International House

International House is a dreamland for people who want to travel the world but can't afford it, yet.
It's a student residence funded by the Rockfeller Foundation, whose goal is to enable its members from around the world to live and learn together in a diverse residential community that builds life-long qualities of leadership, respect and friendship. 700 members, students and visiting scholars, are chosen from over 100 countries to create a vibrant community for mutual understanding and intellectual exchange.
So far, I've met people the usual international students from Germany, France, India, but there are also people from Iceland, Uruguay,Congo, Nigeria whose major include human-right activism, engineering, mathematic, musicology, and religion.
In my field of applied mathematics, the students from France are especially strong where they attended schools such as École Polytechnique, École normale supérieure, and Ecole Supérieure d'Electricité. So the French are not the relaxed wine-drinkers I thought but are probably living up to the legacy of the likes of Cayley, Fermat, and Lagrange.

Ban Manhunt 2 - The correct decision

The recently released, shall we say release-planned video game Manhunt 2 has been recently banned by the BBFC in UK and also apparently banned in Italy, Ireland, and Australia. In the United States, it received an AO, Adults-Only, rating.

Great Decision.

Yes. I can hear the liberals screaming censorship and the breach of freedom of choice. But maybe they should first checkout the entirely sadistic overtone of the game. In one trailer, the game character sneaks upon an unsuspecting guard and then pulls out his vertebrae with a clamp in graphic detail. All while accompanied by laughter from the gamer behind the character who "committed" this torture through the virtual reality of the new Nintendo Wii device.
Even adult's freedom of choice are often restricted when the danger of the restricted material is deemed too high. For example, YouTube video posted by Mexican mobsters that shows the torturing of captured assassins got taken off. Yes i know that this video is real and the game is fake. But it still constitutes a breach of freedom of choice. The justification for this breach is the guarding of public safety.

Public safety you say? You must be thinking of how adults can distinguish between the fantasy of a violent game and the reality of a gruesome murder.

Well checkout the following comments from various Youtube videos relating to Manhunt2.
http://www.youtube.com/user/zeldahalomanhunt: violent video games give me hard-ons
http://www.youtube.com/user/saynotodrug999: fuck that totally defeats the perpuose i rather order it online for the uncunt version then little bitch no gore version
http://www.youtube.com/user/infernalmage: Even though it gets an AO rating I bet you anything 12 year olds will still have it... look when GTA came out. ROFL... my cousin was 12 at the time and he got it. Freaking insane man, but oh well... only in America...XD

Below is a really interesting comment:
http://www.youtube.com/user/KokSquad: it doesnt matter its not real life ur not hurting anybody. and there has never been case where a video game actually made someone kill. and criminals who have said it made them do it were trying to get off free. its the parents job to monitor wut ur kids do. dont impose beleifs on other people

I think that's a great idea in an ideal society. But look at how dysfunctional families are in America and how irresponsible some parents are! The rampant cases of child abandonment and single motherhood must speak to how the government needs to step in as "Nannys" in extreme cases. Such as Manhunt 2.

Manhunt 2 might not drive most people to kill. But there's a good chance that it can turn a small number of people more violent. When weighing public safety against freedom of choice, public safety wins in this case.