Sunday, August 24, 2008

Truth is ugly when you believe your own beautiful lie

Truth is ugly when you believe your own beautiful lie. A lie where you are the centre of attraction, the whole world revolves around you. You are the smart and capable person, the indispensible one. You do not want to know the ugly truth, where you are just an unimportant nobody.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Free Lunch

Getting out of MRT today, someone handed me a piece of paper, entitled "Free Lunch". It was an invitation to Lunch for the next 11 Tuesdays at Telok Ayer Methodist Church. That seem to contradict our government's "Nothing is free" philosophy. Actually nothing is free. If you get something free, that is because somebody had paid for you. Salvation is free, because God paid the price.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Government want their side of story in Money No Enough? Pay to say.

PM Lee Hsien Loong complained that "Money No Enough 2" is not objective enough and too one-sided. Let us look at it this way. Jack Neo's money is not enough, so he decided to make this movie. The poorer parts of Singapore's money is not enough, so individually, they cannot broadcast their plight. Collectively, they pay to Jack Neo via movie tickets to be their voice .
Now, everyone in Singapore knows that nothing is free. You have to pay and pay. This is the truth, though at lot of people in other parts of the world refuse to believe in the truth. Singaporeans know this truth because their government had taught them well. So they pay Jack Neo to be their voice. So Jack Neo has to be one-sided. He is their voice. If not, then the movie will not sell. If the government wants to have their voice heard, they should approach Jack Neo and said, "Look, we pay you this amount and you put this government character in to speak our side of the story." Then Jack Neo can make business and artistic decisions to see how he could in corporate both views into his story. You cannot expect Jack Neo to voice out for the government for free. After all, it is this government that teaches us that nothing is free. So they should practice what they preach. Pay and say. If Jack Neo manages to find a win-win solution for all, he may make a new move - "Money Enough" and everybody will be happy.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

The Two Sides of Efficiency - Consumers and Producer

When I was young, I noticed how inefficient lifts are. Sometime, when all the lift are on the ground floor, then one person goes in, and the lift closes the door and moves off with that one person. Then another come, and another lift goes off with that one person. I felt that the problem is that the control is inside. The lift system cannot forecast passenger needs. A more efficient way, I thought, is to select the floor while you were outside. This way, the system can predict in advance who is waiting for the lift at which floor and desgin the most efficient route. And this idea was implemented at Wisma GKBI (pronounced Gay-Kah-Bay-Yee) in Jakarta. But it turned out that what was efficient for the lift is very inefficient for me.The lift took a long time during non-peak hours because it maximise its throughput, fetching as many passengers as possible in every floor. And I had to wait a long time for the lift.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

China's Olympic Child Singer

To me, it really does not matter that nine-year-old Lin Miaoke (林苗可) sanged with seven-year-old singer Yang Peiyi's (杨沛宜) voice, as long as due credit is given. Unfortunately, it seem that in order to present a perfect Chinese girl, the authorities has pretended that Lin Miaoke has both the looks and the voice. When you sacrifice truth and justice, you will miss its benefits, among them, integrity, science, mathematics, good and clean government, and finally, wealth.