A Short History Of Nearly Everything

“We used to build civilizations.

Now we build shopping malls.”

  – Bill Bryson

“I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.”

From A Short History Of Nearly Everything:

“There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone cacll from the frankly interesting.”

“If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It’s a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.”

Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.

“Protons give an atom its identity,

electrons its personality”

  – Bill Bryson

In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face.

“It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be , is every bit as strong as ours-arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additions existence. Life, in short just wants to be.”

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.”

“We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they’re watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So, they’re not seeing you and me. They’re watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs–people who don’t know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that’s quite a trick. Any message we receive from them is likely to begin “Dear Sire,” and congratulate us on the handsomness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us.”

“I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job.

But here’s an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be living the universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. Because we are so remarkably careless about looking after things, both when alive and when not, we have no idea — really none at all — about how many things have died off permanently, or may soon, or may never, and what role we have played in any part of the process.

In 1979, in the book The Sinking Ark, the author Norman Myers suggested that human activities were causing about two extinctions a week on the planet. By the early 1990s he had raised the figure to about some six hundred per week. (That’s extinctions of all types— plants, insects, and so on as well as animals.) Others have put the figure ever higher — to well over a thousand a week. A United Nations report of 1995, on the other hand, put the total number of known extinctions in the last four hundred years at slightly under 500 for animals and slightly over 650 for plants— while allowing that this was “almost certainly an underestimate,” particularly with regard to tropical species.

A few interpreters think most extinction figures are grossly inflated.

The fact is, we don’t know. Don’t have any idea. We don’t know when we started doing many of the things we’ve done. We don’t know what we are doing right now or how our present actions will affect the future. What we do know is that there is only one planet to do it on, and only one species of being capable of making a considered difference. Edward O. Wilson expressed it with unimprovable brevity in The Diversity of Life: “One planet, one experiment.”

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here— and by “we” i mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.

We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviorally modern human beings— that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities— have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth’s history. But surviving for even that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune.

We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks.” 

Rice Paddies & Math Tests.

From the book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell.

Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.

If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly If you’re Chinese, though, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4,8,5,3,9,7,6—right every time because—unlike English speakers—their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.

That example comes from Stanislas Dehaene’s book “The Number Sense,” and as Dehaene explains:

Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is ‘si’ and 7 ‘qi’) Their English equivalents—”four,” “seven”—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.

It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one would think that we would also say one-teen, two-teen, and three-teen. But we don’t. We make up a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty, and sixty, which sound like what they are. But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound what they are but not really. And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the “decade” first and the unit number second: twenty-one, twenty-two. For the teens, though, we do it the other way around. We put the decade second and the unit number first: fourteen, seventeen, eighteen. The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten one. Twelve is ten two. Twenty-four is two ten four, and so on.

That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster. Four year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American children, at that age, can only count to fifteen, and don’t reach forty until they’re five: by the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

The regularity of their number systems also means that Asian children can perform basic functions—like addition—far more easily. Ask an English seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty two, in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is nine and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens nine.

“The Asian system is transparent,” says Karen Fuson, a Northwestern University psychologist, who has done much of the research on Asian-Western differences. “I think that it makes the whole attitude toward math different. Instead of being a rote learning thing, there’s a pattern I can figure out. There is an expectation that I can do this. There is an expectation that it’s sensible. For fractions, we say three fifths. The Chinese is literally, ‘out of five parts, take three.’ That’s telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It’s differentiating the denominator and the numerator.

The much-storied disenchantment with mathematics among Western children starts in the third and fourth grade, and Fuson argues that perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that math doesn’t seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated.

Asian children, by contrast, don’t face nearly that same sense of bafflement. They can hold more numbers in their head, and do calculations faster, and the way fractions are expressed in their language corresponds exactly to the way a fraction actually is—and maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy math, and maybe because they enjoy math a little more they try a little harder and take more math classes and are more willing to do their homework, and on and on, in a kind of virtuous circle.

When it comes to math, in other words, Asians have built-in advantage. For years, students from China, South Korea, and Japan – and the children of recent immigrants who are from those countries – have substantially outperformed their Western counterparts at mathematics, and the typical assumption is that it has something to do with a kind of innate Asian proclivity for math.* The psychologist Richard Lynn has even gone so far as to propose an elaborate evolutionary theory involving the Himalayas, really cold weather, premodern hunting practices, and specialized vowel sounds to explain why Asians have higher IQs.** That’s how we think about math. We assume that being good at things like calculus and algebra is a simple function of how smart someone is. But the differences between the number systems in the East and the West suggest something very different – that being good at math may also be rooted in a group’s culture.

Epic!

Finding epic/war kind of music. I find it kinda uplifting. I’m also checking out the soundtracks for Tron Legacy (heehee), which includes a blend of orchestra and the duo Daft Punk’s signature  electronic beats. And the soundtrack for City Hunter too, which kinda reminds me of the soundtrack for Inception, the movie.

Finished Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Although it was meant to be like a discussion of how and why some achieved more than others, the last two chapters of the book touched deeply into my heart. Rice paddies and math tests reminded me of how we had achieved our own kind of success, and why our parents reminded us of the need to be merticulous and work hard. It’s part of our cultural legacy, the asian cultural legacy.

I’m halfway through A Short History Of Nearly Everything which and I kinda regretted to have not read it during my time in VJ. It’s interesting in that it discusses in much depth the history of our natural world, without classifying the knowledge of the world we know today into things like oh, Geography/Chemistry and all.

I quote:

In 1869, at the age of 35, he began to toy with a way to arrange the elements. At the time, elements were normally grouped in two ways – either by atomic weight (using Avogadro’s Principle) or by common properties (whether they were metals or gases, for instance). Mendeleyev’s breakthrough was to see that the two could be combined into a single table.

As it was often the way in science, the principle had actually been anticipated three years previously by an amateur chemist in England named John Newlands. He suggested that when elements were arranged by weight, they appeared to repeat certain properties – in a sense to harmonize – at every eight place along the scale. Slightly unwisely, for this was an idea whose time had not quite yet come. Newlands called it the Law Of Octaves and likened the arrangement to the octaves on a piano keyboard. Perhaps there was something in Newlands’ manner of presentation, but the idea was considered fundamentally preposterous and widely mocked. At gatherings, droller members of the audience would sometimes ask him if he could get his elements to play them a little tune. Discouraged, Newlands gave up pushing the idea and soon dropped out of sight altogether.

Mendeleev used a slightly different approach, placing his elements into groups of seven, but employed fundamentally the same premise. Suddenly, the idea seemed brilliant and wondrously perceptive. Because the properties repeated themselves periodically, the invention became known as the periodic table.

Mendeleyve was said to have been inspired by the card game as Solitaire…

Yes, classification is necessary for easy identification of facts. But I hate when understand it becomes extremely confusing, because I know I can’t deal well with unfamiliar situations. Maybe I’m not trying hard enough, maybe I can do better. Maybe that’s one reason why I like and treasure the free time I have asides from having to serve a nation, because it gives me the time and space I need to improve.

And I’m also reading The Invisible Gorilla: Ways Our Intuition Decieves Us, because A Short History Of Nearly Everything was too bulky to bring to camp so I had to content with that and Outliers.

I haven’t started on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated but I will start soon. Looks like I need to renew some books.

I also feel like borrowing Libba Bray’s Going Bovine from the library to read or something.

Urgh. So many things to do.

Not including the 16 more episodes of City Hunter to watch too.

 

 

Eidetic memory to the maxxxxxx.

This simply just blewww me away!

What I’ve read, What I’m going to read, And what I’m watching.

Music: A Lack Of Color by Death Cab For Cutie

Was it Dad?

Maybe.

Whoever it was, it was somebody.

I ripped the pages out of the book.

I reversed the order, so the last one was first, and the first was last.

When I flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up through the sky.

And if i’d had more pictures, he would’ve flown through a window back into the building and the smoke would’ve poured into the hole that the plane was about to come out of.

Dad would’ve left his messages backward, until the machine was empty and the plane would’ve flown backward away from him all the way to Boston.

He would’ve taken the elevator to the street and pressed the button for the top floor.

He would’ve walked backward to the subway and the subway would’ve gone backward through the tunnel, back to our stop.

Dad would’ve gone backward through the turnstile, then swiped his Metrocard backward, then walked home backward as he read the New York Times from right to left.

He would’ve spit coffee into his mug, unbrushed his teeth, and put hair on his face with a razor.

He would’ve gotten back into bed, the alarm would’ve rung backward, he would’ve dreamt backward.

Then he would’ve gotten up again at the end of the night before the worst day.

He would’ve walked backward to my room, whistling “I Am the Walrus” backward.

He would’ve gotten into bed with me.

We would’ve looked at the stars on my ceiling which would’ve pulled back their light from our eyes.

I’d have said “Nothing” backward.

He would have said: “Yeah, buddy?” backward.

I’d said “Dad?” backward which would have sounded the same as “Dad” forward.

He would have told me the story of the Sixth Borough, from the voice in the can at the end to the beginning, from “I love you” to “Once upon a time”

We would have been safe.

Wow. Even though Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is fictional, it brought me closer to reconciling with everything that changed the world ten years ago.

Something I felt newspapers and magazines like Time couldn’t capture accurately. Because it touched my heart on a personal level.

And ohmygosh there’s the movie to look forward to next year! On Jan 20.

Currently reading:

1. A Short History Of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. As recommended by one of my seniors in there who kinda has lots of books on his iPod Touch, which is cool.

Will be reading:

1. Outliers: The Story Of Success by Malcolm Gladwell (Why do some people achieve far more in life than others?)

He’s the guy who wrote The Tipping Point and Blink. Which reminds me, I still haven’t returned The Tipping Point back to Lucas yet. Gahh…

2. The Invisible Gorilla and other ways our intuition deceives us. When I first saw the book my fellow soldier-mate was reading back then during our days going through courses, my first thought went to that cool Youtube video which kinda proved that people may not take notice of a Chimpanzee/Gorilla appearing, if there are other things to distract you. I borrowed this book together with the other two books mentioned previously from Bishan Library. Amazing how you can get the things you want for free, despite the library itself being relatively small.

3. And I managed to borrow Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, the guy who wrote Extremely Loud and Incredibly Curious, which I thought was extremely beautiful and incredibly good. Everything Is Illuminated is thus a natural want for me.

Gahh… So many cool/good/interesting things to read. Library gives me a due date that’s less than a month to complete all of the readings. If only I needn’t serve NS. Gah that’ll be wonderful. And I haven’t started on the things that I want to watch and the music I want to listen to.

Some of the things I watch on Youtube will include the video/audio representation of the books that I’m reading/going to read.

But besides that:

1. There’s Muse @ Reading Festival 2011. I’ll selectively watch the parts of the concert that’s either superduperepic/new.

2. Suppressed Science – Inventing the Impossible. One of the several documentary series from UFOTV which I’m recently quite interested in. I was listening to The Secrets Of Nikola Tesla (Remember the definition of Tesla? Yeah that guy.) on my MP3 player and that kinda brought me here.

There’s moremoremore but I guess that’s all for today, if not i won’t find the time to complete my reading. I love how I hate Youtube for recommending me more stuff to watch which are superdupercool.

Off now!

I cried in her world.

Here’s a write up.

Our assignment, a write up on our education, dreams and interests. To know more about ourselves, also a part of serving the nation ~ 🙂

Education

I studied physics, chemistry, mathematics and economics at Victoria Junior College. Besides these subjects, I took General Paper and Project Work for the A Levels. During my course of study of these subjects over two years, I found a liking towards mathematics, economics and the general paper as opposed to physics, chemistry and project work. Not that I did not like working with people. Nor did I not like theories in science. Rather, I disliked the certain rigidity which I felt had existed in the curriculum for these subjects. I preferred mathematics because there was a certain flow of logic which I felt I could connect with when I did problems. I liked economics because the theories and examples taught were extremely applicable to the real world around me, and I felt I could relate to it. And finally, I loved the ideas which were discussed during General Paper lessons because it made me think and probe deeper into issues which concern not only us but people all around us, across different nations. Also, I learnt a bit more about how people (especially those who existed before us) approached the problems they faced and the problems which can impact future generations, such as the environment, inequalities and other social issues. I am also interested in finding out what motivates people in what they do as well as what motivates me in the things that I do.

I will be studying the arts and social sciences at the National University Of Singapore.

Dreams

eg.: How do you plan to change the world, and why?

I used to believe this idea in its most romanticized form – that anyone, if they wanted to, can change the world for the better. However, I learnt, through experience, that not all efforts, despite its noblest intent, can effect positive change. Despite this, I still believe that each person has, in their own personal capacity, an ability to effect change: for themselves, for their friends, for the world and the people they love.

To change the world, I believe in taking small steps first. Sometimes, these steps are made with the most cautious of intents, and this takes time. Not that I intend to procrastinate in proceeding with the actions and ideals I believe in, but because time is a sure thing we have to feel secure about our judgments, judgments that will change the world, hopefully, for the better, one day.

To change the world, I believe I have to have a deeper understanding of myself, of others, of differences, and of the world. A major part of that can be learnt through a wiser approach to education – education that is used as a tool of discovery and enlightenment rather than just merely a tool for social status and monetary gain. While it is important to earn a living and be respected, we only have so much time here in this world so why not make the best out of the opportunities we have?

Interests

eg.: What do you like to do?

• Read
o Anything that interests me, and this includes:
 Intellectual curiosities
 Discussion of interesting phenomena
 Biographies
 Autobiographies
 Literary fiction
 How-to books
 Psychology
 Wikipedia
 Newspaper articles (a place where I get a lot of real-world applications to economics)

• Run
• Swim
• Meditate (thinking about issues before sitting in a lotus position, clearing my mind)
• Travel (around Singapore and out of Singapore)
• Write

• Play
o Piano
o Guitar

• Listen to music
o Anything that interests me, and this includes:
 Rock (includes alternative rock)
 Classical
 Classical & Rock mashed together
 Instrumental
 Jazz
 Blues
 Pop
 Covers of Pop music
 Official Soundtracks (OSTs)
 And much more… (hard to always find a genre to describe the music I like, cause sometimes the piece of music can cross genres or exist as a genre on its own)

• Go to a friend’s place/house to catch up/eat/watch movie. I prefer this informal arrangement as opposed to hanging out with a group of friends at a movie theatre and then going for dinner afterwards, although this would be fine too.
• Surf the internet

eg.: What are your favorite hangout spots?

In camp

• Outside Spec Mess (good, quiet place to read a book)
• Leisure room (watch movie, surf internet)
• Pass Office (to read newspaper)
• Rest Room (bunk, to sleep)
• Observation Posts, eastern most tip of Singapore (I run to say hello to the people there)

Genius & Beautiful People.

I have an education. I was taught by mainstreamed schools. Schools taught me to make the best use of knowledge taught. In ways I never intended, I was taught to reproduce their thoughts, thoughts of extraordinary insight and genius, because…because in one way or another, I had to pass or excel in this thing called the examinations. Galileo, Newton or Albert Einstein didn’t really matter to me, their laws did. Because it was their laws that carried marks, and NOT the story of how they lived their lives.

I live in a country that heavily emphasizes on succeeding in systems and qualifications. I am trapped in a year and ten months bond to my country yet I am now freed to pursue whatever I want at my own pace. I choose to save up my allowance for the future to spend on things that really matter.

I want to understand the lives of geniuses and their works, as well as the stories of people who lived tragically, beautiful lives.

A Universe Is Trapped Inside A Tear.

 

– MK Ultra, Muse.

Rolling In The Deep (Adele)

There’s a fire starting in my heart,
reaching a fever pitch and it’s bringing me out the dark.
Finally I can see you crystal clear,
go ahead and sell me out and I’ll lay your ship bare.
See how I’ll leave with every piece of you,
don’t underestimate the things that I will do.

There’s a fire starting in my heart,
reaching a fever pitch and it’s bringing me out the dark.

The scars of your love remind me of us,
they keep me thinking that we almost had it all.
The scars of your love, they leave me breathless
I can’t help feeling:
We could have had it all
Rolling in the deep
(Tears are gonna fall, rolling in the deep)
You had my heart inside of your hand
(You’re gonna wish you never had met me)
And you played it to the beat
(Tears are gonna fall, rolling in the deep)

Baby, I have no story to be told
But I’ve heard one of you.
And I’m gonna make your head burn,
think of me in the depths of your despair,
Making a home down there,
as mine sure won’t be shared.

The scars of your love remind me of us
They keep me thinking that we almost had it all
The scars of your love, they leave me breathless
I can’t help feeling:

We could have had it all
Rolling in the deep
(Tears are gonna fall, rolling in the deep)
You had my heart inside of your hand
(You’re gonna wish you never had met me)
And you played it to the beat
(Tears are gonna fall, rolling in the deep)
We could have had it all
Rolling in the deep
You had my heart inside of your hand
But you played it with a beating

Throw your soul through every open door
Count your blessings to find what you look for

Turn my sorrow into treasured gold

You pay me back in kind and reap just what you sow

(You’re gonna wish you never had met me)
We could have had it all
(Tears are gonna fall, rolling in the deep)
We could have had it all
(You’re gonna wish you never had met me)
It all, it all, it all
(Tears are gonna fall, rolling in the deep)

We could have had it all
(You’re gonna wish you never had met me)
Rolling in the deep
(Tears are gonna fall, rolling in the deep)
You had my heart inside of your hand
(You’re gonna wish you never had met me)
And you played it to the beat
(Tears are gonna fall, rolling in the deep)

You could have had it all
(You’re gonna wish you never had met me)
Rolling in the deep
(Tears are gonna fall, rolling in the deep)
You had my heart inside of your hand
(You’re gonna wish you never had met me)

But you played it
You played it
You played it
You played it to the beat.

Till I’m Old & Ready To Die (ORD)

I vow

To make the best use of my time here.

1. I read

• Blink: The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking (A compelling book, one which describes first impressions – the first two seconds, in fact – count in everyday experiences. Some of the examples presented by Malcolm Gladwell made me :O)
• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End Of The World (A book that left me awestruck. I loved how Murakami intertwined two different plots with two different destinies)

2. I’m re-reading

• Brain Rules (An interesting read on 12 rules that govern how the brain works)
• The Tipping Point (A revolutionary read on how small things can make a huge difference)

3. I plan to finish:

• Shantaram (Part III to V)

I feel the need to quote some parts of what I’ve read thus far:

• What characterizes the human race more,’ Karla once asked me, ‘cruelty or the capacity to feel shame for it?’ I thought the question was acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know that it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterizes the human races. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.

• “Are we ever justified in what we do? When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn’t be of our making, but that wouldn’t occur without our action.  Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said, were caused by people who tried to change things.”

• Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they’re the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire.  And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and the sorrows.  The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering.  So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.

• Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey.  Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.

4. I want to learn:

• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Communications (Includes Mass Communications)
• Driving
• More about China
• China’s economy (They are progressing faster and faster)
• More about Singapore’s Chinese history
• Chinese & modern day chinese culture

Recently, I’m struck by a sense of authenticity, more so when I try to reconcile with the language and the way of life my predecessors lived and preached. Nothing beats knowing more about your own roots.

5. I want to re-learn:

• Economic Theories

There has been great discussions about the global financial crisis as well as the recent turmoil in the global economy from US to Europe to Japan. I tend to understand better when we discuss about such issues in camp. I never really understood the terminology and specifics what not frequently mentioned in the newspaper or reviews.

I have a friend who recommended me to get a book, one that explains everything about this global phenomenon to people who aren’t sure what’s really going on.

6. I need to:

• Eat more. I want to grow buffer. I think I am far too small size as compared to other guys in camp. I have seniors calling me cute. They think our batch is filled with short, cute guys.
• Run. Jump. Do Pull-Ups. Hopefully everyday. 3 Reasons:

1. In Brain Rules, #1: Exercises boosts Brain Power. Our brains love motion. When we exercise, we sharpen our brains. Also, oxygen, through aerobic exercise, builds inroads for the brain. Besides, I know I’ll feel good after a workout. Always. Without fail.
2. I have not been training much recently. I reached at least silver standard for all my IPPT stations except Standing Broad Jump. I still passed, just that I cannot jump to silver or gold standard.
3. Silver: $100. Gold: $200. Enough said.

• Connect with people, socialize. I want to feel them as who they are.

• Have time for myself, introspect. I want to be who I am.
  

7. I will:

• Write more journal entries.
• Explore music.
• Find music I love.
• Find music with lyrics to die for.
• Find poems with ideas to die for.

8. I know it is her I will never forget. How irresponsible of me to leave her just like that. To have said things I shouldn’t have. And not say the things I should have.