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?"