If I were the PAP, I would have cut out a number of SMCs from the GRCs where PAP support is highest. I am listening to the people; it’s not my fault if the opposition sucks and cannot capture those SMCs (which I made for them). Plus point: I can safely send the lightweights there and prove they have mandate. The SMCs act as a trap/lure for the opposition, who would send their candidates there and continue to fail. I predict Potong Pasir will fall to me eventually, because Chiam’s percentage has been falling steadily (loss of older generation), so I must keep Sitoh there — too risky to change him now. There is little chance of winning Hougang, so I will put cannon fodder there.

Unfortunately, the WP countered this strategy by sending their lightweights to the SMCs, and all their heavyweights to one GRC, and publicly proclaiming that those heavyweights will not take up NMP if they lose. They are gambling on the sentiment that people do not want to see zero opposition in the Parliment. But while it’s risky, they are unlikely to win. And this is a conundrum on my side too. If I win every seat, it’s also bad for me…this is really a lose-lose situation for me. (NB Chiam will never win at Bishan-Toa Payoh.)

How?

If I WERE the PAP, I would sacrifice George Yeo and Zainul Abidin Rasheed, and provide an outlet for the huge discontent now (we can ‘fix’ this later). But PAP is not me, and from all outward appearances, they wanted to keep Aljunied and just bring some NMPs on board. It’s a moot question now.

WP won Aljunied anyway.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney has a gift for presenting general science factoids in an amusing manner. Compared to many non-fiction books whose authors take themselves too seriously, Pretor-Pinney knows that he is writing not only to educate, but also to entertain.

The book is about waves, of course. It is also about things other than waves, such as sand dunes and surfing. The title is self-explanatory. The only glaring shortcoming is that the book ends rather abruptly. I wonder if he couldn’t figure out how to end the book, and so just gave up and handed the manuscript in to beat the deadline.

Also check out his previous book, The Cloudspotter’s Guide.

From amazon.com

Not so simple. Let’s talk about sampling. There are people who spend their careers on sampling issues and I’m not one of them. Here, I am just going to describe a simple and rather amusing thing that can go wrong with Plan to Profit.

Suppose you have a periodic signal, a diurnal cycle of some sort, which I simplify as a sinusoidal curve in black below.

Different samples on original curve

You have, tragically, samples every quarter-cycle, or every 6 hours. A regular way to sample the cycle is at 0h, 6h, 12h, 18h, and then go back to 0h. The samples are marked in red circles. Now you take the samples and plot them out to get a not-very-sinusoidal but fair-enough representation of your signal:

Sample A

Sometimes the sampling times can be offset. Instead of sampling at 0h, 6h, 12h, 18h, …, you may end up sampling at (0+T)h, (6+T)h, (12+T)h, (18+T)h, where T is some time offset. An example is marked in blue squares. Then you plot out your samples, and you get a saw-tooth pattern like below. This causes problems when calculating rate of change (gradient).

Sample B

If you don’t even sample often enough, e.g. only sample at half cycle intervals of 0h, 12h, 0h, …, you might not even get anything! To capture a signal you must sample at at least twice its frequency. Think of it as you must see whatever you are measuring go up and down to realise that it is oscillating, so if you measure at twice it’s frequency and hit peak, trough, peak, trough, …, you recognise an oscillation. In this case (green below), I cheated and measured midpoint, midpoint, midpoint…

More realistically, there is sometimes a drift to the sample times. So the plan may be to measure at 0h, 6h, 12h, 18h, …,
but you end up measuring at, say, (0+t)h, (6+2t)h, (12+3t)h, (18+4t)h, where t is some small time drift. If so you can get something like below:

Sample D

This hardly even resembles what we started out with. At this point, we can try to look for data with higher sampling frequency, or try to compile a profile over a long period of time. Or just give up, filter away the high frequencies and analyse lower frequency signals.

There’s also interpolating between the points but interpolation has its own set of problems.

(All this is just a long-winded way of saying whatever phenomena being studied has to be sampled adequately, which everyone knows already, but I thought the way the wave changed with the sampling was amusing enough to plot out…)

I was stunned. I have never seen a durian that big, and I told him so.

“I think they were from Thailand. Are Thai durians all so big?” he replied.

“They are round…or long?” I asked.

“Long, not round.”

“Hmmmm…”

When I passed by the supermarket near my place, I took this photo and showed it to him:

Not-durians

“Are these the ‘durians’ you saw?” I asked.

“Yes! So you have such big durians here too.”

“They’re not durians. They’re jackfruits.”

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This is a durian:

Durian

The flesh of a durian is usually yellow, sometimes orange, and soft — from mushy-soft to firm-soft. The flesh of a jackfruit is also yellow/orange, but it is hard, shiny and not as complex tasting as that of a durian. In fact, I consider the taste of jackfruit mediocre. I don’t like jackfruits. Dried jackfruit chips are ok though.

Jackfruit flesh

I much prefer the cempedak, which many people mistake for the jackfruit. They look pretty much the same on the outside, but the flesh of the cempedak also yellow/orange) is soft and gooey. It tastes like a sweet durian, but is not as filling.

Cempedak

There are probably other variants, but I’ve never tried any of those, except the breadfruit, and only in the keripik version.

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There is something called an “ang moh durian” (红毛榴莲, or caucasian durian) here:

"Caucasian durian"?

But that is just a soursop. It’s a “durian” with white flesh, so it’s a caucasian durian, get it?

Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind (link goes to www.amazon.com)

Good lesson, bad execution. This book could be condensed to half its length, so I recommend reading enough of the book get get the point, then ditching it. (This kind of “wringing all the water out of the washcloth” style of writing appears not uncommon in pop psychology books. My guess is that the authors are paid for a certain number of words and they have to churn out that number even if it meant torturing the readers to death with repetition.)

But the point the author tries to make is a good one: humans are capable of thinking both is a quick, analytical, logical style, as well as a slow, intuitive style. The two styles are suitable for different problems. Unfortunately, modern society worships speed and logic so much, that they try to apply the first style to situations it is unsuitable for.

I can believe that. My experience is that I seldom get a solution to my problem through logical reasoning. If I follow the logical reasoning backwards from a solution, it has to start somewhere, and it doesn’t start with logic, because logic follows from assumptions and axioms. These assumptions and axioms are changed and altered by … I guess it is “I have an idea, maybe…/what if…/perhaps…”.

My problem is usually that I jump directly from flash of intuition to applying the flash of intuition, which leads me to jump headfirst into incorrect ‘solutions’ then realising after I’ve wasted time. The correct sequence is flash of intuition to analyse whether intuition is correct, then apply or discard the flash intuition. Nobody is perfect, so I’m working on that.

Recently something funny happened. Looks like when people say they are “borrowing” something when they make off with the item, they really mean it.

I had bought a knife to use for fruits and ginger pieces (used to make tea). It’s a nice knife because it came with a plastic cover for the edge. I put the knife in the kitchen, and after a few weeks, it disappeared. This was last year. Fortunately it was one of those cheap knives from a parallel import stall.

The knife has suddenly reappeared.

Well, I thought, that’s nice of that person…to finally return the knife. I picked it up and took it into my office. I wasn’t going to leave the knife out there to be kidnapped again. After a few days, I decided to cut some ginger with that knife rather than with the new one I got. It was then that I realised why the knife had been returned.

The knife is now completely blunt, and useless as a knife. It has certainly seen a lot of usage, wherever it has been.

For some reason, the whole idea was completely hilarious. Perhaps the correct reaction should be anger, but I started to laugh. Someone had stolen a knife, used it until it was blunt, then returned. Perhaps I should sharpen the blunt knife and put it back in the pantry for them to collect?

My colleague said, “what surprises me isn’t that such a thing happened. What surprises me is that such a thing happened here.”

I replied, “Because it happened here, that’s why it’s funny.”

My Indian colleague was making fun of my unsuccessful goatee, which looks to become a Fu Manchu thingy if I let it grow any longer. He would grow ten times more facial hair the moment he stopped shaving, he said.

Then your head would look like a rambutan, I quipped.

Blank stares.

What is a rambutan, he asked.

A rambutan is errr…a rambutan. You know, rambutan. The fruit?

Blank stares all around.

Ok, this is a rambutan:

rambutan

No, it’s not a mutant golf-ball, but a real fruit that people eat. My grandmother used to have a rambutan tree in her garden. Rambutans are pretty annoying fruits to eat, because it’s difficult to open the tough shell to get at the fruit inside. People super-tough fingernails somehow manage to tear the casing open with their iron keratin daggers. I’d probably rip my nail clean of its bed if I tried. So I will grab the top and bottom of the oval fruit and twist one end clockwise and the other counter-clockwise. That would rip the shell open. Unfortunately, if I do it too hard, I end up ripping the inside into half. Also, your fingers start to ache after a while.

Rambutans look really gross on the outside. Unlike the specimen in the picture (which is probably grown in a farm where they marinate the trees in pesticides), pristine rambutans, such as picked from my grandmother’s garden, tend to have blackened, broken, half-rotten hairs on the outside. You have to remind yourself that once you get open the gross exterior, the inside fruit is nice and edible.

Sort of like some people.

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There’s another fruit that looks like a rambutan and tastes pretty much identical to a rambutan. I like to think of it as a shaven rambutan. The rambutan went to the hair-dresser and came out looking like this:

not-a-rambutan

Apparently it’s called a “pulasan”. I prefer buah pulasan to rambutan any day. It’s juicier, I think, and definitely less hairy to deal with.

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While we’re on the subject of squishy white fruits inside red shells, why not show a picture of the lychee?

Lychee

If the pulasan is a rambutan that went to the hair-dresser, the lychee is one who went bald. It’s also much easier to peel — the skin is like cardboard and easily broken…at which point all the juices of the fruit squirt out and hit your eye. The lychee tastes different from the rambutan and pulasan. The flavour is more intense.

According to my mother, one should only eat a few lychees at a time, because “one handful of lychees is three handfuls of fire”, i.e. too many lychees in one go will make one ill.

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Last, but not least, is the longan:

longan

Poor longan, small and brown. It tastes sweet but is also a bit salty. It’s often dried and used in desserts or soups for cough.

If you are a visitor to the Tropics, what should you experience, that will be unique to the Tropics?
No, it’s not the Sun and Rain (and more Rain).

It’s the Fruits. The sheer amount of fruits here that you will never find elsewhere.

Yesterday, my colleague brought back some fruits from Jakarta. They look like this:

Snake fruit

I didn’t know what the real name of this thing is. I’ve always just known it as “the snake fruit”. After a search on the internet, it turns out that the thing is actually called Salak, and it comes from a palm. It’s unofficial name is indeed “snake fruit”, and the reason for that is obvious.

It’s pretty dry and crunchy. The colour and consistency of the fruit reminds me of hard cheese, but without the pungent aroma. The skins is fun to play with when you’ve finished the fruit.

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On the subject of bizarre looking fruits, one of my favorite fruits is what we call a “limkim”, which is this:

lim kim

Inside is full of cloyingly sweet white flesh, which tastes like solidified sugar syrup mixed with flour. It is one of those fruits that taste so much like confectionery that you wonder if some baker had baked it and stuffed it into the shell of a fruit:

limkim, opened

I’ve heard it labelled as “custard apple”, but it’s not a real custard apple. After some digging, I find that this thing is actually a “sugar apple”. It’s definitely sugary, but not very apple-like. We also call it a “shi jia” (释迦), after 释迦摩尼, and if you wonder why please direct your gaze towards the top of his head:

Buddha and his head...

It’s kind of irreverent, but I’m sure buddha won’t be upset.

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The term apple seems more applicable to this fellow here, which we call “jambu”:

jambu

They look a lot more like red pears, but the skin is glassy and they are highly crunchy — they crunch louder than apples. The taste like bland, like slightly sweetened water.

jambu, opened

Strangely enough, I’ve never seen a red d’Anjou pear, until my friend posted a picture of it on her blog last month.

What is this, man?!

This is a relatively old book, so the “radical” reworking is probably not so radical nowadays. However, the title is catchy and the author tells a story like a champ. The pictures of humanoid skulls from past and present and of different races are also fascinating to look at.

The book is about how human beings spread from East Africa to the rest of the world. One key idea I took away from the book was how all species have a “home range” where they diversify from and where they retreat into depending on advantageous or disadvantageous climatic conditions. For humans, it is East Africa.

The radical reworking of human evolution is the notion that humans drive their own evolution through their own technology. It was the environment created by technology that drove humans to evolve along a certain direction, rather than the natural environment. For example, the small teeth and jaws of humans evolved because mouth power was no longer needed for food processing. The reason for that was that human technology could cook and process their raw food. With small jaws, large facial muscles were no longer required. Without large facial muscles, thick brow ridges were no longer required. Without all these extra physical structures taking up space on the human head, human skulls could balloon.

This argument also meant that physical indicators of human evolution lagged behind their actual social/intellectual/technological development. A humanoid fossil that may outwardly appear to be “primitive” would internally (i.e. socially/intellectually/technologically) be more alike modern humans than we would expect.