Links - 12th June 2019 (2)

Mangalica - "Looking like a pig crossed with a sheep, the Hungarian mangalica is a unique breed. Only two decades ago, the world’s last woolly pig was on the verge of extinction. Thankfully, it has re-emerged across Central and Eastern Europe, while also becoming a gourmet staple in local restaurants.The name means “hog with a lot of lard,” an appropriate moniker, as the mangalica is one of the fattiest pigs in the world."

Eric Swalwell Outraged The Word 'Woman' Is Not In The Constitution. There's Only One Problem. - "Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) is not known for showcasing his intelligence, and Wednesday was no exception. The high-profile Democrat and 2020 presidential contender took to Twitter to pander to women by complaining that the United States Constitution doesn't have one use of the word “woman” in it... “That is unacceptable,” he continued. “Women must be equally represented and equally protected,” posted Swalwell, adding a hashtag in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. Yeah, except the Constitution also doesn’t include the word “man.” So instead of scoring points with women, all Swalwell managed to do was prove that he hasn’t read the Constitution and was too lazy to do a little fact-checking before firing off the tweet."

Why the 'Avengers: Endgame' Finale Works So Well - "His decision should be celebrated for how satisfying it is; it’s Endgame’s most human exit compared with all the epic, sacrificial, and even otherworldly losses. Of the original Avengers, Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) launches herself off a distant planet’s cliff for the Soul Stone (which can be retrieved only in exchange for, well, a soul). Iron Man dies on an apocalyptic battlefield to destroy Thanos. But those legendary finales happened because of their character evolutions: Black Widow, though her arc is never explored as deeply as those of her teammates, felt she had prior acts to atone for, while Iron Man had his transformation from playboy billionaire to chivalrous hero to complete.Cap, though? As the paragon of duty, honor, and loyalty since his days as a frail army reject, he’s been a superhero long enough—so in his last moments, he returns to being just a kid from Brooklyn. His choice isn’t about being a quitter; it’s about finally getting to quit"

Why Nebula's Marvel Movie Journey Matters So Much - "Nebula has had the strongest, clearest arc out of not only the Guardians characters, but the rest of the MCU, period. She goes from secondary antagonist to badass antihero over the course of the four films she appears in, and while her arc doesn’t get the moment it deserves in Endgame, she’s still one of the strongest points. More importantly, she manages to avoid the worst trope of all: redemption = death."

‘Avengers: Endgame’ directors just explained some of the movie’s biggest mysteries - "Both Ancient One and Hulk were right. You can’t change the future by simply going back to past. But it’s possible to create a different alternate future. It’s not butterfly effect. Every decision you made in the past could potentially create a new timeline. For example, the old Cap at the end movie, he lived his married life in a different universe from the main one. He had to make another jump back to the main universe at the end to give the shield to Sam...
Q: In both IW and EG, the heroes tried their back to take the glove away from Thanos, so why didn't Doctor Strange just cut off Thanos' hand with his ability?
A: Thanos' skin is almost impenetrable, we don't know whether Doctor Strange had the capability to do it. If he failed to cut it on time, Thanos would still able to do the snap. Doctor Strange realized this issue during his millions of test runs.
All the movie sites will repackage this interview into 20 different articles

Petition Demands Captain Marvel Be Played By Gay Woman of Color - Not Brie Larson - "The petition also indicates that Larson “hasn’t donated to any charity other than The Motion Picture and Television Fund Foundation.” The petition’s creator notes “it’s time for her to show she is not all-talk.”"

Teen schoolboy died after pupil threw cheese slice at him, inquest told - "Karanbir Singh Cheema, known as Karan, suffered a serious reaction when the slice – described as half the size of a post-it note – hit him in the neck area... The boy who threw the cheese, who is now 15 and cannot be named, apologised to Karan’s parents at Poplar Coroners’ Court and said: “I didn’t mean any harm – I’m sorry , I’m sorry for what I did.”Giving evidence from behind a screen, he claimed he was unaware of Karan’s dairy allergy – although he knew the teenager was allergic to bread because of a previous incident... Karan was severely allergic to wheat, gluten, all dairy products, eggs and nuts. He was also asthmatic and suffered from atopic eczema."

Having more sex makes men more likely to believe in God - "According to the research, sex releases a ‘love hormone’ oxytocin not only promotes social bonding, altruism but also divinity – especially in men."

Almost a third of graduates 'overeducated' for their job - "For those graduating before 1992, the number was only 22%, but this jumped to 34% for those graduating after 2007.London had the highest proportion of overeducated workers in the UK, with about 25% overqualified for their job.Graduates in arts and humanities were more likely to be under-using their education...
Elizabeth graduated recently from the University of Manchester with a degree in chemical engineering. She has not been able to find a degree-level job and has worked a succession of minimum wage jobs."I'm sad to have become one of those statistics of female graduates who never become engineers, and dread the next 50 years in minimum wage jobs, because I have no way of getting out of the situation. I should have realised people don't want to employ women in that field," she said."I regret my choice of degree every day. I could have been doing anything by now. People ask me why I am a kitchen porter when I can speak languages and have a degree. It's sad that people who are less qualified are much further on in their career than me."A lack of a driving licence seems to have proved a huge hindrance to my progression, and in many ways might have been more useful than the degree.""
Apparently getting a driving licence is harder than getting a degree in chemical engineering

Burger King releases Real Meals that are based on a variety of different moods - "Burger King has unveiled a selection of meals designed to suit a variety of different moods, as it aims to spread the message that 'no one is happy all the time'.The new options, dubbed 'Real Meals', are inspired by a selection of different moods, including the Pissed Meal, Blue Meal, Salty Meal, YAAAS Meal and DGAF Meal. However, 'happy' is not one of the choices."

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Authenticity - "For St. Augustine... as well as asking, are you just acting, are you doing what you deem to be right because other people think it's right, they'll praise you for doing it. He also asks, are you doing what's right because you think it's right, or because you think God will punish you if you don't? And he has this very interesting distinction between what he calls servile fear, and, and pure fear… are you doing it because you yourself think that that action is right, and therefore has to be done? Or are you doing it because you really don't want to be punished? You don't want to be punished by God… he has this nice line about if you're only doing what's right because you're scared of punishment, then you're not scared of sinning, you're scared of burning."

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Antarah ibn Shaddad - "The Quran has a famous polemical verse about poets and their false boasting... talks about poets, just very briefly about poets who move through the valleys, talking about things that they don't do. So in that sense, there is a sort of backlash against poetry"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Moral Panics - "I think a moral panic is the cultural equivalent of an energy drink. It might set our heart racing in the short term, but it does little or nothing to help society become fitter and healthier"

AirPods Are a Survival Tool for Open-Plan Offices - "If you’re under 40, you might have never experienced the joy of walls at work. In the late 1990s, open offices started to catch on among influential employers—especially those in the booming tech industry. The pitch from designers was twofold: Physically separating employees wasted space (and therefore money), and keeping workers apart was bad for collaboration. Other companies emulated the early adopters. In 2017, a survey estimated that 68 percent of American offices had low or no separation between workers... In offices where there are no walls, millions of workers have embraced a work-around to reclaim a little bit of privacy: wireless headphones... Unlike their tethered forebears, Bluetooth wireless headphones are convenient because they allow workers to forget they’re wearing a device and to leave their desk without yanking their laptop onto the floor. In open offices, people commonly wander around with their headphones on all day, into bathrooms and kitchens, sometimes listening to nothing at all in order to avoid the constant distraction of compulsory social interaction... “People are very good at creating spaces for themselves, and these days you look at everybody and almost without exception they’re on their phones with headphones in their ears,” he says. In a 2018 study, Bernstein and his team found that open offices decrease face-to-face interaction among co-workers by as much as 70 percent, in stark contrast to the designers’ stated goal of collaborative teamwork. The proliferation of small wireless headphones may exacerbate that effect. Since you don’t have to remove AirPods to wander around the office, it can be hard for your co-workers to tell if you’re listening to music or on a conference call, or if you’ve simply forgotten to take them out. For Samuelson, sometimes that’s the point... A person quietly sitting in on a conference call looks pretty similar to a person who’s focused on work while listening to soothing nature sounds, or to one who’s checking Facebook while listening to nothing at all. This ambiguity has prompted a whole new visual language meant to mime the difference to unsuspecting desk-mates. To perform its most common gesture, which indicates that you are on a call, you dramatically motion to your ears while making a face that communicates a sense of semi-smug capitulation: You, too, are currently being inconvenienced by your own importance... Although headphones can help filter auditory interruptions, they can’t block visual ones, which Augustin says can be just as disruptive to performance and focus.AirPods also can’t change the fact that you’re just sitting in the middle of an open room, which Augustin notes is stressful no matter what you’re doing. “When you can be approached from the rear, a little part of your brain is always vigilant,” she says. “It’s not about what you’re looking at on your screen or anything. It’s much more fundamental than that.”"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Judith beheading Holofernes - "In general, people seem not to have been able to pin down this story to any kind of historical source, it seems rather doubtful how it actually arose as a text in the first place… I think it is quite doubtful there was a Judas but there is a very good story in there that was certainly taken up over history for a very long period...
‘In those days, Judith was the second most popular name for a girl after Mary. It was associated with virtue’
‘She was thought of as a type from the Old Testament of, but Mary in the New Testament’
‘Shakespeare himself called his daughters Judith and Susanna’...
‘[On Artemisia Gentileschi] She says she stabbed him, but there's also a version that says she admitted in court that she continued to have let's call it sexual relations with him after this rape.’
‘Yes. And I think he was because she believed that Tassi would marry her and she accepted that element of deflowering on that promise… there were allegations that he had in fact had his first wife killed.’...
‘Is there any sense in which people are attracted to this because of the erotic possibilities in this event?’
‘I think very much so. John Ruskin writing in these mornings in Florence in the 1870s said that there were millions of these horrific pictures which he disliked, he called them ghastly. But that in fact, these didn't follow the story as it actually was. And he thought that artists actually represented this subject because it combined the thrill of an execution and a beautiful woman with the additional attraction of some previously committed sin, i.e. that she’d sucuumbed to Holofernes to a certain extent anyway.’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, William Cecil - "‘Not all that many Catholics died politically under Edward… I'm hedging my bets because there were conservative Catholic rebellions, against the government's policies, particularly in 1549. And a lot of people died. But really, they're dying for being rebels. They’re not dying for being Catholic. And there were rebellions which were not Catholic at the time, and an equal number of people died. So let's not see this regime as a murderous Protestant regime'...
England was a second rate power. It was not one of the big boys, it was not the equivalent, the King of France or the Holy Roman Emperor, or the king of Poland. Those are the three big boys... the government had committed itself to a policy which was desperately unpopular with those three big boys, in other words, Protestantism...
Mary Queen of Scots… makes Elizabeth an offer. And that offer is that she will resign her immediate claim to the English throne and recognize Elizabeth as the absolute rightful Queen of England if in return, Elizabeth will name Mary as her heir provided she herself does not marry and have children. And of course, that offer was so reasonable, several times, Elizabeth took it quite seriously. Mary also proposed that if the two queens could meet Woman to Woman, they could settle their differences away from all these scheming men. And Elizabeth was, there were a number of occasions when Elizabeth was very taken with that idea. And the two queens very nearly met in in 1562. It was stopped by the outbreak of the French wars of religion. But I have to tell you that Cecil had already written the equivalent to the press release canceling the meeting two weeks before the actual event occurred that triggered the French wars of religion"

Meme - "I Really Love How These Dudes Are Using Stats Numbers and Philosophical Argumentation to Prove Their Points Wow Impressive... you're Using Historically Male-Centered Tools to Express Your Anti-Feminist Opinions. What About the Emotions and Lived Experiences of Women in Work and in Life? Your 'Rational Honest Dialogue' Does Not Impress Me"
"if That Is True How Do You Explain My Feelings?"
"Checkmate Bigots"
Basically, an admission that feminism and women are irrational