Links - 23rd December 2012

"Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough." - Groucho Marx

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To Save Congo, Let It Fall Apart - NYTimes.com - "If some enterprises, public or private, can be said to be “too big to fail,” Congo is the reverse: it is too big to succeed. It is an artificial entity whose constituent parts share the misfortune of having been seized by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley in the name of a rapacious 19th-century Belgian monarch. From the moment Congo was given independence in 1960, it was being torn apart by centrifugal forces, beginning with separatism in the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga... Rather than nation-building, what is needed to end Congo’s violence is the opposite: breaking up a chronically failed state into smaller organic units whose members share broad agreement or at least have common interests in personal and community security"

Unicorn lair 'discovered' in North Korea - "they have "recently reconfirmed" the lair of one of the unicorns ridden by the ancient Korean King Tongmyong, founder of a kingdom which ruled parts of China and the Korean peninsula from the the 3rd century BC to 7th century AD."

SHAOLIN STYLE KICK IN THE NUTS 2 - YouTube - "The book of 'Chinese Shaolin Kungfu'. This is Iron Egg Skill. It's also called 'Groin Skill' or 'Gold Armour'. This is a mysterious skill of soft techniques. It is to practise the testicles"

Thanks for Not Sharing - NYTimes.com - "It is tempting to call this unctuous ooze of status updates and vacation snaps seeping across Facebook and Twitter and the rest information overload. But that would be to debase the word “information”... As for Kate she let the world know the status of her labor: “Contractions 3 minutes apart and dilated at 2 cm.” Social media does not mean that you have to be that social. And then there was a Facebook post from Scott telling Addie how she is “my lover, my heart” and — my own heart sank — his “best friend.” It is very fashionable these days to call the love of one’s life one’s best friend. I cannot imagine why. Surely one has best friends in part in order to be able to talk to them about the problems with one’s loves"

Prosecutors Drop Charge Related to "Passing Gas" in DUI Case - "When police were trying to get fingerprints, police say Cruz moved closer to the officer and passed gas on him. The investigating officer remarked in the criminal complaint that the odor was very strong. Cruz is now charged with battery on a police officer, as well as DUI and obstruction"

‘The Generals,’ by Thomas E. Ricks - NYTimes.com - "“a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war”... The flip side of the current system is that promotion even for the most successful combat leaders occurs at a glacial pace: Just as there is scant penalty for failure, there is also little short-term promise of reward for outstanding leadership. No one rockets to the top the way Eisenhower did... rather than admit institutional failure, the Army hierarchy usually prefers to keep a manifestly mediocre or even incompetent commander in his or her post on the theory that the officer will rotate out anyway before long"

Escher Girls - "Now THAT makes total sense! Maybe that’s what’s going on with some of the pictures in the “boobs don’t work that way” tag"

Fake compliments vs. fake insults - "Fake insults from a friend with a tell-tale smile are not exactly hard to decipher. Female dishonesty is much more dishonest, though equally well-intentioned, because it is the whole point of giving a fake compliment is that the person believes what you say... To quote Louis Armstrong, a fake compliment is really saying "I love you". But I believe that we should get into the habit of saying "I love you" instead of giving false compliments... Disbelieving reality is called psychosis, and should generally be avoided. In other words, it doesn't matter how many people tell you that you can jump off a cliff and survive, people that jump off cliffs die. Reality trumps society. That's why false compliments lead to trouble. Let's take an obvious example: terrible singers who audition for American Idol because their friends told them they were good. Eventually, the false perception caused by insincere compliments will be contradicted by reality. In the case of American Idol, that contradiction is public and humiliating... I never believe a compliment from anybody who has not given me solidly negative feedback a few times"

“Girls Don’t Propose! Ew.” - "A sample of 277 undergraduates (M = 19 years) completed a survey that included open- and closed-ended questions about attitudes toward marriage traditions and gender-role ideology. Results of the thematic analysis indicated that both women and men tended to hold traditional marriage preferences—especially with regards to marriage proposals. Multiple regression indicated that endorsing benevolent sexism was related to holding more traditional preferences"

Rachel La Voix D'Homme - Incroyable Talent 2012 - YouTube - "Rachel est une chanteuse de Heavy Metal, avec une voix étrangement grave."
Maybe she's from France's RGS

Battle of the Sexes: Are Men Better Drivers Than Women? - "Researchers who studied thousands of traffic accidents over a 20-year period came up with a finding that even they found surprising: Female drivers are far more likely to run into a car driven by another woman than a man... Crashes involving two female drivers were "overrepresented" in five out of six different crash scenarios: Variations on crossing another vehicle's path, side-swiping, turning in front of another vehicle, and head on. But here's the baffling part - when both vehicles were driven by a female, the crashes exceeded the expected frequency by at least 50 percent in two scenarios, and more than 25 percent in three others... In a nutshell, what that says is a woman is far more likely to crash into another woman than a man, but a man is less likely than expected to crash into another man"
Keywords: men women better drivers, women drive better

Stoya™, Hysterical Literature - "He’s filming women sitting at a table reading literature. The twist is the things going on below the table... I’ve been told to dress as I would for a date with a man, not a boy. I’m wearing a dress from Vivienne Westwood’s Anglomania collection last year. The cut limits the range of motion of my arms, but ideally I wouldn’t need to open my own doors or feel the desire to talk on my phone while on a date with a man. My makeup is simple, my heels very high but relatively practical, and my panties are both sophisticated and expensive... This attempting-to-read-aloud-and-maintain-composure while being sexually stimulated game is new. The video camera adds a dash of exhibitionism which I always appreciate. Most interesting, though, is the Hitachi that my vagina is about to be making very good friends with for the first time"

Bin2Iso - CodeProject - "This is a free tool for converting one CD image format (Bin) to another format (ISO). The conversion routine is very simple. Just read the Bin image and according to it's structure, write the data in another format"
At 24k this is a really efficient program to convert BIN to ISO

JP’s Panzers Wargame & History Forums • View topic - SSI's Fantasy General (1996) ?
The full BIN of Fantasy General was on a Russian site. Good old Russians (everyone else only has the stripped version with no music etc)

Study: 'Tiger Mom' Parenting May Backfire - "Chinese American students were more depressed, had lower self-esteem, and more anxiety than white students... One key may be to encourage social activities like sleepovers, which Chua infamously banned in Battle Hymn. “Children need the ability to work well with other people, to relate”"

justin bieber turned into a sex doll - "TEEN heartthrob Justin Bieber is reportedly furious after a sex toy company has put his name to a blow-up love doll for gay men. "

Gender roles: When women dare to outearn men | The Economist - "As long as the woman earns less, her income does not cause trouble in the marriage. Once she earns more, however, marriage difficulties jump and divorce rates increase. Interestingly, it does not seem to matter whether she earns only slightly more, or substantially more—an indication that it is not female income per se, but the mere fact of earning more, that causes trouble. Economists may wonder why people with "rational expectations" enter such a marriage at all. The answer is: many do not. The marriage market, as economists bluntly call it, clears much less often in regions in which more women have the potential to outearn men, the paper shows."
How come people never say women want richer men? If you ignore the role of women's preferences you are objectifying them
Addendum: The paper is "Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households"

» Amae – 甘え - "Amae (甘え) is a Japanese concept/word that is used to describe people’s behavior when you desire to be loved, you desire someone to take care of you, when you want unconsciously to be depending on another person (your parents, your wife/husband or even your boss) with a certain meaning of submission. For example, a person with lots of amae would be the one who is capricious so he/she gets the attention from other people, children are the best example of amae behavior, always aiming for pamper from their parents. There is amae everywhere in the world, but it is interesting that in the Japanese language there is a concrete word to describe it, there is even a verb amaeru that means “depend on the benevolence of others”. It happens that in Japan the amae phenomenon is very exaggerated and you find 40 years old women who act like a 15 years old girl. Japanese men like girls with childish faces, they expect childish behavior from women, they like them submissive; they usually prefer this prototype, known as “kawai”, than an elegant, beautiful woman with a strong character. Here in Japan, men/boyfriends/husbands like to be the protectors of their women, it seems they don’t like to feel that the women is the one with the control over them"
This sounds slightly less irritating than sajiao/sa jiao

LGBT Gamers Calling In GLAAD Over Long Delayed Star Wars Romances - "some of the players have taken the step of bringing Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in order to try and get BioWare to live up to their promise to bring in same-gender romances before much longer"
Apparently they are "bigoted". Next up: the asexual lobby