Links - 1st April 2012

"Hollywood is a place where they place you under contract instead of under observation." - Walter Winchell

***

George W. Bush: What is George W. Bush really like in one-on-one conversation? - Quora - "He is extraordinarily intelligent. Forget what you've read in the press. The man is smart and has an incredible memory. He'll remember things that you said months ago or he'd remember some minute detail of some obscure policy issue. He studied the issues and took it as a challenge to know as much about a topic as his experts knew... Anybody who says the man is dumb has never met him... Second, he's extremely personable--not in a fake DC kind of folksy way--he comes across as actually caring... [my hardcore liberal-democrat wife] had to tell her liberal friends that the guy actually wasn't the devil--the President actually gave her a hug"

Transformation of an Asian Girl (32 pics)
People always ignore the difference a smile and hair make

Gender 'not a big issue' - "'Don't make every issue out to be about gender,' says Ms Teo Lay Lim, Accenture's country managing director for Singapore and managing director for Asean. Being a female leader in a male-dominated world, for instance, is not a gender issue to her... Women who moan about the glass ceiling might be better off taking charge and defining their own destinies. That view got an airing at a conference on Thursday last week to mark International Women's Day. Ms Tan Gek Khim, senior director at the Management Development Institute of Singapore, said glass ceilings, if they exist at all, should have been shattered long ago. 'Women should not stifle themselves by harbouring negative perceptions. They should not let the proverbial 'glass ceiling' hamper them in their aspirations for higher positions,' she says. 'Such perceived constraints serve only to perpetuate the weaknesses of women.' Ms Monica Sun, president of Henkel Singapore and Malaysia and its vice-president for the adhesive technologies unit in South-east Asia, adds: 'I believe the glass ceiling can be only oneself... Ultimately, it is the leader's capabilities that matter, regardless of gender"
There're reasons why they're in Business doing things, not AWARE complaining about things.
Addendum: Also this is a great example of the idea of a glass ceiling being a "Self-fulfilling prophecy"

Prostitution: What is it like to buy or sell sex? - Quora - "Looking back on it I feel like it made me a better person. I learned that men who pay for sex aren't always or even usually bad people. They can be nice guys who are just lonely or sad or don't have time for a relationship and don't want to lie to a woman that they do, but they want the benefits of a relationship. I did the girlfriend experience which means you kiss and talk and stuff if that's what the guy wants. You have to do the girlfriend experience if you want to get a lot of money. Sometimes the people who hire you just think it's sexier and sometimes they are paying for an hour of feeling loved and sometimes they are paying for an hour of having a therapist who won't try to suggest changes they could make in their lives, who will just go "Poor baby", you know? Every once in a while a guy would pay me just to spend time with him... I learned that everyone has something interesting to say and that they will tell you very very private things when they sleep with you even if they don't know you at all. They will tell you painful things from their childhood or details of their divorce (they love talking about how much their ex wives hurt them) or how painful it is for them to recognize they are getting old"

snopes.com: Toolooz - "The image displayed above (click on the graphic to enlarge it) is purportedly a screen capture of a Fox News report on the March 2012 killings of three French soldiers, three Jewish schoolchildren, and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France. The image includes added text supposedly revealing a plethora of geographic, political, and spelling errors (e.g., incorrectly locating France on a map of Europe, misspelling the city of Toulouse as "Toolooz," misidentifying the French Minister of the Interior as the country's president, referring to Arabs and Jews as the "Asian community," labeling the shooter a Buddhist rather than a Muslim) in this Fox News report"
I saw this being circulated by some people as a sad indictment of Fox. They were as willing to pass on misinformation about Fox News as they accuse Fox News of doing about other things. Ahh... cognitive biases

In Toulouse, Muslims Fear Diversity Is at Risk - NYTimes.com - "Mamadou Daffé, the Malian-born imam at the mosque, said he had never been the target of so much as a racist remark in Toulouse. “None, none at all,” Mr. Daffé said. “Maybe this is surprising, but so be it”... “We are responsible for the image that’s been given to Islam, this beautiful religion,” he said. With the murders, which Mr. Merah said he committed in the name of Islam, “God has tested us,” Mr. Daffé said. His fellow cleric, Mr. Tataï, has led a project to build a grand mosque in Toulouse... (Uncharacteristically, the mosque will be open to the non-Muslim public, outside hours of prayer)"

Racist posts: Culprits 'tend to be young', say observers - "Professor Ang Peng Hwa, director of the Singapore Internet Research Centre, said: 'Racist speech is an insult. The police should not have to respond to insults. Otherwise, we will need an insult detection and enforcement army.'"

Chinese students at NUS upset over compatriot's blog - "Some students said they understood why Mr Sun may have made the comments, saying it is not uncommon for people to make racially offensive remarks casually in China. 'Back home, we are quite racially homogeneous, so people do sometimes label others from a particular region dogs'"

A brief history of breast enlargements - "The filmmaker Billy Wilder described Monroe's bosom as, 'a miracle of shape, density and an apparent lack of gravity'"

Pass the port: Why do you pass to the left - "If the decanter should ever stall it is considered very bad form to ask for it. Instead, you ask the person hogging the decanter: "Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?". If they are au fait with port etiquette they will immediately realise their faux pas and pass along the decanter with an apology. If not, and they answer in the negative, you should say: "He's a terribly good chap, but he always forgets to pass the port.""

The Afghan girls who live as boys - "If my parents force me to get married, I will compensate for the sorrows of Afghan women and beat my husband so badly that he will take me to court every day."

Mohamed Merah: Toulouse gunman's father 'to sue France' - "Algiers-based lawyer Zahia Mokhtari told French media Mohamed Benalal Merah considered his son had been murdered... His half-brother in Algeria, Rachid Merah, said Mohamed had been manipulated by the French intelligence services and did not have any ties to al-Qaeda"

Spain's high-class hookers ban sex with bankers 'until they provide more credit for cash-strapped economy' - "Madrid's top-end prostitutes say their indefinite strike will continue until bank employees 'fulfil their responsibility to society' and start offering bigger loans for struggling Spaniards... Sneaky bankers were trying to circumvent the protest by claiming to be architects or engineers, the sex-workers said. But this was 'not fooling anyone' because, as one escort revealed: 'It has been many years since these professionals could afford rates that start from €300 per hour.' The capital's largest luxury prostitute trade association, which is reportedly initiating the strike, said: 'We are the only ones with a real ability to pressure the sector. 'We have been on strike for three days now and we don't think they can withstand much more,' added the woman, known as Ana MG... the bankers became so desperate they called in the government for mediation."

''Rendez-vous en France'' : des pros à l'affût des nouveautés made in France - "La France est le seul pays d'Europe avec l'Italie où les Américains retournent plusieurs fois. Je trouve d’ailleurs que les produits français sont plus chers que leurs homologues italiens. Pour une même qualité les tarifs sont 20 à 30% moins chers de l'autre coté des Alpes. Cette différence de prix est flagrante sur les établissements 4 et 5 étoiles, forts prisés de la part des Américains. Mais ils savent que la France est un pays de luxe et ils sont prêts à y mettre le prix, jusqu'à un certain niveau... Je m'occupe de location de villas de luxe pour les Australiens... Pour eux, un bâtiment qui a 500 ans d'histoire est une chose exceptionnelle"

Data Dealer. Legal, illegal, whatever. | English - "Data Dealer is a satirical browser game on collecting, processing and selling personal data"

45 McDonald's Items Not Available In The U.S. That Should Be
10/45 are from Japan

The Absurd Myths Porn Teaches Us About Sex - "Alan McKee, an Australian university professor and pornography researcher, tells AlterNet, “Pornography is good at teaching lifelong learning, open communication, that sexual development should not be aggressive, coercive, or joyless, self-acceptance, awareness and acceptance that sex is pleasurable, and competence in mediated sexuality.” In short, he claims that pornography can be the foundation to a healthy sex life—not to mention leading to many solo orgasms. The problem is, learning about sex from porn is like learning about firearms from action movies... A generation of teenagers grew up under Bush’s record-breaking funding for abstinence-only sex education... both Santorum and Romney, the frontrunners for the GOP nomination, favor abstinence-only sex education—despite the evidence that it delays loss of virginity only eight months... trans activist Ami Angelwings says. “Asian trans women porn gave a former boyfriend of mine the idea that trans women were prettier and passed better than white ones which led him to remark ‘Asian guys make the best women’ (and yes that’s when I broke up with him)”"

New study: Weight-loss surgery may cure diabetes - "The study showed that weight-loss surgery is dramatically more effective in the treatment of type 2 diabetes than a conventional treatment of diet changes and medication. Patients in the study suffered from severe type 2 diabetes, and most went into remission after undergoing one of two bariatric surgeries. "It's an unprecedented effect that we've never seen in diabetes before," says surgeon Dr. Francesco Rubino, senior author of the NEJM study and director of The Diabetes Surgery Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. "Remission hasn't even been a word in the textbooks about diabetes"... the diabetics' remission is independent of the weight loss from their surgeries"

The 5 Saddest Attempts to Take Over a Country | Cracked.com

Avalanche Research Could Make Your Ice Cream Taste Better