One who believes all of a book would be better off without books

bad bad school...

So we've all gone through this, or are going through it. What are we going to do in the future? The jump from secondary to tertiary education is enormous. And even after that, most of us are still wondering about what to work as in the future. We leave school feeling clueless about what to do next. So what exactly have we spent the last 13-15 years of our lives learning?

Schools came up when civilizations evolved enough to support entire groups of people not working. A complex society would need people with at least basic education to function efficiently. The word school, came from Greek, originally meaning 'leisure spent in pursue of knowledge'. A lot of times, schools were built as part of a religious center, and if you were not of an upper class or a aristocrat, being a scribe at a temple was probably the only way to learn how to read and write properly. 

Strangely enough, Britain was one of the last European countries to have compulsory education (Aztecs being the first... woohoo! those were smart heads they were chopping off!) 

But if you check up Deschooling the Society, or just google miseducation, you will find alot of opposing views about the actual benefits of going through compulsory public education. Schooling that confuses grades, theories and ability to memorize with success in life, knowledge and competence. Schooling that inhibits your ability to think instead. I especially find fault with the fact that for so many years I've been taught to pronounce flour as 'flar'. And then after you graduate from school, it becomes an artifact in a museum, completely removed from you. Something you gaze at and go "ahh.... school" as if you have stopped learning and stopped having a real life.

After all, if you spent all your life so far in a daily routine of reading books and doing homework, how on earth are you suppose to accept that the Monday after your graduation you're suppose to... well, just do something else. And isn't there something wrong if school is suppose to prepare you for life, but then all the adults tells you the best part of life was being in school? Wait a minute, so all that preparation didn't work anyway? 

So, yes, if you do come out of school feeling lost and confuse, blame it on the education. 

 

 

History of Singapore

Heraclitus said that “everything is constantly changing and opposites things are identical, so that everything is and is not at the same time”


My guess is that he's saying that when you change forward, you need to change backwards as well. But what is changing backwards? By changing the present to fit a fuzzy memory of a happy utopian past. Simply put, nostalgia, tradition, customs. However else you'd like to call it.


So to be a revolutionary civilization, forward thinking and always keeping with the times, it needs also to be grounded in identity and habits. You've probably heard this many times in different contexts.... that Singapore is changing too fast. Maybe we forgot to change backwards while we were sprinting forward at massive speeds. We sacrificed a slice of our heritage in exchange for economic and political stability. And to fill that gapping hole we feel, we created artifacts of history to adore.... the Merlion, Shangnila Utama, do we even truly know what they are?


But yea, seriously, now I'm distracted... who exactly came up with the story of the Merlion? I know Shangnila Utama thought he saw a lion, I don't think Sir Stamford Raffles saw anything other than the Sultan... And I remember going to Sentosa's Merlion where they had a little video of the legend of the Merlion where it rose out of the ocean one rainy day and stared shooting laser beams from its eyes. 
That's the version I told my friends when they ask about the history of Singapore.


I guess we can't really dig for archeological sites and we probably already destroyed whatever was left in the soil with the Circle line, so we're left with what the first bunch of immigrants who arrived in Singapore came up with while squatting by Singapore river eating Hokkien Mee.


Personally, I'd like to think that the Merlion was a very rare high level Pokemon.

Just Beautiful

insane! insane!

Tim Minchin's Storm

Inner North London, top floor flat
All white walls, white carpet, white cat,
Rice Paper partitions
Modern art and ambition
The host’s a physician,
Lovely bloke, has his own practice
His girlfriend’s an actress
An old mate from home
And they’re always great fun.
So to dinner we’ve come.

The 5th guest is an unknown,
The hosts have just thrown
Us together for a favour
because this girl’s just arrived from Australia
And has moved to North London
And she’s the sister of someone
Or has some connection.

As we make introductions
I’m struck by her beauty
She’s irrefutably fair
With dark eyes and dark hair
But as she sits
I admit I’m a little bit wary
because I notice the tip of the wing of a fairy
Tattooed on that popular area
Just above the derrière
And when she says “I’m Sagittarien”
I confess a pigeonhole starts to form
And is immediately filled with pigeon
When she says her name is Storm.

Chatter is initially bright and light hearted
But it’s not long before Storm gets started:
“You can’t know anything,
Knowledge is merely opinion”
She opines, over her Cabernet Sauvignon
Vis a vis
Some unhippily
Empirical comment by me

“Not a good start” I think
We’re only on pre-dinner drinks
And across the room, my wife
Widens her eyes
Silently begs me, Be Nice
A matrimonial warning
Not worth ignoring
So I resist the urge to ask Storm
Whether knowledge is so loose-weave
Of a morning
When deciding whether to leave
Her apartment by the front door
Or a window on the second floor.

The food is delicious and Storm,
Whilst avoiding all meat
Happily sits and eats
While the good doctor, slightly pissedly
Holds court on some anachronistic aspect of medical history
When Storm suddenly she insists
“But the human body is a mystery!
Science just falls in a hole
When it tries to explain the the nature of the soul.”

My hostess throws me a glance
She, like my wife, knows there’s a chance
That I’ll be off on one of my rants
But my lips are sealed.
I just want to enjoy my meal
And although Storm is starting to get my goat
I have no intention of rocking the boat,
Although it’s becoming a bit of a wrestle
Because – like her meteorological namesake -
Storm has no such concerns for our vessel:

“Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy
They promote drug dependency
At the cost of the natural remedies
That are all our bodies need
They are immoral and driven by greed.
Why take drugs
When herbs can solve it?
Why use chemicals
When homeopathic solvents
Can resolve it?
It’s time we all return-to-live
With natural medical alternatives.”

And try as hard as I like,
A small crack appears
In my diplomacy-dike.
“By definition”, I begin
“Alternative Medicine”, I continue
“Has either not been proved to work,
Or been proved not to work.
You know what they call “alternative medicine”
That’s been proved to work?
Medicine.”

“So you don’t believe
In ANY Natural remedies?”

“On the contrary actually:
Before we came to tea,
I took a natural remedy
Derived from the bark of a willow tree
A painkiller that’s virtually side-effect free
It’s got a weird name,
Darling, what was it again?
Masprin?
Basprin?
Asprin!
Which I paid about a buck for
Down at my local drugstore.

The debate briefly abates
As our hosts collects plates
but as they return with desserts
Storm pertly asserts,

“Shakespeare said it first:
There are more things in heaven and earth
Than exist in your philosophy…
Science is just how we’re trained to look at reality,
It can’t explain love or spirituality.
How does science explain psychics?
Auras; the afterlife; the power of prayer?”

I’m becoming aware
That I’m staring,
I’m like a rabbit suddenly trapped
In the blinding headlights of vacuous crap.
Maybe it’s the Hamlet she just misquothed
Or the eighth glass of wine I just quaffed
But my diplomacy dike groans
And the arsehole held back by its stones
Can be held back no more:

“Look , Storm, I don’t mean to bore you
But there’s no such thing as an aura!
Reading Auras is like reading minds
Or star-signs or tea-leaves or meridian lines
These people aren’t plying a skill,
They are either lying or mentally ill.
Same goes for those who claim to hear God’s demands
And Spiritual healers who think they have magic hands.

By the way,
Why is it OK
For people to pretend they can talk to the dead?
Is it not totally fucked in the head
Lying to some crying woman whose child has died
And telling her you’re in touch with the other side?
That’s just fundamentally sick
Do we need to clarify that there’s no such thing as a psychic?
What, are we fucking 2?
Do we actually think that Horton Heard a Who?
Do we still think that Santa brings us gifts?
That Michael Jackson hasn’t had facelifts?
Are we still so stunned by circus tricks
That we think that the dead would
Wanna talk to pricks
Like John Edwards?

Storm to her credit despite my derision
Keeps firing off clichés with startling precision
Like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition

“You’re so sure of your position
But you’re just closed-minded
I think you’ll find
Your faith in Science and Tests
Is just as blind
As the faith of any fundamentalist”

“Hm that’s a good point, let me think for a bit
Oh wait, my mistake, it’s absolute bullshit.
Science adjusts it’s beliefs based on what’s observed
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.
If you show me
That, say, homeopathy works,
Then I will change my mind
I’ll spin on a fucking dime
I’ll be embarrassed as hell,
But I will run through the streets yelling
It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And while it’s memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite
It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!

You show me that it works and how it works
And when I’ve recovered from the shock
I will take a compass and carve Fancy That on the side of my cock.”

Everyones just staring at me now,
But I’m pretty pissed and I’ve dug this far down,
So I figure, in for penny, in for a pound:

“Life is full of mysteries, yeah
But there are answers out there
And they won’t be found
By people sitting around
Looking serious
And saying isn’t life mysterious?
Let’s sit here and hope
Let’s call up the fucking Pope
Let’s go watch Oprah
Interview Deepak Chopra

If you’re going to watch tele, you should watch Scooby Doo.
That show was so cool
because every time there’s a church with a ghoul
Or a ghost in a school
They looked beneath the mask and what was inside?
The fucking janitor or the dude who runs the waterslide.
Throughout history
Every mystery
EVER solved has turned out to be
Not Magic.

Does the idea that there might be truth
Frighten you?
Does the idea that one afternoon
On Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you
Frighten you?
Does the notion that there may not be a supernatural
So blow your hippy noodle
That you would rather just stand in the fog
Of your inability to Google?

Isn’t this enough?
Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?
If you’re so into Shakespeare
Lend me your ear:
“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw perfume on the violet… is just fucking silly”
Or something like that.
Or what about Satchmo?!
I see trees of Green,
Red roses too,
And fine, if you wish to
Glorify Krishna and Vishnu
In a post-colonial, condescending
Bottled-up and labeled kind of way
That’s ok.
But here’s what gives me a hard-on:
I am a tiny, insignificant, ignorant lump of carbon.
I have one life, and it is short
And unimportant…
But thanks to recent scientific advances
I get to live twice as long as my great great great great uncles and auntses.
Twice as long to live this life of mine
Twice as long to love this wife of mine
Twice as many years of friends and wine
Of sharing curries and getting shitty
With good-looking hippies
With fairies on their spines
And butterflies on their titties.

And if perchance I have offended
Think but this and all is mended:
We’d as well be 10 minutes back in time,
For all the chance you’ll change your mind.

what the dinosaurs did….

The last set of lectures is possibly my favourite.

Mark Fisher’s talk on Capitalist Realism was difficult to follow without plenty of background information and definition of words but nevertheless I thought he brought up an interesting view of how we are deemed to be at the last stage of everything. Us being the last men, and reality being the last form of illusion. At a stage where everything has been done and “original” has lost its meaning. That is something we as designers had to struggle with. In a time where cultures are no longer distinctive and “sacred relics of the past (are) viewed as aesthetic history today”.

But rather than the bleak picture he paints of the current overtly-saturated situation, I think that this is instead an important “recycling” era. Like a pasticcio (from which you get pastiche), over centuries, ingredients have been laid down layers after layers, each one integrating into the next. The over piling of food though might make the entire dish tasteless and gaudy and give you the same bloated and unhealthy feeling as too much junk food. Perhaps this is where our current climate comes into play, recycling and aggressively turning over and consuming and digesting everything that history recorded, from fashion to art to mathematical theories. We break it down, over-simplify things and remain rather superficial about it all (because we can never actually experience it). Eventually, the pulp created will form the new basis for whatever there is to come. Maybe new forms of culture related to a universalised world.

If the universe is indeed built on numbers as David Orrell mentioned, then indeed I think men has not seen the last of our species or even glimpsed what is truly meant by reality. Something that particularly stood out of his lecture is that of a cosmic harmonies of the world heard by Kepler. It is such a beautiful magical idea that something as complex, bewildering and incomprehensible to mankind as the universe can be explained in something so simple, pure and so accessible as a melody. Isn’t that quite touching?

If David Orrell thinks that our mental models shape the world that we live in, then perhaps he had better convince Mark Fisher to change his forecast of the last species of men to something much more optimistic that can hopefully tie in Nina Power’s ideal of gender equality and Mattew Taylor’s enlightened society that can be pollinated into the minds of human worldwide (shaping a planet would probably require the mental strength of a planet too) at a universal world fair. Meanwhile, we could all try to convince Saul Estrin that either a) we are not driving ourselves to extinction or b) extinction with the promise of an answer is the way to go… after all the dinosaurs have already done it.

Androgyny

Men look at women and women watch themselves being looked at.

I think that forms the basis of why the media is perpetuated with images and stereotypes of women. Because women like to look at other women too. Perhaps more so than more so than men tend to look at themselves. This constant bombardment of images also makes it a lot easier for people to stop seeing women as individuals but rather as objects. Just like how the butcher at the slaughter house can stop viewing each pig on the conveyer belt as individual living entities.

Nina Power mentioned that men fear and feel that their roles are being undermined by the new liberation of women and constantly try to add a list of terms and conditions while loosening their grip on the lease. I find that sense of fear baseless because women and men hold different forms of power. Of course this would hold a certain degree of generalization because human are an infinite diversity of possibilities and it is not possible to discuss without any form of generalizing, but the characteristics of authority held by men and women are essentially different. For example, women might prefer to not to approach power in a singular, possessive attitude.

In our seminar, we discussed about the objectification of men. But allow me to digress… It may not seem as prevalent in the West but I find an increasing trend towards androgyny and the blurring of clear classification of gender roles. As the world shifts away from the traditional roles of men working the fields and tough manual labour whilst women run the domestic household, the new age men can have long wavy locks and softer silhouettes whereas the women could have pixie-short haircuts and dress in suits and tapered pants. Whether or not this hints to a new distant future of ambigender, where we start to lack obvious forms of gender distinction other than purely roles of reproduction. But then again, that might essentially be impossible and against genetics.

Paul Greenhalgh’s topic on World Fair is immensely interesting as I have never paid attention to this rather historical event before. I can imagine the wonderment of people in the past as they see people of different races and languages and encounter new technological advancements on display. Perhaps the decline of such world fairs could also be due to globalization and the increased accessibility to information from distant countries which makes it less necessary to travel long distances to a world fair. I feel that the future world fair would have to be less about exhibiting and more about creating an environment for an intensive rapid flutter of interactive opportunities for the short period of the fair.

elective series part 1.

Matthew Taylor's lecture on 21st century enlightenment was particularly intriguing, especially on hearing that 3 of the main values in my country's national pledge are inadequate myths. What I found most puzzling was his mention that increased incentives decreases the ability to perform complex tasks because that drives against the idea of setting target goals and working towards a fulfillment.

But having watched Dan Pink's take on Sam Glucksberg's experiment on verbal behavior and problem solving, it became clearer that incentives narrow people's mind and increases ability to perform mechanical tasks as opposed to cognitive tasks. Does that mean we should pay the manual labourers more and give white collared workers less incentives to increase productivity?

Also, perhaps affluent societies have lower levels of happiness but (no references here) we could be less unhappy as well. In other words, we have a neutralized wavelength of emotions. If you're a dialectic then working towards a happier/ more contented society would also mean you create a one which experienced bitter sadness as well. But if we are able to experience sadness through empathizing (let's say with a less fortunate society) instead, and in doing so fill the gap in the "required" emotional polar, are you able to cheat your own moral compass and become a truly selfish, happy community?

Let's give a crude example... a charity organization runs a campaign and tries to educate us on the sufferings in a certain country. We are shown pictures and told stories about their plight and we empathize with them. Compelled by our morals to help, we donate to the organization and then walk away feeling very blessed and warm and happy with the thought of helping someone and a sticker to prove so. But the organization is a bogus that just swallowed your cash as administrative fee to make you happy. Blow this up big scale and you get a twisted dystopia of suppressed sufferers to feed the emotional quota of the happy folks.

__________________

I also think that people have an idealized view of what our future would be like. *warning: generalization* Something not too far from the flying vehicles and sci-fi dreams that started centuries ago. Or maybe the dream of utopian society of lush green fields and evolved intelligent beings peacefully co-existing with nature? And as we work towards creating that vision of ours, we create a lot of by-products that are unfinished or failed experiments and low grade prototypes of what we imagine in those visions. Like the sketches you do before the final piece.

But experiments and creations like these take time and resources. And of course finances. So these by-products are then marketed to the mass, aka ourselves, and advertised and touted as desires of the individual in a society. As such, our bigger inert desire for the future fuel the market to sell us what is essentially the rubbish sketches, and in order to sell those, the market creates in us a sense of desire for these failures. Before long, we demand for more and improved versions because they are merely pale comparisions of something that we think we know deep inside us. And that demand drives the market to supply us even more of the rubbish, faster and with more ting-tongs to distract us.

Anyway, that is my explanation for where the demand the fuels a consumer capitalist market comes from.