Links - 6th August 2013

India: If you have casual sex, you are legally married - "“Any couple who choose to consummate their sexual cravings, then that act becomes a total commitment with adherence to all consequences that may follow,” the Madras High Court ruled in a recent palimony case in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. The grammatically inclined will note that's not actually a sentence. That’s true of most of the clauses in the judgment. But the meaning is decipherable... police frequently file rape charges against men who have had consensual sex with their girlfriends — sometimes for years — if they fail to follow through on their promises to get married... Ramaseshan fought to extricate a young woman from a relationship in which her former boyfriend had claimed they were married on the basis of Facebook photos, among other things.
Maybe this is why there're so many rape cases in India

Top Ten Horrible Book Covers - "34. Old Tractors and the Men Who Love Them
32. Who cares about elderly people?
30. Still Stripping After 25 Years
27. Games You Can Play With Your Pussy. And Lots of Other Stuff Cat Owners Should Know
25. The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories
22. Bombproof Your Horse
20. My big book of Pretty Pussies
19. If God Loves Me, Why Can't I Get My Locker Open?
17. Sweatshirts with Style
15. Cooking with Pooh
13. She'll Never Get off the Ground. A novel about a woman airline pilot...?!
8. The Best Dad Is A Good Lover
3. The Penetratr
2. Shag the Pony and Other Stories. London: Catholic Truth Society"

PAS moots ban on Muslim muscle men - "While praising the government’s stance in prohibiting Muslim women from taking part in beauty pageants, PAS Youth has questioned its “double standard” in not adopting the same stance for Muslim men taking part in bodybuilding competitions."
Such a valiant stance against sexism brings a tear to my eye

Sober sex is out as British couples rely on booze to get them in the mood - and one in ten haven't made love sober in six months - "Two thirds, 66 per cent, claimed that they simply 'aren't in the mood unless under the influence of alcohol'; while almost a fifth, 18 per cent, admitted that they drank regularly with their partner, and as such was often under the influence when making love... Of those who felt sexual performance suffered with alcohol, 72 per cent were male respondents. The rest claimed, however, that drinking gave them more confidence, and could therefore help them in the bedroom - and 42 per cent said it made them open to trying new things sexually."

Sex blogger’s mother to be questioned by MCMC? - "The public prosecutor argued that setting setting them free would inspire them to repeat their offences. The bail denial drew condemnation from opposition lawmakers and civil society leaders who accused the government of selective prosecution. They argued that while swift and stern action was taken on “Alvivi”, the same treatment had not been accorded on others guilty of past racial slurs, like Perkasa’s Datuk Ibrahim Ali and Datuk Zulkifli Noordin."

Scientists Trace Memories of Things That Never Happened - NYTimes.com - "The vagaries of human memory are notorious. A friend insists you were at your 15th class reunion when you know it was your 10th. You distinctly remember that another friend was at your wedding, until she reminds you that you didn’t invite her. Or, more seriously, an eyewitness misidentifies the perpetrator of a terrible crime. Not only are false, or mistaken, memories common in normal life, but researchers have found it relatively easy to generate false memories of words and images in human subjects... they have created a false memory in a mouse, providing detailed clues to how such memories may form in human brains."

Can You Get Too Much Exercise? - NYTimes.com - "the more races that someone had completed between 1989 and 1999 or the faster they had finished, the more likely they were to require hospitalization in the next 10 years for an abnormal heart beat, a condition known as arrhythmia... A 2011 study of male, lifelong, competitive endurance athletes aged 50 or older, for instance, found that they had more fibrosis — meaning scarring — in their heart muscle than men of the same age who were active but not competitive athletes."

McDonald's: Bristol couple hold £150 wedding reception for 33 guests at favourite restaurant - "Chilled food firm worker Steven proposed after a string of burger-based dates."

How To Travel — Some Contrarian Advice - "There is nothing inherently valuable in travel, no matter how hard the true believers try to convince us. Seneca, the stoic philosopher, has a great line about the restlessness of those who seem compelled to travel. They go from resort to resort and climate to climate, he says. “They make one journey after another and change spectacle for spectacle. As Lucretius says, “Thus each man flees himself. But to what end if he does not escape himself? He pursues and dogs himself as his own most tedious companion. And so we must realize that our difficulty is not the fault of the places but of ourselves.” It’s hard for me to see anything to envy in most people who travel. Because deep down that is what they are doing. Fleeing themselves and the lives they’ve created. Or worse, they’re telling themselves that they’re after self-discovery, exploration or perspective when really they are running towards distraction and self-indulgence... I don’t take it as self-evident that going to this place or that place is some accomplishment. There are just as many idiots living in Rome as there are at home... There is to me, a lot more to admire in someone who stayed put and challenged their perspectives and habits and lifestyle choices at home than there is to some first world Instagram addict who conflates meaning with checking off boxes on a bucket list."

'Discover Your Inner Economist' by Tyler Cowen - "If the quality of food is the sole mission, Cowen argues, look for contrary indicators. “Iron bars on the windows,” he writes, “and barbed wire on the fences, however bad for the residents or your own safety, are both good signs for the food.” The magic ingredient, he elaborates, is extreme income inequality, which ensures a large reservoir of cheap labor to grow and prepare the food, as well as a sufficient number of rich people who, being rich, must eat well."

Lawyer Suing Apple Is Banking On Millions of People Being As Stupid As He Was - "The alleged harm that Weiselberg suffered, besides having to watch Big Daddy, was the additional $1 he expended for an HD copy of the movie that played in standard definition. Remember, he’s complaining about picture quality for a movie he’s watching on a 3.5-inch screen, so he’s not exactly a cinematic connoisseur. A lawsuit for $1 in damages is not going to get very far, so this is a class action alleging that Apple made “millions of dollars in undeserved profits.”"

5 Business Ideas to Avoid in Singapore (2012) - "1. Small Cafes
2. Private Gyms
3. General Bookstores
4. Interior Decorating
5. Small Tuition Agencies"

How P.Z. Myers' "Incendiary Rhetoric" and "Class-War Claptrap" Shocks His Fellow Evolutionists (Prelude to a Rebuttal) - ""I was not rude enough to MacLatchie," writes PZ Myers, despite the fact that PZ recently told pro-intelligent design undergraduate student Jonathan M. that he should be "ashamed to have been responsible for this bulls--t." Apparently PZ doesn't feel it was "rude enough" to have alleged that Jonathan M.:
is a "flaming moron"
"is an idiot"
is guilty of "ignorance"
is "completely ineducable"
promotes "ludicrous nonsense"
"doesn't know word one about basic biological concepts"...
Is this the type of dialogue that new atheist evolutionists stand for? Such harsh personal attacks from PZ and his followers are nothing new. In fact, the rhetorical strategies of Professor Myers and his colleagues are so uncivil that they have earned criticism from mainstream academics and writers who are otherwise pro-evolution... A credible academic reviewing evolution blogs in a leading evolution-educational journal just said that "amateur" blogs are a "better source of information about science" than P.Z. Myers' renowned Pharyngula... 'If the goal is to create an America more friendly toward science and reason, the combativeness of the New Atheists is strongly counterproductive'... Even left-leaning media outlets like the NY Times and LA Times have taken notice of PZ's uncivil methods... the NY Times doesn't see Myers' methods favorably. Instead, the paper compares PZ Myers' blog (as well as his fellow science bloggers) to "Fox News"--the ultimate insult in the left-leaning world of the establishment media... PZ's harsh rhetorical style is, in effect, a deliberate method of silencing opposition"
Not coincidentally, he is also a feminist

The Medium - The Uses and Abuses of Science Blogging - NYTimes.com - "The stilted and seething tone of some of the defection posts sent me into the ScienceBlogs archives, where I expected to find original insights into science by writers who stress that they are part of, in the blogger Dave Munger’s words, “the most influential science blogging network in the world.” And while I found interesting stuff here and there, I also discovered that ScienceBlogs has become preoccupied with trivia, name-calling and saber rattling. Maybe that’s why the ScienceBlogs ship started to sink... PZ Myers revels in sub-“South Park” blasphemy, presenting (in one recent stunt) his sketch of the Prophet Muhammad as a cow-pig hybrid excited about “raping a 9-year-old girl.” Clearly I’ve been out of some loop for too long, but does everyone take for granted now that science sites are where graduate students, researchers, doctors and the “skeptical community” go not to interpret data or review experiments but to chip off one-liners, promote their books and jeer at smokers, fat people and churchgoers? And can anyone who still enjoys this class-inflected bloodsport tell me why it has to happen under the banner of science? Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd... Under cover of intellectual rigor, the science bloggers — or many of the most visible ones, anyway — prosecute agendas so charged with bigotry that it doesn’t take a pun-happy French critic or a rapier-witted Cambridge atheist to call this whole ScienceBlogs enterprise what it is, or has become: class-war claptrap"

Heston Blumenthal Cooks Mice - YouTube - "Heston Blumenthal cooks mice and tries to get the public to eat them. Surprisingly, they're not that up for it."

Lawyer: Apple Should Protect Me From My Porn Addiction - "The Plaintiff began desiring, younger more beautiful girls featured in porn videos than his wife, who was no longer 21. His failed marriage caused the Plaintiff to experience emotional distress to the point of hospitalization. The Plaintiff could no longer tell the difference between internet pornography and tangible intercourse due to the content he accessed through the Apple products, which failed to provide him with warnings of the dangers of online pornography whatsoever."