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I finally got tired of all the broken promises by MSN. They first announced the account upgrading at the end of June 2004, but kept pushing the date back, from "next month" (ie July) to "this fall" to "by the end of September" to "later this year" (ie the end of 2004). So when the calendar rolled over into 2005 I was furious.
Then, Benjy sent me this: Get your Hotmail account upgraded from 2MB to 250MB
And it worked! Well at least the first step, from 2MB to 25MB, did. Now to wait for 250MB.
Such discrimination against users on the basis of country. No wonder my secondary account, opened in 2003, got upgraded to 2GB, but the account I've had since 1998 hasn't. So much for treating loyal customers well...
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IVLE My Community - NUS Freethinkers' Community
"Hello fellow freethinkers,
Are you fed up with irritating invitations/threats from religious fundamentalists to attend religious services?
Are you disturbed that so many people today, in the 21st century, are still treating ridiculous fables/legends as the unquestionable truth?
If you answered "yes" to any of the above, you have us for company.
All atheists, agnostics, deists and other freethinkers, whether students or staff:
Welcome aboard!"
To join, login to IVLE, click the "Add/remove communities" button at the bottom of My Workspace, then click "Add communities" and the category "Religion & Beliefs". Click the check box beside the community name and then click "Bookmark".
***
Extract from my tutorial answers:
Science philosophies
Question 4: Do Popper's and Kuhn's descriptions of science correspond to your own ideas about science?
Answer: They make something relatively simple seem profound and obscure.
Question 5: What is the relationship between science and truth?
Answer: What is truth?
That aside, studying Popper and Kuhn's views on science is instructive. I do not agree with the whole "facts do not exist" spiel though, for not only does it lead to epistemological nihilism, it is also self-contradictory.
The important thing to keep in mind, as always, is that nothing can be taken and held as the Gospel truth, and that paradigms should be discarded when their time has come.
I was in Seminar Room 2, and I asked someone where Tutorial Room 1 was.
He said he thought it was on Level 5 of the block, so I went down to Level 5, but it didn't seem to be there.
I went back up to Level 6 and found that Tutorial Room 1 was opposite Seminar Room 2.
Gah.
***
My sister asked me what I would want my epitaph to say.
I suggested: "It's Morphin Time!".
She said that was quite good :)
Comments/suggestions:
"a cheerful transformation name for what is essentially decomposition to feed the maggots and fertilise the soil"
"here lies a weird guy."
***
More tales of Handsome Boy, Steven Lim
"I am looking for a girl friend now for a serious relationship!!!! My trust had been betrayed by a 16 year old girl and we ended our six months relationship on 26th December 2004. All the promises she had given cannot be fulfilled but all turned around and laughed at me at the last minutes. She used to listen to me and put me in priority. She had changed suddenly and heartless and I am so so heartbroken because I really love her. I cried so badly while walking in Orchard's shopping malls feeling betrayed why she had chosen her job over me. She dun care about me anymore! Many people recognized me as Steven Lim and feel puzzled why the sadness. All I ask from her is to get a job that ends earlier like 8pm not after 12am everyday, so that we can spend more time together like before. That is wrong!?!? Relationship needs time together to be healthy n sweet! But she dun listen to me anymore!!! I am a Virgo and I had to admit that I am a demanding/picky boyfriend and I need someone (a gal) that dun argue too much and rather be submissive towards me to save time on quarrels, supportive towards my passion in performing art, pure and can gradually give me 100% of total devotion, pretty, slim, dun irc, dun smoke/drink, preferably no curfews so we can roam together if we want to, close to female friends rather than guy friends and age between 16-21. Follow me wherever I go, lift me up when I fall and I would like to bring u see the sunrise, sunset and walk the globe with you or on my motorbike, holding your hands tightly till the day we die. Love me for what I am, Steven Lim is earnestly waiting for you. Eye for a girl. Contact me with the following numbers and email me with pictures if interested. Thank you. Extra note in case you regret you contact me. I always subsidize 2/3 of my girlfriend expenses only, not full. Just my way of doing things."
Erm. Right. That pretty much speaks for itself, I think. Maybe her mother saw him making a fool of himself on television multiple times (it wasn't even funny; pathetic, more), and realised that this was the man her daugher was going out with.
A 28 year old looking for a 16 year old girlfriend? Maybe because their mental ages are closer than would seem at first glance.
I recall someone's suggestion - pair Xiaxue and Steven Lim together!
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Believers go on rack to prove God relieves pain
"People are to be tortured in laboratories at Oxford University in a United States-funded experiment to determine whether belief in God is effective in relieving pain.
Headed by Baroness Greenfield, the leading neurologist, the new Centre for the Science of the Mind is to use imaging systems to find out how religious, spiritual and other belief systems, such as an illogical belief in the innate superiority of men, influence consciousness.
Scientists have long been baffled at the persistence of these beliefs in the face of seemingly irrefutable logic. Professor Lewis Wolpert, the biologist, has speculated in the past that a belief in how the world was created and what happens after death may have conferred an evolutionary advantage."
***
The Nazi's testimony - "Oskar Gröning was at his local philately club when a fellow stamp collector cast doubts on the Holocaust. Gröning knew he was wrong - because 50 years earlier he had served at Auschwitz."
Of course, the conspiracy theorists would have a different answer,
You just might be an altie (a person so militantly pro-alternative medicine and so distrustful of conventional medicine that he will never admit when conventional medicine is effective and refuse ever to concede that any alternative medical practitioner might, just might, possibly be a quack) if... - "If you dismiss every well-designed randomized clinical study that failed to show a benefit for an alternative medicine or therapy over placebo control as either not proving that the therapy is ineffective or as having been manipulated by nefarious forces (conventional medicine, the pharmaceutical companies, the government, etc.) to produce a negative result"
Herbal Remedies Found to Contain Toxic Heavy Metals - "Some herbal remedies may do more harm than good. Researchers writing today in the Journal of the American Medical Association report that 20 percent of herbal medicine products sampled contained dangerous levels of heavy metals."
WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT? - "Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"
Scholars Mull Their Separation From the Mainstream - "When humanities scholars gaze in the mirror, what is reflected? If the 120th Modern Language Association convention is any indication, many prominent scholars in language and literature see their growing estrangement from mainstream discourse"
I think the problem with academia is that academics write only for other academic to read, and the nature of the humanities and social sciences is that, unlike the hard sciences and engineering, they actually have direct relevance to the world.
The essential scientific and political links in any Tsunami Early Warning System... - "Here is a brief analysis of what is required, highlighting the links in the chain that may prove difficult to achieve. The science is the easy bit - the political will and local planning within each state are what will really count."
I recall there was a great deal of outrage when people found out that a warning system was considered but never implemented. This post shows just why.
'Dark forces' behind tsunamis - "Just 11 days after Asia's tsunami catastrophe, conspiracy theorists are out in force, accusing governments of a cover-up, blaming the military for testing top-secret eco-weapons or aliens trying to correct the Earth's "wobbly" rotation. In bars and Internet chatrooms around the world questions are being asked, with knowing nods and winks, about who caused the submarine earthquake off Sumatra on December 26, and why governments were so slow to act in the minutes and hours before tsunamis slammed into their shores, killing almost 150 000... Scientific evidence, however, cuts little ice with many conspiracy theorists. " [Ed: Emphasis mine]
Concentration test for men - I wonder what the one for women's like. Some girls I sent it to didn't even notice the distraction. Bah.
Science Made Stupid - "What is Science? Put most simply, science is a way of dealing with the world around us. It is a way of baffling the uninitiated with incomprehensible jargon. It is a way of obtaining fat government grants. It is a way of achieving mastery over the physical world by threatening it with destruction. Science represents mankind's deepest aspirations - aspirations to power, to wealth, to the satisfaction of sheer animal lusts."
The Economics of Flatulence - "The dilemma resembles that of a cartel like OPEC. A collusive agreement to cut back production (thereby raising prices) is most easily sustained with a small number of producers, but typically crumbles as the number of producers rises. The difficulty of identifying and punishing cheaters makes cheating more worthwhile, leading to a breakdown of cooperation."
Why Singapore is a Pathetic Place - For the few who haven't seen this, a Hong Konger's perspective on Singapore.
The Natural "Crime Against Nature": Homosexual Behaviors In Animals - "In the approximately 1,000 to 3,000 species whose behavior has been well researched and described in the literature, approximately 450 have been shown to have clear homosexual behaviors."
U.S. Ally Sentences Elderly Mother to Prison, Hard Labor - "After torturing her son to death, allegedly by boiling him in water, the government of Washington's closest Central Asian ally, Uzbekistan, has sentenced his 62-year-old mother to six years of hard labor in prison, according to human rights groups, who are calling on the Bush administration to speak out against the continuing persecution of independent Muslims there."
