dsng.net - the daryl sng blog: October 2006

Vainglorious attempts at banking application

The woeful tale of Aleksey Vayner, I-banking applicant. Hell, he's even cited as an example of "what not to do" in writing a CV. Sure, he's a Yalie, and Yalies have been known to tell a fib or two... but faux inter-school rivalry aside, no matter how weird/sad that video resume was, it certainly shouldn't have been leaked...

(Man, Blogger has been acting up on me - was impossible to post anything.)

Twins

Woman gives birth to twins, one black, one white (same dad, before anyone besmirches the mother's good name). (Tangent: I love the word "besmirch".) Wonder if such a dichotomous twin birth has happened in Singapore? Anyway, back on point - the two boys really are cute - and really do look like each other.

Linksfest: World gone topsy-turvy

Global ecosystems 'face collapse' (from the Living Planet Report)
The conservative Weekly Standard places a Democrat on the cover and writes a glowing report.
More on invisibility, from Popular Science.
Salon's Broadsheet blog notes the furore over a Peekaboo pole-dancing kit being inadvertently put in the children's toys and games section at Tesco.
Yep = iPhoto for PDFs (via Popagandhi). Nifty.

Labels: links

On manipulation or the lack thereof

William Saletan (who can at times be insufferable) has a good response to Rush Limbaugh's claims that Michael J. Fox was somehow not playing fair in his campaign for stem cell research ("This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn't take his medication or he's acting, one of the two.") The fact is - once you've established that he's not acting (which by all accounts he isn't), how could it be wrong to display the symptoms of a disease if he's really suffering from it?

There's a tendency, as Amanda Marcotte has sharply noted in her critique of Ann Coulter's rhetorical technique, to exploit the culture's valuing of detached observation over experience (would that be the Intuitive/Sensing divide in the Myers-Briggs test?) to try to disqualify those with experience from speaking out:

I think the purpose of slandering 9/11 widows is that Coulter needs an outrageous distraction to smuggle in the idea that politics is a game and anyone who takes is seriously should be ejected from game play. This is another one of those situations where she has some amount of social support for her assertion, but she’s trying to reinforce it so that others can pick up her ball and run with it. There’s already a tendency in our culture to value detached observation above experience and Coulter’s building on that to argue that anyone who is actually hurt by a government policy or action should be disqualified from speaking out against it.

She’s also trying to bolster the already-existing idea that if one side has much better arguments than the other, the other side should get a handicap to make it “fair”. Again, it’s the “politics is a game, let’s not muck it up by acknowledging the real life aspects of it” argument, one which benefits those who support policies that will lead to unnecessary loss of life, for instance. (Link, via Hughes for America)

As Digby rightly points out, just because something is real and emotionally affecting does not make it manipulative.

Die or diet

New York has a fascinating article on calorie restriction - not to be confused with anorexia - and how it could potentially double your lifespan. Certainly not my thing - it's entirely possible that I've had more than 1800 calories in a day just from Pepsi/Coke - but the rigour is intriguing. Take Michael, the guy who counts 1913 calories a day - no more, no less. (Clever quip: "Cooking for him is the same elaborate exercise in dietary Sudoku it is for all CR die-hards, only more so.") How much of the extra lifespan is spent weighing and counting calories?

I have to say this, though. Michael is cited in the article as having a BMI of 15.6. For the longest time, until I went to America, that was pretty much my BMI (I was a meaty 15.9 entering the army).

Consider those dimensions for a moment. Divide Michael’s weight by the square of his height and you get a body-mass index of 15.6. Compare that with the minimum BMI of 18 recently decreed by the organizers of the Madrid Fashion Week—who cited the World Health Organization’s definition of 18.5 as the lower limit of healthy weight and offered medical assistance to any models who couldn’t meet it—and you might wonder how Michael can stand up in the morning, let alone jog twenty miles a week.

So... for a long while I had the same BMI as a man on a severe near-starvation diet? Good lord.

Parkinson's and the Fox

If you haven't seen the Michael J. Fox campaign ad yet, the display of his Parkinson's symptoms is pretty shocking. Marty McFly, travelling through time, now reduced to not even having full control of his muscles.

Blog community

Met up with some fellow bloggers - including old friends Kin Mun, Adrianna, and Adrian - at a dinner thing with Richard Edelman tonight (talking about concepts such as the horizontal peer to peer conversation). 'Twas just nice to emerge out of my work burrow for some blog-related stuff, if only for an evening. And 'twas nice to catch up with Kin Mun and see his spankin' new studio. (A koan: what is the sound of one hand clapping? I don't know, but it has much less echo in a soundproof studio.)

And while I admit I almost never talk about the so-called Singaporean blogosphere, I do know that Mr Miyagi has left the Mr Brown show, and it was nice of him to throw in a credit to me for the "Zhng My Car" concept in his post about leaving. (I must stress the scripts and everything else were solely theirs, and I should note that "Zhng My Car" arose out of some goofiness with my friends.)

As for the very popular character ‘Johnny’, played inimitably by Kin Mun, credit is due to our friend Daryl Sng, who, on a pub outing with us, said, ‘eh, you know it would be very funny to have a Singaporean version of MTV’s Pimp My Ride, called ‘Zhng My Car'’, or something. I paraphrase, but you know what I mean lah.

One minor corrigendum though - perhaps 'twas to hide the innate geekiness of it, but we were most certainly not on a pub outing when we had the conversation. We were in the (confession time) Sim Lim Square basement carpark after spending a couple of hours looking at computer parts.

You say conundra, I say conundrums

So, randomly, I decided to look up the plural of conundrum today, and, as this illuminating discussion points out, "conundrum" isn't definitively Latin in origin. I particularly like the correction of the snob who insists that 'octopuses' is wrong:

I hope that Philip Moreland says octopodes not octopi, given that octopus is 3rd declension Greek not 2nd declension Latin. Actually I am sure he does, but for anyone to whom this is news, the word octopodes has four syllables.

The Prestige

One of the chief aspects of The Prestige is, well, the prestige - the point in the magic show where the magician shows the audience something they've never seen before. And, as Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) warns, a good magician should never reveal his secrets, for without his secrets he is nothing. And yet the best part of this show - just as in Memento, the first film written by the Nolan brothers - is the revelation of all its secrets, the part where the audience figures out how everything is pieced together...

A full review will follow when I have the time, but just wanted to note that this was a great film, some fine, solid acting by Hugh Jackman (one does feel sorry for his character in the end) and Christian Bale...

Linksfest: Sunday Randomness

History Shots. What crisp presentation of information.
An old one, but Fiona Apple is a sweetheart.
Weird Al Yankovic, and what he owes to MTV, as well as why he's not weird.

Labels: links

Barb Wire

Crikey, another stingray-to-the-chest attack.

She Blinded Me With Science

Talk about science fiction - coming up to breathe for a few minutes, I found news about the world's first (non-fictional) cloaking device and then teleportation (between light and matter, no less)... I love how the article on the invisibility device allowed the reporter to bring out his geek-lit side, referencing H2G2:

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams extended the desire for invisibility from people to problems, with the "Somebody else's problem field", which banishes worries by rendering objects inside it someone else's concern.

The Office, worldwide

Slate had a fascinating comparison of what different countries' versions of "The Office" reflect about work (and general) culture. (And yes, I do love "The Office".) What would a Singaporean version look like, I wonder?

Hello, Panda

China wants more pandas. And that involves "panda porn" apparently. Cue sleazy music, scantily clad pandas...

Who Moved My Blackberry

Just read Who Moved My Blackberry?, the book-length version of Lucy Kellaway's "Martin Lukes" Financial Times column parodying business speak and jargon (the Martin Lukes character loves, loves the concept of 'creovativity', a bastard blend of creativity and innovation). I got hooked on the column in Bonn (the hotel I was in gave me the FT as the daily paper) and it was quite funny to read this tale of the absurdity of corporate life.

Amusing Characters in History, Part 1

Always found eccentrics amusing, so I was highly intrigued when someone pointed out Timothy Dexter, eccentric and very lucky man:

Because he was basically uneducated, his business sense was peculiar but extremely lucky. Somebody inspired him to send warming pans for sale to West Indies, a tropical area. His captain sold them as ladles for local molasses industry and made a good profit. Next Dexter sent wool mittens to the same place. Asian merchants bought them for export to Siberia.

His next venture was selling coal to Newcastle, which should have been a sure failure. His ships happened to arrive in the time of a coalminer's strike and potential customers were actually desperate.

Here's the tale of his business success in Dexter's own words... But the most eccentric part was his relationship with his wife:

Dexter's own relationship with his wife was troubled as well. This became evident when he started telling visitors that his wife had died, despite the fact that she was still very much alive, and that the "drunken nagging woman" whom frequented the bulding was simply her ghost.

Again, in his own words...

Oktoberfest

October's here again, and with it brings the promise of one of my favourite dishes, German pork knuckles... okay, I just had real German pork knuckles in Bonn in May, so it's not like I've been deprived, but man, nothing like a huge chunk o' meat.

Spotted this on the Amara hotel brochure promoting their Oktoberfest buffet... "our delectable buffet variety such as Wiener Schnitzel... Roasted Pork with Crispy Crust, Linzer Torte" (so far so good), "Seafood Teppanyaki... and crispy Tempura station". Um. I'm not saying I'm a major cultural expert or anything, but something tells me that teppanyaki and tempura are not German...