Taste
I'm just writing this to remind myself. In the future.. listen to your children because they may daringly provide insights that wiser people would think twice before offering.
Only children believe an idea's merit is in how creative or good it is.
Adults tend to worry about the who/why/when/how before they look at your idea.
Sometimes ideas are gifts from God. How are certain people blessed with unique ideas?
How many people achieve greatness at all.
I have no mouth. But I must scream.
I don't know what I've been doing lately. I mean.. basically I haven't been doing anything at all. I've been reading and reading and reading, and thinking and dreaming and feeling woefully emotional. Emotions are the evolved response to deal with stresses in a humourous way.
But the real problem is.. I don't know I don't know I don't know.
I wish I was young again. Back then, stories and myths and fantasies and dreams and folktales and customs all ran together in a mess. Stories of festivals and Christmas and great things people did in the past and now. The thought of being great. The work, following my own compass, keeping in touch with computers, with literature, with philosophy, with even medicine..
But it's all a touch! How I wish I always lived in that false illusion that new discoveries came like clockwork. 13 turns in Civilization 3 and you'd have researched Monarchy. 56 turns to a Great Library. You never know how long it'll take you unless you know where you're going.
And I don't know where I'm going. Day by day, I sit by my console, and monitor what the world is doing. Wars here, tsunamis there, the latest breakthroughs in LCDs, semiconductors, amplifiers, latest hugo award winners, neubla, booker prizes. Movies worth watching or not. Papers.
It's all become routine. And routine is the enemy of innovation.
How does one become great? When the whole world says gastric ulcers are due to stress and not helicobacter pylori. When the whole world says the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. When the whole world is against you, and you too are against yourself, because of that desire to conform, to confirm what people have found true, and are happy to "know" something true at last...
How do you break free from that prison of what you "know". How do you escape? Why should you break free. Why do you want to shatter the illusions and pride of those who "know"?
First the how, then the why...
I don't know where I'm going, I don't know what I'm doing and why. I'm just straining ... I'm not straining. I'm not moving. Why.
Purpose
Maybe if I work hard today, I'll be stronger tomorrow.
Maybe if I work hard tomorrow, I'll be stronger.
Shoes
I just came back from dance and realized that shoes fit in those three colour categories too! Black, Silver/white and Tan.
It's sort of the holy trinity of non-coloured stuff, probably cos it matches every other colour out there.
Hmm.. just looking at more pro fashion photography out there gives me ideas.
Tan colors seem to go well with tan hair. in a sort of grey/different shade of grey/different shade of grey look. The key is in the colour accent. Probably the dress should be slightly pinkish or bluish to avoid looking like a prisoner.
If you want to look paler/whiter, Dark clothes will make you look that way.
If you want to look darker, lighter tan or white clothes.
Ah I don't know why I'm suddenly giving dressing advice.
Anyway I also thought that the human face was a composite of two isoceles triangles and the oval. One isoceles triangle has the apex between the brows and the two base points resting on the anterior ramus of the jawbone. The other is inverted with the base between the eyes and the apex at the centre of the teeth.
If you make a sketch of all those points you'll get a face.
Anyway.. going away to get lost in music. Lost!
Photography, Asimov's, UML
Haha just remembered something that struck me while waiting at Jitterbugs for my dance class. Saw this little pamphlet there advertising lingerie, and I just flipped it open to glance through. (For research purposes! I must clarify.)
Readers, do this with me. Notice the different tones of the model's skin in the various photographs, even though the model was the same. Notice the different looks the differently coloured lingerie gave the model, and think why this is so.
The colour of lingerie affects the grey point of the camera. The grey point is determined by the camera's light metering system. Thus, the camera compensates for the change in colour due to the lingerie by slightly overexposing, undersexposing or stretching the colour range.
Look closely at the skin tone. Can you see that in the black lingeries, the skin tone is stretched. That means, there is a greater range between the highlights and the shadows. Look at the tans, the skin tone is compressed. There isn't that much a difference between the highlights and the shadows. Look at the whites. There is a greater difference between the highlights and the shadows.
This is how lingerie colour works to fool the eye. Why is black seductive and white chaste? Why does lingerie only have such an effect, and white and black cloaks considered equally chaste by our muslim friends?
Perhaps seduction, from the colour balance in photos, is about shadows. The more shadows the eye is drawn to, the more mysterious the object is, and hence the greater the desire. The smaller the highlights, the more pearlescent the object appears, and more gem like.
Same thing as the white, but instead, the idea is reversed. It shows the person to be gemlike and pure, with still a little shadow, a little uncertainty.
Tan of course, is average.
Anyway... Lets move on to more serious things that I've been spending my time on. Just finished Asimov's Foundation's Edge, and rereading it again, you can see all the references sci-fi has taken from it. Part of the story really reminds me of the Star Wars, and the ending is straight out of Ender's Game. Of course, who influenced what, only the chronology can tell us. But it was a good read all the same.
UML is this markup language that I'm exploring right now... How do you link all that you think about into one coherent whole? When I was doing literature, we used to annotate in the margins, so that when we pick the book up again, we can see what we thought about in the past. But now... where do we have time to pick up books again to see what we think?
How can we connect the thoughts of the past, to the thoughts of the present, in a form that will be available to us in the future? How can we do that without too much work on our part?
I used to take this blog as my source of history. But blogs do not organize. They will not stay for ever either. There must be a better way out there and I will find it.
Asimov's Stories
It's been a long time since I've read science fiction. The stories of my youth, just as short stories were the stories of my adolescence, just as the world became the story of my adulthood.
I wonder how much I understood then..
I'm now rereading the books of my youth. Going through Asimov's Foundation series to see what those writers were trying to tell me such a long time ago. In a certain sense, my life is like those characters in Never Let Me Go. How much of the views of my world have been unknowingly shaped by those first few books?
Tammylan, Moon-face, Fenton Hardy, Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allen Poe, those reccomended reading texts.
I remember a session with 3stan when we were identifying all the cartoons we've watched before. If we could just turn back time and watch them again as an adult, watching them critically, how many values we have today are part of those.. early "teachings"?
From Wile E Coyote, to Shredder and Mutant Turtles, to X-Men...
All of them treat life differently, all of them say certain things about the nature of our existence that as a child we never really questioned.
Is life really a never ending series of trapping, failure, trying again? Or do we empathize with running away, blind luck, and a certain cockiness?
Are the evil forces in the world of limitless resources, and yet also of woeful intelligence? The good men are resource limited, in nasty surroundings, and in many ways, depend on the goodwill of the people around them (April O' Neil) and their own ingenuity.
X Men was largely a study on discrimination, and how there are always different philosophies of dealing with discrimination. Extermination or Enslavement. Somehow.. peaceful co-existence was the ideal that could never have been.
Dancing
Whoa.. Just had one of my worst practices ever.. Couldn't concentrate and remember the choreos at all. Managed to do the tricks better though.. just got to work on the form.
and then there's such a huge gap between remembering the choreo and dancing the choreo and actually making the choreo come to life. Saw Shu Ping dance the choreo today and was totally blown away! Her "me gusta" was really clean and hot. and Hong Ping told me he danced 5 days this week!
All I've got is this hols! I'm super inspired now to just watch salsa vids and practice at home. Catch up! Catch up!
Made another boo boo today.. caught the wrong part while doing a trick.. But Jacqueline was ok with it.. pretty concerned about me catching up too cos the rest are just going on at full steam and sorta leaving me behind.
She told me, don't look at what others are doing. Your choreo is in your head. Concentrate and look at yourself in the mirror.. It is really all in the head..
I've got to concentrate.. I don't have time anymore to look around.. Sometimes it's really frustrating that challenges are just coming one after another, and I don't have the time to prepare for all of it. Chingay next.. What's going to happen when school starts?
I'm now very sure that I'm not eliteist.. (which worried me for a while) after all, how can I afford to be when I'm so lousy? I'm just a very lucky boy.. to have met a group of friends that have opened my eyes to so many things over the years.. To have joined a group with dancers that really care about every member and won't leave anyone behind.. Really grateful to all the senior members who risk their lives every time I attempt a trick (because they really trying to help me get the move as soon as possible)
Got to work harder and give something back to them. Got to take up their salsa dreams.
On Mistakes
Remember the first time you fell?
No I don't remember mine either.
I think everyone makes mistakes from time to time.. It's inevitable. It's unavoidable. I don't think badly of anyone because of mistakes, and I hope that people don't think that of me. A mistake isn't forever.
Some mistakes linger for a long time, some mistakes just right themselves and become jokes that you share with your friends. Some mistakes literally change the world around you. And some mistakes are unavoidable.
But mistakes are often our most important learning points. We can't stand until we've learnt to fall. We can't cure disease until we've dared to try and harmed a few people. We can't keep friends until we've lost a few.
It's interesting though.. how in life everything is pretty much immaterial. No one cares how big your house is, or how generous you are, or how enlightened you are (like those buddhist monks in jin yong stories.)
I there is a trend in life.. The defining characteristic of the memories of a person long past, is how he dealt with his mistakes and caught them. President Clinton commited a major mistake but he admitted it and recovered. President Bush commited a mistake but hasn't admitted it, and still fights and struggles on.
The Jews commited a mistake and up till now, entire religions haven't united. Ariel Sharon is now trying to right a mistake that has cost millions of lives.
Mistakes are a part of life. It's part of the existence, it's part of the growing process. Mistakes are because people are unique and have different perspectives, different circumstances, different mores.
Acknowledging my own mistakes to me is part of accepting and celebrating the diversity of mankind, part of hoping for the vastness of human forgiveness, part of accepting the inevitability of failure, and move forward on the search for success.
For all people celebrating Christmas in 14 days time, when you are all busy buying gifts and writing cards for the people around you. Perhaps you could consider giving forgiveness out as well.
To all the people I've hurt over the years.. I'm sorry.
Apologies to 3stan
Recently I've felt that relations between me and my wonderful anat group has soured somewhat but I didn't really know why. Last night, someone came to tell me, and I'm very grateful for that.
I think I owe the 3stans an apology. And I do hope they forgive me. Sometimes I offend people without meaning to, and I cannot make amends until I know that I have made a mistake. :D I thank that person who told me about it and gave me a chance to make it right again.
I won't go into specifics here, but rest assured that I will apologize to the people concerned and not do things like that again.
I guess part of the problem is the speculation, because I don't really explain myself in person very much and very often. Truth is, I was very offended by the FRS project about appearances and the medical interview. All of us have friends that have tried very hard to get into NUS medicine, some with grades that are the equal of ours. And yet, some of us made it and some of us didn't. Why?
I think it's very disgusting to suggest that the some of us that did, did better because of our dressing. And I think the profs would be very insulted as well to think that their choice of students in medicine hung on their dress sense. I'm sure they're aware of this possible bias and gave us all a fair chance no matter what we wore.
On the GEP issue.. I don't think that my post was the all encompassing definitive account of the GEP experience. I heard that other people take away different things. But the point of my post mostly, was a reply to the man who was upset because his daughter seemed to be growing too fast, and not a triumphant dismissing of the mainstream experience.
I have friends who are from both camps, and I don't really think there is a major difference whichever path you chose. I'm not saying that one's better than the other in being a better person, I'm just sharing perhaps, the benefits of the GEP programme.
I'm sure there are benefits in a mainstream education as well. More time for sports, more time to enjoy activities outside school, leadership opportunities, making close friends and hanging out.. Lots of things are better on the other side. It's just that I chose to focus on the GEP side of things and perhaps.. for people who are used to having a complete account, I neglected the benefits of the other side.
I honestly think GEP and mainstream programmes are complementary. We make each other stronger. I don't discriminate.
As to the history of this webpage and it's name... Please click on to the first post ever on this blog... It is a legacy thing that I won't change. I think it's important to have a pillar in your life.. Something that reminds you of who you were so that you know who you are now... I've even dug out the old format thanks to the Internet Archive. You can see what it was. I hope it will be the same even in a hundred years.
It feels like walking across a snowy field and being the first to make footprints
What did people see when they first opened their eyes? Did they see a world full of treasures, or did they see a world full of fears? Did they see a world like God's Eden, or did they see a realm of hulking elephants, hippotamuses and tigers? With scraggly bones of long deceased animals littering the plains? Did they see in the forest, a bright warm home, or a dark, fetid, claustrophobic hell?
What does it mean to do research? I keep going back to definitions, because definitions are our springboard to the unknown. It tells us what we already know. By exclusion then, it tells us what we do not know. And helps us find our way.
My answer to that first human who opened his eyes. It depends. If he first saw a cat eating a mouse, and he could kill that cat. Then, it very much would be Eden to him. But if the first thing he saw, was a tiger fighting with an elephant, with snarling, roaring, trumpeting and the Earth shaking, he would then conclude that this was hell.
My point is. Perhaps research is about this whole idea of us. Where do we stand? To bacteria, insects, maybe we are the most hellish environment imaginable. We have huge defences, big size. To viruses, maybe we are nothing more than walking food silos and factories. To animals, perhaps we are food.
Everyone lives life based on their prior experience. When I chose my future, what was I thinking? I'm a naturally suspicious person. To me, it was consciously walking into hell.
Because all fruitful research is done that way. See a snowy field and be the first to make footprints.
