Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
求知若飢，大智若愚。

Nature Walk 2

Britain Burning

Bad news never seem to go away in the summer of 2011.

First there was the shoot-out at Norway. Then a horrible train crash at Wenzhou in China. Looming behind all this was the unpromising economic prospects at Europe and the US, with the S&P unhelpfully dousing oil on the already raging fire.

And now, we see looting and rioting in the UK.

The green and pleasant land is now in an inferno. Shops get burnt down, countless cars set to flames and vandalised. The police didn't seem to know what to do with the sudden surge of violence and vandalism..., hey, haven't we seen all this in Northern Ireland before? It's London gone Londonderry. And Bristol. And Liverpool. And Gloucester.

Gloucester?! The Cotswolds is not the sort of place one expects a riot surely?!

But they just don't think England proper required the NI treatment. "Those bl**dy Irish. That's the only language they understand! We English of course are more civilised and better brought up...". Oh yeah.

The social discontent in the UK, as we can see in these few days, is way bigger and more serious than we had all been thinking. Offenders are now as young as 11 and certainly not confined to the minorities - many are white and seemingly well-brought up. From the way ministers were called from their Italian villa or Spanish beaches hurrily back to the UK to deal with the crises (yes, plural - the economy is not in a good health either), they have gravely underestimated the seriousness that a small protest in Enfield would unfold into. This latent hatred against the society has now spilled out in full. It is a big mess - and those in government will have a grave task to try to sort it out at a now much nastier situation.

A bit like the Europe economy in a sense. The PIIGS are up in their sty, streaking for more food, threatening to mess up the Farm if no more feed is coming. The oxen are complaining: they work harder and save more feed for the farm, why it is that the PIIGS get what they want by just sleeping around? But, it seems like, to keep the Farm strong running as a whole - with an idealism of 'Animal Brotherhood' - you just need more and more feed for them, although one can't exactly see how or when these rather stoutly souls are going churn out good profits.

The oxen will not like it. What is there one can do without paying more? Not much - unless, the Farm is disintegrated into two. But then, the Farms will become much weaker. The PIIGS will surely be left on their own and probably start a decade-long economic 'famine'; the oxen will take a bad hit too as people simply lose trust on the products of their farm as well; and how frail is the idealism of Animal Brotherhood!

Would anyone do that? I'm not too sure. Maybe we could all hope the PIIGS would stop lying around and start working properly. This, I'm even less sure about.

So what's the way out for this? I'd really hate to say so but, we seem to be revisiting the world as it was in the 1930s. The recession. The unemployment. The unfair society. It was when ultra-nationalists like Hilter would have his chance to stand up and make his voice heard. And we all knew what happened when someone like him took control over Europe...

This we must stop at all costs. Let's hope it wasn't the 1930s again.

I hope you're not reading this with Internet Explorer

Hahaha! This is such an attention-grabber in the seemingly-never-ending browser war:

Internet Explorer users have 'below-average IQ'

OK people. We've all heard how Internet Explorer (IE) was vulnerable to script attacks, how webapps using ActiveX sucked ("I don't have IE and I can't run this?..."), crappy OS integration (not that one has the choice!) etc etc... But I have to say, IE has gone a long way from those dark, old days. The IE nowadays (ver 9.0 as of today) isn't that bad. At least to the ordinary Joe Smith behind the computer, it's a very useable browser.

Simple. Gets the work done. Font doesn't look as smooth as Safari but, hey, that's no matter.

That brings out an important point. Joe Smith is most likely an ordinary folk and not a computer geek. He will just use what is tossed onto him by Microsoft, i.e., IE.

By this logic, since there are more ordinary folks - who, we can safely assume, will have an averagely lower IQ than computer geeks, who has skewed IQ scores [or they're not geeks!] - using IE, IE users will have an averagely lower IQ score. This does not take anyone with high IQ to figure out (but alas! I can't tell if this is true for newspaper people... :p)

By saying IE users have lower IQ, one misses a crucial point. IE is still a far more popular browser than the others. If only Linux geeks would use Lynx, I'm sure Lynx would top the IQ charts since Linux people, really, are very smart (this I tell from personal experience ;-)

So the only reason for this trivial news is the juicy news value. Newspaper people have a beefy story that sells so they don't mind publishing it; Microsoft haters like a field-day on basically any anti-M$ matter so they won't mind coming out to bask under the glorifying 'computer-is-free-for-all' sun and condemn IE to the gutters. Everyone else would just laugh at the age-old "IE is stupid" slogan.

There are truly many other things that matter, people. Laugh all we can, but please, do move on when the light is out.

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Update 2011.08.10: This non-sense is actually a hoax! Blah... what a surprise.
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Nature Walk 1