Herpes new year!

Single with a STD? Don't despair, here's your chance to share your experiences with "hundreds of thousands". Continue to be an active member of the community and give something back.

http://www.positivesingles.com/?tid=122

Dr Zuma, or: Why I learnt to stop worrying and love the guy

Just how dumb exactly is the average South African? A previous patterntub entry gave me an inkling of this via the rather abstract notion of IQ: the average IQ in SA is allegedly 72. But what does this really mean? If your majors at school weren't psychology and statistics, you can deduct little beyond "my countrymen are dumb as dirt".

There are subtle clues all over the place. The trick is to force yourself to recognize them. This must only be attempted by those immune to depression or who are in any case already depressed. If you hear a voice in your head telling you not to open up to this reality, ignore it, it’s just Your Sanity speaking. What has he done for you lately?

One telling example is a regular etv (1 of 4 public networks in SA) “competition” in which the viewer is given "cryptic" clues and must sms (text) the answer to some literally unforgettable number.

The format for all of these questions is always exactly the same: A short but ridiculously useful description of what this person does, a glorious full colour 5 megapixel photo, and a thinly disguised anagram of the persons name. So far, my personal favourite of these weekly mindbenders is:

She’s the popular host of a talk show and one of the richest women in the world:

ORAPH

This is nothing less than downright insulting. But it is only insulting if you have the mental faculty to feel insulted by it, and I don’t think etv is in the business of insulting people.

I’m patiently waiting for this one to come up:

He’s the controversial creator of the universe and doesn’t really exist:

DOG

It can only be a matter of time.

Yes, I now it’s supposed to be easy, but really. The questions are designed to make the viewer feel that she is playing a game and that she is really clever for figuring out the answer, and therefore has a sporting chance to win the latest piece of technological junk that will be obsolete just about the moment it arrives in the mail. etv obviously believes that these questions are sufficiently taxing for the average television and mobile phone owning South African to be enticed into throwing R2 down the drain. And they should know, they only need to count the number of sms’s received.

The scariest thing: the TV and mobile phone owners hardly constitute SA’s most ignorant demographic. No wait, the scariest thing surely has to be that these are the more priveleged among the people who vote in all matters deemed important enough to vote on. You know when we refer to the voice of the people? That’s them. Well, the people have spoken to etv, and they are saying that they are ignorant and gullible. They insist. This is why a guy that purports to wash away HIV in the shower after rape I mean sex is on his merry way to being our next president. (Unrelated, I hear a shower does wonders for pepper spray as well). If you’re not sure who I’m talking about, here’s a clue:

He’s a corrupt moron and one of the most loved statesmen in South Africa:

ZACOB JUMA

Thundermugs

Some (wonderful) images of 19th century chamberpots from the book Chambers of Delight.






[Via The Nonist]

The Aerial Photography of Yann Arthus-Bertrand

My favourite photographer, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, has put more than a thousand photos from across the world onto his website. All of them downloadable as wallpapers. Good times.
[link]

Foreign Office

Slate has an essay comparing and contrasting four different versions of The Office. In addition to the U.K. and U.S. versions, both France (Le Bureau) and Germany (Stromberg) have produced their own versions of the show.

The Naked Face

The two men, protégé and mentor, sat at the back of the room, as faces flickered across the screen. Ekman had told Tomkins nothing about the tribes involved; all identifying context had been edited out. Tomkins looked on intently, peering through his glasses. At the end, he went up to the screen and pointed to the faces of the South Fore. "These are a sweet, gentle people, very indulgent, very peaceful," he said. Then he pointed to the faces of the Kukukuku. "This other group is violent, and there is lots of evidence to suggest homosexuality." Even today, a third of a century later, Ekman cannot get over what Tomkins did. "My God! I vividly remember saying, "Silvan, how on earth are you doing that?' " Ekman recalls. "And he went up to the screen and, while we played the film backward, in slow motion, he pointed out the particular bulges and wrinkles in the face that he was using to make his judgment. That's when I realized, "I've got to unpack the face.' It was a gold mine of information that everyone had ignored. This guy could see it, and if he could see it, maybe everyone else could, too."

From Malcolm Gladwell's The Naked Face, an article about what people see when we look at each other and how some have taken that skill to a seemingly super-human level.

Short piece detailing how Brian Eno composed the Windows 95 startup sound.

Transcript of Brian Eno discussing Generative Music at the Imagination Conference, 1996.

Kings of Africa

[HALIDOU SALIL, amido of Bibemi]

"There are still several hundred monarchs on this continent. While some amongst them have been relegated to the level of touristic curiousities, others still maintain significant traditional and spiritual power. Born of dynasties which marked the history of Africa until the twentieth century, these kings are the source of underground power with which "modern governments" have to co-exist. Contrary to the Indian Maharajas, they have survived the upheavals of history, and evolve in a parallel world but one which is very real."

.

From Daniel Laine 's online photograpy exhibition, Kings of Africa.

[HADJ MAMADOU KABIR USMAN, Emir of Katsina]

[GOODWILL ZWELETHINI, King of Zulu]

[SALOMON IGBINOGHODUA, Oba Erediauwa of Bénin]

[Via Spy's Spice]

Bedtime Stories by Thom Yorke

The Happy Little Bunny
Once there was a little bunny who had a little furry tail and a little shiny nose. But the electrodeath cloud of commerce strangled it and its foxhole was converted to a parking lot, a parking lot, a parking lot. Ample parking asphalted over bunny bones. Everyone everyone everyone get in.

Hannah and Gunther
Hannah and her brother Gunther lived in a happy wooden house at the end of a windy road by the forest. Chomping tree-eating machines grinding, halting, grinding the forest destroyed the trees—birches branches Branford—to make end tables and politician luncheon plates, spin spin spin. I can't feel my legs anymore.

Whoopsie the Clumsy Dragon
In the dragon family in the enchanted cave, there lived Mother, Father, Brother, and Whoopsie. Whoopsie tried to be like the other dragons, but anytime he tried to help he ended up making a mess. Diplomats destroy the ozone and waiting, wailing. Crawl in the hole, leap the banshee, and eat the sunlight. Tonight, tomorrow, why bother? Another. Another. I'm a grown monkey wastechain.

.

Everybody Enjoys Manners!
When we eat, it's fun to have our manners eat with us! Wear your napkin on your lap and don't hit your sister, even if she throws peas at you. Reason your reasons, razors shave the planet clean. Blood fills the rivers, clogs the tubes. I want to die, eat your ice cream.

.

By David Hart at McSweeneys.

Are you an Occamist?

Someone once quoted Shakespeare to the philosopher W. V. O. Quine: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The remark was meant as a put-down, a sort of "Yeah, what do you know?" To which Quine is said to have responded: "Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth." Quine was an Occamist.

On the other hand, I have heard that in an episode of The X-Files, Fox Mulder dismisses Occam's razor by renaming it Occam's Principle of Unimaginative Thinking. Let a thousand paranormal and pseudoscientific flowers bloom. Mulder is an Anti-Occamist.

Interesting post on Occam's Razor here.

For the kids

The 20 most loathsome South Africans: Number 17: The Real Realist

The real realist is the owner of a blog called “Why South Africa is crap”. It is supposedly dedicated to “revealing the truth about the failed South African 'Rainbow' nation and monitoring its decline into a Turd World Hellhole.”

In principle there is obviously nothing wrong with trying to dig up news that is for whatever reason not properly covered by the media. However, my problem with this guy and his blog already starts to manifest itself in, and is very well summed up by, his pseudonym, the name of the blog, and the nomenclature in his blog motto.

Firstly, his carefully chosen name. He’s not just a realist. He’s not even a real realist. He is nothing less than “the real realist”. Only he knows the “real” truth, he says.

Secondly, the name of the blog. He’s not saying that he feels South Africa is less than perfect. He doesn’t even stop at saying that to him South Africa is crap. He is stating that South Africa is crap as an objective fact. If you don’t think SA is crap, he says, you are simply delusional. He explicitly or implicitly makes it clear in every second post that he has completely given up on SA, and any person that suggests that they do not agree with him 100%, is thumped into the ground by His Greatness and his cronies. I don’t need anyone with such a childish, arrogant, stupid name telling me how to feel about anything.

Thirdly, the blog motto. The fatalistic “failed” I can handle, but the “Turd World Hellhole” is too much. Because it doesn’t just stop there, oh no. Any native of a poorish country is referred to as a “Turd Worlder”, by the Almighty Realist as well as his disciples. Certain human beings are said to be human excrement. What’s more, any non-white South African is referred to as a “New South African”. This guy categorizes on a level of detail only marginally superior to a newborn who is still coming to terms with the fact the universe can be divided into more than just himself and the rest.

He’s not even a good writer: his foremost tool in his comeback armour is the exclamation mark. That really is just about all he has to offer. It’s not unusual for him to refute a perfectly good argument with something like “Now you are talking complete bollocks! That’s hilarious! Your comments are stupid!” Just that, nothing else. The frustrating thing is that it is a very effective strategy if you’re trying to convince an idiotic readership. Most of them are simply angry, stupid racists that can’t get over the fact that a white skin no longer guarantees them the American Dream. They can’t think for themselves, so they assume that the odd comment expressing anything on the sane side of the Apocalypse must be obviously stupid if there are more than three exclamation marks in the Almighty Realist’s reply.

Case in point:

His Holiness The Real Realist misquoted a few numbers (a 50% weakening of the rand becomes 100%) regarding the ZAR/USD exchange rate, and promptly proclaimed with the conviction of a four year old with a new Superman costume jumping of fa roof: “I think I’m starting to see a pattern here”. Like he's understating an obvious fact.
He claims that since 1994 things have basically been going to shit, according to the numbers. The real truth is that there isn’t a pattern by a long shot, which I’ll demonstrate below. I tried to protest, but only got a relentless bombardment of exclamation marks in return.

The graphs below show some of SA’s most important vital statistics (excuse the horrible layout, I blame www.blogger.com). I don’t pretend to be an economist, but there is no pattern of regression in these numbers. The red parts of the graphs show SA’s progress since 1994 (when the new government was inaugurated), the black parts everything that happened between 1960 and 1994. (There is nothing special about the starting date, that is simply as far back as the data at my disposal goes.)

For the more technically inclined, the scales on the vertical axes are all logarithmic (the exact numbers are irrelevant), just to make interpretation more intuitive, and the horisintal axes denote the date. The straight line shows the trend in the data pre-1994, and extrapolates it to 2006. In simple terms: the straight line determines whether SA has made better or worse progress since 1994 (than between 1960 and 1994).

As you can see below, yes, the rand has weakened at a slightly quicker pace than it did in the Apartheid days. But if there’s any pattern, it’s a very positive one: the rand stood at something like R14 per dollar a few years ago, and now it’s at about R7. A remarkable recovery.

As the other graphs show, however, SA’s GDP growth and share markets (the ALSI represents about 99% of the SA equity markets) have accelerated, and inflation has decelerated since 1994.

No-one can deny SA has a lot of problems and faces a lot of challenges, and who knows where we’ll be in 10 years’ time, but the last thing we need is some idiot giving tens of thousands of us the impression that we’ve regressed in areas that we’ve actually made some very good progress, against all the odds.

dead people Mensa wishes had been members

Mensa must be the dumbest smart people on the face of this earth.

Case in point:

Since 1991, Mensa America has had the arrogance to induct defenceless dead people into its so called “Hall of Fame” (I’m sure these geniuses got this from baseball or something. America must be the only country in the world where artistic and intellectual pursuits imitate sports). According to wikipedia, they have thus far claimed the scalps of 14 famous intellectuals that have crossed over to the dead side:

· Nicolas Copernicus, Inducted 1991
· Marie Sklodowska Curie, Inducted 2005
· Charles Darwin, Inducted 1991
· Leonardo Da Vinci, Inducted 1990
· Thomas Edison, Inducted 2003
· Albert Einstein, Inducted 1990
· Euclid, Inducted 2005
· Benjamin Franklin, Inducted 1990
· Galileo Galilei, Inducted 1991
· Isaac Newton, Inducted 1990
· Louis Pasteur, Inducted 2005
· William Shakespeare, Inducted 2005
· Socrates, Inducted 2004
· Nikola Tesla, Inducted 2004

None of these people were actual members of Mensa, of course.

Notice how Shakespeare only cracked the nod in 2005. He must have been the subject of heated debate (“Yes his little stories are neat, but how did he contribute to the US bottom line and its quest for world dominance people? God Bless America.”)

How funny that the “High IQ Society” makes IQ tests look stupid.

Terror in the sky

Interesting article of the terror plot recently foiled in England here

UN is 'not Africa's messiah'

From news24

Johannesburg - United Nations special envoy to Africa Stephen Lewis "is not Africa's Messiah" and does not understand the country's HIV/Aids programmes, according to the health department.

"We reject with contempt the statement made by Stephen Lewis with regard to response of South African government to the challenge of HIV and Aids," said department spokesperson Sibani Mngadi in a statement on Saturday.

Mngadi said Lewis' comments should not be seen as the views of the UN and its agencies, which continued to work on HIV/Aids with SA.

On Friday, Lewis told the International Aids conference in Toronto, Canada, that SA could "never achieve redemption" for its HIV/Aids policies as 600 to 800 people a day died of Aids in SA.

Lewis said what the South African government was doing was "wrong, immoral and indefensible".

He accused the government of expounding HIV/Aids theories "more worthy of a lunatic fringe than a concerned and compassionate state".

SA government has tripled the budget allocation for the HIV and Aids over the last four years from just over R1 billion in 2002 to R3.5bn in 2005. This allocation constitutes 90% of resources currently being used to implement HIV and Aids in South Africa," said Mngadi.

He said Lewis should say whether any other country had distributed, as SA did, more 340 million male condoms and close to three million female condoms each year free of charge, or had put more people on anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment than SA had.

Mngadi said what Africa needed was not an "unsubstantiated attack", but delivery on the many resolutions made by international organizations and other countries on "addressing poverty and underdevelopment which increases the vulnerability of our populations to diseases".

I can tell you now, the UN is the most non-confrontational organization in the world. If Steven Lewis is shouting at Manto, it means he must consider her beyond diplomacy... Consummate diplomats do not get enraged easily.

What the UN does not understand is that these people are not evil per se, they are just uneducated and uncouth.

And yes, it can be as simple as that.

And in a totally related story: Manto gets a new Merc

For a scathing factsheet on this dumb as dirt piece of shit, please see the DA's Fire Manto site.

Science podcasts

Do any of you listen to podcasts much? After listening to one on Dr. Borlaug this morning on my way to work, I have decided to check out more science related podcasts. I have found one cool website so far, The Science Show. Tomorrow morning I think I'll listen to a commentary on Not Even Wrong - a newly released book highly critical of String Theory. I read about in the UK Times, via aldaily, and it sound pretty interesting.

I will probably also check out the topics of the formation of the solar system and plate techtonics.

Any other recomended sites?

Is calling someone a racist not racist?

This story is indicative of the politically correct bullshit pervading our society. Calling someone a racist should not be an argument in itself. Even if I say I think I am better than you, so what? You have your existence to prove me wrong. If a person is going to constantly invoke the spectre racism to win an argument, I will start thinking this person is an idiot, unable to have a dialogue or argue a point.

Its like the Dark Ages, when blasphemy was invoked to settle a dispute. I thought we were over that.

I guess not

Search Narratives

from wikipedia:

"On August 4th, 2006, AOL released a compressed text file on one of its websites containing twenty million search keywords for over 650,000 users over a 3-month period, intended for research purposes. AOL pulled the file from public access by the 7th, but not before it had been mirrored, P2P-shared and seeded via BitTorrent. News filtered down to the blogosphere and popular tech sites such as Digg and Wired News.

Whilst none of the records on the file are personally identifiable per se, certain keywords contain personally identifiable information by means of the user typing in their own name (ego-searching), as well as their address, social security number or by other means. Each user is identified on this list by a unique sequential key, which enables the compilation of a user's search history. In fact, in a test, of whether it was possible to do so, the New York Times was able to locate several individuals from the released, and anonymized, search records alone.

AOL acknowledged it was a mistake and removed the data, although the files can still be downloaded from mirror sites. Additionally, several searchable databases of the report also exist on the internet."

You can use www.aolstalker.com to browse these logs. It's interesting to see the narratives that appear in some of these people's search histories. Here are some excerpts from the user 14162375 :

14162375 marriage counseling
14162375 spy on the wife
14162375 spy recorders
14162375 signs of cheating
14162375 tracking cell phone numbers
14162375 dealing with cheating wives
14162375 divorce lawyers
14162375 cheating wives
14162375 saving a marriege
14162375 sex products
14162375 sexual techiques
14162375 www.americagreentings.com
14162375 stop your divorce
14162375 alchool withdrawl sintoms
14162375 disfunctional erection
14162375 cheating therapy
14162375 women’s urine blood
14162375 spy from a distance
14162375 listen through walls
14162375 car sound recorder
14162375 car conversation spy
14162375 spy on wife
14162375 phico card readers
14162375 st. petersburg fl medium
14162375 psychic
14162375 psychic st.pete fl
14162375 get my wife back
14162375 i want revenge to my wife
14162375 get revenge from a wife cheater
14162375 munchies
14162375 lisbon jobs
14162375 divorce and kids
14162375 my wife wants to leave me
14162375 how do i get my wife love me again
14162375 need help getting my wife back
14162375 i want my wife bach
14162375 i need my wife to get back to me
14162375 my wife doesnt love animore
14162375 i still live whith my wife can i get her bach
14162375 i want revenge towards my wife
14162375 making my wife suffer as i do
14162375 making even with my wife
14162375 get my wife back
14162375 foxsoccerchnnel.com
14162375 get my wife back
14162375 avoid breaking up
14162375 my wife doesn’t love me anymore
14162375 stop breaking up
14162375 get even with my wife
14162375 husband revenge
14162375 how to harm my wifes lover
14162375 infidelity
14162375 catch your wife having an affair
14162375 baby monitors
14162375 my cheating wife
14162375 i want to kill myself
14162375 suicide help
14162375 helpe me with suicide
14162375 i want to make my wife suffer
14162375 kill my wifes mistress
14162375 my wifes ass
14162375 a cheating wife
14162375 recording home survellence
14162375 audio room surveillance
14162375 www.cornerspyshop.com
14162375 get rid of cheating wives
14162375 sore muscules
14162375 make the infidelity suffer
14162375 i am so italian
14162375 the portuguese mafia
14162375 www.ymca.comportuguese mafia
14162375 www.airportugal


And user 2917636:

2917636 date rape
2917636 is it normal to cook you rfriend breakfast after he rapes you
2917636 the morning after being raped
2917636 sexual assualt

I'll be spending hours on this site.

The drug league table

The UK Science and Technology Select Committee, which advises the government, commissioned an assessment of 20 legal and illegal stimulants to examine the actual social and physical harm they cause based on scientific evidence. Here is the table they developed:



More info in New Scientist

Interesting to note that alcohol and tobacco rank higher than many illegal drugs that we were told by authorities will surely fry our brain, like LSD, pot and ecstasy.

Denial

From The Independant:

South Africa's Aids epidemic is driving a new health crisis in the country as women, fearful of appearing to be HIV positive, are becoming obese in record numbers.

Nearly one third of women in South Africa are now severely overweight, Tessa van der Merwe of the International Association for the Study of Obesity has revealed, as a combination of new fears and traditional, cultural factors encourage excessive weight gain.

"Regretfully, there is a perception that if a black woman is thin, she might have HIV/Aids," Ms Van der Merwe said.

Deep fry your fear in fat