Technology Sociology

Yesterday, during my work break, I learned of a cool thing, and a tragic thing. The cool thing is that a young father, wanting to share his love of the Zelda series of video games with his daughter, has been reading the text for her. As the daughter would prefer that her avatar in video games be female, he has been changing the references to the hero, Link, being a boy, to being a girl. To preserve this once she does learn to read, he hex edited the rom and re-burned it with the references all changed. Some awkwardness ensued, as all text had to remain the exact same length, lest all pointers thereafter become wrong, corrupting the entire ROM. Link is ambiguous looking enough so that this works out. At first, the comments that the father received were admiring, especially from young women who wished that they could have enjoyed media in this way. However, after the blog entry had been up for about a day, suddenly a storm of people came in infuriated that he altered the original game, feeling that he was somehow ruining it. A veritable torrent of rants, whines, and complaints that he was infringing Nintendo's copyright ensued. Perhaps these people were trolling, or perhaps they felt that any modification of their favorite thing detracted from it, even hypothetically, but it did make me wonder one thing about the world of technology. Is the world of video games and computers sexist? I do admit that there were only four people in my graduated class who were female...and none of them graduated as a computer scientist. All of them switched to math or other related majors. None of them really explained why, but when I look around, I suspect it's the culture. Computer science has been so male dominated for so long that a fraternity-esque "dudebro" culture that's as disconcerting for an average women as a knitting group consisting primarily of bitterly divorced mothers would be for an average man dominates the scene.

Some pundits posit that this doesn't really matter, but I think it does. Many of the most important pioneers in computer science have been women, such as the very first programmer ever, Ada Lovelace, or the inventor of higher level languages, Admiral Hopper. Other fields also had problems of a sexist culture, such as medicine, and they resolved it by treating sexist behavior as completely unacceptable. I see no reason why computer science can't do the same.

The Trolling Tax

According to Slashdot, there's a new game coming out. Depending on how you play, it could be free. Or it could be $60, plus another $100 for the ability to speak to other player with a microphone. This fee depends on if you're a nice guy who helps other players, or a shameless troll. The article doesn't explain the exact mechanics, but I assume that there'll be a fee for the game as usual, but players who are well behaved will collect refunds until they have all their money back.

Left unmoderated, the average Internet community quickly declines in quality, as trolls and other attention seekers make the area significantly more annoying to be around. The attention seekers will go to any length of effort to be the center of attention, and the trolls just like pissing people off for the sake of being obnoxious. This is bad for business, as you now have a community of people who annoy the crap out of you pretty much for the sake of annoying the crap out of you. And players who get insulted, harassed, or intimidated too often will stop playing. There's not enough funds from these obnoxious jerks to pay for the server alone, so clearly they must be punished.

The helpful players, however, tend to encourage additional sales. A community of useful and helpful people is fun to be around, to the point where you'd pay money to stay. And this is what the company is banking on.

Most other games just charge everyone the same price, and then ban players who become excessively obnoxious. And even then, the bar is set rather high, as a banned troll will stop paying on the spot. I'm quite familiar with this model, as my own job revolves around removing the unproductive customers that pay $19.99...and then cost the company $10,000 in bad behavior.

The parent company, Valve, is now quite famous for their unusual payment plans. They recently made one of their games, Team Fortress 2, completely free to play, but made customization options available for extra cash. These customization are super popular, as it differentiates your character from the teaming masses, and players are gleefully paying out the nose for the chance to show some personality.

This is not the first time the Internet confronted these issues either. Cracked's David Wong wrote an article several years ago about the radical moves that would be required to prevent trolls from destroying the Internet. Why? Because people want to make money, and obnoxious people are threatening to ruin that. And if there's one thing I've noticed about America, it's that threatening people's income never goes well.

The No Shut Up Gun

Ever been in a business meeting with one guy who just loves the sound of his own voice? Every culture that has business meetings has at least one of this guy, and it gets on everybody's nerves. Most societies chalk it up as a social problem and leave it at that, but Japan thought differently, and came up with a technological solution. The device is a gun-like device that, when the trigger is pulled, reflects all speech back to the speaker after a very short delay. This effect is very jarring, and while it could be worked around if you REALLY want to talk, it's enough to convince the average Japanese person to shut up, at which point you can put the gun down and continue the meeting. So the next time Yoshi won't shut the hell up about his new condo for seven minutes straight, suddenly you can whip out the gun, reflect his yammering back at him, and continue the meeting, as it'll only take a few milliseconds for him to realize what a doofus he sounds like. The effect is apparent to anyone who's had to work with a PA system or a shoddy cell phone. Hearing your voice after a short delay makes your brain not entirely sure if you actually finished what you've said, so you start getting confused, and after a minute or two of mumbling, the average person just gives up on speech entirely. The effect can be completely countered by plugging your ears, or just pushing on through anyway, as your brain can learn to adapt. Of course, if the gun doesn't silence a chronically disruptive person, the average company will likely resort to more extreme measures, like making the disruptive person leave.

Economic Creativity

The Korean, a Korean American man with some very fascinating takes on both his respective cultures and their interactions, has a fascinating article on why Korea will never produce a company quite like Apple. For cultural reasons. Wait, what?

The first surprising one is the superpower status of the home country. We Americans tend to think of our status as a superpower mostly in hard-power terms: Extensive military might, so many trillion dollars that we could outright buy at least 3 quarters of the countries out there, and the like, but the soft power is what's driving things here. People in incredibly diverse nations still love American ideas, culture, clothing, and inventions. That iPods and MacBooks are American designed is an active selling point in all but the most virulently anti-American areas of the world. The Korean points out that if the iPod were, say, Italian, it'd have difficulty selling outside of Italy. The modern internet's love of bands like Caramell (Swedish), O-Zone (Romanian), and singers like Eduard Khil (Russian) is actually an aberration historically, as most people prefer music in a language that they already speak, in a style appropriate to their own culture. Another culture's music typically sounds vaguely preposterous, unless that culture is a superpower that you feel you need exposure to for success. If the iPod was Korean....it'd probably be doomed unless well stocked with American music.

The Korean then went on to report that there used to be a site very much like Facebook many years before Facebook. It was perfect for Korea...proper language support, a style that suited Korean culture, and so on. One out of every four Koreans used it, a prospect that gets most businesses drooling. It then failed to expand past the borders of Korea when, surprise, things assumed to be true in Korea turn out to be totally false in other countries. The glam and glitter that appealed to Koreans looked like a cornball thing for a five year old girl in other countries. The extensive use of high density images that gave it its luster in Korea made it load slower than flowing glass in countries that didn't have as good a high speed network, which is pretty much all of them. And so today, those Koreans use Facebook. The network effect took off to the point where the older site just doesn't have your friends on it and facebook does. And today I've seen people use facebook to have friends across five oceans.

This isn't to say that being creative is not a cultural trait the Koreans have. My Korean-built cell phone is plenty creative. Korean ships can be found in every port. The creativity is clearly still there, but the domain and expression tends to be very different. Since Korea's independence in 1945, it went from the poorest country on earth (basically totally wrecked in World War II) to today in the top 7 wealthiest nations.

Nations are probably best off figuring out their strengths, and playing to them. If I wasn't so tired, I could probably draw a profound conclusion from this.

Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo appears in the news a lot these days. He is the recipient of a Nobel peace prize, one that the Chinese government is hell-bent in preventing him from actually receiving. The Chinese government is really enraged about him, and to know why I'll have to explain more about his prize and how he got it.
In 1977, a group of Czech intellectuals irritated the then communist Czech government by producing a document called the Charter 77, which demanded human rights and democracy, and lambasted the Czech government for denying its promises in this regard. Though the Czech government lashed out, ultimately the demands outlined in Charter 77 were upheld after the fall of communism. Liu Xiaobo and a large number of other Chinese intellectuals were inspired by this document, and made a similar one called Charter 08 (as it was written in 2008).
This clearly annoyed the Chinese government, who not only was very irritated to be criticized like that, but also considers human rights to be a load of western bullshit that would derail Mao's vision of an equal society. Mr. Liu then went on to further annoy them:

(It would take) 300 years of colonialism. In 100 years of colonialism, Hong Kong has changed to what we see today. With China being so big, of course it would require 300 years as a colony for it to be able to transform into how Hong Kong is today. I have my doubts as to whether 300 years would be enough.

These kinds of views are generally seen as seditious, and I think if I expressed any similar beliefs (if I advocated that it would be a good thing if America were to be conquered by another country, say Germany or China), I think I would be loudly denounced as a treasonous bastard, though not arrested. The Chinese government, nationalistically insulted, arrested Mr. Liu on grounds of sedition.
The Chinese government was further enraged when Mr. Liu was awarded the Nobel peace prize for the work on Charter 08, and its inability to lobby the Norwegian Government to influence the decision. (Members of the selection committee are chosen by the Norwegian parliament, but the government has no further input on selection and certainly enjoys nothing remotely similar to veto power.)
So that's why he's imprisoned, why the Chinese government is mad at Norway, and why shit will fly for years to come from all this. I argue that human rights, "Ren Quan" in Chinese, is an important part of Sun Yat Sen's "Minquan," or "people's power."

Defeating CAPTCHAs

Another coworker of mine mentioned to me that a hobby of his was defeating CAPTCHAs, and that instant, I realized that there were two completely different routes to do that. One social, and one technological. CAPTCHAs are, of course, a Completely Automated Public Touring test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Those squiggly letters you're forced to enter to post on a forum, register new accounts, or whatever. They make them to prevent mechanical submissions, which get really annoying, really quickly.
The technological approach is to basically reinvent OCR, Optical character Recognition. OCR has gotten a lot of funding as a way of automating the conversion of paper documents into computerized ones, to gain the advantages of computerized documents -- easy transmission, copying, editing, and so on. An OCR approach analyzes the graphical elements to determine which letter they were originally, and enters that. Supposedly, really good ones can work with just a 3-pixel row.
The social approach is to decide that only humans are capable of reading the bent and distorted letters of a CAPTCHA and convinces them to do so. One common approach is to offer something in exchange, like file downloads, or pornography. There are plenty of people who will willingly do just about anything to get more of those things, including decipher letter puzzles. It's not as fast, but it is plenty reliable. After all, the goal of the CAPTCHA maker is not technically circumvented, a human being is solving each and every one of their little puzzles. Just...not in the way they had hoped. Social attack CAPTCHA are promptly cached and used to hammer the server with mechanical submissions.
My coworker, however, said he took the technological approach. He took pride in the quality of his OCR craftsmanship, boasting on his only requiring of the right three rows to totally guess the correct answer.

The Fruit Machine

Mentally-ill engineering can also be used for evil. In Canada shortly after World War II, there was a paranoid fear that homosexual people would infiltrate the government and do whatever things that right-wing homophobes think that gay people are plotting to do. As an attempt to counter this, a machine was invented for the supposed purpose of identifying gays, which was about as effective as modern polygraph or the Vietnamese war's famous "Magic Eye." That is, it worked because people thought it did and then their own paranoia gave them away. They called it the "Fruit Machine," "Fruit" being one of many slang terms for a gay person.
The device resembled a dentist's chair, and had a screen and a camera. The screen showed pictures. Some were neutral pictures of scenery, math, or some other thing that held no interest. Some were pictures of naked women. Some were pictures of naked men. A crank theory popular at the time claimed that a person's eye dilated when exposed to things of interest to the person, so if a man's eyes dilated for the naked men pictures and not the naked women pictures.....WHOOP WHOOP GAY DETECTED!!!! Same if a woman responded more to the naked women pictures.
Except that this whole thing was fatally flawed. Pupils dilate more in response to changes in light than to perception of objects of interest. So if the lightbulb on the ceiling happened to flicker while the thing showed you pictures of your gender, it falsely flagged you as gay. And many gays went undetected. The camera had to be off to the side to prevent it from interfering with the screen, which made it often report dilation when actually there was merely a reflection in the pupil. It also produced unpredictable results if the subject had larger-than-average pupils, because it measured dilation by the diameter of the pupil and didn't calibrate first.
The devices were all dismantled in the 1970s after withering criticism from all angles. The device was demonstrably faulty, not only from the engineering standpoint, but also technically and even ontologically as homosexuality was ruled by a number of psychological institutes as not being a mental illness, but a normal human variation. Small comfort to those who lost their jobs and were forever scorned because of the errors of a machine, but at least the abuse stopped there.

Common Dreams

A study by a Hong Kong area psychologist found out that you, and I, and random people in Hong Kong, often have extremely similar dreams. There are some dreams that pretty much everyone on earth has, which is kind of strange because of the variety of cultures and lifestyles out there. I'll tell you some of mine, and the study shows that you almost certainly had them too.
As a young child, I often dreamed that I was driving a car with some other children. Sometimes the incongruity of this never hit me at the time, other times I had a nagging suspicion that maybe children shouldn't be driving cars, and maybe I'd get in trouble for it. Those stopped when I learned to actually drive. I also used to dream about having a fist fight with a person who couldn't be damaged. They could hurt me, though, and thankfully those stopped in college.
I used to dream about being naked in public, and boy was it embarrassing. In the more recent ones, however, I always seem to come to the realization that no one cares (at least in the dream), and so I don't have to be embarrassed. Perhaps my subconscious thinks that what I'm most embarrassed about really is no big deal to everyone else? And about two weeks ago, I had for the first time in my life that old chestnut of dreamers, falling out teeth.
In my senior year at college, I would have dreams in which a professor ruled me to be "stupid," and thus required me to repeat high school, or worse, junior high school. And I would feel humiliated...but the kids there only made fun of me for being "old," which really didn't bother me at all. Even though I'm easily now twice their age. And repeat high school was always so....easy.
Dreams common with other people, but that I generally haven't had, include being chased, searching for a specific place, having to pee but there being no suitable toilets (which I've had maybe once), eating lots of delicious foods (I'm going to guess these people are dieting), and suddenly being famous.
The psychologist, Dr. Calvin Kai-Ching Yu, also said that psychotic thinking was far more common in dreams than in people's waking environment. Believing that a famous person is in love with you despite any evidence to the contrary is, in waking life, a disorder called Erotomania, which suggests we keep you away from this person before you hurt that person or yourself. But in dreams, at least half the people worldwide have that experience. Dr. Yu said that psychotic-thinking based dreams are actually the most common kind, and that draws some interesting questions. Could many mental disorders actually stem from a damaged ability to tell dreams from waking experience? (And I can't tell you how many times I've woken up convinced of something, only to realize that it couldn't possibly be true.)
The most surprising thing about this is the way that people from different cultures have almost exactly the same dreams. One would think that, say, French and American and Hong-Kong-ian people would have different dreams because their waking lives are so totally different. What those three people would chose to wear, and do, and deal with other people, and eat, and so on, are all totally different. Then they all go to bed and have a dream where their teeth fall out. That is the weirdest thing I have heard all month.

Population Pressure

Governments and corporations would like there to be more people. More people means more money flowing about, and more power to be had, and everything just goes faster. Environmentalists would like there to be less. More people means more used resources. More displaced wilderness as we require more cities, more farms, more mining, more everything. And both sides would, I imagine, like to apply pressure. Most famously, earlier this week Iran's government suggested dialing back the marriage age as a way of encouraging growth.
I think a major factor in people's decisions about reproducing are about resources. Not the biggest factor. The biggest factor is personal attitude towards reproducing. Someone who thinks it's their duty to God to have more children will have more than someone who thinks it's a burden on the Earth's ever-dwindling resources. But resources plays a role too. When food and toys and housing and education are expensive, and work opportunities are few, children are going to feel like a luxury that one just can't afford. One feels that any children one brings into the world will be living a life of deprivation and want, never sure where their next meal is coming from.
Or, even connecting couples can be a problem. In societies that strictly segregate men and women, men and women tend not to know each other very well. One may want to start a family, but in this kind of society, one has no idea how to go about doing it. Maybe you could talk to your parents or friends about it, and maybe someone knows someone who knows someone who you can hook up with, but it does make it far less likely. And even if you do manage to meet, you're so unfamilar with each other's upbringings that you may very well develop a relational train wreck. In other societies, people are so shy that they don't connect well. It's hard to want to marry someone who's afraid to hang out with you, or tell you what they're really thinking.
So, should society encourage more or less reproduction, and if so...how?

Synthetic Hair

A number of charities allow you to donate hair. You wouldn't think hair would be useful, but the most common use is making wigs for little girls who have cancer. The treatment for cancer costs them their natural hair, and having a wig makes them feel more...normal...about the whole thing. For this reason, they want long hair pretty much exclusively. If the hair is too long for the recipient, she can always cut it. If the hair's too short...well, not much can be done about that. If hair isn't long enough for that, it's also proven well at absorbing oil slicks. Or it can be made into brushes.
All hair use, however, is just a little insufficient. We get a lot from haircuts, and from Indian widows who are required, for religious reasons, to shave their heads when their husbands die, but we need so much more. So it's time to look into substitutes. Doll hair uses nylon fibers, and kind of resembles hair good enough for a paint brush. Not quite good enough on a human being.The texture is vaugely wrong, and not quite bouncy enough. A better substitute can be found in animal hair. Horses have some very good hair for this purpose in their manes and tails, and angora rabbit's hair would be perfect if it could be gotten long enough. Either would be fine with being shaven in hot weather. In fact, horses often prefer it, as their natural mane has a way of getting dirty and tangled, requiring vigorous brushing. Ask a parent with a toddler what their child thinks of being brushed, horses are about the same about it.
I think the best solution, however, would be reverse-engineering the way that horse and rabbit hair grows, and producing an artificial version of the same, be it chemical or biological (grown in a vat). Then we'd have all the hair we want. Wigs? One for everybody. Insulation? Now with hair for extra creepiness! Oil slick? We'll drown it in nylon hair bags!

Hikkikomori City

"Hikkikomori" is a culturally-specific psychological syndrome, affecting only people of Japanese cultural upbringing. People with this condition are withdrawn and fearful of interacting with other people, and tend to live in their parents basement well into old age. They tend not to work, shrink from education, and spend all of their time on hobbies, much to the great irritation of everyone around them. The closest way to describe them in western psychology terms would be a mix of Agoraphobia (they do not wish to leave their homes at times), avoidant personality disorder (they really don't want to interact with anyone besides their families), Autism (they tend to have very narrow, obsessive hobbies, and again the not fitting in with society thing), and extreme shyness (they find even talking to a shop clerk to buy something unbearable). Japanese psychologists claim there are up to 1 million such people in Japan. Their parents all wish they'd just move out and get a goddamn job already.
I'm imagining a city, built beneath a mountain, and having space for up to 1 million people. A train, subway style, connects this city to the rest of Japan. The city is made of little rooms cut from the stone, and has electricity, water, and Internet. There are many gloomy apartments, perfect for Hikikomori hobbies. And living here has...conditions.
For one, people living here will be charged rent. You can earn it with psychological studies on re-socializing the Hikikomori, or, we'd have a number of jobs that don't require dealing with the general public. (Socializing tends to be easier for 'Hikki" people if the other person is also one. For one, there's a greater chance of empathy in the encounter.) Many jobs would revolve around things the person could do in a small room by them-self, like programming, art, industrial design, or assembly of small objects (which would arrive and be sent back by pneumatic tube). The most extroverted position available would be store clerk, who would sell things to people feeling particularly brave that day. (I predict most goods would be sold by vending machine.) Most contact would be by internet and telephone, which these kinds of people tend to be more comfortable with than face-to-face contact.
The train would regularly go back to surface Japan, so that people could visit their famlies, and hopefully, report an improved quality of life. Japan would probably want to regularly send in psychologists, both to study the disorder and to provide therapy to make people able to function outside this little city beneath the mountain.
If this existed, it would also test a theory popular with Japanese psychologists, that "Hikkis" are the way they are because they have different ideas about independence, interdependence, and the self, which subjects them to intense bullying in Japanese society, which makes them socially withdraw. If this theory is true, then "Hikki City" would thrive. If they are, like western psychologists suspect, just really obsessive agoraphobics with varying degrees of autism, then I think "Hikki city" residents would tend to not pay their rent until forced to move back to their family's home in shame.

Bread and Circuses

In the later part of the Roman Empire, the roman government spent fortunes providing bread and entertainment to the masses. This was not out of the goodness of their hearts. One enraged person can be ignored, but riotous masses have a way of ruining everything when they get past a certain amount of frustrated. Namely, they tend to take what they need to survive by force. And then set things on fire just to show how truly pissed off they are.
In fact, in the countries where communist revolutions succeeded, I've noticed three common factors:
1. A useless and insufferable aristocratic class
2. A large body of intellectuals
3. Starving and enraged peasant masses
The local communist party recruits its main body from the intellectuals, and makes promises to the peasants along the lines of bread, circuses, and employment, and blames everything on the aristocrats. Which they then have killed as a way of solving those problems. Allthough Karl Marx was still thousands of years in the future, as was his idea of communism, Rome was trying to prevent this sort of thinking, which wouldn't have ended well for the aristocrats. And worse for the emperor himself, who was usually at the forefront of helping out.
A good economist can draw a modern lesson from this, I'm sure. And probably something lest costly than free bread and stab shows.

Watching the Watchers

The Roman poet Juvenal once asked "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", Latin for "Who will guard the guards themselves?" Referring to the ever-recursive problem of corrupt police and other officials. The police are expected to protect you against crime, but if the police themselves are corrupt, then society is just sort of out of luck on that aspect. Worrisome, as there are two kinds of people who want to be police officers. One type wants to be helpful and bring peace to the community, and should be encouraged, but the other loves power, and to boss people around, and should be discouraged. (The second kind is also deeply corruptible, further harming everything around them.)
In most modern police forms, this is answered with a police-of-police department, called Internal Affairs. Their job is to investigate complaints against police officers, and arrest those who engage in illegal acts. The Internal Affairs department is unpopular with the police for the same reason that police are unpopular with the general public: they're the ones telling you that no, you can't, and the rules apply every time with no chance of exceptions. No you can't plant evidence on a guy you don't like. No, you can't beat up people who pester you. No, you can't except bribes. Not even this one time. (Just as the regular police tell you that no, you cannot have a loud party at 3am. Not even just this once.)
The other day I was thinking about this, and jury duty, which is expected of the American population, and this gave me an idea. What if, in communities with low trust for the police, we call in random people for police-oversight duty? When called, you become an internal affairs officer for the day, investigating and rooting out corruption. Random people will gain insight into police activity, why they do as they do, and police officers will have every incentive to do their jobs properly and professionally. The watchers will be watched themselves...by everyone.
Probably excessive, as I hear that Internal Affairs does a good enough job as it is.

Understanding the opposite sex

If there's one sociological problem that totally baffles people, it's dealing with the opposite sex. Especially when they're heterosexual and dealing with a significant other. Poll after poll suggests people's confusion and aggravation.
Part of the reason is people's ignorance of the other side's socialization. We were not magically created as adults, but began life as babies, who grew up into children, then to teenagers, and finally adulthood after many years. During our formative years, we learn things, culturally, about how a man or woman is supposed to act. These lessons quickly become subconscious. We act on them without even realizing it.
As an example of this, emotional expression. Men in American society are taught that it's unmanly to show any strong emotion other than anger. A man can be weakly happy or sad about something, but a man who bursts into tears expects to be derided as pathetic for doing so. On the other side of the gender divide, an American woman is expected to show more happiness than her own feelings have. She's expected to be majorly happy in minorly happy circumstances, mildly happy in neutral circumstances, and neutral in mildly sad circumstances. Also, she's not supposed to show anger, no matter how much she feels. Typically, she sits on such feelings until they explode. Both of these lead to major misunderstandings. She finds his apparent indifference infuriating, and he finds her abrupt outbursts irrational. (Because she's not just angry, she's burning inside with the fury of a thousand suns, and if she were merely angry, she would have kept silent.)
A common complain from both genders is a lack of observational skills. You changed your clothes, or your haircut, and your significant other doesn't even notice! I usually hear this from women, though a poll I read suggest that many men feel gripy about this too. Perhaps you worry that if your partner doesn't notice that big a change, then maybe they wouldn't notice if you were replaced with a completely different man/woman (insert as appropriate) altogether! Though I think this is normal. People do tend to be change blind if it happens behind their back. If a man doesn't watch his girlfriend's hair get cut, then he'll run into her later, and stop his noticing at "my girlfriend is here." That's good enough for him, but not for her. Apparently, the other way around works too.
I have a report here, from Japan, about the top ten things that Japanese women are confused about their boyfriends or husbands, and 9 out of 10 of them apply to American relationships too.

1. He was desperate to date you, but once you started dating he no longer cares

I think this is a "thrill of the chase" thing. When he was single, acquiring a relationship was a major goal. Now that he has a girlfriend, doing things to further the relationship don't occur to him.

2. He thinks he’s really doing well if his girlfriend can cook a stew
[there appear to be some substantial differences in opinion between the sexes as to how easy it is to prepare Japanese cuisine based on stewing, or "nimono"]

I think this is Japanese-cultural specific, because it means nothing to me. Stew? It seems to be saying that the men in this relationship are impressed with things that the women consider trivial. (He's impressed because he can't cook at all, and she's not impressed because she's made this a gazillion times while single, what's the big deal?)

3. He thinks it’s all over once you get married

In both America and Japan, women expect their standard of living to go up when they get married, as they will share in their husband's resources, get higher status in society as a household leader, and present a unified face to society, and she can now have socially respectable children if she desires.
The men in both societies, however, are expecting their standard of living to go down. They expect that their now wives will take the relationship for granted and stop trying to impress them. They expect to be pressured to buy expensive things to improve the wife's social status. Many of the things that affect him now are now out of his control. If his wife wants children, and he doesn't, he will be pressured to have children anyway, and society will mock him as selfish for resisting. If his wife doesn't want children but he does, he will be expected to again cooperate with the wife's wishes and ignore his own. (Though society does encourage women to want children, and pester them if they don't. A husband is not permitted to be the source of this pressure.)

4. Even though he has a girlfriend he still goes on group dates (goukon) for fun

I'd want to know how serious going for a "group date" is in Japan. Assuming the worst, that it is a romantic kind of thing, I suppose one could see it innocently as enjoying the attention (but coming home to the girlfriend every day, thus choosing her over the other girls), and at worst as being a total womanizer who wants a massive harem.

5. Whenever he’s with his friends he starts talking tough

This is a socialization thing in both our societies. He's expected to show a tough and macho face to his friends.

6. He thinks he can see his girlfriend any time he likes so she becomes a low priority

Did you know that neurological studies show that considering the opposite sex makes the part of our brain associated with tool use light up, and the part associated with dealing with people remain quiet? (Shame on him anyway.)

7. He tries to impress with his manliness by eating large helpings and hot dishes

This is a socialization thing again. Men are expected to extremity any factor that distinguishes them from women, hence what started with eating more because he's larger (and requires more food to maintain his body) turned into eating even more than that ... because he's male. The spicy thing is because men are expected to be stoic in the face of pain, to the point of inviting it to demonstrate his might. (I'm not afraid of spicy! Rrrarrrgh! _{ow ow ow ow make it stop})

8. He says he doesn’t see the point in marrying so he won’t marry

He thinks his quality of life will go down, and doesn't fully grasp how his girlfriend's quality of life would go up.

9. He won’t ask people about things he doesn’t know as he doesn’t want to be indebted to them

A man in American society is expected to be independent, and to know things. Not knowing things (or at least admitting as such) is being dependent on other people. For an American man to admit that he doesn't know something will make him feel like he's being childish. Apparently a different, but related, dynamic appears with Japanese men.

10. He ignores his girlfriend and talks solely about himself

He knows himself better than he knows his girlfriend. Been together longer, you see. This is probably a bad habit left over from single days when he was only expected to look out for himself.

Why One World Government Will Never Happen

One item I've been repeatedly told by various conspiracy theorists is that there's a big conspiracy to combine all countries into one very large one that covers all territory on earth. This nation would unify the legal codes and currencies, and resistance would be futile. Mostly because it would be impossible to move away from it.
It's...not going to happen. For a number of reasons.
For one, governments literally can't just impose whatever dictate they feel like. And I can't think of an issue that this government could take a position on without driving some part of the world into riotous anger, with pitchforks and foaming mouthes and looting and burning. Economics? The kind that would please, say, India, would send the US's central regions into a fit. And vice versa. Religion? Everyone wants theirs to be the official one, and all the others banned. And no, no one cares about the massive contradiction this would involve. A few tolerant people are willing to live side by side, but there's not nearly enough of them.
Even currency will involve massive conflicts. Countries mostly choose strong currency or weak currency strategies based on what kind of industries they have. If we have only one country on Earth, we clearly can only chose one. Regions that have the "wrong" suiting on this will be infuriated.
But the biggest reason that this would fail is that we have no commonalities. Most countries have a shared identity, be it ethnic or ideological. And we humans can only, at the neurological level, comprehend the existence of about 150 people. Attempting the circumvent this leads to stereotyping, racism, and other means of "lumping" people you have little to do with into one person. So to try to "lump" 6, almost 7, billion people together, when they have nothing in common and will spend the entire time stereotyping each other, and all hell would break loose.
Lastly, the benefits to this are questionable. A unified government might have slightly increased trade, maybe, if it somehow managed to retain order, which it probably wouldn't. Mostly, it'd be like the current German - Greek crisis, to the billionth power, and with way more guns and pitchforks. And every country on Earth is, to a degree, in debt. A one world government would assume every last one of those.
So for pathetic benefits and massive drawbacks, this is worth basically no one's while, so it'll never happen.

Trolling Big Brother

Though the totalitarian states of George Orwell's writings have diminished to just two, minor acts of big brotherish douchebaggery spread around the world, deeply annoying people. Various acts of activism are proposed to deal with it, none as effective as the planners hoped.
So what to do about it? How about trolling the authorities? Wait, no that won't work. They have absolute power over you. How can you annoy someone who's thousands of times more powerful than you? In Max's Stubfield's hillarious parody, he does it by being insufferably ignorant and trival, being too compliant to actually punish, but still grotesquely irritating and impossible to deal with. He gets privacy by being too boring and annoying to actually watch.
Which is what he wanted in the first place. Muahahahahaha!

Chinese correlation

China has some 5000 or so years of history, most of which have very detailed records. The current government took censuses, recorded astrological events, described major issues, and stored a massive library of literature that grew over time. And periodically, it collapsed and was replaced with a different one, the details of the rebellion also being added to the records. A historian reports that the records all had something in common, namely, they all occured during periods of local climate cooling.
Now, correlation isn't causation. Ice cream sales are linked to riots, but to claim that ice cream causes riots is insane. There's a common factor in those, namely the hot weather. (People buy ice cream during hot weather to enjoy the cool sensation, but the hot weather also makes them way crankier.) The historian believes that the colder weather caused more crop failures, which lead to social instability ("I'm starving! Why's that jackass eating?!?!") which lead to revolution. And conquest, as China's neighbors became more interested in conquest when their own positions were undermined.
If the historian's findings were correct, then threatened dynasties could have saved themselves with some sort of food relief program. Tragically for them, this never occured to them, and they now reside in the dustbin of history.

What's a fan worth?

Social networks have long had the ability for people to point out what they like, and to pester their friends with this information. Why? Partially for social reasons, people like to be with people that enjoy the same things that they do. But now, Business magazine Forbes reveals that there's a cash value associated with this.
Someone clicking an "I like this" button on a social network is worth $136.37 to a marketer. This number comes from estimations on how much more of something a fan buys vs. a non-fan, how often they tell their friends (the ever famous "viral marketing" that has many marketing firms violently salivating), how loyal they are (so that they don't switch to the competition just because the competition gave a minor discount), and how likely they are to buy again. All of these are factors that marketers pay out the nose for.
Of course, the only difference since social networking is that now this is obvious, even blatant, and public. Before, companies might have noticed that some people were more vigorously pleased with the brand, bought it more often, and so on, but now people are practically putting a little badge indicating their fan-dom.

Obesity is Unsexy

Discovery News has another reason to diet and exercise: being fat hurts your sex life.
Apparently this comes from a statistical study. The higher the participants BMI (Body Mass Index, which admittedly is just a mathematical measure of weight vs. height rather than an actual measurement of how fat a person is), the less often they had sex, the more often they had sex-related problems like impotence, and the more likely a woman was to mess up on birth control and wind up with an unplanned pregnancy. (Men apparently were not impeded from condom use, if it went up at all in the first place.) Also, the obese were more likely to contract an STD.
Part of this is likely sociological. We live in a society that rules that being fat is gross. But part of this is also medical. Being overweight apparently is hard on a lot of your body's systems. If your body feels it has to sacrifice something, sex is often it's first choice. (After all, if you're not healthy enough to have sex properly, how will you manage the possibility of parenthood?) The two likely combine with each other, where fat people become more insecure, and insecure people do less to avoid being fat. And people wind up both and desperately unhappy.
I think the evidence suggests that obese people are being more sloppy about sex when they do manage to have it. Possibly because it's so rare that, well, can't be bothered with abstractions like STD and pregnancy avoidance.
Next, the study where we figure out something useful to do with this.

Another reason why TV is bad for you

Parents hate TV. It encourages their children to lay about and expect passive entertainment. It encourages them to ask for toys that are advertised. Children that are watching TV probably aren't playing outside, doing their homework, or doing whatever else parents want them to be doing.
Discovery News has a new, more damning, report that a diet of all advertised foods is absolutely hideous for your health. I believe I can readily explain why.
A business wants to buy raw ingredients as cheap as possible, sell the finished product for as much as possible, and sell in as great a quantity as possible, as possible. Cheap food is not good for you. Cheap food processed to encourage greater consumption is worse for you still. But that same cheap processed food is the most profitable type to sell. So its advertised the most heavily. Also, considerable research is done into making it pleasing to the eye and taste bud. Unappealing food just doesn't sell.
So vegetables and other health food just kind of loses out. It's not engineered to be more appealing, what little advertising it has is mostly drowned out by ads for cheap processed food, and sits forgotten at the back of the refrigerator.
I think reversing this will require revising farm bills. Subsidizing broccoli and brussel sprouts instead of corn would result in broccoli and brussel sprouts being cheap, and thus incorporated in as many foods as possible.