Sometimes you will hear it being said at funeral oratories: "he lived a full life".
I never thought very much about the significance of this. It sounds great, but then when you think about all the stuff that was missed out, what does it mean? He didn't say, "he was a good man", or "he lived a good life". Or "he lived a good life". Or "he managed to achieved this but failed in that".
Just a full life. It can't be that hard. All you have to do is to avoid doing stuff that's "empty". So long as you're occupied with something interesting every waking hour, you're on your way to living a "full life". Somebody says that at your funeral, and everybody thinks, "wow, that's great".
Think, guys, it can't be that difficult. The bar is like way down there.
Saturday, 29 March 2008
Wednesday, 26 March 2008
Chicken and Egg
I might have said this before but I will say it now in a soundbite.
One of my greatest ambitions is to solve the problem of artificial intelligence - how we can build a machine that has a human like intelligence, who can invent concepts and make use of them - you know, think.
I'm on the wrong side of 30 now so I'm probably running out of time. But one of the key questions that I will face is this: what gives a concept meaning? Is there something that has meaning of its own, which is so great that it and it alone gives meaning to everything else? Or is everything circular, as in you have this fantastic big web of concepts and meanings, and everything is pointing to something else?
It's very useful that I've studied maths before. Because maths is nothing other than a system of concepts and meanings, and it is very clear - more clear than other systems of meanings, like law, or ideas in politics - how all these ideas are related to each other. So what we have in maths is that we have a few anchors, we call them axioms, where the ground rules are being laid out and they don't need any evidence to support them. Then everything else is built on top of those axioms.
But what gives those axioms validity? I think what gives it validity is how many ideas you can build upon those foundations and the whole system does not screw up. There have been times before when the system looked very shaky, and a lot of wild conclusions that seem to have been derived from those precepts. But I think for the most part the structure is safe. So I think what validates the axioms is that they give rise to something sensible, they don't lead to contradictions.
Yet another way to put this is that the axioms themselves derive their validity from the theorems that these axioms give rise to. In a way the axioms and the theorems validate each other, so in a way, logic is still circular.
Or let's have a more concrete example since I think I might be boring my readers with my high minded conceptual shit. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Or let's have a simpler example, how are the meanings of a chicken and an egg derived? In other words, which came first? The idea of the chicken or the idea of the egg?
We could say a lot of things about the chicken but ultimately one of the crucial things we will say is that it is the thing that hatches out of the egg. The egg is the thing that hatches out of the chicken. They give meaning to each other. You can't define a chicken without the egg, or vice verca. But that's OK, because that's the way that they evolved. On its way from evolving from a bacteria to a chicken, it stopped being a unicellular object, and you needed a mechanism to protect the embryo during that very vulnerable period in the chicken's life cycle. There just happened to be a layer of calcium, and it just so happened that the packaging and unique enough to fool the human mind into thinking that these are 2 separate entities, which of course they're not.
Neither the chicken nor the egg came first - you see the reason why this question is so tricky is because the way that it was worded is already philosophically loaded - you're assuming that the chicken and the egg are separate entities and that's not really the right way to look at it. If you remember that they are part of the whole system which is the life cycle of the chicken species then it doesn't make sense to consider them separately. Neither came first, of course.
One of my greatest ambitions is to solve the problem of artificial intelligence - how we can build a machine that has a human like intelligence, who can invent concepts and make use of them - you know, think.
I'm on the wrong side of 30 now so I'm probably running out of time. But one of the key questions that I will face is this: what gives a concept meaning? Is there something that has meaning of its own, which is so great that it and it alone gives meaning to everything else? Or is everything circular, as in you have this fantastic big web of concepts and meanings, and everything is pointing to something else?
It's very useful that I've studied maths before. Because maths is nothing other than a system of concepts and meanings, and it is very clear - more clear than other systems of meanings, like law, or ideas in politics - how all these ideas are related to each other. So what we have in maths is that we have a few anchors, we call them axioms, where the ground rules are being laid out and they don't need any evidence to support them. Then everything else is built on top of those axioms.
But what gives those axioms validity? I think what gives it validity is how many ideas you can build upon those foundations and the whole system does not screw up. There have been times before when the system looked very shaky, and a lot of wild conclusions that seem to have been derived from those precepts. But I think for the most part the structure is safe. So I think what validates the axioms is that they give rise to something sensible, they don't lead to contradictions.
Yet another way to put this is that the axioms themselves derive their validity from the theorems that these axioms give rise to. In a way the axioms and the theorems validate each other, so in a way, logic is still circular.
Or let's have a more concrete example since I think I might be boring my readers with my high minded conceptual shit. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Or let's have a simpler example, how are the meanings of a chicken and an egg derived? In other words, which came first? The idea of the chicken or the idea of the egg?
We could say a lot of things about the chicken but ultimately one of the crucial things we will say is that it is the thing that hatches out of the egg. The egg is the thing that hatches out of the chicken. They give meaning to each other. You can't define a chicken without the egg, or vice verca. But that's OK, because that's the way that they evolved. On its way from evolving from a bacteria to a chicken, it stopped being a unicellular object, and you needed a mechanism to protect the embryo during that very vulnerable period in the chicken's life cycle. There just happened to be a layer of calcium, and it just so happened that the packaging and unique enough to fool the human mind into thinking that these are 2 separate entities, which of course they're not.
Neither the chicken nor the egg came first - you see the reason why this question is so tricky is because the way that it was worded is already philosophically loaded - you're assuming that the chicken and the egg are separate entities and that's not really the right way to look at it. If you remember that they are part of the whole system which is the life cycle of the chicken species then it doesn't make sense to consider them separately. Neither came first, of course.
Monday, 24 March 2008
Tip of the day
Some of you may be reaching that magical age of 30 where from then on life goes downhill all the way.
You would have changed your NRIC, and the clerk (probably Malay and wearing a tudung) over there would have given you back your old IC with a hole punched through it.
Don't throw that NRIC away. It will still work as a library card. So I can go to the library these days and use my supposedly invalidated NRIC to borrow books. I will keep my real NRIC at home where it is safe and nobody other than my maid can steal it.
You would have changed your NRIC, and the clerk (probably Malay and wearing a tudung) over there would have given you back your old IC with a hole punched through it.
Don't throw that NRIC away. It will still work as a library card. So I can go to the library these days and use my supposedly invalidated NRIC to borrow books. I will keep my real NRIC at home where it is safe and nobody other than my maid can steal it.
Sunday, 23 March 2008
The thing
One night, I went back home late at night and saw the remote control on the floor, in smithereens. Wondering what happened, I shot an email to my parents, asking
Can we assume that the remote control is no longer working?So this was the reply from my father.
Lately, I noticed that it was not working well and mentioned it to mummy a couple of nights before. Last night, upon my return from qigong, I believe that I reminded nicely to mummy about it and that it possibly could be caused by the battery. She reacted unpleasantly that she didn’t know what I was talking about. I possibly said something like `this thing’ ( for whatever reason, I just couldn’t describe the `remote control’) and she just wasn’t interested to look at what I was holding and I got very mad and threw it in front of the computer that she was concentrating on.
She grabbed it and threw it hard on the floor and obviously it is now not working.
Friday, 21 March 2008
Galactic Space Terror
I’ve heard about what high school in the USA is like. People don’t like going to high school over there. It’s a bitchy, competitive place. If you’re in a lousy ghetto neighbourhood school then there is plenty of violence, bullying and the occasional gun massacre. If you’re in a exclusive prep school, there is plenty of bitchy competitiveness, one-upmanship, nerds vs jocks. I think there are places with good spirit where the atmosphere is nurturing, people have a good sense of belonging. But I think either they are fairly rare or you don’t see them so much in media representations.
I think RJC would have fallen in between these 2 extremes, but I think it was a little bitchy. It is strange that I could have gone to 2 schools that are so closely associated with each other – RI and RJ, and feel so different towards them. I always felt that there was a sense of camaraderie in RI that was completely missing in RJ. Perhaps the stakes were less high – I could screw up my “O” levels, (to a limited extent I did) and still get to the next level, and as for RJC – I didn’t appreciate it at that time how relatively easy it was for me to get into the uni I got into, and how somebody from maybe another JC but managing to accomplish what I did accomplish might not get in. Furthermore it was a junior college where all the feeder schools going into it were unisex schools, the first time that you had a lot of hormone fuelled guys trying to impress girls, and it made the environment that much more competitive.
Yes, this is RJC, the one which would 10 years later produce the likes of Li Hongyi and Wee Shu Min.
For me it was not that easy because I think while the balance of power between the nerds and jocks was even in RI, in RJC it was firmly on the side of the jocks, since we had such a pro- sports principal.
I can look back on my days at RJC as being fairly carefree, in spite of the academic pressure. That would have to wait when I got to the U. Because if you haven’t figure out by now, I’m one of those lucky guys who have the magical ability to understand in 5 minutes what it takes mere mortals 1 hour to understand, that’s one, and secondly I never had to take any classes outside the ones that I’m traditionally strong in, ie Maths and Science.
They weren’t completely happy days, and I wished that I had done a lot of things that I didn’t do during those years. I wish I had been more sympathetic to those around me who had to struggle more than I did, and I wish that I was more curious about the outside world back in those days, it would have served me well in the army, in the uni and at work. I also wish that I had more confidence about myself, and realised that I was not as unattractive as I thought I was. (But this is not saying much because I thought I was the ugliest guy around.) The only tofu I was eating was from the canteen stall that I frequented a lot around that time. God, I must have had some seriously beautiful skin and bad flatulence.
I was glad that I was among the engineers. The arts guys are typically more astute, and always slightly more bitchy (but smarter – I took up political science in uni because I wanted to find out just what it was that made them so smart). And there were not a few hot chicks there. Those were the more street smart guys (at least they were more street smart at that time) and foxy chicks, a lot of the same girls who would later on earn the NUS faculty the reputation of having the most chio zhabors. And even one of the hotter chicks in my class, the one who turned up on the first day of class wrapped in an SCGS uniform that she was about to outgrow – so tight that catwoman would look at her and start hyperventilating – she who would brave the risk of heroically ripping up her uniform by actually bending over to put her schoolbag on the ground in front of her – she who would give a second meaning to “flag raising ceremony” and “standing at attention” – she would get into the Law faculty.
Sorry about my digression into happy memories from the past. Anyway, the Arts chicks were usually hotter and held to a higher standard of hotness – except for 1, who was, honestly speaking, ugly as fuck. I don’t know if it was merely her looks, or that she was as obnoxious as she looked. (But we all know that being obnoxious and being obnoxious looking are loosely correlated.) Whatever it was, she was definitely in a vicious cycle (and probably in a vicious circle of friends). You could have the odd cutting remark flying out unexpectedly, or you could have the insouciant slight, or even the unintentioned but careless blow to your dignity. There were rumours that she once wrote a love note to a fairly attractive female teacher, and attempted, in full view of the rest of the class, to slip it under her skirt.
I didn’t know her personally although I knew people who knew her (and they gave me the rumours). You had to conceal the first flinch of revulsion when you bumped into her, but otherwise you could just pretend that she wasn’t that ugly. But she was massively unpopular. The ugliness gives way to insecurity, the insecurity causes more clingy behaviour, the clingy behaviour makes you even more unattractive as a person than the ugliness alone, and eventually you have a reputation and nobody is your friend. There was this “school event” where the whole school had to go to a big auditorium. I would not forget the sight – she was on one of the seats near the back, the tiered seats. Most of the seats in the gallery were taken, except for those in a perimeter around her – the empty seats forming a ring around her.
And things were about to blow back in the ugliest way possible. At the entrance of the old RJC library at Mount Sinai Road, there was a room where you would put your bag there. Most students in those days had a file containing all the lecture notes, and all the other stuff went into a bag. So you usually brought the file there to study. Thing is, near the prelims, she would squirrel away the files, and chuck them in a garbage bin. This went on for quite a long time, a few weeks, and it would cause widespread panic among her victims, although most of her victims would be lucky enough to get their stuff back. Eventually she was caught and had to be sent for counselling. I don’t know if she picked the victims, I don’t think she did. Many of them never did her any wrong.
People knew the score, and didn’t entirely blame her. What we witnessed, before this terrorism thing became a big issue, was basically terrorism. The logic is the same – somebody who feels oppressed, unable to seek redress for her problems, and she takes it out on the random person on the street, maybe to make herself heard, or maybe because this is the one and only way she can exert power over her fellow human beings. She did people wrong, and also people did her wrong.
I think RJC would have fallen in between these 2 extremes, but I think it was a little bitchy. It is strange that I could have gone to 2 schools that are so closely associated with each other – RI and RJ, and feel so different towards them. I always felt that there was a sense of camaraderie in RI that was completely missing in RJ. Perhaps the stakes were less high – I could screw up my “O” levels, (to a limited extent I did) and still get to the next level, and as for RJC – I didn’t appreciate it at that time how relatively easy it was for me to get into the uni I got into, and how somebody from maybe another JC but managing to accomplish what I did accomplish might not get in. Furthermore it was a junior college where all the feeder schools going into it were unisex schools, the first time that you had a lot of hormone fuelled guys trying to impress girls, and it made the environment that much more competitive.
Yes, this is RJC, the one which would 10 years later produce the likes of Li Hongyi and Wee Shu Min.
For me it was not that easy because I think while the balance of power between the nerds and jocks was even in RI, in RJC it was firmly on the side of the jocks, since we had such a pro- sports principal.
I can look back on my days at RJC as being fairly carefree, in spite of the academic pressure. That would have to wait when I got to the U. Because if you haven’t figure out by now, I’m one of those lucky guys who have the magical ability to understand in 5 minutes what it takes mere mortals 1 hour to understand, that’s one, and secondly I never had to take any classes outside the ones that I’m traditionally strong in, ie Maths and Science.
They weren’t completely happy days, and I wished that I had done a lot of things that I didn’t do during those years. I wish I had been more sympathetic to those around me who had to struggle more than I did, and I wish that I was more curious about the outside world back in those days, it would have served me well in the army, in the uni and at work. I also wish that I had more confidence about myself, and realised that I was not as unattractive as I thought I was. (But this is not saying much because I thought I was the ugliest guy around.) The only tofu I was eating was from the canteen stall that I frequented a lot around that time. God, I must have had some seriously beautiful skin and bad flatulence.
I was glad that I was among the engineers. The arts guys are typically more astute, and always slightly more bitchy (but smarter – I took up political science in uni because I wanted to find out just what it was that made them so smart). And there were not a few hot chicks there. Those were the more street smart guys (at least they were more street smart at that time) and foxy chicks, a lot of the same girls who would later on earn the NUS faculty the reputation of having the most chio zhabors. And even one of the hotter chicks in my class, the one who turned up on the first day of class wrapped in an SCGS uniform that she was about to outgrow – so tight that catwoman would look at her and start hyperventilating – she who would brave the risk of heroically ripping up her uniform by actually bending over to put her schoolbag on the ground in front of her – she who would give a second meaning to “flag raising ceremony” and “standing at attention” – she would get into the Law faculty.
Sorry about my digression into happy memories from the past. Anyway, the Arts chicks were usually hotter and held to a higher standard of hotness – except for 1, who was, honestly speaking, ugly as fuck. I don’t know if it was merely her looks, or that she was as obnoxious as she looked. (But we all know that being obnoxious and being obnoxious looking are loosely correlated.) Whatever it was, she was definitely in a vicious cycle (and probably in a vicious circle of friends). You could have the odd cutting remark flying out unexpectedly, or you could have the insouciant slight, or even the unintentioned but careless blow to your dignity. There were rumours that she once wrote a love note to a fairly attractive female teacher, and attempted, in full view of the rest of the class, to slip it under her skirt.
I didn’t know her personally although I knew people who knew her (and they gave me the rumours). You had to conceal the first flinch of revulsion when you bumped into her, but otherwise you could just pretend that she wasn’t that ugly. But she was massively unpopular. The ugliness gives way to insecurity, the insecurity causes more clingy behaviour, the clingy behaviour makes you even more unattractive as a person than the ugliness alone, and eventually you have a reputation and nobody is your friend. There was this “school event” where the whole school had to go to a big auditorium. I would not forget the sight – she was on one of the seats near the back, the tiered seats. Most of the seats in the gallery were taken, except for those in a perimeter around her – the empty seats forming a ring around her.
And things were about to blow back in the ugliest way possible. At the entrance of the old RJC library at Mount Sinai Road, there was a room where you would put your bag there. Most students in those days had a file containing all the lecture notes, and all the other stuff went into a bag. So you usually brought the file there to study. Thing is, near the prelims, she would squirrel away the files, and chuck them in a garbage bin. This went on for quite a long time, a few weeks, and it would cause widespread panic among her victims, although most of her victims would be lucky enough to get their stuff back. Eventually she was caught and had to be sent for counselling. I don’t know if she picked the victims, I don’t think she did. Many of them never did her any wrong.
People knew the score, and didn’t entirely blame her. What we witnessed, before this terrorism thing became a big issue, was basically terrorism. The logic is the same – somebody who feels oppressed, unable to seek redress for her problems, and she takes it out on the random person on the street, maybe to make herself heard, or maybe because this is the one and only way she can exert power over her fellow human beings. She did people wrong, and also people did her wrong.
Wednesday, 19 March 2008
Tibet
Heard that Bjork has gotten into trouble in Shanghai for rallying for independence in Tibet during a concert. She probably didn't understand that it would be very badly received. Well it's understandable that China (and also the man in the street in China) do not want Tibet independence.
So what about the Tibet question? It is a big country. It is a damn big country. It is the size of Iran. It's not easy to grant independence to Tibet. I heard that the Dalai Lama is resigned to not having independence, which is just as well: for all practical purposes, you have to depend on China for just about everything.
The other thing is that it's just your bloody arse luck if you are a smaller country stuck between 2 big countries. Just ask Korea and Poland. And Finland. So when China thinks about an independent Tibet, they're going to wonder if the Indians are going to gain influence in that country, have to think about the Russians. Better off declaring that you're part of China and heck with it.
But if they're going to dump all the Hans into the country, if they're going to repress you and stop you from being Tibetian, if they're going to colonise (this word rhymes with "sodomise") you then there's plenty to be upset about. And that's why a lot of people are protesting. I've said before that the Olympics are a big platform for a lot of unhappy people to make their political views better known to the world. And so it goes.
So it appears that the issue is not about the status of Tibet: we'll probably have an autonomous state. The immediate issue is how the thing is going to be governed. Divorces are always painful, and successions between countries are further complicated by the fact that the countries are still going to be neighbours after the succession. Sometimes (Singapore-Malaysia, Czech-Slovak) things are easier when both parties are consenting and other times when only 1 party wants the divorce things get a little messy.
Thing about China is this: yes you always have the Opium war getting mentioned. You also have those tremendous sufferings during the Japanese wars. The unequal treaties. Of course China is also perfectly capable of fucking itself (Great Leap Forward famines, civil wars, warlord period, cultural revolution etc). But China is also a colonial power. We don't really talk about colonies these days but it's still alive in a certain form: Russia with its problems with Chechnya, Israel and West Bank, China with Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan. The US and Cuba / Central America. Indonesia / East Timor. Serbia / Kosovo. As is usually the case you will go on and on about historical injustices, but it's a totally different story when you're the one trying to get those darn Tibetians to toe the line.
Tibetians seem like nice people and I'd like to see China treat them with a little more respect. Of course the Dalai Lamas have had a history of being tyrants and it's like their PR is really good. (This is not a comment about the current Dalai Lama since we don't really know how he would have run his own country.)
A friend visited Tibet recently, I wonder what she's thinking about the funky stuff going on in the country. Usually it's fight fight fight, then take a break to allow some tourists to pass through, snap a few pictures with your Kalashnikovs, then fight fight fight again.
Sorry, I know nuts about Tibet actually, I'm just rambling.
You know the Greeks understood the nature of things very well. Their gods were assholes who played around with common mortals for sport. It is the way that powerful countries mess around with smaller and weaker countries: not so much immoral as amoral, which means that sometimes they will be the good guy when it suits them.
When your backside is itchy then you will go stir up shit in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Uncle Sam will go dick around in Latin America in the manner of an unhygienic guy absent-mindedly scratching his balls every now and then. When the USSR was still around they sponsored wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Cuba, Ethiopia, Syria - basically anything to piss off the Americans, until they made the fatal mistake of messing around with Afghanistan. So when China rises to the fore, you just wonder how it's going to behave, given that it's now influencing Burma, Taiwan, North Korea, Tibet, India, Pakistan, Central Asia. It's always interesting to watch.
So what about the Tibet question? It is a big country. It is a damn big country. It is the size of Iran. It's not easy to grant independence to Tibet. I heard that the Dalai Lama is resigned to not having independence, which is just as well: for all practical purposes, you have to depend on China for just about everything.
The other thing is that it's just your bloody arse luck if you are a smaller country stuck between 2 big countries. Just ask Korea and Poland. And Finland. So when China thinks about an independent Tibet, they're going to wonder if the Indians are going to gain influence in that country, have to think about the Russians. Better off declaring that you're part of China and heck with it.
But if they're going to dump all the Hans into the country, if they're going to repress you and stop you from being Tibetian, if they're going to colonise (this word rhymes with "sodomise") you then there's plenty to be upset about. And that's why a lot of people are protesting. I've said before that the Olympics are a big platform for a lot of unhappy people to make their political views better known to the world. And so it goes.
So it appears that the issue is not about the status of Tibet: we'll probably have an autonomous state. The immediate issue is how the thing is going to be governed. Divorces are always painful, and successions between countries are further complicated by the fact that the countries are still going to be neighbours after the succession. Sometimes (Singapore-Malaysia, Czech-Slovak) things are easier when both parties are consenting and other times when only 1 party wants the divorce things get a little messy.
Thing about China is this: yes you always have the Opium war getting mentioned. You also have those tremendous sufferings during the Japanese wars. The unequal treaties. Of course China is also perfectly capable of fucking itself (Great Leap Forward famines, civil wars, warlord period, cultural revolution etc). But China is also a colonial power. We don't really talk about colonies these days but it's still alive in a certain form: Russia with its problems with Chechnya, Israel and West Bank, China with Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan. The US and Cuba / Central America. Indonesia / East Timor. Serbia / Kosovo. As is usually the case you will go on and on about historical injustices, but it's a totally different story when you're the one trying to get those darn Tibetians to toe the line.
Tibetians seem like nice people and I'd like to see China treat them with a little more respect. Of course the Dalai Lamas have had a history of being tyrants and it's like their PR is really good. (This is not a comment about the current Dalai Lama since we don't really know how he would have run his own country.)
A friend visited Tibet recently, I wonder what she's thinking about the funky stuff going on in the country. Usually it's fight fight fight, then take a break to allow some tourists to pass through, snap a few pictures with your Kalashnikovs, then fight fight fight again.
Sorry, I know nuts about Tibet actually, I'm just rambling.
You know the Greeks understood the nature of things very well. Their gods were assholes who played around with common mortals for sport. It is the way that powerful countries mess around with smaller and weaker countries: not so much immoral as amoral, which means that sometimes they will be the good guy when it suits them.
When your backside is itchy then you will go stir up shit in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Uncle Sam will go dick around in Latin America in the manner of an unhygienic guy absent-mindedly scratching his balls every now and then. When the USSR was still around they sponsored wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Cuba, Ethiopia, Syria - basically anything to piss off the Americans, until they made the fatal mistake of messing around with Afghanistan. So when China rises to the fore, you just wonder how it's going to behave, given that it's now influencing Burma, Taiwan, North Korea, Tibet, India, Pakistan, Central Asia. It's always interesting to watch.
Monday, 17 March 2008
Woof woof
Had a dream last night. There was a dog who came under my care, very unexpectedly. Now you guys know me, I never keep pets. I wouldn't know what the hell to do with them. It gave me a lot of problems. Threw tantrums at me. I argued a lot with it, it wouldn't sleep in the kennel like it was supposed to. Kept on demanding more care and attention.
The one day the pound came and took it away.
Have you had this sort of a dream before? Any of you who has watched "Solaris" (I watched the Tarkovsky version) would find this dream familiar.
The context of this dream was that it happened 1 or 2 days after I asked a girl out on a date. I wonder if having a girlfriend would be something like dealing with that dog.
The one day the pound came and took it away.
Have you had this sort of a dream before? Any of you who has watched "Solaris" (I watched the Tarkovsky version) would find this dream familiar.
The context of this dream was that it happened 1 or 2 days after I asked a girl out on a date. I wonder if having a girlfriend would be something like dealing with that dog.
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