Links - 15th February 2020 (1)

OhMiBod wants to let your Tinder matches control your vibrator
3 years on it seems this isn't a thing yet

He Bought Her a $100,000 Engagement Ring—Then They Broke Up and Things Really Got Messy - "he bought Dickens a four-carat engagement ring about 18 months ago. It's valued at more than $100,000, and despite the dissolution of their plans to wed, she isn't giving it back. About a month after they began dating, says Strasser, she moved into his D.C. condo for three weeks, when repairs necessitated by a car accident prevented her from returning home to North Carolina. (This is the sort of detail that makes for great wedding-toast fodder if the relationship goes well, but is insane if it does not.) When his one-bedroom condo proved too tight for them and their three dogs, they moved in July 2016 to a five-bedroom house in an upscale neighborhood, where he assumed sole responsibility for paying the $4,800-per-month rent and all their living expenses.Also: "Within months" of agreeing to date exclusively, he says—which happened when she moved in!—she gave him a one-year proposal deadline. (Proposal deadlines never go well.)... Dickens reportedly had very specific requirements about diamond-rating criteria, and the ring they eventually selected together, which included fourteen diamonds total, was priced at $119,000—although Strasser was able to secure a slight discount. To help defray the cost, he took out a personal loan, on which he began making monthly payments of $912.71 in February 2017. He will continue to make those same payments through New Year's Day. Of 2020... She refused to leave, and prevented him from taking anything more than a duffel bag's worth of clothes when he moved out.  Then, several months later, he returned to their home to discover that she had abandoned the premises at some point—but not before she turned off the refrigerator, causing meat to spoil inside, and covered the walls in "angry writings" using "pen and permanent marker." The cost of repairs exceeded the amount of his security deposit, although his landlords still returned $1,000 "as a thank you for being a good tenant," both because they were aware of the complicated situation and also apparently because they are the nicest landlords in the world."
If someone agrees to marry you and changes his mind, can you sue for damages?

If one more polyamorous coastal 'queer' tells me Pete Buttigieg isn't gay enough I'll scream. He is — and so am I - "The thing is, many (if not most) gay people are boring and want to live in the real world, which means living in a largely straight world. They want white picket fences, and nuclear families, and monogamy. They spend their time not sniffing poppers at a Fire Island orgy, but praying in a flyover state church. They don’t see their rights deriving from these institutions, as Keating argued, but from the Constitution. Many (but not all!) have politics that are moderate. Some even — quelle surprise! — are capitalists who like their insurance. In short, many gay people either are, or want to be, like Mayor Pete. This notion that the first openly gay candidate for president is insufficiently gay is homophobic. It pretends that if you’re not a polyamorous self-identifying “queer” who lives in New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles (or, to put it bluntly, a stereotype) that you’re not doing homosexuality right — as though there’s ever been a right way to do it"

China’s Mistress-Dispellers | The New Yorker - "His clients are women who hope to preserve their marriages by fending off what is known in Chinese as a xiao san, or “Little Third”—a term that encompasses everything from a partner in a casual affair to a long-term “kept woman.” Mistress dispellers use a variety of methods. Some Little Thirds can be paid off or discouraged by hearing unwelcome details of their lovers’ lives—debts, say, or responsibility for an elderly parent—or shamed with notes sent to friends and family. If the dispeller or the client is well connected, a Little Third may suddenly find that her job requires her to move to another city. A female dispeller sometimes seeks to become a confidante, in order to advise the targeted woman that the liaison will inevitably crumble. In certain cases, a male mistress dispeller may even seduce the woman... Yu took pictures of the two women and then got the friend to take several of him and Wang with their arms around each other. Once the weekend was over, these pictures found their way to Wang’s boyfriend. “A picture speaks louder than a thousand words, and, in a jealous man’s imagination, it can speak ten thousand,” Yu told me. The man ended the relationship, and returned to his wife, appreciative, if nothing else, of her loyalty. The mission had taken around four months in all... When I asked why his Wuxi client hadn’t considered divorce, he was incredulous. For a woman, divorce was rarely a sensible choice. “In today’s world, a secondhand woman is like a secondhand car,” he said. “Once it’s been driven, it’s not worth a fraction of its original selling price.” A secondhand man, on the other hand, Yu explained, is like renovated property in China’s real-estate market: “The value only appreciates.”... “There are no enduring marriages,” she told me matter-of-factly. “Only mistresses who haven’t worked hard enough at tearing it apart.”... There is little sense that a couple should work together to address the underlying dynamics of their relationship. Instead, the clients seek training in how to win back their husbands through unilateral effort, mostly while keeping the consultations secret. One of them told me, “If he finds out I went to a therapist, he’ll think this is a ploy and that I am actually entrapping him with my newly learned techniques.” Ming’s lessons consist of strategy tips that amount to a kind of Art of War for marriage. A wife who has run out of things to say to her husband might be advised to buy him presents or to plant an unexpected romantic note in his suit pocket. From a Western perspective, Ming’s method offers an odd vision of empowerment, achieved through pragmatic acceptance of a retrograde model of marriage. Husbands are to be flattered, seductive clothes worn (“a relationship necessity”), and all the work of the relationship done by the wife, without the husband ever being aware of it... Occasionally, she discovers that clients have embarked on sham divorces, in order to buy property on preferential terms that are available only to unmarried people. Men have been known to lure their wives into this arrangement and then take up with mistresses as soon as the papers are signed. The phenomenon is common enough that, last year, it constituted the plot of a critically acclaimed film, “I Am Not Madame Bovary.”... Zhang’s services include sheltering women thrown out by their husbands, but her specialty is coaching clients on confronting and beating up the mistresses. She recently told a Chinese newspaper that violence was therapeutic for the wives: “Those who don’t dare to beat will develop diseases including esophageal cancer, uterine cancer, lung cancer.”... When comparing the experiences of her two marriages, Li used the words “heaven and earth.” “My first husband wasn’t a bad sort,” she said, but, amid the poverty of rural China, there was little to their relationship beyond day-to-day survival. “We needed each other to just keep our stomachs full and our bodies warm at night,” Li said. The kind of desire Li discovered with her second husband, with its “somersaults of excitement and yawns of blissful fatigue,” was an awakening.  Li paused again and drew a deep breath. “The enemy of marriage is time,” she said, smiling. By the eighth year, the honeymoon period had long given way to “the salt and vinegar of daily life.”"
The corollary of the 2011 decision is that before, the law had advantaged women by letting them keep property bought before marriage. Given that in China men need a property to get married, it is clear where the injustice is

Alligator spotted crossing the street in Montreal - "the alligator was returned to its rightful owner, who had all the necessary permits, and the animal was actually part of an educational project."

Indian students wear boxes on their heads to prevent cheating - "The Bhagat Pre-University College in Haveri, in India's southwestern Karnataka state, implemented a trial run of the new measure... The school had faced a widespread and persistent cheating problem last year -- leading to new anti-cheating experiments like the boxes... There has been a number of cheating scandals across India in recent years. One particularly prominent scandal in 2015 saw parents and family members in Bihar state scaling the exterior walls of school buildings to pass their children cheat sheets... Critics have pointed to such pressure as a motivator to cheat, and a source of poor mental health among students -- earlier this year, 19 students in the southern Indian state of Telangana took their own lives after the release of exam results."

Bihar cheating scandal: What parents in India will do for good grades - "a father in the city of Mathura was caught strapping his 8-year old daughter to a motorcycle after she refused to attend school to take her assessment.Tied with a multi-strand rope to the back of a bike, onlookers captured images of the trussed girl, her bare feet hanging low, scraping the asphalt. According to local police officials, the girl's parents offered her several incentives, such as chocolates and toys to entice her, however when the girl was still reluctant, her father decided to take matters in his own hands. After photos started making the rounds on social media, police officials took the man into custody and charged him with "breach of the peace." He is now out on bail. "Even after he got out, the father showed no remorse. He has five children to feed and he believes the only way they can get out of this poverty trap is through education""
"Stereotypes"

Melissa Chen - "The Boston Tea Party looms large in the folklore of American nationalism and in the annals of civil disobedience, and somehow along the way the truth has mutated over the course of history.You probably have been told that the "tea party" was to protest the outrageously expensive British tea and that it had something to do with high taxes or "taxation without presentation."The truth is that it wasn't actually a protest against high taxes. In fact, it was sparked by a tax cut, not a tax hike. You see, the English Parliament passed an Act that exempted the British East Indies Company from the tax on importation of tea to North America.So in reality, the tea was cheap - too cheap, in fact - and it became a problem. The good people of Boston had been making quite a living smuggling Dutch tea into the Colonies. Now the Brits had cut the price of tea to undercut the smugglers... So yeah, the Tea Party was prompted by a corporate bailout and actually symbolized protectionism more than the feel-good libertarian cause of protesting high taxes that we have been taught to believe over the years. Just as the tea from the shattered chests darkened the waters of the Boston Harbor on the night of December 16th in 1773, so too has the story we tell ourselves about this event in America's history been corrupted."

𝐅𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚 𝐈𝐧 𝐕𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐚𝐜𝐞 on Twitter - "Richest woman in the world - Mackenzie Bezos
Net worth - $40 billion
Source of income - divorce"

Killer Rabbits in Medieval Manuscripts: Why So Many Drawings in the Margins Depict Bunnies Going Bad - ""The usual imagery of the rabbit in Medieval art is that of purity and helplessness – that’s why some Medieval portrayals of Christ have marginal art portraying a veritable petting zoo of innocent, nonviolent, little white and brown bunnies going about their business in a field." But the creators of this particular type of humorous marginalia, known as drollery, saw things differently. "Drolleries sometimes also depicted comedic scenes, like a barber with a wooden leg (which, for reasons that escape me, was the height of medieval comedy) or a man sawing a branch out from under himself"... Then, of course, we have the bunnies making their attacks while mounted on snails, snail combats being "another popular staple of Drolleries, with groups of peasants seen fighting snails with sticks, or saddling them and attempting to ride them.""

Barack Obama: Women are better leaders than men - "If women ran every country in the world there would be a general improvement in living standards and outcomes, former US President Barack Obama has said."
Sexism is good when it's anti-male

Wind chill is a terrible, misleading metric. So why do we still use it? - "The wind chill index is designed for a very precise, very narrow purpose. "It was developed solely to assess the risk of frostbite on unclothed parts of the body"... Those are very particular conditions, and they don't really describe our full range of experiences outside. So, more often than not, wind chill dramatically exaggerates the cold we actually feel.  This is not a secret. Many people have pointed this out over the years. In 2007, Slate's Daniel Engber suggested that "rather than trying to patch up wind chill's inconsistencies, we should just dump it altogether." The real mystery, then, is why weather forecasters continue to use wind chill — even though most experts know that it's wildly flawed... Bluestein's updated wind chill formula is relatively simple: You plug in the temperature and wind speed, and it spits out your risk of frostbite.But this formula is based on the assumption that each one of us inhabits the same body — about 5-foot-6, and heavyset, with the exact same size face — and therefore each of us loses heat at the same rate... different people lose heat at dramatically different rates... This is one of many oversimplifications that are now baked into the wind chill formula we use daily. It assumes the sun isn't shining at all, and that whenever you're outside, you're constantly walking at a speed of about 3 miles per hour straight into a steady wind... Moreover, the wind speeds generally used to calculate wind chill come from airport weather stations, but as Bluestein notes, "if you're walking in an urban environment, buildings and trees are going to cut down wind speed. At the airport, there's nothing blocking it."... even the new formula dramatically exaggerates what it "feels like" to be outside... some meteorologists and weather buffs want to do away with these sorts of "feels like" metrics entirely, relying solely on a single number that tells you exactly what it promises: the temperature. "[Wind chill] is a parameter which has huge variation from person to person and depends significantly on how we dress, what our environment is like and on many factors where there will always be some level of uncertainty," writes Vrolijk, the Canadian meteorologist. "While we have gotten used to explicit declarations of the wind chill value, reality is far more fuzzy.""

Tarekh Rana is an acclaimed Ajax businessman. Is he also a fugitive crime boss? - "Both Rana and the wanted man, Khandekar Tanvirul Islam, alias Joy, an alleged leader of the Seven Star crime group, are 52, similar in appearance and lived in Kolkata, India.Police and court records allege that a man identified by his co-accused as the Seven Star leader was arrested in Kolkata in 2007, and that he used the alias Md. Tarek Rana. The Ajax businessman also goes by Md. Tarekh Rana.A photo allegedly taken following the 2007 arrest of the suspect alleged to be Joy shows a man resembling Rana... The birth date, father’s name and wife’s name in the passport match those of the Ajax entrepreneur.Shown the passport, Rana confirmed it was his but denied being arrested in Kolkata or anywhere else and raised the possibility he had been the victim of identity theft.“I am now really shocked because for some reason someone is using my passport & picture,” he responded in an email... According to court documents, the man arrested in India 12 years ago has a remarkably similar health history to Rana’s, having undergone surgery on both legs in Kolkata in early 2007 to treat severe arthritis. Rana said he had undergone the same procedure in Kolkata in late 2006 and early 2007.The Indian court file of the man alleged to be Joy includes a driver’s licence, bank statements, business records and tax returns — all under the name Md. Tarekh Rana. They describe the suspect as born on March 3, 1967. Ontario property records show the Ajax developer has the same date of birth."