"When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it." - Clarence Darrow
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Nipples 'Light Up' Brain the Way Genitals Do - "A few men who have been studied show the same pattern of nipple stimulation activating genital brain regions"
Please Give Me "Coke" - YouTube
How to ask for Coke in Korean (there is a reason I'm linking this)
Today I Learned Something New - "I blog about things which fall outside common knowledge. Learn something new every day!"
Cooperative Dolphins Help Fishermen Catch Fish - "Bottlenose dolphins have apparently taught themselves to work as a team with fishermen, creating a win-win for both the marine mammals and humans"
Sumo : Paolo Patrizi Photographer
Visual Representations of 15 Over-Used Movie Poster Clichés
The Singapore Beautiful Single Earthlings (Singapore) - Meetup - "This is a meetup group for reasonably pretty, pleasant-looking, nice-looking and beautiful people to mingle, meet up and befriend one another... Important***Members must all be humans/earthlings. Strictly straight"
The old description was even better: "This is a meetup group for reasonably pretty, pleasant-looking, nice-looking, sexy, HOT; handsome males and beautiful feminine females (humans/earthlings) to join; mingle, meet up, befriend and hopefully have a healthy loving sexy romantic relationship with one another - BEAUTIFUL ENOUGH TO PISS ugly destructively jealous satan off to hell. HAHAH! *joke*. Okay, seriously, just for pretty people to.."
Music evolution: Is this the end of the composer? - "The idea behind it is simple: to see if music can evolve out of noise - without the controlling hand of a composer."
'Alien Abduction' Research Suggests Episodes Are Actually Lucid Dreams
S'pore is Asia's most expensive city for travellers TripAdvisor - "How much would two travellers have to pay for a night out in Singapore? S$480 (US$374.94), according to TripAdvisor's latest index. The expenses covered a room for two at a four-star hotel, a round-trip taxi ride of about 3.2 kilometers each way, cocktails for two at a five-star hotel bar and dinner for two with a bottle of house wine. This made Singapore the most expensive city in Asia, and the 10th most expensive city in the world for travellers. The index covered 48 key tourist cities around the world. Tokyo was Asia's second most expensive city and the 13th most expensive city in the world, with travellers having to pay S$448 or US$349.62 for the same items."
1999 Darwin Award: Living on Zionist Time - "In most parts of the world, the switch away from Daylight Saving Time proceeds smoothly. But the time change raised havoc with Palestinian terrorists this year... The bombs had been prepared in a Palestine-controlled area, and set to detonate on Daylight Saving Time. But the confused drivers had already switched to Standard Time. When they picked up the bombs, they neglected to ask whose watch was used to set the timing mechanism. As a result, the cars were still en-route when the explosives detonated, delivering the terrorists to their untimely demises"
What happened when I followed The Secret's advice for two months. - "Apparently the universe has a language-processing disorder and doesn't comprehend standard English usage of the words don't, not, and no. So, as the book explains, if you summon the universe by saying, "I don't want to spill something on this outfit," the universe translates this as, "I want to spill something on this outfit." If only Rhonda Byrne, the television producer who is the author of the book and creator of the DVD, had been there to counsel those negative authors of the Ten Commandments!... The book is dotted with quotations from great men of history that supposedly back up The Secret's assertions. Take this one from Winston Churchill: "You create your own universe as you go along." Something about this struck me as sounding not terribly Churchillian. I looked it up and it turned out Churchill did write it, but it was his mocking characterization of the metaphysical twits of his day... according to The Secret, people don't just randomly end up being massacred, for example. They are in the wrong place because of their own lousy thinking. Cancer patients have long been victims of this school of belief. But The Secret takes it to a new and more repulsive level with its advice not just to blame people for their illness, but to shun them, lest you start being infected by their bummer thoughts, too.
Interview with Pickup Artist Chaser Clarisse Thorn - "I'm obviously fascinated by gender issues, sexuality, and masculinity; PUAs are a weird intersection of those three topics... a dude who only ever picks up girls in mainstream LA nightclubs might have some trouble shifting gears if he tries to pick up an introverted PhD student at a World of Warcraft convention. That said, I do think that many basic principles of "the game" are generally valid, and a smart charismatic dude from LA will figure out how to work the WoW convention pretty fast... To me, the more important question is how you frame these things. You can choose to believe that many "game" ideas are valuable because women are stupid self-centered gold-diggers...or you can see them as valuable because people in general, including men, respond to certain social dynamics... 'If people saw cross-gender relationships as more mutual than oppositional, then people would expect sex to be more mutual than oppositional. Instead, most people expect aggression and trickery to be part of sexuality'... 'You mention the popular book The Rules, which is also about maintaining power in relationships, but from a female perspective. Must relationships always be about power? Aren’t there people who are just not interested in playing power games?' Maybe, but I think those people are pretty rare. Power interacts with the human psyche in powerful ways that we don't fully understand. I don't believe that anyone has zero interest in power. The real questions are: How do we talk about power and deal with it in a positive way?... I've never seen a widely-used PUA strategy that wasn't accurate in some sense... When a person gets mad about "drama," they're usually mad because someone is trying to grab power in the relationship -- or they're making a power-play themselves... Other feminists are usually too busy freaking out about PUAs to think critically about PUA tactics, which is too bad... One of the smartest things any PUA coach said to me was this, which I quoted in my book: 'Some women may appear to love assholes. But those women are not actually looking for assholes. They're looking for something that's most closely approximated by an asshole'... When PUAs talk about ways of understanding consent using non-verbal communication, in some ways they're serving feminist goals... I often wish that feminists would spend more time looking at larger cultural patterns -- understanding where more people are coming from"
Addendum: Keywords - nice guy, nice guys, proxy for, jerk, women are looking for someone who, closely approximates, women are not looking, bastard
So what if I'm opinionated and vain, says Xiaxue - "She gave as good as she got, in online rants that over the last two weeks have become celebrated as much for their kick-in-the-crotch deadliness as for their foul-mouthed wit... 'No one should be bothered by a hater because a successful person will not have the time to write nasty things online, they have better things to do.'"
"Mystery mushroom" which leaves Xi'an villagers befuddled turns out to be artificial vajayjay - "Xi'an Up Close 《西安零距离》, an investigative journalism programme which airs on Xi'an TV, has become a national laughing stock after airing a report on June 17 on a "mystery mushroom" which was discovered by villagers in a rural part of the city... Reporter Ye then begins to describe the curious object as the camera pans in on it. "As we can all see, this looks like a type of fungus, on both ends of which you'll find mushroom heads." "On this side, you can see what looks like a pair of lips," she adds. "And on that side, there is a tiny hole which extends all the way back to this side. The object looks very shiny, and it feels really fleshy and meaty too." "I've done my own research on the internet," says the afore-mentioned villager. "It's a type of lingzhi mushroom, called the taisui." [Editor's note: Taisui refers to 60 celestial generals named in the Chinese zodiac.] Without skipping a beat, reporter Ye chimes in with her own research, saying this type of lingzhi is generally found in the Shaanxi region deep underground and is hence rarely seen. "When the Emperor Qin Shi Huang was on the hunt for the secret to longevity," she elucidates, "it is said he discovered this lingzhi was the answer." Eagle-eyed viewers who saw the report on Sunday immediately identified the mystery mushroom as a double-headed masturbation toy with an artificial vagina on one side and an artificial anus on the other"
Turtles fossilised in sex embrace - "It is said to be the only example in the fossil record of vertebrates being preserved in the act of having sex."
Smartphone users 'risking health' with overuse of devices - "An online survey, of 2,010 office workers by the Society found that nearly two-thirds of those questioned continued working outside office hours. The organisation said people were topping up their working day with more than two hours of extra screentime, on average, every day. The data suggested that having too much work and easing pressure during the day were the two main reasons for the extra workload... "Excessive work levels are not good for anyone. Overworked employees are not only unlikely to be performing well at work, the stress an unmanageable workload causes is also likely to be making them ill""
This is why BYOD is not necessarily a good idea
Is Your Smartphone Harming Your Health? How the BYOD Movement is Taking Years off Your Life - "nine times out of 10 a work emergency is better solved at 7 a.m., once you are refreshed and at least partially charged"
Overtime Work Linked With Higher Depression Risk: Study - "people who work 11 or more hours a day have a more-than-doubled risk of a major depressive episode, compared with people who work the more-standard seven to eight hours a day... nearly a quarter of the global workforce is depressed, with 92 percent of survey respondents saying that their job performance was linked with their mental health"
Nature News Blog: Taliban halts polio vaccinations over drone strikes
Naturally, the Americans are somehow to blame