All posts by Wan Kong Yew

Books, Science Fiction

The Windup Girl

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I picked up The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi solely on the strength of the blurb advertising it as having won both the Hugo and the Nebula for best novel. Not bad for a debut novel by a relatively unknown writer. It turned out to be a very pleasant surprise and I was particularly impressed by how deftly it portrays Southeast Asia. While I have misgivings about the plot and how events rush to an unsatisfying end, I still consider it to be one of the best novels I’ve read in recent years (not that I’ve been reading much admittedly).

Despite the title, the real star of the show here is arguably the city of Bangkok itself which is where the novel is set. In the 23rd century, the rising waters caused by global warming has destroyed many cities and even entire countries. With the world’s fossil fuels all but depleted, globalization as we now know it, is no more. The most powerful entities are the biotechnology companies who feed the world using their genehacked crops, maintaining their dominance by employing bio-engineered plagues to destroy natural food sources and even sending in private armies to topple governments when necessary.

Continue reading The Windup Girl →

Politics, Science

Tohoku earthquake and tsunami

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That seems to be what the disaster is being officially called. Some of my own thoughts on the events, divided into a few categories:

Civil Order / Looting

Many commentators, particularly in Asia, have noted how civilized the Japanese have acted and how little looting there is. Most people cite it as evidence of their superior educational system and the way their culture frowns upon individualism. But that’s a shallow and general observation that doesn’t satisfy. What would be interesting are concrete examples of how the Japanese are taught differently and how their system is set up that delivers these results.

Continue reading Tohoku earthquake and tsunami →

Politics, Religion

The disputed origins of Yoga

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As much as I would like to write something about the ongoing events in Japan, events are developing too quickly to really write anything intelligent about it. The situation with their nuclear reactors could really go anywhere at the moment. Obviously, I hope that things go well. The Japanese sure could use a break.

Instead, here’s a link to an article disputing the Hindu origins of yoga. It has since evoked a great deal of controversy and ignited a significant debate over the issue. Considering how popular yoga is in Malaysia now and how it has stirred some debate over here as well as to whether or not it is a religious practice, I thought it would make for interesting reading.

Part of the article is a reaction against the “Take Back Yoga” campaign in the United States by the Hindu American Foundation who are upset that the modern practice of yoga is, more and more, shorn of its Hindu elements. In response, the author roughly makes the following points:

  1. Yoga, as it is popularly practiced and known throughout the world, is really just the physical component of yoga, hatha yoga. This style is extremely popular in India as well and has little spiritual or meditational content.
  2. This form of yoga is not really that old after all. The author claims that it was born in the late 19th or early 20th century as a form of exercise during the Hindu Renaissance that incorporated Western ideas of science, evolution, health and physical fitness.
  3. Effectively the techniques were drawn from drills, gymnastics and boidy-building techniques borrowed from Sweden, Denmark, England and the United States and then grafted together with the Yoga Sutras. In particular, the author traces the teachings to physical yoga to a school based at the Jaganmohan Palace of the Maharaja of Mysore in the early 20th century. In the 19080s, a Swedish yoga student found in the library of the Palace of Mysore a book entitled Sritattvanidhi that illustrates many of the techniques of modern yoga but also included rope techniques practiced by Indian wrestlers and traditional Indian gymnastics. It may also have drawn from exercises developed by a Dane and introduced to India by the British in the early 20th century. The palace at that time was certainly equipped with a Western-style gymnasium including wall ropes and props.
  4. Finally, the author claims that it is impossible to trace the ancient origins of most yoga sutras. Some yoga teachers claim that the sutras exist in some texts that now no longer exist. Others claim that a particular text contains some of these sutras yet other scholars cannot find them. One prominent yoga teacher claims that he traces his teachings to a text that dates from over a thousand years ago but now no longer exists. He knows of it because the ghost of an ancestor dictated it to him while he was in a trance.

Obviously, all of this is strongly disputed by opposing parties and the magazine even hosts a rebuttal by another author who fiercely disputes these conclusions.

Films & Television

Spartacus: Blood & Sand

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It seems that the new trend for television series is to have short seasons, averaging 12 to 13 episodes per season, rather than the normal 20 to 23. Since incidences of this trend correlates strongly with the quality of the series, this is something that I very much approve of. The latest example of this that both my wife and I enjoyed is Spartacus: Blood & Sand, and boy, has it been a wild ride.

As usual, I first read about the series on QT3. The initial buzz was quite poor however and after I learned that the people who worked on it were also some of the same people who were responsible for Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, I sort of lost interest. But then a weird thing happened. Usually shows get hyped up and then interest levels off after a while. Instead, Spartacus premiered as a bit of a damp squib, but then garnered more and more critical acclaim.

Continue reading Spartacus: Blood & Sand →

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Feb’ 11)

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Four articles this month and only two of them are the human nature stuff that I usually like to link to. One is an invention that I’d honestly wondered myself if it would work. The last one is not really a scientific article. Instead, it’s one person’s attempt to create art using technology and to illustrate a fundamental biological process at the same time. We’ll go with the human nature stuff first.

The first one comes from PsyDir and covers a question that many people are no doubt curious about: is there any link between genetics and religious fundamentalism? The paper in question took data from a national survey in the US to look for data about variations in religiosity between identical twins and non-identical twins. The paper also tried to sort out influences caused by the family environment that would be shared by siblings and the environment outside of the family.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (Feb’ 11) →

Films & Television

Shaolin

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My wife and I watched the new Shaolin during the Chinese New Year holidays. As my wife commented, it looks like a shoo-in for the Hong Kong film awards. For my part, while it’s production values are undeniably sky high and it has decent kung fu, the Buddhist philosophy is conveyed is far too blunt and heavy-handed a manner. I tend to agree with this reviewer’s take on it being a self-indulgent extravaganza. Since it was made with the close cooperation of the real Shaolin temple, it’s no surprise that the temple is portrayed in excessively reverent terms.

For anyone curious what the real Shaolin temple as it exists now is like, this article from the National Geographic magazine is much more interesting. Most of it is a very respectful account of the last respects paid to a Shaolin master, Yang Guiwu, as well as a meeting with his most famous student, Shi Dejian. It’s quite amusing how the modern world has managed to intrude into the world of ancient martial arts.

Shi, having decided that the Shaolin monastery has become too busy and too worldly for his purposes, has retreated to a more secluded and difficult to access mountaintop where he has built his own monastery, but as he recounts, his fame is such that even this does not dissuade admirers and challengers. Within the space of a week, he has had to entertain a television crew who had brought along a professional mixed martial arts fighter to challenge him, a research team from Hong Kong University who wanted to study how his meditation regimen has affected his brain activity and a Chinese Communist Party official who wanted him to cure his brother’s diabetes.

The article is too polite to criticize the Shaolin temple too harshly but it’s hard to shake the impression that the writer is at least disdainful. He describes how the temple was, contrary to the portrayal in the new film, essentially a wealthy estate with its own private army and its has frequently being criticized throughout its history for its riches and its taste for luxurious furnishings. Today, the various projects the temple is officially involved in include television and film ventures, an online store selling Shaolin branded products, touring kung fu troupes and a plan for Shaolin franchises abroad, including one in Australia. It appears that many of the workers at the temple, wearing robes and bearing shaved heads, aren’t even monks at all but employees paid to look the part.

Such is the importance of the kung fu teaching industry that the  city of Dengfeng is now full of competing martial arts academies who pay commissions to touts to welcome new arrivals and bring them to their schools. The masters interviewed for the article even bemoan how high kicks and acrobatics aren’t part of Shaolin kung fu at all, but students expect them and so many academies incorporate these moves into their repertoire. So it turns out that even at Shaolin itself, traditional Shaolin kung fu is in danger of being forgotten as students learn what is effectively the movie version of kung fu instead.

Politics

Color revolutions

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It appears that the current term for the recently successful democratic revolution in Egypt is “Lotus Revolution”. It technically isn’t a color but is still considered to be one of the color revolutions that started with the mass social movements in various formerly-USSR states in the early 2000s. I keep wondering where these names come from. The Tunisian one that ended with the ouster of President Ben Ali has been the Jasmine Revolution, which isn’t a color either but does at least share a plant theme. The failed movement in Iran in 2009 was called the Green Revolution and that one certainly is a color.

Still, even the revolutions in the former-USSR states weren’t always named after colors. I think things started with the Rose Revolution of Georgia in 2004, which appropriately enough is both a plant and a color. But it really became a trend only with the Orange Revolution of Ukraine later that year. Next came the Tulip Revolution of Kyrgyzstan in 2005. Strangely enough, it seems that the red-shirt protests of Thailand in 2010 doesn’t count even though I distinctly remember them evoking the spirit of the earlier movements.

I don’t really have much to comment on them except to say that I’m all for democracy, even if the will of the people means that the new governments are less friendly to the West. Having Islamist parties come into power is certainly a real possibility but in the long run, I do not believe that this is something to be feared. In fact, I believe that this will be a critical step in enabling the Islamists around the world reconcile themselves to democratic values and find their place in the world. It is one thing to be express extremist views in opposition to gain popularity but as such movements as Hamas has learned, it is quite another to do the same when you’re running the government where compromise is routine and wooing the moderate middle becomes critical.