Night Festival at the museum

"Sky ballet", as someone behind me told someone over the phone.

By the stunning »Studio Festi.

Gehry & the Sky

Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, gorgeously taken by »Daily Dose of Imagery. I looove the bronze flowing into the blue.

Ethical problem-solving

A thought. In this day and age, branches of academic studies are getting so specialized that specialists are typically just focused on solving the (mathematical) problem at hand. They are, or at least I was, usually not sensitized to the ethics behind the problems they are tasked to solve. For instance, consider a mathematician tasked to solve for:

The most efficient dimensions of a gas chamber to gas 5,000 people with an average weight of 60 kg.

It is all too easy to "assume a gaseous flow of x cubic metre per second", solve the equation from there and get a nice promotion out of it. But what of the consequences behind the solution?

Could it really be possible to justify to oneself, "But I was just solving a math equation!', and sleep well at night?

Great-grandfather's progeny

Two months ago on the inaugural trip back to our maternal hometown of Fuzhou, mama and uncle got excited one afternoon and started telling stories about great-grandfather, his many wives and the many hazy characters in the family. Great-grandfather was apparently a rich man who went around in a trishaw collecting rent from the shops in Sungei Road. I love the image of him going around in singlets and shorts with decked-out wife no. 3, being fully ignored by the jewellers until they find out who the real boss is.

Last night finally, I sat down and organized the scribbled notes of my maternal family tree from that afternoon:

Sabbath at Haji Lane

Nous aimons femmes et carottes

From the scarily deadpan teacher yesterday -

Aimer means love or like. In French, we use aimer for everything - we use it for women, for carrots, everything.

A few minutes later -

We love discrimination in French. Everything is either male or female. There's no logic... Like women, you know. [Continue deadpan look] You ever tried understanding women? DON'T.

I wanted to reply -

No, don't understand... Just love!