Starch and varlings

I had a misconception about starch. I used to think that starch makes people stupid. It's a long story that started in my childhood. I grew up in a somewhat stagnant society in which people do not mind committing little sins for a little profit. Or just to stay alive. (It's not as bad as I'm making it perhaps.)

Schools were (and probably still are) popular places for snack sellers to open their "mobile" stalls. The reason was hundreds of kids running out to buy snacks 3 times a day (during the 2 breaks and at the end of school). As tasty as these snacks used to be, sellers substituted expensive ingredients with cheaper ones. For example, meatballs no longer contained meat but mostly starch and some compound that simulate the bouncy/chewy texture; more starch added to make "syrup candies" more "syrupy"; and especially colourful food colouring was added to make snacks look more attractive.
My parents told me not to buy these snacks. They cited the reason above: cheap ingredients were added to substitute costly ones partly or even completely, with starch being mentioned as a prime example. These snacks made me stupid, so I was told. Somehow, I made the connection that this means starch made me (and people in general) stupid.

Now I understand that it is the lack of protein (because starch substitutes meat) is the real culprit.

Another misconception is related to this snack seller example. Food hawkers on side streets also did this substitution trick. Note that such business was usually handed down from parents to their children. Inflation and globalization only made things worse. In short, ingredients were getting more expensive but sellers needed to keep the price low to be affordable. And there was more competition from Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's.
I can understand that the hawkers were more or less forced to substitute costly ingredients, give less sauce, and other tricks to keep cost low in order to survive. The price was that with each trick, the taste inevitably degrades. Many such stalls finally stopped selling because customers no longer come because the food was no longer nice.

Somehow, I made another link of reasoning and concluded that things only got worse as generations pass. All talks about "good old days" only reinforced this conclusion. How my city used to have vast paddy fields when my Dad was in elementary school. How the temperature used to be much cooler. How the roads used to be much more peaceful with few motored vehicles.

Thank goodness for writers like David Brin, who wrote novel I am currently reading, Glory Season. His writing is one major influence in freeing my mind from these misconceptions. That human can get better. That we should look to the future, think about what we can do, instead of fretting about the good old days, the lost golden age in the past.

A novel cannot be interesting without a central character. She was Maia, a varling (see explanation below) like all of us. She was born in a maternal society in which human could breed via sexual mating and self-cloning (apparently organisms as complex as insects and even lizards are blessed with this ability). What is more, self-cloning was preferred to form clans. Children born from mating were called varlings and automatically became second class citizens. Thus, Maia's story easily attracts my sympathy.
One theme (among so many in the novel) that strikes me at this particular stage of my life is, quoting the afterword, "no plan, no system or stereotype, can suppress an individual who is boldly determined to be different."

Back to misconceptions, on our eyes it is obvious that isolated society into which Maia is born cannot be sustained for long. Sooner or later people will want openness. To Maia and other women in this society though, this concept is far from obvious. It is almost heretical.
It pushes me more than I like (or comfortable with) to re-evaluating what I learned from my parents. It is an obvious necessity to other people, but it is almost heretical to me.


Other novels by David Brin that I enjoyed reading are Kiln People and Earth.
You can check his official website here: http://www.davidbrin.com

(Edited on 5 March 2015)

Nooooooo....

Melinda is out from American Idol? How can quantum mechanics and probability theory explain this?

(Disclaimer: This is some trashy impulsive post.)

The Third Installment

I looked forward to Spider-Man 3 really badly. I was skeptical on the first and second films, and was proven wrong both times. So I thought the third one must be just as good or even better. Unfortunately, I was proven wrong again.

Spidey 3 is not a bad film. It looks as good as the first two; but I did not feel the same resonance as I did with the first two. There was even moments that I thought, "I hate this Peter Parker." I could not identify what exactly the film lacks compared to the other two. Execution, perhaps?

Probably the main reason is too many things going on in one film. I suspect the writers added Venom because a lot of fans wrote that they wanted to see Venom in the third film all over teh Intarweb. I wonder if the film would be better had the villain been only Sandman. That way, more time is available to explore "the battle within"--promised by the film's tag line--Peter and Harry (and, to certain extent, MJ).

(Warning: possible spoilers after this.)

Moments I dislike in the film:

• The way Harry changed his mind by his butler. I was expecting the change to be some thing like "my father went that way, I won't; I am a different man from him." What I got was a (somewhat) immature change of mind just because an older person says so.
• WTH did Harry jumped in front of Peter in the climax fight? How could he change that far in the span of (probably) a few minutes?
• The resolution between Marko and Peter. Ugh, just by "I forgive you" everything is alright? What about the things Marko did so far? The Spidey I know would have said "I understand your situation and everything, but I still gotta put you behind bars."

I do like the tension built up between Peter and MJ. I think their problem happens everywhere. After all, is it not more difficult to tell our negative stories (e.g. being fired from a play) to the closest person than to (more-or-less) strangers?

Good film, but could have been incredible.

Tag line

True to MediaCorp tradition, they are airing Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 on Channel 5. It is the ad for Spider-Man 2 that makes me cringe. It shows some moody emotional close ups of MJ and Peter. And they add text that goes more or less like this:
"You can never escape from a relationship with Spider-Man..."
"... because he is the only one who sticks around."
I'm not sure if this is an attempt at humor or a straight-no-joke stuff; I just find it unbearably bad.

The other night, though, there is such ad for another (much lower budget) program, Lifeline, I think. It's a local drama about civil defense officers. The ad is a collection of shots from the show; but the audio is replaced with siren. With the audio/video goes the text that goes something like:
"Siren sound..."
"... is it a sign of trouble..."
"... or is it a sign of hope?"

For some reason that tag line sticks to my mind even though I saw it only once.

I guess the statement gets into me because recently I experienced first-hand such double-meaning things. Things that can be interpreted in different ways depending on where you were when it happened. For accident victims, siren sound may mean hope. For by-standers,
siren sound may be an annoyance or even a sign of trouble.

I cannot help but thinking that emotion is a function of physical position (how close I am to the siren to be annoyed), social position (if I am with friends I am more likely to be concerned about what happened than if I am alone), and "role" (I cannot find a better word; this means whether I am an accident victim or a by-stander).

I'm sure there are more dimensions to human to fully define the function that explains human emotions; but I was happy to find myself thinking in this somewhat analytic mode. The reason is that I'm currently reading Computer Science: Reflections on the Field, Reflections from the Field. It is a somewhat easy to read book about different areas in Computer Science (CS).

Reading the book is almost like re-living the moments I spent with a friend/more-than-friend who is no longer with me; replacing the emotional pain with intellectual & egoistical pains. The book reminds me of the wonders and excitements I experienced when studying CS during undergrad time. One plus about the book is that it is narrative than technical; I learned quite a number of historical accounts on how the CS concepts I learnt was developed.
Here is a number just for a taste: database (a small joke: what do you mean people are still doing research on database?), algorithm, computability, P and NP, machine translation, NLP, statistical methods, Gaussian classifier, Alan Turing, game playing, Claude Shannon, Noam Chomsky, different levels of grammars, lambda calculus, relational calculus...


(Edited on 5 March 2015)