Author Archives: Kevin L

Every time I truly expend effort to write an essay, I find myself reducing lots of complex issues into simple, logical arguments that should have been very obvious to any one who first encounters the issue. I realized that many times, we thought too deeply into the topics we are attempting to engage and in the process, we lost the sense of individual issues’ simplicity. Identifying the most fundamental and basic components of an issue allows you to tear it apart and treat each of the bits with a wholesome discourse. The result can be either a trivialization of the issue at hand or a great depth of analysis. Of course, the latter happens more frequently than the former unless the writers are not thinking about the issue at all.

The most tricky part about writing any essays is really about pin-pointing the segment of the question or issue that interests you the most and that you can engage passionately. For me, politically-correct topics are hard to handle because of the sheer (self-perceived) hypocrisy necessary and my unfortunate desire to criticize things in a bid to make the world a better place for everyone. On the other hand, when it comes to Science & Technology (maybe also Globalization), I am often too biased towards innovations, and I disregard the importance of traditional stuff that we have been withholding. That being said, it doesn’t naturally mean that I embrace all things new equally – because when you expect me to tackle moral and ethics, I attack all the new alternative cultures that are springing up from nowhere and stick wholeheartedly to traditional values and principles. How about solemn issues of death penalty and war? I take on this very cynical attitude that dismiss all as part of nature and all that exist are necessary.

Other times, I always want to achieve a breakthrough in the ideas I raise. I hope for the sort of impress that would make a reader exclaim how well crafted the argument and logic is. I guess I had that sort of epiphany when I read Sam Harris but then again, I may be just plain biased then so it’s hard to say. For my essay, it hardly happens to myself but I wonder if it happens with the other readers of my essay. There was once though, when I read what I wrote last time (I forgot completely what I wrote) and found it surprisingly well-wrote. The analogies in the essay, I can recognize as my style but I just don’t recall the state of mind I was in when I penned the words. Of course, there will be times when I simply chose the wrong question to write and ended up with crap that would give me a fail grade. I guess it’s all about being serious with what you are doing and giving thought to what you have written.

This entry feels so weird, not in typical mode today.

Because my name was mentioned by Kwang Guan, I cannot escape the responsibility of a decent discourse on ‘comparisons’ as he has pointed out. While his entry is on something entirely different and probably something too mature for my understanding, the part where he raised my name and concluded about the whole idea of reference anxiety, needs to be reviewed. As Wensi has intelligently pointed out, the entry seems to be inspired by reference anxiety and I sure hope this post of mine doesn’t seem so.

In the entire of humanity’s history and as far as society is concerned, there has always been a tension between competition and collaboration. The very fact that a society is formed at all is enough to demonstrate that a high degree of collaboration is possible and essential for the advancement of all man but more importantly, it fosters the correct environment for healthy competition. Therefore, ‘comparisons’ essentially is a manifestation of the 2 forces at work. While comparing seem to be all about competition, in that we are trying to show how one is superior over the other in terms of something, it can also be for the sake of collaboration (why else would we have ‘comparative advantage’ for trade and specialization). In any case, there are many perspective that has not been considered in Kwang Guan’s critique of reference anxiety and more importantly, the habit to ‘compare’ has never been ‘strange’ at all. Friction in relationship can arise out of pure incompatibility and not to be attributed to comparisons because comparison places everyone at the same level, just like comparing prices of the products on the market. A society, with humanly comparison is merely a microcosm of the economic forces at large that governs almost every aspect of our behavior and while we cannot help it, the increasing flow of information and connectedness of the individuals is making things more fair and equal.

The world has always been unfair and it is all of our responsibility to make it fair to us, by working to its requirements, by relentlessly pursuing what it considers to be merits. Sometimes, the world is just not meant for us – but neither is it meant for anyone else. So go on, attempt to change the world to suit yourself, or more easily, shape yourself to suit the world and you will be on the better end of the comparison, the one to cause others to shy away upon thinking about you. It takes efforts, and the process is not going to be too comfortable. More essentially, at the end of the day, you might even think that you have been slogging for something you never wanted. The fact then is, you haven’t discovered yourselves enough.

实用华语似乎不再那么自在了。已近一年多没有靠华文的经验了；虽然仍有用话语，而说话还算与以前一样流利，但感觉似乎有点不同了。除了与家人说话还是一样的自在，但来到工作室，我对华语的态度已有了转变。华语对我来说好像就只适合朋友间交谈，聊天，与家人沟通的语言，而工作室，总是用不上。恐怖的是，这话语重要性的萎缩似乎是说大家欢迎的。我的GP就像是因为没有了中文课的存在而进步的。难道，真得不能同时学习，并且精通两种语言吗？对此，我感到很不自在。

新加坡真是烦。近日大部分对国家政策（包括莫些人薪金膨胀一事）的争论，都是由一些洋派的人士发表。这类趋势该是反映受中文教育人士‘原吃苦’的精神还是新加坡人‘有苦难言’呢？当真可笑的是，这些批评国家领袖的人们，便是希望取代他们，甚至成功取代，但却重蹈覆辙的人们。始终不言不语的百姓，的大众，则是永远守护着国家，一心为国，任劳任怨的人们。我呢？只能算是个旁观者吧?就在这儿观着人间的冤案。这也不怎么自在。

I haven’t been reading and I think that’s making me cynical. I am giving my teachers a really hard time by presenting skeptical arguments within almost every aspects of plain inquiry. It appears, I have shown that all arguments can be made logical by twist of language for any flawed model (for Human Geography), all double-side coins can be split and attacked from multiple sides (for General Paper), economic goals and theories conflict so much that all equally valid theories disagrees all the time (for Economics), you just have to slam formula into every single problem and you get some sort of solution (for Mathematics & Chemistry). I guess not encountering new arguments or attempting to get convinced by others would simply cause you to think like a cynic. Worst, I have been rather sick this few days and I am getting rather pissed with my current state of health.

Nothing exciting is coming out as everyone prepares for ever increasing tests and study for the upcoming assessments that would be proved very important. For me, I still have the stupid SAT to worry about though I must say I am significantly less worried already. May has started and I have not even looked at a single SAT question – I guess I won’t be joining Mib after all. It’s a hard life anyway. Looking back so far, I have been really lucky to meet great people, worked with very nice people and learned loads from really intelligent people. Frankly, when you think this way, life isn’t that tough after all. And I have to concur that it is fun to be sharing personal experiences with others (though not that part about others’ good news being your bad news and stuff like that). It’s just that often, I find myself appreciating my experiences so much more after sharing and learning about others – perhaps I have been more optimistic, or maybe I have been really lucky.

While this post is titled ‘The Cynic’, by this point of the entry, I probably no longer sound so much like a cynic. There’s still loads of intellectual space for academic discussions that would inspire many new ideas (but not the debate about ‘true illusions’ – I kinda had enough of that), so I would always be welcoming thoughts encompassing a variety of fields of knowledge. Now, for those hunting for more stuff to read, you might like to try your hands on normalizing a wave function, then read up on the normal distribution. Those are probably not enough, so you may be feeling stressed out, try taking a nap. After waking up, it’d be cool to learn more about Semi-Conductors which are totally pervading every appliances in our lives. Of course, given the climate report, who can resist knowing more about global warming?

Oh, in case no one realizes, the sub-heading on top of this page now changes randomly with every refresh. If you don’t understand what those lines say, don’t ask me – neither do I.

I rarely talk about my life but today’s Sports Meet have been an eye-opener. First there was the running-on-slippery-track act that totally stunned me (in other words, cause me to feel so bored I was practically stoning). Next comes the cheering that involved a few zi-high committee people banging plastic bottles and metal pans. Then there was a bunch of idiots who actually made some money out of selling things you don’t typically see on a Sports Meet – ‘Oven-baked Dough’ of various types. Most importantly, I have this freak behind me who told me, ‘You are totally trying to be funny on your blog. You use such complex sentence structures and vocabulary just to express a simple statement.’ I paused. Totally freaked out by the insult, not the person who delivered the statement.

Language have been an issue for me since a kid. I never liked spelling because the notion of a few blades that spins when you turn it on, with some metal netting covering the blades doesn’t seem to relate to the alphabets ‘F’, ‘A’ or ‘N’ and after understanding that the ‘metallic bird’ that we board to go to London is known as the ‘Aeroplane’, I decided that language is something I will not be very good at. Life as a kid who was bad in language is really sad – you start hurling vulgarities (probably the only few words in your vocabulary) when you are frustrated with the weird arrangements of alphabets you are presented with, without knowing what those vulgarities mean. The result – some sort of counseling session that wouldn’t have any effect anyway. Trust me, it really feels bad to be speaking some Hokkien and lots of Chinese when you are in a school with teachers who totally dislike such students. I spent majority of my English lessons in Primary school standing at the back of the classroom, especially for lower primary.

I thought it’d be great to be in a Chinese School since my English was so bad and western culture sounds a little barbaric sometimes. Unfortunately, the school was at a stage of trying to shed their ‘Chinese’ image so I had to go with the flow and trying to pick up English in the way the education system wanted me to. They gave me loads of incentives – I got more counseling sessions for over-using English and there were rules stipulating that Mandarin is disallowed in all lessons except Chinese. In particular, a history teacher scolded me rather badly for speaking Mandarin. It’s fine in retrospect. That’s totally better than the Chinese oppression in Indonesia (that I happen to learn later in that lesson). I knew I had to learn English in the way that I can use it so I embarked on the arduous journey in search of a sort of ‘Enligishtenment’. Eventually, I decided that intuition was the best way of directing my use of the language. Hard learning of grammar rules or memorizing vocabulary does little to improve my standards. Only by embracing the language, using it flexibly, and distorting it to suit the circumstances, would you truly use it and be a user of the language.

So when my sister asking me the meaning of ‘ruefulness’, I said, ‘I am not a dictionary. I study not the language. I use the language.’ Of course, while I now know the term is supposed to mean sorrow, I was trying to illustrate the point that every word you use is but a figure, just like a number, with something it represents but cannot fully describe or replace the ‘thing’ – physical or metaphysical. As a user of language, I am allowed to manipulate it the way I want to achieve my desired effects. Why should that rascal tell me that I am over-working my sentences and using redundantly difficult words? Life’s getting worst for the kid who’s English cannot make it.

Now that you have had a taste of my rant, I think it’d be good for you to improve your thinking habits.

What do you call a person who spends his/her weekend reading about Quantum Tunneling, Socrates’ Moral Philosophy from a book The Great Philosophers, Wave-particle Duality, History of Netherlands, Summation of the Grandi’s Series and it’s cousin, and finally, a poor attempt with the Hwa Chong Ionic Equilibria Lecture Notes? Vib.

As if a single term would suffice to describe such a person. I didn’t read all those topics on Wikipedia. I mean I do that sometimes but for this weekend, I really went into the books sort of knowledge and truly understood many things that I haven’t when I was surfing through Wikipedia. While I spared myself of Schrödinger equation, I took de Broglie’s hypothesis pretty calmly and understood what it means. In fact, de Broglie’s PhD thesis presented one of the most elegant relation that I can imagine (as compared to the one that I can’t imagine, which is Euler’s Equation; ironically with the imaginary term in it), and I read about it quite long ago when I was being introduced to the field of Quantum Mechanics. Quantum tunneling is something that helped excite me further about the quantum world. I must say all the quantum thing that I was ever interested about was more to do with Unifying Theories, which I have been brought into by Brian Greene several years ago with an online version of The Elegant Universe. I seriously think anyone concerned about natural forces should watch this. I spent quite a fair bit of my Secondary 3 life pondering over the stuff the video mentioned but then exams set in and so goes Relativity, Superstrings and stuff. Now it’s time for a revival. In fact, this weekend of exploration made me visualize wave-particle as an entire continuum where you either behave like a wave because you have too small a mass that you are almost pure energy or you behave as a participle because you have too large a mass that makes your wavelength so small and undetectable. Whatever in-between are just the quantum stuff. More importantly, I suspect a connection between gravity and electromagnetism. I just have this feeling that gravity is just the ‘electromagnetic’ counterpart of particles.

Then on to Socrates, I discovered how his idea of man being creatures of perfect rationality (but not wisdom) is actually coinciding with economic thought. His ideas banished Altruism almost entirely, by suggesting all good is done to cultivate one’s soul and gain happiness. Well, from a Kantian perspective, if you believe in Socrates, just twist the whole means-end thing around. I do have my doubts about Socrates but I must say that his spirit is absolutely commendable – exemplification of a rather ideal moral person, though his wits and playful rhetoric often work against him in terms of him being a philosopher or at least a pillar of thought. To put myself in his shoes, I suspect he would rather be a commoner, forgotten, rather than to be father of philosophy itself. I guess unless philosophy is purely a study of techniques of inquiry, Socrates should not like his position as the ‘father’ at all.

Finally, the mathematics I have just to learn to appreciate is really fun! Grandi’s series, and a whole lot of mathematically counter-intuitive stuff has helped make it less rigid. I mean, for a pseudo-arts-quasi-science student like me, it wouldn’t be fun for me if there was a universal and perfect answer to every problem in the world. I truly enjoy the fact that we can sit down and discuss whether the sum of a particular series should be this or that, or whether the series converges to a particular number. That’s more Mathematically Vib, or Vibbishly Mathematical whichever you would prefer. The (1 – 2 + 3 – 4 + 5 – 6 + 7…) series actually sums up to (in the Euler’s revised definition of summation sense) a quarter! Can you believe it?

While reading a lot of crap brings down your grades quite very occasionally, I do enjoy the moments of epiphany of realizing how Superfluid defies gravity (it’s quantum jiggling supersedes it’s tendency to form solids; or to put it in another way, the quantum rule against non-motion of the particle overcomes any potential inter-atomic forces), or why on Earth would an electron orbital consist of two spaces with a node of discontinuity in between and yet the electron can move within the two places simultaneously. I do hope to be a Polymath but that can easily cause myself to stray into the abyss of a ‘Jack-of-All-Trades (And Master-of-None)’. Well, I’ll just explore what I like for the moment.