Links - 7th September 2012

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

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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