Andrea Tan Yehua’s Neighborhood

I just got a few more documents dumped on me, so with two weeks of presumably intensive work, it doesn't look like I'll be reading The White Man's Burden. I'm done with Dead Aid, moving on to The Malay Dilemma, which I may also skip. I think I shall try Stephen Hawkings instead. My sister borrowed The Universe in a Nutshell. I'm done with the first chapter, and I'm pretty intrigued. Too bad she's returning it tomorrow.

Damn, I should have paid more attention in Physics.

On other things, I got myself a pair of table-tennis bats! :-D Also thinking of going back to sailing. I need more money.

To withhold judgement,
To keep an open mind,
To learn from others but also to listen a bit less to them,
To make things happen for myself.

I'll think about the material stuff later.

INTERVIEWS NEXT WEEK HELP.

Aw. (LOOK AT HER EYES~) I would love to have a rescued dog too. I would never get a toy dog (too artificial), or, come to think of it, any dog but a rescued dog.

It disgusts me how Singaporeans mistreat their pets. Rather, not treat them at all. The maids do the walking, cleaning, feeding; the owners do the cuddling. Some of the dogs stink the lift too, especially those with thick coats of fur, and the guard dogs. Honestly, I think people should stop going cosmetic with pets. It's superficial and cruel.

I'd like to be a good pet owner.

What I intend to read this week:

Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa

Dambisa Moyo

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little G

William Easterly

The Malay Dilemma

Mahathir Mohamad

Since we were pretty darn free, my mom and I took a bus down to Little India intending to try out a vegetarian restaurant, which my aunt recommended. We tracked the restaurant down to 7 Sensations in Madras St, which is just behind the Tekka shopping centre (The Verge, I think). However, upon seeing the pricey menu - it's Little India!! - and disappointed by the fact that it wasn't an Indian restaurant, we walked on a bit more.

Good thing, because we chanced upon Sakunthala's. (The website isn't a good reflection of the Dunlop branch, but there's some background stuff and the location details.) The food had to be good, as the place was one of the few in the area that was packed. Heck, there was a queue. Didn't take too long for us to find seats, luckily, and we quickly settled for Tandoori Chicken Briyani. Good stuff. We also tried the fish, which was okay, I guess. There's free flow of briyani / rice - and I was amazed to see an Indian lady opposite me accept two or three bowls worth of extra rice after eating the same amount. The first dollop is already a lot, so I'd recommend sharing a meal, and adding a vegetable or meat dish with that. Next time, we're going to try the paper prata. It's gigantic. I'm thinking it's just a few centimetres shorter than my CPU.

Awesome.

Sakunthala's
151 Dunlop St

After yesterday I'm just going to chillax.

Check out the EtherPad (rec by Mr Lim).

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Been on a cooking frenzy recently, in between all the mulling over university and swatting flies. Cooking for friends was not too brilliant, I really shouldn't have tried to deal with an entire chicken if I haven't done it before. Edible, but not as good as what Mum can churn out.

I didn't really expect myself to start baking either, but somehow I did. In the past week I've made two avocado cakes. Good reviews at home; both were finished in a couple of days. But I think avocado isn't a good fruit to use in any food - it has no aroma on its own. I think I'll work with something else next time.

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A while back, someone generously gave me a copy of The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel ("A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence that Points Toward God"). Since I have just completed Dawkins' The Greatest Show, I wanted to see how Strobel held up to Dawkins' evidence in his chapter on biological information.

In this chapter, Strobel interviews Stephen C. Meyer, who has a PhD in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge. (I genuinely wonder what that means.) I have qualms about how the chapter starts, but more later.

One of the things that Strobel cites in his interview is the Cambrian Explosion. Put simply, there is a millions-of-years-old layer of rock - the Cambrian - where there is a sudden burst of fossil records available. Creationists argue that this is the period when God created a whole host of complex living organisms, with bodies more complex than the single-celled organisms that were more common before the Cambrian era.

Strobel says, In fact, some experts believe that "all living phyla may have originated by the end of the explosion". I believe that his quotation of J W Valentine's words has been taken out of context. It appears, to me at least, that Valentine's adding later that "genomic reppaterning occured, [...] as novel body plans evolved" does not make the Explosion as astonishing as Strobel makes it out to be.

Now,

In my interview for Chapter Three, biologist Jonathan Wells had satisfactorily answered my objection [...] one of which was that transitional organisms may have been too small or soft to have left a legacy of fossils.

Wells had argued that soft-bodied organisms had been found in Australia and even in the Cambrian layer. However, this is not the only anti-thesis to creationism. If you read the Wiki article on the Explosion, or The Greatest Show, you will realise that there are possible explanations.

Moreover, there are certain species of worms which, in spite of the millions of fossils acquired, have no fossil data. Does this imply their springing into existence yesterday?

Interestingly, Meyer continues, Evolutionists are still trying to apply Darwin's nineteenth-century thinking to a twenty-first century reality, and it's not working. Explanations from the era of the steamboat are no longer adequate to explain the biological world of the information age.

Isn't that ironic? And Intelligent Design - arguably just a guise for creationism - is modern, progressive thinking? I guess what Meyer really means to say is that, Christianity - like Science - is out-moded!

And besides, Meyer's theories don't seem to go down well with his "peers" - the scientific community. Strobel himself has received criticism for this book for not so much "investigating scientific evidence" as talking to biased scientists.

More problems abound with Meyer's scientific rigour: he cites Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, published in 1985. However, Denton later rejected ID and instead stood by evolution, while still staying a Christian. This was after his second book, Nature's Destiny, in 1998. The Case for a Creator was published in 2004... So did Strobel interview Meyer more than six years before publishing his work? I doubt it. Furthermore, Denton and Meyer were acquainted at the Discovery Centre (which promotes ID). If Denton was straying from the concept, Meyer should have known. In other words, Meyer was likely cherry-picking.

In any case, even compared to Dawkins' regular digressions from the topic, which even then are about science, Strobel's writing is cringe-worthy.

Where do you think this came from -

We got together on an unusually sultry summer day, had a pleasant lunch in an avant-garde Asian restaurant, and then settled into an office at the Discovery Institute. Meyer lowered his lanky frame into a plain wooden chair, his back to a half-opened window through which random traffic noises could be heard. It was nearly midafternoon before we got started with our discussion.

A novel, perhaps? Nope, that's how Chapter Nine poetically begins.

"Astonishing evidence"? Astonishingly unscientific, more like.

Why am I the only one here?

My father has the fanciful idea that, if I am good enough, some company will release me from the shackles of the scholarship bond.

"What if they don't?"

"You don't know!"

"Isn't that exactly the problem?"