Author Archives: Kevin L

The Cynic

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.

Language Use

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.

Cycles of Absurdity

I would proclaim that I have been an existentialist. But in fact, I may not be – not in the Sarte way, not in the Camus way or the Nietzsche way. So maybe I am just an existentialist in the Vib kind of way. Essentially, I make use of their arguments, their notions of reality and tools to argue my advice and ideas on life. But the recent studies on climate change and global warming started changing my ideas about cycles and the meaningless-ness of life itself and other natural processes. This discourse would concentrate on tackling Camus’ ideas of Absurdism more than other things and would eventually present something that would sound deterministic. I hope I don’t sound that I have betrayed existentialism because I still feel strongly about one’s ability to change his circumstances and the need to define oneself – but I also believe this ability is part of the entire general direction everything is heading towards anyway.

Scientist studying climate change always looked at the past for patterns of our weather conditions and attempt to use them to predict the future. And all these relies on this fundamental assumption that whatever happens at present and in the future, is governed by exactly the same laws and affected by the same variables as in the past – something that has to be reconsidered given our magnitude of rapid changes. This infectious intuition that things goes in cycles arise not only in Geography (Climate, Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Weathering) but also other social sciences such as Economics (Trade Cycles), Sociology (Societies) and more importantly, Philosophy dealing with existence and sentience. In the aspect of philosophy, Absurdist ideas draws upon most of its conclusions of the meaningless-ness of life from illustration of how everything runs in cycles.

My concern here is that cycles that we speak of, are not full circles and we are never on the same path as the past. It is all a spiral that tends to somewhere. We may well be on a contracted spring, with cycles in that we are going round and round so we find things familiar but we are effectively progressing up the spring. That’s to say that all that we have been through is not wasted. Things proceeds with meaning, or at least a macro purpose such that everything that may seem meaningless would converge to something meaningful. Thus, all the climate changes, plunging into Ice Ages can well be processes that drives the entire climate system into maturity, into more stable weather systems. The same applies for Absurdism – every cycle brings us closer to the end. And to answer to Beckett, I think Vladimir and Estragon will meet Godot one day because the time dimension still exists, which is to say that the similar stuff that goes on signifies there’s some end.

Trade cycles as well. There are ups and downs but I guess we can safely assume that economists have been clever enough to identify that we are heading towards upward spiraling purchasing power and ability to satisfy our needs. In this intellectual discourse then, we would still say Economics have been heading in the right direction of analysis at least. All the other disciplines are simply too pessimistic.

We do go through cycles, but it’s a spiral to maturity.

Rant on Standards

This is a blog entry from a while back that reflects some teenage ambitions and angst at oneself for falling behind. The context is no longer clear even to the author but reflects the drive and intellectual passion of my youth. It is interesting however, to see a reference to God (with G in caps) even when I was not yet a Christian.

Lots of frustration tied up in my mind because of the sudden deviation of my standards from those of whom I have been pacing. This spells disaster because I am already not catching up with the rest of the world and a hell lot of people thinks I am doing well. Apparently the graph is beginning to taper, signaling that it seems God’s will to confine me within the narrow abilities that I now seem to possess. I seriously have not reached the limit yet, at least I believe that’s not my limit. I should convince myself that this is just a stalling time for another ‘great leap forward’ in the path. The worry is that this leap will not come in time to save me from the crisis I have plunged into starting from March. It is an absolute, steady decline in both performance and perseverance.

It is perhaps time for some sort of change, more commitment perhaps? Somehow there’s this limit to the proportion of effort I can force into academic activities. As long as my total effort put into my life is expanding, this academic nonsense will expand. So by taking up more commitments, I am just driving myself into some hyper-work mode that will eventually force me to work harder for everything. For now, it appears that I am not busy enough.

Weekend Vib

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.

Weekend Vib

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.

Business Crap

Like last year, I devoted to what hopes to be one out of infinity units of my life on playing the lamest computer-simulated business game ever. Well, you can say this is just a dumb rant on going to lose in the game (the game is ending in about 1.5 hours and my team is still far behind), but I’ll surface extremely valid points that will demonstrate how the game cannot reflect anyone’s business ability. More importantly, the entire spirit of business is lost as we look at the varying commitments of players to the game. Our team is one of the slackiest and un-serious so that’s perhaps why we have such problem. In any case, I still have the urge to flame the organizers.

The idea of using computer simulation for business is a great idea – we simulate economic models, theoretical physics model and environmental models and they are all helpful when they allow us to see things in the real world. The problem with any simulation, is then that they are far-fetched from anything that’s real – then it cease to be a simulation but simply an imagination. The whole idea of attempting to predict the real world is the fundamental basis for having simulations in the first place. A business simulation, is thus highly flawed in a few aspects: (1) Uncertainty, (2) Timing and (3) Strategic.

A business simulation is unable to bring in uncertainty into the game properly. It is 2-dimensional but no elements from the 3rd dimension are entering this plane. Typical things like ill rumours, reputation index, strategic moves and tactics involving the temporal dimension is not allowed, reducing uncertainty only to mere fluctuation in prices that can be predicted quite precisely based on understanding of all rival teams (and in our case, the understanding of their level of devotion and amount of temporal devotion available). Of course, I can easily explain where I failed at – time; I didn’t have time sitting by the computer, hecking my tutorials and lectures, pretending to go to the toilet (but end up in the computer lab adjusting parameters), or even attempting to plot a demand curve by adjusting prices and looking at the consumer index that is given by the system.

The second point, with regards to timing in business, the simulation is such that things get problematic when transactions peak. The sounds more like some speculative stock market than a business arena. Worst, the timing is serious distorted by time lags. The movements in the demand market lags behind the dynamics of the input market, making it unrealistic for any players who does anything at all between each hours. To make the explanation clearer, I shall describe the game: you face a dynamic price system with regards to inputs where raw material prices fluctuates based on the demand for them but your demand is not so quick-changing, you only know whether your products are sold at hourly intervals. The general strategy: Rush to the computer at the exact hour when your products are bought, stock up raw materials to maintain supply before others does (so that you enjoy the assumed lowest prices) and then adjust any parameters as desired, and then get back to your life. Very realistic huh?

Finally, with regards to strategies. The simulation reduced your strategy options drastically compared to the real world but that’s fine; problem is parameters such as advertising should not be allowed because it sends out the wrong information that the more money you put into advertising, the more you can differentiate your demand. Simple economics and perhaps some common sense would suffice to tell you that’s not true at all. The game is strategically flawed in the sense that there are fixed strategy that works, and although there’s a threshold for the number of players who are allowed to play the strategy before it collapses, the way the demand manifest is such that all players faces similar market conditions and thus strategies to be played out are expected to be similar – leading to faster collapse of workable strategy (assuming they are worked out quickly by players). The information asymmetry in the market is not well-simulated (all players are given the same market report, meaning that players do not attempt to gain more information if they are willing to buy it) as well, further reducing the strategical realism.

Well, let’s just forget about it anyway. It’s time to get a life, geeks out there still fiddling with your company parameters!

Broke-Bag

Damn it, my USA POLO bag that’s barely 1.5 years old gave way. It was the weakest part of it, the fastening plastic that broke, partly due to the heavy weight and partly due to the fact that I have this bad habit of carrying just one side of the bag for prolonged periods. The last bag I used before this switch was a Hayer bag and it totally rocks. In fact, after washing it in the washing machine, it looked absolutely new, not a single clue of having been used for more than 5 years. I guess the brands sometimes do matter after all. Well, no choice, that bag that failed me was bought from Carrefour at a rather low price so it’s probably time to get a new bag.

Problem is I won’t be able to get one that soon – that’s what happens when you don’t have enough money, not even enough income. Pity I am not a civil servant (or minister), neither is any of my parents. Anyway, with a politically incorrect blog, I shouldn’t be expecting a pay rise even if I have a public sector job. Life’s tough when you are not on the right side of the fence.