A serious post for once

 I saw someone on Twitter comment that the market cap of Zoom has now surpassed that of the oil majors, and that the industrial age is now giving way to the digital age. 

It just struck me how amazing that was. 

Mere decades ago, people were hand-writing letters and posting them. All the information that you could transmit to someone in another place was your writing on a physical piece of paper that had to be delivered physically by a middle-man (postal services). A middle-man that is enabled by the industrial age in the form of fossil fuels, ships and aeroplanes.

The Internet changed all that. The information that I can transmit no longer had to be physical. I can make this blog post and anyone else in the world can see it as long as they have an Internet connection. I can send an email. And now with Zoom, I can video-call. Zoom is the middle-man that has been enabled by the Internet to deliver such a service. Previous middle-men like the postal services still exist, but their importance in our lives has diminished. 

Now, it is argued that the blockchain is going to bring forth a new wave of change. Not only can you transmit information, you can transmit value. But, you say, I can already do an online bank transfer, what's the point of a blockchain?  

A bank is a middle-man like a postal service. It makes use of the Internet to provide banking services. In effect, when you transfer money online from person A to person B, it goes from person A to the bank account of person A, and then it goes to the bank account of person B before it goes to person B. Whereas using the blockchain, it can go direct from person A to person B. 

Bitcoin is perhaps the email of the age of blockchain. It's probably pointless right now to speculate on what's the Zoom equivalent of the blockchain. A better question would be, what is the Blogger equivalent? What is the Yahoo equivalent? 

Twitter Review

Since we've been doing all these reviews, let's review Twitter the social media platform.

Virtually none of my friends use Twitter, and I set up an account cos I thought, hey, gotta make new friends. Maybe I'll find people with similar interests, since you can follow all these different people.

I ended up following people in cryptotwitter, people who seem to know whether bitcoin was gonna go up or down. Sounds ridiculous looking back. Followed a couple who posted about stocks and wealth. Followed a great analyst of geopolitical affairs.

And then I gave up after 6 months. It was taking over my life. Whereas I would spend my pre-covid time stoning and staring into space on the train, now I was scrolling my twitter feed any time I was 'free', like when I'm taking a dump. I was getting anxiety trying to keep up with all the information on the feed.

So I deleted it. And it was perfectly fine. I don't miss it at all. I had some good discoveries. I subscribed to the email newsletter of the geopolitical analyst, and occasionally go to the blog of a crypto dude who really knows his stuff. In the end, there were too many people trying to sound important on twitter. Blowing their own trumpets. outdoing each other with the best analysis, the best predictions etc.

The problem is that the intellectual masturbation doesn't do jack for me. It was time to go.

Though who knows, might be back someday.

name review: X AE A-12

i'm glad people are still doing insane things during covid time. i legit thought i was going insane, until the article i read on what elon musk has named his kid.

okay that didn't make me less insane, just him being out of this world insane.

wait... "out of this world"... sounds like how he would like it.

inb4 all the memes on how his kid's name (i refuse to even type it, i tried so long and still can't find the code to type the AE greek letter) could be a captcha or a registration ID. one of those randomly generated serial numbers. the internet has covered all the possibilities on how his name was derived.

then there are some people who worry about his kid being made fun of at school; but hey, did you really think that elon musk was going to send his follow-up robot/machine/homo deus to a place where he/it can meet other NORMAL PLEBS?

i hardly think so. school is reserved for losers like you and me.

from what i see, he merely gave his child a name the aliens could pronounce, because space is the future.

you guys read animorphs? (childhood flashback again)

on the planet where andalites came from, thousands of light years away, "Aximili Esgarrouth Isthmil" is a very easy name to pronounce.

for all you know, X AE A-12 is the equivalent of Dave on some foreign planet.

that would make so much sense no?

let's stop for a moment with the extraterrestrial theory and talk about earth - since i feel like i'm losing some of you with an alienating line of argument. i feel it is so much easier (and more fun!) to engage in some elon musk-bashing with "he's a crazy dude".

what did you really expect from a kid whose parents have names like "ELON" and "GRIMES"?

i mean, GRIMES? i once knew a Muk but Grimes is like calling your kid Gastly or Jynx. its beyond a pokémon name, it's a distorted pokémon name with negative connotations.

see, if your kid was called Scyther, that could be cool.

Gengar could also be cool.

Sandshrew is a bit more dodgy.

Caterpie maybe not.

but you get what i mean.

nevertheless, this genius of a Grimes took to Twitter to explain the name of their progeny, which in my humble opinion explains nothing at all.

look, if you were going to name your children after whatever you like, then i guess my future child is gonna be called..

ZZNC D2 VW

ZZNC = 珍珠奶茶 (milk tea with pearl)
D2 = Dota 2
VW = Volkswagen.

just kidding! (get it..? kidding??) i don't really like VW.

i could go on forever, but i need to think about what to really name my child. after all, not being elon musk means i need to send him/her to school and having been a mean kid once, i know i'd make fun of a name.

Book Review: Death on the Barrens

This is a really good book.

6 guys go on a canoeing trip into the Canadian wilderness. They're not exactly friends at the beginning, just a group of people on a trip together.

Shit happens. One guy, the trip leader, dies from exposure to the elements. (His canoe capsized and he spent too much time in the freezing river water). The rest make it back to civilisation.

On the scale of difficulty for explorations, there's probably been tougher expeditions. You can even say they underestimated nature and screwed up in their planning for the trip. But that would be missing the point.

This memoir feels really personal. Sometimes, people say they have a spiritual journey and I roll my eyes. For this memoir, I can almost feel the author's spiritual journey, and that of his companions. It's not a feel-good story. It's not written by the author to justify himself. It's also not a survival book that documents how the author had the grit to survive. In fact, it's the opposite. It examines the feebleness of life and shines a light into hidden corners of life that we don't even consider when we live in material comfort.  

In this age when we give likes to others for just eating at a nice restaurant, or a well-taken photo of a shoe, this book goes back to the basics of life and death. 

It's the kind of masterpiece that an author can only put together once in his lifetime.  

Why do people believe in God? There isn't a simple answer but this book shows and hints at some answers. It's not easy trying to convey what cannot be understood in its abstract, but the author tries his best.

differences

1) what is the difference between my bed, 9:30am on the S&P and the USD?

Ans: the first is a place where i spend all my time, the second is a time where i spend all my money, the third is a money that's spent in all places and is honestly only there to make the riddle complete.

2) what is the difference between an angsty dota 2 pub (e.g. me) and the world famous dendi?

Ans: the former has probably won at least a dota game in the past two weeks.

3) what is the difference between talk cock summit and UN General Assembly?

Ans: the latter is televised.

4) what is the difference between spanish laughing guy (see below) and ho ching?

Ans: this guy laughs JAJAJA and JEJEJEJE while ho ching prefers a variety of HEE HEE and HIC HIC HIC HIC!

5) what is the difference between donald trump's ego and my bicycle tyre?

Ans: one needs to be inflated and the other deflated. not necessarily in that order.

6) what is the difference between Crash Landing on You and the new berlin airport?

Ans: there's some landing taking place where there isn't supposed to be; and for the latter.. there is no landing where there's supposed to be.

nothing's landed about 69 years after the airport has started construction.

and with covid we could be waiting another 69 years more woohoo~

laundry

this is an issue i have been grappling with - i wonder if laundrical (?) norms still apply now that i'm practically out of society. i've thought a while before posting this, but ah come on, it's not as if i'm going to be meeting any of you guys anyway.

judge all you want - but you will realise by the end of the post that i make sense.

perhaps it would be most helpful to first ask: why do we do laundry?

the prima facie answer is simple - to have clean clothes. (duh has lockdown dumbed your senses?)

now i could launch into a full-scale debate of whether doing laundry really does give you clean clothes, or that the difference pre- and post-laundry is minimal, but that would turn a talkcocksummit post into a thesis, so let's scrap this for now.

if i wanted to do a thesis, i should be doing my real thesis anyway :/

let's do it shanmugam style and set up a false dichotomy. if you do your laundry, you wear clean clothes. if you don't, you wear dirty clothes.

so what if you wear dirty clothes? dirt never truly killed anyone, if we were to define dirt as the dust particles that settle in your room on a daily basis.

***COVID IS NOT CLASSIFIED AS DIRT.***

then detractors would argue, but dirt doesn't have to kill for it to be wrong. it is unhygienic and could be unhealthy for your skin if you wear dirty clothes.

this could be controversial but surely hygiene is only an issue when normal society applies?

let's put it this way. i did know of some pretty dirty people back in school but i didn't bother lecturing them on the finer points on how body odour turns people away, or could cause skin problems.

oh no boy. i just avoid them like the plague. i go to school on the first day to book my seat next to people who do not dig their noses in class.

i might have digressed a little. my point is, i am now one of those "dirty" people but everyone is already avoiding everyone. therefore i conclude that the old rules don't apply.

the next-level moralist could be asking an even deeper question: such as, should you not be doing the "right thing" even when nobody is looking?

like would you jaywalk across the road when it's 3am?

for the record, i would. (i even do it when it's 3pm, as long it's not in front of an elderly german lady with children nearby.)

and that's precisely why i cannot apologise for not doing any laundry this month.

applies to everything

saw this little graph making its rounds around social media, i must say it has to be rather true for the most of us sitting at home doing mindless surfing:

 

or even if you aren't doing mindless surfing, this exponential graph still likely holds true. see, you only take 2-3 seconds on the simple graph before you swipe to the next image; or move on to the next piece of news.

therefore, if you were to check covid stats 10 times a day compared to your daily update back in january (if you even did check anything), that qualifies as exponential, kind of..?

can't think of what other exponential graphs one could be looking at - although what did occur to me are the number of exponential graphs i could plot after lockdown.

first is the time i spend on social media. i think that goes without saying. for any amount of time that you spend in bed alone and awake (so exclude sleeping, rabak and seks), you're most likely to be surfing some random chit or watching videos. 

lockdown = a lot (read: exponentially) more time at home

exp. more time at home = exp. more time in bed

exp. more time in bed = exp. more time on social media

there i've solved it. 

second is the time i spend on runs. it's so far an untold secret that i'm becoming the asian eliud kipchoge. while he now only takes a leisurely "jog" every morning according to some interview, i have been doing serious training and running my arse off every other day.

some qualifications though:

- his leisurely jog is still probably faster than my "running my arse off"

- my "serious training" is the only physical activity i get. other 23.5h i'm immobile.

- only reason why this is an exponential graph is because of the pathetic time i've put into running in jan/feb.

my trusty strava app showed that i did 77.7km in april, compared to 40km in march and something like 10km in february.

granted it's not a lot, but it's still exponential.

third is the time spent cooking. i doubt i need to launch into any lengthy explanation for anyone to understand this.

so i'll stop here. i think the point is made - this can apply to everything.

still, exponential graphs don't last forever. there is a limit at the top because at some point, finite resources dictate that the line does not run to infinity. if i already spend 20 hours a day wasting my time on social media (p.s. i don't, i also waste my time on dota), the next exponential step could be 80 hours and we all know nobody has 80 hours in a day.

unless you're doing MLM and borrowing others' hours for yourself ahem.

anyway, what this means is that the insanity has to stop somewhere. for one i think most of us have stopped looking at covid stats, because they are just rising numbers that reveal unpleasant truths. what's the point even if you know that x country has y cases a day? unless you run a slightly sadistic covid betting game (i can totally imagine), there is no sense to monitor the situation that feverishly.

hmm... btw >500 pays 1.2, <500 pays 6 any takers?

similar to the time spent on exponential graphs situation...

i'm gradually finding that every social media article is becoming the same (trump says this, expert virologist says that, random singaporean overseas says f**k this shit).

i'm getting muscle fatigue and frankly all this running around the same area is becoming boring. (and smells of army, see previous post)

i hate cooking with a vengeance and have now resorted to eating bread with cheese and ham for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

you see the trend. they are all tapering off. we can therefore project that in may, all exponential graphs applying to all situations can follow this trajectory:

and hopefully, the covid situation as well

you might ask, so what is the point of knowing this?

well i don't know, i'm still trying to figure it out. if knowledge is power and with great power comes great responsibility... i need to assume this great responsibility of thinking of how to convert this information to money.

brb.

cheers!

sometimes when i'm on my 3-6k run (depending on day/mood) along the dirt path to rummelsburg, i get a whiff of some real sour intenzio sewage-like smell.

i can't exactly put my finger on where the smell came. let's see, it could be waste treatment, body odour, wild boar manure... the list goes on.

but this more-than-pungent odour reminded me of army days in tekong, where we used to get up and run at an ungodly 6:15am in the morning. somewhere around bmtc school 1 basketball courts along the ippt route by the channel of where the painful penguins ply, there was always this awful smell.

i used to suspect the sergeants did this on purpose such that you'd have the motivation to run faster. now that i smell it again here in germany, i have to doubt my previous theory.

some smart alec will say it's "german gas". well no, because i smelt it in singapore.

nonetheless, until someone enlightens me, this will remain one of life's mysteries. what is NOT a mystery however, is how dreadfully obsolete army cheers are.

all that running and that familiar tekong smell, led to another sensory assault when the army cheers from years ago started to flood into my mind.

there was this one about not having time to do xxx, but there's always time to do yyy. that song defies all logic i could swear.

soldiers have got to be the most horny people on earth, yet one of the lines go "got no time to meet my girl, but got time to clean rifle".

uwotm8? that has to be the most ridiculous shit i've ever heard. sure, you could be gay, that's a possibility - but you wouldn't then be meeting "your girl"? and of all the things you LIKE to do in the army, i'm pretty damn sure cleaning a rifle is not one of them.

nice things of army include: booking out, canteen breaks, and for those who like a little bit of a challenge, maybe completing SOC. heck, i'd even accept field camp.

cleaning the rifle is one of the most MUNDANE and POINTLESS endeavour, for the next day when you draw arms to go out and fire more blanks, the whole cycle restarts.

please, whoever wrote the lyrics to this song.

there was another one i remembered from OCS Sierra Wing. despite the supposed improvement in one's ability to think when in occifer school, the words to this are just plain laughable.

"we marched last night ah, we marched the night before, now we march like we never march before, ah!"

clearly the writer for this thought about this like he never thought before. god i am so ashamed for you.

firstly, what is the fucking point of this whole marching story? i don't remember the rest of the cheer well, but i vaguely recall it to be along the lines on how we enjoy marching. still doesn't justify the first line.

secondly, it's not well defined on what it means to have never marched before. on the first day i came to BMT, i had no marching experience. so i marched with my left hand and left leg at the same time. is that what you meant, songwriter?

gee i felt like i just insulted all songwriters. anyway this is a rather obscure cheer, other than that time in OCS where some joker brought it up, i've hardly heard it after. we can talk about more mainstream stupidity.

purple light in the valley. apparently where we all want to be.

have never trained in any valley in singapore - the only "valley" i know being river valley. and then there's the purple light - which is a reference to...? none of the colour disks i know make a purple light with the torch.

i paused for a few seconds after the previous paragraph, but no i still do not get where the purple light is coming from. is it to make up the required number of syllables? it could have well been "yellow light", that's closer to torch colour reality.

or "lime green light" from the luminous sticks. heck, any kind of two-syllabic light is more realistic than a "purple light" i've NEVER seen in my army days.

light colour aside, you might also notice that there is a logical flaw in the last line, which goes..

"with my rifle and my buddy and ME"

okay. then who were you referring to in the rest of the song? i assumed that doing IPPT and SOC was all you.

basically, if the ippt/soc bit of purple light were to be summarised into one line, it would read something like "soc, ippt, pt is all sibei jialat but i like doing it with my rifle and my buddy and me."

you like doing it with you, eh.

hahahaha i could go on forever but my brain has run out of RAM. if you have more army songs/cheers please send them to me so i can dissect its stupidity.

cheers. no pun intended.

fish sauce

Although I've never mixed you in
As often as I should
You have served me so damn well
As I knew you would

Bought you at the Asian mart
Ten million years ago
You still possess the good old taste
Of ajinomoto

Lettuce, carrots or pak choi
It matters not to me
You can turn any dish of mine
From a one to a three

Hordes of Asians swear by you
A taste not to be missed
If sauces were all humans then
You'd be Chuck Norris

flatten the curve

today i want to talk about something very serious.

as you can see from the title, it's about flattening the curve. not sure if you have any opinions on how the CB has been going on; but if you ask me it's definitely not working.

the f**king CB (not literally), if anything, is making the curve much worse than before.

i've found a picture on the internet to describe what i'm talking about.

..

..

..

..

..

this is what my chopping board looks like. messed up.

i swear, i just went to sleep one night and the next day, the chopping board had a curvature that would make beckham proud.

as google can answer so many things now, i was ensured that i'd find out the reason for this unwarranted curvery. from my understanding, apparently it has to do with uneven moisture content on different sides of the board which causes expansion and contraction of the wood through absorption of water.

i shall have to be very careful the next time i go swimming and lay on the beach to suntan. for all you know that could cause some serious back curvature.

thankfully, there seems to be two simple solutions to flatten the curve.

the first is to leave it alone. when the damp side's moisture content lowers, the board moves back to its original shape.

the second is to use a hot iron or some heavy stuff to press down upon the board. the pressure eventually will flatten the board.

unfortunately, i only have one f**ked up chopping board, so i couldn't test to see which method works better.

otherwise, the humble little wooden chopping board could be an indicator on how to handle flattening other curves. after all, this is science, how can it be wrong?

plurali

today there was some good chit going on in the waterpolo aka haters chat i'd be remiss not to document this.

never doubt the flow of a conversation when it somehow lands on (or up) the final processor of the digestive system: namely, the anus.

ck brought it up today. i forgot how, but that's irrelevant.

for another unknown reason he had to talk about its plural and we arrived at the debate if it should be anuses or ani.

wtf? who even thinks about such things?

one might attribute it on the lockdown; but i could have as easily imagined this conversation in non-covid times.

miao checked it and surprise, surprise: both forms are acceptable.

well i didn't find that acceptable. i thought something was really wrong with the english language.

for starters, this "-us" to "-i" plural endings are not applied consistently across the language. sure we know english is a pretty messed up language with a million exceptions, but if more than one syllabus is syllabi and more than one anus is ani then surely more than one bus is bi?

okay fine so perhaps it's the exceptions that make the language beautiful.

now on to my main gripe.

don't know if you've read bookworm club books when you were young. they were popular in singapore back in the 80s-90s. it was a children's series, documenting the (mis)adventures of a bunch of seven kids in school.

the singaporean version of enid blyton's secret seven or famous five, if you will.

in typical singaporean fashion they had to make sure each race and gender was represented. so there was smarty, louie, kokku, simone, sam seng (how the fuck am i remembering all these omg), porky and last but not least..

FAT ANI.

did i ruin your childhood? you're welcome.

homework

in a rare moment of inspiration that occurs about as frequently as three-digit covid cases increases in singapore (i.e. used to be more common in the past, now not quite), i decided to maximise my stay-home experience by working my python skillz.

you can check it out the last exercise i completed here:

they sure know how to motivate their students

for the uninitiated into the world of computing, you might be a little fazed by all the colours and 'geeky' commands. however upon looking closely, practically ANYONE with a basic understanding of logic could get this. as it turns out, both "patriots" and "rams" were accepted answers. yes - i had to find out if there was a trick to this, but no, there isn't.

now am i wrong to say that as an adult, our homework is getting so much easier? (btw this is a python intermediate course, don't mess.)

i'd never have imagined anything as easy as this during the good old asknlearn days of iLearning at ri. obviously while now i look back with fondness of the "good ol days", i am sure back then i wasn't all that happy doing iLearning even alt-tabbing to neopets and runescape.

homework was hard. and i bet it still is for the ri boys today.

then i think i get the answer. it's hard until you pay money for it.

one might argue that schoolgoing children also pay school fees, but that is nothing compared to the course fees of an external course run by a company. and i guess, nobody likes to pay good money to be frustrated by difficult exercises and then feel like shit.

unfortunately, i'm paying good money for le python course and feeling like i just had my intelligence insulted... therefore feeling like shit.

but then, this course was paid for by my university. so i should feel better about that.

but then again, i paid for my course at university. so i am by extension, indirectly contributing to the cause that makes me feel like shit.

and in a very roundabout way, while we can talk about how spending money can make our lives better; inevitably it may still backfire like it did on me.

i decided to close the exercise and see what else was on offer for me.

 

apparently there's a lot of (quasi-free) stuff here

i can't comment on anything much except for the "practise while you're commuting" bit. it was then i resolved to be 100% committed to doing my python exercises on the go on every single commute i make during lockdown. that will be my lockdown goal and i expect to have infinite success at it.

(p.s. if you didn't get it 0/0 = infinity)

so thinking about how i've been only spending money to my own disapproval, it was inevitable that i had to make amends.

 

4 euro apple crumble

despite this being an overpriced apple crumble and may quite literally leave a sour taste in the mouth, at the very least i know it won't insult my intelligence.  

talk lock summit

who'd have known it was going to end up like this?

no i'm not talking about the coronavirus - i'm talking about my blogger account.

after spending the good part of the last decade in cold storage, it was frozen over and died a death so quiet that it might as well have not existed at all.

(un)fortunately, the internet never forgets. some 15 years after the talk cock summit was established, i return after a 7-game losing streak on dota amidst a 7-week lockdown. i'm just glad that unlike dota, at least there are no people commenting on what i'm supposed to do here lol.

anyhow, back to the blogger account. my failure to retrieve it not only adds to my recent list of failures (more on that another time), but it offered some insights into my previous life.

1. I USED YAHOO. the shame, the shame. blogger no longer allows you to log in using the old username, not that i remember it anyway. i ended up using a password recall and the service reminds me politely that an email was sent to ...@yahoo.fr. which then reminded me,

2. I STUDIED FRENCH. mon dieu. maintenant j'ai besoin de naviguer ce système tout en français. taking a deep breath, i dived deep into the recesses of my memory to find the damned yahoo.fr address i had been using, and returned with this: yj_ri4j@yahoo.fr.

i can already sense some judgment. like HAHAHAHA WTF USES THEIR SECONDARY SCHOOL CLASS AS EMAIL? (there's more coming, hold your popcorn.)

 

to win, select all pictures with cars!

 

now this is stupid. look at the top right hand corner. that's more of a camion than a car. do i select it or not? i did not in the end and to my great dismay, being overly technical with terminologies meant that i had to assess some other images to prove that i am not a bot.

come on yahoo. if i were a bot i'd be using google.

3. i have strong school/class identity. the painful step of identifying myself as human then led to another dance to ensure that i am the correct human.

flashback: from secondary to primary school

the best part is: after trawling through a convoluted web of old usernames and passwords, i was still denied access to talk cock summit. it was only through YL that i found out that it wasn't the correct email at all.

that brings me to the final two observations.

4. young crazy me had a gazillion email accounts. and for whatever reason that i created them back then, i definitely see no reason now. conclusion: some innocuous random shit you do in the past can and will come back to haunt you, innocuously and randomly.

not wanting to drag on the pain of trying to uncover weird email addresses or passwords, i capitulated and asked YL to send an invitation to my current gmail account. and here i am now, back to good old BLOGGER in 2020. kind of goes to show that...

5. in times of trouble, one reverts to the basics. i return to my most basic instinct, talking cock.