Commonplace Book

Apposition

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Tue, 10 May 2011 01:07:00 +0000

"... unemployment rates range from 8 per cent to 12 per cent in many countries with First World Parliaments.

...

"Had we a First World Parliament, would we honestly have got out of the recession as fast? Or would it have seen us still arguing while we slipped into a second recession, let alone got out of the first?"

From Paul Krugman's New York Times column:

"The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness.

"So this seems like a good time to point out that this blame-the-public view isn’t just self-serving, it’s dead wrong.

"The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious."

Library book graffiti and long conversations

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Sun, 08 May 2011 07:19:00 +0000

Some time ago I borrowed a copy of the book that first introduced the word "meritocracy" to widespread attention, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033 - an Essay on Education and Equality, by Michael Dunlop Young. As you can tell from the title, it's satire. Young wrote this mock-history to criticize what he saw as the tendency for the educated elite in Britain of his time (the 1960s) to think that their social and economic position were something they deserved because of their hard work and talents alone (hence the "rule of the meritorious"). This simply ignores of course the huge inequalities of opportunity at the time, which still remain with us today. It is not true that someone who is poorer is necessarily less able.

Today people use "meritocracy" as a term of approbation. There seems to be something wholesome and commonsensical about it, but the problem, as Young recognized and satirized, is that it is a moral trap, leading people to a false sense of entitlement and an estrangement from empathy. Not surprising, then, that his book would be popular reading for students.

The copy that I got from the college library turned out to be full of underlinings, circling, and marginal notes. Normally I'm very annoyed by these things. Another book I borrowed recently was full of dog ears, and I spent ten minutes standing in the stacks unfolding every single one of them. However, when I looked closely at the marginalia, I found them to be amusing, even educational.

Some people didn't get that this was satire. There was one set of notes that expressed alarm and dismay of the "how could he say that!" sort. In a different hand on the same pages were notes upon those notes, expressing surprise that the other guy was dense enough to think that this book was 'for real'.

Then I turned to chapter V and the facing blank page was covered in a graffiti 'conversation' of sorts. Given the age of this book copy, successive generations of students over maybe several decades could have been responding to each other in these pages!

In case it's not clear from the picture, here's what the graffiti says, each line being in a different handwriting:

"Hi! You are a member of the upper 5% of the meritocracy!!"

"If you know what I mean"

"Yes, but will that get you into Med School, turkey?"

"Only if your dad's the dean of admissions!"

"Who cares, you're all a bunch of pompous Harvard assholes"

"Trained to be so, of course"

"His Lordship's artificial leg was not to be found"

"The greatest fulfillment lies in submission..."

[arrow to the previous statement] "Hmmm is this female handwriting?"

On the one hand this is a validation of both the Tragedy of the Commons (no one takes care of common property because it belongs to no one person) and the Broken Window theory (that crime proliferates in poorly-maintained neighborhoods because the poor maintenance shows that people don't care enough to protect their property). Once someone started writing in the book, I suppose it was easier for the next guy to forget about the rules.

On the other hand, this shows how little some things change at Harvard - we all still have hang ups about elitism, and are never really comfortable with the H-bomb. Little surprise then that a book about meritocracy should attract so much inline commentary over the years.

Polling day diary

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Fri, 06 May 2011 21:34:00 +0000

I hear that the civil society group MARUAH is doing a polling day survey to ask Singaporeans whether they felt the polling process to be fair and secure. Voting overseas, though, I've already cast my ballot paper six and a half hours ago, and there's still three more hours before polling opens in Singapore. What was it like? Quite uneventful, actually!

From Boston, I took the bus down yesterday and used the opportunity to meet up with some friends. I stayed overnight with my friend Adi who lives in Brooklyn (that's him on the left)

In the morning I woke up bright and early and we took the subway down. Many of the subway stations outside Manhattan are ground-level and open to the air. Also in need of a new coat of paint...

He got off at his workplace, and I continued down to Manhattan. Along the way had to make a transfer at 14th St Union Square. I like the industrial feel that the girders give the place.

Finally reached 51st St station, got out into the sun and it was a beautiful day outside! Warm, but not hot, sunny, the trees finally turning green, people walking around without being swaddled up in ten layers of wool....

I kept walking and soon found the right street. A bit more and the familiar colors were peeking out between the springtime foliage.

At the polling station I couldn't take any pictures, of course. The process was really swift. I was ushered through a simple metal detector, and then they checked my polling letter and NRIC. I left my jacket and backpack at the coat room, and walked upstairs to a carpeted conference room. Before and after me there were maybe two or three people, but there was no queue and everything was very quick. The staff checked my IC and particulars again, then crossed my name off the register. They gave me a ballot paper, and I asked one of them "so are there are lot of people voting here today?"

"Quite a few," she replied, though she didn't give a number. From the size of the list she had, perhaps a thousand or so could have been registered.

There were three little booths made of cardboard, and in front of it the ballot box, also made of cardboard, sealed except for a slot on top. I crossed the appropriate box, folded it in two, and dropped it into the box. Done!

Walked downstairs, got my jacket and bag, and then went back into the sunshine.

Strolled over to Times Square, and got on the next bus back to Boston. Exam tomorrow, must study!

Thoughts on the Coming Election

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Mon, 02 May 2011 17:28:00 +0000

This will be the first General Election in Singapore since I turned 21, and I will get to vote as an overseas voter at the consulate in New York. It is certainly not the most convenient situation - it's a five hour bus ride each way between there and Boston, and I was worried that I would have to reschedule an exam depending on when the overseas polling would take place - but I think that it's both my right and duty as a citizen to cast my ballot, given that it's within my means to do so.

Watching the media coverage from afar, mainly through the establishment Straits Times and the 'citizen journalism' portal The Online Citizen, I'm removed from the hustle and bustle of the activity that surrounds the campaigning. I can't attend any rallies, can't see the candidates on their walkabouts, nor can I get a sense of what "the average Singaporean", who doesn't post his thoughts and opinions online, is thinking. This puts me in a position to be what the prime minister would consider to be the ideal voter, who is calm, rational, and unswayed by emotional rhetoric or crowd fervor. At least, this was the reason that the 'cooling off' day was implemented as a pause in campaigning before polling day, to allow voters to reflect 'coolly and calmly' on the issues.

Read more »

Applause and Embarrassment

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 16:16:00 +0000

Two days ago, I attended a scientific lecture which was open to the public, so there was an audience of a certain kind there, mostly of older, middle-class retirees. The man who introduced the speaker (this was an invited lectureship) walked up to the podium, and as he delivered his opening remarks, a cellphone went off. I think it might have been staged, because he said, snippily, "turn off your effing cell phone!" with a slight hesitation before the key participle of the sentence, to applause from the audience.

My question is: why applaud? There are a few possible reasons:

They were glad that it wasn't themselves being rebuked,
A feeling of self-righteousness, a sense of populist vigilantism - 'finally that guy got what he deserves!' (there's always that guy in every audience),
Plain schadenfreude at seeing someone else publicly embarrassed,
Or, a desire to conform with the wishes of and flatter the dominant personality in the room, viz. the person at the podium.

In any case, these are not particularly edifying reasons and it hence made me uncomfortable that people are so quick to turn against the nonconformist in their midst, whether for good or bad reasons, when given the appropriate encouragement to do so. I'm flagging this incident in my mind, to remind myself to look out for more on the psychology of crowds.

On Commonplace Books, Index Cards, and Scraps of Paper

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 18:21:00 +0000

The historian Keith Thomas writes about his experience gathering reading notes. There are two kinds of reading: casual and attentive. It is increasingly clear to me that serious, attentive reading requires note-taking, unless one has superhuman memory (Thomas cites the example of Macaulay).

In the one project of historical writing which I've undertaken, I laboriously copied quotes and notes into a single notebook, instead of onto cards and slips, because I had this notion of not wasting paper. Back at home (this was before I owned a laptop) I would transcribe my notes onto a word processor, and when I actually started writing I would cut and paste the individual notes and citations in order before stitching them together with prose and paraphrase. It was both Baroque and Byzantine but it worked. Two observations: the constant re-writing and the necessity to recall where a relevant previous note was within the physical context of the notebook made me more familiar with my material, and without the final cut-and-paste on the computer this project would never have been finished, because I was keen to use every single scrap of information that I found.

The Benefits of a Low Birth Rate

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Wed, 26 May 2010 13:13:00 +0000

This letter to the Straits Times newspaper has attracted some online comment, mostly negative, among people I know. The writer claims that Singapore's low birth rate is attributable to society valuing career-building over home and family and to women having unreasonably high expectations for the men they'd want to marry (hence delaying marriage and childbirth), resulting in "a nation of 'spoilt princesses' unwilling and unable to handle the rigours of motherhood."

I'm not particularly interested in his characterization of women. What strikes me is that we still believe that a low birth rate among citizens and permanent residents is an impediment to the success of Singapore, an open and cosmopolitan city. The argument often offered for encouraging locals to have more children is that it increases the pool of talent from which the country can draw upon for its endeavors. This notion rides on a whole set of implicit beliefs and even bears some historical baggage.

The one that is in the back of everyone's mind, whether voiced or not, is Lee Kuan Yew's professed belief in some kind of eugenics. He believed that children born to educated, intelligent parents would likewise be more likely to succeed in life, because intelligence or ability is heritable. As a result, policies like the Graduate Mothers Scheme gave incentives for highly-educated women, who were also less likely to get married and have many children, for each child they bore. The declining birth rate is most marked among university graduates and careerists, precisely the kind of people that Singapore believes it needs more of. Hence birth rate anxiety is also class anxiety.

The other assumption is that talent inheres in a more-or-less fixed proportion of society, let us say the top 5% or so. Therefore, to have more talent, one can only increase the total size of society so that we have more people in this upper bracket. If, however, we believe that talent and ability are neither the products of inheritance nor necessarily rare or scarce, we are free to imagine more possibilities for society. I have found, more often than not, that my peers have developed their talents not through sheer innate force of will or genius, but through early influences in their upbringing, through the environment and work ethic which they have been immersed in, and through interactions with the people and resources that they have encountered. That is to say, we are more products of our circumstances than we like to think. Therefore, the reason that 'talent' (or should we instead say: conventional markers of success) is concentrated in a small segment of society does not suggest that true talent is rare. Instead it means that most people do not experience that fortunate confluence of circumstance and motivation that displays one's innate abilities to best advantage.

This explains why a low birth rate can help Singapore. Instead of raising the population to increase the number of 'talents', we should instead focus our efforts on increasing the proportion of high ability within the population size. As for the issue of importing 'foreign talent', which incurs a lot of resentment, I remain agnostic, but observe that poaching from the best that other countries have to offer has been how America, for example, has maintained its technological lead over other countries. The main issue then is that the local population represents a pool of potential talent that should be developed and nurtured fully before we should claim that we need to look outside to find people of ability. The same set of implicit assumptions, and the same refutations of them, applies to that issue too.

English names in China

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Fri, 14 May 2010 06:31:00 +0000

On the topic of English names adopted by Chinese...

From Danwei.org, via Benny.

Tango Aficionado

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:40:00 +0000

Planet Tango's website with lyrics and music to old tango standards. Oh joy.

Snake writ large

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 01:14:00 +0000

I always thought that many buildings looked like cellphones stood on end.

(via Chenzi)

Words

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 01:46:00 +0000

This evening I listened to a Spanish Catholic mass written in the Renaissance, sung in a Protestant Church by secular people. It still feels weird even though I've been to many such concerts; perhaps it's my irrational belief in the meaning and significance of words.

What's in a Name?

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 04:06:00 +0000

Americans sometimes ask me what's my 'real' name when I introduce myself as Brandon. Surely my Chinese name is more authentic, the more correct way to address me, their reasoning probably goes, and I don't fault them in that because usually it's born from a desire to be friendly and accommodating by taking the trouble to learn how I presumably am accustomed to being called, even though it might be hard to pronounce. So they are sometimes surprised when I tell them that it is my legal name, it's how I've always been called and how I think of myself. And yes my English is very good because it's my first language: I read it, speak it, think in it, and dream in it.

So it was with some disappointment that I read Lee Wei-ling's column on Chinese who adopt Western names for themselves (via TOC). Her argument is that doing so, unless one is a Christian adopting a Christian name, is inauthentic and vain, trying to make oneself out to be something that one is not, and making a fool of oneself in the process. I disagree deeply with this assessment, and with her basic assumption that taking on a Western name is the same thing as blindly exalting the West over one's own cultural and ethnic heritage.

There are a few reasons why one might want to adopt a Western name if one wasn't born to one: (1) To make it easier for Westerners to address you, if your name is hard to pronounce. (2) The idea that if one uses a Chinese name when speaking Chinese, one should use an 'English' name when speaking English, as a matter of complementarity. (3) To invent a new identity for oneself, to become a self-made person of some sort. (4) Because it is fashionable and everyone else is doing it. (5) As a pen name or working name to put some distance between oneself and the people one meets in the course of one's vocation. Lee's article directly criticizes only the fourth group, and implies that the fifth are déclassé, but doesn't address the other motivations above. Group 1, for example, chooses new names for themselves out of consideration for others' convenience, and group 2 espouses a very intuitive way of looking at the issue of names and languages if one is bilingual or multilingual.

Lee, like her father, whom she cites in her essay, is quite a cultural purist; in her father's case, this purism was born as a direct response to the colonial experience. But a multiplicity of names has been the norm, rather than the exception, for most cultures, including the Chinese, until quite recently. Literary Chinese of the past, for example, would choose for themselves a nom de plume that expressed some character or made reference to some place of significance to themselves. Chinese generally would not refer to each other, especially their elders, by their names given at birth, but would use generational terms, or familiar nicknames. One's 'true' name, though, was what was inscribed on the ancestral tablet and recorded in the genealogies. This is not to say that in traditional Chinese society, adopting a new name was not a mark of vanity - calling oneself the "Old Poet of Such-and-such Grove" surely is! - but instead that the vanity 'epidemic' is nothing new. It's not a malaise of modern society, as Lee supposes, but merely a reincarnation of an age-old way to distinguish oneself from the crowd, and quite literally make a name for oneself.

The most incongruous point in her article is that she accepts, and even approves, of Malay names derived from Arabic and Sanskrit roots. These attest to two of the great cultural exchanges that swept through the Malay Archipelago in its long history; at some point someone must have made the decision to adopt a new, 'foreign' name, and that decision stuck. How is that any different from what we've been discussing before?

It's easy to laugh and point at people who try too hard to be different: the "Uneeks" and "Uniques" that she mentions in her article, for example. (Steven Levitt also brought up the example of babies named "Unique", and observes in a chapter of his book Freakonomics that your circumstances of birth might determine your name, but how well you do in life is not so much a function of the weird name you have but instead those same circumstances that predisposed you to your name.) Her fundamental thesis is that non-Westerners who choose Western names for themselves are culturally insecure, and leaves her analysis at that. On the other hand, I think that the cultural purism that she preaches, and the unwillingness to accept the cross-culturality inherent in something as deeply personal as one's own name, points to an even deeper and more insidious kind of cultural insecurity. In Singapore our cultural inheritance is a curious pastiche anyway. We speak a colonial language, we watch and listen to media from China, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan, we eat food from basically everywhere... but our names must somehow be 'pure'? The sooner we accept the 'rojak' in us, the sooner we can get past this post-colonial hangover, and become truly comfortable in calling ourselves Singaporean.

Menu Shennanigans

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:23:00 +0000

How do restaurants make you choose the more profitable option on the menu? A look at the cunning ploys that menu designers employ. Some dos - puting unprofitable items away in some corner, giving two pricing options. One don't - putting items and their prices in a column where the prices can be easily compared.

Problem is - if we know these tricks we think we can outsmart the restaurants, but what if they've already outsmarted us by pretending that there is an art to menus and pricing? What if everything is overpriced?

Science, Superstition, and Soccer

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:52:00 +0000

Earlier this evening I was at the Science Center attending the launch of two new titles in its natural history guidebook series. Many of the familiar faces from the biodiversity scene were there, but an interesting experience was standing in a circle with scientists and science educators and listening in on the following conversation:

"...and when I was resident at Eusoffe Hall in NUS, some of the students said that they looked into the bus terminal and saw things. One guy was so spooked out by it that he moved out. Another told her mother, who hired an exorcist who did the whole ritual at the hall one day when I was away."

"Yeah what about Ulu Pandan camp? That's where they took the soldiers who were killed in combat during the emergency, right?"

"At least the Science Center doesn't have any of those things."

Given that the various numbers of True Singapore Ghost Stories have been consistently been bestselling (fiction!) titles in this country, shouldn't be too surprising that these stories are always circulating in some form.

*****

The other great Singaporean pursuit being soccer, I also heard about this great short film called Tak Giu (link to filmmaker's website with YouTube video), via Siva. The story is about three young guys and their quest to find an open field to play their game of football, without being harassed by the 'mata' (police) for trespassing. Neat social commentary too, and one should keep an eye out for its director/producer, Jacen Tan, who seems to be an up-and-coming talent.

Mistake/Corrective

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:54:00 +0000

Mistake: Making a rude comment on someone's facebook status that you later regret.

Corrective: Make more rude comments on everyone else's facebook statuses, and a few ads for Rolex watches, and then blame it all on your account being hacked.

Dashing Doggies!

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 04:03:00 +0000

Sir Aurel Stein was a Hungarian-British explorer and scholar of Central Asia, best known for his rediscovery of the famous Dunhuang Caves along the Silk Road, and the manuscripts and paintings contained within. On his expeditions he was always accompanied by a dog, and there were in total seven of them, all named 'Dash'. Reading about their fates (run over by bus, killed by pack of dogs, killed by leopard (!)) gives some idea of the danger of travel in that era, and really makes me want to name any dogs I have 'Dash' too.

Lesson 2: Population

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:05:00 +0000

There are lots of people on this island, and the best way to see a good cross-section of society is at the shopping centre. When I was a kid, Tampines had one small one, with a Japanese supermarket as an anchor tenant. Now there are three big shiny malls, one of which is built on the site of the old one, the sheltered area between the MRT station and the bus interchange is filled up with shops that have seemingly spilled over from the row of shops in the older building beside them, and it teems with people. They have come to shop, to see the many colorful ways in which their money can be parted from them.

Being a neighborhood shopping center, they come dressed in the Singaporean uniform: t-shirt and shorts, or sometimes jeans, and usually slippers. L told me: "someone commented that Singaporeans dress too casually, but what can you do if you're not in an air-conditioned office all day - it's too hot to dress up."

There are categories of people easy to recognize because their kind is so ubiquitous: the young families going out, schoolkids in uniform, army boys, aunties doing their auntie thing. There are other categories which are easy to recognize because they are not themselves numerous, but because we have trained ourselves to spot and strenuously ignore them: old people peddling tissue paper, people in wheelchairs peddling more tissues, more old people scavenging for aluminum cans out of rubbish bins, buskers playing a tune with their laminated permit clipped to their music stand. Walking out of an MRT station I saw an old man, neatly dressed, asking passers-by for money. My mother commented, as we walked by: "more and more of these old people standing outside and asking for money." Begging, in other words.

One problem with trying to ignore such 'problematic' people is that you'll never quite know how to react when directly accosted by one. 'Problematic' here has two meanings: the first being the economic problems that force a person to scrounge for money on the streets, the second being the purely social problem of how to interact with such a person without insulting him or your own conscience. With people peddling things, it's easy to reason away a rejection: "I didn't have small change", "I didn't need more tissue paper", "I politely declined", "I'll buy something from him next time", or maybe "if you buy then more of them will start to harass you." What if he's just begging? To say (or think) "he isn't working productively so why should he be given money" is satisfactory when the beggar is a fit young man, but what about some frail old woman? Some time ago while out at lunch with some of the younger guys from church, we were approached by an older man, eyes bloodshot and obviously a bit disturbed, who had gone from table to table asking for "rokok" - a cigarette. No one really knew what to say, we turned him away, someone piped up "don't smoke, it's bad for you." We all need some kind of reason when we turn people away.

-----

On the weekend I went cycling with a bunch of friends, we cycled overnight seemingly all over the island. We rented bikes from East Coast park, went down to the city, through Clementi, up to Bukit Timah, down to Little India, Kallang, and then back again to Bedok Jetty to catch the sunrise, before returning our rented bikes. At night one sees all sorts. There were the pretty young things lining up to get into some nightclub by the bay, the construction sites for the casinos spotlighted and still buzzing with workers close to midnight (and possibly beyond), other fitness fanatics in their more expensive bikes with lights and tights and everything.

We cycled down a row of new condominium buildings near Keppel Island, the name was something Caribbean. The metal drain covers on the sidewalk made a huge racket as we cycled past them, but it seemed deserted, one of us thought that it wasn't occupied yet, so I didn't feel too bad about it, until I saw the lights on in some units, some windows with curtains in them, then I felt a twinge of guilt at making so much noise at 1 am. No one leaned out to shout at us, or if they did, we were soon gone.

At night in East Coast park there are lots of tents, we didn't notice them at first, but then we started seeing one in the bushes, close to the thick vegetation, one pitched under a rain shelter, and once you start spotting a few you soon see them all and they were everywhere, in some places only a few meters apart from each other up and down the beach line. So many people camping. But not all of them for the sheer pleasure of it. By the time we reached them we were too tired to make much noise, and it was just as well. Between the time the revelers and barbequers go home, and the time the sun comes up and the morning joggers turn out in force, they don't have many hours to get a decent night's sleep.

In Little India, we passed through a bus stop with a man sleeping on each of the three benches. Near the Kallang River, we saw people on the benches. Couples making out, we thought at first, but they weren't, for the most part. They were mostly men, some reclining fully, some sitting up with their heads resting in their hands or on their propped-up knees. Passing under an underpass lit up with painfully bright fluorescent light (for safety, presumably), we saw posters on the wall, some belongings stacked up in a miscellaneous assortment of crates and boxes, and two hammocks strung up, one with a sleeping body twisted around as if to shield his eyes from the unrelenting light. There were metal drain covers mounted on the ground, but we took care not to ride over them this time. To have woken him up would have been cruel.

Lesson 1: Geography, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:20:00 +0000

My old school friend M and I agreed to attend the Online Citizen's End-of-Year Review for 2009. We met up at the MRT station, and followed from there some brief directions that I had written out on a scrap of paper. Walking from Lavender into Little India, we soon got disoriented among the shophouses and other low buildings which all looked alike - this wasn't the well-labeled HDB heartland we're accustomed to navigating. Old men, in shopfronts smelling of machine oil, watched as we picked our way through the cluttered five-foot-ways. We stopped at a hawker center so M could use the bathroom, and noticed that the ubiquitous old men, looking much alike in either graying striped polos or neatly pressed white thin cotton short-sleeved shirts, were having their evening beers in glasses poured from big dark quart bottles.

We got our bearings easily from there on, and at the event met a school senior, C, who we had not seen since leaving secondary school. He's since graduated, and wants to be a journalist. After leaving, and having a long lingering talk with one of the guests at the front door of the venue, we decide to catch the last train and have dinner closer to home. But it is dark and the road looks completely different. We decide to start walking anyway, and pass several KTV lounges instantly recognizable by their lurid neon signs, blown up pictures of cognac bottles in the windows, and heavily made up women sitting pretty by the door. I glace inside one and see a row of them singing and gesturing on a dark stage, and hurry on.

Soon enough we're lost again, and M does what I'd been resisting for a while, and whips out her iPhone to look at the map. It turned out that we were on the right path, just so uncertain that we didn't even know it. We keep walking and she glances at a road sign and says, "Pe-ta-in Road, wonder what it means." It sounds like a Malay name. C corrects us, "Marshal Petain, the French World War I hero who later was a Vichy collaborator - a taboo name in France." Why would someone name a road in Singapore after a French traitor? "It seems like there are several roads named after World War I commanders in this area," he went on, "Kitchener Road... that's the guy in the British 'I want you!' recruiting posters, the ones that inspired the Uncle Sam posters." And there's Haig Road too, I added, and strained to remember any more. C points out Foch Road, too. If these houses were built just after the war, it might explain why the roads were named this way. Strange that they never changed Petain's road, though, after what he did. Perhaps people just didn't remember it was there.

Would LKY get his own road? we wondered. Not anytime soon, but eventually, for sure. But what road would be suitably proportional to his influence? Maybe Orchard Road? The road that leads to Parliament House? Some new road in a new HDB estate? Some time ago, Goh Chok Tong had suggested having some of the roads now named for 'minor colonial officials' renamed for prominent locals instead; perhaps this was sometime after S Rajaratnam's funeral when people were briefly paying attention to the past. Who gets to choose, though? We'd just spent the whole night listening to people talk about politics. Perhaps when they name a road for one of the Barisan Sosialis leaders we'd know that the political scene has finally changed - or would that just be tokenism, domesticating the past? In the course of this debate we walk past some more shophouses, some funeral parlors, small businesses, an eclectic mixture on the outskirts of the city center. We enter the underground MRT station, and C remembers an old story: "What about that old tunnel that was supposed to connect Sentosa with the main island?"

---

From my bedroom window on the 18th floor, facing South over the broad low plain of Bedok, Katong, Marine Parade, and beyond, I can see glimpses of the sea from between the highrises that sprout up to take advantage of their coastal vantage. Most of the other blocks in my direct line of sight are lower than mine. And in the horizon of those bits of ocean, I see green hills and islands far away. It is shameful then that I don't know exactly what they are, except vaguely that they're Indonesian. To me, and most people, I suppose, the maritime heritage of this country is more imagined than inherited. There is a sign somewhere on Kent Ridge, on a nice lookout point near a shed built by NParks, which labels all the features to be seen on the horizon. From that ridge one can also see Pasir Panjang, the Long Beach, today a mass of cranes and containers, but previously a pretty piece of seafront property. No wonder all those big old houses were built where they are, like in Katong too, holiday beach villas marooned by land reclamation.

As Singaporeans, we shouldn't be too surprised by now at the change wrought by development, but it's always a bit jarring when one looks into the landscape and suddenly can read the traces. At least as human beings, we can potentially move around and not be smothered by change when it comes, unlike the corals which used to fringe Sentosa, which are now, ironically, smothered in white coralline sand imported from Indonesia, to create a simulacrum of a tropical beach for our enjoyment.

Optional Winter Session Course 65r - Singapore, an Introduction (Field Course)

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:09:00 +0000

Intensive (re-)introduction to Singapore, its past, present, and possible futures. Students will be taught immersively and phenomenologically, living and interacting with Singaporeans and other dwellers in the island city. Topics to be explored include geography, society, environment, and the state. No formal assessment is required, but students are required to discuss their experiences with their peers. Prerequisites: some prior familiarity with the subject; this course is suitable for Singapore residents who have been away for some period of time.

Arabic Math Notation

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:05:00 +0000

The W3C's MathML interest group notes on Arabic math notation brings a few thoughts to mind:

MathML looks like a pain to do by hand. Much easier to use texvc to convert from LaTeX.
Math users everywhere are all a bit obsessed with having their math look pretty, regardless of the language.
The use of the letters 'hg' (the initial letters of the Arabic for 'sum') as the summation sign in Machrek notation, instead of the Greek capital Sigma, is a reminder of how most Western math notation evolved from similar abbreviations (e.g. long s as the integration sign)
Although the Arabs write their numbers left to right, they write their math right to left, except for the Moroccan style (which is influenced by French math notation). This must be quite confusing for n00bs.

Institutionalized

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:06:00 +0000

I've been dining institutionally for the past four years, and for most of that time also living in institutional housing. Not to mean that I have been institutionalized (though sometimes I wonder if I should be); by 'institutional dining' I refer to food served up in cookhouses, staff canteens, and dining halls. Likewise with institutional housing: barracks and dorms. What defines institutional dining as an experience? How is a dining hall a special place, compared to other kinds of places where one can eat? While musing on this point I was thinking about school canteens: do they count as institutional food? After all one is likewise obliged to be commensal, messing together (both in the sense of consuming one's viands and exasperating the custodial staff) under some protective roof. Given this common trait, the act of eating together in a big space with people from a given institution is not what defines the experience of institutional dining. The true answer lies in the relationships of power and patronage at work when we are served our meals.

What I finally concluded truly defines an institutional dining experience lies in who prepares and serves up the food. In a canteen, with its multiple vendors, one has the pick of whom to patronize. A dining hall, by contrast, even if there is a wide and diverse buffet spread to pick from, has really only one kitchen, one group of cooks, one master mind and deciding hand behind the menu. The principles of competition do not apply. Instead of playing patron to the vendor, the roles are reversed and the consumer becomes patronized by the all-powerful hidden power that dispenses food, drink, and sustenance. From having a buyer's dignity of choice (however limited), to being beholden to an anonymous kitchen in order to stave off starvation, how great a gulf! The cornucopia laid out on the tables is not a vision of plenty, it is instead an act of disdain: take as much or as little of this food as you want, for we hold the keys to it and your present plenty is at our whim. More fruit? Less homogenized mush? A choice of beverages other than colored sugar water? Fill out this slip with your thoughts, and drop it into the forbidding maw of the feedback box and we shall retire to contemplate your respectful memorial.

So this is the great lie we have to recognize: that plenty is prosperity. The hand that feeds is also the hand that takes away, otherwise why would we be warned against biting it? In our mortal condition we are powerless to fight or contend against the various powers that hold our lives in the balance, some of which inspire reverential worship, and others fearsome loathing. So it is also with the quality of food in different dining halls. My greater point, though, is that the sooner one realizes the truth about one's situation, the easier it is to come to terms with it, and the more urgently one pushes oneself to find a real job, live in a real home, and eat TV dinners heated in a microwave like real people do.

Not My Party

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 20:55:00 +0000

Yesterday was July 4, my dear sister's birthday. Coincidentally, it also happens to be Independence Day in a country some of you may know as the United States. Woods Hole, the village that I'm in for this summer, has a charming little parade down the two blocks of streets that constitute the center of the Hole. It has some of the trappings that you'd expect from a Fourth of July parade - the Stars and Stripes, a marching band (drum and fife, and a random trumpeter who later got attacked by a giant mosquito, but more on that later), and watermelon - but the highlights are the floats and displays put on by the students and faculty of the various courses at the Marine Biological Laboratory. They're biology-themed, very campy, and very nerdy, as one would expect (a video of last year's parade to prove my point).

The Embryology course did their classic gastrulation dance, dressed up in three colors to represent the three embryonic germ layers. The neurobiologists had big floats of their favorite organisms, which this year were a blue lobster and a three-eyed mutant frog. More diverse were the favorite microbes represented by the microbiologists, who to a large extent had a different costume each (giant Vibrio and a giant host squid, two really cute kids who were tottering along in bacteriophage costumes with big capsid caps, a very fetching anaerobic methane oxidizing consortium, etc.) though there were some symbiotes in the crowd, too. Several giant parasites (including two huge mosquitoes) hovered around while immunoglobulins and other components of the host immunity swatted them away, and the cell physiologists did something too arcane for me to interpret, though it involved aggressive popping of balloons and lots of water bombs. And those same water bombs (and water guns, which are the only weapons that Massachusetts doesn't strictly regulate) were involved in warfare between the different contingents - the mutant frog got totally spattered, the microbes and parasites fought back with high-powered squirt guns, and general chaos ensued in the streets. Aside from the courses, there were other groups too: local residents, the Children's School of Science group which went as Darwins and the Finches, and assorted independents, including myself as a (hastily assembled) sea squirt, the result of a (similarly hasty) commitment made the night before.

That was all great fun. Later in the evening, as the sun set, I walked around hoping to see fireworks. The town of Falmouth, I knew, has a great display every year at the beach, and I was hoping to catch a glimpse from the shore here. Eventually I followed the sounds of explosions and found my way to the private neighborhood just some way off from my dorm. They were having their own small fireworks party at their shared beach. Not being a resident, I could not go in after dusk, but walking down a side-road to find a better vantage point, I ended up standing in front of someone's driveway, joining a Slavic family that was there also to watch the show from the opposite side of the cove. It was brilliant, to see the pyrotechnics from so close. Each of the sparkles and whizzles was clear and sharp, and the noise was thrilling. Being downwind on a gusty evening, I imagined that I could smell the peppery spent gunpowder. It was also a lonely experience. There were children shouting and running about - the glowing dots of their sparklers gave away their positions in the darkness. Out to sea on the horizon, there was an even bigger show of fireworks on the mainland, but from the distance it was reduced to minuscule sprays of silent, glittering pixels. It was then that I knew that this was not my party. It was mine to watch but not to revel in, looking on from across the bay as someone else sets the charges off to light up the sky, briefly.

Motorcycle Diary

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 22:04:00 +0000

The motorcycle is a much more democratic vehicle than the car - and not just on the principle of one man, one engine. The pedestrian struck by a car is more grievously hurt than the driver, who is cossetted by the crumple-zone, seat-belt, air-bag, and other hyphenated accoutrements of safety. The lot of the motorcyclist, however, is much closer to that of the pedestrian. He is exposed to the dangers of the road with nothing more than a helmet, and sometimes not even that, and so in a crash is just as likely to be tossed and killed as the pedestrian he strikes. Acquiring an independent means of transport brings many benefits to one so blessed, including freedom of travel and the ability to bring goods long distances, which can do no harm to one's socio-economic position. Vehicles are hence, well, vehicles of inequality, widening the gulf between haves and have-nots. But cars set one apart much more markedly, dehumanizing the motorist, because the road-unit that the observer sees is not the driver but the car. The motorcycle, then, with its equality of possible harm to pedestrian and rider, is the vehicular equivalent of the Golden Rule, of turning the other cheek.

But that is not why I like motorcycles. I like them because they feel fast. Not that they are fast, which undoubtedly many of them are capable of being, though not the ones I have ridden. What they do possess is the ability to make even relatively slow speeds feel faster, to make one viscerally conscious of what is otherwise only a number on the speedometer. Speeding is hence a much more deliberate act for the motorcyclist: the driver can claim that he didn't know he was hovering five kph above the limit - it doesn't seem that much different to him whether he goes fifty or fifty-five. A motorcyclist can feel the difference, and he knows that he is speeding. Speed becomes palpable, speed becomes real. For TE Lawrence, perhaps, the speed itself held more reality than the country road that he sped through towards his death. Psychologically disjointed from what was supposedly his own society, abnegating himself by serving as a lowly enlisted man under a pseudonym, knowing that one could not possibly ever top a former life as Lawrence of Arabia, maybe that was why he took to the engine with such gusto.

Aside from speed itself, I believe that the exercise of one's faculties of balance also makes motorcycling attractive, just as one's balance is constantly tested on a bicycle or on horseback. One becomes part of one's vehicle in a way that a regular driver of cars could never understand. Leaning into turns for example, subtle adjustments made to one's body, shifting one's weight just so. I remember being kept in training overtime by my riding instructor, just going at the figure-of-eight until I was sick of that shape. When I finally understood how to execute it, however, realization came suddenly, it became intuition rather than learning. Practiced movement done skilfully is pleasing and satisfying, and that is what I think every motorcyclist knows, consciously or not, at the back of his or her mind.

Having not ridden for almost three years now, I probably should not be trusted with any class of vehicle. But I still can remember how it was, going just a bit faster on a hot day to cool off, stopping at the traffic lights and surveying the other dumpy, boxed-in motorists from a high perch. One day soon I'll go and get licensed again, and put these vaguely equestrian longings to rest. And the first thing I'll try, of course, will be figure-eights in the parking lot.

Matured Tastes

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:43:00 +0000

As a child there were some things that I resolutely would not eat or would pick out of my food, among them ladies' fingers (or okra - I never understood the name, because any lady with green ribbed fingers like those must be some sort of vegetable witch), sea cucumber, and Chinese parsley (cilantro). Even in 'normal' food like chicken I would carefully remove the little bits of vein or clumps of fat, and much preferred the big homogeneous chunks of white meat even though they had, in my parents' view, much less flavor. In retrospect it seems silly to have done so, but to a little kid, gristle and schmuck looms larger and is harder to ignore - a full sized adult with a full-sized appetite can wolf things down quickly without pausing to inspect too carefully. A child with a penchant for close inspection (elsewhere applauded as inquisitiveness and curiosity but here slapped down as fussiness) sees all the gory details of cooked flesh. If anything, the fine dexterity developed by my young fingers for the purposes of my little neurosis has surely benefited my present skills in dissection.

Why these foods deterred me had as much to do with texture as it did taste. The gooey insides of okra was like so much mucus and slime. Sure, there are more disturbing examples of the use of slime in food - the gong-gong is a kind of conch that produces copious amounts of slime as a self-defense mechanism (as I discovered trying to dissect it), and it is precisely this slime which is favored for thickening certain seafood stews. Somehow, vegetables seem less icky than animals, but when I got it on my lips and fingers, I still could not help being reminded of a messy sneeze. Spices that taste odd are a little easier to understand. The cause of spiciness is usually some manner of small molecule produced by a plant, as a form of deterrence against herbivory. Hence my dislike of these pungent tastes simply means that these chemical defenses were doing their job well.

But tastes change, and to my surprise I found myself, within the last week, very much enjoying a salad with lime and cilantro dressing, and chewing contentedly on the chunks of clam in a bowl of clam chowder. Being accustomed to having cilantro as a garnishing on my soup or chicken rice, having it with something sour was a novel sensation and piqued my interest. Similarly, chunks of okra in gumbo no longer faze me. What happened? Why have I disavowed the carefully curated avoidances of my childhood? Were all those accumulated hours spent picking out every little offending leaf or morsel spent in vain?

Perhaps my sense of taste is deteriorating; maybe taste and smell are dulled with age much like hearing. Things that use to jar and offend now become mellowed and tolerable. But I don't like this particular hypothesis, because first it means that I have begun this inexorable slip down the slope of senility, and my vanity forbids that I admit it. More objectively (as objective as one can be with an unmeasurable thing like smell and taste), the foods I used to avoid but now tolerate or enjoy are no less slimy or pungent than what I remember them to have been, and I hardly think a deterioration on the agricultural stock could be an explanation (have clams become less squishy?). No, they taste exactly the same as they had before, but now I have learned to like them. Psychologists call this a 'hedonic shift', and this principle has been applied to explain how people come to enjoy the heat of chili peppers. It's not that one becomes desensitized to the burn after eating lots of chilies. The burn is just as strong (evidenced by the fact that one can still detect the active principle at similarly high dilutions) but because one knows that the pain, while thrilling, does not cause lasting harm, one learns to enjoy the sensation, a sort of dissonance between what one's body is screaming (and scream it does) and what one's head knows (just a spot of bother). The same can be said of skydiving or 'taking very hot baths' (an illustration that the authors of a paper on this subject used), but I'm not so sure that the latter does not have lasting effects, at least on men.

Maybe, too, it is a search for novelty that drives me to sample things that I wouldn't have before. The texture of boiled cabbage can only hold one's fascination for so long. Sooner or later the child is seduced by the charms of arugula and thence becomes a man. I am sure that my earlier food avoidance has helped me in this respect, because having avoided so many kinds of food before, there is still much that is new to me. If I ration out my time and schedule my hedonic shifts appropriately, I might learn to like blood cockles and other squishy foods in my late dotage, saving these foods most appropriate for toothlessness to the very end. I would not want to succumb to the curse of prosperity and plenty, where the very abundance and variety to be found in modern supermarkets have driven the bored, rich consumer to the ghastly concoctions of molecular gastronomy. After all, who needs bacon ice cream when the mushy amorphousness of braised sea anemone (good with oyster sauce and some sautéed leafy greens) is just as disconcerting? There is still much to be eaten before we have to resort to the manipulations of chemical cookery to thrill and excite us.

So that might be the substance of my new-found tolerance and widened appetite, learning that these foods really won't kill me. Thus it is that more than two decades after being weaned off milk, I finally learn and accept that food is mostly harmless. (Vindicating exasperated mothers around the world, almost-pleading that 'it won't kill you to try!') I still draw the line, however, at eating cephalopods. Molluscan meat in general used to be my bête noir, but I have come to terms with clams and (soon enough) oyster (scallops were down my gullet long ago - they are too juicy to resist). Cephalopods, though, I still cannot bring myself to eat. Their knowing eyes speak to me when I peer at them in their tanks as they flutter their tentacles, silently intimating: one day, it shall be your kind who shall grace our maw....

Resolutions

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 01:48:00 +0000

Elizabeth Bennet thinking about her sister Lydia, who had eloped with Wickham:

How Wickham and Lydia were to be supported in tolerable independence, she could not imagine. But how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue, she could easily conjecture.
-- Pride and Prejudice chapter 50