Links - 9th July 2019 (2)

Davina Sparks Case: Can a Witness Wear a Veil? - "The Constitution guarantees public trial by jury, affords defendants an opportunity to confront witnesses testifying against them, and protects the free exercise of religion.What happens when those rights are in conflict?... How relatively embarrassing, intimidating, or traumatizing is it to compel a veil-wearing Muslim to expose her face?"

— look. i don’t think my stretch marks are... - "look. i don’t think my stretch marks are beautiful. i don’t think they’re tiger stripes or natural tattooos. i don’t think my acne is beautiful. i don’t think the bags under my eyes are beautiful. i just think they’re human. and i don’t think i have to be beautiful all of the time in order to be accepted and loved and sucessful. i don’t think every small detail of my outer appearence needs to be translated into prettiness."

Do Singaporean Women Only Take their Husband's Last Name When It Sounds Special? - "“I feel like Singaporean women tend to take on their husband’s surname after marriage if their husband is ang moh.”... another chimes in that everyone who has taken on their husband’s surname or adopted a double-barrel surname seems to have a Caucasian husband. There is a glaring lack of mention about interracial marriages not involving Caucasian men or men with Caucasian sounding surnames"

Keep dogs away from Muslims, signs posted in Pitt Meadows off-leash park say - "The city of Pitt Meadows is removing unsanctioned signs posted in one of its off-leash dog parks asking owners to keep their canines away from Muslim people.A number of flyers were recently posted in Hoffman Park asking dog owners to keep their pets leashed."Many Muslims live in this area and dogs are considered filthy in Islam. Please keep your dogs on a leash and away from the Muslims who live in this community," the flyers read.

Why Does Islam Teach Hatred of Dogs? - "A Muslim taxi-driver in England, one Abandi Kassim, was recently fined for refusing to take on a blind passenger’s seeing-eye dog because, as Kassim claimed: “For me, it’s about my religion.”There have been many such cases in the U.S., the UK, and Canada of Muslims refusing to pick up fares with seeing-eye dogs. Many of the Somali taxi drivers who made up three-quarters of the 900 taxi drivers at the Minneapolis airport refused to pick up blind passengers because of their dogs. When forced to do so, some of them simply quit... Dogs are to be killed, according to Muhammad, with the only exception made for those that are used for hunting or to guard a herd of cattle... It was easy to distinguish the Christians, and to prevent fraternizing between Muslims and Christians. Christians had paintings, icons, and statues in their homes -- the very things which, according to the hadith of Bukhari, the angel Gabriel said would prevent him from entering a house. That led to Muhammad to command the same for his followers... dogs are revered in Zoroastrianism.The conquest by the Muslim Arabs of the Sasanian Empire (Persia) by 651 made the Muslims masters of the Persian Zorostrians. And just as the Muslims could use Muhammad’s ban on “pictures” to distinguish themselves from the Christians they conquered, a similar ban on dogs would help Muslims to distinguish themselves from the Zoroastrians they conquered"

Muslim countries have highest rates of suicide, murder, rape and mental health problems - "Suicide, murder, rape and mental health conditions are skyrocketing in a stretch of Muslim-majority countries from Morocco to Pakistan, many of which have been wracked by violence and conflict.A major study covering data from the last 25 years shows soaring rates of death by suicide or at the hands of others. In 2015 alone, the last year for which data was used, around 30,000 people committed suicide, while 35,000 were murdered. The figures do not include deaths in places which are at war, such as Syria and Iraq, and represent increases of 100 per cent and 152 per cent respectively since 1990.The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)"

Stronger than aluminum, a heavily altered wood cools passively - " the wood has some properties that could make it extremely useful as cladding, covering the exterior of a building. While most of the cellulose fibers are aligned along the grain of the wood, that alignment is very rough—there's plenty of variability in their orientation. That means light that strikes the processed wood will bounce around within a dense mesh of cellulose fibers, scattering widely in the process. The end result is a material that looks remarkably white, in the same way a sugar cube looks white even though each sugar crystal in it is transparent.As a result, the material is really bad at absorbing sunlight, and thus it doesn't capture the heat in the same way regular wood does.But it gets better. The sugars in cellulose are effective emitters of infrared radiation, and they do so in two areas of the spectrum where none of our atmospheric gases is able to reabsorb it. The end result is that, if the treated wood absorbs some of the heat of a structure, wood can radiate it away so that it leaves the planet entirely. And the wood is able to do so even while it's being blasted by direct sunlight... covering an apartment building with the treated wood could save about 35 percent of the energy used for cooling. In a dense urban setting, that number goes up to over half. Plus, it also has the strength to handle some of the internal structure of the building. And while forestry can create environmental issues, it is certainly possible to manage it in a way that is sustainable."

'Aquaman' Has No Business Being This Good - "Aquaman is a hilariously dense, intensely nerdy, and sublimely silly project, one where discussions of oceanic parliamentary law exist alongside a giant octopus playing the drums... Aquaman serves as further evidence that the DC Universe can thrive if it embraces the grander sincerity of its godlike heroes rather than trying to ground them in the real world. Yes, Momoa knows how to have a good time amid all the underwater special effects and encyclopedic world-building. There’s plenty of humor and fun to be found in a film where Dolph Lundgren rides a giant seahorse into battle. But Aquaman works because it isn’t laughing at itself—it’s both joyously whimsical and confident in its own seaworthiness."

Seeing Superman Increases Altruism

Fat–Carb Combo Is a Potent One–Two Punch - "foods high in both carbs and fats tickle the brain’s reward circuits more so than snacks that showcase just one or the other... 'Modern processed foods like french fries, donuts, hamburgers and even yogurts contain high levels of fat and carbohydrate. In contrast, foods high in fat and carbohydrate are very rare, if they ever existed at all, in the natural food environment. So we wondered, if fat and carbohydrate both release dopamine, might it be the case that their simultaneous consumption produces a superadditive response, resulting in foods that are more reinforcing, calorie for calorie?'"

Primate Conflicts Play Out in the Operating Room - "conflict in the OR surged when male surgeons' teams were mostly male; or when female surgeons were with mostly female teams. "It would be a no-brainer if we found that all females were cooperative, but that's not what we found."Instead, the highest levels of cooperation occurred when a female surgeon had a male surgical team, and vice versa—perhaps, Jones says, because those mixed teams avoided male–male or female–female conflict. In fact previous studies in primates--both human and non-human--have shown that competition is strongest between individuals of the same gender"

The Crusades Were a Reasonable Response to Unchecked Islamic Aggression - "People who believe the Crusades were somehow "bad" inevitably are completely and unforgivably ignorant of both Christian and Moslem histories, let alone the infamous and barbaric treatment of Christians under invading Moslem armies in Spain, Portugal and France between AD 711-1492... By the time the Crusades had started in AD 1099, invading Moslem armies had slaughtered countless thousands of Christians in the Levant, the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Portugal, France and Italy. A full 90% of Christian territory had been unjustly invaded and annexed. And under the lash of their "peaceful" Moslems overlords, Christians were enslaved, raped, forced to pay the extortionist tax known as the jizya"

Ariana Grande sued for S$68,000 – for using photos of herself - "Ariana Grande is being sued by a photographer, who claims that she used two of his photographs on Instagram without permission.Robert Barbera has sued the megastar for copyright infringement and is seeking damages to the tune of US$25,000 (S$34,000) per photo or all the profits she made from the photographs."

Speech2Face: Neural Network Predicts the Face Behind a Voice - "In a paper published recently, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have proposed a method for learning a face from audio recordings of that person speaking.The goal of the project was to investigate how much information about a person’s looks can be inferred from the way they speak"
"Stereotypes"

Fast Walkers Live Average Of 20 Years Longer Than Slow Walkers, Study Finds - "After researching a pool of almost 500,000 people, the study found that fast walkers lived an average of 20 years longer than their slow-paced counterparts... Experts say it boils down to fast walking is an indication of better physical fitness, regardless of weight or even height for that matter."

Faster walkers more likely to live longer - "middle-aged people who reported that they are slow walkers were at higher risk of heart-related disease compared to the general population. The study, which also used data from the UK Biobank, showed that slow walkers were twice as likely to have a heart-related death as fast walkers, even when other risk factors such as smoking and body mass index were taken into account."

Captain Marvel steals a Motorcycle Extended Scene - CAPTAIN MARVEL (2019) Movie Clip - YouTube
This is very telling about how feminists think - speech you don't like should be met with violence. The original scene was already silly enough
Comments: "Yes. The new face of the MCU is a 'hero' who hurts, threatens and steals from people for being rude to her. Are we sure she's not a villain?"
"Do she does the exact same thing as the first terminator and someone thought "Yup that's what a hero would do.""
"This scene is referencing the motorcycle bar scene in Terminator 2, but it's a very poor imitation. It works in T2 because Arnold is an amoral character at the beginning and literally has no concept that killing is wrong until John teaches him. His only guiding principles are to protect and follow the orders of John Connor. And even then, Arnold only responded after being assaulted himself. This is someone playing bully because they're stronger than their victim and can get away with it, while also pretending to be the good guy. She not only assaults and robs this guy over being a cocky jackass, but also robs innocent store owners and almost causes a car accident."
""Oh my god, he flirted with me! I'm going to break his hand and steal the motorcycle.""

Martin Luther King Jr ‘watched and laughed’ as woman was raped, secret FBI recordings allege - "J Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s notorious director, believed the material gathered by his agents in the Sixties exposed the civil rights leader as a “notorious liar” and “one of the lowest characters in the country”.It included a tape which, according to an FBI summary, recorded King laughing and offering “advice” as a fellow Baptist minister “forcibly raped” a woman... Michael Mosbacher, the acting editor of Standpoint magazine, which is publishing Mr Garrow’s article about the files, said the files reveal MLK as “the Harvey Weinstein of the civil rights movement”... “The group met in his room and discussed which women among the parishioners would be suitable for natural or unnatural sex acts.“When one of the women protested that she did not approve of this, the Baptist minister immediately and forcibly raped her.”A handwritten memo, probably added by the FBI’s head of intelligence operations, adds: “King looked on, laughed and offered advice.”"
Does intersectionality mean you should release this and villify him, or bury it and praise him?

Jack Ma Alibaba when you’re rich whatever the fck you say is wisdom