OK, this one is a bit strange, or at least the sort of thing we know exists but the traditional media only displays it on the weekend when they are hard up for what they consider to be “real” news and have to find anything to fill print space/program time.
I read via Reuters [Link] that a German woman has been granted a divorcement on the grounds that her husband is excessively neat and tidy. Part of what makes this unusual is that it rather contradicts our stereotypes of the gender relationship of tidiness. After all, hunters are naturally messy, bringing back whatever they first find that meets nutritional needs, while gatherers have to neatly bring back what is optimal in terms for freshness and ripeness. Of course, that sort of changed with the adoption of sedentaryness and agriculture, it has only been in the last century or so that rows are not plowed in a strict rectangular raster pattern. But, that adoption has only been for a decamillenium or so which is almost lost compared to a goodly fraction of a megayear.
Still, we have this social concept that women are the ones frantic about cleaning of homeplaces and men are somehow slobs who clean only when forced to. So tthe news that a woman finds some sanitomaniac unlivable seems extreme. Having been an undergraduate in the ’60’s when men were just beginning to get peeks of women’s dorm rooms I know better. My dorm room was a mess but not the chaos that so many of the coeds’ rooms were that I saw. Not that some were not as neat as Martha Stewart’s pretensions, but the mean was decidedly less tidy than the mean of men.
On a similar note, having to do with stress, I read that poor kids have less working memory than rich (?) kids. [Link] Getting past the mediaese, it seems that working memory in children is positively correlated with family income. The hypothesis then is that being poor creates stress and that stress must be the reason for the memory reduction.
I have no problem with the correlation. After all, family income and (some estimation of) working memory are quantifiable and observable. But stress? No psychologist I ever had dealings with indicated that there was a quantitative measure of stress. So unless this is some sort of whacked, almost meaningless scale, like the one rehabilitation therapists use for pain, which is highly individual, subjective, and untestable quantitatively, the stress hypothesis is shaky to specious. And I shan’t belabor the correlation equals causality leap.
What is attractive about this theory is that it helps explain why humans have taken so long to get what little we have done today, and why we seem to be continually burdened with mental parasites like mysticism and tyranny. But to go into liberal social engineering terminal hand wringing because the recession is damning children to stupidity? Better blame poor parenting as the root cause of permitting the recession to occur in the first place.
Lastly, I see that scientists have pinpointed regions in the brain that they associate with wisdom. [Link] Aside from the obvious question of how you quantify, even qualify, wisdom, I was taken with the statement
Does that mean that science is replacing mysticism and superstition in medical research? How amazing. Someone go inform all those mystic ‘research’ facilities that they have to mend their ways or go out of business, not that their business is actually understanding.
Simple Country Physicist 