Apology I recognize and accept that a number of statements that I made on my on-line journal “Seksi Matafaka”, were defamatory of A*STAR, its Chairman, Mr. Philip Yeo and its executive officers.I admit and acknowledge that these statements are false and completely without any foundation.I unreservedly apologize to A*STAR, its Chairman Mr. Philip Yeo, and its executive officers for the distress and embarrassment caused to them by these statements.I undertake not to repeat the statements, or make further statements of the same or similar effect in this or any other forum or media. I further undertake to remove any such posting anywhere that has not been deleted.(NB: for avoidance of doubt, the above is fake notice and a homage to Acidflask.We will remember this.You only die once and you might as well do it in style.) The End I'm reading "The Long Emergency" by Kunstler. There won't be enough time before this blog closes down for me to write about it properly. But this is probably important enough that you will have to think about it.Sometime in the middle of this century, we will face a very severe oil shortage. There have been hopes that we will eventually find an alternate source of energy, but the whole point of oil is that it's cheap energy. Alternate sources will not be as cheap. This means that the world economy that we knew in the 20th century - everything, will be gone.The leaders of the world are loath to talk about this. They know that the one other thing our economy runs on is "consumer confidence", and if they don't watch what they say, the economy will slow down on their watch, and they'd be out of office in an instant. In the short term this is the responsible thing to do, but not in the long term.The downside of democracy is that the government is run by the people, and people generally don't give a fuck about the environment.Crude oil is not only about fuel. One reason why the population of the world can be 6 billion people is because we have new agricultural methods which increase yields per land area. These methods work because of the use of a lot of fertilisers. Where do these fertilisers come from? Crude oil. So it's not only cars that run on crude oil, human beings also run on crude oil.What happens when there is a severe economic depression? The last time this happened, it led to World War II. Granted, there were other causes, but the 1930s were a time when it seemed that liberal democracy had failed. If the world economy dies because we run out of oil, it is very very possible that we will all start to kill each other. During the Cold War, we had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world a few times over, but the only thing stopping us is that life's too good, people are too well off.At the end of the long emergency, it's possible that the population of the world would be half of what it is today, which is probably a good thing because our planet wouldn't be able to support so many people anymore.So people of our generation, be forewarned. Around the time we turn 70 or so, we will witness something fairly horrible. You Really Got Me What is a melody, after all? It is a meme. And as in evolutionary theory, the most selfish meme will survive. A good piece of music could be catchy, but doesn’t necessarily have to be. But its appeal should transcend cultural boundaries, that would be really good, and most importantly you could play it 100 times (not consecutively), and you would not get tired of it.For me, the 100 times test is the most important test in distinguishing between a good and a lousy piece of music. “Pachelbel’s Canon” for me fails this test. I got sick of it by the 5th time and I really can’t listen to it anymore. But the funny thing is that it appears so many times in pop music in (to these ears) vastly superior renderings that I wonder if it wasn’t just something that was very sloppily done.Pachelbel’s Canon appears in:“In My Life” by the Beatles“Pictures of Lily” by the Who“Love in the First Degree” by Bananarama“Debaser” by the Pixies“Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead” by XTCWhy does “You Really Got Me” pass this test? Possibly because there are dramatic elements to this music. First thing is the riff, and you could play it over and over again, it’s catchy. It’s actually a mini conversation between the guitar and the drums, but more than that, it is also a contrast between figure and ground, the guitar fills up the first half of the measure, and then there is silence, only broken by the drums. Then there is the asymmetry between the 2 halves. GGFG-XX-. The GGFG is contrasted with the -XX-.These are quirks that make the music interesting. The fact that you can pack so many interesting things into an 8 note figure is what makes this a great riff. If you know information theory, there is a lot of information in here.Then the melody comes in. “Girl, you got me going baby, you got me so I don’t know ...” etc etc. The melody is in counterpoint with the riff. Sounds simple, but the features: First a long note (or a short one followed by a rest.) Provides a window for the riff to peek through. Then “you got me going baby” goes against the riff half of the time and goes with it the other half, providing an interesting contrast. Then “you got me so I don’t know...” builds upon the idea introducedThe melody never fills up the entire space, and similarly when you are having a good conversation no one person is talking all of the time. The play between the silence and the music is there.Then a few lines down, the melody gathers steam, first by going into the (second note), then the dominant note. Why does it feel so good when he starts singing “you really got me, you really got me” at the end? Let’s go back to the beginning. First there is some tension caused by the abrasive contrast between the melody and the riff. Then the tension is escalated by transposing the melody to 2 different keys. But at the end he releases it, and finally sings in unison with the guitar figure, meaning that these 2 sources of tension are gone in one fell swoop. What does this remind you of? Well rock and roll is all about sex.A fairly convoluted piece of analysis, to be sure. But you have to listen to it to see how it works. I’m describing to you like 30 seconds of music, and I have uncovered so much meaning in 30 seconds of music. Only an ignorant fool would say, “because this is pop music, it ain’t worth shit.” You and I know better: this is a classic. Squeaky Bum Time When I first started tuning into the English Premier League, it was probably due to my sister and 2 of my cousins who were Man U supporters. 1994 was a special year for both Man U and the Singapore National team. For Man U, it was their first great team under Alex Ferguson, when Schmeichel, Bruce, Pallister, Ince, Kanchelskis, Keane, Cantona, Giggs and Hughes were in that side. They steamrolled their way to the title: of course later on Arsenal and Chelsea would win league titles in the same invincible fashion, but that was the first time in a long while anybody had such complete dominance over the league. For Singapore, it was our League and Cup double, although it turned out that Abbas Saad had bribed some opponents to lose, and that tarnished the result. Also it was the last season in the Malaysia cup and, with all due respect to the S League, the end of the glory days.But later I discovered soccernet and eventually it turned out that the mind games were some of the most interesting part of the English Premier League. It was, for me, an introduction into the fascinating world of political science.There was that season when Newcastle led the league by 12 points at Christmas, and everybody assumed they were going to win the trophy. Then slowly but surely, Man U crawled their way back up. This was the year of Fergie's fledglings, one of whom was David Beckham. Remember, Alex Ferguson had just dismantled the class of 94. That was the season when a commentator said "you'll never win anything with kids". But amazingly they caught up. They were playing Leeds (where are they now?) and Newcastle would play them 1 week later, then Alex Ferguson egged them on by accusing them of being softer on Newcastle than Man U. Incredibly, the Newcastle manager had a meltdown in response to this comment, saying, "I'd love it if we beat them." It didn't augur well for their club. Man U won the title.You had to know the situation: when you're 12 points ahead at 1 stage, but the gap gets closed down, the pressure is immense. Lose a tight race, and nobody will blame you too much. Lose a 12 point lead, and you're a loser for the rest of your life.Then there was the treble season when they were neck to neck with Arsenal, having lost the league title to them 1 year earlier. Won the league by 1 point. There was this crazy situation where every game was a must-win game for them, and incredibly they won all the 3 titles: all 3 of them were close calls. They had to claw back the lead from Arsenal in the league. In the FA cup, they had extremely close calls against Arsenal and Liverpool, and it was a substitute - Sheringham, who scored the winning goal. As for the Champion's league, ask any Man U fan and he will explain to you what happened against Bayern Munich.Anyway what happened this weekend was dramatic enough. Man U had been leading by 9 points at 1 stage. They were looking to win the league comfortably, but they slipped up against Portsmouth and blew the race open. Yesterday they could only draw against Middlesborough. That handed the advantage to Chelsea. In fact I was near expecting Chelsea to capitalise and win against a non- performing Newcastle side. I think most of us were. I was thinking that this could be the beginning of a great Man U catipulation, because a lot of games would have to be played in the near future without many key Man U players in the side.Now this Mourinho fellar is interesting. He used to complain about having to play his matches after Man U, because every time Man U wins, he gets extra pressure to match that win. The problem is that Man U today offered Chelsea the golden opportunity to cut that lead to 1 point. And amazingly Chelsea failed to take advantage of it. I say amazing because Chelsea had the fewer injuries of the 2 teams. Man U had Gary Neville, O'Shea, Saha, Vidic and Park out. Chelsea are usually seen as a team which doesn't choke, but for some reason they choked. They only drew against Newcastle, which means Chelsea are back to 3 points behind.When your opponent hands you an advantage, ironically there is additional pressure for you to take advantage of it.Equally fascinating is the relegation battle at the bottom of the table. Watford just got relegated, but there are 2 more slots, and they could be filled by 2 of these 5 teams: Charlton, West Ham, Sheffield United, Wigan Athletic and Fulham. A few weeks ago, Charlton and West Ham were certainties, but no longer, even though they are both still in the relegation zone now. If any of the 3 above them continue their bad run of form, that's the end for them.In the other game today, David James set a premiership record for the most number of clean sheets. It's very nice to see somebody pick up 1 more accolade at this very late stage of his career. In the race, I think I wouldn't mind being in the 9th of 10th position in the league: too low to compete for Europe, but safe from relegation. Just play your matches, harry a little if you're slipping, but mostly stress free maintenence. Although it's actually a very dangerous mindset to have. I usually think of clubs like Southampton, Derby, Charlton, Sunderland, Coventry who were in this happy situation 1 season and suddenly 1 season later, gets sucked into a relegation battle the next season. Andrew Hill, 1937-2007 One of my favourite jazz pianists, Andrew Hill is dead.Andrew Hill, as you know, is the composer of "Siete Ocho", after which this blog is named. I have thought of writing him and asking for permission to adopt the name for a music group, but I guess I'll never get to do that.He was under- appreciated in life. But it is definitely true that his music just wasn't designed for mass consumption. In terms of complexity and originality, he is peerless. He was working until the very end. At an age where people 20 years younger than him would be past their prime, he was still making top class music - his "Dusk" was named as one of the best jazz albums of 2001.I'll tell you why it's wonderful to be young. I remember there was a time when I was still discovering indie music. Hearing all those albums for the first time: The Smiths, the Stone Roses, REM, Matthew Sweet, David Bowie, Prefab Sprout. And attaining a level of comprehension that wasn't there before, it was wonderful. Not really to hear for the first time, but rather, after a few listens, to have all the pieces fall together in your head. Because all those pieces are just manifestations of a "meta music". It's like, if you understand the underlying logic behind a few pieces of music which are similar, you will be introduced to a whole new system of musical logic and grammar, which on its own, can generate an endless amount of new music.I've had 2 such experiences in my life. An epiphany with indie music, and then a second epiphany with jazz music. And Andrew Hill's "Point of Departure" was very much a part of the second epiphany.By the way, thanks very fucking much to a certain person out there who is dragging the name of "Siete Ocho" through the mud. Debut directorial effort (originally posted in 2004)This took place 6 years ago, when I was in a hotel in Chicago. I was travelling with A and B (I'm protecting their identities here.) B wanted all of us to get drunk. I didn't really like the idea because I was feeling a little puritan but we went ahead anyway.Later that evening, fuelled with alcohol, I wasn't very happy about all that drunkedness. I drank my share but made sure that A and B were more drunk than me. I then decided that we were going to make a documentary about the debauchery that people are capable of when they have too much to drink. Considering that it was my first time directing a film, that the dialogue was ad libbed, and that I was drunk I think it was a fairly decent effort.When I say "decent" I am of course referring to the artistic quality of the film, not the contents.Written, directed and acted by: sieteocho (7-8).Acting / live prop: ACinematography, editing and off-screen commentary: BThroughout this short film, only A and 7-8 are on camera. B is holding the camera, although he provides some off-screen commentary.All 3 are drunk. This entire film was done in 1 take, and composed of various shots spliced together.Titles: This video intended for mature audiences only. Rated R. Copyright 2001.7-8: (shot from bottom, arms raised in triumph) I’m really impressed with myself tonight! YAAAAAARRRRGH!!! (cue music: van Halen, "Jump". The part where David Lee Roth is screaming his head off.)Subtitle: Starring 7-8 as himselfSubtitle: Starring A as himselfSubtitle: Exclusive interview.Subtitle: Raphael Hotel, ChicagoSubtitle: 7-8: the man and his ideas.Subtitle: What is the act of sex?7-8: What is the act of sex? One human being comes together with another human being he really likes and he does the wild thing with him you know what I mean?Subtitle: Foreplay and Orgasm.7-8: Normally when you think about sex you think about the orgasm but the orgasm is just, you know, just the result of sex. It’s not the process of sex you know. It’s like the end of the journey but it’s not the journey itself. And a wise man said that it’s the journey itself that matters, not the destination of the journey.B: (murmurs of assent, like Paul Shaffer in David Letterman shows)7-8: And now I propose that the act of sex is not the, you know, act itself but rather the foreplay.B: Yeaaah!!7-8: And right now we are going to capture the foreplay on film. We’re going to be a part of the action here man. (Camera pans to bed. A is lying there, dead drunk.)You know something?B: Yeah?7-8: The bed is trembling right now. He’s vibrating.B: Because he’s cold.7-8: No… not because he’s cold, but because he’s secretly turned on.B: Ohhhh….A: Go away! Get lost! You’re crazy!B: (laughing unkindly) he’s afraid….7-8: No no no…B: He’s asking for it….7-8: You got it. He’s asking for it. So right here, right now, we are going to consummate the LUST we have been building up towards each other for … you see he’s trembling with excitement right now…A: I’m not trembling with excitement. (more laughter from B) I feel really sick right now…7-8: He’s really sick? Does the television audience really believe that he’s just sick?B: NOOOOOOOO!!!7-8: Despite all my pretensions towards being very experienced in the field of sexual topics, you know, …B: yeah…7-8: (facing camera) I have to admit. I am a virgin. So like right now I need something to decrease my inhibitions. So I’ll just have a drink right now, you just stay there where you are, and after I’m done with this I’ll just come over to fuck you in a second. (more unkind laughter from B)A: (piteously) shut up.B: Yeah baby…7-8: He’s being coy. There’s a lot of shit in my head, you know. This thing, like, really puts a lot of shit in your head….B: The pose he’s in right now, of course he’s not exactly drunk.A: (getting up) go away…(cue music Van Halen’s “Right Now”: Don’t wanna wait til tomorrow, why put it off another day?. Subtitles: Go away… he just wants it.)7-8: It’s the extent towards which I am sexually attracted to him. No no no don’t look at me. Go look at him.(7-8 and A still have their clothes on, but you can clearly see that 7-8 is banging his hips into A’s arse)Come on let’s do it! I’m going to do it right now!!(to B) Can you see me? Can you see me? Yeah man. You going to do it right now? Focus, zoom. This is about him and me now. (B starts to tilt the camera for special effect) No no no… don’t turn the camera now. Keep it straight. Yeah. Focus on the hip action....3 CommentsYou should digitize and post this video so that I can whack off to it.By the way, you now have access to my livejournal. It's not as interesting as yours.Posted 10/10/2004 at 11:53 PM by giddyninjaAt least you write about your real life in your livejournal which is more than what I have. What you mean to say is that my imagination is more interesting than your real life. Well duh. Don't you think that it's a little like scraping the bottom of the barrel that I have to resort to recounting interesting events in my life that took place years ago?The video is in digital form, but for obvious reasons I'm restricting the circulation.Posted 10/11/2004 at 9:28 PM by sieteochoYou mean all that hoo-hah with that woman who lived in your block of apartments was fiction?Damn! You had me fooled. You're a very good writer.Posted 10/14/2004 at 9:43 AM by giddyninja Music and I As a kid, I must have looked up upon those faces gazing down at me from the wall in my music class. I still remember some of them: Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven. Austere, dignified, the gatekeepers of the music. Ang mors, all of them. That same music that you had to master in order to avoid getting whacked by either your parents or your teachers. So beautiful and yet so ghastly.I took to music like a fish takes to water. Music is the art form that I take to the most easily. If I am not a musician, I am not an artist, possibly I would be nothing. It is a strange amalgam of structure, logic and beauty. Perhaps besides music only architecture is so structural as an art form. Some people appreciate beautiful surfaces, I tend to appreciate beautiful structures.I did not enjoy learning the piano, but somehow I made it to Grade 8. My parents, and I guess I did too to some extent, appreciated the logic that it "would be a shame" if I didn't go to the end. When I stopped, it was conventionally assumed that I was a drop out. Or maybe not that much of a drop out, since I finished Grade 8. But in retrospect, my musical education had just begun.Music appeals to your heart, your ass and your head. In that order. Intellectualising about music can never pass for true appreciation of music, and even more so because language and music are two fundamentally different modes of appreciation.For example, I cannot write down a maths equation, show it to a person who doesn’t understand maths, and explain why it is so aesthetically appealing. It makes so little sense, it’s almost like explaining, without drawing pictures, why a 36-24-36 is better than a 30-28-35. Aesthetics is something that is somewhat innate to human nature, as in you show a 36-24-36 to most males in the world, and they would be interested. But quite why it’s 36-24-36 and not some other ratio is a peculiarity. Similarly why we would find certain arrangements of notes more appealing than others is a mystery, but it is certainly there.It's almost blasphemous to say this, but 10 years of classical music never did it for me. It only made sense when I could hear a simple song, take it apart, and then tell the difference between good and bad. If had hadn't been turned on to pop music, I would never have appreciated classical. All that music theory, it hardly prepares you to make the most important distinction in music: between good music and bad music. And it’s not like I can give you an exam on it - there are bound to be too many controversial calls. But too many people have questionable taste in music, even those very highly educated (in music, that is) An analogy would be people who can write essays where the grammar is perfect but the meaning is nonsensical.What do I think about music? I never saw it as a performance art. It was never about standing on stage. I'm of the CD generation, which means I'm later than the vinyl generation, which is later than the performing-live-is-everything, but I'm an old fogey to the people who walk around with iPods and MP3 players*. I've written more than 20 songs, and I've never written them down, or shared them with anyone, or performed them. I have absolutely no inkling what it'd be like, no idea what it'd be like to perform them on stage. I know that I have to do something about them pretty soon, but I don't know what.* I came across a quote by Edward de Bono who tries to explain the appeal of walkmans, and it's faintly derogotary: "A generation brought up on watching 30 hours a week of television was in need of constant stimulation. Habits of internal stimulation (such as thinking) had never been developed. Without external stimulation, the brain was inactive. Thus the portable tape recorder provided the ideal means of providing stimulation wherever you went." As for me I never found any use for an iPod because I can basically play in my head any song I know well enough: drums, bass, guitar, all the parts. Practical advice A great prank. It occurred to me when I was mass SMSing this morning.1. Steal somebody's handphone.2. Send this SMS to everybody in his list: "Hello everybody, I've changed my hp number to (insert non-existent number). Pls take note."3. Watch the chaos ensue.How to find out whether your spouse is having an affair:Pretending that you are carrying out the above as a prank, and insert your own telephone number. This is better than hiring a private detective. When the person you suspect your spouse is having an affair with calls up, indulge in heavy breathing, and hope that the person speaks first. Then freak him out by screaming obscenities into his face. A great prank. It occurred to me when I was mass S... A great prank. It occurred to me when I was mass SMSing this morning.1. Steal somebody's handphone.2. Send this SMS to everybody in his list: "Hello everybody, I've changed my hp number to (insert non-existent number). Pls take note."3. Watch the chaos ensue.How to find out whether your spouse is having an affair:Pretending that you are carrying out the above as a prank, and insert your own telephone number. This is better than hiring a private detective. When the person you suspect your spouse is having an affair with calls up, indulge in heavy breathing, and hope that the person speaks first. Then freak him out by screaming obscenities into his face. Violence We talk about our love for violence. We think that it takes the form of kids like the Korean guy in Virginia Tech, or Columbine High. Of the sex and violence that comes through on mass media and television. We think about Jackie Chan, Rambo, Schwartzenegger.But I think it goes deeper than that. I think we have a love for war, and that we are genetically evolved to have a propensity for violence. We talk about people being at war, and how they come back from the frontier and tell their grandchildren war stories, about how it somehow becomes the defining experience of their lives. They almost miss killing a bunch of Japs / Germans.There is an extremely close relationship between physical violence and moral heroism. The war in Iraq is a moral crusade to topple a tyrant. World War II was a heroic struggle against the evils of fascism, and the Cold war a struggle against the evil commies.This talk has translated into the language of Mutual Assured Destruction, with the attendent echoes of the idea of the berserk warrior. There is a disproportionate amount of spending on the Department of Defence. The National Security Council meetings are very important because they tackle the "real" issues of government, instead of the "soft" issues like health care, or, like, the fiscal deficit. If you want to be a real minister in Singapore it helps a lot if you are a general first.If you go to the bookstores, there will be 1 gigantic section talking about war. I've read 1 or 2 war books, but I can't see myself going on. It's the same shit over and over again: who's taking what hill, people dying of disease, spectacular strategic blunders. I wonder how come this boring shit sells so well. But that's like the lowest common denominator, because that's the one thing anybody who has any passing interest in history would understand.Of the 2 big dynamics that underly human relationships - competition and co-operation, we tend to emphasise the former, so much so that Darwin's theory of evolution comes to be seen in almost exclusively competitive terms, and those people who want to point out the co-operative aspects of interaction between the agents in the system have to scream so loudly that they are only being heard now.I'd say that a lot of acts of terrorism have to do with perceptions of inequality. Am I surprised that the Korean guy who did this is a middle class student in a university? I don't think so. So many of the guys who carried out 9/11 were university graduates. Terrorism is a middle class occupation. But in the note that Cho left behind, he did bitch a lot about rich and snooty classmates. And of course there's this guy who has to right the wrong. And back then when Raskolnikov from "Crime and Punishment" was to commit his murder cum robbery, just before the act, Dostoevsky supplied the reader with copious descriptions of poverty and wretchedness. The act of robbery and murder is inextricably linked with his delusions of being a crusader for justice.In May 2001 I came across an issue of Newsweek magazine which talked about the "banality of evil", about how people who committed great acts of violence turn out to be mild mannered, quiet introverts. Like the Unabomber, and Jeffrey Dahmer, and now Cho. I thought up a short story that had a plot like this:This guy boards a plane, and it appears he is on a business trip, which he is. An attractive lady sits next to him, and he talks with the lady for a bit, and they sense some kind of a connection. It's obvious this guy has been lonely for a long time, and there's this vague sense that things are going to get better. Then the lady falls asleep on his shoulder. Afterwards, he thinks about his life back at home and his family. He gets a little disturbed for a while, then he decides, business is business, and he gets down to his work, which is to hijack that aeroplane and set off a bomb on board.But as I was about to write it, 9/11 happened, so that project was shelved.So that guy is a playwright, like I once aspired to be a playwright. Well having an appreciation for art is not really a guarantee that you won't turn out to be a mass murderer. Adolf Hitler was an art student. Phil Spector: enough said. Kim Jong Il a notorious movie buff. Endangered motherfuckers I love this story! The use of the f word There's this fascinating book I saw in the library. It's called "the 70s: how we got here". I've not read it yet but when I do it will be too late to talk about it on this blog because it would cease to exist. The thesis is that a large part of our lifestyle was shaped in the 70s and not a lot of things have changed sinced then. It's a fascinating thesis, and one I will be keen to explore.One of the things is that people became more rude to each other in the 70s. Why? The name of this blog has an f word in it. Seksi matafaka is "sexy motherfucker" in Malay spelling. But some people complained it was too rude, so it became sexy mother - shut your mouth.So why are youngsters swearing so much nowadays? People from the older generation always complain about this because it's very offensive to them. Well here are some reasons why, and you can either think hard about them, and learn a bit about the world we live in today, or you can pretend you've never seen this article.1. Liberalism.In a way, values have become more liberal. This is a truism. But it is not enough to say that values have become liberal. The question is why. And this is not easy to explain. You can say that we got influenced by the West. But this is problematic. The West was conservative in some periods and not others.It is more accurate to say that we get influenced by our impression of westerners, rather than real westerners. We meet the select group of them who find their way to our shores, instead of the rest of them.And lest people think that this is a phenomenon that is confined to the youngsters, it is worthwhile to remember that one man who has held the highest office in the world is known to have a foul mouth. I'm talking about Bill Clinton. Let's forget for a moment that he got sucked off in the oval office. He was the first baby boomer president, and was one of the "1968 generation". Also, there's Joashka Fischer, the German foreign minister, who was a student protester back in 1968.Maybe it's still important for many other leaders in other countries to behave in a more socially acceptable way. But the point is that a lot of people in high places have fairly liberal ideas now.2. The decline of authoritarianismSociety has become less respectful of authority. There was the US experience of Vietnam, where people in the younger generation were constantly questioning the government why people were being sent to a far off land to die. In 1968 riots erupted all over the world, taking authority down a few notches.The power of traditional forms of authority has been eroded over the years, because power and knowledge no longer reside in the hands of a few. Because of improved communications, and I'm not talking only about the internet, power is up for grabs for everybody.3. The decline of stigma against sexThere was the sexual revolution as well. A lot of swear words are highly sexual in nature. Now this conflation of profanity with sex, something I never fully understood.Now sex feels good. It makes for cordial relations between married couples. People reproduce from sex. Best of all, under certain circumstances, it is free of charge. So why do people think of it as a bad thing?There are consequences. Having a child out of wedlock is very serious business. There's this chapter in Freakonomics which argues that crime rate has gone down largely because abortion was legalised 20 years earlier. I think he'll get a lot of flak for that, but the arguments are plausible.But when you have contraception and abortion, there's one less really really big reason for sex to become immoral.Another reason why sex is immoral is AIDS. Well, can't do much about that. But if you are in a faithful relationship with somebody who doesn't have sex with the rest of the world, it's not a problem. This means that you don't even have to be married.Actually AIDS is a serious problem. 40 million people in the world today are HIV positive. And it's not like cancer, heart disease or diabetes, because it kills young people in their prime.The third reason why sex is immoral is because sex outside of a lurving caring relationship is problematic. People get hurt. Some religious nuts think that sex is only for procreation. These people are wrong. But I think that the only other reason is to enhance relationships between men and women. Having it only for pleasure kinda makes life empty. But this consequence is not as serious as the other two.So, paradoxically, even this time honoured tradition of shoving somebody's body part in and out like an engine piston has its meaning utterly transformed in our day and age. Bottom line: sex has simply become less offensive.4. StressLife has become less like slow sex and more like gang rape. In human history, the transition of mankind from hunter-gatherers to agriculture has resulted in a lower standard of living, because it makes a larger number of people more dependent on a few. It couldn't be helped, population is rising and there was no way a hunter gatherer lifestyle could be sustained on a much larger level.A big reason why life is stressful is because of the larger population. Larger populations make life wonderful for a few people at the top of the pyramid but really bad for everybody else. Remember some motherfucker thinks that Singapore can support 6.5 million people? What an asshole.5. Structure of societyThe 1990s saw the rise of Silicon Valley, where a lot of college geeks could change the world through technology firms. The richest man in the world today is a computer nerd.Life has become more complicated. It's more difficult to be autocratic when you're running a large organisation. Management guide books tell you that you can't merely look at every part of your business as though it were a black box, but when your organisations are so large, no CEO of a sufficiently large company can ever understand everything. In a way this point is closely related to point 2 where traditionalPoint is, this. If you say "fuck" to a superior, that's insubordination. If you say that to a subordinate, that's misuse of power. The most likely person you're going to use the f word on is a peer, and if society has become more horizontal, then there are more opportunities to say the f word.6. Hokkien is a great language for swearingNow when it comes to getting a kick out of swearing, "fuck" or "shit" has nothing on "tamade". In a way this reflects the beauty of the Chinese language. Even a word like "motherfucker" has so many meanings that when you say it it loses much of its sting. It's not even the most offensive language in English anymore. I think it's been supplanted by "nigger". However, when you say "knn... etc etc" you are still spelling out the meaning of the words.7. National Service This was where I embraced the wonderful cultural diversity of Singapore and learnt swear words in Malay and Tamil.8. UglinessThe world has become more ugly. Perhaps it cannot get as ugly as a, say, communist city, but ghetto culture and hip hop are the order of the day. Why is this so? This has to do with the fast pace of life. There is less time for flowery decorations, for decorum. For the beauty of the language. People want things, they want it now, and they want it fast. The era of great art has passed us by. The gods we pray to, I don't think Venus is one of them. It's all about commercialism, money, etc etc. Aesthetics aren't that important anymore.So that's one reason why we have the rise of undecorous language.9. Punk / postmodernismNow "fuck" is a simple word, but the ideas behind this word are not so simple. When you use a term like "motherfucker" and mean it as a compliment, and worse still, everybody around you knows that it's a compliment, it has certain implications. At its worst, it is moral relativism. But it's also some form of democracy, some form of levelling.Issues such as social stature either have less meaning, or they become extremely complicated. Like who's the master of the class, the teacher, the class bully, or the guy at the back of the class with all the wisecracks? At different points in time, when you ask yourself different questions, or define social stature according to different criteria, the answer is different.Who ever knows? The distortion of the meaning of "motherfucker" is a compelling piece of social commentary. Black is the new white. Bad is the new good. Up is the new down.10. Sex and violence on TV.There are examples of people using foul language, and it's supposed to look really cool. Like Samuel L Jackson on "Snakes on a Plane". It's a bit like smoking, really. Some people disapprove of it, but it's got that cool appeal. Some people come off completely klutzy but others become cultural icons. Suddenly people mimic this behaviour, and what used to be pure fiction becomes a part of the cultural landscape. Then there's this complicated feedback process between what's on TV and what people say and do. Then the TV just has to make people swear more because it's become the reality.11. NuancesThere are certain nuances of meaning that are more succintly conveyed with the use of vulgar language. Take for example the controversial advertisements for Australia tourism. They lay the plates out for you, polish the silver, let you dine outdoors in the brush with a juicy leg of lamb on the stove, and then ask, "where the hell are you?" Now there were plenty of objections, and even I would agree that maybe swearing on an advertisement is not the best thing you should do. But then the slogan got changed to "where are you". Now this is even worse than the original. "Where the hell are you?" has this connotation: why aren't you visiting Australia. A more accurate translation would be "why aren't you coming over?" But with "where are you?" this meaning is completely lost.When somebody says, "what are you doing?" it is definitely not the same as "what the fuck are you doing?" Because the f word denotes that it is the speaker's opinion that there's something seriously wrong with what's currently being done. And even if you say, "you're doing something wrong" another connotation is lost. The word fuck exemplifies the shock of your realising that something has gone dreadfully wrong. It compresses a large amount of realisation into a very small space. It is embodied in the Buddhist principle of sudden realisation. This is why both fuck and fo begin with the letter f. Ministerial salaries I'm wondering what to say about our ministerial salaries. Is it right that our ministers are paid $1M every year? I don't know.People are up in arms. Life is not fair. Why do we have the most highly paid civil service in the world?Let's talk about the arguments, both for and against, and assess them properly.1. Senior civil servants do not need to be paid that much because they do not work in organisations that make money. In a way that is true when you look at it from an accounting standpoint alone. Whatever you do, you take a cut of it. If you're earning big bucks, you take a cut of it, becuase the impact to the bottom line is not that great.However first this direct approach of measuring the worth of a person solely on his economic contribution to his organisation raises a few questions. If you are working for social services and health, surely your contribution is more important than just $$$. But because you are not making a lot of $$$, does it mean that that work is not valued much? For articulating environmental policy, that is not really tangible in $$$, although you are making the world a safer place for your grandchildren, assuming the world is not coming to an end by the time they grow up.While your contribution is not measurable in $$$, unfortunately your sole renumeration would have to be $$$.The other aspect is that governments may not be raking in $$$, but they can have a big influence on the country's economic performance. We know that the Great Depression is more a result of really really bad economic policies, rather than that people working in firms everywhere was lazy. If governments get a lot of blame when economic policies don't work, they should also get a lot of credit when they do. Otherwise it's not fair.2. Top people should be paid top salaries in order to make our government a better oneFirst off, our government is not made only of top people. Sorry to disappoint the cabinet ministers, but people at entry level also make a difference too. Why aren't they paid well?If a system where the path to the top is not always based on merit, or based on a questionable form of merit (scholarship system), then what do high salaries have anything to do with attracting talent? Isn't this more of a method of enriching a few elites who already have privileged access to the upper echelons of the civil service, rather than casting your net far and wide for civil service talent?The other thing is the assumption that you can buy the best people with the highest salaries. Is that true? Maybe up to a certain point. But the correlation between performance and salary has always been weak. It's only if you combine the salary incentive with a system of widening your net, that this incentive scheme will work. Otherwise it'd be most obviously a system of people benefitting their own kind.3. Corporations pay their top people top dollar tooWhat is the basis of pegging the salaries to big earners in corporations? Do heads roll when they don't perform? Not always. It's only when the system works. Like there is an enlightened board who are not under the thrall of the CEO (case in point: NKF), or when there is an action by the shareholders to make sure that the board and the senior management aren't in active collusion to skim away the takings of the company, legitimately, since you can basically name whatever the fuck you want as your salary.It's a terribly distorted market, because the systems that rein in how much people are paid in corporations don't work very well. In the end, because of market forces, even hitherto honest companies have to raise their senior executives' salaries to match the "market", which is, truth be told, a pretty fucked up market.We are all told in economics that salary renumeration is rational because there is a market (which approximates to the "perfect competition" we all read about in la la land and economic textbooks) which really pays people what it's worth. This is not true. For people who are aggressive alpha male go getters, there is the big cock effect, where you will demand more money than you need, more money than you'd be comfortable with, not because you need to upkeep a nice lifestyle, not because you need all that money for anything (after all you're working so hard, how on earth are you going to enjoy all that money?) but because you want to show that you're earning more than some particular other person. That is why, after a certain amount of money is being made, people go into philantropy. Philantropy is, after all, just another outlet for these sort of people to satisfy their competitive instincts. After all, binging and purging are merely 2 facets of the same coin.If you want to align the ideals of the higher echelon of government to the corporate world, you are aligning it downwards, not upwards.4. Paying the top people top dollar is a waste of governments' money.Not entirely true. To a certain extent, it is possible that paying people a lot of money can prevent a lot of corruption and pork barrel politics from taking place. And also a way of maintaining the incorruptibility of civil servants. This can save the government a lot of money.What are 2 big reasons for the Iraq war? You think that Cheney didn't take into consideration how the war would enrich Halliaburton? Why does the US military have so manytoys it doesn't need?If these abuses can take place in such a so-called "open" country like the United States, wouldn't you think that things would be worse in Singapore? We all like to talk about openness, freedom and democracy, but it's not that effective when a few disparate activists and NGOs go around bitching about all these under the table deals. They can't affect policy, they can't do a damn thing. The only realistic option is for a government to police itself.Then again, you might go back for reservist training and notice that the SAF has gotten rather top heavy with a disordinate number of colonels and generals walking around with nothing better to do, not really willing or able to leave the organisation because they can't find a real market for their talents. Even if all these people are smart, capable people, does the civil service really need all of them? How much are people paying to keep all these deadweight? How are you going to explain to the young and ambitious people in the civil service that you can't raise their salaries to the superscale?5. We have a world class civil serviceWhile it may be true that our government is more effective than most other governments in implementing their policies, is that indicative that we have a superior civil service, or is that an indication that our people are basically in thrall to the government and is willing to follow whatever we do?Put it this way, if a city is crime free, the police force does not have to be very good.The other thing is: we're a small country. Why does the PM of a small country need to be much more capable than the PM of a large country? You could say that we have a lot of vulnerabilities, given our precarious situation: multi racial, Chinese island in a Malay sea, very easy to go wrong. But is that really true? Are tiny nation states necessarily more vulnerable? The Venetian state lasted more than 1000 years! D6. We are the only country who pays that much to our executives.Probably. But look at the Queen of England. An essentially parasitical existence, since she's not an executive. Surely she gets more than $2M a year. Of course, comparing these salaries to royalty is a completely different thing. It's not as though we should aspire towards this situation.What do I think? I think that the top civil servants should be paid well. But they are already being paid well, so this recent increase was completely unnecessarily. I don't have a problem with them earning $1M a year, but I definitely have a problem with them saying that $1M is not enough.I think that the increases should be across the board, that the salaries of the rank and file should get more of the increase. They should publish the ratio of the top executive to the entry level. In corporations, this is an outrageous amount, and there's no reason why the civil service have to reflect such inequities. Music scene I came across this article on a talent show, where not only the performers and songwriters are appraised, but also the whole marketing and managing team and executives behind them. I think well, at least Joe Strummer is dead and he doesn't have to see this, but maybe he's turning in his grave. For me this is just plain awful.You notice how when 20-something girls are at their most beautiful, they are also at their most haughty and arrogant, and suddenly by the time they're 40, they turn into desperate housewives. And so it is with the music industry. It's a dying industry, at least for the major labels, and all this American Idol shit is just reflective of how the media's given up on good ideas, given up on music quality, letting their audiences do their talking and thinking for them.You have to wonder why there's this constant divide between commercial appeal and critical appeal. When you read books like "Tipping Point" or "Wisdom of Crowds", you'll understand that a big part of the reason why such and such a song is a hit and not another song, is accident. Why it's so important that a song has to gain the critical mass needed in order for it to be a hit. Whereas whether it's a good song or not, is something that's more intrinsic about the song itself. It either has good quality, or it doesn't. Even for people who were ignored by their contemporary audiences, like Nick Drake, Big Star and Velvet Underground, they will eventually be recognised because the quality is there. If Nick Drake hadn't died, he'd be rich and famous today. Now how incongruous is that?I still remember this brief time when Nirvana managed to turn the whole music industry upside down. It was a glorious moment, when a lot of good music that had been bubbling under suddenly got unleashed upon the world. A lot of bands that were really good, who had been plying their trade for many years without being recognised came up at the same time. Suddenly the whole world knew about people like the Pixies, the Smashing Pumpkins, Husker Du, Massive Attack, Teenage Fanclub, REM, Sonic Youth, The Fall, Meat Puppets, Happy Mondays, Ride, My Bloody Valentine, Sundays, Stone Roses. It was a hundred flowers blooming, like the Cambrian explosion.But you'd see this pattern emerging: 1. There is a punk movement, and a lot of bands who deserve to be well known suddenly make it big. 2. Music industry gets caught with their pants down, and as is typical behaviour, scrambles around for the next big thing. 3. Lots of hacks, a few of them really talented, but mostly talentless opportunists jump onto the bandwagon and fuck around. 4. Meanwhile, newly famous bands from point 1 are badly equipped to handle fame and fortune, and some, like Kurt Cobain, screw it up really really badly. 5. Scene implodes owing to either their audience moving on, or talentless opportunists from point 3 screwing up the quality of the music, or noveau riche from point 4 screwing up the fame and fortune part. For more details, read "Last Party" by John Harris. So it all ended with the gunshot that killed Kurt Cobain*. Suddenly people who can't sing like Britney Spears come along and the music scene is back in NKOTB mode.I've been watching long enough to see what it is like for Michael Jackson to be an upstart. By now he's worshipped like a God. He used to be worshipped like an idol, and people were saying, "he's good, cool, flashy footsteps and nifty music. But the Beatles were better." Now he's joined the pantheon of the Gods, for no other reason than because he was famous 20 years ago. I've had to raise my eyebrows before when people said, for the first time, that the Smiths were one of the greatest English bands alongside the Beatles. Nowadays, a great number would agree with that. Remember when ABBA was just a cheesy disco outfit? Now they're called pop geniuses, like they were Mozart or something. Remember when people derided T-Rex for having a terribly short but phenomenal period of stardom? Now every wannabe who wants to be famous has to study their tricks.What I'm a little aghast at, though, is the amount of respect accorded to some system where people sing in front of some panel of judges, and they just pontificate about what the guy is supposed to do. (For the record, Paula Abdul was for a short time a teenage idol much like Britney Spears now is. She had some good songs and was a nifty dancer but her singing was shit. This, by the way, is the consensus.) I think that's totally wrong. The best kind of performer is the one who figures out the best way to perform, comes up with something totally new, and then lets the audience catch up with it 20 years later. The second best kind of performer is the one who listens to his audience and catches up with his audience. After that, comes the performer, who needs a third party to tell him what he (the third party) thinks the audience wants to hear. And after that, is the performer who needs a third party to tell both him and the audience what the audience wants to hear. In other words, the judge tells the performer what what he thinks the audience wants to hear, and at the same time he's telling the audience what the audience is supposed to want to hear. This is a fourth rate performer, worse than the third rate because he's performing for a dumb audience who needs to be told what sort of a performer to look out for. Last of all is the performer who can't perform.We thought that the 80s were a bad decade for music, because that's when music started getting really really commercialised. It was the decade when image started overruling the quality of the music, and must have come as a nasty shock to a lot of people. Turns out that it was just a mild taste of things to come. Suddenly, inexplicably, a lot of the hits from the 80s are now considered "classics", even dubious ones like "You turn me around like a record baby". And this is why: people don't write their own music anymore. Nowadays fame is so fleeting and comes to such a small number of people in the scene that you practically have to whore yourself to get noticed. Don't come up with your own stuff, do covers. Janet Jackson used to be able to tell people something original about "What Have You Done For Me Lately". After that it's all ill disguised covers of Sly + Family Stone, or Joni Mitchell, or even more ludicrous, Satie. Even Eminem has to cover "Dream On" by Aerosmith. American Idols must sing covers, even though that decision is admittedly practical: it's easier to judge a person who sings a song that everybody knows.Maybe it's because I haven't really stayed in touch with the music scene, that I only know about the most commercial stuff (which is inevitably the most disappointing.) Maybe I would find a lot of creative stuff bubbling under that I don't know about. But a lot of what's happened recently makes me pine for the 90s.** I could easily have written instead, "Kurt Cobain's suidide", except conspiracy theories abound that it wasn't a suicide. Fashionable nonsense Reading this book - Fashionable Nonsense, written by 2 scientists who feel completely appalled that many postmodernists abuse many references to maths and science. One of them wrote a parody of postmodernists misusing scientific concepts, and turned out a paper full of junk, and submitted it to a postmodernist magazine. What do you know? It got published.In a way I never really got into studying the Humanities in my college. For all my claims towards having a broad and well balanced education, I didn't do a lot of humans stuff, only social science. And even that was a little disappointing because people there didn't have the guts to teach us anything much more than the constructivist approach. This means that you basically "see through" everything on the surface, and then you find that all these meanings are man- made, and either not to be taken seriously, or it could just as well could have been otherwise. I think that these are very good caveats to have, very good analytical tools. I think these ideas allude to the ability of people to invent new meanings to things, and I like this because I like the idea of freedom.At the same time I'm also quite concerned that people take this postmodernism / constructivism thing too far, and go on to say that basically things don't have meanings. I don't like that. There was this book I had to read which repudiated the idea that Asian Americans do better academically because their parents are more likely to tell them to study hard. This is definitely untrue.At the same time I believe that there is a limited application for ideas. I don't really believe that ideas are entities unto themselves, like Plato does. I don't believe that there is an ideal "chair" out there which is somehow more real than something that you sit on. I just think of ideas as abstractions. And an abstraction is a tool, a memory aid, a sketch. That's all. People who use them as crutches, I sometimes sympatise with them because I do that too. But that's all, it doesn't amount to respect. An idea can give you clues as to what the real thing is about, but there's still a gap between that and practice.One of the paradoxes of postmodernism is that while it tends to be a repudiation of the importance of ideas, it dresses itself up in nothing but ideas. Perhaps it stresses the primacy of the idea, that ideas shape reality to such a large extent that you could say something and make it true. That simply by getting people to see things differently you would be able to change the concrete reality.I am a little wary about going into fields of study which base itself on interpreting texts, or works of art, where it is not easy to show whether a person is right or wrong. Then it could end up as a competition to see who's the best at arguing, and not who's right. I've been in discussions where people can be very articulate about being wrong, so much so that it actually scares me. I will not begrudge the fact that a lot of academia follows fashion. We are all humans and some things are always "in" and others "out". But the extent to which academic trends are based on what sounds fashionable, the extent to which people listen or not listen to your ideas based on how trendy and chic they sound, it matters.At least with science and engineering, you got results to back you up, even though there is the occasional holy war. All fields of study are fuckable, but some are more fuckable than others.Like I can read about how Lacan tried to smoke people by comparing mental states with the topological classification of manifolds. (This mental disorder is a torus, that one is a sphere... I know, it's that stupid.) It's hilarious reading that shit, and you know for sure it's wrong. I wonder if he knows that he's venturing into an area with a smaller scope for smokability than his own field. And how he thinks he can talk about compact sets while offering a highly distorted definition*. I'm glad that somebody wrote that book, because higher mathematics ain't nothin' to f wit.Reminds me of somebody who used to ask me questions about some maths theories. I might explain things to her, but then I'd shudder to think about how the concept would be used.This tells you something about higher maths. It's very hip to be able to drop names of theorems and funky concepts. The ideas are very aesthetically appealing. It's very nice to think of yourself as being able to understand all that stuff. In fact I wouldn't have done higher maths if the ideas didn't sound so cool. Unfortunately the scope of application of higher maths is rather limited. The ideas are elegant but we live in a messy world. Why is something simply more "true" just because you can use fancy Maths to show it? A lot of people will buy it, but I'm no longer one of them. Even if the precision and rigour, the scope for fucking around is simply too much. If your axioms are wrong, then everything is wrong.* A set is compact if, for any cover of that set made up of open sets, there is a subset of that cover which also covers the set. In other words, you can always guarantee the existence of an open cover with a finite number of sets, this makes it easy to prove certain properties on that compact set. In real Euclidean space, any set which is closed and bounded is also compact. Ascension I must have mentioned so many times before that I'm going to close this blog down, but never got down to doing it. And short of actually physically deleting this blog, I don't see how that's going to happen. Well, folks, don't worry about this blog being deleted. It's not going to happen.Not within the next 2 weeks anyway.The reason this blog arose was part of the malaise I had. In a way I never really got accustomed to leaving school. I never really moved on from my old existence of obeying rules. All my life, it's been a one track mind. Get that piece of paper. Or if you're in the army obey instructions. If you want to slack off don't get caught. If you want something of your own, reach out and grab it, so long as you don't have to veer off your straight and narrow path to do so. Never much thinking for myself.I discovered while in the uni (but I'm sure that there are people out there who would disagree with me) that I'd be best being a researcher, pursuing what I wanted to pursue, with the freedom to go around doing only what I wanted to do. And, this is most important: not really caring if what I did would have value to other people. I think that is one common conception of what freedom is about.It did rankle a lot with me that I didn't get to pursue this much further when I came back. But I think eventually when you're more settled you always think that it's so much easier to take things as they come. A lot of the problems in the beginning were about not really understanding a lot of things: why did people do things a certain way and not another way? Why did they value quantity over quality? Why don't people think that a contemplative life is worth leading at all? Why do people think that if you're not 100% committed to $$$ then there's something morally suspect about you? Why do people think that learning history is a frivolous enterprise?And some problems with friends and family too: without further elaborating, let's say that certain people think there are more important things than being happy and living in harmony.Anyway my blog was some way of recording down a lot of my thinking, a lot of my ideas, some synthesis I got from reading (and I still do an awful lot of that.) Making things clearer, making the whole picture more coherent.In the Hotel California, some people dance to remember and others dance to forget. I blog to forget. What I learnt from my stochastic processes classes (such elegant, beautiful, ultimately useless maths) was this special exponential / geometric / Markov distribution, which had this "memory-less" property. It struck me that I could be "memory-less". You wake up every morning and the whole world begins anew, as though yesterday never happened. You may not be getting anywhere in your life, but at least you are always young. Sorda.I record things down so that I wouldn't have to think about it. I empty my thoughts out on paper so that more new thoughts can go into my head. Maybe I will look back upon this record and some new things will strike me. Maybe I will never read what I've written again.Sometimes these dynamics have a life of their own. I often find, after a while that I will punch in a few sentences about a topic, and in order to finish writing about that, I'll have to spend another 1/ 2 hrs tediously typing every thread of logic to its conclusion. It's not fun, it's time consuming. The only fun part was finding that idea in the first place. Too many hours of joyless exposition is not good for the health.Many people who know me would see me as being sloppy in many regards, and I guess I am. But when it comes to following through with an idea, I am not sloppy. I am not sloppy with logical rigour, I am not sloppy when I demand from myself new original ideas all the time. I try very hard not to tell the same joke twice. Perhaps never to say the same thing twice, which is why I find myself very very quickly running out of things to say to people. But still...Then the other problem with pursuing knowledge for its own sake is that you're really never sure where it all fits in in the grand scheme of things. If you're running a business, at least you know that in terms of practical solid reality, you're always involved in the lives of others, even if in some oblique way. It's almost like you didn't have to worry about this as an academic, so long as the funds keep coming your way, you could publish and publish and publish, who'd read? Only such a small percentage of work has any bearing on other peoples' real lives. That's something I've come to realise over the course of working in a corporation. So is it better to be a cog in a machine that is doing something, or to be an autonomous entity unto yourself, whose participation in the grand scheme of things is suspect?Another thing is, I've come to realise that that nagging sense of unease that I've experienced throughout my undergraduate years comes about because I lack that mental security that I am doing something that's "real". I could say, "yes, this sounds impressive". I could say, "what an original, non-trivial, penetrating insight". But in the grand scheme of things, how have you benefitted your brother in a concrete fashion?So we set into motion a process, whereby whatever this blog stood for: my intellectual pursuits, hours of refining a train of thought, perhaps even my self imposed isolation. Like Woody Allen said in one of his films, a relationiship is like a shark, it needs to constantly keep swimming otherwise it will not get the oxygen it needs. And we need to be moving on. And maybe I've also seen too many people come and go at work to think I haven't been sitting still for too long.Oh, I've mentioned to one of you that the quality of the blog inevitably declines over time. (But of course I said it in a more direct way than that.) So am I superimposing my values over yours? That just because my blog has outlived its purpose than yours will inevitably do so. Maybe, I hope not, because that wouldn't be very nice. But it's getting tiresome to keep writing and I can imagine that it's tiresome to keep reading. Iraq Iraq. The popular wisdom about Iraq is that it was a completely unnecessary war, fought only for oil. The WMD was only an excuse. The reconstruction was badly handled.For me, after I've read Niall Ferguson's "Colossus", I will only agree with the third statement. I will think that the war was in some way necessary, even if it's not for the reasons that the average American will agree with. Saddam had to go. Yes, the US fought an amazing 3 major conflicts (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq) in the space of 5 years. But they were "leftover" incidents. The Balkans problem had been around since 91/ 92. The Taliban had been around since 1995. Iraq was an unsolved problem since 1991. Is it wrong to clear up shit that other people have left behind for you?There are reasons why intervention in Iraq was necessary. Saddam had to go. The sanctions were not working and instead of encouraging the citizens to rise up against Saddam, they strengthened his hand because all the foreign aid had to go through him. He was a threat to security. Yes, there was the prospect of oil, but in the large scheme of things Iraq is very important strategically and you had to do something about it if the Middle East was going to progress and prosper.There was the temptation that if a successful rebuilding of Iraq took place, Iraq could be a lynchpin for liberal democracy, and help foster this in the Middle East, just as Japan and Germany were to be for East Asia and Europe respectively. Of course it's going to be much tougher for Iraq to function as a democracy than Japan or Germany. Japan and Germany had been prosperous and industrialised states, even at the time of the war. While Iraq was relatively rich just before the Iran Iraq war, it wasn't a "capable" nation in the sense that Japan and Germany was. Germany and Japan only needed to look back at their pre-militism past in order to remember how to build a strong nation. Iraq only had Saddam Hussein to hold the nation together, and after he's gone, the Iraqis don't have a strong sense of nationhood. In reality, Iraq is 3 parties: the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shi'ites. One wonders if it will ever be partitioned, if it will collapse into a long period of civil war.You only have to look at Indonesia, the Congo, the former Yugoslavia and the former USSR to know that states, after the collapse of a strong dictator will struggle to hold themselves together.Ferguson's argument is that the reconstruction of Iraq is possible after a long and sustained period in the country. For example the US stuck around in Japan and Germany for around 10 years.He wrote something very interesting about the military occupations of Germany and Japan. Much has been made of how, in Germany and Japan, the American occupations have been essentially benevolent, in spite of the fact that these were defeated war powers. This fact is often held up as proof of American goodwill. Well guess what? It turns out that they prospered because America screwed up! America didn’t want Germany and Japan’s economies to grow that quickly because they wanted to incapacitate both economies. But it turned out that if these two countries were not allowed to make the quick transition to peacetime prosperity, the occupations of both countries would turn into a gigantic humanitarian aid operation. They were allowed to develop out of expediency, and not because of any humanitarian goodwill.In both countries, many of the people involved in the government were allowed to keep their posts. This was a measure that drew a lot of criticism over the years, but Ferguson argues that it was the right thing to do. A total revolution would have badly disrupted the The reconstruction of both countries has been compared to Iraq. Now one of the big problems is that during the occupation of Iraq, the occupying forces dismissed the entire police and armed forces. I think people now agree that this was a really stupid thing to do, because a large number of the insurgents causing problems in the country are former police and armed forces people.Also reading "Plan of Attack", which is the second of a trilogy of Bob Woodward's reports on George W Bush's administration going to war. Interesting titbits: (1) General Tommy Franks had just finished a war in Afghanistan when he got wind that they wanted to attack Iraq as well. His first reaction was, "Goddamn. What the fuck are they talking about?" (2) George W Bush attended a briefing in which everybody was served peppermints. He ate his peppermint, and after a while, started eyeing William Cohen's (Clinton's defence secretary) peppermint, and was like, "you want that?" Cohen said no, and Bush ate that one too. (3) The "Pottery Barn" principle for foreign interventions: you break it, you own it.What do I think? I think that although if there were WMD, the case for war would have been very clear cut, there were also very compelling reasons for the war. But I wonder sometimes if they were too greedy. Why couldn't the USA wait for everybody else to join in the war effort, instead of rushing in unilaterally? There are a few possible explanations. One is that the oil that you'd get from Iraq would be paid for in US$, instead of Euros. Thing is, if everybody joined in the war, then a more broad based coalition would have had more legitimacy, and perhaps the Iraqis would have accepted them more easily. It's plain to see that Dick Cheney, with his connections to Halliaburton would have profited immensely from the war effort as well.It could have been everybody's problem, but since the US chose to go it alone it, and it alone is responsible for the big mess now.After reading “Colossus” by Niall Ferguson, a very interesting book, I am beginning to see why the guy has such a reputation for being a contrarian historian. According to his preface, his book has upset a lot of people. First of all, if you want to say that America is a world empire, you aren’t allowed to say that it’s a good thing. Secondly if you agree that America’s extraordinary military and economic superiority in the world is a good thing, you aren’t allowed to call it an empire. Ferguson has done both. He thinks that America is an empire, and that it’s a good thing. And he got a bit of flak for that. I wonder what he thinks about the war now, though. One of his points is an interesting one: only an empire would assume responsibility for Iraq. If you're just a sovereign nation state, you just go about minding your own business, you just sweep the snow from your own doorstep. Most of the time you wouldn't give a damn about Iraq, you'd just assume that it's the US's business. If the US doesn't do anything about Iraq, it's the US's problem. If the US goes it along in Iraq, it's also the US's problem.Oh, today is also the 6th of April, which makes it Rwanda genocide day. Dead book stores If nothing else, remember that a bookstore, in order to be successful, has to be placed in the path of people. I still like bookstores but there are so many ways to get your books.First you could wait until there's a warehouse sale, and it gets advertised in the papers a few weeks beforehand. Or you could go on Yahoo auctions and look for it. Or you could get it a few $$ cheaper at a 2nd hand bookstore. Or you could get it off bookmooch. There are fewer and fewer reasons to get something for full price.1. MPH at Stamford The granddaddy of all dead bookstores. When it closed down I felt like I was witnessing history in the making. It was a little shoddy in the 80s, but they refurbished it, and it opened to great fanfare in 1991. It had a music section, also called "Music Power House". But its location, in a quiet little Armenian Street was always going to count against it, and what more with the central library no longer existing.Had a friend who used to work at Music Power House. Told me it was bleeding money. They used to sell their CDs cheaper than anybody else, and I used to stock up there 10 yrs ago. Of course, that was just before the MP3 which was basically a catastrophe to the CD business.Today, MPH occupies 2 locations not too far away from the Stamford Road building, which is more logical because they are in the path of copious amounts of pedestrian traffic: in Raffles City and in CityLink.2. Times at Plaza SingapuraAnother one of the largest bookstores in Singapore. But it had to go when they refurbished the whole of Plaza Singapura 10 yrs ago. When Plaza Sing opened again, it was there, and smaller. And recently it shrunk some more.3. Times at CentrepointTime was when you could put one of the largest bookstores in Singapore on the 4th floor, and people would still go there. And it wasn't for lack of ambition that the bookshop faltered: a few years ago, it was occupying 2 floors, on the 4th floor and the 6th floor of Centrepoint. Unfortunately people stopped coming, and it had to beat a retreat, first shutting down the 6th floor and returning to its original size of 1 floor, and now it's ceded half of its space again.4. MPH at Junction 8, MPH at Wisma AtriaAt least the Junction 8 store lasted more than 10 years. Maybe it's more difficult selling high end English books in heartland shopping malls. Most of the bookstores in these outlying areas are Popular book stores, which sell Chinese books as well, more stationery, more children's books, assessment books. I think the Junction 8 MPH also closed because the library was opening next door. The MPH at Wisma Atria was on the 4th floor, where Food Republic is now. It's never a good idea to put a bookstore up there, unless it's big enough to draw traffic in its own right.5. WH Smith at NovenaWH Smith wanted to set up shop in Singapore. It opened a whole chain of shops in Changi Airport, and in Novena square. Good attempt, I thought. But Times bought over their Changi Airport operations, and WH Smith eventually pulled out of Singapore. Well there's an MPH right next door to where the WH Smith used to be, so it might be possible to support a bookstore there. Or maybe not.6. Word Shop at (gasp) Orchard TowersI think 20 years ago this was a fairly large shop. I don't know what happened to it. As usual it doesn't pay to be in an ulu place, where there aren't enough sober customers to buy what you're selling.7. Page One at Marina CentreThis was a real quirky store. The one in Marina Centre closed down, but they have a large store in Vivocity. Which is nice, they still have all those slanted shelves. Also they seem to have understood (as MPH and Times have not) that a good bookstore needs to have a critical mass in order to attract people there. The slanted shelves are still there.But there is a big problem with the store. Some of the shelves face the window, and you should never expose your books to the sun. Well, hope they can sell their books quickly then.8. Kinokuniya at Wisma AtriaThis is alright, I think they moved next door to Taka, became a very very big store, and is doing really well. I don't know about the Liang Court branch though. But maybe a great place for people to meet on Saturday night before they go chionging at MOS.9. Times at Toa Payoh, Serangoon GardensTime was when you could still stock up a small bookshop in the middle of the wilderness. But I think it doesn't make sense anymore. A good newsstand can stock more magazines than you, and you can't beat a large bookstore for variety: not much reason why anybody would buy a book from you.10. Tower Books.There is still a Tower books, and it's at their store in Suntec. I think the Tower model of a music superstore doesn't quite work anymore. They were for a brief time the largest music store in Singapore. It was a catchword for a lot of hip and trendy stuff. But they had such a large range of inventory they probably didn't know how to manage it well, and also probably made the mistake of bringing in things that people aren't going to buy. (But that's OK, since you are a chain, you can always ship the stuff elsewhere.) It used to be that music retail was about stocking up a really wide range of CDs, nowadays people are careful to only bring in bestsellers and value for money propositions.Borders and Kinokuniya have changed the equation completely. As has NLB. People are much more demanding about what they want from a bookstore. It used to be that people were saying 15 years ago that you could never get any decent books at the bookstore (I remember my first impression of London when I went there 15 years ago was how incredibly well stocked their bookstores were.) But that's no longer true. Thank You for Smoking Movie binge recently. I was maybe bored with my books? Movies just don't take up that much of your time."Thank You for Smoking". I have rather mixed feelings about cigarettes. I remember going on a trip of the US, and we hired a tour guide who brought us around, and we got to the subject of cigarettes, and I, probably I was 12 and fairly brainwashed by government propaganda at that time, I said that they should put all the smokers on an island so we don't have to breathe in their second hand smoke. Then not long after she let out that she was a smoker. I regretted what I said.(smoking)I think while we want to cut down on smoking, it's really quite harsh to sequester people into yellow boxes. People should be allowed to smoke in the open air. Recently they have this campaign to limit the number of places where you can light up to an absolute minimum, where each restaurant has only like 2 tables for smokers, I think that's like going to give them a persecution complex. I used to hate the smell of tobacco, but after getting more exposed to them while in NS I don't have that many objections to them. I wouldn't touch that stuff but live and let live.About pictures of lung cancer and throat cancer on packets of cigarettes, I got to admit that it's a little heavy handed. People smoke to have fun, and you're spoiling their fun. (But I guess that's how it's effective.) I guess things can get a little miserable for the people with their addictions and you get reminded that you will die horribly one day, but you still got to have a puff.But then I have some objections to smoking. You probably have seen, maybe on Seinfeld, some ambitious climbers who smoke a lot in order to be pal-ly with the boss. That's a little strange, I wouldn't ruin my health in order to be pal-ly with the boss. If it happens, it just happens. If it happens in the Army... I mean these people are supposed to be the epitome of physical fitness, and if they smoke, if you got to smoke in the SAF to get ahead, I do think it's pretty screwed up.I wouldn't ever take up smoking. I have an addictive personality and I know it. It's just as well I don't get high on alcohol, or at least I don't find being drunk fun.(living fast)I used to watch my diet carefully. Used to eat a lot of yong tao foo, fishball noodles, econ rice and the like, but recently have thrown caution to the winds. Now it's laksa, bryani, prata. You wonder why Indians, especially those older one, usually end up so fat. Why Korean chicks have such good skin? Because they alway eat brown rice or unpolished rice, and all that fibre is busy at work scraping all the toxins into their shit. And that's the funny thing about eating both peranakan and teochew stuff at the dining table. Teochew women are usually among the best looking Chinese in Singapore, because of the good two shoes diet they have : steamed fish, porridge, braised pork, tau pok. Then there's the sinful peranakan stuff: ladies fingers with dollops of sambal, ayam buak keluak, assam fish. The saint and the sinner.I guess what I'm saying is that I'm 30 and worried if I'm ever going to balloon in my middle aged years. I don't think so but you never know. I go out and eat all sorts of nonsense: KFC. Murtabak. Hor fun. I rationalise to myself that I burn it all up during my 2 hours of exercise every week but not always true, and dangerous to tell these things to yourself.What I'm trying to get at is the tension between being young and thinking that you can do whatever shit you want, and getting older when you realise that you got to watch your ass whatever you do. Like smoking, when you're young, it's really glamorous. Then when you're middle aged all the damage starts showing. Like when they kidnapped the lobbyist in the show and slapped 200 nicotine patches on him and he had to be hospitalised and get so near to death....I actually want to distinguish between death and decay. Death means that everybody has to go someday, and if I were, at 80 years old be fit and healthy still up and about, my body not wasting away, or diseased, and suddenly I get an anvil dropped on my head, or die in a car crash (quickly, mind), or in my sleep, it doesn't bother me at all. What's more terrible, though, is the decay of the body. If you were to lose an arm when you're 50, eyesight half gone by 55, having difficulty walking by 60, had hip replacement by 65, I think that's a bad way to live. I don't personally fear death, but it's the wasting away that's terrible that I can do without.I don't really care about inviting death, but I don't want the decay. Maybe that will motivate me to get more fit. I haven't even gone for lasic because I'm scared of the risk of going blind when I'm old. That'd be terrible.(thank you for smoking)Tobacco lobbying in the US is a nasty piece of work. I haven't watched "The Insider" yet but the guy who has to worry about being killed because he leaked internal memos about tobacco research to the press? Damn. I guess I wouldn't be so sympathetic towards big tobacco in the States becuase they got too much muscle to laugh at. (And by the way I feel for the small guy puffing away on the cigarette but really couldn't give a fuck about all those big companies.) There's this book sitting on my shelf, "Ashes to Ashes", a Pulitzer prize winning account of the amazing stranglehold big tobacco has on the US, and I will read it some day but not soon because I'm getting a little tired of doing nothing but reading books. (By the way one of my shelves gave way today - too many books. Think I'll shore it up with some steel plate reinforcements. )Katie Holmes is hot. No wonder that lobbyist wanted to fuck her. I'd want to too but Tom Cruise already got her. No wonder she gets Tom Cruise. But of course a lot of people are going to hate her for that, or otherwise it smacks of being too careerist. And naturally tongues are going to be wagging about how he gets some young starlet with not that many movies under her belt. (Maybe it's that other stuff under the belt that's more important.) Maybe I'll go watch her other movies. But I don't like Christian Bale.Some reviews of the movie have criticised the movie for portraying the lobbyist as a sympathetic character but I'm alright with that. I think it's OK to humanise humans. That way you can see why seemingly normal, sensible, ordinary human beings can devote their lives to such horrendous causes. The lobbyist says - what's it all about? It's about paying the mortgage. 99% of all the shit that ppl do is for paying the mortgage. The journalist who used her pussy to squeeze the lobbyist for secrets - how's that - having fun on your job. But how she used such treachery on him (albeit for a good cause, so that's forgivable), that's about paying the mortgage. It's a good touch to see a lobbyist try to explain what he does to the son. That way all his obfucation, all his lawyerly tricks, all his rationalisation and self justification comes to the fore. He's a good performer but his best performances are reserved for his son who still holds him in thrall.And that's the thing that makes him more compelling as the central villian of the piece. He can smooth talk his way around other people because he has a little bit of goodness in him, enough of it can come out for people to like him - they won't be persuaded otherwise. He wouldn't be convincing if he didn't have any decency whatsoever. That's what makes him real, and ironically that's what makes him effective.People are portrayed as weasels here. How the Dilbert cartoonist in all his wisdom portrays the typical office worker: not an angel, nor a devil, but a weasel, somebody capable of both good and bad. A devoted father can be an asshole without a conscience at work. A journalist with the righteous intention to expose the machinations of the tobacco lobby resorts to offering sex to dull her victim's alertness. It gets into the heart of what's going on, why evil happens. Evil is a pattern of the alignment of peoples' interests with each other. If they are set up against each other then evil results. The system affects peoples' behaviour. (Which is not to say that people can't opt out of the system - they choose not to.)Other film watched was "Broken Flowers". Not much to say but I'd recommend it.Oh, and England failed to beat Israel. I wonder who the next England coach is going to be. Work that stick baby It's a harebrained scheme, but I guess I had to do it anyway. I started driving a manual car for myself without the supervision of anybody. The manual car was there, so I went to drive it. Before I started, I only knew 2 things: first, you have to depress the clutch when you're changing gears. Second, and this was told to me by a cousin, when you're changing gear, you have to release the clutch and step on the gas at the same time.My introduction to manual transmission was a very rough one. I had no idea: was so used to automatic where I would just keep 1 foot on the brake no matter what. In my first 20 minutes in the car, I must have heard the gnashing of gear teeth, engine brought to a violent standstill, stalling in the middle of the carpark (thank god for car parks!) around 20 times. I was truly learning from the school of hard knocks. I hardly knew how to get out of the parking lot at first. I would depress some wrong combination of pedals, and the car would jerk forward and come to a violent stop. I was truly concerned about doing something terrible to the engine. In fact, within 5 minutes, I had the car lurching forward in spasmodic jerks that were so violent the radio popped out of the socket. Everything that was on the passenger seat was on the floor. I was really sweating.I would probably have killed somebody if I managed to get the engine out of first gear. But luckily that's not possible. Even if I drove headlong against the wall it would probably cause more than a minor dent. But I was panicking because I didn't know what I was doing.Worse was to follow when I tried the clutch accelerate thing on my reverse. I didn't understand why it was so hard to get right. A hiccup, a lurch, but never managed to get the reverse right. (I found out later that I didn't have to use the brake. The clutch was the brake for reverse and 1st gear. But because I didn't know this at first, I panicked because I realised that I wasn't going to be able to park the car. By now I was driving circles around the top levels of the multistorey car park. In the end, my car came to a complete standstill in the middle of the parking lot, half way it. I didn't know what to do. So I set the gear to neutral, turned off the engine, and pushed the car all the way in.After that, I drove the auto car to McDonalds', thinking "thank God for auto transmission. That's the difference between my being alive or dead by now. I guess if you only know auto, you don't really know how to drive. There's a machine somewhere doing half your driving for you.Sat there for half an hour, drinking iced lemon tea and reading Karen Armstrong's book on fundamentalism. And drove back. A cursory inspection of the car revealed a new mark on the car, to my dismay. I hope that I can explain that away as something that was there before I lay my hands on that car. Or maybe not.Well I wasn't that happy about failing in my first attempt to drive a manual, so after I was back home I took out the manual again, and this time I learnt that when you switched from standstill to first gear, there's no need to use the accelerator, because it only makes things more complicated. That was a stunning revelation. OK, at least now I can make the car start moving without destroying the gearbox. Was able to reverse park the car properly. Wow, that was a big relief. But of course, some vestige of the trauma of the spasmodic jerking and engine dying was still there. I still had the jitters when I walked away from the car: I felt like I was walking away from a car wreck.I'm driving the auto to work tomorrow. I wonder if I can pull myself together, forget about the traumatic experience with the manual and concentrate on the driving.Edit: a few days later: I have successfully driven to work. Unfortunately some motherfucker ran his motherfucking key down the side of my car. The problem is that when you're having a fancy car people think that you're some kind of boss or something. To be a peon, and at the same time get your car scratched by some motherfucker, is like a double whammy.Edit 2: 2 people have separately come up to me and recommended that somebody who knows manual sits next to me and teaches me what is going on. That's a little bit too late. I've figured out most things through trial and error. I'm going to do the safe thing and drive at night.My father hardly scolds me for anything these days but I've left 2 scratch marks on his car. (It's a big car and it's hard to manoeuvre, so I've scraped the bumper against the wall or a car a few times). And he blasted me for my damned incompetence. One of these ppl (my sis) told me that it reminded her of this incident when I was a kid and I got caned for tearing away at the wallpaper. Not very flattering but funny.Well he came back and his reaction now was one of resignation, "we'll do a paint job after we know that you won't be so stupid to scrape the side of the car against the wall anymore." Anyway he probably doesn't want to get angry that much because he's contracted the dreaded Legionnaire's disease.I also found out that the scratch on the side of the car was already there before the holiday. Which means that it wasn't ppl from my company who did it, which is a great great relief. I wouldn't want to think of them in that way. England national team England national team in deep shit again. The post of the England national coach is as cursed as the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher post at Hogwarts. No wonder they got to pay ppl millions of pounds each year to take it.Sven-Goran Erection is actually a decent coach. Somebody pointed out that nobody in Europe has matched his record of getting to 3 consecutive quarter finals in major tournaments. (But you know, in 2002 a lot of big names fell at the first hurdle.) He has a very good record in qualifiers, the occasional howler against Northern Ireland aside. Yes, the problem with England is that they don't have good coaches, because in the rare occasions they get qualified coaches, (Ramsey, Robson, Venables) they have generally done well. If England had Hiddink or Scolari they wouldn't be in the mess they are in today.But they cannot attract top talent to the England national team coach role, because it is an extraordinarily high pressure job. The media and the paparazzi are incredibly intrusive into your private life. Granted, in other nations like Spain, France and Italy the national coach role is extremely pressurising, but I think they don't intrude into your private life. They hurl all manner of insults at you if you lose, but you don't get your profile splashed all over the papersAnother thing is the talent system. They had a great youth system, but mainly from West Ham (Ferdinand, Carrick, Defoe, Cole, Lampard) and Man U (Beckham, Scholes, the Nevilles, Butt). Who's going to contribute to the next generation of players? In the top 4 teams, you have mainly foreigners up and coming. Thing is, you have top ppl from Spain (Fabregas, Alonso), France (Henry, Makalele), Portugal (Ronaldo) playing for you but then, Owen Hargreaves aside, English players don't prosper outside of England.The other big minus against the England team is the lack of coaching talent. The top 4 are manned by foreigners. (Ferguson is Scottish and will never coach the England team.) Think about all the names that have been put forward as potential England coaches. McLaren at least guided a team to a UEFA cup final, even though it was more through sheer luck than anything else. Stuart Pearce is barely holding on to a job. Peter Taylor is in his rightful place in a lower division team. That leaves Allardyce. Perhaps Steve Coppell will come on board 1 day. Alan Pardew is too controversial, Alan Curbishley will get relegated. And let's hope that Martin O'Neill will come good.Problem is that England coaches don't make it big outside England, in the same way that Wenger has come to England and become a top coach. England players don't make it big outside England either.Putting Venables in as your assistant is perhaps the kiss of death, and Bryan Robson can testify to that. Venables was a good coach in 1996, but has he done anything decent since then? (Other than keep Middlesborough from being relegated.)Anyway it isn't as though England have much pedigree. Here are the list of nations who have won the European championships:USSRSpainItalyGermanyCzechoslovakiaFranceNetherlandsDenmarkGreeceEvery major nation has appeared on this list (although you could say that Sweden is a "bigger" football nation than Denmark, or the former Yugoslavia is a bigger nation than Greece.) But England has this ignominous record of never having won this tournament. In fact their best performance was semi-finals. Yes, they were unlucky not to have gotten past Germany in 1996. That was their best chance. There was this incident in extra time when a ball cut across the goalmouth and Gascoigne was straining to reach it. If he did, England would have been in the finals, and you'd probably tip them to beat the Czechs. As it is, it wasn't to be.And then look at the stadiums that were used to host the 1996 European championships: Hillsborough (Sheffield Wednesday have managed the arduous task of getting promoted back to the championship). Elland Road (Leeds are going down to League one). City Ground (Nottingham Forest relegated all those years ago and not looking like coming back anytime soon.) Villa Park (you still think that Martin O'Neill is your messiah?) and St James' Park (Newcastle getting kicked out of the UEFA cup after losing a 2 goal lead).Looking at the sides just outside the top 4 make for strange reading in terms of the historical pedigree of the clubs. OK, Tottenham and Everton were always going to be there. But now a lot of unfamiliar clubs like Reading, Portsmouth, Bolton and Blackburn. The big 4 are always going to be the big 4, but outside of that, it seems, anything goes.Oh, they're offering England gives 4.5 ball to Andorra. I'm not betting on that. I'll put my money on Andorra eating the 4.5 balls.Edit: I was right! England failed to beat Andorra by 5 goals. I mean, seriously, you didn't think it was going to happen, right? DVD-RAM A little bit miffed.Took half days' leave today. There were 2 reasons which were not very good. First I wanted to come back home and record a show on my DVD player for my parents who are in HK this week. Second, I wanted to get some sleep because I slept at 3 am last night. Why is the first reason not very good? Because if I had set up the timer properly last night and slept early last night I would not have had to take leave today. But that's another story.I came home around 4, and had a short nap first. Exhausted, really. (Oh btw I saw this restaurant at Tanjong Pagar Road, Amici, which makes really good stuff. I ate at the Holland V branch before and I thought that the pasta was decent. I had a steak and it's one of the better steaks I've had in recent memory, even though it was "only" a lunch special and in the end the bill was under $20. The other thing is that probably Tanjong Pagar Road is not one of the best places to open a restaurant because it's a low traffic place. I wonder if those guys are aware of that. It looks like a great place to eat, nobody ever goes there so you'll get some privacy, so remember to go check out that place before it closes down. Hey don't give me that what-you-can-spend-$20-having-lunch-alone look. Single men have very few privileges but this is one of them. Oh, and condemned prisoners too.)I woke up at 6. Show was supposed to start at 7. So far so good. I looked around, the manual for the DVD recorder was nowhere to be found. I went apeshit. My parents inhabit the living room, and use it for their workplace, and not surprisingly the whole place is a bloody pigsty. I couldn't find the manual for the DVD. I was cursing my mother for not leaving the manual in a place I could easily find it, which is easily one of the stupidest things she's ever done (although that is nowhere as stupid as giving birth to me.) Finally after turning half the house upside down it suddenly occurred to me that manuals are normally kept hidden in a certain drawer, and there it was.The other thing that got me miffed was that I had bought the wrong recordable discs. I found that out when I was rummaging through the box the DVD player came in in, and I saw something that says, "this DVD player does not use DVD-RW" As though the confusion between DVD-RW and DVD+RW wasn't bad enough. So it seems that I could only record on DVD-RAM and blew $20 on 10 DVD-RW discs for nothing. (Anybody who wants this stuff at a discount pls let me know thanks. Otherwise next time I get a new computer I will get a DVD writer that uses this stuff.)Finally managed to figure out how to tune the VCR channel to channel 8, and get the timer program set up, 15 minutes before the show was set up.That's the nice thing about growing up. For years your parents have criticised you over and over again when you screw up for this or that, and of course it's true that they (at least this is true for my father) have had less to get by on and had a really tough life but it's a perverse sense of relief when you understand how technically incompetent they are, and you could easily knock them back for not knowing how to program a VCR, use Microsoft Office, manage their email, etc etc. A great relief. I needn't have felt bad about them calling me useless way back then. Acidflask reflux Finally, 2 years after the infamous Acidflask incident, we get some statements from A*STAR, even though they're not that well publicised, but rather released through some guy's blog.When I read the comments that were defamatory, I was startled. Startled because the comments were less serious than I thought they were.I was dead curious to know what these comments were. I think many of us are. I was thinking the comments were of a more serious nature, for example the misuse of research funds. Going down unfruitful avenues. Vanity projects that were costly and not useful in advancing science.Instead I heard that ASTAR funded the students' PhDs instead of the universities. I heard that some researchers saw ASTAR as a fat lamb ripe for fleecing.Basically not much that I couldn't have figure out on my own.I can see why Philip Yeo objected to those comments. You absolutely do not want to convey that impression that you're just an ATM which doles out cash for scientists in already rich countries. You don't want people to be talking about you in such a manner. What you do want is for people to be discussing things that you have done in research. I don't blame him for wanting to do something, but I think he made some serious missteps.For example I knew about acidflask's blog for quite some time before THAT incident, but I hardly read it. I could not have known about the defamatory remarks. Then the blog was closed down and everybody knows about it.What is startling? The "defamatory" comments made are not startling. There's nothing wrong with pouring big money into something if it's truly useful. But what's startling is how heavy handed, inept, even naively this incident was handled. I don't know if acidflask was calculating in this way, but I can't think of anything else he could have done that would damage the reputation of A*STAR more than acidflask closing down his blog. And that includes if he were to make those comments himself. (Apparently those comments were not in his main entry, nor written by Acidflask, but part of the responses to it.)SLAPP-ing worked so well in the past. Suing for defamation worked like a charm. But you can't sue invisible people who pop up on the internet. The right response for A*STAR would have been to either issue clarifications through the press, or ask Acidflask to post stuff that balances the position. An even better response would be to have some real scientific achievements to really crow about.Why did acidflask kill his old blog? I don't know. Maybe he felt that he didn't need to deal with all this crap? I'm sure that ASTAR calculated that this would be a possible response, and I'm guessing that they felt that this response would vindicate their position. It didn't, and the incident blew up in their face. As if it's not bad enough that people are suspecting you of buying your way into the league of top research locations, now you have to be some Big Brother gagging people who post their stuff on the internet.On what counts is the ASTAR response dumb?By not mentioning the nature of the defamation, people get led to idly speculate on what the defamatory comments could be. This is never a good sign because people have a tendency to believe the worst.By threatening to sue a hitherto harmless ex-scholar. Voldemort raised Harry Potter to his own level by attacking him when he was a baby. In the same way Philip Yeo raised Acidflask's stature by going on a one on one with him. This sort of heavy handed behaviour is easily perceived to be extremely unfair and is very bad PR.By pushing Acidflask to make a public apology. When you can say "limpeh is Philip Yeo, limpeh was out there uh developing the economy of Singapore when you were still in diapers", why you want to go down the road of arm twisting somebody so that he can call you uncle?Bloggers are cockroaches. You kill 1 cockroach, hundreds turn up at the funeral.When we think of Philip Yeo we think of an intelligent, if brusque and condescending man. He handled himself better this time, personally making comments on acidflask / elia diodati's blog, and on Aaron Ng's blog. He's still snide and stuck up, because Philip Yeo is Philip Yeo, but this is miles better than the huge gaffe of the Acidflask incident. But it's still vaguely disappointing that he took so long to learn.When he said "Never let the rude people bully the polite people." I thought at first this was somebody else doing a parody of Philip Yeo. Then it occurred to me that nobody does a parody of Philip Yeo as well as Philip Yeo. Either he doesn't see the irony in that statement or he's relishing it completely.He's been complaining about the anonymity of bloggers, why they blog in secret. You think there's anything wrong with that? Now I've never voted before even though I'm almost 30. Possibly this will still be true by the time I'm 50. But if I were to vote, and you know my vote is more important than mere words I can spew on a blog which nobody reads anyway. Do you think my vote should be secret?He talks about stepping on toes. Why are the toes there in the first place? Because they are connected to my feet. Duh.Seriously, it's not entirely fair to completely knock Philip Yeo or other people like him who roll up their sleeves and get things done. But sometimes you wonder if they couldn't be more circumspect.The tragedy of Singapore is not that there is a Philip Yeo. The tragedy is that there is not more than one Philip Yeo. Because the only person who can hold him in check is another person like him. It would be better if there were two of him and they could check each other, compete with each other, bounce off each other. Both of them could apply their energies for the greater good of Singapore. Two 800 pound gorillas are better than one. Half Nelson and I Heart Huckabees I watched 2 movies lately because I needed a break from reading reading reading and working working working. I'm not going to do what I normally do with movies, which is to pontificate over them until I cum in your faces. So this will be brief.One of them is "I Heart Huckabees", a movie by the same guy who directed "3 Kings". It's a philosophical essay about a few guys confronting their existential angst. There are a lot of things to get irritated about in this movie: it's too self- consciously clever. It's too deliberately quirky for its own good. Too precious and cutesy. In the beginning I saw that some characters are such obvious caricatures that you want to retch. But later on, it turned out that there are several currents interacting with each other, and the arguments between 2 schools of thought play themselves out through the characters and a fair bit of hilarity ensues. Some of the philosophical ideas are sharply lampooned. (Actually a bit of background knowledge on the major philosophical ideas is recommended before watching this movie so that it's easier to understand what's being made fun of.) As an example of this humour, the "existential detectives" in the movie mercilessly sift through every section of the characters' lives, because this makes fun of how, when a person examines himself for the guise of philosophy, every single shred of his being comes under the microscope. There's another hilarious scene of Isabelle Huppert (I tell you if every 50 something woman looks like her I probably wouldn't mind going for older women, plus the chick I was ogling at in "The Page Turner" is a young version of Huppert) and Jason Schwartzman dunking each other in mud and having sex in the open. I'm sure some send up of some obscure French philosophy is afoot but it's hilarious all the same.The movie is still very smug and irritating, but at least there are wonderfully funny bits.Then I watched "Half Nelson", which is about an inspirational teacher who is unfortunately also a crack addict. Movie was praised everywhere for being really gritty and realistic, and I won't deny that it is. But it is at times slow moving and ponderous. It's one of those things which work because it's such a realistic portrayal of little lives. But just remember that realistic portrayal of little lives can get a tad boring.I also watched a small portion of "DOA". What's there to say? Impossibly flat abs. Superb muscle tone. How, unlike the arcade version, it's no longer necessary to render the 3D animation such that the tits bounce properly when the character is executing flying kicks. Watch for mental relaxation. Axiom of choice One of the more startling things that I learnt was the existence of uncountable sets. Like the set of real numbers between 1 and 0 are uncountable. In other words, there is no way of mapping the set of integers to the real numbers. An uncountable set is bigger than a merely infinity set.What is a real number? The set of real numbers is the completion of the set of rational numbers. A rational number is any number that can be expressed as a fraction involving 2 integers. Like 22/7. Not all numbers are rational. For example, the square root of 2 is not rational*. Can still remember how fascinated I was to find out that irrational numbers exist.This is a sketch way to construct the real numbers (my maths professor would blast it because it wouldn't be rigorous enough, but I don't need all that detail here). The rational numbers is not complete because you could always draw a small circle with a non-zero radius around a rational number, and it would contain some irrational numbers. Now assume that every real number has a unique representation in decimal**. Then for any given real number k, you can construct a series of rational numbers whose limit is k. Let's say that k is 2.53057285....(random series of digits till infinity) then k1 is 2.0, k2 is 2.5, k3 is 2.53 etc etc you get the idea.Now for the proof that the set of reals between 0 and 1 are uncountable. Suppose you had a sequence of real numbers where all the reals are listed at least once. I could form a real that's not in your list. My number would have a different 1st decimal place from the 1st number, a different 2nd decimal place from the 2nd number, different 3rd decimal place from the 3rd number, etc etc etc.The more I think about it, the more I feel that there is a sleight of hand involved in all this. I think I can pinpoint where all the confusion lies. The way to construct a real number is this: you start with some integer, then you get down to the decimal places. For every decimal place until infinity, you put in some digit from 0 to 9. Then that is your real number which is distinct from all the other numbers in the sequence.Is the set of rational numbers countable? Yes it is.(1/1),(2/1), (1/2),(3/1), (2/2), (1/3),(4/1), (3/2), (2/3), (1/4),.....Now uncountability is a mindboggling concept when I first heard about it. I didn't really want to believe in it. In a way, I still don't.There are some very weird philosophical problems that come out of uncountability. For example, for a while, people thought that uncountability was related to this concept of volume. The proper maths term for "volume" is measure. The measure of a set is related to the intuitive notion of how much "space" it takes up.For the set of all real numbers between 0 and 1, the measure is 1. For the set of all real numbers between 0 and 10, the measure is 10. You get the idea.The measure of any countable set, however, is 0. Every point has a measure of 0. Add up the volume of 1000 points, you get 0. Add up to 1000000 points, you get 0. Until infinity, you get 0. So for a while they thought that all uncountable sets had non-zero volume, whereas all countable sets had zero volume. Turns out that only the latter is true, because they found out that the Cantor set, a fractal-like set, is uncountable but has a measure of 0.Now the rational numbers is "dense" in the set of reals. As in, if you take any real number, and you draw a small circle around it, there will be a rational number in that circle, no matter how small that circle is. So in a way the rational numbers is "space filling". But it still has 0 volume. So the rationals is like styrofoam - it seems to take up space but inside is all air.Now, there is one more set larger than the rationals, but smaller than the reals. It is the set of algebraic numbers. These numbers are the solutions of polynomials with finite degree and integer coefficients. Now the square root of 2 would be a member of this set, because it is the solution of the equation x^2 - 2 = 0. And it is countable, because the set of polynomials with finite degree and integer coefficients is countable. So in this sense, square root 2 is a member of a set which is countable. And we have so far not needed members of uncountable sets for anything.In fact we only use very few non-algebraic numbers (I think they are called transcendental numbers). Examples are e and pi.So why is the set of reals so special? Why do we need real numbers?One reason is that we are kiasu and we want completeness, so we define a set which is so much larger than what we need.Why is a transcendental number special? I think one of the reasons why it is special lies in the way that these numbers are generated. If we were to think of how a countable set is generated, it's like 1 tortoise crawling down an infinitely long road, and every step it takes, it will call out a number, ad infinitum. But to generate real numbers, it's like each turtle, for every step it takes, will split itself into 10 different turtles, and each call out a number. For example, the turtle will first call out "0". Then it will take 1 step and split into 10 different turtles, each calling out "0.1", "0.2", "0.3"... etc. Then each of these 10 turtles will take 1 step and split into 10 each, and call out, "0.01", "0.02", "0.03"... for the children of the 1st turtle, "0.11", "0.12", "0.13"... for the children of the 2nd turtle, etc etc etc.But would you consider all these descendents of turtles part of the same set? It's like the set of all parallel universes. That's how you generate a magical set which has "volume". But I'm not sure that this set has any basis in reality. If you ask me for 1 transcendental number, I'll give it to you. But to ask for all possible transcendental numbers that could be generated, and call it a set, I don't know. I can't think of any physical process that gives rise to this set.I guess what I'm trying to say is this: whether a set is countable or uncountable doesn't so much depend upon the "size" of the set (although it matters, the set of reals is unequivocally larger than the set of rationals) but also on the way in which the set is generated. You can't analyse a set without going into the mechanism by which it was generated. Generating an uncountable set requires a massive parallel way of "counting", and to me that is all there is to "uncountability".The funniest sort of logic that could arise out of this is that you could impose an order on the sets such that for every 2 elements of the set, either a This sounds like a relatively harmless theorem, until you consider this: you could order an uncountable set in such a way that in an uncountable set, there is an element omega, such that a subset of elements strictly smaller than omega under that ordering is countable. But any subset of elements strictly smaller than zeta (where zeta is larger than omega) is uncountable. This is bullshit, everybody knows that the union of a countable set and 1 element set is still countable.I'll say it again: whether a set is countable or not lies in the way that it's being generated. You can't "arrange" the set in order and then say "this is the countable part, that is the uncountable part." While you can re-order a countable set, you can't re-order an uncountable set. Or maybe you can re-order it, but you have to specify exactly how it's going to be ordered, and lay down rules for the ordering, so as to convince people that the ordering makes sense.My beef with this is that you can't re-order an uncountable set. People say that you can re-order an uncountable set simply because there's this axiom of choice where you can choose a single element and set this as the smallest, and do this over and over again until everything is ordered. But in order for this to happen, you must be able to count the set, which is why you can't reorder an uncountably many set.I don't think that uncountable sets can be re-ordered by the way. If you re-order a set using the axiom of choice, then you are taking elements out of the set one by one using the axiom of choice, and the order in which you take them out is the re-ordering. But since the set is uncountable, you can never "finish" re-ordering the set. You cannot use inductive proofs on an uncountable set, because induction relies on the set being countable.The way I see it, the countable form of infinity and the uncountable form of infinity are different in nature. Many mathematicians like to play fast and loose with these 2 different forms of infinity and I don't think that's right.Then again, you could say that infinity is nothing more than an abstraction. It is. It has been estimated that the universe contains 10^32 atoms. I think this ought to be the highest number that has a strictly physical basis. As in, you can count the physical object. So that means that this infinity thing is strictly fiction.Everybody knows that the practical purpose of infinity is as an approximation to a very very large number. Like for series with a finite limit, you can tell that you will approach a limit as you go to infinity, then you can say, the 1000000th number in the series is probably going to be around here.* Proof: Suppose you had a/b = square root 2. Then a^2 = 2 * b^2. Since both a and b are integers, they have unique prime factorisations. Also both sides of the equation have a unique prime factorisations. However, prime factorisation for square numbers have an even number of primes, while in that equation, a^2 has an even number of primes, while 2 * b^2 has an odd number. Therefore that equation is wrong and a and b can't both be integers.** This is mostly true, if dubious. For example, it can be shown that 0.99999.... until infinity with all 9s, is the same number as 1. What happened? I remember one of the things my international relations professor said on the first day of class. "Why do you learn history? Because you want to understand big events. You want to know what it all means. Are you going to be like that generation of people who stumbled into the 2nd World War and when your children ask you, 'what the hell happened?', you say, 'I don't know'? "I supposed that was an interesting thing to remember. There's not much I really remember from those classes since it's been more than 5 years since, but then I hardly remember much of what's been said. The interesting question here is: when people are teetering on the edge of a crisis, do they know it? It's all so easy for the children to say, "what the hell happened", but then that accusatory tone is also asking some other questions, like "do you know it was going to happen?", or "could you have done anything to prevent it from happening?", or "did you know that something you thought was right would be judged by history as wrong?". For example: you could be a southerner in the 19th century, and you didn't think there was anything wrong with slavery. Then comes the Civil War, emancipation, and suddenly the whole lot of you are condemned for posterity.I was reading a history of the 1930s, a dark and troubled period which presaged people going into WWII. Liberalism and democracy was on the verge of collapse, the international economic system had failed, people (at least the Europeans) were still coming to terms with the shock of WWI. Did they know they were on the road to ruin, and is there anything anybody could do about it? We can see fairly clearly what was wrong with their way of thinking, but did they know? And were there enough cassandras knowing to put a stop to the rot?(And by the way folks, the one thing you must know about WWI is that it came like a bolt out of the blue. The period before 1914 was a period of prosperity and great technological advancement, in some ways similar to our day and age. Then the leaders of Europe made a few really stupid mistakes, and next thing you know, everything's gone to pieces. )Stock market crashes always take place in a year ending with 7, don't they? Like in 1987, there was this sudden crash, and then there was 1997, the Asian financial crisis. Now with this large downturn in the stock market, who knows what's going to happen this time around?I'm reading a book about the American debt. It's astounding. I always thought that the deficit is something that is cumulative. It's not. When they say that the US government ran a deficit of $521 billion in 2004, it's the debt for 1 year. That means this debt will be around until god knows when. And 1 year later, when another God knows how many hundred billions are spent, it's added to the total debt.The US debt per capita is $181K. Every US citizen owes this much. It's staggering. If people all around the world were to call in this debt, they are in for plenty of shit. If nobody wants to buy US bonds, then they are in for a lot of shit. How can the US economy be held as one of the strongest in the world when it's waddling in a pool of shit?The book begins with a quote from Alexander Tytler, which says this of all democracies: that this is the path through which all democracies pass. From bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependence back again into bondage. I think this is true. When we talk about democracy and freedom as the best systems (or at least the least screwed up systems) we are thinking mainly about the experiences of America and Europe in the late 20th century. But we haven't played out the latter stages of that cycle, so we don't know. Democracy assumes that people should have that self determination, and that people are right about everything. But are they? Democracy is founded upon an educated populace, and the assumption that people know the truth. But in this complex world we live in, how possible it is for people to know the truth?When somebody asked Zhou Enlai what he thought of the French Revolution, he said "it is too early to tell." And naturally only a Chinese with a consciousness of 4000 years of history could have said something like that. It is true: the American Republic is only 230+ years old. Already the decline is in sight: the imperial overstretch that Paul Kennedy vaunted with his book "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers". He later rescinded that comment because America became very powerful in the 1990s, but many people think that his comment was right. America should enjoy their status as the only superpower, because in 50 years time, they will have to share that status with Europe, India and China. Johnny Mathis' Feet I lay all my songs at Johnny Mathis’ feetI said, "Johnny tell meCan you tell me how to live?All my hopes are unraveling and I just lost my leaseOn my house without love, doors, or windowsWithout peace."And with a wave of his jewel-encrusted handAcross the glittering Las Vegas scene he said,"You gotta learn how to disappearin the silk and amphetamine."Johnny looked at my songs and he said,"Well at first guess, never in my lifeHave I ever seen such a mess.Why do you say everything as if you were a thief?Like what you’ve stolen has no valueLike what you preach is far from belief?"And with a wave of his red white and blue handAcross the glittering Hollywood scene he said,"You gotta learn how to disappearin the silk and amphetamine."Johnny looked at my old collection of punk rock postersAnonymous scenes of disaffection chaos and tortureAnd he said, "You were on the right trackBut you’re a lamb jumping for the knife."He said, "A real showman knows howto disappear in the spotlight."One of my favourite American Music Club songs. The author is Mark Eitzel, one of the greatest songwriters of the last 20 years, also an alcoholic.I mentioned before that people who see the world as it really is are depressive. Mark Eitzel is a classic example. And not surprisingly this blog entry, as well as the aforementioned song, are about seeing the world as it is. Or maybe let's say having a biased towards pessimistic view of life.In a way I can understand what he's at. There are many times I wish I could be like Johnny Mathis who knows how to be this slick sleazy Las Vegas showman who smiles at everything. Johnny Mathis is a real person, a singer with a slick image. I wonder what he thinks about this song. Either being Mark Eitzel or Johnny Mathis is wrong, the real secret to life is being somewhere in the middle, finding a balance between the two. And really I should be ashamed of myself because us Chinese are supposed to be good at being Johnny Mathis.Oh, if I'm not wrong, the story behind this song is that Mark Eitzel wrote this to console a friend dying of AIDS. National Library Why am I suddenly posting again? Because I got a new monitor to replace to broken one for my crappy 7 year old windows 98 computer and I have a second computer in my room without having to jostle with my parents for it.It's like going to the bathroom for the first time 1 month and finding all your shit piled up.The old national library. A landmark. Many people have protested its closing down, and now that it's gone, what do we have in its place? Some stupid tunnel?Personally, I don't mind the new central library. Who could complain about it? It's much larger and more luxurious than the old library would be. I suppose the central library was never going to be able to house all those books.It used to be that the place was a small arts hub. MPH Stamford down the corner, the Substation and the Asian Civilisations museum next door (formerly Tao Nan Primary) The National Archives down the road (formerly Anglo Chinese Primary) Drama Centre at Fort Canning. National Museum next door. Nothing left of it all other than a huge gaping hole. I mean like literally. Well you have a new university in town, and maybe you can't complain about that. MPH Stamford wasn't getting much pedestrian traffic and sorda had to close down. After the National Library was to close, it really had to close down.Maybe you have to do what's necessary to ease the flow of traffic in the city. Think about London, which is full of wondrous landmarks and quaint little crannies and nooks, and the traffic is like shit. In fact that's too kind. Traffic in London is a bad case of constipation.But this wonderful tunnel, what does it do? Really, how difficult is it to drive from Armenian Street to Park Mall? Why do you need a second route? No problem with tunnelling if it's part of an expressway, but how are things better this way? Why does Fort Canning Hill now have a hole in the middle of it? Are we paying homage to the Brits who dug tunnels in there too?I think that in Singapore, redevelopment has usually won out over conservation. And even old buildings and shophouses have to be modernised. To an extent this is OK. And after all a library is a library is a library, even when the musty shelves are replaced by a spanking new complex complete with modern carpeting and books arra