Japanese Robot Girlfriend
My prediction — in the future, if you do not meet a husband/wife by age 40, you will have the option of being given a robot boyfriend/girlfriend:
Pretty interesting where robotics is going. It will really get interesting with the merging of artificial intelligence, prosthetic development, innovative CPU processing developments, low cost storage (SSD) and a connected Internet…. the next 50 years will allow for some crazy and perhaps scary, developments.
Is Temporary Marriage The Wave Of The Future?
Is a lifetime of monogamy fast becoming an impossible dream, and an until-death marriage agreement nothing but an unfair trap, sprung by your past self onto your future self? Mexico City likely will test out a system in which matrimonial contracts run for two years, as a solution to the problems associated with messy divorces and drawn-out unhappy unions. In the future, lifelong marriage will likely be seen as an arcane and barbaric institution. Reuters reports:
Mexico City lawmakers want to help newlyweds avoid the hassle of divorce by giving them an easy exit strategy: temporary marriage licenses.
Leftists in the city’s assembly — who have already riled conservatives by legalizing gay marriage — proposed a reform to the civil code this week that would allow couples to decide on the length of their commitment, opting out of a lifetime.
The minimum marriage contract would be for two years and could be renewed if…
Mean Bosses & Co-Workers Cause Damage Beyond the Workplace
From ScienceDaily:
A co-worker’s rudeness can have a great impact on relationships far beyond the workplace, according to a Baylor University study published online in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.
Findings suggest that stress created by incivility can be so intense that, at the end of the day, it is taken home by the worker and impacts the well-being of the worker’s family and partner, who in turn takes the stress to his/her workplace.”Employees who experience such incivility at work bring home the stress, negative emotion and perceived ostracism that results from those experiences, which then affects more than their family life — it also creates problems for the partner’s life at work,” said Merideth J. Ferguson, Ph.D., assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at the Baylor University Hankamer School of Business and study author.
“This research underlines the importance of stopping incivility before it starts so that the ripple effect of incivility…
Jilted Boyfriend Announces Ex-Girlfriend’s Abortion On Billboard
Via Fox News:
ALAMOGORDO, NM— A New Mexico man’s decision to lash out with a billboard ad saying his ex-girlfriend had an abortion against his wishes has touched off a legal debate over free speech and privacy rights.
The sign on Alamogordo’s main thoroughfare shows 35-year-old Greg Fultz holding the outline of an infant. The text reads, “This Would Have Been A Picture Of My 2-Month Old Baby If The Mother Had Decided To Not KILL Our Child!”
Fultz’s ex-girlfriend has taken him to court for harassment and violation of privacy. A domestic court official has recommended the billboard be removed.
But Fultz’s attorney argues the order violates his client’s free speech rights.
“As distasteful and offensive as the sign may be to some, for over 200 years in this country the First Amendment protects distasteful and offensive speech,” Todd Holmes said.
The woman’s friends say she had a miscarriage, not an abortion, according to a…
Married Couples Are No Longer a Majority in U.S.
Sabrina Tavernise writes in the New York Times:
Married couples have dropped below half of all American households for the first time, the Census Bureau says, a milestone in the evolution of the American family toward less traditional forms.
Married couples represented just 48 percent of American households in 2010, according to data being made public Thursday and analyzed by the Brookings Institution. This was slightly less than in 2000, but far below the 78 percent of households occupied by married couples in 1950.
What is more, just a fifth of households were traditional families — married couples with children — down from about a quarter a decade ago, and from 43 percent in 1950, as the iconic image of the American family continues to break apart.
In recent history, the marriage rate among Americans was at its highest in the 1950s, when the institution defined gender roles, family life and a person’s place…
Rejection Feels Like Spilling Hot Coffee on Your Arm…
Accurate? Jen Doll writes in the Village Voice:
Rejection hurts. Before you groan and sign and say “I know, I know, let me tell you about the time you-know-who did you-know-what to me,” let us clarify. Rejection actually physically hurts. Like dropping something on your toe or getting lemon juice in a papercut hurts. This is true, according to science, and according to the New York Times, which reports on how badly rejection hurts, and how science knows this.
According to a recent study, areas of the brain that indicate physical pain area activated “at moments of intense social loss.” In terms of the actual study, 40 volunteers (who all felt “intensely rejected” due to a recent breakup), were hooked up to MRI scanners to measure their brain activity while they looked at photos of former boyfriends/girlfriends and thought about exactly how they’d been rejected. (Man, science is mean.) Then they were…
Company To Provide You With Fake Girlfriend On Facebook
Need an imaginary girlfriend on Facebook to hide the fact that you are alone? Cloud Girlfriend will do all the legwork (a profile, photos, wall posts, conversation, etc.). I recommend making yours a marine biologist/ballet dancer who lives in Canada. AOL News reports:
That’s what startup Cloud Girlfriend promises, although your friends on Facebook will never know it. The new Internet company helps guys who aren’t ready to admit, at least online, that they don’t have a significant other.
The new service allows users to create the perfect girlfriend who will write on your Facebook wall and otherwise make her ghostly presence known through social media.
Cloud Girlfriend has yet to officially launch, but the site is already generating overwhelming interest, advising visitors to “register early to get in line.”
According to the site, signing up is easy as:
“Step 1: Define your perfect girlfriend. Step 2: We bring her into existence. Step 3: Connect and interact with…
Virginity’s Making A Comeback in the U.S., Report Says
Diane Mapes reports on MSNBC about a recent Centers for Disease Control report (PDF):
Researchers found that between 2006 and 2008, the percentage of 15- to 24-year-old men who had never had any form of sexual contact with another person was 27 percent (up from 22 percent in 2002) while the percentage of 15- to 24-year-old females who had never had any sex whatsoever was 29 percent (up 7 percent points from 22 percent in 2002).
Anjani Chandra, a health scientist at the NCHS and lead author of the study, says 15- to 19-year-olds made up the lion’s share of this category, a finding that seems to counter other reports regarding teen sex trends.
“I think a lot of people misconstrue this as meaning they’ve never had vaginal sex,” she says. “But this is no sexual contact of any kind. They didn’t have oral sex or anal sex. They didn’t have anything.”
Study Claims Ogling Women Makes Them Worse at Math
I wonder what the first person to win two Nobel prizes, Madame Curie, would make of this study. Oh, I know the answer from a classic Simpsons episode … Stephanie Pappas writes on LiveScience:
Getting the once-over from a man causes women to score lower on a math test, a new study finds.
Despite this drop in performance, women were more motivated to interact with men who ogled them, perhaps because they were trying to boost their sense of belonging, psychologists report in the February issue of the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly.
“It creates this vicious cycle for women in which they’re underperforming in math or work domains, but they’re continuing to want to interact with the person who is making them underperform in the first place,” study researcher Sarah Gervais, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, told LiveScience.
Iraq Toys With Polygamy As Solution For War Widows
Roula Ayoubi reports for BBC News:
Years of conflict in Iraq have left the country with more than one million war widows and a shortage of young unmarried men — pressures that may be bringing about the return of polygamy. Iraqi woman and child Politicians have suggested financial incentives for men who marry widows
Hanan lost eight members of her family in the war, including her husband, and was left to bring up three children alone.
The experience has not broken her. She continues to work as a hairdresser in her noisy and lively home on Haifa Street in Baghdad. But she still needs a “man-shelter”, she says — and this is why she ended up married to a married man.
“When he proposed to me, he said he was divorced,” she says. “But after we got married, he got back together with his first wife, because he has children with her.”
He now stays…
Study Finds Possible Link Between Genes and Friendship
Could your genes help decide the friends you choose? BBC News reports:
Researchers in the United States say they have uncovered tentative evidence of a genetic component to friendship.
Using data from two independent studies, they found carriers of one gene associated with alcoholism tended to stick together.
However, people with another gene linked with metabolism and openness, stayed apart.
Details are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers looked at six genetic markers in two long-running US studies, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the Framingham Heart Study, which contain both genetic data and information on friends.
[Continues at BBC News]
Flirting in the 21st Century, Brett Favre Style
Brett Favre in 2006.
Via the First Church of Mutterhals:
Everyone knows I’m not exactly keen on manners. But in some ways I am downright old fashioned. For instance, if a man I was vaguely acquainted with took a liking to me and decided the best way to win my favor would be to forward a hastily snapped pic of his, oh, how should I put this, his wang; well let’s just say there is a very short list of people who could get away with such a thing without my taking out a restraining order.
You know where I’m going with this. Proving once and for all that he is a congenital retard, Brett Favre did the above to a comely female member of the sporting press, thusly taking a bad idea and making it monumentally worse. I know, I know, allegedly. Brett Favre allegedly stuck his cell phone down his shorts…
Florida Woman Arrested for Shaving Private Parts While Driving
CBS4 reports:
CUDJOE KEY ― You’ve heard of the dangers of texting while driving, and talking on the phone while behind the wheel of a car. But how many people actually debate the merits of doing a little, well, “landscaping” while on the road?
According to the Florida Highway Patrol, a two-car crash on Cudjoe Key was caused by a 37-year-old woman who was shaving her bikini area while in the driver’s seat. Her ex-husband was steering from the passenger seat.
Trooper Gary Dunick explained, “She said she was meeting her boyfriend in Key West and wanted to be ready for the visit.”
Megan Mariah Barnes and her ex-husband Charles Judy were driving southbound Tuesday morning when they slammed into the back of a pick-up driven by David Schoff of Palm Bay after he slowed to take a turn.
Read More: CBS4
Grad Student Uses Alien-Seeking Math to Explain Why He Can’t Find A Girlfriend
Frank Carnevale writes on news.au.com:
A student used the Drake Equation, used to calculate chances of alien life, to prove why he was single. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, took on his own dating woes in “Why I don’t have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK.”
In describing the paper online, he wrote “the results are not encouraging”, MyFox reports. “The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.”
Mr Backus, 30, found that of the 30 million women in the UK, only 26 would be suitable girlfriends for him, according to Click Liverpool.
