When brains are outlawed...

An old blog post found thanks to the guys at Freakonomics...

When Wonderbras are outlawed, only outlaws will have wonderbras

August 24, 2006 · 3 Comments

It is once again safe to wear gel-filled bras on airplanes.The TSA pretty much HAD to do this as it realized the only other move would have been to ban breast implants as well which would have shut down LAX.

Hilarious...

Occupational Questions...

Stephen Dubner, one of the two people behind Freakonomics, comes up with a bleg forwarded by a reader:

When I’m at a party and get asked what I do (I am an architect), I always hear one of the same five responses:

+ What kind of architecture do you do?

+ Hey, you can design my dream home!

+ I like Frank Lloyd Wright, do you think he’s good?

+ My brother/father/aunt is an architect.

+ I thought about going into architecture.

All of these responses are fine, but just knowing how consistent they are, it makes me wonder in what ways I ask stereotypical questions of others.

It would be nice to avoid this by having a list of what jobs get what kinds of responses. This idea has led to many interesting party conversations — because many times, the responses are not so nice!

So here’s my bleg question: what are the typical responses you hear when you tell people what you do?

So, how about myself? Well I have given up (mostly) trying to explain people what I do in detail...

I am a computational chemist. people usually says one of these two things:

• - A what?!?
• - Complicational Chemistry? Uh, interesting... I sucked at chemistry in high school / college / primary / whatever...

So, how about you?

Benefit for bringing to term a pregnancy.

This is Hilarious.

After suggesting the Freakonomics blog to a friend, I went off to read some posts myself.

In particular, one of the posts captured my attention, about a study correlating Depression and abortion rates in Australian women...

Then I start reading the comments, and I find out that the Australian government recently raised child benefits, instituting a 4000US$ Baby Bonus which can be claimed for every pregnancy brought to term. That's right, you get the 4000 bucks not only for bringing to light a live baby, but also if he/she's stillborn.

Factsheet is here.

this brought me to think how hard the legislator job really is, when to draft a law it has to account for almost every possible case!!! It's akin to programming, in fact, where every outcome of an expression must be guessed before hand to avoid crashes or the program malfunctioning. Only, there are no known debuggers for politics. Not yet...