Links - 24th April 2011

"Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody." - Mark Twain

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Bad Romance Novels - "He wondered what she’d look like spread open for him. An old museum he had once visited displayed some relics from Old Earth and among them was a beautiful, big shell. It was a coral-pink color and looked as smooth as silk to the touch. Were her cunt lips that same delicate shade? Would they have secrets like those hidden inside the shell?"

Candidates Religion
Source. 42.5% of current Singaporean MPs are Christian (I thought it'd be closer to 70%), while 13.8% don't specify their religion

Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice? - "He had almost no experience and even less interest in the sport. What he really wanted to do was test the 10,000-hour theory he read about in the Malcolm Gladwell bestseller Outliers. That, Gladwell wrote, is the amount of time it takes to get really good at anything — "the magic number of greatness"... The Dan Plan will take six hours a day, six days a week, for six years... The 10,000-hour concept, though, is based on academic research into the idea that success is a choice — made, not born"
I have set a reminder for April 1st 2015 to see if Dan McLaughlin makes it. I really doubt it, since Gladwell conflates the [possibly] necessary and the sufficient

MediaLibrary 1.5.3.4 Pro - "MediaLibrary Pro provides you with a full-featured media library or media collection management environment on a Joomla-based website. MediaLibrary allows for books, movies, music and games."
This lets you set up a private/personal library and have members/people request for books online

Bible or Qur'an
Which line(s) come(s) from which?

Le Lapin du Métro Parisien - "emploi: avertisseur visuel pour les enfants et les idiots
j'aime pas: lapin à la moutarde, gibelotte de lapin, lapin chasseur façon grand-mère, lapin au père Wrigley, lapin à la flamande et tout les autres plats à base de lapin. le mensonge, l'hypocrisie, la moquerie sur ma main, la guerre, la pluie, le métro, etc..."

Metaphilm - Fight Club - "Just as Calvin has an imaginary jungle-animal friend named Hobbes, whom everyone else believes to be nothing but a stuffed toy, "Jack" in Fight Club has an imaginary cool-guy friend named Tyler, whom no one but Jack can see... Hobbes, newly adjusted as "Tyler Durden" (after all, grown-up Calvin would no longer accept a jungle animal walking, talking, and eating canned tuna), re-enters Calvin/Jack’s life, determined to show Calvin everything he’s done wrong, whether he likes it or not... G.R.O.S.S. shares the following characteristics with Fight Club... This transition from gleeful Calvin to dull "Jack" is not uncommon. Little Nemo became a banker, Peter Pan became a lawyer, and Garfield was caught and butchered by the chef of a Chinese restaurant. (One exception is Charlie Brown, who from all indications was mentally middle-aged at the time of his birth)"

Anxiety gender gap: Are women really more anxious than men? - "Women, according to countless studies, are twice as prone to anxiety as men... there's some bad news we need to get out of the way first: a few recent studies have indicated that the hormonal differences between the sexes really do make women a touch more biologically inclined toward anxiety than men... Don't get hung up on the fact that these studies were on rodents; most of what we know about the neuroscience of fear actually comes from tormenting lab rats... Parents coddle girls who cry after a painful scrape but tell boys to suck it up, and this formative link between emotional outbursts and kisses from mom predisposes girls to react to unpleasant situations with "negative" feelings like anxiety later in life"
The fact that research findings are described as "bad news" is telling (but unsurprising)

Women worry about their bodies 252 times a week

Hong Kong's most defiant egg waffle vendor: 'Go ahead and arrest me' - "Ng Yuk-fai, also known as "Ah Bak," has been selling the Hong Kong-style waffles for 30 years and is often cited as the maker of Hong Kong's best egg waffle... Over the last three and a half months, Ng has been arrested six times by officers from the FEHD; the last arrests all took place in the past 10 days... About 70 people gathered around Ng to show their support for him as FEHD officers dragged him and his wooden cart away."

Acne science: What makes pimples so peculiar to people? - "Compared with our ratings of clear-skinned individuals, we're quick to associate unpleasant concepts (brutal, bad, ugly, angry, aggressive, vomit, mean) with acne sufferers... 'there is no single disease which causes more psychic trauma, more maladjustments between parents and children, more general insecurity and feelings of inferiority and greater sums of psychic suffering than does acne vulgaris'"

How to save your butt when the social media bubble bursts - "I am so very sick of people who have never had to work in a corporate bureaucracy or manage through a budget crisis explain that measuring social media is like measuring your mother, or your pants. Here’s another one that drives me nuts: “The ROI of social media is that your company exists in five years” … again implying that you need to do social media, just because you need to do social media. Bullshit... The bubble always bursts, at least in a free economy... As a business owner, are you willing to spend more than $100,000 per year without requiring any accountability for a return? What kind of a company are you running?"

Alternative energy - "Cosmic energy draws its powers from the "universal and higher multidimensional energies"... Because energy can been "sent" without physical contact, she has been healing some overseas clients as well"

Scientist imam: Muslims need to talk about evolution - life - "I wrote an article saying that we needed to move beyond the simplistic idea held by many Muslims that God created Adam from clay and then breathed life into him... a visiting influential Saudi scholar, Salir al-Sadlan, was asked whether someone who believed in evolution was fit to lead prayers, and he said no... a leaflet was handed out saying that anybody believing in evolution or who propagates it must be killed... A lot of [Muslims] enjoy science programmes on TV such as those by David Attenborough, but they tend to say he's an unbeliever so we can't trust him... I'm abandoning my attempt to reconcile [Evolution] with the Koran until things settle down. I am not willing to risk my life over this issue"

Europe’s Christian Comeback - "The rapid decline in the continent’s church attendance over the past 40 years may have done Europe a favor. It has freed churches of trying to operate as national entities that attempt to serve all members of society. Today, no church stands a realistic chance of incorporating everyone. Smaller, more focused bodies, however, can be more passionate, enthusiastic, and rigorously committed to personal holiness"

'Royal Virility Performance' British beer containing Viagra launched - "A beer should be brewed with a purpose, not just because some toffs are getting married, so we created something at our brewery that will undermine those special-edition beers and other assorted seaside tat, whilst at the same time actually give the happy couple something extra on their big day"

Entangling Alliances with None - "The foreign policy expressed by America’s founding fathers was one of goodwill, peace, and “little connexion”... the idea that America should intervene in the affairs of others as needed, and has the mission of saving the world... is rooted not in the writings of the founding fathers, but instead in the writings and sermons of the Puritans 150 years earlier, who viewed American Indians as wanting them to “come over and help us” and who believed they were a “city on a hill”... The worldview behind that motto – we’re here to help, whether you want our help or not – is the Massachusetts Puritans’ most enduring bequest to the future United States"

"Chief of Armskote" CPL Tan writes an open letter to MG (Ret) Chan - "The tone you used, the look of your face, the words you used, the body language, and arrogance served you well in SAF because who you were then... You were the master in SAF but now you are a servant, serve us not lord over us"

How I got a blank book to the top of the Amazon charts - "Any new author needs to wake up and smell the rankings. Most books, however well written, hardly sell many copies at all

Is Sugar Toxic? - "“High-fructose corn syrup, sugar — no difference... The point is they’re each bad — equally bad, equally poisonous” ... The fructose component of sugar and H.F.C.S. is metabolized primarily by the liver, while the glucose from sugar and starches is metabolized by every cell in the body... if the fructose hits the liver in sufficient quantity and with sufficient speed, the liver will convert much of it to fat. This apparently induces a condition known as insulin resistance, which is now considered the fundamental problem in obesity, and the underlying defect in heart disease and in the type of diabetes, type 2, that is common to obese and overweight individuals. It might also be the underlying defect in many cancers... the last time sugar consumption jumped markedly in this country, it was also associated with a diabetes epidemic... If you want to cause insulin resistance in laboratory rats... feeding them diets that are mostly fructose is an easy way to do it"

The gender gap: if you're a vegetarian, odds are you're a woman. Why? - "Of the 12.4 million people who call themselves vegetarian, 68 percent are female while only 32 percent are male... women visit the doctor an average of 6.2 times per year and men 4.5 times per year. One could use these figures to argue that women are hypochondriacs, but what they show is that women take a more proactive approach to their health... "I do believe women are more sensitive to the suffering of others"... "We know what it's like to be powerless [so] we can see a relationship between our powerlessness and others' powerlessness," including animals... A battered wife transformed her relationship with animals while being choked by her husband...becoming vegetarian is a literal act of liberation for some women who see getting away from the hot, greasy preparation of meat as a kind of freedom... women who eat less (of everything, not just meat) are viewed as more attractive than their peers who eat more... No meat product was deemed feminine... For men, [food] cravings usually involve meat... women reported more overall cravings--mostly cravings for sweets associated with the menstrual cycle"
Interestingly, (according to Rationally Speaking's vegetarianism episode) vegans actually live as long as meat eaters, while vegetarians and occasional meat eaters live longer than the former; they missed women being easily conned by dodgy health advice and their being into fads/fashions

First homosexual caveman found

Malaysian transsexual 'dumped British husband fortnight after getting visa'
If you enter a relationship with a pre-op transsexual what's your sexuality?!