Not Your Grandmother's Karma

Most of us "lao wai" misunderstand karma. (For that matter, most Chinese misunderstand karma as well.) The flavor of karma that's evolved in the west seems to have a scheming intelligence behind it that ensures:

1. If you do something, the karma will rebound within this lifetime.
2. Unless you're really not paying attention, you'll know what act is "paying you back" at the moment. After all, that's the whole point, right?

I guess you could say we think of karma as some kind of externalized conscience, which forces us to pay up for our bad activities by bringing reminiscently similar bad things to bear on us (ditto for good thing). This is far removed from the actual origin of the theory, which served as a solution to an existing problem, not some high-minded philosophizing.

I bring this up because of something recent that resounded rather loudly of western-style karma. When I was a lot younger, I bought a bicycle horn at a Scout flea market, and spent a great deal of time making my younger sister jump by honking the horn when her back was turned. In retrospect, this was a Not Nice Thing To Do.

Since moving to my new first floor flat, I've become the victim of a very Asian practice: various buyers, sellers, and repairmen walk continuously from door to door, blasting a bicycle horn to inform everyone that "I'm here to buy/sell/repair stuff!" It would be quaint if they didn't do it multiple times every day.

Karma or not, I certainly deserve this. The fact that these sellers advertise their presence with a bicycle horn is just a nice touch of another form of justice. And the next time I move, I'll be looking for a 20th floor apartment in a not-so-traditional part of town. With sound-proof walls. Ooh, and a nice balcony, if possible.


Unrelated News of What I'm Doing: Currently studying up on Google Android, the rather revolutionary mobile platform for next-generation phones and maybe laptops too. Problem is, it's very radical. Learning it requires huge amounts of patience, while I read through pages upon pages of documents to understand why they do it this way, that way, etc. In the end, their decisions make sense --problem is, I've only got 3 days left before the competition to master something that I thought I already knew well enough.

An Eponym for an Awesome Family

So the Hetu family is pretty awesome. We've got a doctor (and a half) a sensible musician, a potential author, a theological savant, an expert pianist, a set of telepathic twins, and the rare psychologist-boxer. (Note: this list includes Hetus who haven't been born yet). I feel that one of us will eventually become super-famous, and the world will be wanting for an eponym. That is to say, the "Hetu-ish Method" or whatever will need to be printed in a textbook.

Now is the time to decide how to press-gang our name into an adjective form. The wiki page on auctorial descriptives is particularly helpful, as is a general search for the word "eponym". Here's a list of existing possibilities, along with that person's accomplishments.

Person/Accomplishments	Conjugation	"Hetu" This Way
René Descartes Major accomplishments in philosophy and mathematics. Created the X/Y co-ordinate system.	Cartesian	Hetusian
Franz Kafka Accomplished German author; wrote the book Metamorphosis.	Kafkaesque	Hetuesque
Eric Blair/George Orwell Famously authored 1984, really good with the dystopia genre..	Orwellian	Hetuian

There are plenty more eponyms to look at, but they're all rather dull-sounding. These three are the top contenders. So... what'll it be? I like the "Hetusian" the best, even though it's probably a misspelling of "Hetuian". (Or, there could be several famous Hetus! Or, we could just ignore pesky spelling details.) The term "Hetuesque" is a bit too cerebral. Hetuian sounds terrible, in my opnion.

Of course, we're not famous yet, so we're still open to suggestions. For now, though, I'm settling temporarily on "Hetusian". And there you have it...

Arcane Wisdom

A letter-to-the-editor in the Economist claimed that mandatory community service made no sense, since an hour of Person A's time is not equal to an hour of Person B's time if person B is highly educated. I think this is a very priggish thing to say, since the whole benefit to volunteer work (besides actually getting the house built) is a strengthening of character.

Still, his statement has a nugget of truth to it: shouldn't we volunteer some of our time to tasks which target our strengths? With this in mind, I started to volunteer my skills at computer programming. That was a while ago... and one of those projects caught up such a following that I even decided to buy the domain name. I mentioned it in the last post; we're approaching another release.

Or so I though.

The other day, I was using the very same product I'd designed, as part of a routine check. Suddenly, it crashed. Stopped working. Seized up. Let me make it perfectly clear that my programs do not crash. Oh, sure, they've got bugs and glitches and errors and all that. I've spent countless nights staring at my laptop trying to figure out what is wrong with a page of seemingly-correct text. I make lots and lots of mistakes. But when we're mere days before a release, and I've fixed all known bugs, we never, ever get a random, non-reproducible crash. This would be like a veteran bicyclist falling off his bike after twenty years of solid riding. While stopped at a traffic light. With his feet on the ground. This kind of thing simply doesn't happen.

After posting a frantic bug report with nearly every related detail I could think of, I narrowed down the error: it was something that I had never learned about the language I was coding in. To give a brief estimate, I could probably fix this with a week or two of hard work.

I must say, I was legitimately agitated for a few days. Not about the time necessary to fix this mess (I actually enjoy rewriting lots and lots of code; don't ask me why). Rather, I was upset that I'd let ignorance creep in to a project I wholeheartedly cared about. Granted, I was lucky: this error occurred on a side project, with a relatively small user base, on a non-essential feature, and was caught just before release. For my first professional mistake, it could have been much worse.

What brought me out of my gloom was the realization that it was time for my favorite part of being a computer scientist: arcane knowledge! I knew exactly what book I needed, but I couldn't find it in the public library, as the last major update was circa 2000. I knew the quality of the author's knowledge on this subject, though, so I looked in the private collections on campus and found a dusty pre-release dating back to 1997. And there you have it: a single book in a "restricted" (to the public) library contained the Knowledge (capital K) I needed to fix the mess I'd gotten myself into. This is the kind of thing you'd see in a sci-fi/fantasy movie! (Note: I also checked Google Books for the "search inside" option, but it wasn't there.)

I love the feeling of such arcane knowledge, especially as it is so rare for a computer scientist to need anything from pre-2005. Since I'm pretty much going to have to re-write all of the core routines in my program, I thought I'd first brush up on language details by reading the entire book. So far, I've found nothing that surprises me like the previous error did. That is to say, I was tripped up by a tiny technicality that I should have thought about more. I did, however, find a lot of really great new techniques I can put to good use. The new code will be even stronger and more maintainable than before the crash, thanks to the quality of this book.

Well, that's that. Like I said: arcane wisdom FTW! I can't help but love an endearing story, and mystical ancient powers make any tale more exciting.

Speaking of story-telling, I think it's time for a....

Mini Movie Review!
Star Trek: Excellent job, guys! Very entertaining.
Angels & Demons: Very disappointing ending, compared to the book.

No English Equivalent

So, it's 2AM, and I'm sitting at my (awesome) desk, looking at the (Burmese) dictionary entry for "hsi", which states:

"noun particle showing direction of action to or from a person (no English equiv.)" [1]

Like a Science Fair volcano project, my brain seems to fizzle and steam every time I read that sentence. What -oh, what!- could it ever mean? And, more importantly, how did we get to the point of me studying this language so late at night.

My increased study of Burmese has coincided with a gradual loss of interest in Chinese. There's a variety of fun reasons for this, but the most neutral is this: I just don't think I have room in the ol' noggin to store 6,000 pictographic characters. I shudder to think what gem of knowledge might be jettisoned just to store an arbitrary character like "mao" (defined as: hair, brush, or communist leader, depending on the context). Burmese is alphabetic, so I need only memorize a few hundred letters, pronunciations, and rules.


In fact, the story of how I came to be studying Burmese is pretty interesting: it began with a project to create a typing system, after a discussion with one of my friends (Jake, all the way on the left in the picture). At the time, I thought it best to approach the problem without any knowledge of the language, and that proved very helpful. Later, people started asking for language-specific features, so I had to learn some. And the more I learned, the more I liked.

That picture actually makes me feel a bit nostalgic, since it features a table full of friends that I've lost touch with for one reason or another. Well, except Jake; we still meet up. It's a bit unfortunate that I'm getting nostalgic about Singapore while I'm in Singapore, though. This is fortunate for my readers, however, as it saves you from the original topic of this post. Indeed, the only way I can overcome nostalgia is by covering all things new. Well, let's get started!

We're approaching release version 1.7 of the software I mentioned earlier. Here is a graphic I made for the web page which encourages users to "talk about" this release to their friends; the boy is saying the name of the software (in Burmese, as it's appropriate). At the time, I was overworked, and this was the easiest picture I could throw together to express the concept of "tell your friends". It turned out to be positively adorable. Now that we've actually got real people using the software, releases are a lot more fun! In particular, I have to actually check for bugs these days...

I'm sure I mentioned that we moved a few months ago. I just found out that our new location is in the same zone as that famous author guy you may have heard about if you looked into Singapore literature even just a little bit. I think he's back in Britain now... but his books were pretty good. Besides being very accurate, they snagged you with their simple but endearing passages, a bit like one of my other favorite authors, also British. It seems our friends from the mother land have a real knack for using English effectively, an observation re-enforced from living with one of them years back.

I've fallen a bit out of love with pictures, partly due to the rather true stigma that Asians take lots of photos. Seeing that my latest pictures are from 2008, however, does something to spur my motivation. Plus, webcam conversations have shown me just how far a picture can go to making someone feel like they're right here, enjoying Singapore with me.

For example, this picture -from my phone, hence the graininess- makes it very clear how much fun moving house was. Clearly, I was down not only to my last shirt, but to my last power socket as well. Then again, pictures are limited --I can't recall if I'm moving in or moving out. I think I'm moving out of my old room.



Well, that's all for now, loyal fans. My next goal is more pictures --and also, Star Trek. Ooh, and Japanese food tomorrow! And... more debugging (sigh).



Works Cited
[1] Mesher, G. "Burmese for Beginners". Lesson 6, pp. 158-159

How Long Have These Pictures Been On My Hard Drive?

It occurred to me recently that I somehow forgot to show my family all the pictures from my trip to Burma. This is a bit odd, as I was with them for a whole month during Christmas! Ah, absentmindedness will get the better of me yet. ;)

I'm in the middle of writing a paper (and collecting Sapphires in-game), so this will be a short update. I'll pick a few of my favorites:

This triple-waterfall was amazing! At the top there's a small pagoda --there's tons of pagodas all over Burma, specifically in Bagan, the ancient city.

I'm going to have to ask Nathan to help me get the spellings right... this was at Pyin Oo Lwin. There were a series of caves nearby that we were walking to, but this waterfall was on the way. As you can see, there's a few bridges you can use to get a closer look.



This picture is from Yangon, taken by Mimi from outside the restaurant we were having dinner at. Most of Nathan's friends were in Yangon, so we had a big group to go around with while we were in the city. This night we had the famous "hot pot" dish that you might have seen on Survivor. The idea is sort of like... making soup... at the table you're eating at. Yes, I'd call it "real-time soup".


This picture is of the famous Shwe Dagon pagoda, which is actually visible from most parts of the city. There were tons of people around the temple area at night, doing various activities from praying to just hanging around. Apparently this area has a large social importance in Yangon.






Here we have three of our four-person travel group. On my left is Mimi, and on my right is Admon, Nathan's friend. We're in Taunggyi (I think), which has a really nice "rolling hills" kind of landscape. The yellow patches in the back are sesame plants, one of Burma's prominent cultivated plants.



This was Pin Tay Ya, I think. Inside of this cave complex there were thousands of Buddha statues. This is just one section of them. Each statues is old beyond remembrance, and has to be re-plated with gold leaf every so many years. The plaques list the names of those who donated the most recent layer of gold. We saw some... rather infamous names on a few of those plaques.



Back when I was teaching Environmental Science, one student described the trees in his study areas as hugemongous. When we were in Taunggyi, I actually saw a tree so big that I was at a loss for words, and hugemongous immediately popped into my head. I've included myself in this picture as a size reference; can you find me?








Inle, the floating city, is just about beyond description. Any of you who've read The Hobbit and were enchanted by the description of Escaroth would be equally enchanted by its equivalent in Burma. Here we are on one of the "streets".






Bagan, the ancient temple-city is about a picturesque as one can get. In fact, the number of Japanese photographers there snapping the sunset nearly outnumbered the Burmese.





And that's the end of your tour. Unfortunately, I don't have any really good mountain pictures. We went to visit an extinct volcano, and the caves were all located at high altitudes. Also, did I mention that we went around Bagan in a horse-drawn carriage? Overall, the trip was fantastic for so many reasons, not the least of which was that everyone had a slightly different way of doing things there. All the new customs, and food, and clothing was just such a breath of fresh air. I can't say I wasn't thrilled when I found a place that served a club sandwich, but that's because club sandwiches are unbeatable! Of all the foreign countries I've been to, this one had both my favorite food and my favorite people. A winning combination, really.

Ok, back to normal blog posts... :)

Quesadilla Madness

There's always plenty of food at Nathan's house. His mother always prepares extra, his brother is a great cook, and various others in the house often feel the need to prepare some of their own dishes. Every once in a while, I prepare some food too --I'm more than happy to-- and the most recent of these meals was Quesadillas.

The recipe was a huge success, so I'll include a copy of it here. I mostly used this recipe, but with a few modifications. First, I put the smoked salmon inside the quesadilla, instead of on top. Second, I mixed the avocado with an equal amount of spreadable cheese, and lined the inside of the quesadillas with this. Finally, I lightly oiled the quesadilla maker, and cooked the things for about twice as long as normal.

And they were fantastic! It's always a joy when you can find a food that everyone enjoys. I let Nathan's family borrow the quesadilla maker for a week, and they immediately began the process of "adapting" the recipe to the various Burmese ingredients they had lying around. Well, quesadilla translates (I think) to "with cheese", so as long as they kept that, I suppose they can substitute whatever they'd like.

And In Other News...

I've got another blog I've been writing in, as a bit of a hobby. It's rather technical, unfortunately, so I imagine that the posts will be rather un-interesting to those of different hobbies. However, the idea is easily explainable: if you're studying to become a writer, you read the works of other writers, and if you're studying to become a psychologist, you look at the experiments done by other psychologists. However, computer scientists are often encouraged to work on their own, after only a few figureheads are studied. This leads to the unfortunate case where many computer scientists cannot "read the code" written by others in the field. So, with this blog, I attempt to work on game development by avoiding writing "new things" and instead hacking existing games. ("Hacking" in this sense means "fiddling around with". It's a common point of confusion.)

And For More News...
My supervisor is also the head of one of the Halls here at NUS, and his Hall recently put on a production of the play "The Accidental Death of an Anarchist". Although quite a step apart from last year's production ("The Wind in the Willows"), I found the play quite entertaining. Overall, a very enjoyable night.

A List of Asian Qualities

Another late night, so you guys get an update. Hooray!

Now that I'm familiar with Singapore, I think it's fair for me to start talking about the habits -good and bad- that I've picked up here which are decidedly Asian in nature. This will help you avoid the inevitable that's followed my every return from a foreign country or Boy Scout camp.

• Good: Feet, feet feet. It's all about feet here. I probably wash my feet three times a day (excluding showers) and an extra two if I visit Nathan's house. If there is one habit I infect America with, it'd be this one: clean feet and a clean house are like peanut butter and honey (or jelly, for the hoi polloi).



• Bad: Cell phones. There seems to be an idea here that text messages can be typed without affecting a conversation, and that answering a phone call is paramount to nearly any other social discourse. The recluse nerd in me bought into this with a swift "woo-hoo!". Texting and carrying on a conversation at the same time is one habit I definitely want to kick.



• Debatable: Noodles and sushi, two of the many foods I now eat a lot more than normal. If only they could make a country with sandwiches, pizza, and nga pi fried rice...



• Good: Amazingly more tolerant of foreigners. Cultures and languages are one thing, but learning to work with other people is something else entirely. A sure sign that my friends here feel perfectly comfortable around me is that they occasionally address me in the wrong language when we're in a group.



• Bad: Conversation pace. Fancy words may speed up conversation, but they trip up the average listener. Using lots of simple words and repeating them is a sure way to get your message across, and it's really necessary if you ever start planning activities here. ("Want to meet at 5? Ok? Then see you at 5? Tonight? Ok, 5pm?"). Unfortunately, it's also a great way to drive native speakers up a wall. You'll have to deal with a general downgrade in the quality of my conversations. I'll try to thumb through my word-a-day calendar on the plane though, for your sake...



• Undecided: Waaay too sensitive. You know how you used to love a particular joke about until you actually met someone from ? Suffice it to say that you won't get much laughter out of me at others' expenses. I'm not trying to be a prig; really, it's just a reflex action now.



• Good: Socially aware. Actually, I should have learned this one in High School, but it turns out that I am, in fact, not the most important person in the group. Asian culture usually over-specifies group dynamics at the expense of personal interest, and while I haven't gone that far yet, I've found myself far more socially capable than I was in the past.



• Good, but Unrelated to Asia: Finally done being a tourist! I was having dinner tonight with some friends, and one of them was happily trying every new dish under the sun. I've tried nearly everything by now, and I'm satisfied enough with having liver/intestines/ears that I can comfortably say "no". What's really great about this bullet point is that it settled with the bar slightly higher than it was before I left --so I can really enjoy quail eggs and roast duck without going all the way to jellyfish.

I realize it's been a while without posting, but I hope to get a few more "structured" articles like this one out before I return home for Christmas. This year, I really want to visit all of you, if time allows. Until then, all the best!