Can I touch yo' sushi?

My beautiful sushi on a plate, I shall name you all: (L-R) fatty salmon, scallop topped with cod liver, tamago

(L-R) fatty tuna with less tendon, sweet shrimp, swordfish

and la piece de resistance, yellowtail at 20% off... (top L, clockwise) sea salt, plain, black truffle sauce, citron junos sauce, black truffle oil

Where the place? Itacho at Changi Airport T3. Lots of seating, less lining up for a place at the table. Satisfied the Japanese craving I've been having for the last couple of weeks. XD

My little runaways

So if you leave
Don't expect me to run after you with flowers
and beg you on my knees to come home.
I will not play your schoolgirl games --
that is all they are and I am not so easily manipulated.


But at least today you've acknowledged
that the keys to your future are not in my hands
but your own.
At least you know that much.

Ancient technology

Watched an episode of Ancient Aliens on History Channel. O_o

One of the interviewees was going on about how some form of extraterrestrial tech such as "sonic levitation" must have been an agent in the raising of humongous megaliths that are otherwise beyond modern ken as to how they got stacked one upon the other by our long-deceased ancestors.

Only today, apparently, are we just beginning to rediscover the technology that allows us the ability to harness sound waves. Nonsense. We've never lost that technology -- in fact we use it practically every day.

"Hey, you good-for-nothing idle bunch of low-life slackers! I want Block A stacked on Block B by this evening! I don't care how, just get it done... or else [fire and brimstone consequences]!!!"

Nothing to it, really.

Now hear this!

One key mistake we make when studying for our subjects is that we use our eyes. That sounds counter-intuitive as the material we study from is textual and is therefore accessible via the eyes.

But the eyes are much better used for observing events, that is, for gathering data first-hand. Visual input goes straight to a binary decision-making flip-switch that responds through instinct, not logic. The two options are MOVE or STAY. MOVE breaks down to two possibilities -- Fight or Flight -- in response to a perceived threat. STAY is the primary default state (due to the Law of Conservation of Energy). There is no time to process visual stimulus. Whether one ends up as someone else's lunch or whether we get to consume another meal is highly dependent on instant recognition of a threat and the instant reaction to it.

Study through the eyes messes up our mental state. We experience a sensation akin to fear due to the stress we are under when studying. Instinct tells us to MOVE, but visually there is no real, physical, urgent threat to MOVE TO confront or AWAY FROM to avoid. So we STAY in a confused state until ennui sets in. Actually learn anything? In that state of mind, y'think?

Text is language-based, and the eye doesn't apprehend language at all. Text is, after all, second-hand knowledge. Language is a translation of different stimulus input that has to undergo a process of encoding (where it becomes an idea) before it can be relayed to another person who then has to undertake a decoding process in order to apprehend the idea being transmitted.

This process involves the faculties of reasoning based on logic and requires a common set of shared ciphers and congruent reference points in order to function. The eye has no time for all this processing. Language is fully dependent on our sense of hearing and our ability to listen, not just to the text itself, but also the undercurrents of emotion and nuance that are all but invisible but not to the empathetic ear which picks up inflection and tone and recognizes further meaning in them.

Kids, when you study from text or any other visual stimulus, the best sensory organ to use are your ears.  The listening path is the more direct route to the processing parts of your brain if you are apprehending knowledge through language. The idea that we are visual learners requiring varied visual input to learn is a myth. The reason why we learn faster from video is not due to the image itself, but rather the accompanying audio track that tells us what the hell is going on.

kthxbye.

Tripping hazard

While director, Chris Nolan, spins a ripping yarn about the downfall of the Bat at the hands the Bane of his life and is able to tie what seem like unconnected loose ends of this trilogy together, I can't help but get distracted by the awkwardness of the cowl and the cape, especially in the fight sequences.

The fact that everyone else is dressed more or less normally, even Bane and his oversized retainer (I bet he got that way because the kids in school kept picking on him), Batman with his literally over-the-top mask and unwieldy cape, far from making him look inconspicuous as it's supposed to, instead made him stick out like a sore thumb in company. What's the point, anyway, since anyone who can't figure out that Bruce Wayne is the fabled Dark Knight has to be the densest material on the planet?

At some point, I wish he'd lose the darned things and just fight in his armour. Since this movie seems to have been marketed as the most realistic of all the other superhero movies this season, there's little call for the protagonist doing his thing in a silly outfit. It looks impractical and gets in the way of the action. Even in the shot with the Batman standing on a perch overlooking the city, the cape just... drapes over his shoulders, adding nothing to the drama apart from a distraction. I was more worried about it being a tripping hazard than as an awe inspiring device that the comic book genre makes it out to be.

But perhaps Wayne's inner struggle is right there. While the Batman persona relies on theatricality, technology and training, Rises is Wayne's story about his arduous climb back from the dark into light; from losing everything to finding happiness against all odds. The two personas are irrevocably separate, yet together. And that's the odd thing: the Bat survives when times are tough -- nothing makes the Bat come out stronger than when he is suffering. Make him happy, though, and you just might see the end of the Bat. Who'd have thought?

Does the trilogy end on a happy note, as all good legends should? I can't really say. Though Nolan may have directed his third and final installment in this trilogy, the producers seem intent on keeping the Wayne legacy and the franchise alive.

Oh, my dog!

As I gape in horror at the masterpiece my little dog has installed on my kitchen floor, I marvel at the guy who first described crap as 'holy'!

Arrow to the back

Sometimes a little arrow comes out of the blue. Mengs needed someone to intro a guest speaker at assembly talk. MC of choice: yours truly.

Fortunately, Cheng isn't difficult to introduce. His claim to fame is that he is the former head creative of a major media company (think big mouse ears) who has since gone freelance as a caricaturist, cartoonist, and sort-of visual-arts evangelist. He offers to teach 'untalented' people to express themselves through cartoon drawing and in the process show them that trained technique in the arts counts for more than any so-called 'natural' talent.

The info I had of our guest was 'sketchy' like that and my further instruction was to remind the kids the objective of the session so that they won't blank out if asked to recount the experience for some KPI survey or other. In my mind, I composed a brilliant intro even including a link to the kids' all-too recent trauma that was the GP mid-year exam. Always good to engage prior knowledge, right?

My usual problem is delivery. Mouth and brain are seldom coordinated, but today I surprised myself with a near word-perfect intro delivered with all the (appropriate) aplomb I could muster. Right at the end, on cue, with a dramatic flourish towards the general direction of where Cheng was last standing, I was met with riotous applause. Wow, that must have been some intro... hope I didn't over-sell him.

I turned to hand Cheng the mike... but he wasn't there. I looked behind me and there on the projector screen he had already finished his first sketch -- PPG's Blossom -- while I was still talking. Guess my intro had gone on for a bit, huh? *sheepishly hands mike over and exits, stage right.

To tell the truth...!

I don't know what this is. It started out as a "model essay" for a question from the GP Paper 1 mid-year exam, but turned into a monstrosity. The more I worked on it, the more complicated it became, and now it is so bloated in word count it will never pass for an essay at JC2 standard, took so long to write that it far exceeded the 90 minute time limit, and the content is so shaky and convoluted it's probably got more loopholes than 3-ring binder paper. Don't blame me, I only finished the main essay at nearly 0330 this morning and have been cosmetically touching it up over the past hour or so.

The question was:  The truth should always be told, whatever the cost. Discuss.

Read for a laugh at crappy sleep-deprived writing, read for a headache if you need an excuse to get rid of some of your about-to-expire Panadols, or don't read. It's up to you. More...

Thinking like a machine

"By forgoing an initial singular formula and using relational structures that recognize the rows, columns and diagonals of a boardgame, and making use of several different logic systems — including pure first-order, existential and guarded — a tailored formula could be devised from the data gathered from each logic. An added General Game Playing program helped the system learn how to play tactically, learn legal moves and, ultimately, win." excerpt from Computer Watches Humans Play Connect Four, Then Beats Them

I recognize this strategy. I use a very similar strategy to approach GP, especially for the essay Paper 1. It could also perhaps answer why I am having such a hard time convincing the kids to think like I do: I didn't realize it before, but it seems like this is how machines think and not human beings.

At least I know that what I took to be natural intuition can actually be a structured process. It's almost damn near impossible to teach people to be intuitive, but perhaps they'll be more open if they can see it as a process instead. *shoehorns it down kids' throats...

This is a medical problem?

You remember the old Marx Brothers one-liner when the patient goes, "Doctor, doctor! It hurts when I do this." And ersatz Dr Groucho goes, "Well then, don't do that." Zigzactly.

Asian fruit cornucopia

It's been a couple of years already that I've sworn off durians due to them being a contributing factor to my asthmatic symptoms. Note that it was never a formal diagnosis, pending further confirmation. Since then, I've not had a relapse in a long time. 

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been pushing my limits little by little. The big test arrived today in the form of the big durian party organized by the neighbourhood residents' committee. For $8 per head, each of us was entitled to four whole stinky fruit ("bad ones can exchange!"). That's quite a leap of faith for me as previously I was restricting myself to about four individual seeds per sitting.

Apart from the main attraction, each table bore an additional load of fresh tropical fruit. Do I have to name them all for you? Fine: mangosteen, longan, rambutan and what we colloquially call 'baluku' or langsat.

While I suffered no relapse, eight whole durians between the wife and me were simply too much to stomach in one go. Fortunately, she had foresight enough to bring containers for 'afters'.

This is one lucky recipient of our doggie bag. Both Pebbles and Q-tip are big durian fans. If we ever want to buy durians, we should bring Pebbles. He can tell which are the good ones and will miao to indicate his preference. Those that don't interest him invariably turn out to be lousy.

Return to sender

Took the nephews with us to watch The Amazing Spider-Man. While I enjoyed the movie -- and considering it's reboot of a familiar story, it still manages a fresh, new perspective on the character and motivations of Peter Parker without looking like a rehash -- it was more significant for me that the few hours spent with the boys taught me a little bit about parenting, and how terrible I would be at it.

Two parameters clearly set this situation from a normal night of parental supervision: the first is the short-term contact with the promise of return-to-sender at the end of it, and second, there's no biological imperative to particularly look after their welfare. Social obligation, maybe, but definitely not biological.

The evening went more or less like this: as soon as they got into the car, our conversation turned mainly towards me questioning their every utterance and making them think about what they had just said, examine their assumptions and evaluate their conclusions. Note that they are still in elementary school, but still they were quite game to engage in logical thrust-and-parry. Now everybody's more appreciative of the criteria determining the difference between "near" and "far" as diametrically oppositional yet relative concepts, or more confused... I'm not really sure.

It took a neutral third-party to ask if I had considered the rating of the movie for which I was bringing kids to. I just assumed they'd be let in with no trouble, and indeed they were, but a more conscientious parent would have done some checking first, wouldn't they?

Fortunately, they had a wholesome dinner prepared by their grandma. I was prepared to stuff them with a burger and fries if they were hungry. I still stuffed them, anyway, with a Wendy's vanilla Frosty while we waited for the cinema to let us in. The boys were trying to outdo one another shovelling increasingly bigger spoonsful of frozen dessert into their mouths until the inevitable occurred. They experienced brain-freeze, I had a laugh. And that was before the medium caramel popcorn and Coke that I let them share during the movie.

On hindsight, that extra sugar that late at night might have sent them bouncing off the walls until the wee hours, so perhaps that wasn't really a good parenting strategy either. Not if I wanted unbroken sleep and not have to deal with nightmares and beasties-under-the-bed every five minutes or so. Wonder how their parents handled it after I deposited them at their doorstep and waved goodbye-thanks-for-a-lovely-evening-hope-yours-went-well-too?

To be honest, I did have a good time with the boys, but probably because I could stick to my nutty uncle mode without the need to be a parent. Hat's off to you if you are one! :)

To Riang we go!

A toast to HP to celebrate a slightly belated birthday! (And to whatever it was that Josh and Wayne were celebrating).

We made the staff of La Pizzaiola and Wimbly Lu really happy with our entourage of lunch seekers. These two trendy establishments are housed in neighbouring shophouses on Jalan Riang.

The former serves an Italian menu. The portions are generous for the price; and full of rich, strong, hearty flavours. Whether it's the Parma ham, the creamy mozzarella, the fresh rocket or the robust lasagne, the tastebuds sing with every mouthful. The impact can be a bit much for some people, though.  Fortunately, there are others at the table who are less finicky and will gladly clean up leftovers and table scraps to minimize wastage.

The pix (above) is of Wimbly Lu's s'mores pie: a blend of chopped marshmallows baked over a layer of cream over a layer of chocolate, held together by a crumbly biscuit crust. Looks sweet, was sweet. Discovered that despite having a high tolerance for pasta cream, I got to saturation rather quickly with sweet, creamy dessert. Perhaps if Elim hadn't been distracting me with our Plants vs Zombies co-op game, I might have passed on my dessert to somebody else with a sweeter tooth than me. Never mind, curiosity sated. Next time, I'll go back to the root beer cake a la mode.

Location, location, location

As the mid-term marking season plods on, the talking point of the day is suggesting the best places to get marking done.

There is a premium on being the first to spill the beans on the coolest, hippest, newest, caffeine-enriched locations that tolerate lead-butted patrons who hog the table with piles of reading materials. But you'll get no such tip from me.

My fave marking location is to sneak an unoccupied classroom, windows open, one fan activated (no air-con) and a couple of rows of lights on. Working in isolation with nothing and no one to distract me, I can be quite the grading machine.

For breaks, I have an abundance of floor space to practice crazy walks on, and a panoramic view of the neighbouring blocks beyond the running track. Yay. It should also be near enough to the campus cafe and to the toilet, yet far enough to have to think twice about abandoning my stuff for a quick cuppa or sprinkle.

Such luxury is hard to come by, though. Have to make the best use of it this week while everyone is on exam-mode. This self-imposed exile is also a penance for not being as diligent as I should have been over the mid-term break. :p

+1 Mask of immobility

To follow up on the progress of oncological treatment for the Patient, today's visit was to get measured for a custom made full-face mask. This mask will lock the Patient's head down on the treatment table so that movement beyond a 1mm tolerance is not possible. We're talking about precision radiotherapy and we don't want to fry the wrong part of the Patient's anatomy, do we?

I didn't get to see the procedure for the mask making, but the radiologist showed us a sample of one. It's like a hard netting made of what looks to be a ploymer or silicon material, moulded exactly to fit over the face, so  each mask is unique to the wearer.

Guess if the area to be zapped were on some other part of the body, there would be other means of immobilizing said part. But the head tends to roll around a lot, firstly because the neck is a relatively unstable base, and because any distraction or moment of inattention will cause the target area to shift significantly in orientation, causing unnecessary and undesirable collateral damage to the surrounding tissue.

Tomorrow should be the fitting of the mask, some discussion of customization and modification for optimal comfort, and also a sort of calibrating  rehearsal on the machine -- a dry-run, so to speak. Unfortunately, I won't be able to perform my usual chauffeur duty as my day-job is calling me back from the mid-term break.

Transport will have to be taken over by a free shuttle service for such contingencies, though at the moment the Patient is on a waiting list. Public transport for now, but hopefully the shuttle will be able to accommodate when the treatment begins for real in a couple of weeks' time.

Local treatment

Hospital food has a bad rep. But the Malay rice stall's offerings in the SGH canteen was quite palatable. The fish on the left was especially tasty. No, I don't know what kind of fish it was, but it had a gloriously fatty skin along the dorsal fin area that was delightful in assam gravy.

But the bigger question is, what am I doing in the hospital? To keep things simple, transport duty for a close but not blood relative to get his angiosarcoma seen to. That, btw, is a form of cancer that's rare but aggressive in nature.

The good news is that it's localized and treatment can be targeted specifically at the growth area with radiotherapy. A better option would be for complete surgical removal, but due to certain complications like ageing, among other things, the risk for anesthesia is too high to attempt.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been getting something of an education in the oncological process, at least from the patient's perspective. From the initial reluctance to accept the need for treatment to the eventual ok, let's get this over with. Today's hospital visit was for the radiologist to spell out the procedures for treatment, and the risks and possible side-effects therein. That being done, the patient signs the consent form and commits.

So, in the next two consecutive days we will be starting the process at the hospital. Calibration, not treatment yet. As the procedure is precise, measurements and calculations need to be done first. The urgency is there, but so is the care taken to minimize the risks involved.  We'll go slow and steady.

Helm, set a course!

A new gadget! A Holux S Tracknavi 61B portable GPS for M2. It's a seriously be-earlied bdae pressie from Tong and family. Yes, I have heard reports that the newly-announced iOS6 is killing such dedicated gadgets, but while I'm currently iPhone-less (waiting and seeing if the next iTeration will be worth making the switch) this one will do nicely for getting me from place to unfamiliar place on the road.

Just to test out my new on-board digital navigator, I programmed it to get me someplace familiar. Key in the destination in the search bar with predictive text, hit the 'Navigate' button on the touchscreen and we're off. Clear voice directions way in advance of nav waypoints, supported by symbolic, photographic and 'live' map graphics; it's hard to get lost with this thing in the car now. So where do I let it take me on its virgin voyage? To a place where the burgers are so thick they have to be nibbled at from around the edges, and so. much. bacon. *burp!

A little give and take

“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily rather than learning to think critically and to challenge.  We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.  A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of civilisation is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”
- Chris Hedges

Not often I get a commission to make a post, but I've been asked to comment on the above quotation. I agree. Totally.

If you're being educated because you need a qualification to get a job, you're barking up the wrong tree. Employers won't hire you because your motivation is to TAKE as much as possible FROM the job.

If you're being educated because you wish to learn about being a smart, moral person living amongst other smart, moral people, you're more likely to get somewhere in life. Employers are more likely to employ you because your motivation is to GIVE as much as possible TO the job.

Hey, if you can appreciate value for money, you should know what it looks like from the employer's perspective.

Billy the Exterminator

You know you're the man o' the hoose when you've been summoned to the bathroom to evict the unwelcome house guest. Subject in question: a tiny baby lizard scampering about on the counter-top.

Eviction tool of choice: 1 x sheet of box tissue paper

Methodology: throw paper over lizard, quickly bundle it up for transportation out of the premises.

Rationale: avoid inadvertently applying excessive grip pressure on subject, causing potentially fatal squishing.

First attempt: FAILURE. Subject wriggles free from cellulose enclosure and suffers a long drop to the floor.

Unforeseen circumstance: URGENT! Subject Momo lurking unnoticed under the bathroom counter lashes out with a forepaw, effectively pinning Subject Baby Lizard underneath.

Remedial action: Use left hand to fend off Subject Momo and distract her from Subject Baby Lizard. Right hand  repeats capture procedure. Probably stunned by the fall and subsequent non-fatal squish, Subject Baby Lizard offers no further resistance.

Eviction procedure: SUCCESS! Eviction notice served and executed. Subject Baby Lizard transported to Front Door and released into common corridor where hopefully it will live out the rest of its life without making a return trip.

After Action Reflection: Odd that instead of feeling scared of Subject Baby Lizard, I was more afraid FOR it. With three cats in the house, few lizards get a second lease on life. This one was one of the lucky ones.

Great expectations

We've been lying to our kids. And because the lie has perpetuated for at least a couple of generations already, many of us have also been lying to ourselves. The lie is that the more years we spend in school and the better our grades are, the better we can expect our lives to become.

The assumption makes no sense at all. We spend time in school in order to prepare ourselves. But if our lives are expected to get better, then there's no need to be prepared for it. Who needs to prepare for a life of ease? Of sipping pina coladas by a sunny beachside resort in the Bahamas? In truth, the reason why we prepare ourselves is because we expect bad things to happen. We prepare for disaster. We prepare because our lives are likely to become infinitely worse once we leave the safety zone of our school.

So why has this obviously counter-intuitive lie persisted down the generations? Somehow, people have got the mistaken idea that being in school is the way we pay our dues to society, and that the child's relative present suffering is a way of 'paying forward' a ticket to paradise in adulthood. So when the child finally graduates, he can "[habour] high hope [sic] of a good life afterwards." But it's so disappointing to see his hopes dashed in the face of adult reality.

I don't know the letter-writer personally, but I shall assume that he -- like many other of our graduated students -- has "all the A’s in [his] report card", and yet is unable to find satisfactory employment. I shall also assume that being a straight-A student meant huge sacrifices of freedom and other personal privations in order to focus on his studies and score his A's, all the while telling himself it would all be worth it in the end: a nice, cushy office job; telling the B-graders and below to make the coffee; while the money just rolls in. Because all the hard work was already done in school.

It's hard to face the truth that the shiny, golden academic degree is not the passport to the good life we were told it was. If you've worked hard for it, great! Kudos to you. But the real work begins at the workplace. Sadly, the real work involves everything else you gave up in your earlier life while you chose to mug for your A grades. There isn't a job out there that requires the employee to sit and memorize stacks of notes only to reproduce it all over again a month or six later. Xerox made that job obsolete decades ago. Sorry.

Real work involves having lots of different interests, personal, general and current; in order to be interesting to co-workers, customers and anyone else along the production or service chain. Solo muggers are at a serious disadvantage because collaboration -- i.e., working with others, quirks and all -- is a premium at the workplace. People who can think beyond the manual or even improve it are much preferred to those who can just reproduce it or require it in order to carry out their daily tasks. Workplace problems do not come with their own formulas to apply; they have to be solved with new methods all the time. Workers are comfortable with learning, unlearning and relearning, a concept unthinkable to students of our carefully structured and scaffolded system.

Employable skills are those we pick up when we get our noses out of our textbooks and learn from life itself. We can't say we've visited Rome after reading a Fodor's guide. Likewise.

So why are employers starting to rely on foreign employees? Because foreigners are not as grade-obsessed as we are. They don't view educational qualifications as a certificate of entitlement to a job good or otherwise. It's blinkered of us to keep thinking such because today, every other S'porean grad holds a string of A's, but little else to distinguish one from another. What's an employer to do?

The letter-writer is probably right to call himself a "failed product" of the system and not label the system outright as a failure. We don't have a mass unemployment situation here, so it's likely that most who pass through our system do find jobs. It's these small, unhappy minorities who can't fathom what has gone so wrong for them. I hope his new career coach can help undo the damage his schooling experience has done to him. In the meantime, I'm not going to lie to my kids any more. Never have, actually...!