Stuff you must read today (Mon, 28 Dec 2009)

Tue, 29 Dec 2009
2 min read
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  • Negative income tax

    • Yawning Bread demonstrates how alternative political parties might present alternative policy schemes to those already in place through the example of negative income tax.

  • Sex, science and statistics

    • “‘We aren’t providing realistic social models to young people. We need a healthy cohabitation program … [and] healthy relationship education,’ Dr. Santelli said. ‘We just say how wonderful marriage is. Abstinence programs are aimed toward getting you married at 20, not supporting you and helping you make healthy and smart choices as a single 20-something.'” – That’s true for Singapore too.

  • Barisan Sosialis: A Security Threat?

    • “In 1957, the leadership of the PAP, wishing to have tighter grip of the party, decided to change the original democratic constitution. The organisational inspiration was said to come from looking at the Vatican. There the Pope appoints the cardinals, who then appoint the Pope. It has lasted the church 2,000 years.”

  • The Supplementary Retirement Scheme (SRS)

    • “The SRS is nothing new – it was introduced about a decade ago – yet many Singaporeans do not seem to know about it. Briefly, it’s a voluntary government scheme which gives you tax benefits, in order to encourage you to save and invest for your own retirement years.” – Mr Wang explains the SRS.

  • Lesbians at Play

    • “Hilarious Irene Ang was the host and she played [Don’t Forget the Lyrics]. She asked what line followed these in the song “Little Drummer Boy”:

    Come they told me
    Pa rum pum pum pum
    A new born king to see
    Pa rum pum pum pum
    Our finest gifts we bring
    __ _ _ _ _.”

    LOL!

Playing with words.

Tue, 29 Dec 2009
2 min read
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Finally – a slightly more personal post after so long! (Aaron Ho would be pleased.)

While I was in Bali, I worked on a short story when there wasn’t any sightseeing to be done. After finishing a draft of the story, however, I realised it read more like the Chapter One of a novella. That’s fine too, I guess, but I don’t know how long it’ll take me to finish writing that.

In any case, I’ve just finished tweaking the draft a bit and I thought I’d check if I’d used any words too many times. Apart from being a fun tool to play around with, Wordle helps quite a bit here.

The picture you see above is a word cloud of the story – the greater the number of times a word is used, the bigger the font size of the word in the cloud.

It seemed I used ‘around’ a bit too much as a preposition, so I modified some occurrences. ‘Toward’ has the next highest hit, but it’s harder to replace the word.

I’ll post the story/Chapter One up when I’m done getting feedback on it and editing it. Merry Christmas, everyone and have a Happy New Year!

Stuff you must read today (Sat, 26 Dec 2009)

Sun, 27 Dec 2009
1 min read
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