"If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner." - Tallulah Bankhead

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Bergen, Doris L. "The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (review) - "As Richard Steigmann-Gall points out, "the insistence that Nazism was an anti-Christian movement has been one of the most enduring truisms of the past fifty years" (p. 266). In The Holy Reich, Steigmann-Gall seeks to correct that view. National Socialism had many connections to Christianity, as Steigmann-Gall demonstrates. There were personal ties—Nazi leaders who considered themselves good Christians and were active in their churches, including some, like Wilhelm Kube and Erich Koch, who held high offices in the Protestant Church. There were institutional links too, from Hitler's early attempts to unify German Protestants into a national, Nazified church, to women's organizations that used the rhetoric, methods, and even personnel of church groups to serve the Nazi state and its goals. Most important in Steigmann-Gall's analysis, there was ideological common ground. Members of the Nazi elite—even "paganists" like Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler—used biblical allusions in their private and public pronouncements; retained an affection for Jesus and found a place for him in their world views; and supported a Christian..."
Damn, NUS has no access.

Complaints Choirs of the World - "This is the Complaints Choir sharing web-site. Here you can find information about all complaints choirs that have been initiated around the world. You can also submit information about an upcoming choir, find fellow complainers or discuss in the complaints choir forum. This project was initiated by Tellervo Kalleinen und Oliver Kochta-Kallleinen in 2005. The First Complaints Choir was organized in Birmingham."

Do Economists Recognize an Opportunity Cost When They See One? A Dismal Performance from the Dismal Science - "One expects people with graduate training in economics to have a deeper understanding of economic processes and reasoning than people without such training. However, as others have noted over the past 25 years, modern graduate education may emphasize mathematics and technique to the detriment of economic reasoning. One of the most important contributions economics has to offer as a discipline is the understanding of opportunity cost and how to apply this concept to all forms of decision making. We examine how PhD economists answer an introductory economics textbook question that requires identifying the relevant opportunity cost of an action. The results are not consistent with our expectation that graduate training leads to a deeper understanding of the concept. We explore the implications of our results for the relevance of economists in policy, research, and teaching."

"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut - "George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains."
Instructor's note: "I'd like you to read this famous story and think about whether Nietzsche wasn't on to something when he criticized the naive idea of human equality."

YouTube - the_parlor_dsl - "Just imagine....what if a chatroom was a real thing?"
This is actually on IMDB: The Parlor (2001)

How Not To Get A Job - "Yale senior Aleksey Vayner went far beyond the usual misaddressed e-mail or keyboard-in-mouth embarrassment. Vayner, an aspiring investment banker, sent a video titled "Impossible is Nothing" along with an 11-page résumé and glamour shot to financial services powerhouse UBS. Within hours, scores of investment banks noticed his application, as bankers e-mailed the seven-minute video and turned Vayner into the biggest joke on Wall Street... In his video, Vayner shows off his varied skills: lifting a 495-pound weight, ballroom dancing to Latin Musak, serving a tennis ball at 140 miles an hour and, as a dramatic conclusion, breaking seven bricks with a karate chop... Younger employees, often devotees on MySpace and reality TV, are predisposed to online missteps in the workplace, says Castellini. "Voyeurism is an aspect of their lives," he says, "and they don't understand the ramifications of it.""
Die liao.

YouTube - mac - "One of the coolest features of the macintosh is it's really easy to shut down. All you have to do is use a piece of software and poof! It goes away. Gone. Shut down. You didn't push any buttons. You didn't close it. You didn't even save... You push the power button and it won't turn off! You go around and unplug it, and you better hope it's not a laptop... It's the only operating system I know where click and drag doesn't mean you move or copy anything, you're just making shortcuts on your desktop!... I like the handle here. That's where you can attach a chain and use it as a BOAT ANCHOR!. The Mac is practising some kind of bizarre psychological warfare on me because I'm working late at night and the corner of my eye keeps seeing this thing jumping up and down. The Update Manager is bouncing at the bottom of the screen like like a Jack Russel fucking terrier!"

UCLA Police Tasering Video of Student in Powell Library - "On Tuesday night around 11pm, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a UCLA student, was stunned several times with a Taser after he wasn't able to produce his anti-Taser device (his Bruin card) and did not leave the CLICC Lab in Powell Library in a timely manner"
This is why cameras are banned in the SAF.

'uniquely Singapore', by PeasantMoNkEy - "What type of singaporean are u? So, you criticise the judiciary, you are SCANDALISING it. You criticise PAP leaders, you are DEFAMING them. You criticise the govt, you are DISLOYAL. You migrate, you are a QUITTER. You ask about the govt reserves & investment, you can not know cos it's NATIONAL SECURITY."

Contrasts and Comparisons from Baroque to Modern: Tartini's Devil's Trill Sonata - "The violin of the baroque era was very different from the modern violin. Bridges on the violins were thicker and less curved in comparison with their modern counterparts, the angle of the neck and fingerboard in relationship to the instrument was in line with the instrument instead of sloping at an angle of twenty to thirty degrees away from the instrument, a graduated bass bar and belly, and a thinner sound post when compared with the modern violin. Of course, there are other more obvious differences between the baroque and modern violin, such as the absence of a chin rest, the gut strings in use, and the significant differences between the pitch of A=415 MHz and around A=440 MHz. With all of these differences in mind, it can be hard to imagine that the modern violin even resembles its early counterpart!"
God. Not only is there an anti-right click script on the page, the source is hideously messed up.

Keynesian Theory and the AD-AS Framework: A Reconsideration - "Aggregation represents another problem for the optimizing approach. To obtain definite results, any theory of the economy as a whole has to engage in aggregation. Thus, there can be no attempt at full disaggregation in the agent space, as in Arrow-Debreu models of general equilibrium, and it is well-known that even if all individual agents were fully rational and maximized well-behaved utility functions subject to standard constraints, the aggregate variables do not behave as if determined by an optimizing representative agent (see, for instance, Kirman, 1992). Aggregation problems therefore imply that the use of an optimizing representative agent in NK models has little to recommend itself... A more subtle danger of the optimization approach is that it may predispose the analysis to slide from individual ‘rationality’ to systemic ‘rationality’. Some economists may view optimization is simply an organizing principle (see note 16), but countless examples suggest that an optimization approach may generate (sometimes unconsciously) a slippery slope in which individual optimization eventually leads to social optimality. Sargent (1993), for instance, is able to assume bounded rationality and yet produce, eventually, his unique, new classical equilibrium. As a second example, many of the problems caused by efficiency wage considerations can be ‘solved’ when credit markets function efficiently (again, with clever institutions). A history of how a focus on individual optimization in neoclassical economics inexorably, albeit tortuously, has led to presumptions of social optimality awaits an author, if one does not exist already."

Human Mating Strategies - "Cultures varied tremendously in the value placed on some characteristics. The desire for chastity or virginity (lack of prior sexual intercourse) proved to be the most cross-culturally variable, as shown in Figure 1. Mainland Chinese placed tremendous value on virginity; Scandinavians typically placed little importance on chastity... Studies of the response rates to personals ads also confirm the results found with expressed preferences. Women mentioning physical attractiveness and young age as part of their self-description in their ads receive significantly higher response rates than women who are older or who fail to mention anything about their physical attractiveness. Conversely, men who mention excellent financial resources in their self-descriptions in their ads received a higher response rate from women than men who fail to mention this attribute (Baize & Schroeder, 1995)."
He plagiarised himself. Bloody hell; "You might as well show up with your salary printed boldly on your T-shirt. Save the women at SDU the trouble of asking"

Free speech and opposition parties in Singapore - "The defence of qualified privilege is precluded in Section 14 of the Defamation Act, which is designed to severely restrict the freedom to discuss “questions in issue”. Conversely, this section of the Act focuses on protecting a plaintiff’s reputation more than that of protecting fair comments by politicians in any political discussions or debate (upon which an election usually depends). In this area, the defamation law in Singapore sets itself against the laws in other Commonwealth countries (Davidson and Rubin 2001) and is a “radical departure from its common law roots” (Bryan and Rubin 2004)... Singapore is unique in the sense that its Constitution’s Article 14 on rights begins by focusing on restrictions of freedom of expression, and the right itself is relegated to a secondary role... It does not acknowledge that free speech and freedom of expression is a basic human right, but promotes them as a privilege allowed to only themselves, the ruling party. Hence it is no wonder that one option considered by opposition politicians like Chee Soon Juan of the SDP is the use of non-violent civil disobedience acts. Chee has said that he “sees non-violent civil disobedience and protest as a viable long-term strategy to change the present system in Singapore” (Low, 2005)."