An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish

An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish
Bertrand Russell

"Folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived. The follies of our own times are easier to bear when they are seen against the background of past follies...

Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man is a rational animal. His reason for this view was one which does not now seem very impressive; it was, that some people can do sums... It is in virtue of the intellect that man is a rational animal. The intellect is shown in various ways, but most emphatically by mastery of arithmetic. The Greek system of numerals was very bad, so that the multiplication table was quite difficult, and complicated calculations could only be made by very clever people. Now-a-days, however, calculating machines do sums better than even the cleverest people, yet no one contends that these useful instruments are immortal, or work by divine inspiration. As arithmetic has grown easier, it has come to be less respected. The consequence is that, though many philosophers continue to tell us what fine fellows we are, it is no longer on account of our arithmetical skill that they praise us.

Since the fashion of the age no longer allows us to point to calculating boys as evidence that man is rational and the soul, at least in part, immortal, let us look elsewhere. Where shall we look first? Shall we look among eminent statesmen, who have so triumphantly guided the world into its present condition? Or shall we choose the men of letters? Or the philosophers? All these have their claims, but 1 think we should begin with those whom all right thinking people acknowledge to be the wisest as well as the best of men, namely the clergy. If they fail to be rational, what hope is there for us lesser mortals? And alas-though I say it with all due respect-there have been times when their wisdom has not been very obvious, and, strange to say, these were especially the times when the power of the clergy was greatest.

The Ages of Faith, which are praised by our neo-scholastics, were the time when the clergy had things all their own way. Daily life was full of miracles wrought by saints and wizardry perpetrated by devils and necromancers. Many thousands of witches were burnt at the stake. Men's sins were punished by pestilence and famine, by earthquake, flood, and fire. And yet, strange to say, they were even more sinful than they are now-a-days. Very little was known scientifically about the world. A few learned men remembered Greek proofs that the earth is round, but most people made fun of the notion that there are antipodes. To suppose that there are human beings at the antipodes was heresy. It was generally held (though modem Catholics take a milder view) that the immense majority of mankind are damned. Dangers were held to lurk at every turn. Devils would settle on the food that monks were about to eat, and would take possession of the bodies of incautious feeders who omitted to make the sign of the Cross before each mouthful. Old-fashioned people still say "bless you" when one sneezes, but they have forgotten the reason for the custom. The reason was that people were thought to sneeze out their souls, and before their souls could get back lurking demons were apt to enter the unsouled body; but if any one said "God bless you," the demons were frightened off.

Throughout the last 400 years, during which the growth of science had gradually shown men how to acquire knowledge of the ways of nature and mastery over natural forces, the clergy have fought a losing battle against science, in astronomy and geology, in anatomy and physiology, in biology and psychology and sociology. Ousted from one position, they have taken up another. After being worsted in astronomy, they did their best to prevent the rise of geology; they fought against Darwin in biology, and at the present time they fight against scientific theories of psychology and education. At each stage, they try to make the public forget their earlier obscurantism, in order that their present obscurantism may not be recognized for what it is. Let us note a few instances of irrationality among the clergy since the rise of science, and then inquire whether the rest of mankind are any better...

People still think that the Divine Plan has special reference to human beings, and that a special Providence not only looks after the good, but also punishes the wicked. I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious-for instance, the nuns who never take a bath without wearing a bathrobe all the time. When asked why, since no man can see them, they reply: "Oh, but you forget the good God." Apparently they conceive of the Deity as a Peeping Tom, whose omnipotence enables Him to see through bathroom walls, but who is foiled by bathrobes. This view strikes me as curious.

The whole conception of "Sin" is one which I find very puzzling, doubtless owing to my sinful nature. If "Sin" consisted in causing needless suffering, I could understand; but on the contrary, sin often consists in avoiding needless suffering. Some years ago, in the English House of Lords, a bill was introduced to legalize euthanasia in cases of painful and incurable disease. The patient's consent was to be necessary, as well as several medical certificates. To me, in my simplicity, it would seem natural to require the patient's consent, but the late Archbishop of Canterbury, the English official expert on Sin, explained the erroneousness of such a view. The patient's consent turns euthanasia into suicide, and suicide is sin. Their Lordships listened to the voice of authority, and rejected the bill. Consequently, to please the Archbishop-and his God, if he reports truly-victims of cancer still have to endure months of wholly useless agony, unless their doctors or nurses are sufficiently humane to risk a charge of murder. I find difficulty in the conception of a God who gets pleasure from contemplating such tortures; and if there were a God capable of such wanton cruelty, I should certainly not think Him worthy of worship. But that only proves how sunk I am in moral depravity.

I am equally puzzled by the things that are sin and by the things that are not. When the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals asked the pope for his support, he refused it, on the ground that human beings owe no duty to the lower animals, and that ill-treating animals is not sinful. This is because animals have no souls. On the other hand, it is wicked to marry your deceased wife's sister-so at least the Church teaches-however much you and she may wish to marry. This is not because of any unhappiness that might result, but because of certain texts in the Bible...

The orthodox have a curious objection to cremation, which seems to show an insufficient realization of God's omnipotence. It is thought that a body which has been burnt will be more difficult for Him to collect together again than one which has been put underground and transformed into worms. No doubt collecting the particles from the air and undoing the chemical work of combustion would be somewhat laborious, but it is surely blasphemous to suppose such a work impossible for the Deity. I conclude that the objection to cremation implies grave heresy. But I doubt whether my opinion will carry much weight with the orthodox...

The sacredness of corpses is a widespread belief. It was carried furthest by the Egyptians, among whom it led to the practice of mummification. It still exists in full force in China. A French surgeon, who was employed by the Chinese to teach Western medicine, relates that his demand for corpses to dissect was received with horror, but he was assured that he could have instead an unlimited supply of live criminals. His objection to this alternative was totally unintelligible to his Chinese employers.

Although there are many kinds of sin, seven of which are deadly, the most fruitful field for Satan's wiles is sex. The orthodox Catholic doctrine on this subject is to be found in St. Paul, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas. It is best to be celibate, but those who have not the gift of continence may marry...

It is odd that neither the Church nor modern public opinion condemns petting, provided it stops short at a certain point. At what point sin begins is a matter as to which casuists differ. One eminently orthodox Catholic divine laid it down that a confessor may fondle a nun's breasts, provided he does it without evil intent. But I doubt whether modern authorities would agree with him on this point...

There are logical difficulties in the notion of sin. We are told that sin consists in disobedience to God's commands, but we are also told that God is omnipotent. If He is, nothing contrary to His will can occur; therefore when the sinner disobeys His commands, He must have intended this to happen. St. Augustine boldly accepts this view, and asserts that men are led to sin by a blindness with which God afflicts them. But most theologians, in modern times, have felt that, if God causes men to sin, it is not fair to send them to hell for what they cannot help. We are told that sin consists in acting contrary to God's will. This, however, does not get rid of the difficulty. Those who, like Spinoza, take God's omnipotence seriously, deduce that there can be no such thing as sin. This leads to frightful results. What! said Spinoza's contemporaries, was it not wicked of Nero to murder his mother? Was it not wicked of Adam to eat the apple? Is one action just as good as another? Spinoza wriggles, but does not find any satisfactory answer. If everything happens in accordance with God's will, God must have wanted Nero to murder his mother; therefore, since God is good, the murder must have been a good thing. From this argument there is no escape.

On the other hand, those who are in earnest in thinking that sin is disobedience to God are compelled to say that God is not omnipotent. This gets out of all the logical puzzles, and is the view adopted by a certain school of liberal theologians. It has, however, its own difficulties. How are we to know what really is God's will? If the forces of evil have a certain share of power, they may deceive us into accepting as Scripture what is really their work. This was the view of the Gnostics, who thought that the Old Testament was the work of an evil spirit.

As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles. Whose authority? The Old Testament? The New Testament? The Koran? In practice, people choose the book considered sacred by the community in which they are born, and out of that book they choose the parts they like, ignoring the others. At one time, the most influential text in the Bible was: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Now-a-days, people pass over this text, in silence if possible; if not, with an apology. And so, even when we have a sacred book, we still choose as truth whatever suits our own prejudices. No Catholic, for instance, takes seriously the text which says that a bishop should be the husband of one wife...

Since evolution became fashionable, the glorification of Man has taken a new form. We are told that evolution has been guided by one great Purpose: through the millions of years when there were only slime, or trilobites, throughout the ages of dinosaurs and giant ferns, of bees and wild flowers, God was preparing the Great Climax. At last, in the fullness of time, He produced Man, including such specimens as Nero and Caligula, Hitler and Mussolini, whose transcendent glory justified the long painful process. For my part, I find even eternal damnation less incredible, and certainly less ridiculous, than this lame and impotent conclusion which we are asked to admire as the supreme effort of Omnipotence. And if God is indeed omnipotent, why could He not have produced the glorious result without such a long and tedious prologue?...

The importance of Man, which is the one indispensable dogma of the theologians, receives no support from a scientific view of the future of the solar system.

There are many other sources of false belief besides self-importance. One of these is love of the marvelous. I knew at one time a scientifically-minded conjuror, who used to perform his tricks before a small audience, and then get them, each separately, to write down what they had seen happen. Almost always they wrote down something much more astonishing than the reality, and usually something which no conjuror could have achieved; yet they all thought they were reporting truly what they had seen with their own eyes. This sort of falsification is still more true of rumors. A tells B that last night he saw Mr.-, the eminent prohibitionist, slightly the worse for liquor; B tells C that A saw the good man reeling drunk, C tells D that he was picked up unconscious in the ditch, D tells E that he is well known to pass out every evening... All history until the eighteenth century is full of prodigies and wonders which modern historians ignore, not because they are less well attested than facts which the historians accept, but because modem taste among the learned prefers what science regards as probable. Shakespeare relates how on the night before Caesar was killed,

A common slave—you know him well by sight— Held up his left hand, which did flame and burn Like twenty torches joined, and yet his hand, Not sensible of fire, remained unscorched. Besides—I ha' not since put up my sword— Against the Capitol I met a lion, Who glared upon me and went surly by, Without annoying me. And there were drawn Upon a heap a hundred ghastly women, Transformèd with their fear, who swore they saw Men all in fire walk up and down the streets.

Shakespeare did not invent these marvels; he found them in reputable historians, who are among those upon whom we depend for our knowledge concerning Julius Caesar. This sort of thing always used to happen at the death of a great man or the beginning of an important war. Even so recently as 1914 the "angels of Mons" encouraged the British troops. The evidence for such events is very seldom first-hand, and modern historians refuse to accept it-except, of course, where the event is one that has religious importance...

It is a curious and painful fact that almost all the completely futile treatments that have been believed in during the long history of medical folly have been such as caused acute suffering to the patient. When anaesthetics were discovered, pious people considered them an attempt to evade the will of God. It was pointed out, however, that when God extracted Adam's rib He put him into a deep sleep. This proved that anaesthetics are all right for men; women, however, ought to suffer, because of the curse of Eve...

Among white men, it is held that white men are by nature superior to men of other colors, and especially to black men; in Japan, on the contrary, it is thought that yellow is the best color. In Haiti, when they make statues of Christ and Satan, they make Christ black and Satan white...

The purest races now in existence are the Pygmies, the Hottentots, and the Australian aborigines; the Tasmanians, who were probably even purer, are extinct. They were not the bearers of a brilliant culture. The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, emerged from an amalgamation of northern barbarians and an indigenous population; the Athenians and Ionians, who were the most civilized, were also the most mixed. The supposed merits of racial purity are, it would seem, wholly imaginary...

In Russia, where, under the influence of Karl Marx, people since the revolution have been classified by their economic origin, difficulties have arisen not unlike those of German race theorists over the Scandinavian Nordies. There were two theories that had to be reconciled: on the one hand, proletarians were good and other people were bad; on the other hand, communists were good and other people were bad. The only way of effecting a reconciliation was to alter the meaning of words. A "proletarian" came to mean a supporter of the government; Lenin, though born a Prince, was reckoned a member of the proletariat. On the other hand, the word "kulak," which was supposed to mean a rich peasant, came to mean any peasant who opposed collectivization. This sort of absurdity always arises when one group of human beings is supposed to be inherently better than another...

The discovery that man can be scientifically manipulated, and that governments can turn large masses this way or that as they choose, is one of the causes of our misfortunes. There is as much difference between a collection of mentally free citizens and a community molded by modern methods of propaganda as there is between a heap of raw materials and a battleship. Education, which was at first made universal in order that all might be able to read and write, has been found capable of serving quite other purposes. By instilling nonsense it unifies populations and generates collective enthusiasm. If all governments taught the same nonsense, the harm would not be so great. Unfortunately each has its own brand, and the diversity serves to produce hostility between the devotees of different creeds. If there is ever to be peace in the world, governments will have to agree either to inculcate no dogmas, or all to inculcate the same. The former, I fear, is a Utopian ideal, but perhaps they could agree to teach collectively that all public men, everywhere, are completely virtuous and perfectly wise. Perhaps, when the war is over, the surviving politicians may find it prudent to combine on some such programme...

You may find your colored help making some remark that comes straight out of Plato-not the parts of Plato that scholars quote, but the parts where he utters obvious nonsense, such as that men who do not pursue wisdom in this life will be born again as women. Commentators on great philosophers always politely ignore their silly remarks.

Aristotle, in spite of his reputation, is full of absurdities. He says that children should be conceived in the Winter, when the wind is in the North, and that if people marry too young the children will be female. He tells us that the blood of females is blacker then that of males; that the pig is the only animal liable to measles; that an elephant suffering from insomnia should have its shoulders rubbed with salt, olive-oil, and warm water; that women have fewer teeth than men, and so on. Nevertheless, he is considered by the great majority of philosophers a paragon of wisdom...

Eating cooked food is "unnatural"; so is heating our houses. The Chinese philosopher Lao-tse, whose traditional date is about 600 B.C., objected to roads and bridges and boats as "unnatural," and in his disgust at such mechanistic devices left China and went to live among the Western barbarians. Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent.

The commonest objection to birth control is that it is against "nature." (For some reason we are not allowed to say that celibacy is against nature; the only reason I can think of is that it is not new)...

Women, as the object of our strongest love and aversion, rouse complex emotions which are embodied in proverbial "wisdom"...

In Victorian days the saint was much more emphasized than the temptress; Victorian men could not admit themselves susceptible to temptation. The superior virtue of women was made a reason for keeping them out of politics, where, it was held, a lofty virtue is impossible. But the early feminists turned the argument round, and contended that the participation of women would ennoble politics. Since this has turned out to be an illusion, there has been less talk of women's superior virtue... Women themselves, for the most part, think of themselves as the sensible sex, whose business it is to undo the harm that comes of men's impetuous follies. For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience.

The deeply irrational attitude of each sex toward women may be seen in novels, particularly in bad novels... Women novelists, also, have two kinds of women in their books. One is themselves, glamorous and kind, and object of lust to the wicked and of love to the good, sensitive, high-souled, and constantly misjudged. The other kind is represented by all other women, and is usually portrayed as petty, spiteful, cruel, and deceitful. It would seem that to judge women without bias is not easy either for men or for women.

Generalizations about national characteristics are just as common and just as unwarranted as generalizations about women. Until 1870, the Germans were thought of as a nation of spectacled professors, evolving everything out of their inner consciousness, and scarcely aware of the outer world, but since 1870 this conception has had to be very sharply revised. Frenchmen seem to be thought of by most Americans as perpetually engaged in amorous intrigue; Walt Whitman, in one of his catalogues, speaks of "the adulterous French couple on the sly settee." Americans who go to live in France are astonished, and perhaps disappointed, by the intensity of family life...

Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion...

A good way of ridding yourself of certain kinds of dogmatism is to become aware of opinions held in social circles different from your own. When I was young, I lived much outside my own country in France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. I found this very profitable in diminishing the intensity of insular prejudice. If you cannot travel, seek out people with whom you disagree, and read a newspaper belonging to a party that is not yours. If the people and the newspaper seem mad, perverse, and wicked, remind yourself that you seem so to them. In this opinion both parties may be right, but they cannot both be wrong. This reflection should generate a certain caution.

Becoming aware of foreign customs, however, does not always have a beneficial effect. In the seventeenth century, when the Manchus conquered China, it was the custom among the Chinese for the women to have small feet, and among the Manchus for the men to wear-pigtails. Instead of each dropping their own foolish custom, they each adopted the foolish custom of the other...

For those who have enough psychological imagination, it is a good plan to imagine an argument with a person having a different bias...

Be very wary of opinions that flatter your self-esteem...

Other passions besides self-esteem are common sources of error; of these perhaps the most important is fear... Fear is the main source of superstition and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavor after a worthy manner of life...

The most refined religions, such as those of Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza, are still concerned with the conquest of fear. The Stoic doctrine was simple: it maintained that the only true good is virtue, of which no enemy can deprive me; consequently, there is no need to fear enemies. The difficulty was that no one could really believe virtue to be the only good, not even Marcus Aurelius, who, as emperor, sought not only to make his subjects virtuous, but to protect them against barbarians, pestilences, and famines. Spinoza taught a somewhat similar doctrine. According to him, our true good consists in indifference to our mundane fortunes. Both these men sought to escape from fear by pretending that such things as physical suffering are not really evil. This is a noble way of escaping from fear, but is still based upon false belief. And if genuinely accepted, it would have the bad effect of making men indifferent, not only to their own sufferings, but also to those of others...

Fear generates impulses of cruelty, and therefore promotes such superstitious beliefs as seem to justify cruelty. Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. And for this reason poltroons are more prone to cruelty than brave men, and are also more prone to superstition. When I say this, I am thinking of men who are brave in all respects, not only in facing death. Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one. Obloquy is, to most men, more painful than death; that is one reason why, in times of collective excitement, so few men venture to dissent from the prevailing opinion...

Perhaps the world would lose some of its interest and variety if such beliefs were wholly replaced by cold science. Perhaps we may allow ourselves to be glad of the Abecedarians, who were so-called because, having rejected all profane learning, they thought it wicked to learn the ABC. And we may enjoy the perplexity of the South American Jesuit who wondered how the sloth could have traveled, since the Flood, all the way from Mount Ararat to Peru-a journey which its extreme tardiness of locomotion rendered almost incredible. A wise man will enjoy the goods of which there is a plentiful supply, and of intellectual rubbish he will find an abundant diet, in our own age as in every other"

Confucianism, Good Samaritans in China and Cultural Authenticity

A: "What accounts for China’s lack of good Samaritans? Theories vary, and point to factors as variable as the lack of obligations to strangers under the Confucian value system,,,"

ZOMG SEDITION

B: Korea can refute that comfortably.

C: oh please, how post cultural revolution China can still be considered Confucianist, is totally beyond me.

Me: A lesson of Marxist social engineering schemes is that changing human culture (let alone human nature) is not easy.

Ask a Korean!: Confucianism and Korea - Part VI: The Korean on Confucianism in Modern Korea

"Ability to deal with strangers

Korea's driving situation is notorious: it is disorderly, erratic and fatal. Korea's rate of traffic fatality is over twice of the OECD average, coming in third-to-last among the 29 member countries. The streets of Korea often approach a state of total lawlessness, with cars jumping onto and driving on pedestrian sidewalks and motorcycles whizzing by between lanes.

Korea also has a bad track record of discrimination. As the Korean chronicled a number of times on this blog, xenophobia and racism are rampant in Korea. Even among Koreans, there is still lingering discrimination against homosexuals, disabled, children born out of wedlock, people from certain regions, etc.

What do these two social ills have to do with each other? They are both examples of how Confucianism never evolved to fit the modern life. Remember that Confucian worldview is relational, based on the five specific relations -- parent-child, ruler-subject, husband-wife, old-young, friend-friend. But what about people who do not fit in one of those relations? If you are a serious Confucian, what are you supposed to do when you encounter a total stranger who does not fit the existing set of relationships?

Bad driving and discriminations are two examples that show Confucianism's failure to deal with strangers. (There are certainly many more examples.) When a Korean person meets another person, they spent the first few minutes asking each other how old they are, what they do, where they are from, etc. in order to figure out their relational positions. But you can't do that when you are driving a car. Behind the wheel, all the markers that matter to a Confucian are hidden. Because of that, the survivalist tendency takes over again, which leads to crazy and selfish driving. Similarly, discrimination against other people ultimately originates from failure to relate. When a person does not fit a set of existing social relationship, that person matters less than other persons who do fit. This is true everywhere, but particularly truer in a society that takes a relational understanding of humans.

A crucial characteristic of an industrial and capitalistic society is the ability for people to move around and constantly deal with strangers. Without this characteristic, modern society is not possible. But Confucianism is not very good at teaching people how to deal with strangers, although it may be excellent with teaching people how to deal with your parents, for example. Since Korea would prefer to have modernity than Confucianism, Confucianism must yield on this aspect."

D: This has nothing to do with Confucianism or any other philosophical ethos. It comes down to being human and are you willing to help your fellow men. China has issues in the past where good samaritans were chastised and sued. Then again, if you have a society filled individuals with an "only child mentality" - you can imagine how that would affect a country in general.

E: Lack of obligations to strangers under the communist system - it's the government's job.

Me: So philosophical ethoses are impotent since they do not affect human behavior

E: Culture affects people. Politics affects culture. Philosophy/theology is too hard for most people - they follow the pop version of their religion or official cultural philosophy.

Philosophy can affect people if first popularised through art for easy consumption e.g. existentialism.

Me: Does philosophy affect culture ?

E: Confuciansim was supposed to be the philosophy for the ruling class of China. Taoism was the religion and life guide for peasants.

A simplified and distorted philosophy can affect culture, similar to how the religion that most people follow is simplified and distorted and far from their religious texts.

The general public didn't understand empiricism until after they watched The Matrix.

The general public has a distorted view of the philosophical implications of the quantum uncertainty principle, due to its misuse in pop culture.

Me: So what is "true" Confucianism? Is fundamentalist (hah) Confucianism the only Confucianism worthy of the name? Mencius and Xun Zi developed Confucian philosophy in different ways - should we repudiate everything they said as "corrupted" Confucianism and go back to the source ? Note that here we are not blaming Confucius per se but Confucianism

Cultural influences are always mediated. Doesn't mean they don't exist. For example Buddhism in china was different from Buddhism in India. But you can't say Buddhism in India has nothing to do with Buddhism in china. Or that it's not Buddhism.

E: I know my limits. Don't know much about Confucianism. But what I'm saying is that your average Chinese follows his culture (you might call this a circular argument) and doesn't really know what Mencius actually wrote.

My point was not about splits within a religion. I'm saying that most Indian Buddhist don't know much about Indian Buddhism. I'm extrapolating from my experience with Christians. I don't know many Buddhist but I had a colleague who thought she was Buddhist but she was actually following a Buddhist/Taoist mix.

Me: Most Indian Buddhists don't know much about *traditional Indian Buddhism* (if that can be defined). What they practise is Indian Buddhism, by definition, and that is based on traditional Indian Buddhism.

In any event, traditional Indian Buddhism is also contested.

If you want to talk about Christianity, most Christians don't know about the early history of Christianity. But early Christianity is not necessarily the most "authentic" version. There were many competing versions.

A Cult of Ignorance

A Cult of Ignorance
Newsweek, 21 January 1980

"It’s hard to quarrel with that ancient justification of the free press: “America’s right to know.” It seems almost cruel to ask, ingenuously, ”America’s right to know what, please? Science? Mathematics? Economics? Foreign languages?”

None of those things, of course. In fact, one might well suppose that the popular feeling is that Americans are a lot better off without any of that tripe.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Politicians have routinely striven to speak the language of Shakespeare and Milton as ungrammatically as possible in order to avoid offending their audiences by appearing to have gone to school. Thus, Adlai Stevenson, who incautiously allowed intelligence and learning and wit to peep out of his speeches, found the American people flocking to a Presidential candidate who invented a version of the English language that was all his own and that has been the despair of satirists ever since.

George Wallace, in his speeches, had, as one of his prime targets, the “pointy-headed professor,” and with what a roar of approval that phrase was always greeted by his pointy-headed audience.

BUZZWORDS: Now we have a new slogan on the part of the obscurantists: “Don’t trust the experts!” Ten years ago, it was “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” 8ut the shouters of that slogan found that the inevitable alchemy of the calendar converted them to the untrustworthiness of the over-30, and, apparently, they determined nevr to make that mistake again. “Don’t trust the experts!” is absolutely safe. Nothing, neither the passing of time nor exposure to information, will convert these shouters to experts in any subject that might conceivably be useful.

We have a new buzzword, too, fór anyone who admires competence, knowledge, learning and skill, and who wishes to spread it around. People like that are called “elitists." That’s the funniest buzzword ever invented because people who are not members of the intellectual elite don’t know what an “elitist” is, or how to pronounce the word. As soon as someone shouts “elitist” it becomes clear that he or she is a closet elitist who is feeling guilty about having gone to school.

All right, then, forget my ingenuous question. America’s right to know does not include knowledge of elitist subjects. America’s right to know involves something we might express vaguely as "what’s going on.” America has the right to know “what’s going on” in the courts, in Congress, in the White House, in industrial councils, in the regulatory agencies, in labor unions—in the seats of the mighty, generally.

Very good, I’m for that, too. But how are you going to let people know all that?

Grant us a free press. and a corps of independent and fearless investigative reporters, comes the cry, and we can be sure that the people will know.

Yes, provided they can read!

As it happens, reading is one of those elitist subjects I have been talking about, and the American public, by and large, in their distrust of experts and in their contempt for pointy-headed professors, can’t read and don’t read.

To be sure, the average American can sign his name more or less legibly, and can make out the sports headlines—--but how many nonelitist Americans can, without undue difficulty, read as many as a thousand consecutive words of small print, some of which may be trisyllahic?

Moreover, the situation is growing worse. Reading scores in the schools dedine steadily. The highway signs, which used to represent elementary misreading lessons (“Go Slo.” “Xroad”) arc steadily bring replaced by little pictures to make them internationally legible and incidentally to help those who know how to drive a car but, not being pointy-headed professors, can’t read.

Again, in television commercials, there are frequent printed messages. Well, keep your eyes on them and you’ll find out that no advertiser ever believes that anyone but an occasional elitist can read that print. To ensure that more than this mandarin minority gets the message, every word of it is spoken out loud by the announcer.

HONEST EFFORT: If that is so, then how have Americans got the right to know? Grant that (here are certain publications that make an honest effort to tell the public what they should know, but ask yourselves how many actually read them.

There are 200 million Americans who have inhabited schoolrooms at some time in their lives and who will admit that they know how to read (provided you promise not to use their names and shame them before their neighbors), but most decent periodicals believe they are doing amazingly well if they have circulations of half million. It may be that only 1 per cent—or less—of Americans make a stab at exercising their right to know. And if they try to do anything on that basis they are quite likely to be accused of being elitists.

I contend that the slogan “America’s right to know” is a meaningless one when we have an ignorant population, and that the function of a free press is virtually zero when hardly anyone can read.

What shall we do about it?

We might begin by asking ourselves whether ignorance is so wonderful after all, and whether it makes sense to denounce “elitism.”

I believe that every human being with a physically normal brain can learn a great deal and can be surprisingly intellectual. I believe that what we badly need is social approval of learning and social rewards for learning.

We can all be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like “America’s right to know” and, indeed, any true concept of democracy, have any meaning."

--- Isaac Asimov

Of Deformity

Deformed persons are commonly even with nature; for as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature; being for the most part (as the Scripture saith) void of natural affection; and so they have their revenge of nature. Certainly there is a consent, between the body and the mind; and where nature erreth in the one, she ventureth in the other. Ubi peccat in uno, periclitatur in altero. But because there is, in man, an election touching the frame of his mind, and a necessity in the frame of his body, the stars of natural inclination are sometimes obscured, by the sun of discipline and virtue. Therefore it is good to consider of deformity, not as a sign, which is more deceivable; but as a cause, which seldom faileth of the effect. Whosoever hath anything fixed in his person, that doth induce contempt, hath also a perpetual spur in himself, to rescue and deliver himself from scorn. Therefore all deformed persons, are extreme bold. First, as in their own defence, as being exposed to scorn; but in process of time, by a general habit. Also it stirreth in them industry, and especially of this kind, to watch and observe the weakness of others, that they may have somewhat to repay. Again, in their superiors, it quencheth jealousy towards them, as persons that they think they may, at pleasure, despise: and it layeth their competitors and emulators asleep; as never believing they should be in possibility of advancement, till they see them in possession. So that upon the matter, in a great wit, deformity is an advantage to rising. Kings in ancient times (and at this present in some countries) were wont to put great trust in eunuchs; because they that are envious towards all are more obnoxious and officious, towards one. But yet their trust towards them, hath rather been as to good spials, and good whisperers, than good magistrates and officers. And much like is the reason of deformed persons. Still the ground is, they will, if they be of spirit, seek to free themselves from scorn; which must be either by virtue or malice; and therefore let it not be marvelled, if sometimes they prove excellent persons; as was Agesilaus, Zanger the son of Solyman, AEsop, Gasca, President of Peru; and Socrates may go likewise amongst them; with others.

--- The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans, Francis Bacon

An extract from a reading someone sent me:



"I think Deconstruction appeals to the clerisy of graduate students, who like to feel themselves superior to the laity of common readers, liberated from their shared meanings; liberated, too, from the tedious requirement of meaning as such, the official obligation to suppose that words mean something finite rather than everything or nothing. Deconstruction allows them to think of themselves as forming a cell, the nearest thing the universities can offer in the form of an avant-garde. The wretched side of this is that Deconstruction encourages them to feel superior not only to undergraduates but to the authors they are reading (The New York Review of Books, 41)."

- Ending/Closure: On Derrida's Edging of Heidegger

Someone on String Theory and application to Economics:


I think we have witnessed enough man made disastors to prompt us to instinctively cast doubt upon any theory that claims to unity - to reduce the chaos of human interaction inherent in the social sciences into patterns of regularity that can be expressed as verifiable laws. Think about the IMF austerity plans, their underlying models and how they wrecked half decent economies that were momentarily caught out.., the collapse of LTCM, a hedge fund with two nobel prize winning financial economists on board...

I can think of three simple reasons why grand theories and Euclidean like mathematical artifacts will continually disappoint us in the social sciences.

1. Unlike the natural sciences, we have no constant substantive phenomena, or any source of predictibilty in the changing contours of our socio-economic systems. To put it simply, gravity in Newton's apple is the same gravity today. Fifteen years ago, it was held widely that the geopolitics would 'freeze' in a bipolar system founded on nuclear deterrance, and after that came the "end of the history" thesis, and today these ideas look quaint in a widely fragmented world system..

2. Human interaction is inherently unpredictable - we have ways and means of simplifying human behaviour, 'black-boxing' it but we have neither the technology (ie 3000+ years and all we have is game theory) nor the imagination to comprehensively do so. Theories that rely on abject simplications of human behaviour can only serve as benchmarks or 'ballpark figures' that guide our judgement.

3. Theories in the social sciences are reflexive - they can be unconscious products of history, culture and interests. Dominant theories reflect certain fashions and trends which can be brutally fickle...

I've come to increasingly believe that the only way to deal with the challenges of a increasingly disjointed, yet rapidly moving global system to have a mind that can accept incoherency as the starting point, not one that seeks to eliminate it...

"One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards." - Oscar Wilde

***

Assuming I am not senile yet, I remember that in Secondary School (or was it JC? I forget) we got this really far-out reading where the most hilarious claim was that:

"Plato's teaching about music is, put simply, that rhythm and melody, accompanied by dance, are the barbarous expression of the soul. Barbarous, not animal.

... rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire--not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored.

Young people know that rock music has the beat of sexual intercourse. That is why Ravel's Bolero is the one piece of classical music that is commonly known and liked by them."

I swear that at some point in the past I found the essay it was from online, but anyhow I was prompted to look for the full thing again today to reference to someone.

It seems it's from Allan Bloom's "The closing of the American mind : how higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students". Wikipedia's summary:

"He especially targets the "openness" of Relativism as leading paradoxically to the great "closing" referenced in the book's title.

The book's lengthy introduction delineates two kinds of "openness". One sort stimulates the student to pursue "the good" by discovering new aspects of goodness in other times and places than the West; this is the sort that Bloom apparently favors. The other sort misuses the study of other cultures to prove the dogmatic, a priori assumption that our culture is not the best and that we have no special claim on knowing the good.

Bloom criticizes the openness of cultural relativism, in which he claims:

"the point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all."

In line with Plato, whom he quotes periodically throughout the book, Bloom believes that it is incumbent on the individual to search for truth in order to have any hope of a higher life. He believes it is the unique obligation of the university to point students in this very direction.

Like Tocqueville and Nietzsche, Bloom asserts that democracy—by valuing the opinion of each citizen equally—is not an environment in which genius excels. It is therefore the university that needs to lead the lost art of living the good life.

Contemporary critical reaction to the book was politically polarised, but many of those hostile to Bloom's conclusions acknowledged the value of the book's recapitulation of the history of political philosophy." (Emphases mine)

It's in the NUS library too, so I really have no excuse not to read it.

(Maybe after I finish my travelogue. Hurr hurr.)

"When I was an undergrad like you I used to spend my holidays reading Karl Marx... Marx is very difficult to read. Most people read Karl Marx in jail... no one spends their holidays reading Karl Marx." - NUS Staff


"Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness, without recognising the inherent political, social, or cultural problem of openness as the goal of nature, has rendered openness meaningless. Cultural relativism destroys both one's own and the good. Culture, hence, closedness, reigns supreme. Openess to closedness is what we teach."

Trying to prevent prejudices by "removing the authority of men's reason is to render ineffective the instrument that can correct their prejudices."

(Quotes from a review here)

Does Evil Really Exist?

"“People have been obsessed by evil for centuries—obsessed with what evil is, who is evil, and how to avoid evil—and the 21st century is no exception. President Bush famously dubbed Iran, North Korea, and Iraq the Axis of Evil in his 2002 State of the Union address. In casual conversation and media stories alike, terrorists, politicians and criminals are labeled evil. With all these accepted references to evil, it is time that its true nature is exposed and thoroughly examined,” Frankfurter says...

In many ways, the term terrorism and its close association with the concept of evil conjures meanings and responses similar to the terms witchcraft, devil-worshipper, and commie. And that, Frankfurter says, should be of concern to many.

“We become lost in these large-scale terms for evil, invoking them for every anxiety, every criminal suspect, every political maneuver,” he says. “Those who have become wed to large-scale schemes of danger and conspiracy have sought to root it out by any means necessary.”...

For those deemed evil, often the public response is to take drastic measures to cleanse them from the landscape. “One imagines the view of Tutsis in 1994 Rwanda, the view of Jews in 1939 Germany (and often in European history), and the view of Christians in second-century Rome. They represent predators, obstacles to safety and success,” Frankfurter says.

When society labels people as evil, it places them outside humanity where others don't have to think about motivations or context in any critical way. “Use of this label amounts to intellectual laziness and has led, consistently, to the worst atrocities we know about. Speaking of ‘evil’ leads people to evil,” Frankfurter says.

And according to the professor, people are thinking more about evil today. “We see and hear about so many horrible atrocities and crimes, yet are constantly presented with contexts and backgrounds and ways of understanding how they could happen. For many people, especially people of evangelical Christian bent, to label something or somebody evil has a refreshing clarity to it,” he says."


The Midanites were evil -> It was right and proper to wipe them all out
The Jews were evil -> It was right and proper to wipe them all out

"Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly." - Simeon Strunsky

***

In the MOE HQ building, there's a section set apart from the rest of the complex - the Customer Service Centre, as well as the toilet beside it, presumably compartmentalised so outside people can visit them freely. I wanted to go to the toilet, but had to get a security pass before I could pass. Maybe they're afraid someone will blow up their toilet.

Someone pointed out to me that the flaw with an epistemological framework based on the existence of objective truth is that we don't live in an arid thought experiment world. This is true enough, but neither do we live in the idealised world beloved by those of the "never make generalizations" school of thought. For example, having the maxim "Don't discriminate against furry monsters" is all well and good, but if 90% of the furry monsters your firm hires are prone to feral fits and eat your customers, you're not going to hire them. In the real world, you don't have the luxury of unlimited time and resources, no matter how noble your aspirations.

SMS from Patch: "Chinese Sign seen outside no1 color centre photoshop advertising for job opening which welcomes malays. Who, i guess, must be bilingual." Unfortunately, he didn't manage to get a picture. If anyone is passing by Toa Payoh Block 69, I'd appreciate a picture.

"Mongol Experors of the Liao dynasty tortured prisoners by placing them under large bronze bells, whose continued ringing ultimately killed them."

I wonder how Colin Matthews feels about Pluto being demoted.

Never trust theories of male sexuality formulated by women and/or gay men.

***


Foreigner Gets Punished As He Impersonates Japanese AV Stars at TV in Japan - "This is how you make fun of people from other cultures. By getting them to do female orgasm impressions. And then wacking them with bats. On TV. In Japan."

YouTube - Windows Vista: Photos are Memories? - "We have receive an unbelievable response from the first 2 videos that Eden put together. Now, by popular demand, here is number 3! This is a fun spoof of M$'s previews of Windows Vista."
I never use the inbuilt OS tools anyway.

YouTube - Monty Python - Hitler in England - "Over here is Mr Hilter... This is Ron. Ron Vivventrop."

One Man + Six Pool Tables + Japanese Television Production Values = Awesome at TV in Japan - "This might just be the most amazing trick shots ever seen on TV ever before. Plus, it has smoke, shiny lights and a very animated old man just kicking ass. If guys did this kind of stuff here, trick billiards might just finally make it over to regular ESPN."
This is better than the Tornado Shoot.

Woman is fitted with 'bionic' arm - "A former US Marine has become the first woman in the world to be fitted with a "bionic" arm that she can control by her thoughts alone."

Researchers learn to extract crude oil from pig manure - "Inside a white metal building nestled among fields of corn and soybeans, the students pressure-cook the messy muck until it becomes thick, black, energy-dense crude oil remarkably similar to the stuff pumped from deep within the earth. As oil and gas prices continue their steep climb, the dedicated crew of engineering researchers at the University of Illinois are refining an economical process to transform smelly hog droppings into piggy petroleum that can be refined into industrial fuel."
HARAM!!!

Two judges scolded for behavior in court - "The Washington State Commission on Judicial Conduct has admonished two local judges, one for leading a football cheer before sentencing a man for manslaughter and one for forcing a Muslim woman out of the courtroom when she wouldn’t take off her head scarf... When Grant came into the courtroom, she instructed approximately 100 onlookers – mostly family members of Teang and Patricelli – to cheer for the Seahawks, who were to play in the Super Bowl that weekend... Grant even filed the formal complaint against herself."

Maxims for Revolutionists - George Bernard Shaw, 1903. Man and Superman

"A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education."

"Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation."

"No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another."

"Do not give your children moral and religious instruction unless you are quite sure they will not take it too seriously. Better be the mother of Henri Quatre and Nell Gwynne than of Robespierre and Queen Mary Tudor."

"Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination, because there it is invested with the approval of society."

"Vice is waste of life. Poverty, obedience, and celibacy are the canonical vices."

"To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad."

"The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man."

"The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it."

"The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown."

"Mens sana in corpore sano is a foolish saying. The sound body is a product of the sound mind."

"Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting, your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to poverty. The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your objections."

"Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get. Where there is no ventilation fresh air is declared unwholesome. Where there is no religion hypocrisy becomes good taste. Where there is no knowledge ignorance calls itself science."

"Acquired notions of propriety are stronger than natural instincts. It is easier to recruit for monasteries and convents than to induce an Arab woman to uncover her mouth in public, or a British officer to walk through Bond Street in a golfing cap on an afternoon in May."

"Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself."


My second favourite:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

And the best of all:

"If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself. "

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it." - Terry Pratchett

***

Someone claims that my use of such terms like "the 'never make generalisations' / 'what is truth?' school" is simplistic, yet surely I have to come up with a name to refer to people who broadly share certain precepts, or I'd have to write 10,000 personalised reports dealing with each individual's nuances and variations and even I am not that free, contrary to popular belief; individual variations can be addressed after the similarities are dealt with. For example, there's a wide spectrum of libertarians, but they all share a common skepticism in the power of Big Government to solve problems.

I suspect that people of the aforementioned school tend to lack statistical training and knowledge. Not least, this is because my impression is that those in fields which lack such training seem prone to such thinking (sociology and probably many of the other social sciences are more fond of another of the sneaky tools of the social sciences - when you're not happy with the results, question the methodology, blame the West/rich people or find some weird exception and crow that it negates a generalisation). The influence of ideology is doubtless also a major factor, but I shan't attempt to factor it out, nor am I sure how I even could.

I predict that such people would also be fond of false dichotomies, since they cannot conceive of a grey area in which intermediate solutions would lie (hypothesis testing). They would crow triumphantly at finding one or two outliers, claiming that this disproved generalisations, whereas generalisations are not intended to be universal and axiomatic (for otherwise they would have to be necessarily true).

Such people might also be outraged to discover, as some scene in a movie went, that car companies tweak their cars until the cost of incrementally improving safety equals the money saved from avoiding one less class-action lawsuit. This callous disregard for human life might seem galling, until one recalls that lawsuits in the US often result in insane awards and, more importantly, that it is impossible to design a car that is 100% safe, and that even if it were possible, it'd be so bulky, ugly and expensive that no one would buy it. I hope they also do not discover that if some defective products are found in a batch of manufactured goods, the QC people will let it through as long as it is not above a certain level (it is impossible to ensure 100% of the products work perfectly).

Some Greens might also fall into this category, if they supported recycling even if it were more harmful to the environment than just buying everything anew (transport, cleaning and refitting costs et al.)

If I made a simple statement, say 'Birds fly', I might be pounced on for being simplistic and close-minded, ignoring the many birds who are unable to fly and accused of denigrating these flightless birds and holding them to my arbitrary notion of bird-ness and of depriving them of the moral dignity due to them as living things, animals or even sentient beings. Of course, saying that 'Birds fly' does not mean that a necessary condition for a bird is for it to be able to fly, and that those birds that can't fly are somehow inferior or incomplete. As entry 111 of How Girls Waste Time goes, "Analysing and cross-analysing in excruciating detail the words and actions of others, often reading into them implicit meanings that don't actually exist, and seeing daggers where there are none (which explains why girls like to do Literature)" (of course this is not exclusively a female problem). Such wild-eyed criticisms reveal more about those making them than about those to whom they are targeted.

One must never lose sight of the trees for the forest, but losing sight of the forest for the trees cannot do either. Of course the problem with most people is that they are happy to see forests and not trees, but this does not justify swinging to the other extreme and denying that the forest even exists, for just as society is more than the sum of its parts (individuals), regardless of what Margaret Thatcher thinks, so are forests emergent systems that cannot be understood by considering each individual tree in isolation.


Peripherally related: I wonder how many people take certain of my utterances like "Never make generalizations", "... women" and "I support the death penalty for attempted suicide" at face value and then start hammering relentlessly at me. I have been attacked on separate occasions by separate people for the first two, at least, but so far people are smart enough to realise what the last is about.

Someone: application to social sciences and humanities in general
damn all this positivism, essentialism, structuralism, postmodernism, post-structuralism
for making the lives of poor students so complicated

yes, we get that in human geog
and damn them all for trying to make simple things so complicated
to them, a map is more than a map
it is a representation of power struggles and social tensions, and contributes to the shaping of space and identities

that's the theme of my latest reading. gah

Me: do you agree? ;)

Someone: i agree, inasmuch as i am able to see the points they illustrate

but when i'm on the streets of bangkok with the same map
i don't care about these power struggles
all i care about is, "am i lost?"

Me: well it is a curious confusion to go from the assertion that maps can be used for blah blah to the assertion that maps are always used for blah blah


Someone: which is the problem with the idea of literature, isn't it?
­a lot of people like seeing daggers where there're none because it is cool to be the devil's advocate, no matter how dumb you can be.

neh, i'm just talking about people's perception of lit

Blogs for Bush: The White House Of The Blogosphere: The Death of Science

"It was, after all, science and its enthusiasts which fell for the Piltdown Man, Haekel's embryos, eugenics, Population Bomb, ALAR, etc, etc, etc. So many bogus theories, dressed up as science, and greeted by the believers in science as the be-all and end-all of existence. After a while, it was bound to errode the foundations of science - and now it has. Science is now so intertwined with myth and political gamesmanship that whatever judgements are pronounced under the cover of science are immediately suspect - everyone who hears such things wonders when some future science will completely refute what is held as rock-solid science today."


Creationist bashing gets boring after a while, which is why I haven't engaged in it for a time - really it's like shouting at people with their fingers in their ears and chanting "I can't hear you". But anyway I've just thought of a new corollary:

History is not based on genuine empirical evidence (of the sort that say, Charles's Law is) but rather on subjective attempts to string together a few axiomatic principles of the nature of the human condition such as those presented by Mr. ***, and pre-conceived notions of past occurences into a full-blown narrative of the past. In the process a lot of bad logic goes into the works eg the circularity of relying on documentary and archaeological evidence (especially dating artefacts by means of the decoration of pottery shards), or the deliberate ignorance of the documentary record that doesn't fit into the theory (eg Fairy tales, The Book of Gilgamesh, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, The Donation of Constantine, The Book of Mormon, The Hitler Diaries), or all sorts of chicanery in an attempt to produce "proof" that Alexander the Great reached India.

The patchy "evidence" of the historical record doesn't really "prove" the veracity of the historical narrative, all it proves is that at a certain period of time a certain artefact of this sort existed (in many cases it proves even less than that, i.e. all those fanciful reconstructions of "life in the Egyptian Old Kingdom" etc are great works of fiction and art in many cases). This is empirical evidence all right, but of a conjectural variety and not "logical" in the true sense of the word that we use. To artfully paint the "historical links" between documents and artefacts is very creative and imaginative indeed, but it is not logical, any more than *** were to buried with Gibbons, this would provide "proof" for alien visitors in the future that 17 centuries ago a great empire fell.

"As a scientist studying animals, not humans, I am also concerned about how our verdict of cheating affects our views of the animals themselves. Some of the early papers on extra-pair paternity in birds are interestingly divided in whom is portrayed as the active party in the behavior. Initially, there seemed to be two approaches, neither one particularly favorable to females. Either the males were roaming around taking advantage of hapless females waiting innocently in their own territories for the breadwinner males to come home with the worms, or else females were brazan hussies, seducing blameless males who otherwise would not have strayed from the path of moral righteousness into turpitude. One scientist refers rather peevishly to "female promiscuity" in blackbirds. Several papers, including one published in the prestigious journal Nature, call young birds fathered by males not paired with the mother as "illegitimate," as if their parents had tiny avian marriage licenses and chirped their vows (Gyllensten et al. 1990, Hassequist et al. 1995, Bjornstad and Lifjeld 1997)... A paper on Tasmanian native hens, birds with a rather complex set of relationships between the sexes, discussed what appearsto be polyandry, multiple males associated with a single female (Maynard Smith and Ridpath 1972). The paper refers to this behavior as "wife-sharing," but I have never seen multiple females associated with a male, its mirror image, and a common mating pattern, called "husband-sharing". Making the males the active parties (they "share" the female, as if she were a six-pack of beer), may reduce the likelihood of noticing what the females do, of seeing things from their point of view. Similarly, if we only see female baboons as mothers, we are less likely to notice that in fact their relationships, not those of males, determine troop structure and movement (Smuts 1999)."

--- Marlene Zuk, Animal Models and Gender, from Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective, 4th ed.

"We all know that the great argument of those who defend capital punishment is the exemplary value of the punishment. Heads are cut off not only to punish but to intimidate, by a frightening example, any who might be tempted to imitate the guilty. Society is not taking revenge; it merely wants to forestall. It waves the head in the air so that potential murderers will see their fate and recoil from it.

This argument would be impressive if we were not obliged to note:
(1) that society itself does not believe in the exemplery value it talkes about;
(2) that there is no proof that the death penalty ever made a single murderer recoil when he had made up his mind, whereas clearly it had no effect but one of fascination on thousands of criminals;
(3) that, in other regards, it constitutes a repulsive example, the consequences of which cannot be foreseen.

To begin with society does not believe in what it says. If it really believed what it says, it would exhibit the heads. Society would give executions the benefit of the publicity it generally uses for national bond issues or new brands of drinks.

... How can a furtive assassination committed at night in a prison courtyard be exemplary? At most it serves the purpose of periodically informing the citizens that they will die if they happen to kill--a future that can be promised even to those who do not kill. For the penalty to be truly exemplary it must be frightening. [...] Today there is no spectacle, but only a penalty known to all by hearsay and, from time to time, the news of an execution dressed up in soothing phrases. How could a future criminal keep in mind, at the moment of his crime, a sanction that everyone tries to make more and more abstract?"

- Albert Camus, Reflections on the Guillotine (as transcribed by voctir)

Someone else quoting from the same:

"What then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal, who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him, and who from that moment onward had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life."

I was digging in the Young Republic archives to get the following for someone's essay. I thought I'd posted this before, but it seems I hadn't, so here goes:

>China is a sprawling country with
>the majority of its people not ready for the political freedoms that come
>with democracy, as they are still struggling to make ends meet. One reason
>why democracy was implemented successfully in Taiwan is because the KMT
>adopted Sun Yat Sen's Three People's Principles (nationalism, democracy,
>people's livelihood) and taught that democracy would have to develop in
>stages as people were taught of their responsibilities as
>citizen-participants. Democracy 'from the bottom up' thus developed as an
>inevitable result of economic well-being, together with democracy 'from the
>top down' as the KMT allowed the DPP to be set up and liberalised its
>political system in the 1980s.

I'm sorry but I find such arguments both unconvincing and offensive. The implication that only rich nations are 'fit for freedom' is not supported by empirical evidence. This mistaken impression comes from the fact that most democracies are rich -- even in Africa, it is the most democratic countries, such as Nigeria, Senegal, Botswana, and South Africa which are the richest. Democracy makes for accountable government, and this in turn makes it likely that the govt will not pursue policies which are directly harmful to the
country's economic health. Sen has pointed out that no famine has ever occured under a democratic govt. (This is not to say that democracies are always richer, but merely that they are unlikely to be disastrously poor. India, for example, had its growth hampered by excessive state intervention in the economy and in trade. But it has fared much better economically under the current democratic govt than under the British Raj.)

The case of India also shows that even in a poor country, democracy can thrive. In fact, India has a lower per capita GDP than China, yet it is a relatively healthy democracy. Politics there suffers from some degree of corruption, yet the govt is still responsive to the ppl, for if not it can expect electoral retribution. Politicians have also generally not exploited the platform offered to them by democracy to stir up sectarian violence.

An even better example is Indonesia. In 1997 the conventional wisdom was that the chaos after Suharto's regime broke down proved that democracy was unworkable in a poor country with low levels of education. 7 years on, Indo has proved the doubters wrong. It has carried out peaceful, free and fair elections with high turnout rates. It is, as the Economist calls it, a 'shining example'.

***

A Guide To What's Wrong With Economics

"From the 1960s onward, neoclassical economists have increasingly managed to block the employment of non-neoclassical economists, narrow the economics curriculum offered by universities to students, and made their theory increasingly irrelevant to understanding economic reality. Now, they are even banishing economic history and the history of economic thought from the curriculum. Why has this tragedy happened? At this time of accelerating momentum for radical change in the study of economics, "A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics" comprehensively examines the shortcomings of neoclassical economics and considers a number of alternative formulations. In it, a distinguished list of non-neoclassical economists provide an examination of some of the many worldly and logical gaps in neoclassical economics, its hidden ideological agendas, disregard for the environment, habitual misuse of mathematics and statistics, inability to address the major issues of economic globalization, its ethical cynicism concerning poverty, racism and sexism, and its misrepresentation of economic history. In clear and engaging prose, "A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics" shows how interesting, relevant and exciting economics can be when it is pursued, not as the defense of an antiquated and close-minded system of belief, but as a no-holds barred inquiry looking for real-world truths. This book is a must-read for all economists and their graduate students, as well as for the general reader."

***

A Linguistic Big Bang

"When the greek historian herodotus was traveling in Egypt, he heard of a bizarre experiment conducted by a King named Psammetichus. The inquisitive monarch, wrote Herodotus, decided to wall up two baby boys in a secluded compound. Whatever came out of the boys' mouths, reasoned the King, would be the root language of our species -- the key to all others. Herodotus tells us that eventually the children came up with the Phrygian word for bread, bekos. In addition to demonstrating the superiority of the Phrygian tongue, the King's inquiry proved that even if left to their own devices, children wouldn't be without language for long. We are born, Herodotus suggested, with the gift of gab.

Ever since, philosophers have dreamed of repeating Psammetichus's test. If children grew up isolated on a desert island, would they develop a bona fide language? And if so, would it resemble existing tongues? Yet only someone with the conscience of a Josef Mengele would carry out such an experiment. Then, in the mid-1980's, linguists were confronted with an unexpected windfall. Psammetichus's experiment was repeated, but this time it came about unintentionally. And not in Egypt but in Nicaragua...

Nicaraguan Sign Language (known to experts as I.S.N., for Idioma de Signos Nicaragense) has been patiently decoded by outside scholars, who describe an idiom filled with curiosities yet governed by the same "universal grammar" that the linguist Noam Chomsky claims structures all language. Steven Pinker, author of "The Language Instinct," sees what happened in Managua as proof that language acquisition is hard-wired inside the human brain. "The Nicaraguan case is absolutely unique in history," he maintains. "We've been able to see how it is that children -- not adults -- generate language, and we have been able to record it happening in great scientific detail. And it's the first and only time that we've actually seen a language being created out of thin air.""

This site is the third search result on Google for 'Jennifer ellison boob job' (sans quotes, a referral I keep getting).

I am ambivalent (sorry, no pictures of her breasts before she got them enhanced).

***

Moral skepticism

"In meta-ethics, moral skepticism is a theory which maintains either that ethical claims are generally false, or else that we cannot sufficiently justify any ethical claims, and must therefore maintain doubt about whether they are true or false.

For example, the claims "it is wrong to kill" and "it is acceptable to kill" are both false, according to the first version of moral skepticism. The moral skeptic says that this is because ethical claims implicitly pre-suppose the existence of objective values, and that these do not exist.

Such a position is exemplified in J. L. Mackie's book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Mackie's main argument against the existence of objective values is the argument from queerness - objective values would be very queer things indeed, very different from everything else in the world - indeed, they would have to be something like the Platonic forms (which Mackie considers a "wild product of philosophical fancy"). Furthermore, how we are supposed to discover these objective values is mysterious.

The moral skeptic's conclusion is that objective values are merely useful fictions for the preservation of society."

***

Current hair status:

Fringe: When pulled down, some parts go just past the bottom of my nose. When pulled back, the strands are about 1cm from the top tip of my ear.
Side: It goes maybe 2-3cm past the end of my earlobe
Back: At its longest, the hair at the back now touches my collar, so when I move my head my hair tends to get tousled. This doesn't mean that the hair is very long, just that I have a short neck. Pity.

I was thinking of how I could keep the hair at the back in order. It's long enough to be formed into a tuft and pinned or tied, but that would look hideous even by my standards, so (apparently some people possess the secret lore of how to clip presentably, but I know not any of them).

Ah well. At least I can now bunch the hair at the back up into a small tuft with one hand and run my other hand through it. Daily conditioning has paid off.

"A man can but wish for a Swiss house, a German car, and a Japanese wife, who is well-versed in Chinese cooking, and a cellar of French wine." - Mizusaki (attr. Xephyris)

***

2 people on my M$N list have the presumed acronym "THMC" in their nicknames. I asked both of them; one didn't reply and the other said it was for him to know and me to find out (bah).

Earlier, one person changed his to "THSC", and when I asked him what it stood for he said it was "Temasek Hall Singles Club". Therefore "THMC" must stand for "Temasek Hall Something Something".

One person suggested that it was "Temasek Hall Morons Committee". Mmm, good guess. After all, they need to form lots of committees to get lots of ECA points to compete with each other to get rooms in halls. They're all suffering from money illusion. Bah.


Someone: nus.. sigh. but i really like the way you refer to it as
"The Premier Institution of Social Engineering". reminds me of all those cheesy NUSSU ads on double decker [Ed: The one of the swimming pool in which 2 graduates (with the stupid graduation hats) prance]


Someone on previous post: "and there i was, the computing student who had to make sure the rest of them were not handing up their rubbish for marking"

ZOMG!
This is exactly what happened for my Japanese Studies project!
I almost thought I was reading my own thoughts there!

***

Sheares Revisited

What I've learnt from FYP and Sheares Hall

2. Got various invitations/hints to sleep overnight in a guy's room, on his bed. I'm shy, so I ended up not getting any sleep at all as long as I was in Sheares. Even guys try to play matchmakers. Albeit very indiscreet, quite vulgar, and quite brainless ones.

4. Got an offer to be made 'a real woman'. Interestingly, this offer was the second one from the same and only fellow who has ever expressed carnal interest in me. YES! Hope for the troll! Sadly, I think he doesn't remember the first time anyway, and I think he's probably not very discriminating, nor was he very serious (both times). (This isn't the same fellow as point 2.)

7. Learnt about the extensive Porn library and its librarian in Sheares.

I went for project one day, and after having been there for a few hours was informed that the stack of CDs in front of me was porn. Want to watch? Apparently there were 2 different types of porn in that stack. The ones with plot, and the ones without. Was informed that the ones without plot all looked the same in the end and hence, the ones with plot were slightly better.

The stack of CDs I saw was an insignificant portion of the porn collector's library. No, Porn-librarian was not my group mate, and I don't think I know him.

I think it was mostly Taiwanese porn. Not sure.

12. Learnt that hall people, or Sheares hall guys really do nothing except gossip about their Sheares hall mates. Gossip usually involved - girls, girls and girls. Learnt that a guy and girl walking alone anywhere together would usually result in gossip. Guilty without trial.

15. My life long ambition is to be one of those narrow-minded old ladies who dress up in samfoos and stake out our national parks to spy on and throw bricks at amorous young couples. After that I hope to progress to the old cranky coot in your void decks who does nothing but terrorise the little kids who walk past making too much noise disturbing me while I spy on the rest of the inhabitants in the block of flats.

In conclusion, I will never ever step back in Sheares again. Might miss the guys, and think of those times fondly when I'm drunk, or losing my mind, but otherwise you'll have to kidnap and drag me screaming and kicking back.


Some people get all the fun / action. *pout*

Computing / Sheares Hall guys must be very despo *runs away*

***

Someone on SMU: im only taking 4 modules. no exams for the other 2. all projects and reports.

i rather have exams...
the grading system is silly.

financial accounting for instance. we have 1 presentation, 2 reports, hmwk, quiz, participation, mid term n final term exam. so hard to score!

"leadership and teambuilding" is even more cock. we had to plan and do a community service project and submit a report. then according to the report, the prof will IMAGINE how our implementation of the proj went and mark accordingly. and its 35%!

participation is very wayang.
some people juz talk for the sake of talking..

Me: so you regretting SMU?
so-called seminars are rubbish I hear
basically it's a combined lecture + tutorial
and a lot of presentations

Someone: i wouldn't say i regret.. perhaps not yet. haha.
yeah, alot of presentations n projects. especially the past 2 weeks..

then grp presentation was evaluated in this way: 4 groups present on each of the 2 presentation days. 5 students will be assigned as judges on each day. at the end of the presentation, they will rank the 4 groups. the prof has a vote too. adding up, the grps will have an overall ranking 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th. marks are awarded according to the ranking. so the grp that get 3rd can never have a mark

the grp that get 3rd can never have a mark higher than the 2nd grp. though they might have the same grade. so even if a grp is very good, but the student judges think otherwise, or they wanna help their own friends, the better grp also LL.

and becoz everyone knows we are being rank, there is competition. during QnA, there were these few people who juz kept bombarding other grps.. they want to screw up people's presentation, make themselves seem better.

my grp did the *** one lor.. heng i had training under u before that. haha.. i compiled a list of anticipated questions and sent them to my grp. but only 1 of the gals read thru. then when people bomb, we block, bomb again, we block again.. the prof said we handled the Q n A well even though questions werent easy. haha

Me: haha training under me?
hahahahaha
you're welcome ;)


An alternate view:

hahahaha please lah it's HOW easy to do well in smu
largely for two reasons

1) singaporeans are morons
2) singaporeans are morons

i should compile a list of why i love smu
except i can't get past the first reason of 1) the girls are hot.

***

The Concept of Liberty

In Two Concepts of Liberty Berlin sought to explain the difference between two (not, he acknowledged, the only two) different ways of thinking about political liberty which had run through modern thought, and which, he believed, were central to the ideological struggles of his day. Berlin called these two conceptions of liberty negative and positive. Berlin's treatment of these concepts was less than fully even-handed from the start: while he defined negative liberty fairly clearly and simply, he gave positive liberty two different basic definitions, from which still more distinct conceptions would branch out. Negative liberty Berlin initially defined as freedom from, that is, the absence of constraints on the agent imposed by other people. Positive liberty he defined both as freedom to, that is, the ability (not just the opportunity) to pursue and achieve willed goals; and also as autonomy or self-rule, as opposed to dependence on others.

Berlin's account was further complicated by combining conceptual analysis with history. He associated negative liberty with the classical liberal tradition as it had emerged and developed in Britain and France from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Berlin later regretted that he had not made more of the evils that negative liberty had been used to justify, such as exploitation under laissez-faire capitalism; in Two Concepts itself, however, negative liberty is portrayed favourably, and briefly. It is on positive liberty that Berlin focuses, since it is, he claims, both a more ambiguous concept, and one which has been subject to greater and more sinister transformation, and ultimately perversion.

Berlin traces positive liberty back to theories that focus on the autonomy, or capacity for self-rule, of the agent. Of these, Berlin found Rousseau's theory of liberty particularly dangerous. For, in Berlin's account, Rousseau had equated freedom with self-rule, and self-rule with obedience to the ‘general will’. By this, Berlin alleged, Rousseau meant, essentially, the common or public interest—that is, what was best for all citizens qua citizens. The general will was quite independent of, and would often be at odds with, the selfish wills of individuals, who, Rousseau charged, were often deluded as to their own interests.

This view went against Berlin's political and moral outlook in two ways. First, it posited the existence of a single ‘true’ public interest, a single set of arrangements that was best for all citizens, and was thus opposed to the main thrust of pluralism. Second, it rested on a bogus transformation of the concept of the self. In his doctrine of the general will Rousseau moved from the conventional and, Berlin insisted, correct view of the self as individual to the self as citizen—which for Rousseau meant the individual as member of a larger community. Rousseau transformed the concept of the self's will from what the empirical individual actually desires to what the individual as citizen ought to desire, that is, what is in the individual's real best interest, whether he or she realises it or not.

This transformation became more sinister still in the hands of Kant's German disciples. Fichte began as a radically individualist liberal. But he came to reject his earlier political outlook, and ultimately became an ardent, even hysterical, nationalist—an intellectual forefather of Fascism and even Nazism. Once again, this involved a move from the individual to a collective—in Fichte's case, the nation, or Volk. In this view, the individual achieves freedom only through renunciation of his or her desires and beliefs as an individual and submersion in a larger group. Freedom becomes a matter of overcoming the poor, flawed, false, empirical self—what one appears to be and want—in order to realise one's ‘true’, ‘real’, ‘noumenal’ self. This ‘true’ self may be identified with one's best or true interests, either as an individual or as a member of a larger group or institution; or with a cause, an idea or the dictates of rationality (as in the case, Berlin argued, of Hegel's definition of liberty, which equated it with recognition of, and obedience to, the laws of history as revealed by reason). Berlin traced this sinister transformation of the idea of freedom to the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, both Communist and Fascist-Nazi, which claimed to liberate people by subjecting—and often sacrificing—them to larger groups or principles. As we have seen, to do this was for Berlin the greatest of political evils; and to do so in the name of freedom, a political principle that Berlin, as a genuine liberal, especially cherished, struck him as a particularly monstrous deception. Against this, Berlin championed, as ‘truer and more humane’, negative liberty and an empirical view of the self.

In addition to the debates concerning the conceptual validity and historical accuracy of Berlin's account (extensively documented in Harris 2002), there is considerable misunderstanding of Berlin's own attitudes to the concepts he discussed, and of the goals of his lecture. Berlin has often been interpreted, not unreasonably, as a staunch enemy of the concept of positive liberty. But this was never wholly the case. Berlin regarded both concepts of liberty as centring on valid claims about what is necessary and good for human beings; both negative and positive liberty were for him genuine values, which might in some cases clash, but in other cases could be combined and might even be mutually interdependent. Indeed, Berlin's own earlier articulations of his political values included a notable component of positive liberty alongside negative liberty (see e.g., 2002, 336–44). What Berlin attacked was the many ways in which positive liberty had been used to justify the denial, betrayal or abandonment of both negative liberty and the truest forms of positive liberty itself. Berlin's main targets were not positive liberty as such, but the metaphysical or psychological assumptions which, combined with the concept of positive liberty, had led to its perversion: monism, and a metaphysical or collective conception of the self. Two Concepts of Liberty, and Berlin's liberalism, are therefore not based on championing negative liberty against positive liberty, but on advocating individualism, empiricism and pluralism against collectivism, holism, rationalistic metaphysics and monism.

(Emphasis in bold mine)


I do not think I am the only one who sees parallels between Fichte's concept of Volk and one core aspect of so-called 'Asian Values', ie Putting the community above the self.

The logical conclusion of this is, as the author notes, a form of Communist/Fascist-Nazi ideology.

***

"According to the truly frightening Spirit and Destiny, colourpuncture was devised by a German scientist, a claim which is typical of the New-Agers' desire to have it both ways: it's an alternative to mainstream medicine, so not subject to the same principles and tests; but devised by a scientist, with the implication that it has some credibility with the mainstream... Theirs is a "voyage of discovery", implying at the outset that what is being "tested" is a wonderful world of wisdom and knowledge, not a dubious sea of sloppy-minded rubbish." (Bad Moves: Loading the dice)

Ooh. Touche. I love this guy.

***

The longest, most amusing and most detailed Gamebook reviews I've read:

"Niggle #14, Trial of Idiot Savants: Occasionally a writer will get confused enough to jot down something like this: "Bob grinned and shook his head at himself, musing on the finer points of Cartesian dualism in the middle of a great jewellery heist." It's a good bet that if you find yourself apologizing for what you just wrote, you have a problem to fix, even if it's just the existence of the apology itself. For this book Waterfield has come up with a completely irrelevant, arbitrary and unexciting puzzle, and to be on the safe side he declares as much. Well, in this case there _was_ a problem to be fixed: the exercise in section 309 is flawed in multiple ways and will accomplish only that the player dies and never returns for another attempt."

"Niggle #17, Attack of the Stunt Doubles: There's a system for dream combat which basically amounts to this: you are screwed."

(on FF28: Phantoms of Fear)

Quote of the Day: "It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do." - Jerome K. Jerome

***

Not too long ago:

Mrs Chan (JC GP teacher): Where are you now?
Me: NUS - the premier institution of Social Engineering
Mrs Chan: You haven't changed.
Me: Is that good or bad?
Mrs Chan: I don't know


Meanwhile I'm being blamed for doing all sorts of "unethical" things that I never knew about. Gah.

***

NUS canteen food is cheap, but many - maybe even most - of the stalls give small servings. Besides cutting costs for the stallholders, who presumably aren't allowed to increase prices, this is also because:

1) People go to the canteen when they're bored, so this prevents over-eating.

2) Anorexic girls won't eat if the servings are too big

3) Anorexic or small-stomached girls can't finish their servings even if they do decide to eat

The power of the constituency mentioned in 2) and 3) is also the reason why the Arts and Business canteens have better food (so it is said) than the Science and Engineering ones; if the food sucks, they won't eat it. Which is also the reason why girls schools supposedly have good food, while RI was stuck with Monty's for 4 years.


I sat in for half of one of PaRaDoX's maths lectures; now I understand the pain that he has been going through over the past year. I had to concentrate very hard to figure out what words the lecturer was using, let alone to understand the Advanced Calculus that he was teaching. Hell, I think more people would have understood what he was saying if he had spoken in Chinese. So when I stumbled out of the LT after 45 minutes, I was reeling in shock, and my mind had been wiped even more effectively than it would if I had been reading Plato.

One surprising thing was the number of girls in the maths lecture, for they filled at least three quarters of the lecture theatre. Even assuming that most of the lecture skippers were guys, the girls would still fill two thirds of the LT. After all, the female gender generally always has problems with maths, so I would have thought that once it was no longer compulsory, they would no longer take it.


I was at Fuzion Smoothie Cafe in Prince George's Park Residences, where they make smoothies without ice, but instead with IQF (Individually Quick Frozen) fruits. While waiting for my order to be processed, I noticed that they advertised their smoothies as having "no sugar" and "no ice". I also noticed that they had a soft serve machine with a curiously ice-like slush swirling around in it.

My curiosity was piqued, and I asked the man at the counter what the stuff in the machine was. He replied that it was "fruit extract". On my pressing him, he conceded that it was fruit sugar to sweeten the smoothies. When I pointed out that fruit sugar was still sugar, he replied that there was no artifical sugar in the smoothies. Now, I don't know about saccharin, except that it isn't used much these days, but aspartame is hugely expensive, and only used when they need to advertise a product as low-calorie and/or sugar-free. In all other cases, people rather use natural sugar, not least because it tastes better. I then gave the man some examples of natural sugars: cane sugar, which is from sugar cane; beet sugar, which is from sugar beets and just as I was explaining about how high fructose corn syrup is also natural, he conceded my point.


Interesting Sociological studies:

1) A guy sat in a car and took notes while bank robbers used it for their robbery

2) A Lord Humphrey watched men having sex with other men in public bathrooms and tracked them down months later, pretending to be an insurance claims investigator, and found that most of them were married with children.


We watched a hilarious BBC interview with Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the President of the Maldives, and all he could say to the correspondent's questions was: "It's not true", giving that bland reply even when faced with proof of his regime's human rights abuses, and so implying that the correspondent was lying about his observations.

Due to a clashing of timetables, my South Asia tutorial group is going to meet for a discussion next Monday. So boo hoo, there goes my free day. No matter - I shall view the webcast of my sole thursday lecture and declare it my free-day-in-lieu.

USP students can't vote in the Arts Club elections (which were a walkover, but even if they hadn't been, we still wouldn't have been able to vote), and this is enshrined in the constitution. It's no wonder we're forced to be elitist and hide in our little corners.

I should arrange to be Handsome Boy Steven Lim the Eyebrow Plucker's agent and get him to come down to NUS to pluck eyebrows. Then I cane take a 10% cut of his earnings.

Lots of people wear their JC and even Secondary School T-shirts to school. Unfortunately, I can't fit into those of mine which fall into the latter category.

Qiying says I am like Michael Moore in "the way [I] do things". Right. I thought it was because I look sloppy.

One advantage of watching webcasts is you can set the playback speed to "fast" and finish a 2 hour lecture in under 1 1/2.

People have suggested, in the past, that I write a book about my experiences as a slave. Now someone has suggested that I turn How Girls Waste Time into a book too. Heh.

We were shown a Tesla coil made by a 14 year old RI boy mostly from off-the-shelf materials and junk. Costing less than S$100, its sparks are more powerful than that of a commercial Tesla coil which costs US$1,000. My juniors are so outstanding :)

Friend: Do you live in hall?
Me: No, why?
Friend: *gestures at me* Just a random thought
Me: I customarily look sloppy

I saw a stall near the Arts Canteen selling "special" T-shirts for $2 each. On closer examination, they turned out to be the white-coloured, suspiciously-transparent Arts Orientation Week T-shirts. Great way to recoup costs!

It seems SMU has such fluffy sounding classes as "Analytical Skills" and "Creative Thinking". Ho ho. *ahem*

One guy in my tutorial group raised the point that most Philosophy professors are agnostic or atheist. Haha.