The Passing of Mr Lee Kuan Yew

Mr Lee Kuan Yew passed away on Monday morning, 23 March 2015. The last three days have been internally confusing. I wanted to express my gratitude towards this great man, but I did not know how. Today I decided that I should at least share articles that formulate in words what I feel about him.

Mr Lee Kuan Yew's lawyer, Davinder Singh, remembers the man

Here is a quotation from the article that I personally feel important.

"My father immediately stood up when it was announced that Mr Lee had arrived, even though he must have known that, standing so far away in the midst of hundreds of parents and cadets, Mr Lee would not have been able to see him. After he stood up, others from all races followed. It was then that I truly realised what this Chinese man meant to my Punjabi father who was not even born in Singapore."
"It were these spontaneous reactions from migrants, who had seen what life was like in their home countries and now felt protected by a man they completed trusted, that made me pause and think."

The text in italics expresses my personal feeling about Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore.

Critics call Singapore an autocracy. But I never felt more free than when I lived there.

Personally important quotation:

But in the coverage that followed the death of Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew on Monday, Western media has painted a very different picture. They describe a crushing autocrat that chained his people and stripped them of basic freedoms. My experience was quite the contrary. Outside of this tiny island utopia, I never felt more free.

Again, the text in italics formulates my feeling.

Beyond foreign leaders, international brands join in to pay tribute to LKY

Closer to my present occupation, this article was a surprise find. Perhaps I underestimated Singapore's gravity as an economic destination.

On Wednesday evening I went to the tribute site at Jurong East, just behind JCube. I have two anecdotes that I feel worth sharing.

• I saw Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Ms Halimah Yacob there. To my surprise, they said "Thank you for coming." I thought it was I who should be thankful to have a tribute site arranged near where I live.
• I saw a young father, around my age, with his young daughter, probably younger than Primary 1 age. He softly said to his daughter, "Let's give respect and then we go home." It brought so many thoughts, memory, and feelings to me. I start to understand that we all try to introduce some understanding about the past to the next generation, "to link the far past with the far future."

Rest in peace, Mr Lee Kuan Yew. Thank you for enabling Singapore to be what it is today.

Parallels of the Planets of the Apes

Recently my wife and I watched Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). We found it good enough, that I suggested that we watch first film, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). Watching the two films near enough to each other enabled us to see some interesting parallels between them.

(Spoiler alert. If you do not want to be spoiled, please stop reading here.)




















Both films start with a group hunting another group.

• In Rise, human hunted apes.
• In Dawn, apes hunted... other animals.
• Perhaps this parallel tries to tell us how far the apes advanced.

Both films put a (school?) bus as a significant piece in human versus apes battle.

• In Rise, the apes pushed a bus to shield them from human machine guns.
• In Dawn, the apes loyal to Caesar were imprisoned in a bus.
• I do not know if this is intentional. If it is, why a bus? If you have an insight, please comment below. I will be happy to know.

Both films have a scene in which an ape rode a horse.

Both films have a sense of dread throughout. My wife and I agreed that somehow the films makes us dread the bad thing that will happen in the climax.

Overall, though, we thought Rise was more fun to watch than Dawn.

(Edit on 10 Feb 2015)

In both films the "villain" character fell (to his death?).
My wife pointed out an interesting observation related to this:

• In Rise, Koba pushed the villain character.
• In Dawn, it is Koba who fell.

It struck me as a poetic way to show Koba's character arc. Further, it revealed this to me:

• In Rise, Caesar was not willing to do the pushing/killing. He let Koba do this.
• In Dawn, Caesar accepted that he needed to do the killing. So, he let Koba fall.

What a way to design parallel scenes to show arcs of the two major characters.

Jogging Log for 18 Feb 2014

I was curious to explore a route to get to the old train station. It did not feel that far...

 

Why G.I. Joe fits Chinese New Year

Sunday, 2 February 2014, was the second day of Chinese New Year and Channel 5, one of Singapore's TV stations, aired G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra as a "Chinese New Year special." On the surface, it looked like a simple coincidence. After the film ended, though, my eyes went wide with realization. G.I. Joe has an abundant of characters (quite a few even have flashbacks); it also has an abundant of cool things for audience to see. The last scene in the film perfectly captures these. The film is about abundance, one of the traditional things related to Chinese New Year.
Now I know why G.I. Joe fits Chinese New Year (and knowing is half the battle).

Jogging Log for 27 Jan 2014

Today I jogged with David Liew, Gareth, Patrick Woo, and Winston. Here is our route:

We ran 4.5 km!? How did that happen?

Sufficient is enough

After one year of no post, I am posting a silly post.

Chinese New Year (CNY) is coming soon, so there are quite a number of CNY-related ads appearing on MRT stations. This morning I saw one that said "Happiness and Abundance." At that moment, I realized the Answer to why a lot of people were unhappy: abundance (or at least wanting abundance). I thought the ad should have said "Happiness and Having Sufficient"; but then I realized it wouldn't have been traditional and perhaps CNY is about tradition. So I walked on.

In conclusion, a few hours later, a blog that had no new posts for a year finally got one. And that's both an abundance (relatively speaking) and sufficient (for now).

By the way, if you happen to be one of the students in my VFX class, please have a look at these photos. Looks like an idea to execute using green screen, don't you think?

2012 Update

After more than a year of hiatus, I decided it is time to resume writing for this blog.

There are many reasons to this. Work schedule finally stabilizes so I can allocate time for my interest outside work. I had a magical holiday week with my family so I felt the urge to resume writing down my thoughts. I helped a little with a social network marketing at work (please visit the Dream Defenders blog & Facebook page). Plus, Patrick started working at CG Protege and rekindled my interest in group projects.

So, an update is in order. I am now working as a VFX (visual effects) artist at Tiny Island Productions. Last year (and a little portion of this year) I was involved in the production for a Ben 10 tv film, Destroy All Aliens (the film in turn gave me a page at IMDB). Now we are working on Tiny Island's original series, Dream Defenders. In addition, I am helping out with VFX class at CG Protege (our school next door to our production studio).

Being a class instructor gave me the opportunity to explore things outside the usual things I do during production. Even when the class is about a simulation tool I use at work (FumeFX, for example), I can try out values and parameters that I had never paid attention to before. It has that boundary feel between experimentation and repeating steps I am familiar with. Sometimes trying reveals something completely new; though most of the times it turns out less than spectacular :p

So, here I am. I plan to write my thoughts about VFX work for animation. Soon. Maybe. If we are lucky.

On 3D Modeling

It has been a long time since my last post, so allow me a quick, unpolished post this time.

I have been learning how to create 3D models the last 10 months. Here are what I learned from my modeling lessons.

• Modeling is basically putting vertices on 3D space in such a manner (for example, 2 vertices are connected to form an edge, 3 or more edges form a polygon) that the computer can create an image that we can recognize as objects.
• Polygon modeling using 3ds Max, to me, means defining edge loops at points important to define a shape; then let the computer interpolate the area in-between (using the TurboSmooth modifier). As a computer science graduate, I see this style of modeling as a way to selectively add details.
• Modeling using Mudbox begins with defining a basic shape (called the base model). Vertices on the base model should be spread as uniformly as possible; equivalently, quads on the base model should be as close as possible to a square. Next, we sub-divide the base model and add details by pulling out or pushing in vertices. As a computer science graduate, I feel this style of modeling reminiscent to brute-force algorithms. We rely on the computer hardware to handle the large amount of data generated as we keep sub-dividing the base model in order to add finer and finer details.

I found myself agreeing a friend when he said that modeling using Mudbox is just using a fancy FFD (Free Form Deformation). However, further use convinces me that the tools provided by Mudbox are much more powerful than FFD. The difference among the tools are subtle enough to fool me into thinking that sticking to one tool is enough. They, however, serve different purposes and are useful on different scenarios/problems.

All in all, I find modeling using Mudbox much closer to drawing. I can concentrate on getting proportions right, enhancing shapes, and other high-level thinking instead of worrying about the topology of the model.

Comparing Stereotypes

I made an interesting observation recently. It is about Lyo and Merly, the mascots for the recent 2010 Youth Olympic Games.

The setting was a chaotic but warm family gathering, with many adults and 3 children. The TV was on, and Lyo and Merly made a brief appearance. Someone asked, "Which one is Lyo and which one is Merly?" Another replied, "Usually blue is boy, what. So blue should be Lyo and red should be Merly."

I instantaneously thought, "Hey, that's a wrong stereotype!" I was using the Power Rangers stereotype in colour scheme. Red is always the main guy; blue is one of the sidekicks, who is sometimes a girl (especially if the blue is close to cyan, like Merly's colour).

The next moment, I questioned my own thought, "Why is that wrong? After all, the boy is usually given the color blue and the girl pink, a shade of red."

I find it interesting that 2 stereotypes I take for granted clash each other in a manner I never expected.

Some Thoughts on Drawing

I like to look at drawings, paintings, and sketches. Then I found out that I seemed to be better than my peers in drawing things on paper and I became interested in drawing, painting, and sketching. Soon, this interest started to make me feel the need to learn from other people who I think are better than I am.

However, I often cannot understand what (people who call themselves or are called) artists mean when they describe their work and their working process. For example, it was only recently that I found out that "organic look" means something in the line of "non-geometric look". Before that, I never understood what "organic look" meant whenever I read or heard this term.

As I continue drawing, painting and sketching, I found a lot of fuzzy concepts that I learned from going back and forth between practice and reading books on drawing and painting. Examples of such concepts are (1) the reason behind squinting eyes when painting and (2) the difference between drawing lines and painting strokes. I realize I need labels/words/terms/vocabulary to describe these things and organize them in my mind (I personally believe that organizing what I know helps in learning things that I do not yet know). It is at this point that I started to understand why artists usually use words that I did/do not understand. They try to describe fuzzy concepts that they know exist (because they use these concepts when creating things) but people in general are not familiar with. (I wonder if this is a universal problem because of specialization.)

I felt the need to write this article because of my recent experience collaborating with a friend from my drawing group. She shares similar interests in drawing, painting, and sketching (let's put "visual arts" label to this set of things), but her background and experience are very different from mine. There were times that I realized we were having difficulty to communicate (to describe what look that we want to achieve, for example). I wondered why this difficulty was there at all. As I pondered on it, my train of thought helped me to formulate the cause as I wrote in previous paragraphs. We both tried to explain what we meant using inexact words either because there were no exact words or because we did not fully understand what we wanted to describe.
---
Related to this experience, there is another fuzzy concept that I started to see. I'd like to attempt to describe it here.

I find myself often using the words "high level" and "low level" to categorize things. The things can be concepts related to visual arts, programming, or anything in general; but let's to stick to visual arts concepts. A high level concept is not necessarily better/greater/more advanced than low level ones. A high level concept is built on top of a number of low level concepts (perhaps the metaphorical "top" is the reason for the term "high level"?). For example, walking is a high level concept while swinging arms, shifting body weight, moving a leg forward, and so on are low level concepts needed for walking. Low level concepts are more concrete than high level concepts. The fuzzy concepts I mentioned earlier above are high level concepts I learned from practicing low level concepts many times.

Now, an artist has his own knowledge, which is a set of high level concepts. As he practices, he learns more concepts.

• On the one hand, people are naturally interested in new things, so usually they want to learn new things.
• On the other, learning is a personal experience; thus learning what you are interested in means that you are likely to care about the topic deeply. Most of the time your care is deep enough to make you tie your self-worth to what you know.

I think this is why people are likely to be defensive/argumentative when discussing the concept they are currently learning. At least I often catch myself being so.

Artists with less experience care more about low level concepts, such as drawing the correct proportions, smoothing line curves, tightening up & cleaning up sketches, or even minute details of character (e.g. exact number of spikes in the case of anime hair). At some point, all these would sink to the background. The artist still thinks about all these, but they are in a background process that do not need much attention. It is at this point that he can learn new concepts because his conscious mind is free from all these. It is at this point that he starts building high level concepts using the low level concepts that now runs in the background process.

I think it is also at this point that he starts to use words people don't understand :)

Reality is no doubt much more complex than this; but, hey, that's what I can formulate in words for now.

Tobe Gundam

Recently, I found that it is possible to get overwhelming nostalgia from things I am not too familiar with. I got it from listening Tobe Gundam in Operation British. I have listened to Tobe Gundam before this, but I thought it was ridiculous and I did not like it. It was listen-once-and-forget-about-it. After a while, though, I happened to hear the song and found it nostalgic. I still think it sounds outdated, but now I can enjoy the song and sometimes (when I'm in the appropriate mood) get teary eyed a little.

I also had a similar experience with the song Shine in the Storm (also in Operation British), but it is less surprising because I watched Gundam 08th MS Team, the series that has the song as opening.

Still, I think there is something about the musical style in Tobe Gundam that reminds me of my childhood (when anime was still infinitely cool).

Youth Rebellion++

I just read Solanin and To Terra volume 1. On the surface, they are completely different:

• Solanin (2005-2006) is a slice-of-life story. The story ingredients are "normal:" boyfriend, parents, bands, music, the city, work...
  
• To Terra (1977-1980) is a sci-fi story. The story ingredients are fantastic: space travel, space cadets, telepathy, super computers, closely controlled society...
  

Yet, at the core, they touch one thing in common: youth rebellion. (To Terra is a long manga, so this applies only to the first 2 parts of volume 1, I think.)

I thought what was the chance for me picking 2 random manga titles from the library that share a similar theme packaged in 2 very different genres? But perhaps it's quite likely because at my current age, I tend to gravitate towards this kind of stories.

And perhaps "youth rebellion" is not what I meant. It's one step after that. What happens to people after the rebellious phase? As Solanin puts it, they can either accept what life they have or they can fight their life to the end.

These are 2 abstract choices inevitably interpreted differently by different people, but I think there's truth to them. I think they are not mutually exclusive. We can pick one choice for one aspect in life and pick the other in another aspect. (Perhaps this is what hobbies are for? To experiment with the other choice we didn't pick the first time?)

I think that happiness is related to what we choose between the two. It interesting to note that a character in Solanin explicitly asks the question "Are you happy?" and "Am I happy?". To Terra, on the other hand, uses the word "sadness". Of course these words are the product of translation from Japanese to English; perhaps the actual Japanese words have some different connotation/meaning. But still, it's funny to see how some themes are universal (across genres and time).

---

On another note, I recently read the novel and then watched the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was blown away when I checked the year of the film on the back of the DVD case. 1969! It made me re-think my credits to films like Star Wars (1977) that I thought pioneered special effects for space films. Star Wars deserves a big credit, after all the 3 films shaped my generation's imagination. However, 2001 shaped the imagination of the generation that worked on Star Wars! The realization was amazing.

Even now, I'm still re-evaluating 2001's influence. I can't help noticing that the space stations in To Terra look very similar to those in 2001 (they look like wheels). Some space ships have segments that is reminiscent to the space ship Discovery One in 2001.

(It's interesting that To Terra started running in the same year as the first Star Wars film came out. Is this just coincidence? Or was the boom in space travel stories caused by 2001?)

---

Yet another topic is the drawing style in To Terra. I can't help noticing that it is very similar to that in Candy Candy. The way they depict emotion and gags are very similar. Perhaps it's no wonder because they ran in more-or-less the same years. But it made me wonder if this is because of Osamu Tezuka's influence.

I used to think of Tezuka simply as "Astro Boy author." Then I found out that he also drew Kimba the White Lion (the original title was Jungle Emperor). I thought, okay, so he also drew some serious stories, but it still looks like some cute stuff.

Next, I found out that he also drew Black Jack. I thought, okay, so he also drew some dark stories, but some Black Jack stories are plain ridiculous.

Then, I found Anime World Order podcast and finally found out why Tezuka was called the god of manga. His works are like 2001 (the film) in the sense that 2001 looks outdated but I can still be blown away that it looks that good despite its age.

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Let's close this post by coming back to the theme of youth rebellion. When I first read David Brin's article, I was amazed that every generation rebelled. It's human nature. It left the nagging question "so why things change gradually?" I think the answer is because it is also human nature to resist change. As I grow older, I realize that every generation actually walks more or less the same path as the previous generation did. Sensibility, taste, fashion, appearance, etc change. But the general trend is the same.

In my personal experience, it was scary/loathsome to realize that I am following the steps of the very people I tried to be different from/rebel against. And then I realized that perhaps this was because we found the "best way;" I just agreed with what people before me found. That's not something to be unhappy about.

Cast Off! K-On!

Just a few days ago I realized dreadfully that I was getting shallow. Recent show I watched are painfully light and perhaps shallow, but I found them very entertaining for multiple reasons.

First, I watch Kamen Rider Kabuto. To me, recent Kamen Rider titles are fun because of their gimmicks: costume design, fighting choreography (usually for climactic moments), and the Rider powers (cheap special effects that are fun to watch). With Kamen Rider Kabuto, I enjoyed Kabuto design. I also love the concept of "Cast Off", where a Rider takes off his heavy armor to reveal a slimmer form, and "Clock Up", essentially a mode in which the Riders and the monsters move very fast. I think I accepted that Kamen Rider is half comedy while watching Kabuto.

I was disappointed by the later part of the series, though. I usually enjoy the powered-up form a series introduce mid-way. But Kabuto's "Hyper Form" is just too powerful and poorly executed. It could have turned the series even more fun, but it didn't (it turned the series worse, in my opinion).

Still, I love that voice, "Cast Off! Change Beetle."

Next, I watched K-On! It's very light-hearted and, as Anime World Order may put it, nothing really happened. But it reminded me of high school days. With that weird (to me) notion of friendship.
I personally keep only a few friends I am (relatively) close with and hang out with them often. The way things worked, one way or another people move on and these friends keep changing. That is to say, friend who used to be close usually drift further and I accept this a fact of life.
So, the notion of making really close friends in high school, which I guess what I did, only reminds me of the next thing awaiting in the corner: U-U-U-University. Where people are very likely to go on their separate ways. It was when transitioning to university that I realized that in real life, people prioritize on what they want to do, not friendship. It sounds terrible, but that's fast of life for me. Maybe that's why I don't keep very close friends anymore.

Anyway, watching K-On! was a so-happy-and-nostalgic-that-it-hurts-a-little for me.

But these on their own did not trigger the said realization above. It was when I started watching Baccano! that I realized I was having trouble watching somewhat complex story. I remembered I used to look for this kind of stories in anime. Compare it to the kind of shows that I watch now. Maybe I'm too comfortable in my comfort zone?

Anyway, I'm still continuing inside my comfort zone with Kamen Ride D-D-D-Decade!

That Heightened State

Today I had a deadline. It isn't important what the deadline was for; what's important is that I could not run away from it and it was important to me.

The thing that is different about this deadline is that I had so many things to do before it came that I knew it was impossible to finish them all. I have not had this kind of deadline for a long time. I think the last time I had it was back in university (5 years ago?). It gave me that heightened state of body and mind in which I don't care about anything else other than finishing things before the deadline.
At the same time, I experienced despair because I knew I could not finish all these things. This aspect made me frantic, then emotional, then exhausted. It made me appreciate the opportunity to rest on the bus on my way to a final touch ups before submission. Surprisingly, it helped me to think what is important and what is not. Was it really important to finish all the things I listed down? Or was it more important to made enough changes until my team mate & I were satisfied? After submission, I felt tired and somewhat empty, which I also experienced with similar bad deadlines.

The new things this time, tough, are these:

• I strangely feel ready for the next thing. In my previous experience with bad deadlines, I felt too exhausted to do anything.
• The thought about what is important and what is not made it easier for me to accept a personal rejection. I was dreading that I would be even more down after the deadline passed.

I wish I could slow down to think about this more, but there are more things to do before this year ends (somehow all things are concentrated at year's end), so I thought I'd write this down so I can revisit it someday.

In the Beginning... Was the Command Line

Remember sometime ago I posted that I will read this book called "At the Beginning... Was the Command Line"? Well, apparently it is a long essay that was originally published online and got printed because it is popular. You can get it here:
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

If you want to know the author, Mr Neal Stephenson, a little better, you can read his Slashdot interview (he sounds like a cool guy):
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/20/1518217

Another little story is about another book in my want-to-read list, Neuromancer. I was moody Friday evening and didn't feel like going home directly from work but too moody to go to crowded place. So I went to a second-hand bookstore near my home. As I was browsing the SF section, I saw "Neuromancer". Wow! I quickly fished out the book... and saw a fantasy-like cover, which forced me to read the title more carefully. It was actually "Necromancer". Geh.

(Edited on 5 March 2015)

Book Titles

There is a thread in Reddit to list book titles. Here is what I choose in a very biased manner:

• A Clockwork Orange
• Brave New World
• Enders Game
• The Selfish Gene
• Epic of Gilgamesh
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Neuromancer
• In the Beginning...was the Command Line

Other than that, guess I'd mention these to hint what is influencing me at the moment:

• Cry Engine demo was out early this week. Very demanding about GPU; but gorgeous graphics... Lovely tropical island look & amazing sea water.
• There will be stage building feature in Super Smash Bros Brawl (let's abbrev. it as SSB Brawl). Apparently there were earlier SSB 64 and SSB Melee. Some early pro gamer impression from the payable demo is that Brawl is completely different from Melee. (Sonic's in Brawl, btw.)
• Drawing can be seen as an organized activity to put what I see in my mind onto paper. Sometimes I feel it can almost be mechanized (put into a deterministic algorithm); but then even scratching a pencil line is ambiguous. Why 65.2937492873498237498 degrees instead of, say 65.33948290482340234980 degrees? Why 23.2348982309480 mm line instead of 25.2349239048209 mm one?
• Painting is somewhat similar. Only I can think in terms of patches instead of "blocks".
• Some people with too much time in their hands actually wrote a compiler for LOLcode. Sure LOLcats are fun; but writing a compiler for LOLcode seems rather extreme, no?
• Whoever says Perl scripting is dead needs to experience moar Perl. Many, many extensions on CPAN; some with really helpful manual.
• I found an evidence today that people do seem to agree that wisdom and intelligence/genius are mutually exclusive after certain threshold. Example: Kurt Godel is a genius, but he is certainly not wise. My colleague, Ian, told me a quotation from ADnD (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons): "When it rains, intelligence tells you that it is water falling from the sky; wisdom tells you to take cover."

(Edited on 5 March 2015)
From the book list, I have read these:

• A Clockwork Orange
• Enders Game (highly recommended; also "Now a Major Motion Picture!")
• Neuromancer
• In the Beginning...was the Command Line

"With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility"

I have made fun of this quotation a lot. It sounds so cheesy.

The first time I read it, I did not understand it. A first enlightenment came while (out of all things) learning Object-Oriented (OO) programming. (In OO programming, the more "power" you have to access the attributes of an object, the more you have to be responsible/careful in using them.) Only two weeks ago, I had a second enlightenment. This time, it's as real-world a scenario as it gets.

Google vs. Evil: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/google_pr.html

It is an old article in Wired.com; but still an interesting read. Google's is a unique story that resembles a superhero beginning/origin/year one story. Two university students with the ambition to do good for mankind by providing a usable, fair search engine. And then they got a super power. Real super power. I cannot even begin to imagine how it feels to have such power that countries feel the need to talk to you, a mere individual. Even more, you have the power to impact so many people's life.

Anyway, with such a slogan as "Don't be Evil", I wonder why it took me so long to link a comic book quotation to Google.

Getting busy

Right now is probably one of the best times in my life. I have all the opportunity to do what I like.

Now, the difficult thing is that I still have many things I want to do and I definitely cannot do all of them at the same time. For example, I want to:

• create a Dev ID for my deviantArt page;
• work on another short comic for Hamthology vol. 2;
• try making a 2D animation (Tsunami Channel OP that I've delayed since the time when dinosaurs still walk on earth (around the time Jurrasic Park was popular, I mean (maybe)));
• continue working on my Joan of Arc 3D model;
• colour the WIB poster I started working on some time ago;
• work on a simple 3D scene engine.

The order reflects the likelihood of my starting each work.
A little interesting to note that the short comic on point #2 has "choices" as the theme :)

Besides that, I'm still reading books, of course. I'm currently on The Transparent Society by David Brin. It's an interesting read about how the Internet opens up whole new possibilities and problems. Even more amazing is the fact that the book was published in 1998. That means, what, he started writing it around 1996? When the Internet was just starting (and Netscape was still fighting the Browser War against IE)?

Anyway, time to get busy :)

(Edited on 5 March 2015)

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)

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)