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Just so you know.
You might remember that Randy and I have had a fair few posts and comments about food and nutrition in the past. Well I’m just back from our annual gasshuku in Virginia. The long weekend was brilliant, as always, and I’m sure there will be a few pictures from it coming up. But I also got a chance to see Randy’s new vegetable garden, and he sent me back to St Louis with an ice-chest packed with lettuce, herbs, chard, carrots, peas and squash. Here is just some of the treasure:
Veggies from Randy's garden.
At Takushoku there was a chance your sempai might kill you. Mine are sending me home with heirloom carrots. Better, no?
I thought this was a pretty interesting blog post. (Hat-tip to Greg Restall.)
It has been my (merely anecdotal) experience that people who have been exposed to habitual violence are often very reluctant to wear a certain sartorial item: the tie.
Now I suppose the best explanation for this might be that the kind of people who are exposed to habitual violence most often are the kind of people who would be reluctant to wear ties anyway, but in talking to people about this I’ve often had the impression that their main concern was defensive; they were less concerned about wearing clip-on “ties” for example. So I thought this article about schools in the UK switching to clip-ons was interesting.
Full personal disclosure: I had to wear a tie at school and I have the evidence to prove it (although apparently I hadn’t got the hang of the Windsor knot yet – mine is the straggly one on the far right in the second row from the top.)
- Anti-oxidants nullify some benefits of exercise?
- Crank, crank, crank. (Careful what you say about this one, the British Chiropractic Association is getting litigious over Singh’s use of the word “bogus” and one of the weirder aspects of the case: the point of contention doesn’t appear to be over whether the BCA is making false claims, but over whether they’re making false claims deliberately. If I were their press officer, I’m not sure I would have advised them to get into this one.)
- Michael Pollan: In Defence of Food This is a great book, but if you have any faith left in the claims of nutritional science, it’ll tear it to shreds. Really, if you had any trust left at all it’ll make you sad. (“Wait! All that milk/bran/low-fat X, for nothing?!) But you should read it anyway.
I’ll try to post something less nihilistic soon…
I was sick tonight, and so had to sit and watch tonight’s casual training session in Bob’s garden. It did allow me to get a few photos of Bob training Dave though…
Training with inner tubes.
Some links from around the intertubes:
- Ikigai has a hilarious post on 5 very bad martial arts ideas.
- I don’t know if we’ve ever linked to this, but it’s so jaw-droppingly amazing that it’s time we did: David Bowie gets a karate lesson. Of course, who needs karate when you’ve got the Goblin army?
- This is for those of you aren’t shy of a little heavy. (If you look closely you’ll see that Beer Runner actually appears to be a magazine for runners … who like beer.)
- And finally, strength isn’t everything they say, but here’s some inspiration to step into the power-rack before the day is over.
Today marks the 45 year anniversary of the murder of Kitty Genovese, the event which prompted Darley and Latane’s ground-breaking work into what is now widely referred to as Bystander Effect.
One of the more disturbing things about the Genovese murder was that it did not take place in an isolated area. The police investigation revealed that more than 38 people had heard the attack – including Genovese’s repeated screams for help – but still no-one had helped her. No-one even called the police.
The newspaper editorials at the time dredged up the usual explanations: declining moral standards, the corruption of city life etc., but Darley and Latane had a couple of hypotheses that they thought might go some way to explaining what had happened. They were
- that when there are many bystanders – people also observing the situation who are in a position to act – people use the reactions of these others to interpret the situation, and to decide whether it is really one that requires action.
- that when there are many bystanders, each person feels a diminished responsibility for acting, as if the responsibility could be shared out between them.
They used some ingenious – and now famous – experiments to establish Bystander Effect. For example, they asked subjects to complete a written test under exam conditions with two other people in the room. Unbeknownst to the subject, the other two people are not other volunteers, but actors in the employ of the psychologists. While they are all taking the test, smoke gradually begins to enter and fill the room from a vent. The actors are paid to ignore the smoke and continue to take the test as if nothing is wrong. The experiment found that subjects who shared the room with the actors were significantly more likely to ignore the smoke than the control subjects who took the test alone (and tended to go for help, go out to ask about the smoke etc.)
A different experiment placed a number of subjects in individual booths that were connected by microphones and told them that they wanted to gather information about pressures faced by college students. They were told that the researchers would not be listening to the discussion at the beginning, to allow the students to get more comfortable before they began (actually to remove the obvious authority figure from the situation). One of the “subjects” (an actor) would stage an epileptic fit in the midst of the discussion, at a point where he had the mic, so that all the subjects could hear him (and none of them could hear each other.) The experimenters found that the subjects’ response to the event declined with the number of others they also believed to have heard it. For example, “eighty-five percent of the subjects who thought they alone knew of the victim’s plight reported the seizure … only 31% of those who thought four other by-standers were present did so”. (Bystander Intervention in Emergencies, Darley and Latane.)
The lessons of Bystander Effect for martial artists would seem to include at least these. First, don’t underestimate bystander effect on YOURSELF. Be aware that it is normal to feel more reluctance to intervene in a situation where there are many other bystanders, and that this natural tendency might be something that you consciously need to overcome, so that YOU are the person who speaks up, or who calls the police, or provides first aid, or who (where appropriate) intervenes physically. And second, be aware of the bystander effect on OTHER PEOPLE. Be realistic about the likely effects of things like shouting for help, setting off a car alarm or using a rape attack alarm – just because lots of people can hear you doesn’t mean that lots of people are going to help you. Be aware that if you are providing first aid after a fight or an accident, you may have to actually single someone out in the group of bystanders and say “YOU, call an ambulance and the police”, or “YOU, give me your coat”, since less specific requests for such things may receive less response.
Robert Miller CPT CES
Gillian Russell
Randy Simpson
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