"Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist." - G. K. Chesterton

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Some 16 year old: i'm a young boy?
so are you michael jackson?
or do you go by ... "Peter Pan."

Me: !@#$

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I bought a pack of "甜不辣" (Tian2 Bu4 La4 - lit, Sweet and not Hot) from Shilin Taiwanese Street Snacks, but was appalled to find that, contrary to its name, not only was it not sweet, it was hot due to liberal sprinkling of their pepper-spice powder (the same one used for their XXL chicken). It must be a sick Taiwanese joke for it to be completely the opposite of what its name would suggest. And $3 for what tastes like potato wedges (supposedly it's fish paste, but I only tasted potato - maybe the powder was too hot) is very expensive.

The spreads on air tickets are ridiculous; the difference between 2 airlines for a 6 month return ticket can be as much as $1,000. I suppose this is called brand loyalty for you (or people just love flying SIA due to unspecified reasons).

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"Coke vending machine camouflage" - (Kevin's term for it). Damn Japs. It must be the fish they eat (maybe mercury poisoning again).

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Creationists irrationally love to bash and spread FUD about Evolution because they worry about the implications it has for strict literalism and Man's special place in Creation. However, I think that the evolutionary adaptations humans possess pose a much greater threat to their ethical system (and to a lesser extent, natural law theory), since their system is predicated on fundamental misconceptions about Man's "natural" conscience.

For those who didn't catch the juicy extracts, in September, from my Evolutionary Psychology textbook's chapter on Short Term Mating (aka Casual Sex), here're some random points, mostly about the topic so many of a religious persuasion get so hung up about:

- Human relative testis size showing that humans are not designed for exclusively monogomous relationships
- No concealed ovulation in females: sex is not designed only for reproduction, but also pair bonding. contraceptives ok)
- Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, being so promiscuous
- The evolved tendency for some short term sexual dalliances in both genders
- Chastity is bad, and rape might be a way for males who cannot otherwise do so to spread their genes
- Intra familial conflict: inter-sibling and parent-offspring (even in the womb)
- The role of women in mate choice (which upsets the patriarchal order)
- The evolutionarily stable strategy being tit for tat, not turning the other cheek

And then there are the other random cruelties of nature, like nature being the world's greatest aborter - 50% is a middle-range estimate of the number of fertilized eggs that fail to even implant in the first place (more get aborted along the way, but I can't find a figure for the number of fertilised eggs that never make it).

Citing design and intention in nature to come up with an overly-restrictive moral code does not then work. Of course, they always have the oh-so-convenient escape clause - "The Fall" (which allegedly corrupted mankind's original purity blah blah). In this way, evidence which would normally be used to refute their argument turns out to support it; various aspects of what is natural or intended to be can then be either good or bad depending on how you wish to classify them.

So, bravo, we have yet another unfalsifiable theory (2 can play at that game, but I won't stoop to that level, except perhaps as a proof of concept).