Nexus Junction

Rooting my Archos 101 with Urukdroid 1.5

2011-12-05T17:35:00.001+08:00

"Storage Space is critically low"
A strange problem manifested itself in November. For some strange reason, the free System Storage Space on my Archos 101 tablet kept going down and down and down. For several months, I had it hovering around the 30 MB threshold (the moment free System Storage Space drops below 30 MB, the Archos will display an annoying message in the notification bar that "storage space is critically low" - one that irks me to no end). Previously, I had danced around this problem by deleting web browser caches, clearing cache data, and even uninstalling apps. But this time, all this tricks were to no avail. Even when I had uninstalled practically all miscellaneous apps, leaving only the absolutely critical ones that I needed on my tablet to serve as an e-reader, the free System Storage Space just kept dropping and dropping and dropping...

And then on 25 November, the free System Storage Space dropped to 0 MB. No program could be launched in this state. I had to reboot the device to free up some System Storage Space so that I could use the device.

I knew then that I had no choice. I would have to reformat my Archos, or alternatively, "root" it.

Rooting
If I were to reformat the tablet with the original Archos firmware, I knew that I would encounter the low System Storage Space problem sooner or later. Due to a poor design decision on Archos part, they have actually partitioned the Archos 101 with a meagre 300 MB of space for System Storage out of the 8 GB of storage available. A more rational design would have been to allocate at least 1 GB or more for the System Storage partition. Thus, reformatting the device with Archos firmware was not on my radar. I needed to go with the more dangerous fix of "rooting" my Archos tablet.

I am not a fan of "rooting". I think consumers should not have to do such technical gymnastics on an appliance - which is what I consider the Archos tablet to be - for the appliance to perform satisfactorily and to work reasonably. I am adept enough to follow technical instructions carefully to carry out this operation on the tablet. I am sure most common folks, who are even less technically knowledgeable than me, may not even attempt "rooting". They are more likely to just junk the device, and buy something more friendly like the iPad. Besides, every one knows that Android is much harder to use than the consumer-friendly iPad. It has often been remarked that Android tablets (and Linux systems) often require rocket-science expertise to use the damn things properly.

On the Archos forums, Urukdroid 1.5 is very favorably reviewed as the best package for rooting the Archos 101. After reading all the materials I could lay my hands on about installing Urukdroid, I took the plunge on the night of 25 November (a Friday) and proceeded to root my Archos.

I was very pleased that I was outright successful on my very first attempt. When I checked on the Settings > Storage page, my jaw dropped on seeing that Urukdroid provided a massive 700 MB of free System Storage Space!

Even today, two weeks later, I still have
554 MB of free System Storage Space
after installing a whole bunch of apps
and live wall papers into my "rooted" Archos.

Gotchas
However, I suddenly realised that the multimedia content on my 16GB MicroSD card had been entirely erased (I had backup my SD card, so it was alright). For some reason, Urukdroid was installed on my MicroSD card, and not on the internal 8 GB storage space of the Archos.

I thought I had made a mistake. I didn't want to install Urukdroid on the external MicroSD card. I wanted to install Urukdroid on the internal 8 GB space, so that I have the flexibility of swapping out different SD cards.

I removed the external MicroSD card from the tablet, and repeated the Urukdroid installation. Unfortunately, I was not mistaken. The Urukdroid installation process - I chose the "Easy Installation" mode - insisted on my inserting a MicroSD card into the MicroSD card slot. Urukdroid 1.5 - if you choose "Easy Installation" - can only be installed on the external MicroSD card.

I believe it should be possible to install the operating system on the internal storage space if I had chosen to go with "manual/advanced installation". However, I am no Linux expert, and I wasn't brave enough to venture down that route. I rationalised to myself: "Hey, I didn't brick the tablet. It is working fine, and I now have a whopping 700 MB of free System Storage Space to install apps. Don't press your luck!!!!"

And that's the extent of my experience with "rooting" my Archos.

Freedom
With so much free System Storage Space, I need no longer restrict myself with installing just the critical apps that I had been putting myself up with over the past few weeks. I installed lots and lots and lots of apps - far more than I could with the original Archos firmware. Without having to worry about the nagging "Storage space is critically low" message, the apps-loaded tablet felt all anew - as if it was a brand new purchase and not one-year old equipment! The happiness I felt was exhilarating.

Now that I could afford to, I also re-downloaded lots and lots of Live Wallpapers. I am currently using the one called "Sun Rise Free Live Wallpaper" as my default wallpaper.

Adobe Flash 11.1 can finally be installed.

I can now install Google+ and Facebook and Skype without issues.

I also realised that with so much System Storage Space, there was no longer any need for me to move apps from "System Storage" to "Internal Memory". I had to do this previously under the Archos firmware because of its limitations, and I was peeved that apps like Adobe Flash or the Google Pinyin IME could only be installed in "System Storage" and could not be moved to "Internal Memory". These issues are now non-events. Also, because I now left the apps in "System Storage", I could also install widgets that invoke these apps (like the Go Weather widget and the News Republic widget). Widgets can only be added to the home screen if the associated app is installed on "System Storage". This was a no-no previously. What was once impossible has now become practicable.

Limitations
However, despite the great increase of System Storage Space and the new freedom this afforded with regard to the number of apps that I can now install without impunity, the Archos 101 is still saddled by its scrawny 256 MB of RAM.

Whenever the system runs low on memory, the resource-heavy Sun Rise Live Wallpaper will suddenly disappear and be replaced by the less resource hungry Grass Live Wallpaper.

Pulse Reader will suddenly restart itself whenever it encounters a low memory condition.

And low memory causes Live Wallpapers to behave sluggishly. The User Interface is non responsive to finger swipes if the Live Wallpaper is busily animating lots of movement.

Yes, "rooting" has resolved my big bug-bear problem of low System Storage Space. However, it doesn't resolve the other hardware limitation of too little RAM. 256 MB of RAM is really not sufficient for a tablet.

(I think 1 GB of RAM would have been ideal.)

But that can wait till the purchase of a new tablet with the hardware firepower to run Android 4.0 smoothly. For the moment, I am very glad that I got my Archos tablet working again, souped up tremendously no less, thanks to Urukdroid 1.5.

Urukdroid Installation Links
1. To install Urukdroid, it is first necessary to install the Special Developer Edition firmware from Archos. See this post.

2. Instructions for installing Urukdroid. Although the documentation is for Urukdroid 0.7, the EasyInstall instructions are still applicable to Urukdroid 1.5. Link

3. Description of Urukdroid 1.5. Link

Archos 101 Update : Design Flaws

2011-09-04T18:38:00.001+08:00

I recently showed a friend my Archos 101 (pretty outdated now, what with all the new Android 3 tablets that have been introduced into the market), and so the conversation naturally flowed to whether I would buy a new tablet with Honeycomb, and whether I would get the next generation of the Archos tablet that is to be released sometime this month: the Archos 101 G9.

Although I love gadgets, most of the gadgets I buy have to serve some kind of purpose. For me, I bought the Archos 101 primarily as an e-reader, and for that, the Archos 101 has fulfilled its purpose most admirably. In fact, I love browsing the internet on the tablet, so much in fact that I actually spent more time with the Dolphin browser application than the ezPDF application.

However, no matter how I love reading on the tablet, the tablet is still not a very good appliance for writing. As some internet pundit remarked, the tablet is a "consumption" device, and not a "production" device. The tablet on-screen keyboard is not good for writing anything, including this blog post (which I am doing from my notebook by the way). Thus, if you are on a tight budget, and am undecided between choosing a notebook or a tablet, I will always recommend buying a notebook if you intend to use the computer mainly for producing stuff. Tablets are not very ergonomic for writing articles, emails, spreadsheets. Notebooks are much more versatile.

That is why I will not be buying a new tablet anytime soon, as my current Archos 101 is working just fine. In fact, I am more likely to buy another notebook computer (despite the fact that I already own a Core i7 notebook already) than to buy another tablet. As a producer, a notebook is a more useful purchase to me than another tablet.

Archos Tablet Design Problems
Also, there are several "flaws" in the Archos tablet pertaining to its hardware, and to the Android operating system that drives it. I can live with these flaws as I wasn't expecting much from my budget purchase when I acquired my Archos 101 back in December. These may or may not be fixed by new models of Android tablets (whether from Archos or other manufacturers), but I have decided to list them down just for the record.

1. Glossy Screen and not Matte Screen

If you are using a computer - be it a notebook, netbook, or a tablet - primarily for reading, a matte screen is a must. Glossy screens - being highly reflective - creates a "glare" problem, which greatly diminishes the reading experience.

Unfortunately, the public at large love "shiny" things, and for this reason, the majority of consumers prefer to buy computers with glossy screens. When you are at the shop, the movies that are being demo-ed on the computer will look much better on a glossy screen than on a matte screen. Because of that, consumers are tricked into thinking that glossy screens are "superior" to matte screens. And unfortunately, this creates an artificial demand spike for glossy screens. To satisfy this majority demand, manufacturers produced more computers with glossy screens, and this results in a lower manufacturing cost for producing glossy screens versus matte screens. And at the end of the day, everything in manufacturing is about bring costs down. As such, almost all computers in the market now comes only with glossy screens.

Even the Apple iPad comes with a glossy screen. Steve Jobs may be a god in aesthetics, but all too often, he has let his vision of beauty override pragmatics. I believe that the "glare" from glossy screens are spoiling the eyesight of users, and this is particularly so for young users. But why should Steve Jobs care about saving the eyesight of young children when glossy screens look so much prettier? If Steve Jobs had chosen matte screens to protect the vision of his users, the cost price of matte screens would have fallen instead, and all other manufacturers would have followed.

Since manufacturers of Android tablets are particularly sensitive about cost, they will go with glossy screens as these are cheaper than matte screens. I don't expect tablets to come with matte screens any time soon.

2. Archos 101 Screen has a Small Viewing Angle

Because the Archos 101 is a budget device, its LCD screen has a very small viewing angle. The screen is usually viewable by only one person, who is facing it directly at a 90° angle. If there are several persons trying to watch the same screen on the Archos, the people who are seeing the screen at an angle side will see a darkened screen and not see the image clearly.

I have seen noticed that other tablets like the ones from Apple or Samsung do not have this problem. Those tablets come with more expensive LCD screens that sport a wide viewing angle (almost 170° ) which allow several people to crowd around the same screen and still be able to all watch the action on the screen.

The small viewing angle is not a problem for me because the tablet is only used by one person - me - most of the time. However, when I want to play a YouTube video or to show some photos for friends, the small viewing angle is very annoying.

3. Landscape instead of Portrait orientation

Apple got it right when they designed their tablet with a Portrait orientation. Google chose to go for Landscape orientation for the Android tablet, which might have been done to avoid being labelled as "copying" Apple's design. But I think it is a wrong decision.

The reason is ergonomics. If I hold the tablet with my left hand, and use the fingers on my right hand to do the swiping and clicking, it is much easier to hold the tablet in a portrait orientation than in a landscape orientation.

The only time I would want to use landscape orientation is when I am watching a movie on the tablet. But hey, a movie is typically 90 minutes long, and I don't think I want to hold the tablet (with either one or with both hands) for one and a half hours. I would lay the tablet on the table, probably standing it at an angle facing me, and watched it without making my arms tired.

(This is why the Archos 101 built-in stand is marvellous for watching videos on the Archos tablet).

In typical usage (browsing, reading, replying short emails), I contend that the tablet will be easier to use, and less tiring to hold, in portrait orientation than in landscape orientation.

Perhaps Google's engineers decided that as most notebooks screens are landscape orientation, making the tablet screen landscape is more natural. I think this is not a valid comparison because we don't use notebooks and tablets in the same way. A notebook uses a keyboard and a mouse, whereas a tablet doesn't. A tablet is like a sheet of A4 paper. We normally generate documents on A4 paper in portrait mode. The tablet default orientation should have been portrait too.

4. Landscape / Portrait - Android Auto Rotation Switch Flaw

I use the Archos tablet in portrait mode almost 99% of the time. As such, I like to lock the display to Portrait orientation - instead of enabling Auto-Rotation and allowing the tablet to switch between Portrait and Landscape. I don't like Auto-Rotation because I like to read in bed, and it is very annoying if the text on the screen keeps flipping its orientation when I turn from my right side to my left side, or vice versa.

However, the Android operating system has a flaw of omission. In the Settings > Display > Auto Rotate Screen option, I can choose to enable or disable Auto Rotation. However, there is no setting to lock the display permanently to Portrait mode!

When Auto Rotate Screen is enabled, the tablet can switch between Portrait and Landscape modes. However, when Auto Rotate Screen is disabled, the tablet is simply set to Landscape mode. There is no way for me to disable Auto Rotate Screen and to set the tablet to Portrait mode, my preferred orientation!

Luckily, the ezPDF, Dolphin browser, and FBReader apps have internal settings that allow the app to lock to Portrait or Landscape orientation. However, there are many other apps like Wikidroid, Pulse, News and Weather etc that don't have these internal app setting, and thus rely on the Android system setting, which only allows either the Landscape orientation or an Auto-Rotate orientation. Thus, when I am lying on my side on the bed holding the tablet in Portrait orientation, I cannot use these other apps properly!
This is an Android 2 flaw (the Archos 101 currently runs Android 2.2). It would be sad if Android 3.x carries over this same flaw.

5. 300 MB System Storage Partition - Archos Flaw

My Archos 101 has 8GB (or 8000MB) storage. However, Archos has decided to partition it such that 300MB is used for System Storage, while the remaining 7700 MB is partitioned as Internal Storage.

This is really a foolish design!

Although programs can be installed in either the System Storage partition or the Internal Storage partition, the fact is that for every program installed, a little bit of space must be allocated in the System Storage partition for the program, even if the program is installed in Internal Storage.

There are thousands of Android Apps in the Android Market, and most of these apps are less than 10MB. With 7700 MB in the Internal Storage partition, and assuming 10 MB average sized apps, I should be able to install at least 770 apps in the Internal Storage partition..

But I can't because of the stupid 300 MB System Storage limit imposed by Archos!

First of all, many system programs cannot be stored in the Internal Storage partition. For example, Google Docs, or Adobe Flash 10.3, must be installed in the System Storage partion. After installing some crucial stuff, the amount of System Storage space is typically reduced from 300MB to a mere 90 MB!

Also, every app that is installed on the Internal Storage partition also requires some space in the System Storage partition. After downloading and installing 20 or 30 apps in Internal Storage, the Archos complains that the free space in System Storage partition has dropped to less than 30 MB, and displays a "Storage Space Low" notification. When this happens, activities such a app updates will be suspended, which prevents me from installing new apps. The browser will also take a performance hit (I think some cache files are saved in the System Storage).

I have no idea why Archos used such a small 300 MB partition for such a critical System Storage partition. Wouldn't it be better to just use the entire 8 GB as System Storage? Or why not partition 4GB as System Storage and 4 GB as Internal Storage? Heck, even if they use 1 GB for System Storage, it is still better than the ridiculous 300MB System Storage that they have provided.

Because of the silly 300 MB System Storage limit, there is no way for me to install lots and lots of apps, even when I have plenty of free storage space left. I think that with the 300MB System Storage limit, the Archos 101 can at most install 30 apps into the Internal Storage when the tablet will run out of System Storage space. I have to uninstall a lot of dormant programs so that I can download and try new ones.

6. 256 MB RAM Only - Archos Flaw

This is another cost-cutting design decision from Archos which hampers the Archos 101.

Tablet programs are on the ascendancy, and because of the large 10.1" screen size, tablet apps can be more complex than their smartphone cousins, and are bigger than the smartphone apps.

It is also more natural to multi-task programs on tablets than phones with a smallish 3.5" or 4" screen.

But because the Archos has only 256 MB RAM, multi-tasking is not really effective. Even when using the Dolphin browser, which permits the opening of many tabs simultaneously, a browser with many tabs consumes more RAM, and thus the tiny 256 MB RAM has a crippling effect on the browser's performance.

It has been argued that a tablet with more RAM memory consumes more electricity. Currently, Archos is able to boast of a 10-hour usage on a single charge. If the RAM is not a small 256 MB, but 1024MB instead, a single battery charge may only provide 7 to 8 hours of usage, and not the 10-hours usage with the 256 MB RAM..

256 MB RAM is simply not adequate for tablets. Even my Samsung Galaxy SL phone has 512 MB RAM. Personally, I think tablets should have at least 1024 MB RAM. This low RAM specs of the Archos 101 is a real downer.

The tiny 256 MB RAM means that the Archos 101 cannot effectively run Android 3.0 (Honeycomb). Although Android 3.0 can run on a device with only 256 MB RAM, the lack of RAM will throttle the performance tremendously, and rendering it pointless to update the operating system. If Archos had only been far-sighted enough to put in 1024 MB of RAM initially, the Archos 101 would not have any problems being updated to Android 3 today, and perhaps even Android 4 next year. The low RAM means the Archos 101 is not future-proof, and is permanently relegated to the Android 2.2 operating system.

I am afraid Archos is repeating the same cost-cutting measure in their new Archos 101 G9 model. If you examine the technical specifications published by Archos for their new Archos 101 G9 tablet, you will see that once again, Archos did not list the RAM size (Archos only lists the Storage size - 8GB/16GB Flash memory, or 250GB hard disk). However, other manufactures such as Samsung, Motorola etc have no such qualms, and publicly list the RAM specifications for their Android 3 tablets. The fact that Archos needs to suppress this information speaks volumes about their cost cutting intents.

7. Tablet cannot be charged via USB - requires proprietary power supply

The Archos101 must be charged via its proprietary power supply / connector. It cannot be charged through USB unlike my Samsung Galaxy SL phone.

This is probably because of the batteries used by the tablet. USB charging is a kind of trickle charge, and this may not be optimal for charging the tablet's high capacity batteries.

I think Google should have created a standard power connector for tablets, so that the same power supply / connector can be used by every Android tablet. Now, we are stuck with the manufacturer's proprietary power supply / connector for each device from different manufacturers. This is the same problem faced by phones previously, until the handset association got together and standardised on using the Micro-USB cable for charging. I wish the same had been done for Android tablets.

Blind Spots

2011-08-24T20:42:00.001+08:00

I often receive email articles or internet links to photos of breathtakingly beautiful landscapes, or pictures of unusual animals, or news about someone who was saved from a catastrophic accident, in which God is attributed as the maker or responsible for saving the life of the lucky one.

If I were argumentative, I would tell my friends that if God is responsible for all the beautiful things in nature, then God must also be responsible for the ugly ones, like diseases, poor African children stricken with hunger, or for the deaths of the people who did not make it out alive from the accident. However, the answer from my religious friends would invariably be that God has a reason for doing what he does, and it is not for us to know why.

This kind of cop-out thinking is pervasive among the highly religious. Once they have don their "God Goggles", no naturalistic explanation that is offered can satisfy them. For them, the answer is always God, and God can do no wrong!

Which is why I like this video from The Thinking Atheist, in which Seth talks about the "Blind Spots" in the religiously afflicted. Seth was a Christian for 30 years - including 12 years as a Christian broadcaster. However, Seth ultimately found the bible's answers to be sorely lacking, and upon critical examination of his religion and to "think" for himself, finally put down his God Goggles and became an atheist. I like this video and decided to link it because Seth's story is not only interesting, I find him very funny, and his talk is highly entertaining.

Accessing a Windows 7 file share from Archos 101 with the ES File Explorer application

2011-01-15T18:03:00.001+08:00

This post is created as a reply to Damian, who wanted to know how to access a Windows 7 file share from the Archos 101 using the ES File Explorer application (see Damian's original comment). I thought this info might be useful to others, so I have crafted my reply to Damian as a blog post. It was also easier to do a blog post as my reply is basically a series of self-explanatory screen captures. (Click on the image to view it in full size.)

Hope you find this helpful, Damian. And thanks for reading my blog.

My New Toy: The Archos 101 Android Tablet

2010-12-31T02:57:00.005+08:00

On 15 Dec 2010, I finally acquired my first tablet computer, the Archos 101 Internet Tablet running under the Android 2.2 operating system. This is also my first Android device.

Archos 101 Internet Tablet

Why I Chose Google's Android over Apple's iOS
I have been considering getting a tablet computer for many months, ever since Apple launched their iPad back in April this year. I like the iPad design. Apple is tops in user interfaces and design.

However, I do not like the fact that the iPad is proprietary technology. There are several facets of the closed and proprietary nature of the Apple iPad that I find very disagreeable:

Apple made it such that iPad applications can only be installed through the Apple's App Store. The iPad does not allow apps to be sold through 3rd parties, or for apps to installed over a USB link ("side-loading").
Apple censors and restricts the types of 3rd party applications that are allowed in the App Store. No reason is offered by Apple as to why an application is rejected. However, it has been suspected that software that competes with Apple's own offerings are rejected.
Apple does not allow their OSX or iOS operating systems to be licensed by other companies. They claim that they need to maintain the quality. But the real reasons are monopoly and control. Apple's eco-system is similar to that of a communist state, where all decisions are solely determined by its leader, CEO Steve Jobs.

I prefer the capitalist nature of the competitors.

Because of the control exerted by Steve Jobs on all Apple's products, Apple's products are never cheap. Also, they are often severely crippled for the sake of aesthetics. The difference in the hardware offerings of the iPad and the Archos is very telling.

The Apple iPad provides only one proprietary interface connector.

The Archos provides the following:

a USB host connector - this allows you to connect USB keyboards, mouse, Thumbdrives to the Archos. The USB host connector can also be used to connect to USB hard drives.
a USB slave connector - this allows the Archos to be connected to a PC running Windows, OSX, or even Linux. You can then use the PC to copy files to and from the Archos memory.
a HDMI connector that allows the Archos display to be sent to an external monitor with HDMI ports

a MicroSD card slot - this allows the memory space to be expanded. The device will not be limited to the internal memory space that you purchased originally - which is the case with the Apple iPad.

Finally, you need a Mac running OSX to develop programs for for the iPad. The iPad could not be programmed with cheaper PCs running alternative operating systems. From Apple's point of view, the iPad is merely an extension of the Apple's eco-system. When you buy an iPad, you are buying into this eco-system.

The Apple eco-system is one designed for the richer and well-off in society. Apple's products are always priced at a premium, in which Steve Jobs would defend (the premium pricing) to reflect its quality and upmarket-ness. Apple likes to associate their products with those of luxury goods. It is not an eco-system for the rest of us (i.e. the majority) who cannot afford to pay the lavish prices demanded by Apple.

This is where Google comes in. Google's Android offering is the complete antithesis of Apple's closed system. Google released the source code of the Android operating system to the public, allows users to either install programs via the Android Market or through side-loading, does not restrict applications of certain genres (e.g. pornography) from being offered in the Android Market. In fact, Google is very permissive on what programmers are allowed to do with Android. The only commandment that programmers need obey is that their apps must "Do no evil."

I know that I will not be satisfied with a proprietary and closed system like the Apple's iPad. I have more affinity with devices that run on a more open and not-so-proprietary system, like Google's Android. Thus, although the Archos is not as aesthetic as the iPad, nor as simple to use, the Archos is the better choice for me.

Why I chose the Archos 101 over other competing Android tablets

There was one specific thing I wanted my tablet to be used primarily for: as an e-book reader that is more suitable for reading PDF files of books formatted for A4 sized pages. This meant it has to have a large screen. Given the choice of 10" (Archos, Creative) , 7" (Samsung and others) and 5" (Dell) screens, I eliminated all those that did not have a 10" screen.

A lot of e-books are unfortunately not formatted in the EPUB format, but in the PDF format. PDF is ubiquitous, but it is a format that favours the printed page. When it comes to electronic books, HTML is actually the better format. For those not in the know, the EPUB format is actually based on HTML. An EPUB file is actually a zip file containing multiple HTML formatted files.

With HTML and EPUB files, text is automatically re-formatted based on the size of the screen. You can even enlarge the size of the fonts. With PDF, if the original document was formatted for A4 size, it is actually very difficult to read the pages on a 5" or 7" screen. If a full page view of the A4 page is set, the text will be so tiny you won't be able to read it. If you set the view to display at 100%, the 5" or 7" screen will only be able to show a portion of the A4 page. To read the A4 page, you must pan left/right/up/down to read this. This is a very frustrating experience.

I already own an Ectaco Jet e-book reader (http://www.jetbook.net/) which has a 5" display. It is very hard to read PDFs with A4 pages on this e-book reader (although this e-book reader is excellent for reading EPUB files). Thus, for my new tablet, a 10" screen was a mandatory requirement.

Unfortunately, there are not many Android 10" tablets. I only knew of 2 companies, Archos and Creative, that have a 10" tablet on their catalogue. I like Creative products, and personally own 3 Creative MP3 players. However, the Creative 10" tablet (the Ziio 10) is vapour-ware. Although it has been announced since October for a December release, the Ziio 10 tablet has still not been released as of today (30 Dec 2010).

Which brings the choice down to getting an Archos 101, or to wait for a few more months when more Android tablets will be in the market. But since it was already approaching December, and Christmas was in the air, I decided now is better than later. Thus the decision for Archos it was.

The Archos 101 was available in 2 configurations: 8 GB internal memory (S$499) or 16 GB internal memory (S$599). I didn't want to pay an additional S$100 for a mere additional 8 GB of internal memory, so I went for the 8GB (S$499) model.

However, many other people around the world had the same idea apparently. Although I had already decided on getting the Archos 101 since the 3rd week of November, the Archos 101 was out of stock worldwide. Finally, MemoryWorld (www.memoryworld.com.sg) called on the morning of 15 December (Wednesday) to indicate that the new shipment had came in. I collected my unit from them that very evening.

The Android Operating System
The Archos 101 came preinstalled with Android 2.1. But I have already read on the internet that there were limitations with version 2.1 that were addressed with version 2.2:

In version 2.1, programs must be installed on the built-in flash memory. They could not be installed on external memory such as a MicroSD card. Version 2.2 removes this limitation.
Adobe Flash (needed to run Adobe Flash programs, or watch videos in FLV format - like the ones on YouTube) is only supported in version 2.2.

After I acquired my Archos 101 on 15 December, Archos released the Android 2.2 update for the Archos 101 the very next day on 16 December. However, the "Over The Air" update for this firmware patch was not available, and it was necessary to download the file from the Archos web site, copy it into the Android's root drive, and restart the tablet to execute the Android 2.2 firmware update. This is very complicated as compared to just running an automatic update "Over The Air", and is a one of the differences that delineates the complexity of the Android operating system versus the simplicity of the Apple iOS on their iPad.

Google has a shopfront called the Android Market where 3rd party developers can publish/sell software to Android users. Android Market is equivalent to Apple's AppStore for the iPhone and iPad.

However, Google has some rules in place that constrains Android device manufacturers ability to include the Market app/icon. Device manufacturers can only include the Android Market app on Android devices that are phones with 3G capability. If an Android device does not have 3G capability (e-readers like the Barnes and Noble Nook e-reader, tablets like the Archos and Creative ones), the Android Market app cannot be installed on the Android device.

Luckily, because Android allows programs to be "sideloaded" (unlike the Apple iPhone or iPad), it is possible to download an APK file from the internet, specifically the file gApps4Archos2.apk, place it on the root drive of the Archos as before and re-power up the Archos to install the APK file. Once installed, the full Android Market application will be available on the Archos.

Actually, Archos provided a similar application called the AppsLib (Application Library) to get over the restriction that they cannot put the Android Market app on their tablet. One advantage of AppsLib is that 3rd party applications featured on the Archos AppsLib are guaranteed to work on the Archos tablet. When you access the actual Android Market, applications designed for all kinds of devices - phones with 3.5"/4"/5" screens, tablets with 7" or 10" screens - are all available. There is also a lot of crappy apps out there. Applications originally designed for a small phone screen may not necessarily scale well to a 10" screen like the Archos 101. In the Android Market, this is very tedious to find out. In AppsLib, Archos only publishes those apps that are guaranteed to work properly with the Archos tablets.

And really, there is a lot of stuff in the Android Market. The Archos AppsLib features a useful subset of this, and not encumber the user with a large list containing unnecessary dross or poor applications. The only drawback for AppsLib is that it doesn't have as much software listed as the Android Market.

While reading about the wide range of devices that run Android, one word that is often mentioned by the press is the word "fragmentation". In the Apple iPad world, software developers only have to program for a 9.7" screen with the screen resolution of 1024 x 768. In the Android world, it is a bit more messy with 5", 7" and 10" devices available, offering a wide range of screen resolutions from 1024 x 600, 1024 x 768, 800 x 480 etc. It would be nice if screen resolutions are fixed, but then, there would be no evolutionary improvement. Messiness is the price that has to be paid for improvement. A static environment is more stable, but it is also less vibrant, and thus less exciting.

User Interface
This being the first time I am using an Android operating system, I was quite fascinated at the user interface, which by and large is a clone of the Apple iPhone's touch screen interface. Despite blatant copying (or because of the blatant copying), the Android user interface feels pretty logically laid out, and also pretty well designed.

In the Apple iPhone and iPad, there is only one hardware button - the Home button. Whenever you press this hardware button, it will bring you to the Home screen.

In the Android world, device manufacturers need to provide 4 hardware buttons instead:

Home
Back
Options
Search

Interestingly, the Archos 101 does not have these 4 buttons implemented as hardware buttons, but as software buttons instead.

Apple fans will typically cite that because there is only 1 button on the Apple iPad/iPhone, new users will immediately know how to use the iPad. This simplicity is touted as a feature that makes the iPad more user-friendly, and easier to learn. Personally, I don't subscribe to this. There is something called "too simple". A device that is too simple can also limit the usefulness of the device.

Because the iPad has only a Home button, all applications must use valuable screen space to draw a Back button and/or an Options button. This is a trade off. Having just one button is pretty elegant from an aesthetic point of view. But having 4 buttons means the programmer always have access to 4 important functions that the programmer can choose to either implement or not, which can make programming simpler.

Anyway, there is really no right or wrong answer for this.

Recently, Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 operating system seems to have taken a compromise approach. Windows Phone 7 includes 3 mandatory hardware buttons for Home, Back and Search. There is no Options hardware button.

Home Screen Design
Now that I own an Android, I have discovered that the Home screen is one of 5 screens where the end user can place icons for shortcuts to favourite programs. The Home screen is the centre one of these 5 "Favourites" screens. 2 Favourites screens can be reached by swiping left from the Home screen, and 2 others by swiping right from the Home screen.

There is a "Programs" button - a software button - that is always drawn on the bottom of every one of these 5 Favourites screens. Clicking this Programs button will bring you to a "Programs" screen showing ALL the programs that have been installed on the Android device. You can then "long-click" on a program icon in the Programs screen to bring it to the current Favourites screen that is currently in focus.

This is actually quite a good design. It is definitely way better than the Windows Mobile user interface that I am currently using on my Windows Mobile phone.

However, the Android Home and Favourites design is not without its flaws.

It turns out that to delete an icon from a Favourites screen, you need to select-click on the icon, and then drag the unwanted icon to the Programs button icon - when both the unwanted icon and the Programs icon will turn red. Unfortunately, many a time, instead of doing a select-click, you will inadvertently do a normal click and run the unwanted icon's program instead. Also, in the midst of dragging the icon, if you cross over other icons as you are dragging, the system will unselect the unwanted icon that you have been dragging. You then have to repeat this process again, hopefully with more success. It would have been so much easier if a function is available from the Options hardware button to remove the selected icon from the Favourites screen.

Also, I think there is a hardware design issue on the Archos 101 screen. A lot of people on the internet have also mentioned that in the centre of the screen, the surface is not so sensitive to touching. I do not encounter this problem for the casual clicking operation. But when performing a "drag", I can lose the drag if I have to drag the icon across the centre of the screen. Also, when I try Chinese handwriting, it is very difficult to paint strokes near the centre of the screen unlike painting strokes in other areas. It does appear that the centre of the screen is not as touch-sensitive as other areas of the screen.

Also, the screen is very glossy, and is very reflective. Shiny reflective surfaces are not good for reading. But as this is a tablet, it is easy for me to re-angle my hold on the tablet so that I don't see the reflection from the glossy screen head on. It is too bad that many LCD screens are not available with matte (non-reflective) finish. Almost 90% of notebook computers on sale nowadays sport glossy screens. According to some internet articles, it is cheaper to manufacture glossy screens, as matte screens are actually created by applying an additional coating on the glass. Hence, matte screens are more costly to manufacture, so manufacturers don't).

I was thinking of buying an anti-glare screen protector for my Archos 101, but some internet reports stated that the protector makes the touch screen surface less sensitive. Wary of this, I have not bought the screen protector yet. Fortunately, the glossy screen is not so problematic on the Archos 101 tablet as on my ASUS Core i7 notebook. On my notebook, the glossy screen was so irritating (as I use my notebook 8 hours a day - sometimes longer) that I had to get an anti-glare screen protector after 3 days.

The touch screen is also a thumb print magnet. As my fingers are oily, the screen is strewn with thumb prints all over. There is something to be said about using a keyboard and a mouse. It keeps the screen clean.

PDF Reader Apps
The stock programs that come with the Archos 101 out of the box is pretty basic, but functionable. However, as my main intention for the Archos 101 is for reading PDF e-books, I was surprised there was no PDF reader installed by default. The only program that came with the Archos for something similar to this is the Aldiko e-book reader. Aldiko is quite a well implemented e-book reader application, but seems to only support EPUB files, and not PDF files.

Also, when reading an EPUB book in landscape mode, Aldiko displays the page shifted too far right such that the there is a wider than usual margin on the left hand side, while the text on the right hand side of the page is always overflowing the right hand margin and is thus cut off. This problem does not occur if the Archos tablet is switched to portrait view. I suspect that the Aldiko e-reader app was originally designed with a smaller phone screen in mind. In landscape mode, it doesn't scale well to the 10" screen of the Archos 101. Perhaps a future update will fix this problem.

As Aldiko cannot open PDF files, and as there is no PDF reader app provided out of the box, it was necessary to go to the AppsLib and Android Market to download PDF viewers apps for testing and evaluation.

I tried all the free ones in the AppsLib or Android Market, but many of them suffer from one killer defect or another.

My test PDF file is one weighing in at over 35MB and has over 800 pages. It is a freely downloadable book called "Atlas of Creation - Volume III" by Islamic creationist Harun Yahya. I used this for my test as the book has many graphics, and these usually trip up less robust PDF viewer porgrams. (I am simply amazed that the creationists are so wealthy that they were able to print this lavishly illustrated book in colour, and gave thousands of the printed copies free to many schools and universities worldwide).

As this PDF file has lots of illustrations, is massive, and has hundreds of pages, many of the PDF viewers will not even open the file saying it is too big. Others could, and so my PDF reader app list was trimmed down to just the following:

Adobe Reader X (version 10.0.0) - FREE
BeamReader (version 1.2.0) - US$9.99
ezPDF Reader (version 1.0.15.0) - US$0.99
PDF Viewer - FREE
RepliGo Reader (version 2.1.7) - US$3.99
VuDroid - FREE

Of course, I wanted to use a free application if it served my purpose. So I first tried Adobe Reader, PDF Viewer, and VuDroid.

Adobe Reader X opens the file and renders each page quickly. It even has a very important feature: REFLOW TEXT. With Reflow Text enabled, the viewer will strip off all layout formatting and simply display just the text content, reflowing the text to fit the size of the screen and the viewable area. This can be very helpful when reading novels in PDF format.

However, Adobe Reader X suffers from the following flaws:

No "Go To Page" function. Instead, it has this silly slider bar where you can slide to the page that you want. However, it is very difficult to slide to the precise page as compared to simply typing out the page number.
Adobe Reader doesn't remember where you had read to previously. Every time you open a PDF file, it always opens at page 1. This is totally unhelpful with the reading of manuals with hundreds of pages. In fact, it is the only shortlisted PDF viewer program that doesn't have the "Remember Last Page Read" function.
When viewing in "Reflow Text" mode, which is the mode I expect to be using most of the time when reading PDF books, Adobe Reader will always display a small rounded box on the top left corner of the page showing the current page number and the total number of pages in the PDF file. This "Page Number Popup" box will appear for 5 seconds - hiding the text under it - before disappearing. I find this extremely frustrating because every time I flip to a new page, the first one or two words on that new page will always be covered by the "Page Number Popup" box for 5 seconds. I wish Adobe had simply shown the "Page Number Popup" box at the bottom left corner of the screen instead. This way, my reading experience won't have to be unnecessarily paused for 5 seconds at each new page, causing some minor aggravation.

PDF Viewer has 2 problems:

It has no "Reflow Text" capability. This makes it very troublesome to read files formatted for A4 sized pages.
Even though I have switched to landscape mode to view the PDF pages, when flipping each page to get to the next, I found that the page edges are not anchored to the sides of the screen. All pages appear to be in free form positioning, so when you flip up the current page, the next page following it can slide either to the left or to the right, instead of staying locked to the centre. This made page navigation very troublesome.

VuDroid did not have the "Free Form Positioning" problem that plagues page navigation in PDF Viewer. All pages are nicely locked in a fixed position, so that you can easily flip up one page to the next with ease. However, VuDroid also has 2 problems:

It has no "Reflow Text" capability, like PDF Viewer.
The page rendering is VERY SLOW. And this is true even for pages containing plain text only, instead of pages laden with graphics. In fact, VuDroid has the slowest page rendering among all the shortlisted PDF programs.

After my evaluation of the free PDF programs, I knew what I wanted. The PDF program must have:

"Reflow Text" capability
"Remember Last Page Read" capability
"Go To Page" function
A good page navigation mechanism.

Because every one of the free PDF programs had one missing feature, I decided to also evaluate the non-free PDF Reader programs. If there was one that meets all my 4 requirements, then it will be worth buying.

ezPDF Reader is the cheapest - at US$0.99. However, there was no free trial version. Only RepliGo Reader and BeamReader had free 10-day trial versions. So I tested RepliGo Reader and BeamReader first. Both RepliGo Reader and BeamReader met my 4 mandatory requirements.

However, although BeamReader is the most expensive of the lot, it has a very strange quirk. It will only display the contents of the page that is currently in focus! It makes sense to display the current page, and not display the next page first. But I find it inexplicable why even the previous page that you had just been reading is also made invisible when the focus goes to the next page! (With BeamReader, if you are currently reading page 12, the parts of page 11 and page 13, if these pages are in view, will be greyed out, hiding whatever text or contents that rest on page 11 and 13. I find this behaviour very annoying.)

RepliGo Reader, which was significantly cheaper than BeamReader, did not have this quirk. In fact, it was the best PDF reader that I had tried up to then, and I was seriously considering buying this app when the free 10 day trial period was over.

I was curious about the last - and also the cheapest paid app - ezPDF Reader - which unfortunately had no free trial edition. I had skipped evaluating it, as I didn't want to pay US$0.99 for an app that may not ultimately meet my requirements. (In my opinion, all consumer apps should allow some form of trial period.)

Then, I saw this YouTube video that showed the features of ezPDF Reader:

It turns out that ezPDF Reader has all the features that I was looking for in a PDF Reader, and has a nifty page turning animation to boot. With my doubts vanquished, I decided to buy the app from the Android Market, and installed it on my Archos tablet.

Indeed, I was surprised that the user interface of the ezPDF Reader was even better than RepliGo Reader, which I already held in high regard and was already planning to buy. And ezPDF is cheaper than RepliGo! It is often said that the best software need not necessarily be the one that is the most expensive. ezPDF Reader has demonstrated this maxim to be true again.

Web Browser

Android comes with a stock Android browser, which is actually pretty full featured. But I was reading all these glowing comments on the web about the Dolphin Browser HD. As this app was free, I downloaded it to try it.

I was blown away. The features in the Dolphin Browser HD far surpassed that of the Android browser, and adds many more. The developers seem to have thought of just about everything that will improve the browsing experience on a touch screen. I was truly impressed with how they implemented tabs, bookmarks, previews, and an amazing gimmick they called "Gestures". They had actually brought the full experience of a desktop browser - like Opera - into a mobile browser. If you own any Android device running Android 2.0 and higher, you must try out the Dolphin Browser HD. I can guarantee that once you have tried the Dolphin browser, you will never go back to the default Android browser. Indeed, it is that good!

File Explorer

The Archos 101 came with a built-in app called "Files" that allows you to navigate through the entire filing system. This is what I like about an open operating system like Android. The flexibility to browse the file system is given to the users, unlike the Apple iPad/iPhone, or the new Microsoft Windows Phone 7, which do not come with any File Explorer application at all. Both Apple and Microsoft do not want people to pry into their systems. Google encourages people to explore theirs.

Unfortunately, there appears to be some issues with the default Files app when it comes to accessing a file share on a Windows PC. No matter what I tried, there was no way I could get the Files app to access a file share that I have made on my Windows 7 (64 bit) notebook. This file share can be seen by other computers on the network, and even on the Archos 101 Files app. However, the Files app can only see the file share's name, but not its contents. The Files app just could not access the file share.

I learnt about an alternative File Explorer app for the Android called "ES File Explorer". The "ES" in its name stands for "Extra Strong". Since this too was a free application, I decided to try it. And amazingly, ES File Explorer is able to access all the files in the file share on my Windows 7 notebook when Files could not. With such a positive result, I removed Files from my Home screen and replaced it with ES File Explorer.

Dictionaries
Since the tablet is basically to be used as an e-reader, it was necessary to install a dictionary app on it. And there were several to choose from. I didn't do much research in this area, and simply downloaded the best rated free English dictionary app that was listed in the Android Market. This dictionary app is called "ColorDict Universal Dictionary" (version 2.4.0). Although it is free, it is actually very good.

While installing dictionaries, I also installed a Chinese dictionary called "Hanping CE" (version 2.3.1). Hanping CE is also a free app, and again, I was astounded at how good it was!

I often tell others that my greatest problem with using electronic Chinese dictionaries is that most of them do not have sufficient input methods. Some require you to type in the word you want to look up in hanyu pinyin. Some provide an additional choice of typing in the English word. Although this 2 input methods appear comprehensive, it is insufficient.

I were to come across a signboard with several Chinese words that I am unfamiliar with, the above Chinese dictionaries will be useless. Since I don't know the unfamiliar Chinese words, I will not be able to input them in pinyin in the dictionary. And I can't look the word using their English synonym if I don't know what the word means in the first place!

Hanping CE remedies this as it installs a Chinese handwriting keyboard app called HanWriting Sogou Input. With this keyboard, I can draw out the character strokes of the unknown word and input the Chinese word by drawing its strokes. Any competent electronic Chinese dictionary must offer this last method of input: handwriting input. And usually, they are not free. So it was great that Hanping CE was.

The only thing lacking is voice pronunciation of words. This isn't so much of a problem with the Chinese dictionary, as I can read the hanyu pinyin to figure out how a word should be pronounced in Mandarin. For English words, pronunciation is a bit more tricky, and unfortunately, the ColorDict dictionary entries do not include pronunciation tips on how to pronounce words. It may provide the definition of the word "ecclesiastes", but it doesn't provide any help on how one should pronounce it.

But then again, it is a free app. We should not complain about free apps!

I also installed a free app called "Quickpedia" which is just a skin for accessing the contents in Wikipedia. However, Quickpedia works best with a web connection, as Wikipedia is on the web. Quickpedia is not really essential, as one can also just use the browser to visit Wikipedia and access the same info.

Editors
The Archos tablet is not really suitable for editing large documents, or creating spreadsheets. Thus, installing a full blown word processor or spreadsheet is overkill. It is still more efficient to produce documents using an actual PC with a keyboard and mouse.

However, it is still useful to have a note taking app for writing short notes. For this, I installed "Evernote". Evernote is pretty impressive. I used it to synchronise notes on my Windows 7 notebook, my Windows Mobile 6.5.3 handphone, my Windows XP Home netbook, and now on my Android 2.2 tablet.

Miscellaneous
I like the Live Wallpaper feature on Android. I currently set my wallpaper to the "Aquarium Free" live wallpaper. However, I am sure it sucks CPU cycles and slows down my Archos tablet performance tremendously. But what the heck. The aquarium fishes are very pretty.

I am not really into games, but I quite like the Raging Thunder 3D driving program that the Archos had installed out of the box. I wish there was a 3D car driving game that is not so competitive. I like a Zen like car driving simulation where the player simply drives serenely through different terrains and enjoy the beautiful scenery.

As the "Angry Birds" game is the talk of the town, I downloaded this on the very first day of my acquiring the Archos tablet. I had already played a little of the game on an Apple iPad at an Apple store, so I knew what it was all about. However, what I did not know was that on the iPad/iPhone, the Angry Birds app is a trial version, and only includes 12 free screens from level 1. On the Android Market, the Angry Birds app is advertisement sponsored, and features all the 63 screens from 3 levels (21 screens per level). I was stuck at screen 21 on level 1 for the past week. Only today did I manage to finally clear it.

The Angry Birds game demonstrates how a simple game can be made so popular through fun graphics and amusing animations. However, after a while, the levels can become too difficult. My favourite game at the moment is the web online game "Plants vs Zombies". Too bad in the mobile world, the game is available only on the iPad. There is currently no Android version of this game. I would buy the Android version, as I really like the PC-based web version.

Finally
Over these past 2 weeks, I really grew fond of browsing the internet on the Archos tablet. The tablet form factor is really like a book, and makes reading computer text far more enjoyable than on a PC or notebook.

I need to buy a case for the Archos 101. There is none in the market so far. All the cases available are for the Apple iPad, showing how strong Apple has influenced this market. Luckily, the Archos 101 fits perfectly into one of my old CD wallet. So I am carrying the Archos tablet around in this CD wallet while waiting for some shop to carry bring in a decent Archos 101 casing. Hopefully it is soon, and that it won't be too expensive.

The Archos 101 doesn't have a built-in 3G modem, and it is not able to recognise my M1 Mobile Broadband USB device. When I am outside, the only way I can connect the Archos tablet to the internet is to find a place with a free Wi-fi hotspot. But as not many places offer free wi-fi, and since I already have the M1 Mobile Broadband modem, I am thinking of buying a portable mobile wi-fi router (mi-fi). The portable mi-fi router comes with a Lithium ion battery that can hold a charge for one to 1.5 hours of surfing through my Mobile Broadband modem. However, the cheapest portable mi-fi router is S$129 (the Edimax 3G-6210N). Also, I also feel that it is very troublesome to have to carry so many gadgets around (the Archos tablet, the M1 Mobile Broadband USB modem, and the portable mifi router) just so that I can enjoy internet access from the tablet while outside. It is probably simpler (and less costly) to just carry my netbook and the mobile broadband modem if I need internet access when outside, and skip having to purchase an expensive mi-fi gadget.

And I also have to catch up on my reading.

Religious Morality

2010-10-11T09:53:00.001+08:00

The problem with religious morality is that it often causes people to care about the wrong things, leading them to make choices that needlessly perpetuate human suffering. Consider the Catholic Church: This is an institution that excommunicates women who want to become priests, but it does not excommunicate male priests who rape children. The Church is more concerned about stopping contraception than stopping genocide. It is more worried about gay marriage than about nuclear proliferation. When we realize that morality relates to questions of human and animal well-being, we can see that the Catholic Church is as confused about morality as it is about cosmology. It is not offering an alternative moral framework; it is offering a false one.

- Sam Harris (The Moral Landscape)

http://www.jesusandmo.net/2010/10/05/four-2/

Top Ten Signs You're a Fundamentalist Christian

2010-10-08T10:08:00.000+08:00

10 - You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of yours.

9 - You feel insulted and "dehumanized" when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that we were created from dirt.

8 - You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a Triune God.

7 - Your face turns purple when you hear of the "atrocities" attributed to Allah, but you don't even flinch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in "Exodus" and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in "Joshua" including women, children, and trees!

6 - You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans, and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women, but you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god who got killed, came back to life and then ascended into the sky.

5 - You are willing to spend your life looking for little loopholes in the scientifically established age of Earth (few billion years), but you find nothing wrong with believing dates recorded by Bronze Age tribesmen sitting in their tents and guessing that Earth is a few generations old.

4 - You believe that the entire population of this planet with the exception of those who share your beliefs -- though excluding those in all rival sects - will spend Eternity in an infinite Hell of Suffering. And yet consider your religion the most "tolerant" and "loving."

3 - While modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in "tongues" may be all the evidence you need to "prove" Christianity.

2 - You define 0.01% as a "high success rate" when it comes to answered prayers. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% FAILURE was simply the will of God.

1 - You actually know a lot less than many atheists and agnostics do about the Bible, Christianity, and church history - but still call yourself a Christian. (link)

Rony Tan - Lighthouse Evangelism - and the denigrating of Buddhism

2010-02-10T06:45:00.005+08:00

These are the video snippets of Pastor Rony Tan of Lighthouse Evangelism Church criticising buddhism that has resulted in his being hauled up by the ISD (Internal Security Department). Although Rony Tan's mocking statements about buddhism has been widely reported on TV and in the Straits Times, it is still very useful to see what the brouhaha was all about.

(Note: the first 2 Youtube videos have been mis-titled. The video titled "part 2" is really the 1st part, and the video titled "part 1" is really the 2nd part. They are listed here in the correct chronological order:) ***

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBv2ZpsfA8M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8EIDGqMb64

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLHZCdgF2NE

-------------------------------------------------------

It is very sad to see that the 2 ex-buddhists have forgotten all their buddhist teachings - particularly the Eightfold path. If they remember 2 aspects of the Eightfold path: "Right Speech" and "Right Intention" - they would not have allowed Rony Tan to exploit them into mocking their old religion in front of an audience.

You can see from the videos that Rony Tan is a huckster of the highest calibre. Glib and smooth tongued, and obviously possessing a stronger command of the English language than the ex-buddhists, he was able to stoke the two along into making it look as if it was the ex-buddhists themselves who were denigrating buddhism, and that he was simply commenting on it. However, the whole performance is obviously masterminded by Rony Tan - with a single goal in mind - to make his brand of christianity the premier religion among all religions.

Just as there are different schools of christianity, there are similarly various schools of buddhism. Chinese buddhism is actually in-fused with a lot of shenism beliefs. But basic buddhism does not really teach that practising the buddhist rituals will help you become "more powerful than god". Instead, the buddhist rituals are just an aid to guide a person to enlightenment. An enlightened person cannot heal sickness or develop supernatural abilities like a "god". An enlightened person is simply someone who can finally see things as they are, instead of seeing things distorted by our own biases and our own selfish wants.

Indeed, in one school of buddhism, great emphasis is placed on training the mind to think sceptically and critically about everything. In Zen buddhism, there is an idiom that goes:

"Great doubt, great enlightenment. Little doubt, little enlightenment. No doubt, no enlightenment."

In the video, Joseph (the ex-buddhist monk) says that his Tibetan monk mentor said that even though he (the mentor) had practised meditation for so many years, the mentor has still not achieved great enlightenment. Little does Joseph know that his mentor is actually quite enlightened!

-------------------------------------------------------

Just as the 2 ex-buddhists who have forgotten their buddhist teachings, Rony Tan, a "christian", has completely forgotten the teachings of Jesus. Didn't Jesus say:

"And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not perceive the plank in your own eye?" (Luke 6:41)

Just as Rony Tan thinks that much of buddhism is superstitious fantasy, there is much about christianity that is just as equally unbelievable. For example, in the gospel according to Matthew, it was stated that when Jesus died, an earthquake occurred, and the graves were opened. However, the zombies stayed in their graves until Jesus was resurrected, in which then these zombies started to leave their graves and walk to Jerusalem, appearing to many. (Note: this fantastical tale is told only in the Matthew gospel, but not in Mark, Luke or John. See Matthew 27:51-53).

Most rational people will say this tidbit is completely made-up. If hundreds of dead people start rising from their graves and walk to a major city like Jerusalem, such an incredible event would have been reported by many other historians living in Roman Empire times. However, this mass resurrection sequence is described in only one book, the bible (and only in Matthew). However, many fundamentalist christians accept this fairy tale to be literally and historically true!

Rony Tan thinks that women are treated as second-class citizens in buddhism. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

The 10th commandment states:

"you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor." (Exodus 20:17)

Wives (women) are basically grouped together with slaves, ox, donkeys - as property of the "neighbour". Notice that the "neighbour's wife" is not the "neighbour". The "neighbour" in the bible passage specifically implies the guy!

Even in the New Testament, the entire book is littered with sayings like:

"the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man" (1 Corinthians 11:3)

"Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." (1 Timothy 2:11-12)

It is precisely because of these writings in the New Testament that the Catholic Church does not allow women to become priests. Therefore, Protestant churches that allow women to be ordained as priests and preachers are actually not following the bible teachings!

In fact, not only does the bible not promote equality for women, it doesn't promote equality for people, period. This is why the bible is littered with rules and regulations and teachings on how to treat your SLAVES! Even Jesus did not preach against the institution of slavery. This is why christians could used bible scriptures to support their practice of enslaving African Negroes until secular society changed the laws to end slavery in the late 19th century. If Jesus had simply condemn slavery explicitly in any of his parables, African Negroes would not need to have such a tragic history of being slaves in Europe and America in the past.

-------------------------------------------------------

It is sad that so many Singaporeans in the church were laughing away at the masterful performance by Rony Tan in his show in denigrating buddhism. Unfortunately, I have a nagging feeling that this denigration of non-christians is being carried out in many of the other evangelical churches as well. This cannot be avoided because of the zeal that evangelical christians are going about proselytising and promoting their faith.

-------------------------------------------------------- *** Edited: 14 Feb 2010 - The original YouTube links that I had linked to were taken down by the user. I have revised the links to other copies of the same videos that are still online.

Pandering to Islam

2010-01-24T16:22:00.004+08:00

So finally, McDonald's has corrected their mistake, and brought the Pig back into their Chinese Zodiac toy set:

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20100122/tap-singapore-mcdonalds-pig-c3bb44c.html

However, McDonalds is not the only American company that is going to great extents to avoid "offending" Muslims, but has no problems with "offending" non-Muslims. Even Google, who claims to be against censorship and says it is a strong supporter of free speech (as in their recent skirmish with the China government and threatening to pull their company out of China over censorship issues), seems to be pandering to Muslims.

If you go to "www.google.com", and then type some words into the search box, Google has a special feature called "Google Suggest" that will automatically display a list of sentences that starts with the words you typed in the search box.

Now, if you type the text:

christianity is

(note: remember to type a space after the word "is"), you will see a list of sentences, many of them unfavourable, shown by Google Suggest.

If you next type:

buddhism is

you will also see the suggestions, again many unfavourable, being listed.

However, if you type the text:

islam is

(remember to type a space after the word "is"), you will see that Google has censored the suggestions list!

You can try this for other religion names ("hinduism", "taoism", etc). You will see that the suggestions list has been specifically censored by Google for only the Islam religion.

*************************************************

Why did McDonalds pander to Muslims and made such a pig-headed move in the first place? I believe this is because it thinks that "offending" Muslims can lead to more disastrous consequences than "offending" the Chinese or the Hindus (Hindus consider cows a sacred animal and do not eat beef. If McDonalds is truly sensitive to religion as it claims, it will not serve beef to not offend Hindus).

Look at the recent troubles in Malaysia, where 10 churches were vandalised, fire-bombed, and burnt, over a legal ruling on the word "Allah". Instead of settling the dispute calmly and civilly in the law arena, deeds almost amounting to terrorism were acted upon by some Muslims, who were clearly offended by the legal ruling which seemed to favour the Christians and unfavourably to the Muslims.

Indeed, in the past few weeks, we hear of:

- an American Muslim army major who killed 13 people and wounded 30 others in his own army camp, in the name of Islam ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Hood_shooting )

- the Nigerian Muslim who nearly suicide bomb himself in a plane with 289 passengers in the name of Islam ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Farouk_Abdulmutallab )

- daily terror bombings in Afghanistan and Iraq by Al Qaeda in the name of Islam

In the West, Muslims often complain that they are unfairly treated, and that they are victims of Islamophobia. However, the word "phobia" means an "irrational fear". With violent reactions by Muslims over issues such as the above and these:

- naming a toy bear with the name "Muhammad" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_teddy_bear_blasphemy_case )

- the Danish cartoons ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy )

we can see that a fear of Islam is not an "irrational fear". Islam is indeed a religion to be feared, because it does incite its believers to do dangerous deeds.

Thus, Google is probably right to censor the suggestion list for "islam is ". It might save their office premises around the world from being fire-bombed by Muslim extremists, who appear to take offence at anything done by non-Muslims that even remotely appears to encroach upon the Islamic religion.

*************************************************

The Malaysia issue of banning non-Muslims from using the word "Allah" to mean God is shortsighted, and shows a hardening of Muslim fundamentalism creeping in the country ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_v._The_Herald ).

Unfortunately for the UMNO government, which is creating this unnecessary controversy, "Allah" is not an exclusive Islamic term!

To begin with, most of those who insist "Allah" is uniquely Muslim or Arabic seem unaware that the words for "God" in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic are so closely related as to be virtually indistinguishable. The Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - have different conceptions of God, certainly, but etymologically speaking, the Arabic Allah shares the same root as the Hebrew Elohim and the Aramaic Alaha.
Elohim derives from eloh (Hebrew for "God"), Alaha is an emphatic form of alah (Aramaic for "God"), and Allah ("The God") is linked to ilah (Arabic for "God").
'All three of these Semitic words for "God" - eloh, alah, and ilah - are etymologically equivalent,' writes Dr Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, a Muslim scholar. If one heard Elah or Alah in Aramaic (pronounced Al-aw) it would sound almost exactly the same as Allah in Arabic (pronounced Al-lawh or Al-lah, depending on the context).
It is difficult to say Christians cannot say "Allah" when Arab Christians have been doing so for thousands of years and when Christ, who spoke Aramaic, would probably have said Alah, Elah, or Alaha. Both Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34 tell us that at the ninth hour on the cross, Christ cried out:
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? ("My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?")
where Eloi being the personal possessive of Elah. Still, it would be as meaningless to say that Christians have a better claim on the distant common root of Elohim, Elah or Allah, because Christ came before Prophet Muhammad."
- Janadas Devan - "What's In A Name" - Sunday Times - 24 Jan 2010

(See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allah )

Ironically, the situation between the UMNO politicians and the Catholic Church reminds me of an action of the Catholic Church back in 1633 when it punished the scientist Galileo Galilei to life imprisonment because Galileo says that the facts are that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and not the Sun revolving around the Earth as taught by the church and written in the bible.

Now, UMNO wants to punish Christians because the Christians say that the facts are that the use of the term "Allah" by non-Muslims predates Islam by thousands of years, and is not exclusive to Islam as UMNO wants the situation to be.

UMNO can behave like the enlightened political body it claims to be, and teach its Muslim members the historical truth of Islam and its origins, and help foster a harmonious society together with the other religions, and build a country that celebrates its multi-religious make-up. Instead, because of the hardening religious stance, they are now telling their members that only Muslims have an exclusive lock on the "Allah" term and only Muslims can be permitted to use it, ignoring history and reality that this is not true (in the Middle East, Arabic Christians and other non-Muslim faiths still call their God as "Allah" today).

This posture is just like the Catholic Church's stance back in the 1600s, dogmatically teaching its members that the Sun revolves round the Earth, ignoring science and reality that this is not true.

When religion comes into the picture, truth gets thrown out the door.

Christmas Unwrapped - The History of Christmas

2009-12-26T14:16:00.000+08:00

I have just watched a very informative documentary about the history of Christmas, and learnt a lot of interesting stuff about the origins of the many traditions in modern Christmas celebrations:

the spherical ornaments on the Christmas tree is supposed to represent the Apple from the Tree of Knowledge from the Garden of Eden

Christmas was not celebrated by Protestant Christian Church until the 1800's, and was in fact not even an official holiday in the USA until 1870.

The tradition of giving gifts and having a family feast was actually started by Charles Dickens' story "A Christmas Carol" first published in 1843.

The Christmas tree was introduced into England when Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, who was a German, and the Germans celebrate their Christmases with the Christmas tree. Prior to that, Christmas celebrations in England and USA do not include a Christmas tree.

Santa Claus was invented by the American bishop Clement Clark Moore in 1823 when he wrote a children's poem called "A Visit from Saint Nicholas", nowadays more famously known as "Twas the night before Christmas", where he first introduced the character of "St Nicholas". This is the poem that starts:

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;

The success of the poem made "Saint Nicholas" - soon corrupted to Santa Claus - a Christmas character that is now even bigger than the baby Christ.

Interestingly, if you read the whole poem ( http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19286 ), you will see that in the 8 reindeers, mentioned, the name Rudolf does not come up:

Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!

Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer was a character invented by Robert L May for the Montgomery Ward departmental store in 1939 to be Santa Claus main sidekick. The promotion of this departmental store character is so successful that nowadays, most people only remember the Rudolf reindeer and not the other 8.

Interestingly, the character of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer is not a public domain character and is subject to copyright, so if you publish a work involving Rudolph, theoretically you need to pay royalties to the company "Character Arts LLC" and "The Rudolph Company LP", which owns the rights to the character.

Christmas UnWrapped - The History of Christmas

#1 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5T5ibb2E9I

#2 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAZDGKSveD8

#3 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ3BvK1R6hI

#4 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvopeBfS89w

#5 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqjQpu3cctk

Regards,
NJ

***********

P.S. The character of Saint Nicholas/Santa Claus is of course based from the Catholic Christianity's patron saint of children, "Nicholas of Myra" ( http://saints.sqpn.com/saint-nicholas-of-myra/ ).

However, I was quite surprised that the Catholic Church has created an entire catalogue of patron saints for each and every conceivable occupation and activity you can think of. I was absolutely astonished to see this list:

http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/patron00.htm

In fact, they even have a patron saint for the Internet (Isidore of Seville) and Roller Skating (Lydwina of Schiedam)!

In Catholic tradition, a person can only be recognised as a saint When at least 2 miracles are verified by the Vatican to have been performed by the person POSTHUMOUSLY (ie. the 2 miracles have to be performed after the person had died).

http://people.howstuffworks.com/question6191.htm

Hell Awaits You!

2009-12-05T22:50:00.004+08:00

A humorous article from Yale's University Yale Daily News:

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/university-news/2009/12/04/evangelist-causes-stir/

According to Jesse Morell, the list of people destined for hell are:

Fornicators
Homosexuals
Liars
Thieves
Masturbators
Obama Voters
Buddhists
Dirty Dancers
Hindus
Gangster Rappers
Muslims
Drunkards
Feminists
Immodest Women
Democrats
Liberals
Evolutionists
Atheists
Potheads
Sodomites

When one sees a placard like this, we can tell immediately that the person carrying it must be an Evangelical Christian of the most devout persuasion. Because only Evangelical Christians, in their zeal to spread their religious faith, will denigrate every one else who do not believe what they believe.

Indeed. And why is "Obama Voters" on his list? Is that a synonym for black people?

I am sure that any rational person seeing this sign will deem the person a fringe element, or a loony. But this is exactly what religious indoctrination does to people.

It would be interesting if other Christian groups who do not share the same views as Jesse Morell start criticising him and his ministry, and debate him on what exactly the bible is teaching. If Morell loses such a debate, would he then add "Christians" to his list?

--------------------------------------------------

The problem with Christianity is that besides extreme cases like Morell, the more moderate ones like Catholicism and Anglicanism are also indoctrinating people into hating people, specifically homosexuals, simply because of bible passages.

Science has already shown that it is biological reasons that determine if a person is born heterosexual, homosexual, male, female, or transgendered. Your genes also determine the colour of your skin, and perhaps the capabilities of your brain. The church does not denigrate people who are born of the wrong colour (why do Christians think that Jesus is a white Caucasian with blue eyes?), or because they were born retarded. And yet, the church continue to vilify homosexuals who are born the way they are, simply because the bible tells them to do so.

It is a fact that the bible encourages the slavery of people. It is a fact that the bible teaches that women are inferior to men, and that women should always be subservient to men. It is a fact that the bible teaches that the Earth is the centre of the universe and that the Sun revolves around the Earth, and that humans were created 6000 years ago along with all the other animals. In modern societies which have benefited from the advances of science, and the societal liberation of the enlightenment, all these bible teachings have been examined, studied, questioned, and discarded. And yet, Christianity still clings on to a bigotry on homosexuality when that too should be discarded, along with the teachings on slavery, male superiority, and bad science.

So why does the church not do so? One possibility could be that as more and more parts of the bible are shown to be wrong and are discarded, Christians worry that soon, even their concept of god will be found to be wrong and flawed. An ideological line has been drawn to state that they have ceded much to science and knowledge, and that they will cede no further. Hence, the church will not cede the fact that the bible is wrong in saying that gays are sinners and bad people. Admitting the bible is wrong on this remaining few straws may lead to the slippery slope to admitting that the existence of god is probably wrong too. And hence the resistance.

Society should not let religions determine what is morality. We do not derive our morality from religions. Our morals are innate in us, as it is innate even in animals. Animals do not need to pray to imaginary deities, and yet respond with goodwill when treated with goodwill. Animals do not need religions to show love, or even exhibit altruism, to others of their own kind. Yet, here are religions proclaiming that only believers (and specifically, believers of their own god) are good people, and non-believers (and all other people) are evil people. This is not right, and atheists should stand steadfast against letting religions have their sway on societal matters.

Anglican Church "Mainstream" Values

2009-12-02T10:58:00.004+08:00

The following is a Straits Times Forum letter about some comments made by Dr John Chew from the Singapore Anglican Church and that was reported in the Straits Times. In the original ST article, it was reported that John Chew urged Anglicans to unite against single motherhood, homosexuality, and atheism, saying that these were non "mainstream" values. I am very pleased that Harvey Neo responded with such an eloquently written letter:

Respect those outside traditional family
I REFER to yesterday's report, 'Unite against alternative values, Anglicans urged'. Do people actually marry in the belief they will be divorced some years down the road? Who chooses deliberately to be a single mother? Who wants to be a homosexual and be vilified as an enemy of 'mainstream values'?
For many divorcees, ending the marriage is the only way to continue to lead a fulfilling life. In many such cases, love and support from family members and friends are precisely what is needed to get them through difficult times.
A single mother often needs the help of her extended family and friends to raise her children. Love for a child born out of wedlock is no less than that for one born within the 'classical' family structure.
The gay man can be a filial son, a loving uncle, a steadfast friend, a doting godfather and an accommodating colleague.
If there is to be any consensus on 'mainstream values', it must be built on respect, empathy, compassion and tolerance. The family should reflect such values and not be used to draw divisive lines.
Harvey Neo
http://www.straitstimes.com/STForum/Story/STIStory_460985.html

Religious leaders have the most obnoxious views when it comes to pre-judging people who are not from their group. People like John Chew frequently denigrates others who do not accept his own superstitious beliefs. What is remarkable is that while some Christian sects reject homosexuality as a sin against god,there are other Christian sects that actually ordains gay priests, and it's supposed to be the same god that they all worship!!! This just goes to show that the Christian religion is entirely based on interpretation of the mythical stories written in the bible, and has got nothing to do with the bible being a sacred or an inerrant book dictating what humans should be.

It would be great if more Christians read the actual bible on their own, and not get their bible education from bigots like John Chew. Many people who left Christianity are actually ex-Christians who finally read the bible for themselves, and realised that the god that is actually described in the bible is actually a cruel and evil character, and is really not worthy of worship. I was really surprised that many of my more devout Christian friends do not know many of the horrible, cruel, and sexually audacious stories that is written in their own bible. It was very obvious to me that my devout Christian friends have been shielded by their church from knowing about the non-"mainstream" stories that is written down in their holy book.

Black-Eyed Virgins

2009-11-04T17:33:00.004+08:00

Last week, the newspapers were filled with daily reports of suicide bombings by Islamic terrorists in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the more severe attacks were:

02 Nov - Pakistan - Twin suicide attacks resulting in 25 people injured in Lahore, 36 killed in Rawalpindi

28 Oct - Pakistan - 117 people killed, mostly women and children, at a market

25 Oct - Baghdad - 160 people killed, including 30 children in a day care centre

Of course, one is curious why the Muslim terrorists are also targeting innocent Muslims. Well, according to some Egyptian Muslim clerics in TV programs broadcast in Egypt earlier this year, it is good for a Muslim to die as a martyr, even if innocents are killed.

First, dying as a martyr, according to the Koran, guarantees that one will go to Paradise (despite how sinfully the person may have led his life before then). Besides, true Muslims do not fear death. They only fear being burnt in Hellfire for Eternity.

And so what if innocent boys are among the victims who are blown up? Innocent boys will be sent to Paradise immediately. So it is good for more innocent boys to be sent to Paradise to be with Allah. (As girls are not specifically mentioned, I guess girls who are blown up might not be going to Paradise.)

Also, the blood of the Muslims that are killed have the power to "clean and purify" the area of its sins. So the more blood that is spilled, the "cleaner" the place will be. One of the clerics even says he monitors the number of people sent to Paradise this way, and revels with happiness when he sees high numbers.

And there is this perennial fixation with the 72 virgins to satisfy the sexual hunger of the Muslim martyr. And we are not talking about any normal run-of-the-mill virgin, but "black-eyed virgins", man! These "black-eyed virgins" will embrace the suicide bomber and utter words like "I have never seen anyone as perfect and handsome as you" to him. Everything in this Islamic Paradise seems to be designed for men and men only. No wonder women are treated like chattel and 2nd class people in fundamentalist Islamic countries.

And yes, children must be educated to HATE anyone who is not a Muslim. "The Koran tells us to hate them, not to love them." "We must teach our children that death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty goal."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uK7k4KBta0

A most interesting video.

P.S.

Obviously, any rational person would immediately asked the imam, "Well, if becoming a martyr can give you such rewards as a place in Paradise and black-eyed virgins, why aren't you yourself taking up Allah's glorious offer?"

But then these imams would offer the lame excuse: "The glory is not for me, but for you, brother!"

And of course, only suckers will accept it.

Upgrading to Windows 7

2009-10-28T17:39:00.006+08:00

I have installed Windows 7 Ultimate on my Dell Inspiron 6400 notebook on Saturday (24 October). I was previously using Windows XP Professional on the notebook.

If your Windows XP computer is working fine, there is truly no compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 7. In reality, most of us use applications, and these applications will run fine on Windows XP. There isn't really any Windows 7 specific application out there either, so there is really no pressing need to use Windows 7 in place of Windows XP.

And indeed, if you are using Windows XP, Microsoft does not provide any way to upgrade from it to Windows 7. The only way I could install Windows 7 is through a clean install, and to then migrate all my data files to the new operating system. You would think that since Microsoft has priced their operating system so expensively (Windows 7 Ultimate upgrade price = S$379, Retail price = S$549), an upgrade option would be offered. But NO!

So why did I bothered? Well, there were a few reasons:

My Windows XP operating system was corrupted. There were several applications that I cannot click to execute, but have to right-click and execute using "Run As Administrator". And despite repairing the system files via re-installing Windows XP, the corruption could not be repaired. To permanently fix this required installing a fresh copy of Windows XP, and if I needed to do that, I might as well do a fresh install of Windows 7.

I was running the 32-bit version of Windows XP. However, a 32-bit operating system can only address a maximum of 4 GB of RAM memory. Nowadays, RAM memory is extremely cheap. Some PC motherboards can easily accommodate up to 12 GB of RAM (6 pieces of 2GB RAM modules). In the near future, most PCs would come with 8 GB of RAM as standard, and such systems would need a 64-bit operating system.
I thus installed the 64-bit version of Windows 7 to future-proof my installation.
However, a lot of hardware drivers are not available in 64-bit versions. Thus, when one switches to a 64-bit operating system, a lot of legacy hardware may be rendered useless if the manufacture did not provide an appropriate 64-bit driver.
Windows XP is actually available in a 64-bit version too. However, 64-bit Windows XP is plagued with the same lack of drivers problem, in fact, even more so than 64-bit Windows 7, because most hardware vendors are simply writing new 64-bit drivers for Windows 7 and not for Windows XP.
And Microsoft has reduce the pain somewhat of missing 64-bit drivers because in Windows 7, they have provided a feature called "XP Mode", which is a virtual machine running Windows XP 32-bit. Programs that could not run in the 64-bit Windows 7 host system can always be run in the 32-bit XP virtual machine.
In fact, I was pleasantly surprised that even my 10 year old USB TV tuner that had just XP 32-bit drivers, and thus could not be installed on the 64-bit Windows 7 host, could actually be installed in the XP virtual machine and run fine within the virtual machine environment. That was quite remarkable.

I have been using Windows XP since 2001, and I was getting tired of the Windows XP interface.
Windows Vista was disappointing because of software compatibility issues, and high resource requirements (Vista was just plain slow), which was why I reverted back to XP after a few weeks with Vista. (I actually installed Vista back in 2007 in "dual boot" mode. I found that there were so many software compatibility issues I always had to use the XP operating system. After a while, I wiped out the Vista "dual boot" partition to free up more disk space for Windows XP.) Thus, I didn't really get to use the Windows Vista user interface much.
The Windows 7 user interface, being similar to Vista, is not really that fantastic to justify its exorbitant price (it would have been excellent if Windows 7 wasn't so expensive). However, at least Windows 7 is not as slow as Vista, and the compatibility issue has been deftly handled with "XP Mode" in Windows 7.

So, using the Windows 7 interface was refreshing. It sort of made computing fun again.

In fact, there are some nice things about the Windows 7 interface:

The new Taskbar, which allows you to preview and choose which window to bring to the top (if you have many programs running), is well done. This feature is called Aero Peek.

The system tray is more organised.

There are some window actions that are pretty useful (eg. smart-resize when pulling the title bar from full screen, flipping a window to the left or right of the screen)

There are of course some good Vista features (directory crumbs, integrated search box in the Start menu) that are now available instead of having to use 3rd party tools to accomplish them.

My opinion is that if you are buying a new PC or a new notebook, you should get it with Windows 7. There is no point buying a new PC and tag it with the ancient Windows XP interface.

However, don't bother spending S$379 (upgrade) or $549 (retail) for Windows 7 to upgrade your existing copy of Windows XP. That money is simply too expensive for an operating system. Microsoft can charge this kind of money because they are a monopoly. There is really no point making Microsoft richer than they already are.

nciku Chinese English Dictionary

2009-09-25T15:36:00.005+08:00

I accidentally stumbled upon a new Online Chinese English Dictionary application today. This is by far the best online Chinese English dictionary for people like myself, where we learnt Chinese as a 2nd language.

www.nciku.com

So what is so special about this dictionary as compared to the others? These are 2 reasons:

*****

1. In other dictionaries, you have to "switch modes" if you want to:

Translate English to Chinese
Translate Chinese to English
Pinyin input
Chinese character input

In the nciku application, you can enter anything in the textbox: Chinese characters, Pinyin characters, or the English word if you want to translate English to Chinese instead. This is extremely valuable because many a time, I know the English word but don't know the Chinese equivalent. For example, I know the English term "instant messaging", but don't know what its equivalent is called in Chinese (it is "即时通讯").

The all-encompassing search box in nciku behaves like Google. You just type the word in any format (Chinese characters, pinyin, or the English term) into the nciku textbox, and the nciku application will "magically" return the dictionary definition for you.

And when the dictionary definitions are returned, you can hover the mouse pointer over each definition in the results list to see the pinyin characters of the entire definition/explanatory text. This is tremendously helpful for reading and learning how to pronounce new words that I encounter in the definition.

*****

2. However, the most unique feature in the nciku dictionary is the search by "Handwrite Characters" button to the right of the search box.

Many a time, when I come across a Chinese character in a signboard, a newspaper, or in a book, I am unable to look up the character using other online dictionaries because I don't know how to pinyinise the unknown Chinese character. This is an innate problem with the Chinese language. The Chinese character's pictogram doesn't tell you how to pronounce the word, and as such, you cannot use an online dictionary to lookup the word if the online dictionary requires you to input Chinese characters via pinyin (a catch-22 situation).

The powerful search by "Handwrite Characters" allow me to draw the Chinese character inside a special "paint" box. As I flesh out each stroke in the "paint" box, nciku automatically "guesses" 12 Chinese characters that could fit what you have "drawn" so far, and displays the possible words in a 4x3 grid. Once you see the word you are looking up in the 4x3 grid, you can just click the appropriate cell to immediately retrieve its definition.

This is a damn powerful feature! None of the other Chinese English online dictionaries I have previously been using provide this capability!

*****

And amazingly, nciku is free!!!

nciku is the product of a South Korean company called NHN, which is the biggest search engine company in South Korea (i.e. the Korean equivalent of Google). If you are interested to know more about them, there is a Forbes magazine article about the NHN company and the nciku application here:

http://www.forbes.com/global/2008/1027/062a.html

LEFT BRAIN-RIGHT BRAIN Optical Illusion

2009-09-04T17:23:00.002+08:00

Recently, Channel News Asia ran an in-house advertisement showing a woman in silhouette spinning. The advertisement voice-over says that if you see the woman spinning clockwise, then you are a RIGHT-BRAIN person. However, if you see the woman spinning counter-clockwise, then you are a LEFT-BRAIN person.

Every time I saw the advertisement, I could only see the woman spinning clockwise (which meant I was a RIGHT-BRAIN person). I found it hard to accept that some people will see the woman spinning counter-clockwise. I tried to focus my mind to "see" the woman spin in the counter-clockwise direction, but as the CNA advertisement ran for only a short 30 seconds each time it was played on the TV, there was never enough time for me to accomplish this.

Today, I found the spinning woman optical illusion on this web site:

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,22492511-5005375,00.html

Now that I have more time to look at the optical illusion, I found that indeed, if I focus on the image in a special way, I can see the woman spinning in the other direction.

By default, I always see the woman spinning in the clockwise direction. To trick my brain to see her spin in the counter-clockwise direction, I have to turn my head 90 degrees to the right of the picture, and then do a side-glance on the image (which is now on my left), using periphery vision from my right eye to see the picture. When I glimpse at the picture through this sideways glance, I can make my mind see the woman spinning counter-clockwise. Once my brain has locked on to the counter-clockwise spinning image, I can then turn my head to gaze directly at the picture while holding on to the counter-clockwise spinning image.

Interestingly, if I lose my concentration for a while, I will immediately see the woman spinning in the clockwise direction. The transition is quite startling. As I just cannot force my mind to see her spinning in the counter-clockwise direction if I am staring at the picture directly, I have to repeat the above exercise to see her spin in the opposite counter-clockwise direction again. I did this a few times to experience the "transition", and I am really rapt at the strange effect on my brain whenever the "transition" occurs.

I am sure some people have the ability to "switch" between the clockwise and counter-clockwise view while gazing directly at the picture. But I am not one of them.

According to the news article, a RIGHT-BRAIN person like me "uses feeling", is "big-picture oriented" among other traits, whereas a LEFT-BRAIN person would "use logic" and is "details oriented" etc. This is pseudo science, and is in the same group as other rubbish like horoscopes, palm reading, biorhythms to determine a person's character. There is absolutely no scientific foundation.

The Vatican

2009-09-03T12:27:00.004+08:00

A Penn and Teller's Bullshit! episode about the Vatican, criticising the Pope for the Catholic Church's stance on issues such as condom use, protection of paedophile priests, homosexuality is now a target by the fundamentalist Christians in the US, who want to shut down the TV program.

I am against the stance of the Catholic Church's because the Catholic Church positions on these issues are not based on rational or ethical thinking, but on their desire to protect their personal interests, and on unreasoned acceptance of religious dogma.

1. Condom use

The Catholic Church condemns the use of condoms, and actively prevents countries in Africa which are hard hit by HIV/AIDS to allow people to get access to condoms. This means that a HIV infected husband cannot wear a condom to prevent infecting his wife. Also, this also prevents the world from introducing yet another unwanted child.

The reason the Catholic Church is against the use of condoms is because they BELIEVE that every sexual act should be done for procreation. That is fine if you are a believer. But they should not use their immense wealth to prevent others who are non-believers from getting access to condoms.

The Catholic Church believes that condoms prevent the transmission of life. In reality, for AIDS infected Africans, condoms actually prevents the transmission of death (from the infected husband to the wife). And the Catholic Church claims that it is Pro-Life!

2. Paedophile Priests

Recent news articles in the past few years has revealed that the Catholic Church has a secret history of child molestations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_sex_abuse_cases). However, the Catholic Church has been found to cover up almost all of these cases - basically protecting the priests instead of the children victims. In fact, the Catholic Church created a secret document back in 1962 that more or less said that in the reported cases, both the priest and his victim must keep this secret. If not, both parties will be subjected to ex-communication!

According to the Wikipedia article, almost 11000 cases of child sex abuse was reported against the Catholic priests. And in 81% of the cases, the victims were boys.

This statistic confirms a widely held truism that the Catholic Church has a large number of latent homosexuals.

3. Homosexuality

The Catholic Church, like most other religious organisations, are against homosexuality simply because of religious dogma. They keep claiming that homosexuality is against nature simply because it is condemned in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 in the Old Testament. However, modern science has shown that homosexuality is not only natural, but scientists have documented homosexual behaviour in more than 1500 species of animals. And humans are animals too.

The Catholic Church is even intruding into politics in many countries to try to prevent the overturning of laws that homosexuals are criminals simply by virtue of their sexuality. Ironically, outsiders have estimated that about 20% to as high as 50% of the Vatican parishioners can be closeted homosexuals. And yet, the church goes about actively promoting the view that homosexuals are criminals, and want to have homosexuals treated as second class citizens.

Here is a link to the Penn and Teller program. It is definitely worth a look:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=af6_1251568394

Caning Punishment

2009-08-24T17:35:00.006+08:00

Recently, Malaysia sentenced a Muslim woman to 6 lashes of the cane for the offence of drinking alcohol (after already giving her a fine of 5000 ringgit - which is approximately S$2050). Today, I learnt that good sense had prevailed, and the higher authorities had rescinded the caning punishment.

New York Times article about woman being freed from her caning sentence:

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/08/23/world/international-uk-malaysia-caning.html

The Independent article about the original caning charge:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/if-youre-going-to-cane-me-then-do-it-in-public-1775806.html

Caning Kartika just for drinking beer puts the Progressive Islam that former Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi was championing in a very bad light. She has already been fined RM5000. Subjecting her also to capital punishment is truly excessive.

And Kartika is actually a mother of 2 children. It just perpetuates the bad image that Islam already has, that it is misogynistic, barbaric, and backwards. And it is not as if she was being caned for an offence like manslaughter, drug peddling, inflicting violence on others, harming children etc. Her offence is that she was caught drinking beer! She was to have been flogged for an offence that did not harm any other person other than herself.

It just appalls me that the Malaysian Shariah courts wanted to cane this mother of 2 just to make her a "showcase" for Islam. The initial judgement to cane her simply shows that religious fundamentalism is making Malaysia slip back into the Middle Ages, instead of helping Malaysia progress with the rest of the world into the 21st century.

*****************************************

While trying to find what other offences by women are punishable by caning in Malaysia's Shariah Court, I accidentally stumbled upon a video showing in absolutely horrific detail how a Judicial Caning in Malaysia is like.

Judicial Canings are meted out by the Federal Court, and can be served on both Muslim and non-Muslim males for over 40 kinds of offences (e.g. rape, illegal immigrants, drugs, violence etc).

Singapore also practise the same kind of Judicial Caning, except that the sentences are harsher in Singapore. The minimum stroke in Malaysia is 1 stroke. In Singapore, it is 3 strokes. In Singapore, caning can also be meted out for traffic offences as well as homosexuality.

In the following video, you can see a prisoner being given 20 strokes of the cane by the Malaysian police.

Warning: The following video is very brutal, and is not for the faint hearted. You have been warned!

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=5ab_1172940415

If you are interested, you can read about the kind of offences that result in Judicial Canings from the following site:

http://www.corpun.com/singfeat.htm

It is interesting to see that in the year 2007, Singapore meted out 6404 caning sentences. That is 120 canings per week!

*****************************************

Personally, I am not against the use of caning as a deterrent to prevent crimes. (Although I did find the caning video extremely unsettling. It is not without reason that many Westerners find the caning sentences "barbaric".) However, I feel that the punishment must fit the crime. "Drinking alcohol" is a non-violent act, and harms no one (other than one self - and for that, you have to drink a lot). Inflicting caning for this "offence", especially to a mother of 2, just seems a bit excessive in this modern age. It is as bad as other Shariah punishments like the chopping of limbs for crimes like stealing. The practice of chopping of limbs as a punishment is downright barbaric.

Some one once said that since this is the law of Malaysia, then you must simply obey it and not question it.

Although this sounds logical, the truth is that laws are man made, and many laws are ill-conceived, vague, oppressive, and/or immoral. Consider the race laws passed in Germany after Hitler assumed power, in which people of "un-pure bloodlines" like Jews were sentenced to death. These were "the laws of the land". Yet who would defend such racialist laws today?

We are not sheep. We are capable of passing moral judgements. The whole progress of human liberty depends on courageous people who question and challenge immoral "laws". The chief impediment to human progress is the notion that one must not question anything.

Unfortunately, Islam is a religion whose holy book dictates that none of its contents can be questioned. Any Muslim who challenges the doctrines of Islam is branded an "infidel", in which the official punishment is death. It is precisely that Islam does not allow itself to be questioned that fundamentalist Islam has been permitted to thrive and grow. Moderate Muslims just dare not question the actions of Muslim terrorists such as suicide bombers and murderers who kill non-Muslim civilians, or the practices of other Muslim countries which deny women the same rights as men, because speaking up against their Muslim brethren is deemed "un-Islamic". However, by not standing up for reason and rationality, moderate Muslims allow the worst excesses of their religion to become mainstream and acceptable practices. And this simply leads to their religion becoming more and more out-of-step with modern progressive societies.

Bill Bryson's - A Short History of Nearly Everything

2009-08-20T13:18:00.004+08:00

I have just finished reading Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything".

This book is EXCELLENT! Bill Bryson's book is very informative, very easy to read, and surprisingly, very funny! I chortled at many of his narratives about eccentric scientists. The human stories in the book made the story of science lively and engaging, something which a lesser writer would have killed or rendered dry as dust (think school science text books).

Highly recommended!

What if all atheists were to leave America?

2009-08-13T06:27:00.005+08:00

One of the fervent exhortations by American fundamentalist Christians is to ask atheists to leave America. An example is the following letter to the editor:

Well, a YouTube video answers this question:

Source: The Reason Project

Proselytisation

2009-08-06T09:27:00.008+08:00

While chit chatting with a friend last week, he told me that his 2 children (the son in Secondary 1, the daughter in Primary 5) have recently expressed enthusiasm for picking up Christianity as their religion. As my friend is a Buddhist, he is a bit concerned by this. He believes that his children have been influenced by their friends in school. It is not hard to imagine this happening in Singapore, as our schools are teaching in English, and Christianity is the dominant faith among English/Western societies. Children like to read English story books, and there are many Christian story books out there in the market promoting the religion. And children can be easily persuaded.

Personally, I do not have any problem with people taking up any religion of their choosing. If you like the tenets of a particular religion, and decide to commit to it, that's fine with me. However, I do draw a line if you then go about hounding other people into converting to your religion or into joining your religious group. I hate aggressive in-your-face proselytising, which is something that only the Christians practise.

For instance, in Buddhism, the Buddhist practitioners will simply give you the precepts and teachings of Buddhism, and let you read and study about the religion on your own time. You must choose to accept Buddhist teachings yourself (as Buddhism is all about personal effort. There is no deity who will grant you your wishes or forgive you for your sins). You do not see Buddhists accosting people on the road and haranguing them to convert them to Buddhism.

But this is completely different with Christianity. It is one of the tenets of Evangelical Christianity that to be a good Christian, you must spread the religion to non-Christians and convert them to the Christian faith. That is why the "proselytisation brigade" is almost exclusively comprised of Evangelical Christians. And by employing good marketing techniques, they are also very successful.

If you study the doctrines of Christianity, you will probably have no quibbles with the ethical aspects of the religion to do good and to do no evil. Philosophically speaking, the ethics and moral aspects of all religions, Christianity included, are simply elaborations of the golden rule:

Do not do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you.

If everyone follows the golden rule, we will all be living in a society filled with peace and harmony, despite our differences in race, language, or religion.

It is the superstitious aspects of Christianity that I have trouble with. And boy, are there lots of myths and superstitious beliefs in Christianity. Unfortunately, fundamentalist Christians are very aggressive in promoting their myths and superstitions as SCIENTIFIC and HISTORICAL FACTS. In fact, any criticism of the Christian Bible is treated by believers as a denigration and attack on their personal well being. The problem is that these believers do not feel the same way when they denigrate and attack the religion/belief systems of the non-Christians during their conversion exercises! What hypocrisy!

Examples of Christian mythology treated as SCIENTIFIC/HISTORICAL FACTS:

- That some deity created ADAM and EVE to lord it over the animals (reality: humans are animals too. Humans are really evolved apes).

- The concept of ORIGINAL SIN by humans eating from the Tree of Knowledge (reality: everything in Genesis is a fable and not history)

- The concept of JESUS being born of a virgin (reality: there is no such thing as a virgin birth in humans. Although parthenogenesis is technically possible, the offspring would be a female, and will never be a male. This is because a woman only possesses the X-chromosome. A man is required to supply the Y-chromosome for the X-Y chromosome pair to make baby boys. Thus, female virgins - should they exist - would only be able to give birth to daughters and never to sons. The reality is that Mary was never a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus).

- The concept that a loving deity must have someone DIE for the SINS of humans so that humans can be SAVED. What sins can a baby have? Besides, human parents usually exhibit unconditional love for their children - and will forgive their children transgressions when their children do wrong. Why can't this deity be like human parents and just forgive without exacting the penalty of DEATH by crucifixion for Jesus, or subject non-believers to everlasting burning in Hell?

- The concept that only believers will be saved, and non-believers will be doomed to eternal and everlasting punishment by burning in Hell forever and ever. (Reality: there are about 2 billion Christians, and more than 4 billion non-Christians, in the world. If the Christian theology is correct, then the majority of humans have been doomed by this deity to burn in Hell forever because they did not accept Jesus Christ as their saviour. What kind of deity is this that will submit the majority of humans to eternal punishment, and only allow a select group to be saved?)

- The concept that the god of the bible is an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent god. (Reality: if you read the bible, the god described in it is anything but omnipotent, omniscient, or benevolent!)

Indeed, the philosopher Epicurus said it best:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is not benevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?

The existence of suffering (also referred as the problem of evil) is the best evidence on why there is no such thing as gods - at least not the type which answer our prayers or interfere with our lives to fulfil some divine plan.

-----------------------------------------------------

Science has helped us to learn more about ourselves and the universe, and has helped demote many such religious beliefs into the realms of superstitions and myths. However, when children are not taught the facts, or are not nurtured from young to do critical thinking, they can fall prey to treating such myths as facts.

Richard Dawkins wrote a very good essay in his book The Devil's Chaplain titled Good and Bad Reasons For Believing. If your children are thinking of converting to any religion, it might be helpful to ask them to read Richard Dawkins essay, which can be found here:

http://www.siliconglen.com/news/2009/01/richard-dawkins-letter-to-his-ten-year.html

Children should also be told that it is perfectly fine to not believe in the concept of god or gods. In fact, most rational people, after examining all the available evidence, always come to the conclusion that there is probably no such thing as gods, and do not need to believe in such things. Indeed, humans are already good without god. There is no need to postulate the hypothesis that gods exist to explain the goodness in people.

The list of atheists include some very famous and renowned people. I am proud to associate with and consider myself part of this group:

Let's celebrate reason!

Codex Sinaiticus

2009-07-08T02:27:00.003+08:00

There was an article in Tuesday's (07 Jul 2009) Straits Times about the official launch of a web site featuring the world's oldest copy of the Christian Bible:

http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Tech%2Band%2BScience/Story/STIStory_400035.html

The web site itself is at:

http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/

The web site allows users to browse through digitised images of every page of this bible, which is completely handwritten in Greek, as well as displaying its English translation simultaneously. The was very interesting for me because of something I learnt while reading about the history of the bible, which I could now view with my own eyes.

*****

Although I am not a Christian, I read many of the bible's stories when I was young, and one of the most memorable stories about Jesus is the tale about how the Pharisees, the sworn enemies of Jesus, brought a woman "caught in the very act of adultery" before Jesus. The Pharisees told Jesus that according to the Law of Moses, an adulterer should be stoned to death, but they want to know what Jesus had to say about the matter. Should they stone her or show her mercy? Of course, the Pharisees were laying a trap for Jesus. If Jesus says to let the woman go, he will be accused of violating God's Law. But if he tells them to stone her, he will be accused of dismissing his own teachings of love, mercy, and forgiveness.

Jesus reply was: "He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone."

Of course, none of the Pharisees were free of sin. So one by one, they left, finally leaving just Jesus and the woman. Jesus, looking up and noticing that all the men were gone, asked the woman: "Woman, where are your accusers? Is there no one who condemns you?" The woman replied, "No one, my Lord." To which Jesus responds, "And neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more."

(New Testament: The Gospel According to John - Chapter 8 - Verse 1 to 11)

This was a captivating story, which cleverly illustrates the compassion and the brilliance of Jesus. I loved this story when I first read it as a child, as it appealed to me in how Jesus ingeniously outsmarted his enemies.

But a few years ago, I learnt that this beautiful story was actually a forgery.

****

Before the printing press was invented by Gutenberg in the 15th century, any book that you want to make a copy of has to be copied "by hand". Thus, when someone wants to make a copy of the bible, he can only do so by copying it manually. In fact, all copies of the bibles produced before the 15th century were handwritten ones painstakingly written out in longhand by scribes.

And interestingly, among all the earliest copies of the Gospel of John, there is not a single mention about the story of Jesus and the adulteress. In fact, this endearing story of Jesus and the adulteress is not mentioned at all in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, either. Indeed, the story does not appear in any other place in the New Testament at all.

According to historians, the story of Jesus and the adulteress did not even appear in any manuscript of John before the 9th century. And then suddenly, from the 9th century onwards, copies of the bible started to appear with this story INSERTED into chapter 8 of the Gospel of John. And it was one of this "tainted" bibles that was translated into English in the 16th century as the "King James Version". And the fabricated story has been carried forward into all subsequent editions of the bible from then onwards.

****

Now that the Codex Sinaiticus is available online, I immediately went to the site to look at the section bearing John 7:53 to 8:11. And indeed, as has been described by historians, the entire passage does not appear in the Codex Sinaiticus.

Of course, the Jesus and the adulteress story is not the only fabrication that has been inserted by forgers into the New Testament. In the earliest copies of the Gospel According to Mark, the book ends very abruptly in chapter 16 verse 8. The Mark gospel actually ends when the 3 women (Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James, and Salome *) are told to inform the disciples that Jesus will be meeting the disciples in Galilee. However, the women flee the tomb and said nothing to anyone, "for they were afraid."

And as with the story of Jesus and the adulteress, scribes copying the Mark gospel felt that this ending was too abrupt for a gospel. So, somewhere down the line, one scribe decided to add 12 verses to chapter 16 (verse 9 to verse 20) so that the gospel concludes with a "happy ending". And the "happy ending" Mark gospel is the one that got translated into English in the "King James Version", and which is propagated to all subsequent editions.

As before, the true ending of Mark (Mark 16:8) can now be seen from the Codex Sinaiticus web site.

* Note: The 3 women in the Mark Gospel directly contradicts the Matthew Gospel, which states that only 2 women, Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary", went to Jesus' tomb (Matthew 28:1).

"How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer

2009-06-29T13:44:00.006+08:00

The most interesting idea that I took away from the book "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer is that when patients suffered head injuries that affected their brains, causing them to lose their emotional faculties but retaining their reasoning ones, these patients end up being unable to make any decision, no matter how trivial the subject.

Without emotional faculties, the patients ended up rationalising everything they are doing. They could not make up their minds on what clothes to wear, what food to buy etc, as their brains constantly seek to evaluate all conceivable choices that could be made, no matter how irrelevant many of the choices would have been. Apparently, humans use their emotional faculties to discard choices. After we have discarded all other alternatives leaving our sole choice, our brains will then use these same emotional faculties to "rationalise" the choice we kept, regardless of how good or bad the choice actually was. Without emotions, the human brain cannot discard even the most remotest of choices, so the person becomes embroiled in a state of "analysis-paralysis".

This was very fascinating because I was not aware of the great impact our emotions had on our rationality. Most of us probably think that the less emotional person will make the more rational decision. Apparently, this is not really the case. In fact, people with strong emotions tend to be more rational in their decision making. It is just that these more rational people tend to also have better control of their emotions. When faced with a crisis, they can usually see both sides of a subjective situation, and maintain great discipline to not yield to the first instinctive emotional response.

Sam Harris - Reconciling science and Christianity

2009-06-29T04:14:00.003+08:00

In an exchange between Sam Harris and Philip Ball (both are atheists by the way) about whether scientists should patronise religionists, and acknowledge religion as a worldview that is as robustly supported as that of the scientific one, Harris made a very humorous description of Christianity that I just have to repeat here:

For instance, a reconciliation between science and Christianity (the explicit goal of The BioLogos Foundation) would mean squaring physics, chemistry, biology, and a basic understanding of probabilistic reasoning with a raft of patently ridiculous, Iron Age convictions.
In its most generic and well-subscribed form, Christianity amounts to the following claims:
Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days. He promptly ascended, bodily, to “heaven”—where, for two millennia, he has eavesdropped upon (and, on occasion, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings. Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and sceptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good fortune to be convinced, on Mother’s knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most important series of truth-claims ever revealed about the cosmos. Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will (probably) be consigned to a fiery hell for all eternity.

http://www.reasonproject.org/archive/item/what_should_science_dosam_harris_v_philip_ball/

Great quote, Sam!

Introduction to Christianity

2009-05-31T13:29:00.005+08:00

A very funny Dave Allen sketch about his introduction to the church:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpVjBBDMOoA

It is absurd that Christians always proclaim themselves to be morally superior to atheists just because atheists do not subscribe to the superstitious beliefs of Christianity. Christians go around proselytising to all and sundry, claiming that the godless and the non-Christians among us need help to be saved from eternal damnation. To respond to these Christian soldiers, nothing beats this quip from Dan Barker, an evangelical preacher who ultimately became an atheist:

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
- Dan Barker (from Losing Faith in Faith)

Blogging The Bible

2009-05-25T15:33:00.005+08:00

It took me several days to finish David Plotz's very funny blog, "The Complete Blogging The Bible":

http://www.slate.com/id/2150150

Plotz's posts summarises the stories from the Jewish Bible (i.e. the Old Testament of the Christian Bible) for modern readers. By reading his posts, you get a pretty good précis of many of the bible's stories without having to trudge through them yourselves. The bible stories are written in an archaic and tedious style that most modern readers do not have the patience with. That is the reason why many so-called Christians do not actually read the bible themselves, but are contend with what their preachers tell them every Sunday during church service - if they attend church service. But this is a problem. The preachers only tell the "good" parts of the bible to their congregation, and never the "bad' parts. It is when people start reading the bible stories for themselves that they realised that they've been hoodwinked. The merciful and benevolent god that answers all their prayers is actually nowhere to be found in many parts of the bible. Instead, one often finds an angry, jealous, vindictive god that is so cruel that you might as well believe and pray to satan, if they both exist.

I was previously uninterested in the goings-on of the religious. My philosophy of life is that if you want to believe and pray to your god, it is fine with me as long as you don't force me to believe and pray to your god too. However, 9/11 change all that. Suddenly, I saw that religion KILLS. And it is not with Islam. A more serious reading of history, such as the Christian Crusades, the Burning of Witches, the persecution of Galileo shows that Christianity was just as bad as Islam, except that the barbarism of Christianity has been tempered with the benevolence of the Enlightenment. It takes knowledge and reason in science to clear the superstition and ignorance of religion.

But the bible is a very interesting book of history and literature. It is important for both religious and non-religious folks to read it, especially in light of modern day fundamentalist Christians who seek to overturn the fruits that the Enlightenment has brought to society, and who want to bring society back to a barbaric world where rules of morality are determined in books written by misogynistic and ignorant shepherd folks from 2500 years ago. It is important that Christians read the bible in its entirety, so that they know exactly why non-Christians do not like the morals written in that holy book. It is important that non-Christians read the bible, so that they will know why it is so important that we cannot allow our society to be ruled by religious fanatics who seem to believe in fairy tales like talking snakes and virgin births.

David Plotz's series reminded me of Isaac Asimov's "Guide to the Bible" which I have also read recently. However, Asimov's tome covered both the Old and New Testaments, whereas Plotz's blog posts only covers the Old Testament (the Jewish bible). Also, Asimov covers the bible from a historical context, whereas Plotz's posts are like Cliff Notes summaries. Most people would prefer Plotz's treatment, and to his new book, the "Good Book", which is a fun and light treatment on the same subject which he compiled from the material he garnered while doing "The Complete Blogging The Bible" posts.

In the promotion of his new book, Plotz made the following blog entry, "What I learned from reading the entire bible", which is also an interesting read:

http://www.slate.com/id/2212616/pagenum/all

If you find this post interesting, you should at least glance through "The Complete Blogging The Bible". Many of the entries are informative, and very very funny.

Waraku Restaurant - Update

2009-05-12T15:52:00.009+08:00

Desmond has forwarded the Waraku bill. I have snapped it below for posterity (notice the spelling error of the word "Dining" on the bill) :-)

So what we had were:

Annie : Dream Ramen

Desmond : Gindara Yaki (broiled black cod fish), Rice, and Mango Short Cake

Freddy : Tempura Yamakake (tempura with grated potato)

Kar Yen : Kaisen Nabe (seafood and vegetables in claypot) and Green Tea Tiramisu Short Cake

Myself : Mix Fry Wazen

The Hot Ocha is the Japanese Green Tea which we all had.

As I had mentioned in my earlier post, you can view these food items from the Waraku menu online:

http://www.waraku.com.sg/docs/menu/casual/lnk/index.html

*******************************************************

Corrections :

Desmond has indicated that his IT Security course is held at Nanyang Polytechnic, and not at Nanyang University.

Waraku Restaurant (7 May 2009)

2009-05-09T16:28:00.005+08:00

Annie sent an email a few weeks back (23 April) about arranging a dinner meet up. Although we have kept in touch via email, the last time I saw Annie in person was on 6 February 2000 (second day of Chinese New Year), when she invited a few friends including myself to her home at Stratford Court, and that is like almost 9 years ago!

Annie arranged the dinner gathering at the Waraku Japanese Restaurant at Marina Square on 7 May (7 pm). Besides myself, Desmond, Freddy, and Kar Yen also attended. Kee Hai could not make it because he had to look after his children, while Koon Chee is still in Hong Kong.

The word Waraku is transliterated into Japanese characters that look like the Chinese words for 和乐 (or Harmony):

I have not stepped into a Japanese restaurant for many years (although I did try the Japanese Egg Omelette at a Japanese foodcourt called the Ishi Mura in the new Northpoint annex a few weeks back - but that's another story). I normally patronise Chinese and Western restaurants. So I was also looking forward to trying the food in the Waraku. It did not disappoint.

I arrived at the restaurant at exactly 7 pm on Thursday evening. I met Desmond just outside the restaurant, who had himself also just arrived (we were the earliest).

I was quite impressed with the posh surroundings as we were led to our "private" room:

I was quite enamoured when we were shown to our "private" room. This is actually the first time I have ever been inside such a room - characterised by the low table with a distinctive gap under it for putting our legs. When I dined in other Japanese restaurants previously (back in the Conner and IDTECH years), the private rooms we had were like any normal dining room with waist level chairs and tables). The unique furniture arrangement piqued me - having only seen such things in movies and television:

About 1 minute after Desmond and I settled down, Annie and Freddy arrived. Kar Yen joined us about 20 minutes later, and our party was complete.

Annie had asked for a "private" room so that we will we have a quiet surrounding to chit chat. What a joke! There was a doorway sized gap in the partition wall that leads to a passage leading to several other "private" rooms (you can see the gap in the above photo). However, one of these "private" rooms were occupied by a motley group of young ladies celebrating the birthday of one of their lot. These gregarious ladies were squealing with laughter at decibel high ranges, and were drowning out whatever quietness and tranquillity that was promised by a "private" room. They were so loud and deafening at one point that I got up, went to their room, and asked them to please tone down their excitement level. Although they did quieted down a bit, the noise level gradually returned to the highs as the night wore on. You just can't keep a good woman's voice down :-)

*******************************************************

I can't recall exactly the names (my Japanese is pretty bad) of the food we ordered. However, Desmond ordered some kind of steamed fish, and I think Annie, Freddy, and Kar Yen ordered noodles (soba?). As for me, I ordered some kind of Tempura "Wazen". "Wazen" means "Set Meal" in Japanese. Here, you can browse through the Waraku Restaurant's menu from this URL:

http://www.waraku.com.sg/docs/menu/casual/lnk/index.html

The "Wazen" menu is shown on page 12/13 in the above link. However, it does not feature the item I ordered, which comprised of:

- fried prawn fritters (tempura ebi)

- fried calamari (squid - tempura calamari)

- baked potato

- assorted vegetables (carrots and Brussels sprouts - my favourite)

- soba soup ramen (noodle)

- egg custard with pork slices (chawanmushi)

- rice

My Tempura Wazen meal cost $18.80, plus the hot green tea at $1.00, set me back $19.80, which I felt was pretty reasonable. My Wazen meal was absolutely delicious (tempura is always a favourite), and was pretty filling. I give my Tempura Wazen a rating of A+.

*******************************************************

During dinner, conversation revolved around the old standard questions: Where is Goh Kim Siew now? What have we been doing? How is the economy? Etc etc.

Where is Goh Kim Siew now?

Actually, no one knew. It was said that Kim Siew and his wife had divorced a few years back, but other than that, no one really knows where he is at the moment.

However, during dinner, Annie mentioned that she had a Facebook page, while Kar Yen mentioned that Siok Kee also had a very nice one. I commented that I don't personally like Facebook, because I find its default settings to be too invasive of privacy. Things that you might not want to publish can be inadvertently open to the public if you did not set up your Facebook settings appropriately.

Anyway, as I was writing this, I thought that perhaps Kim Siew may have a Facebook page. I did a quick Google search, and found the following link:

http://kimsiew.com

Looks like Kim Siew is doing very well.

What are we doing now?

I am still with a software company (CRISTAL Solutions Pte Ltd) working on logistics software (Warehouse Management Systems). I have been doing the WMS software since 2001.

Annie is currently between jobs. She quit her job with an Air Show company some months ago to look after her dad when he fell seriously ill. Her dad had passed away recently.

Desmond is still with Seagate. He is now working at the "Endpoint Security" department, and is also taking a part-time course on IT Security at Nanyang University.

Freddy is still with UBS. Because of the worldwide financial crisis, banking sector jobs are also perilous in these times. No one really knows what is going to happen next.

Kar Yen is currently working at Yongnam Holdings Limited. She said that she has to make a long commute every day from her home to Tuas.

Physical Appearances

Everyone commented on how much weight Kar Yen has put on. The rest of us didn't seem to have changed much, although I must admit that I now weigh 82 KG (I used to weigh only 75 KG).

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

I do not follow fashion news, so I was aghast when I learnt that the handbags that Annie carried (a gift) and that Kar Yen bought (at staff price discount) were so expensive. Annie's bag (COACH) retails at $600+, while Kar Yen's bag (GUCCI) retails at $900+. I commented that the satchel that I carried cost only $25.

You can have a glimpse of the bags from these thumbnails:

Annie's Bag

Kar Yen's Bag (partially clipped)

My bag is propped at the corner behind Desmond

I made the usual joke that many years ago when Koon Chee told me that he bought a pair of branded shoes (Dr Martens?) for $250, I told him that the cost of my shirt, pants, and shoes total to less than $100, which is less than the cost of 1 of his shoe ($125)! Anyway, as I said before, and as my friends know me, I am not really into branded clothes. I usually spend my money on computer stuff and books. I recently spent over $500 on books about science and philosophy. I have also spent equally much on computer gadgets and accessories.

*******************************************************

We decided to call it a night at 10 pm, because many of us have to work the next day (Friday). Originally, Annie wanted to arrange the meet up on either a Friday or Saturday, but Desmond had classes on Friday evenings, and Kee Hai is not free on Saturdays. This was why the meet up was scheduled on a Thursday. It is ironic that the person whom Annie accommodated for this could not make it.

This reminded me of the time back in 1995 when Annie, Desmond, Koon Chee and myself were supposed to go to Hong Kong on a holiday trip. Koon Chee had promised to show us the sights if we went together. We queried Koon Chee whether he really could make it, and he said something to the effect that "even if he was sick, he will drag himself out of bed to join us on our Hong Kong trip". And as it turned out, Koon Chee could not join us on that HK trip :-)

*******************************************************

There was some hoo-hah over the bill because according to our server, customers who paid with a HSBC credit card is entitled to a 10% discount. However, it turns out that the HSBC credit card was associated with two promotions:

a) one-for-one free dessert

b) 10% discount

Because Kar Yen and Desmond both ordered cakes for dessert (the rest of us skipped dessert), the cashier had automatically extended the one-for-one free dessert promotion on the second cake to Desmond's HSBC card. Only when we were calculating the amounts each of us had to pay for dinner was the missing "10% discount" uncovered. We told our server that it is ridiculous to give the "one-for-one free dessert" because that was only worth $2.80, whereas the "10% discount" would cut our bill by at least $10! We asked the server to void the previous bill (which Desmond had already signed), and to issue a new one with the corrected amount. Hopefully, there is no cock-up when the credit card statements are received by Desmond later in the month.

I look forward to the next gathering.

Links

Photo album: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/njwong88/DinnerAtWarakuRestaurant

Waraku Website: http://www.waraku.com.sg

12 May 2009 : See updates and corrections in the following post.

AWARE

2009-04-19T10:29:00.006+08:00

The AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research) leadership seems to have been usurped by fundamentalist Christians who seek to replace AWARE's liberal stance which was pro-abortion and pro-homosexuality with one that is more congruent to the fundamentalist Christian stance of the new leaders which is strictly anti-abortion and anti-gay.

I happen to know Dr Alan Chin, the husband of Josie Lau (the new AWARE chief), who was my camp's Medical Officer during my National Service days. I am so surprised that he has become such a religious bigot. As Christopher Hitchens rightly noted, religion poisons everything, including one's mind.

Fundamentalist Christians like Alan Chin always tout the same ridiculous arguments about abortion and homosexuality. They always say:

1. Homosexuality is not natural, and is a human sin.

Well, if that is so, why are there so many animals that are also homosexual? Obviously if there are homosexual animals, then homosexuality is a natural behaviour.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RlTAyNI8WE

Homosexuality is not a sin. In fact, since fundamentalist Christians believe that god is the maker, then according to this logic, homosexuals must have been created by the same god. And since god made these humans homosexual, surely god must love homosexuals too and not condemn them as sinners who are doomed to eternity in the fires of hell?

Famous Christian homosexuals:

- Ray Boltz http://christianmusic.about.com/od/editorial1/a/rayboltzcomesou.htm

- Marsha Stevens http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%20America/CCM/marsha_stevens.htm

- Ted Haggard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Haggard

2. The presence of gay people will encourage straight people to become gay.

If that is so, surely the overwhelming presence of straight people will encourage gay people to become straight. Indeed, as only about 5% of the world's population is gay, all gay people should have become straight by now due to the huge number of straight people in the population.

3. Gay couples are unnatural because they cannot produce children.

If this is so, then infertile couples and old people past child bearing age shouldn't be allowed to marry since such pairs cannot produce children either. Besides, what the world needs is MORE people.

4. Children of gay parents will not succeed because a home is only complete if there is both a male and female role model at home.

If that is the case, then society should not allow single parents to raise children either. All children of single parents (whether through divorce or being widowed) should be fostered out to homes where there is both a male and female parent.

5. The presence of gay people will change the foundation of society. Society could never adapt to new social norms.

Well, in the biblical age, women were treated like chattel and slavery was condoned. I think human society have adapted very well to the new social norm in treating women as equals; and abolishing slavery outright.

6. Life begins at conception.

If every conception is allowed to develop to full term, I can tell you that the world will have more than the 6.5 billion people that it has now. In 1900, the world was only populated by 1 billion people. The world's population has grown 6.5 times in a span of 110 years. There is just too many people in the world as it is, and family planning - including legal abortion - is a rational way to resolve this over-population problem.

7. Abortion is killing. Abortion should be illegal.

If abortion is illegal, and a woman is caught having one, what should her penalty be? Should she be sentenced to jail? Since abortion is killing, should the woman be executed? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk6t_tdOkwo

8. Life begins at conception.

This is ridiculous because it defines a fertilised egg to have the same rights as that of a new born baby.

What if a woman was raped and is now pregnant? She will be emotional conflicted with a foetus that she does not want. If she is a wife, how will the husband take to the baby? If she is an unmarried girl, will she be able to find a husband if she has a bastard child in tow? It is because of society, and religion in particular, that we have this problem of ostracism of illegitimate children, and which is why many women seek to abort unwanted children. Will unwanted children that is brought into this world be able to lead a happy "life" in families that do not love them?

----------------------------------------------

All the ridiculous arguments against homosexuality and abortion made by fundamentalist Christians are not made because of concern about people's well being, but because of some arcane writings in the bible. In the bible, the Leviticus chapter states that male homosexuality is an abomination. Fundamentalist Christians always tout that this religious ruling must be followed (since everything in the bible is god's word). However, Leviticus also states that humans should not eat clams, oysters, crabs, lobsters, and shrimp, as these are also "abominations", and that disabled people should not approach the altar of god as the disabled people would defile it. Why do fundamentalist Christians not followed such rules too?

In fact, fundamentalist Christians pick and choose. They don't follow many of the rules laid out in the bible. They ignore many of the rules (such as the non-eating of crabs and lobsters) even though this rule is also "god's word", and just keep harping on the homosexual and sanctity-of-life bits. And they demand that the whole society, including people who are not of the Christian faith, to follow the rules against homosexuality and abortion.

The bible is one of the most racist, intolerant, misogynistic, violent and cruel book ever written. We should treat people with understanding, with compassion, with empathy, using reason and science, and not because of some writing in this horrific book concocted by ancient people for a society and a way of life that no longer exists today. It is sad that intelligent people like Alan Chin - and the new leaders of AWARE - are so warped by their religious indoctrination that they fail to see just how harmful and heartless their religious thinking can be to people who don't subscribe to their religion.

What Would Jesus NOT Do?

2009-04-19T09:47:00.006+08:00

Christians believe that Jesus is an amazing god, as described by the stories in the bible: making the blind see, turning water to wine, walking on water etc. However, if Jesus was god, and came here to forgive humans for their sins, why did he not end suffering? In my book, the fact of the existence of suffering in this world proves resolutely that a god does not exist, and it is truly a waste of time praying to an imaginary being. Indeed, if god really existed, then the existence of suffering proves that this god is not a benevolent god, but a malevolent one, and why should humans pray to such a nasty being?

The following is a nice video cleverly illustrating why it is so irrational to use the bible to prove that god exists, and that god "loves" us and wants to "save" us from our "sins".

The bible is just a work of fiction, written by bronze age people more than 2000 years ago to explain about the mysteries of life in the tiny corner of the Earth that they occupied. Lacking the scientific knowledge of the 21st century, they had to invent a mythical creature called "god" to explain all this "mysteries". It is time rational human beings junk these superstitions of the bronze age. We should live our lives using rational thinking, based on the pillars of reason and science.

From Taoism To Infidel - Richard Carrier

2009-03-25T02:10:00.003+08:00

I just read a very interesting narrative by Richard Carrier about his journey into atheism.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/testimonials/carrier.html

I have always found Chinese philosophy (Confucianism, Taoism, as well as Buddhism) to be more intellectually satisfying than the theistic religions. As Richard Carrier mentioned, the Eastern philosophies says much about how to conduct oneself in society and living in tune with nature. Theistic religions, particularly Christianity, seems to be about "believe or be damned". This has always irked me. The precepts of Christianity is particularly nasty as it seems to imply that ethically and morally good people should be punished (not rewarded by going to heaven) simply because they do not believe that Jesus Christ is god, while evil doers (murderers, robbers and thieves, bullies) will be rewarded as long as the evil doer accepts Christ. Naivity and gullibility in believing in fairy tales is rewarded instead of honest effort and critical questioning about understanding life and how to live it propitiously.

Truly, the intellectual contrast is staggering. That is why it astounds me how smart theists do not question themselves more honestly and more critically about why they believe what they believe, especially when what they believe is in direct contradiction with reality. It simply amazes me that superstition still has such a strong stranglehold instead of reason and rationality in our current age, where we have the tools of science to acquire new knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.

The Holy Trinity

2009-03-19T00:29:00.005+08:00

I read a very amusing post in RichardDawkins.NET today about the Christian belief in the Holy Trinity (link).

A theist has mentioned that he accepts the belief that God, his son Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are each 3 individual entities, but are also just 1 entity (God itself). To this Christian, "God is three and God is one". Everything is consistent.

Shuggy responded that this is a false proposition. And a false proposition implies ANY proposition. With such a proposition, the Trinity can be made to be consistent with ANYTHING.

Shuggy then proceeded to use an amusing mathematical proof to illustrate this.

So, first, we have 3 = 1 .... eqn (a)

Minus 1 from both sides, we get:

2 = 0 .... eqn (b)

Now, if we add 1 to both sides of eqn (a), we get:

4 = 2 .... eqn (c)

But since 2 = 0 from eqn (b), we can substitute this into eqn (c) to get :

4 = 0 .... eqn (d)

If we divide both sides of eqn (c) by 2, we get :

2 = 1 .... eqn (e)

But since 1 = 3 from eqn (a), we can substitute this into eqn (e) and get:

2 = 3 .... eqn (f)

Looking at all the equations we have derived, we see that we have proven:

0 = 1 = 2 = 3 = 4 and so on.

Thus, if you can believe in the Trinity, it logically follows that you can believe literally everything, regardless of whether it is true or not.

Presentation Zen

2009-03-09T17:24:00.003+08:00

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynold is a book about creating presentations with software like Microsoft PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress. How it differs from other books on the subject is that it asks you to reject the templates that comes with these software, and to instead think "less is more".

The ideas in this book emphasize that the visual aspect of a presentation can be ruined by using too many graphical objects on each chart. This is often the case with casual users who become enamoured by the capabilities of the presentation software they are using, and then proceed to make the mistake of including as many widgets as they can on each chart. Reynold gives many refreshing ideas on how a good presentation should look like, and refers to slideshows by Steve Jobs as well as those on TED as examples of how a good presentation should be done.

Reynold has a web site at www.presentationzen.com that expands on the ideas in his book.

Belief in Belief

2009-02-14T12:15:00.002+08:00

Daniel Dennett wrote a nice summary in a commentary about Jerry Coyne's book review/article "Seeing and Believing".

Dennett's reply can be found here.

Because Dennett's summary points are so well written, I just have to include them in my blog:

DANIEL C. DENNETT
Belief in Belief
Jerry Coyne nicely dissects the urge of many people to persuade themselves that their religion can coexist peacefully with science in general and evolutionary biology in particular. And he shows just how hopeless this quest is. The question remains: why is this urge so strong, even in some people who have devoted their careers to science? I can discern more than half a dozen plausible reasons for belief in belief in God, and in some people these reasons are no doubt additive, not exclusive. I list them more or less in order, ranging from abject through feckless to noble-if-misguided:
(1) The fallacy of sunk costs: "I've already invested fifty years of my life in this position, and it would be excruciatingly embarrassing to acknowledge my error. In fairness to myself, I was entrapped in this view when I was too young to know better, and I've never been able to find a face-saving exit strategy."
(2) Err on the side of prudence: "I can conjure up enough uncertainty about these issues to excuse myself from drawing the invited conclusions, which might be mistaken, after all, and could, I suppose, do some harm to somebody. Where it doesn't itch, don't scratch!"
(3) Religion for art's sake: "The only cost-effective way to preserve the great music, literature, and art of the world's religions is to encourage all people to support these magnificent living museums with their weekly offerings."
(4) What would my mother think? "People whom I hold dear, and who depend on me emotionally, would be heartbroken to learn of my defection. I'm going to carry this white lie to the grave, or at least until my parents are safely in their graves and my children and loved ones give me clear signs of being able to take such a confession with equanimity."
(5) Credal calisthenics: "It keeps me modest, and fosters a desirable habit of moral reflection that helps me do the right thing 'without even thinking'. It's a method of self-purification that keeps me morally fit."
(6) We must fend off moral chaos: "I myself don't need God to tell me how to live, but some people really do. Religious belief puts the fear of God into some who would otherwise behave reprehensibly."
(7) Don't make waves: "I have more than enough substantive controversies that I would rather spend my energies on. Why discard alliances, make enemies, lose the affection of powerful friends and associates by raining on their parade?"
(8) Dumbo's magic feather: "Religious belief is a moral prosthesis: it strengthens the resolve and courage of many who want to be good but don't have the true grit they need. If I recant, I contribute to the dissolution of an aspect of the world that they truly depend on. I have no right to take away their crutch."
The combination of any two or three of these is enough, apparently, to induce some very smart people to defend some very lame arguments. They would never tolerate such fuzzy and illogical thinking in their science–or, in the case of philosophers, in their analytic work in ethics or epistemology or metaphysics. They manage not to notice how they have transformed the object of their worship from the original Celestial Bio-engineer into a Divine Nudger of Randomness into an Omniscient Lawgiver into the (impersonal, but still somehow benign) Ground of All Being. Not only don't they notice this comical retreat; they applaud the deep sophistication of the theologians who have conducted it. (I haven't any idea what the Ground of All Being is, so I guess I don't have to be an atheist about that. Maybe the process of evolution by natural selection just is God! Now there's a way of reconciling evolution with religion! )
Each reason for belief in belief in Gd is defensible up to a point, but we need to weigh the indirect side effects of going along with tradition. First, there's the systematic hypocrisy that poisons discourse, and even more important, our vulnerability to those who abuse the "reverence" with which we are supposed to respond to their indulgences. We can continue to respect the good intentions of those who persist in professing belief in God, but we'll be doing them a favor if we stop pretending that we respect the arguments they use to sustain these fantasies.

Freedom to Think, Vital to Question

2009-02-13T09:57:00.010+08:00

There were 2 excellent comments in Thursday's Straits Times that resonated with me. They were both on an article by Ngiam Tong Dow about fostering creative ideas in the Singapore culture.

Freedom to think
http://www.straitstimes.com/ST%2BForum/Story/STIStory_337151.html
'The model in the Bible is one of fear and submission. Look to Greek philosophers instead.'
In his otherwise excellent article on Tuesday, 'Fostering the freedom to think', Professor Ngiam Tong Dow offers the Bible as a model of free thinking, as opposed to the Chinese imperial examinations. I beg to disagree. The model of behaviour in the Bible is one of fear and uncritical submission to 'the will of God'. A prime example is the story of Abraham who followed 'the will of God' and tried to sacrifice his own son. This is not an example of 'fostering the freedom to think'. If Prof Ngiam is looking for a model of 'freedom to think', he could look to that provided by Greek philosophers instead. In the dialogues of Plato, participants search for answers through the critical examination of one another's claims. To say they 'plead and argue' with one another is not the best expression either, due to its legal connotations, which have nothing to do with freedom to think as practised by philosophers.
Dr Panagiotis Karras

The second comment is:

Vital to question
http://www.straitstimes.com/ST%2BForum/Story/STIStory_337136.html
I WAS delighted to read Professor Ngiam Tong Dow's article on Tuesday, 'Fostering the freedom to think'.
The Chinese equivalent of learning or scholarship means 'learn and question'. A school is usually seen as a place where one's questions are answered, when it should be a place where one learns to ask more questions. If a student leaves a school with fewer questions than when he enrolled, he should demand a refund. A teacher who cannot answer all his students' questions is a poor teacher, and one who can, has poor students.
The Chinese model of a great teacher is a famous teacher who produces top students. A lifelong teacher will have failed if he does not produce a single student more prominent than himself.
Shouldn't a good leader also foster creative thinking and encourage questioning? Isn't it a sign that a great leader should step down when he starts to believe that wisdom stops with him? I believe this: Do not crown yourself. Let others do it. Do not allow others to remove your crown. Do it yourself.
Ee Teck Ee

Both comments resonated with me. Dr Karras struck a truth vein about the inhibiting restrains of Christian thinking. The problem with Christian philosophy is that you first have to accept the dogma that every one is born a sinner, and that Jesus died for our sins. This is alien thinking for me. If every one born a sinner, it speaks more about the kind of deity that the Christians worships than about people in general. This is why I find Christianity to be intellectually deficient and unsatisfying, although the bible does make interesting fiction reading.

I like the phrases Ee Teck Ee wrote:

A teacher who cannot answer all his students' questions is a poor teacher, and one who can, has poor students.

The Chinese model of a great teacher is a famous teacher who produces top students. A lifelong teacher will have failed if he does not produce a single student more prominent than himself.

Do not crown yourself. Let others do it. Do not allow others to remove your crown. Do it yourself.

So many choice quotations in such a short commentary!

Atheist Universe

2009-02-08T11:20:00.007+08:00

I've decided to write summaries about books that I have finished reading. Usually, I only add books that I have read into my Shelfari page (www.shelfari.com/njwong88). However, it seems such a waste not to comment on some of the better books that I have read. And Atheist Universe by David Mills is the book that spurred me to starting this.

**************************************

So what can I say? This book is fantastic. It is concise, direct, and written in simple language that most folks will understand. There are many books on atheism, but many of them are dry, or wordy, or may require a high level of vocabulary to understand (it is often very interruptive to call up a dictionary to look up words you don't understand while reading). David Mills uses just enough difficult words to present his case, and whenever he uses a difficult word, he will always give the definition immediately after the word, making trips to the dictionary unnecessary. I love this form of writing. It makes this this book highly readable, even for children.

Since I have already read many of the other atheist literature (primarily The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation), I already know many of the anti-theist arguments that have already been presented. However, I like one particular chapter in David Mills book: "Chapter 8: The Myth of Hell", which presents a new perspective on an old argument, but one that I have not read before.

In this chapter, Mills argues that normally, when a criminal is convicted and sent to prison, this banishment to prison is done mainly for 2 reasons:

1. to separate the criminal from the public - so as to protect the public from being harmed by the criminal. However, depending on the severity of the crime, this separation is only temporarily for minor crimes. Only with major crimes is such separation permanent.

2. to rehabilitate the criminal - especially for criminals who commit minor crimes - and can be rehabilitated before being returned to the general populace.

However, in the Christian hell, no rehabilitation is possible as a person is banished to hell for eternity, and repeatedly tortured for ever and ever. And the "souls" sent to hell will be eternally separated from the ones sent to heaven regardless of the severity of the crime. And a minor crime such as "not accepting Jesus as the saviour", is a hell inducement route, guaranteeing the non-believer eternal damnation.

This conclusion means that God would rather torture humanity than to forgive humanity unconditionally. This conclusion carries the charge that God created Hell for no reason other than to inflict suffering. In this case, as Thomas Paine noted, the Bible could more accurately be called The Word of a Demon than The Word of God.

In the Old Testament, Yahweh's punishment for people who displease him (such as non-Jews who worship other gods) is merely being massacred by the blessed Jews (the chosen ones). In the Old Testament, once you die, you die. In fact, only in the New Testament with Jesus arrival did he introduced the concept of eternal punishment in hell, and thus making hell become a place for eternal torment.

**************************************

This book may not be as comprehensive as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, but it is still covered a lot of ground. David Mills does not claim to put forward any new ideas in his book. All the information in the book, he claims, are already in the public domain and that the book was meant as consolidation, to put these pieces together to "articulate why...all science and all logic indicate that we live in an Atheist Universe."

David Mills has a web site at http://www.davidmills.net/ where an extract from his book can be downloaded.

I highly recommend Atheist Universe.

Cyril Hanouna

2009-02-05T21:25:00.001+08:00

The naked couple who strolled down Holland Village last week truly stirred a storm of discussion in the media here. If you were not aware of it, you can read the Straits Times report from:

http://www.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne%2BNews/Singapore/Story/A1Story20090128-117672.html

There have also been several follow up articles in the newspapers since then about this couple.

Of course, Singapore is an ultra-conservative society (at least on the surface :-) ), so any news involving nudity is guaranteed to become hot media fodder. It is such a shame actually that many people are so prudish about seeing naked bodies. Personally, I think most people are interested - nay - exhilarated! - when they see bare skin. How else can you explain the extremely successful billion-dollar porn entertainment industry? However, because of our stiff upbringing, when we are accosted with such daring displays in public, we will immediately decry about sin, evil, morality etc when in actual fact, the naked couple had done nothing on their part other than to be in their au naturel!

In Europe (and in many other liberal countries), where the populace do not have such severe hang-ups about nudity, the sight of naked bodies in public will not evince such a rigorous reaction from the people. When I spent a few weeks in Germany last year (on a work project), I was impressed by PUBLIC TV showing full frontal nudity without any qualms or perturbations. Although I couldn't understand a word of the German narration or dialogue, I watched a science/health education program about the human body showing everything (no loincloths discreetly covering the naughty bits). There was a game show where participants played in the buff. Movies shown on the TV do not have sex segments censored. Etc. It was too bad I couldn't understand a single word of what I was seeing on the TV :-D . The liberalism was like a breath of fresh air.

My friend forwarded me a YouTube video of a TV program from France featuring a comedian called Cyril Hanouna. After you see this TV segment, you will know why I find amusing the ruckus from conservative Singaporeans who made such a big hoo-hah about the Holland Village couple.

Warning: Adult Content. Action begins at the 3:00 minute mark :-)

Cyril Hanouna: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtjMrodgi6s

Happy New Year 2009

2009-01-02T15:27:00.003+08:00

So over the New Year, we learnt from the news that a bug in Microsoft's MP3 player, the "Zune", caused the player to freeze and cannot be started up. Apparently, there is a Y2K (or more correctly Y2K9) bug in the Zune software, making it think that the year 2008 is NOT a leap year! The solution given by Microsoft: wait for 24 hours. When the Zune's internal clock rolls over to "2nd Jan 2009", the problem date will be bypassed, and the Zune will now be able to start up properly !!!

Sounds similar to other solutions offered by Microsoft to resolve Windows problems (press "Ctrl-Alt-Delete"; power down and power up the PC etc ... )

*****************************************

Of course, bugs abound in every program. You can even find some "mysterious" bugs in Microsoft Windows XP:

Mysterious bug #1

From Windows Explorer, try and create a new folder with the name "con" (or "CON" - it is not case sensitive). You will find that it simply cannot be done. You will also not be able to rename an existing folder's name to "con"/"CON" either.

Mysterious bug #2

Create a new document in Windows Notepad. Make sure this document has exactly 1 line and only the following 18 characters:

Bush hid the facts

Save this Notepad document (you can save it with any file name). Close Notepad. Run Notepad again and open the document file you have just saved. If you have performed this steps correctly, you will see that the line is now changed into either Chinese characters or SQUARE symbols.

(Note: this bug will not work if you created 2 lines in the document by accidentally adding a carriage return at the end of the line. So make sure your Notepad document has exactly 1 line and those 18 characters only).

*****************************************

Of course, this are not "mysterious" bugs. There are perfectly logical - but technical - explanations for both of them which you can look up through Google if you are interested.

However, the Zune bug is another pie in the face for Microsoft after its 2008 fiasco with Windows Vista. In the forums, the solution recommended by experts on avoiding the Zune bug is: get an Apple iPod :-)

And as for problems with Windows Vista: upgrade to Windows XP :-)

This situation is humorously encapsulated in one of the most amazing home made videos I saw yesterday. I am always impressed by end-users who can create home made videos with such professional looking special effects:

Mac vs PC (Transformers edition): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLbJ8YPHwXM

*****************************************

It was also reported in the news yesterday that the financial collapse in the last 3 months of 2008 has wiped out US$7 trillion (ie. US$7000 billion!!!) from the stock market - or all the gains accrued in the last 6 years. The amount lost is simply staggering. How could so much wealth be lost in such a short period of time? Where did the money go to? Did they all disappear into ... a black hole?

The Black Hole: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5_Msrdg3Hk

(I thought the character and scenario featured in this video was very appropriate - Wall Street worker archetype, money, greed, etc).

Let's hope that the turnaround will be quick, and that this year will be better than the last.

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-24T18:49:00.003+08:00

Recently, I have been receiving a lot of Christmas e-cards which cajole the recipients to celebrate the birthday of Jesus Christ.

But of course, Jesus was not really born on December 25. In fact, no one really knows when Jesus was born, or when he died. These 2 holidays that we mark on our calendars were decreed by the Catholic Church. Good Friday was formalised in the year 325 AD, and Christmas some time in the late 300s (probably 378 AD).

Think about it: Good Friday is celebrated on 21 March 2008 this year. However, it will be celebrated on a different date, 10 April 2009, next year. Why is Good Friday - Jesus death anniversary - not commemorated on a fixed day, but Jesus birthday is? (Note: Good Friday always fluctuate between March 21 and April 23 inclusive.)

If Jesus death anniversary can fluctuate every year, shouldn't Jesus birthday fluctuate every year as well?

The reason why Good Friday fluctuates is because the Hebrew calendar is actually based on the Moon, whereas our current calendar - derived from the Romans - is based on the Sun. As Good Friday is actually determined by the Hebrew calendar, this is the reason why the date fluctuates when mapped onto our solar calendar.

Logically speaking, Jesus birthday should follow the Hebrew calendar too, and thus Jesus birthday should fluctuate when mapped onto our solar calendar. For consistency with the fluctuating Good Friday, Jesus birthday should not be celebrated on a fixed December 25 every year, but should fluctuate likewise.

The bible does not explicitly state the date of Jesus birth. So why was Jesus birthday fixed on December 25?

One explanation is that the early Christians, being Jews, believe that their prophets always die on an anniversary of their birth, or of their conception. For Jesus, it was believed that his death on Good Friday was on the anniversary of his conception. If Jesus was conceived in March/April, then his birth, 9 months later, would be some time in either December or January.

During ancient times, people living in temperate countries have noticed that there is a day in the 3rd week of December where the hours of daylight is the shortest in the year (typically December 21 or December 22). This astronomical event is called the Winter Solstice. The Winter Solstice is commemorated by many ancient civilisations, including China.

In Rome, the common people have been celebrating the week long festivities of the Winter Solstice as Sol Invictus, or "the birthday of the unconquered Sun". This holiday has been celebrated for hundreds of years, where prayers and offerings are made to various Sun gods like "Elah-Gabal", "Sol", and "Mithras".

When Rome adopted Christianity as its official and ONLY religion, it could not rid its people from their pagan celebrations and worship of the sun gods during the Solstice festivities. The Catholic Church thus decided to co-opt the "birthday of the Sun" to the "birthday of the Son". The festivities were now made into the worship of Jesus instead of the worship of Mithras et al.

In Jewish families, infant boys must be circumcised on the eighth day of their birth, in a ritual known as the Brit Milah, to honour the covenant between Yahweh and the Children of Israel. Since Jesus is a Jew, he would be circumcised on his 8th day, and that would be the first day the child is officially with God. It was conveniently proposed that Jesus was circumcised on January 1, which means that he must have been born 8 days prior, on December 25, to coincide with the Solstice festivities.

And that is how Jesus birthday became officially fixed on December 25, and which we now mark on our calendars as Christ's Mass day.

Merry Christmas!

The Golden Rule

2008-11-15T14:12:00.009+08:00

I received an email from TED.com about Karen Armstrong's (author of A History of God and The Bible: A Biography) new initiative, the Charter for Compassion (http://charterforcompassion.com).

The Charter for Compassion project seeks to build a peaceful and harmonious global community among the world religions, by seeking to remind the world that while all religions are not the same, they all share a core principle of the Golden Rule, which was stated as:

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

However, I have always thought that the Golden Rule was framed in the negative. To my surprise, I learnt that this variant is actually called the Silver Rule:

Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.

Although they appear to be similar, there is a subtle difference. Suppose you are a masochist (a person who derives pleasure from being offended, dominated, or mistreated). Under the Golden Rule, you would be encouraged to inflict pain on others because of your delight in such mistreatment. A sadist (a person who derives pleasure from inflicting cruelty on others) is jokingly said to be a masochist adhering to the Golden Rule. Under the Silver Rule, inflicting pain on others would be discouraged.

In the Bible, Jesus taught his disciples to repay evil with kindness. In reality, no body really follows that. Indeed, when Confucius was asked about the Golden Rule, he replied: "Repay kindness with kindness. Repay evil with justice." This is surprisingly called the Brass Rule:

Do unto others as they do unto you.

But the problem with the Brass Rule is that it can create a vicious circle of revenge. Two wrongs do not make a right.

Even baser than the Brass Rule is the Iron Rule:

Do unto others as you like, before they do it unto you.

This Iron Rule has also been called the ironic version of the Golden Rule (a cynical variant goes: "He who has the gold, makes the rules.")

Of course, we don't live in an ideal world where people live their lives following just the Golden (or Silver) rules. In fact, most of the world seems to practise an amalgam of the Golden Rule for your superiors, and the Iron Rule for your inferiors. In maintaining the metallic references, this rule has been called the Tin Rule (as tin is known for its flexibility):

Suck up to those above you, and abuse those below.

***

Personally, although I do not have any major problems with the Charter for Compassion initiative, my main gripe is that the charter, as written, specifically omits any mention of people without religion. To be truly global and inclusive, such initiatives would also include people without religion. People without religion are people too. There appears to be an unstated bias that people without religion are immoral, when this is really not the case.

An atheist call to arms

2008-11-01T09:01:00.004+08:00

In 2002, Richard Dawkins presented a speech at TED to appeal for atheists to make public their beliefs and to aggressively fight the incursion of religion into government and politics. The video was released to the internet on April 2007, but I had only watched it today. It is still a compelling video, and provides a very strong argument why atheists should not be apathetic and to let religionists rule society. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html

It's Time for Reason and Science

2008-09-20T09:24:00.003+08:00

A wonderful promotional video by some of the greatest scientific minds in the English speaking world:

Disk Drives

2008-05-27T16:11:00.001+08:00

As I used to work in the disk drive industry (Conner Peripherals - bought over by Seagate), I like to follow news about developments in the disk drive industry.

Today, I came across a very amusing YouTube video featuring disk drives:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3plw-oye90

The disk drives in the video are supposedly from Maxtor. Now you know why Maxtor lost money and was finally sold to Seagate too

However, the disk drive industry is facing a threat form flash-memory based drives (solid state drives). Today, I read a news item about Samsung releasing a 256GB solid state flash memory drive:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9952007-7.html

With such high capacity flash-based drives becoming main stream, I think it is a matter of time before flash-memory drives completely displaces disk drives in consumer appliances. Perhaps in 2 or 3 years, the only disk drives in the market will be the very high capacity ones - 1 terabyte and larger - used mainly for backup storage or in servers. The majority of consumers will probably be using only solid-state drives in their laptops, mobile phones, PDAs, game consoles etc.

"Jesus: The Missing History" - Discovery Channel documentary

2008-05-26T03:09:00.003+08:00

I'd caught this documentary ("Jesus: The Missing History") on Discovery Channel (Asia) today, and was very impressed by the host, biblical scholar Kent Dobson, raising very important topics that critically questions the authenticity of the scriptures concerning Jesus. The documentary even ended with Dobson talking about how his study into Jesus' history had made him cast doubt on his beliefs, and even challenged his faith, which I felt was very remarkable for Dobson to do on a globally syndicated program.

I googled the net trying to see if the video of this documentary is available on YouTube. I couldn't find any, but instead learnt an unexpected piece of news. Apparently, after this documentary was broadcast in the US on March 16, Kent Dobson was forced by his school, the Northpointe Christian High School, to resign from his teaching post on March 27:

http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2008/04/on_historical_jesus_video_oust.html

Dobson's unfortunate experience seems to resemble a Christian version of "Expelled".

Although Dobson is a man of faith, as a teacher, he is not afraid to teach his students to think critically and to ask hard questions. On the documentary, he comes across as an honest, sincere and earnest person, and I think that one day, he will have an epiphany like Prof Bart Erhman or ex-Reverend Dan Barker, and realise that we can all be moral and good people without having to believe that Jesus is a god.

Myanmar

2008-05-13T17:51:00.008+08:00

If you have been following news of the Myanmar Cyclone Nargis disaster, or have donated to the relief effort to help the Myanmar victims, you would know that the Myanmar government is preventing the relief organisations from using their own experts/equipment to handle the donated supplies. Instead, the Myanmar government has told these organisations to hand over the supplies to the army, who will then distribute the supplies to the victims. The Myanmar government does not want the relief organisations personnel to distribute the donated supplies to the victims themselves.

1. According to this New York Times article, a local official found that good rice donated from Thailand under the United Nations auspices have been kept by the army. The army instead gave poor quality/rotting/waterlogged rice from its own inventories to the victims instead:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/world/asia/12myanmar.html

2. This blog entry from a Myanmar dissident says that donated supplies are now found on sale in the black markets in Yangon. Since all donations must be handed to the Myanmar army as commanded by the Myanmar government, it is obvious who is re-selling these donated relief supplies for their own profit:

http://baydah.blogspot.com/

3. A report from Burma Campaign UK states that Myanmar earned about ₤1.35 billion (about US$2.7 billion) per year from the sale of gas. However, the Myanmar government, in a meeting with UN officials on 5 May, stated that they are spending ₤2.5 million on the disaster. The Myanmar government won't need to cough out more of their own money, not with the generous cash donations pouring in from UN, US, and other countries totalling hundreds of millions of dollars:

http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/pm/weblog.php?id=P348

4. So, if the Myanmar government is going to use only ₤2.5 million from their yearly earnings of ₤1350 million from gas exports for the relief effort, what should the balance ₤1347.5 million be used for? Well, how about a wedding? According to this BBC report, when General Than Shwe (the leader of the Myanmar government) married off his daughter in 2006, just the gifts for the couple came to ₤50 million:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6109356.stm

You can get a sense of the opulence that was lavished on Than Shwe's daughter from this YouTube video. Mind you, while 90% of Myanmar's population live below the poverty line, the military government is apparently using the country's wealth to benefit themselves:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWj0tDpLAaI

-------------------------------------------------------------

It's too bad the UN, Singapore, and the other Asean countries will not interfere in how the Myanmar government treats its people. Yup. The policy of non-interference in another country's "internal affair" is sacrosanct, even if the Myanmar government actions (or lack thereof) can potentially kill hundreds of thousands of people. If hundreds of thousands of people were to die due to diseases or hunger because of the lack of relief supplies reaching the victims, this would be nothing short of genocide. And the UN, Singapore government, Asean members would all be partially culpable, because they would have foreseen that the deaths would be the end result, but didn't do anything to prevent it.

Tragic.

The LHC and the Higgs Boson

2008-05-06T19:51:00.004+08:00

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is one of the most ambitious science project to date, rivalling that of the space project to sent humans into outer space. Costing an enormous US$6 billion to build (for comparison, the space shuttle Endeavour cost only US$1.7 billion, and the NASA Mars Project is US$1.2 billion), it boggles the mind that the main purpose of its construction is to determine the existence of an infinitesimally minute elementary particle called the "Higgs Boson".

More photos of the LHC at http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/03/time-machine-worlds-biggest-particle.html

There is a very engrossing talk by Professor Brian Cox about the LHC. It compresses in 20 minutes a presentation of the best scientific explanation of "what the universe is", and why the LHC is such an important project. I am sure you will enjoy this talk:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/253

-------------------------------------------------------------

If you need a primer of what is a "Higgs Boson" particle, here is my simplified explanation:

Back in my early school days, I was taught about how all matter is composed of atoms. In fact, the theory of atoms being the fundamental building block of matter was first written by the ancient Greeks back in 400 BC.

However, in the late 19th century, scientists discovered that the atom is not the most fundamental particle (a fundamental particle is a subatomic particle that is not composed of any other subatomic particle). Instead, they found that atoms were composed of electron particles orbiting a nucleus containing protons and a neutrons.

This is probably the level of science that most of us were taught up to in secondary school.

In the mid-20th century, scientists discovered that while electrons are fundamental particles, protons and neutrons were not. Protons and neutrons are composed of an even smaller particle called the quark.

Quarks never exist alone. They are always found in groups of other quarks. A composite particle made of several quarks is known as a "Hadron", which is what the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is named for.

Thus, the scientists now have 2 fundamental particles: the quark, and the electron.

Unlike the quarks which always exist in groups (you always find quarks in groups of two or three quarks), the electron is always alone (they are said to be solitary particles). However, scientists found that electrons were not the only solitary particle. Besides the electron, scientists found other solitary particles like the muon, the tau, and the neutrino. Scientists categorised these solitary particles as "leptons".

So basically, matter is made of the fundamental particles of quarks and leptons.

(There is actually another group of fundamental particles called "anti-quarks" and "anti-leptons", which are the components of "anti-matter". However, I will not discuss anti-matter in this explanation).

But how do protons and neutrons bind themselves together in the nucleus? Why do magnets attract iron nails? Why do uranium decay, (causing harmful radiation in the process)? Why does the Earth revolve around the Sun?

All these actions are actually forces that are exerted by particles on other particles. Scientists identified 4 kinds of forces, mainly:

Strong Nuclear force (the force that binds protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom)

Electro-Magnetism force (the force that allows a magnet to attract iron nails)

Weak Nuclear force (the force that causes radioactive decay)

Gravity (the force that stops us from falling into space)

To explain how particles exert this forces on each other, scientists proposed another form of particle called the "force-carrier particle" that interact between quarks and the leptons. The force-carrier particles for each of the 4 forces are:

Gluon : Strong Nuclear force

Photon : Electro-Magnetism force

W+, W-, Z : Particles for the Weak Nuclear force

Graviton : Gravity

In summary, matter is basically composed of quarks, leptons, and force-carrier particles.

Now, quarks and leptons are "space occupying particles". For example, two quarks cannot share the same "space".

However, force-carrier particles do not behave in the same way. For example, 2 or more photons can share the same "space".

Scientists classify "space occupying particles" as fermions, and "space sharing particles" as bosons.

Thus, all quarks and leptons are fermions, while all force-carrier particles are bosons.

The "Higgs Boson" is a force-carrier particle that that has been predicted by the mathematics of particle physics, but has not been physically observed. If found, it will provide the explanation of why particles acquire mass!

If you are interested in learning more about particle physics, I can't recommend enough the following site:

http://particleadventure.org/index.html

Babies being thrown off 50-foot tower

2008-05-04T14:37:00.000+08:00

Truly one of the most bizarre videos I have ever seen. This practice of throwing babies off the temple tower has been practised by both Muslims and Hindus in a small village in Western India (the state of Maharashtra) for the past 500 years. However, it appears extremely reckless and dangerous to me. What if the baby twisted its body midway down and landed head first and snap its neck? Shiver....

CNN video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDRlWGR1kLg

CNN article: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/05/01/babies.tower/#cnnSTCText

Can't imagine parents would actually let their babies undergo this kind of religious ritual.

Mecca Time

2008-04-22T11:11:00.002+08:00

You just can't make this kind of stuff up.

An Islamic conference held in Qatar last Saturday wants the world to change the reference point of world time from Greenwich in England (GMT) to Mecca in Saudi Arabia because Islamic scholars have "scientific evidence" that Mecca is the "true centre of the Earth".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7359258.stm

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=214103&version=1

I wondered to myself "who would be this crazy?", until I was directed to this video of an Egyptian TV program featuring Islamic "scientist" Dr Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyed on why Greenwich Mean Time must be abolished and replaced with Mecca time:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_N7t19hfeSE

So what is the difference between setting the reference point in Greenwich and in Mecca? Well, for one, anyone can visit Greenwich - whether you are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, freethinker etc. Greenwich is open to one and all. However, Mecca is completely out-of-bounds to anyone who is not a Muslim. That is, 80% of the world's population are not allowed in Mecca simply because they do not follow Islam.

These people are plain deluded in thinking they can ask the world to make one of the most restricted places on Earth to be a global reference point for everyone.

In the same news article, it was mentioned that a "Mecca Watch" was also introduced at the conference in which the hands move anti-clockwise, the same direction that worshippers move when they circle the Kabaa. Let's see, Mecca as the centre of the world, a clock that runs backwards. I think I see where this is going...

FITNA - The Controversial Anti-Islam Movie

2008-04-04T08:58:00.001+08:00

You may have read about the huge hoo-hah around the world about Geert Wilders controversial 15 minute anti-Islam movie. It has been criticised in the Straits Times in articles printed yesterday and today for being polemic and being sheer propaganda. Muslim nations every where have decried the movie, saying it insults Islam and that what it depicts is not "true" or "mainstream" Islam. Indonesia wants Google to eliminate the movie from its servers, effectively asking Google to censor the video, and thus countering one of the tenets of Western civilisation: freedom of speech.

I have watched the movie, and agree that it is indeed highly polemical and extreme. But the irony of it is that many fundamentalist Islam videos - those constantly put out by Al Qaeda and the Taleban sympathisers - is structured in the same way. But the Al Qaeda videos are not condemned by the Muslim nations universally, or as vehemently, as against Wilders' film. In fact, Geert Wilders has used video footage from many of these fundamentalist Muslim videos in his film. Many portions of Wilders' film is comprised of footage from news reels and Muslim terrorists videos, juxtaposed with Quran sayings, just like the terrorists' videos!

The Muslim nations keep making the call that Islam is a "religion of peace". Unfortunately, since the 9/11 US attack, 2002 Bali bombings, 2004 Madrid bombings, or the London 7/7 bombings, Islam has constantly demonstrated that it is anything but because all the perpetrators have been Muslim. The Muslim nations say that the terrorists are not "true" Muslims. But then, why do the news videos always show captured terrorists, as they are being hauled away, always screaming into the camera that they are unrepentant for their actions, and they are doing it all "for Allah" and "in the name of Islam"?

If Islam is a "religion of peace", why is Islam breeding such destructive elements? Why can't mainstream Islam halt the growth of the radicals?

Or, could it be that the mainstreamers could not criticise the radical Muslims' actions because what the radicals are practising is indeed condone by the Quran?

This is the stance of Geert Wilders controversial film.

Personally, I think Geert Wilders film won't have much of an impact in reducing radical Islamism. Radical Islam must be reformed from within by Muslims themselves.

However, as the Muslim nations want to ban the movie from the Internet, and they might succeed in doing so, you might want to take a look at it before it gets pulled down. Do watch it knowing that Geert Wilders is also an extremist, and that his video has been made in exactly the same extremist style that radical Muslims make in their own videos. Please be warned that there are extremely violent images in the film (I was particularly disturbed by the beheading scene):

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3369102968312745410

P.S. I just learnt that the trial has just started yesterday for the 8 Muslims arrested in August 2006 for planning to bomb 7 commercial passenger planes in mid-flight. These were the terrorists who initiated the worldwide ban of carrying liquids, creams, gels etc into planes. As the BBC news report indicated, the 8 Muslims were going to blow themselves and the planes up "in the name of Islam":

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7328892.stm

Chinese Characters and the Bible - Part 2

2008-03-30T15:49:00.007+08:00

Yet another Christian friend has found the original World Bible School "Chinese Characters and the Bible" video and has again forwarded it to me. The following is a follow up reply to this second friend, in which I explain why I do not find the Bible to be that "great" a book:

Any big book, such as the Bible, can be made to advocate anything that you desire. For example:

- Want a harsh, strict, wrathful and vengeful god, killing everything and everyone through genocide and infanticide, or endorsing the practice of slavery? Read Exodus and Leviticus in the Old Testament.

- Want a quiet, subtle, kind, gentle, loving and forgiving god? Read Paul's epistles in the New Testament (eg. Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Philippians etc)

As I love to read history and philosophy, studying the world's many religions (their origins and their doctrines) holds a constant fascination for me. And when I read about the history of the Bible, it is very clear that most of the Bible's stories must be read metaphorically and symbolically, and not literally.

Many fundamentalist Christians believe the Bible is a divine book of God. As God's book, they believe it is inerrant - and that everything written in it is literally true! But if the Bible is a divine work of god, why are there so many errors and contradictions in it?

http://skeptically.org/newtestament/id19.html

If the Bible contain errors, then it is not perfect. If it is not perfect, is it still a divine piece of work from a perfect God?

The rationalist in me says that the Bible is simply a piece of work by humans, and is not divine. As the list of the errors and contradictions show, it is far from perfect.

And the Old Testament certainly does not describe a "nice" God that fits with contemporary societies. Many of my Christian friends only know of the "good" bits of the Bible, but never actually read its "bad" parts. They find reading the actual Bible to be very tedious because of its old language and style, so they merely read the "nice" parts selected by their priests or pastors. These "nice" stories are very tame and would not be out of place even in a collection of stories for children.

However, a more complete reading of books such as Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and you will see a much different picture of the "nice and loving" god.

In an effort to encourage people to read the WHOLE bible and not just the "nice" bits, the site "The Brick Testament" at:

http://www.thebricktestament.com

has illustrated many portions of the Bible as comics styled narratives using Lego bricks. Most people find reading the comic style illustrations much easier than reading the actual Bible itself. When people can see the writings in Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Joshua presented graphically, they see a whole new dimension in the "Good Book".

I recommend the following links for a picture of the more "vindictive" and "cruel" aspect of the religion:

The Law : http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/index.html

Joshua : http://www.thebricktestament.com/joshua/index.html

Judges : http://www.thebricktestament.com/judges/index.html

As one commentator has said,

The Old Testament God is a "psychotic monster". Not only is the character of God diabolical in those books, but there are explicit prescriptions for how to live that are not metaphors; they are not open to theological judo. God just comes right out and says "stone people" for a list of offenses so preposterous and all-encompassing that the killing never stops. You have to kill people for working on the Sabbath. You kill people for fornication.

- Sam Harris

As you read the Old Testament and compare it against the New Testament, it would seem like they are describing 2 completely different entities! But then, that would contradict the mantra that there is only "One God".

This brings me back to what I stated at the beginning: that the Bible is such a big book that it can be used to advocate anything you desire. Need "Proof" of vindictive God? See Old Testament. Need "Proof" of loving God? See New Testament.

Using the Bible as "proof" that God is real is hardly persuasive.

Regards,

P.S. By the way, I just finished reading the book "Misquoting Jesus" by Bart Ehrman:

http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060859512

which describes how errors crept into the New Testament.

Bart D Ehrman, its author, is a famous Biblical scholar and author ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman ).

He actually presented a lecture on his book at Stanford University, which is available from this link. It was after listening to this lecture that I went on to read his book:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=397006836098752165&hl=en

If you are keen to learn about some of the errors that have crept into the New Testament that you are reading today, you need to listen to Professor Ehrman's lecture.

Letter declining a church invite

2008-03-18T19:31:00.006+08:00

This was a reply I wrote to a Christian friend declining his invitation to attend church:

Regarding attending church, I think you should know my answer by now :-) What is the point of my attending church when I am not a believer?

Yes, scientists do not know how the universe is created. But just because we don't know, why should we accept the explanation that the universe is created by a deity? And specifically the biblical god Yahweh at that. Just because we don't know how the world was created doesn't mean that we should accept any explanation that is offered. What if the explanation is wrong?

When I am given an explanation, I will always examine it to see if it answers my questions satisfyingly before I accept or reject it. As I have mentioned before, the explanations offered by Christianity do not answer my questions satisfyingly. That is why I don't accept Christianity.

Many of my Christian friends always tell me that the bible is a great book of morality because it contains god's instructions on how man should live his life by. And they always cite The Ten Commandments as the ultimate moral guide. But I've read parts of the bible, and the Ten Commandments, and I am not impressed. What does the bible say about Slavery? If the bible is so full of morals, why does it not condemn the enslaving of people?

Why does the bible treat women not as equally as men? Is not women also created by god? If women are equals of men, why did god put in statements in His Divine Book that say that women are inferior to men (e.g. "the head of the woman is the man", "wives must always submit to their husbands" etc)? Shouldn't a divine religion for all time preach equality of the sexes right from the beginning?

Why are celibate men "pure"? What is it about women that is so evil that when men is "defiled by women", men are no longer pure?

The logic of Christian punishment/salvation is also extremely unsatisfying.

- Hitler massacred 6 million Jews plus countless others during World War 2. But since Hitler is Catholic, he will be "saved" because he accepted Christ.

- Abraham Lincoln brought the United States to a civil war so as to free millions of blacks from slavery. But since Lincoln is not a Christian, he will not be "saved".

Does this make sense? Is salvation to be dished out to all and sundry who believe in Christ, and denied to all those who are not of the faith despite their meritorious deeds?

What is the explanation Christianity offers to explain the presence of suffering? Was god responsible for the 200,000 people who were killed by the 26 Dec 2004 Tsunami? Did god do this to punish certains groups of sinners? Why didn't he just kill those sinners instead of killing so many innocents (children especially) to accomplish his aim?

Perhaps god didn't create the Tsunami. Perhaps the Tsunami was made by the devil to destroy god's creations. If so, why didn't god stop the devil from accomplishing his task? Is god not omnipotent?

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
- Epicurus (341 BC to 271 BC)

Of course, it is fine with me if others believe in god, as religion has been an age-old tradition and teaching carried forward from the ancients. However, just as we no longer believe that the world is flat (the Earth is spherical), or that plagues and illnesses are due to demons (they are caused by germs), or that slavery is an acceptable way of treating people (definitely not), I also feel that in this day and age, we should transcend from a religion created by ignorant bronze-age people to a modern philosophy grounded in knowledge, science, mathematics and ethics.

Regards,

NJ

Chinese Characters and the Bible

2008-03-15T14:19:00.013+08:00

Yesterday, a friend of mine forwarded me a video file that purports to show that the Chinese language shows proof of the authenticity of the stories of Genesis:

http://students.washington.edu/cbsf/cool/Chinese.swf

The video is produced by an organisation called the "World Bible School", but when I clicked on the link in the World Bible School's website, they have removed the video:

http://www.wbschool.org/chinesecharacters.htm

If you don't like the flash video version, the same contents can be viewed as a static web page here:

http://www.jdaniellowe.com/china.html

However "entertaining" this article is, and may seem utterly convincing and believable to some people, the sceptic in me immediately tells me that this is not PROOF!

There are at least 20,000 characters in the Chinese language, although only about 10,000 are used contemporarily (see note #1). With 20,000 characters to choose from, it is possible to find all kinds of coincidences and meanings to fit whatever you want. (Note: another Wikipedia entry states that at least 53000 unique Chinese characters were compiled in 1039 CE during the Song Dynasty. See note #2)

There are only 214 radicals in the Chinese language, which are used to form the Chinese characters. It is obvious that for any combination of radicals, you would get at least several characters that are formed from such radicals. Now, all you need is to choose characters that have any superficial connection to the bible stories, and put them into this multimedia presentation, and ta-da, you have a very convincing presentation that seems to say that the Chinese language validates the authenticity of the bible!!!

This is weak thinking. In actual fact, this video proves nothing except that you can choose to interpret anything you want to make the flimsiest of connections to the bible.

Fundamentalist Christians have a weakness for developing this kinds of "proofs", in which you first form the conclusion ("Chinese characters are related to the bible"), and then look for evidence that supports the pre-conceived conclusion and publishing them, while ignoring and discarding evidence that do not support it. This is totally against the scientific method, in which you accept and publish the evidence that are both pro AND con to your hypothesis. In the scientific world, if contradictory evidence is found, the initial hypothesis MUST BE REJECTED, and the researcher must refine it, or re-propose a new hypothesis. Unfortunately, fundamentalist Christians do not like to acknowledge contradictory evidence, always choosing to sweep aside facts and ignoring them when such contradictions are pointed out. This is the sole reason why fundamentalist Christians believe that the bible is LITERALLY true, and that the universe is only 6000 years old because of this unshatterable belief in the inerrancy of the bible.

I found that another blogger has written about this video, and has use the same kind of weird logic employed by the World Bible School to make a mocking association that is so provocative that you just have to read it yourself:

http://www.hanzismatter.com/2006/03/chinese-language-of-god.html

Notes

#1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language#Vocabulary

#2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese#Literacy

China Job Fair Photos

2007-12-24T06:21:00.000+08:00

My friend Dennis sent me some eye-popping photos of throngs of students looking for employment at a job fair in Shenzhen, China. I wasn't able to locate the original web site hosting these photos, so I uploaded them into my web album for your viewing:

From China Job Fai...

Although I couldn't find the original web source, I found this China news story that commented on the extreme overcrowding situations at these China job fairs:

http://www.iwaiyu.com/html/guowaixinwen/shehsh/20070414/2805.html

In the 2nd photo, the escalator's handrails were completely bent out of shape!!!

According to the article, China releases 4.8 million university/college graduates into the job market EVERY YEAR! That is more than the population of Singapore! But there isn't enough jobs for all these graduates. No wonder many of its people have landed in Singapore looking for employment.

For instance, I was struck by this recent Straits Times article which mentions a Ms Wu Ye Li who has been working for the past 2 years at the dessert stall in the Koufu Foodcourt in Toa Payoh. Ms Wu Ye Li works 12 hours a day, gets only 2 days off every month (ie. she works 28 days a month), and is only paid a monthly salary of S$1000:

http://business.asiaone.com/Business/Office/Ask/Story/A1Story20071209-40266.html

(do a text search for "wu ye li" if you don't want to read the whole article.)

So, if you are complaining about your job or your pay, hope this puts things into perspective ...

Merry Christmas!

NJ

BBC News video: Chimps beat humans in memory test

2007-12-05T01:54:00.000+08:00

This is an eye-popping news feature from BBC News. This video is definitely a MUST watch!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7120000/newsid_7126100/7126174.stm?bw=bb&mp=wm

The chimpanzees are absolutely amazing. Chimpanzees are of course, the closest animal relative to human beings on the evolutionary tree. I know chimps are extremely intelligent creatures as evident from many a Hollywood movie and from science documentaries. Chimps know how to use tools, can be taught Sign Language, and are known to exhibit many human characteristics (like altruism).

However, this is the first time we know that chimps actually have an EXCELLENT (photographic?) memory. This memory faculty far surpasses our own.

I have always thought humans are superior to all other animals when it comes to brain (cognitive) functions. This has now been proven completely wrong! Watching the chimps' stunning performances is truly humbling :-)

The accompanying text article is here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7124156.stm

Documentary - "The Bible Revolution"

2007-11-24T17:52:00.000+08:00

I watched a very informative documentary called "The Bible Revolution" on Google Video this morning (see below for hyperlink), which should be of great interest to my Christian friends. If you are not a Christian, the history of the English bible, which is what this documentary is about, will still be very educational.

I find it fascinating that there is more than 38000 different Christian denominations in the world (grouped under 5 major branches). Why are there Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans, Presbysterians etc when at the heart of it, they all worship the same Jesus Christ? Apparently, many of the breakaway factions came about simply because of differences over the bible!

The first OFFICIAL bible was authorised in the year 382 by the Roman Catholic church. At that time, all the existing texts were only written in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. The Roman Catholic church translated these texts into Latin (the language of the Roman Empire), and made the Latin compilation the official Christian bible.

However, with the fall of the Roman Empire in the year 476, the Latin language slowly declined and fell from disuse. By the late 16th century, most people in Europe could not speak Latin. Latin was a "dead" language mastered mainly by intellectuals and the church, and not by the common folks. The common folks could not read the Latin bible on their own, and had to hear the bible stories from the priests of the Catholic church (in the early 1500s, all churches in Europe were Catholic churches).

In England, William Tyndale translated the bible into English in 1523. The Catholic church was against the translation (they insisted that only their Latin version is the one-and-true bible). William Tyndale was arrested in 1535 for heresy and treason simply because of publishing the bible in English. He was executed by the Catholic church by being burnt on the stake in 1536.

In Germany, Martin Luther had also translated the bible into German (also in 1523). Now that the bible can be read by the common folks in Europe, the people realised that many of the Catholic church practices were NEVER taught by Jesus nor even documented in the bible. The practices were pure inventions of the Catholic church. Martin Luther initiated a movement to eliminate the invented Catholic practices from his church movement, which became the birth of Protestantism Christianity.

With the English bible in the hands of the common folks in England, Protestantism was also taking root there against the Catholic practices. Finally, the notorious King Henry VIII (who married SIX TIMES and who is rumoured to have fathered many illegitimate children), decided to sever all connections between the Church of England and the Catholic church. The reason: so that he could divorce his first wife Catherine to marry Anne without seeking the Pope's permission!

Queen Catherine gave birth to Mary, while Queen Anne gave birth to Elizabeth. Mary was Catholic, while Elizabeth was Protestant.

The severance of England from the Catholic church angered the Pope, who initiated a war against England. Within England itself, there was a lot of power play between Catholics and Protestants supporters. When King Edward, who succeeded Henry VIII, died in 1553, the Catholics manage to install Mary as the Queen of England. Queen Mary immediately started repairing ties with the Pope and the Catholic church. During her reign, almost 300 Protestants were burnt at the stake for heresy, resulting in the term "Bloody Mary" being used to refer to her.

Unfortunately, Queen Mary died childless, and Queen Elizabeth I inherited the throne in 1558. By deft political manipulation, Elizabeth I managed to strike a compromise between the Catholic and Protestant forces in the church, resulting in the amalgam known today as Anglican Christianity. This is why Anglicanism contains aspects of both Catholic and Protestant practices.

In 1611, England published the "King James Version" of the English bible. By all intents and purposes, the KJV version of the bible is William Tyndale's bible.

Through his English translation of the bible, William Tyndale left a huge impact on the English language. Many famous English idioms and phrases we use today such as:

Am I my brother's keeper?
Stranger in a strange land
Burning bush
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth
Spare the rod and spoil the child
Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die
See eye to eye
Can the leopard change his spots?
In the lion's den
Man shall not live by bread alone
Turn the other cheek
Cast your pearls before swine
Wolf in sheep's clothing
New wine in old bottles
He that is not with me is against me
Sign of the times
I wash my hands of it
Physician, heal thyself
Grapes of wrath
Lost sheep
Prodigal son
Cast the first stone
Doubting Thomas
Through a glass, darkly
The root of all evil
Armageddon
A thorn in the flesh
Weeping and gnashing of teeth
Go the extra mile

all originated from the English bible, and specifically from Tyndale's translation. Just as the English language owes much to William Shakespeare, its debt to William Tyndale is unmeasurable.

If the Catholic church had not violently countered the translation of the bible (people were burnt on the stake by the Catholic church simply for translating the bible!), there probably wouldn't be so many church denominations today. The history of the English bible is truly a dark and macabre one.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6101527704063312894

Science Lectures - "Growing Up In The Universe"

2007-11-23T17:04:00.000+08:00

Professor Richard Dawkins is the famous evolutionary biologist and ethologist who wrote the book "The Selfish Gene" and introduced the word "meme" into everyday English. Richard Dawkins is also the current holder of the "Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science" at the University of Oxford.

In 1991, Richard Dawkins gave a series of 5 one-hour lectures on Science which was telecast on BBC television. These lectures were aimed at children and young adults. Recently, all 5 lectures were made available on the internet for free viewing online by Richard Dawkins' foundation (prior to the free release, you would have to buy the DVD to view them).

If you have young children who are interested in science (maybe they want work in the fast growing Biomedical/ Biotechnology industries that Singapore is investing huge amounts of money in currently when they grow up), they might find these science lectures interesting. I watched them last night, and they were so engrossing I had to watch all 5 of them at one sitting. They are exceptionally educational and absorbing.

This is a short segment from one of the lectures explaining how our human eyes have evolved:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUOpaFVgKPw

If your children find this segment to be interesting, they may want to watch the entire 5 lectures. As for myself, I have never had science lessons when I was young presented in such a fascinating manner. Indeed, I found this series to be very illuminating as I had always marvelled at the incredible workings of the human eye. In another lecture, the even more complex brain and its workings are described.

All 5 lectures can be watched from the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science website:

http://richarddawkinsfoundation.org/foundation,growingupintheuniverse

Christian "Thiology" in Singapore Parliament

2007-11-03T14:51:00.000+08:00

Thio Li Ann

I do not follow Singapore politics much as political discussions here are pretty dull and bland, focusing mainly on bread and butter issues. The PAP government is very effective in economic matters and providing for its citizens the lower level "deficiency needs" (as defined by Abraham Maslow) , but in return, curtails too much on creativity matters by enforcing excessive security and caution in these areas to ever fully provide the higher level "growth needs" required by Singapore to advance to the next level.

As such, I was not even aware that parliament had inducted into its chambers the vitriolic and dangerous Thio Li Ann until I read about her extremely vindictive and hate-filled speech on the S377A repeal recently.

It doesn't take much to quickly discern from her malevolent speech that Thio is a fundamentalist Christian who is hell bent to import into Singapore the same kind of fundamentalistic right-wing Christianity from the US that currently infects much American politics. Fortunately, Thio's rants have been countered in some excellent rebuttals like Janadas Devan's commentary in the Straits Times and articles in the blogosphere like this.

Personally, I have many issues with this kind of myopic thought processes contaminating our government, and to me, it all comes from a global onslaught by fundamentalist Christianity against secularism. Fundamentalist Christians are out to promote an agenda of proselytisation as vehemently as they claim homosexuals are promoting the "gay agenda". To fundamentalist Christians, their version of morality is God-ordained, and thus, the "true" morality that every human being "must" follow. Top of this list is the requirement (nay, commandment) that everyone "must" accept the Christian god as the one true God, failure of which is eternal damnation in a hell of fire and brimstones. Hence, the fanatical opposition to evolution, stem cell research, condoms and contraceptions, secularist thought, or heaven forbid, homosexuality! simply because they contravene writings in the Christian bible, which is accepted blindly as the gospel truth.

As a person of science living in the 21st century, I absolutely refuse to accept anything without questioning its veracity by testing it against science and reason. However, reason and rationality seems to be in short supply in the Singapore parliament as I read in the Straits Times that Thio's malicious speech was received by loud and boisterous thumpings of approvals from many of the other parliamentarians. (I am very glad to read that our PM, Mr Lee Hsien Loong, is not one of these "thumpers".)

To prevent the malicious beliefs of Thio and her ilk from acceptance by the general public, it is necessary to dismantle fundamentalist Christian thinking by tearing it down with science and reason, and to bring science and reason to the public.

1. Science and evidence

Fundamentalist Christians are guilty of first concluding that Yahweh (the Christian god) created the Earth 6000 years ago, and then going about looking for and showing only the evidence confirming Creationism, and loudly proclaim that science has proven Creationism to be true. In the process, they completely discard all the other (and overwhelming) evidences that show the Earth is much older than 6000 years old. This is because fundamentalist Christians always make their conclusion first ("God did it"), and then go about finding the proofs to confirm their previously formed opinion. Facts that do not confirm their pre-formed conclusion are jettisoned and ignored.

True scientists do not do this. Scientists first observe how nature behaves, make a hypothesis on how they think nature operates, and then look for more evidence to test if their hypothesis holds true or not. If any evidence is found that negates the hypothesis, the hypothesis is rejected, and a new hypothesis is made to accommodate the negative findings. The whole investigative cycle is then repeated. Scientific conclusions are thus always based on all evidences and facts found. Negative and contrarian evidence is never discarded, but is always used to hone and fine-tune the theory that is finally established.

I bring this up because Thio and her ilk claims that homosexuality is not natural, and that it is not in-born.

This is absolutely not true, and is against a mountain of scientific evidence that homosexuality is rampant in the animal kingdom. Thanks to YouTube, you can even view the homosexual behaviour of animals your self:

Gay penguins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UibmZXbiI3Y

Gay dogs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DXl_zW6OJc

Gay lions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl8VLG8hwJQ

Gay bucks (male deers): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dOvGC8t5mw

Gay pigs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plcM6rqHobQ

In fact, gay behaviour has been observed in 1500 species of animals and well documented by scientists (see Wikipedia and New Scientist). If this is "not natural", then, pray tell me, what is?

Personally, I have both effeminate male friends as well as very butch female friends, and they are all extremely nice people. I can see they are born this way (as they already exhibit such behaviour when young). Their sexual orientation are as natural as it comes, and in no way do I see them as "evil" or "immoral" people just because of their sexual orientation. And it is a fact one doesn't have to be an effeminate male or a butch female to be homosexual. Very masculine males and feminine females can also be sexually oriented to their own sex, such as these folks:

- Ian McKellen (Gandalf in "Lord of the Rings", Magneto in "X Men")

- Richard Hatch (Reality show winner in "Survivor")

- Ellen DeGeneres (TV comedian/host)

- Angelina Jolie (Angelina is bisexual)

The problem with faithheads like Thio is that she cannot see these people beyond their sexual orientation. Blinded by her faith, she sees all homosexual people as evil and immoral people, when in reality, sexual orientation has absolutely nothing to do with whether a person is evil or immoral. Straight men and women also cheat on their spouses, breaking up families and damaging children in the process. Are straight adulterers no less evil and immoral by Thio's religious standards?

2. Christian Hypocrisy

Because of ignorance and fear by the general public, homosexual people are frowned upon and looked down by society at large. To progress in society and live their lives safely, many must hide their sexual orientation and lead double lives. Many homosexual men and women marry and have children, but because their sexual orientation is in-born and innate, they cannot eradicate it, and many a time succumb to the craving to have sex with someone of their own gender.

However, because of fundamentalist Christian's abhorrence of homosexuality, gay people who are born in such environments often have to become hypocrites to loudly condemn homosexuality, when they are themselves born to such a bent.

The most famous of these hypocrites is Pastor Ted Haggard of the New Life Church. Haggard condemns all homosexuals as "sinners" and teaches that believing in Jesus Christ will cure them of their sins. Too bad he was gay and could not resist the temptation of having sex with Mike Jones, a male prostitute, who outed Haggard to the world.

The Roman Catholic Church is likewise tainted with its admission that many of its male priests had been sexually abusing boys in the 2006 court case that was splashed in all the news media. The Roman Catholic church is always condemning homosexuals, but in the end, they are uncovered as the true hypocrites that they are. Perhaps they should reflect more on Jesus exhortation that "he who is without sin can cast the first stone" (John 8:7)

It is also extremely ironic that Thio's invective was spewing with hatred of homosexuals when Christianity is supposed to be a religion of peace and love. Jesus may ask his followers to "love their enemies, turn the other cheek" etc (Luke 6:27 to 36). For Thio, I don't see much "love" in the hate-filled diatribe she gave in parliament. This is an aspect she shares with Haggard.

3. The Perfect God

If God is real and is all powerful, why must he create gay humans and animals?

Science is still trying to understand the reason why homosexuality exists in humans and animals. What is the evolutionary benefit of homosexuality? Generally, homosexuals who are not attracted to the opposite sex will not procreate, and hence will not propagate their lineage. Over hundreds and thousands of years, homosexuality should ought to have died out. Yet, it is still prevalent in the human and animal kingdoms.

If you are a Christian, and you believe that Yahweh created everything, then you must accede that Yahweh made homosexuals that way. But why would a "perfect" god make such people in the first place if he is going to condemn them in his bible? Homosexuals are shunned, looked down upon, and ill treated by society at large. Why would a "perfect" god make homosexuals, and then sanctify people like Thio and her ilk to carry out their condemnations of homosexuals and to mete out punishments on god's behalf? Can't a "perfect" god simply not make homosexuals in the first place?

As a rationalist, there is a very simple answer to the above. God is imaginary, and is created in men's image. The early humans cannot understand why homosexuals exist in their midst, so they mark them as imperfect beings and evil. They later ascribe their abhorrence of homosexuals to come from god. Unfortunately, they subsequently use the god reason to condemn homosexuals in general, advancing yet another aspect of circular reasoning (circular reasoning is prevalent in many of the reasons offered by Christians about why they believe their god is the "true" god).

4. Tyranny of the Masses

One of the edicts promoted by Thio and her "thumping" colleagues is that anal sex between a male and a female is not a crime, but anal sex between 2 males is. This is outright discrimination. If anal sex is a crime when practised by 2 males, it should also be a crime if it is committed by a male and a female!

Singapore law has been made to be an ass!

To be fair and equal, the Singapore government should have also kept S377 (anal sex between male and female) in the books and not repeal it and leaving only S377A. This way, the Singapore government can simply say anal sex is a crime, and we do not discriminate against criminals who perpetrate such activities regardless of whether they are man or woman.

However, by repealing S377 but not S377A, the Singapore government is now saying specifically that this is a crime only when committed by homosexual males.

There are many analogies (pun intended) of such discriminations against humanity in history:

a) women are second class people (as they still are in Saudi Arabia and many Muslim countries). Because Eve caused the fall of Man from the Garden of Eden (the Original Sin), women are also badly vilified in the Christian bible.

b) slaves are treated like goods that can be traded or purchased. Slavery is sanctioned by the Christian bible.

c) minority races are treated as second class people by the majority race

The Singapore government has always spoken out against discrimination of the minority, and has set about many rules and regulations to prevent the majority Chinese to compel their practices and beliefs on the minority Malays and Indians. Similarly, the government enshrines secularism so that no one religion is "holier than thou" against another religion. These actions are to be applauded.

However, the government has failed in this case to prevent the discrimination of an entire group of people simply because of their sexual orientation, and has allowed Christain Thiology (pun intended) to influence its thinking.

Thio and her ilk justifies this discrimination by claiming that the majority are against homosexuality, and therefore majority rules.

However, this makes for very bad laws.

Singapore is a very small country (minority) against much bigger countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and the US (majority). However, we have had political confrontations with all these countries, and in all cases, Singapore stood by United Nation laws that do not side with one country simply because that country has a much larger population than Singapore. A law should be based on reason, and not because it is the preference of a majority .

Just because the majority thinks one way does not mean that the majority is right. What is right should be the truth.

For example, for thousands of years, the majority believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and that the Earth was the centre of the Universe. Minorities like Galileo Galilei who said that the Earth revolved around the Sun was condemned for blasphemy by the Catholic Church and incarcerated. Yet today, we know that Galileo was speaking the truth, and that the majority was wrong!

Thio's advocates that because the majority thinks that homosexuality is a sin, therefore Singapore law should follow majority thinking and make homosexuality a crime. This is basically advocating tyranny of the masses, and I am extremely concerned that the Singapore government has allowed its carefully crafted principles of equality and non-discrimination to be compromised by Thio and her ilk.

What To Do?

There is no "gay mafia" agenda as Thio would like Singaporeans to believe. The support for repealing S377A is simply because preserving S377A is flat out discriminatory.

This discrimination is due to fundamentalist Christianity thinking striking a hold in Singapore, and worse of all, in the high echelons of the Singapore government.

Thio will push Singapore society into a polarisation between fundamentalist Christians like herself and everyone else. Thio will divide people with her religious influenced rhetoric. Her "holier than thou" approach succeeds because there are many fundamentalist Christians who are biased with the same beliefs as hers.

It is vital that we open the eyes of people to the evidence in nature, and teach them to use science and reason to question such irrational beliefs. How can homosexuality be unnatural if even animals are homosexual? How can we conclude that homosexuality is unnatural, evil and immoral, and discard the overwhelming evidence that it isn't? Shouldn't the scientific way be adopted to study all the evidence first, not ignore negative evidence, before forming any conclusions about whether a person can be judged as evil and immoral because of his or her sexual orientation?

Using god to justify laws is just plain bad. What about people who don't believe in your version of god, or who don't believe in the supernatural? Why should they be subjected to laws by your god? Secularism is a proven model in governing Singapore. It must be protected, and must not be compromised by fundamentalist Christians as is happening now.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Europe underwent a philosophical transformation with a period known as the Age of Enlightenment. Although it is now the 21st century, I think we still need to go through this again to stamp out the resurfacing of irrationality, superstition, and tyranny. History does truly repeats itself.

At the barbershop

2007-10-18T23:35:00.000+08:00

I can't believe that I had a religious discussion with the barber today. It started innocently enough with his asking me about my line of work. I told him I write computer applications for a living. He mentioned that god had blessed me with a good brain to be a computer programmer. I told him that I don't believe in the existence of gods. And so it went. I was his last customer for the day. Although he finished with me at 8pm, he was very ardent in continuing our religious discussion, so I obliged him and chatted with him until 9pm (closing time). It was a very strange experience.

The barber is a Buddhist, which happens to be one of the more favourable religions that I like. I like the Buddhist philosophy of living life with moderation (the Middle Path), the 4 Noble Truths about life and suffering, the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment, Karma, and the practice of meditation. I always felt that if you want to believe in religion, Buddhism is the most intelligent of the lot that one can possibly profess to. However, I don't subscribe to the ideas of Reincarnation and Rebirth. Notwithstanding the Dalai Lama and how Tibetan Lamas are selected, I just don't believe that people who have died can be re-born with their memories and thinking intact and transferred to a new baby born into this world (the transference of souls). I don't think the evidence for Reincarnation is compelling at all. Other than my vex for the more mystical aspects of Buddhism, I have no qualms with Buddhism at all, and am personally quite partial to this religion as compared to Christianity, Hinduism, other religions etc, and Islamism.

I single out Islam last specifically because I think that today, Islam is the worst religion in the world. What with all the suicide bombings, beheadings of innocents, kidnapping of civilians, the ugly demonstrations and the spewing of hatred for non-Muslims, the barbaric treatment of women, the senseless violence etc. Islam has completely failed to live up as a "religion of peace" that it always profess itself to be. But words must be accompanied by deeds, and all the ugliness of Islam I read everyday in the newspaper tells me otherwise.

Personally, I think Islam needs to undergo an Age of Enlightenment like what Christianity and Western society underwent. Without reforms to eradicate the violence, there is no way Islam can ever restore its prestige or its respect in the eyes of others.

I learnt that my barber friend believes in the Chinese school of Buddhism, which is a variant of the Buddhism heavily influenced by Chinese deity mythology. The barber believes that deities like the Jade Emperor, God of Hell etc are real. I told him that I only treat these characters as myths as they simply cannot be true (where is the compelling evidence?). I found his belief in the deities to be very jarring. I always felt that the philosophical aspects of Buddhism are appealing enough as it is, and often wondered why Buddhists would also need to believe in the stories of deities that are obviously supernatural in origin.

I told the barber that I am a person of science, and that I do not believe that humans have been ordained with special gifts by the divinity. The presence of humans on Earth are due to an accident of circumstances, and not because a "god" made us so. Humans (ie. in the form of homo sapiens) have been walking the Earth for only the past 100,000 years. In contrast, dinosaurs ruled the planet for at least 160 million years (although they were suddenly wiped out 65 million years ago). The story of humans have not even covered 10% of 1 million years, so why should we think we are special, or that we will last forever? Indeed, if we are not careful, human beings may just go the way of the dinosaurs.

Evolution has given humans incredibly powerful brains, which allows humans to contemplate. It is because of the contemplative nature of our brain that we want to find a solution to every mystery. Humans crave solutions so desperately (as is the craving for sex) that we must have an answer to every question, regardless of whether the answer is right, wrong, or incomplete.

Our ancient ancestors, with their limited knowledge base, have tried to find answers (to the questions of life) that marries with what they knew back in their time. However, we are now living in the 21st century, and our knowledge of science is millions of times more advanced than what our ancestors knew. Surely we should re-look at these answers, and perhaps attempt to answer the same questions but with the viewpoint and understanding of a modern scientific person? Why must we blindly accept unsatisfying answers from antiquity when new, refreshing, and more rational answers can be provided?

God is not a satisfying answer to the mysteries of life. For every question that theists answer with an attribution to god, I can provide a more compelling answer using purely reason and science, and that has no need to resort to an imaginary god. God doesn't exist. Answers involving imaginary beings are never as convincing as answers that are based on physical realities.

Treatment of Women in Islam

2007-10-08T17:19:00.000+08:00

Seriously, this is what some Arabic sheik believes is the difference between Man and Woman:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5KmIXZM-V8

I don't understand why more Muslim women do not protest against the sexism that is advocated in the Quran. The Muslim holy books were written way back in the 7th century, and surely the religious norms and practices that are observed then are no longer relevant today. However, because these holy books are accepted as inerrant even in the 21st century, they allow Muslim clerics to condemn women as "Deficient in Intelligence":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MylrCU3u6V8

And here is a Muslim lawyer (a doctor no less) who describes how the wife should be beaten by the husband as instructed in the Quran:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nUI3TUdFCk

Indeed, the sorry treatment of women in a fundamentalist Muslim society is still thriving today because all these chauvinistic conduct against women rights are actually endorsed by the Quran! In the 7th century, the status of women is pretty low (practically non-existent) - and women are often compared to property or livestock. Even Prophet Muhammad himself had 11 wives, and his last wife, Aisha, is a mere 6 years old when betrothed to Muhammad. Although Muhammad "only consummated" this marriage when Aisha turned 9, we would call a person having sex with a 9 year old child a paedophile in the 21st century! Today, these Quran writings are being held up and used to perpetuate such abhorrent practices!

Luckily, there are some brave women who are speaking out against the barbarism of fundamentalist Islam (at great danger to their lives, no doubt, as fanatical Muslims are prone to violence against anything they don't like):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wPglHZQf-0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPioGIjS4vc

Libra

2007-09-19T11:32:00.000+08:00

I discovered this gem of a utility yesterday night. It is something I have been looking out for in quite a while, and I am simply astonished that this particular version I found can be so full featured - and FREE!

If you have a considerable collection of books (as I do), and you have been thinking of cataloguing them inside a personal electronic database, but you never got around to doing it because you simply don't have the time to input all those information into the computer, then Libra could just be the program you have been waiting for.

The "smarts" of the Libra program is that instead of entering all the voluminous book details of each book (book title, author, synopsis etc), you enter just the ISBN number (a 10 digit or 13 digit number that uniquely identifies every publication) into the program. Libra uses the ISBN number to cull all the nitty-gritty details of the book from the Amazon.com database, and transfers this information into your own personal database! Because Libra will also pull the book jacket image from Amazon, your book collection is presented in a very pleasing fashion as the following screen capture will attest:

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/njwong88/Libra/photo#5111727272205672498

As you can see from the image, Libra can also catalogue music CDs (the 3 titles on the bottom shelf). Libra can also catalogue video DVDs. (The titles in the screen capture are some books/music in my personal collection. You can click the "View largest photo" link to see the book/CD titles more clearly if you want to know what I have been reading during the past few months )

The program is dirt easy to use and requires no tutorial. And despite its already outstanding feature set, the author has even included a feature which allows you to use your webcam to "scan" the ISBN barcode instead of typing in the 10-digit (or 13-digit) number manually. However, I couldn't test this capability as I don't own a webcam (currently).

Amazingly, this program is developed by a Singaporean company (CodeJam Pte Ltd at Noel Building in Playfair Road). It is sad that instead of reading about this amazing-amazing software from this local company from our veritable Straits Times, I have to learn about it from an American

You can download Libra (and read a much better sales pitch of it) from here:

http://www.getlibra.com/

Remember to click the "About Us" link to read the authors' humorous description about themselves...

Mormonism

2007-09-08T17:25:00.000+08:00

There are many branches of Christianity, each having a slightly different tenet from the other. For example:

Catholicism
Protestant
Presbyterianism
Anglicanism
Methodist
Baptist
Pentecostalism
Charismatics
Quakers
Sunday Adventists

This is just a few of the denominations with churches in Singapore. According to the Wikipedia, there may be as many 300 Christian denominations in the world [link].

However, one of the strangest is that of Mormonism (also called the Latter Day Saints). Mormonism was only established in the United States in 1830, but has a very controversial history because its founder, Joseph Smith, claims to be a latter day prophet who had spoken personally to both the Christian God as well as his son Jesus Christ, and that they had told him to establish a new religion because none of the churches then were practising Christianity correctly. The story of the creation of the Mormon's sacred text, The Book of Mormon, is also one laced with incredulity.

South Park has a segment that accurately portrays how the Mormon religion was founded. As you watch it, you will understand why I find it absolutely amazing that intelligent people today can believe this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTeMEGG4U98

For example, one of the US presidential candidates for 2008 is Mitt Romney, who is a Mormon. Another famous Mormon is the best selling science fiction author Orson Scott Card.

If you are interested, you can read more about Mormonism from this Wikipedia entries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Mormon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith,_Jr.

Straits Times Forum - Charging laptops in the Community Centre

2007-09-01T21:52:00.000+08:00

The Straits Times published one of my letters to the Forum (its in the Online edition and not the Print Edition). Read it if you are interested in my say:

http://www.straitstimes.com:80/ST%2BForum/Online%2BStory/STIStory_153523.html

I really loved the comments, especially the contrarian viewpoints that were offered. It is extremely interesting how very differently people can interpret my short letter from my original intention. When I wrote the letter, my thought processes were this:

- It only costs pennies to power laptops.

- There are more electricity draining equipment such as air-conditioners which are MUCH MUCH more expensive to run compared to laptops.

- CCs are funded by government money for the benefit of the public, especially poorer people. Come on, the Singapore government is super-duper rich. Just look at the PM's million dollar monthly salary. Why besmirch users for tapping into the power socket to power their battery drained laptops when it only cost pennies?

- I was also thinking in terms of the convenience provided to the casual user who may need to recharge his laptop once in a while. I am actually very thankful when I am outside to be able to find a place to charge my laptop battery so that I can continue using my laptop - especially at the end of the day (no thanks to lousy battery technology, most laptop battery can only hold 2 hours of charge). I sometimes do this at fast food restaurants (thanks, McDonalds).

- I am thus in favour that the publicly funded Community Centres allow users to recharge their laptops, and would like to encourage this behaviour.

Obviously, free facilities given in good faith should not be abused. Many critics against my letter state that providing free laptop charging will be abused by the public (and they really draw it to extreme conclusions). Unfortunately, the Singapore Government has been quite effective in teaching everyone that nothing is free (e.g. to get your free CPF $400 top ups during election year, you first have to put in $50 into your CPF account :-) ) and that free things will be abused.

Personally, I think we can encourage altruism in our society and not think so negatively about so many things. Call me the optimist :-)

The God Who Wasn't There

2007-08-28T13:52:00.000+08:00

This is a great documentary which isn't available for sale in Singapore due to our strict censorship laws regarding taboo topics such as religion. Generally, anti-religious books are easier to obtain in Singapore, but movies or documentaries are usually no-nos. It is great that some one has uploaded this documentary on YouTube.

If you do not know what this documentary is about, there is a good write up of it in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Who_Wasn't_There

Part 1 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cioXrHanjXc

Part 2 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MweSy-61lU

Part 3 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8Ouy9W8RkE

Part 4 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04hzgMjPRtk

Part 5 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJd1kWlLjPs

Part 6 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re2HtQ0n9W4

Google Maps and Google Earth

2007-08-22T15:41:00.001+08:00

I just learnt that Google Maps can now be embedded like YouTube videos within a HTML page. That is quite useful. Below is a Google Maps embed of my home street (Yishun Central):

View Larger Map

You can click and drag the mouse to navigate within the image, or zoom in and out using the "+" and "-" buttons on the left panel.

The "Map", "Sat" and "Hyb" buttons shows the plain map, or the satellite photo, or a hybrid combining both the map and the satellite photo.

Click on the "View Larger Map" link to go to Google Maps directly where you can search for other locations.

Besides Google Maps, which runs in a web browser, Google also has a more powerful standalone desktop application called Google Earth. Google Earth now even includes an astronomy feature (called "Sky"). The new "Sky" function of Google Earth is introduced here:

Google Earth (version 4.2) can be downloaded from here:

http://earth.google.com/sky/index.html

Isaac Asimov's "The Tragedy of the Moon"

2007-08-19T03:17:00.000+08:00

I found this great video on YouTube that lists several famous atheists:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdVucvo-kDU

I am often surprised that many scientists like Francis Collins and Michael Behe, with their knowledge of science, still cling to their belief in the supernatural Judeo-Christian god as the creator of the universe. Although I too believed in a god when I was a child, when I first learnt the scientific explanations for life and the universe, I realised that science offered a much more elegant and satisfying explanation for our being as compared to the religious explanations.

As a child, I had read the bible stories in my school library, and I felt that the stories were like fairy tales (Adam and Eve and a talking snake, Noah and his titanic boat, Moses and the killing of all first born children in Egypt etc). However, my adult teachers say these were facts that really happened as they are written in the bible. Luckily, I was also brought up on stories of Chinese and Hindu gods, and I immediately realised that all their creation stories of how the world was made conflicted with one another. By the time I was 13, I already knew that since none of these religious creation stories are the same, the religious explanations were probably all wrong, and the stories are really myths, just like all the other fairy tales I have read.

In 1979, I read a book by Isaac Asimov called "The Tragedy of the Moon", which was actually a collection of his science essays. The main essay, that is also the title of the book, gave Asimov's explanation on why he think it was a tragedy for Earth to have a Moon, and speculated on how much better it would have been for humankind if the Earth had no Moon.

The main premise of that essay is that because of the Moon, which does revolve around the Earth, the ancients were led to the belief that the Sun must also revolve around the Earth, and similarly for all the stars in the sky. Earth must be the centre of the universe, and humans are special and must be created by god since god has put humans to inhabit the Earth.

Asimov argued that if the Moon did not exist, humans would have realised much earlier that the Earth actually revolved around the Sun, and that science and astronomy would not have been set back by thousands of years because of the wrong belief of an Earth-centric solar system instead of the correct helio-centric solar system.

In that essay, I learnt about Christianity's horrible treatment of scientists like Galileo Galilei and Copernicus because they had dared to question the belief that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and to raise doubt that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. I subsequently learnt how harshly the Christians have treated scientists for speaking about science that conflicted with the bible, condemning innocent people for witchcraft, forcing people into slavery, or forcing religious conversions on people of other religions. Christianity certainly did not earn my admiration.

In the following year, I watched Carl Sagan's enormously fascinating "Cosmos" series on TV. By then, I realised that good scientific explanations could be offered for many questions on the aspects of life. There was no need for any recourse to a magical being for explaining why things were so. The religious explanations for life were so insufficient and lacking in so many ways.

From then onwards, I would reply my Christian friends who tell me that "man is made by god " that they were wrong, and that instead, it is god who is made by man.

"Planet Earth" Documentary Series

2007-08-15T11:32:00.000+08:00

I was recommending the BBC documentary series "Planet Earth" to a friend who didn't know about it, and thought maybe I should share it with the rest of you.

"Planet Earth" is the most expensive documentary series made to date, and Singaporeans were extremely lucky that Arts Central bought it and screened it a few months back (the telecast ended in June). This documentary series boasts of incredible visuals filmed with High Definition cameras. Even though Arts Central only broadcasts in Standard Definition, the HD quality seeps through the telecast, and the images were simply astounding even when viewed on a normal Standard Definition TV.

To understand what I am raving about, Amazon.com is hosting a trailer for the "Planet Earth" documentary series in their promotion for the DVD. This trailer shows several of the breathtaking visuals from the series, and you will know why I rave about this series once you see them:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/2379

Actually, someone has uploaded some episodes (complete episodes) of the "Planet Earth" series on Google Video. However, these uploaded videos are compressed, and much of the visual quality is lost. However, the documentaries are still excellent for their informational content.

The following link is for the "Caves" episode:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4535193000141776798

One segment of this episode shows how Bird's Nest is made by a bird called the Swiftlet inside a cave in Borneo (Sarawak) called "Deer Cave" ("Deer Cave" is among one of the largest caves in the world). If you are interested in how the Bird's Nest you consume is made, then this video is a must-watch.

If you like this particular episode, you can use the "Related Videos" link to follow other uploaded episodes of the series.

BBC Documentary on Scientology

2007-06-29T19:20:00.000+08:00

You probably know that top Hollywood stars Tom Cruise and John Travolta worship a religion called "Scientology". Scientology is highly controversial, and as for me, I just cannot understand why highly intelligent people like Cruise and Travolta would believe in this kind of pseudo-science stuff.

In May of this year, the BBC broadcast a Panorama documentary about Scientology which reveals the creepy way this wacko cult operates - the Scientology people actually hired spies to secretly follow the BBC crew around as they were making their documentary. This, and other devious tactics practised by the Scientologists, are aptly depicted in the BBC documentary which can be viewed on Google Video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-126281853779690652

More facts about Scientology can be found at the Wikipedia website ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology ), and it makes for fascinating but disturbing reading. There is also a 3 minute South Park cartoon satirising Scientology, but which actually contains a condensed but accurate depiction about Scientology's beliefs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAmEO-oLHzA

The End of Faith

2007-06-24T19:33:00.000+08:00

After 9/11, the Bali bombings of 2002, and the Jemaah Islamiyah threat to bomb the Yishun MRT Station, I have became more conscious that Islamist religious fanatics can seriously threaten and destroy civilisation. Without doubt, these Islamic terrorists must be stopped before more innocent lives are killed.

Indeed, Sam Harris was so affected by 9/11 that he wrote the book, "The End of Faith", as his response to it (S$17.33 from Kinokuniya). It is a well argued book on why blind acceptance of religious beliefs is a threat to civilisation, and why fundamentalist Islam is particularly dangerous.

Harris wrote a follow up book, "Letter to a Christian Nation", which emphasizes on the dangers of fundamentalist Christianity.

Both Islam and Christianity centre their foundations on the "divine" writings in the scriptures of the Quran and the Bible. The dogmatic interpretations of these ancient writings by fundamentalists in the 21st century poses a conflict with modern civilisation, and makes religion particularly dangerous - especially to people who do not believe in the same faith as the fundamentalists.

Many Christians believe that the Bible is a perfect document written (or influenced) by a perfect god and as such is an infallible text. Harris points out in "The End of Faith" that the Bible is actually riddled with contradictions, and that even way back in 1859, William Henry Burr has actually published a book called "Self-Contradictions of the Bible". The list of contradictions has been published here:

http://skeptically.org/newtestament/id19.html

These mistakes in the Bible should lead thinking Christians to query whether the Bible is indeed the handiwork of a perfect god, or that the book is as perfect as it is being claimed. With such revealing mistakes, it becomes suspect as to whether the writings in the Bible should be treated literally as divine truths.

I like another section in "Letter to a Christian Nation" in which Sam Harris talks about Christians who strongly believe that "The Ten Commandments" in the Bible is the strongest statement about morality which no other religion can improve upon:

The Ten Commandments
1. You shall have no other Gods but me.

2. You shall not make for yourself any idol, nor bow down to it or worship it.

3. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God.

4. You shall remember and keep the Sabbath day holy.

5. Respect your father and mother.

6. You must not kill.

7. You must not commit adultery.

8. You must not steal.

9. You must not give false evidence against your neighbour.

10. You must not be envious of your neighbour's goods. You shall not be envious of his house nor his wife, nor anything that belongs to your neighbour.

In response, Harris quotes Mahavira, the patriarch of Jainism, who surpasses the morality of the Ten Commandments with a single one:

Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.

In fact, there is a very humorous skit by comedian George Carlin on YouTube about the Ten Commandments:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CitfTtMIx8

There is another George Carlin video on religion in general:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uBAPbOWLxc

The God Delusion

2007-06-23T18:15:00.000+08:00

I bought Richard Dawkins book "The God Delusion" at MPH Funan Centre on 19 May 2007 (price: S$18.90). This is the new UK paperback edition with a new preface (book details at Amazon.co.uk):

"The God Delusion" is an excellent book that uses science, philosophy, history, logic and reason to explain why the gods promulgated by Christianity, Islam, Judaism are extremely improbable, and debunks the idea that we need to believe in such gods to be good humans to lead meaningful and moral lives.

In fact, when I was young, I had already pondered on the following conundrum:

Christianity says it is the one true religion. Islam says it is the one true religion. But logic dictates that if Christianity is the one true religion, then Islam must be wrong. Or if Islam is the one true religion, then Christians must be worshipping the wrong god.
How can both religions be right? The only logical conclusion that can be drawn is that they could both be wrong!

As I learnt more about science and history, I gradually came to the realisation that it is not god who created humans, but it is humans who had created god.

Being educated in an English speaking environment, I was exposed to a lot of Christian evangelists who were extremely enthusiastic in their trying to proselytise me to their faith. I am very glad that my school education required me to study all the major religions of Singapore: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism. When you study comparative religions, and have a good grounding in science and history, you will be armed with enough defences to protect yourself against the shrill being blasted at you by the Christian evangelicals that "you must believe in Jesus Christ or you will be condemned to burn in Hell for eternity!" Talk about a loving god :-)

Despite my constant debates and arguments with these Christian evangelists, I knew these debates were always lost causes. I cannot possibly sway others who are set in their beliefs to my way of thinking, as they cannot possibly convince me about changing my stance without conclusive evidence that their god is a real entity.

However, I do not go about preaching to others about my atheism. The irritating thing about Christian evangelicals is that they do. And every Saturday, you will see them waylaying passerbys (especially people going to the library) to tell them about the "4 Spiritual Laws".

However, as the Christian evangelists are well funded and are always proactively promoting their religion, so it is inevitable they will gain new converts. Indeed, the dawn of the 21st century has not seen humankind stepping into a new age of science and reason. Indeed, in the sole hyper-power of the world, the United States of America, fundamentalist Christianity has greatly expanded its influence, and have gained significant power in the political arena.

The problem with fundamentalist Christians is that their stance is as rigid and as scary as the Islamic Taleban , as they both base morality on ancient scriptures instead of rationality and reason.

"The God Delusion" is a much needed book to educate the public on why the existence of the Christian god is highly improbable, and that morality should be based on rationality and reason, and not on ancient texts espousing values that have no relevance to modern living. The book is well thought out, well argued, well organised, well written, and well worth reading.

Richard Dawkins actually made a 2-part documentary for UK's Channel 4 station on a related theme prior to the publication of "The God Delusion". You can watch the documentary on Google Video:

Root of All Evil - Part 1 : The God Delusion

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9002284641446868316

Root of All Evil - Part 2 : The Virus of Faith

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7619161192220036050

Lingoes

2007-06-22T13:08:00.000+08:00

A few years ago (2004), I wrote about the excellent Merriam Webster Online Dictionary (www.m-w.com) . I still find this online dictionary extremely useful today because besides giving you the definition, you can also click on the speaker icon to hear how each word is pronounced.

Try figuring out how to pronounce these words:

Cheyenne
Banyan
Pyrrhic

and you will see why the pronunciation feature is a godsend.

However, if you are using a notebook computer, you may not have internet access all the time. It would be nice to have access to a dictionary that is installed on your hard disk in such situations. For this, I can heartily recommend this new freeware that I have just found called "Lingoes":

www.lingoes.net

Lingoes is not a dictionary. It is a dictionary engine. After installing the dictionary engine, you need to load the actual dictionary separately. However, it can load MORE THAN ONE dictionary! I loaded mine with the following dictionaries:

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Oxford Advanced Learners English Dictionary
Oxford Advanced Learners English-Chinese Dictionary
Collins COBUILD Advanced Learners English Dictionary

The interface is very user friendly. The dictionary interface will display the word definition from all the dictionaries you've loaded. Thus, if you do not understand the explanation provided by one dictionary, you can scroll down to read the explanations given by the other dictionaries to make things clearer. And because I also loaded the "Oxford Advanced Learners English-Chinese Dictionary", I can also see the Chinese definition on the same page.

Mind you, the dictionaries available for download are ELITE stuff (from Longman, Oxford, and Collins no less). True, the dictionary publishers supplied only their "Learners edition" dictionaries for free, but that is actually good enough for the average user.

For your info, the Oxford and Collins advanced learners dictionaries only cover about 50,000 words, while the Longman dictionary covers about 100,000 words. That is why many a time, you will find a word defined only in the Longman dictionary, but not in the Oxford or Collins advanced learners dictionaries. Because the Longman dictionary has a larger word set than the others, I arranged for it to be the first dictionary in my results list.

In contrast, my hard copy "Oxford Concise English Dictionary" covers 240,000 words, which is more than double that of the Longman and 4 times that of the advanced learners dictionaries. Obviously Oxford will not provide their premium "Concise English Dictionary" away for free.

The "Oxford Advanced Learners English-Chinese Dictionary" has a word set of only 25,000 words. However, for its limited vocabulary, its Chinese definitions are invaluable.

I noticed that the definitions given by the Collins COBUILD dictionary are the easiest to understand. This dictionary is very suitable for primary school children.

Lingoes also has a feature called "Cursor Translation", which allows you to display the dictionary definition of a word in other applications like Word, Excel etc. Just hover the mouse cursor over a word and click the Left Shift key to popup the dictionary definition.

Finally, Lingoes has a LIMITED pronunciation capability. It actually makes use of the built-in speech synthesizer in the Windows XP operating system to pronounce the words. Speech synthesizers do not normally pronounce words correctly. You can compare the pronunciation generated by Lingoes with those recorded in the Merriam Webster website. The difference in quality is very pronounced :-)

Letter to the Straits Times Forum

2007-06-02T09:17:00.000+08:00

The Straits Times Forum published a letter of mine in the online edition today. I had commented on an article written by Dr Andy Ho, the senior science and ethics writer for the Straits Times, which actually contain hidden biases favouring Creationism and Christianity over science (I am sure Andy Ho is a devout Catholic based on the position he has taken in his other opinion articles). I submitted my letter to the Straits Times last Friday (25 May 2007), and thought that it was rejected for publication. I was quite surprised that they finally published it today (2 June 2007), almost 9 days later.

http://www.straitstimes.com:80/ST%2BForum/Online%2BStory/STIStory_124926.html

I believe the free site on the Straits Times website contains only a 3-day archive for free access by the public. If you are interested to read what I wrote, you will need to visit the link before Tuesday (5 June 2007).

For some strange reason, the Straits Times has made every sentence ending in a period (full-stop) a paragraph on its own. In my original letter, excluding the bulleted points, I had a total of 6 paragraphs. In the published version, this ballooned into 13 paragraphs! The Straits Times published my letter without deleting a single word from my original.

Regards, NJ

Dispatches - Undercover Mosque

2007-05-10T16:03:00.001+08:00

Last Saturday (5 May 2007) at a reunion lunch gathering with some ex-Conner (FIS) colleagues, I mentioned to my friends that I was very perturbed by the hijacking of religion to promote hatred and intolerance. I was referring to the fundamentalist Islam as practised by militant and radical Muslims in the Middle East, but which is gradually making in-roads into South East Asia, and even influencing moderate Islam here. Personally, I feel that the problem has been severely amplified since 9/11 as moderate Muslims everywhere are not aggressively confronting the theology of hate that is sprouted by the radicals, allowing children and impressionable youths to be indoctrinated with this dangerous form of their religion that threatens life and society for everyone. By allowing these teachings of hate to grow, the intolerant form of Islam becomes the "norm" instead of the extremist variant they were supposed to be!

I had developed a certain impression of such radical Muslims from my reading of internet articles and newspaper reports. However, I was actually quite unprepared for the level of hatred that is being espoused by the religious teachers (imams) against non-Muslims until I watched this British documentary, "Dispatches - Undercover Mosque" from UK's Channel 4 TV station. The 1-hour documentary shows how although some British mosques publicly profess to promote an Islam of love and understanding and tolerance of other faiths (they belong to a government inter-faith group that works with other religious organisations), internally, the imams go about propagating their teachings of hatred for all "kuffaars" (non-Muslims), and for their ultimate aim to bring down governments and establishments and to install their militant brand of Islam for everyone.

The documentary is quite an eye-opener. It was aired in the UK on 15 January this year.

Part 1 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peFQWuk4nuo

Part 2 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuCLC8kjWCI

Part 3 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5t5EqWX92k

Part 4 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMztM0Z7BYE

Part 5 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4Zv3BUmwqs

Part 6 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvjvNScmTQA

DVD43

2007-04-20T12:45:00.000+08:00

Last Sunday (15 Apr 2007), I visited the new megastores at Tampines (Ikea, Courts, and Giant) for the first time. I learned 2 lessons from this outing:

Never visit 3 megastores at one go. It is tiring to walk around just one megastore, never mind three!
Never shop at Giant Tampines on Sunday, or at any peak period. The queues are horrendous!

I had not intended to buy anything at Giant. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Giant was selling the original DVD for "Superman Returns" for only $12. Now, that is even cheaper than the VCD version, which retails at $15! The DVD version even includes a second DVD containing a bonus documentary about the making of "Superman Returns", which was not available on the VCD.

There was a catch. This original $12 DVD is actually a Region 6 DVD, meant for the China market. Singapore is designated Region 3, as is most of South East Asia. However, the Region 3 DVD for "Superman Returns" retails for $30, which is significantly higher than $12 for the Region 6 DVD.

Theoretically, all DVD players sold in Singapore should only play Region 3 DVDs. However, most standalone DVD players have been tweaked at the factory to be "Region Free" - otherwise, consumers will not buy them. As such, playing the Region 6 DVD was not a problem on my standalone DVD player.

However, when it came to the DVD drive on my Dell notebook, this was not so simple. Region coding has not been disabled on the DVD drive on my notebook, which has been configured as Region 3. And all the DVD playing software provided by Dell (Dell MediaDirect as well as Microsoft Windows Media Player) "respected" the region code setting on the drive, and therefore refused to play the Region 6 DVD!

Although I could change the DVD Region setting on the DVD drive to play the disc, I am limited to only changing the region setting 5 times. This was not a permanent solution:

I did a Google search, and found the following freeware gem:

http://www.dvd43.com/

DVD43 installs on your Windows XP system and performs real-time decrypting of Region protected DVDs. When it is running, it displays a green smiley face on your system tray, and will auto-strip all Region protection from a protected DVD when the DVD is played.

And indeed, once installed, the Region 6 "Superman Returns" DVD played beautifully in both Microsoft Windows Media Player as well as Dell MediaDirect on my notebook.

Hope you find this tip useful.

Downloading YouTube videos and converting Multimedia files

2007-03-30T00:52:00.000+08:00

I recently upgraded my Singtel account to the Singtel MIO bundle (broadband + mobile phone + fixed line phone for $68 per month). Making this switch netted me physical savings of $4 per month (compared to the $72 total I paid previously for the services separately). Besides being cheaper, I am also getting:

faster broadband speed (3000 kbps compared to 1500 kbps previously)
free SMS, free caller ID, and more mobile minutes for outgoing calls (100 minutes compared to 80 minutes)
- free outgoing fixed line calls (I used to pay 1.4 cents per minute for outgoing calls on my fixed line)

This is truly one of those "no brainer" deals.

****

When I upgraded to the MIO plan, Singtel said it was mandatory that I get a new mobile phone. After evaluating the offerings available, I finally opted for a $0 phone. For a free phone, I found the Samsung Ultra Edition 8.4 to be feature-packed! You can read a review of the phone and its features at this site:

http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/mobilephones/0,39051199,39271322p,00.htm

As you can see from the CNET magazine review, this phone can play MP3 music and MP4 video files. As I have never owned such multimedia phones before (yup, I am that behind the times in terms of handphone ownership), I got all caught up trying all kinds of MP3 songs from my personal music collection for my ring tone. In the end, I settled on "Sara" (from the Jefferson Starship album "Knee Deep in the Hoopla"), which is one of my favorite songs from the 1980s.

However, I then found the "Sara" music video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqRTtkEHrA4

Not content with having "Sara" as my ring tone, I now wanted to also load the "Sara" music video on my Ultra Edition phone.

If you have tried to download YouTube's videos before, you know that you can't actually save YouTube videos on to your hard disk as easily as you can with regular files.

A little investigation told me that all YouTube videos are actually stored in FLV (Flash Video) format. I also found many techniques and utilities for saving YouTube videos as FLV files on the hard disk. However, the method that I am recommending is also the easiest to remember: Just put the word "Kiss" before "YouTube" to get "KissYouTube".

To download a copy of a YouTube video, simply prefix "kiss" before the word "youtube" in the URL. Using the above URL as an example, to download the "Sara" video, all I needed was to type this URL instead in my web browser:

http://www.kissyoutube.com/watch?v=ZqRTtkEHrA4

On the KissYouTube page that is opened, click the link "Download Now" to begin the download. As per the instructions given, you must remember to add the extension ".FLV" to the file name when you save the file on your hard disk.

****

If you want to play FLV files from your PC, I strongly recommend the freeware (and open sourced) media player VLC, which can be downloaded from this site:

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

A few years ago, I obtained a video in WMV format from a Microsoft CDROM. However, the WMV file on the CDROM was partially corrupted, and Microsoft's Windows Media Player refused to play the corrupted WMV file - complaining that it was bad and not playable etc. The corrupted WMV file will not play on other players like RealPlayer or Quicktime either. As I wanted to watch the video, I discovered references to the VLC program from a Google search. To my astonishment and delight, VLC played the corrupted WMV file without any problems whatsoever. I was sold on the VLC player ever since.

****

However, the Ultra Edition phone cannot play videos in FLV format. To play the "Sara" music video, I need to first convert the FLV file to MP4 format.

I have found a fantastic web site that will convert a file in any media format to any other media format. And yes, the conversion service is free!

http://media-convert.com/

In the Media-Convert site, simply specify the source file from your hard disk and its media type. Then, specify the destination type you wish to convert the file to. Click the "Convert" button, and viola! The conversion is done for you. There is no software to be installed, so you can perform these conversions from a Windows, Mac, or even Linux computer!

I converted the "Sara.FLV" file to "Sara.MP4", and uploaded the MP4 file into my phone. I now have the "Sara" music video playing beautifully on my new phone.

Wickedly, the Media-Convert site is also able to convert the FLV video file to an MP3 music file too. Thus, this is also a good way to extract just the audio portion of a video file in to an MP3 file for use as a ring tone!

Hope you find these tips fun and useful. As a bonus, here is another YouTube music video that you might want to "rip" and "collect":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhAjrIAFiJ0

Enjoy! NJ