February 2012
1 post
January 2012
3 posts
How Will You Measure Your Life? →
… find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?
… the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to...
Suggested List Of 2012 Oscar Nominations [as of... →
Oscar-potential films yet to see
The Artist … … War Horse … … In The Land Of Blood And Honey
Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close … … Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
J. Edgar…
December 2011
5 posts
The Life Reports II →
Read Later
A few weeks ago, I asked people over 70 to send me “Life Reports” — essays about their own lives and what they’d done poorly and well. They make for fascinating and addictive reading, and I’ve tried to extract a few general life lessons:
Divide your life into chapters. The unhappiest of my correspondents saw time as an unbroken flow, with themselves as corks bobbing on top of it....
November 2011
8 posts
WatchSlimtime
Notes On 2011 BMW Shorties Finalists →
[Reminder: All opinions are subjective. They always are.] Just watch one. Forget the others. (Okay, that’s not a very democratic suggestion. Watch them all to make up your own mind about them. But…
"Roller Blades", by Jamie Harrison
Race fast Whizz past Roller blades Scenery fades Wheels spin Cheesy grin Black plastic I’m fantastic! Brake light Big fright Nerves chill Oil spill Blinding flash! Fatal crash Oil tanker Stupid person
“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness...”
– DAVID FOSTER WALLACE in The Pale King
My Family's Experiment In Extreme Schooling →
New Humanitarian had standard subjects, like history and math, and Danya had many hours of homework a week. But Bogin added courses like antimanipulation, which was intended to give children tools to decipher commercial or political messages. He taught a required class called myshleniye, which means “thinking,” as in critical thinking. It was based in part on the work of a dissident Soviet...
REVIEW: The Adventures Of Tintin - The Secret Of... →
Suggested List Of 2012 Oscar Nominations [as of... →
October 2011
7 posts
REVIEW: "Short + Sweet Theatre Gala Night" →
True or false? To begin on the road to achieving success, one of the continual tasks you have to do is to hide and dodge from the insufferable voice that insists on blaring out your insecurities and self-doubt at you, nonstop and unfailingly. Once it succeeds in sinking its hooks into you you get stung and become paralysed.
“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as...”
– DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Songs Of The Moment [Late 2011] →
September 2011
8 posts
“[In the process of making a decision,] I weigh the various arguments and...”
– MICHAEL FRAYN, “The Human Touch”
“Somebody told me once, “If you have a problem with a character, give the problem...”
– ALVIN SARGENT, screenwriter of the Spider-Man trilogy
Talent Is Nothing Without Focus And Endurance →
In every interview I’m asked what’s the most important quality a novelist has to have. It’s pretty obvious: talent. Now matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist. This is more of a prerequisite than a necessary quality. If you don’t have any fuel, even the best car won’t run. The problem...
August 2011
21 posts
Op Art! →
Op art, also known as optical art, is a style[1] of visual art that makes use of optical illusions.
“Optical art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing.”[2] Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made in only black and white. When the viewer looks at them, the impression is...
Automatic Assumptions Of Violence And Bigotry In...
There are certain entrenched assumptions we have in Malaysia.
One of those assumptions, is a sort of sword of Damocles that has hung over our heads since 13 May, 1969. That threat says: be careful what you say or do, because you might provoke the dreaded racial riots that will destroy the harmony of this country.
In other words: shut up and don’t say anything.
Now let’s look more...
The Definition Of Racism
To say something is ‘Malay’ and ‘Chinese’ is not in itself discriminatory in a racist sense.
To say ‘Malays are all XXX’ or ‘Indians are always XXX’ or ‘Dayaks never XXX’ is quite possibly but not necessarily racist. After all, you must be able to say stuff like ‘the ancestors of all the Malaysian Chinese came from China’.
...
Why We Enjoy Music
When a song begins, the cerebellum synchronises itself to the beat and then attempts to predict where the beats will occur as the music continues, perking up when it guesses the right beat but even more so when the song violates the expectation in a surprising way. The cerebellum seems to find pleasure in performing these continuous tiny adjustments in order to remain synchronised.
- DANIEL...
No One Way Of Thinking Or Learning Is Superior To...
As we practise, our ability to perform a task grows; the rate and shape of improvement are relatively stable across different tasks … the rate that people improve with practice follows a similar pattern.
The learning curve shows us that, while practice will always help improve performance, the most dramatic improvements happen first with diminishing returns thereafter. It also implies that...
Gilles Trehin and the imaginary complex city he... →
Mental Calculation: At about age 6 he surprised us by answering questions on the multiplication table which we were asking his sister for rehearsal… She told us that Gilles knew more, when we asked what she meant, she said “he knows 12th 13th 14th multiplication tables”, we tried, (with a calculator) and indeed Gilles could multiply, actually he was only stopped as he...
Perhaps what one needs to do now, is to claw one’s way up from the murky but comforting depths of self-denial into the brutal, eye-squintingly bright rays of reality above the surface.
But on the other hand, there are secondary consequences to consider. Paralysis, indeed.
“Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72.”
– Mark Twain
“Dear Optimist, Pessimist, and Realist:
while you guys were arguing about the...”
– The Opportunist
It occurred to me today that:
We are no longer affected by movies the way people of the early days, to the 50s, 60s, up till the 70s are affected by movies. Back then, there were terrible special effects and less sophisticated cinematography, and pre-50s the acting was uniformly hammy, but people bought into it.
Nowadays, you watch a film with state-of-the-art visual effects using the best computer graphics technology...
REVIEW: "A Darker Shade Of Red" →
The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight →
… You know it is possible in the right conditions that people, even children, might revert to savages. You know about the instant-coffee-version of cultures too. You remember high school. You’ve worked in a cubicle farm. You’ve watched Stephen King movies. People in new situations instinctively form groups. Those groups develop their own language quirks, in-jokes, norms, values and so on....
Beautiful Young Minds →
Details the experience of competing to compete at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
In particular, portraits of the supremely arrogant and extremely self-confident autistic maths prodigy with the flippant and unnecessarily technical diction.
And the shy, insecure maths prodigy with the near-perfect pronunciation in Mandarin and a Chinese girlfriend and who’s actually...
