"Health food makes me sick." - Calvin Trillin
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On alleged media bias:
A: I'm reasonably certain that the media and, indeed, humanity in general has no ability to filter truth from fiction. I mean, look at the show MythBusters. Those guys take things that are generally accepted as completely true and just destroy them every which way from Sunday. People believe things that sound cool and things that they want to hear, frequently without actually investigating on their own. My bias plays in because here I see a guy actually thinking about this stuff by himself and I want him to be right.
Credibility in reporting is dead. If you heard it from someone who heard it from someone who is friends with an expert on the subject and we want it to be true, then by golly it's true.
B: I quite agree. I find reading news frustrating because if all the reports agree, I'm suspicious. If all the reports differ, I'm suspicious. And if someone has a really out-there theory, I'm suspicious.
My ego allows me to believe that I am able to discern fact from fiction, but really, unless I am standing right there watching something happen, I HAVE to at some point rely on someone else to tell me what happened.
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Since people in NUS are so desperate for ECA points, and can set up new ECAs with any old excuse, they should set up a dating/matchmaking club. It should be very popular, and can even get funding from SDU! Though if being single is a pre-requisite for joining, they may have a problem as the committee members keep having to quit.
I miss my Utrecht internet connection - I was regularly downloading torrents at 400-600kb/s minimum and uploading at few hundred kb/s. Whatever my ISP is doing to cap BitTorrent downloads, it can be partially mitigated by setting "Maximum connections per task" to 1000. Patching the maximum number of TCP connections, OTOH, didn't seem to help anything (though my sample was admittedly small).
I've seen a lot of Nigerian Email scams, but now they're using a Christian angle to try to con people also ("I decided to donate this fund to churches or Christian individual that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct. I want a church or individual that will use this money to fund churches, Orphanages and Widows. Also, the ropagation of the work of God, building and maintaining the house of God through this money, is very important. The Bible made us to understand that Blessed is the hand that giveth.")