Links - 18th July 2012

When it is the wife who strays - "Some spouses also attempt to soothe the guilt over an affair by arranging an extramarital liaison for their partner. This happened when a cheating husband arranged for his wife to hook up with another man, said Mr Bong, who met such a couple in recent years. The couple, who have two children, later got divorced and married their respective partners"
One comment: "divorce lawyers are more likely to see female cheaters because husbands are probably more likely to split after an affair, while a woman is more likely to suck it up and stick it out if the husband cheats!"

Love and Death - NYTimes.com - "This is why romantic love requires death. If our time were endless, then sooner or later the future would resemble an endless Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney. It is not simply the fact of a future that ensures the intensity of romantic love; it is the future of meaningful coexistence. It is the future of common projects and the passion that unfolds within them. One might indeed remain in love with another for all eternity. But that love would not burn as brightly if the years were to stammer on without number."
If this were true, love would be most intense among the elderly

Jailbreak Rat: Selfless Rodents Spring Their Pals and Share Their Sweets

The wonder of breasts - "DDT, PCBs, trichloroethylene, perchlorate, dibenzofurans, mercury, lead, benzene, arsenic. Because breasts store fat, they store toxic, fat-loving chemicals. When we nurse our babies, we feed them not only the fats and sugars that fire their immune systems, cellular metabolisms and cerebral synapses. We also feed them, in albeit miniscule amounts, paint thinners, dry-cleaning fluids, wood preservatives, toilet deoderisers, cosmetic additives, gasoline byproducts, rocket fuel, termite poisons and flame-retardants. If, as Cicero said, your face tells the story of your mind, your breast milk tells the decades-old story of your diet, your neighbourhood, and increasingly, your household decor... The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety is debating the country's breastfeeding recommendations, which would have been unthinkable a decade ago. "I don't think it will change the current recommendations [to breastfeed for a year], but maybe there's no benefit to breast-feeding after six months"... Norway has the single highest breastfeeding rate in the world, with 99% of new mothers doing it. At six months, more than half of all babies are still nursing. The country has banned advertising by formula companies. It grants paid maternity leave for 42 weeks. It is a country deeply committed to breastfeeding. And now it is rethinking it... Bernadino Ramazzini, a Renaissance-era doctor, was the first to notice that breast cancer was more common among nuns, which led to the link with nulliparity... In 1982, the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery said "there is a substantial body of medical information and opinion … to the effect that [small breasts] are really a disease""

Thoughts of death make only the religious more devout - "Thinking about death makes Christians and Muslims, but not atheists, more likely to believe in God, new research finds, suggesting that the old saying about "no atheists in foxholes" doesn't hold water. Agnostics, however, do become more willing to believe in God when reminded of death. The only catch is that they're equally as likely to believe in Buddha or Allah as the Christian deity, even though all the agnostics in the study were American and thus more likely to be exposed to Christian beliefs"

Why Atheism Will Replace Religion: New Evidence - "The reasons that churches lose ground in developed countries can be summarized in market terms. First, with better science, and with government safety nets, and smaller families, there is less fear and uncertainty in people's daily lives and hence less of a market for religion. At the same time many alternative products are being offered, such as psychotropic medicines and electronic entertainment that have fewer strings attached and that do not require slavish conformity to unscientific beliefs"

Houston Strip Clubs Hit by New 'Pole Tax' - WSJ.com - "The City Council passed an ordinance Wednesday that requires strip clubs to pay a $5-per-visitor fee to help pay for the analysis of biological evidence collected from rape victims in hopes of identifying their attackers... Critics strongly question attempts to tie strip clubs to violence against women, calling the fee unfair. "There is no known correlation between people going to nice, high-end gentlemen's clubs and rape," said Albert Van Huff, a Houston lawyer who represents local strip clubs. A 2009 report by the University of Texas at Austin concluded that no study has "authoritatively linked alcohol, sexually oriented businesses, and the perpetration of violence.""

Outside New York City, sexes separated on state-funded bus - "The sex-separated seating arrangements on publicly subsidized commuter routes — viewed by many of the ultra-Orthodox riders as an accommodation to Jewish modesty requirements — are said by one advocate to violate civil rights laws"

Women Don’t Need the Paycheck Fairness Act - NYTimes.com - "Young, childless, single urban women earn 8 percent more than their male counterparts, mostly because more of them earn college degrees. Moreover, a 2009 analysis of wage-gap studies commissioned by the Labor Department evaluated more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and concluded that the aggregate wage gap “may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers”... Some of the bill’s supporters admit that the pay gap is largely explained by women’s choices, but they argue that those choices are skewed by sexist stereotypes and social pressures. Those are interesting and important points, worthy of continued public debate. The problem is that while the debate proceeds, the bill assumes the answer: it would hold employers liable for the “lingering effects of past discrimination” — “pay disparities” that have been “spread and perpetuated through commerce.” Under the bill, it’s not enough for an employer to guard against intentional discrimination; it also has to police potentially discriminatory assumptions behind market-driven wage disparities that have nothing to do with sexism. Universities, for example, typically pay professors in their business schools more than they pay those in the school of social work, citing market forces as the justification. But according to the gender theory that informs this bill, sexist attitudes led society to place a higher value on male-centered fields like business than on female-centered fields like social work"

Reading offers Brazilian prisoners quicker escape - "Inmates in four federal prisons holding some of Brazil's most notorious criminals will be able to read up to 12 works of literature, philosophy, science or classics to trim a maximum 48 days off their sentence each year, the government announced. Prisoners will have up to four weeks to read each book and write an essay which must "make correct use of paragraphs, be free of corrections, use margins and legible joined-up writing," said the notice published on Monday in the official gazette... "A person can leave prison more enlightened and with a enlarged vision of the world""
Nazi camp commandants read Goethe

Women are better than men - Roger Ebert's Journal
Amusingly, maybe only slightly less than half of the comments I saw bash him for sexism.
My favourite comment: "Now *this* is a column that took balls to write!
In other words, only a man could write it."

10 Surprising Things That Bacteria Like to Eat - "A strain of the bacteria Wolbachia targets an interesting part of the Aedes aegypti mosquito - the gonads. The bacteria doesn't destroy the entire reproductive organ, but they make a home there and alter the course of reproduction. While this is a cruel move on the part of Wolbachia, it does prevent the mosquitos from carrying the Dengue virus, a virus that infects 50 million people in third world countries each year."

City Harvest, Prosperity Gospels and the Cultural Mandate - "Perhaps more interesting for us was the dismissive, even sneering, attitude of some mainline church leaders we spoke to whenever the topic of prosperity gospels was brought up. It was not uncommon to see Methodist or Anglican leaders, in private of course, roll their eyes or let fly a rude quip at the expense of megachurch-goers... We realised that the phenomenal growth of the megachurch in Singapore was partly down to its ability to express Christianity in the language of market logic, thus appealing to the economic aspirations and consumer habits of many young upwardly mobile Singaporeans. In sociological terms, the mantra of the megachurch shares “elective affinity” with the aspirations of young upwardly mobile Singaporeans. The dismissive attitude of mainline denominations towards the megachurch and the so-called prosperity gospels may find some explanation in the tension that arises from the on-going social distinction between the established and emerging middle class. Another key feature of the megachurch and CHC in particular is the notion of cultural mandate"

130 Million Strong: Al-Qaeda’s Deep Muslim Support - "Pew also provides each polled country’s percentages of support for al-Qaeda: 34 percent of Jordanians, 49 percent of Nigerian Muslims, 3 percent of Lebanese, 20 percent of Egyptians, 23 percent of Indonesians, 18 percent of Pakistanis, and 4 percent of Turks. In real numbers, the total is staggering. A whopping 129,942,000 Muslims support al-Qaeda. That’s right, almost 130 million Muslims support al-Qaeda — and that from just the six countries Pew’s pollsters visited. As the Pew organization admits, pollsters couldn’t conduct their research in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan, where al-Qaeda and the Taliban rule"

Monkey Business - New York Times - "Adam Smith, the founder of classical economics, was certain that humankind's knack for monetary exchange belonged to humankind alone... The data generated by the capuchin monkeys, Chen says, ''make them statistically indistinguishable from most stock-market investors'... During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind"

Facebook email switch prompts outcry - "acebook users were venting anger over a move changing users' default email address to the one operated by the leading social network. "You can thank Facebook for making that change without telling you," said security consultant Graham Cluley of Sophos... "Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me. In other contexts, this is known as a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack. What on earth do they think they are playing at?" said Gervase Markham on his blog, "Hacking for Christ""

ASK LIBBY! - "An officer from the Singapore Police Force clarified that in situations where vulgarities are used, either as abuse towards a person or even in normal conversations; the receiving party could make a police report should he feel an element of abuse towards himself. When a police report is made, the investigation officer would proceed to investigate. Penalties could range from warnings to being charged in court, depending on the severity. The Singapore Statutes outline certain situations in which the use of vulgarities and obscenities is punishable by law."
Time to shut the SAF down!