Second Links — 7.14.10

New Scientist explores  The Secrets of Laughter , and finds that “laughter is an unexpectedly serious business. ”

Observing the human animal in its natural habitat — the shopping mall — they documented 1200 instances of laughter, and found that only 10 to 20 per cent of them were responses to anything remotely resembling a joke. Most laughter was in fact either triggered by a banal comment or used to punctuate everyday speech . . . . [W]e are 50 per cent more likely to laugh when speaking than when listening, and 30 times gigglier in a social setting than when alone without a social surrogate such as a television.

Scientists claim, from the habits of birds, that  Parental care is linked to homosexuality .

Birds that spend less time parenting engage more frequently in homosexual behaviour, according to a study published this week . . . [although] it is not clear whether homosexuality is a neutral by-product of evolution or whether it serves an adaptive function.

A psychiatrist insists that  Good Parents May Plant Bad Seeds .

For years, mental health professionals were trained to see children as mere products of their environment who were intrinsically good until influenced otherwise; where there is chronic bad behavior, there must be a bad parent behind it.

But while I do not mean to let bad parents off the hook — sadly, there are all too many of them, from malignant to merely apathetic — the fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children.

Conan Doyle and the creeping man asks “What was the mysterious force that haunted the creator of Sherlock Holmes?” and suggests that

Taken chronologically, the books strike the reader as part of a (possibly unconscious) project – a series of attempts to articulate systems of thought which might make sense of the chaos of life and the human condition (“this circle of misery and violence and fear”, as Holmes puts it in “The Cardboard Box”).

Guy Sorman exposes the Darkness in Beijing , and notes that

Andrei Sakharov, Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel, Lech Walesa: in the 1980s, these men were household names, winners of extraordinary victories against bestial tyrannies . . . . Today, we need to remember another set of names: Wei Jingsheng, Hu Jia, and Liu Xiaobo. They are the new Havels and Mandelas, the heroic agents of a future dignity now denied to 1 billion of their fellow Chinese, men and women seeking the same rights that we enjoy.

And also:

Trying to Stop Cattle Burps From Heating Up Planet

Vaseline launches skin-whitening Facebook app for India

The forgotten art of Romani vardos