Links - 13th August 2012

Woman slammed for giving free meals to poor - "A woman, who has been cooking food for the needy, has been criticised online, with one netizen even calling for her arrest. Rachel Lim Yan Xuan, a 34 year-old dance instructor, has been preparing meals and distributing them for free to people begging or selling tissues on the streets of Geylang and outside a temple at Waterloo Street... “Someone threatened me, saying that as I do not have an AVA licence to cook from home for public distribution, and that as giving the food to the poor is [supposedly] illegal, I may end up in jail”... Ms Lim said that her overseas friends were startled when they saw the comments. “They wondered why a developed country like Singapore would have such unreasonable people,” she said in her interview with Lianhe Wanbao. Some of the netizens who made scorching comments have since removed their posts from Ms Lim’s Facebook account"

I laugh with my friends about how bad Mediacorp shows are on Twitpic - "Mediacorp has been more than happy to be able to do our bit to help us bond"

HAHAHA Hippo gets explosive diarrhea! - YouTube

Italian laws: Court rules it is a criminal offence to tell a man he has 'no balls' because it hurts male pride - "The ruling, which comes after years of legal dispute, did not specify whether any insults against women should now also be considered crimes"

The Freakish Faces Of Synchronized Swimming

If Video Games Were Real | SMOSH

Hypocrisy of the rich liberals who buy their way out of the schools calamity their dogma created - "Sir Jonathan’s profound aversion to private education is well known. In accordance with his principles, in the Seventies he sent his own children to Pimlico comprehensive school in Central London... Now William says that he and his wife have decided to educate their primary school-age children privately to ensure that they, too, do not become — as he has characterised himself and his siblings — the ‘victims of the most cavalier of social experiments’. And his father is helping foot the bill... They were the victims of their parents’ ideological fixation with abolishing privilege — a fixation expressed by refusing to give their children the educational advantages that all too often they themselves had enjoyed... through an utterly misplaced idealism, they resolved that if everyone could not benefit from such schools, then no one should. Accordingly, the principle of equality of opportunity that lay behind selective education — including that provided in the state system by the grammar schools — was replaced by the doctrine of equality of outcomes. The result was a disastrous confluence of comprehensive schooling with child-centred educational theories, which in the interests of eradicating both ‘illegitimate’ adult authority over children and equally ‘illegitimate’ differences in achievement, simply undid the very concept of education altogether. The result was countless numbers of children abandoned to ignorance and under-achievement... The damage done by this experiment has been incalculable. The further irony is that it actually increased the numbers going to independent schools"

Looted Afghan artefacts returned to Kabul - "More than two thirds of the exhibits at the National Museum in Kabul were stolen or destroyed during the civil war... there will be concerns about the fate of the artefacts, given the unpredictability surrounding Afghanistan's future"

Sesame street- MANAMANA - Original 1969 version.flv - YouTube

best running gag ever 2816 - YouTube - "on the muppet show there were strange funny phone calls"

Man writes to Cathay CEO to ask them to stop pilot from having sex with his wife - AsiaOne Forum

The Imbibing Idiot Bias: Consuming Alcohol Can Be Hazardous to Your (Perceived) Intelligence by Scott Rick, Maurice Schweitzer - "Alcohol consumption and cognitive impairment frequently co-occur. We propose that the relationship is so familiar that exposure to alcohol cues primes expectations of cognitive impairment. Across five studies, we find that in the absence of any evidence of reduced cognitive performance, people who hold an alcoholic beverage are perceived to be less intelligent than those who do not, a mistake we term the imbibing idiot bias. In fact, merely priming observers with alcohol cues causes them to judge targets who hold no beverage at all as less intelligent. The bias is not driven by a belief that less intelligent people are more likely to consume alcohol. We find that the bias may be costly in professional settings. Job candidates who ordered wine during an interview held over dinner were viewed as less intelligent and less hireable than candidates who ordered soda. However, prospective candidates believe that ordering wine rather than soda will help them appear more intelligent."
Ahh Americans!

Beyond initial attraction: physical attractiveness in newlywed marriage. - "In contrast to the robust and almost universally positive effects of levels of attractiveness on new relationships, the only association between levels of attractiveness and the outcomes of these marriages was that attractive husbands were less satisfied. Further, in contrast to the importance of matched attractiveness to new relationships, similarity in attractiveness was unrelated to spouses' satisfaction and behavior. Instead, the relative difference between partners' levels of attractiveness appeared to be most important in predicting marital behavior, such that both spouses behaved more positively in relationships in which wives were more attractive than their husbands, but they behaved more negatively in relationships in which husbands were more attractive than their wives"

South Korean gold gymnast vaults from rags to riches - "Nongshim, the manufacturer of Yang's favorite instant noodles, has also said it will provide his family with "limitless amount of instant noodles""

Wrestling the Troll : Sam Harris - "You might think that it’s the triumphant ill will expressed here that gets under my skin—but you would be mistaken. What bothers me is the persistence of misunderstanding. I can’t shake the feeling that if I just wrote or spoke more clearly, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen... people like PZ Myers continue to malign me as an advocate of “racial profiling.” I have written to Myers personally about this and answered his charges publicly. His only response has been to attack me further and to endorse the false charges of others... Simply raising these issues—even to clarify misunderstandings—does little more than inspire trolls... generally speaking, I’m at the limits of my bandwidth and have to draw the line somewhere"
Addendum: "If my daughter one day reads in my obituary that her father “was persistently dogged by charges of racism and bigotry,” unscrupulous people like PZ Myers will be to blame."

Why I don't have comments - "First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally, and most important for you, it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters"

The Macrobiotic Diet: Eat Tiny Portions of Foods You Don’t Like - "Lack of energy (and/or self-righteous bitchiness) may result from following the macrobiotic diet too closely. One look at Gwyneth Paltrow’s self-satisfied blog “Goop” is all the evidence you really need to see…."

delanceyplace.com 5/6/11 - theater acting vs movie acting - "The modern film actor knows that real people in real life struggle not to show their feelings. It is more truthful, and more potent, to fight against the tears, only yielding after all those defense mechanisms are exhausted. If today's actor emulates film, he'd be better off watching a documentary. The same is true of drunkenness. In real life, a drunk makes a huge effort to appear sober"

delanceyplace.com 5/8/12 - the stallion sacrifice - "The stallion was then smothered to death, presumably to avoid damag­ing its body, whereupon the king's first wife, his queen, symbolically coupled with the sacrificed horse under covers, while the royal court gave her encouragement with obscene remarks"

delanceyplace.com 6/12/12 - bible sales vs. bible knowledge - "So biblical literacy is low to zip, even while biblical reverence remains high and Bible sales rise. What's going on? Could it be that biblical literacy is being replaced by biblical consumerism? In today's consumer culture, we are what we buy, wear, and carry. We identify ourselves by our patterns of con­sumer choices, by the market niches we buy into. It's gone beyond that post-Cartesian proof of existence, 'I shop, therefore I am.' Today, it's closer to 'I shop for what I am.'"

FLIGHT RISK! Vietnamese airline fined for staging in-air beauty-queen bikini show

Send Anything to the Edge of Space, for Free

Is there an 'obesity paradox' in diabetes? - "overweight and obese people who get diagnosed with the blood sugar disorder tend to live longer than their leaner peers... it's probably not that excessive pounds are protective, said Carnethon, but rather that lean people who get diabetes are somehow predisposed to worse health"

Cough Medicine: Should You or Shouldn’t You? - "We've never had good evidence that cough suppressants and expectorants help with cough"

Sushi Bullies - WSJ.com - "Geri-Ayn Gaul had her first encounter with a raw-fish autocrat in August at Ino, in San Francisco. First, she tried to add some soy sauce to her seaweed salad. Big mistake. Chef Noboru Inoue scolded her, she says, telling her, "No, no, no. No soy sauce!" Then, she had the temerity to scrape some wasabi off a piece of sushi, because she doesn't like spicy food. The chef's response, she says: "'No. It needs the wasabi.'" She obeyed, and choked down the fish. "I was so nervous, I spilled my miso soup," says Ms. Gaul, whose meal for two, with no alcohol, cost $75 -- before tip. While unaccommodating service may sound like a recipe for a failing restaurant, these domineering sushi chefs can have lines of supplicants out the door... They reserve special enmity for spicy tuna rolls -- typically made with scraps of raw tuna, mayonnaise and chili powder -- which they say were only invented so that restaurants could mask the taste of substandard fish... Some patrons are so chagrined over being banned that they try to come back disguised in baseball caps, sunglasses, and, in one case, a wig"

Texas Gov. Rick Perry: 'political correctness has to stop' - El Paso Times - ""When conservatives are offended by a corporate policy, we simply choose not to give them our business." He added that offended liberals "try to keep everyone else from giving them business""

LOCAL - Columnist blasted online after piece on 'chestless, man-like' female Olympians - "Aytuğ said the Olympics forced women to "look more like men" in order to be successful and wrote about an ongoing "sporting violence against women," while criticizing what he called an understanding of "the manlier you look the more successful you are.""
This portion of his criticism actually sounds like feminist analysis