at the neck of the hourglass

So this is my last night in Singapore. After all the rushing about, I’ve finally forced myself to sit down, reflect, and write.

It’s been really busy, the past few months. The earlier reunions start off safe; birthdays, or just a casual meal, and everyone congratulating each other on having survived secondary school, JC, army, or even the first few years of university: it all depends on the congratulatee. But soon the gatherings start to have a faint hint of the impending separation in the atmosphere. And then the gatherings become overt farewells, and the pace picks up. Lunch, dinner, lunch, high-tea, dinner, supper, overnighters… and then the airport, and photos and hugs and waving and watching the glass doors slide shut behind other people; soon it’ll be my turn. My turn to walk through those glass doors, to pass the departure gates and the flight attendants on the way to my seat, to watch the ground peel itself away from the plane, further and further and further away, and the people and buildings and patches of grass getting smaller and smaller, and then, cloud.

It’s like I’ve been living in a huge passenger plane all my life, and my fellow passengers are my friends and family, and now I’m getting up from my seat, and slowly walking towards the open door at the end of the aisle. The light pours in from the open door; it is from there that I must jump. And along the way, I pick up speed as I put on my sky-diving gear, and I high-five family and friends who are seated along the aisles. And the remaining length of aisle contracts under my advancing feet, until I can see the people in front of me, jumping off one by one, and soon it is my turn, and I glance back, see the faces one more time, and then I jump. And I see cloud.

Cloud, and not the distant land below; featureless cloud, featureless as my impression of my destination. Sure, I’ve heard stories of this Land where I’m going, seen it too, through pictures, moving or not. But they remain isolated images, glimpses through the cloud. There are no memories of smell, of sound, of taste, and no memories of events and emotions associated with those memories of sense. My destination is a distinctive Other, a new kind of new, different from any place that I’ve visited for the first time back here in Singapore. In Singapore, no place is really new; an air of familiarity lingers in even the most novel of circumstances, in the air, the people, the food, the weather; an air of familiarity that comes with having spent a fifth of a century of my twenty year life in places which are but variations on a theme. But America. America is different. I might as well be going to a mythical land. After all, my only impressions of both places are solely through stories and pictures. And it doesn’t help that my destination shares the name of the home of Odysseus.

So I will hurtle through the cloud – horizontally in the literal and vertically in the metaphorical sense. And yet, though I will be moving a great speeds, I will feel like I’m hanging in limbo, suspended in the timeless zone between the departure and arrival gates, the doorways to other worlds, passing zoneless time. I imagine that’s what a grain of sand would feel like as it passes through the neck of the hourglass: behind it, the sands of its past, relentlessly pushing it forward to a single point; before it, its future, spreading out larger and larger into the open and unknown. And at that exact point between irrecoverable past and unknowable future, it hangs for what seems like an eternity. Or what Odysseus must have felt, standing at the open gate of his house, his family and home of many years behind him, and all the road before him. The foot that crosses the threshold separating home from the rest of the world takes an eternity to land on the earth that belongs to the Outside, the Other, the Odyssey.

Tomorrow, I shall take that step. Tonight, I sleep.

a reminder

Though you are in your shining days,
Voices among the crowd
And new friends busy with your praise,
Be not unkind or proud,
But think about old friends the most:
Time’s bitter flood will rise,
Your beauty perish and be lost
For all eyes but these eyes.

-W。B。 Yeats

Armstrong’s song, Aldrin’s din

What the men on the moon might have sung, post Apollo 11:

(a.k.a. the dark side of the moon landing)

courtesy of Elton John, Harry Nilsson and (yes) Ernie! I think Ernie says it the best, and says much more, too

some people

Some people talk and talk
and never say a thing;
Some people look at you
and birds start to sing.

Some people laugh and laugh,
and yet you want to cry;
Some people touch your hand
and music fills the sky.

-Charlotte Zolotow

When two people of the first kind meet, fog meets frost, and they dully pass their dreary existence on this bleak earth in mutual tolerance.

When a person of the second kind meets a person of the first kind, the spring meets the snow, and perhaps a green shoot or two might possibly be drawn out of that cold, hard ground.

When two people of the second kind meet, heaven erupts and the earth rejoices, the trees shower forth blossoms of bliss, the wispy clouds perform their strange ethereal dance beneath the smiling sun, and in the distance,  one can hear the sound of church bells ringing.

the guitar is hard again

So I’ve just restrung HY’s guitar.

The pristine white bass strings and the crystal clear treble strings beckon to be played, to channel a love song, or a Bach piece, or a bluesy chord progression. And I’m very inclined to oblige.

There’s just one problem: It’s a left-handed guitar, and I’m not sinister (in the original sense of the word).

But then again, how hard can it be? The strings are nylon ones, not steel, so they’re much easier to press. The chord fingerings and notes are just a mirror image of the fingerings I’m familiar with. All I have to do is apply my own tips that I give to my guitar “students”, and I’ll be playing to the likes of Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix in no time!

So I fit the guitar snugly over my right thigh, grasp the neck with my right hand, and hazard out a C-chord. So far so good. The fingering feels awkward, but otherwise OK. Now to see if it sounds right. I eagerly position my left hand over the sound hole, take a deep breath, and give it one good strum, and…

love at first note

Captivating from the very first pizzicato

crypto nuts

Cryptographers have a sense of humour.

Or maybe they’re just nuts.

Read the following excerpts from peer reviewed papers and judge for yourself.

Inspired by Carter and Wegman, we use simple primitives which we call NUT (for “n-Universal Transformation”) since they are so cheap to implement. We propose construction methods for block ciphers that we call COCONUT (for “Cipher Organized with Cute Operations and NUT”), PEANUT (for “Pretty Encryption Algorithm with NUT”), and WALNUT (for “Wonderful Algorithm with Light NUT”).

-Decorrelation: a theory for block cipher security, S. Vaudenay

Then this other bunch of guys comes up with a new cipher:

In this paper we will suggest a new block cipher called DONUT (Double Operations with NUT) which is made by two pairwise perfect decorrelation modules. DONUT is secure against boomerang attack.

-New Block Cipher DONUT Using Pairwise Perfect Decorrelation, Dong Hyeon Cheon et al

(Don’t ask about the boomerang…)

I’m not surprised if, when cryptanalyst come up with a new, powerful attack that breaks all known ciphers, they call it Cryptonite.

And it pays to watch movies after all… Who knows? One day you might get to cite them in your papers! See citation 28:

The title of this paper is… <drumroll>… “Dial C for Cipher”. And in case you didn’t catch the allusion, the authors are kind enough to add a footnote:

Refering to the famous movie by Alfred Hitchcock Dial M for Murder[28]…

-Dial C for Cipher, Thomas Baignères and Matthieu Finiasz

The same authors are responsible for another cipher, the Krazy Feistel Cipher. Why “Krazy” and not “Crazy”? There might be other reasons (remember what I said about them being nuts?), but take a look at the initials…

(do I hear clucking?)

1 John 4:16

Don’t tell me that God lives;
Why do I care?
Show me instead that Love lives,
And then, perhaps, I’ll hear.

velveteen

An Easter bunny, of a different kind.

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others… He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

“What is REAL?” asked the Velveteen Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.

“But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

-The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams

Meryl Streep’s reading of the story, with George Winston’s music in the background, is particularly enchanting, but you’ll need to have half an hour to spare, and maybe some tissues nearby as well. It’s split into three videos.

martha

We all know the story told in the Gospel of Luke about Jesus’ visit to the Mary and Martha:

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him.

She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said.

But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

It’s obvious who’s the role model. Mary is the positive example, Martha is the negative one, and we are to avoid getting caught up in the business of life and missing out on that special communion with the Master. Plain and simple. Even kids know that.

But I’d like to think it’s not that simple. The bare, straight-forward narrative of the story allows us to fill in their inner mental states, and I’d like to think that deep down inside, Martha envied Mary.