Do you love fountain pens?

March 31st, 2007 TreatsTags: Pens

Selling Pilot VP in Yellow Ochre for SGD200 – Medium Nib
Selling Sailor 1911 for SGD300 – Music Nib

Both are used but well-cared.
(You know my email.)

Someone else on Online Dating

March 30th, 2007 elsewhere

From the comments of Half Sigma on Why People Stay Single So Long. The article from NY Times isn’t half interesting as the comment by this person on online dating.

What I learned from online dating is:

1. Attractive women are extremely hard to get.
2. Attractive women are very picky because the can be.
3. I need to buy a nice condo/loft and vehicle inorder to have a chance with an attractive woman.
4. I simply cannot lower my standards because I can’t help who I like, I have no control over it.
5. I can’t get attractive women, but I can have sex with decent looking or just plain ugly women.

Match.com started out as a way for me to find a relationship. But it ended up as a way to meet average looking women to have sex with—which actually isn’t so bad of a deal.

The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature – Geoffrey Miller

March 30th, 2007 books

Ask a young man of 18 the reason for being a rock star and you would get a summary of this book. A particular strain in Darwin’s theory of evolution – specificially mate selection – is developed at length in this book. The book relies on two theories: runaway selection and the handicap principal.

Runaway selection, in short, refers to the selection process that got out of hand because the perference for an attribute may cause dibilitating effects on the survival of the species. Handicap Principle refers to the signaling by an individual reduces the chances of survival to show extremely high fitness.

Miller’s wonders about the developement of art from the point of view that art is wasteful: why would anyone want to spend time on waste? Miller developes this point with the idea that mankind pro-create for the purpose of having children. The developement of a brain can be viewed as part of a sexual ornamant due to runaway selection. (That is, large brains developed because females prefer it.) If so, the brain and all that comes with it – creative intelligence, novelty, arts and so on is not a waste but a product of female selection even if the body is handicapped by the big brain and has to consume more energy. He hints also that traditionally, where the male sex preens to attract female, a signal of a large brain (through participation or creation of arts) shows high fitness. (He said many other things relating to courtship, body size, feature preference, mating and so on , but this part was the one that attracted this art-fart.)

The book is a very interesting read, I must say. It’s the only science book I manage to read from cover to cover. However, I think Miller should consider the problem with pleasure as the starting point.

I don’t think we pro-create with the intention to ensure a line of descendents. Mankind doesn’t think long term – we have to be trained to think long term. We do it because sex is fun. We eat because we don’t enjoy the feeling of hunger, we have children because kids are fun to be around, we enjoy novelty because the false anxiety gives us a ticklish jolt.

Why would us girls think that guys who dabble in art more attractive? Art requires greater sensitivity in a person. A sensitive guy who is keen on you would pander to you and your young. He is fun to be around. Pleasure comes up again. (Look at personal ads: Good Sense Of Humour appears freqently as one of the mating requirements.)

Now, digging deeper into pleasure. We feel pleasure because the brain releases endorpines. A brain, larger or smaller in a human would release endorpines. Why do we need a large brain? It seems that brain size is an approximation of the intelligence of the species. But I don’t think that intelligence is a signal for fitness, because it would then follow that brain size would flactuate with nourishment level. Malnourished children should suffer first a shrinkage in brain size but they don’t – they just suffer a host of physical conditions. (Bloated African children comes to mind.)

This suggests that our bodies will put up a fight to retain a working brain. I think the reason is simply that the brain is mankind’s means of surviving. The preference for larger brains, signals intelligence and results in better survival prospects. Therefore it wasn’t runaway selection but that lower intelligence means reduced survival prospects, therefore even if mating choice occured, they would still die out.

Now a question I can’t figure out: why is the size of a man’s brain larger than a female brain?

The Castle In The Forest by Norman Mailer

March 29th, 2007 books

The first book I have thinking about Hitler’s brand of evil is Siegfried by Harry Mulisch was cerebal, slightly more difficult and less gossipy. This book is not so cerebal, more shocking, attempts to understand Adolf Hitler through his background and his family, all the time positing that it was the devil that made him do it.

How much is true, if the background is that shocking? A seach on google informs one that Mailer’s fiction is only the bit about the devil paying special attention to Adolf, his interactions with his family – but the skeletal outlines are all true.

Mailer knows how to shock and to create a long lasting effect of the shocking news on one’s mind. I didn’t quite enjoy the book but it was a page turner.

Update: Ted Burke’s review of the book

Foo Chee Yin

March 23rd, 2007 Obituaries

Grandfather had gone to Hainan Island to visit the ancestral tombs and on the return flight, fainted and changed position from vertical to the eternally horizontal. He was 91. A good death and a good life – the candles at the alter are suitably red.

Robert Altman – 20th Nov 2006

March 18th, 2007 Obituaries

Altman died on November 20, 2006 at age 81 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles. According to his production company in New York, Sandcastle 5 Productions, he died of complications from leukemia. Altman is survived by his wife, Kathryn Reed Altman; six children, Christine Westphal, Michael Altman, Stephen Altman, Connie Corriere, Robert Reed Altman and Matthew Altman; 12 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Bitter Over Bonuses – Today Paper 16.3.2007

March 16th, 2007 elsewhere

A friend sent this me a copy of the news report in glee. (”At last, the truth!”)

The article talk about how happy Singaporeans are about their bonuses.
5.9% were happy with what they got
17.7% expected what they got
45.9% were unsatisfied what they got
30.6% were very unsatisfied what they got

It also reported commentaries by recruiting firms warning the huge bonus musical chairs.

I’m lately checking jobsdb.com to know if the agencies are putting in ads for my workplace’s recruitment needs. The volume of ads were not significantly increased. (I use to see 2-3 pages relating to my work.) It seems that the big musical chair hasn’t come. Could it be that there is still one bank that hasn’t distributed the money? Or the musical chair has already happened last quarter with UBS sucking up priority banking people?

Out of Order

March 11th, 2007 Uncategorized

I am immensely irritated with myself. I bought tickets and forgot about the show. I was rather looking forward to it.

Music and Lyrics

March 11th, 2007 screen

The romance between the two lead characters was not quite believable and the pace rather prodding. The show is only made enjoyable by its songs – you can hear them on the site http://musicandlyrics.warnerbros.com/ The re-creation of the 80s sounds and MTV is amazing and sounds just like the early 80s – Wham! sounds. I simply can’t get rid of Pop! from my head. Then the lovely pop tune Don’t Write Off Just Yet and Way Back Into Love.

Did you know – music chap who did this, Adam Schlesinger, also wrote That Thing You Do?

Update: Lyrics available here

The History Boys

March 11th, 2007 screen

Some dramatists like to push an idea into one’s face and just so it doesn’t hurt, slam it with a bit of turkey. But to criticise these sort of plays that way is to miss the entire point and so nobody says it. History Boys handles ideas putting it as a system of belief of a person and pushing the point to a dramatic tension. It is clever in knowing that as an audience I take what I want out of it, much like the boys taking what they want from their teachers. The show was a bit of a culture shock. How did it become so twisted that the boys calmly allow Hector to grope them as a sign they are his favourites? For persons not homosexual, why aren’t they more interested in girls?

The acting is uniformedly wonderful except for the headmaster, who turned out cartoonish. The film did very well in showing the film from a time of the past. The pale school walls, drab school uniforms. Perhaps I am looking at the film from today’s eyes: the boys seem extremely confident of themselves for just being 18 year old. The know too much literature too – not in the sense of the works, which is just shockingly too much – but enough to actually recognise literature is consolation for losers. How would they know if they had not before lost? At 18, the future stretches out blindingly bright.

But this minor quality of being somewhat unrealistic, for me lifts the film to enjoy it. (I can never enjoy Jack Neo films because they never lift. They are to me as a series of depressing tirades by a nagging taxi-driver uncle.) What a sweet experience it would have been, to watch it on stage. I read the production went to Hong Kong.