| misc |
[Nov. 22nd, 2011|11:13 pm] |
just cant get anything in my head tonight. |
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| an (unsolved) riddle on existence |
[Oct. 15th, 2011|11:56 pm] |
Let us say that the pages in my book (including the front and back covers) compose my book. Since all the pages exist, the book, an additional object, also exists.
Composition does not appear to take place all the time. The pages in my book and Obama's lungs do not compose any object (or so we normally think). The pages in my book exist, Obama's lungs exist; but because they do not compose anything, no new object is being brought into existence (by their existences).
So when do objects compose another object? At the outset, it might be helpful to make a useful observation about the logic of existence: either an object exists, or it does not; there's no in-between answer. so either a given set of objects compose something (and brings it into existence), or it does not.
But here is the problem. While existence is not vague, thing-ness is vague. It can be vague whether an object is a book. If I destroy the spine of my book and cut random chunks out of every page, it would be a vague matter whether one would call the disfigured mess a book.
Suppose I have destroyed the spine of my book and cut random chunks out of every page. According to the determinacy of existence, either the mess compose something, or it does not.
Suppose it does, what kind of thing does the mess compose? We can't say that the mess composes a book because it's not clear we could call the mess a book. In fact, it doesn't appear that the mess is any kind of thing at all. We could say that the mess composes a kind of thing which we have no name for, but if we were to allow this, then surely we could allow the pages in my book and Obama's lungs to compose some other kind of thing as well.
Suppose it does not compose anything, then it presumably does not compose a book. So a book does not exist, therefore the mess is (definitely) not a book. But we have said earlier that it is vague if the mess is a book. This doesn't mean that the mess is a book, but it certainly does not mean that the mess is (definitely) not a book either?! Isn't this a contradiction?
I can see a few ways out.
1. Deny that composition ever takes place. The pages are arranged book-wise (or better, the atoms are arranged page-wise and the page-wise arrangements of atoms are arranged book-wise), but there is no object 'book' that exists. All that exists are atoms arranged bookwise (i.e. in a book-structure).
But even if there are basic objects called atoms in this world, couldn't there be other possible worlds be such that there are no simple atoms, that everything is infinitely divisible? In such a world, material objects can still exist, yet if we deny that composition takes place and therefore no composite objects exist, how can we account for the real existence of these material objects, whatever they may be? So some other composition principle must be in place in these other worlds, but if some other composition principle is in place in these worlds, why can't that same composition principle be in place in this world?
2. Deny that existence is determinate. Suffices to say that this will raise a whole host of problems (that I have no knowledge of)
3. Deny that things exist simpliciter. So we cannot say that balls exist, full-stop, we can only say that according to X, balls exist. Well, what sort of thing is X? What range of possibilities can X coherently take? Certainly X cannot deny that composition ever takes place for if it did, then according to the reasoning spelled out earlier, X will have to claim, falsely, that nothing exists in worlds where everything is infinitely divisible.
4. Deny that thing-ness is vague. If book-ness is not vague, then we will have a borderline scenario where the stuff compose a book, but if any atom in that stuff is shifted 1 nanometer away, we will no longer have a book. Is that a plausible view? Isn't it arbitrary to determine the cut-off point for book-ness? If it is arbitrary, then why can't we have multiple understandings of book-ness: you have your own criteria for book-ness, I have my own criteria for book-ness, etc. And if we can have multiple understandings of book-ness, then isn't it sensible to define book-ness as the overlap of everyone's understandings of book-ness, which, again, is vague because we don't know what everyone's understandings of book-ness are. In the first place, if we can be arbitrary in this matter, why can't we arbitrarily stipulate that my pages and Obama's lungs compose an object?
Here is a closely related question: what do we mean when we say that X exists? Presumably, we don't mean that the atoms that make up X exist because according to the conservation of matter, the atoms that make up X will always exist.
Here's another closely related question: is there a real question at all? If my pages and Obama's lungs compose an object, what does it mean (for us/for the object/etc)?
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Philosophy has taught me that it is almost impossible to be consistent in daily life. I think one can see metaphysics as an attempt at untangling all these basic inconsistencies. |
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| misc |
[May. 24th, 2011|12:24 am] |
today is one of those days where i feel really blank in the head.
its not that i suddenly crave contact. its that i dont think of anything, dont do anything, am not interested in anything. its one of those days that i can pass sitting on my chair for hours with the computer turned off, not reading not writing not thinking not listening to music not playing games.
i think i am a little tired from all the work. |
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| Things I cannot stand |
[May. 20th, 2011|11:57 pm] |
1. geometry. i do not have any geometric intuitions at all. i am very lucky that it is not compulsory to do geometry questions in the exams.
2. 'contextual philosophy'. e.g. explain the influence of philosopher x on philosopher y in book z. trace the evolution of the concept object distinction over frege's lifetime and explain its significance in the grundlagen. i hate close reading. such questions are really just high level lit (so maybe this is where a lit background is useful). it doesnt help that i dont understand the secondary material at all. |
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| the metaphysics of meaning |
[Mar. 20th, 2011|12:34 am] |
1. what is (the nature of) meaning?
2. is meaning reducible to self-interest or morality?
3. can the good life be understood by self-interest or morality alone?
"When I visit my brother in the hospital, or help my friend move, or stay up all night sewing my daughter a Halloween costume, I act neither for egoistic reasons nor for moral ones. I do not believe that it is better for me that I spend a depressing hour in a drab, cramped room, seeing my brother irritable and in pain, that I risk back injury trying to get my friend's sofa safely down two flights of stairs, or that I forgo hours of much wanted sleep to make sure that the wings will stand out at a good angle from the butterfly costume my daughter wants to wear in the next day's parade. But neither do I believe myself duty bound to perform these acts, or fool myself into thinking that by doing them I do what will be best for the world. I act neither out of self-interest nor out of duty or any other sort of impersonal or impartial reason. Rather, I act out of love.
As the egoistic and dualist models of practical reason leave out what we might call these “reasons of love,” so they seem to me also to leave out many of the reasons that move us to pursue nonpersonal interests about which we are especially passionate. Writing philosophy, practicing the cello, keeping one’s garden free of weeds may demand more of one’s time and attention than would be optimal from the point of view of one’s own well-being. Yet in these cases, even more than in the cases involving beloved human beings, it is obvious that no impersonal perspective requires us to go on. Just as, in the case of acting for a loved one, it is the good of that other person that provides us with a reason for our act, what draws us on in the nonpersonal pursuits I have in mind is a perceived or imagined value that lies outside of oneself. I agonize over the article I am trying to write because I want to get it right—that is, because I want the argument to be sound, the view to be correct, the writing to be clear and graceful. It is not for my sake—at least not only for my sake—that I struggle so with my work. I do not know or care whether it is best for me—that is, whether it is best from the point of view of my self-interest—that I try to improve my work beyond a certain point, any more than I care whether it is best for me that I put so much energy into making my daughter happy. We might say that I struggle “for philosophy’s sake” rather than for my own, but that would be misleading and obscure as well as pretentious. Still, it seems to me that it is the value of good philosophy that is driving and guiding my behavior in this instance, as it might be the beauty of the music or of the potential garden that moves the cellist or gardener to sacrifice ease, and exercise discipline in pursuing her goal."
"...it may not be clear whether the woman whose life has been made more meaningful by the adoption of a child is, all things considered, better off because of it. The woman herself may not care about this. The fact that her relationship with the child adds meaning to her life implies that the relationship engages and, at least partly, fulfills her. Thus, she will have other reasons for being glad to have adopted the child - reasons of love. "
Taken from 2007 Tanner Lectures by Susan Wolf |
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| (philosophytalk) what i have to say on free will |
[Feb. 28th, 2011|11:37 pm] |
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Suppose Tom threw a ball at you and it hit you, hard, on your forehead. If you know that Tom just has a sick desire to injure you, you will likely feel angry with him. If, however, you know that Tom is mentally unsound and has an uncontrollable habit of throwing things at people, you will likely not feel as angry, if at all, with him. This example suggests that deliberation and choice matter in our everyday ascriptions of responsibility and consequently, they matter in our feelings towards other people. In the first instance, it appears that Tom could have chosen not to throw the ball at you. He could have put the ball down or threw the ball in another direction, among other alternatives; he threw the ball at you because he wanted to injure you and that is why you take offense and feel angry with him. In the second instance, Tom, being mentally unsound, could not control his habit of throwing things at people. As such, even though you got hit by a ball thrown by him, you do not feel as angry with him because you do not perceive him to be as responsible for throwing the ball as he was in the other instance. Determinism attempts to undermine this idea by positing that all actions are completely causally determined by antecedent states or causes. Let me illustrate what I mean. When one throws a ball from the top of Radcliffe Camera, we commonly think that the path of the ball through space and time is determined entirely by the height of Radcliffe Camera, the velocity of the ball at the instant at which it leaves his hand, the wind speed and direction, etc. Given perfect knowledge of all the relevant factors and how these factors influence the ball, we could, in principle, calculate the path of the ball through space and time. Even if we cannot calculate the path of the ball, the path of the ball could not have been otherwise given that the conditions – namely, the wind speed and direction, the height of Radcliffe camera, etc – were as they were. Similarly, determinism claims that given perfect knowledge of all the states of the world at any moment, we could, in principle, discover the state of the world at any future moment. Even if perfect knowledge is impossible, the state of the world at any future moment could not have been otherwise given that the state of the world at a previous moment was at it was. In other words, the state of the world at any future moment is completely determined by the state of the world at a previous moment. In particular, given that the state of the world 1 minute before Tom’s birth was as it was, Tom could not have not have but hit you in that moment when he hit you. The state of the world 1 minute before Tom’s birth has completely determined that Tom would hit you one at that moment; Tom could not have chosen otherwise. Since we do not take Tom to be responsible for any state of affairs before his birth, it appears that we should not take Tom to be responsible for hitting you with the ball. I am not suggesting that this is the only understanding of determinism or that this understanding of determinism is true. What I am concerned with in this essay is whether the truth of determinism as spelled out above undermines our common intuitions regarding freedom and responsibility. If the event where Tom threw the ball at you was completely causally determined by states of affairs before his birth, do you have any reason to be angry at him even though he appeared to choose to throw the ball at you out of his sick desire to injure you? More generally, are actions preceded by careful deliberation and thought no more than reflex blinks because in both instances, the agent could not have done otherwise? So far, we have been assuming that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. Frankfurt challenges this principle and constructs a thought experiment to explain why this principle does not fully capture our idea of moral responsibility. Suppose Black wanted Jones to kill Peter and would take great efforts to have things his way but did not want Jones to know about his intentions. As such, he waited until Jones has made up his mind about whether to kill Peter. If Jones decided to kill Peter, Black would not intervene because he would get what he wants but if Jones decided otherwise, Black would hypnotise Jones in such a way that Jones would end up killing Peter. It turned out that Jones decided to kill Peter for his own reasons and consequently, Black did not intervene in the entire process at all. It seems to us that Jones should bear as much responsibility for killing Peter as he would have been borne had Black not been in the picture. It does not seem right to withhold responsibility from Jones just because the circumstances were such that he could not have done otherwise. This is because the fact that he could not have done otherwise did not play any role in his decision to kill Peter. If Black had not been in the picture, Jones would still kill Peter for the same reasons. As such, Frankfurt concludes that although Jones could not but kill Peter, he was fully responsible for killing Peter. (Frankfurt, 173) If Frankfurt is right, then the fact that someone could not have done otherwise is not a sufficient basis for saying that he was not responsible for that action. Consequently, the fact that Tom could not but throw the ball at you is not a sufficient basis for denying that he was responsible for throwing the ball at you. But determinism could still be incompatible with moral responsibility in other ways. One could argue that determinism threatens moral responsibility because if determinism were true, our life narratives would be completely causally determined by events prior to our birth. Thus we are not the authors of our lives and this lack of authorship prevents us from being responsible for the things we do. (Watson, 7) We are no more than trains chugging down a fixed course. This issue is complex and I will not be saying more here. For now, I want to look at Strawson’s views on this matter. Strawson avoids the metaphysical problem of whether people could have done otherwise altogether and argues that even if determinism is true, it does not undermine our everyday notions of freedom and responsibility. Unlike Frankfurt and most other philosophers, Strawson’s starting point is not conceptual analysis but the facts of human moral psychology. Strawson wants to find out when and why we typically take other people as responsible for particular actions. According to Strawson, there are fundamentally two different types of attitudes that we can take towards a person: reactive attitudes and objective attitudes. An example of a reactive attitude is anger. When Tom threw the ball at you, it was natural for you to feel angry with him. If Tom was aiming for his friend but accidentally hit you, your anger will subside but they may not subside completely. If Tom was in the middle of a game with his friend and you intruded into their playing zone, you may not feel angry at all but instead feel apologetic towards Tom for disrupting their game. If Tom hit you out of a sick desire to injure you, your anger may be increased. What these scenarios show is that we demand a certain level of good will and concern from the people around us. To the extent that these demands are not met, we feel angry or resentful towards the relevant people. The objective attitude, on the other hand, requires no such involvement. If Tom is mentally unsound, you will not feel angry with him because his mental abnormality renders him unable to recognise the significance of his actions. If Tom is a small child who has barely learnt how to walk, you will not feel angry with him because he is too young to understand the consequences of his actions and behave responsibly. In both cases, Tom is an inappropriate target of resentment because he is abnormal or immature and hence cannot be reasonably expected to show the good will and concern that you ordinarily demand from people. Your approach to Tom is therefore an objective one – you see Tom as an ‘object of social policy; as a subject...to be managed or handled or cured or trained.’ (FR, 79) Given these observations of human interaction, how would determinism influence our reactive attitudes such as anger? We have earlier discussed how determinism attempts to break down our idea of responsibility by suggesting that whether or not an action was preceded by careful deliberation and choice, it could not have been otherwise given the antecedent causes or states of affairs. This implies that in that situation, whether or not Tom deliberated carefully before hand, he could not have shown more concern to you and not thrown the ball at you. As such, abandoning our reactive attitudes and adopting a thoroughgoing objective attitude might be more suitable. Strawson takes a different view and answers this question at various levels. On one level, he claims that the truth of determinism does not discredit our reactive attitudes because determinism does not imply that no one ever lacks good will or fails to show the requisite amount of concern ordinarily demanded. Neither does determinism imply that every person is in some way abnormal or immature and hence an inappropriate target for reactive attitudes. (McKenna and Russell, 6) On another level, Strawson argues that we are psychologically incapable of being totally objective towards others all the time. While it is possible for us to take up the objective stance occasionally, as social beings, reactive attitudes are so deeply ingrained in us that we cannot conceivably give them up even if we have good reasons to. On a yet higher level, Strawson thinks that even if we ask whether acknowledging the truth of determinism should rationally make us give up our reactive attitudes (which may not be possible), the answer is no. This is because the truth of determinism is a theoretical matter whereas the question of whether we should give up our reactive attitudes is a practical matter. According to Strawson, practical questions are answered by considering how we would benefit from the choices at hand and there is little doubt that abandoning our reactive attitudes and seeing everyone simply as objects will greatly impoverish human life. Thus, the thesis of determinism is irrelevant to our reactive attitudes. (Strawson, 87) Many people feel uncomfortable with Strawson’s argument because it appears to be missing the point. Strawson might have provided a good account for what it is for agents to be held responsible but there surely is a difference between being held responsible and actually being responsible (McKenna and Russell, 12). One can be responsible without being held responsible and the converse is true as well. When you claim that Tom is not responsible for throwing the ball at you because he is mentally unsound, you want to say more than “I do not consider Tom responsible”. You also want to say that Tom is, in fact, not responsible for throwing the ball at you and hence, you are justified in not ascribing responsibility to him. By understanding responsibility solely in terms of the way we ascribe responsibility, Strawson risks conflating the two issues. Nevertheless, there is an important sense in which Strawson is addressing the question. To understand this, we need to put Strawson’s comments in the context of his larger philosophical naturalism. Strawson claims that as social beings, our natural disposition to attitudes and practices is naturally secured against arguments suggesting that they are in principle unwarranted or unjustified. According to Strawson, nature determines certain features of human life, such as our reactive attitudes. Moreover, we have a non-rational commitment to these features and this set of naturally determined features sets the stage upon which reason can effectively operate. (SN, 39) Therefore, in asking what determinism means for our reactive attitudes or for our ascriptions of responsibility, we are over-intellectualising. Strawson believes that the general framework of attitudes that we possess is a given fact of human society. Although we can modify, criticise and justify positions within this framework, “it neither calls for, nor permits an external rational justification”. (FR, 91) As such, questions on whether determinism forces us to relinquish our ideas of responsibility are fundamentally misguided. I think Strawson’s view is persuasive but it stops short of being compelling because it omits crucial elements. Many people find the issue of determinism and responsibility perplexing not because they question the way in which they typically ascribe responsibility – they are perplexed by how determinism, which (in some sense) appears to be a feature of our world, can coherently coexist with responsibility and freedom as they recognise them phenomenologically. Strawson may be right that we do not need to take sceptical challenges to responsibility too seriously but to make his account complete, he needs to provide a comprehensive explanation of how freedom and responsibility are possible in our world in the first place. If determinism is true, does it mean that actions preceded by careful deliberation and choice are no more than reflex blinks? I would like to answer the question on two levels. On one level, actions preceded by deliberation and choice are no less causally determined by antecedent causes than reflex blinks. This follows simply as a consequence of our understanding of determinism. On another level, although actions preceded by deliberation and choice are no less causally determined than reflex blinks, we will continue, inevitably, to view them as different from reflexes. This is Strawson’s contribution to the subject and I think there can be no disagreements here. Whether the two levels are jointly coherent is a much more complex question that has not been resolved and will certainly not be resolved here |
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| two great quotes |
[Feb. 18th, 2011|03:18 pm] |
"[Reid’s point …] is that argument, reasonings, either for or against the skeptical position, are, in practice, equally inefficacious and idle … Where Nature thus determines us, we have an original non-rational commitment which sets the bounds within which, or the stage upon which, reason can effectively operate, and within which the question of rationality or irrationality, justification or lack of justification, of this or that particular judgment or belief can come up. I then played roughly the same game, as one might put it, with the moral life. We are naturally social beings; and given with our natural commitment to social existence is a natural commitment to that whole web or structure of human personal and moral reactive attitudes, feelings, and judgments of which I spoke. Our natural disposition to such attitudes and judgments is naturally secured against arguments suggesting that they are in principle unwarranted or unjustified just as our natural disposition to belief in the existence of body is naturally secured against arguments suggesting that it is in principle uncertain."
From pg 39, 'Skepticism and Naturalism' by Peter Strawson.
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"You're not thinking; you're just being logical."
A comment, overheard, on whether computers can ever be said to 'think'. |
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| misc |
[Feb. 9th, 2011|12:58 am] |
describe determinism
determinism is the doctrine that all states are determined completely by prior states
describe free will.
free will is the ability to make choices without certain kinds of compulsion.
if determinism is true, do we have free will?
no. if determinism is true, we could not have chosen otherwise. therefore we are not free.
if determinism is false, do we have free will?
no. if determinism is false, then we cannot be sure if our actions will turn out the way we want them to turn out. so we have no control over our actions, so we have no free will.
so do we have free will?
no.
but we think we have free will?
yes. but that is an illusion we are under.
but free will looks pretty attractive. how can you explain the fact that i can raise and not raise my right hand. i can raise my right hand when you ask me to raise it. i can also not raise my right hand when you ask me to raise it. how do you explain that?
well, they can be explained by the prior conditions and the laws of nature.
so that means i am not free to raise my right hand?
yes.
but perhaps freedom means something other than being completely determined by the laws of nature.
well, that freedom is not free.
maybe our freedom is not free.
so we have no free will.
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i think my coursemates here dont take philosophy seriously. its easy enough to say that we might be brains in a vat, that we might be dreaming, that we dont know anything other than the contents of our sense experiences, that we dont know if the sun will rise tomorrow. if you say you dont know and you challenge people to prove according to your standards if they disagree with you, surely nobody is going to say anything to you. but then philosophy stops for you.
i think one of the main aims in philosophy is to make sense of life. how do we make sense of this feeling of freedom that we have. if it is not free will (as described above), what is it? can we make sense of it? why do we think it is valuable? does it contradict with what we know abt the external world? maybe that should be the proper question of free will.
scepticism is an important part of philosophy. the sceptic is always there, often for good reasons. the challenge is to answer him not with indubitable proof (for they dont exist in philosophy) but to persuade him that your reasons are good enough. again, philosophy is not about finding the ultimate nature of reality, it is about making sense of the reality that we inhabit - that is what makes philosophy rewarding. often we find it very difficult to provide reasons, but that is what makes philosophy challenging. |
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| my analysis of the game |
[Jan. 30th, 2011|12:01 pm] |
1. murray was struggling to hold serve the whole night. murray cant attack behind the first serve and got drawn into too many rallies (due in part to djokovic's outstanding return of serve). murray was totally reliant on big first serves and djokovic would have won much sooner if not for clutch serving by murray. but when djokovic creates close to 20 break points, there's no way murray can save all of them. this created all sorts of problems for murray. for example, he needed to break djokovic 3/4 times a set to win because he was losing too many points on his serve. also, he couldnt gain momentum after breaking the djokovic serve. his first serve percentage didnt help but had he served at 70%, i think he would still have lost the match.
2. djokovic totally out-rallied murray. he neutralised murray and showed how murray still lacks the weapons to hurt the top players. he was unfazed by murray's groundstrokes and very consistent in retrieving them (often with interest). murray, on the other hand, murray had too many loose points. he was making errors on shots that wouldnt have hurt djokovic even if they went in. djokovic was making unforced errors as well (in the third), but the difference was that djokovic made (fewer of) them when he could afford to. i'd like to see the stats for rallies longer than 5 shots.
3. djokovic's (aggressive) defense was outstanding. he was able to play attacking shots/hit winners from all corners of the court on the dead run/on the full stretch. his defensive lobs were spot on today. consequently, murray's attacking play was toothless for most of the night. conspicuously, murray's down the line-backhand was not on show tonight, partly because there were hardly any weak replies from djokovic and murray could not drag djokovic out of position. according to commentators, he played one level higher than in his straight-set win over federer. it sure is difficult to see how anyone (fed, nadal included) can beat him when he plays like that.
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"I would have liked to have played better," confessed Murray. "But I think he would have beaten every other player on the tour if he played like that tonight. He served well. He didn't make many mistakes from the back of the court. He moved really, really well. He hit the ball very clean."
Djokovic's movement and ball-striking were indeed outstanding by anyone's standards. That much cannot be doubted. |
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| misc |
[Jan. 6th, 2011|11:47 pm] |
I am suffering from a bout of food poisoning in Spain. I woke up twice at 3:30am and 5:30am to vomit before enduring a 3-hour early morning bus to Murcia on which I couldn´t sleep properly as my stomach was not feeling well. Upon reaching, I had diarrhoea more serious than any previously experienced. Thankfully, my host in Murcia was very caring and understanding. She let me rest (sleep) in her house for the whole afternoon and even gave me some panadol as I did not have any medication with me.
Thereafter, we went to Cartagena but I wasn´t in the mood for any sightseeing so I spent the evening sitting in the plaza battling chills and playing handphone games. I asked my host to bring us to a restaurant that served healthy fare (having skipped breakfast and lunch for the first time in a long time) and she kindly cooked a simple vegetable soup with baguette for all of us when we got back.
On the bus to Murcia, I kept thinking how it was very embarrassing for me to ask my host to take care of me but my host has been amazingly helpful so far. I will evaluate my condition tomorrow before deciding whether or not to go sightseeing but I need to get a gift for my host and spending most of two days sitting in the house while they are out working really isn´t the best way of treating my hosts.
Anyway, I have 4 more nights before returning to London (and then Oxford). I am quite travel-weary now; I´ve almost forgotten what it´s like to not travel (and study). |
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| misc |
[Dec. 3rd, 2010|01:00 am] |
my term ends tomorrow. i am looking forward to it as i am getting quite sick of doing math and philosophy. i never thought i would say that but i've been doing too much work for the past few weeks. i dont stay up past 1am for work but i feel that i am losing the focus and drive for work.
i think i need a few weeks of doing nothing related to math and philosophy. i need to restart reading/talking about the news/things outside math and philosophy. one thing about oxford is that it really drains my intellectual energy. after all my work, all that i feel like doing is resting/playing sports.
writing essays in oxford is quite different from writing essays in jc and im still learning how to write good essays. the demands are different, although i think they shouldnt be that different. looking back (i still keep all my old essays), a lot of my old essays were quite bad. i think the main problems are that back then, we werent exposed to enough ideas and werent reading texts closely enough. we were taught to be clear but there is little value in clarity when you are not capturing philosophical arguments completely. reading journal articles before we had a solid grounding in the material was also a stupid idea. i hardly read journal articles even now and most journal articles i read are not as useful as the books i read.
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( the only good essay i wrote this term )
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i really regret not taking physics in jc. its really stupid to learn to solve wave equations and laplace's equation without understanding a lvl physics. i dont know if i will learn fourier analysis next term but doing fourier analysis without a lvl physics is lame as well. i think everyone who is vaguely interested in physical sciences should seriously consider reading physics in a lvls. reading math goes without saying of cos. (btw, according to admission tutors here, math is one of the best predictors of future academic performance. even applicants to oriental studies have conditional offers that require an a in math.)
i feel that i need more practice in math. in jc, we spend 1 year practicing integration by parts. here, multiple integrals are taught in 1 lecture. i can follow most of the theory but there are many tricks here and there that i am not familiar with. ive figured how to do the 4 qns in the last (deleted) post. on hindsight, all of them were not difficult and have fairly intuitive solutions.
im really lucky to be doing philosophy and math. doing math is out of the question because a lvl physics is assumed for dynamics/mechanics (which i luckily dont do because i (generally) only read pure math) and i would definitely not be able to cope with them. doing philosophy just half the time is good because while i enjoy reading locke and hume, i cant imagine spending whole weeks just reading locke and hume. while i still like philosophy, i now think that i do not want a philosophy phd. the way people spend papers talking about subtle unimportant points in mostly unintelligible ways does not strike me as something i want to do. i am still open to doing further studies in math; we'll see how things go next term/year. |
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| why studing philosophy is hard work |
[Nov. 17th, 2010|12:21 am] |
it never occurred to me before today how difficult summarising/rewriting an argument can be. i always assumed that after i (feel that) i understand an argument, writing it out should follow pretty easily. it turned out that i was stuck with summarising strawson's "self, mind and body" for almost 2 hours just now and i am still not certain that i am capturing precisely what strawson is saying. sometimes it is clear that the argument is lacking (e.g. descartes' argument for self to be non-extended thing) but most of the time it is not clear if the argument is lacking or if you are simply missing a crucial part of an argument. sometimes it is clear that different interpretations of an argument are possible but most of the time it is not clear if the argument can be interpreted in another way or if you are simply misinterpreting the argument. after you summarise an argument, you then need to ask yourself if your summary captures all important features of the argument (have i captured all of descartes' reasons in sixth meditation for thinking that material things exist?)/if your summary is the best way of summarising an argument (is this actually ryle's main point in "the concept of mind"?). do this 5 times and you will get an outline of an essay to which you add structure/your own critical comments.
reading contemporary philosophy is very different from reading classical/modern philosophy. the main challenge in the latter is the language (which i thought was extremely cumbersome but i hope i am getting better at understanding 16th century english) while the challenge in the former is the sheer mass of complicated ideas being tossed around. it is really difficult to form a (well-formed) opinion on an article, partly bcos most of the time, there is nothing obviously wrong with them. philosophers spend their careers thinking of sophisticated ways to answer their critics while i am here trying to comment on 5 philosophers in a single essay.
i need to do that because essay questions here are set in a very direct way that do not allow waffling. is the mind a distinct substance from the body? is ryle right in identifying descartes' account of dualism as a category mistake? do you agree with berkeley's critique of primary qualities as spelled out in his principles of human knowledge? there are hardly any 'discuss' questions that allow you to talk about anything you like.
one thing i think i would benefit from is discussion. i am currently studying general philosophy alone, which means that i have one-to-one tutorials (where i discuss my essay with my tutor). i think it is helpful to explore other questions/approaches that i did not cover. it would also be helpful if i can read other essays to see what others are saying of the same topic. currently, i only have my own essays as a revision guide (and i have no idea exactly how well i do in them). needless to say, this mode of studying is drastically different from anything that im used to.
i think i enjoy studying philosophy because i get excited by ideas and arguments. even though they are very hard to summarise/rewrite in propositional form/explain in your own words, at least i feel that i've learnt something from writing an essay. i just hope i dont spend too much time on philosophy and burn out. (i think i am spending too much time atm.) |
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| a very nice problem |
[Nov. 8th, 2010|10:24 pm] |
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A train moves along the real number line with constant integer velocity and starts out at t=0 at an integer. At each time t=0,1,2,..., you are able to check whether the train is at a single integer of your choosing (which may be a different choice each time). Explain how it is possible to determine the train's velocity and starting position. |
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| on the previous question |
[Oct. 28th, 2010|12:07 am] |
A and B both pick a random integer separately. What is the probability that A and B end up with the same integer?
Since the number of integers is infinite, the probability that A and B end up with the same integer is infinitely small. lim 1/x, x--> infinity = 0, so the probability is 0.
But it is possible that A and B end up with the same integer. As such, should we conclude that "probability = 0" and "cannot taking place" are not mutually exclusive events?
...
A few thoughts (some inputs are courtesy of my philosophy tutor):
1. Yes, 'probability = 0' and 'event cannot take place' are not mutually exclusive events. 'Probability = 0' merely implies that the event will almost surely not take place/the probability of the event is infinitely small. If we repeat the scenario a finite number of times (assuming that we can) , we would not expect the event to take place at all. Nevertheless, it is possible that the event takes place.
2. It is not possible to pick a random integer. Since the size of the set of integers is infinite, we are practically excluded from picking integers that are too big to consider. Even if we were to spend our whole lives reciting the digits of the number or defining a number (e.g. 1234^12345 + 1), we could still conceive of (infinitely many) numbers greater than that number.
3. The probability is different from the limit. The probability is smaller than any positive number that we can give but since there cannot exist a number x such that 1/x=0, the probability is not 0. it is unfortunate that mathematics does not have a symbol to mean 'an infinitely small positive number'. As such, the best that we can say about this probability is that using the idea of mathematical limits, it is 0.
Due to (2), any selection of integers by A or B would not be random because it does not consider several arbitrarily large numbers. Here, we can ask if it is possible to construct a probability distribution that assigns an equal probability to each integer. If such a probability distribution exists, then it would have to assign the probability 0 to each integer else the sum of probabilities will be infinite. Therefore, it appears that we cannot construct such a probability distribution, at least given our current understanding of numbers and probability.
(3) might suggest that we need some richer conception of number that can capture the idea of an infinitely small but non-zero number. In standard analysis, there cannot be such a number. However, my tutor points out that in non-standard analysis, such a number might be permissible and I would be better placed to study the possibility of alternative axiomatic systems in 2 years time.
We could then rephrase the question more accurately as: if the probability of an event, as given by the concept of a mathematical limit, is 0, is that event possible? My answer would then be yes. Otherwise, we will get paradoxes in the above and other related scenarios (such as the probability of a point on a plane being selected).
I hope this helps to clarify certain issues. Comments are welcome. |
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| misc |
[Oct. 19th, 2010|09:35 pm] |
A and B both pick a random integer separately. What is the probability that A and B end up with the same integer?
Since the number of integers is infinite, the probability that A and B end up with the same integer is infinitely small. lim 1/x, x--> infinity = 0, so the probability is 0.
But it is possible that A and B end up with the same integer. As such, should we conclude that "probability = 0" and "cannot taking place" are not mutually exclusive events? |
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| misc |
[Oct. 13th, 2010|11:59 pm] |
my housemates in oxford are some seriously crazy people.
my neighbour is married and spent a few months hitchhiking in europe. his wife draws and sells portraits on the streets and thats how they survive. prior to that, he (a croatian) sold his (inherited) house and everything he's got and that's how he paid for his oxford education.
this guy from the floor below spent a year hitchhiking in europe with zero euros in his pocket and zero electronics in his bag. he lived and ate and travelled entirely on the generosity of strangers. besides, he almost didnt make it back to oxford because he was almost called up to tour canada with a rockband. it isnt surprising that he doesnt have a family, so he is on a student loan to get through university. now university loans are cancelled if you arent around for 7 years so he plans to hitchhike for 10 years around the world after he graduates.
everything ive done is really nothing compared to what these people have done (in terms of daringness) but they are so extreme that i dont wish i was like them. i think we all appreciate people who push limits but at the end of the day, we should not push limits simply because we like to push limits but because they bring us to where we want to be. that said, i believe that hitchhiking in europe with zero euros in your pocket for a year brings tremendous personal growth, personal growth that cannot take place while studying in university or working in a wallstreet firm or even spending 2 months in india. i also appreciate the guts of someone who hasnt travelled before to spend a year hitchhiking in europe all of a sudden. i wish i have the guts to pursue whatever i want to do in future.
(i do wonder also if the point of life is merely to experience as much as possible and to do as much as possible. people usually mean something of this sort when they express disapproval of a staightforward, safest and well-trodden life but perhaps the opposite extreme is just as ridiculous. perhaps this means that to talk about experience and doing stuff is to miss the point of life altogether.)
(to kao and yzq) im exploring mountaineering/hiking/climbing/walking with the university but its impossible this term (and possibly year) because weekend trips leave on fridays at 5/6pm but i have classes until 6:30pm every friday. i hope that lead climbing in the indoor gym will do my technique/strength some good though. i also hope to meet people interested in outdoor activities while climbing here so that i can get climbing partners in the alps/scottish highlands, although cultural differences will probably make that very difficult. (it is already very hard hitchhiking around europe as a british white; i wonder if that is possible as an asian.) |
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| misc |
[Oct. 1st, 2010|01:17 am] |
i just finished sara gruen's water for elephants.
its definitely good but lacks the depth to be truly great.
i shud also recommend quang van nguyen's fourth uncle in the mountain here.
i enjoy reading about people's extraordinary lives. i enjoy knowing and meeting people who celebrate life, even if i don't agree with all their views. continuing to hope and give oneself the best chance in ridiculous circumstances has to be one of the most valuable traits around. unfortunately, it's also one of the rarest.
i think it's fair to say that most people around us are mostly uninspiring.
that's why we need to read, otherwise we will stop believing in the/our possibilities.
...
i just looked through many of my fb friends' and nearlyfriends' (i.e. share a large number of frens but not frens) profiles. i am startled that outside the few that i usually socialise with, i actually know many christians. i know many christian conservatives too. i just wonder whether they are the stereotypical american sort. |
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| on faith |
[Sep. 21st, 2010|11:28 pm] |
1. as much as schools teach us how to build and project self-confidence, no one is fully confident of or comfortable with themselves. this is not only because not everything is within our control, but also because we are not perfect beings and we are not infinitely plastic. not perfect refers to our lack of (certain) abilities while not being infinitely plastic refers to our inability (or the impossibility) of shaping ourselves to become whoever/whatever we want ourselves to be. actually the above should not be surprising because it only affirms us as human beings, not machines or plasticine models. but its natural and good to want to become better than one already is, therefore one needs to learn how to live with one's imperfections, how to look in the mirror and be proud of what one is and is becoming. because we cannot be certain that we will succeed, we need to have faith in ourselves. because we may and will fail, we need to have faith in ourselves over and over again.
2. everyone knows of people around them doing stupid things. today someone steals my water bottle, tomorrow someone issues a fatwa calling for his head, the next day someone expels her from her country. people do stupid things all the time and worse, give stupid reasons to support their stupid things all the time. believing that they are mistaken and 'the truth will set them free' may be helpful and correct but believing that all people will be corrected soon/within their lifetimes is certainly unjustified. but people do nice things too, nice things that make our world a nicer place although we cannot be certain if, on balance, the world will become an increasingly better place. that's why we need to have faith in the world, to have faith that tomorrow will be worth living for. people will continue to do stupid things tomorrow and in the distant future; that's why we need to continue to have faith in the world and continue to believe that tomorrow is worth living for.
are the two faiths justified? no, but it's not a fair question because faith is neither knowledge nor a form of knowledge. faith is the 'negated uncertainty that corresponds to the uncertainty of becoming'. is this faith reasonable? i think it is. actually, what do we mean by a reasonable faith? let's set aside that for now and say that insofar as i think my faith is reasonable, i am not justified in holding that it is reasonable. i simply have faith that my faith is reasonable and so does everyone else. will everyone's faith in whatever they have faith in result in the world becoming a better place? again, i can only have faith that that will be so. strangely, faith is one of the most important yet radical things in life. |
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| misc |
[Sep. 3rd, 2010|11:16 am] |
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i just called mindef call center to ask about exit permit stuff and the service i got was seriously top notch. |
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| misc |
[Jul. 9th, 2010|01:01 am] |
today i felt utterly tired and sian.
too tired to read the papers, too tired to read books, too tired to watch tv, too tired to leave the house, too tired to surf the net. and that was 3 hours after waking up.
so i went to slp and spent the next 3 hours drifting in and out of deep sleep and dreams i cannot remember. i think i have never felt like this before.
...
i am clearing a section of my bookshelf. let me know if you are interested in the following books because they will be given away (at a bookexchange or charity or wtv) anyway.
authenticity - david boyle
listening to kramer - peter kramer (library-sale book)
walking the tightrope of reason - robert fogelin
a dialogue on ethical issues of life and death - rocco gennaro (lsb)
how good do we have to be - harold kushner (lsb)
frames of mind - howard gardner
a disciplined mind - howard gardner
leaps of faith - nicholas humphreys (lsb)
the curious incident of the dog at night time - mark haddon
the argumentative indian - amartya sen
socrates cafe - christopher phillips
looking for spinoza - antonio damasio
the republic of wine - mo yan
the final call - leo hickman
fast food nation - eric schlosser
a fortune teller told me - tiziano terzani
a briefer history of time - stephen hawkings
(i really dont expect much because these books arent that useful to me anymore, but dont expect me to meet you and give you books at your convenience for nth. trades welcome (open to whatever you recommend me except poems, comics, fiction-that-is-part-of-a-series and pre-1900 fiction.) contact me via email.)
...
while arranging my table+cupboard, i flipped through (and kept) my s2 student-led conferencing portfolio, simo junior team notes, s3 math portfolio (for best student interview), s3 sabbatical notes, tictactoe report, taiwan immersion programme information booklet, recruit handbook, stanchart halfmarathon cert, letter of acknowledgment from vietnam schl and mountaineering information booklet. today, i recollected what/how much ive gone through in the last 9 years. the realisation that i have unmistakably grown was a deeply moving one.
(i also flipped through some photos whose origins i can no longer remember. but nvm, they have been discarded.) |
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| these were once my favourite songs |
[Jul. 8th, 2010|11:30 pm] |
(in chronological order, more or less)
only love - trademark
life is a rollercoaster - ronan keating
i don't want to miss a thing - aerosmith
here is gone - goo goo dolls
linger - the cranberries
beautiful day - u2
take a bow - madonna
one - u2
the reason - hoobastank
runaway train - soul asylum
heart of the matter - don henley
伤痕 - 林忆莲
梦醒时分 - 陈淑桦
记事本 - 陈慧琳
最爱的人伤我最深 - 张雨生+张惠妹
辛酸的情歌 - 彭佳慧 |
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| misc |
[May. 16th, 2010|12:46 am] |
by now you should have known that south korea won the 2010 uber cup. i dont usually watch women's badminton but i had to watch all the matches this time after wang yihan lost the first tie. all in all, the badminton wasn't breathtaking but the tension and drama on court was ridiculous.
the chinese players, usually known for their unflappableness, performed way below par due to inexperience. even though wang yihan lost, you could tell that she was more talented than her counterpart. unfortunately, all the talent in the world cannot save you if you keep making elementary mistakes.
the second singles was standard affair. even though china was 0-2 down, it was difficult to see korea winning this one because (i think) china's domination in woman's singles is so complete. chinese players are (usually) fitter and (hence?) more technically/tactically gifted than any other players. (tine rasmussen gets away sometimes with her height and her powerful smashes) the fitness part was obvious today. besides, the korean shuttler does not have an aggressive gameplan. she simply could not chase the shuttle for 3 sets against the chinese shuttler. with more experience and less mistakes, i thought the chinese shuttler could have easily wrapped up the game in 2 sets.
i dont understand doubles tactics very well so i shall not comment on doubles play. while reading chinese reports on the final, i found out that du jing (one half of the olympic champions, second doubles in ubercup) was nursing a leg injury (the report also mentioned that the injury was rather serious. i take it to be true). i don't know if its possible/feasible to switch pairs in such a situation but this really demonstrates how lucky the koreans are. the second korean pair has never beaten a top chinese pair before and judging by how close the match was, i tihnk its fair to say that things might have been very different if china had a fit second doubles because the third singles matchup is, again, heavily in their favour.
on a related note, i should add that sho sasaki's win over simon santoro in the thomas cup semis was one of the most exciting matches ive watched. sho sasaki is not an imba player unlike lin dan (lin dan's shotmaking is in a class of his own, i think no one can even compare with him in that respect) but he played his heart out. everyone could see and admire that. the last 21 points of the 3rd set (of which he won 18) may well be the best 21 points he has ever played in his whole career. its very exciting to see someone playing 'way beyond his ability' (to quote the commentators). he was at his absolute best. no wonder simon santoso was 'mesmerised'. |
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| misc |
[Apr. 30th, 2010|01:41 am] |
1. murray's crosscourt forehand is the worst among top 10 players.
2. murray ferrer has got to be one of the worst matchups (for murray).
3. murray needs to play tennis smartly, not nicely. mixing up the game with slices and then missing with them is unforgivable.
4. murray needs to practice his attacking shots, esp on the forehand wing. |
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| something i've learnt |
[Feb. 1st, 2010|11:13 am] |
its not about the destination.
its not about the journey.
its not even about the experience or the things learnt.
its about the attitude. |
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| vietnam |
[Jan. 16th, 2010|09:45 pm] |
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for those who arent aware, i am currently teaching english in vietnam. in many ways, the experience has been very rewarding thus far. i am happy to be here and to have 3 more weeks of lessons before heading home. |
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| on singapore |
[Dec. 20th, 2009|12:46 am] |
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/01/singapore/jacobson-text
good introduction to singapore for non-singaporeans. it got me thinking about a few issues too.
1. i thought mm lee's reply to nmp viswa's maiden parliament speech was heavy-handed. i read nmp viswa's speech in full and thought that it was very well-written. there was no pap-bashing or opposition-bashing, unlike many wide-ranging speeches on singapore. instead, nmp viswa clearly and carefully conveyed his thoughts on singapore's past, present and future, and the values that make us singaporeans.
nmp viswa asked us to think more deeply about racial equality and harmony; he did not ask us to forget our racial makeup or pretend that we are all raceless citizens. towards the end of his speech, he mentioned that although he felt that we were being reminded of our race 'in almost everything we do' (nric, school, cc course application), he understood that collecting racial data was sometimes needed for analysis. that suggests that nmp viswa's views on racial equality/harmony were nuanced and sophisticated. they cannot be simply reduced to simplistic positions such as 'all race categories must be abolished' or 'absolute equality should prevail between the races'.
hence, when mm lee denounced nmp viswa's speech as highfalutin, he was being unreasonably harsh in his interpretation of nmp viswa's views. nmp viswa did not argue for blanket equality between the races or suggest that singaporeans have attained the 'regardless of race' mindset. in fact, he would agree with mm lee that the pledge remains an aspiration; he merely asked for our policies to be reconsidered in light of the aspirations articulated in our pledge.
2. what is the relationship between political systems and human nature? do political systems try to improve humans or do they try to provide the best system given a particular understanding of human nature? mm lee's thoughts were very revealing. according to him, humanity is animal-like. "the confucian theory was man could be improved, but i'm not sure he can be. he can be trained, he can be disciplined".
the distinction between our political system and our pledge shows itself starkly. our political system was created to best harness the energies of the people and improve their lives, to discipline them so that they do not regress into their animal-like ways. our pledge represents our aspirations and our hopes. one is shamelessly pragmatic while the other is blamelessly idealistic. can they meet each other as nmp viswa wishes?
i dont want to spend too much time discussing how political systems should be like. it is clear to me, however, that many of the heavy-handed measures that singapore undertook such as ethnic quotas and compulsory retirement savings have proven themselves to be good policies. while they force us to live in mixed neighbourhoods and do not allow us to have total say on our income, they create societies that over time, emerge with fewer social dislocations and unrest. we are not wrong to demand liberty; however, we often think of liberty in immediate and myopic ways.
the same tendency to mis-think is probably true of other values such as equality. removing a minister of muslim affairs is not the best way to restore racial equality because many malay families, like mm lee rightly pointed out, trust ministers of other races less. in order to raise their educational standards/increase their average welfare, such measures will be counterproductive.
thinking from these points of views is surely one of the hallmarks of the 'singapore way'.
3. tbc |
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| misc |
[Dec. 19th, 2009|10:29 pm] |
1. a few days ago i decided to stop playing mousehunt and ghost-trappers. i still play facebook games but i limit myself to scrabble and scramble now.
2. i started a routine of completing one game of minesweeper under 150 seconds before going on the net. recently, i clocked times of 97 seconds for expert mode and 30 seconds for intermediate mode. i have learnt that in order to clock good times at minesweeper, you need to be calm and composed. thinking about the record distracts you. thinking about how fast you took to clear the first 50 mines distracts you too.
3. i suffered a gum infection on wednesday at the wisdom tooth area. that was my second gum infection (in that area) in a month. oddly, i did not encounter any gum problems between the surgery in late sep and late nov. i went to see my dentist and he told me that the gum infection resulted from food being trapped in a pocket at the exposed molar beside the extracted wisdom tooth. he prescribed me some antibiotics and anti-swelling medicine. he also asked me to purchase a special toothbrush designed to reach hard-to-clean areas such as the pocket at my molar.
i did not trust his judgment as i felt it was very unusual for there to be 2 gum infections in a month. i thought there had to be something wrong with the wisdom tooth extraction and/or the wisdom tooth region. i remember i did not encounter similar problems when i got the other wisdom tooth extracted a few years earlier. it also did not help that the dentist i saw regarding the first gum infection (both gum infections felt similar) had a different opinion of its cause. he thought that it might be a result of incomplete removal of teeth fragments. otherwise, it could be one of those rare events that happen every once in a while.
i went to alexandra hospital's dental clinic to seek a third opinion. they had my pre-extraction x-rays and were perhaps in the best position to tell me what was wrong with my gum. surprisingly, the dentist at alexandra hospital told me that there was nothing unusual with my gum. it was nothing more than my body's natural immune reaction. after all, full healing of the exposed molar and the gum would take at least 3 months. he further advised me to discontinue the antibiotics and anti-swelling medicine prescribed by my dentist. the anti-swelling medicine, he said, was a steroid that could impair my body's ability to fight other illnesses. i asked him what i should do if future gum infections occur. he said they shouldn't happen, which didn't comfort me because both of my gum infections should not have happened to begin with, but if future gum infections occur, i should wait them out as far as possible. i dont know if i can trust his opinion.
4. most zi-char/mixed-vegetable-rice cooks did not set out to cook. in fact, an increasing number of such cooks come from malaysia and china as few singaporeans are willing to take up the stuffy kitchen job with long working hours and little rest. it is my opinion, however, that a large percentage of zi-char/mixed-vegetable-rice stalls sell decent food even though their 'cooks' were new to the cuisine here and probably only learnt how to cook the (large range of) dishes over a few days.
i want to be able to cook like a zi-char/mixed-vegetable-rice cook. it cannot be too difficult, can it? i dont want to source for exotic herbs, sauces and other ingredients in order to make the lengthy ingredient-lists on most recipe books. i am not cooking for some gourmand. i just want to be able to fry a decent plate of vegetables, tofu or meat using standard kitchen items such as soy sauce, salt, sesame oil, onionchilligarlicginger, etc.
where can i learn that/get recipes for that? |
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| misc |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|12:55 am] |
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有时候，我总觉得心里既空洞，又是十分急促。整个人精神充沛，不想赖在床上，但也不想读书，玩游戏或出外散心，最后只是在屋内不断徘徊。有时候生活就是这样，不仅使你觉得烦恼，纳闷，也给你一种不知所措的感觉。 |
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| ord thoughts |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|11:26 pm] |
When I was still in school, I thought that National Service was a waste of time. I thought that people like me should not be required to serve 2 years of military service, for couldn't we better contribute to Singapore in other ways? Spending 2 years in the army will necessarily mean spending 2 less years of our prime outside, 2 less years to study, work and pay taxes. Surely the costs of NS were too great to justify conscription - couldn't a regular army do?
I don't think NS helped to change that. In 2 years, I haven't felt the existential threat to Singapore's survival that many say we face and I am not convinced that this is because of the strong SAF that we have. Indeed, although as an AI trooper I learnt how to do fire movement and clear trenches, it never occurred to me that I might one day have to do it for real. If I was a soldier, I was a soldier by name only.
But if NS did not convince me that NS is necessary, it taught me many things about life. NS forced me to interact with people of different educational and social backgrounds. I grew up in a well-to-do household and attended only brand-name schools. In 12 years of formal schooling, I hardly met anyone who speaks Hokkien, much less smokes and sports tattoos. NS allowed me to step outside these gates and meet other people. For what it was worth, I thought it was a good experience. As I got to know my platoonmates better, I learnt to step into their shoes and see the world from behind their eyes. Regardless of whether I agreed with them, I came to appreciate how they thought and why they believed what they believed. Interacting with my platoonmates has made my worldview more sophisticated. It enriched my life and made it fuller than before.
NS also taught me to take responsibility for my own actions and put in my best in everything I do. Unlike school, I struggled with training initially and got very frustrated as a result. I remember being the last person in my BMT company to pass my M16 technical handling test because I just could not assemble the rifle parts. I was also repeatedly shouted at for failing to coordinate my fire movement with the rest of the platoon. My failure to meet standards and persistent poor attitude must have resulted in my posting to 41 SAR after BMT. Thankfully,as I adjusted to army life with the generous support of fellow platoon mates, I learnt to take charge of my own duties and perform them well. Whether it was doing sentry during laager or cleaning arms after exercise, everyone needed to do their part to make things run smoothly. Although I do not have a natural affinity to army stuff, the tasks that I perform can mean so much to so many people. From there, I learnt to take pride in my duties naturally enough, if only to live up to others and myself.
NS taught me to take a healthy and positive attitude towards life. Too often, we, rightly or wrongly, hold on to our viewpoint stubbornly and try to destroy every other position. Many try very hard to down PES and/or slack as much as possible because they are convinced that NS is meaningless and a waste of time. I learnt that this tendency to tear down everything that we disagree with is unhealthy. Even if we disagree on the necessity of NS, we can agree to work towards a more effective AI company and a more effective SAF. Even if we think that we can better contribute to Singapore by not serving NS, we can still try to create a positive NS experience for ourselves and our peers. I learnt that our perceptions and beliefs interfere with and influence our experiences in profound ways. NS, like life, can only be as meaningful as we allow it to be.
Reflecting on the past 2 years, I feel very lucky to be posted to Glory despite all the training and saikang. At the end of the day, our NS experience is not judged by the number of field camps we have been through or how slacky the training was. We remember NS because it has made us fitter, stronger and better people. We remember NS for the 2 years of memories in the field, in the office and outside camp (during cohesion). We remember NS for the many wonderful people that we have met and the number of lives we have touched and changed. On these counts, I think Glory provided me with a meaningful and memorable experience; one that I am grateful for even as I feel relieved to move on with life.
(26 October 2009)
...
Several people commented that their problems with NS stem from their lousy superiors. I must say that the vast majority of my superiors have been pleasant to work with. Superiors cannot be expected to be perfect/most efficient. If they screw up and need help, naturally you are expected to help them. I think I have done a fair bit of such work in army, not to mention routine rounds of paperwork. I don't particularly dread them, because I know that if I screw something up, my superiors will try and help me out of my mess. Treats and good welfare now and then do not hurt too. For me, it works well both ways. |
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| more baking stuff |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|09:34 pm] |
thanks ivan. i think i am slowly getting more confident in baking. |
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| on immigration |
[Oct. 13th, 2009|10:26 pm] |
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/10/06/second-thoughts-on-immigration
even in singapore, immigration policy (closely linked with foreign talent policy) is becoming a very thorny issue. traditional liberal theory dictates that a society with a conservative immigration policy is insular, insecure or even racist. however, liberal immigration policies have largely failed to win over the masses. i would like to ask if there is a rational defense of conservative immigration policy? |
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| misc |
[Sep. 10th, 2009|10:00 pm] |
I used to be proud to tell people that I enjoy trekking and will be trying my hand at mountaineering soon. I was proud because trekking and mountaineering are activities that many people dream of, but only a few take up. But this pride is ebbing away because I have come to realize that my interests/’achievements’ are unspectacular. Anyone can climb Kinabalu or trek in Nepal given sufficient time and money. More than any other factor, my interest/’achievements’ should be attributed to my supportive parents. That may be personally important, but it is surely nothing to shout about. I have been lucky in many ways, that is all there is to it.
Pride wise, I am rather ashamed of myself for being technically incompetent. I struggle to climb the simplest routes and do not even attempt the more difficult ones. That is not the mark of a person who prides himself for his love of such activities. It only reflects that I am someone who has the resources to do fancy (and easy) treks overseas but lacks skills to do simple (and cheaper) technical rock-climbing. I remain interested in such activities, but I am not proud of being defined that way.
Perhaps I cannot expect too much, for I did not put in the effort to become a better rock-climber. I did not even do physical conditioning regularly. Having been exposed to similar activities since I was young, I expected myself to have an affinity with such activities. I have learnt that it is unreasonable to expect myself to have natural talent in a particular area. For many people, improved performance only comes with consistent training.
Rock-climbing reminds me of mathematics. I used to be proud that I am talented in math and can solve problems that many others cannot. However, looking back, I cannot seem to identify any period of time where I actually put in a lot of effort to improve my math. In secondary school, math was, as strange as it sounds, a social activity. All of us in the Math Olympiad Team will do math together during lazy afternoons in school or on Saturday mornings in NUS. I did math certainly because I was good at it and found it to be fun, but also because my friends were doing it. Saturday mornings were characterized more by Spinelli spins and curry puffs than the 7-mark problems. It only made sense to join my friends in doing math. When the math got too difficult and required more effort from me, I packed up and went away. Math is not for me anymore, I reasoned, and my problem solving ability has hardly improved since then. Against such a backdrop, do I still have reason to be proud of my above-average math abilities? Is being above-average in something sufficient for being proud in something?
Like having trekked in many countries, being above-average in math makes me stand out. Like having trekked in many countries, being above-average in math required little effort and conversely, involved much fun. Like having trekked in many countries, being above-average in math was a goal that I did not, for very long, consciously seek out. Crucially, I did little to further actively develop myself in both areas.
Upon reflection, my life has been somewhat of a contradiction. I get recognized for things that I put in the least effort. On the other hand, all my pursuits – doing volunteer work, getting to know more people, becoming better in badminton and tennis – have met with scant success. I believe in what I strive for and put in more time and effort into them than into things which I get recognized for. What am I to make of this? I feel displaced and lacking of direction. To be fair, I still enjoy math and trekking/rock-climbing and do consider them to be among my pursuits. Thinking about why I have not been more steadfast in developing these pursuits makes me even more confused.
More than ever, I feel overawed by the hype that surrounds me. All the hopes and expectations that I would do well as a scholar, that I will do well in oxford, that I will become a good citizen of the world in my own way. I wonder what people see in me and my story. Do they see a remarkable person rising from an unremarkable environment or remarkable environments shaping an unremarkable person? Have they heard of my stories or do they have their own?
I think I need to be motivated and moved. I don’t feel like I am growing anymore. I am reflexively doing my duties and attending to my weekend commitments. I am not deadened to the external world yet but I hardly feel the excitement and the challenge anymore, partly because I readily shrink away from them. But if there’s one thing that I have learnt so far, it is that I need to be passionately engaged. The self and the world cannot be thought of and treated separately; they need to be harmonized into a whole. Success and fulfillment do not come from hard work and perseverance alone; hard work and perseverance need to be applied to causes which the self is already motivated towards. My pursuits need to engage the entire person. I have not felt engaged in a long while.
Sometimes I stare into the future and try to imagine what I would be like in 10 to 20 years time. I daydream a lot and have many different dreams of the future. I spend afternoons dreaming about I could be a successful freelance tour guide who brings people to every corner of the world. I would tell them the history of western civilization while exploring Roman ruins and popular legends surrounding the Greater Middle East while descending into Istanbul by a hot-air balloon.
I dream about collecting important awards from important people for pioneering worldwide changes in social work and education. Surrounded by well-wishers, I would feel strangely honoured but not out-of-place. I would look back into my past and be surprised (but proud) of how I got the award by simply pursuing my interests all my life.
Of course, I also dream about becoming a world-class mathematician who is not only gifted, but is also bringing new crowds of people to like math and excel in it. I dream of emulating Chris Sharma as I climb impossible walls in Dairy Farm and the Himalayas.
Soon enough, I will get jolted out of my daydreams. As reality hardens, I will look into the mirror and reconsider how I will be in the future. Invariably, thoughts about my past and present states will come into mind and threaten to envelop talk about the future. Will I be strong enough to determine where I end up in future, or will the past continue to sweep me forward relentlessly, as I lay in meek submission? Am I going to end up in one of the faceless crowds toiling in the bureaucracy, comfortable but drained, stable but meaninglessly so?
It’s tiring to choose and to force things to go your way all the time. It’s tiring to think about which way you want to go too. Increasingly, I resign myself to the force of everything around me and slip into the mindset that things only appear as we want them to appear. I would drop grand modern notions of success and be content to find meaning in the small and routine things I do, whatever those may be.
I don’t know if this is the right way to approach the future. I just hope that things will turn out that way. |
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| first class |
[Aug. 25th, 2009|09:44 pm] |
just watched first class on channel 5. i am quite surprised that i liked it and thought it was funny. it was lame, unsubtle and sometimes i just felt that they were intentionally acting badly. but if it turned out to be a pleasant watch at the end, do these 'deficiencies' really matter?
i am not a qualified judge for stylistic and technical merits but ive been conditioned to judge actors based on their abilities to fit into character, to judge scripts based on their ability to create suspense and feeling blah. to me, first class fails on these indicators. it was a joke from start to end, albeit a pleasant joke that non-singaporeans will find hard to appreciate.
perhaps comedies require different rubrics for evaluation, though i would be hardpressed to come up with one that recognises and appreciates first class. not that i am obsessed with the need to critique first class though. if it cannot be called good, so be it. if what i like is not 'good', so be it.
this reminds me of js mill's "it's better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; it's better to be a socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." in what sense better? does better matter?
in a more general sense, ive been grappling with the last question for some time now. i'll leave it for a future post though. |
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| on literature |
[Aug. 15th, 2009|08:02 pm] |
i am reading colin thubron's shadow of the silk road. it's a celebrated book, very well-received by reviewers and laymen alike. however, i do not share their enthusiasm. as i review my difficulties in appreciating the book, perhaps u could better understand my 'problems' with literature.
"No one is here. Only the whirr of air-conditioning in the darkness. The museum is half demolished and the traffic of Urumqi mutters outside. In their cabinets the bodies lie as if tumbled in sleep. I walk among them lightly, fearing they might wake." (pg 110, harperperennial version)
what does it mean for traffic to 'mutter outside'? okay...mutter means to speak in a low and unclear voice. so here, the traffic noise must be low and unclear. but in the end, this scene where the traffic noise is low and unclear is beyond my imagination. words cannot and can never convey the meanings that their authors intended because meanings are twice refracted. the author transcribes his feeling into words and i interpret the word into feeling, my own this time. its not usually a problem but it is when the author is describing something that u have never experienced.
so i have a vague idea of a dark room with low and unclear noises from traffic and the aircon. now i need to add bodies that lie 'as if tumbled in sleep'. what does it mean to be 'tumbled in sleep'? tumble means to fall down, so tumbled in sleep means to have fallen down to sleep. okayy. but tumbled is surely an unusual choice of words. why would anyone tumble to sleep? why cant they lie down to sleep? -->what does it mean to tumble to sleep?
okay, this one eludes me. i really dont know. but my mental idea of the room has extended. now the room is dark, with low and unclear noises from traffic and aircon, and bodies lying down.
now the author walks among them lightly, 'fearing that they might wake'. what an odd feeling. you walk around a museum lightly because u are afraid of waking the dead/preserved bodies in the museum? i dont understand why the author would walk because of such a motivation. surely the bodies do not resemble sleeping ghosts? wouldnt it be more natural to walk lightly because the room is sacred and quiet and you dont want to disturb the tranquility? the author's 'fear that they might wake' is unfortunately not accessible to me. i guess i shud just read it as the author walks lightly.
now of cos i dont read like that. these things dont consciously come through my mind as i glance through the words. but i do stop every now and then to take stock of what i've understood from the preceding lines. then, more often than not, the feeling is one of catch-no-ball. what did the author just say? did i miss anything?
i did. i missed all the nuances and subtleties of description (which all good writing is supposed to be rich of). occasionally, i miss the entire plot with it and have to read everything again. the above represents an effort to reconstruct the blur that happens when i read descriptions like that. a blur, not a flurry of excitement and sensation. sometimes, i dont understand at all; at other times, it is simply too laborious and tiring to construct the understanding.
"Their dark, pitted faces were powdered with beards."
"A creamy mist dissolved into the sky."
okay. my sensibilities are limited. there are just too many things that escape me, that i dont get. dont even get started about poetry. |
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| physics |
[Jul. 21st, 2009|11:30 am] |
1. a piston-engine car takes 4.96 seconds to cover a quarter-mile. assume that the rear wheels lifted the front wheels off the pavement, what is the minimum value of the coefficient of static friction necessary to achieve this time?
2. a trapeze artist steps off an elevated platform, starting from rest with the ropes taut at an angle x to the vertical. suppose the size of the performer is small compared to the rope, the artist does not pump the trapeze to swing higher and air resistance is negligible. show that when the ropes make an angle y with the vertical, the performer must exert a force mg(3 cos y - 2 cos x) so as to hang on.
3. a particle of mass 1.18kg is attached between 2 identical springs on a horizontal frictionless tabletop. the springs have force constant k and each is initially unstressed.
a) the particle is pulled a distance x along a direction perpendicular to the initial configuration of the springs as shown.
show that the potential energy of the system is U(x) = kx^2 + 2kL(L-rt(x^2+L^2))
b) plot U(x) against x and identify all equilibrium points.
c) assume L = 1.2m and k = 40.0N/m. if the particle was pulled 0.500m to the right and then released, what is its speed when it reaches the eqm point x=0? |
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| misc |
[Jul. 19th, 2009|11:52 am] |
sometimes i feel ashamed that despite having played tennis so much so frequently, i am still so bad at it. actually its not exactly shame; its a bit of disappointment and disgruntledness too.
dont get me wrong, i still love tennis very much. i just feel like i cant do shit and need some help. |
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| misc |
[Jun. 20th, 2009|09:14 am] |
when the going gets tough, i often have this creeping urge to ord. i feel that i cannot take it much longer, even as my mind drifts away and forgets the hardship and the pain. i appear to be surprisingly calm, but in reality i can no longer concentrate. on the outside, i stare blankly at people and respond mechanically at orders. inside, i think about nothing but ord. i need to leave all the mess and shit as soon as possible, once and for all.
actually, the label 'all the mess and shit' is highly misleading. 'all the mess and shit' is routine business for many; it is 'just another bad day'. i always remind myself that i ought to do my own thing and not be so affected by outside events. the truth is, i am far less resilient than i thought. i dont have the fortitude to overcome even simple obstacles, partly because i never needed to my whole life.
besides, i always tell myself to rise above the everyday fluctuations in mood because moods change with environments but attitude towards life ought to remain the same. needless to say, i cannot motivate myself to stay positive/take the next chance to prove myself. the last few weeks have been one low point after another, separated only by time out of camp/free time before slp.
i take the above to mean that i am not born for army/still cannot settle into army. people like me who are hopelessly incompetent in the field should just serve their ns doing some menial job and get lost for everyone's sake. that had been my idea of how the army should accomodate me for some time, until one of my commanders told me that had i gone to sispec/ocs, i would have turned out less blur and more competent. having posted straight into a second year unit, perhaps i hadnt gone through the training needed to toughen me up and 'wake up my idea'. according to him, i look like a typical 'civilian', which is a strange description considering how wide a category 'civilian is, but less so if u consider just how much my attitude and traits differ from those required of soldiers.
with less than 5 months to go, i am at a loss of what to make of my army life. a confirmation of my inepitude in certain things? a difficult first step to being a better person? a waste of time?. i think i have made real progress in many areas, but it just embarrasses and scares me how much more i need to improve in various places. i am ashamed of myself for making so many errors and needing so many lessons to correct the numerous errors. it doesnt help that the more i try to correct my ways, the more i confront my fragile, vulnerable and weak being. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 1st, 2009|09:44 pm] |
just want to say a few things abt tennis and sports in general.
1. confidence and attitude matter a lot. skills and tactics provide you with options, confidence and attitude provide you with the ability to select and execute these options. that was the difference between a stunned federer after dropping his first two sets and a spirited federer at the end of the third set. the stunned federer chooses his shots poorly (e.g. plays too many low-percentage shots, too many hard shots down the center) and times his shots poorly (because he is impatient/cannot believe that his opponent can hit so well). the spirited federer chooses his shots wisely (because he's thinking about his shots, not his (losing) position) and times his shots well (because he is relaxed and calm).
2. that said, federer was not playing well and was incredibly lucky. he was lucky to get real crowd support (something which nadal never got until it was too late), he was lucky to save his breakpoint with a risky inside-out forehand shot (that he has missed many many times before) and he was lucky that haas missed a few crucial shots early in the third set.
tbc. |
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| fyi |
[Jun. 1st, 2009|08:59 pm] |
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moe offered me an overseas teaching scholarship and ive accepted it. if everything turns out as planned, i will be studying mathematics and philosophy at oxford next year. |
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| misc |
[Mar. 31st, 2009|11:31 am] |
i got hold of a copy of the compilation of our is papers. i dont think most of them were particularly outstanding or even outstanding for that matter but that isnt important now. reading them two years on, its hard not to feel a sense of longing and fondness for ki lessons in the past. i no longer have the energy to criticise/nitpick and the audience to hear me criticise/nitpick anymore. more than that, i think the compilation serves as a marker to our intellectual development when we were 18. it reminds us how we we were in the past and how we have grown over the years. seen in this way, there's nothing to feel ashamed about having written a substandard paper (that was declared to be good). these, and other achievements that we accomplished in the past, are mere fleeting footprints in the sand as we continue to mature.
i think it is fitting to spend some time talking about life and objectivity here. i used to prize this thing called objectivity in the past and thought that all emotions, actions, etc had to follow from an objective reading of the world. i thought we needed to understand (objectively) what people were like, what communities, societies and institutions were like in order to move on in the best possible manner. its not that i no longer find it important to understand the world around me. rather, i realised that i am not an external agent appraising the world, like a surveyor assessing the suitability of a plot of land for constructing an mrt station; i am, inextricably, a being in the world.
being part of the world, my view of the world or following merleau-ponty, my lived world, is and has to be more than the objective state of affairs in the world. as far as my existence is subjective (directed and mediated by 'i'), my world is also shaped by my feelings, attitudes and choices. for example, whether we are dealing with global poverty or a lone beggar, we choose to sympathise or not sympathise, to hope or not to hope. the world is but a stage for us to exercise our choices; while some circumstances seem to lend themselves better to certain feelings (e.g. a prisoner in the holocaust might feel that the only thing he can do is wait and/to die), we ultimately decide whether to hope/dream/die and what to make of whatever we are facing. there's nothing objectively good/bad about doing/not doing community work or pursuing/not pursuing a cause that you feel for; you act because you choose to act, you hope because you choose to hope. because so much of our lived world is influenced by our character, attitudes blah, its as important, if not more, to develop, understand and find oneself (all highly subjective experiences) as it is to understand the world in itself.
...
“The clash is between intolerant people within different cultures – it’s a clash of intolerances. The Danish cartoons example is certainly relevant here. The key thing is that whilst freedom of expression is a right in the West, there is no compulsion to act upon that right. Just because we have the right to do something does not mean that we should neglect our duties towards other people. In the Danish case, the clash is between different absolutists in different cultures. People who believe in moral and political pluralism practice their rights in a way that leaves space for others. It has to do with listening and learning. It is not about whether there is the right to publish the cartoons - constitutionally speaking, of course it is legitimate – it is about the fact that it is necessary to think about the consequences of one’s actions if one does not want to harm people, and that puts limits on free speech.” Ramin Jahanbegloo
i think a lot of people disagree, but i do agree here. it reminds me of sth i came across recently, on how (i think) i am politically liberal, but personally conservative. politically liberal because you could be different from me, personally conservative because i dont often feel a need to challenge things, people blah.
...
will be in vietnam for a holiday until 13 april. |
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| misc |
[Mar. 21st, 2009|05:08 pm] |
i always thought that i would make a fairly good teacher, even though i could never really back that claim. it wasnt a matter of being helpful/unhelpful or patient/impatient; i thought i could understand kids/students/people better and while getting to know them as people, i could perhaps help them to grow/learn blah. i also thought i understood the basic principles of doing math problems/writing exercises quite well and if i could teach people to think in the same way, they would be able to handle academic work much more effectively.
but after tutoring/mentoring primary school kids for more than 2 years now, i find that i am not suited for the job (at least for p schl kids). you not only need to understand how they think and process information, you must also be able to relate to them, thereby slowly nudging them to think/treat things in the 'proper' way.
thats only my theory of how to teach people things anyway, and by that model, i fail at relating to kids. i try my best to talk to them at their level but i think i never really reached them, even though sometimes they seem to understand what i am saying. engaging the student and getting things across requires a tremendous amount of skill and it isnt as simple as recognising what needs to be done.
in the first place, i realise i do not really recognise what needs to be done, which makes my model woefully inaccurate. its very easy to recognise that someone needs to learn how to write grammatically, but very difficult to make him learn to write grammatically. i used to and still believe that the best way to learn grammar is to write and read more, but even if i were correct, there still remains a whole bunch of unresolved issues. lets take away motivational issues (e.g. how do you make him concentrate on writing? how do you make him focus on the text and not leave his chair after reading two lines?) for now and look at pedagogical issues alone. what type of writing exercises should you give? how should you go through his compositions? how should you guide him in reading? do you need to supplement this with learning of grammatical rules? if so, how?
for far too long, i never really questioned if i was doing things the right way. i started asking myself all these questions a while ago and feel totally unprepared to tutor kids properly. the truth is: education is difficult business. if you still have rosy and straightforward ideas about how to teach/learn, your idea of education probably extends only to yourself and people extremely similar to you.
the relating to kids part, i must confess i am totally at a loss of what to do when i deal with kids in a large group. i cannot manage/lead/control them or coordinate activities within the group. i cannot even make myself heard and known. i think the problem is that i can only relate to people in 1 way: my friend-to-friend way (if you know what i mean). when situations require a different approach, i know i need to change but such attempts are inevitably feeble and ineffective. on hindsight, i have never worked well in groups with people i dont know well too.
i still enjoy and am fascinated by teaching, if only by the thought of it. but the more i enjoy it and am serious about it, the more i need to be aware of my own capabilities and limitations pertaining to it. i dont think i will ever become one of those who can effectively motivate and excite classes and classes of kids. i think i would be better off in small classes in secondary school/jc. perhaps i would be even more effective and useful as an academic who sits in his office thinking through chim theories and complicated approaches to education while entertaining the odd graduate student. but if i somehow end up there one day, it will not be because i am 'too smart' for the humble classroom. rather, it would be because i am too useless and dumb for it. |
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| misc |
[Mar. 10th, 2009|07:56 pm] |
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if you havent applied for uni and/or are thinking of visiting nus this saturday, pls leave a msg or pm me. |
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| misc |
[Mar. 2nd, 2009|04:14 pm] |
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| misc |
[Feb. 27th, 2009|10:30 pm] |
the bx course this past week reminded me of how pathetic i am as a soldier and how much more i need to improve in order to become a decent, respectable soldier. it pains me that i still cannot perform simple tasks properly and consistently and solve my own problems. im not trying to be outstanding - im just trying to be someone who can hold his ground and fight, someone who can say that he has learnt what it means and takes to be a soldier. my csm says i lack self-confidence and i believe he is partially right. i approach things with the default mindset that i will fail and therefore try hard to do items 1, 2 and 3 in order not to fail. half my idling time is spent repeating to myself what needs to be done and how that should be done and when i actually get down to doing it, my mind slips into a state of blankness where i just do things more or less in default mode. on a related note, i find it very difficult to concentrate and put 100% effort into things. its like i am never really in the present; not that i daydream or 'think too much' or am in 'somewhere else' but i always feel very detached from things. i get very frustrated and angry with myself, but that's a response to my actions/inactions, not to the task/surroundings.
(incomplete. too many things to say too little time.) |
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| misc |
[Jan. 31st, 2009|12:11 am] |
1. how do you make coffee using ground coffee beans? i dont have a french press or a coffeemaker but i have coffee filters. typically i heap 1 tablespoon of coffee and wet the beans with hot water for 1 minute before pouring hot water through the filter to make a cup. i read that a french press brings out the flavours much better but i am quite sure local kopitiams dont use them, and many of them still make good cups. (how to make the kopitiam kopi anyway? i have a bag of the traditional coffee-margarine mixture.) also, is evaporated milk replaceable by say, creamers or powedered milk?
2. can anyone kindly lend me a sat(1) book?
3. verdasco showed us how to use the drive volley today. if he keeps up his form and works on reducing his errors, he's going to be a worldclass player. |
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| misc |
[Jan. 21st, 2009|06:58 pm] |
http://rustbeltphilosophy.blogspot.com/2008/12/late-thursday-seriousness-blogging.html
a nice distinction, although i think he's being rather uncharitable in paragraph 4. i would be interested to read a reply to this.
i still think that the central ideas of the book (cosmopolitanism blahblah) are sound though, as with other books in the series. amartya sen's identity and violence and dershowitz' treatise on preemption are both excellent works. |
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| misc |
[Jan. 12th, 2009|08:42 pm] |
i was reading accounts of ascents of 7k+m mountains when it struck me how much work one needed to scale 1 7k+m mountain. i always thought of ascents as mere tests/markers of physical fitness, with the occasional rock climbing/rope/wtv skill but the more i read accounts the more i realise that if i go into mountain climbing with this type of mindset, i am just trying my luck and waiting to die. i am starting to see mountain climbing as much more than a x-day climb/walk but as a test in weather reading, ground reading, route finding and most importantly, being independent (learning to take care of oneself, treating oneself of frostbites/etc, motivating oneself, making decisions for oneself, blah). as they say, there are numerous ways to die on the mountain. better learn to watch out for them.
i have always treated trekking/mountain climbing as a leisure activity rather than a challenge. it may be somewhat challenging but i dont do it because it is challenging. i do it because it is fun and rewarding, of which only a part can be attributed to it being challenging. stepping up to 6k+m peaks, i feel rather unprepared mentally and technically. the technical part can be taken care of by alpine courses but i keep thinking that these (whatever i can take before the planned expedition) is not enough. mountain climbing is not a problem sum where you see how an example is done and attempt the next problem - its much less straightforward than that.
i still would like to do an ascent of a 6k+m peak in the near future, although i harbour no ambitions of being an adventurer out to assault peaks in the most spectacular/independent/challenging fashion. in that regard, i see myself more as a 'mountain tourist' rather than an adventurer, although thats really nothing to be ashamed of. i play tennis not because i aspire to beat federer/etc; i watch movies not because i wish to become a leading film critic; i (wish to) visit pyramids/stonehenge/blah not because i wish to unveil new findings to the world - i do them because i enjoy them at my level, in my capacity. for that reason, i dont see exploring the outdoors/mountains/wtv as a personal quest for excellence, where i take on progressively difficult challenges and forget about all the 'easy' or 'lesser' endeavours. sure, challenges are valuable in their ability to let you find out more about yourself, your limits, strengths and weaknesses. a technical ascent of a 6k+m peak would also be valuable in providing a new type of experience (that of iceclimbing and 'really feeling the altitude'). but when it grows and demands too much of you, you need to let go and hang on to your other passions.
atm, i need lots of money, time and confidence. i'll see how it goes, but i dont feel prepared for now. i am not confident of my ability to manage, survive and enjoy the whole thing, and there are always other things pressing me for attention. |
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cjqsg's journal
