59% of the 'Tuna' Americans Eat Is Not Tuna - The Atlantic - "Sushi restaurants were far more likely to mislabel their fish than grocery stores or other restaurants.
In Chicago, Austin, New York, and Washington DC, every single sushi restaurant sampled sold mislabeled tuna.
84% of fish samples labeled "white tuna" were actually escolar, a fish that can cause prolonged, uncontrollable, oily anal leakage...
"If you've ever wondered why the sushi in the display case is so affordable, given the dire state of the world's tuna supply, well, now you know."
Gordon Ramsay's daughter Tilly prefers her mom's cooking
Number 1 in 2018: Who Cheats More? The Demographics of Infidelity in America= - "cheating is somewhat more common among black adults... A person’s political identity, family background, and religious activity are also related to whether or not they cheat. Overall, Democrats, adults who didn’t grow up in intact families, and those who rarely or never attend religious services are more likely than others to have cheated on their spouse... when it comes to who is more likely to cheat, men and women share very few traits. Separate regression models by gender suggest that for men, being Republican and growing up in an intact family are not linked to a lower chance of cheating, after controlling for other factors. But race, age, and religious service attendance are still significant factors. Likewise, men’s education level is also positively linked to their odds of cheating. By comparison, party ID, family background, and religious service attendance are still significant factors for cheating among women, while race, age, and educational attainment are not relevant factors. In fact, religious service attendance is the only factor that shows consistent significance in predicting both men and women’s odds of infidelity."
Please Get Your Noise Out of My Ears (Ep. 439) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "When a coral reef is healthy, it’s quite noisy with the sound of marine activity, and that noise attracts more activity. But a patch of coral reef that’s dead or dying is quiet. So, the scientists went to these quiet patches and placed speakers underwater to play the sounds of a noisy reef.It seems to have worked, attracting lots of fish, who stayed on. Here’s how the researchers put it: “Acoustic enrichment shows promise as a novel tool for the active management of degraded coral reefs.” So, there are beneficial ocean sounds and the opposite...
HAGOOD: Sound has always been a challenge to our sense of autonomy.
Emphasis on the “always.”
HAGOOD: We can look back at the famous stoic Seneca, back in ancient Rome, who wrote that if you were truly in control of your own consciousness and emotions, then you should be able to withstand any sort of sound. And yet eventually Seneca moved out of Rome to the Roman suburbs because he couldn’t stand the noise anymore...
DEAN: If we double how loud the room feels, the workers are about 5 percent less productive on this task. And just to put that number in perspective, we also randomly assigned how much we were paying participants based on their production. And there, if we double their payment from five shillings per pocket to 10 shillings per pocket, that only increases productivity by around 3 percent."
Many Businesses Thought They Were Insured for a Pandemic. They Weren’t. (Ep. 437) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "Bruce Carnegie-Brown, not surprisingly, has a different view of the industry. A more appreciative view of insurance.
CARNEGIE-BROWN: If you sit looking at it from my perspective, it’s actually a great enabler.
An enabler how? Consider the act of driving your car.
CARNEGIE-BROWN: When you look at the most frequently bought form of insurance, it’s motor-car insurance, and you have to have it in order to drive a car.
Auto insurance is one of the few forms of insurance that is mandatory in most places. What would it look like to drive a car without insurance?
CARNEGIE-BROWN: If you looked at driving a car through a different lens, you’d say that you couldn’t afford to get into your motor car, because if you happened to knock somebody over or have an accident that created a disability in a third party, the cost to you in economic terms — let alone all of the emotional issues — would be beyond your net worth. And so, actually, it enables things to happen... we like to think of it, therefore, as enabling people to take more risks than they would otherwise be able to take...
KUNREUTHER: What you have to tell people — and it’s very hard to do this — the best return on an insurance policy is no return at all. Celebrate you have not had a loss...
CARNEGIE-BROWN: Every time a hurricane comes onshore in the United States, fewer than 25 percent of the people affected by the hurricane have insurance.
At the same time, we do tend to buy other, less essential forms of insurance.
CARNEGIE-BROWN: People insure their mobile phones, for instance. And that’s worth $500 or $600. But what they don’t do is buy enough health care if they get cancer or enough insurance for their families in the event that they die...
JUCKER: One thing about disasters, I tell everyone, you get one pity party and no more, because you’ve got to get to work."
Meanwhlle, some people are having pity parties after more than a century
Forget Everything You Know About Your Dog (Ep. 436) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "So, you want to make a dog? There are just a few ingredients. You’ll need wolves, humans, a little interaction, mutual tolerance. Mix thoroughly and wait, oh, a few thousand years.Or, if you’re the Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaev, you simply find a group of captive foxes and start selectively breeding them. In 1959, Belyaev began a project that has greatly informed our best guesses as to what we believe the earliest steps of domestication were. Instead of observing dogs and extrapolating backward, he examined another social canid species and propagated them forward... After forty years, three-quarters of the population of foxes were of a class the researchers called “domesticated elite”: not just accepting contact with people, but drawn to it. He had created a domesticated fox. Incredibly, by selecting for one behavioral trait, the genome of the animal was changed in a half century. And with that genetic change came a number of surprisingly familiar physical changes. They have floppy ears and tails that curl up and over their backs. Their heads are wider, and their snouts are shorter. They are improbably cute...
Why, for instance, dogs urinate where they do. Here’s one response we got:
DOG MAN: They’re marking their territory, that’s like their whole — they’re kind of like putting little flags around the neighborhood to let people know it’s theirs.
What’s Alexandra Horowitz think of that explanation?
HOROWITZ: It’s totally right to think of the marking behavior, just peeing a little bit on lots of different things, as leaving little flags, it’s sort of like little calling cards that say, “Me, me, me!” But it’s not territory, right? I mean, if dogs were really marking their territory, we’d expect that they’d go around the perimeter of your apartment or house and are marking every spot along the wall, because that’s their territory. You know, instead, it’s just leaving information about themselves in places that other dogs can sniff it."
Pettiness: Conceptualization, measurement and cross-cultural differences - "Although pettiness, defined as the tendency to get agitated over trivial matters, is a facet of neuroticism which has negative health implications, no measure exists. The goal of the current study was to develop, and validate a short pettiness scale. In Study 1 (N = 2136), Exploratory Factor Analysis distilled a one-factor model with five items. Convergent validity was established using the Big Five Inventory, DASS, Satisfaction with Life Scale, and Conner-Davidson Resilience Scale. As predicted, pettiness was positively associated with neuroticism, depression, anxiety and stress but negatively related to extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, life satisfaction and resilience. Also, as predicted, pettiness was not significantly related to physical functioning, or blind and constructive patriotism, indicating discriminant validity. Confirmatory Factor Analysis in Study 2 (N = 734) revealed a stable one-factor model of pettiness. In Study 3 (N = 532), the scale, which showed a similar factor structure in the USA and Singapore, also reflected predicted cross-cultural patterns: Pettiness was found to be significantly lower in the United States, a culture categorized as “looser” than in Singapore, a culture classified as “tighter” in terms of Gelfand and colleagues’ framework of national tendencies to oppose social deviance. Results suggest that this brief 5-item tool is a reliable and valid measure of pettiness, and its use in health research is encouraged."
Tee Soon Kay v Attorney-General[2006] SGHC 151 - "This is an appeal by Mr Tee Soon Kay, together with and on behalf of 99 public officers (collectively, “the appellants”), against the trial judge’s decision in Originating Summons No 618 of 2006 (“the OS”) holding, inter alia, that the appellants were not entitled to revert to the pension scheme as they had opted to convert from the pension scheme to the Central Provident Fund (“CPF”) scheme in 1973... The claimants were appointed to the public service before 1 December 1972. When firstemployed, they were on the pension scheme
The case where ex-civil servants sued the government to try to get their pension back. This doesn't mention the exemption given to those who were under a certain age when they made the decision though (either 18 or 21)
Chinese noodles not the inspiration for pasta, historians say, its roots are in ancient Greece – and they have the texts to prove it | South China Morning Post - ""pasta culture was already flourishing in the Mediterranean region centuries before he travelled east, among the ancient Greeks and later among the Romans. “Noodles are one thing, pasta another food altogether,” says Ms Anna Maria Pellegrino, a food historian and a member of the Italian Academy of Cuisine. “They reflect two separate culinary cultures and identities that have developed in parallel"... “The way they are cooked, the pots, the types of cereals used, the preparation, ingredients and toppings are completely different and specific to each civilisation. There’s no direct link between the Asian and the Italian or Mediterranean ways of mixing cereals with water to create noodles or pasta,” she says... Historical texts and works by classical poets help to date the first type of primeval pasta to the time of the ancient Greeks. Mr Giorgio Franchetti, a food historian and scholar of ancient Roman history, is the author of a book, Dining With the Ancient Romans, which was recently translated into English. He roundly dismisses the Marco Polo theory about the origins of pasta. “It’s pure nonsense,” he says. “The noodles that Marco Polo maybe brought back with him at the end of the 1200s from China were essentially made with rice and based on a different, oriental culinary tradition that has nothing to do with ours.”... “Between 1000BC and 800BC, the Greeks first mentioned the existence of laganon, a flat pasta sheet sliced into irregular strips that was later adopted by the ancient Romans with the plural name of laganae. It was used in soups of leek and chickpeas, a very popular Roman dish,” he says... The birth of dry pasta has been linked to the culture and lifestyle of nomadic Arabian tribes. To cope with long journeys across the desert where water was scarce, Arabs dried their pasta in hollow cylindrical shapes, similar to macaroni. Ninth-century Arab food scholar Ibn-al-Mibrad wrote in a cookbook that the dry pasta could then be mixed with legumes, especially lentils. Called rishta, the dish was popular with the Berber and Bedouin desert tribes of northern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant, and is still eaten today across the Middle East. Spaghetti, in particular, appears to have had Arabic influence. Mr Franchetti has found a book dating to 1154, more than 100 years before Marco Polo’s journeys, written by an Arab geographer called Al-Idrin. It mentions long strands of dough called triya, curled up like balls of wool and exported in wooden barrels along Mediterranean merchant routes from the city of Palermo in Sicily, then under the Arab rule.""
Boobeman - "Under communism I'd be starving too much to have tits this big"
"Buy this shirt for all your large breasted acquaintances at shirt dot sexy Thank you Tara for your breasts @tetraniii on twitter"
Sue Bird: “You Have to Pay the Superstars.” (People I (Mostly) Admire, Ep. 12) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "I was actually pretty good... By my senior year, I was the starting point guard on my high school team. But there was only one problem. I hated everything about basketball. I hated practice, I hated games. But I stuck with it and I thought: you'll look back when you're older and you'll have such fond memories of playing basketball. Well, the fact is that I don't have any good memories of playing basketball: only trauma and agony. So here's my advice to anybody engaged in any activity, whatever the age, no matter how good you are, if you hate something, you should quit"
Episode 155: Historic Hospitals with Isabelle Kent, part 1 — The Art History Babes - "Valdés Leal and Murillo, who did a lot of the paintings in the chapel both became members of the Hospital de la Caridad [sic; in Seville]. They probably actually did the paintings kind of on the cheap as a way of getting into the town [sp?] membership. So, so yeah, Mañara. Mañara was a savvy businessman. He knew he could ask the best artists to do it, and then just, you know, help them get the membership."
Episode 156: Historic Hospitals with Isabelle Kent, part 2 — The Art History Babes - "There's a lot of confusion about St. Anthony because there are two St Anthonys. And so a lot of people think that St Anthony's fire is named after St Anthony of Padua. He’s the saint who is a follower of St. Francis. He is a very beloved saint. His relics are in Santo in Padua and they're one of the major pilgrimage sites still to this day because he is the sort of Saint of lost things and if you've lost someone, or you've lost something or a loved one or something like that, you'll go visit St Anthony and one of the reasons everyone thinks that St Anthony's fire is connected to him is because he died of ergotism. He died of St. Anthony's fire, but actually, it's not. St Anthony's fire is named after St Anthony the Great who was an early Christian saint. He was born in Egypt in 251. So 251 AD, and he apparently lived for 105 years. So unlike all the other saints from this period, he wasn't a martyr. He died of old age...
'This altarpiece being made for this chapel that would have treated the sick and you'd think, okay, what the sick need if they're in a huge amount of pain and trying to heal is a nice reassuring image. And that is not what they got. What they got is the most grisly painting. We've already done a little bit of describing of those first scenes, the scenes that you see on the outer layer of the altar piece, but I think now would be a good time to really zoom in and to talk about some of the details, what they mean, how they connect to the religious order, and to the treating of the sick, but I think really to emphasize that these are very strong, intense images to be seeing when you're already feeling ill. And especially if you're at a stage where ergotism is causing you to have some form of madness. That's, that's maybe not the kind of images you want to be seeing.’...
‘The twisting of Christ’s body and limbs, and it's one of those things where you could crop out just a single hand or potentially a finger from this Christ and still get-’
‘The pain that he's feeling.’
‘Yeah, Yeah, it's that visceral’
‘Yeah, well it’s fascinating because the story of the passion is that is so full of pain and, and it describes very vividly, you know, he's got, he's got nails through his hands, I mean, how incredibly painful must that have been to then be hanging by nails that are driven through your hands. And yet a lot of the crucifixions that, you know, many of us are used to seeing are quite peaceful. You know, Christ looks, you know, peaceful and radiant even. And it's not this violence that's being seen in this image. Yeah, those contorted hands in particular, they look almost as though they're sort of spiders that have been, you know, pierced in the center and they're just rigid with this pain, but they are. Yeah, it's incredibly rough. And then the feet as well... it looks like skin from a corpse that has been dead for several days and it's kind of hanging off and they're green and the flashes, it was really lifeless, and there's blood dripping down from them. This is all very strong and intense imagery... The feet, they look gangrenous. You know, they look like the feet of people who would have been suffering the late stages of ergotism… he's covered in these kind of pockmarks, which is similar to what you would get when you had the disease. And so, you know, it's taking that idea of having empathy with Christ to the next level, because Christ is literally feeling the way that you are feeling... I think it would have brought comfort, certainly this quite intense, possibly grotesque comfort, but it shows that you know, you too, can pass through this'"
Episode 157: Decolonize the Art World with Yaa Addae — The Art History Babes - "[On George Floyd] ‘I was particularly angered with how galleries and museums who make profit or even if that is a sort of cultural capital of exhibiting black artists’ works but in time like this were completely silent. And so I had made the account initially to call out specific galleries...
At the same time there are these very real power dynamics that make me study African history in an institution in the United States, giving me more capital and access and resource that if I was studying it, let's say in Accra were like, you know, in the context of it. So going back to what kind of knowledge is validated what is even understood as knowledge.’...
‘As someone who has spent a lot of my life in academia, like I've just been thinking about, a lot of the ways in which academia is, is a really hierarchical system. It's very much you know, steeped in white supremacy.’"
This is amazing. Activists intimidate galleries and museums into featuring black artists (regardless of market demand) and then turn around and accuse galleries and museums of profiting off black artists (even if they lose money - presumably if a ticket worth $1 is sold they're profiting even if they lose $1 million on staging an exhibition no one wants to see
Apparently it's more important to study Africa in Africa than to study at a place from experts and which is rigourous
Academia indulges grievance studies, and in return grievance studies savages it. Hoist by their own petard!
Episode 159: Yellow: the Grooviest Color — The Art History Babes - "‘We should just talk about what's going on, do our usual banter thing, as we do. I feel like we've been doing that for the last hour.’
‘I know. I feel that it's like a, maybe not a trade secret. But I feel that all podcasts do that where there's a conversational element to it. Or like they start and I'm like you guys, I can tell you are shooting the shit for like, 30 mins before’
‘There was a conversation before the conversation. It's like a pre party’
‘You got to warm up.’...
‘Imagine if we all like met at parties in grad school. Like we didn't go to someone's house and drink together first. We just all met at the door sober.’...
‘Y’all know that I'm a bird lady. And part of being a bird mom is that your bird babies sometimes get sick. And so I took lemon man to the vet. And the vet was just really really scoffing at me and was like, well, I just want to let you know that lemon “man” is actually a girl and I just thought, you know, first of all don't gender my bird because… it got me thinking about imposing gender norms onto my pets because I always refer to my animals as little men or my little, you know my little boys or or I am very into a, I’m very into a good boy for like a pet’...
‘There is this consistent use of yellow as the default skin tone. That's, I think the intention is it's supposed to be a catch all. Where that gets really problematic, though, is that yes, it is. That's might be the intention. But ultimately, the way it actually reads in our subconscious and reads in our mind is a lot of times yellow represents white people. You know, Simpsons is a perfect example.’...
‘It is important to talk about the Simpsons in that way, like, I mean, I don't want to get like dramatic but like, that's kind of a form of white supremacy that the Simpsons is building into its entire show.’
‘Yeah, no, it's 100% a form of White supremacy and that's the issue because there are people of color in the Simpsons. There are people with brown skin tones, like there are’
‘There are some pretty racist characters in the show’
‘Totally’
‘100%, but the default is yellow. And ultimately, we read consciously or subconsciously, we read those yellow characters as white people’
Gender madness spreads to animals
When you look for racism, you'll find it
Episode 165: Art History BB: Malagan Masks — The Art History Babes - "'The Malagan Masks can be classified as what we call ephemeral art... Ephemerality, with a spiritual or ritualistic purpose... the artist sort of gives the rights of the design to the family of the deceased. Additionally, Malagans are given power and authority from their creator and are used for a very specific ritualised purpose and for the honouring of a specific person or family and for this reason they are often destroyed after the ceremony'...
'The ways in which they destroy them... sometimes they'll leave them on the actual burial site. Sometimes they'll just straightup destroy them, like fire...sometimes they'll go put them up in a remote part of the forest and let it like decay and get like consumed by the forest... another thing that they do that they still consider destroying it is sell it to Western museums... that is the best, they're just like let's make some money off of it, it'll be out there in, you know Germany, getting seen by all these tourists... I will sell you my garbage'"
Why Are We So Attracted to Fame? (NSQ Ep. 41) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "Celebrity worship has been an intrinsic part of human history for ages. Stephen and Angela discuss the hysteria around people like Audrey Hepburn and Britney Spears. But this sort of frenzy is nothing new. Victorian novelist Charles Dickens was greeted like a rock star when he toured the United States in 1867. His hotel in Boston had to place armed guards outside to stop fans from trying to reach him. He was even stalked by Jane Bigelow, a socialite from Baltimore who threatened and attacked women who expressed interest in him"
Yes, Flat-Earthers Really Do Exist - Scientific American Blog Network - "a YouGov poll conducted in February 2018. According to YouGov’s report, when asked, “Do you believe that the world is round or flat,” 2 percent of the 8,215 respondents chose “I have always believed the world is flat.” When we asked YouGov for the data, however, we received a spreadsheet reflecting data for 10,374 respondents, of whom only 1.28 percent preferred the always-a-flat-earther response. Unfortunately, YouGov was unable or unwilling to resolve the discrepancy, making it impossible for us to reach a firm conclusion about the actual size of the flat-Earth movement on the basis of the poll... Perhaps it’s easier to admit the existence of flat-Earthers in light of a 2016 survey finding that 27 percent of Americans don’t accept heliocentrism, 48 percent don’t accept common ancestry of humans and non-human animals, and 61 percent don’t accept the big bang"