Links - 13th November 2010

"Hello seeker! Now don't feel alone here in the New Age, because there's a seeker born every minute." - Firesign Theatre

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How come some girls write what in their facebook also will have plenty of guys "LIKE" the status? - "my facebook got one girl just say "I just had maggi mee for lunch!" and 12 guys liked that status
so they is like the fact that she is eating maggi mee for lunch or what?"
A: maybe the maggie mee is branded one?
B: I think if I post a picture of da bian,they will also comment:"Wow your da bian look so yummy."
C: if the gal not chio...U see how many "likes" there will be?
D: It's like when there's a thread created by a female EDMWer in EDMW, lots of replies come flooding in.
E: TS i think u r jealous because you do not have maggie mee to eat
F: i oso show 1 ger post something like her menses is killing her, then got 3146598973123 ppl "like" it
G: go irc. type 16/f/desperate.

Stove's discovery of the worst argument in the world - "Our conceptual schemes are our conceptual schemes, so, we cannot get out of them (to know things as they are in themselves). In Alan Olding's telling caricature, `We have eyes, therefore we cannot see’... There are obvious difficulties with presenting the arguments in the original works of Derrida, or Lacan, or Baudrillard. They do not write in any natural language, they do not put the premises before the conclusion, the conclusion is distributed over the text rather than appearing in any one sentence, positions are assumed to have been established outside the texts one is actually reading, in previous texts, or perhaps future ones, and so on... If we see things only from our perspective, through the filter of our cultural experience, and so on, is there not some problem about how to get out (and see the world as it really is)?’ That may be so. But what made the `Worst argument’ worst was not that it raised a question about how to get out, but that it claimed immediately that there was no way to get out"

Twitter Mood Predicts The Stock Market

American academic in Singapore casts doubt on Yale tie-up - "2. In Singapore, the humanities and social sciences simply cannot achieve the kind of social recognition and financial reward associated with the science and business spheres. This may be happening everywhere, but it’s particularly acute in Singapore.
3. An uncongenial environment for the personal downtime and reflection that go along with a liberal arts education: try to find somewhere peaceful and quiet to ruminate on the big questions in life in Singapore, away from campus. Good luck. Over the decade-and-a-half that I’ve lived here, I’ve seen the opportunities to go for long, thoughtful walks diminish as space becomes increasingly chopped up and commercialized, and it’s even hard to find a relatively quiet place just to read or discuss off-campus where you don’t have to pay through the nose.
4. An unnecessary reduplication of effort: NUS is already doing as good of a job as Yale probably ever could in the social sciences and humanities sphere for this particular setting"

My First Dictionary - "Today's word is pact.
Lucy and Tom have made a pact. They have made an agreement. It is called an online suicide pact"

Things Japanese girls do that make guys go, 'Huh?' - "3. They go to the bathroom in groups.
9. They’re obsessed with fortune-telling.
10. They have a separate stomach just for dessert."
I think it's an East Asian thing

Why Teachers Should 'Friend' Students Online - "Have you ever considered that children are friending teachers they trust, because they are looking for an adult to watch out for them while they are online?"

Teacher banned for life for being 'useless'

Foreigners victims, perpetrators of sekuhara - ""The attitude was always the same — I was a pretty, young, blond, blue-eyed white woman, so of course this would happen to me, what did I expect?" she says. "If you fit a certain profile, then your life will be a lot more difficult in Japan"... In addition to Japanese males harassing foreign women, there is also the reverse: foreign men harassing Japanese"

YouTube - RetroHeroes's Channel
Full cartoon episodes

Malawi students’ Bible desecration could signal new Muslim militancy, priest worries - "Representatives of the Gideons Bible organization had offered a Catholic primary school in a predominant Muslim area free copies of the New Testament... Although the school had made it clear that no Bibles were to be given to the Muslim pupils and that no one was obliged to take a copy, some Muslim youths created an uproar. They tore up the Bibles, threw them at their teachers and then threw torn pages on the streets. Some of the students denounced the Bible distribution to their religious leaders as an “insult to Islam” and claimed that they had been forced to accept a Bible. In the days after the incident, Catholics feared violent attacks from Muslim groups"

the myth of mass panic - "Kathleen Tierney and her co-workers at the University of Colorado at Boulder investigated accusations of panicking, criminality, brutality and mayhem in the aftermath of Hurricane Ka- trina. They concluded that these tales were 'disaster myths.' What was branded as 'looting' was actually collective survival behavior: people took food for their families and neighbors when store payment systems were not working and rescue services were nowhere in sight. In fact, the population showed a surprising ability to self-organize in the absence of authorities... if there is such a thing as panic, it probably better describes the fear and helplessness of lone individuals than the responses of a crowd in the midst of an emergency"

Is this evidence that we can see the future? - "Parapsychologists have made outlandish claims about precognition – knowledge of unpredictable future events – for years. But the fringe phenomenon is about to get a mainstream airing: a paper providing evidence for its existence has been accepted for publication by the leading social psychology journal. What's more, sceptical psychologists who have pored over a preprint of the paper say they can't find any significant flaws... In one experiment, students were shown a list of words and then asked to recall words from it, after which they were told to type words that were randomly selected from the same list. Spookily, the students were better at recalling words that they would later type"

Vasectomy? Why so many wives tell their husbands to have the snip - "Gina now admits she wants Paul to have a vasectomy not just as a contraceptive, but to reassure her he’s not thinking about a future without her... It’s almost always the woman who suggests a vasectomy... Women are used to being in control of contraception and it’s often difficult to let go of that, even when it’s their husband’s fertility, not their own, in question... if a woman wouldn’t consider being sterilised, how can she expect her husband to do so?... ‘There are bitter cases where a man has a vasectomy to please his wife and then she leaves him a month later. It’s deliberate — she’s done it to spite him’"

bitplay INC.
A light you can shoot off, a light that has a timer and an alarm clock you must construct.

Mystery of how cats lap is revealed - "Cats use their tongues to delicately draw up water without breaking the surface of the liquid... The team thinks cats may have adopted this more complex but neater approach because it means they are less likely to be splashed with water as they drink."

Web Designers vs. Web Developers (Infographic)

Buddhist Warfare and The Six Perfections, reviewed by Katherine Wharton - TLS - "Have you heard about Vakkali, the Buddhist sage who attained Nirvana while slicing his own throat? Of all the major faith traditions, Buddhism is often seen as the most peaceful, but Buddhist Warfare exposes its darker side. The eight essays in the collection describe twisted teachings on phenomena such as “Soldier-Zen”, and atrocities carried out by groups such as the Buddhist cult army of Faqing... Takuan’s militarism could be seen as an aberration, a late distortion of Buddhist teaching, but Demiéville presents similar examples from across the tradition. Most uncanny are the texts that directly reanimate the Buddha, often in slightly uncharacteristic and shocking situations... Stephen Jenkins describes an early Mahayana text that justifies “compassionate torture” as burning of the remnants of the victim’s past sins. Derek Maher describes the fifth Dalai Lama attributing the status of a Buddhisattva to his Moghul patron Gushri Khan, a war Lord who “realised emptiness”"

Maruah gazetted as a political association - "Maruah, the Singapore arm of the region-wide Working Group for an Asean Human Rights Mechanism, is barred from receiving funds from foreign donors, letting foreigners take part in its events, operating as a political party and being affiliated to any local or foreign political party... The Political Donations Act, which came into effect on Feb 15, 2001, is in line with the Government's stance that politics in Singapore should be for Singaporeans only. Maruah is the fourth group -after the Open Singapore Centre, the Think Centre and Singaporeans For Democracy - to be gazetted as a political association"
Comments: "Most singaporeans already won't go near anything resembling 'politics' with a mile-long pole. This will make them stop thinking of even fellow human beings. Good, we can focus on capitalism and making money. For ourselves."
"Politics is for Singaporeans only, or for PAP only?"
"Does this mean that other advocacy groups like TWC2, AWARE and Nature Society will become political associations? They receive funding from the embassies too."

Supermarket cashier's large breasts overcharges shopper - "A supermarket shopper was surprised to find she had been overcharged for her fruit and veg – because the cashier’s large breasts were resting on the scales... ‘I’ve had 40 years in retail and I’ve never come across anything like this before – and I probably won’t again. The only thing I can compare to this is that we once had a problem with rhubarb being underweighed.’"

copyranter: The most inventive tear-off phone number street ad ever was for penis circumcision.

Renault peut-il baptiser sa voiture Zoé? - "'Selon que nous aurons de la chance ou pas, nous serons un joli pot de fleurs, ou au contraire un martinet, un godemichet ou un balai à toilettes'... Quand on s'appelle Zoé, a poursuivi Me Koubbi, "on n'a pas envie d'entendre: 'On va te faire la vidange', 'Je vais tâter tes airbags' ou 'ça roule Zoé?'". Selon lui, les prénoms utilisés pour dénommer une voiture comme Logan, Mégane ou encore Clio ont d'ailleurs subi une érosion spectaculaire au moment de la sortie des véhicules éponymes. C'est bien simple, "à partir du moment où le véhicule sort, le prénom disparaît!"... Les blagues que l'on pourrait faire sur le prénom Zoé, "ce sont des jeux de mots qui se font dans les cours d'écoles et n'impressionnent personne. C'est d'une stupidité affligeante!"... Enfin, a-t-il observé, il y a 122 marques Zoé à l'international. "Pourquoi donc Renault se verrait la victime de cet opprobre alors qu'il y a des utilisations de Zoé pour tout, y compris pour de la lingerie coquine?!""

An ad campaign that has obviously failed

"Birthing boys or birthing girls is equally good. Girls are also descendants"

(a picture from Guangzhou, via Charis)