Links - 24th April 2020 (2)

The Iroquois Theater Disaster Killed Hundreds and Changed Fire Safety Forever - "The opulent theater had been advertised as “absolutely fireproof.” How could hundreds of souls – mostly women and children - perish so rapidly? Who was responsible?Days later, the Chicago Tribune ran a list of regulations that had been flouted by the Iroquois, including the lack of an adequate fire alarm, automatic sprinklers, marked exits, or suitable fire extinguishing devices. Even the two large flues on the rooftop where the smoke and flame could have vented out were boarded shut... The fire forced Chicago to take a hard look at how they regulated large public spaces in the booming city. “How much of that was because they had flouted the building codes and how much of it was that the building codes didn’t go far enough?” says John Russick of the Chicago Historical Society. “…[there was] a fair amount of ‘our buildings don’t protect us and we need to do more to them.’ It wouldn’t have been enough even if the building codes had been followed—a lot of people would have died in the Iroquois Theater fire.”"
I wonder how libertarians will blame regulation for the deaths
Someone says this is why exit doors open outwards, but I can't find unanimity on this (or even which direction they should swing in)

Singapore jails Indonesian helper for mixing menstrual blood, saliva into employer’s food - "A foreign domestic helper had stolen more than S$17,000 (US$12,624) in cash from her Singaporeanemployer’s mother. She was also afraid that the family would scold her for her work performance.So the Indonesian mixed some of her urine, saliva and menstrual blood into their rice and water, and the family of six ended up consuming it.This practice of using vaginal fluids to make love and magical potions can be found in some parts of Southeast Asia, where some believe that they have special powers."

PINK HEDONIST on Twitter - "When women are told that they can never be wrong and are never responsible for anything bad that happens to them - they become tyrants. However, while acting like tyrants, they think they are the VICTIMS that have been falsely wronged. Nothing can be more dangerous than this."

Why Is Vietnamese Food in America Frozen in the 1970s? - "Forty years after the Vietnam War, many Vietnamese restaurants in America are still a tribute to a time and a place that no longer exists: 1970s Saigon. I thought I knew Vietnamese food until I met the dish banh trang nuong. As a Vietnamese-American, I’ve always clung to the nostalgic idea of Vietnamese food as a way to connect with folks back home. But when I first saw banh trang nuong in a YouTube video documenting street food, and then in real life at Brooklyn restaurant Di An Di, I faced a moment of crisis. The dish, dubbed “Vietnamese Pizza” on the menu, consists of a circle of rice paper crisped up on a grill and topped with cooked egg, shrimp powder, pickled chiles, ground pork, and hot sauce. The idea of there being a Vietnamese dish that I didn’t know about was distressing, to say the least... You can see it in the way pho is almost universally expressed in the United States: It’s the South Vietnamese style, which includes tableside garnishes like basil, sliced chiles, and hoisin sauce. In the North, they prefer their pho without such last-minute additions. Though pho only came to the South in 1954, when Northerners migrated that way en masse in response to the country’s partition, Southern chefs used the soup as a base to showcase the flagrant potency of their region’s herbs and chiles. Like any other cuisine, food in Vietnam has evolved and expanded in the last four decades—banh trang nuong was only one example of the myriad innovations and trends that have arisen from street vendors and chefs since the 1970s. Nevertheless, the enduring image I have of Vietnamese food is only what my parents and grandparents could piece together in their own kitchens. My grandparents and their children cook what is nostalgic for them; in turn, their memories of the past are what I myself crave. The mom-and-pop restaurants I frequent as an adult have rarely challenged this narrative: We all remember and fill in the gaps together... Through food, they could, like many Vietnamese restaurant owners, remember Saigon, even if maps didn’t show it.
So much for "authenticity"
Keywords: stuck in the 70s, stuck in the 1970s

Meet the Woman Bringing Social Justice to Astrology - "Nicholas used November 2017's mercury retrograde to urge her followers to contact the FCC prior to its vote on net neutrality. She wrote about the new moon in Scorpio representing the need to heal during the initial wave of sexual assault accusations in Hollywood. She’s posted about DACA and the border wall and has even been promoting an online tool called FreeFrom, which was started by her wife Sonya Passi to help victims of domestic violence understand how to pursue financial compensation"
Since both are bullshit and Democrats are more likely to believe in astrology, this is fitting

Avast's Free Antivirus Harvests All Your Clicks, Sells Them to Third-Parties - "As we’ve learned time and time again, “free” things on the internet are almost never truly free. If you’re not paying with money, you’re probably paying with your data. That’s the case with the free antivirus products from Avast, which harvest browsing history for sale to major corporations. Despite claims that its data is fully anonymized, an investigation by our sister site PCMag and Motherboard shows how easy it is to unmask individual users"

Comparing meta-analyses and preregistered multiple-laboratory replication projects - "Many researchers rely on meta-analysis to summarize research evidence. However, there is a concern that publication bias and selective reporting may lead to biased meta-analytic effect sizes. We compare the results of meta-analyses to large-scale preregistered replications in psychology carried out at multiple laboratories. The multiple-laboratory replications provide precisely estimated effect sizes that do not suffer from publication bias or selective reporting. We searched the literature and identified 15 meta-analyses on the same topics as multiple-laboratory replications. We find that meta-analytic effect sizes are significantly different from replication effect sizes for 12 out of the 15 meta-replication pairs. These differences are systematic and, on average, meta-analytic effect sizes are almost three times as large as replication effect sizes. We also implement three methods of correcting meta-analysis for bias, but these methods do not substantively improve the meta-analytic results."
Garbage in, garbage out

Darius Media Network - Posts - "sleeping around in your 20's has consequences later on in life, don't let society fool you.i wanna know how women got triggered by this tweet when this wasn't gender specific. I am confusion."

Cathy Young on Twitter - "American Dirt, a novel that takes a sympathetic view of the migrant crisis, has earned the author death threats and forced her to cancel the book tour. But it's not Trump world that hates it—it's woke liberals."
"This, I think, is why attempts to find a "cancel culture on the right" are a fundamental misreading. Right-wing mobs sometimes target political enemies, for sure. But there's no RW equivalent to this kind of ideological policing toward people sympathetic to RW causes."

France is losing the battle to save the baguette, warns leading bread historian - "France is losing the battle to save good bread as a Gallic baking renaissance among a small elite of boulangers has failed to topple the tasteless white baguette, the historian considered the world’s foremost authority on the subject has warned.Steven L Kaplan, who France has decorated for services rendered to the quintessentially French staple, said that the country was facing a “perfect storm” of factors - from globalisation to complacency - that have blunted the ability of bakers and consumers to care about or even recognise a top quality loaf. The American historian had long warned that standards were slipping, dating the decline in quality to the 1920s with the transition from slow bread making with a sourdough base to a quick process using yeast. Mechanisation in the 1960s hastened the plunge towards increasingly tasteless bread.The result has been plummeting daily consumption in France, which has fallen from 600g per person in the late 1880s - two and a half baguettes - to just 80g today - less than a third of a baguette.There was hope in 1993, when the French government issued a decree to create a special label called “the bread of French tradition”, made exclusively with flour, salt, water and leavening and no additives or freezing. In parallel, millers offered bakers better flour and renowned Parisian baker Lionel Poilâne blended large-scale production with artisanal practices like lengthy fermentation with sourdough and wood oven baking... Instead of a widespread rise in top quality bread, the government decree only sparked a “niche renaissance” among an elite of “incredibly imaginative, audacious” bakers, some of whose loaves are “so good they are up there with a Cheval Blanc or Chateau Latour wine”.“That’s great for people in the bourgeois bohemian districts of Paris but it just hasn’t touched the vast majority; among France’s 29,000 so-called “conventional boulangers”, only 10 per cent at best are interested in such things,” he said.The rest continue to offer mediocre bread to the French, whose “lack of taste is underlined by one staggering statistic: about three quarters continue to eat the 1960s white baguette - a bleached, deformed, unnatural, tasteless loaf,” he scoffed.It is not a price issue, he told the Telegraph, as often “we’re talking about a difference of sometimes 20 centimes”.“Most French are no longer able to discern and then evaluate what constitutes good or bad bread. They take refuge in the citadel of subjectivity by saying: ‘I know it’s good, I’m French. Because I like it, it must be good.’”... Globalisation is one of the culprits, he said, saying that it had “powerfully sapped terroir, the French attachment to local and national taste” and spread the desire for soft fluffy fare you don’t have to chew.But more dramatically, he said it was a sign that the French had lost their reign as the “hegemonic source of the arts de table they had enjoyed since the 17th century”.Meanwhile, France’s national confederation of bakers and patissiers was making things worse by waging war on industrial baguettes and bakery chains without defining and improving the quality of their own bread.The latest “scary” sign of the decline was France’s absence from the podium at this month’s bakery world cup in Paris, whose winners were China, Japan and Denmark."

The surprise place where hijab can spell trouble - ""It is easier to be wearing hijab in London than Cairo." This is how 47-year-old Dalia Anan describes her experience as a woman wearing the Islamic headscarf - also known as hijab - in London compared to her hometown in Egypt... "I feel judged in Egypt more than I do here"... "After a certain time in the evening, you are not allowed into some restaurants or what are regarded as 'cool' places, especially in the north coast"... Several women also reported not being allowed to swim with the full-body "burkini" swimsuit or scuba diving suits in some resorts.  "The problem is that hijab has become subconsciously categorised as 'low class', and, hence, it is banned in places that cater exclusively for the high class"... In Egypt, Dina explains, "high class now refers to those who have a lot of money, speak English rather than Arabic and are 'open minded', which means they drink alcohol and wear revealing clothes"... All those I spoke to said an increasing number of Cairo's upper class are taking off the hijab, and they said those who are still wearing it frequently get questioned about why they still have it on... The stigma of wearing hijab among Egypt's upper class was also one of the main drivers for the #MyChoice social media campaign that was launched in May. One of the campaign's co-founders, 30-year-old Heba Mansour, says she had "a cultural shock" when she moved to Egypt three years ago after living abroad with her family."You are mocked and downgraded because of the hijab," says Heba, who works as a senior progressive adviser at the American University in Cairo and just completed her Masters degree in educational leadership."
I never knew there was so much disgusting Islamophobia in Cairo
All those posts about "Afghanistan" and "Iran" in the 70s (i.e. Kabul and Tehran) take on a different light

Intimate relationships between races more common than thought - "Intimate partnerships between the races—estimated at more than 5 percent of all marriages in the United States—are much more prevalent when cohabitation is also considered... While 25 percent of married Asian women have white husbands, for example, nearly 45 percent of cohabiting Asian women have white partners. And while 17 percent of married Latino women have white husbands, about 22 percent of cohabiting Latino women live with white men... “Cohabitations are not a trivial share of young people’s unions,” Harris and Ono report. “Among the four racial groups we examined, about one in six unions is a cohabitation. Just over 16 percent of unions for Asians, Latinos, and whites are cohabitations, and more than 25 percent of unions for Blacks. So focusing exclusively on interracial marriages, as most previous research has done, seriously underestimates the extent of intimate contact between the races.”In general, whites and Blacks were much more likely than Asians and Hispanics both to marry and to cohabit with their own racial group, the researchers found. But within each racial group, there were slightly different patterns, depending on gender as well as type of union.While almost 96 percent of married white women have white husbands, the researchers found, fewer than 93 percent of cohabiting white women live with white men. White women are 3.5 times as likely to live with Black men as to be married to them, and they’re also more likely to live with than marry Asians and Hispanics... About 69 percent of married Asian women are married to Asian men, while 25 percent of married Asian women have white husbands. “But as common as marriages are between Asian women and white men, cohabitations are even more prevalent,” says Ono. “In fact, Asian women are more likely to be living with white men than with Asian men. Nearly 45 percent of cohabiting Asian women have white partners, while less than 43 percent have Asian partners.”... In general, the researchers found that Black, white, Asian, and Latino men and women consistently choose to cohabit with people who are different from the people they marry. For all of these groups, cohabiting unions are more likely to be interracial than are marriages"
The first data I've seen on interracial relationships beyond marriage; interracial gender dynamics are even more exaggerated here than with marriage