Date:	2007-05-17 02:18
Subject:	A Letter to the ST Forum
Security:	Public
Mood:	sleepy

I've not been writing for ages because I'm in the middle of an LJ-to-Wordpress migration, but the recent ST Forum debate on the (eventual) decriminalisation of homosexuality has bugged me enough to reply to a particular Dr. Alan Chin.

Of course, it just coincidentally happens to divert all attention off the issue of the rise in ministers' pay, but I'm sure that's an accident.

You can also read the letter to which I'm responding  at miak 's post.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Figures speak for themselves: Practising gays have higher risk of HIV
Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 01:40:05 +0800
From: Jin Hian Lee
To: stforum@sph.com.sg

To the Editor,

I am writing in response to Dr. Alan Chin Yew Liang's letter titled "Figures speak for themselves: Practising gays have higher risk of HIV".

I thank Dr. Chin for keeping the discussion on an emotional topic grounded in rational discourse, and such an effort deserves a considered response.

First, with regard to Dr. Chin's point about the higher relative incidence of AIDS in homosexual people - the risk of contracting AIDS amongst people who "practice" homosexual sex is not a justification for continued criminalisation, but by safer-sex education and outreach programmes. This is exactly society's approach towards addressing the risk of contracting STDs amongst people who actively "practice" heterosexual sex or that of lung cancer amongst people who smoke.

Dr. Chin goes on to address the question of whether or not a person can change their sexual orientation, and quotes a study by Dr. Robert Spitzer to draw the conclusion that "even if one person can change, then
homosexuality is not an immutable trait."

Unfortunately, Dr. Chin's conclusion is a skyscraper erected upon a foundation of straw. Dr. Spitzer's study does not support the Dr. Chin's claim that homosexuality is not immutable, because the sample population was not random but specially hand-picked for a special purpose.

Sadly, this is a mistake that is made so often by non-specialists that Dr. Spitzer himself was compelled to respond. On May 21st 2001, the Wall Street Journal published a commentary by Dr. Spitzer about his own study where he said (verbatim):

"In reality, change should be seen as complex and on a continuum. Some homosexuals appear able to change self-identity and behavior, but not arousal and fantasies; others can change only self-identity; and only a very few, I suspect, can substantially change all four."

"I suspect the vast majority of gay people would be unable to alter by much a firmly established homosexual orientation."

"I did not conclude that all gays should try to change, or even that they would be better off if they did."

In other words, just because one person amongst millions might possibly be able to change their intrinsic sexual orientation and attractions after years of therapy, it does not therefore mean that everyone else is able to (or should even try, given the potential destructive consequences of failure). After all, can you imagine what it would take to make a red-blooded straight man stop being attracted to a Playboy centrefold?

Lastly, I will turn again to Dr. Spitzer's commentary to address the issue of equal treatment (not protection, mind you!) for homosexual people:

"My study concluded with an important caveat: that it should not be used to justify a denial of civil rights to homosexuals, or as support for coercive treatment."

"Gay rights are a completely separate issue, and defensible for ethical reasons."

I could not have said it any better myself.

Date:	2007-03-31 11:14
Subject:	Apple's New Product!
Security:	Public
Mood:	tickled

via [echeng] - Apple's latest product!

"Before today, I couldn't imagine paying $12,000 for a product-unveiling product," CNET editor Jasmine France said after the presentation. "Now I can't imagine living without it."

The Onion certainly has its moments of sheer brilliance.

And, for all you photogs out there:
What the Duck

Yup, I'm in a blazingly funny mood this weekend, 'cuz I've got nothing to do!

Date:	2007-03-20 01:11
Subject:	Place of Pure Perfection
Security:	Public
Mood:	content
Music:	Can't Take My Eyes Off of You

For a dear friend:

For far too many years
I have wanted to be flawless,
    Perfecting my pursuits,
    I bargained all for love.
For all those many years
I made masks of my own doing,
    Pursuing my perfection,
    I found I was pursued.
And then
one day
I fell
    sprawled
    flattened
    on the fertile
    ground of self.
Naked in dirt
no mask
no bargains
I raised my soiled face
and there
    you were
I struggled to stand.
Dirst from my body fell
in your eyes.
Your hand reached for me.
Blinded,
your hand reached
me.
There is, in all of us, the place of pure perfection.
we discover its geography together.


Update: Realised I left off the credit!! Will add the author's credit later..

John Williams' scores are the warm Valrhona chocolate cakes of music.

Liquid & molten; sweeping & grand; comforting & calorie-free. Mmmmm...

Been meaning to put this up for a while - I think it accurately describes the state of most people on this planet.

'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from
here?' said Alice to the Cheshire cat.

'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the
Cat.

'I don't much care where--' said Alice.

'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.

'--so long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation.

'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk
long enough.'

Date:	2007-02-25 17:02
Subject:	Prizeworthy
Security:	Public
Mood:	relaxed

discoecstasy  went to Japan and came back with some spectacular photographs that deserve to be entered for the Lucies!

Check out my top picks of his work!


( Check out the full pics.. )

Date:	2007-02-08 09:00
Subject:	Haunted
Security:	Public
Mood:	sleepy

Most people are haunted by ghosts.



from gapingvoid via an artist's desktop wallpaper.

Week of Oct 27th

SCORPIO (Oct 23 - Nov 21): You're ready for take-off. It's time to taxi to the launch location and prepare to go airborne. I suggest you do what birds and airplanes do, which is to fly directly into the wind as you leave the ground. As long as you're forcefully propelling yourself forward, that will give you maximum lift. Oh, and flap your wings gracefully, not frenetically. Don't stare at the ground right beneath you, but rather fix your gaze at a distant point high above you. Halloween costume suggestion: Eagle, jet, hang-glider, dragonfly.

Week of May 5th

SCORPIO (Oct 23 - Nov 21): I have a rabid appreciation for your efforts to make this world a steamer, wilder, more lyrical labyrinth. Thank you for all the entertaining mysteries you conjure so regularly. You are a true Puzzle Master, both in the sense that you create beautiful enigmas and that you solve seemingly impossible riddles. Having said that, though, I want to beg you to ease up on the drama for a while. Now and then there com times when you get so heavy and thick with obsessive longing and complicated emotions that you're in danger of imploding. This is such a moment. So lighten up, please. Consider indulging in the pleasures of harmless fun and frivolous diversions for a few days.

It has been a fine run, but all good things must come to an end. GV Grange is closing down, so you're invited for a last (stiff) drink at this iconic residence which holds fond memories for many who might read this. While you're over, pick out some wonderful mementoes at bargain-basement prices - who knows what gems you might find!

Tuesday 7pm until the drinks run out...let me know if you're coming via SMS.

Electronics
1. SoundBlaster Live! x2 - $20 each
2. SoundBlaster Audigy 2 (w/ Gold-Plated connectors & SPDIF out) - $30
3. Promise FastTrak66 RAID 0/1 Controller - $5
4. ATI All-in-Wonder 128 AGP 32MB  - $10
5. ATI All-in-Wonder 7500 AGP 64MB - $50
6. ATI All-in-Wonder 9800SE (modded to Pro) AGP 128MB - $100
7. S3 Savage3D AGP - $5
8. Thrustmaster FlightStick w/ Throttle Control - $10
9. Logitech Wingman WIRELESS! Programmable Joystick - $40

Furniture
1 adjustable  bar stool - $5
1 Zen square coffee table - $200
1 round rattan lounge chair - $80
1 half-leather high-back chair - $50

All prices negotiable, of course.

While many in the local audience would recognise "The Best is Yet To Be" as my secondary school's (& JC) motto, few would know that it is actually from the the first stanza of a poem by Robert Browning titled Rabbi Ben Ezra:

“Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, 'A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!'”

You can read the rest of the poem here. Wikipedia.

My other favourite quote from the old geezer's work?

“Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?”

Well put, old chap, well put.

I was exploring RadioBlogClub and stumbled on a really beautiful song. Unfortunately it's in French - anyone care to translate?

Babelfish is sorta half-baked and I can slowly figure out the meaning, but nothing beats a human translator.



(Nâdiya)
La Personne À Qui Tu Penses

Si je pouvais revenir en arrière
Inverser l'orbite de la terre
Je le ferais pour revenir avec toi
Lorsque tu dormais contre moi

Si rien qu'en clignant des paupières
Je pouvais changer le sens des rivières
Si je n'étais pas qu'un etre humain
Qu'il pert tout ce qu'il tient dans ses mains

Refrain :

J'aimerais juste etre la personne a qui tu penses
Que le soir sans moi et dans le coeur, un vide immense
J''aimerai juste etre la personne a qui tu penses
La personne a qui tu penses

Si je pouvais dompter les panthères
Apprendre l'art et la manière
De te parler, de te toucher
Sans que tu puisses jamais te lasser
Et repousser les limites pour rester en orbite autour de toi
Et repousser les limites pour arreter les heures
Je crois que j'aimerais

Refrain

Si je pouvais rien qu'une chose a controler
Quitte à laisser tout le reste tomber

Refrain

Discovery lifted off yesterday, and the New York Times article has a spectacular picture of the night launch:

Sometimes, I wonder if these right-wing nut jubs bother to think.

Today, judging from the response from conservatives to the Iraq Study Group report, I'm forced to wonder if they have a brain at all.

"If they think the war cannot now be won, they need to explain that."

Would you like me to explain why the sky isn't red? What a f***ing moron.

'"We are fighting the spread of radical Islamist terrorism, and the two major production centers for that very problem are Tehran and Damascus," read a posting on the conservative site captainsquartersblog.com. "Holding a regional conference with them to determine anything but their surrender in that war only encourages the spread of the terrorism that we seek to end."'

Yes, and getting tough and invading Iraq has helped that goal how, exactly? Oh wait! It's bred *more* terrorism, hatred and suffering. Fools.

It's all very well to have good intentions - hell, even the 'realists' want to end terrorism and spread democracy. What matters is the tactics to be employed, and at the end of the day, your tactics can only be judged by the results they produce.

The conservatives think they're being brave and morally upright, but I say they are being cowardly. In their simple minds, there is only right and wrong, and answers are easy to come by. They have no room for nuance or the slightest bit of sophistry, and that simple-mindedness has gotten us where we are today. Thanks, Bush.

It is the realists, who are willing to take on the far more difficult task of supping with the Devil and forging consensus in a messy world where there are no right answers, that will succeed in stopping the spread of terrorism and promoting democracy.

It is the realists who are the heroes.

As for these so-called 'conservatives'? Let's call 'em what they are: Moral Morons.

"What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder."

Q: "What's the between God and Steve Jobs?"
A: "God doesn't think he's Steve Jobs."

Nor does God do MacWorld presentations, for that matter.

What Jobs hath joined together (iPod & iTunes), others have rendered asunder - that's right, folks, it *is* possible to use an iPod WITHOUT iTunes.

Some might ask, "Why would anyone not want to use iTunes?"

Now there are lots of good reasons why a person might not want to install or use iTunes. It doesn't let you get music OFF your iPod onto another computer, it hogs resources and leaves services running in the background and worst of all, it doesn't play FLAC files.

But all that doesn't matter. The real question is, "Why should anyone be forced to use iTunes with an iPod if they don't want to?"

As it turns out, you can, indeed, divorce the iPod from iTunes.

Wired News has a list (titled, funnily enough, "Rescue Your Stranded Tunes"), and my favourite picks are:

Yamipod (review)
Anapod (review) &
Winamp iPod Plugin

The Winamp iPod plugin is what I'm using now, and it works perfectly.

Winamp is an old favourite of mine, and it plays FLAC, Monkey's Audio, OGG and any other DRM-free music format of your choice, lossless or otherwise. The iPod plugin  promises to eventually even transcode unsupported audio formats (like FLAC) into MP3 when you transfer them over to your iPod - automagically.

I'm all for choice, so if iTunes works for you, great. For all you malcontents out there - start your divorce proceedings!

Napoleon's Court, early 1800s.

A brilliant mathematician, Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, has solved the problem of celestial mechanics and just explained the hitherto-miraculous workings of the solar system to Napoleon. Also present is Joseph Lagrange, another prominent mathematician & astronomer.

Napoleon: "How is it that, although you say so much about the Universe, you say nothing about its Creator?"

Laplace: "[No, Sire,] I had no need of that hypothesis."

Lagrange: "Ah, but that is such a good hypothesis. It explains so many things!"

Laplace: "Indeed, Sire, Monsieur Lagrange has, with his usual sagacity, put his finger on the precise difficulty with the hypothesis: it explains everything, but predicts nothing."

----
Quotes from WikiQuote.

The New York Times has a good article on a recent science-and-religion conference that "began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told."

My favourite quote from the conference? When religion was fondly described as a crazy old aunt by a Dr. Weinberg:
“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”

Indeed. My thoughts on this later..

Over at GameIndustry.biz, Lorne Lanning does an interview about computer/video games not being influential in a wider cultural medium the way movies and music are.

It's a little whiny, but he does make a good point. At the end of the day, games are, like movies and music, a medium of expression. Given the interactivity it's possibily the richest medium of the lot, but also one that is evolving at a rapid rate.

Lorne longs for a stable technology platform so that he can focus on the story and the content, but I don't see that happening anytime soon, simply because the capabilities of the medium itself are governed by Moore's law, and hence are evolving so quickly that it's like trying to build on quicksand.

Compare, for instance, PacMan to Half-Life 2. In twenty years, game platforms have had multiple quantum leaps in expressiveness - so much so that game designers don't have the time to master these new capabilities. In contrast, the fundamental capabilites of movies haven't changed much since the first camera was invented, with sound and colour being the only notable improvements in the audience experience.

Still, I think we're reaching saturation point, and designers are going to have a little more time to master the tools of this new medium and hopefully soon, we'll start seeing some really great games that educate and enlighten as much as they entertain.

I shot this panorama in 2003 while trekking in Point Reyes National Park, which is a part of the US national park system (which is a treasure trove of refuges, including the famous Redwood Forest.)

The highlight of the picture, however, is that little speck in the centre - the moment I saw it, the lyrics from Oklahoma! popped into my head:

Ev'ry night my honey lamb and I
Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk
Makin' lazy circles in the sky

That was exactly what the hawk was doing - riding the air currents, regally gliding around and around as the sun set against the Pacific Ocean. Oh, for a telephoto lens to capture what my eyes saw!

Date:	2006-11-17 11:26
Subject:	The New Bond
Security:	Public
Mood:	excited

I'll admit that I wasn't very impressed with the new James Bond, but a homoerotic hunk-emerging-from-water-in-sexy-tights scene?

I might enjoy Casino Royale  more than I expected!

Just to feel better about my indulgence in molten Valrhona chocolate yesterday night, Forbes says "Dark Chocolate Helps Keep Blood-Clotting Dangers at Bay". Yeh!

When a spaceship approaches a planet, there are a number of paths that it could choose depending on the mission profile.

The first is a "gravitational slingshot," where the spaceship is momentarily captured by the planet's gravity, then flung off in a different direction, picking up speed as it goes along. (It's like when you catch someone's outstretched hand, swing him around, and then suddenly let him go, laughing as he flies off in another direction.)

Gravitational slingshots are important because spaceships carry limited amounts of fuel, so flinging around planets to go faster can save months of travel time. Ships have even been known to slingshot around the same planet more than once!

If, however, the mission planners want a closer look at the planet, the ship's braking thrusters fire at the opportune moment, and it enters orbit around the planet. There it may stay for a while, poking and prodding the planet with all manner of instruments and  radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum in order to learn its topology, composition and history.

Sometimes (and much more rarely), an engine burn will place the ship in an atmospheric entry trajectory. Atmospheric entry is a very delicate process, and there is only a very narrow "entry corridor" that represents the safe path down to the planet. Outside this path, the spaceship will either skip off the atmosphere (like a coin skipping off the surface of a pond) or burn up due to excessive friction - history is littered with the debris of entry mishaps.

If all goes well (i.e. no heatshield failures or metric conversion errors), the ship lands safely on the planet to begin its detailed exploration and analysis of an alien surface. Often, it's a permanent stay, lasting much longer than the original mission plan, resulting in a triumph for science and humanity.

Whatever mission, one thing stands out - the sheer complexity of guiding a spacecraft through space and time. A million things have to be planned for and executed perfectly, and smallest mistake could be fatal, so nowadays, when it seems almost routing, it's easy to miss the miracle of it all.

P.S.: A little late, but the NASA will repair the Hubble after all!