Sunday 26 July 2015

Rant 1215 / Two Months In the Making, Two Minutes In The Reading.

Democracy is about continuity.

It sets a platform which leaders can use immediately when they take over.

Continuity is the problem with all other forms of government. Monarchy, in all its forms, was pretty close but the king or queen still has to gain the trust of the rest of the people with power when he/she takes the throne.

Democracy, on the other hand, takes away this issue by letting the newly elected leader choose new people for the positions of power in the new government. Nobody is too deeply entrenched in the system and thus nobody can amass power beyond that of the leader.

Or at least, that's my theory.

I should probably just read a book.





















23 May 2015

I'm about to wear a bright pink T-shirt for the walk today to Bollywood Veggies.

New milestone in life.



















11 June 2015

No, I didn't go on the walk mentioned on the 23rd last month. Weather didn't look good and gf didn't want to walk long distances in wet shoes, so it was called off.

Moving on, it's her birthday tomorrow and I still haven't gotten her a gift as of 1.55pm. Planning to get her a bouquet of teddy bears, just not sure when.


















Cantonese is one of the oldest Chinese dialects. Got me thinking while watching "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest" how related the Swedish language must be to the German language due to the presence of Niedermann, a German, in Sweden in which the film was based in.

Are the Scandinavian languages as close to each other as our Chinese dialects are if we hadn't lost our written forms? Similarly, how related are the Indian dialects to one another?

Anyway, I think that is why Cantonese is so complicated compared to Mandarin. To understand this, one has to know that in the past, the written language was only used by the wealthier part of society, eg the government officials. Even today, farmers have little reason to study very hard, with a few exceptions, so imagine what it was like centuries ago in the agricultural-based economies in most of ancient China throughout the millenia.

In this context, it is clear that there is little reason to simplify the language at all. Languages are often simplified to make it more accessible to the masses, like in the relatively recent cases of simplified Chinese and modern Turkish. However, if a language was only used by the intelligentsia, then it would make sense that there is a certain sense of elitism among the literate people, ie "if you think this language needs to be simplified, maybe you're just too dumb to be studying."

However, Mandarin was indeed simplified by its users in ancient China, just not at such a basic level as our modern simplified Chinese. Historically, writers were more succinct and used minimal characters without losing their meanings, eg "why" is now "为什么" as compared to "" or ""in the past, although I feel that "" is closer to "Why is this necessary?" This makes the language pretty poetic if you think about it.

This brings me to the question of what happened to the poetry of our various Chinese dialects before they were unified by the First Emperor. Surely before that dude got famous, they were already writing those in their own written forms instead of the standardized official language aka Mandarin.

Why aren't those ever mentioned?




















17 June 2015

Why do I procrastinate so much?


















Jurassic World didn't really shock me. I'm concerned. Am I numb? Or was I distracted the whole time by her?
























18 June 2015

The Fermi Paradox is famous for good reasons.

Just read about it and it's about aliens.

1) The Sun is a pretty young star and there are billions of stars billions of years older (billion = 1000 million).

2) It is very possible that some of these stars have planets similar to Earth, especially with all the Earth-like planets we've already discovered so far in the last couple of years. Thus it's also very possible that there is intelligent life out there.

3) Space travel can't be that hard - we managed to reach the moon after a couple tens of thousands of years - so with all that billions of years of head start, some aliens out there must already be capable of interstellar travel.

4) Even if it takes millions of years to travel between stars for them, they should already have colonized plenty of stars.

Therefore the paradox: where the heck are they?




























01 July 2015

The SAFRA Tampines swimming pool was pretty awesome. The first SAFRA pool I've ever visited, it was small yet impressive compared to the public and private swimming pools I've been trying out recently.

The Bedok Swimming Complex is my benchmark. Entry is a dollar, no time limit, and it has a shallow kiddie pool, a practice pool and a real swimming pool. For most of my visits there, I've been using only the practice pool because it had more space and nobody gave a damn if I just rested in a corner for too long just because my stamina sucked.

The Clementi Swimming Complex was another pool I had tried recently. It was older and smaller, with the practice pool and deeper swimming pool separated by the canteen and entrance area. Not very convenient if anyone wants to switch pools. I've only been to the deeper pool and it had, by far, the saltiest pool water I've ever accidentally tasted. That can't be good.

A third pool I've tried was a private pool at a condominium. It was small and had a baby pool next to it, but the water was great. So low was the chlorine content my hair felt noticeably less dry compared to what it felt like after a visit to any public pool. The shower facility was tiny and not as well-maintained as those at the public pools though, strangely.

The SAFRA Tampines pool was just a single pool larger than the Olympic size. Everyone there was pretty serious about swimming and there was no children around. No practice pool. The water seemed fine, less chlorinated than public pools and cleaner, but not as awesome as that of the private pool. The safety was better, with at least one lifeguard on duty the whole time I was there, sometimes two. The shower room, however, was the best I've ever seen. Not only was it clean and free of the stench of urine, it had tiled benches at the walls, doors that only reached the chest level so that you can watch your belongings you left on the bench, at least one rack for your bottles in each shower cubicle, and ceiling-mounted rain shower heads.

Best of all, it's free for SAFRA members, and I'm a member till the next decade LOL!

The only issue is that with just a single pool, it can get quite crowded there even in the off-peak weekday afternoon I was there. Can't imagine what it's like in the weekends.

Funny thing about that particular pool was the sight of men suntanning on the benches.

Seriously? You can easily get a tan just by going out for lunch!
























Just received my Krisflyer card. Didn't even know that I should be expecting it. I'd thought the account I'd signed up for earlier for a bit of free mileage didn't include an actual card until I book a flight on Singapore Airlines.

Guess I was wrong. Anyway, cool! Not sure if I'll be booking any SIA flight this year or the next though... LOL!























14 July 2015

So I had typed quite a bit on my first two days in Perth earlier this month but they were wiped out when the Blogger app updated after the iPad finally got some WiFi at home. Whatever.
























19 July 2015

I felt nothing. After the quarrel a few days ago, this most recent one that happened last night incited no emotion in me whatsoever till later today.

Now, I only feel bad that I made a little girl cry.

There is a puzzle here that needs to be solved, one that I may be ill-equipped to understand in the first place - why are there so many incidents in which I become utterly emotionless?
























26 July 2015

So I'm watching this documentary "Monarchy" about the history of the English monarchy and there was this incident that seemed particularly interesting to me somehow.

After the William the Conqueror occupied England, the first white collar crime to be mentioned in the series happened during the reign of King Henry, the third king after him. Apparently some people at the mint had been mixing in baser metals like tin into the coins and the discovery had led to massive inflation, so Henry had every single person there hauled away for trial.

94 of the 150 men were found guilty; the punishment was the cutting off of their right hands... and castration. Best of all, nobody protested despite the fact that all of the guilty were English, not Normans, plus some of them were pretty high-ranking too. That was so barbaric, yet just.













Anyway, while packing the storage room yesterday, we found some pretty cool stuff. The Urban Stranger wallet was nice but it was too thick even without all my cards, so I'm donating that. More importantly, I found letters from my great-great-aunt to my father written in 1995 still in its envelope, albeit with the stamps removed, unsurprisingly. My father used to collect stamps too.

Just by scanning one letter, it could be learnt that back then, 700 ringgits were the equivalent of 400 Singapore dollars.

On the back, however, was a detail far more interesting than our historical exchange rate with the currency of our closest neighbour - the address of my great-great-aunt 20 years ago.














Still going to get a wallet from the duty-free shops at the airport before flying off to Melbourne then. My current one has a hole in the coin pouch :(