Monday, March 17, 2008

"A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends." - Baltasar Gracian

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MFM comments that even Dell and Acer have better hardware than the Macbook.

Allswell rebranded their drinks with the slogan: 'new look, same great taste'. At the same time they reduced the sugar content. Duh.

Someone had a Freudian slip and referred to Valentine's Day as "VD". Heh.

It seems that there really *is* Canadian 2 for 1 Pizza in Canada. Though it tastes better, of course.

Psychology and Economics are the most scientific of the social sciences. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are also the least ideologically charged.

The next time someone asks me, not for the first or even second time, to go to Mass with them, I'm going to ask the person to watch Faces of Death with me. Or maybe 2girls1cup. Or I could go along and after I'm done neither of us will be welcome there ever again (yes, Lucretia's father [in some versions] meant well too, by expurging the stain upon the family); luckily Jehovah's Witnesses don't go door-to-door in Singapore, or they would be recipients of my wrath.

It has been observed that statistical tests using a 5% significance level means that one out of 20 academic papers could be wrong in their conclusions, and that due to publication bias (papers with results get published), this means that wrong conclusions might be drawn. Yet, if the underlying facts are neutral, we would expect there to be an equal number of published papers showing the opposite conclusions.

I got linked by 2 blogs: one called FeministFocus and another called Condomania (with the post called "will the condom fit my penis"). Hahahahaha. Fortunately (or otherwise), they're spam blogs.

Since people are so into the symbolism of Obama, what about the symbolism to the rest of the world if Clinton is elected? Much of the rest of the world thinks women are unsuitable/unfit for power, so electing her would cause foreign policy to go down the drain. Therefore we shouldn't elect Hillary.

After observing many elections and revolutions across time and space, I've noticed that the hope and promise of change you always see in the runup and during the Honeymoon period is inevitably dashed by the power of established institutions, reality and the fact that rhetoric is free. Rhetoric is never followed up fully (or even mostly) by reality, and symbolism is much overblown (yes, deliberate repetition here). Which is why I value Obama's hot air less than the energy required to heat it up. (Incidentally this also shows you why the Rational Expectations hypothesis does not hold). Which is not to say that nothing will change, but a high discount rate needs to be applied to grand talk.