Links - 25th August 2010

"The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed." - C. S. Lewis

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Competition for a mate shortens men's lives - study - "The more imbalanced the ratio of men to women, the more pronounced the effect was"

'I wrote 2U B4'! British Library shows up textspeak as soooo 19th century - "It turns out they were doing it in the 19th century – only then they called it emblematic poetry, and it was considered terribly clever... There will also be the first book ever printed in English, which, reassuringly perhaps, has inconsistent spelling"

Wanted - Baby Sitters With Foreign Language Skills - "Bilingual children tend to have smaller vocabularies in English than their monolingual counterparts... “Bilingualism carries a cost, and the cost is rapid access to words”... At the same time, bilingual children do better at complex tasks like isolating information presented in confusing ways... One arena in which being bilingual does not seem to help is the highly competitive kindergarten admission process."

West Midlands police force bans the thin blue panty line - "Thongs or boxers creeping over waistbands and colourful bras peeping through white shirts outlawed under new uniform policy"

YouTube - Living With Steel Wool Hands (How I Lost My Nipple) - "Nothing compares to the day that I woke up with steel wool hands. It has its drawbacks, but with the help of case-mate products and industrial strength nipple tassels, I am able to live a normal life.
If you struggle with steel woolen extremities, check out case-mate to protect your iPhone."

True Colors - "White marble has been the norm ever since the Renaissance, when classical antiquities first began to emerge from the earth... Knowing no better, artists in the 16th century took the bare stone at face value. Michelangelo and others emulated what they believed to be the ancient aesthetic, leaving the stone of most of their statues its natural color. Thus they helped pave the way for neo-Classicism, the lily-white style that to this day remains our paradigm for Greek art... Armed with high-intensity lamps, ultraviolet light, cameras, plaster casts and jars of costly powdered minerals, he has spent the past quarter century trying to revive the peacock glory that was Greece. He has dramatized his scholarly findings by creating full-scale plaster or marble copies hand-painted in the same mineral and organic pigments used by the ancients: green from malachite, blue from azurite, yellow and ocher from arsenic compounds, red from cinnabar, black from burned bone and vine"

What's After The Credits? - "What's After The Credits is simply a site that you can utilize to quickly find out if a movie, television show, video game, etc. has any special scenes during the credits or post credits (aka Stinger / Movie Stinger)"

Best. Decade. Ever. - "The first 10 years of the 21st century were humanity's finest -- even for the world's bottom billion."
Nobody ever got funding by saying that things were going well

On Facebook, wife learns of husband's 2nd wedding

The queen feminist thinking twice about employing young women - "If Sarah became pregnant, I would be legally obliged to keep paying her for a full year after she’d given birth – which the business could ill afford. Now, on top of this, the government has announced that parents of children up to the age of 16 (as opposed to only up to six) will have the right to ask employers for flexible working arrangements... My pigs certainly aren’t going to thrive on flexi-feeding schemes. And neither is my business... At least one thing seems clear to me now: the femi-nist mantra of the 1980s – that a woman “can have it all” – has turned out to be a lie"

The Wickedest Man in Oxford - "One of the last of the many legendary contests won by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer was his encounter with Mike Tyson in 1987... [He] was entertaining a group of models at a New York party when a girl ran in screaming that her friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. The parties involved turned out to be Tyson and Naomi Campbell. ''Do you know who . . . I am?'' Tyson asked in disbelief when Ayer urged him to desist: ''I'm the heavyweight champion of the world.'' ''And I am the former Wykeham professor of logic,'' Ayer answered politely. ''We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.''"

Company tries to get gun classed as medical device

More Evidence That Intelligence Is Largely Inherited: Researchers Find That Genes Determine Brain's Processing Speed

Third of women earn more than their men - "Working women resent female colleagues who have children because they think they get better treatment... childless working women - are bitter about co-workers leaving work early for childcare reasons or having their hours cut on their return to work after maternity leave. Nine out of ten women said those without children 'resented the flexi-hours and time off mothers can have'. Seven in ten said other women were their harshest critics in the workplace and a third of female directors thought mothers less productive. A third of working women without offspring think working mothers use their children as an excuse to get off work."

Report: Men Unfaithful to Women Who Earn More
Naturally, men being unfaithful to women who earn more was explained as "Men might engage in "hypermasculine activities" — displaying their sexual virility or sexual competence — as a form of compensatory behavior", while women being unfaithful to men who earn more was positioned as "economically dependent women may encounter fewer opportunities to cheat, and they may make a calculated decision that cheating just isn't worth it"

If Women Were More Like Men: Why Females Earn Less - "Women who become men (known as FTMs) do significantly better than men who become women (MTFs)... The less-convincing appearance of MTFs probably explains part of the reason they earn so much less after they transition"

Artificial Ape Man: How Technology Created Humans

Kuo Chuan Primary School students FORCED to pay $5 deposit to ensure they watch YOG games
I love how "no outside food and beverage" (sic) is positioned as a way "to ensure a safe and enjoyable experience"

Boeing 727 Convertido en Hotel

New research: Children's vegetable intake linked to Popeye cartoons

Museum Of Bad Art Gives A Home To Forlorn Paintings

Top 11 Ways to Get Fired at Apple - "3. Start a Twitter account without approval from the Communication Geniuses Department.
1. Suggest a mouse design that functions properly."

Finally, an excuse for pregnant women to eat bacon and eggs

Brainless slime mould makes decisions like humans - "To us, a thing’s value depends on the things around it. Economists often refer to this as “irrational”. But if that’s the case, we’re not alone in our folly. Other animals, from birds to bees, make choices in the same way"

How black people use Twitter. - "Black people—specifically, young black people—do seem to use Twitter differently from everyone else on the service. They form tighter clusters on the network... black people [have] the means to dominate the conversation on Twitter... "It's the same issue I have with certain black comedy shows," says Elon James White, a comedian who runs the site This Week in Blackness. "They put out these ideas of blackness that—if it were someone of another race saying them—you'd go, 'Whoa, that's racist!' I remember when #ifsantawasblack hit, I lost my shit. I was freaking out. It was literally a game of, What's the most racist thing we can say? And it was black people saying it!""

How Many People is Enough in Singapore? - "Profits in Singapore are increasingly being earned by foreign, not local capital, and in many cases subsidized by tax breaks and other incentives not enjoyed by local business. Hence Singapore becomes ever more reliant on inflow of that capital for continued growth as well as on importing foreign labor to supplement a now almost static indigenous labor force. Recent public disquiet over immigration may be prejudiced and seem irrational to a leadership that thinks it always knows best what is good for Singaporeans. But the nation badly needs a real debate about demographics and growth priorities."

Reporters Sans Frontières - Open letter to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange: ‘‘A bad precedent for the Internet's future'' - "Revealing the identity of hundreds of people who collaborated with the coalition in Afghanistan is highly dangerous. It would not be hard for the Taliban and other armed groups to use these documents to draw up a list of people for targeting in deadly revenge attacks... The precedent you have set leaves all those people throughout the world who risk their freedom and sometimes their lives for the sake of online information even more exposed to reprisals. Such imprudence endangers your own sources and, beyond that, the future of the Internet as an information medium. A total of 116 netizens are currently in prison in a dozen countries because of the comments they posted online"

Boomerang for Gmail: Send email later or receive it when you want

Teen sex doesn't cause bad grades - "Teens in committed relationships do no better or worse in school than those don't have sex... Last year, nearly half of high school students reported having sexual intercourse, and 14 percent have had four or more partners"

Opinions vs. Data - "I immediately figured out how to use it, but my gut reaction was «most people are not going to get how this works.» It seems I was wrong. This is one of the reasons why I don’t put too much trust into opinion-based usability reviews: There’s a lot of guesswork involved, and guessing how humans behave is an endeavor fraught with peril. Expert reviews can be helpful, but they are no substitute for actual testing."

Obama's Islamic America - "President Obama says Islam has always been part of America, which raises the question, does the president know something about American history that we don't?... Islam had no influence on the origins and development of the United States. It contributed nothing to early American political culture, art, literature, music or any other aspect of the early nation"

Why don’t Anglo women like Asian men?
Amidst the meaningless motherhood statements, I like this comment: "Asian men, well, you tend to be shorter and skinnier. You have figures most women torture and starve themselves to achieve, except you lack boobies. You challenge our femininity, basically."

Why photographer was handcuffed - "POLICE handcuffed a photographer taking flood pictures along Bukit Timah Road last month because public safety was involved... The photographer had stopped his car illegally along the road at about 7.40am to take the photographs, causing an obstruction to other motorists... 'There was clear danger not only to the photographer but to other motorists as well,' said Mr Shamugam. When the photographer ignored a second advice from police against taking pictures on the flooded centre divider, he was handcuffed."
Someone parks illegally and you handcuff them for public safety. Nice try, do you think anyone other than Singaporeans will buy that?

Former RCP president backs review of drugs laws - ""Everyone who has looked at this in a serious and sustained way concludes that the present policy of prohibition is not a success"... He argued that many of the problems health staff encountered were the consequences not of heroin itself, but of prohibition... decriminalising personal use could free up police resources, reduce crime and improve public health"