Rants

I like to think that I understand myself very well. But there are bits of me that even I don’t get. Over the past three weeks, the online advertising world had been rocked by massive incidences of fraud and malware. As part of my day job I have traced the sources of malware and fraud and we have ceased working with those companies behind them. At the same time I was also involved in a … let’s just call it consulting capacity to another potential fraud case (not within online advertising). I got into a frenzy working on both projects at the same time. Usually I would be happy that I’m highly productive, but this time round I felt rather miserable.

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I have a confession to make. It had been slightly more than a month since I last committed any code to Fork the Cookbook. In fact, the whole team hadn’t contributed to Fork the Cookbook in about a month. Only the scant updates here and there. If you were to have a peek into what we were doing, you would think it was abandonware. Only that it wasn’t. For two weeks now, I have been actively writing code for Fork the Cookbook again. [Read More]

Today has been a generally dark day for me. Today, for the first time in almost 6 years, I lost faith in humanity completely. This sounds terribly pompous of me, but this is my blog and I can say whatever the fuck I want, although these sorts of posts are usually kept private and later deleted. Today will be different. Today my rant will be public.

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This post is a rant. I need to get it off my chest – it may disappear in the future if I deem this post’s tone too negative. Increasingly and lately, I have come to realize that not everyone shares your passion or commitment towards something.

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Several discussions I had throughout today has brought me into this funk that I am in right now. But first, let me regale you with a tale of yonder. In my university years, I concentrated my study on two ‘streams’ of economics – the microeconomic ‘stream’ and the econometric ‘stream’. In the microeconomic stream, I did stuff like experimental economics, game theory and the like – you know, micro stuff. In the econometrics stream, I did stuff that had to do with data analysis. [Read More]

I watched In Time a couple of days ago and while I’ve been a huge fan of all four of Andrew Niccol’s big name movies (In ranking order: Gattaca, S1m0n3, Lord of War, Truman Show), I must admit that In Time let me down quite a bit, but also strangely I loved the rather nicely realized version of an economic model. The movie was fine – Cillian Murphy’s acting was top notch, but the same cannot be said about Justin Timberlake. I loved the premise of the story, I loved the setting of the story, and I am fine with the story being all over the place. They kept hinting at more (I personally was hoping for a Logan’s Run-esque payoff – i.e. something larger than themselves), but there was no satisfying payoff in the end, and I was fine with that. I give In Time a 6.5/10. The following will be an exploration of the economics in In Time. Needless to say, here is a spoiler alert

What really bugged me though, was the mechanics of the currency. The premise of the movie is as such: time is now a currency, and intrinsically linked to their lives, and the lower class of society has to fight for their lives. They live from day to day, working just enough to earn them one more day of living. Another premise is that at least nominal price inflation happens. At the beginning of the movie, we the audience are told, and shown with rather emotional consequences that the prices of things are rising. A third premise that I think is fairly important in considering the economics of In Time is that the currency is spent every living second of a person’s life. Let us not consider to whom first, and assume that the currency evaporates. It is on these premises the plot of the movie was built upon. Essentially what bugged me the most was this: Given the premises of the movie, why was there even inflation to begin with? I try to give reasons in this article.

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My partner made a joke earlier when we went out for dinner. It was something along the lines of “do your duty for God, Queen and Country”, to which I replied, “but I don’t believe or endorse any of those concepts to be good concepts!”. Of course she knows that I am agnostic to all of these, and hence the joke.

The concept of fairness plays a bit part in my mind, and what I consider my values. Yes, despite the fact attitudes may be made up on the fly, I do think that I have some values and attitudes I hold on to – and I like to think I have carefully analyzed and reanalyzed those values I hold to. In short, I think I have reasoned myself into holding some values and chucking some other values. In fact if you had read this blog since its inception in 2004, you would have known I have blogged less, and appeared to be less opinionated on some things – it was partly due to having less time, and also partly due to a lot of re-evaluation of my values and knowledge (essentially there was a period in 2008-2011 when I thought I really didn’t know enough to comment on anything)

Part of why I disagree with the concept of “duty to”, “God”, “Queen” and “Country” is because of fairness, and in one of the cases, a very recent event has left some bitterness and hence triggered this post.

Onwards, shall we? 

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Lately, I have been questioning my own actions. Actually, for the majority of the last month I have been bogged down by a lot of work, and a lot of work means I start questioning myself a lot more – my sanity, my ethics, etc. I meditate a lot, and I can quite confidently say that I am quite fully aware and mindful of my own thoughts, which of late has become more of the “YOU ARE A CRAZY PERSON” thoughts.

So, I decided to write them down, and today I am publishing it, because hey, the Internet needs more pollution, amiright?

In the past, when I faced exams, I rarely panicked, even if I was severely underprepared (incidentally the only exam I ever panicked for was also the only exam I failed). The moment after the exam though, the panic sets in. Thankfully for me, I had fairly solid basics – toss me any derivatives and given enough time I could work it out. Which worked out okay for me in exams – because you know, there was a set syllabus, and the curviest of curveballs I ever had was a sneaky metric spaces question in a microeconomics mid-semester exam.

Right now, my life is going past me at breakneck speed, and like exams in the past, I am not panicky.  And this troubles me greatly. 

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A few months ago a Christian friend posted a note on Facebook, and I replied. He however, has not chosen to respond properly, opting to dismiss everything I wrote as “It is sad when one can’t see the forest for the trees”, which quickly degenerated any possible discourse into nothing substantial. Reproduced here are the exact original post and my response. Since I also respect the said person’s privacy, I have chosen to not reproduce his full name.

Original post – Atheism is a Faith & Agnosticism willful ignorance:

An agnostic will rightly say of God that ‘we cannot know’ if he exists. I agree, and I can’t prove that he does exist – so in a sense I am agnostic – but I differ in that I believe he does. The fence-sitting agnostic however has to actively and wilfully ignore the topic of God altogether, and I cannot say that they are right or wrong for doing so – only that should they continue, they might find out too late. An Atheist, on the other hand, ‘cannot know’ that God does not exist because they cannot prove it.

As much as I have a faith that God is real, the atheist has a faith that he is not real. Atheism, therefore, is not a lack of belief in God, but a proactive decision to believe he does not exist – which by virtue awards it no lesser or greater merit than any other faith.

The idea that Atheism & Science go hand in hand and that consequently Atheism is somehow more intelligent & less ignorant is misleading and deceptive. Scientific discovery can for the atheist lend support to his/her beliefs, and for the Christian lend support to his/her beliefs.

Of-course I want others to have what I have, or else why would I have it myself? But regardless of your stance please give careful thought to what Science is, and what it is not. It is a limited and finite tool by which we can discover many things, but not all things.

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Hey you, pop quiz. What shits me the most that I have to blog about it at 1 a.m despite not having an Internet connection at home yet * This post was brought to you by a better-than-the-iPhone HTC Desire tethered on a Telstra connection ? If you guessed religious evangelists, you guessed right.

You know, for all the honesty and good that they supposedly preach and represent their religions, religious evangelists can be quite dishonest. They are willing to lie and misinform people. And that seriously shits me.

So what happened was this: someone sent me a link to a Christian apologetics site that claimed that Chinese characters proved the Bible’s authenticity. Accordingly the ancient Chinese people  worshipped the Christian god, and that the evidence is in the characters.

Here, I shall dissect the person’s bad arguments and then proceed to tear them to pieces. One by one. I shall be using Richard Sears’ very very awesome Chinese Etymology site (and seriously, we should donate some money to this guy, who put up 20 years worth of research up online FOR FREE). The lower the characters, the older they are – as you scroll down the page, you’ll see a word reverting back to its original form.

Let’s begin.

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