Author Archives: Kevin L

In my September Holiday random wiki surfing, I stumbled upon an article on van ‘t Hoff, not because I wondering how fast chemical weathering will take place in the tropics or how moving the same piece of limestone from Jamaica to Canada can slow down its solution process. I was, in fact, looking at the article on the Arrhenius Equation mainly because I forgot if the (RT/Ea) that was a post-exponential factor had a negative in front of it.

I was first introduced to the name van ‘t Hoff in Physical Geography, when we studied about chemical weathering. We spelled his name as ‘Van Hoff’, apparently dropping off the necessary alphabets that conveys no information on how to pronounce his name. I had doubts about them being the same person but upon reading more about him in the Wikipedia article, I am pretty sure they are. In Physical Geography, we learn the Van Hoff’s Law.

Van Hoff’s Law states that for every 10 degree Celsius increase in environmental temperature, the rate of chemical weathering increases by two to threefolds.

Although this law appears strongly Chemistry, it is firmly grounded in the area of geology and the reason, I have realised, is that van ‘t Hoff was professor of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at the University of Amsterdam for 18 years. I guess geology have not progressed that far since his time, relative to the subject of Chemistry. Looking at the work van ‘t Hoff did in Chemistry, I must say his talents had been way beyond the subject could offer him in his time. The most amazing thing is that he is the first ever recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and that was 1901 and obviously, Physical Geography have paid more tribute to him than Chemistry did. At least for today.

Van ‘t Hoff was responsible for proposing the relation between the rate constant, temperature and activation energy now known to be the Arrhenius Equation. Svante Arrhenius provided the physical justification and interpretation for the equation and thus got his name attached to the equation. Svante Arrhenius was one of those top scientists at that time who could have contributed greatly to today’s Physical Geography in area of Climate Science. He proposed the greenhouse effect and its link to ice ages. He received the third Nobel Prize in Chemistry in history, in 1903.

Subjects are converging once again…

Talking to several people, problems with my hypothesis have been raised, which I find worth sharing:

Wee Chern focused on traversing between the space and time dimension: Is speed a means of being purely in a type of dimension? What sort of implication would an expanding spatial dimension have on the model?

Yong Xian gave a Special Relativity viewpoint: Maybe individual objects have their own axis of time within their own frame of reference? And so the differences in time experienced arises not from a distortion of reality but merely the differences in frame of reference?

My own questions emphasized on the problems associated with the notion of distortion: What exactly is this stretching? What is the movement of the ball like along the time-axis? Is it a constant speed? If it’s constant then stretching caused by object moving will only occur when the object ‘accelerates’, because if stretching continues when object is maintaining high speed, then time for the object must always move slower than the rest of reality and this effectively means the stretching will increase along the time-axis, creating the same ‘infinity-stretching’ problem I had in order to make time stationary for objects at light speed. I circumvented that issue with erasing it from time but for this, I can’t. Even if I can accept the stretching modification, the whole model is not well erected enough. There’s fine-tunning required pertaining to the exact details of ‘stretching’ or distortion.

It’s apparent this hypothesis still has a long way to go and I shall think about these questions after my Prelims (maybe after A Levels too).

Teachers’ Day Celebrations. Too bad the highlight was something more intellectual. While I had lunch with a couple of classmates (Pei Shan, Yu Shan, Yong Xian, Peng Sing and Jiahao), Pei Shan started talking about ‘The Time Travelers’ Wife‘ (by Audrey Niffenegger) and that got me talking about the Concept of Time I have formulated almost exactly a year ago. I thought it was a very simple illustration of time but I was fully aware of its limitations. I was expecting Yong Xian (who does Physics H3) to be like one of the first to comprehend my model and start questioning its validity. Well, she kind of disappointed me. But anyway, I thought of a question for myself to ponder over on my way home.

In my model, the entire spatial dimension is encapsulated in the Time dimension and this presents a problem. It conflicts with Einstein’s postulations of time slowing down for one experiencing high speed. Einstein’s model is such that any object would constantly traverse at the speed of light, except when it is at rest, all of the object’s speed is focused on travelling along the time axis, which would mean that it experiences the full force of time. When the object is in motion however, it begins to traverse in the spatial dimension with some speed as well, this speed is then deducted from the Time dimension and this makes the time slow down for the object experiencing motion. Since time itself travels at the light speed, once an object attains light speed in the spatial dimension, time for it stops and thus that’s the fastest it can go. This model doesn’t fit into my concept of time because my over-simplified model assumes everything to be traversing in time at the same speed (ie. everything in reality, on the ball is traveling along the exist of time at light speed). That’s to say that my model conflicts with Special Relativity. That’s the question I was expecting Yong Xian to ask but too bad – I thought of it myself.

In a bid to reconcile my model of time with cases of Special Relativity, I have to make a little modification. I make a bold claim that the ball of reality is rubbery, and therefore can be subjected to distortion. I apologize for imitating Einstein when it comes to the use of geometric distortion to circumvent problems of temporal-spatial convergence in cases of Special Relativity – I must say it’s really useful. When stuff in reality is subjected to motion (ie. traversing spatial dimension), it stretches the surface of reality. The way it stretch is such that the point of reality that the object at motion is on, moves against the direction of the axis of time. Relatively, as long as the object is not at light speed, the net movement is still forward in time, but the experience of time will be slower, slower than the rest of reality. The rest of reality continues moving along the time exist at the same way, albeit with projections protruding from it as a result of stuff speeding through space. Because the speed of light is so fast, our normal kind of travelling, even the speed of sound, would only produce little ‘humps’ on the surface of reality. To produce a ‘projection’ would require objects to be traveling at speeds that particles in particle-accelerators move.

The ball of reality at that vertex stretches out such that the corresponding value on the time-axis remains constant for any object at the speed of light.

The ball of reality is like a rubber ball, thus the name for the hypothesis of this model of time. The distortions that this rubber ball is capable of ensures that not all parts of reality moves at the same speed along time, and thus internalizes the whole of Special Relativity. As the object decelerates, it returns back to the rest of reality and thus experience everything like others. Essentially, the existence of the object is lengthened in terms of a God’s perspective but for itself, because of the slowing down of time, its motion within the frame of reference is also slowed down and thus it experiences effectively no difference. The Einstein’s method of moving into the future would involve stretching reality such that time stops for you for a while, and so the rest of reality tumbles on far from you along the time axis. When you return to the rest of reality, you are suddenly allowing yourself to speed through all the time that the rest of reality has already traverse and then getting back in touch with the rest of reality. Your experience of time is less than the others, and you successfully moves to reality, but in a way that’s within the constraints of the model. In this sense, time travel forward is still plausible, though not in the way others would normally conceive.

Armed with such a visualization, I challenged myself once more by thinking about what happens if the object tries to move faster than light in spatial dimension. Einstein would say it’s impossible because the speed can only be shared between the spatial and the time dimension and there’s a ‘conservation of speed’ that limits the total speed in all dimensions to that of light speed. I suspect that if you travel faster than light, there’s a chance you can move against the direction of the time axis, but you will tear the rubber ball of reality. Or perhaps, you’ll just lift yourself off the rubber ball because it can no longer stretch beyond that and enter a void. The elasticity of the rubber ball is thus limited by this constrain on speed. Unfortunately, we can’t think of it in the sense of elasticity because if you continually travel at light speed, you are effectively stretching the surface of reality infinitely – then comes the question of what is light and how it actually manifest on this rubber ball. To account for all that, I must say that time cannot stop for any object besides light. If an object is to travel at light speed, it’ll have to behave like light, which means it has to vanish from the axis of time, and exist only in spatial reality. That being said, anything that stretches the ball infinitely would leave this uni-directional dimension and exist solely in the spatial dimension. Therefore, to exist in both time and space, the object must only tend towards light speed and will never attain it. Here, the limitations of having space encapsulated in time presents a problem – one needs to be able to accommodate the notion that spatial reality is indeed contained in the ball but in some other sense just as time in felt to be contained in our space (ie. they contain each other and it really only depends on perspective; which is why I highlighted this issue as a bias that my means of visualization would pose). Hence, to cease existing in temporal dimension means the object (as well as all light we experience) are not contained in this rubber ball model.

Having said all that, I must stress that the ‘Rubber Ball Hypothesis’ is not a scientific theory but a proposed visualization of what is time and how it works and a plausible model in explaining the impossibility of time travel. I welcome modifications to overcome the existing limitations and biasness that is inherent in the model even if it’s in the expense of complicating the geometrical visualization of the model.

For the first time in my life, a thumbdrive failed me, causing majority of the files inside to become corrupted and unusable. Worst still, it’s my latest 2GB Imation Flash Drive – FlashGo. Even the 64MB USB Flash drive that I bought more than 5 years ago is still working well for me. More than 500MB of my data are wiped out, not deleted or lost but simply corrupted – it doesn’t really make much difference actually. I bought this drive for a price of 50 bucks, which was quite a steal and I got it right at the beginning of the year. I didn’t expect it to screw up that early in its life. This is a disaster. Compounding on my problems is the fact that most of the files inside are single copy files that I downloaded from the net, like my academic notes and also some important summaries I have compiled myself.

This is freaking ridiculous, I wonder if I can sue the manufacturer for this. Forget it, I won’t have enough energy to settle such a matter in court. But there’s something important I learnt. All the files which I have decided to share with friends, uploading them online or sending them out to people were in most sense, retrievable. It really pays to be kind and I sort of learnt this lesson many times over in my entire life. Good thing most of the time I was on the ‘lucky’ side, where I did help people and benefit from it, rather than to grief in retrospect that I should have been kind.

Start looking for people to copy the files from…

It’s amazing how ill-developed our memories are when we were young, or perhaps we just have terrible memory capacity. My sister (Let’s call her Jib) who was working on the Soundcard from Creative for her Project Work, expressed awe in the fact that Sound Blaster came out only after I (her brother) was born. She thought that everything was already rather hi-tech by the time we (our recent cohort) were born. I told her it wasn’t, as I remember the times when my mother was using Windows 3.1 and we had the huge 5.25-inch floppy disks for storing minute bytes of stuff. After that…

Jib: I only remembered the times when we had Windows 93…
Vib: There’s no such thing as Windows 93…
Jib: Erm, oh, it’s Windows 98…
Vib: Nope, it’s Windows 95 -_____________-||

Well, this brings back lame memories about the times we had to use the DOS command prompt to kickstart safe mode whenever the computer hanged and we had this really cool game which was 3D, but we have to use the DOS command prompt to start it and soon we got tired of typing long strings of commands that we gave up playing the game altogether. By the way, for anyone who didn’t realise, DOS stands for ‘Dirty Operating System’, it was not invented by Bill Gates. It was originally an OS invented by a firm known as ‘Spyglass’, and named Q-DOS (for Quick-Dirty Operating System) and Bill Gates bought the license from them and modified it a little before renaming it as MS-DOS. Glad we got this dirt off our XPs.

Kwang Guan asked me if I am a lifehacker (actually he simply implied that I am a lifehacker in our conversation) and I told him I am not. In fact, I am only introduced to this concept a couple of days back and wouldn’t have the sort of free time to study time saving techniques (pretty paradoxical huh?). While I only got to know about lifehacking and all those lame nonsense, I seem to have been following their sort of philosophy in the way I do things since a couple of years ago.

I still can’t be too sure what’s lifehacking but I know some ways of organizing life, saving time and maximizing productivity like:

Reading notes when you are on the bus

Writing reminders on a notepad so that you don’t forget

Getting a TV book (just whatever book you like) which you read only during TV programme commercial breaks

Conning yourself into working like crazy in school by believing you will be slacking when you get home

Reading lecture notes during lectures so that you don’t have to go through them at home

Sending good ideas to the future using futureme.org so that they won’t be lost while you are occupied with the present reality

Emailing yourself reminders to email important people or send out important letters so that you do that immediately when you check your inbox the next time

Get your hands on a book whenever you go out, you never know when you have a short break to read a couple of lines

Turning on the TV only when there’s something on which you want to watch; try hard not to channel-surf

Try not to get a facebook account if Yi Da tells you to do it…

Alternatively, if you already have an account, deactivate it…

These are life-saving techniques sometimes, at least the lifehackers think so.

Perhaps influenced by Yi Da, but more because of my curiosity about Singapore’s history, National Day Holidays seems appropriately (though not necessarily meaningfully) spent on reading Mr Ngiam Tong Dow’s book. Rather than to review his book in this entry, I would say I am choosing to thank the book for the sort of thinking I have been forced into and the insights I have gained about Singapore. Reading the book, I do sense a rather strong nostalgia, which strange enough, I felt I share. Never been in favour of public sector jobs, never even ever been a administration career, and in fact never been into the society, I must admit it feels extremely weird to feel the excitement of nation building as I flipped through Ngiam Tong Dow’s personal reflections of the policies he have contributed and participated in implementing. Maybe that’s what’s pushing Yi Da towards his goal.

For me, the book has offered me valuable information about the past of Singapore, the stories of how our forefathers built and transformed Singapore. Because our nation is so small, I believe the core of the transformation can only lie within the public sector, the civil service. The vision of our leaders, was important but perhaps overemphasized in our social studies syllabuses. I am interested in the thought processes, the things that were going through the minds of the administrators, the policy-makers and those who implement the policies at those points of time. Our leaders often offer us the most pragmatic explanation that the perspective of a rational governor can give – forcing us down with the weight of undeniable logic. I thought that if we look deeper into the concerns of our government, the emotional tirades they might be going through within themselves, we can get a better picture of how the system erected came to be so sound and steady.

Going through the book really makes me appreciate our achievements better, and more forgiving towards any blunders that our state has committed, but I observe this particular recurring idea that I thought is important. We can no longer look back into the past to learn what to do in the future and we (as in Singapore and its rulers) must look into the future in the way we have done, in the past. Change must be better accepted. During the time of independence, the organization of the public sector was built upon the simple stuff left from the colonial government and the flexibility offered to the public service administrators were immense. I have decided that the idea that administrators are inflexible and rigid only came about in recent decades when the system stabilized and people became too comfortable. Today, the huge structure we have erected is producing difficulties within the system. The tradition we have laid down have become a burden to people today (which very much parallel some other institution’s student council as far as I know).

On talents I think the monopoly on talents that our public sector have is something very real. As I flip through the scholarship brochures of the major scholarship providing bodies in our nation (most of which, in fact almost all of which are public service), I realized our ‘local talents’, are all tied up in the public service. I saw one Cambridge Masters Economist in the police force, probably already served pass his bond period; and there’s also those engineers from top international universities, working on administrative stuff. Of course, I am not saying they are not suited for the job or that they would have greater opportunities outside public service; but the point is that the system should not be aiming to produce a couple of really top people and then putting them into public service, while peripheral achievers (nice term for those who fail to make it to the extreme top) fail to be educated in top universities (because they have no money), stifling their opportunities. My point? Spread the funds out, let more people who truly deserves it enjoy overseas education (with subsidies) and make the gradient uphill less steep.

The existing situation is such that there’s this pile that goes all the way to the top and it probably can only accommodate a few person. Everyone fights to climb up the pile because no one is allowed to be in-between and then finally the ‘few’ are selected and poof, even those who are almost reaching now have to be on par with those who are right at the bottom.

Thai Police makes their staff wear Hello Kitty armbands for flouting minor laws as a means to shame them. It is to ensure discipline. The use of shame in Asian society as a means of punishment have become useful so much so that we are already at risk of desensitizing our people – probably accounting for ever-increasing shameless acts (which I shall not elaborate).

When I was a child, there were a couple of stuff I held in firm belief, which in retrospect, would send me giggles.

The Salvation Army exist to salvage unwanted toys

Albert Einstein’s hairstylist is named Robert J. Van de Graaff

Adolf Hitler & Charlie Chaplin were brothers

English dragons were predecessors of dinosaurs; Chinese dragons are predecessors of Man

Arabs invented Algebra, so Chinese invented Calculus

PAP is a giant chain kindergarten operating business that provided pre-school education to masses

Windows is to Microsoft like Apple is to Macrohard (I was waiting for this name to appear on the papers)

If you had landed properly on your feet, committing suicide by jumping off high buildings would be quite a feat

If you put enough ice into a cup of water to make it cold enough, you can get a huge lump of ice the size of the cup

Rocks are harder than stones

If you flap your hands really fast, you can fly

I seriously think I was once an idiot.

I don’t have a knack for criticizing things I have learnt. Most of the criticisms are learnt from other books or articles and then reproduced in my own words when they are deemed consistent with my logic. The same is very true for economics – sometimes I discover an enlightening piece of critique, which I go on to extend its analogies, examples and finding more evidence to substantiate its claims. Other times I reject it with a joke about its relevance and decide that there are lunatics around the world anyway. That being said, I seem to form a double standard when I meet with something prescribed in the holy document known as the ‘syllabus’. Just as the responsible, unquestioning syllabus-following teacher, I suppress any doubts I have about the knowledge to be passed on to the next generation and blindly follow the examiner remarks made by UCLES.

Lately, I have begun to wonder if I have been doing the right thing. No doubt my abilities in Sciences and limited scope of exploration in the field has empowered me insufficiently for the duty of pointing out the mistakes of our mentors. I did, however, point out problems with the knowledge we were taught when I was doing Primary School sciences because I was really interested in them in the past. The discouragement I got later (teachers told me to ignore my outside readings) played a rather critical role in limiting my personal exploration. Yet in the field of Geography, and perhaps also Literature, I have been constantly encouraged to explore and challenge the limits of analysis of the ‘experts’. Teachers welcomed fresh perspectives on old issues, exploration of new interpretations on old poems no matter how well-studied they have been. In retrospect, these great teachers I got were more of exceptions than rule. But I guess I have been lucky.

More than 20 months ago, the subject of Economics trotted along into my life. It is a wonderful subject that intersects several disciplines that I have always been interested in – Moral Philosophy, Social Issues, Multiple Agent Interactions (or Social Networks as I used to know it as), Anthropology and perhaps even Logic. Some say it’s ‘common sense made difficult’ but the dynamic nature of what truly constitutes common sense in today’s world makes theorizations of this social construct rather vital in our study of many other things. The tools of Economics, ‘Marginal Analysis’, ‘Demand & Supply Curves’, and convenient assumptions of ‘perfect rationality’ & ‘ceteris paribus‘ came to me easily because I knew what the subject seek to study and thus the things it needs to get models working. As a social science, I expected a degree of self-exploration bestow upon me by teachers that would be similar to that of Geography. I expect fresh analysis in the subject, previously unexplored to be welcomed and heralded as an indication of precocious abilities. Yet truth have been otherwise since I was connected into the Economics circuit in the Academia. I am not sure whether this is restricted to the rather closed education system, merely my College, or that it applies to the whole of Singapore (though I am very confident it doesn’t apply throughout the entire field itself globally – or it should surely have crumbled quite thoroughly).

When asked to cite factors of a particular phenomenon, or concept (such as demand), an answer that is not previously laid down would quickly be dismissed as implausible, irrelevant or at best, insignificant – true common sense was never evoked in the process. Just take for example the concept of demand. All factors of demand (as well as its elasticity) have to be non-price. I have, however, decided to evoke common sense and realized from this small-scale activity that the concept has to be much more complex than it is currently practiced. Say the demand of a good starts rising and rising because of a non-price factor initially. We have learnt that this will merely caused translation of the demand function. But thinking about it: Won’t the changes in units of the y-axis have any effect on the elasticity? In other words, if demand for something rises (say because of fashion), the elasticity will also change once the price starts climbing. In actuality, changes to demand is not so simple and changes between elasticity and the function itself cannot possibly be isolated concepts. If such fundamental common sense is not even expected of us, how can students, or even teachers be trusted to analyze concepts that involves even more variables. Ceteris Paribus must be challenged sufficiently and not ignored. I have seen economics teachers highlighting that Ceteris Paribus is not a significant thing to question because it is hard to quantify changes in the real world.

Yet these discussions I attempted above would be easily considered heresy in my classroom or lecture theater. At best, they are thought to be ‘divergent’ thinking that should be left to the break-time discussion and limited just to that time. When examinations come, be prepared to fail if you attempt to explore these territories charted during coffee breaks. I have come to realized, that our education promotes nothing close to the pursuit of knowledge. It merely tries to ‘train’, ‘instill’, ‘inculcate’ (do note that other synonyms includes ‘brainwash’, ‘persuade’, ‘coerce’) people into model agents that would promote growth in the economy and possibly stability in the society. Thinkers can just suffer similar fate as Socrates or Galileo Galilei. Education systems did not progress beyond the ancient times of Church’s reign although social cultures did. I therefore, disagree with the idea of having an education system that teaches beyond the 3 ‘R’s (wRiting, Reading and aRithmetic). Schooling and the pursuit of knowledge should have little to do with each other besides the fact that the former leads to (or at least allows for) the latter.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. – Mark Twain

I didn’t have the intention of using the quote but it just seem to fit into today’s entry so nicely. But there’s one thing I cannot agree with Mark Twain in the quote. It would be too kind to simply tolerate the nonsense that our schooling is doing to us.