Rotundus.com

Francesco Lentini – The Three- Legged Man

This may be the strangest tale of chimerism that I've come across: "Lentini was born in 1889 in Rosolini in the province of Sirocusa, Sicily as one of twelve children. Technically, he was one of 12 and a half children. ... in total he had three legs, four feet, sixteen toes and two sets of functioning male genitals."

How online retailer Novosbed is giving the mattress industry a wake-up call

I've got one of these - it seems to have worked out pretty well (and a lot cheaper than buying memory foam at a mattress store.

Soul mates are doomed

One of the study's authors: "Our findings corroborate prior research showing that people who implicitly think of relationships as perfect unity between soul mates have worse relationships than people who implicitly think of relationships as a journey of growing and working things out"

8 Year Old Charged For Sexual Conduct With Sitter

According to the prosecutors "the babysitter initiated the contact". Any guesses as to the gender of the 8 year old?

Why cyclists should be able to roll through stop signs and ride through red lights

"already a few places in the US ... allow cyclists some flexibility in dealing with stop signs and red lights"

Not sure if you've heard of GamerGate but it seems to be the current online feud of note. Regarding it, I found the following in an article entitled How to End Gamergate: A divide-and-conquer plan for dissolving a toxic online movement:

One site, the Escapist, did issue new ethics policies and allowed civil discussion of Gamergate early after the start of the controversy, and Gamergate members, shockingly, seemed satisfied, as the Escapist did not make the Gamergate community’s boycott list, even after the Escapist subsequently ran 10 interviews with anonymous female game developers, many of whom were sharply critical of Gamergate.

What the Escapist seems to have done is to have accepted criticism to the extent it was legitimate. Not too surprisingly this defused tension against them. In consequence it then gave them a more effective platform from which they could address negatives associated with the same movement.

This Bug’s Bite Can Turn You Into a Vegetarian

"It might sound like something out of PETA’s handbook of master plans, or a scheme by evil scientists fed up with climate change deniers. Either way, hundreds of people across the United States can no longer eat red meat because of a tick."

To Refrigerate, Or Not To Refrigerate? - The Chemistry of Tomatoes

"In short, the verdict seems to be that you can get away with storing fully ripe tomatoes in the fridge for up to a week to prevent them going off, before then leaving them out for a short time to recover their volatile compound producing ability"

Costa Rica Becomes First Latin American Country to Ban Hunting for Sport

I can understand hunting to eat, but catch-and-release seems cruel to me.

Male birds eat poison to attract females

And I thought humans were weird: "the toxins from the beetles also kill parasites that live in the birds’ reproductive orifice known as the cloaca .... The cloaca, which is also used for defecating, is then rigorously inspected by the femalev"

,

Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn is probably best known as a Russian critic of the Soviet system, a system under which where his writings were suppressed and he was eventually expelled from the country. He wasn't exactly uncritical of the West though. Here's a bit of a commencement speech he gave at Harvard in 1978:

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to flock together and shut off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era. There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of a petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events.
... I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced -- Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. ... But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively.

Are the Western societies of today better or worse off than in 1978?