My land's only borders lie / Around my heart.

No man, no madness
Though their sad power may prevail
Can possess, conquer, my country's heart
They rise to fail
She is eternal
Long before nations' lines were drawn
When no flags flew, when no armies stood
My land was born

And you ask me why I love her
Through wars, death and despair
She is the constance, we who don't care
And you wonder will I leave her - but how?
I cross over borders but I'm still there now

How can I leave her?
Where would I start?
Let man's petty nations tear themselves apart
My land's only borders lie around my heart

Why I perhaps should switch citizenship

Because the Serenissima is a nice place to live in. And it has plenty to be proud of, if only one looks. The Government may be ham-fisted in dealing with dissent and tends to forget that each person is an individual mind sometimes. But on the whole it works marvelously. The Republic has had the good fortune not to be disturbed by any massive natural disasters so far. But if one day, should , the heavens forbid, something happen, I am confident that this place will be able to pull through every bit as well. The place may be small. But does that really matter, in this time and age? Even small places have plenty of hidden nooks and crannies. I hadn't the slightest idea what the relatively less-disturbed parts of Lim Chu Kang looked like until last Sunday. Besides, when the place gets a little too familiar, there is always the region, the world outside, the vast castles one can build in the air out of the virtual emporium of phantasmagoria that is the Internet.
Drury's crescendo chords really do come out of nowhere. Impressive. Excuse me. The last bit was random.

Why I shouldn't switch my citizenship.

Because that national seal with Tian'anmen embroidered in gold on it is pretty neat.
Because I am proud to be a citizen of a country with a long and rich culture and history, so rich it flows out of rocks and bricks and perfumes the air unnoticed. A country which has moved forward so much, lifted so many of its people out of poverty, and is still moving forward. A country whose civilisational heritage is apparent in all of East Asia. A country whose government and people respond to natural disasters not by shutting out help and ignoring the problem, or by trying to apportion blame and strike political postures, but by devoting what resources they can to resolving it.
About seven hours ago the whole (or most) of that country was still for three minutes. How could one have imagined? Hundreds of millions of people and cars standing stock-still for the same three minutes, united in tragedy.

We mourn ...

... the victims of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar and the giant Ritcher 8.0 earthquake in Sichuan.
Now isn't it ironic that the latter is receiving more attention even though the former claimed more lives? China's status in the eyes of the media is evidently rising, even if it is still not quite given first-class treatment all the time.
But now is not the time to quibble over such trivialities.

The schedule ...

... would be perfectly manageable if there weren't Maths Jam 2 around. Damn.

Golden Ratio pops up again.

Why were the BSLC and ASLC training programmes shuffled around?
So that the course lengths would be Fibonacci numbers of weeks. 8 weeks and 13 weeks. If you divided the latter by the former you'd get a pretty good approximation of the golden ratio. Accurate to almost 0.1%. You see, the Ratio is everywhere. Even in SISPEC.
Bah.

In search of a word ...

This is an interesting site
In particular see this story on scrumping .
And 'scrumptious' came from 'scrimp'. The connotations reversed from negative to positive somewhere down the line. Interesting.

Two operators

What, pray tell, is the essential difference between addition and multiplication? From the formal point of view, not much. They are just arbitrary binary operators. If we are operating in the context of a field, they have to satisfy many of the same axioms, the main difference being in the different roles they play in the distributivity axioms and the case of the additive identity as an exception to the multiplicative inverse. Probably distributivity is the key. It states a.(b+c) = a.b+a.c, and not a+(b.c) = (a+b).(a+c). From an intuitive point of view, addition preserves the summards. Three apples plus four apples maketh seven apples, but then of course the initial three and the original four are still there, part of a larger punnet of apples but still maintaining their separate existences. Or, to be less absurdly metaphysical about it, it is still possible to scrump the three of them without disturbing the other four. Multiplication, on the other hand, involves mixing the operands thoroughly. The essence of each affects the other to form the final product. And so three and four are multiplied, each by the other, to form twelve.
Yes, and maybe that did sound a little ridiculous. Excuse me.

Castles in the air ...

Castle: A large, imposing structure which one retreats into, away from the outside world, and which presents only its massive, impassive façade to the latter.
Castle: A highly elaborate structure, rich, teeming, wonderful in its complexity.
Castle: An endless labyrinth in which beginnings are mooted, ideas fade into static and light is denied by darkness.

Postings.

Plus ça change ... oh well. Thirteen more weeks of the same. At least the end-of-course date is nicely placed.