The Science Behind Beer Goggles

Scientific proof that the more you drink, the more attractive everyone looks.

First, a study in 2002 took two sets of people, one more tipsy than the other. When they put the same photographs of people of the opposite sex in front of both groups, the tipsy people rated the pictures 25% more attractive than the sober ones. This effect can be rooted to the following:

The effect can reportedly be traced to the nucleus accumbens. When you’re looking at another human being, the nucleus accumbens is the area of the brain that decides how attractive that human being’s face is….As it turns out, alcohol, all by itself, stimulates the nucleus accumbens. So when you’ve have a few drinks, and you look at a face you may have judged as unattractive when you were sober, your brain, under the influence of alcohol, tells you that this face is in fact somewhat attractive. And the increase in perceived attractive seems to be directly proportional to the amount of alcohol consumed.

But this is my favorite. The article above goes on to say that n 2005, a study was conducted where scientists actually came up with a mathematical formula to calculate the state of “goggliness” that people are in, factoring in how brightly lit the area is, the eye sight quality, the amount of smoke in the air, and the distance between the two people, with the end result being your “beer goggle score”.

I’m thinking the next generation of Mobile Simplicity’s application needs to include a widget that incorporates this formula. There has to be a drinking game here.

Google Goggles

So yesterday I downloaded onto my wonderful new Googomotozion Android phone Google Goggles. No, its not an application to optimize drunken hookups. It is visual search. Basically, you fire up the application, take a photo with your phone’s camera, and Google will scan the photo and look up information on that item. I gave it a quick test run yesterday and I have to say I was blown away. But its Google, I would expect as much. I took a quick photo of my work Laptop, which is a Lenovo, and ran it through Goggles. Not only did it spit out information on lap top computers, it actually delivered results specific to Lenovo!! Impressive to say the least. So similar to the Barcode Scanning applications for Android and iPhone, this app has a wide variety of possibilities from commerce and product comparison, to just looking up something that you encounter in your travels. I look forward to trying this out on other things to see how it performs.

Three straight posts on Google, but they appear to be in product release mode these days.