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Saturday, Aug 29, 2009 - 22:34 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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Ham, Thy Name Is Fame






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Saturday, Aug 29, 2009 - 17:43 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Algo Brüno Championleagueo

(N.B. Ph.D. Taxi driver blogger identity confirmed - the blog is legit)


Algo

Been spending a bit of time with algorithms recently, in particular basic asymptotic analysis, which I'm informed is a math module too (ulp). Before that, what is an algorithm?

While the word "algorithm" may conjure up visions of complex oodles of code, at its heart an algorithm is simply a collection of instructions that aim to complete some task. For example, babies eventually discover the algorithm for walking as:

1. Put one foot ahead of the other.
2. Put the other foot ahead of the first foot.
3. Repeat.

 (N.B. Computer Science [CS] people call it an "algorithm" instead of simply "steps" or "a plan" to justify their existence)

Algorithms are important in CS as computers are, despite being very fast and very loyal, also gloriously stupid. Say that an executive has a file containing 1000 account numbers, and wants them in ascending order. One possible solution is to tell a personal assistant, "Sort these accounts in ascending order before lunch." The other is to let a computer do it.

Unfortunately, computers today are generally not very good at human languages (we're still a way from C-3PO of Star Wars fame), and have to be told how to do every tiny thing - threatening to fire them won't help. How might our executive instruct a computer to do the sorting? Well, he could order his PA to tell the computer the individual steps involved in sorting. The PA then sits in front of the computer, sighs, and comes out with a plan:

1. Pick the lowest account number out of all unsorted account numbers.
2. Put this account number at the bottom of the list of sorted account numbers.
3. Repeat while there are still unsorted account numbers.

This isn't quite detailed enough for the computer, and might be expanded as follows:

1a. Check the next unsorted account number is lower than the current lowest unsorted account number.
1b. If it is, it becomes the current lowest unsorted account number.
1c. Repeat while there are still unsorted account numbers.
2a. Exchange this lowest (sorted) account number with the next unsorted account number.
2b. Increase the number of sorted account numbers by one.
3. Repeat while there are still unsorted account numbers.

Better, except that the computer still doesn't understand English and has no plans to pick it up, forcing the PA to translate his plan into one of the many computer languages:

$sorted = 0;
$maxi = 1000;

while ($sorted < $maxi) {

    while ($i = $sorted; $i < $maxi; $i++) {
        if ($i == $sorted) {
            $lowest = $U[$i];
            $lowi = $i;
        }
        if ($U[$i] < $lowest) {
            $lowest = $U[$i];
            $lowi = $i;
        }
    }
    $U[$lowi] = $U[$sorted];
    $U[$sorted] = $lowest;
    $sorted = $sorted + 1;
}

And we are done.

This particular (pretty natural) method of sorting is called selection sort, because at every iteration, the smallest (or largest/cutest if desired) item is selected. Although selection sort is completely correct, we might ask if there are faster ways to go about doing our sorting. As it happens, there are!

Unfortunately, better/faster algorithms are often more complicated (otherwise the obvious algorithm would be the best). For example, consider quicksort. The idea behind it would be to first pick any element as a "pivot", and then move all elements smaller than (or equal to) the pivot to its left, and all elements larger than the pivot to its right.

For example, for the following list, taking 5 as the pivot:

5 9 7 1 3 2 10 4 8 6

we would get something like this:

1 3 2 4 5 9 10 7 8 6

by going through all 10 elements exactly once. Looks better, but it's not quite right yet.

How do we continue? Well, we repeat the same process on the two lists to either side of the pivot. Each time we do this to a list, the problem is reduced to that of sorting two lists of at most half the size of the original. Eventually, we end up with lists of a single element, which are of course sorted by default.

This algorithm clearly works too, but why is it better than the simpler selection sort? Here's a rough idea:

At the top level, there is a list of n items. Let us say each item takes 1 second to process, then the list takes n seconds to process.

After the lists are halved, at the next level there are two lists of n/2 items, which also take n seconds to process in total.

We see that at the third level, there are four lists of n/4 items taking n seconds in total also, and so on for each level, until each list contains a single element. How many levels are there? After L levels, each of the L lists will have n/2(L-1) items, so the last level is when n/2(L-1) = 1, or with a bit of algebraic manipulation, L = (lg n/lg 2)+1. Put into perspective, for n = 1 million (i.e. a list with a million elements), there are just 21 levels. The total time taken is thus about 21 million seconds.

What about selection sort? For the same list, the first iteration would need to check all one million elements. The second iteration would check 999 999 elements, the third 999 998 elements, and so on for one million iterations in total. Using the summation formula that 1 + 2 + ... + (n-1) + n = n(n+1)/2, the total number of checks and therefore the total number of seconds required, would be (1 000 000)(1 000 001)/2, or over 500 billion seconds, more than 20 000 times longer than quicksort! By trying larger figures for n, we easily see that the larger n is, the better quicksort performs compared to selection sort.

In Big Θ notation, we say that selection sort takes Θ(n2) time, while quicksort takes Θ(n lg n) time... on average. Why is this so? Consider a list that is already sorted. Then quicksort, taking the first element of a list as a pivot each time, has to go through a total of n lists, and would be no better than selection sort. However, that is a pretty rare case, and in general we are justified in saying that quicksort is faster, since even when the lists aren't divided perfectly evenly, the effect is still to diminish the size of the lists very rapidly.

This is what asymptotic analysis is all about: Stating which algorithms are faster than others as the number of elements to be inspected grows. In ascending order (lousiness), some of the orders are Θ(1) [constant time], Θ(lg n), Θ(n), Θ(n lg n), Θ(nk) and Θ(kn).

While it is not set in stone that an algorithm with a lower order is always better in practice [an algorithm that takes n2 time is faster than one that takes 1001000(lg n)10000 time unless the value of n is truly stupendous - note that the number of particles in the entire universe is estimated to be somewhat less than 10100, and 264 (about 1018) grains of rice is already more than what the Earth could produce in centuries], the order nevertheless is an invaluable rule of thumb, since in practice huge constants and exponents are rather uncommon.

Again, in practice, computer programmers seldom (re)implement such code themselves - programming languages worth their salt would include prewritten subroutines that can be called upon for almost all purposes, and trying to code one's own version for greater efficiency is for most part not worth it. Remember, a programming language, even assembly code, is to an extent an abstraction or algorithm to generate the bits that constitute true machine language. In real life, our long-suffering personal assistant as seen in the example above would probably have just dumped the data into Microsoft Excel.

From personal experience, great algorithms often seem very obvious once they are learnt. Having the imagination to discover them is another thing altogether, I suppose. Some examples: Given a number of tasks scheduled for a fixed time period, and given that you can only do one task at any one time, how would you select the maximum number of achievable tasks? Given a huge map of thousands of intersecting roads, how would you find the shortest route between two points? Hint: Both problems can be solved in a time nearly proportional to the number of tasks/roads.

A third interesting problem is the stable marriage problem, or how to match up an equal number of men and women (or students and advisors, etc) such that all the pairings hold, by making sure that there are no circumstances where a husband and a wife currently in different marriages are willing to leave their spouses for one another (assuming that their preferences do not change over time). Yes, it can always be done, and there's an algorithm to do it. Don't let the SDU get wind of it!

Things are not always so simple, of course. Consider board games like Power Grid (played last Saturday with colin & triceo). While it is certainly to compute all possibilities on the last turn, when someone has the funds to build the maximum number of power stations, it is often too late to affect the outcome by then. A more classic example is chess, which has a finite number of piece configurations, and therefore must be solvable by examining all possible configurations and their transitions (i.e. by brute force); the practical issue is that there are about 1040 such possibilities.

I will delve into more applications of algorithms sporadically in the future, and for now introduce a puzzle site called [wu:riddles], which has been around for some time. Strangely, I have managed to come across a few of the puzzles in the course of taking modules (particularly in algorithms, game theory and psychology)

My pick for today is one of the "medium-difficulty" questions (though the ratings are quite subjective, and may not be applicable to those with particular strengths):

WORLD SERIES BETTING

You dare not offend nor disappoint Great Uncle Willy lest he disown you. He has placed $2000 in your hands to bet on the outcome of the World Series, which is a baseball contest won by whichever of two teams first wins four games. Willy's $2000 was given to you in advance of the series. At the end of the series he expects you to return to him either $4000 if the team he chose wins, or nothing if it loses.

But you can find nobody who will accept bets on the entire World Series. However, there are wagerers who will take on even-odds bets, in any amount(s), on each game individually. What strategy for placing bets on individual games will achieve the cumulative result Willy expects?

Note: This task was reputedly set before job-seekers at a Wall Street brokerage in 1994.

Clearly this would be trivial if Willy's nephew had money to spare (in which case he could just take on the bet himself), but the intention of the puzzle is that he is flat broke. Also, the actual abilities of the baseball teams are irrelevant. Honorary AAAAA up for grabs!


Brüno

Checked out what was possibly my first R-21 rated film, Brüno, with occ and alvin at Cine. Hamstrings still ached slightly after Tuesday's badminton session with occ and law, likely due to not stretching. And Mr. Ham assures me that his strings never hurt. Bah!

Sadly, the movie was a notch less funny than I had expected. As one reviewer said, it has exactly one trick up its sleeve, and repeats it over and over again. There are some priceless moments, such as when some parents are willing to let their babies land any sort of acting gig, even if it involves operating antiquated heavy machinery while dressed as a Nazi.

Another gripe is that it is hard to believe that all the scenes were unscripted, for example the reviewer comments, which had to be quite specific to support the continuation of the plot (unless Cohen played it by ear). Still, it is a special kind of talent that manages to get Paula Abdul to speak about humanitarian work while using a Mexican as a chair, and a special kind of bollocks that indulges in terrorist-baiting - "I want to be famous. I want the best guys in the business to kidnap me. Al-Qaeda is so 2001..."

In the final accounting, Brüno is probably a disservice to the more well-behaved gays (which is just about the rest of them), despite raising awareness, but as Kazakhstan found out with Borat, you takes what you gets.

One thing that struck me was that Brüno looked slightly familiar, and lo and behold:


On the left, Liverpool star Fernando Torres
On the right, comedy genius Brüno
(Sources: Buzznet.com & Ekolay.net)


The resemblance hasn't been lost on his teammates (okay, News of the World isn't the most reliable source, but...). Well, having another celebrity spearheading their forward line won't affect them much, seeing that they have Kevin Spacey as their manager.

Okay, I confess, I matched the colours of the two images (and touched up Brüno's eyebrows some, or was it Torres?) to heighten the similarity, using Photoshop's Match Color (what else?) tool. Protip: The Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition module I'm currently taking teaches one how to do that... with MATLAB.


Championleagueo

And we return to footy, in a week that saw Liverpool surprised 1-3 by Aston Villa (Brüno netting their consolation goal), and United rout Wigan 5-0, but it's still early days. Memories are short in football, and if United beat Arsenal later tonight they'll be regarded as lock-ons for four titles in a row, and if they lose it's time for Ferguson to leave. Part and parcel of the game.

What shouldn't be part of the game are the scenes at West Ham vs Millwall a few days ago, with large-scale fights, though fortunately no fatalities. Quite by coincidence I had just borrowed The Football Factory some days ago, which gives a man-on-the-groud perspective on such clashes between hooligan "firms". Kind of an odd feeling to see locations I've been to (e.g. King's Cross, Seven Sisters) referenced.

The major motivation appears to be a sense of belonging (tribalism/brotherhood), and the sheer adrenaline rush, and perhaps a touch of Fight Club-style psychological support. The Football Factory follows a Chelsea fan, who coincidentally is badly injured near the end of the book after getting outnumbered against Millwall supporters.

Mass brawls such as these were far more common in the Eighties, and usually took place some distance from the stadium itself to avoid police presence. Weapons were not compulsory but far from prohibited, and there appears to be no real motive - participation and not getting beat up too badly seemed to be the key goals. Not a bad way of letting off steam, except for the property damage and people possibly getting disabled or killed.

[N.B. Speaking of participation, Usain Bolt is a relief in a world where technology seems to be taking over sports, e.g. super-swimsuits in the pool and various doping procedures of dubious legality in cycling (and atheletics to a lesser extent)]

More trivia: one area where football hooliganism might not have been expected to impact is fashion, but it did. Leather jackets and work clothes were a real police magnet, and the obvious solution was to adopt a more affluent and respectable look. Such apparel was more expensive, and again an obvious solution presented itself - just steal it. And one didn't even have to skulk about in the process; with sufficient numbers, less scrupulous supporters could just flood a store and walk out with what they wanted!


Materazzi: "Football, bloody game, eh?"
Rui Costa: "Indeed, indeed."
(Sources: Lordcolus on Flickr)


Returning to the business of football proper, the Champions League group stage draw took place on Thursday night, and was nowhere to be seen on Starhub presumably thanks to Singtel buying up the Champions League rights. United drew CSKA Moscow, Beşiktaş and Wolfsburg, a decent group but with a lot of travelling.

An observation from the draw was that the person choosing the groups might have reasonably easily chosen his desired group, since there were a maximum of eight balls in his transparent bowl, and an assistant always placed the balls two at a time in order into the bowl, i.e. knowing which ball contained which group letter is straightforward. Of course, having the assistant deliberately mix the balls about first might impugne on the drawer's integrity...

Virtual punting: $174/$200 after City failed to oblige with a second goal in the second week. Since I haven't got a copy of The New Paper with me, odds will be from Singapore Pool's website:

$50 on Man City (-1.5) vs Portsmouth (at 2.45)
$25 on Everton (-1.5) vs Wigan (2.70)
$25 on Man Utd to draw Arsenal (3.10)



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Saturday, Aug 22, 2009 - 17:09 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Davydov And Pratchett

Done: Categorized all 300-plus of my Facebook "friends", of whom I probably only know maybe a hundred personally, as a consequence of the numerical necessities of Facebook gaming. Also discovered that there is no copy of the canonical Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen et al. to be had for love or money, after a trip to the Clementi Textbookshop.

Mindful that I wouldn't have that much free time, I borrowed only two books from the library this visit, among them Pratchett's (with Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen) Darwin's Watch: The Science of Discworld III. The choice was not unlikely given that I'm an avid reader of Pratchett (and am constantly vexed at the slim selection at my regional library), but what piqued me was that it happened to be a great counterpart to a book I had just returned, Davydov's God Exists: New Light on Science and Creation (preview).


Book covers in warm red shades (Source: Amazon.com)


We first note the similarities: both books are concerned about God and Science. Let us proceed with Davydov's God Exists, which I picked up in order to hear both sides of the debate - one must be able to argue the other side to claim understanding, and I may pen the best argument I can make for particular God(s) one day. For now, hear Davydov out.

A little background: Joseph Davydov received his Ph.D. at the Moscow Institute of Energy in 1967, and was a former subject of the USSR, which as we know enforced state atheism. Davydov begins by stating that atheism is the opposite of religion (strictly speaking not the case, since Buddhism is commonly recognized as a religion and states that there is no God). He then asserts that atheism is scientifically bankrupt, and that religion in contrast agrees with science. Undoubtedly an interesting position to occupy, and he proceeds to justify it.

Davydov defines idealism as the primacy of objective ideas and the subordinacy of matter, while materialism is the reverse. Of the latter school, he holds up Lenin as stating that "there is nothing in the world except for matter in motion", a phrase that will be repeated many times over the course of the book; this sentiment came, by the way, from Karl Marx's practical dialectical materialism, and of course Marx was a key founder of modern communism; it is no wonder that the two got intertwined.

It is apparent that Davydov holds no great love for the Soviet regime (and who can blame him?), and his objective is to discredit the philosophy of dialectical materialism, and thereby atheism. In particular, he states that the Bible is powerful because it is true, and communism collapsed (well, almost totally) because totalitarian atheism is false. (Of course, one then wonders what conclusions can be drawn from the gradual demise of religious states in favour of secular ones...)

What are the major thrusts of his arguments? On idealism and materialism, he attempts to discredit materialism through the analogy that the primacy of matter is akin to an engineer building an aeroplane, then thinking of the design, which is absurd - surely an engineer would think first (thus primacy of ideas) before building?

This is not a new argument at its heart (and to be fair, truly novel arguments almost never get discovered), and is mostly the teleological argument, more commonly known as the argument from design, or watchmaker argument (it is obvious that such incredibly complex things as humans must have had a designer, i.e. God, just as a watch presupposes a watchmaker). As you may expect, Pratchett's Darwin's Watch has something to say on this, which we shall leave for later.

Holding a Ph.D. in science, Davydov is not wanting for evidence - the ratio of the radius of the nucleus to the diameter of the atom is approximately that of the radius of the Sun to the solar system, he says. Does this similarity not then demonstrate that they are different details of some creative, intelligent design, he continues. However, is this good reasoning?

Firstly, the diameter of the solar system is not universally agreed upon - if Pluto is taken as the boundary, it is just 0.1% of a light year. If you take the cloud of comets revolving around the sun as part of the solar system, it is about a thousand times greater, on the order of one light year. Then let us say instead that the nucleus-atom ratio is several orders of magnitude smaller than it actually is. Is there then a similar cosmological ratio that can be presented as evidence for design? Yes, that of the Earth to the Moon. If several orders of magnitude greater, we may use the galaxy, and so on. Thus, presented with enough such ratios, it would be more surprising that no "designed" coincidences could be found!

Davydov claims that (Soviet, at least) scientific atheism uses completely unproven basic assumptions, namely that "the world contains nothing except for weighty and visible matter", which is demolished by phenomena such as photons (weightless) and radio waves. It does in fact seem to defeat Lenin's "everything is matter in motion" materialism, but wait - some current definitions of matter do include energy and fields as forms of matter. Davydov has no truck with this so-called revisionism, and says that scientific atheism has adapted their dogma to agree with scientific advances circa 1900.

A related criticism is made of the "scientific atheist" statement that "matter is uncreatable and there exists a law of conservation of matter", which is not true of some forms of matter (e.g. if electrons and positrons, which are generally considered matter, come together to form photons, sometimes not considered matter). A third one is of the expansion of the Universe, which contradicts the fixed Universe supposedly hailed by atheists and materialists - indeed, Davydov reveals that they once declared the expanding Universe theory as "blatantly religious".

Thus it appears that Davydov takes umbrage at the fact that Marx, Lenin and their dialectical materialist buddies moved their philosophical foundations to suit new evidence, that the sort of matter that they recognized when crafting their theory is not the sort of matter that was later scientifically discovered. Therefore, since the original interpretation of dialectical materialism is false, dialectical materialism must be false!

At this point, it may be instructive to rewind a little to the front of the book, where Davydov mentions that the Bible is 3300 years old, and must be correctly translated into modern scientific language for its truth to be apparent. He further includes a charming Middle English poem from the 14th century to make his point, that it is unintelligible without commentary, presumably from a graduate student in Medieval Literature.

Skipping the observation that Davydov allows, nay, insists upon, a liberal interpretation of his chosen holy text while denying the same to poor ol' Marx, let us partake of his explanation.

For a start, the Biblical earth is stated not only to refer to land, but to also the "concepts of planet, material, matter, the galaxy, the Universe and the Material World". However, a problem is that early believers would almost certainly have directly and literally interpreted earth as the land, and insisted that this was correct (the alternative, of admitting doubt, is not particularly common in religion) - indeed some such as the Young Earth Creationists of today would concur. Then, by Davydov's standards, would their belief be false since their premises were shown to be inaccurate?

Continuing on, Davydov maps the Six Days of Creation to six scientific eras - Energy Evolution, Hydrogen Evolution, Planetary Evolution, Stellar Evolution, Biological Evolution and Intelligent Evolution, in that order.

One immediate objection might be the placing of Stellar Evolution after Planetary Evolution, since the currently accepted scientific hypothesis is that the Sun was formed first some 4.6 billion years ago, and that the planets (including Earth) then coalesced in another hundred million years or so.

Unfortunately, Davydov doesn't have much choice, since the book of Genesis clearly states that by the end of the third day, there existed dry land and seas, and even vegetation, and the making of two great lights to rule the day and night only came after that, during the fourth day. In other words, your apple trees (remember, God created all species...) flourished before the Sun sparked into life.

I guess one might interpret dry land, seas and vegetation in other ways (a tree of gases?) just as Davydov interpreted the "waters" of the second day as hydrogen plasma, and the "firmament" as vacuum space. Or maybe the "two great lights" can be interpreted not to refer to the Sun and Moon, but to some other entities. Who knows?

Further, while Davydov names the stages "Evolution", he does not follow the scientific consensus regarding evolution, insisting that it is guided and limited; he says that "fossils discovered by archaeologists convinced us that the evolution of each living species occurred without the slightest trace of transformation of lower life forms into higher forms." This, I believe, is not quite true (see list of transitional fossils).

Davydov then pulls out several counterarguments to evolution, including the argument by design (again), that interspecies breeding isn't possible because different species are unrelated (false, think horse-zebra and lion-tiger crosses among others), and that scientific atheism has embraced the theory according to which human beings descended from apes (false, since the scientific claim is that humans and apes have a common ancestor that is properly neither human nor ape).

Here, it appears that the author has not bothered to grasp the most rudimentary basics on evolution, writing that "if we were to dry out the Atlantic Ocean, none of the billions of fish there would turn into a sheep or a camel...", disregarding the sheer scope of time that the process of evolution requires, i.e. Darwin's finches took millions of years to split into a dozen species.

A more accessible example may be (low-tech) animal husbandry, where men chose animals with desired characteristics and crossbred them, and it often happens that in a relatively short period of time (on the order of thousands of years), new species are created, if the definition of different species being unable to interbreed is taken.


Picture them marching up an ark together
(Sources: Lovemymastiff.com & Puppy-and-dog-tips.com)


For yet another example, Take dogs - while nominally a 180-pound English Mastiff and a 2-pound Chihuahua are of the same species, in practice they aren't going to have babies. Compare this to the case of lions and tigers, which Davydov would likely accept as different species, despite being much more physically and reproductively compatible. It would be quite understandable for a layman to pronounce the mastiff and chihuahua to be of different species; surely they appear more distinct than horses from zebras, or lions from tigers!


Wolves don't particularly like the implications of evolution either
(Sources: Arizona.edu & Anno.nl)


As for the argument from design that remains, Darwin's Watch deals with it. The general agency of designless evolution is that it is guided by competition - for food, for space, for mates, i.e. "natural selection", that the the gene pool of each generation is altered just a teeny weeny bit as the "more successful" have more kids, and that this glacial change, as populations of what was originally a common species become isolated (not as hard as one may suppose, since fruit flies fed different kinds of food will not mate with each other after as few as eight generations, in an easy-to-reproduce experimental setup), splits an original species into new, distinct ones.

Thus, I ended up slightly disappointed with Davydov's tome, which offered few new insights regarding the proof of an Absolute God, although I hasten to add that I do not see how a definite proof of the nonexistence of such a being can be formed, and thus my formally agnostic leaning. In addition, consider Davydov's pains in matching up scientific reality with the Biblical canon of creation in Genesis, and showing that Genesis does not contradict science. Leaving aside the order of Sun/Earth creation, how meaningful is such a matching?

Let's do the same with the Egyptian myth of creation. "In the beginning there was only water, a chaos of churning, bubbling water..." - does this not describe exactly the scientific reality of the fluid gases that eventually became the solar system? And out of this came "hills of dry land", and over these came the first sunrise. Note that there could not by definition be a sunrise without anything for it to rise over, so this leaves open the possibility that Ra-Horus the Sun came before the Earth, in perfect concordance with known scientific fact!

Next, let us ask the Australian Aboriginals, those experts with boomerangs. "There was a time when everything was still. All the spirits of the earth were asleep - or almost all. The great Father of All Spirits was the only one awake. Gently he awoke the Sun Mother. As she opened her eyes a warm ray of light spread out towards the sleeping earth... and everywhere she walked plants grew." How incredibly accurate - the Sun's energy allowed the first plants to photosynthesize! Certainly it is, like the Egyptian story, scientifically no less spot-on than Genesis.

What about us Chinese? Well, we had Mr. Pangu to do the task. "In the beginning there was nothing in the universe except a formless chaos. However this chaos coalesced into a cosmic egg for about 18,000 years. Within it, the perfectly opposed principles of Yin and Yang became balanced and Pangu emerged (or woke up) from the egg." Dare I see the Big Bang theory? Come to think of it, what are we paying those physicists and cosmologists for? Fund them millions and build them observatories, and the best they can do is to confirm what Chinese peasants knew thousands of years ago.

Not to leave out the Hindus, in the interest of harmony - of all the cosmologies described thus far, they probably come closest to current scientific consensus, that the Earth is over 4 billion human years old - no mucking about with interpreting days as eras for the Hindus! Shiva, Lord of the Dance, dances the creation and destruction of the Universe, exactly the cyclic model, and this universe is just part of an infinity dreamed by untold numbers of other deities, the many-world hypothesis. Might Davydov not then logically embrace the superior revealed truth of the Vedas?

As a final demonstration, consider the opening of Moby Dick. "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." may in fact be a veiled description of Creation. There is a hint of untold ages ("never mind how long precisely"), of nothing in the beginning ("having little or no money... nothing particular to interest..."), and of impending flux in the hydrogen plasma which led to the Earth ("sail about a little... the watery part of the world.")

The point is, even given the acceptance of an abstract Absolute God, its conflation with the specific God of the Bible, or of any particular religious tradition that claims itself as the only truth, cannot be done with any reasonable degree of confidence.

It is the equivalent of stating that there is some perfect, wonderful, indescribable being outside space and time, and from there jumping to a knowledge of said being getting very unhappy if one particular species out of the innumerable ones created by Him does anything productive in one particular day-and-night cycle out of every seven, and that He will torment any member of that species forever and ever if it doesn't believe in Him, even if it never heard of Him and didn't have the imagination to dream all His accepted attributes up.

Summing up, Davydov's contempt for the forced atheism of the USSR is well-founded, but unfortunately his scientific approach to reconciling science and his particular chosen faith is unimpressive. Indeed the religious counterpart to the USSR, a theocracy where belief in a particular God is forced upon its subjects on pain of punishment, is no better. Would Davydov accept an alternate reality USSR, where Christianity were the only state religion, with atheists-by-choice and members of other religions persecuted? But it's obviously the only truth...

I will leave off with another argument by another Ph.D. (in Gas Kinetics). Dr. Monty White has taken up the challenge of defending the literal Biblical position of the Earth being about 6000 human years old, a task I do not envy. His "simple, conservative arithmetic" proof goes as follows: beginning from Adam and Eve, assuming the population only doubles every 150 years, there would still be over eight billion people in less than 5000 years, close to the current world figures. Thus, it all adds up!

In contrast, Dr. White says, if humans have really been around for hundreds of thousands of years as evolutionists say, then using a figure of 50000 years and the same doubling rate, there would be 10100 humans, which is clearly false! Without pausing to let the incredulity sink in, Dr. White confidently says that "...such a calculation makes nonsense of the claim that humans have been on earth for tens of thousands of years." and challenges the dumb evolutionists: "If humans were around millions of years ago, why is the population so small?"

No, unfortunately, I don't think this is a joke, which makes it unimaginably pathetic. One might present Dr. White with a pair of fruit flies (named Flydam and Fleve, perhaps), with the supremely conservative doubling rate of a week. Then, in a year, by Dr. White's logic, the original pair would have undergone 52 doublings, leaving a grand total of 4 500 000 000 000 000 flies (you do the math), and in a mere ten years the mass of the flies would be far greater than that of the Earth. Ergo, fruit flies have existed for only days, if they exist at all. Where are the hordes of hamsters flooding the earth?

It is a distressing sight to see undoubtedly intelligent people mortgage all good sense in defence of the dumb parts of religion.

On the bright side, I feel much more confident about completing my Ph.D. all of a sudden.


Not the greatest of starts to the new season of the $100 Challenge, no thanks to Owen's one-on-one miss. $90/$100 after Week One.

$50 on Man City (-1.5) vs Wolverhampton Wanderers (at 1.90)
$40 on Arsenal (-2.5) vs Portsmouth (2.10)
$10 on Man United 1, Wigan 0 [Exact Score] (6.00)



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Sunday, Aug 16, 2009 - 20:21 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

- - -
Mild Headaches To All Humans!

changelog v1.14b
---------------
* Comment bug that truncated all comments after the first quotation mark fixed.

To my dear fans, the hamster ones and not the human ones, I, Mr. Ham G. Bacon, am very upset.

I had trusted my nominal guardian, and regarded him as a friend. Never mind the squeezing, hand wiping and using me to wipe tables. What's getting soaking wet between friends? I didn't even complain when he sent the ghost of Mr. Fish to hound me for my blog post yesterday, nor murmur when I discovered a copy of How to Fossilise Your Hamster on his table.

But get this: As I was busy typing my assigned blog post - at a pittance, mind - I chanced upon the ultimate betrayal. He was playing MouseHunt! He even had the cheek to blog about it last December, which I would have noticed had I not slacked off on doing my post-reviews!

Of all such games on Facebook, he had to play MouseHunt, notwithstanding the feelings of rodents everywhere. He could have played Fish Wrangler, since I have no affection for those slimy things, but no, he had to insult my species. (Well, technically I'm clearly not a mouse per se, and it goes without saying that hamsters are much cuter and more adorable than the common mouse, but it's not their fault that our poor cousins are born with such ugly long tails and mean faces, is it?)

Still, that wretched game is an affront to all rodentkind, and I stand in solidarity with my inferior mouse comrades in protest. Some of the pet food is cast, and I'll be throwing down a gauntlet as soon as I find one lying around.

Turnabout is fair play, and thus I have programmed a new Facebook game called HumanHunt.



HumanHunt Prototype Screenshot (Click to enlarge)


Not feeling so smug now, eh, humans? How do you feel now that hamsters everywhere will be checking back every fifteen minutes, to call the Hunter's Handphone and see if some puny human has fallen into one of our ingenious traps?

And once I take the game public, I'll buy a nice cage for myself somewhere and be free of your dictatoria... hey, put me down! Not again, it's none of my business that you spilt your fruit jui... ahhhhhh it's freezing cold!

Brrrrrrrrr.

What's this? A note from the Traitor to Hamsterkind to include his $100 Challenge update? Never! Shall I be accessory to the whims of a human tyran... "or no dinner?" Ah, playing hardball, I see. Very well, but I do it at my own pleasure. Hamsters and other rodents of the world, arise! Until breakfast, at the bare minimum!

$40 on Man United (-1.5) vs. Birmingham (at 1.67)
$10 on Man United 2, Birmingham 0 [Exact Score] (at 6.00)



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Saturday, Aug 15, 2009 - 19:21 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

- -
Grad Week One

(Editor's note: Mr. Ham was supposed to submit a post, but has requested for an extension. His bonus has, of course, been withheld.)

1949年只有社会主义才能救中国；
1979年只有资本主义才能救中国；
1989年只有中国才能救社会主义；
2009年只有中国才能救资本主义。

- China, socialism and capitalism (source) (translation)


Before Grad Week One (before 9th Aug)

More DotA and gaming, of the sort that leads one to feel that one has accomplished something, when one has in fact accomplished nothing. Tsk tsk. Wins became harder to come by, with many defeats snatched from the jaws of victory, in the immortal words of yiren.


Sunday, National Day

Seen one, seen them all, or at least that was my attitude towards the NDP. Soldiers marching with clockwork precision, parachute jumps, the giant flag helicopter flyby, choreographed mass displays... it never deviates much. So I didn't know what possessed me to sit through maybe a third of the parade this year. What's that... pole dancing?! Well, now!


Monday, National Day Holiday

Watched Up at Cathay (non-3D version voted for) with the usual gang. As forewarned, the first 20 minutes were a real tearjerker, and that's not even including the animated short before that, Partly Cloudy.

(Spoiler warning)

The last bit of the movie was a big bust-up between an old explorer (the protagonist's hero in his childhood) and the protagonist. The old explorer had settled in a hidden corner of South America for ages, trying to find a live specimen of a giant bird to rebuild his reputation, after scientists had denounced a skeleton he brought back as fake.

To me, it was more than a little strange that the protagonist didn't simply give up the giant bird, which he didn't even like, and before the explorer implied that he had killed perceived rivals in his search. Grab Mrs. Bird and her chicks, hightail it back to civilization, and everybody's happy, no? Given the difficulty of locating even a single specimen, the giant birds were likely functionally extinct anyhow.

Notable pop culture references: the snipe hunt, and also dogs playing poker.


Tuesday, Grad Career Day One

Back to being a student again. Got on the same SBS bus to NUS, the same shuttle bus to COM1, and the same lecture room where the Game Development module was held last year. The course this time was Foundations of Algorithms, with the professor helming it supposedly once in charge of Informatics Olympiad training. I will however reserve comment on the lecture content until I get the homework done.


Wednesday

"An unconfirmed report on an Internet website
said that DNA samples taken from the man killed
in a raid last weekend do not match those of
terror leader Noordin Top's children."

- Front page of the Straits Times, Aug 12, verbatim
(why doesn't the ST publish something from this blog then?)


Busier day than most. Buffet lunch at 12:30 p.m. with the CVWO people (the prof kindly gave a treat) at The Ridge cafe, NUS Guild House. This took a couple of hours, and led into a meeting with another prof, who actually took the time to email those who had indicated interest in his research area - quite touching.

Well, I had suspected that there weren't too many locals taking up a Ph.D. in CS, but the prof confirmed it with his remark to the other two students in attendance, whom were both from China. A couple of faux pas-es followed, as I couldn't recall whether he was one of the two profs who had taken me for the Computer Graphics module, which to be fair was years ago (he didn't), despite him saying that I looked familiar. It turned out that he was one of my FYP examiners (oops).

His projects were fairly interesting, but since they're not publicly announced, I shouldn't say much about them. Next order of business after the hour-long session ended somewhat after four was a swim at the SRC pool with al-who-shalt-not-be-named-vinny, who had discovered that our AlumNUS cards were good for free lockers and hot showers. I don't think too many people know about this perk.

Dinner next, and a tour of the Adaptive Research lab by psw (nice carpeting), and then the Foundation on Database Systems lecture, which again had like fifty students. It was about what I expected, thus I put in my module selections once I reached home; hopefully I'll be able to get my top choices.


Thursday

Inadvertently arrowed triceo to organize the Mind Cafe outing (thanks) for the jobless 4O kias. Went to the Princep Street one, located in a shophouse very close by the SMU city campus, and a short walk from Buona Vista MRT.

We got the $5-for-four-hours-from-two-to-six package, inclusive of four free drinks each, which would have accounted for the five bucks alone. The cafe owners had good reason to put out this offer though, as the place was mostly empty being a weekday. Nobody wanted to play Munchkin this time round, so we got a recommendation, and were given Pictureka!

Pictureka! is a kid's game that consists of nine boards filled with drawings that may be placed together in any orientation and combination to form a large composite board, and a stack of cards. The game then consists of flipping over one card at a time and trying to find the objects specified on the card (e.g. "five cows", "ten sharp things" or "twenty things that can be found in the toilet"), or bidding to find the most of some group of objects, which quickly got ridiculous when it emerged that there was no penalty for failure (thus "I bid 100000 spiders!")

Needless to say, it didn't last long, and we went on to Citadels, which the Europe grad trip people had played several times at least. kkok won it, as well as the Dirty Minds game. Dirty Minds is a game where players take turns to read out a three-liner riddle. Any player who manages to guess the answer after hearing just the first line draws three cards, or two after the second line, and a single card if all the lines are required. First to complete the word D-I-R-T-Y with his cards, wins. Note that this is one of those games which eventually becomes unplayable, once players memorize the answers.

Example riddle (taken from the website):

I'm a four letter word.
I'm a name for a woman.
I end in u-n-t.
What am I?

Law's recommendation was Imaginiff, where "each round, one of the players is chosen as the 'subject' of a question. The question has six multiple choice answers. The question is read aloud and players vote on the answer they think is correct. Points are awarded to the players that chose the most popular answer." (Note that the subject's own choice isn't given any special weight).

This is in fact sort of a Keynesian beauty contest, where the players' actual thoughts aren't as important as what they think the other players think. Indeed, where a clear correlation cannot be found, players might do well to just pick any choice that stands out, i.e. an abnormally short, long or outrageous choice.

Finally, we split up to widen our options (not that many games support more than six players well), and my group tried Container. The preceding wikipedia link describes the game in more detail that I can justify copying and pasting here, so I will assume the reader has perused that before proceeding to the following analysis.

Simply put, Container is a game of economic decisions - how many factories and warehouses do I build, and which goods do I buy and at what price? Quick recap: Players may build factories to produce containers, which can then be bought by some other player to stock their warehouses. Some other player (not the owner of the warehouses) may then steer his ship into the warehouser's port, and transport those goods to the island, where all other players may bid for the entire shipment.

Finally, the shipper either accepts the highest bid and draws an equal amount from the bank as a government subsidy, or matches the highest bid to claim the shipment for himself. At the end of the game, each container owned by a player is then allocated a predetermined amount of Victory Points depending on colour, the distribution being private information known only to the player himself.

There are a few basic strategy considerations to be kept in mind (the BoardGameGeek forums helps here). Firstly, funds are hard to come by early on, as each player begins with only $20, some may well invest in more factories/warehouses, and no new funds enter the game until somebody ships out to the island and accepts a bid. This is an important point, since building factories to produce containers to sell for a few bucks each (remember, each dollar is one Victory Point in the final reckoning) doesn't look too smart when the shipper earns double any bid and the final owner might well make up to 10 Victory Points per container of the right colour.

A second observation is on the final auction at the island - containers are worth a maximum of 10 Victory Points, often quite a bit less, and remember the rule that the container colour that a player has the most of will have to be discarded at the end of the game. Thus, it appears to make little sense to offer more than $10 per container, except in the most contrived of situations (e.g. the game is ending and a player has 15 of his most valuable container and 11 of his least valuable ones - in this case a shipment of five of the least valuable containers would be worth 15 * $10 - 11 * $2 = $128, or over $25 per container!).

Also, when bidding, players seem to often neglect the dollar-for-dollar government subsidy granted to the shipper. Let us say that a player bids $40 for a shipment of five of his most valuable container, a good deal since they will each be worth 10 Victory Points at the end, right? (we assume that he has a good stockpile of lesser containers to discard, which would have cost something too) Well, the $40 would have been 40 Victory Points by themselves, so by winning the bid, the player has made a net gain of just 10 Victory Points.

Moreover, consider the shipper, who gets his $40, as well as $40 from the government subsidy (bank) for a total of $80, or 80 Victory Points! Granted, the containers had to be bought from someone else in the first place, but common warehouse prices are $3 or $4 per unit. Assuming the higher figure, that's an outlay of $20 for the five containers, and a net gain of 60 Victory Points from the auction, though it has to be said that the process of shipping consumes a few actions. Although this is partly intuitive, the scale of the difference may not be immediately apparent to newer players.

The other guys played some salad card game (could neither recall nor find the name), where the objective was to get rid of all the cards in one's pile. The rules are simple - you have to call out the name of the ingredient on your top card (one of cauliflower, lettuce, yellow pepper and tomato) as you add it to the central pile, but not if it happens to be the same as the previous card, in which case you have to call some other ingredient. There are also special ban cards, which disallow one ingredient from being called at all.

The final game played was after we left Mind Cafe, as triceo had brought Bohnanza with him. It's essentially a bean planting game, with players trying to collect plenty of the same variety to exchange for more gold, with the restriction of being able to manage at most two varieties of beans (or three, if one invests in a third field) at any time. Speaking of farming, if there are any Country Story players on Facebook, drop me a line.


Friday


Would have been helpful before the trip


Received my Eurail souvenir, a surprise since I had neglected to specify which souvenir I wanted, and moreover didn't supply them with my travel information to the level of detail specified, i.e. with train numbers. Brings back memories.

Attempted the hardest question on my algorithms homework and completed the first half, I think. A couple more crushing defeats on DotA, par for the course. Strangely I've been having a rather higher success rate with pubs recently.


Saturday

"Baby bonus has had little impact so far"

- Straits Times headline, Aug 15; I could have told them that...


Was alerted by psw to a special blog - that of a Stanford Ph.D. who had recently been made redundant from the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) of A*STAR, and is now working as a taxi driver (you would think that there would at least be advanced test-tube washer openings...). Keeping in mind that this is an unconfirmed report on an Internet website, I would plead that my blog should be held to slightly lower standards than the Straits Times, and therefore that blog is fair game for discussion.

A quick search of the IMCB website with the name claimed on the blog revealed that the blogger, or someone with the same name, was part of their staff, and an Associate Professor no less (thought they had tenure?), but with a (Left - Email Extension) remark, and no department. The blogger also referred to a paper he claims to have written after leaving IMCB, and various other details that mean that even if the blog isn't authentic, someone put in a decent bit of effort in crafting a fake.

Either way, it's a stark reminder that even a Ph.D. doesn't provide any guarantees, (not that there are any true guarantees in life), that the world always needs ditch-diggers and road sweepers, and that in the end, politics is the thing to study.

The tales told are entertaining, and a good read for those of us who may end up driving a taxi at some point in our lives. Facts: Singapore has nearly 100000 taxi drivers, a good 3% of the estimated 3.2 million citizens, a percentage made more useful by the citizenship requirement for taxi driving. However, since about a third of those citizens are probably retired or too young to work, a better estimate might be that 5% of all working Singaporeans are employed in taxi driving (!)

The blogger points out that "...taxi operating companies do not care about the demand in ridership. They only care about collecting rentals from the drivers. In the time of economic downturn, many people become jobless and they are the abundant source of supply of potential taxi drivers. The taxi companies recruit these people, train them, give them the license, and get them sign a taxi hiring contract for at least 6 months.".

By the way, the rental is a minimum of S$77 a day, not inclusive of fuel costs, meaning that drivers have to at least recoup that S$77 in fares before making any profit. From the companies' viewpoint, though, one driver equals seventy-seven bucks (or ninety two bucks, for newer taxis) a day, no more no less. Why not just rent them out (with a minimum six month contract), and let the market weed out the less successful drivers? Given that his company couldn't even find the time to fix his fare meter for him, I'm not sure if they would care too much...


Andddddd... the EPL is baaccccckkkkk, and so is the (virtual) $100 Challenge! To kick off,

$50 on Man City to beat Blackburn (at 1.90)

N.B. I'm also punting for fun on matchpredictions.com. Let's see how that goes.



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Wednesday, Aug 05, 2009 - 20:55 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

- - -
Increasing Muggosity

To honour csq & tpk emerging once more from the river/lake to blog again, I'm throwing together this brief update.


On School

Dodged the grad school orientation ("highly recommended" only, lah) day as I wasn't feeling too fine, not to mention that it didn't seem quite that important. Good news is that I'll know at least one guy, another TCHS alumni, who is embellishing his CMU bachelor's with an NUS master's. Nice.

Forced myself to wake early for lunch at NUS with csq, Canada-bound psw and roastbird. csq spoke of some Japanese ramen-cooking robot he saw on TV (a video of an example, probably not the one seen). Just after I thought a general-purpose cooking bot (add packaged ingredients into correct compartments, or even try to automatically detect them?) might be a good innovation... The next step up from the rice cooker, and the decline of household culinary skills?

Mindful of the terms of the NUS Research Scholarship, in particular item five, "...undertakes to devote his/her full time and energy to his/her studies and to the best of his/her ability, apply himself/herself to his/her programme of study, to the satisfaction of the University.", I figured I had best get a leg up, and printed the past year exam papers for the Qualifying Exams, to be taken in about nine months.

Come to think of it, the "full time and energy" and "best of ability" clauses are, strictly speaking, humanly impossible to fulfil to the letter. It is sometimes heard that a person or group has given "100%", "101%" or even "200%", but that is pure hyperbole - blindly maximizing effort doesn't maximize performance, while maximized performance is unverifiable. Of course, the key thing here is to satisfy my alma mater/paymaster, and thus far they've been quite reasonable; thus, by the frequentist interpretation, I should be okay.

Now, the Qualifying Exams consist of two papers, CS5201 - Foundation of Theoretical Computer Science and CS5202 - Foundations in Computer Systems, which roughly comprise theoretical CS and applied CS respectively.

For CS5201, the paper has always been three hours long and open-book (I knew I kept those notes and textbooks for a reason), with a choice of three out of four questions, so there's about an hour to solve each question. There is one question from each sub-area, namely algorithms [corresponds to CS3230, taken], theory of computation [CS3231, taken], programming languages [CS3212, taken] and logic & AI [CS1231,CS3243,CS5340? taken].

Browsing through the papers, I was a relief to have a vague recognition of most of the questions, i.e. they were of the sort to have appeared in the final examinations of the relevant modules (in this respect, it is a slight advantage to attend grad school at one's undergraduate institution?).

Some algorithm/theory of computation questions looked, dare I say, fun, with logic & AI ranging from (deceptively?) simple to rather more tedious. I confess I've never particularly like (and probably therefore not scored particularly well in) principles of programming languages, so I can't quite evaluate the difficulty of those questions. Will brush up on the basics, but I see myself dropping the programming language question when the time comes (unless it's really superbly simple).

The format of CS5202 is identical to CS5201, with the four sub-areas being operating systems [CS2106, taken], computer networks [CS2105, taken], database systems [CS2102S, taken] and computer organization/architecture [CS1104 (now CS2100), taken].

A quick observation is that these modules are all at a lower level, and though I did fine on all of them, I have also forgotten relatively more, likely since I took the four modules in my first four semesters, thus it's been an average of three years since I covered the material.

The grades lend faith that the content is muggable, just that it might be hard to confirm if one's answers are acceptable - perhaps sneak onto the modules' forums if desperate. From the looks of it, databases should be an almost certain pick, with no particular preference between the three remaining sub-areas. While advanced (higher-level) modules in some of the areas (e.g. databases, networks) exist, a cursory glance indicates that such knowledge is probably not required.


On Games and (maybe) Funny Stuff

Whiled away some hours on Hardwarezone forums' Shocking n Funny Gifs thread. Guy using a marker to draw on his jeans, then setting the line on fire before being stomped on to put it out? A cat that would make a decent baseball outfielder? Panda rolling down a slope? There's all that and much, much more.




One of the standouts was probably the breakdancer vs. baby incident above. No worries, the kid was just winded, but if you have edchong's parenting instincts you might want to skip the video.

DotA-ed with a full 4O team for the first time in eons, as colin reappeared out of nowhere on leave from his accountancy gig. Managed three games, and slightly more notably actually won all of them for once. Here are the reports:


Game One

Juggernaut (csq), Lightning Revenant (tpk) / Doom Bringer (twm) / Spiritbreaker (me), Bone Fletcher (colin)

vs.

Skeleton King, Dragon Knight / Enchantress / Phantom Assassin, Stone Giant

Standard Ring of Health start, progressing to Power Treads, managed to pick off a careless PA early thanks to imba Greater Bash. Enchantress was a pain to kill, but once Doombringer started throwing Dooms and csq did his usual "plug-pulling" to leave one-and-a-half Battle Furies behind for Doombringer, that was it. Grabbed Aghanim's Scepter more for the much-needed mana pool boost than the ultimate cooldown, and ended with a Reaver.


Game Two

Crystal Maiden (tpk), Phantom Lancer (csq) / Butcher (twm), Spiritbreaker (colin) / Centaur Warchief (me)

vs.

Doom Bringer, Sand King / Troll Warlord / Drow Ranger, Nerubian Weaver

Randomed Spiritbreaker again, swapped for Centaur. Pudge roamed pretty soon, unfortunately the early ganking of Drow with an Illusion rune didn't come off. Played conservatively in the bottom lane with Stomp/Return Damage reactive harassment, farmed, farmed some more, got Radiance as second item by Level 12 (not even boots). No real urgency with low pressure from the opposing side. Dagger and Boots of Travel next, then Heart, though the game was probably over before then. Phantom Lancer experimented with Diffusal.


Game Three

Vengeful Spirit (csq), Lord of Olympia (tpk) / Axe (colin) / Alchemist (twm), Ogre Magi (me)

vs.

Shadow Shaman, Stone Giant / Troll Warlord / Demon Witch, Spiritbreaker

Another taste of the new Aghanim-not-required Ogre Magi. Highlight was probably the top lane of Rhasta + Tiny, which had the potential to be dominating (though frankly VS + Zeus would at least have a fighting chance). Sadly Rhastiny appeared to be somewhat slow on the take, the extent of which is best illustrated by twm's observation that Rhasta protects his Serpent Wards with his tower, instead of the other way round (which is the usual case). Troll was probably the best of the lot, though he didn't stand a chance without backup. Not a great game for farming, but charged up a half-dozen charges on my Bloodstone with a string of kills helped by lucky Multicasts soon after getting the item.


On Local News, Again

Local news update: SM Goh "sees a potential danger arising from Singaporeans becoming more religious", by which I infer is the "my God is the only true God and nobody should hold any before Him (all glory be to Him), burn/kill/convert infidels/heretics/pagans, sniff sniff" type of religious, instead of the "well I may think so but that's not very important, what's more important is to do right by your fellow man" kind.

More interestingly, I wonder what has led SM Goh to see "rising religiosity" here. The intensity of belief (and more importantly, concrete actions taken as a result) is one possibility, but hard to quantify. The proportion of professed believers is a more tangible measure, and a check with SingStat says that "...there was no significant change in the population shares of the major religious groups", over the past few decades:

Resident Population Aged 15 & Over by Religion
198019902000
Christianity10.1%12.7%14.6%
Buddhism27.0%31.2%42.5%
Taoism30.0%22.4%8.5%
Islam15.7%15.3%14.9%
Hinduism3.6%3.7%4.0%
Other0.5%0.6%0.6%
None13.0%14.1%14.8%


Amusingly, I would have been counted as a Buddhist in the statistics for year 2000 (being sixteen then), although the sum total of my devotions then was being very occasionally dragged to temples, where the pigeons were a far bigger draw to me than the smoky altars. In fact, I'm not even sure if I have officially changed my religious affiliation in the eyes of the government, and actually even if I haven't, I'm in no particular hurry to update their records.

Keeping that in mind, other than the major trend being the decline of Taoism and rise of Buddhism (what was the driving force, I wonder), another striking trend is the disproportionate percentage of young people professing "no religion" (see Table 4 of the above paper for detailed figures). Some 17 to 18% of those aged from 15 to 34 identified as such in the year 2000, compared to just 13.7% of those aged 45 to 54, and 9.8% of those 55 and over.

Then what about globally? Authoritative data is hard to come by, but there are some more-or-less accepted figures.

Christianity, including Catholics (which make up over a billion), is the largest religion, with a total of just over two billion believers. However, over the past century, its share of the world's population (about 32%) has actually declined slightly. There has been a great explosion in Africa (from 8 million in 1900 to nearly 400 million in 2000), but this has been offset by a decline in the First World democracies of Europe and *gasp* even America. In these cases, the move is largely towards non-religious beliefs.

Islam is definitely growing faster than Christianity, largely through higher birth rates, although the difficulty (or impossibility) of converting out may have contributed. Its current share of the world population is about 19%, but there are wildly different projections of future growth. At one extreme, the World Christian Encyclopedia predicts nearly no growth for Islam from now till 2200 (with a growth in Christianity to about 37% in the same period), while at the other end, assuming current growth rates as determined by the U.S. Center for World Mission hold up, Islam would overtake Christianity in a couple of decades. Have a care for argumentum ad populum, then.

What about the non-religious? Lumping atheists and agnostics together, they make up about 14% of the world population, and as a percentage they have declined in the last few decades. Yes, those bemoaning rising irreligiosity in America and Europe may be surprised at this statistic, but the explanation is simple: The significant masses in China and the former U.S.S.R were under (actually, are still under, in the case of China) Communist regimes that enforced bans on religion.

With the U.S.S.R no more, and China slowly loosening up, those forced to abandon religion in these places began practising once more. Forced atheism is no better than forced theism, and neither is the commie bastard-godless atheist linkage, so it's all for the best. Religious workers are actually one of the most trusted groups of people in China according to a poll of over 3000 Chinese by Insight China magazine - though, for what it's worth, prostitutes came in right behind them in third place. Students came in fifth, until such time that they become teachers, and slide further down the list.

Latching on to the "growth by birth" theme, PM Lee felt it important enough to emphasize falling birth rates as a worry ("Well done gals, but where are the babes? Don't worry, there aren't many breakdancers to kick them here"), even after SM Goh aired the issue just a few days ago. No change from last year then. PM Lee has a First in Math from Cambridge (and a diploma in CS!), but I fear that "no solution" stares at him here - maybe set up a cosmetic hub? Nine more years to go for my prediction...

Finally, Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard, former chief economist of the IMF, is of the opinion that "Within a few years, Western governments will have to sharply raise taxes, inflate (itself a sort of soft default?), partially default - or some combination of all three.", as published in the Straits Times. Guess what, The Onion was there first yet again.



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Monday, Aug 03, 2009 - 01:14 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

- -
The Washing Machine

changelog v1.14
---------------
* Existing blog entries normalised to have compulsory line endings after double line breaks (implications in returning summarised search results).
* Tab-to-search functionality in Google Chrome implemented.
* Some miscellaneous edits in previous posts, e.g. the 4O uni major data, and addition of an occ-quote.
N.B. blog policy: errata may occ-ur in previous posts without explicit notice/timestamps etc, where they are minor and do not detract from the original thrust of the post. Spelling/grammatical mistakes of course fall within this category.

The old Sanyo washing machine finally gave up the ghost this week, after a decade's service and some months of the most frightful random banging noises. Most probably, the balancing mechanism failed. Grandma voted it out of the house, and we now have a spanking new Toshiba. I'll miss winding the dial on the Sanyo.

Back to bunnies, bunnies bunnies bunnies:



A freaking sweet "unsaveable" penalty kick by Nani, even as United lost the Audi Cup to Bayern on penalties (note ball bouncing out of the net):


Source: Redcafe


And the attention-seeking Mr. Ham actually swallows the whole stalk moments after this photo was taken. A career as sword-swallower awaits? Should have taken a video clip...


mmmmppppffffhhhh


The local news continues to helpfully throw up issues related to those recently covered here. On food security: buy/rent foreign farms, or lock-in prices with foreign suppliers. Not only that, more precious local land will be set aside for food production. A laudable attempt at diversification, but if history is anything to go by, the most important part of the equation is staying relatively richer than major food-producing countries.

Productivity concerns - the productivity of local workers is falling, says the NTUC sec-gen. The first solution stated is to "develop new markets", which seems to indicate that the problem is recognized to be on the demand side. No sense churning out ten washing machines, if only one can be sold (yes, the price can be dropped, but only up to a certain point).

In fact, the short-term cause of the fall in productivity is said to be due to employers retaining workers (saving jobs), although the jobs aren't quite there. In other words, borrowing the scenario used to illustrate the problem, one may have orders for only 80 washing machines per day, which say eight workers can adequately fulfil. But since one had ten workers, and doesn't want to fire them, each worker produces somewhat less than he can.

So, labour productivity in this case is not an issue with laziness, or declining technology, or mismanagement - one could develop a process that allows workers to manufacture washing machines at twice or thrice the speed, at the original cost, and that wouldn't help labour productivity squat (okay, it could if wages are a large component of total costs, since the factory could then conceivably lay off half or two-thirds of its workers and maintain identical production capacity). Put another way, improvements in production tech can't make a difference if people just aren't buying.

Now back to the Sanyo washing machine. An interesting observation on consumer durables is that, quite often, good workmanship is often detrimental to sales. There was an old Mitsubishi (if I recall rightly) fan in my room that had lasted for some thirty years, and superficial looks and perhaps some small efficiency gains aside, there was little reason to replace it - electric fan technology, unlike computers and handphones, hasn't advanced much.

Would the company have been better off producing fans that lasted on average say, five years, before falling apart? Not if other companies continue making comparable fans that last 30 years, since consumers would soon ditch them. But if the major electric fan, or washing machine, producers colluded and cut the expected lifetime of their products by half? Would that not paradoxically double demand, since consumers would have to purchase twice as many fans/washing machines over any given timespan?

Perhaps not, if consumers recognized the reduced lifespan and decreased their willingness to pay correspondingly, or even fell back to manual fanning/washing if they felt sufficiently shortchanged (unlikely, since fans and washing machines are relatively cheap). I'm not too sure if many consumers would know the lifespan of such durables, or factor such knowledge adequately into purchases, though - ten years, thirty years, big deal? This effect may be aggravated by having only a few personal anecdotes as advice when making a decision (small sample sizes), and the low number of/long time differential between purchases.

Even then, lower productivity being desirable is probably a fallacy anyway, for the economy in general - the extra effort and materials used to replace the fans and washing machines could have been channeled into other goods and services. Once the demand for essential (or close-to-essential) durables is satisfied, we can always produce frivolous luxuries and make everyone even happier. That is, if people want to buy that stuff, which isn't quite the case right now...



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