IT’S an excuse I’ve heard many, many times whenever the idea of a balanced diet is brought up.

“It’s too expensive to cook every meal. I can’t afford to eat like that.”

Fast food outlets are seen as places where people go when they can’t really afford to feed their families well on a budget. I don’t know how much people believe it, but I’ve certainly heard it more times than I can count .

But that excuse is going to sound even hollower after a study in the Journal for Population Health Management.

It turns out fast food “dining” is actually more popular with those on a middle income than those with the lowest incomes:

“Fast-food restaurant visits rose along with annual household income up to $60,000. As income increased beyond that level, fast-food visits decreased.”

So income is still a factor with people eating less fast food the higher their incomes got, but it’s still interesting to note someone on $80,000 a year is more likely to eat fast food than someone on $30,000.

Picture: wjmc.blogspot.com

As The Atlantic reflects:

“Suddenly, last year’s news from the Centers for Disease Control makes sense: Nearly half of obese adults in this country are not poor but middle-class, earning at least $77,000 for a family of four.”

“The fact is that most people with means, even limited means, will opt for the easiest option come dinnertime.”

The truth is the attraction of fast food is a perfect storm of factors, not limited to just price. It’s very easy, it’s cheaper than a lot of the other easy options, we’re culturally conditioned to think of it as an easy option …. and of course it tastes damn good.

I’ve written in previous posts there is nothing wrong with liking the way fast food tastes -it’s hard wired into a lot of us. In fact – if you’re someone who GENUINELY dislikes the taste of fried chips, or a hamburger you’re actually a bit of a weirdo biologically speaking.

As Dr Deirdre Barrett told the ABC’s All In The Mind:

“Fat was scarce, it was nuts or certain meats although animals were much leaner then so getting a little fat was important and that’s why it was hard to find, we’re really coded for that…”

“…instincts are what are leading us towards eating cheeseburgers, drink the milkshakes, just follow the simple instincts…”

It's Mac time. Picture: stayfitbug.com

But those instincts are costing us.

Mark Bittman reported recently in the New York Times it’s actually far more expensive to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than it is to feed them at home.

“Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food’s value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink’s value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)”

All of this is bad news for governments trying to tackle the problem of rising obesity levels. And it’s one hell of a problem  – Obesity is doing a good job of waddling up to smoking as Australia’s number one cause of preventable death.

Left unchecked it can lead to type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other associated health concerns. Recent figures from the ABS show two thirds of Australians are overweight, with a total cost to the economy of nearly $60 billion.

It’s clear we can’t make it taste worse. So it has to be a combination of making fast food more expensive, both in terms of money and time.

The idea of a “fast food tax” – which will inevitably be called a “fat tax” – has been thrown around quite a bit lately. The Sydney Morning Herald observed that other countries are already super-sizing their fast food prices:

“Hungary has a hamburger tax, Denmark has just imposed the world’s first fat tax, the US is debating a ”soda tax” and now Britain is contemplating its own junk food levy.”

The SMH article quotes Dr Kelly Brownell, a renowned obesity expert from Yale University who also points out that traditional public health campaigns are “destined to fail because [food] companies can outspend [the government]“.

He joins what the article claims is an emerging international consensus that “only direct government intervention such as taxation will discourage people from eating unhealthy food”.

Certainly, economics dictates that if you make fast food expensive enough it will become less attractive to your average consumer. At some point that should motivate them to purchase something else.

If you were then using the money taken from taxation to subsidise other healthier foods that should also promote their consumption.

But it’s going to be a complicated and difficult job balancing these measures with the rights of fast food manufacturers. And the next generation of Aussies seem to be clueless about decent nutrition with a recent study finding:

“…one in two don’t know how many servings of fruit and vegetables to eat in a day, and even fewer know the serving sizes of common fruit and vegetables….”

It all adds up to an issue which is serious, and growing.

I could never stay angry at that face.

The Guardian's new series 'Reading the Riots' has shed light on the motivations of those involved. Picture: computerweekly.com

THE largest study ever conducted into this year’s London Riots has found many of those involved consider the riots to be anti-police in nature and felt “policing” was the most significant cause of the riots.

While I’m sure the exact reasons behind the riots will be argued over and studied for decades to come the report has revealed the deep seated “and sometimes visceral” anger towards England’s peace officers.

The study, a collaboration between The Guardian newspaper and the London School of Economics, is the largest yet performed on the riots and takes into account:

• Interviews of 270 people who rioted in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Manchester and Salford.
• A collection of “more than 1.3m words of first-person accounts from rioters”.
• An analysis of an exclusive database of more than 2.5m riot-related tweets

You can find a more thorough breakdown of the project’s methodology at The Guardian, which impresses me. It’s not often the detail behind a report is presented on the home page along with the article.

The Guardian reports that while a range of reasons were given for participation in the riots including “opportunism” and anger at a “pervasive sense of injustice” relating to a lack of jobs, money, or opportunity:

“…many of those involved said they felt like they were participating in explicitly anti-police riots. They cited “policing” as the most significant cause of the riots, and anger over the police shooting of Mark Duggan, which triggered initial disturbances in Tottenham, was repeatedly mentioned – even outside London.”

The report also highlights frustration and anger with the way police used their powers, with many feeling they had been targeted unfairly. Rioters from different parts of England repeatedly described the police as a “gang” and said  the riots provided them with an opportunity for “payback” and “settling scores”.

“The most common complaints related to people’s everyday experience of policing, with many expressing deep frustration at the way people in their communities were subjected to stop and search.”

“Of those interviewed in the Reading the Riots study, 73 per cent said they had been stopped and searched in the previous 12 months. They were more than eight times more likely to have been stopped and searched in the previous year than the general population in London.”

YES, but they’re probably not thinking about it as often as you’ve been told.

If you’re anything like me you’ve probably heard someone remark that men think about sex every seven seconds, or every two minutes, or some other vague number picked out of thin air.

Turns out they’re all wrong.

According to new research the amount of time between pornographic ponderings is 50 minutes and 30 seconds for men and every one hour and thirty six minutes for women.

Well, kind of.

The study was conducted by researchers at Ohio State University and found the average number of times young men think about sex is almost 19 times per day and young women think about it nearly 10 times a day.

So yes – that also means men think about sex almost twice as often as women.

But the lead author of the study, Professor Terri Fisher, said individual comfort with sex and their sexuality was the most important factor in how often someone thought about sex – more so even than gender.

“Frequency of thinking about sex is related to variables beyond one’s biological sex,” Prof Fisher said.

She also said it wasn’t clear from the test results if:

“…males might be having more of these thoughts than women are or (if) they have an easier time identifying the thoughts.

“It’s difficult to know, but what is clear is it’s not uniquely sex that they’re spending more time thinking about, but other issues related to their biological needs, as well.”

The study involved 163 female and 120 male college students between the ages of 18 and 25 who were randomly assigned “urges” – 59 were told to record instances (by using a hand-held “clicker”) of thoughts about food, 61 about sleep and 163 about sex.

And sex won. But only with men.

Men, on average, thought about sex 19 times, food 18 and sleep 11 while women thought about sex 10 times, eating 15 and sleep 8-and-a-half.

I’m curious about a few things about this study. The fact that it was self determined is interesting and open to interpretation. It would be good to look at how different environments changed the number of sexual thoughts – I’ve noticed a lot of advertising aimed at men seems to be quite sexual in nature (I know – I’m a genius):

Where's the point in me even putting a caption on this?

But I haven’t noticed the same frequency in advertising aimed at females (but there is some, more lately as well – another interesting thing to ponder).

And the idea of using college students and grouping sex in with other “urges” is also interesting – not that I want to speculate much on the average randiness of a college student.

The there are the raw numbers to consider.

“In raw numbers, male participants recorded between one and 388 daily thoughts about sex (every 2.47 minutes at the highest rate), compared to the range of female thoughts about sex of between one and 140 times per day 6.8 minutes at the highest rate).”

That’s a pretty wide range for the figures to fit into. I would like to see the standard deviation or just a table showing the variance.

It also means there are some interesting students at the University of Ohio.

At the far end of the spectrum you’ve got a guy who only thought about sex ONCE – presumably when he picked up his “clicker” thing.

And on the other end you have a guy who thought about it 388 times – that’s one thought about sex EVERY 2.47 MINUTES.

He would have had that thing in his hand the entire day.

Ahem...

Imagine having coffee with that guy.

“How is your studying going this semester?”

“Yeah not too bad *click* I think I’m getting into a rhythm”

“Uhhhh, what’s that thing all about?”

“Nothing, nothing at all. It’s just part of an experiment…I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Oh ok then. Hmmm…oh yeah – so my study is going pretty well. I’m going to have to flog myself to get past these mid-“

*click*

“Seriously what the hell is that?”

Here are some other interesting averages per day. 

Television: The average American spends about four hours on average watching TV each day, and it’s about three hours eleven minutes for Australia.

Online: Then there is data suggesting the average american aged between 18 and 24 spends about 32.2 hours a month online, or approximately one hour a day.

Reading: Of course we can’t forget the amount of time spent reading things that weren’t on the internet….21 minutes (slightly higher inAustralia with 39 minutes).

Want an apology? F!@# you! I'm into JUSTICE!!

ARE you the apologetic type? If so you’re probably not a narcissist, fair enough.

But you also probably don’t have justice as a moral foundation.

Sorry?

Andrew Howell , Raelyne Dopko, Jessica Turowski, and Karen Bur from the University in Edmonton have done an empirical analysis measuring an individual’s “disposition to apologise”.

Scientific American reports the study was conducted by asking participants to gauge:

“…their level of agreement with a series of statements, such as “My continued anger often gets in the way of me apologizing” or “If I think no one will know what I have done, I am likely not to apologize.” The researchers then used the answers to determine every participant’s “proclivity to apologize,” and they cross-referenced these scores with results from a variety of personality assessments.”

While the study confirmed Howell’s hypothesis that people who had high marks for compassion and agreeability were the most willing to apologise he found you had to hit the “sweet spot” for self esteem to be willing to admit wrongdoing.

The study found that while people with low self-esteem were less inclined to apologize, so too were people with “an overly grand view of themselves”. So don’t expect too much from pushovers or narcissists.

It seems, as Howell puts it, only: “people who are sure of themselves have the capacity to confess to wrongdoing and address it”.

But even if you’re sure of yourself you probably don’t have justice as a guiding moral foundation. Howell explains:

“…the unanticipated finding that apology willingness correlated negatively with justice as a moral foundation may reflect that while caring and apology-making are other-oriented, justice motivation is more self-oriented (Batson, 2002); similarly, it may reflect the disjunction between reconciliation (caring and apology) and retribution (justice; Exline,
Worthington, Hill, & McCullough, 2003).”

"I'm sorry, sometimes I forget to think about things from other's point of view. I get all wrapped up in the whole 'being Judge Dredd' thing. It's a drag sometimes. I feel all this pressure. I can see now this is all probably just a big misunderstand.... I AM THE LAW!!!" Picture: collider.com

KEVIN Bacon is closer to you than you think, closer to you than he was last year. And he’s going to keep closing in on you. Inexorably, unstoppably.

Well that’s if you believe what Facebook has to say.

If you’re anything like me you might have heard of the game “six degrees of separation”. It’s a game that makes the terrifying  observation you can connect Hollywood actors through film roles to lead to Kevin Bacon in six steps.

METAPHORICALLY connect.

To use Wikipedia’s example: Elvis Presley was in Change of Habit (1969) with Edward Asner and then Edward Asner was in JFK (1991) with Kevin Bacon.

I’m not saying Kevin Bacon shot JFK and organised Oswald to take the fall. I’m not saying that at all.

The “game” is based on the “small world experiment” by social psychologist Stanley Milgram who found, on average, six degrees of separation between people in his 296-strong test group.

Yes, that’s the same Stanley Milgram who then showed us all that if I put ten people in a room more than half of them will electrocute your ass if I tell them to and happen to be wearing a labcoat.

Well if Facebook is to be believed life just became a little more frightening – Kevin Bacon, and the rest of the world, just got one degree closer.

The social networking giant last week released the results from a joint study conducted with the University of Milan that found that every one of the social network’s 721 million active users can be linked to any other in just 4.74 steps.

And that’s worldwide. The gap gets even smaller when you look at individual countries, which found only three degrees of separation between users.

So if you live in the US you’re only three steps from the man himself. That’s how many people you could fit in the back seat of a car! He probably* buys his milk from the same store you do. He could even be outside your house RIGHT NOW.

And he’s not stopping there. Oh no, Kevin Bacon keeps getting closer.

And smouldering-er. Picture: Paramount Pictures

Facebook’s data team pointed out in a blog post that: “the degrees of separation between any two Facebook users is smaller than the commonly cited six degrees, and has been shrinking over the past three years as Facebook has grown”.

Don’t just take my word for it, trust Facebook (you do with all those drunken pictures you took of yourself half-naked).

“As Facebook has grown over the years, representing an even larger fraction of the global population, it has become steadily more connected. The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while it is now 4.74.”

Really? REALLY, really?

If all this is stopping you from sleeping tonight take heart. There is the fact that Facebook “friends” are a completely different sort of friend to the ones you’re used to.

I have several Facebook “friends” I went to school with. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to them apart from the obligatory “what have you been up to” when I added them. But still the connection is still there.

It’s like our past friendship is in a vegetative state on some sort of life support with neither one of us willing to cut tenuous thread keeping it presently, albeit dimly, alive.

While I’m fairly confident none of those people are presently plotting my downfall with Kevin Bacon they could be useful allies for the moment when the inevitable tide of social media brings him bedraggled and enraged to my front door.

Wired magazine  points out I can probably rely on them more than my professional buddies and the ADD crowd that hang out on Twitter. They cite a Pew Research study that found:

“Of the four major social networks surveyed (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace), Facebook users tend to have closer relationships with one another. Take note, though: Google+ wasn’t around quite yet when the survey took place.

But I may not have to turn to these friends. There could be salvation from the most unlikely of allies – mathematics.

After spending all of last week fearing every knock on the door could be Kevin Bacon (or at the very least the daughter of his grocer’s hairdresser) the Guardian’s Matt Parker came to my rescue.

Parker, aloft his mighty steed Euclides, points out the results from the study aren’t actually that amazing. And we may have no more reason to fear Bacon than we always have. Parker explains*:

“If everyone only had the median 100 friends this report found, that means you already have 10,000 friends of friends. If you include their 100 friends each, you’re at 1 million people within three degrees of separation. At five degrees of separation you have 10 billion people linked to you, which is greater than the Earth’s population.

If only having 100 friends each has you linked to everyone else on Earth an average 1.4 times each (so to speak), we shouldn’t be amazed that it’s a small world after all. We should be asking why we ever thought it was so big.”

So I guess the moral of the story is that mathematics can still stand defiant against the power of even the mightiest of social networks.

And that while you should still check your cupboards and under your bed for Kevin Bacon each night you have no more reason to fear him than you always did.

*Almost certainly false

Quite a surprising story going around today.

Turns out smart people really like drugs. The Atlantic reports:

“With over 40 years of research to support their findings, a team of British scientists was slightly surprised to learn that people with higher IQs are much more prone to drug use. “It’s counterintuitive,” says lead author James White. “It’s not what we thought we would find.” And it’s not for lack of trying either.”

Scientists from Cardiff University took data from 8000 people in the 1970 British Cohort Study, which is actually quite interesting in itself, and found that

“…subjects that tested above average on IQ tests at age 5 were twice as likely to have done hard drugs within the past year, when asked at age 30. The smart kids weren’t just smoking pot, either; the numbers suggest that they prefer cocaine and ecstasy.”

White said he thought the “likely mechanism is openness to experience.”

“And, I think, it’s also this idea of having an educated view of risk as well.”

The Atlantic reports this isn’t the first time scientists have made this connection either. They point out evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa also found people with higher IQs were more likely to use drugs.

He hypothesised that smarter people are attracted to “evolutionary novelties”.

Novelties, it seems,  like getting off your head on drugs.

Something that is being touted at the moment as almost inevitable is the concept of “telecommuting” – working from home. But what effects will this have on the work of those involved?

Slate is running a good report at the moment of the preliminary findings from a Stanford University study examining the effects of telecommuting on productivity.

A Chinese online travel agency ran an experiment at its airfare and ticketing office in Shanghai where it offered employees with at least six months’ experience with the company the option of enrolling in the study.

Of the 255 employees who enrolled 50 per cent worked from home for four of their five weekly shifts over an eight-month period. Those who remained acted as a control group.

So what happened? Surprisingly for overbearing bosses who think they need to be there to “crack the whip” the study found:

“Productivity went up, as did hours worked, and employees seemed happier for it.”

Home workers answered 15 per cent more calls, each hour was 4 percent more productive, and they spent 11 per cent more time answering calls. This increase in productivity was due in part to home workers taking fewer breaks and sick days, rarely arriving late to their desks, and having fewer distractions.

And the employees were just as effective as they were in the office, and seemed to prefer being at home, Slate reports:

“While answering more calls, the distractions of home life had no impact on the quality of service: The home-work group converted phone calls into sales at exactly the same rate as those in the office. And employees themselves liked the arrangement better, making it look like a win-win for the company. The home-work group reported less “work exhaustion,” a more positive attitude towards their jobs, and were nearly 50 percent less likely to say they were planning to quit at the end of the eight months. (In fact the quit rate among home-office workers during the experiment was about one-half of what it was for those making the commute.)”

But before you decide it’s time to hand in your ID card and grab your moccasins there was an interesting development AFTER the experiment. As Slate reports:

“Given its smashing success, the company decided to roll out the home-office setup to the entire company. Surprisingly, only about one-half of the employees agreed to the deal, and many of those involved in the original experiment decided that they’d had enough, preferring the hours in commute in exchange for the human interaction of office life and a fixed beginning and end to each work day.”

As someone who traded in working in a completely empty office that actually had a much nicer TV setup, bathroom and kitchen than my actual house I can understand. I feel far happier being in an office with people around (even if I spend my evening barely talking to them) rather than be alone in an office or my home. While this would conceivably be different in a home environment I would still be reluctant to take up an offer if it were extended.

I would also be curious to see if the jump in productivity decreased over a longer timeframe or if it were a permanent increase.

You could do this. One day. Picture: Fox / Supplied

Strange confluence of news reading today.

Firstly I wrote a piece after an interview the publicity company for X-Men:First Class organised with John Dykstra.

This is not a shameless pimp. I swear.

I’m a big fan of Dykstra’s work, not only in Star Wars but more recently in Spider Man and Hancock. I thought it would be the usual sort of puff publicity interview for the film and didn’t have heaps of hope for it.

But Dykstra was incredibly interesting with the sort of mind that jumps all over the place.

I thought the most interesting thing he said was where he thought technology could take the movie experience in the future:

“Imagine recording and moving someone else’s thought patterns into your brain so you could experience what they were experiencing,” Mr Dykstra told news.com.au.

While conceding that kind of technology was hard to imagine Mr Dykstra said advancement in technology were “always magical thinking”.

“Any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” he said.“But we have technology like this already.”

“There are programs that are capable of sensing your mental state to move a cursor on a computer stream and others that capture neural path signals to operate a prosthesis.

“It’s amazing what we are capable of doing already.”

And he is right. Looking around I found quite a few articles about people doing exactly that already. Which certainly requires some diligent follow-up over the next few weeks.

The Economist ran a piece today detailing three instances where individuals were able to do amazing things using only their thoughts like: control a virtual helicopter and two other examples where neuroscience is approaching mind-reading qualities.

In the latest demonstration of this, just published in the Public Library of Science, Bin He and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota report that their volunteers can successfully fly a helicopter (admittedly a virtual one, on a computer screen) through a three-dimensional digital sky, merely by thinking about it.

Signals from electrodes taped to the scalp of such pilots provide enough information for a computer to work out exactly what the pilot wants to do.

The obvious application for this is prosthetics. The Daily Telegraph had a story earlier this year about a US doctor who is using these techniques to help military veterans who lost limbs in battle.

Glen Lehman, a retired US military sergeant who lost his arm in Iraq, demonstrated the latest technology at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

“It feels great, if feels intuitive. It is a lot better than the other prosthetic I have now,” said Lehman, whose forearm and elbow were blown off in a Baghdad grenade attack in 2008.

“The other one is still controlled by muscle impulse, you just flex muscle to make it move, it is not intuitive. This arm is more trained to me, whereas the other arm I had to train to it,” he said.

“It does feel like my own hand.”

Lehman demonstrated for reporters how he could pinch his finger and thumb together, lift his forearm and bend his elbow, and turn his wrist just by thinking about those actions.

All of this is very interesting but it’s all things coming out of your brain, nothing going in like Dykstra was talking about.

Except for one sentence in the DT piece.

The arm’s creator, US doctor Todd Kuiken, said more advances, such as the ability to transfer some sensation to the limb, are being studied in the lab but have not yet made it to patients.

Now THAT interests me. I’ve read elsewhere about how scientists are able to “give” people the sensation of having a dead arm.

This is exactly what John is talking about. The ability to implant sensations into people raises a lot of questions (especially ethical) and has HUGE potential.

I’m no neurobiologist but I’m curious what sort of impulses could be transferred.

Artificial sensations are one matter but imagine a world where you could literally know what it felt like to be someone else.

Imagine the implications.

iPads, iPhones, iThis, and iThat. Apple put computing in the pocket of millions and changed the way people think about technology and design forever.

But I’ve always been more interested in the legacy that isn’t mentioned as often – the economic legacy of Apple and iTunes.

Jobs and iTunes were trailblazers for new ways of doing business online and his model is now imitated by just about any online endeavor from EBay to Amazon.

Some markets, like music, were changed and now exist in a far more fragmented form. Others were inadvertently created from scratch almost as a by-product like the thriving Ap-store.

Look at two things it has changed:

It changed the way songs and the music industry are marketed. Katy Perry this year equalled a record that Michael Jackson set pre-iTunes – the most no 1 hits on a single album release. Does anyone think Katy Perry (or whoever is out musing about kissing girls and then writing songs for her) is a better songwriter than Michel Jackson? Or has there been a restructuring in the way albums are made? Writers aim now for songs that stand as entities on their own, because that is increasingly becoming how they are sold.

And look at how it has created an industry in games so simple that you could probably load them on a Commodore64 if you had enough tape.

Angry Birds is only the second highest grossing game after the new Smurfs game (which sneakily allows users to bleed a lot of money out through the game) – it makes at last estimation a staggering $1 million a month.

And it’s a flash animation game.

I had better games than that on my old 486 PC and yet it out-earns some high concept games that people invest far more money in.

I’m talking to some economists tomorrow about the specifics to write something longer. But I think the bottom line is this – after iPhones, iPads, and iPods are all a distant sepia-tinted memory Apple’s most enduring legacy could be the way it showed people how to make a new commercial model work on the internet.

First interesting snippet was on the ABC’s QandA Monday night. The intro was so good I don’t think I heard a lot of it. Slavoj Žižek was a guest and he is someone who’s work I’ve really admired ever since I was first introduced to him by “The Perverts Guide to Cinema”.

It really is all that. Recommended.

The panellists were questioned about alternative sexual and relationship practices. The first responded that if you were just a “loving person who behaved decently, we shouldn’t have too much to worry about.”

Žižek took a much larger approach talking about the way culture and society in a way dictated the way we feel about sexuality. He out forwards the theory that society was pressuring people “more and more” towards hedonism.

He observed that people now feel guilty “not if they give way to their perverse desires, but if you DON’T enjoy … the result is not everybody is happy screwing around, the result is the opposite – there is more frigidity and impotence than ever.”

I’m curious about his ideas on the degree that culture can dictate sexuality and even love. One of the panellists said “sex is politics” (could have even been him).

I’ve read some articles talking about the effect pornography is having on our sexuality and our fulfilment, and the academic I talked about a few posts back on “hyperstimulation” observed pornography can fall into the same category as junk foods in it’s corrosive effect on your functioning despite some people being attracted to it because of primal urges (why is it so popular?).

The observation that – despite more permissive attitudes and all tastes and desires being catered to – there is still a jump in sexual dysfunction and unfulfilment is an interesting one. And one I’ll look into more.

I’m also curious about the way society can dictate love and the way we perceive ourselves as loving, lovable and loved entities. People acknowledge that sex can be culturally specific but I haven’t heard of love talked about in the same way.

Why not?

Advertisers know that sex sells, but in what way is sex SOLD TO us? In what way is love sold to us? If I think about it love is present in books, movies, advertising, it’s used to motivate people to do things, great things, terrible things – it’s everywhere.

Yet “all you need is love”? Why is love seen as a pure drive?

The second thing that happened was yesterday’s court ruling on the legal recognition of genders:

Two female-to-male transsexuals have won a landmark High Court battle to be legally recognised as men under WA’s gender reassignment laws.

The judgment, handed down by the Full Court in Canberra this morning, means that female-to-male transsexuals do not have to undergo dangerous penis construction surgery that is not performed in Australia to legally swap genders under the WA legislation.

This is also very interesting. To me it seems to mean that self-perception trumps biology to a degree. Or rather, if you want to look at it – that your brain’s biology is now recognised as being the most dominant aspect of your “self”. I don’t know what I fully think about this yet so I won’t spout off about it just yet but it’s a fascinating ruling. I’m going to get a hold of the judge’s verdict to try and get some more insight into the decision.

I’m very curious about how that can be related back to the first point. Society in a way assigns gender roles, and even genders themselves. I remember an international relations lecture in university where we learnt about a “third gender” in some parts of the world where culturally people are not considered male or female but something distinct and different.

It would be fascinating to see if anyone had done neuro-imaging to see what was going on in the brains of these people as I have read before similar images taken of the transgender individuals has found a brain that was indeed of the opposite gender.