"I found him a good deal changed. He looked anxious and puzzled, and seemed to be in doubt about something. I felt it could not be modern scepticism, for Murchison was the stoutest of Tories, and believed in the Pentateuch as firmly as he believed in the House of Peers; so I concluded that it was a woman, and asked him if he was married yet.
'I don't understand women well enough,' he answered.
'My dear Gerald,' I said, 'women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.'
'I cannot love where I cannot trust,' he replied."
When you can't live without bananas
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
Links - 2nd April 2013
Survey: 74% of women turn down jobs due to work-life balance concerns - "Having a life outside of work is so important to women in Singapore that 74 per cent of them have turned down a job due to work-life balance concerns, a recent survey found. For men, that figure was 50 per cent... men and women here define career success differently reported the survey. Recognition of one's contributions was the defining factor for career success for 66 per cent of female respondents. Meanwhile, 64 per cent of male professionals considered money to be the hallmark of career achievement."
More reasons why men earn more money than women
How tiny Estonia stepped out of USSR's shadow to become an internet titan - ""For other countries, the internet is just another service, like tap water, or clean streets," said Linnar Viik, a lecturer at the Estonian IT College, a government adviser and a man almost synonymous in Estonia with the rise of the web. "But for young Estonians, the internet is a manifestation of something more than a service – it's a symbol of democracy and freedom." To see why, you just have to go outside. Free Wi-Fi is everywhere, and has been for a decade. Viik says you could walk 100 miles – from the pastel-coloured turrets here in medieval Tallinn to the university spires of Tartu – and never lose internet connection... You can vote on your laptop (at the last election, Ilves did it from Macedonia) and sign legal documents on a smartphone. Cabinet meetings have been paperless since 2000. Doctors only issue prescriptions electronically, while in the main cities you can pay by text for bus tickets, parking, and – in some cases – a pint of beer. Not bad for country where, two decades ago, half the population had no phone line... To a British audience, the ID card will have a whiff of Big Brother. But many Estonians argue the opposite: that it allows them to keep tabs on the state, rather than the other way round. "You'd think, given our history, we'd have a problem with it," said Ilves, in an oblique reference to the days when the KGB had an office down a cobbled street in central Tallinn. "But I feel much more secure with a digital ID. If anyone goes into my files, they're flagged. Whereas if my files – which would exist anyway – were made of paper, no one would know who was looking at them." Every Estonian can see who has visited their data, and they can challenge any suspicious behaviour. In one famous case, a policewoman was caught accessing information about her boyfriend. During a recent election campaign, a candidate was swiftly punished for accessing personal information about would-be constituents. "I don't know what the idiot was thinking," said Viik. "You can't hide.""
Employers spill the beans on how they hire (image, JobsCentral survey)
TunnelBear - "We think the Internet is a much better place when everyone can browse privately, and browse the same Internet as everyone else. TunnelBear wants to bring the benefits of VPN to everyone with our incredibly simple applications for PC, Mac, iOS and Android devices. Our highly accoladed applications have appeared on Lifehacker, PC World, TNW, Huffington Post and WSJ.com for making it easy for average users to avoid access restrictions and browse the internet privately. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Toronto, Canada, TunnelBear is available everywhere (except China occasionally)."
Pretend you're accessing the Internet from another country
Welfare State: Handouts Make Up One-Third of U.S. Wages - "In the U.K., social welfare benefits make up 44 percent of wages and salaries"
400 yrs ago we painted our breakfast! - "stop ranting on the meal pictures on instagram, we’ve come a long way! 400 years ago We had to paint it! "
Emotional Selection in Memes: The Case of Urban Legends - "legends that contained more disgust motifs were distributed more widely on urban legend web sites."
Compulsive liar Elizabeth Jones who cried rape 11 times is jailed - "She had made her first false rape claim in 2004 when she was just 13, Southampton Crown Court heard. Between 2005 and 2007 she made another eight allegations which police investigated and dismissed, although she was not prosecuted. In 2009 she was sentenced to a ten-month detention and training order for a similar offence. Jones’s latest victim was a boyfriend against whom she made the allegation after the pair had an argument... ‘The man was arrested and he gave a statement. He had to live his life with people accusing him of being a rapist’"
9 false allegations with no punishment!
Oscar ratings higher with box office hits nominated? Charts show the correlation. - "Ratings for the Oscar broadcast have been in a fairly steady decline over the last 35 years, but spikes have occurred when a blockbuster film was nominated"
Mikan Newspaper | an epic ad for oranges
Chimps' 'girl talk' uses more negative gestures - "In female-female interactions, the chimps used more aggressive signals and "apologised" less often with gestures of reassurance. But they employed a more positive strategy around males, with more expressions of greeting and submission... "To speak anthropomorphically, I can certainly see some parallels in my own life: women are generally more aggressive and competitive with each other... [and] men do not change their behaviour outside the context of social rank," she said, referring to studies of gesture differences in humans... She added that her analysis of female aggression could be controversial because "there is a belief in the field that males are more aggressive than females." "Some researchers likely will have trouble accepting my results since I show that females are also aggressive," she said. "It's not that they are more aggressive, just different from males in their use of aggression.""
Patriarchy!
Noodles With No Need to Dress Up - NYTimes.com - "those fresh noodles were quite unlike anything I had ever tasted, toothsome, yet tender and delicate... Fresh pasta is indeed best with very little in the way of sauce. The point is to show off the noodle and enhance its flavor with a little butter or cream, perhaps a bit of prosciutto or snipped herbs"
Welcome to Rangers in NZ - "This is a nerds’ guide to filming locations used in Power Rangers shows filmed in the Auckland region of New Zealand, where the show has been made since 2002 with Ninja Storm. This guide is from the perspective of someone who’s actually walked to the locations themselves on two separate occasions, once in 2011 and again in 2013"
Rod Liddle on Rennard and women in parliament - "some say it's time for women to "toughen up" about workplace harassment. Jo Phillips, once former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown's spin doctor, told Radio 4’s Today programme this morning during a discussion about sexism in Westminster that politics was a "very tough world" with "a lot of bullying ... so you do have to toughen up a little bit". John Major's former press secretary Sheila Gunn said women should understand the "culture" of Westminster and find ways of "coping with that sort of inappropriate behaviour". Liddle suggests such advances should be "brushed off", describing a dinner party he attended where an attractive young female journalist fended off a lecherous fellow guest by warning him of severe reprisals if he tried to touch her "clunge" again"
Colombian Army Mortar FAIL! - YouTube
Go Away MDA - "Bypass MDA filters. And bring porn back into your life"
Yahoo: Mayer culpa | The Economist - "Forcing workers to come into the office is a symptom of Yahoo’s problems, not a solution to them... A study by researchers at Stanford and Beijing Universities of a large Chinese travel company compared the performance of employees allowed to work from home with those who were stuck in the office: among the home-workers, job satisfaction rose, staff turnover fell by half and productivity went up by 13%. Hardly surprising, since a lot of people don’t seem to work while they are at work: last year J.C. Penney, an American retailer, discovered that a third of its headquarters’ bandwidth was taken up by employees watching YouTube videos. Ms Mayer’s move is not just a bad idea in itself but also a nail in the coffin of the naive notion that women with big jobs help their sisters up the ladder. Her plan will knock out a few rungs. Flexible employers help women run families and jobs simultaneously. Rigid working practices make combining the two impossible or unpleasant. To be fair, as somebody who took two weeks off to have a baby, Ms Mayer is hardly asking others to do what she would not; but then she has dulled the pain of separation from her child by installing a nursery next to her office. Yahoo’s less privileged and less Stakhanovite women may well hoof it to a friendlier organisation."
Why rich men are better in bed: Women have more orgasms with wealthy partners, study finds - "The researchers found several factors influenced the women's enjoyment of sex. However, one of the biggest turned out to be the income of their partner... The link between enjoyment of sex and partner's wealth was statistically significant even when they took into account other factors such as age, education, happiness, the length of relationship and health. The scientists say the findings could be explained by bias in the study - that women who have frequent orgasms tend to overestimate their partner's income, or that women with 'high powered' partners exaggerate how much they enjoy sex... The link between enjoyment of sex and wealth has also been found in studies in Germany and America."
More reasons why men earn more money than women
How tiny Estonia stepped out of USSR's shadow to become an internet titan - ""For other countries, the internet is just another service, like tap water, or clean streets," said Linnar Viik, a lecturer at the Estonian IT College, a government adviser and a man almost synonymous in Estonia with the rise of the web. "But for young Estonians, the internet is a manifestation of something more than a service – it's a symbol of democracy and freedom." To see why, you just have to go outside. Free Wi-Fi is everywhere, and has been for a decade. Viik says you could walk 100 miles – from the pastel-coloured turrets here in medieval Tallinn to the university spires of Tartu – and never lose internet connection... You can vote on your laptop (at the last election, Ilves did it from Macedonia) and sign legal documents on a smartphone. Cabinet meetings have been paperless since 2000. Doctors only issue prescriptions electronically, while in the main cities you can pay by text for bus tickets, parking, and – in some cases – a pint of beer. Not bad for country where, two decades ago, half the population had no phone line... To a British audience, the ID card will have a whiff of Big Brother. But many Estonians argue the opposite: that it allows them to keep tabs on the state, rather than the other way round. "You'd think, given our history, we'd have a problem with it," said Ilves, in an oblique reference to the days when the KGB had an office down a cobbled street in central Tallinn. "But I feel much more secure with a digital ID. If anyone goes into my files, they're flagged. Whereas if my files – which would exist anyway – were made of paper, no one would know who was looking at them." Every Estonian can see who has visited their data, and they can challenge any suspicious behaviour. In one famous case, a policewoman was caught accessing information about her boyfriend. During a recent election campaign, a candidate was swiftly punished for accessing personal information about would-be constituents. "I don't know what the idiot was thinking," said Viik. "You can't hide.""
Employers spill the beans on how they hire (image, JobsCentral survey)
TunnelBear - "We think the Internet is a much better place when everyone can browse privately, and browse the same Internet as everyone else. TunnelBear wants to bring the benefits of VPN to everyone with our incredibly simple applications for PC, Mac, iOS and Android devices. Our highly accoladed applications have appeared on Lifehacker, PC World, TNW, Huffington Post and WSJ.com for making it easy for average users to avoid access restrictions and browse the internet privately. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Toronto, Canada, TunnelBear is available everywhere (except China occasionally)."
Pretend you're accessing the Internet from another country
Welfare State: Handouts Make Up One-Third of U.S. Wages - "In the U.K., social welfare benefits make up 44 percent of wages and salaries"
400 yrs ago we painted our breakfast! - "stop ranting on the meal pictures on instagram, we’ve come a long way! 400 years ago We had to paint it! "
Emotional Selection in Memes: The Case of Urban Legends - "legends that contained more disgust motifs were distributed more widely on urban legend web sites."
Compulsive liar Elizabeth Jones who cried rape 11 times is jailed - "She had made her first false rape claim in 2004 when she was just 13, Southampton Crown Court heard. Between 2005 and 2007 she made another eight allegations which police investigated and dismissed, although she was not prosecuted. In 2009 she was sentenced to a ten-month detention and training order for a similar offence. Jones’s latest victim was a boyfriend against whom she made the allegation after the pair had an argument... ‘The man was arrested and he gave a statement. He had to live his life with people accusing him of being a rapist’"
9 false allegations with no punishment!
Oscar ratings higher with box office hits nominated? Charts show the correlation. - "Ratings for the Oscar broadcast have been in a fairly steady decline over the last 35 years, but spikes have occurred when a blockbuster film was nominated"
Mikan Newspaper | an epic ad for oranges
Chimps' 'girl talk' uses more negative gestures - "In female-female interactions, the chimps used more aggressive signals and "apologised" less often with gestures of reassurance. But they employed a more positive strategy around males, with more expressions of greeting and submission... "To speak anthropomorphically, I can certainly see some parallels in my own life: women are generally more aggressive and competitive with each other... [and] men do not change their behaviour outside the context of social rank," she said, referring to studies of gesture differences in humans... She added that her analysis of female aggression could be controversial because "there is a belief in the field that males are more aggressive than females." "Some researchers likely will have trouble accepting my results since I show that females are also aggressive," she said. "It's not that they are more aggressive, just different from males in their use of aggression.""
Patriarchy!
Noodles With No Need to Dress Up - NYTimes.com - "those fresh noodles were quite unlike anything I had ever tasted, toothsome, yet tender and delicate... Fresh pasta is indeed best with very little in the way of sauce. The point is to show off the noodle and enhance its flavor with a little butter or cream, perhaps a bit of prosciutto or snipped herbs"
Welcome to Rangers in NZ - "This is a nerds’ guide to filming locations used in Power Rangers shows filmed in the Auckland region of New Zealand, where the show has been made since 2002 with Ninja Storm. This guide is from the perspective of someone who’s actually walked to the locations themselves on two separate occasions, once in 2011 and again in 2013"
Rod Liddle on Rennard and women in parliament - "some say it's time for women to "toughen up" about workplace harassment. Jo Phillips, once former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown's spin doctor, told Radio 4’s Today programme this morning during a discussion about sexism in Westminster that politics was a "very tough world" with "a lot of bullying ... so you do have to toughen up a little bit". John Major's former press secretary Sheila Gunn said women should understand the "culture" of Westminster and find ways of "coping with that sort of inappropriate behaviour". Liddle suggests such advances should be "brushed off", describing a dinner party he attended where an attractive young female journalist fended off a lecherous fellow guest by warning him of severe reprisals if he tried to touch her "clunge" again"
Colombian Army Mortar FAIL! - YouTube
Go Away MDA - "Bypass MDA filters. And bring porn back into your life"
Yahoo: Mayer culpa | The Economist - "Forcing workers to come into the office is a symptom of Yahoo’s problems, not a solution to them... A study by researchers at Stanford and Beijing Universities of a large Chinese travel company compared the performance of employees allowed to work from home with those who were stuck in the office: among the home-workers, job satisfaction rose, staff turnover fell by half and productivity went up by 13%. Hardly surprising, since a lot of people don’t seem to work while they are at work: last year J.C. Penney, an American retailer, discovered that a third of its headquarters’ bandwidth was taken up by employees watching YouTube videos. Ms Mayer’s move is not just a bad idea in itself but also a nail in the coffin of the naive notion that women with big jobs help their sisters up the ladder. Her plan will knock out a few rungs. Flexible employers help women run families and jobs simultaneously. Rigid working practices make combining the two impossible or unpleasant. To be fair, as somebody who took two weeks off to have a baby, Ms Mayer is hardly asking others to do what she would not; but then she has dulled the pain of separation from her child by installing a nursery next to her office. Yahoo’s less privileged and less Stakhanovite women may well hoof it to a friendlier organisation."
Why rich men are better in bed: Women have more orgasms with wealthy partners, study finds - "The researchers found several factors influenced the women's enjoyment of sex. However, one of the biggest turned out to be the income of their partner... The link between enjoyment of sex and partner's wealth was statistically significant even when they took into account other factors such as age, education, happiness, the length of relationship and health. The scientists say the findings could be explained by bias in the study - that women who have frequent orgasms tend to overestimate their partner's income, or that women with 'high powered' partners exaggerate how much they enjoy sex... The link between enjoyment of sex and wealth has also been found in studies in Germany and America."
Post ID: 5698944202578934224
Monday, April 01, 2013
Best. China Souvenir. Ever.
Something a chap handed me when I was walking in ChengDu with my friend:
"
“第一次不来是你的错
下次不来是我的错
清纯秀丽
中高大学生
活波可爱
青春少女
都市美女
高口味
高素质
货真价实
诚信为本
先玩后付款
不实不收费
可出具发票”
Translation:
"If you don't come the first time, it's your mistake
If you don't come the next time, it's mine
Pure and Simple Beauty
Middle and High School, and University Students
Lively and Cute
Young Girls in Bloom
City Beauties
Sophisticated Taste
High Quality
Real Products and Honest Pricing
Honesty is our Foundational Principle
Play first, Pay later
If we're not honest with you, we won't charge you
We give receipts"
(no, this is not an April Fool's joke, hilarious though it is)
"“第一次不来是你的错
下次不来是我的错
清纯秀丽
中高大学生
活波可爱
青春少女
都市美女
高口味
高素质
货真价实
诚信为本
先玩后付款
不实不收费
可出具发票”
Translation:
"If you don't come the first time, it's your mistake
If you don't come the next time, it's mine
Pure and Simple Beauty
Middle and High School, and University Students
Lively and Cute
Young Girls in Bloom
City Beauties
Sophisticated Taste
High Quality
Real Products and Honest Pricing
Honesty is our Foundational Principle
Play first, Pay later
If we're not honest with you, we won't charge you
We give receipts"
(no, this is not an April Fool's joke, hilarious though it is)
Post ID: 1369943377128043161
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