I've been dining institutionally for the past four years, and for most of that time also living in institutional housing. Not to mean that I have been institutionalized (though sometimes I wonder if I should be); by 'institutional dining' I refer to food served up in cookhouses, staff canteens, and dining halls. Likewise with institutional housing: barracks and dorms. What defines institutional dining as an experience? How is a dining hall a special place, compared to other kinds of places where one can eat? While musing on this point I was thinking about school canteens: do they count as institutional food? After all one is likewise obliged to be commensal, messing together (both in the sense of consuming one's viands and exasperating the custodial staff) under some protective roof. Given this common trait, the act of eating together in a big space with people from a given institution is not what defines the experience of institutional dining. The true answer lies in the relationships of power and patronage at work when we are served our meals.
What I finally concluded truly defines an institutional dining experience lies in who prepares and serves up the food. In a canteen, with its multiple vendors, one has the pick of whom to patronize. A dining hall, by contrast, even if there is a wide and diverse buffet spread to pick from, has really only one kitchen, one group of cooks, one master mind and deciding hand behind the menu. The principles of competition do not apply. Instead of playing patron to the vendor, the roles are reversed and the consumer becomes patronized by the all-powerful hidden power that dispenses food, drink, and sustenance. From having a buyer's dignity of choice (however limited), to being beholden to an anonymous kitchen in order to stave off starvation, how great a gulf! The cornucopia laid out on the tables is not a vision of plenty, it is instead an act of disdain: take as much or as little of this food as you want, for we hold the keys to it and your present plenty is at our whim. More fruit? Less homogenized mush? A choice of beverages other than colored sugar water? Fill out this slip with your thoughts, and drop it into the forbidding maw of the feedback box and we shall retire to contemplate your respectful memorial.
So this is the great lie we have to recognize: that plenty is prosperity. The hand that feeds is also the hand that takes away, otherwise why would we be warned against biting it? In our mortal condition we are powerless to fight or contend against the various powers that hold our lives in the balance, some of which inspire reverential worship, and others fearsome loathing. So it is also with the quality of food in different dining halls. My greater point, though, is that the sooner one realizes the truth about one's situation, the easier it is to come to terms with it, and the more urgently one pushes oneself to find a real job, live in a real home, and eat TV dinners heated in a microwave like real people do.
12 July 2009
06 July 2009
Not My Party
Yesterday was July 4, my dear sister's birthday. Coincidentally, it also happens to be Independence Day in a country some of you may know as the United States. Woods Hole, the village that I'm in for this summer, has a charming little parade down the two blocks of streets that constitute the center of the Hole. It has some of the trappings that you'd expect from a Fourth of July parade - the Stars and Stripes, a marching band (drum and fife, and a random trumpeter who later got attacked by a giant mosquito, but more on that later), and watermelon - but the highlights are the floats and displays put on by the students and faculty of the various courses at the Marine Biological Laboratory. They're biology-themed, very campy, and very nerdy, as one would expect (a video of last year's parade to prove my point).
The Embryology course did their classic gastrulation dance, dressed up in three colors to represent the three embryonic germ layers. The neurobiologists had big floats of their favorite organisms, which this year were a blue lobster and a three-eyed mutant frog. More diverse were the favorite microbes represented by the microbiologists, who to a large extent had a different costume each (giant Vibrio and a giant host squid, two really cute kids who were tottering along in bacteriophage costumes with big capsid caps, a very fetching anaerobic methane oxidizing consortium, etc.) though there were some symbiotes in the crowd, too. Several giant parasites (including two huge mosquitoes) hovered around while immunoglobulins and other components of the host immunity swatted them away, and the cell physiologists did something too arcane for me to interpret, though it involved aggressive popping of balloons and lots of water bombs. And those same water bombs (and water guns, which are the only weapons that Massachusetts doesn't strictly regulate) were involved in warfare between the different contingents - the mutant frog got totally spattered, the microbes and parasites fought back with high-powered squirt guns, and general chaos ensued in the streets. Aside from the courses, there were other groups too: local residents, the Children's School of Science group which went as Darwins and the Finches, and assorted independents, including myself as a (hastily assembled) sea squirt, the result of a (similarly hasty) commitment made the night before.
That was all great fun. Later in the evening, as the sun set, I walked around hoping to see fireworks. The town of Falmouth, I knew, has a great display every year at the beach, and I was hoping to catch a glimpse from the shore here. Eventually I followed the sounds of explosions and found my way to the private neighborhood just some way off from my dorm. They were having their own small fireworks party at their shared beach. Not being a resident, I could not go in after dusk, but walking down a side-road to find a better vantage point, I ended up standing in front of someone's driveway, joining a Slavic family that was there also to watch the show from the opposite side of the cove. It was brilliant, to see the pyrotechnics from so close. Each of the sparkles and whizzles was clear and sharp, and the noise was thrilling. Being downwind on a gusty evening, I imagined that I could smell the peppery spent gunpowder. It was also a lonely experience. There were children shouting and running about - the glowing dots of their sparklers gave away their positions in the darkness. Out to sea on the horizon, there was an even bigger show of fireworks on the mainland, but from the distance it was reduced to minuscule sprays of silent, glittering pixels. It was then that I knew that this was not my party. It was mine to watch but not to revel in, looking on from across the bay as someone else sets the charges off to light up the sky, briefly.
The Embryology course did their classic gastrulation dance, dressed up in three colors to represent the three embryonic germ layers. The neurobiologists had big floats of their favorite organisms, which this year were a blue lobster and a three-eyed mutant frog. More diverse were the favorite microbes represented by the microbiologists, who to a large extent had a different costume each (giant Vibrio and a giant host squid, two really cute kids who were tottering along in bacteriophage costumes with big capsid caps, a very fetching anaerobic methane oxidizing consortium, etc.) though there were some symbiotes in the crowd, too. Several giant parasites (including two huge mosquitoes) hovered around while immunoglobulins and other components of the host immunity swatted them away, and the cell physiologists did something too arcane for me to interpret, though it involved aggressive popping of balloons and lots of water bombs. And those same water bombs (and water guns, which are the only weapons that Massachusetts doesn't strictly regulate) were involved in warfare between the different contingents - the mutant frog got totally spattered, the microbes and parasites fought back with high-powered squirt guns, and general chaos ensued in the streets. Aside from the courses, there were other groups too: local residents, the Children's School of Science group which went as Darwins and the Finches, and assorted independents, including myself as a (hastily assembled) sea squirt, the result of a (similarly hasty) commitment made the night before.
That was all great fun. Later in the evening, as the sun set, I walked around hoping to see fireworks. The town of Falmouth, I knew, has a great display every year at the beach, and I was hoping to catch a glimpse from the shore here. Eventually I followed the sounds of explosions and found my way to the private neighborhood just some way off from my dorm. They were having their own small fireworks party at their shared beach. Not being a resident, I could not go in after dusk, but walking down a side-road to find a better vantage point, I ended up standing in front of someone's driveway, joining a Slavic family that was there also to watch the show from the opposite side of the cove. It was brilliant, to see the pyrotechnics from so close. Each of the sparkles and whizzles was clear and sharp, and the noise was thrilling. Being downwind on a gusty evening, I imagined that I could smell the peppery spent gunpowder. It was also a lonely experience. There were children shouting and running about - the glowing dots of their sparklers gave away their positions in the darkness. Out to sea on the horizon, there was an even bigger show of fireworks on the mainland, but from the distance it was reduced to minuscule sprays of silent, glittering pixels. It was then that I knew that this was not my party. It was mine to watch but not to revel in, looking on from across the bay as someone else sets the charges off to light up the sky, briefly.
21 June 2009
Motorcycle Diary
The motorcycle is a much more democratic vehicle than the car - and not just on the principle of one man, one engine. The pedestrian struck by a car is more grievously hurt than the driver, who is cossetted by the crumple-zone, seat-belt, air-bag, and other hyphenated accoutrements of safety. The lot of the motorcyclist, however, is much closer to that of the pedestrian. He is exposed to the dangers of the road with nothing more than a helmet, and sometimes not even that, and so in a crash is just as likely to be tossed and killed as the pedestrian he strikes. Acquiring an independent means of transport brings many benefits to one so blessed, including freedom of travel and the ability to bring goods long distances, which can do no harm to one's socio-economic position. Vehicles are hence, well, vehicles of inequality, widening the gulf between haves and have-nots. But cars set one apart much more markedly, dehumanizing the motorist, because the road-unit that the observer sees is not the driver but the car. The motorcycle, then, with its equality of possible harm to pedestrian and rider, is the vehicular equivalent of the Golden Rule, of turning the other cheek.
But that is not why I like motorcycles. I like them because they feel fast. Not that they are fast, which undoubtedly many of them are capable of being, though not the ones I have ridden. What they do possess is the ability to make even relatively slow speeds feel faster, to make one viscerally conscious of what is otherwise only a number on the speedometer. Speeding is hence a much more deliberate act for the motorcyclist: the driver can claim that he didn't know he was hovering five kph above the limit - it doesn't seem that much different to him whether he goes fifty or fifty-five. A motorcyclist can feel the difference, and he knows that he is speeding. Speed becomes palpable, speed becomes real. For TE Lawrence, perhaps, the speed itself held more reality than the country road that he sped through towards his death. Psychologically disjointed from what was supposedly his own society, abnegating himself by serving as a lowly enlisted man under a pseudonym, knowing that one could not possibly ever top a former life as Lawrence of Arabia, maybe that was why he took to the engine with such gusto.
Aside from speed itself, I believe that the exercise of one's faculties of balance also makes motorcycling attractive, just as one's balance is constantly tested on a bicycle or on horseback. One becomes part of one's vehicle in a way that a regular driver of cars could never understand. Leaning into turns for example, subtle adjustments made to one's body, shifting one's weight just so. I remember being kept in training overtime by my riding instructor, just going at the figure-of-eight until I was sick of that shape. When I finally understood how to execute it, however, realization came suddenly, it became intuition rather than learning. Practiced movement done skilfully is pleasing and satisfying, and that is what I think every motorcyclist knows, consciously or not, at the back of his or her mind.
Having not ridden for almost three years now, I probably should not be trusted with any class of vehicle. But I still can remember how it was, going just a bit faster on a hot day to cool off, stopping at the traffic lights and surveying the other dumpy, boxed-in motorists from a high perch. One day soon I'll go and get licensed again, and put these vaguely equestrian longings to rest. And the first thing I'll try, of course, will be figure-eights in the parking lot.
But that is not why I like motorcycles. I like them because they feel fast. Not that they are fast, which undoubtedly many of them are capable of being, though not the ones I have ridden. What they do possess is the ability to make even relatively slow speeds feel faster, to make one viscerally conscious of what is otherwise only a number on the speedometer. Speeding is hence a much more deliberate act for the motorcyclist: the driver can claim that he didn't know he was hovering five kph above the limit - it doesn't seem that much different to him whether he goes fifty or fifty-five. A motorcyclist can feel the difference, and he knows that he is speeding. Speed becomes palpable, speed becomes real. For TE Lawrence, perhaps, the speed itself held more reality than the country road that he sped through towards his death. Psychologically disjointed from what was supposedly his own society, abnegating himself by serving as a lowly enlisted man under a pseudonym, knowing that one could not possibly ever top a former life as Lawrence of Arabia, maybe that was why he took to the engine with such gusto.
Aside from speed itself, I believe that the exercise of one's faculties of balance also makes motorcycling attractive, just as one's balance is constantly tested on a bicycle or on horseback. One becomes part of one's vehicle in a way that a regular driver of cars could never understand. Leaning into turns for example, subtle adjustments made to one's body, shifting one's weight just so. I remember being kept in training overtime by my riding instructor, just going at the figure-of-eight until I was sick of that shape. When I finally understood how to execute it, however, realization came suddenly, it became intuition rather than learning. Practiced movement done skilfully is pleasing and satisfying, and that is what I think every motorcyclist knows, consciously or not, at the back of his or her mind.
Having not ridden for almost three years now, I probably should not be trusted with any class of vehicle. But I still can remember how it was, going just a bit faster on a hot day to cool off, stopping at the traffic lights and surveying the other dumpy, boxed-in motorists from a high perch. One day soon I'll go and get licensed again, and put these vaguely equestrian longings to rest. And the first thing I'll try, of course, will be figure-eights in the parking lot.
15 June 2009
Matured Tastes
As a child there were some things that I resolutely would not eat or would pick out of my food, among them ladies' fingers (or okra - I never understood the name, because any lady with green ribbed fingers like those must be some sort of vegetable witch), sea cucumber, and Chinese parsley (cilantro). Even in 'normal' food like chicken I would carefully remove the little bits of vein or clumps of fat, and much preferred the big homogeneous chunks of white meat even though they had, in my parents' view, much less flavor. In retrospect it seems silly to have done so, but to a little kid, gristle and schmuck looms larger and is harder to ignore - a full sized adult with a full-sized appetite can wolf things down quickly without pausing to inspect too carefully. A child with a penchant for close inspection (elsewhere applauded as inquisitiveness and curiosity but here slapped down as fussiness) sees all the gory details of cooked flesh. If anything, the fine dexterity developed by my young fingers for the purposes of my little neurosis has surely benefited my present skills in dissection.
Why these foods deterred me had as much to do with texture as it did taste. The gooey insides of okra was like so much mucus and slime. Sure, there are more disturbing examples of the use of slime in food - the gong-gong is a kind of conch that produces copious amounts of slime as a self-defense mechanism (as I discovered trying to dissect it), and it is precisely this slime which is favored for thickening certain seafood stews. Somehow, vegetables seem less icky than animals, but when I got it on my lips and fingers, I still could not help being reminded of a messy sneeze. Spices that taste odd are a little easier to understand. The cause of spiciness is usually some manner of small molecule produced by a plant, as a form of deterrence against herbivory. Hence my dislike of these pungent tastes simply means that these chemical defenses were doing their job well.
But tastes change, and to my surprise I found myself, within the last week, very much enjoying a salad with lime and cilantro dressing, and chewing contentedly on the chunks of clam in a bowl of clam chowder. Being accustomed to having cilantro as a garnishing on my soup or chicken rice, having it with something sour was a novel sensation and piqued my interest. Similarly, chunks of okra in gumbo no longer faze me. What happened? Why have I disavowed the carefully curated avoidances of my childhood? Were all those accumulated hours spent picking out every little offending leaf or morsel spent in vain?
Perhaps my sense of taste is deteriorating; maybe taste and smell are dulled with age much like hearing. Things that use to jar and offend now become mellowed and tolerable. But I don't like this particular hypothesis, because first it means that I have begun this inexorable slip down the slope of senility, and my vanity forbids that I admit it. More objectively (as objective as one can be with an unmeasurable thing like smell and taste), the foods I used to avoid but now tolerate or enjoy are no less slimy or pungent than what I remember them to have been, and I hardly think a deterioration on the agricultural stock could be an explanation (have clams become less squishy?). No, they taste exactly the same as they had before, but now I have learned to like them. Psychologists call this a 'hedonic shift', and this principle has been applied to explain how people come to enjoy the heat of chili peppers. It's not that one becomes desensitized to the burn after eating lots of chilies. The burn is just as strong (evidenced by the fact that one can still detect the active principle at similarly high dilutions) but because one knows that the pain, while thrilling, does not cause lasting harm, one learns to enjoy the sensation, a sort of dissonance between what one's body is screaming (and scream it does) and what one's head knows (just a spot of bother). The same can be said of skydiving or 'taking very hot baths' (an illustration that the authors of a paper on this subject used), but I'm not so sure that the latter does not have lasting effects, at least on men.
Maybe, too, it is a search for novelty that drives me to sample things that I wouldn't have before. The texture of boiled cabbage can only hold one's fascination for so long. Sooner or later the child is seduced by the charms of arugula and thence becomes a man. I am sure that my earlier food avoidance has helped me in this respect, because having avoided so many kinds of food before, there is still much that is new to me. If I ration out my time and schedule my hedonic shifts appropriately, I might learn to like blood cockles and other squishy foods in my late dotage, saving these foods most appropriate for toothlessness to the very end. I would not want to succumb to the curse of prosperity and plenty, where the very abundance and variety to be found in modern supermarkets have driven the bored, rich consumer to the ghastly concoctions of molecular gastronomy. After all, who needs bacon ice cream when the mushy amorphousness of braised sea anemone (good with oyster sauce and some sautéed leafy greens) is just as disconcerting? There is still much to be eaten before we have to resort to the manipulations of chemical cookery to thrill and excite us.
So that might be the substance of my new-found tolerance and widened appetite, learning that these foods really won't kill me. Thus it is that more than two decades after being weaned off milk, I finally learn and accept that food is mostly harmless. (Vindicating exasperated mothers around the world, almost-pleading that 'it won't kill you to try!') I still draw the line, however, at eating cephalopods. Molluscan meat in general used to be my bête noir, but I have come to terms with clams and (soon enough) oyster (scallops were down my gullet long ago - they are too juicy to resist). Cephalopods, though, I still cannot bring myself to eat. Their knowing eyes speak to me when I peer at them in their tanks as they flutter their tentacles, silently intimating: one day, it shall be your kind who shall grace our maw....
Why these foods deterred me had as much to do with texture as it did taste. The gooey insides of okra was like so much mucus and slime. Sure, there are more disturbing examples of the use of slime in food - the gong-gong is a kind of conch that produces copious amounts of slime as a self-defense mechanism (as I discovered trying to dissect it), and it is precisely this slime which is favored for thickening certain seafood stews. Somehow, vegetables seem less icky than animals, but when I got it on my lips and fingers, I still could not help being reminded of a messy sneeze. Spices that taste odd are a little easier to understand. The cause of spiciness is usually some manner of small molecule produced by a plant, as a form of deterrence against herbivory. Hence my dislike of these pungent tastes simply means that these chemical defenses were doing their job well.
But tastes change, and to my surprise I found myself, within the last week, very much enjoying a salad with lime and cilantro dressing, and chewing contentedly on the chunks of clam in a bowl of clam chowder. Being accustomed to having cilantro as a garnishing on my soup or chicken rice, having it with something sour was a novel sensation and piqued my interest. Similarly, chunks of okra in gumbo no longer faze me. What happened? Why have I disavowed the carefully curated avoidances of my childhood? Were all those accumulated hours spent picking out every little offending leaf or morsel spent in vain?
Perhaps my sense of taste is deteriorating; maybe taste and smell are dulled with age much like hearing. Things that use to jar and offend now become mellowed and tolerable. But I don't like this particular hypothesis, because first it means that I have begun this inexorable slip down the slope of senility, and my vanity forbids that I admit it. More objectively (as objective as one can be with an unmeasurable thing like smell and taste), the foods I used to avoid but now tolerate or enjoy are no less slimy or pungent than what I remember them to have been, and I hardly think a deterioration on the agricultural stock could be an explanation (have clams become less squishy?). No, they taste exactly the same as they had before, but now I have learned to like them. Psychologists call this a 'hedonic shift', and this principle has been applied to explain how people come to enjoy the heat of chili peppers. It's not that one becomes desensitized to the burn after eating lots of chilies. The burn is just as strong (evidenced by the fact that one can still detect the active principle at similarly high dilutions) but because one knows that the pain, while thrilling, does not cause lasting harm, one learns to enjoy the sensation, a sort of dissonance between what one's body is screaming (and scream it does) and what one's head knows (just a spot of bother). The same can be said of skydiving or 'taking very hot baths' (an illustration that the authors of a paper on this subject used), but I'm not so sure that the latter does not have lasting effects, at least on men.
Maybe, too, it is a search for novelty that drives me to sample things that I wouldn't have before. The texture of boiled cabbage can only hold one's fascination for so long. Sooner or later the child is seduced by the charms of arugula and thence becomes a man. I am sure that my earlier food avoidance has helped me in this respect, because having avoided so many kinds of food before, there is still much that is new to me. If I ration out my time and schedule my hedonic shifts appropriately, I might learn to like blood cockles and other squishy foods in my late dotage, saving these foods most appropriate for toothlessness to the very end. I would not want to succumb to the curse of prosperity and plenty, where the very abundance and variety to be found in modern supermarkets have driven the bored, rich consumer to the ghastly concoctions of molecular gastronomy. After all, who needs bacon ice cream when the mushy amorphousness of braised sea anemone (good with oyster sauce and some sautéed leafy greens) is just as disconcerting? There is still much to be eaten before we have to resort to the manipulations of chemical cookery to thrill and excite us.
So that might be the substance of my new-found tolerance and widened appetite, learning that these foods really won't kill me. Thus it is that more than two decades after being weaned off milk, I finally learn and accept that food is mostly harmless. (Vindicating exasperated mothers around the world, almost-pleading that 'it won't kill you to try!') I still draw the line, however, at eating cephalopods. Molluscan meat in general used to be my bête noir, but I have come to terms with clams and (soon enough) oyster (scallops were down my gullet long ago - they are too juicy to resist). Cephalopods, though, I still cannot bring myself to eat. Their knowing eyes speak to me when I peer at them in their tanks as they flutter their tentacles, silently intimating: one day, it shall be your kind who shall grace our maw....
02 January 2008
Resolutions
Elizabeth Bennet thinking about her sister Lydia, who had eloped with Wickham:
How Wickham and Lydia were to be supported in tolerable independence, she could not imagine. But how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue, she could easily conjecture.
-- Pride and Prejudice chapter 50
10 November 2007
The College Board SATs are ripping you off
So you think the SATs are an objective measure of 'scholastic aptitude'? It turns out that they are the sad and sorry descendants of now-discredited intelligence tests developed during WWII to more efficiently process soldiers for various vocations according to 'aptitude'.
It wasn't always this way: the College Board was initially set up in 1900 at the instigation of the presidents of Columbia and Harvard Universities, to offer uniform standards of high school education for admission to college, so that colleges participating in the scheme could have a uniform set of expectations of what their admitted students would know and understand. The original tests were not multiple-choice but were instead essay questions based on a syllabus designed by high school teachers and college faculty working in collaboration. Now that the field of pscyhometric testing has fallen out of fashion elsewhere and the simple one-variable theories of intelligence undergirding its practice largely replaced by more sophisticated understandings of human intelligence and ability, why does the SAT still hold sway over college admissions? It can be only a misguided belief in 'quantitative methods' and laziness in seeking alternatives that require real effort in assessment.
Read more in this article by Diane Ravitch.
It wasn't always this way: the College Board was initially set up in 1900 at the instigation of the presidents of Columbia and Harvard Universities, to offer uniform standards of high school education for admission to college, so that colleges participating in the scheme could have a uniform set of expectations of what their admitted students would know and understand. The original tests were not multiple-choice but were instead essay questions based on a syllabus designed by high school teachers and college faculty working in collaboration. Now that the field of pscyhometric testing has fallen out of fashion elsewhere and the simple one-variable theories of intelligence undergirding its practice largely replaced by more sophisticated understandings of human intelligence and ability, why does the SAT still hold sway over college admissions? It can be only a misguided belief in 'quantitative methods' and laziness in seeking alternatives that require real effort in assessment.
Read more in this article by Diane Ravitch.
01 April 2007
The Pirates of Singapore
Lately the news that Chow Yun Fatt will be playing the leader of the Singapore Pirates in the upcoming final instalment of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise has made a little blip in the local press. Is depicting Singapore as an 18th century pirate's den insulting to Singaporeans in the same way that the depiction of Persians as blood-lusty warriors with a sexually ambiguous and cruel king in the movie 300 is supposedly a sly swipe at Iranians by Hollywood-the-media-arm-of-the-decadent-West? The local paper Life! took a straw poll of several Singaporeans and found that most, simply put, couldn't care less. Either it was seen as being part of the distant past which had no relation to Singapore now, or that it wasn't true anyway, that Singapore was never a pirate's den and the movie just made it up for entertainment, just like everything else. However, contrary to what most Singaporeans think they know about Singapore's past, pirates did lurk in our Straits even up to the early days of the modern settlement in the 19th century. The present-day pirate problem in the Straits of Malacca, often ranked as one of the more pirate-infested waters in the world, can be viewed as part of the heritage of indigenous piracy in the Malay Archipelago that hid and thrived in the innumerable islets and coves of present-day Indonesia and Malaysia.
In the 14th century, the Chinese Yuan dynasty traveller Wang Dayuan wrote the Daoyi Zhilue, an account of his travels in the southern seas, and among his traveller's tales is a description of a place called Longyamen, or the Dragon's Tooth Gate, identified with today's Keppel Harbour, and Danmaxi, or Temasek. He noted that
Raffles himself was fully aware of the pirate problem. In his letters he made mention of them, and in 1823 he applied for a vessel from the government to sail the waters near Singapore and ward off pirates. By March 1827, "a gunboat armed with lelahs and muskets was fitted with native sails and went out to cruise near Singapore against pirates." Prior to the arrival of the British and the Dutch in the region, the indigenous trade that passed through Singapore and its surrounding waters would have been primarily between the Riau-Lingga islands to the south and peninsular Johore. Today's political boundaries between Malaysia and Indonesia were the result of European colonialism, whereas in the past, the boundaries of the former Johore-Riau empire were a more accurate reflection of the economic and trade links among these islands and its peninsular hinterland. Piracy attacked these boats that travelled between Riau or Lingga and Singapore. Generally, the smaller indigenous (and some Chinese) traders, mostly in prahus and junks, were at greater risk and were the main targets. But pirate vessels could also be formidable. Buckley's Anecdotal History contains a description of one such pirate prahu:
In 1832, the pirate situation was so bad, and the Government seemed to be doing so little about it, that the Chinese merchants of Singapore took up subscriptions to equip and arm four trading boats to launch their own anti-pirate operations, independently of the Government. They promised to pay a reward for every pirate boat destroyed, and a sum of compensation to the family of every Chinese seaman killed in the operations. This vigilante fleet managed to sink a number of pirate vessels, though a few Chinese were killed in the process. This embarassment and public indictment of its weakness spurred the Government to order two gunboats from Malacca to combat pirates.
It was a miserable and dangerous time to be a sailor. Victims of pirates drowned trying to escape, were put to the sword on the spot, were taken away to the pirate lair and then killed there, or enslaved by the pirates to be manual labour for them. But being a pirate was also to live life within a hair's breadth of the sword, musket, or hangman's noose. Pirates when caught were treated just as was shown in the Pirates of the Caribbean, hung up at the beach as a warning to all who dared engage in piracy. By the 1830s, more naval vessels were coming down to patrol the Straits and to engage with pirates. Among the more famous and successful was the sailing sloop, the Wolf. The first steamship (hitherto all had been sailing vessels) to engage with a pirate ship was the EIC ship Diana. When it approached several pirate boats attacking a Chinese junks, the pirates, seeing the smoke, thought that the Diana was a trading ship on fire, and turned to attack it. To the pirates' surprise, the Diana bore down against the wind and returned fire, killing many of the pirate crew. With the arrival of the steamers, (other famous boats being the Nemesis and the Hooghly), the pirates soon became much less significant a threat, and their attacks became less frequent and less outrageous.
So it is quite clear that pirates and other unsavoury characters, for long periods of Singapore's history, did lurk on our island and in our waters. Certainly the movie stretches the truth considerably. No pirate would have dressed so magnificently at sea, and most of them were Malay, not Chinese. Of course, there is some evidence for Chinese banditry in the South Seas, because the Nanyang has traditionally been a haven for outlaws fleeing the Chinese imperial authorities via the Southern Coast of China. During the Qing dynasty, for instance, some survivors of the Amoy Small Knife rebellion fled to Singapore and Riau, as did remnants of the Taiping Tianguo rebels after their movement was wiped out by the imperial troops. Countless petty criminals surely had also made their way down South in the centuries before. The pirate problem still has repercussions today, in the form of modern piracy in the Straits of Malacca, which persists for similar reasons as in the past, viz. a complex shoreline with many hiding places, economic depression in undeveloped coastal areas, and a tradition of seafaring that lent itself well to both legitimate trade and illegal piracy. Those combating piracy today should certainty take a leaf from the lessons of the past, in order to wipe out this menace to shipping once and for all.
In the 14th century, the Chinese Yuan dynasty traveller Wang Dayuan wrote the Daoyi Zhilue, an account of his travels in the southern seas, and among his traveller's tales is a description of a place called Longyamen, or the Dragon's Tooth Gate, identified with today's Keppel Harbour, and Danmaxi, or Temasek. He noted that
"...when junks sail to the Western Ocean the local barbarians allow them to pass unmolested but when on their return the junks reach Ji-li-men [Karimun], the sailors prepare their armour and padded screens as protection against arrows for, as a certainty, some two or three hundred pirate perahu will put out to attack them for several days. Sometimes [the junks] are fortunate enough to escape with a favouring wind; otherwise the crews are butchered and the merchandise made off with in quick time."Pirates were a menace in the waters of Singapore right up to Raffles's time. According to Munshi Abdullah, Raffles's Malay tutor and a chronicler of the period,
"at this time [soon after Raffles's arrival] no mortal dared topass through the Straits of Singapore. Jins and Satans were even more afraid, for that was the place the pirates made use of, to sleep at and divide their booty, after a successful attack on any ship's boat or prahus. There also they put to death their captives, and themselves fought and killed each other in their quarrels on the division of the spoil."It was not just the waters surrounding Singapore that were full of piracy. Singapore itself bore traces of this gruesome profession. Littering the beaches were the skeletons and skulls of pirate victims, some with hair still clinging to them. This was sure evidence that pirates had used Singapore as one of their dens, one of the countless bases from which they would spring out of to attack passing ships, and to which they would retreat to kill their victims and divide their loot. Under instructions from William Farquhar, the skulls and bones on the beaches were collected up and disposed of at sea, possibly to help make Singapore a little more conducive to the conduct of trade.
Raffles himself was fully aware of the pirate problem. In his letters he made mention of them, and in 1823 he applied for a vessel from the government to sail the waters near Singapore and ward off pirates. By March 1827, "a gunboat armed with lelahs and muskets was fitted with native sails and went out to cruise near Singapore against pirates." Prior to the arrival of the British and the Dutch in the region, the indigenous trade that passed through Singapore and its surrounding waters would have been primarily between the Riau-Lingga islands to the south and peninsular Johore. Today's political boundaries between Malaysia and Indonesia were the result of European colonialism, whereas in the past, the boundaries of the former Johore-Riau empire were a more accurate reflection of the economic and trade links among these islands and its peninsular hinterland. Piracy attacked these boats that travelled between Riau or Lingga and Singapore. Generally, the smaller indigenous (and some Chinese) traders, mostly in prahus and junks, were at greater risk and were the main targets. But pirate vessels could also be formidable. Buckley's Anecdotal History contains a description of one such pirate prahu:
"Malay piratical prahus were from six to eight tons burden and from sixty to seventy feet long. They carried one or two small guns with four swivels or ratankas on each side, and a crew of twenty to thirty men. When they attacked ships they put up a strong bulwark of thick planks. They had, of course, spears and krises and as many fire-arms as they could procure."Many local rulers were also involved in piracy, and even the rulers in Singapore were accused at one point by Raffles of having dabbled in it, though this was probably just an outburst in a fit of frustration about their reluctance to personally do trade with the British. At that time, the pirates were not afraid to attack even European vessels, which were presumably larger and better armed than local ones. Most ships stood little chance because the pirates did not act alone but in fleets, using tactics and sailing expertise honed from a lifetime at sea and a tradition of piracy.
In 1832, the pirate situation was so bad, and the Government seemed to be doing so little about it, that the Chinese merchants of Singapore took up subscriptions to equip and arm four trading boats to launch their own anti-pirate operations, independently of the Government. They promised to pay a reward for every pirate boat destroyed, and a sum of compensation to the family of every Chinese seaman killed in the operations. This vigilante fleet managed to sink a number of pirate vessels, though a few Chinese were killed in the process. This embarassment and public indictment of its weakness spurred the Government to order two gunboats from Malacca to combat pirates.
It was a miserable and dangerous time to be a sailor. Victims of pirates drowned trying to escape, were put to the sword on the spot, were taken away to the pirate lair and then killed there, or enslaved by the pirates to be manual labour for them. But being a pirate was also to live life within a hair's breadth of the sword, musket, or hangman's noose. Pirates when caught were treated just as was shown in the Pirates of the Caribbean, hung up at the beach as a warning to all who dared engage in piracy. By the 1830s, more naval vessels were coming down to patrol the Straits and to engage with pirates. Among the more famous and successful was the sailing sloop, the Wolf. The first steamship (hitherto all had been sailing vessels) to engage with a pirate ship was the EIC ship Diana. When it approached several pirate boats attacking a Chinese junks, the pirates, seeing the smoke, thought that the Diana was a trading ship on fire, and turned to attack it. To the pirates' surprise, the Diana bore down against the wind and returned fire, killing many of the pirate crew. With the arrival of the steamers, (other famous boats being the Nemesis and the Hooghly), the pirates soon became much less significant a threat, and their attacks became less frequent and less outrageous.
So it is quite clear that pirates and other unsavoury characters, for long periods of Singapore's history, did lurk on our island and in our waters. Certainly the movie stretches the truth considerably. No pirate would have dressed so magnificently at sea, and most of them were Malay, not Chinese. Of course, there is some evidence for Chinese banditry in the South Seas, because the Nanyang has traditionally been a haven for outlaws fleeing the Chinese imperial authorities via the Southern Coast of China. During the Qing dynasty, for instance, some survivors of the Amoy Small Knife rebellion fled to Singapore and Riau, as did remnants of the Taiping Tianguo rebels after their movement was wiped out by the imperial troops. Countless petty criminals surely had also made their way down South in the centuries before. The pirate problem still has repercussions today, in the form of modern piracy in the Straits of Malacca, which persists for similar reasons as in the past, viz. a complex shoreline with many hiding places, economic depression in undeveloped coastal areas, and a tradition of seafaring that lent itself well to both legitimate trade and illegal piracy. Those combating piracy today should certainty take a leaf from the lessons of the past, in order to wipe out this menace to shipping once and for all.
02 December 2006
Eng-kok and Ang-mo
William Pickering, the first Protector of Chinese in Singapore, made the following note in his description of a Chinese secret society initiation ritual in the 1870s:
"For some years I have strongly discountenanced the use of the words 'Ang-mo' or 'Red-haired,' for 'English,' except in those unavoidable cases when a 'freshly caught' Sin Kheh would be totally unable to understand any other term.
I have no doubt that on occasions when I have been present at meetings, special instructions have been given to the 'Generals,' to avoid the objectionable expression, and to use the words 'Eng-kok' or 'Tai-Eng-kok' for English or British, as also to give the proper titles to local Officials. It is however an unpleasant fact that the Chinese in designating foreign officials, use terms somewhat less complimentary than those to be found in the appendix to Mayers' 'Chinese Government'; Inspectors of Police for instance, are called 'big dogs,' and the Superintendent of that body has no higher title than that of 'Head of the big-dogs.' Inspectors of Nuisances are called 'Earth buffaloes,' and so on. At the meeting above described, it was most amusing to hear the 'Generals' correcting themselves when guilty of a lapsus linguae, or to see the austere visage of a 'Guardian' relax, as he called out to a 'General' fresh from the jungle, 'You fool! they will be angry if you say Ang mo; you must only say 'Eng-kok.' As for the candidates, the effort to comprehend such words, as the Chinese equivalents for 'British Government,' and 'Inspector General of Police,' was evidently too much for them, and seemed to be an even more severe ordeal than the drawn swords under which they had to pass."
-- Journal of the Straits Branch, Royal Asiatic Society 3: 1-18, 1878
24 October 2006
Modern Day Tyranny
Tyranny was not always a bad thing, despite the modern-day connotations of the term. Even the most fearsome dinosaur commonly known to children has 'tyrant' in its name (Tyrannosaurus), but the first tyrants were merely political leaders in ancient Greek states who overthrew aristocratic governments with popular support and instituted reforms to revitalise the political and economic life of the states. Tyrants were usually aristocrats themselves, but they allied themselves with the middle and lower classes to overthrow the rule of the nobility, and so could be considered class traitors. The reason for discontent among the ruled classes was usually underrepresentation in government, since power was held by those who owned the most land and had the most wealth, poverty, and the rise of a new middle class which had aspirations to power and for reform. Hence the rule of a tyrant, called a tyranny, was probably tyrannical only to the hitherto rich aristocrats who had their lands seized, but much welcomed (at least initially) by the poor who had those lands parcelled out to them.
Some characteristics of the ancient Greek tyrannies are eerily reminiscent of the rule of populist leaders today, like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, such as (i) popularity and power base among the poor, (ii) seizing control during times of turmoil, (iii) seizing land from the rich to give to the poor, (iv) replacing a corrupt regime with promises of reform and patriotism, (v) implementing public projects ostensibly to benefit the poor. Scanning his profile on the BBC news website reveals most if not all of these traits and actions. It seems that such a leadership pattern or strategy has a long history of use; perhaps really is an effective means of achieving power.
For the ancient Greek states, tyranny was often beneficial. It replaced corrupt and deadened political oligarchies, where an elite class held most of the power, with a more democratic model and helped to restart economies through the promotion of trade and manufacturing. The latter was tied to the rise of the new middle class of tradesmen and artisans who did not fit into the traditional agrarian way of life. The wealth of this middle class was not tied to the land, and so they were not beholden to the great landowners who were the aristocrats. But because they had wealth but little political power, they were interested to see the overthrow of the aristocracy and the implementation of a new regime which would grant more influence to their class, and so through the tyrant, they achieved their aim.
However, tyranny can lead to ruin for a state, especially a modern one, in particular where populism is carried too far. In the case of Chavez's Venezuela, loyalty to the state is in some cases being subsumed by loyalty to the persona of the president. This is where the tyrant's authority overwhelms all others and is accepted unquestioningly. This can be a powerful tool in coordinating national action, yet it is a very dangerous situation where dissenting opinion is ignored or suppressed, because checks and balances against the abuse of power then fail. Chavez's dominance of the state media, his ubiquity, saturates those who cannot afford other means of finding out about the outside world, and hence moulds their world view to his. The citizen militias preparing earnestly for an 'assymmetric war' against the United States, whom Chavez views as an aggressor and threat, are almost entirely due to his influence, and some say paranoia. In the modern day, 'power to the people' promised by the tyrant is more likely an excuse for the empowerment of the tyrant himself. Furthermore, another tactic for galvanising support is to find a scapegoat for the country's ills, and even a strawman enemy will do. For Chavez, this is the United States, while for the Greeks, presumably it was other nation states who were in competition (economic, territorial, and military) with their own. Hence patriotism is another distinguishing trait of populism or tyranny.
So how can tyranny be avoided? The state of Athens provides a model, because it answered attempts to establish a tyranny through reform. These reforms were headed in 594 BC by Solon, a man empowered by the state and with a mandate from both the aristocrats and commoners, who averted the political collapse of Athens. He abolished debt slavery, then prevalent among the poor farmers. Economically, he revived Athenian fortunes by promoting the new industry of olive oil production. And in place of the traditional aristocracy, he substituted a timocracy, a system of government where power and representation was in direct proportion to wealth. In this way, the middle class was accomodated in the middle rungs of power (minor offices in the council), the wealthiest could hold on to the highest rungs (such as the positions of archons), and the poorest were admitted to the assembly from which they had hitherto been barred. Legally, he also instituted a more moderate code of law and a court of appeal. But if Solon's reforms are compared to those characteristics of tyrants listed above, we can see some parallels: land reform, economic revival, (somewhat more) power to the people. The difference, though, was that Solon instituted his changes with the initial approval of all social classes, he did not hold on to office after his period of service, he did not play one socioeconomic class against another in a bid to gain influence and power, and his implementation of timocracy carefully sloped reform such as to let the aristocrats retain much of what they had been used to.
Of course, Solon was not entirely successful. In 546 BC, an aristocrat named Peisistratus (or Pisistratus), in the typical fashion, seized power, drove out some nobles, confisticated their lands, cozyed up to the middle class, instituted public works, and patronised culture. But Athens was thrown into turmoil again upon his death and his sons did not last long when they attempted to succeed him as tyrant. Eventually, another lawgiver in the fashion of Solon, named Cleisthenes, set in place several reforms to placate the discontent. Among the most important of his reforms was the introduction of deme membership as the criterion of citizenship of Athens. Previously, citizens were registered under their clans, so foreigners who had been newly granted citizenship under Solon's or Peisistratus's reforms were unable to register because they had no cultural or religious ties to these clans. Demes, then, were geographic units of the state which were the new basis of citizenship, rather than clans. As a result, sociocultural factors no longer could exclude foreigners from full citizenship and participation and removed a major source of discontent. This must rank as an early example of an immigration policy.
We can learn several things from the Athenian story. First, that to pre-empt revolution, one must remake oneself. In Venezuela, despite a democratic tradition dating from 1958 (AD!), the two major political parties before Hugo Chavez were plagued by corruption and resource mismanagement. Therefore, his promises to bridge the rich-poor gap and to root out the rot were widely welcomed. Had there been sufficiently vigorous self-renewal in the old system, perhaps his message would not have been necessary. Second, economic growth and solving income inequity are necessary for staying popular, and even promising these things might be enough to gain popularity at first. The formula for populist support has stayed the same through the millenia: land reform, public works to benefit the populace and generate employment, and a hint of Robin Hood. Both Peisistratus and Hugo Chavez work(ed) from the same manual. Third, not all reforms work, nor do their consequences always show up immediately. The problem of foreign immigration was caused in part by Solon's liberalising of Athenian citizenship law, but only solved by Cleisthenes almost a century later. Solon's reforms were not all accepted by every quarter of Athenian society, and could not prevent the tyranny of Peisistratus.
Finally, a note in passing about another populist leader, though recently deposed, Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand. Thaksin's power base was primarily among the rural poor, who voted in droves for his Thai Rak Thai party. They also welcomed "cheap medical care and debt relief, his nationalist platform and his contempt for the 'Bangkok elite'." (BBC profile) Among the businessmen (the equivalent, if one recalls, of the Greek middle class of tradesmen and artisans) he was popular for his businesslike style and the rebirth of the Thai economy after the 1990s doldrums. But he forgot a crucial point, that as a populist leader he was a class traitor, and despite being the richest man in Thailand, he could not give the impression that he or his family was gaining undue benefit from his position as Prime MInister, as the sale of his family's Shin Corp shares seemed to many Thais. Therefore, the opposition, including his disdained traditional elite, could muster enough support from those who felt betrayed, to overthrow him in a coup. He betrayed his own class by gaining support from the poor by attacking the elite, but betrayed the poor in turn by his family's apparent profiteering and so made his position untenable.
Some characteristics of the ancient Greek tyrannies are eerily reminiscent of the rule of populist leaders today, like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, such as (i) popularity and power base among the poor, (ii) seizing control during times of turmoil, (iii) seizing land from the rich to give to the poor, (iv) replacing a corrupt regime with promises of reform and patriotism, (v) implementing public projects ostensibly to benefit the poor. Scanning his profile on the BBC news website reveals most if not all of these traits and actions. It seems that such a leadership pattern or strategy has a long history of use; perhaps really is an effective means of achieving power.
For the ancient Greek states, tyranny was often beneficial. It replaced corrupt and deadened political oligarchies, where an elite class held most of the power, with a more democratic model and helped to restart economies through the promotion of trade and manufacturing. The latter was tied to the rise of the new middle class of tradesmen and artisans who did not fit into the traditional agrarian way of life. The wealth of this middle class was not tied to the land, and so they were not beholden to the great landowners who were the aristocrats. But because they had wealth but little political power, they were interested to see the overthrow of the aristocracy and the implementation of a new regime which would grant more influence to their class, and so through the tyrant, they achieved their aim.
However, tyranny can lead to ruin for a state, especially a modern one, in particular where populism is carried too far. In the case of Chavez's Venezuela, loyalty to the state is in some cases being subsumed by loyalty to the persona of the president. This is where the tyrant's authority overwhelms all others and is accepted unquestioningly. This can be a powerful tool in coordinating national action, yet it is a very dangerous situation where dissenting opinion is ignored or suppressed, because checks and balances against the abuse of power then fail. Chavez's dominance of the state media, his ubiquity, saturates those who cannot afford other means of finding out about the outside world, and hence moulds their world view to his. The citizen militias preparing earnestly for an 'assymmetric war' against the United States, whom Chavez views as an aggressor and threat, are almost entirely due to his influence, and some say paranoia. In the modern day, 'power to the people' promised by the tyrant is more likely an excuse for the empowerment of the tyrant himself. Furthermore, another tactic for galvanising support is to find a scapegoat for the country's ills, and even a strawman enemy will do. For Chavez, this is the United States, while for the Greeks, presumably it was other nation states who were in competition (economic, territorial, and military) with their own. Hence patriotism is another distinguishing trait of populism or tyranny.
So how can tyranny be avoided? The state of Athens provides a model, because it answered attempts to establish a tyranny through reform. These reforms were headed in 594 BC by Solon, a man empowered by the state and with a mandate from both the aristocrats and commoners, who averted the political collapse of Athens. He abolished debt slavery, then prevalent among the poor farmers. Economically, he revived Athenian fortunes by promoting the new industry of olive oil production. And in place of the traditional aristocracy, he substituted a timocracy, a system of government where power and representation was in direct proportion to wealth. In this way, the middle class was accomodated in the middle rungs of power (minor offices in the council), the wealthiest could hold on to the highest rungs (such as the positions of archons), and the poorest were admitted to the assembly from which they had hitherto been barred. Legally, he also instituted a more moderate code of law and a court of appeal. But if Solon's reforms are compared to those characteristics of tyrants listed above, we can see some parallels: land reform, economic revival, (somewhat more) power to the people. The difference, though, was that Solon instituted his changes with the initial approval of all social classes, he did not hold on to office after his period of service, he did not play one socioeconomic class against another in a bid to gain influence and power, and his implementation of timocracy carefully sloped reform such as to let the aristocrats retain much of what they had been used to.
Of course, Solon was not entirely successful. In 546 BC, an aristocrat named Peisistratus (or Pisistratus), in the typical fashion, seized power, drove out some nobles, confisticated their lands, cozyed up to the middle class, instituted public works, and patronised culture. But Athens was thrown into turmoil again upon his death and his sons did not last long when they attempted to succeed him as tyrant. Eventually, another lawgiver in the fashion of Solon, named Cleisthenes, set in place several reforms to placate the discontent. Among the most important of his reforms was the introduction of deme membership as the criterion of citizenship of Athens. Previously, citizens were registered under their clans, so foreigners who had been newly granted citizenship under Solon's or Peisistratus's reforms were unable to register because they had no cultural or religious ties to these clans. Demes, then, were geographic units of the state which were the new basis of citizenship, rather than clans. As a result, sociocultural factors no longer could exclude foreigners from full citizenship and participation and removed a major source of discontent. This must rank as an early example of an immigration policy.
We can learn several things from the Athenian story. First, that to pre-empt revolution, one must remake oneself. In Venezuela, despite a democratic tradition dating from 1958 (AD!), the two major political parties before Hugo Chavez were plagued by corruption and resource mismanagement. Therefore, his promises to bridge the rich-poor gap and to root out the rot were widely welcomed. Had there been sufficiently vigorous self-renewal in the old system, perhaps his message would not have been necessary. Second, economic growth and solving income inequity are necessary for staying popular, and even promising these things might be enough to gain popularity at first. The formula for populist support has stayed the same through the millenia: land reform, public works to benefit the populace and generate employment, and a hint of Robin Hood. Both Peisistratus and Hugo Chavez work(ed) from the same manual. Third, not all reforms work, nor do their consequences always show up immediately. The problem of foreign immigration was caused in part by Solon's liberalising of Athenian citizenship law, but only solved by Cleisthenes almost a century later. Solon's reforms were not all accepted by every quarter of Athenian society, and could not prevent the tyranny of Peisistratus.
Finally, a note in passing about another populist leader, though recently deposed, Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand. Thaksin's power base was primarily among the rural poor, who voted in droves for his Thai Rak Thai party. They also welcomed "cheap medical care and debt relief, his nationalist platform and his contempt for the 'Bangkok elite'." (BBC profile) Among the businessmen (the equivalent, if one recalls, of the Greek middle class of tradesmen and artisans) he was popular for his businesslike style and the rebirth of the Thai economy after the 1990s doldrums. But he forgot a crucial point, that as a populist leader he was a class traitor, and despite being the richest man in Thailand, he could not give the impression that he or his family was gaining undue benefit from his position as Prime MInister, as the sale of his family's Shin Corp shares seemed to many Thais. Therefore, the opposition, including his disdained traditional elite, could muster enough support from those who felt betrayed, to overthrow him in a coup. He betrayed his own class by gaining support from the poor by attacking the elite, but betrayed the poor in turn by his family's apparent profiteering and so made his position untenable.
01 October 2006
Characteristics of Life
"Elementary textbooks of biology used to contain lists of the defining characteristics of life; the only one I recall is 'irritability', because of the picture it summoned up of an irritable oak tree."
-- J Maynard Smith / The Theory of Evolution xi
16 September 2006
Science Fiction and System-Building
The best science fiction authors were system-builders -- Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Gene Roddenberry -- they all build up worlds of their imagination, made up of fictitious but well-integrated elements that fit together to give a harmonious, plausible (in the context of the genre), and intellectually pleasing whole; a system, in any other nomenclature. And part of their success in capturing the imaginations and loyalties of their fans and reader-/viewer-ship lies in the flexibility of fictional systems to admit and accomodate additions of our own devising -- fan-fiction. We, the fans, co-opted the fantasy worlds of theirs for our own fantasies, our own bedtime reveries as we stared at dark, black ceilings and imagined that to be the view of dark, black, space from some porthole or beyond some forcefield.
That is the strength of good science fiction: its systems, self-coherent, well-integrated storylines and characters, yet accomodating of elaboration and fantasy. Yet the mind which is predisposed to concoct great mental universes is also ill-suited for predicting human nature and collective personality, i.e. societal and cultural trends. This is ironic because the people most familiar to us as futursts -- specialists in predicting the advances and technologies of the future -- are largely science fiction writers, whom we imagine to be well-suited to the task, though as I shall contend, they are in a subtle way not.
The trouble lies in the systems. A mind that favours systems as the means to achieve progress or to go about doing things would tend to overplay the importance of collective endeavour and underestimate the value of private enterprise. Simply put, he or she may not be able to find a place for mavericks in the system. One of the epics of science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, shows the horror with which exceptions, singularities, are treated. All through the first part of the show we are treated to a sumptuous, 'futuristic' vision of how the well-oiled machinery of the future world works: seamelss air-space travel, excellent service in an orbital hotel, interference-free telephony, the closely-planned schedule aboard the Discovery. But when one rogue element with a personality of its own enters, it is the villain -- the computer HAL. Someone has said that HAL is the only 'human' character in the story, and even then, he is 'just' a machine. The individual is treated as a horror in the otherwise seamless and orderly world of the future that Clarke and Kubrick have dreamed for us.
Another instance concerns the Star Trek: Voyager series, wherein a Starfleet crew is stuck with a rebel crew (the Maquis) aboard the Voyager, in the opposite end of the galaxy, trying to return to the safety of Federation space. While the writers for the show have tried to layer and nuance the rebel characters and their motivations, rather than portray them as all-out bad guys forced to join hands with the good guys, you cannot deny that the Federation, as personified by its Starfleet crew, is seen as the model, the admirable prototype for the future: a uniformed, homogeneous service of talented individuals serving science, peace, and diplomacy. They have coolest gear and sleekest ships, while foreign ships and crews always look a bit messy, (even the straight-edged cyborgs, the Borg) or a bit disorganised (compare a Klingon ship interior to a Starfleet vessel). And it is tellingly convenient, too, how Starfleet subsumes the roles of a military, diplomatic service, scientific exploration service, and anthropological survey, all under the aegis of one organisation. Science fiction, it seems, is inordinately fond of comprehensive systems and organisations.
Enough digression. To be honest, what set me thinking about all these systems and organisations was a passage in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World where a character worries about a perfume tap at home left running. Perfume on tap? That must be the ultimate municipal supply system. The thing is, who would settle for perfume that came from a tap? We, as normal minded humans with average free will, would want something unique instead: perfume is something we wear to distinguish ourselves and match our personality, rather than just a functional means to mask bad body odour. This is why fashion is such a sprawling and all-consuming field, because it is a means to distinguish oneself from others in the most obvious way, through one's appearance. Any perfumer's would have a bewildering array of bottled perfumes. If you can find one who would mix xcents for you, then you'd have a potentially infinite number of possible combinations of scents -- it is entirely possible to concot one that is unique to you and you only. And that is it with humans: our irrepressible need for individuality and free will. To simplify things, this is why communism failed and will always fail, because you cannot make or treat everyone the same. Likewise, the world of the future will have too many choices to count, and not just one Starfleet or one kind of perfume on tap. We see it in our world already. For every kind of international issue there is a glut of NGOs and international bodies to tackle it. It seems a bit naive to think how Starfleet is simultaneously military and diplomatic. The same naivete is at work in those who see the UN as a sort of global police or international government. At best it is an international benevolent fund, but even in that capacity it is not always the best of solutions.
So what does this mean for the futurist? It means that the future will be far more chaotic and diverse than they could ever imagine it to be. Monopolies -- on technology, on perfume, on intergalactic travel -- may hold up for a while but do not last for very long once someone finds that alternatives are possible and economical. This is the message of the free-market economists: that planning an economy is a Sisyphian task beyond any man or politburo. One more example that comes to mind is the scientific database featured in the novel 2051, where any piece of the world's scientific literature can be searched and retrieved for a price. But this is not the case today: we have a rather more messy scene of publishers offering their own proprietary services, some free or per-payment public services, and so on. So futurists take note: global standards are rare exceptions, rather than the rule when technology and society develop. Even metric is ubiquitous, and it has had a long headstart and overwhelmingly good reasons for its universal adoption.
Thus galactic, or even merely global, standards, systems, and organisations will probably never see the light of day: the dreams of science fiction nonwithstanding. Science fiction lures its fans with the promises of well-ordered systems, but it is this same preponderance of system building in the psychology of the genre that is truly alien to the real human world. Heretically for a Trekker, I shall have to say that Star Wars, with its cultural and political chaos and sumptuous, Byzantine individualities, is likely closer to the future than Star Trek. Rationality is appealing, but we've learnt that human nature and thus human economics are something else entirely. Sorry, Spock.
That is the strength of good science fiction: its systems, self-coherent, well-integrated storylines and characters, yet accomodating of elaboration and fantasy. Yet the mind which is predisposed to concoct great mental universes is also ill-suited for predicting human nature and collective personality, i.e. societal and cultural trends. This is ironic because the people most familiar to us as futursts -- specialists in predicting the advances and technologies of the future -- are largely science fiction writers, whom we imagine to be well-suited to the task, though as I shall contend, they are in a subtle way not.
The trouble lies in the systems. A mind that favours systems as the means to achieve progress or to go about doing things would tend to overplay the importance of collective endeavour and underestimate the value of private enterprise. Simply put, he or she may not be able to find a place for mavericks in the system. One of the epics of science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, shows the horror with which exceptions, singularities, are treated. All through the first part of the show we are treated to a sumptuous, 'futuristic' vision of how the well-oiled machinery of the future world works: seamelss air-space travel, excellent service in an orbital hotel, interference-free telephony, the closely-planned schedule aboard the Discovery. But when one rogue element with a personality of its own enters, it is the villain -- the computer HAL. Someone has said that HAL is the only 'human' character in the story, and even then, he is 'just' a machine. The individual is treated as a horror in the otherwise seamless and orderly world of the future that Clarke and Kubrick have dreamed for us.
Another instance concerns the Star Trek: Voyager series, wherein a Starfleet crew is stuck with a rebel crew (the Maquis) aboard the Voyager, in the opposite end of the galaxy, trying to return to the safety of Federation space. While the writers for the show have tried to layer and nuance the rebel characters and their motivations, rather than portray them as all-out bad guys forced to join hands with the good guys, you cannot deny that the Federation, as personified by its Starfleet crew, is seen as the model, the admirable prototype for the future: a uniformed, homogeneous service of talented individuals serving science, peace, and diplomacy. They have coolest gear and sleekest ships, while foreign ships and crews always look a bit messy, (even the straight-edged cyborgs, the Borg) or a bit disorganised (compare a Klingon ship interior to a Starfleet vessel). And it is tellingly convenient, too, how Starfleet subsumes the roles of a military, diplomatic service, scientific exploration service, and anthropological survey, all under the aegis of one organisation. Science fiction, it seems, is inordinately fond of comprehensive systems and organisations.
Enough digression. To be honest, what set me thinking about all these systems and organisations was a passage in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World where a character worries about a perfume tap at home left running. Perfume on tap? That must be the ultimate municipal supply system. The thing is, who would settle for perfume that came from a tap? We, as normal minded humans with average free will, would want something unique instead: perfume is something we wear to distinguish ourselves and match our personality, rather than just a functional means to mask bad body odour. This is why fashion is such a sprawling and all-consuming field, because it is a means to distinguish oneself from others in the most obvious way, through one's appearance. Any perfumer's would have a bewildering array of bottled perfumes. If you can find one who would mix xcents for you, then you'd have a potentially infinite number of possible combinations of scents -- it is entirely possible to concot one that is unique to you and you only. And that is it with humans: our irrepressible need for individuality and free will. To simplify things, this is why communism failed and will always fail, because you cannot make or treat everyone the same. Likewise, the world of the future will have too many choices to count, and not just one Starfleet or one kind of perfume on tap. We see it in our world already. For every kind of international issue there is a glut of NGOs and international bodies to tackle it. It seems a bit naive to think how Starfleet is simultaneously military and diplomatic. The same naivete is at work in those who see the UN as a sort of global police or international government. At best it is an international benevolent fund, but even in that capacity it is not always the best of solutions.
So what does this mean for the futurist? It means that the future will be far more chaotic and diverse than they could ever imagine it to be. Monopolies -- on technology, on perfume, on intergalactic travel -- may hold up for a while but do not last for very long once someone finds that alternatives are possible and economical. This is the message of the free-market economists: that planning an economy is a Sisyphian task beyond any man or politburo. One more example that comes to mind is the scientific database featured in the novel 2051, where any piece of the world's scientific literature can be searched and retrieved for a price. But this is not the case today: we have a rather more messy scene of publishers offering their own proprietary services, some free or per-payment public services, and so on. So futurists take note: global standards are rare exceptions, rather than the rule when technology and society develop. Even metric is ubiquitous, and it has had a long headstart and overwhelmingly good reasons for its universal adoption.
Thus galactic, or even merely global, standards, systems, and organisations will probably never see the light of day: the dreams of science fiction nonwithstanding. Science fiction lures its fans with the promises of well-ordered systems, but it is this same preponderance of system building in the psychology of the genre that is truly alien to the real human world. Heretically for a Trekker, I shall have to say that Star Wars, with its cultural and political chaos and sumptuous, Byzantine individualities, is likely closer to the future than Star Trek. Rationality is appealing, but we've learnt that human nature and thus human economics are something else entirely. Sorry, Spock.
12 September 2006
Wordcount
Since the first love letter was posted, countless romances have been conducted through written correspondence. Indeed, every medium of communication has probably been used at some point by lovers to speak through a distance to each other, but love letters hold a special place in the practice of romance. The lovely thing about writing to a lover is that a love letter can be carried about on the person, to be read and re-read when one needs some form of affirmation or reminder. So it is not a surprise that among the personal effects of many soldiers carried out into the frontlines are letters from family and lovers back home, and that much writing goes on while they're dug in, waiting in the trenches for action.
Email and online messaging through the Internet have expectedly also been co-opted by pining people around the world to stay in touch with their loved ones with even more immediacy than before, though personally I feel that something might be lost in such instantaneous communication. Both the amorous arts of conversation and of letter-writing suffer: being able to converse at any hour at seemingly any distance makes us treasure the moments of actual conversation less, while the 'live' nature of a chat is antipathic to the considered reflection and extended modulation of a letter.
But online romance does suggest a radical and interesting experiment that could shed some light on philosophical musings about what love is all about and how love develops between two people. A growing number of people have met online and had their relationships mature into something akin to our offline notion of romantic love (and for all intents and purposes is the same thing save for being carried out online). Once in a while the newspapers do report on couples living in different continents who met online and finally agreed to meet in person and marry. While these dramatic stories play on our sense of disjunction between the close online intimacy and the long physical separation, cases where the two people aren't complete strangers in the offline world (friends of friends and so on) and who live in the same region must be more common and an increasing means of partnership.
The important thing for this proposed study is that these relationships begin online and continue online until the point where the two parties think it is something like love. Why is this important? Consider that most instant-messaging programs enable chat loggnig, so all that has been said will be recorded down as a computer file, and that emails can be saved virtually forever. Therefore, every single word that has gone on between this online couple from the time they met has been recorded! And assuming that they only communicated online and not talked on the phone or met in person, which is quite likely if they live far apart and telephony or travel are prohibitively expensive, then we have a record of the entire extent of communication between the couple! So, simply put, we can count the exact number of words that are needed to pass between two people for them to fall in love. Not only that, we can go over every single conversation and track the alternating periods of drifting apart and drawing closer that oscillate in every relationship and watch how the incidences of drawing closer become increasingly preponderant. We can replay the instances where misunderstandings were cleared up and one party gains insight into the other's mind and soul. We can learn if the circumstances of the very first conversation and how it turned out have any bearing on the final outcome ("if you thought he was a jerk the first time you chatted, why did you still continue to say hello when he came online?").
So there you have it: an exciting new experiment in human psychology with important consequences for how we view and depict love in our assumptions and in our communications. Interested volunteers can send me their word counts at the usual address.
Email and online messaging through the Internet have expectedly also been co-opted by pining people around the world to stay in touch with their loved ones with even more immediacy than before, though personally I feel that something might be lost in such instantaneous communication. Both the amorous arts of conversation and of letter-writing suffer: being able to converse at any hour at seemingly any distance makes us treasure the moments of actual conversation less, while the 'live' nature of a chat is antipathic to the considered reflection and extended modulation of a letter.
But online romance does suggest a radical and interesting experiment that could shed some light on philosophical musings about what love is all about and how love develops between two people. A growing number of people have met online and had their relationships mature into something akin to our offline notion of romantic love (and for all intents and purposes is the same thing save for being carried out online). Once in a while the newspapers do report on couples living in different continents who met online and finally agreed to meet in person and marry. While these dramatic stories play on our sense of disjunction between the close online intimacy and the long physical separation, cases where the two people aren't complete strangers in the offline world (friends of friends and so on) and who live in the same region must be more common and an increasing means of partnership.
The important thing for this proposed study is that these relationships begin online and continue online until the point where the two parties think it is something like love. Why is this important? Consider that most instant-messaging programs enable chat loggnig, so all that has been said will be recorded down as a computer file, and that emails can be saved virtually forever. Therefore, every single word that has gone on between this online couple from the time they met has been recorded! And assuming that they only communicated online and not talked on the phone or met in person, which is quite likely if they live far apart and telephony or travel are prohibitively expensive, then we have a record of the entire extent of communication between the couple! So, simply put, we can count the exact number of words that are needed to pass between two people for them to fall in love. Not only that, we can go over every single conversation and track the alternating periods of drifting apart and drawing closer that oscillate in every relationship and watch how the incidences of drawing closer become increasingly preponderant. We can replay the instances where misunderstandings were cleared up and one party gains insight into the other's mind and soul. We can learn if the circumstances of the very first conversation and how it turned out have any bearing on the final outcome ("if you thought he was a jerk the first time you chatted, why did you still continue to say hello when he came online?").
So there you have it: an exciting new experiment in human psychology with important consequences for how we view and depict love in our assumptions and in our communications. Interested volunteers can send me their word counts at the usual address.
20 August 2006
University Rankings
University rankings have been in the news lately, with Newsweek's ranking of the top fifty 'most global' universities being featured in the local news, because NUS was ranked 31st in that survey, above some better known foreign schools like the Ecole Polytechnique and the Australian National University. But are such rankings of colleges and universities really reliable? A closer look at the criteria used by Newsweek to produce its ranking reveals more.
The magazine's survey was computed from three sources: a survey conducted by Shanghai Jiaotong University, the Times Higher Education Survey, and the size of the universities' library holdings, 'as a measure of scholarly resources'. The Shanghai Jiaotong survey, in turn, is based on these criteria: the number of highly cited researchers in the natural, applied, and social sciences, number of articles published in Nature and Science in the past five years, and the number of articles in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities Indices. The Times survey considers the following: percentage of international faculty, of international students, citations per faculty member, and the faculty/student ratio.
Looking through these criteria, one fact jumps out at you: these are mostly to do with publications and prestige of research faculty. Only the faculty/student ratio of the Times survey touches on anything remotely to do with instructional quality, while percentage of international faculty and students may tell you how 'global' (as the buzzword goes) an institution is, but little about how good its teaching is. My worry is that many college-bound students and their parents will take these ratings as a measure of how well a university will instruct and prepare its students in their chosen fields. Unfortunately, this survey will be of little help in choosing which university to attend.
To call it a survey of higher education institutions is surely a misnomer. This survey is mainly about the academic bugbear of 'publish or perish', the doctrine by which publication volume is equated with performance, while teaching and mentorship, which are the foundations of academia and sound scholarship (we hear so little of this word in its traditional sense), take the back seat. A recent article in Science reported on the reactions of the Chinese scientific community to recent scandals involving the faking of data by high-profile scientists. Scientists are undoubtedly human, and subject to the same weaknesses for power, influence, and publicity. Unfortunately, these compromise the quality of science being produced, and thus hurt the scientific community. The article described how many Chinese universities have made it compulsory for postgraduate students to publish at least one (for the MA degree) or two (for the PhD) papers in internationally indexed journals before their degrees may be awarded to them. Promotion and pay rises are also linked to publication in international journals, leading to what is euphemised as 'courtesy authorship' and 'institutional authorship' for major papers being published in leading journals.
Another victim of this unhealthy culture is what an article in the Savage Minds blog calls the 'academic gift culture':
Universities (or their publicity departments) often dismiss these rankings as unimportant or irrelevant, especially when they do not come out on top of their rivals, yet behind the scenes, their incentive and reward system for faculty is based upon the very same factors used to construct them, showing that they really do care. Academics have their own three-fold way of research, teaching, and administration. Naturally, if the system awards tangible research results (in the form of papers) and administration (in terms of committee chairmanship and the like), teaching will be neglected because it is the most nebulous and hardest to assess with hard numbers. Student surveys on teaching quality are notoriously unreliable, because students will tend to rate 'easy' teachers who award marks liberally very highly, while 'tougher' teachers who may be more stringent with quality will come out poorly. Furthermore, when 'star faculty' are hired on the basis of their research reputation, they are usually given very little teaching load, if any, and so it is unwise to select a college because a famous academic is there: he or she will probably teach few classes, and those that are taught will probably be oversubscribed. The Ivy League and other private universities which charge exorbitant tuition fees have frequently come under fire for leaving most teaching work to graduate students who work part time as teaching assistants, or to part-time adjunct faculty, who frequently shuttle between several schools to augment their income. The name beside a course on a course catalogue may only come to deliver a lecture to an overflowing lecture hall, then leave tutorials and discussion sessions (where the bulk of learning is done) to TAs and adjuncts.
So should we get too excited about NUS coming up among the leading 'global universities'? Well, both yes and no. Yes, because it shows that the university at least has a reputation and this can of course benefit our local students in terms of foreign student exchanges, overseas work opportunities, and the in-flow of overseas students and researchers who can enrich the local academic community. What's not hot is if the NUS administration lets this go to their heads and plays the 'ranking game' -- coming up with policies and incentive systems that serve only to drive up the university in the ranking tables but which do little to nothing for students. We must remember that education is the foundational objective of any university: since Singapore has only three universities, and NUS is the only comprehensive one among them, we cannot afford to turn out dullards. Having research and development is well and good, but not if the educated population has not been well-educated enough to appreciate its significance, or to perform competently in their professions, or to understand the issues of the day. The open book in NUS's coat of arms makes it clear: it is an institution of higher learning.
The magazine's survey was computed from three sources: a survey conducted by Shanghai Jiaotong University, the Times Higher Education Survey, and the size of the universities' library holdings, 'as a measure of scholarly resources'. The Shanghai Jiaotong survey, in turn, is based on these criteria: the number of highly cited researchers in the natural, applied, and social sciences, number of articles published in Nature and Science in the past five years, and the number of articles in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities Indices. The Times survey considers the following: percentage of international faculty, of international students, citations per faculty member, and the faculty/student ratio.
Looking through these criteria, one fact jumps out at you: these are mostly to do with publications and prestige of research faculty. Only the faculty/student ratio of the Times survey touches on anything remotely to do with instructional quality, while percentage of international faculty and students may tell you how 'global' (as the buzzword goes) an institution is, but little about how good its teaching is. My worry is that many college-bound students and their parents will take these ratings as a measure of how well a university will instruct and prepare its students in their chosen fields. Unfortunately, this survey will be of little help in choosing which university to attend.
To call it a survey of higher education institutions is surely a misnomer. This survey is mainly about the academic bugbear of 'publish or perish', the doctrine by which publication volume is equated with performance, while teaching and mentorship, which are the foundations of academia and sound scholarship (we hear so little of this word in its traditional sense), take the back seat. A recent article in Science reported on the reactions of the Chinese scientific community to recent scandals involving the faking of data by high-profile scientists. Scientists are undoubtedly human, and subject to the same weaknesses for power, influence, and publicity. Unfortunately, these compromise the quality of science being produced, and thus hurt the scientific community. The article described how many Chinese universities have made it compulsory for postgraduate students to publish at least one (for the MA degree) or two (for the PhD) papers in internationally indexed journals before their degrees may be awarded to them. Promotion and pay rises are also linked to publication in international journals, leading to what is euphemised as 'courtesy authorship' and 'institutional authorship' for major papers being published in leading journals.
Another victim of this unhealthy culture is what an article in the Savage Minds blog calls the 'academic gift culture':
The good academic supervises, teaches and encourages students without hesitation, and does her best even when she is asked to teach courses she is tired of or uninterested in. She organises workshops and conferences, reads and comments upon draft manuscripts by collegues, and she responds to emails even from students towards whom she has no formal obligations. She accepts to sit on committees and to take part in exhausting evaluations, and she referees manuscripts for journals and publishers. Sometimes she has to get up at four thirty to catch the seven o’clock flight to Bergen or Stockholm, in order to give a guest lecture or examine a dissertation. She often goes to research seminars, and she accepts time-consuming administrative tasks at her own department.
Much of this work is anonymous, and it is either unpaid or remunerated with a symbolic fee.
Universities (or their publicity departments) often dismiss these rankings as unimportant or irrelevant, especially when they do not come out on top of their rivals, yet behind the scenes, their incentive and reward system for faculty is based upon the very same factors used to construct them, showing that they really do care. Academics have their own three-fold way of research, teaching, and administration. Naturally, if the system awards tangible research results (in the form of papers) and administration (in terms of committee chairmanship and the like), teaching will be neglected because it is the most nebulous and hardest to assess with hard numbers. Student surveys on teaching quality are notoriously unreliable, because students will tend to rate 'easy' teachers who award marks liberally very highly, while 'tougher' teachers who may be more stringent with quality will come out poorly. Furthermore, when 'star faculty' are hired on the basis of their research reputation, they are usually given very little teaching load, if any, and so it is unwise to select a college because a famous academic is there: he or she will probably teach few classes, and those that are taught will probably be oversubscribed. The Ivy League and other private universities which charge exorbitant tuition fees have frequently come under fire for leaving most teaching work to graduate students who work part time as teaching assistants, or to part-time adjunct faculty, who frequently shuttle between several schools to augment their income. The name beside a course on a course catalogue may only come to deliver a lecture to an overflowing lecture hall, then leave tutorials and discussion sessions (where the bulk of learning is done) to TAs and adjuncts.
So should we get too excited about NUS coming up among the leading 'global universities'? Well, both yes and no. Yes, because it shows that the university at least has a reputation and this can of course benefit our local students in terms of foreign student exchanges, overseas work opportunities, and the in-flow of overseas students and researchers who can enrich the local academic community. What's not hot is if the NUS administration lets this go to their heads and plays the 'ranking game' -- coming up with policies and incentive systems that serve only to drive up the university in the ranking tables but which do little to nothing for students. We must remember that education is the foundational objective of any university: since Singapore has only three universities, and NUS is the only comprehensive one among them, we cannot afford to turn out dullards. Having research and development is well and good, but not if the educated population has not been well-educated enough to appreciate its significance, or to perform competently in their professions, or to understand the issues of the day. The open book in NUS's coat of arms makes it clear: it is an institution of higher learning.
11 August 2006
The Path of Duty
"...there will come occasions... when the path of duty will not be perfectly clear... and you will be apt to exclaim, as I myself have done, Would that there were a Urim and Thummim or an Ephod now, as in the days of David, that I might enquire of the Lord in plain words 'Shall I go up or shall I not go up?' and 'Wilt thou deliver them into my hands?' and receive a distinct categoric 'Thou shalt go up,'... to save you from the responsibility of a personal decision. And you will find... that tho' there will be occasions on which you will be shut up as it were to one course, when you will feel, 'I have no choice -- circumstances compel me to do this or that,' it will not always be so. Pray for help to decide, and then decide, on your own judgement, and with an eye to God's glory, and you will find that God's spirit has been just as really present... altho' you have not been able to distinguish his promptings and guidings from your own thoughts... reason and judgement. And looking back in after times, you will say, 'If ever I was divinely guided, surely it was then."
-- James Murray, quoted in E. Murray, Caught in a Web of Words.
29 July 2006
Kraken
The Kraken
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millenial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Because of its reputed large size and tendency to turn the sea murky with ink (according to the 18th century Natural History of Norway), the Kraken was believed to be a kind of giant octopus. We know now that the giant squid Architeuthis could be responsible for sightings of giant tetacular beasts in the open sea. Seafarers are notorious for their poor eyesight and wild imagination: the mermaid legends are believed to have originated from sightings of sea cows or manatees -- stout, unattractive beasts as their names suggest, far from the beautiful sylphs of nautical legend. The Latin name of the group, Sirenia, also commemorates the Sirens of Odysseus's journey, whose beguiling song he protected his crewmen from by plugging their ears with wax.
As for the giant squid, their washed up remains on Scandinavian shores sans tentacles probably were responsible for cryptic pictures in old natural history books showing giant bishops' hats found on beaches. If you look at a squid's body without tentacles and turn it the right way around, it's not too difficult to see how it might be described in that way, given a length of time and embellishment of detail after a sighting. Stranded giant squid bodies are not uncommon. Bodies up to 16 m long have been recorded, and even greater records claimed, though as Clyde Roper of the Smithsonian Institution put it, molluscan flesh and tentacles being as rubbery as they are, it's possible that some of these records were stretched into the record books. He also described the dissection of a beached whale -- a big messy job -- and the finding of many squid beaks in the gut of the whale: squids appear to be a major component of whale diets. It is not impossible, therefore, that whales should also prey upon giant squid, and whale bodies have been found with giant sucker marks on their skin, demonstrating that in the deep dark ocean depths, mammal and mollusc do battle in the struggle for survival. It is also interesting because sperm whales from time to time cough up congealed, waxy masses from their gut, which float to the surface of the sea and are gradually cured by the combined action of seawater and sunlight, being eventually found by humans on coastlines as the prized perfume ambergris, quite literally worth its weight in gold because of its rarity. It is believed that at least some of this material has an origin in the undigested or partly digested food of the whale, that is, some of it might derive from squid, even giant squid.
Real life is so much stranger than fiction. Giant octopuses terrorising ships seems rather predictable and passe (how many B films by now have shown giant creatures terrorising poor defenceless humans out at sea?) compared to the fact that one of our most expensive and prized perfumes is actually whale vomit, possibly formed partly from the remains of giant squid. Beat that, Davy Jones!
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millenial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Because of its reputed large size and tendency to turn the sea murky with ink (according to the 18th century Natural History of Norway), the Kraken was believed to be a kind of giant octopus. We know now that the giant squid Architeuthis could be responsible for sightings of giant tetacular beasts in the open sea. Seafarers are notorious for their poor eyesight and wild imagination: the mermaid legends are believed to have originated from sightings of sea cows or manatees -- stout, unattractive beasts as their names suggest, far from the beautiful sylphs of nautical legend. The Latin name of the group, Sirenia, also commemorates the Sirens of Odysseus's journey, whose beguiling song he protected his crewmen from by plugging their ears with wax.
As for the giant squid, their washed up remains on Scandinavian shores sans tentacles probably were responsible for cryptic pictures in old natural history books showing giant bishops' hats found on beaches. If you look at a squid's body without tentacles and turn it the right way around, it's not too difficult to see how it might be described in that way, given a length of time and embellishment of detail after a sighting. Stranded giant squid bodies are not uncommon. Bodies up to 16 m long have been recorded, and even greater records claimed, though as Clyde Roper of the Smithsonian Institution put it, molluscan flesh and tentacles being as rubbery as they are, it's possible that some of these records were stretched into the record books. He also described the dissection of a beached whale -- a big messy job -- and the finding of many squid beaks in the gut of the whale: squids appear to be a major component of whale diets. It is not impossible, therefore, that whales should also prey upon giant squid, and whale bodies have been found with giant sucker marks on their skin, demonstrating that in the deep dark ocean depths, mammal and mollusc do battle in the struggle for survival. It is also interesting because sperm whales from time to time cough up congealed, waxy masses from their gut, which float to the surface of the sea and are gradually cured by the combined action of seawater and sunlight, being eventually found by humans on coastlines as the prized perfume ambergris, quite literally worth its weight in gold because of its rarity. It is believed that at least some of this material has an origin in the undigested or partly digested food of the whale, that is, some of it might derive from squid, even giant squid.
Real life is so much stranger than fiction. Giant octopuses terrorising ships seems rather predictable and passe (how many B films by now have shown giant creatures terrorising poor defenceless humans out at sea?) compared to the fact that one of our most expensive and prized perfumes is actually whale vomit, possibly formed partly from the remains of giant squid. Beat that, Davy Jones!
27 July 2006
Advertisement
Singapore Theatre Festival '06 Event:
12 August
LIFE: New Country, Old Constraints?
ART: The Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ
Could the Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ in fact become a reality in today's Singapore? How do we view the Opposition, or alternative views? How do we value or acknowledge them? Can we?
Moderator: Alfian Sa'at
Points of View: Sylvia Lim (Worker's Party Chairman, NCMP), Gayle Goh (Citizen Commentator), Eleanor Wong (Playwright, Lawyer), Tan Tarn How (Playwright, Social Commentator)
Time: 5.30 pm
Venue: Function Rooms at the Drama Centre @ National Library
Free Admission
The play "The Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ" by Eleanor Wong also plays at the Drama Centre Theatre at 3pm and 8pm on the same day.
12 August
LIFE: New Country, Old Constraints?
ART: The Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ
Could the Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ in fact become a reality in today's Singapore? How do we view the Opposition, or alternative views? How do we value or acknowledge them? Can we?
Moderator: Alfian Sa'at
Points of View: Sylvia Lim (Worker's Party Chairman, NCMP), Gayle Goh (Citizen Commentator), Eleanor Wong (Playwright, Lawyer), Tan Tarn How (Playwright, Social Commentator)
Time: 5.30 pm
Venue: Function Rooms at the Drama Centre @ National Library
Free Admission
The play "The Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ" by Eleanor Wong also plays at the Drama Centre Theatre at 3pm and 8pm on the same day.
23 July 2006
Bloody Colourful World
An Indian man in Bangalore has turned his wedding reception into a blood donation drive, according to a report from the BBC. Despite opposition from his parents, who consider 'blood-shed' during a wedding as inauspicious, he and his wife, she a first time donor while he is well-known as a campaigner for blood donation, led the way for blood donations from most of the guests at the party. It isn't for nothing that he's known as Blood Kumar in Bangalore.
If you're inspired by his story and want to donate blood, you can check out the Singapore Red Cross website for more information. Don't worry, it's virtually painless! Just try not to think too much about the large-bore canula stuck in your vein.
***
The Library of Congress has a wealth of websites and materials online of digitised library collections, including its well known and well stocked American Memory website. Among the treasures they have put online in their online exhibitions is a remarkable set of photographs, the Prokudin-Gorskii photographic record. Taken between 1900 and 1915, they document the landscape, architecture, and people of the Russian Empire before it fell to the Bolsheviks. The photographer himself, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, was commissioned by the Tsar to take these photographs. What is unique about them is not just that they record a Russia that has since disappeared, but they do so in colour. Colour? In 1915? Prokudin-Gorskii used the ingenious method of exposing three negatives of each picture he wanted to take using three different filters of red, green, and blue. After developing the glass negatives, he would then project the slides in a lantern with the same colour filters, and the three overlapping images would form a colour image, in the same way that modern colour photography is also based on simulating real colour with three pigments.
For me, part of the charm of old photographs is their sharpness of focus. It's quite amazing how the old glass negatives could achieve even better resolution than today's film, and how the old photographers could stand lugging around cases of heavy and fragile equipment all around the countryside. Even more amazing is how they could persuade their subjects to hold still for long enough. Photography used to be an adventure: photographs of faraway exotic lands were highly sought after, and public screenings of lantern slides could attract large, paying audiences. The information explosion of the 20th century has resulted in people being able to get whatever information they want whenever they want it and in whatever quantity, no matter how specialised or obscure, if they are persistent enough. Sadly it has probably caused us to lose some of our sense of wonder and enthusiasm for exploration. With a veritable buffet of diversions available, the singleminded devotion to a particular hobby or passion, in the tradition of the Victorian amateur expert, might either be strengthened or diminished.
If you're inspired by his story and want to donate blood, you can check out the Singapore Red Cross website for more information. Don't worry, it's virtually painless! Just try not to think too much about the large-bore canula stuck in your vein.
The Library of Congress has a wealth of websites and materials online of digitised library collections, including its well known and well stocked American Memory website. Among the treasures they have put online in their online exhibitions is a remarkable set of photographs, the Prokudin-Gorskii photographic record. Taken between 1900 and 1915, they document the landscape, architecture, and people of the Russian Empire before it fell to the Bolsheviks. The photographer himself, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, was commissioned by the Tsar to take these photographs. What is unique about them is not just that they record a Russia that has since disappeared, but they do so in colour. Colour? In 1915? Prokudin-Gorskii used the ingenious method of exposing three negatives of each picture he wanted to take using three different filters of red, green, and blue. After developing the glass negatives, he would then project the slides in a lantern with the same colour filters, and the three overlapping images would form a colour image, in the same way that modern colour photography is also based on simulating real colour with three pigments.
For me, part of the charm of old photographs is their sharpness of focus. It's quite amazing how the old glass negatives could achieve even better resolution than today's film, and how the old photographers could stand lugging around cases of heavy and fragile equipment all around the countryside. Even more amazing is how they could persuade their subjects to hold still for long enough. Photography used to be an adventure: photographs of faraway exotic lands were highly sought after, and public screenings of lantern slides could attract large, paying audiences. The information explosion of the 20th century has resulted in people being able to get whatever information they want whenever they want it and in whatever quantity, no matter how specialised or obscure, if they are persistent enough. Sadly it has probably caused us to lose some of our sense of wonder and enthusiasm for exploration. With a veritable buffet of diversions available, the singleminded devotion to a particular hobby or passion, in the tradition of the Victorian amateur expert, might either be strengthened or diminished.
20 July 2006
The Limits of Poetry
Poetry is a craft of words (the 'word-craft' of the Anglo-Saxons) and words are limited in what they can portray or evoke, even though the range of what they can do is still very very wide indeed. Aside from the form of the text and the (optional) use of rhyme or meter, what distinguishes poetry from prose is the poetic mood: the understanding between the poet and the reader that there is a deeper meaning to the text, that it is not meant to be read merely literally.
There are several well-established devices for a poet to express the prosaically inexpressible: metaphor, metonymy, and so on. A poet may try to capture or express a mood by relating the circumstances which led to it, or by describing the kinds of feelings which it brings up in his mind or body, or by comparing it to something concrete with (hopefully) meaningful points of comparison. All these methods hinge on the necessity that for a mood or feeling to be accurately conveyed from a poet to a reader, it must be to some extent at least be based upon or start off from a shared experience, i.e. an experience not entirely unique to the poet, but something which suitably artful description and hint-dropping will enable the reader to recognise that same feeling and from there appreciate the poet's intent and perhaps how his feeling is different from our own. But there must be at least some recognition, otherwise the meaning is entirely lost.
This relates to how some poetry is untranslateable into other languages, because they depend on cultural assumptions and mindsets that would simply spoil the poem if they had to be explained at length (for instance if the 'point' of the poem is to allude to that particular aspect of the poet's cultural milieu). Likewise, if one has a unique emotion, or at least which one thinks is unique, how does one express oneself poetically, especially if that emotion is strong and yearns for expression? It is like trying to explain pain to a doctor: how painful is it? Perhaps the doctor could pinch you and ask you if it is 'as painful as that'? But the pain of a pinch is a different sort from the pain of a tummyache. What kind of pain, then, is it? A throbbing kind? or a sharp kind? And sharpness can be sharp like daggers or sharp like pin-pricks, but to some people a pin-prick hurts like a dagger, while to others daggers are merely pin-pricks. While we struggle to make the doctor understand, the pain overwhelms us.
So the limits of poetry are the limits that language places on our poetic intention. It is a limit on what we are able to share, and what we are able to evoke. Perhaps accuracy in pin-pointing a certain frame of mind or internal state is not the intention of all poetry, but a limited poetics means a limited human condition. We cannot share everything even with a lover; we are shut off from the internal intimate workings of others around us; we are individuals in the literal sense of the word. And so we come to the sad conclusion:
There are always things too private to tell, because we have no means to tell of them.
There are several well-established devices for a poet to express the prosaically inexpressible: metaphor, metonymy, and so on. A poet may try to capture or express a mood by relating the circumstances which led to it, or by describing the kinds of feelings which it brings up in his mind or body, or by comparing it to something concrete with (hopefully) meaningful points of comparison. All these methods hinge on the necessity that for a mood or feeling to be accurately conveyed from a poet to a reader, it must be to some extent at least be based upon or start off from a shared experience, i.e. an experience not entirely unique to the poet, but something which suitably artful description and hint-dropping will enable the reader to recognise that same feeling and from there appreciate the poet's intent and perhaps how his feeling is different from our own. But there must be at least some recognition, otherwise the meaning is entirely lost.
This relates to how some poetry is untranslateable into other languages, because they depend on cultural assumptions and mindsets that would simply spoil the poem if they had to be explained at length (for instance if the 'point' of the poem is to allude to that particular aspect of the poet's cultural milieu). Likewise, if one has a unique emotion, or at least which one thinks is unique, how does one express oneself poetically, especially if that emotion is strong and yearns for expression? It is like trying to explain pain to a doctor: how painful is it? Perhaps the doctor could pinch you and ask you if it is 'as painful as that'? But the pain of a pinch is a different sort from the pain of a tummyache. What kind of pain, then, is it? A throbbing kind? or a sharp kind? And sharpness can be sharp like daggers or sharp like pin-pricks, but to some people a pin-prick hurts like a dagger, while to others daggers are merely pin-pricks. While we struggle to make the doctor understand, the pain overwhelms us.
So the limits of poetry are the limits that language places on our poetic intention. It is a limit on what we are able to share, and what we are able to evoke. Perhaps accuracy in pin-pointing a certain frame of mind or internal state is not the intention of all poetry, but a limited poetics means a limited human condition. We cannot share everything even with a lover; we are shut off from the internal intimate workings of others around us; we are individuals in the literal sense of the word. And so we come to the sad conclusion:
There are always things too private to tell, because we have no means to tell of them.
16 July 2006
Things
Things / Jorge Luis Borges
My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,
The obedient lock, the belated notes
The few days left to me will not find time
To read, the deck of cards, the tabletop,
A book and crushed in its pages the withered
Violet, monument to an afternoon
Undoubtedly unforgettable, now forgotten,
The mirror in the west where a red sunrise
Blazes its illusion. How many things,
Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,
Serve us like slaves who never say a word,
Blind and so mysteriously reserved.
They will endure beyond our vanishing;
And they will never know that we have gone.
(Trans. Stephen Kessler)
My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,
The obedient lock, the belated notes
The few days left to me will not find time
To read, the deck of cards, the tabletop,
A book and crushed in its pages the withered
Violet, monument to an afternoon
Undoubtedly unforgettable, now forgotten,
The mirror in the west where a red sunrise
Blazes its illusion. How many things,
Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,
Serve us like slaves who never say a word,
Blind and so mysteriously reserved.
They will endure beyond our vanishing;
And they will never know that we have gone.
(Trans. Stephen Kessler)
09 July 2006
Cool Curves with Graphmatica
Graphmatica is a freeware mathematical graphing program that's popular in schools for teaching curve sketching and the properties of mathematical curves. One reason why it's so popular is that it's really easy to play around with different equations to produce all sorts of cool shapes. The Mactutor History of Mathematics Archive has a webpage featuring famous curves: not Marilyn Monroe or Marlene Dietrich, but more abstract classic beauties like the Hyperbola, Ellipse, and rather more obscure exotics like the Lemniscate of Bernoulli and the Quadratrix of Hippias.
So while playing with Graphmatica I found a way to construct the Yin-Yang symbol using only two simple polar equations: it is quite striking to see how the ancients concocted a symbol whose shape is so purely mathematical. Simply graph both r = tanh t and r = -tanh t and the two 'tadpoles' which form the picture will fit into each other. For the little circles, x^2 + (y + 0.5)^2 = 0.0525 and x^2 + (y - 0.5)^2 = 0.0525 seem to fit the dimensions best.
In my opinion, though, the cutest one I've found so far is the 'egg in egg' equation, r = t sin t, which really does look like an egg nestled in another egg! There are also a whole lot of equations to draw heart-shaped curves. The cardioid family of curves is perhaps best known, but they don't have the tapered bottom of the classic valentines heart. Math World has an encyclopaedia entry on the topic.
So while playing with Graphmatica I found a way to construct the Yin-Yang symbol using only two simple polar equations: it is quite striking to see how the ancients concocted a symbol whose shape is so purely mathematical. Simply graph both r = tanh t and r = -tanh t and the two 'tadpoles' which form the picture will fit into each other. For the little circles, x^2 + (y + 0.5)^2 = 0.0525 and x^2 + (y - 0.5)^2 = 0.0525 seem to fit the dimensions best.
In my opinion, though, the cutest one I've found so far is the 'egg in egg' equation, r = t sin t, which really does look like an egg nestled in another egg! There are also a whole lot of equations to draw heart-shaped curves. The cardioid family of curves is perhaps best known, but they don't have the tapered bottom of the classic valentines heart. Math World has an encyclopaedia entry on the topic.
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