Politics

Why unity through enforced assimilation doesn’t work

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My wife and I are currently working our way through all five seasons of Babylon 5. It’s one of the most highly acclaimed science-fiction shows ever produced for television, so not having watched it was seriously hurting my street cred as an sci-fi geek. Anyway, in one of the first season episodes, The Geometry of Shadows, the command crew of the station is presented with an odd problem.

Members of one the minor races, the Drazi, have begun fighting one another for no apparent reason, and the escalating level of violence is threatening the security of the station, so the newly promoted Commander Ivanova needs to find a solution to the problem. To do that, she needs to find out why they are fighting. As it turns out, every once in a while, the Drazis put a number of sashes in a gigantic barrel, one for each Drazi. Half of the sashes are dyed purple, the other half green, so whichever colour of sash a Drazi draws out of the barrel determines which group he belongs in. As the Drazis explain, “Where there was one Drazi people, now there are two. The two fight until there are one.”

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Films & Television, Science Fiction

Aliens watch Hollywood film for free

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The latest Hollywood blockbuster right now is this year’s remake of the science-fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still starring Keanu Reeves. In one of the odder publicity moves, the producers have decided to beam the film into outer space just in case any extraterrestrials want to watch it. The transmission is being directed at the star system closest to our own, Alpha Centauri, which is about 4.37 light years away from our Sun, though the studio notes that it is a wide beam transmission so that any aliens who happen to be travelling within the cone of the transmission or even beyond Alpha Centauri should be able to tune in as well.

More seriously, it’s pretty unlikely that any aliens will be close enough to catch it, and it’s a big question whether or not the signal will remain coherent enough to be watchable at any reasonable quality 4.37 light years away. In any case, since Earth has been leaking radio transmissions into space for decades by now, if any aliens are in Alpha Centauri and wanted to send a reply, we’d have heard from them by now.

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Fun

My photo rendered using polygons

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Okay, this is really nothing more than a cool toy, but it is still really cool! This is made using a simple application by Roger Alsing that starts with a blank slate and then adds some random polygons to it. The result is compared to the source image and if it looks closer then it is kept, otherwise it is discarded. The kept result is then further mutated and compared again and so forth. After a while, it gets pretty close to the original source.

There was a bit of skeptism about this when this was first spread over the Internet, but the creator has since made his source code and binaries available via Google, so go download it and play with it if you’re so inclined. The author originally used the program to generate an image of the Mona Lisa and he managed to get a very good representation after about 900,000 generations and using 50 polygons. Unfortunately I happened to pick a rather more complex photo, and this is what I got after having the computer working at it whole night. As you can see, it’s up to 2.3 million generations and 172 polygons.

The author calls this an example of genetic programming, but I’m not sure if the term is appropriate because usually these things involve a population pool of multiple competitors in each generation while there is only ever one instance in each generation in this program. People have been using this as an example to implement their own versions that do involve competition between multiple mutations though, and it will be interesting to see if they are more efficient at arriving at the source image.

Politics

Zaid Ibrahim a libertarian?

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So I received a Malaysia Think Tank newsletter today and, surprise, surprise, it seems that the controversial Zaid Ibrahim has joined the group’s advisory board. The news was covered in The Star as well, but I didn’t notice it earlier. For those out of touch, this was the guy who resigned from his post as a minister in the Prime Minister’s department after the government used the ISA law on three prominent people earlier this year and eventually got sacked from UMNO after attending events organized by opposition parties DAP and PKR. People were expecting him to join one of the opposition parties, especially after Anwar Ibrahim commented that the PKR would be delighted to have him, but he declined without ruling it out entirely.

If Zaid Ibrahim really does lean libertarian, it’s not so surprising that he would be uncomfortable being a member of any of the main opposition parties since all of them are explicitly socialist. Malaysia doesn’t have a libertarian political party yet, but this is surely a good sign of things to come.

In other news reported in the newsletter, the Malaysia Think Tank apparently won an award from the Atlas Economic Research Foundation for its work in spreading libertarian thought in Malaysia by promoting Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Now, I’m not sure how exactly they promoted the novel because The Fountainhead is probably still my favorite novel and if something was being done about it in Malaysia, I’d expect to have heard something, but that’s still great, great news.

Politics

Mugabe: Cholera epidemic? What cholera epidemic?

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I’m sorry but I just can’t stop myself from posting bad news from Zimbabwe because it’s so sad that it’s comical. Anyway, in response to growing pressure from the rest of the world to send in outside troops to bring relief to the Zimbabwean people, President Robert Mugabe has announced that there is no cholera epidemic in his country, and hence no reason for any other country to mount any kind of intervention. As he says:

“I am happy to say our doctors have been assisted by others and WHO (the World Health Organisation)… so now that there is no cholera,” he said in a nationally televised speech.

That’s not what everyone else is saying, of course. Take this example from ReliefWeb:

The U.N. aid agencies report the outbreak is worsening amidst growing criminality in the country. They say security is bad and looting is on the increase, as are attacks and robberies of humanitarian aid workers.

Cholera is having a devastating impact, as 43 out of Zimbabwe’s 62 districts are reporting cases. In addition, the United Nations reports cholera is spreading to South Africa, Botswana and Mozambique.

That’s some serious chutzpah right there, comparable to the Iraqi Information Minister’s bombastic claims that there were no American troops in Baghdad on live television in 2003 even while American tanks were rolling in behind him. Let’s hope that the world will see the back of Mugabe in fairly short order so that the real work of rebuilding Zimbabwe can begin.

UPDATE: The Zimbabwean government is now saying that the cholera epidemic is still going on but claims that it is caused by a biological weapon attack orchestrated by the United States.

News & Politics, Politics

Newsflash: immigrants are good for us

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Today’s copy of The Star has an article rather naughtily entitled “Night market hides a foreign secret”. It’s about a market in Sungai Buloh New Village that is operated mainly by traders of Bangladeshi origin and caters mostly to other immigrants. Even though the reporters note that the traders sell pretty much the same things that you might expect to find in a typical Malaysian market and they manage to do it at a lower price than comparable Malaysian traders, the idea that it needs to be hidden implies that this is something wrong or shameful. The article even chose to highlight only comments from those locals who happen to know about the market that put it in a bad light, complaining about how the traders there have stolen business from them, how it has become a gathering place for Bangladeshis and how it’s illegal and protected by thugs.

As often is the case, the article showed up as a discussion thread on LYN, I was pleasantly surprised to read the rational and economically literate reactions from the posters there. One posted that the government should issue them with permits and that they should be allowed to operate as they wish so long as they obeyed the country’s laws and paid their taxes. Another noted that having the local council maintain them as illegal businesses simply meant that the police and other local authorities would be able to extract regular bribes from them. Yet another posted that at least these people were willing to work hard for their money instead of posting silly rants online.

So it seems that there are moderate Malaysians who recognize that this market isn’t only harmless but actually contributes to our national economy. Which makes it doubly sad that a national newspaper like The Star would choose to skip this higher and nobler road of educating the public that immigrants are ultimately a net good for us and instead pander to populist, economically illiterate and racist anti-immigrant sentiment.

Politics

Dong Jiao Zong threatens to strike over language issue

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I know I’ve defended vernacular schools in Malaysia earlier, but this latest move by Dong Jiao Zong puts me in a bit of a quandary. My libertarian instincts tell me that the schools should be free to teach whatever subjects in whatever languages they feel like and parents should be free to choose which schools their children should attend accordingly. Threatening to mount a nationwide strike over the issue however strikes me as a tad heavy-handed especially since there are already independent Chinese schools which have voluntarily switched over to teaching science and mathematics in English with good results.

The organization justifies its actions, as always, mainly based on the fundamental right of Chinese Malaysians to be educated in Chinese if they so wish but I can’t help but wonder if the real reason might not be a more pragmatic one. After all, I seriously doubt that many of the teachers currently teaching the two subjects in Chinese are able to competently switch over to teaching them in English. Even if the schools were able to recruit enough replacement teachers, that would result in a huge number of unemployed or underemployed teachers, something that Dong Jiao Zong would understandably find unacceptable.

This isn’t a frivolous point by the way. If Malaysia doesn’t have enough teachers who can teach in English competently, then it doesn’t make any sense to force everyone to teach in English, as this blog post highlighted earlier this year. Trying to retrain teachers who used to teach the subjects in either Bahasa Malaysia or Mandarin to switch to teaching in English doesn’t work very well. On the other hand, it’s easy enough to see that moving to teaching the subjects in English should be the the way forwards and unless the schools are given some pressure to move in that direction, they’ll just hope that this is just a fad that will hopefully blow over and won’t give serious thought and effort into switching over.

The unexamined life is a life not worth living