A new perspective.

"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.

Death of the printed book.

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.

2010

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.

Fuckonomics

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.

You are Not a Gadget

A new book I’ve been reading has forced me to think about the impact of information in our society. It is bluntly critical of web 2.0. It's called "You are Not a Gadget" by Jaron Lanier

The book is written by one of the pioneers of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier. He had already been dealing with the question of what the web would be like, long before 1995.

First, he thinks that the way that the web is set up today encourages mob behaviour. As psychologists already know, people do not behave at their best in a mob situation. We no longer act like individuals with a moral sense, but just become one of a crowd, the mystical crowd who is supposedly wise.

Well that’s the paradox of the crowd. If I recall Surowiecki’s “Wisdom of Crowds” correctly, he said that crowds are wise when they make decisions independently of each other, when the crowd is diverse enough to include – uh – diverse viewpoints and when the processes are decentralized. But inevitably crowds are not very democratic. Markets don’t behave like wise crowds because people are always communicating with each other and therefore having their decisions influenced by each other.

In any case, crowds do not produce great works of art. Great art, more often than not, is either a dictatorial activity, or a collaboration between a few people. It seems that crowds are probably better at decision making, which is just as well that big decisions at companies are made by boards.

But as many of you know from reading comments sections of highly controversial blog posts and know that firstly people become polarized into one of two opposing positions on the issue. Then everything breaks down and people start calling each other names. A lot of useful information does filter through, but you’d also have to wade through a lot of drivel.

One problem is that everybody is represented as a bunch of digits in cyberspace. People become dehumanized. Web pages are linked to each other based on key words without much regard about how relevant they are. It’s better than randomized linking, but a lot of the main context is lost. A lot of information is out there, but it’s all fragmented. The information is not rich: it’s just a bunch of words. You could call it pretty shallow info.

He is highly critical of search engines, because when things are linked to each other, a lot of the context that produced the document in the first place is lost. For example, a list of the top 100 works of music. What you get is that each item in the list is just a number, instead of understanding and appreciating that each piece is a universe unto itself. This becomes dehumanization through decontextualisation.

Another problem he talks about is how music can become free and cheap due to downloading. Artists don’t get paid for their work, and therefore not much good work gets produced.

The internet has also widened the gap between the rich and everyone else. In the internet world, there are a few stars holding on to a disproportionate amount of wealth and influence. He calls these people “lords of the clouds”. Everybody else is just struggling to get by. Advertising has replaced the creation of great art.

I think that shortly before the web became ubiquitous, people thought about multi-media. There was a burgeoning industry that produced multi-media on CD-ROMs before the whole enterprise got wiped out by the rise of the web. The emphasis for this was on the richness of medium, about novel ways of creating the user experience through sound and vision. Maybe it will be some time before the emphasis shifts back to this multimedia stuff.

The web has prospered because text-only information, or text information with only a few graphics has always been more economically efficient to produce. This has been true throughout the age of the printing press. At the end of the day, economics will always carry the day. Unless we have more efficient ways to encode data?

The problem with his book is that it seems to be a lot of ranting that has been cobbled together hastily. This is a shame because he has a lot of very thought-provoking points to make, even though some of the alternative scenarios seem quite far-fetched.

It’s always useful to listen to what people like him have to say, because they were around before the rise of the internet, and they had envisioned something slightly different from the web that we ended up with.

I’m also reading John Seely Brown’s “Social Life of Information”. It was published 10 years ago, but I think that the web hasn’t actually changed all that much since then.

One step closer

I know what it’s like to feel smart, and I know what it is like to feel stupid. People who know me: if you were to ask them which one I am, half will give you one answer and the other half will give you the other.

After Daniel Goleman introduced the concept of EQ to the world in 1995 (that was the year that book came out) the idea of multiple intelligences has truly caught on. But already in the 1980s Howard Gardner has classified intelligences into roughly 7 segments. We now know that the brain is a Swiss Army jackknife, and all the components have differing capabilities relative to the rest of the population. The nerd has got great analytical skills but poor psychomotor skills. The jock, vice versa.

I suppose when I went in to take a standardised test, there were already some good omens. First, the astrological readings said that I had high energy today. That’s good. The second thing is that I bumped into a friend I hadn’t seen very much since primary school. He later went on to shingot’s JC and probably was top student there or something. Talking to him, I realised why they gave him a prestigious scholarship – he’s a humble guy, feet on the ground. He was going to do his master’s in public admin. I suppose he’ll stay in the civil service for quite a while – he might become somebody famous, or not.

We talked for a bit. I suppose you can always talk to your old friends. But considering that the last time we interacted meaningfully – I had him over for my 12th birthday party. He gave me a birthday present, a pirated copy of Phantasie. I was to play that game a lot in Pri six, and to date it was the only computer based RPG I played a lot of. From Pri 4 to 6, we always played police and thieves during recess. That was the last year of real childhood, just before they start grabbing you by the collar and tell you right in the face that you’re growing up to be a real man and you better start acting like one. (Or if you can’t act like one, at least be as smart as one.

The bad omen, the extremely bad omen is that the scores may not come in time for certain uni applications. But since I know my score, that may not matter very much.

It was weird going to the building. The testing place was opposite the Science Centre, which I also last visited while in primary school. The process was very meticulous. My friend said that the ante room looked like a police station, where you held all the suspects before taking them in for questioning. You had to sign a declaration saying that you were indeed the person who registered for the test.

When they called your name, you found yourself in some kind of a control centre. There were closed circuit cameras on every test taker of a computer monitor. It was like motherfucking 1984. When you left the room, you had to sign out, and they checked your signature against the one in the passport.

They had a locker for you. You were to empty all your pockets. I was shunted around by a grumpy short Malay woman. (Reminds me a bit of the grumpy short woman I know at work). I asked, you want my coins as well? She said, “which part of ‘everything’ do you not understand?” Then she shunted me over to the computer, and asked me to look at this funny webcam. I looked at it as though it were that machine from Men in Black that makes you forget everything.

I went to the terminal, and I was fairly amused that the picture that they took of me froze me in a kind of a “what the fuck” position.

The test itself went well. I had the first indication that things were going OK when they told me that they weren’t repeating either the verbal or the quantitative section. Instead, they asked me to be a guinea pig and help them test a whole new quantitative section.

I had a pretty decent score. I was glad I didn’t have to take the GRE again. The computer based GRE will repeat one of your sections if you did badly, but that didn’t happen to me. Instead, it said, here’s a new section for you. If you're one of the top 100 scores, you stand to win a $100 dollar prize!!! So I did that section too.

I don't know how I did on the writing but since I do so much practice over here for the benefit of you guys I think I should be OK.

I felt a bit like a man again. There was this time when Dr Old Fogey gave a short academic quiz to everybody, I was the only one who got full marks on it. (But then there were only 3 people, including myself and Dr Old Fogey, who had gone through that material in a graduate-level course). That was quite satisfying because I did feel that Dr Old Fogey had been looking down his fucking nose at me the whole time we were in the same department as each other.

Well sometimes in my current job I don't really feel like a man. And this is where I'll tie it in with the stuff I've written earlier. There were some skills the job required and I realised, to no small panic, that I had to develop them from scratch. And when I saw people who were so much better than me, I felt a certain despair that I hadn't really felt before.

I think that people who never had to deal with their own stupidity are lucky in their own way. Probably the way that I was back at school, when I was just good at learning. I took 5 minutes to learn what some others took 1 hour to learn. I was never allowed to think, "well I'm more hardworking, aren't I?" but I can see why people who have more talent just think that way. Other people around them struggle, and they can put in more effort, but because the results don't come, they're lazy and useless. I've had to deal with that relatively late in my life.

Will I learn those skills? To be fair, I hadn't learnt some of those skills because I wasn't really interested in them. And it was hard to pick up those skills because I still aren't really interested in them. Was I going to stay in this state for a long time? I thought, shouldn't I just try to run away to another place where those skills were not as crucial as they are in my current place? I always had an intention to do so, just never got around to doing that.

And now - the future? It's hazy. Very hazy. But at least, I think, it will be somewhat different from marching on the spot forever. Another tentative step towards the door, then...

Solitaire Strategies

I’ve discovered some solitaire games. One of them is “Flood It”, which I saw Nat playing the other day. You can go see the rules for yourself, it is very simple.

Not surprisingly, this game has been analysed by computer scientists who have found the complexity involved in searching for solutions. It is NP hard, which means, to the best of current computer science knowledge, the amount of time taken to find all solutions increases exponentially with respect to the problem size. There are some other interesting results which state how quickly the average number of steps required to solve the problem increases with respect to the size of the problem.

I was thinking about what are the best strategies for playing this game, and I have found a strategy that works well, that will win the game around 75% of the time. This doesn’t have to do with brute force computation but just some guidelines.

The guiding principle in this strategy is that all the blocks can be arranged in a stack, that every block has a “distance”, meaning, how many moves does it take to get to that block. Always pay attention to the blocks that have the greatest depth because winning the game is the same thing as being able to convert those blocks within 25 moves.

To be sure, the exact definition of “distance” will depend upon what is the sequence of colours you choose. But as a rule of thumb, it’s the number of squares between your territory and the edge. If there are bigger blocks in that unconverted zone, then there is less distance (since that zone can be converted with fewer moves). If those big blocks are perpendicular to the perimeter of your territory, then the distance decreases further, since with 1 or 2 clicks, you can reach the edge (And afterwards, a really big surface area is exposed).

Early in the game, the key is “depth first”. Aim to capture an area which looks like the shape of a river. Always try to convert the blocks that are deep rather than wide – the blocks which are perpendicular to your territory. Maximise your perimeter, because the greater your perimeter, the more blocks you can convert. Concentrate on maximising the depth, try to convert the blocks that are large.

There are pictures which show the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest. (Sorry to use such an emotionally traumatic example). The denuded areas are at first narrow and deep, then after that they widen, until the rainforest is gone. That’s the way you should be doing things.

Why is it important to go depth first early on? Because when you expand your perimeter early, it will pay back many times in subsequent moves. The order in which you click the colours does not matter because naturally you will go through all the six colours. All those blocks next to your “river” shaped territory will be converted. Go for the quick returns – the high depth, low distance blocks. Don’t think too hard about the other blocks, because they will take care of themselves.

A corollary of the depth first principle is that you shouldn’t convert the blocks close to the walls too early, because in that way your perimeter will only have exposed blocks on 1 side.

Another other concept is degree, which means the same thing as in graph theory. How many other blocks is your block connected to. A certain block may be only 1 square large, but it could give you access to 3 large blocks. Then that block suddenly becomes valuable because it is strategic.

Obviously, you also play the colour that captures as much territory as possible. A corollary to this is that if you have just played a colour, don’t play that same colour 1 or 2 moves later, since not many blocks of that colour can be exposed in 1 or 2 moves. But I would actually say that early in the game, depth and degree are more important.

Yet another concept is the order of colours. Suppose there are 2 or 3 possible colours to play, then you just have to work out what is the best order in which to play them, in order to capture as much territory as possible.

You may find that there will be 1 colour which does not have blocks that fit the above criteria. This is perfectly OK. Do not convert colours that do not impede your progress. Ignore that colour until one of them obstructs your progress, then you can convert a large number of colours with 1 fell swoop.

So early in the game, you have 5 strategies – Go for depth, go for degree, go for high conversion, optimise your order of colours and convert colours as late as possible.

Gradually, when we have reached squares which are near the south or the east wall, we come to the end game. In the end game, the objective is not to expand your territory as quickly, but to convert all the squares with as few moves as possible.

First, if there are any colours which are totally exposed, convert them now. It’s the end for 1 of the colours. One way of thinking is that winning is the same thing as finishing off the 6 colours. The move that finishes off a colour is necessary, and it does not matter whether it is played earlier or later. But it’s better to play this move earlier since this will probably give your access to more colours.

As a corollary, if there is a move which can convert all squares of the same colour except for 1, it would be a waste to play that move now. Unless that 1 block is buried so deep that you probably have to wait a while before you get that block.

However, if there is a move that can lead you to finishing off 1 colour, then it might be worth playing that move.

Secondly, thinking about distance is even more crucial in your end game. For every colour, you should be thinking about how many moves you need to finish it off. This principle is a more broad version of the earlier “if you can finish off a colour in 1 or 2 moves, do it”. If not all blocks of the colour are exposed, you can think about whether it is possible to finish off half of them now, and whether there will be a situation later on where the other half is all exposed. Then that colour would count as a 2 move colour.

Most importantly, though, you have to concentrate on the most distant blocks, since these blocks will have the greatest impact on your endgame. You should have an end strategy in mind for every colour, and you should try to access those most deeply buried blocks in the least number of moves.

Which brings us to the last important point of the endgame: the order of the colours is very important. You should always know what colour exposes what other colour, and based on this knowledge, work out an optimum order of moves.

Now that I have worked out the winning strategy for Flood it, hopefully my short but intense addiction to the game would have come to an end.

My other favourite solitaire game comes with every Windows from XP onwards. It’s “Spider Solitaire”. I play the medium level, because 1 colour is too easy, and 4 colours is too difficult.

The strategy for spider solitaire is really simple.

The main strategy is this: empty a stack as quickly as you can. Once you have an empty stack, the number of possibilities increases greatly. Do not waste your empty stack unwisely, and preserve it for as long as you can.

Use your undo as many times as you need to discover what’s behind the cards, and to find the best possible sequence of moves. Remember that in the XP version, there are some moves that cannot be undone, such as dealing cards, or finishing a suit. (In the Windows 7 version, all moves are undoable). Not very elegant, but make sure that you know as much as there is to know

Experienced players will know that when you manage to empty a stack, the odds of solving a game is around 70%, and when you manage to uncover all the cards, the odds of solving the game is around 100%.

I don’t aim to maximise my statistics. If there are games which are stubbornly hard to solve, I consider it a challenge to solve them, and I will incur a lot of “losses”. I think this is OK. It’s more satisfying to solve a hard game than an easy one. But if you have to try a new game, try taking a different route by making different moves. It is often the case that in certain card layouts, playing move A earlier on will result in a difficult endgame, while playing move B earlier on will result in the same endgame. People familiar with chaos theory will know that small changes to the system could have unintentional really huge effects, and at the same time large shocks to the system could have completely negligible outcomes.

Tiger Woods

Well, here it is, the infamous and extremely controversial Tiger advertisement.

When was the first I had heard of all this? There was a news item where Elin Nordegren used a golf club to “help” Tiger Woods out of a car. I thought, “that’s so cute. This is what marital bliss is like”. Well I was wrong.

Let’s not talk about that long list of porn stars / waitresses / neighbours’ daughters who claim to have had sex with / been semi-raped by Tiger Woods. This is the one man who can make Bill Clinton look like a virgin.

He had shot into the limelight in 1997 when he was one of the youngest to win a Master’s. Then, he was the talented kid. And after that, some people make that transition from tomorrow’s great hope into a great champion, even though we know many didn’t. There was a lot of pride among the Thais, when we found out that he was half Thai and half black. He was probably one of the first famous black golfers, playing a sport that had been mostly associated with white people, the way that Jimi Hendrix was one of the few famous rock guitarists among a mostly white population. For a brief, shining moment, it seemed as though anything was possible, that if he could reach the top, anybody could.

I suppose we can always admire a person who’s a champion. But what really makes a champion a champion? Granted, he has great mental strength. But is that an inborn talent, or something acquired through effort? It’s hard to say. There are millions of golfers out there, but only one Tiger Woods. His focus and his mental strength are legendary. There are times when some people will be ahead of him in the middle of the tournament, and he will come from behind and catch up, hitting incredibly low scores in the last 18 holes. Then there was the period when he had to fade out for 1 or 2 years – he had to learn a new stroke, because the stroke he started off with placed a very high strain on his back. This was a risky move because it could have ended his career – it didn’t. After allowing Vijay Singh to be the top earner in prize money for 1 (or 2?) years, he came back again.

We don’t see a golfer like Tiger Woods much – I don’t think that anybody dominates any sport so completely as he dominates golf. And golf is unlike most competitive sports, where you have around 10-20 years, and then you go downhill just because of old age. People who are good at golf can go on for a long long time.

But even before the sex scandals hit, we knew that he had a dark side. He was brooding and quiet. We saw that nasty scowl when things didn’t go his way. But we could always put it down to – nobody is as tough on himself as Tiger Woods is. He was focused on winning to the point of being selfish.

And when he won, he always kept himself locked up in a bubble. He didn’t talk to many people, or get involved in many community projects. He didn’t give his money away. I think the Thais got sick of him after a while. They saw him earning a lot of money through a company (Nike) who exploited 3rd world labour. In this respect, he was similar to Michael Jordan. Even though black people saw him as a shining beacon of what it was possible for a black person to achieve, he didn’t really have much in common with the common black brother. He was asked to comment on 9/11 and he basically talked about what he did on that day, rather than give a heartfelt speech about the terrorist tragedy. I think in a way, all these people steered clear of controversy so that they could continue making bland, impersonal product endorsements.

Time was when you could have sports champions with big personalities. You used to have big mouths like Muhammad Ali or Maradona or John McEnroe, who were every bit as entertaining opening their big mouths as they were playing their sport.

But these days, for some reason the great majority of athletes are told to shut their mouths, if they wanted to continue their lucrative sponsorship deals. You had to have the right image if you wanted to sell products to people. Thus, 3 of the biggest product endorsers in sports – David Beckham, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods ended up spouting platitudes, saying nothing other than the most obvious things. They had to be handsome, well groomed, and seen to be family men.

Well the irony was that David Beckham and Michael Jordan were shown to be adulterers. David Beckham is back with Victoria, and he managed to save his marriage. Probably the fact that his brand name was so closely associated with his wife’s made it rather difficult for a divorce to take place. Michael Jordan didn’t manage to save his marriage. And this brings us back to Tiger Woods.

We knew that he wasn’t a saint. And a lot of people could forgive him for being grumpy. But being a serial sex maniac was probably something that shocked a lot of people, and his star has fallen. It’s okay to be a grouch if your own morals are impeccable but he’s starting to look like a big asshole. We think of certain people who were great sportsmen but unsavoury characters – Ty Cobb, the great baseball player comes to mind.

Tiger Woods could be said to be out of touch with reality. From a young age, he had had a cocooned existence, surrounded by minders, who answered to his every whim. As the scandal unfolded you had to admire the work of this army of people who was able to keep the public in the dark about so many mistresses. But you also got reminded that Tiger Woods had iron discipline.

You somehow saw all this as a product of his lifestyle. The incredible wealth, the endless touring and training, and time spent away from his family. All this, as well as the loneliness of always being surrounded by people but not necessarily his friends. I got reminded of something else I read about Michael Jordon – other than his intense competitiveness, he was an inveterate gambler, and sometimes used to go to bars, where he would pick up ladies and have his way with them. He was also fond of playing games with many of his friends, and not allow them to end until he finally won. A bit of a decadent lifestyle.

So Tiger Woods had to make a choice – what did he want, did he want his old life back, or did he want his wife? He apologised to his wife, who pointedly did not attend the press conference where he read out his apology statement. I think she realised that he was going to have to choose between her and everything else. There was some tentativeness to the whole issue – they weren’t totally comfortable with the divorce, because of the kids. But she was demanding that he gave up golf – at least, give it up for long enough for her to be happy.

Then, in the end, came that infamous advertisement, which will probably be one of the most controversial advertisements of all time.

Some people felt that it was a "brilliant" advertisement. In a way, yes. How do you capitalise on one of your star assets being disgraced in so public a manner? Just tell the truth. One of the big stories in the Tiger brand is the stern but loving father who raised one of the great champions. The ghostly voice is Earl Woods' own. It may have been taken out of context, but the essential truth is there: that is exactly how he would have counseled Tiger Woods. Great advertisements arise out of truth, and this was the truth. Or was it?

Except: first, it's in rather bad taste to trolley out a dead person to do some talking for you, especially if he's talking for a person whose reputation has been disgraces.

Second, the messages are mixed. I don't think that David Beckham or Michael Jordan has ever had to confront marital infidelity in this way. I don't think they had to do that in the form of an advertisement. They would have hidden away and let the storm tide over.

Tiger is different. Nobody really thinks of him as a lothario. He's black but he's not the stereotypical badass. His work ethic is more Asian. You normally think of him as the stereotypical Capricorn: always working, always striving, always winning, and in some senses, a family man. But this is one of the most stunning and swiftest collapses in reputation we've seen of late. Most people going from hero to zero are much more well known as a zero (Madoff) or as a hero (Muhammad Ali). Tiger is well known as both. No doubt, the fall is part of the story.

But what is the meaning of parading the shamefulness of it all? How is it shame when you're putting it up on every TV, every youtube account?

And when you see that advertisement, all the old questions come up. Is this a man ashamed of himself? Is this a man who is apologising to the public? Or is this a chronicle of a man coming to terms with his path towards redemption? More importantly, when Earl Woods asks "Did you learn anything?" Is he berating his son for hurting those close to him, or his he berating him for being stupid?

The last and most important reason why this advertisement is probably offensive: what are the ulterior motives? Nike desperately trying to find a way to flog more mileage from their fallen star before deciding whether or not to renew his contract? Tiger desperately trying to shore up himself as a marketable image?

No wonder Elin Nordegren was so offended. Like it was all about Tiger Woods. That the first thing he wanted to rescue from the wreckage was not his wife and family. The first thing was the sponsorship deal. Then after that, his golf career (disregarding her wishes for him to spend time away from golf). And his family as an afterthought.

Well - you can't really blame a guy for wanting to have his life back.

Emotional avoidance

I think I have to face up to it – I am a cold person. It’s only when you admit that you have a problem, then you are on the first step to solving that problem. The problems exist because you are not aware of it. People have characteristics, their brain is wired to ask some questions more prominently and others less so. So something like “what is the other guy like, what’s he thinking?” is something that unfortunately doesn’t rank very high on my list.

There was this chick I had a short internet fling with some years back. And this wasn’t even like codfish because I had never met her in real life. At the end, after saying goodbye, she said, “you’re a little cold, you know.” At that time, I thought it was just some lame excuse, until it occurred to me: I probably did come across to people like that. But was it that I was really cold, or did I just seem like that?

Then there was a friend Ghost. After 1 drunken tirade at Sniper (the same one which earned me the moniker “The Man”), he also proposed a nickname for me: ice. I thought it was funny at that time but have come to realise that it has some meaning.

When I think back upon the times I played football, I was never good at it. My preferred position was usually central defence. Partly because you didn’t need a lot of skill, partly because I was big. My strength was that I didn’t panic easily. My weakness was that I was too passive. Both are the sides of the same coin. I was the iceman.

When I spent 4 years in a cold and dark place, I paradoxically told myself that I loved winter, in spite of having grown up in a tropical country. It suited me because inside I was a little frosty.

When I helped my sister move out of her North Carolina place, there was a dog who was scared of lightning. During a thunderstorm, it would come and look for me. I bitchily called it an "emotionally needy canine" and while my sister laughed at that, I think inside she must have been thinking, "this guy needs to open his heart".

It’s true, that I make a lot of crazy jokes, but they help to counterbalance the coldness. I try to do the right thing, but when that happens, it’s because reason is guiding me, rather than because I know by instinct what the right thing is. I have to think about whether people are happy or sad, I have to find reasons. I have to be mindful and watchful.

There has always been one constant in my life: I have had very little need for human contact. I have only ever felt truly alone on 2 occasions. One of them was when I was hanging out with a clique and I knew that nobody in that clique really liked me. But that was just a while. The other occasion was college. It was an extreme situation: being in a foreign country, I knew a few people, and I was alone most of the time. The winters were long and cold. But I was good at keeping myself occupied with things, trivial things and such – I probably suffered much less from this than most people in my situation would have done. Even when I was a kid, I remember that I was emotionally avoidant. It definitely wasn’t only that my mother was pushing me away emotionally, I was also doing the same to her.

I was infamous at family gatherings, as a kid, for being the one who refused to kiss ppl goodbye. On one hand, it’s true that kids should not have to be subject to that bullshit. On the other hand it could not have been very endearing to the aunts that I would kiss them goodbye and wipe my lips afterwards. I was not Marcel Proust. I wasn’t born to thrive on human contact. My sister used to kiss me in order to irritate me. It worked. I would then make up stories about how her saliva was the most vile poison known to mankind (believable because she’s a scorpio).

I have never excelled in inter-personal relationships. There are plenty of people out there who have much better relations with their parents than I had with mine. I don’t think my parents are bad people by the way. Even my mother who I consider to be a flawed person, has her strengths. But it could be true, as my sister once complained, that there is no love in the family. It’s easy to blame the parents for that but I think everybody (including myself) shares some responsibility.

It’s too easy to blame your parents for teaching you the bad things. But this is from a book I read about relationships by Judith Rich Harris. What happens is that both the parents and the children have the genes that make them difficult to get along with. Then the parents and the children don’t get along, the parents aren’t very nurturing, partly because they are not inclined to be nurturing, and partly because the children are assholes. In this way, it is everybody’s fault.

In brief, in many respects we are the typical asian family.

Now that I have badmouthed my family, it’s time to give them some credit. My family, especially my father’s side, have gone through really tough times. My mother’s side also has a few strong characters. Surely I’m not alone in this: it’s an Asian thing. And the Asian way? Stoicism. We talk about fortitude, we talk about stamina, and we talk about ren3. That infamous word, which when written in Chinese is a knife blade on top of a heart - endure. And it is a very double edged concept, because while it is very useful for fortifying yourself against shit, it also has the effect of inviting people to give you even more shit. You had a great leader like Mao, he gave China the greatest famine of the 20th century, as well as the cultural revolution, and you still think he’s a great guy. That would make me think that Chinese people are the greatest fools on earth if not for the fact that recently North Koreans have proven themselves to be more worthy of that title.

My problems have been different at different times. When I was younger and more clueless, I was blithely unaware of stuff that was going on all around me. When I was older, as a teenager, I got too wrapped up in my troubles that I was hardly aware that it would have been easier telling people about it... well actually a little hard because normally your family would be the first people you turn to for help. Sometimes my parents were there for me (especially if those are things they are interested in, like education, or sending me to the hospital when I break my bones). But I have never sought help from them for emotional problems for various reasons, one of which is that they themselves were a big source of those emotional problems. Again – some fairness. I don’t tell them my problems. And they have criticised me for not telling them my problems. But then again they haven’t been very good listeners either.

Now that I’m an adult it’s a different story. There’s this scene in Zhang Yimou’s “Hero”, where the assassin is granted an audience with the emperor he was sent to kill. The emperor, well this was the Qin emperor and obviously no fool. He asked the assassin, are you here to kill me? The assassin said, “what makes you think so?” and the emperor pointed to a grid of candles between them. “There is evil qi emanating from you. You see? You have even managed to deflect all the candle flames.” Well, not that I want to kill people, but there is evil qi flowing out of me a little too often.

Seen in this context, I would say that my brief, online relationship with codfish was one of the strangest, most atypical episodes of my life. It was almost as though, in 1 brief year I more or less compensated for the emotional barrenness of the rest of my life.

But come to think of it, I don’t think it was hardly a coincidence that this took place when I was in college, at the one time when I was the most deprived of human contact – and yet when you are among Americans, you see a whole range of human contact you wouldn’t normally see among Asians. (To put it in a nice way). And she was an online entity to me. Your brain fills in the things that you cannot see, and it probably generated the image of a perfect girlfriend (until she started to mess up). When you have a real girlfriend, I’m sure you will find 1001 annoying things about her.

When was the last time I did something for love? To be frank, a very very long time ago. I have to be a nicer person. Both for my own sake and for the sake of those poor ppl who have to occasionally put up with me. That will require some change. And I’m wondering where it will come from.