You know what’s sad about it?
The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness.
It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.
On the Celestial Scale
Circumstances have thrown me off my path again and as I force myself to be resilient once more, I learn that even as we struggle through the darkest hours, we must no matter what, have faith in ourselves and in Him. He will do what He promised. Rights and wrongs will all be perfectly calibrated and accounted for on His celestial scale. You will see that this is not the end.
If I can only watch one movie in my life, it will be Constant Gardener. Here is a beautiful, beautiful song from the best movie ever made. Absolutely enthralling.
In my hands
A legacy of memories
I can hear you say my name
I can almost see your smile
Feel the warmth of your embrace
But there is nothing but silence now
Around the one I loved
Is this our farewell?
Sweet darling you worry too much, my child
See the sadness in your eyes
You are not alone in life
Although you might think that you are
Never thought
This day would come so soon
We had no time to say goodbye
How can the world just carry on?
I feel so lost when you are not at my side
But there is nothing but silence now
Around the one I loved
Is this our farewell?
Sweet darling you worry too much, my child
See the sadness in your eyes
You are not alone in life
Although you might think that you are
So sorry your world is tumbling down
I’ll watch you through these nights
Rest your head and go to sleep
Because my child, this is not our farewell.
This is not our farewell.
David Orr – Slow Knowledge
What is fast knowledge?
The culture of fast knowledge rests on these assumptions:
- Only that which can be measured is true knowledge
- The more knowledge we have, the better
- Knowledge that lends itself to use is superior to that which is merely contemplative
- The scale of effects of applied knowledge is unimportant
- There are no significant distinctions between information and knowledge
- Wisdom is an undefinable, hence unimportant, category
- There are no limits to our ability to assimilate growing mountains of information, and none to our ability to separate essential knowledge from that which is trivial or even dangerous
- We will be able to retrieve the right bit of knowledge at the right time and fit it into its proper social, ecological, ethical, and economic context
- We will not forget old knowledge, but if we do, the new will be better than the old
- Whatever mistakes and blunders occur along the way can be rectified by yet more knowledge
- The level of human ingenuity will remain high
- The acquisition of knowledge carries with it no obligation to see that it is responsibly used
- The generation of knowledge can be separated from its application
- The generation of knowledge is general in nature, not specific to or limited by particular places, times, and circumstances
What is slow knowledge?
The worldview inherent in slow knowledge rests on these beliefs:
- Wisdom, not cleverness, is the proper aim of all true learning
- The velocity of knowledge can be inversely related to the acquisition of wisdom
- The careless application of knowledge can destroy the conditions that permit knowledge of any kind to flourish (a nuclear war, for example, made possible by the study of physics, would be detrimental to the further study of physics)
- What ails us has less to do with the lack of knowledge but with too much irrelevant knowledge and the difficulty of assimilation, retrieval, and application as well as the lack of compassion and good judgment
- The rising volume of knowledge cannot compensate for a rising volume of errors caused by malfeasance and stupidity generated in large part by inappropriate knowledge
- The good character of knowledge creators is not irrelevant to the truth they intend to advance and its wider effects
- Human ignorance is not an entirely solvable problem; it is, rather, an inescapable part of the human condition
Imagine a world guided by slow knowledge. How will slow knowledge change the conditions for science and technology? How will slow knowledge change the way we perceive space and time? And what about slow development?
Street Names
The Panda dispensed interesting nuggets telling how street names come to be!
“These synonyms follow British tradition and each has a specific meaning. Avenue, a main road with trees in each verge; Close, a short cul-de-sac or dead end; Cresent, a curved street as the crescent moon; Drive, from the private road leading to a mansion in its own grounds; Grove, from a small group of trees; Heights indicates raised ground with a view from here; Lane, a minor and narrow road; Place, usually a city street which may also be a square, as in Raffles Place; Square, an open space or park with houses on all four sides; Terrace, a street of linked houses; Vale indicates a small valley; View, there should be a view from here; Walk, a very minor suburban street, perhaps pedestrianised; Way, a word with a 1930s ‘garden suburb’ feel, is similar to avenue. Rightly, there is no Sunset street because street indicates an urban road”
A quote
Panda sent me this quote. I like.
“I wish all of us identified with Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor of the Russian journal Novy Mir, who, the first time he read Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s staggering account of life in stalin’s slave camps, got out of bed and put on a coat and tie, saying that it would have been an insult to the victims had he read the book in his pajamas. But we do not.” – William F. Schulz 2001: 197 David Trimble’s Tears
The Sky
I inherited a beaverish character from my dad and mom. I find it hard to not do something about the state of my room once in a while. Either I will start tidying and cleaning every nook and corner (a vesitge of my obsessive-compulsive complex about cleanliness from young) or I will start shifting furnitures to feel different about the place. Today, I did the latter. I finally rid off the old cumbersome CPU that is taking up so much space on my study desk and shifted my table to face the Windows. It’s an amazing change. The whole day I just kept staring at the skies. Occasionally, I saw the clouds floating by and the skies changing colour. Now, as I am writting I see the orange hues in the farthest corner of the nightsky. The view out of my room provided a lot of joy to my essay-trouble soul and now as I typed away, I do not feel so much of a hermit anymore. From my small and messy room, I have a piece of the Sentosa sky!
P/S: SY, here’s a belated photo of how my room looks like btw! It’s non-comparable to yours, esp in terms of tidiness! =p
The window-grills are out for now because Mum's convinced that people do climb into HDB flats through windows at night till this day.
Barack Obama
| By Nick Bryant BBC News, Washington |
To measure fully the historical achievement of Barack Obama’s victory it is worth recalling what America looked like in 1961, the year of his birth.
Back then, much of the American South remained segregated, the races separated from the cradle to the grave.
Black people – or Negroes as they were known then – were born in segregated hospitals, educated in segregated school systems and buried in segregated graveyards.
Handed down in 1954, the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, which called for the integration of southern schools, had been met in many southern communities with a campaign of “massive resistance”.
For segregationist die-hards it became the twisted metaphor of the age, as they fought to uphold a system of racial apartheid that was known by the deceptively friendly aphorism, Jim Crow.
Washington DC was regarded still as a hardship posting for African diplomats, despite the efforts of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to desegregate the nation’s capital.
Restrictive covenants prevented them from living in the most fashionable parts of town, and they were denied service in the high-end barber shops.
Distance travelled
When they made the journey to the United Nations in New York, they travelled a road, Route 40, which was lined with segregated motels, diners and restaurants.
Back at the start of the 1960s, America’s first black presidential aide, a former public relations man called E Frederic Morrow, published a memoir of his years working under Dwight D Eisenhower.
It was titled Black Man in the White House. It revealed how he was never allowed to be left alone in the same room as a white woman, such was the fear that he might sexually molest her.On becoming president in 1961, Jack Kennedy made a series of senior black appointments. Still, the young president’s most valued African-American aide was a man called George Thomas, whose job each morning was to lay out his clothes.
Leaving others to attach racial meaning to his candidacy, Barack Obama has not spoken much about the struggle for black equality, nor the tumultuous decade into which he was born.
Go through his speeches, and you will find little mention of the civil rights era.
For to become a history-defying candidate he has been something of a history-denying figure. The strategy throughout has been to de-emphasise his race.
A quirk of scheduling and a quantum leap of history meant that Mr Obama delivered his acceptance speech in Denver on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech.
But even then, Mr Obama did not mention Dr King by name, referring to him instead as the “young preacher from Georgia”.
Black and white
Back in June, on the night when he finally saw off the challenge from Hillary Clinton, his celebration speech made no reference to his historic racial first, and noticeably he dedicated his victory to his white grandmother.
Throughout the campaign, Mr Obama has emphasised his whiteness as much as his blackness.The president-elect understood one of the great paradoxes of the civil rights era.
While it helped pave the way for his ultimate success, it also made it more difficult for northern candidates, like him, to win the presidency.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, he told an aide: “We have lost the south for a generation”. But he had miscalculated.
The once solid Democratic South – the Democrats used to be an unhappy alliance between Northern moderates and progressives, and southern segregationists – started to go reliably Republican in presidential elections.
Prior to 1964, the Democrats won six out of eight presidential elections. After 1964, they lost seven out of 10.
Achieving the impossible
The civil rights era was responsible for the great historical anomaly of US post-war politics: the process through which the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, established a stronghold in the states of the Old Confederacy.
It is no coincidence that every Democratic president since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has hailed from the south: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and, the die-hards would contest, Al Gore.
The new law not only demolished segregation, but re-drew the US political map.
So it is worth remembering that Barack Obama will not only be the first African-American president, but the first Northern Democrat to serve in the White House since Kennedy.
To achieve this racial first represents the most extraordinary of achievements.
Since the end of Reconstruction – the period in the aftermath of the US civil war – there have been just three black US senators.
Only two states, Massachusetts and Virginia, have elected a black governor.
With the election of a black president, what many considered the politically impossible has now become real.
On 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King spoke of his dream for America, with the brooding statue of Abraham Lincoln offering the most glorious of pulpits.
On 20 January 2009, Barack Obama will appear on the west steps of the US Capitol, at the other end of the Washington Mall, and seal his historic triumph with just 35 words: the presidential oath of office.
Nick Bryant is the author of The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality
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