In the 1990s, daring researchers finally tackled a question that was discussed everywhere except in formal academic settings. When someone's speech "sounds gay", what makes it sound that way?Not exactly crucial to the advancement of the human condition, but it's good to see that I am not the only person to have wondered why (some) gay men sound so gay.
The APA report also featured a 1998 study, in which the same researchers asked college-aged girls to try on either a swimsuit or a sweater, assess their appearance, then perform mathematical tests. The girls asked to wear swimsuits performed significantly worse.“This is how sexualisation fragments consciousness,” says Dr Lamb. “These girls were so hung up on their appearance they literally didn’t have room in their heads to do maths. They learn that preoccupation from the women they look up to in the media.”
One psychologist explains the problem this way:
Though Dr Wilson believes flirtation and exhibitionism are natural for young girls, he says that clear lines must be drawn. “Children want to be looked at, but wearing items like thongs and revealing clothes sends the message that they are sexually available. It also implies knowledge of sexuality that just isn’t there,” he says.As to the group think of girls, it also points out this:
But while criticism of the media is the answer Dr Lamb hopes for, it is girls criticising each other that is beginning to change attitudes among some groups. “There is a backlash beginning,” she says. “Girls quickly go from being popular to being derided for their slutty behaviour. It’s sad because they do all these things to fit in, but go too far and they are soon turned against.”I wonder if anyone has looked at the comparative "early sexualisation" behaviour of girls from mixed gender schools and girls only ones.
Makes me feel so much better.Mr Goodall, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford West & Abingdon, is the latest serious thinker to turn popular myths about the environment on their head.
Catching a diesel train is now twice as polluting as travelling by car for an average family, the Rail Safety and Standards Board admitted recently. Paper bags are worse for the environment than plastic because of the extra energy needed to manufacture and transport them, the Government says.
Nor is there anything like skinning the whale’s penis, “longer than a Kentuckian is tall,” and wearing it as a tunic while you slice up the fat harvested from the rest of its body. Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, claims that the mincer of blubber usually wore such a tunic, in a clerical cut that made him look like “a candidate for an archbishoprick.” For “Moby-Dick,” Melville drew on scientific, historical, and journalistic accounts of whales, but he had a reputation for blurring the line between fact and fiction, and scholars have noted that for this chapter “none of Melville’s fish documents was particularly helpful.” In other words, he may have made the tunic up, for the sake of the archiepiscopal pun and perhaps, too, as a symbol.It's a really interesting read. Go to it.
The Japanese obsession with fish is a problem. As another Foreign Correspondent report (this one on massive Japanese overfishing of tuna off Australia and elsewhere) noted:Tetsuya Endo, a professor and researcher at Hokkaido Health Science University's faculty of pharmaceutical sciences, affirmed the other doctors' condemnation of small-cetacean food products.
In a terse e-mail sent to this correspondent, Endo said, in reference to dolphin meat, "It's not food!"
In 2005, Endo published the results of a three-year study on random samples of cetacean food products sold throughout Japan, and concluded all of it was unhealthy because of high levels of mercury and methylmercury.
However, Hideki Moronuki, deputy director of the government's Far Seas Fisheries Division of the Resources Management Department, in an interview with The Japan Times, maligned Endo's study, calling it "misleading information." When pressed, though, he failed to substantiate his accusation.
Japan has only two per cent of the world’s population yet Japanese eat a chunky ten per cent of the global fish catch. The national appetite seems almost insatiable.
Petrol costs about 10p a litre, so Tehran is usually one continuous traffic jam. On Friday there is gridlock at midnight. And electricity is 70% subsidised. Seen from the air at nights, the capital burns as bright as any American metropolis. Because petrol is sold so cheaply, it makes no economic sense to build refineries in Iran, but because of the absence of refineries there is actually a petrol shortage. Rather than raise prices, the government has introduced rationing, handing out smart cards that limit most users to 100 litres a month. There was an initial wave of protests a month ago when the scheme was first introduced but those have since faded. The lull may be an illusion though. Many people have burned through much of the four-month ration on their initial smart card in just over 30 days. When the cards run out and people can no longer get to work, there is likely to be another bout of anger and frustration.
....the grain of the original film is visible when scans are fully enlarged. The most detailed images from lunar orbit show rocks and other surface features about 40 inches (1 meter) wide.I wonder just how carefully these photos have been looked at already (there's 36,000, after all.) What's the bet that some people might will be spending hours looking at them for an alien artefact that been missed so far.
Silicone dolls are quite popular in Japan, where they are known as "Dutch Wives" ('datch waifu'). Their name originates from the term, possibly English, for the thick rattan or bamboo bolster, used to aid sleep in humid countries by keeping one's limbs lifted above sweaty sheets.I just thought that maybe it was internationally recognized that the Dutch were the world's first perverts.
So, if you are in Japan and see some old codger bringing into his house what looks like a series of dismembered limbs, there may be a perfectly innocent explanation. (Depends how you define "innocent", too, I suppose.)A completely bald man with a cane, who appeared to be in his 70s, entered the gallery and, after fondling a fake female, chuckles and remarks, "Their hair's black — I like that. These days young women all dye their hair."
The gent fired a series of questions at the staff, apparently hoping they would ship a doll to him disassembled so he could sneak it into his house. The man was encouraged to visit Orient Industry's sales showroom in Ueno, but he settled onto a nearby couch and wistfully gazed at the dolls.
