Spice of Life

First health subject matter experts to living longer told us to drink more coffee, then they informed us in no uncertain ways that  red wine was the elixir to better heart and even losing those extra kilos that MEdia dragon compiles due to being now over 21. Now we get this Nude Zooland story suggesting that marrying into a Sikh family is the healthiest move we could have ever made ...

Curry really could be the spice of life after scientists discovered that eating hot food regularly possibly lowers the risk of dying prematurely. A study of nearly 500,000 Chinese people over seven years, published in the British Medical Journal, found those who ate spicy food three times a week were 14 per cent less likely to die early than those who did not. Listening to Hot Chilli Peppers

A photo posted by an Aussie twitter user purporting to show an orphaned wallaby hugging a teddy bear has gone viral and is probably the cutest thing you’ll see today.

“The value of a good hug”. Source: Twitter

Eating Spicy Food Linked to a Longer Life New York Times. Spices have lots of antioxidants.

Why the long face? Horses and humans share facial expressions PhysOrg

Spiciest part of Saudi life …The two women in niqabs quickly found two items that the sheikh approved of: matching sets of thongs and skimpy, transparent nightgowns, one in red and the other in blue. An excellent piece from Peter Hessler in the New Yorker that begins with a teaser on how the Chinese pioneered the market for lingerie in Egypt and just expands from there. Lots of lessons on development economics, foreign policy and more. Via Marginal Revolution ...

If one is more intimately familiar with a particular element of a film than the average bear, at some point the willing suspension of disbelief is likely to come crashing down, demonstrating the limits of even this most benign form of doxastic voluntarism. I went toIrrational Man with this limitation in mind, reminding myself that at some point we, as teachers of philosophy, would have to face absurd simplifications of our reality. So I did not expect anything more insightful or complicated than Philosophy for Dummies but I was, perhaps unfairly, expecting something more insightful and complicated than the chapter titles ofPhilosophy for Dummies.

Sadly, Allen — who once joked that he only read Kierkegaard and Freud so he could get girls — now seems content to use their McNuggets of Wisdom™ in order to defend the girls he has pursued and the ways in which he has pursued them. Rumor and its connection to truth are a central theme of Irrational Man, and they serve as about as subtle an allusion to Allen’s personal troubles as the allusions to Socrates’s trial in The Phaedo.While the story is by no means centered around it, there is lying beneath the surface, a troubling defense of the relationship between its main characters: Abe Lucas, an older, dour philosopher, and Jill Pollard, his much younger, bright-eyed undergraduate student. Philosophers on irrational man who read Freud in order to pick up a Sikh Grrrl