"If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience." - John Cage

Figures

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Spiders on Drugs

Mbeki Says Crime Reports Are Racist - "President Thabo Mbeki has made a withering attack on commentators who argue that violent crime is out of control in South Africa, calling them white racists who want the country to fail. He said crime was falling but some journalists distorted reality by depicting black people as "barbaric savages" who liked to rape and kill."

Asia’s Awesome Bootleg DVD Selection Traced Back To Single Chinese Mafia Boss Film School Dropout - "Chueh’s decision to pirate movies for a living appears to be not only an act of revenge against Hollywood, but also, at the same time, an act of enduring love for film... Also according to Goodman, by 2005 the average bootleg DVD table on Silom road in Bangkok had “a better selection of movies than any legal shop in the world, or for that matter, the whole Netflix catalog.” A sample of recovery from a police raid in 2006 included the Criterion set of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Decalogue,” Noburo Tanaka’s “Showa Trilogy,” and both Todd Haynes’ “Poison” and “Superstar,” the latter of which is so rare it is not legally available in the United States. The sheer depth of film knowledge required to have even heard of these movies led investigators to look for film-school backgrounds among known Asian mafia, which eventually led to Chueh."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Clamour to ban fake 'hymen' - "Sheik Sayed Askar, a member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood who is on the parliamentary committee on religious affairs, said the kit will make it easier for Egyptian women to give in to temptation... Prominent Egyptian religious scholar Abdel Moati Bayoumi said anyone who imports the artificial hymen should be punished. "This product encourages illicit sexual relations. Islamic culture forbids these relations except within the confines of marriage," Bayoumi said... "If this thing enters Egypt, the country is going to go to waste. God protect us," commented a reader on the Web site of Egyptian newspaper Al-Youm Al-Sabie."
When I read the title I thought it was the feminists.

Spy SG: Spying the secret life of local female celebrities and bloggers - "We are tracking pretty / sexy / cute female SG and MY bloggers :
-blogs (wordpress, blogspot)
-video (youtube)
-photo (flickr, picasa)
-social network (friendster, facebook, twitter)
and many many more to come."
...

Product Info. Female Viagra - The Trusted Meds Online for everyone - "Product info: Women's health Erectile Dysfunction"
Uhh...

Why young single men are more xenophobic II | Psychology Today - "Social and cultural ornamentation presents men with one problem that males of other species, who lek via physical ornamentation, do not face: It does not travel well. Social and cultural ornamentation is, by definition, socially and culturally specific... This is in clear contrast to women’s status and mate value... Yanomamö men will see that a Victoria’s Secret lingerie model is extremely moko dude (a Yanomamö phrase meaning “perfectly ripe”)... One empirical study with a large European sample shows that, controlling for age, education, and income (factors that are expected to, and in most cases do, affect people’s ability to travel), unmarried women are significantly more likely to vacation abroad than unmarried men. The same study also demonstrates that, controlling for age and education, unmarried women are significantly less likely to express xenophobic attitudes than unmarried men toward individuals of other nationalities, races and religions. The pattern is similar among Americans as well. In all cases, the sex difference disappears once the respondents are married"

Women cry more than men - " According to the German Society of Ophthalmology, which has collated different scientific studies on the phenomenon, women shed tears on average between 30 and 64 times a year and men six to 17 times. Men tend to cry for between two and four minutes, but for females sessions last around six minutes. And weeping turns into full-blown sobbing for women in 65 per cent of cases, compared to just six per cent for males. Until adolescence, however, there is no difference... 'showing that blubbing because of joy, sadness or anger is something that is learned'... Women cry when they feel inadequate, when they are confronted by situations that are difficult to resolve or when they remember past events. Men, meanwhile, tend to cry from empathy or when a relationship fails"
Secondary sexual characteristics also manifest at adolescence...

Hard Work's Overrated, Maybe Detrimental - "Late nights are seldom very useful in the grand scheme of things. Hard work? Overrated... 'We agreed that a lot of what we then considered "working hard" was actually "freaking out"'... Fake points to the salient example of Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA. They spent a lot of time lollygagging and goofing off, going to parties and bullshitting over coffee. That might seem like a historical footnote, but our everyday experience vindicates it. After all, have you ever had a great idea at your desk? But how often does that bulb go off in the shower, or in bed? Modern neuroscience actually vindicates this apparently lackadaisical approach. It turns out that the best way to find breakthrough ideas might be to avoid working hard"
This is only true of Creative work, not Routine work

The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English

Google's Marissa Mayer Assaults Designers With Data - "Currently they do employ designers at Google. But if they actually do design or not is up for debate since every decision at Google comes from data testing, not the reasoning of a creative mind"
Ah, the clash of empiricism and romanticism!

Ninth Level Dork - "So Dungeons and Dragons did a lot for me. It made me a little more understanding of rabid, war hawk conservatives... most importantly, Dungeons and Dragons taught me that sometimes it's important to just wade in and be direct about what you want. So if there are any other dorks out there, I'd really, really like to get a game going. I'll even play the cleric."

men who look like old lesbians