The Last Post of 2025

I guess I should do one last post for 2025. The last few posts that I did are mainly to explain myself for not being able to help others that much. While this is a personal blog and I should be able to write what I want, I will try to do more blog entries that are more educational. Nobody really wants to read one's rants and personal problems that much.

So for 2026, the resolution is ... still 1920 × 1080 ... just kidding. I guess, I want to do more educational writing, sharing more of what I know in the hope of they pass as good deeds. But let's see how it goes. Sometimes one gets overly ambitious and only a minute fraction of them gets realized.

With the family, I tend to share what I think would be useful to them in general but this I do within our famly's WhatsApp. Here is one of them - Why Big Companies are Leaving KL for Negeri Sembilan (You Need to Know). This will inform the forthcoming development in Negeri Sembilan and hopefully it will help us to strategize for our future. Related to this, I also shared this piece of news of semiconductor industry in Senawang. I have also shared what Yanis Varoufakis explaining about trade and money but unfortunately the video has been taken off. I managed to write the main points of his explanation:

• In 1971, US President Richard Nixon, severe the relation between US currency with the gold standard (The Nixon Shock).
• In 1973, was the oil crisis and US made the Petrodollar agreement enforcing oil be traded in US currency.
• In June 2024, this agreement ended and there is a gradual move of oil trading in non-US currencies.

Yanis explained the future may be rather unsettled and it is best that one gets prepared for whatever outcomes there might be. I did not know all these before and I am certainly no economist but this scares me (a little?). My awareness now is perhaps triggered by earlier read on Emad Mostaque and Svozil's paper in this post. 

Just this afternoon, I have finished commenting of the revised paper that my former PhD  student has done and hopefully it will get published. There is still another paper to be edited hopefully done in January 2026. As a consequence, I have been reading about entropy (since the two papers dealt with Tsallis entropy). First, there is a pedagogical article by Baez, "What is Entropy?" that seems to have grown out of his tweets. Another is this book by Denbigh & Denbigh, which I bought as a second hand book from Galloway & Porter in Cambridge.

I thought of finishing the book before the year ends and that is not going to happen. I normally picked up the book when I am going to bed and you can guess what happens next. I'm not even half-through yet butthe book is centred around how the term entropy has been used as incomplete knowledge to ignorance and from ignorance to subjectivity. The latter seems to be the problem. It demonstrates how problems can arise when a term is being used loosely and this happens quite a lot in the popularization of science. Talking about 'loose' usage, I remember how a famous social science professor criticise my working paper in a meeting, saying that the paper is 'too loose'. From then on, I started to learn that working papers are best written in a legalistic language and to a certain extent thee seems to be a formula or procedure in writing them. I was never taught about all this but I have learned this on the go and from examples that people gave me. In meetings, one can go on indefinitely discussing a working paper and its 'many-worlds' interpretation. So this e who aspire to be in the management, be prepared ....