Interesting Links for 15-06-2012

[andrewducker]

• Glasgow kirk quits Church of Scotland over gay clergy row
  (tags: lgbt religion scotland )
• The mothers and aunts of gay men have more children than those of straight men, indicating genetic link on X Chromosone.
  (tags: genetics sexuality lgbt )
• Why does a cabbage cost $28 in Northern Canada? (Because it's a very long way from cabbage-country)
  (tags: canada food business )
• The Defensive Patent License and Other Ways to Beat the Patent System
  (tags: patents law usa )
• Government sets out its plans to 'ring-fence' banks' retail and investment activities
  (tags: banking banks uk )
• Memos From Fury. The SHIELD director is not pleased, and he's going to tell you why.
  (tags: movies comics funny avengers )
• A porn star talks about the difference (for her) between porn and prostitution
  (tags: viaNeilGaiman prostitution pornography )
• Existential Star Wars
  (tags: video funny philosophy starwars )
• Designer prosthetic legs. Some of these are awesome!
  (tags: design art prostheses )
• School bans nine-year-old blogger from taking photos of her lunch.
  (tags: uk school EpicFail food censorship )
• One explanation for why a school dinner blogger was banned unveils terrifying authoritarianism
  (tags: schools censorship government scotland uk )
• Where Are The Best And Worst Countries To Be A Child (hint, the US and UK do not come out well)
  (tags: uk uk children happiness health society )
• How to Talk to Human Beings
  (tags: conversation communication advice )
• How an economist was hired by Valve to deal with in-game economies.
  (tags: economics valve software computer_games )
• A summary of Michael Fassbender's role in Prometheus.
  (tags: prometheus funny )
• Evolution to be added to primary curriculum
  (tags: evolution biology education uk )
• DragonBox: a game for teaching algebra to kids. I don't know how effective it is, but I'm addicted...
  (tags: games mathematics ios android )

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Fascinating how the article on mothers of gay men decides attraction to men is the issue. I always assumed it was a survival characteristic in another way--uncles to provide extra support. There is evidence of this in that children with childless aunts and uncles tend to benefit from extra investment (lots of migrant studies on the different familial patterns of ethnic groups bears this out).

I have a cousin with six children by the way, and yes, her brother is gay (as is one of her sons).

[andrewducker]

I tend to take the explanations for why with a grain of salt (as it's far too easy to be influenced by all sorts of cultural stuff), but I'm impressed that they at least tried to check their idea (and discounted their original theory).

[hano.livejournal.com]

Re Valve's economist, CCP hired an economics professor some years ago, up till then they had know real understanding as to why Eve's in game markets were behaving the way they did. Shame in a way, a lot of the easier ways of making in game cash got nerfed as a result.

[andrewducker]

I think it's going to be more and more common amongst companies that really care about how their users operate. Fascinating discussion of some of it here.

[hano.livejournal.com]

that's a good discussion. Especially the stuff about the (eventual) economic integration of Dust 514, which as you can imagine, is being thought about a lot in my Alliance and I'm sure everywhere else. It'll be awesome if they can pull it off, but the apparent insistance on a PS3 only release can only hurt them. I say apparent, cos there's all sorts of hints and rumours about a roll out to PC and Xbox, but nothing concrete yet because of Sony and various exclusivity clauses in CCP's contract with them.

[andrewducker]

Further discussion of in-game economics here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4114295

Official response from Argyll & Bute council here:
http://www.argyll-bute.gov.uk/news/2012/jun/statement-school-meals-argyll-and-bute-council
(which is a piece of epic fail, including scaremongering)

[hano.livejournal.com]

I really wouldn't want to be one of Argyll & Bute's PR people right now. Or is it one of those councils that fired all their PR people to save money? Seeing as this is now a lead story on the BBC website, someone somewhere is looking ver stupid indeed. They really need to have the Striesland effect explained to them don't they?

[andrewducker]

The piece on Spygate indicates that they fired a bunch of them, and are operating in "paranoid idiot" mode right now...

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I'm still mystified about why they took any action. I've just skim-read the blog and it's not as though it is constantly critical - many of the posts are complimentary about the food.

Glasgow kirk quits Church of Scotland over gay clergy row

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh, they quit because they want FEWER gay clergy, that's a disappointment.

Do you know anything about the church of scotland's decisions? That says they do have gay clergy, but only those previously ordained, but I couldn'd see why they'd ended up with that compromise.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I've some sympathy for the council -- if I'd been been trying my best and suddenly everyone hated me, I can very much imagine lashing out: some things are genuinely harder to do under worldwide scrutiny.

But also, shouldn't children have freedom of speech? I mean, the school has to curtail SOME freedoms for their own safety, but isn't more transparancy and awareness about schools something we WANT, and this girl was succeeding where lots of prior effort hadn't, that's a GOOD thing.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I still don't get that "cabbage price" article:

"Transport generally makes up 13% of our costs," -- Um... OK, so the $28 cabbage would be $24.78 if it could teleport into the shop. That's still a pricey cabbage.

[naath.livejournal.com]

They list other factors, including:
*higher shop-running costs (more expensive to light, heat, etc. the shop)
*higher minimum wage (more expensive to hire staff)
*higher spoilage rates (so you need to send more cabbages per cabbage you get to sell)

[steer.livejournal.com]

They did -- but it seemed hard to make the numbers add up -- the minimum wage wasn't double the minimum wage, the spoilage rates would only add on a percentage (unless a huge percent were spoiled)... the shop running costs, well I had no baseline figures to compare, but they didn't seem huge to me.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Have you read either FTW or Halting State? Both feature in-game economics as major plot points.

[andrewducker]

I've read Halting State, which I liked most of (the ending didn't really work for me), even though I thought the idea of people moving characters between realms was pretty silly.

(Which doesn't mean it won't happen, of course. Things I find ridiculous happen all the damn time.)

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Likewise Neal Stephenson's recent doorstopper novel REAMDE - the in-game economics are discussed at length in his inimitable style.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Couldn't it also just be that if 12 percent of men are going to be gay no matter what, that women who have more children are more likely to have gay sons?

I mean if there is a general 1 in 9 chance of a child being gay, the odds of you having a gay child increase if you have 5 kids rather than one.

[andrewducker]

If the researchers didn't think of that then one would hope that the fact-checkers, editors and reporters would have done...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Good question. The report sounded like they had slightly more detail than that, but not enough to explain what they DID measure. So I doubt it, although it wouldn't be the first time someone has mistaken a simple statistical mistake for a scientific observation.

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

Here's the paper:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1743-6109.2012.02785.x/full

which I haven't been through in detail, but I think this paragraph suggests they've controlled for that by getting matched controls:
"It is relevant to note that estimates referring to populations of units different from the survey units (i.e., in this case, the population of the mothers or aunts of homosexual subjects) is a complex issue and can lead to oversampling in large families (with higher fecundity than average). There is a tendency to oversample larger families due to their higher probability of being selected compared with smaller families. This tendency makes comparison with national statistics on family size inappropriate [...] The control sample was not from national statistics but instead was selected using the same methodology to reproduce the same possible biases and to guarantee the required internal validity of the comparisons."

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Stoya is awesome, but she missed one other difference between prostitution and porn.

In prostitution the goal is to get the male partner off - generally as quickly as possible.

In porn the idea is to not get the dude off. Any given sex scene has to be filmed from multiple angles and it often takes eight hours of filming to get one 20 minute scene shot.

So, the couple fucks for three minutes. Then stops, has their make up adjusted, starts fucking again for another 15 minutes, then stops so the crew can change lights and camera angles, they fucks again for another 20 minutes.

If at any point in this process the male actor cums, they are fucked because of the time needed for a dude to get a second erection, plus if he accidentally shoots inside her they then have to get her douched so that people can't see jizz leaking out before there would be any logical reason to.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that a prostitute has to be as sexy as possible for her partner. A porn star, not so much.

(Did you know that often when you see a guy cum in a porn movie you aren't actually seeing a guy cum? You are seeing a penis shaped water pistol filled with Ivory soap shooting Ivory soap on the girl's tits, ass, face, whatever...)

[andrewducker]

I did know that - but I hadn't thought about that other difference - thanks for pointing that out!

[steer.livejournal.com]

Any given sex scene has to be filmed from multiple angles and it often takes eight hours of filming to get one 20 minute scene shot.

Really -- this is sort of surprising as I guessed they would want to cut costs as much as possible so such a long period filming to film in the can ratio seems super duper high production values. I wonder why?

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

I really like Stoya too. I have to say I did not realise that shoots took that long -- I just figured you got the multiple angles from having multiple people with cameras.

I haven't seen many water pistols that haven't been obvious, but I guess it would make sense since there's generally a lot more liquid than you'd expect.