Bigger on the Inside

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. 

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.

So, my girlfriend and I were watching the 7pm Project just before MasterChef started today, and there was a segment about organ donation. Naturally, my ears perked up. I’ve always had been interested in organ donation. Call it a perverse interest, but I like to think about how to match up organ donors to recipients – an obsession undoubtedly sparked by Al Roth. Amongst the thoughts of organ donation, I too often think about stuff like the liquidity of the organ market – that is to say, how many willing/able organs are there which at any given moment are able to be donated – and how to increase such liquidity. Of course, when such questions posed in a less-than-delicate manner, had led some colleagues of mine to wonder if I am actually sane * I’m not crazy, my mother had me tested . Today I’ll talk about some of my views on organ donation.

Here’s the 7pm Project video in question (starts about 5 minutes in):

I run a startup. And today opportunity knocked on my door. Right in my phone – someone had called me up and offered my startup a ridiculously awesome opportunity. And I had to turn it down, because we were not ready.

Needless to say, it was a bitter 2 hours for me. 8.30 a.m – an acquaintance called and offered me a good opportunity for the startup to grow at ridiculous pace.  I told him to give me a couple of hours to check to see we were all systems green for this opportunity. Within that 2 hours, I had checked, double checked and triple checked with all my colleagues, to see if we were good to go. Alas, we were not. You see, one of the requisites for this opportunity is that we were live and open. We were not. 10 a.m, I rejected the opportunity and helped in giving it away.

And this isn’t the first time this has happened. Over the last 1 year, we’ve been afforded opportunity after opportunity – so much so that I have once considered myself a very lucky man. And over the past 1 year, I’ve had to turn down opportunity after opportunity, some big, some small. And all for the same reason. Today’s opportunity is as large as they come – someone wanted to offer my startup a booth at CeBit Sydney for virtually free * It burns me even now, to think that I had to put on a smiley face and offer this opportunity to someone else I know .

It was the longest long weekend in Australia last week – a total of 5 days holiday – it’s a combination of Good Friday, the weekend, Anzac Day and Easter Monday. There won’t be another 5 day long weekend in Australia until 2038. I had spent the long weekend in the Central Coast of New South Wales with my partner and made some very interesting observations.

We had left the house at about 8 a.m on Friday, to try to beat the traffic jam to the Central Coast. Feeling a little peckish, we decided to have some yum cha for brekkie. Alas, there were no shops within a 7 km radius that was open for yum cha. I live in a suburb with a fairly high concentration of Chinese food places, and none of the shops were open. That perhaps, would have been indicator of what was to come next.

We arrived at our destination at about 11 a.m, and feeling extremely hungry, decided to look for brunch. The whole town had only one eating place open. Like the yum cha places, most shops had decided to close for the long weekend. As I munched on my $40 lunch (yes, it was a case of supply and demand – but that’s not the point of this article), I began to ponder upon the shops being closed.

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.

So, I got pretty ranty in my previous post about Channel 7’s “Hainese” chicken rice in their My Kitchen Rules program. So I decided to make Hainanese (again, note the correct spelling) Chicken Rice myself. I set myself the challenge of bringing it down to its utmost basic, that is, celebrating the Chicken.

Hainanese Chicken Rice – A History

Hainanese chicken rice has a long history. The Hainanese were a people of food * other Chinese sub-ethnicities too have good food, but as a gross generalization, the single characteristic trait of Hainanese people is that they are brilliant restaurateurs . When they left China at the beginning of the early 20th century, they brought with them their flair of running restaurants. However, being immigrants with limited resources, they conserved every bit they can, which lead to chicken rice.

Chicken rice is an interesting dish in the sense that it is in my opinion, a celebration of chicken. Virtually everything about  chicken rice involves, well, the chicken. So I thought to myself, knowing how traditional Hainanese hawkers cook, on how to make good chicken rice. You will notice that one single chicken goes everywhere in this dish.

I watched My Kitchen Rules for the first time tonight. And it will probably be my last time watching it. This is why:

YOU DON’T MESS WITH FOOD

It’s this simple. Channel 7 is a poor channel and My Kitchen Rules is a sad pathetic lame excuse for a cooking competition show. And I’m pissed about it, for reasons unknown. How pissed? I thought that a 45 minute Magic the Gathering game with 2 very close matches against cfgt would take my mind off it. It did not.

What got me so pissed off? Firstly, if anyone from Channel 7 is reading, it’s spelled “HAINANESE Chicken Rice”. Note the spelling. You spelled it on screen wrong. TWICE * Evidence 1. Evidence 2 . And everyone pronounced the word wrong countless times. Is it so hard? Hai-nan (IPA: ˈhaɪˈnæn)

Hainan?

The etymology of the word ‘Hainanese’ is as such: the root word is Hainan, which is a place in China. Hainanese describes a situation where something is of Hainan. Hainanese people are a sub-ethnicity of the Han Chinese (oh yeah, there are more ethnicities in China than you think). Hainanese food are foods typical of the Hainanese culture.

Now that the primer is done, here’s some more interesting things. Hainanese chicken rice is not exactly Hainanese. You see, the Hainanese people moved south from China into South East Asia. They settled in places like Malaysia and Singapore. And with them they brought their cuisine, which having passed through a different geography, mutated on its own. Ingredients not found in the place of origin were added (like pandan/screwpine leaves).

The original inspiration for Hainanese chicken rice was the wen chang chicken (文昌鸡). And what was it? Chicken blanched in hot water. What’s special about it is the sauce, made of ginger, garlic, spring onion, and soy sauce.

That was the original inspiration for Hainanese chicken rice.  As previously mentioned, the recipe mutated. Chicken was boiled in pork stock instead of just water. The sauces had a dash of sesame oil. As such, it can be said that Hainanese chicken rice is almost exclusively a South East Asian fare, although I’d grant you as far as saying it’s Hainanese.

But this is not what the judges say. Here is a transcript of what they said:

1,000,000.

Doesn’t seem like a lot does it? Some cultures – like the Pirahã in Central America, or the Walpiri in Australia – use a one-two-many system * This should be noted that one-two-many is a generalization. There are subtleties in the counting methods of both cultures, that upon deeper inspection, may not necessarily conform to the normal understanding of the one-two-many theory . I would contend that all humans use a superset form of one-two-many.

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it. Not even if I have said it, not unless it agrees with your own reason and your common sense.

The quote above is often attributed  to Siddharta Gautama, aka the Buddha, in the Kalama Sutta. If that quote were presented to me, I would have an issue with it.

The reason why I would have a problem with it is because “your own reason” and “your own common sense”  is not at all very helpful. An asylum full of people have their own reasons and their own common sense for doing things. A schizophrenic person has his/her own reason to stand in the middle of the road and start stripping stark naked – after all, that voice that tells him/her to do things are his/her own reasoning talking back which is simply perceived as an external voice.

It is here that I must pause, and raise a point – I feel that the Buddha had been misrepresented. Of course I am no translation expert but pretty much the experts agree that in the original Kalama Sutta, common sense and one’s own reason are the sources where one should not rely upon – specifically the original Pali * Yes, I have nothing better to do than to learn a completely dead and foreign language to read books. Same reason why I learned German: to read Marx phrase “Ma anussavena, ma paramparaya, ma itikiraya, ma pitakasampadanena, ma takkahetu, ma nayahetu, ma akaraparivitakkena, ma ditthinijjhanakkhantiya, ma bhabbarupataya, ma samano no garu ti” [ref] which translates (as literally as possible to)

• Not because it is repeated information
• Not not because it is tradition
• Not not because it is common knowledge (more in the tune of “it’s common knowledge that…”
• Not not because it is scriptures (literally: not text, but given that the only text back then were scripture, it’s fair to come to this conclusion)
• Not not because it is axiomatic reasoning (or more literally: not because logical inferences are made without support – i.e. surmises)
• Not because it suits one’s beliefs (common translation includes inferences, and conjectures)
• Not because it seems to be right (i.e. common sense)
• Not because of one’s bias to an idea (more literal translation: not because one likes the idea)
• Not because it seems acceptable
• Not because the teacher says so

[/ref]

While I am by no means skilled in hermeneutics * it’s also my personal belief if something needs deep interpretation skills, said text is worthless , I believe the spirit of the sutta refers to one of radical skepticism – i.e. question everything. The latter part of the Kalama Sutta (it’s a very long and tediously repetitive work) says something about after analysing and observing the facts, if the implementation of the idea is good for one and all, then it can be considered a good idea.

It can be read as an early form of peer-review (the phrase “if it’s praiseworthy by the wiser ones”)