All Hail the Sun

A pity we were way too close to the Equator to see anything. The total solar eclipse also had the quite spectacular effect of temporarily turning a large part of China and the Southern China Sea into what looked like a huge inky void.

40 Years of Humbling Perspective

The Apollo Moon landings were a tremendous achievement, a triumph of technology and sheer human will ... something well worth celebrating. But just as the view of Earth from space gave the pioneers of Apollo a new sense of perspective and a profound sense of humility, so the 40th anniversary of the landings should giev us occasion for sombre reflection and serious contemplation rather than just smug self-congratulation. Seeing the Earth as a small blue marble must have impressed indelibly upon Apollo's astronauts the vastness of the cosmos and the tinyness of our place in it; our knowledge of this, along with the vast regions and possibilities of space still unexplored even today should spur us on to further questioning, exploration and wonder.

It is heartening to see that NASA's celebration activities have focussed on the future rather than the past, in the true spirit of exploration and science, highlighting the questions and possibilities that have risen from Apollo's accomplishments rather than what has already been done.

Nature Presents its Data

The manifold patterns that clouds form in the sky aren't just subjects for aesthetic appreciation, they 'are nature’s way of drawing in the sky the physics of what exactly is going on in the air ... If you can reduce their shapes and patterns to numbers and plug them into mathematical formulas, perhaps you can predict the weather, or even forecast changes in the climate.' You can see the interface at work in NOAA / NASA's jointly-produced animation of the 2008 hurricane season. It's certainly a pretty interface, although we're still not too adept at reading it intuitively ...
But then again it must be difficult to design an interface anywhere near intuitive when the data to be presented is so myriad and complex. It applies to other masses of data too---Gapminder World, a fine example, tries to intuitively present socio-economic time-series data across countries and regions. A successful interface would achieve more than just look good: it would help make sense out of raw information; it would help us make use of the data productively in a way that a poorly-presented version could never hope to do. Sometimes presentation really does make all the difference.

A Timeless Tapestry

What if time did not really exist as we intuit it? What if were just another dimension out of four, not so very different from the three space dimensions we roam freely in, except in the regard that we did not have the facility to move around so freely in it?
If the entire history of our universe were only a 'tapestry of motion woven with the world-sheets of the strings', so that we live in an essentially 'frozen Universe, viewed from the perspective of a photon,'---since photons move at the speed of light, by relativistic time dilation they do not experience time at all, nor space; they are everywhere at once---'in which neither time nor space has any meaning, and everything that ever was or ever will be just is'?
That would give determinism a whole new twist. But if we never could know, if our movement in the fourth dimension is really fixed and restricted in such drastic ways, would that matter? We are not photons, and we could never be in every place or time at once. The future is still a mystery to us, even if we can say that it has been fated. Our lives are still unfolding, not spread out in plain sight before us. Such a radical view of time could even be liberating instead of suffocating.
If you believed hard enough in it, maybe you could draw solace from it, as Einstein did: when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died in 1955, he wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

(quotes in second paragraph drawn from John Gribbin's In Search of Schrödinger's Kittens)

Own Time Own Target

It was actually quite funny, though perhaps a little towards the slapstick side ... '"So, what would you like to to say about your men?" "They are a bunch of chee ... ... ampions."' But it seemed to capture so much of the NS atmosphere ... a mixture of coarseness, sian-ness, cock-ups, petty sqabbling and good old camaraderie.
It would be quite sad if Singapore's top brass really were but a bunch of work-avoiding, know-nothing goofers, or if the media were as muzzled as it was made out to be in Full Tank ... but it's probably just exaggeration for a good purpose. The intent of satire is after all to correct by exposing to ridicule.
Watching Botak Boys, on the hand, was a little like watching my own life from a different perspective, although the plot focus wasn't entirely on BMT per se. It's a useful thing, and not the least uninteresting either, to look at the same things you see every day through different eyes sometimes. You notice things you usually might not, or things just appear in a new light, different relief. In this case, I think the most salient point was how arbitrary, and sometimes dehumanising, BMT can seem to recruits; and hence the importance of conducting it in such a way as to diminish or counteract this impression ... and to think BMT instructors had once been recruits before too. Strange. It's almost as though empathy doesn't extend through time ... or perhaps it is just far too weak against the combination of the demands of training and sheer laziness.

Dig In and Smile

Honestly, I don't recall being greatly impacted by participating in Dr. William Tan's ultramarathon at RI. I only remember the humdrum tedium of running 30 laps---12 km---straight. The longest I'd run up to then, or since. Every once in a while the good Doctor would zoom past in his wheelchair ... and the whole bunch of runners around him would cheer him as he sped past. It must have been an awesome feat of endurance, to keep wheeling and wheeling, round and round the track, for 100 kilometres ... but no matter that we were supposedly running alongside him, it was more like gazing at a vast feat of human determination than participating in one. Maybe those who ran with him for the whole long haul would have felt something ...
I don't feel particularly sorry for missing the deadline to send words of encouragement to him; such words wouldn't have been very personal, wouldn't have come from very deep in the heart. They would only be more words among so many.
But I do still admire his tenacity, and would be more than glad to show my support by participating in any meaningful fund-raising activities he might lead despite his illness. '"How can I give up a fight? It’s not my way of life,” he said, his eyes crinkling in a smile.'

Subsist

To exist, or to consist in ... but also to support, to provide means of sustenance. Almost as if to give support is to grant existence.

Watch your words, Erdogan!

Maybe the Turks and the Uighurs share common blood ancestry, but that does not justify, by a far stretch, such intemperate remarks on the part of the Turkish prime minister.
'Genocide' is a very strong word. It implies concerted, systematic action undertaken with the specific aim of eliminating or expelling a people from a certain area. The recent incident was nothing like that. It was an airing of grievances, mostly economic but lined with ethnic undertones, which went violently wrong. It was not at all very concerted, but more a spontaneous mass eruption. There was no systematic or explicit aim of ethnic cleansing. The mobs which went around beating people up perhaps did target people according to their ethnic group; but they did not go around the area seeking every member of the other ethnic group as a target. The police did far less than even that.
I assume Erdogan meant to suggest genocide towards the Uighurs, not towards the Han, when he spoke. However, in the absence of any breakdown of casualties by ethnic group, it is a most shaky assumption that the majority of casualties were Uighur. In view of the facts that the rioting mobs at the start were primarily Uighur and that the Han form a majority in Urumqi, it is more probable that the majority of the casualties were Han. Where does that leave Erdogan's description of the incident as "almost genocide, where hundreds of people were killed"? Is he saying that the disgruntled Uighur, a minority in their own homeland, are attempting to carry out genocide against the Han?
There are words to describe incidents where hundreds of people are killed. Tragedy, massacre, riot, and war are some of them; so is genocide. But each of them describe different circumstances, and to entirely disregard these circumstances when picking which word to use is not only ignorant, disgustingly so for a leader of a country which itself stands accused of genocide in times past, but also irresponsible, because to use such words in a public context, in such voltaile times, can be to create self-fulfilling prophecies. Genocide, a prominent public figure says. Genocide, the radicals start crying. And soon the masses are chanting it too, and then it may just become a reality.

When zoos were still travelling ménageries ...

A ménage is a household, with emphasis on the domestic aspect. A ménagerie of animals is a household composed of the most diverse and varied members: horses and cows, monkeys, big cats, elephants, perhaps others. It is a collection of animals cobbled together and taken care of in a most unnatural of households, of sorts, for the express purpose of public display and exhibition.
A zoo, short for zoological gardens, is a collection of animals that is brought together for purposes of scientific study, beyond mere display, even if the original Zoological Gardens were indeed mainly intended to display the London Zoological Society's collection of animals to the public.
Zoo seems to suggest an increased and more sophisticated emphasis on the animals, independent of casual human curiosity, compared to ménagerie.

A Want of Sincerity

We need more genuine ambassadors of understanding between the Han and the minorities ... outstanding individuals who are fluent in Mandarin, Uighur, Tibetan, Mongolian (why not? Just because they haven't been so troublesome ...) and other minority languages, who are conversant in the cultures of the minorities as well ... we need such people to apply themselves, in a spirit of genuine goodwill and fraternity, to promoting communication and understanding, especially on the part of the overwhelming majority towards the minorities; to resolving disputes peaceably and profitably for all, to eliminating misunderstanding and miscommunication. Hopefully, with enough of these people around, a genuine spirit of respect and friendship can replace the half-grudging, half-patronising, state-enforced tolerance that often prevails at present.
The state, whether represented by Beijing or Urumqi, is making an admirable decision by enforcing tolerance and forcibly de-emphasising the ethnic aspect to the recent unrest, even if its means are sometimes a little crude. Perhaps its general blockheadedness and lack of sensitivity towards the western regions were in no small part responsible for the riots ... but I believe the government is being genuine when it speaks of China's fifty-six (officially-recognised) ethnic groups being part of the same big family, and whatever discrimination there has been has, unfortunately, been partly due to stark geopolitical reality and mostly due to the natural lack of sensitivity of an overwhelming more-than-98% majority towards the remaining less-than-2% in their midst.
I describe it as "natural", only in the sense that it is to be expected given the inherent laziness of the human mind to comprehend and actively accommodate those different from ourselves, especially when they are so few and, usually, far in between. It is by no means a desirable state of affairs. Government-enforced tolerance can only hold so far and achieve so much. When the only thing stopping (some of) Urumqi's Han and Uighur inhabitants from beating each other up to a pulp is a line of paramilitary policemen, something cannot be right. What if one day the police were no logner there, or split along ethnic lines too? And even if the police were there all the time, reliable and unfailing in their duties, would you want to be part of such a society? Where your Uighur neighbour hates you, no, hates an abstraction that he identifies you with, and wishes to beat you to a pulp just because you happen to be Han?
What is needed is genuine understanding, tolerance and accommodation, not the patronising toleration epitomised by propaganda slogans. And such ambassadors of understanding would help greatly in this. By speaking, fluently and humbly, the tongues of the minorities, they are showing by their deeds that they respect the differences between the minorities and the Han. By actively immersing themselves in and acquainting themselves with minority cultures, they are irrefutably demonstrating that they respect these cultures as equals to their own, helping eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, any perception of arrogance or insensitivity. By encouraging and initiating conversation between the ethnic groups, they will help build trust; and once that happens the problems at hand will become much easier to resolve.
At the very least, the ethnic / religious dimension, which is potentially explosive but not very relevant to the solution of the essentially economic issues that drove the recent riots and general resentment amongst the minorities, would be neutralised and taken out of the picture. Economic underdevelopment and lack of economic opportunity in the minority-populated western regions is a serious issue of pressing concern. It would be an unqualified tragedy if the issue is manipulated along ethno-religious faultlines to create an ugly and most unwanted ethnic conflagration, while the issue at the heart of the matter remained unaddressed.

SimCity Ultimate

SimCity 4 offers plenty of options for the would-be city builder, and with its ability to handle a wide range of user-added content, just about any aspect of urbanity one can think of, or even rural development or wilderness, can be rendered in the game. But still something feels amiss at times ...
For instance, most of the pieces needed to create a SimAmsterdam fairly reminiscent of the real city already exist and are freely available. An avid player, vanderaap, has painstakingly created in-game reproductions of dozens of Amsterdam's gabled canalside houses. Another player with great skill and patience has made a true-to-life reproduction of Amsterdam's fairytale-mansion-like Centraal Station. Bike paths and canal sets complete with embankments, bridges and locks can also be found.
Nevertheless, even with all the pieces, it is exceedingly difficult to actually create such a SimAmsterdam. The simulator, for all its complexity, is still far too coarse-grained and inflexible compared to the actual process of development in the real world.
Amsterdam's gabled houses, for instance, despite their varying appearances, are arranged in neat rows, with rounded corners where streets meet, as common sense would dictate. The simulator, however, throws them up in all sorts of configurations: set back from the road at wildly uneven distances, corners in the middle of a row of houses, and so on ... it was built with neither the concept of street corner buildings nor that of row houses.
Amsterdam's canals used to carry substantial traffic, both passenger and freight though mostly the latter, and the remaining ones still act, to a limited extent, as transport arteries. Its bike lanes today carry much more traffic than its roads in the inner city. Yet no matter how wide the coverage of your SimAmsterdam's network of bike paths or canals, the basic traffic patterns will not change---cars and freight trucks will still be king, and the roads will still be clogged. The simulator assumes the default mode of transportation for any trip more than a couple of tiles long is by car---and proceeds to make adjustments based on this fundamental assumption.
The simulator was probably built with American cities in mind. There buildings are placed on spacious lots, and except in a few places like San Francisco and New York there is little historically-formed, densely-packed genuine urban fabric. The prevalence of cars and trucks, also, is definitely a chip off the block of the most motorised nation on Earth.
So perhaps the simulator would do better in creating a replica of an American city---Los Angeles, say, or Chicago? Perhaps ... but still there will be imperfections and flaws. The buildings along a SimSan Fran's Market Street, for instance, will not be able to face the diagonal street, but will be set off at 45-degree angles, due to the limitations of the game's grid system. Many of the finer details of the urban texture, such as cascaded plazas wedged in the midst of skyscrapers or parks beneath viaducts and bridges, which involve innovative use of tightly- and often unusually-packed spaces, will be lost to the clumsiness and low resolution of the simulator.
How can we eliminate these flaws and make the game even more realistic? The most obvious way forward is to refine the rules of the simulator and increase the resolution of the grid system---perhaps even do away with the grid altogether and use some other way to specify location. We could even have individual automata to simulate each SimDenizen and element of the environment, such as the weather, wider economic outlook, etc., and let their interactions determine the city's development---this would be a more accurate model of the actual process of development in many areas than the rough and heavily state-centric model of SimCity now. But this can only ever be a holding measure---after much time and effort has been expended finalising the latest refinement, environmental challenges, human ingenuity and historical circumstances conspire to throw up something new, which the simulator has never seen before and thus cannot recreate. Youv'e taught it to recognise street corners? What about tightly-wedged plazas? Reservoirs and parks under highway ramps? Integrated bike lanes? Underground highway intersectiosn? Underpasses or bridges between buildings? The list is endless ... and the fundamental problem, which cannot quite be fixed, is that the simulator can only recreate things we have told it about---and it is not easy to tell it new things.
A far less exciting way of achieving visual realism is to simply take micromanagement to an extreme. Corner buildings keep turning up in the wrong places? Then build gabled houses whole blocks at a time---neat rows and properly-placed corners pre-ordained. Too many cars despite the bike lanes? Block the roads with artificially-placed roadblocks. No suitably-shaped plaza for this space? No worries, we can create a custom-tailored one ... the same goes for any other feature of the urban )or even non-urban) landscape. The price to pay for thus obtaining a visually-perfect replica is a loss in functional realism. It looks just like the real thing---but do its SimResidents live, work and play just like the real ones? Its development was micromanaged, its traffic systems heavily regulated, almost everything was built by the state and all other builders disallowed ...
So perhaps computer simulations are destined to be limited in some way. But what if you built an imaginary city in your mind instead? The human imagination can be infinitely malleable ... only it would seem difficult to hold in the mind's eye any complete image of the city, in all its glorious detail ... let alone render any such image out on paper.
That is, however, exactly what monsieur Gilles Tréhin has done in Urville---a city created entirely in his head. Urville has towering skyscrapers, imposing public buildings, wide-open public spaces, state-of-the-art public transportation systems ... and all of them come together in an altogether organic, natural way in Tréhin's amazingly detailed drawings.
Yet look closely at his drawings, and you can spot many familiar elements: this skyscraper vageuly resembles the Sears Tower, that the Bnmk of China Tower; the trains look like France's old TERs and TGVs; the churches have many elements of Gothic cathedrals across France ... there is nothing altogether novel or surprising in Urville---though perhaps that is because Urville dates from 1986 and it is now 2009. It is like a subtle hint that Urville ultimately still owes its existence to essentially mechanical instincts and abilities---as the ability to hold exceptional levels of visual detail in the mind may well be---rather than something essential to and inseparable from human consciousness. This is not to demean the still-incredible talents of autistic persons such as monsieur Tréhin or the "human camera" Stephen Wiltshire, only to say their talents are of a slightly different nature compared to, say, that of a composer, or even a pianist or painter.

Du calme, messieurs. Du calme.

Yes, it is entirely possible that the majority of the Iranian public does support Ahmadinejad; although more than half the people polled did not give a response, and there probably were irregularities which boosted his final taking of the ballots. Amir Taheri probably explained the situation best: "there is no independent monitoring at all in Iran", so it is simply not possible to argue based on concrete evidence to what extent voting irregularities were present. The speed with which Ahmadinejad's victory was announced---there were more than 40 million ballots to count, by hand, and they announced the victory within 2 hours of polls closing---; the fact that Ahmadinejad won across all age, ethnic, and other divisions; and other statistics such as higher-than-100% turnout in some places---although this could be partly explained by people registering to vote in one place but voting in another, which is legal in Iran---do, though, constitute sufficient reason to suspect there was vote rigging, or that some votes were simply disregarded; or, at the very least, to discredit the 63% figure even if Ahmadinejad had indeed won the popular ballot.
So while it may be quite incorrect to say that Ahmadinejad's re-election does not represent the will of the Iranian people, it could be said that his re-election is opposed by a significant minority, and that the way the election has been conducted, as well as the way the concerns of this minority have been addressed, has been downright disgraceful.
Until there is further evidence, I do not think it plausible that Western countries played a substantial role in the protests that followed; the charges that Western media reports were fanning the flames and that Western intelligence and political establishments were providing covert funding and other support probably had some truth to it, but the support was probably never very major, and the Western media was only following its usual instincts by focusing on potential irregularities and controversy.
A columnist, a former US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury no less, provides an alternative view: "As a person who has seen it all from inside the U.S. government, I believe that the purpose of the U.S. government’s manipulation of the American and puppet government media is to discredit the Iranian government by portraying the Iranian government as an oppressor of the Iranian people and a frustrater of the Iranian people’s will. This is how the U.S. government is setting up Iran for military attack." Perhaps, but, with the economy still in the doldrums, the military stretched wide across two theatres and North Korea throwing nuclear tantrums again, any military attack on Iran cannot be a priority for the US government at the moment. Besides, the Middle East penchant for conspiracy theories is infamous.
More importantly, there seem to have been substantial local roots: genuine unhappiness among sectors of the population, and perhaps power-play among the ruling elite. So while it is quite false and irresponsible to describe the election as a "coup d'état", Mousavi's remark that Iran's recently-elected government is "not legitimate" may not be too far wide of the mark. Its recent violent crackdown would only harden that perception. But it need not precipitate breakdown or revolution; the power-play between the reformist movement and the conversative establishment might become quite bloody without exceeding the existing framework of the Islamic Republic.
In the long run, to take a objective, perhaps clinical, view, the recent violence may not be too different from a major market correction. It will be painful, but Iran's political system will come out the better, and possibly a shade more reformist and more humane, for it.

Neda's death was tragic, but harping on it risks losing focus on the bigger picture in Iran; and even as we share in the world's grief, let us not forget that far worse shit happens every day, sometimes just next door, only we never notice because it generally goes unreported.

The Year of H1N1

Now that there are almost 90,000 laboratory-confirmed human cases of A/H1N1 influenza, it is becoming more difficult to form a clear global picture of the virus' spread. Newspapers no longer report worldwide figures, but focus exclusively on the country, and sometimes, once in a while, on the region. It's quite a recent phenomenon. Less than a month ago news agencies continued to provide fairly detailed breakdowns and accounts of cases worldwide, like this Xinhua report.
And it wasn't just how the breadth of information that has shrunk as the caseload increases exponentially, but also the depth of detail. A June 9 Straits Times report on 3 new cases in Singapore still described in detail how each of the patients contracted the flu; the latest update, in contrast, doesn't say anything about the 91 new cases confirmed. Bulletin boards and forums such as this now provide more complete, but less organised, information.
The increase was really quite fast. Three weeks ago France and the Netherlands combined had 20-something cases, whereas Singapore only had a handful; now despite rapid spread in both these places, and everywhere else, Singapore has almost twice as many cases as the two European countries combined. It's probably the huge number of people returning from the States, Australia, and everywhere else for the summer, plus the fact that Singapore is a major air hub, plus the absolute density of this place which makes it only a matter of time before a few imported cases start to trigger community transmission. Europe, despite its lack of borders, may simply be less dynamic a place in terms of human traffic than the Pacific rim; its lower density also, certainly, cannot hurt.
That curve looks a bit scary ... until you realise that the usual seasonal flu probably spreads just as rapidly, or even more rapidly. It's only that nobody usually tracks the worldwide or even countrywide numbers. Which makes one wonder: is A/H1N1 really so much worse than the normal seasonal flu? Is all the fuss warranted, or is it just a mere fuss?
We shall have to wait and see, probably. The WHO and health establishments worldwide had reasons to be cautious: the novelty of the strain, having mixed swine, avian and human origins; and similarities in provenance and situation to H5N1, which is considered fairly virulent and has a high reported mortality rate---about 60%, although that is not controlled for factors such as poor healthcare, failure to diagnose and seek treatment in time, etc.---; warning signs such as a high proportion of human cases being young people, as had been the case with Spanish flu, and a long incubation period which means the virus can spread before we realise, relative high morality in the initial outbreak epicentre of Mexico; and so on.
But so far the virus has been mild. With about 450 deaths amidst almost 90,000 cases, the mortality rate works out to be about 0.5%, not at all very scary. The general consensus is that it hasn't been spreading much faster than seasonal flu---only it's still spreading after flu season. On balance, the world seems to have over-reacted so far; it was simply not necessary to expend so much resources, effort and attention on something barely worse than the seasonal flu. On the other hand, at least more drastic measures such as border closures or the cancellation of major events such as the haj have not been taken. It is a good thing that there is debate about such measures, and that advisories are issued and precautions taken; but seeing as how H1N1 is not yet especially severe, disruptive restrictions are, in my opinion at least, not warranted.
Then again, how were we to know things wouldn't have turned out for the worse instead? And there are still reasons for caution: having already started to acquire drug resistance, the virus may further mutate or recombine to become more virulent, more severe, or, the WHO forbid, both. So we should keep our guard up, but perish any thought remotely linked to paranoia or panic. Unless it does get much, much worse, A/H1N1 should remain a headline topic, but not the headline topic, as it is, more or less, now.
The press and government here are admirably cool-headed in disseminating information about subjects other than themselves; but judging from Warrant Officer Roslan's theatrics the other day maybe they use too many big words, and need to work more on putting the gist of the message across to people who will not spend so much time reading fine print. What most people hear from the whole long spiel about "community transmission" and "mitigation" and "social responsibility" is "H1N1 is a threat, we are dealing with it; do not panic and follow these instructions." A rather clearer picture would have been "H1N1 is a new strain of flu. We have been treating it as though it were much worse than the usual flu so far, because it could have been. Don't worry too much about it though, because as it turns out it isn't. But don't get too complacent, and do adopt some of these precautions, because it could still get worse." Actually, it isn't too hard to see the big picture after a bit of reading and background research ... and the government and The Straits Times do provide sufficient background information to fill in parts of it. Guess simple laziness is the only reason why people can still go around wide-eyed asking "so what is H1N1?" and "are we going to die?"