I'm an ORC. My life for the horde.

Here is to wish everyone all the best to them for whatever path they are given.



Oh gosh.


3 weeks confinement!

See you again then!

Wheeeeeeeeeeeee...

I find the words "you" and "we" particularly interesting. With the inclusion of these words, the writer of a sentence would appear to be making a connection with the reader. I'm not sure if it's just me, but reading a blog full of "you" and "we" just feels different from reading non-fiction. It fascinates me that if someone were to write an entry containing "you" and "we", even after he/she's dead, a reader would, for a moment, think that the writer is alive and interacting with the reader.

It is a strange feeling to be looking at pictures of my father in BMT. He was 18 then, younger than my current age(which is 19, to facilitate my future rereading of this blog). A trivial but important thing about age is that if you are younger than someone, you would always be younger. But when you access the past through memory of others or your own, or through artifacts, it enables you to look at the actions and mindsets of elders when they were young from a slightly more mature and modern perspective. It is quite refreshing that while an elder of the present is more experienced and mature than you of the present, you of the present can be more experienced and mature than an elder of the past.

It is also quite amazing to meet someone of the same age who lives in a different generation and environment from us. Remnants of them reside in the memories of the elders. There are so many 19 year olds around us.

I am glad that there are many who blog about their lives. Provided they do not delete their blogs (or blogspot doesn't crash like a diary-x), they provide the newer generation an outlook of their lives when they were much younger, if the younger are interested. (Oh yes, NLB is archiving popular blogs, good for all!) I mean, wouldn't you be curious if you could read your parents' petty squabbles with their classmates, or random rants about homework/particularly irritating people when they were, say, 15 years old? Or even more cute, with the benefit of hindsight, your kid could read how you had a crush on someone, while your spouse(his dad/mom) is still completely oblivious. Reading their blogs side by side would be like real time action for them. (Though there would still be a lot of self-censorship, since it's a public domain after all.)

Sometimes I do find it easy to forget that a 50 year old elder hasn't been 50 years old for 50 years. If the youths of the future do get access to their parents' blogs, those youths are going to have a heck of a time reading their parents growing up. I know, my children wouldn't have a chance, since I don't blog much about my life anymore.

Some grammatical rules are not always followed. One example I cannot help but notice is that conjunctions are not always used to join sentences together. The full stop and exclamation mark are supposed to end a sentence, and a sentence is to be begun with an uppercase character, but- Alas! this is also not always the case.

By the way, I am the most humble person in the world. (The fact is that I am the most humble person in the universe, but I only claim to be the most humble person in the world. This just shows how humble I am - never mind the extremely high likelihood that the only people in the universe are in this world.)

It is my humble opinion that one should perhaps refrain from the use of weasel words, as they can occasionally cause the sentence to be- in many people's view- unnecessarily lengthened. It is also not impossible to show that any proposition, when sufficient padded with weasel words, can become so shrouded in uncertainty that it may not convey enough meaning. The use of weasel words may therefore be considered as dishonest, since the user pretends to make a proposition, yet gives him/herself such a large error margin that he/she can perhaps never be wrong.

Jam.

Hohoho look what I've found on the net: KI Tuition!!

I'm interested to know who "May" is, and whether she has found clients yet.

Points to note:
-$60 per hour is bloody expensive for May's qualifications. For the sake of comparison, a Physics Olympiad absolute winner with teaching experience and a degree charges $50 per hour to teach physics.

- "It is likely that a maximum of five hours (in total) will be needed only"... While I understand that the tutor is talented enough to master all aspects of KI in just five hours, I'm afraid that those who need tuition aren't.

Ok, ok, I shan't talk too much; after all, she's has scored 'A' consistently for KI while I haven't. But damn, if she gets a client, she'll be earning in an hour what I earn in five days. Yes, civilian May, go ahead and laugh.

Oh, and I'm very happy about my A level results.

A not-serious-but-critical review of "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli. [You could interpret this fragment in 2 ways, but obviously only one is correct]

When I read "The Prince", I felt like I was reading "FAQ about Princedom". Take note of the length and title of each chapter, and you might agree with me.

Personally speaking, Niccolo Machiavelli is a damn cool name (though "Machiavalentova" would sound cooler), and he makes interesting comments like "It is far safer to be feared than to be loved" and "Fortune is the mistress to half of our actions yet leaves the control of the other half to ourselves", which makes anyone who quotes him feel good. Still, that doesn't immunize his work against critical review.

Since the knowledge of government is a posteriori knowledge, we would expect much of the arguments to be inductive. One example of such argument in his book is:

P: In all the places I have been to and from all the historical documents I have read, inherited Princedoms are more stable than new Princedoms.

C: Therefore all inherited Princedoms are more stable than new Princedoms.

Of course, in his book, this is not so clearly spelled out. He simply states that inherited Princedoms are more stable than new Princedoms, and gives one case of such(although if you look at the example he gave, you can clearly see that it is a hypothesis contrary to fact). That is a weak inductive argument. An example of a strong inductive argument in support of the statement "all inherited Princedoms are more stable than new Princedoms" would be:

P1: Princedom A is inherited, and Princedom A is stable.
P2: Princedom B is inherited, and Princedom B is stable.
-
- (ditto)
-
-
Pn: Princedom n is not inherited, and Princedom n is not stable.
-
-
- (ditto)
-
PN: Princedom N is not inherited, and Princedom N is not stable.

C: Therefore all inherited Princedoms are more stable than new Princedoms.

We can see that making a table of stable/unstable princedoms and comparing their characteristics would make a more convincing argument than just stating a couple of examples, which Machiavelli had done. Nowadays, tables of statistics are necessary for political studies. Just look at all the papers that support the "monadic democracy peace theory". If you put Machiavelli's book next to those papers, "The Prince" would just seem like a collection of opinions. However, note that in his dedication to the Italian Prince, Machiavelli claims that the things he had written in his book are what he has learned and known through a great deal of suffering, danger and hardship. This is supposed to give all the statements in his book the backing of authority on the subject, but this still leaves much of his statements open to doubt.

One example of another type of argument he uses is as such:

If you use mercenaries, there are two possible cases. Case one: the mercenaries are too cowardly and stupid to be of any use in war. Case two: they are so courageous and smart that they would plot against you in war. You do not want either things to happen, therefore you should never use mercenaries.

Clearly a fallacy of false dichotomy.

I apologize in advance to anyone who might be offended by my lack of intellectual humility, but I do wonder how this book became a classic. If this book were so good, why didn't the Italian Prince keep it properly in a secret closet and use it to conquer and control other princedoms, rather than letting it be read by everyone? Kinda interesting, isn't it?

Summary: Quite nice to read, but not very reliable.

There are vegetarian foods that are designed to imitate the look, taste and texture of meat. Generally speaking, these foods are highly processed, and are not a healthy substitute for meat. By hasty generalization, I generalize that the vegetarians who eat such foods are not doing so for health reasons, but for the sake of compassion.

Some people question whether the vegetarians who eat these sort of vegetarian food really become vegetarians for the sake of compassion, since they are still have the desire to eat meat. However, I do not think it is problematic. The desire to eat meat does not necessarily imply a desire to take lives. I suppose their motto is "When the buying stops, the killing will too." If you have issues with vegetarians who eat imitation meat, I'll suppose you'll have issues with people who eat imitation sharks fin too.

One loophole in the motto "When the buying stops, the killing will too" is that stealing shark's fin soup is actually fine, since you are not buying it. You also can't be said to be contributing to the demand of shark's fin, since you have the desire but not the ability to eat shark's fin. So one way to eat shark's fin and be environmentally friendly about it is to steal shark's fin soup from the restaurant.

I've once thought about this: how do the people who make and sell imitation meat know what they taste like? Then I recalled that one doesn't have to be a vegetarian to sell or make vegetarian food. Generally speaking again, most of the people who sell Muslim food are also Muslims, so maybe that explains why there isn't halal imitation pork on the market yet. (I await the day that one can order "nasi babi" without getting hollered at.)

So if we follow the standards of vegetarians, it seems like only the next thing to do to get the cannibals to make and sell imitation human meat. After all, having a desire to consume human meat doesn't imply a desire to kill humans. My eldest sister once said, "To know if a French restaurant is good, you must see if the French patronize it." Therefore, if you see many cannibals patronizing an imitation human meat restaurant, you'll know if it's really good. Of course, a small problem comes in when you want to find out which people in the restaurant are cannibals.

If imitation human meat becomes a hit, I wonder if the stem cell researchers would try to catch up by introducing consumers real human meat into the market. Sounds interesting. Would you want to try human meat?

Random:

We had orange for dessert during lunch at live range.

Sarge is still called sarge in NS.

If you really want to hardcore your studies, when you dream, you should only spend your time doing math. This is because mathematical knowledge is a priori, so no matter what crazy situation you find yourself being thrown in, a mathematical proof that's right in your dreams would be right out in the real world, unless you made mistakes.

If you ever suspect that you are trapped in Plato's cave, you should get a mathematics degree. Even if some guy decides to drag you out of the cave and bring you to the "real world", your degree will still be recognized! Sad for the people who study medicine and astronomy; all their mugging will go down the drain.

There is a platoon sergeant called "Valentova". I think Valentova is a cool name. Maybe it's cool because of the -ova suffix.

Alwynova.
Xiamanova.
Alexova.
Clementova.
Mitchellova.
Lincolnova.
Jimrova.