Some random things i came across while catching up on my blog reading. Hopefully I will become more exciting in the future.

Here's silly study (via Dienekes') run by scientists with not enough to do, proving what everyone with a shred of common sense already knows. Men think that women want muscle bound men that can't force their arms to hang by their sides, and women think that men want runway model size zero thinness. And magazines perpetuate these misconceptions. Ok so maybe not everybody is duped by the magazines but I get the feeling that there are an awful lot of people who are. So is there a check on this runaway self image propaganda? Perhaps, perhaps not, one thing that I'm fairly certain of, is that there will never be a correct answer to "do these pants make me look fat?"

The real question is how do you get the job of sitting around all day looking at magazine pictures? Sounds like not a bad way to make a few bucks.

In a somewhat related vein here's another post from Dienekes' about what people find attractive. Apparently, women like heroes (no big surprise there) but while doing stupid things to get a girl's attention can sometimes be endearing, doing stupid dangerous things is not. Such as picking fights or drag racing. Do any girls find that attractive?

What confuses me is that the abstract refers to dangerous sports as a "non-heroic risk" but doesn't exactly explain what it means by dangerous sport. Are we talking Ultimate Fighting or Skydiving? I'd have to say that Ultimate Fighting is decidedly less attractive than Skydiving. Both carry a certain amount of "non-heroic" risk and it can be argued that being good at ultimate fighting has some sort of evolutionary advantage. Perhaps it's because I feel that skydiving, though it's scary as hell, isn't really all that risky.