"Reality is nothing but a collective hunch." - Jane Wagner

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Some of the Detestable (MAKRUH) Conducts in Islam - "To be very optimistic about oneself.
To consider other's bad deeds as great.
To be awkward and not to get on with others.
Lying when joking.
To accuse someone of something in a joke.
To joke a lot.
Too much laughing.
To rely on others.
Doing useless things.
To express grief in hardship.
To complain about life.
To grief about worldly things.
To have long worldly hopes.
Discrimination, fanaticism, and racism.
To sleep a lot.
To be either extremist in one's affairs or indifferent.
Associating with sinners."
I assume anti-Semitism doesn't count

This Is a Photoshop and It Blew My Mind - Photosketch - "According to authors, their software can take any rough sketch, with the shape of each element labeled with its name, find images corresponding to each drawn element, judge which are a better match to the shapes, and then seamlessly merge it all into one single image"
This looks better than it sounds.

'Girls can't have it all... having a career AND children may be too ambitious' says leading headmistress - "Young women needed to realise that they will face challenges and be forced to make difficult choices in life, such as deciding to take a career break while raising children. This is not 'selling out' and young women should 'stop beating themselves up' about their decisions... Channel Five newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky, 37, declared that women cannot have it all after giving up 30 per cent of her £1million salary so that she could present just one bulletin a day and spend more time with her 14-month-old son Arlo... 'They will need to realise that there may be times when they might want to take a lesser job because their priorities have changed... Margaret Morrissey, of the family campaign group Parents Outloud, insisted that... 'Most females can do three jobs at once while most men can just about struggle with one.'"
Again, the paradox of women's lib. And you gotta love the double standards with the last quote.

Murder in America : The New Yorker - "The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy... Roth’s argument is profoundly unsettling. There is and always has been, he claims, an American way of murder. It is the price of our politics... Spierenburg speculates that democracy came too soon to the United States... we became free before we learned how to control ourselves... [Monkkonen] hypothesized that four factors accounted for the centuries-long differences between American and European homicide rates: mobility, federalism, slavery, and tolerance... LaFree observed that the crime rate correlates, inversely, with public faith in government and trust in elected officials... “Big cases make bad laws” is a criminological axiom... "If we glance at the pages of history, we will find that laws, which surely are, or ought to be, compacts of free men, have been, for the most part, a mere tool for the passions of some""

Sexonomics Main Page - "Sexonomics is a new system for confused logical types who despite all efforts fail to understand how male-female relations work... Using simple principles like supply, demand, equilibrium, markets, and competition, we show how a theory of sexonomics can be used to make predictions and solve important real-world scenarios relevant to us all."
The case studies are shot through

Human ancestors had big-brained babies - ""This H. erectus would have even wider hips (than modern women)," says Simpson. One main difference between human males and females is hip width, which makes women sway as they walk and which allows men to run and walk more efficiently. "The reason women do have that sway is their hips are a little further apart," says Simpson. "[H. erectus] would have had a good one.""
One of the mysteries of life is solved!

Secrets of a woman's walk - "Women walking with a sexy sway may actually be sending out misleading messages to men to ensure only the males they are interested in are able to get close to them... When fertile the women were found to walk with their knees closer together and with less of a sway"

Author Paulo Coelho supports piracy: “share to get revenue” - "Coelho thinks that giving people the possibility to swap his books for free, actually has a positive effect on sales... When he uploaded the Russian translation of “The Alchemist”, sales in Russia went from around a 1.000 books per year to 100.000 and then to a million and more... He always had a dream of going to a lodge in the mountains and write the book of his life. So Coelho went to the Pyrenees and wrote his book. The result? The most boring piece of writing he had ever produced. Coelho: “From now on I live a normal life when I write a book, since I’ve to stay connected to reality”. "

Swedish parents keep 2-year-old's gender secret - "A couple of Swedish parents have stirred up debate in the country by refusing to reveal whether their two-and-a-half-year-old child is a boy or a girl... the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction... "Child-rearing should not be about providing an opportunity to prove an ideological point, but about responding to each child’s needs as an individual"... Both Nordenström and Pinker refer to a controversial case from 1967 when a circumcision left one of two twin brothers without a penis. Dr. John Money, who asserted that gender was learned rather than innate, convinced the parents to raise 'David' as 'Brenda'... David Reimer denounced the experiment as a crushing failure before committing suicide at the age of 38. "
Sounds like the child will become dysfunctional

Overdue school library books return 50 years later with $1,000

How to unlock a locked PDF file in Windows

Orchestra to play in brothel - "[It is] a novel effort to bring classical music "out of the concert hall and to where people are". Punters and employees at the Eros Centre in Leipzig will be treated on Friday (local time) to six musicians and a singer from the city's Forum for Contemporary Music performing "licentious and erotic" works, the orchestra promises."

Women banned from wearing trousers in Paris - "A decree banning women from wearing trousers in Paris is still technically in force, it emerged on Monday, making the laissez-faire French capital theoretically stricter than hardline Sudan in the fashion stakes."
This beats 377A

Belle de Jour sex blogger Bristol scientist Dr Brooke Magnanti - ""I've felt worse about my writing than I ever have about sex for money... I did have another job at one point, as a computer programmer, but I kept up with my other work because it was so much more enjoyable."... Spokesperson for Bristol University Barry Taylor said: ''This aspect of her past bears no relevance to her current role at the university.""
In less civilised countries, she'd be fired.
One comment elsewhere: "Given the state of funding in biomedical research, the low pay and poor career prospects in the UK and Europe, it's hardly surprising and she's probably not the only one."

Belle de Jour revealed at last: scientist who penned Diary of a London Call Girl outs herself to foil Daily Mail - "Finn Mackay, of the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution, said Magnanti's positive experience was far from the norm. "To come out saying, 'It's so wonderful' is a slap in the face to the great majority of women who have had horrendous experiences in the sex industry... Helen Ward, professor of public health at Imperial College, said: "Belle de Jour's case is not the norm, but it's not that unusual either. Policy makers tend to portray sex workers as either drug-addicted young women like those murdered in Ipswich, or as trafficked migrant women who have no control over their lives. But I've been working with sex workers for over 20 years as a researcher and as a doctor, and I know that there is a wide range of people involved in sex work... said Catherine Stephens, an activist for the International Union of Sex Workers who has been a sex worker herself for 10 years, "At a brothel I worked in, I think I was the only one not doing a PhD.""

Cook To Bang – Recipes To Get You Laid - "Food and sex have been linked since the dawn of civilization. Cavemen once roasted saber-tooth tiger kebabs for their cave-babes, which set the mood for Cro-Magnon copulation... COOK TO BANG is not just gourmet recipes broken down into steps so simple a monkey could make them. It’s not just a smartass seduction guide. COOK TO BANG offers simple, effective methods for of enjoying the two greatest pleasures, food and sex. So unleash your inner Kitchen Casanova. COOK TO BANG!"
It's just a gimmick, but the recipes look quite innovative.

Do women really care what kind of underwear we wear? - "I asked six different women and got six different answers. There's only one rule of thumb — it's got to be clean."

30 Second Cure For Hiccups - "This has never failed me, and from the testimonials below, it seems to work for many people"

5 Signs You May Be a Bad Coworker - "I used to work with someone who was constantly making personal calls that involved yelling and swearing at the person on the other end. Crying wasn't unheard of either. She never noticed that everyone around her was cringing in discomfort."

Gay Marriage Lost, But It's Not Losing - "'A domestic partnership is not a marriage.'... The advantage of this bashful euphemism is that it accommodates gays on the most important issues related to family—legal recognition and rights, protection for children, access to pension and insurance benefits—while avoiding the weighty symbolism of calling this arrangement by a name that carries religious connotations... Many gay-rights advocates reject anything short of full access to marriage as a disgraceful revival of the old "separate but equal" policy—which was anything but equal for African-Americans. But you don't get across a broad river in a single leap. You get there by building a bridge that allows you to travel across one step at a time."
Self-fulfilling prophecies, the power of symbolism, discrimination, yada yada.

Indian couple divorce over 'soap opera' - "An Indian woman successfully divorced her husband after he refused to allow her to watch television soap operas"
Oppression has many guises indeed.