Author Archives: Kevin L

I’ve not been blogging, deceiving myself that I should spend more time absorbing ideas rather than expounding them. It’s kind of true I have been reading and perhaps obliquely due to Peng Sing’s discussion on Richard Feynman on his blog, I was curious and decided to try and read some stuff by Feynman. I also read a couple of stuff about ‘thinking’ for the sake of some projects I am planning to initiate. The process of reading these materials seem more passive than I previously expected – I wanted to look into what these people studying the processes of ‘thinking’ have been achieving. As a result, I carefully took in the different thinking tools and the rationale behind them. For some, I practiced the same thinking habits in vastly different ways and in other cases, I had actually been using them all the time (except not as formally as suggested by Edward de Bono). It was pretty exhilarating to realised that your own methods of doing stuff are actually the ones studied and proposed by experts to be ‘taught’ to others.

The reason for citing the reading I have been indulging as a ‘more-passive-than-expected’ process is that I didn’t seem to quite interact with the proposed ideas in the way I normally do. When reading Feynman, I no longer have that ‘nods with agreement’ experience I encountered with ‘The Elegant Universe’. Maybe I was expecting too much – like the Teh-Si from 136 香港街鱼头火炉 opposite Singapore General Hospital. I felt that they produce top-notch Teh-Si when I first drank it and the second time I drink it, I feel that it tasted below standard although my cousin who was there both times, insisted the quality was the same. I had much higher expectation the second time because the first was in some sense, a surprise. Likewise, having read Brian Greene and heard about Feynman’s skills with lectures, I was expecting too much. I felt like I was just plainly looking at the type of ideas Feynman has to offer eventually.

I wonder if this is the gestation period for some big essay that’s going to come up. All the studying have kind of dumbed me into a standard essay sort of machine. Trying to study SAT essay section also produce the same effect. It sucks, and it drains values out of essays. In the same way, the life I am going through right now makes me appreciate big issues a bit less – I have got National Service, Tertiary Education and lack of sleep to worry about. At least during the preparation of ‘A’ Levels, I only had to worry about whether I studied and as long as I covered the syllabus and know my stuff, I am free to explore. Of course, some may be stuck at the preparation stage and I don’t deny there are times when it happened for me but by and large, I seem to actually enjoy more freedom before than after the academic hurdle. It is freedom of the mind I am referring to. The more decisions you have to make on your own and the more independence in life you gain, the harder it is to find time to explore the world and stay as an observer like I have always been. Curiosity can no longer be the excuse to find out about things – society needs you to back it up with the practical reasons for knowing, the function of discoveries and the benefits finding out brings. But the grass is always greener on the other side and knowing that helps you to push on with your existing circumstance.

On this very day last year, that’s 15 December 2006, my auntie was in the hospital and on my way to the hospital, I left my K700i on that bus. It was a SMRT bus Service No. 75. Fortunately I managed to retrieve it that night from the Bukit Panjang Bus Interchange after calling up the bus company. It was a sigh of relief.

Today, I found that my phone is missing when I woke up. I vaguely remember setting the alarm but apparently it was the memory from the day before. I suspected that I left it in the slacks I wore yesterday. My mum then exclaimed that she already put the slacks into the washing machine to wash. Opening the cover of the machine, we found the slacks on the top and true enough, the piece of K700i was inside the left pocket. It was dripping wet and you can even see water in the screen as if the phone was some tank. I think you can keep a couple of amoebas as pets in the phone at that moment.

15 December are bad days for my K700i somehow. I am still drying the phone right now and I am aware that the phone was turned on while being placed in the washing machine. It spells trouble but I really hope this Sony Ericsson can tide over this crisis. I’ll not be using it once I enter National Service anyway.

An Update (16 February)

I tried the phone and it work! The exception was the backlight of the screen, which means the screen never lights up! Initially there was some problems with the joystick too but after trying it for a while, it started to work. I didn’t bother to test the camera since I don’t really use it and the devastation of the backlight means I can’t really use it anymore. I switched to my old Nokia 3100, which I’m probably going to use for my National Service, only to discover that the vibrator of the phone is damaged from the impact when it dropped last time (my dad was using it that time). Too bad.

I haven’t blogged for a real long time and in this long time there’s quite a few entries which should have been written but was ‘lost’ somehow through my sheer laziness, reluctance to do something unexciting on my computer and conscious economic decision that playing computer games would grant me a higher marginal benefit. There’s one on ‘Meritocratic Nature of Free Markets’, inspired by the experience of getting rejected for the EDB scholarship; another on ‘Nasty Cities’, looking into the problems plaguing developing cities from a primary perspective, inspired by my trip to the various coastal cities of China (Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wuxi and Nanjing); also a rant on life titled ‘Scammed’ which documents the scams I was subjected to when I was in various places (Pu-er Tea Leaves of Kunming, Yunnan; Long-jing Tea Leaves of Hangzhou; Silk Blankets of Suzhou; Teapots of Wuxi; Yahoo! 2007 Mail Alert Sham in my mobile phone when in Singapore).

I don’t think I’m going to write any of these entries. In fact, there’s a long overdue entry on meritocracy but I decided to just dump that. The fate of these ‘floating entries’ (floating in my mind) will be rather similar, my mind has wandered to other things. When I went to Building & Construction Authority’s Scholarship & Career Talk I suddenly became endowed with a designer-engineer mind. On my way back from Suntec City, as I was taking the ‘Down’ escalator (a misnomer because it does not ‘escalate’ you) into Citylink, it dawned on me that the moment we step on the escalator from a higher position we are holding on to a hell lot of potential energy and there shouldn’t be a need to expend external energy source to ‘carry’ us down – what we need is merely a system to slow the release of this potential energy that we have. It is the same idea as for an elevator going down – getting it to move down based on the weight of those people inside the elevator. This should theoretically reduce energy consumption quite substantially. Unfortunately, in both cases, the main obstacle is the inability to design a system that can handle variable weights. I suspect one means is to use friction, because the higher the weight, the more the potential energy but also the higher the friction – I do not have any quantitative relations but I am rather positive that holds. As a result, I think modifying the existing Down escalators would be easier than the elevator thing. I have not come up with any designs but I think this is a nice problem to think about for any hard-core engineers.

Such experiences leaves me rather disturbed because I can no longer be sure if Economics is something I want to place my future in. I have such varied interests, which I once thought could be contained in the multi-disciplinary, all-pervading nature of Economics – now I am aware that is not possible, especially when it comes to career. Organizations in the real world are looking for flexibility and versatility but not someone who wants to mix everything up. For a person like me, keen on studying application of river studies on traffic management strategies (or hoping to create an experimental advance community living so greenly that it contributes to negative carbon output to study its economy), the real world offers little room for me. This is not supposed to be a rant; I am going to make some room for myself somehow.

Finishing ‘A’ Levels was like running across a final checkpoint after a 15-year long run with a few important checkpoints but none as important as this. There were Y-junctions and I made choices, some out of convenience and the others somewhat forced but they all culminate some way or another into this final checkpoint. Essentially I always treated education as a blackbox I have to run through, with its contents unknown if not too difficult to understand for parties uninvolved in it at any point of time.

I took the free time I have to visit my young cousins still at early stages of the Singapore education system. One, at the age of 11, with PSLE due next year, just swept clean all the awards for her cohort in the school except ‘Best in Chinese’. The other, entering Primary school next year is happily anticipating the stuff she’s going to pick up although somewhat dissatisfied with a mere recital of the English alphabets during her Primary One Orientation. This younger cousin picked up ice-skating, keyboarding and computer gaming without any outside help. I recalled the time of my Primary One Orientation, nothing but cries and screaming for my mother. I spent my first 3 weeks in Primary school learning nothing but the concept of waiting for the dimissal time to come and returning home so that I can play with my toys. I had no kindergarten friends around with me so it wasn’t that easy to adapt – but when it became easy for me to make friends, the trouble of the manifestation of my talkative nature arose and I was soon a target for ‘stand at the wall’ punishment that I became introduced to.

Early stages of education for me was so much simpler. There was no CCA requirements and attendance marking wasn’t even strict. Parents brought you to school so there’s no such thing as ‘ponning’ school and everything was so structured. ‘No going back to classrooms during recess – if you need to retrieve something, ask for permission from the prefects’. I broke this rule by attempting to explore how the classrooms are like without a single soul in them and that was how I got to know Chun Kang (who was already a prefect then and carrying out his duty by eventually giving me the permission to pretend to retrieve my stuff and leave the classroom block at once), before entering the same class as him in Primary 5. I enjoyed the days of playing hide-and-seek with the prefects and making sarcastic remarks right in front of them about their inability to adhere to school rules anyway. Funny thing is that I became a prefect in Primary 5 and ended up not quite a renegade but instead, one who upholds rules a bit too stubbornly. Maybe that was some sort of lesson for me in life. Nevertheless, the experiences contribute to my principles in life subsequently.

Primary school today is another affair. One moment you have people doing videos for news events in the school, another moment you have to actually ‘study’ for exams (I didn’t remember about that in my Primary school days), then there’s the part about scoring 294 in the PSLE exams. That’s all too much for people like me. Oh yes, the system changed so much that overt discrimination through the EMX (X being some number) system now transformed into one with subtle discrimination. And recently the attempts to mix former GEP students in Primary 5 and 6 with the mainstream students have been hailed as a ‘success’, as if they had been living on different planets until now. Oh, just to prevent any misconceptions, the ‘success’ was basically a comment to explain that the students didn’t experience any falling grades because of the mix, as if abilities of people followed the laws of diffusion (ie. moving from regions of higher concentration to lower concentration), or that being average was an infectious disease so the elites have to be kept away from the victims.

In any case, treading out of education, at least the formal, blackbox sort of system is a great achievement and looking at the kids today, I wonder if I should pity or praise them. But I’ll cheer them on in either case, the fruits (at least right now) may not be worth the time and effort but as an Asian, to be put through the system trains you for the asian society at large as long as you have adopted the right mindset to approach it.

While talking to Peng Sing on MSN, I suddenly had the idea of dissecting all the subjects I take and break them down into simplistic ideas just for the sake of facilitating muggers and also poking fun at the nature of our syllabus. This is going to be short and sweet because I am still having a break from slacking.

Chemistry
Chemistry is really just about a couple of rules that govern everything, just like Physics. But in the case of Chemistry the application of these rules are highly specific and limited to a couple of stuff. More importantly, there’s always exceptions and anomalies to these rules and there’s other fundamental rules governing all the exceptions. So Chemistry is basically a concoction of different factors and when certain factors becomes relatively important in specific cases, a particular trait manifest. It’s real logical and when the mathematics comes in, there’s no dispute.

Mathematics
Mathematics at this level is about a couple of stuff: Alertness, pattern recognition, nimble fingers and mastery of the calculator functions. Firstly you got to take note of what the question is asking – real important, because often you can’t interpret the question, you get stuck and you don’t know what operations to perform or what equation to formulate. Pattern recognition is important in two aspects: 1) Sequence & Series 2) Drawing parallels between tutorial/revision questions and exam questions – no further elaboration on this needed. Nimble finger so that you can reach the correct calculator buttons at the appropriate speed. Mastery of the calculator functions is of utmost importance because nowadays at least 5% of all the questions in the paper is testing you on your ability to perform certain calculator functions with the information they give you and copy them down on the foolscap.

Economics
Economics is real tricky to break down but it’s still possible when you encounter such scientific approach towards teaching it right at my Junior College. Basically Economics is about theories, and applying them to all sorts of stuff in reality. It can be firms (monopolizing markets), a problem (like negative externality), an industry (like the PC industry) or a country’s economic policy. You are taught a whole load of concepts and theories: Law of Comparative Advantage, Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns, Keynesian National Income Determination, Monetarist Transmission Mechanism, J-Curve Effect, Marshall-Lerner Condition, Expenditure-Switching, Scarcity, Liquidity Preference Theory, etcetera (It did cross my mind to list everything but I guess it slipped off my mind the moment ‘etcetera’ came into it). You just have to whip out whatever relevant when you encounter the questions asking for stuff in reality. Other times you really only regurgitate the theories.

Geography
There’s two parts to Geography, the Human and Physical Component. Basically the Physical component requires an understanding of concepts very much like Science and Maths or even some part of Economics. Nonetheless it is more science than Economics and application is more direct and to the point relative to the need to customize economic theories as the situation deem fit. There’s also a component on hazards & management in Physical Geography and so you are expected to discuss matters that are more social science in nature. Human Geography is nothing more than understanding social theories and then criticizing them with all the case studies you have in the world before telling us how they are useful in the limited context they are designed for. There’s plenty of room for critique in Human Geography and you should never feel you wrote enough in essays.

Okay, I am done with this – found it pretty much like a rant.

Yesterday I decided to get away with writing just one essay by writing a trashy one that is supposedly a joke. I kind of enjoyed writing it although I am not sure if readers would be equally amused. Today, I thought I’ll really take a break and write only a single essay although I don’t mind writing another trashy one. Today’s essay isn’t particularly impressive and I thought I didn’t quite follow GP conventions. It’s an attempt with Arts and Culture, a topic I rarely work on. And because of its discussion on Literature, I guess I need to show off some knowledge of literature works, which is, I have to admit, severely limited to the text I studied during my days in The Chinese High. Then again, actually the fact that I had limited knowledge of works (needed to answer this question) was because the question required something to do with Singapore Literature, which I barely bother.

I always hear about Dr Goh Keng Swee’s contributions to the economic development and strategies of Singapore: He initiated the idea of GIC, he decided that Singapore should retain the National Service, he once helped to manage the education system as well as our national defence. Perhaps because of what I hear, I had always hoped for the chance to listen to his ideas, his opinions about different issues. I finally got the chance when I found the only 3 books he published about his work. The recent ‘biography’ of him published wasn’t so much something that I desire because I didn’t want to delve into his life. I wanted to know about Dr Goh’s ideas.

I read one of his speeches for a seminar on urbanization and felt enlightened about the functions of cities. A third of my Human Geography syllabus was on urbanization and studies of cities. A sixth of the syllabus held ideas about development and modernization. In his speeches, I found names like ‘Myrdal’, which I come across when I learn about growth theories. Despite that, I struggle to conceive a purpose for cities. To me, the congregation of more people, in a larger space meant nothing more than an exaggerated version of towns and villages. I understood the kind of administrative, business functions that cities serve but these were all micro-activities that seem far from national-level importance of economic planning. Economic development, to me, was something related to, but much larger than city itself. Cities, to me, was no more than a component that provided growth and drove growth in the modern age.

Perhaps I was trivializing the role of cities, indeed, after learning of the function of a city, especially the city of a developing economy from Dr Goh, I decided that my beliefs about the role of cities is seriously doing injustice to urban areas at large. Dr Goh believes that urban cores epitomize modernization and thinks that all cities have the role to spread this modernism, both tangible products of technology and intangible ideas on managment, on reality and modern philosophy (perhaps of life) to the rest of the nation, in order to push it along the road of development.

It is perhaps the attitudes in the cities, the desire for better life, the acquaintance with competition, the belief of a better tomorrow, the enterprise, the innovation that sets the urban core above the other areas where people congregate. It is the spread of such ideas, of such lifestyle and beliefs that the city have to perform in order to push the rest of the country with it. Without playing this role, the city can continue to grow and prosper, but that would produce a dual economy, where benefits of these urban sectors would not reach the rural areas. There may even be a backlash resulting from that as the stagnating rural economy fails to provide sufficient food supply for the urban center. Of course, the urban center, with its riches, can import those products and remove its dependence from the rural area – though that is unlikely to turn out well for the national economy.

In all, the urban center is more than a leader in the economy spearheading development, it is the cauldron of attitudes, ideas and knowledge that have to be spread around the economy to achieve modernization, to attain development. The soup in this cauldron have to be scooped out and served, not aimlessly boiled to dryness through rapid yet mindless growth.

I have been writing rather madly these days, sticking to my commitment to do standard sort of academic essays and a few days back I suddenly had the urge to read Orwell’s “Why I Write?“. I was introduced to this essay by a little book in the bookstore that holds the collection of Orwell’s essays and short writings. That was the third time I read this essay of his and I guess it’s the first time I truly understood what he was talking about. My writings these days, beyond what is on my blog is largely the expression of knowledge rather than ideas so it’s impossible for me to draw any parallels between Orwell and myself.

Sadly, I didn’t really give thought to writing as a career and so I guess I don’t even consciously reject the idea of writing. And I realised that the vaguely termed ‘Historical Impulse’ of Orwell’s ‘motives of writing’ seem to stand out for me. I just want to keep records of thoughts that flew past me (that probably makes up part of ‘sheer egoism’). Political impulse is pretty weak given my understanding of my audience and the desire for status quo in politics. And like what Orwell has claimed, Aesthetic enthusiasm exist somehow but is feeble.

I decided that even after my examinations, I should continue with that sort of discipline and write at least a single essay a day. But I’ll no longer write those that are required by the A Levels, having already completed the examinations. I’ll be writing little essays of things I want to discuss on comment on, much like my blog entries but with more academic rigour (assuming it’s currently deficient in my blog entries although I would admit otherwise).

After 2 days of experimentation, I am positive I can sustain my efforts and continue being prolific (probably for the rest of my life). I have decided to work on essays everyday to keep me in the mode of writing and encourage myself to read up more in order to synthesize what I know into piece of writings. I will be uploading the essays I wrote here, so that anyone can access them and use them for reference of as tools for revision.

I’ll be writing any sort of essays so you’ll probably find me answering a General Paper Essay question and a Macroeconomics essay on the same day. I have dated all my essays to force myself to keep to my commitment. Blog entries will not be factored in but I’ll still continue with analysis of daily encounters and stuff here.

Oh yes, anyone interested in sharing their essays or having their essays featured there can also gmail me your essays. I’ll make sure you are properly credited as long as you do a good job.

Back to writing…