Tag: January 30, 2007

THE TOP minds of the campus will once again pit wits when the Pautakan, the Varsitarian’s annual intercollegiate quiz contest, fires off on Mar. 6.

Now on its 30th year, the Pautakan is the longest battle of the brains in the country.

Contrary to popular belief, the National Quiz Bee is not the oldest quiz contest in the country. Three years its senior is the Pautakan, which was the brainchild of the 1977 staff of the Varsitarian.

But at that time, it was not known yet as Pautakan, but as the “Annual Intercollegiate Quiz Contest.”

THE LOVE of wisdom and the word makes all the difference for the alumni of the defunct Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (Philets). Such love and passion have made many Philets alumni among the Philippines’ dominant and influential thinkers, artists and humanists.

WHAT do national hero Jose Rizal, National Artists Rolando Tinio, F. Sionil Jose and Bienvenido Lumbera, philosopher Emerita Quito, former senator Francisco Tatad, sculptor Julie Lluch, former New York Times correspondent Alice Colet-Villadolid, and Manila Bulletin columnist Jullie Yap Daza have in common?

They were all graduates of the defunct Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (Philets), whose star-studded alumni have banded together to form the Philets Foundation.

The Philets Foundation held a reunion last December 28.

Steeped in images of plagues, disasters and the end of time, the Book of Revelation has inspired equally fertile imaginations of a gruesome judgment day, also known as the Apocalypse.

But for Fr. Gerardo Tapiador, NCR director of the Episcopal Commission on the Biblical Apostolate in the Philippines, the trivially construed doomsday expositions, revived in best-selling novels and other popular depictions is only surface interpretation.

JOANNA Choa, a junior Medical Technology student, has been used to ending a virus process, NETSVC.exe, from the Windows Task Manager before she can safely remove her flash disk.

“If my friend did not tell me about NETSVC.exe, I would not be aware of the virus in my laptop,” Choa, Faculty of Pharmacy Scholia Tutorial Club president, said.

THE FUTURE of humanity passes by way of the family.

That future lies in Asia, said Arch. Orlando Quevedo, who stressed family values, growing population and close-knit family ties in the region in the face of biotechnology’s effects on family lifestyles around the world.

In a message to the first issue of the Varsitarian on January 16, 1928, the UST Rector Magnificus, Fr. Serapio Tamayo, O.P., expressed his “firm conviction” that the publication would “catalyze students” to become good writers.

Seventy-nine years later, the good Dominican seemed to have his belief confirmed. A year shy of its pearl anniversary, the Varsitarian, the official student organ of UST, has consolidated a solid reputation as the campus paper that has formed several generations of top Filipino journalists, writers, artists, and leaders.

PHOTOGRAPHY is a marvelous, unique medium—the most mass-oriented form of communication after the television; it is capable of delivering a message without any need for spoken or written word.

Indeed, photography has been a key source in historical research and social documentation. Photos enrich man’s appreciation of man and the nature and society that surround him. It depicts the good and the beautiful, the real and the existing.

HACKER.

People may be teasing me or they seriously mean it when they call me a “hacker.” They call me that since I am a Computer Science student who has a knack for computer ciphers. Unfortunately, being called a hacker connotes thievery. Furthermore, hackers are often portrayed as mysterious and strange. Still, the question remains: is it really bad to be a hacker?

DESTITUTE Filipinos remain chewing on the same cud contentedly: hope. Nine out of 10 Filipinos look forward to this year with optimism rather than with fear despite their relentless struggle with poverty, the newspapers said.

Why? It’s not as if they had a choice. As a proverb puts it: “Hope is the poor man’s bread.” Hope sustains 78 per cent of Filipinos who had suffered “severe hunger,” surviving every day by eating almusal, tanghalian and hapunan in one meal—the proverbial “altanghap.”