Mink Stuff

The Japanese somehow managed to add cuteness into robots!!

Men who struggle to control their emotional responses also have trouble regulating their sexual arousal.

Researchers set up an experiment in which male volunteers watched 16 video clips, which alternated between funny and erotic. For certain videos the participants were asked to try to control their responses. (Yes, a machine that measures erections was used.) During the erotic videos they were attempting not to be aroused by, the men showed a 25 percent reduction in overall erections.

What's interesting is that the men who couldn't keep it down when asked turned out to be the same ones who couldn't help but laughing when told not to respond to the funny clips. In fact, among those with the poorest impulse control, attempting to regulate arousal/laughter made it "worse" than when they weren't asked to.

What would be even more interesting (and science we could use) is if the same holds true for women. If so, guys would inevitably start scoping the bar for the easily amused.

Women need and want to be constantly reassured, they thrive on insecurity. They are emotion-driven creatures, and sometimes can be irrational. This is why they often put us men to the test by asking what seem to be innocent and harmless questions, but very different in reality. These questions are designed to make a man fail and suffer a merciless punishment for failure. Here are a few of the most common question women use trap men, along with possible responses, even if you don't mean it, they're still better responses that the truth.

"What are you thinking?" - Women believe that the sun and universe revolve around them. So when a women asks this question, what she really means is: are you thinking about me right now? Her female psychology drives her to imagine that she dominates your thoughts the whole time.

Bad responses

• The game tonight
• Have you seen the new neighbor who just moved in across the hall?
  

Good responses

• I was thinking how pretty you look today
• I was just thinking what a lucky guy I am to even know you.

---

"Do you think I'm fat?" - What she's really asking is, do you think i'm sexually attractive, even though I haven't been inside of a gym in five years? This is like a trick question, because she knows she's fat, otherwise she wouldn't be asking the question in the first place. She wants you to lie, but you can't be obvious about the fact that you're lying.

Bad responses

• Yeah, you could lose a few
• compared to who?

Good responses

• Just look at her in utter amazement that she could even ask such a question
• Don't answer directly. Say something like, "You're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.

---

"Are you attracted to my brains or my body?" - This is a perfect trap. If you answer that it was her intelligence and charming personality, then she'll come back with, "So you think i'm ugly?" And if you mention the latter, prepare to run.

Bad responses

• Openly leering at her breasts

Good responses

• You're the perfect combination of beauty and brains.

---

"If you could sleep with one of my friends, which one would it be?" - This is the test of your loyalty.

Bad responses

• Wishfully naming one of her friends as your brain throws up images of a torrid threesome
• Or worse is saying "It would be a tough choice between... and...
  

Good responses

• You're so beautiful that I wouldn't want to sleep with anybody else.
• I've never thought of any of your friends that way, so I really couldn't pick one

---

"Do you love me?" - What she's really asking is, "Is this relationship going to end up in marriage or am I just wasting my time here with you?" Women look at dating and relationship as business, and if she's not going to realize a future profit, then she will have no further use for you.

Bad responses

• I guess so
• That depends on what you mean by 'love'

Good responses

• Sidestep a direct answer, say something like"You're the perfect woman. I love being around you"

---

"How many women have you slept with?" - In her mind, she's really saying "How could you possibly have had sex with anyone other than me?", "Do you still think about these women?" and "Were they better sexual partners than I am?"

Bad responses

• Starting to count on your fingers, then moving on to your toes

Good responses

• I can't remember, because since I met you, no one else matters.

These are just a few examples of her trap questions, and there are plenty more in her arsenal. Don't feel by about lying to her because what she's really after is psychological reassurance. Just make sure that you're constantly alert and vigilant, or you might just fall.

Just WOW!!

There's a theory out there about how women often respond to the bad boy image. This might be true in some cases, but does that mean every guy has to be a bad boy to get women attention? The truth is you can still get the girls by being a nice guy, as long as the nice guy on the dating scene doesn't overplay his hand and come across as timid, awkward and unworthy of the lust he seeks. Nevertheless, women require more in the way of emotional balance on your part, so you can't possibly expect an easy hook-up by using only one strategy.

Your friends may have given you advices and it usually revolved around being indifference toward your lady. Essentially, they're telling you to just play it cool, treat her like you would with other friends. That is absolutely true because it is definitely a problem if you come across as desperate and need. However, being indifference falls in the bad boy category, it borders on neglect and disinterest. So the general rule is that women will always gravitate toward respect and charm.

The concept of being a nice guy seems to be lost with many men. Being a nice guy doesn't mean making the woman the center of the universe. A nice guy understands the give and take nature of a relationship and he also in tune with the woman's needs. He pays attention to her without being overbearing. If she needs some alone time, he kindly acquiesces. If she tells him about a special date that means something to her, he remembers it. If she had a bad day, and instead of a night out, she rather stay in and rest in your strong arms, he happily obliged. Most guys will complain about not knowing what she wants, about how they giving her gifts every week and doesn't get anywhere with her. And they'll just give up and conclude that being a nice guy gets you nowhere, all the while never realising that customary standard gifts aren't the same with respect.

While most guys understand that women aren't usually attracted to cockiness and boasting, their behaviour during the first meeting with a woman is often thinly veiled posturing. They'll add a bit here and there, and when it comes time for the date, they'll instantly take the lead. What would nice guys do? They do exactly what women often ask of men - they are themselves and speak to the girls as they would speak to any close friend. They're confident but they're also relaxed and honest. They are more than willing to talk about their achievements but not without being humble and an interest in her achievements.

Just about every last woman on the plant will whine - All I want is a nice guy, is that really so hard to find? At the same time, many nice guys are shaking their heads, shrugging their shoulders, and firmly believed that such women are lying about the nice guy attraction. The truth is they're not. You just have to know the definition of a nice guy and how to be one.

The most annoying thing people get when they wake up in the morning is having a very sore neck. We all experienced it before. I am experiencing it right now :(

Here's a few things you can do to help ease the pain.

1. Exercise the muscles slowly. Slowly rotate your neck in a circular motion to help to stretch out the agitated muscles. This may be somewhat uncomfortable at first, but it ultimately helps to alleviate the pain.

2. Take a shower. Let the lukewarm to hot water run over your neck for at least four or five mins Keep your neck straight as you do this, and do not turn it.

3. Use a heating pad. Apply a heating pad for a couple of minutes to help to stimulate your neck.

4. Use an Ice Pack. Apply an ice pack, or something from the freezer wrapped in a towel to the affected area. This can give better relief than the above.

5. Apply balm to the sore neck.

6. If Neck Pain is severe, a neck brace may be needed to support the neck. Only use if you feel your neck is unstable and pain is more severe. To do this at home, roll up a bath towel and wrap around your neck so that your base of your skull rests on top of the towel. Sit in a comfortable position - but if pain is severe seek help.

7. Take a bath. Take a bath with 'radox' it soothes muscles and gets rid of pains.

8. Get A Massage. Go get a massage at your local Day Spa. It is costly so shop around for a good one.

9. Sleep the right way and take naps

10. Apply warm cloth to affected area to relieve some pain.

I have done 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, and 10. It seems to be getting better but the pain is still there. Might be going back to 9 soon -_-

The picture says it all. I thought this was amazing, and it actually makes sense lol!!

Everyone knows the benefits of playing online poker is that you are able to play as many tables as you want at the same time. Of course, this depends on your screen size, brightness and contrast, problems with your eyes etc etc...

Nonetheless, it's beneficial to multi-table online. Basically, it allows you to get significantly more hands per hour than you normally get in brick-and-mortar casinos. However, it is important that you find a good balance between the number of tables you play and your ability to play well at those tables. Each extra table you play requires a certain amount of attention and that degrades your overall decision making capability.

Multi-tabling can be a huge benefit to you as an online poker player. It takes a lot of practice to find exactly what system works best for you, but the highly hourly win rate is worth it.

It's been found that if a child is spanked, his IQ will be lower.

Researchers tested the intelligence quotients of two groups of children: 2-to-4-year-olds, and 5-to-9-year-olds. They then retested both groups four years later. While the IQ of all small children improves with age, it increased on average five points more for un-spanked 2-to-4 year olds, and 2.8 points more for those who had not been spanked in the older group.

The researchers controlled for factors such as parents' socioeconomic level, but acknowledged the only way to make this type of study infallible is to randomly assign children into spanked and un-spanked groups -- which wouldn't be ethical.

However, if they want to test the effect spanking has on adult cognition, we're pretty confident they can find volunteers for the study =)

Some of you might be one of those guys who still sitting around and waiting for life to happen. Well the fact is we can't live and remain young forever. If you're not well on your way to what you really want to do with your life, you probably need to start yesterday. Life won't just happen unless you start doing something about it.

You are not going to stumble into your dream job. Ask yourself, is what you're doing right now really what you want to be doing? If you took your current title and printed it on business cards, would you be happy handing that thing out to people??

The truth is careers take work and dreams take even more. It takes practices to master something. Mozart wasn't some lucky kid, he practiced everyday until music was his language. This also applies to everyone. You can't expect to succeed in anything you do in life if you're just going through life filled with vague and distant dreams.

The same thing applies to relationship. Your dream girl will not just fall down from the sky. Romantic comedies teach us two random people will just wandering into a meaningful relationship. Sitcoms tell us we'll be across the hall from hot chicks who will love us for our quirkiness. These are fictions and they rarely happen in real life. You're delusional if you're leaving your love life up to chance, hoping for destiny to settle things. You can either put effort into meeting someone you'll be thrilled with, or just settle for crappy relationships.

The point is, good things don't just happen to people. Sometimes they do but that's just you benefiting from positive variance. So if you want something, you have to go after it. Don't leave it to chance because by the time you realized this, it would've been too late.

I don't understand why some men don't like to cuddle. Women always want to cuddle. I'm not a woman and I still like to cuddle. This seems to be a common attitude with men who can't wrap their heads around what their women see as the necessity of cuddling.

Let's look at the science. Cuddling releases a hormone called oxytocin, sometimes called the cuddling hormone. Oxytocin is responsible for aggravating what scientists refer to as "pair bonding" which means it makes the cuddling couple feel closer and more intimate. A woman wants to create this bond in order to get the man to commit to her. Even if she isn't trying to marry you and start a family, she is still drawn to create an emotional bond with you and this kind of physical intimacy is a good way to do it.

Also, cuddling just feel pretty damn good. If you let yourself relax enough emotionally and physically, you might actually enjoy some of the benefits of cuddling. Oxytocin is released in your brain, along with many other feel-good hormones that will leave you feeling happy.

Remember, cuddling doesn't have to be just a post sex only activity. In fact, she'll probably enjoy it more if you spontaneously start to cuddle her in the middle of the day. Just cuddle for cuddling's sake and you'll reap the rewards of making your girl feel happy, connected and close to you.

You may never get to be a superhero and smash your way through buildings like the Incredible Hulk, but there's at least a chance your sperm will. (OK, so that's not actually a good thing, but at least "super-sperm" sounds cool.)

Women's bodies are designed to make life difficult for sperm. According to Dr Hasson, of Tel Aviv University in Israel, "They eject, dilute, divert and kill spermatozoa so that only about a single spermatozoon gets into the vicinity of a viable egg at the right time." Apparently after generations of this, sperm got fed up and started hitting the gym.

According to an evolutionary biologist, some men are producing sperm that is so strong and so fast they barrel past the female's defenses in their effort to fertilize the egg, allowing multiple sperm to hit the target. If you recall your birds and your bees correctly, in order for fertilization to work, only one sperm can fertilize the egg. When several hit home it's called polyspermy and the egg ends up ruined.

This has, in turn, led to a rise in levels of infertility, at least according to Dr. Hasson's theory. The solution to the problem is apparently just to wait it out, as women's bodies evolve in kind, presumably by producing some manner of ovarian Kryptonite xD

People always say they want to be lucky, but what does lucky even mean? If you hit the jackpot or win Lotto, does that make you the luckiest person in the world? What people perceived as luck is actually called variance. Google definition of variance is "The act of varying or the state of being variable; A difference between what is expected and what happens; an activity that varies from a norm or standard". So contrary to what people may believe, you didn't win the raffle at your local pub because you are blessed. You were simply the beneficiary of positive variance.

With respect to poker, variance simply means the distribution of your results over a set of hands or sessions. The greater the variance, the wilder the swings; the lower the variance, the more likely a given session results will be close to one's average result. If you play perfect, optimal poker then your variance will be based on the times that the odds go in your favor.

For example, if you're all-in preflop with AA against 22, your odds of winning this hand is 82.2% based on mathematical probability. However, when we actually run this hand 10 times though, there is no guarantee you'll even win half of the time. If AA win only four out of ten times, you're experiencing what is called negative variance, or more common term "bad luck".

But over a much large sample, the distribution of results will be where they should be. Those holding AA will win the hand 80% of the time. However, anyone could sit down at the table and win on any given day. It's the same reason you could walk into a casino and turn $100 into $10000 or flip a coin 10 times and have it always land on heads. Any one can have a string of good luck as long as they hit a period of positive variance.

The real test of poker players is surviving through a stretch of negative variance without letting it affect their games. One thing remains the same: if you play better than other people, you will take their money. They are not luckier than you if they beat you over the course of one or two days. The higher the volume you play, the less variance you'll have to elude in order to be profitable in poker.

So I've been really busy with my MBA program and everything, and I haven't had a chance to update the blog since the Record Breaker last month. I still have about a week to go with my MBA courses, can't wait!!! =D

I found this really cool clip and it's just way too cool to not put it on my blog. For those of you who don't know or are not familiar with the Danjo dance, it was originally made from a program called Vocaloid - a singing synthesizer application software developed by the Yamaha that enables users to synthesize singing by just typing in lyrics and melody. Some guys made it by using the Hatsune Miku, one of the character you can use on Vocaloid, and the dance became famous and people are doing it all over the world..

Like many other poke players, I play mostly on FullTilt and PokerStars. And this weekend, I have a chance to be part of the history making, Guinness Book Record breaking, online poker tournament - the largest online poker tournamant ever held.

PokerStars did it in December last year and the record number was 35000. This year FullTilt was actually the one who is trying to break that record as part of their 5 years celebration, FIVE. The tourney is on this Sunday 15.05 ET, the buy-in is $5 with $250000 guaranteed and another $250000 added so that makes $500000 of the total prize pool!!! The cap is 50000 players, but I already registered xD



Today, PokerStars decided to also do the record breaking tournament also on the same day, except I think their tourney started an hour earlier. The difference is that they're going for 100000 players. That's just huge!! With only $1 buy-in and $100000 guaranteed prize pool, they'll probably beat their original record and possibly beat FullTilt also.

So don't forget to register and be part of history.. I'm registered for both, but not sure which one I'll be focusing on yet, probably FullTilt but we'll see ;)

After so many days of poker, we finally have The November Nine for 2009. Here are the full chip counts

1. Darvin Moon - 58,930,000
2. Eric Buchman - 34,800,000
3. Steven Begleiter - 29,885,000
4. Jeff Shulman - 19,580,000
5. Joseph Cada - 13,215,000
6. Kevin Schaffel - 12,390,000
7. Phil Ivey - 9,765,000
8. Antoine Saout - 9,500,000
9. James Akenhead - 6,800,000

Darvin Moon, a logger from Maryland who plans on going back to his day job, might be the chipleader but he is not the biggest name of the November Nine. Yes, we all know who I'm talking about.

Phil Ivey, considered by most to be the best player in the world. Having won 2 bracelets this year and 7 in his career, winning the Main Event will surely cement this place in poker history. Even though, he's only got 9,765,000 in chips, but he's definitely the name that everybody will talk about.

With such professional players as Ivey, Shulman (Editor of CardPlayer Magazine), and Ankenhead in the mix, some are concluding that this will be one of the strongest Main Event final tables of the past few years.

It started yesterday, Party Poker has decided to square the pot of every 50000th hand played on its felts. This is just an awesome promotion, which runs for 10 million hands, and every millionth hand iwll also receive a massive boost. Basically, every 50000th pot will see its value squared. However, this is where it gets really good, the minimum of the jackpot is $100, while the maximum payout is $5000.

So let say you're playing at a table and it happens to be the 50000th hand, but the pot is only $5, because of the promotion, the jackpot would still pay out $100, not the square of $5, which would be $25.

Every player involved in that hand will divide the extra payout equally, while the winner will scoop the original amount. The promotion applies to all cash game tables with $0.10-$0.25 and hight are eligible and also include Limit ($0.25-$0.50 and higher), No Limit, and Pot Limit Hold'em along with PLO and Stud.

Another part of this awesome promotion is every millioth han dwill feature at least a $10000 prize pool. The ten-millionth hand, which will mark the end to it, comes with at least a $100000 prize. These sizable bankroll boosts do not apply to heads-up cash game tables on PartyPoker. Players dealth to in a hand will share in its bonus prize and uncalled bets are not counted in the pot's value.

I never play on PartyPoker before, but with a genius promotion like this, I better go sign up ;)