Links - 29th July 2013

Are you strictly wheat and two veg ... - "We know better than most, the trials of sticking to a meatless diet. It's hard! So hard in fact that some of us stray. We started off vegetarians, then gently began experimenting with slim meats - the wafer-thin hams, the prosciuttos, the bacons. Before we knew it we were bathing in liver. We're not alone. When she got married, Madonna embraced the Brit lifestyle, embracing sausage rolls, protein and blood-lust after a lifetime of staunch vegetarianism. Anthea Turner says she smelt her builders' bacon butties and fell off the vegetable wagon. While Julia Sawalha strayed to the meat-side after four years on the greens - she was filmed eating ostrich on the Big Breakfast. Busted! One of Peta's 'sexiest vegetarians' Reese Witherspoon appeared on Ellen Degeneres' talk show cooking coq au vin. 'Everything's better with bacon!' she trilled. Liv Tyler went vegan for love when she met Joaquin Phoenix, but returned to beef when the relationship went sour. Vegetarian animal rights campaigner by day, former fur-wearer by night - 'When I crack an egg now,' Heather Mills says, 'I think: "Could that have been a baby?"' Her ex-ex Chris Terrill fondly remembers Heather cooking him her sublime Lancashire hotpot.Drew Barrymore, once a strict pleather-wearing veggie, now likes a sausage. Or, as she puts it: 'I don't put strict restrictions on myself any more.' And even the Dalai Lama's strayed. 'When I see a row of plucked chickens hanging in a meat shop, it hurts,' His Holiness once said. The poor dear tried to keep to a diet of nuts and milk until doctors forced him to return to meat."

Supposed Crimes of the Mind - "Yet whites at times seem exempt from any fallout over the slurring of blacks. Democratic Minnesota state representative Ryan Winkler recently tweeted of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s vote to update the Voting Rights Act: “VRA majority is four accomplices to race discrimination and one Uncle Thomas.” Winkler’s implication was that four of the jurists were veritable racists, while Thomas was a sellout. After a meek apology, nothing much happened to Winkler... Does profanity against women destroy celebrity careers? Apparently not. TV talk-show host Bill Maher used two vulgar slang terms with reference to Sarah Palin, without any major consequences. Those Palin slurs were mild in comparison to late-night television icon David Letterman’s crude riff that Palin’s then-14-year-old daughter had been impregnated by baseball star Alex Rodriguez. In contrast, when talk-show host Rush Limbaugh demeaned activist Sandra Fluke as a “slut,” outrage followed... So how do we sort out all these slurs and the contradictory consequences that follow them? Apparently, racist, sexist, or homophobic words themselves do not necessarily earn any rebuke. Nor is the race or gender of the speaker always a clue to the degree of outrage that follows. Instead, the perceived ideology of the perpetrator is what matters most. Maher and Letterman, being good liberals, could hardly be crude sexists. But when the conservative Limbaugh uses similar terms, it must be a window into his dark heart."

Twitter / FantasyTiffany: How I feel about the whole ... - "i hope Trayvon Martin gets justice but TBH idgaf about it. Why? Bc Black people full of shit. We so quick to pull the Race Card when in actually ya'll just as racist, or more. Now if a NIGGA hada killed Trayvon, this would have never made the Media. Young Black Men get killed worldwide EVERY DAY & who killing them? NIGGAZ. Oh but let 1 Hispanic kill ONE nigga. Ya'll want justice? FOH. NOBODY kills more black people than Black people, so if you care so much about your people, stop being so fuckin ignorant. *Drops Mic*"

IP over Avian Carriers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC) is a proposal to carry Internet Protocol (IP) traffic by birds such as homing pigeons. IP over Avian Carriers was initially described in RFC 1149, a Request for Comments (RFC) issued by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) written by D. Waitzman and released on 1 April 1990. It is one of several April 1 RFCs... During the last 20 years, the information density of storage media and thus the bandwidth of an Avian Carrier has increased 3 times faster than the bandwidth of the Internet. IPoAC may achieve bandwidth peaks of orders of magnitude more than the Internet when used with multiple Avian Carriers in rural areas. For example: If 16 homing pigeons are given 8 32GB SD cards each, and take an hour to reach their destination, the throughput of the transfer would be 9102Mbit/s, excluding transfer to and from the SD cards."

Meet the 1920s gal Instagramming her life long before social media existed - "Children's nanny Vivian Maier took over 150,000 photographs during her lifetime"

An Earnest Plea to Christians: Please Stop Thanking God Publicly. Thank You. - "Want to thank God for your presumed “blessings”? Fantastic- just don’t do it in public. It only comes across as narcissistic vacuity. And please- if a loved one survived a tragedy, sickness, etc………not under ANY circumstances should you thank your God in public. Do you know the message this sends to the thousands of people who have lost loved ones prematurely? It sends the message that your God was looking out for your loved one but not theirs. Can you try to imagine for a moment what that would feel like?"

TCM proponents have it both ways - "[They] highlight what is wrong with non-evidence-based medicine - a dismissal of scientific evidence on the one hand, and unequivocal claims of efficacy on the other."

'Made in France' sex toys set to stimulate economy - The Local - "“Banks won’t finance projects like these because they consider them pornographic. Even when you come to them with a viable business plan, they tell us that there’s an ethical problem," said Lecca, whose stand-out product so far is an Eiffel Tower-shaped dildo, called the ‘La Tour Est Folle' (the tower is crazy). The rubber sex toy's website prides itself on offering a "monumental sensation", as well as being hypoallegenic and made entirely in France. La Tour Est Folle also boasts that the product contains no fat, whale oil, nails, screws, soy, GMOs, or radioactive material, and that it once successfully gave French adult film star Julie Valmont an orgasm... Despite their reputation as great lovers, the French have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to their indulgence in the odd naughty game, it would seem. “The French are way behind other European countries, especially the British,” said Lecca."

Dog urine blamed for rust on Henley, England, lampposts

Singapore's business, engineering students reveal top 10 dream firms - "According to the latest survey by Universum conducted among university students in Singapore, Google continues to dominate the hearts and minds of those studying in Business, while A*STAR secures the top spot among Engineering students"
Students are easily conned

China's top ten porn search terms might surprise you (SFW) - "The top 10 most commonly searched terms on porn sites over a 6 month period from China: Japanese, Chinese, Chinese (gay), Asian (gay), Japan, Asian, Japan (gay), Japanese (gay), China, Korean ... Chinese porn watchers don't appear to be very interested in anyone not of asian heritage, a mild xenophobia that's shared with Korea and Japan, both of which also prefer to watch asians getting fucked or doing the fucking... Of China's neighbours, only India and Kazakhstan search for members of other races getting their sex on"

People’s Pornography – An interview with Katrien Jacobs - "Chinese men really prefer Japanese porn over Western porn. I think it is primarily because the Japanese know how the play the Chinese markets for pop culture and sex entertainment. They simply supply an excessive kind of erotic imagination that Chinese entrepreneurs cannot handle. Even though there is a wealth of genres and mind-boggling fetish products available from Japan, the cultures actually share a quite narrow-minded patriarchal view on sexual pleasure. This is perhaps the reason why Chinese men like Japanese stars, because they embody a feminine ideal of innocence and purity that is harder to find in Western porn. Western females in porn are considered to be too active and too “coarse” for Chinese men. Also, it works well for Chinese people, and specifically youngsters, to project liberation and otherness onto the “foreign” Japanese porn culture... Pan Suiming is one of the leading Chinese scholars who has documented the deep-rooted effects of abstinence and sex/porn starvation in males during the Mao years. While males are now able to find a wealth of movies and hostess/sex work services, it is much harder for women to participate and release their frustration about this situation. So I think that China needs porn education, which would be more exciting than sex education, and would allow all kinds of people to watch and judge products, or even to make some of their own. But this is merely a fantasy at the current moment."

Christopher Lin's answer to What do feminists have instead of porn? - Quora - "As an avowed feminist, I often find myself masturbating to the sweet sound of the patriarchy being crushed underfoot. But as I grasp my penis in my hot little hands, I am suddenly suffused with self-doubt: "Can the master's tools ever dismantle the master's house?" I ask myself. My grip loosens, and my manhood shrinks with the recognition that my complete misreading of slogans from contemporary feminist thought is merely yet another part of my privileged existence. Would that Redstockings offered pleasure as simplistic as that of Vivid!"

Rabbinate presents: Pork-flavored foie gras - "farmers in Spain recently decided to breed geese in non-industrialized pasture lands. As opposed to the modern methods, they didn't fatten the geese, but gave them natural food. When the farmers tasted the first chunk of goose liver, they were amazed. "It tastes like pork," they cried out. They decided to share the sensational discovery with the chosen people, and sent a halachic query to Chief Rabbi Metzger. The latter demanded a second opinion, and asked that the goose liver be sent to three non-Jewish professional chefs in Europe, who are very familiar with the taste of Pork. The three chefs confirmed the discovery of a "rare culinary duplicate". Rabbi Metzger struggled with the problem and finally gave his answer: The meat is completely kosher. His ruling was based on a citation from the Talmud, which states that for every prohibition God imposed on the people of Israel – he created a kosher substitute with the exact same taste"

Durian wine, anyone? NUS students create grape-less wine - "n 2009, Japanese scientists found that combining durian and alcohol could prove fatal. This is because the fruit's high sulphur content inhibits the body's ability to process the drink."

My flat chest is a turn-off, says Keira - "The actress says her breasts were digitally boosted for the advertising campaign for her 2004 movie King Arthur. She also claims magazine publishers in the US ban stars from appearing on their front covers unless they have at least a C-cup size, or are willing to be digitally enhanced to make it appear as if they have."