You know what they say, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence and the third time is enemy action.
Omnia mutantur
11:59 AM
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Just an article that I found very interesting - Why the high IQ lack common sense. In any case that would explain why common sense is not common in RJ, judging from my blogposts from my JC days.
Another interesting tidbit - I've started practising on my own the Grade 6 violin examination pieces. Haha they're really hard! I am absolute fail at doublestopping. I will probably get lessons starting from 2011. Hopefully I'll be able to hightail to Grade 8 in 2012 and actually complete what I started so many years ago.
Thanks to my sudden influx of free time this month, I've been watching every single (palatable) movie in the theatres. So currently my record stands at Ip Man 2, Shrek, Robin Hood... Hmm suddenly they don't seem like a lot. Sure felt like it though, but maybe it's the fact that when you're free, the days stretch into years...
I don't like it when people treat movie-going as a social activity. It's not. It's sitting quietly 2-3 hours in a dark room with your friend doing what you could enjoy just as well alone. Movies are the top pasttime of the uncreative and the boring. Speaking of which, I am going to watch Prince of Persia this afternoon, because PL cannot think of anything else to do.
I'm not complaining, but I'm quite tired of this monotony. I'm tired of having to look out for others. I've quite enough to do with my own family, which is my top priority. It's been quite a struggle. I don't want to have to care about anything external to that, but I've been born with a misplaced sense of obligation and responsibility.
I don't think I've been writing honestly for a long time, or speaking as frankly as I should. I always self censor now. There're many negative influences and naysayers that I would like to shut out and be able to do as I please. Sometimes it really weighs me down. I can't seem do anything on my own anymore, without some kind of disproportionate feedback.
Sometimes I can't seem to do anything myself, out of fear or hesitation. This existence is pretty pathetic. I fail to see a lot of meaning in life in general. I cannot compose music, write, or speak without this weight on me. Which I try to ignore, and I'm as sucessful as a man trying to ignore an elephant in his living room.
My life will continue in this short of caged up misery. I can't see any road out of it without a lot of mayhem and destruction. Maybe a few years ago, I would have been able to pull myself together. But now...
Sooner or later I will come to the realisation that I cannot save anybody, and that even doing that for myself has become a stretch.
And also, another blow in life - I've come to really dislike teaching. I feel extremely underpaid for putting in so much effort, dishonest students, and my students' parents expect me to be at their beck and call, and cancel classes whenever they like after I've rescheduled classes for them out of the same misplaced sense of obligation and responsibility. No way. No more piano lessons, no more tuition, no, nil, zilch. After this year is over I'm going to completely run away from the profession until I'm 60.
Somedays I just want run away to somewhere where no one knows me and s c r e a m. Oh yes, I'm frustrated, and rightly so.
Omnia mutantur
10:23 AM
Friday, May 28, 2010
Not bad, I'm 23 and I act like 23.
You know unemployment's set in hard when you start doing memes.
[ ] You know how to make a pot of coffee [x] You keep track of dates using a calendar [x] You own a credit card [ ] You know how to change the oil in a car [x] You've done your own laundry [x] You can vote in an election [x] You can cook for yourself [x] You think politics are interesting
TOTAL SO FAR: 6
[ ] You show up for school late a lot [x] You always carry a pen/pencil in your bag/purse/pocket [ ] You've never gotten a detention [ ] You have forgotten your own birthday [x] You like to take walks by yourself [x] You know what credibility means, without looking it up [x] You drink caffeine at least once a week
TOTAL SO FAR: 11
[x] You know how to do the dishes [x] You can count to 10 in another language [x] When you say you're going to do something you do it [ ] You can mow the lawn [x] You study even when you don't have to [ ] You have hand washed a car before
TOTAL SO FAR: 15
[x] You can spell experience, without looking it up [ ] The people at Starbucks know you by name [ ] Your favorite kind of food is take out [x] You can go to the store without getting something you don't need [x] You understand political jokes the first time they are said [x] You can type pretty quick
TOTAL SO FAR: 19
[ ] Your only friends are from your place of employment [ ] You have been to a Tupperware party [x]You have realized that practically no one will take you seriously unless you are over the age of 25 and have a job [ ] You have more bills than you can pay [x] You have been to the beach [x] You use the internet every day [x] You have been outside of Singapore 3 or more times [ ] You make your bed in the morning
TOTAL SO FAR: 23
Omnia mutantur
9:47 PM
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Loin très loin du monde Où rien ne meurt jamais J´ai fait ce long, Ce doux voyage. Nos âmes se confondent Aux neiges éternelles L´amour cachait Son vrai visage.
Oh viens, ne sois plus sage Après tout qu´importe Je sais la menace Des amours mortes Gardons l´innocence Et l´insouciance De nos jeux d´antan, troublants.
N´aie pas de regret Fais moi confiance, et pense A tous les no way L´indifférence des sens
N´aie pas des regret Fais la promesse, tu sais que L´hiver et l´automne n´ont pu s´aimer
Debout la tête ivre Des rêves suspendus Je bois à nos amours Infirmes Au vent que je devine Nos lèvres éperdues S´offrent des noces Clandestines
N´ouvre pas la porte Tu sais le piège De tous les remords De l´anathème Je me fous des saisons Viens je t´emmène Là, où dorment ceux qui s´aiment.
Viens ce soir Viens me voir Viens t'asseoir Près de moi L'aube est là Reste là Je te promets D'être là Pour l'éternité
Omnia mutantur
7:53 AM
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Here's to one year of accident-free, smooth driving! Yes, it's been one year since I passed my driving exam. So the provisional driving plate goes off. Unless my sister passes her driving exam next monday, in which case HERE'S TO MY SECOND YEAR WITH THE PROVISIONAL DRIVING PLATE.
And introducing... Snowy! Actually I've fed her before, but now I'm getting a general hang of what her prowling patterns are like, so it's easier to locate her.
I'm beginning to sound like a crazy cat lady huh. I wonder if my future dwellings won't be crawling with cats in every nook and cranny.
And now that my 'holidays' are here (I use the inverted commas because my holidays really mean unemployment) I've been doing a bit of reading with Plato's The Republic. I've been also been hearing Naomi Novik's novels of dragons from James, and I like the stories very much. It's one of the first fantasy novels that I find very endearing (maybe because the dragons behave like cats, haha!). It's about a dragon named Temeraire who's fighting the Napoleonic wars on the side of the British army. Very interesting observing how they tweaked history and the context to fit dragon combats into it.
Temeraire with the map of Western Europe.
I really should get down to doing more reading and actually finishing the books I have at home really. This will be near impossible as one of my half finished books is Les Miserables and I can't cart it around outside home because it's so thick. I find that reading while travelling is the best way to spend the time. I've been wanting to try Sōseki Natsume, a bit of Stephen Hawking and Stephen Fry.
Oh well, another day teaching piano! I'm stopping my piano teaching (at last!) end of December when my first diploma student will have taken her ATCL. It's been such a long journey with some of these students.
Omnia mutantur
7:37 AM
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Heartbroken - one of my terrapins is dead. I came home from work to find her floating lifelessly on the her back on the water surface. I carried her up but she didn't poke her head out curiously like she usually does, her neck just drooped limply, eyes still wide open. She drowned to death after the other one, flipped her on her back in the water. She'd always been a bit sickly and this didn't give her enough energy to flip over. I placed her onto her favourite basking spot in the tank one last night before going to bury her tomorrow.
I've been listening to this lately, and this magnificent soundtrack by Abel Korzeniowski suits this occasion.
Omnia mutantur
9:51 PM
Monday, May 3, 2010
This is so interesting that I simply have to post it here. Stephen Hawking can write very well without all the physics jargon! I think I'll have to rank him among my top 3 favourite scientist-writers, along with Michio Kaku and Richard Dawkins.
STEPHEN HAWKING: How to build a time machine
By STEPHEN HAWKING
All you need is a wormhole, the Large Hadron Collider or a rocket that goes really, really fast Stephen Hawking
'Through the wormhole, the scientist can see himself as he was one minute ago. But what if our scientist uses the wormhole to shoot his earlier self? He's now dead. So who fired the shot?'
Hello. My name is Stephen Hawking. Physicist, cosmologist and something of a dreamer. Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free. Free to explore the universe and ask the big questions, such as: is time travel possible? Can we open a portal to the past or find a shortcut to the future? Can we ultimately use the laws of nature to become masters of time itself?
Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I'm not so cautious. In fact, I'm more like the people who built Stonehenge. I'm obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I'd even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.
To see how this might be possible, we need to look at time as physicists do - at the fourth dimension. It's not as hard as it sounds. Every attentive schoolchild knows that all physical objects, even me in my chair, exist in three dimensions. Everything has a width and a height and a length.
But there is another kind of length, a length in time. While a human may survive for 80 years, the stones at Stonehenge, for instance, have stood around for thousands of years. And the solar system will last for billions of years. Everything has a length in time as well as space. Travelling in time means travelling through this fourth dimension.
To see what that means, let's imagine we're doing a bit of normal, everyday car travel. Drive in a straight line and you're travelling in one dimension. Turn right or left and you add the second dimension. Drive up or down a twisty mountain road and that adds height, so that's travelling in all three dimensions. But how on Earth do we travel in time? How do we find a path through the fourth dimension?
Let's indulge in a little science fiction for a moment. Time travel movies often feature a vast, energy-hungry machine. The machine creates a path through the fourth dimension, a tunnel through time. A time traveller, a brave, perhaps foolhardy individual, prepared for who knows what, steps into the time tunnel and emerges who knows when. The concept may be far-fetched, and the reality may be very different from this, but the idea itself is not so crazy.
Physicists have been thinking about tunnels in time too, but we come at it from a different angle. We wonder if portals to the past or the future could ever be possible within the laws of nature. As it turns out, we think they are. What's more, we've even given them a name: wormholes. The truth is that wormholes are all around us, only they're too small to see. Wormholes are very tiny. They occur in nooks and crannies in space and time. You might find it a tough concept, but stay with me. Enlarge Time travel through a wormhole
A wormhole is a theoretical 'tunnel' or shortcut, predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity, that links two places in space-time - visualised above as the contours of a 3-D map, where negative energy pulls space and time into the mouth of a tunnel, emerging in another universe. They remain only hypothetical, as obviously nobody has ever seen one, but have been used in films as conduits for time travel - in Stargate (1994), for example, involving gated tunnels between universes, and in Time Bandits (1981), where their locations are shown on a celestial map
Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you'll find holes and wrinkles in it. It's a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids. Now it's easy to show that this is true in the first three dimensions. But trust me, it's also true of the fourth dimension. There are tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids in time. Down at the smallest of scales, smaller even than molecules, smaller than atoms, we get to a place called the quantum foam. This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times.
Unfortunately, these real-life time tunnels are just a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimetre across. Way too small for a human to pass through - but here's where the notion of wormhole time machines is leading. Some scientists think it may be possible to capture a wormhole and enlarge it many trillions of times to make it big enough for a human or even a spaceship to enter.
Given enough power and advanced technology, perhaps a giant wormhole could even be constructed in space. I'm not saying it can be done, but if it could be, it would be a truly remarkable device. One end could be here near Earth, and the other far, far away, near some distant planet.
Theoretically, a time tunnel or wormhole could do even more than take us to other planets. If both ends were in the same place, and separated by time instead of distance, a ship could fly in and come out still near Earth, but in the distant past. Maybe dinosaurs would witness the ship coming in for a landing. The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we'll have to go more than 2,000 times faster
Now, I realise that thinking in four dimensions is not easy, and that wormholes are a tricky concept to wrap your head around, but hang in there. I've thought up a simple experiment that could reveal if human time travel through a wormhole is possible now, or even in the future. I like simple experiments, and champagne.
So I've combined two of my favourite things to see if time travel from the future to the past is possible.
Let's imagine I'm throwing a party, a welcome reception for future time travellers. But there's a twist. I'm not letting anyone know about it until after the party has happened. I've drawn up an invitation giving the exact coordinates in time and space. I am hoping copies of it, in one form or another, will be around for many thousands of years. Maybe one day someone living in the future will find the information on the invitation and use a wormhole time machine to come back to my party, proving that time travel will, one day, be possible.
In the meantime, my time traveller guests should be arriving any moment now. Five, four, three, two, one. But as I say this, no one has arrived. What a shame. I was hoping at least a future Miss Universe was going to step through the door. So why didn't the experiment work? One of the reasons might be because of a well-known problem with time travel to the past, the problem of what we call paradoxes.
Paradoxes are fun to think about. The most famous one is usually called the Grandfather paradox. I have a new, simpler version I call the Mad Scientist paradox.
I don't like the way scientists in movies are often described as mad, but in this case, it's true. This chap is determined to create a paradox, even if it costs him his life. Imagine, somehow, he's built a wormhole, a time tunnel that stretches just one minute into the past. Stephen Hawking in a scene from Star Trek
Hawking in a scene from Star Trek with dinner guests from the past, and future: (from left) Albert Einstein, Data and Isaac Newton
Through the wormhole, the scientist can see himself as he was one minute ago. But what if our scientist uses the wormhole to shoot his earlier self? He's now dead. So who fired the shot? It's a paradox. It just doesn't make sense. It's the sort of situation that gives cosmologists nightmares.
This kind of time machine would violate a fundamental rule that governs the entire universe - that causes happen before effects, and never the other way around. I believe things can't make themselves impossible. If they could then there'd be nothing to stop the whole universe from descending into chaos. So I think something will always happen that prevents the paradox. Somehow there must be a reason why our scientist will never find himself in a situation where he could shoot himself. And in this case, I'm sorry to say, the wormhole itself is the problem.
In the end, I think a wormhole like this one can't exist. And the reason for that is feedback. If you've ever been to a rock gig, you'll probably recognise this screeching noise. It's feedback. What causes it is simple. Sound enters the microphone. It's transmitted along the wires, made louder by the amplifier, and comes out at the speakers. But if too much of the sound from the speakers goes back into the mic it goes around and around in a loop getting louder each time. If no one stops it, feedback can destroy the sound system.
The same thing will happen with a wormhole, only with radiation instead of sound. As soon as the wormhole expands, natural radiation will enter it, and end up in a loop. The feedback will become so strong it destroys the wormhole. So although tiny wormholes do exist, and it may be possible to inflate one some day, it won't last long enough to be of use as a time machine. That's the real reason no one could come back in time to my party.
Any kind of time travel to the past through wormholes or any other method is probably impossible, otherwise paradoxes would occur. So sadly, it looks like time travel to the past is never going to happen. A disappointment for dinosaur hunters and a relief for historians.
But the story's not over yet. This doesn't make all time travel impossible. I do believe in time travel. Time travel to the future. Time flows like a river and it seems as if each of us is carried relentlessly along by time's current. But time is like a river in another way. It flows at diff erent speeds in diff erent places and that is the key to travelling into the future. This idea was first proposed by Albert Einstein over 100 years ago. He realised that there should be places where time slows down, and others where time speeds up. He was absolutely right. And the proof is right above our heads. Up in space.
This is the Global Positioning System, or GPS. A network of satellites is in orbit around Earth. The satellites make satellite navigation possible. But they also reveal that time runs faster in space than it does down on Earth. Inside each spacecraft is a very precise clock. But despite being so accurate, they all gain around a third of a billionth of a second every day. The system has to correct for the drift, otherwise that tiny di fference would upset the whole system, causing every GPS device on Earth to go out by about six miles a day. You can just imagine the mayhem that that would cause.
The problem doesn't lie with the clocks. They run fast because time itself runs faster in space than it does down below. And the reason for this extraordinary e ffect is the mass of the Earth. Einstein realised that matter drags on time and slows it down like the slow part of a river. The heavier the object, the more it drags on time. And this startling reality is what opens the door to the possibility of time travel to the future.
Right in the centre of the Milky Way, 26,000 light years from us, lies the heaviest object in the galaxy. It is a supermassive black hole containing the mass of four million suns crushed down into a single point by its own gravity. The closer you get to the black hole, the stronger the gravity. Get really close and not even light can escape. A black hole like this one has a dramatic e ffect on time, slowing it down far more than anything else in the galaxy. That makes it a natural time machine.
I like to imagine how a spaceship might be able to take advantage of this phenomenon, by orbiting it. If a space agency were controlling the mission from Earth they'd observe that each full orbit took 16 minutes. But for the brave people on board, close to this massive object, time would be slowed down. And here the e ffect would be far more extreme than the gravitational pull of Earth. The crew's time would be slowed down by half. For every 16-minute orbit, they'd only experience eight minutes of time. The Large Hadron Collider
Inside the Large Hadron Collider
Around and around they'd go, experiencing just half the time of everyone far away from the black hole. The ship and its crew would be travelling through time. Imagine they circled the black hole for five of their years. Ten years would pass elsewhere. When they got home, everyone on Earth would have aged five years more than they had.
So a supermassive black hole is a time machine. But of course, it's not exactly practical. It has advantages over wormholes in that it doesn't provoke paradoxes. Plus it won't destroy itself in a flash of feedback. But it's pretty dangerous. It's a long way away and it doesn't even take us very far into the future. Fortunately there is another way to travel in time. And this represents our last and best hope of building a real time machine.
You just have to travel very, very fast. Much faster even than the speed required to avoid being sucked into a black hole. This is due to another strange fact about the universe. There's a cosmic speed limit, 186,000 miles per second, also known as the speed of light. Nothing can exceed that speed. It's one of the best established principles in science. Believe it or not, travelling at near the speed of light transports you to the future.
To explain why, let's dream up a science-fiction transportation system. Imagine a track that goes right around Earth, a track for a superfast train. We're going to use this imaginary train to get as close as possible to the speed of light and see how it becomes a time machine. On board are passengers with a one-way ticket to the future. The train begins to accelerate, faster and faster. Soon it's circling the Earth over and over again.
To approach the speed of light means circling the Earth pretty fast. Seven times a second. But no matter how much power the train has, it can never quite reach the speed of light, since the laws of physics forbid it. Instead, let's say it gets close, just shy of that ultimate speed. Now something extraordinary happens. Time starts flowing slowly on board relative to the rest of the world, just like near the black hole, only more so. Everything on the train is in slow motion.
This happens to protect the speed limit, and it's not hard to see why. Imagine a child running forwards up the train. Her forward speed is added to the speed of the train, so couldn't she break the speed limit simply by accident? The answer is no. The laws of nature prevent the possibility by slowing down time onboard.
Now she can't run fast enough to break the limit. Time will always slow down just enough to protect the speed limit. And from that fact comes the possibility of travelling many years into the future.
Imagine that the train left the station on January 1, 2050. It circles Earth over and over again for 100 years before finally coming to a halt on New Year's Day, 2150. The passengers will have only lived one week because time is slowed down that much inside the train. When they got out they'd find a very diff erent world from the one they'd left. In one week they'd have travelled 100 years into the future. Of course, building a train that could reach such a speed is quite impossible. But we have built something very like the train at the world's largest particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
Deep underground, in a circular tunnel 16 miles long, is a stream of trillions of tiny particles. When the power is turned on they accelerate from zero to 60,000mph in a fraction of a second. Increase the power and the particles go faster and faster, until they're whizzing around the tunnel 11,000 times a second, which is almost the speed of light. But just like the train, they never quite reach that ultimate speed. They can only get to 99.99 per cent of the limit. When that happens, they too start to travel in time. We know this because of some extremely short-lived particles, called pi-mesons. Ordinarily, they disintegrate after just 25 billionths of a second. But when they are accelerated to near-light speed they last 30 times longer.
It really is that simple. If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we're ever likely to do that is by going into space. The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we'll have to go more than 2,000 times faster. And to do that we'd need a much bigger ship, a truly enormous machine. The ship would have to be big enough to carry a huge amount of fuel, enough to accelerate it to nearly the speed of light. Getting to just beneath the cosmic speed limit would require six whole years at full power.
The initial acceleration would be gentle because the ship would be so big and heavy. But gradually it would pick up speed and soon would be covering massive distances. In one week it would have reached the outer planets. After two years it would reach half-light speed and be far outside our solar system. Two years later it would be travelling at 90 per cent of the speed of light. Around 30 trillion miles away from Earth, and four years after launch, the ship would begin to travel in time. For every hour of time on the ship, two would pass on Earth. A similar situation to the spaceship that orbited the massive black hole.
After another two years of full thrust the ship would reach its top speed, 99 per cent of the speed of light. At this speed, a single day on board is a whole year of Earth time. Our ship would be truly flying into the future.
The slowing of time has another benefit. It means we could, in theory, travel extraordinary distances within one lifetime. A trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years. But the real wonder of our journey is that it reveals just how strange the universe is. It's a universe where time runs at different rates in different places. Where tiny wormholes exist all around us. And where, ultimately, we might use our understanding of physics to become true voyagers through the fourth dimension.
