brunch

You are currently browsing articles tagged brunch.

Passing the Sniff Test

September 28, 2009 in Psychology by Ezra S F | No comments

I found a discussion over brunch entertaining.

Apparently women sniffed teeshirts worn 2 days by males. Women preferred the shirts belonging to genetically dissimilar men. These are the good men because they ensure better MHCs in offspring. Unfortunately, the women on oral contraceptives preferred genetically similar men. Yeah. The latter women would prefer their brother, son, or father (all sharing 1/2 her genes) to any other men. The feared scenario is women marry men satisfying their preference for genetically similar men and in preparing to have children suddenly find their husbands revolting.

Our mothers were on to something when told us to always smell nice. Preventing women on birth control from smelling who we really keeps us from getting judged down inappropriately. Well, really the game we play is not letting the other side have too much information.

P.S. The same study almost found significance to single women preferring genetically similar men. That really would make news.


Related posts

Trusting Social Networks

July 14, 2009 in Privacy, Social / IM / Chat by Ezra S F | No comments

Sunday at brunch we had an interesting conversation about Facebook.

Establishing the appropriate privacy levels to the various constituents see appropriate material is hard. So hard it takes a long pages of text and screenshots to just paint a picture of what to review for the top 10 Facebook privacy settings.

We were discussing how to make the Facebook world we touched more private. How to keep those we supervise or those who supervise us at bay once accepted into our social circle. Few of us only post things our grandmothers would find acceptable, so how do we ensure grandma will never see that picture? This meant banning grandma from seeing the Wall or photo albums or tagged photos.

I had heard we would soon be able to change the privacy levels of individual posts.  This privacy granularity comes at a price according to the New York Times:

By default, all your messages on Facebook will soon be naked visible to the world. The company is starting by rolling out the feature to people who had already set their profiles as public, but it will come to everyone soon.

People like walled gardens. Taking a term from Seth Godin, interacting with just the handpicked few forms a tribe.

If sunlight is the best disinfectant, then social networking on Facebook will die should it be exposed to the world (or too hard to remain private). The most common criticism of blogging is the whole world is in your business. People like the faux-protection of participating online where Google cannot archive it for posterity. This is why Facebook experienced such explosive growth.

Hopefully users will be able to deal with keeping everything as private as they like. Otherwise, we’ll be looking for another walled garden. Maybe I’ll even end up back on my private Twitter account?


Related posts

I’m blogging this.

July 5, 2009 in Athens GA, Photography by Ezra S F | 3 comments

Elizabeth For about eight months I have participated in a group called the Brunch Bunch here in Athens. We get together to eat and talk. Many conversations drift into the nerdy (my forté?). The locations vary so I have gotten to try new (to me) restaurants. Elizabeth (pictured right) vouched that I am a great guy. Well, these are great people.
:)

Elizabeth also brought a friend of hers from out of town, Claudia. Claudia, smartly has a newer version of my Canon Rebel. I have the XT. She has the XSi (two models newer). The newest is the T1i.

Downtown Athens is a great place to shoot photos. So, we walked around for an hour or so looking in stores to get out of the heat. This is the hat Elizabeth bought from Helix who also had some cool stone candle holders. Native American Gallery had some interesting petroglyph jewelry and gray flower pottery. I’ve got some ideas for gifts to give for upcoming birthdays, holidays, etc.

One of the employees at Helix and Claudia both asked if I had a blog. I’m sure it was because of my shirt! I only admitted to this one and blogging about Blackboard. Though, I guess I have diversified somewhat here. I probably should blog more about local stuff as well. That would mean getting out more as well.

I'm blogging this.For years, I have been collecting teeshirts from thinkgeek.com. At present the collection consists of:

Some others are on my wishlist. I do have some shirts from other places. By far the most popular is the xkcd sudo comic. I’ve added a few others from xkcd to my wishlist as well.


Related posts