Short Story

The kids are gathered at this departure gate, waiting for the plane which will take them on the last leg of their journey - for some, a journey measured in light-years. The faces are a varied constellation of budding femininity, wrapped in the age-old uniform of snowy blouse and chocolate skirt and tie, regional uniforms discarded in its favour. Yet as for schoolchildren anywhere, uniformity of dress doesn't mean harmony of mind. As with tired children anywhere, some tempers are beginning to simmer, and since these are girls, the bubbling-up takes the form of verbal competition.

Although this conference is intended to remind all of the unity of human origin, a certain planetarianism is in evidence. As they stare out through the glass at the sea beyond the airport, one says:
"My planet has huge forests of seaweed. Huiyooooh! A harvester can pull in tons and tons of kelp in a day. My uncle once brought me and my brothers go out on his boat."
Some others, whose homeworlds resemble the twentieth-century moon plus a few lichen beds and greenhouses, look envious.
But a gawky blonde, her Scandinavian ancestry clearly unmatched to the planet whose sun has darkened her face and bleached her hair, answers, "We don't have such big seaweeds, but near the coastline where I live, there are beds of algae with many clams and fish in them."

Daunted by the evidence of more advanced terraforming, the first contender looks around wildly for sympathy. Her eyes fix on another sallow-skinned, black-haired girl and wordlessly urge reinforcements. In a voice barely above a whisper, this one volunteers, "On my planet, we have seals."
"What are seals?" asks another.
"Big animals that eat fish."
There is a collective gasp. A few seconds later, the kelp-grower and the oyster-catcher, pretending to be interested in the view from another window, drift away.

The little Brownie whose planet has such a robust ecosystem as to support an eater of fish smiles quietly. Out of the group of two-hundred-odd, she and another girl have not warped in from distant colonised systems, but have merely flown across the face of the one they now stand on. Since the "icebreaker" games and formal introductions haven't taken place yet to match avatars and identities to persons, the others haven't realised that this one is from Earth.

Oink

I can hear squealing, grunting, and burbling noises coming from the jungle outside our fence. Either the monkeys are up to something really bizarre, or it's that sounder of wild boar that Mum's mentioned seeing. Which is funny, because the dogs aren't barking. Third option - bird that makes weird sounds? Pa said he saw two owls zoom over some time ago. No idea.

Not about to go outside and check them out though. My determination to be a good biologist is kinda outweighed by it being cold, dark, and extremely mosquito-ridden outside...and nearly 3a.m.

LRT blues

Drew this for The Star, hoping to win a quick fifty bucks...oh well. It's not really editorial cartoon type anyway.

Otherwise I would have to gouge out my eyes

[12:38] me: speaking of robots...did you see the I Robot movie?
[12:38] Steve: ya, disappointed in it...
[12:38] Steve: i robot books so, so, so very much better
[12:39] me: k, glad i didn't see it then.
[12:39] Steve: it wasnt' all taht good
[12:39] Steve: buchered Susan Calvin's character
[12:39] me: i was really disappointed they had Will Smith as the star instead of say, Judi Dench. i
[12:39] me: like, old ladies can't be geniuses?
[12:39] Steve: she was a wise, old cranky lady who just happened to be human's foremost expert on cybernetics
[12:40] Steve: in the movie, she was a little sex appeal.
[12:40] me: i knooooow
[12:40] me: SEX APPEAL?
[12:40] Steve: yep.
[12:40] me: Susan Calvin and sex appeal do not go together in the same senetence
[12:40] Steve: she was....hot.
[12:40] me: now i'm really glad i didn't see it.

Augustine on ecology

So Augustine had some weird opinions on how young girls shouldn't bathe because we should be ashamed to look at our own bodies - which is ludicrous and clearly the product of his having been extremely hamsup in his youth. But have you ever known anyone to be right about everything? I like what he has to say about ecology, even though if you had said "oecologia" or whatever to an ancient Greek-speaker, they might have said "What, the art of housekeeping?"

Chapter 16.—Of the Ranks and Differences of the Creatures, Estimated by Their Utility, or According to the Natural Gradations of Being.

... These are the gradations according to the order of nature; but according to the utility each man finds in a thing, there are various standards of value, so that it comes to pass that we prefer some things that have no sensation to some sentient beings. And so strong is this preference, that, had we the power, we would abolish the latter from nature altogether, whether in ignorance of the place they hold in nature, or, though we know it, sacrificing them to our own convenience. Who, e.g., would not rather have bread in his house than mice, gold than fleas? But there is little to wonder at in this, seeing that even when valued by men themselves (whose nature is certainly of the highest dignity), more is often given for a horse than for a slave, for a jewel than for a maid. Thus the reason of one contemplating nature prompts very different judgments from those dictated by the necessity of the needy, or the desire of the voluptuous; for the former considers what value a thing in itself has in the scale of creation, while necessity considers how it meets its need; reason looks for what the mental light will judge to be true, while pleasure looks for what pleasantly titilates the bodily sense. ...

No place on earth can be called a wasteland, except for what humans themselves have laid waste. Even deserts are ecosystems, even though they don't look like it to the the careless eye. National Geographic is one publication that's done a really good job of bringing this to public attention, for instance (which is why I'm annoyed at how dumbed down it's become in the last several years).

Someday, I will write what we saw in the Philippines last year - a national park being eaten away by hectares of illegal abaca plantations.

Note that Augustine is also pointing out how human evaluation is so flawed that we even refuse to place a greater economic value on a fellow human than an animal or thing, even though most people would acknowledge that the human has greater value on some moral scale.

Chapter 22.—Of Those Who Do Not Approve of Certain Things Which are a Part of This Good Creation of a Good Creator, and Who Think that There is Some Natural Evil.
This cause, however, of a good creation, namely, the goodness of God,—this cause, I say, so just and fit, which, when piously and carefully weighed, terminates all the controversies of those who inquire into the origin of the world, has not been recognized by some heretics [the Manichaeans, to wit - translator's note], because there are, forsooth, many things, such as fire, frost, wild beasts, and so forth, which do not suit but injure this thin blooded and frail mortality of our flesh, which is at present under just punishment. They do not consider how admirable these things are in their own places, how excellent in their own natures, how beautifully adjusted to the rest of creation, and how much grace they contribute to the universe by their own contributions as to a commonwealth; and how serviceable they are even to ourselves, if we use them with a knowledge of their fit adaptations,—so that even poisons, which are destructive when used injudiciously, become wholesome and medicinal when used in conformity with their qualities and design... And thus divine providence admonishes us not foolishly to vituperate things, but to investigate their utility with care; and, where our mental capacity or infirmity is at fault, to believe that there is a utility, though hidden, as we have experienced that there were other things which we all but failed to discover. For this concealment of the use of things is itself either an exercise of our humility or a levelling of our pride; for no nature at all is evil, and this is a name for nothing but the want of good.
...Now God is in such sort a great worker in great things, that He is not less in little things,—for these little things are to be measured not by their own greatness (which does not exist), but by the wisdom of their Designer; as, in the visible appearance of a man, if one eyebrow be shaved off, how nearly nothing is taken from the body, but how much from the beauty!—for that is not constituted by bulk, but by the proportion and arrangement of the members. But we do not greatly wonder that persons, who suppose that some evil nature has been generated and propagated by a kind of opposing principle proper to it, refuse to admit that the cause of the creation was this, that the good God produced a good creation.

I'm very tickled by the phrase "fit adaptations" because it sounds like something an evolutionary biologist would say. Even though they're meaning different things, though, they have the same sense...those functions which a living organism is best suited for.

He's probably right, that this contempt for whatever parts of nature aren't directly and obviously utilitarian to man is partly derived from a Manichaean mindset, that there's an evenly matched good vs. evil struggle on the metaphysical plane and therefore half of the physical world is also evil. It probably was useful to the Europeans when they were going around stealing everyone else's land.

...I should be fair. Destruction of the environment isn't something that originated in Europe only a few centuries ago, and in all likelihood it's probably as old as civilisation. In the last few years I've noticed (well, there's probably a lag between people saying it and me noticing, since I'm not an anthropologist) that anthropologists and historians are saying more and more that there were other civilisations that pushed themselves over the edge into collapse, like the Anasazi (the Gears' The Summoning God is really good, btw, and I fully plan to read their other Anasazi Mystery novels).

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Anyway, going off topic...the main point of this post is that anyone who thinks that "the environment" is some hippy neopagan or evolutionary secularist propaganda or whatever bad names you care to slap on it...YOU'RE A MORON AND A HERETIC TO BOOT. St. Augustine says so. Hehe.

Just realised that name-calling is totally un-Christian...okay, I'll shut up now before I get myself into any more trouble. I suck. =P

Gigi palsu

Mum and dad both got crowns done a couple weeks ago. The moulds look rather Halloweeny. Sad to say, they don't glow in the dark.

Amuk in America

Yes, this blog started out with a biology focus, but since virtually all the readers appear to be friends or acquaintances I'm going to indulge myself. I suppose you could cram sociology and psychology under bio, in a pinch. I've blogged about Horowitz's The Deadly Ethnic Riot before - almost done now. But here we go again. It was this sentence that suddenly connected with something else:

In many ways, but not in the pengamok's resignation to his own death, amok-like impulses pervade the riot; and amok, however calculative in its methods, is the polar opposite of instrumental violence

- p. 537.

Horowitz writes about amok/amuk ["running amuck" in US English] as being in some ways analogous to the state of mind of participants in the deadly ethnic riot - its being a reaction to perceived insult, a period of brooding - the "lull" between a precipitating event and a riot, in some cases a belief in magical invulnerability, hypermasculinity (participants are exclusively male), discarding of normal inhibitions, the goal of killing as many victims as possible.

Amok has attracted great attention from the mental health professions, concerned about how to classify it and about whether it is a culture-bound syndrome or merely a culture-specific exemplar of a disease that is universal in its incidence.

. - p. 103

I shall argue for the latter. People don't really amuk here much any more. The last case I remember reading about in the newspapers was a few years ago when one guy jumped on a bus and cut up a few passengers, including a girl who was going to try out for a beauty pageant. However, if you consider the symptoms of amuk, it sounds remarkably similar to a phenomenon which has been occurring in the West over the last decade or so: the school or workplace massacre.

The attack is brought on by an insult or a series of affronts to self-esteem, for which redress seems impossible,. After a period of anxious brooding or depression, the pengamok emerges suddenly with a weapon (usually a knife or kris) and, in a burst of manic energy, kills everything and everyone in his path until he is captured or killed in turn...

Once you notice the pattern, it's impossible to not compare it with the stereotype of the school killer that has emerged over the last few years: an antisocial loser, bullied over a long period of time. He is too weak to stop others attacking him by direct confrontation, and too much of a misfit to stop them by negotiation.

In certain Southeast Asian societies (and some others), the heroic attack of the pengamok is a powerful cultural motif, to which people might recur in appropriately analogous situations.

Kimveer Gill, who shot a number of students on a university campus in Canada, wrote on an Internet forum that "His name is Trench. You will come to know him as the Angel of Death," and reportedly wore a trenchcoat to the university - which, if it wasn't a reference to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of the Columbine high school massacre in 1999 who called themselves the Trenchcoat Mafia, sounds awfully like. People have expressed concerns that over-reporting of this type of mass murder in the news media could encourage copycat acts by people with similar resentments (as with other types of self-destruction like cutting, suicide, and suicide bombings), and in this case it seems to have done so.

Anybody remember from Pemahaman Prosa Klasik [Classical Prose Comprehension] the story about Hang Jebat mengamuk-ing, chasing everybody out of the palace and raping a dayang [concubine]? He eventually killed the dayang when Hang Tuah broke into the palace to take him down, too. (It's in the Sejarah Melayu if you want to look it up.) Does this sound anything like Charles Roberts who barely a few weeks ago barricaded himself in a school with a group of Amish schoolgirls whom he had intended to rape, before killing them as police closed in?

The pengamok is engaged in an utterly defiant destruction, "a self-liberation through revolt; a soul too sensitive to suggestion, humiliated by its own conscious enslavement, at last turns in upon itself, and accumulates so much energy that the only faintest pretext is needed to release it."

- p. 106. The quotation is from Henri Fauconnier, The Soul of Malaya, OUP 1965.

..."the killings are envisaged as a means of deliverance from an unbearable situation."

- p. 107, quoting B.G. Burton-Bradley, "The Amok Syndrome in Papua and New Guinea", Medical Journal of Australia 1(7), 1968

Notice Fauconnier's physical imagery; he seems to be talking about a nuclear bomb, or a supernova. Perhaps a volcano. Such rage, exploding...

I remember crying in the bathroom when the news broke about Columbine; tears not for the victims, but for the murderers, and for my own rage and helplessness. Lashing out in that way would never have occurred to me, because physical violence is not something I'm predisposed to, and self-annihilation remained more or less a restrained fantasy (not quite sure why), but I empathised with them. Sadistic classmates and indifferent teachers easily make school a living nightmare of taunting voices, grasping hands, stealing, mocking, making you eat your own soul and tear your own flesh, becoming rawer and rawer. (I still think of Seremban as the worst place I have ever lived.) There are conditions under which the only quick resolution to your shame is going out in a blaze of dark glory.

...solitary amok, which is a socially learned but declining form...

- p. 107

He missed it. This book was printed in 2002, but surely in a few more years Horowitz would have noticed the resurgence of amuk - not in Southeast Asia, but in his own country. Young men, social outcasts, seeing nothing to live for and brooding on fantasies of a climatic death, growing in a culture that increasingly glorifies killing whether state-sanctioned or individual, kill for both their maximum satisfaction and ultimate annihilation. In Horowitz's words, "to achieve revenge and suicide in a few strokes."

The gun is more deadly than the parang. Kyrie eleison.

Bambooboo

Note to self: next time wear gloves when stripping bamboo. It's bloody sharp. Bamboo is basically a type of giant grass, and if you've ever had to walk through lalang/cogon/razorgrass you know how mean that can be...

I got all Robin Hood and decided to try to make a bow because my parents' house has a big stand of bamboo behind. See instructions at this guy's blog.

ARRRRRRRRRRGH he used green bamboo to cut the lashings from. No wonder it was so hard when I cut mine from dried staves.

So my thumb, index, and middle fingers are all covered now in shallow papercut-like lacerations. This is the genius of HSH: long on ideas, short on common sense =P

MCIS

Teaching myself to play Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness on our ancient Casio keyboard. When I was small we used to turn on the built-in accompaniments/beats and dance around the living room. It feels good to get back to piano after more than a year.

It's in F sharp major, which is kinda weird at first, but then you realise the black keys are easier to hit. I read somewhere about some famous musician (early 20th century?) who was self-taught and composed more of his songs in that key for that reason...can't remember the guy's name.

Links to the piano scores are available here. I'm using the version by Janna Hutz and Eric Agnew. It's a really pretty song. I'd like to hear my friend AT play it - she's an oddball pianist who doesn't like classical music. She's written some pop melodies...cool stuff. (Scroll down to "Compositions" to download some of her mp3s.)

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We don't have a guitar at home at the moment so my more musically-inclined siblings complain when they come home. We're going down to Seremban next Monday, and mum's thinking of picking up a cheap one. EK told me to get a small one for my hands.

My cousin Jerng gave me a Yamaha classical guitar when we were in freshman year of college, but somehow I never learned to play it. Dating a guitar geek didn't do anything either - apparently musical ability does not spread by osmosis.

It seems like the guitar is an autodidact's instrument, and I've always needed a bit of prodding to learn something new. I just tend to be nervous/easily intimidated when there are so many other people around who are better...so it's gonna be a while. Let's see how long I can go before I get bored and try to pick it up when I get back to Madison. Hope my new apartment's walls are soundproof.

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I also have a recorder but for the sake of public order and sanity practising that is OUT OF THE QUESTION. =D

Engineering a disaster

Sorry, first proper blog entry in a long time. I've been bloody busy, despite having given up on searching for jobs. (Thought process was like: Let's postulate that a fresh graduate will take about three months, on average to find a job. From the middle of September on, I will be in Malaysia for a total of three months. Therefore, by the time I find a decent job, it's time to leave.)

The first thing that came up was that a lady at my dad's church had a sob story about a Form One kid in her science class who was illiterate and taking care of six younger sibs and a mentally ill mother. Turns out that her school is also missing a bio teacher because their bio teacher's wife got cancer and he had to accompany her overseas for treatment...so sight unseen, I volunteered. I hated secondary school, and especially secondary school Biology (I obviously love biology, the KBSM syllabus is another story entirely), so if I hadn't had that whiny letter printed in The Star last week and been given the chance to walk the talk or walk the plank, I'm not sure if I'd have done it.

Anyway, pity the poor kids with a month and a half to go before the SPM and no teacher. More on that later...Thursday was my first day.

The other thing that came up was that an education publisher to whom I applied for an assistant editor job wrote back with a) a test editing assignment to complete and b) an offer of a freelance writing assignment.

I rather enjoyed doing the test assignment...the tricky part was cutting it to below the word count limit. The writing was so horrible I couldn't figure out whether it was really something a client had given them in the past, or contrived. Sample:

These subjects take candidates one step higher in terms of knowledge development and one step closer in understanding the dynamics of business today. These subjects again have one goal that is to provide to candidates carnal knowledge of the internal working of the organization as well as how to survive in the external business environment.

The "carnal knowledge" part had me laughing my ass off, and I couldn't figure out what the writer could possibly have intended until my mum (ex-English teacher, also did some freelance editing before) suggested "intimate knowledge".

The engineering article...is another story. It's supposed to be about different industry sectors where fresh engineering grads can look for work. I jumped at the chance to do it eagerly, but I'd barely gotten started when the "where am I going, and what's with this handbasket?"^* feeling set it. I realized that I'd volunteered to write an article of over 4000 words on a subject which I know EFFING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about. o_O

Summore the contact person had originally told me the article was needed "in about a week" (on a Tuesday afternoon) and then when I accepted the assignment, this changed to "by the end of this week." Damnnnnnnnn... I told her I'd send it in by Monday morning.

The upshot of this is that I feel like a total dumbo and my engineer friend a.k.a. knight-in-shining-email back in Madison is doing the bulk of the descriptions stuff for me and I'm researching the Malaysia-specific stuff.

So far we've come to the conclusion that the person who put together the list of sections to be covered doesn't know anything about engineering either...so hopefully they won't notice.

* Going to hell in a hell in a handbasket, mah.