Kevin Low

Yes, the Primary 6 kids just got back their PSLE scores, and my primary school top scorer wasn’t so good anyway – the score have never been higher than the top of my year, even until now. I don’t have much recollection of that time and I know I didn’t do that well anyway. But then, let’s just forget about PSLE and think about Primary Education for a moment. I just news from my cousin who was in Primary 4 that she was sad she didn’t get top for any subjects, though she got the overall top. Yes, I know she used to top Mathematics and English, sometimes Science, together with the never-anyone-else position of the overall top. That’s kind of crazy I know, but she happens to be in the same Primary School as the one I graduated from.

I do not suspect that schoolwork’s getting any easier, or exams, in any case, are getting less strict, but I do suspect that the Pygmalion effect (also known as the Rosenthal effect, or more commonly known as the “teacher-expectancy effect”) is at play, and this is bad. I am not doubting my cousin’s ability in any way but the education this days have the huge problem of Pygmalion effect even when the streaming is not in place. Somehow, without streaming, teachers may even find that they have to trust themselves even more now, thus discriminate much more people (reflecting the truth in the numbers sometimes – how can schools have so many talents anyway).

At my time, Pygmalion effect was already at play and I suspect I was one of those who benefited from it. But I also remembered that more people were in my league that in my cousin’s, now. I was the noise-maker who somehow manage to convince teachers that I was making noise in class not because I didn’t get a thing but because I already know everything. Somehow, the teachers also make me feel that I have got to know everything to get this right to make noise so there I go, in this endless cycle of deception and eventually make lies become truth. The guy who made noise because he knew nothing turned out to get to know things – in order to make noise; and he got a little hungry for stuff to know. Frankly, teachers just have to coincidentally influence students in the right way to get them going.

There’s still a long way to go for all these to incidentally happen, for my primary school, for my cousin, for the system, as well as the teachers hoping to inspire. Everyone just have to be themselves to eventually be someone else, because you always find that you have always been someone else anyway. I am glad to admit I am talking in spirals, because that’s who I am in any case.

It’s not easy playing God, even in videos. The stupid green screen effect I was trying to do for my film project cannot work out at all. The lousy green walls have huge problems with inconsistent lighting and being nobody with light control, we failed terribly. The actors had green reflected on their faces and became transparent when we applied the effects, making a couple of ‘Hollow M(e)n’ and totally screwed the video up.

Sometimes I feel that Arts is the only ‘real’ thing in this world. Without the ability to produce the effect, you cannot try and ‘fake’ like you do in faking report, using impressive languages, and such. In Arts, though there are so called ‘props’ and stuff to fake around, in fact, you get people to fact – the moment when the work presents itself, everything is ‘real’. In paintings, it takes real efforts, in photography, it really takes skills. But for one, playing God is only possible in Arts. You can make your characters defy laws of physics, do ridiculous stuff like a ball ‘bouncing upwards’.

Science is kind of real – since it is a study of reality. Unfortunately, many times, science has become so preoccupied with unreal stuff like molecules that you can’t see, DNA’s coiling around histones, or the processes in the mitochondrion, even the effects of gravity on anti-matter. Too far-fetched, too unreal in that sense.

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…