A litre of unleaded petrol in Malaysia now costs RM2.70(~USD0.80), a 40% increase over the previous price of RM1.92. As per usual motorists could be seen making a beeline for the nearest petrol station last night to “take maximum advantage” of the old subsidized fuel prices as the revision will come into effect at midnight.

Much consternation aside, it is not as bad as it looks. The government has announced that they will be awarding an annual RM625 rebate to each vehicle with an engine capacity <= 2000cc when you pay your road tax effective this July 1st.

What this basically means is that you will be recieving RM12 per week to absorb the new hike in prices. For those lazy with maths this means that if you have been pumping RM30 worth of fuel per week this rebate will be paying for the 40% hike. Any lower and you will be gaining a positive income, any more and you’ll feel some heat.

I’m cozying up to this change as it will provide those owning economy cars with more incentives to use less and at the same time perhaps encourage Malaysians to pursue alternative fuels or to practice efficient power management. Here’s hoping that the extra tax income generated will be wisely spent on upgrading our public transporation systems. Better yet, fix the goddamn potholes all over the country with REAL asphalt that could withstand severe rain corrosion (I swear mechanics are making a killing everywhere fixing wheel alignments and whatnot. Maybe it’s a conspiracy :O). 

That’s not to say everything is fine and dandy however, undoubtly prices of almost everything else will escalate in tow and inflation was projected to hit 6% this year. Time to ask for those pay increments, or start carpooling.

Best, Malaysian, Song, Ever.

Can you feel the wave of change that’s sweeping all over the nation? Malaysia’s all growing up. /tears

Anyways do check up the site. It’s full of delicious fruits. Just don’t eat the guava. The geek bites. (I know she said she doesn’t, but it’s scary nonetheless).

I’ve fielded this question twice already so far. If the materials in the films to be aired on Pangea Day are so great and powerful, why not just watch it later? Why not download the shows say, a week later, and sit alone in your room and watch it? Why stay up at 2-6 a.m. (GMT +8) on a Sunday morning to watch the show with millions of other people all over the earth (who are physically sitting down at the exact same moment)?

Because at exactly 2-6 a.m., millions of people around the world will be saying, “I want to know.” I want to know about everyone else on this earth, I want to understand them, I want see what they see, and feel what they feel.

Because at exactly 2-6 a.m., millions of people around the world will be saying, “Let’s stop.” Let’s stop this relationship based on fear and lies and misunderstandings. Let’s stop stereotyping and assuming. Let’s escape our narrow mindsets.

Because at exactly 2-6 a.m., millions of people around the world will be saying, “Let’s begin.” Let’s begin changing our minds if not ourselves, let’s begin spreading the love and the understanding. Let’s begin making the world a better place for all of us.

Because on Monday, or Tuesday, or the week after that, those 24 short films will be just short films. And the reason anyone will be watching the show after that, will be because it was recommended all at once by those millions of people, who will be sitting down this Sunday, at 2-6 a.m. (GMT +8). Watching it after that by yourself will be like, as one of my friends put it, “sitting your ass watching some inspirational stuff and doing nothing.” Well the doing’s on this Sunday guys. We’re doing so much more than making a statement, but we are definitely making a strong one. We’re saying, ALL of us, collectively, that we care.

http://pangeadaymelaka.blogspot.com

This Sunday (11 May) at exactly 2.00 a.m. (GMT +8), millions of people around the world will be sitting down together at the first ‘global campfire’ in the spirit of unity and peace, to watch 24 short films made by the world, for the world.

Starting at 02:00 a.m. locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

The 24 short films to be featured have been selected from an international competition that generated more than 2,500 submissions from over one hundred countries. The films were chosen based on their ability to inspire, transform, and allow us see the world through another person’s eyes. Details on the Pangea Day films can be viewed here.

Myself and Ugendran are organizing the Pangea Day event for Multimedia University Melaka Campus. More information about our local event is available at http://pangeadaymelaka.blogspot.com. All staff, students, and alumni are invited! Please RSVP to us at pangea@mmu.edu.my so that we can keep track of how many people are coming.

/fume

Here’s a conversation I had about 20 times in the past 5 days.

Me: “Are you coming for the Pangea Day event?”

Person: “I have to work the next day lah.”

Me: “…”

Person: “Wut.”

Me: “It’s 2.00 a.m. on Sunday. ON SUNDAY. It’s errr, Saturday night or Sunday morning. Not Sunday night.”

Person: “Owait.”

Me: “The clearest I can get is, 3 hours after the show ends, it’s 9.00 a.m. Sunday morning. You can sleep the rest of the day.”

Person: “Right.”

Really? It’s that hard to understand “11 May 2008 (Sunday), 2-6 a.m. ??”

/facepalm

Well, it’s not my country, but I would be remiss for not posting this speech by Barack Obama, one which will probably (and definitely should) be remembered for a long, long time in history, depending on how the next US Elections turn out. Far away as I am, his honesty and the simple efficiency with which he boils down issues which aren’t too alien in my own country brings on the kind of surge of hope I’ve been feeling quite a bit of lately after Malaysia’s recent round of elections.

Not just ‘one of the’ constructs, but THE construct.

Wikipedia might disagree with such a statement, considering the number of definitions you can find there. Well let’s see what the contributers there have to say. The summary of common traits associated with intelligence can perhaps be listed as:

1. using tools
2. culture
3. problem solving
4. abstract thoughts
5. complex thoughts

All these terms (and the long sentences on Wikipedia) are human attempts at defining the thoughts that dominate our consciousness, something which no other species on earth appears to exhibit. Figuring out the presence of intelligence based on 4 and 5 is a rather daunting task - no one is quite capable of experiencing consciousness from another person’s perspective. It will not be easy to ‘prove’ that another species or even person is actively thinking abstract and complex thoughts. However, due to our ability to communicate our own thoughts to another person, and have them reciprocate with ideas/thoughts of their own, we assume that they possess a similar intelligence (and that they are not a very powerful supercomputer pre-programmed to produce all the right responses to any given input in order to seem intelligent). Since that animals are unable to communicate any similar thoughts to us, we assume they do not.

However, aspects 1 to 3 is considerably easier to test for.

Remember back in school when your science (or biology) teacher said, “Humans are actually a type of animal as well, biologically speaking. It is only our intelligence that separates us.” And you asked, “But what is this intelligence that makes us different?” And he/she answered, “We are the only species on earth that have displayed the capability to use tools.” At least, that was the textbook answer in my country back in around 1995. Apparently the textbook writer(s) didn’t do his/her homework or check in with Jane Goodall, who have discovered tool-using chimpanzees since 1960. In fact, tool-use is not common to all chimpanzees but exclusive to certain communities of them which have apparently discovered it, and these continue passing on that knowledge across the generations. Chimpanzee communities which have not figured out how to, for example, fish termites from their mounds using a stick, leave termites alone despite their abundance as a food source in their territory.

When Louis Leakey received an excited telegram from Jane describing her discoveries he made his now famous response: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

No. 2 (culture) and 3 (problem solving) have never been strong arguments for intelligence since that many animals display some semblance of group behavior and the ability to survive and adapt in different environments, suggesting some ability at problem solving. More thorough research have actually revealed animals to display cultural differences between different communities - exclusive behaviors that is passed on through observational learning. And apart from being observed solving problems in the wild, many animals display and pick up increasingly complex problem solving skills quickly when in captivity. What then is left to differentiate us from them?

Language.

Of course, I am aware that dogs are capable of expressing anger by growling, and that romantics may call this language. I don’t. The language I’m referring to here is more like an arbitrary set of learned symbols (usually vocal) organized systematically into a logical grammar consisting of small infinitely combinatorial elements, capable of communicating concrete and abstract meaning, and shared by a group. (Yes, I ripped it off somewhere.)

Try coming up with an abstract or complex thought without the usage of language. Try to explain the word ‘explain’ in pictures, or how binary addition works without 0s and 1s (mathematical language). If you think a little, you will find that most of the activity in your mind is either prompted by your dominant language, or facilitated by it. Which is why I much prefer to ask people what language they think in than what their mother tongue is. The guy who tells you that he thinks mainly only in a pictures is a monkey (trying to be funny) or maybe a donkey (trying to be an ass).

Our tool-use, culture and problem solving capacities are also vastly superior or more complex compared to animals due to language in two ways. The fact that we have been cataloguing the things, experiences, and concepts we’ve seen, heard, felt, experienced or dreamed up for centuries through language, and the fact that we’ve shared all these things with each other in (almost) all it’s complexity and richness. Simply put, language allows us to think, and saves each of us the need to start from scratch.

After writing the bulk of this article, I found out happily that Dan Dennett agrees, and he explains all this in a much more precise way. Here’s an excerpt:

Our human brains, and only human brains, have been armed by habits and methods, mind-tools and information, drawn from millions of other brains to which we are not genetically related. This, amplified by the deliberate use of generate-and-test in science, puts our minds on a different plane from the minds of our nearest relatives among the animals. This species-specific process of enhancement has become so swift and powerful that a single generation of its design improvements can now dwarf the R-and-D efforts of millions of years of evolution by natural selection. [...] if we survive our current self-induced environmental crises, our capacity to comprehend will continue to grow by increments that are now incomprehensible to us.

I’ve had long philosophical conversations in the past in which there were differences in opinion. A great many people seemed to be always happy to say, “Yeah, I know what you mean, but I don’t agree. I have my own opinions, and it’s hard/cannot be explained, but it’s there.” I checked - it wasn’t the traditional language barrier - they couldn’t explain it in any other language either. They just disagreed for a reason they could not state. Similarly a lot of people when talking about their world view goes, “I have this perspective, you know. On how the world works and stuff. I just haven’t really figured it out yet in detail yet, so I can’t explain it, but it ’s there I assure you.” Others are reluctant to air their opinions citing, “I don’t want to say why I think like that, because your language skill is better than mine. Of course your argument will sound better! I don’t explain mine as well. [But mine is just as good.]“

If you are too lazy/can’t be bothered to reason out an ‘opinion’ or ‘perspective’ to yourself in some form of language, you don’t have an intelligent one. Haphazard thought which is not reasoned out and cannot be explained is not thought. Human intelligence is facilitated by language. Language defines intelligence - and intelligence is what sets us apart as a species on this planet. Understanding the most complex of concepts requires the understanding of the language that describes it. Which is probably why I am still currently hopeless at the kind of maths required for advanced physics.

A monkey may think the world is a banana for whatever reason (if it can even think that), but I doubt it would claim that reason an intelligent one - at least, not by human standards.

I’m glad to have picked up at least one language - relatively well.

This is my second life and it seems pretty sweet so far, aside from the gnawing pain across the whole of my right torso and the occasional steak knife stabbing agony when I try to mobilize certain muscle groups.

At 8:30 a.m. this morning a Kia sedan became a little more excited than usual and plowed into the driver side of my car with enough vigor to tame a thousand female amazonian warriors should they exist. Apparently annoyed at this transgression my lightweight Satria absorbed the blow like a trooper and spun two complete circles, smashed into the curb, smothered a bush and probably frightened an entire ant colony whose queen upon staring at the sudden and totally rude appearance of my car’s front fender, predictably issued a royal decree that setting up shop at the corner of a deadly intersection seems like an overvalued idea (in hindsight), and proceeded to have three ministers whipped publicly, a thousand warriors ordered to assault said offending fender and had a dozen contingent of scouts recon for a more suitable nesting site.

(This is the part where I write “But I digress” but I happen to like digressing aand it will not kill you to noticed that I had DONE so)

I discovered that it’s rather annoying to have ONLY “FUUUUUUKKKKKKKK!!!!” screaming in my mind when I realized the increasingly high probability that I will die. No time dilation, no slo-mo flashbacks to my kindergarten sweetheart, just pure unadulterated horror. So much for dramatization.

When the spinning finally stopped, and when my faculties finally switched back on one by one I noticed that there was an acrid smell in the air (my airbag had deployed) that seared my throat. I then noticed two pairs of hands grabbing the frame of my door and trying to pry it off so that I can actually be extracted. There were a lot of disembodied voices asking if I’m alright, or where does it hurt and whether I can move. This prompted me to wave my left pinky weakly. There certainly was urgency in the air about all the getting out of car thing but I wasn’t feeling anything much if at all and my seatbelt was still on so things should be alright if I just take a quick nap, aight?

A small defiant part of my mind however was desperately trying to inform me that most (but not all) cars runs on internal combustion engine and those gulp down stuff that makes it combust. Licking flames hmm. OH SHIT FUCKKK (excuse my pathetic literary efforts during a crisis)

So I promptly unbuckled my seatbelt, yanked myself over to the passenger side, unlocked the door, stepped out onto the asphalt and immediately fell down on all fours, coughing. Wiggling my extremities to check if anything important was broken/maimed/smashed I noticed the lack of spilled blood, which was basically an encouraging sign. I then stood and stalked around my expired car, much to the relief of six men (how did they get here so quickly??), who are still asking the same questions save that they are now also asking me to sit down and rest.

It sounded incredibly absurd at the time.

What I saw when I got round to the impact site was even more incredulous:

In a nutshell if I had been a fraction slower I would bear the force of the trauma and would probably have a broken spine/hip/be playing D&D with Gary Gygax. If I had been a little faster my fuel tank may have ruptured and pose a great hazard, regardless of whether it exploded or not. Talk about providence.

Somebody handed me my spectacles at this juncture, which I noticed to be lacking the left lens but I put it on anyway.

So we fast forward to various men in uniform buzzing in asking questions, Min Chen swooping in and going postal on the offending driver (who was insignificant to me at the time as to how bedbugs are pretty insignificant to us -I don’t know why) and my Dad finally arriving to send me to the hospital for a checkup, which I found to be rather tedious at the time because my organs felt like they have been rearranged according to alphabetical order i.e. balls retreated into my abdominal cavity and heart dropping to where my bowels was.

I presently found myself on a wheelchair, waiting for a pretty cute nurse to give me a prelim check in the ER ward of a hospital. Both of us had to wait for a doctor and the X-Rays, and it was boring so I did what every self respecting dude would have done if he just had a serious accident and is waiting to find out if he’s about to die.

ME: So, how long have you been working here.
Pretty Cute Nurse (PCN forthwith): Ah…this is my third week and my second day in ER.
ME: Oh?
PCN (Blushing a little): Yeap, I’m a student still. From (Some Uni name lost in the haze of the moment).
ME: Ah. I’m a lecturer.
PCN: Really? Which university?
ME: Lim Kok Wing
PCN (Sagely): Ah, very expensive. Most expensive.
ME: Uh, nah it’s about the same really. How long till you graduate?
PCN: This semester. I’ve been posted to other hospitals for two months now.
ME: Ah so they rotate you around.
PCN: Err… yes
FANTASIZING ME: Tell me nurse, would you mind stripping together with me in the x-ray room so we can conduct a full body examination. With x-rays. And maybe some whiskey to numb the pain.
ACTUAL ME: I teach games. (Picture a burning fighter jet spiraling meteorically into the ground in a huge fireball)
PCN (Feigning interest and surprise): Wow, a game genius! (WTF is that supposed to mean?)
ME: Err…nah I just tell people about what’s fun.

At this point the radiographer rushed in and promptly abducted me into the X-Ray chamber. I didn’t even get to say goodbye. After a tense ten minutes the doctor called me into his office, stuck my X-Ray up on a lightbox and started pointing vigorously to blurish blobs of matter. Well it turned out that everything is where they should be and my skull (they had to X-Ray it FOUR times - yeah it’s thick) hadn’t sustained any fractures. He then gave me a prescript, told me to rush back to the hospital if anything starts to leak (figuratively) and shooed me away.

And so here I am, typing this away while refraining my self from chewing the Celebrax painkillers to save them for tomorrow when according to the doc “you just might get out of bed, good luck”.

William found this little gem on http://cectic.com/019.html . Brilliant.

I think most if not all of you have heard Lux Aeterna and its various incarnations(compositions). Still puzzled?

Think Lord of the Rings trailer.

It was originally composed by Clint Mansell for the movie Requiem for a Dream, and have been featured an adapted to various movies and their trailers. Even games are picking it up for their own teasers.

Despite the dreadful amount of cheesiness one may expect from this score due to its many exposure to pop culture it remains a demonstrable evidence that music can and WILL reach down to our psyche and yank our soulstrings. I am clearly not qualified to justify or explain this phenomenon but as a listener I’m disarmed by its ability to whip chains around my overactive imagination and yank it around in a crazy fashion to create a constant stream of epiphanies when I’m doing just about anything.

Here’s a youtube sample of the original.

and one composed just for LoTR.

So now, a few easy steps to really make your life more interesting(to yourself only, unfortunately):

1) Obtain the mp3 and pop it into your ipod/mp3 player.
2) Listen when you do your laundry, drive to the store, lick stamps, conduct perfunctory observations of your right big toe, or even (for the hell of it) slap your monkey.
3) Come back in tears feeling like a vindicated hero.
4) Grimace as the sledgehammer of Mundane Life plow mercilessly into the depths of your livid conciousness.
5) Repeat step 2 as many times as necessary.

I love music.