The Chinese astrology is spectacularly wrong about one thing: the year of the bull. Consider:
1973: Oil crisis. Biggest worldwide recession since the 1930s.
1985: Recession in Singapore.
1997: Asian financial crisis. No problem with the US, but it was crap in Singapore and the region. Later on, Russia, Brazil and Argentina would catch the Asian flu.
2009: Probably another year of recession.
Moral of the story: either stop believing in Chinese astrology, or change it to the year of the bear.
nb: while I was typing this story, a bull that was hanging on the wall fell to the ground.
Saturday, 31 January 2009
Saturday, 24 January 2009
Suicide
I saw a New Paper headline, “this hunk is a Government Scholar” on the New Paper. A few days later, I saw another headline where a scholar, ostensibly because of the failed pursuit of a girl from China, jumped to his death. Maybe they should take a picture of the mess at the bottom of the HDB block and headline it, “this gunk used to be a Government Scholar”.
They are making a big deal out of it isn’t it? People usually kill themselves for larger reasons than just the end of a love affair. The decision to die involves the ending of a life, and it usually reflects the belief, rightly or wrongly, that definitely more than one aspect of the life have failed. It could not possibly be that a girl had just rejected him. He must have felt that he failed in other aspects as well. The way that the suicide was reported therefore makes the reasons seem unnecessarily frivolous. Maybe he had just come home from a place where winters are extremely long and dreary. Maybe he couldn’t fit in socially with his new workplace.
There are 2 general meanings of suicide. One of them is a cry for help. The other one is a true unwillingness to carry on living. The first could come across as a little disingenuous: you don’t really want to kill yourself but you’re sending a strong signal that you want people to help you. In the second you don’t give a damn and you just want it to end. Statistics on suicide usually show that women attempt suicide more often, and men commit suicide more often, which highly suggests that the first reason appeals more to women and the second reason more to men.
There have been 2 times when I seriously considered suicide, and thankfully it has stayed this way for quite a few years. During the second time I was in the uni and yes – I had just ended a relationship, but I think it was more than that that drove me to despair. I couldn’t find an easy way out of my troubles, my future was murky, I didn’t know how I was going to slog through the rest of my uni years. There had been a period of optimism before that, when I thought that I had solved a lot of problems in my life, and later on I found out that at least some of the solutions were temporary. For the record I am acquainted with another scholar who “attempted” suicide. She was female.
Thank goodness nothing happened. I could deal with the fact that my life was over, but what would happen if my name was splashed across the papers, as an example of a recipient of privilege who cocked it up in a uniquely spectacular fashion? I would be dead by then, of course, and unable to know anything about the consequences, but my God, the shame! Thank goodness it never got to be a thought in my mind.
-----------
On another note, I recently heard that a divorce had taken place. It was sad. I didn't know the couple that well but it never seemed to me that the couple had anything in common. It was sad because that wedding was one of the first I had been to, and I saw what it was like when the groom (he was a colleague at that time) was scurrying around to fix things up.
I am a little superstitious. I have been to like maybe 3 dates in 10 years, but I noticed that if I were to go dating in places that close down soon after, the relationship is near the end. There was the annex of a spaghetti restaurant (the second floor was closed soon after.) There was a date at Scott's food court not long before it got closed down. Both didn't last. OK, one of them petered out to its fairly unseemly conclusion, in the other case both of us didn't click and we didn't pursue it.
OK, it's superstition. But psychological research shows that human behaviour is very much shaped by its environment. I suppose that the strength of a relationship - any one, not just a spousal one - depends on there being a shared environment. That's why I would want that environment, that context to be a lasting one. If an environment that symbolises a relationship were to disappear without being adequately replaced, that is very dangerous.
Well that wedding took place in a place that closed down soon afterwards and while I never allowed myself to think that the "curse of the closing down location" would affect this guy, this does fit in with the natural pattern. I would be very wary about closing down places.
------------------
An update on this earlier post - I think that water girl is still living in my block. I bumped into her at the lift. She still looks great, but I feel much less crazy about her than years ago.
They are making a big deal out of it isn’t it? People usually kill themselves for larger reasons than just the end of a love affair. The decision to die involves the ending of a life, and it usually reflects the belief, rightly or wrongly, that definitely more than one aspect of the life have failed. It could not possibly be that a girl had just rejected him. He must have felt that he failed in other aspects as well. The way that the suicide was reported therefore makes the reasons seem unnecessarily frivolous. Maybe he had just come home from a place where winters are extremely long and dreary. Maybe he couldn’t fit in socially with his new workplace.
There are 2 general meanings of suicide. One of them is a cry for help. The other one is a true unwillingness to carry on living. The first could come across as a little disingenuous: you don’t really want to kill yourself but you’re sending a strong signal that you want people to help you. In the second you don’t give a damn and you just want it to end. Statistics on suicide usually show that women attempt suicide more often, and men commit suicide more often, which highly suggests that the first reason appeals more to women and the second reason more to men.
There have been 2 times when I seriously considered suicide, and thankfully it has stayed this way for quite a few years. During the second time I was in the uni and yes – I had just ended a relationship, but I think it was more than that that drove me to despair. I couldn’t find an easy way out of my troubles, my future was murky, I didn’t know how I was going to slog through the rest of my uni years. There had been a period of optimism before that, when I thought that I had solved a lot of problems in my life, and later on I found out that at least some of the solutions were temporary. For the record I am acquainted with another scholar who “attempted” suicide. She was female.
Thank goodness nothing happened. I could deal with the fact that my life was over, but what would happen if my name was splashed across the papers, as an example of a recipient of privilege who cocked it up in a uniquely spectacular fashion? I would be dead by then, of course, and unable to know anything about the consequences, but my God, the shame! Thank goodness it never got to be a thought in my mind.
-----------
On another note, I recently heard that a divorce had taken place. It was sad. I didn't know the couple that well but it never seemed to me that the couple had anything in common. It was sad because that wedding was one of the first I had been to, and I saw what it was like when the groom (he was a colleague at that time) was scurrying around to fix things up.
I am a little superstitious. I have been to like maybe 3 dates in 10 years, but I noticed that if I were to go dating in places that close down soon after, the relationship is near the end. There was the annex of a spaghetti restaurant (the second floor was closed soon after.) There was a date at Scott's food court not long before it got closed down. Both didn't last. OK, one of them petered out to its fairly unseemly conclusion, in the other case both of us didn't click and we didn't pursue it.
OK, it's superstition. But psychological research shows that human behaviour is very much shaped by its environment. I suppose that the strength of a relationship - any one, not just a spousal one - depends on there being a shared environment. That's why I would want that environment, that context to be a lasting one. If an environment that symbolises a relationship were to disappear without being adequately replaced, that is very dangerous.
Well that wedding took place in a place that closed down soon afterwards and while I never allowed myself to think that the "curse of the closing down location" would affect this guy, this does fit in with the natural pattern. I would be very wary about closing down places.
------------------
An update on this earlier post - I think that water girl is still living in my block. I bumped into her at the lift. She still looks great, but I feel much less crazy about her than years ago.
Sunday, 18 January 2009
Big Bang
OK, I’ve supposedly read “A Brief History of Time”, but that was 10 years ago, at the very start of my 10 year old reading binge and possibly I just read the words without fully understanding most of the stuff. A lot like how I used to study a lot of stuff at school and haven’t had much time to think through it (because I have a bad habit where every semester I will take a subject I have never encountered and consequently do not have a background in.)
Now, when I read the biography of Stephen Hawking by John Gribbin, I start to understand how strange his big bang theories are. The first strange thing that we know about are black holes. We know that stars are made of massive lumps of hydrogen which are densely packed, owing to their own weight. Due to the heat generated by the release of gravitational energy, nuclear fusion takes place – a process that produces massive amounts of radiation and converts hydrogen to helium.
In the late stage of the development of stars, after a certain amount of hydrogen is used up, the sun swells up to become a yellow giant or a red giant. When even more hydrogen is used up, the star becomes more dense (spent hydrogen fuel is more dense than hydrogen – anything other than hydrogen is more dense, for that matter) and starts to collapse under its own weight. I think that the nuclear fusion process helps to make the star less dense by counteracting the gravity but I don’t remember how. Then you have stranger stars like white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes.
Black holes are the most interesting. They occur when matter becomes so densely packed that nothing – not even light can escape it. In Newtonian physics, gravity is merely an attractive force between 2 massive objects. Einstein changed this concept slightly with his general relativity, and showed that gravity is actually a warp in the space-time that produces an effect similar to an attractive force, but with 1 difference – gravity also works on light. So far, everything is understandable from what we know from our intuition about physics.
Here’s when it gets weird. Hawking found out that black holes produce radiation. Black holes, supposedly a triumph of gravity over everything else, produces radiation. Just like a black body! Now, one of the main features of the black hole is the event horizon, which is effectively a curtain separating the black hole from the rest of the universe. Because of how the black hole distorts space, within the event horizon, all space leads inwards. There is no way you can get out of a black hole. However, due to quantum theory, which posits that by chance, small amounts of matter and its anti-matter can form spontaneously, it is possible that some stuff is formed on both sides of the event horizon. That stuff can emit a small amount of radiation, known as Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation was calculated using some maths that was traditionally used to reason about thermodynamics. For this reason, black holes are thought to have this property called “temperature”, which analogously to other forms of matter
Another cool thing about black holes is that they have very few properties. They are matter which is so dense and collapsed that they don’t really exists like other kinds of matter which exists in the form of atoms and molecules and have chemical properties. If you have 2 black holes with the same event horizon radius, angular velocity and electrical charge, they are basically identical. All black holes are perfectly spherical because the gravity makes it that way.
The really strange part is how you could have a spin-off universe within the event horizon, and how some rip in the space time fabric could cause there to be “baby universes” whose existence is not detectable to us because they exist in dimensions that are orthogonal to our 3 dimensions. (just as people who live inside a sheet of paper cannot conceive of the universe outside of that sheet of paper). I thought, well that’s really weird. He’s really pushing it this time. Is the big bang the result of the formation of a bubble universe? He posits that the big bang is not a singularity (ie everything is squeezed into a geometric point, which is mathematically troublesome because you have a lot of dividing stuff by zero.) Instead the geometry of the big bang looks like the North pole, where you keep on going north until you reach a point where you can’t go north anymore because everywhere else leads south.
I’m like, fine. You want to say all this, it’s OK. You can keep on scratching out weird maths equations on your paper and talk about weird stuff that goes on out there that we don’t know about, that’s fine. But it is freaking weird. Is it freakier that we are coexisting in some mother universe which exists in dimensions that we are not aware of, or is it freakier that there is some heavenly father out there who said, “let there be light” and everything came to be? Is the creationist theory more compatible with the singularity type big bang, or the smoother continuous north pole style big bang?
These are weighty questions – portentous in the extreme and bearing absolutely no practical relevance whatsoever. No wonder even when I went to a university which had one of the best physics departments in the world I ended up not doing Physics but more real world stuff like – uh mathematics.
On another note, my book jacket is from Times the Bookshop, at its imperious phase before Borders and Kino came to town and totally pummeled its business. Some of us have been in Singapore for long enough to remember when it was the biggest book chain in Singapore. We remember the love hate relationship with that bookstore. It’s wonderful to see so many books around, but they had such a lousy small range of books.
I will list down the branches that Times used to have. Pls note that Times as of today has around 5 branches.
Times Centerpoint (this used to be the largest Times around and the flagship store. Now go look at what’s happened to it.)
Times Raffles City (Taken over by MPH, and then MPH moved to the basement.)
Times Plaza Singapura (this had to close when the entire building had to have a makeover. Now there is a smaller one on the 4th floor)
Times Lucky Plaza (I kid you not. closed down.)
Times Marina Square (see entry for “Plaza Singapura”)
Times United Square (United Square had a makeover, and then there was no more Times)
Times Northpoint (Driven out by Popular?)
Times World Trade Centre (same as “United Square”)
Times OUB Centre (see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Holland V (see “Lucky Plaza”. I think its now a steakhouse.)
Times Columbo Court (see “United square”)
Times Bishan (see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Kesington Park (This means Serangoon Gardens. see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Kovan Centre (Never been there)
Times Kalm’s Marina Centre (Why do you need 2 bookshops in the same place?)
Times Apex Jurong East (never been there)
Times Ginza Plaza (never been there)
Times Clarke Quay (see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Hougang (never been there)
Times Toa Payoh (see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Tiong Bahru (see “Northpoint”)
MPH actually had the biggest bookshop in town. I can’t bear to look at it now because they’ve changed it into a furniture shop as the location turned out to not have very much traffic going there. Armenian street used to be one of the coolest places around, because you had the big MPH on one side of the street, and on the other – the substation and the National Library. Now the national library is gone – demolished, like Arthur Dent’s house, to make way for a highway bypass. The MPH I think had been running up losses because there’s not much passenger traffic going there – a bookshop must always thrive on passenger traffic. And I suspect that the authorities are not too unhappy to separate the respectable symbols of informal education away from the less respectable artistic weirdos at the Substation.
Now, when I read the biography of Stephen Hawking by John Gribbin, I start to understand how strange his big bang theories are. The first strange thing that we know about are black holes. We know that stars are made of massive lumps of hydrogen which are densely packed, owing to their own weight. Due to the heat generated by the release of gravitational energy, nuclear fusion takes place – a process that produces massive amounts of radiation and converts hydrogen to helium.
In the late stage of the development of stars, after a certain amount of hydrogen is used up, the sun swells up to become a yellow giant or a red giant. When even more hydrogen is used up, the star becomes more dense (spent hydrogen fuel is more dense than hydrogen – anything other than hydrogen is more dense, for that matter) and starts to collapse under its own weight. I think that the nuclear fusion process helps to make the star less dense by counteracting the gravity but I don’t remember how. Then you have stranger stars like white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes.
Black holes are the most interesting. They occur when matter becomes so densely packed that nothing – not even light can escape it. In Newtonian physics, gravity is merely an attractive force between 2 massive objects. Einstein changed this concept slightly with his general relativity, and showed that gravity is actually a warp in the space-time that produces an effect similar to an attractive force, but with 1 difference – gravity also works on light. So far, everything is understandable from what we know from our intuition about physics.
Here’s when it gets weird. Hawking found out that black holes produce radiation. Black holes, supposedly a triumph of gravity over everything else, produces radiation. Just like a black body! Now, one of the main features of the black hole is the event horizon, which is effectively a curtain separating the black hole from the rest of the universe. Because of how the black hole distorts space, within the event horizon, all space leads inwards. There is no way you can get out of a black hole. However, due to quantum theory, which posits that by chance, small amounts of matter and its anti-matter can form spontaneously, it is possible that some stuff is formed on both sides of the event horizon. That stuff can emit a small amount of radiation, known as Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation was calculated using some maths that was traditionally used to reason about thermodynamics. For this reason, black holes are thought to have this property called “temperature”, which analogously to other forms of matter
Another cool thing about black holes is that they have very few properties. They are matter which is so dense and collapsed that they don’t really exists like other kinds of matter which exists in the form of atoms and molecules and have chemical properties. If you have 2 black holes with the same event horizon radius, angular velocity and electrical charge, they are basically identical. All black holes are perfectly spherical because the gravity makes it that way.
The really strange part is how you could have a spin-off universe within the event horizon, and how some rip in the space time fabric could cause there to be “baby universes” whose existence is not detectable to us because they exist in dimensions that are orthogonal to our 3 dimensions. (just as people who live inside a sheet of paper cannot conceive of the universe outside of that sheet of paper). I thought, well that’s really weird. He’s really pushing it this time. Is the big bang the result of the formation of a bubble universe? He posits that the big bang is not a singularity (ie everything is squeezed into a geometric point, which is mathematically troublesome because you have a lot of dividing stuff by zero.) Instead the geometry of the big bang looks like the North pole, where you keep on going north until you reach a point where you can’t go north anymore because everywhere else leads south.
I’m like, fine. You want to say all this, it’s OK. You can keep on scratching out weird maths equations on your paper and talk about weird stuff that goes on out there that we don’t know about, that’s fine. But it is freaking weird. Is it freakier that we are coexisting in some mother universe which exists in dimensions that we are not aware of, or is it freakier that there is some heavenly father out there who said, “let there be light” and everything came to be? Is the creationist theory more compatible with the singularity type big bang, or the smoother continuous north pole style big bang?
These are weighty questions – portentous in the extreme and bearing absolutely no practical relevance whatsoever. No wonder even when I went to a university which had one of the best physics departments in the world I ended up not doing Physics but more real world stuff like – uh mathematics.
On another note, my book jacket is from Times the Bookshop, at its imperious phase before Borders and Kino came to town and totally pummeled its business. Some of us have been in Singapore for long enough to remember when it was the biggest book chain in Singapore. We remember the love hate relationship with that bookstore. It’s wonderful to see so many books around, but they had such a lousy small range of books.
I will list down the branches that Times used to have. Pls note that Times as of today has around 5 branches.
Times Centerpoint (this used to be the largest Times around and the flagship store. Now go look at what’s happened to it.)
Times Raffles City (Taken over by MPH, and then MPH moved to the basement.)
Times Plaza Singapura (this had to close when the entire building had to have a makeover. Now there is a smaller one on the 4th floor)
Times Lucky Plaza (I kid you not. closed down.)
Times Marina Square (see entry for “Plaza Singapura”)
Times United Square (United Square had a makeover, and then there was no more Times)
Times Northpoint (Driven out by Popular?)
Times World Trade Centre (same as “United Square”)
Times OUB Centre (see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Holland V (see “Lucky Plaza”. I think its now a steakhouse.)
Times Columbo Court (see “United square”)
Times Bishan (see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Kesington Park (This means Serangoon Gardens. see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Kovan Centre (Never been there)
Times Kalm’s Marina Centre (Why do you need 2 bookshops in the same place?)
Times Apex Jurong East (never been there)
Times Ginza Plaza (never been there)
Times Clarke Quay (see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Hougang (never been there)
Times Toa Payoh (see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Tiong Bahru (see “Northpoint”)
MPH actually had the biggest bookshop in town. I can’t bear to look at it now because they’ve changed it into a furniture shop as the location turned out to not have very much traffic going there. Armenian street used to be one of the coolest places around, because you had the big MPH on one side of the street, and on the other – the substation and the National Library. Now the national library is gone – demolished, like Arthur Dent’s house, to make way for a highway bypass. The MPH I think had been running up losses because there’s not much passenger traffic going there – a bookshop must always thrive on passenger traffic. And I suspect that the authorities are not too unhappy to separate the respectable symbols of informal education away from the less respectable artistic weirdos at the Substation.
Saturday, 17 January 2009
Little Nyonya
I was surprised when a colleague told me that he wanted to go home in time to catch the last episode of the series. Little Nyonya fever has spread over Singaporean households, many of whom have not seen a period drama from Mediacorp in a long time. Sure, the marketing blitz probably had something to do with this. Plus the fact that mediacorp has not showed period drama serials ever for a long time hint that there might be budgetary restraints, or else it is difficult to find people who lived in the old days, and are still young enough to be writing scripts for you.
These days drama serials are divided into 2 categories. The first category revolves around yuppies – probably mediacorp executives and their 5Cs dealing with the banal trivialities of their banal trivial lives. The second category revolve around HDB folk who are not very bright, probably even retarded dealing with the banal trivialities of their banal trivial lives.
So it is quite refreshing to see period dramas of life before 1965, when Singapore was a genuine 3rd world country, even though in the late 80s they were churning this out on a more regular basis.
This series has been a favourite of my father’s for a few reasons. One is that he and his siblings, like Juxiang and Yueniang were at the wrong end of polygamic politics in their childhood. So it was like seeing the getting pushed around by the other side of the family all over again. The formula is very simple: Xiang Yun = my grandmother. Jeanette Aw (both the dumb one and the speaking one) = my father and his siblings. Not all the siblings, actually, since I had 2 aunts who were given away because my grandmother couldn't afford to raise them.
The other thing is that his fairy godmother was a peranakan. His father’s mother was sympathetic to the family of the third wife (this third wife is my grandmother who is still living with me today). So we carried over some of the traditions – mainly culinary. Yes, belachan was pounded in my house until quite recently. No, there's none of that stupid sewing beads or women gelek-ing around the house in strange costumes. No, nobody in my house speaks Malay (except my grandmother) - as opposed to some other Peranakans I've met at work. Yes if you are Peranakan (or Hainanese, for that matter) you have a higher than average chance of being an Ang Mor Pai (although I prefer to be called "Ang Mor Buay Pai"). Yes I ate dinner while watching the last episode and suitably one of the things I ate was ayam buah keluak.
So there would be some of those comments – “that’s slow. I could draw water from the well faster than that in those days.” Or “yah – those beaded stuff. People used to do those things. Very tedious and boliao”. Or he would call the maid to pay a little more attention to the parts that dealt with the cooking.
It was less dramatic in those days, of course. There was no big family fortune. My grandfather had a middle class salary but it wasn’t so middle class when you had to divide it between 3 families. There were no servants, no attempted murders, no getting impregnated by Japanese, no rapes, no pimping of wives, no bribing angmohs (actually not sure about that). But there were stuff like getting shit from people from "the other family", feeding the chickens before you went to school, loansharks hammering at the doors, etc etc. I actually went to the house they lived in before it got torn down and converted into HDB flats. I was 6 years old and couldn't remember much. It looked a lot like Liu Yidao's shack.
The younger generation like me have more serious things to think about, for example how compilers work.
Update: The corporate ethos, actually the Temasek ethos in particular demands that if there is something to be milked at all, you have to milk it for all it's worth.
These days drama serials are divided into 2 categories. The first category revolves around yuppies – probably mediacorp executives and their 5Cs dealing with the banal trivialities of their banal trivial lives. The second category revolve around HDB folk who are not very bright, probably even retarded dealing with the banal trivialities of their banal trivial lives.
So it is quite refreshing to see period dramas of life before 1965, when Singapore was a genuine 3rd world country, even though in the late 80s they were churning this out on a more regular basis.
This series has been a favourite of my father’s for a few reasons. One is that he and his siblings, like Juxiang and Yueniang were at the wrong end of polygamic politics in their childhood. So it was like seeing the getting pushed around by the other side of the family all over again. The formula is very simple: Xiang Yun = my grandmother. Jeanette Aw (both the dumb one and the speaking one) = my father and his siblings. Not all the siblings, actually, since I had 2 aunts who were given away because my grandmother couldn't afford to raise them.
The other thing is that his fairy godmother was a peranakan. His father’s mother was sympathetic to the family of the third wife (this third wife is my grandmother who is still living with me today). So we carried over some of the traditions – mainly culinary. Yes, belachan was pounded in my house until quite recently. No, there's none of that stupid sewing beads or women gelek-ing around the house in strange costumes. No, nobody in my house speaks Malay (except my grandmother) - as opposed to some other Peranakans I've met at work. Yes if you are Peranakan (or Hainanese, for that matter) you have a higher than average chance of being an Ang Mor Pai (although I prefer to be called "Ang Mor Buay Pai"). Yes I ate dinner while watching the last episode and suitably one of the things I ate was ayam buah keluak.
So there would be some of those comments – “that’s slow. I could draw water from the well faster than that in those days.” Or “yah – those beaded stuff. People used to do those things. Very tedious and boliao”. Or he would call the maid to pay a little more attention to the parts that dealt with the cooking.
It was less dramatic in those days, of course. There was no big family fortune. My grandfather had a middle class salary but it wasn’t so middle class when you had to divide it between 3 families. There were no servants, no attempted murders, no getting impregnated by Japanese, no rapes, no pimping of wives, no bribing angmohs (actually not sure about that). But there were stuff like getting shit from people from "the other family", feeding the chickens before you went to school, loansharks hammering at the doors, etc etc. I actually went to the house they lived in before it got torn down and converted into HDB flats. I was 6 years old and couldn't remember much. It looked a lot like Liu Yidao's shack.
The younger generation like me have more serious things to think about, for example how compilers work.
Update: The corporate ethos, actually the Temasek ethos in particular demands that if there is something to be milked at all, you have to milk it for all it's worth.
Saturday, 10 January 2009
Champions League draw
Now for some boliao mathematics.
In the draw for the Champion's League knock out phase, out of 16 teams there were 3 Italian teams and 4 English teams. As it turns out, all 3 Italian teams were drawn against English sides. Fabio Capello, the England coach has said that "with all the permutations, that was practically impossible". Is he as good a mathematician as he is a football coach?
Now in a randomised draw, all permutations are equally possible - anyway without knowing much about how the draw took place, that is what I assume. We will calculate how many possible combinations of teams there are. The formula is:
In the draw for the Champion's League knock out phase, out of 16 teams there were 3 Italian teams and 4 English teams. As it turns out, all 3 Italian teams were drawn against English sides. Fabio Capello, the England coach has said that "with all the permutations, that was practically impossible". Is he as good a mathematician as he is a football coach?
Now in a randomised draw, all permutations are equally possible - anyway without knowing much about how the draw took place, that is what I assume. We will calculate how many possible combinations of teams there are. The formula is:
ie the number of ways of choosing 2 from 16, then the number of ways of choosing 2 from 14, etc, then we divide it by 8 factorial because there are 8! different ways of arranging the same match up in order, and we need to remove the duplicate combinations.
With a little bit of algebra manipulation we have
Next we calculate the number of different permutations for there to have the English teams matched with the Italian teams. First, we assign Man U to match 1, Liverpool to match 2, Chelsea to match 3 and Arsenal to match 4. Then we will assign Inter Milan, Juventus and AS Roma to one of these matches.
Inter Milan can choose between 4 matches, Juventus chooses 1 of the other 3, and AS Roma chooses one of the two. Then the last English team chooses 1 of the other 9. So that gives us 4 * 3 * 2 * 9 ways of arranging matches 1 to 4. For matches 5 to 8 we have, according to the calculation of the first part, 8! / (4! 2^4) combinations. So multiplying the two together and cancelling the 4! on the top and bottom, we have:
Then, we take (3) and divide it by (2) and see what we get...
Apparently there is only a 1 in 100 chance, meaning like something like this is a rare occurance, but not like Fabio Capello says, practically impossible.
The conclusion is that Fabio Capello should stick to football coaching and stop pontificating about probability theory.
Saturday, 3 January 2009
Eating Meat
We used to think that meat was a great thing. It was great when our generation had more meat to eat than others. Eating meat also had connotations of envy. The Teochew saying, “jiak bak” literally means “eat meat” but it also means “loafing off”. It’s a jealous thing to say because just because somebody is seen enjoying something, it means he’s a bad person, but I guess this is another aspect of Chinese culture (and one I disapprove of).
But there is something wrong about eating meat. I used to think it was the custom that people just ate a lot of meat, just something you get used to. But eating meat means that somewhere, some animal is being caged up (and it will probably be caged up for life). Probably it will be fed junk food. It will be a couch potato – getting almost no exercise because space constraints make it hard for the animal to run around. It will be stressed because of overcrowding.
I suppose a lot of us get rather complacent about eating meat. We don’t eat meat sandwiches like the angmohs do. We eat fewer steaks. Our plates are full of rice. But when I saw this report and it listed down how much meat people will be allowed to eat in order to not destroy the environment, I think I’m eating a little too much.
A few western stalls in hawker centres are pretty good, but I’ll have to go there less often. Fewer trips to Uno Beef House or Aston specialities. Have to watch how much chicken rice I eat. When at the economical rice stall I can only have 1 meat side and the other two are veggies. Eat more yong tau foo. There’s a large chunk of rib at the bottom of your double boiled soup isn’t it?
Goddamn this overpopulation problem.
But there is something wrong about eating meat. I used to think it was the custom that people just ate a lot of meat, just something you get used to. But eating meat means that somewhere, some animal is being caged up (and it will probably be caged up for life). Probably it will be fed junk food. It will be a couch potato – getting almost no exercise because space constraints make it hard for the animal to run around. It will be stressed because of overcrowding.
I suppose a lot of us get rather complacent about eating meat. We don’t eat meat sandwiches like the angmohs do. We eat fewer steaks. Our plates are full of rice. But when I saw this report and it listed down how much meat people will be allowed to eat in order to not destroy the environment, I think I’m eating a little too much.
A few western stalls in hawker centres are pretty good, but I’ll have to go there less often. Fewer trips to Uno Beef House or Aston specialities. Have to watch how much chicken rice I eat. When at the economical rice stall I can only have 1 meat side and the other two are veggies. Eat more yong tau foo. There’s a large chunk of rib at the bottom of your double boiled soup isn’t it?
Goddamn this overpopulation problem.
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