More outside-the-box, wildly-counterintuitve and deeply informative "news you can use" from our very serious and professional media.

Who knew?

Men find photos of the opposite sex much more "rewarding" than women, new research claims today.

The "new research" is based on exhaustive study of 100,000 years of human history conclusively proving the frigging obvious.

According to the study men take the same pleasure out of looking at an attractive female form as they do from having a curry or making money whereas women do not take any significant reward from looking at pictures of men.

The survey published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B said that brain scan studies show that "reward centres" are triggered in men when they gaze at a woman's face or body whereas they are not in females. It also shows men are more likely to make an effort to view pictures of the opposite sex and pay out money.

The findings shed light on why men are much greater consumers of pornography than women and why sales of Playboy have always exceeded those of Playgirl, according to Dr Benjamin Hayden at the Centre for Neuroeconomic Studies, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, North Carolina.

"One natural inference is that men are more willing to pay to see these images," he told The Daily Telegraph.

Give this man a Nobel stipend, stat.

...

This study shows that photos follow the same principles, and that more attractive photos act like larger rewards, said Dr Hayden. Rewards also offer incentives to work harder and they can be traded for other kinds of rewards, which is why men exchange money for pictures of naked women.

It should be said that this doesn't explain the "why" at all. It merely confirms the "is" that we always knew. The headlines erroneously claims the research explains why men are more willing to pay for nudey pics, but it does not such thing.

Especially informative is the caption under a pic of men's girly-mags:

Men consume more pornography than women

I feel like Han Solo after C3PO tells him the obviously-broken hyperspace drive isn't working. "Really? Chewie, take The Professor into the back and hook him up to the ship's computer..."

Somewhat related -- and not safe for work; this isn't porn per se, but a cutesy half-clever parody/homage to porn -- is this video of stats about porn, drawn on to the body of a porn-posing lightly-clad woman:

One thing to keep in mind about those various figures tossed out about how many billions porn makes a year: A persuasive article (sorry, no link, can't remember where it came from) made the case that those numbers are almost certainly wildly overstated, verging on complete crank. The media always credulously reports these figures, given their interest in sensationalism and their distaste for fact-checking.

Basically there's no real hard (ahem) data on how much the porn industry actually makes, no real professional industry group which can provide rigorous analysis and firm-ish numbers. It's all guestimates, and the numbers are provided by the porn industry itself, which has good reason to inflate how much money they're making: making a lot of money tends to legitmize an otherwise disrespected occupation, so porn people, like strippers and prostitutes, have a natural incentive to make wild claims about just how much green they're rolling in. A bigger number also tends to "prove" porn is mainstream, which is something they also strive for; and a bigger number helps with lobbying the government not to regulate or criminalize their strange industry.

Plus, some have alleged that porn is largely owned by the mob, which always needs businesses to own in order to launder money made from outright-illegal businesses. Can't say you made $20 million selling coke on your 1040A, so you claim you made all that money through your ownership of Dirty Filthy Schoolgirl Footwhores Entertainment Group.

Not sure if that's true, either, but it would make sense. The mob likes shady businesses, especially those whose actuall profitability is difficult for the IRS to verify. It also explains why there's so much damn porn -- surely the thousands of new pornos released a year can't all be profitable, can they? But if the goal of your business isn't to make profit, but rather to credibly fake profit, the delirious welter of new porn titles every week makes sense.

And -- $2.6 billion just on internet porn? Who pays for internet porn?

Thanks to someone for the first link. I got the second one here, an MSNBC blog featuring a particularly tech- and science- heavy linkfest.

Related: Not safe for work, so see it before Monday. Hot, animalistic public sex between pillowy chairs. Good stop-motion animation shows two chairs really going at it in most of the major positions. Well done and pretty funny.

But -- not safe for work. Yeah, it's chairs, but they're really going at it.

Posted by: Ace at 06:02 PM | Comments (37)
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From Slublog, who confirms Jeremy's report that while the film's teaser might suggest (to the suspicious, like me) that it's filled with leftist political messaging, it's actually pretty hard to spot any politics in it at all.

Plus, Slublog says it's a good movie. I'm seeing it either tonight or tomorrow, due to good word of mouth.

I thought the first one was good, but overrated. It's hardly like we're lacking for solid zombie movies lately; 28 Days Later was hardly unique in being literate, realistic, and well directed. The Dawn of the Dead remake is, I submit, a minor classic of movie making generally -- generally; not just as regards the diminished standards of horror -- and Shaun of the Dead was nearly as brilliant.

So I found myself scratching my heads at critics who asserted the first one was some kind of revelation as to what could be done with such a premise.

Even if overpraised it was, unquestionably, a good movie by any standard (and again not just by "horror movie" standards). So I'm happy to find out the sequel is good.

And yes, I know, technically, these films don't feature "zombies." Just things that look and act exactly like zombies, minus the decomp.

Related, Even If It's Old: The first 28 ____ Later flick starred newcomer Cillian Murphy, who is now in pretty much everything, including Batman Begins as Scarecrow.

I don't think I linked this Cracked run-down of Oscar picks for (I think) the last Oscar show. And I know why I didn't link it -- comedy jealousy. I was annoyed that it was so funny and that I'm just not at that level.

The schtick is that no matter who the actual nominees are, one of the guys doing the run-down always picks Batman, or a Batman actor, as the winner, based on his two Oscar criteria, "Oscar loves big tits" and "Oscar loves a Batman movie."

Here's his pick for Best Actress. The nominess are Judi Dench, Fellicity Huffman, Reese Witherspoon, Charlize Theron, and Keira Knightley. Worthies all, but he gives the Best Actress Award to Cillian "Scarecrow" Murphy.

Cillian Murphy, Batman Begins. Not technically a woman in the genitals-sense. But he can act the shit out of Dame Judi Dench, and he's so, so pretty.

Your tender eyes make my fluttering heart soar, Cillian. Your gaze is like a rainbow that ends in my pants.

Posted by: Ace at 04:57 PM | Comments (29)
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Critics laughed at the excellent action fantasy National Treasure for postulating a secret map written in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Indpendence.

That conceit didn't faze me at all. After all, we have fifty years of intrepid Indiana Jones-ish judges -- Raiders of the Lost Clauses -- finding all sorts of secret messages and invisible codes in the Constitution of the United States.

Yesterday, America moved one baby step closer to apartheid, a society in which racial groups are officially considered unequal and consigned to their own separate spheres under the law. California's supreme court granted a temporary stay in a murder trial about to begin, on the unprecedented ground that the county where the crime took place and the trial was to be held does not have enough residents of the same color as the defendant, who is black. In other words, the underlying theory is that a defendant may be entitled to a jury of his or her own race, at least in some as yet undetermined minimal percentage. No showing is exclusion of jurors on the ground of race need be shown if a change of venue is granted. Mere demography could become a criterion in presumed prejudice.

Since we are guaranteed a jury of our peers, if the stay is upheld and a change of venue required by the California supremes, the justices would in effect be ruling that being of a different race can make one not a peer and unable to judge fairly in the eyes of the law. From this sort of ruling one can logically derive many corollaries establishing in law the principle that we are not in fact all equal irrespective of race.

You might wonder, "Wait -- don't courts already overturn convictions for racially-imbalanced juries?" Well, not quite. Since the 80s, I think, they can and sometimes do reverse convictions in cases where a prosecutor has used his juror challenges deliberately to cull potential jurors of a certain race from the jury. (I'm not sure if an acquittal can be overturned due to the defense attorneys doing the same thing, but in reverse-- probably not.)

But under those rules, a prosecutor needs to be found as having engaged in a deliberate effort to craft a jury of specific racial make-up (or if not deliberately doing so, coincidentally just happening to remove certain jurors to create a jury of a certain racial mix). In other words, a conviction can be overturned if the prosecutor is found to have shaped the jury through his challenges to acheive a certain racial mix.

This review by the California Supreme Court goes quite a bit further than that. They're deciding whether or not a jury which perfectly-randomly turns out to have not enough (or too many, I suppose) minorities can judge the guilt of a minority. No improper shaping of a jury's racial mix -- just if too many White Devils wind up on the jury (say, because you committed your murder in a nearly all-white venue), then no conviction can be had. Prosecutors will be forced to change venue themselves out of the natural venue (where the crime occurred) to a venue having more minorities. Or, perhaps, begin using their challenges to strike non-minority jurors in an effort to get that "constitutionally required" minimum number of minority jurors.

Racially shaping a jury, I guess, is secretly mandated by the Constitution in order to ensure more minorities on a jury, it now seems, even though just twenty years ago the Constitution was found to have a secret code prohibiting such racial shaping.

See what I mean about National Treasure? So what if the Declaration of Indpendence contained a mere series of coded numbers on its back. The Constitution apparently has thousands of secret messages in it, only a thousand or so currently discovered. With all these secret messages and invisible-ink codes, can there be any doubt our living Consitution has the potential to grow throughout all time?

Question: The next group of "short-dicked white boys" accused by a mentally unstable stripper of rape will be entitled to have a jury consisting of at least 75% white males, correct?

PS: As a technical matter, I'm sure the judges are claiming the California, not the US, constitution contains these secret codes. This is a dodge employed by liberal judges to avoid having their strained, hyperliberal reading of state constitutions overturned on appeal by the Supreme Court. Because another secret code of the US Constitution says, in practical effect, decisions based on state constitutions can be read as liberal as state judges like, and there can be no appeal for very liberal readings.

On the other hand, if a state consitution is interpreted too conservatively, and hence conflicts with the minimum-acceptable-level of liberality imposed by the US Constitution, it can and will be overturned on appeal.

In other words, a state constitution can't be read as providing fewer liberal "protections" than the US constitution, but it definitely can be (and often is) read as guarateening greater liberal "protections."

Even if this is, as I assume, all based on the California Constitution -- I'm sure the California Constitution contains as many actual textual guarantees of minimum minority representation of a jury as the US Consitution does, i.e., none at all.

By the way, Lifson calls the legalities of the case "complicated," because the man charged with murder didn't actually kill anyone; he's being charged, if I'm getting his botched quote right, under California's "provocative act" murder rule, which holds that if one of your fellow criminals is killed in the act of your group effort in a major crime, you're responsible for his death as if you actually killed him yourself.

Actually, this isn't very complictated or novel at all; it's thoroughly routine and noncontroversial. It seems to be just a different term for (with perhaps somewhat different particulars) for the standard-issue felony murder rule. Felony murder is a doctrine stating, basically, that if anyone should be killed in the course of your commission of a defined majory felony (armed robbery, etc.), including even deaths which would otherwise be considered noncriminal (i.e., a security guard killing your confederate in attempting to lawfully repel him), you can get slapped with a felony murder charge -- your felony led to a homicide that would not have otherwise occurred, and thus it's a kind of murder.

So if, like I used to do, you're watching a crime show and keep hearing "felony murder" and wonder "what the heck sort of murder wouldn't be a felony?," that's what it means. It's called "felony murder" because it just isn't what is usually thought of as straight-up, "normal" murder (i.e., you commit the act that kills with the intent of taking a life).

Anyway, that complication isn't the cause for the California Supreme Court's stay. That's just run-of-the-mill basic law that's been on the books for decades, if not for centuries.

Thanks to Larwyn.

Posted by: Ace at 04:18 PM | Comments (33)
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Which is the separation of the skull from the spinal column, without actual separation of the head from the body.

She has a long, long road of recovery ahead of her.

A car crash in Nebraska on Jan. 25 threw Malloy up against the vehicle's dashboard. In the process, her skull became separated from her spine. The clinical term for her condition is called internal decapitation.

"I remember the impact and then I had no control over my head," said Malloy. "I wasn't focused so much on the pain. I just kept thinking, 'I have to stay alive.'"

Dr. Gary Ghiselli, a chiropractor at the Denver Spine Center, said Malloy's will to survive is what saved her.

"I've seen it once before and, unfortunately, the patient didn't make it," said Ghiselli.

Five screws were drilled into Malloy's neck. Four more were drilled into her head to keep it stabilized. Then a thing called a halo -- rods and a circular metal bar -- was attached for added support. It's not exactly a pain-free procedure.

"My skull slipped off my neck about five times. Every time they tried to screw this to my head, I would slip," said Malloy.

At least she seems to have all of her higher brain functions intact.

Let's just call this site Ace of Dri.

Posted by: Ace at 03:59 PM | Comments (13)
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Well, according to this site, practically everything. Kind of Lettermanesque videos of just putting anything they can get their hands on into an industrial shredder.

Dri strikes again.

Posted by: Ace at 03:33 PM | Comments (9)
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It's like a retard version of Poco.

Correction: I'm told Poco was the retard version of Poco. Okay, how about the retard version of the Still the One guys?

Via Hot Air, where Cindy Sheehan too panders to the Truther movement, praising them.

And the media continues to ignore this.

Allah notes Ron Paul's popularity with the Truther radio host Sheehan made her comments on. Unsurprisingly, Ron Paul is Andrew Sullivan's favorite Republican candidate. He's got all the things Sullivan looks for -- he's crazy and he could never win a race against Sullivan's actual candidate, Barack Obama.

Diggin' on Assassination: Hot Air points out that a comment about assassinating Cheney is being warmly received at Digg, with +48 Diggs (i.e., 48 more positive votes than negative, I guess).

Digg, apparently, will delete any post or comment offending the copyright protection law (as they did when someone posted the code for breaking copyright protection), but doesn't sweat the small stuff like advocating the murder of a high official of the United States.

It's interesting how far the country has come in tolerating murder speech of this kind. And it's not really a mystery as to how it came to be this way. When the murder speech was coming from the right -- as it often, and unfortunately, did, especially during the hyperpartisan Clinton years -- the media performed its duty of exposing such vile speech and embarrassing those who traded in it.

But of course now it's coming almost exclusively from the left-- the media has a more, ahem, nuanced view. Well, not a nuanced view. They don't defend it per se. They simply ignore it and allow it to grow like mold in the darkness.

I don't think I'm going out on a limb to suggest that should a Democrat be elected president in '08, the media will suddenly become very interested once again in patrolling political statements for extremist advocacy of political violence.

JackM tells me, by the way, I got linked on Digg for my various anti-Ron-Paul posts. He tells me I'm Public Enemy Number One there. Well, I guess Public Enemy Number Sixty-three thousand two-hundred and eleven. Still, that's something.

Posted by: Ace at 02:08 PM | Comments (12)
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He's missing his front legs -- so he walks entirely upright, all the time.

Just too strange.

Dri again.

Posted by: Ace at 01:52 PM | Comments (11)
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Easily insulted youths of magically indeterminate ethnic origin and their PC sycophants at Tufts University did.

Allah has the story. Get all the details at his link.

As for me? I'm not as easily intimidated as some touchy-feely tenured professors and their darling little leftists in the student body. So I'm going to republish the purely factual advertisement here that caused the thought-police to respond so aggressively, with a little message to the easily aggreived at Tufts.

Tufts University? Fatwa this.

Remind me about this next year too. I would so love to re-run this when it's "Islamic Awareness Week".

UPDATE:Some people were not able to see the ad in question on the main entry, so I have added a link to the pdf file that contains it.

Posted by: Jack M. at 01:38 PM | Comments (18)
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Part of his scam was frequenting the Truther sites.

Yet another update. I remember this guy getting caught a while back, after arguing, fluently and more or less intelligently, about a traffic ticket. Which prompted an investigation.

A Vancouver man was sentenced Friday to 13 months in prison for pretending to be mentally retarded in order to claim disability benefits.

Pete J. Costello, 28, pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy to defraud the government and to Social Security fraud. He began receiving disability benefits when he was 8. He was ordered to repay the $59,226 he has received since turning 18.

Costello, who cannot read or write, dictated a letter to his public defender that was submitted to the judge before sentencing and filed in court.

"I know that it was wrong to 'act like a child' in the Social Security office when that is not how I really am," the letter said. "I feel very bad about this and want to do everything I can to pay this money back."

...

Pete Costello continued to fake retardation into his mid-20s — picking at his face, slouching and appearing uncommunicative in meetings with Social Security officials.

His mother coached him and and his sister to fake being retarded. The mother is due to be sentenced this week; the sister's whereabouts are unknown.

The government's case consisted almost entirely of this hidden-camera footage of Pete, or "Donnie with a D" as he often called himself:

Thanks to dri.

Posted by: Ace at 01:34 PM | Comments (15)
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Eh... close enough. I mean, they all have "good ends" and they all have "bad ends" where stuff comes flying out.

Thanks to dri.

Posted by: Ace at 01:13 PM | Comments (62)
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