Kevin Low

Not too long ago, I was telling a few people in my family this:

In the life of every cup in our family (and probably millions of other families in the world), the water it ever contained is much less than the water used to wash it clean.

It was an irony, to poke fun at the fact that my family is a little too clean sometimes – too clean for our economic good. Of course, the fact that I declared has environmental implication but that’s not so much my central concern. But then I realized our self-regulating nature of our environment is full of ironies. I learnt, from Jared Diamond that successful forest fire fighting in United States resulted in ever worsening forest fires in current times. I also realised, from Thomas Schelling that in a ski resort, increasing the speed at which the chairlift brings people up the hill would not shorten the queues lining up to wait for the chairlift ride – instead, it will lengthen them.

And according to the latest survey on the brain by The Economist, it appears that while we believe that emotions always prevent us from making rational decisions, it is emotions that helps us make decisions because a emotionless mind simply knows the pros and cons of things, without the necessary fear that turns it away from the cons and anticipation or joy that draws it towards the pros. As a result, decisions can hardly be made by an emotionless mind. Having explained this, I guess I should naturally help readers understand the other two ironies I raised.

Successful forest fire fighting produces dense forest because vegetation that’s the most flammable and the irritating understory of the forest remains in place when it would be naturally wiped out by forest fires. That natural selection process, having been disturbed by human’s kind fire fighting efforts, makes the forest that’s supposed to have trees resistant to flames left standing rather spaced apart changed the landscape to a dense, ‘bushy’ forest overgrown with understory – extremely vulnerable to forest fires. That’s supposed to be why the forest fires that came up lately are harder to suppress and spreads much faster – leading to more hotspots. One more irony, or rather paradox – people don’t want deforestation that is necessary to make forest more resistant to fire, believing that it disturbs nature and yet can’t believe the fire department is going to fight future fires by letting forests burn down by natural fires to strengthen the forests’ resistance to flames.

And yes, the ski resort irony. The chairlift in ski resorts are continuous and so if people going on to the chairlifts are climbing up in the same speed as when the chairlifts are slightly slower, it means that the chairs have to be spaced further apart to allow more time for the people to climb on (relative to the speed at which the chairlift operates). This would in turn result in less chairs overall for the people. Well, in the ski resort, assuming that visitors number do not change before and after the adjustment in speed, people can only be doing a few things – skiing down the hill, queuing to go up the chairlifts, on the chairlifts or slacking somewhere else. Since those slacking somewhere else do not affect our equation, let’s assume they are constant in number and since those skiing down the hill will not be taking the chairlifts any time soon so we’ll also leave them out. That leaves us with 2 groups of people left – if there’s less people sitting in chairlifts at any moment, doesn’t that mean that more people will be in the queue? By the way, I must reiterate the fact that I picked this up from ‘MicroMotive and MacroBehaviour’ by Thomas Schelling, the 2005 Nobel Prize Economist (he wrote the book in 1971 though). I admit I koped this example.

Ironies are getting kind of irritating because I realised that the purpose that is always attached to some happenings is defeated due tp resulting or peripheral effects when it’s ironic. Unfortunately, life itself may be so as well (remember the part about living to die?).

“Less than half of British children between the ages of seven and 11 are aware that Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus, according to a BBC poll.” – AFP

The fact is, that it isn’t. At least not in the purest and most truthful sense. The New Testament of the Holy Bible gave no specific date of the birth of Jesus though we did spent quite a fraction of our attention in this lifetime listening to stories of ‘the King’ born in a stable, surrounded by animals and most notably, the arrival of the Three Wise Men who brought gifts for this special child. It was perhaps, Sextus Julius Africanus, a 3rd Century Christian Historian who popularized this day as the birthday of Christ.

Christmas is a festival choked with different cultures of the west and accumulated a host of different customs that was gathered from different religious/social influences. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that we consider it highly commercialized today – it was something much like the essence of globalization. The Pagans of Rome already had something much like Christmas Day, which gave us the part about Santa Claus, his elves and reindeer. The Christians originally celebrated Epiphany (6 January) and somehow, the dates were fused together by Western Churches and we thus have 12 days of Christmas – referring to the days (26 December – 6 January) after the Christmas feast. The ‘integration’ of the idea of Santa Claus (or Father Christmas) pushed the celebration back even earlier, to the Christmas eve – at least for the modern times.

In fact, traditionalist may insist that Christ was born on 6 January and the Irish considers this day ‘Little Christmas’. A pity BBC didn’t know, though the kids probably had no idea as well.

[Added on Boxing Day]

As an afterthought, I realized I didn’t take into account the fact that our calenders did change from the traditional Julian one to the current Gregorian calender. According to this mysterious comment-maker (whom I believe to be spam – due to the fact that the lame comment appeared in another post and not this), the Epiphany is supposed to be the Christmas Day adjusted from the Julian calender to the Gregorian one. And that 25 December is traditionally accepted to be the proper day given that we are using the Gregorian calender. In any case, no one would know when the Christ was born anyway.

I didn’t realize how dirty my laptop could get until I tried cleaning it. Sure, my iBook was the 12-inch white one that would definitely attract loads of dust and dirt but I have always took care of the cosmetic aspects of the iBook so it didn’t appear that dirty. It was only when I started moving wet tissue over the keyboard keys that I realized how dirty my fingers could have been when I was typing (for the last 3 years). I lifted the whole keyboard and cleaned the inside – the edges were surprisingly dusty. I seriously wonder how those dirty stuff got in there.

Then came the trackpad and the surroundings that looked a little yellowish – the ethanol on wet tissue did the job of getting rid of those stains. Now the ‘interior’ of the laptop looks much cleaner, so on to the base. I expected the base of the laptop to be the dirtiest but it was unexpectedly clean. I just went over it once and it remained as white. The top required an extra bit of effort but those didn’t deter me and soon, I got a iBook that looks as good as new.

My iBook just entered 3 years old this year, with it’s day of first usage sometime between 30 October to 1 September 2003. It’s a G3 so most new softwares cannot run on it anymore, that applies even for Google Sketchup, which is pretty sad. Fortunately, I have had several old, and outdated but nonetheless powerful softwares that allows me to get by with graphic design work and other miscellaneous stuff.

Much like my iBook, our minds have been around for quite some time. We are probably no longer ‘compatiable’ for news things at some point of time but that’s okay as long as we retain our powerful selves and not be swayed by the new and trendy stuff. More importantly, I guess we don’t realized how contaminated our thoughts or how corrupted our ideas have become in the process of existence in this reality. Like the dust or ash particles that pollute our air, reality is filled with vices and contaminants that will linger around our minds and we really should take time off to clean them off – that’s to say we should practice a little more thinking, about what we know and believe in, a process much like hard disk fragmentation and identification of bad clusters except this time, you can completely remove the corrupted documents with your willpower. Only so, would we not fall victims for the fallacies or untruths that we have to absorb to get by in reality and allow ourselves to be clean and new to the world every single day – to shed all the fatigue(ness) of being.

Stay on the tip of the rabbit’s fur. [With reference to ‘Sophie’s World’ by Jostein Gaarder]

The past week have me in Hong Kong – a place very much like Singapore, except the lack of too many strict regulation/enforcement as well as a livelier culture. The living standards are quite very similar but the city presents a totally different path of evolution from Singapore. In Hong Kong, just as all human geographers postulate, the building front prices are the highest and most heavily utilized, as compared to Singapore where the government (as well as retailers and customers) will probably prefer to shop indoors. The city is shaped purely by capitalistic needs and thus space utility is really high in the Central. I realized that their shopping areas are severely restricted to the outdoor streets though there are lots of new shopping malls that feature a whole building of stores/departmental stores. Buildings, commercial ones are usually filled with retail activity on their outside, with tiny lift lobby that will lead upstairs, to the offices that the building’s primarily houses.

Perhaps because of this sort of intensity presented in spatial utility, with residence included (Hong Kong city-dwellers usually live on the apartments above the retail outlets) that allow bare elevated areas around the city. In Singapore, you probably won’t see the tall bare hilly areas but Hong Kong has abundance of them. They prefer to build private apartments on these hilltops, like those near the Repulse Bay. They don’t have public housing, at least not too much – but I guess the price gap isn’t that high relative to Singapore given our high ‘market prices’.

Like Singapore, the Places of Interests in Hong Kong is highly limited. I went to Ocean Park and Hong Kong Disneyland, both different in presentation, system and style but with the same sort of squeeze that we hate to experience, though they are less crowded compared to Japan’s Disneyland and Universal Studios, which are frequent by the locals.

Disneyland was more cozy, albeit small, and the Asian feeling is nice – that is to say that Japan’s Disneyland has a more foreign feeling for me. Ocean Park, in contrast, perhaps because it was raining when I went (and thus extremely biased against that place), lousy, in all kind of sense. You can’t really blame them. The place is old, not run-down but just a little outdated. The exhibits are ‘hi-tech’ in a sense and they give you lots of knowledge (the place was built for educational purpose initially) but presented in this arcane way like Singapore Bird Park or the Crocodile Farm a few years ago.

But there’s something we must admire about the place – their Mother Tongue retention. Perhaps, that’s just part of Cantonese Culture (even in Singapore, the dialect retention of Cantonese families are the highest), but the fact that the language operates almost at all levels of the place even when English is used very frequently in more high-end areas. I personally can only understand Cantonese a little, and speak no more than 50 words of it but the dialect variant in Hong Kong has taken an exceptionally interesting path that perhaps no other Chinese dialects in this world have evolved. They have lots of loan words from English and they have this very impressionistic use of their vocabulary. An example, ‘Qi Xint’, which literally translates to ‘Wires sticking together’, which is supposed to be a literal description of what happens to cause a short circuit, is used to describe a person behaving insanely. Today, this term, which originate from Hong Kong, can be spoken to the equivalence of our Singlish’s ‘Siao’.

On the other note, when they want to describe the fact that a couple’s relationship is on the decline, they use a phrase that literally translates into ‘Throwing Pots’. I guess you can visualize what happens when Hong Kong couples quarrel. Oh yes, the street food there are good, and in general, while the food prices in Hong Kong and Singapore are about the same, the food there always taste better – something not accounted for in the GDP.

Okay, I didn’t say anything about Windows Vista Copying Mac OS X. Seriously.

I am not exactly intending to get one of those new softwares or hardwares next year because of the loads of school work coming and the fear of disappointment either way. I have been spending quite a lot on such stuff already this year and I don’t wanna burn a hole in my pocket – so I guess I have to forget owning a MacBook anytime soon.

Naming a place to characterize Singapore is hard – Sentosa? Or The Merlion, Lau Pa Sat & Shenton Way? Perhaps Clarke Quay or the revamped Chinatown. Alright, maybe Orchard Road’s the best. I don’t know.

But I know every single of those above had elements of artificial decor, historical backing, and a whole lot of tourism board nonsense. Since a nation is made of it’s people, for if no one claims citizenship or belonging to the nation, it do not exist at all, and not land (not even the reclaimed ones), I thought a place to characterize the nation should be one well appreciated by its people, with a strong flavour of Singaporean activity.

I went to MOE today, and emerged untouched by the huge concentration of undesirable figures there, but I found a place, that do have elements that characterize Singapore a bit. Holland Drive, absolutely uninfected by NTUC Fairprice, has a rather great wet market with the nice smell of spices and dried food. Yes, it is kind of revamped market, but at least it’s still around and even when it’s mid-day, it’s still bustling with activity. The coffee shops around there were pretty full and though not the kind of place teens would hang out even if you pay them to, the food’s pretty nice. Unfortunately, the price is a little steep, but that’s inherently Singapore!

The funny thing is that these places are not alone, just like Jurong Bird Park is paired with the Zoological Gardens. A subsequent visit to ICA building revealed a little ‘Hong Lim Complex’ in the Lavender area, a place I would least expect to see such stuff. The design was very ‘Chinatown-like’, probably a feature of Jalan Besar GRC and the feeling is really familiar – cheap bag shops, hair salon chemical smells, the traditional Chinese medicine halls, the small toy shops that sell plastic balls, water guns that gets damaged easily, yo-yos that doesn’t allow you to walk-a-dog or rock-a-baby and plastic green soldiers that you see in Toy Story movie. And you get 80 cents milk tea (or Teh, which means 70 cents Teh-O) there, something that have recently ceased to exist in the city/downtown areas after the coffee shop price hikes.

Sometimes we really need not cover up so much, we need not erect some great statues, or spend thousands a year to put up paintings in canals to ‘brighten’ the heartlands. We don’t have to put up art exhibitions all around Singapore to have a ‘biennale’ – artworks/HDBs/Coffee shops/4D Betting Booths/Litter/People/Paintings are everywhere and more importantly, they are indeed Uniquely Singapore, unaltered, uncensored and entirely natural, in the Singaporean way.

Though a month is over and homework is barely complete, the holiday has turned for the borer and I came up with the idea of starting this Corporation ‘Parody Inc.’ with the following subsidiary companies, brands, and tag lines.

Supermarket Chains

UnfairPrice – 贵价合作社

Dwarf – Dwarf Variety, Dwarf Prices, Dwarf Savings

Curryfoul – 咖哩福

Hot Oven – The Cooked Food People

Cafes/Coffee Clubs

DKK – De Kopi Konnoisseur

The Kopi Dao & Teh Hyio

AstroDollars

Kopi Klub

Food Courts

Food Junktion

Copitiam

Panquet

This giant holding company will specialize in the F&B industry and will attempt to expand into banking sector as well as opening cinemas, because it probably have nothing better to do.

I wanted to talk about this pretty long ago, but there’s a couple of stuff I am afraid of. I fear I may offend the secret service people, the defense science personnels, the military police and perhaps even trigger a operation to arrest myself. I convinced myself of the fallacy that Discovery Centre is no way affiliated to the military and so decided to go ahead with this entry.

It sux, totally. Discovery Centre is like the kind of place where you get ripped off for absolutely nothing. It is worse than getting the $2.50 National Education brochure that says ‘Social Studies Textbook’ on its cover. It is no better than attending a school neighbourhood police talk that requires an admission fee of $5.00. It just the kind of place you want to go to after a long roller coaster ride that say, stretches all the way from Siberia to Alaska in the round-the-earth way, having tasted enough excitement of your life. I once told everyone that the ‘Admission Fee’ list outside Escape Theme Park has nothing but 2 words, ‘Rip Off’, but Discovery Centre seem worse. I don’t mean tourist shouldn’t go there though – that’s really one of the places to get the taste of Singapore.

Firstly, ‘Discovery Centre’ is kind of a misnomer because you go there to ‘discover’ that you already know all the stuff they tell you. It’s like being Steve Irwin and going to some crocodile farm listening to that pathetic sociology-trained park guide explaining the diet of the reptiles, except the part about getting stung by stingrays. They tell you stuff like ‘The Merlion…’ Oops, pardon me, I was dozing off before I can type anymore. I think you should get what I mean.

Little George wasn’t responding to my calls either – so much for some intelligent robot. That heap of metal has been abused by tonnes of children shouting at it in the past when it stood close to the entrance of the exhibits. They decided that he had enough and decided to place him as the last exhibit before you turn to your right to the souvenir shop. Exiting from the place was the greatest part; I said the first ‘wow’ when I entered the souvenir shop, not because of what they sell but because I realized I just finished a 15-minutes walk that cost me 15 bucks. Cool.

The souvenirs are alright, at least the prices are more reasonable and I would have gotten one of their polo T-shirts if I wasn’t a Singaporean. Fortunately, the visit wasn’t just that because I soon find myself sitting in a 350-seater auditorium dozing off from some 3D documentary about 3D movies. Yes, it was 3D, stuff come zooming at you from the screen and your eyes are strained because of that. But the storyline wasn’t like some dragon invading Singapore or going on some time machine roller coaster ride, it was a documentary, on 3D technologies used to help us perceive the 3D on screen – they call the video ‘Misadventures in 3D’. That was when I totally admit defeat and decided that I shouldn’t be wasting time extracting more value from that little ticket of mine – it was free for me anyway.

Perhaps you are feeling rich, or maybe you need to see the world before entering Woodbridge Hospital and be trapped there for the rest of your life, or if you had enough with everything sensible in the world and hope to do something absolutely irrational or probably to some extent, perverse – do visit the Singapore Discovery Centre. This paragraph is written solely to refer to Singaporeans, the insensibility lies on the fact that we all know the stuff they want us to ‘discover’. Tourists should definitely visit this ‘place of interest’ located in our great SAFTI Military Institute Campus, and ‘discover’ Singapore for yourself.

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.