So, these last few weeks I’ve been taking really long walks like every other day, and to pass the time I’ve been listening to audiobooks. And the late Robert Jordan‘s (and now Brandon Sanderson‘s) epic Wheel of Time series seemed like a fitting thing to start on, with 12 eight-hundred plus page books and counting, it’ll definitely occupy my nightly walks for some time.

This review is for the first book in the series, called The Eye of the World.

This stuff is classic epic fantasy. It’s got Lord of the Rings written all over it. In fact you can actually find pretty direct equivalents to the Shire, the Nazgul, Aragorn, Orcs, a female incarnation of Gandalf, and quite a bit more. The world of this series, judging from just this first book, seems to be definitely as rich as Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. Chronologically in this world, prior to the beginning of this book’s story there has been countless ages with heroes and legends and cataclysms and interactions with various fantasy races all with unpronounceable names. Indeed the whole concept behind the Wheel of Time is that time is a cyclical thing and you know, the whole “all of this has happened before, all of this will happen again” concept is drilled into the reader. So yeah, epic scope, hope I make that clear. Twelve books, two authors, still hasn’t ended.

The story starts out pretty slow I thought, in a quiet backwater village that seems inconsequential to anything important that might be happening in the world. But of course things are not as they seem. First of all, the heroes of our story are adolescent denizens of this village, which makes the whole story a coming of age tale (making it a tad annoying at times). And, soon enough, weird visitors start showing up, a mix of good guys and bad guys. And then boom, crazy shit starts happening and our young heroes now have to go off on a great quest! It’s boilerplate fantasy fare.

What kept it from just being a boring rehashing of a coming of age fantasy tale, though, is the sheer richness of the world that Robert Jordan has built. I’ll attempt a half-assed summary of it. So, there is this powerful dark lord who has been imprisoned, and is somehow on the verge of escaping from his prison, and in anticipation of his release, his minions have been preparing the ground for his dominion, and the good guys have been trying to hamper them in their plans. It’s just that most people in the world have forgotten about this grave threat and are going about their lives either worrying about minor things or in other cases being overly worried about irrelevant things (there’s a group of zealot Inquisition type guys who go around torturing and killing everyone they suspect are helping the dark one). So, the only people who seem to know what’s really going on are the Aes Sedai, who are an order of mages/sorceresses, who are the only ones able to wield “the One Power”, which is like the source of the most powerful magic in this world. The thing though, is that the Aes Sedai are all female, so they’re kind of like the Bene Gesserit in Dune. Well, it’s not that men are unable to wield the One Power, they used to be able to in ages past, it’s just that all of the male Aes Sedai went crazy and died off 3000 years ago before our story begins. And guess what, the Aes Sedai have a prophecy about the coming of a man who will be able to wield the One Power and defeat the Dark One, which is of course, another fantasy staple. On the other side of the good/bad spectrum, are the Fades and Trollocs, who are minions of the Dark One. The former are like Nazgul from Middle-Earth, and serve as commanders for the hordes of the latter, which are kinda like Orcs from Middle-Earth, just with heads of various animals and bodies of men. You can see them looking badass in the pictures below.

And that just barely scratches the surface of the story in the first book, which barely scratches the surface of the whole series. There’s tree people, space-time warps, merry ale drinking in inns, ravens that are, well, particularly ravenous, lost treasure, fog-monsters, hippie traveling parties, and all kinds of things going on.

So, what do I think of it? It’s not my favorite fantasy series for sure. The last fantasy book I read was A Dance with Dragons, and comparing that book with it’s intricate plotting and gritty realpolitik to the more adolescent, wide eyed adventurey tone of The Eye of the World, I’d say I’ll go for George R R Martin’s grittiness any day. But that doesn’t mean that the Eye of the World isn’t fun and super enjoyable to get lost in. I’m pretty sure I’ll keep listening to the rest of the audiobooks in this series.

I do have certain complaints about it though. And that mostly has to do with the characters. Again, it might be unfair to compare the characters in this book to the ones in say, more “mature” fare like A Song of Ice and Fire and Dune. But… it seemed like all the characters are either those coming of age types who are young and naive right now but just waiting to become awesome superheroes, or are already really powerful types who have very few flaws. That does make the characters hard to relate to. I never really felt particularly worried about any character’s plight because it felt like you already knew beforehand that they’ll succeed in some way eventually.

And for a world on the verge of being overrun by all consuming evil, people seem to be awfully polite and honorable. The only extant of swearing in this book seems to be the ubiquitous cry “blood and ashes!” And there’s no sex or gory murder or anything of the sort. It’s all very PG. And certain gallant characters spout lines such as “I will hate the man you choose because he is not me, and love him if he makes you smile“, which makes me all emo on one hand and roll my eyes at the same time.

But those complaints aside, if you’re fantasy fan, and don’t mind devoting a huge amount of time reading thousands of pages about a made up world, by all means pick up this book. It’s really fun.

And today, we have a book review. I stumbled upon this book from this webcomic called Wasted Talent that I often read. So, it’s a steampunk novel set in World War I that has the Germans in giant battle mecha-robots fighting the British (plus French, Russians and others) who… have giant genetically engineered animals like whale/airships which have crews of hundreds of “airmen” living in them. It was too cool sounding not to check out so I googled it and guess what, the book has an accompanying trailer! I think that’s like the new thing now, for novels to have accompanying trailers. What makes it particularly cool for this book though is that it also has really awesome illustrations in it, like this one, and this, and this. In the trailer (below) you can see some snapshots of the cool illustrations that feature in the book too. Novels with pictures are so cool, all of them should be like that.

So, the plot is set at the dawn of the First World War. One of the two main protagonists is the only son of Franz Ferdinand, the archduke of Austria, who gets assassinated and sends all of Europe into a frenzy. The poor kid was only 15 or something and gets dragged out of bed in the middle of the night by his guardian/godfather (who’s an awesome character) to go into hiding. The other main character is a Scottish girl who has a passion for flying thanks to her late father and dreams of joining the “royal air navy”. She pretends to be a boy and ends up joining the air navy to become a midshipman on one of the whale/airships. The boy’s name is Alek and the the girl is Deryn, but changed her name of Dylan to pass off as a boy.

I guess it’s supposed to a “Young Adult” book, like Harry Potter or The Golden Compass or something like that, which features adolescent protagonists in a coming of age tale. But the whole time I didn’t feel annoyed by the main characters at all. I think it’s because the plot was so fast paced and just perfectly synchronized so that you never have a boring moment, and yet you don’t feel like the author is adding in action and excitement for it’s own sake. And I think the main characters were sympathizable too. All too often, if you have these young protagonists in coming of age tales you get the whole Harry Potter’esque “he’s super awesome but somehow he acts like he’s the emo loser kid” thing going on, it all seems unrealistic. The two kids in this book do seem more larger than life than typical real life fifteen year olds, but they mess up, they don’t have any secret super powers, and they really seem like naive teenagers thrown into a huge mess of a situation, particularly Alek.

Another commendable thing about the book is that although the setting is a ludicrously fantastical world, the author makes it into something rather believable. I love it when fantasy authors get their worldbuilding right, where it’s fantastical but within the framework of that world, everything has it’s own explanation. For example, the giant airship/whales are an ecosystem all on their own. They float because they are filled with hydrogen (as a result all the crew are only armed with airguns), which is produced by bacteria living in the whale’s gut. The bacteria feeds on honey that is produced by a shipboard colony of bees. Which means the airship/whale refuels by flying over fields of flowers and letting the bees feed on nectar, or by directly digesting massive amounts of starch.

The book also walks a fine line between real history and made up history. For example, the real historical Franz Ferdinand had more than one child, but the book stayed true to his real life romance with his non-aristocratic wife and the resulting dynastic difficulties. And as you may know, the history of the beginnings of World War I is labyrinthine and complex as hell (Germans invading France by way of Belgium to take them out before the Russians in a preemptive strike because they expect the Russians will invade in retaliation for Austria declaring war on Serbia, etc etc). The novel doesn’t skimp out on the gritty political details. Young Alek gets taught all this gritty geopolitics during a fencing lesson.

So, yeah, go grab the book! It’s the first part of a trilogy. I’m reading the second book, Behemoth, right now, and it’s set in a weirdly wonderful steampunk version of Istanbul. The third part of the trilogy comes out sometime this year I think, and there’s talk of this book series being made into a movie, which would be awesome, just for the eye-candy alone!

Anyways, tonight I was just randomly searching on Youtube to see if there were videos of shows I went to see in Singapore, and boy was I pleasantly surprised! These Singaporeans with their hi-tech gadgets and their kiasu-ness have recorded pretty much every single show I’ve been to this year with international bands. And unlike usual bootleg concert footage, the sound and video quality is amazing.

Heaven Shall Burn – This is the latest show I’ve seen, it was about a month ago. It was at this really small studio at Fort Canning and there was only about a hundred people. It was pretty amazing, well, I wouldn’t expect any less from these guys. And definitely the heaviest band I’ve seen this year.

Heaven Shall Burn – Endzeit (live in Singapore @ White Studio, Fort Canning Park)

King Ly Chee – These guys came to play for this huge (kinda, by SG standards) festival of regional for indie bands at the Esplanade called Baybeats. It had like three stages, right by the waterfront, and best of all, it was free. There were all these punks in mohawks and leather jackets walking around near confused/excited tourists who just happen to pass by the touristy place while taking photos. Really happy that I caught these guys, I’ve been a fan since I was a teenager. The song in the video is their cover of this Chinese punk band called SMZB, who are apparently one of China’s earliest punk bands.

King Ly Chee – Scream for Life (live in Singapore @ Baybeats 2010)

Slash + Coheed and Cambria - This one’s is my favorite show this year. I went there just excited about Coheed and Cambria but Slash was just awesome! The vocalist for his live band is Myles Kennedy, who’s from Alter Bridge, and man, can the dude sing! They played a ton of the old Guns N’ Roses songs, and a couple of Velvet Revolver songs plus a bunch from Slash’s new solo album. It was so much fun. Coheed and Cambria was good but they played a whole bunch of songs from their latest album (which I haven’t listened to) and random selections from the old ones, I was hoping they’d play The Crowing or In Keeping the Secrets of Silent Earth, but I guess they didn’t want to play many 8 minute songs.

Coheed and Cambria – Welcome Home (live in Singapore @ Fort Canning Park)

Slash (with Myles Kennedy) – Sweet Child of Mine (live in Singapore @ Fort Canning Park)

Smashing Pumpkins – I paid overpriced tickets for this festival they have here called Singfest (which is mostly big-name pop, hip-hop and pop-rock stuff), and was not really into the rest of the bands that night, but Smashing Pumpkins definitely made my night.

Smashing Pumpkins – Tonight, Tonight (live in Singapore @ Singfest 2010)

Rise Against + Muse - I don’t listen to Muse much but they played an epic show, they’re just super-talented and the theatrics were crazy, there were all these lasers and huge screens and giant balloons bouncing around. Rise Against weren’t too shabby either, they’re always great to scream along to.

Rise Against – Savior (live in Singapore @ Big Night Out 2010)

Muse – Undisclosed Desires (live in Singapore @ Big Night Out 2010)

So, that’s all folks. There’s only  one more show coming up for me this year, HATEBREEEED! Yeah! That one’s in November and it’s going to be epic!

So, things have been rather dreary on the little tropical island. My classes at NUS have begun and it’s already halfway through the term! And man, I have been super busy of late. The thing is, I teach private tuition for O-level and A-level kids as a part-time gig, and I’ve quickly coming to realise that being a full-time grad student does not sit well with having to travel all over the island and do 20-odd hours of teaching a week. Plus, I have to tutor undergrad classes at NUS, and I also teach a volunteer English class on Saturdays. Yeah, so while I do thoroughly enjoy indulging in my passion for teaching, it’s definitely wearing me out. When I get home, 6 out of 7 days a week, it’s usually past midnight.

Well, complaining aside, what else is new? I’m going back to Yangon for a week! Leaving tomorrow (Sunday 19th Sep) and coming back next Sunday. It’s the mid-term break, so I get a week off school before the mid-terms exams start.

And about school itself? Hmm… where to start? First off, everyone except three people in my Master’s class are from China (the People’s Republic, to be more precise). The three being me, a Singaporean Chinese guy and a girl from India. But the entire cohort of graduate students in the economics department is only 18 students, counting both Masters and PhDs, so we do have relatively small class sizes, which is good. And at least for the first semester, Masters students and PhDs have to take the same classes, after that I can still keep taking the same classes as the PhDs, so there’s really no limit to how much torture I can impose on myself (it’s so exciting, serious).

As for the classes themselves, we have the standard four this semester, Micro, Macro, Math Econs, and Econometrics. And now the boring details… Micro is pretty standard, we pretty much go according to the biblical microeconomics textbook by Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green, and it’s being taught by two profs, the first half was by some big-shot visiting prof from Oxford. We’ve done choice, demand, production, and some general equilibrium up to now, but he went pretty fast and it’s all a bit of a blur. For Macro, we’re just doing some dynamic optimization and just finished overlapping generations models. But there’s no mid-term for Macro so I haven’t really kept up to speed with it. We’re not following any textbook for Macro but there’s some set of lecture notes by Per Krussell that the prof’s own lecture notes seem to be heavily based on. Later in the semester we’ll be using a lot of Romer’s Advanced Macroeconomics, and having read some of that book before, I have to say it gives a much clearer picture of the topic than the stuff we’ve been doing up to now. For Econometrics, we have a prof who’s fresh of the boat from doing his PhD and he seems to be a real nice guy. Goes really slow and makes sure everyone understands before moving to on. A great relief for me seeing as how my venturings into the land of probability and statistics in college did not go so well. And finally Math Econs, that’s the one I understand the most! The reason being that up to now we’ve only just covered the stuff you find in an undergrad real analysis class, and thankfully I had the privilege of taking real analysis in college from an awesome, awesome professor. I think in the second half of the semester we will being doing more advanced stuff from A First Course in Optimization Theory by Sundaram, so yeah, looking forward to that.

And for those of you people reading this who aren’t economist-types, lets just say by the end of the first semester, I would have forgotten all the interesting stuff about economics I learned in college and would have replaced them with a bunch of mathematical gobbledygook that I won’t really understand. Well, it’s the road I’ve chosen, and in time hope has it that such gambles might well pay off, so, onward we march.

I’ll report back when I come back from Myanmar, and hopefully things will settle down more. Although I fear the insanity will just escalate as the semester wears on, especially since my tutees are having the O-level and A-level exams in late October-November and they’d want me to come for extra classes, and I’m too nice to say “Well, can’t pass your exams? Too bad for ya”.

I really want to go back to the days when I had time to read, reflect, blog about intellectual things, all that good stuff, but that will have to wait.

Well, I think it has to do with momentum, when you stop habitually doing something, it’s hard to get the ball rolling again. Also, and this is important, the lack of inspiration. When I first came to Singapore last year, man, it was exciting. Not that there were interesting things going on in my life at that point in time that are no longer happening now, its just that I was excited about things in general. It was about coming back to a familiar place after a long absence. About seeing things with a new set of eyes. It was about feeling that the stuff I had to say and the stuff I thought about were relevant, about feeling that I was relevant.

Well, that understandably fades away as monotony sets in. Boredom and drudgery are evil. Not being excited enough about your life to tell others about it is probably worse.

But that’s no longer true! The tides of change are brewin’!

So, here’s an update about the last few months of my life:

30 June, 2010 - Two important things happening today. (1) It’s the last day of my second job in Singapore. (2) I’m moving house, again! It’s the fourth place I’ll be living in since I got here last August.

Elaborating on (1). Yes, my second job. Since January, I’ve been working as a teacher teaching O-levels and A-levels at the school I used to go to when I was a teenager in Singapore. I was there for one and a half years doing my A-levels in ’03-’04. So, this time around, I came back to work as a teacher through just sheer dumb luck actually (more on that later). What do I teach? Physics and economics, duh!

But I had a blast! The principal, Matthew, is the nicest boss anyone could ever have. And he was the first economics teacher I ever had in my life! He was the one who sparked my passion for economics. I really consider him a great friend, and I’ll always try to keep in touch with him, wherever I might find myself later in life.

Oh, and the students. I’ll really miss them. Especially my A-level economics students. I feel like I’ve truly imparted something upon them, made them understand important things that they shouldn’t forget for the rest of their lives (AD=C+G+I+X-M!). That aspect of being a teacher is probably way up there on the list of “reasons for job satisfaction”, probably the only things that beat it are saving lives and creating original works of art or something.

So, why am I quitting such a satisfying job? Well, let me tell you first about point (2), moving house (again).

So, I’m moving from living with my othercousin and her husband in Choa Chu Kang, to living by myself in Clementi. I’m renting out a room in an apartment owned by an old Singaporean-Chinese couple. So, I’m on my own again, breaking free from the social ties of my extended family. I can’t believe I’ve been living with my cousins for about ten months. After six years of living on my own halfway across the world, I’ve become more acquainted with living alone than living with people I’m close to. So, nothing too strange there, although I’ve never lived in a Singaporean family’s house before.

So, why am I moving in with strangers instead of living with my cousins? The same reason I’m quitting my job. I’m going to be a full time student starting in August!

Yup, after a year of “the real world”, I’m heading back into the snuggly arms of academia once again. I’ll be studying for a Master’s degree in economics at the National University of Singapore. It’s the most prestigious university on the island and it has a pretty good international standing too. Besides, from what I’ve gathered up to now, they run a pretty descent (i.e. rigorous) master’s program in economics, something that schools in places like the US have had cut down on because of funding issues.

And speaking of funding, the best part about the whole affair is that I’m getting a big fat scholarship! Whippeee! They cover all my tuition, miscellaneous expenses, textbooks, even airfare! Plus, I get a stipend every month, which is almost as much as my current salary as a teacher! So, I guess all the summers working as a research assistant in Middlebury and all the long hours I spent laboring on my undergraduate economics thesis kinda paid off. And sheer dumb luck I guess, as always.

(Quick aside: The new place I’m moving to in Clementi is about a 15-minute walk from the university.)

Dumb luck, of course, is also the reason that I got this job here as a teacher late last year. As you may well know, I came here last year with bright-eyed hopes of joining my bosscousin’s telecommunications business. Well, that didn’t turn out as I hoped/expected. They turned out to have a lot of “issues”, and basically the whole company kind of derailed in the couple of months that I joined them. It’ll teach me not to get into business relations with family in the future.

So, one fine day in December, I randomly paid a visit to my old school just to catch up and say hello to the teachers and staff there, and after a quick conversation with my principal and the school’s managing director, they basically were like, “hey, you want a job?”. At which point I pretty much said, “er.. yes”. I might be simplifying a bit here, it was slightly more formal than that. But boy, was I relieved.

And for the past few months, I think I’ve really become quite independent and able to support myself financially, which I’m definitely proud of. Also, at first, I didn’t know that I’ll be getting a scholarship for my master’s degree so I was planning to study part time, work full time, and pay for it myself. It’s not all that cheap to get a master’s degree either, so I was really putting in the extra effort to save up for the past few months, working as a private tutor after my work at school. Often times, it’d be midnight when I got home. It was somewhat of a monotonous grind but I find that times like that when I’m struggling towards a concrete goal are also times when I’m feeling most stable. It’s like your whole being is honed in on doing one particular thing, and getting it done.

So, that was my update. In a couple of hours, I’m wrapping up here at my job, getting a cab, and moving to my new place. Grad school starts early August, so starting from tomorrow, I’ll get a break for a whole month!

Again, boredom and drudgery are evil, so hopefully I won’t fall prey to them and will spend more time writing interesting stuff here instead!

It seems to have become somewhat of a meme this month for political/econo-bloggers. Here’s a list from economist Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, and here’s one from the famous political blogger Matt Yglesias.

It’s funny, none of the books that come to my mind right away are academic ones, or ones that I had to read for class. All the books on the list are ones that I read in my spare time, except #6 which I did read for class. Even though I read that during totally chilled out month when I was doing an independent reading/study. I guess it says something about the rate at which one absorbs ideas and internalizes them. Especially for me, reading something, reflecting, mulling over, sidetracking on a tangent and being lost in my thoughts for an hour before returning to that page I was on is not only one of the best private joys, it’s also essential for me to remember or understand anything. It’s like planting a vine and watching it’s shoots climb across the fields of my memory and entangle themselves with the rest of the complicated mess that constitutes my “understanding of the world”.

So, here’s the list. I’d recommend any of these books to anyone with eclectic interests ranging from science to society.

1. George Orwell, Burmese Days.

This was the first book by Orwell that I read. I instantly fell in love with its atmosphere of subtle bleakness, and just how much it resonated with modern day Myanmar. I was about fourteen when I read it, I think, and Orwell’s portrayal of colonial Burma was to me a spot on description of twenty-first century Myanmar.

Most of Orwell’s most famous works like 1984 and Animal Farm, which are diatribes against totalitarianism are banned in Myanmar for obvious reasons, but this book, being a critique of colonialism, is widely available. It’s the ultimate irony. Orwell’s Burmese Days provides a more penetrating critique of present-day Myanmar and any of his other works. 1984 and Animal Farm dealt with made up, idealized dystopias, this book deals with a real-life one, in which Orwell himself lived a good chunk of his life. In Myanmar, nothing really ever changes, and anybody who wants to understand the country has to first realize that fact.

2. Stephen Jay Gould, Full House.

This book made me appreciate the explanatory power of clear-headed scientific reasoning. When you finally get to the real reason behind things, it usually has that stark simplicity that makes you go “duh”.

Gould centers the book around two questions, the first concerns the disappearance of the 0.400 batting average from baseball, and the second concerns the idea that evolution has a “direction”. Yeah.

It’s written so well, and it’s like reading a crime novel, where the clues build up and you only get the real answer in the end. It’s one of the few non-fiction books for which you have to watch out for spoilers. And the realization you get in the end that connects those two questions together, like I said, really makes one appreciate scientific reasoning.

3. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity.

In high school, I was obsessed with complexity theory. Obsessed. I would scour the libraries in Singapore looking for books about Lorenz attractors, small-world networks, autocatalytic sets, sand piles, and all the other weird and wonderful things associated with that topic.

This book in particular, really stuck in my memory. I think especially because it was centered around the lives and stories of misfits: Brian Arthur, Stuart Kauffman, Chris Langton. And it gave me my lifelong dream: to go to the Santa Fe Institute.

4. George Johnson, Fire in the Mind.

Another book on complexity and the Santa Fe Institute. Out of all the books I’ve read on the topic, this book particularly stuck. It presented things from a perspective of individual peoples’ worldviews, specifically people who have settled in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico throughout the ages. And in the middle of that social history, the author would mix in more detailed descriptions of science, religion and worldviews, leading up to the “complexity” view of the world. It also had a particularly well written description of modern physics.

5. Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher and Bach.

Wow, where do I start? It’s an absolute classic. Probably unlike anything else you’ll ever read. Get ready to become friend’s with Achilles and the Tortoise, GOD and Djinn, and if you don’t already, to really dig M.C. Escher and the genius of Kurt Gödel.

Hofstadter bends your mind. I haven’t really gotten back to thinking about the ideas in the book, but I think I still believe that his idea of the “strange loop” is a fundamental, inescapable part of reality.

6. Joeseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

Hmm… it seems I’ve unconsciously arranged this list into a somewhat chronological order. The first half of the list were books I read before college. The second half, I read during my college years. And my college years were a time when my interests shifted from the natural to the social sciences, and now I have an unhealthy obsession with both.

Well, anyways, like I mentioned above, I had to read this book as part of an independent study while I was on break from college in the US and living for a month back home in Myanmar.

I was studying economics in school, and as anyone who studies economics, you are gradually induced to take a side on whether you’re a “right-wing” free market supporter or a “left-wing” supporter of government intervention. This book of Schumpeter’s and his other book The Theory of Economic Development, were the two books that really convinced my how markets were essential and how markets worked.

And the thing I love about Schumpeter’s arguments are their sophistication. This is nothing like the pathetic dribble you hear the talking heads spewing on TV these days. This was written by one of the most brilliant economists of the twentieth century, who was a first rate sociologist as well as an economist; a believer in the power of entrepreneurs and private enterprise, who nonetheless worked for and admired a socialist government that came into power in inter-war Germany; who was living in an era where big government controlled socialism seemed to be the wave of the future (the 1940′s). This book was an acceptance of that trend, and a quiet lamentation and defense of the market forces that are so important to society.

7. Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers.

I read this during a summer before I took a class on the history of economic thought. I think I enjoyed reading this small book more than all the stuff I had to read for class.

This book introduced me to Mill, Marx, Veblen, and Schumpeter. And who can forget that kind of an introduction? I love learning about how people view the world, and how worldviews evolve.

8. David Brooks, On Paradise Drive.

When David Brooks is not writing in his sometimes brilliant/sometimes crappy New York Times column, he’s going around America being a “comic sociologist”. This is one of his books where he analyzes American society in a not-so-serious but very fun and insightful way. I remember chuckling alot while reading the book and basically agreeing with pretty much all he says in the book. I particularly liked the part about geography, where he dissected the different groups of Americans depending on whether they lived in the inner cities, suburbs, exurbs, etc. It’s a great book for a foreign kid trying to understand American attitudes and mentalities. It’s like a slightly more serious version of Stuff White People Like, and sometimes just as funny.

9. George R R Martin, The Song of Ice and Fire series.

(Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, Book 4)

In addition to being a brilliant, brilliant story about a whole bunch of people in an awesome fantasy world, the Song of Fire and Ice is also about the gritty, realistic portrayal of medieval society and politics. You get sucked into it. The people you love die, just like in real life. And just like in real life, evil people are more often than not, people that you can really relate to. You can’t put these books down.

10. Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle.

(Book 1, Book 2, Book 3)

I think this series has influenced me more than any other book on this list. And if I look back at where all my ridiculously eclectic interests in everything from science to history to economics to computers come from, it’s from this series of books.

The books are historical novels set in the Baroque era (the late 17th century) and deals with real life characters such as Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Christian Huygens, William of Orange and a whole set of other characters ranging from a Catholic Samurai vagabond to Eliza the escaped harem girl from the fictional island of Qwghlm.

They weave together science, philosophy, politics, finance, economics, religion, the beginnings of what was to become computer science, and pirates hunting for gold. Stephenson is a total geek, and his books are meant for geeks, they’re like those “tomes of experience” in RPG games that upgrade your geekiness all in one go.

So, we start at the beginning, with the Presocratics, who, as the name implies, were the folks who were in the philosophy game before the time of Socrates. I think the term only applies to Greek philosophers before Socrates, since we’re talking about the Western tradition. The ancient Greeks, of course, had colonies all over the Mediterranean so these guys come from all over the place, from Sicily to the Western shores of modern Turkey.

The author is Catherine Osbourne, a professor of philosophy from the University of East Anglia. She’s written a few books on ancient Greek philosophy, including one on the ancient Greek notion of love, and another about Greek notions of animal rights or something or other.

The wikipedia page on Pre-socratic philosophy has a wonderful “family tree” of the Presocratic philosophers, starting from Thales of Miletus to the Sophists such as Thrasymachus who debated with Socrates in Plato’s Republic. It gives a good overview of who influenced whom and also shows the chronological order of the lives of these thinkers. I found it a helpful reference while reading the book, because the chapters were categorized not chronologically but according to the topics in which these people dabbled in, with some, such as Zeno, Pythagoras and Heraclitus receiving special treatment (they get a chapter each).

I had to read some of the chapters two or three times for the material to sink into my head. It seemed at first like there really wasn’t anything interesting that these folks had to say, their ideas seemed more vague and mystical than anything else. What’s more, a lot of modern day interpretations of their philosophy literally rely on bits and pieces of text that survive from that era. Most of the texts that have survived since the age of the Presocratics are in the form of incomplete fragments of paper that have to be fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. So if we are lucky, we have half the page of some old document that happen to have contained a poem by some philosopher that was written down a hundred years after his death. If we are comparing among vague and mystical texts, I would at least settle for vague and mystical texts that at are at least complete, right? I mean, if I was a researcher on ancient philosophy, I’d choose to work with the Upanishads, the writings of Confucius, or the Torah any day, then have to start each day trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle.

So, why do people bother to read the ancient Greek philosophers? Well, it’s because the Western tradition IS a very important part of our global heritage and culture, and it’s important to know how these ancients influenced great philosophers ranging from Plato to Nietzsche.

So, what did they actually say, these Presocratics?

Parmenides: The first Greek philosopher that we know of is Thales, who was famous for falling into well while deeply lost in his thoughts, and also for claiming that everything in the universe was made of water. After Thales, a whole bunch of people started claiming different things about the fundamental constituents of the universe, such as air, fire, earth, etc. Then Parmenides comes along and one-ups the argument, by claiming that nothing is made from “more fundamental things”, but actually, everything in the universe is just one indivisible whole, including both space and time. No atoms, no future, no past.

Armed with our modern knowledge of Physics and Chemistry, all these baseless ontological arguments seem silly of course, but the author of the book points out that what’s important and interesting is rather the way these philosophers came up with their claims. Moving away from mere speculation, Parmenides was the first to posit the idea that from our observations of the world, we can postulate a perfect and unchanging ideal. This is of course something that greatly inspired Plato’s philosophy, and it’s still a issue that is being dealt with by modern philosophers.

Moreover, Parmenides was the first to have employed some system of logic to prove his arguments. This, of course was also a huge step forward for philosophy. So now, you can no longer say “what you say is logically correct, but I disagree”, unless you are just expressing your opinion. We can use logic to separate opinion from fact.

Zeno: This guy is famous for his paradoxes, and is probably one of the most well known among the Presocratics. I remember first reading about him in Douglas Hofstadter‘s wonderful book Gödel, Escher, Bach. Zeno’s most famous paradox involves a race between the Greek hero Achilles and a tortoise. I’ll go over it for the sake of people who don’t know about it, but Google will probably find you a better explanation of it.

So one day Achilles and the tortoise decide to start a race. Achilles decides to give the tortoise a head start because obviously he knows he’s going to win the race no matter how much of a head start the tortoise has. The race begins, and Achilles catches up to the point where the tortoise had started from, let’s call it point A. By that time the tortoise had already traveled a little further, up to point B. Achilles quickly catches up to point B, and during the time it takes for Achilles to travel from A to B, the tortoise has traveled just a little bit further, to point C. When Achilles reaches point C, the tortoise is already at point D. This goes on and on, ad infinitum, and of course, the paradoxical conclusion is that Achilles can never catch up with the tortoise.

Since we all know that in real life, Achilles do catch up with the turtle, something must have gone logically faulty somewhere in the story. According to the author, Zeno intended this to be a reductio ad absurdum, to show that if you take space or time to be infinitely divisible, you get to absurd conclusions. Zeno was inspired by Parmenides and also believed in the indivisibility and “one-ness” of space and time.

I didn’t like the chapter of the book on Zeno too much. The author seems to have a muddled view of some basic mathematics. After explaining Zeno’s paradoxes, she goes on to say this about present day mathematicians, who DO take space to be infinitely divisible, unlike Zeno:

mathematically there will be no point that is the last point before reaching B, and no time at which Achilles changes from being behind the tortoise to being level with her. There is a time at which he is not yet there, and there is a time at which he is already there, but no time at which he exchanges the former description for the latter. This is a counter-intuitive observation. Mathematicians evade the difficulty by the use of the fiction of ‘infinitesimal’ quantities, which treat the series as if it effectively had a last member, of infinitesimal size. But the fact remains that in reality the parts do not suddenly become ‘infinitesimally small’ as though that were some ultimate size; in fact they go on becoming ever smaller ad infinitum. So Zeno was right, and we cannot evade the truth that the completion of the task may come between two identifiable points in time and space but not at any time or place.

From what I’ve learnt in Math classes, modern mathematicians no longer use the “fiction of infinitesimal quantities“. I believe they had stopped using that concept since the nineteenth century, since the development of analysis. My complaint is not about the author not knowing the history of mathematics, but rather muddling up Zeno’s paradox, which is only paradoxical if it occurs in the real physical world, with mathematical abstractions. Yes, she is right, that in the physical world, “parts do not suddenly become infinitesimally small”, but mathematics does not concern itself with the physical world. You can’t diss mathematicians by saying the assumptions that they are making won’t hold true in the physical world.

Heraclitus: If you’re trying to find the intellectual ancestor of people who say blatantly contradictory things to sound deep and wise, look no further, this guy must have been the godfather of them all. Some of the things Heraclitus said include:

The road up and down is one and the same.

The sea – he says – water most pure and most impure; for fishes drinkable and healthy; for humans undrinkable and deadly.

Gods are mortal, humans immortal, living the death of those, dying the life of these.

Into the same rivers we step in and we don’t step in, we are and we are not.

Yes, my friends. We are… and we are not… How profound! Maybe I just don’t get it, but spewing blatantly contradictory one-liners is not an intellectually respectable activity. If I walk around saying stuff like that, say at a job interview, what are the chances that I’ll get hired? Zero! But when a philosopher says it, it’s profound.

Okay, to be fair, I guess the reason Heraclitus’s contradictory remarks are held with esteem by many great philosophers from Nietzsche to Heidegger is from the fact that they make us take an introspective look at what we actually mean when we use words like purity, being, and mortality. It was probably Herclitus’s intention to cast these statements as riddles that have no clear answer. His whole entire worldview and cosmology seems to have revolved around the idea of “not having a clear cut resolution”. Heraclitus’s world was one in which opposites intertwine, which was endlessly being destroyed and recreated by fire, and in which there was always a tension and an eternally recurring struggle.

Pythagoras: We’ve all known about this guy since our primary school math classes, but I think he deserves a “Very Short Introduction” book all by himself. For this guy, science, religion, philosophy and mathematics were all parts of a unified whole.

Among other things, Pythagoras believed in reincarnation, and was an advocate of vegetarianism. It’s curious that all these Presocratics believed in ideas that are similar to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs, be it reincarnation, or Heraclitus’s belief that the world is destroyed and recreated over and over again, to Parmenides’s belief in the “one-ness” of everything. I guess beliefs and ideas must have flowed in to Greece from the East during this time, through trade and conquest. Or perhaps it was just beliefs that were native to the Mediterranean.

Of course, Pythagoras’s theorem about the sides of a right triangle is his most famous work in mathematics, but he actually was the founder of a whole entire religion which held that numbers governed the entire cosmos, making everything work in perfect harmony. The ancient Greeks were obsessed with mathematics and geometry, from the Golden Ratio to the Platonic Solids, and the religious reverence for mathematics that Pythagoras and his followers had would live on for millennia.

Well, that was my short introduction to the short introduction. I did not really like that book all that much, it did not flow as well, usually because the author would keep citing fragments of ancient text from another page in the book, and you’d have to flip back and forth constantly. I believe it would have been better to start off with the wikipedia article on the Presocratics and followed the links from there, that would have been a better short introduction to the subject, and one that was more coherent and comprehensive.

So I thought I’d read a couple every week and write about them on my blog, to give it some pretense of sophistication.

We start off this week with the one on Anarchism, written by Colin Ward, who’s a really old dude (born in ’24) who’s written dozens of books on anarchism. The guy doesn’t seem to be a university-tenured academic, but I think he’s been a scholar in the field for more than half a century so I guess he knows what he’s talking about.

My own prior knowledge of anarchism is minimal. I’ve listened to Chomsky rave about anarcho-syndicalism in his lectures, and I know a bit about Bakunin, mainly as one of Marx‘s intellectual opponents (in my opinion, he’s a much more sensible kind of a radical than Marx could ever be). But the thing that really interested me was the history of the anarchist communities during the Spanish Civil War. The thing is, some of the communes/unions that formed during that pre-WWII period still survived today in some form or another. Mere survival of a fringe political group is nothing impressive of course, but some, such as the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation (MCC) is anything but an irrelevant fringe political group. Today, it is the world’s largest worker’s cooperative and is a conglomerate of financial, manufacturing and retail companies that accounts for 3.8% of the GDP of the Basque Country. I don’t know enough about them to make a sound judgment as to their relevance (maybe they are heavily subsidized), but I sure hope to find out more in the future.

Anyways, let’s get on with the book itself. It starts off with an overview of the different strands of anarchism, ranging from collectivist anarchism and individualist anarchism, to green anarchism and anarcha-feminism. It also introduces figures like Bakunin, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley’s dad, and this other Russian guy called Kropotkin. Apparently Kropotkin is one of the most important intellectual fathers of anarchism, who went from being a geographer to someone who was obsessed with coming up with ideas about how to rearrange society. Unlike the more successful Marxists, these early anarchists in general seem to have been a lot more interested in talking about how  their alternative society will actually function instead of just ranting about capitalism and calling for revolution.

As for revolutions, anarchists seem to have had a hand in quite a number of them as well. The popular image of the anarchist is of course the guy protesting on the streets, with a bandanna covering his face, flinging a Molotov cocktail. However, there hasn’t been many examples of successful real world anarchist revolutions, except for those that appeared in Spain during the civil war. Unlike the similarly radical but much more autocratic Marxists, anarchists believe that any measure of unjustified authority is hostile to their movement. It’s little wonder why they have not had many successful or long-lasting revolutions. People don’t like doing things until they are forced to.

According to Kropotkin, anarchism is

a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements, concluded between various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.

I guess its based on a fundamental distrust of authority, and a fundamental optimism in the ability of people to behave in a civilized manner without any need for coercion. Also, it’s not a type of government per se, but rather a set of ideas, a point the author repeatedly makes in the book.

The author claims (he does a lot of “claiming”, as we will see) that all sorts of people from the Anabaptists to supporters of Oliver Cromwell to Mahatma Gandhi were influenced by anarchist ideas. Anarchism, it seems, is more like a set of broad-based beliefs about how society ought to be structured rather than a concrete social or philosophical theory. It’s the common strand of thought behind the ideas of religious reformers, organizers of civil society, small business owners, paeceniks, punks, and revolutionaries.

A lot of the book consists of something along the lines of, “Oh, you know that really cool thing that we take for granted in modern society? Like how teachers don’t smack you anymore and how you don’t have to dress formally for your office job on casual Fridays? Yeah, anarchists were the first people to come up with those ideas! Serious!”. Apparently anarchists deserve credit for ideas ranging from Britain’s National Health Service, to the practice of serving probation instead of doing time in prison, to urban agriculture, to the idea that legalizing drugs might actually reduce drug abuse.

It does seem somewhat like a series of cases in which the author tries to put a positive spin on anarchism’s not-so-impressive list of achievements by claiming credit for various niceties of modern society. However, I do think he does have a point or two about how certain aspects of society have steadily progressed towards the anarchist ideal, specifically in education.

I remember when I first went to government school in Myanmar when I was about six years old. It was terrifying. Our class of fifty or so first graders were made to sit at our desks for the entire day, copying down what the teacher wrote on the board. Anyone falling out of line, fidgeting too much, or playing with the kid next to them quickly gets smacked by the teacher. This was in Myanmar the early 1990′s, or it could have very well been in the US in the 1890′s. This of course, is a far cry from any kind of first grade classroom that you can find today in a developed country. The image of the teacher as the singular figure of authority in the classroom has eroded in the previous century. Also, all the freedom in subject and curriculum choice afforded to schools and students have made learning a much more voluntary affair. I don’t think it is too difficult to imagine a time when a school is more of a

community center with doors open twelve hours a day, seven days a week, where anybody can wander in and out of the library, workshops, sports center, self-service store, and bar. In a hundred years time the compulsory attendance laws for children to go to school may have gone the same way as the compulsory laws for attendance at church

as one anarchist had envisioned. Especially since education is becoming increasingly digitized. A lot of world class universities are offering their entire curricula and lectures online for free, ebook readers are about to become ubiquitous, and Wikipedia and the free-software movement are probably the most successful anarchist revolutions that the world has ever seen. Today, we can learn whatever we want whenever we want (i.e. geek out), for free. I am in full agreement with another quote from the book: “The true object of education, like that of every other moral process, is the generation of happiness”. Take that! Nasty cane-wielding first grade teachers!

The rest of the book does cover a bit more of the political and economic aspects of anarchism, but they do not get as thorough a treatment as I would like. The author seems to like to treat anarchism as a social movement in its fullest sense, and not just narrowly focused on politics and economics.

In politics the big thing is of course the dismantling of the state, and likewise it’s associated modern day form, the nation-state. The author points out that anarchism seems to work pretty well across nation-states. One country has no legal jurisdiction over what happens in another, and has no authority to coerce anybody who isn’t in its borders, and yet international mail arrives on time; planes, cars, and ships travel from port to port with no hassle, all because of voluntary agreements between nation-states. So, the argument goes, why not break the nation-states themselves down into smaller units, where people are attached only to the cultural affinity of their home regions, and have no necessary affiliation with a vast, imagined, nation under the iron will of its state. Of course the counter-arguments to this would constitute a book unto itself, and this is just a “Very Short Introduction”. Understandably, we do not get a long debate on the issue.

I’m even less satisfied with the treatment of economics, primarily with the whole entire branch of political-economic theory influenced by anarchism: free-market libertarianism. The term libertarianism is used by both people from the extreme left and the extreme right, both of them being hostile to authority and incredibly partial to freedom and liberty. The author of the book is politically left-winged, and seems dismissive of the free-market variant of anarchism. In the chapter on “individualist” conceptions of anarchism, he drops a few names like Friedrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard but in the end denounces them as “academics rather then social activists, … their inventiveness seems to be limited to providing an ideology for untrammeled market capitalism”.

I did enjoy reading the book despite it’s shortcomings, and did develop an appreciation for anarchism not just as the naive and impossibly idealistic political ideology preached by humanities professors and Molotov flinging protesters, but rather something that has been an undercurrent in society for a long time. All of us taking part in a quiet anarchist revolution against authority that has been brewing for centuries, every time we look up something in Wikipedia.

After about a month of not going out of the house at night for my 3 in the morning strolls around the neighborhood, I’ve gotten into the habit of doing them again. As all of you probably know, I love staying up at night, and I love walking around in urban areas, and so it’s kind of sad that I haven’t been indulging in my favorite pastime for so long. And the best thing about this time of the year is that coffee and breakfast-oriented shops in the central area all tend to open twenty-four hours. This means the streets are less deserted and spooky, and every now and then I can just pop into a shop for a wifi+caffeine fix!

It’s kind of ironic though, that Singapore takes on more of a “city that never sleeps” vibe during Christmas season, because this is probably the only time of the year that the average Singaporean can get any decent amount of sleep. Let me explain.

Singaporeans are expected to work A LOT. It’s the same situation across every strata of society.

Even this morning, on the 25th of December, I woke up to the sounds of construction work going on in all the the new condominium projects near my house. There’s no weekends or public holidays or fat old bearded men bearing gifts for them. It’s all just work work work. The poor Bangladeshi immigrant construction workers, the very bottom wrung of Singapore society. It seems like they live an entirely separate existence from the rest of society.

One thing about Singapore is its peculiar economic/political/geographic situation. As one of the few places in the region which has developed to first world standards, it seems like there’s this vast hinterland of resources that can be called upon at will by the powers that be that run this country to fulfill whatever grandiose plan they have envisioned for their little city-state. Need to build a world class casino? No problem, just get a couple of hundred thousand more Bangladeshis. But what happens when there’s about a million more people on the island than anybody in the right mind could imagine? Orchard road on Christmas Eve is a gridlock of human bodies, the trains during rush hour are soon going to be like Japanese subways. Well, we’ll just build another subway, and more shopping districts. How do we do that? More Bangladeshis (and Thais, Mainland Chinese, Indonesians, Indians, Burmese and what have you), of course. All the while, the massive government spending spurs magical Keynesian multipliers, making the economy buzz along at a comforting 5% annual growth rate.

My point though, is not that this place is overcrowding (although that’s true), or that the Singaporean government often acts detached and unconcerned (although that’s also true). Its the fact that this city which is a country onto itself, this weird artifact of colonial history, is an odd arrangement of politics. See, in China, Brazil, India, the US or wherever else, there’s also a big problem of rural to urban migration. Cities are so big now, that often they are governed as separate political entities, on the same stature as states or provinces. However, most of the migration to the cities in these other countries come from the within their own countries. The migrants are their citizens, and possess the same political rights as urban people. In this country, that is definitely not the case. The migrants are foreigners, most of whom are overjoyed at getting a chance to leave their bleak, flooding, poverty ridden third world villages and slums to come to this city that is a little piece of the developed world amidst a sea of poor countries. When they do come, they are discriminated, not only as part of the culture of racial, socioeconomic, linguistic, religious divisions that is very prevalent here, but also as officially ordained by government policy. And after all, how would you expect it to be any other way? After all, these are foreign nationals, and the Singaporean government really has little to no interest in their general welfare. After all, do these people not have governments in their own countries who are supposed to watch out for their well being? Well…. no, not exactly. Welcome to the third world.

Also, these migrant workers only come here temporarily. Imagine, the average Chinese villager who goes to find a better life in a coastal city like Guangdong or Shanghai only goes there so that she can make enough money, to afford to come back to her village as a rich woman, be able to afford a house, a TV, washing machine and the works, and rise up the village social ladder. This is what a Chinese citizen, traveling to a Chinese city, where people speak the same language as she does (+/- some dialects), where everybody looks like her, aspires for in her temporary migration to the city. Now imagine someone in a similar situation coming to Singapore, a different country, where no one speaks your mother tongue, and most of the people will look down at you for petty race and cultural differences, and where life is so unrecognizably different from home. Why on earth would the migrant want to stay in Singapore for even a day longer than she absolutely needs to? This is not the kind of migration that took place when Europeans came to America, leaving home completely to search for a brand new life.

So, that is my point (not particularly well made). Singapore is a peculiar place, and exists in this weird amalgamation of barely holding together, yet being meticulously planned and structured and thought out. The moment you step into the airport, you’d think you’ve finally found a group of people who’s read Plato’s Republic as an instruction manual and executed it to perfection with an anal retentive kiasu attitude. The moment you step out of the airport and into a taxi, the uncle will tell you a different story, a much more complicated one.

So that was about the people who come here temporarily, usually from a poverty ridden life in a neighboring country. How about the rest of the people here, the ones who come here with more in mind than simply dreaming of becoming the first person in the village to afford a TV? Or the locals, the people born and bred here?

Higher up the socio-economic food chain, in the skyscraper office buildings, if you just look at working hours, there’s not much of a difference either. For most people I know, regular office hours end at 6PM, but very often they are expected to stay until 11 or midnight, with no overtime, and they’re also expected to come in on Saturdays. I’ll write about them in a separate post though. This one has become too long.

I’m so lucky to have spent a significant amount of my life in this city/island/nation but having never had to be part of the core system that keeps this place going. I’ve always just been an observer. *empties bottles of pepper into his plate of food *

And it’s a really good song.

And the lyrics very succinctly describe how I feel about my life right now.

And I just saw this band live last week, they were really good.

Ignore the actual video, it’s from some random guy with a camcorder and lots of time on his hands. The song is good though.

Do listen to it.

Lyrics:

You’re sailing through the air to nowhere
the trajectory unclear
but it feels like it’s somewhere
don’t really care if you land or you fall
because it’s not up to you
don’t you know that it should be?

Sign on the dotted line for an unlimited time
but you still won’t know

You feel a hundred feet tall
you see all the things that you could do
but they’re not what you’re doing
Everyone knows where you stand
but you can never see it for yourself
Don’t you know that you should be?

Sign on the dotted line for an unlimited time
but you still won’t know.