Let God be X

I was reading the newspapers early this morning and a couple of things about religion riled me up. But I'm not going to succumb to the temptation of ranting about it again. I've said enough. Today, I'm going to write about learning.

This is a topic that has intrigued me every since I was a kid. I've always observed that each one of us is born with a certain aptitude for specific areas and not others. I noticed that in my class then, there were those who were hopeless when it came to subjects like mathematics, but excel in languages.

What makes a person pick up maths easily but flounders when it comes to stringing a simple sentence in English? In my case, I certainly wasn't a math whiz and I even disliked the subject during my primary years,  but then I learned to like the subject when I entered Form Four. 

I've always loved subjects like history and geography but was also scientifically inclined. Which made me neither this nor that. If there had put me in the Arts stream, I would have been bored by the way in which there teach the subjects. Humanities require good, inspirational teachers, which are few and far between.

Like all reasonably good students, I was of course put in the Science stream. And that was a revelation, akin to a religious awakening. The subjects of Physics and Chemistry suddenly opened to me what real science was all about--that the universe itself could be understood and expressed in beautiful mathematics. Mathematics became to me, the language of God. 

I fell in love with mathematics. But I realized at that time, I did not perform as well in the subject as some of the other students who came from Chinese schools. I was curious. What was their secret that made them excel in the subject?

As I spent more time with them, I noticed that their minds were more logical. There's no vagueness in everything they say or do. It was the 'dullness' of their logical minds that made them think clearly when it came to solving math problems. 

This clear logical style of thinking is something that my young mind was not accustomed to. I had the mind of an artist--prone to passionate bursts of emotion and poetry. A romantic, if you will. And when it came to solving mathematic problems, I was careless and always making silly mistakes. And I noticed that I did not bother to understand the underlying concepts with the thoroughness and clarity of a logician.

 To achieve that precision and clarity of thinking, I realized that I had to slow down my mind. As an artist, I value my flights of fancy--the flurry and passion of thoughts as they whiz through the mind. But this is like painting in broad impressionistic strokes of impasto. You can fill the canvas up very quickly but leave out a lot of details.

When it comes to mathematics, you have to be a Pointillist. One dot at a time. One logical conclusion after another. State a fact, and then ask yourself, what's the next logical step. Put that down on paper, clearly. Clarity and precision are key.  Always, one statement of truth at a time. Break a large problem into smaller parts. Tackle them independently, and then put the pieces together. By following this principle, you will always arrive at the inevitable conclusion: the right answer.

I began to perform a lot better in maths after that. I was thoroughly in love with the subject because it opened up a world of beauty to me. Every problem, can be broken down into simple parts, by the application of specific mathematical techniques--a deft substitution, a transformation or a geometrical approach. And when I saw how mathematics were used to expressed the laws of Nature, I was ecstatic because I finally could catch a glimpse of God's genius.

It is funny how I use the word "God" so often when I discuss mathematics but in everyday life, I try to make my language secular. You will never find me saying "God bless you". But when it comes to mathematics, I am unashamedly 'religious'.

I am veering dangerously back into the subject of religion, which I am trying to avoid because I have written too much about it. But I just want to register this point: it was applied mathematics that made me understand why people find the concept of a personal God, even an impersonal one, appealing.

For instance, in the subject of Statics Mechanics, there's the concept of centre-of-gravity. You are always given a weird looking object with various weights or forces impinging on it and instructed to calculate where is the centre of gravity for this system of forces. You will define a point X somewhere in the middle of object and then you write an equation that balances the moments caused by the forces clockwise and counter-clockwise. When the point X is found, you can forget about all the other details. Everything reduces to a single force acting on point X. Point X is where you would put your finger, to hold the entire object in balance. A complicated problem is reduced to an extremely simple one, by finding X.

God is like X.  We always need mental stepping stones to figure out the problems in life. As humans, we deal with people. We know how to love or be loved by someone. Our minds work with people-related metaphors. If God is a fictitious lord, invented by superstitious people, it is perhaps a necessary one. We know how to obey or respect a person of authority. And that streamlines all our subsequent actions. A centre-of-gravity 'exists' because all forces act in a resultant manner on that particular point. 

We can debate the ontological truth of God, but we will never transcend the limitations of human understanding, which sees the world in terms of people, 3-dimensional space and time which moves from past to future. We are, in other words, 'naive'.  But even a naive understanding of the universe is useful, as long as we understand it as a model, and not the ultimate reality, if ever there was one.

To tackle mathematics, I had to modify my model of thinking. When I understood mathematics, I saw metaphors that helped me to under other concepts like God. Without labels like "God" or "center-of-gravity", we would find it difficult to express anything that is useful. Is there such a thing as a "center-of-gravity"? It's not important. It is a property of the system that has a certain utilitarian value.

Always define the unknown as X. Put it in an equation. Sometimes there are more than one variable: X, Y, Z or X1, X2, X3....  There's no harm in polytheism as long as it serves some useful purpose. But remember, they are there because we need them to think and act. As long as we are clear with the metaphors that serve us, we'll never run into delusions about their reality. Beyond that, there's nothing more to be said. 

Learning, Unlearning and Relearning

Most people will be starting work tomorrow. The past week has been good as the traffic in KL was still rather sparse; it was great being able to zip from place to place easily.

I've made a resolve to be more independent when it comes to work. I used to have to depend on the services of a graphics designer to do some of the design that comes part and parcel with app and web development. Engineers are usually hopeless when it comes to even the simplest graphics design. They are almost aesthetically blind, having no sense at all of the basic elements of balance, contrast and harmony.

I've been spending the past week doing some of the graphics on my own. All graphics designers have Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator as their basic tools. Many use pirated copies. I don't own or pay subscription to any of these tools. And I was reluctant to invest time to build up proficiency in using proprietary tools, even though they are considered industry standards.

Frustrated by the entire industry's dependence on these tools and how we are forced to pay for them, I made a resolve to find open source alternatives. Here, I'm glad to say that I've tested and found good open source substitutes: GIMP for bitmap images and Inkscape for vector graphics. Using them, I'm already able to import all my old Adobe Illustrator assets and make modifications to them. I am finally free, at least for what I'm doing, from the need for the services of a graphics designer and the tyranny of Adobe tools. And it feels very liberating indeed.

I've also made another resolve (I actually have new year resolutions after all!), to be free from the Windows operating system. Unlike many of my friends in the industry, I'm also not a Mac die hard. On the server side, I've been using various distribution of Linux for years and have no issues with it. My laptop is set up to dual-boot with Windows and Ubuntu. And lately, I've been finding myself using Ubuntu exclusive for all my needs and I'm doing just fine. GIMP and Inkscape work beautifully on Ubuntu. Being completely free from Microsoft, Apple and Adobe definitely gives me a great sense of satisfaction.

I rarely write about IT matters on my blog, even though that's been my profession all these years. Today's entry must seem like a rare exception. But I'm also trying to inject fresh subjects into this blog of mine and there are many philosophical insights that one can gain from IT too. These will be interesting blog topics for the future.

I guess 16 years is long enough time for me to get over any disillusionment I had with the industry. I realized that it is the only industry where the skill to learn is perhaps the most valuable skill of all. The pace of change in this technology is staggering and the only survival skill one needs is the skill to re-skill oneself. As the eminent futurist Alvin Toffler once said: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

And that's the only thing that I've been doing consistently all my life.

My Mobile University

Living in KL means a lot of time spent in my car. Fortunately I have a consolation: audiobooks. For the past few years, I think I've listened to more books than I have read.

Not only have I "read" many of the latest non-fiction--Malcom Gladwell's Blink and Outliers, and Tim Wu's The Master Switch among others--through the audio medium, I've also sat through many lectures in subjects as diverse a the philosophy of religion, Russian literature, history of classical music, the human body and movie appreciation. My car has become my mobile university; driving is no longer a chore, it is something I even look forward too these days.

I also listen to a lot of poetry--Yeats, Shelley, Dylan Thomas, Edgar Alan Poe. I even sleep with my iPod: my favourit bedtime listening are philosophical talks on religion by Alan Watts. I've been using my first generation iPod for maybe 7 years now and it is the best investment in gadgets I've ever made.

What joy it is to be able to carry a whole library of wisdom right in your breast pocket. Listening is so easy--you just plug in your earphones and lo and behold, the author talks in your head.

Whenever I need a bit of break, in between heavy sessions of academic lectures, I'll dive into my portable collection of classical music--Chopin, Mozart and a bit of Baroque music will usually put me into a very relaxed and blissful state. Ah, instant knowledge, instant relaxation!

I used to buy audio cassettes and have a huge collection of audiobooks in cassettes. But nowadays, I get my audio content from Audible, commiting myself to more than RM500 of audiobooks every year as a Gold subscriber. I have more than a hundred books in my audio wishlist, and the list is still growing.

Unlike many of my IT friends, I'm not exactly an Apple aficionado; It concerns me not if the latest iPhone is thinner, lighter, comes with bigger screen and supports LTE. The iPod is all I care about. With the iPod and Audible, the world's knowledge--the pleasures of life--is always an 'earshot' away.

Qualities We Need

This is my first blog entry for the year, and hopefully there'll be many more to come in the coming days and months.

My daily routine these days is pretty regimented, with very little chance of variation due to the many work and family obligations that I have. Well, even a bachelor has family commitments--old folks to take care of, mortgages to pay and properties to maintain. And these are tough economic times for everyone. We'll all need to hunker down and weather the storm the best we can.

It is tough times like these that really test our resilience and character. We must remain steadfast and never waiver in our self-confidence. To stand still is to regress. Trudge forward, if you can't jog or run. The key is to keep on moving, and to continue learning.

Learning never stops. Everytime we read a book, we always learn something new. It is impossible to read without learning something in the process. Even works of fiction. Sometimes you'll learn even more from well-written works of fiction.

I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks, as I believe our ears are under-utilized as an input channel. We "abuse" our ears by subjecting them to noise and random sounds. Sadly, only the blind know how to use their ears as a serious instrument for acquiring knowledge.

The Chinese Lunar New Year celebration is coming up next week. Let's welcome the Year of the Ox by reflecting on the qualities of this animal: strength, resilience, toughness and hardwork. Exactly the qualities we need to tackle these trying times.