Purity of Arms

Don't you feel it will always be a little ridiculous to talk of the purity of arms when there is blood on your hands? No matter how "justified" the war might be. And to think the IDF put it in its code of ethics.
I do not think it is entirely fair to argue, as someone did in a comment on Global Voices Online, that "when hundreds of civilians are dying as a result of the “surgical” attacks of Israel there is no excuse. These are war crimes." The following editorial cartoon presented an entirely probable, and possibly more accurate, version of why surgical strikes in Gaza are still creating collateral damage:
Both sides are, in their quest of security, doing things that could, conceivably, be war crimes, because they do not see viable alternatives.
It is, really, an unfortunate conflict born of misunderstanding and block-headedness. In this light, it is utter nonsense to talk of the purity of arms. What purity can be associated with arms which are tainted with blood shed out of incomprehension, miscommunication, prejudice?
On the ground, however, slightly different realities prevail. Not every Israeli soldier or Palestinian is equally unwillingly to talk to the other side; some, perhaps many, are open-minded and intelligent enough to see that compromise and accommodation is the best possible endgame for both sides. But the conflict perpetuates itself: by creating dynamics that reinforce mistrust, it persuades even open-minded and intelligent people of the necessity of fighting for their lives and dignity. For a combattant who genuinely believes s/he is defending something worthy, against genuine enemies, the notion of purity of arms may be more than just a meaningless chimera.
But what is genuinely worth defending means different things to different people---no Palestinian would agree to defend Israel's right to continue to occupy the West Bank---and who on earth is a genuine enemy? Maybe the IDF soldier is a genuine enemy to the Palestinian suicide bomber, because s/he is an occupier of Palestinian land---but the converse holds as well. There can be no meaning, beyond the entirely subjective, assigned to the part of Purity of Arms that involves the justness of the cause, and "Loyalty to Country" probably encapsulates what the IDF wanted to say in this regard, more clearly and much more frankly.
What about the part that involves humanity in means? This might have some meaning, but it can only ever be an ideal to strive towards, not something that can be achieved, because war is an inherently nasty business. No matter how surgical your strikes are, there is, as the recent balance of evidence goes to show, bound to be some collateral damage, especially if your opponent is hiding amongst civilians. No matter whom you kill---innocent old man, footsoldier, terrorist mastermind---you would have ended the life of a breathing, thinking, feeling human being, who probably had a family who cared for him/her. Any way you look at it, there will still be blood on your hands. And no matter whose blood that is, and how tainted you say it is, it will detract from the supposed purity of your arms.
But of course, ideals serve their purpose too, as reminders of what should be. The situation in Israel and the Palestinean territories could be better; but it could have been worse, without the voices of reason of which Tohar HaNeshek is a part.

新疆人，辛苦你了

想必写这篇文章的是汉族人吧，要不然受了这么多委屈后怎会还肯坦然地宣布：“新疆，是祖国版图不可分割的一部分；新疆人，是十三亿中国人的一部分”，怎愿意只渴望同胞们体谅和感谢，而不要求更多的发言权和自治权？
但也可能我错了，也许新疆人已经有了超越民族分隔的国民意识。他们在抱怨不平的同时也能考虑到整个国家的利益，而且因为爱国，因为对国家有认同感，所以愿意在某种程度上为了国家的前进而牺牲自己的利益。
其实，我们不需要太关心作者的身份。无论是汉族，还是维吾尔族、蒙古族、哈萨克族；无论到底是不是新疆人，甚至是不是中国人，这是次要的。作者显然不在主张闹革命或者政变，而是在真切地述说新疆人的痛苦。我们因此应该重视文章的内容，注重解决里面提到的问题，例如新疆人就业机会不足，教育等发展需要的设施不足，原子弹测试留下的后患等等。
这些问题如果不得以解决，都可以成为新疆人民对政府不满，导致不稳定的原因。有网民作出反应，表示其他地区在过去也曾为国家的利益作出牺牲，这是完全正常的事，没有什么可诉说的。我不以为然，牺牲也许是必要的，可是至少也应该众所周知：让人们意识到，前进是在部分人的牺牲的基础上建起的。
西部大开发，当年办得轰轰烈烈的，后来在公共论坛上也就没有多少下文了。这篇文章正在提醒我们，大开发还没有达到把大西部的发展规律水平拉上来的目的，还必须开发下去；还有，一定要记得，开发不止是公开对东部、公开对外界，它还包括发展。

Pealing and Tolling

A peal is technically a set of bells, or a change rung on a set of bells, a sort of melody that comes out of ringing tuned bells in a particular sequence. To peal the bells is to play such a sequence on the bells, and is usually done in celebration, of a festival, an accomplishment, or simply out of spontaneous joie de vivre. To toll the bells is to ring the same tone, slowly, in a gesture of mourning and commemoration.

Weedy

Scrawny, with no fat on it. Like an emaciated garden weed, in other words. Isn't it a little derogatory towards the horizontally less-endowed, though?

Turbo Hand-Waving

'"Abstract nonsense" is a nonderogatory term that is commonly used by mathematicians when skipping over parts of an argument that can be proven through a commonly used long and theoretical argument with which readers are expected to be familiar. The usual usage is something like, "...from which the result can be shown through abstract nonsense."'

Palmanova, Italy

A nine-pointed star, perfectly formed. NASA's Earth Observatory produces an even more striking image of the star fort amidst the surrounding patchwork of fields.

Exemplar, not Example

Sometimes it is difficult to tell, because those two have meanings which very much overlap. Both came from the same Latin root, from the verb meaning to take out, perhaps to exhibit as an example. Both can refer to a typical instance (Monet's Impression: Sunrise is an example of Impressionism), or a similar instance (US involvement in the Vietnam War may have provided an example for Bush's headlong charge into Iraq).
But exemplar can also refer to the archetype, the original model of something (the extended real plane is the exemplar, not just an example, of projective geometry), whereas example has no such meaning. That is the essential difference. The original model, versus just another model. So even though the adjective is exemplary, only example is used to refer to conduct worthy of imitation. It is as if the adjective referred to a Platonic ideal of conduct which cannot be reached, only approached, by imperfect concrete examples in the real world.

The Region? What's That?

Every once in a while someone will lament how Singaporeans are woefully ignorant of their region. Harry did it again just recently, I believe. Nonetheless, lack of awareness of the surrounding region may not be a uniquely Singaporean problem.
Does it matter? Our neighbours are much, much larger: they have large resources of their own, reserves of land and forests and minerals, and multitudes of consumers, which we can only dream of. Their need for increased integration within ASEAN, economically and otherwise, may not far less pressing that ours. But surely they will be better off with the fruits of integration, even if they can live without it. And moreover, the matter will eventually impact us ...
Contrary to popular belief, it is actually possible to clap with one hand. It does, however, take significantly more effort, and the hand that is doing the clapping cramps up rather quickly. Similarly, continued co-operation and closer integration within ASEAN, which Singapore is so eager to see, is difficult to sustain by the efforts and enthusiasm of any one of its individual members alone. Awareness of the region amongst people throughout the region, then, not just here in the tiny Serenissima, should be a legitimate concern for policymakers and thinkers here, not just something that is vaguely interesting, but strictly not necessary, to ponder over.

Apprehension

In the first instance, to take hold of or to seize, in a quite literal sense. Then, to understand: for the mind to grasp. Next, once knowledge is attained, anticipation of future consequences, which the mind grasps eagerly from its deductions. And finally, it seems, fear of those consequences, dread of what has yet to happen, but is sure---so suspects the mind, somewhere deep inside---to happen.

Grrr

Have you ever been so annoyed by a problem or mystery that you simply insist on solving it? One day I'll master cofinality and Hartogs numbers and large cardinals. But not now. There are other things to take care of now.

Mr. Market's Friends

It's not free markets operating alone in a vacuum that are supposed to work Chicago-school magic, it's

markets operating in the context of property rights backed up by the rule of law and a degree of trust among strangers.

And never you forget that.

Elementary but Involved

Look at Erdös' proof of Bertrand's postulate. The guiding argument is clear, but all the supporting details seem to fly in from all over the place and land in just the right spot. 'Elementary but involved' was really a good description. It shows what I conceive of as the two-part ultimate obstacle course of solving a problem. First spot the route--devise the argument. Then follow it up--supply all the supporting details--to reach the summit--the solution.

Visualising the Counter-Intuitive

Imagine a circle. Easy. Now imagine a cylinder. Still easy. A Moebius band? Not too difficult once you understand what it is. What about a bottle that has no inside or outside?
Might be a bit harder. Now you are told that the bottle can be constructed by gluing two Moebius bands together along their boundaries. The difficulty mounts exponentially. Computer animation can help.

The smooth, infinitely dense material that is the idealised mathematical surface embedded in space, as well as idealised space itself, has extremely counter-intuitive properties--only more proof, really, that actual matter is discrete, not continuous: you cannot keep breaking it down without eventually reaching some sort of indivisible component. If you could, it would share the bizarre and mind-boggling paradoxes that idealised surfaces, with their continuity, present. There's, for example, the Banach-Tarski paradox: the ball (in mathematics, that specifically refers to the inside of a sphere, a sphere without its skin as it were) can be divided into six pieces, which, after being rotated and moved around in space, then form two balls, each of the same volume as the original.
A only slightly less strange result is a theorem of Stephen Smale which states, among other things, that the surface of a sphere can be turned inside out smoothly. What exactly this means, and how this can be done, is the subject of the illuminating video Outside In.

The video was the work of the Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota (why their site is hosted on UIUC's servers I can't quite fathom). This research centre, which operated from the 1980s till 1998, focused on the 'computation and visualisation of geometric structures'--in other words, using technology to make it easier for us to see what things that the mathematics says must exist, but are too strange for us to imagine unaided. Another of their works, Not Knot, about what we would see if we lived in a space with certain points removed--it's nowhere as simple as just seeing some sort of black hole where the removed point is--is also available as a streaming video.
A good example of technology extending our horizons, no?

Vietnamese Artillery in Laos?

Maybe this is old news. But supposedly Vietnamese artillery was at it again just a few days ago.
And there's barely a whisper anywhere in the media about it. The Straits Times doesn't say anything. Neither does the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Times of London, Le Figaro, Le Monde, the Bangkok Post, the Vientiane Times or Xinhua. And Google News only has it somewhere down the middle. There was only news about Hmong refugees in Thailand and their repatriation. The Bangkok Post reported a statement from Vientiane relating to Hmong repatriation which would have sounded perfectly in place in the middle of Catch-22.
You'd think the fact that a foreign army was firing field artillery against alleged rebel guerillas in any country's borders would be major news. Apparently not. Apparently it's still part of the world's most secret war. Supposedly Xaisombun Special Zone, where all this bullshit is supposedly happening, doesn't even exist anymore, because it was dissolved and parceled out to the surrounding provinces in 2006. It's unreal ... and more than a little disturbing.

An Insaitable Urge for Peanuts

Google's Brin, Page, and Schmidt work for a base salary of $1. Our Dear Senior Minister and Minister Mentor get salaries of five peanuts each, about equal to that of our Prime Minister. Brin, Page and Schmidt are running a corporate entity, for whom profit is a legitimate raison d'être. The SM and MM are involved in running a country, which, whatever your economic theories may be, should certainly, at least, be more than just a profit-seeking corporate entity. Brin, Page and Schmidt are still working at Google; the SM and MM were doing the PM's job before but had handed the post over to someone else some time ago.
Of course Messrs Brin, Page and Schmidt receive income in other forms, for example equity investment in their own company. But these things are entirely dependent on their company's performance. And, besides to repeat for the sake of emphasis, they haven't retired yet, so it is perfectly fair they should be receiving some sort of compensation for their work.
The SM(s) and MM posts are, on the other hand, posts for people who have left the more conventional portfolios in the Cabinet, but who just don't want to leave for some reason. Do you really have so little faith in your successors, that you insist on remaining in a formal position of power even after you've handed over the Prime Minister's post? Or perhaps you just really wish to remain to offer advice. Or, perhaps, others in the Government wish you to remain to offer advice. In which case, why do you insist on drawing such a ridiculous salary for it? Besides, there is no need for you to remain formally in order for you to continue to guide the current leadership in times of need.
How small a proportion of government expenditure the fifteen peanuts combined--two SMs and a MM--form is not a issue. By that logic, the Government could surely spare another one million a year, since it is such a small proportion of the national expenditure--not even two peanuts, for crying out loud--, and credit it to my bank account on my birthday? It would increase my welfare immeasurably, and be extremely competitive compensation for my service on Tekong. Of course, that is absurd. Similarly, the issue at hand is why you are drawing the large salary in the first place, not whether the country's finances can afford it.
Despite your title you are not a minister: you do not have a clearly defined area of responsibility or portfolio. You're more like an extremely experienced consultant. Of course consultants deserve renumeration for good advice. But how do we know all the your advice you have given or will give as a SM or MM is good? What if it is not? And it is bizarre in the extreme for any company, even more a country, to pay a consultant so much for advice that is not always solicited.
It is bad enough that you remain formally in the Government. By doing so you are sending a message that you have no faith in your successors, or that they have no faith in themselves, that they will never do as well as if you continued to guide them from within. It is even worse that you are drawing a salary for it equivalent to the Prime Minister's. By doing so you are telling us that you don't really care for your country and are only doing it for the money, or, more likely, that you are plain greedy, and even though your original intentions in remaining as SM or MM may have been less unnoble, you can't see why you should stop drawing those five peanuts a year, just because you can.

w00t

Good luck to everyone else waiting for admission decisions ... or especially those who just found out they're on the waitlist.