Global Warming Crusaders Target Marmots in Cruel Genocide
Or is it "zoocide"? Whatever: they can't wash the blood off their hands this time.
"I didn't intend to spend 40 years studying marmots, but new questions kept coming up," confesses a researcher whose professional life was hijacked by this under-reported drama. His perseverance paid off for us all with his "groundbreaking study, published in Nature," revealing to a stunned scientific community that "mountain rodents called marmots are growing larger, healthier and more plentiful in response to climate change." The longer growing season has boosted the plucky creatures' size, strength, and numbers. Unless. Unless we let Al Gore back out of his cage, in which case decades of hard-fought progress in the marmot community could be senselessly undone.
Snapping Back to the Narrative. Someone must have handed our scientist a note from off-camera during the interview, because he hastens to add: "This benefit to marmots is probably short-lived. . . . [I]f there's less snowmelt to nourish plants that marmots forage in the summer, it will severely affect them. In droughts, we've had very high mortality." Marmots cannot catch a break.
The next time you thoughtlessly exhale, or wait to exhale, consider that you're dooming a marmoset to the Scylla and Charybdis of obesity and starvation. Here's a site where you can support marmot research. Look into your hearts and dig into your wallets.
Apparently, What They Need at the U.N. Is Softer Blankies
I've never been much of a negotiator -- probably that empathy thing you're supposed to have. Often I have almost no idea how other people come to their decisions. Here's some research on factors that may be creeping into the process under the radar.
Research psychologists at Harvard, MIT, and Yale recently reported that our judgments are surprisingly influenced by the texture of objects we're in contact with during or just before the decision-making process. For instance, interviewers judged job candidates as better qualified and more serious about the position sought when they were given the resumes on heavy clipboards. The heavier clipboards also were associated with interviewers' higher opinions of their own accuracy in judging candidates.
In the same vein, listeners to a story about a social interaction described it as harsher when they had been given rough puzzles pieces to assemble as opposed to smooth pieces. Similarly, they described one character's attitude in a story as more rigid or strict when they had been given a hard wooden block to hold, instead of a soft blanket. When participants in a mock bargaining session were seated in comfortable chairs, they turned out not only to be more flexible in their responses to successive offers, but also more likely to judge their opponents to be "more stable and less emotional."
Looks like we should be presenting our resumes on heavy, smooth, soft tablets. If nothing else, you guys might view your wives as less emotional and unstable if you'd take the precaution of settling into a comfy chair before listening to their complaints. No fair going to sleep, though.
I couldn't find a clip from the "Day of the Dolphins" where Fa and Bee explain that they like humans because they're smooth, like dolphins, not rough like sharks, so I went with this:
Nor is it just these Ivy League researchers who are into the new "tactile tactics" in social conflict. No one was surprised when researchers from the University of Minneapolis and the University of British Columbia concluded that shoppers were more comfortable on carpet than on hard vinyl tile. What was a little surprising is that the comfortable flooring had opposite effects on their purchase judgments, depending on how far away they were from the products on the shelves. Moderately distant objects were judged "more comforting" by the shoppers who were standing on soft carpet, by some kind of unconscious confusion of the tactile sensation of one object with the inherent worth of another. In contrast, nearby products appeared to suffer from comparison with the softness of carpet: a gift basket was judged "less comforting" when the carpet-treading shopper was very close to it.
I suppose the trick here is to present the gift basket to the object of your affections when she's moderately far away on a soft carpet, but don't put it into her hands until you're maneuvered her onto some challenging parquet. But if you want to bring out the big guns:
An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly.
In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed.
Evidently the best way to win an argument, then, is to be really glum about it, or at least take some pains to appear to be in the worst mood in the room.
On the other hand, “positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts.”
So as long as the people you’re talking to don’t care how you got there, you’re more likely to win them over by being jolly. Maybe the rule is to be grumpy when you think you’re right and jolly when you suspect you’re full of it.
My better half could not be suspected of a sunny disposition even by his friends. From now on, when he’s morose, I’ll simply observe that he seems unusually persuasive today.
Global Warming Crusaders Target Marmots in Cruel Genocide
