Monday, April 30, 2007

"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast." - Oscar Wilde

***

"computing might help save lives, but physics lets you build battlecruisers." - Someone on the NUS SoC ad

Masters Students don't like take-home exams because since they don't care about grades (and don't study [much] anyway), their objective is to minimise suffering. After doing a take-home, I can understand why.

"An economist is a man who knows a hundred ways of making love but doesn't know any women"
"An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible."

At 7:25am on the 18th (Wednesday) there were 9 people on the 6th floor of the Central Library (part of which has gone pseudo-24 hour in view of exams). Hurr hurr.

For one Propaganda module, they have to write a 500 word Wikipedia article on Singapore and submit it (Example: Singapore Literature - Edwin Thumboo). Neat.

There's this module where people have to write papers based on talks they attend. The bizarre thing is that the papers have to find common themes across the talks. Given that the talks this semester have been about things such as AIDS prevention, cultural imperialism, business ethics, religious ethics, environmental ethics, religious tolerance, urban planning, poverty alleviation, it is hard to find common themes. So I suggested writing something about how subsidising AIDS treatment/prevention is cultural imperialism, because the liberal state should not privilege any conceptions of the good life by subsidising then, and that they should let AIDS patients die of AIDS because, hey, claiming that having AIDS is a bad thing is presumptuously ethnocentric. Someone said he would write that but didn't want to fail. Ah well.

I was eating at Engin with someone, and he'd left a plate of food on the table while he walked out of viewing distance to talk to someone. When someone else and I accosted him, he said there was someone at our table, and he probably thought it was his friend's table. When we went to our table, we found out that the guy was protecting the food from birds. Ah, it's so hard to find people like this nowadays.

The Science Library has a 'general reading' section. Maybe they wouldn't read anything otherwise, hurr hurr.


One day, I saw a McDonalds receipt in Chatterbox from the same day, but with a timestamp of just before 4am. It listed enough food for two, and 2 drinks too. I was speculating that people were taking advantage of the venue's 24-hour availability to engage in nocturnal activities, until a few days later someone said that it was her 4-member group doing a project till 7:30am that day - the other 2 members did not want to eat anything. Ah well. Given that the aircon shuts down between 10 and 11pm, anyone camping over would be guaranteed to have a hot time.

In a similar vein, I was related a secondhand story about how someone entered the sofa room and saw 2 people making out.