May 4 2009 Issue of TIME

Amazingly there are so many useful and interesting articles in the latest issue of the magazine. One seems to be of use in a previous essay while another seems to be of use in an upcoming extra essay task (of course, I know best…I just set the questions before I read this issue).

Singaporeans moan that besides shopping, dining and the movies, there’s not a lot you can do here. Ignore them. The must-see list for the one-day visitor to Singapore, especially the first-timer, is absorbingly long. There is very little chance you’ll get bored. Most tourists tend to gravitate first towards the famed retail stretch of Orchard Road. Fine, get your fix of bold-faced names like Louis Vuitton, Chanel and every other couture label under the sun. When you’ve gotten that out of your system, dump your purchases back at the hotel and head out into the ‘burbs where the real charm of Singapore lies. We’re here to guide you to the top 10 places where tourists don’t normally go; in short, the places where Singaporeans in the know live and play. (http://www.time.com/time/travel/cityguide/article/0,31489,1845806,00.html)

Here’s another extract on Torture:

When the CIA was asked to resume hostile interrogations after Sept. 11, some agency leaders were dead set against it, arguing that the military was better equipped for the task. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted the job belonged to the CIA. We now know that Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. His interrogator, a former CIA colleague of mine, admits he had almost no training in the technique and knew nothing about how the cumulative effect of waterboarding might affect the quality of the information he was trying to extract. (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1893509,00.html)

It seems like the US has been cowed in recent time, or they may just be reflecting on their deeds, or they may just be playing the moral diplomat. Here’s another article that gives us a glimpse of the US mentality (the printed version is actually written in a different tone–if only someone could just help me retype that and email it to me for I can’t find the same version online):

The anniversary celebrations come at a pivotal moment for the United States and China. On April 6 Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced his intention — and a budget to back it up — to build future defense spending around the “wars we are in,” rather than those that military planners can imagine. The decision is hugely consequential. Even as the U.S. was engaged in two fronts in the so called War on Terror over the last eight years, it simultaneously spent defense dollars on weapons systems grounded in the assumption that someday the U.S. might well find itself in conflict with a big, technologically sophisticated nation with global ambitions, one with a well-funded, well-equipped army, navy and air force. America needed, in other words, to be ready to go to war with China. (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892954,00.html)

Sometimes with insecurity, we fall back on somethings that give us comfort. If an armada floats your boat (well, it’ll actually crush your boat literally), so be it. For most of us lesser beings, we turn to comfort food, like chocolate:

Move over, organic, fair trade and free range–the latest in enlightened edibles is here: food with “embedded” positive intentions. While the idea isn’t new–cultures like the Navajo have been doing it for centuries–for-profit companies in the U.S. and Canada are catching on, infusing products with good vibes through meditation, prayer and even music. Since 2006, California company H2Om has sold water infused with wishes for “love,” “joy” and “perfect health” via the words, symbols and colors on the label (which “create a specific vibratory frequency,” according to co-founder Sandy Fox) and the restorative music played at their bottling warehouse. At Creo Mundi, a Canadian maker of protein powder, employees gather around each shipment and state aloud the benefits they hope to imbue it with for their consumers–increased performance, balance and vitality. Intentional Chocolate, founded in 2007 by chocolatier Jim Walsh, uses a special recording device to capture the electromagnetic brain waves of meditating Tibetan monks; Walsh then exposes his confections to the recording for five days per batch. (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1887858,00.html)

So there you have it: five articles in one issue of TIME. I sincerely think it is a noble initiative in making them freely available on the Internet.

Watch this space for the blockbuster essay!

Am working on a supermassive essay that merges elements from some students’ writings for Term 2 Paper 1 Assignment 1. Welding the two Benjamins’ essays with the rest of the good paragraphs will be a challenge. So far I’ve only got Jermaine and Soo Mei’s paragraphs. Still waiting for the rest. In the meantime I found something that could be used with these loose paragraphs:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1893324_1893292_1893287,00.html

Dive Bombing

By ARYN BAKER

The Kajaki dam and the lake

Best Place to Swim in a War Zone
Helmand, AfghanistanDeep in the middle of enemy territory, where Taliban own the night while British forces patrol by day, there lies a treasure so precious that few will admit it even exists, lest it be taken away. Soldiers based at the Kajaki Forward Operating Base in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province will say they are there to protect an important hydropower plant that, once completed, will provide the surrounding provinces with more than half their electricity needs. But to them the real prize lies half a kilometer upstream, where a massive dam, completed in 1953, holds back the crystalline waters of one of the largest reservoirs in Afghanistan.

The Kajaki dam and the lake that laps at its 330-ft.-high (100 m) berm is a sublime example of the beauty that can be achieved when man partners with nature. In the far distance golden hills blend into the sapphire waters with bands of green. At the mouth of the dam sheer granite walls rear up. It is here that the soldiers, when free from their duties, dare each other into acts of escalating bravery by leaping from the cliffs into the water. They wear their running shoes as they jump, the better to scramble back up the cliffs for yet more audacious aerial assaults. The water is warmed by the sun, but still refreshing in the desert heat that come summer can reach 113°F (45°C). Those leaps are forbidden by commanding officers, but for soldiers denied almost every other pleasure during the conduct of war, it’s a risk worth taking.

***

Seems like the supermassive mega blockbuster essay will be on that “living for the moment” question, and it is going to be interesting to see how the paragraphs for “instant fame and fortune” fit in.

Watch this space.

In chains

The greyish blue sky engulfed the  innocence of the night. All seemed quiet but the silence deceived. Bouts of yellow pulsed through the clouds like a hammering heart. Something seemed to weigh on the mind of the omnipresent, but the courage to show seemed to have drowned in the Lake below.

Tendrils of lightning crawled and clawed. The flesh of the cotton clouds thinned with wounds. Chains of yellow flashed in staccato as the orchestra of the dark played a symphony. Despair. Anger. Resignation. Recoils and repercussions.

Somewhere in the distance soldiers trained; their rifle shots accompanied the music of the night in rhythmic blue and jaundiced yellow. This sounded like war. Today I saw the vulnerability of Mandai Lake.

Memories of the countless glorious sunsets didn’t seem quite willing to accept this new, dark interpretation. A beautiful scene, ironically. 

 Standing there for half an hour was worth it. The emptiness of the stomach was nothing. At 8pm, the body would have been numbed by the day’s chores. 

I don’t like the violence. The psychological violence is still bearable, ceremonies still a courtesy. But I would love to get away from the facade of democracy and pleasantry. They don’t really belong here, but if they don’t move out, I think I will.

At 8pm after a good ‘discussion’ with close friends concerning the “veritas” which could not wait, the soul was lost, the spirit taken. I hope there isn’t going to be The Second Exodus. Nature was what I needed; it felt good to leave the meeting and head for the hockey match at Delta, the green pitch the closest I could get  that resembled nature at that time.

And I was so glad I was able to make it to the match: a 2-0 win for our Girls! Nothing to gloat about, but everything to savour. The purity and simplicity of life, like nature itself.

I miss buffet

While searching for the various meanings of the word “buffet”, I realised the reason why I pronounced the name “Buffett” wrongly in class was that it was spelt wrongly on the answer scheme! So, it wasn’t me.

To my surprise, my dictionary actually holds this entry, the name of the brand of hair gel I have been using for the past 20 years! lol

Brylcreem.

For the record, the answers I had for the Buffett question were correct.

Maths Revision

Was revising for Maths when I came across these all-too-familiar concepts which I shall now summarise. Reminds me of argumentation techniques…

Proposition: If A, then B.

Inverse: If not A, then not B.

Converse: If B, then A.

Contrapositive: If not B, then not A.

Of course, the proposition itself must be valid and sound!

Let’s recapitulate on what we had done last year with regard to these techniques.

The unsaid fact here is that spiders have eight legs.

If Xeno has eight legs, then she is a spider.

If Xeno doesn’t have eight legs, then she is not a spider.

If Xeno is a spider, then she has eight legs.

If Xeno is not a spider, then she doesn’t have eight legs.

All these sound like perfect common sense, but let’s complicate matters a bit.

If websites are banned, then they must be destructive (and it threatens social cohesion or psychological well-being).

If websites are not banned, then they must be harmless.

If websites are destructive, then they are banned (to prevent them from harming social cohesion or psychological well-being).

So you don’t stop the paragraph without doing some EV in such manners (of course there are other ways of EV-ing, but these are a start.)

Annals of a Drugged Mind

The medicine helped and hopefully tomorrow will be a Good Friday.

Man, it hurts real bad to be food-poisoned. Thankfully, it is not the now infamous rojak. I kind of believe that the stall-owner is somewhat innocent. The kind of freaky weather we’ve been having can turn food bad easily; not to forget that the birds may also be affected and they may just be having the runs as well (they are not toilet-trained, mind you) anywhere anytime.

Now I do feel less guilty about one of these birds that smacked right onto my car while it’s in flight on Sunday. For the record, I wasn’t the only bird killer on the road that day.

I wonder what the verdict will be for the rojak stall. As of now, there are three (plus one foetus) deaths.

Hopefully it will be as fair a trial as any other in Singapore. Glimpsed from the news today that the father and son (of dirty deeds) failed to quarantine the latter’s comatose Vietnamese bride in the local hospital. Turns out that the Viet folks managed to pull off the heist in a totally Mission Impossible setting. I’m sure the two men had tight security. Or maybe they were sleeping. In any case the law ruled in favour of the bride’s family.

I guess if judges are not asleep while they listen to cases, the verdicts will be fair.

Collected my car from the workshop today; actually the boss picked me up in my car at Bishan. It looks good with the modification! Hopefully no more crashes. 449 seemed like a cursed set of numbers and I have them on my number plate. Wishing real hard that the number “1” before “449” on the plate means that the crash on 4th April 2009 was the one and only one that I will be caught in! Strange things did happen: the cabbie whose cab I hit was a nice man, and I still wonder why out of the five bears in my car, only Good Luck Bear flew forward. All five were not wearing seatbelts.

Didn’t seem like good luck to most of my students who’d just received their PW results today. Saw one of them at Bishan while I was waiting for my car and I ponder if she’s usually like that, deep in morose thoughts.

Cibosity

This is cool!

Sign up and adopt a pet! It’s free! And it will help you look smart. Haha!

Remember to turn up the volume.

http://www.savethewords.org/

“Those who were poor have the habit of keeping cibosities in their homes, just in case.”

Your gift to Mr K will impact the value of your A-level certificate

I have been procrastinating over this: will I receive any death threats for posting yet another amusing poster here especially when I am seriously considering doing my Master (in some IT stuff) with NTU?

For the record, the poster went missing a couple of days after I took this picture in March. The security camera must have caught me sniggering (no kidding) at it. I was actually quite shocked when I first saw it.

Ed: The poster’s back when I visited the campus today (10 Apr 2009)! Good for you.

Taboo-inspired research

This is a quick link to a quick research inspired by today’s episode of Taboo. It is unfortunate that I can’t get a copy of the series from okto; I guess acquiring it from Australia is going to be too expensive.

http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Th-W/Wet-Nursing.html

That’s something I didn’t know, but France and Japan have been fascinating me recently.

So much things to say…

Aaaah! Just realised I could have held the B1 students back for another 10 min for the lecture since it only officially started at 11.25am, but I forgot and ended up rushing the last few portions. Luckily the important things have been delivered.

There’s just so much things to say…

In any case, here’s a preview of Term 2 Week 10. It will be “Consolidation Week”. Basically, in each tutorial I will be covering any queries you have for the lectures in Term 1 & 2. So prepare all the questions!

I am ready.