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Monday, Jan 12, 2009 - 19:59 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Final Push

"The Chicken Kicker - Kick a chicken a respectable distance"

- Fable II (currently played by my cousin) achievement


The Last Timetable (as an undergrad)


Four day week :( (Tutorials unconfirmed)

Discovered to my chagrin that near 2000 Programme Account points isn't all that much for a final year student, as my bid to take Financial Economics II was flattened by a mere 55 points in the first round, and thereafter it cost well over my total holdings. Considered appealing, but thought it unlikely to succeed since I had several other options, thus I snapped up Environmental Economics at the end, with nary a point to spare (Your bid: 801 Winning Bid: 801).

I currently have absolutely no idea what Environmental Economics pertains to, but if it goes the same way as the last time I took an economics module under the same circumstance (hint: Health Economics), it should go just fine.

Tutorials will be packed on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so if push comes to shove skipping the Tuesday and Friday single lectures would leave me with a two day week (one of my grand ambitions) . Historically lecture attendance has generally had a slightly inverse relationship with final grades (Physics notwithstanding), so I figure that if I think I can safely skip these, I'll do well.


I Look Like Who?



So those of you who don't know what I look like can imagine it... not. The site doesn't work on hamster faces, btw.


Books, Books

Returned my recent haul, which off the top of my head was Emperor: The Gods of War (a mostly-historical retelling of Julius Caesar's life and deeds, the ending which should be familiar to any high school student tasked to read Shakespeare's tragedy, or [probably more willingly] Asterix and Son [whose creator has kindly provided for to continue after his death]); Ludlum's (co-authored) The Hades Factor (N.B. If you wish to get acquainted with Ludlum's true powers, don't use this - or anything from his Covert-One series, for that matter. Same for Clancy and Net Force/Op-Center, IMHO).

Also Orson Scott Card's Shadow of the Giant; David Edding's The Younger Gods (found the title by searching god temple insect novel from what I remembered); Some collection of Lovecraft's (forgot the title, but certain of the stories within like The Doom That Came To Sarnath, The Strange High House in the Mist and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath may be found here, sadly none really scary), and finally some short work on Artificial Intelligence. Oh, and I about-completed Midnight's Children.

And I got about paying my library fines too, since the NLB finally got smart (or poor) and stopped those with outstanding dues from borrowing stuff (soon). There goes another inflation hedge :(

My new loans: Roar of Honor (yet another BattleTech novel, an acquired taste), Asimov's Gold (a SF collection), Card's Prentice Alvin (not yet read, and no not that Alvin), and Jeffery Archer's Cat O'Nine Tales. Say what you want about Archer (who by the way is a bona fide criminal author, having served time for perjury, but he wrote Cat O'Nine Tales with material gained in prison - talk about lemonade from lemons), but boy is he some storyteller.

For want of a better word, Archer is simply... readable. The pages turn naturally. He won't win many prizes for allusions, depth, turn of phrase or vocabulary here, and nor are some of the plots even a surprise, but he doesn't pretend - or try - to be what he isn't. No stretching for a Booker or Pulitzer (ok, he's not American, but you get the idea), but for what he does there are few better. He lays down a tale, and gets the reader into it without any heavy lifting. And it goes on. And on. And when it's done, the next one is ready and waiting. It sounds simple. Maybe it is simple. But very few can do it.

Not that many might care to try, as in Gold, Issac Asimov (one of the few science fiction writers the general population should be aware of) mentions that three years after he sold his first story, he could sell every story he wrote, and thus could be considered a successful writer. Unfortunately it would take him seventeen years as a successful writer before he reached the stage where he could support himself comfortably from his earnings as a writer. Incidentally, on the point of writing being simple above, the very first story in Gold deals with a robot programmed to be able to write like a human.

The book I have been itching to discuss in slightly more detail is none of these, though. It is Naked Empire (part of the Sword of Truth series), which I obtained from a different source.

For those who have not sampled the series, the Sword of Truth is set in a fantasy world, the sort which corresponds roughly to the medieval age, with its own magic and rules, the usual. What makes it stand out, other that the realistic (voyeuristic?) depiction of villainous acts, is that much of the book is spent by the main character (and others) reasoning out what he (they) should do, often by way of dialogue. He is the Seeker of Truth, one who is charged with knowing the truth, after all.

(Plot details yadayada follow...)

In Naked Empire, there exists a group of people, previously cut off from the wider (and unkinder) world by magic, who have now become exposed to it after that magic failed. Generations of exile have left them with a uniformly pacifist philosophy, and conflict is virtually unknown amongst them. When their children misbehave, the worst punishment is to be left alone and cut off from the community for a time, which is dreadful enough to them that it usually suffices to enforce better behaviour for quite a time.

Serious crimes do still occur (though they do not like to be reminded of their existence), and though at first it is taken that the criminal needs help, and utmost effort is put into reforming him, it so happens that sometimes all their reasoning is in vain, and it is obvious that the person will not change. These people are completely against violence, and so if it comes to this, their very worst sentence is that of exile beyond the safety of their realm (some sort of chasing and wrestling to restrain the criminal seems permissible) - which for all intents and purposes is equivalent to death, to the best of their knowledge.

They cross the protagonist's path after their land is taken over by a horde of cookie-cutter evil barbarians, the sort that beat women up and pull the fingers off kids. Their initial strategy was one of concession and appeasement, of delivering property and wives to the intruders in a show of good faith, which unsurprisingly fails.

However, being enlightened, they are not the sort to raise their hands in defense of their own, under any circumstances - they are not that enlightened as to be willing to put up with having their children's fingers yanked off, though, and in their desire to reconcile their two opposing needs, come up with the obvious solution of getting an unenlightened (and capable) foreigner to do the shedding of blood and drive the invaders away. (Ta-dah!)

Now, our protagonist is just such a capable and unenlightened foreigner, and as such a representative approaches him to be their liberating hero. He refuses, not wholly without justification, as he is also needed elsewhere. Plan B is activated, and they slip him a poison that has the antidote distributed amongst several of their villages, so that our protagonist will have to free these villages or die, aligning their goals.

At this point, it is easily observed that these people are not above killing (however they may regret it) for their own purposes, both in exiling recalcitrant criminals, and poisoning an unwilling saviour. The thing that the author drives across (rather bluntly at that) is that they do not contemplate doing it themselves (directly, at least). They want a certain result, and know the price required, but are unwilling to recognize reality.

There are obvious parallels to groups and movements in real life, such as Gandhi's non-violent and peaceful resistance against the British in India, and closer to home, religious groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses who refuse to serve in the armed forces - but I must hasten to add that the comparisms are not perfect.

Let us take Gandhi first. In his book Non-Violence in Peace and War, Gandhi's advice to the British people (who were then under imminent threat of invasion by Nazi Germany), was:

"I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions... If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them."

 which is frighteningly close to what was proposed by the people in Naked Empire, though Gandhi does draw a distinction between non-violence and cowardice ("...that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence").

There are important distinctions between the circumstances of India and of the fictional people in the story, though - while the British were hardly always proper gentlemen in India, they were reasonably civilized, not the sort who would go on wholesale rampages and murder senselessly as a rule. Had their occupiers been outright barbarians, I believe that ahimsa would have been a mere footnote; far more of the oppressed would be motivated into armed resistance, and perhaps more importantly there would be no public opinion pressurising the occupiers to leave. The British wanted the status, power and wealth of Empire, and presumably had some basic decency, and thus could be realistically expected to leave through these methods. Thus the sacrificial strategy of non-violence was buttressed by the very real prospects of success. Take these prospects away, and the willingness of the many to continue would indisputably be drained.

The relevant response by our protagonist follows:

"...We are loyal to an ideal - an ideal of liberty wherever man lives. We do not guard territory, bleed for a piece of dirt. We don't fight because we love violence. We fight for our freedom as individuals to live our own lives, to pursue our own survival, our own happiness."

"Your unconditional rejection of violence makes you smugly think of yourselves as noble, as enlightened, but in reality it is nothing less than abject moral capitulation to evil. Unconditional rejection of self-defense, because you think it's a supposed surrender to violence, leaves you no resort but begging for mercy or offering appeasement."

"Evil grants no mercy, and to attempt to appease it is nothing more than a piecemeal surrender to it. Surrender to evil is slavery at best, death at worst. Thus, your unconditional rejection of violence is really nothing more than embracing death as preferable to life. You will achieve what you embrace."

 In the context of India's independence, the British might be thought of as evil for setting out to control India and enforce their wills - but as evil goes they were a pretty benign evil (please don't hawk the all evil is evil line, littering is not equal to murder and the penalties should rightly be different).

More generally, if non-violence is to be truly practised, can there be armed forces at all? or even police? Even Gandhi admits that police will probably still be needed, but posits that "The people will instinctively render them every help and through mutual cooperation they will easily deal with the ever decreasing disturbances".

How then do they deal with, say, gun-toting robbers? Preach to them after each break-in? Might not their unfettered success encourage more to follow their lead? One might suggest contraptions such as nets and blowdarts, but these are not proscribed methods in reality, and are presumably not commonly used since they are impractical. I would surmise that in equilibrium, given human nature, true non-violence is simply a pipe dream.

Put it this way: A man who, upon seeing a wild dog maul a baby, fervently dreams and hopes that a branch falls and pins the dog, instead of plucking a switch to beat the dog away, can hardly be admired. Indeed the chance that all humans become sufficiently enlightened for total non-violence to work is probably lower that that of all the constituent atoms in the branch to spontaneously shift themselves over the dog...

This is not to say that non-violence never works. It is just that, while it works in particular instances, it does not work in general. When Gandhi said "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall - think of it, always.", did he realise that he also acknowledged that tyrants and murderers have always risen, and likely will always exist, especially if given leeway?

In civilized nations, the rights of protestors for peace are protected by the "sublimated" violence of law. The entire edifice of law was forever built upon the ability to (legally) commit violence as a last resort! Property may be seized and people removed, by force; Dangerous criminals are met by proportional violence such that the (more) innocent may sleep well. Has it ever been otherwise?

This is not to glamorize or encourage violence, but to recognize it and its reality - those who live and firmly renounce it in its totality while enjoying the protections it affords may be gentle but are certainly delusional. If they truly are as Thales and have transcended life and death, then so be it that they be prepared to die, and even Thales said nothing about pain incurred.


IPPT FAIL

Should have expected this, given the sedentary lifestyle I have led these years - apparently brisk walking is not a substitute for an old-fashioned 10-klick run. Most horrifyingly, I discovered that I couldn't even do thirty proper crunches in a minute, something I had thought quite impossible in primary school (btw, the world record seems to be 77 a minute - averaged over 24 hours. This crazy world). Got to build those core muscles all over again...

IPPT at Maju would be quite enjoyable if I were fitter, though. They have moved all the stations to a ground floor location (as opposed to a second-storey hall the last time I went), with the 2.4km run in a covered carpark, complete with electronic lap timing through our number tags!

Not disheartened at all by the results since I know full well what I can do, with a few months of thrice-weekly intensive training. Thus it is a matter of getting my butt off the chair, which is rather a problem since they are good friends. IPPT reminded me of the satisfaction that could be gained from a good long run, though (ah, for the days of a 1km/5min pace, kept up for 15 or more km). And at least I ached the next day, which should be a good sign (haven't pushed myself physically for... um... this is embarrassing).

Next time, next time.

The army standard-issue Brooks running shoes (+ SAF boot medicinal insoles, tip by cousin) were quite comfy at least. Too bad I haven't found a sole with decent grip on slippery surfaces yet.


Ong Bak 2

Lots of cliches, but one has to cut Tony Jaa some slack for doing his own stunts. Hero's parents killed? Check. Orphaned (cute) girl companion who later works her way into the plot? Check. Bad guys taking turns to attack? Check (mostly). Animal (elephant) companion coming to save the day (for awhile)? Check. Biggest bad guy not killing hero when he has him at his mercy, in preparation for the sequel? Check.

Japanese ninjas in Thailand? Okay, that's new. Then again most action films should be able to fit in a ninja and pirate or two...


Footy

Note: There has been no $100 challenge for some time, which is just as well since results these few weeks have been more unpredictable than the usual, if that is possible. Nothing juicy this week either, so it'll continue being on hiatus.

United dismantled Chelsea out of the blue in the wee hours of the morning, made all the more enjoyable by being at the local kopitiam with several fellow Manchester United supporters (and one occ). Despite all the goals, the highlight of the match must be this corner by Giggs (from 0:33 onwards):



Everybody present justifiably thought Giggs had gone bonkers (and this not long after Scholes' volleyball-spike goal), but it turned out that the replay didn't show the whole process, and it was actually a cunning plan that was as cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University.

The trick: Rooney had been first up to take the corner, but only tapped it very slightly such that it just rolled out of the corner. This is not that uncommon, and with Giggs running up most would expect that Rooney was just leaving Giggs to take the kick. Their actual intention however was that Rooney's touch would be considered the corner kick itself, and since Giggs would then be the recepient of the corner kick in that case, he was well within his rights to dribble the ball. N.B. This trick is not even very original (Roma among others have tried it), and quite often disallowed.

Question is, is this legal? Referring to FIFA's Law 17 pertaining to corner kicks, it seems so - the ball was kicked and moved by Rooney, whereupon it should be considered in play, and Giggs went to receive it. So strictly speaking, the move was completely above board.

The problem is that players commonly use their feet to position the ball before taking the actual kick in all kinds of dead ball situations, and there is no clear indication as to which touch signals the start of play, though it is usually obvious; thus opposition players (and the referee) seldom contest moves that might strictly be interpreted as a valid restart of play. For example, if Giggs had instead rolled the ball back to the corner arc and taken a conventional corner kick, there would have been nary a whisper.

So why was it disallowed? Beats me. It was likely the wrong call by the assistant referee (who wasn't very quick on the uptake), as the attacking team is generally given the benefit of the doubt in situations like this (e.g. quick free-kicks), though at least he was quick about it and raised his flag to signal for the infringement before Giggs released his cross. Technically, it might be considered Unsporting Behaviour, which is a catch-all available to the referee whenever he isn't sure what the heck is going on. Still, Vidic scored from the retaken corner anyway, so all's good!

Half-time adverts...


...then goals from Rooney and Berbatov as the Chelsea machine collapsed. Good way to start school.



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