Earthquakes and solar flares

Japan was hit by a magnitude 8.9 quake on Friday afternoon and it happened when a shockwave from an X-Class flare hit the planet during a 24 hour window.

A permanently erect penis

Men once had penile spines like those found on chimpanzees, monkeys and mice:

Losing the spines has allowed man to enjoy longer lasting sexual intercourse, unlike other primates who still have theirs, scientists believe.

It may also have aided the evolution of monogamous partnerships.

If humans still had these elements of DNA, they might not only possess spiny penises but whiskers too, researchers said.
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Penile spines, or barbs, are typically present in species that mate quickly, such as male chimpanzees who must compete to fertilise one or two receptive females.

These spines - made from keratin, the protein found in fingernails - often lie over sensory receptors, and some experiments suggest removing them makes copulation last longer.
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Dr David Kingsley of Stanford University in California and his team found one section of DNA deleted in the human genome was responsible for producing sensory whiskers and prickly spines.

'People are always surprised to hear that the penis of many organisms are covered with these spines,' Dr Kingsley said.

Dogs also have cartilage spines in their penises.

Among humans, only the Khoi-San (the Hottentots and Bushmen of South Africa) have cartilage spines in their penises.

From The Khoisan people:

The San male penis (I had a private peek) is constantly at a 64 degree horizontal position while the Bantu has a 0 degree position. Quite a few snickers were heard when they compared my total vertical penis with their semi erect horizontal one.

The penis, when not erect, maintains an almost horizontal position.

Khoi men with unerect penises:

Naked redneck chicks

A study has found that chickens are capable of empathy.

Chickens have feelings too:

The writer E.B. White, patron saint of us dwellers in darkness who have come late to the barnyard, wrote about the mystery and menace of country life from his saltwater farm in Maine. He wrote about weak lambs who die in the night, heifers who refuse to breed, colts who go lame for no discernible reason. The theme that runs through all his farm accounts is the extremely tenuous thread that links livestock to life, a thread he turned into the world’s most famous web when he wrote Charlotte’s Web.

The story White never wrote was one that I reckon he deemed too hard for young readers to take, the story of a tame hen who willfully tore a chick to pieces and then, crazed with remorse, went into the cellar and committed suicide by eating moth balls.
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The story this week that chickens are capable of feeling empathy might have surprised some folk but it sure didn’t surprise me. I’ve known chickens who were capable of love, jealousy, selfishness and lust. I’ve observed the politics of the chicken yard and found them to be as complicated and heartbreaking as any parish council in the land.

A simple explanation of human nature

From Bleeding Heart Libertarians:

An exchange can be mutually beneficial and yet unfair or degrading. If you are drowning in a lake, and I row by on the only canoe in sight, it is morally wrong of me to make my rescue of you contingent upon your signing over the deed to your house. Granted, you would be better off taking my deal than passing it up.
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We can grant that even exploitation of a mutually beneficial sort is a serious moral wrong, but it simply does not necessarily follow from this that it is something that governments ought to prohibit it. ... Perhaps prohibiting exploitative transactions will lead would-be exploiters to offer mutually beneficial deals on fairer terms. But, as is illustrated in the case of sweatshop labor, there is reason to worry that prohibiting exploitation by, say, mandating safety improvements or a higher minimum wage, will make the package sufficiently unattractive to would-be exploiters that they wind up preferring to make no offer at all.

Yep, its called the free market by some or survival of the fittest by others.

New footage of September 11 attacks

Captured from a New York Police Department (NYPD) helicopter, the 17-minute video shows the aircraft hovering just 300ft above the Twin Towers as thick black smoke spewing out from the roof of the building.

After the 1727ft North Tower imploded, the police pilot can be heard on camera commenting: "Holy ----, that’s it, biggest disaster in the world, right there".

The footage was used at the official inquiry into the collapse of the World Trade Centre buildings. It was obtained from New York City authorities under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) but was not released publicly.

However, the video was passed onto whistleblowing website Cryptome who leaked it onto the internet.

It's here.

Sorry guys, size DOES matter...

...at least when it comes to fertility:

When it comes to male fertility, it turns out that size does matter. But not the measurement that most men worry about.

The dimension in question is a measurement known as anogenital distance, or AGD.

The shorter the AGD, the more likely a man was to have a low sperm count, a U.S. study has shown.

Men whose AGD is shorter than the median length - around two inches - have seven times the chance of being sub-fertile as those with a longer AGD, according to the study published on Friday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

That distance, measured from the anus to the underside of the scrotum, is linked to male fertility, including semen volume and sperm count, the study found.

I'll show you my AGD if you show me yours.

The last "White Rajah"

Anthony Brooke, who died on March 2 aged 98, was heir to the throne of Sarawak and briefly ruled the romantic jungle kingdom on Borneo:

Brooke's English family had been the absolute rulers of Sarawak for three generations. Popularly known as the White Rajahs, they had their own money, stamps, flag and constabulary, and the power of life and death over their various subjects – Malays, Chinese and Dyak tribesmen, a few of whom still indulged in the grisly custom of headhunting.

The Brooke family ruled Sarawak (which is the size of England) from 1841 until 1946 when they were forced to cede it to the British Empire. It was finally given independence in 1963 when it joined the new Federation of Malaysia. Read the whole thing if you can stomach the British jingoism but I did enjoy how Anthony Brooke ended up after ceding Sarawak:

[He] embarked on a second career as a self-styled "travelling salesman" for world peace. In the late 1950s, he led a campaign to put morality back into British politics, and in the 1960s he toured the world on a "peace pilgrimage", meeting Nehru, Zhou En-lai and U Nu of Burma, and walking across the Punjab with the Indian saint Vinoba Bhave. He lived with the New Age commune at Findhorn, in the northeast of Scotland, adopting their belief that flying saucers would bring "peace on earth and the brotherhood of man".

I think I'd take the lunacy of the British Empire over flying saucers anyday.

"Obama’s deep thinking is ultimately bogus"

Any sane person knows that Obama is a phony but it takes a fag to really see how totally insincere he is about "gay marriage". Bruce Bawer:

Of course, Obama isn’t just your run-of-the-mill opponent of gay marriage. No, he wants to have that one both ways, too. So it is that every time he reiterates his hostility to gay marriage, he insists on adding that he’s “grappling” or “wrestling” with the issue.
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Obama’s distinguishing characteristic throughout his adult years has been a species of intellectual vanity that seems to overwhelm his every other personal attribute, good or bad. So pronounced is this intellectual vanity — and the self-seriousness that goes with it — that it stood out even at Harvard Law, where he studied, and the law school at the University of Chicago, where he taught. He has, in short, even by the formidable standards of the Ivy League, the law profession, and high-stakes politics, an exceedingly lofty opinion of his own mind and wants us to share that opinion. Nothing else, it would seem, matters to him nearly as much.

So thoroughly does this trait dominate Obama’s character, indeed, that it utterly dwarfs other traits that one might consider important in a president — or, for that matter, an alderman, school superintendent, night manager at a deli, or anybody else in a position of responsibility. Time and again, when the impressive thing would be to make a strong and timely decision — and to make a clear case for it — Obama hesitates, vacillates, equivocates, and ends up, as in the matter of gay marriage, making a muddle of things and riling up pretty much everybody; and instead of recognizing this habit as a weakness, Obama himself shows every sign of considering it a virtue, a mark of excellence, that distinguishes him from lesser — which is to say less cognitively inclined — beings.
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Obama’s deep thinking is ultimately bogus. It’s as if he’s posing for Rodin, elbow on knee, chin on fist — all the while staring in a mirror, pleased by what he sees.

Couldn't have said it better myself. I'd have just said he was a typical pseudo-intellectual snob.

HT GayandRight.

The odds of an American soldier being killed in various wars

From Nicholas Hobbes' Essential Militaria:

• War of Independence: 2 percent (1 in 50)
• War of 1812: 0.8 percent (1 in 127)
• Indian Wars: 0.9 percent (1 in 106)
• Mexican War: 2.2 percent (1 in 45)
• Civil War: 6.7 percent (1 in 15)
• Spanish-American War: 0.1 percent (1 in 798 )
• World War I: 1.1 percent (1 in 89)
• World War II: 1.8 percent (1 in 56)
• Korean War: 0.6 percent (1 in 171)
• Vietnam War: 0.5 percent (1 in 185)
• Persian Gulf War: 0.03 percent (1 in 3,162)

Our Civil War was the deadliest but the figure is more than double the others because both sides were counted as American soldiers.