Links - 23rd September 2017

Are White People Squeamish About Race Discussions?, episode #159 of Question of the Day - "'We did standup shows in all these kind of red states... The best thing that happened was that we got to the point in having conversations with regular Americans in Birmingham or Columbus, Georgia or wherever we were where people could say, ask me the question: why do you call yourself Iranian-American? Why can't you just call yourself American-American? That kind of question I think is considered racist or a faux pas or whatever. I think that's a great question. But there's a lot, there's a lot of fear embedded in making, in asking those kinds of questions'
'So do you think if you'd done that same exact show in a real blue state or a blue city, you're saying that people wouldn't have been willing to ask that kind of question?'
'I think maybe it would've been too sensitive. You know and they would want to be culturally appropriate and all of that stuff. And I think what's happening is we're not answering earnest sincere questions that white people might have about race and ethnicity and so as a result I think it leads to Donald Trump'...
'New York City, look. My relatives, your relatives... when my relatives came into the country, they were about as low as you could go. It was one barely-literate poor Jewish guy who left his family in Poland and came here to, you know it's the standard thing. But there was a period in America and there's still very much in most ways that same environment where you would be maybe discriminated against, maybe cheated, maybe ridiculed but you had a chance to make it happen. And I think in order to continue that effort collectively we need to have conversations that are harder now to have when frictions are so high that many or most well-meaning white people are scared to say anything. That's my feeling... I want to be more comfortable than I am [talking about race]'"

Free Mouse Auto Clicker - "Free Mouse Auto Clicker is a software that can free you from repeat mouse click work. It's simple but enough for normal use"

Collingwood's Sircuit Bar wins right to ban women - "A GAY venue in Collingwood has won the right to ban women to ensure its patrons are not subjected to attempts by predatory females to turn them straight... Other gay venues have had less success in banning patrons. Last year the Peel Hotel in Collingwood lost its right to ask people their sexuality before they were allowed to enter."
Is this misogyny? Is overturning this homophobia?

Hudson’s Bay Company policies set stage for modern environmental struggles - "Simpson acted to squelch competition from American traders who could legally operate in what was then called the Oregon country. One of his main concerns was creating a buffer to protect the company’s richest beaver-trapping operations in the interior of British Columbia. To keep Americans at bay, he set out to create what other historians have described as a “fur desert” in the Snake River Basin. This involved trapping as many animals as possible to make the area unprofitable to American trappers. Simpson’s strategy worked, but decimated the beaver population."

Marvel's New Ironheart Is Named After Porn Movie - "A 15-year-old is donning the Iron Man suit and will be called Ironheart. Apparently Joe Quesada came up with the name. The problem is that there is already an Ironheart out there -- it's a Japanese Iron Man porn parody... Hey, and the two covers looks the same, too. I think the bigger question is why would Tony Stark let a 15-year-old girl fly around in essentially what is a weapon of mass destruction? Yeah, that makes sense."
Diversity!

Social Justice RPG - YouTube - "Don't forget to check your Privilege stats."

Theranos and the Dark Side of Storytelling - "Consider the medical technology company Theranos, founded by Elizabeth Holmes, which seems to be reaching the end of an epic flameout. Following a long stretch of fawning coverage from business and technology journalists, The Wall Street Journal reported in October 2015 that the company’s flagship blood-testing technology was a near-total failure. This month, investors accused Theranos of running a long con... Theranos—a company once valued at $9 billion—got as far as it did mainly on the strength of “a preternaturally good story.” Holmes constructed an inspiring hero narrative starring herself—a precocious girl-genius who, at nineteen years of age, began pioneering medical technologies that could potentially save millions of lives around the world. Despite abundant warning signs, and despite the Silicon Valley company’s refusal to provide real evidence that their technology worked, journalists didn’t skeptically evaluate Holmes’s story—they simply repeated it. They told and re-told Holmes’s story until she began to seem less like an actual person, and more like a living symbol—of progress, of innovation, of female empowerment... To put it positively, good stories—fictional or not—make us more open minded. To put it negatively, they make us a lot more gullible. This is the reason, as explained by the science journalist Maria Konnikova in her book The Confidence Game, why a powerful, emotion-drenched story is at the heart of every con job. And it’s also the reason that academic journals exclude storytelling technique from scientific reports. Scientists understand that storytelling dials up emotion and dials back rationality, clouding objective analysis."

Changes to elected presidency: MP Joan Pereira suggests reserving election for Eurasians
Identity politics means everyone wants something

Scientists Accidentally Discover Efficient Process to Turn CO2 Into Ethanol - "this conversion process could be used as temporary energy storage during a lull in renewable energy generation, smoothing out fluctuations in a renewable energy grid."

Bollywood Power Rangers. Maybe 1980's or 1990's. : OldSchoolCool

“It’s not just big data. It’s for the good of humanity.” - "Three co-workers wanted their company to support World Community Grid, but they knew they’d need to convince many people to make their vision a reality. Here’s how they did it. Each year, employees with SILCA (one of the information technology and services arms of Crédit Agricole, an international bank based in France) are invited to submit proposals for new company initiatives at Crédit Agricole’s Innovation Week. In 2015, a small group at SILCA presented a carefully crafted proposal to run World Community Grid on company computers. Their proposal led to a successful pilot project, and eventually a wide-scale implementation that currently includes more than 1,200 computers."

The Myth (and History) of the Cocktail Umbrella

'Breastfeeding bullies' keep up campaign that 'breast is best' - "So-called "breastfeeding bullies" have been shaming moms on social media for years. It's easy to find their comments online, on message boards or on parenting blogs. "Formula-feeding is selfish," reads one. "Moms who formula-feed are lazy," says another. The death of a B.C. woman suffering from postpartum depression is drawing more attention to the issue after her husband recently posted a statement on Facebook about her depression — and her anxiety over breastfeeding... it's the "smugness" and the "moral self-righteousness" of breastfeeding advocates that gets to her. "My experience has been that women are pushing back against the established dogmas around breastfeeding and insisting on their own right to choose now," she says."

Japanese businessman reunites with elusive Singapore girl after 40 years - "Seven members of Ms Chua's family, including her husband turned up to meet Mr Isoda... Ms Chua's daughter told Wanbao that she knew her mother was beautiful when she was young, but never guessed that someone would hold a torch for her for 40 years. "Mum told us how she had many suitors in the past, but we thought they were just stories""

Bad news for gym bros: Lower sex drive linked to intense workouts - study - "A new study from the University of North Carolina has found that men reach a ‘tipping point’ after which they are too tired or just not in the mood to have sex."

SR Nathan: When people sing the national anthem, they are singing to me - "At the same time, SR Nathan lamented the lack of executive powers in the Singapore presidential role and the only time he actually fulfill his role was when he allowed the ruling party PAP government to spend S$4.9 billion from the national reserves in Jan 2009 when the government went into a budget deficit."

Are good reasoners more incest-friendly? Trait cognitive reflection predicts selective moralization in a sample of American adults - "We contrasted social violations that are intrinsically harmful to others (e.g., fraud, thievery) with those that are not (e.g., wearing pajamas to work and engaging in consensual acts of sexual intimacy with an adult sibling). Our key hypothesis was that more reflective (higher CRT) individuals would tend to moralize selectively — treating only intrinsically harmful acts as genuinely morally wrong — whereas less reflective (lower CRT) individuals would moralize more indiscriminately. We found clear support for this hypothesis in a large and ideologically diverse sample of American adults. The predicted associations were not fully accounted for by the subjects’ political orientation, sensitivity to gut feelings, gender, age, educational attainment, or their placement on a sexual morals-specific measure of social conservatism"

UCLA Student Body Drops Term 'Illegal Immigrant' - "“[T]he racially derogatory I-Word endangers basic human rights including the presumption of innocence and the right to due process guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution,” the resolution reads. It continues: “Human beings need to be central in immigration discussions in order to move toward a more civilized and humane tone in public discourse and policies on immigration”... The Associated Press removed the term “illegal immigrant” from its style guide in April, marking a major shift in how the U.S. news media writes about the undocumented. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists and immigrant rights activists have long contended that the term is inaccurate and offensive because it criminalizes the people described rather than their actions. "
Wut. Can we still call criminals criminals?
"Undocumented" just makes it sound like people lost their papers

Humans, not climate change, wiped out Australian megafauna - "New evidence involving the ancient poop of some of the huge and astonishing creatures that once roamed Australia indicates the primary cause of their extinction around 45,000 years ago was likely a result of humans, not climate change... Miller said the extinction may have been caused by "imperceptible overkill." A 2006 study by Australian researchers indicates that even low-intensity hunting of Australian megafauna - like the killing of one juvenile mammal per person per decade - could have resulted in the extinction of a species in just a few hundred years."
So much for the myth of the noble savage and living in harmony with nature

Steve Heard's answer to Are the Japanese as honest as many people have claimed? - Quora - "One of my vendors in Kyoto developed a lo-jack like system to track cars. They were unable to market it in Japan because who would take someone else’s car?
This applies to money and property. Relationships are a different matter. To sell a cell phone in Japan it must have a “mistress mode”. Some contacts are deemed secret and do not show up in call logs, phone directory, etc. without entering a password known only to the phone’s owner and presumably not to their spouse."

BBC World Service - The World This Week, The missile that changed the game - "The idea of relocating migrants, spreading them out more equally across the European Union was the idea of taking pressure off Italy and then Greece as well. But these are people who are seen as vulnerable people: they're refugees, asylum seekers or those who have suffered abuse. When we're looking at those arriving in Italy that primarily is not the case. The issue that Italy is dealing with is predominantly young men who are looking for a better life, mainly from West Africa. Also though we do see from Bangladesh many middle class people as well because they're the only ones who have got the money to then pay the smugglers"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Grenfell Fire: Four weeks on - "We have three pillars of the welfare state: health, education and housing and we may have issues with the health system or the education system but fundamentally it works. But all governments have failed when it comes to the provision of council housing in Britain. We've sold off nearly two million council houses since nineteen eighty under the right to buy. Forty two percent of us you know in nineteen eighty lived in council houses. Now it's only eight percent so there is a stigma"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thursday's business with Katie Prescott - "It's interesting that the sales of online goods in America is half the level of that in the UK which is probably not what most people would expect"

North Korea cites Muammar Gaddafi's 'destruction' in nuclear test defence - "North Korea has defended its latest nuclear test, saying the fate of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya showed what happened when countries forsake their nuclear weapon ambitions"

What’s the Difference between Adamantium and Vibranium? - "While vibranium is the more durable material, adamantium is the more dense material. This means that given the right circumstances, adamantium can potentially cut through pure vibranium. If we had to pit the shield versus the claws, since the shield is a vibranium alloy, not just pure vibranium, it can withstand the attack of adamantium claws."

Power Rangers Movie Easter Eggs

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Vice-chancellor: Education is 'a competitive market' - "When you say it's only a small fraction of the money that goes from fees, it's quite interesting what happens with top salaries. Because the people who are earning the top salaries always say that. But of course the people at the very top are just the apex of the system. In the University of Bath, in the information I was sent by staff and students who are very angry at what's been happening at Bath, it shows that there are 67 top managers in the University of Bath who earn over 100,000 pounds"

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Building A Better Future - "[On the Seychelles] People often tell me that the police say they don't arrest people for fear they'll be accused of victimizing opposition voters"