Links - 3rd January 2011

"This year I've resolved to stop regretting the past and start dreading the future instead" - Pickles

***

Music Is Better Off On BitTorrent, Than With Apple or Big Music - "[Giving away my music] expanded the amount of people who pirate my music, therefore it has expanded those who bought CDs, donated to me, or came out to shows. Another interesting thing is that it wound up in some licensing company’s hands that I’ve never worked with before, and got me additional placement in TV/film/etc, which is a good portion of my income... [Apple] might single handedly be the worst thing that has happened to entertainment media in the last 3 years... iTunes completely screwed up the track listing of my last album Arboreal. Their network is so influential that over half of the people who have bought the CD from my label now have botched track titles on their mp3 players. Apple doesn’t have ANY accessible artist support to deal with things like this... If I want to sell a 30 minute long track (Louisiana Mourning, for example), they require me to split it up into a bunch of separate tracks. Their distribution system is so unorganized that artists have to pay business like Tunecore upwards of $40 per album (and annual fees) to do Apple’s job for them"

YouTube - iPad Shower, Steve Jobs Apple's Keynote Parody : iPad Shower (Guignols) - "steve joBs. il rend indispensable ce dont nous n'avons pas besoin"
De Les Guignols de l'Info

Did George Lucas change cinema with ‘Star Wars’ prequels? - "We see the water-opera sphere in “Revenge of the Sith,” which appears to be reenacting the last battle of the next film, while Palpatine explains Anakin’s origin without directly telling him. Look carefully and follow the patterns: Overall, there is a transforming flow of identities that take spherical form, a path from nature into the mechanical"
I think he took too many Lit classes

Harry Potter was a good Christian?

Fantasy & Mythology: Fisher-Price Little People Noah's Ark Playset

Murder in America - "He has determined that four factors correlate with the homicide rate: faith that government is stable and capable of enforcing just laws; trust in the integrity of legitimately elected officials; solidarity among social groups based on race, religion, or political affiliation; and confidence that the social hierarchy allows for respect to be earned without recourse to violence... in using quantitative methods to make an argument about the human condition, Roth has wandered into a no man’s land between the social sciences and the humanities. After a while, arguments made in that no man’s land tend to devolve into meaninglessness: good government is good, bad government is bad, and everything’s better when everything’s better... Although the crime rate today is fifteen per cent lower than it was twenty-five years ago, the incarceration rate is four times as high"

Pope Benedict XVI Visits Britain - "When he's not staring at worshippers with his hypnotic demonic gaze or sacrificing babies to Baal in the Vatican crypt, Pope Benedict likes to take trips abroad to convert more people to the ways of the Catholic church... He is rarely seen outside in public, but when he is, he scares people with his diabolical grin and sinister stare... On Friday, the Pope visited Westminster cathedral where it was reported that he inspected the choir to see if they were up to the same standard as his boys back in Rome"
This one is pure gold - must be the funniest thing I've seen this year (and possibly since Asian Prince)

Hunch Blog | The Bullying Epidemic: Does it really get better? - "Whether you’re more into Heathers or Saved by the Bell, you’re probably familiar with the stereotypes of bullied high schoolers... [Data] Stereotypes exist for a reason, huh?... We’re happy to report that Hunch users who were bullied in high school have found that life after graduation is, in fact, better... people who were bullied grow up to be just as happy and successful as people who were not bullied. (They are however, somewhat more likely to be naturally compassionate than impartial and are slightly more likely to support charities.) We wouldn’t wish bullying on anyone, but might it be one of those bad experiences that can build character?"

Really short stories - "She was the wife every man could ever hope for; smart, sexy and with a mute button at the back of her neck."
"Little did prince charming know, that Rapunzel's curly locks came not from her head, but from her.."
"I spent the day in the confession box, seeking forgiveness from God for all the bad things I had done for the government. But before I left, I spent a second seeking forgiveness from the priest, having planted 2 bullets in his head for knowing too much."

Malaysia: Church officials told to remove crucifixes and avoid hymn singing when Prime Minister attended Archbishop's Christmas party - "Among the directives given were:
. To remove any overt Christian symbol, such as crucifixes, from the party premises
. That carollers not belt out hymns
. Not to quote from Scriptures or say any Christian prayer during the visit."

Where Are The World's Best Choirs? Not In America - "There's nothing like the depth of choral tradition in the U.S. that there is in the U.K., thanks to the Anglican church... The Anglicans rule choral music. The Catholics, on the other hand, to whom much of the repertoire rightfully belongs, have not sustained their music traditions as well, and their choirs mostly sound bad when they're not doing some guitar mass or something"

Letter urges Israeli girls to avoid dating Arabs - "It urges Jewish girls not to go out with non-Jews or work in places that employ non-Jews"
Considering Muslim girls are forbidden to marry non-Muslims, it is not so outrageous that Israeli girls are advised not to date Arabs

All social media experts “are actually the same person,” Wikileaks documents reveal - "“Paul from Miami,” as he is identified in Wikileaks documents, appears to be the source of an entire industry of Twitter experts who seemingly give the same advice and yet somehow all have over 20,000 Twitter followers each... The documents also revealed trust funds, spam, wealthy spouses, and jobs at Starbucks to be the top ways in which those social media experts who are real people pay their bills... “Social media experts could not be responsible for these [DDOS] attacks,” theorized CC Chapman, a content strategist, whatever that means. “Social media experts just don’t know enough about the internet to make it happen,” he concluded"

China preparing for armed conflict 'in every direction' - ""In the coming five years, our military will push forward preparations for military conflict in every strategic direction," said Liang Guanglie in an interview published by several state-backed newspapers in China. "We may be living in peaceful times, but we can never forget war, never send the horses south or put the bayonets and guns away""
China will talk about peace... until they ram your boat without provocation - and then blame you for it

Why your child's school bus has no seat belts - "Modern school buses are already remarkably safe, and because seat belts don't work the same way in buses as they do cars... "Costs far exceed benefits, and school bus seat belts appear to be less cost-effective than other types of safety treatments"... If the West Brook bus had been equipped with seat belts on that day in 2006, "I'm certain Ashley would have survived and many of the other girls would have escaped serious injury. Parents expect better""
Big cases make bad law

The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 - How-To Geek
These are mostly for Windows 7; "I often need to crash Windows 7 for testing purposes. Also, being that this is primarily used for troubleshooting hard hangs, it does improve windows by creating a memory dump, which can be used to help diagnose the issue"
Another useful tip elsewhere to remove the ATI Catalyst Control Center: regsvr32 /u "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\ATI Technologies\ATI.ACE\Core-Static\atiacm64.dll"

Skip the Annoying "Use the Web service to find the correct program" Dialog - How-To Geek

Delaying Sex Credited for Making Marriages Stronger - "Those who had sex with their spouses within the first month of dating were much less satisfied with their marriages than those who had waited longer or waited until after marriage... 50 percent of [American] couples initiate premarital sex within a month of the first date... [Yet] people who wait until after marriage to have sex may find themselves sexually incompatible... She advises couples to wait to engage in sexual relations until they've established an emotional bond. "Love at first sight is a lot of baloney," she adds, "and usually based on superficial criteria"... It's not just the cheapening of the experience, however. Busby points out that sex early on in a relationship may confuse the decision-making process in couples and lead them to continue relationships that aren't really working"

A defense of "May-December" marriages like Hugh Hefner's. - "There's little evidence that marriages with wide age gaps between partners turn out any worse than marriages between people born around the same time... A Canadian study found that an age gap can correlate with a higher likelihood of divorce—especially if the woman is older—but it can also make divorce less likely... every relationship has power imbalances, whether in terms of income, intelligence, or social status. The age gap is different only in that it may be more visible. It therefore gets blamed when a marriage goes bad... There's also a squirm factor"

Origins of Christmas Gift Giving: The Feast of Saturnalia - "The origins of Christmas gift giving are rooted in ancient Roman times during the Feast of Saturn, or Saturnalia"
No, it has nothing to do with the 3 Wise Men giving incense, myrrh and gold

Un drive-in au sex shop: "Alors je voudrais un vibro pocket et un oeuf vibrant" - "La loi d['Alabama] interdisait les jeux sexuels pour adultes "sauf pour besoins médicaux, scientifiques, éducationnels, législatifs et judiciaires"... On imagine les réponses: "Mon vagin est complètement coincé, j'ai du faire un faux mouvement", "Je souffre de solitude, un lapin m'aidera à sortir de ma dépression" ou encore "J'ai des petites pannes, je me suis dit qu'un anneau m'aiderait à tenir plus longtemps plutôt que du Viagra""

Bocca della Verità - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "The most famous characteristic of the Mouth, however, is its role as a lie detector. Starting from the Middle Ages, it was believed that if one told a lie with one's hand in the mouth of the sculpture, it would be bitten off"
I just discovered that "the Mouth of Truth" is not JUST a cheap scam, but also a real Roman sculpture!

Trevi coins to fund food for poor - "The thousands of coins thrown into Rome's Trevi fountain are to be used by an Italian charity to set up a supermarket for the city's poor"

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science (a blog on statistical issues in social sciences)

Mortality and immortality: The Nobel Prize as an experiment into the effect of status upon longevity - "We estimate that winning the Prize, compared to merely being nominated, is associated with between 1 and 2 years of extra longevity."
An alternate explanation: "Not getting the Nobel Prize reduces your expected lifespan by two years"

Referees' quotes – 2010 - 2010 - Environmental Microbiology - "'reading a well written manuscript before X-mas makes me feel like Santa Claus'
'The writing and data presentation are so bad that I had to leave work and go home early and then spend time to wonder what life is about.'"

the truth about job interviews - "Going on a job interview is like going on the worst first date ever. You have to be able to answer questions without actually revealing anything bad about yourself, while insuring your doubletalk sounds sincere... We all hide ourselves in some way throughout the day, but completely shield ourselves on interviews. I’m starting to think that the point of them is to see how adeptly one can dodge and weave, how good one is at judging what needs to be said and what needs sidestepping, which (after all) are all important qualities in forging a promising career"
Comment: "HR has as its priority to hire employees who will create the least amount of work for HR. In creative industries they usually the get the complete opposite of what the business genuinely needs."