Seksi Matashutyrmouf

Chinese New Year

2012-01-23T18:36:00.002+08:00

You will encounter the animal of your birth sign every 12 years, and it's supposed to mark something. The first time I encountered it, I was 11. Now that I think about it, it was a challenge to me. The lunar year of my birth sign were usually fairly uneventful affairs in themselves, but they portended change. So the first time I completed a cycle, I was about to be introduced to teenage angst. The second time I completed a cycle, I was about to be introduced to the real working life. Looking back, maybe those were years when I had the opportunity to ready myself for what lay ahead of me.

Who knows what lies ahead of me next?

Gopnik

2012-01-23T18:29:00.002+08:00

I was reading some stuff in bed the other day. I’m still reading random books, even though I’m supposed to be studying – bad habit I guess. I was reading this compilation that edge.org publishes every year, when I came across this article, saying that school is a form of childhood.

It didn’t seem that way at the time when I was in Snowy Hill. I think it was a happy delusion for 4 years that it was a form of adulthood, when real adulthood came knocking on the door, it was a shock that took a few years to recover. So what is real adulthood now?

The article says that childhood is like R+D, while adulthood is like production and marketing. You get exposed to a lot of things in childhood, but it narrows down in adulthood, and you are supposed to pick 1 or 2 things to excel and be very good at. That would be your niche. Childhood is like academic learning in school. Adulthood is like actual practice in real life. That way of splitting things up does make things a lot clearer for me. But it is not a lot of comfort.

My first culture shock in the adult world was national service. That was when I found out that I didn’t have a lot of skills that I would later need in life. It was a great relief to be back at school in Snowy Hill, and I actually did think about trying to acquire some of those skills. I was successful at some of those skills, like improving my writing. I did have to formally learn some things about human psychology – I guess I’m not as astute as many other people for whom it comes naturally. And I realized that the traditional way of education – of shoe-horning a person into 1 particular academic subject at the expense of everything else – while it made sense a few hundred years ago, which was when the system was designed, it just wouldn’t do. So I arranged a curriculum that was sprawling and messy. Up till now some people believe I have a maths degree, but that’s because you can learn a lot of different stuff and still call it maths.

Looking back, there are a lot of ways I shunned adulthood. When I was in Snowy Hill, I didn’t specialize. Now, specializing is a bit like the “child” side of the dichotomy because the academic knowledge is concentrated in 1 particular part of the spectrum, and learning too much of the same subject will give you an education that fails to capture the complexity of real grown-up life. But it is also adult-like because becoming really good at something, and being an authority figure and a leader in that segment is also adult like. I didn’t go for research experiences. I didn’t go for higher degrees.

I did have a job, but it wasn’t important enough to count. It was a good experience to be teaching Physics, it earned me 1 good letter, without which I might not have made it to the University of Mexico. But it wasn’t really enough.

I turned away from engineering. I even turned away from computer science. It’s hard to say that I really regret turning away from computer science, because learning maths 10 years ago, and then computer science now is also pretty good. In fact there are very good reasons for putting off learning computer science as late as you possibly can – because it’s a much cooler subject today than 10 years ago, when the internet was in its infancy and stuff wasn’t yet set up. But one thing I sacrificed was my ability to learn how to plan and make decisions. There is remarkably little decision making involved in mathematics – based on the premise that there is often only one correct answer to the question. In fact, I learnt a lot more decision making while writing term papers – in figuring out how to choose between many ways of making an argument. That was a very good skill to have.

When I was at work, I turned away from front-line day to day work, where plenty of decisions had to be made without thinking too much about them. I opted for more long term projects that took more time to bring to fruition, with the increased risk that a lot of them would not make it because the great big hazard about long term projects is the lack of immediate feedback.

I could have joined activity groups. But instead I spent a lot of time reading books. To a certain degree, the books were necessary because I had to fill myself in on all the branches of knowledge that I had only started to open for myself at Snowy Hill. But the book habit did go on for a little too long.

I could have looked for a life partner. That would have taught me something. But there were always other things to do – my work. My books. My long distance running. My application for a post-graduate degree. I just couldn’t balance it all.

I did become a keyboard warrior, and a few disastrous episodes aside, I think I’m a pretty effective one. I can debate effectively with people. That’s a good skill to have, but that is meager reward for all the hours I spent.

During my first few years at the job, I was thinking, “I really should get back into academia. That’s where my strengths are.” But academia is very competitive, and if there was a good time for me to get back into academia, I’m probably past it by the time I got here. Still, earning a master’s degree, which was for me the first thing I thought of that I wanted to do after quitting my job, stuck in my head. And it’s just as well that I’m here and getting some needed perspective.

Yes, I’m here because I liked learning academic stuff. I liked learning new ideas, and where better to learn about ideas than computer science, where you have to grapple with every conceivable method of representing knowledge? And I came in here, adjusted to life, learnt more ideas in computer science, got decent results in my first quarter. But at the back of my head, I’m always wondering – what is it that I really want now?

The crux of computer science is not really about academic knowledge. It is about practices. And I’m not getting enough of that. After a few sleepless nights tossing and turning about my future, it occurred to me – finally, I have to think about operating like an adult. Acquire the adult skills.

I didn’t come to the University of Mexico because it was good at teaching. I didn’t come here to attend classes that professors meticulously prepared for me. I came here because it had a good reputation for research. (Same is true for NUS, but well, here’s more of an adventure.) And now I realize that by coming here, I have a better shot at the IT jobs here. That the job hunt and the research have actually superseded the classes in order of importance.

Computer skills – they weren’t going to hand me computer skills on a platter. I already have the ability to learn computer skills on my own, but the really hard work is doing it – practicing by doing things.

It’s not necessarily pleasant, because it involves doing stuff that I’ve studiously avoided doing for most of my adult life. But it’s necessary. And so I suppose I do have another form of focus again.

The other thing is that this world that we live in has become a lot more complicated than when I was a kid in the 80s. Back then, you just had to do the right thing, obey authority figures, work hard, and you probably became moderately successful. Even though you probably did not have a lot of freedom to say what you really thought, and do what you felt was correct. Now, you have to do a lot of crazy things in order to show people that you are special. I remember my parents asking me if I was getting good grades at school. If only it were that simple this time around! No, the grades were probably just the tip of the iceberg. The real important thing that people really wanted to see was the skills. And you had plot your own chart with that.

Around the time that I was mulling leaving my job, I asked myself – you are leaving your old life behind. What do you regret? Of course, regret is a very strong word, because you aren’t suppose to regret, according to the new school paradigm of psychology which states that you are supposed to avoid negative emotions. But regret is important – or at least remorse is important. Only by positively identifying aspects of your life that you wish to change, will you have any chance at all at improving. OK, this division of skills into child skills and adult skills is very useful for my thinking. Now we have that answered, which is good.

What is not so good is that I realise that going back to school was in part a desire for more of that "child" academic knowledge. And I was going to have to put that aside now and focus on the "adult" stuff. It's not nice that I have had to switch targets. I suppose that life does go downhill in middle age because when you're young you learn all the things that you found fun, and you were always leaving the unpleasant stuff out until they all caught up with you.

Being in school is a form of childhood. And for the Singaporean male, it’s something that you only graduate out of when you’re 25. That’s very late, and 1/3 of your productive life is already gone. It’s not only in Singapore that we have an obsession with academic results. In most of the East Asian countries, it’s also the same. A proper education was so important to the growth and prosperity of the middle class that it assumed almost mythical status. But then it didn’t do a lot of good to the people who went through the system. The difference between a person who didn’t study in school, and somebody who studies hard is plain to see. But the added difference between people who study hard – to a conventional extent, and Japanese kids who go to cram school, and put themselves in front of the books 12 hours a day, is not much. And all that extra studying, at the expense of learning more practical “adult” skills in life is probably not beneficial at all.

A lot of the skills that I spent learning in school were terribly 20th century. Physics. Chemistry. Maybe even trigonometry. It’s incredible that I managed to graduate out of high school without learning much about computer science or economics. Or politics. Then I had to scramble hard to rectify that in my adult life. I didn’t learn much about planning, about design. I probably had the chance to learn about leadership, but I avoided it.

I have to be fair to my schools – they did teach me critical thinking and creativity, and they taught me well. But there are too many deficiencies in the education system that you really have to fix.

Anyway, I suppose I have loaded myself up with enough things to worry about for the time being.
1. Get involved with research.
2. Get involved with a project.
3. Find that job.

I expect these pains in asses to be with me for quite a while yet. I suppose – better they be pains in asses than twiddling my thumbs and wondering what the fuck I’m going to do all the time.

Annus Mirabilis

2012-01-20T20:46:00.000+08:00

There are a few good omens for me, and probably a few bad omens. Somebody told me that for Fengshui purposes, I should be living in the northwest part of a city. Well my uni is in the northwest part of a city. Maybe when I go back to Singapore, I might end up living in Woodlands, and why not because my parents would have moved to JB by then.

The other thing is that the zip code of this place contains a year that I consider to have been one of the most wonderful years in my life, even though that year followed what was one of the shittiest years of my life. Since then, I’ve had 2 or 3 years that were as good as that year, and yes, most of those years were in the US. But that year, when I looked at what I managed to pull off, was quite wonderful.

1. I won an invention competition early in that year. I think that was part of the reason why I felt that I was going to be an engineer of some sort.
2. 10K run to East Coast.
3. I discovered a lot of new music. It’s staggering how much of that music that I found is still stuff I consider my favourites. One of my big discoveries that year was REM, who had just broken up recently.
4. I won an essay competition.
5. Friendship with CEO. We used to talk on the phone for hours. He was a very fascinating person, and he told me all kinds of crazy stories. We hardly talk anymore, but he really shaped a lot of my life, and what I thought.
6. I became very good friends with my sister
7. I had Job week as a scout. Actually this was the second scout week I was involved with, but
8. My Chinese teacher
9. There was a scout camp at the end of the year. I won’t forget that it was a crazy one. So many stories, but I became a patrol leader after my patrol leader conveniently injured himself before the scout camp, and the deputy fell out because of the heat exhaustion.
10. I went to the UK in the June holidays. One of my biggest regrets was that I lost the itinery of that tour, and I’m no longer able to locate many of the places that we had gone to.
11. I went to New Zealand in the December holidays.
12. I watched a play that totally blew me away – it was written by a senior in my school. The craziest thing was that I endeavoured to write a play 1 year later and I actually succeeded in having it staged at a later edition of the same event.
13. I went to a camp in the June holidays. It was an outreach program to nurture people into writers.

There were disappointments during that year, but they were noble failures:
1. I tried, but failed to pass my Grade 8. In fact I had already passed it the previous year (undeservedly, in retrospect) but I tried to get a better grade the second time around, and I failed it. Eventually, I dropped out of piano lessons, so it wasn’t a bad thing at all for me.
2. I screwed up a music project. We had to hand in a project every year, and I tried to do an anthology of all popular music. I overreached, and produced a piece of junk. But when I started, I was so starry-eyed that I thought I was going to do something I always dreamt of doing.
3. I failed to get selected for my school maths team. Frankly speaking, I don’t think I would have been able to cope with both the mathematics and everything else I had discovered.
4. At the end of the June camp, people would submit their work and be assigned a mentor to work with. I didn't get that mentorship but 1 year later they would realise it was a mistake.
5. I made absolutely no headway with my romantic life.

I think that was the year that a lot of doors were opened. I was in my teens. I had despaired about growing up the previous year. But now I faced the future with confidence. I knew that I had around 3 great talents, in writing, in mathematics and in music. And I was going to make the most of them.

I had become an artist that year. When you are an artist, you have to know what it feels like to be totally swept away by an experience. I experienced that for the first time that year. I knew that what I felt that year was totally special. If I had to tell somebody that I lived a good and full life, that year will be 1 argument that I will always be able to make.

I’ve never again had a year where it was the beginning of so many different possibilities. But that’s OK. I had opened up enough possibilities for half a lifetime. The rest of my life could be a relatively drudgery compared to that one year, but that’s OK, because making good on the promise of youth was always going to be a relatively drudgery compared to that first heady flush of “oh my god, all this is possible!”

Well back to my present life. I have to tell myself that I’m probably living a dream now. Yes, in many ways this is what I’ve always wanted. I spent 1-2 years waiting to do this. This is something more akin to what I should have been doing.

In a way, I could have been doing this even earlier. If I had done this right out of university, I would have been thinking of doing a PhD. I might even have started a PhD 4 years ago. Now, it’s too late. If only I had packed all my reading of books into 4 years instead.

Now, I think about what I could have done in my undergraduate days at Snowy Hill if I knew back then what I know now. I think what I did in 4 years could have been done in 3 or even 2. And now, I realize with a bit of sadness that I will never relive those days again, regardless of the fact that I’m now back in the USA. I am not young anymore, I no longer have the luxury of taking academic courses just for fun, and if I did what I did in my undergrad days, I would get sick and tired of it. But I can do something different, and build up some solid achievement brick by brick, and do some things I should have done in my younger days but didn’t. And there’s no shortage of that.

When I read biographies of great people, I sometimes wonder about their lives. For people who are creative, and I mean people who are remembered for creating things, or ideas, or works of art, it is usually the case that most of what they are remembered for last for less than 10 years. The Beatles were recording for less than 10 years. Brian Wilson wrote most of his great works within 10 years. David Bowie's period of greatness was between 1970 and 1980. Albert Einstein is celebrated for his 4 papers of 1905. There are people who do groundbreaking work for longer than that, like Shakespeare, or Miles Davis. And that is why they are considered extraordinary.

I would need a few more years like the one I just talked about in order to have a good an meaningful life.

Life Inc

2012-01-12T18:47:00.003+08:00

I’m starting to wonder how on earth I managed to spend so much time on books during my 9 years of a working life. At first, it was good intentions, but I think that after maybe 2007 I was running on a treadmill, reading a lot of stuff over and over again. Beyond that, maybe the problem was that I just delved into a lot of knowledge that interested me on the surface, I would learn a lot about some random topic, but then afterwards, some crucial context is lost. I would get that knowledge without the surrounding context, and then it would lose a lot of its meaning.

My sister told me about a dream that she had about me – she wanted to eat A but I was on a mission to cook B and to cook a LOT of it. That is sadly typical of me. One of my biggest weaknesses is my propensity to go down blind alleys.

However I have read 2 very good books recently. One of them I had already talked about – “Push” by John Seely Brown. Another one is “Life Inc” by Douglas Rushkoff. In a way this book is similar to “The Corporation” by Joel Bakan, in that it shines a light on the evil behavior of corporations. But I like “Life Inc” better. “The Corporation” is merely about the evil that corporations do. But “Life Inc” is about Corporatism – the logic behind corporations, that has spread like a cancer on all of our values.

Corporations assume that people are rational and self-interested agents, and that the primary relationship between them is competition. Corporations act by turning people into numbers, discouraging direct interactions between people and instead, making interactions go through them. They lure people into a system where people compete against each other, but they work for the benefit of masters of the system.
In fact, one of the key (and startling insights) of the book is that corporatism is very similar in character to Mussolini’s Fascism:

We have succumbed to an ideology that has the same intellectual underpinnings and assumptions about human nature as - dare we say it - mid-twentieth century fascism. ... that we're forced to dance around this F word today would certainly have pleased Goebbels greatly.... The current situation resembles the managed capitalism of Mussolini's Italy in particular. It shares a common intellectual heritage (in disappointed progressives who wanted to order society on a scientific understanding of human nature), the same political alliance (the collaboration of the state and the corporate sector), and some of the same techniques for securing consent (through public relations and propaganda). Above all, it shares with fascism the same deep suspicion of free humans.

One of the most startling passages of this book is a revisionist history of the Middle Ages. This is a story that he brings up in order to illustrate the fact that the money that we use has its own bias. To quote from the blurb:

1. Money is not a part of nature, to be studied by a science like economics, but an invention with a specific purpose.
2. Centralized currency is just one kind of money – one not intended to promote transactions but to promote the accumulation of capital by the wealthy.
3. Banking is our society's biggest industry, and debt is our biggest product.
4. Corporations were never intended to promote commerce, but to prevent it.
5. The development of chartered corporations and centralized currency caused the plague; the economic devastation ended Europe's most prosperous centuries, and led to the deaths of half of its population.
6. The more money we make, the more debt we have actually created.

You can think of the money we used today as being a pyramid scheme, lent out through a central authority, with all other forms of money disallowed. All things have a price relative to that money. The permanence of money allows money to be hoarded, instead of being used as a medium of exchange between products. This hoarding constantly depreciates the value of money because when people build their wealth, the medium gets taken out of the system. Money can be lent, but since compounding makes the face value of the loan increase exponentially over time, when you lend out money, the money automatically multiples in value for the lender. For the borrower, he will have to work that much harder to pay back the loan. The lenders are the rich, and they benefit at the expense of the poor, who often have to borrow just to get by. In other words, the entire money system was engineered to benefit rich people!
In contrast, Rushkoff mentions that the money that was used in Europe in the late Middle ages had an expiry date. It could not be saved indefinitely. It had to be spent. If you wanted to buy something big, you paid in installments. If you couldn’t spend all your money, you had to give it away. It was a system which worked very well, and apparently it promoted the growth of economy, everybody had plenty to eat.

However later on money became centralized, and kings outlawed the use of local money so that they could control and centralize the flow of currency. In a way, money in the permanent and centralized form we know of today was an invention borne of need: you had to have capital in a long term form that was legal tender over great distances in order to make international trade possible.

So the big question today is: can we go back to a system where we have a 2-tiered money system: money that self-destructs, to be paid to individuals as wages, and long term capital, which can be used for long term investments and risk management? Would that make it a more equitable system for everyone?

Anyway, reading that passage was extremely eye-opening for me. At least I found out why usury was once regarded as extremely evil, and why institutions like Oxford and Cambridge mysteriously arose during what was supposedly the “dark ages” of Europe.
There are so many good insights in that book that you probably have to read it yourself to absorb them all. IT is a wonderful book. Of course, you will not agree with everything that is written, but even when you disagree with him, he will make you think. This book is valuable to me because it goes deep into the heart of the hidden logic underlying what goes on in a lot of the world.

Later on, Douglas Rushkoff will write another book, “Program or be programmed”. In fact, I was going to read that and, failing to find that book in the library, decided to go try out “Life Inc” instead. And instead I found that “Life Inc” was such a wonderful book! In “Program or be programmed” book, I think that Rushkoff goes off on one tangent hinted at in “Life Inc”, and talks about how all systems have inherent biases that affect its behavior. (Of course, most of what he talks about in “Life Inc” is about how corporatism is really the sum of how the inherent biases of corporatism influences its character.)

2011 Obituaries

2011-12-20T13:02:00.004+08:00

I blogged 3 years ago that 2008 was the year of roads for me. In 2011 there has been a lot of very prominent deaths.

Computer scientists
When I was in secondary school, and this was before the internet, people told me that mathematics is the king of science. In some ways this is true, but I can’t help but notice that computer science is becoming the king of science. Let’s face it, mathematics in the context of other knowledge, is essentially a form of representing knowledge. And when it comes to representing knowledge, computer science can do it more powerfully than mathematics. When we started out, computer science used to be a branch of mathematics. Eventually, when you consider that the knowledge that can be represented in computers is a superset of what can be represented by mathematics, it’s safer to say that now mathematics is a branch of computer science.

There have been 3 great scientific instruments. The first was the telescope, and Galileo, Kepler and Newton used that to help derive the laws of physics that underpin so many other inventions that have taken place since. The second was the microscope, and that is the most important instrument in our understanding of biology until now. Now, we have the third and possibly the greatest instrument of all, the computer.

Steve Jobs
It is impossible to overstate the roles that Steve Jobs played in the computer revolution for the duration of his involvement in it. His first great product was probably the most important of all, the Apple II, because it helped usher in the era of the PC. Then there was the mac with the WIMP system that was later adapted by Microsoft Windows. Then there was iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. That Apple is the most powerful IT company in the world today is almost a miracle, considering that for 15 years, Apple was the sick man of Silicon Valley!
Anyway I don’t have much to say about this guy that hasn’t already been said elsewhere.

Denis Ritchie
This is the Ritchie of Kernighan and Ritchie. People have mentioned that Steve Jobs’ influence is prevalent all over the IT world, but this is the guy who designed the UNIX and C systems, and with it, a lot of the computer systems today.

John McCarthy
John McCarthy was an AI pioneer. Well not much has progressed since. He also invented LISP, which is a very cool computer language.

Politicians
The 2 most important dates of the last 25 years were 9/11/89 and 11/9/01. The first was the fall of the Berlin Wall, which marked the end of the Cold War. The second marked the beginning of the age of terrorism.

Vaclav Havel
He became the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia. Under the communist regime, he was a dissident and a freedom fighter, and helped to organise the resistance to the communist dictators while writing plays mocking the system. Eventually, over the course of 1 incredible winter, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were liberated from Soviet rule. 2 years later, the Soviet Union was broken up. And strange and terrible things were starting to brew up in Yugoslavia.

Kim Jong Il
Kim Jong Il was a reminder that things didn’t play out the same way in the communist countries of East Asia. The Tiananmen uprising was brutally put down. The communist regimes of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were never overthrown, although they were liberalised to a greater or lesser extent after 1989. Taiwan and South Korea were never communist, but they were military dictatorships which made the transition to democracy.

Communism did not vanish in North Korea or Cuba. In North Korea, the cult of Kim was so strong that in spite of the tremendous hardships visited upon his people in the form of poverty and famine, Kim Jong Il was never overthrown. He was never ousted from power through US intervention, mainly owing to 2 factors: the proximity to China and nuclear weapons. Upon his father’s death in 1994, nobody gave Kim Jong Il a snowflake’s chance in hell of being able to survive, yet he did just that, outmanoeuvring the US, South Korea, Japan, Russia and China to stay in power.

Osama Bin Laden
The world had already heard of Osama Bin Laden prior to 9/11. He was the mastermind of the 2 African US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, and also a bombing of a US military vessel the USS Cole. But his claim to fame came in spectacular circumstances, in the capital of the world financial markets and in the headquarters of the greatest military power in the history of mankind.
There is no doubt that the bombings did much damage to the US. However what caused even greater damage to the US were their reactions to the bombings: the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The millions of dollars spent on anti-terrorism security. And the withering away of the civil rights of citizens and the atmosphere of general paranoia in response to the terrorism.

Arab Spring
Dictatorships in the Arab countries were once thought to be a permanent fixture. In part they were sponsored by the Americans who wanted to put a friendly regime in place so that nobody would cut off their supply of oil. It doesn’t matter that they already did the same thing with the Shah of Iran and that resulted in the 1979 revolution and the rise of the current theocracy.
So it was an extremely curious thing that Bush 2 decided to invade Iraq to “Bring democracy to the Middle East”.

Mohamed Bouazizi
This is the guy who started off the riots in Tunisia by burning himself. Apparently he had his stall confiscated over and over by corrupt municipal officers. Then he set himself on fire in a public square. The riots that ensued brought down the Tunisian government and inspired other popular revolts in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen. This set the stage for what is now known as the “Arab Spring”, which is named after a similar uprising in Prague in 1968.

Gadaffi
The sometime comical eccentricity of this man should not detract from the fact that he was an extremely brutal dictator who crushed all opposition under his fist and once was a supporter of Carlos the Jackal, the most famous terrorist in the world before Osama. He managed to “rehabilitate” himself by giving up nuclear weapons, and at some point even Singapore wanted to do business with him. (Some of you will remember the infamous photos of him having a nice chat with Goh Chok Tong).
But after the uprising began, Gadaffi made the fatal mistake of deciding that he was going to crush the rebellion with his military, instead of negotiating for peace and promising reforms. The US decided to back the uprising by supplying weapons and bombing the Libyan army. Their tactics of “leading from behind” and opting for a less active role in intervention, in marked contrast to similar interventions in the past, was successful. Gadaffi’s end was brutal – he was captured, raped and killed by the rebels.

The journalist: Christopher Hitchens
I don’t really know this guy, and I haven’t read that many of his books. But he’s one of the members of the New Atheists that I’ve come to dislike. He’s a polemicist who consequently isn’t very honest in his arguments.

The biologist Lynn Margulis
I’ve read one of her books. Maybe reading books is a waste of time because I’ve almost totally forgotten what I read. Only that her view of evolution is slightly different from the predominant vision of species competing with each other. She was putting forward a different form of evolution, which emphasises co-operation and which also takes place at the cell level, instead of at the level of the organism and the species.

The mathematician Patrick Billingsley
I don’t really know this guy very well, but one of his books on measure theory sits on my bookshelf. It was assigned for an advanced probability course in Snowy Hill. Apparently Billingsley was not only a professor of probability theory, he was also an actor who appeared in the “Untouchables”. Which is very unusual I suppose.

Footballers:
Gary Speed
One of the finest midfielders in the Premier League era. He, along with David Batty, Gordan Strachan and Gary McAllister were the quartet which helped Leeds win their last championship. He played many matches with Everton, Newcastle and Bolton, and for some time was the player who made the most appearances in the Premier League. More recently, he was the manager of Wales national football team, and brought them very close to qualifying for Euro 2012. For reasons unknown he hung himself and died young.

Socrates
Another member of a famous midfield, with Falcao, Zico and Eder. They were one of the most celebrated World Cup teams, who played brilliant football almost at the level of the great 1970 side. Brazil’s swashbuckling brand of football was often described as “if you score 3 we’ll score 4”. Unfortunately in the quarter-final match against Italy, Italy scored 3 and they scored 2. Socrates was also a brave man because he was famous for speaking out against the military junta who ruled Brazil in the 1980s. After quitting football, he had drinking problems, and his health deteriorated greatly.

Musicians
All 5 musicians in my list died of health problems.

Gil Scott Heron
This was one of the earliest rappers, who read poetry to funky music. His most famous tune was “The Revolution Will not be Televised”. Unfortunately for the last 20-30 years he was not active due to drug problems and going to jail for trafficking. In 2010, he made a highly regarded comeback, and it was a shame he had to leave so soon after that.

Gerry Rafferty
He was an alcoholic, and also wrote one of the greatest songs on alcoholism, “Baker Street” about a guy who dreams of owning a house but doesn’t get around to doing it.

Amy Winehouse
Let’s face it, very few of us would have expected Amy Winehouse to live to see the age of 30. She just had to abuse anything within reach. Drugs, alcohol, whatever.

Heavy D
This guy got to rap on Michael Jackson’s “Jam” and was one of the hottest rappers in the early 90s.

Evoria
I don’t know her very well. I have one of her CDs, apparently she’s a highly regarded singer from Cape Verdean islands, which is a former Portugese colony in Africa.

Spiritual leader: Sai Baba
I know about him from a school friend whose father used to worship him. Seems like a nice guy.

Of course, the most important and significant obituary is for my grandmother.

MRT disruptions

2011-12-16T07:54:00.004+08:00

In my former workplace there was an IT analyst who quit. I asked him why he quit, and he cited an incident where an IT downtime cost the company millions of dollars in lost revenue and pissed off customers. He said that it happened on my watch, and I don’t want to work anymore in that place because it happened. He didn’t specify what was the exact nature of the relationship between his departure and that incident, so we can only speculate. Hence I’m going to speculate.

When there is a catastrophic failure, employee morale decreases. Some things went wrong, we’re not sure exactly what. Maybe the glitch was caught and corrected, and maybe it will always be a mystery, and some scapegoat is targeted in its place.

I was reminded about this incident because of another recent incident involving 2 major MRT failures in 2 days. The second, involving the stretch of the north south line between Marina Bay and Bishan involves Singapore’s oldest (and unfortunately also the most important) stretch of MRT stations. Among these 11 stations, maybe 6 or 7 are current or future interchanges. You can expect it to be a madhouse in the future. Apparently there was a train stuck in the tunnel for up to an hour, and a window had to be smashed for ventilation. That was an iconic photograph that circulated on Facebook. There was also another photo circulated that spoke of “profit opportunities” for cabbies to be picking up passengers stranded by the MRT stations.

There are immediate causes of these incidents, and no doubt the finger can be pointed at some engineer who was unfortunate enough to be overseeing the incident. But at the same time, those people at the top have to be responsible as well. And in connection with that cryptic comment made by my friend, some questions come to mind about this incident:

Are the causes of the more frequent failures that of faulty decision making at the top level?
One of the most reviled policies in Singapore in the recent years are that of the 5.5 million population blueprint. I was shocked when I heard about it 10 years ago, and unfortunately I did not pull my weight to speak up against it. It’s really hard to imagine the drawbacks of not having all these extra people in Singapore, but the negative effects of such a sudden increase in population are clear enough from the standpoint of public transportation. And it is clear that the MRT infrastructure is straining from having so many stations built in so short a time, and at the same time having to serve so many more people.

If the MRT people underestimated the amount of commuters on the MRT line, it's also the fault of the guys at National Development, or whoever it was compiling statistics to estimate the effect of the increased population on riderships.

Now we have a very potent combination of factors: an aging infrastructure, teething of new systems, and a high throughput. It is extremely bad that all 3 factors came together. The transport operators may have been overconfident that their system, which previously worked so well in the past was able to rise up to the challenge. They may have underestimated the challenges that these factors presented. And maybe the next question is part of it:

Is the profit principle to blame for these failures?
One of the effects of the big move towards “liberalisation” and “privatisation” was the incorporation of SMRT. To be sure, there are many other statutory boards who have been converted into GLCs and who have not stinted on their service quality as a result. But those tend to be the ones who do not enjoy natural monopolies. Companies like SIA, PSA and many others who have to vie for customers are scared of them. In contrast, SMRT is a natural monopoly, or rather, an oligopoly with SBS. M1, Singtel and Starhub can compete with each other to see whose customer service is the worst.

Liberalisation has proven tremendously useful in generating revenue for GIC / Temasek, and probably goes some way towards increasing the revenue of the Singapore government. However, it may drive service level to the bottom – they find the level, what is the lousiest service that they can get away with, and then they will degrade the system to that level. Never mind about the customers, only Temasek and shareholders matter.

We haven't solved the principal agency problem. Thing is, if the executive pay of the upper management in SMRT is pegged to profits, isn't this system creating the incentive for SMRT to get away with scheduling train arrivals as infrequently as possible, and skimping on maintenance?

Are engineers on the ground being unfairly scapegoated?
I’m sure that there have been a bunch of engineers who have been working very hard last night. But after all their troubles in bringing the system back up, will they get a reassuring pat on the shoulder for a heroic effort, or will they see their career prospects within the company evaporate into thin air? Is this breakdown in the system really their fault, or are they made to unfairly carry the can for bad decision making at the top? We all know what civil service culture is like. One department gets fingered as the black sheep. The other departments around them gloat. The other departments probably won’t lend a helping hand until they fall from grace themselves.

Of course, this fingering take a lot of subtle forms as well. These normally manifest themselves as people from other departments offering "helpful suggestions" in order to score points and draw further attention to the failings of the department that has cocked up.

Do the consumers expect too much of the system and make too big a deal about their expectations not being met?
It is exactly the same dynamic now, except that the demanding boss is replaced by the demanding customer. There are people who have demanded that heads roll for this incident, never mind that Raymond Lim’s head has already rolled prior to this. There is a lot of ammo for opponents of the ruling regime to hit at the so-called failures of the PAP government. And there are plenty of political points to be scored by asking people left right and centre to step down. However this is just “accountability”. We don’t need accountability per se. Or rather, what we want is better governance. It’s not that important whether you get rid of the people currently in the present position. What matters is whether you have a better system in place at the end of it.

There are some people who thought that it was very unprofessional for Lee Hsien Loong to put up a notice saying that he's on holiday, and that Teo Chee Hean would be acting Prime Minister, but many other people think that this is a little too small an incident to be involving the PM. I agree. What is truly comical is that at the time of this MRT outage, Lui Tuck Yew, the new transport minister, was in Cambodia giving advice to the Cambodians about how they could learn from Singapore's transport infrastructure.

It is extremely unrealistic to expect that 20 year old systems work as though they were brand new. So the question is, to what extent should their expectations be tempered, and to what extent is this systemic failure? People will become more hostile towards SMRT. But whether that means being more hostile towards the top management, or the people who work in the rank and file, that remains to be seen.

Is the infrastructure old enough that these incidents will just become more frequent in the future?
Ultimately it can be demoralising for the engineer to realise that the disrepair of the system has reached the point where outages and failures are just de reguer and you can't do anything about it anyway. Shit will keep on happening, and you will keep on being blamed for the shit.

So for me, taking all these factors into consideration, I’m not surprised if that other system failure in my old workplace generated an environment that was poisonous enough that it helped make that guy switch jobs.

Saw Phiak Hwa is one of the most reviled CEOs in Singapore. Right now she's facing a lynch mob over the great SMRT breakdown. People are not only angry at her for this incident. Big incidents will eventually happen. But they are angry at her for the general degradation of service level. The rising number of breakdowns. The scheduling of trains at 10 minute intervals at off-peak periods, ensuring that trains running at night would be packed to the maximum. Of the massive jams that people changing trains at Jurong East MRT station have had to endure. Of her cavalier remark that passengers could always "wait for the next train". Of her travelling around in a Mercedes 500 while the people of Singapore got crammed into cattle cars.

Yes, it's true that the subways of Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing have had to suffer more. But we are a city of only 5 million people and we shouldn't have to suffer like the megacities. We all know a time when Singapore actually had a world class transportation system. And we all know that Singapore can do better.

Lactose Intolerance

2011-12-11T14:15:00.004+08:00

Some of you might recall that when I applied to grad school, I considered the major universities in the same part of the states as my sis. There was 1 university that I did not apply to, and that was Americanos University. That was because Americanos was a big city that I didn’t really like.

It’s not really that I didn’t like Americanos, but it was just that I had heard so many bad things about Americanos. There were a few of my favourite musicians who really got messed up in that city. It was big and loud and – well, Palm Tree and Mexico just seemed more welcoming to me.

The last 1 week just passed in a whirlwind. During term time, there is always a period of time, 3 weeks before the end, when I would just lapse into a big funk and not give a shit about anything, and keep on procrastinating away. Then miraculously some of the term projects start to get done, I start cracking, people start barking at me, I bark at people, and then there is the climax of the term, the finals week. My professors were merciful: there was just 2 take home exams, and 1 project. I didn’t want any in-class exams: you lose the ability to memorise things after you’re 30. So it’s unfortunate that many of the other courses I’m going to take will have in class exams. Take home finals are nice because you don’t spend the finals week trying to study everything and wondering what’s going to come out in the exam. You just have to follow the course and be prepared and just do the questions that they give you. Of course it is not possible to start learning everything from scratch and doing those questions during that 1 week, but at least you don’t get that sickening feeling of “the one question I didn’t study for was exactly the one that came out.

So there was 1 week of constant work. My 2 courses with take home finals were OK, and I’m expecting a good grade from those courses. The one with the project – let’s say that my project partner, who’s a very well liked person apparently, decided to slack on one thing, and that one thing was that project. In the end I did more than my share of the work, and I forced him to write up the slides and the paper. Even then I had to do a lot of editing because he’s from China.

In any case it all culminated on Super Thursday, when both the final exams were due, and the paper had to be presented. I actually went out that night but when Friday came, I had to go do my packing. As fate had it, I bought a plane ticket to go home for the first time after the death of my grandmother, and I was flying off from “Americano” rather than “Mexico”. I had no choice – the flights out of “Mexico” were a few hundred dollars more expensive than from “Mexico”. So here were the details of how I would have to go to “Mexico”:

1. Take the bus to Small Town.
2. Take the train from Small Town to Americanos
3. Find my way from Americanos train station to Motel
4. Sleep in motel for 1 night and get up early the next day
5. Take the morning flight out of Americanos.

And that would be the price I would have to pay to save a few hundred dollars. Number 3 was the trickiest to plan, but I decided that I could take a shuttle bus to the airport, and then take another shuttle bus from the airport to the motel, which was supposedly just 10-15 minutes’ drive away.

I did a bit of packing, a bit of stock taking – stuff I didn’t need had to get sent home. Was dead exhausted from that intense 1 week. I had tried to slowly deplete the stocks inside my fridge, but there were a few pieces of chicken, half a gallon of milk and a few veggies left. I cooked a few pieces of chicken, ate some of them, and saved the rest for later. I was also drinking some of the milk – it was probably a little brave of me to drink up 2 cups of milk at one go – my stomach’s lactase wasn’t what it used to be.

So 1 hour after I drank the milk, I suddenly had to go to the loo. That was easy – I was still in my own dorm and I could go run there. I did 2 things, one of them was a great decision and the other was not. First, I cooked up everything and brought it out with me in tupperwares. And second, I finished drinking the milk. I didn’t sleep, and I set out at 6 in the morning.

It was a relatively uneventful trip, except that I missed the announcement that the train from Small Town to Americanos would not be running. That was stupid. Happily, the Greyhound station was just next door, and I hopped over and took the Greyhound instead. The only problem so far was that the bottle that was holding my small flask of gin and tonic was leaking a little and there was some sugary liquid (tonic water is very sweet) on the papers I planned to read on the plane. Otherwise, it was quite smooth. Obviously I slept a lot on the greyhound trip.

The only problem would be that my plan to take 2 shuttles to the motel would be scuppered. I used the bathroom in the greyhound station, and I went out. Later on, I would realize that that was my worst mistake of the entire day.

I called up a limo service and found out that they were charging me $30+ to send me to the motel. I walked out to the street, and saw a few tough looking 50+ year old guys on the street corner. I plucked up the courage to ask them where the train station was. It turns out that the guys were running their own private taxis. He quoted me $25 to send me straight to my motel. I weighed it up in my mind and then I decided to trust him. It turned out that that was a great decision. The guy – well I suppose you just couldn’t look at the average scruffy looking guy and simply assume that he was going to drive you into a dark alley and beat the shit out of you. It’s just as well that he could be trusted. And he didn’t look that much like a bad guy. A nice, avuncular latino guy in a leather jacket.

In the middle of the journey, I started feeling a queasy rumble in my bowels. I hoped and prayed that he would send me up to the model fast enough, before something terrible happened. Yes, I had drunk the milk 4-5 hours earlier but most of the trip from “Mexico”, I had been asleep, and the body doesn’t loosen the bowels until you wake up.

When I got to the motel, I filled in the card to register. There was this terrible moment when they told me, your room is on the third storey. Third storey! Fuck! I was about to blow! I grabbed the key as fast as I could when they handed it to me. I was just wandering around the car park of the first floor, when the guy came out and indicated to me that I could use the lift. So I dashed into the lift and I tried to make it into the room before something bad happened.

I was already on the 3rd floor, and 25 seconds away from the bathroom, when the bottom gave way. I felt the terrible sensation of something warm and brown dribbling down the left leg of my khakis. I dashed over to the bathroom, threw all the things on the bed, and found, to my dismay, a great mess had occurred.

In many ways, this was similar to the massively unfortunate events of my cousin’s wedding. But there were a lot of things in my favour. First, if you want to mess yourself up, you better do it when you’re right next to a big bathtub where you can clean everything up afterwards. Second, nobody’s watching you, as opposed to it’s your cousin’s wedding, and there are people everywhere. Even then, thinking back, that little boy’s behavior was kinda bizarre – why would you take off your shit stained trousers and fling the shit everywhere?

The toilet paper was frantically deployed and unfortunately there were 2 splotches on the carpet. Now I know why motel rooms are so dimly lit – you just don’t want your guests to see what a disgusting place it really is. You just want to stay for the night, get a good sleep, and get the fuck out of there.

So after emptying the rest of my ass into the toilet bowl (truth be told there wasn’t much of it left) I surveyed the wreckage. Shit on my left shoe, my left sock, underwear gone fuck. I had to go clean every damn thing up because I wasn’t going to live in the same place as all the shit. Ran the bath tub, and it took some sitting in it, rinsed my ass 3 times. My balls were soaked in the shit. The socks were OK, I can survive a plane ride without socks. I had very fortunately brought back half my underwear collection. You see the nice thing, the nice thing was that it was all diarrhea shit, watered down, and you could see all the components. There were scraps of peppers, tomatoes and onions that were in last night’s Ragu spaghetti sauce. And for some reason the shit had this mucuous, slimy texture that was kinda – well yuck.
The whole ordeal lasted maybe half an hour. In my mind’s ear, I was playing to myself “Sweet Virginia” by the Rolling Stones, you know the song where he sings “ gotta scrape that shit right off the shoe”. It’s kinda gross that there’s this splotch on the shoe, and some of it got on the inside. I had to wipe it off, take out the sole and rinse it. Then the socks. Then the undies. And finally the khakis.

My trousers were the only pair that I had at that time. And I had to wash the damn thing, get it dried, and then wear it on a 20+ hour flight. It was not a pleasant prospect at all! Well fortunately Americanos weather is dry and windy. I took my khakis and slung it over the railing. But then I wouldn’t be able to go out. I had to watch my khakis and make sure that nothing untoward happened to it, otherwise I would not be able to fly back home! So I was watching it for a few hours while absentmindedly surfed the internet and watched TV. I was so glad that I had brought food over from Mexico - I wouldn't be able to get myself any food during this period of time. I briefly thought about - I had a few long sleeve shirts and a sweater, and I could tie both of them around my waist, and use them like some kind of a skirt. Later on, I decided that it was a real bad idea. Instead, I heated up some stir fry cabbage, some spaghetti (more Ragu sauce by the way) and ate it all up. But of course I had to be obsessively careful about what I touched just before I ate my food. I found myself washing my hands like a sufferer of obsessive compusive disorder before I started. After lunch I decided that I was too sleepy to keep on eyeing my trousers on the railing, I had to take the damn thing down and hang it up in the bathroom. I took a bath, and then a nap.

I woke up to the sound of some guy trying to open my door. It was this African looking guy. I told him, “those clowns gave you the wrong room, the wrong key. Go back downstairs and ask for another room.” And after that I wondered for a little moment how much more disastrous it would have been if I had met the same problem, and had to go downstairs to the lobby in my shit stained trousers to go ask for another key. Well count your blessings eh?

I sat up and watched “Big Bang Theory”. They were showing some episodes on the TV, I watched it, and after that, my pants were dry enough to wear, which was a great relief. I went out and bought some take out – some fish and shrimp, Lousiana style, cooked by a Chinese guy. I ordered a place on the airport limo.

I don’t really know if I was in a bad part of Americanos or what. It looked gritty and worn down. I haven’t regretted my decision to go to Mexico rather than Americanos: both universities were roughly equally selective, and to be frank, Americanos might have been a better fit for me in terms of what I wanted to do. But I just didn’t want to go to school in a place like this. I wonder whether this unfortunate incident was a matter of Americanos returning me the love that I had for that place. Or well when my grandmother was alive, she always insisted on having some food that she liked. One day she ate an ice cream in spite of her lactose intolerance, and after that the poor maid had to spend 1 hour in the bathroom with her.

In any case, I have worked out the immediate problems. I wonder what other kinds of challenges are ahead of me on the trip home.

A life

2011-11-28T18:32:00.004+08:00

I was awoken out of bed at 7 in the morning. I have a phone where I had to pay a $2 daily fee to use it. (It's quite worth it if I only have to use it for long distance phone calls home.) That phone rang, and I blearily picked it up, for it to be cut off in the end. I was pissed off at first because I thought that either it was a wrong number, or a crank call and therefore I was $2 poorer. But if it was my family, it had to be a very special reason for them to call without emailing me about it beforehand. And I was about to find out what that reason was.

My grandmother passed away a few days ago. My biggest fear about going to University of Mexico to study was that it would be the end for my grandmother and it was realised in the most horrible way. The worst thing was that I had just posted on my wall, wondering why the Friday after Thanksgiving was called Black Friday. Well it would be the day that my grandmother died.

I’ve had a boring life. A nice boring life, but it was due to the sacrifices made by a lot of people who came before me. My grandmother didn’t lead a boring life. In fact it was probably a little too exciting. I know very little about her childhood other than that she was Cantonese. She didn’t go to school, but she said that she learnt how to read by hanging out with other people in the village who knew how to. She doesn’t know how to write, but she can force herself to write her own name.

She lived through the war, of course. She was a teenager, and she told of horrible stories where everybody had to hide in ditches. There was a rumour going all around that the Japanese bombers had sonar detectors, so everybody had to muffle their babies and make sure that they didn’t cry, otherwise they would get caught by the Japanese. She told stories of this marvelous brother of hers who had a seeing eye. One day, at a checkpoint, the Japanese told him to get onto a bus. He had a strange feeling about that bus, and he avoided it. He would later learn that he escaped getting executed at Changi.

When she was a teenager she became pregnant out of wedlock, so she had to marry my grandfather. My grandfather was a customs officer, and he already had 2 wives, so she had to be the third wife. She had 7 children, and raised 5 of them. The last 2 had to be given away. We made some contact with them 10 years ago, and there was a brief reunion. Apparently my father and those “missing” sisters had some contact with each other when they were kids. I’ve seen one of my “missing” aunts once.

Life was really hard. My grandfather used to be wealthier, but he had fallen on hard times. Basically when LKY eradicated corruption, there was a huge drop in household income. My grandmother’s branch of the family were the niggers. Everybody from the other branches tried to pick on my father’s family, and there were a lot of fights with the stepsiblings. My father and his siblings went to school. It was one of the best schools at that time, but a notch down from the former glories now. At the same time, they had to help run a farm, do the housework, everything. I heard some rumours that it was not only the farm that was important, but also it was a front for some money laundering. I’m not sure about the details.

A lot of the stories that came out of that period were fairly Dickensian. Now this is not the extent of poverty you find when you visit the shantytowns of a major third world city, but it was bad enough. There was the waking up at 5 in the morning to deliver the eggs. There was the cleaning of the chicken coops. (There were a few fights with the stepsiblings that were won because my father’s family had access to a pile of chicken shit that they could throw at the enemy and gross them out.) There was the occasional nightsoil duty. There was a time when the household money was kept in a till, and my aunts managed to find out where the money was. They managed to squirrel out some money, without letting my grandmother find out.

My grandmother was a very spirited person, but her record as a mother was a little spotty. My father’s family were fairly resentful that she didn’t fight harder for their rights, but I suppose when you rank last among the wives, there’s not really that much that you can do. She was very strict on my parents, and never hesitated to deliver corporal punishment on my father for not finishing top of the class, or occasionally getting lower marks than a certain stepbrother. Theirs was the first generation who learnt English. My grandmother and a few of my aunts later on learnt Mandarin. They all went to English schools. At home they spoke dialect. I’ve never considered Mandarin my mother tongue because it never was.

Around the time when my father was a teenager, disaster struck. My grandmother had set up an insurance scheme for the village, but apparently her sister absconded with the money. So for a while, not only were they the niggers in their own family, they were also the niggers in the village. This was a dark side of my family’s history that wasn’t told for a very long time. There were other hare brained schemes, such as the time when my grandmother sent my aunt to go work at a “hairdresser”. In the red light district. My father had to go rescue her, and needless to say, neither of them were very amused. The debt collectors were pounding at their door. There was a time when I was inundated with ECAs in school, and I had to study, write a play and direct it at the same time. I complained to my father, and he retorted that there was a time when he had to balance studying, taking care of household matters, keeping the debt collectors at bay, running the farm and giving tuition part time. That ended the conversation very quickly.

Anyway, he made the decision that my grandmother had to abscond. My grandmother worked as an amah, bringing up a kid in a wealthy family. It was not the last time she was handling children.

As we all know, tough times don’t last. From the 70s onwards, a lot of my siblings did well for themselves. Except for an uncle – he’s doing very well now but that didn’t happen until the 21st century. All 5 of them have a bond that is forged in fire, and while their relationship has seen better times, it’s still very strong.
Life got better for many Singaporeans in the 70s. My father married my mother. My aunt also married and she took in the other siblings, and they lived in the 3 room flat that they are still living in today. My grandmother ended her stint as an amah, and then needed somewhere to stay. At that point accounts diverge. My grandmother said that my mother invited her into the house so that she could help take care of the kids (that’s us). My mother said that my grandmother pleaded to have a roof over her head, and she took my grandmother in. My father refused to comment on the controversy.

They hit it off on a bad note, and they never reconciled. It was a feud that lasted for the entirety of my life, and ended last week. My mother was convinced that she married a good man (she’s right) but she was terribly insecure at not being as smart as his family. She – well since she’s criticized my lack of maturity hundreds of times, I’m sure I can return the favour. She didn’t have a mature attitude about this at all. She never spoke to my grandmother, unless it was for business. My grandmother took over the running of the household and did a lot of the chores. She was determined to make the best of her second shot at motherhood, and make amends for what she didn’t do right the first time around. My mother? She tried what she could, but she was just too insecure about this and she made a lot of mistakes. As you probably already understand from reading the earlier part of this story, anybody who goes against my father’s siblings, and my grandmother usually ends up getting beaten.

I have sometimes wondered if my grandmother was a good mother. It’s a very difficult question to answer. She had a herculean task, as did my father and his siblings. It’s easy to say she could have done better, but she did a lot for them. They were better raised than my step-uncles, who turned out to be mediocrities in life. But they rightfully resented her for being too strict, and for giving them a hard life. She did get them into huge amounts of trouble, but my sister thought that she tried her best to teach them the right values, and in the end they were all as intelligent and capable as she had been.

So there were the 3 people who were the 3 pillars of my life and my sister’s life when we were kids. My father, who worked hard to provide us with a solid middle class upbringing with all the trappings – the swimming lessons, the country club and the piano lessons. They are not wasted by the way – I am a very talented musician. There was my grandmother, who cooked all the meals. Funnily enough, she learnt cooking from my aunt, who didn’t mind sharing the cooking tips with her. And my mother, who had to play the unenviable part of the drill sergeant, and making sure that we did well in school.

My grandmother had a special bond with my sister. I suppose it’s not something I can really understand because I’m not a very social person. I’m not unemotional but I’m not social. My sister and my grandmother loved each other. My mother didn’t like that, and I suppose when you have kids, you know who belongs to which parent. I was my mother’s son, and my sister was more like my grandmother. I could stand being fairly distant from people, just like my parents. My sister was more like my grandmother, who was capable of winning a lot of friends and being well liked by everybody. My mother tried to drive a wedge between my sister and my grandmother.

My mother was a difficult person to live with. We had to put up with her violent tempers and her cold wars. (cold war: she stops talking to you for a week.) She wasn’t as bright as the rest of us. Mostly we thought that her problems were down to immaturity rather than malice, but over time, the distinction no longer matters. She was diligent and conscientious, and was tough about pushing us to do our best. But at the same time she said the meanest things.

Today my housemate in the Uni of Mexico was in tears, and sobbing his heart out. I understood that when you study in a foreign country for the first time, there will come a day, in your first term, when you sob your heart out. There are many things that cause this, like realizing that when you leave your homeland for a few years, a big part of what could have been your life is gone forever. That also happened to me. But in my case, my mother had written a mean email that said that she disowned me. I knew that she didn’t mean it, but I was very upset. I was sharing a room with a black guy and he was totally embarrassed that day, kept looking away – black guys don’t condone this sort of behavior. I wrote a long email to her telling her that we both missed a lot of opportunities to have a good mother child relationship. She was apparently quite touched by it but for me it was the end of something. I realized that it was the end of that kind of relationship where I was the child and she was the mother, I could no longer consider her to be a parent, only a relative who stayed in the same house as me. Those of you out there who are going to be parents: don’t ever do this. When you say you disown your kid, he will disown you right back.

My grandmother was not always an angel (although she was more capable of that than my mother). She told white lies in order to get things done her way. She was a politician, but in a mostly (not always) benign way. She had her bossy and arrogant side, but she was soft-hearted. Except to my mother. Her behavior towards my mother bordered on the passive aggressive. Ostensibly she was in a weaker position, but she knew which buttons to push to stoke my mother’s insecurity. It was – I’m not proud to say, a technique of conflict management that I picked up from her.

It was worse when my sister and I grew up. Since my grandmother was the more likeable one, inevitably we liked talking to her the most. This is true more for my sis than myself. The jealousy and rage this provoked in my mother was probably hurtful to all of us. Irony of ironies, it fell to my mother to be the disciplinarian, even though she herself was the least disciplined of the three adults. And you know what grandparents are like, they spoil the kids even though the parents are trying to knock some sense into them.

But credit to my grandmother, she was an excellent housekeeper. She ran the household as though her life depended on it, and in a way it did: my mother never really acknowledged her right to live in the house, but my sister and I were the reasons why my grandmother couldn’t leave. We wouldn’t allow it, my father wouldn’t allow it, so she never managed to get what she wanted. For me one reason is that my grandmother was a genuinely bright presence to have around. In fact she was the most happy go lucky of the 5 of us, and we just had to have her in the family.

We had 2 televisions in the home from the time when I’m 7 until now. My grandmother would watch one, and my parents would watch the other. I’ve always considered the 2 televisions to be the symbol of the way my family operated.

We couldn’t show any affection to the grandmother in front of the mother. My father told us it was unnecessarily provocative. We were all Asians, so there was no such thing as being able to talk about these things outside of the family, especially when so many other things were going swimmingly. We entertained no visitors. That feud had the effect of cutting away contact with the rest of the world. I didn’t understand much as a kid. Probably couldn’t explain the dull aching sensation I had most of the time. We grew up in the shadow of this feud. It was a bad way to live. In a way, as a child I rejected all 3 adults as role models, and went about my own freaky way. Only later did I think about what it was like as an adult.

My sis and I tended to side with the grandmother. This happened in subtle ways. In many ways this was my mother’s fault, because she was the one who was always losing her temper. My sister always felt that my mother was mainly the one to blame, although eventually she realised that my grandmother was also to blame for the family situation. My father lost all his hair before he was 50 years.

So far I’ve only talked about the sad parts of my childhood. Let’s have a more balanced picture. All 3 of them worked hard for us 2 kids. We never lacked for anything materially. Both of us were brilliant at school and people won’t admit this very much but being brilliant at school does make you a happy person. My sister and I had a very good relationship. Everybody – my mother aside – got along with each other.

I suppose if you wanted to think about things, this is the contrast with my mother. She rationed her affection for us. There was this deep fear that she would spoil us, or maybe she didn't really care that much. Every time she did something nice for us, there was this fear that it was in vain, or that it was a wasted "investment" of effort.

My grandmother just gave without thinking. It was more instinctive. Maybe it was calculative, because she knew that she just had to win over my sister and me no matter what. If I am a spoilt person, my grandmother is a prime suspect. Well you know - it's no fun if 2 people in your house are always squabbling and it's no fun if you are what those 2 people are squabbling over.

There is this natural tendency for grandmothers to spoil their kids. There was a time when I was in primary school. I had lost my goggles when I left them behind in the swimming pool toilet. I was quite unhappy when I got home because I knew that my mother would give me hell for that. So my grandmother just brought me out to Tang's (the same department store was there 25 years ago, the one that now has that sewage problem). We bought a pair of goggles with the same design so that she would never know. I mean one way to look at it was that my grandmother was playing to good guy to my mother's bad guy. But another way to look at it, my grandmother was capable for forgiveness, and my mother wasn't.

Another incident was something I won't easily forget. I was in secondary school then. The road outside my housing estate had not been raised yet, and it was very prone to flooding. I was walking home from school after a particularly heavy rain, and I saw my grandmother walking around in the floodwaters. I learnt that she had lost a slipper in that flood. I suppose it is quite heroic when a sixty year old woman thinks she has to protect you like that.

My sister went to the states. I was never as close to the grandmother as she was. They shared a special relationship that I didn’t envy too much. Maybe I’m a person who’s very sensitive to whether people are trying to manipulate my emotions, and I keep an arm’s length from everyone. My mother tried to keep them apart. Letters were confiscated. Phones were installed with caller ID. It was just about impossible for my grandmother to contact her. When I returned home, it fell to me to notify when my parents were taking a vacation so that she could “safely” call back.

I came back home, and I found that the squabbles between my mother and my grandmother intensified. At that point I was thoroughly fed up, and it was a big reason why my first 2 years of working life were totally miserable for me. I felt that my father had erred in not beating any sense into her, even though this is partially justified in his being in a very difficult position. I decided to take the hard line on my mother. Unfortunately I now know that it was the wrong thing to do, although it did have the intended effect of forcing my mother to see the error of her ways.

My sister never came home. There were various reasons why she stayed in the USA, becoming a doctor and all that, and all the unhappiness was a big part of it. She repeated it like a mantra: there's no love in the family. But I think she overstates the case a little. I felt that after 10 years of adulthood, some of the scars should have healed a little. My sister was training to be a doctor, which was a fairly harsh lifestyle even for people who have a family to support them. She was under a lot of duress. Later on I found out: when she was forced to cut ties with my grandmother, a lot of feelings that she had for the family and for Singapore were lost. My grandmother was what kept her spiritually tethered to Singapore.

Later on, my mother became more bearable to live with. Probably we were all adults and we could stay out of each other’s way. At the same time, my grandmother had all sorts of ailments: going blind, osteoporosis making it difficult or impossible to walk, stomach no longer working. I wish that my parents would take better care of her, but they didn’t. OK, that sounds harsh but there were plenty of circumstances which prevented my grandmother from receiving the best possible health care. I took up some of the slack of taking care of her, but it wasn’t that much. My mother did try to do her token bit. In truth, both of them always had very little contact anyway.

Her health problems were symptomatic of her life. She was going blind, but she hardly talked to anybody about it. She still tried to be as active as she could. She was still partially running the household until one day, she fell down. Then we started grilling her about what the hell was going on, and she admitted that she had been keeping her health problems from the family. There was also this deep insecurity about her, as my sister pointed out to me. She had been a refugee for most of her life, whether as somebody’s third wife, or a debtor, or somebody who had to be put up in her son’s house. Her children had a love hate relationship with her. But ironically, when everybody was more willing to forgive her and make amends for her, she became a matriarch instead.

So she hid her health problems. Now she did pass down some very good genes to my father and his siblings. They were as intelligent and determined as she was, and they were good people. But on the downside, she had a congenital defect in her eyes that made her go blind. She had osteoporosis so severe that her first three children (including my father ) have it. And I’m worried that I will get it one day.

And after that fall, I should have been more careful with her. We employed a maid and kept her at home. We couldn’t allow her to go to a nursing home – out of the question. She was such a lively person at 70+ that it was very cruel, everything was taken away from her. She couldn’t walk unaided, she was blind. We made some mistakes taking care of her. If we had forced her to exercise every day, and if we had wheeled her around to all her friends, we could have extended her life by a few more years. But when all the symptoms of old age start piling up, it is an increasing struggle to keep yourself alive, and furthermore a struggle which gives you diminishing returns.
That was when I started realizing the truth about death. Death is not something that takes place over 1 day, unless you’re talking about a person murdered in his prime of youth. The way that my surviving grandparents departed the world told me something: it is a long drawn out process that ends up with the termination of life. From that fall to her demise last week, that whole period was a slow death.

She was unable to cope with blindness. It is the worst thing to lose your sight when you’re old. When you’re young, you can learn coping mechanisms. When you are old, you’re too old to learn. The only real defence against the onset of aging is to have an active and healthy life, but she didn’t get that. Towards the end, I took over some of the work of her caretaking. But I’ll always suspect that what I did was too little and too late. By the time she died, the early symptoms of dementia were already there.

There is no doubt in my mind that she was a great person, in terms of what she did with her life. Raising 5 children under the most difficult of circumstances was a heroic feat. And then after that, she raised my sister and myself. Whatever doubts she had as a mother, she was a great grandmother. Everywhere she lived, she made a lot of friends (other than my mother). When I bump into neighbours in the lift, they always ask me about my grandmother. In spite of her difficult life, she managed to live it to the fullest. She was a great cook. She had a big heart.

On the negative side, she made plenty of horrible mistakes in her life. Like getting pregnant with my father, or setting up that insurance scheme. She had this tendency to bottle things up and not confront issues when she had to. And she played a small part in perpetuating her problems with my mother. But then again, nobody is perfect. They say that the smartest people are the craziest, and she was as smart and crazy as anybody.

But it will always be a source of regret that I was never able to be as close to her as I could have been. There’s the generation gap. There’s the fact that I have to communicate with her in Mandarin which is not my best language. I received a great gift from her but I always think about how it could have been even better. When my mother disapproved of our being close to my grandmother, I acquiesced, but my sister didn’t care and kept on talking to my grandmother like a best friend. She taught more things to my sister and in hindsight, my sister was better off for it.

I first mourned for her when in my early days in national service. Of course there was a selfish element to it, like I was pining for home comforts. But at the same time, I counted the years, and I worked out that my time with her was almost half gone by that time. (I was right). That was the first time I thought seriously about her dying. There were other times, like when I was in a kitchen in Snowy Hill, and I thought that it was such a shame that I never learnt cooking from my grandmother. The funny thing is that I went back home and I still didn’t learn cooking from her. And then she had her fall and after that it was too late. I didn’t seriously think about her dying after that, but I knew that her time was short. One of the things I’m most ashamed about was not looking after my other grandmother as well, so I thought that I should take care of this one. This one, I took better care of her but it could have been even better. There was a time last year when she had to be sent to the hospital a few times. I started realising that the end could be near. But after that she made a remarkable recovery, and I thought that she was going to live a long time, at least until I had come back from Mexico.

In the end, what killed her was most probably that she had a weak immune system. I thought that those things were responsible for her hospital visits.

So when I received the call, I will always remember the last time I spoke to her. I had called home, my father asked me if I wanted to speak to my grandmother. I said OK. I don't know if my grandmother was asked to wake up, or if she was holding the phone the wrong way. She was screaming "hello" a few times and she didn't get to hear what I had to say. It was a very farcical last conversation.

It's a terrible way to lose your grandmother. Both my grandfathers died before I was born. My other grandmother: I had just graduated from Snowy Hill, when she got a stroke. She was never able to speak again, and she became a vegetable for 3.5 years before she died. I was in America when her stroke took place. Which means I have not been at the deathbeds of any of my grandparents.

Now, for this grandmother, I was also in America when she died. What softens the blow is that she died quickly. I wouldn't say there was much suffering, but unfortunately given the state of her health you have to say that death was a release.

And this is not just a grandmother dying. A person in whose very big shadow I have always lived is gone. A chapter of my life is over.

The long drive home

2011-11-14T21:51:00.003+08:00

Just before I was about to leave for the States, my cousins held a farewell dinner for me. It was a fairly posh place at Dempsey. It’s funny, that was only 3 months ago, but I can’t remember much of what was said that night. Maybe I said a few things about how I was about to get ready for the trip. It was a little noisy. Much of what happened in my last month in Singapore was about cleaning my room out. For the years I spent in Singapore between my graduation from Snowy Hill and my going to Mexico, I hadn’t been very disciplined about keeping my room neat and tidy and now I had to make up for it.

We did talk a bit about the good old days. We talked about the cousins who weren’t there, one, a scientist who was doing pretty well. Another, a doctor somewhere in the midlands of England. Another, my sister. And I was going to join them overseas, except, unlike my sister and the doctor, I would never earn the title of Dr.

I was the only guy around, same as it was when we were growing up, and we used to meet up on Sunday afternoons. The “eminent” scientist was also a guy, but he wasn’t available. We had a generally good time.

I have to remember that for 1-2 years, my life has been leading up to this, what I am doing today. Most of that time, there was a lot of lugging around a notebook and going to the nearest Ya Kun, plonking down either $2 for a big kopi, or $4 for a full breakfast set. And it was always a little too noisy to study properly. Something happened in 2008, and what happened was the transition from paper to e-reader. Except that I didn’t use an e-reader. I used a laptop and it was a very heavy e-reader. I was thinking to myself over and over again – wow, last year in Singapore, last year in Singapore.

I’m not sure I’ll ever fully adjust to life in California. I think I was happy about leaving my work, happy about the fact that that enterprise had come to an end. But I missed a lot of the other things about Singapore: the people, the food, the places. “Mexico” is a little sterile.

I didn’t always have a good relationship with those cousins, even though this was back in primary school. My mother was the only English educated one of the lot, and I’m the one who sucks the most at Chinese. Everybody speaks English at work now, so we all speak English to each other. But I always stood out for being an English speaker, and a guy.

They are a strange bunch. Of the 4 elder cousins, only the scientist is married. The other 3 – they don’t look ugly, far from it. But they never had the temperament for marriage. And much as I envied them in their childhood for having such a happy time playing with each other – with dolls – I don’t envy their adulthood, which for 2 of them still involves playing with each other and their dolls. Well then again I was a music junkie in my teens and that hasn’t changed. I used to envy what I thought was their more idyllic teenage years, but I don’t envy their adulthood. It just seemed like so much shopping, doing of hair, gossiping about colleagues – I don’t know if they were just letting their hair down or if they were really happy to do all this bimbo stuff.

Later on, I drove one of those cousins back home. She was a good person, the friendliest among the lot, we talked quite a bit. She told me about the quirks of her brother the scientist. I sent her up to her place in Hougang. For some reason, after all these late nights out, I usually think about the van driving its way down ghostly, almost deserted streets after midnight, making its weary way home – except that home was probably an empty house. Your Ang Mo Kio Ave 5, your Buangkok Greens, you Yio Chu Kang Roads.

We were both entering middle age. For all intents and purposes, 3 of my older cousins have expired body clocks, and are destined to be childless. That cousin of mine enjoyed playing with my youngest cousin so much when they were kids – how did she end up not having kids? Anyway I don’t know why but it always did seem that middle age was about that van making its weary way home after a long night out.

After I dropped her off, I pulled into a carpark, parked the van and slept in it. I only woke at 5, and was lucky not to have a parking ticket. And after that, it was off to the Salvation Army drop off point to donate a lot of useless stuff that had piled up at home. After college, after moving house 4 times in 4 years, I finally learnt that you do not keep your physical possessions forever. You should only have a few souvenirs with you, everything else is expendable. (I have moved house 10 times in my life, at last count).

Stone Roses

2011-10-28T22:10:00.003+08:00

Anyway, I’ve heard that the Stone Roses are about to reform. That’s great news. I’d say that the Stone Roses were a band that my generation listened to. They were a defining band of the 90s. People talk about how Nirvana were an underground band which broke through, but the Stone Roses were the band which broke the Madchester scene. The fusion of dance, funk and 60s pop was to be a template for so many other indie bands that followed them. Some of the bands that followed in the scene were great (Happy Mondays). Some were so-so (Inspiral Carpets). Others were shit (Soup Dragons, The Farm). To paraphrase one of their album titles, the Stone Roses was the second coming of the 60s. It was an album that you could put aside many of the great albums of the 60s, and it could have come out from the 60s. It was a late 80s album that did 60s music and beat them on their own terms.

I used to go wandering around Toa Payoh listening to this album. No, I didn’t have a Walkman. I memorized the entire thing and played it in my head. It brought me back to more innocent times, when all I needed to care about was my “O” levels and listening to as much great music as I could get my hands on. I first listened to them a few years after the first album came out. I had heard about them, and it was around the time that the reputation of the first album was about to go through the stratosphere.
I was a little disappointed when I heard the album for the first few times – I had assumed that it was mindblowing. It wasn’t. But many of the songs eventually grew on to me. I still don’t think it’s a work of genius. But they did the ordinary things extraordinarily well. The songwriting on that album was uniformly excellent. And that album was a curious one in the light of all the problems they had later. I think that people like the Beatles more than the Stones because the Beatles had an image of being happy, friendly people. The Stone Roses were also like the Beatles – happy friendly people.

Unfortunately, their first album was also just about the only thing that went right for them in their whole career. Ian Brown and John Squire wrote great songs for the first album. John Squire was a great guitarist, and the Stone Roses had a great rhythm section. But the vocals were shit. Ian Brown cannot sing. Later on, I listened to their earlier stuff. Aside from a few gems, most of the stuff that came out before the Stone Roses album was inferior. During the first album, even their B sides were downright brilliant. They had “What the World is Waiting For” and “Something’s Burning”. After that, they had a problem – just like Bruce Springsteen after “Born to Run”, we had a band at the height of their powers, unable to record a follow up to their classic. When the dust settled, they went back to the studio and recorded “Second Coming”, which was a very good record, but not as great as the first. It didn’t really bear comparison to the first, though – it just went down the dance funk direction hinted at by “Fool’s Gold”.

After that, they had to break up. Their relationships got stained by the excessive use of drugs. John Squire was acting like an asshole. (I don’t envy the guy – who wants a name that screams out, “I’M NUMBER TWO”?) He formed a group called the Seahorses who recorded an album that was politely reviewed at that time but is generally acknowledged to be shit today. Ian Brown embarked on a career that had its moments but paled in comparison with the Stone Roses. The bass player joined Primal Scream. The drummer – ironically he was the best at his instrument at the time the band formed – dropped out of view.

I am very lucky to have come across music like this when I was a teenager. I don’t think I would have quite appreciated it if I had first listened to it as a 30-something later on.

I think about how the first album was lionized out of proportion. I have this theory – the great albums of the 60s defined in many peoples’ minds what great albums had to sound like. They were a collection of great songs. The songwriting was good. It wasn’t to be formless or experimental. It had to be simple enough that a lot of people could relate to it. It was not only a classic album, it was classical – meaning that it was iconic and representative. It would appeal broadly because it wasn’t that fancy. It had meat and potatoes. It was one of those very rare albums that was both a throwback to the 60s, and not inferior to the best of 60s music. Most albums who look back to the past are necessarily limited. It’s not the only great album of the 90s (let’s face it, the Stone Roses belongs to the 90s more than the 80s). But it’s the one that a lot of people agree upon.

But paradoxically, it was also an innovative album, because not only was it a throwback to music of the 60s, it managed to create a fusion that wasn’t really attempted back then – dance, funk, rock and pop. It was a prism through which you could look backwards and see the disparate threads of 60s music, and it foreshadowed what a lot of 90s music was going to be like – people throwing music of different genres together to see what sticks.

I think that people took that as a sign – when people compile lists of the greatest albums of all time, a lot of the 60s albums come out on top, followed by the 70s. Those are the 2 decades that people agree are the best for pop music. But the Stone Roses were loved because they were the first sign that something great was about to happen. Let’s face it, the 10 years between 1988 and 1998 were among the great periods of pop music. We had Sonic Youth, REM (actually REM did most of their best work before 1988 but never mind), Dinosaur Jr, De La Soul, Public Enemy, the Stone Roses, Blur, Oasis, Wu Tang Clan, Nas, Jay Z, Arrested Development, Guns n Roses, Metallica, Bjork, Radiohead, Beck, Guided by Voices, Pavement, PJ Harvey, Pulp, Manic Street Preachers, OutKast, Tortoise, Wilco, Goldie, Roni Size, Primal Scream, Talk Talk, Nirvana, Tori Amos, My Bloody Valentine, Pet Shop Boys, the Orb, Orbital, Future Sound of London, Prodigy, Tribe Called Quest, Souls of Mischief, Dr Dre, Tindersticks, Mogwai, Bell Biv Devoe, Keith Sweat, Ice Cube, Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Shack, PM Dawn, Matthew Sweet, Jane’s Addiction, Tupac, Notorious BIG. It was a musically very rich period and I am lucky to have all these bands soundtrack my teenage years.

But you know what? I know I’m becoming an old fart when I see an article like this, where some youngster gets resentful of the Stone Roses. It’s just like when I was young, and people always told me that music of the 60s and 70s was better. It was, but having a lot of great music in the 90s somehow made up for that. A lot of it was innovative, and a lot of it arose from the proliferation of synthesizers and sequencers. They were building something new and exciting, not merely mastering the music of the 60s and 70s and doing it better. They were producing stuff that didn’t exist in those earlier periods. I would say that the music of the 60s was made possible by the advent and proliferation of the electric guitar and amplified music.

The 70s gets a bad rap because disco is so vilified, but it’s the mirror image of the 60s, and a lot of great black music was produced during that decade. It was a grungy time. When a musical movement arises, it’s usually made possible by some advent of technology or some social movement. Equal rights for blacks, or women, or gays. Thus, the rise of DJ culture gave rise to dance music, disco and rap. The rise of the sequencer made a lot of genre blending music possible.

Unfortunately, if I were to characterize the decade of the 2000s, I would say that it’s the age of the crowd / cloud. I was a teenager who hated the idea of uniformity and conformity. I was horrified at the idea that American Idol was going to dominate the idea of music. I never did like the idea of Talentime. Unfortunately that was the legacy of Britpop. It started out as a triumph for underground music breaking through to the mainstream. But unfortunately it ended up as a lot of people just hankering for their 15 minutes of fame, and gaming the system. It was responsible for a lot of mediocre music making its way to the top. In a way it was like the 80s again.

So for the teenager who wrote that article, I think he was a little upset that his generation didn’t produce a Stone Roses, never mind that for all intents and purposes, the greatness of the Stone Roses is, like, one album. I’m also a little put off at youngsters who don’t respect music that was made before their time. I had a healthy respect for that. Of course, I was even more enamoured of music that was made before my time, but only were truly appreciated during my time. Bands like ABBA, the Velvet Underground, Steely Dan and Nick Drake didn’t truly belong to their eras. Yes, it’s unusual to say that bands like ABBA weren’t appreciated during the 70s when they were the best selling band around, but they didn’t have a great critical reputation. That only came later, around the time when Erasure hit number 1 with some of ABBA’s hits.

I’m especially critical when – they just dismiss bands like Steely Dan outright, on the pretext that it sounds on the surface like reviled smooth jazz. Steely Dan is a “still waters run deep” band, who, underneath the smooth veneer have the most cynical and sarcastic lyrics ever committed. I don’t know if I’m on the money when I think that many youngsters are just too superficial. Maybe they don’t understand cynicism and sarcasm enough to understand the real meaning of punk. To them, punk is just a fancy costume you wear, and a symbol that you’re really cool. Rather than an attitude and a way of life.

Maybe they never understood what it was like for underground music to be an underground movement. Maybe they never understood what it was like to rebel against authority, because they’ve never had a lot of conflicts with authority figures.
However, it’s great that there is a lot of music made today in indie music. I haven’t really decided whether it hits the heights scaled in the 90s.

Anyway I hope this reunion turns out well for them. The Dinosaur Jr reunion was a great success, and produced new material that was very near their late 80s peak. I had a blast attending their concert last year.

Changing face of the University

2011-10-27T23:27:00.000+08:00

One of the most interesting books I’ve read over the last few years (OK I’ve not been reading as many books as, say 2005-2010) is “The Social Life of Information” by John Seely Brown. John Seely Brown is apparently a big shot at Xerox PARC and is one of the advisors at SMU so he’s a tua bai foreign talent.

It was written 10 years ago, and this collection of essays tries to make the case, among other points raised, that information and knowledge are not the same thing. Just because information is more readily available all across the world because of the internet, it doesn’t always translate automatically to knowledge. Transforming information to knowledge, from “know what” to “know how” is really difficult.

What is certain is that the internet is changing society in very deep and profound ways that we can scarcely imagine. Many futuristic novels that were written in the 20th century centred on advances in transportation technology. What happened if people were fitted with jetpacks and could fly anywhere they wanted. What happened if people could set up colonies on the moon. What happened if people could just teleport. But not that many people thought very much about advances in information technology and communications. Because these advances are less tangible and harder to understand.

But these advances are more profound, more far reaching. Probably they are more significant, because the information technology revolution is about to continue, even as the transportation technology revolution is grinding to a halt. Because there are limitations to what we can do with our physical bodies, but there are no limitations to what we can do with information and knowledge. Also because intelligence is a more important thing that how fast you can move a human body around: human beings rule the world because they are the smartest animal. The strongest, fiercest or fastest animals are no match for us. For a long time, until he started giving away a lot of his money, the richest man in the world was a nerd, not a jock.

Anyway, enough digression on the big meaning of the information revolution. This article is about the changing fate of the university.

There is this great university system that hasn’t changed for a few hundred years. People went to professors. They went to lectures. They read from books. They housed themselves in compounds where they learnt from each other.

But there were many aspects of university education which portend that some changes may be needed for the current university model.

1. Elitism / selectivity
It used to be that university education was something that was only available to the elites of a cohort. These days, almost half of the people will get a degree. Degrees these days aren’t worth very much, unless they come from elite universities. In the old days, the bargain was that you gave 4 years of your life to earning a degree, and because it opened so many doors, those 4 years were worth it. But these days, you are giving a lot of hope to a lot of people, but they might not find that hope fulfilled.

There was this cultural shock when I spoke to people of my parents’ generation. They still treated university education as a big thing, and in a way it is a strange thing. The first person in my father’s family to attend university went to an Ivy League one: that’s how strange it is, from nothing to the Ivy League.

Attending university is not an elite thing, even though the Ivy League is still elite enough. NUS is becoming pretty elite these days. But going to a university – well, let’s say at least 95% of my friends on facebook attended university. It’s nothing special at all.

2. Cost
These days you have the spiralling cost of spending 4 good years of your youth pursuing academic knowledge. Tuition fees are going up, possibly because the cost of running a university is going up. A lot of resources are going into research. Research – you know, is like climbing a mountain. The further up you go, the harder it gets. Professors are no longer the authoritative bastions of society that they used to be, they are no longer as protected as they used to be.

There were many fat years for being a university. Go to a top university, and the facilities are top rate. And I’m not talking about the toilets. Many sports facilities and dormitories are fairly luxurious, and fairly underused. Libraries are full of books that will, if they are lucky, be read once or twice.

Those costs were probably justifiable, if at least tolerated, if being in a university conferred upon you as many advantages as it used to in the good old days. Now, I don’t really think so.

3. Accessibility of knowledge
It used to be that university was the great gateway to knowledge. Make no mistake, universities are still great repositories of knowledge. But these days, a lot of stuff is available on the internet. You can learn a lot of stuff on MIT’s open courseware, and while that will not be as rigorous as attending MIT and doing homework and getting tested, there’s a lot that you can learn from that.

The cost of getting a private audience with a professor is also high. Many professors will – with good reason – not bother with students who don’t pull their weight in acquiring knowledge. It’s not just the school fees. If you just want information without that much substantial depth, then professors may not be the ones who are best to give it to you. For example, how does a computer program compile, what’s wrong with the one that you have written, where are the bugs?

I knew people who skipped a lot of lectures, essentially turning his uni education into a correspondence course. But he still did well for his exams.

4. Type of knowledge
The question is: what can universities teach you that you can’t really learn for yourself these days? Answer: not as much as it used to.

The thing that universities used to excel in is teaching ideas and knowledge to people. Now, with the internet, these are things that people can learn for themselves, albeit with more difficulty than if there were a professor standing in front of you and pumping you the greatest hits of his hard won wisdom. But it is possible.

Some of the most compelling uses of a university education are for disciplines like medicine, law and engineering. The university presents you with a course of study that combines book knowledge with some real life examples of what a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer might encounter in real life. Probably some practical wisdom. These forms of knowledge are best suited for a university education, and I don’t see these schools under threat.

You can get legal advice over the internet, and you can get medical advice. But there is no way you can become a doctor or a lawyer without a university education, and then passing a professional exam. 1 year ago, I took the GRE subject test in computer science, which is one of the closest things there is to a professional exam in computer science. In terms of scope and what I had to study for that exam, it was the most difficult exam I ever took.

There is also the ideal of a liberal arts education. This is a very uniquely American way of teaching people and seldom been replicated around the world, although now that Yale is tying up with NUS, we’ll see how Singaporeans grapple with it. A liberal education mixes and matches knowledge from many diverse sources. But it is a very dangerous course to take, because it is hard to quantify that something tangible has been achieved by taking this course of action. The road I took is the closest to this form of education, even though I did take a few engineering modules. I might not have dared to take liberal arts, but I had 2 sources of protection: being from a prestigious university and having secured a job offer.

Liberal arts is very difficult and dangerous because it is a course that gives you very few constraints. You need to take a course of study that is broad enough in both history and geography to give you a range of knowledge. You could study many things from a wide variety of cultural contexts, and it could give you a very deep understanding and knowledge of – well a lot of things under the sun. Being immersed in many different forms of knowledge can help complement each other. You will see how a political scientist critiques a sociologist, how a psychologist critiques a historian.

But you could end up studying a lot of junk that is useless. You could study the life of some obscure nobleman from the 16th century and in the end you might wonder, what have I learnt? And realise that there’s very little that’s applicable in real life. I have picked up a lot of useless knowledge about groups and rings. Knowledge that might be useful to somebody somewhere else but not me. Worst of all is post-modernism. By itself it is a very useful reality check, because it delineates the limits of what knowledge can do, what is knowable, and what are just labels we put on things and people in order to reinforce our hidden biases. But taken to its extreme (and this happens all the time in universities, unfortunately) it can convince you that there is no such thing as knowledge, no such thing as reality, no such thing as right and wrong. Which, as I have learnt, is rubbish.

The biggest argument against liberal arts education is that people can simply pick it up on their own by reading enough books and study guides. The university is mainly there to make sure that the students understand correctly what they are reading.

It is the case that the liberal arts needs students more than the students need liberal arts. A society will still need humanities scholars at the highest levels of knowledge. And they need to be funded. So why not put up a university system that combines the two needs, and get the students to pay for it?

5. Connection between research and the prestige of the university
Now, the “best” universities in the world are usually ranked based on their research. Universities are generally dual purpose – to educate and to push the frontiers of knowledge. But they are usually ranked in terms of their research quality. And they are ranked in terms of proxies, because research quality is hard to quantify.

Now I have heard that in the US, there are universities called Liberal Arts universities, which are dedicated towards teaching, rather than research. So these universities may be short on world class research facilities, but they are good at devoting a lot of their resources towards teaching students. Students get more personalised attention from the professors, which is great if you like having teachers around. (I don’t). So they are ranked separately. And since the class sizes are small, they are also pretty selective, but pretty good value for money compared to a big government university where everybody’s focused on research and has no time to teach you.

The problem of equating a university’s quality to research is that the universities end up giving an education that is more like their research, and the pursuit of academic excellence is given precedence over some more important aspects of training. What people are assessed for in universities does not have that much resemblance to real life. Of course, we can’t be so “practical” that we end up teaching the dark arts of sucking up to people, shoving your co-workers aside, and screwing around tree huggers so that they don’t interfere with your running of a business. But we ought to be assigning people more practical tasks like how to meet or interview people, how to set up and run a small business, how to fix a circuit board.

6. Flexibility / relevance.
There’s that word again. When I was studying things in the university, I was fairly amazed that I was sometimes studying a curriculum that was set 20 years earlier, like in the 80s. Turns out that a lot of the professors had been around at my university for a long time, did a lot of early good work, and then gained their tenures, and ended up being really comfortable with life, that they were content to teach the same things over and over again. Now I was studying pure maths, so it’s not such a bad thing.

But I was amazed that my university had one of the best regarded computer science departments in the country, and they didn’t even have one course on software engineering. I supposed they were pretty caught up in advancing their research, and teaching a lot of high falutin ideas, to the extent that they just felt that more flaky stuff like software engineering could be picked up on their own.

Anyway it’s fine if you are teaching arts and social sciences or history, you can teach the same stuff year in year out. Just introduce all the ideas. Some of them will come into fashion, some will go out of fashion. Just teach the classics and you’ll be fine. Even for pure maths, the theories do not change.

Computer science, the programming paradigms change every year with every software upgrade. It used to be called “object oriented programming”. Then it used to be called “Component object model”. Now we have .NET. How are people going to keep up? There’s a great surge in demand for programming on mobile devices, and for cloud computing. But can the professors keep ahead of the curve? Or are they going to teach stuff that’s fashionable 10 years ago?

They used to tell me, knowledge learnt in books is “dead”, whereas the street knowledge is “alive”.

More students in Universities in Singapore?

One of the big announcements that PM Lee had for the universities were that they were capping foreigner enrolment in the universities. I think that raises very interesting questions. I don’t mind there being foreigners in Singapore but I think it’s a policy that has gotten out of control. There are too many foreigners in Singapore, introduced over a too short span of time, and we’ll have problems if they don’t integrate properly. Of course, whether a person is a foreigner is something that is on a continuum. Take a person like Shingot: he’s studied in Singapore since primary 1. Do you really believe that he’s 100% Malaysian? Neither do I. Then there are those who come in after reaching adulthood. Some integrate very well, others don’t.

The other issue is that they are wrecking the curve. Well we had that issue in Snowy Hill university, where our Singaporeans would flood the engineering department, take courses together, copy homework from each other, set up their own support groups, and have a decisive advantage over Americans who don’t do the same. In the end, we also have people from the PRC who do exactly the same thing to use in NUS. So it’s kinda ironic really.

I’m thinking about one of the most admired public university systems in the world, in California. We have the elite University of California system, where world class research is being undertaken. If you believe all the rankings, NUS is somewhere between LA and San Diego, behind Berkeley, and ahead of all the rest of the U of Cs. Then they have the State Universities, where the stated aim is to provide university education to all the less elite students. And then we have community colleges.

Now when we are talking about the much praised USA system of education, we have to remember that it is mainly the elite USA universities that are very much admired. What the US does for the less elite universities may leave much to be desired. So we can imagine that NUS is trying to be like Berkeley, which is good.

I’m just wondering – why didn’t the ministry of Education try to open a middle tier university? Yes, we have all the private education centres that provide degrees from less prestigious unis like James Cook uni. But they are all profit making centres that bilk you of money and I don’t know how well run those things are. I’ve heard enough stories about degree mills and scammed students. Maybe the government thinks that second tier universities are a very dodgy state of affairs. I never thought of going to a university that was not one of the best. What’s the purpose in that, anyhow?

One thing that Singapore is trying to do is to provide a very interesting alternative to universities. The thing is that universities cater to a certain type of person (I am that type) whose brains have a predilection for academic knowledge. They are also trying to cater to those people whose brains are wired differently. So those people are sent to polytechnics where practical skills are more at a premium. Or ITEs too. The problem with those places is the prevailing mindset that being in those places means that you are less capable.

But we are starting to set up good quality arts schools, vocational schools that teach a more design-oriented model of learning. We even got MIT as a partner. It has the potential to be a player in the big debates about university educations in the future.

Push
Another book I’ve read recently is “Push”, also by John Seely Brown. He has been looking closely at the forces unleashed by the internet, and how it has empowered people to form self-help communities that push themselves towards excellence, using much fewer resources than it used to do. I had 2 people expressing surprise at what small companies are capable of. They were both colleagues at my workplace. (OK, one of them is my boss.)

You don’t need a lot of money to accomplish miracles these days. You need a few people, a few computers, and those people need to have brains. (Which means some of the bosses at my company don’t qualify.)

It’s no longer that big companies have the sole monopoly on big ideas. There is a big ecosystem at work. In a natural ecosystem, the biggest players are the bacteria. I think in the future, smaller companies will have more power. This is because they are more flexible, are able to change direction more quickly.

When I read about this, I realised that what we have here, in terms of being able to innovate and create new products and services for the market place, in terms of being able to create new projects by NGOs, this is something that is, if not new, then at least a force that is gaining a lot of power.

We had at least 3 stages of the internet revolution. First is the widespread popularisation of the world wide web, which is web 1.0 which culminated in the tech stock boom and bust. And there was web 2.0 which rose up in spite of the ill informed naysayers who thought that the tech stock bust proved that there was nothing to the internet after all (how stupid huh). And now there is the rise of Facebook / social networking / mobile devices.

Now this third stage is causing a lot of havoc in the world. It has put a lot of power into a few enable individuals. The wikileaks scandal, one of the biggest leakage of secret cables on the US government was perpetrated by a very small group of people, including Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. It has enabled people to take down governments in the Middle East, where before it seemed destined that those dictatorships would go on forever.

Advantage
Another book I’ve read of late is “Advantage” by Adam Segal. It seems to be a very pro-USA take on how research and development is so much better in the US than in the rest of the world – at least for now. He does make a few salient points. First of all, it doesn’t really matter that China and India are pumping in a lot of money for their R+D. They still don’t have the right culture to turn research and development into real innovation and real products. Which may well be true. But it just means that it would take a little longer for the current lead that the US enjoys on the rest of the world to be whittled away.

He does have a point that success in R+D in the US is very much a matter of culture. Often, it is the culture that is more open, more willing to share information, and more tolerant of failure, that succeeds better. This was shown in Anna Lee Saxenian’s classic work “Regional Advantage” that showed that a high tech cluster in the US Northeast failed to keep up with Silicon Valley, even though both of them were around the same level in the late 70s.

So I can believe that the Chinese can grow the greatest manufacturing centre in the world. The Japanese and the Koreans have already shown that us Asians are experts at building and running factories. Keep your head down, be disciplined, incremental improvement, good scientific knowledge. As for whether they can lead the world in knowledge and R+D, that is something where I’ll have to see it to believe it.

My own experience in dealing with academics who are keen to work with us on our problems is that we have a lot of obstacles in our path. First, our corporation is one that guards its knowledge very closely and jealously. In fact, I have heard members of senior management go on tirades about how and why corporate information is leaked out to the public. I have worked with 1 international consulting firm for a project and I was put in charge of making them jump through the hoops just so that they can complete the project without our exposing to them the contents of our black box.

Other people seem to have tied up with newest research with academia in more interesting ways, although they are sceptical about their ability to push radically new systems through the bureaucracy.

One of the impressions I get when we have academicians coming to us to introduce their projects to us is that they don’t really know the ground. We don’t have a very good history of working with academicians and there are a lot of misunderstandings to be cleared up on. I find that the intentions of academia and our corporation are often at cross purposes with each other. We want to solve a real life problem and we want to solve it as cheaply and cleanly as we can. They want to publish papers and get ahead in the fucking rankings. And there’s not very much about our company that we want published. So we haven’t really put up a modus operandi of how we want to do things.

I thought that if I stayed at my workplace, it would be possible for me to grow into a role where I could become a middle man. I’m not very near that at the moment. I don’t know if other interesting stuff is happening elsewhere, if corporations in Singapore / Government agencies in Singapore have created a good modus Vivendi by which academia and industry can work hand in hand. I haven’t seen it myself yet.

Anyway, in that book, it was mentioned as an aside that the biotech research hub being set up near the MOE HQ has a 50% chance of success. Nearly made my eyes pop out. Furthermore you can see for yourself some of the comments that are being posted here about many researchers kao-pehing about the way that research in Singapore is being managed:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v468/n7325/full/468731a.html

Not long after, 2 significantly high profile researchers decided to leave Singapore.

Trivialities

2011-09-24T04:41:00.004+08:00

Random conversation over facebook:

CatOwner
I've lived 34 years, been highly educated, met all sorts of people around the world, and i still get so easily cheated of my money. I feel like a right fool.

Random A What happened? Where?

Random B ‎:( !

CatOwner One dishevelled and rather fey man walks into my neighbourhood mcdonalds. says hi to the old lady opposite me and the old man behind me, and goes to get himself a cup of coffee. then he just walks up to me, taps my table, thrusts an open palm in front of my face and says "ay miss, give me 20 cents". most normal ppl would, judging the circumstances, tell this person to fuck off. but not me.

"i need it to make a phone call," he says.

"who still pays money to make a public phone call?" i question.

"aiya...i didn't bring my handphone!"

i hand him the money. he walked off. i don't think he even said thank you. but what i thought i DID hear a few moments later, was him telling the old man behind me in cantonese: "she looks like the stupid kind".

and boy, i certainly was, wasn't i. i mean, i can say things like i want to be kindhearted, i like to give ppl the benefit of the doubt if they say they need money, but the truth is i'm just bloody blind. i don't put 2 and 2 together. he could buy himself a cup of coffee but not have 20 cents??? why the fuck don't i see these things and add them up fast enough? i get put on the spot by someone who says he needs help, and i don't want to be a bastard by interrogating someone already humiliated by begging, or look like a selfish rich person brushing off the poor, and so i turn off my bullshit radar and take out my wallet like a zombie.

i don't get it: my mind works so quickly when calculating money. i am unscrupulous when checking clothes i buy. not even the tiniest flaw escapes my eye. but i can't see this neon orange elephant in the room?!? i don't want to go the other way and become this jaded skeptic who thinks ALL ppl who ask for money are con-artists, but i'm sick of being a sitting duck! what can i do about this? am i destined to be not-street-smart forever just coz i didn't learn the skills in my school-going years?

CatOwner another thing which pisses me off: the old man and old woman, watched this happen, and never said a thing. never stopped him, never warned me, nothing. bloody dog-eat-dog world, this is, ay? "he's my friend if he doesn't cheat ME, and if you're dumb enough to fall for THAT shit, you deserve to be fleeced". yup, beautiful world. good morning, CatOwner. now WAKE UP.

CatOwner ‎(i know...it looks like a small incident. but i let this sort of thing happen to me all...the...time...)

Etc etc etc…

Random C Just take it as a donation. you have good karma :D What he does with the 20c is no longer your problem. You've already done your job ;)

SieteOcho You mean you actually thought that you were doing the wrong thing by giving a bum 20c?

Isaac Newton Well at least its just 20cents and not a few bucks

CatOwner Random C, ‎I know that's the case, but i cannot be happy to be made a fool of the rest of my life. this has got to stop.

SieteOcho, you are deliberately complicating the issue and setting up a trap for me by twisting my words and logic. "wrong"? no, but "dumb", yes. "bum"? define "bum".

CatOwner ‎Isaac Newton, yup.

Random C ‎CatOwner just heck care. nevermind, give, give as long as you can. You will get it back in other ways :)

SieteOcho No, you're the one who's complicating things. Some bum comes up to you and ask for - what - 20c. Based on available information, you can only tell he's a bum. (Define bum however you want to define it here.) Later on, he turns around and bites you. So you're confused. You should be lamenting the fact that he's turned out to be an asshole - an outcome that - how would anybody have forseen that? You shouldn't be regretting giving him the 20c. So don't learn the wrong moral of the story.

SieteOcho The real moral of the story is this: every time you are kind to a person, you run the risk of being made a fool. Understanding this risk is crucial to the understanding the meaning of kindness. If you expect that every kind act is going to be repaid with kindness, then you'd be better off being an asshole.

Isaac Newton What kind of warped logic is that? Glad i'm an asshole though

CatOwner it's not about "FOREseeing", SieteOcho. it's about SEEING what is right there AT THE TIME instead of ignoring the warning signs because one is pressured by expectations to be kind and perhaps even having a patronising view of those who you deem less fortunate than you. in my assumption that i HAVE to help someone who asks me for it, i failed to mentally evaluate if the call for help was genuine or if i was being taken for a ride. someone rude, with enough money to buy himself a cup a coffee (which i saw him holding) but doesn't have 20 cents? who said hi to ppl he knows around him but demands money from me, a total stranger? i actually think MOST ppl would have noticed these (except maybe you and me, since you also seemed to miss all these details in my original account).

you really are making too many assumptions and casting aspersions on my thought process and moral character. did i in any way say i expected this guy to REPAY my kindness? no. i know it doesn't work that way. what gives you the right to insinuate that i am an asshole (or would like to be)?

you really have missed what i was getting at here. i don't know how, but you have.

SieteOcho I didn't say that you're an asshole. I'm saying that if you don't understand the risks involved in being kind to somebody, you shouldn't be kind. You did not expect to be repaid, but surely you expected him to not call you out as a fool.

What I am saying, though, is that 20c is a very small sum compared to : 1. the mental effort you put into agonising whether the guy asking for help is genuine. 2. You agonising over this after this is over and getting upset.

When you handed over the 20c, that was not wrong, that was not foolish. The mental agony that you are expending over it - now THAT is foolish. Feeling like a fool just because somebody thinks that you are a fool - THAT is weakness. What you did wrong is that you did not walk away with your head held high and congratulate yourself on being a good person.

Isaac Newton It doesn't pay to be kind. Especially in front of self righteous people like those darn stompers.

SieteOcho What I've been trying to say is that there will always be assholes. Therefore that is the risk of being kind. And if you are kind to a lot of people, some of them will appreciate it, some of them will be assholes, on balance you will still gain. Therefore it doesn't hurt to be kind. THAT is the way the system works.

Isaac Newton Yeap they appreciate it so much they put gold taps in their toilets

CatOwner sigh, SieteOcho, no matter how much i've tried to explain it to you, you have misunderstood me, made assumptions and judgements about me, and given me wise philosophical instructions on how to fix myself.

look, even without you telling me, i do understand the risk of being kind means sometimes being cheated. yes 20 cents is a small sum. but this was never about the money! AND I NEVER IMPLIED THAT THE LESSON I WAS GOING TO TAKE FROM THIS WAS "I WILL NEVER AGAIN BE KIND TO ANYONE". that was how you somehow interpreted my meaning. I just vowed to open my eyes a little wider. i said over and over and I MAINTAIN THAT handing over 20 cents would NOT have been foolish, and i would NOT have FELT foolish, IF THIS GUY HAD AT LEAST BEEN A GOOD ACTOR AND REALLY LOOKED GENUINELY IN NEED OF HELP. i maintain that HE DIDN'T, AND I MISSED IT WHEN IT WOULD HAVE BEEN PLAIN FOR EVERYONE TO SEE. i am upset over how i fall short in the powers of observation department. and i am upset about how i ALWAYS fall short in the observation department while everyone else around me at the time says, "you didn't notice??" AS I SAID BEFORE, this is NOT THE FIRST TIME i have missed an OBVIOUS con job. and i am kicking myself for still not being more observant. THAT'S ALL! SIMPLE, RIGHT?

it's not because he called me a fool that i feel foolish. ppl say nasty things about me all the time. i can shrug it off. hearing him say i was stupid just made me realise too late that i had missed all the OBVIOUS SIGNS that he was a cheat. THAT made me feel stupid. but if there were NO SIGNS and anyone could have fallen for his act, then i wouldn't feel bad about it and i would be doing that "congratulating yourself on being a good person" nonsense that you 'recommend'. good people don't have to be stupid. one can congratulate themselves on being a good person but still vow to be a bit wiser. i do not see the two as mutually exclusive, and as this has happened often enough, i am through with merely congratulating myself. i'm going to LEARN THIS TIME, goddammit! (and "learning" does NOT equate to being closed off to all needy ppl henceforth)

y'know i'm spending a lot of time agonising over this only because i keep having to explain to you what i'm actually upset about coz you don't get it! you're practically pulling a ziggy on me. making pronouncements on what "i am" when you are actually misunderstanding the point entirely? please! and if this explanation is still not clear, then i really don't know how else to put it to you, and i honestly don't want to bother anymore. coz if there's anything i hate almost as much as being fooled, is being misunderstood and put on the defensive. and let's not kid ourselves: you ARE being very offensive right now.

CatOwner sorry to everyone else who keeps getting notifications on this thread.

SieteOcho I haven't misunderstood you CatOwner. I know your point of view, I just don't agree with it. I don't regret giving money to beggars, and I don't even think that you should vet them, which is why I think the issue of being "cheated" or being "too blind to realise he's a thief" is not an issue at all. For me at least, 20c is not worth giving a second thought about.

I've put forward a few less gloomy ways to look at things, and you've just rejected them all. The point is not that you're being calculating. This is not a microcosm of other things that are going on in your life. You made an economic decision about 20c, you were given 3 seconds to make it, you made a mistake, and suddenly you're stupid? Good lord. If you had to get every single such decision right you'd have no time and energy left to do anything.

The point (and this is not a trivial point at all - many people including myself sometimes never learn) is: some things are just not worth giving a damn about.

---------------------------------------------------

This conversation is not over yet. I know I was being a little obnoxious but it did tick me off that I had to read about shit like that on the facebook feed over and over again.

Somebody told me that in business school, they had a class who had to do a case study. Basically, somebody said that the stationery was getting depleted all the time. A few groups had to give presentations about what to do with the problem. The group that won came up with the solution which was no solution at all. Do nothing, because the costs of enforcement outweighs the cost of the stationery. I'm assuming that that was the answer that the professor wanted to hear.

When I heard about that case, I was flabbergasted. People pay good money to go to business school to hear about something that they could have learnt in elementary school? Gradually it dawned on me: first, it is a very important point.

Most people, I find, who aren't very good at their work do a lot of things that aren't important. It is a very damaging habit. Second, I think there are other people who fell for the trap of saying you had to go catch the thief. I think that maybe they hadn't thought through the problem deeply enough. Third, given the number of people who never master this point it is probably important and non-trivial enough that it's made in such a spectacular manner.

Loosely Coupled

2011-09-19T14:51:00.001+08:00

When I was an undergraduate at Snowy Hill, there was a sizable Singaporean community. I think we didn’t really have to look too far beyond it. I’m still meeting people from that bunch every now and then. I suppose, if you have people in that situation, you become closer. I think that those of you who are foreigners, you will know that you will hook up with ppl from your own country, and that will be the source of a lot of your friends.

I wish that I had hung out more with the natives. But I don’t really regret it that much. That crowd of people was like a family to me. As you ppl know, the most important thing about a family is to have one, and not whether you are very close to each other. I suppose I’m very paradoxical – I’m not the kind of person who gets terribly close to people, but I enjoy being part of a tribe. I suppose – OK, I know this for a fact, people are programmed to want to be part of a tribe. That is the first thing they teach you in social psychology. If you want to know about these things, there are books that you can read (I read “Imagined Communities” by Benedict Anderson and “Us and Them” by David Berreby). It does make a lot of sense, although since I’m more of a loner than average, I don’t feel these things as keenly as many other people might.

I met up with a few old friends in California. They seemed happy to see me. We talked for a bit. My sister was there too, since she was doing research in the same university as them. And the funny thing is, we had so much to talk about, after lunch was over, we thought about meeting up for dinner. (It was my last day in that town). So we did that too. And after that was over, my sister said, “that was funny. It was just like I had talked to people and I could operate entirely on instinct. I didn’t have to guess what the American way of thinking, and the culture was. I could just operate on auto-pilot.” She didn’t exactly say that she misses that. And she’s also 10 times better than me at dealing with Americans. But there was that great big sense of relief.

I’m back in university, and by coincidence there are 2 people here from the same year in my school, and they’re both PhD holders. (wtf have I been doing with my own life anyway?) One of them I probably won’t get to meet him. I looked up the other one on Friday afternoon. And I had an astonishing conversation with him. Well he did keep on coming up with stuff to talk about. I said, it’s getting late, why dun we grab dinner? And we went, and then we talked until it was almost closing time. We had old friends that we could exchange stories about. I suppose it was a lot about not meeting these people since JC. And there’s a lot that I saw but I didn’t understand when I was a kid, and a lot that your old schoolmates did as well. Then now you revisit these things through the eyes of an adult, and it’s – to say the least, quite interesting. That was the first time I had an 8 hour long conversation in a long long time. No disrespect to people with whom I’ve recently had 4 hour long conversations with. Anyway I think it did go on for too long but I didn’t really want to stop him. I’m just wondering if, I didn't hang out enough with people, I would end up in that condition, where every old Singaporean friend is a sight for sore eyes.

After a while, I thought about it. I think that Singaporeans were brought up to be tightly coupled. I don’t mean that in the sense of having emotionally intimate relationships. But too many of us will live in only one city, ever, because of the strange existential condition of being in a one-city country. And it will be incestuous. We’ll see the same people in elite schools, and then we’ll grow up, having our own secret code, our way of doing things.

And it’s funny – we would probably understand certain things about each other that other people might not get. We don’t really operate on the emotional level. If I were to talk to an American with that kind of emotionless demeanour that I have, they would probably suspect that I wasn’t really human. But that’s not true, of course. We’ll just do it to each other, and in the end, we all understand that that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Anyway the meaning of tightly coupled would be in the software engineering sense in which different parts of the system have dense and rich interactions. It’s not supposed to be a good thing, because when one part of the system changes, it will have nightmarishly disruptive impact on the rest of the system.

Maybe, I thought, we should be more like Americans – loosely coupled. We have a lot of people, and we can potentially interact with a very large group of people from all walks of life. It’s very unlikely that we will have an extremely huge clique, which is something I think that our schooling was about. But the potential for plucking any old guy out from the crowd, and saying whats up dude to him is there.

I’m just thinking I should really learn to be a little more American in this regard. And as for whether or not that makes me less Singaporean – truthfully I don’t see that happening. I’m a pretty constant person, and it’s a little hard for me to change that much anyway.

Institutional obsolescence

2011-08-25T11:15:00.002+08:00

Recently I stopped being such a bookworm. But I think I stopped at a bad time. It used to be that those books written between 1995 and 2008 said the same thing, and I probably read all the same arguments more than once – we are on the course towards more and more economic success, fuelled by greater openness in the world, greater efficiency gains through the internet, the magic of capitalism spreading towards more and more new markets.

After the great recession of 2008, there has been a lot of changes to the thinking that globalisation / capitalism is a great thing and they are leading us into a glorious brilliant future. Recently I borrowed 2 books from the library. One of them is “Life Inc” by Douglas Rushkoff. It charges that too much of our modern life is controlled by corporations, and because of the dynamics of the system, a lot of dysfunctional behaviour results. Another book is “The enigma of capitalism” by David Harvey, which posits another way of looking at macroeconomics. The way that an economy works is a lot like blood circulating around a body. You wouldn’t think of studying biology by studying how much blood flows into each organ. But for some reason that’s the way that economists do things. It’s crazy and it doesn’t make sense.

If there is something that I will remember about 2011, it’s that there is a big change in the old way of doing things. Many certainties are crumbling before our eyes. Here are some of them:

1. Japan and the West will always be the rich and powerful countries of the world
2. Books and CDs will be the primary means of transmitting words and music.
3. The social / democratic / welfare model is sustainable
4. The neoliberal “everything is a commodity” model is sustainable. Unfettered capitalism will always channel money into the most productive enterprises and it will help ensure that the people who benefit society the most stand to gain the most for themselves.
5. There are more than enough resources for all of us, and everything is getting cheaper
6. Economic growth is always a good thing because the earth will never run out of resources / more industrial activity is not going to change the climate
7. Life is always getting better / everybody is moving towards democracy
8. Democracy will always get the right people into the positions of power in government.
9. The Arab dictatorships will always be in place
10. PAP will always be able to hold on to government power in Singapore
11. Government power in Singapore will be able to achieve anything it wants
12. You will prosper when you put all your money in stocks
13. The most important wars are being fought in physical space instead of cyberspace
14. The internet is a force for democracy and freedom all over the world
15. Universities are the best way of getting educated / certifying the people with the best ability.
16. East Asia will be a peaceful and prosperous place in time to come.
17. The PC will always be on the cutting edge of technology.

All the old systems are failing. All those things that you thought were designed to work – they can’t make the transition when the situation changes. Your old school curriculum that drilled you over and over again to do complicated maths shit – you’d be better off knowing how to write a good computer program. Capitalism – you have to ask yourself why only a few people benefit from it. 2 party democracy in America – it’s all be bought by corporations. Old processes – people were given orders, and then they forgot what all those orders were for, and then they will follow the law to the letter, regardless of whether it still serves its original purpose or not. There’s so much of the sorcerer’s apprentice.

I think Douglas Rushkoff said that the world is being governed by "Legacy systems", which is an IT term for old stuff that is no longer relevant, but impedes progress towares new and better way of doing things, because it is very difficult to get people off that system. I think that is a great metaphor for understanding so much of what is going on in the world today.

Much ado about Curry

2011-08-18T18:07:00.005+08:00

I think that this incident defied common sense. A lot of people from the government are actually going to stand up for the principles behind the mediation. They'll tell you the philosophy behind the mediation and all that. But the outcome will lack common sense. So let me state the reasons why.

1. Everybody cooks curry in Singapore. Newcomers just have to adjust. Curry is not a special local food, it is also the national dish in India and Great Britain. Even Japanese people, not known for their love of spices in cooking, love curry. So curry is not only found everywhere in Singapore, but many places outside of Singapore. It is one hell of a thing to impose a temporary ban on it.

2. The howls of indignation are not racist. At least, it is not anymore racist than the original terms of mediation.

3. In the "Good Old days", we suspect, the government would have told everybody, in the name of racial harmony and tolerance, to put up with the smell of curry. The narrative of building a nation in Singapore goes something like this: the Chinese settle in the Southern Seas. They meet strange new people from other lands. Maybe they don't like the smell of curry. Now, we have Hainanese curry rice, curry is a staple in Peranakan cooking, and we have curry yong tao foo.

Curry is lodged in our subconscious, maybe not as a national symbol, but at least a powerful symbol that there is a modus vivendi between the 3 main races. If there is a symbol for Racial Harmony Day, it ought to be a pot of curry. These days, if you want to piss off Singaporeans of all races, just take away their curry.

If you want to take it a little further, it is also a symbol that Singapore has, with no small difficulty, considering that we are a small nation, forged a separate identity for itself. Chinese migrants originally thought they were going back to China. But their descendents made a home here, and attempted to forge a community anew, something slightly different from what their parents envisioned. This something new is the nation of Singapore.

4. There is something wrong with the current mode of mediation. Where we don't attempt to articulate the values of the community to newcomers, where we don't attempt to "preserve our way of life" (SAF's words, not mine) by at least being a little more forceful about putting across the point that something valuable is in danger of being sacrificed. This is not "being neutral". This is "letting things slide". Mediators do not take a point of view.

I think in this case, they may have misread that the interests of the community are not served. One of the mediators admitted that she didn't realise that this curry story was going to blow up. Myself, I didn't know that it was going to blow up either, but I knew that people would get upset. If the mediators didn't see this coming, that if and when this story got publicised, does that mean that they're a little tone deaf and are effectively walking through a minefield blindfolded?

Why didn't they look out for the interests of the community? Why didn't they advice and warn the mainlander newcomer about the kind of flak that they were going to receive when they stop people from cooking curry? How did they not see that this would be interpreted as a cowboy newcomer muscling his way through the rights of a minority? Is the mediation narrowly defined as a mediation between 2 parties, or is there a 3rd party, the community / nation, whose input is being conveniently ignored?

The mediator said that nobody could say that the Indian family didn't willingly accept the terms of the negotiation. So ostensibly it's not fair to say that the Indian family was forced into it, and also not fair to say that the Indian family was not forced into it. But when the Indian family said, "we'll just hope that they give curry a try", now that's a hint.

Now let's look at a few specious arguments that some detractors of the cook curry movement have put up.

1. This cook curry movement is xenophobic and anti PRC

As said above, curry is a powerful symbol that assimilation between the 3 races is working. This symbol of assimilation is in contrast to another process of assimilation which is still in process, but whose success is yet to be guaranteed: the assimilation between the new arrivals and Singaporeans.

My reply is that an invitation to cook curry is just that. It could even be a belated attempt to reach out to mainlanders, even though it's an attempt that is done on our terms and not theirs. It is not a sit-in, a protest, a hate mob. It is a nice meal. But there is this subtext too: if you can't stand the curry, consider other options.

And after all, for all the talk about tolerance, there is one thing that you can legitimately be intolerant about: and that is intolerance. Tolerance is simply the intolerance of intolerance.

2. It is embarrassing that a protest has gathered the attention of the newspapers.

I don't think that people in Hong Kong or Taiwan are extremely embarrassed at their inability to handle people from the mainland. You tell me, what is the common factor in all of this? Singapore is just like Hong Kong or Taiwan, there is nothing to be embarrassed about.

3. Singapore has to position itself as a global city in order to attract more immigrants, so that it can further position itself as a global city.

The way in which the Singapore has integrated its races is something that is interesting. It has never been “neutral” about race. This is a melting pot, to be sure, but it is also a melting pot where the 3 main components are still identifiably there. The government, in the past, has always taken a large role in putting together the 3 races. Many of these measures are sometimes contentious, but to me they are experiments that worked. First, the ethnic quotas in HDB flats. Some people might think that this is a “forced” way of reaching out to people, and having to put up with neighbours. But putting them next to each other, side by side, even if the relationships are a little dysfunctional at first, are a great way of getting them to accept each other as a fact of life.

Second, the racial harmony act, which forbids people to stir up shit by making comments about each other’s race that might cause offence. On the face of it, this is also like forced sterilisation, where we are forced to deal with our differences by pretending that they don’t exist. In reality, when a lot of time goes by without major incidents and flashpoints, it becomes a powerful force for accepting of each other’s cultures. People start picking up subtleties and understanding how each others’ systems work. Conversely, if you study how things work in places where ethnic integration has failed, such as Iraq or the former Yugoslavia, or even medieval Spain, you understand that many years of peace and harmony can be torn asunder by one divisive act.

The old methods of integration are disappearing in the name of globalisation. Now, when we have another class of new foreigners, they don’t seem to be living in the same Singapore as the rest of us heartlanders. I once asked an angmoh who claimed to live in Singapore for 5 years, if she knew a place called Toa Payoh that was 3 MRT stops away from Orchard. She didn’t. For that matter, how many angmohs do you see north of Novena, that are not going to the zoo?

Well the fact is that we do have a lot of new migrants, and we’re going to have to learn all over again to live side by side with them. Pinoys. Non-Tamil Indians. Mainlanders. Indonesians. Things are very difficult this time because instead of learning 3 sets of stereotypes, we have a lot of cultures to learn from. In the past, it was still possible to achieve that old balancing act, where we had harmony between the 3 major ethnic groups, and the 3 major ethnic groups still maintained their separate, individual identities. Now we have the foreigner where we can’t figure out where we stand with them. We look at a new guy and can’t really tell if he’s Vietnamese, Burmese, Indonesian or Pinoy until he or she opens his mouth. People speak languages that we can’t identify. It is a strange and bewildering world. The old rules are being swept away.

I don’t think the 3 anchors – Chinese, Malay , Tamil, should go. (Yes, I said Tamil, because I don’t feel I understand the new Indians very well). At least they are like signposts to guide us through this strange new world. But they no longer stand for as much of the new picture as they used to.

Basically, the point of all this: last time, we knew how to integrate the races together. Now, we’re just not very sure. I wish we had done something like, we get a new group in, and then we try to integrate them into our structure. Of course, that means we introduce the foreigners slowly, which is something that we adamantly are not doing right now. Instead, it’s all about economic dictates.

So do you now understand the meaning of curry? Curry is a symbol of that old structure. Singlish is also a symbol of that old structure, but for some reason, this other much cherished symbol of racial integration is in danger of the government declaring that outsiders have a problem understanding us. It might be sacrificed in the name of global integration. I feel that there is a danger that the government is getting a little too dumb to realise that it’s dismantling something good. So what do we sign up for? The standard of living in the 3rd world, and our standard of living eventually converging towards each other?

It is a small war between that old nationalist integration between the 3 major races, and a newer integration with the global community. Something where we don't really know if it's going to work.

We are losing our sovereignty. We used to hang Fior Contemplacion when we thought we should, we used to cane Michael Fay whenever we thought we should. Now somebody comes into our HDB flats and asks us to stop cooking curry, and we bend over like meek obedient slaves.

Well, Singlish might be something that puts us in conflict with the rest of the world, even though it shouldn’t. New York, London (cockney), Liverpool and much of Scotland are proud of their local accents, and we have to hide Singlish away like something to be ashamed of? We have bureaucrats insufficiently enlightened to understand how Singlish can be an essential part of our branding.

Curry will not put us in conflict with the rest of the world. In London, during happier days, it was a symbol of integration between Whites, Blacks and Indians (known as Asians).

What we should be aiming for, is that we should rebuild our national identity. Now, we see all these forces tearing up all the old rules. But we should still have a national identity in place. Singapore should still feel like a coherent community. We shouldn’t have ethnic enclaves, disenfranchised foreigners, disenfranchised locals. At least we are helping to make sure that the foreigners are, by and large employed. It would be a total disaster if we didn’t do that. Those global “cities” where there are significant minorities who operate completely independently of mainstream society should not be models for us to emulate. I’m talking about violence in the suburbs of Paris. Marseilles becoming a North African city. Islamist movements in London that led to the subway bombings. These are products of failed integration.

So this is the nub of my complaint: I don’t see Singapore taking concrete steps to avoid going down that road. We are pulling dead bodies out of public parks and we don’t really know how they got there. We are no longer the clean and safe exceptional city in Asia.

And to do that, we should have some notion of who we are, and not allow these new forces to tug us around however they feel like it. Newcomers will bring their traditions, their food, their culture here, and they will be able to influence Singapore, but telling somebody not to cook curry is just plain disruptive.

4. Mediation is unbiased and neutral

I think I had a mediator writing a long essay on what mediation is all about. I suppose it is very easy to say that you’re neutral, and it avoids all kinds of legal complications. But what is absent in this mode of thinking is the voice of the community. There is no definition of what is right and wrong. Effectively it means that the views of a fresh off the boat migrant and somebody who knows Singapore really well are accorded equal status. That’s not right. If all mediated outcomes turn out to be midpoints between the positions of both parties, then there is every incentive for people to take extreme positions, so that he can get what he wants. Or the one who is more forceful in arguing the case will get what they want. There is a disincentive to start with moderate positions, and the centre is squeezed out. Suppose I were in the middle of getting robbed of $20. I would suppose a neutral approach is that I get robbed of $10 instead.

The mediator argued that it is a fallacy that the mediation outcome will always take the middle ground between two opposing stances. But how do you avoid taking the middle ground, when the mediator has promised not to take a stand? If the mediator’s job is to go through and see what is the interests of all parties, then doesn’t this contradict the other aspect of mediation, where they are seldom allowed to give advice and never allowed to give judgement? Because when you are identifying who are the interested parties, and what their interests are, you are basically making a judgement.

In this particular case, I think the mediator missed out on the interest of the community. They didn’t consider what the community thought. They should have warned the mainlander family of the consequences but that mediator told me that she didn’t forsee this happening. Now, if you are a mediator in a community and you don’t really know what that community is thinking, it is very dangerous.

The mediator brought out some very interesting insights on what a mediation means. It is not meant to be enforcible. It is not meant to be legally binding. It is not backed up with force. It is mainly there to defuse the tension. And to be fair, the mediator herself has expressed a lot of dissatisfaction with the process.

But I preferred that the government used to take a moral stand on a few issues. I'm sure that the mediator can include the voice of the government in the mediation. Even the People's Association can be represented, since they are ostensibly the voice of the village. It cannot be just about two parties, as though the two parties live in a vaccuum.

And there are a lot of boilerplate answers, civil service style. Here are the procedures. We followed the procedures. It doesn't matter that the outcome is absurd, our asses are well and fully covered. No, we will not review our procedures, even in the face of reality. (But to be fair to them, it is fucking difficult to change procedures.)

Tips on naming your kid

2011-08-15T17:12:00.000+08:00

10 SAF Name Tags that you don’t want your kid to be wearing so think carefully before you name your baby.

1. CB Chow. In fact, CB anything, so think about that Tan Cheng Bok! CC Bai
2. DB anything
3. LJ Wee
4. SA Tan
5. CK Pek
6. LT Tan (Anything that denotes rank, like SG, LT, BG, LG, MG, PC, OC, PM, SM etc)
7. SM Lan
8. KN Nah
9. P Pwee / PJ anything.
10. PC Cheng

Memories of my workplace part 2

2011-08-13T07:34:00.001+08:00

23. Bumping into ppl on weekends.
Sometimes the work would spill over onto the weekends, for various reasons. Too much procrastination during working hours. Or running a simulation on a Friday and checking if it did finish running on a Saturday. The attire would invariably be sloppy. Maybe the same home clothes I went to sleep in. Maybe slippers. Unshaven. Then I would bump into ppl. Sometimes honest face. Sometimes Mr Medan. We would say “what the fuck are you doing here?” and then get on with work.

24. Part time studies
It was a crazy time, the last few months. Juggling my studies and my work. At first I thought that with a little more effort I would be able to pull it off. But for some reason having to both manage my work and a appallingly heavy course load proved rather too much for my poor overtaxed brain. For 2 days in a week, I would drive off to night classes. Then, while they didn’t have programming assignments or what not, I would have to read papers and figure out what was going on. I didn’t exactly take to it like a fish to water, but it’s true that artificial intelligence is not for the feint of heart.

Like I said, I didn’t like driving because I don’t like pumping carbon into the atmosphere. So I used to drive from my work place to NUS in order to make it to lectures on time, then drive back to my work place after that. Then I would take public transport home, while reading on the bus, leaving my car at the work place, so that I could go for evening lectures on Wednesday the same way.

So there were 1 or 2 occasions when I came back late on Tuesday, came into the office and surprised my boss who was staying back to do his ECAs in the office.

25. Spying on couples
I was notorious for bumping into couples from my workplace. Or maybe I just travelled alone so much. Or maybe everybody else knew how to shut their mouth instead of me. I saw a couple before it was open knowledge that they were dating. I saw ppl with their families (Mr Engineer). I saw Nat and someone he denies dating. I bumped into the CEO and his family at the columbarium.

26. Drinking sessions
The new boss came in, and he was an ex-Army guy. He probably found out quickly that he’s a jock in a department of geeks in an organisation of jocks. (cf Singapore is a Chinese island in a Malay sea in a continent that is dominated by Chinese.) But he was, at least in the beginning, interested enough in his ppl to bring them for drinking sessions at Temasek Club.

27. Interns / card games
There was a time when the guy in charge of looking after the poly interns decided to spice things up a little by getting people to play card games in the office. Thereafter, for a period of 6 months to 1 year, we were playing a lot of card games in the office during lunch time.

28. Studying for GREs
There was a year when I was studying for the computer science GRE subject test. It was my ticket out of my current job (although to what was never very clear). It started out being fun for 2 weeks, and then after that it was a drag, it reminded me why I wanted to study science and arts but not engineering.

I had assumed that hitting the books would be a breeze, just because I liked reading popular science / econs / psychology books so much. I was wrong. It was confusing, it was overly technical, it was very straining on my powers of imagination to keep on having to draw parallels between many new concepts that I had just learnt 1 or 2 hours ago.

For that year, instead of idling and having fun and reading plenty of general knowledge books to feed my head, I had to plough through plenty of dry material. Well I suppose there was a reason why it’s called work.

29. Text books
I have to admit that I was thinking about further studies from the moment I received my Snowy Hill diploma. At first, I thought that I was going to read more books on mathematics. I had read a lot of books where you did very funky things with mathematics. How to use stochastic differential equations. How to compute probabilities for time since last event, time to next event. Functional analysis. Topology. Complex analysis.

Gradually I had to move away from mathematics and go into computer science. Mathematics was too embedded in what Edward De Bono variously called rock logic or black hat thinking. It was too easy to be seduced by Snowy Hill, and believe that anything they taught you would be useful.

I tried to read about economics, but I think I found it too heavy going after a while. I did learn a lot, but I’m just wondering if … well in my early 20s, I thought that I was going to learn everything. Well if I had a hundred good years when my brain was learning things at the rate it was learning, it might have been a sensible task. But academic learning is something that doesn’t scale up. The more you know, the harder it is to learn, because then every new thing must be connected to everything else you know, and your brain has to do the equivalent of running around with a haversack.

30. Cum sessions
OK, they are usually called comm sessions, because they are for the COO to address the people, rally them and boost their morale. For a few years in a row, he was there just to harangue people on 1.) productivity or 2.) safety. It was boring, and not particularly useful. I admit it got better when they revamped it so that it could showcase some initiatives that were being done on the corporate level.

In fact, on my last working day, I took a half day of leave just to avoid that session.

31. Codfish
We broke up but we remained as friends. And we managed to remain as penpals for a few years, during which time I learnt as much about her as I did while we were LDR-ing. But through a combination of unresolved issues, having divergent interests and personality clashes, we drifted apart. That is why it’s so difficult to think back on the LDR part of the relationship – we’re basically strangers now.

32. auctions
There was this time when I was compulsively buying books from warehouse sales. I think the compulsive collection of books went on until a few years ago. Later on it did occur to me: most current affairs non-fiction books are just extremely lengthy magazine articles. I would be much better off surfing the net for good stuff.

A few years ago I decided to sell away a good portion of my books. At first it was just listing a lot of stuff on yahoo auctions. When that died, it was ebay.com.sg, which was free and had a turbo lister. When I left snowy hill, I think my feedback rating was around 350 or something. Now it’s 650. Which is great.

Recently I had taken to buying a lot of CDs from cash converters. It is actually possible to find a lot of great CDs there at a low price. But now I have a backlog of more than 200 CDs to sell, and the process of buying and selling CDs has taken up so much of my time that I’ve just decided to stop buying.

33. Being late
I’m always late for work. I was punctual for my first 2 months, and then after that, almost never. I don’t know if I could have pulled off being on time for a month in a row. But I know that if my work ethic was good enough to do that, it would also be good enough that I would have had a great career here.

34. New transport infrastructure
The Northeast Line opened 1 year into my work life. It’s a pretty old system by now, and I got to get used to it. Later on, there was the circle line, and then I’ve found an alternate route to get back. In fact, one of my favourite hobbies was to find novel ways of getting back home from my office.

Getting to office in the morning was something that required a compromise of a few factors: walking distance, travelling comfort and time taken. The one that I always use is the fastest, but it also requires a lot of walking.

And considering that I worked in the same place for 9 years, it’s funny that I found good way of going to work 1 year before I would leave. It allowed me to sleep on a bus for at least 20 minutes, and didn’t take much more than 1 hour. Of course I never woke up early enough to use it.

35. Taking leave
There would be great days when I would take leave. I don’t know why my bosses always insisted that I gave them a lot of notice. If there were days when I didn’t have anything to do or I didn’t feel like working, it was just as well I took leave. I don’t know why they insisted – probably some archaic idea that equated the ability to take leave way in advance to executive competency.

I liked taking leave. I had the freedom to wander around. I often treated it like a weekend. I could be watching a movie. I could be reading a book, going around in a bus. When you stepped out of the office after lunchtime, the feeling could be magical. There were only 2 or 3 occasions when I did not work, and did not go to the office for more than 4 days in a row, and the sensation of returning to that building after not being there for a long time will be exceedingly strange.

36. Fancy eateries at Bukit Timah
I suppose the soaring land prices made a lot of people very rich. I am old enough to remember a time when $600K could buy you a semi-detached house in a prime location in Bukit Timah. These days, anything less than a few million is wishful thinking.

There was the Island Creamery at Serene Centre. I think I should go there more often since I don’t know when it’s going to close. There were a few places at Cluny Close. A few bars with overpriced beer. (Amusingly enough, one of them is near the Mormon church.)

37. American consultants / wrestling with the program.
I was asked to collaborate with some American consultants on a project. They were going to build what we’ll call an optimiser. I was put in charge of preparing the simulator for them to use.

There was some fairly quixotic behaviour on our part. We were supposed to send them the simulator to use. I was supposed to only give them a compiled version of the simulator. I had to encode certain parts of the simulator so that it didn’t show up when you passed the simulator through a text editor. I had to do other weird stuff to make sure that the black box I was passing them was really really black. And my department was not 100% interested in seeing them succeed with the optimiser, so they asked me to liaise with them, knowing that I’m a little tardy.

I think this was also an exciting time for me. There is a time in your career when you finally feel that you are getting the hang of things, that you’re finally being trusted to do some things. I found all kinds of weird stuff in the simulator when I was asked to run it. It was my nature to go out and keep on squashing bugs. But at the same time, I had to make sure that I wasn’t going to admit to those guys that the simulator was wonky.

Funnily enough, after all the effort that we spent in trying to make the simulator work, it’s now in danger of not being able to continue, now that most of the principals involved are out of the department. I’m passing the simulator to a youngster, but I’m not 100% sure that she can make it work. If she can do it, it will be a heroic thing.

38. Inflatable friends
One of the fruits of the friendships that were forged in this department was an inflatable toy, a “bop buddy” that was purchased when one of our guys went over to the US for a simulation conference, and he bought an inflatable punching bag, something that probably paralleled the lowly status of our department within the organisation.

That friendship didn’t last for long for reasons I won’t elaborate upon here. But after both of them left this department, the inflatable friend was passed to ghost. After a few years, ghost left and it was passed to shingot. Then after a few months, shingot left and it got handed over to me. I didn’t know if I was up to being the curator, so I passed it to honest face. Instead it ended up at Nat’s cubicle, which probably sounded like a good decision. It was, for a while the bride’s bouquet, and whoever caught it would be the next one to find a job outside of our department.

39. Songwriting
There was this one year when I found out how to work a pirated software that I bought somewhere, and finally I could flush out from my memory some songs I had been holding in my head until then. Then later that year, quite a few songs came pouring out, and a lot of it was pleasantly surprising. I felt that I did have a viable career option as a songwriter, even though learning many other aspects of the music business would require fair amounts of hard work.

40. Up all Saturday night
During my 30th year, I just decided to go and take things easy for a while. I would just stay up late and bring a lot of books to a 24 hour joint, and order a coke, and drink and drink and read and read. It was a strange time in my life. I felt that I was in a shuttle that was moving very fast over great distances, but at the same time I wasn’t really doing anything in particular. It could be the story of my life, that I was constantly being disconnected from reality.

I also had the habit of going to a gourmet coffee joint, curled up with a book, and hanging out there for upwards of 2-3 hours, just reading. It felt great at first, and I almost came to think of Starbucks as the modern version of the opium den. Eventually I got bored of all that, but it took me a long time to get bored.

41. In camp training
It’s actually a novel experience for me to be going through in camp training. When I finished my full time service, I had only finished the courses. I hadn’t had any operational experience. For me now, I would have thought of it as a great experience. I would have gotten some insight into what operational matters were all about. I didn’t get that in the uni because I studiously avoided engineering courses. I got found out in the first few years at work and it almost destroyed my career.

Funnily enough, I was in a position of some authority at my unit, since I was the second last in the pecking order. I actually had to be a commander of an armoured vehicle. It was a bit nerve wrecking at first, and all my men enjoyed laughing at me. Till now, I don’t really know if I have what it takes to command them. But it doesn’t really matter. ICT was one big party, compared to active service. I did learn a lot, I did work at being better, but I knew that I could never be a commander. No matter now, since I’ve only 2 more cycles to go.

I just felt that it was a funny thing, we were all obsessed with national service when we were school kids. When I was in my uniformed group, we were always told, we had to do this or else we wouldn’t be ready for service. And now I’m at the point where none of this would ever matter. It really felt that national service was one big anticlimax.

42. Remedial training
Most of the time I didn’t have to go out on my own to do my IPPT test. I would have at least 1 in camp training and the IPPT would be conducted then. Suddenly there was one full window where there was no training. And I forgot to take my IPPT test! It was horrifying. I was charged, I was fined, I had to go down to CMPB (taking leave, of course) and answer charges. Dress up in an army uniform. I was in this room, and the officer read the charges out to me. Then he said, “Are there any reason why din you do IPPT?” I said no. He was probably a little startled that I wasn’t going to come up with any bullshit. SAF officers are probably trained to think that you are being cheeky every time you open your mouth.

I got fined $50. But the next time, I was told, I would be thrown into detention barracks. So I got to be extra careful with my IPPTs now.

The funny thing is, I had an in camp training scheduled. And I would pass it if I passed my IPPT. I fucking failed my chin ups by 1. And in the end, I was subjected to the indignities of remedial training.

My 9 years were OK. They weren’t excellent, but they weren’t horrifying either. Except for my first few years at work, which were full of existential angst. They were, truthfully, quite underwhelming. And it did feel like I was just muddling along, and pushing all the big and important stuff to a time that was later in my life. In fact the first big event of my life that would come up would be my studies. Another big one, if I could manage it, would be to find a partner. A third one, would be to have a musical career of a larger or smaller sort.

Memories of my workplace part 1

2011-08-13T07:16:00.003+08:00

After months of not really accepting the inevitable, I have decided to leave. After all that’s been said and done, it’s just nuts that I’m not going to follow through. Do I know exactly what I’m doing? No. For some time I had been vain enough to wonder how I’d be remembered when I leave this place. After all, I spent 9 years here.

Then it occurred to me, when I was making that change in my life, that I would be looking forward, not looking back. Until one day. For some reason, I thought that I would report sick. Now I never get an MC without being sick, but it was a soft MC. Just a bit of flu. Just feeling a little tired. It was something I hadn’t done in a while, maybe did it once or twice a year. Then I decided to go to my company’s clubhouse to rent a few VCDs. (I always made copies of them and returned them the next day.)

If I had something to compare it to, it would be like the time I left secondary school. First few years at secondary school were painful for me. The rest of the time was fairly relaxing. Sure, there were times of underwhelming achievement. Sure, I didn’t think I 100% belonged to that place. But I would be lying if I said I learnt nothing, achieved nothing, made no friends, didn’t stretch myself a little here and there, that the whole experience was hellish. It wasn’t a time of intense achievement. It was a time when there was some hard work, some slacking going on. It would not be a heroic time in my life, but there were good memories.

There was a time, when I was thinking back on my secondary school days. My biggest regret from those times was my not being a member of my school’s maths team. (Coincidently I’ve just met up with one of the guys who was keeping me out of the team.) But I suddenly asked myself another question: were you happy during those days? Yes, I was. Was I happy during my 9 years on my job? Not really extremely happy, but more happy than not.

Why am I leaving my job? I would be “more happy than not” for the rest of my life. But more than likely I was starting to get tired of what I was doing. Even if the career progression was not fantastic, I could always dream up of a few more new things to do, new ways to do things. But in the end, I needed a change of environment badly. Or I could see myself rotting in my current position.

So what I have here are memories of my time. Not all of these things took place at work, but all of them took place during these 9 years. I'm putting up 42 because it's a nice round number.

1. The basketball / football games
Halfway into my second year, Sniper started organising games in the evening for our department. A lot of people made their appearances there, except for the bosses of course. Even so, water tap was a regular. There were people from other departments joining us sometimes. People who later became deputy factory managers.

Those weren’t entirely happy times for me. I got more than my fair share of sniping. But there are always team mates you like, and others you don’t and they always come in one package. I was no athlete, but I learnt how to play a bit of basketball and soccer, very importantly, before I hit 30. Because after that, you probably will never pick up any more physical skills. Sure, there were quarrels. Sure, I drove a nail into the coffin at the end. But it was good while it lasted. I’ll never regret walking out of it the way I did, but those are fond memories.

2. The lunches in coffee shops and hawker centres of old housing estates
We work in a “factory”. The building that we worked in had been refurbished 6 months before I started work. Most of the time, there were 3 stalls in the cafeteria. The Chinese stall, the Malay stall and the drinks stall. The Chinese stall was making a killing because he provided lunches to all the crane operators. Nearly 10 years later, he’s still there. I detest his stall with a passion.

So we often drove out to eat. Most of the time, it was somebody else’s car. We would end up at a hawker centre or a coffee shop at an old housing estate. The thing about the older housing estates, they are a reminder of what Singapore used to be, a more idealistic, generous period, when people didn’t charge you sky high rentals, or make you pay more for your food just because there was air con, or squeeze you into a ridiculously small place. Sure, these were grimy places but I liked them because they remind me of Singapore’s golden period. It’s too bad, that when the inhabitants in there die, the whole place will also be emptied out.

3. Sipping tea at meetings
We had a messenger who made good pandan tea. He was some kind of a joker as well. I suppose it was here, as well as my time in NS, that I learnt how to drink tea Singapore / Malaysia style. It would be possible to replicate this elsewhere but I cannot imagine why anybody would want to flavour their tea with anything else other than condensed milk.

4. Reading books in ice cream parlours after work. The long rides on the Lornie Road bus
There was this period when I was always taking the same long route back. I would go to a nearby bus terminal, pick up an icy drink at a convenience store, and sip it on the back of a bus, reading my latest book from the warehouse sale. Or I would stop at an ice cream parlour halfway, order 2 scoops, and just while time away. Or maybe it would be a beer. I think it was a very decadent time. I was almost determined to have an easy life around the time when I was 30. I don’t know if I regret that now.

5. Teapot
A few months ago, a colleague that I had once gone after got married. I haven’t talked to her since. There were a few dates, and then it ended like that. I’m not under any illusions that you have to put in the work if you want to go after the girl. For various reasons, and possibly because of other things going on in my life, I didn’t go after her. And even if I did, I don’t think it would have worked out.

6. Borrowing VCDs
The company’s clubhouse had a VCD rental service. It was a boon for me. To be sure, you only got the movies that opened at theatres. You didn’t get art house masterpieces. But there was a good selection, and once the movie was out, it was certainly cheaper than watching it at the cinemas. I copied a lot of movies and I still have a stockpile, from the time when I would just burn loads of movies for the heck of it. Supposing I were to watch a movie every other week, which is actually a lot, I would still take 1 or 2 years to finish the lot.

7. Getting my mobile phone subscription
The other boon from the clubhouse would be corporate mobile phone plans. I pay 50% of what a lot of other mobile phone users pay. However I am not a mobile phone fan, and I don’t have an iPhone or any wi fi / 3G thingy that most ppl have these days. I haven’t taken advantage of the latest plans. But I did remember how exciting it was to get my first handphone, even though it was one of those old dot matrix thingies.

8. Going to video arcades after work
Yes, for 2 or 3 years at the beginning of my working years I used to go play at video arcades. They still had those things during that time. I used to play puzzle games, like bubble bobble, shanghai mahjong. Later on I developed better vices, like reading books.

9. Going to libraries / book stores after work
College turned me into a reading fanatic. I was a general knowledge / history fanatic for many years. It lasted until 1 or 2 years ago, when I got tired of it all. Those days, I would just go to the library, look at all the wonderful colourful books, read the blurbs, which often consist of somebody’s great idea of the world, and then pick 1 or 2 for the weekend.

10. Expeditions to the Lighthouse / Riau Islands / Bangkok
In the earlier years, my colleagues were a fairly close knit bunch. This was before they started snatching each other’s wives. They were quite gracious about it, arranged everything. Barbeques. Funky games. For us it was just the novel experience of being able to laze around in a bungalow for cheap.

11. Naps on the bus during lunch time
I didn’t always get my 6-7 hours of sleep. It would be hell in the morning, but then I would just excuse myself and get myself some shut eye. Sometimes I would just get on a bus and go sleep on the seat. Or I would go to the cafeteria downstairs for a quick meal and grab half an hour of shut eye. The third place I could nap was my van. I would just grab a quick lunch, drive to a multi-storey car park, park it there, and then spend half an hour sleeping.

12. Driving ppl around for the 1st time / driving back from sports day.
Football and basketball sessions were also fun when I had my own vehicle. I would ferry ppl around for late dinners at 9 something. I liked the novelty of starting to drive all by myself. In fact I like driving. I just don’t like the idea of pumping carbon into the atmosphere.

13. Conversations with Water Tap
And before I got the van, it was invariably water tap who gave me a lift home. I can’t say that know him very well. And there are times when he would start nagging me about work, or about finding a girlfriend. But he never allowed awkward silences to take place, and I liked that. He had become a factory manager and recently I had dinner with him. Then we ended up talking about factory work. That was interesting.

14. Joo Chiat
A very strange period in my life, 3 months in all. But no regrets at all, really.

15. Gatherings at ppls’ houses
Many of the times they used to be at Sniper’s house. Then there were gatherings at Totoro’s house, and once at Ghost’s house. Nat was supposed to host 1 time, but he didn’t. I don’t host these things because my home has a bad vibe. Basketball Jones – I went to his house and I remembered that bachelor pads should not be hosting parties. My apartment at Snowy Hill Uni was always in a mess. Sometimes they were fun and other times not. And mostly in the early years. But good experience.

16. Long Distance running training
So many people started running marathons that when one day shingot decided to run a half marathon. I thought, OK. I’ll do it too. In the end, I finished a half marathon one year and the full marathon the next, and then I quit. I hope shingot succeeds earlier because it gets harder when you get older.

I don’t know if there is something about my department which is conducive towards finishing a marathon. Maybe it was the ability to keep on bashing your head against the wall in the face of overwhelming apathy from the rest of the corporation. Maybe it was the introversion that made it humanely possible to spend hours alone. Because long distance training is an overwhelmingly solitary activity, and having a running partner only makes things slightly better.

But the honour roll of people in my department who have finished marathons is fairly long. There is 1 data clerk, 1 programmer analyst (I think), Nat, Leonpix, Blinky, Dr Maths, Garoupa, Colonel, and finally myself. Shingo and Sniper have run half marathons, but probably they didn’t finish marathons because, unlike me, they have a life.

17. Concerts with Nat
This was only in the last few years. There weren’t more than 4 or 5. And most of the time I decided where to go. But the music was never any less than excellent. First there was George Clinton, then Joe Lovano, then Tortoise and Joanna Newsom.

18. Blogging / secret diary of Montgomery burns
In the middle years, it became an open secret that I blogged. There were a few people who got to read my blog. These days I wouldn’t let the youngsters know about it, I wouldn’t let the bosses know about it, and my readership has basically dropped to zero. But that’s OK. Alfian called his blog his secret wank shed, and that’s what it is for me.

There was a boss who everybody got frustrated with, and we even set up a secret blog for him. I got worried, and slapped a password on it – now I don’t even know what it is.

19. “Training sessions”
Our company held training for its staff. They purportedly taught stuff like customer service, creativity training and etiquette. While some of these courses are useful, a lot of them was just making sure that these things were taught to people in case they didn’t already know. There was a lot of fairly solid stuff that could have been taught. Some of the time was just spent in teambuilding games. Some of these were feel good sessions. Generally it was of dubious utility.

When the Colonel came in, he revamped the training and made some courses more relevant to the company. I always thought that was the right thing to do, but it speaks volumes about our company that until he came along, nobody thought to do that.

20. Stalking water girl
There was this time, right after I got dumped by codfish, that I passed by water girl, and I said to myself, this will be my next girlfriend. A few years passed, not much happened. After much nagging from my friends, I decided to go and stalk her. It was a big effort, and lasted for 1 year or so, on and off. Later on, I read her blog and realised that we just weren’t right for each other, and that the effort was more or less entirely wasted.

21. Weddings
The first 3 weddings in my adult life were affairs to forget. The first one, I missed because I was going away to the USA. The second one, I also missed. Codfish was the bride, and for that matter, it ended in divorce. The third one was sniper, and it also ended in divorce. The rest seem to be in good condition so far. (edited: I learnt last weekend that another one ended in divorce. But it was a buffet lunch wedding, I was 10 mins late and I missed the very short solemnisation ceremony)

I remembered that at the first wedding I went to, I often felt very touched when they pulled out all the photos from the archives, and it’s like a fairy tale, ppl live happily ever after. But as you get older, it’s more a matter of been there, done that.

22. Trip to the USA
My sister asked me to accompany her on a trip across the USA. And it happened around the time my bond ended. It was a time for me to think about the future. It’s a curious thing, a lot of the time, up till the trip to the US, I was still able to remember my university life fairly vividly. Thereafter, I seem to have completely cut my ties to the USA. Now that I’m going to Mexico, I seem to have forgotten what Snowy Hill was like.

Malaysia Cup and the Quasi-Singaporean

2011-07-17T20:36:00.000+08:00

Malaysia Cup days. Ah, the good old days. Everybody’s talking about the good old days.

It’s funny, because during the intervening 17 years that Singapore was not part of the Malaysia cup, the causeway seems to have grown wider. First, there was the Asian Financial crisis. JB had gotten much more dangerous. People still go to JB but ever since 1998, the place seems to be full of scary Indonesian gangs rampaging through JB and slicing and dicing Singaporeans. It seems standard practice to chop down a business rival by ordering a hit job on him when he’s going there on his weekend golf trip.

I still remember when it was possible to receive RTM channels on TV. Now we don’t get that anymore.

And most significantly, no Malaysia Cup. Of course, when Singapore travelled to the other club sides in the region, it was a charming experience. Water logged pitches. Lights that didn’t always work. Witch doctors casting spells on the goalpost. (There was 1 match against Perlis where the Perlis goal mouth seemed to lead a charmed life.) But Malaysia was not a foreign country. Even if they weren’t our brothers, surely they were our cousins. And behind all that animosity, I’m sure, given all the entertainment value of meeting a Singapore side,
It was genuinely wonderful being everybody’s favourite enemy.

To be sure, the 80s were a wilderness for the Malaysia Cup. Singapore didn’t win a single Malaysia Cup in the 80s, or get into any finals. There was the ignominy of knowing that your best, most talented striker Fandi Ahmad was winning Malaysia Cups for Pahang and Kuala Lumpur, or that Sundram was winning one with Kedah.

That aside, everything changed with Abbas Saad. He, together with Alistair Edwards, brought us into the final in 1990. Then he moved to Johor and helped them win in 1991. By 1992, Singapore got relegated into the 2nd division. But in 1993, all our stars returned. Malek Awab, Fandi Ahmad, V Sundramoorthy, Abbas Saad, Alistair Edwards. That year, we got into the final, but we lost to Kedah. I remember a semi-final of that year, where we came back from 0-2 down to beat Pahang.

And in 1994, there was the double. No more to be said about that. However, after that, Singapore was banished.

I suppose, people who lived through the 60s and 70s must have had many years of Malaysia Cup memories. For the younger folk like me, the romance barely lasted 5 years. At least my sister had been to one fantastic match where Singapore stuffed Perak 6-1.

So this Malaysia Cup thingy, is it going to work? Here’s something I spammed on a friend’s facebook page.

“It's funny that Abbas Saad and Jang Jung were considered more Singaporean than Daniel Bennett who actually grew up here. I don't know why. Maybe they are more "us" because they are our comrades against the Malaysians. Maybe because we were a club side in the Malaysia Cup. Probably because we saw them on TV all the time. Maybe if we saw Precious Emuejeraye enough on TV and learnt to pronounce his name the way we learnt how to pronounce sas-wa-di-ma-ta-da-su-ki we would accept him as Singaporean.

What is clear is that the Malaysia Cup had a powerful branding, possibly now displaced by the English Premier League, that even international success in three - THREE Tiger Cups was not able to overcome apathy to our local football scene. When you are that successful and people don't recognise you it's time to pack up and go home.”

OK, so I was wondering, why did Jang Jung and Abbas Saad have so much appeal, as compared to the foreign imports in the 2004-2007 national team? Why was Abbas Saad a star, as compared to Daniel Bennett? Then over the weekend, I saw a picture of the 1990 Abbas Saad, the young, sexy, and bare chested teenage heartthrob Abbas Saad on the cover of the New Paper. It was as close as you can get to gay porn on the cover of a major Singapore media publication. And then it hit me.

Abbas Saad and Jang Jung were very well accepted in Singapore because they are quasi-Singaporeans. Abbas Saad may have been an Australian, but he was of Lebanese descent. He could very well pass off as a Singapore Eurasian. He had a Muslim name, which meant that he was a quasi-Malay.

Jang Jung was a Korean. But Koreans are similar enough to Chinese people. And he wasn’t a “country bumpkin” Chinese person who finds that life outside the village is strange. He was an urban quasi-Chinese. It wasn’t very difficult to make the adjustment.

Compare him to Alastair Edwards, who gave us a middle finger after scoring a goal against us. He was never really accepted in Singapore. Because he’s an angmoh. And if you are an angmoh, you’re never really part of mainstream Singapore society. Expats in Singapore who are angmoh instinctively know that, which is why there is such a big divide between them and the locals. That’s why they never really get accustomed to local culture. Because they know that Singaporeans may be deferential and polite to their faces (or not – Chinese people are less polite than Koreans, Japanese, or Vietnamese. We are the least polite race among the East Asians.) but there will never be a willingness to accept them as our own. OK, we’ll make an exception for Daniel Bennett, after all he’s gone through NS like the rest of us (I should hope!)

But Precious Emuejeraye, Agu Casmir, Aleksandar Duric, Itimi Dickson and even Mustafic Fahruddin don’t really make the cut. Technically, Mustafic Fahruddin is from the same stock as Abbas Saad, but probably he doesn’t have Abbas’ charisma.

The exception to this rule is Douglas Moore. Maybe there are reasons. Douglas Moore is a New Zealander, so maybe he’s almost Asian. Maybe you accept an angmoh if he’s a boss. Especially if he’s a capable one. Which is probably why Raddy Abramovich is probably the most popular guy in the National football team.

The other reason was that there was constant television coverage. In the Malaysian cup, all our opponents are Malaysians, who are by definition quasi-Singaporean.

The biggest threat to the Malaysia Cup, however, is the English Premier League. Recall that the first 2 seasons of the EPL coincide with the last 2 seasons of Singapore being in the Malaysia Cup. It could well be that even if Singapore played on in the Malaysia Cup, we would see first hand the ignominy of EPL superseding the Malaysia Cup fever. That would not be pleasant. Better now, if we fail, that we have the excuse that it’s the 17 years that smothered the Malaysia Cup fever.

When I see the list of Malaysia Cup champions in the interim, I see a lot of unfamiliar names. Like:
Selangor (expected),
Perak (expected),
Brunei (huh?),
Terangganu (wtf?),
Petaling Jaya (who’s that?),
Perlis (puny little Perlis?),
Kedah (expected),
Negri Sembilan (puny little NS?),
Kelantan (they’ve never won before).

So instead of the usual suspects (Pahang, Selangor, Sabah, Sarawak) we might find that many teams which have been minnows all along have risen to the fore. Maybe there’s an explanation for this? Maybe there are rules that stipulate that all teams must field players that are native to the state? Maybe some rich sultan is behind the smaller teams? We won’t know unless we get to see the Malaysia Cup matches.

And most importantly, it’s a big shame that we don’t see the Singapore National team playing. This would be just the U-23 team, for starters. But if it’s possible to have a Singapore - Malaysia Super League, with SAF, Home, Tampines, Woodlands, Geylang, Hougang and Balestier in the Malaysia Cup, that would be really interesting. Just one suggestion – call the super league whatever you want, but don’t ever rename the Malaysia Cup. There is no substitute for that brand.

In the end, will we have the glorious days of old, where there was the Malaysia Cup fever, or will we have another failed venture like the S League? I have a feeling that it will be somewhere in between. That it will prove to have an atmosphere better than S League in the long run. But that media coverage of the EPL will be so much better, and quality of the football will be so much better that – let’s put it this way. It is not only that Singapore has a lot of foreign talent. But we built our economy by inviting MNCs into the place. Basically our economy has been a foreign economy for years. The mentality is that if the foreigners can do it better, let them do it. That’s why subconsciously, we will never be world champions at football.

The end of work

2011-07-09T01:29:00.000+08:00

I remember when I was a kid in the mid 80s, and I was reading books about the world in 2000. Well we all know what the world in 2000 was like, so the prediction was way off. But a lot of the futurists were thinking about a world where robots did all the work of human beings. Then there would be much fewer working hours in a day for each person.

Well, there is something fishy about that picture, isn’t it? That picture is not something that corresponds to the labour economics as you and I know it. In the world that we know, at least the one that we’ve lived in for a long time, people compete for jobs, so that they can earn a salary, so that they can buy things for people to eat. You know the picture in economics where the entire labour force provides their labour to the system, and the system pays everybody back in salary so that they can consume goods.

But what if this system is fundamentally imbalanced? Suppose, in the whole world, all the labour in the world will produce far too many goods and services for people to consume. Therefore, some people will always have to remain jobless. Some people will always need to be left out of the economy. Because all the businesses in the world will have to shut down production of excessive goods and services.

In a way, this is something that Marx predicted a long time ago. He talked about technology development leading to inequality in society. A few people will own the rights to a disproportionate amount of the “means of production”. Then we have surpluses being accumulated by a wealthy few at the expense of the masses. In the end, what the labour class has to offer to the bosses becomes deprecated. The rich people get richer simply because they have the property rights of all these means of production. Corporations get more efficient all the time, they can afford to hire less workers, and therefore the poor people, they only have labour to offer, and since the value of the only thing they have to offer is deprecated, they become poorer.

From the macro perspective, everything looks great. All the things that ever need to get done will get done with lesser human effort than before. But all the benefits of this go to those sneaky enough to get their tabs on this “means of production”. Today, in America, the top 1% of the people own 40-50% of the wealth. This is a ridiculous amount of wealth inequality that needs to be addressed. Was this the proportion in the feudal ages?

Now, Marx is abhorrent to many because he is credited with creating a system – communism – that was so horrific in practice. Never mind that he had been dead for 30 years by the time 1917 came around. Everybody thinks that communism is the logical outcome of his ideas. It needn’t be the case. After all, what was the biggest criticism of communist countries? Inequality of wealth. Ironically, a system that started off trying to make everybody equally wealthy ended up benefitting a select few at the expense of everybody else.

What we need now is a different kind of society. Something that can redistribute the wealth of society. Surely there must be enough to go around. It’s true that winner takes all capitalism is great at spurring technological advancement in our society. But it is far from certain that technological advancement works for the benefit of most of the people in society. What we need is to think up of some social system which is good at spurring technological advancement, like western style capitalism. And at the same time it’s good at redistributing the fruits of labour to all people.

My old reading habit

2011-06-25T23:47:00.000+08:00

I’m wondering or not I’ve blogged about my reading habit. Probably not when I while I was still indulging in it.

I was talking to Nat one day and he told me that he felt that grade school taught you the real stuff, the things you really needed to know, whereas university taught stuff that was of dubious value. I don’t know about that, but there’s probably some truth in that, that’s why primary school is primary school, and even though uni is sibeh glam, it’s still called “Tertiary”.

It’s also funny how, when my bond ended a few years ago, that was also probably the end of what I called my “post college / neo-college” years. I think maybe I could have been too impressed with my college. Maybe it was a place that I fitted in too well, relatively speaking.

For me, college was a place of learning. And it did feel like a great experience for me at that time. Yes, my mind was opened to plenty of new and wonderful ideas. Yes, I wanted what I called a “liberal education”. That means you study broadly in many different fields. I didn’t study for knowledge. I studied for “mental infrastructure”. Which means, I didn’t study to learn facts, but more to absorb the main ideas behind different academic disciplines. So that when I wanted to, I could think like a sociologist, or a historian, or a scientist. I may not believe this as strongly now as I did then, but I think that a liberal education was beneficial. (I’m starting to realise that a liberal education teaches you very little about how to be practical and execute plans. It teaches you little about how to get yourself organised.)

Now one of the things I found very useful was that I finally learnt how to write when I was there. Perhaps I was as good a writer as I’ll ever be when I was 23. Sadly my brain is feeling its age, and admittedly I don’t feel like I’m driving a sports car when I try to put an essay together. It was brought home to me that writing was a weak point when my general paper was the only subject where I missed out on an A in the “A” levels. And I’m glad I got that fixed. But now I also know: the really tough subjects that you learn are the engineering and computer science ones. Reading subjects are the easy way out. Should have tried more toughness then, isn't it?

So it was learning how to read and write for me, and it was great for me to master these skills. It did feel much easier for me to write and think about big ideas. Maybe my brain was more suited towards big ideas. I’m a more natural essay writer. Even when I did maths I did pure maths, which is closer to philosophy than number crunching. Perhaps, then I was a good at maths only because I was good a philosophy.
So during my neo college phase, my big big hobby was reading all those books to fill up the gaps in knowledge. In college, I had brought back a lot of bookshelves in my head. Now was the process of filling it up with books. Maybe it was just too much reading during those days that made my brain tired, I don’t know.

I think at that time I foolishly believed that I was going to be a great learned person in any subject I wanted to be good at. I suppose I’m now learning the hard way that there are limits to the cognitive capabilities of the human mind. I met a person from the Singapore MIT Alliance that said that the American college experience was like drinking from a firehose. Well I put myself up towards drinking from 5 different firehoses during those days. It was a profoundly disorientating experience. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do it again. Mastering new disciplines, creating mental architectures from scratch, and then pitting yourself against other people who had been doing all this stuff for years. I think there was a lot of hubris in that. Maybe I could have gotten ahead a little more with a little more focus.

Anyway shortly after finishing college I promised myself that I would go back there again. (Yes, I’m only beginning to fulfil an 8 year old promise). And in the meantime, I would just read a lot of books to fill up my knowledge. I would think now that so much of it is just self-indulgence but the context is important. Going for seconds and thirds is self-indulgence, but the first round at a buffet table is not: if you don’t have that, you got nothing.
So this is what I chose to fill my head up with:

Network theory / chaos theory / fractals / power laws / catastrophe theory.
Terrorism
How to make money (surprisingly I was only interested in the theory and I didn’t use much that was practical about this.)
History
Economics
The workings of the government
Psychology
Consciousness

I still remember those trips to the expo, where I would come back with boxes and boxes of books, of which I would at the most read 20%, keep another 40% and sell 50%. (Doesn't add up to 100% because I sold off a lot of the books that I read.) I read 500 books, roughly.

Well since 2-3 years ago, real life finds its way in, just like snow finding its way into your shoe when you’ve been walking around long enough. And now reading almost feels like a luxurious indulgence I can’t really afford. Even though I still do it so much. When I was younger, I read so much because I didn’t know better, and I just told myself, that’s the easiest way to go forwards in life and still have a good time doing so. Well now is the time that I reluctantly start the chores that I have been putting off for so long: learning by doing. Real experience. Whatever.

Chinese Language

2011-06-19T17:08:00.002+08:00

I saw this essay written on Facebook. It says that China will not be able to rule the world until China becomes the (so to speak) Lingua Franca of the world. There are some issues that I have with that statement. First, I have to talk about how and why Chinese will not become the Lingua Franca of the world.

1. There is already another Lingua Franca of the world, and that is English.
Now, let’s not pretend that the English were angels. They could be as brutal as any other colonial power. And when we say that they weren’t as cruel as the Spanish, or the Dutch, or the French, that’s only relative. There were actually 2 main periods of British colonialism. First was North America, which ended abruptly in 1776. Then later, after 1850, the second stage of imperialism began in earnest, and ended around 1956, during the Suez crisis, the outcome of which was the realisation that the UK could not sustain itself as an imperial power.

Anyway, the point here is that the last 2 great powers of the world were English speaking. The English spread their language to all the countries they colonised. This is because they tried to set up some form of government in those colonies. There are good reasons why English is spoken in the former colonies, whereas French is not spoken in Indochina, Spanish is not spoken in the Philippines, Dutch is not spoken in Indonesia, and Flemish is not spoken in the Congo.

Anyway, if Chinese is going to be spoken widely, it will have to supplant English. That’s not going to be easy at all. How’s that going to happen? Chinese are going to colonise the world?

2. The spread of the Chinese language has been traumatic.
When you think about how China was ”unified”, it involved Qin Shihuang bringing the entire empire under his “thumb” and calling it a “country”. This is fairly anomalous. In the process, he also wiped out the written languages of the other non-Chinese speaking parts of the empire, and grafted the Chinese written word onto those languages, calling them “dialects”. So there are roughly a few groups of dialects, which probably correspond to the vanquished nations. There are the Wu dialects (Shanghainese is one of them), the Min dialects (consists of Teochew, Hokkien, etc), the Hakka dialects, the Yue dialects (Cantonese, etc).

Nowadays, when we talk about burning books, we think about atrocities like the burning of the Library of Alexandria, the Nazi purges, and Qin Shihuang.
Admittedly, the spread of English has also been traumatic. But you have to see how easy it is to adopt the language, and how willing others are to learn the language.

3. Chinese is hard
The most important argument here is that Chinese wasn’t really designed for the internet. It’s a miracle that this language is in existence. It is the only major language where we use thousands characters, instead of a relatively small alphabet. Chinese characters have been simplified 50 years ago, and when I was learning Chinese, I was the grateful beneficiary of that. My name is much easier to write in simple Chinese than traditional Chinese.

Now, I’m biased, because I’m an English speaker. I will never have the attitude of some of my classmates who thought that Chinese is a low class language. I put in effort to learn it, but admittedly, not that much. OK, admittedly, I’m not that fantastic in English either, even though my GRE scores state otherwise.

Chinese wasn’t really meant to be easy to learn. You have to be really smart to learn it well. I suppose you can observe that Chinese speakers have fewer problems with English than English speakers have problems with Chinese. That tells you something. Like most languages, it used to be the exclusive domain of the elites. The barrier to entry is high. You have to memorise thousands of little pictures, and remember how each of them is pronounced, because there is no relationship between the way it is pronounced and how it is written. Languages have to go through certain processes before it becomes “modernised”/ “promulgated”/ “standardised”. The writings of the characters have to be standardised, the pronunciations, the spellings, the meanings of the words, etc etc. OK, Chinese has gone through all that. And one of the effects of the modernisation is that it is supposed to be easier for people to pick it up. One modernisation they came up with was the simplified Chinese. Now a lot of cultural meaning is lost in the process but overall I think it’s a good thing. But it will not be enough to make Chinese an easy language for people to pick up.

And think about what a pain in the ass it is to type in Chinese. Admittedly less of a pain than writing. But I think even bilingual ppl would want to type in English, everything else being equal.

4. Chinese is incompatible with other languages
Have you seen Chinese rendering English names? It's awful, because English has a lot of consonant combinations that Chinese doesn't have. Consider Smith. It gets rendered as si3mi4si1. 3 syllables. A lot of other stuff gets garbled as well. In contrast, Chinese is easier to render in English. Hanyu Pinyin is practically rendering Chinese in romanised form so that it becomes slightly easier to learn.

To be fair, English speakers have a really hard time mastering the Zs, the zhs and the qs. And the 4 intonations of mandarin seem to take forever to master. But it's not that hard to write somebody's name in hanyu pinyin, and you know exactly how it is to be pronounced. The other way around, it's impossible.

Do you want to learn a foreign language which mangles your own language? I dun think so. When I see how Japanese mangles the English language, I also see why this didn't catch on.

5. Chinese has never caught on anyway
I suspect that if it wasn’t the main language of one of the most powerful countries in the world, it would have died out long ago.

Think about the Vietnamese, who used a language whose written form was similar to Chinese. They wiped it out and replaced it with a Romanised form. Think about the Koreans who also had a language which was similar to classical Chinese. Same fate. Only Japanese today uses the Chinese characters. 1 out of 3 is not a very good record.

The other aspect of this argument is that China will rule the world. Now that is a fairly troubling thought. Arguably, China is the world’s first totalitarian state. It’s not comfortable with democracy. For me, it is a troubling thought because I suck at Chinese. But China, in its quest for empire will have to understand a few things that the British have learnt. First, you can’t really sustain an empire without the acquiescence of the people who are being ruled. Second, you’re going to have to deal with the phenomenon of democracy. As Zhou Enlai so astutely pointed out in a conversation with Kissinger, we still don’t know the full implications of the French Revolution. That was the birth of modern democracy. Then the scope of democracy expanded. Women got to vote. Black people got to vote. Now, even gay ppl get to marry.

The western powers colonialising the world was undoubtedly a traumatic experience for the colonised. But it was also eventually an equally traumatic experience for the coloniser, because the weapons that you develop to put down the slaves will eventually be deployed when the masters fight among themselves. The American Civil war was what happened when the slave owning states turned those weapons on the free states. World War I was what happened when the military technology developed to keep the colonies under control was turned into a bloodfest between France and Germany.

And throughout the experience, the western world eventually learnt that there were a lot of limits to colonialism, or what you could do to your colonies. The trouble makers in the last major wars are usually those newly industrialised countries who have no experience in being imperial powers, and go on to imagine that it is very easy to rule the world. Like Germany and Italy making belated entrances into the league of colonial powers, and Japan. Now imagine if China were to start stirring up the same amount of shit.

Now the British have always operated on a democratic system. It's just as well that one of the greatest empires of the world was founded on these principles. Maybe that's why they didn't meet with so much resistance. There is a lot of hypocrisy on the part of these two governments, because we know that when they wield their power overseas, there's not much in the way of freedom and democracy. But the rhetoric is there, and there's always people who will hold them to their actions. Suppose your standpoint is that you're only in it for yourself, as China's is, wouldn't the reality be even worse?

There's no way of telling what kind of an empire China is going to form. It could well be something even more benign than the Americans. It could be the old Ming dynasty style of "OK guys, pay your tributes and we'll leave you alone". But it could be something much nastier than that.

What really matters

2011-06-12T03:12:00.000+08:00

I think a little about when I was 15. There were a few doors that I opened that year. In a large way I’m still expounding on the doors that I opened that year. In a way I wasn’t that lucky that year: when I was 14, it had been a bad year, so that year was in a way a make up for it.

I had some good friendships that year. I found out that I mainly have 2 talents: I’m an artist, and I’m a mathematician. I went on trips that opened my mind. I went on summer camps. I’m starting to wonder how I managed to live through 9 years where so little has happened, compared to that one wonderful year. But in a way I was really lucky. A lot of the good things that happened that year took place because of the work of other people.

When I think back on the good things that have happened to me in life, I’m struck by how little they had anything to do with money. Yes, money is there to buy physical comfort, and I can’t deny that it’s a good thing. But when I think about stuff like a shiny, snazzy new sports car, it leaves me cold. I think I will tip my hat to people who think that way, only enough to hide how I think that it’s extremely weird.

I think that it’s important to keep myself from being cold, starving and miserable. But beyond that – when I think about some of my happiest moments, it doesn’t really have to do with all that.

So I’ve read some articles about the coming bubble in higher education and it leaves me very concerned at the path I’ve always wanted to take.

To be sure, I’ve always wanted to do a PhD, rather than a masters. I’ve only ended up doing a masters because I know that there’s no room for me to do a PhD. It would have been easier if I had tried 5, 10 years ago. But it’s over now.

In retrospect, I did grow up in a first world country. But it’s a first world country no more. In fact, much of what we thought were first world countries aren’t like that anymore. No, we were sheltered from much of the rest of Asia. We didn’t have to face them if we didn’t want to. Now, borders are more open. And we get a lot of people coming in, and we get influenced by them. Those ppl are a lot more like the older generation, and they, even if they’re not more materialistic, are more aware of the power of the dollar. More willing to slave away for money.

Now there are debates that call into question the value of a college education in the US. It used to be that people didn’t question the economic value of an education so much, but tuition inflation has risen so sharply, and at the same time, people are graduating into an economy wrecked by unemployment that it really seemed like a dumb idea to be hundreds of thousands of dollar in debt after graduating with a liberal arts degree, and find it incredibly difficult to land a job.

http://nymag.com/news/features/college-education-2011-5/
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand?currentPage=all

But does that mean that education absolutely has to be utilitarian? I didn’t want to choose. I tried to pack both aspects into my uni education, with greater or lesser results. Ultimately I didn’t think that it was right that a liberal education left you bereft of useful skills. That would have been defeating the ideal of an all-inclusive education.

In the end I thought there was something dreadfully wrong about putting a monetary value on everything and worshipping it. As many of you know, I have become a music freak in my early years. There seemed to be a complete disconnect between the quality of music and whether it goes up high on the charts. A lot of top 10 hits are completely dreadful, and a lot of wonderful music never gets anywhere near the charts. And I slowly lost respect for the possibility that money could buy you better music. A shitty album and a great album cost exactly the same. OK, the obscure but great album might cost you more money because it would be harder to find it. That is one of my early life experiences which made me lose a lot of respect for money. That, and the fact that I didn’t really have to earn it.

Then again, if the main purpose of college is not really to give you the means to earn a lot of money, then why does it cost so much? Technically, you could have a good, broad, liberal arts education for very little as well. In fact, 90% of what I had learnt in uni are things I could have learnt by spending years on a desert island with a good library.

But gradually, it started to creep in, especially from the 2-3rd year of work onwards. It just seemed that the people who had more respect for money seemed to be leading more meaningful lives. Those who didn’t give a shit, they realised that they were on this fucking treadmill for basically nothing. I think it was just something you had to do in order to keep yourself sane.

I’ll admit, I kinda lost my initial vision of what was really precious in life for the last few years. But now that I’m starting to sorda remember, it seems like the endless possibilities of youth. Not very helpful for a guy who’s just a few years away from 40. But I have to invent something that goes beyond that old 5Cs paradigm, that idea of money as keeping score. I have to invent something special again.
And this education thing – well I shouldn’t corrupt it. It was mainly for interest, and this idea was conceived at a time of my life when I was still in the mode of, I can afford to pursue stuff for interest. Maybe I will always be in that mode, in that frame of mind. Now, it has to be dual purpose. I don’t want to squeeze my head too hard in the utility vs education as a higher purpose debate. I want something dual purpose, as I did the last time. And I have to remember not to get any more lost than I had been.

It’s also a sad factor: often, when I’m starting with a blank sheet, I tell myself, I want A. Then I think about it a little more, and I decide, in order to get A, I need to do B. In order to do B, I need C, and so forth. And in the end, I end up getting fixated on F, and slowly forget the original connotation, the original connection to A in the first place. Maybe the ground had already shifted, and there’s no more connection, I’m left with a dead link. I have to be so mindful of that these days.

The inarticulate Singaporean

2011-06-04T20:46:00.000+08:00

Singaporeans are by and large inarticulate.

I think that the culture in Singapore is simply not conducive towards mastering languages. You don't master Chinese because the standard of Chinese is not high: mastering this language is not required because it is not a working language. And even though I am not great at this language, I have my doubts about its efficacy as a working language: I don't think it's precise enough, and that's probably the reason why scientific papers are written in English.

People also tend to refrain from being too good at English because you can get mocked for doing so. Because of our colonial heritage, and having westerners talk down to us using their superior command of English, we tend to associate having a good command of English with exaggerated verbosity. There are a lot of unsavoury connotations associated with being good at English. Even our Singlish is our way of subverting the white man’s language, but on our terms.

They either confuse expediency with efficiency, which means that if you bother to express yourself clearly you are expending effort that is better off spent somewhere else. Being too clear about things is not that crucial with how things are being run.

Furthermore there has always been a political element to this. We don’t want to have to mention things too clearly, and we don’t want to have to discuss things too much. For those who wield authority, and take a dislike to who you are and what you have done, it’s not worth the trouble of an argument to mete out the desired punishment. There is this fear, which is admittedly very real, that if you were allowed to talk things through, the power of the centralized authority would be eroded.

Children are almost never allowed to talk back to their parents in Chinese culture, although there always will be the more enlightened parents who prefer to discuss things over. They were expected to do as they were told. So in a way, yes, Chinese people become very intelligent at stuff like schoolwork. But when it comes to thinking out of the box and dealing with very different situations, all the mindsets are different.

Everybody has shared assumptions about things. Sometimes this is good, because everybody is behooved to just watch and understand first before opening their mouths to criticise. Very often the system does work, and the criticism is due to some imperfect understanding. And things are usually smoothed over when people just keep quiet and bear with the status quo, which most of the time is preferable to having a small squabble spiral out of control over nothing.

But over time silence always favours the oppressor at the expense of the oppressed. And of course it has always been in the interest of people in authority that people don’t always think very deeply, clearly or precisely about issues, so that it becomes so much easier to pull the wool over their eyes.

Also important are the problems that get swept under the carpet. Woody Allen films are always about people who talk about their own problems too much. Lee Ang’s films, especially his first 3 movies, the “father” trilogy, are about people who talk about their problems too little.

But strikingly for Singaporeans, they seem to have even bigger problems than the Chinese. I see that in TV drama serials, people always end up abusing alcohol or letting out primal rages. But not really talking out why they are really really angry. There’s not very much insight into their characters. There’s this impression that the gentleman at the bar drowning away his sorrows is fairly inarticulate, bulldozing his way through life blindly, then bashing his head against the wall when meeting an obstacle.

Somebody wrote in a comment online, "some people are just not meant to be articulate. They may be good at maths but are not good at expressing themselves." I don't agree. I watched and observed the way that Americans talked, and it did wonders for the way that I was able to bring ideas across. I will never be very good, especially when it comes to talking, but when you see the array of techniques they employ to bring their point across - anecdotes, crude metaphors, slang. Singaporeans just don't have this range. And I will hesitate to try talking to people about ideas that are philosophical because I will always be met with this "you think too much".

I wasn't always good at writing. I had a terrible GP tutor in junior college. But then I met a fairly competent freshman writing teacher, and even as she was tough, I learnt so much from her that the difference in my writing standards was like day and night. Maybe I already had the talent and all she had to do was nudge me in the right direction. Or maybe she had to tell me some things I hadn't heard before.

Whatever it is, it was just a few 1 hour a week, one on one sessions. Just looking at what I wrote, and pointing out all the problems. This was not the Sidney Poiter life changing heroic teacher things. It was just somebody telling me something I hadn't heard before. And after that experience, for which I was grateful, I was wondering, "why do I have to travel halfway around the world for this?"

On the cusp, in the mire, just getting it on

2011-05-28T23:20:00.000+08:00

1. On the cusp.

6 months ago, I thought to myself, “my life is going to change in many ways”. I’m on a brink of a … well I’m like a log on a river headed towards a waterfall. But till then nothing has seriously happened. I know that all I have to do is to say yes, and my life will be changed for 1-2 years. And then possibly forever. But it hasn’t totally registered yet.

In “Before Sunset”, the ending is one of the most intriguing ones that I’ve seen. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have a reunion, and there is a great amount of drama going on, considering that these are 2 people who have spent a grand total of 2 days in each other’s company. Ethan Hawke’s from out of town, and he has a plane to catch. And 1-2 hours before the departure time, he’s still at Julie’s house, and the movie ends abruptly, giving no sign whatsoever whether he’s going to stay or leave. What we are sure of is that he will either be staying forever or leaving forever. When you make decisions in middle age, they're either your last decision or your second last decision. (OK, actually not true, my father managed to change his life when he was 50, but that's another story for another day.)

I still remember the last 14 kilometers of my first and only marathon. I remember thinking to myself, "Am I nearer to the end than the beginning?" After all, the preparation that I had took me 28km into the marathon. I was starting to limp. Considering that the last third had been as agonising as the previous 2 thirds, I didn't know which segment was longer. Preparation only takes you so far, the rest is improvisation. Also, you don't really know when it's going to end. Many times, you think "it should have ended by now, but it really hasn't." And when the heat is on, when you almost can't take it anymore, I was thinking, "I can't bear to fail, but I also can't bear to move another step. Either way, you lose." Mercifully, the marathon ended before I had the chance to think of any more such nonsense.

2. In the mire

There is a war going on in the Congo. I remember that for 1 semester I had thought long and hard about Rwanda. Should the US have done something about Rwanda? Then my thoughts turned to the subsequent war in the Congo, that even commentators have not mentioned about, because so little of it got reported in the news. It's not an exaggeration to say that World War III is going on right now. The war in Congo is, in terms of death toll, bigger than either the Korea war or the Vietnam war. But this time, not even a squeak.

The version of me 10 years younger than myself would have been very uneasy about that fact. I would have railed at the injustice of the world. I might have gotten cynical about the goodness of man. Now I look in marvel of my friends who used to be just like me. Reading books about great historical events of the past. Knowing obscure random facts. But doing nothing with their lives. Well admittedly I'm doing nothing with my life. But that doesn't matter. It feels like I'm doing something with my life and that's good enough for now.

So what's the answer to that question, "what about the Congo"? Well in our generation we are in the process of lifting 2-3 billion people out of poverty. Parts of Africa are finally beginning to develop economically. The Arab world - imagine, the Arab world - is getting its first taste of democracy. Let's concentrate on ourselves. Let's concentrate on what's in our power to take place. Let's think about whether global warming is going to unleash disasters of magnitude far exceeding what's going on in the Congo right now. If anything, let's help the Congo help itself. Other than that, nothing to be done.

I'm reminded of this song from way back, by Nick Cave. "As I Sat Sadly By Her Side". Classic lyrics. But what does it mean? Everybody wants to know what it means, "I couldn't wipe the smile from my face". My interpretation is this. This is the work of a man who's lived a wild tempestuous life, but is settling into middle age. He's at the height of his powers, having just written "The Boatman's Call". If you have achieved nothing else by middle age, you would have at least attained the wisdom of serenity. The woman said at the beginning, basically that this is a world of marvels that we live in. Open your heart to the wonderful things in life. Then Nick Cave plays the devil's advocate and says, "but life is terrible, too for the wretched of the earth." Then she says, "don't care too much for them, because it will break your heart. You just got to do what you got to do and you can't do anything more." Then he smiles, because, she gets it. Many people will criticise these dual attitudes as contradictory to each other. Taken together, this is what wisdom is about. She has learnt, she is wise. That is why he is smiling.

3. Just going through it

Struggling. Just getting through it. One of my project partners is in deep shit. He couldn't graduate from NUS because he failed a module. He's working part time now, and trying to finish this course. Unfortunately he picked the wrong course to take. He picked the sort of course that I would want to take. Guys - take it from me. If you see me seated next to you in class, go and run far away because it means that this course is not for the faint hearted. He has to graduate this semester because if he has to stay back, apparently his school fees are about to be doubled. But he's not keeping up with his work. Well I feel bad for him because he's such a great guy. And sometimes it's just great to have somebody to discuss work with - it's incredible how many times you can solve problems just by having somebody to talk those problems to.

Then my other project group, I'm struggling with Java. My other 2 project mates are struggling with English. Not much gets said to each other. It's already so difficult to articulate issues about the project in a language you're familiar with, let alone a English.

And on top of all this, there's work. I will be so glad when it's all over.

Then there was the exam. I don't know if I screwed it up. But I do know that I zoomed in on the wrong things. I didn't study some things that were obvious. I mean I did skim through the text, but I didn't go through it step by step, in detail. What I did go through in detail didn't come out. And in hindsight, some of the things that did come out should have been quite obvious. I’m still very wasteful. The decision making – my god, what an appalling waste. I can see that mediocre grade coming right out at me now. I don't deserve this. I've been more conscientious than when I was an undergraduate! (Or maybe back then I did have more energy, so that cancels it out.)

But I do feel very lifted. I feel that a weight has been taken off my back. Actually I have 2 more term projects again. Then I can say goodbye to this insane lifestyle for a few months.

Then again, this is supposed to be living in luxury, isn't it? My life was supposed to have been pretty meaningless before this, wasn't it? Sigh...

The future of PAP

2011-05-21T01:08:00.000+08:00

I have followed Cherian George's writings ever since he put out "Air Conditioned Nation" more than 10 years ago. I always thought that his comments on Singapore politics were fairly accurate and well informed (well considering that his brother in law is Yaacob Ibrahim, he'd better be.)

The one article that I have a major disagreement with is Cherian’s assessment of the opposition’s chances in 2016. I don’t really agree that the David will find it harder against a reformed Goliath.

Is life getting better?
Rightly or wrongly, people tend to judge governments harshly. They won’t vote on the basis of which government they think can do the job better. They vote based on whether their life has been more miserable or better over the last 4/5 years. Or put it another way, the die hard PAP ppl will always think that PAP is the better government. The die hard opposition will always think that the opposition better than PAP in power. And the swing voters, the one whose votes determine the outcome of elections, vote on the basis of “is my life getting better”.

Life in 2016 will not be easier than life in 2011. We will have to deal with climate change, oil shortage, even higher land prices. Also it will take a while for the government to cut down the number of foreigners in Singapore, even if they wanted to (by no means certain.) How long before people think that the roads are less

The internet is the opposition home ground
The opposition owns the internet. You can think of it as an opposition constituency. And history tells us so far that so long as the town council is competently run, opposition constituencies are notoriously difficult to win back. They start to see themselves the same way that the inhabitants of Gaul in the Asterix comics see themselves. 10 years ago, when surfing on Sam’s Alfresco coffee shop, I knew that the PAP had already lost the internet.

The PAP is unable to adapt to the internet
Anyway, I have come to the conclusion that the PAP is congenitally unable to adapt to the internet and social networking.

If the PAP had the ability to learn how to engage people over the internet, it would already have done so. It is totally shocking that the best they can muster is Tin Peiling. How much can they learn in the next 5 years, that they didn’t manage to learn in the last 10?

PAP were lucky enough to have George Yeo, who instinctively understood that people wanted to be listened to. But I don’t think that many of the rest of them. But George Yeo is gone. He has become collateral damage in the battle royale described in this article In a strategic blunder, the PAP put Lim Hwee Hwa into Aljunied as an additional human shield and managed to lose her as well. I don’t think the WP went after him. They probably felt that the ground was sweet in the old Cheng San and Eunos and he was in the way. So the person who could best help the PAP reinvent itself is also the one who doesn’t have an electoral mandate.

LKY is a liability
You have an MM who is universally regarded as a legend in his time. But now periodically tells the rest of his audience that he knows lala land (he calls it “the 60s”) better than anybody else. Which may be true, but lala land is lala land no matter how you look at it. And after that, he goes on to shoot whichever part of his foot that hasn’t already been blown off.

I don’t know if it’s because LKY hasn’t been campaigning for so long that he’s forgotten what it’s like to sell himself to an electorate. I see all the old pictures of him on TV. He made a lot of brilliant PR moves. Dressing everybody in white to represent no corruption, in direct contrast to Lim Hock Yew’s corrupt government. Picking up a broom to sweep the floor himself. Planting a tree. Explaining to villagers that he wanted everything done efficiently and smoothly. How did he suddenly become so inept at endearing himself to the public?

(NB I wrote this section before LKY tendered his resignation)

The PAP is divided
This was quite apparent during the elections. One interesting thing is that Goh Chok Tong was quite unhappy about having to be Tin Pei Ling's chaperone. He was also quite unhappy about the fact that George Yeo had to be in the line of fire in Aljunied. Not long after the elections, a Temasek Review article was put up alleging that Goh Chok Tong had advocated George Yeo to run in East Coast GRC, so that the Singaporeans didn't have to choose between George Yeo or a very strong Worker's Party team. But he was overruled by the 2 deputy prime ministers, Teo Chee Hean and Wong Kan Seng. I think that this revelation was even too explosive for the Temasek Review and it was taken down a few days later.

What is apparent in any case is that PAP is struggling to portray a united front. That is inevitable when it makes up most of the government. There will always be factions forming on different issues, there will always be people with different views about things. And this is more so when the party is attempting to make a transition in the way that it does things. You can expect a lot of quarrels between the liberal and conservative factions of the party, over the rate of the change, and what can or should be changed.

The PAP does not know how to read the situation
There is a current of thought that the PAP has the right policies, and all they have to do is to explain those policies better to the populace. I think they should disabuse themselves of this thought because it will land them in trouble. The people know that some policies are there to benefit the upper echelon of society at the expense of all other people and they’re not too stupid to figure that out for themselves.

I don’t know if Elite Girl (aka Wee Shu Min)’s infamous essay reflects the mindset of the PAP, that people who are disadvantaged in life deserve their lot because they are stupid and lazy. A lot of these attitudes seep through in the way that PAP interacts with people on line. Invariably, the PAP gets flamed on its own web site. Invariably, the sysads sometimes reply that the hordes of people with their herd mentality do not have the intellectual capability to understand all of PAP’s long term policies. (Even though this is bad PR, it is sometimes true.) The worst posts get deleted. Invariably, a flame war erupts and the PAP screws up yet again.

The PAP does not have the culture to adapt to change
But by far the biggest obstacle to PAP being able to reinvent itself, is its own mentality and attitude. They seem to be a top-down, autocratic institution, totally unsuited for democracy. Can you imagine a young PAP member being able to advise his superiors about how to frame his message so that it sinks in better? Can you imagine the young PAP being able to attract the sort of person who does this? Can you imagine the PAP being able to shed off its insecurity and paranoia and adopting a more spontaneous, breezy style?

The PAP has problems attracting talent
Cherian acknowledges that the PAP has a problem attracting talent, an even bigger problem than the opposition. The opposition have their Wijeysinghas, their Chen Show Maos, their Ang Yong Guans and Nicole Seah. Part of the reason for their sudden ascent to prominence is the sheer novelty of seeing a different type of opposition candidates for the first time. Perhaps the PAP have great and capable people standing in the wings. But this was not sufficiently highlighted. How many of the 4th generation leaders compare to the aforementioned opposition candidates in terms of their charisma? How are they allowed to express themselves and bond with the people? You cannot do that when you have a party line to stick to all the time. The best politicians are always allowed to be themselves all the time.

Branding
If you want to talk about branding, let’s analyse the brands of the political parties. The PAP. A group of hardworking, intelligent and honest people set up one of the best governments in the world. Singapore was a place which had economic problems in the 1950s, but by the 1970s, the nation building was so successful that they managed to lift the living standards to first world. However, the style of government is autocratic. Fear and repression was the order of the day. People don’t want to join PAP unless they are mindless minions who always enjoy doing what they’re told. Otherwise they are evil geniuses. PAP people are like the school nerds who always try and always fail to be cool.

Why? Because it is always cooler to be a rebel, and it is especially cool to be a rebel when the odds are overwhelmingly against you. People who vote PAP are mentally and morally weak people who give in to their fear.

Branding - the opposition.
To be sure, since time immemorial, Opposition Party rallies have always drawn a big crowd. Then, as now, they were opportunities for people to be free of the PAP controlled media once every 4-5 years. But in the past, they were more like freak shows, circuses or public hangings. You went there to see what the clowns looked like just before they got guillotined.

Foolhardy but brave
They used to be a bunch of fools going strong where angels fear to tread. They used to be bitter complainers. In any case they often had the short straw. Now? Now JBJ, Tang Liang Hong, Francis Seow, Chiam See Tong and even Chee Soon Juan are like martyred saints.

Well meaning tree huggers
Now they are professional policy analysts who have postgraduate degrees. Or they are amateurish but well meaning cassandras who, like Qu Yuan, try to counsel that the country is going the wrong way, and who are likely to get executed for their troubles. More than a few of them look like tree hugging hippies a card short of a full deck but liberal bleeding hearts cannot resist guys like that.

Battered underdog. Cheap but good
Chiam See Tong – look at his instinctive understanding of branding. The Volkswagen. (the people’s car, in other words.) The partitioned makeshift municipal office. The poisoned plant, whose tale was recounted by Lina Chiam in a rally speech. The iconic “welcome to Potong Pasir” sign. Even his Toa Payoh Lorong 8 is a time capsule, and a reminder of a moment frozen in time, the 80s, shortly before the PAP began to lose its way. And his greatest, most iconic image is not himself as the young warrior taking on the rest of parliament single-handedly. It is the image of him, Saint CST, down with stroke. Silently we accuse the PAP: this stroke is the cumulation of the ordeals you put him through over the 27 years. Bravely, he mumbles into the mike, “I am not a brave man, but I love Singapore.”

Whisper to a scream
Gone are the days when JBJ used to stand helplessly at MRT entrances, piteously hawking his book while the rest of the world passed him by while trying to avoid his glance. Now the trickle has become a flood. One of the iconic images of GE 2011 would be the stopped traffic outside Serangoon Stadium and the triumphant hordes saluting the Worker’s Party.

Regular folk
I was browsing through Chen Show Mao’s web page. Now this is a guy who gets paid a lot for his legal work. But you had pictures of him still being connected to the ground. You had Sylvia Lim, Low Thia Khiang, Pritam Singh, and they look like a gang of old pals that you want to hang out with, rather than royalty. They were hanging out at the kopitiam, shaking hands. Eating prata for breakfast. Riding the MRT. Contrast this with the PAP. When you look at them, there is an invisible velvet rope separating them from you. They’re it, and you, in case you didn’t know it yet, are not. They were ministers, always in a hurry, always chauffeured. They had the worries of the world on their shoulders, but for some strange reason, “the world” doesn’t include you.

Little Nyonya
Who would have thought that only a few years after Mediacorp’s top rated Chinese drama, “The Little Nyonya”, there would be a Nicole Seah who could come in and fill those beaded shoes in real life? And who would have thought that she’s even better looking than Jeanette Aw?

Anyway her day job (advertising executive) is figuring out how best to tug at peoples’ heartstrings. From the looks of it, she’s probably damn good at her job.

Getting tracked
Anybody who’s ever leant support to an opposition party would know that sneaky creepy feeling that his career / route of advancement might be curtailed if he or she is outed. For a time, the lawsuits have had their chilling effect. Now the shoe is on the other foot. People have started finding comfort in numbers. How are you going to sue 90000 people for “like”ing Nicole Seah? Conversely, any hint that the system may be favouring the PAP will, fairly or unfairly, have the internet vigilantes coming down on the PAP like a ton of bricks.

Hanging on the Ledge
So why is this a problem? Consider the worst case for the PAP. Another 2 big swings against the PAP in the next 2 elections. After the first swing, they get 55%. That would translate to losing 20 seats. (I know you wrote that it is possible that the PAP will poll 55% but still win everything. This is possible but extremely unlikely due to a dynamic similar to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.) After another swing of 50% they could lose the outright majority, and with it, the government. Can the opposition form a government in 10 years? Do their guys have the ability to govern? Nobody knows for sure.

There are broadly 3 outcomes for Singapore. First is that the opposition regresses and things go back to the “good old days” of PAP taking all seats except for 1 or 2. Not an interesting case because we’ve been there before.

The second case is that the opposition wins a larger share, but it is still in the minority. Certainly not large enough to hinder policy making, but large enough to be a strong voice, and be the “co-driver” that it has sold itself as. This is the outcome that I favour. But it is also an outcome that, thanks to the GRC system, lies in a fairly narrow band of the popular vote. (50% to 60%).

The last case is that the opposition forms a majority and decides to form a coalition government, leaving PAP in the opposition. This is unlikely but not impossible. If it happens prematurely it will have catastrophic consequences for Singapore. The country will then be in the hands of a cadre that unlike our tried and trusted PAP folks, have not been groomed all their lives to lead the nation. They may well govern in ways substantially different from the past. They may have ideas that work great on paper, but bomb in practice. They may bleed our reserves dry. They may make promises to citizens that it would be impossible for subsequent governments to fulfil. Or they could fulfil their promise and make Singapore a much better place than the PAP is capable of.

But unless it is clear that the PAP is leading Singapore on a road to ruin, I wouldn’t want to gamble on an “opposition” government. (opposition government is technically an oxymoron.)

Democracy for Singapore
Is Singapore ready for a democracy? Singaporeans are well educated and possibly they are intelligent. You couldn’t tell by the inane comments they leave on forums, but that is also a consequence of a high internet penetration – the smart guys are not the only ones with access to computers. But are they politically matured? I don’t think so.

At the risk of making crude caricatures, the PAP supporters are unthinking stooges who cannot see past the specious arguments that the government makes in order to justify policies that benefit a chosen few at the expense of the screwed majority. The opposition supporters are rebels without a cause; uncouth, potty mouthed and morally smug people who wouldn’t be able to tell a genuinely well meaning government policy even if it slapped them in the face.

People are all too quick to root for their tribe, too quick to subscribe to a Manichean divide of good vs evil. People on both sides are too quick to dismiss moderate opinions as being muddled and confused. This is the consequence of our education system which places emphasis on memorisation of facts

This is the last election where people can vote opposition and not have to worry about triggering off a constitutional crisis.

Maybe Cherian has his reasons why he wants to put out an essay reassuring people that the PAP will get their act together. For me, I feel they have a mountain to climb.

On the GRC

2011-05-14T15:54:00.001+08:00

The group representation constituency was introduced in 1988. Its ostensible purpose is to make sure that we had enough minority representation in parliament. I still remember watching the 1988 elections, and it was exciting, I was only a kid at that point but it seemed like an exciting thing. But in the end I found it to be a tepid affair, since everybody knows that the PAP wins everything anyway.

One of the things I remembered most was a comic strip that was a supplement to the Sunday Times, and it came with a cartoon that warned that if we didn’t have the GRC, we would end up with racial politics and peace in Singapore would crumble. I remember a panel where Singapore was drawn as a time bomb, there were Chinese on one side, Malays on one side, Indians on a third side, and the fuse was lit.

Now the question of race in Singapore – it’s not a severe problem in Singapore. And people have criticised the fact that in HDB flats there are quotas for people of various races. I don’t think that’s a problem. One of the most important factors behind racial harmony in Singapore is that most people at some point or another have had neighbours of a different race. Certainly this is true for almost all Malay or Indian people. After a while you start to think of yourself as Singaporean, rather than, exclusively, Chinese, Malay or Indian.

I think that Singapore’s racial policies have been pretty OK. They are heavy handed, and they are not completely effective. Malays do feel a little disenfranchised, and the stigma that they are mostly security guards, librarians and dispatchers is hurting them. But there is no such thing as racial equality almost anywhere in the world.

The big problem with the GRC is that it is apparent that the GRC was not solely about race. In fact I think that there are more important issues than race in the GRC. It’s about disadvantaging the opposition, and it’s about being anti-democratic.

I’m not a believer in “this or that is good in principle”. I don’t believe you should judge anything on principles. You should look at the probable outcome of what you’re going to do, and then decide or not whether you like that outcome. Principles are only there to make outcomes easier to understand. Otherwise they shouldn’t supersede thinking about outcomes.

Similarly I will never criticise something on the basis of its being anti-democratic. After all, democracy is not always good. In fact I think that democracy’s only point is that it is a good check against tyranny and abuse of power. I have a lot of faith in the ability of democracy to fire a bad leader, but I have less faith in its ability to appoint a good one. That being said, I believe that the US presidential election, the toughest election in the world is rightly known as the toughest job interview in the world, and an effective way to appoint a good leader.

Now the other issues involved in GRCs are that they are first past the post on steroids. They give an advantage to the incumbent, which is almost certainly the PAP. And similarly they give a disadvantage to the opposition.

I think it was party to address the issue of leadership renewal that the PAP (more specifically LKY) came up with this great idea. Since it was the cabinet ministers who always got very good election results (LKY often scored more than 80%) you put one cabinet minister into each GRC, he would anchor that GRC and then it would be easier to win it. (When I talk about cabinet ministers, I always use “he” because our first and only woman cabinet minister just got voted out last week.) That way, you can sneak all your guys into Parliament via the GRC, and pretend that they were democratically elected.

I don’t think this is inherently evil. If a person is good and capable, but he’s a nerd, you don’t really expect him to do very well in elections. I don’t mind having people like that in parliament. If you trust the PAP machinery to bring out the best people then vote for them anyway. And if they’re lousy, you trust the PAP not to put them up in the next election.

But the people must also have some say in this. There is no problem with a 3 person GRC. But if you have 4, 5 or even 6 member GRCs then this is a gerrymandering process that has gone too far. Singapore is 75% to 80% Chinese. If you want parliament to reflect this composition, then you should have a larger than average representation for minorities in your GRC. Therefore GRCs should not be larger than 3.

The other irony about the GRCs is something that most Singaporeans, PAP or opposition, have complained about. Tin Peiling in, George Yeo out. Well that’s the problem when you bundle a cabinet minister together with 2 other guys. You are effectively bundling the 3 together, and the leader is a human shield. The PAP is effectively saying, “vote for me, otherwise I will throw you out of power.

Looking back at the elections results, in 1988, GRCs had 3 members. In 1991, they had 4. By 1997, they had up to 6. They were increasing the sizes of the GRCs the way heroin users increased their dosages. Clearly it’s not really about race anymore. And in the end they paid the price by losing 2 ministers, probably a speaker of parliament and a “potential office holder”.

The game on nomination day is like this: if the opposition party fields a very strong team, do you want to keep that team out? Do you play your best people in that GRC, or do you fold and give up and send a weak team to get whipped? PAP also sent out a moderately strong team, better than average GRC, and in the end, they lost.

That’s the problem with a really big GRC. You tie the fates of 5 candidates together. Everything comes in the same package. Whether the opposition has a larger representative voice in parliament, who gets to run the municipal council, who gets to run the foreign ministry, who gets to go back to China. And between Chiam See Tong and Low Thia Khiang, they probably agreed that we’re not going to let the Singaporeans have the luxury of returning PAP all the seats, except for 2 token opposition in parliament. I don’t know if it was deliberate strategy by the opposition, but all the strong candidates contested in GRCs and not SMCs. The voters weren’t allowed to be complacent and say, “Wijeysingha will get his seat”, or “Gerald Giam will get his seat”, or “Pritam Singh will get his seat” or “Nicole Seah will get her seat” or “Tan Jee Say will get his seat”. Probably only Yaw Shin Leong was a strong person and that was because WP needed to hold on to Hougang. I think this was deliberate strategy to smash the GRC system. If all the GRCs were to go, then I think the opposition would have won more than 10 seats.

But let's face some facts: in some way the GRCs also benefit the opposition. Because the outcome of the GRCs are more in the middle range, it would be hard to lose your deposit. In fact the only person who lost his seat did so in a 3 cornered fight. Possibly if the SDA managed to challenge LKY in Tanjong Pagar they would lose their deposits. I always believed that the election officer did them a favour by disqualifying them. In almost every GRC, the opposition team would poll 30%. (I've even heard people bitching: they get 30% all the time even though they did nothing. I've often thought that a lot of people vote opposition to compensate for the first past the post system. If we had proportional representation, and people knew that 40% of the vote mean 40% of the seats in parliament, people would vote very differently. )

The other thing is that the opposition GRC does allow for people to be passengers. You probably need most of your opposition members to be outstanding stars. But not all. It is possible to sneak in 1 or 2 less capable candidates. And more importantly, since the opposition has almost no fear of losing their deposits, it is a great opportunity for new blood to gain campaigning experience.

I don’t really think it has to go. Yes, it’s an election engineering system, but I think that elections shouldn’t be 100% democratic. I think the people should have a voice, have a say in affairs, but they should at the most give some, not all input. They should have to power to do something drastic and attention grabbing if things don’t work out, such as unseat an MP when things go wrong.

So for GRCs, keep them, they have a purpose after all. But no larger than 3, please.

Wishlist for the elections

2011-05-04T23:20:00.000+08:00

I wrote this as a facebook note. Later on I thought the better of posting this under my own name. All of these things were written 1 day before cooling off day, before the results were known.

1. That all this talk on the internet actually amounts to a real change in election results. The opposition gets a few seats. Otherwise people will realize that Gen Y does not matter at all. Just a few, not too much. Anyway if the election results are the same as 2006 then most of these points will be moot.

2. That the PAP follows through on the apology and that this would mark a change in its attitude. And more specifically they should relook some of the policies that favour the rich, and not have so many “cracks” that people can fall through. That if nothing else, they will learn how to explain their policies better and learn how to function in a democracy.

3. We haven’t talked a lot about the new PAP candidates because they have been overshadowed by the wonderful surprise that we actually now have a credible opposition. Apparently one of them is a future prime minister. My wish is that he’s a good one. The last 3 have ranged from “pretty good” to “legendary”.

4. That the advances that the opposition parties have made in these elections would not be lost. That even ppl who don’t get voted in will continue and contest in the next elections. People like
1. Nicole Seah
2. SDP’s Holland Bukit-Timah team
3. WP’s Aljunied Team
4. SPP’s Bishan Toa Payoh team except CST who should retire and not stand for the next elections.
5. Teo Soh Lung
6. George Yeo
7. All the former civil servants who got sick of their political masters and decided to run against them

5. That the aforementioned people will not betray the high hopes that people have come to foster upon them. (But I think that 1 or 2 of them will.)

6. That the GRC system is either scrapped altogether because it’s a sham, or the size is limited to 3 or 4

7. Now that Singaporeans feel able to speak more freely, we can actually talk about serious stuff like general direction for Singapore, economic policy, values system rather than petty stuff like:
1. Is the election fight fair?
2. Did you fill in your form correctly?
3. The PAP locked us up and jailed us (true but a lot of this stuff doesn’t happen anymore.)

8. The entertainment value of democratic elections (and Singapore is beginning to learn that the possibilities are endless) does not overshadow the serious business.

9. The PAP has behaved well in this elections by their (admittedly low) standards. We didn’t have gutter politics, not much anyway. Goh Chok Tong set the tone earlier on and asked everybody to behave in a civilized manner. The coverage of opposition members is much fairer than before. This is surely not an accident but the result of a deliberate policy.

10. The opposition, if they proceed to get into parliament, will not proceed to screw up and sabo themselves for another 20 years like they did in 1991-1996. That they actually have enough clout to rein in the worst excesses of the PAP, and not get pawned by them. That they dun anyhow talk cock in parliament.

11. That what we are witnessing is a dawn in gentlemanly bipartisanship / multi-partisanship.

12. The opposition seems to be made of brave and committed people who are fighting for a cause. (Many, not all from the PAP are also like that.) My wish is for this to continue, and we don’t reach a point where people on both sides are cynical opportunists who jockey for power and influence. Because this is the age of innocence for the opposition parties and the age of innocence will come to an end.

Candidates, good luck for polling day because you are going to need it.

War of ideas

2011-04-30T16:59:00.000+08:00

I’ve been comparing this election to 1991. Well there is another parallel with 1991. In retrospect, LKY’s premiership will be seen as the Cold War premiership even though admittedly less significant than him being seen as the founding father of Singapore the nation.

The Cold War was a war of ideas. Crudely, it was putting liberal democracy against what was called “communism”. Communism is supposed to be an enlightened utopia run by the proletariat. But it didn’t turn out that way, because the “provisional dictatorship” that was supposed to oversea this transition turned out to be worse monsters than the capitalist pigs they were replacing.

The end of the cold war, and the USA’s ascension to the greatest superpower there ever was sparked a mood of triumphalism throughout the 90s and the first half of the 00s. Books upon books were printed about the USA’s supreme economic, military and soft power. And the funny thing about it is how short-lived all that power was. The ink was hardly dried when the Great Recession took place.

Just as the Great Depression triggered a great deal of talk about the fall and decline of the West, so did the Great Recession. We won’t see a repeat of the Great Depression where there was a lot of (now seems misguided) admiration for fascism and communism, and it led us into the second World War. But Western values are similarly under threat. Instead of communist Soviet Russia and Fascist Germany, now the challenges to the ascendency of the West are China, India, and much of Asia. And to a lesser extent, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East. There may not be a world war, but these are realer threats to the superiority of the west. (In any case, the World Wars were the beginning of the downfall of the West, since it more or less destroyed colonialism.)

As I mentioned earlier, there is a war of ideas going on right now, no less than the Cold War era. And there are 2 major arguments.

Democracy vs dictatorship.

Winston Churchill said that “democracy is the worst form of government except all the other forms”, which is to say that it’s the least evil. But is that true? Nobody seriously thinks that democracy is a perfect form of government. Even those who advocate it state that it has a lot of flaws. But it will usually do the right thing in the end. True or false?

For a long while, this has been held to be true. The West performed better than the Communist bloc and seemed to put this argument to rest. But now we have the USA and Europe going through a massive fiscal crisis.

The fact is that no republic has ever lasted more than 300 years. It’s only been 200+ years since the independence of the USA. The biggest worry for any democracy is that the citizens will bilk out the treasury over time, and that does seem to be happening already. Democracies will not last in the long run because they always go broke.

There is no doubt that the people will decide what is best for their self interests when they focus on the long term instead of the short term (which is not true), when they receive the best information (which is not true, and it doesn’t matter how much information is pumped out over the media all the time because the signal to noise ratio is always there), and when everybody’s voices are heard, not merely those with the means to operate as political insiders (which is also not true).

The financial crises that are taking place in much of the developing world are a great rebuke to the workings of democracy. Somehow, it hasn’t been able to stop the income inequality from growing. It hasn’t been able to stop the rich from monopolizing the media. It hasn’t been able to stop unscrupulous bankers from dumping their toxic assets on unsuspecting people.

Admittedly things are not very much better in China. Most of what’s been reported in China is about the economic giant that it promises to become. China has been very successful in the last 10 years, but not for long enough for us to see how long its success can be maintained. There are all sorts of threats. Inefficiency of state owned enterprises. Lack of transparency.

The history of China, post 1949 is full of the horrendous mistakes that are made when leaders (I’m thinking about Mao Zedong) are not accountable for their actions. The Great Leap Forward that resulted in the greatest famine in history. The involvement in the Korean war which killed dunno how many Chinese soldiers. The Hundred Flowers Bloom campaign that wiped out all the intellectuals. The Cultural revolution. The laogai that sent so many people to the countryside. The Cold War with the Soviets, necessitating a massive expenditure to build fortifications on the border with Mongolia and Russia.

China’s greatest asset has always been the same asset that it has had for the last 4 thousand years – the people. Whenever the emperor cocks up, and the emperor has cocked up so many times in the history, it’s always the people who come to the rescue.

Ironically, the government in Singapore has never been more widely admired than it has over the last few years. Previously, a lot of talk about Singapore has been about the “Asian Values”, where we have a way of doing things (very little welfare, centralized control, export led growth, massive government role in developing the economy, death to the opposition) People in the West are looking at Singapore and thinking, “wow this place is so well run”. This is at a time when Singaporeans are getting increasingly disgruntled with the government.

Democracy, on paper is about how you would get the government replaced when it fails to do its job. But having an alternate government who can step in to replace the old one is not very useful when:

1. The alternative is no better than the incumbent, or
2. There is no viable alternative, or
3. We live in a political environment where the government, or any conceivable replacement, is losing its ability to do its job.

Ultimately a lot of the questions about democracy are centred around the form of the government. But they don’t directly address a more important issue, that for some reason, political analysts are not very keen to answer, because they are ancillary to the power grab. That question is, “What makes a cabinet perform better?”

Why would a cabinet automatically perform better when it knows that it will be replaced after the next election? Or will this encourage it to be cynical and engage in vote buying in order to get the best returns in the short run. Is it actually possible that the PAP has been an honest government for a long time because it knows that its position is secure, and it might as well do a good job anyway, since it will be around for the long run?

If it knows that it can be voted out of power at any time, then wouldn’t that sour its relationship with the people? Would that make the cabinet do its job with less heart?

Ultimately it does matter whether your leaders are good people. As LKY has shown, dictatorship need not need be a bad thing if your dictator has a good heart and has sound policies. And many countries who are democratic get lousy governments anyway. The question is, are the leaders in it to serve the people or are they there to serve themselves? Because all the competence in the world is not going to make you a better person if you're mainly in it for yourself? How do we get rid of the people who are in it for themselves?

It may well be that paying the ministers a million dollars a year is an unconvincing answer to these questions. But when you don’t pay the head of state a million dollars a year, you might end up with somebody like Tony Blair, who more or less allows business interests to take over the running of the government.

Free market vs government intervention

The winning of the cold war also seemed to favour the idea that the less government intervention in the market, the better. This idea seemed to gain currency towards the end of the Cold war. It’s the neo-liberal economy.

Basically people have argued that it’s best to let the market take care of itself, and that the market is a self-regulating system. Therefore: out with social programs. Out with the rich paying higher taxes. Out with government regulations on businesses. Out with increasing wages for the middle class.

These ideas gained ascendency with the regimes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. A lot of social programs were dismantled under their watch. This led to a great stock market boom that lasted from 1982 to 2008. It was also responsible for plenty of economic crises, for example the Asian financial crisis, the currency runs in Russia, Argentina and Brazil, the fiscal crises in some countries in Europe, and finally the Great Recession.

It’s also largely responsible for the widening gap between the middle class and the top 1%. Most of the economic gains in the last 20-30 years have gone to the top 1%.

I think that a lot of the neo-liberalist ideas have been adjusted as such: people are now acknowledging that governments have a role to play in running the economy. That regulation has been extremely lax. Budding industries need a lot of subsidies by the government to get their feet off the ground. It’s only after they have established themselves, that they should be weaned off subsidies, and after that they can compete in the big bad world.

But in Asian countries where the government has had a big say in the economy, something interesting has happened. The line between the government and the economy is fading, if it hasn’t disappeared altogether. In Singapore it’s not a disputed fact that a large part of our economy that is not run by multinationals is run by government linked companies. That a lot of functions that used to be previously run by the government is now privatized. Is this a good thing?

There are problems with this. First, it concentrates wealth and power (since they are now interlinked) in the hands of the insiders. Do you need regulation changed so that you can do your business better? No problem. You change this regulation for me, and I will give you a nice directorship when you leave the government. Now, this is not corruption, the way that corruption is officially defined. But we would agree that there is something, if not dishonest, fairly improper about this. Then other companies outside who wish to compete are no longer playing on a level field.

Secondly, it shields the government against accountability. When functions that were originally done by the government gets transferred into holding companies, then that function is no longer accountable to the public. If your utilities companies get privatized, then the government is officially not culpable and accountable if anything goes wrong. Then again, there are many things that in the minds of people are still connected with the government, no matter what. If the utilities provider fails, people will still blame the government, regardless of whether the company has been privatized or not.

Anyway, in any case, business has always been a dictatorship. It wasn’t built to be democratic. There is some democracy at the board level, but you can always remove a troublesome director when it suits your purpose. You can have a democracy where ostensibly the government is responsive to the needs of the people, but then politicians would be so dependent on campaign donations and funding by corporations that you can never hope to win a popular election without being in cahoots with big business. So democracy is distorted. In the other model, you can have the authoritarian government, and the government and the businesses can influence each other to a great extent, but the will of the people are not reflected at all, save for a Tiananmen style uprising.

Because of the wealth and the power of big businesses, they have an increasing say in what goes on in the governments. Increasingly you can make policies that are more pro-business, but less pro-worker and less pro-consumers. You can make the average citizen pay more in taxes but give tax breaks to the big businesses. You can drive down the bargaining power of the average worker. All in the name of “attracting foreign investment”, because everywhere around the world, businesses are using the fact that they are mobile to force these changes through. It used to be “workers of the world unite”. But quite obviously, and in spite of the internet, they are increasingly unable to do so. It’s more like “corporations of the world unite”.

And not to absolve the governments of their complicity in this, but in this environment, governments have increasingly little say on the issue of worker’s rights. But they should be putting up a stiffer fight, rather than collapsing in front of the might of business, as they have done in the last 20-30 years. And you don’t have to buy into that baloney that worker’s rights is bad for the economy, because you can always look at Germany and Sweden.

Politics

2011-04-23T09:32:00.000+08:00

It’s a funny thing. The elections are upon us again. In 2006, there were dark mutterings about Singaporeans turning against the PAP. Now, things are even more interesting. There are more capable people joining the opposition. I am personally acquainted with 1 candidate from the SPP. And another from the PAP.

From the SDP, Vincent Wijeysingha is the son of my former RI headmaster. Teo Sung Leng is one of the detainees from Operation Spectrum. I actually picked up her book at the NLB book exchange. The SDP also had managed to rope in James Gomez. And in a great coup, Chee Soon Juan actually roped in Tan Jee Say, who used to be Goh Chok Tong’s secretary.

This is a remarkable turnaround for Chee Soon Juan, because his political career was considered to have been finished. Very few Singaporeans identify with the SDP because they think that they are too westernised and politically liberal / leftist. We still remember that hunger fasting stunt. We still remember how he would heckle after Goh Chok Tong in a hawker centre. (Never mind that his question, “what the fuck are you doing with our foreign reserves” is actually quite a legitimate one.) We remember his protest marches and we found them quite silly, especially as you can probably not gather a bunch of 50 people and march down 1 street before getting stopped by the police. But in my eyes, this looks like a remarkable political resurrection.

Some other political parties have met their crises. Kenneth Jeyaretnam seemed to be an up and coming star when he started the Reform Party a few years back, but now a lot of the people in there have defected. Probably they didn’t think that party had a good future. Also Chiam See Tong, putting aside his remarkable political longevity, seems to be a quarrelsome bugger who has been kicked out of both the SDP and the Singapore Democratic Alliance.

From the National Solidarity Party (formerly part of the SDA), Nicole Seah seems to be one of the more impressive opposition candidates. At least, for her age, much more impressive than Tin Pei Ling, whom the Straits Times inexplicably put on the front page twice.

There is the general feeling that change is in the air. I remember 1991, when a great change was in the air too. There was a lot of uncertainty about the future. The Cold War had just ended, and the USA had won. Now, in an even more dramatic turn of events, the USA, Europe and Japan, the economic powerhouses of the world in 1991, are in really really deep shit now. The problems had been steadily building up over the decades.

1991 seemed to be a turning point for the opposition. They had 4 people elected into parliament, which was an all time high since 1965. 2 of them are still there: Chiam See Tong and Low Thia Khiang. My father took some form of perverse pride in this. He would tell me that Hougang, and to a smaller extent, Potong Pasir had a large proportion of Teochews. The implication being that all Singaporeans were kiasee with the exception of us Teochews.

Lim How Doong shot himself in the foot by mouthing off “don’t talk cock” in parliament. And the PAP won that seat back. To be fair to them, the PAP did stage a big operation and tried to win back those 4 seats by pulling out the stops and promising that their town council would be so much better than when under SDP. Cheo Chai Chen lost his seat, because of the tumult that took place in the SDP in the years immediately following 1991.

Things are different this year. You can feel it. 2006 was novel in the sense that the opposition party was not merely fielding people you could consider the “man in the street”. This year, they took it one more step forward, and there are a lot of opposition candidates of fairly high caliber. A few former scholars are in here. A few high ranking former civil servants.

2006 was one of the first few years that keeping blogs was a fashionable thing. Now, only hardcore nerds like me update their blogs every week. Back then what was exciting was the novelty of the idea that the internet could influence the elections in a big way. In 2001 not enough people had the internet to make a difference. More significantly, that was web 1.0, where social media was almost non-existent. Nobody published their own stuff. That changed in 2006. And more significantly, 2011 will be the first election in which a lot of people have Facebook.

I think that Facebook is a game changer. Now, when I log onto Facebook, I see that a lot of my friends are making a lot of comments about the opposition. One of the tricks that the PAP has used, over the years, to keep themselves in power, is to create the image of the opposition as marginalized outsiders. Well, when so many people talk about the opposition on facebook, that illusion is slowly but surely being blown out of the water.

Significantly, the Straits Times has actually been a little more even-handed in their coverage of opposition members. Although they are still the mouthpiece of the PAP. I think there might be a sense that PAP's repressive ways of doing things may no longer serve a good purpose. Yes, it had its value when you were trying to weed out communists. It had its value when you knew you had a good system, and you just had to have things done in a certain way, you had to do it efficiently and you didn't want there to be deadlock. But when you used this awesome executive power to entrench the interests of an elite few at the expense of the many, when you used it to cover up your mistakes, and when you used it simply because the idea that all people are equal, and have an equal voice is simply abhorrent to you, then there is something wrong with the system.

Giving feedback is something that is - well it's been said that a customer's complaint is a sort of gift. So I think some people in the government wanted to hear what exactly people were upset about. They wanted to listen to the opposition a little more. So there is progress after all.

Anyway, if you want to know why ppl are upset about the gahment, there's a fairly succinct summary over here.

Idiot Librarian part 2

2011-04-16T13:32:00.002+08:00

Part 1 is here

Another unpleasant encounter with library staff. Maybe I think, if it wasn’t for the books, I wouldn’t bother with that place. Maybe there’s a reason why people don’t have respect for civil servants. Maybe they’re jaded because they have to deal with the worst of humanity.

It’s the library book exchange again. I thought that I would get rid of some more of my books. I had left it late. This time last year I had just taken my subject test GREs – what I then knew was a trial run. This year I would actually be deciding on my options.

Anyway the build up to this encounter wasn’t exactly pleasant. I realized that the book exchange was on Saturday, I had done nothing for 2 weeks because it was the climax of the academic term, where people are taking tests all the time and rushing after projects. Then there was this stupid feature in Microsoft Visual C which always produced a bug unless you told the compiler exactly which library to link to. It was common enough that I found 5 other people putting up that exact problem and exact solution while searching the internet. (Nat if you’re reading this thanks for yr help)

Then, a rush home to make sure that I could find 30+ books to clear out and dash out to the library. Things went wrong all the time. Books went missing everywhere. I told the maid to summon the lift for me, and she missed it by a couple of seconds. (Yes, I know I’m dangerously close to a re-enactment of a very famous photograph). Then I looked everywhere for the van and found it in the not often used parking lot. Then I got my maid to load up the van, and was about to drive off when some beeping told me that the door wasn’t closed properly. I drove over to the nearest library when my way got blocked by a car turning into a police compound. (This was an important factor in my decision not to blast a 10 second horn and swear loudly at him). Then I found myself at a carpark with 20 minutes to go. I dragged the luggage, finding that it was not very ergonomic. The walk to the library was around 100m.

So the point is – I reached the library in a foul mood. Later on, the librarian said that she was going to inspect the books for quality. She threw back 10 of my books. 1 or 2 of those books, I wasn’t going to argue with her about the quality. But I was quite irritated at how she flipped through most of the pages (later on I realized that she was looking for underlinings, so that made sense, but at first I was pissed off that she was being fussy). Then I grew really hot under the collar when she threw out some books that were perfectly good, never been read before, in pristine condition, for no other reason than that the pages were yellow. Naturally I wasn’t going to take that lying down. I said, what does it matter, you’re not paying me a cent for all those books anyway. She said, we don’t want to be throwing out too many books when people don’t want them. That sounded OK for now. But I argued about the books’ condition, and I got her to take back 4 of the better books.

Then she told something to another librarian and walked off. The other librarian wrote out an order to me for 26 books. I knew that the 26 books didn’t include 1 of the books I just got her to accept, so I said it was 27. The second librarian said, she told me 26. Do you want to wait for her to come back? I said no, after all it’s only 1 book. So I signed and took it.

But I got back home, counted the books that were rejected and realized that I had given away 31 books. I was shortchanged by 4. Now, you remember, this was the same people telling me that they didn’t want to throw out too many books, and on the other hand they’re now practically guaranteeing that 5 books will be thrown away. I didn’t know what to call this. I don’t think she should be handed over to the police but I would call this theft. I’m sure she wanted to make sure that I got fewer coupons than I gave books.

Well there're always ways to resolve the situation. You know how civil servants hate complaints. So I used the feedback thing on the NLB website. And I added some little note about how I loved going to the library for years - until now. Heh heh.

Anyway I did the wise thing - went for the book exchange early in the morning and got some remarkable books. An account of Teo Soh Lung's stay in the air con room, Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid", "The Logic of Life". I only regret that I didn't pick up Galbraith's "Affluent Society". In a book exchange, a large number of books will not be picked up. That's only to be expected. After all I am giving them a pile of books that, even though I would have picked them up myself, I wasn't able to sell them.

A new perspective.

2011-04-10T15:40:00.000+08:00

"What would you think I'd see, if I could walk away from me?" - Lou Reed

The other night while lying in bed I had a vision. No, not the kind of vision that horny men usually have just before they fall into a deep contented sleep, but that night, I saw a vision of myself.

Now I was very startled. I almost never visualise myself. Definitely not from the outside. I was wearing a suit. I was smiling. Maybe I looked a little like an encyclopaedia salesman. But the fact is that I almost never think of myself in those terms. I usually don’t even think of myself at all. As in, I don’t think about what I look like from the outside.

Maybe that’s why there’s a problem with my self-image. There’s not so much of asking, “what would a person see if he was looking at me?” I don’t see things from other peoples’ perspective. I don’t look at myself in the mirror, unless it’s shaving day. This is in stark contrast to some people I catch staring at themselves in the mirror for hours at the office toilets. I don’t think, “what’s there to like, what’s there not to like?”

The person I saw in that vision is not strikingly handsome or ugly. One thing unusual, he’s smiling. He seems to be having fun. Maybe he’s playing at a concert. Maybe he’s banging away at the keyboards. Maybe he’s banging away at some chick. A healthy, happy guy. Maybe I should practice and learn to see myself that way. Maybe things will get better.

Big Decision Time

2011-04-02T20:32:00.004+08:00

OK, all results are out. I’m not in my 1st choice school, not in my 2nd choice school. I have to think about the University of Mexico. So I’ve got to make a decision soon. So I do what most people do: ask my friends for advice. And this is a controversial issue, very controversial.

Choice A:
I continue what I am doing, which is a part time master’s at a local uni. Academically, it’s almost as good as Mexico. I keep my job, but grow more white hair as a result of a hectic lifestyle. I think about where to go after this degree. Of course I am psychologically reluctant to take this course because of all the work I put into paving the way for choice B.

Choice B:
I go to the University of Mexico, have a nice time in Mexico. I lose a job for 1-2 years. But I get access to a new life, new friends. School fees are not cheap, in US$ terms, same as Snowy Hill 10 years ago. It has increased due to inflation, so even though Mexico is supposed to be cheaper, over the 10 years, the tuition has “caught up” with Snowy Hill’s level of 10 years ago. In S$, of course, there is a big discount due to the exchange rates. This option is also attractive to me because I love giving people surprises.

Anyway it’s very interesting because people always have different kinds of advice for me.

Person A: (knows something about the field of study)
What the hell? Do academics? Why don’t you just go into music instead? (he’s got a good point). But then again, I don't see you working here for very long.

Person B: (Studied in the field of study)
Go, just go! what's a hole in your pocket when you're going to be married to her forever?
can you hold your head up in society with an ugly wife? i say dig deep and pay for the trophy wife!
Going to Mexico can help you get a good job in the US. (Yes but do I want one?)

Person C: (Did a PhD in the field of study)
Both options are shitty deals. Why don’t you go for a PhD which is free? (nb: I need to talk to person C again because 6 months ago he told me to try out a master’s first if I wasn’t sure to go for a PhD.)

Person D: (Studied in the field of study but not involved in it right now. Is loaded.)
Do you want to change your life? Why worry about the money when you can go for a new adventure? Don’t you want to explore what life is like outside of your current circle?

Person E: (Working in that field of study)
Well whether you are going to do a master’s or a PhD, the thing is, you are eventually going to do his shit work unless you have a very good idea what you’re going to do for yourself. You have to know very well what you’re getting yourself into.

Person F: (Is an asst prof in that field of study)
I applied to University of Mexico but eventually I went to University of Cornfield because it looked like a better school. Also I didn’t find what I was looking for in Mexico. Yes, employers in the US and also in Singapore will look more kindly upon a foreign degree than a Singaporean one. (Sad but true). I lecture in a Singaporean University and I’m surprised that they don’t hire people who did their PhDs in Singapore.

Person G: (My sister, and a main reason why my choices are all in a certain region.)
Take a year off and see how it feels. (Well there are 3 semesters a year in the quarter system and I’ll try and figure out if I can cram everything into 5 quarters.) Try to think of what you really want to do next.

Person H: (Doing a postdoc in University of Mexico)
Housing is really expensive here. But Mexico is a good place for grad studies. (In the US, Mexico is usually rated between 10th and 20th for my field).

Person I: (A scientist)
The more you think about it, the more confused you will get. If you want to go just go. But you have to remember, you are not young anymore, and age will count against you in academia.

Well I’m kicking myself now. I didn’t give myself that much of a choice because I restricted my choices to a certain region in the USA. I didn’t apply to anywhere in Europe. If I got the big 2 I would not have hesitated, I would have gone. Mexico – is it really that much better than Singapore that I would drop everything and leave?

Anyway I’m superstitious. When Spain won the world cup, I was glad that there was a first time winner, because means 4 years of luck for me. And if Arsenal wins the league this year, this is a sign that things are going to change for me. Yes, big changes took place in my life, in 1989, 1991, 1998, 2002 and 2004. 2004 not so much but…

Public Accountant

2011-03-27T18:23:00.001+08:00

Around 2 years ago I came across an ad, where 600 CDs were being listed as being on sale. I could tell that there was some really interesting music. At that point I hadn’t been keeping up with the developments in the latest music. So I think, it was through researching on which CD was worth buying, that I later on learnt what were the hip names to watch out for. Later on, I also started paying regular trips to second hand CD shops, and bargain bins. I think, that revival in my habit of buying music has seen my buy (and sell) hundreds of CDs.

At the same time I was amazed that there were so many obscure indie bands in that collection, and I also wondered if the seller was some pampered princess who just had a buying addiction. (But I also sometimes wonder that about myself.)

Recently, I’ve had to stop the trips to the cheap CDs. I finally found it too much of a hassle. And I have 400 items on sale, of which almost 300 are CDs. I set a cap on myself, that I should never have so much stock that I have to go beyond 400 items.

2 weeks ago, some guy with an incredibly high feedback rating bargained down my CDs and bought 2 CDs from me. I’ve had weird encounters with people who bargained down stuff, but I thought well $2 isn’t much, and I clear 2 CDs. So I said yes, payment was made quickly, the CDs were sent out quickly, everything was fine. Anyway I overcharged him for postage just to compensate.

Except that after that, 1 day after I sent out the CD, he sent out a testy message saying that I didn’t reply him after he paid up. I was a little annoyed by his impatience but then I noticed that he was the director of some SME. That really got my goat, that somebody earning such big bucks was going to haggle with me over small things.

So I wrote back, “Your CD is on the way. I know I gave you a $2 discount on the CDs. But I don't really know why a public accountant like you needs a $2 discount.”

At the same time I put that up on my facebook page, and some of my friends replied, “some people are like that, if you win it means that he loses,”

And I was hoping that he would see it as the trivial remark it was and think to himself, “I’ve got $2 from you, I can walk away now as a winner,” But I guessed that I would set him off, and I was right, although I’m a little surprised at how worked up he was.

“Hi, I am not quite why you need to make that comment. Anyone is entitled to ask for a discount, regardless of their financial status or profession. Are you insinuating if I told you I was a student without any income, you will give me a hefty discount, in the great name of a fairer distribution of income? Or that if you knew my profession you would have refused to sell me the CDs, let alone gave me the discount, but instead asked me politely to go to HMV and pay $30 for each of the cd?

I would have surmised anyone who has even heard of (insert obscure indie band) would be way too insouciant and unbothered to take a low jibe at someone who he doesn't even know as a person, but who chose to pass a sweeping judgement on me, on the obvious incongruity of someone like me asking for a discount. This utterly confounds me. Oh well...

May I know what profession are you in, or if you are a student, what profession you intend to be in?

Sent from my iPad”

Now that’s a fucking hilarious email if there was any.

At the same time, I saw that ad from 2 years ago which was selling stuff. It was 500 CDs instead of 600. Then I noticed something: that guy was the same person I had argued with. I’m just wondering, since I was eyeing some of his CDs, whether I should still go ahead and buy stuff from him, and see if he realizes that I’m the same person who insulted him. (Or rather wound him up.)

Anyway, this is what I wrote back to him, and I’m still waiting for his reply:

“Yes, it's about the financial status, not the profession. I'd say that having class is not about which obscure indie band you do or do not know, but rather it's the self knowledge that being fairly well to do, it's kinda cheap to be asking for another $2. I think I would have given you the discount anyway because if I were to discriminate based on class I'm just operating on your level. Although I must add that nobody who has managed to make my friends laugh so hard can be a truly awful person.

Are (obscure indie band) listeners (whatever that means) chin chye (I know what insouciant means but I prefer the Singlish version) enough to not pass a comment, but at the same time not chin chye enough to pay $7 for a CD, and that he has to bargain it down further? Well it gives me a headache to think about that but fortunately I have passed the CD on to somebody more suited to ponder that question.”

5 10 15 20

2011-03-06T14:27:00.000+08:00

They have this wonderful feature on pitchfork, where they invite a musician to talk about the music that they were listening in 5 year intervals of their life. Well I’m a musician, even though I’m not the kind of musician they’d invite to give talks on pitchfork (at least not yet). But that sounds like a great idea for a blog entry.

5 years old.

I would say that most of the music that filtered to my consciousness at that age was 70s disco. Probably one of the strongest early memories was ABBA, and my father was a fan. Other things that I must have picked up at that time were the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, the Brothers Gibb, etc etc. Considering how easily I took to 70s funk later on in life, it probably made a great impression on me. That was also the year when I started music lessons.

10 years old.
Not much happening to me music wise that year, although that was when I passed my grade 5. I was probably listening to more classical music, because my music teacher (erroneously in my opinion) believed that pop music was a bad influence. I really liked: Beethoven’s moonlight sonata, his 5th symphony, a lot of Chopin etudes, his Fantasie Impromptu.

That was the 80s. I remember that Europe’s “Final Countdown” was a big hit that year.

People in Singapore have this attitude, probably fostered in colonial times, that art is some luxury that is patronized by the upper class. As opposed to something that makes your soul complete, as opposed to something that’s all around you, that tells you something about your own life. A pretty fucked up attitude, I would say. It took me a long time to see beyond that.

15 years old
That was the year my ears were opened to a lot of music that was pouring out due to the “Alternative music” revolution. That was the year I went on a music binge: I discovered Bowie, The Clash, Public Enemy, Bruce Springsteen, Jimi Hendrix, kd Lang, REM, Nirvana, Teenage Fanclub, Meat Beat Manifesto, Pink Floyd, Suzanne Vega, World Party, Matthew Sweet, Sly Stone, Peter Gabriel, Sonic Youth, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Faith No More.

I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard Public Enemy for the first time. There was so much density going on in their records, and they were doing all sorts of tricks: feedback, bleeps, noise, spoken clips, “YEEEEHHH BOYEEEEE”. I probably didn’t fully understand that it was also a soundtrack to – let’s say – people of a fairly disadvantaged background, but it’s hard to understand how their lives could be so wretched if there was so much great music going on.

At the same time, there was the white mirror image of the Clash, the most socially conscious punk band. Yes, the recording quality was tinny, you couldn’t make out the words from the thick cockney. But the accent was totally authentic to me. They were such adventurous people too, moving from punk to reggae to funk, yet always sounding distinctively themselves. Plus they were also fantastic songwriters, who came up with such catchy anthems. How Jones and Strummer is not mentioned alongside the Brill Building greats is somewhat beyond me.

20 years old
The music of the late 90s was also a wonderful time. Lots of great rap records were made then, although I only knew about them later. Electronica, punk, Jungle, alternative and rap. And some other artists who used all those as colours on a palette. Beck, Bjork, Portishead, Massive Attack, Tricky, Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers and Goldie were making music that were basically uncategorisable.

But it was also a time for me to be discovering older classic music. I got acquainted with T Rex through “The Slider”. He made such wonderful 3 minute pop. I found Northern Soul through Dexy’s “Don’t Stand Me Down”. I bought my copy of “Bitches Brew” that year if I remember correctly.

25 years old
In the interim, I had discovered a lot of jazz music when studying overseas. I marveled at the compositions of Jobim, the experiments of Charles Mingus. But I found my real musical soulmate in Thelonious Monk, who understood the architecture of awkward silences.

That year, though, I listened a lot to Bill Evan’s “Sunday at the Village Vanguard”. It was a wonderfully tranquil record, with so much going on under the glossy sheen of “easy listening” music. Listening to how he played was like watching the reflection of the moon on the ripples of a lake, and all those little explosions of light.

30 years old
It was a quiet time for me musically. I had sworn off buying records. I think I discovered Scott Walker around that time. I first became acquainted to the Walker Brothers when I bought their compilation on a whim. Fantastic voice. I liked the strings he put on Pulp’s “We Love Life”. But I was quite unprepared for what I found on “Nite Flights” and “Tilt”.

This was the year, I think, that I started cranking out music on a regular basis. I had just downloaded a freeware that allowed you to make short MIDI clips, something really shitty quality. But it enabled me to write down a lot of music that I held in my head previously, and I was able to write a few songs that year. It was a good year, if every year I wrote as many songs and they were as good as what I came up with that year I would be very happy.

Playing your own music to yourself is a little like popping your own cherry. Writing music without producing it, but keeping yourself amused by listening to it over and over again is the music equivalent of masturbation.

Death of the printed book.

2011-02-27T19:08:00.000+08:00

It was bound to happen one day. There is news that Borders is filing for bankruptcy.

I grew up in a Singapore where a lot of good books were not available. I remember going for a talk, and the lecturer bemoaning the fact that Singaporeans never managed to get a lot of books from the stores. In those days, we had Times, we had MPH, and not much else.

And it’s strange to think that, for those years, since – this will surprise a lot of you – I wasn’t a bookworm in school, I got a lot of my knowledge from school books. Which means curriculum planning forms the basis of so much of my knowledge.

The arrival of Tower Records was a big thing in Singapore, even though, as we now know, Tower lasted only slightly more than 10 years. Those things were the big triumph of American capitalism. My teenage years of getting my ears opened to music took place in the last few years before the internet year 0. When I visited England in the early 1990s, I was amazed at all the used book stores in that place. There were an incredible range and variety of books on topics that I never ever knew existed. I went into Virgin megastore as a – so to speak – virgin. I left as a not so virgin.

Those were the days when there were a lot of books and records that I heard were very good, but were never available in the stores. Television’s “Marquee Moon”. Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew”. Big Star’s “Third”. If and when you did find them, there was this amazement that that piece of treasure was in your hands, then you realised that it would cost you 1 week’s pocket money. Well I suppose you just had to save up.

I read an interview of LCD Soundsystem, where the guy said that he lived through this. (he’s 5-10 years older than me). I know about it. The legends that grow around certain records. The music would inevitably be good, but no matter how good, it would be a let down. In fact, while you were being deprived of it, you had to imagine what it sounded like. I can also trace my development as a composer to the fact that I sometimes had to wonder what the music sounded like, before I heard it.

In this way, I read about accounts of what Jimi Hendrix’s music was like before I heard it. The same was true for Captain Beefheart and Television.

In fact, in a way I feel sorry for the younger kids, who never had to deal with that type of deprivation. They never knew what it was like to go to a bookstore, read magazines about rock music, get seduced by all the lurid descriptions of how wonderful this or that music is like. It’s like from young, you only get to watch hardcore porn, and you don’t know what it’s like to have a fully clothed by nice looking girl slowly seduce you over a long period of time. They don’t get to go through the human mating ritual.

Like I said, Tower coming to Singapore was a big thing. Things changed in a big way. I never had to endure a lot of that deprivation anymore. MPH knew about Tower records, and they tried to steal a march. They refurbished the Stamford road building, and there was a “megastore” called Music Power House. I thought it was dumb that they wanted to rename Malaysian Publishing House as something else, until I realised that MPH was itself renamed from its original moniker of Methodist Publishing House.

The ethos of a megastore: there were a few factors. First, you needed to have a fancy and nice looking layout. Everything had to look more sexy than your drab Times the bookstore. You needed to have fantastic piles of books, and seduce people through sheer volume and variety. The message: you would never need to go anywhere else to shop for books. Second, you needed to produce a very homely environment, where people felt comfortable hanging out for hours at a go. Some people don’t mind drab warehouses with cobwebs everywhere. But others wanted the smell of expensive gourmet coffee in the air, nice sofas for you to rest.

Then, there was price. The megastores would be able to get new releases at lower prices than the other independent stores. I think a lot of other independent stores got killed as a result. And for most of the other books, they could price them higher because you are paying a premium for being able to walk into one store and get all the books that you want.

Then, there were the events. You would have book signings (not that common in Singapore, actually). You would have the book launches, of which Harry Potter were the most infamous. There was this time when I saw enough copies of “Order of the Golden Phoenix” to fill a 20 footer.

I wish I had taken pictures of megastores, I didn’t know that they were doomed. 2 years ago, I visited 2 megastores, in San Francisco and Denver. I didn’t know that this would be the last I would ever see of them. I should have taken pictures but I didn’t. Within 1 year, they were finished.

Ultimately, then, what is killing the megastores? I think the megastores are a very temporary and artificial environment. If you think about it, the thing that made them flourish is also the thing that kills them in the end. At first, there was no internet. They were superior because they and they alone had access to all the computer databases. They alone had access to all that knowledge about where all the good books were and where to find them.

In the second stage, everybody had the internet. Then it was even more a boon for them, because everybody had greater access to a wider range of books. Consumers being more well informed is on the whole a good thing because there is a lot of desire for books that didn’t really exist before. I think that the internet fuelled the rise of the megastores, because it released a whole load of pent-up demand for books that didn’t really exist previously.

There were other things, such as computer aided publishing making books a whole lot more presentable. You just try reading some books that were published in the 80s, before LaTeX came along. You would have shoddy looking footnotes. Maybe not so great looking indices. I think that a lot of the books in the age of the word processor have 10-20% of their length taken up by footnotes. That is incredible – hints of material that wouldn’t make it onto the actual book itself is such a large percentage of the total.

The cover picture looks tacky unless a skilful graphic designer was involved. LaTeX was responsible more for textbook porn than anything else, and was probably responsible for some peoples’ decision to go get a PhD. Yes, all because they make mathematics equations look fantastic when printed out.

There were other things: after I had read a book, I would google the name of the book, and read what some other people said about the book. That book itself would not be the be all and end all of a certain form of knowledge. I would then understand if the book was biased in a certain way, or if the author had certain predispositions towards certain viewpoints. I would read all the countervailing arguments. It was like reading a second book on top of the first, and it was massively helpful for me.

The classic example of a book that didn’t come with all the internet commentaries attached, was of course the Bible. If people in those times got to read all the semi-edited version of the Bible, a lot of the reverence for that book as a supernatural thing would have been lost, you might wonder if Christianity would ever have gotten off the ground.

However the internet brought along with it a lot of threats. First, book reading as a hobby would be threatened by the great availability of stuff on the net. Second, you had competition from Amazon.com. Third, you had competition from ebay.

The first indicator I got that Borders was on the way out – something that I should have known but didn’t – is the MPH warehouse sale. You had a lot of books that you didn’t manage to sell. And many books – they have a shelf life. The pages get yellow. Those books about current affairs will all clearly be outdated within 2-3 years – barely enough time for people to read it. Even history books – people always prefer history books to be based on the “latest research” but I wonder if that really makes it better. Novels – I don’t know why people have so much reverence towards “classic” novels of the 19th century, and books that were written 10-20 years ago are all written off, even the more “literary” ones.

Whatever it is, for a physical book, it would be extremely difficult to plan inventory. There are university courses all about planning inventory. A lot of people use statistical functions to predict demand. That sounds extremely laughable! If a book is a blockbuster, versus if it were a bust – as though it’s like a normal distribution, what kind of weed were those professors smoking?

The second indicator was Borders itself. It used to be such a pristine place. In the first year, people would treat that place with reverence. America was the most powerful country in the world, and it was like getting invited to the American way of life. You never saw so many books in your life. You just felt that you would read and read forever. I certainly felt that way, but soon after I left for a place that was actually in America and had no Borders until I was almost to leave that place.

Towards the end, the arrangements of the books became more sloppy. All the good books are bought up, and what’s left are the embarrassing extravagances. The quality of the material on display always goes down. People will look at a lot of the books in the bargain bin and start to wonder, “who ever thought of publishing a book like this?” or “this is such an obscure niche”. As hard as it is to plan inventory for the big blockbusters, planning for inventory further down the long tail is even more, devilishly difficult.

The third indicator was my own bookshelf. People discovering Borders for the first time would normally just grab a lot of books. I didn’t. I grabbed a lot of books from the warehouse sale instead. And as time goes by, the books you have on your shelf are much less sexy than when you first bought them. I’m sure that a lot of married men feel the same way about their wives. I just have a whole shelf full of books, and I don’t really know what to do with them. Some of them are going to be expired.

That’s when it occurred to me that Borders is sitting on a time bomb. A lot of their customers are the naïve buyers. After a while their poor Singaporean rooms will be filled up and there will be no more buying of books. The great enduring mystery of Singapore is why is shopping is the national past time when Singaporean homes are too small to accommodate that much merchandise. Eating makes more sense because you know what happens to the food in the end. And say what you want about the casinos, at least they strip you without taking away your living space.

Borders is predicated on the premise that people would want to spend a small fortune on a nice book. To be sure, books are really nice things. Even with the advent of backlit plasma screens, ink on paper is still the best. Kindle might close the gap, but nobody knows. But when it comes to information, packaging something like that in something that looks like a brick is somewhat arbitrary. Information is not meant to be packaged. It is not meant to be stocked up. Maybe as an artwork, the novel makes more sense. As a non-fiction book, the periodical makes more sense. The textbook, which attempts to give you a broad survey of closely related intellectual material makes sense. A non-fiction book, which is somewhat like a novel?

OK, the book would be fine for me in this regard: somebody takes the time and effort to take a lot of information and refine it into something higher and more valuable. There is a lot of value in the process of putting things together. Issues are rendered on a deeper level and you can see the deeper underlying patterns, rather than if you were to just read a whole load of blog articles / magazine articles. The analysis is better. But what if it’s a book that I didn’t really want, or a book that I only intend to read a small part of?

Then what you have is a lot of books taking up a lot of space. The package that the book comes in lasts much longer than the validity of the information. Yes, it’s a good thing that we got to learn a lot about the Sumerians based on what they wrote on their clay bricks. But there are too many books in this world.

Non fiction books make more sense if they are packaged in bits instead of atoms. That way you would never have to decide what is the inventory level. You only have to decide how to price them. Information works better as a flow. You should have to stop selling the books when you run out of physical books. You should only stop selling them when the information they contain becomes invalid.

The other thing, paper books are not really searchable. They have tried to circumvent the problem using the index. If and when eBooks becomes the default medium, you shouldn’t even had an index, except maybe to indicate when a concept is the main part of a certain passage, or when it is only mentioned in passing.

Also for the consumer, eBooks is also useful: I don’t want to learn everything in a book. I just want to look it up. I may not want to read it, ever. I don’t want a clunky volume taking up space in my room if I don’t need it. I’m careful about what I buy but I still end up getting my house flooded in all that stuff.

Information also wants to be free. There’s so much to be learnt from the random blog post, the breaking news on the internet, the commentary, and talking to people. The information is demand driven, wrested out by the interested person. Rather than you just have to read this book chapter because that is what some author somewhere a few years ago presumed that you would read. And it might not be everything there is to know because so much has to be held back / censored / redacted in order to satisfy editorial / journalistic / censorship board standards. If a book is written for the general audience, it means that it was written for somebody other than you, and you would also have to share it.

And with the death of the printed book, I think also about a way of life. I used to spend hours hanging out at megastores, whether for CDs or for books. I realise that this is not something people a generation older or a generation younger would do. When I’m browsing a bookstore, I would serendipiditiously come across something else that I like. That’s what I looked forward to while browsing bookshops. That’s why I was such a committed bookworm for about 7 years – there was always something to discover. The entire sensory experience, people all walking around you, colourful covers, and when you shut them all out, the random engrossing book chapter. Also finding the random interesting book, was like bumping into an interesting stranger. When you’re surfing alone it’s a much lonelier experience.

Then the last thing was the serene and happy hours promised by the first flush of the internet. The dream was that you would just put your money in internet stocks, they would do all the work for you. And then you would spend the rest of your leisurely life sipping lattes, reading for leisure, maybe discovering good music, cinema, surfing for interesting stuff.

No, the internet has taken away a lot of our job security. Taken away a lot of certainties in life. It’s hard to be a rich man these days without working your socks off. Poor and rich alike have to slog away. Most people will create new and wonderful things that nobody will ever buy. That is the new economy, and it’s very sad.

Staying the course

2011-02-12T16:46:00.001+08:00

OK, things are proceeding with rapid pace now. 2011 will be a very interesting year. In a way, 2009 and 2010 were about me preparing for 2011. Considering how nervous I was about getting into CS grad school it’s nice to know that I haven’t been rejected from any yet. I’m already in a local uni (acceptance rate 1 in 4). I’ve been accepted at the University of Mexico (1 in 10, actually maybe 7). Plus Mexico is not obscenely expensive.

When you hire a prostitute, there are prostitutes who a famous for being really good in bed, based on word of mouth reports. There are others who have nice legs, nice figures, but are basically virgins. I would categorise myself as a virgin.

I had hoped to get a 80% percentile on my subject test, but instead got a 70%. And I thought, oh no not even Mexico would want me now. (But at least that's not true.) And Mexico's not my safety school - there are no safety schools, because if you don't get into a school you really want you may not do the masters.

Somebody left my department and I’m the last person who knows how to pick up his slack. So I’m actually quite busy this year. I thought that I would be devoting more time towards charting out the new course in my life. I’m actually stuck with more work, and balancing it out with my part time course. This was not exactly what I had in mind, even though, the certainty that comes with it is welcome. Although it could distract from my pursuit of my dreams in the near future, it is a way for me to learn new skills.

My relatives are beginning to catch on that I’m thinking of a master’s overseas. I don’t know if they’ll try to dissuade me. I know they don’t like it. But what are you going to say to somebody who has just spent a few years doing something he’s not sure about, due to contractual obligations, and now has his own ideas about what he wants to do?

One of them told me, “I don’t think you should be teaching the next generation”. I replied “you probably think I should stay far away from babies and not have children ever.” He must have realised that he just said something really offensive because he turned the discussion into something really incoherent after that.

The idealist in me would have loved for me to do stuff like pure maths and philosophy. Now, I'm glad I didn't go all the way down this path, because it would have meant a dead end road. I'm also glad because I realised that the real world where real people live in is very much more interesting than the world of pure maths and philosophy.

Again, the idealist in me wants to do research and solve the problem of artificial intelligence. The pragmatist in me would just want to find a way to leave his job. But if his job is already pseudo research, it needs to be that much better for me to leave. Otherwise this is a monk-like existence, with the "leave me the fuck alone and let me do research" not an unhappy state of being. I thought that I would leave my job but now that looks more and more tenuous.

Anyway, I've yet to hear from Bottom of the Hill uni and Palm Tree uni. There's also Uni of Big City which I haven't applied for (the deadline is really late) which I'm not sure about because it's really expensive, compared to Mexico. Ironically, if I get into both Bottom of the Hill and Palm Tree, I will be wondering why on earth I didn't straightaway apply for a PhD in the first place.

I've thought about exploring more options. Maybe I should have done more of it last year. Maybe I should have sniffed around and looked at the industry. Because, I've come to realise, once I start school overseas, and once I start paying more than $2K a semester (which is the going rate for a part time master's in a local uni) the clock starts ticking. And sometimes I wonder why I went to Snowy Hill uni when just about 90% of the stuff I learnt, I learnt through reading textbooks. It's not to say it wasn't a great experience but not as great as it could have been.

Looks like I still got a lot of thinking to do.

What I’ve learnt about PhDs.
1. It’s fairly amusing to be reading all the forums about graduate education. Edulix, Urch, Gradcafe. It’s very informative about how to prepare for graduate school.
2. I’ve believed that I have some of the qualities for graduate school. And I’ve tried to incorporate that in my admission essay. Intellectual depth and breadth. Tenacity. Curiosity. Creativity.
3. I chose my 3 letter writers as such: one would testify that I could study, another that I could teach, and a third, that I could work.
4. So many people think about PhDs as a waste of time that it’s scary. And people have accused the authorities of giving the misleading impression that a PhD is a much better prospect than it is. And even then, it’s ridiculously hard to get into a PhD program, especially in computer science.
5. When you are deciding whether or not to go into research, it’s not about enjoying the rewards of research, ie the sense of achievement that goes into writing an important paper or making an important discovery. What really matters is that you must like the day to day work itself: the long hours, the reading of endless papers, the grinding out results, the programming.

Well I thought – I formulated what I want to do – I want to be an inventor. Which is a broader category than a researcher.

A history in physical activity

2011-02-01T23:16:00.000+08:00

I was having a run at McRitchie the other day, and it occurred to me that I had started the long and slow physical decline that would continue for the rest of my life. It’s hardly edifying to know that everything’s downhill from now on. So I thought I’d think back to all the times when I pushed my body to physical exertions.

There was very little of it before I was 12. I knew that my father jogged a few times every week, and I used to marvel at him for doing so. But keeping fit was something that was quite foreign to me, and I thought that it involved a strength of will that I didn’t have.

There was this one incident, though, I was 8 and occasionally, we went to East Coast Park to cycle. During those days, it was a nice place, and the largest park in Singapore. (This was before it got over-commercialised, and before it got taken over by the homeless.) We were all curious about the milestones, so one day I rode the bicycle all the way to 0, which was probably around Tanjong Rhu. I could see the city skyline from there. (minus OUB centre, minus UOB centre, and a lot of other buildings that weren’t yet built). At that time, I didn’t know that Tanjong Rhu was going to feature again in this tale.

I wasn’t ever a sportsman. I was, and still am, physically clumsy. My sister was better at sports. She played softball for her primary school, and was a frenemy of a certain person called JK who will appear in this story again. When she was 12, she actually embarked on a school tour to Malaysia. It was something more adventurous than anything that I had experienced up to that point. My father was a farmer in his teens, and in adulthood he still had a pretty impressive set of biceps. In contrast, for myself, up till I was 12, my physical activity was limited to police and thieves during recess.

OK, there was swimming. I was a fast swimmer when I was 8, and I won a few medals at the local club. But that was as far as it went. I think I didn’t continue to become competitive, although it was always a form of exercise.

When I was 13, that was when my father decided to teach me how to do some long distance running. There were a few times when I didn’t manage to last the distance. I would start off fast, but there was no consideration about how long I could last. It took me a few times to get it right. And even though I did participate in the annual cross country runs with everybody else, it was probably not until I was 16 that I became comfortable with running on that McRitchie track.

What I do remember is the scout camps. When I was 14, I joined the scouts. It wasn’t my intention to join the scouts. But they made it a rule that everybody had to either join a sport or a uniformed group. In other words, something that is physically strenuous. Because my mother had been a girl guide, she thought that I should join scouts. The people who joined scouts were those who couldn't cut it in sports. You didn't join a sports ECA unless you had talent.

They told us that the scout camps were going to be tough. In fact they were a lot like military camps. And I didn’t really have the physical preparation for it. The first one took place in a school near Yio Chu Kang road. There were plenty of runs, plenty of push-ups. I don’t remember doing much scouting at all. And there was this run, I’ll never forget. We had to carry 5kg bags and run. I was dying. I remember having to cook our own meals using kerosene stoves, and making a complete hash of it. I remember that soft drinks were banned, so we just drank a lot of water. I found a bag of sugar, though, and I often stole spoonfuls from it. Disgusting, I know, but still…

I remembered, though, that this was around the time when my sister was having her back operation. She had scoliosis, and one of her shoulder blades jutted out like a camel. This may or may not have had something to do with how one of her legs was longer than the other. But that operation spelt the end of her being a sportsman. No more softball, no more squash, and no more running, except on dirt tracks (concrete’s too hard.) And she was lucky not to be in the 5% of cases in these operations where the people ended up as quadriplegics.

So as tough as that 3-4 day camp was for me, I thought about my sister who had it much harder. And I suppose the camp came to an end for me. I couldn’t get out soon enough.

Later that year, I went on an orienteering trip. We were supposed to run to 3 or 4 checkpoints, over a distance of around 10K. My legs gave out at the end, and I experienced such serious cramps for the first time: later on I was told that not only did I have to replenish myself with water, but also with salt. That was a good piece of knowledge to have.

There were other camps. There was a camp where we had to run all the way from the campfire of a sister school to East Coast Park, carrying 5 kg as well. We were dying as well. Just as well they let us off easy once we had gone to the beach. I remember running past the McDonald’s near the National stadium, thinking that it’s a nice place to hang out at night. I remember that I had just listened to David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” for the first time a few weeks earlier, and I was playing it to myself as the sun rose (I have an inbuilt walkman).

I actually recall the scout camp at the end of that year the most vividly, but that was no longer an introduction to physical fatigue.

A large portion of what physical training was about was preparation for national service. So much than when national service was over, I was thinking, “well what was all that fuss about?”

In the build up to national service, the main thing was to concentrate on passing the fitness test, so that I would not have to go in 6 weeks early, and so that I would actually have a vacation in between my “A” levels and the national service. I don’t remember much, but the pull ups were a main thing. The other station was the sit and reach, and because I didn’t have the flexibility, I actually grew my fingernails by 1 cm to make the cut.

The details of my national service are remarkably hazy. I think, once I’m past the age of 25, I can no longer look back on any part of my life with reliable clarity. First was the punishing basic military training. It was not as punishing as what it was 10 years before I went in, but it’s nowhere as soft as it was 10 years after. It was a mid period of a gradual softening.

I will most probably remember the mental stress of adjusting to life with people from vastly different backgrounds from my own. But the physical bit was punishing too: getting up early in the morning, going to bed late at night. No napping. The weather was always hot. The physical training was always tough but what made it even tougher was that your muscles were all aching at the end of the day, and you would still have to strain them even further.

There were the big 3 things we had to complete in order to pass basic military training, over an above the military stuff: the rifle range, the physical training and the standard obstacle course. I had height, which was a great advantage for the standard obstacle course, but I don’t know why I was one of the fastest in my platoon, in spite of not being particularly strong or a particularly good runner. I suppose I was pretty handy with the monkey bars, or I knew how to pace myself, or I was just good at running with a standard battle order.

There was the 24 km route march. It wasn’t particularly tough, and very few people dropped out. I admired the Muslims who had to endure that through Ramadan, but as I was to find out later on, exerting yourself on an empty stomach isn’t particularly tough.

It’s true that I was physically exerted during my national service. But it was never like what it is during my first scout camp, where I was – let’s say – a virgin to physical punishment. It was just a load getting heavier and heavier, but it was not traumatic.

The 3-4 weeks I had with an air defence unit were even tougher. It was a totally crappy system which was completely user- unfriendly. Deploying it involved moving a lot of heavy equipment around within 10 minutes. We did the drill over and over again, and there was a lot of sadistic punishment. Mercifully a horrendous but not quite horrendous injury ended my stay over there.

There was not much else that was really significant about my military training. Those 3-4 weeks were the worst of the lot. There was still some training in the school of infantry specialists to come, which I didn’t really enjoy. Especially one night where we were supposed to dig a trench in the middle of the night. But by that time it was mainly mental fatigue, it was about getting thoroughly sick and tired of the military life.

I also ended up back in air defence. Since there was so much emphasis on arm power, we did pull ups every morning. My maximum was 14 pull ups. Then after I left the army it quickly declined to 6. And now I’m fighting to make it stay at 4, or else I don’t pass my physical tests.

When I finished the 2 years and 4 months, it felt funny. Ever since I entered the scouts, there was this subtext – get yourself fit, otherwise you will suffer in national service. Almost everything had been geared up towards being able to manage national service. But all those years of preparation only really matters during your first 3 months of national service. After that, your body adapts, and you will cope, no matter what. (And if you don’t cope, you just get a long term injury and subsequently get rewarded with clerk work.)

After that was college. One of the things I wish I found out early in my college life, and not only halfway through the 3rd year, was that you just had to exercise 2-3 times a week. Otherwise, depression takes hold of you and housework doesn’t get done and homework doesn’t get done.

During the 2nd year, though, I fell in love. There was this week, I just wanted to go running every day. I did push ups at night. Maybe I just got that taste of endorphins and I just wanted more more more. But it didn’t amount to a steady regime yet. This “thou shalt exercise once or twice a week” was a commandment that I have stuck to for the last 10 years, although during the last year, it has faltered more than a few times.

For 5 years, a group of people in my office got together for basketball games. They didn't always start off as basketball games, there was a lot of soccer in the beginning. One of the players was my sister's old friend JK, who turned up as Sniper's friend's wife. I didn't have strength, and I didn't have skill. I was a fringe player at the best. But I knew how to read a game, and all those last minute blocks and crucial interventions did have their impact on a game. I figured that it was the last time I would ever have the opportunity to play ball. Basketball eventually won out over football when the numbers of that gang dwindled to the point that there were only 6 of us left.

For some reason I never bothered to play ball when I was in secondary school - probably couldn't get past my awkwardness. But it was good that I had the opportunity. Although that didn't stop me from deciding one day I had enough of Sniper sniping at me. I left that gang for good. I don't know how long they carried on after that. I thought that Sniper was too fussy about who was in that gang, otherwise there were a lot of people who were willing to join that bunch.

3 of the people in that gang were the Real Madrid of 3 on 3 basketball. They won every title in the club for 3 years in a row.

2-3 years ago, I made a go for the half marathon. There were a few people in my office who had done the marathon. Some did it 20 years ago, some did it recently, some did it many times, some did it only once. I didn't think the marathon was for me, so I did the half marathon. Later on, after succeeding, I began to seriously think about the full marathon, especially on the urging of my jogging partner. I promised myself that I would do it once: no more and no less.

The fact is, you can carry on running for an indefinitely long time as long as you don't get injured. After 30 km, your body runs out of fuel, but if you know how to properly replenish yourself, and if you can condition your body properly, you can keep on going after that. And you can keep on training for as long as you can so long as you don't get injured.

But in both the year of my half marathon, and my full marathon, I did get injured. 4 weeks before the half marathon, I got a very deep gash in my knee. And I missed 2 weeks of training. I still managed to go all the way. For the full marathon, I found out, to my horror, that I got injured quite often if I were to run for more than 20 km. I switched away from the McRitchie gravel track to the pavement of the streets, and that helped.

Anyway I've blogged all about this before, shortly after I finished that marathon. I suppose this would be the greatest and the last big bout of physical activity in my life. In a way it was full circle: my legs gave way around the 27-28km mark, at Tanjong Rhu where more than 20 years earlier, I had done my first long distance event by cycling 8km on a little boy's bike.

I think, after that, my physical fitness would go downhill. I think it already started going downhill while I was training for the marathon. I noticed that it was more tiring keeping late nights. There was a spring in my step that I ran the half marathon with, that was no longer there by the time I progressed to my full marathon.

I think back on talking to an old colleague of mine. He told me that he played a lot of football in his youth. I couldn't picture it. I suppose I have to always remind myself: all these physical feats you did as a young man will one day disappear.

Progression

2011-01-22T02:09:00.000+08:00

It wasn’t easy for me to grow into a teenager. I think it took a few years of struggle. But I’m sure I came into my own when I was 15. That was a great year. That year:

- I discovered a lot of great rock music
- I found my talents in writing and music
- I made a few very good friends
- I started being a proper philosopher. I think that the potential for deep thinking had always existed. I always knew the principle that behind an idea lay another deeper and greater idea, and you had to follow the trail and find them one by one.

I think the next great transition in my life was when I was 22. I became a kidult. That year:

- I developed a faculty in language that helped me become more articulate
- I had a great cyber-relationship. At least it was great while it lasted, because after that it was not great.
- I learnt to make peace with myself. At least for a while, up till then.
- I got interested in a lot of academic learning, especially the humanities. Economics, political science, sexual politics, complexity theory,

And regrettably, I don’t think I’ve moved on from there in a big way. For me to fully become an adult (and there’s not much time left)

- I have to learn how to manage my life (at least much better than I’m doing now)
- I have to learn how to manage my wealth (or at least whatever that word means in my context)
- I have to mingle among adults and do stuff that adults think is cool.
- I have to enjoy at least one expensive hobby. Otherwise running around like a headless chicken trying to grab every dollar you can find will be exposed as a great sham.

Problem is, a lot of those adult things don’t make sense. Enjoying an expensive bag, enjoying expensive clothes – I don’t mind dressing up elegantly but that’s a matter of artistic taste. Buying something expensive – that’s the kind of insanity that Thorsten Veblen had so much contempt for when he wrote his “Theory of the Leisure Class”.

A lot of teenage life made a lot more sense. I enjoy rock music, I enjoy philosophising. I enjoy learning new things. But you could come to

Then again a lot of adulthood makes sense. How to progress from being a keen observer of life to an active participant in it. How to play a game and win. How to raise kids. How to keep on going even when you’re tired.

Who I am today is still the legacy of my college years. The things I learnt or picked up during those years. To be sure, they were turbulent, problematic times. But they were also some of the best years of my life.

1. Knowledge is fun
2. Movies
3. Jazz
4. Travelling
5. Groceries and housework
6. Exercise
7. Psychology
8. Slow and steady
9. CD Trading

Think I better explain # 8. I decided that it was best to live life at a more leisurely pace, but to adopt a slow and steady. I decided not to give myself too much pressure to do things, but to keep on pushing steadily and not to worry as long as things moved forward always.

It was a good idea, but it didn't always work.

2010

2011-01-16T17:44:00.000+08:00

Another year is almost over. This has been an interesting year. I had called 2008 the end of long roads, and 2009 a new beginning. This year? In some ways it’s special, and in other ways it’s ordinary.

Computer Science

I was always going to do grad school. When I graduated, around that time I had a dream. I dreamt that I was starting school again the next year. I supposed that I always saw myself in grad school.

This is a year that’s crucial to my plans. Somewhere in the middle of 2008, I decided that I was going to do grad school. Sometimes I’m wondering why I didn’t do all these things one year ago. I’m guessing that I was giving myself a lot of time to study. Maybe I really needed all that time to study computer science. Or maybe I didn’t. I don’t know. Now that I’ve learnt all the stuff I learnt, I’m wondering if I took too much time. I’m also wondering – spending 1.5 years to do a marathon – if that was too much time.

I'm also thinking about whether I spent too much time on computer science because I think maybe I should have done more coding as well.

The main thing was the computer science subject GRE. That basically asks you a lot of stuff that you may or may not know if you have a computer science bachelor. What I know is maybe 1/3 of that. There was a lot of trotting around with heavy books on weekends, spending 2 hrs going through shit boring stuff. I put up with that for a long time.

Well, going through the marathon was another one of those experiences – you just kept on going, you didn’t know how much was enough. And when you come to the end, you know.

Some people I knew were trying to get back into PhD programs. Some succeeded, some didn’t. I’ll start a master’s first, and if I like it, a PhD will be next. This is what people who have done PhDs (some of whom distinctly underwhelmed by the experience) have told me.

There was a lot of thinking about what college really means. Thinking about what an IT career really means. What a research career really means. Some talking to people. Some reading about other peoples’ experiences of postgrad life. Some reading up on the subject matter of the intended field of study. Maybe not enough reading up on real papers? A lot of twisting your hands and wondering if people are going to write letters. Wondering whether exams are going to turn out alright.

As of now, I’ve been accepted into 1 school. The applications for 4 other schools are already ready to submit. I’m 90% there. By March I will know about the results.

Grandmother
Things came to a head this year. I’m sorry to say that I should have been more attentive to her. All those afternoons that I spent studying / reading instead of being there for her – I could have spent some of that time trying to get her fit. Not one of my prouder moments.

She was in and out of the hospital a few times. If she had been keeping herself fit, this would most likely not have happened. As it were, she’s rotting away. This is not entirely my fault, because I’m only her grandson, and there is another generation between her and me.

It was very depressing at one point. Only 6 years ago, she was still doing housework. Only 3 years ago, she was reasonably OK, just a little unsteady on her feet. This year, it was scary to watch her eat, knowing that some of it would inevitably be thrown back up. There was the constant pain and discomfort. But thankfully things are much better this year.

Family
It’s very ugly when people criticise their parents. I see people slag off their parents on Facebook, even when they’re living under the same roof as them. It’s not pretty. But I’m sure that their parents deserve it. Well at least I believe that most of the time there is truth to the complaints.

Still, one good thing this year is that I’m winding down the war I’ve had with my mother for way too long. What originally started with my intention to kick her in the ass so that she can wake up her idea has tragically spun out of control. Now we are moving towards normalcy.

Music
I started this year thinking that maybe I would play in a band as a hobby. Turns out that the outlay in time would be tremendous. At one point, I was thinking, I have a schedule for my computer science stuff, but not for my music. I couldn’t let the music sidetrack my computer science stuff.

On the other hand, I went back to cash converters. I bought bagfuls of CDs. I hadn’t bought CDs for such a long time. There was so much to discover, that I had missed out on. There was a remarkable variety to be had for less than $10 a piece. Very often, 2nd hand CDs are cheaper than legal downloads. And better, unless you don’t want to have extra clutter around the house. Can you believe – I must have bought hundreds of CDs this year.

Then there were some that I intended to just rip and sell off. I probably sold about 50? I’ll set a deadline, and if by then I haven’t gotten rid of those, I’ll just sell then back to the 2nd hand dealers.

Reading
Ever since graduation, reading has been a great hobby of mine. I had to do a great amount of reading in school. It was work for me. I didn’t get used to it. I liked knowledge. I liked thinking, but I didn’t like reading, at first. Something like you like having a sexy body but you don’t like going to a gym.

But this “I like reading whatever book comes into my hand” is far too indulgent and I managed to cut down on it.

Diversions
There were 3 diversions. I suppose they led to nowhere, but interesting nevertheless. Cat Woman, Remedial training and the World Cup. Well, a 1st time winner has won the world cup, and that has traditionally been a good omen for me.

Work
I have taken my eye off the ball a few times. Bummer about that one.

Not an excellent year, not a terrible year either. What it amounts to is that I have come to the age where – if you’re not going forward, you’re just going backwards. I said before that in 1990 and 2000 I was given a taste of what the future would be like. Now – things are busier, a little less care free. I feel a little more tired.

McDonald's and US Interstates

2011-01-07T23:06:00.000+08:00

When I was in JC, they closed down one of the coffee shops in the block near the MRT. They replaced it with a McDonald’s.

I think that was one of the earlier McDonald’s that wasn’t in a town centre. I was like, “What? They’re raiding the coffee shops as well!”

It was 10 years later that I actually went into that McD’s for the first time. One of my earliest sojourns inside, it was my one date with Water Girl where she contrived to make me wait for more than 30 mins. But I started noticing that it’s quite a homely place.

And I think this is something that I picked up while in uni. I just felt like I wanted to have some place to park my ass and take in 2-3 hours of reading. I think I got that good feeling about doing that because it used to mean that I would be making progress on my books instead of waiting nervously for deadlines to come and eat me up. It satisfied my ideal of having an ever-expanding brain.

I discovered the McD’s at off-peak hours are excellent for this kind of activity.

I used to really enjoy this mode of activity, and I would indulge in it every weekend. I could tell myself that I was doing things I wanted to do in life and was good for me (up to a point, it was not wrong, but I’ve reached that point quite some time ago).

When McD’s became a 24 hour joint, it was even better. I would pop down there at 2 in the morning, have either half or the whole place to myself, and polish off maybe another 50 pages. I remember doing that every week at one point. Driving to a different 24 hour place and parking your ass there for 2-3 hours.

I remember that there used to be problems with vagrants. You would have a few old and haggard people just sitting in that place. I’m guessing it’s not often that they enjoy an air-conditioned, clean and green place. Some crazy old woman would just look around for unused napkins left behind by diners, and collect as many as she could. Another would just snore there for hours. There was this drunk guy who was sweet talking a middle aged woman with very low self-esteem. Eventually they were tired of calling the police so often, and instead they would close the Al Fresco section right before midnight. That way they would eject any trouble-maker from the inside and he couldn’t continue to hang out at the outdoors section.

There were some older McD’s, and they harked back to a time when McD’s was considered “high class” food (not anymore) and their restaurants were either very spacious, or comfortable. I think during the 80s it was actually fashionable to dress up like a punk and hang out there. They renovated quite a few McD’s restaurants and changed the dominant colour to orange so that it looks like a warmer place.

There were a few McD’s which were not changed. One of those was in the Toa Payoh Cinema. Another in Clementi central. A third in Bukit Merah central. All 3 have since closed down for various reasons. But the Bukit Merah central one was my favourite for a long time because it was so damn spacious.

They did a good job of making McD’s into a homely environment – that is, during the hours that it wasn’t positively crawling with people. It wasn’t such a bad thing that McD’s were replacing a few kopitiams. They couldn’t replace all the kopitiams, for one, and even many of the kopitiams and hawker centres, with the easy-to-clean formica tops and heavy plastic chairs were beginning to resemble the McD’s a little more. McD’s has infiltrated the HDB landscape because it managed to fit in so well.

It used to be a favourite activity for me: a café, an ice cream parlour, a McD’s or a bus. Sit down and read. Few hours (and I partially kidded myself those were productive hours) pass. Even a kopi-tiam, when an EPL match is going on. On my 30th birthday, I went to the Coffee Bean in front of Borders, ordered an all-day breakfast, and read there for an hour. That was my idea of fun. It was what fun was in my 20s.

It’s just as well that the Coffee Bean is gone. (Now replaced by a Coffee Club). When things are gone, it just means to me that a big mode of living is gone as well.

Even during that trans-continent road trip with my sis 2 years back – I would be staying in Motel 6s across the country because they were one of the cheapest and yet reliable places. Those places were rest stops on the great highway. There would sometimes be a 24 hour eatery nearby so that you could go and clog up your arteries at any given time of the day. Sometimes in the middle of the night I would sneak out and go read a book there for an hour. Not surprisingly this was during the high tide of my café era. It’s usually a bad decision to stay up because driving the next day would be a little more woozy and dangerous, so I only did that twice. But it does occur to me that those places are rest stops on the great highway of life.

And sometimes I wonder – when you’re travelling, 75% of the time you’re seeing the road. There’s nothing really beautiful or meaningful about roads. You just go through them to get from point A to point B. The boredom and tedium gradually breaks your spirit. At the end of the day, when you asked yourself, “did you enjoy the ride?” the answer is usually “ho hum”. Creature comforts only make the unbearable less so.

So when I think back upon that year of the end of 4 roads, I wonder, am I treating life as though it were some long road, some meaningless midpoint between point A (birth) and point B (death)?

Shady Puzzle Walkthrough

2010-12-31T22:36:00.000+08:00

There's a new online game that I first came across while reading MyPaper. You can find the website here.

Be careful because that game is very addictive. Normally when I meet games like this I try to just plunge into it for 3-4 days in a row, playing it for 6 hours a day, before I get sick of it, and then it doesn't bother me again.

When I Google it the autocomplete has "shady puzzle walkthrough" on it, so I suppose some people out there are thinking about how to solve this thing. Well basically if you can't solve the puzzle, you shouldn't be trying to solve it. (Then again, if you have already figured out how to solve the puzzle you shouldn't be trying to solve it either) But I think I should share what I learnt.

In this account, rows will be numbered 1 to 8 from top to bottom. Similarly, column 1 is the leftmost, and column 8 will be the rightmost. I will usually consider 1 column / 1 row at the time. So the 4th square of the column will be the 4th from the top, the 3rd square of the row will be 3rd from the left. etc etc etc.

This is the puzzle we'll be solving.

First fill in all those that you can deduce immediately.

Row 5 (3,1,2) is a giveaway.

For row 3 (4,1), the leftmost position of the 1 is starting at square 1. Therefore the leftmost possible position of the 4 is starting at square 3. The rightmost position of the 4 is starting at square 5. In any case, squares 5 and 6 are shaded. So put that in.

Same logic for rows 8 and 2. Same logic for column 1.

Let’s call this the Law of Locus Invariance, ie whether you slide a large block to the left or right, there are always certain squares that are covered by the block. Therefore large blocks are your friend.

The second principle is that if you have filled in a square at the edge, then it is to your advantage. You can deduce the position of the entire block from that square. Look at row 2: the leftmost square has been filled in. Therefore the 2 is all the way to the left. Then fill in the block, and put in 1 blank for good measure. In the same way, you would have done the same for the bottom most squares for columns 6 and 7.

I’ll call this the Law of the edge.

In column 6, you would have deduced the position of the 4 long block. So mark it in. Notice that this means that in row 4 (1,1), there is a square marked in. It’s obvious that the square is a 1 long block. So mark in the blanks. Similarly, in column 5, the block from row 2 to 3 is the “2” of the “2,3”. So mark in the blanks.

This is a different version of the law of the edge. Always mark in the margins of completed blocks with blanks. They will be useful.

Another more subtle application of the law of the margin: look at column 2 (2,2): rows 2 and 5 are marked in. Are they in the same block? No, because none of the blocks are 3 long or more. So they are part of 2 different 2 blocks. Because the bottom most block will never be as low as rows 7 or 8, you can blank those rows out.

Be careful when you are trying to guess which block a filled in square belongs to. Look at row 1 (2,1,1). Square at column 6 is shaded in. Does it belong to the right “1” or the centre “1”? You don’t know. The only thing you know, from counting your squares, is that it doesn’t belong to the “2”. Do not make any hasty conclusions. But you do know that it is part of a 1, so you can blank out the margins.

Fill in column 7 because you know that row 1 is blank.

After this, there’s a lot to be deduced from counting your blocks. Look at row 6. Squares 6 and 7 are blank. There are only 2 blocks in that row, so square 8 is also blank. So your (2,2) fits just nicely into the first 5 squares. Fill that in.

Look at column 1. From block counting, squares 5 and 6 are part of the middle “2”. And therefore square 8 is the “1”.

For column 3, the “2” must be squares 7 and 8. Fill them in, and put in the blanks at the margin. For column 5, you know where your 2 and 3 is, so fill that in. You now have enough information to complete rows 7 and 8. In column 8, you have filled in both the “1”s, so the 2 is in squares 1 to 3. Use the law of invariant locus to fill in square 2.

Finish off row 2 and row 4. Then deduce that for row 3, the “4” is squares 5 to 8. Then finish column 8.

Finish row 1. Then use the law of the edge to finish columns 1 and 2. Then complete column 3. Then we have solved the puzzle by logical deduction alone without any need to do trial and error.

What happens when none of the techniques used (locus invariance, law of edge, block counting) can get you any further? Then you will have to use trial and error. What I do is to select a strategic square to guess. Something, that when filled in or blanked out will lead to a whole chain of deductions. And if I meet with a contradiction, then I know that my initial guess was wrong, I go back to the beginning with the additional info of what that square was. (ie if I guessed the square was black and I’m wrong, I now know that it’s white.)

The other way - and this is often what I do when the board is very sparse (ie very few black squares). I just play around with strips of paper (or drag shaded squares around on MS Excel). I can play columns and rows. ie I drag blocks left and right along the rows, and try to make it such that it agrees with the requirements stated on the columns. Then there's a lot of trial and error involved, but much lesser calculation and logic.

Suzuki / Tiger Cups

2010-12-29T01:04:00.005+08:00

Football in Southeast Asia is a funny thing. Asia, as we all know, are the minnows of football in the world. And Southeast Asia are the minnows of Asia. We aren’t as good as Northeast Asia, where Japan and South Korea always take their places in the World Cup. We aren’t as good as the teams in the Middle East. We probably aren’t even as good as the ones in Central Asian countries , you know, the –stans.

But people in this region are football crazy. The standards are crap, the referees are probably corrupt, the players are probably corrupt. But everybody loves it. There’s probably nowhere else in the world that you can have 55,000 people turn up every week for extremely mediocre football.

People still remember the good old days of the Malaysia Cup. The win in 1994 was bittersweet. Singapore lost the finals in 1990 to Kedah, and in 1993, again, to Kedah. (I hate Kedah!!!). So in 1994, it was the first win in 14 years. Before it got booted out of the competition. (Now I don’t know what the hell is going on with the Malaysia Cup because apparently teams like Brunei and Kelantan have won the prize).

Now, the S-league has patently failed to live up to expectations. It was too much for every small town in Singapore to have its own club. Big cities, London aside, tend to have 2 or 3. It didn’t make sense to have a league where all the teams were in the same city. The atmosphere was gone.

But the Tiger Cup brought back some of the atmosphere. One thing about this tournament – it’s probably not very important, but routinely a lot of interesting things take place.

I first got interested in the Tiger / Suzuki Cup in 1998. I was in college, but I heard that Singapore, most improbably won the second Tiger Cup. Singapore were supposed to be a team in decline. Even in the days of the Malaysia Cup, Singapore was always second to Selangor, which was a state team. Furthermore, the coach at that time, Barry Whitbread was routinely criticised for being ultra-defensive, as opposed to the attractive, free flowing football we all enjoyed under Douglas Moore for that one unforgettable 1994 season.

That tournament was held in Vietnam. Singapore and Vietnam had qualified from their group, and Singapore had topped the group. Thailand and Malaysia were both trying to avoid winning the match and meeting Vietnam. Both had already qualified, and were playing their last match against each other! So we had this spectacle where both teams tried to lose that match. In the end, that match was decided by an own goal.

In any case, for Malaysia and Thailand, it didn’t matter who played which semi-final, because they both got knocked out.

Singapore were the underdogs to win the final, because they were the away team. And I think they were on the back foot a lot of the time, but they scored a fluke goal – a corner kick hit the back of R Sasikumar and it went in.

The tournament in 2002 was entirely forgettable for Singapore. Singapore were hosting the tournament, and they had a coach who was on the staff of the Denmark team which won the Euros in 1992. Unfortunately he was a shit coach. Singapore got stuffed 4-0 by the Malaysians in Kallang stadium. It was the most shameful experiences in living memory. (Although Lim Tong Hai’s 2 own goals against Myanmar in 1993 takes some beating).

We didn’t have a lot of expectations for 2004. But that was a tournament that changed everything. I only sat up and took notice when Singapore qualified for the semis. We knew that anything could happen after that, because you just had to play 2 teams.

The first leg against Myanmar was actually held in Kuala Lumpur because I think they didn’t have a place in Myanmar to host the match. It went 4-3 Singapore’s way. As if that wasn’t exciting enough, the return match was extremely dramatic.

Kallang’s pitch was waterlogged, but the match went on anyhow. In the mudbath, Myanmar went 2-0 up, 1 goal ahead on aggregate. Noh Alam Shah had a legitimate goal disallowed. Then 1 Myanmar player got sent off. Then another Myanmar player scored an own goal, levelling the aggregate score.

Then with minutes to spare, Singapore got a penalty. The Myanmar player conceding a penalty got sent off for a second yellow. There was a melee, during which Singaporeans and Myanmese had to be pulled apart from each other. Then a Myanmese kicked some mud in the referee’s direction. He got sent off for his troubles. To top it all off, Indra Sadan Daud missed the penalty! But it’s OK, Singapore started the extra time with a THREE MAN advantage, and scored 2 goals to get to the finals. Not surprisingly, afterwards there were some skirmishes between fans of both sides.

I found a commemorative VCD of this tournament at a cheap sale. I have kept it ever since. I’m recalling this match from watching that VCD but I also watched it live at that time and it made a big impression on me.

There was a squaring off between Raddy Avramovich and the Indonesian coach, Peter Withe. They had played each other before in the English league: Withe for Aston Villa and Avramovich for Norwich.

The first leg of the finals was to be held at Indonesia’s Senayan stadium. It was described as a cauldron. 70,000 fans screaming right out at you. However Indonesia played with 4 strikers, probably intending to score a lot of early goals, but they ended up conceding early and fortunately for Singapore, lousy tactics cost Indonesia the cup. Fortunately because it was quite a strong Indonesian side.

But there was a taint of doping involved in our wins. Agu Casmir was a foreigner playing in the S-league, and he was given a Singaporean citizenship (something I paid for with 2.5 years of national service). There was also Itimi Dickson. And these guys weren’t the first Singaporean foreigners to play for the Lions – there was also Engmar Gonclaves who unfortunately wasn’t able to reproduce his S-league form for the national side. Well 2 was not so bad for the 2004 side. In 2007, we added Shi Jiayi, Mustafic Fahrudin and Precious Emuejeraye.

You could say that all these additions were significant because Singapore relied on being more physical and being better organised than the opponents, who were often faster and more skilful. Still, it didn’t hurt our pride that the stars of the 2004 and 2007 wins were real Singaporeans: Daniel Bennett, Noh Alam Shah and Lionel Lewis.

In 2007, the final was tainted by Singapore being awarded a penalty kick that Thailand disputed. I was watching that match, thinking at that time that it was the last major football match to be hosted in the Kallang stadium. (I was wrong). And right before my eyes, Thailand staged a walk-off protest. According to the wiki article, Singapore also had a goal unfairly chalked offside.

In 2008, I watched the Singapore-Vietnam semi-final at the Kallang Stadium. This time, it really was the last match that was played there. Singapore attacked, and attacked and attacked, and the ball refused to go in. Then Vietnam had 1 counter-attack and they scored. After the match, there was a fight between Singaporeans and the Vietnamese, and a few people were injured. Even during the match, the Singaporeans and the Vietnamese were throwing stuff at each other.

In this edition of the Suzuki cup, Singapore exited the tournament, capping a miserable year for Singapore football. Singapore failed to qualify for the Asian Football Championship, losing a crucial match to Jordan. Then there was that infamous free for all between Beijing Guoan and the Young Lions, which was basically 2 youth teams. Then there was that exodus of our national players to the Indonesian league, which paid much better than our S-league. Then there was FC Etoile winning the S-league, the first time that a foreign team won the S-league.

Singapore were supposed to qualify. It was supposed to be an easy group to qualify from. But they only drew the game with the Philippines. Granted, this was an unusually strong Philippines team which qualified for the semi-finals. Then there was the ignominy of having to win the Burmese team from behind. And after that, losing by the odd goal to our bogey team, Vietnam.

So it may have been weird for Philippines to win the defending champions Vietnam to qualify, but a lot of people were rooting for them. And after Malaysia was trashed 5-1 by Indonesia most didn’t expect them to qualify, let alone reach the final and stand on the brink of the cup after winning 3-0 in Kuala Lumpur.

I suppose if that were to happen, the final score would be Singapore and Thailand 3 each, Vietnam and Malaysia 1 each. I think that this prize was destined to be shared between these 5 countries (Indonesia will get their turn one day). But I also hope that Singapore will win it again soon.

As usual, there was another talking point because there was trouble at the first leg final match . Apparently some fans were caught pointing lasers at the Indonesians. Seems like it is very difficult to hold a Suzuki cup where nothing ever happens.

Meleka

2010-12-20T22:40:00.003+08:00

Go North Young Man
OK, my father in his “welcome to Malaysia” introduction sequence has arranged a family vacation to Meleka, which is nominally a nice place. It’s a family vacation, except that my grandmother is in no shape to travel, and my sister is in California. Well since I’m on the topic of “Go North Young Man” he tells me that he reads somewhere – you shouldn’t think of JB as a foreign country, because it’s not. JB is actually going to be part of the Greater Singapore metropolitan area. Singapore the city is about to become larger than Singapore the country. JB is around 3-4 times the size of Singapore. Singapore will expand to JB, just as Tokyo has expanded to Kawasaki and Yokohama. Or NYC has expanded to Jersey City. Eventually this whole greater Singapore metropolitan area will have 15 million people, of which 6 million are on our island. Think about that.

It was jammed on the causeway when we crossed it going into JB. On the other side of the road are busloads of JB suckers who can’t wait to get their asses creamed by our integrated resorts. Such great neighbours are we.

North South highway
I drove there. Yes, it’s not for the faint hearted but you know I’m not. Still, there were 1 or 2 episodes with him screaming at how I cut into somebody’s lane too near to the vehicle in front. The first intimidating sign board is the speed limit – 110 km/h.

I see the place littered with skid marks of people doing stupendously idiotic things. Skid marks 50 metres long. Skid marks of cars going into the ditch. Going straight into a pole. There are 2 lanes in the JB – Meleka stretch. Unfortunately I got into big trouble because I drive too fast for the left lane and too slowly for the right one. There are people who come up to you and tailgate you 2 metres behind your ass when they’re not happy with the speed at which you’re driving. They flash their headlights at you. I’ve been tempted to slam on the brakes and start a pileup but you know, my parents are in the car too.

Traffic Jams / Navigation
It was pretty crowded. I put that down to the school holidays. Nearly half of the cars have Singapore license plates. When we got to the highway that went into Meleka, the Ayer Keroh highway was flooded with traffic going into Meleka.

My father who last visited Meleka 12 years ago (with us, as usual) notes that the traffic has become somewhat of a problem. You don’t normally think of it that way in a city that is supposed to be a rustic historic area but there you are. As noted in my Lonely Planet (bought in a cheap sale 7 years ago and only used now) Meleka’s road system is a nightmare, but it’s like any other town built in the days of horses and carriages.

It was difficult trying to figure out what road names are, since Singaporeans are spoilt by how well and clearly Singapore roads are marked. But luckily the hotel we stayed in put up plenty of signs that brought us there. It was also helpful that it was a in a stretch of clear land and you could see it from afar. But since so many of Meleka’s streets are one way, you had to make one big round to get there. It was just as well that our hotel was on the edge of central Meleka, nearer the road leading in from the NS highway. Because we didn’t have to negotiate that nightmare of that one spinal road leading down to the Red Dutch Church.

It is difficult to find places based on their addresses. It’s not like Singapore or other places where you have the name of the street, and everything is numbered from 1 to dunno what. All the maps come with landmarks drawn on them to help you figure it out. There was a lot of grumbling (mostly from my mother) and some getting lost before I located the Peranakan restaurants that we were looking for. They are Auntie Lee’s and Mako’s. Go and look for them, unless you’re vegetarian (in Peranakan cuisine, the only thing that’s vegetarian is the rice because there’s shrimp or stock everywhere). And good luck. However owing to my superior navigation skills we always found our way there in the end.

You want a historical overview of Meleka? Go and read your Lonely planet from the library.

Peranakan food
I’m often a little embarrassed when I bring people to Peranakan restaurants, because very often the food just doesn’t measure up. When I went to the authentic ones in Meleka I could taste the difference. There’s all the standard stuff: assam fish, sambal kang kong, tofu with tau choir, ayam buah keluak, 4 corner beans, claypot this, claypot that.

And people know the good stuff: more than half of the customers in those places were Singaporean. They were all packed during the weekends, and you had to haggle your way in if you were a small party without reservations. On our first night at Auntie Lee's, the head waitress was a scatterbrain whose most important priority was whoever happened to have her attention at that time. We asked her, you think we could pop over for Monday lunch? She said no problem. On Monday, we came early for lunch - not that early because my mother insisted on stretching her shopping trip to Jusco for longer than what we allowed her, but the travelling there was short because we knew better now than to travel through the centre. So we went in, and the waitress (a different one this time) said, no we don't take any customers today because we have 3 or 4 small groups from tourist companies. Of course, we were completely not surprised at being played out. Then my father sat her down and asked her if we could have a few simpler dishes. She said, OK whatever, so we managed to get our other peranakan meal.

There’s just a great amount of effort that goes into making all this food and it’s hard to get all this stuff done – with all that work you might as well be making gourmet food and making your sucker customers pay through their noses for it.

Satay steamboat
One of the other places we heard about was a steamboat, where instead of cooking stuff in steamboats, we cooked them in satay sauce. Naturally that stuff was recycled over and over again and it could get a little icky. I navigated the way there, but I made my parents walk for 5 minutes against 1 way traffic, just so that we didn't have to make 1 big round through obscene levels of traffic.

The food was OK, not too bad. Not as fantastic as Peranakan food, but what could ever be? I must say that the teenage waitresses and short skirts were a definite draw.

Jonker Street (aka Jalan Hang Jebat)
This is a historic street with all those old Peranakan shophouses. Then we went into one of the more famous eating places (number 88) to try their chendol. (note: every chendol seller in Jonker Street sells the best chendol in the world. Just like the one on the street in Penang that also sells the best chendol in the world. Go figure.) You wouldn’t think much of those terrace houses, looking from the front. Then we went to the toilet at the back, and then my father discovered: wow this is one of those famous Peranakan houses that he heard so much about. It’s 7 rooms deep! I suppose that’s the way that people built houses 300 years ago.

Behind that street were 3 places of worship, another great testament to racial harmony in Malaysia (or rather the lack of serious racial disharmony): a mosque, an Indian temple and a Chinese temple, all side by side. That Chinese temple is also the oldest in Malaysia, and it’s 350 years old.

It’s a fairly good night market with plenty of special Malaysian pantries, peranakan kueh. All the dialect clans are there (Teochew, Hokkien, Hainanese, etc. True to form, the Hokkien one is the flashiest).

Markota parade
There was a big shopping centre that was built on reclaimed land, near the city centre. Kinda like Parkway Parade in Singapore. It’s not exactly crawling with people, so that’s nice. It’s nice to visit all these places like Bangkok, Meleka, Penang because they remind you of what a nice place Singapore used to be in the 90s.

We parked somewhere and disappeared into the mall for a few hours. Then we came out and found a RM 100 fine on our windshield because we hadn’t bothered to

EPL
I thought that it would be a boon that we could watch EPL in the room since we had ESPN. I stayed up on Sunday, waiting for Blackpool - Tottenham to begin. It never did. I later found out why - the match was cancelled due to the snow. Same for Chelsea - Man U. The only match I caught was Sunderland - Bolton, and one spectacular Craig Gordon save aside, there was nothing interesting.

Parking fine
We decided to pay the fine at the Sentral bus terminal. It’s conveniently located at the outskirts of the city centre, 10 mins drive away from the hotel. 5 mins if you didn’t have to drive the big rounds mandated by the fucking one way system. We met with a monstrously corpulent guy at the counter. My mother couldn’t figure out if the sign outside said “Open” or “closed”. That guy laughed and said, “you can’t understand basic Malay? You must be a Singaporean.”

As we waited for the fine clerk to make his leisurely way in, he asked us which part of Singapore we stayed in. He lived in Bukit Merah and worked in the port as a crane operator, earning $3K + a month, which was big money in the 1970s. Unfortunately his fucking stupid agent forgot to renew his work permit, and he got thrown into jail and deported to Malaysia. He said that he’s still bloody sore about that experience. One of the more interesting things he told me is that Bukit Merah used to be a gangster hangout during those days. That’s interesting. But I suppose ports used to be operated by gangs.

Car
My father’s buying a car in Malaysia. Apparently, as part of his package to become a permanent resident in Malaysia he gets to buy a Volvo for S$40K. Yes, you heard it right. How come most Singaporeans don’t know this? Because they are fucking sheep who insist on clinging to their preconceived notions of what Malaysia is like. (Granted – you can never drive that car into Singapore if you’re a Singaporean. But still…)

Second link
On the way home, I wrote a song. Rather, I took another music idea that was in my head since the mid-90s and completed it. That's the perfect combination, the inspiration of youth and the wisdom of experience. I'm half relieved because I haven't written a song in a long time, but then again, it's not as good as my earlier stuff.

My father decided to take the AYE back from the second link. He would get off from Normanton Park and take the Queensway / Farrer / Adam / Lornie way to Toa Payoh. The plan worked a treat, and we avoided the congestion at the PIE. Just as he was about to gloat, we bumped into a freaking huge congestion at the Farrer Road flyover. It was a jam that stretched for 5km. In hindsight, we should have bailed out of Adam Road by taking the PIE to Toa Payoh but we realised that way too late.

Bumper Year

2010-12-16T23:32:00.002+08:00

I think this might have been a bumper year for me when it comes to going back to camp. I went back to the SAF for 5 different things, as opposed to 2009, when that figure was 1, for a 1 day briefing.

1. Getting charged for not taking my IPPT for 1 year (somehow that year I didn't have any in camp training.)
2. Going to a high key ICT, where I had the chance to avoid remedial training if I passed my IPPT (I didn't)
3. Remedial training.
4. A low key ICT (rifle range actually)
5. A stupid half a day briefing only for the CEO to do his fucking peacock strut
6. An exam where we had to learn how to repair equipment.

I thought it was interesting, since it's entirely possible that for the next few years I might not have to go back to camp.

Infinite Loop

2010-12-11T23:25:00.002+08:00

Had a very strange encounter. I was leaving the library, having just borrowed a book. Seems like a usual way for sieteocho to spend his weekend. Then the alarm sounded when I walked through the gantry. I looked at my receipt for the # or the @ next to the book title that indicated that the RFID hadn’t been deactivated. But there was none. I handed the book to the librarian who checked it and found that it was all right. She then asked me if I had another book.

I had a book that I bought from the library sale in my haversack, so I handed it to her. She was taking a long time in deactivating the book, and after that I realised that she had been trying and failing to look it up in the system. Obviously it’s not there anymore. I called out to her, and she didn’t respond or look up. She even tried to log on to her colleague’s computer to retrieve the record. Eventually I had to shout at her, and she looked around.

I told her that it’s a library book sale book, which is why she couldn’t find it in the system. Then I asked her how come she didn’t respond to me. She said, “I heard you. I thought you were talking on the phone.” I said, I couldn’t have been saying “hello” 5 times to somebody on a phone, could I? I couldn’t have been using a phone in a library, could I? This had to be the first time I raised my voice in a library and the nearest librarian didn’t tell me to shut up. All you had to do was to turn your head. She said, “you should have called ‘hello miss’ or something like that”. I said, “and that means that I’m not on the phone?”

Then I asked her, “why did you try to look up that book in the system even though you failed over and over again?” She said, “I was just doing my job”. I was about to spit out, “using your brains is your job too isn’t it?” when I realised that she was totally cross with me, just as I was totally irritated at her for being an idiot. I was so totally put off by her stupid explanations that I didn’t realise that she had entered into siege mentality. You try to help somebody but not only does she not want to be helped, but she gets locked into this “everybody’s against me” mode. What could I do? I just took my book and walked out.

The point of this post is not about what an idiot she was. (Well actually it is). But it’s more about how people get trapped into unproductive modes of behaviour, trying something over and over again, and failing. Like one of those old floppy disks that try and fail over and over again to read a damaged disk. It’s one of those modes of behaviour that are like train wrecks, that are so horrid and fascinating at the same time you just have to keep watching. Let’s just look at the infinite loops that have taken place.

1. Librarian scans the book over and over again, looking for a record which isn’t there. All the while she thinks there is something wrong with the computer system.
2. Librarian hears somebody calling out “hello, hello” and keeps on telling herself that nobody’s calling her.
3. Sieteocho tries to explain to the librarian what’s gone wrong but librarian keeps on being defensive, as though he were nitpicking instead of trying to find out what went wrong.

Well that was incredibly thick behaviour. Maybe she’s not dumb but the behaviour certainly was. I’m a Singaporean so I know as well as anybody that our educational system produces mindless robots. And because I see mindless robots all the time I just get very pissed off about it. I also get pissed off by the fact that mindless robots run our little red dot.

First there is a failure of imagination. Failure of imagination to realise that a.) maybe there is a good reason why the book is not in your database even though it looks and feels like a library book. b.) maybe the guy behind is calling you for a reason that has something to do with a.) and c.) maybe the guy is not trying to censure you, maybe you aren’t having an argument but a post mortem.

There is something really autistic in all this, and I treat this as a cautionary tale, because I know that sometimes I get into my infinite loops every once in a while. And they are extremely destructive, because everybody knows that infinite loops – those that are not designed to be as such, that is – are extremely destructive, because everybody knows that infinite loops – those that are not designed to be as such, that is – are extremely destructive, because everybody knows that infinite loops – those that are not designed to be as such, that is – are extremely destructive, because they just waste a lot of your time and energy for nothing.

It goes down to this – the topical catch phrase at the moment – madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same result. I was thinking to myself as I left the library, what I just saw bordered on madness. Well it takes a person who's on top of things to recognise that as madness, and you shouldn't be too hasty to criticise people who do things on the spur of the moment. But all the same, something mad about that. Except – how do we call and exit loop or a break? I suppose that takes training and alertness.

Operations research and its discontents 2

2010-12-04T12:53:00.001+08:00

Man versus machine
The most unsatisfactory aspect of operations research is that the activity of man is reduced to maths equations. To be sure, other social sciences also do this: like economics. Therefore I never completely liked economics either.

A big problem with economics has been the homo econimus assumption. Greedy and self-interested optimisers is a fairly good description of man, since we see from the collapse of communism that relying on altruism simply doesn’t work. It’s the best simple explanation of how people behave. But it is terribly inadequate. The most exciting research that has come out of economics / psychologists have to do with behavioural economics. Yes, people behave like that but there’s more to it.

Another big problem is the use of statistics to model human behaviour. The range of human behaviour is never perfectly described by maths equations. The standard probability functions are not a very good fit for how people will behave.

One tactic of using mathematics to attack the problem is, like I mentioned earlier, assume the system is a pinned down butterfly, and then use mathematics equations to describe it. But the system is a living entity, and often the usage of mathematics fails to capture the dynamicity of the entity.

Things have gotten better with computers. Unlike the old days when you scratched out equations on pieces of paper, computers can handle an arbitrarily large amount of complexity. It’s still not easy to code out everything, you still have to make simplifying assumptions that may be detrimental to the realism, but it’s much better. That being said, a lot of OR, especially the mathematics part, was conceived in the days that predated PCs. So a lot of models are similarly inflexible and unrealistic.

The spirit of optimizing operations of a firm is also totally wrong. What often happens is that you have a CEO, and he always wants to optimise the profits of the firm. Therefore: pay your workers only enough so that they don’t want to leave. Screw your customers. Screw your suppliers. Screw your environment. In reality you will soften this stance, especially in the face of the need for better PR. But the main thrust will still be there. What Marx means when he complains about the endless accumulation of capital. Anyway I’ll bitch about this in the proper place, which is when I’m bitching about capitalism.

OR believes that global optimisation is always better than local optimisation, which tends not to take into consideration the states of other parts of the system. First, centrallised control is quite akin to communism. In fact, a lot of the pioneers of operations research came from the Soviet Union. It doesn’t always work because the big boss in the centre does not have perfect control of the system. Then there is the problem that your information is not perfect, and that can screw up your entire planning. The real solution, then is to have a balance between piece-wise optimisation of the subsystems, and considering the needs of the system as a whole. Sometimes it’s better for each smaller part to act myopically and greedy

The other problem is the engineering of human beings. You just can’t mandate how people are going to behave from above, unless you use extreme measures. My boss was wondering out loud how on earth they got McDonald’s to get every employee to make the burger in the same way every single time. I had already read “Behind the Arches” so I knew the answer but I kept quiet because he never pays attention to me anyway.

McDonald’s owns the property that houses the restaurant. It rents it out to the franchisee. The franchisee is entirely at the mercy of McDonald’s. Do things your own way, run operations your own way, and boom, you’re out of business. It’s that simple. This is a benevolent dictatorship. I don’t know why Americans always complain about Singapore being a nanny state and shut one eye towards McDonald’s being a nanny employer. But I do know why the Singapore government and McDonald’s get along so well.

In the absence of such drastic measures, you have to deal with conservative Singaporeans who are as stubborn as mules, and who don’t like to change for the better. In general, though, my personal reasons for not liking the engineering of human beings does not have to do with how difficult it is to get people to do your bidding. My personal gripe with there being only one way or the highway is: I like my freedom. You could say that a really high degree of discipline temperamentally disagrees with me. However: I must add, I am probably mellowing with age.

Which is why I was so happy to discover chaos theory. Mathematics, cold, rigid and hard mathematics, actually shows you that things can get really screwed up and unpredictable – without pre-supposing the existence of randomness! Randomness arises from determinism. Determinism arises from randomness. Chaos arises from order. Order arises from chaos. This is the true mathematical derivation of the yin and yang philosophy, of opposites deriving from and begetting each other, rather than the western dualist idea of two irreconcilable poles.

There’s so much more wonderful things I can say about chaos theory, but for me, it has made mathematics much more lifelike and intuitive. It has softened the hard edges and surfaces, but at the same time it has also removed a lot of what was great about mathematics – its predictability. Its ability – some say its conceit – to be able to make predictions with – well – mathematical certainty. Chaos theory doesn’t make precise predictions. It shows you what can go wrong with your maths theories. It seldom has a lot of concrete results to show. What it amounts to is one big spanner being thrown in your direction. But it does bring a long overdue sense of reality.

Other rubbish
In spite of my profound skepticism about operations research, I feel that it is still a valuable tool, so long as we don’t blinker ourselves about its infallibility. There are so many times when I see some people walk around believing that operations research, by virtue of being more scientific, is closer to the truth than stories that workers tell you on the ground. They believe that what’s on a process map is a higher truth than workers describing the million and one exceptions to the rules that take place in real life. They believe that the view from the passenger’s seat is better than from the driver’s seat, and if the driver would just sit up and listen every now and then the world would be an irrevocably better place. Sometimes I just have to roll my eyes at that.

For me, operations research is a tool. Possibly the best tool we have in our mission to improve operations. But at the end of the day it is still inadequate on its own. In the end, I thought I would have some other skills. I was equally interested in studying what human beings are like. My future bosses may or may not have been fully appreciative but I wanted a more fully nuanced view of what a firm was like. I took all sorts of liberal arts courses. In the end, I read a throwaway comment by Peter Drucker that said that business studies is the ultimate liberal arts subject. It was at that point that I felt that my decision had been vindicated.

Recently there was a long overdue sentiment that we were expending too much of our effort in the wrong direction. There was way too much emphasis on operations research solutions, and the attitude is “OR is superior, we’ll just wait for them to wake up and catch up”.

There has been a slight shift away from that. Instead, what we have is conducting information sessions and roadshows that try to persuade operations staff to embrace more scientific and analytical methods of conducting operations. That was a welcome change, in my opinion.

What I also wish to happen is that we have some more capabilities to obtain intelligent information about what goes on in operations. The current practice is that we identify that there are demons of inefficiency somewhere, and we’ll just prescribe medicine to cure what we assume are the problems. It’s always the usual suspects, but we’re never really sure. What I wish to happen is we improve our diagnostics.

A good analogy for what we do is that we are doctors (not surgeons, because surgeons are the ones who work on the ground.) We look after a patient whose health is sometimes good and other times not so good. We’ve got medicine (typically OR) which is sometimes painful to use but we believe in it so much that we push it all the time. But firstly we need to improve our diagnosis so that we can prescribe more finely focused solutions that solve the real problems, rather than wholesale invasive procedures that have negligible effect outside of a hot zone. Secondly, we need a keener, more systems oriented approach, where we realise that reacting directly at a problem will have side effects that might be worse than the existing problem. Some problems have counter-intuitive solutions. For example, cutting down the number of cars going through a road can actually increase the throughput of that road.

We need to improve the diagnostics. Too often we conflate measuring performance with identifying problems that need to be solved. These are different tasks, they need to be solved with different means. We need to look closer at local conditions, rather than assume that what we have will fit a model that we bought out of a box from somewhere else. We need to understand how and why our problems are unique, and perhaps be mindful that the solutions will also be in some ways unique.

In academia there is this undue focus that a solution doesn’t really have much legitimacy until some publisher somewhere else deems it fit to be published. Then what happens in the end is that we graft a solution on top of a problem where the fit is not perfect – sometimes, more than imperfect, there is no fit at all. (Six sigma, I’m looking straight at you.)

A former boss said that he saw a pyramid, from an IBM article. (I saw that pyramid too). He was commenting that he was now doing analytics, whereas what he used to be doing, ie optimisation, is at the top of the pyramid. Well I’m thinking, he doesn’t understand that pyramid very well. If analytics is at the bottom of the pyramid, that is the first thing you must achieve, and do very well. You must concentrate your energies on the stuff at the bottom of the pyramid before you go to the top. You just can’t go straight to optimisation simply because you happened to have a PhD in those things.

Anyway, what I’ve described is mostly the theoretical problems with operations research. The problems that gave me an uneasy, queasy feeling. It got even worse when I became a real life operations research practitioner. I don’t intend to blog yet about what it’s like being an operations research practitioner because it’s blogging about my job. (Talking about operations research is merely dangerously close to talking about my job.)

Fuckonomics

2010-11-28T12:38:00.003+08:00

There’s a song that’s quite popular right now. It’s “Fuck You” by Cee Lo.

I saw a letter in the Straits Times where a shopper was shocked that a song like that was played on the stereo system of a shop in that mall. I’m afraid that some members of the older generation have totally missed out on the pleasures of swearing. Well they are worried about kids, so I’m sure they know the meaning of the f word in practice. It’s totally symptomatic of the stifling conservatism in Singapore that you can get into trouble with the law for using this language in public. A real shame.

There are after all, plenty of vocations, some of them to be found in Singapore, where swearing is very common.

1. Sailors
2. Longshoremen
3. Grocer (especially in a less sexy environment like a market or a wholesale centre)
4. Taxi Driver / Bus Driver / Hauler
5. IT industry
6. Soldier
7. Trader

Certain occupations don’t have a lot of swearing because they take place in unsanitary environments, and you don’t want to be opening your mouths more than

It is instructive to think about the F word. It is actually not the most offensive word in the English language. Offhand, a poll was done, and it was concluded that the most offensive word is “cunt”. There is some evidence that swear words are universal. The relative level of offensiveness in swear words is roughly the same in English and Hokkien. Fuck = Kan. Motherfucking = Kannina. Cunt = Cheebai. The translation is almost exact.

Studies on vulgar language have shown that there is a special part of the brain that swear words activate, which elevates these words to a special status, over and above the normal use of language. Your name is also a special word, because your ears prick up when these words are used.

That said, I’m slightly uncomfortable with the song “Fuck You”. I thought about it for a while, and finally put my finger on it. (As opposed to putting my finger in it.) The F word is not actually a word. It is a word, but it is really a special punctuation mark. By itself, it doesn’t have that much meaning. Well, it means have sex with, it means to do something undesirable / drastic towards somebody. But even those uses can be reduced to something else. Like if you say, “I wanna fuck you”, it’s equivalent to “I wanna fucking have sex with you”. Or “I’m going to fuck him up good this time”, is equivalent to “I’m going to fucking fix him this time”.

I think that the spirit of the f word is that it’s a flavour enhancer, something like MSG. It should not be a word that is front and centre. It is only there to modify the meaning of the words around it. The use of “fuck” can make a funny joke a little funnier. But on its own, it is not a funny word. It is not a particularly meaningful word.

There are some essays written on the wonder of the word fuck. That is a mistake. It’s a bit like saying that the full stop is such a wonderful thing because it can be used in so many situations.

That is not to deny the pliability of the use of the word. If you listen to Cee-Lo‘s “Fuck You” he’s actually an eager beaver. On some level he’s accepted that his girlfriend is gone, but he still says “fuck you” and admits that it hurts to see him go. Consider, in contrast, Dr Dre’s “Fuck You”. It is an example of studied nonchalance. “I just wanna fuck you, we can't be hugging and kissing, you got a husband who loves you.” You are a sex object and I’m here spelling that out to you.

Operations research and its discontents 1

2010-11-21T19:04:00.001+08:00

There I was, in the interview room, with 3 people looking at me. The leader of the 3, the only guy, was already near the pinnacle of his career. Another one would see hers rocket in the next 10 years (she’ll probably be a cabinet minister one day) and another one would be sideline after 10 years.

He looked at me, and noted that I had displayed a talent for maths, and asked “how would you like to do operations research?” I asked, what is that? He said it’s maths. You could do maths for a living. I thought that that was a great idea.

It’s a funny thing, but the first time I thought that maybe this bond thing wasn’t such a great idea was when I started doing OR at that time. My first exposure to OR was in a class that was taught by a professor whose work on computer algorithms was widely respected. He taught an introductory class. I asked him, after the lesson on branch and bound, “there’s no more elegant way to do this?” And he asked me, “what did you have in mind? Come up with something more interesting, and we’ll see.”

Inelegant maths
Well that somewhat destroyed one of the reasons mathematics was supposed to be so attractive. And looking back, that was probably really the first time I had encountered engineering, real engineering instead of mathematics. At the grand old age of 21, which is really really late. (Not really very very late: there was this guy, Dr Old Fogey, who did nothing but mathematics until he graduated. Then only came towards operations research when he started his PhD. And his PhD was mostly maths anyway. Then he went to teach at a university for some years. I think he was about 40 when he became an operations research practioner, when he finally came face to face with real engineering problems. Needless to say, I consider this an extremely unhealthy path of mental development.)

Granted, branch and bound is still an algorithm, and it’s still closer to maths than engineering. But there was a bit of consternation.

Doing maths until your “A” levels, it still looks quite pretty. Sines, cosines, how you cross them, flip them upside down, cross out both sides. Then there’s solving quadratic equations, like you’re doing algebra. There’s geometry, where you use neat tricks to figure out what angle is equal to what other angle. There’s matrix transformation, where you figure out what a square matrix does, based on what it does to each member of the canonical basis.

The only time you had to do something ugly was the taylor expansion, or Mclaurin’s expansion. Even those were neat because there were patterns. The only really ugly thing was Newton’s method of finding a root. And every time I did that, I felt like I had to wash my hands afterwards.

Maths in university was even more neat. Almost all the major theorems had something profound and beautiful at the same time. The fundamental theorem of algebra. The Jordan curve theorem. Galois theory. Law of large numbers. Law of rare events. Index theory. Stone-Weierstrauss.

Now, there it was, the ugliness of branch and bound, where the only elegance was that you were guaranteed to conduct a brute force search by looking through no more branches of a tree than was absolutely necessary. Quite a paradigm change for me.

I began to suspect that there was something to engineering that I didn’t really understand, but I didn’t fully understand, even then, how far up my ass I had placed my head.

Other than that introductory class to operations research, I hadn’t done much OR during my first year. I didn’t want to do OR. I felt, you didn’t just go to a really good school and go away just knowing 1 subject in-depth. The curriculum I designed for myself was supposed to look like a minimum spanning tree.

Cold and beautiful mathematics
But eventually I did OR. Unfortunately I wasn’t in the right state of mind to do mathematics. There was a time when I started actively hating that subject. It was partially to do with how I had seen more of it than at any other time in my life, even JC. Partially to do with how divorced from reality I realized those equations were. Partially to do with how I was discovering many ideas from many other subjects that were much more exciting than those you found in mathematics. (Ideas from economics, psychology, history). Those were much more lovable and human things to study. Mathematics is hard – not only in the sense that it is mentally challenging, but also hard as in hard and cold.

Sometimes the more beautiful theories are hard and cold beauty, like that of a snowflake, or an elegant skyscraper. I had thought that mathematics was everything. There was a certain arrogance that you had in the university, where physics and maths were departments which had relatively high prestige. (Wouldn’t be the case in Singapore, but it was over there.) That is not to say that the engineering department was shoddy – it was one of the best engineering schools, even though it was not MIT. There was this arrogance that, if you couldn’t say something with equations, you hadn’t really understood anything about it. That engineers were merely engineers because they weren’t good enough in maths.

But even then I was starting to rebel against that attitude. Mathematics started to become unsatisfying because … well beautiful maths is like poetry. It is elegant, it is profoundly meaningful, and there are plenty of coincidences of meaning. But it is not a universal language. You would never write a technical report in poetry. Moreover I’m a prose person, not a poetry person. I’m for analysis, not algebra. I’m for non-fiction, not fiction. The uglier maths was just – well, ugly.

Inadequacy of means
Statistics was even worse. There was this assumption that everything was normally distributed. I could feel it in my bones that a lot of this just wasn’t true. Waiting times in a queue are almost never normally distributed. The wealth of people is not normally distributed. The intensity of natural disasters is not normally distributed. I just didn’t know what the student’s t-distribution was good for. Every time I used it for the wrong reason, I felt like I was shoving a square peg down a round hole.

I suppose it was possible to find better distributions, but then you had to find a different test for a different distribution. Very mathematically intensive.

There were other aspects of operations research that were fairly unsatisfying. One of them was the exponential arrival pattern. I suppose that the memory-less property was fairly wacky. Suppose you were waiting for a bus that came on average every 5 minutes. And suppose you had already been waiting for 5 minutes. Well, you could expect to wait for another 5 minutes.

Actually that was wacky enough. Another wacky inter-arrival distribution are things like earthquakes, where if an earthquake had just happened, it was more likely to happen again in a short period of time. Conversely if it hadn’t happened for a long time, it’s just never going to happen.

What I didn’t like about studying queuing theory was this. Either you did it with mathematics equations, in which case you had to do an absurd amount of mathematics for a relatively simple system. (I suppose this is true of a lot of physical systems: typically your physics questions in “A” levels involve fewer than 5 objects, and you have to write pages and pages of equations. And remember that nobody seriously attempted the 3 body problems until you had computers you could program to simulate what happened.)

Eventually, we have to resort to something that is brutally inelegant: simulations. And the worst part? Simulations give you generally accurate predictions about outcomes, until the complexity of the situation is too much for even computers to handle. (see earth sciences). The most unsavoury aspect is when you assume that the final product is a bell curve. I just thoroughly detest the bell curve: especially when modeling something as normally distributed is wrong, which happens surprisingly often.

What I didn’t like about doing optimisation was this: you assumed that the information was static, and you assumed that it was reliably correct. Both are very bad assumptions to make under operating conditions. It’s like somebody with a 155mm cannon having a fight with somebody with a M16. Under ideal conditions, the 155mm cannon guy will blow the crap out of the M16 guy, who will meet the nastiest death possible for a human being. 9 times out of 10, the M16 guy will win, because he can shoot the 155mm guy in the head before he loads the first shell, and even if he runs out of bullets, he can probably bayonet the gunner anyway.

To be sure, there are textbook examples of how optimisation can perform very well. For example, the allocation of resources. Rostering. Possibly some scheduling, but scheduling is a very iffy thing, because there is so much uncertainty involved. You need more and more sophisticated ways to do optimisation under uncertainty.

Fundamentally, one disappointment about operations research is this. At first, you are persuaded that you have “scientific” tools at your disposal, and that you will bring enlightenment to the poor people who have been doing things as in dark ages. Then you go to a school and they teach you textbook cases, and you’re thinking, “gee, this looks pretty simple and straightforward”. But later on, you start noticing that your models are not only an imperfect representation of reality in the sense that the answer will be an approximation to the best answer. It is often imperfect enough that your computer generated answer runs the risk of looking fairly ridiculous.

This is not computer science, where, once you type the program in the book into the computer, and assuming that your system requirements are satisfied, and assuming you don’t have bugs, it will work perfectly every time.

(to be continued)