Varia: The Week Leading to Anniversary

Yesterday was our 32nd wedding anniversary and we celebrated it rather modestly. Let us backtrack for a few days more.

Given that I have 'more time' these days, I spent a little bit more on social media looking at all the viral issues being discussed, only to be depressed. There are many more educational materials in the internet but there seems to be more gravitation to dubious sources. Even with AI, I do think we need to read real books and reflect more. I do give such advices to my own family. I shared the following video to my family: key phrase - question everything. When I look at my book collection, I realised that my family rarely touch them. Of course, most of these are on maths and physics, which they will not be interested in. But I do have plenty of religious books and self-help books too. A large percentage of them is in English and the non-English ones many are written by Indonesian authors. In a way, I saw that people only read what is familiar and understandable. I worry about where these books should go, once I'm gone. At the same time, I rushed my writing on my Malay blog to post this, so that more could benefit from what I have been thinking.

The weekend also some mild earthquake happened in Segamat. Rather unexpected. I post the following to my family WhatsApp.

While not trying to be alarmist, one should always be aware of such news. In fact, this morning, another earthquake was felt and posted the news in my family's WhatsApp. I will keep posting things that I felt important.

During the weekend, we went to UiTM Shah Alam for my youngest son to collect his convocation gown. The convocation will be in mid September.

After collecting the convocation gown, he took some photos there after donning it.

Just two days before, he collected his new pair of glasses after a visit to our local opthamologist (it was detected that he had high astigmatism in one eye). 

To add, I also bought myself a new pair of leather shoes just for his convocation to conform to the dress code during the convocation. I was not sure if my Skecher shoes is allowd (wore these because of my back problem). Soon I hope, he will register for his BSc degree. By then, I hope I could manage with the extra expenses if he stays far away. I pray that everything will be well.

Last night, my other half and I decided to go out and have dinner at the local Middle Eastern restaurant.

I thought that I wore a smile when the pics were taken. I guess these were the best that I can do with many things on my mind. Don't worry, be happy.

Unplanned and Funerals

The day before yesterday, we took an unplanned visit to sister-in-law's place in Segamat for personal matters and the hope then was to continue the journey to Rompin. We waited for my other half to come back from work in Mantin. We reached Segamat during Maghrib time and we realized that we did not switch any lights and our cats will be left in the dark.

The next day (yesterday), the planned journey to Rompin was cancelled and at the same time, my eldest son received the call for a job interview. In a way, the coincidence of Rompin's cancelled visit allow us to go back to Seremban for my son's interview. While we were on our way back to Seremban, we received the news that the daughter of my niece, Nur Malihah Maisarah, has passed away. Just two days before, she was admitted to the hospital for lung infection. Given the flurry of activities, we thought of deferring our visit at a later time. Fate has it in a different way.

Thus, while we were still on the way back to Seremban, we decided to go to her funeral in Kuala Lumpur as soon as we take a stop at home and let our eldest son take some rest for the next day's interview. On reaching Seremban, we saw a slight traffic congestion due to a bush fire left to the flyover heading to our home.

This had never happened before and we were curious on how it started. After a slight rest and refreshing ourselves, we began our journey to Kuala Lumpur. We initially set our journey to Imam Al-Tirmidzi Sri Sentosa Mosque where the funeral prayers will take place. Since we are rather late, we decided to head straight to the burial place in Bukit Jalil Muslim Graveyard. Since the burial will be after Maghrib, we prayed Maghrib at a nearby surau.

Before the burial, the father gave us the opportunity to see Maisarah for the last time (since we did not get to see her before the funeral prayers). There is a photo shared among family members only and we will not share it out of respect. Instead, I will share her photo in the way we would like to remember her.

Among muslim community, we called those children who passed away while they are still very young as 'anak syurga' literally translated as children of the heaven or jannah. May Allah grant us to meet her in Jannah.

Today, again my other half received another sad news that her cousin just passed away in Muar. Her cousin has a similar name to mine and slightly older than me. Life is fragile and the grim reminder that we can go at any time. My other half is now travelling to Muar with my eldest son. My youngest son and I stayed home to settle some domestic chores.

Putting Books Away

Yesterday was the last day of my teaching contract with XMUM. I rushed myself to finish whatever tasks left for me to complete my teaching portfolio (plenty of documents to prepare, more than what I was used to in my former university). In the previous semester, the coordinators for the courses I taught had took the initiative to complete the teaching portfolio themselves and saved me from all the details needed to fill up the course portfolio. This time round, I had one course that had me as the sole lecturer (hence coordinator) and for the other shared course, I had to look into parts of the teaching portfolio. Thus, my past weekdays have been really busy with me filling the teaching portfolio. At several stages, my eyes teared up, out of all the strain looking at all the numbers.

It was only on Thursday night that I was able to complete the course portfolio and got the endorsement from the Head of Department. What a relief. Many of the repetitive things (e.g. marking) become chores but these are part of what I have been paid to do. To add, me being old-fashioned, I tend to do some things manually, even if easier automated ways are available. But that is my choice of making things relatively harder but to my satisfaction.

So now, I can put these books away.

The main textbook is the one on the right (really expensive) to which we refer to a lot. The book on the left is a book of my eldest son during his BSc course; I did not quite use this since it is meant for maths students, but just took it out for reference.

The other books that I will put away are the following.

I thought of reading them to give me a sense of what mathamtical tools would be of interest to the students. I had also took out another book on econometrics by Maddala,which I did not read at all (not in the ucture). The book on the right by Takayama is more rigorous and it covers topics on equilibrium. Some might wonder why I have these books. I have always considered mathematics as a more precise language that scientists use and I had the curiosity of how maths are being used in economics. I really wanted to read Takayama's book (appropriate for research level) but now, I will have to put this off perhaps indefinitely. So before putting it back, had a quick read of the foreword and introductory pages. I was surprised that it mentioned Planck:

Commenting on Max Planck's decision not to study economics, J.M. Keynes remarked that economics involves the "amalgam of logic and intuition and wide knowledge of facts, most of which are not precise." (Takayama, p. xv)

If Planck had decided otherwise, perhaps quantum theory will only be discovered much later. To have Planck to even consider economics is perhaps not much of a surprise. Another giant of quantum theory, John von Neumann later make contributions to game theory. This is another subject which I knew very little but wished that I know something about and it extrapolates the 'continuum' in economics (a thing of interest in quantum theory). Indeed I highlighted this matter in my classes though was not really appreciated. I even mentioned in class, that when dealing with economics, one ought to think more like physicists than mathematicians as many variables carry dimensions (not pure numbers) and that there are hidden assumptions all the while that one has to be aware of. I was trying to make the class more interesting to students. In fact, I use WolframAlpha extensively to help students build intuition often not found in books. I mention this in a document of the course portfolio to show that I make extraneous efforts to help students understand. In the course that I was handling alone, the course contents had two strands in it namely the linear algebra strand (matrices) and the applied calculus strand. To a certain extent, this seems 'disconnected', but they can be made more unified if the multivariable calculus (the last part of the course) makes use of the matrix structure. However the difficulty is to find a suitable introductory textbook that approach it as such. I did mention this in the course review document and hopefully it will be helpful for future versions of the course.

Now, back to my beloved quantum stuff ....

Making A Transition

Currently I'm doing a lot of reading in topics which I have plenty of interest in, making notes (including exercises and proofs) wherever possible. I still do my daily survey of arXiv to have some notion of what is of interest to others. I'm doing a lot of listening to a lot technology podcasts to understand where industries are going. Note that I've been doing these all the while, irrespective of how busy I am with my teaching duties (the priority, of course, being paid for this). With my teaching contract is coming to an end, I will be doing more of these. I still owe the university, filing up my teaching portfolion. Sometime last week, I thought of finishing my duties by sending the exam scripts to the exam unit of the university but unfortunately I found out that there are more things to do. Thus, I figure that I can only end my duties later this week.

From listening to technology podcasts, I'm learning about new tools in the hope of it will help me in research. One that I saw is Google's Notebook LM. I found out that it could summarize Riemann's 1851 thesis, which is in German, and I do find that is of value. Another feature that I saw was the mind map tool that could be very useful (see picture)

I do hope to toy with it more when I find the time is suitable. I have tried other tools that help summarize papers but I do not want it to replace totally my own reading of the paper, which is needed for proper understanding (the devil is in the details). Perhaps, I can use such summaries to see whether I should proceed reading a particular paper.

In anticipation of forthcoming duties (formal or not), I hope to reread my books on quantum field theory and quantum many body theory. Let's see what happens.

Marking Mania Stressful Week

Ever since the final exams on Friday, 25 July 2025, I was only able to begin marking on the following Sunday, since on Saturday, I was in a wedding (as mentioned in the last post). As usual, the initial marking began quite slowly as one is getting used with the way students answer the exam. At the time, I had one bundle of SEM101 scripts (the subject shared with Dr. Athirah) and another bundle of scripts for the subject SEM112 that I teach alone. For the shared subject, I have three questions to mark, which accounts for 50% of the marks, and Dr. Athirah marks the other four questions. I thought I could finish the SEM102 bundle on Monday, so that I can exchange scripts with Dr. Athirah. But alas, I could only finish the bundle on Tuesday and made the exchange then. On exchanging, I had another five bundles to mark, totalling around 300 scripts for SEM102. The rest of the week was spent on these remaining five SEM102 bundles, focusing more on groups under her. I started marking for my own SEM102 group only on Friday evening (after returning four bundles of scripts back to Dr. Athirah). Noting I have the other subject SEM112 to look into and that the deadline for uploading the marks by Monday noon, I panicked. I told my other half, I should have cancelled the physiotherapy session last Saturday because that 'wasted' half a day.

That last weekend also saw all my sons back at home but I could not spend much time with them, for me to focus on marking. Also two problems came up then, that put me in a lot of distress - the kind of emotional disturbance that I was experiencing, I can say, would be equivalent to the recent 8.8 Richter earthquake. I had to make myself physically, emotionally and mentally strong, relying on whatever religious strength that I had with me. It was also unfortunate that I had left my usual Qur'an reading for the whole marking week, for it would have helped me better.

Come Sunday, I did not sleep to make sure I finished all my marking. Did some discussions with Dr. Athirah and the Head of Department, that went way after midnight, to settle and finalise the marks. The finalising carried on up to the Monday, when I am supposed to upload the marks. Naturally, I had to ask the Head to help get the extension and the deadline for me was extended to 6pm that day. I did what I could and the following Tuesday (after making sure that I rested, having not slept since Sunday), I still have to resolve some issues. Hopefully that will be the end of it. So today, I went to UPM to collect new stock of medicine as the ones I have are almost finished. Met Dr. Nurisya and Dr. Chan to talk about future plans.

Thus, it has been a stressful week for me. My prayer that Allah grant me ease in the near future. Perhaps the only happy news that I had received was the paper acceptance by the journal Quantum Information & Computation. The paper contains parts of what I have presented in the Siam conference (see this post - I'm still paying the expenses of this). Other than that, prior to the marking mania week, I met up with another theorist, hoping to help a cosmology research project that he is doing - I have not done anything just yet.