Links - 29th July 2012

Vicar condemns hotel after it replaces Gideon Bible with 50 Shades of Grey - ""I thought it would be a special treat for our guests to find it in their bedside cabinet and that includes the men too. "They are as desperate to get their hands on a copy as the women. "The Gideon Bible is full of references to sex and violence, although it's written using more formal language, so James' book is easier to read." He underlined the Gideon Bible would remain available at the reception desk. Mr Bartholomew believes many people intrigued by the book were too shy to buy it"

Cats purrs exploit our nurturing instinct by incorporating the same frequency as a baby’s cry.

Calculating Bruce Wayne's Worth and the Cost to Become Batman

Singapore must pause and reflect - "anger, impatience, a sense of entitlement and rudeness are steadily on the rise here... I even became a Singapore citizen in 2008 as I regarded this country as home. However, in the past five years, there has been a remarkable shift in the opposite direction, which does not bode well for the long-term future of Singapore. In fact, if this trend continues, many of the desirable talent Singapore worked so hard to attract and cultivate - citizens as well as foreigners - will think of leaving... I am sad to witness this trend and I hope Mr Leslie Koh's article may be the starting point for Singapore to see that a bright future starts from a more balanced, happy and sustainable lifestyle."
Amusing comment 1: "The writer, a new citizen, obviously has the evil intention of feeding negative sentiments into our heads and we are so easily taken in"
Amusing comment 2: "Though he may seem to be raising valid points, if he had been a born and bred Singaporean then it's a different story altogether."

China's 'unwanted' single women feel the pressure - "Xu, a pretty woman in her 30s, warily walked into a Beijing singles club in a bid to shed her status as one of China's "Unwanted". Xu had not been to the "Garden of Joy" for more than a year... "I just want someone with whom I share things in common, but who is also in a better financial situation than me." Xu, who did not want to be identified, is one of China's so-called "Sheng Nu". The term, which translates to the "Unwanted", is derived from a phenomenon in Chinese society which affects hundreds of thousands of women, particularly the urban, educated and financially independent. The term, which is unique to China and which only applies to women, appears in China's official dictionary and refers to "all single woman above the age of 27"... "The new generation of women don't want to 'make do'. Many live quite well alone and don't see the point in lowering their standard or life in order to marry... with no potential partner on the horizon, Shelly is preparing to return to the United States to do a second Masters degree -- a decision partly motivated by her desire to escape her colleagues, parents and friends. "I think I will return to China when I am 40. I want right now to be so old, so broken that they will leave me in peace""
Rich women go for even richer men; at least they have 2 more years than the Koreans and the Japs

Nigeria police hold 'robber' goat - "Police in Nigeria are holding a goat handed to them by a vigilante group, which said it was a car thief who had used witchcraft to change shape"

Answer to As a young female, how can I shake the feeling that being good-looking is the primary thing that males will acknowledge and praise my existence for? - Quora - "Work Part-time as a hooker/porn-star OR become a slut. You will then realize men value sexual availability more than appearance."

Adventures In Customer Support: E-commerce Gets Some New Breast Friends - "The San Francisco-based startup relies on a questionnaire and an algorithm designed to determine bra size as effectively as a human expert. Bras from brands such as Calvin Klein and Natori are $45 and sold using a model similar to that of game-changing eyewear retailer Warby Parker: customers receive a box of five bras and have a week to try them on, keep what they want and send back what they don’t. Shipping and returns are free. True&Co uses information about what you keep and what you send back to help customers make better decisions about their next purchases"

Quick study: Satoshi Kanazawa on intelligence: The disadvantage of smarts | The Economist - "intelligent people do well in almost every sphere of modern life, except for the most important things, like how to find a mate, how to raise a child, how to make friends... Would you rather be a good brain surgeon or a good parent? Would you rather be a good corporate executive or a good friend? More intelligent people don’t always make good parents or friends. Intelligent women make the worst kind of parents, simply because they are less likely to become parents in the first place. There is also some evidence that children of more intelligent women are more likely to suffer from health and behavioural problems, probably due to the fact that they tend to have children later... My theory would also predict that intelligent men should be less likely to become parents, but data do not confirm that. Some suggest that women prefer to have children with more intelligent men, but the data contradict this too. Men’s income or education has no effect on their likelihood of becoming parents"

10 Tooth-Cleaning Devices & Products of Yesteryear - " The miswak was recommended by Mohammad himself. In existence for thousands of years and still used to this day, the miswak comes from the twigs of the Salvadora persica (a.k.a. the Arak or Peelu tree). The fibrous stems aren’t just ideal for removing detritus, either—they’re also a natural source of fluoride. A 2003 study on miswak vs. toothbrush use concludes that (when users are given proper instruction), chewing sticks are “more effective than toothbrushing for reducing plaque and gingivitis.”"

‘DARK KNIGHT RISES’: Rotten Tomatoes disables comments for the first time after harsh reaction - "There are plenty of other things to get angry about, like war, famine, poverty and crime. But not movie reviews"

Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History by Florence Williams – review - ""if big, firm breasts tell a man that a woman is fertile and ready for sex, then why would her breasts be at their biggest and firmest when she's already pregnant or lactating?" Once Williams has asked that question, almost any competing theory becomes likelier than the breast as a seed-and-time-saving signal for men. he anthropologist Gillian Bentley has developed the "flat face" theory – "in order for newborns to get through our unusually narrow bipedal hips, their faces need to be flat. Flat faces and flat chests don't work well together." There's the camel theory, that breasts are fat deposits, which render a woman's fertility and lactation more resilient to a bout of famine. There's a theory about the specific suckling technique the breast engenders, which develops the muscles needed for speech... there are many cultural assumptions made about the breast, and she deftly shows almost all of them to be wrong. Breast milk... is presented as pure, a means by which the mother-infant dyad can lock out all the toxins of modernity while they get on with their bonding. However, the composition of breastmilk is a little more complicated: sending hers to a German lab, Williams, an American, discovers that it has levels of flame-retardant (a class of chemicals known to accumulate in fat) 10 to 100 times higher than those of European women. The composition of the breast makes it a magnet for environmental toxins, so they "carry the burden of the mistakes we have made in our stewardship of the planet""

The Burger Lab: Why Double Fry French Fries? - "Eight years ago my mother sent me a fancy set of calipers in a vain attempt to draw me out of the dark depths of the restaurant kitchens and back to a much more sensible career like mechanical engineering or gunsmithing. Who knew that their inaugural run would be on a couple of potatoes? Well mom, your gift has finally paid off. Using the thoughtful (and rather presumptuous) gift, I confirmed that the crust formed on a traditional french fry, at 39/1000ths-of-an-inch, is over twice as thick as the 17/1000ths-of-an-inch crust formed on a fry that is only fried once"

How Can I Learn to Take Criticism Without Taking It Personally? - "Remember, haters gonna hate, but even they sometimes hate for reasons worth considering."

When Continental Drift Was Considered Pseudoscience - "German geologists piled on, too, scorning what they called Wegener’s “delirious ravings” and other symptoms of “moving crust disease and wandering pole plague.” The British ridiculed him for distorting the continents to make them fit and, more damningly, for not describing a credible mechanism powerful enough to move continents. At a Royal Geographical Society meeting, an audience member thanked the speaker for having blown Wegener’s theory to bits—then thanked the absent “Professor Wegener for offering himself for the explosion.”"

'Snow White' Casting: Should Dwarfs Play Dwarfs? - "Actors with dwarfism, along with an advocacy organization for little people, are protesting the new film "Snow White and the Huntsman" for using normal-height actors instead of employing dwarfs for several roles... There is even a protest march planned against Universal Pictures... While it's true that actors with dwarfism have difficulty getting employment in TV and film roles, does this mean that tall (or able-bodied) actors should not play short (or disabled) roles? Where do we draw the line? Should Gary Sinise not have portrayed amputee Lieutenant Dan in "Forrest Gump"?... Should film studios be required (or pressured) to cast disabled actors for roles as disabled characters? There are many excellent little people actors, but what if the best person for the role is a tall actor?"

Replication studies: Bad copy - "Psychology is not alone in facing these problems. In a now-famous paper, John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist currently at Stanford School of Medicine in California argued that “most published research findings are false”, according to statistical logic... Psychology and psychiatry, according to other work by Fanelli, are the worst offenders: they are five times more likely to report a positive result than are the space sciences, which are at the other end of the spectrum... One reason for the excess in positive results for psychology is an emphasis on “slightly freak-show-ish” results... Simmons should know. He recently published a tongue-in-cheek paper in Psychological Science 'showing' that listening to the song When I'm Sixty-four by the Beatles can actually reduce a listener's age by 1.5 years... n a survey of more than 2,000 psychologists, Leslie John, a consumer psychologist from Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts, showed that more than 50% had waited to decide whether to collect more data until they had checked the significance of their results, thereby allowing them to hold out until positive results materialize. More than 40% had selectively reported studies that “worked”... the JPSP, Science and Psychological Science all said that they do not publish straight replications... With its ability to verify but not falsify, conceptual replication allows weak results to support one another. “It is the scientific embodiment of confirmation bias”"