Links - 29th September 2012

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think interior decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves." - Anna Quindlen

***

Extra, extra! Your best friends are getting happy divorced - "Divorce Newspapers have been developed in Japan which allow couples to distribute a report of the demise of their marriage to friends and family quickly and easily. It’s also a way for the newly divorced to save the embarrassment of telling each person individually... The “divorce newspaper” is the creating of divorce guru Hiroki Terai, who is also a strong proponent of “divorce ceremonies.” Divorce ceremonies are either fun or solemn events aimed at giving the couple a chance to look back on their time together and part ways with a good feeling. In some cases divorce ceremonies have even led to a cancelling of the divorce"

delanceyplace.com 9/21/12 - obsessing about sex - "Does all this frivolous sex make our species sound 'animalistic'? It shouldn't. The animal world is full of species that have sex only dur­ing widely spaced intervals when the female is ovulating. Only two species can do it week in and week out for nonreproductive reasons: one human, the other very humanlike. Sex for pleasure with various partners is therefore more 'human' than animal. Strictly reproductive, once-in-a-blue-moon sex is more 'animal' than human. In other words, an excessively horny monkey is acting 'human,' while a man or woman uninterested in sex more than once or twice a year would be, strictly speaking, 'acting like an animal.'"

Thai Group Says Steve Jobs Reincarnated as Warrior-Philosopher - "he has said the reincarnated Mr. Jobs spends much of his time lounging in a glass palace resembling an Apple store. Phra Chaibul also has said the being formerly known as Steve Jobs is attended by 20 servants, who seem to resemble the Apple store 'Geniuses' who help customers set up their iPhones and other devices here on earth."

Japanese Charity Breast-Squeeze! - "All money raised will be donated to STOP!AIDS, a charity aimed at promoting the awareness, treatment, and prevention of AIDS. Oppai momi is particularly popular in Japan, and there are plenty of Japanese style pubs where you can go have a beer and also a squeeze of the waitresses breasts after a hard day in the office. This is the first oppia momi fundraiser we are aware of though."

RTA advertisement (NSW, Australia) - YouTube
"Such a sexist ad says a lot about the people behind it."

Throw like a girl? With some practice, you can do better. - "She believes that men and women aren’t as different as they are often portrayed, and she has mined data on social, psychological, communication and physical traits, skills and behaviors to quantify the gap. After looking at 46 meta-analyses, Hyde found what she defined as a “very large” difference in only two skills: throwing velocity and throwing distance."

Kate Middleton topless photos: When did bare breasts become taboo?

Kate Middleton's Boobs: Why Are We So Obsessed With the Royal Chest? - "Helen of Troy's face may have launched a thousand ships, but it was really her breasts that buoyed the army. Legend has it that sight of them caused Menelaus to drop his sword... It is fitting, as well as quite funny, that the royal couple fled the tata tornado only to land back in time, in the Solomon Islands, where they encountered bare-breasted women at every turn"

"the best part about the treatment is that it is not age biased as it caters to women in their 20s, 30s or 40s" (picture)

Asian Swingers Online dating at asianswingers.net - Front page
Only one out of four people in the picture is Asian. And of course it's a girl

Burger king has no burger, Swensen's has no ice cream & Soup restaurant no soup (image)

If you want to live the American dream, move to Denmark

Sophos Antivirus Detects Itself as Malware, Deletes Key Binaries

Putin muses on the benefits of group sex - "President Vladimir Putin of Russia has mused that group sex is better than one-on-one intercourse because participants can take a break."

An Introduction to Singaporean Food | Serious Eats - "This kind of perfection in simplicity can only come from a place where eating is a way of life unto itself. And where a meal is judged solely by what comes on the plate—fancy restaurants and big name chefs not necessary... As one of the wealthiest countries in Asia, it's drawn workers in from everywhere, and where large populations of immigrant workers go, good food is sure to follow. Singapore feels similar to New York in this way: not only is it a glass-towered metropolis of wealth; it's also a hotbed for a half dozen or so different ethnic groups making—and cooking—their way through the world"
Presumably he hasn't checked out all the food blogs where a meal is judged more by how it looks and where it's served than what comes on the plate

How Hobbies Can Help You Get Hired - At Work - WSJ - "“Reading” by itself is a snooze. But “reading medical mysteries” is a little quirky and shows some intellectual rigor"

Saudi Arabia's Female Olympic Athletes Called 'Prostitutes'

Krugman, Human Weakness, and Desert - "When someone drops out of high school, overeats, or fails to exercise, you tell us that their behavior is only "human." But if a conservative or libertarian objects to paying taxes to help people who make these choices, you get angry. Question: Why are you so forgiving of people with irresponsible lifestyles, but so outraged by people who don't want to pay taxes to help people with irresponsible lifestyles? This seems morally perverse. If you're going to single anyone out for condemnation, it should be the person who behaves irresponsibly in the first place, not the complete stranger who asks, "How is this my fault?""

A Superstitious Fund - "The Superstitious Fund Project is a live one year experiment where an uncanny algorithm or SUPERSTITIOUS AUTOMATED ROBOT will trade live on the stock market"

Bill Dickens on Me on Poverty: A Rejoinder, Bryan Caplan - "the American poor had very high rates of employment and high marital stability when the welfare state was smaller... It's still easy for today's white working class to get jobs that would support a family at the income level of the 1950s.  U.S. per-capita income in 1950 was under $10,000 (1990 dollars).  That actually understates the ease of maintaining earlier living standards because modern household technology and family size make it a lot easier for mothers to work... As women's labor market opportunities improved, their interest in low-status men with stable jobs declined. This in turn led many low-status men to either give up on work and women, or try to impress women in other ways. Some of these "other ways," strangely, are self-destructive behavior like non-remunerative crime and substance abuse... How do you, Bill Dickens, respond when your students don't come to class, don't study, fail the final exam, then come crying to you? Whether you tell them or not, I strongly suspect you're thinking, "Your failure is your own damn fault." You don't give them the same assistance or sympathy that you'd give a hard-working student who's struggling with the material. I think such meritocratic moral intuitions are sound, and ought to guide public policy as well as private conscience. If people are poor because they're behaving irresponsibly, they should be far down our queue of people to help - if they belong on the queue at all. That said, I also happen to think that reducing the generosity of the welfare state and making assistance conditional on good behavior will (eventually) reduce bad behavior... if the trade-offs are bone-headedly simple - like "heavy drinking makes you less employable" or "single motherhood is tough" - very very bad decisions are a matter of choice. This in turn seriously undermines efforts to claim "victim" status"

The Post-Employee Economy: Why Sky-High Profits Are Here to Stay - "Robots have come to destroy our way of life, just as we saw in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, though not as we expected. They're taking our jobs, and are forcing us to reexamine how we value ourselves... It's a bit perverse that we cheer the gains in health-care employment while we decry the rise in health-care costs - the two are related. Presumably, technology will cause health-care productivity to soar, reducing the need for health-care workers. Again, great for consumers and capital, bad for displaced workers... Americans continue to define themselves by work when technology continues to reduce the demand for labor... The end of the age of consumption and the decreasing need for labor are intertwined"

Laser Eye Surgery: 10 Years Later - ""Our findings are that both are safe after 10 years," and the visual correction holds for the most part, says researcher Jorge Alio, M.D., Ph.D., an ophthalmologist"

Gabriel Seah's answer to Why do many doctors performing LASIK opt to continue to wear corrective lenses instead of getting the procedure done on themselves? - Quora - "In 2008, 30% of the refractive surgeons surveyed by the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery had had LASIK, PRK or LASEK performed on their own eyes, which was four times the frequency among the general public. Some ophthalmologists do not want to undergo LASIK for specific reasons, like the need to work with a microscope"

Osama bin Laden 'wanted 9/11 follow-up' - "Bothered by altitude sickness, he said, he volunteered to be a suicide bomber but was rejected because he had not undergone enough religious training... he was arrested in Pakistan after leaving the tribal areas because the fighting season was over and he wanted to find a wife."

What are some stereotypes that Asian people have about White people? - Quora

Newsbeast.gr | Ο,ΤΙ ΝΑ 'ΝΑΙ : Η κακόγουστα κάνει πάρτι
Weird nailart

Polar Bear Population Higher than in 20th Century: Is Something Fishy about Extinction Fears? - "If 300 years of study revealed 60-80 cycles of climate changes, the arctic climate would have presumably undergone many more cycles of drastic changes over the past thousands of years. And with a more than 110,000-year history of survival, it doesn't mak sense to believe that polar bears are dying unable to withstand swimming exhaustion due to larger water bodies... If the world is actually feeling threatened that polar bears might cease to exist at some future point of time, why are they still being subjected to legal hunting?"

"Japanese" Dating

Japanwommendating.asia — Experience Dating with Japanese Girls Number One for International Dating:


"Experience the joy of a Japanese Lady and set your life on fire!"

This must be the first time I've seen "Japanese" ladies with names like Peng, Liling,
Lingyan, Sha, Huabi, Wenhui, Yancen or Ting.

I don't think the photo of a geisha typing on a laptop comes from a stock photo site, so I wonder how much they paid to commission it.

The Next Generation - Weird

"I never get my hopes up so I never get let down." – Eeyore

***


Starhub: Local Server - Ping 31ms, Download Speed 8.53Mbps, Upload Speed 1.08Mbps


MyRepublic: Local Server - Ping 14ms, Download Speed 37.03Mbps, Upload Speed 33.09Mbps


Starhub: US West Coast - Ping 410ms, Download Speed 9.07Mbps, Upload Speed 1.00Mbps


MyRepublic: US West Coast - Ping 196ms, Download Speed 4.48Mbps, Upload Speed 2.45Mbps

Links - 26th September 2012

"When a man comes to me for advice, I find out the kind of advice he wants, and I give it to him." - John Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw)

***

“New atheists” are privileged racist homophobic imperialists | Butterflies and Wheels - "who says Greta Christina (since she’s the example Scofield chose to illustrate that claim) belongs to a privileged group? Who, in particular, says she does so more than Be Scofield? He has some forms of privilege that she doesn’t have. Why does he get to italicize from their own social location by way of rebuking Greta, as if she loomed over him like the lord of the manor? Why is her reason more tainted by privilege than his? I don’t know; I suspect he’s just posturing."

Bees 'could deter vandals' at Greenfield heritage park

Your Facebook personality is genuine (study)

Storming the Sand Castle | BioWare Blog - "If there’s any criticism I would level, it’s that many fanfiction writers insulate themselves in the safe cocoon of an appreciative audience so that they never receive the criticism required to grow. There’s no harm in that; not everyone needs to grow as a writer– but those who do find that criticism, somewhere, can turn into pretty fantastic writers... They laden their prose with words they fancy because they think it makes their writing more poetic. It doesn’t. It makes your prose heavy, and while there might be some readers who appreciate that, it won’t make you a better writer. Be sparing with your language, and realize there isn’t a sentence so clever it shouldn’t be cut if it doesn’t assist your purpose– which is telling a story"

Mass hysteria in upstate New York: Why Lori Brownell and 13 other teenage girls are showing Tourette’s-like symptoms. - "Victims are often accused of faking it, but more often they are suffering real physical symptoms that are psychological in origin. The phenomenon has been observed for centuries, with the blame shifting to whatever specific anxieties are culturally pervasive at the time. But one theme has remained consistent: The victims are overwhelmingly female... Victims of mass hysteria are so often female that gender imbalance is one clue doctors use to differentiate hysteria from poisoning"

IKEA stores, a wonderland for Chinese freeloaders - "Taking a nap, freeloading on air-conditioning, sipping free coffee, and organizing a speed dating event…It seems that quite a number of Chinese go to IKEA stores for anything but furniture shopping... Last year, IKEA Shanghai experienced a coffee crisis. It told its customers that 30 yuan (US$4.6) spent on a membership card can guarantee them countless free refills of coffee in the cafeteria. The promotion became a near disaster: each Tuesday and Thursday, hundreds of members of a matchmaking club at their middle age and beyond came from all over the city and took up seats for five or six hours while meeting their dates. Each one of them got free coffee from an organizer who flashed her own IKEA membership card to the staff at the cafeteria and then generously extended her privilege to everyone in the club. Bags of creamer, sugar and disposable cups ran out in half an hour"

Bernhard Schlink: being German is a huge burden - ""Germans have a melancholic, a pessimistic streak, which cultural historians trace back to the thirty years' war [a series of wars between 1618 and 1648 that devastated much of Europe including large parts of Germany]. There are these beautiful comparisons of German, English and French soldiers' war songs, and the English and French ones, they're all about hope and victory, and the German soldiers' songs are all about losing comrades, or imminent death. This pessimism I think leads people to ask now: 'Have we had it too good?'""

Singapore and Hong Kong men are the most promiscuous in Asia - "Singapore and Hong Kong men are the most promiscuous in Asia, with an average of 16 bed partners in their lifetime, according to a worldwide survey carried out by condom producer Durex. For women, Malaysian women are the most promiscuous in Asia with some 39 percent confessing that they cheated on their partners in the poll, which covered 29,000 women in 36 countries. The Malaysian women came third behind Ghana (62 per cent) and Thailand (59 per cent). In fourth and fifth place were Russia (33 per cent) and Singapore (19 per cent) respectively."

Condom highly sought after as gift for Chinese New Year - "many young men are out making a living by themselves and are reunited with their wives or girlfriends only during the New Year. Condoms that are rarely used throughout the year now sell like hot cakes for people’s quality time."

Material greed of Chinese women turns Chinese men off; Western women become popular - "[He] has found himself more attracted to the traits of the Western female character. He thinks that these women are more independent, straight-forward and less coddled than Chinese women. Being outspoken is what they especially appeal to Li Lei. “If they have something they want, they will tell you directly”... Tony had two relationships with Chinese women, but was angered by having to find out why his girlfriend had mood swing. As a result, he made up his mind two years ago that women from North America or Europe suit him better. Part of the reason why they now prefer Western women is an increasing number of Chinese women are materialist"

Diva - My S'pore boyfriends were not driven, boring dependent, childish - "After she broke up with her Singaporean boyfriend two years ago, Miss Ang had enough of local men. Her ex had called her materialistic after she told him that being content with a future salary of $3,000 a month was not good enough for her. “So I decided I wanted someone different,” Miss Ang said. The 21-year-old set her sights on Caucasian men, and 10 months after she broke up, she got her wish. She met her current German boyfriend, 25, at the smoking area outside a Clarke Quay pub. He approached her and started a conversation. “Normally, Singaporean men would not be so bold,” she said... [She] spoke with a Western accent... “I love my boyfriend because he is very reserved and simple”... “I also want to have beautiful children who are mixed blood, to create diversity in the family”"

Self-confessed ex-SPG: Local men are sensible, responsible gentlemen - ""When I was an SPG, I wanted to explore and thinking these Caucasian men were more adventurous and intelligent -- my thoughts fooled me. I was disappointed dating a few of the most inglorious and ignorant men I've ever met. They always think they are way smarter and able to outsmart me. But when I outsmart them in turn, they feel threatened and hate the feeling of losing to an Asian woman. Thus, they begin to turn nasty... I would describe local men as researchers, humans curious about their planet. When they don't know something, they are eager to learn more about it. They research and gain more knowledge about it unlike Caucasian men, who tend to think they know it all... most of them don't really care how you look, it's just how you sleep with them"

The Sexual Double Standard - "A more lighthearted approach to a sexual double standard was taken in a study done in Texas examining country music lyrics. All of the songs used were sung by female artists. Interestingly, these researchers found that female singers excused infidelity from married women but not married men... A later study by Marks and Fraley investigated why recent empirical results seems to support the lack of a sexual double standard while anecdotal evidence still strongly supports it’s existence. Their findings suggested that the confirmation bias (a tendency to search for information that confirms already held precepts) sustains belief in the sexual double standard (2006: 25)."

YouTube video shows Indian beer thief hiding 20-pound case under skirt - What's On Tianjin

Tapioca pearls in bubble tea contain carcinogens: German study

Virginity cream sparks Indian sex debate - "An Indian company has launched what it claims is the country's first vagina tightening cream, saying it will make women feel "like a virgin" again. The company says it is about empowering women... Ancient India has always been celebrated for its openness and lack of hypocrisy, for its modernity and inclusive attitude; but in one aspect, it has remained rigid: the need for women to be virgins... she has even heard stories of companies which work at night, such as call centres, finding their toilets full of condoms which they cannot flush down, as some couples find it hard to find a place to be alone"

Why top sport stars might have 'more time' on the ball - "an individual's perception of time does seem to slow as they prepare to make a physical action"

Eating less fails to extend monkey lives - "monkeys eating 30 per cent less than control animals did not have longer lives. Dieting monkeys also died from age-related diseases just as often as controls. The results not only conflict with findings from worms, flies, rats and mice, but also with those of a very similar study of rhesus monkeys at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in 2009."

Cost of staging NDP: $115, spent in 10 years
I'm sure this doesn't assume paying NSFs at market rates

No go for cycling lanes - "On average, 18 cyclists died every year from 2008 to 2011, Parliamentary Secretary for Transport Muhammad Faishal Ibrahim said in Parliament on Monday. Half of the cyclists involved in fatal and injury accidents were partly at fault... Those who don't observe the highway code are also a menace. Cyclists sometimes ride two-abreast in a single lane, blocking vehicles whose drivers end up waiting behind them, said avid cyclist Stephen Choy, 47. Some cyclists in housing estates also ride on pedestrian paths "thinking they have the right of way and then expect drivers to give way at zebra crossings""
""I am really angry. I have seen so many cyclists disobey traffic rules, yet cyclists are always the angels and motorists are the culprits," said the Tampines resident. "We are not against cyclists but they must obey the rules. Motorists are the poor scapegoats.""

How the contraceptive pill messes with women's minds: Rage, despair, low sex drive... - " the Pill affects women’s choice in men. The study showed women taking it tend to choose reliable, caring and steady men, rather than adventurous, dashing and dangerous types... Using a medically respected questionnaire, researchers found Pill takers had an average depression rating of 17.6 compared to 9.8 in non-users... A study of more than 1,000 women at Germany’s University of Heidelberg found the Pill dramatically reduces levels of desire and arousal during sex."
How ironic that it reduces desire

Now THAT is Retarded

"School is learning things you don't want to know, surrounded by people you wish you didn't know, while working toward a future you don't know will ever come." - Dave Kellett

***

From: R-word | Spread the Word to End the Word

"The R-word is the word 'retard(ed)'. Why does it hurt? The R-word hurts because it is exclusive. It’s offensive. It’s derogatory. The R-word is hate speech...

When they were originally introduced, the terms “mental retardation” or “mentally retarded” were medical terms with a specifically clinical connotation; however, the pejorative forms, “retard” and “retarded” have been used widely in today’s society to degrade and insult people with intellectual disabilities. Additionally, when “retard” and “retarded” are used as synonyms for “dumb” or “stupid” by people without disabilities, it only reinforces painful stereotypes of people with intellectual disabilities being less valued members of humanity."


Recent pledges:



Default pledge: "I pledge and support the elimination of the derogatory use of the r-word from everyday speech and promote the acceptance and inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities."

My pledge: "The R Word is pernicious but I find the term "intellectual disabilities" almost as offensive and insulting. I support inclusion of the "Differently-abled"!"

(there is a delay between pledging and having the pledges show up - I'm suspecting it's more due to screening of pledges than server lag, since I didn't see anyone pledging that "this campaign is retarded")


As @lynnylchan comments, "Not allowed to say 'disabled', it's now 'differently abled'... this is pointless."

In other words, the website and campaign are already outdated and offensive.

Moral of the story: Offence is in the Eye of the Offended.


More: Pinker on the Euphemism Treadmill

Ars gratia artis

"I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous." - Graffito

***

On the film "Fiesta":

"I should have known my next picture would be trouble as soon as the Mexican tailor demanded that my bosom would have to go. Almost from beginning to end, Fiesta was jinxed…

Before shooting began, I traveled to Mexico City to get fitted for a traje de luces, the beautiful jewel-encrusted suit of lights that every matador wears in the ring. The tailor who was making my suit was very by-the- book — it never registered with him that this was for a movie, or if it did, he didn't care. When I went for my first fitting, he looked at me, took my measurements for the jacket, shook his head, and said,

Imposible, senorita.

He was upset because traditionally the stiff jacket must lie vertically against the chest. Given the measurements he wanted, the only way a woman could wear one "properly" would be if she were constructed like supermodel Kate Moss — perfectly flat. Now I wasn't quite Jane Russell, but I did have a bustline; and this little tailor was just sickened at the sight of me because I was ruining the look of his suit. At that point he refused to do any more work on it unless I agreed to have my bosom surgically removed.

When I realised he was serious, I crossed my arms over my chest. We were at an impasse – a Mexican standoff”

--- The million dollar mermaid / Esther Williams, Digby Diehl

u r wt u wr - 24th September 2012

"If it weren't for baseball, many kids wouldn't know what a millionaire looked like." - Phyllis Diller

***

u r wt u wr:

- 'You can't catch me'
- 'Kiss me. It's trendy'
- 'Cute'
- 'New Menico
US 27
There my they time
What's your name'
- 'a sparkling weekend is coming' (this was worn on a saturday so presumably it was not that weekend)
- 'My boyfriend is a tenant. Were-something-'
- 'Need a hug today'
- 'somewhere sometime it could happen. Love edc'
- 'I'm SMART. That is why I am still SINGLE'
- '*something* *pic if strawberry* it is juicy'
- 'Good cats make u :) naughty cats make u :* but i -something- them all'
- 'Sweet cherries' (7 year old girl)
- 'There's a wild thing inside us all' (Secondary school girl with mother)
- 'You don't forget me. That's why I like you'
- 'Vamp'
- 'coffee chocolate men. All better rich'
- 'Shrink to fit' (I could see her tummy)
- 'Like me to love St.'
- 'Always imitated never duplicated' (Why you would want to, I wouldn't know)
- 'You know you love me too'
- 'remember me'
- 'I haven't met a boy I couldn't beat'
- 'B.U.M college rule #237. Not remembering is the best part'\
- 'I'm not perfect but I'm limited edition' (rationed crap is still crap)
- 'remember me'
- 'nice' (Must've referred to her personality, I'm sure)
- 'Show off' (There wasn't much to show)
- 'player'
- 'more respect less attack'
- 'Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me' (She was maybe in her early 40s. She had quite a lot of pimple craters, had neither figure nor butt, and had early stage female pattern baldness)


Guys:

- 'mark ♥ erwin' (turns out his name was neither)
- 'remember when sex was safe and motorbikes were dangerous'
- 'Love to love' (these were inside a lipstick mark)
- 'Smile if you're gay'

Links - 23rd September 2012

"The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age." - Lucille Ball

***

Australian Brothel complains Church will bring “Wrong Sort of People” - "A North Shore brothel has complained to the local council about plans to build a church in the same street, fearing it will bring the wrong sort of people into the area."

Sexy friends 'deter male advances' - "A team researching how males and females act socially with one another have found that certain female fish who are not in the mood to mate deliberately hang around with "more sexually attractive" female fish in order to deflect attention from randy males"

The Great Singapore Penis Panic and American Mass Hysteria - "Forty-three years ago, a strange series of events unfolded on the island of Singapore. Hundreds of men rushed to the hospitals of the island with the terrifying belief that their penises were shrinking. Each feared that if his penis shrank away completely, he would die. Some came with lucky red strings tightly wrapped around their penises to prevent the lethal disappearance. Others had clamps holding their wayward organs in place. Most often it was a firm grasp of a hand, their own or a frightened family member's, that prevented the shrinking penis from slipping away and taking their life with it. Oddly enough, about a dozen women also fell victim to the panic. This was the Great Singapore Penis Panic, or what doctors refer to as an epidemic of the psychiatric condition called Koro"

The quintessential SG girl / Drunk on fun. - "I’ve been here in Perth for almost a month, and each day, I learn a little more about this new home of mine and the people inhabiting it. One of the hardest things I had to learn - and it was something I was quite shocked by - was the views on Singaporean girls... the ones most likely to judge you, and form stereotypical views about you, are the Permanent Residents, ABCs (Australian Born Chinese for you noobs) and overseas students who have been here for at least three years. They’re views on Singaporean girls are… to say the least.. not very flattering. In fact, you can almost hear them scoff every time they say, “typical SG girl..”"

Non-Techie Cofounder Learns Code, Builds New Site Feature in 6 Days

Twitter / tastylongwiener - "This made me LOL so hard! A+ for effort though"

How to Make Love Like a Caveman - "So we can look back to six to seven million years and say, that has been six to seven million years of human primate promiscuity, pretty much uninterrupted until we get to 10,000 years ago with agriculture and the advent of monogamy. So that gives you a sense of why it’s so difficult for most people. We’ve been, you know, going down this same path for so long and then suddenly we’re told, no, no, that’s not the way we behave anymore. And in fact, that’s not natural. So if you behave that way or you want to behave that way or you fanaticize about behaving that way or you get off on watching other people behave that way, there’s something wrong with you. You’re sick"

Letter to Singapore « youdonthavetoagree - "In London, I can be a saint or a sinner. I can be City boy, goth girl, punk kid; I can be in with the media, in with the cool kids, I can drop rhymes in East End ghettos and I can drop cash in Mahiki on cocktails. I can be posh, p oor, upmarket, downmarket, chav, toff, hippie, indie. I can be gay or straight, man or woman. I can make myself up, make myself down. And London will still embrace me, and I will always find somewhere that will take me in, and raise no eyebrows should I wear hoop skirts and pierce my lip and call myself Bettie Page. I’m not sure you could ever do that, Singapore. You say you celebrate diversity, but really you only grudgingly tolerate it"

Power Ranger Lego Intro - YouTube

It's fatuous to deny race link in child sex-grooming case, says equality chief Trevor Phillips - "He was asked on BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show whether the case illustrated a cultural problem in part of the Pakistani Muslim community about the way men regard white women as ‘fair game’... ‘I think anybody who says that the fact that most of the men are Asian and most of the children are white is not relevant, I mean that’s just fatuous’"

SUPER SEXY HIV AWARENESS MUSIC VIDEO (HD version) - YouTube

Gillette’s worst nightmare? Possibly. « The Grooming Guru

The true story of how McDonald's started (picture)

Feel The Pride - YouTube
Comments: "I feel something, but I'm not sure it's pride.."
"Nasa scientist. Captain America. Marry Bieber. Basically, they all dream of leaving Singapore. Niiiice~"
"as a comedy, its a gem. The way the absurdist-humor element digs into our own anti-nationalism (lol just scroll and read the comments), irony at its best. Brilliant script. I'm amazed the authorities couldn't see the allusion to actual singaporean-bashing by singaporeans in the overly dramatic second-half of the video."
At first I thought this was a spoof video

Watch the Simpsons' amazing Game of Thrones intro

Before and After Marriage (picture)

Remake / Submissions

Bride's 'Cold Feet' May Predict Divorce - "While men seemed more likely to have cold feet, their wives' reservations better predicted future problems"

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - "Have you even heard of Pacman?... Think about it. It's like Kafka wrote a Lovecraft story"

Japanese Porn Star Tries, Fails, to Repair Japanese-Chinese Tensions

David Briggs: The Complicated Connection Between Religion and the Paranormal - "both individuals with no religious beliefs and the most committed individuals -- those who attend services weekly -- are among the least likely to hold paranormal beliefs. Those who believe the Bible is the literal word of God are also highly unlikely to hold paranormal beliefs"

Japan’s Phillips Curve Looks Like Japan

What Is the Koran? - "Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam's first two centuries—they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans in existence. What's more, some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God... "To historicize the Koran would in effect delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community"... The orthodox Islamic view, Abu Zaid claims, is stultifying; it reduces a divine, eternal, and dynamic text to a fixed human interpretation with no more life and meaning than "a trinket ... a talisman ... or an ornament""

The dark side of Dubai - "All over the city, there are maxed-out expats sleeping secretly in the sand-dunes or the airport or in their cars. "The thing you have to understand about Dubai is – nothing is what it seems," Karen says at last. "Nothing. This isn't a city, it's a con-job. They lure you in telling you it's one thing – a modern kind of place – but beneath the surface it's a medieval dictatorship"... "When I see Western journalists criticise us – don't you realise you're shooting yourself in the foot? The Middle East will be far more dangerous if Dubai fails. Our export isn't oil, it's hope. Poor Egyptians or Libyans or Iranians grow up saying – I want to go to Dubai. We're very important to the region. We are showing how to be a modern Muslim country. We don't have any fundamentalists here. Europeans shouldn't gloat at our demise. You should be very worried.... Do you know what will happen if this model fails? Dubai will go down the Iranian path, the Islamist path"... It is illegal to be gay in Dubai, and punishable by 10 years in prison. But the locations of the latest unofficial gay clubs circulate online, and men flock there, seemingly unafraid of the police... "In Saudi, it's hard to be straight when you're young. The women are shut away so everyone has gay sex"... "All the people who couldn't succeed in their own countries end up here, and suddenly they're rich and promoted way above their abilities and bragging about how great they are. I've never met so many incompetent people in such senior positions anywhere in the world""

Office romance still frowned upon in Singapore

BLACKFIVE: Another View of the Syrian “Revolt” - "The Syrian Christians to a man told me that the “freedom fighters” where nothing more than Sunni Jihadists looking to take advantage of the various “Arab Spring” movements that had been successfully overthrowing stable dictatorships throughout the region in favor of radicalized Muslim groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda. They told me at that time that these groups were not only the main aggressors in the conflict, but that they were specifically targeting Christians for both religious persecution and for political retaliation. Several told me that in Homs the graffiti left by the insurgents often stated, “Alawites to the grave, Christians to the cross”... The once vibrant and always peaceful Iraqi Christian community was systematically hunted down and killed by both al Qaeda and JAM with the bulk of the survivors fleeing to…Syria"

Study of the Day: Why That Last Piece of Chocolate Tastes the Best - "If you think something is the last, you'll tend to like it the best"

What 'Rock n Roll' means

"I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose." - Woody Allen

***

"The music from which rock ‘n’ roll was born throbbed with more libidinous content and performance than anything coming out of white America at the time. Even the name was salacious. ‘Rock ‘n’ roll’, according to the cultural historian Michael Ventura,

was a term from the juke joints of the South, long in use by the forties, when a music started being heard that had no name, wasn’t jazz and wasn’t simply blues and wasn’t Cajun, but had all those elements and could not be ignored. In those juke joints ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ hadn’t meant the name of a music. it
meant ‘to fuck’.

When the music crossed over to white middle-class radio, so many songs involved rocking and rolling that radio deejays — possibly naively, perhaps cunningly — called it rock n roll.

From its very birth, rock sizzled with sex. Elvis was such a sex bomb that his FBI file apparently declared him a ‘definite danger to the security of the United States’, and it only got more dangerous from there."

--- Sex, Genes and Rock 'n' Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World / Rob Brooks

New blog picture - 17th September 2012

neither bones nor muscle, neither blood, nor life, nor relief, indeed nothing that constitutes imitation

Links - 16th September 2012

"Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel." - William Hazlitt

***

A virus that kills cancer: the cure that's waiting in the coldc - "Swedishly uninterested in profiteering, devoted only to the purity of science, Magnus and his co-workers on this virus have already published the details of their experiments in leading journals around the world, which means that the modified virus as it stands can no longer be patented. And without a patent to make the virus commercial, no one will invest"

What Women Want: Porn and the Frontier of Female Sexuality - "Deen has carved out a niche in the porn industry by looking like the one guy who doesn’t belong there. Scroll through L.A.’s top porn agency sites and you’ll find hundreds of pouty women ready to drop to their knees, but just a few dozen men available to have sex with them. These guys all have a familiar look—neck chains, frosted tips, unreasonable biceps, tribal tattoos. Deen looks like he was plucked from a particularly intellectual frat house... “My problem is I never really had anything I wanted to do in life other than porn. I’ve never really had a hobby. I never really had any ambition,” Deen says. “I was in kindergarten or something and I saw porn for the first time, and I said, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to grow up and be in porn.”... Deen is not supposed to be the star of his scenes—his sex partners are. But on Tumblr, a network of teenage bloggers has emerged to turn the focus on him. The young women trade Deen videos, post candid photographs, and pluck out all the minute details that turn them on: the way he looks at a woman, touches her, stares into her eyes, whispers in her ear... “I don’t know a single woman that watches any of these porn-for-women Playgirl type of things,” Deen says. Most women? “They want to see porno. They’re watching what they want to watch, regardless of what’s marketed toward them”"

Overcoming Shame - "for me – I still held back on orgasms. I would start to come, and my instinct would be ‘hold it back, hold it back…it will get on the sheets…mom will see it.” In fact, to this day, whenever I go home to visit my mom, she reminds me of how I ruined her sheets (and she still has them) by masturbating and staining them... I had been holding back, but as he was in me and talking to me and telling me how much he loved me and how warm and wonderful I felt, and as he started describing my cum in such wonderful ways, I suddenly let loose and came. I couldn’t believe the feeling of just laying there and coming, and knowing it was ok. I had tears in my eyes as I realized that it was ok to feel this way, and it was ok to come even if it meant the sheets needed cleaning, or I was messy... I now tend to reach a point where I can finally let go and enjoy that release and not worry about the cleanup or what my husband (or anyone else) thinks. The shame has gone, and has been replaced by utter joy"

“Mahna Mahna”: How a ditty from a soft-core Italian movie became the Muppets’ catchiest tune.

25 Pictures Taken At Exactly The Right Moment

Brazilian girl dies after a continuous orgasm of 12 minutes with a friend

Beste lingeriereclame ooit (NSFW)

The Many Faces of Helena Bonham Carter (JPG)

9GAG - Net Worth

Why do nuns not wear bras? - Yahoo! Answers - "God supports everything"

Death by PowerPoint? Not if Cebu Pacific has any say

I'm a Porn Star, and if You Harass Me I Will Punch You in the Balls - "in a room of pornography fans, who have actually seen me with a dick in my mouth and who can buy a replica of my vagina in a can or box, I am treated with far more respect than I am walking down the street."
The racist, sexist heterophobia in the comments is sick: "Straight white men are a plague on the planet."
Also I'm amused at how many women say in the comments that this has never happened to them
"As a man, I have FAR more to fear walking down the street than a woman does: for every category of violent crime except rape, men outnumber women as victims in the BJS stats and case clearance rates are lower for male victims, too. Rape is the exception because until this year, the FBI and BJS didn't consider it possible for a man to be raped"

Guidelines to identify gay and lesbian symptoms published - "In an immediate response, Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin sent out this tweet message: “I wear fitted, v-neck t-shirts. I’m okay.”"

The 6 Most Ridiculous Abuses of Diplomatic Immunity - "#4. Kidnapping a Man by Stuffing Him in a Diplomatic Bag"

What Happens To Old And Expired Supermarket Foods - "“Foods can remain safe to consume for some time beyond sell-by and even use-by dates provided they are handled and stored properly,” says Dr Ted Labuza, professor of food science at the University of Minnesota. For fresh produce and refrigerated foods this means storage at below 41 degrees Fahrenheit. Canned foods and shelf-stable goods like salad dressings, Labuza adds, can be consumed for years beyond their expiration dates. While their quality might suffer, for example emulsified dressings may split, they will not pose a safety hazard unless contaminated. Apart from baby formula and certain types of baby foods, product dating is not even required by federal regulations... “We put enough preservatives in our food to embalm an elephant,” the manufacturer confessed"

Empathic rats spring each other from jail - "De Waal suggests that the rats’ behaviour is the result of ancient neural circuits that allow mammals to “make the situation of others their own to some degree, thus offering them an emotional stake in it.” These circuits underlie the behaviour of apes, dolphins, elephants, rats, and probably more. De Waal thinks that they originated from the care that mammal mothers offered towards their young, which might explain why female rats (like female chimps and female humans) seem to be more empathic than male ones. In Bartal’s experiment, all the female rats opened doors for a trapped individual, compared to just three-quarters of the males."

9GAG - I can't even...

ϟ • For all that enjoy wearing their pants below their butts - "This trend was born in United States jails. Prisoners who were willing to have sex with other prisoners needed to invent a signal"

Connie Podesta: Men Are Better At Getting Their Needs Met - YouTube - "Okay, women, what do we do now if he didn't love us enough to read our minds and know what we meant to say even though we never said it. What do we do?... There's a little look, we learnt it when we were 2, it goes like this. And we're gonna teach him a little lesson, aren't we. We're gonna give him the 'Silent Treatment'"

Megaupload shutdown did nothing to slow piracy, study finds

Middle Eastern women may have vitamin D deficiency - "Saadi and colleagues at the United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, studied vitamin D levels in 90 women who were breastfeeding and 88 women who had never given birth. Many dressed to cover their whole bodies, including their hands and faces, while outside of their homes."

In Jerusalem, women are voiceless at a decidedly womanly event - The Globe and Mail - "The controversial exclusion of women from various settings in Israel because of pressure from ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders reached a new level this week with a major conference on gynecological advances that is permitting only males to address the audience."

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - "Academician versus Person from Anywhere ELse"

The Burger Lab: How to Make Perfect Thin and Crisp French Fries - "The first thing I noticed was the surface texture of the fries. They seemed smooth, but on closer inspection, I noticed that they were dotted with tiny tiny bubbles, indicating that they had definitely been fried at least once prior to arriving at the store. I measured them with calipers and found that they were precisely 1/4 of an inch thick. A good size for optimizing crust to interior ratio."

Japanese Court Orders Google to Suspend Autocomplete Feature

Denying sex to spouse on first night ground for marriage annulment: Delhi high court - Times Of India - "It cited various Supreme Court judgements on the issue and said "it is evident that wilful denial of sexual intercourse without reasonable cause would amount to cruelty." Referring to the apex court's observation that "sex is the foundation of marriage and marriage without sex is an anathema," Justice Gambhir said, "Marriage without sex will be an insipid relation""

London tourist's illegally parked car blown-up by police

Top Misconceptions About The Gaming Industry - "6.) Development Costs Are Rising
Some game development costs have gone up while others have gone down. Development tools in particular (a crucial part for designing games) have gone down in price drastically, enabling just about any entry level designer to make a quality looking game
8.) Day-One DLC Is Finished After Certification
if story DLC releases day and date with the game it's not something that comes after stuff like motion-capture, voice recording or mechanic implementation. It's going to be going through those phases at the same time as the rest of the content to maintain continuity"

Fight for talent goes pink - "Companies that are vocal about inclusiveness are generally in the banking and finance, IT, food and beverage and retail industries"
As a good economist, I believe the market punishes systematic discrimination. Ergo women in South Korea not working for local companies

Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure - Archie McPhee & Co. - "This 5-1/4" tall, hard vinyl Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure has a wild look in her eye and comes with six cats. She also has a seventth cat perched on her shoulder and an eighth cozily tucked inside the pocket of her bathrob"

George Takei Calls For Shatner And Fisher To Unite Against A Common Enemy

A transman on "male privilege"

"Most transmen will laugh, some quite loudly, at the notion that we transition in order to achieve male privilege. I’ve been transitioned for many years and still don’t know what that is. I’ve looked around, but the concept is as elusive as the winning lottery ticket that I’m sure I purchased but now can’t find anywhere. Transmen transition because of a gender incongruity, and if male privilege comes with it, it’s only a side effect. But most of us will attest to the fact that there isn’t much male privilege out there to be had."

--- Just Add Hormones: An Insider's Guide to the Transsexual Experience / Matt Kailey

Traditional Islamic Religious Tolerance

"I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours." - Hunter S. Thompson

***

"The traditional political and social order which flourished in the Ottoman Empire and, with some modifications, in the realms of the shahs of Iran, had its roots in classical Islamic law and custom, and beyond that in the remoter civilizations of the ancient Middle East. As in other religious cultures, it was based frankly on inequality, since it would be inappropriate and indeed absurd to accord equal treatment to those who accept God’s final revelation and those who wilfully reject it. Sorne modem apologists, in justly praising the religious tolerance of traditional Islamic regimes, have described it as a system of equal rights. It was not, and such equality would indeed have been seen at the time not as a merit but as a dereliction of duty. In refusing equality to the unbeliever, the Islamic state was following the common practice of religions in power. Where it differed from most others was in according to these unbelievers a recognized status in society, defined and maintained by Holy Law, and accepted by the mass of the Muslim populations. This was not equal status, but it did provide a level of toleration which in states guided by other dispensations was not achieved until religion was disestablished or, at the very least, deprived of much of its influence in public affairs. Muslim religious tolerance was of course limited to monotheists who accepted what Islam recognized as earlier revelations. In practice, in the Middle East this meant Christians of various denominations, and Jews. In Iran there was also a small surviving community of Zoroastrians. In the Ottoman Empire, these minorities were constituted into what were known by the name of millet."

--- The Middle East / Bernard Lewis

Links - 7th September 2012

"He who lives without folly isn't so wise as he thinks." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

***

We failed in Bosnia - "the case for interventionism does not rest on the ease with which constitutional democracy can be transplanted in emerging states. Because western-style democracies are rare, and some states (such as Afghanistan) have proved resistant to them, it is fashionable for critics of intervention to claim to be realists. In reality, they are more usually sophists. Liberal-democratic internationalism, for all its limitations, holds out some hope of avoiding a Hobbesian world in which aggression is rewarded... Western failure in Bosnia was almost total. The reputations of its authors have barely been scathed by it."

Biker fined for speed camera gestures - "A teenage motorcyclist who deliberately set off 26 different speed cameras giving German police the finger in each one has been fined £4,000. Dimitri Salovic, 17, covered up in biking leathers and a full-face helmet, hid his registration number before roaring around Munich at speeds of up to 70mph, a court heard. Police finally nabbed him when they worked out a pattern to his route and set up an undercover traffic team where they thought he'd strike next."

Till Death Do Us Part - "Garvey had a stroke in January of 1940, and he becomes incapacitated. George Padmore, who was a columnist for The Chicago Defender, had heard a rumor that Garvey had died and instead of confirming this, he published a premature obituary.
The obituary described Garvey as a man whose followers had deserted him; a man who died “broke, alone and unpopular.”
When Garvey reads it, he lets out a loud moan and he collapses. He suffers a second stroke and next morning he dies."

The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Genius - "Margie Profet was always a study in sharp contradictions... the most salient fact about Profet is her absence. Neither friends, former advisers, publishers, nor ex-lovers has any idea what happened to her or where she is today. Sometime between 2002 and 2005, Profet, who was then in her mid-40s, vanished without a trace. Best known for three landmark papers in the prestigious Quarterly Review of Biology (QRB) and Evolutionary Theory, Profet recast a trio of everyday curses into a trinity of evolutionary blessings. Allergies, menstruation, and morning sickness, she argued, eliminate germs, carcinogens, and mutation-causing toxins from the body"

I'm an Asian Woman and I Refuse to Ever Date an Asian Man - "I'm an Asian girl. I don't date Asian guys. Yep, I'm one of those that date lots and lots of (mostly, but not always) white guys. Why? It's simple: I'm a racist... Asians are marrying non-Asians at a rate much higher than any other racial group. This summer Pew reported that 37 percent of all recent Asian-American brides wedded a non-Asian groom. In an earlier study of the couples who married in 2008, 9 percent of whites, 16 percent of blacks and 26 percent of Hispanics did so with someone of a different race or ethnicity. Thirty-one percent of Asians did. This trend has nothing to do with skin color. It has everything to do with patriarchy and cultural sexism and a lifestyle I grew up with and want nothing to do with anymore... Dating white men means acceptance into American culture. White culture"

What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress? - NYTimes.com - "2 percent to 7 percent of boys under age 12 regularly display “cross-gender” behaviors, though very few wish to actually be a girl... 60 to 80 percent of pink boys do eventually become gay men. The rest grow up to either become heterosexual men or become women by taking hormones and maybe having surgery. Gender-nonconforming behavior of girls, however, is rarely studied, in part because departures from traditional femininity are so pervasive and accepted. The studies that do exist indicate that tomboys are somewhat more likely than gender-typical girls to become bisexual, lesbian or male-identified, but most become heterosexual women... genes account for 70 percent of gender-atypical behavior in both sexes... A 1998 study in the academic journal Sex Roles suggests just how ordinary it has become for girls to exist in the middle space: it found that 46 percent of senior citizens, 69 percent of baby boomers and 77 percent of Gen-X women reported having been tomboys... “People rely on gender to help understand the world, to make order out of chaos”... When J. Crew ran an ad of its president painting her son’s toenails neon pink, with copy that read, “Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink,” one commentator said she was exploiting her son “behind the facade of liberal, transgendered identity politics... Boys and men do have more latitude these days to dress and act in less conventionally masculine ways. Among straight men, long hair and (certain) necklaces and (certain) pairs of earrings are almost normative, at least in some communities. Plenty of men wax their eyebrows, get manicures and wear pink”

‘Missing’ woman unknowingly joins search for herself

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Who's Hungry? - "Before I knew it, tall, healthy-looking Western women became the trigger for my cannibalistic fantasies. I guess my infatuation with such women stemmed from the fact that I was short, ugly, and had an inferiority complex and therefore sought people who were the exact opposite of myself. Eventually, I began feeling a strong desire to bite into them—not to kill them or eat them per se, but merely to gnaw on their flesh. It was purely a form of sexual desire. It wasn’t like I felt like eating someone every time I was hungry. But you know how you tend to feel a stronger sexual desire when you’ve eaten a full meal? That’s when I would start feeling the urge to eat a girl. It’s absurd, right? In essence, it’s different from the type of hunger that people experience for food. This cannibalistic urge, where I’m going, “I want to eat human meat,” is a sort of sexual appetite, so if I don’t make sure that I ejaculate frequently enough, the desire only gets stronger and stronger"

Why Most Singaporeans Are in Debt - "Most Singaporeans will be in debt if they do the following:
1) Earn less than what they spend
2) Have no savings
3) Lose their jobs
4) Stay in a company for too long without promotion and their company pay them pathetic bonuses
5) Spend on liabilities
6) Do not delay gratification
7) Marries somebody that likes Cartier or Larry’s
8 ) Do not invest"

Visualising UI, UX etc

TOC News » Are Singaporeans too easily offended? - "Singaporeans have begun a crusade. Not against tyranny, or oppression, or privilege. In fact, this crusade, as far as anyone can tell, is against ever having to feel offended. And this crusade is leading more and more Singaporeans to seek out offensive content, so that they may destroy it... Offense is a self-inflicted injury. It makes no sense to hold other people accountable for your own self-inflicted injury... if I see a fat man in a dark alleyway and his obese frame offends me, who is responsible for my feelings of offense? Is it the fat man's fault that I find him offensive?... Worst of all, now, it seems, many Singaporeans are chomping at the bit, searching for more and more foreigners to hold responsible for their own hurt feelings. They are seeking out the alleyways where they know that fat people will congregate, and then launching an attack. News sites have been scraping the very bottom of the barrel to supply similar stories (one recent Temasek Review article alleged that a foreigner had called Singaporeans "low quality"). The appetite for these stories has become insatiable."

This Is Not a Joke: Government Issues Study of a Study About Studies

Population clock shows Japanese face extinction in 1000 years

Stand Up, Walk Around, Even Just For '20 Minutes' - "Use chocolate milk to replenish sugars after an intense workout. Reynolds calls it an "ideal recovery beverage" because it has the right ratio of carbs and proteins to aid your body's recovery process."

Low fertility increases descendant socioeconomic position but reduces long-term fitness in a modern post-industrial society - "modern fertility limitation represents a strategic response to the local costs of rearing socioeconomically competitive offspring, but contradict adaptive models suggesting that it maximizes long-term fitness. This indicates a conflict in modern societies between behaviours promoting socioeconomic versus biological success"

Robin Amos Kahn: A Husband, A House, A Mortgage, A Baby, A Light Bulb Moment - "I acted like I really enjoyed cooking though I hated cooking. And he acted like he really enjoyed spending weekends with me, when he really wanted to work seven days a week. But we made a commitment and we worked at it and we became a family... Here is my suggestion: Be you. Don't try to be anyone else. Also, live your life with pleasure and do what you love and what is important to you. Work hard, play hard, don't be waiting for someone to complete you. Complete yourself. A great marriage is really a dream for most. It takes honesty -- knowing and presenting who you really are. It isn't for everyone; it takes effort and a great deal of compromise and patience. It is not the Nobel Prize of life"

YouTube Flags Democrats' Convention Video on Copyright Grounds - "The most likely culprit is YouTube’s pre-emptive content filters, which allow large media companies to upload content they claim to own and automatically block videos that an algorithm decides matches their own. That would make the glitch the second livestream copyright-policing snafu in the span of a few days: On Sunday, a similar algorithm at uStream interrupted the livestream of the Hugo science fiction awards. The award show included clips of copyrighted videos, though the algorithm didn’t know that the clips had been authorized. In early August, an official NASA recording of the Mars landing was blocked hours after the successful landing, due to a rogue DMCA complaint by a news network."

Man nearly dies shipping himself to girlfriend

S'pore women attribute infertility to non-physiological reasons - "Majority of women in Singapore attribute their infertility to non-physiological reasons and say their condition is "god's will" or "bad luck"... Called "Starting Families Asia", the study also found two in five women here are unaware that a man can be infertile even if he does not have any problems having sex. Two in five Singaporean women also do not realise that a man may be infertile even if he produces sperm"

Jia Jia, the Chinese panda coming to Singapore receives its S Pass!

GooPhone I5 manufacturers want to sue Apple when iPhone launch - "According to reports, the Chinese manufacturers have filed for a patent on the design and are ready to take Apple to court when the next iPhone debuts"

Naomi Wolf's "Vagina" is full of bad science about the brain - ""dopamine is the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain"... If that were true, women with Parkinson’s could never be feminists, because that disease is caused by degeneration of the dopamine neurons. If that were true, feminists would be campaigning for the legalization of cocaine and crystal meth – at least for women – because those drugs boost dopamine levels. In fact, if that were true, it would mean that the most complimentary thing you could say to a woman would be “You sound like you’re on crack!” Naomi Wolf, you sound like you’re on crack."

Chocolate giants disown deep-fried Mars bar

What happens when you risk going too far

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” - T.S. Eliot


National Geographic Adventure Magazine: Story--Lost at Sea

"In 1982, at 24 and with a Whitbread Round the World regatta under her belt, sailor Debbie Kiley boarded a 58-foot (18-meter) sailing yacht in Maine for a routine delivery to Florida.

After a stopover in Annapolis, Maryland, the weather quickly worsened—60-knot winds whipping up 40-foot (12-meter) waves. In the course of the next three days the crew lost their boat, survived 18 hours of treading water, lost two crew members to sharks and another to injuries sustained in the sinking, and suffered hallucinations from severe dehydration and hypothermia"

Conversations About Singaporeans' Career Aspirations

"School is learning things you don't want to know, surrounded by people you wish you didn't know, while working toward a future you don't know will ever come." - Dave Kellett

***

CONVERSATIONS ABOUT SINGAPOREANS' CAREER ASPIRATIONS

"INTRODUCTIONS
Hi! We're a multi-disciplinary research unit within the Public Service Division <www.psd.gov.sg>. We're embarking on a project to learn more about Singaporeans' career aspirations, and we would love to hear your stories and experiences behind your career journey and life aspirations. Hence we are inviting you for participation and input to our learning journey.

WHAT OUR CONVERSATIONS ARE LIKE
We typically like to spend around 1.5 hours to chat with individuals or couples who fit the profiles listed below. These sessions are face-to-face, there will be about 3-4 people from our team, and preferably at the comfort of your home or office (or anywhere that you prefer and is conducive). Based on past experience, we found that the session would be more comfortable and enjoyable for participants when done in a manner more like casual friendly chat, hence no worries about having to go through a stiff/boring survey interview! Participants will also be compensated with shopping vouchers worth S$80 in appreciation of their time.

ABOUT YOUR CONFIDENTIALITY
Rest assured that all your personal information will guarded with the utmost confidentiality. We will also be recording our conversation and taking a few pictures only for the purposes of note-taking and internal reference, if you're okay with it and with your permission of course. And if you prefer to remain anonymous for the project, we will respect your wishes too. All information will be kept confidential for the purpose of this research, and there will be a confidential agreement to be signed by both you and us before we start the session.

HOW TO SIGN UP
Please take a moment to have a look at the profiles below, and fill the form further below if you fit the bill and would like to participate. Alternatively, pass this on to your friends/family who you think might be interested (and you can badger him/her for 'commission' after that!). CONTACT Upon completion of this short questionaire, we will contact you via phone or email for a quick chat and to coordinate an interview venue and timing. We aim to hold these sessions over the period between 10 to 22 Sept (Mon-Fri). If you have any questions, please contact Jason Leow at or 9229 4308, or Leon Voon at or 9229 4105.

Thank you so much in advance for your interest in participating in this project! We're really looking forward to hearing your stories. :)

Profiles
Please select which profile fits you best. If you feel none of the profiles fit, please fill in the text box under "Other". The examples stated are meant for illustration purposes only, so variations in degree can be accepted. :)

1. Someone who dropped out of university to pursue their own alternative career path
2. Success story of someone who only went through primary / secondary school.
3. Career hopper (e.g. changed jobs every year for past 10 years)
4. Global careerist (who held jobs in different companies in different continents)
5. Self-employed entrepreneur with successful business
6. Career part-timers / career free-lancers
7. Radical mid-career switcher (e.g. corporate bank CEO to non-profit NGO director)
8. Highly educated but chose not to have no career (e.g. long-term volunteer doctor)
9. Radically alternative career (e.g. professional psychic)
10. PhD holder
11. Stayed in 1 job for almost whole lifetime
12. Singaporean now working in Singapore but was schooled overseas all of his/her childhood
13. Someone who can go university but stop at polytechnic
14. JC student who went to polytechnic instead of university
15. People who pursued careers outside of what they were trained in while in university (e.g. engineers who became teacher)
16. Scholarship holder
17. Working adult who was home-schooled all his childhood
18. Current polytechnic student who owns a business
19. Low-income university student
20. Mid-/Retiring adult who is life-long learner, e.g. had 2 bachelor degrees, a MA and PhD, and still going for certifiable courses
21. Someone who intentionally denied promotion for personal / life / aspirational reasons
22. Someone who is happily (or unhappily) settled for second-best career option (e.g. couldn't to be doctor so went on to be nurse)
23. Career Counsellors / Life coach
24. Recruitment Firm / Head-hunter
Other:


(I don't actually know - or know that I know, at any rate - anyone involved in this)

On China's Dysfunction

"Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in." - Leonardo da Vinci

***

You’ll never be Chinese

"I wanted to be Chinese, once... I wanted China to be the place where I made a career and lived my life. For the past 16 years it has been precisely that. But now I will be leaving...

If I had to choose one word to describe China in the mid-1980s it would be optimistic. A free market of sorts was in its early stages. With it came the first inflation China had experienced in 35 years. People were actually excited by that. It was a sign of progress, and a promise of more to come...

Deng had promised the Chinese people material wealth they hadn’t known for centuries on the condition that they never again asked for political change. The Party said: “Trust us and everything will be all right.”

Twenty years later, everything is not all right...

Modern day mainland Chinese society is focused on one object: money and the acquisition thereof...

To rise to the top you must be grey, with no strong views or ideas. Leadership contenders might think, and here I hypothesise, that once they are in position they can show their “true colours.” Too late they realise that will never be possible...

Leadership requires empathy, an ability to put yourself in your subordinate’s shoes. It also requires decisiveness and a willingness to accept responsibility. Believing themselves to be unique, the Chinese find it almost impossible to empathise... the system is designed to make avoidance of responsibility a prerequisite before any major decision is taken...

A leader must also offer something more than supremacy. The current “world leader” offers the world the chance to be American and democratic, usually if they want to be, sometimes by force. The British empire offered freedom from slavery and a legal system, amongst other things. The Romans took grain from Egypt and redistributed it across Europe...

The Party wouldn’t know a legal system if you swung the scales of justice under its metaphorical nose. (I was once a plaintiff in the Beijing High Court. I was told, off the record, that I had won my case. While my lawyer was on his way to collect the decision the judge received a telephone call. The decision was reversed)...

There is one final reason why the world does not want to be led by China in the 21st century. The Communist Party of China has, from its very inception, encouraged strong anti-foreign sentiment... To speak ill of China in public, to award a Nobel prize to a Chinese intellectual, or for a public figure to have tea with the Dalai Lama, is to “interfere in China’s internal affairs” and “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” The Chinese are told on a regular basis to feel aggrieved at what foreigners have done to them, and the Party vows to exact vengeance on their behalf...

Everything the Party does to fix things in the short term only makes matters worse in the long term by setting off property prices again... I hope the upheaval, when it comes, is peaceful, that the Party does not try to distract people by launching an attack on Taiwan or the Philippines...

China does not nurture and educate its youth in a way that will allow them to become the leaders, inventors and innovators of tomorrow, but that is the intention. The Party does not want free thinkers who can solve its problems. It still believes it can solve them itself, if it ever admits it has a problem in the first place. The only one it openly acknowledges, ironically, is its corruption. To deny that would be impossible"

***

China: at war with its history

"The party archives still hold many documents that remain “sensitive,” in the official euphemism. The extent of cannibalism in the Cultural Revolution is something he had discovered during his research...

Most striking this year, perhaps, is that the centenary of 1911, which marked the end of over 2,000 years of China’s imperial system, has gone largely uncelebrated. The party preferred to remember its own 90th birthday in July, perhaps unwilling to remind people that what the 1911 revolutionaries embraced were not the ideas of Karl Marx but democracy...

The result is an ostensibly modern nation in which historians can still be fired or worse for deviating from the party line and in which, in the name of social stability and national security, a fifth of humanity must pretend to believe a national story invented to keep the Communist party in perpetual control...

The mission of public history became to demonstrate that foreigners had been behind the country’s major setbacks since the early 19th century...

5,000 years ago, China did not exist in a shape recognisable today. The true political father of the Chinese state is Qin Shihuangdi, the brutal first emperor of the Qin dynasty, who, some 2,000 years ago, conquered neighbouring princely states... But the territory ruled by Qin Shihuangdi was still only a fraction of the size of today’s People’s Republic. The political entity that he created was to fragment and change repeatedly in the following centuries. China’s current borders date only to the 17th century...

[They claim] that the term Chinese applies equally to the majority Han and to the ethnic minorities now within its borders. The Qing emperors knew different: they spent much of the 19th century suppressing rebellions both by disaffected Muslims and those native Chinese who saw them as foreign oppressors...

In 1974, war crimes committed by the Japanese invading Manchuria in 1931, then China proper in 1937, had been so forgotten that when a Japanese delegation visited Fudan University in Shanghai where I was studying at the time, the campus was festooned with banners that proclaimed “Friendship between the Japanese and the Chinese People, from Generation to Generation.” The 1937-38 Nanjing massacre which left 150,000-300,000 Chinese civilians dead, and the Japanese occupation of China (1937-45), might never have happened. Nor were the mid-19th century Opium Wars with Britain prominent in the public memory...

The National Museum of China, one of the cornerstones of Beijng’s monumental centre, has spent almost as much time closed as open since it was inaugurated in 1959"

GK Chesterton on False Demons (and Smoking)

"He who lives without folly isn't so wise as he thinks." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

***

"A fairly large majority consume it so that one may roughly form the opinion that they would be better in health if they smoked less, just as one forms the opinion that they would be better if they took a shade more exercise or ate a shade less meat. A mere dot on the map of this minority is a very small minority of people who are so constituted that they should not smoke at all; and a smaller dot marking a yet tinier minority who actually induce illness by smoking. Those are about the proportions of peril in the thing. It is about as dangerous as sitting in a draught. It is about as questionable as eating pork. If a policeman can take away my cigarette, there cannot be the slightest rational objection, on a warm day, to his taking away my overcoat. In wet weather he might change my boots for me violently in the street, or suddenly garrott me with a muffler. The thing is a typical mild human indulgence, enjoyed by most people and over-enjoyed by a few people, a thing like scent or sweetmeats. Realize that the reality which we all know it to be, and then measure that mad abyss of disproportion, on the other side of which are the eight States holding up their streets with policemen and treating every man who is carrying a cigarette as if he were carrying a bomb. Thus all our cranks of culture are leading us back (or onward) into barbarism. For the essence of barbarism is idolatry; that is the worship of something other than the best reason and justice of the Universe. Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice. The Moslems say, 'There is no God but God.' The English Moslems, the abstainers, have to learn to remember also that there is no Satan but Satan"

--- GK Chesterton

Links - 5th September 2012

"Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control." - Don Marquis

***

Heteronormative Biases And Hermeneutic Phenomenology In Mass Effect 3 - "Basically I want to address the video game Mass Effect 3 and its scripting of heteronormativity, including heteronormative biases and hermeneutic phenomenology and I will use Butler's performativity and Foucault's concept of power/discourse to show how hegemonically masculine stereotypes could be creating a generation of 'virtual skinheads' and the critical role pedagogy can play. Okay, this isn't about that at all. I mean, it could be, someone in the humanities somewhere followed along with those opening paragraphs and felt like something real was in there, but mostly this article got written because I was bored and wanted to play a video game, so I started one over and decided this time I would play a girl"

Write Your Own Academic Sentence - "The emergence of praxis clarifies the position of the invention of print culture."
Humanities and social sciences != academic

Can A Man Really Get Pregnant? Sure, But It Might Kill Him

Want To Get Pregnant? Eat Ice Cream - "Researchers in the United States have found a link between a low-fat dairy diet and increased risk of infertility due to lack of ovulation (anovulatory infertility)"

Different HIV Rates Among Homosexuals And Heterosexuals Ignores Risky Behavior Data - "to end the HIV epidemic, gay men would need to have rates of unprotected sex several times lower than those currently evident among the straight population. This is because transmission rates are higher for anal sex than they are for vaginal sex, say the authors. But "role versatility," whereby people adopt both “insertive” and “receptive roles,” also plays a part, they add. A gay man can be easily infected through unprotected receptive sex, and then infect someone else through insertive sex. Gay men are therefore far more susceptible to the spread of the virus through the population, even with the same numbers of unprotected sexual partners"

Video Games And Violence: Are Studies Biased? - "Writing today in the International Journal of Liability and Scientific Enquiry, Patrick Kierkegaard of the University of Essex, England, suggests that there is scant scientific evidence that video games are anything but harmless and do not lead to real world aggression. Moreover, his research shows that previous work is biased towards the opposite conclusion... "With millions of sales of violent games, the world should be seeing an epidemic of violence," he says, "Instead, violence has declined." Research is inconclusive, emphasises Kierkegaard. It is possible that certain types of video game could affect emotions, views, behaviour, and attitudes, however, so can books, which can lead to violent behaviour on those already predisposed to violence"

Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes? - "the average client of a $300/hour hooker (which was exactly what I charged) wants a good, quality "girlfriend experience" (GFE), which will be much more likely if he treats his "date" like a lady.  Most escorts who are treated as though they're "bought and paid for" will try to complete the act as quickly as possible and get such a client out the door.  Furthermore, in my experience, the typical client enjoys the illusion that a beautiful woman wants to spend time with him, even if he intellectually knows she is there for the money.  I guarantee you that the majority of my clients tried their utmost to impress me, even to the point of bringing me gifts, flowers, and the like... Intelligent men are less likely to believe in silly propaganda against us, and less likely to have the kind of fragile masculine ego which would be wounded by "having to pay for it." The intelligent man knows that "free tail is the most expensive kind," and can make the reasonable and pragmatic decision to spend his money on a "sure thing" rather than chasing women whose price and quality are uncertain"

Female mate choice is influenced by male sport participation - "We predicted that females would favor males that participated in team sports over individual sports and non-athletes because team sport athletes may be more likely to display qualities such as the ability to work well with others and role acceptance. We used a questionnaire, a photograph, and manipulated descriptions to gauge the effects of sport involvement, attractiveness, and status on 282 females’ willingness to participate in various types of relationships. Team sport athletes were perceived as being more desirable as potential mates than individual sport athletes and non-athletes. It is suggested that team sport athletes may have traits associated with good parenting such as cooperation, likeability, and role acceptance, and/or these athletes may be better able to assert dominance in a team setting"

DesignPorn | Toast messenger by Sasha Tseng - "Eat your words! This toaster by Sasha Tseng incorporates a little message board where one can write quick notes. The message also gets “toasted” into the toast itself."

Nightclubs' foreign entertainer quota cut - "The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) said in a circular sent to nightclub operators a week ago that the new limit is in line with the Government's efforts "to regulate the increasing dependency on foreign manpower""
Comment: "If this is MOM trying to show us that they are doing something about FT and FW in Singapore, then I think our MOM is hitting the wrong tree.
Foreign Entertainers do add real variety and value to this industry and do not compete with locals. Each entertainment gig has their own appeal and value and do not compete on cheap pay, unlike in the other industries.
And Singaporean entertainers in general are really quite BORING!"

Bizarre HR: Candidates without Facebook “suspicious” - "Human resources professionals are becoming increasingly wary of candidates who aren’t on Facebook, because it makes them look 'abnormal'... The biggest concern from employers is that a lack of a Facebook page – or other social networking sites – could mean the applicant’s online account contains so much inappropriate content that it had to be deleted. While there could be many reasons a person does not have or want a Facebook page – whether it’s too addictive or they crave privacy – owning one is a sign of having a healthy social network

True & Co: This Startup Has The Secret To Finding The Perfect Bra - "When you sign up, you take a quiz to answer questions like what shape your breast is"

Why Narcissists Ace Job Interviews - "Employers should keep this study in mind: although narcissists dazzled in the interviews, there is no evidence they were more or less effective workers."

Lexington: The scarcer sex | The Economist - " Even now, fewer than two out of ten members of Congress are female. For this, women have only themselves to blame. Plenty of research shows that women who stand for election do just as well as their male counterparts: they raise as much money, scoop up as many votes and are no less likely to win. The problem, according to a recent study and survey by Jennifer Lawless of American University and Richard Fox of Loyola Marymount University, is that so few choose to run. Even though a record number are running for the Senate, women are competing in fewer than a third of congressional races this year. In short, what women mainly lack is political ambition. Perversely, a decade of high-profile role models has done nothing to make a political career more alluring. If anything, the experiences of the likes of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and the former House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, appear to have produced the opposite effect"

Consensual sex can lead injuries, rape: study - "The study, in which the researchers compared rape victims with nursing students to come to their conclusion, casts doubt on commonly held view that vaginal injuries are evidence that intercourse has been forced. "The findings are extremely interesting. The nursing students experience just as frequent vaginal injuries as rape victims, and so these injuries cannot be used for much more than to establish that intercourse has taken place"... n cases of convictions based on evidence of vaginal injuries, there could now be discussions as to whether there have been miscarriages of justice... The nursing students' results were not affected by whether they had engaged in rough or gentle sex, or whether they had used condoms or sex toys"

‘Theft’ Law in the 21st Century - NYTimes.com - "From its earliest days, the crime of theft has been understood to involve the misappropriation of things real and tangible... The problem is that most people simply don’t buy the claim that illegally downloading a song or video from the Internet really is like stealing a car. According to a range of empirical studies, including one conducted by me and my social psychologist collaborator, Matthew Kugler, lay observers draw a sharp moral distinction between file sharing and genuine theft, even when the value of the property is the same... criminal law is least effective — and least legitimate — when it is at odds with widely held moral intuitions... We would do better to consider a range of legal concepts that fit the problem more appropriately: concepts like unauthorized use, trespass, conversion and misappropriation"

Indonesian Syariah stronghold 'rehabilitates' punks - ""Why did they arrest us? They haven't given us any reason," said Fauzal, 20. "We didn't steal anything, we weren't bothering anyone. It's our right to go to a concert." A 22-year-old man from Medan city, who did not want to be named, said he feared he would lose his job for staying at the camp for 10 days. "I've just started with a bank in Medan. I don't even know what to tell them because I don't know why I've been arrested." Police said the objective was to deter the youths from "deviant" behaviour. " "They never showered, they lived on the street, never performed religious prayers," Aceh police chief Iskandar Hasan told AFP. "We need to fix them so that they will behave properly and morally. They need harsh treatment to change their mental behaviour"... Aceh, on the northernmost tip of Sumatra island, adopted partial syariah law in 2001 as part of a special autonomy package aimed at quelling separatist sentiment. Only Muslims can be charged under Syariah law, although the non-Muslim community is expected to follow some laws out of respect."

U.S. scholar inspires president to end conscription - "Zue told him that Taiwan's compulsory military service makes college graduates forget what they learned in school and keeps them out of touch with the latest technological advances in their disciplines"

Teachers Don’t Like Creative Students - "'creative people tend to have traits that some have referred to as obnoxious (Torrance, 1963). Torrance (1963) described creative people as not having the time to be courteous, as refusing to take no for an answer, and as being negativistic and critical of others'... although teachers say that they like creative students, teachers also say creative students are “sincere, responsible, good-natured and reliable.” In other words, the teachers don’t know what creative students are actually like"