Grateful

I cannot find the closest English word to “syukur” and I don’t think “grateful” really represents what I am feeling now. Indeed, Allah says:

And (remember) when your Lord proclaimed: “If you give thanks (by accepting Faith and worshipping none but Allah), I will give you more (of My Blessings), but if you are thankless (i.e. disbelievers), verily! My Punishment is indeed severe.”

(Ibrahim 14:7, Dr. Mohsin Khan translation)

Besides saying syukur, doing your best in the things you have been made responsible with is also the way to express your syukur. Also, be consistent in performing solat dhuha and don’t forget to give sadaqah to the needy.

I know it is going to be challenging in some years ahead, but insha-Allah, we have chosen this path and this is it! No turning back and we are all behind you, Sayang!

On another note, if you have free time between 6.05 to 6.55 p.m. everyday, do tune in to TV AlHijrah and please watch an Indonesian comedy series titled Islam KTP. It is packed with life lessons and the best thing is they have made it into jokes. We both like watching it while relaxing after work, cooking and playing with Omar. Whenever we suddenly burst into laughter, he usually joins too!

Candlemakers’ Petition

By Frédéric Bastiat in 1845:

A PETITION From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting

To the Honourable Members of the Chamber of Deputies

Gentlemen:

You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories and little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic industry.

We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity for your -- what shall we call it? Your theory? No, nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you have a horror of systems, as for principles, you deny that there are any in political economy; therefore we shall call it your practice – your practice without theory and without principle.

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds – in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.

...

(Read in full here: http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html)

I cannot recall who first showed me the petition years ago, but remember very well how I thought that it was – and still is – really cool.

Week 2

I am beginning the think that there is something conspiring against me going online. Streamyx at home continues to be erratic, while at work Google sites like Gmail and Google Reader take forever to load. The only way I can get Gmail to load is in basic HTML view. Google Reader simply refuses to load completely.

We are now in the second week of the semester so the class lists have basically settled, although I still had a student asking to join my class on Monday and one suddenly showing up today. Registration was supposed to be over last week, but apparently the university only charges a RM5 per day fee for late registration. No wonder many students think nothing about coming and registering late. Even today, a saw a small group swarming the kulliyyah office with manual registration forms.

A colleague recently proposed that we drop one topic from the ECON1610 syllabus to spend more time discussing issues in class, but I disagreed because the content of the course is simple enough as it is. Instead, we can always cut down on instructions and assign reading to the students. We are doing GDP this week. I’ve covered all the definitions and calculation bits on Monday, so will discuss issues today.

Economists haven’t gotten many things right lately, and we don’t even agree on what we’ve gotten wrong. Paul Krugman argues that we have underestimated the flaws and frictions of the market. I would go further. We have overestimated the size and significance of the very thing we call “the market.”

Nancy Folbre; What We’ve Learned: Our (Increasingly) Non-Market Economy

If we have poor measures, what we strive to do (say, increase GDP) may actually contribute to a worsening of living standards. We may also be confronted with false choices, seeing trade-offs between output and environmental protection that don't exist. By contrast, a better measure of economic performance might show that steps taken to improve the environment are good for the economy.

Joseph E Stiglitz; Rethink GDP fetish

All Along the Watchtower

So I’m YouTube hopping like I have nothing else to do.

U2 introduced me to the song. I know it’s a Dylan original but I like the Hendrix version best.

No reason to get excited, the thief, he kindly spoke
There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late

The Breakfast Club

One of my all time favorite movies is The Breakfast Club from 1985. I saw it one afternoon a long time ago. Everybody else in school went to religious school in the afternoon but my parents decided that it wouldn’t do much good. So my afternoons were spent watching the matinee show on TV instead.

Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us – in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain...
... and an athlete...
... and a basket case...
... a princess...
... and a criminal.
Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.

Really cool song too by Simple Minds.

Four Seasons

It doesn’t pay to make predictions
Sleeping on an unmade bed
Finding out wherever there is comfort
There is pain
Only one step away
Like four seasons in one day

Crowded House, Four Seasons in One Day (1992)

A beautiful song; they played it recently at the end of an excellent episode of CSI. The video is a bit out of sync, but I think this live performance is way better than the original studio version.

Knowing

I know that I should have gone to bed, at around midnight, so I can have enough sleep to wake up fresh in the morning. Yet here I am, as always, wide awake till at least 2 a.m.

Knowing what’s right and doing it are two different things altogether, aren’t they?

Do, or do not. There is no try.

Yoda, Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Jaded

Can you help me remember how to smile?
Make it somehow all seem worthwhile
How on earth did I get so jaded?
Life’s mystery seems so faded

Soul Asylum, Runaway Train (1992)

jad•ed (ˈdʒeɪdɪd)
–adjective

1. dulled or satiated by overindulgence: a jaded appetite.
2. worn out or wearied, as by overwork or overuse.
3. dissipated: a jaded reprobate.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)

Choice

People don't like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don't run, don't walk. We're in their homes and in their heads and we haven't the right. We're meddlesome.

River Tam, Serenity (2005)

What is the meaning of virtue without the chance to sin?

I wanted to write about government, religion (or the roles of religious authorities), faith and freedom of choice – all heavy stuff – but I got lazy to actually do it.

Die

A random movie quote because I don’t have anything better to post.

President Thomas Whitmore: What do you want us to do?
Captured Alien: Die. Die.

Independence Day (1996)

The Truth

I find it interesting that instead of referring to August 31 as the National Day, as the celebration is officially known, more and more people are calling it Independence Day. The fact is that only West Malaysia, then the Federation of Malaya that included Singapore, gained independence from British rule on 31 August 1957. East Malaysia only became independent through the formation of Malaysia on 16 September 1963.

While we may argue ad infinitum whether August 31 or September 16 should rightly be celebrated as our National Day, reducing August 31 to merely the Independence Day only serves to highlight the gap between the two sides of our nation separated by more than just the South China Sea.

“May you live in interesting times” may not be an actual ancient Chinese curse, but few will dispute that we are living in an interesting time in the history of our young nation, and it is beginning to look very much like a curse. Fifty-one years on, we are still struggling with our identity, perhaps more than ever.

In the meantime the new political reality is creating a lot of confusion. Our past, our history is being questioned. Have we been wrong all this while? How can we move forward to the future if we cannot be certain of who we were, who we are? There are many stories, conflicting stories about everything, all claiming to be the truth.

Of course, there is only one truth, out there, but we are all really like the blind men with the elephant grasping with half-truths. Everybody claims of having an open mind and thinks of knowing better than others but do we really? After all, we only see what we want to see.

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.

Andre Gide (1869-1951)

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NOTE: Hazy out of whack insomnia entry.

The Aliens are Coming!

Obviously, somebody forgot to brief the Auditor General. There’s only one explanation for the government’s paying RM224.00 for RM40.00-screwdrivers, RM1,146.56 for RM160.00-pens, and RM10,700.00 for RM417.00-books etc:

We are preparing for an alien invasion!

It's all hush-hush, of course; we can’t let the alien know now, can we? There is a top-secret massive underground complex stretching from under the Ministry of Defence Complex in Jalan Padang Tembak to the Kuala Lumpur City Centre, with secret emergency evacuation exits through the Putra LRT and SMART tunnels.

Of course, you don’t hear it from me.

President Whitmore: I don't understand, where does all this come from? How do you get funding for something like this?
Julius Levinson: You don't actually think they spend $20,000.00 on a hammer, $30,000.00 on a toilet seat do you?

Independence Day (1996)

Revelations

I never thought I’d ever be glad that I sneezed. Well, I did (sneeze) and I was (glad). I woke up on Saturday morning with a very blocked nose that I actually wondered how I could possible wake up still breathing. Then I sneezed, hard.

PHEW!

In the meantime our house is under siege by ants. Previously we were invaded by this species of red ants my mother calls semut gila – crazy ants because they seem to run around like crazy, well, ants. Now, those thin loony ants are taken over by some kind of mean, stocky black ants I like to call semut manggis – mangosteen ants – because my first recollection of them were on the old mangosteen tree we had behind the house. So now every morning my mother has a new routine engaging the ants in chemical warfare, and whenever we’re not careful the ants will strike back by swarming the kitchen cabinet or dinner table.

Two interesting news I found online today. In the first, a seventeen-year-old girl in the UK was taken to the hospital for caffeine overdose, after downing seven double espressos while working the family shop. It basically confirms that all you heavy coffee drinkers are nothing but a bunch of caffeine junkies. LOL. I typically have only one dose of coffee a day, if any, when I drop by Dunkin Donuts for the Iced Coffee/Latte Combo breakfast on the way to work.

Coffee by kris-wilson at deviantART

In the second, in the Health & Science section of the International Herald Tribune was an article called ‘Sex surveys don’t add up’ by Gina Kolata. Basically, sex surveys consistently report that men are more promiscuous and have more sex partners than women. Everybody seems to accept that because men are supposedly biologically inclined to spread their genes. The problem is the finding doesn’t make sense mathematically when the male-female ratio in the population is about equal.

As explained by (Emeritus) Prof. David Gale from the University of California:

By way of dramatization, we change the context slightly and will prove what will be called the High School Prom Theorem. We suppose that on the day after the prom, each girl is asked to give the number of boys she danced with. These numbers are then added up, giving a number G. The same information is then obtained from the boys, giving a number B.

Theorem: G = B

Proof: Both G and B are equal to C, the number of couples who danced together at the prom. QED.

The researchers can't explain it, but one possible explanation that I particularly like is that men exaggerate while women understate their numbers to conform to societal expectations and stereotypes.

Go figure!

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PS: Scalzi has a really interesting explanation to the whole conundrum here.

Where the @#$% is my Stuff?!

Jesse: Dude! You got a tattoo!
Chester: So do you, dude! Dude, what does my tattoo say?
Jesse: “Sweet!” What about mine?
Chester: “Dude!” What does mine say?
Jesse: “Sweet!” What about mine?
Chester: “Dude!” What does mine say?
Jesse: “Sweet!” What about mine?
Chester: “Dude!” What does mine say?
Jesse: “Sweet!” What about mine?
Chester: “Dude!” What does mine say?
Jesse: “Sweet!” What about mine?
Chester: “Dude!” What does mine say?
Jesse: “Sweet!” What about mine?
Chester: “Dude!” What does mine say?
Jesse: “SWEET!”

Okay, Dude, Where’s My Car? is not the kind of intellectually and emotionally stimulating or enlightening movie to be quoting from but it is funny; kinda.

My last purchase from Amazon is overdue, which bugs me a little. It’s not about the money – well, maybe a little bit – but really about the feeling of having been let down. In all likelihood it may not be their fault at all – things get lost in the mail all the time – but my confidence is definitely shaken.

That’s the most important thing, I suppose about conducting business and in fact all relationships in general – trust. It is not easily gained or built but can be shattered in an instance; often by the most stupid, most innocent mistake.

And no, I have not ‘betrayed’ or for that matter ‘been betrayed by’ anyone lately; just completely and utterly bored.

What I have is a new desktop wallpaper, by the brilliant Russ Schwenkler:

Nissan 350Z Hood UP - Vexel by dangeruss at deviantART

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PS: A glimmer of hope. Amazon asks me to wait for another week for the shipment before they will send a replacement. Hopefully it arrives soon.

The Blind Leading The Blind

Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.

Stephen Vizinczey (1933 - ), An Innocent Millionaire

A student dropped by my office earlier this week to ask about her course load. She is a new, direct-intake student with a pre-sessional status. New students joining the university are tested for Arabic and English placement tests. If they fail to meet certain standards, they are required to take remedial courses and classified as pre-sessional with limited course load. When I joined IIUM I had to take remedial courses in Arabic. This particular student is taking a class in English listening skills.

She came to see me because she was worried that she had not registered for enough courses. Other students, university officials and lecturers were giving her different answers, and she was confused. So, she finally came to see me, the stand-in student advisor. It turns out that she has registered for more courses than she needs to. Full-time students need to register for twelve to fifteen credit hours per semester. Pre-sessional students need only register for six credit hours. She already has eleven and a half.

She was smart to come to see me. Most students, especially those coming from the matriculation program, rely on their friends and seniors for information. Direct intake students do not have friends or seniors they know from matriculation to turn to. They usually arrive at the university only a few days before the beginning of the semester, sometimes even on the first day of the semester itself. The university does not have an arrangement in place to help them specifically, so they typically spend the first week, with class registration and adjustments, running around feeling lost and abandoned. Last week one of them actually got around to submitting a complaint over the system that “discriminates against direct intake students in favor of students from the matriculation program”.

I know exactly how they feel, as I experienced the exact same thing when I first joined the university eight years ago. Obviously something has to be done about it. Eventually, however, these students will find their way to a student advisor. Here comes the irony: since ex-matriculation students have friends and seniors to refer to, they almost never see a student advisor. So later on in the program we tend to see them having all sorts of problems with their studies as a result of receiving the wrong advices and information from their fellow friends and seniors. The direct intake students, having received the correct information through consulting a student advisor, do not have the same problems.

I remember classmates coming from the matriculation program taking more language courses than they had too simply because the seniors told them so. Even after showing them the program curriculum structure, they chose to believe the equally clueless seniors instead!

Cosmic Smokescreen

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinded critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.

Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)

My latest order from Amazon arrived today. The main item in this particular order is a hardcover edition of John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades, plus two other books – all military science fiction novels. It's terribly frustrating trying to find the latest science fiction (SF) books at the local bookstores – nobody reads them – so I have to resort to buying online. The Ghost Brigades is a follow-up to the 2005 Old Man's War, which was nominated for the 2006 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

As usual, I had the order delivered to the office, largely due to the high regard I place on the Pos Malaysia delivery service at home. Hopefully, I'd be able to start reading the books by the end of the week. As of now, I still have three piles of examination scripts to mark – a total of about 120 scripts. Just looking at them makes me sick; if only I could outsource the whole marking work to some company in Bengaluru.

I wonder if the students could understand what they wrote themselves. Half of the handwritten scripts are barely legible, while some thought that they can get away with not knowing what were actually being asked by dazzling me with whole pages of pure BS. I also found one student (so far) dedicating one whole page of the answer booklet composing a letter of apology for not being able to completely the answer the exam questions. Looking at the scripts, it is hard not to wonder what the students were doing the whole semester. Am I that bad?

Thankfully, there are always the few that tell you that it is all worth it.

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QUICKIE: The Hugo Award is given every year to the best science fiction and fantasy (SFF) works of the previous year by the World Science Fiction Society. The 2006 Hugo Award for Best Novel went to Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. Really cool book, I read it earlier this year in April.

Bedtime Stories

Today I went to a GW meet; the first since I got back, my only second time ever. It is quite strange, though not in any negative way, to see a bunch of people you know only by their online nicknames. Even face-to-face, we call each other by nicknames. It’s just convenient, I suppose, than to try to remember the names of people you only meet a few times a year. I am terrible with names, anyway. The pseudo-secret venue, communicated directly to those who were coming via text message/SMS, was one of the newer but more peaceful shopping malls in KL, thankfully. I would have hated it if the meeting was set up at Suria KLCC, like that one time I went before.

As can be expected, some took the opportunity of the meet to seek confirmation for stories, rumors, urban-legends, if you like; that they have heard before: do we have this or that and how many, did this or that actually happened and how etc. I just sit there and listen.

The worst thing anyone can do with a rumor is to tell it to someone else. It doesn’t really matter whether there is a grain of truth in it, or totally outlandish; the damage is in the spread. Rumors are by definition unsubstantiated and incomplete. We like to think that there must be at least some truth in it, like how a legend is based on an historical event, and fill the gaps in the account with our own imagination.

Like a terrible secret, a rumor is hard to keep, so we spread them around. Sometimes it is out of concern – “just in case it is true” – and sometimes it is just for fun – “what harm will it do?” More harm than good, really. Some rumors create panic, like bomb scares, but generally rumors are like waves on a beach. Slowly but surely the erosion changes the shoreline. Just as we cannot take back our words, one cannot un-hear a rumor. Some rumors are in fact slanders; worse than adultery, according to the Prophet.

Many people argue that they don’t mean to spread rumors and slander, but just telling the [real] story; same difference. Some rumors are started off by certain parties for their own not-so-innocent motives, so by spreading them around we are only turning ourselves into willing tools for someone else's sinister machination.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933 - 1945

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PS: I don’t care for Akademi Fantasia (AF). But doesn’t anybody else think that the daily Diari AF is turning people into voyeurs? I’m pissed that my mum is so caught up in it.