Kevin Low

Nothing beats spending 12 bucks on lousy stuff, like lousy movies, with lousy popcorns that cost money, followed by lousy organization, then lousy games with some lousy rubber bands. I have to admit, the food that came after all those wasn’t lousy, but the quantity of food provided was. Oh, sorry about the cost, I made a mistake – the cost of this lousy package is 15 bucks, due to some lousy mistake. You learn things out of little bits and pieces of life, and of most of them, these bits are the really lousy bits because only by experiencing the worst can you know what you have may actually have been the best all the while.

Nah, Convenant wasn’t that bad, at least there was the ‘Marvel-Dragonball Z versus Capcom-cum-StreetFighter/MortalKombat’ kind of Kung-fu effects. I thought everything else was pretty expected, except for exceptional move involving a corner-kick kind of move that was done to the ball of ‘power’. Yeah, it’s kind of childish I must say. I bet Flushed Away will be a few hundreds of times nicer than this movie.

I am seriously attempting to be apathetic. I won’t be so later.

After the Project Work Presentation, I seem ’empowered’ by a strong sense of apathy – but the feeling ultimately stems from something else (not the Project Work). I have always been curious about the feeling of apathy, given how infectious it has been amongst the youth and the elderly in recent times. There are reasons for being happy and sad, emotions correlate with some matters in reality and so should apathy – but what?

The answer struck me as I continue to pursue the roots of the emotion, backtracking from the feeling to it’s source. I realized that apathy can be generally explained by ‘an expected sense of disappointment’. In other words, people are apathetic towards something because they feel that the outcome would be disappointing to them. Therefore, apathy can be easily summarized by the line, ‘What’s the point of doing [something]?’. I considered a few cases: Why would people be apathetic towards nation-building? Because they believe that they can effect no change (a huge source of disappointment and a great opportunity to ask ‘What’s the point?’). Then why would youths be apathetic towards some traditional art form? Probably because they think they wouldn’t be successful in mastering it anyway.

Having understood the explanation behind apathy, I questioned the sudden emergence of such an emotion in the times of modernization. I believe it is because of the flow of information and the infamous preoccupation with speed. Wanting to succeed quickly, and being able to see how many have done so, one with the expectation that one would be disappointed quickly becomes discouraged and do not even care to engage in the activity. But why do I mention that I am ’empowered’ by apathy. The feeling, I realised, stems from the expectation for disappointment but it acts as a reaction to this expectation – it does so by dismissing the activity/task in concern. In other words, when I know I can’t effect a change in terms of nation-building, I think nation-building is not important. In that way, I continue to justify my disregard for the activity I expect to be disappointed in.

I guess apathy is a strong barrier that helps holds us up most of the time. It is perhaps an important feeling for those with some kind of inferiority complex, but unfortunately, apathy is one that leads to further isolation, very much in line with the existantialist standpoint. Nothing can rid anyone of apathy other than the wearing off of the expectation of disappointment – probably anything that can build confidence. Apathy can destroy policies and plans within systems, but it also disrupts the spirit of man and may not necessarily be something healthy to feel about. Though existantialists may tend to disagree.

After 5 years of suffering from a couple of willful viruses, getting past a few bugs and worms, downloading patches and updates madly, getting sick with the stupid Windows Protection Center’s paranoia over a simple web browser (namely Firefox) attempting to access the Internet, I am starting to feel that I may miss Windows XP after all. If Microsoft just happens to stop postponing the release date of Vista, XP’s fate will probably be sealed a few months ahead, that is to assume that people have had enough of it, though my assumption may not be quite right given what I am feeling.

True, XP may have been a bother, and it is after the emergence of XP that I decided to try Mac, but XP surfaces as a sincere victim to the tonnes of naughty geeks out there attempting to show their prowess. At least, it doesn’t demand as high specs as Vista, which will probably be burning a hole in my pocket soon. Running XP on a 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 has never been an easy feat, with just 256MB of RAM, the computer hang frequently, something which I thought of as a 90s phenomenon. Worst, the work I am doing requires me to run programmes like Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Photoshop CS on them, meaning I am working both the operating system and the computer close to death. Still, XP did not fail me.

In this 6 year of usage, the computer has been working rather well, ignoring the occasional bug fixes it requires and the updating requested by my anti-virus software. I strongly encourage all to take on a wait and see attitude with regards to Vista, and before removing XP because it may prove to be the last of Microsoft’s reliable companion in this chaotic world of nonsense – at least for the PC users, though you guys can always opt for a Mac.

The holidays left me a huge chunk of time with Wikipedia and it now seems that I can’t really stop that readily. I thought it would be nice for me to prescribe a few readings I did today so that I may take a break from all the reading I did in the day. Today’s readings will bring you through quite a couple of topics, ranging from the sciences to the humanities so you may need some background knowledge for each of the different subjects before embarking on them.

To begin, let’s start with a little stuff about logic and arguments. You might like to know a bit about the Reductio ad absurdum technique of rhetoric. To apply what you may have just learnt, it would be nice to know about the rather offending but otherwise hilarious Flying Spaghetti Monster, as recommended by the first article. While all the laughter ended, I was led into more serious stuff.

Unsure of the highest oxidation state of Phosphorus while I was working on a few Periodicity problems, I researched ‘P4O10’ and obtained Phosphorous Pentoxide, which from it’s name, confirmed I was right about the question; subsequently I found myself reading about Anthony Burgess’ The Wanting Seed while attempting to understand why Phosphorus glows. Oh yes, in case you are wondering about the inconsistency with the spellings ‘Phosphorus’ and ‘Phosphorous’ – I learnt that the word phosphorous is the adjectival form for the P3+ valency:

Just as sulphur forms sulphurous and sulfuric compounds, so phosphorus forms phosphorous compounds.

Returning to the original position where I started out, I got to know about Frederic Bastiat, an economist who employs the reductio ad absurdum to argue his case. For that matter, I read his ‘Candlemakers’ Peition’ to get a feel of his style.

If all these reading’s aren’t enough, I recommend going out to Kinokuniya and grabbing a copy of Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist to understand the all-encompassing nature of Economics, before working on Stephen Levitt’s Freakonomics, which I guess came out a little too early (at least before most of us can get our Economics fundamentals right). I know, those prescribed cannot possibly be enough for a mind hungry for knowledge in a day so I think we’ll just end off everything with Jostein Gaarder’s Through a Glass, Darkly, a fiction I really liked (though I normally hate fictions) with a message about life I truly appreciate.

Just got to experience what it feels like to have no sleep at all in 48 hours or so. It is not fatigue that one feels, but extreme irritation (of the mind) and intense frustration. It is as though you become pissed off with nothing. It definitely feels as though there is no direct link between this and the lack of sleep but I guess the brain is failing to work well. For me, my brain started confusing emotions and rationality, intellect and lame-ness. Eventually, I was feeling pretty lost until I got to sleep, much later.

Yes, so I was wrong. Wee Chern told me a few days back that the recurring decimal of 0.9999…. is equals to 1 exactly and I refused to believe him, highlighting that it will go on and cannot be rationalized. It is, perhaps against intuition to think that they are both equal given that recurring decimals are uncommon figures that we never thought would be rationalized, though we do know they can be expressed as fractions most of the time – and this is key to proving this seemingly absurd relation.

I can’t believe how simple this is and we simply can’t accept it for the first time we see the relation:

1/3 = 0.333333……
Multiply both sides by ‘3’.
3 * 1/3 = 3 * 0.333333……
Hence,
1 = 0.999999……

Mathematics have to be weird sometimes to challenge our intuition, just like the Monty Hall Problem.

Seriously, I wonder if Economics is truly dismal because from what I learnt from Tim Harford, Economics always seem to make things more optimistic. That’s also partly because economists tend to be living on the richer side of the world and thus understand that the potential of things and tend to think towards the more hopeful side. This is true especially for David Ricardo who managed to make a fortune out of the study. The gloomy part is almost only about the inequality. But as John Kenneth Galbraith has pointed out about inequality, the problem becomes less of a problem when basic demands are satisfied. That being true, consider John Locke’s notion that all man have a limited capacity for consumption, therefore, even if unlimited acculmulation of wealth is possible with money, the marginal utility of acculmulation should drop theoretically as one grows rich.

Having reconciled the problems with theories and concepts, the study now should focus on the real world application. As a social science, it should be cutting down the barriers to attaining the highly functional world that it postulate to be possible. We all know the problems and in fact, we have a clue what the solutions are. Unfortunately, nothing is initiated such that things can be solved smoothly – or maybe they are only initiated to an extremely limited extent. But either way, the long term theory suggests that things would be better and definitely need not be worst as long as the attitudes of man don’t change. That’s to assume that economics remains to be as important as it is.

That requires us to realise that economics can answer environmental problems and despite the fact that the 2 fields seem to be at odds usually – at least a perception I get from studying Geography, they are actually concerned about the same things. Though being biased to economics, I would say that environmentalist are sometimes to emotional about what they are doing and may exaggerate facts to attain their goals that would have lost their original purpose. Still, I suspect that we can still go wrong theoretically, so why not wait for implementation of ideas to see how things work first…

Exams are really over, in fact it has been quite some time since the final paper, though there’s still one more official A Levels examinations coming up. I have a pile of books at home, which I purchased long ago and didn’t bother to read and I decided that I probably won’t be reading them for the time being – I found more books that I want to read at this instant.

So there I was, spent more than 4 hours at Kinokuniya in Ngee Ann City, deciding which books to buy. The main stuff I picked were ‘Globalization and Its Discontents‘ & ‘Making Globalization Work‘, both by Joseph E. Stiglitz, ‘The Undercover Economist‘, by Tim Harford, ‘Collapse‘, by Jared Diamond and finally, ‘New Ideas from Dead Economists‘, by Todd G. Buchholz, with a foreword by Martin Feldstein.

If you happen to be surfing Amazon, with a calculator in your hand, you’ll probably discover that the books that I listed would amount somewhere to 300 SGD and there’s no chance I can finish all those within the limited time I currently have. Yes, non-fiction books take longer to read (more thinking and re-reading of paragraphs) as compared to fictions and they cost more. This happen to be verified by my reading of ‘For One More Day’ by Mitch Albom a few days back. I finished that seemingly thick book (it has big words, I mean literally) within a matter of hours – though it cost me about the same as the non-fictions I wanted. Eventually, taking into account the stuff I want to learn and know within the short time, I decided to purchase ‘The Undercover Economist‘ and ‘Globalization and Its Discontents‘, using up a few red notes in my wallet as well as 2 pieces of $20 vouchers my junior gave me.

This reading thing is really burning holes in my pocket, maybe I should just learn to be Gnosiophobic, as [implicitly] suggested by Wensi.

I have long wanted to produce a discourse on the problems with our Economics syllabus of the A Levels but this time I just happen to get the right amount of fuel for it. That’s after getting a really lousy score for an essay I have written that I was pretty proud of. The marker’s comments: “Recognise that you are well-read but exploration of crucial concepts needs more emphasis/details as required by the A Levels syllabus”.

So what can I say about that? True, I do have the knack for not defining terms I deem not worth defining, such as ‘Market Failure’, or ‘Public Goods’ and reading The Economist have trained me to give no attention to explanation of ‘simple but crucial’ concepts of occupational immobility or how negative externality arises (I cited a mere example for that). These are too insignificant compared to the point that I am arguing, that we cannot leave the allocation of economic resources to price mechanism alone. That’s dangerous. Too bad, the people, preoccupied with fulfilling the A Level syllabus, failed to allow students to pursue the true essence of Economics and thus have to force students to write out what they know (about extremely basic concepts) in order to give scores for that. That being true, even if we produce a college standard theory paper to answer the exact question in A Levels would probably fail the paper.

For Sciences, what we are learning is far from the stuff in the cutting edge of research and education can hardly catch up for students to be working on really profound stuff because this information are generally not that easily accessible. Unfortunately, for humanities, the exploration of further and more profound concepts by an ordinary student like me is possible with the publication and the fact that the subject can be elaborated and explained in much simpler languages even for rather advanced portions. This feature is derived from the very fact that Economics is fundamentally very basic common sense that has been tested and made into theories. As such, having reached higher and attempting to climb further, I have to let go of the rungs at the bottom and give up my existing position. This is a dilemma and I really hope things change with the introduction of Macro-economics that is even more all-encompassing.

Formalization of education has very much benefitted us in the education of sciences, but for the arts, perhaps we should receive much more freedom. Geography, and History, both do not require us to give explanation on how statistics lie or explain very fundamental concepts like why wars occur and why weathering arises. So I guess, we should not be expected to be explaining to our markers that negative externality can be defined in some way though it do not always apply and narrate some very textbooks stuff that do not support the main argument at all.

These are the huge topics to be tested tomorrow while all the others are enjoying their post-promos celebrations. The Mathematics examination practice frustrations drove me into a series of frenzy gaming session (which includes the dumb Miniclip Table Tennis and Heli Attack 3). The gaming session continued today with the part-holiday mood since tomorrow is the alleged last paper (that’s to assume that Chemistry Mock SPA is nothing to do with promos). I have been working through the lectures over the whole year and gained a certain degree of enlightenment on the issue which I have decided to talk about as a pre-paper writing exercise.

The fundamental ideas beneath the whole ideas interweaving the two topics is the comparison between the EMDCs and the ELDCs. After going through all the materials, we can safely make a few generationalisations: ELDCs face problems because of very standard factors that combines in the worst possible way. These factors includes corrupt government, lack of education of citizens, uneven distribution of resources, income, resource allocation, investments, funding, infrastructural development. All these spatial biasness translates into the problem within the urbanisation processes. Population problems of the ELDCs shares similar factors that includes lack of educated citizens, and the social mindset, coupled with poor institutional policies in place to tackle problems.

In contrast, the EMDCs are always blessed with economic growth, even if it is a little stagnant, great governments, with well-established political system that facilitates economic growth (namely, market economy or capitalist) and they would already have the infrastructures in place to solve the problems. In fact, most of the time, they are not perceived as problems at all. Underlying all these great perks of EMDCs is the fundamental product of the social and economic change that has taken place over the past few centuries – fertility drop. Following this drop, the population to share the resources amongst falls and everyone has a bigger piece of the pie, as compared to the ELDCs. It is thus rather clear that low population and momentum in the first place do pave the way for development.

I always argue that the existing EMDCs, the rising economies (ie. Korea, Singapore & Hong Kong) and the ELDCs usually have rather different paths of development. The EMDC experience is one that is confined to arcane ideas with a weird concoction of traditionalist ‘classful’ society and modernization in the old-odd way. The rising economies, on the other hand, have their secret in staying small and confining areas to control and regulate. The result of these closed control, open trade and economy system usually allows for better moderation of growth (as in what is desirable and wanted is taken in and the bad stuff are either prevented from entering all eliminated all together). Of course, the rising economies owe the growth to their size, the indigenous Asian culture and values, in addition to their willingness to experiment with alternative styles of development.

The ELDCs, the last point on hand, tends to have very weak structures. These weak structures give rise to chaos and breeds more problems. Those experiencing rapid growth have this ‘old’ problem of pollution probably because of the level of technology in which they engage. Unfortunately, this engagement of technology is not homogenous because they manufacturing sectors are not labour intenstive enough. The result is increasing unemployment, population rising not proportionate to increase in tax revenues and thus more burden on government and hence more debt incurred. This downward spiral is something that can really happen if the existing balance is not sustained by the trust of debtor or their kindness and cause the nation to collapse entirely.

Then again, no one is offering any solutions – and who’s this kid here talking these bunch of crap anyway…