"It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information." - Oscar Wilde

Random Playlist Song: Kermit the Frog - Being Green

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I'm very traumatised by my Microeconomic Analysis I exam; all the funny fractions (and not even proper ones, at that) and weird questions. I heard SAF-style curses flying from at least one direction.

Maybe I'll do something to my hair.

8 days to my next, and last, paper!

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We Are Bloggers, Our Name Is Legion

CowboyCaleb: "The Singapore blogosphere is unique. The fact that we have mature (in body and mind) leaders like MrBrown leading the charge and prescibing common sense has really helped... Now we have reached critical mass, and are forming collectives. Tomorrow.sg is the best example of a collaborative effort of several bloggers who neither need the exposure, have no reason to work for free and have no veto power over individual decisions. Far from being an exclusive club, Tomorrow is the natural evolution of seasoned bloggers’ need to increase exposure for new and known blogs that may never reach the mainstream without proper word of mouth."

Actually, I think that with the formation of a Boing-Boing-like community, Singaporean blogs have lost their innocence and maybe even some of their charm.

A growing segment of the Singaporean blogosphere - in absolute, even if not relative terms - now seems incestuously small, just like Singapore itself, and the Singaporean diaspora - at least the Singaporean student diaspora. Everyone links to everyone else, everyone trackbacks everyone else, everyone talks about everyone else and everyone reads everyone else, especially the same few heavyweights. Perhaps it's a fetishism by Singaporeans of all things Singaporean.

When something happens on or with one blog, the rest will be quick to pick up on it, spread the word, and pen some commentary, as if something had just happened to someone in the neighbourhood. Gossip and comments flow, just like in a MeatSpace neighbourhood. Wash, rinse and repeat recursively.

For this reason also, some form of bowdlerisation can sometimes be sensed on bloggers' parts, perhaps to reduce the amount of flak they might get for being controversial (unless the point, of course, is to be controversial), and also avoid offending certain other members of the blogosphere by saying what they really think of them and/or their blogs.

The Internet is supposed to be a global phenomenon, but the Singaporean blogosphere seems to be turning into itself. When does a support and networking system turn into a sticky web? When does cohesion and closeness slip into insularity and parochialism?

After a while, everything seems to blends into an indistinct, miscible whole, which is why I don't bother to keep up with all the good (as well as the occasionally good) blogs. In any case, if something is really good, it's bound to be linked to by other blogs.

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HotAIR - How Do Porcupines Make Love?

"Female pre-copulation

It was noted that the animals of both sexes objected to being stroked or having their feet, tail base, or genitals touched by the authors. In July/August, as the mating season approached, the female porcupine would often rub her genitals on structures such as food and water dishes, sticks, and the cage wire. As the season progressed she sought and accepted more frequent tactile stimulation (presumably from the human investigators). As the mating season approached, young females become more nervous and excited and put more "vim, vigor and action" into their activities. They would even "seize, straddle, and ride sticks about the cage" walking erect and stimulating their genitalia with the stick. This period of excitement was followed by a stage the female went off her food, remained close to the male and "moped." During this period the female even accepted the insertion of a thermometer into the vagina (which she resisted at other times).

Conclusions

1. Young children should be banned from university library basements.

2. Sometimes the most improbable science is also the truest.

3. Never stand close to a cage that contains courting porcupines."


Clever Canines - Did domestication make dogs smarter? - "In their relationship with humans, dogs have developed remarkable interspecies-communications skills, says Mr. Csányi. "They easily accept a membership in the family, they can predict social events, they provide and request information, obey rules of conduct, and are able to cooperate and imitate human actions," he says. His research even suggests that dogs can speculate on what we are thinking."

A sentimental education - Ian Jack deplores the media's role in fomenting grief on the death of public figures - "The Pope, having been, so far as I can remember, a fairly marginal figure in the paper's worldview, was now in death bang at the centre of it. The Pope — this is a crude and prejudiced paraphrase of the coverage — had ended the Cold War, brought down the Berlin Wall, and defended the world's poor against the depredations of the world's rich. He was ripe for beatification. No more humane, more spiritual or more important individual had recently walked the globe. Millions of people, by no means all of them from Poland, were invading Rome to see the body, watch the funeral, and to be witnessed by the rest of us doing both."

Transcript for "Edward O. Wilson and The Future of Life" - "It [Sociobiology] was a new discipline that I was proposing, which was the scientific study of social behavior in all kinds of organisms on a foundation of biology. It was a very successful attempt in the study of animal behavior. It succeeded immediately. But I also decided to apply it to that special species of animal, Homo sapiens, and when I did, I just suggested that maybe there were some implications of this for humans... maybe there is such a thing as instinct and human nature and maybe this is the way to study it, with this new discipline. And gee, yes, in the middle Seventies that was not an idea permitted in most of the social sciences and on American campuses."
I was under the impression that this remains the case even in the 00's (Have they found a name for this decade yet?

How are you supposed to spell Muammar Gaddafi/Khadafy/Qadhafi? - "I count at least 12 different ways to spell the colonel's handle, including Qaddhafi (New York Review of Books), Qaddafi (New Republic), Gaddafi (Time), Kaddafi (Newsweek), Khadafy (Maclean's), Qadhafi (U.S. News & World Report), Qadaffi (Business Week), and Gadaffi (World Press Review). Libya's UN mission, in an effort to spread further confusion, spells the name Qathafi, and I know I've seen Gadaafi somewhere. To make matters worse, the Library of Congress and the Middle East Studies Association, to whom one would ordinarily look for guidance, have a fondness for Qadhdhafi, which is an abomination unto God. I think you now begin to grasp the dimensions of the problem. Some publications have used several spellings over the years; unfortunately, the result has not been a stylistic convergence, but rather a prolongation of the dismal status quo. In 1973 Business Week started out with Qadafi, which had the advantage of simplicity, at least; unfortunately, almost no one else used it, and BW sheepishly changed to Qadaffi. As of December 30, 1985, the usually punctilious New Yorker was spelling it Khadafy; by January 20, 1986, this had inexplicably morphed into Qaddafi. The Wall Street Journal initially used Qaddhafi, but now has shifted to Qadhafi. My personal feeling is to chuck all the preceding and just call him Poohead, which is easier to remember and has an undeniable evocative power as well. But to each his own."
An excellent question I never managed to get an answer to.

Dumb thief, unplugged - "Clearly Richard Wayne Cook learned no lesson four years ago when he ripped off Mitch and Theresa Wyman. Back then, Cook was convicted in a Charleston, South Carolina, court for grand larceny and burglary. Unreformed, Cook was recently nabbed again after stealing the same stuff from the same house."

One of the very few places on the net where you can download an MP3 of Elgar's The Snow!