Links - 23rd November 2010

"The problem with the designated driver program, it's not a desirable job, but if you ever get sucked into doing it, have fun with it. At the end of the night, drop them off at the wrong house." - Jeff Foxworthy

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Toy store goes PC mad with pig ban - "BARMY shop bosses axed a tiny pig from a kids' toy farm set - in case it upset Muslim and Jewish parents. An angry mum complained to the Early Learning Centre when she found the pig missing and was told it had been removed for "religious reasons". The mother, named only as Caroline, found there was no porker with the cow, sheep, chicken, horse and dog in the store's HappyLand Goosefeather Farm... after The Sun intervened ELC admitted it made a pig's ear of the episode and said the porker will return"

Harry Potter Spell or Part of the Human Anatomy?

Grandma's Superhero Therapy (18 photos) - "A few years ago, French photographer Sacha Goldberger found his 91-year-old Hungarian grandmother Frederika feeling lonely and depressed. To cheer her up, he suggested that they shoot a series of outrageous photographs in unusual costumes, poses, and locations. Grandma reluctantly agreed, but once they got rolling, she couldn't stop smiling"

Another TSA Outrage - "We were ALL carrying weapons. Everyone was carrying an M4 Carbine (rifle) and some, like me, were also carrying an M9 pistol. Oh, and our gunners had M-240B machine guns... The TSA personnel at the airport seriously considered making us unload all of the baggage from the SECURE cargo hold to have it reinspected. Keep in mind, this cargo had been unpacked, inspected piece by piece by U.S. Customs officials, resealed and had bomb-sniffing dogs give it a one-hour run through... a guy empties his pockets and has a pair of nail clippers. Nail clippers. TSA informs the Soldier that they’re going to confiscate his nail clippers... approximately 233 people re-boarded that plane with assault rifles, pistols, and machine guns–but nothing that could have been used as a weapon"
This is what happens when you don't need to catch real terrorists - like Israeli airport security

Alexis Ong: The problem with Singapore men - "Sometimes a friend and I play a little game whose main objective requires us to guess whether androgynous-looking guys are gay or just your garden-variety metrosexual... Sadly, guys like these aren’t anomalies in Singapore -- they’re the rule... after a lifetime living overseas, a girl can get pretty accustomed to some good chat. This elusive creature is almost non-existent in Singapore... The reality of the situation is, guys here just aren’t used to dealing with a little spunk... Personally, I blame the men. There are plenty of traditional old Chinese men in my family who just can’t compute when it comes to dealing with a modern career-minded woman, much less a woman who speaks her mind... Guys here are either alpha-male dominant and aggressive (hello, CBD business crowd) or totally whipped -- there’s hardly a visible demographic in between... The sad fact is that many guys here still can’t come to terms with gender equality. From experience, the hyper-masculine set still don’t take a woman’s view seriously. And for the submissive man-wife, the message here is: grow a pair. Don’t wait for someone to grow them for you"
She claims Singaporean guys cant accept gender equality, then tells submissive guys to "grow a pair". SPOING!

Just Chill Out: You really need a Boy Friend!!! [HQ] - "When hungry, the boyfriend is forced to pay for your food, due to the cruel rules of our society!"

Are airport X-ray scanners harmful? - "[He] found the exposure to be about one-fiftieth to one-hundredth the amount of a standard chest X-ray. He calculated the risk of getting cancer from a single scan at about 1 in 30 million, "which puts it somewhat less than being killed by being struck by lightning in any one year," he told me. While the risk of getting a fatal cancer from the screening is minuscule, it's about equal to the probability that an airplane will get blown up by a terrorist, he added. "So my view is there is not a case to be made for deploying them to prevent such a low probability event""

What goes on in a woman's brain when she has an orgasm - "Sexual arousal numbs the female nervous system to such an extent that she doesn’t feel as much pain – only pleasure. American researchers found that the orgasm affects up to 30 different parts of the brain including those responsible for emotion, touch, joy, satisfaction and memory... A woman’s orgasm last an average of 10-15 seconds, whilst a man’s is thought to last for just six seconds"

KAYAK Explore - see where you can go for how much
Map of the world showing how much flights to destinations are. Unfortunately it only seems to work for Southeast Asia and India: "Fares displayed are for round-trip economy class travel found by Kayak users in the last 48 hours"

JayCut - "Your Free Video Editor – Online
Engage your audience with the world's premier online video editor seamlessly integrated on your website, or edit your own videos on JayCut's community."
Create movies online

Ephebophilia: it's today's word, and it matters - "[He] suggested greater clarity in the labelling of sex offenders: for instance, he says, it is incorrect to say that those who have sex with underage teenagers are paedophiles — and if we say they are, we risk overestimating the scale of the problem of paedophilia. With predictable fury, Michele Elliott, the director of the children’s charity Kidscape, rounded on the policeman... “He is saying they are not paedophiles and they bloody well are”... The reason for the revulsion felt for paedophilia... goes to the defiance of a law of Nature... By contrast, to have sex with somebody who has passed the age of puberty is merely to defy a law of Man — and a pretty arbitrary law at that... He correctly points us to a difference between the tabloid nation’s favourite bogeyman, a kind of latterday Fagin beckoning a crooked finger through kindergarten gates, and the excited hormones of a young man in the close presence of a buxom, bosomy come-hither girlie who, in other cultures and, indeed, at other times in this one, he would be perfectly entitled to embrace"

Chinese Noodle Dinner Buried for 2,500 Years - "Noodles, moon cakes and other foods dating to 2,500 years ago were recently unearthed in a Chinese cemetery... Since the cakes were cooked in an oven-like hearth, the findings suggest that the Chinese may have been among the world's first bakers. Prior research determined the ancient Egyptians were also baking bread at around the same time, but this latest discovery indicates that individuals in northern China were skillful bakers who likely learned baking and other more complex cooking techniques much earlier"

Le couple et ses pièges : le démon de midi - "Le démon de midi, est comme son nom l'indique un démon qui va habiter l'homme comme la femme, entraînant chez eux une fièvre qui leur fera "faire n'importe quoi"... La femme, n'a pas les mêmes besoins que l'homme sur le plan sexuel, par contre il est important pour elle de voir que malgré les années elle est encore désirée et désirable"

Long Live the Web - "The tendency for magazines, for example, to produce smartphone “apps” rather than Web apps is disturbing, because that material is off the Web. You can’t bookmark it or e-mail a link to a page within it. You can’t tweet it. It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time. Some people may think that closed worlds are just fine. The worlds are easy to use and may seem to give those people what they want. But as we saw in the 1990s with the America Online dial-up information system that gave you a restricted subset of the Web, these closed, “walled gardens,” no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing Web market outside their gates. If a walled garden has too tight a hold on a market, however, it can delay that outside growth"

Don't Be Scared of MSG - Food - GOOD - "In what is either a prolonged placebo effect or a massive conspiracy, hundreds of people have been afflicted with [Chinese restaurant] syndrome... it’s hard to market something associated with headaches, castration, and brain damage. One neurosurgeon, Russell Blaylock, claims the food additive damaged the brain through excitotoxicity—essentially by exciting brain cells to death... The studies on humans often inadequately mask the flavor or fail to have a control group, and the data from studies on rats and mice are sometimes misinterpreted. “What we have is a bunch of wingdings out there who talk about exitotoxins and brain death. It’s lunacy”... Even the head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the food-safety advocacy group, told the Wall Street Journal “I don't see normal amounts of MSG as posing a risk to the vast majority of people”"

One Free Korea » China the Predator - "I wonder if a woman as shrewd as Mrs. Clinton now realizes that feeding China’s ego also feeds its arrogance and its predatory nature. It must have occurred to her that China’s leaders are the product of a zero-sum world view where preying on the weak is just what the strong do, where the ideology of class equality masks a cultural obsession with status, place, and power so deep that not even Mao could exterminate it... her early gestures of conciliation were received as signs of weakness and subordination in Beijing, where there is a long institutional memory of foreign kings bringing tribute"

Facebook | The brain drain (and what really fills it) - "If I was an excellent Singaporean Nurse, I would be working in Australia. In fact, many of our top nursing graduates, best staff nurses and experienced specialist nurses already are... I say they are real nurses. Nurses who do not wish to be treated like maids... [Here,] they are prohibited from giving the 'first dose' of IV medications, and deemed incapable of checking the sticker on a packet of blood against a patient's nametag. A short plane ride to Australia offers a tantalising prospect, where nursing as a profession is well respected and appreciated by the general public. Where nurses play the role of the 'Houseman', as the first line of medical care for their patients. Where nurses make morning rounds, order investigations and prescribe, (let alone serve the first dose of), medications. Where nurses are paid more than twice of what they are being paid here."

Fresh Challenges and the New Political Playing Field | VotingRp - "If Singapore is really run like a corporation, then it is a very bad type of corporation. Singapore Inc is run like the worst sort of short-termist corporate cost-cutter that has lost sight of who its shareholders are. Furthermore it has been engineered without accountability for poor performance whilst paying out enormous pay cheques to the board"

Ultra-small is beautiful for Japanese homeowner - "Moriya, an unmarried man, and his mother, Yoko, live in a house that's built on 30 square meters, that's the same as the size of a parking space for one car"

Are Good-Looking People More Employable? - "Employer callbacks to attractive men are significantly higher than to men with no picture and to plain-looking men, nearly doubling the latter group. Strikingly, attractive women do not enjoy the same beauty premium. In fact, women with no picture have a significantly higher rate of callbacks than attractive or plain-looking women. We explore a number of explanations and provide evidence that female jealousy of attractive women in the workplace is a primary reason for the punishment of attractive women"
Misogynist: a man who hates women as much as women hate each other; other research shows attractive women get better raises - probably because their bosses aren't other women

Today’s Lesson: Make Facebook Angry, And They’ll Censor You Into Oblivion - "Facebook has confirmed that it is automatically blocking all links to Lamebook and that it has also removed the company’s ‘Fan’ page. Not because the content was offensive, mind you, but because Facebook doesn’t like Lamebook... it isn’t the first big company that’s overzealous when it comes to protecting its trademark. But by blocking Lamebook’s content, Facebook is crossing a line"
Singaporeans probably think: "Serves them right"