OK, the meme is really funny but hear me out: I lived it. Sort of. I did not fuck any buildings but (#story coming)

About 15 years ago I developed, with some excellent undergrad research assistants, a method of (we hoped) assessing sexual aggressiveness potential in straight men for future research studies. This isn't super special; there are many of these. I study sexual aggression (mostly).

Well, we needed a method of knowing how good the assessment system was. Our response: if we make a randomly-selected group of participants horny, they should have higher scores on our assessment compared to the non-horny group. Thus, I spent many nights hunting the web for public-domain or CC images of hot ladies in skimpy bathing suits. I found 20 or so photos, vetted by half a dozen undergrad men who agreed they were arousing.

Of course it's much more convincing if you have a control condition that is similar to the experimental condition in every way except the factor you're manipulating (i.e., horniness). Thus I spent many other nights hunting for public domain or CC-licensed photos of interesting architecture. Buildings. The experimental group would spend a few minutes looking at attractive women (and we hoped getting sexually aroused, at least a little), and the control group would do the same thing, but with interesting buildings.

We ran the study. We found fuck all for this manipulation check: there was no statistically significant difference in our sexual aggressiveness measure between the men who looked at boobs and those who looked at buildings.

I really should publish this someday.

i was feeling dejected about the lack of results one evening. My wife at the time heard my story and said,

"There's your problem. Those are some sexy buildings."

(edited for typos etc.)

#research #architecture #psychology #meme

People think the #Matrix was about robots. It wasn't. It was about operating systems.

#Windows is the blue pill.

You take it, and everything stays comfortable. Pretty icons. Friendly sounds. A setup wizard asking if you want to save your soul to the #cloud. Updates appear at the worst possible moment like a Marvel post-credit scene nobody asked for. Your #PC reboots. You cry. #Microsoft thanks you for improving your experience.

#Linux is the red pill.

You wake up. You see how deep the #RabbitHole goes.

At first, it is terrifying. The #terminal stares at you like Darth Vader asking if you know the power of the #CommandLine. You type one wrong character and feel like you accidentally launched nuclear missiles.

But then something changes. You realize your #computer actually belongs to you.

No ads in the Start Menu. No #AI assistant spying harder than a reality TV producer.

No mysterious background process eating half your #RAM like Pac-Man after three energy drinks.

You choose what gets installed. You choose when #updates happen. You choose what your #desktop looks like.

You are Neo.

Windows #users are still sitting in their pods, downloading the latest mandatory #update called KB-Whatever-Again, wondering why their printer suddenly speaks ancient Sumerian.

Linux is not perfect. Sometimes Wi-Fi drivers behave like a side quest in Dark Souls.

Sometimes you spend two hours fixing a problem just to feel smarter than everyone else.

But that is the point. The red pill was never about comfort. It was about #freedom.

And freedom means occasionally reading a forum post written by a Finnish guy in 2007 who solved your #problem and vanished forever like a #Jedi master.

Welcome to Linux. There is no spoon. Only #sudo.

#meme #choice #os #software #foss #floss #opensource #gnu #gpl #computer #user #nerd #just4fun #system