Another MIND

This morning, my other half suggested that we should have only one big meal per day with health reasons but also the cost in mind. By saying this, it doesn't mean we want to only eat once a day; but we can have some light meals between each big meal. Just saw, a stack of bread snacks on the table top for anyone to eat. Well, we just had lunch two hours ago after we had roti canai breakfast this morning. Practically, we can actually really do that because our children have been skipping some meals since they have been busy with their work. O do think we (Malaysians) are eating more than we are supposed to (leading to obesity problems). Myself, I rarely have more than one small plate of rice in one meal because I get easily full. In fact, when we have our meals outside, I normally have difficulty to finish up what is being served since it is more than what I wanted to eat (but I finish it up anyway because we have paid for it and normally it will cost (in-)digestion problem). Let us see how this plan goes - usually we can skip our lunch and the only time all of us can be together is in the evening, which implies heavy meals before bed (not so healthy then).

The real intent of this post is to say something about Mostaque's MIND capitals, which is said to be scalable all the way down from country to organization to individuals. For individuals, these are

• Materials (M) Capital: One's physical health, personal savings and the sustainability of personal physical environment.
• Intellectual (I) Capital: One's knowledge and skills and the rate of learning them.
• Network (N) Capital: Quality and strength of one's relationships with the family, friends and community.
• Diversity (D) Capital: The portfolio of one's options of resources that can build resilience against unexpected changes.

When I saw this, I thought that Mostaque is also playful/creative with acronyms. It also reminded me about a label that we came up with when we were asked to reinvent our maths institute, namely Mathematical Institute for Natural and Disruptive Sciences (MINDS) - see this post and this post. That idea never saw the light of day but never mind about that. In the past, when I read self-help and management books, I realise that the management gurus really have the habit of creating acronyms (at a time I wonder why such fuss). But then physicists also do that including this scrawny self. Take for instance, the acronyms EQuaLS (Expository Quantum Lecture Series) and QuEST (Quantum Explorations of Science & Technology). The idea with such acronyms that it can be easily remembered and if one is lucky, it can be viral and be beneficial. Once, I became so playful and created horrible ones (remember LuFTER?) until a high school mate called it childish (thank you Zaki for the criticism), and thereafter I stopped. Yes, I do listen to criticisms. Another instance, Bob Coecke was telling me that I complain too much on social media, after which I do less rants. Having said this, imagine how foreigners perceive the commentaries of our local social media users ...

Back to MIND Capitals. How do I fare? For M Capital, have a comfortable home now (pushing now for spiritual betterment). Health and savings are so and so but I'm thankful. For I Capital, I never stop learning and browse the arXiv daily for four different counters but at this late stage of life, I should be pushing for spiritual knowledge. For N Capital, this is where I perform the least, being a shy and introvert person. For instance, I did have the opportunity to reconnect with some high school friends in a reunion, but circumstances just wouldn't let me. I  have once my best primary school friend with whom I have reconnected in FB much earlier on, but due to the kind of posts he made, I unfriended him (feeling embarrassed); I should have simply unfollow his posts but I did not know that I could do so then (feeling regretful). The same goes for friends in universities with whom I mainly reconnect through social media but not so much since most of them are in high positions. In my former workplace, I tend to become a loner mainly because of the field I'm in. Thus, so much for my N-capital. I should just stick to the surau community given the current age. For the D-capital, my skills have not been diverse enough to venture away from academia. Earlier what I've thought to be investments tend not to help much (some are even scammers). So leaving only my writing or teaching skills that I have not really capitalised. I wonder whether it is too late now. 

But really in the above, I'm still thinking in materialistic terms. Shouldn't it be more than that? During my earlier reading of Mostaque's book, I had imagined a different kind of the 'last economy' as I had the impression of what he meant was what it means to be truly human. I coined the term 'amal economy' emphasizing good deeds that we can bring over to the hereafter. Even this, I'm not confident about how one fares. Can we be sure that our good deeds not be thrown back to our faces. Who could be that sure?

The Last New Post?

What title should I give this post?

Anyway, last Monday, which is the public holiday of Deepavali, we send our youngest son back to college. He was still recuperating from the fever he had - it did not intensify over the weekend and thus probably just a normal flu (as opposed to influenza). Bought some food items for him during the weekend and banked in some pocket money hopefully enough for another two weeks. While we were there at his college, I helped out carrying things to his room and I met his room mate, Shahrul. It is good to meet and know him.

Driving back home, there was traffic congestion almost all the way as people are returning home to work from the long weekend.

The following few days, I was thinking about the future a little. I come to the following thought of not putting myself as a burden to anyone while still hoping for some opportunities. In the past, I was always asking what and how I can contribute to the organizations I'm with. While we are earnng our pay, I sometime get offended being labelled as simply 'makan gaji'. I do hope people see that I have tried to go beyond that, played my role in building ip theoretical physics. During the early stage of my carreer, some probably thought I was just doing high energy physics, though the training was on mathematical physics adaptable to many different domains but the specialization was quantization. I was generally eyeing on the mathematical techniques that I can use for me to explore various types of physics. This explain why the different areas of research that I was involved in.

Right now, out of current rave about AI, I started to listen to many AI podcasts, just to keep my options open. During the MSC rave, I tried to get into webste building, learn some computer programming and at the time, I was interested in doing computer visualization (even helped building an MSc curriculum in the 90s surrounding topics of Computational Physical Sciences, which includes even quantum computing - that early - but it was never realized). I was also trying to popularize Mathematica as a tool for doing science but those closer to engineering preferred a different software. Indeed just a few days ago, I had to sadly uninstall my Mathematica software (bought out of my own pocket) from my laptop as it was eating up 5GB of my hard drive and causing problems to my laptop. I would have to resort to WolframAlpha after this. So after that (brief) period of computer visualization interest, I found myself leaving these computational sciences (as they are rapidly changing) and focus back on doing mathematical stuff. So, given this experience, my interest in AI is a bit more cautious, probably focusing more on mathematical matters.

One of the things I did was to buy Emad Mstaque's e-book The Last Economy over in Google Play. I have been listening to Emad Mostaque several times and he seems to be well-respected, As he was a hedge fund manager and founder of an AI company, he has the expertise to write on the topic. Reading it on Google Play is not really my thing and I was hoping to have a pdf version. Little did I know that it was available at his Intelligent Internet website. Anyway, just finished reading the whole book (including the appendices which have more technical details) this afternoon (yes, I'm a slow reader and would be considered 'hopeless' in the AI age). Hopefully I can convert some of my notes into a blog post in Acu Frekuensi soon.

The journey continues .... ?
Or should I stop?

Education - Are We OK

Woke up this morning, thinking of what is wrong with me and then extending it beyond myself and see what is wrong with this world.

There is a lot online about how current education has 'worsened' and much of this tend to do the easy blame game, some degenerated into political comments. These are often of no help and in fact may deteriorate the situation. Here is my take on this and I hope it will be limited to this post. Too much noise on this.

First, the current education system is inherited from past policies, good and bad. Second, education goes beyond the classroom and the education syatem is very much an open system subject to external influences. Focusing on the first and ignoring the second will make us continue with the same mistakes. There is so much filth online accessible to anyone and external prohibitive measures often do not work. Have we been able to educate ourselves and our kids to guard ourselves against external negatve influences. We all have seen acts of bullying, violence, sexual abuse online and some are proud to exhibit them online (no shame or fear?). Remember the four letter word that has been adopted as part of vocabulary of many to express disgust, surprise or even feeling cool about it? Such expressions would have made Steve Rogers say 'Language'. For muslims, we know that we should not use such foul language but somehow the wider community has normalised it (even a political leader of superpower country uses it publicly). Are we okay with it? Take this further in the age of AI and there are already talks of sexbots, erotica agents acting to your whims (listen to this to know on their existence - mentioned in the podcast about Grok's naughty agent - and how we are making our brains to evolve). On the larger scale, are we ok with the current g*n*cide in the Middle East available for everyone to watch (note that embarrassingly I even have the fear of spelling some words in full, why?). Even on the abstract level, are we ok with the idea of truth being malleable according to each own's world views?

Some treat education as a monolith and expect a single stroke of solution (policy or whatever) to make education right. In reality, we all understand the multidimensional aspects of education and yet we are entertaining comments that are unidimensional. At this stage, I have always maintained that teaching and learning are creative processes but what happens now, we tend to make them as an algorithmic process, often introducing bureaucratic processes along the way, adding workload to the teaching and learning agents, positively or negatively. Are we ok with monolithical instructions with the risk of stifling creativity and not to mention lessening the passion of agents in the teaching and learning processes? I tend to see many plans and strategies were made within an engineering framework (see remark later about Snowden's complex system approach). But there are many aspects to education for any single person or body to handle; there are too many aspects being entangled - our colonial past, our cultural values, our social engineering experiments, external technological incursions, all giving rise to our present state of society. That is why I'm more interested in diffusion processes as used by Snowden (see this for example) and consider dispositional states and adjacent possibilities within the Sensemaking and Cynefin frameworks. This is more action-oriented and perhaps fall outside the formal classroom system to be considered as a possible solution. I remember mentioning about Snowden's approach and a junior colleague said that it would not work here. Maybe so, but how can we proceed then? We think we know what we want (do we really) but yet we do not know how to get there.

I'm a retiree now and my actionable sphere is limited. As such, the actional sphere (burden) falls upon the younger generations in order to better our educational system. I'll shut up now. Will resume taking gabapentin (see here) perhaps to dull my senses, growing old as I'm supposed to.

Learning with my three-legged cat, the companion of an old person.

Mid October Already?

At some point, I paused posting anything. Partly, I was busy handling personal matters and partly, I also resisted the feeling that I have to be posting something, just because I wanted to be a content creator (I used to joke with my youngest as content kereta). Many do so, to an extent that I felt silly, making things up just to get the attention of others. I would prefer not to do that and in fact, I am really a shy person all my life and only got to be a 'social' person out of necessity. Otherwise I prefer to fade in the background, doing my own kind of things uninterrupted.

Speaking of my youngest, he was fetched by my eldest to be home for the long Deepavali weekend. Apparently, he was down with fever and given the current influenza outbreak, I took him to the clinic this afternoon.

Let me retrace back to several days earlier. Well, October was the month of Nobel Prize announcements and the Nobel Prize in Physics  this year goes to a discovery in quantum science, namely macroscopic quantum tunnelling. 

In the past, I would have written something 'elaborate' in the social media or make a blog post about it. This time, I don't feel like to, because of the feeling that everyone seems to champion quantum S&T these days and like what I've said above, I prefer staying in the background and not be a 'quantum cheerleader'. For chemistry, I find it interesting to see Omar Yaghi as one of the Nobel laureates, given that he is a son of a Palestinian refugee. But perhaps the name also stand out to me, because of his visits to UPM before this.

Back to personal matters; on Wednesday, we rushed to Rompin to visit my sister-in-law and her husband who just had an accident. This is the shape of their car. Really bad, total loss.

They were hit by a runaway oil-palm carrying lorry, rolling down a slope without a driver. Alhamdulillah, they escaped with only bruises and minor cuts. The husband (driver) spent a night at the hospital (now discharged). My sister-in-law was actually thrown into the back seat on impact. I can't imagine what they were feeling then. It could have been worse. Their car went into one side of a ravine while the lorry went to the other side. So far they are ok. Here's a pic of my sons with Abang Mat (rightmost, the driver).

Today, while my eldest went to fetch my youngest, we had our breakfast at an eatery in City Park. My son had a job interview this morning and another interview online in the afternoon. He has yet to arrive home this evening, probably stuck in the traffic jam as people going off for holidays for the long Deepavali weekend. I have returned the Macbook that he bought for me back to him since he needed it more than I do. I'm fine with my old laptop as is. When I have enough money, I just hope to upgrade the hard disk and get a new battery - probably will stick with it till the end.

That's it for now.

Back to College Varia

On Saturday, we send back our youngest son Izzuddin, back to college for his BSc studies. It was also my first time using the petrol subsidy Budi Madani for my car that has not been used for awhile. I paid RM50 for petrol that was supposed to RM65.33. Every help counts. 

Most of the registration matters was done online and his registration at the campus was a breeze. My other half helped pay his fees while I provide for his pocket money for at least for the first two weeks (to be topped up later). 

Despite all the preparations for this trip, there are still some necessities that we forgot to bring e.g. a pillow, padlock for his locker. So we went out to get these as well as bringing him to lunch.

We left him at the college sometime before 2pm.

After having him stay with us since his industrial ttaining, I kinda felt sad as we drove away. I used to joke a lot with him at home and I will certainly miss him. I pray that he will be successful in his studies.

Currently our third son is with us at home and he is currently seeking for a new job. Today we will be sending his car for service. So we are pretty much occupied at home with personal matters. Elsewhere, the news is abuzzed with the humanitarian aid floatilla to Ghazza being intercepted at international waters. The floatilla group, this time, is big consisting of 496 participants from 47 different countries.

They have been 'arrested' on interception and many are still being held in prison despite the international protests. With the help of our Prime Minister and many others, 23 of Malaysian participants have been released, alhamdulillah.

On another piece of interesting news, the Prime Minister has also announced the forming of a national team for quantum science & technology. I do not know who will be on board but I certainly hope that it will be inclusive particularly given that there is already the MyQI initiatives. 

I am also happy to see that my younger colleagues in UPM has started to organize events in collaboration with UM (see here). I hope that it will be successful.