iphoting's Sink

One week ago, I began my life as an OOC (out-of-course) from ASLC (Advance Section Leaders’ Course). It was joyful as I’m finally freed from having to do stupid and useless things in the sun, worsening my breathing problems.

Although it is meant to be less physically demanding, I’ve only slept on the bed in bunk for 2 times in the whole of last week. Other nights were spent out-field (in Tekong), guard house keeping the ‘pass room manned’, and performing COS (company orderly sergeant) duties for 24 hours.

That week has given me all evidence NOT to become a third sergeant, and I’ll pray and see to it that I do not become a sergeant.

Performing COS duties on a weekday, especially on the day where people are booking out is absolutely no joke. There are a million and two things that needed to be done, and with your physical presence, i.e. manning the office phone 24/7. I cannot imagine how this job, suited for two can be humanly performed by one person.

Anyway, next week is a new week and I’ve started a new blog here to write about timely happenings, for those of you who are really keen to know what a day is like for people garrisoned in a barracks. Most certainly, I’ll have to censor out pseudo-sensitive terms to keep myself safe from the Official Secrets Act.

Having been really busy these days, I hardly have time to check emails in accounts which I rarely use. Lately, someone pointed out that there’s an email in the school issued email account (where its interface quite resembles Hotmail 1.0). Albeit the insincerity, it talks about ‘Univerisity offers and Response to questionnaires’.

Basically, it’s a survey to find a correlation between the IBDP result and university offers. That’s the boring part.

The more exciting part is a polite advertisement for a survey going around regarding “the implementation of the IB programme”. Although the email claims that “official approval” is required for such surveys to be conducted, I think otherwise. Having it ‘officially approved’ in the first place would introduce bias into the questions, creating an observer effect, which can induce negative outcomes to the results. Moreover, I find it absurd that we were told “not to respond to this survey”, to announce our names to them, and to retract our responses from the researcher if we had done so. After all, we are no longer under the jurisdiction of the school and they are pushing it by telling us what we cannot do even after we have graduated.

What they have effectively done is to tell the whole world to stop imagining a pink floating elephant in front of them. By the tone of the last paragraph, it sounds as if the implementation of the programme is extremely shameful and would raise serious consequences if let known by researchers and the public.

做賊心虛

Sadly, the deadline for survey submissions is up. Otherwise, I will do them the favour by pointing you to the survey.

I’m glad to have got my hands on a great book, The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s an awesome book to read... especially when we’ve all got much waiting to be done (after rushing).

Check out this interesting protein called Laminin. It is used to form sheets of each other to give structure on which other proteins can rest on; in other words, Laminin is vital to making sure overall body structures hold together.

Here’s how they look like:-

Cool eh?

These days, my national slavery commitments have been keeping me away from the computer and phone most of the time, leaving me little opportunity to comment about eye-brow raising ‘news’ that keeps popping up over the past week.

In fact, a thought even transpired in my mind – newspapers are withheld from NSFs so that they will not be disillusioned by the absurdity of current affairs and dilute their determination to ‘protect Singapore; WITH MY LIFE’.

To further prove my point, check out this blog post and compare it to what the Shit Times have been feeding us over the past week and see for yourself what perspectives mean.

That aside, my already blunt mind have been irritated by the strange flow of illogical arguments and justifications seen in the news about ISD “punishments”. The irony is that the justification is delivered by the Home Affairs Minister, whom in my opinion, ought to be sacked.

Aright, that’s about it for this weekend.