pen it down

It's sometimes a mystery to me why there are so many problems I can ponder in my head that seem as unsurmountable conundrums, only to seem quite simple to resolve once I write them down(or more likely type them out). According to the extended Church-Turing hypothesis, all computable problems can be solved with a Turing machine. And a human brain is surely Turing complete, right? It can simulate a Turing machine by following the procedure step by step. But aha! The assumption of an infinite memory tape is not held! A normal human brain that doesn't write anything down can't store and retrieve arbitrarily long bit strings at will. So an unassisted human brain is not Turing complete. But armed with a recording device - aha! Then the human is Turing complete, and can solve all kinds of (computable) problems. So I guess when people argue that writing is the greatest human invention, I could supply another (not particularly intuitive) reason to support that argument.

double happiness!

I'm really happy for my sister. Both my sister and her now-husband are so amazing! I'm glad that things are moving ahead in their lives. I'm also glad that I can now refer to the amazingly intelligent, considerate and decisive (and lucky) Oliver Wicker as my brother-in-law instead of "just" my sister's boyfriend(which has a somewhat transient feel to it, even though they've been together for so long!). And I can refer to Kitty as "my sister-in-law... sort of" instead of the awkward "my sister's boyfriend's sister" which somehow seems more distant than it feels. During the wedding reception(which was a high tea), I had the chance to sit with and talk to people around 9 years older than me. It's quite remarkable how... "steady" (forgive my diction) they seem! Conversation flows easily and casually even between strangers - they know what questions to ask to simulate a friendly chat, and how to respond in a witty manner. I wonder if it's because they are in the same age group and they have a better idea of what the concerns of people of that age are? Or perhaps making friendly conversation with people they've just met is a universal skill they've acquired over time? That seems like a really useful thing to learn. Sitting at that table I keep feeling that they know a great deal about life that I don't, but they are all pretty cautious about giving advice. For a while after the reception I felt like I was the most immature of the bunch of people at the reception (well maybe excepting the one year olds), and wondered: Do all x year-olds talk like x year-olds? I don't want to be sound young and immature! Is there any way around it? And my mom told me: It can only come with experience, through success, failure, or even suffering, and all that will take time. Of two people of the same age, one can sound like old when talking about one thing, but he'll probably sound younger when talking about another, as the time they have will tend to equalize the amount of experience they have, and no experience has greater intrinsic worth over another, be it success or failure. Oh well, I guess I can only wait then!

Brought about by change

I just identified the background music in NLB when they announce "Dear readers, the library will be closing in 15 mins, …) it's moonlight sonata! -------------------------------- Today, when I received some change from a waitress, I was reminded of this story by my primary school teacher: there was once a student who didn't really know etiquette. So everyday, when the student submitted a notebook containing his homework to his teacher, the teacher would toss it aside and walk away without any explanation. This made the student frustrated yet puzzled. Every day he would greet the teacher, or say something nice before submitting his homework, but the teacher did the same thing: toss it aside, and walk away. It was only one day when he finally, by chance, decided to try handing in his homework with both hands that the teacher finally accepted it. So, according to my teacher, the moral of the story is: it's more polite to hand things over with both hands. But the obvious thing in the mind of the student would be: Why doesn't the teacher just tell me what I'm doing wrong? Perhaps, the student could also have watched how other students were handing in their homework to try to figure out what he was doing wrongly. That reminds me of an article about reinforcement learning vs imitation vs instruction. The article found reinforcement learning to be less effective than both imitation and instruction for a certain task. It makes me wonder: if machines become conscious, would they get frustrated when we try to train them to do something by reinforcement learning? Would they think, "Yeh right, as if you know how to do it!" or "Why don't you just tell me what you want and not make me do this over and over again?" But I guess there will always be some amount of reinforcement learning to be done as long as there are unsolved problems - some people need to stay at the forefront to do less inefficient learning task of discovering new methods, while others can help to spread the knowledge in a more efficient way by making more people aware of the method, or by teaching it well. Perhaps the moral of the story is that Nature is kinda like that annoying teacher in that story, and we as students should help to make each others' lives a bit easier.

a new hope?

This is the 500th post! I can't believe that this blog has survived so long. Unfortunately, nothing epic is going to happen here (Then again, 500 is only special because we have 2 hands, 5 fingers, and Indian merchants were smart). This is just a test for a web service called "IntenseDebate", which I think seems pretty cool. Really! Nothing much to see here.

I do hope that overseas Singaporeans stop giving people the impression that Singapore is a dictatorship/totalitarian/authoritarian/despotic state.

What prompted me to write this post is that some of my schoolmates from USA thought that Singapore isn't a democracy - they were genuinely surprised to hear from me that Singapore holds elections at all. When I asked them, "What gave you the impression that Singapore is not a democracy?" The response: "Even the other Singaporeans whom I've talked to don't seem to think that Singapore is a democracy."

I find it rather curious why some people from the US get the impression from Singaporeans that Singapore is some sort of an outright dictatorship. It is a matter of fact that Singapore is a democracy. Leaders are chosen by elections. Leaders are accountable to the people. Citizens have civil rights. What is left as a matter of opinion is the extent to which the above three are true, and whether that means that Singapore is "truly" a democracy.

I cannot generalize this to all overseas Singaporeans, of course, but from the ~5 Singaporeans whom I have encountered describing Singapore to Americans, I get the impression that they tend to be too eager to state why Singapore is not "truly" a democracy, but forget to mention that Singapore is a democracy in the first place. While another Singaporean will understand that Singapore isn't run by Mussolini/Hilter/Mao, someone who hasn't heard much about Singapore might have a different idea in mind when one says, "Well, we don't exactly have free speech, we are known for really strict laws, and the ruling party has been ruling since independence."

Why do we (the ~5 people we have met and admittedly, myself initially) so spontaneously speak of how Singapore isn't "exactly" a democracy before we even state that it is one? My guess is that Singaporeans are used to talking about Singapore-style democracy in the context where they are arguing about the finer points with other Singaporeans, who are well aware of and are used to all the rights that they have in Singapore. The largely pro-government mainstream media wouldn't hesitate to remind us that the government is accountable to the people. The rulers wouldn't hesitate to remind us that they are, after all, chosen by the people fair and square. The truth is not entirely that. Given these information as the basis to agree upon or to critique, New media and coffee-shop talks balance out the dominant influences of public opinion with a primarily anti-government stance to arrive at something that is more accurate.

The effect of this context of pro-government media is that when discussing Singapore politics, a Singaporean subconsciously assumes that the listener already knows some big things about Singapore. We are already used to doing all kinds of things with few state-enforced consequences, the things that we cannot do without consequences are particularly salient. We pretty much take our rights for granted. As such, we are used to talking about the rights we don't have and how elections aren't exactly fair, rather than the rights we do have.

This works fine in Singapore, because everyone lives here and has some intuitive idea of how "oppressed" we are. But when someone who is used to thinking of and talking about Singapore politics this way will be misleading to people who haven't heard much of Singapore. Without the preconception of all the things you can do in Singapore, it gives a rather negative and inaccurate impression.

I cannot prescribe what one should say to others about Singapore. After all, what I say is also mostly my own opinions. But I do hope that when Singaporeans talk to other people about Singapore politics, do consider that people might assume the worst if you only state what is not good.

PS: Another observation is that Malaysians tend to give a more positive portrayal of Singapore than Singaporeans themselves do. Maybe we can learn from them to produce a more balanced "pitch" about Singapore politics.

Are exclamation marks outdated? CAPS LOCK IS QUITE GOOD AT GIVING THE IMPRESSION OF SHOUTING. In fact, from the first word of the 'capped' sentence that you read, you would already know that there is some shouting going in, whereas if you were reading a sentence that ends with an exclamation mark, you would have no idea that the sentence was meant to be emphasized, leading to only the last couple of marks "sounding louder" in your inner voice!