Links - 15th November 2010

"Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had." - Michael Crichton

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TODAYonline | Columns | The Fairer Text | Play mates - "One of them announced that a single guy can never be friends with an attractive single girl. All the fellas at the table agreed solemnly, nodding in unison... They unanimously agreed that if there was no repulse factor, guys will subconsciously still hit on her by being gentlemanly, considerate of her well-being and making sure she's fed well, comfortable and hopefully, drunk too... a Penn State University study of 300 students found that the friendships that thrived despite the attraction or occurrence of sex were those in which the friends had an explicit discussion of the sexual boundaries, and felt confident and positive about each other's feelings. They concluded that a key factor for male-female friendships to be successful is similar to romantic relationships. It's all about open communication"
Ladder Theory!

No racial undertones - "The general trend that the Criminal Investigation Department has noticed is that our gangs, like our society, are multiracial in nature"
Obviously this points to the success of racial harmony in Singapore, and that we can scrap the Sedition Act

How radical Islam seduced the academics - "I thought that no one could deny that the universities needed to confront campus sectarianism. I reckoned without the limitless capacity for self-delusion of British academe... Alongside the racism [of visiting Imams at UCL] came the concomitant sexism, homophobia and hatred of the western world. You might have thought that in light of the above, academics would have wanted to protect their students. In particular, they should have wanted to protect Muslim students from going the way of Abdulmutallab. Instead of facing the problem squarely, they pretended it did not exist. Philippe Sands, a law professor who is always alleging that Tony Blair is a "criminal" for overthrowing Saddam Hussein's genocidal tyranny, appeared undisturbed by the existence of actual criminals among his university's alumni... We are always told to condemn less and understand more. So, instead of criticising, I will empathise with the academics and try to appreciate why supposed liberals such as Sands will not confront anti-liberal movements when they are raging around their workplace"

Live crab vending machines for commuters in China

Man charged over rude tattoo - "The 25-year-old customer wanted a yin and yang symbol and a dragon but instead was given a 40 centimetre tattoo of a penis and a rude slogan implying he was gay... the tattooist will appear in court next month charged with two counts of assault occasioning bodily harm and one charge relating to the Public Safety Act"

Ugly people dating agency celebrates first engagement

Study: 3 Cups of Coffee a Day May Shrink Women's Breasts

Paris vs New York, a tally of two cities

YouTube - A Meal To Die For - "Bill Geist visits the Heart Attack Grill in Chandler, Ariz., where you can almost feel your arteries clogging"

YouTube - The Sun: Page 3 - the woman you'd love your woman to be like

Ban hair straightening: Clerics - "The commission's deputy secretary Aminudin Yakub said the school had requested a formal edict declaring rebonding a breach of Islamic law 'except for women who are married and have the permission of their husbands'"

How a Pulitzer Prize Winner Writes a Job-Leaving Farewell Letter

Iraq's disappearing Christians are Bush and Blair's legacy - "Given the overt Christian faith of the two architects of the invasion, Bush and Tony Blair, there is a tragic irony in the fact that their most lasting contribution to the region may well be to have created the environment that led to the destruction of Christianity in one of its ancient heartlands – something Arab, Mongol and Ottoman conquests all failed to pull off"

Desk, dishcloths dirtier than toilet - "It's safer to make a sandwich on a toilet seat than on a cutting board in the average home"

Cold, Hot, Cold, Hot - "A lot of office thermostats are completely fake -- meant to dupe you into thinking you've altered the office weather conditions. The specialists are unrepentant. Fed up with of complaints from sweaty men and shivering women, HVAC technicians install dummy thermostats to give workers the illusion of control... That "close door" button on elevators? It won't work unless you're a fireman or an elevator operator with special access to the system. The rest of the time, in deference to various building codes, it's deactivated, according to engineers at Otis Elevator."

Adolescents of the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Sexual Orientation, Sexual Behavior, and Sexual Risk Exposure - "Adolescents reared in lesbian families are less likely than their peers to be victimized by a parent or other caregiver, and that daughters of lesbian mothers are more likely to engage in same-sex behavior and to identify as bisexual"

The Burger Lab: Revisiting the Myth of The 12-Year Old McDonald's Burger That Just Won't Rot (Testing Results!) | A Hamburger Today - "Not only did the regular McDonald's burgers not rot, but the home-ground burgers did not rot either. Samples one through five had shrunk a bit (especially the beef patties), but they showed no signs of decomposition. What does this mean? It means that there's nothing that strange about a McDonald's burger not rotting. Any burger of the same shape will act the same way. The real question is, why? Well, here's another piece of evidence: Burger number 6, made with no salt, did not rot either, indicating that the salt level has nothing to do with it... the burger doesn't rot because it's small size and relatively large surface area help it to lose moisture very fast. Without moisture, there's no mold or bacterial growth"

PGA TOUR, INC. V. MARTIN - "If one assumes, however, that the PGA TOUR has some legal obligation to play classic, Platonic golf–and if one assumes the correctness of all the other wrong turns the Court has made to get to this point–then we Justices must confront what is indeed an awesome responsibility. It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States... to decide What Is Golf... Either out of humility or out of self-respect (one or the other) the Court should decline to answer this incredibly difficult and incredibly silly question. To say that something is “essential” is ordinarily to say that it is necessary to the achievement of a certain object. But since it is the very nature of a game to have no object except amusement (that is what distinguishes games from productive activity), it is quite impossible to say that any of a game’s arbitrary rules is “essential”... Agility, strength, speed, balance, quickness of mind, steadiness of nerves, intensity of concentration–these talents are not evenly distributed. No wild-eyed dreamer has ever suggested that the managing bodies of the competitive sports that test precisely these qualities should try to take account of the uneven distribution of God-given gifts when writing and enforcing the rules of competition"

College admission rates for women spur civil rights probe - "Anecdotal evidence suggests that some schools are favoring men by admitting them at higher rates than women to try to preserve a male-female balance on campus. Conventional admissions-office wisdom dictates that colleges dominated by either sex are less appealing to applicants in general... Over the past 40 years, women have gone from underrepresented minority to overrepresented majority on U.S. college campuses, where they outnumber men by a proportion approaching 60-40"
It's only discrimination when you discriminate against perceived minorities

Men brought up with women are less sexy - "Sexual behaviour was influenced more by the male-female ratio of the litter in which they were brought up than the one to which they were born"
Comment: Look. This article is to help you understand Rats. Be happy if you ever achieve that - forget about understanding women - it is like nuclear energy - enough to know how to make it work for you.

Make your Girlfriend Happy - Reminders, tips, deals and ideas to keep your relationship strong - "Get the inside scoop on the gifts she really wants and never forget an important date again. Take 30 seconds now for a stress-free future."
One of the rules is that "Women will always be treated as completely equal to men in all respects" - yet they have no site on making one's Boyfriend happy. Even more problematically, one of their emails links to a photo gallery of Oktoberfest in Munich, with "Hot photos, NSFW", which bares lots of cleavage and has questionable captions despite another rule which goes "Never make any sexist remarks to either men or women."

A Look At How Many People Have Been Kicked Offline In Korea On Accusations (Not Convictions) Of Infringement - "It's worth noting, of course, that the reason South Korea put in place such a draconian copyright law was due to serious diplomatic pressure from the US as a part of a supposed "free trade" agreement between the two countries"

UK should not put up with US airport security – BA chairman - "Martin Broughton says the US does not enforce many of the checks it demands of British airports"