Links - 26th September 2011

"We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it." - Dave Barry

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How sexists find love - "Women who are charmed by the tactics found in manuals like Neil Strauss' "The Game" are generally either interested in casual sex -- or they're sexist. It turns out the same is also true of the men who use these strategies... ladies who subscribe to negative stereotypes about their own gender will take a liking to aggressively dominant men. (An important caveat: The female subjects self-reported their receptiveness to various flirtation styles described in neutral terms. This is problematic because, as Mystery himself told me four years ago, "What a woman says she wants and what she responds to are two different things.")... What's especially interesting about this study is that it not only confirms that there are sexist ideas behind pickup artist strategies -- as has often been the criticism -- but it also shows that sexist women are complicit. "Women are not just sexual gatekeepers," he says. "It's not like they're helpless, non-participants in this interaction. Instead, sexist women are essentially choosing sexist men." This is what's called "assortative mating" in social psychology"
I can't download the article, Sexism and Assertive Courtship Strategies, but it seems problematic. For one, it seems to use the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI), where statements like “When women lose to men in a fair competition, they typically complain about being discriminated against” and “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men” (i.e. being skeptical of feminism) are labelled as "hostile sexism", while everything that benefits females is labelled "benevolent sexism"; perhaps it is telling that "Sex Roles" is a self-described feminist journal

The Death of Liberalism - "Modern liberals... regularly defend dictatorships (think Venezuela, China, and Pakistan) for the simple reason that these nations are openly anti-Western. At the sime time, they spend massive amounts of energy attacking democracies (like the US and Israel) that have the temerity to be proud of who they are and what they represent. Liberals are now quite authoritarian when it comes to the issue of free speech... the obvious question is, why has this happened? The answer, quite obviously, is that liberalism is now ingrained with anti-westernism. Liberals have taken a pround tradition of self-criticism, and turned it into a deadly dose of self-loathing. Anything Western, especially anything white and male, is to be looked upon with suspicion and criticism. Anything non-Western is to be looked upon with admiration and acceptance (unless, of course, it is associated with, or has its roots in, the West)"
"The unfortunate truth is that this code of silence, and, frankly, coddling of criminals, affects minorities and the poor (who are more often than not the victims of these crimes) disproportionately."

Iceland Still Believes in Elves and Ghosts

Women Earn Less Than Men, Especially at the Top - NYTimes.com - "The pay gap is largely the result of outside factors. Within a specific job, before controlling for outside factors the typical female worker earns pay that is only 90 percent of the typical male worker’s pay; after controlling for these variables, she earns 94 percent of the typical male worker’s pay. For jobs paying below $100,000, the gap narrows further. The implication is that in most jobs where a wage gap exists, it is probably not due to overt discrimination... Rather, in most jobs, the different career choices that men and women make — or perhaps the different career opportunities men and women have available to them — account for big differences in pay... In jobs that pay more than $100,000, women earn just 87 percent of what men receive, even after adjusting for outside factors... in jobs where quality measures are more subjective, meritocracy may not rule, and men may be better compensated for reasons other than their qualifications. For example, perhaps men are subconsciously viewed as more competent than women, or are more adept at negotiating for raises"
The objectivity in the article and the emotion in the comments make for an interesting contrast

30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits. - "Fire Ant: Queen and Workers "Negotiate" the Colony’s Sex Ratio: A queen wants to propagate her line by producing another queen, which needs male drones to mate and produce a colony. Worker ants, on the other hand, have no use for males (which die after mating). So, the queen and her daughters negotiate a rather violent solution: when she needs male drones, the queen will "overwhelm" the colony with male eggs. The female workers will kill many of their brothers, but they can’t kill them all!

Book of the Week (2): David Graeber’s take on the fake economics and their Imaginary Myth of Barter - "It is the founding myth of our system of economic relations. It is so deeply established in common sense, even in places like Madagascar, that most people on earth couldn’t imagine any other way that money possibly could have come about. The problem is there’s no evidence that it ever happened, and an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that it did not."

A Croissant Tour of Paris – A Life Worth Eating - "When I first came to Paris I was determined to find the best croissant in the city. But the longer I lived here, and the more croissants I tasted, the clearer things became. There are several boulangeries here that I would classify as having the top tier croissants. Of those top bakeries differences come down to personal preference. Do you prefer a sweeter pastry? More substantive on the inside? How flaky? Even external factors like weather and chance affect the outcome of these pastries: absolute consistency is impossible and is at odds with artisanship. I couldn’t pick just one place."
More places to go to eat the next time I am in Paris! Also: Pierre Hermé

Ladurée Revisited – A Life Worth Eating - "At Ladurée, moderation is very important; I try to never get more than 30 macaroons during a single visit. The vanilla, pistachio, rose, and licorice flavors are my favorite, each one an unembellished concentrated representation of the natural ingredient from which the small meringue sandwiches were made."

Flavorwire » The Most Bizarre Contraband Items Found at JFK - "From piles of Pakistani steroids to gallons of Polish date rape drugs to unidentified animal corpses, Simon tirelessly snapped over 1,000 photos in her makeshift studio at Terminal 4... it’s the truly exotic things that pique our interest — salted slab of pork fat from Ukraine, anyone?"

how-to shibari for kids and families
Damn Japs

Harvard Pledge Values ‘Kindness’ Over Learning - "Some veteran faculty members tell me that the students’ drive to succeed manifests itself in a surprising way. A social norm has emerged, they report, in which students avoid saying anything that might make others look bad in class, even if that restraint means stifling discussion. “I note in the current generation of undergraduates a tendency to hold back on disagreement or criticism of other students in class,” says Jeffry Frieden, a political scientist. “They’re much more respectful of each other -- much more than when I was an undergraduate. If someone states an opinion, even if absurd, they take it in stride”... Treating “kindness” as the way to civil discourse doesn’t show students how to argue with accuracy and respect. It teaches them instead to neither give criticism nor tolerate it"

Straight Talk about Twin Studies, Genes, and Parenting: What Makes Us Who We Are - "None of the twins in Bouchard's study were reared in real poverty, raised by illiterate parents, or were mentally retarded. There is reason to believe that under more dire circumstances, the heritability of IQ would be significantly lower than that reported by Bouchard... In one study, Eric Turkheimer and colleagues studied 320 pairs of 7-year-old twins who were raised in extreme poverty. Among the poorest, the shared environment accounted for most of the differences in IQ (60%), and the genes accounted for very little; consequently, in this study, the heritability of IQ was reported to be close to zero! Among the richest, however, the heritability of IQ approached what Bouchard found: variations in the genes accounted for most of the differences in IQ scores, and the shared environment accounted for very little of the variance. This study points to the fact that estimates of heritability depend on the sample that is studied, and the environment of that sample"

Benjamin Franklin Urges A Young Friend To Take An Old Mistress - "When Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their Influence over Man, they supply the Diminution of Beauty by an Augmentation of Utility... there is no hazard of children, which irregularly produced may be attended with much inconvenience... in the Dark all Cats are grey... The having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections; none of which can attend making an old Woman happy. 8th & lastly. They are so grateful!!!"

WhereGotOffer - Deal - $68 for Motion Detector Digital Video Recorder Clock (Worth $120) - "Fret no longer that you’re losing your mind, record your every move with this brilliant Digital DV Camera Clock with Remote Control and Motion Detection... There are so many uses for this fantastic clock that you may never even think of all of them"
I forsee many peeping tom cases in coming months

UMD Smith School of Business Study Finds Facebook Applications Create More Than 182,000 New U.S. Jobs Worth $12.19B+

Davis case helps focus on what's wrong with death penalty - "If Davis were not confronting execution, but instead had been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole by his trial jury, the simple truth is that he would be just another nameless, faceless prisoner among the thousands upon thousands who have been convicted of crimes and incarcerated notwithstanding colorable claims of innocence... Odd as it may be, the existence of capital punishment represents the most hopeful stimulus for procedural and substantive changes necessary to prevent and correct the injustices worked by wrongful convictions in criminal cases throughout the land."

Scientists Reconstruct Brains' Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment - "Imagine that. Capturing your visual memories, your dreams, the wild ramblings of your imagination into a video that you and others can watch with your own eyes."

This Badass Virus Kills Breast Cancer Cells - "Other studies have shown the virus also kills cervical cancer, so it's an exciting lead"

Faster than light particles found, claim scientists - "Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are buggered"