Men Without Heads

A couple of breakthroughs in science this week:

1. Men and women are different.

I always had a hunch, but I guess now I can really be sure--men and women are different. As the article states, "The science proves it." Thank goodness we have science, otherwise we may have to trust observation or reason.

The best part is that these scientists are not done with this study:

"The larger implications of this work, as well as other work pointing in the same direction, is that we may increasingly find out that there are differences in the 'hard wiring' of male and female brains."

"We'd like to push forward in this area," added Bell, a Killam scholar at the U of A. "It hasn't been seen yet how this information can be used to help patients, but more work in this area may lead to that."

Let's hope their funding keeps pouring in, we may discover more differences between men and women. Oh, the possibilities!

2. There is something common to all humanity, no matter what race or nationality.

Ok, this one is technically billed as "art," not science, but it is technology that has allowed these people to understand the commonality shared by all humans:

Marwa Morsi, a 16-year-old junior in the school's Arts, Humanities and Communications Academy, was taken by the machine's promotion of unity. The deeper message of the race machine, said Morsi, who is of Middle Eastern descent, was that "everyone's the same on the inside. It's the outside that's different."

This common link of all people was demonstrated in a fascinating way:

Within seconds, the machine morphs his image, projecting color photos of how Hawthorne, who considers himself white, would look if he were Asian, black, Hispanic, East Indian and Middle Eastern. Hawthorne, a fine-arts major at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, W.Va., says he sees a bit of himself in each picture.

Of course he sees a bit of himself in each picture! It is still a picture of him, just morphed with another photo. Who knew the end to racism could be found in Adobe Photoshop?

It's just a funny article all around, but I have to give the creator of the race machine some credit. At least she recognized the irony of having to use physical stereotypes to create a machine that is supposed to break down stereotypes:

Then Burson chose the "most representative photographs of each race" to develop composites, she said, adding that this process was the most difficult. She felt as if it went against the principles of nonjudgment and racial unity the machine was meant to represent, she said.

"I struggled with . . . 'You know, everybody is beautiful to me. Now I have to decide what's going to look better. What's going to blend better. What composite can I arrive at that's going to blend with everybody's faces,' " Burson recalled. "I felt like I was judging people on their appearance."

[Also, as a disclaimer to anyone who thinks this race machine is real art, I concede that I have no taste. My wife loves Mark Rothko, but I can't tell the difference between his level of talent and what it took Warhol to do his Oxidation Paintings.]