Adventures in 20 Days

Twenty days have passed since the last entry here, and while I don't know who is really following this blog, I think I might owe my hidden audience an update or two ever so often.

Much can occur in twenty days, and it is of no difference now. Over the last twenty days, I have done the following (in no particular order):

• Met up with the ``new generation'' geocachers at an event
• Bought a new 箫 and 笛子
• Found a long lost geocache that was stumping the usual finders
• Got a first to find on a puzzle cache for my geocache centurial find
• Got assaulted by red ants on bare skin
• Walked through a mini tunnel near a drain that runs through a building
• Walked along a mossy rock-infested shoreline towards cliffs at low tide
• Learnt more about dog breeds than I had cared to find out
• Bashed through two jungles in Singapore and breaking lock combinations of the logs of the geocache
• Got stung by something unknown
• Performed light ``field surgery'' to remove a thorn splinter in my thumb
• Made some break through in work
• Got spanners thrown at me for my studies

No wonder it felt much longer than that.

I think I believe more in myself now than ever. I think I no longer harbour a strong need to have someone who is there for me; I think that I am starting to understand what it means to be a strong individual. It's funny to think that I need such a long time to finally realise what many folks have understood for a long time. In any case, it is a nice reprieve from all the unhappiness that I have been having over the last few years over this; while it is a little contrary to my overall being (a normal thing, considering that I'm a man of walking contradictions), it is still a sound proposition to myself. There is really no need to be reliant on a special other when one is strong enough. And thanks to the amazing powers of gender roles in society, it becomes much easier to convince myself that I am on the right course.

Of course, the true acid test of whether my mettle is stronger is when the time comes and I fly off for my next round of studies. Isolation has a strange way of amplifying all sorts of latent negative emotions that are absent when one has a support network of friends.

Taste of Failure...

What is the taste of failure? Is it completely bitter, or does it taste of forlornness as well? Is there any other thing that ``tastes'' worse than failure? Does anyone know?

Failure is something that most people strive to avoid, just because it is the representation of a lack of an achievement, and that it is also the manifestation of the supposed inability. Such a notion is so ingrained in the psyche that for the most part, everyone views failure in disdain.

But the truth is often more stranger than perception. While failure gives the most disgusting feeling of dread to almost everyone as a general rule of thumb and is almost universally scorned. the fact remains that failure is the only way that society as a whole progresses. Allow me to further illustrate this point.

The entire advancement of science as a knowledge system is based wholly on that of failure---each time a theory fails on a particular case, a new theory has to be concocted that will ``fix'' the broken theory. But if a theory has always been successful thus far, there is no guarantee that it is actually correct, since scientific theories are based largely on the principle of empiricism than induction as in mathematics; just because the theory works for the last large number of trials does not necessary mean that it will be simultaneously successful for the next trial, though we will, without loss of generality, assume from past verifications that it is still ``correct'' as far as we can tell for the foreseeable future.

So from the individual's perspective, failure is among the most distasteful of positions to be in, yet paradoxically, for the global good, we find that it is of an utmost necessity. This is not the first time we are seeing this phenomenon---I have talked about this some time ago regarding the optimisation problem, where the global optimum does not necessarily mean that every single individual comprising the group under study will benefit.

But of course, no one really wants to taste failure...

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