Evolution of the ideal female body

This piece on the evolution of the ideal female body across the past century raises all sorts of questions:

  • Did the ideal female body evolve so quickly in past centuries as well, shifting from one decade to the next?
  • Why does the ideal female body change so quickly? Is it culturally influenced? The evolutionary argument has always been that a female's body is a key signal of physical fitness and suitability for child-bearing, but that shouldn't change so much over one century, and certainly not in the seemingly haphazard manner documented in this piece, jumping from thin to curvy to heroin chic to bootylicious. Perhaps the evolutionary argument is somewhat weakened?
  • Who drives the definition of the ideal female body more, men or women? The article does not come down conclusively one way or the other, but many of its profiles seem to lean towards women, especially celebrity women, defining each decade's standard.
  • Has the ideal male body also changed as much across the past century? If not, why? The only equivalent male standard that comes to mind is the Brad Pitt Fight Club look, a lean, muscular look with super-defined abs, and to me it feels just as unattainable an ideal as the supermodel standard must feel to women.

Spot the sniper

Given the unbelievable opening weekend box office of American Sniper, this photo series titled Camouflage is timely. Simon Menner worked with German military to stage scenes in which a sniper or soldier camouflages themselves. Can you spot the sniper in these without any clues? In every photo, the sniper is taking aim at the viewer/camera.

If you click through to Menner's site you get clues to help you find the sniper, but even with those I really couldn't spot them that cleanly. The most visible element is usually the round end of the rifle barrel, but without a red circle over them I have no idea if I've spotted the right thing.

In the movies like Blackhat or American Sniper, the telltale giveaway is always a brief flare when the sun hits the scope on the rifle or binoculars, but without that I have no idea how you spot them short of superhuman vision.

Element of smart teams

Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.

First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.

Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.

Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.

Results from a study of what makes some teams smarter than others.

The first feels intuitive; one thing that distinguishes good leaders, it's been said, is getting the most from a team, drawing out dissenting views from those who might otherwise be silenced by group dynamics.

The other two elements are more intriguing. I wish the article spent more time discussing how and why those two contributed to a team's superior performance. Is it in maximizing effort from everyone involved? Improved teamwork? Increased comfort in dissent or just greater honesty in general?

SimCity's homelessness problem

SimCity's homeless people are represented as yellow, two-dimensional, ungendered figures with bags in tow. Their presence makes SimCity residents unhappy, and reduces land value. Like many other players, Bittanti discovered the online discussions when he was searching for a way to deal with them.

At first, players wondered if they were having so much problems with the homeless in their cities because of a bug in the game. Like many of 2014's big-budget games that launched in broken or barely-functional states, SimCity originally would only work if players connected to EA's servers, which repeatedly crashed under the load of players. It seemed possible that the homeless problem in SimCity was simply a mistake.

"Has anyone figured out a easy way to handle the homeless ruining those beautiful parks you spend so much money on?" asks one player on EA' site. "Create jobs, either through zoning or upgrading road density near industry, that helped me a lot," another player suggests.

Amazing. Professor Matteo Bittanti has collected online discussions about how to eradicate homelessness in 2013 SimCity in a two volume book called How to get rid of homeless. Volume 1 costs $150, Volume 2 $70.

Since Simcity is a game simulation of urban planning, it's impossible not to regard it as a standard bearer for the arrogance of Silicon Valley technological solutionism and difficult not to invoke Baudrillard. Given the income inequality of the Bay Area and its own notable homelessness problems, this is the most Silicon Valley-ish story I've read in weeks, I'm surprised I didn't read it in Valleywag or Gawker.