Links - 13th April 2011

"Life is just one damned thing after another." - Elbert Hubbard

***

Legal or not, sex industry powers on - "WHETHER prostitution is legal or not has ''little or no impact on the size of the industry'' but it does affect the health of sex workers, Australian research shows"

Software firm wants naked web coders - "As far as I am aware this is not only the first UK office job for naturists in web-coding or web-selling, but is also the first worldwide facility for naturists to earn substantial sums of money from work that incidentally provides them with the capability to work entirely without clothes... Mr Taylor admitted that a naturist office offers "no benefit to business productivity other than providing a nice facility for the staff". There's no benefit for customers, either, since they'll "never know that the provider is nude""

S'pore ranks second-lowest for job satisfaction - "In Robert Half's latest survey of finance professionals, Singapore ranks second-lowest worldwide for job satisfaction, with only 53 per cent of local respondents claiming to be satisfied with their job... Other Asians are not much happier in their jobs than Singaporeans, forming a regional theme of dissatisfaction"
Something is wrong in Asia and especially Singapore

The Daily Mash - Increased drinking caused by cancer fears - "There is of course a link between stress and cancer and drinking. Stress causes both cancer and drinking, while drinking eliminates both stress and any memory of articles about stress and cancer, which in a nice, neat way are now the single biggest cause of stress. The answer is to either stop reading newspapers or for every drop of alcohol in this country to be sold at below cost price"

Real Nick Clegg found chained in Conservative party basement - "The Lib Dem leader has apparently been kept prisoner since the day after the general election, when he visited David Cameron to discuss forming a coalition government with the Conservatives. His place was then taken by either a clone, an android or a secret twin that he was previously unaware existed"

YouTube - Charlie and the Apple Factory - "The best new iPad feature? Golden tickets."

Disinterested or uninterested? How long we should cling to a word's original meaning. - "Suppose a friend said to you, "I know you're disinterested, so I want to ask you a question presently." Then he didn't say anything. Would you be momentarily nonplussed? Quite likely, yes. The above paragraph contains four words whose primary definitions have changed or are currently changing... Such archaism seems designed to attract attention, and nothing more"

Friday Lyrics Analyzed with Rebecca Black - "Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal. That line, that line is about consumerism. I gotta have my bowl. I gotta have my cereal. We can't live without these things in modern society. And for some people, it's a mortgage. For others, it's a bowl of cereal"

No Free Trade - Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism - "Two years after becoming Treasury Secretary in 1789 at the outrageously young age of thirty-three, Hamilton submitted to the Congress the Report on the Subject of Manufactures, where he set out the economic development strategy for his young country. In the report, he argued that 'industries in their infancy', like the American ones, need to be protected and nurtured by government before they can stand on their own feet... Given his views, were Hamilton finance minister of a developing country today, he would have been heavily criticized by the US Treasury Department for his heresy. His country might even have been refused a loan from the IMF and the World Bank"

Hermit crabs at the Great Shell Exchange - "hermit crabs with an empty shell are like women at a shoe store"

1869 Harvard Entrance Exam
Today those who know Latin can't do maths and vice versa

DenialDepot - "Welcome to my climate science blog. I believe that one day all science will be done on blogs because we bloggers are natural skeptics, disbelieving the mainstream and accepting the possibility of any alternative idea. We stand unimpressed by "textbooks", "peer review journals" and so-called "facts". There are no facts, just dissenting opinion. We are infinitely small compared to nature and can't grasp anything as certain as a fact."

Rebecca Black exposed as fake - "A press statement from Universal Studios says Rebecca Black is a character from the family movie The Music Factory, due for release on April 29... The Music Factory, directed by Home Alone's Chris Columbus, is about a secret facility where cyborgs resembling young teenagers are created and turned into pop stars."

Why Feminism Is the Anti-Viagra - "Gender equality inhibits arousal. The majority of women have submission fantasies... Almost every quality of dominant males triggers arousal in the female brain: dominant scents, dominant gaits, deep voices, height, displays of wealth... On the other hand, most men are aroused by being dominant... In humans, the hormonal vagaries of prenatal development appear to cause a substantial portion of men to be born with active submissive circuitry... just as democracy has no effect on our basic taste preferences for sugar and fat, democracy doesn't affect our basic sexual preferences for domination and submission."

Increased life expectancy discourages religious participation - "Many religions and societies link to some degree the cumulative amount of religious effort to benefits in the afterlife. We show that higher life expectancy discounts expected benefits in the afterlife and is therefore likely to lead to postponement of religiosity, without necessarily jeopardising benefits in the afterlife"

Economics focus: Paper chains | The Economist - "CHRIS ROCK, a comedian, is a big fan of Oprah Winfrey, a television host and philanthropist. He recalls one of Ms Winfrey’s shows during which a woman confessed to her husband that she had frittered away $300,000 and as a consequence their home was about to be repossessed. “By the end of the show, it was all the guy’s fault,” a clearly impressed Mr Rock told David Letterman, another talk-show host. “He was apologising for not loving her enough—it was the greatest ‘Oprah’ of all time.”"

New Statesman - The politics of hair - "The Guardian's Hadley Freeman has written on the "most unfair state of affairs" that "discriminates against baldies"; Samson's struggles to come to terms with his hair-related self-esteem issues, meanwhile, famously resulted in much unnecessary strife -- his inability to adjust to an unfortunate haircut led to eye surgery at the hands of the Philistines, whose licences to practise in ocular care had not been approved by the General Optical Council... The leader of Japan's Your Party, Yoshimi Watanabe, has instead taken a more proactive approach, exploiting hair's semiotic value for political gain. Though formerly mocked by colleagues for being the leader of the "new party [of] one person", Watanabe's followers swept this month's House of Councillors election, winning ten seats. Many, including the Mainichi newspaper, have ascribed Watanabe's recent success to his distinctive "antenna" hairstyle, reportedly based on David Beckham circa 2002"

Raped, teenager flees only to be gangraped - "An 18-year-old woman was raped four times within a span of two hours in south Delhi on Saturday. The hapless teen was first allegedly raped by her brother's father-in-law at his house in Vasant Kunj. After she ran out of the house and pleaded with a taxi driver to help her, he and two other men took her to a secluded place in Dwarka in the cab and allegedly gangraped her there."

RUNNING IS FOR GIRLS - "Running makes me all sweaty. But at least I don’t smell like a boy. Ew."
This site is full of misandry

Women who post lots of photos of themselves on Facebook value appearance, need attention, study finds - "These women are more likely to base their self-worth on appearance and use social networking to compete for attention... females identify more strongly with their image and appearance and use Facebook to compete for attention... The people who tended to base their self worth on things like academic competence, family love and support, and being a virtuous or moral person spent less time online and showed less interest in attention-seeking through social media"
This suggests that feminists' claims that women dress up "for themselves" is false; the paper is interesting: "Weiser discovered that female Internet users tend to seek health and education information online, whereas males prefer searching for news and entertainment purposes"
Addendum: This also suggests that [some] women not only like being objectified, but objectify themselves

English: Who speaks English? | The Economist - "EVERYONE knows the stereotypes about foreigners speaking English: Scandinavians are shockingly fluent, while the Japanese lag despite years and billions of yen spent trying. Now a big new study confirms some of those stereotypes. But it holds some surprises as well... Wealthy countries do better overall. But smaller wealthy countries do better still: the larger the number of speakers of a country’s main language, the worse that country tends to be at English. This is one reason Scandinavians do so well: what use is Swedish outside Sweden? It may also explain why Spain was the worst performer in western Europe, and why Latin America was the worst-performing region... Export dependency is another correlate with English... Malaysia, the best English-performer in Asia, is also the sixth-most export-dependent country in the world. (Singapore was too small to make the list, or it probably would have ranked similarly.) This is perhaps surprising, given a recent trend towards anti-colonial and anti-Western sentiment in Malaysia’s politics. The study’s authors surmise that English has become seen as a mere tool, divorced in many minds from its associations with Britain and America. Teaching plays a role, too. Starting young, while it seems a good idea, may not pay off: children between eight and 12 learn foreign languages faster than younger ones... Finally, one surprising result is that China and India are next to each other (29th and 30th of 44) in the rankings, despite India’s reputation as more Anglophone. Mr Hult says that the Chinese have made a broad push for English (they're "practically obsessed with it”). But efforts like this take time to marinade through entire economies, and so may have avoided notice by outsiders. India, by contrast, has long had well-known Anglophone elites, but this is a narrow slice of the population in a country considerably poorer and less educated than China"
I feel insulted