***
Finally went to Settlers Cafe, albeit the Holland Village annex. A 3 hour session with 5 dinners was surprisingly affordable: $67 for 5 people (with 10% members' discount), and we got to play Taboo, Trans America, a Slamwich card game, Pictionary, a Pit trading card game and maybe one or two more. The mysterious one has a review.
***
"Dear Students,
I have prepared a very exciting assignment for you to solve. Please retrieve it from the "Assignments" Folder of IVLE. Enjoy!
Cheers,
xxx"
Gah.
Being a hall inmate sucks more than I thought:
"another stupid thing in hall. block committee elections. what elections. it's like the presidential elections in singapore. everything's rigged. ultimately only one person is qualified for each post in the committee, subjected to whether the seniors like his or her face, the way he or she sits/stands/talks/eats/sleeps/walks. only one person will be voted for by the seniors for each post, safe for sporadic rebels.
poor things, those unsuspecting freshies. "
***
On SAF and SCDF CPR:
"Some of you here are being too scepticle over the roles of an SAF medic. Why do you need to compare the SCDF medics and SAF medics? Both of them deal with real life scenario for those ignorant ones out there. However, they face different types of casualties generally. This is due to the crowd they serve. For example, SAF soldiers usually suffer from heat injury and physical exhaustion. SCDF usuallly deal with RTA (Road Traffic Accident) and suicide cases. It's totally different. However, if you talk about Asthma or the usual head and spinal injuries, both SAF and SCDF medics are equally profision. To tell you the truth, SAF medics are trained to do certain things which a student who graduate from the diploma in nursing are not."
***
On the biological underpinnings of altruism:
"But the wider point about not trying to force everything into an evolutionary perspective has some force and needs a commen. My view is that
- we may have conscious motives that are genuinely altruistic (wanting to help)
- we may have conscious ulterior motives for apparently altruistic behaviours, in which case we are insincere (giving blood to impress)
- we may have unsconsious motives in the sense the Freud would recognise them, e.g. a need to avoid feelings of guilt leading us to charitable acts
- in all these case motives are proximal mechanisms and matters for psychological enquiry
- one cannot assume that every modern behaviour pattern (e.g. donating to tsunami appeal) is directly reducible to an explanation in terms of inclusive fitness, and some (e.g. celibacy in Catholic priests) are clearly not so reducible (no offence meant)
- some behaviours are so reducible (any eg. of kin selection you like)
- the basic idea is that the tendency or susceptibility to altruistic behaviour, and the social structures and practices that foster it, is biologically based via natural selection
- the issue is whether the patterns of behaviour in general, with all their variety and diversity, is better explained by admitting such an evolved biological substrate than by denying it
***
More modules should have anonymous feedback turned on. It will save me the trouble of opening a Hotmail account if I've anything bad to say to the lecturers. Heh heh.
Someone on anonymous feedback: its on vile?
Freudian slip!
***
Recovering Christians: God bless my Yong Tau Hoo - "In my heart, I prayed for a miracle as I dug deep into my wallet. Surprisingly, out came the exact amount of money to pay for the food, which I knew for certain wasn't there in the first place. Thank God for saving me the embarrassment."
MindGuard Home Page - "Welcome to the MindGuard website, your source for the award-winning MindGuard family of anti-mind-control software for Amiga and Linux computers. Developed by Lyle Zapato during the psychotronically turbulent early 1990s, MindGuard offered Amiga-using paranoids the world over a new opportunity to think free of evil influences using advanced Active Anti-Psychotronic (AAP) software, theretofore only available to mind-control agents and paranoid millionaires. At the dawn of the Third Millennium, MindGuard was made available for even the stingiest paranoids with the introduction of MindGuard X for the free Linux OS. Now no one has an excuse not to be mind-control free!"