Links - 28th March 2012

"When you're through changing, you're through." - Bruce Barton

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Woman fined for spraying insecticide on noisy toddler - "In his mitigation plea, Kong's lawyer Tng Kim Choon said she had never been in trouble with the law before. Her arrest was a traumatic experience for her, he said. A policewoman had mishandled her and screamed at her, and she was handcuffed and taken to the police car below her block. Her brother, who lives nearby, had to intervene, telling the police to show a senior citizen some respect. He said she never expected a misunderstanding with her noisy next-door neighbour to end up in her humiliating arrest. Mr Tng said his client had been very stressed and had even contemplated suicide a few times due to the strained relationship with her neighbours, who have since moved out. She thought that spraying insecticide outside her flat would discourage the children from sitting on the steps, he said, adding that she did not intend to hurt anyone. Psychiatrists found that Kong, who is single, had been suffering from insomnia and a mood disorder for at least two years. She could have been jailed for up to six months in addition to her fine"
I'd try this mitigation plea, but I doubt it'd work.

Study: Anger motivates people to vote

Hugging and chatting with lover while naked ruled NOT adultery - YouTube - "as prosecutors said that the man did not have 'direct evidence" of his wife cheating - such as footage of the lovebirds getting jiggy with it, or tissue paper with semen on it - the wife was not prosecuted."

3:AM Magazine » Bad Faith VIII - "The intention behind such wilfully unintelligible text is, it seems, not to invite thought or reward it, but to repel and discourage it. This is done by exhausting the reader’s efforts to comprehend and reducing him to a state of demoralised dishonesty, whereby absurd and vacuous statements are repeated and endorsed, regardless of incomprehension and for fear of appearing stupid. By publicly endorsing vacuity, and making great claims in its name, the unsuspecting student has thus been painted into a corner and any subsequent rethinking entails an intolerable loss of face and credibility... Postmodern prose is perhaps best approached as an exercise in posturing and phonetics — of couching slim and trite observations in needlessly Byzantine language; or as what Sokal and Bricmont refer to as “a gradual crescendo of nonsense.” Efforts to fathom deep meaning, or meaning of any kind, are generally exhausting and rarely rewarded. More often, what you’ll find is essentially a pile of language, carefully disorganised so as to obscure a lack of content... It’s important to understand that nonsense of this kind is rarely arrived at by accident"

Concerns raised over prof’s Yale-NUS College call - "Twenty-two-year-old NUS student Estella Goh, for instance, was concerned that "some people might take it overboard". "What would people expressing their freedom of religion do to our social fabric?" she questioned... Another student, Kang Kai Xin, 24, recognised the proposed resolution "could work both ways". "Students would have a platform to voice and understand in depth of the current situation which is necessary in education point of view (but) having too much understanding may mean that they… may challenge traditional rights," she said"
Singapore: where freedom and thinking are dangerous

'Superman' expectations of S'pore men in the sack - "The average is four to five minutes for Asian men, while a 2009 survey by Haga Hospital in the Netherlands put it at six minutes. That study covered 474 men from the Netherlands, Spain, Britain, Turkey and the United States... Dr Lee said she has seen clients who have over-expectations of sex. 'Often, they have little sex education and tend to be virgins,' she added. 'I let them know that five minutes is normal and sex need not last so long.' She noted that 'if you are in an advanced relationship, it is normal to have sex once a week'. Her recommendation? 'Sex once every 10 days, so couples can build up their emotional bond.'"
White men last longer in bed. No wonder they're more popular; this is another reason why it's irresponsible to get married without having pre-marital sex
Another source: ""Couples should make the time to be intimate as it leads to a stronger more fulfilling relationship," Prof. Lim advised... 19.8 per cent believe it is up to the man to make the first move, 5.7 per cent favour the women being the initiating partner. For others, it becomes a matter of negotiation, as 4.1 per cent believe the time for sex should be negotiated in advance."

Gentlemen, Rate Yourselves: Cucumber or Banana? - "Singapore's Society for Men's Health and a pharmaceutical firm are proposing a four-point scale for erectile dysfunction, allowing men to rate their own hardness with four categories: cucumber, unpeeled banana, peeled banana and tofu (bean curd)."

Minister signs MoU blindly - "The Indonesia-Singapore bilateral meeting on Tuesday included the signing of agreements at the ministerial level, but one of the Indonesian ministers said he did not know the substance of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) he and his counterpart just signed... “The point is that Singapore has much better public servants, and the country is not far from here”"

LA VIE DES FEMMES VUE PAR LES HOMMES : 4) LA FORCE | GQ Magazine - "Souvent, sur Internet alias la source de toute vertu, je tombe sur des commentaires de jeunes mecs de douze ans qui ont sincèrement l’air de penser que femme = incapable de faire quoi que ce soit. Alors que personnellement je trouve que femme = flemmasse qu’on encourage dans sa flemmasserie"

Life After Tenure (in the US, anyway) - "In the AT study, tenured men were more likely to be married than were tenured women. Tenured women are more likely than men to be divorced or widowed, or never to have been married"

Commuters thank minister Lui Tuck Yew for resuming train services - "While most attributed the quick resumption of services to hardworking engineers, many others thanked transport minister Lui Tuck Yew for standing around to making sure things got done. “I’m amazed he found the time to ensure that the crowd walked in an orderly fashion,” said Wan Too Pi, 35, as he walked stridently out of Dhoby Gaut station to the free shuttle buses provided. He was also impressed at how the minister chose to observe how commuters reacted to the breakdown, instead of looking at whether the repair work within the tunnel was done properly."

Crackdown On Homeopathic Medicine - "He said homeopaths had used crushed-up pieces of the Berlin Wall to treat depression. And in the latest edition of the journal Spectrum of Homeopathy, the authors detailed the use of wolf's milk for eczema and bulimia, cheetah's blood for multiple sclerosis and tiger's blood for depression"

Missing From Asia’s Boardrooms: Women - "Ms. Yi, who was the key researcher behind the survey, said that boardrooms in Asia were not just lacking women, but rather diversity of any kind — with directors generally coming from “homogenous groups” or family owners, resulting all too often in groups of people with similar backgrounds and nationalities... some female executives argue that forcing companies to be diverse is not necessarily a good solution. “It is not just about the quotas, but the diversity within those quotas — it isn’t just about having three women, but women from different backgrounds who can contribute different things”"

Andy Capp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "Early on, the Andy Capp strip was accused of perpetuating stereotypes about Britain's Northerners, who are seen in other parts of England as chronically unemployed, dividing their time between the living room couch and the neighbourhood pub, with a few hours set aside for fistfights at football games... But Smythe, himself a native of that region, had nothing but affection for his good-for-nothing protagonist, a fact which showed in his work. Since the very beginning, Andy has been immensely popular among the people he supposedly skewers."
Ditto for Speedy Gonzales - taking offence on others' behalf can harm the very people whose interests you claim to be protecting

Geotagging poses security risks | Article | The United States Army - ""Is a badge on Foursquare worth your life?"... Warren cited a real-world example from 2007. When a new fleet of helicopters arrived with an aviation unit at a base in Iraq, some Soldiers took pictures on the flightline, he said. From the photos that were uploaded to the Internet, the enemy was able to determine the exact location of the helicopters inside the compound and conduct a mortar attack, destroying four of the AH-64 Apaches"

Rightsholders Group to Charge Libraries for Reading Books to Kids - "The library rep calculates that it could cost them roughly 250 euros (which is about $328) per year to pay SABAM for the right to – again – READ BOOKS TO KIDS"

I killed the Internet - "When­ever the web missed a fea­ture, I didn’t look at a way to fix it to pro­vide sim­i­lar capa­bil­i­ties to what devices offered but I looked away and said let’s aban­don the web and move to apps instead. I didn’t push for some more dia­logue to fig­ure out issues around latency, camera/accelerometer/microphone/WiFi/GPS/Bluetooth access. Instead, I did the easy thing and focused on devel­op­ing for only one plat­form (or a lim­ited set of platform) . When­ever I bumped into a silo like Face­book, I may have grum­bled but I didn’t leave. In fact, I pushed more con­tent into it, not ask­ing that it push con­tent back out. I did that because that’s where the read­ers were, where I could get more users, etc…I may have killed the inter­net… but so did you"

Happy Birthday To The Only "Modern Shakespeare", Dr. Seuss! | Shakespeare Geek - "Last year for Seuss Day we had a grand old time mashing up our beloved poetic heroes over on Twitter with the #SeussSpeare tag... Did you hide him here, or there? I hid Polonius under the stairs.
I lay there with Julie. We lay there, we two, and I said, "How I wish I had poison to drink.""

Single Parenting: What is it like to be a single father? - Quora - "Being a single man with a small child raises many more flags than being a single woman. More than once was I pulled over by cops because I carried a 2 year old throwing a temper tantrum into a car. While I appreciate the diligence of cops and callers, it became very annoying after a while... I always carry my son's passport with me when we go to the playground. A random single man sitting on a park bench watching kids play will get the cops called. After the first time I started carrying the passport. I have used it quite a bit since... Leaving the country with my son was an ordeal. "Where is the mother or the mother's consent form?" "I am a single father" "Wait here" "Sorry you missed your flight, pass on through"."