Creep

What makes someone creepy? Inspired by Slate's, Is Robin Hanson America's Creepiest Economist? and the Fark response, I began to wonder. Robin Hanson is kind of creepy, but why? Is it simply that he compares a socially acceptable resource deficiency (money) to a socially unacceptable resource deficiency (sex)((Unless you are Rodney Dangerfield, of course)).

An internet search reveals that there has been extensive research into creepiness. Psychology Today points our that men are more likely than women to be creepy and that clowns, taxidermists and morticians have a high creep factor. Many of the other links about "creep factors" refer to the same survey. Bustle points out 8 things that you can do to be creepy (or avoid as the case may be): Stare, avoid eye contact, take pictures, ask personal questions, overshare, focus on one subject, ignore hygiene and show little emotion). OK, it's really 8 habits all creepy people have, but it could be a guide. Quora puts the question out there and gets 15 answers.

Finally, the Scary Pockets cover of Radiohead's "Creep.":

Mallrats

Ian Bogost sort of eulogizes the mall in the Atlantic article When Malls Saved the Suburbs From Despair. It touched a nerve because malls have been integral to my life. As a young child, my parents would take me to Upper Darby's 69th Street or stand-alone stores along Lancaster Pike, but I do remember the occasional foray to the Plaza at King of Prussia. In junior high, I would ride my bike to MacDade Mall, (which doesn't merit a Wikipedia entry, but has closed and re-opened.) As I entered high school, Springfield Mall opened, and I spent quite a bit of time there over the next few years. Come to think of it, Springfield Mall was a pretty regular stop for me until I moved to Florida. In addition to these, Granite Run Mall and Exton Square were frequent haunts.

When I got married and moved to Horsham, my wife was working at the Village Mall. This gave me a sense of deja vu, because the Village Mall was a duplicate of the MacDade Mall in Holmes, PA. Of course, by that time Woolco had been replaced by Bradlee's, but they were still very similar. We did grocery shopping at the Acme, got pizza from Roman Delight, filled our prescriptions at Thrift Drug, bought batteries, switches, and other electronic ephemera at Radio Shack, and went to the movies at the Village Mall Cinema. Over the next 30 years, my wife worked at Willow Grove Mall and Montgomery Mall, and visits for meal breaks eventually included children who just had to visit KayBee Toys and the pet store.

My wife still works as an on-call at Macy's in a mall here in Florida, but things are certainly not the same as 30 or 40 years ago. I certainly spend more at Amazon than I do at any mall, and the Wal-Mart just down the street is the easiest place to go for various household items required on short notice. It would be nice if the mall would morph into something that could fit into our ever-changing society and grow along with it, but that is probably too much to hope for.

BTW, this post has absolutely nothing to do with the Kevin Smith movie, Mallrats. Other than, like the physical mall, Mallrats 2 seems to have died.

Wolves!!

Seacrest Wolf Preserve

Seacrest Wolf Preserve on google mpas

Seacrest Wolf Preserve on Atlas Obsura

Red Wolves

Red Wolf Recover Efforts

Return of the Red Wolf Blog

At the Durham Museum of Life and Science

The Ghouish Game

Is is Hungarian Ghoulish? ABC News says that the game drove a teen to suicide. It struck me as quite similar to the "Fishing Hole" game in Stephen King's "End of Watch." It seems like a Russian dude has been arrested for creating the game. Another article calls out the Stephen King similarity, but says that the Russian dude hasn't provided the impetus behind the game.

Beer

RateBeer

Explore Beers from Lifehacker

What is the Beer Capital of the US?

Science

The article The Problem With the March for Science states thoughts that I have been unable to articulate this clearly for a number of years. It also adds some more irony to Ars Technica's 107 cancer papers retracted due to peer review fraud.

My son, who is an actual scientist, commented:
Parts I found most amusing:

“When a lot of the fake peer reviews first came up, one of the reasons the editors spotted them was that the reviewers responded on time,” Wager told Ars. Reviewers almost always have to be chased, so “this was the red flag.

Fake peer reviewers often “know what a review looks like and know enough to make it look plausible,” said Elizabeth Wager, editor of the journal Research Integrity & Peer Review...I wonder if this journal has the same issues with the peer review process. That would be ironic.

Then again, some sort of response is needed. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' disbanding of the National Commission on Forensic Science was a move that will hurt the effort to prove the science behind "forensic science." Slate's Jeff Sessions Doesn’t Understand the Necessity of Science is perhaps the most thoughtful discussion of the decision I've seen. A quote from Jeff Sessions' decision to cut Department of Justice forensic science commission raises eyebrows says that "...we're going to take this and we're going to put it back in the Department of Justice, create a new office of forensic science. On the surface, that sounds good...The problem of forensic science is that it grew out of an arm of the judiciary, and by putting it back, you basically don't deal with the questions that are being asked from mainstream science." With explanations like that, it's hard not to read ulterior motives into Sessions' actions.

A day later, some more info on "science." Ars Technica again with “Mindless Eating,” or how to send an entire life of research into question describing a social scientist who seems to have a limited grasp on statistics. While I would tend to think that if this were a physicist or chemist or climate researcher, that they would have a better grasp of statistics, I am basing my opinion on conventional wisdom, not any actual review of the relative statistical ability of the scientists in various disciplines.

Farmers

I read two posts on Fivethirtyeight

about farming. Big Farms Are Getting Bigger And Most Small Farms Aren’t Really Farms At All points out the the official definition of a farm has masked the trend to consolidation in farms by including large tracts of land used for single family houses as farms. The follow-up story, Even Mega-Farms Are Mostly Family Owned seems to be a response to the fear of agri-business, that the big farms are still mostly family owned. For the most part, our food is still raised by farm families. They are just bigger farms than in the past.