Links - 12th August 2018 (2)

Soon, Your Sex Doll Will Have An Intelligent Conversation With You

Sex Doll Brothel Opens Up in Barcelona - "Lumi Dolls brags that its dolls are among the most realistic on the market — and they cost around €120 per hour, which is about $127"

Party Doll Bunny Girl Saori & Geisha Tomoko sex dolls by Orient Industry - "The Party Doll Geisha Tomoko is without doubt the most unusual Orient Industry sex doll available. Not only does she look ravishing, you can squeeze her exquisite right breast and then the drink stored in the table compartment will come out of her left breast. Orient Industry has created a sex doll that is also a drink dispenser: the perfect party hostess. Gesiah Tomoko comes with a traditional Japanse costume."

156: Meet high-end China sex doll offering 'alternative' to adultery - "Like millions in China who leave their hometowns to work in the cities, the 29-year-old automobile designer leads a bachelor's life during the week, returning to his wife and toddler in neighbouring Hebei province every weekend. Liu has been married for more than a decade, and does not want to be unfaithful, but still needs to satisfy his sexual appetites."

Sex doll 'brothel': Paris council to decide on future of Xdolls games centre - "Currently, Xdolls is registered as a games centre, but opponents argue it is effectively a brothel... Mr Lousquy says the dolls are sex toys and that he does not see them as degrading to women."

To Your Brain, A Runner’s High Looks A Lot Like Smoking Weed
Ban running!

Israeli army: Video shows killed Gaza medic throwing gas canister - "The Israeli military released a video Thursday showing a Palestinian volunteer medic who was killed on Friday in Gaza border clashes with the army, throwing a gas canister at the demonstration. In the video, Razan al-Najjar is seen in a white coat throwing the grenade with her face partially covered by a mask. "Razan al-Najjar is not the angel of mercy that Hamas propaganda attempts to portray"

Masked London robbers steal Australian TV crew’s camera and threaten to shoot them - "An Australian journalist has raised concern over London’s “crazy” crime rate after masked robbers forced her crew to hand over a television camera as they were recording... Footage of the incident showed her trying to grab the $25,000 (£14,000) camera back before her colleague shouted “No, no – he’s got a gun.’” “The thing about this was how brazen it was – we were in an upmarket area surrounded by people,” Ms Irving told the Sunrise programme... It comes amid a nationwide surge in violent crime and several disturbing incidents in London, where a 24-year-old woman was heard begging for mercy before being left in a critical condition in a moped mugging"

Correlation between autism diagnosis and organic food sales

The Best Asian Food in North America? Try British Columbia - The New York Times - "Over 74 percent of the city’s 200,000 residents are of Asian background, according to the 2016 census. (Its popularity among Asians is sometimes attributed to the auspiciousness of the Cantonese translation of its name.)... Unlike sprawling Los Angeles, where the best Chinese restaurants are strung along freeway exits in the San Gabriel Valley, the scene here is highly concentrated: Half of Richmond’s estimated 400 Asian restaurants are within a three-block radius of a short stretch of No. 3 Road... “People often say the Chinese food you get here is superior to what you get in China, where everyone is concerned about pollution. A lot of Richmond is still protected farmland, which means there’s great bok choy, gai lan — all the Chinese greens. And we’re right on the Pacific, so we have access to some of the freshest seafood in the world.”

Do Cops Need a College Education? - "Police behavior regarding arrest and search show no significant difference when considering college education. Officers with a college education and those without behave the same. The author points out that there is little discretion in making arrests or conducting searches, since both are governed by law and court decisions. However, these are just two of the areas in which police utilize discretion. The Michigan State study looked at another area of discretion: use of force. The conclusion was that although higher education has little influence on arrests and searches, a college education significantly reduces the likelihood of force occurring"
Mocking someone for not having a college education would usually be considered elitist. But people do it to cops all the time

Police agencies find it hard to require degrees - "Most departments give higher pay to recruits with four-year degrees, he says, but have avoided requiring recruits to have them for several reasons. Among them: concerns about recruiting enough minority officers in increasingly diverse urban areas"
Disparate impact!

Court OKs Barring High IQs for Cops - "A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court’s decision that the city did not discriminate against Robert Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test... Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took the exam in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125. But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training... The court said the policy might be unwise but was a rational way to reduce job turnover."

Do college grads make better cops? - "College-educated police officers are more likely to be dissatisfied with their job. But they are less likely to use force on citizens... cops with a degree may have negative views of their supervisors. They’re also less likely to favor community policing, a strategy aimed partly at reducing the number of deadly police-citizen incidents that currently dominate the headlines. “Our latest results on police views might lead one to question whether a college education is beneficial for officers,” says William Terrill, professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University... Job dissatisfaction might stem partly from the fact that college-educated officers who join the force wanting to make a genuine difference in society are instead met with the reality of patrolling high-crime areas at night"

Nutritionists write open letter to Jamie Oliver challenging 'damaging' childhood obesity rhetoric - "Led by Dr Laura Thomas, they criticise the government’s strategy in dealing with the crisis and raise concerns about how the language used by leading figures could contribute to eating disorders and weight stigma... "Encountering microaggressions, inequality, poverty, status – these all have an effect.”"
Uhh

Throwback Thursday: Hilarity Ensues as Sweden Starts Driving on the Right Side of the Road

Trudeau uses NYU graduation speech to criticize growth in identity politics - "Respect people who don't look or think like you do, Trudeau said. Engage those with whom you may not agree. And take up a leadership role against the aggressive nationalism and identity politics that are making the world a far more complex place to live."
So much for Trudeau's "Because it's 2015". Presumably identity politics is only bad when it's right wing

The Business Of Video Games: How Much Is Being Spent And Why [Infographic] - "In 2016 the average buyer of video games was 36 years old and mostly male. These stats changed from 2015 and not in the direction that I thought they would. The average buyer went down in age and the percentage of men buying games went up."
Women may make up the majority of those who play games. But men are clearly the majority of gamers

Twice the number of women play Overwatch than any other FPS - "Women make up 16% of Overwatch’s playerbase. That’s around five million female players, generating over $250 million in revenue for Blizzard. Why does this out of all the shooters appeal to women the most? Well, it’s mostly down to the setting, the diverse cast, and the powers"
16% is still tiny. Of course you can still blame sexism

Political correctness is exceptionally unpopular - "Sixty-six per cent think political correctness has gone either much too far (42 per cent) or a little too far (25 per cent). Nine per cent think that it has not gone far enough, with 17 per cent answering “about right”. “Too far” has a majority in every political, geographic and demographic group apart from under-25s. But even among the youth, there is little evidence of “generation snowflake”, with “too far” 20 points ahead of “not far enough” (37-17)... There is, of course, the “political correctness gone mad” cliche. But a look at its broader usage suggests significant acceptance by neutral sources, both in the media and elsewhere. The BBC, for example, includes a political correctness programme category, and numerous other uses of the term without quotation marks, as do various other media sites, academic publications, pollsters’ websites and court judgements. Waterstones has a PC section in its online book shop. And qualitative researchers tell me that the term (and the topic itself) increasingly arises unprompted in focus groups. Other polling suggests that public opinion on political correctness is about more than a phrase with negative connotations. A recent YouGov poll found that 67 per cent felt that “Too many people are easily offended these days over the language that others use” came closer to their view than “People need to be more careful about the language they use to avoid offending people with different backgrounds”... Across the Atlantic, the 2016 American National Election Study found 58 per cent thinking that people were too easily offended. Americans generally give answers less hostile to political correctness than Brits do, although it could be argued the United States is less PC than the UK and that the explanation lies there... Right now Britain is bitterly divided, with the public split on many issues. Poll findings as lopsided as these are pretty rare. And it is hard to think of an issue on which the tone of debate within elite circles diverges so sharply from public opinion. Is it possible that by going to great lengths to avoid causing offense, the political bubble, the media and the corporate world have offended others?"

New Microsoft Project Turns Boring First-Person Videos Into Awesome Hyperlapses - "There are barely any mountain bikers, climbers, skydivers or skiers left who don’t have a GoPro camera attached to their helmet. Nobody really wants to sit through an hour of video of you heading up and down the slopes, however. You could just speed those videos up, but then they become completely unwatchable. Thanks to a new Microsoft Research project, however, you may soon be able to turn those long boring first-person videos into really smooth hyperlapse sequences that run at 10x the speed of the original video but don’t make you want to throw up because of the camera shake."

An Abridged History Of Video Game Dicks

Ronda Rousey says she has A LOT of sex before each fight - "Unlike some of her male counterparts, Rowdy says she tried to squeeze in as much sex as she can before she gets in the Octagon “For girls, it raises your testosterone, so I try to have as much sex as possible before I fight.”"

A porno intro worthy of an Oscar

Mark Lutchman 🇺🇸 on Twitter: "Know why bi-racial adults identify with their black lineage & not their white? Because there's no benefit of being white, no privilege.… https://t.co/cBwdHOwmOG"

'I've lost the city I used to shoot' - "Lui Hock Seng, an 81-year-old photographer, is nostalgic for the long-vanished Singapore he used to capture."

The Evolution Of Star Wars Games

Video: Millennials are ruining proposals with this engagement ring/smartphone case - "For people desperate to turn their marriage proposals into the perfect social media moment, this engagement ring box that doubles as a phone case is the perfect combination. Called the RokShok, when the case is opened, it positions the ring perfectly in front of the camera to film the reaction, making modern proposals even less romantic."

I am a liberal. But I know Democrats in office are no better than Republicans | Alice Dreger - "I live in East Lansing, Michigan, a city so blue that our public library has a social justice reading group – for preschoolers. Our police chief is on good terms with the ACLU. Our high school recently designated all-gender bathrooms with unanimous support of the school board, and our Islamic Center hosted a citywide “Go Solar!” event... Watching our city government came as something of a shock. While the policies were consistently liberal – in favor of the arts, the environment, and the unions – the behaviors were troubling. We saw cronyism, unmanaged conflicts of interest, and a general attitude that citizens are at best naive bores... when people get elected to serve in government, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, independent or Green, they tend to be human, not heroic. Liberals, like conservatives, assume they will govern differently once in power... what I’ve come to believe matters much more than my vote is giving people high-quality, non-partisan news. This is news that doesn’t take sides – that requires us to try to rise above our loyalties, to try to cancel out each other’s biases in the collaborative reporting and editing process."

Trump says he is likely to support ending blanket federal ban on marijuana
Maybe liberals will be anti-marijuana now

Is Pop Music Evolving, or Is It Just Getting Louder? - "After peaking in the 1960s, timbral variety has been in steady decline to the present day, the researchers found. That implies a homogenization of the overall timbral palette, which could point to less diversity in instrumentation and recording techniques. Similarly, the pitch content of music has shriveled somewhat. The basic pitch vocabulary has remained unchanged—the same notes and chords that were popular in decades past are popular today—but the syntax has become more restricted. Musicians today seem to be less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another, instead following the paths well-trod by their predecessors and contemporaries. Finally, it comes as no surprise that music has gotten louder... Loudness comes at the expense of dynamic range—in very broad terms, when the whole song is loud, nothing within it stands out as being exclamatory or punchy... pop music of yore was better, or at least more varied, than today’s top-40 stuff. (A recent study also found that song lyrics are darker and more self-focused than they used to be.)"