Category: ranting

As Lin Yutang, the famous Chinese writer and inventor said: “What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?” That must be it.

Kenneth Jeyaretnam in Disneyland With the Death Penalty, Revisited [wired.com]

That might be the most insightful thing about Singaporeans I’ve ever read… You could never find another place on Earth that has the variety of food in Singapore. Food is one of the things that make it hard to take a Singaporean out of Singapore.

Someone, commenting on this article in another forum said:

I think we have to stop saying shit about the place you live. If you don’t like it, move :)

Setting aside the fact that moving is often not an option, I think this person missed the point of the article, expressed near the end:

Later this evening I’m going out to eat in Little India’s Serangoon Road at the Banana Leaf Apolo Restaurant. There one dines deliciously off a banana leaf rather than a plate. It’s still one of my favorite places to eat. I used to go with my parents as a boy and my father used to take my son out there for breakfast. No doubt my son will take his son.

Despite the fact the the author’s father was sued into destitution by members of the ruling party for defamation, the author still calls Singapore home. And regardless; if one is going to complain about a place, it is in the end only where you do, or have lived, that you should be complaining about. I think it is altogether right to complain about is where you live… No place is perfect and you can always desire change in the things you do not agree with or you dislike about your home. It might be a product of leisure time but it is what it is. Desiring the better the place you live strikes me as a healthy form or navel gazing. We all want things to be better. Every time we get what we want we move the goal post. We always strive for a better place in the world. Singapore is a good place on balance but that does not mean people who live here should just accept things as they are forever, let do better in the future.

The Guardian has a great article [theguardian.com] by Ian Stewart about the mathematical basis (or lack thereof) of the derivatives market explosion which lead to the financial meltdown when the sub-prime mortgage market collapsed.

As with most things that eventually come crashing down spectacularly we should have seen it coming… between the hubris:

[the equation] allowed derivatives to become commodities that could be traded in their own right. The financial sector called it the Midas Formula and saw it as a recipe for making everything turn to gold. But the markets forgot how the story of King Midas ended.

Ian Stewart, The mathematical equation that caused the banks to crash, from The Guardian

and the eye watering numbers:

[the equation] underpinned massive economic growth. By 2007, the international financial system was trading derivatives valued at one quadrillion dollars per year. This is 10 times the total worth, adjusted for inflation, of all products made by the world’s manufacturing industries over the last century.

All that because of the abuse of mathematics by people who don’t understand math. When people who do understand (scientists) math abuse it you end up with nuclear WMDs. When people who don’t understand it (traders) abuse it you end up with financial WMDs.

To quote:

[M]arket traders copy other market traders. Virtually every financial crisis in the last century has been pushed over the edge by the herd instinct. It makes everything go belly-up at the same time. If engineers took that attitude, and one bridge in the world fell down, so would all the others.

Monkey see; monkey do. My favorite quote in the article has nothing to do with finance or math:

In ancient times, all known swans were white and “black swan” was widely used in the same way we now refer to a flying pig. But in 1697, the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh found masses of black swans on what became known as the Swan River in Australia. So the phrase now refers to an assumption that appears to be grounded in fact, but might at any moment turn out to be wildly mistaken.

That’s a thing I didn’t know.