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The One New Year’s Resolution That Usually Works
TIME: Realistic financial resolutions are relatively easy to achieve. We all know the drill by now: Make a New Year’s resolution to lose weight or reduce spending or finally finish that novel. Fail in miserable fashion. Feel bad about yourself and scarf down a tub of double-chocolate ice cream. ... “If it’s a few seconds to New Year’s and you’re just throwing something up in the wind, then it’s not going to work,” said Dr. John Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton who has conducted multiple studies on the subject. “It requires preparation. You have to be serious about the endeavor.” Read the whole story: TIME
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Terrorism May Make Liberals Think More Like Conservatives
Liberals’ attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants became more like those of conservatives following the July 7, 2005 bombings in London, new research shows. Data from two nationally representative surveys of British citizens revealed that feelings of national loyalty increased and endorsement of equality decreased among political liberals following the terrorist attack. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Terrorist attacks on major international capital cities such as Paris, Ankara, or London are rare and dramatic events that undoubtedly shape public and political opinion.
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Pot luck
The Economist: MEN want sex and sex leads to fatherhood. If these two statements were propositions in a syllogism, then the logical conclusion would be that men want fatherhood. Observation, however, indicates that this is not always the case. As the number of women left, literally, holding the baby shows, quite a few men run a mile from fatherhood. Of course, the statements are not part of a syllogism, for the word “fatherhood” has different meanings in the first sentence and the second and third ones—the first meaning is biological and the second social. Moreover, there are quite a few men who do not run a mile from the social form of fatherhood.
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The Spiritual Life of the Long-Distance Runner
The New Yorker: Shortly after sunrise, on June 14, 2015, a Finnish man named Ashprihanal Aalto stood on Eighty-fourth Avenue, in Queens. At 6A.M., he began running around the block. He passed a playground, some houses, and a technical high school. After half a mile, he returned to his starting point. Then he kept going—until, forty days later, he’d run five thousand six hundred and forty-nine laps, for a total of thirty-one hundred miles. Aalto was one of twelve runners attempting the world’s longest certified footrace, the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race. Eight of the runners finished the race within the fifty-two-day time limit.
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Happiness Doesn’t Bring Good Health, Study Finds
The New York Times: Go ahead and sulk. Unhappiness won’t kill you. A study published on Wednesday in The Lancet, following one million middle-aged women in Britain for 10 years, finds that the widely held view that happiness enhances health and longevity is unfounded. “Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality,” the researchers concluded. “Good news for the grumpy” is one way to interpret the findings, said Sir Richard Peto, an author of the study and a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford. ...
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In Texting, Punctuation Conveys Different Emotions. Period.
The Wall Street Journal: Technology is changing language, period The use of a period in text messages conveys insincerity, annoyance and abruptness, according to a new study from the State University of New York Binghamton. Omitting better communicates the conversational tone of a text message, the study says. As with any study by university researchers, though, it’s not that simple. The study found that some punctuation expresses sincerity. An exclamation point is viewed as the most sincere. (I overuse exclamation points!) “It’s not simply that including punctuation implies a lack of sincerity,” said the study’s lead author, Celia Klin, an associate professor of psychology at Binghamton.
