Links - 1st August 2012

“The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don't know anything about.” - Wayne Dyer

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Fired Florida Lifeguard's Coworkers Exit - "Six Florida lifeguards have lost their jobs for backing a coworker's decision to save a man struggling in the surf but outside their jurisdiction. Tomas Lopez , 21, was fired Monday for vacating his lifeguarding zone to save a man drowning in unprotected waters 1,500 feet south of his post on Hallandale Beach, Fla... "What we're basically supposed to do is watch them die"... A spokesman for Jeff Ellis and Associates, the aquatic safety contractor that fired Lopez, said in a statement that "We have liability issues and can't go out of the protected area""
Given the number of frivolous lawsuits in the US, one cannot be unsympathetic to the company's view

Finding Goatse: The Mystery Man Behind the Most Disturbing Internet Meme in History - "For years, Johnson has been rumored to be the Goatse man, based on their similar frame, skills, and matching moles on both Goatse's and Johnson's ass. Reader, I examined the moles. They match... Jay Stile sold his site last year, and it became a vanilla porn portal. Stile is now a marketing consultant for porn sites. "I got burnt out after doing it for 12 years," he said. "I wake up and I'm eating an omelet while looking at girls shitting in people's mouths and I was like, 'this is not how I want to spend my morning.' I'm done with this shit.""

Prisencolinensinainciusol - YouTube
"The song is deliberately meant to sound like English spoken with an American accent, but the lyrics are actually pure gibberish, with the exception of the words "all right.""

The loud American I swore I’d never be - "to American ears, British people sound smart; French people sound sophisticated; but Canadians sound like teenagers with a learning disability"

Twitter / mental_floss: According to a law passed ... - "According to a law passed in 2007, at least 20% of $1 coins produced by the U.S. Mint must feature Native Americans."

China’s Spending on Internal Police Force in 2010 Outstrips Defense Budget - "The surge in public security spending comes as so-called mass incidents, everything from strikes to riots and demonstrations, are on the rise. There were at least 180,000 such incidents in 2010, twice as many as in 2006"

‘Paying for It’ Is Chester Brown’s Memoir of Prostitutes - NYTimes.com - "After a series of unhappy relationships, he decided he was through with romantic love. He wanted sex yet not a girlfriend. As far as love and fellow feeling were concerned, friends and family were enough. “The romantic love ideal is actually evil,” Mr. Brown declares, casually tossing a thunderbolt. It promotes “more misery than happiness” and causes many people to yoke themselves for life to the wrong person simply to satisfy society’s dictates. His ego is not so fragile, he says, that he needs someone to tickle him like a stuffed animal and affirm that he’s lovable... Most of his encounters he finds to be pleasant, however. The first one makes him feel “exhilarated and transformed.” He writes, “A burden that I had been carrying since adolescence had disappeared”... Mr. Brown’s fundamental pro-prostitution argument — he considers it a feminist one — is not dissimilar to one put forward by the political philosopher Martha Nussbaum in the wake of the 2008 call-girl scandal that forced Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York to resign. “The idea that we ought to penalize women with few choices by removing one of the ones they do have is grotesque, the unmistakable fruit of the all-too-American thought that women who choose to have sex with many men are tainted, vile things who must be punished,” Ms. Nussbaum wrote. Mr. Brown puts it this way: “Feminists should be consistent on the subject of choice. If a woman has the right to choose to have an abortion, she should also have the right to choose to have sex for money. It’s her body, it’s her right.”"

Goose parade - YouTube

Mario Vargas Llosa: Literature and the Search for Liberty - "There are those who have coldly reduced all questions of humanity to a matter of economics and see the market as a panacea. In doing so they ignore the role of ideas and culture, the true foundation of civilization. Without customs and shared beliefs to breathe life into democracy and the market, we are reduced to the Darwinian struggle of atomistic and selfish actors that many on the left rightfully see as inhuman... All individual freedoms are part of an inseparable whole. Political and economic liberties cannot be bifurcated"

Soft-spoken and lovely girls - YouTube
Aka Ajinomoto Japanese Stadium Commercial, or why Japanese girls all speak in an artificially high voice
Keywords: low voice

"Frankenstein" Bog Mummies Discovered in Scotland - "Two ancient bodies made from six people"

Do Supermodels Age Well? 22 Models Then And Now

Aerosmith has made more money from Guitar Hero than from album sales.

11 Product Names That Mean Unfortunate Things in Other Languages - "“It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.” When you translate Purdue Chicken’s classic slogan to Spanish, it means something different: It takes a, well, hard man to make a chicken affectionate"

How Much Should One Spend on An Engagement Ring? - "both men's and women's incomes were positively correlated to the amount spent on an engagement ring. These two findings are indicative of marriage customs found in other cultures such as bridewealth and dowries. Furthermore, the authors uncovered a negative correlation between the amount spent on a ring and the bride's age. In other words, the younger the bride, the larger the expenditure"

Infographic: Less than half of mobile apps earn enough to break even - "a staggering 59% of mobile apps do not generate enough money to break even. Only 12% of developers earn $50,000 or more from their apps, and these developers were found to have big marketing budgets of $30,000 or more. They also spend about 14% of their time focusing on marketing on average"

Amazing photos 2012 - Imgur

Channel 4 sex education film for schools is withdrawn after parents protest - "The withdrawal of the film from sale follows a long-running campaign by parents and MPs, who say parts of it are like ‘a blue movie’... Another segment intended for eight-year-olds shows a naked cartoon couple chasing each other around a bedroom with a feather before having sex"

Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30? - NYTimes.com - " In your 30s and 40s, plenty of new people enter your life, through work, children’s play dates and, of course, Facebook. But actual close friends — the kind you make in college, the kind you call in a crisis — those are in shorter supply. As people approach midlife, the days of youthful exploration, when life felt like one big blind date, are fading. Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends. No matter how many friends you make, a sense of fatalism can creep in: the period for making B.F.F.’s, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It’s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K.O.F.’s (kind of friends) — for now"
Addendum: Handy Hints for Making Friends as an Adult - NYTimes.com: "YOU’RE NOT AS CREEPY AS YOU THINK “People are really terrified of coming off as that kind of stalker person,” said Andrea Bonior, the author of “The Friendship Fix: The Complete Guide to Choosing, Losing, and Keeping Up With Your Friends.” “That other person might be feeling that exact same way.”"

Don't Know Much About History: MSNBC's Matthews Uses Phony Winston Churchill Quote In New 'Lean Forward' Promo - "A Mem­ber ques­tioned Churchill’s increase in the arts bud­get while Britain was fight­ing for her life. Churchill’s sup­pos­edly responded that he could jus­tify the increase "to remind us what we are fight­ing for"... Churchill believed in the cultural significance of the arts and with it some measure of state support for the arts. But that doesn't mean Churchill felt arts funding was sacrosanct, even in a world war where Britain's very survival was on the line"

Some Thoughts About "Continental" and "Analytic" Philosophy - "[There was] a deep division within academic philosophy. This manifests itself primarily in terms of which historical authors a scholar reads and refers to. There is a list of historical authors typically associated with "Continental" philosophy, including: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, and others. These authors have nothing in common methodologically, sytlistically, or doctrinally. There is no reason to regard them as belonging to some identifiable philosophical type"

Florida abuzz over mosquito plan - "It took a decade for the biotechnology firm Oxitec to develop genetically modified mosquitoes whose progeny die before they can spread dengue fever. But it took only three months for Mila de Mier to gather 100,000 names from people opposed to the release of the mosquitoes in Key West, Florida, where the potentially lethal disease is making a comeback... “I started thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, what if these mosquitoes bite my boys or my dogs? What will they do to the ecosystem?’”"

The Scoop: On Pie A La Mode - "Making pie à la mode allows that pie to reach its full pie potential"

The Anatomy of a Compliment and Art of Giving One

Special Operations Command Durian Tender - "The taste of the durian must of 70% bitter and 30% sweet of the total quantity...
All necessary equipment (inclusive of table for the opening of durian and boxes for take away) in regard to the durian shall be provided by the vendor;
The successful vendor shall in charge of removing the eaten durian husk after every session and dispose off at the appropriate rubbish bin (not in user premise)...
The successful vendor shall provide familiarization tour of their premise for the evaluation team when call upon by the Authority"

How to Market Plastic Vaginas: Don’t Call Them Vaginas - "If you ask Brian Shubin what he does for a living, he’ll tell you he’s in plastics manufacturing. If you press him further, he’ll say his work involves injection molding. Ask again and he’ll tell you what he molds: vaginas... his father, a former police officer, “saw a lot of sexual abuse and domestic violence on the job,” Shubin says. “The Fleshlight became his contribution to tempering the male sex drive.” Today, the justification continues. “We sell to so many people who are deployed in the Armed Forces,” Shubin says. “We have the ability to offer something to the troops out there fighting for us. I have never been so excited to share the Fleshlight”"