Links - 17th June 2015

#KillAllMen - "“another angry woman,” writer “stavvas” opens her defense of the “kill all men” slogan by saying “nobody is actually planning to kill all men.” According to (probably) her, it’s just a “shorthand war cry,” a “structural critique, presented in a provocative fashion.” Continuing in this (dishonest, dissembling) vein, stavvas reminisces about being part of a reading group that was studying would-be Andy Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas’ “SCUM Manifesto,” which calls for the extermination of the vast majority of male human beings. She notes that “the power of SCUM is the effect it has on men,” but regretfully notes, “It’s pretty difficult to mention SCUM (or indeed just cry “kill all men”) without the misogynists crawling in, crying misandry”... One can’t reach any sort of understanding with a person who is both committed to saying inflammatory things, and determined not to mean them."

When doctors marry doctors: a survey exploring the professional and family lives of young physicians. - "Twenty-two percent of male physicians and 44% of female physicians were married to physicians"

Women who murder their children - "When Mouzos crunched figures on the distribution of parents who killed children by gender and biological ties, she found biological mothers posed a more lethal risk to their own. Biological mothers account for about 35 per cent of all filicides (about the same proportion as stepfathers and de factos), while biological fathers account for 29 per cent. "
Women are more likely to murder their children than men

Beard goggles: Why a fuzzy face is attractive only when it is a rarity - ""When a fashion goes mainstream it loses the advantage of rarity. And so it begins to subside," one of the authors of the research wrote on the academic news site The Conversation. "Innovative new styles," he said, "may enjoy a premium while they are still rare." This means as the lumberjack look becomes increasingly conventional, it may be time for a shave. Beards are sexy only before they are cool, is the implication... genetic variations are perpetuated across generations specifically because they give a survival edge with combinations of "good genes," compared with the mainstream."

I was intimidated and branded a racist for bringing Rochdale abuse gang to justice, says prosecutor - "They said I had given racists a stick with which to beat minorities"

Britain has many major problems - racism isn't one of them - "No high-level, activist campaign exists in any Asian country to eradicate such racially charged language. Nobody feels strongly enough to object, least of all white people. In Britain though, where I now live, the opposite seems to be true. I can’t help noticing that certain sections of the population are now so acutely tuned into the issue of race that they spot racism where none is intended. I was stunned for instance, when a few years ago police in the Isle of Wight arrested a beach-bar singer for belting out the pop song ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ because someone had complained it was racial aggravation... there was an online petition against a Knorr advert featuring Marco Pierre White making a dish of rice, peas and chicken and describing it as Jamaican — the chef’s creation was not authentic enough, apparently. A writer in the Guardian called this ‘disrespectful cultural appropriation’... To the British young, racism is not repugnant — it’s incomprehensible... The danger with crying racism at every turn is that it conceals real problems. Immigration cannot be discussed properly here, because anyone who wants to raise the subject is labelled bigoted or racist — even if they’re talking about white Poles. The concerns of the poor, who live in areas where immigrants flock, are about oversubscribed GP surgeries or about schools that suddenly go multilingual. Yet their concerns are dismissed by the governing elite as racist, such as when a voter once voiced her concerns over crime and immigration to Gordon Brown, and he was caught on microphone calling her a ‘bigoted woman’. It risks alienating a class from British politics and driving people to support genuinely racist parties. And while Britain is looking out for the old bigotry, new ones creep in. ‘Culturalism’ — favouring someone because they share the same mindset as you, is not so bad because it’s not ‘racist’. Appearing before the Commons education committee, an Ofsted inspector recently raised the issue of working-class white schoolchildren being overlooked and without representation versus ethnic groups: too much race awareness tends to cause division, rather than inclusion."

Marriage equality is great. Now how about equality for singles? - Magazine - The Boston Globe - " “Oh, you just haven’t found the right mate yet” sounds a lot like “Oh, Jim, you just haven’t found the right girl.” Just as it used to be considered better to be heterosexual than homosexual, there remains the presumption that being in a couple is better than being single. What’s wrong with being single? Nothing, unless you consider all the forms of discrimination visited upon unmarried people. Let me count the ways. There are 1,138 of them, at least according to a 2004 report by the US Government Accountability Office. These are the federal statutory provisions in which marital status factors into determining “benefits, rights, and privileges”... In a recent op-ed, social scientist Bella M. DePaulo explained how discrimination against single people can somehow be seen as more legitimate than racism or sexism... At a recent visit to The History Project, New England’s LGBT archives, I found no evidence of a push for marriage equality prior to 1986. In fact, quite the opposite. A 1970s flier from the gay activist group The Red Butterfly perhaps sums it up best: “ .  . . what gay men and women, as well as others, should demand is freedom from being forced to mold their lives after a rigid, and strictly historical, family structure.” Amen."

How scientists rank drugs from most to least dangerous — and why the rankings are flawed - "Marijuana is generally safer than alcohol. Drug experts broadly agree that individuals and society would arguably be better off if marijuana became the most accepted recreational intoxicant of choice instead of alcohol."

Study: Popular song lyrics found to be at a 3rd grade reading level - "He found that the country music genre had the "smartest" lyrics over the past 10 years, averaging a reading grade level of 3.3. Pop and rock tied with a reading grade level of 2.9, while R&B/hip-hop earned a reading grade level of 2.6. What earned country music such a high score? It doesn't use filler words like "oh" and "yeah," while it does cash in some lyrical ten-dollar words often, such as "Hallelujah," "cigarettes" and "tacklebox." It also uses long geographical names, such as Mississippi and Louisiana, while R&B/hip-hop uses less complex city names, like L.A. and New York. It's also worth noting that the song writer's gender didn't matter: Songs are getting dumber across the board, no matter who wrote them. Keep in mind that the website is just looking at the word choice. It doesn't factor metaphors or other nuances that would add deeper meaning to a song. Anything over a grade of 22 (which we didn't find) would imply it's at graduate school level."

Japan's Robot Dogs Get Funerals as Sony Looks Away - "Despite the loyal fanbase, Sony decided to discontinue the bot in 2006, after selling around 150,000 units. "Our core businesses are electronics, games and entertainment, but the focus is going to be on profitability and strategic growth," a Sony spokeswoman said at the time. "In light of that, we've decided to cancel the Aibo line". For years following the announcement, Sony would repair Aibos that experienced technical difficulties. But in July 2014, those repairs stopped and owners were left to look elsewhere for help.... “The first time I spoke directly to a client he told me, ‘He’s not very well, can you examine him?’” Hiroshi Funabashi, a robot dog repairman, told AFP. “I realized he didn’t see it as a robot, but as a member of his family whose life was more important than his own”... While concerted repair efforts have kept many an Aibo alive, a shortage of spare parts means that some of their lives have come to an end. The following images show the funerals of 19 Aibos that engineers at A-Fun were unable to save."

How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses - "Using 599 e-mail addresses of young adults, their self-reported personality scores and the personality judgments of 100 independent observers, it was shown that personality impressions based solely on e-mail addresses were consensually shared by observers. Moreover, these impressions contained some degree of validity. This was true for neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and narcissism but not for extraversion"

The Red Effect, in People and Monkeys - "In many human cultures, the color red is linked to sex and romance. But if the effect is found in other primates, it could reflect a biologically innate sensory bias... female monkeys looked longer at photos of male scrota on red backgrounds. The effect was not solely due to the red background, as they did not look longer at seashells on a red background. Nor was it specific to scrota, as the females did not look longer at scrota on a blue background... The results with the female monkeys, at least, suggest that the importance of the color red is ancient. Social cues based on color may be a universal among primates."

Can’t do heels? Don’t do Cannes - "I’ve seen some commentators online – all men, funnily enough – snark that it’s no different to demand women wear high heels than it is to insist men wear bow ties. They’re absolutely right, of course – if bow ties render them next to immobile and leave them in crushing pain with lifelong foot problems. And maybe they do; I’ve never worn one. I sometimes wonder if men think women have special powers that render them magically able to walk on their tiptoes all night without any pain (and enjoy hours of makeup and hairstyling, awkward and uncomfortable dresses and starvation diets). It has always seemed exactly right to me that the most famous designers of high heels in the world, Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin, are men. The assumption still is that in order to look elegant women have to be in some kind of self-restraining physical pain. Because that still, apparently, is the look of a human woman."
Many women must be masochists, apparently, since they love heels. And ties make me feel like I'm choking.

I read 'Fifty Shades of Grey' with my boyfriend and this is what it did to our relationship - "Reading “50 Shades of Grey” gave Dave and me the unique chance to see each other’s perspective on how couples should communicate. More importantly, we were detached from the characters, thanks to their bizarre qualities and poor character development. This detachment meant that if we disagreed how one character acted or miscommunicated we could calmly discuss our opinions without getting into a heated dispute where someone’s pride was left beaten on the floor."

I went to McDonald's in France and discovered how America is doing it all wrong - "the McCafé near the Louvre in Paris has a four-star rating on TripAdvisor. One reviewer from Glasgow, Scotland said she at ate the McCafé for breakfast every morning while she stayed in Paris because it was cheap and she liked the macaroons."