Dismal for Real

Being a student of economics, there’s an urgent need to bail the subject out of its cruel accusation of being dismal – okay, this topic seem pretty old. I could have gotten back to Geography but I think my pretty lengthy discourse is going to share similar nature has what I have done on Geography.

Unfortunate for the geographers who thinks only of problems and nothing else, and the environmentalists who argues how ungreen our world is – I am on the side of the economists. The subject, being extremely depressing on the systems, in which human interactions work upon, seem extremely optimistic about the way nature is played around and growing with humans. In other words, humans are interacting with nature better than with themselves. The views on resource balance that have long gotten out of date are still pretty much dwelled upon by the students taking Geography (like me) and therefore, there’s s great need for economist to correct the ideas involved. We have to clarify that the world has much more than it needs and the problem really lies not on the nature but the logistics involved and the distribution, which can be part of nature’s fault but looking on the bright side, humans should be able to resolve such problem if not for their nature (not abilities). As such, if we fix the context, and simply change a single variable and that is the burden to bear, we realise that there’s isn’t much problems to speak of.

Geography, because of its roots in natural sciences, in contrast, needs a more systematic way of describing everything, much like economics, while economics are heading towards a more mathematical viewpoint that involved studies of mathematical theoratical models. That would make things more balanced. Unlike the sciences, data and models in Geography are rarely updated because of their irrelevance in dispute. Unless new landscapes or natural compositions are found, it is hardly possible to postulate any theories on the behaviours of nature. It is such a circumstance that makes Geography unrealistic as compared to economics. For economics, it appears that things are logical in the sense that when we assume ceteris paribus, things can still apply in reality, but not that well for geography because of its apparent lack of control over the subject matter. As such, there’s a real need for geography, especially its human branch to merge with economics to study human interactions with themselves and nature in the process, and thus the effects on our environment and so on.

Things are just being studied in such isolated manner that I think the world would have been much less depressing if people can correct each other well enough before they present themselves. Disputes in the hybrid fields arises out of the over-reliance of traditional theories within individual subjects. If these traditional theories could be revised, fused and reviewed, we can get the universal equation tha Physics seek for, or at least get close to it. Making sense at first won’t be easy – but at least we try.

Writings

Rather than allow this blog to rot while I mug, I might as well comment on the stuff I am mugging. There’s a hell lot of stuff that I have pointed out to teachers and friends alike and I guess I would point them out in a more public scenario like erpz.net. That’s assuming that there’s any readers at all. Apparently many friends believes and understand that simplicity is very much dead. The fact is that the blog simply couldn’t catch up with my life – which is going a little too fast after I entered college.

In case no one knows, I take Geography and having obtained a considerably poor grade for Geography, I decided to write about some conventional problems with the study of Geography.

For once, we must all come to understand that Geography has gone through a long way to become what it is today. In fact, we may have to accept this fact that many students of Geography of the past will disagree with the kind of topics the falls under Geography today. Many fields of knowledge is such – no one would dispute that religion is not science in ancient Greece and so on. But the extent in which Geography evolved is so amazingly ridiculous that one should naturally be considered an all-rounder of the past to be considered a full-scale geographer.

A geographer of the past draws maps, map topography, and topograph landscapes. They study things that now falls under the branch of Physical Geography, independently devoted to very scientific field that was somewhat isolated from the others nowadays. In fact, Geography is the true ‘Natural Science’. Somehow, the subjects of study that used to be classified under macroeconomics became a part of Geography, mostly incorporated into what we now call ‘Human Geography’. The irony is that Geography has the tendency to avoid scientifically crude terms like ‘human’ and prefers terms like ‘anthropogenic’ – so one should naturally expect the branches of Geography to be termed ‘Corporeal Geography’ and ‘Anthropogenic Geography’. But it didn’t happen.

The fact that Geography evolved so much posed a considerable degree of inconvenience in the definition of things that are ‘Geographical’. We use the term only to refer to the old topics under Geography but not the new ones. We use ‘Geographical Factors’ to a nation’s success to refer to the how its location on the map benefits it. We can’t use ‘Geographical’ to refer to population factors, or development factors, because they are namely considered ‘Demographical’ and ‘Economic’. This makes me wonder what one can mean when we say ‘Geographical perspective’ to a scenario.

There’s a whole lot of other problems with Geography. I’ll probably leave them to later. In the meantime, mugging takes priority again after this moment of ‘Publish’.

Blogging with Flock

As a Mac user, with the priviledge to use Flock, I tried its blogging feature to complete this post. Though it’s the holidays, Vib’s been damn busy with school and outside activities. But even so, I continued experimenting with the new softwares coming up. Everyone should try the Google Sketchup or even Flock.

Since this is just a test post, I shan’t say that much.

Polling Day

Polling Day went on well and fine and I must say the results this time is not disappointing at all. The trend that the parties are heading towards is definitely satisfactory and we simply need to gather those who are more supportive together. I can only see what’s going to happen within the next 5 years to possibly tweak the results.

Online

While everyone ushered in the year 2006, I was online.

While everyone were busy looking at fireworks, I was online.

While everyone were wishing each other ‘Happy New Year’, I was also online (and I received them too).

The holidays have left me too much time to remain online so hours and days, while the rest of the time when I wasn’t online were devoted to gaming. This is bad, because I haven’t actually been playing for a long time, and it is probably quite hard to rid of this form of addiction in such a short notice. Holidays is really the best times to shuffle your thoughts and be happy, but it is also a good time to slack, game, and feel that life is nothing.

There seem nothing recent that happened, and is great enough for me to comment on. While erpz.net might stay around, I may no longer stay around to blog because of other stuff to do and the heavy workload in wherever I am going. I might still be writing political articles but they will not come online any time soon. In any case, they are more likely to be in Chinese and there’s no point posting them, with no readers willing to stop by and read chinese characters.

In fact, I am thinking of revamping the blog such that it just displays pictures I post, sort of like a photoblog, except there’s probably no text at all. 2006 will probably the same as every other years which have past, with the same number of hours and days, with the same old people ruling the world, and the few coffeeshop critics reflecting on the society. Then of course, there will be new buildings around the world; Olympics Village in Beijing (or is it done?), some more houses in Aceh, more ‘piers’ in Jalan Besar’, and IRs on our island. Oh, and there’s something new actually, not a new building, in fact it is pretty old, but it just begin serving mankind – the Buangkok MRT Station.

Eve of New Year’s eve

I realised how vulgar bash.org was, but there were clean, funny jokes as well. I picked out a few good ones:

#25464
kow `: “There are 10 types of people in the world… those who understand binary and those who don’t.”
spacerain: That’s only 2 types of people, kow.
spacerain: STUPID

#171987
th3no0b: Im going to be the next hitler
th3no0b: Im going to kill all the jews and 1 clown
rageagainsttheamish: why the clown
th3no0b: See? no one cares about the jews
rageagainsttheamish: lmao

#291262
mendo: lmao there’s a wicked lookign spider on my monitor and if i move the mouse around he chases after it
spitfire: haha mendo
spitfire: take a screen shot
spitfire: wait
spitfire: that made no sense

Enjoy the last day of the year!

Eve of New Year's eve

I realised how vulgar bash.org was, but there were clean, funny jokes as well. I picked out a few good ones:

#25464
kow `: “There are 10 types of people in the world… those who understand binary and those who don’t.”
spacerain: That’s only 2 types of people, kow.
spacerain: STUPID

#171987
th3no0b: Im going to be the next hitler
th3no0b: Im going to kill all the jews and 1 clown
rageagainsttheamish: why the clown
th3no0b: See? no one cares about the jews
rageagainsttheamish: lmao

#291262
mendo: lmao there’s a wicked lookign spider on my monitor and if i move the mouse around he chases after it
spitfire: haha mendo
spitfire: take a screen shot
spitfire: wait
spitfire: that made no sense

Enjoy the last day of the year!

Xmas Gift?

I am pretty lag to realise this only now and I guess that’s a Xmas Gift for web designers – or not, as mentioned in the article that too many of the existing sites online are coded exclusively for Internet Explorer. In fact, I have been experiencing so much problems with IE, that I may some times give up designing work because people request for the site to appear exactly the same in IE and the other browsers.

I wonder what’s with Bok’s Wine thing and Mib’s Christmas, which I still couldn’t figure out why the stuff he mentioned in his blog ‘is a bummer’. If you have nothing better to do, having finished with Xmas Celebrations, I recommend you visit Teddy’s Cameron Highlands ‘Photos Webpage’ (I don’t really think that’s a photoblog), to waste some time.

Christmas

I guess Mib’s got his Christmas present of producing an error when he tries to change his blog template. Mib, I advise you to make a switch to WordPress! I was particularly busy on the 22nd, after attending a meeting that my complicate my 2 years ahead with added responsibilities, then the 2 days that follows, including today, is about slacking, and doing nothing. For once, I felt that playing computer games was more productive than what I was doing (basically lazing around, changing TV channels, and trying to cook up some lame stories to blog about, though I eventually couldn’t think of any).

Hence, I dug up my dusty old ‘Age of Empires II: Age of Kings’ CD from the old cupboard where I store my encyclopedias and installed it into my old computer (almost as old as Windows XP, in fact, slightly younger). When I started gaming, there was apparently no stopping. I played for 4-5 hours straight and was tackling 7 hard enemies (the maximum number with a stage less than the maximum difficulty). Of course, I was being Kiasu by setting a giant map and including plenty of resources on the map. I know I am getting pretty bad at the game, and reasonably so because the last time I played the same game was some time 2 years back, when Mib was still back in Singapore, and I was still quite mad about Computer Games.

That was the first ‘real’ computer game I ever played (yes, I mean Solitaire and Hearts are not real games). Somehow, it doesn’t seem to get outdated to me – partly because the Age of Empires III didn’t come out until some time at the beginning of this year. But it didn’t really matter because within the 5 hours of game play, I was forced to use a few cheats to produce more resources, and a few ‘Cobras’ (that is if you know what it is in the game) to strengthen my military. I knew I was getting lousier and thus, after that session, I have to admit defeat (not in the gaming sense but the mental sense). It is this incident that I understand the reason to admire Mib, for his incredible persistence in slacking and gaming.

My Christmas Wishlist (if I really had one), would probably be filled with books, ranging from novels to social science papers, in contrast to Mib’s series of ‘Games-to-buy’ for the festive season (if you consider it one). Let’s hope Bok receives at least a new pillow, in addition to the heaps and heaps of chocolate, chicken wings, drumsticks, strawberry cream rolls and Mathematics Ten-Year-Series(es) for the occasion.