On Quotes, Reason, Atheism and Irony

"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into."

Author unknown

The above quote, in its pithiest and most quotable form, has an unknown providence but it is a frequent lament of atheists and freethinkers on the subject of arguing with religious people. Because when it comes down to it, how does one hope to dislodge a theist's beliefs when usually, said beliefs had been indoctrinated into their minds since childhood, far before they have achieved the age of reason? Any "reason" that theists use to justify their strange miraculous beliefs, by necessity, had to have arisen ad hoc.

Indeed, too many times have Christians and Muslims told me, "You just have to accept it on faith! Once you have accepted it, it will make sense to you!" It was a sly gambit. They were hoping to pit my own faculties of reason against myself but fortunately, I am no fool - for only fools will accept something on faith before it is proven to them. If I say to you, "Just trust me. Sign your house over to me and I'll pay you RM1,000,000 afterwards," would you just take my word for it or would you at least have me sign some papers first or show you that I do actually have that kind of money?

Anyway, to return from my digression, there are really no good rational reasons for believers to believe in what fairy stories their parents, teachers, peers and clerics have passed down to them. It follows that you cannot then reason them out of said fairy stories. When I tried to trace the genesis of that astute aphorism, I was led to Sidney Smith (1771-1845), an English writer and Anglican cleric who apparently said,

"Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out"

The attribution appeared in A Dictionary of Thoughts by Tryon Edwards from as early as 1891. Smith's words, however much it resembles the modern atheist watchword, speaks more on the nature of prejudices rather than the mechanics of acquiring and abandoning rhetorical positions. The similarity was but cosmetic. Though it is possible that the modern quote might have evolved from Smith's original saying, I remain unconvinced - so I dug further.

My investigation led me further back in literary history to Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), an Anglo-Irish satirist and essayist whose greatest claim to fame was authoring Gulliver's Travels in 1726. According to Treasury of Thought (1881) by Maturin Murray, Swift allegedly wrote,

"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."

Now that is more like it! The quote fits the form and essence of the modern saying to a T! I would like very much to know the context in which the quote was written but the Treasury of Thought - it being nothing more than an oversized list of quotes - was quite unhelpful in this aspect, which meant that the answer I crave lies buried within Swift's body of work, all of which conveniently belongs to the public domain now in this day and age.

Finally, after looking through (or rather, after siccing all the power of a modern search engine against) the collected writings of Jonathan Swift on the internet, I think I might have discovered the surprising original context and the maiden wording of his quote. I will reproduce a large portion of my source here, but bear with it because I feel it is deserving of your patient attention,

"... And here I am at a loss what to say upon the frequent custom of preaching against atheism, deism, freethinking, and the like, as young divines are particularly fond of doing especially when they exercise their talent in churches frequented by persons of quality, which as it is but an ill compliment to the audience; so I am under some doubt whether it answers the end.

Because persons under those imputations are generally no great frequenters of churches, and so the congregation is but little edified for the sake of three or four fools who are past grace. Neither do I think it any part of prudence to perplex the minds of well-disposed people with doubts, which probably would never have otherwise come into their heads. But I am of opinion, and dare be positive in it, that not one in an hundred of those who pretend to be freethinkers, are really so in their hearts. For there is one observation which I never knew to fail, and I desire you will examine it in the course of your life, that no gentleman of a liberal education, and regular in his morals, did ever profess himself a freethinker: where then are these kind of people to be found? Among the worst part of the soldiery made up of pages, younger brothers of obscure families, and others of desperate fortunes; or else among idle town fops, and now and then a drunken 'squire of the country. Therefore nothing can be plainer, than that ignorance and vice are two ingredients absolutely necessary in the composition of those you generally call freethinkers, who in propriety of speech, are no thinkers at all. And since I am in the way of it, pray consider one thing farther: as young as you are, you cannot but have already observed, what a violent run there is among too many weak people against university education. Be firmly assured, that the whole cry is made up by those who were either never sent to a college; or through their irregularities and stupidity never made the least improvement while they were there. I have at least forty of the latter sort now in my eye; several of them in this town, whose learning, manners, temperance, probity, good-nature, and politics, are all of a piece. Others of them in the country, oppressing their tenants, tyrannizing over the neighbourhood, cheating the vicar, talking nonsense, and getting drunk at the sessions. It is from such seminaries as these, that the world is provided with the several tribes and denominations of freethinkers, who, in my judgment, are not to be reformed by arguments offered to prove the truth of the Christian religion, because reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired..."

Wow, right? I plucked the excerpt from A Letter to a Young Clergyman (January the 9th, 1719-20) written by The Very Reverend Dr Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. He originally coined his maxim on reason when he was talking about the futility of proving Christianity to freethinkers.

I was also disappointed to discover that Jonathan Swift was a prejudiced imbecile. In that letter, Swift was advising young clerics to avoid preaching against atheism in case it puts ideas into their flock, effectively advocating thought-policing and censorship. He also thought that no moral person who received a liberal education ever professed to atheism, and claimed that all atheists are ignorant and immoral. I have no idea how most of the atheists were like in Swift's time but nowadays, studies have shown that atheists tended to be more intelligent, more liberal, more highly educated, and more ethical compared to religious people, the opposite of everything Swift said about non-believers. If Dr Swift is somehow alive today (perhaps through the sorcery of his deity), I wonder if I will be able to reason him out of his prejudice against atheists such as myself using evidence? Well, Sidney Smith is of the opinion that it is pointless to even try.

Maybe I can't reason your prejudice out of you, Dr Swift, but I can totally do this.

I also wonder at how many RPM's his corpse will spin when he finds out that modern atheists have unwittingly and ironically appropriated his quote to describe gentlemen of his breed and quality. To my fellow friends of liberal and godless secular philosophies I ask this question: how does it feel to find out that one of your favourite adages originated from a source contrary to everything you stand for?



Lost respect for Jonathan Swift,
k0k s3n w4i

Dirty Kuching Smokers Infesting The Spring Mall

"Forcing smoke down my lungs is pulmonary rape. It invades my body against my will, and it's not fair."

Patty Young

I went to The Spring earlier this month in pursuit of a haircut. One of the saloons there had more customers than they could stomach while the other wanted to charge me sixty bucks for a simple wash and trim because it was 4th day of the Lunar New Year and that, for some reason meant that they could rob their patrons blind. I ultimately decided to just have dinner and then leave to go barber-hunting elsewhere. Kenny Roger Roasters was serving some weird teriyaki version of their usual chicken so I decided to try it (turned out to be a bad idea). In the restaurant, I was seated right by the window, and this was what I saw,

She's surrounded!

I had a good view of the mall's back entrance and there I saw a little girl trying her darnedest to feed the automated parking machine money while a lime-shirted cigarette addict smoked merrily beside her. At the same time, another bloke wearing a striped shirt - also smoking - approached the little girl from behind. These reprehensible men were forcing their dangerous fumes on her and on every child, baby, senior citizen and pregnant mothers who use the entrance. What you don't see in the photograph is their conscience.

I watched as the bespectacled striped-shirt man walked right up to the little girl till the lit end of his cigarette was hovering right above her head,

Thanks for killing me, daddy.

As it appears, he seemed to be the little girl's father and had wanted to help her pay the machine, and in the process, breathed secondhand cigarette smoke right into her eager face below. I mentioned in a previous post that this is a depressingly common sight in the Kuching: a lot of parents here don't love their kids enough to keep away from them when they indulge in their tobacco habits. I have been to many cities in Malaysia and so far, the people of Kuching appears to me to be some of the most ignorant and least considerate folks in the country. This is a region where I cannot escape from cigarette smoke even after climbing to the summit of a 800-metre mountain!

When lime shirt was done with his ciggie, he casually threw it onto the ground even though there was a trash can situated just a few fucking steps away from where he stood. He didn't even bother putting it out! It's a fire hazard, you Ass Oh Bee!

You'll notice that the ash remained unscattered, meaning that it was still burning right where it laid.

Now, the management have reserved a few parking spots adjacent to the back entrance for the use of mothers with infants, pregnant women, the handicapped and senior citizens. And since The Spring's entrances are where most of the smokers congregate, these people using the special parking spots are regularly exposed to the poisonous fog that these smokers maintained there - and they are the people most vulnerable to cigarette smoke!

To prove that I am not lying, here is a picture of a man smoking right beside the special parking spots I mentioned, all set to force his cancer-giving smoke onto preggos and babies,

He is also an employee of one of the shops in the mall to boot.

Is The Spring's management doing anything to curb smokers (especially from the staff of their tenants) from lighting up on the premises? Not a single lifted finger! They purport to run a place that caters to families but would do nothing to protect them. My wife, back when she was still pregnant with Darwin, actually went to their office to complain about the smokers but they said that they can't do anything so long as the smokers smoke outside (while still remaining on the premises) - which is a fat smelly load of cow-butts because they own the fucking place and could definitely enforce house rules against cigarette smoking on their property if it pleases them! They choose not to, that makes them complicit in jeopardising the health of Kuching's children.

I mean, look at this,

The red-collared MBO Cinema employee was also smoking.

Pictured above are employees of various businesses within The Spring, and three of them were smoking cigarettes. Meanwhile, another little girl was standing nearby with her mother waiting for their ride to swing by. Just look, the Spring's management allows this to happen to poor defenceless kids!

The main entrance and foyer of The Spring have an equally bad (perhaps worse) infestation of these nicotine junkies,

Not pictured: human decency.

In the picture above, you can see the guy in blue sucking on a cigarette while two unsuspecting families with toddlers and children stood just a few feet away.

And a few feet away, right outside of Starbucks, two men - one wearing a grey shirt and one orange - were smoking as well when a little girl walked past holding her father's hand.  And if you are observant, you'd notice that the seated man who was partially concealed by the father's upper body just exhaled a lungful of cigarette smoke as well, The girl didn't stand a chance.

I couldn't get a good angle and capture the orange shirt's fag in this shot, but you can see grey shirt's in his left hand if you enlarge the picture.

These are not a collection of pictures taken over an extended period of time. All of them were taken within a span of just 30 minutes.

The walkway outside of KFC and the special needs parking in the basement are also congregation spots for The Spring workers and mallgoers to light up.

We continuously bemoan the epidemic of underage smokers in our country but the fact is, these kids pick up smoking because their parents smoke, everyone around them smokes, and businesses encourage people to smoke by their tacit approval. Something drastic and urgent needs to be done before our entire nation goes up in smokes.

Anti-nicotinist,

k0k s3n w4i

The Price of Happiness

"Pisang emas dibawa berlayar

Masak sebiji di atas peti

Hutang emas boleh dibayar

Hutang budi dibawa mati"

Malay pantun

Sunrise yesterday (28.01.2014), seen from the entrance of my apartment building.

On Monday, I cycled to work with the shadow of a forty-eight-hour, two-day call riding pillion with me. Monday calls are always tough as my colleagues from the other departments would choose to hold on to their patients over the weekend as a form of professional courtesy and then unloading all of them on the poor sod who draws the Monday straw. I had seven referrals before noon and that is a fuck-lot of referrals for a department that can expect zero referrals on a good day. Seven referrals before lunch is a number that even those benighted, overworked peons over at Internal Medicine would consider a heavy load. We Psychiatry Medical Officers are not used to breaking a sweat in the line of duty. That morning, I also admitted two of the patients referred to me putting me firmly ahead in the M.O. leaderboard of most-patients-admitted to our new virginal Psychiatric Ward, which is still pristine and free from the ammonium miasma of insanity that permeates older psychiatric facilities.

That morning, I had breakfast at a coffee shop opposite of my apartment building and as par for course for most open-air eateries in the city of Kuching, dirty, smelly, cancerous cigarette smokers fart through their disgusting mouths without a care, poisoning most of the premises. In order to put myself at least 20-feet away from the nearest of these accursed butt-suckers, I was forced to share a table with a stranger. I am not overly fond of conversations and especially less so on a Monday morning so after I sat down, I distanced myself from my immediate reality by sticking my headphones into my ears and tuned in to an episode of Harmontown (a weekly podcast hosted by Dan Harmon, the misanthropic comedic genius who created my favourite TV show of all time, Community). People usually don't try to talk to people who have headphones on but in my experience, it's not idiot-proof.

Sunset yesterday, as seen from the balcony of my apartment.

I had a bowl of greasy kolo mee, a Kuching staple which the locals are overly and unjustifiably proud of (it's just some salty dry-tossed noodle with little else in it, really). The best part about it is that it is usually cheap. I mean, I am a doctor and I can't even afford to drive to work in this country anymore with the prices of every commodity (except kangkung) rising like sewage out of a toilet blocked by political shitheads. Cheap is what I am looking for these days.

My fellow breakfaster, who had so kindly allowed me to take refuge a safe distance away from the toxic fumes of tobacco addicts (and was so considerate as to avoid the urge to chat or even make eye contact with me) left before I finished, leaving the table to my sole sovereignty. Soon, I too have supped my fill and got up to pay the kolo mee seller. Little did I suspect, I was in for a surprise.

A close-up of the above sunset descending behind the mountain.

"That guy you were sitting with already paid for you," he said.

Say what? I quickly looked around for my benefactor, only to realise that I didn't actually look at him long enough to recognise him the entire time we dined together. I haven't the foggiest why he did it but it sure as heck wasn't because of my good looks. Meanwhile, two senior citizens have claimed my recently vacated table and started chatting spiritedly about whatever it is that senior citizens chat about over breakfast.

"I'll pay for them," I told the shopowner.

"They are not the man who paid for you," said Captain Obvious.

"I know," I answered, paid and left. I couldn't pay the magnanimous John Doe back for his spontaneous act of goodwill, but I could pay it forward. It heartens me to find out that although the prices of everything else continue to rise, the price of my faith in humanity remained cheap - and he bought it back for me with just four bucks.

And the least I could do was give the same gift to others. It blows my mind that if everyone pays every kindness done to them forward, we can make the day of every single person in the world at the price of four measly dollars.



P.S. Much more meaningful than forwarding chain e-mails and re-tweeting, methinks.

P.P.S. All  pictures taken with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ40 camera.



A conduit of kindness,
k0k s3n w4i

Sophie and the Sin of Athenian Idealatry

"Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes."

Rosemarie Urquico

An excerpt from the essay reply to Charles Warnke's You Should Date An Illiterate Girl. I like both pieces.

There is a girl I'm in love with, and her name is... let us call her Sophie. Sophie is perfect, and embodies every quality - rare or otherwise - that I admire in a girl. She's about 5'1" of perky impishness and dimpled smiles, and she wears her hair in that pixie-cut chic I adore oh-so very much. But these are merely the frosting, and not the cake.

The thing about Sophie is that she is a prolific and voracious reader of books. All books. From autobiographies to bildungsromans, historical fiction to sci-fi, and the highest to the lowest order of fantasies. She reads them all no matter if its written by the Brothers Grimm or the Sisters Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe or Ishiguro Kazuo, G. K. Chesterton or Sidney Sheldon. She had been there and back again, into the wardrobe and down the rabbit hole. She had beheld Dorian Gray's portrait in its various stages of decomposition, walked away from Omelas and witnessed the passion of the Nazerene. She always carries a paperback in her handbag, several volumes of audiobooks loaded into her MP3 player, and a thousand more in her Kindle just in case  because she thinks that there is no worthier pursuit to fill the intermissions of her life than ink in its myriad forms. She had visited worlds beyond ours, and lived more lifetimes than the single one helping we are allowed. I want to reminisce with her these places we have been to, these lives we have led. I want to sit across from her as she swims between the pages of a new novel, and I in mine. I'll steal glances at her. I'll watch as as her eyes brighten and her breath halts - and then she'll break surface for a moment just to read to me a line or a passage which excites her, touches her or simply blows her mind out of the water.

As she consumes pages and proses, she also crafts them. She's working on a novel and holds the ideas of several hundred more in the bookshelves of her mind. She could think of no higher calling than to leave at least one of them behind before the light of her consciousness goes out, and no higher honour than having it considered worthy enough to be catalogued in the sum total of humanity's bibliography - a sentiment I share with every fibre of my existence. She understands the crippling paralysis of the writer's block, and the pure joy of finding the perfect words, the bon mots, in expressing precisely what she means to say. She also writes a blog and record every opinion and emotion which inhabit her psyche, and document every worthwhile experience of her beautiful life - because every life interpreted through the lens of carefully-considered, heartfelt words is more splendiferous than one which meanders unlettered. A writer is an uncommon creature which does not merely think, but thinks also about thinking. I cannot identify with those who only wade in their stream of consciousness but never stood at the banks to watch it flow, taking notes of its liquid form, its ripples, its waves. Most of all, I want a lover whose mind I can read.

Sophie is intelligent and loves the accretion of knowledge for its own sake. She believes in the silent power of knowing how things work around, above and inside us. I like it that she comprehends the concept of falsifiability, delights in the fact that dinosaurs still exists today and often on our dinner plates, and knows that the Dirac Sea is not a body of water. I like it that I can argue with her about gravity; on the plausibility of gravitons as predicted by the quantum field theory versus the geometric elegance of Einstein's general relativity. I enjoy our coffee talks where we discuss comparative theology, debate on the merits of Kantian ethics, and wrestle with the Platonic Theory of Forms (which we refer to as the Hylaean Theoric World because we have both read Neal Stephenson's Anathem and loved it). I recognise in her my intellectual equal, and if you lived a life surrounded by simple people and simple conversations you would celebrate this discovery too. It's like she's at just the right height to dance with. Or to kiss.

There are so many women who walked by me without so much as leaving a faint footprint in their passage through my life - faces without names that I shared a seat with on buses and trains, drift past as I stroll down a street or in a mall, or sat across from in a café or a library on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Behind one of these faces is Sophie.

Oh, if only I know which!

Forgive me, Sophie. Forgive me O Future Lover for I have sinned against you. I am a daydreamer, a hopeless romantic and an idealator of the worst degree. And I am in love with the idea of you.

Romanticidal maniac,

k0k s3n w4i

Where My Pixies At?

"The hair... They say the hair is everything, you know. Have you ever buried your nose in a mountain of curls, and just wanted to go to sleep forever?"

Lt. Col. Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman (1992)

These are four of my favourite film stars. What do they have in common?

Ellen Page.

I first encountered her... in X-Men: The Last Stand (or X-Men 3). She was Kitty Pryde.
I fell in love with her... when she cut Patrick Wilson's balls off in the 2005 psychological thriller Hard Candy, a film about what would happen if a 14-year-old psychopath meets a paedophile.

Audrey Tautou.

I first encountered her... as the titular protagonist of Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (or simply Amélie, a 2001 French rom-com set in whimsical indie Paris).
I fell in love with her... in that same film, when I first saw her saucer-eyed, tight-lipped mischievous smile.

Emily Browning.

I first encountered her... as 14-year-old Violet Baudelaire in the film adaptation of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.
I fell in love with her... as soon as I found out she was actually 16 years old at the time and it's not at all creepy for me to profess my drippy crush on her. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Carey Mulligan.

I first encountered her... in her Academy award nominated role as a 16-year-old schoolgirl caught in an affair with an older man in 2009's An Education.
I fell in love with her... the moment I saw her adorable boy cut in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps last year - a movie I loathed, by the way.

I'm not merely speaking about their talents in acting when I named them my favourite actresses - I'm also taking into account their physical appeal. And I'll gladly watch any film that has any one of their names attached to it, no matter the reviews. I suppose you can describe all four of them as having elfin or impish features, but Emily Browning seems to have more of a gnomish disposition going on. It's probably because of her accent. The Australian accent has a sort of stocky stoutness to it which immediately conjures up manly images of kangaroo kickboxing and barechested croc-wrestling in my head. Subtracted some daintiness from her, it did.

Most importantly, all four of them look extra fetching wearing a boy or pixie cut! I can't explain it - I just have a crazy yen for hair like that, particularly if raven or brunette. If only the Long-Suffering Girlfriend™ can be so obliging...

Somehow, I never did find generically hot actresses like Angelina Jolie or Megan Fox to be too attractive to me (you won't believe the amount of crap I got from the guys for daring to be unimpressed with the former Transformers star). While I think I sort of understand why so many men consider them to be sex symbols, I've always been more into the cute, petite ones - with the exception of the lascivious, well-chested Miss Scarlett Johansson, of course. She's everyone's exception. My girlfriend even admitted that she would go lesbian for her.

So, who are your favourite celebrities and why? And what do you find irresistible?



P.S. Natalie Portman nearly made my list, especially after Black Swan. It was my favourite film of 2010.



Fey fancier,
k0k s3n w4i

The World I Want to Live in Within 20 Years

"Based on our findings, there are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources. It is a question of whether we have the societal and political will."

Mark Z. Jacobson

This is probably one of the most exciting piece of science reporting I've read in recent times, and it starts off with this rhetorical question:

"If someone told you there was a way you could save 2.5 million to 3 million lives a year and simultaneously halt global warming, reduce air and water pollution and develop secure, reliable energy sources – nearly all with existing technology and at costs comparable with what we spend on energy today – why wouldn't you do it?"

Just last month, a couple of researchers from Stanford and UC Davis published a pair of papers asking; can we replace our worldwide energy need using only clean, renewable energy sources? The answer they came up with is yes. Hell yes. They've calculated that in less than 40 years, it is entirely feasible to be completely rid of pollution from the fossil fuels by which we run our vehicles and industries and eliminate all concerns of runaway global warming destroying all life on Earth - all with currently existing tech!

That's right, bitch.

OMG OMG HOW? TELL ME NOW!

Three words: Wind, water, sunlight. To be specific, 50% wind, 40% sun and 10% everything else.

Separately, these different sources of energy have pretty well-recognised disadvantages. Wind and solar power has geographical limitations. As we know, not all places are windy or sunny, and not all windy or sunny places are windy and sunny all the time. Additionally, solar power can only be harvested in daytime. Then, there are environmental concerns and the limited availability of suitable sites for hydroelectric dams, wave farms, tidal power stations and geothermal plants which ultimately resisted their adoption on a massive scale.

The solution is to put the whole kit and caboodle together. If you can integrate the power grid optimally, you can actually offset the variation in the wattage each particular resource contributes. Here is an illustration of the concept,

Image stolen from... Bah, too lazy to credit. This is just a freaking blog - not some reputable news site or science journal.

According to Jacobson, coauthor of the papers, wind energy peaks during the night while power peaks during the day (obviously), so the two naturally complements one another. To fill in whatever gaps there is, we can simply pipe in extra energy from hydroelectricity or tidal power to meet demand. This can theoretically power all our homes and industries with little risk of brownouts and blackouts.

Another oft-mentioned obstacle in the adoption of alternative energy sources is storage - how do we store the excess energy we generated from the wind and the sun which we don't immediately need? Using their proposed system, excess energy produced during low-demand time should be diverted to produce hydrogen via water electrolysis which we are going to fuel our awesome future hydrogen cell cars with. And as we all know, they don't fart any exhaust fumes! Only water!

What? Do you think you'll still be driving your same dirty internal combustion engine dinosaurs in 40 years?



Okay, what's the catch?

Virtually none. It is all upsides! We have the tech to do it and our pockets are deep enough to afford it. The cost of making the whole shebang possible is comparable to the price tag of our existing energy model, and we can in fact significantly reduce medical expenditure in treating diseases caused by pollution. Furthermore, the plan itself requires 30% less than the current total world energy demand because it is far more efficient than deriving energy from burning stuff (i.e. oil, coal).

They also calculated how much land the whole installation is going to take. Care to hazard a guess? Whatever it number you came up with, I bet you overestimated it. It's a mere 1% footprint on the face of the earth - mostly to lay solar panels and to space wind turbines, which need to be set far apart to avoid turbulence. But the land between turbines is still totally usable for other purposes like pasture, farming or nudist colonies for those who like a strong breeze blowing at their nips and nads.



So, why isn't this happening right this instant?

You. You are the fucking problem. You and your fucked up governments and asshole politicians.

I 'shopped Recycle Sam a couple of years ago for a recycling drive poster, and I'm going to use it however many times I want to.

To quote Jacobson, "We really need to just decide collectively that this is the direction we want to head as a society."

That's right. We need to stop swigging from the six pack of apathy and demand our better world (and yeah, that's a Green Day lyric reference, bitch). It was projected that we'll run out of oil in 50 years and even before that comes around, we can expect oil prices to become prohibitively expensive not too far in the future. An overwhelming proportion of our power right now still comes from fossil fuels. Almost all of our cars still run on petroleum/gasoline, not to mention other transportations like airlines, ships and trains; the production and transportation of our food supplies; our essential use-and-discard sterile medical equipments which are also mostly made out of plastic derived from petroleum and natural gas...

Imagine a world without oil.

Then, there's runaway climate change to worry about as well because when it does happen, it's going to end our sorry terran asses. Honestly, what will it take to get you peeps to give a shit?

The nail of the anthropogenic global warming "controversy" - it was hit on the head.

The final bit of soapboxing.

For the longest time, I was under the impression that restructuring our power systems entirely to green energy entails either technology we don't possess at present, or that there is some sort of insurmountable logistical and economical hurdle we cannot overcome, but Jacobson and Delucchi's little thought experiment clearly demonstrated that my preconceptions are dead wrong. And believe me, I'm honestly glad to be proven wrong.

Now, I don't expect people to willingly accept radical adjustments to their lifestyles to champion a crucial social cause such as the environment - I know it's bloody unrealistic and most people are selfish pricks. As it turns out, no one needs to give up any luxury or comfort to make this work (unless you reeeally like the smell of exhaust from your car's tailpipe).

So, let's fucking start a revolution! Here's the least of the things I think you can do,

• Pass this science article to as many people as possible. For less scientifically literate folks, you can show them my dumbed-down write-up on this page. Blog or tweet about this. Spread it on Facebook. If you know any anyone in broadcast media such as radio or television or journalists, encourage them to take this cause up. If you know any teachers or lecturers in the field engineering, physics, social sciences, et cetera, ask them if they know that change is possible right now and if they are passing that info on to their students. Awareness is key.
  
• Write to your local politicians and tell them that most voters find environmental issues to be the in-thing these days. It should be easy to do; simply point out our national large scale anti-plastic bags movement or the popularity of Earth Hour amongst wannabe hipster environmentalists (who would go on to fuck up the planet the other 8759 hours of the year).
• Write to our Department of Environment and our Ministry of Energy, Green Technology and Water (and if you know any insiders, even better) about this study - they have e-mails addresses. DO NOT show them my post here because I'm a potty-mouthed, vitriolic godless activist and no one listens to someone like me no matter how excellent my points are. Use the published papers I had linked to below instead. The science will inform policy-making.
  
• If you are part of a non-government environmental organisation regardless of whether it's on a high school, university or national level, bring this up. Get everyone to write individually to the ministries I've mentioned above. Use a template. Volume counts.
  
• Tell me if you have any suggestions so I can list them here.

Resources:
Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials.
Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part II: Reliability, system and transmission costs, and policies
A YouTube video of Mark Z. Jacobson lecturing on some salient points of his published papers



Mean, green blogging machine,
k0k s3n w4i

Coco avant Chanel: A Review

"There have been several Duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Chanel."

Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel

The reason why she did not marry the 2nd Duke of Westminster.

Très chic.

Before I review this biopic, there are several things which I need to disclaim. Firstly, I know next to nothing about the subject of this motion picture, Mademoiselle Chanel, who was - I was informed - one of the most iconic figures in fashion history and was the only couturier to be included in the Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century. Secondly, I admit my ignorance of the mores of fashion. My wardrobe philosophy is simplicity and utility. My taste in women's fashion runs very much in the same vein: minimalistic but elegant.

Clearly, I had a lot to learn and one of the things the film taught me is that Mademoiselle Chanel pretty much hold the same ideas about women's clothing as I do. It might also mean that my taste dates back to the early 1900's, making me about one hundred years out of vogue - but there's no denying Chanel's influence on modern feminine couture.

The film is titled Coco Before (avant) Chanel. It's a story of the woman before the legend. Before the advent of Chanel, women of station dressed in gaudy, ostentatious fripperies. There's a beautifully shot beach scene where Coco and her beau, Boy Capel, were strolling through a sea of people enjoying a day in the sun, and she dismissively pointed out how tastelessly the ladies of her time are adorned to him. She critiqued the profusion in jewelry. She scoffed at a woman trying to run in a corset. She laughed at the ridiculously large and froufrou hats they wear. "They look like pastries," she remarked in amusement.

One of my favourite shots of the film.

Coco stood in stark contrast to her contemporaries. She looked confident without being vain or showy. She caught eyes without screaming for it. It's a testament to her monolithic and uncompromising sense of individuality that when the world and her collided, the world started dressing like her.

But that sense of individuality was not limited to just her clothes. She had been a mistress to many men, but never a wife. She disapproved of how the well-heeled crème of the French social circles did no work but horsed around decadently nibbling amuse-gueules. She could have lived a lavish lifestyle as the domesticated woman of the rich textile heir Étienne Balsan, designing hats as a diversion for her socialite friends - but no, she wanted to be productive and independent. I share her disdain for the institute of marriage. If I had been born a woman, I too would have wanted no part in the evidently unequal contract of matrimony. I would never want to surrender my name for another. I would never be so spineless as to allow each and every last one of my children take my husband's name. "Madame," a waiter addressed her. "Mademoiselle," she corrected him as a matter of factly. She considered her unwed status as something to be proud of, not as a shame.

The real shame, if you ask me, is that generations after the death of Coco Chanel, the majority of modern women would still readily believe the reverse.

The underrated stiff upper lip of the French.

"She was the first good-looking couturier and because of her own strong look, everybody wanted to copy her. She was an artist who intellectualised couture for the first time," explains Catherine Leterrier, who designed and costumed the film. I felt that in many ways, it's amazing how she managed to recreate the simplistic exquisiteness which set Coco out and above the overdressed ladies of her era, whose ruffles and finery often threaten to drown her out. It's obvious that Chanel's - and by proxy, Leterrier's - creations were strongly inspired by menswear, and they exude a certain boyish chic which I find very fetching. I may never understand high fashion, but I certainly know what I like.

Is it wrong that I find women in masculine apparel sexy?

I confess that I only watched this film because Audrey Tautou was playing the legendary fashion designer. I have loved the French actress ever since I saw her as the shy, introverted Parisian waitress in the 2001 whimsical romantic comedy Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain - or simply Amélie to the rest of the world. In Coco avant Chanel, she played an assertive young seamstress attempting to make her way through life on her own terms. The essence of her story spanned the well-trodden road between rags and riches; from an orphanage in Aubazine to being the mistress of an empire which carried her name. The tone of the film is austere, unsentimental and free of the embellishing flounces of fairy-stories; much like her dresses one could say. I have no idea how accurately Audrey Tautou portrayed Mademoiselle Chanel but at the end of it, when she sat herself down regally on a step of a spiral staircase overseeing models outfitted in her distinctive brand of haute couture as they float down past her, I had no doubt that she nailed it.

A real queen, as Coco Chanel demonstrated, needs neither cape nor crown nor king.

Another favourite shot of mine from the film: Coco when she is Chanel.

Discovered a new heroine,
k0k s3n w4i

Losing the Battle for My Soul

"Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be."

Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819)
by William Hazlitt

Two fingers' breadth above the xiphisternum. Place heel of one hand and interlock fingers. Arms straight. Pressure two inches deep. One hundred compressions a minute.

I positioned myself beside and over the old woman with my hands on her breastbone. With my waist as the fulcrum, I levered my weight onto her heart. The idea was to squeeze the blood out of her non-beating heart into her system to keep her organs - her brain, in particular - awash with whatever little oxygen we can feed into the lungs. The idea was to do it for as long as necessary.

Let's backtrack a little. She had no pulse. For a short moment, the cardiac monitor showed her heart flickering between ventricular tachycardia and asystole before it decided on flatlining persistently. A house officer zoned out for a second, stared at the brilliantly green horizontal axis and then said, almost with robotic disinterest: "Asystole. Start CPR now."

It's not like in television when all personnel manning a hospital's casualty unit would snap to immediate attention and swarm around a dying patient in an excited bid to save a life. Reality is a far more sedate affair. No one ran - they walked briskly. One house officer produced a bag valve mask and started pumping air through the old woman's airway. Another house officer, in his second day there, appeared a little undecided on what he should be doing. I can identify: it was only the second day of my A&E posting too, but as a medical student.

"What are you waiting for? Start chest compressions," a colleague of his chided, and he obeyed. There's no panic, which was good. There's no sense of urgency either, which was unsettling. I suppose that that's only natural. In the emergency department, emergencies are routine.

"I'm tired," said the house officer, smiling sheepishly after performing five minutes of rapid and furious calisthenics on the old woman. He met my eyes. "Hey, med student. Wanna take over? Put on some gloves." I did. And that was how I ended up helping to keep a geriatric in her 70's hang on to the tatters of her ghost.

Two fingers' breadth above the xiphisternum. Place heel of one hand and interlock fingers. Arms straight. Pressure two inches deep. One hundred compressions a minute.

I felt sweat beading on my forehead and under my shirt in the chilly, air-conditioned resuscitation zone - it was hard work maintaining the rhythm and pressure, to be sure. As the minutes trickled by, I took to thinking more and more that the human being under my hands was a CPR practice dummy. It occurred to me at that time that it's pretty hard to tell if a person's really dead. Sure, I understand death in theory but on an emotional level, when I personally created and held every beat of the old woman's heart in my own two hands, the distinction became a lot less clear. Was I helping a person stay alive or was I making a corpse appear alive? Five minutes passed without my notice before I was asked to step down and another newly recruited med student was put on the case. We took turns.

"Just another fifteen minutes," said a house officer, checking the clock on the wall and writing in some case sheets. It was a countdown. It was admitting that there's nothing further which we could do besides maintaining her body a little longer for her, just in case she decides to come back. There's an empty spot in the room which optimism usually occupies, but not today.

Arms straight. Pressure two inches deep. One hundred compressions a minute.

"Alright, stop," someone told me, but I can't remember who. I promptly let her go and was surprised at how ridiculously easy it is to do so. I just let a human life go. Wow. I snapped my surgical gloves off and began washing my hands at the sink. Someone opened the double doors and walked outside.

"We did our best. Come in and see her one last time," I overheard him say his rehearsed lines. "Come in one at a time."

Unbeknownst to me, there were at least twenty kinspeople of the recently departed who have been waiting in the exterior the entire time. They filed in solemnly wearing various states of grief. Some remained stoic. Some were crying. There were looks of disbelief, defeat and confusion. For them, what transpired in the past several hours - hidden from their view - was certainly outside of routine. As I dried my hands, I watched as they surrounded what's left of their beloved matriarch and perhaps wondered as I had, how diminished a person looks after she had left her broken shell behind. "Ma... ma..." one or two of the women called feebly and mechanically because they have ran out of rational responses for what was laid before their eyes. A weeping grandchild asked her grandmother to wake up, but no one told her she's being naive or stupid.

I walked into the adjoining yellow zone, separated by some screens. Every once in awhile, the heart monitor gives out an orphaned beep - residual effects of adrenaline in her system. I imagined that it could easily be misinterpreted by someone unschooled in the science of medicine as a sign of life. "Shouldn't they have unplugged everything? Make her more presentable before letting the family see her?" a colleague of mine wondered out loud but out of earshot. Another colleague of mine, a girl who was helping with the bag valve mask, was visibly shaken and was crying. I think it was the first time someone died in her hands. Died. Poof. Just like that. It was the first time someone literally died in my hands too - but I was so detached I was barely there. Analyse and rationalise. Empathise, but not too much.

The doctors, nurses and medical assistants left the little clan alone to grieve and with pragmatic indifference, continued to function and man the casualty machinery - because someone's got to do it. The cries, the sniffles, the halfhearted conversations with the dead in the next room were relegated to background noise. Other patients required attention. Forms and case notes needed filling. Blood needed to be taken and sent. And someone dying in the department necessitates its own slew of paperwork, I'm sure. Being human is not a luxury that a person working in medicine can freely afford to indulge in.

It's a lesson I need to learn and a sacrifice I am expected to make. It's a job that requires me to be more than human to perform. Or less of a human. The distinction was never made clear to me.



Ever so slightly hollower,
k0k s3n w4i

¡Eye Yay Yay!

"Sleep... Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death."

Author unknown

Commonly attributed, in different wordings, to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jules Verne.

Oh hi, readers. It's been almost a week since I last said anything here. It has been a long and unapologetic week. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights all owed me entire nights' sleep I'll never get back. Thursday stole two hours of my life and Friday - today - was quite the bitch.

I don't know if this anyone noticed this, or if it was just the cracks finally showing in the workings of my grey matter - but three days can easily melt into a single protracted, lumbering franken-day when they aren't sectioned neatly by sleep. By Wednesday, I still felt like I'm in still entrenched in Sunday's lethargy and my subconsciousness was obliviously complaining, "Hey, why the fuck am I slaving away on a weekend?" And I also realise that if you deprive your brain of its privilege to dream, it'll start turning real-life into a dream. Now, I have never stayed awake more than three days in a row, but these are envelopes begging to be pushed.

I read somewhere that it is possible to hack our own minds into surviving on only 2 to 3 hours of sleep daily, and I must admit that I see the allure of having such an ability. It's a form of polyphasic sleep pattern called the Uberman's sleep schedule, and it's basically training yourself to cut down on all the time spent in stage 1 to stage 4 non-REM sleep and to go straight into the mental reboot of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Ever watched a dreaming sleeper? Neither have I but if we did, we would be able to see his or her eyes move jerkily under the eyelids in REM sleep. By taking only 20 to 30-minutes nap every 6 hours (and weathering this torturous regime for up to ten days), it is theoretically possible to force your brain into going straight for REM sleep every time you nap.

The idea of having a lot more time awake is very, very attractive to me because my candle's been burning from both ends for some years now and to paraphrase Tolkien, there's not enough butter, or something very much like that. As a result of trying to balance my passions with being a final year medico, I now subsist on about four hours of sleep daily. I am in love with life, and is drunk from all her pleasure. There are so many books I want to read; so many films I want to see; so many good food I want to taste, digest and make into poop. I want to drive on the streets of Melaka in the dead of night with the company of my thoughts. I want to write a novel or ten. Being an atheist, I know that my time alive is finite. To me, every hour spent asleep is a waste of criminal magnitudes.

In other news, I also noticed that my irides look... ragged.

I like to imagine little ocular marine life swimming in and out of those nooks and crannies.

I'm going to start paying more attention to the irides of every patient I examine from now on to see if there are anyone else who have a pair like mine. I don't remember seeing any during my month-long Ophthalmology rotation last year though. Do you know that your irides are as distinctive as your fingerprint? And that their peculiar uniqueness is the bread on which the tech of iris recognition scans is buttered on? You see it sometimes in sci-fi or spy flicks, though it is admittedly a tad overshadowed by retinal scanning. I'm craving for buttered toasts now, for some reason. With real butter. No gentleman should abide by margarine.

I think it's safe to say that I'll be writing in this web journal every other day for the next month or so - and I have a lot to say. I'm in a bit of a breather spot in an otherwise inhumanly frenetic year now, and I certainly will be needing it to recuperate. Every fibre in my body feels as ragged as my irides, let me tell you.



Double-wicked,
k0k s3n w4i

Up to Here with Life

"Eyes open wide, blinded by the sun now
Orange and white, dark red, green and yellow
Rainbow colors! Do not hide, see the view!
Step aside, go through!"

Sticks & Stones (2010) by Jónsi

Most of the rest of this song is in Icelandic.
I can't understand a single word of it, but it sure sounds pretty.

Yesterday was a great day. I woke up about seven and went for a few laps in the pool while Phoebs headed for class with her housemates. I don't know what came over me but I suddenly grew an urge to drop 5 kilograms before my month here is Butterworth is up (I can literally see the food capital of Malaysia from Phoeb's condo unit, so we'll see how this goes). I have restricted myself to two meals a day, small portions only and zero snacks in the interim. And for the first time in my life, I had a dinner consisting only of a stick of celery and an apple. I have always liked celery as a cooked dish, but by Jove, it never occurred to me that celery can taste good raw as well. I'm sure they'd taste fantastic with some salsa or cream cheese? No! Snap out of it! Put your hands in the air and back away real slow-like from the cheese dip, mister!

I'm so going to get a condo unit when I start working next time.

There's just something about this place that just makes me feel a lot less hungry than usual. I'm guessing it's because I do not have a working knowledge of every good eatery in this city. Back in Malacca, I'm hyperaware of the opening and closing times of each of my favourite food haunts. Just for example, at 5:00 am, my internal clock will inform me that that great dim sum shop on Jalan Ong Kim Wee just opened. At 5:30 pm, it tells me that the economy rice shop in Batu Berendam that serves the best damn char siew in the state will start selling and that I should get there 10 minutes early to beat the queue. It's like that for me all day long, every day.

As I was saying, it's nice to go swimming on a weekday morning. There's no one about to see me flail helplessly about like a drowned pig from one end of the pool to the other. I had to stop after half an hour though because I was starting to get dizzy and nauseous; the beginning of the throes of hypoglycaemia. For some strange reason, my blood sugar tended to dip at the merest prods. If I have too much coffee, or if I talk too much, my fingers would start to tingle. A swig of sugared water usually fixes me right up.

At about 8:00 am, I broke fast at this little coffee shop near Phoeb's place called Bee Tin which supposedly serves good curry mee. Some Penang foodie blogs recommended it. You should take a look at my Google Earth. I've populated it with like 40-50 markers tagging all the places where prime vittles can be found on the island and mainland - along with notes on their business hours, driving directions, telephone numbers, GPS cords and menu item suggestions. Took me near a week to gather that much intel on the F&B's of this region, let me tell you. Don't worry; I haven't memorise all of them yet.

Those red, jelly-like lumps made from pig blood are surprisingly un-disgusting.

Which reminds me - I should get myself a GPS-capable device. Or a map. I consider myself to be a pretty good hand at map-reading anyway. I also consider myself to be below the socioeconomic stratum of GPS-capable people.

After breakfast, I decided to explore Butterworth a bit on foot and headed in a northerly direction towards Raja Uda. The weather was beginning to swelter, even this early in the morn, but the sky was mercifully cloudy. I reckon Penang to be just about as hot as Malacca and Muar (where I attend clinics at), all three being coastal and all. Maybe I should have checked if there's a government hospital at the Cameron Highlands. Having to wear my white coat while doing my electives there actually makes sense.

My foot started to blister after about 3 kilometres out. Lousy 50 Rupees sandals. I bought them at Mysore during my South Indian backpacking trip. It figures that sandal from Mysore would make my feet SORE, ah haha ha... *cough*... That's another shopping list item: Walking shoes. I was going to get another pair of Timberland pseudo-formal slip-ons but I guess I'll just have to make do with my old ones for another year.

One of the objectives I had for embarking on this walk was to look for a dim sum restaurant marked on my Google Earth called Chaw Choon - not for second breakfast, of course, but you know, in case of emergencies. I found it closed with this notice stuck on the outside,

I's not saying that it'll be closed till the 15th of April, is it?! Can someone translate and say it isn't so-oh-oh?

Somehow, I managed to walk all the way back to Phoeb's place from there. I just did a beeline measurement of my route through Google Earth and it was almost 10 kilometres coming and going. All in all, it was a pretty good workout if I do say so myself. Plus, I also discovered this vegetarian shop en route which starts operating from 7:00 am onwards - which is good news because I can return to the mostly-vegan diet I subsisted on during my exam prep weeks. There's also this nasi lemak stall that seems to be quite popu... No! Must resist! Nasi lemak is the Enemy. It is the fucking Antichrist!

I think I might just go to the island on foot tomorrow, just for the heck of it. Does anyone know if they allow pedestrians on the ferries? Oh well, guess I'll just have to find out the hard way since I won't, for the lack of an internet connection, check up on this page until much later.

This post is not just for me to waffle about my latest doomed attempt at recapturing my former svelte-ness (I'll show you guys a pic sometimes). I wrote it because I want something to remember a great day by. I just passed the scariest exam I have ever sat for and is on a month long semi-vacation living with the girl I adore after being away from her for a really long time.

I'm sailing the best days of my life. I guess I must be doing something right.



His cup runneth over,
K0k s3n w4i