Links - 8th June 2017 (1)

Steven Lim: One Last Shot at Fame - "I was surprised when I finally reach Steven’s father on the phone and the man speaks to me for a full ten minutes before agreeing to a meeting. He’s driving when this happens, and stops the car just so I can have his undivided attention. He makes it clear to me: he’s only agreeing to talk because Steven is his son, and he hopes I will be able to talk some sense into him."

Before 'Batman Begins': The Secret History of the Dark Knight Movies That Almost Got Made - "Wise and Shapirio tried to charm Warner Bros. execs by mailing them action figures of Scarecrow and Man-Bat, but it was no use."

British special forces are using Bollywood songs to freak out ISIS - "In another incident, they intercepted ISIS' internal communications and blasted them with Bollywood tunes instead. The experiments have reportedly revealed their hiding places and weaknesses, depending on how much time it took the militants to reach the source of the music and how they complained about the music."

COMMENT: Singapore maintains ban on 1970s soft porn - "the MDA review hinted at its progressive side, proudly acknowledging that Fanny Hill was being taken off the banned list. Fanny Hill is an erotic novel set in London. Fanny Hill was published in 1748. So, about 250 years from now, we can look forward to Playboy being taken off the banned list."

Why you really get sick on planes – and how to prevent it - "the air you breath on a typical airplane flight is thoroughly clean. Fresh air from outside the plane is continuously drawn into the cabin via what are known as compressor stages in the jet's engines. These stages compress the very cold and extremely thin air from outside the plane until its pressure matches that of the cabin. Pressurizing the air also heats it up, so it's cooled back down before passing through High-Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filters (which remove a minimum of 99.97% of any airborne particulates, bacteria and viruses) and combining with recirculated cabin air. But there's that word again. Recirculated. Yes, the fresh air from outside the plane combines with some air that's already been making the rounds in the cabin for a little while — but that circulating air started out as fresh external air itself, and it too has been cycling through HEPA filters. What's more, recirculating cabin air is continuously released from the plane via outflow valves, so air inside the plane is constantly being replaced by the fresh air from outside. In fact, the average airplane's cabin air is completely refreshed about 20 times per hour. By comparison, the air in your average office building (which is also typically HEPA-filtered) is refreshed just 12 times per hour. In other words, the air you breathe at cruising altitude is most likely significantly cleaner than just about any you're liable to find on the ground."

Indonesian officials ordered to eat street food to trim budget

Underground Prison Cuisine - "they created strange but what was to them a wonderful meal. “Onions and garlic smuggled from the kitchen, mixed with tofu and noodles from lunch, then add luncheon meat, stew pork and soy sauce. That’s fine dining already!” reminisced Benny. In certain prisons, there were other means to get fresher ingredients. At the Selarang Park DRC, with lush surroundings, wild animals that foraged their way into the premise would fall prey to the desperate inmates working in the garden. Jeffery, a former detainee there, had a vivid impression of a particular hunting method. “They stuck long needles into the grass patch, and then scatter bread crumbs over them to lure the pigeons,” he said. Such ideas and cooking methods were passed down through generations of inmates. They even learnt how to make alcohol from the Malaysian and Indonesians convicts, using antiseptic, pineapple skins and orange juice, “I think that’s how they did it at home,” said Jeffrey... According to Jeffery and Josiah, who left the prison in 2009, inmates no longer ‘masak’ since the early 90s, when prisons were consolidated and the cells were installed with surveillance cameras"

Liquid nitrogen cocktail: Wine bar fined £100k after teenager loses stomach - Telegraph - " Training notes were said to have been "loose" with staff told to wait 10 seconds until the liquid nitrogen had boiled off before consumption"

Fact Checking The Claim Of 97% Consensus On Anthropogenic Climate Change - "Even though belief is clearly below 97%, support over 80% is strong consensus. Would a lower level of consensus convince anyone concerned about anthropogenic global warming to abandon their views and advocate unrestricted burning of fossil fuels? I think not. Even the 2016 Cook paper says “From a broader perspective, it doesn’t matter if the consensus number is 90% or 100%.”
Significantly, this was written by someone with 35 years experience in the oil and gas industry

Do you pronounce 'scone' to rhyme with 'cone' or 'gone'? It depends where you're from - "In fact, the way you pronounce scone says far less about your class and much more about your geographical origins – for, according to “The Great Scone Map”, produced by Cambridge University academics, its pronunciation follows a discernible pattern across Britain and Ireland. Those who rhyme it with gone predominate in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the north of England. Those who rhyme with cone dominate in southern Ireland and the Midlands. The rest of the country is a mixture of the two pronunciations. And, just to complicate the matter, there is a third pronunciation available for the word – in the form of the village of Scone in Scotland, which is pronounced “skoon”... some experts believe that in 50 to 100 years the use of “th” in popularly spoken English will have disappeared. “The idea horrifies some English language teachers but at the end of the day we have to accept that words and their pronunciation are flexible and changeable,” says Setter."

Italian waitress saves up for 2 years, travels to Indonesia to marry villager she met on Facebook - "Ilaria finally arrived in Batang and headed directly to her future husband's home in Tragung village, Kandeman district. However, the foreigner's arrival quickly drew public attention with Dzulfikar's neighbours notifying the police of her presence. Police personnel was immediately dispatched to check on Ilaria and the purpose of her visit to Batang Village"

Why Free Speech on Campus Is Under Attack: Blame Marcuse - "There was one major influence here: Herbert Marcuse, the father of the New Left and perhaps the most influential Marxist of the last half century, and his most famous essay from 1965: Repressive Toleration. It is here that you find the template for an upside-down view of freedom held by so many students today. In this essay, Marcuse explains that free speech and toleration are illusions so long as society has yet to conform to the Marxian ideal. So long as that is true, in fact, free speech must be suppressed and toleration itself must not be tolerated... Marcuse says that if you oppose policies like social security or Obamacare, you should be denied the freedom of speech and assembly. You should be shut up and beat up. The path toward true freedom is through massive real-world oppression. If you have the wrong views, you have no rights... as Marcuse said with characteristic bluntness, we must push the “cancellation of the liberal creed of free and equal discussion.” We must, he said, be “militantly intolerant.”"

107 cancer papers retracted due to peer review fraud - "Fake peer reviewers often “know what a review looks like and know enough to make it look plausible,” said Elizabeth Wager, editor of the journal Research Integrity & Peer Review. But they aren’t always good at faking less obvious quirks of academia: “When a lot of the fake peer reviews first came up, one of the reasons the editors spotted them was that the reviewers responded on time,” Wager told Ars. Reviewers almost always have to be chased, so “this was the red flag. And in a few cases, both the reviews would pop up within a few minutes of each other.”"

Online vigilantes (unsurprisingly) identified the wrong parties in viral Toa Payoh hawker centre clip - "Kids, this is why you don’t play online vigilante. Thanks to the over-enthusiastic efforts of internet lynch mobs and trigger-happy publications, innocent individuals were wrongly accused of being the central figures of an incident that went viral over the weekend... Dozens of posts accused the young couple in subject to be employees of UOB’s Toa Payoh branch, and word quickly spread around, thanks to Singapore’s endless, vapid thirst for viral news."
I'm not sure if I'm more disappointed that Mothership is encouraging cyber shaming and witch hunting or that almost everyone else is cheering it on

What's the Best Age to Have a Baby? (It's Older than you Think) - "if you define “best age” in terms of the longest life expectancy for the mother, the optimum age is oldest of all. Mirowsky conducted interviews with 1,890 mothers, asking about their current health, including chronic illnesses, mobility problems, and self-assessments of malaise and other problems. Then he looked at mortality data, made some adjustments for educational attainment, and concluded that the overall “best age” for a first child, in terms of long-term health and mortality for the mother, was 34. Social pressure that delays the beginning of parenthood, he wrote, “greatly outweighs the biodevelopmental advantages of youthful organs.”"

New App tells women how many times they were "manterrupted" during the day - "Are you a retarded Feminist who thinks everything is a gendered issue? Do you need an application on your phone that will take up your microphone 24/7, causing it slow down and waste your battery power? If you answered “yes” to either of the questions above, then we have just the app for you. A new application called “woman interrupted” claims they can tell how many times a woman has been interrupted in a day by using her smart phone’s microphone."

An Epidemic of Bad Epidemiology - " Do not confuse hazard, a potential source of harm, with risk, the likelihood that the hazard will cause harm. Consider bacon. The influential International Agency for Research on Cancer declared bacon a hazard for cancer in 2015, but the agency does not make risk assessments. Eating two slices of bacon per day is calculated to increase your lifetime risk of colorectal cancer from 5 to 6 percent. Put that way, I suspect most people would choose to continue to enjoy cured pork products. Kabat also argues that an editorial bias skews the scientific literature toward publishing results suggesting harms. Such findings, he notes, get more attention from other researchers, from regulators, from journalists, and from activists. Ever since Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring wrongly linked cancer with exposures to trace amounts of pesticides, the American public has been primed to blame external causes rather than personal behaviors for their health problems. Unfortunately, as Kabat notes, the existence of an alarmed and sensitized public is all too useful to regulators and other interest groups. He quotes an honest but incautious remark in the air pollution researcher Robert Phalen's 2010 testimony to the California Air Resources Board: "It benefits us personally to have the public be afraid, even if these risks are trivial"... Kabat suggests that the precautionary principle—"better safe than sorry"—is largely an ideological ploy to alarm the public into supporting advocates' policy preferences"

Have Leftovers Gone Bad? - "With the decline of traditional home cookery and the rise of efficiency-obsessed start-ups, however, leftovers face a new challenge: finding a role at a time when meals are increasingly taken outside of the home, or assembled from kits. Is there room for leftovers in such a world?... Home economics is now an outmoded term, but its name contains an essential truth: The economics of eating a meal at home were once substantively different from dining out. Home cooks spread the returns on labor and resources over time. Today’s dinner becomes tomorrow’s lunch. The unused celery from a stew later reappears in a soup. Investments that make little sense when used in one sitting became viable when stretched over many. Leftovers were the defining features of home cooking."

Curly and Italian Parsley? What's the difference?

Facebook is predicting the end of the written word - "In five years time Facebook “will be definitely mobile, it will be probably all video,” said Nicola Mendelsohn, who heads up Facebook’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at a conference in London this morning. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has already noted that video will be more and more important for the platform. But Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech"
Damn lazy people

Made in Singapore: Bibi & Baba - worn by children here since 1947

Be Mine? Why It’s Smart to Court Your Friends - "We still don't have a good way of talking about pursuing friendship. Years of style-section trend stories have documented modern problems with finding and forging friendships. The term “friend crush” gets thrown around, or its gendered cousin, the “girl crush.” (See the lovely ’zine and popular Tumblr on the subject.) And, as has become de rigueur for low-level social insecurities, a few apps have appeared to help people forge friendships. A new one called Ketchuppp promises to help you make time for people you love platonically. And when I interviewed Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen, he told me they hope the app will eventually be widely used to find friends, not just make dates. “In every kind of relationship there’s a person being pursued and a person who’s a pursuer,” he says."

College Leaders Are Too Afraid to Advocate for Free Speech on Campus - "Today, nearly half of a random sample of roughly 3,000 college students surveyed by Gallup earlier this year are supportive of restrictions on certain forms of free speech on campus, and 69 percent support disciplinary action against either students or faculty members who use intentionally offensive language or commit “microagressions”—speech they deem racist, sexist, or homophobic. According to a free-speech survey conducted by Yale last year, of those who knew what trigger warnings are, 63 percent would favor their professors using them—by attaching advisories to the books on their reading lists that might offend or disrespect some students, for example—while only 23 percent would oppose. Counterintuitively, liberal students are more likely than conservative students to say the First Amendment is outdated... many of these students employ the classification of “the insider.” Believing that “outsiders” cannot possibly understand the situation that faces these groups of offended individuals, by virtual of race, gender, ethnicity, or some other category, the students often dismiss the views of their professors and administrators who can’t “get it” because they are not part of the oppressed group... Students and their families have been increasingly treated as “customers.” Presidents of colleges and universities have been too reluctant to “offend” their customers, which may help explain why they so often yield to wrong-headed demands by students... Of all of America’s great universities, the University of Chicago seems to have come the closest historically to getting this right. The school’s well-known 1967 Kalven Committee report was, I believe, correct when it stated: “The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society. A university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices, and institutions. By design and by effect, it is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.”"
How long can liberals pretend this is a small, unrepresentative minority of a group?

Is It Better to Blend Your Food? - "when people who drank the blended “soup,” it kept them from feeling hungry for about an hour longer than the whole-food meal... “So if you eat a mixed meal, the water exits the stomach rapidly and the stomach shrinks,” Spiller explained. This is known as gastric sieving. “If, by contrast, you had made that separation of liquid and solid impossible—by blending it into a smoothie or whatever—then that couldn't happen. The liquid that would come out would contain some calories.”"

Are Tote Bags Good for the Environment? - "Just like plastic bags, totes multiply. In a 2009 article about the bags for Design Observer, the Urban Outfitters designer Dmitri Siegel claimed to have found 23 tote bags in his house, collected from various organizations, stores, and brands. Like plastic sacks, tote bags, too, now seem essentially unending. Because of their ubiquity, tote bags that have been used very little (or not at all) can be found piled on curbs, tossed in trashcans in city parks, in dumpsters, everywhere. Their abundance encourages consumers to see them as disposable, defeating their very purpose... it’s less ecologically damaging for Americans east of the Mississippi to import wine from France than from California... Siegel identifies designers as particular culprits in the oversaturation of tote bags. He notes that because the bags are large, flat, and easily printed on, they’re great for embellishment and product placement. They’re given away with purchases at galleries, bookstores, eyeglass boutiques, grocers, tattoo parlors. Plus they’ve been hyped. He describes the 2007 launch of the “I’m not a plastic bag” tote, by fashion designer Anya Hindmarch... few totes are made to last long enough to obtain the number of uses required to reach resource-expenditure parity with the plastic bags they were meant to supplant. Though they promise timelessness and sustainability, they develop holes, straps come undone, seams disintegrate. They become fouled with stains and grime. Many fashion brands sell bags for hundreds of dollars, with totes tracking the increase in economic inequality... An online poll conducted in 2014 by the marketing research firm Edelman Berland found that about half of respondents typically choose to use plastic over reusable bags, despite also owning reusable bags and recognizing their benefits"