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Thursday, November 03, 2005

"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." - H. L. Mencken

Random Playlist Song: Talisman A Cappella - Baba Yetu (Casey Stone Remix)

Baba Yetu Yetu uliye mbinguni Yetu Yetu, Amina.
Baba Yetu Yetu uliye jina lako litukuzwe;

(Okay, I give up. Swahili pronunciation is too much for me to take)

***

"All I took before econometrics was statistics for finance majors, where we learned nothing. Now most of the concepts are coming up in econometrics, the major difference being that we need to understand what all these statistical tests mean."

Heh.

***

Stretching 'fails to stop muscle injury' - "Data from two studies on army recruits in training, whose risk of injury is high, show that muscle stretching prevented on average one injury every 23 years."

A remote control that controls humans - "Headset sends electricity through head, forcing wearer to move"

Cops say hard drives justify 90 day jail without trial - "We have a senior cop, Andy Hayman from the Metropolitan Police, telling us on the same radio programme that the 90 days detention without trial it wants is because the amount of information on a hard drive is more than huge piles of paper... If people have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear."
Yes, let's plant mind control monitoring chips into people's brains. If people have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear.


***

Someone on my MSN avatar: is that some experiment with...pads?

Me: hehe
so smart
there're videos also

Someone: what is that? part time job?

***

It's damn annoying whenever people I don't recognise say hello to me. Sometimes you you know where these people who accost you are from but you can't remember the name, but more often I don't even know where they're from. Argh.

Someone was bemoaning that NUS students lack intellectual curiosity, and don't seek knowledge for its own sake. Another commented that Singaporeans in general lack intellectual curiosity. As is evident from the focus on "practicality" in education, most do not seek knowledge for its own sake, but as a means to an end (and probably a practical/materialistic one). This probably explains the popularity of management bullshit and self-help books here, vis a vis the rest of the developed world.


Nowadays, many people turn to forms of information consumption and knowledge absorption other than books, the traditional preferred medium. In the TV and Internet age, many people suffer from lowered attention spans, and look for shorter and/or more easily digestible sources of information. Furthermore, for most people, once you know a certain quantum of information, diminishing marginal returns set in quickly - it is possible to be reasonably well-informed and erudite even without being a bookworm.

Of course, the bar is set differently for different people - most get by with a very low base of information, some are content with a moderate level and a few set the bar very high. However, the domain of human knowledge expands daily, making it harder and harder to keep up.
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