This week’s collection of links to items you may have missed …
First off something scary. Just look at the size of this giant bug!
Not all critters are quite so scary … For instance, we know the crow family are highly intelligent, now Ravens have been shown to use ‘hand’ gestures to communicate.
But then who would have thought that there are cognitive benefits to chewing gum.
Now here’s a job that you never even dreamt existed, nor wanted … castrating sheep with teeth, which has been shown not to be a great idea!
Here is a list of ten of the most dangerous chemicals in the world. And to think I’ve worked with some of those, as well as a few which aren’t on that list!
Talking of dangerous, this one is really worrying … ‘End of virginity’ if women drive, Saudi cleric warns. WTF do these people think they are! Made me see red.
But then again the Egyptian authorities are clearly no better (and equally make me see red), prompting a young Egyptian woman to stand up for women’s rights and argue that modesty objectifies women. She reinforces this by appearing nude too. Two reports in a weblog here and this one from the Guardian. More power to her elbow. Let’s all hope for her safety.
Finally, for amusement, more on the vulva cupcakes. Maybe a new fashion statement?
So long as a judge keeps silent his reputation for wisdom and impartiality remains unassailable: but every utterance which he makes in public except in the course of the actual performance of his judicial duties, must necessarily bring him within the focus of criticism. [It would] be inappropriate for the judiciary to be associated with any series of talks or anything which can be fairly interpreted as entertainment.
A hint that the large human penis serves as some sort of signal may be gained by watching what happens when men take the opportunity to design their own penises, rather than remaining content with their evolutionary legacy. Men in the highlands of New Guinea do that by enclosing the penis in a decorative sheath called a phallocarp. The sheath is up to two feet long and four inches in diameter, often bright red or yellow in color, and variously decorated at the tip with fur, leaves, or a forked ornament. When I first encountered New Guinea men with phallocarps, among the Ketengban tribe in the Star Mountains […] I had already heard a lot about them and was curious to see how they were used and how people explained them. It turned out that men wore their phallocarps constantly […] Each man owns several models, varying in size, ornamentation, and angle of erection, and each day he selects a model to wear according to his mood, much as each morning we select a shirt to wear. In response to my question as to why they wore phallocarps, the Ketengbans replied that they felt naked and immodest without them [despite that they] were otherwise completely naked and left even their testes exposed. In effect, the phallocarp is a conspicuous erect pseudo-penis representing what a man would like to be endowed with. The size of the penis that we evolved was unfortunately limited by the length of a woman’s vagina. A phallocarp shows us what the human penis would look like if it were not subject to that practical constraint.