If you thought inference questions were tough...

I remember those buggers in the GP comprehensions - the RJ papers would require you to draw all kinds of inferences from the placement of a comma, or a slight change of tone or register. But this takes the cake: the New Yorker's cartoon IQ test. There're 5 cartoons whose punchlines are incredibly obscure, and you have to pick a reason (out of 4 choices) why it's supposed to make sense. Don't be depressed if you don't score too highly.

Guess who?

Unlike Tony Blair, he lacks charm; he is not one of the beautiful people; his Scottish accent grates on many English ears; he resents being depicted as fat by cartoonists; he comes across as cold and even unnatural – his jaw seems to detach itself in a strange manner when he inhales while speaking.

As I read this (taken from this Foreign Policy article), I started to pity Gordon Brown. And by the last one - the thing about his jaw - the writer degenerates beyond mere character assassination and plumbs the depths of death-by-thousand-cuts. Owtch.

Kahlua

Zoroaster got it half right. Life is a desperate struggle between two bitterly opposed polarities - not good and bad, nor truth and falsehood; they don't come into the picture, they are irrelevancies - we're talking about love and emptiness; ecstacy and depression; work and pleasure; opacity and perspicuity; coffee and alcohol.

Coffee and alcohol. There are but two humours - coffee and alcohol - and life's struggles are the simple tension between them. Without them, one is bereft, and in the darkness of uninitiated childhood. With either, one is unbalanced, and sees only a dim half of what life may be.

But marry both in one (if something so perfect may be imagined) and you catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of the ineffable and the infinite. And kahlua is a reminder of this fundamental duality of the human condition.

brahms piano concerto (again)

Now my dream is slowly coming true. I've played through a near-perfect Brahms piano concerto. At that kind of level I've realised that technical proficiency is far from enough - and face it, my technical proficiency is far from enough. But being in the right frame of mind changes things, helps one transcend one's limitations, if only a bit. 

I've realised that to play that Brahms well, I've got to feel like all the pain and sorrow in the world is crystallising within me, and ignore everything else but that state of induced agony. Now gotta go memorise the thing and get familiar with the tuttis and entries and everything, and hopefully I'll do something about it next year.

Amoretti - Sonnet XXX

My love is like to ice, and I to fire;
how comes it then that this her cold so great
is not dissolv'd through my so hot desire,
but harder grows the more I her entreat?

Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
is not delay'd by her heart frozen cold:
but that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
and feel my flames augmented manifold?

What more miraculous thing may be told
that fire which all things melts, should harden ice:
and ice which is congeal'd with senseless cold,

should kindle fire by wonderful device.
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
that it can alter all the course of kind.

Edmund Spenser

one-man campaign of disinformation

Andy Ho's one-man campaign of disinformation has done it again. (For more examples of his egregious errors of fact and logic look here. Or Google his name. If anyone sees an online petition calling for his dismissal I'd be enormously grateful - in fact, I might write one myself.)

In his latest column (yes he has a regular weekly column!) he now suggests that you can catch cancer. This is nothing but alarmist, irresponsible disinformation of the highest order. And he is a trained doctor.

Yes, some forms of cancer may develop from infections - for instance cervical cancer almost always develops from a HPV infection (not to say that catching HPV invariably leads to cervical cancer); hepatitis B or C may lead to liver cancer - but the causes of cancer are far more diverse and complex than Andy Ho attempts to convey.

He suggests, for example, that the RI guy who died from leukemia a couple of months back might have caught some kind of virus (not mentioned in the article, but presumably human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 or HTLV-I). It is indeed possible for a HTLV-I infection to progress to leukemia but studies show that the time lag between infection and onset of cancer is believed to be about sixty years in Japan, and less than forty years in the Caribbean. (Wikipedia)

Andy Ho also mentions the Epstein-Barr Virus as a causative agent for lymphoma - which his relative has unfortunately developed - and writes that the hospital's dietician "advised my relative's wife to cook bigger portions. Her husband would then have more to eat and, for the sake of convenience, she could just consume the leftovers. No risk of catching his lymphoma, of course, she added."

Well, for a start, EBV doesn't necessarily lead to lymphoma - 95% of 35-40 year-olds in the US have been infected at some point in their lives, and they aren't dying of a lymphoma epidemic - and catching EBV is obviously not equivalent to "catching lymphoma". No one "catches cancer" or "cancer viruses"; although viral infections may develop into cancer, the two are very different concepts.

Yet he uses EBV and other diseases to suggest that "the takeaway lesson here for family members? Don't be politically uncorrect unto death."

This reminded me of a dinner conversation nearly two years ago, just after my dad was diagnosed with colon cancer. He said he wasn't sure if cancer was infectious, and maybe he should eat separately or have different food for us. It was an emotional moment, I think at one point we broke down. To me it was utterly unthinkable, and I rejected it immediately. To have done that would have destroyed a centrepiece of our family life, removed any sense of normalcy. It wasn't any question of political correctness, it was a matter of hanging together as a family. 

UPDATE: I've just sent a letter in to ST Forums. It may not get published, but hopefully it'll at least hit the Straits Times editors with a dose of reality.

weak

No... I can just barely do 8 pullups. I have to pass IPPT. I need to go exercise, instead of just moaning about it here.

They should make it legal - no, scratch that, compulsory - to cannibalise unfit people. Not wholesale, you get it, just parts of them. Like the flabby stomach fats and thighs and stuff. If you fry them they might be a really good bacon substitute. Then I might be motivated to go do something about my lipids.

Under the right conditions, a corpse's fat can turn into soap. Now that's freaky. At least that doesn't happen here, cos we roast cadavers to save space.