Links - 15th July 2017 (1)

How to get a random Pocket article – Roman Papush – Medium - "At one point I realised that in no way I’ll be able to read the earliest of entries. Or when I finally get to them, the information might be already outdated or simply of no more interest to me. So naturally, to be fair to my articles and to treat them equally, I set out on a quest to find a way to get myself a “random pocket article” button…"

The Faking Orgasm Scale for Women: Psychometric Properties - "(1) Altruistic Deceit, faking orgasm out of concern for a partner’s feelings; (2) Fear and Insecurity, faking orgasm to avoid negative emotions associated with the sexual experience; (3) Elevated Arousal, a woman’s attempt to increase her own arousal through faking orgasm; and (4) Sexual Adjournment, faking orgasm to end sex"

Faking Diversity and Racial Capitalism - "behind the smiling, diverse faces, many institutions also share a dirty little secret. A lot of the diversity is the result not of the institution’s inclusive practices when it comes to recruiting, hiring, admitting or whatever other word is appropriate. Rather, it’s the result of Photoshop... a recent study of 371 college and university viewbooks found that black and Asian students were overrepresented by 50% in photographs relative to their actual presence in the student body."

The World's Most Efficient Languages - "The prize for most economical language could go to certain colloquial dialects of Indonesian that are rarely written but represent the daily reality of Indonesian in millions of mouths. For example, in the Riau dialect spoken in Sumatra, ayam means chicken and makan means eat, but “Ayam makan” doesn’t mean only “The chicken is eating.” Depending on context, “Ayam makan” can mean the “chickens are eating,” “a chicken is eating,” “the chicken is eating,” “the chicken will be eating,” “the chicken eats,” “the chicken has eaten,” “someone is eating the chicken,” “someone is eating for the chicken,” “someone is eating with the chicken,” “the chicken that is eating,” “where the chicken is eating,” and “when the chicken is eating.” If chickens and eating are à propos, the assumption is that everybody in the conversation knows what’s what. Thus for a wide variety of situations the equivalent of “chicken eat” will do—and does... Experiments have shown that [the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis] is often true to a faint, flickering degree a psychologist can detect in the artifice of experimental conditions... When a language seems especially telegraphic, usually another factor has come into play: Enough adults learned it at a certain stage in its history that, given the difficulty of learning a new language after childhood, it became a kind of stripped-down “schoolroom” version of itself... the colloquial forms of Arabic like Egyptian and Moroccan are somewhat less elaborated than Modern Standard Arabic—they were imposed on new people as Islam spread after the seventh century."

Ghost Army: The Inflatable Tanks That Fooled Hitler - "The Ghost Army, today, is estimated to have saved tens of thousands of soldiers' lives with its deceptions, and to have been instrumental in several Allied victories in Europe. It accomplished all that by, among much else, taking "the art of war" wonderfully literally."

Why Didn't People Smile in Old Portraits? - ""By the 17th century in Europe," he writes, "it was a well-established fact that the only people who smiled broadly, in life and in art, were the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment.""

Why Do So Many Women Wear So Much Makeup? - "Women think men prefer skinnier body types than men actually do, and the same goes for men and muscley-ness... The female participants thought the models looked better with slightly more makeup than the male participants did. However, all of the participants thought male observers would want the models to be wearing more makeup than female observers would. They were wrong—men and women preferred the same amount. And that amount was less than the models had actually applied. Specifically, people thought the models looked best when they were wearing just 60 percent as much makeup as they had actually applied... “Taken together, these results suggest that women are likely wearing cosmetics to appeal to the mistaken preferences of others,” Jones and Kramer wrote in the study, forthcoming from the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. “These mistaken preferences seem more tied to the perceived expectancies of men, and, to a lesser degree, of women.”"
More evidence that women don't make themselves look pretty "for themselves". Or even "for other women". But for men

When You Fall in Love, This Is What Facebook Sees - "As couples become couples, Facebook data scientist Carlos Diuk writes, the two people enter a period of courtship, during which timeline posts increase. After the couple makes it official, their posts on each others’ walls decrease—presumably because the happy two are spending more time together"

The Blog Comment That Achieved an Internet Miracle - "Whenever he desired someone, he reproached himself for not having any right to his feelings. At undergraduate orientations or workshops to prevent sexual-harassment, he reacted differently than male peers who were less credulous, less over-scrupulous and better at understanding ambiguous social dynamics. "With their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that 'might be' sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault," he wrote, "I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year." Without hard rules, he felt a moral duty to error on the side of extreme caution, to never act toward women in a way that might be considered patriarchal or oppressive. "My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual"... This self-loathing caused him to have constant suicidal thoughts and to pursue other radical remedies. "At one point, I actually begged a psychiatrist to prescribe drugs that would chemically castrate me"... "feminists throwing weaponized shame at nerds is an obvious and inescapable part of daily life," citing an awful collection of images that are hard to distinguish from anti-Semitic cartoons mixed in to underscore his point... Over seventy-five percent of psychology majors are female—a disproportion which blows out of the water the comparatively miniscule 60-40 disproportion favoring men in mathematics... 'women actually gain a few percentage points as they enter Silicon Valley. What the heck do high schoolers know about whether Silicon Valley culture is sexist or not?...The entire case for Silicon Valley misogyny driving women out of tech is a giant post hoc ergo propter hoc'... there is no faster way to short-circuit cooperation than treating overall degree-of-privilege and degree-of-victimization as vital questions to adjudicate before identifying or addressing specific problems."
More damage caused by feminism

A New Universal 'New Yorker' Cartoon Caption: 'I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.' - "Charles Lavoie argued that every New Yorker cartoon—from bears-waiting-in-an-elevator to two-old-businessmen-playing-with-dolls—could be aptly captioned “Christ, what an asshole!” Lavoie was correct: They totally could. He documented the rewritten cartoons on his blog for many years... Sometime later, the artist Cory Arcangel suggested a different universal caption: “What a misunderstanding!”"

Daylight Saving Time Is America's Greatest Shame - "DST, and shifts and the rupturing of sleep patterns is also linked to myocardial infarctions (a.k.a. heart-attacks), car accidents, and medical equipment malfunctions... Think about what you could do with $147 million. That's how much the Air Transport Association estimated the 2007, one-month shift cost the airline industry because time schedules with the world (a lot of which does not believe in DST) were messed up."

Roller Coasters Could Help People Pass Kidney Stones

How Often People in Various Countries Shower - "Americans attested to showering more frequently than the Chinese, Brits, and Japanese, where respondents said they take about five showers per week, but not nearly as often as people in Brazil and Colombia, where people seemingly sometimes take more than one shower per day... Perhaps the warm climates play a role—though that wouldn't explain the habits of balmy, relatively-infrequently-bathing Turkey and Spain. It's interesting, too, that in most countries people don't shampoo every time they shower. Mexicans and Japanese people come closest to fully sanitizing their hair each time. In general, the world's women shower more than men. The exception, according to a 2008 study by hygiene-products company SCA, is Sweden, the only country surveyed where men were more likely to shower every day than women were... The ideal woman also apparently "has long hair" (repeat: not on her legs), but she "does not wear it up." Meanwhile, the top tasks required of "the ideal man" were to cut his hair and nails short... "Russian women have to contend with the biggest demands for the attributes of beauty—jewelry, makeup and shaved legs—from those closest to them. The survey also indicated that Russian women value these attributes the most for their well-being.""

How the Hospitallers used slaves - "While some slaves could be used to be personal servants and others would be sent as gifts to various European rulers (including the Papacy), it seems that most would find themselves working on sugar plantations"

Yes, Millennials Have More Personality Disorders - "A 2016 UK survey found that, since 1990, rates of depression and anxiety among the young have increased by 70%, while the American Counseling Association has reported a “rising tide of personality disorders among millennials.” That such disorders appear to be an acute problem with this generation may be an unintended outcome of the unprecedented experiment conducted in the 1990s and 2000s by progressive parents. In 2014, a survey of 100,000 college students at 53 U.S. campuses by the American College Health Association found that 84% of U.S. students feel unable to cope, while more than half experience overwhelming anxiety... The majority of millennial children (now aged 18-34) had two working parents; this was partly an ideological project of feminism and partly economic necessity. The downside was the damage done by daycare, services for which grew by 250% between the 1970s and ;90... 'Children in full-time day care were close to three times more likely to show behavior problems than those cared for by their mothers at homes'...
'Your free speech is raping and killing us.'
People with High Conflict Personality disorders experience similarly paranoid emotions about hidden messages, omnipotent threats, and imminent violence... Parents were taught to not scold or punish, and instead to use “positive reinforcement” in an attempt to raise their children with “high self-esteem.”... Positive Parenting created young people with a “narcissistic wound” for whom the real world would be perceived as a threat to self-worth."
More evidence for this explanation of SJW antics

A Patient With Diabetes No Longer Needs Insulin After Receiving A Bioengineered "Pancreas"

Feminists Go Insane Over Mistletoe - "Feminists have been duped again. First they peed their pants for “equality,” then they ran marathons without tampons to end “period shaming” and now they are on a mission to end the Christmas tradition of kissing under mistletoe because it promotes “rape culture”... The scam which exposed the feminist obsession with victimhood was born by a mere suggestion"

Do Attractive People Make More Money? - WSJ - "Better-looking workers bring in more for the employers, just as a more intelligent worker will. Paying them more is still a form of discrimination, but their attractiveness also tends to raise their productivity... You would think you could find examples of occupations where being unattractive wouldn't hurt you at all. But in every one I have looked at, being better looking helps you. For example, you wouldn't think it would matter much if you are teaching in college. But based on my studies, better-looking [professors] are more appreciated by their students. The only counter-example I've seen is a study showing that if you [commit] armed robbery or theft, it pays to be uglier. The white-collar criminals are more successful if they are better-looking, but for crimes involving force, I'd rather be an ugly robber because I'd scare the guys and they'd give me their money faster...
WSJ: For those of us who are beauty-challenged, what about plastic surgery?
Mr. Hamermesh: I know of only one serious study on that, and that research suggests it isn't a good investment. While looks can be altered by clothing, cosmetics and other short-term investments, the effects of these improvements are minor. We are generally stuck with what nature has given us in the way of looks. Surgery pays back less than $1 for every $1 spent. But it might make you feel better."

Why I Just Can't Become Chinese - WSJ - "Beijing doesn't ever expect to hear from foreigners who want to become Chinese citizens... let's say that I decided to become fluent in Mandarin, brush up my knowledge of Chinese history and culture, move to China and live the rest of my life there. Even then, even with thousands of generations of Chinese genes behind me, I would still not be accepted as truly Chinese... China lags behind the U.S. in a crucial 21st-century way: embracing diversity and making something great from many multicultural parts... The premise of the "banana" diatribe was that an ethnic Chinese—even one born and raised in the U.S.—must be essentially loyal to the Chinese motherland. That assumption could be called romantic or racial. It can't be called modern"
Why does China expect loyalty from overseas Chinese if it won't give them citizenship?

The Myth of the Trigger-Happy Cop - WSJ - "In a city of 8.2 million people—and in a police department of more than 35,000 armed officers who in 2015 responded to more than 66,000 calls involving weapons—NYPD cops shot and killed eight criminal suspects. All of these individuals had prior arrest histories, five were carrying a gun or pellet gun, one was stabbing an officer with a knife, and two were violently struggling with cops to avoid arrest... according to an unofficial database maintained by the Washington Post, it is clear that fatal officer-involved shootings are actually statistically rare—and unjustified officer-involved fatal shootings are rarer still... of the 963 people shot and killed by police last year, 852 had guns, knives or other weapons, according to the database, while 48 of the people shot and killed were described as unarmed. (In 63 cases, it was unknown if a weapon was involved.) ... The notion that cops are engaged in the wanton slaughter of Americans of any race simply isn’t true. Indeed, one tragic measure of the risks that cops face is the number of them killed while doing their jobs. According to news reports, 64 of America’s 900,000 law-enforcement officers were shot and killed in the line of duty in 2016, a third in “ambush-style” attacks that in some cases were prompted by anger over recent police shootings"

How Surgeons Stay Focused for Hours - WSJ

MPs blast firms that order women to dye their hair blonde and wear heels in the office after public backlash
How come you can make men wear ties?