Links - 6th March 2012

"It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull." - H. L. Mencken

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Grand Mansions, Bungalows and Villas of the Past | Remember Singapore - "Chek Jawa House No. 1, Pulau Ubin (1930s – Present). This little Tudor-styled cottage is located on Pulau Ubin, a north-eastern island of Singapore. Built in the 1930s by former Chief Surveyor of Singapore Landon Williams, this beautiful resort, resembling an English cottage, is completed with a private jetty and the only workable fireplace in Singapore."
Elsewhere: "the merlions were almost forced to be removed from their locations as they are not authorised by the Singapore Tourism Board, who owns the copyright and all intellectual properties of Merlion. There are 5 “approved” Merlions in Singapore, which are the original Merlion (with a smaller one behind it) at the Singapore River, the gigantic Merlion in Sentosa, the Merlion of Mount Faber and the one at the Tourism Court."

The Flavor Network | The Big Picture - "Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous."

UK: Students want Strauss-Kahn speech cancelled - "Students at Cambridge University are circulating a petition against a planned speech there by former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kah... "To choose to give this man an opportunity to speak trivialises the experiences of women who bravely come forward and report rape and sexual assault, and reinforces the institutional sexism that faces women who do so," said Ruth Graham, a spokeswoman for the Cambridge University Students' Union Women's Campaign... the decision to invite Strauss-Kahn displayed "a callous desire to exploit gender crime allegations in the service of controversy”... Katie Lam, president of the Cambridge Union Society, said Strauss-Kahn had been invited to speak about the state of the eurozone and the global economy. "The purpose of the Union is to provide a neutral platform for free speech ... An invitation to the Union does not imply support or endorsement," she said"
Elsewhere: "it had been regularly asking him to come and speak on the topic since 2010"; Once again, this is feminist logic (i.e. illogic), and an attempt to turn offence into psychic harm and thus proceed to censorship

Is the jar industry misogynistic? - Quora - "It's also discriminatory against children! They must make jars with smaller lids so kids can open them! I mean, have you seen the size of a peanut butter jar's lid? And don't get me started on the jelly! That jelly gets the lid stuck and it's nigh near impossible to open the jar up! More discrimination!"
Sidebar: Is Islam misogynistic?
Is Hollywood misogynistic?
Is democracy misogynistic?

The Public and Its Problems - "Why, they ask, can’t politicians see the abyss that yawns before them, and come together to resolve the euro crisis once and for all?... If the problem has not been experienced before, the public is not convinced of the potential costs of inaction. And, if action prevents the problem, the public never experiences the averted calamity, and voters therefore penalize political leaders for the immediate costs that the action entails. Even if politicians have perfect foresight of the disaster that awaits if nothing is done, they may have little ability to persuade voters, or less insightful party members, that the short-term costs must be paid... Don’t blame the leaders for appearing short-sighted and indecisive; the fault may lie with us, the public, for not listening to the worrywarts"

BioWare Explains ‘Mass Effect 3′ Power Stat Upgrades - "'So Rank 1 Weapon Damage Bonus may be 10%. If we say at rank 2 the Weapon Damage Bonus increases by 50% what is the correct result for total weapon damage bonus now. If you used formula 1, it would be 15%. But that goes against what people expect, because you are increasing a percent by a percent. Instead, you expect the numbers to add together. So a 50% increase to 10% should be 60%'... Just think: many of you had the audacity to ask your high school math teacher “when will we ever use this?!?” Here you go"

The Duet: The iPod of Vibrators? - "Topolovac and Chang will be releasing two pricier models: one with a gold-plated band for $189 and another with a gold-plated body and band for $349, which hold 8 and 16 gigabytes of data, respectively. The storage wasn’t a part of the original design, but came from the first group of test users, about half of whom mentioned wanting to store erotic content; others want the extra storage for whatever."

Police interview chief suspect in train sex party - YouTube - "Taiwan Railway train turned into a sex train. Eighteen men and one woman participated in this sex party. A group of internet users launched a 'train perv' project on an online forum at telnet://libido.cx at the end of last year. A girl who claimed to be 19 years old and 166 cm tall with a pair of F-cup breast volunteered to join the party and be the 'only girl' present ..."

THE COMPOSITES - "Images created using law enforcement composite sketch software and descriptions of literary characters"

Mackerel Economics in Prison Leads to Appreciation for Oily Fillets - WSJ.com - "Mr. Muntz says he sold more than $1 million of mackerel for federal prison commissaries last year. It accounted for about half his commissary sales, he says, outstripping the canned tuna, crab, chicken and oysters he offers. Unlike those more expensive delicacies, former prisoners say, the mack is a good stand-in for the greenback because each can (or pouch) costs about $1 and few -- other than weight-lifters craving protein -- want to eat it."

Upper class people more likely to cheat study - "People from the wealthy upper classes are more likely than poorer folks to break laws while driving, take candy from children and lie for financial gain"

Boys with big brothers more likely to be gay - "It's one of the few reliable correlates of homosexuality that I know of"

Why This Pro-Choice Feminist is Now a Pro-Life Activist - "A study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the former research arm of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, showed that 48 percent of the women who sought abortions after 16 weeks did so because they “found it hard to make arrangements.” Not exactly a life-or-death reason... I also advocate for the right of women to be free from the documented dangers of abortion: sterility, a perforated uterus, depression, subsequent drug and alcohol abuse. These hazards have been written about in studies published in well-established medical journals. I also have looked into the eyes of women who deeply regret their abortions and who speak openly and poignantly about the pain that abortion has caused in their lives. The testimony of such women speaks volumes about the dark side of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade."

Kermit Gosnell late-term abortion scandal: How late in pregnancy is too late to choose? - "A grand jury in Philadelphia has indicted a local doctor for running an abortion clinic in which no limits applied. Babies of all sizes and gestational ages were casually butchered. It's a tale of gore and nihilism—and an occasion for pro-choice advocates to reflect on the limits of reproductive freedom... "Is there anything qualitatively different about a fetus at, say, 28 weeks that gives it a morally different status to a fetus at 18 weeks or even eight weeks?"... It's one thing to preach these ideas in the lefty blogosphere. It's quite another to see them in practice... Gosnell was known as a doctor who would perform abortions at any stage, without regard for legal limits." This meant killing viable babies. "We were able to document seven specific incidents in which Gosnell or one of his employees severed the spine of a viable baby born alive," the grand jury concludes. One victim was killed at 26 weeks. Another was killed at 28. A third was killed at 32. Some of the dead were 12 to 18 inches long. One had been moving and breathing outside the womb for 20 minutes. The report alleges hundreds of such atrocities. One employee admitted to severing the spinal cords of 100 babies, each one beyond 24 weeks"
Is there anything qualitatively different about a newborn that gives it a morally different status to a fetus at 28 weeks?; Ace: "One of the joys of being a lefty blogger is being permitted to write glib, insensible things without high risk of contradiction, so long as the glib nonsense you're writing is the sort of thing your readers want to read. Here's Jill from Feministing simply making shit up... Jill also postulates, evidence-free, that almost all of these late-term abortions were medically justified... The Supreme Court has ruled that no abortion law can prohibit an abortion, even a late-term one, if it is necessary for the health or life of the mother"

In September 2009, after admitting to my parents that I was atheist, I was abruptly woken in the middle of the night by two strange men who subsequently threw me in a van and drove me 200 mi. to a facility that I would later find out serves the sole purpose of eliminating free thinking adolescents.

Maryland State Sport - Jousting - "Maryland designated jousting as the official sport in 1962. Jousting tournaments have been held in Maryland since early colonial times and became increasingly popular after the Civil War."

Medium ordered to curb activities in HDB flat - "He told the court he became a medium after the deity Guan Di possessed his body, saying: 'This is not what I wanted but I had no choice'"

A Point of View: The language of ties - "Che Guevara didn't wear a tie, nor did Fidel Castro, and Albert Einstein had never really liked them, either. All his life, he had a horror of constraint, be or physical, intellectual or emotional, which he described in the German word "zwang". For Einstein, as for many of the student revolutionaries of the 1960s, the necktie became the very embodiment and symbol of "zwang""

Is the Republican Party ready to lead America again? - "It was the early 1990's and things were bad. To make conversation Mr Major asks Mr Yeltsin a question. "In a word, Boris, what is the state of your nation?"
"In a word: good!"
The Prime Minister felt a fool. He had been fobbed off in front of his civil servants with an answer that was patently wrong. So he tried again: "What is the longer version of that, Boris?"
"Not good!"
... "The party is more unified on general principles - first order policies - than it has been in my lifetime." Whether this unity is good for the Republicans is another matter of course. Political writer Michael Lind left the party because he sees its modern unity as toxic. Too much based on the values of the deep south of the USA - and in particular a visceral and unquenchable dislike of any government by anyone, of anyone. "The thing that holds together the modern Republican party is opposition to the government," says Mr Lind.