France/Spain 2011 - Day 9, Part 1 - Prehistoric Caves, Collegiate Church of Santillana del Mar

France/Spain 2011
Day 9 - 25th March - Prehistoric Caves, Collegiate Church of Santillana del Mar (Part 1)


At breakfast time, a very disturbing video was playing on the ground floor of the hotel: a nature documentary of ants

We then headed to:


Cuevas del Monte del Castillo (Caves of Mt Castillo), caves which retain traces of early human habitation
While Altamira is the most famous (and nicest) cave, access is not currently possible due to conservation reasons. We could've looked at replica drawings, but there wouldn't really have been a point


UNESCO listing certification (2008)


This was the habitation area. Inside were the paintings (where photography was disallowed)


Information on the Cave of Las Monedas (the coins)


Information on the Cave of El Castillo (the castle)


Information on the Cave of La Pasiega


Information on the Cave of Las Monedas (the chimneys)


The Discovery


On the spears


Plan of El Castillo (the one we were in, I think)


Caves

Entrance was only with a guide. Our guide didn't really speak English, but with scattered phrases and his speaking very slow Spanish, we got the main idea.

Prince Albert of Monaco excavated here. The sediments show evidence of human habitation from 150,000 years ago. The painting was done by Homo Sapiens, not Neanderthals. There're paintings from different periods together, and 4 different species: Cro-Magnon, Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals (I missed the last).

There were handprints, but not all were full handprints. A different configuration of fingers was symbolic of different things. A hand on a bison possibly symbolised possession.

Different tribes had different symbols. There were 4 types of symbols: animal, handprints, geometric shapes and shamans in the shape of animals, for example a Shaman as an upright bison. Natural cracks and rock were used to form the image of animals.


Caves sign


Valley the caves overlook


Road down and idyllic valley


Hillside outside Cuevas de El Castillo 1

I think the point of these videos was to record the cowbells from such a far distance, but they're hard to hear above the ambient noise


Hillside outside Cuevas de El Castillo 2


Nuts on top, phyllo pastry below


Views of this local snack


Piedras de Santillana = Stones of Santillana

We also took stock of the preserved eggs: the salted duck eggs were gone but the century eggs still alright as they were in a carton.


Car and Sakura (?) in Puente Viesgo

We then returned to Santillana del Mar.


Zoo banner


Medieval street


Calle del Cantón with a cock "boutique"


Calle de Las Lindas


Church square

There was a bakery near the church.


Casa Quevedo (the name of the place, I think)

However, more interesting than the cakes was:


The best milk I'd ever had
It was extremely rich. If silk were milk, this would be it.


Guy posing with a jug of his fantastic stuff

We then visited the Collegiate Church of Santillana del Mar.



There's more Romanesque architecture in Northern Spain than in France.


"No Swimsuits"


Altar with St Louis


Cloisters view


Pillars


Capital


Cloisters


Jesus (?) - signage was quite poor


Santiago Pilgrim








St. Juliana dominates the devil


Church itself


Some grave


Altar


Altar


Creepers


Capital


The GPS I'd used in France had led us to closed petrol stations but at least the roads were right. The one in Spain had really outdated maps.

What doesn't kill me only makes me suffer

Christopher Hitchens Takes on Nietzsche: Am I Really Stronger? | Culture | Vanity Fair

"One thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”...

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker. Nietzsche was destined to find this out in the hardest possible way, which makes it additionally perplexing that he chose to include the maxim in his 1889 anthology Twilight of the Idols...

In the remainder of his life, however, Nietzsche seems to have caught an early dose of syphilis, very probably during his first-ever sexual encounter, which gave him crushing migraine headaches and attacks of blindness and metastasized into dementia and paralysis. This, while it did not kill him right away, certainly contributed to his death and cannot possibly, in the meanwhile, be said to have made him stronger. In the course of his mental decline, he became convinced that the most important possible cultural feat would be to prove that the plays of Shakespeare had been written by Bacon. This is an unfailing sign of advanced intellectual and mental prostration...

There appears to be an almost eerie correspondence between the episode in the street and the awful graphic dream experienced by Raskolnikov on the night before he commits the decisive murders in Crime and Punishment. The nightmare, which is quite impossible to forget once you have read it, involves the terribly prolonged beating to death of a horse. Its owner scourges it across the eyes, smashes its spine with a pole, calls on bystanders to help with the flogging … we are spared nothing. If the gruesome coincidence was enough to bring about Nietzsche’s final unhingement, then he must have been tremendously weakened, or made appallingly vulnerable, by his other, unrelated sufferings. These, then, by no means served to make him stronger. The most he could have meant, I now think, is that he made the most of his few intervals from pain and madness to set down his collections of penetrating aphorism and paradox. This may have given him the euphoric impression that he was triumphing, and making use of the Will to Power...

Toward the end of [Sidney Hook's] long life he became seriously ill and began to reflect on the paradox that—based as he was in the medical mecca of Stanford, California—he was able to avail himself of a historically unprecedented level of care, while at the same time being exposed to a degree of suffering that previous generations might not have been able to afford. Reasoning on this after one especially horrible experience from which he had eventually recovered, he decided that he would after all rather have died...

[A lack of mercy killing] seems to have concentrated his attention on the way in which each debilitation builds on its predecessor and becomes one cumulative misery with only one possible outcome. After all, if it were otherwise, then each attack, each stroke, each vile hiccup, each slime assault, would collectively build one up and strengthen resistance. And this is plainly absurd. So we are left with something quite unusual in the annals of unsentimental approaches to extinction: not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died...

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write... I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking...

One can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing."


RIP


Related:

How Doctors Die

"What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently...

When doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo...

If a patient suffers from severe illness, old age, or a terminal disease, the odds of a good outcome from CPR are infinitesimal, while the odds of suffering are overwhelming...

Amazingly, studies have found that people placed in hospice care often live longer than people with the same disease who are seeking active cures"

On the claim that financial incentives make claims suspect

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS49 - Eugenie C. Scott on Denialism of Climate Change and Evolution

Robert Biegler: "The claim that all scientists' warnings must be driven by a desire for grant money can be countered by pointing out that this is a universal argument against all warnings. By that argument, scientists must be wrong about thalidomide being a problem for pregnant women, it must be fine to dump mercury waste in fishing grounds (see Minamata), the Newfoundland cod fishery never collapsed, all other fisheries are fine, too, there are plenty of passenger pigeons and Tasmanian tigers, and the oceans are just brimming with blue whales, which are kept out of sight by scientists. The universal denial argument clearly is not universally correct.

A further point here is analogous to the counter to creationists' claims that evolution is ideologically motivated by atheism. That is implausible because scientists of lots of different religious faiths do accept evolution. Likewise in climate science, lots of scientists warn of global warming who are funded by governments that have strong motivations not to act, and therefore strong motivations to engage in wishful thinking and claim there is no global warming. China keeps the lid on social unrest by buying off its people with rising living standards. That depends on continued economic growth, and China is seriously worried about dependence on foreign energy sources. China does have a lot of coal. Nevertheless, China invests in reducing the carbon intensity of its economy. India wants economic growth, which could be powered most cheaply by coal. Despite these incentives, Indian and Chinese climate scientists don't say everything is fine. And US climate scientists kept warning of global warming even during the Bush administration, when the incentives rather were to say everything is fine. The claim that all warnings are motivated by financial incentives simply doesn't stack up."

Stop Telling Women To Do Startups

Stop Telling Women To Do Startups | TechCrunch

"We need to get more guys who are running tech startups instead decide to be stay-at-home dads.

What do you think of that? Stupid, right? That’s what it sounds like when anyone suggests that we need to get more women doing startups.

If you are worried that women don’t feel capable of doing whatever they want, you can stop worrying. Women outperform men in school at such a huge rate that it’s easier to get into college as a male than a female. And women take that to the bank by earning more than men in their 20s. Women would probably continue out-earning men except that when men and women have kids, women choose to downshift way more often than men do.

Clearly, women have a choice. There are plenty of opportunities out there for women if the women would just continue working in their 30s the same way they did in their 20s. So clearly, women don’t want to. Women are choosing children over startups.

So it seems that women are making decisions for themselves just fine. It’s just that they are not the decisions that men make. This should not surprise anyone. Men and women are different. So what?...

VCs are definitely giving women a fair shake, it’s just that women don’t pitch... So what?

Let’s look at all the women writing articles saying that we need women to do startups. Here’s an article by Jean Bittingham. She says the world needs women entrepreneurs now more than ever. But what has she done? She’s an author and an academic. Of course. She has no idea what life is like running a startup, so she thinks it’s a good idea to tell other women to do that while she writes books. I’ve done both startups and book writing, and book writing is like a vacation compared to a startup.

Here’s a post by Tara Brown wondering why women don’t comment on VC blogs. Here’s the answer: Because women don’t care. Is that okay? I actually wonder why Tara cares, because she’s a web site producer. I don’t think she has ever raised money for a startup. But I can tell that all three times I’ve done it, raising money for a startup has been hell, so I think we should really be asking why anyone would want to try to convince someone to do it.

Really, how is it making any woman’s life better to say that women should be doing startups? And hey, if startup life is so great then how about trading in the writer’s life for a founder’s life? It’s really different. Try that for a few years, and then tell all the other women you know, who are out-earning the men they know, or taking care of kids, to trade their life for startup life.

The people trying to give solutions are as lame as the people pointing to a problem.

Whoever started the TED Women’s conference is pathetic. Which would you rather say you spoke at? TED? Or the TED Ghetto?...

Sheryl Sandberg says that women need to “lean into their careers.” Sandberg runs Facebook. She’s doing a great job. She also has two young kids, and a husband who works at a startup. I think you’d be really hard-pressed to find many moms with two young kids who wants Sandberg’s life. Which is why women are not “leaning into their careers” like Sandberg says they need to in order to get to the top.

Pew Research shows that most women who have kids would rather have a part-time job than either work full-time or stay at home with kids full time. This sheds a lot of light on why there are so few female founders, doesn’t it?...

For the most part, women are not complaining about the lack of VC funding in the world. They are complaining about the lack of jobs with flexible hours...

Men could change the world by staying home with their kids and parenting them. Men would provide a totally different perspective as the lunchroom parent. They would ask for totally different after-school programming. Men would hire different babysitters and different SAT tutors. Because men are different than women.

This is the same argument people use for why more women should do startups: They will have a different perspective, think of different models, lend a different sensibility to the industry.

The problem is that people do not need to be told what they should choose. People are pretty good at making choices for themselves. Men can stay home. Women can do startups. The thing is, most don’t want to. And that’s okay."

Why you should not be Vegetarian

Nick Alvarez's answer to Vegetarianism: What is an intelligent argument and/or reason for not becoming a vegetarian? - Quora

"First, the question asks about vegetarianism but if one is concerned with the amount of animal suffering that factory farming produces,* then there is no non-arbitrary reason for having a vegetarian rather than a vegan diet: If one is concerned with animal suffering and wants to alter their diet in response to animal suffering, then one ought to be a vegan. Here then is a first criticism for vegetarianism: it is morally inconsistent or morally lazy.

There are deeper criticisms to be levied, though. First, we should ask whether a change to a vegetarian/vegan diet is morally required of us once we know about the plight of animals. Suppose that causing animal suffering is a bad thing, what follows about how we ought to alter our behavior? This depends on whether we take ourselves to have positive or negative duties towards animals.

A positive duty is a duty to act in some way towards another and a negative duty is a duty not to act in some way towards another. If I make a promise to pay you $5, then I have a positive duty to give you that $5. Generally speaking, I have a negative duty not to take your $5.

If we take ourselves to have a positive duty towards animals such that we ought to work to end the conditions that cause them suffering, then vegetarianism faces further difficulties. First, it is not clear at all how eating a vegetarian diet satisfies this positive duty towards animals since it is a purely negative act: the vegetarian is but restricting his/her behavior in certain ways. Second, even if eating a vegetarian diet did satisfy the positive duty, there are more effective means of satisfying it (because individual action in this case is practically useless). For instance, by donating money to animal rights groups. There is no clause in place that says one cannot eat meat and at the same time work towards changing the way that meat is produced. Here is the second criticism of vegetarianism: practically speaking, vegetarianism is inefficacious.

If we are skeptical about the prospects of establishing a positive duty towards animals, though, we may think it better to cash out a concern for animal suffering as a negative one. We might take ourselves to have a negative duty towards animals such that we ought not contribute to the farming processes that cause them to suffer. The problem for vegetarians here is that the production of animal products besides meat seems to produce just as much suffering or even more (since it prolongs their life) than the production of meat. So, buying milk or eggs contributes to suffering just as buying steak or chicken does. We have a third criticism of vegetarianism: vegetarians are not in fact respecting their negative duty towards animals.

So, if vegetarians are morally inconsistent (criticism one) and they are respecting neither a positive nor a negative duty to animals (criticisms two and three, respectively), then why be a vegetarian?

*Though there are many routes to vegetarianism, I will presuppose ethical reasons."

Links - 11th December 2011

World’s first spiny dogfish fishery receives MSC certification for sustainable fishing — MSC - "Kerry Coughlin, MSC Americas Regional Director, said: “On a global basis, many species in the shark family are vulnerable to overfishing. The BC spiny dogfish fishery is the first of its type to demonstrate, through assessment to the MSC’s rigorous, scientific standard, that the fishery is being conducted and managed in a sustainable manner. We hope this will inspire other fisheries harvesting this species to achieve this bar.”"
Sustainable Shark's Fin!

Oscar Wilde's Paris tomb made safe from kisses - "Oscar Wilde tomb in Paris is fitted with new glass barrier to shield the monument from greasy kisses"

Graduate Employment Survey 2010 (published 2011) - "In terms of employability, NTU Art, Design & Media is once again … last"

STOMP - Singapore Seen - New trend to pose inside lockers? They could damage property and hurt themselves
"All they are doing is preparing for the future. That is how small future HDB flats are going to be."

Stripping the Gurus—Hello, Dalai! - "One of the early Dalai Lamas was particularly known for his love of women. It was common practice for households in which a daughter had received the honor of the Dalai Lama’s transmission through sexual union to raise a flag over their home. It is said that a sea of flags floated in the wind over the town"

Use WhatsApp on your PC with Android Emulator

Eng's Wanton Mee and four others win Hawker Master awards - "The second edition of the Hawkers Masters take place soon after the good news that the Singapore government will build 10 new hawker centres and they will be run on a different governance model. I hope that one of the new centres will also function as a cooking school of hawker food."

Creating space for both smokers and non-smokers: Vivian
Amusingly this had nothing about creating space for smokers

Conflict, theology and history make Muslims more religious than others, experts say - "Muslims are much more likely than Christians and Hindus to say that their own faith is the only true path to paradise, according to a recent global survey, and they are more inclined to say their religion is an important part of their daily lives... there has been no "Enlightenment" in Islam as there was in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, weakening the link between church and state in many Christian countries"

The world's first sex school: An instant guide - "Of course, contraception is available at no extra cost, and, says Nick Jardine at Business Insider, students will board in mixed-sex dormitories, "to make doing homework a little easier""

Kaiser Willhelm's urinal found at bottom of Baltic

Diversity and Donations: The Effect of Religious and Ethnic Diversity on Charitable Giving - "Diversity has a detrimental effect on charitable donations. A 10 percentage point increase in ethnic diversity reduces donations by 14%, and a 10 percentage point increase in religious diversity reduces donations by 10%. The ethnic diversity effect is driven by a within-group disposition among non-minorities, and is most evident in high income, but low education areas. The religious diversity effect is driven by a within-group disposition among Catholics, and is concentrated in high income and high education areas"
Scandinavian social democracy has been similarly explained

Hard Truths declared haram by Malaysia's islamic authority

Teen Commits 'Suicide by Piranha' - Bolivian leaps into river swarming with flesh-eating fish

Married men be warned – being happier than your wife could end in divorce - "Researchers have found that if the man of the house is less happy than his wife then the couple are much less likely to split up. Alternatively if the husband is much happier, then his partner is much more likely to leave him... The happiness gap widened when wives were lumbered with most of the housework, if they had different social backgrounds to their husbands, or if they had higher than average incomes. But the gap was closed when couples were matched in social backgrounds, if they had a common religion, if the chores were shared or if the woman was a housewife, a student or retired"
I wonder if there's a feminist (mis)interpretation of this study

Frequent sex protects marital happiness for neurotic newlyweds - "For spouses with high levels of neuroticism, frequent sexual intercourse improved their marital satisfaction. The effect of frequent sexual activity was enough to completely wipe away the "happiness deficit" that neurotic spouses usually have"

Thin Wives Make Happy Marriages - "“Husbands were more satisfied at the time of marriage, and remained more satisfied over time, to the extent that their wives had lower BMIs than their own,” the researchers report. “Wives who had lower BMIs than their husbands remained more satisfied over time,” they add, “whereas wives who had higher BMIs than their husbands demonstrated steeper declines in their satisfaction over time”... In other words, size matters — but everything is relative"

17-Year-Old Girl Creates Nanoparticle That Kills Cancer

15 Year Old Girl Wins Excel World Championship, That Exists - "15 year old student, Rebecca Rickwood from the UK, has won the most recent Microsoft Excel World Championship. Also, there is a Microsoft Excel World Championship. I’m really not sure which one is the bigger story"

JPMorgan, Goldman Rank Among Best Workplaces for Gays, Lesbians - "JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are among 22 financial firms that received top marks today as the best workplaces for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees. The three banks were among 207 U.S. companies that offer health insurance covering medical services for transgender employees seeking sexual reassignment...　Financial firms outperformed most other industries in adopting and enforcing non-discrimination policies＂
Most LGBT activists would be against the finance industry. How ironic

Survival of the fittest: Linguistic evolution in practice - "A new study of how compound word formation is influenced by subtle forms of linguistic pressure demonstrates that words which "sound better" to the speakers of a language have a higher chance of being created"

Breaking News: Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details... - "The level of secrecy in this case makes it sound like a terrorist investigation, not the censorship of a popular music blog"

Graduates paying to work for free - "We campaign hard against unpaid internships because they exclude the vast majority of young people who cannot afford to work for free. There is something even more perverse about expecting young people to have to pay to work"

Raised by Indians: The Searchers, The Last Of The Mohicans (1992), Little Big Man - "Indians were idealized where they’d previously been demonized, portrayed as noble victims of U.S. expansion. To my eyes, that’s closer to the truth than the inverse, but idealization is its own kind of condescension. When portrayed only as noble, uncomplicated victims—all Chingachgooks and no Maguas—Native Americans become simultaneously less than and more than human"

Why Men and Women Cant be friends - YouTube - "Answering the age old question, Young Independent Filmmakers Jesse Budd and Patrick Romero set out to simply prove a point."
Intellectual Whore theory! However, they only interviewed reasonably attractive girls, so...

Bacon sandwich really does cure a hangover - "Food doesn't soak up the alcohol but it does increase your metabolism... Bingeing on alcohol depletes neurotransmitters too, but bacon contains a high level of aminos which tops these up, giving you a clearer head"
No wonder both are haram

Bikini models in H&M ads are four real heads all photoshopped onto the same CGI body

Atheists Who Go to Church: Doing It for the Children - "Many atheists want their children exposed to religion so that they can make up their own minds on what to believe."

What would Jesus do?: The rise of a slogan - "For Conrad Gempf, a US evangelical who teaches the New Testament at the London School of Theology, as well-meaning as it is, WWJD? is the wrong question. "When we look at what the early church did in the Bible," he says, "they didn't copy Jesus. They did what Jesus told them to do. Jesus spoke in parables, his disciples didn't - they preached about him and they told it straight. They didn't walk on water. Jesus didn't tell us to do what he did, he told us to do even greater things." There are other potential problems with the simple-sounding question. Can we really know WJWD? The life of a first century Judean carpenter, let alone messiah, is hard to compare to that lived by western teenagers today. "There was never a time when it was appropriate for Jesus to play the saxophone. But there may be a time when it's exactly the right thing for you to do. That bracelet will mislead you," Gempf suggests... hanging around with prostitutes and trashing the temple. Is that the kind of behaviour church youth leaders want to encourage?"

Attackers of white girl: They're as Muslim as you are intelligent - "It is official: Racial attacks against white people are excusable. Much of the judicature can be relied upon to deliver justice according to liberal-left, Frankfurt School ideology.  What other explanation is there for Judge Robert Brown’s decision to excuse a quartet of “Muslim” girls that attacked Rhea Page, kicked her in the head and tore out her hair. In case there was any doubt that the attack was racially aggravated, the four-piece gang (actually clan, as they comprised of three sisters and a cousin) yelled “kill the white slag”. Now, if the racial profile was reversed and four white girls attacked a person of another race, while cajoling and exhorting one another to “kill”, then I’m pretty confident a custodial sentence would have been passed. Juxtapose this event with the famous “tram” incident widely disseminated on YouTube, in which Emma West, holding her young child on a tram, launched a rocket of profanities against Poles, black and brown people and argued with other passengers. West has been remanded in custody pending trial on the 3rd of January 2012. We are told it is for her own protection. Maybe it is. Or maybe remanding her is politically motivated. I have watched the YouTube video of the event twice now. The version I saw was not complete, and I don’t know what incited her to rant (reports say she was drunk)"
There are claims that intoxication is a mitigating factor for sentencing, not for culpability, but I'm very sure if you get drunk and knock somebody down, or rape someone, you are NOT going to get probation

The Power of Petitions

twitition - We Demand Apology from Adeline Chia (A STRAITS TIMES Reporter)

"If 5000 Fans Sign this Petition , Adeline Chia will have to Apologize to us"


twitition - Adeline Chia (STRAITS TIMES Reporter) Should Not Apologize!

"If 5001 People Sign this Petition, Adeline Chia should not apologize to anyone! Journalists, bloggers and YOU have an opinion! Why should one apologize for having an honest opinion about something?! ps: This is in response to this petition: http://twitition.com/b6gmf"


Sick of K-pop Cult

"In David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas, there is a futuristic segment set in Korea where a corpocracy rules the land. Advances in bioengineering have allowed human creatures called fabricants to be bred as workers. Physically, they are perfect specimens - with identical, beautiful faces but without any higher consciousness. When they run out the course of their productive lives, they are destroyed.

I found this section of the book particularly disturbing. It is a chilling study of how a capitalist totalitarian society exploits the weak and turns humans into robots for money. Everything looks happy on the surface but beneath, it's maggots and rotten meat.

Recently, I got a taste of Mitchell's dystopian view - at a K-pop fan meet of super-band TVXQ."

Adeline Chia's K-Pop column is actually the best of her Culture Vulture ones.

The Secret to Happiness

Happiness is freedom to choose for herself

"Ms Lee Wei Fen, 24, recent graduate

'I don't think money has to get in the way of happiness. Unfortunately, it often does because it confuses people about their priorities in life.'

How she found happiness:

While others her age headed straight for the corporate world after graduating, Ms Lee took the path less travelled. She went on the road to pursue her interests in South Asian culture and literature.

She has visited India, Bangladesh and Nepal, among other countries. She is learning Tamil to prepare for her master's degree course in South Asian studies at the National University of Singapore next year.

For her, happiness is the freedom to make choices for herself, instead of simply doing what is expected or instructed.

She says: 'We learn more about ourselves when we take time to decide what we actually enjoy doing and why we are doing what we're doing.'

She is also a founder and editor of literary journal Ceriph, which publishes short stories, poems and photographs by local writers and photographers every quarter.

While the technical and administrative parts of putting Ceriph together 'are not much fun', she finds joy in discovering new writers and their work.

The people she meets overseas tend to be encouraging about her taking a gap year. But when she comes home, she feels she is 'judged for not embarking directly on my career'.

She remains sure that 'travelling and learning will never be a setback in life'.

She adds: 'If I want to pursue academia, I want to be able to take my time and learn as much as I can about my field both through an academic institute as well as outside of it.'"


In short, Happiness is having someone to fund your travels and studies

Malaysian Delights

"Hard to find pretty girls in Kuala Lumpur? Poor KL! You should look to Ipoh, where everywhere you turned your head, you'd find pretty girls. The abundanc eof pretty girls in Ipoh had begun to be noticed, and comented upon, by people ever since the arrival of the peaches in the coffee shops. A favourite preoccupation of aficionados of beauty was to theorise how the girls of Ipoh got to be so pretty. Was it the soft water they drank? Or the tofu they ate, that made their skins as white as snow? Or perhaps the famous fat and crunchy Ipoh bean sprouts that thrived on the crystal clear water? Whatever it was, Ipoh had begun to acquire another epithet, the "Town of Pretty Girls.""

--- Ipoh: when tin was king / Ho Tak Ming

Links - 6th December 2011

"The price of being a wolf is loneliness. The price of being a sheep is boredom. Choose carefully what you will be." - Hugh MacLeod

***

To Be Young (Like 9, on Average?) and Homeless - NYTimes.com - "Is the average age of a homeless person 9 years old? Such a statement is made in a new video from the Coalition for the Homeless, which describes itself as the nation’s oldest advocacy and direct service organization helping homeless men, women and children... we reached out to the city’s Department of Homeless Services. Heather Janik, a spokeswoman, said that the department data showed that the average age across the whole system was 24; the average age of single adults was 45, and the average age of people in families, with children and without, was 19. All would lead to an average much higher than 9... Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless, said that the statistic was from the NYC Homes for the Homeless Institute for Children and Policy, and that it has been used and cited by dozens of other organizations (which, while it will be noted, doesn’t make it accurate, just often repeated)"

Fliers Still Must Turn Off Devices, but It's Not Clear Why - NYTimes.com - "Surely if electronic gadgets could bring down an airplane, you can be sure that the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, which has a consuming fear of 3.5 ounces of hand lotion and gel shoe inserts, wouldn’t allow passengers to board a plane with aniPad or Kindle, for fear that they would be used by terrorists... The government might be causing more unnecessary interference on planes by asking people to shut their devices down for take-off and landing and then giving them permission to restart all at the same time"

Is the time you spend online ruining your marriage? - "The more frequently an individual uses the Internet the happier they are in their marriage. This news comes with one caveat, however, that independent of frequency of use people who are compulsive Internet users are less happy with their spouse... The authors test to see if the unhappily married were more inclined to be compulsive Internet users, as opposed to compulsive users being more likely to be unhappily married and found no evidence to suggest that the causality runs in that direction. Here is the most interesting result, though: the compulsive Internet users are only making themselves unhappy. They perceive that their marriages are less satisfying and behave toward their partners in an increasingly negative way over time as a result. This could be related to the fact that 42% of compulsive internet users admit to engaging in affairs online and that 50% use the Internet to engage in sexual activities"

Cadence: i've misjudged your character. - "BEST COSTUME had to go to this young dude who came around smiling benignly and shook everyone's hands. omg he was so in character, i knew what he was immediately - with all the General Elections that just took place this year it's not hard to guess - HE'S ACTING AS A YOUNG PAP MEMBER. he even gathered his friends to behave as his minders, WOW. WOW WOW WOW...
them: er, i think he was a real MP or a member of the GRC.
me: WHAT!! wai, you stay here. do you know him?! ... OH GOD WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME?!?!??!?! i hate you all.
them: we don't know who he is!!!!
me: wah lau eh! who goes around and shakes hands on Halloween, what the heck?!"

J.Ko » The Straits Times and Copyright - "It is a shame that while The Straits Times is suing Yahoo! News for copyright infringement, it does not conduct proper citation or image attribution in its very own backyard."

Boys’ brains, girls’ brains: How to think about sex differences in psychology. - "His colleagues are so afraid of being called “neurosexists” that they’ve refused to study or acknowledge differences... two female scientists in the audience... called the aversion to studying innate differences anti-scientific and an impediment to understanding mental illness in women. The exchange, in which one panelist repeatedly portrayed sex-difference research as a waste of time, confirmed the problem: Fear of sexism has produced a bias against conceding sex differences, which gets in the way of frank discussion and investigation... anyone who dismisses boy-girl differences as cultural artifacts (the panelists criticized Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender in particular) isn’t accounting for similar patterns in animals, such as research showing that male monkeys prefer to play more with cars and less with dolls than female monkeys do. Hines also mentioned a male-female gap in “maze performance” among rodents. You can’t blame that on society... sex differences in math performance had largely evaporated over the past 20 years. But not all differences: A stubborn gap remains in mental rotation, which requires the imaginary realignment of three-dimensional shapes... We need more of that humility, and less glib generalization... 78 percent of effect sizes in studies of psychological sex difference were small or near zero. But that aggregate figure obscures the fine print: Half the effect sizes were between .11 and .35. In aggression, they averaged around .50, and in mental rotation, they were even higher... boys and girls differ more in toy preference than in height... While Eliot and Hyde characterized the effect sizes in sex-difference studies as small or near zero, Cahill argued that these effect sizes were no smaller than those typically found in other neuroscience research. (Indeed, I heard no complaints from the panel about small effect size when Wraga cited a 6-percent effect on math scores as evidence of stereotype threat.)"

Is there a First Amendment right to beat your MMA opponent senseless?

Thai crackdown on Facebook remarks on king - "Thailand has warned users of Facebook that they could face prosecution under harsh lese-majeste laws if they press ''share'' or ''like'' on images or articles considered unflattering to the Thai monarchy"

Atheists can not be trusted: Religious people rank non-believers alongside rapists, study

Why women can be their own worst enemies: Tracy Grimshaw - "If you get a bunch of blokes together in a pub, they are more collegiate, whereas women will be checking out the size of each other's butts or whether they're wearing the right shoes, or what sort of clothes or whether they've got dark roots ... "

Female labour markets: The cashier and the carpenter | The Economist - "It may be unfair, but by working shorter paid hours, women are managing to achieve a reasonable balance in their lives. In a regular survey produced by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, only 16-18% of women (depending on whether they have young children) across Europe report dissatisfaction with their work-life balance, against 20-27% for men... Hours and conditions [in the public sector] are usually more congenial and maternity arrangements more generous. So with better pay, conditions and promotion prospects, it is no wonder that the public sector is the employer of choice for so many women."
This survey is full of more reasons besides discrimination for gender gaps in labour markets. Among other gems, "in all the Nordic countries working women are heavily concentrated in the public sector", "women can be their own worst enemies. They tend to be less self-confident than men and do not put their hands up, so they do not get the plum assignments or promotions or pay rises", "asked to advise a consultancy on the reasons for high turnover among its women, it found that the firm’s projects were often badly managed, making for long hours. The men, it discovered, were not happy either, but they quietly rearranged things to make life easier for themselves. The women went part-time or quit"

Power Rangers run Standard Chartered Marathon.

You May Want to Save Your Pocket Change Next Time You See a Jingle Dude - "The Salvation Army has a wide and noticeable history of financing and supporting anti-LGBT legislation, such as opposing marriage equality. Is that where you want your pocket money going… to defense of marriage lobbyists?"

Inequality and taxes: Equality doesn't always mean redistribution | The Economist - "While income taxes in the Netherlands are highly progressive, all the other taxes (VAT, social insurance, excise taxes and so forth) are so regressive that the total burden of taxation is almost flat across income groups. Everybody pays about 40%... the main reason the Netherlands has low levels of inequality is that incomes in the Netherlands just aren't very unequal, even before taxes or transfers... After taxes and transfers, the Netherlands has about the same level of inequality as Germany and somewhat less than France or Italy. But before taxes and transfers, Germany, France and Italy are far more unequal; in fact gross income in Germany and Italy is more unequal than in America. You can't really say "in Europe, they have higher taxes and more transfers, which is why inequality is lower." That's true in parts of Europe. In other parts, inequality is lower because people just tend to earn relatively equal amounts of money."

Ron Paul vs. the New World Order - "Ron Paul has made a career out of transmitting extremist beliefs, particularly far-right conspiracy theories about a looming "New World Order," into the mainstream of public discourse by reframing and repackaging them for wider consumption, mostly by studiously avoiding the more noxious and often racist elements of those beliefs. Along the way, he has built a long record of appearing before and lending the credibility of his office to a whole array of truly noxious organizations, and has a loyal following built in no small part on members of those groups."

36% of 16-19-Year-Old Boys “Sexless” - "The results of the latest governmental survey of Japanese attitudes to sex and marriage, undertaken every 5 years, reveal a society in which men and women are apparently increasingly alienated from one and other. The survey found 61% of unmarried men aged 18-34 have no girlfriend, a 9.2% increase from 2005. For women, 50% had no boyfriend (suggesting they are tending to date older men)... A quarter of unmarried men and women in their late thirties also reported having had no sexual experiences at all... A related survey of young people aged 16-19 found extraordinarily low levels of interest in sex amongst youngsters – 36% of boys reported having “no interest” in or “dislike” of sex, up 19% in only 3 years, and amongst girls it was up 12% to 59%... It has also been frequently suggested that [Japanese women] tend to have unrealistic expectations as to the income and status of their desired husband"

Nude Lady Gaga reveals all on bad romance - "She added that sometimes she feels she is destined to be lonely. “I had a man say to me, ‘You will die alone in a house bigger than you know, with all your money and hit records, and you will die alone’”"

Philosophy Bro: The Full List - "Philosophy is hard - I read and summarize, so you don't have to, man"
"All it would take is one sneaky little motherfucker near the foundations of my beliefs to blow everything else I believe up, and not only is that fucking terrifying, it's completely possible. Shit."

Caught out for Gobbledy-Gook

A: I am not sure how many people would respond, but does anyone here think that it is never right to describe a suicide as a selfish act? If yes, why?

B: A, I think any response to your question will be inadequate in light of its decontextualisation from the possible circumstances surrounding a case of suicide. At most, we can say that sometimes it isn't right to attribute an act of suicide as being selfish. In the case of the suicide of the Singaporean teenager, we are completely capable of making overarching statements regards the circumstances surrounding her death, but at the same time, we are also able to realise that whatever rationalisations we can concieve of, they always have a tendency to inadvertendly trivialise the situation; that the methods we somehow employ in making sense of her situation can never quite fully comprehend the pain and suffering she had to go through. I think this sense of impotence when dealing with any kind of experience which might be called subjective can be attributed to the tangential lives we are condemned to be living. Just like numbers on a number line, '2' can never really get to '3'; the chasm between them is infinity; '2' gets closer to '3' but never any closer. And so when faced with the absurdity which Life can sometimes throw at us, we can either take it heroically like Camus's Sisyphus or we can choose to abdicate our responsibilities and discard the boulder. Ever so often, from our vantage point from where we roll our boulders inexorably uphill, we see our friends giving up, throwing in the towel. We would like very much to lend a hand, but our hands can never quite reach them from our isolated vertices, and so the most we can do is to cheer them on and hope they somehow receive our messages and pick themselves up again.

C: i marked B's comment as spam

B: It's regrettable that you will regard my comment as spam-but no matter, i merely wanted to give an opinion. Cheers =).

Me: For one to give an opinion it is first necessary for one to have content to communicate

B: Indeed Gabriel, i do agree with you. i had initially thought of messaging you privately but i suppose it be better to not rely on the veil of anonymity and reply here directly. i was wondering if you can put it across to me starkly, am i right to say that the opinion i managed was 'all form no substance'? i think i'll need to know, it'll help me. Thanks in advance Gabriel. ;)

D: Your comment is spam regardless of our attitude towards it. If I see a pile of shit, it is a pile of shit no matter how hard I imagine it as something else.

Your ability to confuse people with your words is astounding. If they had a competition for this kind of thing in the Olympics, you would definitely do our country proud by winning the gold medal. I have, to my misfortune, come across showers of shite, streams of drivel, and all manner of incomprehensible things, and I have to say, what you customarily produce is simply in a league of its own.

You express your ideas in 1,000 words when 100 will do. You enjoy using obscure references to illustrate your points. It is impossible to read your writing without suffering pounding headaches and waves of nausea.

Your vocabulary is atrocious. You seem to be on a mission to misuse as many words as possible within the shortest amount of time it takes for you to force out your linguistic excrement and form it into sentences.

Your spelling is unimpressive. All the time and effort you waste on browsing the thesaurus for big words can be better put to use on checking the dictionary for correct spellings. Of course, we all make mistakes - nobody is perfect - but you give the impression of trying too hard to impress.

Long, flowing, and beautiful scripts are beyond your ability to produce. Do not waste your time creating dismal failures. When in doubt, stick to simple English. It makes proofreading easier. Your readers will be less inclined to dismiss your comments as nonsense and mark them as spam.

If I were your English teacher and you served me your usual fare, I would order you to rewrite the whole thing. If you are thinking of pursuing a degree in Philosophy, Political Science, or some other course requiring a strong command of English, I urge you to reconsider your choice. Any lecturer or professor marking your assignment would definitely contemplate drowning his sorrows in the Bedok Reservoir. Let us try to save a few lives.

To summarise, your writing is as long-winded as a nagging old hag, as uninspiring as a woman imitating a dead fish during sex, as meaningless as the ejaculations a fundie makes when he speaks in tongues, and as pretentious as a drooling popinjay who wears an expensive suit and fancies himself an urbane gentleman.

I suggest you purchase a copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Grammar and Style and read it. Give yourself this Xmas present. It will change your life. Maybe you can even get a date!

Me: In short, "no form, no substance"

On Historical Perspective and the Decadence of the Modern Age

"Conspiracy theory is the sophistication of the ignorant." - Richard Grenier

***

"Without some historical perspective, we wouldn't fully understand what the real problems of today are.

And one of the ways in which I think that is true is that much of the discussion about history teaching in schools today thinks that there has been a catastrophic decline from some sort of Golden Age of History in an earlier time, an earlier time interestingly never actually specified. And that on that basis, draconian measures are needed to try to retrieve what appears to be a catastrophic situation.

One of the things, of course, that we were able to check out as we looked into the history of the teaching of history in English State School classrooms from the 1900s on, in terms of the nature of the teaching, in terms of the number of people studying History, in terms of the exams, in terms of the textbooks. One of the things we were able to check out, was whether there was in fact a Golden Age when everybody knew the reigns of all the Kings and Queens, or whatever it might be.

And it turns out that has never been, as far as we can tell, such a Golden Age. There has always been criticism of the teaching of History in schools as long as History has been taught in schools. And much, I think, of that criticism been valid. But it's also worth saying, in fairness, that there has also been praise for the teaching of History in schools all the way through that period.

None of that, I think, is to say that there was ever a Golden Age. I think we may indeed have a set of problems about teaching History in schools at the moment, but I don't think what that problem is, or what those problems are, is to be understood in terms of a catastrophic declension from a once-great Golden Age."

"And yet that view is always trotted out. People are always saying 'It was better in my day'. And as you say the time period isn't normally established. So why is that? Why do people always think it was better in the past? And is that just people looking through rose-tinted spectacles?"

"It's a standard explanatory paradigm for much of the media that things are terrible now, and they must've been better earlier. And that in a sense absolves you from having to dig deeper into the subject to find out what the truth of things might be. But it's certainly true that from the 1900s on, people have been complaining that History is less well-taught than it was before. Well, that can't be true for the whole 100 years, since if it were then presumably no History would be being taught at all at the moment. But it's always a strong temptation, I think, to say that things were better in the past, and part, of course, of the point of studying History... is to suggest that that's very often a lazy way of thinking about things, and it's very often wrong."

--- 1st December 2011 | BBC History Magazine

Freedom of Speech vs Freedom from Criticism

EDITORIAL: Freedom of speech does not imply freedom from criticism

"Freedom of speech is the cornerstone of any successful democracy. Any modern society that does not allow its citizens to express concerns or grievances in at least some manner is one that is doomed to long-term failure.

That being said, the concept of freedom of speech is one that is frequently misunderstood, even by those who depend upon such a right for their livelihood. “My freedom of speech” has become conflated with “freedom from criticism of my speech,” and every time this fallacious equivalence rears its head it minimizes the struggles of those who face true challenges to their freedoms.

Every media figure faces the prospect of criticism. Every media figure with an audience surpassing his immediate family experiences criticism, and the more successfully he does his job the more criticism he receives. Yet, people refusing to place an imprimatur of approval on a journalist’s speech after the fact does not abridge his freedom; his words are still free to influence whomever they will. Likewise, when a publication makes a poor decision and readers express a modicum of disapproval, that publication is not the victim of speech suppression; on the contrary, citizens with the same right to express their various and sundry opinions are exercising the most important freedom of all.

One’s speech is suppressed when government censors must approve a work prior to its publication. One’s speech is suppressed when speech codes choke words, even unpleasant and unfortunate ones, from the vocabulary. One’s speech is suppressed when he is beaten with sticks for complaining about the local royalty. However, one’s speech is not suppressed when he says something others find objectionable and the offended express their distaste. In fact, such arguments are the only means by which discourse can hope to improve.

This is not to say that all criticism of speech is necessarily well thought out or valid — far from it. However, when one assumes a public stance on a controversial issue, one should not only expect but welcome public disagreement, as the process of argument ultimately benefits everyone."

Correlation and Causation

Schopenhauer on Hegel

"Schopenhauer expressed his dislike for the philosophy of his contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel many times in his published works. The following quotation is typical:

'If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.

Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [..] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.'

In his Foreword to the first edition of his work Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, Schopenhauer suggested that he had shown Hegel to have fallen prey to the Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Schopenhauer thought that Hegel used deliberately impressive but ultimately vacuous verbiage. He suggested his works were filled with “castles of abstraction” that sounded impressive but ultimately had no content. He also thought that his glorification of church and state were designed for personal advantage and had little to do with the search for philosophical truth. For instance, the Right Hegelians interpreted Hegel as viewing the Prussian state of his day as perfect and the goal of all history up until then."

--- Works of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life, Religion: a Dialogue, On Human Nature, The Art of Literature, The Art of Controversy, On Authorship and Style and Other Essays (Mobi Collected Works)


Someone: Hegel is infamous for his incomprehensible jibberish; it's not any better in the German original...

LKY wants students to defy the government

"I had a high regard for the discipline and seriousness of purpose in life Chinese school students displayed compared to English school students. One of my most unforgettable memories was when the Chinese High School was having a sit-in led by my left wing pro-communist activists in October 1956 to protest the arrests of student leaders and closure of Chinese High School and Chung Cheng High School. The Chinese school students camped inside the school. After watching this drama of the sit-in at Chinese High School, I passed by the University of Singapore's student hostels on Dunearn Road, just around the corner from Chinese High. The contrast was stark. I could see the students - the English-educated students - enjoying themselves. They were laughing and blowing whistles, regarding the clash between the Chinese students and the police as a big joke. I thought to myself that if Singapore students all turned out like those in the university hostel, Singapore would fail. I vowed then to change this state of affairs.

This was why I decided to save the good Chinese language schools as Chinese schools switched into English as the main medium of instruction"

Links - 1st December 2011

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true." - Robert Wilensky

***

Saudi moral committee threatens to cover “tempting” women’s eyes - "Women with sexy eyes in Saudi Arabia may be forced to cover them up, according to the spokesperson of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) in the conservative Gulf kingdom... In 2002, the committee refused to let female students out of their burning schools in Mecca for “not wearing the proper head cover,” which contributed to a large number of dead"

Skinny People Need To Stop Pretending That They’re Fat « Thought Catalog - "When thin people talk about their poor eating habits, are they showing off? Are they letting us soak in the irony that they’ve maintained a nice figure by eating absolute crap?"

Bob Ostertag: Militarization Of Campus Police - "Apparently, in the state of California felons incarcerated for violent crimes have rights that students at public universities do not... former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper published an essay arguing that the current epidemic of police brutality is a reflection of the militarization (his word, not mine) of our urban police forces, the result of years of the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror"
"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people"

Funny? The LTA not amused by pedestrian crossing prank - "At the pedestrian crossing in front of Rendezvous Hotel Singapore in Bras Basah Road, a button on the pedestrian crossing has been covered by a sticker which admonishes: 'Press Once Can Already'... [LTA] is not amused by the prank. It warns that individuals who are caught pasting signs or illegal advertisements on street infrastructure can be fined $300 for the first offence and $400 for a repeat offence. If prosecuted in court, they may be fined up to $2,000"
Apparently they don't have better things to do; it's significant that no one they asked disapproved of it per se - despite the journalistic imperative for "balance"

Oddly, Texas can teach the UK a thing or two on criminal justice - "It is the unlikely centre of a revolution in prison reform sweeping the US, overthrowing decades of failed polices and sterile debate driven by politicians scared of being seen as soft. The state has cut crime, costs and the numbers in jail to such an extent it has just shut a high-security prison for the first time in history. What makes this prison revolt even more unexpected is that it is led by some of the most conservative figures in politics. They have decided – correctly – that an expensive prison system repeatedly locking up the same people is a sign of failure. As a result, they have endorsed policies traditionally seen as liberal to keep people out of jail."

Racial murders: nearly half the victims are white - "Nearly half of all victims of racially motivated murders in the last decade have been white... The disclosure will add to the intense debate over multiculturalism in British society. The figures also overturn the assumption that almost all racial murders are committed against ethnic minority victims. Senior police officers have admitted that 'political correctness' and the fear of discussing the issue have meant that race crime against white people goes under-reported. One chief constable has claimed that white, working-class men are more alienated than the Muslim community... it was harder to get the media interested where murder victims were young white men... 'Sometimes we forget that ethnic minorities actually make up quite a small percentage of the population'"

Websites Let People Farm Out Chores - "Erika Dumaine, 24, logged onto TaskRabbit this April and saw the following plea for help: "Buy me shoes ASAP. I stepped in dog poop." So Ms. Dumaine, now a full-time nanny, bought and delivered a requested new pair of navy blue Toms shoes from Nordstrom's to the poster, Guillermo Rauch. (Her payment: $17.)"

Lawsuit: Man fired for not wearing "666" sticker

Behind-the-Scenes Photos of Natural History - NYTimes.com

African-American Atheists - NYTimes.com - "In most African-American communities, it is more acceptable to be a criminal who goes to church on Sunday, while selling drugs to kids all week, than to be an atheist who ... contributes to society and supports his family"

Alcohol-free whisky is halal-certified

Lawsuit Says Prosecutor Went Too Far In Charging Boy - "A 6-year-old Grant County boy has been accused of first-degree sexual assault after playing "doctor" with two 5-year-old friends... the prosecutor, Grant County District Attorney Lisa Riniker, on Monday morning asked a judge for a gag order in the case and was granted it. The gag order prohibits the boy's parents from talking about the case... "She (Riniker) bypassed the parents and sent a 6-year-old boy a summons, on which is a threat that the 6-year-old will go to jail for failure to appear"... The attorneys said they have sought the opinion of many experts who said that children "playing doctor" is not a sex crime"
"The lawsuit says that once he turns 18, he will be listed as a sex offender"

Perverted Justice - "The panic that followed Megan Kanka's murder produced an alarm system that often fails to distinguish between dangerous predators like Timmendequas, who had a record of assaulting little girls, and nonviolent lawbreakers like Elliot, who posed no discernible threat to the general public. They are all mixed together in the online registries of sex offenders that every state is required to maintain... Registration only rarely leads to murder, but it routinely ruins relationships, triggers ostracism and harassment, and impedes education and employment... In Miami local residence restrictions have given rise to a colony of more than 70 sex offenders who live under the Julia Tuttle Causeway, a bridge that crosses Biscayne Bay... Two decades of ever-more-punitive legislation have produced sentencing rules so bizarre and byzantine that the punishment for possessing images of sexually abused children can be more severe than the punishment for sexually abusing them... at least 13 [states] required [sex offender] registration for public urination... the rules aimed at discouraging sex offenders from committing new crimes can produce the opposite effect. "One of the most powerful things that keep people from breaking the law is a sense of what they will lose if they do," she says. "If you're treating someone like a cur, a dog that is being kicked out of the village, how are you strengthening that person's desire or ability to follow the law?"... "Though often thought of as the most persistent and dangerous criminals, sex offenders are among the least likely criminals to recidivate"... conventional wisdom assumes child-porn consumers are undiscovered or future molesters, that assumption is also wrong... "People who watch movies like Saw and Friday the 13th are being titillated by the act of torture and murder. That doesn't mean that they're going to go out and commit torture and murder"... a substantial share of defendants were themselves victims of sexual abuse as children and look at these images as a way of working through the trauma"

Being 'Born-Again' Linked to More Brain Atrophy: Study
The interpretation is odd: in that case atheists who used to be religious would have atrophied brains too

Give them what they want: The benefits of explicitness in gift exchange - "Five studies show that gift recipients are more appreciative of gifts they explicitly request than those they do not. In contrast, gift givers assume that both solicited and unsolicited gifts will be equally appreciated. At the root of this dilemma is a difference of opinion about what purchasing an unsolicited gift signals: gift givers expect unsolicited gifts will be considered more thoughtful and considerate by their intended recipients than is actually the case (, and ). In our final two studies, we highlight two boundary conditions for this effect: identifying a specific gift and using money as a gift. When gift recipients request one specific gift, rather than providing a list of possible gifts, givers become more willing to purchase the requested gift (Study 4). Further, although givers believe that recipients do not appreciate receiving money as much as receiving a solicited gift, recipients feel the opposite about these two gift options (Study 5)."

Dartmouth Algorithm Rates Altered Images - "Dr. Farid got the inspiration when he read about feminist legislators in Britain, France and Norway who were trying to get legislation passed that required digitally altered photographs to be labeled as such... "Readers aren't fooled if you really sculpt the images," Seymour said. "If you're a good editor, you don't go too far these days""

Creative thinkers more likely to cheat: Study - "Creative people are more likely to cheat than less creative people, possibly because this talent increases their ability to rationalize their actions."

How my mother's fanatical feminist views tore us apart - "My mother's feminist principles coloured every aspect of my life. As a little girl, I wasn't even allowed to play with dolls or stuffed toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her. I love my mother very much, but I haven't seen her or spoken to her since I became pregnant. She has never seen my son - her only grandchild. My crime? Daring to question her ideology... Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating. But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women's movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them"

Amazon.com: What's Wrong with Benevolence: Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment - "The attractiveness of communism—the “emotional fuel” of communist revolutionaries for over a hundred years—has always been “exactly the same as the emotional fuel of every other utopianism: the passionate desire to alleviate or abolish misery.” Yet communism was such a monumental failure that millions of people today are still suffering its consequences. In this most prescient of essays, Stove warns contemporary readers just how seductive universal political benevolence can be. He also shows how the failure to understand the connection between benevolence and communism has led to many of the greatest social miseries of our age."

XXX Site to Taylor Swift: Convert to Islam, and We'll Take Down Photo - "We will remove the [photo] if Taylor Swift simply agrees to convert to Islam. To convert to Islam, Taylor Swift must publicly renounce her Jew God Jesus [...] then sacrifice a goat and devour its entrails"

Best divorce letter(s)

Dear hubby:

I'm writing you this letter to tell you that I'm leaving you forever. I've been a good woman to you for 7 years & I have nothing to show for it. These last 2 weeks have been hell.

Your boss called to tell me that you quit your job today & that was the last straw. Last week, you came home & didn't even notice I had a new haircut, had cooked your favorite meal & even wore a brand new pair of silk dress. You ate in 2 minutes, & went straight to sleep after watching all of your games. You don't tell me you love me anymore; you don't want anything that connects us as husband & wife. Either you are cheating on me or you don't love me anymore; whatever the case, I'm gone.

Your EX-Wife
P.S. don't try to find me. Your BROTHER & I are moving away to West Virginia together! Have a great life!


Dear Ex-Wife:

Nothing has made my day more than receiving your letter.

It's true you & I have been married for 7 years, although a good woman is a far cry from what you've been. I watch my games so much because they drown out your constant whining & griping. Too bad that doesn't work. I DID notice when you got a hair cut last week, but the 1st thing that came to mind was 'You look just like a boy!' Since my mother raised me not to say anything if you can't say something nice, I didn't comment. And when you cooked my favorite meal, you must have gotten me confused with MY BROTHER, because I stopped eating pork 7 years ago. About those new silk dress: I turned away from you because the $49.99 price tag was still on them, & I prayed it was a coincidence that my brother had just borrowed $50 from me that morning.

After all of this, I still loved you & felt we could work it out. So when I hit the lotto for 10 million dollars, I quit my job & bought us 2 tickets to Jamaica But when I got home you were gone. Everything happens for a reason, I guess.

I hope you have the fulfilling life you always wanted. My lawyer said that the letter you wrote ensures you won't get a dime from me.

So take care.

Signed,
Your Ex-Husband, Rich As Hell & Free!

P.S. I don't know if I ever told you this, but my brother Carl was born as Carla(woman) ......... I hope that's not a problem

Now that The Old Republic's Beta Test Weekend is essentially over: Churchill on Modern Writing

"The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning. One specimen of this method will suffice:

"It is reasonably certain that a petty chieftain named Arthur did exist, probably in South Wales. It is possible that he may have held some military command uniting the tribal forces of the Celtic or highland zone or part of it against raiders and invaders (not all of them necessarily Teutonic). It is also possible that he may have engaged in all or some of the battles attributed to him; on the other [hand, this attribution may belong to a later date."

This is not much to show after so much toil and learning"

--- A History of the English-Speaking Peoples / Winston Churchill

Experience and Identity Politics

"To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level." - Bertrand Russell

***

On Mata Hati, a play about sex and the Malay politician:

Sex and the politician
(Straits Times, 24th November)

"The question on some people's minds is, what is a Chinese playwright doing writing this play about Malay issues?

'You have no idea how much I have struggled with it' was Dr Loon's lightning-fast response, almost as though he had anticipated the question.

With a sigh, he says: 'I ask myself constantly, 'What right have you as someone coming from the Chinese majority to write about a minority issue?'

'I am constantly aware of my position and this was the hardest play I had to write. It was an interesting experience but not one I would like to repeat.'

To improve his knowledge of Malay issues and the history of Malay politicians in Singapore, he hired an assistant to research the background and speeches of post-1965 Malay leaders.

He also 'tried to balance the peculiarity of the racial issue into something more general'. 'The play isn't just about a Malay politician, but politicians in general. When happens when you get into office?'

Zizi also read his drafts and provided her input. She thinks the fact that it is a Chinese playwright tackling the material is 'inconsequential'.

'If we think that someone else of a different race cannot understand our situation, then I don't think we can be a society without borders.

'The fact that Robin is Chinese makes him more objective. Sometimes, we are afraid to face up to certain truths, or we are afraid of saying things that are controversial.'"

Links - 28th November 2011

"Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some smaller countries are neutral." - Robert Orben

***

disproving intelligent design with a mouse trap ( TheUKatheist ) - YouTube

Who says sex doesn't sell? - Richard's Blog - Virgin.com - "All of the books I have written with sexual connotations in the title have sold a storm. Losing My Virginity, Screw It Let's Do It and Business Stripped Bare all went down well. The only one that hasn't sold as well as the rest was Reach For The Skies, which I wanted to call Getting It Up""

Cheated!!! : Brought a iPhone 4s but gotten a Samsung instead! - "She was given a Samsung phone instead of the iPhone 4S. Mdm Kun Tong immediately asked for a refund but the shop assistant refused and instead challenged her to bring him to court. She called the police immediately, but police officers could do nothing to help her... With the help of CASE, the shop eventually agreed to give her a refund, but insists on charging her $120 for a Goods and Service Tax (GST) processing fee"

Gabe Newell: Piracy is a “Non-issue” to Valve; Providing better Services Will Result in More Sales - "No one knows the PC market better than Valve, and in a recent interview with TCS, Gabe Newell explained why Valve is so successful... He said that there is a general misconception about piracy, and it’s not really the high cost that forces people to pirate. It’s about the delivery service and how convenient it is to people with purchasing power... “Prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become our largest market in Europe”"

Women gamers have more sex, study finds - "Female Gamers have more sex, are more social, and are happy

'He was supposed to drop cat off at SPCA' | The New Paper - "Her husband was caught on camera dumping the feline into a rubbish bin, triggering outrage from netizens... she said that Michael had bipolar disorder and suffered a relapse eight days ago"
Now we see who's stronger: the cat lovers or the advocates for the mentally ill

Having Children Brings High Carbon Impact - NYTimes.com - "Having children is the surest way to send your carbon footprint soaring, according to a new study from statisticians at Oregon State University. The study found that having a child has an impact that far outweighs that of other energy-saving behaviors"
The best way to reduce your carbon footprint is to kill yourself

Man appears in FHM's '100 Sexiest Women' list - "That readers of FHM have voted an androgynous man in to their most recent list of the 100 Sexiest Women in the World might have been a cause for celebration among equal rights campaigners. Instead, the magazine has provoked outrage over its warning to readers to "pass the sick bucket" on encountering 19-year-old Andrej Pejic, rather ignoring the fact that it was they who voted for him in the first place... Having been chatted up by Australian men since the age of 14 ("Sometimes they're shocked, but most of the time they still want to buy me a drink," Pejic says), neither his place on the list nor the reaction it has engendered will come as a particular surprise to him. He has been more philosophical than his persecutors on the matter. In an interview last month, he declared: "It's a very liberal industry. You can be yourself. Just not overweight""
Is it misogynistic to vote a man into a woman's competition?

10 illegal baby names

Ignorance is bliss when it comes to challenging social issues - "The less people know about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption and the environment, the more they want to avoid becoming well-informed"

Section of Evidence Act that can discredit sexual assault victim to be repealed
I'm not holding my breath for Section 509 to be repealed; naturally AWARE is deafeningly silent on it. Bizarrely, Lim Kit Siang says that Section 509 protects men rather than women.

Swearing in Quebec: If you profane something no one holds sacred, does it make a swear? - "One motivation behind the museum exhibit on swear words was to show visiting school children the objects they were referring to when they swore, as many had no idea what a chalice, tabernacle or ciborium (ciboire) looked like. They would recognize hosts, but only because these communion wafers are now sold as snacks in Quebec grocery stores... Swear words disappear not through censorship, but when they no longer offend"

Scorpios and Virgos need not apply, says job at university ' because they are too moody and critical'

STOMP - Singapore Seen - Are curry puffs sold outside MRT stations safe to eat? - "They do not have any license or proper way of handling these curry puffs. They just put the curry puffs in plastic bags!... It is extremely unhygienic to have these people selling curry puffs like this. I urge the relevant authorities to look in to this matter." NEA: "Any person who wishes to sell curry puffs or other food items must do so in a licensed premise such as a food shop or food centre. NEA will continue to deploy officers to take enforcement action against illegal hawkers"
And you wonder why entrepreneurship is so hard to encourage

Fox News Viewers are the Most Misinformed: A Seventh Study Arrives to Prove It (and to Vindicate Jon Stewart!) - "I noted in my prior posts that the studies documenting the “Fox News effect” do not necessarily show causation. In other words, watching Fox may make you more misinformed, but people who believe lots of political misinformation may also gravitate towards Fox. I actually think both things are going on simultaneously—but the new Feldman study does make a strong causal case that Fox is actively driving a lot of the problem."

omy - 新闻 News - Men falling for online sex con - "Con men are now pretending to be underage girls to blackmail men online... The "girls" all claim to be at least 18 years old in their posts. When contacted, the "girl" will not answer the phone and will instead send an SMS to say that she is actually only 15 years old, and willing to have sex for cash. After the offer for sex, the con victims will receive SMSes from the girl's supposed "father", threatening to bring the case to the police. A short while later, victims will receive SMSes from a supposed "policeman" asking them to go to the station to assist in investigations. At this point, the girl's "father" will SMS again to ask for money to drop the case"

Attacks on small nations a 'direct challenge' to S'pore - "The invasion of a small country by a larger neighbour and the forceful removal of its government are direct challenges to Singapore's foreign policy, former deputy prime minister Wong Kan Seng said yesterday at the S. Rajaratnam Lecture. The former coordinating minister for national security used Cambodia as an example. Even though Singapore did not agree with the country's Khmer Rogue regime, it had to make a stand against Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia in 1978."
Free Tibet! Free Taiwan!

Lost in translation: our top 20 picks
The majority are from China

American Samoa football team celebrate first ever win - "American Samoa's football team - ranked as the worst international team in the world - has won a game for the first time in its history."

How to be a bad tourist - "Here are a series of photos I took of some Korean (I think) tourists and a young Burmese girl near Amarapura in Burma earlier this month. This is why when I travel, I try to only take pictures of food."

Burma parliament passes protest bill - "Burma's military-dominated parliament has passed a bill allowing citizens to protest peacefully, a lawmaker said Thursday -- the latest in a rapid series of reformist moves in the isolated country."
And now Burma has more freedom than Singapore (on paper)

Islamic embryology: overblown balderdash : Pharyngula - "I have read the entirety of Hamza Andreas Tzortzis' paper, Embryology in the Qur'an: A scientific-linguistic analysis of chapter 23: With responses to historical, scientific & popular contentions, all 58 pages of it (although, admittedly, it does use very large print). It is quite possibly the most overwrought, absurdly contrived, pretentious expansion of feeble post hoc rationalizations I've ever read. As an exercise in agonizing data fitting, it's a masterpiece."
Is science Islamophobic? If science offends religion, should we criminalise science?

Joe Pressil: Dude, Where's My Semen? - "Joe Pressil is accusing a Houston fertility clinic, Advanced Fertility, of accepting a semen sample from a woman claiming to be his wife in 2007, and, without his knowledge or consent, performing "in vitro fertilization which resulted in the birth of twins... Gibson says Anetria surreptitiously smuggled the spunk by saving the condoms that had been used... Anetria got pregnant only to squeeze more money -- and the house -- out of Pressil, Gibson says"

Tibet and the Chinese People's Republic. A Report to the International Commission of Jurists by its Legal Inquiry Committee on Tibet - ""The view of the COMMITTEE was that Tibet was at the very least a de facto independent State when the Agreement of Peaceful Measures in Tibet was signed in 1951, and the repudiation of this agreement by the Tibetan Government in 1959 was found to be fully justified. In examining the evidence, the COMMITTEE took into account events in Tibet as related in authoritative accounts by officials and scholars familiar at first hand with the recent history of Tibet and official documents which have been published. These show that Tibet demonstrated from 1913 to 1950 the conditions of statehood as generally accepted under international law. In 1950 there was a people and a territory, and a government which functioned in that territory, conducting its own domestic affairs free from any outside authority. From 1913 -1950 foreign relations of Tibet were conducted exclusively by the Government of Tibet and countries with whom Tibet had foreign relations are shown by official documents to have treated Tibet in practice as an independent State"

The Great Irish Famine and the Holocaust - "When blight struck the Irish were ‘totally vulnerable’. This was a ‘nuanced genocide’, he continues, one that manipulated fate ‘by pushing a people to the brink of annihilation and turning away so not to hear the wailing …’. Put briefly and more bluntly, professors Charles Rice and Francis Boyle believe: ‘the policies pursued by the British government from 1845-50 in Ireland constituted ‘genocide’’... to narrow the focus simply to the role of the British government for a moment: for all the massive irresponsibility and buck-passing that characterised the five years of crisis, the state succeeded in organising public relief schemes that employed three-quarters of a million workers, and at one point was responsible for feeding three million people on a daily basis. These are not the actions of a Government or a state bent on genocide"

What's in a name?

"No skating here please... Take the action to *scape Skate Park!"

One man's boon

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas Adams

***

Bob prayed that he would get an earlier appointment with his specialist.

He couldn't wait for a month - he just had to know what was wrong with him.

Hopefully he would be blessed with an earlier appointment

Suddenly, the phone rang.

"Hello. I'm calling from the hospital. Can I speak to Bob please?"
"Yes, this is Bob"
"I'd like to inform you that a specialist appointment slot has just opened up tomorrow at 4pm. Can you make it?"
"Yeah, sure. That's great news. Thank you"

As he put down the phone, Bob knew that he'd been blessed. He was grateful.


(one hour earlier)

The phone rang.

"Hello. I'm calling from the hospital. Can I speak to George please? This is about his upcoming appointment"
"George. But he's... dead. He was eaten by a lion while on safari in Africa."
"I'm very sorry to hear that Sir..."

The nurse put down the phone and marked the late George's appointment slot as free.

His death was unfortunately, but now his slot had to be given to someone else.


(inspired by a true story)