Links - 31st July 2011

"Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man." - J. Robert Oppenheimer speaking of Albert Einstein

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Benako.com - Raymond Queneau: Exercices de Style - "Ung joor vare meedee ger preelotobus poor la port Changparay. Eel aytay congplay, praysk. Jer mongtay kang maym ay lar jer ay ger vee ung ohm ahvayk ung long coo ay ung chahrpo hangtooray dunn saughrt der feessel trayssay. Sir mirssyer sir mee ang caughlayr contrer ung ingdeeveeduh kee luhee marshay suhr lay peehay, puhee eel arlah sarsswar. "

How girl who drowned herself in Paris became 'most kissed face of all time' - "A user of CPR, in the 1950s he developed Resusci Annie, otherwise known as Rescue Annie, a life-like mannequin used to train people in mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. His website says he was so moved by the unknown woman's tragic background, he adopted her mask for his first-aid doll."

53.1% of You Already Know What This Story's About. Or Do You? Need a Hint? - "Daryl Bem, Ph.D., and Sandra Lipsitz Bem, Ph.D., were even interviewed in the first issue of Ms. magazine about their egalitarian, gender-­liberated marriage. The Drs. Bem lectured together for years, giving three-hour seminars to packed houses about a partnership in which housework was split evenly and careers were equally important. Though both are now professors emeriti at Cornell, they don’t share a home; neither divorced nor legally separated, they’ve been apart for eighteen years. “I always loved living alone,” Bem says. “And then the other thing is, I identify as gay.”... “Colleagues of mine, especially those in biological science, say, ‘Daryl, your theory is beautifully written and well argued and almost certainly wrong.’”"

Singapore Heritage: The Old and the New - "The historic Changi Prison, built by the British in 1936 and used by the Japanese to house civilian prisoners during WWII, was torn down in 2000 despite petitions and appeals. Today, all that remains of it is a replica of the chapel built by POWs and a museum."
Luckily I visited it before it got blown up

CPF Minimum sum and why you will never get all of it - "Unless you make a CPF nomination. Under the Act, your entire CPF savings will be distributed to the government if you do not have a single living relative when you die."

Children of divorce score worse in math, social skills - "The detrimental effects on the children do not start until after the parents begin divorce proceedings."

Egyptian women accuse soldiers of conducting 'virginity tests' on protesters - "We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place. None of them were"

Trouver ses magasins et artisans à Paris - Recuperer son Ex en utilisant la psychologie masculine - "Si vous utilisez correctement la psychologie masculine, vous pouvez le faire courir après vous comme jamais auparavant. En fait, ce n'est pas nouveau. Des millions de femmes utilisent la psychologie masculine pour obtenir ce qu'elles veulent de leurs hommes, parfois les hommes sont conscients que leurs esprits est utilisés, parfois ils ne savent même pas ce qui s'est passé... il y a deux strates de l'esprit - le conscient et le subconscient. Ce dernier est responsable de toutes les décisions que l'homme prend"

Dress Codes in New York Clubs - Will This Get Me In? - NYTimes.com - "The New York City Commission on Human Rights opened an investigation (still in progress) into the Continental, a sports bar in the East Village on Third Avenue, for its “no baggy jeans or bling” policy, which civil rights groups called a barely concealed ploy to keep out blacks... for what it’s worth, the crowd was about 30 percent black on a visit in April... Mr. Smith’s defense illuminates a truth about dress codes at even the most exclusive velvet-roped clubs: they are frequently intended to keep out a certain type of person. The clothes themselves are secondary... Mr. Satsky suggests that his male patrons wear “a blazer, a solid button-down or a solid sweater.” For women, shoes are key. “Minimum five-inch heel”"

Wedding’s off, now here’s your $132k bill - "He is now unable to continue with the purchase as he has since broken up with his fiancée, who is a foreigner... he will now have to pay a penalty of 20 percent of the purchase price... Despite his appeals to the developer and seeing his MP twice, he was told to get married, failing which the developer will proceed to forfeit his deposit. John is now harbouring suicidal thoughts as it means he will be thrown into debt... Another solution is for him to get a new fiancé. However, he is again thrown in a dicey situation. As the ethnic ratio quota for Chinese had been filled, he can only marry a non-Singaporean. "Now that the Chinese quota has been filled, I cannot find someone who is Chinese to get married to take over the flat. I have to find other races. This is really very stupid," said John. John said he had asked the HDB and the developer to help him search for a new fiancée who fulfils this criterion, but they were unable to help... "Under such circumstances, the developer can allow another buyer, provided there is an eligible one, to take over such a unit," said the spokesperson. Interested buyers would have to comprise one Chinese and another non-Chinese applicant in order to be eligible"

Asian Women with White Men Suck? - "I am an Asian woman with a white boyfriend... Asian women only suck when they don’t think twice about saying things like:
- I have a cultural/aesthetic preference for white guys.
- Asian men have small penises, trust me, I’m Asian.
- White guys are much more physically attractive compared to Asian guys.
- Asian men are nerds and geeks and quiet losers.
- Asian men aren’t romantic.
- White guys are hot and sexy, while Asian guys are just loyal friends.
- I will never date an Asian guy, I only date white guys.
- I can’t date Asian men because they’re like my brothers.
- Caucasian features are more attractive compared to the round face, olive skin, small squinty eyes Asian guys have.
- Etc. along the same lines.
I’ve heard enough Asian women say these things as if they were absolute truths, without questioning how they came to their racial preferences, and not realizing how much these seemingly flippant remarks harm Asian men, create a rift between Asian men and women, and breed negativity towards Asian women who don’t hold these views. Sometimes I wonder how an Asian woman can say she prefers white men because they are more aesthetically pleasing, when one day she might have a son that looks more like her side of the family than his father’... some pairings cannot be entirely race-blind if Asian females are marrying out at a higher rate than any other minority in the States"
Some of those items can actually be statements of fact

Animal suicide sheds light on human behavior - ""For (St.) Augustine and (Thomas) Aquinas it goes against natural law and so goes against God's law," Ramsden told Discovery News. They called on the lack of suicide in Nature as proof that people should not kill themselves"

King Tiger's World War 2 Battlefield Tour (Europe)

China seeks to muzzle reporting on train crash - "Journalists have been ordered to focus on 'touching stories' and avoid questioning official accounts of the disaster, which killed at least 39 people"

Headless zombie squid and dead frogs dancing - "It is possible to re-animate dead appendages with a little salt, either table salt or in solution form as soy sauce. Be warned, this may put you off your breakfast"

Prostitution and Sex Crimes: Publications: The Independent Institute - "In this paper I examine the hypothesis that the frequency of rape is increased when another source of sex (prostitution) is limited or unavailable. To test this theory I regressed the rape rate in available OECD countries against a proxy for the availability of prostitution. The relationship was found to be anti-correlated at about the 90% confidence level. Using this model, it is estimated that if prostitution were legalized in the United States, the rape rate would decrease by roughly 25% for a decrease of approximately 25,000 rapes per year"

Amish man in Indiana arrested, accused of sexting girl, 12 - "[He] arrived in a horse-drawn buggy for a presumed rendezvous... The Amish community Yoder lived in can use cell phones for professional purposes only and charge them away from their homes -- for instance barns"
Elsewhere: "the proposed sex act would happen inside the buggy... the numbers of Amish on social networking sites like Facebook are increasing"

New Facebook trend: Amish kids - "Several have photos of themselves in traditional garb as well as in "English" dress on their Facebook pages. The photos themselves may seem a leap for Old Order Amish, many of whom refuse to carry photo identification because they regard photographs as violating the second of the Ten Commandments, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.""

Penguin takes wrong turn, ends up in New Zealand

Welfare before the Welfare State - "Many people think life without the welfare state would be chaos. In their minds, nobody would help support the less fortunate, and there would be riots in the streets. Little do they know that people found innovative ways of supporting each other before the welfare state existed. One of the most important of these ways was the mutual-aid society."

My Ex-Gay Friend - NYTimes.com - "“I don’t think the gay movement understands the extent to which the next generation just wants to be normal kids. The people who are getting that are the Christian right”... “I’d always been told that if you had doubts about the rightness of your homosexuality, which I had been having for a while but was trying to silence, that it was because you just hadn’t worked through all your internalized homophobia. But that didn’t feel true now”... he went on, adding that he has never undergone reparative therapy or attended an ex-gay ministry... [he] was fascinated by queer theory — namely, the idea that sexual and gender identities are culturally constructed rather than biologically fixed... I couldn’t help wondering if Michael’s new philosophy might, in a strange way, be a logical extension of what he believed back then — that “gay” is a limiting category and that sexual identities can change. Ben nodded. “A radical queer activist and a fundamentalist Christian aren’t always as different as they might seem,” he said, adding that they’re ideologues who can railroad over nuance and claim a monopoly on the truth... “you used to always insist that I say ‘forward’ when we drove,” I reminded him. “You corrected any gay person who said ‘straight’ in a car.”"