the middle, if we’re relatively healthy our brains may have a few issues, but on balance they’re better than ever during that period.
Q.Do teenage brains and middle-aged brains have much in common?
A.The thing the middle-aged brain shares with the teenage brain is that it’s still developing. It’s not some static blob that is going inexorably downhill. Scientists found that when they watched the brains of teenagers, the brains were expanding and growing and cutting back and shaping themselves, even when the kids are 25 years old. I think for many years scientists just left it at that. They thought that from 25 on, we just get “stupider.” But that’s not true. They’ve found that during this period, the new modern middle age, we’re better at all sorts of things than we were at 20.
Q.So what kinds of things does a middle-aged brain do better than a younger brain?
A.Inductive reasoning and problem solving — the logical use of your brain and actually getting to solutions. We get the gist of an argument better. We’re better at sizing up a situation and reaching a creative solution. They found social expertise peaks in middle age. That’s basically sorting out the world: are you a good guy or a bad guy? Harvard has studied how people make financial judgments. It peaks, and we get the best at it in middle age.
Q.Doesn’t that make sense, since our young adult lives are often marked by bad decisions?
A.I think most of us think that while we make bad decisions in our 20s, we also have the idea that we were the sharpest we ever were when we were in college or graduate school. People think if I tried to go to engineering school or medical school now, I couldn’t do it. Because of these memory problems that happen in middle age, we tend to think of our brains as, on the whole, worse than in our 20s. But on the whole, they’re better.
Q.So what’s happening in middle age that leads to these improvements?
A.What we have by middle age is all sorts of connections and pathways that have been built up in our brain that help us. They know from studies that humans and animals do better if they have a little information about a situation before they encounter it. By middle age we’ve seen a lot. We’ve been there, done that. Our brains are primed to navigate the world better because they’ve been navigating the world better for longer.
There also are some other physical changes that they can see. We used to think we lost 30 percent of our brain cells as we age. But that’s not true. We keep them. That’s probably the most encouraging finding about the physical nature of our brain cells.
Q.Is there anything you can do to keep your brain healthy and improve the deficits, like memory problems?
A.There’s a lot of hype in this field in terms of brain improvement. I did set out to find out what actually works and what we know. What we do with our bodies has a huge impact on our brains. Our brains are more like our hearts in that everything you do for your heart is thought to be equally as good or better for your brain. Exercise is the best studied thing you can do to your brain. It increases brain volume, produces new baby brain cells in grownup brains. Even when our muscles contract, it produces growth chemicals. Using your body can help your brain.
Q.What about activities like learning to play an instrument or learning a foreign language?
A.The studies on this are slim. We’ve all been told to do crossword puzzles. Learning a foreign language, walking a different way to work, all that is an effort to make the brain work hard. And it’s true we need to make our brains work hard. One of the most intriguing findings is that if you talk to people who disagree with you, that helps your brain wake up and refine your arguments and shake up the cognitive egg, which is what you want to do.
Q.Do social connections and relationships make a difference in how the brain ages?
A.There is a whole bunch of science about being social and how cognitive function seems to be better if you are social. There is a fascinating study in Miami where they studied people who lived in apartments. Those who had balconies where they could see their neighbors actually aged better cognitively than others. There are a whole bunch of studies like that. People who volunteer and help kids seem to age better and help their brains. We forget how difficult it is to meet, greet and deal with another human being. It’s hard on our brains and good for them.
Q.What was the most surprising thing you learned about the middle-aged brain?
A.The hope I saw from real scientists was surprising. A lot of the myths we think of in terms of middle age, myths that I grew up with, turn out to be based on almost nothing. Things like the midlife crisis or the empty nest syndrome. We’re brought up to think we’ll enter middle age and it will be kind of gloomy. But as scientists look at real people, they find out the contrary. One study of men found that well-being peaked at age 65. Over and over they find that middle age, instead of being a time of depression and decline, is actually a time of being more optimistic overall.
After we hit 40, many of us begin to worry about our aging brains. Will we spend our middle years searching for car keys and forgetting names?
The new book “The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind,” by Barbara Strauch, has the answers, and the news is surprisingly upbeat. Sure, brains can get forgetful as they get old, but they can also get better with age, reports Ms. Strauch, who is also the health editor at The New York Times. Ms. Strauch, who previously tackled teenage brains in her book “The Primal Teen,” spoke with me this week about aging brains and the people who have them. Here’s our conversation:
Barbara StrauchQ.After exploring the teenage brain, why did you decide to write a book about grown-ups?
A.Well, I have a middle-aged brain, for one thing. When I would go give talks about “The Primal Teen,” I’d be driven to the airport or back by a middle-aged person, and they’d turn to me and say: “You should do something about my brain. My brain is suddenly horrible. I can’t remember names.” That’s why I started looking into it. I had my own middle-aged issues like going into an elevator and seeing somebody and thinking, “Who are you?”
Q.So what’s the bad news about the middle-aged brain?
A.Obviously, there are issues with short-term memory. There are declines in processing speed and in neurotransmitters, the chemicals in our brain. But as it turns out, modern middle age is from 40 to 65. During this long time in the middle, if we’re relatively healthy our brains may have a few issues, but on balance they’re better than ever during that period.
Q.Do teenage brains and middle-aged brains have much in common?
A.The thing the middle-aged brain shares with the teenage brain is that it’s still developing. It’s not some static blob that is going inexorably downhill. Scientists found that when they watched the brains of teenagers, the brains were expanding and growing and cutting back and shaping themselves, even when the kids are 25 years old. I think for many years scientists just left it at that. They thought that from 25 on, we just get “stupider.” But that’s not true. They’ve found that during this period, the new modern middle age, we’re better at all sorts of things than we were at 20.
Q.So what kinds of things does a middle-aged brain do better than a younger brain?
A.Inductive reasoning and problem solving — the logical use of your brain and actually getting to solutions. We get the gist of an argument better. We’re better at sizing up a situation and reaching a creative solution. They found social expertise peaks in middle age. That’s basically sorting out the world: are you a good guy or a bad guy? Harvard has studied how people make financial judgments. It peaks, and we get the best at it in middle age.
Q.Doesn’t that make sense, since our young adult lives are often marked by bad decisions?
A.I think most of us think that while we make bad decisions in our 20s, we also have the idea that we were the sharpest we ever were when we were in college or graduate school. People think if I tried to go to engineering school or medical school now, I couldn’t do it. Because of these memory problems that happen in middle age, we tend to think of our brains as, on the whole, worse than in our 20s. But on the whole, they’re better.
Q.So what’s happening in middle age that leads to these improvements?
A.What we have by middle age is all sorts of connections and pathways that have been built up in our brain that help us. They know from studies that humans and animals do better if they have a little information about a situation before they encounter it. By middle age we’ve seen a lot. We’ve been there, done that. Our brains are primed to navigate the world better because they’ve been navigating the world better for longer.
There also are some other physical changes that they can see. We used to think we lost 30 percent of our brain cells as we age. But that’s not true. We keep them. That’s probably the most encouraging finding about the physical nature of our brain cells.
Q.Is there anything you can do to keep your brain healthy and improve the deficits, like memory problems?
A.There’s a lot of hype in this field in terms of brain improvement. I did set out to find out what actually works and what we know. What we do with our bodies has a huge impact on our brains. Our brains are more like our hearts in that everything you do for your heart is thought to be equally as good or better for your brain. Exercise is the best studied thing you can do to your brain. It increases brain volume, produces new baby brain cells in grownup brains. Even when our muscles contract, it produces growth chemicals. Using your body can help your brain.
Q.What about activities like learning to play an instrument or learning a foreign language?
A.The studies on this are slim. We’ve all been told to do crossword puzzles. Learning a foreign language, walking a different way to work, all that is an effort to make the brain work hard. And it’s true we need to make our brains work hard. One of the most intriguing findings is that if you talk to people who disagree with you, that helps your brain wake up and refine your arguments and shake up the cognitive egg, which is what you want to do.
Q.Do social connections and relationships make a difference in how the brain ages?
A.There is a whole bunch of science about being social and how cognitive function seems to be better if you are social. There is a fascinating study in Miami where they studied people who lived in apartments. Those who had balconies where they could see their neighbors actually aged better cognitively than others. There are a whole bunch of studies like that. People who volunteer and help kids seem to age better and help their brains. We forget how difficult it is to meet, greet and deal with another human being. It’s hard on our brains and good for them.
Q.What was the most surprising thing you learned about the middle-aged brain?
A.The hope I saw from real scientists was surprising. A lot of the myths we think of in terms of middle age, myths that I grew up with, turn out to be based on almost nothing. Things like the midlife crisis or the empty nest syndrome. We’re brought up to think we’ll enter middle age and it will be kind of gloomy. But as scientists look at real people, they find out the contrary. One study of men found that well-being peaked at age 65. Over and over they find that middle age, instead of being a time of depression and decline, is actually a time of being more optimistic overall.
Saturday, 1 May 2010
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