Best Workplace Introduction Ever

"Everyone in this school is failing. Nobody cares. It's okay." [big smile]

The Buck Stops There

The magic number is 21,100. In the interests of this overpopulated, overcrowded Earth, I actually hope there doesn't need to be a second time.
Update. Day 1 and there's a constitutional crisis. Awesome.

Signs of Independence

The Roman script on the road signs in Laos and Cambodia (where they exist) reads "Rue", "Avenue" or "Quai". Thailand's signs just say "Thanon". It's a tiny but persistent reminder that while Siam may have waned and waxed, it has managed to maintain a subtle but unmistakeable independence from the prevailing Powers.
That's what genuine independence is like: quiet, understated and confident. Not brash and loud like what newly-independent nation-states tend to do.

Good Morning

... from as far from the busywork-preoccupied global village as could possibly be.

I wonder what it was meant to say.

May all that could possibly be bad go away, and everything good come to you ... and thank you for coming ...

We need to talk about your stopover

Either I have very strong nerves, or I am just an extremely blockheaded idiot. I suppose I'll find out which view shall prevail when the plane touches down at Suvarnabhumi. Maybe earlier, but I hope not.

Daily Dose of Perspective

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
-- Carl Sagan 

"Is it your country?"

Well, no. Because I don't have a country in the same palpable sense that you do. Countries are mere legal fictions; passports are only bureaucratic conveniences.
Home is other people. There isn't a place I call home. There are bits of home scattered around. Some places happen to have a slightly higher concentration of them, but that's all there is to it. It doesn't really make those places special in any (other) way.
At the moment, there happen to be some faint bits of home where you would rather not schedule any stopovers. But never mind. You'll never understand what I'm talking about.

Corollary to Riposte

So, if you haven't realised it yet, failure is not an option. You can either work hard, or die horribly. (Well, not literally. Maybe not.) Good luck.

Riposte, Part Two

And no, I will not prepare a contingency plan for this. If you're planning an Everest ascent, you don't usually put in a contingency plan to scale an easier peak somewhere else just in case you couldn't make your original target. Well, you could, but it would be terribly lame.

Riposte

Someone said (today) that mathematicians are usually intensely concentrated people who, to put it bluntly, do not really have a life. I say, look at von Neumann.

Sunset over Jurong Island

The Monster of Concrete

Vientiane has no pretensions to being Paris. That's probably just a colourful lie told by foreigners. With enough imagination (or Beerlao, or preferably both), Avenue Lane Xang could conceivably vaguely resemble the Avenue Champs-Elysees, and Patuxai the Arc de Triomphe. Just in case somebody does actually try to imagine that, though, the introduction to the Patuxai, on a concrete slab on the ground floor, tells us that, because construction was "never complete due to the country's turbulent history", "[f]rom a closer distance, it appears even less impressive, like a monster of concrete." In this age of slick overmarketing of tourist non-attractions, that kind of frankness deserves some credit.

Give Up Your Seat. Please?

In most of East Asia, signs near on public transportation appeal to your conscience: they invite you to "please give up your seats to those who need them more." In America, the signs state baldly that "federal law requires that these seats be given to seniors and those with disabilities." One sign of a more legalistic society. The latter has a somewhat disclamatory air too: it sounds as though the transport company really doesn't want to deprive you of your seat, but was forced to do so by Washington.

The signs on the Bangkok Metro show a elderly person, a pregnant woman, children, and a bald guy in a saffron robe (took me a few seconds to figure that was a monk.) The bit of colour in a otherwise monochrome sign was striking.

Walking the Big Mango

Being a flâneur in the tropics is a terrible idea, unless maybe one adopted a Mediterranean schedule ... one usually ends up like the inside of a tropical fruit: wet and sticky. Bah. I remember reading one traveller's lament about how the Skytrain has "turned parts of Silom and Sukhumvit into sunless chasms." That isn't necessarily a bad thing in this weather.

Sathorn was boring. Boring. BORING. Well, maybe not that bad, but walking the length of it was definitely not worth having to endure the tropical heat and humidity. Ditto Silom, Surawong and the long stretch of road along one side of the Chulalongkorn University campus. They were all sort of generically bland with nothing very striking along the way. 

The shophouses of Chinatown and Charoen Krung were at least less bland, and the tree-lined canals of Dusit and lively Lumphini Park were definitely more interesting to walk through.

Can you imagine if all of Bangkok was more like Dusit and Lumphini Park? Instead of ten-lane roads you'd have maybe four-lane ones, and the space in the middle formerly given to six more turned into a canal. And then there'd be plenty more greenery by the roadsides. Sure there could still be high-rise concrete buildings---it would be flatly impossible to pack in eight million people without them---but they wouldn't be the only show in town. It would be like some sort of cross between Singapore and Amsterdam. It would be really nice and liveable. Maybe it'll happen one day. In the far, far, far future.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

The more I learn, the more I marvel at how completely ignorant I have been, and will no doubt continue to be ...

Sound Medical Advice

Travellers to the Mekong region are advised to have quantities of three to five kinds of inactivated viruses inserted into their bodies, and to ingest a synthetic analogue of a bitter toxin on a weekly basis. The toxin may cause nausea, vomitting, lung failure, depression, seizures and suicidal intent, but these are not reasons to stop its regular intake.*

* Actual potential risks associated with Lariam, though not so common as to be alarming.

Bad Pun of the Day

When you're participating in a marathon, running into people takes on an altogether more literal meaning.

Fluke Finish of 42.195km

Now that it's done, I still don't know why I wanted to run a marathon. At least the feeling at the finishing line was priceless ... especially coming after an epic two-hour battle with muscle aches.
How do people complete ultramarathons? I can't even imagine ...
Mind over body, by the way, is quite a misleading cliché. It should be mind and body. Because mental strength does matter, but if the flesh is just too weak, sheer determination alone can't make miracles happen.

沨

My name is apparently quite a musical one. Among other things, it can be used to describe the sound of flowing water, the sound of wind, lingering music (think 琴) or thunderous roaring.