Wednesday, June 11, 2008

On religion.

Creationism
Creationism vid 22

There are 24 videos.

Just FYI, creationism is the belief that all life on earth, the earth and the universe is created by a deity(God). This belief comes from most religions. Some of the Christians in the US are trying to assimilate the bible into education... Which is .. jaw-droppingly stupid.

Another few clips on science vs creationism and creationism. Another one..

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I need to find something to do...

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Ranting

I feel like shit.


Anyone who has dealt with silent, unmotivated teammates would probably know how I feel right now.

Cutting the story short, I am the group leader of a bunch of guys who have almost NO motivation to proceed with the assignment work. They are almost completely silent in the group meetings. I'm reminded of this picture every time I look at them.




and one of these guys is actually dragging his feet. I could cry... The blank stare, and that I don't know attitude is driving me up the wall. This isn't just my assignment, I can't believe I'm going to be dragged down by a bunch of fools. This shows just how important it is to choose your group mates.

Friday, May 2, 2008

It's TOO HOT

It's stopped raining, and the heat is absolutely INSANE. I can smell dried meat, I'm not sure if I'm hallucinating, or am I really being slow cooked inside my room.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Rant

Theres a saying that goes, "Your true friends are the ones who will never lie to you", and I've always appreciated honesty. I have a lot of respect for people who aren't afraid to sound out, and to me, that shows character. Even when I might not like a particular person, I find it admirable that they would be able to speak what they feel, instead of lying... just to suck up.


I know that this isn't a feeling that many people share, I've met people who would prefer to squat in their own world, and when one day their faults become too big to ignore, they will simply pin the fault of their problems on the people around them. IMO, these sort of people are at best kept at arms length, or preferably, kept out of sight.

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Monday, March 10, 2008

Lee Kuen Yew, one of history's greatest minds.

I haven't been posting much lately, for any of those of you who read this blog. Here's some food for thought. --



One is the product of a civilization which has gone through all its ups and downs, of floods and famine and pestilence, breeding a people with very intense culture, with a belief in high performance, in sustained effort, in thrift and industry. And the other people- more fortunately endowed by nature with warm sunshine and bananas and coconuts, and therefore not with the same need to strive so hard. Now, these two societies really move at two different speeds.

It's like the difference between a high revolution engine and a low revolution engine.

-Lee Kuen Yew on the differences between the Chinese and the Malays, March 24, 1965


Let us not deceive ourselves; our talent profile is nowhere near that of, say, the Jews or the Japanese in America. The exceptional number of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews is no accident. It is also no accident that a high percentage, sometimes 50%, of faculty members in the top American universities on both the east and west coasts are Jews. And the number of high caliber Japanese academics, professionals, and business executives is out of all proportion to the percentage of Japanese in the total American population.

-Lee Kuan Yew, "The search for Talent," 1982


I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution. People have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different inter mixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils. I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I've come to. When we were faced with the reality that, in fact, equal opportunities did not bring about more equal results, we were faced with an ideological dilemma.

In other words, this bell curve, which Murray and Herrnstein wrote about, became obvious to us by the late '60s. The bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100.

Asians score more... The Bell Curve authors put it at least 10 points higher.

There are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow. All the bright young men became Catholic priests and did not marry. Bright priests, celibate, produce no children. And the result of several generations of bright Fathers producing no children? Less bright children in the Catholic world.

You read Hong Lou Meng, A Dream of the Red Chamber, or you read Jin Ping Mei, and you'll find Chinese Society in the 16th, 17th century described. "So the successful merchant or the mandarin, he gets the pick of all the rich men's daughters and the prettiest village girls and has probably five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten different wives and concubines and many children."

And the poor laborer who is dumb and slow, he's neutered.

It's like the lion or the stag that's outside the flock. He has no harems, so he does not pass his genes down. So, in that way, a smarter population emerges.







"When young London children called me a Chinaman or a Chink, it did not trouble me. If they meant it as a term of abuse, my business was to make them think differently one day."


the video is here

edit: The Bell Curve sounds quite controversial... The type of thing many people would love to hate. So I went off to dig criticism on it and find out just how credible is this idea...

So here it is, what people have to say about the Bell Curve.


QUOTE Howard Gardner

"The Bell Curve is a strange work. Some of the analysis and a good deal of the tone are reasonable. Yet the science in the book was questionable when it was proposed a century ago, and it has now been completely supplanted by the development of the cognitive sciences and neurosciences. The policy recommendations of the book are also exotic, neither following from the analyses nor justified on their own. (p. 61)"


"Scholarly brinkmanship: ...

I became increasingly disturbed as I read and reread this 800 page work. I gradually realized I was encountering a style of thought previously unknown to me: scholarly brinkmanship. Whether concerning an issue of science, policy, or rhetoric, the authors come dangerously close to embracing the most extreme positions, yet in the end shy away from doing so. Discussing scientific work on intelligence, they never quite say that intelligence is all important and tied to one's genes; yet they signal that this is their belief and that readers ought to embrace the same conclusions. Discussing policy, they never quite say that affirmative action should be totally abandoned or that childbearing or immigration by those with low IQs should be curbed; yet they signal their sympathy for these options and intimate that readers ought to consider these possibilities. Finally, the rhetoric of the book encourages readers to identify with the IQ elite and to distance themselves from the dispossessed in what amounts to an invitation to class warfare. Scholarly brinkmanship encourages the reader to draw the strongest conclusions, while allowing the authors to disavow this intention. (p. 63)"


"On social policy:

Though there are seven appendices, spanning over 100 pages, and nearly 200 pages of footnotes, bibliography, and index, one element is notably missing from this tome: a report on any program of social intervention that works. For example, Herrnstein and Murray never mention Lisbeth Schorr's Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage, a book that was prompted in part by Losing Ground. Schorr chronicles a number of social programs that have made a genuine difference in education, child health service, family planning, and other lightning rod areas of our society. And to the ranks of the programs chronicled in Schorr's book, many new names can now be added. Those who have launched Interfaith Educational Agencies, City Year, Teach for America, Jobs for the Future, and hundreds of other service agencies have not succumbed to the sense of futility and abandonment of the poor that the Herrnstein and Murray book promotes. (p. 71)"


"Concluding comments:
It is callous to write a work that casts earlier attempts to help the disadvantaged in the least favorable light, strongly suggests that nothing positive can be done in the present climate, contributes to an us-against-them mentality, and then posits a miraculous cure. High intelligence and high creativity are desirable. But unless they are linked to some kind of a moral compass, their possessors might best be consigned to an island of glass bead game players, with no access to the mainland. (p. 72)"

Thursday, February 21, 2008

KDU FUCKS ME IN THE HEAD, AGAIN!!!!!

Why did I take a subject under that lecturer... why.. why...

What sort of lecturer will tell a student that she won't teach simply because the student asked at the last minute? Granted I am asking a day before the deadline, but a lecturer is supposed to pass on knowledge? I'm paying this college just to deal with these idiots who are supposed to be teaching.


If I had known I was going to have to deal with these idiotic lecturers in this college I would have just bought a programming book and studied by myself. The assignment isn't covered in the notes, and the "lecturer" doesn't want to help me, just out of spite.


I'm going to have to scrap 8 hours worth of testing just because I CAN'T FIND OUT HOW TO RETURN A GODDAMN ARRAY!!!!. ARRRRGGGHHH