Your Momma Likes Big Butts and She Cannot Lie

Your mom, she likes you. She's a big fan. She thinks you're awfully sharp and a real hoot at the dinner table. And she'll keep thinking this even as the patio swing snaps its chains and plummets through the veranda. Because parents just don't understand that their kids might be fat, (or, for that matter, sort of dumb, or complete assholes) according to findings just presented at the American College of Gastroenterology's shebang in Orlando (yeah, Orlando. There are levels of irony here that boggle the noggin)

Researchers at the University of Washington mailed surveys to parents whose children were, to use a sort-of-postive you-might-be-a-winner phrasing, in the top 30% of BMI (short for body mass index; it's not just a rapacious music publishing conglomerate). According to the press release,

[E]ven though all of the children had elevated BMI, less than 13 percent of the parents of overweight kids reported their child as currently overweight. Fewer than one-third perceived that their child's risk for adult obesity was above average or very high.

Now, Lunar Weight was a helluva chubster at one point in our physical development, and really only slimmed down thanks to an intensive regimen of not making any money, so we can understand the role that "hope" plays here. But considering the fact that obesity puts you at increased risk for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, having to play catcher in tee-ball, and, according to a recent study in Neurology, eventually becoming a drooling idiot, you'd think some sort of alarm bells would go off in between pinching those nummy apple cheeks.

Yeah, no. That 13% figure indicates a serious lack of actually looking around to see if maybe, just maybe, there's something different about your own lil' fry. A nice hypothesis to our mind is the good old evolutionary psychological one (Now with 87% Less Replicability!), namely that to a parent, it's far more important that your child look like it might have the calorie stores to survive famine, flu, or mom and dad getting strangled in their sleep by gibbons. Stents and thrombolytics and those little snack wafers the diabetic kids got that LW was always jealous about don't enter into it at all.

On the shallow front (in which we are, okay fine, the shock troops), we're likewise less apt to heavily weight our spawn's future ability to snag their own supertasty vehicle for future genetic commingling. Heck, Lunar Weight doubts most poeple are particularly well programmed to think sanely about their kids post-menarche naughty bits at all, with some exceptions.

Still, an ounce of perspective is worth a pound of cure.

No, not a poundcake of cure. Are you even listening?

Fine, fuck it, your kid's a Rockwell painting. Hey, how's your health insurance looking these days?

{from the Thighmasters who constitute the American College of Gastroenterology}

Thus Explaining Why, Last Time Lunar Weight Was Dumped, We Got Really Into Tangrams

Pattern-forming behaviors are a response to perceived lack of control, according to a study in the new issue of Science. One could argue that pattern-forming behavior as a consequence of lack of control causes pattern-forming behavior in scientists, but one might run the risk of appearing pedantic. Or worse, of being meta, a label which doubtless will get applied to poor LW by the legions of schemers and manipulators that work towards our downfall.

That wasn't exaggeration for the sake of topical humor. We really are that fucking paranoid monomaniacal. We blame the meds, and also the enormous burden of being such transcendent examples of a human animal.

But back to the matter at hand. According to the press release, "researchers showed that individuals who lacked control were more likely to see images that did not exist, perceive conspiracies, and develop superstitions."

The research, performed on bunnies bunny-like undergrads, employed six different tests to see how perceptions changed in response to lack of control—generally speaking, a carefully planned activity meant to frustrate (though, in the universal case of undergrads, the researchers coulda just searched students' bags before the kids left the dining hall). The frustrated subjects were more likely to see identifiable objects in pictures of static, ascribe success or failure to supernatural or ritual causes, and assume that there are things going on behind their back.

In other words, a bunch of Psych 100 students were fried by a damp preteen, but not before they posted some crap about having a secret crush to their MySpace and told everyone to pass it on or no one would ever have sex again and kitten Jesus would cry and then finished with their woman 'cause she couldn't help them with their mind.

And how was news of this finding reported? With, naturally, endlessly referring to the economy.

Except the Chicago Tribune, which naturally referenced baseball, proving once and for all LW's hypothesis that Harry Caray is L. Ron Hubbard.

(for further details, check out the .PDF transcript of an interview with the study's lead author, Jennifer Whitson, from Science's homepage. It's great reading, except for the crap bit where she talks about "pitchers and batters being very superstitious ... . But you didn't see outfielders being that superstitious." Jenny, love, if you were told in Little League that you were an outfielder but not a batter, it was a grievous insult.)

{from the Type A's at ScienceNOW}