I went to Kinokuniya Bookstore today and found a couple of non-fiction I have always been interested but enable to explore. The first is on Trachtenberg system of Speed Mathematics that is applied beyond multiplication. There’s another on Moscow’s mathematical puzzles. The more arts inclined people can try Feynman’s writings like ‘You’re surely joking, Mr Feynman’ or ‘Don’t you have time to think?’ or ‘Six-piece easy’ or ‘QED’ and many more.
As a pseudo-art-quasi-science student, I am also thinking of reading ‘Sophie’s World’ by Jostein Gaarder, whose price is slashed quite low since its first publication. I think I’ll be getting it soon. There’s another ridiculous book which I would consider to be the ‘Sophie’s World’ of the sciences and it’s titled ‘The Road to Reality’ by Roger Penrose. It’s going to be an amazing read for anyone, absolutely. It might well be more exciting than Sophie’s World if you are of the more mathematical type; I bet Yong Xian will be more interested in Penrose than Gaarder though Pei Shan will probably enjoy Gaarder so much more. I think I’ll want to read both books if I have time. Oh and Jieyee, I didn’t know you read my blog – try reading Penrose if you are still haven’t find your passion; if you hate him then maybe you are not so suited for Physical Sciences. Peng Sing, if you are tired of Feynman, you can switch to Brian Greene (he writes very well too).
Kwang Guan, just in case you still follow up with my blog, you might enjoy a bit more Current Affairs like The Economist’s World in 2008 (which currently cost SGD$25 and I am not considering purchasing it just for your information). Otherwise I think you’ll be interested in Jared Diamond though Feynman should do fine since you seem to be into Physics now.
I’ve not been blogging, deceiving myself that I should spend more time absorbing ideas rather than expounding them. It’s kind of true I have been reading and perhaps obliquely due to Peng Sing’s discussion on Richard Feynman on his blog, I was curious and decided to try and read some stuff by Feynman. I also read a couple of stuff about ‘thinking’ for the sake of some projects I am planning to initiate. The process of reading these materials seem more passive than I previously expected – I wanted to look into what these people studying the processes of ‘thinking’ have been achieving. As a result, I carefully took in the different thinking tools and the rationale behind them. For some, I practiced the same thinking habits in vastly different ways and in other cases, I had actually been using them all the time (except not as formally as suggested by Edward de Bono). It was pretty exhilarating to realised that your own methods of doing stuff are actually the ones studied and proposed by experts to be ‘taught’ to others.
The reason for citing the reading I have been indulging as a ‘more-passive-than-expected’ process is that I didn’t seem to quite interact with the proposed ideas in the way I normally do. When reading Feynman, I no longer have that ‘nods with agreement’ experience I encountered with ‘The Elegant Universe’. Maybe I was expecting too much – like the Teh-Si from 136 香港街鱼头火炉 opposite Singapore General Hospital. I felt that they produce top-notch Teh-Si when I first drank it and the second time I drink it, I feel that it tasted below standard although my cousin who was there both times, insisted the quality was the same. I had much higher expectation the second time because the first was in some sense, a surprise. Likewise, having read Brian Greene and heard about Feynman’s skills with lectures, I was expecting too much. I felt like I was just plainly looking at the type of ideas Feynman has to offer eventually.
I wonder if this is the gestation period for some big essay that’s going to come up. All the studying have kind of dumbed me into a standard essay sort of machine. Trying to study SAT essay section also produce the same effect. It sucks, and it drains values out of essays. In the same way, the life I am going through right now makes me appreciate big issues a bit less – I have got National Service, Tertiary Education and lack of sleep to worry about. At least during the preparation of ‘A’ Levels, I only had to worry about whether I studied and as long as I covered the syllabus and know my stuff, I am free to explore. Of course, some may be stuck at the preparation stage and I don’t deny there are times when it happened for me but by and large, I seem to actually enjoy more freedom before than after the academic hurdle. It is freedom of the mind I am referring to. The more decisions you have to make on your own and the more independence in life you gain, the harder it is to find time to explore the world and stay as an observer like I have always been. Curiosity can no longer be the excuse to find out about things – society needs you to back it up with the practical reasons for knowing, the function of discoveries and the benefits finding out brings. But the grass is always greener on the other side and knowing that helps you to push on with your existing circumstance.
On this very day last year, that’s 15 December 2006, my auntie was in the hospital and on my way to the hospital, I left my K700i on that bus. It was a SMRT bus Service No. 75. Fortunately I managed to retrieve it that night from the Bukit Panjang Bus Interchange after calling up the bus company. It was a sigh of relief.
Today, I found that my phone is missing when I woke up. I vaguely remember setting the alarm but apparently it was the memory from the day before. I suspected that I left it in the slacks I wore yesterday. My mum then exclaimed that she already put the slacks into the washing machine to wash. Opening the cover of the machine, we found the slacks on the top and true enough, the piece of K700i was inside the left pocket. It was dripping wet and you can even see water in the screen as if the phone was some tank. I think you can keep a couple of amoebas as pets in the phone at that moment.
15 December are bad days for my K700i somehow. I am still drying the phone right now and I am aware that the phone was turned on while being placed in the washing machine. It spells trouble but I really hope this Sony Ericsson can tide over this crisis. I’ll not be using it once I enter National Service anyway.
An Update (16 February)
I tried the phone and it work! The exception was the backlight of the screen, which means the screen never lights up! Initially there was some problems with the joystick too but after trying it for a while, it started to work. I didn’t bother to test the camera since I don’t really use it and the devastation of the backlight means I can’t really use it anymore. I switched to my old Nokia 3100, which I’m probably going to use for my National Service, only to discover that the vibrator of the phone is damaged from the impact when it dropped last time (my dad was using it that time). Too bad.
I haven’t blogged for a real long time and in this long time there’s quite a few entries which should have been written but was ‘lost’ somehow through my sheer laziness, reluctance to do something unexciting on my computer and conscious economic decision that playing computer games would grant me a higher marginal benefit. There’s one on ‘Meritocratic Nature of Free Markets’, inspired by the experience of getting rejected for the EDB scholarship; another on ‘Nasty Cities’, looking into the problems plaguing developing cities from a primary perspective, inspired by my trip to the various coastal cities of China (Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wuxi and Nanjing); also a rant on life titled ‘Scammed’ which documents the scams I was subjected to when I was in various places (Pu-er Tea Leaves of Kunming, Yunnan; Long-jing Tea Leaves of Hangzhou; Silk Blankets of Suzhou; Teapots of Wuxi; Yahoo! 2007 Mail Alert Sham in my mobile phone when in Singapore).
I don’t think I’m going to write any of these entries. In fact, there’s a long overdue entry on meritocracy but I decided to just dump that. The fate of these ‘floating entries’ (floating in my mind) will be rather similar, my mind has wandered to other things. When I went to Building & Construction Authority’s Scholarship & Career Talk I suddenly became endowed with a designer-engineer mind. On my way back from Suntec City, as I was taking the ‘Down’ escalator (a misnomer because it does not ‘escalate’ you) into Citylink, it dawned on me that the moment we step on the escalator from a higher position we are holding on to a hell lot of potential energy and there shouldn’t be a need to expend external energy source to ‘carry’ us down – what we need is merely a system to slow the release of this potential energy that we have. It is the same idea as for an elevator going down – getting it to move down based on the weight of those people inside the elevator. This should theoretically reduce energy consumption quite substantially. Unfortunately, in both cases, the main obstacle is the inability to design a system that can handle variable weights. I suspect one means is to use friction, because the higher the weight, the more the potential energy but also the higher the friction – I do not have any quantitative relations but I am rather positive that holds. As a result, I think modifying the existing Down escalators would be easier than the elevator thing. I have not come up with any designs but I think this is a nice problem to think about for any hard-core engineers.
Such experiences leaves me rather disturbed because I can no longer be sure if Economics is something I want to place my future in. I have such varied interests, which I once thought could be contained in the multi-disciplinary, all-pervading nature of Economics – now I am aware that is not possible, especially when it comes to career. Organizations in the real world are looking for flexibility and versatility but not someone who wants to mix everything up. For a person like me, keen on studying application of river studies on traffic management strategies (or hoping to create an experimental advance community living so greenly that it contributes to negative carbon output to study its economy), the real world offers little room for me. This is not supposed to be a rant; I am going to make some room for myself somehow.
