Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The Truth about College

Got this a few years ago. A good read! Haha....


The Truth About College:

College is a bunch of rooms where you sit for two thousand hours or so and try to memorize things. The two thousand hours are spread out over four years. You spend the rest of the time sleeping, partying, and trying to get dates.

Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:
1. Things you will need to know in later life (two hours).
2. Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours).

The latter are the things you learn in classes whose names end in -ology, -sophy, -istry, -ics, and so on. The idea is, you memorize these things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to stay in college for the rest of your life.

After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most thing about. Here is a very important piece of advice: be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers. This means you must not major in mathematics, physics, biology, or chemistry, or geology because these subjects involve actual facts.

If, for example, you major in mathematics, you're going to wander into class one day and the professor will say: "Define the cosine integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid binary axis, and extrapolate your result to five significant vertices." If you don't come up with exactly the answer the professor has in mind, you fail.

The same is true of chemistry: if you write in your exam book that carbon and hydrogen combine to form oak, your professor will flunk you. He wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists have agreed on. Scientists are extremely snotty about this.

So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, psychology, and sociology -- subjects in which nobody really understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve virtually no actual facts. I attended classes in all these subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each:

ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have read little snippets of just before class. Here is a tip on how to get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say that Moby Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand times. So in your paper, you say Moby Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with
Lunatic interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.

PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.

PSYCHOLOGY: This involves talking about rats and dreams. Psychologists are obsessed with rats and dreams. I once spent an entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a certain sequence, then training my roommate to do the same thing. The rat learned much faster. My roommate is now a doctor. If you like rats or dreams, and above all if you dream about rats, you should major in psychology.

SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away the number one subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never once heard or read a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into scientific-sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you'll have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write:

"Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a causal relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory behavior forms."

If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large government grant.

More Stupid Elites.

TEMASEK AND TRANSPARENCY: LIM HWEE HUA
05:55 AM Aug 12, 2009

Some Singaporeans are sore that they do not know enough about how "their money" is being invested by Temasek Holdings, acknowledged Singapore's first female Cabinet minister, Mrs Lim Hwee Hua.


"We have to ask ourselves if transparency is an end in itself, or if it is the means to an end," said the Minister in the Prime Minister's Office to Petir.

"If all our cards are revealed in pursuit of complete transparency, does that serve the purpose of having Temasek and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation manage the reserves well? The goal is really to value-add for all stakeholders.

"It is reasonable for people to ask questions, but ultimately the government holds the responsibility for deciding how much to reveal in our best interests."


I don’t know how she became a Minister. Gosh but anyway you just have to be a yes-man or yes-woman in this case to be one anyway.

Hwee Hua is sprouting nonsense!

I almost fell off my chair when I read this article. Can’t believe one of our Ministers actually said this kinda thing in public.

Firstly every Singaporean has the right to know what is happening to their hard earn money.

"If all our cards are revealed in pursuit of complete transparency, does that serve the purpose of having Temasek and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation manage the reserves well? The goal is really to value-add for all stakeholders.”

Er…what does transparency got to do with managing the reserve well? Hwee Hua actually is telling you that once we let you know what they are doing with our money, GIC and Temasek will have problem managing our reserve. Huh????????????????

"It is reasonable for people to ask questions, but ultimately the government holds the responsibility for deciding how much to reveal in our best interests."

Bull Shit! It is the right our the people to ask questions and decide ON THEIR OWN GOD GIVEN FREE WILL what is best for our interest.

If I read between the lines, I afraid the goverment interest is indeed not the people but for themselve, and they are afraid people will just pack up and leave for good.