The University of Florida, Florida State University found that physically attractive people almost instantly attract the attention of the interlocutor, sobesednitsy with them, literally, it is difficult to make eye. This conclusion was reached by a series of psychological experiments, which were determined by the people who believe in sending the first seconds after the acquaintance. Here, a curious feature: single, unmarried experimental preferred to look at the guys, beauty opposite sex, and family, people most often by representatives of their sex.

The authors believe that this feature developed a behavior as a result of the evolution: a man trying to find a decent pair to acquire offspring. If this is resolved, he wondered potential rivals. Detailed information about this magazine will be published Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In turn, a joint study of the Rockefeller University, Rockefeller University and Duke University, Duke University in North Carolina revealed that women are perceived differently by men smell. During experiments studied the perception of women one of the ingredients of male pheromone-androstenona smell, which is contained in urine or sweat.

The results were startling: women are part of this repugnant odor, and the other part is very attractive, resembling the smell of vanilla, and the third group have not felt any smell. The authors argue that the reason is that the differences in the receptor responsible for the olfactory system, from different people are different.

It has long been proven that mammals (including human) odor is one way of attracting the attention of representatives of the opposite sex. A detailed article about the journal Nature will publish.

I also don’t know about your claim about ANZAC culture. Aside from the fact its beggining to sound like a Howardesque “Australians values” statement disguised as culture, I doubt many people really know or care much about ANZACs, which isn’t very surprising, since Australia’s war time contributions have been basically zero compared to many countries (cf. Gallipoli vs. 30 million dead Russians) — and that’s a good thing. In addition, even for those that do happen to know some of the history, a lot of the contributions seem to be excersizes in stupidity (like WWI, Vietnam, Iraq, Korea) and why should we celebrate that?

I could complain further, but I won’t, but I think your example highlights what is wrong with taking some predefined cultural event and saying how Australian they are (especially if done by the government).

If you’ve never been exposed to (or educated about) impressionist painting or Baroque music employing a continuo, then either may seem odd or incomprehensible, but I don’t see what that has to do with anything. I saw indigeneous art from around the world in the new Museum of Indigeneous art in Paris last year (I forget the museum’s name) and large parts of the art was unusual to me (including some statues from western africa that looked as if they could have been depictions of two-legged aliens!), and while I’m glad that some people have some understanding of it, it’s personally fine for me to not necessarily understand it.

It seems possibly that you’re saying that popular culture is of less value than non-popular culture. Why is something of less value just because it’s popular?

I’m not sure - most of the people I know grew up with a religious background, not a ‘cultural’ one, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens to the generations who grow up without that story. New enduring stories of depth might come along for them - ANZAC seems to be one that is being developed in popular culture.

Like I said before, the evidence should be easy to collect, so we don’t need to speculate about it. My bet is that if I go and collect a group of people that are into high culture as defined by Russell, they will shown no difference in their prevelance of mental disease comapared to their footy loving materialistic idiotic ocker compatriots.

My example of the loss of traditional Easter reflection is about the increasing distraction by more superficial activities. It’s like a diet of chocolates, ice-cream, cake ….it’s not sustaining. (That reminds me, there’s an article in The West this morning abaout a study that shows that a quarter of teenagers eat fast food every day “while more than a third said they hardly ever ate fruit”. Commenting on two threads at once: food and clothes may seem cheaper, but good quality food and clothes aren’t.)

Evidence - - how about the evidence that so many people you admire, over many generations, have thought that these cultural traditions were important to experience and hand on.