e pur si muove

With effect from Jan 1, 2008, the ever more paranoid US government will be enforcing a new rule banning the packing of “loose” lithium batteries in checked luggage, apparently over concerns that such batteries may catch fire. Instead, one must pack new batteries still in the original packaging, or otherwise keep them in a ziplock bag. Travelers will be limited to 2 (!!!) such batteries.

Apparently, batteries in devices do not count. One must wonder at the incredible lack of knowledge that decides that loose batteries can erupt in flames more often than those already installed in electronic devices. Whatever they put in electronics, it’s doubtful that the net resistance is anywhere close to that of air, or even salty water.

Reference

1. US Transportation Security Administration, Safe Travel with Batteries and Devices

After reading a comment on Mr Wang’s post The Silent Singaporean referencing my earlier post on the nonexistence of singaporekini.com, it suddenly dawned on me that I had entirely omitted the issue of literacy from the discussion of why Singaporeans don’t blog more. In retrospect, it’s so obvious! The typical Singaporean has only a functional grasp of English, which may be sufficient to fill out paperwork or even write a passable ‘O’ level composition, but it’s certainly grossly inadequate if one chooses to articulate one’s ideas in English.¹

Thankfully, one’s command of English can be improved, often dramatically. One merely needs to be committed to doing it. To blog is to write, and to write is to communicate. The following is essentially a reproduction of my comment on Mr Wang’s blog on what I think is important as far as good writing translates into good blogging.

1. Have a clear, logical outline of what you want to communicate. If you have a very complicated idea, break it down into smaller pieces. Lists can help. If you have problems with rambling, avoid digressions. Stick to the point; omit anything that isn’t immediately relevant. Be alert for logical fallacies: know what are straw men, false dichotomies, appeals to anquity and non sequiturs.
2. Be concise, but avoid ambiguity. Use words that are as simple as possible, while retaining the desired level of precision in meaning. If your writing is too vague, improve your vocabulary. Read more. Observe the subtle nuances in meanings with choices of words and contexts.
3. To communicate an abstract concept, bring it down to earth by telling a story, giving a concrete example and citing evidence to back it up. Pure abstractions bore people. As a practicising scientist, I know a lot about abstract ennui and abstraction-induced boredom.
4. Be a merciless editor and your worst critic. Imagine you are a mean English teacher and you are marking your own blog post with an evil red pen. Ask yourself if you really need every word and punctuation mark to make your point. Use correct grammar, consistent tenses, and consistent concord (plural nouns can’t go with singular verbs). But don’t sweat the small stuff like splitting infinitives, “correct” irregular conjugation² or worrying about using the part participle tense instead of the past perfect tense, although you definitely get bonus points for doing so!
5. Always check your spelling. With automatic spell-checkers, there is no excuse for unintentional misspellings! Be alert for misspellings that result in other valid English words, such as there and their, dine and dime and its and it’s. Pedants like me will be grateful. Really.
6. If you really have time, write multiple drafts. Wash and repeat; you will probably converge toward something well-written.
7. Blog often. Practice makes perfect! Edison didn’t invent a practical light bulb the first time either.

There are many books out there on improving one’s writing and communication skills, and I would recommend reading a few and do whatever makes sense to you. Here are some techniques that worked for me:

• Write an outline or draw a mind map. I find mind-mapping helps me connect ideas. Outlines help me figure out if a particular way of presenting those ideas makes sense.
• Imagine you are talking to someone else: a coworker, friend, enemy, significant other, or family member, etc. After writing every other sentence or so, I go back and ask myself, “Would this make sense to someone else? If not, how can I rephrase this sentence so that it would make sense?”
• Write up something, put it aside and do something else and read it again later. If what you wrote 2 hours ago or last night doesn’t make sense to you anymore when you read it again, chances are no one will get it either.

1. In some cases, such as Rockson Takumi Tan and the Void Deck, bloggers can still be successful while writing in pure Singlish. Let that be inspiration for future Singlish blogs lah!↩
2. My favorite examples: apex-apices, octopus-octopodes, datum-data, lemma-lemmata, cherub-cherubim, opus-opera, insigne-insignia. Who even uses ‘datum’ nowadays?↩

According to our survey, [not] many people go to the political blog[s]. It’s just very simple - the Malays don’t read [English]! Why should we worry [about it]? We’re not worried. Who will read this? [Political blogs have] no influence. Who’re [they] gonna influence? These blogs and [the] Internet depend on [newspapers for their credibility]. I don’t read much of all these blogs run by Raja Petra or [whomever]. I don’t - I don’t - because I think I’m wasting my time, ‘cos they’re not reliable. They are based on their sentiment[s] and more, if not that, many are not true, because I’m a journalist - I’m subscribed to the Star - and SMS (?), or Bernama, because the people who are working there are professional journalist[s]. - Zainuddin Maidin, Malaysian Information Minister, transcribed from Press for Freedom [mp3], the BBC Documentary Archive, 2007-12-19 (9:55 - 10:55).

I just listened to an episode [mp3] of the BBC Documentary Archive, in which there was significant coverage of the Malaysian blogosphere.

I confess that I don’t know enough about our fellow Malaysian bloggers (unless Cowboy Caleb counts!), and I encourage everyone to listen to the podcast.

One thing that gets me, though, is a wandering thought - why doesn’t the Singapore blogosphere have an analogue of Malaysiakini.com? Are Singapore’s media laws simply far too strict to allow its existence? If the RSF Press Freedom Index is anything to go by, Singapore’s press is about 19% less free than Malaysia’s as of 2007, or 17 levels in rank lower with both still in the lowest quartile surveyed. Is that really significant? And is the absence of cases like Jeff Ooi or Nathanael Tan in our blogosphere an indicator that we simply aren’t pushing the boundaries of the permissible as hard as our Malaysian counterparts?

Or are the cynics right - that we Singaporeans are simply too apathetic to want such an unbiased, non-partisan, independent media, and are content to bitch on Sammyboy and other similar online fora whenever something controversial comes up?

As 2007 comes to an end, it is perhaps time to reflect, in typical navel-gazing manner, on our state of affairs. Specifically, the Singapore government and the MSM still dictate the agenda of many Singapore blogs, let alone that of coffeeshop debate and taxi-drivers’ unsolicited musings. I can’t think of any one news story in which blogs led the MSM in terms of discovery and reporting. It seems, at least in Zainuddin Maidin’s eye, that the blogosphere needs to lead in at least one story in order to establish its credibility, and it would seem likely that the typical layperson would want such to occur before they’d think of blogs as more than “personal diaries” as sources of pointless ranting and/or food pr0n.

Perhaps it’s too much to expect too much from us bloggers beyond an extension of the kopitiam chatter. Despite the diversity of viewpoints ranging from sanctimonious to satirical¹, even professional politician to professional academic, no one blogger (or close-knit group of bloggers) carries enough clout to carry a conversation.

For completeness, I mention other possibilities - apathy/pointlessness as the byproduct of the relentless brain drain of the 80s and 90s, political discourse as orthogonal to the interests of materialism and the 5 Cs, fear of retribution from the state in the form of arrests and/or defamation lawsuits, and social pressure to conform to the majority viewpoint. Each seems plausible, and yet none seems to be a dead ringer.

Then there’s always the excuse which Catherine Lim summarizes succintly as follows:

[T]he present PAP Government will allow open debate ONLY on those topics that have created a public hue and cry, [... which] is actually a step forward from the old dispensation under Mr Lee Kuan Yew, when public consultation was an unheard of thing, and policy decisions were strictly and purely top-down[.] The issue of political freedom, however, is too abstract, maybe even too elitist, and certainly too removed from the exigencies of day-to-day living in our down-to-earth, materialistic society, to ever fire up enough Singaporeans to force the government to pay attention and allow discussion.

The operative word, in my opinion, is enough. Can we get a critical mass of Singaporeans to care about serious issues enough to make their voices heard? No, says Catherine, and a great many people would agree. Yet in my personal experience² there is a significant groundswell amongst the P65 generation, and especially the children of the 1980s, and quite possibly the 1990s as well. The disagreement, then, has nothing to do with universal apathy and everything to do with a growing generational gap. Unhappiness over the current state of affairs in everything from public transport fares to CPF contributions to censorship has created quite a latent undercurrent of discontent.

I would argue that the problem is no longer apathy, of trying to get a complacent nation of sheeple to speak out, but rather broadcast, to get people’s viewpoints across beyond that of the Moral Majority and address an increasing generational gap between the apathetic and conservative bulk of the populate and a new wave of freshly-minted diploma³-holders upset that their pedigrees won’t get them fair market value relative to the world market for labor and increasingly pissed at the vast influx of foreigners depressing the market for wages, before the general level of pissiness drives people toward physical violence. Fearmongering? Take a step back and consider how angry and short-tempered we are as a nation. Having been out of it for quite a few years, looking in from the outside really drives that point home. Even a simple task like getting from point A to point B is full of excuses for a short temper to flare up, be it getting annoyed at having to drive through yet another brand-new ERP gantry, trying to fight off an auntie feigning deafness as she saunters up to a cab that you’ve only just flagged down after an unsuccessful 15 minutes, or wondering why people on a crowded bus don’t spontaneously reconfigure themselves to move toward the back, but rather need some heckling from the bus driver captain to contribute even a token amount of space for boarding passengers. There’s no doubt in my mind that Singaporeans have become angrier, and it is entirely plausible to assert that the root cause is an increasing feeling of helplessness at a disconnected leadership, and that anger has non-negligible potential for civil disobedience (or even physical violence) in the not-too-distant future.

Helplessness is a simple reason, but there is also a much simpler possible explanation for our national reticence. It is also the most prosaic - Singaporeans simply work insane hours. If we can’t even get Singaporeans to procreate, despite tax incentives and other carrots, what more to get them to clear out several hours at a time to sit down and write coherent, thoughtful blog posts? Think of the vocal blogs you know of that have suddenly veered into neglected quiescence. I’d bet you that many of them were written by students who have since graduated, gotten sucked into the work-marry-birth-nurture dogma and suddenly find that there is no time or place for that mouthpiece.

1. There is a pedantic correction that I must make to mrbrown’s duh news #8: zero times infinity is not zero, but is undefined, or more technically an indeterminate form. If zero times infinity were indeed zero, then one could define zero divided by zero as infinity, which would simply open up a whole host of mathematical contradictions. In lay terms, nobody can ever know what the “correct” value should be. (And no, nullity does not count.) ↩
2. My personal experience is of course highly unrepresentative, not just statistically, but also because of my previous, erm, newsworthiness, which has placed me in contact with a great many like-minded Singaporeans; more so, if truth be told, than I had ever suspected to exist.↩
3. Here, I use diploma in the generic sense of a certificate of tertiary-level education.↩

Every bit as hot and humid as I had remembered, although there wasn’t the horrible feeling of walking into a steaming cloud of water vapor when I walked onto the airbridge.

I swear, the guy at immigration seemed to recognize me. “Are you the - ?” he started. I just smiled at him, and he broke out into a knowing grin as he returned me my passport, waving me past the checkpoint.

In between bouts of pigging out, I’ve been helping my mum digitize all our old photos. Man, those were the days.