Links - 19th May 2018 (2)

Why babies in medieval paintings look like ugly old men - "These ugly babies were very intentional. Drawing a line between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is a useful tool when considering ugly babies and significantly more lovable ones. The two eras tend to show a difference in values."

Vida Rz - Skirt-wearing men is the message they’re sending the... - "Dutch men dress up in mini-skirts to take a stand against recent sex attacks in Europe"
Comment (probably from elsewhere): "I was speaking to an ex-Muslim bloke from Israel a few months ago and he was saying that one of the main motivations for Muslim migrants to do these things to women was to show how weak non-Muslim men are by showing them to be cowards who don't and can't look after their women. They come from a hyper-masculine, sex-deprived culture and the only way they know of carving a place in society is through humiliation and violence towards other men and they do this here by humiliating our women to drum up violence in the men and when the men don't give them the violence that they crave, they see it as a vindication of their beliefs that non-Muslim men are weak, and this stupid protest will only solidify this mentality in the minds of the migrants as these men are making themselves look weak. #NotAllMigrantsButManyAndEnough"
"I once had to road manage for a teenage boys' choir from central africa. At first it was hell, then someone told me the trick - I had to somehow out-man them or at least outdo them. So I proceeded to drive 15 hours without a bathroom break until they finally had to break down and ask me to stop. Then we went swimming on a lake and I swam longer than they did. With another group, my girlfriend and I beat 8 of them playing beach volleyball. Weirdly, it established enough psychological dominance for us to cooperate. What would Swedish men have to do to establish themselves as dominant?"
"Let's all take a minute to pause and realize a group of people got together and brainstormed ideas to prevent rape: This was the result."

Why do women have periods when most animals don't? - "It seems the list of animals that menstruate is quite short: humans, apes, monkeys, bats and elephant shrews. What do these seemingly disparate animals have in common? It all comes down to how much control the mother animal has over her own womb... "We argue that spontaneous decidualisation likely evolved because of the conflict between the mother and the foetus"... "As the foetus became more aggressive, the mother responded by putting up her defences before the invasion actually began"... The second possibility is that spontaneous decidualisation evolved to get rid of bad embryos. Human embryos are very prone to genetic abnormalities, which is why so many pregnancies fail in the first few weeks. This might because of our unusual sexual habits, says Emera. "Humans can copulate anytime during the reproductive cycle, unlike many other mammals that copulate right around ovulation," says Emera. This is called "extended copulation". Other menstruating primates, some of the menstruating bat species, and the elephant shrew all engage in extended copulation... Among the Dogon, a natural fertility population in Mali, Strassmann has found that women have about 100 periods over their lifetime. This was probably fairly typical for much of our species' history. By contrast, most modern women have 300-500 periods"

The story behind when the “void deck” was introduced and how it was invented - "early HDB flats did not have void decks. They were introduced after 1969. In fact, the term “void deck” was not mentioned in HDB annual reports until 1977/1978... The void deck was created not as a communal space, but as shelter for children on rainy days."

Kettle that looks like Hitler brews trouble for JCPenney

House that looks like Hitler catches eye of Twitter users - "The slanted roof was said to resemble the Hitler fringe, the door lintel was the moustache and the small top windows were seen as the dictator’s piercing eyes"

People who don't have children benefit our environment more than any campaign – it's time to celebrate them

Biden: Clinton never figured out why she was running

The secrets to a truly restorative vacation - "The Framingham Heart Study followed women in a Massachusetts town over a 20-year period, and they found that the women who took infrequent vacations were more likely to have heart attacks than those who vacationed regularly... She and her colleagues believe there are four major factors that contribute to a vacation that offers recovery: relaxation, control, mastery experiences and mental detachment from work... returning reservists were surveyed about their levels of engagement and energy on the job, and they reported significantly lower rates of job stress and burnout after their deployments than before. In fact, their results looked just like those of people who had been on vacation. This seems counterintuitive, but researchers in other countries have observed the same phenomenon. Even though it can be physically and mentally challenging, reserve service provided a respite from the humdrum stresses of civilian jobs. Detachment also requires being able to escape work-related interruptions. Employees who carry their work smartphones or other devices during non-work hours or who must keep in touch with the office while on vacation show higher levels of stress and work-family conflict. A study of the cortisol levels of on-call workers found a negligible difference between their stress and alertness levels when they were at work and when they were on call. Likewise, people who worry about work in their off hours have lower recovery rates than those who do not. In their study of Israeli reservists, Etzion, Eden and Lapidot noticed something else about the subjects’ happiness when they returned to work. After a month, the effect faded, and they were as happy — or as miserable — as they had been before they left. Psychologists have since discovered a similar effect holds for even the best vacations: the benefits don’t last very long... taking shorter but more frequent vacations every few months could provide greater levels of recovery"

Here’s why ST forum letter about not walking on escalators may actually be a logical one - "Trade publisher, Elevator World, which is a Publisher for the International Building Transport Industry, did state on their website that walking on one side does cause damage and problems to the escalator... a former engineer of SMRT wrote to The Online Citizen, alleging that the “Keep Left” campaign created more escalator faults... Walking on the escalator is proven to be more dangerous than standing on the escalator... if people stood on both sides of the escalators, nearly 28 percent more people can get on the escalators, and bam, no more congestion."

Murderous Mary, the elephant that was hanged for murder, 1916 - "Mary was a five-ton Asian elephant, also known as Murderous Mary, who performed in the Sparks World Famous Shows circus. After killing a trainer in Kingsport, Tennessee, she was hanged in 1916?"

'She Answered The Door In A Bikini.' Guys Share The Biggest 'Hint' They Missed From A Woman. - "I was hanging out with a coworker at her apartment. Sitting on the couch side by side, she complained that her large breasts were a pain to deal with because of their size, followed by "do you want to touch them?" I sort of half-juggled them (as though I was comparing the weight involved) and said "hmm, nice." And that was as far as I went."
"We were macking on my bed and I started kissing her neck. She says, "stop, that’s turning me on!" but in a playful way. Youngster me was like "woah, she doesn’t consent." So I awkwardly backed off and got her out of there."
"She said: ”I do tarot cards. Just before I came here, I did a reading and it said my night would end with a bang.""
"Girl invited me upstairs for coffee after a date. I replied with something very similar to: "No thanks, I don't like coffee. It keeps me up.""
"Went on a date with a woman and she asked if I wanted to come back to her place and stay over. I thought it was perfect as I had work in the morning and she lived right around the corner. I literally got into her bed, said good night, turned over and went to sleep."
"She blurted out, "I know how to put a condom on a guy without using my hands.""
Reddit comments: "Trouble is, if we overstep our bounds, we end up on a list. So best to be stupid."
"Guys don't get asked out. Guys don't get complimented. Guys don't usually feel appreciated. Guys here, can you even remember the last time that a random person or acquaintance gave you a genuine compliment? If you can remember it I bet that it stuck with you and made you smile for months. Guys don't get women throwing themselves at them. We don't get positive attention just for being our selves. So when we think that it's happening we second guess ourselves, assume that we misinterpreted what she meant, or we get defensive and wonder what it is that she's really after. We don't believe that you really are interested in us because you girls are never fucking clear and direct in the rare instances that you overtly show interest. You rarely give guys genuine, no nonsense, compliments and you rely on "hints" so that you have plausible deniability in order to avoid making yourself the vulnerable one in the situation. If you want guys to start believing you and believing in themselves then try to make the guys in your life feel appreciated more often and stop with the childish hints and ask him out the way that you expect him to do for you."

S’pore Parliament used to use words like ‘pimp’ & ‘traitor’, according to new EW Barker biography - "Barker: Order. The Minister is now using unparliamentary language.
Rajaratnam: Sir, but “political pimps” has a different connotation.
Barker: In my opinion, the word “pimps” in any context would be unparliamentary.
Rajaratnam: May I use the words “political purveyors of flesh”?
Barker: Please proceed"

‘White men’: the most dehumanising insult of our times - "Let’s call it Jenkins’ Law: the fury that greets anyone who says old white men have become hate figures proves that old white men have become hate figures... The Guardian, slowly morphing from a newspaper into a tumblr account, has been at the forefront of white men bashing. ‘Philosophy has to be about more than white men,’ said a columnist in 2015. ‘Why are so many white men trying to save the planet without the rest of us?’, asked another in 2014. Even when white men try to do good — not that I buy the idea the planet needs saving — they’re lambasted for their maleness and paleness. They can’t do right for being white... The novelty of this year is that ‘white women’ got it in the neck too. That 53 percent of American white women voted for Trump sent feminists into a frenzy. These poor creatures suffer from ‘internalised misogyny’, we were told (ie. they don’t know their own minds). ‘The problem was white women,’ opined a white woman in the Guardian horrified at ‘the complicity of women in their own oppression’. White women are so dumb, right?... The novelty of this year is that ‘white women’ got it in the neck too. That 53 percent of American white women voted for Trump sent feminists into a frenzy. These poor creatures suffer from ‘internalised misogyny’, we were told (ie. they don’t know their own minds). ‘The problem was white women,’ opined a white woman in the Guardian horrified at ‘the complicity of women in their own oppression’. White women are so dumb, right?... that’s what identity politics is ultimately designed to do: to replace the edgy, potentially destabilising politics of class with the fundamentally conservative politics of identity. This is a tragedy. For whatever you may have thought of the class politics of old, it at least contained within it the ideal of solidarity, where people of all kinds of backgrounds might come together to demand a better, fairer deal. The politics of identity, by contrast, is separatist, and fatalistic, dividing us into biological, racial and gender boxes and telling us we will never truly understand each other."

The surprising thing Google learned about its employees — and what it means for today’s students - The Washington Post - "All across America, students are anxiously finishing their “What I Want To Be …” college application essays, advised to focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) by pundits and parents who insist that’s the only way to become workforce ready. But two recent studies of workplace success contradict the conventional wisdom about “hard skills.” Surprisingly, this research comes from the company most identified with the STEM-only approach: Google... among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas... take billionaire venture capitalist and “Shark Tank” TV personality Mark Cuban: He looks for philosophy majors when he’s investing in sharks most likely to succeed."

Trump 'has worn Kim Jong-un down and forced compromise' - "US President Donald Trump's 'hard-line' stance on North Korea will force the dictatorship to make compromises next year, a South Korean think tank has predicted."

Some See Strategy, Others Chaos in Trump's Unpredictability - "The "madman" theory is ascribed to former U.S. President Richard Nixon's foreign policy. To negotiate an end to the Vietnam War on favorable terms, Nixon tried to portray himself as a crazy and volatile leader. He even raised the Strategic Air Command's readiness level in 1969 to make it seem as if he was possibly preparing for a nuclear strike, in an attempt to pressure the Soviet Union to intervene to end the war."

Trump’s entire North Korea strategy could be a giant bluff - "all the hot rhetoric might just be a giant bluff, using the threat of military action to get North Korea to back off."

Trump’s Full Pressure Strategy for North Korea Is Working - "Has the Trump pressure strategy produced positive results? North Korea has blinked, but the sensationalist mainstream media, from The New York Times to CNN, have missed it. But the sharp minds at 38north.org didn’t. They reported, “Anyone familiar with the North’s statements knows that over the past month there has been a major shift in Pyongyang’s formulation about negotiating.”"

Poll panel reaches out to lone voter in Gir forest - "Mahant Bharatdas Darshandas is the lone voter in the midst of Gujarat’s Gir forest, home to the majestic Asiatic lion, for whom an entire election team sets up a polling booth every election... With the Election Commission mandating that no voter should “ordinarily travel more than two km to reach the booth”, every election time a polling team travels around 35 km to reach the hamlet of Banej"
Democracy at any price?

My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World - "I saw a spike in media references to Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book written by my late father, Neil Postman, which anticipated back in 1985 so much about what has become of our current public discourse... The central argument of Amusing Ourselves is simple: there were two landmark dystopian novels written by brilliant British cultural critics – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – and we Americans had mistakenly feared and obsessed over the vision portrayed in the latter book (an information-censoring, movement-restricting, individuality-emaciating state) rather than the former (a technology-sedating, consumption-engorging, instant-gratifying bubble)"

CROWDING OUT IN BLOOD DONATION: WAS TITMUSS RIGHT? - "For men the supply of blood donors is not significantly different among the three experimental groups. For women there is a significant crowding-out effect. The supply of blood donors decreases by almost half when a monetary payment is introduced. There is also a significant effect of allowing individuals to donate the payment to charity, and this effect fully counteracts the crowding-out effect"

Lifelike child sex dolls created to 'stop paedophiles committing crimes' - "Shin Takagi has founded Trottla, a company which produces anatomically-correct imitations of girls, with ages as young as five."

Sibling Prank. : gifs

'Glitter boobs' woman, 20, who attacked festival groper vows to go topless again and says shaming her 'promotes rape culture' - "THE young woman who was filmed attacking a man who groped her at a New Zealand music festival has vowed to go topless again. Now Madeline Anello-Kitzmiller, 20, whose breasts were covered in just glitter when the man grabbed her, has said shaming women for what they wear "promotes rape culture". Footage from the Rhythm & Vines festival in Gisbourne, New Zealand, showed Madeline and friend Kiri-Ann Hatfield following the man and repeatedly punching him... "My lack of clothing is not the problem, the problem is people thinking they have the right to touch my body without consent." "A human's body is their own, and nobody has a right to touch you without your consent, regardless of what they're wearing.""
If breasts aren't sexual why was she upset at hers being touched?
Does she punch people who tap her on the shoulder?