Links - 15th October 2019 (2)

Starbucks shop boots police officers because customer ‘did not feel safe’ around them: reports - "Five officers were drinking coffee at the Starbucks location prior to their shift beginning when a barista asked them to move out of the complaining customer’s line of sight or else leave... Rob Ferraro, president of the police union, told FOX 10 of Phoenix that such treatment of police officers seems to be happening more often these days."
If you feel unsafe around people with a protected demographic characteristic...

Bystanders taunted and laughed as police officers were being fired upon in Philadelphia - "A video shows a crowd of residents shoving and confronting the police even as they were dealing with a tense hostage situation.. Reporter Alexandria Hoff of CBS-3 Philadelphia reported that she had been harassed along with the officers."

Lancet restaurant gives medical professionals food for thought - "The physician, who graduated from Fourth Military Medical University in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, was given a discount of 84 yuan ($12.67) at a barbecue restaurant that is popular with medical professionals as a result of the paper's "impact factor" - a measure of the frequency with which articles are cited in a particular year. The 84 yuan discount was a multiple of the paper's impact factor of 8.4, which is considered a good score.Under the rules of the restaurant, scientists, medical professionals and social scientists are eligible for a discount if they have recently published papers in journals that are included on internet databases such as the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index.The paper's impact factor is multiplied by 10 to determine the discount, which can account for as much as 30 percent of the bill... Since the promotion began on September 21, hundreds of customers have visited the eatery - called Liuyedao, the Chinese name of The Lancet, one of the world's leading general medical journals - near Beijing Jiaotong University in Haidian district... one out of every four diners is likely to have had a paper published in the world's top academic journals... barbecue is one of the mainstays of Chinese dinner tables. Last year, it held a 20 percent share of the national dining market, second only to hot pot as the country's most popular dish... The day after the promotion was posted, 16 customers arrived, all carrying copies of papers they had published in academic journals. So far, the highest impact factor has been 29.51, which earned the author a discount of 295 yuan.Cheng said the discount system encourages the scholars to be more productive... For Tan, it was a night of surprises because he not only encountered one of his former students, now a chief physician, whom he hadn't seen for a decade, but also met Dr. William Summerskill, a senior executive editor at The Lancet in London.Summerskill was attending a medical conference in Beijing when he heard about the restaurant named after his journal and decided to pay a visit."

‘I went to Rome and all I got you was this stylus!’ Rare inscribed Roman writing implement discovered beneath Bloomberg’s European HQ goes on display - "‘I have come from the City. I bring you a welcome gift
with a sharp point that you may remember me.
I ask, if fortune allowed, that I might be able (to give)
as generously as the way is long (and) as my purse is empty.’
In other words: the stylus is a gift to remind the recipient of its sender; the sender acknowledges that it is a cheap gift and wishes that they could have given more. Its tongue-in-cheek sentiment is reminiscent of the kinds of novelty souvenirs we still give today. It is the Roman equivalent of ‘I went to Rome and all I got you was this pen’, providing a touching personal insight into the humour of someone who lived nearly 2000 years ago.""

Why Genghis Khan’s tomb can’t be found - "Beyond cultural pressures to honour Genghis Khan’s dying wish for secrecy, a host of technical problems hinder the search for his tomb. Mongolia is huge and underdeveloped ‒ more than seven times the size of Great Britain with only 2% of its roads. The population density is so low that only Greenland and a few remote islands can beat it. As such, every view is epic wilderness. Humanity, it seems, is just there to provide scale: the distant, white curve of a herdsman’s ger, or a rock shrine fluttering with prayer flags. Such a landscape holds on to its secrets."

Why billionaires have more sons - "We now know that bad weather makes for more baby girls, as does fasting for Ramadan or suffering from morning sickness... Crucially, a predisposition to having more sons or daughters is encoded in our genetics – men with more sisters tend to have girls while those with more brothers tend to have boys. What’s going on? In fact, the odds of having a boy vs. having a girl have never been exactly 50:50. Worldwide, there are around 109 boys born for every 100 girls. This might seem like a lot, but it’s necessary. Men have weaker immune systems, higher cholesterol, more heart problems, a greater susceptibility to diabetes, higher rates of cancer and lower chances of surviving it. They make up over two-thirds of murder victims, three-quarters of traffic accident fatalities and are three times more likely to commit suicide. Mothers have to have a higher proportion of sons in order for an equal number to survive... why is the sex ratio close to 50:50, but not exactly? It was a tricky subject in need of a daring intellectual mind. Enter Robert Trivers, a renegade scientist like no other. According to his own website, he’s spent time behind bars, formed an armed gang in Jamaica to protect gay men from violence and driven a getaway car for notorious political activist Huey Newton.The Ivy League professor has been barred from university campuses, suffered mental breakdowns and broken with tradition by changing disciplines numerous times, from maths, to law, to history, to genetics. Now he’s an anthropologist at Rutgers University. “Compared to many other scientists I’ve lived a wild life,” he says. Back in 1972, after tiring of history, he turned his attention to Darwin’s problem. “I said whoa – now there’s an idea worth devoting my life to,” says Trivers. Together with a colleague, Dan Willard, he developed one of the most famous theories in evolutionary biology. It’s known as the Trivers-Willard hypothesis and it goes like this... the most prolific mother in world history was the nameless first wife of a peasant from Shuya, Russia, who lived from 1707 to 1782. In total, local records reveal that she gave birth to 69 children, which is nothing compared to the warrior Genghis Khan, who fathered between 1,000 and 2,000 children before he died in 1227... In many animals – red deer, elephant seals, gorillas – the stakes are even higher. Successful males may have harems of hundreds of females, while low-ranking or weak males may never reproduce or die trying.Then there’s the issue of resources. Because they tend to be larger, sons require a lot more food than daughters and in many societies they’ll require more education and money. To produce a son capable of becoming a dominant, high-status male, parents will need to make a big investment. With these factors in mind, Trivers proposed that in favourable conditions, such as where the parents were high status or food was abundant, it would make evolutionary sense for parents to produce more sons. But in less favourable conditions, natural selection should favour parents who produce more daughters, since females don’t face such fierce competition. Even if they aren’t particularly attractive or socially successful, it’s likely they’ll have at least some children... between 1960 and 1963, the number of male children born in China fell to just 104 boys for every 100 girls, a difference of around 5% according to a later study on the famine. The ratio didn’t return to normal until 1965... We now know that from smoking to war, to climate change, unfavourable conditions predispose women to having more girls. On the other end of the scale, women with more dominant personalities, a diet rich in high calorie foods (such as breakfast cereal), or married to U.S. Presidents tend to give birth to more sons. For billionaire fathers, the odds of having a boy are 65%... in [Chinese] families which had more than one child (this was allowed in certain circumstances, such as if the parents were poor farmers from the deep mountains, or if the parents themselves were only children), the firstborn child was significantly more likely to be born a girl compared to the average."

Hong Kong’s sex education crisis: why people turn to sex workers for knowledge - "A tiny picture of a woman’s private parts in a textbook for final-year high school pupils elicits shock from parents and students alike... No wonder, then, that men and women in Hong Kong are turning to sex workers for tips about lovemaking – and that workshops one sex workers’ group recently held were oversubscribed.“There’s no place to learn about sex. Only people like us with thick skins can talk about this,” says Jenny, a sex worker who led the workshops. “Nothing you ask or say will make us blush.”... [Teachers] take a stilted, clinical approach to sex education – a prudishness some attribute to Chinese history. The Cultural Context of Sexual Pleasure and Problems, edited by Kathryn Hall and Cynthia Graham, notes that the neo-Confucian teaching that developed following the Song dynasty – which ended in the 13th century – “has been very influential in shaping current Chinese perceptions of sexuality. Neo-Confucianism emphasised the harmfulness of sexual pleasure to physical health and to spiritual development.”... Matthew Yau Kwai-sang, a professor at Tung Wah College and certified sex therapist, reckons sex education in Hong Kong schools is “still as lousy as it was years ago” – a time when teachers just skipped the chapter on reproduction, as thirty-something Karen Lau Hong-lam recalls. No wonder, then, that parents and students were shocked to be shown a textbook photo of a vagina during a talk. “They said it was pornographic; it’s as if they had never seen anything like it,” says Lau, also a certified sex therapist.“Some friends my age told me that they were told to seal that part of the textbook with tape and not to read it; another teacher asked students to cut out that section and throw it away,” she adds... Yau, founding chairman of the Hong Kong Association of Sexuality Educators, Researchers and Therapists, recalls a client who was worried because he was climaxing after half an hour of sex.“The gentleman said, ‘Well I’m not happy about it … how come it’s not as long as in the DVD? The guy can last for 45 minutes or an hour … and how come my wife is not screaming and moaning like in the movies?”... some people had told her they were afraid of going to the sessions in case they ran into someone they knew."
Given that sex work involves performing, this is quite ironic

Sext much? If so, you're not alone - Scientific American - "apparently, nearly half of all US adults' smartphones contain sexy photos or texts... 50 percent of adults store sexts and images they receive. While the majority of sexters, 77 percent, send this racy content to their significant others, 16 percent send it to complete strangers.Unsurprisingly, the age group that is most keen on sexting is 18 to 24-year-olds -- 70 percent of people in this age group receive sexually suggestive photos and messages. Also, men are more likely than women to send and receive intimate information -- 61 percent of men partake in sexting and suggestive photo taking, while 48 percent of women do."

Scientists Trace Society’s Myths to Primordial Origins - "Although the animals and the constellations may differ, the basic structure of the story does not. These sagas all belong to a family of myths known as the Cosmic Hunt that spread far and wide in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas among people who lived more than 15,000 years ago. Every version of the Cosmic Hunt shares a core story line—a man or an animal pursues or kills one or more animals, and the creatures are changed into constellations.Folklorists, anthropologists, ethnologists and linguists have long puzzled over why complex mythical stories that surface in cultures widely separated in space and time are strikingly similar... This research provides compelling new evidence that myths and folktales follow the movement of people around the globe. It reveals that certain tales probably date back to the Paleolithic period, when humans developed primitive stone tools, and spread together with early waves of migration out of Africa. My phylogenetic studies also offer insights into the origins of these myths by linking oral stories and legends passed down from generation to generation to motifs that appear in Paleolithic rock art images. Ultimately I hope my ongoing quest to identify prehistoric protomyths may even offer a glimpse of the mental universe of our ancestors when Homo sapiens was not the only human species on Earth. Carl Jung, the founding father of analytic psychology, believed that myths appear in similar forms in different cultures because they emerge from an area of the mind called the collective unconscious... But the dissemination of Cosmic Hunt stories around the world cannot be explained by a universal psychic structure. If that were the case, Cosmic Hunt stories would pop up everywhere. Instead they are nearly absent in Indonesia and New Guinea and very rare in Australia but present on both sides of the Bering Strait, which geologic and archaeological evidence indicates was above water between 28,000 and 13,000 B.C. The most credible working hypothesis is that Eurasian ancestors of the first Americans brought the family of myths with them... Evolutionary biologists have observed that most species do not change much for the greater part of their histories. When significant evolutionary change occurs, it is generally restricted to rare and very fast events of branching speciation. This phenomenon is called punctuated equilibrium. The same appears to hold true with myths. When sister mythological versions diverge rapidly because of migration bottlenecks, challenges from rival populations or new environmental and cultural inputs, those events are followed by extended periods of stability."

Fat Is Not the Problem--Fat Stigma Is - Scientific American Blog Network - ""Obesity is the biggest threat to the health of our nation,” proclaims the chief of epidemiology at a major medical school on the Scientific American Observations blog. This all too common suggestion does far greater damage to public health than fat tissue itself. When the focus is on weight and body size, it’s not “obesity” that damages people. It’s fearmongering about their bodies that puts them at risk for diabetes, heart disease, discrimination, bullying, eating disorders, sedentariness, lifelong discomfort in their bodies, and even early death... When the culture and the medical world are constantly pushing the idea that “obesity” needs to be eliminated, it’s not the fat cells that are feeling that stigma—it’s the fat people. This hierarchy of bodies is nothing new, with roots in racism, slavery and every other attempt to rank bodies... It is true that many diseases are more commonly found in heavier people. However, that doesn’t mean that weight itself causes disease. Blaming fatness for heart disease is similar to blaming yellow teeth for lung cancer"
"Scientific" American. It's amazing how far they've fallen
I checked the references the author provides in her claim that fat stigma is the problem, not obesity. They don't say what she claims, of course
Addendum: "Linda Bacon, PhD, is a scientist, author, and speaker with three graduate degrees in weight-related science, including a doctorate in physiology"; "Amee Severson, RD, is a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist whose work focuses on body positivity, fat acceptance, and intuitive eating through a social justice lens". So much for trusting the experts