Singapore’s Escapes

Was a the bookstore and I was forced to simply browse at books without buying them because I already have about 4 books back at home that’s not completed. Worst, school work is piling up and I have absolutely no idea when I will even go back to the books. I hope to complete them before the June Holidays. Anyway, I saw this travel guide series published by some foreign press and so I picked up the one on Singapore. It was an orange book so I guess that’s partly the reason why I even bother to pick it up.

I looked through the chapters: 24-Hours, Hotels, Leisure, etc. The last chapter caught my eye: ‘Escapes’. I was wondering what kind of escapes in Singapore the guide would recommend – some resorts, or whatever exorbitant country clubs? I flipped the pages, looking through the photos of places I don’t seem to remember, Indoor Stadium, Botanic Gardens, and so on. These were the places I visited last time but it’s been a long time since I was there the last time and I am rather sure at this point of time, or any point of time, there’s some construction work at any single location/place that the guide recommends you to visit. In any case, I soon reached the chapter that previously caught my eye…

The first paragraph read (loosely presented from my poor memory): ‘Singapore’s great central location in South East Asia means that it’s convenient to move around to different places out of town…’ That didn’t seem a valid statement, as the part about ‘out of town’ deviates from the part about being central in South East Asia. I looked at the picture on the next page and found it unfamiliar. There’s this tinge of unfamiliarity about it, much like the feeling that you get when you watch foreign films, the yellowish or some other shades that sets it apart from the perfect-white-balance kind of photos of Singapore places. Well, some photos are artistic but it is this un-Singaporean feeling that makes it artistic in some sense. So my eyes reorientated slightly to read the captions beneath the photo on the page. It gave the name of some hotel, followed by a comma and then the words ‘Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’. I checked the cover again and it was still the same book, the title in front was still ‘Singapore’ and I looked back at the page my fingers was gripping. My visual senses weren’t conveying the wrong messages to me a moment ago. This is a Singapore travel guide and they are telling you that the escapes out of town is some hotel in Malaysia? Goodness.

Singapore, it appears, has no urban escapades after all.

The Hardened Heart

Guard against the Hardening the Heart…

Unfortunately, in this harsh world of mankind, humanity seems out of place, seriously misplaced. Sometimes I ponder over how right it is to have a word which has it’s roots from ‘human’ to describe something that is really not that human nowadays. The hardening of our hearts is a phenomena that seriously need some tracing back to understand why it’s really so hard for humans to be humanly and for the terms mankind and humanity to converge.

The Hardened Heart

Guard against the Hardening the Heart…

Unfortunately, in this harsh world of mankind, humanity seems out of place, seriously misplaced. Sometimes I ponder over how right it is to have a word which has it’s roots from ‘human’ to describe something that is really not that human nowadays. The hardening of our hearts is a phenomena that seriously need some tracing back to understand why it’s really so hard for humans to be humanly and for the terms mankind and humanity to converge.

Philonomics

Getting too economics nowadays, and the philosophical mind slips into inquiry into behaviour that does little to question purpose of fundamental existence or the reason behind non-economic emotions. I scurried through some blogs and found how sentimental people around me are. Cool. At least for the hungry philosophical mind. Then economics mode set in and all sorts of question concerning the utility people obtain from being labeled ‘philosophical’ or more colloquially, ‘cheem’, or the kind of incentives that pushes people to thinking in ‘philosophical’ ways despite overwhelming social pressure that considers philosophical inquiry out of modern context or simply put in the most Westernized way, ‘uncool’. That, is supposed to be more of my concern – what exactly drives people to be philosophical? Innate curiosity about the world, pure divine inspiration, or just for the exclusive label forced upon by the society that has some form of mixed-blessing effect?

The last driving force seem the most powerful, though the second last may be as valid. The fundamental things that drives people is based on the incentives involved and thus the utility gained from the action. If the action of inquiry provides such high absolute utility, blogging these thoughts would have such low marginal utility that the action is unlikely to be carried out, so we can be rather sure that innate curiosity is insufficient to make people think philosophically, or at least, insufficient to allow us to perceive the philosophical-ness of a being. The fact that this property is detectable leads us to the next 2 plausible driving forces.

Divine inspiration is an attractive solution to the problem but it’s in no way a stable conclusion to this little problem we have over here. The fact is that people around me shares some similar properties about perception of social forces and they way of handling it leads us closer to the justification of social forces. However, in a bid to remove the ‘divine inspiration’ theory, we first have to present the empirical situation. The circumstances is such that many people are feeling sentimental, philosophical, emotional and they blog about it, and they convey if with such cliche statements that unless ‘divine inspiration’ is a mere software programme that behaves like a virus, that should not happen. The question naturally comes – if everyone’s having this divine inspiration, why not me; or perhaps now is the time? No. The answer is that there’s no divine inspiration to discuss, for everyone’s merely succumbing to this social pressure that innate desire to question seems to fuel. The word is ‘seems’, for it doesn’t. The forceful incorporation of humanities’ way of inquiry in Sciences have upset our youth’s way of thinking. We are ‘forced’ to think of something meaningful to ask about rather than having questions naturally arise from us when we have our encounters. That’s a clear example of pure information overload.

So, what the crap is this social force making people inquire about the natural world, the humanly interactions, and the things we perceive? It is a high level kind of social pressure, one that works it’s way not from interaction, or mirroring the rest, it works through imposing a barrier, that ‘exclusifies’ the author and encourage them to immortalize themselves, at least within their narrow scopes of perception. This sort of crap inquiry, pseudo-philosophy, may be capable of destroying our foundation of humanities, our roots in questioning about the world. Scientists, can never become the sort of philosophers who have asked the great questions we spent centuries seeking to answer, and the effort to make them so can have devastating results to the field of inquiry itself; for the wrong method of inquiry naturally leads one to the wrong solution and thus the wrong answer to the true inquiry. There’s a philosophy version of Alchemy and it’s brewing. Better whip out your Philonomics to clear the way.

Camera

2 Years (or was it 3?) ago, I rejoiced at the fact that I have a Kodak DX that allows me to capture 4.0 mega pixel photos and being a digital compact flash camera, I am happy to bring it around with me on overseas trips as well as gatherings or outings with friends. I was happy to be able to upload what I shoot and to me then, 4.0 mega pixel was a whooping lot of pixels and great resolution. So you can imagine what kind of country bumpkin I was.

A year back, I discovered SLR photography and decided that it was fun and one of the nice activities I am going to indulge in. I never own a SLR so despite using it for quite a long time in my months in Huang Cheng, I was happy to continue with it, so I entered Photography Society to play around with more lens and pick up more knowledge about cameras. Still, owning a DSLR is something I can hardly conceive. In fact, I promised myself to get a DSLR only when I saved enough of what I earned myself. Imagine my horror when I realised those young kids that are now becoming my juniors, those just a little older and are supposedly my seniors, are snapping away during festivals and events with their OWN DSLRs. I am angry for 2 reasons: They were blocking me (And I am supposed to be working for the school!) and they own those cameras they hold in their hands. As an amateur I am already okay with the slow, leisure shots but the high speed ones are really terrible for me, which is also partly the reason for bring angry with those freaks blocking me.

What a rant to make on Chinese New Year Eve anyway. Happy Pig Year!

Spam[s]

It’s been a real long time since I logged into my blog because I have been really busy with school work, and all the orientation for the new-comers and so on. It’s been a long month of January, full of crappy and seemingly meaningless work. The first thing on the dashboard that caught my eye when I logged in was the sheer amount of spam comments I received – 241. Well, that’s a great record for having a blog, which is so obscure no one really reads it.

Spam have now becomes such a common occurrence that I would consider it a freaky day when I log into Gmail with the Spam Folder empty. I’ll probably be expecting to do some stuff in my email even when I am not expecting any mail – because I am pretty sure there’s spam for me to clear. Thus, even the clicking on the spam folder, and then the button to select all spam mails, and finally the button to ‘Delete Forever’, is considered extremely productive work. In fact, while I have typed all these chunk of stuff, a new lame spam has just entered the spam folder. And I felt I attained some kind productivity by deleting that one.

That’s life in the modern age.

Boltzmann Distribution

Yea, I enjoy using laws of natural sciences to explain social sciences phenomena. I made an analogy about life from the kinetic energies of water molecules in a basin, I talked about equilibriums and closed-systems much like those in thermodynamics, and I discussed about really unrelated science theories and laws and apply them on human interactions. There’s one particular law in science that I am particularly interested in applying but never had a chance to. It’s the Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution and I thought if there’s this day, when our income distribution follows that, capitalism would never have met its rival, communism at all.

I am not sure if it comes naturally to you all but the Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution presents the idea that the smaller the pie to share, the stronger the tendency for some big guys to just snatch it away and stuff it into his mouth. Conversely, if the pie gets bigger, the tendency that it is shared becomes greater. Taking the ‘kinetic energy of particles’, which is the x-axis of the distribution curve as ‘wealth of individuals’ and the ‘probability density’ as the y-axis, and the temperature increments as total wealth aggregation, you will be able to visualize how we apply this distribution to the economics. I acknowledge that inequality will remain, and the beauty about this distribution that we have this hope, that while aggregate wealth increases, the inequality gap can be closed – or at least we are tending toward an asymptotic closing of the gap. Wishful Thinking.

Game Analysis

Got introduced to this game and its solution. I generalized the solution to apply to any figures. And yes, I was the second player and the first variant of the game was played – so I lost, though it was out of luck rather than strategy (I wasn’t tabulating the numbers).

A and B are individuals taking turns to call out numbers from x-y (numbers ‘x’ to ‘y’, with x y).

In this scenario, the first player will have an advantage and there are focal points within the games that have to be considered by both players. These points are the numbers ‘m – (x+y)’, ‘m – 2(x+y)’ and so on until the number is one that’s between ‘x’ and ‘y’. The first player will be able to force a win by reaching these numbers starting first. For a change in game scenario such that the first who reach the ‘m’ loses, the second player has an advantage. This game formula is useful for similar variations.