Wednesday Rant

The mark of an educated person, not necessarily a learned one, is the ability to listen, understand, and ultimately to criticise what has been heard.

So it is with great discomfort when I start hearing what some of the leaders are saying out there with respect to various socio-economic issues. No, I am not pointing at the leaders of my current residing country specifically, but as a general observation for people who hold leadership positions in countries and companies that make more than a dent in today's world.

The first thing that comes to mind is this: in the bid to get ``sound bites'', have they lost their mind? Some of the things that are said, while not blatantly false, fall in the category of ``dude, it's obvious and banal---tell us something we don't already know, and more importantly, how you intend to solve them''. It pains me greatly when these folks start to spout intellectual nonsense to advance an agenda that seems not to take care of the people they are supposed to make decisions for by proxy.

It also pains me greatly when there is the blatant abuse of the appeal to authority fallacy. Here's how it typically works: there's a problem that needs to be solved by some kind of management action (I use ``management'' here as a generic term for the decision-making process). Pundits, experts and ``experts'' are assembled into working committees to thrash out the issues relating to the problem. If there is some form of management discipline, well-constructed studies are performed to get actual data to measure the current situation before actions are proposed; more often than not, such studies are rendered in an informal manner, with little checks and balances, and those results are provided to the working committee. The working committee then undergoes a ``brainstorming'' session to talk things through before publishing a fifty-page report with an executive summary on the whole problem and the associated action that they recommend.

The leader involved reads the executive summary and then publically announces an endorsement of the working committee's findings and moves to enact the actions suggested. And the rest of us who need to work within the outcome of the decisions will reap the effects, be they good or bad.

The sequence of actions that I just described highlights the underlying appeal to authority. The working committee's legitimacy is invested by the leader's call for action. The actions suggested by the working committee have their weight from the fact that they were the appointed working committee by the leader who wants to solve that particular problem. The working committee made up of the experts with a report, now gain an authority independent of the original legitimacy that was invested by the leader. The leader then takes the actions suggested and applies them, appealling to the authority of the committee of experts as the final justification as to the applicability of the actions.

What if the actions failed to solve the problem and created new ones unforeseen?

No one takes the responsibility. The leader takes not the blame because it was the working committee of experts that provided their expert opinion on what needed to be done. The working committee takes not the blame because the leader is the final arbiter of the actions to be taken; moreoever the liability, should they be the ones to take it, lies with the working committee and not its constituent members. Since the working committee is ephemeral (assembled only to study and solve the problem before being dismissed), there is ultimately no entity to take responsibility for the outcomes of the actions, good or bad.

This means that even if the educated person listened, understood, and chose to criticise the action plan, there is no one there to accept the feedback to do something about it.

I'll let that steep for a moment.

------

What I mean then, is that when policies are pushed out by leaders, there's no turning back no matter how big the backlash may be. No turning back whatsoever. There has been cases where legislation was forced to be aborted due to a large blowback from the public, but such legislation never stayed dead for long---they always come back, not in the same form perhaps, but in some other related form. It's like a hydra---you cut off the head of the big, problematic action plan, two smaller ones, piecewise of the original action plan, return in place and are likely to be left alone.

This is a systematic problem that has no easy solution, because social institutions these days have surrendered the option of violence to only the state organ, and all non-violent ways have easy means of circumvention by those who lead due to the monopoly of both rule-making and use of violence. No, I am not advocating anarchy, but am merely pointing out the heavily stacked odds against getting any real change done.

In theory, leaders who are obtained via a democratic process can easily be displaced by their voters when the time comes for a general election; I am now referring to public office since it is not the norm to have an egalitarian approach with respect to private enterprises like corporations. In practice, their displacement is protected through the use of both hard and soft power projections, i.e. the threat and use of violence (force), or the threat and use of penalties (``don't vote me and something bad happens''). Under such circumstances, the educated person faces the classic dilemma---to think rationally (avoid the threats and keep the person in power), or think irrationally (displace the person and hope that the threats do not materialise). Since bodily harm is threatened, many will choose the rational [short term beneficial] option.

I don't even want to talk about leaders who are there by appointment. There are no non-violent ways of displacing them, and the best way to avoid having to deal with them is to not be there, i.e. leave. If going away is not a choice, too bad---there's no way out. Sorry.

But back to the displacement of leaders via a democractic process. It appears that to be a proper and responsible citizen of a country or state, education is insufficient---a person needs to be educated and courageous. Since the last world war, much of the world has focused on educating their people. I don't think it is particularly successful given the natural tension between the thinking person and the subservient person, but there has been some good results. The second property though, I believe it has been lost since the last world war.

There's hardly any reason to develop the courage to stand up for one's thoughts and purposes. In fact, there is good reason to suspect that there has been active attempts by leaders to suppress such courage acts, all in the name of security, sedition and subversion. Because those who dare to stand up threaten to disrupt the harmony that is the status quo. Because those who dare to stand up threaten the way of life that everyone has grown to accept and expect.

Because the courage to stand up for one's thoughts threaten the leader when there are no other natural enemies to expend such courage.

Undeserved Update

I think I have written enough.

I'm not apologetic at all for going offline for the past few weeks for both the scribbling and the yelling blogs. I needed a mental health break from some of the vagaries of writing anything at all.

That and having to rest my poor body and brain to recover from a four-day fever.

I don't care that I didn't complete my challenge of writing a story [fragment] a day for this year. I have, as I declared earlier, written enough. I need to keep myself fresh for the upcoming NaNoWriMo whose form I am likely to change. Instead of the compendium of stories I was talking about at the start of the year, I will do something a little more traditional---to spin an actual single yarn. And in true NaNoWriMo fashion, this time there will be no plot, no background, no preparation. It'll be the standard winging method.

I have fallen off of Facebook again by choice. Things were starting to get boring out there, for a lack of a better word. There can only be that many reposts I can take from my news feed before I feel my IQ dropping faster than a cannon ball off the leaning tower of Pisa. That and all those selective bias enhanced versions of folk's good lives---yeah, enough is enough.

Will I return? Maybe, but don't bet anything valuable as to when. As always, if there is a need to contact me (not bloody likely given experience), email will still work wonders.

And I still refuse to use WhatsApp. I don't need yet another tool to remain ``always connected''. I used to think that being ``always connected'' was a good thing, but then I rediscovered reading and all kinds of cool ``down-time'' activities that I realised that being ``always connected'' was more of a manacle with chained iron ball than an empowerment tool. Besides, I don't babble enough for people to actually want to stay ``always connected'' with me, which of course means a negative network effect on me.

So, no push and no pull factors to convince me that using WhatsApp makes sense. I'm already on GTalk/Hangouts, and if you can't get hold of me via email or even phone (when I didn't change my cellphone number for the last 11 years), it's your own damn fault or you don't really need to talk to me that urgently after all.

I suspect that I may have some trust issues; I don't think that I can ever open myself up enough to trust anyone. Maybe it's a combination of being hurt a few times, and the realisation that both the very ignorant and very intelligent are not trustworthy that made me default to shutting the hell up. It probably ought to be a bad thing, but so far, I am not seeing any downsides from it, as long as I have enough things that I can do solo without having the need to have another human next to me to share. Translated to something more pragmatic, it means that as long as I can still read books, write stories, perform with my musical instruments, I'm good. Being single isn't that bad actually, one is only beholden to oneself, and not to mention the lack of the additional social contract one signs when one is eventually married.

The main thing I need to remember though is to periodically kill some brain cells to slow it from over-thinking. It is the mulling part that makes one acutely aware of the social pressure that being perpetually single is somehow wrong. Some mulling is good; it is when one gets stuck in a ``brain loop'' of thinking and rethinking through the same bloody process that one must acknowledge that the mind had misfired and required rebooting to kill the loop.

I have been scribbling entries into my physical diary, so I don't really have much to rant about here now. So that's about it.

Symbols

What separates humans from non-humans? What makes someone more happy than another in comparison?

I was wondering about these two questions recently, and while reading Crime and Punishment as well as reflections upon my sordid life, have come to the conclusion that the key concept that answers these two questions is that of symbology. Or, based on Jungian psychology, the equivalent notion of archetypes.

Allow me to expand upon this a little more. We have known from machine learning and artificial intelligence research that it is possible to identify patterns from data as a form of knowledge. We use these patterns in a very mechanistic way to achieve rudimentary intelligence that helps us with many (but not all) types of knowledge-based work, like search engines or even for information extraction. However, we hardly ever call these programs (with the learnt patterns) as being truly intelligent for the simple reason that they do not associate any form of higher understanding of the patterns learnt. And no, I am not referring to a higher logic-type generalisation of the patterns that some of the newer algorithms can do (taking predicates and generalising them under a universal or existential quantifier). I mean the assignment and use of symbols to the learnt patterns.

When we observe a pattern, we do not see it for its mechanistic properties. From chunking, we parse the world as a set or sequence of symbols interconnected either through spatial relationships or through a series of symboli relationships. Much of the work that attempts to make machine learning rules explainable attempt to code such symbols, but there are always the issue of vagueness associated with each symbol---machines hate vagueness and therefore have a tendency to fail. Deep learning architectures attempt to simulate such vagueness by increasing the amount of expressitivity of the domain in the hopes that that expressitivity is sufficient to capture the blur edges that bound each symbol.

So thinking in symbols is what separates a human from a non-human. But this doesn't quite answer the second posed question, i.e. what makes someone more happy than another in comparison.

I posit that the answer lies again with symbols, or specifically, the level of symbology that a person is willing to observe the world with. There are those of us who observe the world as a mechanism which has cause and effect, and attempt to make sense of the mechanism in a reductionist manner. Under such an interpretation, we have a tendency of making observations that are for the most part objective---we describe what we see and only what we see, and assign no other meaning to it other than what we saw as the cause and what was the corresponding effect.

Those of us who observe the world that way have a tendency to be less happy. There is no other meaning to us about the world other than how it works, and many times, the how in which the world works can be very depressing simply because of the way it is. For instance, realising that many people have to sacrifice their time and health to build the buildings that we live in, to plant the food we eat, to process the food we want into forms that allow ease of long term storage, will make living appear to be extremely precarious, a reality that most do not see since they tend to abstract away such details in a symbolic context---food is available from the supermarkets, buildings are built over time by man and machine, and energy is easily available whenever they want it.

There is also a slightly more obvious and less contrived example: religion. Any school of thought that runs almost completely on symbolism can be reliably classified as a religion. Abstract concepts of salvation, life, death and even sin are codified into a set of symbols coherent under a specific religious interpretation. Ritualised actions are also another manifestation of symbolism---they allow the human to connect with the abstract concepts with a set of physical actions that, under a reductionist empirical perspective, mean absolutely nothing in terms of cause and effect (magical thinking). It may seem silly to those of us who have no strong affiliation with any religion, but those who perform the ritualised actions gain a peace of mind that those who are areligious do not get easily.

That's about all I want to yammer about really. I'm lazy, I'm tired, I'm disillusioned, and I realised I needed to write an entry here. Till the next sordid affair, I suppose.

My Brain Hurts And Here's Why [Sort Of]

I'm not even going to lie---I'm starting to feel very burnt out with respect to the daily writing. It should be evident from the type of writing I have been putting up these days: really short single-paragraph monstrosities, and the deluge of six word stories that I just put up to cover up for this week.

There is, of course, a reason behind it.

Procrastination.

I have meant to write down the abbreviated history of the epynomous City for my NaNoWriMo 2014 piece, ``Tales of the City'', meant to be a part of an entire novel that is entitled the same way. But life got in the way and I never could bring myself to sit down quietly and write it down. Perhaps I will have better luck at it this upcoming week.

I have been examining quite a few life questions over the past week, which unfortunately resulted in my brain overheating and landing me in a semi-delirious state as I try to keep my poor brain in working order for the work-related matters while at the same time allowing myself the capacity to think about the life questions that I had unconsciously chosen to work on this week.

Maybe writing it down here would help push it off my brain and let it have more rest instead of getting all beat up.

The big life question is that of marriage. I was trying to determine my views on marriage and what it meant to me. The overall consensus I got from my thoughts was that I was amenable to the abstract principle governing marriage, that is, the idea of having a spouse who is one's co-pilot on the journey of life to share weal and woe with, a partner-in-crime, a confidante, a friend, a soulmate. However, the implementation of marriage was rather abhorrent to me---the whole ritualistic behaviour prior to marriage (the courtship, stupid excesses in the form of the wedding banquet, all the bullshit involved in the ``trials and tribulations'' that is common in my particular region), the completely imbalanced partnership contract (strong bias towards favouring the woman in any conflict whatsoever thanks to outdated Women's Charter laws that still pretends that there has been no progress in women's rights), and the ritualistic behaviour after marriage from others with respect to progeny (``hey when are you having your first child?''). I'm not even sure if putting up with all that kind of crap is worth the benefits that come from being with one's spouse.

And don't get me started on serial monogamy. It's depressing how people get involved in a marriage with the idea that they would divorce eventually. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't like that kind of marriage. I'd rather stay single if I have to put up with serial monogamy as the alternative.

The second big life question is that of my base of operations. I was trying to determine if I should stay on in the SIN city, or move elsewhere on a permanent basis, or even to live a more itinerant lifestyle, going to where the problems are. I am currently in the first of three options, and I know friends who are in the other two categories. One chose to move elsewhere on a permanent basis because it was clear that given his interests, staying in Singapore would be a complete waste of time. One chose to live itinerantly because he never felt that he had a place that he could sink his roots into and call home, more of a side effect of his upbringing than anything else. I have some roots here, and it is hard to determine if they are worth staying for on what is effectively a ship that is starting on its sinking run should no positive change occur. It's one thing to be a second-class citizen in one's adopted homeland, but it's another thing altogether to feel the same way for one's original homeland, a sentiment that I am finding hard to ignore these days. And I don't mean just the large numbers of foreigners-turned-permanent-residents/citizens---I am also referring to the second/third/fourth generation locals who have been on this same island all these times as well. I feel marginalised even among my own people.

The true trade-off is between familiarity/confidence against sustainability/the unknown. Still no answers here, of course.

And that's all the catharsis I'm looking for, perhaps. I'll try to write up the abbreviated history and push them out piece-wise for this week. Let's hope I can do it.

On Censorship or the NLB Affair

(Cross-posted from Facebook.)

There has been recent rants about censorship in the media. Here is my take: to condone or even support censorship as the primary means of social control is a tacit acceptance that the people have not achieved a level of critical thinking where they can discern what is harmful and what isn't for themselves.

In other words, people who support censorship either think that everyone is too stupid to think for themselves, or are too insecure in their own infirmities to admit it, both of which undermines the fanciful thought that the education system is "doing its job".

"Protecting the values of X" as an argument is the uncritical assumption that the values in question are unassailable and perfect, which is extremism in disguise. If the values are truly unassailable and perfect, why would they need protection through the use of quashing the existence of information that is contrary?

The case for LBGTQ tolerance or acceptance is no different from the case of racial tolerance and acceptance. In fact, apart from the highly stereotyped behaviours of the few, it is even harder to determine if someone is of the LBGTQ community than compared to racial inclusion since there are no "obvious" external signs, i.e. there are no phenotype differences of one who is from the LBGTQ community and one who isn't.

Protectionism as a general rule of operation never worked well unless there is a strong comparative advantage present. We see this occurring again and again in economics, so what makes us think that social problems will behave any differently? Enlightenment is obtained through the careful consideration of *all* evidence present; censorship is antithesis to enlightenment.

We can never go back -- we can only go forward; all the censorship in the world isn't going to make LBGTQ people "go away". Censorship is the head-in-the-sand way of wanting to go back, that somehow, to ignore the existence of something makes it disappear. The only way forward is to face the facts squarely and mediate. That is the mark of 400 years of improvement in human knowledge and understanding that is our heritage.

Because I Felt Like Ranting

(This began as a rant about being labelled a ``scholar'' and being the only non-PhD holder among a group and feeling all left out, but on second thought that is too damn inane a topic to talk about. I don't want to be thought of as being a massive whiner.)

Life ain't shabby. I'm alive, I have a job, I have some semblence of free time, I get to do things I like doing and things I love doing. Yet somehow there is an emptiness within me. It generally doesn't show itself though---I have enough interesting activities to keep things moving that I never feel bored or discomforted. Until of course when I stop to examine myself with respect to the world around me.

I realise that each year, I'm losing one more friend than I had. Sometimes I blame them, but most times I blame myself. There are many instances where I just... don't want to be involved with the people any more. It's not that they had done something untoward to me, it is more like their trajectory in life creates situations that I feel uncomfortable about. No, scratch that, I'm used to being uncomfortable. What I mean is that their trajectory in life makes me feel inferior in all manners of the word.

What I'm talking about is things like: being in the presence of peers who are all PhD holders who talk about nothing but their research using the latest buzzwords, married folks who yap non-stop about their children and all the related jazz, and people who have no fucking clue how to talk with me so they uncomfortably try to blend in and make it all awkward.

I basically leave the first two groups of people out of my life as much as I can, unless forced to deal with them, where I just quietly assume my nondescript position and only open my bloody mouth when I have to. The third group of people, I keep losing at the rate of one per year, and I'm not even sure what to make of that.

I was converting bits and pieces of my autobiography (only up to thirteen years old, unfortunately---some things had been too traumatic to revisit thus far) from the old MSWord document that I started when I was twenty into LaTeX recently when I unconsciously did some analysis on my life, looking for some of the fractal-like patterns in it. And funny enough, some patterns did occur, and even though their form evolved over time, the crucial aspects never did.

The ``me'' within is a different animal from the ``me'' without.

What I mean is, as a person interacting with the world, I have built many walls surrounding the psyche that is the real me. Everyone saw the walls I built, some more clued in than others, and most respected those walls. Only a few managed to breach them and access the me within, either through my own weak moments or through the more inane manner of a lasting friendship. There were periods where I tried to be friendlier and take down some of the walls and barriers thus erected, but they have usually ended up with me being hurt psychologically, which meant that the walls and barriers were up almost as quickly as I tried to keep them down.

Nowadays, as a rule of thumb, the walls are always up, never down. That can explain the misadventure with Janet---it was hard reaching out to her when both of us where having our own versions of the walls up. It was a shame really, I always thought we could have been successful. Maybe there's still a chance, but I'm not hopeful any more.

Sometimes though, I wonder just how deep my friends know me. Considering the amount of resistance I unconciously project through all the walls, it's something that is hard to tell. It's not even a case of keeping secrets---everyone has those---but rather, a segregation of personae. I know how the real me is like, he's complex, dark, wild, but fundamentally non-evil in nature. But the me without is more mundane, serious-looking, and probably very tiresome and boring.

Living this upcoming decade feels very similar to living during the first twelve years of my formal education---everyone around me is mainstream and ignores me in general, while I bury myself among creative endeavours and read a ton of books both fiction and non-fiction, not all of them related to a single specific theme of inquiry. Sadly, given my experience during that duodecennial period, I think I'm not hopeful at how things will turn out now.

To end off, I'll leave behind this: look for Dustin Hoffman's interview on his role in Tootsie.

Welcome to July

July. The beginning of the second half of the year. How time flies.

I am nearly halfway through my insane story-fragment-a-day journey. To tell the truth, I am getting rather fatigued by it. There are quite a few days where I just had to take time off from it all, and just not write anything, hoping that I can fill in the gaps the next day, or sometimes, within the next few days. WriteThis is still doing a decent job, but it is me who is not catching up well.

I find that my writing is lacklustre.

Not to mention that sometimes I cheat. Six word stories are hardly worthy enough to be called ``prose'', the underlying principle behind the writing anyway, yet it had been done quite a few times where I had to do something but had no wherewithal to actually do it.

But as I said, we're halfway through. Once this year is up, I will have to decide how best to carry on filling up entries on my prose blog. This is, of course, not considering the amount of writing that I need to do for this year's NaNoWriMo, which I haven't actually planned in anyway other than that it should be part of a larger narrative that I am supposed to be writing.

Speaking of writing, I have rebuilt all the NaNoWriMo entries. The oversized text on ``A5'' paper was starting to get on my nerves, and I fixed the source files to generate things according to letter-sized instead. The files preserve their old name and are shorter in page count and look a little more readable instead of something designed for those under twelve.

I have also put up A Missed Connection as a PDF for download as well.

I suspect I'm in some kind of an emotional slump. Maybe I need to do something physical again to rebuild sufficient levels of happy-hormones so that I stop feeling this way. And with that, this entry ends.

OPOM and the GWR

I wasn't really intending to write anything for a while. But then I realised to my horror that yet another fortnight is upon me and I should probably say something interesting here. Thankfully, that ``something interesting'' aspect has been graciously taken care of by life itself.

This post is mostly about the comings and goings that occurred on last Friday and Saturday. If you haven't realised by now, I was involved in the Our People, Our Music performance hosted by the Singapore Chinese Orchestra in part as a rally for all the Chinese orchestra afficionados (and musicians), in part to provide a grand ``soft'' opening for the newly reconstructed National Stadium (or Sports Hub, depending on who you ask and when) and in part to break some Guinness World Records while we're at it as an early ``birthday gift'' for the 50th anniversary of Singapore's independence from everyone else.

I hadn't really intended to join in the rehearsal on Friday. For one, it required a full-day's worth of leave due to the timing, and for two, it was likely to become one of those rush-to-wait, wait-to-rush moments due to the sheer complexity involved in moving thousands of people about. Hell, even when I was at the company level of my BMT unit, it already took us some time just to coordinate the movement of a platoon with expert human movers (drill sergeants), and if we scale it up to the thousands involved with less competent human movers (volunteers), the effect was going to be multiplied by ten-fold at the very least.

But in the end, my incipient headache was the deciding factor. It was probably worth the effort to get my ass out there and then spend the waiting time trying to rest while making good use of the actual time that was used for the rehearsal. I took my whole day leave and joined in the rehearsals on Friday.

Travelling to the new National Stadium wasn't that big of a deal considering that the bus ride was catered for. It was once we were in the holding area (Hall 1) where things started to get hairy. The throng of people that were there was not something to laugh at, and to make matters worse they were mostly school-going children. I have nothing against children, but the sheer numbers of them meant that things weren't going to be smooth sailing, because I was a kid once and I knew how rambunctious they can get when they are away from school and are at what is effectively a field trip. It was packed but it never did devolve into outright chaos---the most was mere inefficiencies in terms of movement (and itchy fingers with respect to expensive equipment; but more on that later).

The food was alright. I had erred on the side of caution against shrimp paste anything and ate vegetarian for both days. It wasn't the best of choices because at the end of each day I found myself demanding an extra McDonald's fillet meal to fill me back up to something more tolerable, but it sufficed.

One of the biggest problems that we faced from the get go was the problem of synchronisation. The conductor of a five thousand strong orchestra must necessarily be bloody hard to see from all corners of the field, and to counter that they had a camera that was always directed at him to capture his conducting actions to project on to two large jumbotrons that were facing the field in the direction in which the mega-orchestra was facing. The catch was of course latency, something that Prof Dannenberg taught me a long long time ago during the Computer Music class. And in this case, the latency was bad---there was a delay of between 250ms to 500ms between when he does his action and when that action appears on the jumbotrons. Now, if everyone followed one or the other, there would be no problem, and since we are talking about a large number of people, of course everyone followed the conductor differently. The resultant cacophony was jarring---we were off by up to one quaver in some places. It was terrible. I highlighted it to a crew member who managed to feed back up to the control team who told the marshal at some point about the issue and somehow it ended with everyone synchronising with the conductor as shown on the jumbotrons.

The conductor himself had to make his actions early relative to the sound he got from the monitors to ensure we all played in time, something that made me respect him all the more.

So with the synchronisation problem fixed up by the time we got to our third major rehearsal (two on Friday, one on Saturday before the event), we were gold.

My corner of the section was quite sad. Apart from representatives from our orchestra, the rest seemed a little lacklustre in comparison. I'm not sure if it was because they didn't really play/didn't know how to play, or that I was paying too damn close attention to keeping in time with the conductor that I had tunnel vision and could not pay any attention to what they were up to. All in all though the section managed to pull through and things went by smooth.

We managed to set/break two records too: largest Chinese Orchestra and largest Chinese Drum Ensemble (see 早报 article here).

If you have been paying some attention to my rambling, there should be one big question in your head right now. Largest Chinese Drum Ensemble? Where did that one come from?

The culprit: pellet drums or 波浪鼓.

Among the pieces that were sent out roughly six months earlier was a percussion piece that I was pretty sure no one really cared about except those who played percussion. It turned out that piece actually had parts written for the pellet drums, which everyone in the mega-orchestra was issued on the first day of the rehearsal by virtue of it sitting on our seats. Talk about a shocker, considering no one except the percussionists even have the sheet music for that piece. Nevertheless, all those problem were easily dealt with---we ended up playing a game of Simon says with the SYCO members who sat at the front of each section where the micorphones were.

My original pellet drum was finally replaced by another one when our seat positions were shifted as they tried to compact each section to remove the empty seats. The replacement was actually of an inferior quality---it sounds hard to believe that it is possible to get something of an inferior quality when we are talking about mass-produced goods, but it's true: one of the rivets holding the pellet was placed in reverse, giving it reduced holding power. And so, during the rehearsals, when I was playing on the pellet drum, that pellet flew off and disappeared. I thought I would never see it again until happenstance revealed its location just as we were done with the performance and were heading back. Needless to say, I picked it up and reattached it to the drum once again. I knew from the get-go that the pellet drums were some sort of souvenir (it was a logistical nightmare to collect 5000+ pellet drums; moreover what the hell were they going to do with them given that they had stuck on both sides of each drum stickers commemorating OPOM 2014?) and was actually quite glad that I could find the missing pellet. Now that bugger is sitting in the display case with all the other random pieces of memoramblia I have collected while living this life.

I think I'm out of stories to tell for now. I had told a lot of them before to my mum, but somehow writing those out feels more of a chore than anything else. Maybe I'll write something more abstract and coherent next time.

Thursday, Friday Happy Day

I am always tickled and amused whenever a friend references something that I had written in any of my blogs (this one in particular of course) in meatspace. It shows that I've not been writing into a void, and really helps in delineating those who care and those who care not. I must also make a note that I am officially writing at stupid o'clock once again, and if things get all rambly and angsty, it's to be expected.

Anyhow, the weekend is upon us again. YT got back on Thursday on schedule, and we met up and hung out in the afternoon, eating a whole lot of good food and talking about all manner of crazy things, bouncing between the mundane (catching up on the various antics that our mutual friends have been up to, comparing battle scars on stupidity observed in life) to the sombre (wondering about how life is treating us, how the future looks like (hint: generally bleak)). I'm still digesting some of the stuff that we had gone through; it was a long chat, and much of what was discussed belongs to the subconscious processing unit simply because of the nature of the matter. I will withhold them in my memory and say no more about them here. One thing that was interesting was the tentative plan of synchronising trips to San Francisco to visit Victor---I'm trying to figure out if I should make an additional trip to Boston this time round to visit Xiaolu, but that is something that needs to be thought through and decided upon only nearer November.

Brian visited SIN city again, this time with Ko. We explored the southern tourist trap of Singapore, namely the Marina Bay Sands (MBS), Art/Science Museum, Gardens by the Bay, and VivoCity/Harbourfront. It was the first time that I had got my ass into the Art/Science Museum. They were having a dinosaur exhibit, as well as the photograph exhibition of Annie Leibovitz. Of the two, the first felt exactly like the popular science it was meant to be. Knowing more about anatomy made comparative anatomy on the reconstructed skeletons actually more interesting, and I think that I actually had more fun at this exhibit than at the previous one back in the Science Centre. If the dinosaur exhibit was the clear epitome of popular science and the mainstream, then the photograph exhibition was the polar opposite. Annie's forte was in taking portraits, and the manner in which she takes them (and the people of whom she took photographs of) were, for a lack of originality, provocative. We are talking about taking the extraordinary, the ``celebrity'', and recasting them in a light that shows their humanity despite the deification that we bestow upon them, with the effect where their humanity is depicted in a manner that does not belittle their existence, but rather enhance their stature in that it shows that beyond the celebrity status, they are still like regular people, identifiable outside of the sphere of their fame, sharing the same kinds of basic human emotions the way we do; approachable.

The traipse through the MBS, Gardens by the Bay and VivoCity/Harbourfront were mostly without incident, except for one. Bloody hard-selling nincompoops at the Guardian shop at the MBS near the food court. We were in there, I was looking for a bottle of tea or coffee, while pointing out the citronella oil patches to Brian and Ko for them to consider as their secondary defense against mosquitoes. Ko was talking to the pharmacist to get a hold of some hydrocortisone cream to help reduce the inflammation from the various bug bites he got from their Ubin trip the day before, and I was just about to pay for the bottle of tea I found. Immediately, a skin care sales woman came up to me, pointed at the visible rash on my arm (I was wearing a short-sleeved polo T-shirt with some mild visible heat rash), and told me in Mandarin that she had a product that could help me ``fix'' that. I told her firmly that I wasn't interested, but she lingered for a bit before walking away. I thought that was the end of it and went on to pay for my stuff and gave a stink eye look to Brian, who probably never saw me get so miffed before.

When I was done with buying my bottle of tea a different sales woman came up to me and told me about her skin product that could ``help with my complexion''. Mind you, we hadn't left the damn store yet. It wasn't crowded either, so apparently the modus operandi was ``if at first you fail, try again, even if the potential customer has already firmly said no to the first try, and was visibly annoyed''. I was so pissed I could break someone's leg. But I kept my cool, and told the interloper firmly that I wasn't interested. To avoid having to do time for assault, I walked out of the damn store, signalling Brian to follow me.

Idiots. I can play the get-out-of-my-country card and say that they were both of PRC descent and didn't look naturalised nor understanding to the typical Singaporean leave-me-the-fuck-alone response, but it's really not worth it nor is it accurate; sales staff that are clueless are clueless, and they come in all shapes, sizes, nationalities and what not. I think they should secretly be thankful I had the good sense of sparing their lives from their lack of tact by walking away. And I will stop here on my diatribe on this event---I can go on, but again, it's really not worth the effort.

``Horlicks Balls'' ice-cream from the Gardens by the Bay gift shop really tickled Ko's uhh something. Both he and Brian had no clue what ``Horlicks'' was, and was understandably making all the wrong assumptions. A pity that Ko was lactose intolerant, otherwise he could easily try out one ``Horlicks Balls'' for himself to learn of its flavour, and of the flavour of the malt-drink we all love as Horlicks.

So much for Thursday's and Friday's happenings.

I know Brian will read this at some point (I don't know when), so this piece of news is for him since he asked: that blind date is not happening. My friend conferred with her boyfriend about the... complication that the candidate girl was going through and they had [wisely] made the decision that she was probably not ready for the kind of serious relationship that I was looking for, and for the sake of everyone's sanity, have decided that it was best to not do the introduction. Funnily though, my friend promised to keep an eye out for a compatible girl for me, even though I didn't actually say anything about it. I'm not sure what to feel about that; it was just more amusing than anything else.

Hmm... I don't think there's anything else to add. Work is picking up again, the weather is getting more atrocious, and the June school holiday spirit is starting to affect me slightly. I guess most things are well in life and the only way that I can go is only forwards.

Excitements

I know, I know. I copped out again after having taken a four-day break of some sorts and reverted to using six-word stories. It's not as though I had deliberately planned for that---I was trying to deal with a silly tension headache while simultaneously trying to contain all manners of excitement and trying to keep a level head in this ever increasingly hot weather, the kind where one immediately feels muggy just from stepping out of a cold shower.

So, all manners of excitement huh. I'll bet some of you who are reading this are wondering just what kind of excitement are there. Well, allow me to enumerate briefly. Over Friday and Saturday, I was half-expecting a text message from a friend who was to inform me of the details for a planned blind date that she thought would be an interesting fit; such a date was planned to occur on Sundays, hence the wait with half-expectations. There were some... complications with respect to the original plans that she had made with her boyfriend over this girl, but we'll just leave it as such for now and not talk about it. Over Sunday I was excited for the arrival of Edythe-II as well as the watching of the new X-Men movie with Moo, Paul and his wife. Those were the main excitements that were keeping me up and making me feel too tired to give a damn about writing.

Of course there are more interesting things that have occurred in between. After nearly a month of running computations and ahem hosting, I finally could reboot Elysie-II back into Windows to play a bunch of games over the weekend. One of the games that I had wanted to start on was Unepic. I had heard of interesting responses from KK about this a long time ago, and had gotten the game from GoG some time back, and I was finally going to give it a go. Man, it was totally worth it. It had a rogue-like sort of feel, very similar to Rogue Legacy for example, except that there isn't any perma-death. So the pressure was actually off the game play and learning-by-dying, which actually gave a little more time towards the small puzzles and the hilarious dialogue. I won't spoil it any further, but considering that I had only played a quarter of the game by this point, there really isn't much else that I can say about it. The platforming felt a little stilted though, the manoeuvrability of the protagonist is surprisingly mediocre---it was impossible to say move in a direction and change weapons at the same time. This also meant that cool platforming tricks like side jumping up a platform immediately above the one that the protagonist was standing on was basically impossible.

I had also started on Bioshock, and suffice to say, the horror ambience was starting to get to me. I'm starting to wonder if I'm not really a fan of the horror/survival genre. Most of the FPSes that I play and particularly enjoy are those that involved relatively fast action, with lots of heroic moments, like Borderlands 2 or even Serious Sam. Deus Ex: Human Revolution actually took me a while to get to to complete it, and till date I still haven't completed Doom 3 and Quake II despite restarting on them every few months. Hell, I don't even play Left 4 Dead 2 anymore. But that's probably a slightly different story.

Oh right, Edythe-II. She's a Fujitsu S904, Intel Core i7, 8GiB RAM (4GiB slotted and 4GiB soldered, going to get an 8GiB RAM stick to up to the maximum of 12GiB) with Intel HD Graphics 4400 and a 1TB hard drive. And those aren't the real reason for me getting her. The answer lies in the form factor---13.3'' screen with a resolution of 2560×1440. Well, screw the fact that she is running Windows 8.1 Pro and therefore has a useless Metro UI and the whole App marketplace concept as well as the touch-screen mechanism. That the screen has so many pixels at such a density meant that I could literally use GNU Unifont as the default coding font for all my terminals without having to sacrifice the total character cell count, as opposed to using the Proggy fonts series. This doesn't sound like much, but really, GNU Unifont is more useful than the Proggy series in that it is pan-unicode in nature, which makes things much more coherent when mixing multiple languages. GNU Unifont has the added advantage of actually being taller than its width, something that is false for the Proggy series (they were all 8×8 compared with 16×8 and 16×16).

More pixel space also means that using tools like Scrivener and FL Studio become more viable, something that I will be doing a lot from this point onwarrds. I have two novels that I want to write (more like three based on NaNoWriMo standards, but no one is counting). I had heard of Scrivener and was contemplating its use in organising more complex novels as compared to the slice-of-life stuff that I had been beating out time after time, and bswolf gave what I would consider a glowing recommendation for the tool since he was using it to organise his own novels. But on a small screen, Scrivener doesn't show off its prowess that well, and so Edythe-II was obtained.

Anyway, this week is a short one. Soon YT will be back in town for a meet up, which is good because I have someone more sane to talk to that isn't related to work, and Brian is actually in town right now, but I will only be dragging him all over the bloody place come Friday where I had taken leave just for that. And with my proposed architecture for an access control service approved in principle, things are just getting peachy.

Now, if only that blind date were to occur, and I have some luck and meet someone who is compatible...

Advice? What Advice?

There comes a point in time when I must acknowledge that I have outgrown the epoch of life where I knew answers to anything and everything and therefore could be considered somewhat adequately qualified to give advice to people. It used to not be this way. Among those of my age group, I tended to be the most well-read, the most knowledgeable, and tended to pride upon myself on my dispassionately rational break down of problems and providing simple and workable solutions. Many of my acquaintances (I refrain from using the word ``friend'' here) come to me seeking advice and help, and I was known to give some rather useful ones from time to time.

Then I grew up, and nothing seemed to be understandable.

It took me nearly a decade to work out just what was wrong. It wasn't that I had lost my touch in being well-read, knowledgeable and dispassionately rational in breaking down problems into simple solvable parts. It was that the people I had been working with have changed. And since they have changed, the types of problems and eligible solution space have morphed too. Back in the day, one was always confined by some framework or another, be it from the perspective of education or, well, there wasn't any other alternative, was there? But when applied to the real world, or at least, a much larger framework that is life, the eligible solution space becomes hamstrung by the ineptness and limitations of the people seeking the said advice. Some solutions are easy to implement, but they are illegitimate because they cannot be successfully implemented by the person involved.

Of course, that was what I kept telling myself each time I found that I could no longer advise people effectively. Then, while I was showering earlier today, I hit upon yet another plausible answer: I was the one living in fantasy land and therefore have no right nor the information to provide proper advice to anyone.

I used to think I lived a hard life. Bad skin, relatively low income family, having to seemingly fight for everything that I needed. Then I realised one thing---since I was deemed somewhat more intelligent than my peers, my life beyond that of primary school was basically gilded. Choices were made easy during that time period because the number of choices at that level of gildness were few; there was little trade-off to worry about. Many of the choices that needed to be made had obviously correct ones. Compared to people who had middling abilities and modest home incomes, I had way less things to actually weigh and choose from than they. Which meant that I couldn't exactly learn a lot from the decisions that I had to make. Which also meant that unless the person has lived a similarly gilded life, I had no right to give them any useful advice.

That was what I did over the last decade. I had to overcome my helpful nature to turn it more callous, to literally shut the hell up as much as I could unless spoken to directly by someone asking for advice or help. World's a big place, with many people. I'm no Pope nor US President, so I can't actually help them all. Moreover, why bother helping anyone when I'm not qualified enough to help it?

Streisand Effect

Yeah I copped out and did a couple of six-word flash fiction pieces, but they took a surprising amount of effort to pull off. I am sort of proud of the wordplay in the first piece, and the second one was a bit more icky. But I just felt like trying something new. Ultimately, I think I will stick with the usual types of prose we are used to, and so we'll be back to the regular programme tomorrow.

There is one thing that has been stuck in my head for the past few days that was literally trying to scream itself out loud (which explains this out-of-season post). The Streisand effect is a phenomenon that traditional power players don't seem to ``get'', a simplified description would be that the more one tries to silence a piece of information, the harder the information fights back by being even harder to silence. It is a side effect of the cheap replication powers of the World Wide Web.

News on the Web is like noise---there really isn't a significant difference between the two. News and noise are always generated and cooperate with burying each other through sheer volume. But when censorship is attempted on a piece of news, indignant information ``warriors'' will see it as a civic duty to point out the censorship attempt, hereby guaranteeing that attention would be drawn to an otherwise innocuous piece of information (no matter how damning it may be in context).

In short, it is almost never prudent to take the high-handed approach to any dispute, especially in this time of cheap information replication. The rebound will often be hard and fast, and will likely to make the original cease-and-desist step seem tame.

Singular

The chief disadvantage of striving for one's dreams and goals is that it tends to lead to being in a singular state. Now, being a rather singular person (or unique for those who are a little vocabulary challenged) means one thing: that the overlap of commonalities with fellow humans tends to be small, and in the extreme case, non-existent.

I had known for a long time that I was a ``unique'' type of person. There were a few contributory factors of course; my chronic skin allergies have made me look different from the norm for a long time, my general intellectual interests are often considered esoteric enough that to actually find a single person who shares a large enough overlap in interests is actually hard. And for that reason, I used to maintain several groups of non-overlapping friends, just to ensure that things don't get too complicated.

A decade ago, for reasons of economy, I tried to meld the groups together into a single group that is called ``friends of thelaptop''. Well, a decade has passed, and I can finally come to some interesting conclusions of the experiment.

It was a total failure.

People are weird. The notion that a person can be multi-facetted is something that is almost always foreign to them. It doesn't really help when there are facets that are also contradictory---for example to be both a decent musician while also being technically proficient in the cutting edge---it really confuses the hell out of them. It confuses them to the point that they summarily declare that one was ``too complicated, too singular'' and just ditch the entire relationship with the reason of being incomprehensible.

It took me too long to learn of this. Well, I knew about this before, and thought that somehow I could buck the odds and just cut my own path through life. Like many things facing insurmountable odds, it failed. In fact, at the end of the great combination exercise, I ended up with even fewer friends than before, not all of them actually getting closer to me.

In short, I ended up more isolated now than I was nearly ten years ago. Talk about a horrible surprise.

These days, I don't even bother to do anything more than just be passive about things. There is really no need to demonstrate anything about what I truly am to most people, and I have found that it is merely easier to just let others develop whatever crazy notions they have on me than to try and correct them. There is no polite or authorised way of correcting an adult human's perceptions; if there were, we would have much fewer political and economical issues already, since most of those come from some level of misconception and misperception.

The main side effect of this type of behaviour is that it drives me literally crazy. I always have a compelling need to correct misperceptions and misconceptions, and in general to talk a lot and to talk readily about almost any subject matter that I have some access to, just as a means of learning new perspectives and to gain additional knowledge that I don't already have. But to ensure at least a veneer of friendliness (and to cut back on the perceived arrogance), I have to play the passive game and shut the hell up. It's silly and annoying, but is proving to be a necessary game to play if I still want to have some form of interaction in society.

Last Friday evening, I went on an unplanned drinking session with Michael, his elder sister, and a fellow colleague. I wasn't really planning on drinking at all, but seeing that he was leaving soon and that I will be quickly out of a fellow crazy in the office, I capitulated and joined in. Apparently I haven't really lost my ability to drink, though the strange loss of spatial awareness had emerged itself once again when I knocked over an empty wine glass while gesticulating. I think something like that happened when I was drinking beer with Chris back in Pittsburgh at PHI, but that's a story that I haven't told here. I should probably keep a look out for such things the next time I drink again, which isn't going to happen in a long while I think. The bar that we went to was owned by his elder sister's friend, and was congenial in demeanour. I've tried my first single malt whiskey, and it was an interesting and intense flavour compared to say Jack Daniels, Jameson, or Johnny Walker. By the way, I'm on the look out for the best day to get Jim Beam so that I can finally get the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which I think is probably going to be the most intense cocktail that I will be having in a while, not counting the Graveyard. The company was fine, and I was pretty sure I creeped out his elder sister and the colleague a little, but that's to be expected. It's fun to play the role of the quiet unassuming geek---it gives people a stereotype to associate with. Besides, all the knowledge in the world is useless among people that one doesn't know well; arrogance is a label that can easily be slapped on to a stranger who just sounds like he/she knows too damn much.

Ah, what else is there to talk about here on my solitary soap box?

Oh, right. Facebook. So I've reactivated my account to upload some pictures from the recent trip to the US. Not much stuff since I'm not really a fan of the ``selfie'', but there were a few nice panoramic pictures that I built from shots I had taken. Even though I have reactivated my account, I am still exiling myself from it---the Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR) is asymptotically near zero when compared to the other places where I get my news and information from. And it starts to get old very quickly when I see the two-hundredth baby picture. I mean, yes, I get it. You got married and have a baby. Congratulations. Now please stop spamming the hell out of everyone's feeds with pictures on your baby and saying how ``cute'' it is. That and the ``OMG marriage!'' pictures. And the ``OMG boyfriend/girlfriend get!'' pictures. We all get it. Things are going swimmingly well in your life. The rest of us boring singles are still single and without kids. Thanks for reminding us.

You know, I keep thinking that many people on Facebook have serious narcissism problems. They do things just so that they have a ``cool [picture] story'' to tell on Facebook. Like how cool they are, how well life is and what not. It's the worst kind of narcissism---it's the kind that irritates the hell of everyone who are not them. Then the reposters. Ugh. I don't even want to talk about it. And so yes, that's what I meant when I said the SNR is asymptotically near zero.

Yeah, I'm a grumpy old man now. With a moustache. And short hair. And bad skin. And terrible combination of interests. Who the hell would want someone like that?

I Hope This Makes Up For It

I suppose I really should apologise for not having an entry prepared at the natural fortnight mark, but I won't. I'm not trying to be pompous or heaven forbid to ``act cute'', but I have a very good reason why there wasn't an entry prior to this one.

I was on holiday.

Yes, I shocked even myself. To think that I would break away from actual work for nearly two-ish weeks and to get away, and not to any place but back to America, that is something I wouldn't have ever thought I would have done back in the day.

But in a way, I had to. There was no choice about it whatsoever.

It was the last chance to visit Pittsburgh (and pick up some geocaches) before everyone that I know there is completely gone. It was [probably] the last chance I would visit Champaign-Urbana to come to a better understanding of where things stand between she and I, and more importantly, to meet up with my friends before they leave for San Francisco. It was a time to avenge the lack of running at the 10km race last year when I broke my hallux.

At this point though, I am just jet-lagged and want nothing more than to sleep deeply for a few more hours. I probably should have been less stingy with my leave and applied for another two or three more days just to stay at home to sleep and fight jet-lag.

I should probably write more, particularly about events that happened during my trip to the US, but those have been consigned to the diary already, and I don't want to rehash them here. All I can say is, I hope that the trip I made and the awkward conversations I had with her weren't in vain. If that were true, I would be a pretty sad person.

I could have written an entry earlier, but I had to content with myself playing the transcription and catch-up game for my story-[fragment]-a-day challenge. Around 15+ story fragments were written while I was out in the US, mostly done while on planes and on the train. Only a couple were written while I was in the apartment of my friends. There was still a shortfall of nearly 8 more stories, and those I had to cobble together over the past few days. I am happy to announce that as at now, I am again on schedule for the stories. The 15+ story fragments were written on a stenographer's pad, two lines to a ruled line, which worked out to be around 400+ words per side. That was a nice number for a story fragment, and I suppose I had written so many of these by hand that I have started to write at a ``natural'' 400-ish words per sitting.

And now, I shall collapse to sleep. Maybe when I'm feeling better I will write a more complete entry.

So?

Not a fan of pseudo open talk. But I don't really want this to be that easily read, so bear with me.

V nz fgnegvat gb svaq vg vafhssrenoyr gb yvir urer ng gvzrf. Znal gvzrf jura V ybbx nobhg zr, V frr uhfxf bs sbezre uhznaf, nyy rvgure gelvat gurve uneqrfg gb nccrne gb or jryy-nqwhfgrq, be gelvat gb chg qbja bguref gb znxr gurzfryirf srry jryy-nqwhfgrq. Abj, zber guna rire, abguvat vf rire jung vg frrzf, naq nyy gur cergrafr bs n fbpvrgl zbivat ba jryy vf whfg anhfrngvat.

Gur qnvyl tevaq sbe zr vf whfg gung, n qnvyl tevaq. Jnxr hc, gnxr gur ohf gb jbex, jbex, erghea ubzr, fyrrc; evafr naq ercrng. Gurer vf nyzbfg ab erny ernfba jul V fubhyq rira or qbvat nyy gurfr nal zber, be fb vg jbhyq frrz. V unir gubhtug gung V jbhyq unir n tbbq punapr gb svanyyl or jvgu n tvey V yvxr n jubyr ohapu, ohg bhe eryngviryl ybj yriry bs pbzzhavpngvba abj vf znxvat zr srry artyrpgrq naq fbzrjung hajnagrq, nf gubhtu V jrer whfg znxvat hc gur jubyr fgbel va zl zvaq. V pnaabg gryy vs vg'f whfg n frnfbany inevngvba, n trahvar ybfg bs gur grahbhf pbaarpgvba, be fbzrguvat ryfr nygbtrgure.

Znlor V unq orra yvivat va n frys-perngrq ohooyr nyy gurfr juvyr.

V jnf gnyxvat jvgu n sevraq bire n Thvaarff erpragyl, naq juvyr V'z abg fher vs fur jnf gelvat gb or gebyy-l be urycshy, ohg fur qvq znantr gb tvir zr gur cebireovny xvpx va gur onyyf. V srry nf gubhtu V unir fhqqrayl njnxrarq sebz n pbagragrq qernz fpncr naq nz abj va n yvzob-yvxr avtugzner. Fhqqrayl V srry guvatf ner yrff pregnva guna orsber, rira gubhtu gurer unfa'g npghnyyl orra nal punatr orsber naq nsgre gur pbairefngvba jvgu zl sevraq.

V'z va gur zvqqyr bs ernqvat Tbar jvgu gur Jvaq, naq V'z cerggl fher vg unfa'g qbar nalguvat tbbq jvgu erfcrpg gb guvf engure bqq rzbgvbany fgngr V'z va. Vg uvtuyvtugf gur vffhrf bs ybir naq eryngvbafuvcf, naq gur abgvba bs uneqfuvc, naq ubj Fbhgurea pbafreingvir frafvovyvgvrf ner bsgra ng bqqf jvgu gur centzngvfz eryngrq gb fheiviny. Vg znqr zr dhrfgvba znal guvatf. Zl sevraq jnf naablrq ng zl veerirerapr bire n pbzzrag, juvpu fbzrubj rkgraqrq gb zl veerirerapr gb gur zhygvghqrf bs yvsr, naq abj, V unir orra genafcbegrq onpx gb zl hfhny fgngr bs orvat zbebfr.

Guvf gevc onpx gb gur HF vf fgnegvat gb or fbzrguvat gb or srnerq engure guna fbzrguvat gb ybbx sbejneq gb. V nz fgnegvat gb qbhog znal guvatf, naq jbaqrevat vs V nz vaqrrq qbvat gur evtug guvat ol vtabevat nyy gur cebonovyvgl naq fgngvfgvpny pregnvagl bs ubj guvatf jvyy cna bhg naq cynpvat zl ragver urneg naq fbhy vagb gur yvggyr guvat pnyyrq ubcr gung unf orra zl qbjasnyy sbe gur cnfg srj lrnef.

Gunax lbh, sevraq. Lbh unir fhpprffshyyl oebhtug zr onpx gb gur jbeyq bs qnexre tenlf, jurer gurer vf yvggyr yvtug gb or frra. V'z abg fher vs lbh vagraqrq gb qb gung, ohg lbh unir fhpprrqrq. Xhqbf. V qba'g guvax V jvyy jnag gb gnyx jvgu lbh sbe n ybat, ybat gvzr gb pbzr.

Crbcyr ner jrveq. Rirelbar yvxrf gb guvax bs gurve ceboyrzf naq bayl gurve ceboyrzf. V thrff V'z abg gung qvssrerag rvgure. Hxenvar vf univat n uryyhin fbirervtagl zrff, naq bs pbhefr gurer vf gur jubyr Znynlfvna nveyvar penfu gung rirelbar vf serggvat bire naq cbvagvat svatref naq rkpunatvat ybhq naq unefu jbeqf. Naq V'z urer jbeevrq naq zbbql nobhg zl yvggyr qernz gung jvyy cebonoyl zrrg gur unefuarff bs ernyvgl naq gnxr n uvxr.

Naq V'z guvaxvat bs rkgraqvat gung fnoongvpny sebz Snprobbx vaqrsvavgryl. Gurer ernyyl frrzf gb or yvggyr ernfba gb trg onpx ba gung jntba, rfcrpvnyyl abj. Gurer ner srj crbcyr gurer gung V jnag gb pbagvahr gb xrrc va pbagnpg, naq gubfr jubz V jvfu gb xrrc va pbagnpg jvgu, jryy, fbzr bs gurz whfg qba'g tvir n qnza nal zber. Fb V fnl, rabhtu. Ab zber Snprobbx. V'q yvirq jvgubhg vg onpx va 2006, V pna qb vg abj. Naq vg'f abg yvxr V hfr Snprobbx sbe nalguvat hfrshy naljnl; V'z cnfg gur ren jurer gurer jrer riragf naq jung-abg gung jrer ubfgrq ba Snprobbx gung arrqrq pbbeqvangvba gb tb gb.

Znlor V'z rzoenpvat rfpncvfz gb n jubyr arj yriry. Erxvaqyvat zl ybir bs ernqvat svpgvba unf nyfb cebivqrq n arj ernyz bs ergerng sbe zr, n fnapghnel gung V pna fnsryl erghea gb naq uvqr njnl sebz gur erfg bs gur pehry jbeyq nf vg oheaf gb nfurf nebhaq zr. Be znlor gurer'f whfg fbzrguvat bqq va gur nve gung vf xvyyvat zr rire fb fbsgyl gung V'z whfg gelvat gb uvqr njnl sebz.

Jub xabjf?

So much drivel...

Yet another long overdue update. I swear that fortnights pass so quickly and silently that I don't realise that they have passed me by till they have actually done so. Several odd things have happened, so let me try to put some sense into some of them by laying out some perspective or something to that effect.

First off, something fantastically funny. Twitch Plays Pokemon (TPP) (associated reddit topic here) is a hilarious anarchistic game play of the Pokemon RPG. The quality of the stream isn't from the content of the game (unlike say any of the Games Done Quick marathon sessions), but from the meta-content. By meta-content, I mean of course the fan-generated lore and commentary on the things that everyone is witnessing. I follow the stream semi-religiously, reading mostly the commentary rather than actually watching the chaos that is happening as the thousands of people mash keys into the emulator over IRC. The best part was that the motley crew actually managed to defeat the Pokemon Red game after around two-ish weeks or something. Considering the amount of coordination (or lack thereof partly due to trolls, and partly due to stream lags), it's a miracle of some sort. And as I'm writing now, they are on to the next game in the series, Pokemon Crystal. And in roughly half the time, they are now attacking the Elite Four once again, which can be loosely said as being the halfway point of the game in one sense and ``completion'' in another (the ``real'' final boss-character is Red from the previous game). Now it remains to be seen of the Red character has the same pokemon that the TPP stream was using---there was a request for this to be hacked into the ROM, but there has been no indication if this was done.

Second, anything I've said before about feeling/knowing that one is an adult is moot given the new situation that I now present. One feels that one has stepped irreversibly into adulthood when one's parents are starting the serious matter of handling their funeral arrangements. Nothing gets one into the ``grown-up'' mood quicker than planning around one's parents' mortality. It wasn't macabre or depressing in the least, but there were some sombre moments during that discussion. I now know what my parent would like me to do when they have passed on, and that knowledge has deepened an aspect of my character that I don't really know how to relate in a semi-public avenue such as this blog. I don't think I have even managed to phrase it comfortably into something that I write into my diary. Maybe I will have a good enough description for it in time to come.

Third, this drought and hazy weather condition is driving me absolutely insane. I can no longer train outdoors for my 10-km run safely---the PM2.5 concentration is bordering on being dangerous especially for vigorous activities like long distance running. Already my eyes and nose are suffering---lots of scleritis and rhinitis reactions. I think my lungs have diminished capacity as well from having to deal with the particulates in the air---when playing the 笛子 for my solo during the rehearsal from last Saturday, I found that I couldn't hold my air flow strong enough to cover the 8-beat/16-beat phrases. It sucked because I felt very stuffy and heavy-lunged, and the emergency breath pauses totally screwed up the phrasing, making the entire piece sound very sub-standard. At least I'm not hit with bronchitis for now, and I think I will have to keep physical exertions to a minimum to avoid destroying my lungs too much. This weather condition is getting rather stupid---isn't the hot season supposedly between the months of May and July? If so, why are we facing horrible conditions now?

Fourth, I find that my tolerance for general incompetence and irreverence to have dropped quite significantly between last year and this. There were a couple of times on the bus where I found myself irritated when some irresponsible bugger decided to keep the sound for their smartphone game on a high volume and keep performing actions that triggered that high-pitched arpeggio albeit in non-regular intervals, which made it hard to ignore. The temptation to stand up, turn around, and yell at the guy to shut it was so high, yet I think the repressive behavioural traits that has been inculcated in me since young are still at work and I just passively tried to avoid it by stuffing my ears with my active noise-cancellers and listen to something from whatever my Rock-boxed iPod have. At least incompetence isn't something that I have to deal with at work, which is a good thing. Oh, some other commuters tried to elbow their way through me while getting off the cramped transport while I was actively giving way, they ended up eating a whole bunch of aiki when I just sunk deeper to hold out against them. It made me happy and them pissed, but I don't care.

Fifth, the Android PDF readers from Adobe and FoxIt died when I tried to read the translated epic of The Thousand Nights and a Night by Burton. It wasn't anything too fancy, at the physical page location of 200+ on volume one, it just caused the PDF readers to crash. I got pissed off trying to get it to work until I realised that the PDFs were basically scanned pages. Using the all-powerful ImageMagick, I extracted and converted the PDF files into corresponding Comic Book Archive format (a CBR file to be specific, because why not):

1. convert -density 300 -strip -interlace Plane -quality "30%" -filter Lanczos -resize 800x "pdf01.pdf" "pdf01/pdf01_img.jpg"
2. rar a -m5 -ma4 "pdf01.cbr" "pdf01"

And it worked like a charm. Of course there were some other steps in between, but these two were the main ones. I've also learnt the power of the rename command---it allows the use of regular expressions to specify how to transform the file names. I made use of it to force zero padding on the extracted JPEG images from the PDF---ImageMagick doesn't do that. In principle, there was no problem, but I liked things to be zero-padded and therefore making a stronger guarantee on the order when listed lexicographically. The newly assembled CBR is then read with Perfect Viewer, easily the best Comic Book Archive format viewer, on both my phone and tablet. No crashes so far, and I doubt any will be forthcoming.

Sixth, in the view of intolerance, I have started on yet another period of non-Facebook usage. This time, I'm targetting at least two months, so between now and say June-ish I will not be accessing my Facebook account. It has been deactivated, and should anyone need to contact me, well, they should know how. I have a cellphone number that hasn't changed for ten years, email accounts, and even doing a simple search for me on the 'net with Google reveals enough contact information that it becomes an unacceptable excuse for anyone who needs to find me claiming that there was no way of doing so.

Alright, it's getting late, and the haze is making me more tired than usual. Time to crash out, and hopefully the next update won't be as late.

Duplicity

Okay, I think I maaay be a little late in the promised per fortnightly entry. But here it is, and I hope that this makes up for it.

------

I had been spending time reading Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, not the French version of course but an English translation. And the main comment that I can make is: wow. The main storyline is relatively straightforward with the focus being on Jean Valjean, and the over-arching theme about how class often triumphs nurture, no matter how much has one done to make amends for the crimes that one makes. It's a touching story, especially when you consider the sacrifices that Jean Valjean had made to ensure the future of Cosette, a person who was at best someone he adopted.

But what sets Les Mis apart from other fiction that I had been reading is the large inserts of historical information. Things like the Battle of Waterloo, the political philosophy of the revolutionists, and even the Parisian sewers all made their way into the tome to fluff it up to the nine-hundred page brick it is. I can't write like that; my knowledge just isn't encylopaedic enough. In fact, I'm sure when people said that one could learn a lot of general knowledge from reading they were referring to Les Mis.

I'm sure many have deconstructed the story enough that I won't even attempt to do so here. It is a good book to dive into, but be forewarned, it will take a bit of time to go through it.

In other news, I have tried to re-start my running training programme once again. The last time I started on this, the haze got in the way and I couldn't continue. This time though, I could keep up with it, mostly, until this week when my body started to give out on me from fatigue. The problem with the training programme is that it requires a very specific sleeping and waking schedule, which for most purposes is just brutal to keep up. I can't run in the afternoon, and evenings are terrible for running due to general tiredness and heat, which leaves only the morning. But I take the bus to work in the morning, which means that I need to wake up early. To run, then, would require me waking up even earlier, and to ensure that I have enough sleep, I will have to sleep earlier still.

The long and short of it is that I need to sleep by 2200hrs each night and wake up at 0500hrs each morning. This is bad because I only reach home at 1900hrs at my fastest due to the amazingly [in]efficient transport system. Even driving doesn't help because of the massive jams on all the roads that lead to my home.

I guess it's no wonder that my body decided that enough was enough and shut down on Wednesday, forcing me to take a sick day to rest up.

The haze is fast coming back too. I just hope that I can survive through that.

On another front, I think that I am more isolated than ever now. Janet's been busy with lab, and so isn't talking with me online that often---I miss her enough. The other people that I used to chat online on a regular basis have long since gone on to other pursuits and are thus less available as well. And don't let me get started on the people who are physically near me---there are too few of them left. And the artificial groupings that are thrust into my face are not helping much---dinner and dance, and the ugh faux social group for scholars. I take offense to such artifice. I may have studied on a scholarship or two, but I never felt like I was ``one of them'' scholars. If anything, I feel like a schmuck. I think this might be due to my general distaste for the Machiavellian conduct that many of these people practise---narcisstic self-serving sadists most of them are. Or maybe I'm just bitter I don't have a PhD and am sick of having to explain myself to a bunch of people who never saw defeat and failure in the face. Each time any of these people try to reach out to me, instead of feeling camaraderie, I sense them as just pitying me and just trying to be nice. I don't like it when people act that way. Duplicity is the key to all complications and if I can reduce the amount I have to deal with, the better.

I like people who see what I see, rather than try to see how I look. To look at me for what I am, and not for what I appear to be. Maybe my cynicism has gone too far, or maybe it hasn't gone far enough; I'll leave it to society to judge. Meanwhile I'll just carry on what I've been doing so far, building systems, reading voraciously, and writing a whole lot more.

Till the next update, and sorry for the rambling angsty post.

On Ignorance

Okay, time for a rant. First, read this (this is around 5 web pages long and will therefore take a fair bit of time, props to Janet for pointing this story out to me). Now, read what I have to say about the article.

The article makes me angry. It makes me angry in a way that is cumulative of the many injustices and inefficiencies that I see in the world today that I have found that I am unable to effect any meaningful change. I will try to categorise the facets that have raised my ire in the upcoming text. I've said this before (see the footer of this page), but I will make it explicit here once more: all that I say are my views limited within the context of the time in which it was written, and is in no way the ``final word'' that I have on things. With that, let's soldier on.

The chief problem that the article demonstrates, at least in the early stages, is the common problem of local versus global optimisation. The governor involved in the decision making process that saw the withdrawal of certain forms of aids and subsidies was well-known to be making decisions through assiduous study of large amounts of data, these days known by the pop-term of ``big data''. On paper, it makes a lot of sense---you literally have data that can back up your decision to show that overall, there is an improvement of lives with the reduction in the use of resources such as money or housing. It sounds great, doesn't it? In fact, it probably makes a good newspaper headline, simply because the effect can be compactly represented as a catchy sound bite, a modern media darling. But ``big data'' hides a thousand evils. Decision making with ``big data'' often involves a type of utility function, and sad enough to say, most of the time the utility function is designed to measure something akin to the average case of something, and thus the best decision as defined under the utility function is the one that raises the average case. Ordinarily, by the Mean Value Theorem, we can safely assume that if the average value of a smooth function is improved, then almost all of the image given the range of the function will also be improved, put in more economical terms, a type of Pareto improvement (everyone wins) is achieved.

Except that in many cases, such utility functions are by no means smooth. Worse yet, policy makers are not mathematicians nor are they operational researchers, and therefore their utility functions tend to not pay close attention to the details, or in this case, humane concepts like ``what happens to the lowest percentile of a population given the new decision?''. And that is a major failing that plagues the modern technocrat. This is by no means a new problem, really, it occurs in every human endeavour that involves having to decide boundaries and how to shift them. Remember the times that you have to ask if your puny score for an exam is an `A'-grade or a `B'-grade? You face the exact problem. ``Big data'' analysis methods do not account for boundaries, and using such methods to solve human problems will have the same issues. The effect may be well at the global scale, but for various subsets of locality, we find that the decision taken is ludicrous. I used to think that given a strong scientific method of analysis, we can make the rationally best decision out of all possible decisions in the decision space, but now, I am no longer that firm in that thought. It does not contradict the idealism; it highlights the weakness of the simplified models that are used to aid in the decision making process. After all, isn't it the case that the output of a model is only as good as the input and the model's expressitivity itself?

But back to the article. The previous rant is sort of expected coming from me; the case of local optima (rules of thumbs) and global optima (unified/integrated model) is a cornerstone of making machine learning effective and accurate and was something that I had visited time and time again while I was still working on my PhD. This next part of the rant, however, is something that I have refrained from saying for quite a while because I didn't really have the thought process worked out till now. Allow me to summarise the next part with this one line:

Adults rarely, if ever, change their ways, for good or for bad.

The main thrust of the article is to use the anecdote of a promising girl (Dasani) and her life issues to illustrate the problems relating to the poverty cycle, especially in a land of opportunity such as the US. One theme that keeps coming back in the article, whether or not the author intended so, is the notion of education or at the very least, the conquering of ignorance. On the one hand, you have a promising child, Dasani, bright, street smart, and on the other hand you have her parents, ignorant, foolish, and at times, actively attempting to jeopardise Dasani's future. And then of course you have adults who know better who are trying to help Dasani escape the whole mess by providing all forms of support.

The poverty cycle is vicious. Yes, aid provided may be insufficient, sometimes deliberately so to prevent an over-reliance on the state, as seen by the policy changes highlighted in the article. But aid is always insufficient by very definition---if aid were always sufficient, it is not an aid but a form of livelihood. One cannot expect the glorious state to provide for all of her citizens' needs; it is a model that has been repeatedly demonstrated in history as being unsustainable. Aid is meant to help one tide over some rough times, provide a safety net that cushions off the hardest of the falls. Does one come out uninjured? No, but one is not dead, and that's what aid is supposed to help.

But how does one make effective use of aid? One needs to figure out how to stand on one's two feet, and that means, crudely put, a need to shed ignorance and to act responsibly. From the anecdotes in the article, one can easily see that the parents of Dasani are ignorant. Money that comes in goes as fast, with little to no plans beyond the short term. That is the continuation of the poverty cycle, since they are now poor, and they lament about being poor instead of trying to step out of the cycle by taking control of their lives.

You would think that education can help beat ignorance. Yes it can---all the responsible adults in the article are trying to do that for Dasani, to teach her, to make her learn, to make her think and realise just how ridiculous a situation she is in, to show her that there is a way out through education. Some of them also tried to get her parents to learn, but somehow that didn't work out.

Old habits die hard. The parents acknowledge it themselves in the article. Yet we don't see them actually trying to change. This is, in fact, a very troubling trend that I keep observing in the US, and perhaps even in Singapore. Acknowledging that a problem exists is a good first step, but if nothing else is done about it, then it is as good as not trying to solve the problem. Most of the time, we find that adults are the ones who are in that weird situation; children are more likely to be creative and figure out ways to get out of problems that are highlighted to them, unless of course if they are acting under direct supervision of adults, then they are more likely to take on whatever the adult that is supervising them say.

Ignorance is the true enemy of humans. Ideological extremism, be it political or religious, is based on ignorance. The solution to ignorance is education, but that is where the crux of the problem lies: how can we educate an ignorant person if the said person ignores his/her ignorance? An emerging example of this is the ``debate'' between evolution and creationism. I thought we had put that to rest with the open letter that was written to the Kansas School Board back in 2005; it is 2014 now, and we have a ``live'' debate between a science advocate and a creationism advocate. All I hear from the ignorant is ``no, you are not fit to educate me because I educated thankyouverymuch and I think that what you want to educate me with is baloney given what I believe in''. The ignorant don't even acknowledge that they have a problem, and that is in itself a major problem.

It would have ended there if they kept to themselves, but to raise their ignorance to the level of legitimacy of scientific knowledge is taking things too far. And I digress from the article, of course.

Coming back once more to the article, we find that ignorance becomes hard to stamp out when one reaches adulthood. The ways are set, and of course, the ignorant may not even acknowledge their ignorance, which makes rehabilitation hard to impossible. All hope then lies in the education of the young, and therefore the reliance on the next generation as a way of breaking out of the poverty cycle.

I could tie that analogy to how governance systems and political parties work, but I think I may be stretching it and will reserve that rant for another time.

If ignorance is the reason why the poverty cycle is not broken, why then doesn't the government attempt to break it through legislation? This is something that has interesting consequences. Sure, the cost will be great---we are talking about re-educating (which includes teaching, guidance and enforcement) these poverty-stricken ignorant adults to be more prudent in their finances, and to learn how to make an honest living for themselves and their families and finally break the poverty cycle, never to return---but it is not exactly unbearable. All the money, time and effort spent on dishing out aid (which is short term) can be pushed towards education (which is long term). No problems there.

So why aren't we doing it?

A couple of reasons come to mind. One is specific to the US---personal liberty. The government is supposed to, as far as the US constitution goes, run the country with as light a touch as possible. This means that didactic steps that appear autocratic are implicitly forbidden. Forcing anyone who is ``in a poverty cycle'' to undergo an education process that may appear to be draconian (for effect perhaps) can be seen as a form of discrimination and violating personal liberties. In fact, under a dictatorship, such forced [re-]education processes are the norm, except under most dictatorships, the [re-]education process is more often for the regime than for true altruistic reasons.

The second reason is a little more conspiratorial. There is a vested interest in a voted government to keep the voting bloc as ignorant as possible. Ignorant voters tend to ask less critical questions and are more likely to take what is said at face value, which makes propaganda effective, and therefore remove one level of uncertainty when parties are out campaigning. In many democratic countries, the majority vote is the one that counts, and therefore the ignorant voter who is easily swayed is a very precious commodity for each party to win over to their side. Less ignorant voters are more likely to ferret out the bullshit from the parties, and can make the campaigning process hard, and make the incumbent expend more effort in keeping their power, something that is not really welcomed by any rational party---why would anyone want more work at winning when spending less on education and diverting the funds to propaganda will work even better?

I'll end this rant on a slightly more optimistic note: we as adults are more or less ``finished'' when it comes to issues on ignorance and poverty. Our minds have already been fixed into the final form in some sense. We have little left in our future by way of variation, for good or for bad. But our young are literally the future. Our selfishness for the status quo should never be allowed to interfere in the preparation of our young to be better than we are, if we still want a human world to exist long into the future.

Looking in Both Directions

It's that day again. I'm pre-writing this while I'm still sober and not depressed/manic and so what I may say here is likely to be subjected to some minor changes on the day itself.

It seems like yesterday I was still celebrating my twenty-first. Now, I feel like I have used up yet another decade, and this time, with little to show for it save for the many different kinds of scars both figurative and literal from the whole ordeal that is life. This is the last year that I will have the leading figure of two, and it is one of those magical milestones in life where you stop to take stock of the goings on and decide how the next part should go.

I'm no different. Having tried to spend two decades redefining myself as a unique individual with the ability to change the world into a better place, I have found increasingly that the real world has a way of simply beating one severely to ensure one's conformity with social mores, for good or for bad.

At this stage of my life, I am almost confident that my formal education years are over, and from this point on, whatever I do and learn is based wholly upon my own chosen path, instead of the pre-set but still delusionary free will paths that I had been on since the start of my formal education.

The path before me differs from before. There are, surprisingly enough, much more choices now that I can take. I have unlocked slightly more aspects of myself that I didn't know existed when I was merely twenty, and each of these aspects provide a path that I can choose to go on as part of my life's journey. I have met wonderful people over this decade, and met with a couple that caused me more than my recommended dose of anguish. There were many significant highs, and just as many confidence-shattering lows.

I have been annealled and heated so many times that I an no longer the boy I was. Am I a man yet? From some metrics, I'm well on my way there. Already I have lost some of the freedom that youth gives; though still forthright as a general principle, I have learnt to curb my tongue at times, particularly when I have sensed that whatever I say will not help in matters at all. T'is better to shut up than to worsen a situation with reason that the other refuses to listen. I suppose this is why the PhD became one of those bad decisions that needed to be excised. I may hold a couple of diplomas, but it seems that I'm always within reach of relying on physical violence; such is how aggravating some situations I can get into. And that's why I curb my tongue and hold my peace---confrontations will not end well for the other party if I do allow myself to go ``all out''.

But those reflective thoughts sound a little too nostalgic and self-defeating. Time to look forward.

What's the year ahead for me?

Getting work done---that's my primary occupation. At least eight hours a day for five days a week; doing something to that frequency makes it hard to just ignore it. To build on my own happiness with a woman that I suspect I am starting to love---a hard path that I've chosen, but it is something that has the highest postive expected value. Staying sane is no longer the problem; it seems that I have learnt more ways of accomplishing that now that I am no longer under any form of direct oppression. I also see a deeper exploration of writing on my side, what with the blitz writing that I've promised to do for the rest of the year, and the exploration of poetry forms that I am about to start on.

All in all, a good year ahead is planned.

I don't regret the last decade. True, it had bad parts, like how all the old friends I have starting to drift away and go into their various lives, or how I was delayed in life for effectively four years due to national service and the ill-attempt at the PhD (silver lining: leaving with an MCS). But I changed from being a machine that emulates emotions into a person who thinks he is a machine emulating emotions. In some sense, I have revealed more of me to myself over the last ten years, and am happier by it. It may not seem much to the less observant, but those close enough can attest to the changes that I have undergone.

Or I could just be delusional. Either way works for me.

This is starting to be an aimless entry. That's fine by me. It's my birthday---I get to choose what I want to say, especially on my blog.

Who can stop me?

Structure

Blech. I feel like shooting myself in the face.

So, in one of my earlier posts of the year, I said that I would be writing a short piece of something every day and posting it up on my scribble blog. And I felt like writing something a little more substantial today, so something along the lines of writing for 30 minutes from a prompt, way up from the usual 10--12 minutes that I use, while using WriteThis.

I was almost done when the timer went off, and I was typing a word with the `n' character, which promptly told WriteThis to discard the text that I had in the text box. And so, I lost a 30 minute piece of writing. Since WriteThis doesn't have any form of back-up mechanism, and I stupidly did not use a safety copy-to-clipboard save, I've lost that story forever.

I was ready to rage quit. But instead, I just started on a ten minute piece to post as a means of fulfilling today's quota. Such a stupid action on my part. Bah.

------

On slightly less trivial matters, I have been thinking a little on the whole notion of the corporate entity with respect to social, economic and political spheres. I don't think this concept is new, but it is an interesting perspective to think about nonetheless.

I think that at some fundamental level, structure is the basis of nature. The problem with ``optimising'' nature is the issue of choosing the right structure with which to organise the objects involved.

Starting at a not-so-low level, humans are multicellular organisms. Each of us have roughly the same archetypal structure that makes us human, something that anatomy can easily show us. Yet each cell that makes us up is individual and unique. Such combinations also cause each of us to be individual and unique in the way we behave and in the way we think.

But on an even more macroscopic level, we organise ourselves according to structures as well. Socially we organise ourselves into groups of families, clans, villages, towns, cities, countries. Economically we organise ourselves as sole proprietorships, partnerships, small/medium enterprises, corporations, conglomerations, consortia, trade blocs. Politically we organise ourselves as cells, sects, races, councils, parties, strategic blocs, nations.

There is but one major difference: unlike cells, we can simultaneously be a part of multiple such structures across the three different categories of structures. If there is anything that separates the artificiality of separating artificial from natural, I think this would be the best candidate.

It was once the case thta the three different categories were treated as one. Within a single localised structure of say a village, the social, economic and possibly political groups are one and the same. But as we increase the number of people and increase the scope in which we allow ourselves to travel (both metaphorical and literal), we find that such homogeneity is no longer common. For example, someone may be a staunch ally of the United States (political group), be a part of the Mitsubishi corporation (economic group) and yet be a devout wife in a biracial family (social group). This is a natural outcome from having increased globalisation. Ideas and information are intangible but infinitely reproducible goods, and once a good idea or good piece of information ``escapes'', they tend to reproduce rather quickly and almost without limit.

The problems of the world come about when the membership of each of these groups start clashing. With a cell in a body, it is obvious that it belongs to the body and therefore its loyalty stays with the body. But what about people who belong to different groups across the social, economic and political spheres? What should they do if one or more ideals from their various groups suddenly clash? Who will they side? Who should they side? These are not readily apparent.

In the old days, loyalty was easy---you are loyal to your country, or more specifically, you are most loyal to things that are in close proximity to you. Thus the whole notion of nationalist pride, and calls of defending one's home and all the other brave words that many a warrior had shouted out in the past. But with multi-national corporations being the norm these days, such loyalty becomes murky, since physical location is no longer the determining factor, but ideological alignment is. Should one be loyal to one's country if one discovers that the entity that gives them the most benefits is the corporation that they are associated with? What about one's loyalty to one's country and corporation under the influence of one's religion?

I don't have an answer to the question that I have so posed, but it will be an interesting line of thought to consider with respect to the way the world works. Maybe I might have something new to contribute on this some time in the future as and when I sort out my thoughts on the matter.