On Reading...

Not exactly on a roll here, but might as well write something, yes?

It isn't a secret that I am making my way through the King James Version of the Bible from Project Gutenberg. If it's something new, I highly recommend checking out my reading list to keep track of what I am currently reading.

The purpose is actually quite simple. The Bible is a book that is heavily alluded to (and even quoted from!) in the literature of the western hemisphere, and I cannot call myself a reader of English literature if I hadn't actually had the chance to look at the source material itself. So it is of a more mundane linguistic and semiotic reason that I am tackling the holy book than a sudden epiphany in following the Christian faith.

With that out of the way, some progress updates. I'm up to the Psalms now, and the experience thus far has been rather interesting. Some of the text can be quite laborious (counting off people?), while others lay out some basic principles behind what is deemed to be a moral life (commandmants and the stuff from the Judges and the Kings), as well as the rather petty nature of the almighty as depicted in the early sections (someone accidentally touches the Ark and boom! that person died). Pretty gory stuff for a holy book, but it is still quite interesting. The language itself hasn't bothered me a bit---I suspect I am getting used to the proto-modern English that was used here. A version of the actual form from which the modern allusions come from are well told in the text for the most part, but they often lack the embellishment that specific retellings have. Somehow though there is a realness behind them that defies the fantastical form of the nature that is being described.

Man, I wish I could write like that and be read nearly 700+ years later (KJV was translated sometime in 1400-1500s).

Maybe I'm not as secure in my own thoughts on morality that I thought, because just as I began on the KJV, I started on Feynman's first book of lectures on Physics, covering classical mechanics and special relativity as well as basic quantum mechanics. I won't claim that I am an expert in those branches of physics, but at least I have a better understanding (and a slightly better tuned intuition) behind the more modern aspects of physics compared to the simplified models that I learnt up to the `A'-levels. Feynman has an easy-to-read style that transcends the often crazy equations which govern the underlying physical phenomenon. Or maybe it's from my general lack of exposure to physics proper since my last physics-related class on astronomy and experimental physics back in college. I'll start on the second volume some time in the future---I am getting rather sick of reading too many large volumes at once; KJV is even more brick-like than ol' Hugo's Les Misérables.

I did manage to squeeze in some short stories and novels and even a version of the Singapore Constitution just for a change. Of the lot, the Handmaid's Tale is rather thought provoking. It provides yet another type of dystopian future scenario that hits even closer to home than Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World or even Blade Runner (the movie of course). That a theocratic movement can overcome democratic processes to end up with a type of strict autocratic society is something that cannot be dismissed as implausible given the constant rise of religious fundamentalism and personality cults. It takes the strongly patriarchical hierarchy and marries it with the perversely impersonal utilitarianism to create a formal society that is abhorred by all secretly but loved by all outwardly.

So, what's next?

More KJV for sure---apparently there are ``good news'' in the New Testament stuff, which will probably give me more cause to appreciate the things about St Thomas Aquinas that my old ethics professor talked about when I was taking that course in the Philosophy department. Apart from KJV, I should probably continue with the next volume of the Arabian Nights before marathoning Dune. Reading throughput is likely to be slow next month due to NaNoWriMo.

Speaking of NaNoWriMo, I think I have enough ideas to carry on with the original concept of Tales of the City. The main reason for my sudden lack of confidence came from a post I saw online that tried to characterise Singaporean writing. I found that my story concept was already taken to be a stereotype, and was quite shaken about it, since I thought I was doing something that was a little bit new. But now, after watching the riots in Hong Kong, and remembering Hemingway, I have discovered a new challenge for myself: to write Tales of the City using concise writing instead of the usual verbiage one uses to pad up the draft to hit the magical 50k. Does this mean that there's a chance of failure this year? Yes. But I suppose I will be much better from it as a writer.

The general plot of Tales of the City ought to be similar to my original concept, except this time, we can use more of a dystopian future setting to introduce the tales. This allows different voices and styles not unlike my 2013 entry, which featured that except it was too disturbing even to post online.

It should be fun.

And with that, it is time for me to sign off. I could go on and talk more, but a nine-hundred word blog post of almost no substance is probably enough for most people's palates. Till next time.

Discipline

Today's rant will be about the overly attached emotions one has for the artificial construct of a ``discipline of knowledge''.

I was in a discussion with a friend not too long ago about the state of affairs of machine thought versus human thought regarding the issue of medical decisions. It started off innocently enough, but it rapidly devolved into a slinging match between the two of us as to how humans will always remain ``superior'' to the thinking machines because the former can make judgement calls while the latter cannot. I vehemently disagreed to the premise, of course, since I was of the opinion that any form of human judgement is not completely devoid of stimuli, and can be codified into a system of logics combined with the balancing of probabilities, sort of a mix of regular first (or even second) order logic with associated Bayesian prior distributions over various theorems that get updated with new information. My friend's argument was that machines are too limited and are unable to make judgement calls nonetheless, wherein I brought in the point that the way in which human judgement calls and machine calls are used are completely different.

A human has continuous stimuli in the form of faster feedback loops, while the machine is often forced to make a single judgement given only one chance at getting ``observations'' in the form of some type of sensory/test output. Such a test protocol is obviously unfair and imbalanced.

We wisely ceased continuing the conversation when it was clearly obvious that each of us thought that we were right while the other was a complete moron and completely wrong.

I reflected upon the conversation and came to a much simpler conclusion as to what was going on. We were talking from too deep within our own disciplines. Had the domain of discourse been substituted from medical decisions so something more neutral (in comparison anyway) like that of a judicial ruling, a more productive outcome would have ensued, with some of the points of differing test protocols, types of codified knowledge, relative likelihood assignment and the like be debated on a more neutral territory.

But I was coming from the machine learning/knowledge representation/probabilistic modelling perspective, while my friend was coming in at full speed from the perspective of a medical doctor in training. There are turfs to guard, and that's what the notion of a discipline in human knowledge teaches us. That I was advocating for a more fair assessment of how machine intelligence can help provide medical decisions was seen, rightly or not, as an encroachment on the sacrosanct turf of the learned practitioner of the medical arts, who of course see the computer scientist who looks at data as ``that silly guy who does not have a medical degree'', which prompted the robust response, be it good or bad.

That got me thinking even more about the whole concept of a discipline.

Having disciplines in human knowledge is a good thing. It partitions the vastness of human knowledge into mostly self-consistent chunks, with dogma codifying the founding characteristics of that particular chunk of knowledge. Great advances in human knowledge have come from the explorations of researchers who are a part of each of their discipline, contributing much from their perspective, and sometimes even challenging the dogma to update it with the newly acquired data.

But defining disciplines, like all forms of discrimination, have a dark side. It makes experts in their own discipline arrogant. It makes them complacent; many feel that since they are masters of their discipline, it makes them qualified to criticise seriously on the work of others from other disciplines at best, and at worst, find that it is in their perogative to downplay or even slam the work of others outside of their chosen discipline. Hence the attack on developing machine intelligence for medical decision making by my friend. The world view was strongly distorted from the long periods of time that my friend had spent in the medical world.

Then there's the rise of so-called ``inter-disciplinary'' work. So much talk about marrying engineering with science and what-not. I'm too tired to write more on this, but I'll leave with this Feynman quote from the first book of the lectures:

``...because the separation of fields, as we have emphasized, is merely a human convenience, and an unnatural thing.''

Polarity

I must say that this is rather anomalous.

I lost my voice for quite a while, even before I started on the story-a-day challenge that I had since given up on. Somehow I felt that I had nothing to say, and that's why I said nothing at all.

Yet this fortnight has seen me writing enough entries that can be considered as an obtuse sense of ``frequent blogging''. I cannot tell though if this is an indication that I have finally found mhy voice, or if it is merely a phase to pass through before I go back to long periods of silence.

Work has been harrowing yet interesting. We are close to a major delivery date for the thing we were working on, and so there were the countless tests and re-tests, bug-fixing, feature-inducing, change request masquerading that come along with it. At this point as I write, I can feel that tension headache starting from the crown of my skull and slowly spreading itself as I count the number of hours that I had slept over the past two days.

Of course I'm tired. Giving that final polish on a thing that we had put so much time into building and tweaking is always the 80% of the 80-20 effort. Cognitively, I am quite distended. But there is this deep sense of satisfaction that I can barely start to describe. If it all works out, t'is good.

Yet beyond the satisfaction lies that compulsion to suddenly erupt into a primal scream, as if to release the pent up tension and angst that had been mercilessly gathering within my soul, like the eye of the maelstrom of interactions with the world. Reading and observing people who are no better than imbeciles keep trying my patience at maintaining a sense of outward calm. I took the bus home from the MRT station as always, and I met the most unruly and ill-mannered brats that I had the displeasure of seeing.

They couldn't be more than sixteen. Their diction was poor; vulgarities and obscenities punctuated whatever few conversational words they knew. Their sense of fun was jejune and consisted of spending the entire thirty minutes of taking turns to surreptiously smack each other in the head. Their choice of fashion was poor---mis-coloured hair, shabby looking T-shirts and bermudas, uncharacteristically short blouse that was at best a plain looking piece of brassiere, and tiny shorts with inseams that suggest better use as an inner garment. Their behaviour unruly as they took over the front half of the bus with their antics while the rest of us stared at them in disdain, annoyed enough to show it but not annoyed enough to step into put a stop to it.

When I saw them, what came to mind was not rebellion, it was idiocracy. And I was suddenly aware at just how screwed up a world we live in.

And that's why I avoid going out of the apartment unless it is absolutely necessary.

Creativity

I don't really have bursts of creativity. Hell, I doubt the very premise that I'm somehow a creative person. But I try to do my bit of innovation, be it for work or even for my own personal growth and development.

Something about never wanting to be in the herd.

It's an old thing of mine to never move in the same direction as everyone else. It's a habit I sort of picked up along the way, unintentionally at first, but now more deliberate than not.

The road less taken is the road that is most interesting, since by virtue of it being less taken means that the sights and sounds that come with it are never cliches. Avoiding cliches is paramount to living a fulfilling life -- somehow I suspect that the meaning of life is to generate and live through surprises, i.e. the things that are out of the ordinary for a life.

In more material terms, it means doing what you love, going where you want, and loving who you want without restrictions from silly social norms and mores.

It sounds mildly anarchic, this I will admit. Social norms and mores exist for the reason of allowing larger groups of people to work and live in closer proximity and at higher densities that are possible from a more egalitarian approach, but they do not mean that all of their rules and rituals need to be obeyed blindly. This means that one may follow the social norms and mores when interacting with others, but outside of the sphere of interaction, one should be at liberty to dictate one's terms on living life.

Which makes anything that borders on autocracy is an antithesis to living. Innovation may come from bending around rules through creative interpretation, but slap too many rules on and it becomes too much of a hassle to attempt any sort of innovation whatsoever. Where there's no innovation, there's no life as we know it, and this is a problem that we will be facing in our generation. Hard work and deep thinking are what makes the world go round, not going through cliches after cliches in leading one's life.

Imagine the combined creative power of everyone who thinks critically for themselves.

Typewriterisms

I feel sort of bad. But it was something that I needed at some point given my various experiments.

I wrote this recently and pushed it out on my personal domain: Typewriter-like Line Printer Emulator. I had to; it needed to be done.

There wasn't an easy way to capture the output from a text file (or typewriter-like input) into a PDF or something of that sort. One's at the mercy of the multitude of printer drivers that are out there, which demanded all kinds of... things.

Even notepad/vim is hopeless at this. Control over the number of lines and columns in the page are non-existent.

And cute typewriterisms like overstriking ____________ are missing.

And non-cute typewriterisms like the bad register of the keys on impact.

Of course, apart from the more obvious fun factor of figuring out how to emulate all these line-printer analogues in the precise nature of the digital realm, there are some other practical aspects of it.

It is of no secret that I have an interest in typography in a while. Typography and typesetting. I know LaTeX and even groff/troff/nroff exist and enjoy what they do, but somehow something is lacking. That old rustic charm from an antiquated means of typesetting, the world of monospaced fonts. The type of output one would find in say HAKMEM. It's not practical I know, but to me, it's the artistic merits of it.

And so that's my side project. To build stuff that recreates the old processes in a way that is still usable even in the modern era. Which of course explains the monstrosity that I linked to earlier.

Conceptually, it's simple. All it does is to take in a stream of ASCII characters from stdin and dump them to stdout which can be redirected into a PostScript file in a way that is consistent with a typewriter. This means, of course, the use of Courier (for now), and requiring a predefined paper size as well as font size. The program merrily dumps each line from the input stream to the output stream subjected to the ``physical'' constraints of the defined paper and font size. The outcome is a barebones PostScript file that can be sent into a post-processor to convert into a PDF or some other format.

It doesn't handle the typesetting of the page, or even the enforcement of line wrapping for the current trend of ``single-line paragraphs'' like this blog post. We have other programs for that (think fmt and par) for now---I will be rewriting some of these for my own needs later on.

One big beef is the lack of handling of Unicode, which I will look into once I can figure out how to get a pan-unicode monospace font to work with PostScript (yes, I am looking at GNU Unifont for this).

We'll see how it goes.

On another note, here's an example output of this blog post using the tool and some pre and post processing chains:



Till next time.

Edit: Adjusted to provide the PDF version on click.

Keyboard Adventures

Time for more asinine writing. If this isn't your sort of thing, I suppose it is a hint to move on with life and wait for the next non-whiney post.

Still here? Cool.

I'm just looking for an excuse to exercise the new Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2 that I ordered from EliteKeyboards (see link). It seems like an exercise in excess, considering that I already have the HHKB2 Lite version, but the need to use up the SGD600 worth of ``Flexi'' benefits was the main force behind the choice of purchase. And by a strange coincidence, the one day before the delivery was supposed to be done at my place, my HHKB2 Lite mysteriously decided to suicide. The hardware could not be detected by the machines that it was connected to, and it was frustrating and confusing for a while. In the end, I had to break out the potato keyboard that came with my workstation, the flimsy-feeling Dell keyboard that was still mint in box. Typing with that potato was harrowing, and I was glad that I had brought along Edythe-II to do most of the typing on with regards to the work that I was doing---I will talk about that in a bit.

That the HHKB2 Lite suicided was an excuse on its own to take it apart for a much needed washing. The keys and the tray itself had accumulated nearly five years worth of skin flakes, hair and what not, and it felt more hygenic to send them all through the wash while I was taking apart the keyboard itself in an attempt to figure out what was the reason for its inoperability. From what I can tell, it seems that the controller card was not broken---it was more likely that there's a short in the USB cable that was set up to connect the keyboard controller to the computer itself. I stripped the cable out, and now I will need to get hold of a multimeter and other electronic/electrical tools to confirm my suspicions. If proven correct, perhaps I can resurrect the HHKB2 Lite by rewiring the connector cable.

My experience with Edythe-II has been quite interesting lately. As you may already know, Edythe-II's native screen resolution is 2560×1440 over a 16:9 screen 13.3" large. That's a pretty high PPI right there (I'm too lazy to do the math to find out just how much it is, but I think a back-of-the-envelope calculation yielded something to the order of 220+ PPI). I hadn't been using her at the native resolution thus far---something about the Windows 8.1 ability of ``rescaling'' the font size and what not that ended with the display being used at what was effectively 2048×1152. I had tried the native resolution on the get go, but I think my eyes hadn't figured out how to focus on it yet, and the rescaled resolution was more comfortable.

Until recently that is.

Now I operate at the native resolution, and holy cow it's awesome. Four 78+ columns of text windows for coding on a screen that is no larger than an A4 piece of paper---actual bliss. That alone though was not the only reason why operating at the native resolution was a good thing.

You see, I have discovered a couple of Windows keyboard shortcuts that had changed the way I operate the machines forever.

The new shortcuts that I discovered were the Windows + Left Arrow, Windows + Right Arrow and Windows + Up Arrow commands. Windows + Left/Right Arrow will automatically resize the window to take up the entire height and half the screen width, either left or right, while Windows + Up Arrow will maximise the window. This means that in a crude way, there is an easy means of performing tiling with Windows. This also means that I don't have to fiddle with the mouse to adjust the actual size of the windows when I want to code and refer to the documentation at the same time. Combining this with the X-Windows style mouse of achieving focus by hovering instead of clicking meant that my overall operability of the Windows operating system just shot through the roof.

Alright, I am done with the simple stuff that I want to write. Going to post this up and carry on with work once again.

Till the next update.

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.