On The Move…

I realise that these will have been covered in the Singapore media, but hey, I’m pretty diconnected from that media.

Durex Sexual Wellbeing Global Survey 07/08

Walking Speed 

In a stroke of high irony, the Dean of Admissions at neighboring MIT has resigned after it turned out that she had lied on her resume.  After 28 years at MIT and about nine years as the Dean of Admissions, an anonymous phone tip-off launched an investigation that eventually forced Marilee Jones to resign, according to the Harvard Cimson and the US News & World Report.

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I slept almost all day today, which was sheer bliss.

Last night Andrew, John, Ryan and I went to the first Upper Hall at the newly-built Queen’s Head pub in the basement of Memorial Hall.  The atmosphere was fantastic, the pub looks gorgeous, and the food was lovely – we had buffalo wings and nachos (paid for with Board Plus, woohoo!).  The free-flowing beer and other drinks was an additional perk for us seniors; the specially-brewed 1636 was pretty tasty as well.  I’m glad the four of us went early enough to beat the long lines and find a place to sit.

Afterwards we stopped by the party in the suites next door, and then ended the night with an hour long chat in our own common room where I drank seltzer and ate cookies.  Or more accurately everyone else ended their night – I proceeded to watch various tv shows on my computer until it was clearly time to go to bed.

Still a little breathless (and fatigued) from a very packed weekend which included spending about 12 hours in NYC (and about 10 hours driving back and forth) for the remarkable Singapore Day in Central Park plus the club afterparty.  Plus it was also pre-frosh weekend at Harvard… toughest admissions season to date, so I’ve heard.

Tomorrow (actually in 3 hours) I leave for New Haven by train, but I’ll be back in Boston by 8pm.

So much seems to be happening I can barely keep up.  Maybe I’ll get more of a chance to blog by Thursday…

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On the drive back to Boston yesterday I was amused/puzzled by the decision to edit out the words “cherry pop” from the radio version of Christina Aguilera’s latest track, ”Candyman”.  Is that really more suggestive/lewd/vulgar/corrupting than the lyrics to, I don’t know, Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous Girl”?  The longer I’ve been here the more bizarre I find American culture.

Ok, so here’s my public service post.  A couple weeks back I saw a film that first aired Mar 8, 2007 on Channel 4 in the UK titled “The Great Global Warming Swindle” that (in brief) rejects the idea that climate change (global warming) is significantly prompted/accelerated by greenhouse gases produced by human industry (namely carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels). 

It was a disturbing film to watch, to say the least.  Anyhow, I was disturbed enough to ask some questions and do some research on my own, so here’re the results.  In summary: “Swindle” is a big swindle.

Read my more detailed comments below (originally posted to the campus discussion list where I first heard of “Swindle”):

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To C and everyone else,

I’m glad the Channel 4 “polemic” (their label, not mine, but note this is NOT an objective “documentary”) has come up on this list again so I can post about it. I can say that when I first saw it I thought it seemed pretty persuasively put together, and being a complete non-expert in the very specific fields covered (oceanography, atmospheric dynamics etc.) I wasn’t prepared to come to any conclusions. As background, I am a senior in ESPP, so it’s not as if I haven’t had a substantial amount of exposure to these fields or their experts; I’m just not an expert myself, as I imagine to be generally the case in society.

So I went to the head of ESPP, Professor James McCarthy, who’s worked on the IPCC report (co-author and/or co-chair for parts of the two most recent Reports). (Unrelated: He’s also Master of Pforzheimer House.) Anyway, I sent him a copy of the video and asked for his response. After he saw it, he rejected the arguments presented as being generally without merit (which is putting it mildly). Which of course skeptics and cynics might find unsurprising. However, here’re some revealing facts that emerge, which you can verify from various online sources.

To summarize:

(1) The main scientific counter-theory (or theories, if you like) to a significant human contribution to climate change via greenhouse gases has been roundly refuted a number of times already by a slew of other papers in Science and Nature, and mostly before 2005! (For example, the clips of Professor John Christy talking about discrepancies in troposphere/surface warming are outdated since Professor Christy has already authored a paper admitting that his earlier findings were wrong.) For more details on all this, here’s an easy-to-read summary: http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2032572,00.html

(2) The journalistic integrity of the filmmaker, Martin Durkin, is very questionable, which you can easily verify for yourselves. See the complaints of intentional and complete misrepresentation levelled by one of the scientists who appeared:

Carl Wunsch, the MIT oceanography professor in the film, has posted his official response to the “The Great Global Warming Swindle” program on his MIT website. In it, Professor Wunsch says that he was completely misrepresented, and is very unhappy about that, to say the least. He opens his response with: “I believe that climate change is real, a major threat, and almost surely has a major human-induced component.”

And specifically on the way his comments were edited into the film: “By [my comments'] placement in the film, it appears that I am saying that since carbon dioxide exists in the ocean in such large quantities, human influence must not be very important—diametrically opposite to the point I was making—which is that global warming is both real and threatening.”

On the film “An Inconvenient Truth” (heavily attacked by “Swindle”): “I am often asked about Al Gore and his film. [...] Some of the details in the film make me cringe, but I think the overall thrust is appropriate.” (emphasis mine) In other words, one of the few credible scientists in the film (and the only credible one according to Professor McCarthy) in fact believes the exact opposite of what the filmmaker(s) portrayed him as saying/believing!

Read Professor Wunsch’s response in full (and see links to other revealing news articles and websites about the science and filmmaker behind “Swindle”) online here: http://puddle.mit.edu/~cwunsch/

I appreciate the attention of those people who’ve read this far. I think debate is important, including in the natural sciences (and of course in the policies that lean on that science). At the same time I think the definitive conclusion to draw about Durkin’s film is NOT to take anything in “Swindle” very seriously without careful consideration.

Sincerely,
Jason Yeo

PS: Please feel free to forward this to other lists where you’ve seen “Swindle” discussed or mentioned. I think it’s important that people have an opportunity to conclude for themselves whether the film has any actual merit.

PPS: Kindly refrain from making overly broad assumptions about the details of my personal (non-expert) opinions about climate change or how individuals and societies should respond to the issue.

This article made me cry a little. 

Because the devaluation of beauty should always cause us to weep.

The most arresting article I’ve read anywhere recently is this feature on Imelda Marcos from this month’s W magazine. 

Imelda was of course the first lady of the Philippines for quite a while (1965-1986) while her husband, Ferdinand, was President.  Outside of the Philippines she’s famous mainly for her staggering shoe collection, the cost of which is probably some small fraction of the huge sums of money the Marcos’ are accused of embezzling from the national coffers (allegedly around five billion dollars).  But the article is fascinating mainly for the richness of Imelda’s story, the people she knew (Saddam, Doris Duke and the Pope all make cameos) and the vividness of her personality. 

Much more interesting than anything that could be written about Anna Nicole.  Go read and see for yourself.

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I dreamt last night of my time in the Army, for the first time within memory.  It was a little unexpected, and nice in a way to see those familiar faces again.  I wonder what everyone is up to?  Maybe this dream was triggered by my fast-approaching return to my lieu de naissance :)

Ok, so maybe I didn’t only work on my thesis during the last three days.  I may possibly perhaps potentially have seen a clip or two on YouTube.

Anyway, I know I’m very late to the tech game, but I really enjoyed the “wow” factor and high irony of watching this music video for Beyoncé’s Irreplaceable made with The Sims2.  Compare with the original music video for yourself and see if Beyoncé is herself replaceable by a computer animation

And the reason I saw the Sims2-created music video is because Beyoncé has recorded a Spanish version of Irreplaceable, further confirming her intention to broaden her fan base (ie make more money) and maybe win a Latin Grammy.  Remember of course the recently released remix track and video for Beyoncé’s collaboration with Shakira.

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Why am I awake at 8.30am??  Bedtime.

Taking a little break to have some dinner at my desk.  I’m really just stalling on thesis work because I just spent all afternoon completing my dataset (for what I hope will be the last time, dear God) and I’m a little scared that the couple dozen new or revised observations will throw all my results off.  Eek.

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Here’s a slightly bizarre track: Avril Lavigne singing the Mandarin version of “Girlfriend”.  At least her accent’s pretty good, I think.

Beyoncé looks to be setting some kind of record by releasing a music video for every one of the tracks on her album B’day.  She spoke briefly about a bunch of them on TRL.  Newly released out of this bunch is the video for “Beautiful Liar”, featuring Shakira.  I mention the video only because it’s pretty cool how they made Beyoncé and Shakira look like twins.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but when it’s cold my hands somehow become more prone to scrapes.  Today I managed to accumulate something like six or eight papercuts in four or five different incidents… by the end of the day I realised that my left hand was tingling from the cumulative effect.  In fact, I just washed my hands and each little cut is still smarting!

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As a postscript to what I wrote about Ellen Degeneres yesterday, I forgot to mention that it made me happy to find that Ellen’s myspace page actually showed the pictures she had taken of her and Clint Eastwood during the Oscars – the ones she had Steven Spielberg take for her, which was a hilarious gag to watch :)

Also, Ellen’s on the March 2007 cover of W magazine, in a glowing portrait by Michael Thompson.  I mention this more to note the scary/beautiful series of black-and-white portraits, also by Thompson, that accompany the feature.  I don’t know if it was intentional, but Ellen looks completely transformed in each of them, even though all the pictures feature the same hair and makeup.  When I first saw the magazine, I was struck by this effect: in the first she looks uncannily like Glenn Close, in the second she perfectly channels Princess Diana, and in the final poster-sized portrait she reminds me of Sharon Stone.  See the pictures here and see what you think.

PS: Since I mentioned Princess Diana, and in one of seminars today we participated in a fascinating, real-time negotiation role-play about the expansion of Camp Babylon in Iraq (which in reality has come under mounting criticism since 2004 for the damage that US military operations have done to that priceless archaelogical site), this piece of trivia seems relevant.  In a nutshell: later this year, Prince Harry is being deployed to Iraq on a tour of duty. 

The possibility for tragedy is really too horrible to contemplate.

Yup, this is going to be a long one.  But I’ll make it as brief as I can.

Brief, unlike the thesis footnotes I’ve been writing.  Yesterday, I spent just over two hours working on one part of my draft, and it went like this:

First five minutes:  I write a single, relatively unimportant sentence to support a sub-subclaim I want to make: “A simple scatter-plot of the same data with best-fit line indicates that this pair-wise correlation does not appear to be overly influenced by outliers, as seen in Figure 2*[26].” 

Next two hours:  I write Footnote 26, which is currently over 500 words long, and takes up about three quarters of that page.

Conclusion: I’m never going to finish writing this…!!!

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever felt this continuously pressé.  Every day it feels like I’ve committed some awful crime and I’m just doomed to waiting to be caught…  the awful crime being not having already completed my thesis, of course.  Quelle horreur!

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Miscellaneous (American) pop-culture observations for February 2007, aka ”American Femininity” month:

(1) This seemed to have been a month of unsually high visibility for lesbians.  You had Ellen Degeneres hosting the Oscars, with her partner Portia de Rossi naturally making an appearance on the red carpet and at the after parties.  At the same Oscars, Melissa Etheridge performed “I Need to Wake Up“, a song she wrote for the film An Inconvenient Truth, inspired she said by Al Gore’s message about the need to address climate change.  When the song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song a little later, Melissa jumped up, kissed her partner Tammy Lynn Michaels and in her acceptance speech proceeded to thank her “incredible wife Tammy” and their four children.  On a related note, I have to say that I was extremely confused when reading this article from People covering the birth of Melissa and Tammy’s twins back in October last year.  I still can’t figure out exactly what the quote “these are our first two babies conceived together” means, from a clinical/genetics perspective…

(2) The national spotlight this past month was also cast a little further afield on motherhood in general.  Between Anna Nicole Smith’s unexpected death and Britney’s unexpected episodes, I’d say the outlook on all-American motherhood is looking a little tainted right now.  This is in contrast to last year, say, when we had periods of focusing on women like Nancy Pelosi (raised five children before running for office at 47!) or Angelina Jolie and Madonna’s admirable adoption decisions. (All this is in even starker contrast to last year’s focus on fathers, like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt who both became new dads.)

PS: And as a tenuously related bizarre pop culture “event” around women, let’s not forget about NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak…

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I’m going to quickly wrap up with my Oscars 2007 style observations:

(1) I feel bad for the women who wore things that the American public is unattuned to understanding (never mind liking).  I noticed in going through the “vote: love it or hate it?” slideshow on People.com that I very clearly skew European when it comes to style.  I especially felt bad for the ladies who chose Valentino (Anne Hathaway, Zhang Ziyi, Cameron Diaz), whose signature ruffles and bows are almost continuously reviled by the American public – although Cameron’s dress was admittedly not very flattering.  The same generally applies to people who wore this year’s Chanel (Kirsten Dunst, Penelope Cruz later in the night).  And of course I found Meryl Streep’s red carpet Prada ensemble both very witty as well as stylishly interesting (not to mention flattering), while most other viewers seemed to despise the look.

(2) In contrast, most voters seemed to love Liv Tyler in Marc Jacobs at the Vanity Fair party, which I did not.  So American. 

(3) I non-exhaustively loved:
On the red carpet: Jodie Foster in Vera Wang and Penelope Cruz in Versace… 
At the Vanity Fair party: Katie Holmes in Armani Privé and Natalie Portman in Lanvin…
Everywhere: Jennifer Hudson, whom I thought looked stunning throughout her multiple dress changes.

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Writing this was relaxing.  Now back to work!  *feels shoulder muscles tensing*