The USS Quad Damage

Gravatar now supports identicons. I’ve updated our site to use identicons by default. I now know that none of you enter your email addresses. phooey!

Catalyst recently covered a story of someone who’s been studying “luck” for the last 10 years, and has identified some behaviours which differentiate “lucky” people from unlucky ones (article). Here’s my take on the four main principles:

1. Identify opportunities: The Red ball Passes is a good example of this. If you want to actually do the experiment you have to go to the link and count the number of red ball passes, and only the red ball. Don’t read any further because the answer is coming up… Done? OK. The trick is that there’s a boy who walks in holding a sign. I don’t know what the sign says because the quality of the video is so crap, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that if you were concentrating on the ball counting you wouldn’t have noticed the boy and the sign. Basically, lucky people are more relaxed and concentrate less, finding fewer opportunities, whereas unlucky people have anxiety and suffer from tunnel vision, missing important observations. There’s another video of this but with a gorilla instead of a little boy. The important thing is, neither the gorilla nor the boy are subtle or quick. They really take their time hanging around. I missed the gorilla and I was amazed how long and obvious he was.
   1. Open Body Language: This was mentioned in passing during the story, and I’m not sure which of the tenets it referred to, but I guess it should be mentioned here. Basically, people who were luckier smiled a lot more and had more open body language. I guess this is tied to the ability to make better opportunities for yourself.
2. Intuition: People who were lucky were consistently good at letting their sub-conscious do the work for them. Basically, if you notice that all asians are bad drivers, you won’t ask get in a cab with an asian driver.
3. Positive Re-inforcement: Lucky people believe they’re lucky. If you give a dude a puzzle to solve and tell him that it’s either easy or hard, people who think they’re lucky will try solving it for hours, believing it’s easy. People who are unlucky will give up after a minute or so, believing they got the hard puzzle.
4. Resilient Attitude: This seems like a similar point to the previous one, but the previous one is concerned with your actions, and this one is concerned with your attitudes. Given the same set of circumstances, lucky people believe they’ve gotten good luck (or can turn their bad luck around), where unlucky people think they’ve gotten bad luck.

Counterpoints:

1. Tunnel vision: Anxiety and tunnel vision are useful tools. That’s why we’ve evolved with them. People who have tunnel vision tend to be able to concentrate on tasks for a long time, whereas others are a little less likely to stay put.
2. Prejudice: People who listen to their intuition are often pigs. They’ll say quite racist or sexist things at the drop of a hat (or perhaps, nasty things about people who listen to their intuition). It’s a fine line between using your intuition to help you or just being prejudiced.
3. Douchebag Syndrome: Being fucking happy all the fucking time makes you look like a douche. People will like you for a while then you’ll start to shit them.
4. Stupidity: You should know when to give up on something. “Lucky” people tend to be bull-headed.

The idea is to keep a good balance in your system.

[Disclaimer] Admittedly, I’m in way over my head w.r.t. history and sex role-play, but I can’t stand minor technical faults, so here I go…

If you’re taking part in erotic role-play where you’re a doctor, I don’t think that qualifies you to be a doctor (unless you were already a doctor, in which case why the fuck are you playing a doctor? You should be a fireman or something). Max Mosley (wikipedia) recently tried this, except he was treating five “patients”, and he wasn’t playing a doctor, rather a Nazi… and/or a Jew…

This doesn’t actually make him a Nazi.

I’m not saying he’s not either, just that there’s not enough information to make a determination either way. Hitler was a friend of his dad, but he couldn’t exactly do a lot about that. I’m sure the six degrees of Hitler is pretty telling, especially if you count all the jews. Also, Hitler used to paint, but we don’t sneer at painters. To Max Mosley’s credit, I think Hitler wasn’t that into F1 racing…

So, in the end, he took place in wierd sex games. This is something he denies, but there’s a videotape, so he’s basically full of shit. If you’re feeling generous you could say that you probably can’t tell for sure that he’s definitely doing Nazi shit in this video, just standard BDSM (man I hope that’s the right term).

Contrast with Max Payne, who killed a lot of people to find the person who killed his wife, and ended up having sex with her. And he’s the hero. Fuck I felt bad for Vlad.

I’m not a poet
I wish I was
I could write a haiku
Maybe a limerick.

I wonder why I can’t.

[EDIT: This post doesn’t meet the minimum character count, so here’s Muse singing “feeling good”]

Birds flying high
You know how I feel
Sun in the sky
You know how I feel
Reeds driftin’ on by
You know how I feel

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmnnnnnnnnnggggggggggg- yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiuuuuuuuuuuuuooooooooooooooooooo- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggggggghhhhhh- ooooooooooooooooooooooooiiiiiiiiiuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmm- mmmmmnnnnnggghhhh

Thank you.

So some “guy” reckons he’s become pregnant and that it’s a miracle.

However thats not technically correct.

It would be more correct to say that some gender confused woman who removed her breasts and I assume had a fake penis attached decided to stop taking testostrone and inserted a syringe of sperm into her otherwise undamaged reproductive organs and got pregnant.

While this maybe interesting and I suppose something that the gender confused woman desired it is by no means a miracle and barely news worthy.

No what would be a real miracle is if some guy who was born a male and not a hermaphrodite, never had any sort of medical surgery, treatment or anything happen such as in the movie junior, some how became pregnant.

I mean this story is almost as stupid as some straight guy deciding he liked the homosexual lifestyle thanks to all those gays on TV, living it and then years later marrying a chick and claiming that gay men are sexually attracted to women.

Or how about a child being raised by a pack of wild dogs and the media reporting about a dog/wolf with an opposable thumb and able to walk on it’s hind legs that can be taught basic language skills. Then coming to the conclusion that we’ll soon have dog/wolves running around as members of our society.

Or how about someone using a hand gun as a nut cracker and then realising that it can be loaded with bullets and fired which prompts calls to ban all but crackers because they can be used as guns.

Anyway I think I’ve made my point.