More of the Gratitude Project

The Gratitude Project was begun several years ago by a LiveJournal user called estaratshirai . The rules are simple. Every day between Lammas (August 1st) and Mabon (the Autumnal Equinox) one must find something to be grateful for in life. No repeats - one can be grateful to people more than once, but it has to be for different reasons.

Monday:

I am grateful to Pedialyte for making sure I don't get low on electrolytes and have a heart attack. Thanks, Pedialyte, even if you are way too slimy-feeling in my mouth somehow.

Tuesday:

I am grateful to Filament Magazine for... existing. Hooray for a women's magazine produced by feminists with what women actually want in mind (so bite me, Cosmo, and your endlessly-repeated 100-something ways to be worthy of a man).

Dealbreaker

Dear homophobes who have "lots of gay friends whom they love and respect": Would it be a betrayal of my gay friends if I believed they should have fewer rights than I do as a straight person? I believe it would. Would they be justified in considering me less than a true friend, because I don't respect them enough to value their freedom? I believe they would.

If you don't believe in gay marriage, then all that should mean is you won't be getting one. If you call your gay friends sinners, perverts, deviants, freaks, or an affront to God, then let me tell you. Not only are you not friends, you don't know what the hell a friend is.

I cannot stand when gay-hating zealots suddenly call up the ideal of open-mindedness as a shield. No, you guys, I don't need to be accepting and open-minded when it comes to a view that you are actively attempting to shove onto other people. I can be accepting and open-minded and supportive of your personal choices, but once you start trying to limit the rights of others? Hell no, your view doesn't deserve my tolerance and good will just for being there. Pack up your sense of entitlement and get offa my yard.

All views are not equally worthy of respect, and views which do not allow for tolerance should not be heard later crying for it when they're criticized by the ones who ARE willing to "live and let live."

I am not intolerant for saying there is no supportable rational reason to limit the contractual rights of gay people, and your gay friends are not intolerant for deciding they don't want to be around someone like you who is constantly passing judgement on a life that you openly wish you controlled instead of them. You don't deserve tolerance, you don't deserve acceptance, and you don't deserve empathy.

"Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." -Perosteck Balveda

Sincerely,

Those of us who actually know how to be a friend, those of us who know what "agree to disagree" means, and those of us who don't want to hear about tolerance from people who want their intolerance to have the weight of law.

Personal Space: Are We Too Touchy?

Personal Space: Are We Too Touchy?

It's not easy being a private person in a hugger's world. Wall Street Journal writer Elizabeth Bernstein is, apparently, a "touch-ee": quite against her will, she's constantly being hugged, nudged, patted, high-fived and stroked by her coworkers.

"You're so friendly," said one. "You're always stressed," said another. "You're self-deprecating, and I want to give you a boost," said a third. "You're short," a close friend said.

Although the touching is platonic, it makes Bernstein uncomfortable, and she asks, why is this okay?
It's a weird irony that, even as sexual harassment policies have gotten stricter and more ubiquitous, the rules of personal space have become more lax. Whereas a generation ago no one would have gone beyond a businesslike handshake (unless, I guess, they were having a pre-sexual harassment policy affair), nowadays hugging, sympathetic pats and slaps on the back are commonplace. And it's tricky because, where some people are vigilant about personal space, others see touching as a natural way to express warmth and sympathy. And rejecting a friendly touch is rude.

Yes! For the love of dammit, I hate this!

I hate people thinking that just because they see, they can touch. I hate people thinking that me having boundaries is something I need to "get over." Newsflash, people. The fact that you want to grab me and I don't like it is not something that I need to get over. Get the hell over yourself and your perceived entitlement to engulfing me in your giant midwestern breasts.

Statistics+Obesity=Whoa

Found a link to a study about The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years on Neuroanthropology.

I have no idea what to think of it. Apparently having strong social ties to people as they become obese means that you are statistically more likely to become obese.

A person's chances of becoming obese increased by 57% (95% confidence interval [CI], 6 to 123) if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40% (95% CI, 21 to 60). If one spouse became obese, the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese increased by 37% (95% CI, 7 to 73). These effects were not seen among neighbors in the immediate geographic location. Persons of the same sex had relatively greater influence on each other than those of the opposite sex.

Whoa, what?

To the extent that obesity is a product of voluntary choices or behaviors, the fact that people are embedded in social networks and are influenced by the evident appearance and behaviors of those around them suggests that weight gain in one person might influence weight gain in others. Having obese social contacts might change a person's tolerance for being obese or might influence his or her adoption of specific behaviors (e.g., smoking, eating, and exercising). In addition to such strictly social mechanisms, it is plausible that physiological imitation might occur; areas of the brain that correspond to actions such as eating food may be stimulated if these actions are observed in others.

I'm glad that statisticians are actually looking at the fact that social networks influence the choices of individuals (since I think asserting otherwise is pretty stupid), but this was something I hadn't expected.

We considered three explanations for the clustering of obese people. First, egos might choose to associate with like alters ("homophily"). Second, egos and alters might share attributes or jointly experience unobserved contemporaneous events that cause their weight to vary at the same time (confounding). Third, alters might exert social influence or peer effects on egos ("induction"). Distinguishing the interpersonal induction of obesity from homophily requires dynamic, longitudinal network information about the emergence of ties between people ("nodes") in a network and also about the attributes of nodes (i.e., repeated measures of the body-mass index).

The use of a time-lagged dependent variable (lagged to the previous examination) eliminated serial correlation in the errors (evaluated with a Lagrange multiplier test) and also substantially controlled for the ego's genetic endowment and any intrinsic, stable predisposition to obesity. The use of a lagged independent variable for an alter's weight status controlled for homophily. The key variable of interest was an alter's obesity at time t+1. A significant coefficient for this variable would suggest either that an alter's weight affected an ego's weight or that an ego and an alter experienced contemporaneous events affecting both their weights.

Do we have any statisticians in the house? I find this very interesting, but I'm not qualified to judge their methodology well.

If anybody is interested, there's a 28-minute video on social contagion of obesity. I'm just now watching it, so I can't tell you just yet whether it's incredibly offensive or what. It's got the scientists who did this study in it, so it's worth watching.