- Iowa Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage.
- From Amanda at Pandagon, how anti-vaccination hysteria is about sex, accidentally helping Big Pharma – anything but science.
- Two ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspapers have altered a photo of Israel’s new cabinet, removing two female ministers. (Thanks to Steve.)
- Filed under “We Just Want This To Be True:” more chocolate = better math skills.
- Do optimists live longer? (Thanks to Infinite Monkey.)
- If you’re in Charlotte, NC, check out the new Skeptics in the Pub.
Do optimists live longer that pessimists? Optimists think so. So do pessimists. There’s consensus!
And this:
Conclusion: questionnaire filling has a mortalily rate of around 40% over a period of nine years. No wonder those online jobs filling surveys pay so little: life insurance costs must be outrageous.
Maybe poor health causes pessimism.
Did they learn how to alter images like that from Stalin?
Re: Optimism
I like to think that this is a case where both sides get what they want. Optimists think everything’s grand, so they get to live longer and enjoy it. And pessimits… well hey, at least you don’t have to put up with life sucking as much as the rest of us! :-P
I say be a pessimist, be surprised when things don’t go the way you expected.
As far as Iowa gay marriage, when I heard about about that, I was like…WTF…didn’t see that one coming! Iowa came right out of left field. I always thought Iowa was too conservative for stuff like that.
Orthodox Jewish Newspaper’s motto: “All the news that’s fit to alter”
http://ontopmag.com/error.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/article.aspx
Almost there in Vermont, too!!
@Expatria: Hmm. The typo in my previous post has given me an idea: Pessi-Mitts: Warm winter mittens that bear downer slogans like:
“Summer’s still a long way away”
“Don’t get your hopes up”
and now:
“Well, at least you’ll die sooner”
Well, optimists think they’re going to live longer. Does that count?
@Expatria: Well, then you’d love despair.com’s bittersweets-candy hearts that say stuff like “I cry on Q” and “Dog was cuter”.
Yay us in Iowa! My feeling on this is that since it will take 2-3 years for it to get to a referendum vote, most Iowans will allow it to remain as is. Most Iowans are pragmatic rather than ideological and don’t like out of staters coming in and telling us how to run our affairs. Plus there are other things to worry about right now, like jobs and state budget cuts.
re: chocolate~I don’t care if it’s true or not. I will proceed to believe that chocolate is the ultimate in brain food. And that it has negative calories.
Optimists are 50% more likely to live longer. Pessimists are 50% less likely to die sooner.
@Gods Invisible BFF
The REAL reason Iowa made gay marriage legal was because they’re broke and willing to give out-of-state marriage licenses. :P
Oh, and optimists think the glass is half full. Pessimists think it’s full of cyanide.
@Croobie
I’m cynical enough to believe this as well. Nothing like forbidden fruit to give a money injection. I say bring it!
After clicking on the link about the altered Israeli cabinet photo, I just have to ask…
What, exactly, is a kosher telephone?
Well, Marcotte’s piece started out good, but then it delved into Feminazi/Creationist wannabe bullshit.
It’s nice to see that some things never change.
OK, it’s even worse, Pandagon links to anti-vax quacks. Oh my stars & garters! Medicine isn’t 108.7% safe!!!! It’s an eeeeevil conspiracy.
Get fucking real. Pandagon = Disco Institute.
Pandagon also linked to some supposed Big Pharma™ conspiracy of evilness, where the few commenters who apparently knew what they were talking about refuted the claims of the blogger but didn’t bother to register a name (probably because they stumbled upon the article by chance and weren’t planning to come back any time soon), were immediately labeled Pfizer representatives.
I’ll tell you who sounds like the most realiable source though: the anonymous posters who actually have more to show than just what they can pull out of their ass. Like, you know, actual statistics and numbers, facts you can check …
some basic math:
Of the 200 children in the Pfizer study, 11 died (~5%)
Of the infected children overall, 90% of the ones who didn’t get treatment died.
In other words, you might’ve been about 18 times more likley to die if you weren’t in the study. Seeing how this was a drug trial, I’d bet Pfizer was even picking up the lion share of the tab as well. Had it not been for this trial 180 kids might have died instead of only 11.
This whole issue seems to be about paperwork, not evil big pharma™ killing test subjects because they wanted to make more money.
It’s this kind of shoddy research that actually keeps the anti-vaxxers in business. They depend on it, because this outrage is the only source of new recruits they have.
So sadly, Pandagon is doing the exact opposite of the point her article is trying to make. How’s that for ironic …