Links - 29th December 2012

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell

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Are smart people ugly? The Explainer's 2011 Question of the Year. - "In the U.K., for example, attractive children have an additional 12.4 points of IQ, on average. The relationship held even when he controlled for family background, race, and body size."

MPs call for compulsory relationship education - "The UK has twice the level of teenage pregnancy of France and Germany... While the level of teenage pregnancy was brought down by the previous government's efforts - between 1998 and 2010 it came down by 24% - the numbers of babies born to women aged between 15 and 19 remains the highest in Western Europe... Many agreed that while there was, in the words of their report, "plenty of information and availability of contraception... the relationship advice that should go with this is totally absent."
"Girls who do not become pregnant are also penalised by the system, the report warned, “creating a perverse incentive to become pregnant in order to gain social housing”" - even in the decision to get pregnant, economic incentives affect behavior; the law of unintended consequences still holds

Miss Piggy Snackcercise - YouTube

Does the Earth's magnetic field cause suicides? - "a 2006 review of research on cardiovascular health and disturbances in the geomagnetic field in the journal Surveys in Geophysics (DOI: 10.1007/s10712-006-9010-7) concluded that a link was possible and that the effects seemed to be more pronounced at high latitudes"

Breast Prosthesis | Attachable Breast Forms | MyRealBreast.com - "RealBreast is a line of ultra realistic wearable breast forms available in multiple sizes and 6 standard skin tones: fair, medium, tan, Asian, light-African and dark-African. These colors encompass most natural skin tones. In addition, you may custom blend the silicone color with your skin using blushes and/or foundation make up powders, or alcohol based body inks. Our product is perfect for anyone desiring to emulate the look and feel of natural breasts. Whether you're crossdressing, a transgender individual, or a woman looking for fuller breasts, we have the perfect solution here!"

Exaggerating the strength of the Israeli lobby. - "For purposes of contrast, let us look at two other regional allies of the United States. Both Turkey and Pakistan have been joined to the Pentagon hip since approximately the time of the emergence of the state of Israel, which coincided with the Truman Doctrine. Pakistan was, like Israel, cleaved from a former British territory. Since that time, both states have carried out appalling internal repression and even more appalling external aggression. Pakistan attempted a genocide in Bangladesh, with the support of Nixon and Kissinger, in 1971. It imposed the Taliban as its client in a quasi-occupation of Afghanistan. It continues to arm and train Bin Ladenists to infiltrate Indian-held Kashmir, and its promiscuity with nuclear materials exceeds anything Israel has tried with its stockpile at Dimona. Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and continues in illegal occupation of the northern third of the island, which has been forcibly cleansed of its Greek inhabitants. It continues to lie about its massacre of the Armenians. U.N. resolutions have had no impact on these instances of state terror and illegality in which the United States is also partially implicated. But here's the thing: There is no Turkish or Pakistani ethnic "lobby" in America. And here's the other thing: There is no call for "disinvestment" in Turkey or Pakistan. We are not incessantly told that with these two friends we are partners in crime. Perhaps the Greek Cypriots and Indians are in error in refusing to fly civilian aircraft into skyscrapers. That might get the attention of the "realists." Or perhaps the affairs of two states, one secular Muslim and one created specifically in the name of Islam, do not possess the eternal fascination that attaches to the Jewish question"

Singapore Hall of Shame: Alfian Saat's Untold Secrets - "Oh...I wonder how does Alfian feel when the Malaysians call Singapore dog during the last Suzuki Cup (http://sg.sports.yahoo.com/news/malaysia-dog-football-chant-riles-singapore-fans-055434743--sow.html). How do you feel being called a dog by people from the same country that you admire so much?"

Royal nurse who answered hoax call about Duchess of Cambridge had attempted to kill herself twice before

FileCrop - Search and Download Rapidshare Mediafire and Hotfile Files - "Search Engine for Shared Files"

Long Live the Start Menu [Infographic] | Pokki Blog - "Ironically, in ”about six weeks”, we saw millions of Windows 8 users beg to differ. In the six weeks following the launch of Windows 8, Pokki itself saw half a million downloads of our Start menu, Stardock sold tens of thousands of copies of Start8, and it took only 30 days for 30 different Start menu replacements to come to market. All of which is early proof of our original hypothesis that people need, want, and use the Start menu more than ever... People use the Start Menu more often than they Check Facebook"

Ep3: Shit Singaporean Girlfriends Say - YouTube - "Singaporean girls are sweet & angelic girlfriends! Or.......are they?"

Why the world is running out of helium - "Scientists have warned that the world's most commonly used inert gas is being depleted at an astonishing rate because of a law passed in the United States in 1996 which has effectively made helium too cheap to recycle. The law stipulates that the US National Helium Reserve, which is kept in a disused underground gas field near Amarillo, Texas – by far the biggest store of helium in the world – must all be sold off by 2015, irrespective of the market price. The experts warn that the world could run out of helium within 25 to 30 years, potentially spelling disaster for hospitals, whose MRI scanners are cooled by the gas in liquid form, and anti-terrorist authorities who rely on helium for their radiation monitors, as well as the millions of children who love to watch their helium-filled balloons float into the sky... Professor Richardson also believes that party balloons filled with helium are too cheap, and they should really cost about $100 (£75) to reflect the precious nature of the gas they contain"

Flu fears, rains buoy Cambodia rat exports to Vietnam - ""If you prepare them well and fry the meat with garlic and put some mint on it, they're tastier than chickens"... "Rat meat substitutes well for pork these days," said Khe Le, adding that her family exported up to a tonne of live rats across the border on good days. Rat meat was eaten in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s and for some time afterwards when little else was available. The poor took to rat meat last year when the price of other meat soared, but younger Cambodians tend to avoid it. In Vietnam, rat meat is something of a delicacy... "Some rats are as big as piglets, 2 kilos, and that has intrigued the Vietnamese. They see them as wild animals and they find them tasty," Marong said. Bun Tuon Simona, a Cambodian official in the southern province of Kandal, said the Vietnamese appetite for rat meat has helped a government campaign to get rid of the rodents that were destroying rice fields"

Sexual satisfaction in premarital relationships: Associations with satisfaction, love, commitment, and stability - "At each wave of the study, sexual satisfaction was associated positively with relationship satisfaction, love, and commitment for both men and women. In addition, change in sexual satisfaction between Time 1 and Time 2 was associated with change over the same period in relationship satisfaction, love, and commitment. Furthermore, some evidence was found that sexual satisfaction was associated with relationship stability. Overall, sexual satisfaction had stronger links with relationship quality for men than for women."

Bob's House -- Pepsi's new Super Bowl Ad - YouTube
Comments: ".....what.the.fuck. Who the fuck thought it was ok to mock the deaf like this?"
"Ahhh another uninformed/unintelligent individual with internet access. Do you know anything at all about the Deaf culture??? They know how to joke a lot and definitely love this commercial. Learn before you post man."
"They're not mocking them. It's joke people within Deaf culture would understand and laugh about. You only think it's mockery because people who are differently abled are pitied in our society. Deaf people actually joke about this themselves."

How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body - NYTimes.com

Your Looks and Your Inbox « OkTrends - "a woman is as likely to be considered extremely ugly as extremely beautiful, and the majority of women have been rated about “medium.” The chart looks normalized, even though it’s just the unfiltered opinions of our male users... women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve... the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway... Paradoxically, it seems it’s women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the “average” member of the opposite sex."
"the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process" is a nice euphemism is a good euphemism for "women are crazy"

In-flight internet: Coach potatoes | The Economist - "To prove that this is not an early April fools jape, Boeing has even produced a video, and a bunch of experts, explaining the approach. Potatoes, it turns out, affect the a Wi-Fi signal in much the same way people do."

Michael Kimmel: The Unbearable Whiteness of Suicide-by-Mass-Murder - "In urban settings, when young men of color experience that same sense of aggrieved entitlement - that perception of victimhood despite everything men expect for themselves - they may react violently, and even with lethal violence. But the victims of their violence are usually those whom the shooter believes have wronged him, and the unintended and accidental victims caught in the line of fire. And it rarely ends with his suicide. White men, on the other hand, have a somewhat more grandiose purpose: they want to destroy the entire world in some cataclysmic, video-game, and action movie-inspired apocalypse. If I'm going to die, then so is everybody else, they seem to say. Yes, of course, this is mental illness speaking: but it is mental illness speaking with a voice that has a race and a gender"

S Korea's mass event for singles flooded by men - inSing.com - ""Where the hell are the girls? I can't find any," said Kim Sung-Sik, a 23-year-old college student, describing the event as "utterly disappointing".
"This is awful... I didn't come all this way to get stuck in a bunch of smelly guys," said another male participant who declined to be named. "It looks like there are more doves flying around here than there are girls... I feel like I'm in the army again," he said, referring to the two years of military service mandatory for all South Korean men."