On the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Indonesia I was sitting next to a friendly collegial gentleman in a suit and we soon struck up a conversation. From the conversation I gathered this much; he was Malaysian, worked for the UN or maybe the World Bank, had a PhD, had been an associate Dean at Oxford, had a daughter my age with a PhD working for the IMF or maybe WTO in Geneva in international arbitration, thought earning $1 million a year was a pretty average amount, had a son in the US doing a Masters in Engineering, knew a lot about the politics of SE Asia countries including Cambodia and Burma, thought New Zealand was a nice country (everyone always does in Asia), had a Chinese wife who was high up in Dell, liked to read blogs, spent a lot of time flying around the world for his job, was going to Indonesia to meet with President Susilo and had meet world leaders such as George Bush and Tony Blair in his work. Now you don’t meet these sorts of people everyday, sitting next to you in economy class, so I wasn’t really sure how much of it to believe. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for August, 2005
Allah’s Airline
“Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest. How perfect is He, The One Who has placed this (transport) at our service, and we ourselves would not have been capable of that, and to our Lord is our final destiny. O Allah, we ask You for birr and taqwaa in this journey of ours, and we ask You for deeds which please You. O Allah, facilitate our journey and let us cover it’s (sic) distance quickly. O Allah, You are The Companion on the journey and The Successor over the family, O Allah I take refuge with You from the difficulties of travel, from having a change of hearts and being in a bad predicament, and I take refuge in You from an ill fated outcome with wealth and family.â€? Read the rest of this entry »
dark night flick
Justin Hall “sort of had a breakdown in January 2005″ and has recorded and posted moments of it on the web. In this video he agonises over life, searches for meaning, ponders relationships and wonders how to find connection with others.
Justin’s Links: dark night flick (warning the quicktime video is around 70mb)
Justin Hall is also the author of a 5000 page web autobiography.
Outsider Art
Outsider Art – art created outside insitutionalized, mainstream, or official art culture, with a focus in the past on art by insane asylum inmates.
The Thought Project
What happens when you stop strangers on the street and ask them what they were thinking the moment before you stopped them? Simon Hoegsberg did just that over a 3 month period in Copenhagen, Denmark and New York City. The result: The Thought Project.
The puzzle of the merchant’s daughter
Once upon a time, in a land far away away, their was a merchant and his daughter. The merchant had fallen on hard times and had to borrow a large sum from a moneylender. After a year had passed the merchant was still in debt and had no way of paying the money back. So the moneylender proposed a way to cancel his debt. He suggested that he offer the merchant a bag containing two stones, one black and one white. His daughter must select a stone from the bag, if she chooses the black one the debt is cancelled, if she chooses the white one the debt is cancelled but she must marry the moneyleader. The merchant agrees, however unbeknown to him, the moneyleader places two white stones in the bag. Reaching into the bag the daughter sees the two white stones. She must select a stone, so what can she do to ensure she doesn’t have to marry the moneyleader and get the debt cancelled?
Leaving the Motherland
Sometime towards the end of last year I am told I applied for a job via an internet mailing list I had subscribed to. I don’t remember doing it, but apparently I did, because now I have been offered and have accepted that job starting 18 August 2005. It’s a 5 month contract in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Aceh was devastated in the December 2004 tsunami in Asia. I will be working for the Grameen Foundation USA with two local Indonesian NGO’s who are establishing microfinance initiatives. I will be responsible for implementing, documenting and providing training for the financial information system that the NGO’s will run. Read the rest of this entry »
University life
The highlight of the first semester was a rare campus sighting of Barry Cossar, father of Melbourne socialite Al Cossar (love your work Al). In fact it is up there with the time I saw the band members of Blur coming out of the bFM radio station studio. Yes it’s true, the only people I know at university are the fathers of the people I studied with the first time around. And before you say it, I should remind you that it’s not nice being called names, although I have been called worse things than a “mature student� before. The comment inevitability comes up when I reveal my university ID number, you know, like at parties and stuff, and people realise it is in the elite 2 millions, rather than the 4 millions like recently started students.
So what has been on the academic agenda? I have been taking papers in Sociology, Politics, and Economics. These are the questions I have written about, and what I wrote about them: Read the rest of this entry »
NZ Reality TV
It has been most stimulating and enjoyable to be back for the last 5 months in Auckland after Cambodia, which was stimulating in other, sometimes frustrating, ways. I am soaking up being back in an information overloaded society in which I can pay partial attention to everything and full attention to nothing. In particular are the various reality TV shows on in New Zealand at the moment, a brief run-down follows: Read the rest of this entry »
Return to the womb
It’s that time of year again, when you sit back and think to yourself ‘I’ve changed directions, I’ve moved back home, maybe I should let my friends know what I’m up to?’. Well that time of year was back in January, and I am finally getting around to actually writing to you. Read the rest of this entry »
What does Neuroscience say about schizophrenia and the Self?
In Lecture 5 of the 2003 Reith Lectures series on the Emerging Mind Vilayanur S. Ramachandran discusses new discoveries in the field of neuroscience and what they might mean for ideas about the Self. He describes interesting work by Sarah Blakemore and others who propose a theory of schizophrenia based on the ability of an individual’s brain to distinguish between internally generated actions and externally generated sensory stimuli. He suggests a radically simple test for schizophrenia involving tapping one hand with the other and asking the patient to describe the sensation. Such a theory is able to explain why schizophrenics may think they are being controlled by aliens or the CIA and in fact makes such delusions seem logical given the explanation. As a corollary to this, a schizophrenic should be able to tickle themselves. Using this and ideas emerging from other neuroscience experiments and data, he speculates that what we experience as ourselves may actually be a by-product of the evolutionary necessity to be able to predict the behaviour of others.
wp_ozh_clickcounter v1.01fimt
I have modified the WordPress plugin wp_ozh_clickcounter v1.01 so it:
- can be used to track clicks on links/blogroll
- can ignore bots
- can ignore admin clicks
- ignores links to local absolute URLs.
- $wp_ozh_click['do_comments'] = 1
Joking is no laughing matter
Australian Aviation Powers That Be have decreed a laughable law that makes laughter a crime. At Sydney International (Kingsford Smith) Airport, joking about aviation safety can now get you in trouble.
I saw this television screen notice at check-in during Feb 2005: Read the rest of this entry »
Counter hegemonic action in multi-player online computer games
“Velvet-Strike” is an online campaign inflitrating the multiplayer computer game “Counter-Strike”. Velvet-strikers have been painting anti-war and anti-volience graffiti, such as pictures of soliders kissing each other, inside the Counter-Strike virtual world. Avid players bemoan what they see as an encroachment of political ideology in the gamespace.
NZ Cambodian Community Photos
Photos of the New Zealand Cambodian Community at the Auckland International Cultural Festival and Khmer New Years 2005.
