Joking aside, British really do have unique sense of humour - "A survey of more than 4,000 twins suggests that humour regarded as typically British – sarcasm and self-deprecation – is linked to genes found in British men and women, but not shared, for instance, by Americans... The study looked at genetic and environmental contributions to humour in nearly 2,000 pairs of UK twins. A second US study examined the humour of 500 sets of North American twins. The results revealed that positive humour – saying funny things, telling jokes, a humorous outlook on life – was linked to genes and was shared by twins in the UK and US. However, negative humour – teasing and ridicule, as well as more offensive, racist or sexist forms of humour, together with self-disparaging humour – appeared to be genetically linked only in Britain. Dr Martin, from the University of Western Ontario, said the aim was to find out whether humour has a genetic basis. "In North American families, there was a genetic basis to positive humour, but negative humour seems to be entirely learned. Growing up in a family where negative humour was practised was important in the development of that sense of humour. "In the UK, both positive and negative styles had a genetic basis in the sample. The genetic basis to negative humour in the UK was close to 50 per cent. "Certainly in the UK, TV humour is more biting, whereas in North America it tends to be blander. "One theory is that these styles of humour are associated with other personality traits that probably have a genetic basis. Self-defeating humour tends to be highly correlated with neuroticism. People who tend to be more negative, depressed and anxious tend to use that kind of humour." The comedian Charlie Higson, who helped to create the hit TV series The Fast Show, said yesterday: "What they [Americans] don't understand is the British desire to keep putting themselves down, but they fully understand irony. Their humour is considerably more sophisticated than British humour. Look at their sitcoms – the level of wit and sophistication in Friends – we don't have anything to match that. Ours tend to be about silly people doing silly things, whereas in America, it's clever people doing clever things.""
Decriminalizing “Mere” Walkaway Prison Escapes Is a Mistake - "Section 120 of the German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch or StGB) provides that helping others escape is unlawful. That said, German lawmakers did not similarly outlaw the self-directed decision to escape (Gefangenenselbstbefreiung). German law’s justification for not criminalizing walkaway escapes is generally the same as found in those other countries that permit them. The “urge to be free” (der natürliche Drang nach Freiheit) is said to be so ingrained in human nature that a prisoner merely following the “instinct to escape” is considered insufficiently morally blameworthy to justify the filing of separate criminal charges, regardless of how many escape attempts the inmate made or how dangerous the inmate’s criminal past and proclivities make him or her. This rule against imposing punishment on those who escape without damage to property or harm to persons has been the law in Germany since the 1800s. It is tethered to Article 2 in Germany’s “Basic Law”/Constitution (Grundgesetz), which provides that “the freedom of a person is inviolable” (die Freiheit der Person ist unverletzlich)... German inmates can in fact attempt to flee prison as often as they want without fear of formal sanction, provided they cause no personal harm or property damage in the process. That said, even in Germany, the escapee who the police capture and return to prison will in most cases be subjected to more restrictive and secure conditions, and thus less pleasant, confinement in German prison (Justizvollzugsanstalt or JVA)... At the same time, however, it is difficult to reconcile this permission to escape with German self-defense law’s primary justification, namely, the defense and protection of the empirical inviolability of the legal order (the Rechtsbewährungsprinzip, which translates into “protection of the legal order justification”)... Beyond Germany, other countries also decriminalize non-violent walkaway escapes. Had Cavalcante escaped in Mexico, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, or Switzerland, for example, he also would not have faced a single additional day in prison... Prison escape is, and always has been, punishable under US federal and state criminal statutes. Yet, US law curiously does recognize the notion that a person simply following “natural instincts” may not always warrant incarceration. Setting aside common defences such as necessity, duress, and self-defence, which are also premised on common human instincts, at least 14 US states, including Illinois, Iowa, North Carolina, and Kentucky, permit relatives to help harbour or hide a related fugitive"
Do Washing Machines Belong in Kitchens? - "Why do Brits insist on putting their washing machines in their kitchens? The complaint is a common one among expats living in the U.K. As Tanya Vincent, an Australian architect living in London, has observed: “The washing machine in the kitchen is a convention so entrenched that it is barely questioned. Granted, British houses don’t all have the luxury of a utility room, but what’s often required is a more realistic allocation of space.” In the end, putting it down to a quirk of British life, we resigned ourselves to the inevitability of purchasing a house with a washing machine in the kitchen—then quickly moved it to the downstairs bathroom... “It is disgusting, my life’s work is in part dedicated to getting washing machines out of the kitchen.” The reaction was immediate and irate, with British tweeters demanding to know where washing machines should be put if a homeowner has no utility room. Allsopp’s reply, “Bathroom, hall cupboard, airing cupboard,” merely inflamed the Twitter mob... YouGov, the influential British survey website, rapidly developed a poll on the topic. They surveyed 3,641 adults, and 67 percent of respondents indicated that the kitchen was indeed the right place to have the washing machine... Brits will generally tell you that washing machines are placed in kitchens purely because of utilitarian considerations: constraints on plumbing and space issues. However, to most foreigners, this explanation seems inadequate. While it’s true the square footage of the average-size home is markedly larger in North America and Australia than in the U.K., even in cities where space is at a premium, architects still find room for laundry areas. Of course, housing is typically newer in these countries, but washing machines tend to be placed in kitchens in the U.K. regardless of the property’s age. Moreover, even in properties that have been extensively renovated, with loft extensions and extra bathrooms added, washing machines still tend to be placed in kitchens... The damp climate means that people are forced to use a drying rack, thus taking up precious real estate in the kitchen or living room. Alternatively, you can purchase a combined washer/dryer in place of a washing machine, which is what our house came equipped with. While this sounds like a viable solution to the problem, this godawful device takes a tiny volume of clothes, washes them badly, and dries them until they literally squeak but are not dry enough to, you know, actually fold up and put away. Oh, and the whole process takes about five hours... According to the human geographer Louise Johnson, kitchens in most Western countries were typically located at the back of the house before the 1950s, reflecting their lower status as “spaces dealing with food, dirt, women, and servants.” But things changed dramatically with the rise of open-plan living. As the British design historian Judy Attfield notes, modernist architects saw open plan as a means of embedding modern values in the house’s structure itself. Thus, architects prioritized ease of use and maintenance, rejected traditional styles and unnecessary ornamentation in favor of a minimalist aesthetic, and eliminated walls to create a more “democratic” multipurpose living space. They also relocated the kitchen from the back of the house to become the literal and symbolic core of the home. Although bright, open-plan houses became standard across much of the Western world in the post-war period, they weren’t embraced in the U.K. in quite the same way. The history of New Harlow, a post–World War II planned community, attests to this ambivalence toward modernist design. According to Attfield, the architects of New Harlow designed the homes to include open-plan living spaces instead of the usual two reception rooms. They saw this as democratizing the space by dissolving the “cold formality” of the front room and the “unquestioned traditional social hierarchy” on which it rested. The tenants, however, hated it. The disappearance of the wall separating the front room from the back meant that there was no longer a physical separation between the parlor—typically kept tidy and used as a space to receive guests—from the more private, everyday activities in the back of the house. If, as the anthropologist Kate Fox has suggested, Englishness is characterized by an almost pathological need for privacy, the disappearance of the front room was no minor loss. Tenants reacted to this attempt to kill off the parlor by trying to re-create it via curtains, furniture, and, in some cases, illegal structural alterations to add and reposition walls. The architects, in their turn, complained that “open-plan houses are being closed up again, light rooms are darkened, and a feeling of spaciousness is reduced to cosy clutter.”... Once the kitchen is no longer considered merely a service room, it changes how people use the space, including how they determine what activities are and aren’t appropriate. This is why washing machines in kitchens seem odd to most foreigners. Living spaces are areas where we relax, socialize, cook, and eat (ideally, with the cook able to socialize while preparing food). They are not the appropriate location to perform ablutions on our bodies or clothes... Because conceptions of dirt rely on how spaces are classified, reclassifying the space inevitably leads to a reclassification of what is dirty"
The world's hottest city where birds fall from the sky - "There have been alarming reports of birds dropping dead from the sky and seahorses being boiled alive in the bay. Even the most resilient pigeons are seeking shelter from the sun's intensity. Temperatures reaching 50C are not merely uncomfortable, they pose a serious threat. These temperatures are 13C (55F) above body temperature and can lead to severe health complications such as heat exhaustion, heart problems, and even death if exposure is prolonged. In an unprecedented move, the Kuwaiti government has permitted night-time funerals this year due to the extreme heat. Nowadays, those who can afford it seldom venture outside, preferring to remain in the cool comfort of their air-conditioned homes, offices, or shopping centres... A 2020 study revealed a staggering 67 percent of domestic electricity consumption is attributed to air conditioning units running incessantly"
Full-English breakfast fans could see the return of a historic food staple - "Founder of the English Breakfast Society, Guise Bule de Missenden insisted that the addition of pineapples is not unusual due to their long-standing history on England's breakfast plates... The unique suggestion isn't the first of its kind from the group, which previously called for Britons to boycott hash browns at breakfast time. Instead, they suggested a side of bubble and squeak which they claimed was much more traditional than potato triangles which lack British origin."
Brits much more adventurous with what they eat on holiday - "65% of Britons believe they're far more daring with their diet than their parents ever were, with even 51% considering themselves 'culture vultures'. Of those delicacies, Caribbean flavours are the most sought-after for UK foodies, with 17% looking to try the cuisine, closely followed by Malaysian delights at 14%. Korean cuisine is on the menu for an adventurous 14%, while Brazilian dishes are tempting 13% of the population."
The backlash against self-service checkouts is a case study in why Britain is determined to be poor - "Smart motorways are a perfectly sensible way to expand the capacity of the road network more cheaply. But no. A campaign to demonise them won out despite the fact that smart motorways are actually the safest kind of motorway and nearly 10 per cent of all motorway deaths happen on hard shoulders anyway. Instead, now, we will have either less motorway or higher costs. Or again, we could revel in how varied, cheap and nutritious our diet now is. But we prefer to indulge in moral panics about “ultra-processed food”, obesity and cheap imports, and try to find ways of making it more boring and expensive again. We could be happy at the fact the country is sitting on enough gas to power the economy for decades. But we are too frightened to get it out of the ground. The demand for in-person banking, the opposition to touch screens in cafés and QR codes in restaurants, the vogue for plastic LPs, the list is endless. All are linked by common threads: an inability to look in a clear-sighted way at trade-offs and costs, and a fear of innovation and of the future. Every time we reject something cheaper, quicker and better in favour of how we used to do things, we choose to stay poorer. Labour obviously won’t encourage such innovation. They are, after all, the party of “we know best”, of medieval windmill technology, of job demarcation, of ossification, of nostalgia, of trade union resistance to change. But not everything in this country, even now, is decided by the government. Popular attitudes matter. If too many of us remain curmudgeonly, dog-in-the-manger opponents of invention, then we will continue to have a massive productivity and growth problem... Fortunately, we’ve managed to keep our regulatory environment for AI better than that in the rest of Europe. No doubt Labour will want to change that, but surely some in Government must see that opting out from innovations in the rest of the world is a recipe for decline."
Iran hires Hells Angels, other criminal gangs to hunt down regime critics - "Iran hired Eastern European criminals to attack Iran International journalist Pouria Zeraati, the Washington Post reported on Thursday. Zeraati was stabbed four times in March and left bleeding on a sidewalk. British investigators told the Washington Post that the attackers had not been from Iran and had no discernible connection to its security services. The attackers had reportedly been criminals hired from Eastern Europe who faced few barriers to entering Britain via Heathrow Airport in the days before the attack - and flying out just hours after the stabbing... the US Justice Department filed criminal charges against Naji Sharifi Zindashti after he allegedly sought a $350,000 USD contract with two Hells Angels in Canada to kill a defector and his wife. The hired Hells Angels assassins had reportedly exchanged encrypted messages with Zindashti, where they promised the murder would be symbolically vicious... Iran reportedly hired a German Angel to orchestrate the bombing of a synagogue in Essen. The German member, Ramin Yektaparast, reportedly fled to Tehran to avoid murder charges... Iran has denied targeting dissidents in foreign nations, blaming Israel and a variety of other countries for the “concoctions.”"
What’s behind Germany’s raging Islamophobia | Islamophobia | Al Jazeera - "On September 16, Germany started extending temporary controls along all its borders, to the chagrin of its European Union neighbours. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser clarified that the move is meant to not only curb “irregular” migration, but also to stop what she called “Islamist terrorism and serious crime”... Members of the ruling coalition have repeatedly denounced “Islamism” in Germany... various institutions at the state and federal levels have created “de-radicalisation” programmes that have targeted only Muslims... The anti-Semitic tint of Islamophobic imagery produced by German institutions is hardly surprising. As Israeli-German philosopher Moshe Zuckermann has written, Islamophobia is the projection of an unutterable anti-Semitism... The historical parallel here is hard to miss: far-right forces are rising, as a racist hysteria targeting one racialised group of people spreads through the German state and society... As German politicians of various stripes and colours jump on the bandwagon of Islamophobia, they may do well to remember that their predecessors doing exactly the same almost a century ago did not end well for them. Hate is never a “winning” strategy."
Since Muslim countries have tighter border controls than the Schengen area, and Muslims keep raging about "Zionists" (when they're not being outright anti-Semitic), they are the biggest Islamophobes and anti-Semites of all
If you don't target "extremist Jains" as much as extremist Muslims, you're Islamophobic, because both groups are equally responsible for terrorist attacks
Since Islam is a race, governments need to ban conversions to Islam as that's a blackface analogue
Letting your people be stabbed is apparently a "winning" strategy
15 Things Broke People Always Seem to Spend Money on - "Tattoos
Lottery Tickets
Alcohol
Nails, Hair, and Lash Extensions
Subscription Services
Pets
Flashy Car Modifications
Brand Name Accessories
Holiday on Borrowed Funds
Scammers or Fortune Tellers
Fancy Bottle of Perfume
New Sneakers
Eating Out Regularly
Gym Memberships
Overpriced Coffee"
Clearly these are all
Inside Canada's Polar Bear Jail - "A frontier settlement founded for fur trading in 1717, Churchill sits smack in the middle of the “polar bear highway”—the natural path the animals take to get onto the sea ice every year. Located on the shore of Hudson Bay, Churchill has around 850 human residents and about the same number of bears roaming around. During the winter, the bears live on the frozen bay, hunting seals. But once the ice melts in July, they move onto land where food is scarce. “They live off the fat stores they accumulated over winter while eating seals’ blubber,” explains Rachel Sullivan-Lord, a marine biologist and expedition leader with Natural Habitat Adventures, a company that operates polar bear tours in the area. “Towards the end of November, they come to shore, waiting for the bay to freeze. By then they’ve been without hunting opportunities for several months, so they are starving. They’ll use any chance to get food.” That annual passage makes Churchill a unique place for tourists to watch the Kings of the Arctic in their natural habitat—so up close and personal that the creatures come up to the Tundra Lodge, a seasonal wildlife-watching hotel, and stand up on their hind legs to peek at the people inside. But it also makes Churchill a dangerous place to live. Maclean remembers a recent call she got when a bear was pounding on a woman’s window at 5 a.m. in the morning. “It’s the worst place for a town to be,” she says. “Today, we would never put a town here.” Years ago, a bear smacking at the window or breaking a door would likely be shot to avoid potential human fatalities. But over the years, that mentality has changed, influenced by tourists’ interest in the majestic creatures and by the fact that there aren’t many left. Only about 20,000 to 26,000 polar bears remain in the wild... Today, Churchill’s Polar Bear Alert program keeps a close tab on the hungry prowlers, putting them behind bars and out of harm’s way only when absolutely necessary. Colloquially known as the polar bear jail, the holding facility is a massive hangar of 28 cells built from cinder blocks with steel bar ceilings and doors. A second set of solid metal doors prevents bears from reaching out between bars. Most cells fit only one bear (otherwise they’d fight) but two larger cells are reserved for moms with cubs. Five of the cells are air-conditioned to make them more comfortable during warmer weather. Some bears are tranquilized when they’re brought in. Others arrive awake in huge culverts, traps baited with a chunk of seal meat that snap shut once bears pull on the food. Built in the 1950s when Churchill was an army base, this facility is absolutely unique, York says. Only the military could ship and fly enough material to construct a building that size and strength in such a remote, inhospitable place... “Having that facility has allowed managers to keep bears in the population that otherwise would have been euthanized without the option of holding them until the sea ice was reforming,” he says. Instead of shooting the dangerous bears, the patrol team holds them for a few weeks until the bay freezes... The jail environment teaches the animals that approaching humans results in a boring and annoying experience, not worth repeating. That’s why bears don’t get to do much in their cells. They can perambulate back and forth among the cinderblocks or lounge on straw bedding or wood shavings. They can bang on the walls, which is usually a good sign, says Maclean. “If we don’t hear from a bear, we may occasionally peek in on it,” she says. “But a bear that’s banging is usually a good, healthy bear.” While “imprisoned,” bears get water or snow through a trough that runs across their cells, but no snacks—to avoid associating humans with food. “At that point, they’re already fasting”... “Sentencing” bears is a last resort. Generally, the team tries to haze a bear out of town with empty shots and firecrackers. But if the animal doesn’t leave, keeps coming back, or starts breaking into buildings, the team has to lock it up. “We only do proactive capturing when we know the alternative is worse,” says Maclean. “The alternative is the bear gets euthanized. So instead of letting it get to that point, we capture the bear.”"
Mexican News Station Accidentally Shows Testicles Instead of Solar Eclipse - "That's NOT the moon blocking the light -- one Mexican TV station's solar eclipse coverage Monday was totally nuts, as in the pair of testicles that somehow ended up on the screen ... and they might be famous!"
An Architect's dream is an engineer's nightmare. : r/Showerthoughts
Wurst luck – how Zeppelins hit German sausage-eaters - "the quantity of cow intestines used in manufacturing the airships was so enormous – and the military appetite for the dirigibles so strong – that the making of sausages was temporarily outlawed in Germany and allied or occupied parts of Austria, Poland and northern France. With the guts from more than 250,000 cows needed to produce the bags that held the hydrogen gas in each Zeppelin, the German war machine had to choose between long-range bombing and wurst. It chose the former... "The most interesting thing is that you would have thought that a big bag of hydrogen would be easy to shoot down and set light to," he said. "But for the best part of a year and a half, it was impossible to shoot Zeppelins down. They built 140 of these enormous airships over that period and it was only at the very end of that – towards the end of the war in 1917 – that we finally worked out how to shoot them down." Hunt also discovered that some of the credit for finding the best way to down the dirigibles is owed to his great uncle, Jim Buckingham, the designer of the incendiary bullet. The British eventually realised that the resilient airships could be destroyed by firing explosive bullets to breach the skin and allow the hydrogen to mix with oxygen, and then following up with incendiary bullets to create an explosion."
Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user's public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option - "Facebook has admitted that it scrapes the public photos, posts and other data of Australian adult users to train its AI models and provides no opt-out option, even though it allows people in the European Union to refuse consent. Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh was pressed at an inquiry as to whether the social media giant was hoovering up the data of all Australians in order to build its generative artificial intelligence tools, and initially rejected that claim. Labor senator Tony Sheldon asked whether Meta had used Australian posts from as far back as 2007 to feed its AI products, to which Ms Claybaugh responded "we have not done that". But that was quickly challenged by Greens senator David Shoebridge."
Classic Studies That Are Never Outdate Case Study from Elsevier - "To Dr. Dyer, there is little doubt about the significance of older research; almost every pre-1995 paper is crucial because, in his field, a good experiment does not get outdated. “A lot of work was done in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and because these were pre-computer days, people would build very precise experiments as they were too expensive to redo. Today, scientists may do the experiment again, but it is just for validation of the result.” In fact, a significant 38% of Dr. Dyer’s citations in his articles published between 2010 and 2015 are to Pre-1995 publications, of which 37% are to Elsevier’s Pre-1995 content. This is because several of his current research requires him to refer to models and papers published prior to 1995."
On the myth of "outdated research", or that research older than 10 years old isn't valid
The “outdated sources” myth - "Many writers incorrectly believe in the “outdated sources” myth, which is that sources must have been published recently, such as the last 5 to 10 years. However, there is no timeliness requirement in APA Style guidelines (as defined in the Concise Guide to APA Style, Seventh Edition and Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition). Properly citing relevant sources is a key task for writers of any APA Style paper. You should “cite the work of those individuals whose ideas, theories, or research have directly influenced your work. The works you cite provide key background information, support or dispute your thesis, or offer critical definitions and data” (American Psychological Association, 2020, p. 253). We recommend citing reliable, primary sources with the most current information whenever possible. What it means to be “timely” varies across fields or disciplines. Seminal research articles and/or foundational books can remain relevant for a long time and help establish the context for a given paper. For example, Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment (Bandura et al., 1961) is often cited in contemporary social and child psychology articles. Remember, APA Style has no year-related cutoff."
When is the evidence too old? - "If we put our blinkers on and ignore important research from the recently ‘outdated’ literature from the 1990s (when I first became interested in doing research), we could miss some important foundational work that still influences practice today. The two references I have used below, both from the 1990s, would not be included in the discussion at all. If we only consider literature that is recent, and value that more highly than if it is robust, then we will be missing important evidence to inform practice. Researchers could start asking the same research questions over and over (I have seen some of this already in nursing literature) and even feel pressured to repeat previous studies all over again to check if the findings still hold true in the contemporary world"
Meme - "Perth, WA, Australia. You pay less and so you..."
"Please offer your seat if someone needs it more than you. School students using the student fare should stand for adults."
Meme - Tiffani Lynn (2019): "Danielle is gonna be settled with a family by the time she's 21 and Jojo is gonna be snorting coke out of strippers booty cracks at 18."
Chrissy Joye (2019): "THEYRE BOTH 15... WATCH HOW TF YOU RAISE YO KIDS"
Bhad Bhabie Shares First Photo of Baby Daughter
JoJo says she ‘should be dead’ as she speaks out over substance abuse issues
Meme - Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil: "Today's weed isn't like it used to be. Today's weed has a lot more THC than it used to—almost four times in 2022 what it had in 1995!"
Meme - "That's a cute outfit, did your husband give it to you?"
"How did you know I have a husband?"
"I'm the twink you both air-gapped last weekend."