All posts by Wan Kong Yew

News & Politics, Politics

Greek lessons

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I have to admit that I’m one of those who have been following the travails of the Greek government with a touch of schadenfreude. As this article in The Economist put it, how can the German government justify giving aid to Greece when Greek public sector employees get to retire earlier than German ones. Germany has for years been reforming its own welfare programme to save money while Greece has been happily pretending it could afford its bloated public sector workforce, going to the extent of fudging its statistics and outright lying to creditors about its liabilities.

It’s also worth remembering that the Haiti earthquake happened not too long ago and still needs money to rebuild. While it’s true that corruption and mismanagement played a part in the ineffectiveness of the Haitian government, exacerbating the damage caused by the quake, it’s impossible to argue that the quake was anything other than an accident that the Haitians had absolutely no control over. By contrast, an entire generation of Greeks was complicit in the decisions that led Greece into the mess that it currently finds itself in. How then is it morally justifiable to help the Greeks when there are so many other more worthwhile causes that require finite resources?

This blog post, again from The Economist, is very sympathetic towards the Greeks, but to me, they still reinforce the impression that the current problems are the result of specific choices made by the Greek government beginning in the 1980s. By successively voting for governments that continued those policies, the Greek people chose short-term wealth and growth without a care for whether or not these policies were sustainable, and so are complicit in them. Should they be saved from the results of their own choices?

Finally, shouldn’t the principles that apply to countries be equally applicable to individuals? I don’t begrudge the appeals for aid in cases where clearly the people involved have troubles that are none of their doing. Orphans come particularly to mind. But I do get annoyed when I see articles in the newspapers about how the government should be considerate towards people who have accumulated unsustainable levels of credit card debt or how richer people should contribute towards the welfare of those who have incurred responsibilities that they never had the ability to bear. Why should those who have worked hard to live within their means be punished and those have been short-sighted and irresponsible be rewarded?

Religion

Devil is in the Vatican

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Or so claims no less a figure than the Chief Exorcist at the Vatican for 25 years. This article is surreal to read. It seems like something drawn from the script of a horror movie but it’s actual testimony from a senior cleric who has worked in the Vatican in an official capacity. How cool is it that the Vatican even has a post called “Chief Exorcist”?

But it is kind of troubling to see someone so high up in the Vatican have such a literal belief in the devil. As one commentator on QT3 asked, this guy apparently has assistants to hold supposedly possessed persons down to perform exorcism rituals on them. Wouldn’t it make more sense in our times to take that person to a doctor specializing in mental illnesses? Is there any third party oversight on what they do at all? It makes one think where the line is between respectable quirks of religion and all out looney tunes territory.

Fun

Classical music used as punishment in school

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Here’s an amusing article about a school in Britain that has started using classical music to punish misbehaving students. It’s normal practice of course to punish such students by giving them detention, but the school is apparently aiming at making detention more unpleasant by piping in classical music into the hall. According to the headmaster, this seems to be working as infractions of school rules have dropped by 60 percent since he started the practice.

Once again, I’m not really a listener of classical music but I do appreciate the intellectual achievement in it, so even I feel a little sad that the pendulum has swung so far that not only do youngsters actively hate it, but that a school is willing to exploit this fact and use it as a form of punishment.

Fun

Using Facebook at work sets off alarms

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It’s an accepted fact of modern office life that staff will often browse sites like YouTube and Facebook at work. Sure, some employers hate it and try to block such sites from the workplace but in general, I think that employers should acknowledge that trying to force staff to use every second of their working time only on official tasks is a poor strategy. It makes more sense to gauge the effectiveness of staff, especially in roles where a significant amount of creativity or independent thinking is required, through concrete goals and performance targets while allowing employees to manage their own time as they see fit. In some cases, using such banned websites may actually be helpful to some people in their jobs so a blanket ban is just a hindrance.

One employer however has hit on a novel strategy. Instead of directly blocking offending sites from the office computers, the employer puts such sites on a watchlist and then triggers ear piercing alarms whenever an employee in the room browses onto a site on the list. According to the blog post, this allows employees who legitimately need access to these sites to continue to use them but publicly shames employees who are just goofing off at work. The Freakonomics authors seem to think that this is a pretty smart idea but judging from the comments posted in response to their article, the vast majority of people don’t agree.

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (February ’10)

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Three articles for the second month of 2010. Arguably the first one isn’t really a scientific article as it’s about whether or not the so-called connoisseurs of fine wine actually can objectively evaluate the quality of different varieties of wine. The second article talks about the link between physical motion and happiness in humans and the last one covers a extremely cool way of modeling a transit network for cities.

The first article appeared in SmartMoney and draws information from a couple of different sources to show that even wine experts can have a tough time differentiating one wine from another. It cites a recent court case in France in which twelve wine producers were convicted of fraud for selling millions of gallons of fake Pinot Noir to American distributors over several years. What makes this case so surprising is that the fraud was not uncovered by any customer complaints but because French government officials noticed a discrepancy between the amount of Pinot Noir being exported and the amount actually produced in the region.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (February ’10) →

Films & Television

Little Big Soldier

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Like so many Chinese families these days, we ended up going to the cinema on the very first day of Chinese New Year. Both my wife and I were unenthusiastic as we now have very low expectations of Chinese films, especially whenever Hong Kong celebrities are involved. But we went along anyway as it was a family outing. The idea was to try to watch one of the specifically Chinese New Year themed movies but due to the unavailability of tickets, we had to settle for Little Big Soldier. In retrospect, it was easily the best out of all the films that we could have watched that day.

Despite starring Jackie Chan and being set in the Warring States period in China, Little Big Soldier is neither a martial arts film nor a war film. Though it has elements of both, it is at heart a buddy film in which two characters bond with each other over the course of the story. American-born Wang Lee Hom is competent but otherwise unremarkable in his role as an honorable general of aristocratic stock even if his spoken Mandarin is still noticeably accented. Jackie Chan, however, turns in a surprisingly fresh and entertaining performance as a canny footsoldier who does whatever is necessary to survive, even if means taking cowardly measures and resorting to underhanded tactics.

It’s surprising because I usually find Chan to be insufferably annoying. He basically plays the exact same character in all of his movies with his physical comedy and acrobatics skills as the primary draw. But in Little Big Soldier, he plays against type and while there he still gets to be the comedy and acrobatics guy, both elements are carefully doled out in measured rations as opposed to the usual practice of doling gags out by the spadeful and hoping that some will stick. Thus restrained, his character feels sympathetic, down to earth and realistic.

Another thing that struck me is how genuine and honest this film felt. So many Chinese period films now go for the epic feel. They want to show vast armies and sweeping vistas. They want to tell stories on a huge scale about larger than life characters doing heroic stuff. Little Big Soldier by contrast has a small cast and a very focused and tight vision that feels at odds with the heavily commercialized fare we’re used to from most period films. As my wife and I discussed, the big budgets and big name cast of the epic films probably limit directors to more conventional storylines designed for maximum mainstream appeal so they end up being commercialized dreck that don’t stand out.

Finally, I note with interest that the director Ding Sheng is a virtual unknown with only two entries to his credit on IMDB. Of course, if this had been an epic action movie from the conventional mould, the studio would have gotten a big name director to do it, but it must still have been a brave choice. I also note that this film was conceived by Jackie Chan over 20 years ago and he originally cast himself in the role of the young general instead of the old soldier. Probably no one thought it would make money and indeed I don’t think this film has received much attention or earned much money. That’s a pretty sad indictment of the state of the Chinese film industry right there.

Personal Life

Links for further reading

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I’m going to be busy at work in the run up to the Chinese New Year holidays and likely will not have any regular net access during that time while I’m away, so this is going to be the last post for at least a couple of weeks or so. In the meantime, if you’re starved of reading material, here are links to some interesting stuff I’ve read recently:

  • I’m not much of a fan of classical music, but it’s still sobering to learn that sales of just a few hundred units are currently sufficient to get an album on the Top Ten list by Billboard magazine. My wife, who is something of a fan, argues that this is countered by the fact that classical music recordings have a much longer shelf life than other works, but I think an upper limit of a few hundred sales is still rather pathetic. I fail to see how it’s economic to even produce these albums. Sales outside North America seem somewhat healthier however.
  • This is an older article that dates from August last year but I only recently came across it while reading one of the blogs by The Economist. As someone who’s married but has decided not to have children, I supposed I’m biased but it confirms a point I’ve been making for a long time now: having children is easily the most environmentally unfriendly things a person can do. It doesn’t matter how else you do right, like driving an electric, recycling regularly, use energy efficient light bulbs, etc. As soon as you have a child, your carbon impact takes off like a rocket.
  • Shanghai is cracking down on the wearing of pyjamas in public, apparently because it looks unseemly? What would they think about Malaysian-style singlets and short pants?
  • This review and summary of recently published biography of Ayn Rand, entitled Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Ann C. Heller, compares her to Stalin and argues that even though she rejected the Soviet Union and eagerly fled to the United States, there is still something profoundly Russian about her thoughts and views. It also relates an astonishing anecdote about how she treated her husband Frank O’ Connor who suffered from dementia in the last years of his life. Apparently Rand believed that he could snap out of it if only his willpower were strong enough and assigned him long, grueling lessons on how to think and remember and warned other people not to humor him but instead treat him as they would any other normally functioning person.
  • This essay by fantasy author Terry Pratchett who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease is very well-written and moving. It’s a plea for the authorities to allow people with incurable diseases to decide to die gracefully at the time and in the manner of their choice.