On Mathematics

July 31st, 2008 atschool

Elia Diodati posts on passion, hard work and a link to Through a Glass Darkly by Steven G. Krantz.

Perhaps what people are telling us is that they know that they should understand and appreciate mathematics, but they do not. So instead they are resentful.

Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe. ~ Galileo Galilei

I don’t love maths. I have to get through the basic stuff with a lot of work, kicking and screaming. Although I hate maths and find it mysetrious and secretive, my opinion is that maths is the the language to speak with other people in other fields and, it also appears to me that it is completely impossible to attain any in depth understanding of any topic without maths. Utterly impossible.

Evolutionary Short Comings

July 29th, 2008 popscience

Evolution doesn’t, in fact, tend to perfection: it goes with what works and tinkers with it later. That’s why the retinas of vertebrates seem to be installed backwards, giving us all blind spots in the middle of our visual fields. Eyes like that do the job well enough, and there’s no way of flipping the retina while preserving decent vision across intermediate generations. So we’re stuck with them.

From Here

Treat Staff as if they are volunteers

July 27th, 2008 elsewhere

From a call center blog:

Many years ago when I was working at American Management Systems, I learned something that I attribute to Tom Peters but that he apparently attributes to Peter Drucker, that is to treat your staff as if they are volunteers. Volunteers, that means unpaid people who show up to work for the benefit of you and your organisation out of the very goodness of their hearts.

Elsewhere

July 19th, 2008 popscience

Bisexual Species: Unorthodox Sex in the Animal Kingdom

In some less social species, homosexual behavior is almost unheard of in wild animals but may surface in captivity. Wild koalas, which are mostly solitary, seem to be strictly heterosexual. But in a 2007 study veterinary scientist Clive J. C. Phillips of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues observed 43 instances of homosexual activity among female koalas living in a same-sex enclosure at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. The captive females shrieked male mating calls and mated with one another, sometimes participating in multiple encounters of up to five koalas. “The behavior in captivity was certainly enhanced in terms of homosexual activity,” Phillips says.

This bit is unfinished. There is a quote out of Grass’s autobiography on war almost making one queer.

mistaken identity?

July 17th, 2008 books

A case of mistaken identity? link from Syaffolee

I fell out of the habit of reading romance novels. For one, I couldn’t identify myself with the heroine, much less self-insert. Second, I couldn’t be completely immersed in the romance genre. It feels as though I am reading something imaginary and I feel cheated and sometimes so angry that I feel almost determined to thoroughly destruct the offending book. (In the end, I chucked it in the bin.) All writers try to engage the reader and the reader, for the 100 pages or so, sits in the theatre of the author’s mind. To suspect that it is false or trickery spoils the experience. Great writers, like great actors, employ a simple method to prevents this suspicion. They borrow from themselves certain traits to use it on the main character. This mind trick makes the story ring true – the narrator was there and lived to tell the tale.

Lifestyle choice

July 12th, 2008 Uncategorized

A good post on job selection by StudyHacks

The advice goes like this:

Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there.

What do I mean by lifestyle? Roughly speaking: a detailed feel for what your day to day existence would be like. Some questions to consider when imagining an ideal lifestyle:

How much control do I have over my schedule?
What’s the intensity level of my job?
What’s the importance of what I do?
What’s the prestige level?
What type of work?
Where do I live?
What’s my social life like?
What’s my work life balance?
What’s my family like?
How do other people think of me?
What am I known for?

Female Welfare

July 12th, 2008 popscience

Not A Whisper campaigns for a good cause and in Glass Castle’s current spotlight, there is a v interesting mention about pay and promotion timeline differences for women in Central Police Division.

–

After reading Miller’s Mating Mind, I am wondering if the objectification of females, and exaggeration between the minds of the females and males which resulted wrong perceptions of capability is an unfortunate by-product of male competition just like humour.

Clever Catherine

July 10th, 2008 elsewhere

Link thanks to Elia: Prosperity versus individual rights? Human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Singapore

The paper is interesting but I don’t think it has enough clout it has in forcing the ruling party into changing because it is not persuading the general public to force changes. First, most Singaporean including myself will not feel that our rights are being curtailed because “It Could Be Worse” – hungry, jobless, poor, etc. Change is accepted when something impacts us directly in a negative way. Change is also accepted when we see some other person being affected in a particular way and we think, that is happening to me too. When the change has no impact, a body, anybody will follow Newton’s first Law of Motion (a body at rest, stays at rest, etc) and therefore gives the impression that changes are always resisted and has to be sold (which takes too much effort on the part of the change agent) or force down (which is easier) on the populi.

In this instance, change is not accepted because most can’t see that it is happening. To shout evidence at the top of the lungs will not push for change and in fact, it might backfire by marshaling resistance to change because as a body since we would be stopping to think, and to bring up our experiences to doubt the doubter. That’s the reason why whenever there is some criticism of local politicians, somebody always applies the tagline ‘You Ungrateful Swine’ and perhaps because everyone feels, no, believes us to be guilty, the poor somebody would be furiously shouted down with righteous indignation or plain-vanilla outrage.

What Catherine Lim does to try to open up the discussion is ingenious. She says it is okay. I think that is the keyword to encourage reflection.

(If I had not mentioned before, if there is a sticker for Catherine Lim is Fabulous, I want one.)

Sleepware: pzizz.com

July 9th, 2008 Uncategorized

I don’t have a lot of trouble sleeping most of the time but when on occasions when I’m really excited about something (a trip), or have had a hectic week, or have been reading a lot, I have problems. I downloaded pzizz.com’s 20 min sample mp3 last week. It didn’t get me into sleep at once (eg, 5 mins). I still took about an hour to drop off, which is my usual. Now it takes me about half an hour to drop off, my norm when I am really tired. I shall report back if I drop off to sleep in 5 mins.

Best thing is the long fantastical but almost real dreams I get when I use it.

Lifehacker and 43folders has more.

106 most unread books

July 6th, 2008 books

From syaffolee who got it from dustbury who got it from fillyjonk who got it from Steph.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as unread by Library Thing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded….

Bold = books I’ve read
Italics = books I’ve started but haven’t finished

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Miserables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

My thoughts on this list: Dickens, Dostoevsky, the Brontes, Austen, Woolf I understand – honestly, I find them hard to get through. Atwood, Eco and Tolstoy? That’s harsh.