Go Forth And Multiply

All the hype created by LKY comments on the need for Singaporeans to learn or recognise more American English has RAZORTV running around Orchard Road asking typical Singaporeans what they know about American English vs British English.

The respond was hilarious and surprising.  At least to me.  When I left the country,    I must say I was conscious of my own accent (and even bad grammar) when I speak but I knew no American accent.  I do not even speak a British accent.  In fact, my constant consciousness seemed to guide me to speak slowly with universally accepted "no accent" English.

On one scene this Singaporean was told to fake an American accent and what comes out was a British accent.  So in fact most Singaporean are only aware of angmoh accent but has no idea whether it's NZ, British or American.  And when they were quizzed about the spelling, most could not distinguish "colour" and "color" categories.  And the "ise" or "ize", that was just an ini mini miny moe from the roadside interview-responses.  But seriously, nobody in America will know the difference if one use the Bristish "ise" in the newspaper.  Little do people know that in America, there is only "practise", because "ice" to replace "ise" for the sake of using it as a noun is never heard of (and please, never, never use "practize"   ).

Today I was less conscious of my own English.  In fact I am so comfortable with my own unique way of speaking, on the first day of class, I smilingly request students to go to another Calculus class taught by other professors if they are not used to my accent.  And I do that every semester but my class size still fills to the brim.  But I have to admit, over the course of twenty years, my accent is more American,  I speak a wee bit quicker, and I still love the Singlish accent when I have the chance to meet Singaporeans or Malaysians here.

Given the superiority of the British over American, Britain born, Hugh Laurie, still managed to learn an American Accent as Dr. Gregory House.  My advisor hide his accent in University of Rochester, all the time he was a professor there (now he is in a Japanese University, phew!).  And even Russell Crowe (a beautiful mind) and Nicole Kidman (the Stepford wives) were able to play "American" roles seamlessly.

So do Singaporeans really need to assimilate American accent into their culture?  Ask Alex Tok (a paranakan living in NY for too long, now working in China), and Hossan Leong 梁荣耀 (who also speaks French, he is now hosting the "confirm?  double confirm" show) and maybe artist, Jimmy Ong, who has spent more than half his life traveling between S'pore and America.

Which makes me wonder:  do the rest of the PAP even care about this tiny comment of LKY when he visited the English Language Institute of Singapore?  Is anyone going to re-implement his biligual society after his years trying (with only 5-10% success) to make the whole of Singapore bilingual?

Hey, buddy!
Let me tell you truly
I realized lately
That I also dislike PAP
It is really a Perfectly Arrogant Party

They have turned our country
Into their company
Everything is about money
COE, COV, GST, ERP
Extraordinary charges aplenty

A tiny dot with 30 ministers drawing the world's highest political salary
Paid millions of dollars annually
Yet they are still greedy
Always chasing after GDP
Making S’poreans live miserably

People say, S’poreans are lucky
For our country is corruption free
But when it is ruled by only one party
Can we really trust there is total honesty?
Remember, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”

Kiasu and kiasi, PAP came up with the GRC
So that more MIW can enter by the back door to become MP.
Mistakes after mistakes due to incompetency and complacency
Yet there is no accountability
All because they need not answer to anybody

Only a small country but foreigners there are so many
Government welcomes any Tom, Dick or Harry
And proudly call all of them FT
Giving away PR papers so freely
Hoping they will become citizens and vote for the PAP

Companies happily tell S’poreans to accept low salary
For they have cheap foreigners available readily
FT also took away S’poreans places in the universities
Even in sports we are represented by FT
To win glory for our country shamelessly

Exploiting the government stupidity
Many foreigners become PR just to buy flats by HDB
Resale flats have sky-rocketed due to pro-foreigners policy
So high is the value of COV
That young ordinary S’poreans have delayed starting up a family

S’pore uniquely
A paradise it will be
If you have ‘guan xi’ with the PAP
Never mind you and me or how many are unhappy
Someone already told us we can always go and die in JB.

Very sadly, this is no longer my once beloved country
It is now no more than just a money making company

Here is another Bonus Calculus problem.

The hint is: use the trigonometric sum formula for tan(A+B).

I learnt this in Primary School (elementary school). The teacher taught from the English book that said better is preceded by the word have. So I have to form sentences from exercises that went

Exercise: Use "had better" to form sentences with:


1. go to school now. (I)

Answer:_________________________________


2. not play with the dog. (He)


Answer:__________________________________



It's a fixed expression, one cannot even use have or has. It has to be with the past tense form "had better". Following that we add an infinitive without "to". Usually used to give an advice.

But this was frown upon and ridiculed when, as a small boy, I used it at home. "We had better hurry up, we're late.", said I. But this lady who was an administrator working for some shipping company (who now is a lawyer driving a BMW) corrected me and laughed "It should be 'we better hurry up', where got had better?" I confirmed this with my teacher and even that, I realized her form is more popular and many educated Singaporean even thinks both are acceptable. I can see why someone thought I was wrong. Fristly, it sounded strange in Singapore. Secondly, why past tense and then followed by present tense "we're late"?

The reason for this error goes back to Singaporean not caring about their pronounciations. The form shortens to "We'd better hurry." So being lazy to pronounce the apostrophe "d", we missed out on the correctness of the form.

Xie4 Hou4  ( 邂逅 ) is a difficult Chinese word to translate. 
Google translate says it's

" to meet someone unexpectedly;
to run into somebody.;
to meet by chance;
to meet accidentally;
to encounter"

But the real meaning is more than that.  It has to carry a sense of romance.  It has to be someone you've never met before but is destined to be together or the very parting of that meeting moment has to cause some pain, lovesickness or loss.  Something that's already unexpected but fate has made it happened and either love (love at first sight?)has occur after that or when it's over it's felt as some moment precious.

I'll leave the reader with the lyrics of the Chinese song which is entitled "Xie4 Hou4":

入暮的山途獨有我彳亍，
落紅鏗然顯凄清 低吟起那幽陰的歌，
歌聲抖出了蕭索 歌韻隱隱飄蕩入我波心，
牽引我山游覓覓尋 邂逅你炯瑩的星眸，
顫動我翩翩入夢 恒古雋永美麗的神話，
莫非已降臨此剎那 默望長空我深深祈禱，
愿剎那化永恒典雅

There's nothing like Spring Roll during spring time.  But spring roll in most chinese restaurants are deep fried like their egg roll counterparts.  And those oil reminded us more of hot summer than pleasant spring.

Try some Vietnamese spring roll for a change.  If there is no Vietnamese restaurant near your place, try making your very own.  It's not extremely difficult and it really gives the feeling of spring in spring roll.  As the chinese used to say
(literally translate to:  Spring time is not for studying, it for eating spring roll!)



Ingredients:

1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 cloves of garlic
2 stock spring onion (scallion)

100g bean sprout
100g fried tofu
75 g kol leaves

1 tablespoon of tiram sauce
1 tablespoon of thick sweet sauce (kecap manis)
½ teaspoon of corn starch
1 teaspoon of salt
½ teaspoon of worchester sauce
Vietnamese spring roll wrap (translucent)

Preparation:

Stir fry tofu and kol leaves together until bean sprout is soft
Add tiram sauce and thick sweet sauce until brown.

Wet spring roll wrap for 1 minute.  Spread corn starch on surface.

Combine all other ingredients with fried tofu and bean sprout  enough so that it's still wrap-able.

add cilantro or sugar to taste.

も食べましたか？

This blog was entered for CLICK: April 2009. (Spring/Autumn) theme based contest.

Piracy on the Net

 

Piracy is a serious issue.  Most bloggers who enjoyed writing recipes spent hours taking good photographs and eons trying out the sucess of their recipes for the good of other netters.  The result?  Umpteen "thieves" steal these pictures and recipes, published into beautiful looking books and print them for sales in the market.

 

There are also not "not so serious" pirates who upon seeing those lovely photos and recipes, "cut and paste" and call it their very own.  There is a very high tendency to do that.  I for one am guilty of doing such things in the early nineties when internet wasn't so prevalent and the only browser one could have is by MOSIAC.

But now, almost every course in HTML or Web blogging in America and first world countries teaches the moral and ethical aspect of this "stealing" before they start the course.  However, such practices was never done in 3rd world countries  and even though browsing and internet is just as prevalent, tons and tons of "pirates" are earning money from this "intellectual properties".  But there are also other people who didn't do it for money, like stealing work of others and claim as their own and that's plagarism but that's another topic altogether.

My warning:  Do not steal.  Do not steal.  Do not steal!  Not even if it's just for your own and not for profit. 

There's nothing better than having chicken rice in the worse of snow season.  Yes, folks in S'pore can only have chicken rice in hawker centre or in Chatterbox, but nobody has the opportunity to eat chicken rice with blasterly snow outside blowing at 50 mph and temperature with wind chill factor of 4 degree Fehrenheit (about minus 15 degree Celsius).

My wife has perfected the art of cooking Hainanese Chicken Rice in America.  And she's not even Hainanese.  Hey, she's not een brought up in Singapore or ever lived long enough in S'pore!  But see what I get...

RICE

with Drumstick...
 

 

complete with Soup and Chilli

菜头糕 Fried Carrot Cake (see above), not to be confused with carrot cake (see left picture) is something that's easy to get in SE Asia but very hard to find in the United States.

At first we put rice flour and water with spices together in a pan and fry until everything comes in a lump.  Than we transfer to a shallow plate, smoothen it out and then steam for about half an hour.  And it will look like the above gray delicious looking
"pastry".  But the process is not completed yet.  You can eat it but most people in Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong prefer it pan fried (see side photos).  Then you can call it 生煎芋头糕 (pan fried Orr Kuay) or simply fried Orr Kuay.  But lots of other people like it stir fried.  And you can either have it black 炒黒 (with black soy sauce or sweet sauce) or white 炒白. 

These stir fried Orr Kuay or Cai Tao Kuay are usually stir-fried with eggs.  Different stores in hawker centers will have uniquely different style of stir frying them with eggs but I could not be bothered with the extra work I have to put in, so I just put everything together and chop them into pieces irregularly with my spatula (see last picture below, you can even see the tip of my spatula in the wok).





And that's how you make a delicious plate of carrot cake in the U.S.
But it's nothing compared to Tante Dwi's cinnamon tea

Now that I'm teaching elementary statistics, I like thinking about how I can tell a lay person the marvels of the Laws of Large Numbers.  For example, most people think by having a long losing streak at the one-arm bandit, means the next winning is coming.  Or the weather is warm in Erie in January for the last week means the worst of the winter storm is near so that everything will "average out".

"Otherwise how does one get an average of 20 deg Fahrenheit in January?"

"Otherwise how can you say the chances of getting a head on a coin toss is 50-50?"

So these are misconceptions.  You could be getting 10 heads in ten consecutive coin tosses and yet the chances of getting a head (or tail) on the 11th toss is still 50-50.  But that doesn't violate the Law of Large Numbers.  What the law of large number says is that the more tosses you have, the more likely your average is the probability.  Say you do 50 tosses and the number of  heads will be about 25.  if you don't get that number, day you got only 10 heads, continue with more tosses (so do another 950 more with the first 50 counted).  Then amount the 1000 (one thousand) tosses, this time it will be closer to 500.  And if that's not close to 500, the Law of Large Number say you should try tossing another 999 000 more so that amongst the one million tosses, it will be very close to 500000 heads!

Maybe this graph will give you an idea of what I said.

"And what about the Central Limit Theorem (CLT)?"

That's saying that not only the sample average (layperson word for mean) will approach the population mean (the greek letter is m--Mu), but it approaches the normal distribution.  And what does all that mean?

So if you pick a sample that is big enough (anything more than 30 will be big enough), then the chance that it is the near to the mean of the entire population, but if it's not, it has a bell shape curve behavior.  Sample average approaching the population mean is something to do with "limit" of a number.  That's hard to explain by itself.  But as a random variable, the sample mean approaching the normal distribution is another kind of limit that requires a lot more explaining even if you have a math degree.  It's kind of saying a function is approaching another function.  Limits of functions comes in many types:  there're L₂ limit, point-wise limit, uniform limit, almost-everywhere limit etc.

Composition of functions, f o g, is defined as
That means you feed x first through the g machine and then with the output we call g(x) feed it through the f-machine and the final result is f(g(x)).  Or we can say let g act on x first and then let f act on g(x), to produce (f o g) on x.

And the strange thing is: if both f and g are invertible (i.e. if they both have inverses), then the inverse of (f o g) is not

 instead it is


here's the reason why...

Suppose instead of functions, we have the normal daily "processes".  Say you're in a car and g is the process of "rolling down your car window".  It's not difficult to guess what g^-1 (inverse of g) is.  It would be the process of "rolling up your car window"!

So after you've rolled down your window, you can perform another "process", say you call "sticking your head out of the window" as the next process f.  And it's not hard to see that "sticking your head in" is f^-1 (inverse of f).   With these, the composition
will be  the process of "rolling your car window down and then sticking your head out".  If you still think f^-1 o g^-1 is its inverse, how would you describe the process f^-1 o g^-1 in words?

"Rolling your car window up and then sticking your head in"?

Go Forth and Multiply.  And so every pair of animals crawled from his huge boat and do what they need to do except a pair of snake.  Noah notice they were gathering branches in the wood.

"Why are you gathering braches and sticks?" asked Noah.

"We are adders, we need logs to multiply!"

Get it?  The snakes are adders!  And if you can only add, the Napier Table is the only way you can multiply!

Ever heard of Napier and his log table? When I was young, the school did not allow the use of calculators even though pretty much everyone has a scientific calculator. We were compelled to use the log book if we have to multiply big numbers. The slide rule was invented so that we can "look up" the table and add numbers more quickly. So here's how it goes: say, we want to multiply 103 by 34, first we look up the log of 103 (2.0128) and the log of 34 (1.5315) from Napier's log table. They're up to 4 decimal points accurate. Then we add them up (that will be 2.0128+1.5315) which results in 3.5443. Using the log table agan, we find the "anti-log" of 3.5443 and that's the product of 103 by 34! So instead of "multiplying", we just have to "add"! That's pretty much the technique in using Napier log table. And that little invention claimed to have facilitated the furtherment of astronomy, dynamics and physics in Newton and Kepler's time!

	Most people who took some kind of algebra or Precalculus (and they usually repeat this in Calculus again) will know the First Law of Logarithm depicted in the swirled picture on the left. It has x and y and it has the ln which means "natural logarithm".
	Okay, this is more like it. It says the natural log of the product (times? kali?) is the sum of the natural logs!
	What has this got to do with Noah's Ark? Notice the serpents? The woodpecker? And Noah did say "Go Forth And Multiply? The actual joke coming up in the next blog...