Has Tim finally discovered art? Well no, it’s actually a picture of Mars, coloured by altitude. Google Mars displays the mapped regions of the Red Planet based on satellite photos. There’s also Google Moon and Google Earth if you want to stay closer to home.

Looking into space gives you both a sense of wonder and humility - you feel wonder that the Earth is the way it is, and humbled by how big and beautiful the universe is compared us tiny humans.

Something like this:

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When my family was making the rounds during Chinese New Year we visited an old family friend, who along with her husband had been teaching secondary school for decades. The conversation got around to education, and she told us that she had friends who were tasked with marking STPM papers. The median mark for STPM Science subjects last year was 20%, she said, and if results actually showed improvement that would say everything there was to say about our marking system.

True enough, the Star reports:

The number of Sijil Tinggi Persekolahan Malaysia (STPM) 2005 candidates who passed four or five subjects increased by about 9%.

Because of all the 43% increase in the number of straight-A SPM, students, Scholarship Department (PSD) is warning scholars to “expect to be disappointed”. The newspapers do their part in publicizing this. Conspicuously missing from the mainstream media is any discussion of why there is such a marked improvement in the results in the first place. And this is not an isolated event either, the number of top scorers has been steadily increasing for years!

Isn’t the purpose of a grading system just that - to grade? An “A” should consistently represent the top percentile of students. If anything, the percentage of As shouldn’t change by much. Otherwise it cheapens its value. If the pass rate of SPM students only varied by 1% from 2004 - and this was also true in previous years, why are the number of As given wildly different?

Issuing scholarships and course placements is not a trivial thing, and SPM results are an important factor. The PSD’s solution is to claim that interviews and co-curricular activities play important roles too. But that evades the issue of the As, and evades any questioning of the education system. As long as we get more and more As, the system is all right and we are all doing fine, only As matter. It also begs the question how a person can be the cream-of-the-crop but not be able to handle an interview.

Co-curricular activities are also a subjective thing. Even when i was in secondary school, I knew some students - bright ones, too - who were reluctant to join any clubs or societies unless they were given a place in the committee. Should co-curricular activities become commodities rather than be an outlet of a student’s interests? I won’t be surprised to see the ever-enterprising Malaysians come up with workshops and books on how to do well in interviews next. We are masters of the rat race.

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I’ve decided to move from Blogger to Wordpress. Blogger was taking too long to load and had serious issues with images. I was trying to redesign my old blog but Blogger was insisting on converting my GIFs/PNGs into JPGs no matter what I did.

Wordpress has better content-related functions like categories, trackbacks, and page creation. On the flipside, you can’t customize your templates at all. Although that can be a relief, since you have an excuse for not putting in that effort. I think they’ll get round to it someday.

Fortunately Wordpress has an Import tool so I didn’t lose my previous posts - although the image placements are mostly screwed. I also found out that IE has serious issues with Wordpress - or it could be PHP - so I migrated to Firefox as well. It managed to duplicate my old posts multiple times so I ended up with nine copies of each article in this blog (for a total of about 400+ articles since I accidentally did it twice). Wordpress oddly didn’t have a batch delete function so I had to delete every single one manually!

Anyway, welcome to the new blog, enjoy reading.

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This year’s SPM results saw a 43% rise in straight-A students. Penang sees a 138% rise in straight A students from 38 to 81!

This bodes well for Malaysia. No doubt this generation of geniuses will railroad us into 2020! Malaysia Boleh!

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An interesting read (originally from neXus forums) about the Malaysian Special Branch. Some excerpts:

The old Special Branch of British Malaya was so good that it could penetrate the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). One of the Chinese Special Branch officers actually became a member of the CT (Communist Terrorist — what the British called the guerrillas), climbed up the leadership ladder, and was later sent by the MCP to infiltrate the Special Branch (it is said that the number two in the MCP was also Special Branch who was killed when Chin Peng found out about it). What the MCP did not know is that the Chinese CT was actually a Special Branch officer who had infiltrated their ranks and not the other way around. Invariably, he successfully ‘infiltrated’ the Special Branch (because he was already Special Branch) and sent back ‘secrets’ he ‘stole’ from the Special Branch to the MCP. Imagine how much misinformation and disinformation he fed the MCP. Ever wonder why Chin Peng could never make a move without the Special Branch always being one step ahead of him?

Today, we have Special Branch officers serving as branch chairmen of political parties, not only in the opposition but in the ruling party as well (even some Supreme Council members are suspected of being Special Branch officers; though I can’t mention their names here). The EPF counter clerk you meet to settle your EPF matters could be a Special Branch officer. The Telecoms technician who comes to your house to repair your phone line could be a Special Branch officer. The student in the front row of your lecture could be a Special Branch officer. Your office boy could be a Special Branch officer. Your chauffer could be a Special Branch officer. The list of possibilities is endless.

Finally something to be proud of, eh?

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Calvinism is the Christian doctrine popularized by John Calvin in the sixteenth century, central tenets being that of “irresistible grace” and “total depravity” - that God calls those who are to be saved, and thus being saved (or condemned) is through God’s decision alone; and that people are so evil in nature they would not otherwise be able to choose to believe.

Arminianism, the teachings of Jacobus Arminius, echoes the concept of “total depravity”, but teaches “resistible grace”, which tries to address the inherent issues of predestination in Calvinism. God’s saving grace is extended to many by God, but people have the free will to reject it.

If Calvinism is one end of the spectrum then Pelagianism is at the other. Pelagius, who lived in the fourth century, did not believe in an original sin that condemned man, but believed that man had the ability to choose good or evil for himself, without needing divine intervention. Sadly, his teachings were deemed heretical and condemned. Semi-Pelagianism still survives today and is the opposite of Arminianism - man decides to accept God, and God’s grace completes the process.

Another indirectly related doctrine that has recently emerged is Open Theism, which attempts to address the conflicts caused by the predestination that is taught in many doctrines. In Open Theism, God has not determined the future with certainty (an “open” future), but rather intentionally limits his omniscience so that humans have meaningful free will.

What I personally find most notable about these doctrines is not so much the arguments themselves but the motivations behind them. Calvinism paints a God in control of everything, and man helpless to overcome his own nature. Arminianism tries to absolve God of the condemnation of man, by painting man as the guilty party in rejecting God. Pelagianism reflects a belief in meaningful free will and responsibility, rather than humans who start off already helpless and condemned.

The controversy over Open Theism is interesting. It reflects the need of people to have a deity in control of everything, the omnimax God. There is even a book criticizing Open Theism titled Their God is Too Small. Open Theism in fact resolves many issues with predestination, but that is lost in the furore over the “limiting of God”.

If God knows everything about the future, then he cannot be all-powerful or have free will, because he cannot do things that won’t fulfil the future. If God knows what you need, what you will pray and whether he will choose to fulfil it, then there surely isn’t any point in praying.

I give this my own term, “throwing superlatives at God”. This comes hand in hand with making man as small, helpless, and evil as possible. It fulfills man’s need to have someone in control, but is full of flaws when you think about it.

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The Just World Effect, closely related to the concept of “karma”, is a cognitive bias based on the belief that good things happen to good people; bad things to bad people. I would describe it as an anthromorphism of the cosmos - humans reward good actions and bad actions, so it is tempting to think the universe does the same thing.

At first glance there is nothing wrong with this phenomenon. But this bias leads to “victim blame”: the perception that the suffering of a person is deserved in some way. The most obvious examples are studies that show rape victims tended to be blamed for their ordeals, be it by dressing provocatively, inviting attention, or simply being there.

The Just World Effect is powerful when combined with religion. When syphilis first became widespread in the sixteenth century, the Catholic church proclaimed it the “wrath of god” for adultery. After the advent of penicillin this view was abandoned. More recently the emergence of AIDS also led to a similar decree by many religious leaders; at the time the misconception was that it only spread among homosexuals and therefore God was signalling his disapproval. It is a stigma that still exists today.

In the aftermath of 9/11 Pat Robertson, a controversial fundamentalist proclaimed it was the “lifting of His protection” and the result of America’s immorality. Similar things were said about Hurricane Katrina (or any other natural disaster for that matter), with people scrambling to blame it on everything imaginable: gays, gambling, alcoholism, etc.

The flip side can be just as deceptive - that good fortune justifies a person. Rafidah Aziz claims she has God’s mandate because she was reelected to the Cabinet. After Israel won the Six-Day-War against Egypt, Jordan and Syria, it was immediately claimed a miracle had happened and God’s had given Israel their land - its aerial superiority and brilliant military tactics nonwithstanding.

This bias cheapens humanity and offers too simplistic a view of life. We should help others in trouble, not judge them; we should learn from mistakes and successes and not freely assume divine mantles.

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