Cerulean Cordillera

Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Just uploaded a bunch of photographs I’ve took back in London. Enjoy!

A Walk Down Memory Lane

I went back to London for a duration of two weeks in order to practice for and complete my G1 Exit Test. While there, I had some free time to walk around the neighborhood. This was the neighborhood I’ve grew up in, the neighborhood that left many memories.

Over a thousand Steves...

Let me summarize what happened.

There’s this guy, called Steve. He has a mother. One day, his mother was murdered by their landlord. So what does Steve do?

Well, he goes onto the street and finds a random person. He tells the random person about the story and highlights the injustice of the situation and the grief that he felt. The random person sympathizes, but decides to move on like you’d expect any normal person would. Steve however blocks his way, and tries to physically constrain him, yell into his ear, and attempt to forcing him to help Steve do something about the murder.

Then when the police come to take him away for assault. Steve cries “so what?! The inconvenience I’ve caused him is nothing when compared to the fact that my mom was murdered!”

See, this is one reason why I’m not very trusting of a lot of these advocacy groups. They tend to be fueled primarily through emotions when the problems that they’re trying to address mostly require rational solutions. Of course, they know this too, but they’re prone to emotional outbursts, like this one, that only complicates things and does nothing to help solve them.

Also, why does every advocacy group always have to label someone as the villain? The world is way more complicated than the black and white concept of good and evil, and most of these sad and horrible things are the results of decades after decades of misunderstandings and failed negotiations. Every time a group is labeled as evil, I can’t help but to wonder whether that group can really be blamed given the situation they had to deal with.

Story here
Youtube video here and here.

Found this in the New York Times today.

Apparently some artist is becoming the defiant voice regarding unreleased data on deaths and casualties for the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. I read through the article, and I noticed this particular quote:

“I’m really tired of this bull,” Mr. Ai said Thursday in a telephone interview from Beijing, where he has a large studio. “I went there, and I saw the school building collapsed, and next to it is a building that is fine.”

This makes me remember the argument often used by global warming skeptics, that goes something like this:

“I’m really tired of this bull,” A global warming skeptic said Thursday in a whatever interview from wherever. “This year has been colder than last year and they’re telling us the globe is supposed to be warming.”

I think what we ought to be on the lookout for is these kinds of “common sense” analysis. Being in Engineering has taught me enough for me to know that when you get into the details of scientific principles, many things are nowhere near intuitive. This is an artist who comes up with clever ideas of visual presentation. I will not take his analysis on construction seriously. Now… if instead of him, it’s some renowned civil or structure engineer talking, then it might be worth more attention. But if he’s an artist, he could be right, or he could be wrong, but it’s nothing better than a guess.

For the record, I went to his blog and read quite a number of his posts. Being able to understand Mandarin helped me quite a bit. The real discussion-worthy posts were highly opinionated and most of them left no supporting evidence. On top of that, there seems to be at least eight straight pages of blogging posts where every single post is a carbon copy of an initial “5.12 Wenchuan Earthquake Student Deaths Research” project introduction. What was the point? To boost the apparent number of Wenchuan-related articles?

See, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be skeptical about many of the Chinese Government’s position on things. However, if NY Times is going to bring in someone like this, it’s going to sway a lot of people’s views emotionally, without reason. And that’s an example of the dangers of media.