The View From Here

More Than Meets the Eye

2011-06-13T09:13:00.007+08:00

Or why I am not an atheist. The following are a few questions I ask MYSELF (so atheists need not get their knickers in a knot). One must question everything, as famous scientist Michio Kaku likes to say.

1) How did living things emerge from non-living things? I haven’t seen any satisfactory explanation from scientists. (I do read science magazines, by the way.)

2) How did we get from simple single-cell organisms to complex organisms like the human being? Evolving from extreme simplicity to mind-boggling complexity indicates direction. Can direction be achieved without guidance? Can an American missile hit an Iraqi tank in the middle of the desert without some guidance system? The evolutionists will immediately jump up and say that with a billion missiles in a billion years, we are bound to hit the tank one day. To which I will respond, why is it so blooming important to hit that tank anyway? And how do we know we have hit the tank without a feedback system? Scientists will reply that there is a system and it’s called Natural Selection, supposedly based on trial and error. What they are really saying is that Father Evolution is doing the selecting and not God. It’s just a name change, basically.

3) What happened to the fossil records? Let’s assume there are only 6 steps in the evolution from ape to man (which is a gross over-simplification). We start with 100% ape. Step 1: 5/6 ape, 1/6 man. Step 2: 4/6 ape, 2/6 man … Step 5: 1/6 ape, 5/6 man. Step 6: 100% man. If the change occured gradually over millions of years, where is all the evidence? It took archaeologists years and years to find the “missing link”. What we have a lot of are fully-formed fossils of all creatures and hardly any in-between ones. Why?

4) Is it possible or plausible for DNA to form the way scientists tell us? We got millions of cells in our bodies. These cells are so small we need microscopes to see them. Yet most of them contain DNA. DNA is like the detailed architecture, mechanical, electrical, civil and structural drawings for constructing a building. The human body is infinitely more complex than any building on earth. All this information - written in an elaborate code that requires super computers to decipher - is packed into a cell so small we can’t see it with the naked eye. Is evolution a good explanation?

5) How did nature managed to achieve ecological balance without guidance, when man has only caused massive environmental damage with our brilliant minds?

6) This one’s from CS Lewis. Where did our sense of fair play come from? When a bird gets eaten by a snake, does it lament about how unfair the world is?

I really have no answers for the questions above. But they do point me in a certain direction.

COGNITIVE PROCESSES IN CREATIVITY

2011-02-19T12:30:00.008+08:00

[Note: This is one of the best articles on creativity that I have come across so far. Again, it comes back to hard work.]

January, 1990
http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/courses/ModDis/Internal/HayesCreativity.pdf

By John R. Hayes
Carnegie Mellon

"Creative" is a word with many uses. Sometimes it is used to describe the potential of a person to produce creative works whether they have produced any work as yet or not. Sometimes it is used to describe every-day behaviors as, for example, when a nursery school curriculum is said to encourage creative activities such as drawing or story telling. In this essay, I will restrict the meaning of the term in two ways: First, I will be concerned solely with creative productivity, that is, with creativity expressed in the actual production of creative works and not with the unexpressed potential for producing such works. Second, I will be concerned only with creative acts at the highest level, that is, with the best and most valued works of our artists, scientists, and scholars.

Society defines creative acts through a complex process of social judgment. It relies most heavily on the opinions of relevant experts in making such judgments-music critics, art historians, scholars, and scientists who are presumed to know the field But even expert judgments are highly subjective and are frequently influenced by irrelevant factors. For example, they are influenced by the expert's current focus of attention (Gregor Mendel had to wait decades before the appropriate experts recognized that his work was important), and by the reputation of the creator (it is hard for an unknown writer to get a publisher's attention).

Despite the vagaries of such judgments, there appears to be a core of three evaluations which underlie the identification of a creative act. These are: 1) the act must be seen as original or novel, 2) the act must be seen as valuable or interesting, and 3) the act must reflect well on the mind of the creator. All three of these criteria appear to be essential if an act is to be considered creative. No matter how well executed a work may be, it will not be considered creative unless it incorporates substantial new ideas not easily derived from earlier work. Thus, even the best copies of paintings are not judged creative, not, at least, if the source is known. And no matter how original an act is, it will not be considered creative unless it is also judged to be valuable. A composer may arrange notes in a novel and unexpected way, but the work will not be considered creative unless it is also judged to have musical value. Finally, an act will not be judged creative unless it reflects the intelligence of the creator. If a work is produced entirely accidentally, then it is not judged creative. This does not mean that chance can't play a role in genuinely creative acts. Austin (1978) makes an interesting distinction among four kinds of chance events. Chance I is just blind luck. It could happen to anyone and doesn't depend on any special ability of the person it happens to. In chance II, luck depends on the person's curiosity or persistence in exploration. The fact that a curious person attends more, say, to the habits of beetles makes that person more likely to discover something interesting about beetles than a person who regards them simply as something to be squashed. In chance III, luck depends on the person having extensive knowledge of the field not shared by most people. Thus, the Curies' discovery of radium depended on their recognizing that a certain mineral was more radioactive than it ought to be on the basis of the known elements it contained. Clearly only a very knowledgeable person could make such a discovery. This is the sort of chance that Pasteur was talking about when he said, "... chance favors only the prepared mind." Finally, in chance IV, luck depends on the person's particular, and perhaps unique, intellectual style or pattern of interests. Acts which involve chance events of the last three kinds do reflect credit on the mind of the actor and thus are potentially creative.

In the remainder of this chapter, I will discuss data bearing on two major questions: "What are the characteristics of creative people?" and "What cognitive processes are involved in creative acts?" Finally, I will present a theoretical framework to account for these data.

Characteristics of Creative People

Do creative people have high IQs? Yes and no.

It is often assumed that creativity is closely related to I.Q. Indeed, both Roe (1953) studying eminent physicists, biologists, and social scientists and MacKinnon (1968) studying distinguished research scientists, mathematicians, and architects found that the creative individuals they studied had I.Q.s ranging from 120 to 177-well above the general average. However, these higher than average I.Q.s can not be taken as an explanation of the observed creativity and indeed may be unrelated to it.

Several studies indicate that highly creative individuals in a field do not have higher I.Q.s than matched individuals in their field who are not judged to be creative. Harmon (1963) rated 504 physical and biological scientists for research productivity and found no relation between creativity and either I.Q. or school grades. Bloom (1963) studied two samples of chemists and mathematicians. One sample consisted of individuals judged outstandingly productive by colleagues. The other consisted of scientists who were matched in age, education, and experience to the first sample, but who were not judged outstandingly productive. While the first group outpublished the second at a rate of eight to one, there was no difference between them in I.Q. In a similar study, MacKinnon (1968) compared scientists, mathematicians, and architects who had made distinguished contributions to their fields with a matched group who had not made distinguished contributions. There was no difference between the two groups in either I.Q. or school grades.

How can it be that creative scientists and architects have higher than average I.Q.s and yet I.Q. does not predict which of two professionals will be the more creative? At least two alternative theories seem plausible. I will call the first alternative the "threshold theory." According to this theory, a person's IQ must be above some threshold value, say 120, if that person is to be successful in creative activities. Above the threshold level, however, IQ differences make no difference in creativity. The reason that there is no correlation between IQ and creativity among professionals is that schooling weeds out professionals with IQs less than 120.

I have proposed an alternative theory which I call the "certification theory" (Hayes, 1978). According to the certification theory, there is no intrinsic relation between creativity and IQ. However, being creatively productive depends on getting a job in which one can display creativity--a job such as college professor, industrial chemist, or architect. Being considered for these jobs typically requires a college or graduate degree. Since school performance is correlated with IQ, it may be that one's opportunity to be creative depends on IQ simply because of the degree requirement. Thus, creative people may not need high IQs to be creative but they may need them to be certified to get jobs where they can put their creativity to work.

This second alternative is worth considering, because if it is correct, or even partly correct, our society may inappropriately be discouraging a large portion of the creative individuals in the population.

Other cognitive and personality traits

A large number of studies have been conducted to identify cognitive and personality traits which characterize creative people. Surprisingly, studies of cognitive traits have generally yielded disappointing results. Perhaps most disappointing are the results on divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is widely believed to be an important part of the creative process (Guilford, 1967) and measures of divergent thinking constitute a major component in the most popular creativity tests, e.g., the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. However, Mansfield and Busse (1981), reviewing studies of divergent thinking in scientific thought, conclude that there is essentially no evidence relating divergent thinking to creative performance in science.

Mansfield and Busse (1981) also reviewed studies of 16 other cognitive tests and concluded that none "has consistently shown high correlations with measures of real-life creativity." Researchers have been more successful in identifying personality traits in creative people. I will review evidence concerning four traits which appear to differentiate more creative from less creative people: devotion to work, independence, drive for originality, and flexibility.

Devotion to work

One of the most consistent observations about creative people is that they work very hard. Roe (1951), who studied a group of top ranked physicists and biologists, described them this way:

"There is only one thing that seems to characterize the total group, and that is absorption in their work, over long years, and frequently to the exclusion of everything else. This was also true of the biologists. This one thing alone is probably not of itself sufficient to account for the success enjoyed by these men, but it appears to be a sine qua non."

Chambers (1964) and Ypma (1968) also report that creative people work harder than others. Harris (1972) reports that University of California professors spend an average of 60 hours weekly on teaching and research. Herbert Simon, 1978 Nobel Laureate in economics, spent about 100 hours per week for years doing the work for which he eventually won the Nobel Prize (personal communication).

Independence

Researchers have consistently found that creative people have a strong drive for independence of thought and action. In particular, they seem to want very strongly to make their own decisions about what they do. Chambers (1964) finds that the creative scientist "... is not the type of person who waits for someone else to tell him what to do, but rather thinks things through and then takes action on his own with little regard to convention or current ‘fashion’” (p. 14). He also finds, "When seeking a position,... the overwhelming choice for the creative scientists is the opportunity to do really creative research and to choose problems of interest to them" (p. 6, italics added).

MacKinnon (1961) found that creative architects also strongly preferred independent thought and action to conformity. Ypma (1968) found that creative scientists were more likely than other scientists to say that they would like to have "a good deal of responsibility" in their jobs. Further, Ympa found that creative scientists were much more likely than others to answer "yes" to the question, "Did you ever build an apparatus or device of your own design on your own initiative and not as part of any required school assignment during your later school years?" (Here, "later school years" refers to high school and college.) This last result is interesting in the light of the success that the Westinghouse Science Talent Search has had in identifying outstandingly creative scientists. The Westinghouse Science Talent Search has selected 40 high school students each year since 1942 on the basis of self-initiated projects rather than written tests or grades. The projects are then evaluated for excellence by two scientists in the project's field. In the group of 1520 students selected between 1942 and 1979, there are five Nobel prize winners, five winners of MacArthur Fellowships, and two winners of the Fields Medal in Mathematics. This remarkable performance suggests that the tendency to initiate independent action is, indeed, an important trait of the creative person and that it may be exhibited quite early in the person's career.

The drive for originality

Since creative acts are by definition original, it wouldn't be surprising if creative people showed a special drive to be original. In fact, that is just what research has shown. MacKinnon (1963) describes the typical creative architect in his study as, "... satisfied only with solutions which are original and meet his own high standards of architectural excellence ..." Ypma (1968) found that when they are asked about their major motivations, the more creative scientists were likely to answer, "To come up with something new." Barron (1963) and Bergum (1975) havemade similar observations.

Flexibility

Helson and Crutchfield (1970) administered the California Psychological Inventory to 105 mathematicians who had been rated for creativity by other mathematicians. The more creative mathematicians scored significantly higher on the flexibility scale than did the less creative mathematicians.

In an extensive review of research on creativity in engineers, Rouse (1986) also found that flexibility was strongly correlated with creative performance. Creative engineers tended to mix algorithmic and associative thinking and to represent knowledge both visually and symbolically.

What Cognitive Processes are Involved in Creative Acts?

In this section, I will present an analysis of creative acts in terms of familiar cognitive processes, that is, in terms of processes that are involved in everyday thought and action. Before doing so, though, I should note that there are (at least) two points of view which hold that such an analysis is impossible. The first of these is that creative acts are, in principle, unanalyzable and the second, that creative acts involve special processes which are not involved in other kinds of thought.

Are creative processes unanalysable?

Karl Popper asserts quite forcefully that the process of scientific discovery is indeed unanalyzable. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959), Popper says on pages 31-32,

"The initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it."

"... My view of the matter, for what it is worth, is that there is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas, or a logical reconstruction of this process. My view may be expressed by saying that every discovery contains `an irrational element,' or `a creative intuition,' in Bergson's sense."

In their book, Scientific Discovery: An Account of the Creative Processes, Langley, Simon, Bradshaw, and Zytkow (1987) present a position directly challenging Popper's view. These authors argue that it is indeed possible to account for scientific discovery in terms of well specified heuristic procedures. In particular, they hold that discoveries are achieved when the scientist applies sensible heuristic procedures in drawing inferences from data. They argue quite convincingly for the adequacy of this view by incorporating such heuristics in computer programs, and showing that these programs can induce well known scientific laws from data. For example, one program, BACON. 1, incorporates the following search heuristics:

• Look for variables (or combinations of variables) with constant value.
• Look for linear relations among variables.
• If two variables increase together, consider their ratio.
• If one variable increases while another decreases, consider their product.

When provided with appropriate data, this program successfully induced Boyle's law, Kepler's third law, Galileo's law, and Ohm's law. Lenat had demonstrated earlier (Lenat, 1976) that a well specified set of heuristics, incorporated in his program, AM (for Automated Mathematician), could make interesting discoveries in mathematics. For example, AM discovered de Morgan's laws, the unique factorization of numbers into primes, and Goldbach's conjecture.

Of course, these results don't mean that human creative processes can be accounted for entirely in terms of such search heuristics. If a person did make a discovery by applying search heuristics to data, it would still be interesting to ask what motivated the person to examine that data. However, the results do demonstrate the plausibility of accounting for an important part of the creative process through common sense search heuristics.

Is there a special creative process?

At present, the special process view appears to have achieved "straw man" status in the scientific literature on creativity. It is much more frequently attacked than defended. Further, there are no live candidates for "special creative process" that have substantial empirical backing. While we should not rule out the possibility that such special processes may someday be discovered, we should continue to exercise a healthy skepticism toward candidates which are proposed in the popular press, e. g., "lateral thinking," "right brain thinking," etc. Parsimony appears to be serving us well in this area.

The "Nothing-Special" position

This position, due primarily to Herbert Simon and his coworkers (Simon, 1966; Newell, Shaw, and Simon, 1964), holds that creative acts are a variety of problem solving and that they involve only those processes which are also involved in everyday problem solving activities. According to this view, creative acts are problem solving acts of a special sort. First, they are problem solving acts which meet criteria such as those above-that is, they are seen as novel and valuable and they reflect the cognitive abilities of the problem solver. Second, they typically involve ill-defined problems-that is, problems which cannot be solved unless the problem solver makes decisions or adds information of his or her own.

Ill-defined problems occur frequently in practical settings. For example, in architectural practice, the client typically specifies a few of the properties of a building to be designed but the architect must supply many more before the design problem can be solved.

To describe creative activities as problem solving needn't but to many does suggest that creation happens only when the creative person is in some sort of trouble. To an extent, this is true. Necessity is the mother of invention-at least, of some invention. But, there are other sorts of situations which lead to creation. Creators aren't always digging themselves out of trouble. In many cases, it is reasonable to think of them as taking advantage of opportunities-of recognizing the possibility of improving what is currently a satisfactory situation. Whether an individual is exploring an opportunity or resolving a difficulty, the important point is that they are setting goals and initiating activities to accomplish those goals.

Having reviewed the alternative points of view, I will now return to the analysis of creative acts in terms of familiar cognitive processes. Below, I will discuss a variety of cognitive processes for which there is either data or plausible inference to suggest that it is especially important in creative acts.

Preparation

There is very wide agreement among researchers that preparation is one of the most important conditions of creativity (Wallas, 1926; Ypma, 1968; Mansfield & Busse, 1981). By preparation, we refer to the effort of the creative person, often carried out over long periods of time, to acquire knowledge and skills relevant to the creative act. Hayes (1985) has provided strong evidence that even the most talented composers and painters, e.g., Mozart and Van Gogh, required years of preparation before they began to produce the work for which they are famous. Hayes surveyed all of the composers mentioned in Schonberg's The Lives of the Great Composers (1970) for whom there was sufficient biographical data to determine when they first became seriously interested in music, e.g., began piano lessons in earnest. Seventy-six composers were included in the study. Next, he identified the notable works of these composers and the dates on which they were composed. (He defined a notable work for this study as one for which at least five different recordings were currently available). From these data, he calculated when in the composer's career, that is, how many years after the onset of serious interest, each work was composed. Out of more than 500 works, only three were composed before year ten of the composer's career and these three were composed in years 8 and 9. Averaged over the group, the pattern of career productivity involved an initial ten-year period of silence, a rapid increase in productivity from year 10 to year 25, a period of stable productivity from year 25 to about year 45 and then a gradual decline.

In the same paper, Hayes reported a parallel study of 131 painters using biographical data to determine when each became seriously involved in painting. He defined the notable works of these painters as ones which were reproduced in any of 11 general histories of art. The pattern of career productivity for the painters was similar to that observed in the composers. There was an initial period of silence lasting about six years. This was followed by a rapid increase in productivity over the next six years, a period of stable productivity until about 35 years into career and then a period of declining productivity.

Wishbow (1988) conducted a biographical study similar to those just described of 66 eminent poets. For her study, she defined a notable poem as one included in the Norton Anthology of Poetry. She found that none of her 66 poets wrote a notable poem earlier than five years into their careers and 55 of the 66 produced none earlier than ten years into their careers.

The early silence observed in all three of these studies suggests that a long period of preparation is essential for creative productivity even for the most talented of our composers, painters, and poets. In conducting this research, both Hayes and Wishbow encountered considerable skepticism expressed by experts in music, art, and literature that such investigations could produce any consistent result. The skepticism was based on the following very reasonable argument:

1. These studies included individuals of very diverse esthetic orientations, e.g., Wagner and Satie, who were attempting to do very different things.

2. These studies included individuals from four different centuries (the 17th through the 20th) who produced their works in very different social contexts.

3. Therefore, there is no reason to expect that there would be consistency in the conditions favoring creative performance across such diverse times and groups.

There is nothing logically wrong with this argument. It might be that differences in social context and esthetic goals would dominate all other conditions of creative productivity. As it turns out, they don't. Creators appear to require a long period of preparation despite differences in time and esthetic objectives.

What is this period of preparation used for? Simon and Chase (1973) observed that chess players require about ten years of preparation before they reach the level of grand master. They suggest that during this time, the serious player learns a vast store of chess patterns through hundreds of hours devoted to study and play. They estimate that a player needs to know roughly 50,000 chess patterns in order to play at the grand master level. One can easily imagine that composers, painters, and poets need a comparable period of time to acquire sufficient knowledge and skills to perform in their fields at world class levels.

Goal setting

Goal setting often appears to be the most critical element in a creative act. According to Einstein and Infeld (1938):

"Galileo formulated the problem of determining the velocity of light, but did not solve it. The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science."

Pavlov's discovery of the conditioned reflex is another case in point. As part of a study of digestive processes, Pavlov was investigating the salivary reflex in dogs. Dogs salivate automatically when food is placed in their mouths. The experiment went well at first, but after a while, the dogs began to salivate before the food was placed in their mouths. This development seriously complicated the study that Pavlov was trying to carry out. However, rather than seeing it as an annoyance to be eliminated, he saw it as an interesting phenomenon to be investigated. Against the advice of his colleagues, he abandoned his original objective and set a new goal which led to his historic work on the conditioned reflex.

Janson (1983) claims that Manet's painting, Luncheon on the Grass, was historically significant because it was "a visual manifesto" of a new set of goals-goals which emphasized the importance of visual effects on the canvas in contrast to social or literary "meanings" which a painting might convey. He says, "Here begins an attitude that was later summed up in the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake ..." (p. 607).

Of course, goal setting isn't always difficult. There are many situations in which the goals are obvious even though the means for achieving them are not. Everyone knows that curing cancer and reducing auto accidents are valuable goals to strive for. What distinguishes the creative people in the examples given above is that they recognized an opportunity or a problem when other people did not. What might be responsible for differences in people's ability to find problems or to recognize opportunities? Since we know very little about such processes, any account must admittedly be speculative. Here are some hypotheses:

1. Extensive knowledge of a field should give one increased ability to recognize both opportunities and problems by analogy to previous experience. For example, if a chess situation resembles one the player has been in before, it could signal an opportunity if the previous outcome was favorable, and a problem if it was not.

2. A unique pattern of knowledge outside of a field, acquired perhaps through hobbies or through switching professions, could provide a person with analogies not generally available to others in the field. Such analogies could suggest unsuspected possibilities or problems in the field. Consistent with this view, Gordon (1961) recommends that problem solving teams in industry should include people from very diverse fields.

3. Strong evaluation skills may lead one to recognize problems in a line of research that others fail to recognize and as a result to initiate new studies that others would not have thought of. Evaluation skills in the social sciences seem to depend heavily on the sorts of critical thinking skills taught Huck and Sandler's Rival Hypotheses (1979). Perhaps some aspects of creative performance could be improved through training in these skills.

These hypotheses could be viewed as examples of the operation of Austin's Chance III and Chance IV.

Representation

Since tasks which allow scope for creativity are typically ill-defined, a person doing such a task is forced to make many choices in building a representation of the task. For example, an architect may be given the task of designing a shop together with specifications of the location, size, type of merchandise to be displayed, clientele, etc. To represent the design problem in sufficient detail so that it can be solved, the architect must make a great many decisions. For example, he may decide that the shop should have a certain kind of access, should be "transparent," and should have "levels" (see Hayes, 1978, pp. 206-210). Ill-defined problems offer a great deal of latitude in the way they can be represented or defined.

The way one represents a task can have a critical impact on how hard the task is to do or even whether it can be done at all. Kotovsky, Hayes, and Simon (1987) showed that a problem represented in one way may be 16 times as hard to solve as the same problem represented a different way. The 16 to 1 range almost certainly underestimates the full range over which changes in representation can change problem difficulty. Thus, choosing to represent a problem visually rather than verbally, or choosing to represent the problem by one metaphor rather than another could make a sufficient difference in problem difficulty that one scholar may be able to solve the problem and another not. In some cases, then, the creative person-the one who solved the problem when others couldn't may be the person who chose the best representation of the problem.

Kotovsky, Hayes, and Simon (1985) were comparing different representations of the same problem. Even though the problem solvers' representations of the problem were different in the sense that a problem element might be represented as a position in one case and as a size in another, the underlying problem was always the same. It is rare, though, for two people, acting independently, to define an ill-defined problem in the same way. If two architects were commissioned to design the same house, they would almost certainly interpret that commission in different ways, placing different emphases on the various design requirements. Each architect would define his or her own design task. It is tempting to speculate that creative people define "better" or "more interesting" tasks for themselves than do less creative people.

While there are no studies comparing task definition in creative and non-creative people, there are some task definition studies comparing experts and novices. These studies show that a very important part of the difference between experts and novices may lie in the way they define the task to be performed. Hayes, Flower, Schriver, Stratman, and Carey (1987) found that novice writers represented the task of revision as a sentence level task. That is, they attended to each sentence separately, fixing the grammatical and lexical problems it contained, and concerned themselves rarely or not at all with global problems such as transitions, coherence, and the effectiveness of the whole text. The experts, in contrast, were primarily concerned with the global problems although they fixed the local problems as well. The experts did a far better job of revision than did the novices, and it seems clear in this case that their better performance depended on their having defined a better task for themselves. One can't really expect to do a good job of revision with a task definition that ignores a very important class of problems. Carey and Flower (this volume) provide an excellent discussion of how expert-novice differences in task definition influence expository writing. While these expert-novice studies can't be taken as proof, they do make it seem plausible that creative people may differ from less creative people in part because they define better tasks for themselves.

Searching for solutions

Many approaches to improving creative thinking such as brainstorming (Osbome, 1948) and Synectics (Gordon, 1961) focus on the fostering of divergent thinking, that is, on generating many alternative solutions to the same problem. These techniques appear to be useful for some kinds of group problem solving (Stein?). However, as was noted above, divergent thinking skills appear to be unrelated to the sort of creative productivity that this chapter is concerned with.

It is interesting to contrast the emphasis in the creativity literature on the importance of generating many solution paths with the emphasis in the cognitive science literature (see Newell and Simon, 1972 ) on the importance of heuristic search, that is with narrowing many solution paths down to a few. Perhaps high level creative activities are more likely to demand heuristic search than divergent thinking.

In an early but still influential discussion of creativity, Wallas (1926) claimed that incubation is one of the characteristic stages of the creative process. By incubation, he meant a stage in which the problem solver has stopped attending to the problem but during which progress is being made toward the solution anyway. Researchers have attempted to demonstrate the reality of the phenomenon with experiments of this sort: Experimental and control subjects are given a complex problem to solve. The control subjects are allowed to work continuously on the problem until they solve it. The experimental subjects are interrupted in their solution efforts and asked to attend to another task for a period of time before they are allowed to return to the problem and solve it. If the experimental subjects required less total time working on the problem to solve it than the control subjects, that would be taken as evidence of incubation. While a number of early investigators failed to obtain positive results with this experiment (Cook, 1934, 1937; Ericksen, 1942), more recent experimenters have obtained positive results (Fulgosi & Guilford, 1968; Murray & Denny, 1969; Silviera, 1971).

The success of these experiments, however, can't be taken as definite proof that incubation occurred. The problem, as Ericsson and Simon (1984) point out, is that it is very difficult to establish that the experimental subjects obeyed (or, indeed, could obey) instructions not to attend to the problem during the incubation period.

Even if incubation is a real phenomenon, it doesn't follow that it is a characteristic stage of the creative process. Hayes (1978) reanalysed the data on which Wallas based his conclusions (the testimony of creative individuals) and found many instances in which creative acts proceeded from beginning to end without any pause that would allow for incubation. While Wallas' claims for incubation are interesting, it appears that there is little empirical evidence to support them.

Revision

In performing skilled activities, people often stop to evaluate what they have produced and to improve on any shortcomings they may find. This revision process appears to be especially important in creative activities because of the very high standard involved. Murray, a Pulitzer prize winning essayist, speaks eloquently about the importance of revision. "Rewriting isthe difference between the dilettante and the artist, the amateur and the professional, the unpublished and the published." William Glass testifies, "I work not by writing but rewriting." Dylan Thomas states, "Almost any poem is fifty to a hundred revisions-and that's after it's well along." Archibald MacLeish talks of "the endless discipline of writing and rewriting and rewriting" (Murray, 1978, p. 85).

Revision, of course, is not confined to writing. It happens in the development of scientific theory, in painting, and in musical composition. For example, in a letter, Tchaikovsky says, "Yesterday, when I wrote you about my method of composing, I did not enter sufficiently into that phase of the work which relates to the working out of the sketch. This phase is of primary importance. What has been set down in a moment of ardour must now be critically examined, improved, extended, or condensed, ..." (quoted in Vernon, 1970, p. 59).

If revision is an important part of creative activity, it is reasonable to expect that creative people may be better at revision than are others. While evidence on this issue is scant at best, the question is interesting enough to pursue. There are at least three possible factors which might make creative people superior revisors:

1. Creative people may have higher standards for performance than others.

While this is a very plausible assertion, it validity has been tested only in the area of standards for creativity. As was noted above, creative people aspire more than others to be creative. The impact that this might have on performance is illustrated in a study carried out by Magone (personal communication). Magone collected think-aloud protocols of people who were taking a creativity test in which they were asked to complete a drawing in as many different ways as they could. She found that people who scored high on the test were much more likely than those who scored low to reject ideas as "trite" or "boring." While this creativity test probably does not predict real creativity, the study does illustrate the point that high standards for creativity can shape performance.

2. Creative people may be more sensitive than others in perceiving that standards have notbeen met.

There are no studies comparing creative people with others in this skill. However, Hayes, et al. (1987) have found that expert writers were far more sensitive detectors of text problems than were novices.

3. Experts may be more flexible than others in considering change.

Results of personality surveys, cited above, suggest that creative people are, in fact, more flexible than others. Flexibility could increase one's chances of performing creatively in a number of ways: A more flexible person might be more likely than others to drop everything to pursue a hot new lead as Pavlov did in the example presented earlier. A flexible person might be more likely than others to sacrifice less important goals in order to accomplish more important ones. And a more flexible person might be more likely than others to change problem representation if progress toward a solution is unsatisfactory.

Discussion

In this chapter, we have explored two major questions. In answer to the question, "What are creative people like?" we found fairly good empirical evidence to support the following conclusions:

1. Creative people work very hard.

2. Creative people are more disposed to setting their own agenda and to taking independent action than are others.

3. Creative people strive for originality.

4. Creative people show more flexibility than others.

5. Creative people do not have higher IQs or get better school grades than others when we control for age and education. In fact, no cognitive abilities have been identified which reliably distinguish between creative and non-creative people.

The surprising thing about these findings is that all of the variables which discriminate between creative and non-creative people are motivational. No cognitive abilities have been discovered which discriminate between these two groups.

In exploring the question, "What cognitive factors are involved in creative acts?" we have uncovered convincing evidence on two points:

1. Years of preparation are essential for creative productivity in many fields.

2. Goal setting is the critical element in many creative acts.

In addition, plausible arguments can be made for the importance of the following in creative acts:

1. Choosing good problem representations.

2. Defining good problems in ill-defined problem situations.

3. Accurately evaluating the shortcomings of one's own work.

4. Taking effective action to revise the shortcomings.

Clearly, both cognitive and motivational factors are involved in creative performance. However, the failure of cognitive ability measures such as IQ to predict creative performance leads me to propose that creative performance has its origin not in innate cognitive abilities but rather in the motivation of the creative person. Over a period of time, this motivation has cognitive consequences, such as the acquisition of large bodies of knowledge, which contribute in critical ways to creative performance, but the origin is in motivation, not cognition.

The motivation of the creative person may be thought of as a vector which is special both in strength and direction. Motivation of great strength is necessary because creative people face daunting tasks. They must work for many years, perhaps for a decade or more, before they can begin to accomplish their creative goals. They may have to reject easily available rewards in order to pursue their fields. One of my students said, "I must like art a lot to be willing to go to school for four years in order to be out of work." They may sometimes have to face active opposition as Pavlov did.

The direction of motivation is as critical as its strength. Success in many areas of life requires strong motivation and hard work. In many practical situations, the hard work must be directed to satisfying the demands of a boss or the standards or interests of the public. Creative people, however, are motivated to be in charge of their own actions, and through those actions, to do something that hasn't been done before, perhaps hasn't even been thought of before.

The nature of their motivation may lead creative people to take different paths than others take. For example, creative people may choose fields, such as the arts or sciences, where they believe they can exercise their interest in creative activities, rather than sales or medical practice where creative activities may not be appreciated.

Motivational differences can result in important differences in cognitive factors. If a person is willing to work longer and harder than others, he or she can acquire a larger body of information than others. In solving a problem, this extra information might be used directly to make an essential inference or might provide an analogy that would suggest a solution path. Willingness to work hard could also lead persons to define harder and better problems for themselves and in general to set higher standards for themselves. Higher standards could lead one to be more critical of shortcomings in one's work. Motivation to be independent would predispose persons to set their own goals and motivation to be creative would lead them to reject goals that were "trite" or "boring."

Finally, motivation to be flexible could make it easier to change direction completely when a new opportunity presents itself, to sacrifice minor objectives to accomplish major ones, and to change representation when progress is unsatisfactory. The primary thrust of the position that we are presenting here is that differences in creativity have their origin in differences in motivation. These differences in motivation then cause cognition differences and these motivational and cognitive differences jointly account for the observed differences between creative and non-creative individuals.

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

2011-01-23T10:14:00.005+08:00

This articles confirms some of the things I've been saying, that basically success will not come without hard work.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html?mod=wsj_share_twitter

Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids? And what happens when they fight back?

By AMY CHUA

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.

I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.

All the same, even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough.

When it comes to parenting, the Chinese seem to produce children who display academic excellence, musical mastery and professional success - or so the stereotype goes. WSJ's Christina Tsuei speaks to two moms raised by Chinese immigrants who share what it was like growing up and how they hope to raise their children.

Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be "the best" students, that "academic achievement reflects successful parenting," and that if children did not excel at school then there was "a problem" and parents "were not doing their job." Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.

Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can't. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me "garbage" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.

As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)
Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, "You're lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you." By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out.

I've thought long and hard about how Chinese parents can get away with what they do. I think there are three big differences between the Chinese and Western parental mind-sets.

First, I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.

For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child "stupid," "worthless" or "a disgrace." Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child's grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher's credentials.

If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.
Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)

Second, Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children. (And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.) Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.

By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.

Third, Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children's own desires and preferences. That's why Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can't go to sleepaway camp. It's also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother, "I got a part in the school play! I'm Villager Number Six. I'll have to stay after school for rehearsal every day from 3:00 to 7:00, and I'll also need a ride on weekends." God help any Chinese kid who tried that one.

Don't get me wrong: It's not that Chinese parents don't care about their children. Just the opposite. They would give up anything for their children. It's just an entirely different parenting model.

Here's a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. Lulu was about 7, still playing two instruments, and working on a piano piece called "The Little White Donkey" by the French composer Jacques Ibert. The piece is really cute—you can just imagine a little donkey ambling along a country road with its master—but it's also incredibly difficult for young players because the two hands have to keep schizophrenically different rhythms.

Lulu couldn't do it. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.

"Get back to the piano now," I ordered.
"You can't make me."
"Oh yes, I can."

Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu—which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her—and that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful. Also, he said, maybe Lulu really just couldn't do the technique—perhaps she didn't have the coordination yet—had I considered that possibility?

"You just don't believe in her," I accused.
"That's ridiculous," Jed said scornfully. "Of course I do."
"Sophia could play the piece when she was this age."
"But Lulu and Sophia are different people," Jed pointed out.

"Oh no, not this," I said, rolling my eyes. "Everyone is special in their special own way," I mimicked sarcastically. "Even losers are special in their own special way. Well don't worry, you don't have to lift a finger. I'm willing to put in as long as it takes, and I'm happy to be the one hated. And you can be the one they adore because you make them pancakes and take them to Yankees games."
I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.

Then, out of the blue, Lulu did it. Her hands suddenly came together—her right and left hands each doing their own imperturbable thing—just like that.

Lulu realized it the same time I did. I held my breath. She tried it tentatively again. Then she played it more confidently and faster, and still the rhythm held. A moment later, she was beaming.

"Mommy, look—it's easy!" After that, she wanted to play the piece over and over and wouldn't leave the piano. That night, she came to sleep in my bed, and we snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up. When she performed "The Little White Donkey" at a recital a few weeks later, parents came up to me and said, "What a perfect piece for Lulu—it's so spunky and so her."
Even Jed gave me credit for that one. Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.

There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests. For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. I think it's a misunderstanding on both sides. All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.

Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.

Building a Career

2010-12-25T09:50:00.008+08:00

I wish someone had told me this when I first started out. It would have saved me a world of pain. If you were a fresh graduate sitting before me now, this is my sincere advice to you as you take your first step into the *real* working world out there.

As far as I'm concerned, the two most important things for young people to remember before embarking on a career is 1) your track record and 2) your attitude.

Your Track Record

You should start this as early as possible. Cultivate the habit of compiling all your certificates of achievements from school and keeping them in a safe place. They will come in very handy when you go for your first few job interviews.

When you accept a job offer, go in with your eyes open. Once you are in a new company, be prepared mentally and psychologically to stay for at least 3 years. No matter how shitty it is, no matter how nasty the boss, no matter how unfriendly the colleagues, no matter how demanding the clients, grit your teeth and tough it out! See tasks, assignments and projects through - from start to finish. You can learn from both good situations and bad, from problems and solutions, from mistakes and remedies.

Don't be a quitter. Don't job hop! Don't be a rolling stone! When an employer looks at your track record and it says 6 months here and 9 months there, he is not going to have any confidence in you whatsoever! It tells him that you give up easily, that you let obstacles overwhelm you rather than you overcoming them, that you have no perseverence. It says you have no aim, no direction and no clue!

Your Attitude

When you join a firm, you will be given a job description. If you stick firmly to it, your career is DOOMED! If you go in with the attitude that you will only do what is within your job scope and nothing else, you will achieve MEDIOCRITY and nothing else. On the other hand, if you aspire to become a senior manager or company director, then you will have to know as much about your industry as you can! Get it? You CANNOT LEAD without extensive knowledge!

There is a mountain of information out there you will have to scale if you want to reach anywhere near the top. There is a steep learning curve to tackle, right from day one, and the sooner you start climbing the better! No one is going to hand it to you on a platter. No one is going to package it neatly for you. Spoon-feeding stopped the day you left high school! The knowledge is out there but you'll have to dig it out yourself, one painful nugget at a time!

Pacing Yourself

One final tip for young career builders. Get a better understanding of the industry you are launching into by talking to someone in the same field who is older, preferably in his 40s or 50s. Determine what you are expected to know at different stages of your career. Set out a road map to pace yourself, if you will. Establish a guide like this: a) Mastery of statutory regulations by 30, b) Competency in financial matters by 35, c) Solid grasp of technology by 40, etc. Such milestones will help you to monitor your career progress and keep you on track.

[Now think about how much you will have to pay to hear an *expert* tell you the above in a seminar. You got it here for free! :) ]

The Changed Face

2010-12-12T11:08:00.004+08:00

Having a bit of writer's block at the moment, so let me tell you about a book I have just finished reading.

The Changed Face is a translation of a book by German author Heinz Konsalik.

[Someone mentioned that I seemed to like reading paperbacks or *pulp fiction*. I don't see anything wrong with them. Books are expensive these days and I can get paperbacks cheaply at secondhand stores. They were written at a time when men smoked and Africans were called *negros*. I find that much less stifling than today's politically-correct climate. Anyway, what's PC today may not be PC tomorrow.]

The book is about soldiers who received terrible injuries on the face and their rehabilitation into normal society after months and years of surgical repair. Here is a photo of facial injuries suffered during war time.

You can imagine the kind of emotional trauma these men have to go through. It's akin to a roller coaster ride between hope and suicidal despair. The book is so well written that it feels like non-fiction. An excerpt:

The orderlies lifted the blanket from the head of Rudolph Fischer. There was no head left, no face; it had no human form. It was a miracle that he still lived and breathed. Only one eye was left. It lay in a mess of splintered bone and torn flesh. In the windpipe he had a slit into which a cannula had been inserted.

Dr Mainetti stared at the one remining eye. 'On to the table with him - carefully!' She moved to one side and the eye followed her.

And another:

They left Erich alone, and that was a good thing. He lay flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling, and the tears ran out of his eyes and were soaked up by the new bandage. I've got a new nose, he thought. Mother ... Ursula ... I've got a new nose. And suddenly he began to think of silly, ridiculous things. I can wear sun-glasses again. I can smell mother's baking. I can - I can. God! There are so many things you can do with a nose. And you don't realise it till you haven't got one any more. Later he wrote a letter to Cologne. He was the happiest man in Block B.

You'll be pleased to know that the book has a happy ending. :)

Are We Too Soft?

2010-10-10T09:28:00.009+08:00

I heard this on radio some time ago. Since it was in Cantonese I hope I got the story right. It went something like this:

A team-building expert from Hongkong was in Kuala Lumpur to train some of our local folk. He made our guys do really tough physical exercises. In one activity, they were to hold a particularly taxing position for as long as possible. Our Malaysian fellows cheered and clapped each other on their backs when they lasted one whole minute! The trainer looked them in the eyes and said the WORST team in China lasted 10 minutes!

Hence, my question: Have we become too soft?

Life here in Malaysia has always been much easier than in over-populated places like China. We have plenty of land and natural resources. The soil is rich. Vegetables and fruits abound. Famine is unheard of. We get lots of rain and don't worry about drought. No freezing winters to prepare for. No volcanoes, no earthquakes, no typhoons.

The culture is laid-back too. We are told to be sensitive with each other's feelings, not to push too hard, demand too much. We want quality family and leisure time. We want time to devote to religion. We set up lots of regulations to enhance health and safety. We need lots of permits and approvals before businesses can be set up. Etc.

Well, let's have a look at our competitors and see what's happening in their countries.

In Indonesia, you can open a food stall in front of your house and nobody will be bothered. You can build buildings without architects. You can convert a 3-storey house into a student hostel, with a single escape staircase leading down to the kitchen - the most likely place for a fire to start. You don't work, you don't eat. Simple as that.

In China, you can do piling at construction sites after midnight. You can work 24 hours 7 days a week on a building project smack in the middle of a city. You don't have to worry about racial sensitivities when you chew your workers out. You don't work, you don't eat. No illusions whatsoever.

I'm quite sure many people in China actually work longer hours than the legendary Japanese!

So where do we Malaysians stand in comparison? Are we full of tidak apathy? Have we become so worried about hurting our fellow countrymen that we wrap them in cotton wool? Have we set our standards and expectations much too low? Have we crippled ourselves with kindness? Can we still compete as a nation?

Troubling questions indeed.

Good Jews

2010-10-08T21:05:00.006+08:00

When I was working as a trainee in Sydney, this black-clad Jew stepped into the office and nearly scared the bejesus out of me! He looked exactly like the people in the pictures below.

A Jew is basically someone who belongs to the religion called Judaism. According to the Old Testament of the Bible, they are God's Chosen People and will inherit eventually some place called the Promised Land, also known as Israel. They are different from Christians in that they are still waiting for the Messiah or saviour, while Christians accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah.

Bible-believing Christians tend to treat Jews with great respect as they are considered the apple of God's eye. Thus, when the Palestinians shoot a few home-made rockets at Israel, it's terrorist aggression, but when Israel slaughters 2000 Palestinians, it's noble self-defense. To devout Christians, Israel can do no wrong.

Hitler disposed of 6 million Jews during the Second World War. I think the Germans blamed the Jews for their defeat in the First World War, as Jews are good businesspeople and were apparently financing the British military effort against Germany - in exchange for a homeland in Palestine, which
was then in British control.

I have met Jews who consider themselves "white" and look down on the Palestinians. I like to remind them that it was the white Europeans who gassed them, and not the Muslims. Before someone accuses me of being anti-semitic, please note that I'm pro-Palestinian, who are Semites, just like the Jews.

The Europeans killed two birds with one stone when they transferred the Jewish problem from Europe to the Middle East. Firstly, they got rid of the ultra-competitive Jews and secondly they stuck a thorn in the side of their other competitors, the Arabs. Israel is the West's handy weapon to irritate the Muslims, just like Tibet is used to stir up China.

Zionism is basically an extremist racist political movement that uses past Jewish suffering to justify land-grab and merciless subjugation of the Palestinian people.

Fortunately, there are a few Jews who still possess a conscience. They know the dirty political games that are in play and are willing to speak up against them.

Enough said. Time for the photos to do the talking. Click on them for a larger view.

The Human Spirit

2010-10-03T10:29:00.008+08:00

The Malay language has two words for "spirit" - roh and semangat, the first being an object, like an angel or ghost, and the second, an attitude or a state of mind, as in a "fighting spirit". I happen to think they are the same thing.

The most spiritual book I have ever read is - guess what? - not a religious book! (I also happen to think that spirituality and religion are two ENTIRELY different things.) It is a book about a kind of modern-day Robin Hood, called Simon Templar, also known as The Saint. What makes him different from other anti-heroes, what makes him extraordinary and trandscend above the rest, what makes him spiritual, is utterly simple. He smiles.

That's it! He doesn't pray. He doesn't do religious stuff. He doesn't try to be more holy than anybody else. In fact, he kills when it's called for. It's his approach to life and fear and danger that lifts him up and sets him apart. He refuses to allow his spirit to be crushed. And that, to me, is more spiritual that all the religious costumes and rituals in the world. For me, singing is spiritual. Laughing is spiritual. Doing the right thing is spiritual. Helping the weak is spiritual. Self sacrifice is spiritual.

Here are a few excerpts from the book The Saint's Getaway (1932) by Leslie Charteris, to help you get acquainted with Mr Simon Templar.

"Simon Templar drew a deep breath. Then he fired from his pocket. His gun, with a half-charged cartridge in the chamber, gave no more than an explosive little cough, which merged into the sharp smack of the bullet crashing home into the single electric light switch by the door; and the room was plunged into impenetrable darkness. The Saint hurled himself sideways. Right behind him he heard the dull plop of an efficiently silenced gun, but he was untouched. He twisted like an eel, and his hand brushed a pair of legs. They heard his grim chuckle in the darkness."

"And, knowing her man, she understood. The clear blue of the night was in his eyes, the georgeous madness that made him what he was thrilled in his touch. His words seemed to hold nothing absurd, nothing incongruous - only the devil-may-care attar of Saintliness that would have stopped to admire a view on the way to its own funeral."

"He came to his feet with the lithe swiftness of an animal, settling his belt with one hand and sweeping back the other over his smooth hair. The cold winds of incredulity and common sense flowed past his head like common zephyrs. He had his inspiration. The flame of unquenchable optimism in his eyes was electric, an irresistable resurgence of the old Saintly exhaltation that would always find a new power and hope in the darkest thunders of defeat. He laughed. The stillness had fallen from him like a cloak - fallen away as if it had never existed. He didn't care."

"Monty Hayward looked at him, and was amazed. The bleakness was still in the Saint's eyes, but suddenly there was a twinkle with it as if the sun had glinted over two chips of blue ice. There was the phantom of a smile on the Saint's lips - a smile that had still to reach the careless glory of pure Saintliness, but yet a smile that had not been there before. And the Saint spoke in a voice that showed his smile."

Footnote: Ever watched a baby laugh? (If you haven't, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCl9exidaUY ) My youngest was chuckling at 3 months. A baby cries when it feels pain or discomfort. But how does it know joy and happiness, when it doesn't know sorrow? The only logical reason to me is ... babies are born with human spirits. 10 Oct 2010.

Caravaggio

2010-08-31T08:56:00.007+08:00

This is the most fascinating artist I have had the pleasure of discovering. I'll leave it to you to dig out more info about him from the net. To me, he was just a street kid trying to fit into proper society and not really understanding why he kept failing.

For instance, he was commissioned to do a painting of the death of the Virgin Mary and he dutifully painted a drowned whore they fished out of the river! Look at her bloated body and stiff legs! [Click on the picture to enlarge.] This painting, known as The Death of the Virgin, was rejected and returned to Caravaggio.

This is the most moving piece of art I have ever set eyes on. It's called David with Goliath's Head. But it is really Caravaggio painting himself. At this point in his miserable life he was on the run for murder. It's a younger Caravaggio looking with sorrow and contempt at an older Caravaggio. That expression on David's face is simply heart-breaking! Caravaggio died a few months after this painting was completed - without receiving the pardon he had so longed for.

Here's a video of Caravaggio's troubled life by the BBC. I recommend it highly.

Responses to this Blog

2010-08-21T15:07:00.003+08:00

I do get responses to my writing from time to time. I've just added some to the bottom of the respective blogs in coloured text.

Here's one I don't know where to put, so I'll stick it here.

From a lady in Kuala Lumpur (10 Jan 2010):

I spent the better part of the last three hours reading your blog … in its entirety! It was time well spent, I declare! I must admit here this is not the first time I’ve read/ browsed through it and some entries I find fascinating and riveting, most (are) informative and others simply beyond my simple mind to comprehend. Nevertheless, you constantly amaze me in the breadth and scope of your interests and the amount of reflection and pondering you do on that diverse range of topics you seem to pore over. Syabas!

"YOU OWE THE USA!"

2010-08-14T10:53:00.012+08:00

"WITHOUT THE AMERICANS YOU WOULD BE SPEAKING JAPANESE AND THE EUROPEANS WOULD BE SPEAKING GERMAN TODAY!"

Every time I hear crap like the above, I feel like throwing up. And I seem to be hearing more of it these days. Has Uncle Sam been churning up the propaganda now that the US economy is going downhill?

First of all, what's wrong with speaking German or Japanese? I actually did a one-year German language course back in university. When you speak only English, all your information is effectively censored by the English-speaking British and Americans. For instance, when I look for books on Germany, all I find are travel guides and biographies about Adolf Hitler. Germany is/was the biggest exporter in the world and nobody writes about it!

Second of all, China was actually conquered and occupied by Manchuria from 1644 to 1912 (the Qing Dynasty). Today you won't find Manchuria on a map! Manchuria was absorbed into China and is now Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning in northeastern China! Are the Chinese speaking Manchurian today? Nope, they are speaking Putonghua (or Mandarin)! The same would have happened to the Japanese if they had stayed in China long enough!

Third of all, the USSR - not the USA - defeated Nazi Germany. Look at the Soviet Union's sacrifice compared to America's. What the Yanks really did was to block the Russians from occupying Western Europe. So, without the US, Europe would been speaking Russian, not German!

Look at the USA's teeny-weeny contribution during WW2. The Americans like to over-rate their performance and take all the credit - with lots of help from Hollywood. And the historically-challenged folk swallow it without question. That's what happens when the English-speakers control the mass-media!

[Charts are from Wikipedia.]

US Military Records in East Asia

2010-07-25T10:48:00.013+08:00

I had blogged this before but it is worth repeating.

The US military will never win another land war in East Asia.

They can certainly kill lots of people and cause enormous destruction. That's something the Yanks are still good at. You can call genocide an American speciality.

A PLA general (Zhu Chenghu) once said that China expects to lose ALL CITIES east of Xian in a war with the US. Have a look at the map below. That would include Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Wuhan, Nanjing, ... China obviously expects no mercy from the Americans. What mercy did the US warmongers show the Japanese, the Koreans and the Vietnamese? None.

But let's have a look at Uncle Sam's less than sterling war performance in East Asia to put things into some perspective.

Largest surrender in US military history: Battle of Bataan, Luzon, Philippines. On 9 April 1942, 75,000 American and Filipino soldiers surrendered to the Japanese.

Longest retreat in US military history: Korean War. The Chinese People's Liberation Army chased 140,000 American troops down the Korean peninsular from the border of China to Seoul in 1950.

Longest war in US military history: Vietnam War (1965 to 1975). Uncle Sam lost 60,000 soldiers before getting kicked out of Vietnam.

From that brilliant record, I conclude that the US will NEVER win another land war in east Asia.

The Secret of Success

2010-06-26T12:58:00.015+08:00

If you were to ask me what I thought is the secret of success, I would answer with one simple word: FOCUS. That is what it all boils down to. If you're learning music, for example, fix your mind on music. If possible do it 24/7. Eat, sleep and shit music. Dream music. Sweat music, bleed music, puke music. You'll find that true of a pianist like Lang Lang, I'm sure.

That's what China's Olympic stars are about too. They are taken away at a young age to devote themselves to sports and often don't see their parents for months! No half-measures for them.

How do the Chinese march in such straight lines in their parades? This is what they had to endure. No nonsense. No mucking around. No pain, no gain. Only single-minded determination to get the job done and done well.

When you concentrate force and apply it to a single point, even a steel plate can be penetrated, as shown in this photo of a shaped charge going through armour.

DISTRACTION is the antithesis of FOCUS. It comes in many forms: wine, women, song, religion, television, computer games, the stock market, financial problems, family feuds, noise, illness, ... anything that prevents one from concentrating on the task at hand.

In order to achieve any objective, one has to establish one's present position and decide where one wants to be. The journey between the here and now, and the desired destination is an obstacle course littered with DISTRACTIONS and problems.

I believe a lot of people drift along in life like a boat without oars, hoping and praying that the currents will transport them to a fate that is kind. The true achievers are FOCUSED. They know precisely what they want and have charted the course to get there. I know a girl who became the director of a publicly-listed company in her twenties. Perhaps someone had paved the way for her but she had the target in her sights and got there in double-time.

To FOCUS means to think about the the goal day and night, planning and scheming, probing and pushing, examining and re-examining, weaving, dodging, rolling with the punches, maneuvering around obstacles, driving ever onwards with gritted teeth and eyes fixated resolutely on that single final outcome, that ultimate end-result, with the all consuming, all encompassing obsession that overshadows every other thing.

Whether it's the right objective, whether you will still like yourself when you get there, whether the prize is worth the sacrifice, whether the end justifies the means, ... is another story.

If you know what you want bad enough, you know what you will have to do to get there. No two ways about it. FOCUS!

Sick Earth

2010-05-28T21:28:00.014+08:00

I am reading Small is Beautiful by EM Schumacher. Apparently, people were highly optimistic back in the early 1970s, believing that the "problem of production" had been solved and that rich countries had only to be concerned with "education for leisure" while their poorer counterparts busyed themselves with "technology transfer". Indeed, those were the good old days.

The positive vibes have long gone and few people need convincing these days that planet earth is on the brink of major disaster. The Western economies are imploding, global warming is inducing global dread and people are no longer just mouthing off about sustainability but actually ACTING on it!

We're way past the point of no return, if you ask me.

Jonas Salk: If all the insects on earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on earth would disappear. If all humans disappeared, within 50 years all species would flourish as never before.

Not very flattering to our inflated egos, is it?

Schumacher: Nature always, so to speak, knows where and when to stop. Greater even than the mystery of natural growth is the mystery of the natural cessation of growth. There is measure in all natural things - in their size, speed or violence. As a result, the system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing.

So allow impertinent me to ask this rude question:

Why is Evolution (supposedly unguided by intelligence) able to strike this wondrous ecological balance when man (equipped with the most complex computer in the universe - the human brain) has only been good at F**KING THE PLACE UP?

Science Funnies

2010-05-16T11:32:00.010+08:00

Here are a few funnies related to science from one of my favourite cartoonists, Bizarro.

Imagine looking at a clone of yourself!

That old argument for the Theory of Evolution - put a million monkeys at a million typewriters and eventually they produce Shakespeare.

By the way, we already have millions of brainy monkeys hammering away at millions of keyboards everyday all over the planet and all we're producing is info overload!

How is this related to science? Well, atheists are always using science to back up their disbelief. :)

If you want more of Bizarro, go here: http://bizarrocomic.blogspot.com/

America - Jeckyll or Hyde?

2010-05-09T21:21:00.015+08:00

This blog is prompted by a discussion I had with someone on Facebook who was very impressed with an American soldier portrayed in the tv series "The Pacific". I pointed out that the guy was probably a true hero but to beware of American propaganda. Which is precisely what shows like "Shindler's List", "Saving Private Ryan", "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific" are - Hollywood propaganda. American wants the world to feel grateful and indebted to it for "saving the world", when much of its actions was for reasons far from altruistic.

Let's look at some historical facts to determine the true face of the USA.

Around the 1900s, as Spanish power waned, the US took the opportunity to grab far-flung colonies that Spain was no longer able to control. The Philippines was on the verge of independence when American troops invaded and caused the deaths of some 300,000 Filipinos, most of them civilians.

Was the Second World War a fight between good and evil? Hardly. In truth, it was a struggle among the world's most powerful nations for their share of colonies. Here in Asia, the French controlled Indochina, the Dutch had Indonesia, the British had India and Malaya and the Americans ruled the Philippines. The Germans lost many of their colonies after the First World War. Both Japan and Germany were hemmed in by the other nations and locked out of the colonial game. So they decided to fight. They gambled, lost and were labeled the bad guys ever since. For sure they did some terrible things during the war, but didn't the British or the Americans? Did anybody hang for the fire bombing of Hamburg (50,000 dead), Dresden (25,000 dead) and Tokyo (100,000 dead)?

I would suggest that the Axis forces actually did us a big favour. Germany's war with France, Holland and Britain had weakened the three countries to such an extent that their respective empires crumbled, allowing colonies like Malaya to gain independence with relative ease.

By the way, if you think that the Allies were all great buddies, have a look at this quote from that famous American general, George Patton:

The difficulty in understanding the Russian is that we do not take cognizance of the fact that he is not a European, but an Asiatic, and therefore thinks deviously. We can no more understand a Russian than a Chinese or a Japanese, and from what I have seen of them, I have no particular desire to understand them except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them.

Patton was lobbying to join forces with Germany to attack Russia - at the very end of WW2!

A mere 5 years after Second World War, our American heroes who had so gallantly defeated the Japanese, found themselves in Korea, fighting evil North Koreans and atheist communist Chinese. War-mongering General Douglas MacArthur was rubbing his hands with glee, seeing the Korean War as his stepping stone to the White House.

The Americans dropped so much napalm on North Korea that a shocked Winston Churchill gasped, "When napalm was invented in the latter stages of World War II, no one contemplated that it would be ‘splashed’ over a civilian population.” North Korea was so heavily bombed that "three million North Koreans died during this conflict, and 18 out of its 22 largest cities were 50 percent to 100 percent obliterated." [North Korea: Another Country by Bruce Cumings]. Can we still blame "Dear Leader" Kim for his hatred of the USA?

Curtis LeMay, US Air Force General:

Over a period of three years or so....we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too.

When China entered the Korean War, MacArthur requested 50 atomic bombs for him to drop on Chinese cities. So much for erstwhile friends. And so much for the myth that the selfless Americans rescued China from the Japanese.

Moving on to Indonesia, the CIA instigated a coup in 1965 that destroyed the PKI (the Communist Party of Indonesia) and brought Suharto to power, killing, some say, close to 1 million Indonesians in the process, many of them Chinese, communist or otherwise.

This bloodbath was quickly eclipsed by the savagery of the Vietnam War. The Americans once again tried to seize a colony that the French was forced to relinquish, using the same trick that won them the Philippines from the Spanish earlier. Unfortunately, the US encountered a much tougher foe this time. Once again, Uncle Sam attempted genocide from the air, dropping 7 million tons of bombs on a peasant population. This is twice the tonnage dropped by ALL countries during the entire Second World War! In addition, 20 million gallons of Agent Orange was sprayed on the jungles of South Vietnam. Agent Orange contains a poison called dioxin. Trees are still stunted and babies born deformed today but the US has not paid a single cent to compensate the Vietnamese people.

Korea's attempt at reunification failed, no thanks to the Americans. Vietnam reunified successfully, despite violent opposition from France and the US. Taiwan's reunification with China is similarly blocked by Uncle Sam. Nobody interfered in the American Civil War but don't expect the Yanks to appreciate that. Is the US motivated by sheer spitefulness? Beggar thy neighbour? For the US to succeed, other countries must fail?

What happened to the legendary American hero who would lay his life down for your freedom? Is he a myth? Therein lies the paradox. The truth is simple, I think. There is a group of very idealistic Americans who are true believers in democracy, freedom of expression, and all that jazz. Then there is the other group of highly cynical and powerful Yanks who exploit the first group to get precisely what they want. They control the weapons factories, the military and the media that churns out the propaganda that is fed to the world.

The US is both Jeckyll and Hyde.

10 Unsolved Mysteries Of The Brain

2010-05-02T12:08:00.007+08:00

I have been reading up for a research topic and didn't have much time to blog.

Anyway, here's an interesting article from Discover magazine (http://discovermagazine.com/2007/aug/unsolved-brain-mysteries). I hope to post a few more in the near future, to demonstrate how much scientists know - or don't know - about the universe, and yet have the gall to insist there is no God. To these logically-challenged people, the following statement is true.

I cannot prove God scientifically ... therefore there is no God.

A bit like saying, I cannot prove you are the murderer ... therefore you are the murderer.

What I can accept, however, is the statement God is irrelevant. That is a lot more honest than the arrogant science-is-all-conquering bullshit. Or the science-is-on-the-verge-of-knowing-everything crap. Dream on.

Read - and be amazed.

~~~~~~~~~

10 Unsolved Mysteries Of The Brain
07.31.2007

What we know—and don’t know—about how we think.
by David Eagleman

Of all the objects in the universe, the human brain is the most complex: There are as many neurons in the brain as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. So it is no surprise that, despite the glow from recent advances in the science of the brain and mind, we still find ourselves squinting in the dark somewhat. But we are at least beginning to grasp the crucial mysteries of neuroscience and starting to make headway in addressing them. Even partial answers to these 10 questions could restructure our understanding of the roughly three-pound mass of gray and white matter that defines who we are.

1. How is information coded in neural activity?
Neurons, the specialized cells of the brain, can produce brief spikes of voltage in their outer membranes. These electrical pulses travel along specialized extensions called axons to cause the release of chemical signals elsewhere in the brain. The binary, all-or-nothing spikes appear to carry information about the world: What do I see? Am I hungry? Which way should I turn? But what is the code of these millisecond bits of voltage? Spikes may mean different things at different places and times in the brain. In parts of the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord), the rate of spiking often correlates with clearly definable external features, like the presence of a color or a face. In the peripheral nervous system, more spikes indicates more heat, a louder sound, or a stronger muscle contraction.

As we delve deeper into the brain, however, we find populations of neurons involved in more complex phenomena, like reminiscence, value judgments, simulation of possible futures, the desire for a mate, and so on—and here the signals become difficult to decrypt. The challenge is something like popping the cover off a computer, measuring a few transistors chattering between high and low voltage, and trying to guess the content of the Web page being surfed.

It is likely that mental information is stored not in single cells but in populations of cells and patterns of their activity. However, it is currently not clear how to know which neurons belong to a particular group; worse still, current technologies (like sticking fine electrodes directly into the brain) are not well suited to measuring several thousand neurons at once. Nor is it simple to monitor the connections of even one neuron: A typical neuron in the cortex receives input from some 10,000 other neurons.

Although traveling bursts of voltage can carry signals across the brain quickly, those electrical spikes may not be the only—or even the main—way that information is carried in nervous systems. Forward-looking studies are examining other possible information couriers: glial cells (poorly understood brain cells that are 10 times as common as neurons), other kinds of signaling mechanisms between cells (such as newly discovered gases and peptides), and the biochemical cascades that take place inside cells.

2. How are memories stored and retrieved?
When you learn a new fact, like someone’s name, there are physical changes in the structure of your brain. But we don’t yet comprehend exactly what those changes are, how they are orchestrated across vast seas of synapses and neurons, how they embody knowledge, or how they are read out decades later for retrieval.

One complication is that there are many kinds of memories. The brain seems to distinguish short-term memory (remembering a phone number just long enough to dial it) from long-term memory (what you did on your last birthday). Within long-term memory, declarative memories (like names and facts) are distinct from nondeclarative memories (riding a bicycle, being affected by a subliminal message), and within these general categories are numerous subtypes. Different brain structures seem to support different kinds of learning and memory; brain damage can lead to the loss of one type without disturbing the others.

Nonetheless, similar molecular mechanisms may be at work in these memory types. Almost all theories of memory propose that memory storage depends on synapses, the tiny connections between brain cells. When two cells are active at the same time, the connection between them strengthens; when they are not active at the same time, the connection weakens. Out of such synaptic changes emerges an association. Experience can, for example, fortify the connections between the smell of coffee, its taste, its color, and the feel of its warmth. Since the populations of neurons connected with each of these sensations are typically activated at the same time, the connections between them can cause all the sensory associations of coffee to be triggered by the smell alone.

But looking only at associations—and strengthened connections between neurons—may not be enough to explain memory. The great secret of memory is that it mostly encodes the relationships between things more than the details of the things themselves. When you memorize a melody, you encode the relationships between the notes, not the notes per se, which is why you can easily sing the song in a different key.

Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly. Moreover, the act of retrieval can destabilize the memory. When you recall a past event, the memory becomes temporarily susceptible to erasure. Some intriguing recent experiments show it is possible to chemically block memories from reforming during that window, suggesting new ethical questions that require careful consideration.

3. What does the baseline activity in the brain represent?
Neuroscientists have mostly studied changes in brain activity that correlate with stimuli we can present in the laboratory, such as a picture, a touch, or a sound. But the activity of the brain at rest—its “baseline” activity—may prove to be the most important aspect of our mental lives. The awake, resting brain uses 20 percent of the body’s total oxygen, even though it makes up only 2 percent of the body’s mass. Some of the baseline activity may represent the brain restructuring knowledge in the background, simulating future states and events, or manipulating memories. Most things we care about—reminiscences, emotions, drives, plans, and so on—can occur with no external stimulus and no overt output that can be measured.

One clue about baseline activity comes from neuroimaging experiments, which show that activity decreases in some brain areas just before a person performs a goal-directed task. The areas that decrease are the same regardless of the details of the task, hinting that these areas may run baseline programs during downtime, much as your computer might run a disk-defragmenting program only while the resources are not needed elsewhere.

In the traditional view of perception, information from the outside world pours into the senses, works its way through the brain, and makes itself consciously seen, heard, and felt. But many scientists are coming to think that sensory input may merely revise ongoing internal activity in the brain. Note, for example, that sensory input is superfluous for perception: When your eyes are closed during dreaming, you still enjoy rich visual experience. The awake state may be essentially the same as the dreaming state, only partially anchored by external stimuli. In this view, your conscious life is an awake dream.

4. How do brains simulate the future?
When a fire chief encounters a new blaze, he quickly makes predictions about how to best position his men. Running such simulations of the future—without the risk and expense of actually attempting them—allows “our hypotheses to die in our stead,” as philosopher Karl Popper put it. For this reason, the emulation of possible futures is one of the key businesses that intelligent brains invest in.

Yet we know little about how the brain’s future simulator works because traditional neuroscience technologies are best suited for correlating brain activity with explicit behaviors, not mental emulations. One idea suggests that the brain’s resources are devoted not only to processing stimuli and reacting to them (watching a ball come at you) but also to constructing an internal model of that outside world and extracting rules for how things tend to behave (knowing how balls move through the air). Internal models may play a role not only in motor acts, like catching, but also in perception. For example, vision draws on significant amounts of information in the brain, not just on input from the retina. Many neuroscientists have suggested over the past few decades that perception arises not simply by building up bits of data through a hierarchy but rather by matching incoming sensory data against internally generated expectations.

But how does a system learn to make good predictions about the world? It may be that memory exists only for this purpose. This is not a new idea: Two millennia ago, Aristotle and Galen emphasized memory as a tool in making successful predictions for the future. Even your memories about your life may come to be understood as a special subtype of emulation, one that is pinned down and thus likely to flow in a certain direction.

5. What are emotions?
We often talk about brains as information-processing systems, but any account of the brain that lacks an account of emotions, motivations, fears, and hopes is incomplete. Emotions are measurable physical responses to salient stimuli: the increased heartbeat and perspiration that accompany fear, the freezing response of a rat in the presence of a cat, or the extra muscle tension that accompanies anger. Feelings, on the other hand, are the subjective experiences that sometimes accompany these processes: the sensations of happiness, envy, sadness, and so on. Emotions seem to employ largely unconscious machinery—for example, brain areas involved in emotion will respond to angry faces that are briefly presented and then rapidly masked, even when subjects are unaware of having seen the face. Across cultures the expression of basic emotions is remarkably similar, and as Darwin observed, it is also similar across all mammals. There are even strong similarities in physiological responses among humans, reptiles, and birds when showing fear, anger, or parental love.

Modern views propose that emotions are brain states that quickly assign value to outcomes and provide a simple plan of action. Thus, emotion can be viewed as a type of computation, a rapid, automatic summary that initiates appropriate actions. When a bear is galloping toward you, the rising fear directs your brain to do the right things (determining an escape route) instead of all the other things it could be doing (rounding out your grocery list). When it comes to perception, you can spot an object more quickly if it is, say, a spider rather than a roll of tape. In the realm of memory, emotional events are laid down differently by a parallel memory system involving a brain area called the amygdala.

One goal of emotional neuroscience is to understand the nature of the many disorders of emotion, depression being the most common and costly. Impulsive aggression and violence are also thought to be consequences of faulty emotion regulation.

6. What is intelligence?
Intelligence comes in many forms, but it is not known what intelligence—in any of its guises—means biologically. How do billions of neurons work together to manipulate knowledge, simulate novel situations, and erase inconsequential information? What happens when two concepts “fit” together and you suddenly see a solution to a problem? What happens in your brain when it suddenly dawns on you that the killer in the movie is actually the unsuspected wife? Do intelligent people store knowledge in a way that is more distilled, more varied, or more easily retrievable?

We all grew up with the near-future promise of smart robots, but today we have little better than the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. What went wrong? There are two camps for explaining the weak performance of artificial intelligence: Either we do not know enough of the fundamental principles of brain function, or we have not simulated enough neurons working together. If the latter is true, that’s good news: Computation gets cheaper and faster each year, so we should not be far from enjoying life with Asimovian robots who can effectively tend our households. Yet most neuroscientists recognize how distant we are from that dream. Currently, our robots are little more intelligent than sea slugs, and even after decades of clever research, they can barely distinguish figures from a background at the skill level of an infant.

Recent experiments explore the possible relationship of intelligence to the capacity of short-term memory, the ability to quickly resolve cognitive conflict, or the ability to store stronger associations between facts; the results are not yet conclusive. Many other possibilities—better restructuring of stored information, more parallel processing, or superior emulation of possible futures—have not yet been probed by experiments.

Intelligence may not be underpinned by a single mechanism or a single neural area. Whatever intelligence is, it lies at the heart of what is special about Homo sapiens. Other species are hardwired to solve particular problems, while our ability to abstract allows us to solve an open-ended series of problems. This means that studies of intelligence in mice and monkeys may be barking up the wrong family tree.

7. How is time represented in the brain?
Hundred-yard dashes begin with a gunshot rather than a strobe light because your brain can react more quickly to a bang than to a flash. Yet as soon as we get outside the realm of motor reactions and into the realm of perception (what you report that you saw and heard), the story changes. When it comes to awareness, the brain goes through a good deal of trouble to synchronize incoming signals that are processed at very different speeds.

For example, snap your fingers in front of you. Although your auditory system processes information about the snap about 30 milliseconds faster than your visual system, the sight of your fingers and the sound of the snap seem simultaneous. Your brain is employing fancy editing tricks to make simultaneous events in the world feel simultaneous to you, even when the different senses processing the information would individually swear otherwise.

For a simple example of how your brain plays tricks with time, look in the mirror at your left eye. Now shift your gaze to your right eye. Your eye movements take time, of course, but you do not see your eyes move. It is as if the world instantly made the transition from one view to the next. What happened to that little gap in time? For that matter, what happens to the 80 milliseconds of darkness you should see every time you blink your eyes? Bottom line: Your notion of the smooth passage of time is a construction of the brain. Clarifying the picture of how the brain normally solves timing problems should give insight into what happens when temporal calibration goes wrong, as may happen in the brains of people with dyslexia. Sensory inputs that are out of sync also contribute to the risk of falls in elderly patients.

8. Why do brains sleep and dream?
One of the most astonishing aspects of our lives is that we spend a third of our time in the strange world of sleep. Newborn babies spend about twice that. It is inordinately difficult to remain awake for more than a full day-night cycle. In humans, continuous wakefulness of the nervous system results in mental derangement; rats deprived of sleep for 10 days die. All mammals sleep, reptiles and birds sleep, and voluntary breathers like dolphins sleep with one brain hemisphere dormant at a time. The evolutionary trend is clear, but the function of sleep is not.

The universality of sleep, even though it comes at the cost of time and leaves the sleeper relatively defenseless, suggests a deep importance. There is no universally agreed-upon answer, but there are at least three popular (and nonexclusive) guesses. The first is that sleep is restorative, saving and replenishing the body’s energy stores. However, the high neural activity during sleep suggests there is more to the story. A second theory proposes that sleep allows the brain to run simulations of fighting, problem solving, and other key actions before testing them out in the real world. A third theory—the one that enjoys the most evidence—is that sleep plays a critical role in learning and consolidating memories and in forgetting inconsequential details. In other words, sleep allows the brain to store away the important stuff and take out the neural trash.

Recently, the spotlight has focused on REM sleep as the most important phase for locking memories into long-term encoding. In one study, rats were trained to scurry around a track for a food reward. The researchers recorded activity in the neurons known as place cells, which showed distinct patterns of activity depending upon the rats’ location on the track. Later, while the rats dropped off into REM sleep, the recordings continued. During this sleep, the rats’ place cells often repeated the exact same pattern of activity that was seen when the animals ran. The correlation was so close, the researchers claimed, that as the animal “dreamed,” they could reconstruct where it would be on the track if it had been awake—and whether the animal was dreaming of running or standing still. The emerging idea is that information replayed during sleep might determine which events we remember later. Sleep, in this view, is akin to an off-line practice session. In several recent experiments, human subjects performing difficult tasks improved their scores between sessions on consecutive days, but not between sessions on the same day, implicating sleep in the learning process.

Understanding how sleeping and dreaming are changed by trauma, drugs, and disease—and how we might modulate our need for sleep—is a rich field to harvest for future clues.

9. How do the specialized systems of the brain integrate with one another?
To the naked eye, no part of the brain’s surface looks terribly different from any other part. But when we measure activity, we find that different types of information lurk in each region of the neural territory. Within vision, for example, separate areas process motion, edges, faces, and colors. The territory of the adult brain is as fractured as a map of the countries of the world.

Now that neuroscientists have a reasonable idea of how that territory is divided, we find ourselves looking at a strange assortment of brain networks involved with smell, hunger, pain, goal setting, temperature, prediction, and hundreds of other tasks. Despite their disparate functions, these systems seem to work together seamlessly. There are almost no good ideas about how this occurs.

Nor is it understood how the brain coordinates its systems so rapidly. The slow speed of spikes (they travel about one foot per second in axons that lack the insulating sheathing called myelin) is one hundred-millionth the speed of signal transmission in digital computers. Yet a human can recognize a friend almost instantaneously, while digital computers are slow—and usually unsuccessful—at face recognition. How can an organ with such slow parts operate so quickly? The usual answer is that the brain is a parallel processor, running many operations at the same time. This is almost certainly true, but what slows down parallel-processing digital computers is the next stage of operations, where results need to be compared and decided upon. Brains are amazingly fast at this. So while the brain’s ability to do parallel processing is impressive, its ability to rapidly synthesize those parallel processes into a single, behavior-guiding output is at least as significant. An animal running must go left or right around a tree; it cannot do both.

There is no special anatomical location in the brain where information from all the different systems converges; rather, the specialized areas all interconnect with one another, forming a network of parallel and recurring links. Somehow, our integrated image of the world emerges from this complex labyrinthine network of brain structures. Surprisingly little study has been done on large, loopy networks like the ones in the brain—probably in part because it is easier to think about brains as tidy assembly lines than as dynamic networks.

10. What is consciousness?
Think back to your first kiss. The experience of it may pop into your head instantly. Where was that memory before you became conscious of it? How was it stored in your brain before and after it came into consciousness? What is the difference between those states?

An explanation of consciousness is one of the major unsolved problems of modern science. It may not turn out to be a single phenomenon; nonetheless, by way of a preliminary target, let’s think of it as the thing that flickers on when you wake up in the morning that was not there, in the exact same brain hardware, moments before.

Neuroscientists believe that consciousness emerges from the material stuff of the brain primarily because even very small changes to your brain (say, by drugs or disease) can powerfully alter your subjective experiences. The heart of the problem is that we do not yet know how to engineer pieces and parts such that the resulting machine has the kind of private subjective experience that you and I take for granted. If I give you all the Tinkertoys in the world and tell you to hook them up so that they form a conscious machine, good luck. We don’t have a theory yet of how to do this; we don’t even know what the theory will look like.

One of the traditional challenges to consciousness research is studying it experimentally. It is probable that at any moment some active neuronal processes correlate with consciousness, while others do not. The first challenge is to determine the difference between them. Some clever experiments are making at least a little headway. In one of these, subjects see an image of a house in one eye and, simultaneously, an image of a cow in the other. Instead of perceiving a house-cow mixture, people perceive only one of them. Then, after some random amount of time, they will believe they’re seeing the other, and they will continue to switch slowly back and forth. Yet nothing about the visual stimulus changes; only the conscious experience changes. This test allows investigators to probe which properties of neuronal activity correlate with the changes in subjective experience.

The mechanisms underlying consciousness could reside at any of a variety of physical levels: molecular, cellular, circuit, pathway, or some organizational level not yet described. The mechanisms might also be a product of interactions between these levels. One compelling but still speculative notion is that the massive feedback circuitry of the brain is essential to the production of consciousness.

In the near term, scientists are working to identify the areas of the brain that correlate with consciousness. Then comes the next step: understanding why they correlate. This is the so-called hard problem of neuroscience, and it lies at the outer limit of what material explanations will say about the experience of being human.

Complexities and Contradictions

2010-03-07T07:45:00.014+08:00

I am happy to announce that I have finally finished one of those "must read" books on Architecture: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi. To give you an idea why it took me so long, here's a typical paragraph:

Contradiction adapted is tolerant and pliable. It admits improvisation. It involves the disintegration of a prototype - and it ends in approximation and qualification. On the other hand, contradiction juxtaposed is unbending. It contains violent contrasts and uncompromising oppositions. Contradiction adapted ends in a whole which is perhaps impure. Contradiction juxtaposed ends in a whole which is perhaps unresolved.

I've lost count of how many times the book put me to sleep! Imagine a first-year student, fresh out of high school in Asia, with a tentative grasp of the English language, trying to make sense of that!

Anyway, here's my understanding of Venturi's mind-fogging classic.

Architecture is fundamentally a form of art and, like fashion, is subject to humanity's whims and fancies, actions and reactions. As it progresses through time, its guiding philosophy swings from one extreme to the other, rather like a pendulum. Going back a little in history, we find the Romantic Movement reacting against the intellectualism of the Renaissance. Modernism was, likewise, a reaction to the ornate architectural styles that had prevailed before. (Reacting against Modernism, we had Post-Modernism. And so it goes, on and on.)

Modernism was promoted by architectural superstars like Mies van der Rohe (Farnsworth House)

and Le Corbusier (Villa Savoye).

Call it a severe simplification of buildings to their bare essentials. The structure is the decoration. The house as a machine! As you can guess, it wasn't long before people got sick of these glass boxes and pure geometrical forms. Robert Venturi, a young architect back in the 1960's, came out with his book arguing that Modernism had gone too far and that complexities and contradictions are part and parcel of humanity. I do agree.

John Allen Paulos in Once Upon a Number:

Describing the world may be thought of as an Olympic contest between simplifiers - scientists in general, statisticians in particular - and complicators - humanists in general, storytellers in particular.

I would contend that scientists are very much like the Modernists in architecture. With a giant cleaver, they hacked away everything that is intangible, metaphysical, spiritual, and replaced it all with cold rationality.

I'm waiting for the pendulum to swing in the other direction.

Design

2010-01-30T08:14:00.003+08:00

I can't help but get a sneaking suspicion that lots of people out there don't really know what design is, especially those who ridicule "intelligent design" and claim that ANYTHING can happen if you give it a gazillion years.

I, fortunately and unfortunately, was trained as an architect and had spent around 25 years in the industry dealing with the subject of design - agonising about it over sleepless nights and getting hammered for it when things don't work out. (Luckily good design is achievable and I will blog about that later.)

Have a look at these two videos to see how much thought needs to go into the building design process before idea becomes reality. Look at how many people are involved. And then ask yourself whether it's possible to get from single-cell organisms to our present complexity via Darwin's simplistic "natural selection" process.

Dreams

2010-01-10T09:06:00.005+08:00

Recently someone asked me why I am a Deist and not an Agnostic. An Agnostic, from what I can see, is someone who thinks that there is no way man can know God and therefore is not going to bother trying. That is not my attitude. I am still thinking, seeking and exploring.

One possible way a personality from another dimension may choose to communicate with us is through dreams. Normally I don't remember what I was dreaming about when I wake up, but last night's is still fresh in my mind.

I was walking down the street to my mom's place when an uncle of mine overtook me. (He had passed away many years ago.) He was wearing white and walking much faster than me. As I neared the house, I saw a bunch of relatives standing outside. I was informed that two of my cousins had bought 3-storey shop lots. One of them was already doing a successful jewelry business. (In real life, none of my relatives are in the jewelry business.)

In the next scene, I was sitting next to my dad (recently deceased), watching a video projected on a large screen. Again it's my uncle (dad's elder brother) walking down the street. I asked, "Is that uncle?" He said, "Yes, that's definitely him." I said, "Isn't it amazing how I can project what's in my head onto a screen for everyone to watch?"

Hehehe! Funny dream, ain't it?

Now, assuming it's not due to something I ate for dinner or my blood pressure peaking in the middle of the night, what is its significance? Is it a bit of advice from my dad? Is he pointing me in some direction? Or could it indicate something that I need to watch out for over the coming days? Only time will tell. In the meanwhile, I will mull over it.

And that's something we all need to do in our hectic lives - to take time to ponder and plan.

[Art by Tiffany Liu]

Playing Nostradamus

2009-12-25T20:35:00.020+08:00

Recently when Dubai shook the world with its financial crisis, I thought to myself that even a layman like me could have told them that building skyscrapers and ski resorts in the middle of the baking desert is asking for trouble.

Such things are total no-brainers, right? Who wants to pay a fortune to stay in an artificial environment like this unless you don't have a choice? The moment the airconditioning stops running, you're in deep shit!

But then, what's the point of me talking after the fact? Anyone can boast about wisdom based on hindsight! I have therefore decided to demonstrate to you, ladies and gentlemen, that my ability to look into the future of a country like Dubai was not just a fluke. I will now attempt to make a few predictions of events that I see happening in the next five years! If what I say comes to pass, you will return on Christmas Day 2014 and declare me a genius. Deal? Now gaze deeply into my crystal ball!

Prediction 1: US troops will leave the Middle East for good. In fact, many of the American military bases overseas will be vacated and closed down.

Prediction 2: The US dollar will go down much further against the Yen and Euro. According to the BBC, 1 US dollar today is worth 0.6936 Euros and 91.185 Yen.

Prediction 3: Gold will continue to go up and up. Again, from the BBC website, gold is currently worth US$1104 an ounce.

Prediction 4: The world will NOT end in 2012!!!

Prediction 5: BN will lose big in the next general election. They will no longer form the Federal government.

Further into the future, I foresee Brunei joining Malaysia once the oil runs out. Remember, you heard it here first! :)

Richard Dawkins

2009-11-28T15:33:00.013+08:00

Richard Dawkins is without a doubt the most famous scientist on the planet promoting atheism today. He wrote The God Delusion that sold millions of copies. I have not read it, but I have listened to his interview on the BBC and his talk on TED.

As a Deist (ie. I believe in a Mind behind the universe), you would expect that the bullets in his arsenal of arguments would have my name all over them. But upon closer inspection, you'll realise that most of them are actually aimed at Christianity. And since I'm not a Christian and you CAN'T prove there is no God by debunking Christianity, my beliefs remain largely unscathed. RD is no threat to me.

But he is most definitely a threat to idjits like GW Bush Jr and S Palin, who see the world in black and white, defined by an ongoing war between good and evil, God and Satan, Christ against the anti-Christ and Christians and Jews versus everybody else. Dawkins wants to bring some sanity back into the USA. For that, I applaud him.

That's him in the photo. It's from a campaign back in Jan 2009 to promote atheism in Britain. Now a scientific theory is an explanation that best fits the data and stands until a better theory comes along. So science is all about probabilities. Which means you can't make an absolute statement like "There is no God" when you can't even begin to prove it! The word "probably" was added because organisers of the campaign "did not want to be dogmatic in the way that so many religious leaders are" (timesonline.co.uk).

Even though my position and theirs are diametrically opposite, I respect these atheists for that generous gesture! :)

Cyber Clash!

2009-11-07T15:36:00.011+08:00

If you hang around online discussion forums long enough, you're bound to clash with someone sooner or later. Needless to say, opinionated me has had many such encounters, so much so I can probably call myself a veteran! That is not to say that I don't get upset or stressed sometimes. I still do but I'd like to think that I am emotionally and psychologically much stronger than before, plus a little more adept at wriggling out of tight spots and protecting by butt from getting shot off.

To me, online debates are like paintball games. Very stimulating, yet very painful if you get hit! You are dealing with real people who can be very smart and unpredictable. Yet with enough experience you will be able to develop a set of strategies to handle most situations adequately.

A lot of people seem to believe that the primary objective is to win the argument at all costs. Some will try to drown you in a sea of words. Others employ highfaluting bombastic language or profanities to intimidate you. A few actually think they are victorious if they get in the last word!

The truth is you can win an argument and still lose the audience! People are not always rational. Say there is a quarrel between X and Y. X may be very logical but end up losing hearts and minds because he sounds like he is bullying Y. Get me?

In that way, a weakness can actually turn into a strength. When two or three gang up against one, people tend to support the underdog (unless the latter is promoting something absolutely ridiculous or revolting). Of course if you find yourself outnumbered in a forum full of extremists, the smartest thing is to get out!

There are many lessons one can actually learn from such experiences: about conflict resolution, about keeping cool under fire, about not taking things too seriously, about mental flexibility and dexterity, about winning friends and influencing people, about developing a reputation for honesty and integrity, about showing mercy and compassion to a weaker opponent, etc etc etc.

Below is a little altercation I was involved in recently. See what you think. (Names have been changed, of course.) Hydrogen first mentioned liking the tv series Band of Brothers.

Me: Sorry, but to me it's more propaganda from Hollywood promoting the myth that America saved the world from Adolf Hitler.

Silver XXX: Promoting the myth? I have to say if it wasn't for the americans we'd all still be kaotaoing and saying arifuckingato! True 70%of german losses were on the eastern front but until a good russian war movie is made i'll watch the good ole yanks tearing up normandy! Anyways at the end of the day it's a good show.

Gold XXX: Thank you! I wanted to say 'if it weren't for the Americans, you'd be a panty sniffing pervert whose mother is a bukake pornstar'. But I'm too nice and I hear a lot of American bashing and get tired of it at the end of the day. Also, I might add Hollywood is as liberal as it can get, and the last thing they like to do is to promote the right wing propaganda and patriotism.

Me: Silver, I said "Adolf Hitler", not arifuckingato Japanese. Gold, I don't know you at all and you want to call me a 'panty sniffing pervert whose mother is a bukake pornstar'? Must be the American influence!

[Notice the sting at the end of my reply?]

Gold XXX: Grow some balls and take it like a man.

[At this point, how would you have reacted if you were me? Would you have gone stark raving mad and behaved accordingly? Would you have apologised for causing displeasure? Would you have cleared out of there fast to avoid the stress? Pause and have a think about it before you go on.]

Me: Nice meeting you, too.

Oxygen: As an American, I am apalled at Gold's post. I say its the British influence.

[I was laughing my head off because Gold was defending the Americans and an American came and disowned her!]

Silver XXX: Now now. Play nice people. This is bringing some nasty things to the table.Rich, if it wasn't for the Americans keeping the Atlantic trade route open, Britain would have collapsed. The fact is that even though America didn't officially enter the war until 1941, Many american ships were involved in protecting aid convoys against the german U-boat ... Read Morethreat. Please don't discount the fact that many American Serviceman died doing it as it insults their memory.Gold, please don't insult people like that as it's not nice. you don't even know the guy. In fact neither do i. I know you hear alot of american bashing but sometimes you have to let it go. Personally i think Americans are nice. From what i see the average joe is honest, friendly and like the rest of the world just wants to get on with his life. Their politicians on the other hand have been terrible since Reagan was elected. But you can't blame the majority for the minority. So there.Anyways Band of Brothers is a damn good show.

Silver XXX: And Oxygen, it is the British outspoken sarcastic side of her. Ah... my sis.

Gold XXX: Oh no nigga! I got owned!

Bronze XXX: The best WWII eastern front movie was probably that German film, Stalingrad. Realistic, but waaay too depressing. The entire Ost- Front was depressing to read about. And Silver was right, America was in the war prior to 1941 by supplying arms, ships and then aggressive anti-German patrols for the Brits. God bless the Americans of the 40's. Where are they now?

Hydrogen: All this over the Band of Brothers box set? Dang. Think I'll watch the Simpsons next. Less "political"! ...hee hee

Me: Don't get me started on the Simpsons! (Hahaha!) Nice to meet the XXX family. Happy Ramadhan to you! About movies, I'm waiting for Steven Spielberg to make one about the 10 million Native American Indians who disappeared off the face of the USA.

Silver XXX: Thanks Rich. Nice meeting u too. The XXX family like many others is as dysfunctional as they come but we all love each other....really!honest!

As you can see, it could have ended in total disaster, with me and the XXX family becoming sworn enemies. A certain amount of skill and emotional calmness is needed to turn such encounters around and gain the desired objectives - the respect and maybe grudging acceptance of the logic of your position.

One last tip to remember: Check your facts before opening your mouth! Will save you a world of hurt! :)

Crazy!

2009-10-22T20:06:00.048+08:00

This is inspired by a list I saw in Facebook and I thought I'd do one too. What are the wildest, craziest, riskist things you have ever done in your life? Here's my list. See if you can beat it!

Drank a glass of fresh snake blood in China

Half a glass, actually. I was in Guilin with my dad. We were in a kind of snake restaurant. This guy sliced open a snake and drained the blood into a glass. Then he added some alcohol. The people there kept asking if we wanted it, like they couldn't wait to snatch it from us. My dad turned his back for a moment and was shocked when he found I had gulped it all down! Hahaha! Could only taste the alcohol, though.

Ate "balut" in Manila

Balut is duck egg, boiled just before the duckling hatches. You peel off the shell at the top of the egg and add a bit of sauce. Then you sorta suck the contents out, feathers and all!

Ate monitor lizard in Medan

Guy on a bicycle sold pieces of lizard hot in banana leaf. A bit tough but tastes like chicken. :)

Spent a night outside a girl's apartment trying to impress her

Not exactly like in the cartoon - I didn't have a guitar and I didn't sing! I tried to sleep in the car but it was hot and I got eaten alive by mosquitoes! She rejected me just the same! Said she'll call the police if I didn't get lost! :)

Cried for a week after attending a girl's wedding dinner

Met her after she was registered to another guy. We got along fantastic. She looked so beautiful in her wedding dress. Broke my heart into pieces. Such is life.

Nearly drowned when I got sucked under a waterfall

Never swim under a waterfall. The force of the plunging water pushes you downwards. Fortunately I managed to kick my way up. Swimming lessons are GOOD for you!

Lost a few toe nails after a run through the jungle

I was wearing a cheap pair of track shoes when I participated in this Hash House cross-country run through some secondary forest. The jungle floor is uneven and full of roots. I managed to twist my ankle somewhere near the end and had to limp the rest of the way. When I took my shoes off, three of the toenails had turned black. The entire nails came off after a week or two!

Visited a Mormon temple all by my lonesome

That was during my Christian phase. I was very enthusiastic about saving these cultists from burning in hell, you see? I even had a long discussion with a Hare Krishna fellow once. The Mormon temple is very much like an old-fashioned church. They sing hymns!

On the left is a photo of a godly Mormon guy with his many wives and lovely brood of kids. Mormons also believe God hates black people and had marked them with dark skin.

Visited a mosque with my two kids

No big deal if you're a Muslim but non-Muslims will award you with a Badge of Courage for doing this! :)

Handed out Christian literature to prostitutes in Sydney!

Probably the maddest thing I will ever do in my life and I did it all alone, driven by the conviction that God loved these ladies of the night. I took a bus from my house in the Eastern Suburbs to Kingscross in Sydney with a bag full of little New Testaments. You bet I was nervous. The girls were standing along the street waiting for customers. I tried giving a copy to a pretty girl who looked Chinese but she rejected me. That hurt. I approached a blond girl and she said, "Do you wanna go?" I said no and handed her a Bible. She said "Ta" and turned away. After that one success I chickened out completely and took off for home. Unfortunatedly the buses had already stopped running by that time - around 11pm, I guess. I called a Christian guy who came to pick me up. He was mighty impressed as you can imagine!

The Art of War

2009-10-10T19:13:00.029+08:00

The Art of War by Sunzi is one of the most amazing books I have ever come across. Written by a Chinese general some 2,500 years ago, it still contains lessons that are absolutely relevant today. This is not a book review. I only want to list some of the points that are, to my mind, the most important. Incidentally, my version of the book has James Clavell as the "editor".

1) Discipline

Sunzi was once requested by a Chinese king to demonstrate the effectiveness of his ideas on a group of young women. He carefully explained the orders he would be issuing to the ladies and got them to stand to attention. "Right turn!" he called out. The ladies stood and giggled. "Left turn!" The ladies giggled some more. Sunzi very patiently explained his orders again. If the instructions were unclear, the commander was at fault, he stressed. The ladies acknowledged that they had understood the instructions. "Right turn!" he shouted again. The ladies laughed and did nothing. "Left turn!" More laughter. Sunzi promptly had the group leader, one of the king's favourite concubines, beheaded! Guess what? He had no more problems getting his orders obeyed!

Why did it require the combined might of the USSR, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, etc to overcome a relatively small country like Germany in WW2? My answer: the Germans were highly disciplined.

2) Knowing your enemy and yourself

If you asked me, this is the very reason why the Americans lost in Vietnam (and why they will lose in Afghanistan). The Yanks did not understand the Vietnamese language, culture, spirit, aspirations, etc, and cared less. They arrogantly assumed that they could beat anyone into submission with enough bombs and bullets. As a result, they got their neo-colonial asses whipped.

3) Breaking resistance without fighting

This is not something you would have heard from American Generals like Douglas MacArthur, who had built a career on a mountain of dead bodies. When the Japanese kicked him out of the Philippines, he declared "I shall return!" Years later, the Yanks could have bypassed Luzon island on their way to Japan but MacArthur had to "return" or lose face. The ensuing needless battle for Manila killed 100,000 Filipinos and destroyed the city. Just so a vainglorious general could keep his promise!

Sunzi, on the other hand, preferred not to fight, if at all possible. (Does that sound like he was advocating diplomacy?) If not possible, then fighting should be done in such a way as to minimise casualties and waste. The German blitzkrieg (lightning war) for example, was highly efficient in the use of speed and power to knock an enemy out before he could seriously react.

4) Prisoners and civilians should be well treated

In my opinion, the Rape of Nanjing was a public relations disaster for the Japanese army. What they really intended was to crush Chinese resistance once and for all, via a demonstration of extremely barbarity on the capital of China. But the war was far from over at that point. If you were a Chinese soldier and you knew you would be mercilessly tortured and then executed if you surrendered, would you give up or fight to the death? If the Chinese soldier would no longer surrender, wouldn't life be much harder for the Japanese soldier? The Germans made the same mistake during the Battle of the Bulge. US prisoners were massacred by the SS, which only strengthened American resolve to keep fighting.

5) Holding positions that cannot be attacked

Sounds like common sense, doesn't it? But I've seen lots of people on internet forums get shot to pieces by exposing themselves to fire. If a position cannot be defended, move to a better one, dummy! I will blog more on this later - maybe!

6) Maintaining an army at a distance will impoverish the people

Which dumb-ass nation is conducting wars miles and miles away from home and has consequently gone bankrupt? Give yourself a pat on the back if you answered "the USA!"

Isn't it astonishing how smart Sunzi was compared to some of our modern-day world leaders?

(Art work by Anna Lorimer.)

Porn

2009-09-28T16:49:00.004+08:00

There is a myth about how well women are treated in the West compared to, say, in the Middle East. I would argue that while some societies hide their women as if they are an embarrassment, the West goes the other extreme - to strip, expose and humiliate their women.

The following is from a book called Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity by Robert Jensen. The full article can be found here: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/donhazenintro.htm.

After an intense three hours, the workshop on pornography I have been leading is winding down. The 40 women all work at a center that serves battered women and rape survivors. These are the women on the front lines, the ones who answer the 24-hour hotline and work one-on-one with victims. They counsel women who have just been raped, help women who have been beaten, and nurture children who have been abused. These women have heard and seen it all. No matter how brutal a story might be, they have experienced or heard one even more brutal; there is no way to one-up them on stories of men's violence. But after three hours of information, analysis, and discussion of the commercial heterosexual pornography industry, many of these women are drained. Sadness hangs over the room.

Near the end of the session, one woman who had been quiet starts to speak. Throughout the workshop she had held herself in tightly, her arms wrapped around herself. She talks for some time, and then apologizes for rambling. There is no need to apologize; she is articulating what many feel. She talks about her own life, about what she has learned in the session and about how it has made her feel, about her anger and sadness.

Finally, she says: "This hurts. It just hurts so much."

Everyone is quiet as the words sink in. Slowly the conversation restarts, and the women talk more about how they feel, how they will use the information, what it will mean to their work and in their lives. The session ends, but her words hang in the air.

It hurts.

It hurts to know that no matter who you are as a woman you can be reduced to a thing to be penetrated, and that men will buy movies about that, and that in many of those movies your humiliation will be the central theme. It hurts to know that so much of the pornography that men are buying fuses sexual desire with cruelty.

It hurts women, and men like it, and it hurts just to know that.

Even these women, who have found ways to cope with the injuries from male violence in other places, struggle with that pornographic reality. It is one thing to deal with acts, even extremely violent acts. It is another to know the thoughts, ideas, and fantasies that lie behind those acts.

People routinely assume that pornography is such a difficult and divisive issue because it's about sex. In fact, this culture struggles unsuccessfully with pornography because it is about men's cruelty to women, and the pleasure men sometimes take in that cruelty. And that is much more difficult for people -- men and women -- to face.

Why it hurts

This doesn't mean that all men take sexual pleasure in cruelty. It doesn't mean that all women reject pornography. There is great individual variation in the human species, but there also are patterns in any society. And when those patterns tell us things about ourselves and the world in which we live that are difficult, we often want to look away.

Mirrors can be dangerous, and pornography is a mirror.

Pornography as a mirror shows us how men see women. Not all men, of course -- but the ways in which many men who accept the conventional conception of masculinity see women. It is unsettling to look into that mirror.

A story about that: I am out with two heterosexual women friends. Both are feminists in their 30s, and both are successful in their careers. Both are smart and strong, and both have had trouble finding male partners who aren't scared by their intelligence and strength. We are talking about men and women, about relationships. As is often the case, I am told that I am too hard on men. The implication is that after so many years of working in the radical feminist critique of the sex industry and sexual violence, I have become jaded, too mired in the dark side of male sexuality. I contend that I am simply trying to be honest. We go back and forth, in a friendly discussion.

Finally, I tell my friends that I can settle this with a description of one website. I say to them: "If you want me to, I will tell you about this site. I won't tell you if you don't want to hear this. But if you want me to continue, don't blame me." They look at each other; they hesitate. They ask me to explain.

Some months before that someone had forwarded to me an email about a pornography site that the person thought I should take a look at -- slutbus.com. It's a website to sell videos of the slutbus. Here's the slutbus concept:

A few men who appear to be in their 20s drive around in a minivan with a video camera. They ask women if they want a ride. Once in the van, the women are asked if they would be willing to have sex on camera for money. The women do. When the sex is over, the women get out of the van and one of the men hands the women a wad of bills as payment. Just as she reaches for the money, the van drives off, leaving her on the side of the road looking foolish. There are trailers for 10 videos on the website. All appear to use the same "plot" structure.

In the United States there are men who buy videos with that simple message: Women are for sex. Women can be bought for sex. But in the end, women are not even worth paying for sex. They don't even deserve to be bought. They just deserve to be f*cked, and left on the side of the road, with post-adolescent boys laughing as they drive away -- while men at home watch, become erect, masturbate, obtain sexual pleasure, and ejaculate, and then turn off the DVD player and go about their lives. There are other companies that produce similar videos. There's bangbus.com, which leaves women by the side of the road after sex in the bangbus. And on it goes.

I look at my friends and tell them: "You realize what I just described is relatively tame. There are things far more brutal and humiliating than that, you know."

We sit quietly, until one of them says, "That wasn't fair."

I know that it wasn't fair. What I had told them was true, and they had asked me to tell them. But it wasn't fair to push it. If I were them, if I were a woman, I wouldn't want to know that. Life is difficult enough without knowing things like that, without having to face that one lives in a society in which no matter who you are -- as an individual, as a person with hopes and dreams, with strengths and weaknesses -- you are something to be f*cked and laughed at and left on the side of the road by men. Because you are a woman.

"I'm sorry," I said. "But you asked."

In a society in which so many men are watching so much pornography, this is why we can't bear to see it for what it is: Pornography forces women to face up to how men see them. And pornography forces men to face up to what we have become. The result is that no one wants to talk about what is in the mirror. Although few admit it, lots of people are afraid of pornography. The liberal/libertarian supporters who celebrate pornography are afraid to look honestly at what it says about our culture. The conservative opponents are afraid that pornography undermines their attempts to keep sex boxed into narrow categories.

Feminist critics are afraid, too -- but for different reasons. Feminists are afraid because of what they see in the mirror, because of what pornography tells us about the world in which we live. That fear is justified. It's a sensible fear that leads many to want to change the culture.

Pornography has become normalized, mainstreamed. The values that drive the slutbus also drive the larger culture. As a New York Times story put it, "Pornography isn't just for dirty old men anymore." Well, it never really was just for dirty men, or old men, or dirty old men. But now that fact is out in the open. That same story quotes a magazine writer, who also has written a pornography script: "People just take porn in stride these days. There's nothing dangerous about sex anymore." The editorial director of Playboy, who says that his company has "an emphasis on party," tells potential advertisers: "We're in the mainstream."

There never was anything dangerous about sex, of course. The danger isn't in sex, but in a particular conception of sex in patriarchy. And the way sex is done in pornography is becoming more and more cruel and degrading, at the same time that pornography is becoming more normalized than ever. That's the paradox.

The paradox of pornography

First, imagine what we could call the cruelty line -- the measure of the level of overt cruelty toward, and degradation of, women in contemporary mass-marketed pornography. That line is heading up, sharply.

Second, imagine the normalization line -- the measure of the acceptance of pornography in the mainstream of contemporary culture. That line also is on the way up, equally sharply.

If pornography is increasingly cruel and degrading, why is it increasingly commonplace instead of more marginalized? In a society that purports to be civilized, wouldn't we expect most people to reject sexual material that becomes evermore dismissive of the humanity of women? How do we explain the simultaneous appearance of more, and increasingly more intense, ways to humiliate women sexually and the rising popularity of the films that present those activities?

As is often the case, this paradox can be resolved by recognizing that one of the assumptions is wrong. Here, it's the assumption that U.S. society routinely rejects cruelty and degradation. In fact, the United States is a nation that has no serious objection to cruelty and degradation. Think of the way we accept the use of brutal weapons in war that kill civilians, or the way we accept the death penalty, or the way we accept crushing economic inequality. There is no paradox in the steady mainstreaming of an intensely cruel pornography. This is a culture with a well-developed legal regime that generally protects individuals' rights and freedoms, and yet it also is a strikingly cruel culture in the way it accepts brutality and inequality.

The pornographers are not a deviation from the norm. Their presence in the mainstream shouldn't be surprising, because they represent mainstream values: The logic of domination and subordination that is central to patriarchy, hyper-patriotic nationalism, white supremacy, and a predatory corporate capitalism.

Music

2009-09-13T20:33:00.019+08:00

You guessed it: I am a music lover! Has music ever brought tears to your eyes? Music can certainly make me cry. It made my dad cry. And when my youngest was a mere baby, my wife had sung this mournful song to him and - to our utter surprise - tears were rolling down his cheeks! How does a child who is just a few months old understand happiness and sorrow? Even babies are spiritual beings!

Below is a list of songs that I dug out from Youtube. I have had to reject a few as the list was so long. You will probably be surprised at the type of music I like.

Enjoy!

A Bridge Too Far
(One of the family's favourite tunes.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tQi8ZQgmlM

Ambrosia: Biggest Part of Me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QIWtY7gzvA

Annie Lennox: Love Song for a Vampire
(From the movie Dracula.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhG8zC4npsE

Bryan Adams: Thought I'd Died and Gone to Heaven
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTfIr_euGTs

Carole King: It's Too Late
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPeVbEg1DHE

Chemical Brothers: Galvanise
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2hzVV2Nwfs

Cliff Richard: Hey, Mr Dream Maker
(Bitter sweet tune for those nursing a broken heart.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn7l-AoRqiw

Corrs: Old Town
(My favourite song from them.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5DF-l7sVrI

Counting Crows: A Long December
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNF1a-ZG1uc

Daniel Lee: Mimpi
(Lovely Malay song sung by a Chinese boy.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf3TyhedHkc

Danny Chan: 一生何求
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_H590e5KKw

Dexys Midnight Runners: Come on Eileen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc-P8oDuS0Q

Dido: White Flag
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d05zbvtGhtE

Don McLean: Vincent
(Song dedicated to the artist Vincent Van Gogh.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dipFMJckZOM

Earl Klugh: If it's in Your Heart
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsH2uDRK3_o

Gabrielle: Sunshine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmpaWSz04aQ

Garbage: Stupid Girl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N29vkIT3eo

Gin Blossoms: Till I Hear from You
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CU0LO1gFRA

Goo Goo Dolls: Here is Gone
(One of my favourite bands.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM6yOEMI82Y

Hoobastank: The Reason
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q30-2QpZVc

INXS: Original Sin
(You can see why the girls like Michael.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGeitNLkVog

John Mayer: No Such Thing
(My favourite JM song.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mndGAh7M1GY

Jamiroquai: Little L
(Jay Kay reputedly spends a fortune on his videos.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJj2v37T9xA

Kula Shaker: Govinda
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ioj_Npc5L_g

Lang Lang: Defend the Yellow River
(Part 4 of the Yellow River Concerto which was apparently composed during the anti-Japanese war.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7xI9X8IsuE

Lou Rawls: Lady Love
(Amazing voice, amazing song.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs97K9Fs3RE

Massive Attack: Teardrop
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWiZ7ogzaaY

Matchbox Twenty: Real World
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re33gPbnWfo

My Fair Lady: Ascot Opening Race
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5Sq1Pax7h8

Nirvana: Smells Like Teen Spirit
(What's tormenting Kurt?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXO3OMGKPpw

Paul Hardcastle: 19
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byCCmBwRjGw

Paul McCartney: Pipes of Peace
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVK_mJrLbmY

Puddle of Mudd: Blurry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGmrL2h8lrE

Rob Dougan: Clubbed to Death
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9TzYICt3yg

Sally Yeh: 瀟灑走一回
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_QLb-coHCs

Staind: It's Been a While
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVC1iBVnKJk

Stereophonics: Maybe Tomorrow
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaT86mk9gj8

Steve Perry: Foolish Heart
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-A8MSEB9rg

Stevie Wonder: Sir Duke
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmUvVj2mxnY

Swing Out Sister: Breakout
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q99GdBdX4u4

Tal Bachman: She's So High
(Love this song!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbWyq6MRUX8

Song Fei: 二泉映月
(My dad loved this haunting erhu tune and so do I.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj13KU3SAvE

Saigon Execution

2009-09-04T20:50:00.009+08:00

This is a very famous photo of a Vietnamese police chief in Saigon executing a Vietcong prisoner.

And below is the video of it.

Watch what happens when a bullet goes into someone's head. His feet give way immediately and he drops straight to the ground. His heart continues to pump for a while and blood squirts from his head wound. I'll bet you have never seen anything like it and hopefully never will again.

Napalm Girl

2009-09-03T22:30:00.004+08:00

A few blogs ago, I mentioned a Vietnamese girl who was hit by napalm. This is a video of that incident. Notice the skin hanging off the baby.

[From a young lady in Kuala Lumpur (5 May 2009):

I read ur updated blog… its … I should say … sumthing we will never know & do not bother to find out. I’m seriously type-less (speechless). What makes u to have interest in Vietnam’s war? Or wars? And where did u get all those pictures? From the books u read?

Da moment I saw da girl who took off her clothes when da fire is burning it, and she survives all those……, my life now, is nothing compare to her’s. I’m so lucky to hv what I had now….

Thanks…. ]

Art and Subjectivity

2009-08-30T09:20:00.018+08:00

Yup, that's a photo of me approximately 25 years ago.

I was in Architecture school doing a Communications subject. We were instructed to create a perspective of a small building and place it in some bush environment. I was probably in a state of panic as usual wondering how the heck I was supposed to get over the hurdle. My skill at water colour was (and still is) near zero. So you can see that it was a totally hopeless attempt to produce a painting by trial and error!

When the Aussie tutor first looked at it, he gave me a Pass Conceded or something contemptuous like that. After a while, he came back, studied my painting again and - surprise! surprise! - changed his verdict to Distinction or High Distinction, I can't remember which!

Isn't that absolutely hilarious? It shows that art is something that is totally subjective. How can I jump from low pass to distinction in one step? It's like hopping over that thin red line that exists between genius and insanity! A fellow student looked at my "masterpiece" and exclaimed, "How can they give such a high score to something so ugly!" before she realised I was standing behind her! Hahaha!

Going back a little further, I wrote a speech for a high-school public speaking competition that was rubbished by the teacher assigned to "edit" it for me. I ignored her and used it to get myself into the finals! I came away with the runner-up trophy!

Goes to show that what is crap to you may be beauty to someone else!

I like the word Art. It's very different from Science. In science, E always equals mc2! In art, you can use the same formula and get different results every time! The rules that apply to some may not even apply to you! With experience, intuition, psychological insight and the grasping of a whole lot of variables and maybe some intangibles, you can actually improve your results! Just the way you smile may alter the course of events! That's why war is an art. So is management. And so is stockmarket investment!

George Carlin on Religion

2009-08-23T11:03:00.004+08:00

Even though I'm a Deist (I believe in God but have no religion), I like this video. A lot of the things Carlin said is relevant and should be considered by all who are seeking the truth.

I was a Christian once and tended to get very defensive and upset if people so much as asked questions about my religion. It certainly didn't convince anyone that my beliefs were right. So do watch it with an open mind and think about how other people view the world.

Occam's Razor

2009-08-23T10:38:00.007+08:00

A comment regarding my previous blog entry called "A Universe Built for Us".

The Principia Cybernetica says: "Occam's razor is a logical principle attributed to the mediaeval philosopher William of Occam (or Ockham). The principle states that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed. This principle is often called the principle of parsimony. It underlies all scientific modelling and theory building. It admonishes us to choose from a set of otherwise equivalent models of a given phenomenon the simplest one. In any given model, Occam's razor helps us to "shave off" those concepts, variables or constructs that are not really needed to explain the phenomenon. By doing that, developing the model will become much easier, and there is less chance of introducing inconsistencies, ambiguities and redundancies."

Other ways to present the principle:

"If you have two theories that both explain the observed facts, then you should use the simplest until more evidence comes along"

"The simplest explanation for some phenomenon is more likely to be accurate than more complicated explanations."

"If you have two equally likely solutions to a problem, choose the simplest."

"The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct."

"Keep things simple!"

So, if we take Occam's advice and slash away at the scientists' convoluted concepts about String Theory, M Theory, Multiverses, etc, the simplest purest unadulterated idea we are left with is ... God!

A Universe Built for Us

2009-08-08T20:56:00.018+08:00

I find that a lot of religious people know next to nothing about science and grasp desperately at straws if asked to defend their belief in God. So let me do them a favour, even though I have no religion of my own. This is a good honest article and I hope they will have the patience to go through it as it is fairly long. It's from the December 2008 issue of "Discover Magazine".

Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory

by Tim Folger

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/dec/10-sciences-alternative-to-an-intelligent-creator

A sublime cosmic mystery unfolds on a mild summer afternoon in Palo Alto, California, where I've come to talk with the visionary physicist Andrei Linde. The day seems ordinary enough. Cyclists maneuver through traffic, and orange poppies bloom on dry brown hills near Linde's office on the Stanford University campus. But everything here, right down to the photons lighting the scene after an eight-minute jaunt from the sun, bears witness to an extraordinary fact about the universe: Its basic properties are uncannily suited for life. Tweak the laws of physics in just about any way and–in this universe, anyway–life as we know it would not exist.

Consider just two possible changes. Atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons. If those protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. Atoms wouldn't exist; neither would we. If gravity were slightly more powerful, the consequences would be nearly as grave. A beefed-up gravitational force would compress stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. Rather than surviving for billions of years, stars would burn through their fuel in a few million years, sputtering out long before life had a chance to evolve. There are many such examples of the universe's life-friendly properties–so many, in fact, that physicists can't dismiss them all as mere accidents.

"We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible," Linde says.

Physicists don't like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea. Life, it seems, is not an incidental component of the universe, burped up out of a random chemical brew on a lonely planet to endure for a few fleeting ticks of the cosmic clock. In some strange sense, it appears that we are not adapted to the universe; the universe is adapted to us.

Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multi–verse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.

The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn't even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable non–religious explanation for what is often called the "fine-tuning problem"–the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.

"For me the reality of many universes is a logical possibility," Linde says. "You might say, 'Maybe this is some mysterious coincidence. Maybe God created the universe for our benefit.' Well, I don't know about God, but the universe itself might reproduce itself eternally in all its possible manifestations."

Taking on Copernicus

Linde is lying in bed, recovering from a bad fall off a bicycle that broke his left wrist. His left hand, bound in a cast, rests on a pillow. Linde is sturdily built, with thick gray hair that flops down over his forehead; you wouldn't necessarily pick him out as a man who spends much of his time lost in thought about the distant universe. Right now he is ignoring his injury, reciting a long list of some of the cosmic coincidences that make life possible.

"And if we double the mass of the electron, life as we know it will disappear. If we change the strength of the interaction between protons and electrons, life will disappear. Why are there three space dimensions and one time dimension? If we had four space dimensions and one time dimension, then planetary systems would be unstable and our version of life would be impossible. If we had two space dimensions and one time dimension, we would not exist," he says.

The idea that the universe was made just for us–known as the anthropic principle–debuted in 1973 when Brandon Carter, then a physicist at Cambridge University, spoke at a conference in Poland honoring Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer who said that the sun, not Earth, was the hub of the universe. Carter proposed that a purely random assortment of laws would have left the universe dead and dark, and that life limits the values that physical constants can have. By placing life in the cosmic spotlight–at a meeting dedicated to Copernicus, no less–Carter was flying in the face of a scientific worldview that began nearly 500 years ago when the Polish astronomer dislodged Earth and humanity from center stage in the grand scheme of things.

Carter proposed two interpretations of the anthropic principle. The "weak" anthropic principle simply says that we are living in a special time and place in the universe where life is possible. Life couldn't have survived in the very early universe before stars formed, so the universe had to have reached a certain age and stage of evolution before life could arise.

The "strong" anthropic principle makes a much bolder statement. It asserts that the laws of physics themselves are biased toward life. To quote Freeman Dyson, a renowned physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the strong anthropic principle implies that "the universe knew we were coming."

A Wild Profusion

The anthropic principle languished on the fringes of science for years. Physicists regarded it as an interesting idea, but the real action in the field lay elsewhere. And in the late 1970s, Linde, then a professor at the prestigious Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, was in the thick of that action. At the time, he wasn't interested in the anthropic principle at all; he was trying to understand the physics of the Big Bang. Linde and other researchers knew that something was missing from the conventional theory of the Big Bang, because it couldn't explain a key puzzling fact about the universe: its remarkable uniformity.

Strikingly, the temperature of space is everywhere the same, just 2.7 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. How could different regions of the universe, separated by such enormous distances, all have the same temperature?

In the standard version of the Big Bang, they couldn't. The universe as a whole has been cooling ever since it emerged from the fireball of the Big Bang. But there's a problem: For all of it to reach the same temperature, different regions of the universe would have to exchange heat, just as ice cubes and hot tea have to meet to reach the uniform temperature of iced tea?. But as Einstein proved, nothing–including heat–can travel faster than the speed of light. In the conventional theory of the Big Bang, there simply hasn't been enough time since the universe was born for every part of the cosmos to have connected with every other part and cooled to the same temperature.

MIT physicist Alan Guth found a viable, but flawed, solution to the puzzle in 1981. Linde shored up that work shortly thereafter, making improvements to overcome those flaws. In a nutshell, Guth and Linde proposed that the universe underwent a colossal growth spasm in the first instants of its existence, a phenomenon called inflation. Today widely accepted as the standard version of the Big Bang theory, inflation holds that regions of the universe that are currently separated by many billions of light-years were once close enough to each other that they could exchange heat and reach the same temperature before they were wildly super-sized. Problem solved.

By the mid-1980s Linde and Tufts University physicist Alex Vilenkin had come up with a dramatic new twist that remains nearly as controversial now as it was then. They argued that inflation was not a one-off event but an ongoing process throughout the universe, where even now different regions of the cosmos are budding off, undergoing inflation, and evolving into essentially separate universes. The same process will occur in each of those new universes in turn, a process Linde calls eternal chaotic inflation.

Linde has spent much of the past 20 years refining that idea, showing that each new universe is likely to have laws of physics that are completely different from our own. The latest iteration of his theory provides a natural explanation for the anthropic principle. If there are vast numbers of other universes, all with different properties, by pure odds at least one of them ought to have the right combination of conditions to bring forth stars, planets, and living things.

"In some other universe, people there will see different laws of physics," Linde says. "They will not see our universe. They will see only theirs. They will look around and say, 'Here is our universe, and we must construct a theory that uniquely predicts that our universe must be the way we see it, because otherwise it is not a complete physics.' Well, this would be a wrong track because they are in that universe by chance."

Most physicists demurred. There wasn't any good reason to believe in the reality of other universes–at least not until near the beginning of the new millennium, when astronomers made one of the most remarkable discoveries in the history of science.

The Accelerating Universe

In 1998 two teams of researchers observing distant super–novas–exploding stars–found that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The discovery was baffling. Just about everyone had expected that the cosmic expansion, which started with the Big Bang, must be gradually slowing down, braked by the collective gravitational pull of all the galaxies and other matter out there. But built into the very fabric of space, it seems, is some unknown form of energy–physicists call it simply dark energy–that is pushing everything apart. Many cosmologists were skeptical at first, but follow-up observations with the Hubble Space Telescope, along with independent studies of radiation left over from the time of the Big Bang, have powerfully confirmed the reality of dark energy.

The idea that empty space might contain energy was not the part that surprised physicists. Ever since the birth of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, they have known that innumerable "virtual" particles pop into and out of existence all around us, a sort of quantum white noise, always there but forever beneath our notice. What astonished them was the peculiar specificity of the amount: exactly enough to accelerate expansion, yet not so much that the universe would rapidly rip itself apart. The observable amount of dark energy appears to be another one of those strange anthropic properties, calibrated to allow planets, stars, and us.

"If [dark energy] had been any bigger, there would have been enough repulsion from it to overwhelm the gravity that drew the galaxies together, drew the stars together, and drew Earth together," Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind says. "It's one of the greatest mysteries in physics. All we know is that if it were much bigger we wouldn't be here to ask about it."

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, agrees. "This is the one fine-tuning that seems to be extreme, far beyond what you could imagine just having to accept as a mere accident," he says.

The Multiverse on a String

Dark energy makes it impossible to ignore the multiverse theory.Another branch of physics–string theory–lends support as well. Although experimental evidence for string theory is still lacking, many physicists believe it to be their best candidate for a theory of everything, a comprehensive description of the universe, from quarks to quasars. According to string theory, the ultimate constituents of physical reality are not particles but minuscule vibrating strings whose different oscillations give rise to all the particles and forces in the universe. Although string theory is enormously complex, requiring a total of 11 dimensions to work correctly, it is a mathematically convincing way to knit together all the known laws of physics.

In 2000, however, new theoretical work threatened to unravel string theory. Joe Polchinski at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Raphael Bousso at the University of California at Berkeley calculated that the basic equations of string theory have an astronomical number of different possible solutions, perhaps as many as 101,000. Each solution represents a unique way to describe the universe. This meant that almost any experimental result would be consistent with string theory; the theory could never be proved right or wrong.

Some critics say this realization dooms string theory as a scientific enterprise. Others insist it is yet another clue that the multiverse is real. Susskind, a leading proponent of that interpretation, thinks the various versions of string theory may describe different universes that are all real. He believes the anthropic principle, the multiverse, and string theory are converging to produce a coherent, if exceedingly strange, new view in which our universe is just one of a multitude–one that happened to be born with the right kind of physics for our kind of life.

"Some people would call this the great disaster of string theory, that instead of giving rise to a single theory, it gave rise to something that is so diverse we can never make any sense out of it," Susskind says. "Others would say, 'Ah, this is exactly what we need for eternal inflation, for the multiverse, for anthropic thinking, and so forth.'?"

Prove It

Linde's recent research has helped solidify the connection between string theory and the multiverse. Some physicists have long embraced the notion that the extra dimensions of string theory play a key role in shaping the properties of new universes spawned during eternal chaotic inflation. When a new universe sprouts from its parent, the concept goes, only three of the dimensions of space predicted by string theory will inflate into large, full-blown, inhabitable spaces. The other dimensions of space will remain essentially invisible–but nonetheless will influence the form the universe takes. Linde and his colleagues figured out how the invisible dimensions stayed compact and went on to propose billions of permutations, each giving rise to a unique universe.

Linde's ideas may make the notion of a multiverse more plausible, but they do not prove that other universes are really out there. The staggering challenge is to think of a way to confirm the existence of other universes when every conceivable experiment or observation must be confined to our own. Does it make sense to talk about other universes if they can never be detected?

I put that question to Cambridge University astrophysicist Martin Rees, the United Kingdom's Astronomer Royal. We meet at his residence at Trinity College, in rooms on the west side of a meticulously groomed courtyard, directly across from an office once occupied by Isaac Newton.

Rees, an early supporter of Linde's ideas, agrees that it may never be possible to observe other universes directly, but he argues that scientists may still be able to make a convincing case for their existence. To do that, he says, physicists will need a theory of the multiverse that makes new but testable predictions about properties of our own universe. If experiments confirmed such a theory's predictions about the universe we can see, Rees believes, they would also make a strong case for the reality of those we cannot. String theory is still very much a work in progress, but it could form the basis for the sort of theory that Rees has in mind.

"If a theory did gain credibility by explaining previously unexplained features of the physical world, then we should take seriously its further predictions, even if those predictions aren't directly testable," he says. "Fifty years ago we all thought of the Big Bang as very speculative. Now the Big Bang from one milli–second onward is as well established as anything about the early history of Earth."

The credibility of string theory and the multiverse may get a boost within the next year or two, once physicists start analyzing results from the Large Hadron Collider, the new, $8 billion particle accelerator built on the Swiss-French border. If string theory is right, the collider should produce a host of new particles. There is even a small chance that it may find evidence for the mysterious extra dimensions of string theory. "If you measure something which confirms certain elaborations of string theory, then you've got indirect evidence for the multiverse," says Bernard Carr, a cosmologist at Queen Mary University of London.

Support for the multiverse might also come from some upcoming space missions. Susskind says there is a chance that the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, scheduled for launch early next year, could lend a hand. Some multiverse models predict that our universe must have a specific geometry that would bend the path of light rays in specific ways that might be detectable by Planck, which will analyze radiation left from the Big Bang. If Planck's observations match the predictions, it would suggest the existence of the multiverse.

When I ask Linde whether physicists will ever be able to prove that the multiverse is real, he has a simple answer. "Nothing else fits the data," he tells me. "We don't have any alternative explanation for the dark energy; we don't have any alternative explanation for the smallness of the mass of the electron; we don't have any alternative explanation for many properties of particles.

"What I am saying is, look at it with open eyes. These are experimental facts, and these facts fit one theory: the multiverse theory. They do not fit any other theory so far. I'm not saying these properties necessarily imply the multiverse theory is right, but you asked me if there is any experimental evidence, and the answer is yes. It was Arthur Conan Doyle who said, 'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'?"

What About God?

For many physicists, the multiverse remains a desperate measure, ruled out by the impossibility of confirmation. Critics see the anthropic principle as a step backward, a return to a human-centered way of looking at the universe that Copernicus discredited five centuries ago. They complain that using the anthropic principle to explain the properties of the universe is like saying that ships were created so that barnacles could stick to them.

"If you allow yourself to hypothesize an almost unlimited portfolio of different worlds, you can explain anything," says John Polkinghorne, formerly a theoretical particle physicist at Cambridge University and, for the past 26 years, an ordained Anglican priest. If a theory allows anything to be possible, it explains nothing; a theory of anything is not the same as a theory of everything, he adds.

Supporters of the multiverse theory say that critics are on the wrong side of history. "Throughout the history of science, the universe has always gotten bigger," Carr says. "We've gone from geocentric to heliocentric to galactocentric. Then in the 1920s there was this huge shift when we realized that our galaxy wasn't the universe. I just see this as one more step in the progression. Every time this expansion has occurred, the more conservative scientists have said, 'This isn't science.' This is just the same process repeating itself."

If the multiverse is the final stage of the Copernican revolution, with our universe but a speck in an infinite megacosmos, where does humanity fit in? If the life-friendly fine-tuning of our universe is just a chance occurrence, something that inevitably arises in an endless array of universes, is there any need for a fine-tuner–for a god?

"I don't think that the multiverse idea destroys the possibility of an intelligent, benevolent creator," Weinberg says. "What it does is remove one of the arguments for it, just as Darwin's theory of evolution made it unnecessary to appeal to a benevolent designer to understand how life developed with such remarkable abilities to survive and breed."

On the other hand, if there is no multiverse, where does that leave physicists? "If there is only one universe," Carr says, "you might have to have a fine-tuner. If you don't want God, you'd better have a multiverse."

As for Linde, he is especially interested in the mystery of consciousness and has speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental component of the universe, much like space and time. He wonders whether the physical universe, its laws, and conscious observers might form an integrated whole. A complete description of reality, he says, could require all three of those components, which he posits emerged simultaneously. "Without someone observing the universe," he says, "the universe is actually dead."

Yet for all of his boldness, Linde hesitates when I ask whether he truly believes that the multiverse idea will one day be as well established as Newton's law of gravity and the Big Bang. "I do not want to predict the future," he answers. "I once predicted my own future. I had a very firm prediction. I knew that I was going to die in the hospital at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow near where I worked. I would go there for all my physical examinations. Once, when I had an ulcer, I was lying there in bed, thinking I knew this was the place where I was going to die. Why? Because I knew I would always be living in Russia. Moscow was the only place in Russia where I could do physics. This was the only hospital for the Academy of Sciences, and so on. It was quite completely predictable.

"Then I ended up in the United States. On one of my returns to Moscow, I looked at this hospital at the Academy of Sciences, and it was in ruins. There was a tree growing from the roof. And I looked at it and I thought, What can you predict? What can you know about the future?"

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Cosmic Coincidences

If these cosmic traits were just slightly altered, life as we know it would be impossible. A few examples:

Stars like the sun produce energy by fusing two hydrogen atoms into a single helium atom. During that reaction, 0.007 percent of the mass of the hydrogen atoms is converted into energy, via Einstein's famous e = mc2 equation. But if that percentage were, say, 0.006 or 0.008, the universe would be far more hostile to life. The lower number would result in a universe filled only with hydrogen; the higher number would leave a universe with no hydrogen (and therefore no water) and no stars like the sun.

The early universe was delicately poised between runaway expansion and terminal collapse. Had the universe contained much more matter, additional gravity would have made it implode. If it contained less, the universe would have expanded too quickly for galaxies to form.

Had matter in the universe been more evenly distributed, it would not have clumped together to form galaxies. Had matter been clumpier, it would have condensed into black holes.

Atomic nuclei are bound together by the so-called strong force. If that force were slightly more powerful, all the protons in the early universe would have paired off and there would be no hydrogen, which fuels long-lived stars. Water would not exist, nor would any known form of life.

Do What is Right

2009-07-30T20:41:00.006+08:00

From Wikipedia:

Chiune Sugihara (杉原千畝, Sugihara Chiune?, 1 January 1900 – 31 July 1986) was a Japanese diplomat, serving as Vice Consul for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania. Soon after the occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union, he helped several thousand Jews leave the country by issuing transit visas to Jewish refugees so that they could travel to Japan. Most of the Jews who escaped were refugees from Poland or residents of Lithuania. Sugihara wrote travel visas that facilitated the escape of more than 6000 Jewish refugees to Japanese territory risking his career and his family's life. Because of his actions in saving Jews from the Nazis, Sugihara was honored by Israel as Righteous Among the Nations.

When asked why he did what he did, he replied, "Do what is right because it is right. Then leave it alone."

I have come to the same conclusion in my own life. Do what is right. Doesn't make a damned difference what other people think or how they treat you.

Homosexuality

2009-07-26T14:23:00.008+08:00

A friend in Facebook asked where I got the inspiration for this topic. Well, believe it or not, I had a flashback in a public toilet - hoho! I was using the urinal when the cubical behind me opened and someone came out. For some reason, I half expected someone else to come out after him.

Which invoked memories of the time when two guys actually stepped out of the bathroom in my apartment, one after the other!

That was when I was still a Holy Joe studying in Sydney and sharing an apartment with some fellow believers. I was the de facto head of this Christian household.

One day, this skinny guy I met in church (let's call him Lex) approached me and said he had been kicked out of his flat. I didn't know what the reason was but being the compassionate soul I was (and still am), I offered him the spare room. He was very happy and quickly settled in.

Lex was a Chinese Malaysian and, despite his unusual predicament, had a brilliant mind - he was a medical student! God knows where he is now, but I wish him well.

I can't remember all the details but soon after, I realised something was amiss. Lex was bringing this Aussie chap home with him! One fine day, I caught them emerging from the shower, the first a few minutes before the second - to avoid being discovered!

Naturally, I felt totally betrayed! Lex knew I was a Christian and yet had the gall to use my premises as a venue for his sexual trysts. So I told him to leave.

He actually wept in front of me. And I had my first, and probably last, heart-to-heart talk with a gay man. Lex was effeminate in gesture and appearance, not one of those masculine gays like Rock Hudson. He told me homosexuals were very promiscuous - practically hopping from bed to bed. He told me many librarians in Sydney were gay. He could not study in the University library because the librarians - many old and wrinkled - kept hounding him for sex!

Lex said his brothers were all straight. From young, he had found the woman's naked body repulsive! The sight of bananas and rambutans (a hairy round fruit) attracted him! (I kid you not - that was what he told me!)

So what conclusion can I draw on the matter? There are definitely some people who are born gay. You can ask them to abstain from sex but you can't change them. At the same time, I think a permissive environment, like the one in the West, encourages straight men to experiment with gay sex. Some of them acquire the taste for it. It's a convenient lifestyle, after all. Men don't need foreplay or flowers, don't ask for commitment and, most important of all, don't get pregnant.

What's my take on the Anwar case? Let me answer that with a question. Gay men are not blind and fall for beauty like the rest of us. Do we honestly believe that a rich and powerful homosexual male would choose a partner like Dr Munawar Anees (bless him), when there are so many pretty young boys around? Enough said.

Germanophile

2009-07-12T14:11:00.034+08:00

There are Anglophiles and Francophiles. I happen to be a Germanophile and that basically means I have a healthy admiration for the German people.

A long long time ago, there was a black and white documentary on tv called The Valiant Years. (Valiant = courageous / heroic). I remember, very distinctly, watching this soldier jumping over a wall and a voice saying "The Germans counter attack." I did not have a clue what a German was, what the fighting was all about, zilch. I just liked the "square" helmet and I was hooked from that very moment. I have been siding the Germans ever since, but more in spirit than anything else. In war movies, soccer matches, whatever, for me it was always Deutschland uber Alles! Germany above all! I'm as loyal as a Manchester United fan!

And guess what? In the innocence of my youth, I had chosen one of the best horses in the race! The Germans are a truly remarkable people. They have assumed a low profile internationally after the horrors of WW2 and are loath to blow their own trumpet. So I will do it for them. Here are 10 of their most outstanding achievements.

1. Blitzkrieg (Lightning war). The Germans introduced a whole new way of conducting warfare using speedy mechanised units - light tanks, paratroopers, dive bombers, etc - to disable the enemy's command and communication structures.

2. The Panther tank. One of the best tanks in the Second World War, lovingly crafted by German engineers, who always placed quality above quantity.

3) The 88mm gun. Probably the most formidable anti-aircraft and anti-tank gun in the entire war.

4) The Tiger tank. The Germans took the 88mm gun and mounted it on a tank!

5) The Leopard Tank. Reputedly one of the best tanks in the world today.

6) The Messerschmitt ME262. The very first fighter-jet in the world!

7) The V1. This flying bomb is the grandfather of America's cruise missiles!

8) The V2. German rocket technology helped the Americans reach the moon.

9) 6 decades after the end of WW2, Germany has risen from the ashes to become the largest economy in Europe.

10) 1/4 the population of the USA, Germany is the biggest exporter in the world!

If you see my kids studying in a German university, you'll know why.

Gay Rooster

2009-06-28T08:03:00.003+08:00

A farmer buys a young rooster to impregnate his chickens. The young rooster struts into the barn and yells to the old rooster, “Get out, old man! This is my barn now!”

“Tell you what,” says the old rooster. “I’ll race you around the farm; winner gets all the chicks.”

The old rooster takes off toward the front of the house with the young rooster chasing him. The farmer takes one look at the roosters, pulls out his shotgun, and blows the young one away.

“Dammit,” says the farmer. “That’s the third gay rooster I’ve bought this month!”

Crime Scene Investigation

2009-06-28T07:48:00.006+08:00

An old man lived alone in Idaho. He wanted to spade his potato garden, but it was very hard work. His only son, Bubba, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament.

Dear Bubba:

I am feeling pretty bad because it looks like I won't be able to plant my potato garden this year. I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. If you were here, all my troubles would be over. I know you would dig the plot for me.
Love, Dad

A few days later, he received a letter from his son.

Dear Dad:

For heaven's sake, Dad, don't dig up that garden. That's where I buried the BODIES.

Love, Bubba

At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local Police showed up and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left. That same day, the old man received another letter from his son.

Dear Dad:

Go ahead and plant the potatoes now. It's the best I could do under the circumstances.

Love, Bubba

Dear God

2009-06-27T18:31:00.012+08:00

Once in a while I come across some hilarious story worth keeping. Here's one.

There was a man who worked for the Post Office whose job was to process all the mail that had illegible addresses.

One day, a letter came addressed in a shaky handwriting to God with no actual address. He thought he should open it to see what it was about.

The letter read:

Dear God,
I am an 83 year old widow, living on a very small pension. Yesterday someone stole my purse. It had $100 in it, which was all the money I had until my next pension payment. Next Sunday is Christmas, and I had invited two of my friends over for dinner. Without that money, I have nothing to buy food with, have no family to turn to, and you are my only hope. Can you please help me?
Sincerely, Edna

The postal worker was touched. He showed the letter to all the other workers. Each one dug into his or her wallet and came up with a few dollars.

By the time he made the rounds, he had collected $96, which they put into an envelope and sent to the woman. The rest of the day, all the workers felt a warm glow thinking of Edna and the dinner she would be able to share with her friends.

Christmas came and went. A few days later, another letter came from the same old lady to God. All the workers gathered around while the letter was opened.

It read:

Dear God,
How can I ever thank you enough for what you did for me? Because of your gift of love, I was able to fix a glorious dinner for my friends. We had a very nice day and I told my friends of your wonderful gift. By the way, there was $4 missing. I think it might have been those bastards at the post office.
Sincerely, Edna

[Art by Robb Mommaerts.]

A Tale of Two Christians

2009-06-07T10:34:00.022+08:00

I became a Christian in Secondary School when someone offered me the "free gift of Jesus Christ". I told my parents and all hell broke loose. My dad was dead set against it. We fought bitterly and I thought I was escaping to Christian nirvana when I left for Australia.

Prior to that, I had met A in a local church. He was a dynamic chap who seemed to be totally "empowered" by God and I wanted to learn from him. He was one of these Charismatics who believed that when the Holy Spirit filled you, you would be gifted with the ability to speak in foreign tongues, heal the sick, cast out demons, prophesy about the future, etc, as the New Testament apparently promised. I was very impressed and we ended up sharing a room in Sydney.

Which turned into two years of hell. We soon realised we didn't click and, as I was rather meek then, he became more and more domineering. The rest of the household consisted of the more traditional hymn-singing Protestants. A despised them and refused to join them in fellowship.

A attended a different church called Christian Life Centre and, in the following year, some of the church members formed "The Community of the Lamb", which consisted 4 households - 3 Aussie and 1 Asian. As I was still thirsting for spiritual knowledge and power, I decided to join them - on condition I did not share a room with A. When I returned from the hols, I found they had moved all my things into A's room and once again he had taken the window seat.

Within this household was a chap called B. He seemed to be in a perpetual state of depression, always moaning about something or other. He got out of bed around lunch time and missed lectures and tutorials. Yet he was was able to do well in exams just by looking at his friends' notes. Obviously a brilliant mind, despite his dejected appearance. B seemed to be the exact opposite of A.

While A was always grooming and preening himself and charming the girls with his guitar and dynamic Christian "leadership", B was agonising over the millions of lost souls marching daily into hell to burn for eternity. He would read the Bible in Malay, preparing for his inevitable return to the mission field in Malaysia. He would psych himself for detention under the Internal Security Act for sharing the Gospel with Muslims. A and B went to the same church, listened to the same sermons, read the same Bible, believed in the same doctrines, spoke and sang in tongues, etc etc - yet were poles apart!

We did the weekly shopping early in the morning and since B was always getting up late, the bananas would be gone by the time he stumbled into the kitchen. I suggested rationing the bananas but A immediately said no, it had to be first come, first served. I was such a wimp I didn't say anything more. But I knew things weren't right and, one day, confronted A with the Bible. His reply was a classic and something I will remember till the day I die.

He quoted 2 Corinthians 3: The letter kills but the Spirit gives life!

Meaning that the Bible no longer had authority over him as he was now filled and guided by the Holy Spirit! Meaning he could do no wrong!

I was stunned, struck absolutely dumb and had all the wind knocked out of me. How do you respond to a claim like that? It's Charismania taken to its logical conclusion - why bother with the Bible once you have the Holy Spirit which Jesus had promised as his replacement? You have become God!

That must have been the start of my disillusionment with Christianity. Today I am no longer a Christian and most churches have stopped promoting the baptism of the Holy Spirit as evidenced by speaking in tongues. A is in Singapore, probably practising a safe, easy, middle-class Christianity. B is in the bush somewhere, unmarried I heard, and ministering to the Orang Asli (aborigines), faithfully bringing them to Christ.

Guess which Christian I respect more?

6/4

2009-06-05T18:06:00.016+08:00

I have a copy of the Far Eastern Economic Review dated 15 June 1989 from my student days in Sydney. Bold white lettering on a black cover declares Rape of Peking. A large splotch of red signifies blood spilt. I kept the copy to remind myself of a remarkable event in history 20 years ago.

I was hanging out with some friends from Hongkong and Guangzhou at the time the news reached us. Only a few days before, kids were flying kites in Tiananmen in Beijing and there was happy talk about a new political openness in China. All of a sudden students around me were bursting into tears and shoving Chinese newspapers in my face. I could not read a word and felt secretly ashamed. These students were sick with fear and didn't know if they could ever go home! There was so much uncertainty.

Famous picture of a naive kid standing in front of tanks.

The following days I was glued to the radio at the office where I was doing my apprenticeship. There was news about tank battles between various army units on the outskirts of Beijing. China seemed to be on the verge of breaking up!

I had sided with the "pro-democracy" students naturally. After all, who doesn't want to fight corruption, implement constitutional rights, etc etc etc? But what did we expect the Chinese government to do? Hand over power to the students? A collapse of law and order would have led to chaos, with regional warlords grabbing power, distribution networks breaking down and thousands dying from starvation or violence. And the neo-colonial vultures would be swooping in to tear China into little controllable chunks.

Injured soldiers or policemen. [chinatoday.com]

Look at China today. After years of trying to "improve" China's behaviour, the West has gone bankrupt while China is on top of the world. What a unexpected turn of fortune. Even the USSR has disintegrated. Goes to show that China's decision to move cautiously has been right all along.

Tiananmen today. [chinasmack.com]

Olympic fireworks over TAM. [en.beijing2008.cn]

Bravo, China!

Don't Kill That Caterpillar!

2009-05-24T12:24:00.023+08:00

Know those lime plants that are so popular during Chinese New Year? Well, they are a favourite with caterpillars too. When I was a kid, I used to look out for these little critters and kill them off for chewing up my mom's limes. I look back with regret because they would have eventually become beautiful butterflies.

When I got a bit older and wiser, I collected the caterpillars in bottles and fed them with lime leaves until the larvae morphed into pupae and later emerged as beautiful flying insects. I don't think anything comes closer to perfection than a newly-born butterfly.

[Image by LC Goh.]

Remember that song by Joni Mitchell called Big Yellow Taxi? Here's part of the lyrics:

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot

They took all the trees
Put em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see em

Hey farmer farmer
Put away that DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
To put up a parking lot

They say that what man does not understand, man destroys. Ain't that the truth? We take paradise and turn it into a parking lot - for our convenience. And then worry about pollution and getting fat.

By paving every inch of ground, rain water runs straight into drains resulting in flash floods and massive traffic jams. Aren't we too clever for our own good?

When we see a field full of lalang grass, we worry about snakes and mosquitoes. Again we get it cleared and the rain washes the top soil away turning the land barren. I recently watched a documentary about rich black soil in northeast China. Apparently the soil is actually dead grass! So maybe we should just leave that lalang alone to rejuvenate the land!

Trees and vegetation hold a lot of carbon. They call the Amazon forest a giant "carbon sink". When jungles are cleared, the carbon is released into the air, causing global warming. The carbon is also absorbed by the seas, turning them acidic and killing off the coral. Our oceans are slowly becoming underwater deserts and garbage dumps!

These days, everybody is running around trying to reduce their "carbon footprint"! Well, one sure way to do that is to plant a tree! Why don't we go out and do just that? Instead of chopping everything down in the name of civilisation? The leaves will also filter out a lot of the dust from our polluted air and help our over-worked lungs.

It's really time we stopped treating nature as our enemy!

And I should go back to rearing those wonderful butterflies.

The Fairer Sex

2009-05-09T09:01:00.016+08:00

Once upon a time, when I was a mere laddie and tv was black-and-white, there was this almost-typical story about some peasant Chinese girl having to borrow money to save an ailing dad. She had to sign a contract she barely understood and, as a result, got trapped into slavery. I was young and innocent and I told myself that when I grew up I would use my money to save these girls, or some silly nonsense like that.

I'm a little odd in that way. Maybe it's because I don't have a sister. I often preferred chatting with women rather than go hang out with the boys. I found boys boring. Girls are more stimulating. (Heehee!) Maybe opposites attract. Maybe I found guys threatening as we are always competing over something. Maybe girls are more forgiving of my shortcomings.

Girls always give you things to eat. Girls always have things like toothpicks, tissue paper and nail-clippers handy. Girls think "Isn't he pitiful? Better comfort him," and I end up getting freebies. (Hahaha!)

I'm not gay, in case you are wondering. Once I wept for a week over some girl after attending her wedding dinner!

When I visited Shenzhen, someone took me to these "barber" shops where there were rows and rows of girls sitting there waiting for clients. I felt so sorry for them I could not look them in the eyes. So I looked up at the ceiling! I must have been the oddest guy they have ever seen!

Another time, I found myself alone in the bedroom of a young lady, also in Shenzhen. She said I could look at her CD collection. To be honest, it was totally intoxicating. If she had stood at the doorway, I wouldn't have had the strength to get pass her. But she didn't. And I stepped out. Today she is married to a German and we are the best of friends.

I saw both my sons coming into this world. I cut the umbilical cord for my first son and got blood all over my clothes. I saw the blood pouring out like a waterfall. Call me mystical if you like, but to me the woman's private area is a sacred place. It's the doorway between two worlds. I believe there is a long line of babies queuing up in heaven to get into this world through that doorway. So I prefer not to mess about with it.

I wasn't thinking about moms when I wrote this, but it's relevant. So Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers out there!

[From a young lady in Zhangjiagang (9 May 2009):

to be honest, i sometimes feel it is difficult to find a man who respects women, so your post is a refreshing read :) thanks!]

[From a gentleman in Kuala Lumpur (9 May 2009):

Good article - your writings show earnestness, mostly joy. That's important - enjoying what you do.]

[From a young lady in Jakarta (10 May 2009):

I love your blog about Mother's Day! especially what you wrote about how you see the woman's private area as a doorway of two worlds....that's the coolest words I've ever read or hear from a MAN! ^___^
Tell you the truth...its difficult nowadays to find a man who can respect a woman the way you do! Most of them only see a woman as a wife who has to cook, deliver baby, take are the kids, do laundry, ironing, and other stuff that most housewives do!
Very very few (or perhaps only YOU?) who could respect women like that, I admire your thought ^___^
I wished my husband could be like you a bit...hahahaha!! *joking!*]

Reversal of Roles

2009-05-03T14:26:00.021+08:00

Back in 1988, an American guy called David Henry Hwang (probably a long lost cousin of mine, hehe!) produced a play called M. Butterfly, based on the true story of a French diplomat (Bernard Boursicot) who fell in love with a Chinese opera singer (Shi Pei-Pu) only to discover 20 years later that the latter was a man!

And that seems to be a delusion the entire western world has been indulging in for a long time - the idea that the East is coy and submissive, and therefore feminine, while the West is brash and aggressive, and therefore masculine. Well, the mirage is fading and the roles reversing even as I write.

If you ask me, the process started during the Second World War when the Yanks had their Asian baptism of fire fighting the ferocious Japanese who contested every inch of ground with banzai and kamikaze attacks.

A few years later, lightly-armed Chinese troops pushed American forces half-way down the Korean peninsula, resulting in the longest retreat in US military history.

The final blow came when the US army was kicked out of Vietnam after losing the longest war they had ever fought. This is after a merciless genocidal campaign to bomb Vietnam "back to the stone age".

By the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military had dropped more than 7 million tons of bombs-- more than twice the total tonnage dropped on Europe and Asia during all of World War 2--on a country roughly the size of New Mexico. This is almost one 500 pound bomb for every man, woman, and child in the country. Twenty million bomb craters are all over Vietnam. (http://rwor.org/)

Have a look at this image from Google Earth. This is just one area in Laos. Each point represents one US air attack, meaning 20 to 40 bombs. The stacks represent multiple attacks.

The US often used B52s ...

and napalm.

This is a famous photo of a Vietnamese girl who had to tear off all her burning clothes after she was hit by napalm.

And this is the same person, many years later. Her name is Kim Phuc. She cannot perspire through the damaged skin on her back.

I really have to take my hat off to the Vietnamese people. How many countries can absorb such punishment from the USA and still stand up?

Yet after inflicting all that inhuman savagery on a poor developing nation, the US still managed to lose the war. If I were them, I would quickly conclude there is no way to win another land war in East Asia. The meek and gentle Oriental is not what he seems when you push him too far.

With China's peaceful rising and the West's financial self-destruction, the traditional roles played by East and West are reversing. We are watching history unfolding before our eyes.

[From a gentleman in Kuala Lumpur (5 May 2009):

The US probably knows that too. That is why they have coined the term 'smart power'. That points to a more comprehensive and coordinated usage of all resources, including asymmetric warfare strategies, in their arsenal in the future. No longer will they just use manned huey helicopters or strato-fortresses and phantoms. And carrier groups are just open targets for capitation torpedoes in the high seas. Only the unseen offer new grounds. Man-less drones and cruise missiles such as used in Afghanistan and Lebanon, as well as the future of nanobot military technologies coupled to virtual reality throw-off camouflage and high frequency laser satellite guns .... these are the future possibilities. They are predicated on what they think their adversaries will be thinking..namely the less technology, the more the need to concentrate manpower. So that when manpower is concentrated, the target is magnified, and the use of manless destroy technologies become more efficient on kill ratios besides being more politically acceptable back home while shoring up the military-industrial complex that has been the cause of worldwide destabilisation over the last century.]

Naked on the Battlefield

2009-04-24T20:34:00.046+08:00

How many of you have actually read a book about the Vietnam War, fiction or non-fiction? Very few, I’ll bet. Well, I’ve read plenty. On my bookshelf alone, I have seven:

Bloods by Wallace Terry

Chickenhawk by Robert Mason

Citadel by Dale A Dye

Nam by Mark Baker

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

The 13th Valley by John M Del Vecchio

The Tunnels of Cu Chi by Tom Mangold and John Penycate

But before you go pick up one of these books, be warned - it can be a shocking experience. Here’s a sample from the book The 13th Valley:

“Shee-it, Egan,” a voice boomed out. “I don’t know how you kin smoke them gook cigarettes. They smell like they come outa the asshole of a dyin gook whore.”

And another:

“All right,” Egan boomed from over beside the dead soldier, “who’s got the mothafucker’s ear? You fucken pig.” Egan charged toward Denhardt. “You mothafucker. You low life cunt fuck. Put that ear back on that man’s head.” Denhardt tried to protest. Egan raged more furiously. “BULLSHIT!” He yelled. “Either you put that fucken ear back on that fucken dink’s head or I’m gonna cut yers off en nail em on him. You fucken savage.” Egan spat. He grabbed Denhardt by the shoulders of his shirt, yanked him forward and threw him toward the body. “Bury that fucker before the stench makes me vomit in your mouth.”

In case you didn’t know, a “gook” or a “dink” is slang for anyone racially Asian.

This is from the book Citadel:

‘This man was hit by three rounds of an AK burst at close range. One round apparently got under his helmet and took the top of his skull off causing massive brain damage.’

Corpsman pulled back the battle dressing covering the top of the grunt’s head. Brain was a pulsing, red-tinged mass, spurting frothy blood where cranial arteries had ruptured. Entire top of his skull had been taken off by the enemy round. More diagnosis.

‘A second round entered the chest area under one arm and exited here.’ Doc pulled another battle dressing away from the left side of the man’s heaving chest. Heart and lung, both bravely pumping through a churned and torn mass of rib bone and gristle. As he inhaled, a putrid foam spurted from the exit wound. Corpsman replaced the battle dressing to keep him from losing any more blood.

‘Finally, the third round caught him almost full in the navel. Look at this shit.’ Peeled away a large bandage covering the grunt’s lower abdomen. Shiny intestine surged up like bloated blood sausage through a huge rent in the man’s belly. Nauseating smell. Similar to human shit but much stronger. Smell of waste, decay. Smell of violent death.

Take a look at the following pictures of American soldiers in East Asian wars. Look into the eyes. Do you see something eerily familiar in all of them?

Pacific Campaign, Second World War

Korean War

Korean War

Vietnam War

Vietnam War

A bit like looking into the eyes of insanity, no? The soldiers appear to be stunned by the ferocity of the fighting. Yet the warmongers in Washington DC just keep on sending these boys out to die on foreign soil.

My experience in Australia (see previous blog entry) distorted my perception of the white man (and woman) and it took me a while before I could accept him for what he truly is - a mere human being with fears, insecurities, weaknesses, irrationalities, etc, -just like everyone else. In the war zone, I saw the white man stripped of aura, bravado, pretense, nicety, hype and hubris, often confused, bewildered and helpless, sometimes in great pain, sorrow or terror. In short, I began to empathise with him. I could see through his eyes. I could think like him without being like him. We could connect at a totally different level.

Racism

2009-04-14T13:15:00.005+08:00

Once in a while, I come across some white boy in China complaining that the Chinese are racist because he is forbidden to date someone's pretty daughter. I thought if all you have in your horny little head is sex, sex and more sex, I'm not letting you near my daughter either!

Amazing what gets labeled as racism these days. In contrast, here is something I experienced back in my university days in Sydney.

I used to live very near the University of New South Wales and one night, a friend and I were cycling home after some Christian fellowship activity. It was very close to midnight and the streets in the Eastern Suburbs were fairly empty. My friend is a Chinese Malaysian, just like me. As we rounded a corner, we encountered a car full of skinheads. If you don't know what a skinhead is, the photo (from the Aussie movie Romper Stomper) will give you a good idea. They trailed our bicycles, screaming and hurling abuse and hate at us all the way. The main university gates were locked but fortunately we found one of those little pedestrian entrances that our bicycles could get through and we managed to slip into campus.

Whatever the skinheads set out to do, they achieved it. I was truly traumatized. I was in shock for a week and didn’t want to step out of the house. (Fortunately, it was the holidays and I didn’t have to.)

I don’t know if I was in Oz at the wrong time, but that was even before Pauline Hanson came along. Already there was hate graffiti all over the place: ASIAN INVASION! TWO WONGS DON’T MAKE A WRIGHT! People tell me Australia is such a nice friendly country. Sad to say, I didn’t leave with such a rosy impression.

In fact, I have never experienced anything remotely similar in Malaysia even though I’ve lived most of my life here. The Malays really are a generous people by nature and I am grateful for that. I say that even though my dad came close to dying in a race riot back in 1969.

To me, racism is when someone tries to harm you or deliberately cause you to fall because you are of a different culture, race or religion. So be careful who you call a racist.

[From young lady in Zhangjiagang (14 Apr 2009):

Just read ur latest entry. I totally agree with what you've said. I was fortunate though that i didn't have a similar experience to yours when i was in Oz. Ppl in Melbourne are generally nice and more accepting. And you know, I've never been in a more race/culture-tolerant country than Malaysia, and I'm grateful, proud even, to be a Malaysian. Even more so now that I've been to other countries and seen more of the world.

I wish I had more time to blog. Been bz lately. Well, do keep blogging. Your posts are always thought-provoking. I like your writing. You really should try and get yourself published. As for me, I'm still struggling to get just one piece of short story together. Wish I had your flair for writing.]

[From a young man in Fuzhou (16 Apr 2009):

I had quick look at your blog "Racism". That impressed me a lot, let me say this: I will feel safe in China, because I stay in an place that I belong to. If I want to live in America, I will be judged as invader because I may hurt or take off their interest, I mean something about culture, economy, politics, religion or something else. I beleive that when God creat human being, we are destined to be called a family that each human being need to recognize this point. We learn to respect each lives on the earth.. Racism will make human being ruined from this earth. In my personal opinion, love make peace, hatred cause war. when this world come to being full of hatred, we won't feel safe. each country has its nuclear weapon aimed at another countries, each people point gun to another people. We will call the time the end of the world, wouldn't we?]

The Goldilocks Enigma

2009-04-08T21:17:00.009+08:00

A lot of people in the "rational" West will have you believe that only dumb people accept the existence of God. I want to demonstrate that one can argue for God and do it well - ie rationally, logically, reasonably and even scientifically. So don't let pseudo-scientists bully you into thinking they have a monopoly on knowledge or brains. They don't.

You will notice that all my arguments are based on information sourced from science books and magazines. I don't read religious literature. I'm a Deist. I don't have religion.

Back in 2007, physicist Paul Davies came out with a book called The Goldilocks Enigma. Remember the story of Goldilocks and the 3 bears? That little blond kid found Father Bear's porridge too hot and Mother Bear's too cold. Baby Bear's was just right. The Goldilocks Enigma simply asks "Why is the universe just right for life?"

This is something from The Australian about the book:

It deals with this deeply intriguing circumstance: "If almost any of the basic features of the universe, from the properties of atoms to the distribution of galaxies, were different, life would very probably be impossible." Like Goldilocks's porridge, the universe is just right. Our existence hangs by a thread.

According to Davies, there are more than 30 known examples in physics and cosmology of extraordinarily precise fine-tuning. For instance, the ratio of the mass of the neutron to that of the proton is 1.00137841870. Without that slight deviation in weight (the neutron is about 0.1 per cent heavier), there would be no atoms, no chemistry, no life.

Davies details several other mind-boggling examples. The "biggest fix" of all, he contends, relates to so-called dark energy, the anti-gravity force that permeates space. That force is almost but not completely counteracted by negative dark energy: the cancellation effect is complete to one part in 120 powers of 10. Life would not be possible if the net force were different by a single power of 10. The odds of the right value having arisen by chance is the same as tossing heads 400 times in a row.

The scientists will try to explain it all away, but the indisputable fact remains that for some uncanny unsettling reason, everything in the universe came together precisely for life to exist.

[Graphic from kinderisfun.com]

Closed Systems

2009-04-03T23:38:00.020+08:00

Here's something for the atheists to chew (or choke) on. :-)

Know what's sterilisation? According to Wikipedia, it's any process that effectively kills or eliminates transmissible agents (such as fungi, bacteria, viruses, spore forms, etc.) from a surface, equipment, article of food or medication, or biological culture medium.

Why do people bother to sterilise food, drinks, surgical instruments, etc? So that bad organisms don't get into your body and harm you.

Once upon a time, people (including some scientists) believed in spontaneous generation, which basically means living things popping up automatically from non-living things.

That was until sterilisation was discovered. It has been proven conclusively that once something is dead, it doesn't come back to life. So when you open a can from the supermarket, you don't expect it to be full of germs (or worms).

The food is in a closed system, ie the aluminium can. Life cannot form in a closed system, as anybody in the food industry will be happy to assure you.

So - if spontaneous generation has been debunked - how can life originate on the planet earth, which was ... wait for it ... a closed system?

I'd love to see the "scientists" twist themselves into a knot, trying to explain this one! :-)

Science Nugget

2009-03-15T07:36:00.011+08:00

I read science magazines and once in a while I come across something interesting or delightful that should be shared. Here's a quick question.

My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming ... what? (Answer below.)

Answer: Planets! It's a mnemonic for the Solar System: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. (From BBC Focus Magazine.)

[Image from photobucket.com.]

Race

2009-03-01T09:29:00.008+08:00

I thought I'd put this on record.

When grandpa moved from Fujian province in China to Malaya, he married a Malay girl (from Kuala Kangsar, I believe) and begat 7 kids, including my father. Mom is pure Chinese. So I'm actually 1/4 Malay. You didn't need to convert back in those days, which is why I'm not a Muslim.

My wife's maternal great-grand mother was Javanese. So she's 1/8 Javanese and 7/8 Chinese.

Which makes my kids ... you do the math!

They say there is a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Malaysia has been a melting pot of colours from all over. So who's pinched the gold?

[Image from kidsfunfile.com]

The Poor Palestinians

2008-12-30T22:23:00.008+08:00

Have you noticed that a lot of nice Christians become absolutely merciless when it comes to the plight of Palestinians? They will defend Israel to the death no matter what atrocities the country may commit.

Well, Israel just slaughtered 300+ Palestinians in Gaza as punishment for lobbing rockets into the former. And Christians are again vocal in supporting Israel's right to genocide and ethnic cleansing. Yes, even Christians in Malaysia!

I guess you have to thank the Old Testament of the Bible for this phenomenon. Here are two interesting passages that mention Gaza and the Philistines who lived there. Gaza is part of the Promised Land the God of the Old Testament set aside for the Jews.

Zephaniah 2:
4 For Gaza will be abandoned And Ashkelon a desolation; Ashdod will be driven out at noon And Ekron will be uprooted.
5 Woe to the inhabitants of the seacoast, The nation of the Cherethites! The word of the LORD is against you, O Canaan, land of the Philistines; And I will destroy you So that there will be no inhabitant.

Jeremiah 47:
4 On account of the day that is coming To destroy all the Philistines, To cut off from Tyre and Sidon Every ally that is left; For the LORD is going to destroy the Philistines, The remnant of the coastland of Caphtor.
5 “Baldness has come upon Gaza; Ashkelon has been ruined. O remnant of their valley, How long will you gash yourself?
6 “Ah, sword of the LORD, How long will you not be quiet? Withdraw into your sheath; Be at rest and stay still.
7 “How can it be quiet, When the LORD has given it an order? Against Ashkelon and against the seacoast— There He has assigned it"

The Old Testament God seems to have nothing but hate for the Philistines. The legacy is the present day Christian's contempt of the Palestinians. Why be merciful when God has already ordained that they be slaughtered to make way for the Chosen People, the Jews?

[First image by Carlos Latuff. Second image from stevenfeuerstein.com]

Black Cat, White Cat

2008-12-24T17:57:00.005+08:00

As I said, this is not a political blog but let me lay my political beliefs on the table now, so that there are no doubts whatsoever.

Remember what Deng said about cats? "It doesn't matter if the cat is white or black; if it catches mice, it's a good cat."

That's my politics in a nutshell. I'm a pragmatist, like Deng. There are good points and bad points in both capitalism and communism. So why get hung up on ideology? If it works, keep it!

My primary concern is for this country to be able to compete with rising power-houses like China and India. For that to happen, we need unity among the races. If BN wants to keep playing racial games, we should kick the buggers out.

[Picture is from cats-on-tshirts.com]

Why I am NOT a Christian

2008-12-14T09:49:00.016+08:00

Do you think kids who are 6 and 8 years old should be made to say grace everyday, dragged to sunday school and camp, and forced to memorise verses from the bible? Well, it's happening to my sons, despite my strong objections. There are even plans to turn my house into a venue for prayer meetings and bible study. My son has just received his first bible. I have been hammering the disciples of scientism. It's about time I say something about christianity.

BBC Focus magazine asked Arthur C Clarke (in Dec 2007 just before his death): What is the greatest threat that we, as a race, are facing?

He replied: Organised religion polluting our minds as it pretends to delivery morality and spiritual salvation. It's spreading the most malevolent mind virus of all.

According to the bible, Jesus came to save the world. May I ask how many people has he successfully saved so far? And why should the people that he failed to save, burn in hell for eternity? Why should people like my father burn in hell for eternity? What has he ever done to hurt anyone? If my dad is writhing in agony now just because he didn't become a christian, then I'd much rather join him than all the hypocritical christians who are busy having parties while millions are marching daily into hell.

Jesus said that if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can move mountains. How many mountains have the Christians moved? Name me one. Jesus said you can walk on water. Show me a few Christains who have walked on water. Need I go on? All I see in church on Sundays are christians who are striving to believe more, trust more, serve more, pray more, give more, sacrifice more, yield more, etc etc. They are basically weekly faith reinforcement sessions. Why is this necessary if God is real for the christian?

Why is the God of christianity so small and weak? I am a Deist and my God is infinitely bigger! So much so that I'm probably presumptuous to call him (or her) Creator. Instead of creating objects like we do he probably willed everything into existence. He is so big that I cannot speak for him. So big that I cannot put him in a box, like some people are so fond of doing.

And why is the christian god so hung up over the Jews that he made them his chosen people? So obsessed that he COMMANDED them to conduct merciless genocide and ethnic cleansing on the Palestinian people in order for the Israelites to reclaim the "Promised Land"? Why is god so utterly heartless that he cannot feel the suffering of the Palestinians? Why is he so petty that he has to focus all his attention on a tiny piece of land in the Middle East when there is infinite space in the awesome universe?

Sorry to say this, but the Gospel to me is like mouldy bread that the Western world has already rejected and is now gobbled up hungrily by the rest of the world, who seems to think it's a panacea for all their problems.

[The image above is from theleftcoaster.com]

RPK!

2008-12-09T21:16:00.002+08:00

This is not a political blog but RPK is one guy I really respect.

I'll leave you to find out why. :-)

This photo was taken at the PJ Civic Centre on 7 Dec 2008.

Reason

2008-12-06T13:43:00.006+08:00

I love the book Ideas That Changed the World by Felipe Armesto. (See earlier post for a review.) It has taught me so many things.

Here's an interesting passage from the chapter "The Idea That Numbers are Real":

Once it became entrenched in the learned tradition of the Western world, most people believed in - or simply accepted - the reality of numbers. It enabled them to accept that reality can be invisible, untouchable and yet still accessible to reason. This deduction paved the way for an alliance between science, reason and religion that has lasted until our own times.

I googled the words science and reason and discovered that most people seem to consider the two words synonymous. As if all scientists are reasonable and all reasonable people are scientists. But to Felipe, the words science, reason and religion mean quite different things altogether. We need reason to deal with things that are invisible and untouchable (or cannot be measured scientifically). Things like God and numbers, for example. You can say belief in God is unscientific but you can't say belief in God is unreasonable.

Which brings me to Deism. I was a church-goer for 10 years and got totally disillusioned. I decided to cast all previous religious knowledge of God aside and start from scratch. I was thinking like a Deist before I even knew the word existed. Deists stand apart from both science and religion. So does Reason.

Felipe: Yet reason has helped to temper or restrain rival approaches to regulating the world such as systems founded on dogma or charisma or emotion or naked power. Alongside science, tradition and intuition, reason has been part of our essential tool kid for discovering truths.

Amen.

[Clip art from http://estabrook.ci.lexington.ma.us]

Mr Natural Selection

2008-10-27T22:06:00.000+08:00

Why are scientists so fond of contradicting themselves? Scientists like to believe they are the most logical people on earth but time and time again I find them trying to rationalise their own preconceived notions. I love reading science magazines but I find this dishonesty or blindness very frustrating. Sometimes I think I’m more scientific than the scientists!

Here’s something from Isaac Asimov.

Indeed, humans, as creatures who behave in a purposeful, motivated way, naturally tend to attribute purpose even to inanimate nature. Scientists call this attitude teleological, and try to avoid such a way of thinking and speaking as much as they can. But in describing the results of evolution, it is so convenient to speak in terms of development toward more efficient ends that even among scientists all but the most fanatical purists occasionally lapse into teleology. Let us however try to avoid teleology in considering the development of the nervous system and the brain. Nature did not design the brain, it came about as the result of a long series of evolutionary accidents, so to speak, which happened to produce helpful features that at each stage gave an advantage to organisms possessing them. In the fight for survival, an animal that was more sensitive to changes in the environment than its competitors, and could respond to them faster, would be favored by natural selection. If, for instance, an animal happened to possess some spot on its body that was exceptionally sensitive to light, the advantage would be so great that evolution of eye spots, and eventually of eyes, would follow almost inevitably. [Asimov’s New Guide to Science (Revised Edition) 1987.]

First, Asimov said everything happened by accident. No design, no guide, no aim, no purpose whatsoever. He called the human brain the most complex object in the known universe, but we got that purely by a happy series of meaningless events. (By the way, the brain is so complex scientists today are still struggling to figure out how it works.)

Right after that, he brought up “natural selection”. So there is a purpose after all - survival! For some strange reason, all life is fighting to survive. That is the standard or benchmark all living organisms aim for. And the guy who set the criteria is a chap called Natural Selection. Whatever he is, all scientists agree that he is NOT God! Call him Mother Nature or Mr Evolution, but never never Creator! That’s a sin that will get you excommunicated from the Church of Scientism!

So there are two things all good scientists accept without a hint of irony:
1) There is no God because we can’t prove there is no God.
2) Everything happened by accident but guided by natural selection.
Amazing mental gymnastics, if you ask me.

Here’s another passage I came across recently.

Piet immediately suggested a design for multiply nested binary star graphstellation that would have the delightful technical designation “hyper-super-duper double-star system”: a pair of a pair of a pair of double stars. 16 total. This configuration would be stable and unlikely to interact with nearby stars. It also would do no harm to the solar system or life on Earth, should we end up as part of the formation. The set-up phase would coax pairs of stars into headings destined to bring them into mutual embrace in such a way that the pairings would eventually pair as well, and so on. Such a structure would be vanishingly unlikely to come about naturally, and it would be recognizable at a great distance. An alien observer wouldn’t have to be able to discern all the individual stars in order to notice that something funny was going on; the alien would only have to note subtle changes in the qualities of the light, wobbles in the position, and other clues. [Jaron Lanier; Discover; February 2008.]

What this guy is proposing is to adjust the positions of nearby stars using the gravitational pull of space crafts so that aliens from outer space can detect our presence. Which begs my question, if we can look at the human brain and say it was created by a series of accidents over millions of years, why should an alien look at our “graphstellation” and conclude it’s man-made?

Enough said!

[Image from crystalinks.com]

Book Review

2008-09-11T17:59:00.000+08:00

The Nature of Science: A - Z Guide to the Laws & Principles Governing the Universe
By James Trefil
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company, 433 pages
ISBN 0-618-31938-7

My dear sons,

We all miss your grandpa dearly. Once in a while I still “talk“ to him during contemplative moments. Is he able to “hear” me from where he is right now? Has he traveled to another world - a different dimension or parallel universe, perhaps? I’d like to think he is in a place that is free of suffering and is “interceding” for us poor mortals here on earth.

The religious may call such a place “heaven“, but it is not totally alien to science. Theoretical physicists have postulated that there may be up to 26 spatial dimensions! An English astronomer (Martin Rees) coined the term “multiverse” to suggest many universes, co-existing independently but able to interact with one another. Do you find that a bit mind-boggling? Arthur Eddington, a British physicist, once said: “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

Take a God‘s-eye-view of the Universe. The sun, which we wake up to every morning, is 1,000,000 bigger than planet earth. But our sun is just one star among 200 billion stars in the galaxy we call the Milky Way. There are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe alone! That gives us 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. You can see how utterly and insignificantly microscopic we are relative to the size of the universe! I often think that God may well assume, for all intents and purposes, that we don’t exist!

The great physicist Isaac Newton likened his life’s work to that of a boy discovering pretty shells on the beach when “the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered” before him. As you can imagine, there is still so much we don’t know about what‘s out there, despite the huge strides made by science so far. What then is science, you ask? Well, it began fundamentally with human curiosity. We have all asked questions like why is the sky blue or grass green? As Socrates rightly said, the unexamined life is not worth living. Science offers one way to inspect this life of ours. It is a quest for knowledge using a certain set of accepted and rational procedures.

The book I am reading now, The Nature of Science by James Trefil, has a good description of the scientific methodology. There are two approaches, basically - observation and experiment. The first is by simply looking at the objects around and noting their behaviour under different circumstances. The second is to conduct experiments in a controlled environment and recording the results.

From the data we then try to determine the rationale behind the observation. This is known as a scientific theory - an explanation that best fits the data. When a better explanation comes along the old one is discarded. You should remember that words like “theory“, “principle“, “effect” and “law” are often interchangeably and imprecisely used by the scientific community. There are no hard and fast rules that all scientists adhere to.

Collecting the data is the easy part. It was the interpretation of the information that made scientific superstars out of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Newton showed in detail that the fall of an apple and the precise motions of the planets could be explained by the universal force of gravitation. Einstein demonstrated that time and space curved around massive objects with his theory of relativity.

Trefil’s book is in essence a compilation of all the major rules and regulations governing nature discovered up to the start of the 21st century. The topics are sorted into 8 categories: astronomy, chemistry, earth sciences, life sciences, mathematics, miscellany, physics and rear window. There is enough information on each area for a young person contemplating a career in science to be able to gauge where his or her interests lie.

There are some 250 such topics covered by the book, ranging from the well-known to the obscure. Moore’s Law (Every index of computer performance improves by a factor of two every two years) is in there and so is Murphy’s Law (If something can go wrong, it will go wrong). Also included are ideas with intriguing names such as the Chandrasekhar Limit (A white dwarf star can be no more than 1.4 times as massive as the Sun), the Chronology Protection Conjecture (There is an as yet undiscovered law of nature that forbids time travel), Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (The position and velocity of a quantum particle cannot both be known with absolute accuracy at the same time), Maxwell’s Demon (Can the second law of thermodynamics be violated?) and the Beauty Criterion (Scientific theories are judged on aesthetics as well as on pragmatic criteria …).

Incidentally, “Miscellany” contains concepts that don’t belong in any particular group, such as Occam’s Razor (The simplest explanation is likely to be the right one) and the Turing Test (If computers can act in such a way that human beings cannot tell if they are interacting with a machine or with a person, the machine is said to have passed the Turing Test). “Rear view mirror” looks at ideas that have been discredited, such as Spontaneous Generation (Living things arise spontaneously from inorganic material) and Perpetual Motion (It is possible to make a machine that will run forever or, better still, provide a limitless source of energy).

James Trefil is an American educator and a passionate promoter of scientific literacy. He believes that every person ought to have enough knowledge to be able to form informed opinions about issues that affect the modern world, from cloning to global warming. He has authored more than 30 books and writes in a readable down-to-earth style that makes scientific concepts accessible to laypeople like you and me. Such motivation is admirable, in my opinion. You know I believe in the democratization of ideas. Scientific literacy equips the citizens of a nation to compete in the global environment. I am all for it.

My only quarrel with scientists in general is the tendency to get a little presumptuous when it comes to matters beyond the realm of science. Take the following sentence from the book: "Evolution thus differs from so-called creation science … because there is no observation or experiment that could conceivably convince a supporter of creation science that it is wrong."

That does not necessarily make creation science wrong, does it? You cannot declare that something is wrong just because you can’t prove it wrong! That won’t hold up in court and is an argument based on flawed logic. Science has no monopoly on knowledge, as far as I‘m concerned. Anyone who believes otherwise is worshiping a religion called Scientism.

Isaac Asimov called the human brain “the most magnificently organized lump of matter in the known universe”. If we can believe in an architect for the Taj Mahal, why can’t we do the same for the brain, which is so much more complex? To really understand the true nature of science we need to identify the limits of scientific methodology. Science can give us a lot of answers but not all of them.

Coming back to your grandpa, I suppose the quickest way to know his present whereabouts is to go there myself. Science may one day allow us to communicate with other worlds, but it’ll surely not be within my lifetime.

Meanwhile, let me leave you with a few puzzles from the book to tickle your grey cells. Have you ever wondered why the sky is dark at night when there are so many stars producing light? (This is called Olbers’ Paradox.) If intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, why have we not received signals from it or detected evidence of it? (Fermi’s Paradox.) And if, in order to cross a room, we must first cross half, then half of what’s left, then half of that, then half of that …, doesn’t that make motion impossible? (Zeno’s Paradox).

Read the book, don’t wait for the movie!

Dad

How Scientists Made God Disappear!

2008-05-09T18:38:00.001+08:00

Guess what? I’ve solved another magic trick all by myself! I’ve finally found out how scientists made God disappear! I’ve cracked it and I’m so happy I feel like Isaac Newton! Hahaha!

I came across this amazing sentence in the book “The Nature of Science”:

“Evolution thus differs from so-called creation science, supposedly based on the biblical Book of Genesis, because there is no observation or experiment that could conceivably convince a supporter of creation science that it is wrong.”

Therefore it’s wrong.

Get it?

So scientists are basically saying that it’s wrong because they can’t prove it’s wrong!

Isn’t that absolutely mind-boggling logic? Can something like that hold up in court? You’re guilty because there is no way we can prove you’re guilty?

Here‘s how the magic trick works. Let me distil it like a good scientist would into the following 3 steps:

Step 1: Demonstrate that since there is no way to prove or disprove God using science, therefore God is beyond the realm of science.

Step 2: Get the audience to agree that since God is beyond science, the subject is therefore “not science” or “unscientific”.

Step 3: Glorify the word “science” and stigmatise the word “unscientific”, making it indistinguishable from words like stupid, ignorant, uninformed, uneducated, irrational, brainless, idiotic, etc.

Voila! In 3 simple steps, you’ve turned every believer into an imbecile and wiped God off the face of the universe! So simple and yet so utterly effective! It’s one of the most impressive magic tricks I’ve ever seen and has fooled literally millions around the world!

The title of the book is really apt. I have finally discovered the nature of the beast they call science!

[Graphic is from gif.com]

Fun With Leeches

2008-05-07T18:01:00.000+08:00

Question: How do you get rid of a leech without salt or fire?

I took the kids to Sungai Congkat this morning. It has a fast flowing stream with clear icy waters that is very popular over the weekends. It was deserted on a Friday morning. We were about to step into the water when my son found two small leeches on his leg. Now I have no experience with handling leeches. I had no salt and no fire. So we tried to drown them by keeping his feet under the cold waters. But they remained firmly stuck. I had another idea. You know how leeches walk - head over feet over head. When my son took his foot out of the water they started moving. It's very difficult to remove a leech when its head is stuck to your flesh. So I waited for the precise moment when the head was up to brush it off. It worked! But somehow it ended up next to my son's crotch! And it was inching closer and closer to his nuts!

My son, of course, was going crazy, yelling and screaming! Fortunately he was wearing swimming trunks. So I pressed his trunks to his flesh so the leech wouldn't go under. The leech got on top of his trunks and my son pulled them off frantically. I then got the leech off his swimming trunks with a stick. We tried the same technique with the other leech and it came off as well. It must be a truly memorable experience for my son. Hahaha!

Ideas That Changed the World

2007-10-11T13:08:00.000+08:00

Book Review

Ideas That Changed the World
By Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
Publisher: Doring Kindersley, 400 pages
(ISBN 0751344141)

Whenever I come to a blank in a form requesting my religion, I am tempted to write Deism. Unfortunately most people will not understand what it means. I did not know the word existed until I came across it in this book by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (FFA). Well, Deism is the “belief in God not dependent on organized religion”. It originated back in 18th century Europe when Empiricism - the idea that “reality is observable and verifiable by sense-perception” - was emerging as a major trend and Sir Isaac Newton had just made key discoveries in the laws of mechanics. This filled people with confidence that the universe was as predictable as a clock and all knowledge was within grasp. Things did not turn out as expected, but the prevailing rationale was that if man could understand God through science and mathematics, why bother with religion?

FFA is Professor of Global Environmental History at Queen Mary, University of London. His book is basically an introduction to some of the thoughts and ideas that had guided our actions throughout history. Its pages are packed with information and thought-provoking illustrations. There are 7 sections covering ideas from 30,000 BC to the present 21st century. The topics explained include existentialism, pragmatism, godless humanism, scientific racism, anarchism, utilitarianism, romanticism, German, British, Chinese and Japanese superiority, chivalry, universal morality and regulating incest.

Why are ideas important? Well, they exert a tremendous influence on human behaviour as history has witnessed. The idea, for instance, that we could assume the power of our enemies by eating their flesh, encouraged cannibalism. The idea that strife is natural and conflicts are creative resulted in highly competitive yet cheerless societies - like a certain neighbouring state of ours. Darwin’s ideas about natural selection were used by some to justify racism and the extermination of “inferior” races like the Jews. The idea of a land promised by God to the Israelites became an excuse for the barbaric treatment of the Palestinians. Ideas offer possibilities on how things can be improved and yet produce frustration when hindered by other conflicting ideas. Ideas can destabilize when differing schools of thought clash.

The following is a sampling of the gems contained in this remarkably compact collection.

The Idea of Microscopic Life-forms
Many people held the idea (and many still do) that if life had not originated with God, it must have arisen from spontaneous generation. That is until Lorenzo Spallanzani proved that germs killed by heating could not re-appear in a sealed environment. The entire food industry was transformed by this discovery. So could life have appeared on earth – a closed system - without divine intervention?

The Idea of American Exceptionalism
Americans have always believed that their country is unique and blessed by God. The national psyche is exemplified by two beloved fictional characters. First, every American hero has to be an outsider like the Lone Ranger and has “got to do what a man has got to do”, including partaking in a little violence now and then. Second, Americans are inherently good-natured like Donald Duck and, despite constantly getting into all manner of trouble, are ultimately seeking the best for all concerned! FFA: “The same sort of self-righteousness and obedience to impulse makes American policy-makers bomb people from time to time – but always with good intentions.”

The Idea of a Weapon to End War
Did you know that Alfred Nobel, the guy who created those noble Nobel prizes, made his fortune from explosives and arms trafficking? His original intention was to promote the development of super-weapons. He reasoned that the only way to stop wars was to create weapons so terrible that no one would dare to start a fight! Alfred was apparently consumed by guilt after accidentally blowing up his own brother in an experiment!

The Idea of Unpredictability
Scientists have been trying for centuries to unveil the secrets of the Universe. They succeeded spectacularly in some ways, failed miserably in other ways. A good example of the latter is meteorology. No matter how much statistical data computers crunch, tomorrow’s weather cannot be predicted with certainty. The gulf between cause and effect appears to be so great as to be insurmountable. Chaos theory had a humbling effect. FFA: “The exposure of chaos looks like another nail in the coffin of “scientism” – yet more evidence that nature really is uncontrollable by human minds … Science seems to be self-undermined, and the faster its progress, the more questions emerge about its own competence. And the less faith most people have in it.”

This is a very well-written book and one that I recommend to all armchair philosophers.

The Seduction

2007-08-08T14:05:00.000+08:00

The following account is based on a true incident.

It was an exhausting day of driving. We checked into 3-star hotel and my son fell asleep immediately on the bed. After a refreshing hot shower I found myself in a crowded noisy bar full of party animals.

I managed to get myself a seat and a drink when suddenly a young lady stumbled and fell into my lap. The people around giggled and she gave me a sheepish smile. I found myself looking into a beautiful pair of brown eyes. She apologised and tried to get up but her legs seemed to be giving her trouble.

"I've been standing so long my legs are cramping. I hope you don't mind."

I gazed into those doe-like eyes again and knew I didn't mind at all! "It's okay", I mumbled. She continued chatting with a guy nearby while remaining in my lap. The room throbbed with restless energy.

She looked vaguely familiar, like one of those Hongkong tv stars. Long black hair, porcelain complexion, makeup lightly applied, a slim shapely body - altogether a stunning creature to behold. Her hair smelled faintly fruity.

She had on stylish clothes - a chequered blouse, a long skirt which covered her knees and leather boots. She looked the typical office girl out for some fun after a hard day's work. No plunging neckline, no mini-skirt, no ostentatious mascara, no overpowering perfume that indicated she was a ... prostitute?

She turned to me when her friend stepped away. "I'm Sal. Nice to meet you! Thanks for letting me rest a bit."

No problem, I replied and introduced myself.

"Are you alone?" she asked, again flashing those brilliant eyes.

I hesitated before saying no but she didn't seem to hear me. "What do you do?" she continued.

"I'm an architect."

"Oh, wow! My job is really boring. I'm a secretary in an IT firm."

"I see."

"Architects are good at sketching. Can you sketch?"

"Yeah, a little."

"Um, sorry to keep imposing myself on you but ... do you think you could do a sketch of me? It's something for my kid brother."

"Not at all. Sure I can sketch you but I'm a little out of practice."

"We'll need a little privacy. Come up to my room."

"Now?"

"Yes, NOW!" she replied cheekily. "Can you think of a better time? Come on!"

I was in a daze and probably would have followed this exquisite creature anywhere. I was powerless to resist. She got to her feet with some effort.

At the very same moment, my son rolled off my chest and I opened my eyes in a darkened hotel room.

The Wise Old Tree

2007-08-07T18:54:00.000+08:00

The little boy peeked nervously from behind the bush at the wrinkled old tree.

The tree pretended not to notice and continued chewing on his acorn. "Munch! Munch! Munch!"

The boy moved quietly from behind the bush and took a step closer.

The tree spat a piece of shell from his mouth and chewed some more. "Crunch! Crunch!"

The boy darted a few steps nearer and stopped.

The tree swallowed contentedly and popped another acorn into his massive mouth.

The boy ran up to the tree and shouted "BOO!"

"Goodness gracious me!" said the tree, eyes wide and pretending to be totally shocked. "Is that you again, Tom! If you keep scaring me like that, I'll lose all my leaves!"

Tom chuckled happily as a few dead leaves drifted to the ground. "Surprised you again, didn't I?"

"You certainly did, naughty boy! What are you doing in the forest again? Aren't you supposed to be in school?"

"Yes, sir. But I couldn't concentrate."

"Why not?"

The boy found an old stump to sit on. "Well, I had been thinking."

"What about?"

“You are very old, aren’t you?”

“Pretty old, yes. I knew your great grandpa’s great grandpa!”

“What was he like?”

“Naughty like you!” The old tree laughed.

“You must be very wise then, being so old and all.”

“Well, I’ve seen a few wars, a couple of revolutions, some insurrection, quite a lot of fluctuations, plenty of permutations and a generous amount of transmogrification.” The tree felt very proud.

“Where do people go … you know … when they leave?”

“You mean like when they are no longer … here?”

“Yeah, like where is grandpa now?”

The old tree thought for a moment. “Well, some people think there is a heaven and a hell. Others believe that we come back in another form, you know, like a squirrel.”

“But what do you think?”

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Promise you won’t tell anyone? Well, you can tell your brother, Bob, of course.”

“I promise.”

The tree lowered his voice. “I think he’s here.”

“Grandpa?”

“Yeah, why not! They’re all here!”

“Where?” The child looked around nervously.

“No, I don’t mean like ghosts! I mean they have become at one with nature again!”

“At one?”

“Yeah, you know, like a drop of water returning to the sea.”

“Oh!”

“Or like the air of a balloon escaping into the sky.”

“Wow!”

The boy sat quietly for a moment, dwelling on the thought of grandpa flying in the sky. “I miss grandpa. Do you think he can hear me talking?”

The tree gave the child a knowing smile. “You know what? I believe he can, I really believe he can.”

[Story based on fantasy art work by Bob Schneider at smugmug.com]

Intruder

2007-08-06T17:23:00.000+08:00

It started like any normal Sunday. Dad was griping about Mom’s over generosity with her parents. Mom was chewing me up for being rude to the relatives. And I was bored witless with the same old weekly routine. I couldn’t wait to get home to my playstation and nuke New York or Tokyo.

On the way back, Dad remembered he forgot to refill the leaky radiator with water as the thermometer rose. We had to stop the car, wait for the engine to cool and add water before we could continue home. Fortunately Mom managed to call Maria, our maid, to keep lunch warm before she took off for her weekend break.

Our first inkling of trouble came when Dad saw the front door ajar and exploded, “She forgot to lock the door again! I bet that bloody cat has pooped all over the sofa!”

“What is wrong with Maria?” Mom replied. “She knows how many break-ins we’ve had in this area! You’d better go in first!”

Dad pushed open the door and sniffed the air. “I smell something unusual. What the devil has Maria cooked up this time?”

“Salmon porridge, the way you like it,” Mom said. “It’s the smell of sweat, I think!”

A musky disagreeable odour filled my nostrils as I followed Mom and Dad into the house. The kind of stench you normally associate with zoos. I had to cover my nose with a hanky.

Mom suddenly gasped as she noticed the opened drawers. “Somebody has been going through our things!”

“And look at my chair!” I cried. The sight of my Bugs Bunny stool lying broken on the floor brought tears to my eyes.

Dad clenched his teeth as a growl rose from his barrel chest. “I’ll rip his lungs out if I catch the one who did this!”

“Shall we call the police?” Mom cried.

“Call the police?” Dad snarled as he pulled at his dark brown hair. “Do you know how long it’ll take them to get here?”

“Dad, you’d better have a look at this.” The kitchen was in a mess. Cupboards were open, the floor was covered with broken crockery and Maria’s porridge was all over the dining table. Our precious honey was dripping from the overturned pots.

“I’m afraid,” Mom said in a panicky voice. “It looks - and smells - like some wild animal has been in here!”

“Calm down,” Dad replied. “All right, you try to get the police while I check upstairs. Bruno, stay with your mother.”

I disobeyed as usual and sneaked up behind Dad. The animal stench got even stronger as we ascended. The hair on my back was standing upright. Dad became very quiet at the landing. He looked around the hallway before moving silently to my room where a soft purring seemed to be coming from. He peered in before signaling me to approach. I crept over and stared in amazement at the creature sleeping in my bed. It had light yellow fur and the ugliest hairless face I had ever seen.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“I don’t know. Some kind of exotic monkey, I suppose.”

Back downstairs, Mom said the police had promised to come by tomorrow evening. Dad grabbed the phone and made a call to his zoo-keeper friend, describing the creature to him. The keeper promptly came over with a big net, caught the animal and locked the screaming repulsive thing in his van.

“Phew! I’m glad that’s over!” Dad said to his keeper friend.

“It’s only just begun!” Mom replied. “Look at the cleaning we have to do! We’ll probably have to disinfect the whole house and burn Bruno’s bed sheets!”

“I’m not sleeping in that bed again!” I protested. “It probably has fleas!”

“No,” laughed the keeper as he and Dad bear-hugged and shook paws. “She – yes, she’s female – smells a bit but we keep her very clean. And she's quite intelligent too – managed to pick her lock with a piece of wire. But much lower in the evolutionary ladder than we bears are. A rare species closed to extinction. Some call her Goldilocks but her real name is homo sapien.”

[First published in Write Out Loud]

Lizofik's Monster

2007-08-02T13:52:00.000+08:00

Pangadi stretched his mighty muscles as he rose from fitful slumber. With his energies fully restored he would resume the great hunt. His ambition had taken him a long way from home. He was now in a part of the planet totally uncharted by his clansmen. Yet the task did not daunt him. His pledge to the clan stood and fulfill it he must. He had no doubts whatsoever that he would succeed. Such was his confidence.

He surveyed the scene before him. The feeble sun had cast everything in an eerie light. To his eyes everything appeared odd and not a little grotesque. Nothing was like home. The trees were stunted, the leaves a sickly green, the grass thorny and unwelcoming, the entire landscape wrongly proportioned and disorienting. Even the creatures seemed blighted by disease or inbreeding. He found the region generally repulsive and would not stay any longer than he had to.

As the great hunter bent to pick up his heavy lance, he heard what sounded like a female voice. It appeared to be coming from the very stream he had drank from the previous night. With nary a sound, he moved stealthily through the dense undergrowth toward the source of the noise.

Pangadi crouched at the edge of the stream and slowly parted the tall grass before him. His eyes widened with amazement as he saw a young maiden washing herself in the waters. Her features were a little different from those of his clanswomen but she was undoubtedly beautiful. Of all the ugly things he had seen in that abominable place she was the one and only that pleased his eye.

The hunter watched the beauty dry herself and put on what looked to him like sack cloths. He was about to approach the fair maiden when he noticed a movement in the corner of his eye. To his horror, an enormous beast emerged from the forest and sat itself next to the lady. It was round and had the thick black hide of an olifant. It glared at the maiden with angry blood-shot eyes and bared razor-sharp teeth. She merely stood submissively with her head lowered as if waiting for a command.

The monster growled something to which the lady responded by nodding. Pangadi watched entranced but without comprehension as more instructions were issued in a tongue unknown to him. Eventually the beast lumbered back into the trees. The lady sat down as in despair. After a moment she picked up an old sack and began to fill it with drift wood.

Pangadi checked to see that the monster had really gone before stepping out into the open. The lady, upon seeing the tall hunter, dropped her sack in alarm and attempted to flee.

"All is well, fair lady!" Pangadi spoke in a soft tone. "I mean no harm".

He placed his lance upon the pebbles and sat himself down on a large log.

"I merely wish to talk."

The lady halted her steps and watched Pangadi warily. Pangadi attempted a smile. "Do you understand my language?" he enquired.

The lady nodded sheepishly and replied, "Some."

"My name is Pangadi. I am a hunter from the north. I come seeking Mako meat which is rare and priceless in my region."

The lady's countenance appeared to relax a little. "Mako? Ah, Makoo! Makoo at big valley!"

"Big Valley? Can you take me there?"

A sudden gloom descended upon the girl. "No! No take you there!"

"Why?"

"Much work." With that, she lifted up her sack and turned to leave.

"Wait!" Pangadi called out. "What is your name?"

Lizofik hesitated a moment before replying.

"That is a fair name, Lizofik. As fair as its owner. Let me help you with your burden." In one swift motion Pangadi had picked up his lance and leapt like an agile lipod over to the girl before she could react. "Which way is Big Valley?"

*****

Lizofik allowed the hunter to carry her sack of sticks which felt like feathers to him. She led him in silence to a cliff's edge after a short walk.

"Makoo in big valley."

Pangadi looked in the direction she had pointed.

"Must go now. Thank you."

Pangadi held on to the sack she was attempting to take from him.

"Are you in some trouble, fair Lizofik? Pray let me assist?"

"No. No trouble. Sack please."

Pangadi did not believe her words. "That monster is holding you captive, isn't it? It has enslaved you?"

"No. You no understand. Cannot talk."

"I can help you. I can kill the beast and release you."

"NO! No kill! No kill! You no understand!"

"You have nothing to fear! I will protect you! I ... I love you and will take good care of you!"

"Love?" There was a look of puzzlement in her eyes.

"Yes, I fell in love, sweet maiden, the moment I set eyes on you! You are more beautiful than anything I have seen in my life. Please place your trust in me. I will not betray it."

"I will take you back to my region" the hunter continued, "where you can live in freedom from fear. I will love and cherish you as long as I have breath within my breast. You will be happy there!"

As the girl stared at him in stunned silence, a loud crashing noise spun Pangadi round. He found himself looking into the hellish eyes of the black and towering monster that had caused so much grief to his beloved Lizofik.

"AAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGG!" the hunter let out a blood-curdling war cry as he tossed the sack aside and braced his lance for assault.

The monster's roar in return shook the trees in the forest and scattered creatures in all directions.

Lizofik screamed something that was all but drowned in the uproar.

*****

Hunter and beast fought tooth and nail. The monster bit and tore at Pangadi who managed to dodge most of the attacks but the ones that struck left him bloody and weakened. Yet thought of his precious Lizofik gave him spirit. A sudden thrust of his lance caught the Monster in the foot breaking the bone within. It stumbled and toppled over in an earth-shattering roar of agony. Pangadi leapt on the beast and stabbed it repeatedly. One jab penetrated the heart and silenced the monster's thrashing.

A tired Pangadi jumped off the carcass of his nemesis to seek his fair maiden. He found her cowering in some bushes, tearful but unhurt.

"It is all right now, dearest Lizofik. Your master is dead and you are free at last."

Lizofik hugged her deliverer in relief. They remained in exhausted embrace until the break of the morrow.

*****

"Remember night in forest?"

Pangadi looked up from his labours. A beaming and lovely Lizofik stood before him.

"Yes, dear. Why?"

It had been two bliss-filled years since that fateful night in the south. Lizofik had settled herself well in the hunter's village. The clan loved and accepted her with open arms. Her cheerful and caring nature made her many friends.

"Night we make love?"

"Yes." Pangadi laughed. "Who could ever forget that?"

"We have fruits."

"Fruits?" Pangadi replied, a little puzzled, as Lizofik placed a small bundle on his lap. "Oh wonderful! I am thirsty from this labour. Frapples?"

"No fruits for eating!" Lizofik smiled as Pangadi unwrapped the bundle and stared at two round black balls of fur.

"Fruits of love!"

The Promise

2007-08-02T08:48:00.000+08:00

Jamiok rubbed her stomach gingerly. She could hear birds chirping outside as the spring dawn spread its glow into the cave. It was a chilly morning and her breathe came out in puffs of vapour. As her fingers moved over the taut skin, a sudden movement within made her gasp. The creature was really growing inside her, there was no longer any doubt about that.

Jamiok sighed deeply. She had resigned herself to her fate. More or less. Well, what hope is there left to contemplate? The days had turned into weeks and the weeks into months. With each passing day her spirit had flagged a little. Finally she felt it was just foolish to wait any longer.

The brute had come sniffing at the entrance one night and she had allowed it to enter. That was two years ago and it had remained ever since. At least she had protection and meat to eat. She just hated the sight of its hair caked with blood every time it returned from a hunt. She made a whipping stick and forced it to wash each night before settling in her bed. And now as she listened to it snoring quietly beside her, her thoughts wandered again to what might have been.

A light breeze rustled the leaves outside. Jamiok wrapped her wooly cloak tightly around her delicate frame and stepped out of the cave. She made her way slowly up the face of the crevice. The wind got stronger as she climbed. She was moving automatically, on an impulse, being drawn onwards and upwards. She was thinking only of the promise. As she clambered over the last boulder and stepped onto the flat outcrop, the magnificent vista opened up before her. The welcoming wind whipped around her, making her stumble, but she steadied herself upon the barren rock. She closed her eyes and sucked mouthfuls of frigid air into her lungs. She shivered involuntarily.

You shouldn’t come back, he smiled.

But don’t you see? she replied. There is no other place in the world I’d rather be.

[Story based on fantasy art by Christophe Vacher]

Dad

2007-07-30T13:20:00.001+08:00

Dedicated to my dad who passed away on 24 July 2007

The passing of my father has had an utterly profound impact on me. All the time spent in mourning with the relatives has given me a clearer picture of who he was. Sorry, Linda and Lin, but to say that there is nothing beyond this life is too simple an explanation for me. Life is much too wondrous for that. I suspect the truth is that we came from another dimension or parallel universe and go back when we die. So dad is there now. I wonder if he can hear my thoughts and feel what I’m feeling. I would like to believe that he can and that in some way he will enable me to take what he had wanted to achieve one step further.

My eyes are welling up with tears. All at once I am a child again and yearning for his company and protection. Life seems so much emptier without him. Not just for me but for mom as well, who misses him terribly. (I don’t know what kind of turmoil my brother is experiencing but he has been silent all this while.) I walk through his house and little things bring memories flooding back like a torrent. It’s hard to look at his photos without fighting back tears.

Dad was devilishly handsome in his youth. The photo above his coffin was taken in his forties. The undertakers had enlarged it from a smaller one, blurring it, making him even more dashing and a little larger than life. And making us appreciate our loss even more acutely. Dad had lived his life to the fullest. How many people had he touched and enriched? We will never know. Suffice it to say he was a truly decent human being. I am half the man he was.

Dear dad, wherever you are. It has been a privilege being your son. I had learned so much from you. You had tried to teach me what is important. I know I had been a pretty awful student. May I now have the courage and strength to pass your love and wisdom on to your grandchildren.

See you in a little bit.

Love,
Choong

[From a young lady in Zhangjiagang (17 Mar 2009):

I really respect (and envy) the bond that you shared with your dad. Not many people have that. I can feel your emotion just by the way you talk about him.]