I subscribe to the RSS feed from Snopes.com: New Urban Legends. Pretty interesting and you get a good laugh from some of the more outrageous tall tales going around.

In the past two days I’ve actually had three people message me with links to a story that has been picked up by several news sites. The Age and Ninemsn.com carried stories on Japanese being fooled in a poodle scam. The story goes that cunning dealers have been selling sheep - yes, sheep - to clueless Japanese, passing them off as poodles. Apparently since sheep aren’t native to Japan, they can’t differentiate.

Seriously - the Japanese aren’t stupid! They invented the Playstation, Nintendo and anime! And as Snopes points out, even schoolchildren would know what sheep look like from books. Shame on you people who believed this!

P.S. While on the subject of Japanese urban legends, those skirts-with-underwear-pattern pictures that circulate are staged/fakes. So are the ones with “sharking”. The reports about a Japanese fertility festival are true, though…

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[Update]
You can read theCICAK’s “Ijok Exclusive” for a hands-on take on the issue.

Recently, the media carried articles on the lack of registered voters. You may remember my post on registering to vote. There are 5 million (actually 4,999,999 million since I registered) voters who are eligible but haven’t registered.

DPM Najib said that unregistered voters were “depriving themselves of the right to determine who is worthy to govern our country… We must fight this public apathy.”

The Electoral commission was considering implementing SMS registration for voters. Said the Sun: “Hopefully when this is allowed, young Malaysians, wherever they are, will register the day they celebrate their 21st birthday ­making it their first act on becoming adults.”

Today’s Sun has an article titled Politics in campus under watch. Local universities are setting up committees to monitor students who are getting involved in politics. I quote (emphasis added):

Secretariat chairman Prof Datuk Dr Mohd Wahid Samsudin, who is also the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia deputy VC for student affairs and alumni, said students are prohibited from associating themselves with any political party, regardless of whether it was from the opposition or the Barisan Nasional.

“The Higher Education Ministry has instructed us to look at student activities to ensure they are not actively involved in political parties or activities,” he told theSun.

“It is an offence as stated clearly under Section 15 of the Universities and University Colleges Act (UUCA) 1971.”

The section states that “no university student shall express support or do anything which may be construed as expressing support, sympathy or opposition to any political party“.

Whoa… hold on. Many university students are over the voting age and we are being blasted because many young people don’t vote or are apathetic about it. But apparently, when we do register we must also vote without supporting any political party? Sure or not? If this is another “students must study and do nothing else” thing then hey, don’t blame us if we graduate as people who are politically ignorant, or migrate wherever the grass is greener. Because when we become wage-earners we need to earn money and nothing else. You teach, we learn, we apply.

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Get a keyboard like mine:

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On April 20th Pope Benedict XVI reversed an 800-year old Catholic tradition: the teaching of limbo.

Limbo is a place “between Heaven and Hell” and comes in two flavours: Patriach class, for the good people who died before Jesus’ Ressurection; and Child class, for infants and people who were mentally unhealthy. According to wiki: .

Saint Thomas Aquinas described the limbo of children as an eternal state of natural joy, untempered by any sense of loss at how much greater their joy might have been had they been baptized.

So it’s a place of “natural” happiness, just less happy than they could have been.

Limbo is or was basically an ad hoc solution for the question of how God could still be “good” if he sent babies to burn, because of their original sin. The Catholic News Service (CNS) reports:

“People find it increasingly difficult to accept that God is just and merciful if he excludes infants, who have no personal sins, from eternal happiness…Parents in particular can experience grief and feelings of guilt when they doubt their unbaptized children are with God.”

Saint Augustine taught in the 5th century that infants who died unbaptized would go to hell, it was only in the 13th century that the concept of limbo took hold.

The CNS report begins:

After several years of study, the Vatican’s International Theological Commission said there are good reasons to hope that babies who die without being baptized go to heaven.

This is how it ends (emphases added):

“Rather, there are reasons to hope that God will save these infants precisely because it was not possible to do for them that what would have been most desirable — to baptize them in the faith of the church and incorporate them visibly into the body of Christ,” it said.

The commission said hopefulness was not the same as certainty about the destiny of such infants.

“It must be clearly acknowledged that the church does not have sure knowledge about the salvation of unbaptized infants who die,” it said.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, was president of the commission and head of the doctrinal congregation when the commission began studying the question of limbo in a systematic way in 2004.

Questions:

1. How do you “study” limbo “in a systematic way“, over “years“?
2. Isn’t the Pope supposed to be the “bishop of Rome”, the “Vicar of Christ”, “Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church”, and a whole lot of other things? Doesn’t he have a direct line to God?

The whole thing about “hope” is irritating. Since when did “hope” become a synonym for “I don’t know”? I thought the church was supposed to resolve doctrinal matters, not “hope” that it’s right.

And as Slate magazine asks: What happened to all the babies who used to be in limbo?

Oh for all you Protestants out there, don’t get smug: no concrete answers there either - or differing ones anyway, depending on whether you subscribe to Calvinism (God knows whether the babies would have made the choice to believe or not) or Arminianism (Babies go to heaven - in which case the most merciful thing a parent could do is to kill their children). How you define “original sin” also counts.

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From last Wednesday’s Sun on whether spending government (i.e. the public’s) resources on huge allocations to places where by-elections are being held is illegal (emphasis added):

“Morally, it is wrong but technically, it is not,” Malaysians for Free and Fair Elections (Mafrel) chairman Abdul Malek Hussin said in an interview today.

“This reflects a serious discrepancy in Malaysian election law because it does not clearly prohibit public resources from being utilised for campaigning,” he said, comparing this to other democracies, including India, where the law provides for government officials to be prosecuted.
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Voters in Machap benefited from development projects and promises because of its recently concluded by-election.

The Selangor government announced today a RM36 million development allocation for Ijok where a by-election will be held on April 28.

Now, from today’s Sun (”Najib announces RM3.5m for mosques, suraus, schools in Kg Jaya Setia”):

The Barisan National (BN) is leaving nothing to chance in Kampung Jaya Setia within the Ijok constituency.

Yesterday, Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak announced a special RM3.5 million allocation from the Prime Minister’s Department for seven mosques, 16 suraus and six schools for the constituency.

“Although there has not been any request for these but we feel that we need to do this as a sign of the BN’s commitment,” he said during a ceramah in Kampung Jaya Setia.

Even though the BN won the Ijok state seat in the 2004 elections, the party lost in Kampung Jaya Setia to Parti Keadilan Rakyat by 50 votes.

But in the Star (”DPM: Fighting corruption a national mission”):

KUALA LUMPUR: Fighting corruption remains a national mission and the Government is all out to eradicate graft.

“Some people might be quick to say that the Government is not serious in fighting corruption or that the Prime Minister is the only person speaking on this subject,” said Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak.

Well no shit genius, it’s not that the Prime Minister is the only person speaking on this subject, it’s that all you people are only speaking about the subject!

[Edit] LKS picked up on this too. You know what they say about great minds…

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Sorry I won’t be able to update with anything substantial for the next week or so…busy with assignments.

LKS’s blogs today about Revathi Masoosai/Siti Fatimah - if you haven’t read the news, she deconverted from Islam years ago, and the authorities found out about her status after she gave birth. Her marriage is unregistered because her husband would have had to convert to Islam.

Her 100-day remand by the Malacca Syariah Court has been extended another 80 days. The reason? “She did not cooperate” (Read: Didn’t want to de-deconvert from Islam). Poor baby.

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I read a blog today about Sitemeter installing “extra” stuff on the clients that load pages with the Sitemeter code.

Digging a little on the Net found more information: Apparently Statcounter, a competing website counter provider, was approached by an advertiser and offered $ to install data miners in all member sites. From their original post:

A few months back, StatCounter was approached by an advertiser, offered lots of $$$, and asked to include a spyware cookie on all of our member sites…we refused on the spot.

You install StatCounter to track visitors to your site NOT to open yourself and your visitors up to being spied upon by phantom advertising corporations.

It appears, however, that other players in the world of webstats were happy to take up this offer…

We were shocked to discover just today that another well known stats provider is allowing up to 9 cookies to be installed in the browser of every visitor that hits one of their member websites. This means that the provider is making money by transmitting data on you and your visitors to a third party advertiser. Not only that, but to add insult to injury, the cookies are causing the member websites to load very slowly too.

Although Statcounter didn’t name the “other well known stats provider”, it didn’t take long for people to realize that it was Sitemeter, which led to people migrating away in droves. You can read an explanation from Sitemeter here (in the comments section).

To make things more clear for those who aren’t tech-savvy, most stat counters work by putting a cookie in the browsers of everyone who visits your page. This is so that the stat counters can identify unique users. What Sitemeter does is to place nine additional cookies from advertisers in your visitors’ browsers, not to track their visits to your page, but to track their browsing habits, which is valuable to advertising companies.

Sure, you can opt-out from this data mining (which is ironically done by placing another cookie) if you visit a page that they’re not going to tell you about unless you ask, but the point is that in cyberspace, many people value their privacy. In their eyes, Sitemeter has sold them out.

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MMU introduces a twist in its Engineers and Society course this year: as an assignment, all students are given MMU-hosted blogs, and have to update them regularly, as well as read their classmates’ posts. Link here [Might only be accessible from Malaysia].

This project is the brainchild of Pau Kiu Nai, who holds a bachelor’s degree from Michigan Tech and a Masters of Management from IIUM, and has been an MMU lecturer since 1999. When asked how he came up with the idea, he said that having taught the subject for a number of years, he observed that students needed to interact more. He was also worried about the non-technical skills of MMU graduates. “From the feedback from industries, our students are weak in reporting or writing”, he observed. “Blog(ging) is the best way to encourage them to write”.

Mr. Pau’s class, like many others, comprises students from varying majors and years of study. By enforcing a system where students are required to blog regularly, and receive bonus points for commenting and rating fellow bloggers’ posts, students learn more about their peers - and maybe themselves as well.

To date the students have logged about 3,000 posts and more than 35,000 comments - not bad for a 10-mark assignment! Yes, there are the uncooperative ones who plagiarize articles off the Net and form “I rate you high, you rate me high” conspiracies. And the general level of English is hardly stellar. But by and large the students seem to be embracing the idea. Nearly all of them have uploaded photo avatars, and are posting on practically every subject under the sun: pet hedgehogs, stacking Pizza Hut salads, mountain hiking, stringing for a local paper, university events, becoming a cowboy, baby pictures, the ubiquitous love stories, and many more. Lecturers and tutors are regularly reading their students’ blogs - not merely to criticize or grade, but to know them better. Pau says the posts that are “written from the heart” are particularly memorable. He also pays attention to any complaints and posts that need moderating.

Some students have requested that their blogs be made permanent and retained in the system even after they finish the subject. Pau is also considering converting the existing system into a more formal one for all MMU students if the response is good enough.

The blog system is based on a modified Wordpress engine and is hosted in MMU. Popular blog posts, as well as blogs that have not been “peer-reviewed” are highlighted. Various tweaks were also made to tailor it to the assignment needs and to make it run faster.

Pau says that blogging can be a new teaching tool. “I’ve always believed learning can be fun”.

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“Once a Free, always a Free”

Any of my ex-PFS mates who read that would be rolling their eyes at the oh-so-creative slogan we used to hear back then. And we always agree that our alma mater is going downhill - then again, maybe the generations before us thought the same thing…

But in some people the school spirit is still running strong! ntsocialism has a great post on how he discovered a car (or rather, a pickup truck) with the magic registration number PFS 1816. 1816 is the year Penang Free School was founded, making it the oldest school in SE Asia.

Mr. Lim Yew Meng, the owner of the registration number, is a modest and cheerful chemist who owns a pharmacy in Balik Pulau, Penang. Born and bred in Penang, he underwent his formal high school education in Penang Free School and completed his final year in school in 1983 under the guidance and leadership of the then headmaster, Mr. G. Krishna Iyer.
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Amusingly enough, his three weeks old car has already been hit twice by unknown drivers - to which I responded, “Hmm! Must be them Xavierans!!”

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Apparently it was closed down for about three hours today after police received a tip-off. The International Herald Tribune has a story on it.

Prank or near-miss? …

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