Saturday, March 24, 2007

"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan

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Male Circumcision Reduces Female Pleasure - "A New Zealand study found that reduced female arousal and fewer female orgasms may be linked to women having sex with circumcised male partners. Women reported they were about twice as likely to experience orgasm if their male partner had a foreskin. Nine out of ten women prefer having sex with intact men, the study finds."

Gentle Swastika : Swastika Museum - "In 1925 Coca Cola made a lucky watch fob in the shape of a swastika with the slogan, "Drink Coca Cola five cents in bottles. When I phoned the Coke Archives in Atlanta, Georgia they denied even having one in their collection."

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Youngest Mother - "Regardless of our squeamishness, we have to note that the claim of a five-year-old girl giving birth is apparently true. Her name was Lina Medina, a Peruvian girl from the Andean village of Ticrapo who made medical history when she gave birth to a boy by caesarean section in May 1939 at the age of five years, seven months and 21 days. Lina's parents initially thought their daughter had a large abdominal tumor, but after they took her to a hospital in the town of Pisco physicians confirmed that her abdominal swelling was due to pregnancy. Lina was eventually transferred to a hospital in Lima, where she delivered a six-pound baby boy by Cesarean section on 14 May 1939 (coincidentally the date on which Mother's Day was celebrated that year). Lina's father was temporarily jailed on suspicion of incest, but he was released for a lack of evidence and authorities were never able to determine who fathered Lina's child."

The Perry Bible Fellowship: Nautical Awards - "'the award for most tentacles goes to... OCTOPUS!' 'it's all politics, Joel.'"

EXPOSING THE ATHEIST - "Even though computers aren't capable of rational thought and know nothing about morals, yet they have more sense than the most learned atheist. Case and point: The other day while working on a PC, I began deleting unwanted files. There was an html file that showed all of the TEN COMMANDMENTS. Since it was a duplicate file, I decided to delete it also. When I clicked "delete", the usual message came on the screen that said, "Are you sure you want to send the 'TEN COMMANDMETS' to the Recycle bin?" The question struck me very deeply because of how it was worded and for a moment I hesitated to delete the file. After clicking "yes", a message box came up on the screen that said an illegal act had been performed by a program... Atheists, who made computers have made them capable of being more correctly rational and moral than themselves."

Scientists breed malaria-resistant mosquito - This was submitted to the Tomorrow.sg moderation queue with a very stupid comment: "Scientists should be eradicated, not malaria carrying mosquitos... What if these mosquitos are strong enough to carry other diseases now that they are mutated stronger? AIDs carrying mosquitos + cancer carriers + whoknowswhat...."

YouTube - [AD] ミドリ安全 - 分煙 (MIDORI ANZEN - BUNEN) - An ad for some suction thing.

Hemlock Available in the Faculty Lounge - "Also, I believe this Republic that Prof. Socrates wants to design — as if anyone really wants to let this dreadful little man design an entire city — is nothing but a plan for a hegemonic, masculinist empire that will dominate all of Greece and enforce its own values and beliefs on the diverse communities of our multicultural society. I was warned about this man by my adviser in women's studies. I don't see that anything other than white male patriarchy can explain his omnipresence in the agora and it certainly is evident that he contributes nothing to a multicultural learning environment. In fact, his whole search for the Truth is evidence of his denial of the virtual infinitude of epistemic realities (that term wasn't from queer theory, but from French lit, but it was amazing to see how applicable it was to queer theory)."

Monkeys' stone percussion studied - "Research in Brazil has produced fresh evidence that primates may have something approaching human "culture"."

No thanks for the mammaries - "For Susan the problem has always been twofold: her confidence, which is small like her waist, and her brain, which is big like the rest of her. She used the brain to study macrobiology at university, the point at which her breasts “really started growing, they just really got away from me. I would try to smash them into a too small bra and used to pretend they didn’t exist, as if they were somebody else’s boobs. I didn’t enjoy them.” The problem was that the brain and the boobs weren’t meshing. “That’s the confusing thing about being a woman,” she says. “You want to be attractive but you don’t want to be physically attractive at the expense of your brain.”... She’s halfway through the story in which an Ivy League professor interrupts her during an interview for a science article to tell her that on account of her breasts “I assumed that you were stupid”, when it starts occurring to me how significantly different my life would have been had I had big ones. Men grow up thinking about this all the time, the comparative size of their penises, but do small-breasted women really know what they’re missing? The male facial expression that Susan calls the “Big Tit Alert” — have you ever witnessed it? T-shirts which read: “My face is up here, pal” — have you out of frustration with men ever had occasion to wear one? You’ve done yoga, right? But have you ever been partially suffocated by your own breasts during a shoulder stand?"

Facebook | Why do you need sex, when writing fucks you every night - "Do you obsess over your punctuation and grammar? Do you spend hours up to days trying to write an imitation/summary/essay? Are you getting Cs, Ds and Fs in writing class? If you are, you know this group is for you."
We need a USP chapter.

Reasons for Supporting the Minimum Wage: Asking Signatories of the “Raise the Minimum Wage” Statement - Summarised as such: "(1) US economists are not only divided over the minimum wage, but the distribution of policy opinion is U-shaped, suggesting deep-seated cleavages; (2) The average level of support for the minimum wage is somewhat higher among labor economists than among AEA members; (3) AEA members mostly, but not overwhelmingly, think that minimum wages increase unemployment of the young and unskilled, but that belief has weakened in recent decades; (4) Graduate students are less inclined to believe in young-and-unskilled disemployment; (5) Economist belief in disemployment seems to be highest in the United States and lowest in France; (6) Whereas AEA members are pretty evenly divided on the policy, the general US population shows consistent and strong majority support for raising the minimum wage; (7) Overwhelmingly, scholars in anthropology, history, philosophy, political science, and sociology support the minimum wage."

Tym Blogs Too!: My nose runneth over - "Technorati Tags: cold, sick"
Wah lao. This is pathetic.

Tilt Your Head Like an Indian - "Background: At its most graceful, there’s something Stevie Wonder-esque in the Indian head tilt—an easy rhythmic sway that, once familiar, can prove soothing and even addictive. You could devote a lifetime to learning any of the hundreds of languages that have evolved on the Indian subcontinent. But from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, the metronome-like head tilt offers a universal means of communication. Interpreting and replicating this single non-verbal cue offers you more than just a way to be understood while in India—it’s a chance to employ a unique gesture familiar to one sixth of humanity."

Karaoke songs bring a lump to the throat - "Japanese doctors report a surge in the condition known as “karaoke polyp”, a growth on the vocal cords caused by excessive warbling in bars and parlours. Formerly an affliction of middle-aged businessmen, the malady has spread among housewives and young people because of the continuing popularity of karaoke."

Facebook | Can't I Just Major In How To Be a Good Housewife? - "Are there days when you just wish you could bake some cookies, clean your room, and do crafts, and never have to worry about getting an education? Then this group is for you!"

Recovery programme for email addicts - "Research by King's College London says addiction to email is doubly worrying because such technology depletes cognitive abilities more rapidly than drugs. Email users suffered a 10 per cent drop in IQ scores, more than twice the fall recorded by marijuana users."

Unhappy Meals - "The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem — journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, “Eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters."