tired fools

Your typical office, or public, building tends to have some kind of receptacle for spent cigarettes. They tend to have some kind of abrasive surface to stub it out, and somewhere to put the butt. We (smokers) expect such things.

Today I happened to be visiting a hospital in South Wales. Right outside the main entrance was this:

Actually an intercom for when the main doors close after 10pm.

Zac likes to play PS3 first person shooters. So do I. Interestingly he’s said more than once that if he was ever in a real war then he would just hide.

Via Rob (and boingboing) a new study:

The researchers also found that: 1) Players showed no signs of desensitization over the course of multiple play sessions; and 2) Subjects who tested higher for psychoticism (based on a pre-trial psychoticism questionnaire) experienced less anxiety from killing enemies. That higher psychoticism would correlate with lower negative feelings about violence is not surprising. It is interesting, however, that players showed no signs of physiological or emotional desensitization. While this doesn’t necessarily disprove that desensitization to videogame violence can occur over long periods of time, it does suggest that brief exposure has little or no desensitizing effect.