Links - 12th October 2011

"I think it's always a good move to listen to that inner voice, if it doesn't lead to a crime." - Lisa Kudrow, Vasser Commencement Address, 2010

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A Lesson in Treating Illness - "I’m sad that today I’m adding a slide to one of my live presentations, adding Steve Jobs to the list of famous people who died treating terminal diseases with woo rather than with medicine... Steve, it turned out, had been treating his pancreatic cancer with a special diet prescribed by the alternative medicine promoter Dr. Dean Ornish... As he dieted for nine months, the tumor progressed, and took him from the high end to the low end of the survival rate"

Selflessness Gone Awry, and the Damage It Can Cause - "When ostensibly generous “how can I help you?” behavior is taken to extremes, misapplied or stridently rhapsodized, it can become unhelpful, unproductive and even destructive. Selflessness gone awry may play a role in a broad variety of disorders, including anorexia and animal hoarding, women who put up with abusive partners and men who abide alcoholic ones... selflessness run amok can crop up in political contexts. It fosters the exhilarating sensation of righteous indignation, the belief in the purity of your team and your cause and the perfidiousness of all competing teams and causes... sanctimony can be as physically addictive as any recreational drug, and as destabilizing. “A relentless addiction to indignation may be one of the chief drivers of obstinate dogmatism,” he writes. “It may be the ultimate propellant behind the current ‘culture war.’ ” Not to mention an epidemic of blogorrhea, newspaper-induced
hypertension... Train nurses to be highly empathetic and, yes, their patients will love them. But studies show that empathetic nurses burn out and leave the profession more quickly than do their peers who remain aloof. Give generously to Child A, and Child B will immediately howl foul, while quiet Child C will grow up and write nasty novels about you"

Anorexia nervosa and altruism - "Anorexics may have a hardwired predisposition to an altruistic phenotype, in sociobiological terms, exhibited under extreme conditions of scarcity. There would be obvious advantages to the group of the anorectic’s seemingly paradoxical behavior – maintaining constantly elevated cholesterol and serotonin levels at baseline, without the fluctuations involving increased aggression and feeding behavior that characteristically occur in conditions of scarcity prior to the attainment of actual starvation states. While remaining reproductively unavailable themselves (they are thin and sickly-appearing, disinterested in sex, and ammenorheic), they nevertheless maintain a high rate of activity serviceable to the group. (It is notable that they usually enjoy doing for others such necessary things as cooking and cleaning, while diverting very few caloric resources to their own maintenance.) As with other celibate or nonreproducing individuals, their genes would be selected for indirectly by enabling the progeny of their relatives who do reproduce to have a better chance of survival and to propagate their genes."

World's Earliest Christian Engraving Shows Surprising Pagan Elements - "Snyder said that the mix of Christian and pagan traditions in the inscription is striking. He told LiveScience that he's studied early Christian paintings on the Via Latina that mix biblical themes, such as the story of Samson or the raising of Lazarus, along with figures from classical mythology, like that of Hercules. "Those kinds of things I find particularly interesting, because they seem to suggest a period of time in which a Christian identity is flexible," Snyder said. "Is it just a simple either/or between pagan and Christian?" he asked. "Or is there really something rather like a spectrum? Or are you really sort of both in certain respects?""
More material for POCM!

Spearmint Rhino boss urges students to strip to pay for degrees - "John Specht, UK vice president of the company, said female students could earn good money while having "fun" working in lap dancing clubs... One Sheffield student, Jilly studying for a law degree with hopes of becoming a commercial lawyer, dances at the club in the city. She said : "I came to Spearmint Rhino two years ago. I came and I thought it was a really nice atmosphere it's nothing like what is portrayed by the media especially in music videos, it's totally different and I like it""

Romantic Gifts - Gifts for Men, Romantic Gift Ideas - Send a Pantygram - "Are you single and wanting to turn the corner with the man in your life? Happily married for 25 years? Having a long-distance romance? Sending your man a pantygram message is the perfect romantic gift to rock his world. After all, we all know men only have one thing on their minds, right? So why not feed his imagination? Make his day, his month, or better yet his year! One thing is for sure - he won't forget this gift experience - or YOU! If you want to see what kind of results you can get by sending a pantygram message to your man, read some of these happy results..."
Is self-objectification a form of self-harm?; If objectification were not desired it wouldn't happen so often. A two-way dynamic is present in most endemic phenomena

Family Planning And Homeopathy

AFP: Singapore to tackle jams with car ownership curbs - "About 12 percent of Singapore's land area is now taken up by roads compared with 15 percent for housing"
This statistic is disgusting

Myth-Making: People Doubt Global Climate Change or Evolution Because Doubters Say it So Often - "Here's how it's done, according to a new mathematical model for rumor-mongering offered by a physicist turned linguist, Lukasz Debowski, although there's no reason to believe he intentionally planned to throw fuel on the rumor mill. His prescription, developed through incredibly complex mathematics, is this: Say it often. Keep it short... We believe some things just because we want to think they are true. Psychologist Nicholas DiFonzo adds another element. Humans have a desperate need to make sense out of a world that often seems senseless. We believe, because the alternative seems unacceptable"

Man rips own eyes out in Italian church - ""Emergency responders said Bianchini was calm and lucid when they arrived at the scene and told them a "voice told him" to rip his eyes out... Emergency responders picked up his eyeballs from the floor of the church but they were unable to be replanted. Gino Barbacci, the doctor who treated Bianchini, said it would have taken superhuman strength for a person to gouge their own eyes out and added he had never seen anything like it in 26 years of medical practice."
It must've been a miracle, a sign!

Giving Up on Unattainable Goals: Benefits for Health? - "Three studies examined associations between goal disengagement and goal reengagement tendencies and indicators of physical health (e.g., health problems, cortisol rhythms, sleep efficiency). Based on research showing that goal adjustment tendencies are associated with subjective well-being, the authors predicted that people who are better able to disengage from unattainable goals and reengage with alternative goals also may experience better physical health. Across the three studies, the findings demonstrate that the ability to disengage from unattainable goals is associated with better self-reported health and more normative patterns of diurnal cortisol secretion. Goal reengagement, by contrast, was unrelated to indicators of physical health but buffered some of the adverse effects of difficulty with goal disengagement"
Whereas the motivational spiel has it (sans evidence, naturally) that if you pursue an unattainable goal, you will develop yourself personally

Man sodomises 23-day-old son after wife declines sex
Malaysia Boleh!

SlutWalk: a celebration of the right to be slutty even when you aren’t - "a slut has to be hot or at the very least, sexually attractive. Miss wholesome, blonde and chubby with her chubby counterpart? Not sluts. As for this liberated woman wearing the BDSM-inspired bra-top? She looks like an insane hyena, not a slut. As a wide-circulated internet saying goes: “Do not stick your dick in crazy”... To paraphrase the gist of the message now: “I demand to be respected as an independent female even as I dress like a whore.” A Slut Pride parade if you will. Except that – if the photos plastered online were any indication – a fair bit of SlutWalkers don’t exactly qualify as sluts. So unless these wholesome voluptious women with no business showing their overflowing bits in a overly-tight bra top out in public HAVE actually been called a slut previously, their protest to be called a slut without shame makes no sense. Like a meat-eating person joining PETA."

Slutwalk may damage women's rights cause, professor Gail Dines says - ""By having a slutwalk, you have turned the focus onto what women are wearing," Professor Dines told The Age. "The men who are responding to this message are not getting the irony at all." By dressing in fishnets and push-up bras and brandishing 'slut" signs, she said, the organisers are playing into the hands of raunch culture. "Men want women to be sluts and now they're buying in.""

I Wanna Be Lenglui: SlimFit Spa - Natural Breast Enlargement Centre? Yeah right... - "Aww....That was the time when I haven't found the magic of Googling... If I did... that would have saved me about RM4.5k... LOL... Look at the rantings of all these girls who went for their services..."

Teens Leave Churches Seen As Judgmental, Unfriendly According To New Book 'You Lost Me' - "They also consider congregations antagonistic to science and say their Christian experience has been shallow... One in four 18- to 29-year-olds said "Christians demonize everything outside of the church.""

Oh In Hye 오인혜 from South Korea - Lenglui #195 | Pretty + Sexy + Cute + Hot + Beautiful Girls - "On Oct 6 2011, little known newcomer Korean actress Oh In Hye 오인혜 / 吴仁惠 became an overnight sensation right after she walked down the red carpet at the 16th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) in a daring orange Grecian goddess-inspired dress with a plunging neckline that drew everyone's attention with her glamorous appeal."
This comes via Eisen who proclaimed that "THANK YOU I am bookmarking this hahaha"

Fascist Weddings In China - "Taking into account that for Chinese just-married couples it's almost a cult aim - to take memorable wedding photos, maybe it is not that surprising to see such oddities of Asian creativity. If they were taken in a Japanese uniform of the WWII time, this would be much more brave..."
The bride seems fresh from a Vampire shoot