Food, marriage, and Star Wars

Ahh, three of the most important topics in anyone's life. First, a fascinating jaunt through the lives of plants disguised as a mild chiding of self-righteous vegetarianism.

The next article is a bit older, but I hadn't had time to read it until now. It's an exploration of an attempt to make a marriage better. The article fascinates, as much in what doesn't get answered as in what does. There were a lot of things that also made me examine my own past relationships (well, relationship, really...). Life ain't easy, is it?

Finally, on a lighter but also much more important note, I give you a slightly disturbing yet deeply insightful 70-minute review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Yeah, you read that right. The full review is an hour and 10 minutes long. But you know what, it's the best damn movie review I've ever seen or heard. He does a bang-up job of picking through all the things wrong with Phantom Menace, not just from a fan perspective, but from a real movie-making and storytelling perspective. It really made me think and taught me something. If you're only willing to watch one, watch #6.

Death and Happiness

NYTimes has a very interesting article about death and organ donation. It asks some really interesting questions about when death starts. I've always believed that life and death are rooted in the nervous system, but man there's a lot more gray area than I've ever thought about.

On a happier note, I want to revisit an Atlantic article about what makes us happy. Had it up in the profile a while back but this was before the blog. This article made me happy, mostly because I read these articles and think "yup, got that, yup, got that too, hey I got all the happiness checkmarks". It's like I'm in a competition or something, gotta be happier than thou. Never fails.

Weirdness

Today's updates are brought to you courtesy of Slate magazine. First, a very NSFW trip through the English countryside exploring some, ah, interesting clubs of the past, shall we say. Very droll, I'm sure.

Also, if you've only ever heard of Mr. Ed through that theme song, like me, this will come as a bit of a surprise. Somehow the fact that the talking horse was a bit of a pimp just doesn't compute...

Bagels and Breast Cancer

Mathematics + food = AWESOME. Enough said.

Also, NY Times Magazine (of course) has a nice little article up about the numbers associated with screening for breast cancer which really applies to all testing in general. And also happens to be a nice primer on priors in probability! Probability is AWESOME. Yes, yes, I'm a huge nerd.

Letters and fruit flies!

This is a common complaint, but nonetheless true. When all our correspondences are via email, where are we going to get all those long books full of people's letters that the biographers love? This Slate article on letters doesn't really address the question, but does bring up some fascinating quotes from letters past. I'm going to write all my emails as if they're being preserved for posterity from now on!

Speaking of posterity, apparently fruit fly boys dig the big girls. Although apparently that can be quite bad for the ladies....

Superman & Loneliness

Two topics today: one serious, one not so much. Time has an article up on how loneliness can be contagious, from results on a studying done on the Framingham Heart dataset (seems like everybody's going to this data these days). This follows the earlier a bunch of earlier results on how behaviors ineverything from smoking to obesity also spreads through social networks. The question nobody seems to have addressed yet is why are these links asymmetric? If you have a network with a lonely person and some people who aren't lonely, when does the lonely person drag down the happy people, and when do the happy people lift up the lonely/sad one? Inquiring minds want to know!

Speaking of uplifting, I recently found a reasoned, scientific treatise on Superman's mating prospects. Suffice to say that the reproduction of a Kryptonian alien is not a simple matter. That is all.