Early Saturday morning, my second son Ihsan came back home from JB simply because he wanted to make visits to my side of family (in the past years, he was unable to do such visits due to work). This visit was spontaneously planned by my other half and Ihsan with my sisters-in-law in Kepong, wives (Maimunah and Raja Faridah) of my two late eldest brothers (Aminuddin and Zainal Abidin). It is actually convenient that both of them live in the same neighbourhood separated by only several houses.
Ihsan actually began his journey home way before Fajr prayers and he arrved in Seremban aroung half past eight. After getting some rest, we headed off to Kepong around 10 am. Here are the pics from the visits:
For my other family members, we will have to do the visits at another time. During this visit, I was reminded also of my late third eldest brother, Ahmad Tajuddin. So today, I took out the following three books which I have 'pinched' from my late brother's collection, in the hope of reading them in memory of my late brother.
May Allah forgive my late brothers and place their souls among the company of the Blessed.
Today, we went to visit my brother-in-law (the elder brother of my other half) in Sikamat.
After the visit today, I saw that Mehdi Hassan had interviewed Prof. Jiang in my FB feed. Unfortunately the post was only video snippets of the full interview, but I already saw that Mehdi was asking questions rather aggressively, almost bordering on disrespect. One snippet showed Mehdi questioning the professor title of Prof. Jiang and I could not see Jiang's full response to this (I have addressed this before in an earlier post). The one snippet I was really interested in seeing Jiang's response was during Mehdi's retort to Jiang's remark of academia being overly focused on facts and rigour. I'm very much aware that Jiang tend to use (loose) narrative tools in building up his predictions and as such is open to hidden assumptions and imprecise notions. Much of his allusion to game theory are essentially qualitative but yet includes a sense of ordinality in his game-theoretic parameters. Thus framing him as Nostradamus of the East is rather inappropriate. I also saw that some have expressed ridicule about him and dismissed him altogether. For me, I have learned several new things from him despite the speculative arguments. His appeal to 'eschatological' and 'conspiracy' elements certainly would have been dismissed by default in academic circles (see this fair criticism by Prof. Tim Wilson), but such elements also made him 'unique' (or 'entertaining' in the words of Prof. Wilson). Reality check: some of the events of the world e.g. the war, are indeed propelled by eschatological elements (see this post). Making such elements available in his 'predictive framework' may indeed be logic defying but it can approximate better a reality that involve irrational players/agents. On top of the criticisms expounded by many, I would raise another 'personal criticism' on Jiang's work: he placed too much emphasis in 'creativity' in his work and this may lead to a delusional path (note this defect is also seen in some hard sciences). Misplaced creativity or not, one could always be open to 'alternate realities' without necessarily believing in them.
Here ia an alternate reality where my three-legged cat being surprised in the appearance of an extra limb:
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