Links - 10th May 2010

"He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife." - Douglas Adams

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Save these girls from dole queue - "SIXTEEN Page 3 Girls in all their glory represent the very image of freedom in this country. But if Labour or the Lib Dems win the election, this could be the last time they are allowed to pose together. MPs Harriet Harman and Lynne Featherstone will move swiftly to change the law and ban Page 3 forever. Our national treasures - who even enjoy the Royal seal of approval from our future King Prince Charles - will be no more. And at a stroke the very liberties that put the Great into Great Britain will be torn asunder."

Brain shuts off in response to healer's prayer - life - "Schjødt and his colleagues scanned the brains of 20 Pentecostalists and 20 non-believers while playing them recorded prayers. The volunteers were told that six of the prayers were read by a non-Christian, six by an ordinary Christian and six by a healer. In fact, all were read by ordinary Christians. Only in the devout volunteers did the brain activity monitored by the researchers change in response to the prayers. Parts of the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, which play key roles in vigilance and scepticism when judging the truth and importance of what people say, were deactivated when the subjects listened to a supposed healer. Activity diminished to a lesser extent when the speaker was supposedly a normal Christian"

The dirty tricks of food photographers - "Motor oil, as a stand-in for unphotogenic syrups."

Fear of falling short sends men to dodgy docs - ""They inject oil and all sorts of concoctions under the skin of the penis to induce an inflammation"... The substances used in the jabs are potentially cancerous, said Dr Lim. Some men develop complications like hardened skin and ulcers... Often when a man cannot perform, he is blamed for it, said consultant psychiatrist Brian Yeo. "No one blames the girl. When it comes to sexual satisfaction, usually it is the man who initiates and provides pleasure," Dr Yeo said. "It's a guy thing. If you tell a man he is impotent, that is the greatest insult.""

A hymn to him: men are sexy, smart and good for women - "If men are no longer needed for producing sperm, perhaps they are no longer needed at all — that was the suggestion humming in the media and the blogosphere last week, often rather nastily disguised as humour, with lists of ways in which men are worse than useless. Misandry — the dislike of men — is a powerful force. It reminds me of my student days, when feminist meetings had signs at the door saying, “Women and girl children only”, and when extremists told us that all men were rapists. Free of men, the feminist separatists told us, we would be free of aggression, competition and war, as well as all that ideologically unsound and nasty penetration. Those ideas trickled down fast into the playground: I once found my eight-year-old daughter telling her poor little brother that boys are all rough and nasty and do all the bad things in the world. She was lisping the conventional orthodoxies around her, which still prevail... growing female triumphalism... has been accompanied by a growing bewilderment and displacement of men... I have always had a small, sneaking sympathy with Camille Paglia, who notoriously said that if civilisation had been left to women, we would still be living in grass huts. It is also true that if it were left entirely to men, the huts would all be burning down"

i.q. tests - "A century ago, in a less complicated world, there was very little familiarity with what we now consider basic abstract concepts... Examples of abstract notions that simply didn't exist in the minds of our nineteenth-century ancestors include the theory of natural selection (formulated in 1864), and the concepts of control group (1875) and random sample (1877). A century ago, the scientific method itself was foreign to most Americans. The general public had simply not yet been conditioned to think abstractly"

狮城男人：巴士地铁站　最多美女看 - "在巴士站和地铁站，瞄到美女的机会最高，不但能看到本地美女，还能看到漂亮的国外背包客... 只有6名男性认为酒吧和夜间娱乐场所是偷瞄的地方... 酒吧灯光昏暗，不必偷瞄，能光明正大的看，而且在那些场合女性也比较不介意男生多看他们几眼"
Someone: 狮城男人眼睛都生疮了

Judge rules Asbo on low-slung trousers illegal - "In a victory for skaters, hoodies and owners of oversized trousers everywhere, a teenager has won the right to wear his tracksuit bottoms halfway down his backside... “The proper punishment for the comically low-riding trousers favoured by some people is that we all think they look like idiots”"

Over 70 percent raw vegetables at restaurants infected with parasite (in Saigon)

World Cup welcome: A billion condoms and 40,000 sex workers. - "Arguably, the soccer World Cup is to the sex industry what the holiday season is to candy shops. A temporary surge of excited people feeling collectively festive, willing to pay for a bit of extra indulgence... “White men like black women,” she said proudly about the anticipated wave of soccer fans in search of exoticism. Scarlet says she uses condoms most of the time, unless men pay her extra to not use one. “Men don't like condoms,” she said. Most do, however, like soccer."

Determinants and Consequences of Female Attractiveness and Sexiness: Realistic Tests with Restaurant Waitresses - "The waitresses’ self-rated physical attractiveness increased with their breast sizes and decreased with their ages, waist-to-hip ratios, and body sizes... the waitresses’ tips varied with age in a negative, quadratic relationship, increased with breast size, increased with having blond hair, and decreased with body size"

A lesbian mother wants to be the only mommy on Mother's Day. - By Erika Milvy - Slate Magazine - "Mother's Day aside, I don't even like to share the term mommy. I find it a little jarring when I hear my partner on the phone saying, "This is Nora's mother…" And I'm always aware—when my daughter and I are out and about—that when I say, "We should call mama" or "Mama's waiting for us" that, to an eavesdropper's ear, I am someone other than this child's mother."
Time to end the bigotry and change it to Mothers' Day

Veterinarians more likely to commit suicide - "Vets are more comfortable with the concept of euthanasia, convinced as we are of its benefits and desensitized as we may be by our frequent application of this method as a valid way of alleviating suffering... "entrance to veterinary schools is limited to high achievers, whose personality traits may include neurosis, conscientiousness and perfectionism, all risk factors for suicidal behaviors""

Sir Ian McKellen is mistaken for a tramp on a Melbourne bench between Waiting for Godot rehearsals

Teacher sparks outcry with Mao comments - ""You can go to the mausoleum to see Chairman Mao Zedong, but don't forget it is China's Yasukuni Shrine, where a butcher with people's blood on his hands is worshipped"; and "The only correct thing Mao Zedong did after 1949 was die"... Yuan's remarks on Chinese history textbooks include statements claiming Japanese history textbooks have far fewer distortions than those in China; and that the material in Chinese history textbooks is less than 5 per cent truth, and the rest is pure nonsense. He has also said that the 30 million people who died during the Great Famine topped the death toll in Europe during the second world war. According to online posts, Yuan also said the Dala Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize because of his opposition to the Chinese invasion of Tibet."
Mao killed at least twice as many Chinese as the Japanese