The First Post of 2026

I was mostly resting in bed during the first few days of 2026. Thought I should now post something. My son from JB came back home on Sunday. Like always, we celebrate his cominng home by going out to eat outside in order for him to have a meal at the new eatery PnC Kitchen in Ikon, Seremban 2. Despite that I'm still in ontok-ontok mode, I thought I should be fair to all my kids so that each of them have at least one meal at this new place. The place is a bit pricey and it is always fully packed. In any case, my son had just transferred some cash to me and I was just returning him a treat. Here are some pics (as you can see, we had to sit outside).

Another educational post in my family WhatsApp group: an AI-generated video of John Mearsheimer's explaining Malaysia's decision to move currency and trading towards the gold standard, beginning in mid 2024. Thereafter, according to the video, several negotiations and counter-explanations were made revolving around arguments of others against this move. The video again has been removed (strangely) and I can't find any reliable information about the matter. If it is true, it is certainly a bold move to make our country less dependent on the US currency.

Another AI-generated video that I find interesting is "Emad Mostaque and the ideas from his book "The Last Economy"". The YouTube link (if it is not removed) is simply a plain audio clip which offers a (better) summary of Emad Mostaque's book "The Last Economy". I did not post this to my family group since I have already told them about Emad Mostaque's work before. The clip is over 1 hour 46 minutes offering a very good glimpse of what is inside the book, much better than the one I have given before (see this post). I saw that for the published version of my post in Majalah Sains, the editor actually had removed one added note that I wrote in the blog, about how to perceive 'harmonic flow' with respect to learning, which I thought was an interesting observation (but this is fine; it makes a smoother read). If I were to improve the post (or article), I would have added some diagrams (I will only describe them in words here and you can imagine how they look like). First to describe the first two flows (gradient and circular), one imagines a flat surface representing the phase space. Locally, one can then consider a radial (gradient) flow orthogonal to the (concentric) circular flow on the flat surface. The harmonic flow would then be added structures to this bland planar description i.e. by adding a height degree of freedom perpendicularly transverse to the surface. So one can add as many peaks and dips to the surface engineered at will where the circular flows will represent topographical contours and the radial flows will be flows ascending to a peak or descending to a dip. This will give an idea of what Mostaque meant by 'geometric engineering'. Of course these are all theoretical and the challenge is how to realise these given the compound civilizational variable of MIND. Mostaque did say in this podcast, that a technical paper will be written to detail out how these work and I'm looking forward to such paper.