You can't blame a left hander for being leftist

Well, waddya know, and who could have figured. CHRISTIANITY IS BAD; CATHOLISM IS BAD - We all know that's a biased remark and provocative journalism at best, but I didn't say it. Or if you prefer the non-scientic article, pending an online subscription PAYING system.

Ok, so the article used the word 'religion' instead, but i think they're just trying to be diplomatic, since we all know how powerful the opus dei is (the wiki link is there to provide a more 'balanced' - rd: diplomatic - opinion of the issue). The research is predominantly based on the idea of 'churches' being synonymous (correct me if i'm wrong) with 'venue of religious worship', though locals in such a religiously diverse climate would know how different a mosque operates from a temple (hindu or taoist or buddhist), let alone churches. You might as well compare pizza hut with macdonalds (yes, they're both fast foods, but D-I-F-F-E-R-E-N-T).

Oh damn. Am I going to be prosecuted under local charges of instigating religious and/or racial disharmony? Whoo. I'm dead meat. I take that back! Everything that i just said. My personal favourite quote comes from an issue of the IS magazine (that's free by the way. I'm cheap and I love free things. Who doesn't?) that goes something like a local minister scoffing the idea the layman 'misconception' that "there'd be people lurking around dark corners waiting to catch you if you say the wrong things". Like duh. That remark had the OB index down by quite a few points if i recall.

Disclaimer 1: The potentially derogative statements have already been disclaimed, within the same breadth of that sentence. Christians and Catholics are nice people. I love them. I might have dated a few of them in the past, maybe more in the new future, so no seeds of discords sown here! If given a choice between church and jail, allelujiah!
Disclaimer 2: Correlation does not mean causation. Other mediating factors? Time to trade that robe for a labcoat and do some research father.

I need to watch less Jon Stewart.

Labels: FFT (Food for thought), Sightings, Whine

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 04

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after.

Before that, kids' lives are dominated by their parents, not by other kids. Kids do care what their peers think in elementary school, but this isn't their whole life, as it later becomes.

Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about.

The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.

Labels: Sightings

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 03

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists.

For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. They don't consciously dress to be popular. They dress to look good. But to who? To the other kids. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they make to do things "right" is also, consciously or not, an effort to be more popular.

Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it. Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.

Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.

Labels: Sightings

Why I like Japan

Right click save as. Cute and cuddly and comical. 'Nuff said.

Or why some people MIGHT like SMAP, other than eye candy takuya. Hell, he even has his own wikipedia entry.

Labels: Sightings

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 02

By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that guys envy, girls like.

In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.

At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it.

Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don't think many nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable. But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would be a step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone?

And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.

Labels: Sightings

10 Myths from 'The Myth'

01) Kim Hee Sung is the only women on the planet that looks great with eyebags.
02) So that's how a cup handle looks like!
03) Hair and pin makes good sewing kit
04) Indian (elephant?) glue has omnipotent strength
05) Budget ferry? Ratan basket complete with dark skinned boatman and oar!
06) Still on budget ferries... India to China in 2 days!
07) Rambo? It's general Meng now! Watch him dodge arrows, slide and dice king's horses and men, at the same time rearranging them into a nice molehill ala everest for him to scale on!
08) Duracel rabbit? Make way for duracel horse! Despite gut piercing humongous crossbow shot, it just goes on and on and on and on...
09) Shih Huang Di as Alexander the Great with Indian diplomatic ties?
10) Collapsing anti-gravity environment works better against rock hard ceiling walls than protagonists.

Labels: Updates, Whine

Why Nerds Are Unpopular - Part 01

Well said, and a thoroughly enjoyable read. In 16 parts. By Paul Graham from his website, reproduced without permission (Please do not prosecute me).



February 2003

When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."

We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.

My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. So I've seen a good part of the popularity landscape.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

Labels: Sightings

Hurricane report - minus the relevant details

After Katrina, the buzzword's now Rita. Let's home the matter do not escalate to another ugly americans showcase. Sorry all you good samaritans and neutral helpless victims, but when you have police turning in badges, the act itself is indication enough of a mob taking over the majority and forming the general public - hence the generic sweeping statement.

But seriously, amidst all these tragedy reports, has anyone wondered how people actually name hurricanes? Did a google (actually more a yahoo, since google is reserved primarily for academic pursuits of moi) and the rationale goes something like this:

1) Assigning names to hurricanes beats latitude-longitude codings and minimises errors.

Well, how's global warming for a name then?
This blogger seemed to have some good suggestion.
Apparently, the NYtimes has got something to say as well, but what's appaling to me is how NYTIMES is charging people to access their bloody news archives as well!! Shame on you! are news and information not public domain anymore?! Now I know where ST interactive gets its audacity from.

At the same time, let's get this straight about hurricanes, cyclones, whirlwinds and typhoons. Cyclones refer to the generic name for this group of wind-gone-out-of-control air, usually accompanied with the word 'tropical'. Hurricanes refer to the really big ones, typhoon the smaller one and whirlwind the smallest.

2) The current system goes something like this: different met stations of different regions maintains different lists of names, with each in rotation. By this logic, the next time Katrina comes along would be in 2010.

3) However, political sensitivities and common sense would prevail sometimes and replace/substitute hurricane names that has severely damaging consequences. How severe 'severe' means would hence be determined by the WMO (world meteriological organisation i presume)

Prior to this, MY own errogeneous belief was that hurricanes were really LIKE people. They're unique, and individual, but how you can actually tell apart and determine who's who is up to the scientists - a way like how parents can discern between their twin offsprings better than the common layman.

Of course, the research turned up a few interesting insights too, like the street poll conducted by FOX. What's interesting is how "A sizable 40 percent minority believes natural disasters are messages from a higher being, but just over half disagree (51 percent)." As good as saying how almost half the number of people in the world believe in fairies, or that elvis is alive, etc etc. I mean HELLO! Having a religion - belief - is one thing, having it working for you is another.

Simply put, is the religion working for you or are you working for the religion?

But i digress. My personal brush with manic winds came when i was in hongkong last hols when the nightsky burst into water and tigress and bitches descended. What can be more unfazing that seeing rain like it would have back home in sg? It was only later on that i realised typhoon warnings were reported that night and that everyone should stay indoors. In retrospect, I wouldn't know what would've happened had it escalated to full blown "Airflown Induced Damage System", or AIDS for short. However, what resurfaced again was how ugliness transcent boundaries, its apparent universality replicated in the form of how some dude pretended to dash across some z-crossing in the pouring rain, only to come into the path of some babe (there was NO ONE else around) and groped her breasts or something. The babe? She was more bemused and trying to get to wherever she's getting at I presume.

Damn i wish i'd thought of that.

Nostalgia

As the chinese saying goes, history can only be reminisced. Back in the good old days when chinese pop music is still largely MUSIC (it's just chinese pop now), radio was pretty much educational to a certain sense. Most of my idioms were learnt via songs; in fact, i was so inspired by some that i aspired to be either a chinese teacher or dj or singer for much of my youth. Kinda account for my cheena (teacher) trash talking (dj) choirboy (singer) lifestyle now, isn't it?

So now the truth is out - radio shaped my life. Which is no wonder that i haven't been tuning in much in a long while, with not much of a life nowadays (and the problem compounded with trashy long winded djs that doesn't reflect much depth other than the fact that most of them came from the now defunct HCJC or part timing as imitations in a folk cafe).

At the same time, life's lessons of love were presented in assorted serenades over the airwaves. After all, why learn from your own (potential) mistakes when you could learn from the rest?

Lyrical and witty, I present 2 personal favourites, both similarly refreshing (then and even now) and bold. What struck me most was how it was not all kok and no content. I actually find the stereotypes very meaningful and real. Right click save as.

Now, who even writes or talks like that nowadays? Companies are just looking for that unique unlikely voice that pitches reasonably and eye candy, and/or formulaic to a mould where when 'it' (i wouldn't even use humanistic qualifiers here) ceases to become fashionable, gets discarded aside in favour of some other flavour of the moment.

And the song that i've been looking on the net for YEARS (since i had access to the internet) has finally been found. Not months, nor spur of the moment epiphany, but one of the timeless one-hit classics where u know the song but neither the singer nor title. Sorry dudes and dudettes, it's so rare that I can't even find any site that does any hotlinking. Mail me and maybe i just might share.

Simple and bare, isn't that all there is to it? No need for theatrics, no time for tantrums, just a sense of loss. Makes me just wanna hook up with some girl, get dumped just so i could enjoy the song better.

Yes, i'm a sucker, and a sucker for sad songs, and the sadder the better.

Need a good laugh?
Or go handicap - lame - trying. In chinese.