Links - 3rd November 2016

That Male Birth Control Trial You're All Laughing About Left People Infertile - "Commentators lined up to mock weak-willed men for bailing on a trial thanks to what women put up with every day taking the Pill... Reporters covering this – many of whom likely did not trouble themselves with actually reading the study, which is available here – neglected to mention that some of the consequences were actually quite serious. Of the 320 participants, one guy was rendered infertile by the treatment – four years after finishing the injections he had not recovered a normal sperm count. A total of eight men (2.5% of the study) were not back to “normal sperm counts” a year after they stopped the shots (page 4 of linked study)."

The Straits Times - Timeline - "Cold Storage apologises for 'insensitive' beef promotion during Deepavali"
Comments: "I am a Hindu and I fail to understand exactly why this is a big deal. I am not going to purchase the beef anyway so the signage doesn't even bother me. Time to grow a thicker skin."
"Aiyaaa no need to be too sensitive la. Why must deepavali "discounts" be only for hindu related or deepavali related items ?!?! I enjoy good shopping during CNY sales, Xmas sales, Hari Raya Sales ! No need to be too sensitive, i am a Hindu and i don't find this insensitive or offensive at all !!
Kaliperumal Sundaram: "Even pork are given discount rate during Deepavali, I would take it as positive. Thinking that items are given in discount rate to non-Hindus during Deepavali period. They also can buy and enjoy the holiday."
"Just like Leena, I am a Hindu and I don't think it's really a big issue. Cold Storage has explained that it's an oversight. Let's move on please."
"Why is this offensive! Hinduism doesn't force you not to indulge in beef. There are many ways to reach God! In Tamil 'Kadavul' means look within. God is within you! Nothing offensive."
Ummaira Mohd Razid: "What if hari raya promotion they state pork? Of course the muslims won't buy it. It's a promotion on a festive season for the non muslims to buy. In this case beef cannot ? The ones buying are non hindus...im just saying. Peace no war"
"Too hard to believe we have not come out of it....Deepavali promotion for non-Hindus to enjoy the festive along with us....NO WORRIES."

Obama: Hillary What's Wrong With Politics - "President Obama endorsed Hillary Clinton Thursday afternoon, saying “she’s got the courage, the compassion, and the heart to get the job done.” But that’s not what he was saying in 2008 when the two were competing for the Democratic nomination. In a January 2008 debate, then-Senator Obama accused Clinton of being “willing to say anything to get elected.” He repeated the charge in a radio ad that same month, in which he attacked Clinton as “what’s wrong with politics” and claimed she “will say anything to get elected.”"

16 female MPs don saris for Tamil Murasu Deepavali special - "16 female members of Parliament (MPs) ditched their regular power suits and outfits for colourful Indian saris last Friday (Oct 21), for a Tamil Murasu photoshoot ahead of Deepavali on Saturday, Oct 29."
Cultural Appropriation!

This Greenpeace Stunt May Have Irreparably Damaged Peru's Nazca Site - "The ground around the site is so sensitive and so sacred that Peru has even forbidden presidents and top officials to walk where the Greenpeace activists went. Peru's Deputy Culture Minister told the BBC: "They are absolutely fragile. They are black rocks on a white background. You walk there, and the footprint is going to last hundreds or thousands of years. And the line that they have destroyed is the most visible and most recognized of all.""

Why Did WikiLeaks Help Dox Most of Turkey’s Women? - "Whatever else you might say about WikiLeaks, it’s hard to think of an institution that squanders goodwill more efficiently. Even the people most sympathetic to its aims and ideals have had a hard time defending it recently. Just over the last couple of weeks, whoever ran its Twitter account posted tweets that are either anti-Semitic or deeply weird (the fact that WikiLeaks founder and head Julian Assange ranted about Jewish reporters to a British journalist in 2011 certainly makes it harder to view the posts in a charitable light). Then it was revealed that some of the Democratic National Committee documents it leaked last week — timed intentionally to do maximum damage to Hillary Clinton’s presidential chances, according to Assange — contained personal information, including credit card and Social Security numbers, of DNC donors."

Family Sends Pizza Deliveryman to Check on Grandma After Hurricane - ""I was calling the police department, I was calling the sheriff's department, and no one was answering, so I was really worried." On Sunday, when he still wasn't able to reach her, he decided to get creative. "So I just said, 'I'm going to order her a pizza, and if they can deliver it, then I know she's alive,'" Eric Olsen said... "Police and fire couldn't do it, but Papa John's got there in 30 minutes and put the cellphone to her ear," he joked. He said he got the idea to order the pizza spontaneously. "I was just thinking, 'Who can go there right now? Who can I call in a city where I know no one?'""
People respond to incentives

Judith Gabrielle's answer to How do people with IQs of 140-200 think? - Quora - "When I ask a question, I receive condescension from my peers, and literally watch them gloat over them “knowing something” I don't. When I have an answer, it is weighed less than anyone else's. When I have a suggestion, it is resisted always until or unless circumstances obviate its acquirement. When I need an item in stock, my asking creates resentment….even to people standing around when I'm working. They discuss their personal lives, and don't ask about mine. They make post-work plans and never include me…not once. They ask each other questions that they know I can fully answer just so they don't have to hear me give another explanation. The owner has told me I shouldn't work there. He asked me what else I could do for a job while on parole in which I may use my mind. Everyone else's jokes are funny to him, mine are not... I see hopelessness everywhere. I see people clinging so violently to a hope (either an opinion or an idea) which brings their life into relevance, that even broaching another possibility is perceived as an attempt to invalidate their entire worth as a human being. I see totalitarianism everywhere. I see people so wildly bent upon demanding others accept and even celebrate whatever they do in the name of tolerance, that even only tolerating it is seen as bigoted hatred worthy of being intolerant towards... Socially….exceedingly lonely and have been my entire life. Virtually always misunderstood, virtually always see through the façade I'm presented with from someone else….and virtually always borne out as correct over time."

Miriam Cooke - Canary Mission - "Cooke was a signatory to a 2002 open letter suggesting that Israel would use the war in Iraq to engage in “ethnic cleansing” against Palestinians. No retractions were ever issued for the letter after its claims failed to materialize. Cooke has reportedly whitewashed Palestinian female suicide bombing attacks targeting Israelis, saying: “For those of us who really are concerned with women’s role in the Arab public square, in the way in which women have been trying to empower themselves vis-à-vis the U.S., vis-à-vis old colonial powers, vis-à-vis their own men, the situation has become so desperate that now women’s participation in war is a mark of absolute hopelessness.” This line of reasoning runs counter to that of other professors, like Rabab Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University (SFSU) who lionize Palestinian women’s involvement in terrorist violence. Abdulhadi and others routinely praise female terrorists such as international hijacker Leila Khaled as an “icon in liberation movements and…an icon for women’s liberation.” According to a Middle East forum report, Cooke wrote that “complicated relations” between Muslim men and women are solely the result of the “colonial experience.” On the other hand, Cooke has also defended polygamy in the Muslim world... Cooke posited that addressing the suppression of women by Muslim men, in particular, was the key to terminating the mad drive for Empire and ushering in world peace. Along the way, she blamed the establishment of the state of Israel as a root cause of Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: “9-11 has a long history going back through the Gulf War to the establishment of Israel in 1948.”"

Sexist Peer Reviewer Suggests Study Needs Male Authors - "“It would probably also be beneficial to find one or two male biologists to work with (or at least obtain internal peer review from, but better yet as active co-authors), in order to serve as a possible check against interpretations that may sometimes be drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically biased assumptions,” the anonymous reviewer wrote... The paper detailed findings on the scientists’ examination of gender differences in the transition from Ph.D. to postdoc in the field of life sciences... Rather than gender bias, the reviewer suggests an alternative interpretation: “It could perhaps be the case that 99% of female scientists make a decision in mid-life that spending more time with their children is more important to them than doing everything imaginable to try to get one of the rare positions at the utter pinnacle of their field.” The reviewer, whose gender is unknown, goes on to add that the differences could be attributable to differences in physiology and stamina between men and women which could explain why men, on average, work 15 minutes longer each week"
Yet, when there are not enough women, we are told that we need women for "diversity of thought and experience", you can't have a so-called all male panel which considers the gender gay gap (even though there is a female member and many female associate members), and you can't hold an all male women's rights conference. And feminists lament that the burden of childcare falls disproportionately on women (i.e. that women spend more time with their children and so can't do everything imaginable to try to get one of the rare positions at the utter pinnacle of their field

PLOS ONE ousts reviewer, editor after sexist peer-review storm
How can you give a paper an honest peer review if you're afraid you'll be ousted?
Addendum: When there are no females, the research is slammed as being sexist
When there are no males and it is suggested that a male be gotten, that suggestion is slammed as being sexist

It's time to consider a curfew for men - "Think of it as a mass grounding for men. After a designated period of time, we’ll allow them back on the streets after dark to see how it goes. If the sexual assaults and harassment continue, well, it’s back to the curfew."
"Not all feminists" huh

Phantom Carbohydrates – A Nutrition Mystery - "When a food contains fewer than 5 calories per serving, the manufacturer is allowed to “round down” to 0 on the Nutrition Facts label"

Islamic, yet integrated | The Economist - "estimates put the number of Muslims in the country at around 1% of the population, compared with 4.5% in Britain and 5% in Germany. Moreover, American Islam is not dominated by a single sect or ethnicity. When the Pew Research Centre last tried to count, in 2011, it found Muslims from 77 countries in America. Most western European countries, by contrast, have one or two dominant groups—Algerians in France, Moroccans and Turks in Holland. This matters because the jumble of groups in America makes it harder for Muslim immigrants and their descendants to lead a life apart. Different traditions get squashed together... America’s Muslims are better off than their European co-religionists. They are almost as likely as other Americans to report a household income of $100,000 or more. The same cannot be said of the Pakistanis who came to work in the now-defunct textile mills of northern England or the Turks who became guest workers in West Germany"

The Bedouin Billionaire for Muslim Integration - WSJ - "Mr. Altrad’s biggest challenge wasn’t academic or professional success—that would come easily—but learning to integrate himself. “When you are born in Syria,” he recalls, “you grow with ideas which are not necessarily correct. For example, they educate you that you have to kill Jews wherever you find them. When I came to France I came with this idea.” But then he found himself learning alongside Jewish students at university, “and we became friends”... His thinking about assimilation sounds harsh. But it would be familiar to the immigrants who came to the U.S. at the height of America’s open-borders policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries."

Tumblr Originals: shows original posts and hides reblogs for any given tumblr blog. - "This tool will show only original posts and hide all reblogs for any given tumblr blog. Awesome."

Boba Fett Was Supposed to Be a Bigger Bad Than Darth Vader

Van driver Christopher Gard with eight convictions for using phone at wheel killed cyclist Lee Martin while texting - six weeks after judge let him keep licence

Marvel Pulls Variant Cover For Sexualizing Invincible Iron Man's New 15-Year-Old Hero
If you try to please SJWs, they will just turn on you. What's so sexualised about the Iron Man cover?! And isn't this how teenagers dress?!
And considering real 15 year black girls are also curvy - and some have even bigger breasts...
Comments: "people are so worked up by the body type/costumes of said teen superheroes, but are okay with the notion of them being sent out to potentially die fighting supervillains. It just seems messed up all around."
"I showed this image to my girlfriend who is not particularly comic book savvy... when I told her the character was 15 and the image was pulled from use because the character is thought to be oversexualized, she laughed. “Looks like what most 15 year old girls wear.” was her comment. I had to agree."

The Future (Probably) Isn’t as Scary as You Think - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "when Kasparov lost, there were several things that went through people’s minds. One is: well that’s the end of chess. It’s like, who’s going to play competitively because computers are always going to win? And that didn’t happen. In a funny kind of way, playing against computers actually increased the extent to which chess became popular. And, on average, the best players became better playing against the artificial minds. And then finally, Kasparov, who lost, realized at the time, that — he said, “you know, it’s kind of unfair because if I had access to the same database that Deep Blue had of every single chess move ever, I could have won”... the best chess player on this planet is not an AI. And it’s not a human. It’s the team that he calls centaurs; it’s the team of humans and AI. Because they’re complementary. Because AIs think differently than humans. And the same of the world’s best medical diagnostician is not Watson, it’s not a human doctor. It’s the team of Watson plus doctor"