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You Don’t Write on Your Own Facebook Wall

A peculiar fact about Facebook is that you are not supposed to write on your own wall. Because that really could have gone either way, eh? With blogs, conversations take place on a single blog, often with the blog’s owner commenting on his or her own blog. It has the advantage of the entire conversation being in one place. But a disadvantage is that anyone who comments on a blog will have to go back to that blog to see if anyone responded to it.

What I wonder is who decided that posting on your own blog is OK, but posting on your own Facebook profile is not. Was it one person who persuasively argued for a position? (e.g., I’ve seen it argued that posting on your own wall is like leaving a note on your own fridge and hoping your friends will stop by to read it) Or did it just happen naturally due to subtle properties of Facebook that make having conversations between walls easier than having them on a single wall? Or was it completely arbitrary, with one position that just happened to spread around and eventually became codified as a new taboo?

It makes you wonder if other taboos develop in similar ways. Like, who decided it was wrong to wear a hat at dinner time? I’m sure there was a good reason for it at one point, but now, I see no reason why having a piece of cloth on your head disrupts a meal.

Of course, a good source of LOLs is breaking taboos, so I’m gonna go write inane messages to friends on my own Facebook wall while I eat pizza in a cowboy hat.

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Mikey Likes It?

Growing up with the name Mike, and not being very picky about food, I often hear the phrases “give it to Mikey! He’ll eat anything!” and “Mikey likes it!”

The thing is, has anybody actually seen the Life Cereal commercial these phrases come from? Look:

Neither phrase is actually spoken in the commercial. Ok, people can be forgiven for saying “Mikey likes it” instead of “he likes it”, since the latter only makes sense in the context of the commercial. But as for “he will eat it, he likes everything”, it’s the complete opposite.

Listen carefully. The kid actually says “he won’t eat it. He hates everything.” In fact, that’s the whole damn point. If Mikey likes everything, then it’s no surprise that he likes Life Cereal too, so there’s no reason for the kids to go apeshit. But if he hates everything, yet likes Life, then it must be really good. Almost makes you want to go out and buy it, which is, you know, sorta the purpose of a commercial.

Since I really do like everything, it’s probably a good idea to feed this Mikey anything that you suspect is good, but want to make sure it’s not surprisingly nasty. Because then if I hate it, you can scream “he hates it! Hey Mikey!”, and avoid that product. Address available upon request for anyone who wants to send me free food. Get the original Mikey to eat some too, and you have a sort of double dissociation going on. Too bad he died from eating pop rocks and Coke *.

* [citation needed].

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See also: Luke, I am Your Father: 8 Memorable Movie Misquotes

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The Psychology of Ice Cream

In the psychological study of learning, there has been a lot of research on how to reinforce behaviours. Of particular interest is the timing of rewards. If you want someone to keep doing something, do you reward them every time they do it? Or do you reward them only some of the time?

Well, it turns out that if you want somebody (or somerat) to do something a lot, and keep doing it, it’s best to reward them only some of the time, and to randomly determine whether they will get rewarded or not. This is called a variable ratio schedule. If you don’t believe me, here is a graph with writing and numbers. Graphs do not lie:

This is why gambling is so addictive. You get rewarded for pulling that lever, but randomly and only every so often. It may also be why checking email can be addictive. Clicking that inbox gets rewarded with a message, but only sometimes.

I think this also applies to ice cream. As we all know, the best part of many ice creams is the chunks. Vanilla ice cream is OK on its own, but in a spoonful with a nice big chunk of cookie dough or a brownie bit, it’s infinitely more rewarding.

But usually, in a tub of, say, 100 spoonfuls, there can only be, say, 25 spoonfuls that contain yummy chunks. And since the chunks are randomly distributed throughout the tub of ice cream, each spoonful only has about a 25% chance of containing a chunk. If eating a spoonful of ice cream is the behaviour and chunks are the reward, this is what we call a VR4 (variable ratio 4) schedule; reinforcement is random, but on average, every 4th behaviour is rewarded. It’s the perfect recipe for making someone eat ice cream quickly, and keep eating it.

This is why I eat so much ice cream. It’s friggin’ science. And while I often complain that there are not enough chunks in ice cream, it’s clear that ice cream manufacturers have outsmarted me. It wouldn’t be quite so addictive if every spoonful had a chunk.

It’s also why you shouldn’t eat right from the tub. With the magic of psychology at work, you would probably eat the entire tub in the time it takes to, say, write a blog post about the psychology of ice cream.

*burp*

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P.S. If you do a Google image search for “Reese ice cream”, you will find a surprising number of pictures of Reese Witherspoon eating ice cream. She, too, must be a victim of variable ratio reinforcement.

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Toronto

The last stop on my trip/vacation was Toronto. I had planned on spending the day there, but that didn’t really work out, so I just took the Robert Q directly from the airport. But just because I was only there for an hour doesn’t mean I don’t have stories to tell you, dear blog readers. No no, I’m determined to blog about something from every city I visited. I’ll even make up stories if I have to.

This one is true though. While waiting in the airport, I saw a couple enter the waiting area. The woman was blind. She had a guitar and a walking cane. As they got closer, I saw that the man was deaf, or at least nearly so. He had a big hearing aid device, and whenever the woman talked to him she had to lean way in and speak directly in his ear.

They happened to be on the same bus as me. She asked if she could tune her guitar on the bus, and I was like hell yeah, gives us something to listen to. So she tuned her guitar and quietly practiced while the man read a book. When they both got bored of indulging in their respective senses, she leaned over and asked him to describe the countryside. He whispered about things that are mundane to most people – trees, farms, cows – in her ear.

It was just cute how they complimented each other’s shortcomings like that.

This story isn’t funny or anything. Oh wait, one thing that was funny was when she went too far in tuning her guitar, and immediately exclaimed “I popped my g string!” Hah.

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Halifax

My last major stop on my trip was Halifax, where I presented research at the Canadian Psychological Association convention. The poster was about my research on the relationship between geomagnetic activity and creativity. Basically I found that when the earth’s magnetic field is disturbed by funky stuff going down on the sun, people are more creative. So, you know, pretty out-there stuff. Surprisingly, nobody really challenged it and most found it quite interesting. One person asked me if this means that there is something to magnetic bracelets, and I said no, those are a scam and they are stupid. I think maybe she was wearing one so that was insulting, but dude, they’re a scam.

Halifax is a beautiful city. I’d love to live there someday (though maybe I’d regret it come winter). Here are some pictures:

Apparently Halifax has the most pubs per capita in North America, and was populated only because residents were promised free booze for a year. My kind of place.

The Keith’s brewery is there, obviously.

Alexander Keith, who was a mayor of Halifax in addition to brewing average-tasting beer, is buried in this graveyard:

We saw Anonymous protesting Scientology. One sign said “honk if you oppose Scientology”, but I was on a tour bus at the time, so I just sorta made a honking motion in the air. Because seriously, screw Scientology.

Peggy’s cove, a tiny fishing/tourism village just outside Halifax, is gorgeous. Look:

This girl was chasing two ducks and some giant mutant duck-goose-thing in a prom dress. She was laughing as she tortured the poor birds, while other nicely dressed people took pictures. It was all very surreal.

Anyway, Halifax was probably my favourite part of the trip, because I did lots of fun things and ate lots of delicious foods and met lots of awesome people. You should go.

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British Columbia

My family and I went to BC for my grandma’s 80th birthday celebrations. My grandma is as sassy as she ever was, and it was awesome seeing that she has so many friends that she hangs out with. I hope that I can still be that social when I’m older, because it seems that for a lot of people, being old can be lonely.

She lives in a gated community where people give dirty looks to anyone they don’t recognize. I suppose that’s the price you pay for making it slightly more difficult for criminals and hooligans to wander into the neighbourhood.

This is supposed to look like eyeballs.

We were in White Rock, a small place pretty close to Vancouver. However, when you’re driving around there, you never really know what city you’re in. One minute all the signs say White Rock, the next you see Surrey City Hall, then the Burnaby shopping centre goes by, etc. There’s no place where one city ends and the next begins. I guess there are areas like that here (i.e., the GTA), but I’m used to seeing at least a few cows between one town and the next.

See, not cows.

BC rained most of the time we were there. So typical of you, BC. Many of the shops along the main strip in White Rock were closed, with signs explaining “closed on Sundays and rainy weekdays”. I wish I could stop working every time it rained.

There was one nice day though, on which we went to Crescent Beach.

It was wonderful to just walk around, enjoying the weather and taking a few pictures. There were crabs under most rocks.

And lots of sea shells around. If you picked up a handful of shells and stayed still for a few minutes, many of them would come alive; hermit crabs would emerge from them and scuttle around.

I took this picture of the beach and a cloud, which I think is quite beautiful and artistic:

But reality is uglier than fakery, so I photoshopped it:

You can use it as your computer wallpaper if you pay me $5.00, and/or promise to back me up if I am ever involved in gang warfare.

This is a Betty Boop limo / hearse looking thing for a wedding that was happening on the beach. The driver explained that he rents it out “to weird people.”

The trip had many other highlights, such as learning what bum fluff and fairy liquid are, and many good times with family and alcohol. But I will save some stories for boring my real life friends with a narrated slide show.

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Montreal

Montreal was the first stop on my cross-country tour. We went to see Geoff get ordained, so I got to experience the actual religious versions of all the Quebec swearing. Before, I didn’t know that the “‘ostie” tacked on the end of every sentence when a person from Quebec gets emotional was referring to little flour wafers, but Geoff had a little tub of hosties and they taste pretty good. Crisse, chalice tabarnac ‘ostie!!!

In general, it was interesting to see the issues with language that are prevalent in Quebec. Here, language is something that requires no thought; it’s a safe assumption that everyone speaks and approves of English. There, every greeting requires a guess as to whether one should say “hello”, “bonjour”, “hellobonjour”, or “bonjourhello”. Sure, everyone will probably understand any of them, but the language one starts with will colour the first impression given off, and there is always uncertainty over whether the other person will understand. I often felt a bit bad starting with English, but I don’t know if starting with mangled French would be any better (P.S. Education system: you failed me. Thanks for nothing. Sarcramant!)

The city has its own feel to it, with the unique houses with the stairs on the outside and the “mountain” always giving a sense of direction. The subway system is great. It felt almost like a teleportation system; get in the subway station, wait a while, and pop up in a completely different part of the city.

We went to two different bars that made their own beer – one was Brutopia and I forget the other one. Both were delicious and I wish they shipped their beer outside of the bar. Like to my house. Montreal is also famous for its bagels, and those did not disappoint.

Montreal is an awesome city, and I’m looking forward to going back. There is so much to see there that I didn’t, like the people who beat each other up with fake weapons while wearing duct tape every Sunday, and I didn’t stop by to see my entire family that lives there. Next time.

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Coffee of Doom

I’m writing this from a Starbucks in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I’ve never written anything in a coffee shop before, but it seems to be a thing that real writers do, so here I am.

This vacation has been awesome, but I gotta point out one thing about traveling in today’s world. More and more, every place I go looks almost the same. This Starbucks has a pretty sweet fireplace and no breakfast sandwiches, but other than that, I might as well be in London. I drive down any major street in any decent-sized city, and it’s Wal Mart, McDonalds, Starbucks, Pet Smart, CIBC, Starbucks, some generic family restaurant chain, Starbucks, another family restaurant chain, etc., repeat. Any major street corner plaza could be constructed, and probably be successful, by putting the names of big franchised businesses into a hat and pulling a dozen out.

One of the most fundamental laws of the universe is that entropy constantly increases. Things get more spread out, random, arbitrary. Less meaningful. Us humans like to think of ourselves and our society as an exception to this law, getting around it due to the open vs. closed system loophole in nature, as we get more organized, and our lives becoming more meaningful. But maybe that’s not entirely true.

Maybe the future of human civilization is every restaurant collapsing together into a Kelsey’s-flavoured mass; every coffee shop mixing into a super-grande cup of Starbucks. Then, like milk poured in coffee will eventually spread out randomly until it’s just a beige sludge, each type of business, represented by a single brand, will randomly disperse throughout the world. The “character” of a city will be determined purely by chance fluctuations in its mix of businesses.

The fact that you can already get a hot cup of Starbucks coffee on every corner of every city is an early warning sign that the heat death of human civilization is near.

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Vodka Illusions

Bill Deys recently wrote about a Business Week article stating that, in a blind taste test, all vodkas taste pretty much the same.

It was an informal test with a writer and a few friends. Without statistical analysis, it’s impossible to tell if the friends were guessing at an above-chance level or not (there was one correct guess about vodka brand during the trial, but who knows if it was based on taste or just a lucky guess). Still, the theory behind it makes sense; vodka is basically alcohol and water, without any oak barrels or extra ingredients being added, so differences would have to be subtle if they exist. And if people who claim to be able to distinguish one brand from another obviously can’t do so at all even in an informal test, differences can’t be as major as we’ve been lead to believe.

The implication here is that all vodkas are the same. Is that really true, though? I don’t think so. I’d argue that the appeal of a drink is about more than just the electrical signals going from our tongues and noses to our brains. It’s also about atmosphere, expectations about taste, preparation rituals, discussion of the drink with other people, etc. These factors are eliminated from a blind taste test, but present in real life. A blind test may reveal that vodkas are the same in the absence of knowledge about what brand is being drunk (drinken? drunken?), which is interesting information, but doesn’t exactly map onto real-life drinking situations.

In real life, the subjective experience of a drink is different depending on the brand. For some people, buying a $100 bottle of vodka, putting it in the freezer, garnishing it and mixing it with just the right amount of ice (or not) is more enjoyable than doing the same with a $20 bottle. Furthermore, it probably actually tastes better to them. It may be an “illusion” in the sense that the difference in taste is not purely based on receptors in the tongue and nose; but does it really matter if good taste signals are originating in the tongue or in the drinker’s own biased brain? No; a better taste is a better taste.


The problem, though, is if people knew that all vodkas were physically identical, they might have a harder time deceiving themselves into believing that “better” brands actually taste better. I guess that’s the difference between actual physical differences in taste and illusory differences; illusions can disappear as soon as one becomes aware of them. It’d be hard to enjoy a $100 bottle of vodka knowing that the stuff inside is the same as the stuff in the $20 bottle.

Luckily I’m not so into vodka after several pukey experiences with it, and I doubt the same lack of brand differences applies to more complex drinks like rum, scotch, wine, and beer. “Still”, a lot of the differences are probably all in our heads, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Here is a dog made of beer labels:

(from here.)

This is the 2nd post in an unintentional series of posts about the link between alcohol and psychology. See the 1st: Beer and Statistics.

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Good People

Let me share a story that raised my spirits today.

The last two weeks or so, when I’m out for a walk with Willow, there’s a certain bush she’s obsessed with. When we’re near it, she’ll sniff at it like crazy and refuse to move on. She’ll ask to go outside, then when we go out, immediately run to this bush instead of doing her business. I never saw anything special about it. But then, yesterday, as she did her usual sniffing at the bush, I saw a baby rabbit poke its head out from the other side. Willow loves baby things…she probably smelled it long before anyone saw it.

I also made a note to myself to make sure to walk on the side of the bush closest to the road from now on. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but if we scared a rabbit out onto the road and something happened, I don’t think I could live with myself. Roads are no place for baby animals.

Today, we saw the baby rabbit again and said hi. Further down the road, on the way to the Thames river, we were off in some brush, and Willow stopped as someone walked by on the sidewalk. It was an old man. Willow started waving at him with her front paws, and he waved back. I brought her over to see him, and they were both delighted to have met each other. Something about this guy caught Willow’s attention and she just had to see him.

I got to talking with him, and he told me that the reason he’d been down at the river was that he’d seen a mother duck and six baby ducks walking down his street. He knew they would have to cross several busy streets before reaching the river, so he followed them and stopped traffic on these streets, allowing them to cross safely, then walked them all the way to the water.

Isn’t that the sweetest, most touching thing ever?

No matter how crappy the world may seem sometimes, at least there are people like that man out there. People that dogs just know are good people, and that we should all aspire to be like.