Thursday, December 10, 2009
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
2 stories
2 great stories i like to share, from the words of Rory Sutherland
Frederick the Great of Prussia was very keen for the Germans to adopt the potato and to eat it, because if you had 2 sources of carbohydrates, wheat and potatoes, you get less price volatility in bread and you get a far lower risk of famine because you had 2 crops to fall back on. The only problem was it looked pretty disgusting and also 18th century Prussians ate very very little vegetables. He tried making it compulsory, but the Prussian peasantry said they couldn't get the dogs to eat this damn things, they're absolutely disgusting, good for nothing. They're even records of people being executed for refusing to grow potatoes. So he tried Plan B, the marketing approach. He declared the potato as the royal vegetable and none but the royal family could consume it and he planted it in a royal potato patch, with guards who had instructions to guard over it, night and day, but with the secret instructions of not to guard it very well. 18th century peasants know there's one pretty safe rule in life, if something's worth guarding, it's worth stealing. Before long, there was massive underground potato growing operation in Germany. What he effectively done was he rebranded the potato.
Another story of the veil. Atatürk of Turkey, mush like Nikolas Sarkozy, was very keen to discourage the wearing of the veil in Turkey to modernize it. Now, boring people would have simply banned the veil, but that would have ended with a lot of awful kickback and a hell of a lot of resistance. Now Ataturk was a lateral thinker. He made it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil.
It's not very fully, but you could see 2 things. How creative both these men were, and how effective that rebranding was to acheive what they wanted.
another example comes from signs and lights that showed you how fast you were going, with smiley faces and frowny faces that indicated whether of not you went over the speed limit. it baffels modern economists because these signs cost only 10% of a conventional speed camera to operate and work better than a fine and demerit points to your license.
it's hard to change reality, it's easy to change perception
Frederick the Great of Prussia was very keen for the Germans to adopt the potato and to eat it, because if you had 2 sources of carbohydrates, wheat and potatoes, you get less price volatility in bread and you get a far lower risk of famine because you had 2 crops to fall back on. The only problem was it looked pretty disgusting and also 18th century Prussians ate very very little vegetables. He tried making it compulsory, but the Prussian peasantry said they couldn't get the dogs to eat this damn things, they're absolutely disgusting, good for nothing. They're even records of people being executed for refusing to grow potatoes. So he tried Plan B, the marketing approach. He declared the potato as the royal vegetable and none but the royal family could consume it and he planted it in a royal potato patch, with guards who had instructions to guard over it, night and day, but with the secret instructions of not to guard it very well. 18th century peasants know there's one pretty safe rule in life, if something's worth guarding, it's worth stealing. Before long, there was massive underground potato growing operation in Germany. What he effectively done was he rebranded the potato.
Another story of the veil. Atatürk of Turkey, mush like Nikolas Sarkozy, was very keen to discourage the wearing of the veil in Turkey to modernize it. Now, boring people would have simply banned the veil, but that would have ended with a lot of awful kickback and a hell of a lot of resistance. Now Ataturk was a lateral thinker. He made it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil.
It's not very fully, but you could see 2 things. How creative both these men were, and how effective that rebranding was to acheive what they wanted.
another example comes from signs and lights that showed you how fast you were going, with smiley faces and frowny faces that indicated whether of not you went over the speed limit. it baffels modern economists because these signs cost only 10% of a conventional speed camera to operate and work better than a fine and demerit points to your license.
it's hard to change reality, it's easy to change perception
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Saturday, December 05, 2009
beauty
yesterday before i faded into unconsciousness, i decided to think a bit about the idea of beauty. by decided i meant just so happened, and by faded into consciousness, i meant held against my will while someone injects doxylamine in to the artery in my neck.
once, while i was surfing the net, i came across an article that talked about "rating" women based on how they look. As sexist as that may have sounded, there is probably more merit in it than we care to admit. with that said, i have tried "rating" people, not just women, only once. When? you'll never figure out.
most of what i say (write) would be about women, because i prefer looking at women. enough said.
anyway, i think beauty, the outward kind, has really 4 categories for women. there's the "cute" type of women, which evolution would have us believe that we find them aesthetically pleasing because they look like newly-born or the young, creating a hormonal reaction in your brain to, at least want to, "take care" of them. it's basically why China zoos will never go poor as long as they have a steady supply of pandas and why the German zoo may soon be since, well, since this ...
people that i would consider cute, would definitely be different from whom i would consider in other categories, which i'll talk about later. some defining characteristics were obviously young age (or at least looking like), and i can't really think of any others because i'm sucked in by how cute she looks. anyway, some examples are people like Hayden Panetierre and Lindsay Lohan before she got drugged up.
Another category i would make up out of thin air is the "hot" type of women. it is essentially calling people sexy, which for some reason not socially acceptable anymore. i think just by describing people as sexy brings another "viewpoint" to what we perceive as aesthetically pleasing, so i shall not delve into that anymore than i should. some people that would be called hot would be , well , Megan Fox, and some other people, i guess.
"Beautiful" is also another category. i use it to describe very elegant and classy style of beauty. beautiful is what i would use to describe a date to prom, but only when she is wearing a prom dress that does not look like it's made with less fabric than a handkerchief. the one person that i would describe as beautiful, but not in the other 3 categories, and i would be a little (very) biased is Emma Watson. Also, just so you're not mistaken that people can only look good in a evening dress gown thing, here's another where she still retains beauty without sacrificing any time picking out a intricate dress.
The last category would be "pretty". just to be clear, there's a difference between pretty and beautiful. let me explain. someone who would be described as pretty would be one who looks very girl-next-door-ish, a very close to home feeling when you see her. A little like that old high school crush from back in the day that always seem to be in the movies. A simple way to tell the difference between "beautiful" and "pretty" is the difference between Emma Watson and Jessica Alba. Pretty tends to have a effect of making people breathe a sigh of "idontknowwhatthehellthatis", then their eyes go into dreamy mode.
now that i've fully wasted my time talking about something that is only marginally important. let's talk about actually "rating" women, the ridiculously sexist way of giving numbers to girls based on how they look, all in the comfort of your own brain. and they don't even have real units, they are just arbitrary numbers that don't have any relation to anything
For some reason i feel compelled that i must admit that i have different tastes and standards in what i perceive as beauty. Many times have i looked at people, astonished and (vice versa) when they say so-and-so looks better than so-and-so when i thought it was the other way around.
originally i wanted to present this information in the form of a bell curve, where i showed that my "median" shifted either left or right. but then i realised that beauty extends beyond a linear scale of what can be called "eye candy" and "my eyes are bleeding from the inside". also, a shifting of the bell curve would imply that my standards were either lower or higher than my peers.
what i'm trying to say is that what i think is beautiful can sometimes be nowhere near what my friends or even the majority would feel is beautiful. everytime i see a person and i would instantly figure out whether i think the person is beautiful or i think the MAJORITY thinks is beautiful. take the example of Megan fox. when i (like the rest of the world) first saw her in the Transformer movie, i was pretty meh about it. i didn't know much about the rest of the worlds' opinion at that time though, simply because the movie came out after the o levels, meaning that the after-movie buzz could not really be shared with anyone since i'm a hermit that stays at home most of the time. so, i never really expected much hooplah about her anyway. when the Transformers 2 movie came out, i came to be rather surprised (and slightly hungry) at the fact that Megan Fox has become the de facto standard for beauty that all media seems to use. i found that fact to be that using her as a basis for what a goddess should look like is slightly discomforting, simply because i don't put her on that pedestal that everyone else seems to be doing. Even once when i was asked the question "what if a girl that was so hot, like as hot as Megan Fox, decided to talk to you and ask you out, even though you have never talked to her before, what would you do?" i felt that i needed to surpress the instinct to point out that she is not pretty, just to conform with everyone elses' beliefs, much like prison.
To understand why i don't think Megan Fox is hot, per se, is to understand that she does not look natural. not like "of course she's not natural, she's a goddess.", it's more of a she's looks airbrushed, and bronze, like shining. also, she's sounds stupid, or at least, she sounds American public school stupid. that's over-generalising, but that's about as descriptive as i can be as to why i don't think she's that hot. i mean she doesn't have any physical deformity, so i can't really point that out and laugh at her. she may be "hot" but she's not the 10 everyone thinks she is, she may be the 6 or 7, but she has the body that was destinined to be a model, and that's not really a compliment, it's more of a fact, like how some people look like they were meant to be bodybuilders and weightlifters even though you're not really complimenting them.
i have found many many differences between who i think are beautiful and what (i perceive as) the majority thinks is beautiful. which is really really strange to me. often times i found myself saying to other men, hey this girl is pretty, or at least prettier than (whomever you keep bringing up), give her some credit. afterwhich it usually fades away, never to be heard again. i know beauty is subjective, but even then, there has to be some kind of basis for what me and the rest of the world agrees with. it cannot be healthy to often find yourself disagreeing with everyone over something like this. what i'm trying to say is that there has to be an underlying "condition" if you will, something that we can all agree on.
this obvious deviation of tastes between myself and the rest of the world is quite difficult to demonstrate in celebrities simply because they are celebrities simply because they can do what they do on the idiot box or the silver screen without making people want to throw up. i would love to do so by describing people i have met in real life and know by their first name, but that would be unfair and biased, not to mention incredibly demeaning to them.
so i'm going to do it anyway. unfortunately for people who only know me in JC won't understand this story so feel free to put a blindfold over you head and scroll down roughly 3 and a half times on the mouse wheel. that should be enough. remember when we were sec 3 and all through out our upper sec years, we would always proclaim to the heavens that all the pretty girls went to 3/4 Unity (which is a class). Normally i would disagree the hell out of the guy, but then i had no choice but to realise that if you simply turned you head around and saw the other classes, then by simple math, you'd too have to admit that all the pretty girls went to that class. Now in that class, were a few girls that would be infamously known as "the-people-we-would-always-use-as-a-reference-to-pretty-girls-in-our-class group". In other words, they came to become generic names for (comparisons to) pretty girls, like Oprah is to talkshow hosts, scotch is to tape, Maggi is to instant noodles. So for some reason, the majority of not only guys but also girls always referred to these few people as the most beautiful in the school, which truly baffles me, because they aren't THAT pretty, even by school standards, they were like at most a 7.
But unlike Megan Fox, i had a more easily explainable reason for why they aren't as pretty as legends claim them to be. one, for the instances of not getting sued, shall be named Wriscillia. (now my ass is safe from any and all legal matters) she was this girl was okay in looks, but never really stood out to me as someone really really attractive, and you know this because if you were to look out into a crowd, especially so if you were from a slightly elevated position, you (should) instantly see the most attractive person out there. For her, you never really did. Also, if you tried really hard to see why she's as beautiful as they say (like i did), you'd see that she actually looks like either she's only sleeping for 2 hours a day, or she's drugged or she's messed up. Another girl, Lhelsa, would on the other hand, be among guys' top five, if only she did not sound like someone who is really uptight (and bitchy). Both what she says, and what her voice sounds like points to my "conclusion". so i shall not delve into the matter any longer.
Like most (legally sane) I have my own "list" of people i think are the most attractive. I wouldn't go as far as to call them my "eye candy" simply because if i did, then i would be doing them a disfavour by not looking at them enough, as proven by my many friends who constantly gaze dreamily at their own eye candy, which is fortunate because at least their eye candy doesn't know them in person, also they have abs made out of iron and painted with the finest of bronzes, which in case you don't know what i'm talking about is the korean pop groups like (i have no idea who they are).
I would be rather fine with you, any of my loyal readers, that's all five of you, if you asked me who my top 5 were. of course, stastically, you would only know 2 and a half of them, which is sad, since the other half said you looked kind of cute.
once, while i was surfing the net, i came across an article that talked about "rating" women based on how they look. As sexist as that may have sounded, there is probably more merit in it than we care to admit. with that said, i have tried "rating" people, not just women, only once. When? you'll never figure out.
most of what i say (write) would be about women, because i prefer looking at women. enough said.
anyway, i think beauty, the outward kind, has really 4 categories for women. there's the "cute" type of women, which evolution would have us believe that we find them aesthetically pleasing because they look like newly-born or the young, creating a hormonal reaction in your brain to, at least want to, "take care" of them. it's basically why China zoos will never go poor as long as they have a steady supply of pandas and why the German zoo may soon be since, well, since this ...
people that i would consider cute, would definitely be different from whom i would consider in other categories, which i'll talk about later. some defining characteristics were obviously young age (or at least looking like), and i can't really think of any others because i'm sucked in by how cute she looks. anyway, some examples are people like Hayden Panetierre and Lindsay Lohan before she got drugged up.
Another category i would make up out of thin air is the "hot" type of women. it is essentially calling people sexy, which for some reason not socially acceptable anymore. i think just by describing people as sexy brings another "viewpoint" to what we perceive as aesthetically pleasing, so i shall not delve into that anymore than i should. some people that would be called hot would be , well , Megan Fox, and some other people, i guess.
"Beautiful" is also another category. i use it to describe very elegant and classy style of beauty. beautiful is what i would use to describe a date to prom, but only when she is wearing a prom dress that does not look like it's made with less fabric than a handkerchief. the one person that i would describe as beautiful, but not in the other 3 categories, and i would be a little (very) biased is Emma Watson. Also, just so you're not mistaken that people can only look good in a evening dress gown thing, here's another where she still retains beauty without sacrificing any time picking out a intricate dress.
The last category would be "pretty". just to be clear, there's a difference between pretty and beautiful. let me explain. someone who would be described as pretty would be one who looks very girl-next-door-ish, a very close to home feeling when you see her. A little like that old high school crush from back in the day that always seem to be in the movies. A simple way to tell the difference between "beautiful" and "pretty" is the difference between Emma Watson and Jessica Alba. Pretty tends to have a effect of making people breathe a sigh of "idontknowwhatthehellthatis", then their eyes go into dreamy mode.
now that i've fully wasted my time talking about something that is only marginally important. let's talk about actually "rating" women, the ridiculously sexist way of giving numbers to girls based on how they look, all in the comfort of your own brain. and they don't even have real units, they are just arbitrary numbers that don't have any relation to anything
For some reason i feel compelled that i must admit that i have different tastes and standards in what i perceive as beauty. Many times have i looked at people, astonished and (vice versa) when they say so-and-so looks better than so-and-so when i thought it was the other way around.
originally i wanted to present this information in the form of a bell curve, where i showed that my "median" shifted either left or right. but then i realised that beauty extends beyond a linear scale of what can be called "eye candy" and "my eyes are bleeding from the inside". also, a shifting of the bell curve would imply that my standards were either lower or higher than my peers.
what i'm trying to say is that what i think is beautiful can sometimes be nowhere near what my friends or even the majority would feel is beautiful. everytime i see a person and i would instantly figure out whether i think the person is beautiful or i think the MAJORITY thinks is beautiful. take the example of Megan fox. when i (like the rest of the world) first saw her in the Transformer movie, i was pretty meh about it. i didn't know much about the rest of the worlds' opinion at that time though, simply because the movie came out after the o levels, meaning that the after-movie buzz could not really be shared with anyone since i'm a hermit that stays at home most of the time. so, i never really expected much hooplah about her anyway. when the Transformers 2 movie came out, i came to be rather surprised (and slightly hungry) at the fact that Megan Fox has become the de facto standard for beauty that all media seems to use. i found that fact to be that using her as a basis for what a goddess should look like is slightly discomforting, simply because i don't put her on that pedestal that everyone else seems to be doing. Even once when i was asked the question "what if a girl that was so hot, like as hot as Megan Fox, decided to talk to you and ask you out, even though you have never talked to her before, what would you do?" i felt that i needed to surpress the instinct to point out that she is not pretty, just to conform with everyone elses' beliefs, much like prison.
To understand why i don't think Megan Fox is hot, per se, is to understand that she does not look natural. not like "of course she's not natural, she's a goddess.", it's more of a she's looks airbrushed, and bronze, like shining. also, she's sounds stupid, or at least, she sounds American public school stupid. that's over-generalising, but that's about as descriptive as i can be as to why i don't think she's that hot. i mean she doesn't have any physical deformity, so i can't really point that out and laugh at her. she may be "hot" but she's not the 10 everyone thinks she is, she may be the 6 or 7, but she has the body that was destinined to be a model, and that's not really a compliment, it's more of a fact, like how some people look like they were meant to be bodybuilders and weightlifters even though you're not really complimenting them.
i have found many many differences between who i think are beautiful and what (i perceive as) the majority thinks is beautiful. which is really really strange to me. often times i found myself saying to other men, hey this girl is pretty, or at least prettier than (whomever you keep bringing up), give her some credit. afterwhich it usually fades away, never to be heard again. i know beauty is subjective, but even then, there has to be some kind of basis for what me and the rest of the world agrees with. it cannot be healthy to often find yourself disagreeing with everyone over something like this. what i'm trying to say is that there has to be an underlying "condition" if you will, something that we can all agree on.
this obvious deviation of tastes between myself and the rest of the world is quite difficult to demonstrate in celebrities simply because they are celebrities simply because they can do what they do on the idiot box or the silver screen without making people want to throw up. i would love to do so by describing people i have met in real life and know by their first name, but that would be unfair and biased, not to mention incredibly demeaning to them.
so i'm going to do it anyway. unfortunately for people who only know me in JC won't understand this story so feel free to put a blindfold over you head and scroll down roughly 3 and a half times on the mouse wheel. that should be enough. remember when we were sec 3 and all through out our upper sec years, we would always proclaim to the heavens that all the pretty girls went to 3/4 Unity (which is a class). Normally i would disagree the hell out of the guy, but then i had no choice but to realise that if you simply turned you head around and saw the other classes, then by simple math, you'd too have to admit that all the pretty girls went to that class. Now in that class, were a few girls that would be infamously known as "the-people-we-would-always-use-as-a-reference-to-pretty-girls-in-our-class group". In other words, they came to become generic names for (comparisons to) pretty girls, like Oprah is to talkshow hosts, scotch is to tape, Maggi is to instant noodles. So for some reason, the majority of not only guys but also girls always referred to these few people as the most beautiful in the school, which truly baffles me, because they aren't THAT pretty, even by school standards, they were like at most a 7.
But unlike Megan Fox, i had a more easily explainable reason for why they aren't as pretty as legends claim them to be. one, for the instances of not getting sued, shall be named Wriscillia. (now my ass is safe from any and all legal matters) she was this girl was okay in looks, but never really stood out to me as someone really really attractive, and you know this because if you were to look out into a crowd, especially so if you were from a slightly elevated position, you (should) instantly see the most attractive person out there. For her, you never really did. Also, if you tried really hard to see why she's as beautiful as they say (like i did), you'd see that she actually looks like either she's only sleeping for 2 hours a day, or she's drugged or she's messed up. Another girl, Lhelsa, would on the other hand, be among guys' top five, if only she did not sound like someone who is really uptight (and bitchy). Both what she says, and what her voice sounds like points to my "conclusion". so i shall not delve into the matter any longer.
Like most (legally sane) I have my own "list" of people i think are the most attractive. I wouldn't go as far as to call them my "eye candy" simply because if i did, then i would be doing them a disfavour by not looking at them enough, as proven by my many friends who constantly gaze dreamily at their own eye candy, which is fortunate because at least their eye candy doesn't know them in person, also they have abs made out of iron and painted with the finest of bronzes, which in case you don't know what i'm talking about is the korean pop groups like (i have no idea who they are).
I would be rather fine with you, any of my loyal readers, that's all five of you, if you asked me who my top 5 were. of course, stastically, you would only know 2 and a half of them, which is sad, since the other half said you looked kind of cute.
Friday, December 04, 2009
My Safe-Word
"Bona-Fide" will now be my new safeword.
if i ever say that to you in the form of a sentence, i.e "this is my bona-fide new date" or "my mom's at the door, Bona-fide!!!" or "I'm held against my will, Bona-fide."
basically, if you ever hear that word out of my mouth, it means to shut up and find a way to talk to me in private because i can't speak of said matter in front of other people.
so the appropriate response should be "dude, can you help me with something, far far away from here"
this safe word because nobody really knows what it means and we need a way to say alert without giving it away.
if i ever say that to you in the form of a sentence, i.e "this is my bona-fide new date" or "my mom's at the door, Bona-fide!!!" or "I'm held against my will, Bona-fide."
basically, if you ever hear that word out of my mouth, it means to shut up and find a way to talk to me in private because i can't speak of said matter in front of other people.
so the appropriate response should be "dude, can you help me with something, far far away from here"
this safe word because nobody really knows what it means and we need a way to say alert without giving it away.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
And the eleven day countdown starts now.
with 11 days remaining.
within these 11 days, i intend to :
play soccer with friends
buy army things
watch a movie with friends
play pool with friends
edit a photo
finish fallout 3
pack up my books
and then get disappointed over doing none of these things
within these 11 days, i intend to :
play soccer with friends
buy army things
watch a movie with friends
play pool with friends
edit a photo
finish fallout 3
pack up my books
and then get disappointed over doing none of these things
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