the mating game or on why you cant hurry love

My alma mater drawing headlines in the world for really progressive research has this time, outdone themselves. Prepare to be knocked off from your feet, specially if you are single, like me...

An LSE researcher has helped to develop a mathematical model of the mating game to help explain why courtship is often drawn out.

Duration of courtship effort as a costly signal, by Dr Peter Sozou, research associate, Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, LSE and Professor Robert Seymour, Mathematics, University College London (UCL) shows that extended courtship enables a male to signal his suitability to a female and enables the female to screen out the male if he is unsuitable as a mate.

The research, published in the January edition of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, uses game theory to analyse how males and females behave strategically towards each other in the mating game.

Dr Peter Sozou, LSE Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science and Warwick Medical School and, said: 'From a female's point of view, males are not all equal. A female would like to mate with a good male, but cannot tell a male's type from his appearance alone.

'The strategic problem the female faces is how to screen out bad males, and this is where long courtship comes into play. A male is assumed to always want to mate with a female, but a good male is more willing to pay the cost of a long courtship in order to claim the prize of mating. This leads to an outcome in which the female is not willing to mate immediately, but instead requires the male to wait for an indeterminate time before she agrees to mate with him. During this time, the male may give up on courting the female.

'Bad males give up at some random time if the female has not by then mated with them, but good males are more persistent and do not give up. The female’s strategy is a compromise - a trade-off between on the one hand the greater risk of mating with a bad male if she mates too quickly, and on the other hand the time cost of delay. Under this compromise there remains some risk that she will mate with the wrong type of male. She cannot eliminate this risk completely unless she decides never to mate.'

Young Dwarf Star

One of the hottest white dwarfs known to scientists lies in the heart of this nebula, called NGC 2440, about 4,000 light-years from Earth. The star (the bright dot near the photo's center), has a surface temperature of roughly 360,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Since white dwarfs cool as they age, this one must be relatively young. The glowing purple aura around it is the left-over material cast off by the star when it became a white dwarf star at the end of its life


White Dwarf: Dead Star ShiningBy 02.13.09 At the end of a star's lifetime, when it's burned all there is inside it to burn, it often collapses into what's called a white dwarf star. These dense globes have roughly the mass of the sun packed tight into a ball the size of the Earth. Since there is no fuel left for fusion in white dwarfs, they shine only faintly, by emitting stored heat. A white dwarf is thought to be the end stage awaiting most of the stars in our galactic neighborhood, including the sun — only about 3 percent of nearby stars have masses so huge that they collapse even further in supernova explosions.

Sabato nominated for Nobel Lit prize

One of Latinamerica´s finest writers alive, Ernesto Sabato, has been nominated to the Nobel Literature Prize. Ernesto Sabato was born in Argentina back in 1911. Curiously he graduated from Physics and earned his PhD from La Plata National University in Argentina. He also worked in the Currie Institute in Paris. After World War II, Ernesto Sabato lost his faith in science and starting writing.

His first book, the Tunnel (el Tunel) was a major success. This was his best book in my opinion which was a major literary inspiration in my law school days.

Some memorable quotes from Ernesto Sabato:

Un genio es alguien que descubre que la piedra que cae y la luna que no cae representan un solo y mismo fenómeno.

A genius is he who discovers that the rock that drops and the moons that does not, represents the one and same phenomenon.

Vivir consiste en construir futuros recuerdos.

To live consists in building future memories.

Ser original es en cierto modo estar poniendo de manifiesto la mediocridad de los demás.

To be original is in certain mode to manifestly highlight the mediocracy of others.

La vanidad es tan fantástica, que hasta nos induce a preocuparnos de lo que pensarán de nosotros una vez muertos y enterrados.

Vanity is so fantastic that it induces to worry about what will be thought of us once we are dead and buried.

Cops arrest Michael Phelp´s (weed) friends in Columbus, South Carolina

Local people in South Carolina are calling it the Michael Phelps incident. A week ago, 8 time olympic gold winner, Michael Phelps was shown in a picture of the News of World paper in United Kingdom hitting the (weed) bong. Now police in South Carolina apparently have arrested some of the friends that where with Phelps. This is truly a classic example of how the politics of drugs often violate civil liberties. Police in South Carolina must be water tight on the evidence, and I am not talking about heresay or simple cell phone pictures.

The legal quagmire resides in the fact that Michael Phelps has publicly recognized that he smoke marijuana in Columbus, South Carolina. Now, police in South Carolina can (must?) charge Michael Phelps at least with possession of drug controlled substances, because of the news of the crime...Phelps is facing a three month ban from competitive swimming and now it looks like a court date in South Carolina...

What percentage of US college students have clean sheets from criminal courts in the US? Not a lot I would say...

the Benkler-Carr wager - Peer produced or price incentivized?

Back in July 2006, Nicholas Carr (editor of Havard Business Review) made a bet with Yochai Benkler (a teacher of law from Yale & Harvard), concerning the future the internet. They envisioned the future of the most influential sites on the internet. Nicholas Carr argues that in the future the most influential sites will be dominated by price incentivized sites (content provided by paid workers) whereas Yochai Benkler argues that in the future the most influential sites will be commons based peer production (as wikipedia, youtube and flickr).

I think Benkler is right...

his book wealth of networks can be freely accessed at benkler.org

the Michael Phelps-Bong incident

This is the reply of Mike Edison (former publisher of High Times Magazine) concering Michael Phelps incident smoking weed out of a bong...

George W. Bush never had to answer for his “youthful indiscretions.” Michael Phelps, not so lucky. Having been caught red-handed with a smoking bong firmly pasted to his maw, the long knives are out for the Olympic hero.
Let’s see if I’ve got this right. Phelps isn’t a future Hall of Famer juicing himself with the “cream” and the “clear,” or getting his gluteus maximus pin-cushioned with designer ’roids. He isn’t a doped racehorse, or a testosterone-shooting bike nerd trying to turn his Lycra-Spandexed bum into a blur pedaling across France.
He isn’t even the current president of the United States, who freely admits to having toked his share of tropical trumpets back in his Hawaiian hoodlum days, not to mention tooting some of the Big Island’s finest imported disco dust.
He’s a 23-year-old rock star who got caught smoking pot. How is Phelps going to do the breast stroke covered in tar and feathers?