Links - 11th December 2013

Russell Brand made a glamour model meditate for an hour at 6am - "Russell Brand apparently meditated with a glamour model at 6am the morning after she spent the night at his home, and she has claimed he was "a bit of a let-down" when they slept together. According to Sophie Coadie, 23, the 38-year-old comedian didn't make love to her the first night they spent together earlier this year, instead drinking "lots of tea" and practicing relaxation the morning after... "He also woudn't let me touch his hair. He was very protective about that.""

UK PM Cameron Rejects Call to Lower Age of Consent to 15 - "in countries with lower ages of consent, young people have sex at a later age and teenage pregnancy rates are lower"

A Forgotten Past – The Days When Singapore Mafia Ruled Europe - "It was rumoured that the former dragon head “maintained” his Singaporean roots despite living in Europe for decades. He would talk to his men in Hokkien and missed Singaporean food so much that he had the likes of char kway tiao, laksa and yong tau foo airmailed to him."

From Russia With WTF!? Russian Prom Photos Are Wilder Than You'd Ever Imagine

Meet the first HEARTLESS man who is able to live without a heartbeat or a PULSE - "The device works by supplying a continuous flow of blood through the body, using blades to move it along."

Man behind 'Why I Don't Have a Girlfriend' theory to marry - "Peter Backus, a researcher in the U.K. who once calculated he had only a 1 in 285,000 chance of finding love, has beaten the odds: He's getting married this weekend."

The Married Women of AshleyMadison.com - ""The women's movement into the workplace was the first massive jump into unfaithfulness," says Noel Biderman, CEO of Ashley Madison. "The more financial independence women have, the more it correlates to how unfaithful they'll be." When Biderman launched the site in 2001, he predicted "that the Internet would be the second massive jump and usher in an era where women would behave like men. Ten years later, having built a female brand, I think I was right"... While the overall membership skews 70 percent male, Biderman claims gender parity among people in their thirties (which translates to lots of lecherous 65-year-old men hitting on 30-year-old women)...
Most common career field of male cheaters on AM: Finance
Most common career field of female cheaters on AM: Education"

A Complete Curmudgeon's Guide To 'The Sound Of Music' - "Maria is apparently sent off to the von Trapp household in the early summer, "until September." At the time she leaves, she wants to be a nun. Before the end of the summer, she has decided she wants a military husband and seven children. Maria needs a gap year, or she's going to enter into a series of unsatisfying short careers."

Axe men's body spray: What happens when a woman wears it for a week? - "The Wall of Axe (a naturally occurring phenomenon in which eight or more teen boys reapply Axe after phys ed, then stand in the stairwell together) has become so bad at some local schools that it’s been banned altogether. Another guest described a perennial teen rite of passage—the agony of spraying Axe down your own pants for the first time... The truth is, my experiment in smelling like an adolescent male for a week had only two really profound consequences. One, I really did grow to love the fragrance. And no. I don’t want to talk about it. But two, and distinctly more important, both my kids were so embarrassed that they stopped using it within days of my initiating the experiment"

Fear vs. Radiation - The Mismatch - NYTimes.com - "leading health scientists say the radiation from Fukushima has been relatively harmless, which is similar to results found after studying the health effects of Chernobyl... Beginning shortly after World War II, epidemiologists and radiation biologists began tracking atomic bomb survivors. Researchers have followed roughly 112,600 Japanese: 86,611 who had been within 10 kilometers of the center of the explosions, and 26,000 who were not exposed. The most current analysis estimates that, out of 10,929 people in the exposed population who have died of cancer, only 527 of those deaths were caused by radiation from the atomic bombs. For the entire population exposed, in many cases to extremely high levels of radiation, that’s an excess cancer mortality rate of about two-thirds of 1 percent. These studies have also found that, more than two generations later, there have been no multigenerational genetic effects on humans, Godzilla and the mutant giant ants in the 1954 film “Them!” notwithstanding. Fetal exposure in utero produced horrible birth defects, but no permanent genetic damage. Perhaps most importantly, research on the bomb survivors has found that at lower doses, below 100 millisieverts, radiation causes no detectable elevations in normal rates of illness and disease. (Among several measures of radiation exposure, sieverts reflect the biological effects of radiation.) The vast majority of the doses received by people living near Fukushima or Chernobyl were well below this 100 millisievert threshold. The robust evidence that ionizing radiation is a relatively low health risk dramatically contradicts common fears. But nuclear accidents have provided strong evidence that those fears have dramatic health consequences of their own. The World Health Organization’s 20-year review of the Chernobyl disaster found that its psychological impacts did more health damage than radiation exposure did, and a principle cause of the population’s debilitating stress was “an exaggerated sense of the dangers to health of exposure to radiation.” Epidemiologists are already seeing the same things in Fukushima, where radiation exposures were far lower than at Chernobyl. Radiation biologists say the increased cancer risk from Fukushima will be so low it won’t change general cancer rates for that area, or Japan generally... children in Fukushima Prefecture have become the most obese in Japan since the nuclear accident prompted schools to curtail outside exercise, in most cases in areas where the risk from radiation was infinitesimal"
Deaths from stress caused by the Fukushima evacuation > deaths due to radiation if they had not evacuated
Addendum: More Fukushima people supposed to have died of stress than from direct effects of disaster - Le blog de fukushima-is-still-news

Heather Smith: Porn-Industry Laws May Have Unexpected Side Effects - "Sometimes identifying the actors was easy. They would say their names at the beginning of a video (“Hi, I’m Tammy Jenkins, this is Mark Jones, and you’re watching A Simple Tale of Butts VIII!”). Sometimes I would find myself staring into a writhing spaghetti pile of women, all more or less the same hue of tan, the same shade of blondness and the same shape of bosom, and I would try to pretend that I was plucky and I could do this: I was Nancy Drew in The Case of the Indeterminate Orgy. Other times, I was confronted with complete enigmas, like the performer who was nothing but a penis poking out of a pink bunny suit. When that occurred, I would call over my supervisor, a somewhat bitter man who had been doing this so long that he could identify most of the 20 or so men who worked regularly in straight porn by crotch shot alone... a lot of the laws that get proposed to make porn safer have unexpected side effects — some of which are just as bad as the original problem... In gay porn, condoms are common but testing is rare. By contrast, actors working in straight porn get tested for HIV and other STDs every few weeks, as part of voluntary industry standards. If condom use were mandatory, such standards could fall by the wayside. Or consider the elaborate databases people like me helped to create in order to protect against underage pornography. The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act reporting requirements seem to have done a good job of keeping people under 18 out of the porn industry, but they have done so by compromising the personal information of every person over the age of 18 who has ever worked in porn, or erotic modeling, no matter how briefly. Even as a contract worker with no background check, I had access to the addresses, Social Security numbers, real names and unflattering ID photos of every porn actor or actress that I identified. I could have used their information to commit credit-card fraud. It’s always easy — and it plays well on camera — to call for a simple new law. But the creation of low-cost health clinics with staff members who are trained to work with sex performers would probably do much more to protect people’s safety and privacy. That’s harder than just passing legislation, but we’re far more likely to help porn performers if we treat them less as victims in need of protection and more as workers with a stake — and an interest — in their own safety."

Zhengzhou man steals pet cats, sells them to restaurants as mutton - "the entrepreneurial catnapper described a scene straight out of a Looney Toons short. The man used a live sparrow to bait a trap cage, when a cat tried to get a quick feathered snack the cage would snap shut and the unlucky feline would be on the way to becoming "mutton"... How did the man pass of cat meat as mutton? He told police he soaked the meat in lamb's urine and oil (yum), before selling it on to restaurants at "wholesale prices""

Girl given 200,000 RMB money dress on best birthday ever - "a Beijing girl was given a dress made out of stitched-together money from her older lover as a 21st-birthday present"

Bride has sex with groomsman after mistaking him for husband - "The bride, surnamed Huang, had allegedly gone to the bathroom the morning after wedding night, after which she groggily returned to what she thought was her room, and started touching the man she thought was her husband. It turned out this was the groomsman next door, but she apparently didn't realize she had had sex with the wrong man until the next morning. "Help! I've been raped!" her piercing shriek rang throughout the house shortly after sunrise. Everyone gathered around and after a heated debate, they decided that the family's dirty linen should not be washed in public and that the groomsman should compensate the newly-weds with 20,000 yuan. The proposal, however, was rebuffed by the groomsman himself, who felt he had done nothing wrong and didn't have the money anyway. The couple then took him to the police station but police officers apparently were not willing to take the case because they didn't think what happened constituted rape. Exasperated, they then filed for rape charges against the groomsman at the Napo County People's Court, but the court overruled them, stating that since no violence or coercion was used, the groomsman was not guilty of rape."

China: Trafficked Babies Rescued, but Parents Don't Want Them Back - "Police believe the parents feared that they would have to surrender the payments they received from the traffickers — a small fortune for these subsistence farmers — and were also concerned about having to pay the taxes and fines associated with having an extra child under the one-child policy."

Selfies at Funerals

One blog post gets Air France to crash on social media - "An Air France passenger, Jay Harish Shah, has an unforgettable experience with Air France. Unfortunately, it's not unforgettably good; it's unforgettably bad. Shah writes a letter to ALEXANDRE DE JUNIAC, chairman and CEO of Air-France KLM. The letter is beautifully crafted, which perhaps led to the letter going viral. You can read the letter here."

Difference Engine: The threat in the pocket | The Economist - "GIVEN all the talk about mobile malware—Trojans, viruses, keyloggers, phishing expeditions and other scams infecting the phones in people’s pockets—users might be forgiven for thinking cybercrooks are cleaning up at their expense. Truth is, surprisingly few bits of malware have found their way into mobile phones. More by accident than design, smartphones have turned out to be much tougher to infect than laptops and desktop PCs. At least, that is the case at present."