Raising Rockstar

The moment JD stabilised from her accident (barely) we were strongly advised to get all the testing re her various pre-existing conditions done at the same time, so the veterinary professionals knew what to focus on… My heart has soared, sunk, levelled off, even as the saga continues, with some of the most unexpected twists and turns in the tale…

OK quick catch-up – Kids had 3-way conference before the Easter break (YES that’s how long this has been sitting :P)

These are the kids going to 3-way Conference in school. Rockstar is dressed… as a normal human being who is nonetheless proud of having completed Outward Bound Camp through the school. HN is dressed….. as Wonder Woman*

3-way Conference is a day for the kids to think of and show what work they’re proud of, and where they can improve. As I understand it, it’s based on their own targets as discussed with and set out by their teachers (rather than say, in any competition with other kids), and is largely meant as a day for positive reinforcement (not say, criticism).

*Re Wonder Woman costume: When laying out their clothes the night before, I asked HN if she wanted something with sparkles, and she replied “No, I’m going as Wonder Woman.” It took some self control not to discourage her from actually following through on it. Because I worried if she wore that, she might attract some measure of Huh. So You Think You So Wonderful At Schoolwork Issit? (Interestingly I suspect if she had chosen some Disney Princess dress she’d just get Oh So Cute-kind of reactions)

And so we’re supportive. This is Wonder Woman at Conference showing… numerous bits of paper taped… and taped…. AND taped together into one of her books.

One day when challenged How High Can You Go at writing numbers she’d gone on and on, and on, inexplicably on various bits of paper, so school staff had taped the entire thing together and rolled it up in her book.

DON’T freak out, this is Rockstar’s not HN’s haha – our favourite numbers game at his conference. We haven’t made it to 10 digitd yet and are still resisting the urge to Google it…

There was also a list of trivia questions and Global Goals issues and I dunno how many parents can answer ok… Fine. Just me. I don’t know how many of these things in Conference – name all the Goals etc – I can answer! 🙂

And, sports. That’s the simple (but pretty huge deal to us) “badge of honour” you get for playing a sport for the school

Rockstar tells me there are kids who have like, five or more of those white badges on their shorts, for having represented the school in various sports events. N-ot Rockstar’s natural strength. There are kids who are really, really good at all these field and ball sports – they move like adults, better than some of us adults. Except they’re kid-sized. Kid sized adults. Kadults. 

For Rockstar to just make the one, to get to play something for Kennedy before finishing his schooling there, has been an honour. (And you can see some of the kids with multiple white “bars” on their team uniform shorts 🙂 )

Then it was the last day of school and the kids got makeovers (and caught Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg’s latest – loves!)

“Before” looks:

And after:

Scream.

ps: Can I just say… if you had a kid who topped “everything” from maths to language to music to competitive ice dancing, winning umpteen Gymnastics gold medals along the way, then you’re either aliens or your kid is completely not being challenged to improve… And NASA also probably wants to talk to you 😀 

JD’s in the animal hospital under critical care, after a pre-existing condition was aggravated by her trying to jump into a taxi to go dig holes on the beach. The following (and subsequent backlogged) posts were in various stages of completion before this…

I worry a lot about doing a church a disservice* by telling people I go to church. But well… thousands of us attending IslandECC, it’s just possible some of us aren’t perfect. That was a JOKE ok, NONE of us are perfect….. 🙂

This would otherwise not have been necessary. (That’s the Easter craft from HN’s Kids Club class…

…and some of the word challenges below (the smaller print one is Rockstar’s))… HN loves cutting and colouring but she also likes to play the Word Search app on my phone (something about crossing out alphabets being very satisfying) and she hadn’t seen the Easter word search at the next table before settling at and refusing to leave the cutting and colouring table when it was time to go, so I took a copy home for her

Ok I better elaborate on my earlier comment about worrying I do my church a disservice by blogging about it – it’s not the “You’re A Christian???” reaction that I’m worried about, it’s been on my blog from the very beginning that I’m a Christian. 3 bank mergers spanning a bit over a decade in my former life before I quit, every dealing room I went to I had a stack of Bible verse cards on my dealing room desk. (Fine, call me One Of Those People. But I didn’t go chasing colleagues around with them (now there’s a scary image 😀 ) and you should also know the rest – that I had a relatively staunch Taoist/ Buddhist upbringing (pretty sure my Mum was terrified when I first told her I had become a Christian) and, as Malaysia is often so diverse as to confuse so many people I meet here in Hong Kong, my best friend from Secondary School was Muslim.)

Back to the Bible verse cards though. In my first banking job in Singapore, when I was an eager beaver who couldn’t run fast enough from the Accounting/auditing degree my parents had nudged me to take at Nanyang Technological University, I experienced my first merger. “Merger” might be putting it mildly – out of the 80+ dealing room staff, some of whom had been working there for decades in this relatively small Singaporean family bank who had mostly been minding their own business structuring their own instruments under regulatory and academic supervision to take care of an already established client base, the acquiring institution eventually kept maybe 12 of us, predominantly on the structured products/ derivatives side.

During this, I met Janet. Late 30s, pretty, with a bob haircut she dyed very black, she was the senior trader on the Rates desk. From where I sat, I could hear her daily conversation with brokers, sales staff, junior traders. Early each morning Janet would apply a bright lipstick (I on the other hand wore no makeup to work until my Mum suggested it after I chopped my long hair off into a short pixie), cheerfully wished the people on the other side of her dealerboard “Good Morning” – that is not to say she didn’t also tell them to shut their mouths when they tried to get away with lousy rates – and then appeared to barely move from her post ’til lunchtime.

Janet was one of the “old(er) timers.” While I never heard anything unfavourable said about the quality of her work, her role and team were completely overlapped by the acquiring institution’s and she must have known she would be done for when the merge was completed. She had once told me that in her late teens/20s a tumour at the base of her brain stem had nearly obliterated her eyesight, and treatment had left her unable to have children. The job she had held for so long and was about to lose must have been a big part of her day-to-day. She prayed quietly, put her lipstick on, and wished people a good day every morning anyway.

Even though I didn’t believe and had no wish to in those days, I had no doubt that she did. With every fibre of her being, and it showed. 

The last thing I had wanted was to go with Janet to church. I had practically run from that same church several years prior, after being pulled up to the stage by a well-meaning but overly enthusiastic fellow student at university who wanted me to try speaking in tongues.

I still don’t speak in tongues. But experiences like that, together with my “very un-Christian” upbringing, taught me how very different people are, and the OCD in me makes me even more worried something I say will cause someone to stumble. There are people who have had bad experiences, and then there are people who have studied very, very carefully** to arrive at what they believe in. I didn’t study. The night I followed Janet to her church after the umpteenth time she asked me, I knew more about other faiths than I did about this one. I didn’t even like her church. But something happened to me that night I was sitting in back, trying so hard to melt into the background, and I never looked back after. I went to classes (Alphas, spiritual gifts, Bible studies, baptism) after. And it was also incredibly humbling that it would happen for me in that church. Sometimes I went back there after, sometimes I went elsewhere.. Not too long after that we came to Hong Kong. I was baptised at IslandECC, and both kids were dedicated to the Lord there as well.

This is the awesome rock-concert-esque Kids Club FX Easter service, inadequately illustrated by my hurriedly taken blurry pics:

Kids Club Giveaway (it’s all free, but you do need to register how many kids you’re bringing beforehand so they can budget the number of giveaways and other supplies)

**On another occasion they showed the American Football movie Facing The Giants, where a coach takes his lacklustre team to the top via the power of prayer to overcome their fear of failure before each game, and we loved it so much (Rockstar enjoyed it, I really liked what I had caught when I came to pick him up) we went to buy the movie off Amazon.com ….

… and it was a long time later when I then learned how heavily they vet, discuss, check “Dove ratings” (what even is a dove rating, never knew they existed!) on what they show.

So please don’t judge the Message by the limitations of this messenger dabbling on her personal blog. (Am I Christian though? Yes.)

He is Risen, Praise the Lord

Last thing I heard re Janet was maybe 8 years ago, that she had delivered a healthy baby girl not too long ago. She must’ve been about 45 years old by then. The trader who told me that, our former colleague whom I had run into, shrugged. “Well I guess everything finally decided to start working again.” Then he carried on his way. Lunch was almost over and the markets would be starting back up..

I’ve always liked looking at faces, reading about people’s lives. There is so much to learn. I love learning. REAL learning, not the annoying stuff everyone has to get through FIRST, especially nowadays. You want to see a person’s real face. You want to find out where they come from, learn why they think or act the way they do… 

I picked up Unstoppable – My Life So Far by Maria Sharapova because I was looking for how she dealt with her doping charges. Reformed cheater in a highly competitive sport where “everyone” does that? Fake-reformed, not-really-sorry cheater? It was nothing like that. Instead there was so, so much more…

pic from books.google.com

“…the need to win …less about trophies than about beating other girls.”

“I was not friends with the other girls… They could have been the nicest girls in the world, and I wouldn’t even have known it, I chose not to know.. I have no interest in making friends on my battlefield. If we are friends, I give up a weapon…”

She was then 6-8 years old.

First time I read about her childhood, I thought Wow Little Alpha Female. The more I read it however, the more I think 1) “defence mechanism”. She had an insecure childhood, and who can blame her? She describes arriving in the States (Florida, because they had heard about the Williams sisters) from Sochi, Russia, one night with her father who spoke no English, after wrangling a visa over. She was separated from her mother, who had initially provided emotional support. The car and team coach never show, her father proceeds to try and find their way, with just USD 700 in a roll in his pocket. They are initially told at the first place they find, with the help of a random Polish couple whose identity they never learn but who stay with them and act as translators, that to even use the courts so someone can see 6yr old Sharapova show her skills costs USD 1000. That, from some receptionist on a power trip. (Years later, Maria Sharapova, world-renowned tennis player later, ever thought what that looks like? 🙂 )

Sharapova describes one of her former coaches deliberately making her and her dad insecure so they would be more… controllable. He hired her dad and kept his passport. Required payments especially at times when he knew they were particularly broke. Then when they couldn’t pay came the binding, predatory contracts written in soaring legalese – served to the Russian immigrants who still struggled with rudimentary English.

“What was I? Eight, nine years old? I had been playing well and it had attracted a vulture.” 

We wonder why bullying exists among kids, and that – the wondering – is almost laughable, because adults do it all the time to get what they want. How could they possibly expect kids not to be that way if they are? Kids can smell hypocrisy a mile away. It’s why we eat our candy and other junk while they’re in school 😀 (Fine, I’m kidding, ok? We don’t eat candy, we only eat vegetables)

For real though, I do not like people who breed insecurities in order to control others. It means that’s the tool they themselves understand. I don’t want to know that! (Yup, still an idealist.* More, far below.) Insecurity is the ugliest thing. It brings out the worst in otherwise good human beings. It’s a cancer, a parasite on people’s abilities, on how much they can really achieve. Performance enhancement books would tell you not to breed insecurity. Or well, make sure a child is secure. Because we are hard wired to first of all survive (otherwise we’d just all be extinct).

A brain and body with survival instincts kicked in is a brain and body not focussed on learning other stuff because learning only comes after the immediate threat to survival is sorted. (That’s not me, that was totally from some book written by an Actual Qualified Person <sheepish> that I read a long, long time ago, would take more work to find it and I have to finish this post that’s been sitting in my drafts folder for weeks and weeks quickly and go do real work, so…) And you’d be surprised at some of the things that really trigger “survival instincts,” it’s not all intuitive…

Anyway, back to Sharapova – she had a talent, had come all this way to one of the Tennis Capitals with nothing else, those girls living with her in the dorm talked and laughed at her, in a language she barely understood, went through her stuff… and she’s now supposed to let them win? 

“I was younger than the other girls (at the academy)… and they punished me for it…”

And so she beat them on the court. What else would she do? Now go back up and look at her first quote about not making friends because she wanted to beat them. Looks different, no?

“These were rich kids… spoiled and sent down to live out a parental dream... I was… one of only a few on scholarship… we were the advertisement, we attracted the deluded wannabe parents.”

Now lemme step into the parent shoes:  If I sent my fairly talented child to an exclusive academy to train and well, develop her game, play a few tournaments… I don’t want my kid picked apart by the hungry Russian prodigy with the huge chip on her shoulder and bone to pick (I’m just saying).

“…deluded wannabe parents,” Sharapova writes. She probably took extra pleasure in demolishing their kids. Of course she would. The parents probably took extra pleasure kicking her and her dad out. Of course they would.

“Tennis is a game populated by fierce parents…”

“…dozens and dozens of such girls (like herself), each with a father who considered his daughter destined to be the best in the world…”

2) be that as it may, for all her unapologetic court intimidations, she is not unbeatable. Yes she hates losing, but it wasn’t like she never lost. You’d think someone whose former coach says “don’t look Maria in the eyes before, after or during the match” is invincible, but she’s not.

Sharapova describes how Serena Williams beats her (and I very much respect her honesty*) Looks at her like she’s a bug – Do Your Worst. NOT Intimidated – kind of thing. (So if you ever came up with a girl who tries that, you undo them by not giving it to them.) A quick search of Serena Williams will give you her top quotes:

“Tennis just a game..”

“I’m really exciting. I smile a lot, I win a lot…..”

This is how Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova stack up (someone correct me, I think Sharapova is probably lower down than she would otherwise be, because of her 15 month exile due to doping**):

from wikipedia

Sharapova talks about “game face,” serious intimidation across the court. Now, what I know about tennis could fit on a pinhead, but I competed in taekwondo (free sparring) up to State level in my teens (I’ve won my weight category at State level before. I’ve also exploited qualified for medical exemption from PE – I was not blessed with naturally good health.)

So anyway where I was training, I mostly only ever had boys to spar with. And used to be any early attempts at “game face” didn’t work on my male team mates. As in, you try to get all “game face” and glare at them and what-not and I’m not sure how much even registers, they kinda just go H-uh (or maybe D-uh 😀 early affirmation re Men from Mars and Women from Venus haha). Then they’d keep pummelling, because God forbid they ever lose to a – yuck – girl in front of their friends. Fear of getting beat by “a – yuck – girl” in front of their friends overrides “game face” by any girl.

Jeff Kinney had the right of it at how much more scary this must be for the boys (pic from diary-of-a-wimpy-kid-wikia.com)

So my former all-boys team taught me that “game face” only works when the other person speaks the same language. And when you try to “game face” someone and it doesn’t work, it can backfire on you –

Sharapova says something like that about Serena Williams. Williams undoes her because unlike other girls, Williams isn’t intimidated. “Tennis just a game.” Not the same language. And it undoes Sharapova herself. Think also, that growing up a hungry, underprivileged Russian prodigy, she’s still honest enough to write all this. She tells you why her own chief strategy doesn’t work on her own chief rival. And that makes me also believe what she says about the doping charge**.

The charge nonetheless cost her a lot in her otherwise notably long-lived professional career. And as she was not a “friend” in the game, so too the tennis community was largely unsympathetic and unsupportive. Serena Williams yet commended Sharapova on her honesty, and it’s something I really respect as well. Two warrior women, two gladiators on the court. I might actually start watching tennis after this 😀

“At a few key moments, I have been spotted and championed by powerful women who came before me. They did not do it for reward. …anonymously… just giving a leg up to a girl who could play…”

“Salt and sugar.. bad luck… good luck. Every now and then some greed put us up against it… more often than not it was some person who, for no other reason than just because, saved us…”

I’ve mentioned I insist on being idealistic – I believe that everyone has a choice and an ability to either be mean, cruel, dishonest….. or the opposite. I mean. Everyone. You cannot help if someone else takes a “cheap shot”. But it’s entirely your choice not to allow it to change you. Those “powerful women” Sharapova describes as helping her – d’you think they never had a bad day/ week/ month/ year/ countless cheap shots taken at them? And I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of these amazing kinds of people too – surely their impact on our own choices, on who we choose to be, should outweigh that of the people we don’t respect:

3 years into my marriage, recovering from what Bloomberg reporters once dubbed World’s Largest – the ICBC IPO-fueled equity derivatives run of 2006/07 – as the senior derivatives dealer on the wealth management desk, I found out I was unexpectedly pregnant. I was also in the middle of two job interviews (this is quite normal, head hunters call “everyone,” “all the time”.)

Despite management’s best efforts in response to the unprecedented massive expansion in deal volume, getting in enough additional staff would likely take several more months of negotiations, contracts, waiting out the new staff’s gardening leave periods. The worst of the initial crush was over, and our exhausted team was trying to regroup, but I had lost a significant amount of weight off my 5ft 6in frame, weighing in around 45kg. Being newly pregnant ruled out the possibility I could stay at my current place if I wanted a decent chance at keeping the pregnancy. That left the other 2 prospective employers – a European securities house whose ads you’ve probably seen on CNBC and in finance magazines, and a British commercial bank with a strong retail presence in Hong Kong, looking to set up a private bank investment product desk.

This is what I told them:

“I’ve never tested pregnant before. I’m only about 5 weeks along and may not even still be pregnant in a few months. But if the pregnancy is healthy I would be having a baby before the year is out.” 

I deliberately disclosed this before reaching the “offer” stage – they cannot easily rescind an offer they’ve made if I then tell them I’m pregnant. Did I expect to be turned down? Quite. But I couldn’t imagine working someplace without knowing if they would still have taken me pregnant, and without them knowing that I wouldn’t stuff them with a new employee who would be off for 2.5 months so soon after she was hired.

What happened next is why I wanted to tell the story initially on Women’s Day, what with HN having lotsa little girl friends who adore their baby siblings.. She’s asked for one and I’ve said no, she may instead have a hamster. Which of course means she wants to grow her own baby when she grows up..

European securities house’s response:

Head dealer: “Hah! I was over 6 weeks when I even found out! They called me very pregnant.” (This is a “nerd joke” because you either are or aren’t pregnant, yet we still insist on saying “how pregnant are you?” in conversations. Her son at the time was about 6; we kept loosely in touch for awhile, and if you wonder why I didn’t end up there, it’s simple – my experience was in derivatives, not vanilla equity, which is their strong suit and what they were considering me for. I simply couldn’t ask for as much money. I know it’s quite obvious, but I said it anyway – “I wouldn’t be worth as much to you, you can’t make me a better offer than the derivatives house.” 🙂 )

Commercial bank’s response:

(Then) Retail and Private Banking Product Head: “Oh. Ok, thanks for letting me know.” <rings off>

Several days later, bank HR calls. “(Interviewing Boss) told me you’re pregnant. When’s your due date?” I have to go annoy my gynea to guesstimate the due date on a 5+ weeks pregnancy. 10 years later, I would bring her a picture of HN and JD on the floor, sharing a laugh. She is a dog lover who has been known to adopt her patients’ Cocker Spaniels alongside rescue mutts.

When I go in again, bank HR would explain they had one of the best maternity packages around, but for me to qualify, I had to sign on quickly because I was already pregnant – I had to work for them 6 months beyond probation, something like that. I still had my own gardening leave to serve before starting with them. My immediate boss, the one who rang off quickly when I told her I was pregnant, was hopping off the line to tell HR to check. She then informed her boss, travelling for business at the time. They signed me on before I met the big boss, who would not be back in time for me to still claim full maternity benefits if I signed only after meeting her. My immediate boss bore the risk of taking flak if I should turn out to be a lousy hire, what with her boss not having met me yet. That’s why I would have taken a bullet for her. 

That boss, no longer living in HK, is a mum of 2 girls – she left the market and a very aggressive investment bank for 4 years to be with her girls, returning to eventually head retail and private banking products when we met. One daughter went to Wharton, while the other is in medical school.

I served faithfully and with great pleasure under her, until new acquisitions and market-necessitated restructuring changed my reporting line away from her and ultimately a total of 5 times in 3 years. (Sigh, you know what they say – some are born bosses, some become bosses, and some have bosses thrust upon them 😀 )

As for my 5+ weeks unexpected pregnancy?

Rockstar was born at 39 weeks. 

**Re Sharapova’s doping charge, she says 1) a supplement she had taken long term (commonly prescribed for coronary artery disease – she kept taking it after it was first prescribed to her in 2006 for abnormal EKGs) made the list of banned substances just 2 months prior, and 2) it goes by a different name in Eastern Europe where it is apparently much more commonly taken; her original sentence was reduced due to “no significant fault”.

“When you are stumped, open your mind to opposites.. – Dr Niven, The Answer 

Besides, there comes a time when the soaring heights of PhD-authored self help books begin to flounder in producing inspiration, instead inducing altitude sickness, for which one must repair to the motivational equivalent of the chip shop at base.

Haha not really. But we’re talkin’ amusement arcades, baby.

The (Frivolous) Problem: Arcades can be a real black hole for spending money.

Now, arcades probably had an even worse rep in Malaysia than say, Hong Kong or Singapore, when I was growing up – you could get suspended from school for being seen in school uniform at an arcade. Arcades were for “latch-key kids,” loitering there ‘cos no one cared where they were after school…

In his book, Dr Niven mentions Walter Mischel’s “Marshmallow Experiment” – a study of 4 year olds left in a room alone with a marshmallow, promised an additional marshmallow if instead of eating the one in front of them they left it alone until the researcher returned. How many little kids d’you think went for the marshmallow in hand? About 70%. And when they pulled SAT scores of the same 4 year olds as teens, those who had managed to wait it out with the marshmallow at aged 4 scored on average 210 points better, “the difference between being admitted to Yale and New York State at Binghamton”.

The correlation in that one was between test scores and the ability to delay gratification. Beyond test scores, little kids able to see beyond the immediate marshmallow also grew into more resilient, stress-resistant young adults, who could see projects through to completion. (That’s actually quite logical, right?)

So arcade <soaring, inspirational music comes to screeching halt>. We’ve been going to Jumpin’ Gym USA (misleading – this is a local company holding 90% of the relevant kiddie amusement park market share in HK according to Wiki, “USA” is purely in name only) for some years now and at press time neither of my kids has popped over any 7-11s. It was a nice combination of saving up points-chalked-up-from-playing-games for a points-redemption scheme for toys (didn’t want the “prize” to be a piece of candy – it’s not about the actual consumption of one little piece of junk food, it’s about looking at junk food as the reward you were holding out for..), and well, a little case study in stretching their spending money/ earning tickets for toy redemptions.

For each ball game, you get 20-40 paper tickets. That’s not that much on its own – a rare (ie very difficult to purchase outside) small-ish Friends Lego set is about 5000 tickets/points. That’s 100 – 200 games bowling, shooting baskets or throwing a rubber ball at targets BUT a) there are games that yield more tickets (right along with ones that give you none, mostly claw machines for soft toys, dolls, paperweights, key chains etc etc) – Rockstar once checked out the Youtubes of how claw machines work. It seems the claw can be adjusted to some varying degree of “strength”. (We’ve all played machines where the claw can’t grab anything, right? 🙂 ) Most of the claw machines cost 10-12 tokens a try. That’s the real black hole – you get no paper tickets for redemptions, you can blow about a try a minute – HKD 10-12 a minute – with nothing to show for it..

…and b) Fun Delayed Gratification exercise. The kids played for a couple years before even getting close to the points available for redemption. They were aware of all the redemptions, kinda “never thought they’d make it,” one day they realised they could now afford a lot more redemptions and suddenly that made the redemptions sweeter….. and then they decided to continue saving and couldn’t bring themselves to redeem much. Don’t think I could’ve done it if instead of ball games that was say, Kumon exercises 😀

At least some of the toys are not carried in stores, I once tried to buy one of the bigger claw machine prizes (Cars disposable camera) for Rockstar, walked around the toy stores and couldn’t find it, went back to the arcade to try and buy it, and learned you can only get it from playing this one game. YES, CLAW MACHINE. Tried it couple times, decided I wasn’t going to be able to get the toy in a reasonable number of tries (fine, it was NEAR IMPOSSIBLE), walked away. I suppose it is now safe for Rockstar to read that I once didn’t get him a Cars disposable camera unavailable anywhere else.

This one time they had Sylvanian Families doll houses for redemption too (but these you can easily buy outside as well… the cheapest I could find that 18,000 point doll house set for outside was a bit under HKD 1000 years ago…)

One day we passed the Jumpin’ Gym in Causeway Bay, full of local families inputting piles and piles of paper tickets into their cards. I asked one mum, whose card reader indicated in excess of 30,000 points, what they were saving up for and she said: –

– they wanted to refresh the kitchen and were looking out for the “good stuff” that occasionally came up for grabs. (I remember also seeing a small microwave oven at 15,000+ points in one of their catalogues. I. KNOW. Microwave oven cheaper than dolls’ house! I wish I had a little microwave in my dorm room growing up, all the idiots who would bang on my door at freaking 3am to go out for “supper” after cramming.) There’s also lunchboxes, backpacks, various other school supplies – relatively “lower-hanging fruit” redemptions 🙂

Anyway, we thought we’d try the ticket thing –

This is the most Rockstar’s ever made – 4532 paper tickets from predominantly the two machines behind him (we inputted about 400 earlier from a Feed The Chicken game that HN loves to play and has gotten better at, with practice – you time when the chicken bends over to peck at ping pong balls moving along on a conveyor belt and get a ticket payout based on how much you managed to feed it)

The two machines behind Rockstar are some of the cheapest games to play, about 2 tokens or HKD 2-4 a try. As in:

HKD 1000 gets you 990 game tokens. HKD 200 however would get you m-aybe 100, possibly less (they regularly change this a bit). Roughly however, you’re paying close to double a game by converting “only” what you need for one session. I agree it’s uncomfortable to appear to blow so much money on one token conversion BUT that would make me extra careful, put more effort into restraint… as opposed to feeling good about only converting a much smaller amount…. and then feeling it’s ok to top up a bit – at double the cost per token. 

If you lose your game card, it costs you HKD 10 – as in, you “lose” nothing else except the physical plastic card. All your accumulated points and token money you put in are tied to your HKID, so as long as you produce identification, they re-code the new card chip with the same information – money you’ve put in, redemption points you’ve already accumulated. I might also add that we’ve been in the Tai Koo Shing outlet during seriously peak hours and noticed things like Star Wars Lego sets purchased from Toys R Us next door (in mint condition and with proof of payment tape still on it)…. and it lies there for the entire time at one of the machines and no one takes it. People move it aside to play the machine, and then put it back on the machine. 90 mins later when we leave, it’s still there. Just…. don’t try to cut queue though, I’ve also seen parents snap at each other “Queue. Up.” 🙂

Now to the two games behind Rockstar in the pic:

“Timing,” the game on the left, allows you a chance at substantially more tickets if you press the button at the right time when the ball drops, in similar fashion to HN’s Feed The Chicken game (that means, with practice you can seriously improve your odds – in fact for HN’s favourite game there’s no spin, little is left to chance, you just time when to press the button and have the chicken peck up a ping pong ball), pushing it into one of the higher payout windows or an additional spin for a jackpot that pays out 1/5 times, a 20% chance. I… need to ask Rockstar what the Jackpot is on this one, he got quite a lot out of it 🙂

“Horsin’ Around” however, the game on the right, is my favourite. For 2 tokens, you pull a pinball-esque ball release for chances to win tickets.

Now, that “probability” is a bit misleading in the sense that the coloured “ball drops” that pay out more than 3 tickets are slightly raised. So you do not have an equal 1/10 chance for each “outcome.” The only way to figure that without taking the machine apart – calculating how fast that carousel spins, how high the coloured ball drops are raised, and then having to make assumptions about how hard the player pulls back the pinball-esque ball launch to send the ball spinning into the carousel…………..

….is to make assumptions. That’s both the key AND the rub, it’s the same for any hairy complicated investment product. Ditto the concept of correlation. Because garbage in garbage out So let’s look at it another way:

Just by buying 1000 tokens, ie at ~HKD 1 a token, this game costs ~HKD 2 (2 tokens) to play, but will always pay out AT LEAST 3 tickets 😀  Compare that to a claw machine at HKD 10-12 (if you weren’t topping up your card HKD 1000 at a time, that’s HKD 20-24!) a try and which pays nuthin’ … That’s how much more playing a claw machine really costs…

The “Jackpot” starts at 100 tickets, and increases by 5 tickets for every game played, until it’s won. Then it resets to 100 tickets.

Given all the unknowns, let’s just do this quick and dirty:

On average, the Jackpot reaches roughly 215 tickets before we manage to clear it. So let’s do a rough check of whether we like our odds (come on, this is fun and it pays).. Recall when you started playing, the Jackpot typically begins at 100 tickets and increases by 5 tickets at a time. If the kids on average add 215 – 100 = 115 tickets before they manage to hit the jackpot, then it’s taking them an average of 115/5 = 23 tries. At ~HKD 2 game, that’s about HKD 2 x 23 = HKD 46 spent to get 215 tickets from the Jackpot. 

But that’s not all the tickets we can get because there are also chances to win 10, 20, 30, 40 tickets, and of course the default 3 tickets per try. The Jackpot accumulation depends only on how many times you play the machine, however winning the minor prizes of 10, 20, 30, or 40 tickets does not affect whether you win the Jackpot. I love this – no correlation adversely affecting your chances at tickets.

Now, both kids do not leave this game until they’ve either run out of budgeted spending money or managed to empty their jackpots out into physical tickets. It’s not uncommon for them to empty their jackpots several times and not want to play much else.

For one thing, HN loves feeding the ticket-counting card machine 

This batch took the kids maybe half an hour to input oh, and never pull your card out without pressing that button to make sure your card has registered all those points

In all the times we’ve played, they’ve run out of money and had to walk away maybe twice ever. The rule is, leave when you have run down your budget, or not be allowed back. I’ve mentioned how hedging a trade is a necessary precaution that nonetheless also cuts your profits. This is my OCD talking I wanted the kids to erm, be able to “walk away” from an ALMOST!! Jackpot <sheepish> because I do feel that not being able to walk away is exactly how you end up killing yourself at say, a gambling table someday not knowing how to quit when you’re ahead. Or at least not heavily owing the House.

Try it when you think you’re “almost there!” on some game that nonetheless still relies “too” much on chance (hence the needing to walk away). It hurts. That’s also exactly why we practice it. Once, an auntie immediately (and apologetically) took over the machine to keep playing for the Jackpot we’d accumulated. It had reached over 300 tickets. (But we already had a fairly good number as well.)

Besides, easy(ish) come, easy(ish) go… What is worth even more is the extent to which people who aren’t “collecting” let strangers who are have their tickets/ consolation plastic gem prizes/ basically stuff they don’t need but someone else might. 

Y’know, that old adage whereby if you have “free food” (or extra redemption points), do you blow it all on something you don’t really need or do you “save it,” put it to good use by sharing and making a friend? Which would you rather have, a white elephant/ the metaphorical free food when you’re not hungry and that’ll go bad, or a friend who might return the favour when they have extra tickets they’re not collecting? 

It hasn’t been uncommon on quieter days for local uniformed kids to hand HN their paper tickets before leaving to their extra-curriculars. The random validation that “niceness” exists, by an older child – especially someone we don’t know and never see again – is priceless. I once tried to treat them to an extra basketball game, and they politely declined saying they were going to be late for activity, “Bye-bye, girl! <waving to HN>”. It’s happened 2-3 times and since we never see them again and I don’t want to be Random Stalking Woman Of Local Girls In School Uniform, all I can do is blog it. (OMG. Just read that back. That sounds soooooo creepy.)

While some counter staff are aunties, virtually all the patrolling staff appear to be in their late teens or early 20s, and probably a good number of them are students, wearing earpieces, breaking out screwdrivers to fix/ reset etc game machines, on one occasion quick to politely put an end to annoying poll surveyors (adults) with no other reason to be there except to get parents to answer their survey, refusing CNY lai see on principle despite having spent the last 30 minutes patiently unscrewing components and jiggling the wires so the card reader of the particular station we want to play can be used… even as all around them constant cacophony reigns.

WHY don’t swankier places like Bel Air hire more of these kids? They’d slay the clubhouse fees calculations and what not…. I can think of one reason though – no big arcade and mall attached, not sure those kids want to work there either 🙂

Ends

Epilogue:

Because people ask me so often how “these two” get along….

Rockstar, 4.5 years older, works way harder at chalking up redemption points. He’ll look for Youtubes, he’ll try and figure how hard the machines are…. HN redeems way more of their shared arcade points than Rockstar does. There’s a lot more stuff she likes – Friends Legos, shiny plastic paperweights etc etc…. On the other hand, HN rarely spends much of her cash gifts – last year’s “shopping spree after CNY” HN gave Rockstar her remaining cash – more than half of what she started with – because she didn’t see anything else she wanted and Rockstar had something he needed more cash to buy.

YES THAT FREAKED ME OUT. First time she did it, I was quite worried HN would later regret it and we would have an Armageddon. (But she never did, and Rockstar lets her play with most of the stuff he gets. That ALSO FREAKS ME OUT but she’s yet to actually break something truly valuable of his. (Touch wood. Will wonders never cease 😀 ))

So anyway, when the kids go shopping, rather than “I wish I had that,” it’s “I wish I found something I wanted, that would’ve made me as happy.”

HANG ON –

The kids may not fight about money or even belongings very much, but THEY FIGHT ABOUT THE STUPIDEST STUFF. Whether one is secretly mocking the other – the most benign (to anyone else) sentence, word or yes, look can be heatedly contended for the presence of sarcasm. Who Disrespectin’ Whom.

Newsflash kids, we do not live in Da Hood.

Only a Parent Of Little Children Who Fight will understand the incredibly niggling “phantom pain”, or Itch In A Place You Can’t Scratch. Why no, we don’t play “favourites,” kids.  Like in Brad Pitt’s Fight Club, WE DO NOT SPEAK OF THIS BECAUSE FAVOURITES DON’T EXIST 😀 . But club is good. Or, more accurately, support group is good.

“Hi, I’m Aileen. My kids fight about Really Stupid Stuff.” (All around the group, murmuring “Hi Aileen”.) “I can’t wait for the legalisation of sedation for bickering children. Does this make me a Bad Parent?”

Epilogue II

At the meal table one day…

HN: Mommy? D’you…… love some family members more than others?

Me: No darling, of course not.

HN: Really?

Me: I have two kids. <wide-eyed, HN begins nodding earnestly as Kings and Rockstar half listen, both immersed in their tech after the meal>No parent should express favourites, kids should be equally loved and know it <HN nods encouragingly >, that’s how you really have a chance to grow to love each other as well <HN’s still nodding>. It’s very important for a family –

HN: SO – what you’re saying is… you don’t love me more? (grins) 

Rockstar: <GIANT SNORT>

“Tiger Mum” need not be elaborated on, but the first time I ever heard the term “Eagle Dad” was in the SCMP Post years ago when Chinese businessman He Liesheng was interviewed about his then-4yr old son. (Eagle Dad = Parent Who Drops Eaglet Off High Place, forcing him to Fly Or Die; young He Yide is now 9, studying a syllabus 3 years ahead of his chronological age, and has in fact neither run away from home nor murdered his dad in his sleep.)

While not dropped from a high place per se, Urban Meyer Baseball Player was “not welcome in the family car” if he struck out. On those days, he walked the 10 miles home. He went further (in the game) than 99% of all semi-pro 17 year old baseball players. It wasn’t enough. Soon, he was failing in every game and at every position so his dad (a.k.a. Guy Who Kicks Him Out Of Family Car For Striking Out) told him that if he quit he would not be welcome home ever. He could call his mum at Christmas, but Dad would not be coming to the phone.

Meyer Jr was failing spectacularly at practically the only career and future he had ever really seen himself in. His dad was about to disown him because he wanted to quit. 

What was Urban Meyer’s solution to his problem?

He became one of the most successful coaches in college football. He leveraged his upbringing in a way only he could know how, given the unique confluence of his natural talents and childhood. I love this, for surely we are all meant to do the creative best with the hand we are dealt in life.

I care very much because OCD, as I often agree among all the dedicated dog spoilers owners in our area, pets exist so you can be incredibly irresponsible about discipline are for spoiling! 😀 Allow your child to be a horse’s behind to everyone else in the name of the child being your “precious” however (remember the last time someone called something their “prrreciousssss”*?), put anything less than your absolute best judgement and effort into their upbringing, and someday you could be causing countless other humans immense pain and suffering, from yet another dysfunctional adult with massive hangups joining society. (That’s not self-righteous bull. That’s from having friends I cared about on the receiving end because they loved someone dysfunctional.) And I say this despite being aware many humans are @ssholes in a way most animals aren’t 😀 (Except cats. Cats and those yappy little Pom things have awful personalities. I’m going to get hate mail from the cat and Pomeranian people now.)

*Golem’s precioussssss (pic from forexlive.com)

(And here’s the kids’ “precious-es” (umm..) from when they visited Entopia (love the play on “Entomology” and “Utopia” 🙂 ), the Penang Butterly Farm, just before CNY. #yesitsreal : butterfly, giant millipede, cat gecko…

…HN nearly fell head first into that earth pit which is a couple feet deep, so intent was she on digging up her prize #oneunhappymillipede which turned out to be fatter than her fingers…

…and here they are placing as many butterflies on her as they can:

(Rockstar got really good at scooping up butterflies to put on HN, you can see the flapping wings above her head… You can find butterflies of all shapes and sizes resting everywhere, from fruity feeding stations to garden flowers to…. one tourist’s legs. There was a young mum there whose legs kept getting covered in (only) that large white butterfly HN is holding top left – she would tell us she had happened to apply a moisturiser (Nivea After-Sun – of course we asked her what she used 🙂 ) not too long before her visit to the farm…)

More “precious gems” – Entopia sells live cocoon souvenirs! (Some of those look like jade, wonder what comes out of them)

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Back to The Answer… I thought it interesting that while He is Chinese, and featured in SCMP’s Rise of the Tiger Dad in June 2017, Meyer is American. It would seem a myth that “eagle parents” are exclusively of a particular race, though maybe the choice of what to be “eagle” about might differ… But… if the kid is a fish, it still ain’t flyin’ (or well, climbing a tree – Einstein’s original quote: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”)

Speaking of fish….. See how I did that? Smooth, huh? (pic off ebay.com)

(Quick aside – at press time the original movie poster, creased up and all, was selling for USD 71.00 on eBay. And it had 5 bids. Know where’s a potential place to find these things? Try the old DVD shops all over HK, or your average old disc rental place in most of Asia, for that matter. Preferably not in a place that has a lot of people who like vintage Spielberg. Then try to sell ’em to some Spielberg fan in the States (or Spielberg himself! What d’you give a guy who has everything? An original poster of a movie with huge personal sentimentality, first edition print books…… ))

Steven Spielberg was a relatively young movie director when he had a problem. The kind that threatens to end your budding career. Someone had created this expensive realistic shark for the Jaws movie, painstakingly and extensively testing the thing before movie production………………… in fresh water.

(No judgement; in hindsight “everyone” knows “everything.” It is a humbling reminder if you’re getting full of it at having invented the Next New Thing, that something that has been around since the (real) dinosaurs and is free and available in abundance can end you. Salt. I’m talking about the salt eating into the water-proofing). When they actually tried to shoot the Jaws movie in the ocean, the salt water was quickly shorting out the robot shark. It was a time before computer graphics and animations a la the Transformers. They were losing money, huge amounts of money, fast, because their state-of-the-art horribly expensive remote control shark couldn’t swim in salt water. 

What was Mr Spielberg’s solution to this problem?

He shot a movie about a monster shark largely without the shark. The scariest parts of Jaws are when the presence of the shark is implied. Arguably the most powerful scenes he produced were on days when the shark didn’t work and he had to use his own ingenuity. He turned what others would’ve seen as the greatest “weakness” in the hand he was dealt into his greatest “strength,” the movie’s greatest asset. This is also one inspiration for when I said there is nothing that can replace human judgement and experience, no matter how clever we think we get with technology, innovation and inventions – they are still tools, though some are no less impressive and super fun to use 😀 . Sir Anthony Hopkins is Sir Anthony Hopkins (who has Asperger’s, the high-functioning autism) whether he is doing black and white low-tech Lear onstage, or whether he’s being shot against a green screen and appears in the final cut standing next to a huge shape-shifting alien life form with a French accent.

SAME DIFFERENCE

Moving on…

Yet, as with every “package” of goods and bads, the double-edged sword cuts both ways… Sometimes a trade hedge is referred to as the double-edged sword. (Because a hedge of the original trade is in the opposite direction. When your trade is making money, your hedge is losing it. You can understand why hedging is both crucial and erm, heart-breaking 🙂 It requires huge discipline and restraint to follow Risk and Compliance’s assessment of what you need to hedge, because when you’re making that hard-earned money from that meticulously analysed trade, it is very hard to accept that part of it is required to be hedged away.)

With vision and judgement that goes beyond that of Artificial Intelligence and Technology, is also the potential for jarring human error…
This statistic I’m gonna plagiarise share straight out of Dr Niven’s book: After you’ve entered an irreversible decision, your belief in the correctness of that decision increases by about 38%.

Did your odds really get better? Nope. They’re the same as before you entered a trade. But you will have about 38% more conviction that you are right if you can’t walk yourself back from the decision.

So I’ve been stomping on investors… what about doctors? Now, I myself cannot imagine going to work every day where your “bad day at work” is someone dying on your watch and you having to inform their loved ones that you couldn’t save them. You would assume doctors take the proverbial “Hippocratic Oath,” among others, to first do no harm. When you are a doctor however, you could become so dedicated to the fact that, despite insurmountable evidence, it’s hard to believe another doctor could be doing the opposite. In that way in which life sucks Ironically, that’s when you most need to shake off your blind spot. It was by their very education and training that they had worked so hard for, their very belief in the responsibilities of their profession, that made them blinder than people without their training.

A serial killer who is a doctor? Unbelievable. (And truly terrifying.) It’s why the other doctors at Ohio State University Medical Centre chose to give Dr Michael Swango the benefit of doubt despite patient and nurse witnesses that he was seen with mysterious syringes in toilets, in rooms of patients he had no business being in, despite having an actual sample of the stuff he was injecting into patients. (They didn’t test the sample, and it was eventually thrown away.) Know when they finally caught and convicted him? About 16 years and 60 victims later.

Yes, professionals can make mistakes. Yes, a human’s judgement can be so skewed.
And since I haven’t figured how to end this post, there might be a part III…

“From this rough metal we forge virtue.”

– Quarry Bank High School motto

In the 1950s, QBHS had a problem student.

QBHS boasted an “A Cluster” offering the most challenging courses reserved for the best and brightest – kids with the most potential, expected to further their education at top institutions of higher learning. Kids expected to do great things like win a Nobel Prize someday 😉

Into this “A Cluster”, boy who would drive everyone batshit a certain boy was enrolled. QBHS had recognised his abilities, and accorded the corresponding respect and opportunity to nurture this.

After his first year, he was however downgraded to the “B Cluster”.

2 years later, he had unceremoniously been demoted into the “C Cluster”. This was where they dumped put dumped the kids everyone had given up on. Kids not expected to amount to anything in life.

As one teacher put it on his school report, “a poor result due to the fact he spends all his time devising witty remarks.” Another used the word “hopeless.” This boy failed nine out of nine tests.

It wasn’t just teachers who thought he was a problem, parents did too. One of the friends he would come to work closely with when interviewed recalled his father saying, “You stay away from him.”

What appeared a problem (back then) that turned out to not be a real problem (debatable) was that this boy was actually learning in his own way by making a total horse’s behind of himself pitting himself against educators. “C Cluster” or no, he wrote like a demon. At age 10, he devoured countless volumes of short stories, and created his own journals for poems, musings and sketches. His aunt whom he lived with periodically blew through his room, carrying with her sheaves and sheaves of papers which she promptly disposed of, just to keep the furious production from overwhelming the place.

“When I was 12,” Problem Student recalled, “I thought I must be a genius, only nobody’s noticed.” 

10 years after he left Quarry Bank, he received a letter from current students trying to make sense of his writings in English class. Flattered (kind of), he produced a work in their honour:

“I Am A Walrus.”

The sole purpose of Walrus was apparently to befuddle anyone who tried to make sense of it.

The boy’s name was John Lennon. Boy Whose Dad Didn’t Want Them Hanging Out is Sir Paul McCartney. I call it The Problem That This Book About Answers To Problems Says Isn’t A Real Problem And Yet I Think It Kinda Still Is, because they were drugged to the eyeballs so often and that can’t be good even if they’re making money.

This is not about how in every problem kid lies a rough diamond, a star waiting to be discovered, a “genius” that teachers (and parents) just didn’t “get”. This is to say that EVEN IF YOU ARE FREAKING JOHN LENNON YOU ARE STILL GETTING DETENTION 😀 

And Then Some 😀 I especially like “20 June: Just no interest whatsoever.” – pic from dailymail.co.uk

BUT

If you are John Lennon, your original detention sheets sell for up to GBP 3,000 😀 

pic from liverpoolecho.co.uk

He worked hard for the money, baby. Driving everyone up the wall in the name of his own education and potentially at the expense of other students’ takes work. 🙂 No I don’t mean that in a mean way – he wasn’t sorry about it, he made an entire incredibly successful career from being nuts and high.

I feel like after making that observation, I need to find a more erm, redeeming eg along the same lines:

pic from memegenerator.net

pic from imgflip.com

pic from memegenerator.net

pic from memegenerator.net

pic from pinterest.com

pic from imgflip.com

pic from Twitter

pic from memegenerator.net

This is the Chuck Norris Phenomenon of Yore (it’s yore in internet terms 🙂  ) and story goes, one day the internet decided to elevate Guy Who Was Once Beaten By Bruce Lee On Film’s career by inserting “Chuck Norris” in all manner of pop culture fantastical feats. Quite suddenly, in that random way social media has, Chuck Norris of the Bruce Lee action era was internet royalty to a whole new generation.

Everything’s a “package”…. of goods and bads, and every decision you ever make will be a choice to take both. (Where you land in your choices should be how important each good and bad is on your personal laundry list of priorities.) So too the internet – it’s not going anywhere, we’re stuck with it, may as well look for legitimate opportunity when we hear “legitimate risk.” Not all netizens are evil (just a good number of them are 😀 ), look how much fun everyone had with CN (and I’m forever taken by Sir Anthony Hopkins’ admission to not understanding technology but having no problem using it for the most entertaining, make-no-sense-but-look!-technology! movies)..

Alright, back to the book – I got to page 146 before I thought, This Is Awesome. How Come? Who wrote it? See, I have a confession to make. I really didn’t feel it when I read Small Data and tried to write it, but it was a New York Times Bestseller, while I’ve never even written a book in my life, so who’m I to talk right? <cough Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome> But I’ve been looking for a problem solving book to go with the Small Data-esque observations ever since, and found:

pic from tici.vn (Yes Vietnamese site. Yes it doesn’t say Bestseller-anything on it. So you know my Love is Real!)

David Niven, PhD, writes from research findings that are……. counterintuitive in the spades. But as an advocate for No Free Lunch who spent her former life looking for As Close As You Could Get (To Free Lunches) In Investment Products, I firmly believe in the “market” already pricing in all apparent “wins” to the point that your only way to find a true “win” is to be counterintuitive, where the market hasn’t priced everything in. Because if you and everyone else all agree it’s a good buy, you’re paying for it upfront no matter how cheap you THINK it is – the only way to make a profit from that is if things get even better than everyone expected. 

“eBay culture” is pretty interesting. Years ago I used to love to look at all the crazy things people bought and sold, simply if someone wanted it and was willing to pay something for it. You can technically make a trade out of virtually anything (legal) that someone wants to buy, and someone else has available to sell. You might think financial derivatives have no bearing on anything else in the “real” world, but you can find a way to artificially access practically anything, if you had an investor (and a lawyer 😀 )- decades ago, David Bowie securitised the rights to some of his songs. (So it’s not just credit derivatives, bonds, property, mortgages and all the other “boring” stuff)..

I initially showed eBay to Rockstar. Ready buyer, ready seller. It happened in garage sale junk on eBay (old Barbies, Transformer toys, your unopened trading Pokemon baseball cards), and it happened in Over-The-Counter products like credit derivatives and swaps. And then people broke this wonderful mechanism by all the cheating – they cheated on eBay, they cheated on countless derivatives, there arose so many caveat emptors, so many Buyer Bewares, so much time and energy spent catching crooks and throwing the book at them, instead of well, actually creating something. If people didn’t have to spend so much time watching their backs (or looking for backs to stab) think how much more energy would be poured into…. curing cancer. Solving poverty and famine. The list goes on…..

Welcome to the World of What Happens When Aileen Does Her Crackpot Theory of Demand & Supply: As long as it pays (extra “perks” might alter this a bit) more to be a crook, you will always attract first rate crooks. Insanely brilliant people who say, deliberately start fires for kicks. (Unfortunately many insanely brilliant people come with egos to match.) The first time I said that was in relation to Enron (“as long as it pays more to be a crook than a regulator, you will get first-rate crooks and second-rate regulators; the only way around this is to throw the book so hard at misdemeanours that it “costs” too much to be a crook.” I was a trainee auditor for awhile, right after graduating).

Wherein lies the rub of course, is how to determine what the real “misdemeanour” is and who should really get the book thrown at them. (Think about it: that’s literally everything. That’s also near-impossible to do without a huge amount of resources and effort and possible failure. Case in point: “Collateralised Debt Obligation, CDO,” has become almost a dirty word. The problem of course, is almost never the actual instrument. It’s what people used it for. The difference between giving a monkey or a sushi chef a knife.)

Oh, and btw, sushi chefs use really sharp knives and connoisseurs like to eat things like fugu (pufferfish. What are the odds you die from eating a piece of sushi where the poison sac has been punctured by a less-skilled chef?) And you thought CDOs were a walk on the wild side? 😀 But back to my original point – CDOs can be amazing for corporates with a particular purpose and Board requirements in mind… and then someone said Oh, That Worked So Well Let’s Make That Retail, Sell It To Your Average Uncle-On-The-Street. WAIT, there’s more – there were guys who chose to buy 16 different tranches of CDO over an extended time frame, and tried to put in mis-sell claims for all of it. Their defence was “I never knew what I was doing” (all 16 times and half a decade).
This is a HUGE pet peeve for me because people who do this rob assistance from the people who really need and deserve it. (Ends Rant).

As for John Lennon, they weren’t wrong about him in school but by the time that epiphany came round, I wonder where his old teachers are today (“I hated that kid, and he became a Beatle?!). But eBay, Derivatives, People, Hindsight. I wonder how Lennon’s aunt felt about throwing out all those papers in hindsight…

Quick one, cos I didn’t want to lump school sports with the next post <ominous>

“It’ll look like total chaos, but they actually know what to do.”

<crickets chirping>

HN’s School Sports Day (which was broken up into Y1 and 2, Y3 and 4 sessions, with 5 and 6 scheduled for the next day) included events like the Rubber Chicken Relay, parachute games…

And there they are

…winter-wear relay…

Over-sized kitchen mittens, scarves and monkey winter hats

(Just an aside, back when they were briefing parents re prepping the kids for school, it was important that we supplied the kids with stuff that would facilitate independence – and one of the things they mentioned was for kids to practice putting on and taking off their own shoes and socks, which they have to do before entering the PE gym. You’d never think twice about it, but after you see that video – camera panning back and forth along this line of 30 kids, all incredibly, incredibly, incredibly engrossed in their shoes and socks before they can even begin to do PE or get back to class……….. you will totally understand the necessity for races to put on and take off items 😀 )

Lots and lots of fun ways to hone motor skills, grow neurons…

And where else could we feel perfectly at home yelling…

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“PASS THE CHICKEN!!!” 

Not sure who enjoyed themselves more, the kids or the parents. Rubber Chicken Race Cheering neuron….. check!

And here’s the “Chaos Round”

This one is amazing to watch because you have a big bunch of little kids bent on doing… inexplicably… something, and as an adult I didn’t get it immediately but all these kids really do know what to do, and the colour-coded shapes and bean bags really do get systematically scored on (according to HN this is one of the things they do in PE as well, and I really do like it because most of anyone’s day is more colour-coordinated chaos – random spots to stand on and throw from, rather than say, all pre-determined moves all the time)

(And that includes tidying up right after…)

Then the HK Health Department announcement that schools would be closed til after the Chinese New Year (hence you don’t see Rockstar’s school Y5 and 6 sports day :).

Last Sunday evening Rockstar sat for his Dan 1 Part 1, the first half of the Black Belt exam, 6 years after first starting at Potential Taekwondo, 1.5 years after training for the belting.

Rockstar (in blue head guard) at registration; there were over 200 kids taking gradings

By now we’ve kinda gotten used to the kids’ gradings being in places of Hong Kong we would not normally venture to, and from seeing all the locals casually coming off public transport lugging their gear during previous gradings, we decided to take an extra hour to try a similar experience #notsoaccidentalHKtourists

(And look at what HN is doing on the crowded train…)

Checks on hamster, “reads” Stick Man activity book (while still holding hamster… by now Sophie has been to crowded arcades, the movies, restaurants, church, countless supermarkets and cafes… half the time cabbies waive the HKD 5 additional animal/bird charge – “that’s… not really an ‘animal’.” Um.. thanks? (Come to think of it, they didn’t charge for our goldfish or red guppy things either 😀 )

Moments later, HN is gone from Rockstar’s side, squeezing her way (yes, with book and Not Really An ‘Animal’) over to a Putonghua-speaking girl who looks about 7 or 8, on the other side of the packed carriage, attracted by her sneakers (satin ribbon, large flowers), visible in between all the commuters’ legs. I reach them in time to catch the tail end of what HN is saying,  ” – shoes.<points> I sa-aid, I-like-your-shoes. Did you make them yourself?” (Since Girl With The Fabulous Sneakers is also carrying an Anya Hindmarch crossbody bag, it’s a toss-up 🙂

Moments later the train jolts and HN rolls backwards on her Heelies, falls right over in the crowded train, pops right back up, still holding hamster and book –  “I’m ok! I’m ok!” 

Only what her bro and I look like on the inside. (pic frm community.hughesnet.com)

Cool-sneakered girl and her mum smile goodbye and alight, and then it’s our stop next:

HN: Bubbles! How come they get to play in there?
Me: Maybe because they live there

We cab the final short distance…

Cabbie: <curiously, looking through the rearview mirror> Your younger girl is much prettier than your older one.

Me: Maybe because my older one is not a girl.

Cabbie: Oh that makes a lot more sense.

Rockstar: How rude. I no pretty meh? <cabbie chuckles>

(What can I say, these kids are growing up in Hong Kong! 😀 )

And we’re there! Siberia! (Fine, Shek Kip Mei. So almost Siberia :D). We’re a bit early, and the teen boys and girls who use this centre are still in regular training, and lemme tell you – those kids can really slug. The walls reverberate with a constant loud thudding as they throw their weight into their blows, pummelling leather-clad kicking and punching targets of various shapes and sizes. We find Rockstar’s regular coach preoccupied behind the receiving end of a large padded target being hammered by a fairly slight, t-shirt-clad youth who is managing to inflict seriously heavy blows interspersed with cheerful conversation. Man, I love martial arts. I love that the ability to break inches-thick boards is honed alongside self control.

Rockstar mentioned that now in Y6 at school they all do a spot of Wushu regularly, it’s all good.

Amid the noise and action, Rockstar finds some of his gym-mates – everyone is from at least 3 different international schools (plus some local ones though not everyone is taking the exam today) but with this taekwondo class in common. I turn to locate HN in the growing crowd. She’s squeezed herself onto a nearby bench, “Aren’t you going to find a seat, Mum-may?”

It’s the leg-cross that makes it art 😀

HN settled having settled herself, I turn to peer back into the exam hall where, after roll call..

..the candidates are being seated to wait for their turn

The exam is conducted completely in Cantonese. With Rockstar, they repeat things once or twice patiently… in Cantonese  🙂

A few years ago pre-grading out in the corridor, instructors were trying to move a couple kids in Cantonese – said kids appeared polite but unresponsive and then someone from their gym recognised them as fairly new….. and Korean. Just an aside, because HK, especially in the area where we live, is so incredibly diverse it’s really not uncommon to come across Asian kids who aren’t fluent in Chinese…. or Caucasian kids whose first language isn’t English (we’ve had neighbours who are French, Russian, Romanian, Dutch, German, to name a few…)

For the most part though, by senior belting, many faces are more familiar, coaches have some idea who can understand Cantonese, who really can’t, and who can if you light a fire under them 😀  We have always deliberately tried to put the kids in a local activity here and there that is conducted in Cantonese (they get Putonghua in school) because well, we live here 🙂

Usually they don’t allow parents in, even taping up the cracks in the doors, but this time we can even see the wee white belts receiving their yellows

Across the auditorium some proud parents occasionally get down on the floor for better shots of their little kids doing their first pushups in grading – I imagine it must be all over non-English social media – but nothing like that among parents of the more senior belts (God forbid we do something to embarrass our kids and then they don’t let us come watch anymore, even if the examiners still let us in  😀 )

(Though this kid is probably the littlest Red Black; his instructor double checks his standard-issue shin guards before they start, but once they’ve begun he moves nothing like the beginners…)

Throughout the roughly 90 minute exam duration, the head examiner can be heard throughout the hall gruffly telling kids to buck up, perform their patterns more confidently, switch legs, don’t only use one technique, and stop waiting for everyone else to move first. So when in the same tone he snaps at one of the older boys before the free sparring, we’re not expecting “Don’t put your glasses on the floor. Bring them here.” <puts glasses on his table> 

As the older, more senior Red Blacks take higher black belt grades…

…they call in more instructors to spar with them. The technique is awesome, but I don’t get any good pictures because they move too fast 🙁

Then grading’s over and everyone pretty much rushes to leave. It’s after all Sunday night, we still have to make it back across town and there’s school the next day.

And of course the moment we let her, Sophie comes out to play 😀

Rockstar’s first lesson after the grading 3 days ago, two Bel-air Clubhouse staff interrupted the class, announcing in front of everyone, “You can’t have the lesson, your parents haven’t paid the fees,” before escorting him out.

Rockstar exits the class where these staff proceed to show my 10yr old son a long list of kids’ names, pointing out his name is also on it. (So what, make him an example and everyone else scrambles to pay up?) 2 more clubhouse staff join them. His coach – at least a 5th Dan (ie very senior) black belt who has been teaching there for years, tries to reason with the 4 staff. I’m usually there by the end of class, they can easily catch me in another 40 minutes. Instead, they remain inexorable about not letting Rockstar back in nor do they make any move to tell me what they’ve done. All this happens in full view of passersby, directly outside the gym. Someone calls me and hands the phone to the staff. After I go bananas, they check our payment records and let Rockstar back in. Without ever clarifying to his classmates that it was a misunderstanding, something of a clerical error. So now I have to say something.

At the time they pulled Rockstar out, we had already paid Rockstar’s fees in advance up til end February 2018. These two staff had hauled Rockstar out over 3 lessons from back in August 2017, a sum so small I could’ve paid with an Octopus card – Rockstar could’ve paid with his Octopus card, except at the time those 2 staff hauled him out they likely had no freaking idea that it was outstanding due to an idiot error (explained below). None of this stopped them from having that little show. 

Off and on over the last few weeks I’d been receiving calls and voicemails about “fees due.” At least two of the calls, staff could not tell me what was outstanding, promise to get back to me, and never do. Next time I got a call it would be someone new saying we owe something but again, they would have no idea what.

The morning of the day they called Rockstar out, someone had even called Kings in Bangkok. Now, Kings has been in 4 cities, some with significantly different time zones, in the last 2 weeks. At one point, engrossed on his cell at an unfinished site in Ho Chi Minh, he almost walked off the end of an 18/F balcony. Even if you KNEW what you were really calling about, it might still not be a good idea to call him especially when I’m walking up to the counter every so often asking to pay you money except you have no idea how much to bill us for.

When I got clubhouse messages, I would walk up to a counter next time I was there, and ask what we owed. Each time, I had then either been billed in advance or told we didn’t owe anything else. At 2 different main counters, staff had assured me I had paid up everything. I’m guessing either 1) whatever screen the person at the counter is looking at doesn’t show this up unless they page back, or else 2) the staff, many of whom are constantly new or being transferred around, are too unfamiliar with the system. Either there is no way to leave a note in the system or staff exist in a different dimension, but –

How in the freaking freak hell can we settle something we don’t know we owe, or pay an amount no one can accurately tell us? 

Hey, Lai Family, you owe us money. We don’t know how much, but that’s probably not important information that you need in order to write us a cheque.

What we are going to do is wait until your kid goes to class and then we’re going to stop the entire class and tell everyone why. Because instead of a fly swatter for a niggling little pest of a clerical problem, we shall empty an entire AK 47 at it and then run over everything with a six-cylinder turbodiesel engine ATV. Oh and if senior coach tries to intervene, more the power to us. Cos we badass! 

Overkill?

Nah.

Even as all around us mums scramble for their cheque books to pay everything they can in advance <resounding clap of thunder> (they got what they wanted, right?)

Rockstar’s coach told us he has received an apology, as did we. In fact, the moment I reach, Bel-air staff say, “We then checked  the system and in fact you often pay in advance.” But two staff walked in and pulled Rockstar out, announcing to the entire class that his parents hadn’t paid his fees before checking that. And when they realised their mistake they didn’t rectify that to the class they had informed of Rockstar’s parents’ bad debts.

When I showed the text message about August 2017 fees to the duty staff yesterday afternoon, (btw rarely are the people who call us also the people at the counters when I try to pay) they have no idea who sent the message, and further discover the amount on the text message is wrong and they need more time to get the right amount. I make a special trip back just to pay this one thing – my fourth trip in 2 days – having paid everything else I could all the way to March by then. Y’know, before someone else decides to go Rambo With A Pig Head in the kids’ classes again. (They got what they wanted, right?)

Now, the entire Bel-air development has 3 clubhouses serving several thousand units (quick Google search says Residence Bel-air alone has 2,900 units, and that doesn’t include the other Bel-air development phases which’ll add several thousand more) and they have to coordinate and rotate many, many staff amid what appears to be pretty high turnovers to boot. I’m very tolerant of “errors that don’t hurt” – errors due to staff turnover, errors due to overworked staff, errors due to staff who sit on calculating the fees for me to write a cheque, sit on printing, leave stuff out so the next person taking over their shift has to do it/ get hammered for the mistake. How could I possibly be mean to that next person? 

Kings has asked me why sometimes I seem extra nice to near-strangers working the counters or the local Starbucks etc etc. It’s because as illustrated here, some people are baboons who don’t check before hauling your kid out of class and publicly making dramatic accusations for kicks, while others are amazing – clock in for their shift, realise the person before them has flubbed your printouts, immediately replace everything without Much Ado About Nothing. It is inexplicable that these two kinds of employees should be paid the same. But try to tip, try to support the good, deserving ones, and watch the bad ones proverbially pour lighter fluid in your coffee because you didn’t give them credit they never deserved in the first place.

Rockstar’s grading exam, conducted across town at the Shek Kip Mei Sports Centre in a modest part of Hong Kong. His first day back in class at Bel-air Clubhouse in our development. Worlds apart in more ways than one.

How Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize by “changing gravity” 

In 1933, a certain former football and baseball player and wrestler on his high school teams failed the entrance exam into University of Minnesota. More athlete than egghead, he would eventually attribute sports as nurturing in him the drive that helped him succeed in the field of Agriculture:

“Wrestling taught me some valuable lessons… I always figured I could hold my own against the best in the world. It made me tough. Many times, I drew on that strength. …”

To afford his education, Borlaug found a position in the civilian conservation corps, where many of the unemployed who worked for him were starving:

“I saw how food changed them. All of this left scars on me…”

That was in 1935.

Wheat, a vital food source, was plagued by disease, particularly “stem rust,” which weakened the plants, reducing crop yield by anything from 20 to 80%. Now, you can invent and test fungicides – chemicals – and run the additional risk that several decades down the road you suddenly discover the kids in that region all have extra toes….. or you can breed disease-resistant, stronger-stalked wheat plants.

This was copied and pasted into a part II because I thought the previous post ran long (zzz), and then couple days ago HN’s year 1 band went on their long-planned field trip to the Zen Organic Farm, where speakers explained how in addition to not using pesticides, they were working on preserving vital plant species from extinction in order to preserve variety in gene pools… which honestly I hadn’t been expecting…

Here’s one eg, “Dinosaur Kale” (this particular pic from farmfolly.com)

…right along with when they dangled a plastic fly strung from a fishing rod over some fruit as they explained to the little kids that they did not believe in combining insect-and-plant DNA to breed insect-resilient crops because it was against nature. No Franken-fruits for us!

KIDS THESE DAYS.

SO MUCH GREEN. And on the tray are home made dinosaur kale chips (recipe below) – that tray had to be refilled 3 or 4 times, I lost count

Kale is hailed as the “new beef,” and the kids were encouraged to replace potato chips with the kale chips..

He’s tidying away a clean plate!

The kids got to pull up their own carrots, pluck cherry tomatoes and huge leafy greens, rinsing them off and munching on them (no manure in fertilisers), making their own salads garnished with flowers. They learned about natural sweeteners. They learned about the importance of bees in pollination and the making of honey, met earthworms.

HN btw, is five. 

This is a screenshot off the school newsletter where this is one of the things you might spot in the kids’ carefully nurtured gardens around the school

Back to Borlaug – he and a team that comprised soil scientists, maize and potato breeders kept at it for about 16 years and 6,000 crossovers, ultimately producing a plant resistant to the diseases that affect grain yield. It was named “Dwarf Wheat”. 

Sturdier stalks. That’s how they “changed gravity” 

When Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize, it was 1970. That’s 35 years after once failing his college entrance exam. 

Author Martin Lindstrom of Small Data and sometime “Brand Expert” believes that while Big Data helps you garner important information, ultimately enabling you to see the “correct Big Picture,”  Small Data is needed to help you create uniquely. It’s picking up on the small details that inspires you to new heights specific to your target audience.

In his search for clues and inspiration, Lindstrom pays a lot of attention to minute details, does things like  going on a wild goose chase observing mummiji and their daughters-inlaw in their households in India, devotes considerable attention to their very different colour preferences, who does the cooking, who does the cleaning and can therefore scent everyone’s laundry with the detergent she prefers……… all in the hopes of designing a new cereal packaging. His goal: to make mils and dils go home from grocery shopping with the same cereal – his.

Yet in cases like Borlaug’s it can mean discovering a vital need, or looking at an existing one in a new way, and with a confluence of inspiration and drive, maybe even saving lives, saving economies, someday. (If your land doesn’t yield anything, you simply don’t have an economy, and plants are the only living thing capable of making their own food.)

Now let’s go further off on that tangent – can you make barren land yield produce?

The Martian is about an astronaut who, after his mission goes awry, has to find ways to grow his own food until the rescue mission from Earth (which takes about a year and a half to get there, Mars is so far away) can come back to get him. So Matt Damon sets off to replicate the conditions on Earth that will allow him to grow potatoes on Mars. It makes you really appreciate all the conditions for growing food that we take for granted on a daily basis, and towards the end of the full-length movie also some of the vitamin deficiencies he experiences from not having a balanced diet:

Rockstar couldn’t bring himself to sit for 2.5 hours straight for the movie…

….so he got the book. And Youtubes 😀

Anyway. After the science fiction book-turned-movie-starring-Matt-Damon, NASA decides to try growing potatoes on Mars, how freaking cool is that?)

Speaking of science fiction becoming reality, here’s one that I stopped watching…

…because it was too sad and possible an alternate reality. I mean, potatoes on Mars are cool, killer man-made highly contagious brain disease n-ot so much (more below). Written by a guy with a Masters in Accounting, no less. (Being accounting-trained myself – are accountants unhappy with the world, or what? 😀 )

Possible spoiler alert…

These teenagers find themselves post-apocalypse Maze Runners because they are the “fortunate” few who have evolved some kind of immunity to a disease that yes, pretty much eventually turns you into a screaming, cannibalistic zombie (thereby opening the door in later movies to all these awesome visuals of mutations as the virus evolves).

Here’s why I found this universe so terrifying and sad: Firstly, The Flare is a lab-developed originally-painless viral infection intended to solve the over-population problem. Basically, another way of “changing gravity” – but instead of feeding more people, this was a potential means of culling excess population.

Bad enough this (possibly fictitious-government-run) Biotech company named “WCKD” gets to create the disease and keep it on shelf somewhere, it is then accidentally released on the masses during some solar flare natural disasters. (At least this was how it originally looked, from the first few movies. I may be too chicken to watch Death Cure, the latest instalment out in cinemas now.)

My point is this: How many inventions and experiments, even some begun as well-meaning, that “we don’t plan on letting out of the lab” uh, end up causing apocalypses in movies?? NASA decided to grow potatoes out of Science used-to-be-Fiction. So really. No Franken-fruits for us. If you have the ability and inclination, may you also have the discipline and restraint 🙂 (No, not easy. Mankind doesn’t have a good track record for restraint in their creations, look at the financial crisis.)

So these “fortunate, immune” boys are placed within this ever-changing mechanical maze, their memories wiped, and given life-threatening “problem solving” (monsters, deliberate infections, lack of food and other supplies, and yes navigating the maze) so the way their brains work can be monitored and the scientists can figure a cure for the rest of the world.

It begs the same question as with Minority Report, last post: Would you argue that the good of the many (so many more people saved from violent crime or terrible disease) outweighs the good of a few (the psychic or immune children being locked up or experimented on for their abilities), essentially the same argument when you think of say, sending troops for peacekeeping. No matter how stacked in your side’s favour the force depletion is:

It depends which category your kid is in 🙂

Maze Runner, it’s awesome. It’s heartbreaking. I can’t watch! These boys fight their way out, struggling all the way, creating a social structure slightly reminiscent of 1954 Lord of the Flies (tween boys find themselves stranded and create their own social structure and hierarchy in efforts to survive, slowly becoming more aggressive and cruel – again, art in an old book, showing how even the most well-meaning face temptation and evil, brought upon by fear and insecurity) occasionally having to kill each other, clinging to the hope they can one day be free in the “normal world,” which they idealistically assume to be better than their current one…..

And then the “normal world” is horrible and some of them don’t survive the shock from finding that out. See, we draw on our experiences and memories, and while the bad ones are awful, they serve a vital purpose, they are refiner’s fire. With innocence also comes a potential lack of resilience, also a lack of being tested. The No Free Lunch Of The Real World…

The Ends.

ps:

Kale recipe from the Zen farm

The morning of Rockstar’s Class Assembly couple days ago, traffic was blocked up. I mean, REALLY blocked up – no buses or cars were getting in, and the taxi queue was getting longer by the minute. 

Now, if you have ever tried to cut a taxi queue in HK, you would know what a huge deal this is. One of the few things Rockstar says in Cantonese is “Pai Dui” – which means queue for your turn. “Because any (local) playground we’re at, the kids are always going ‘pai dui, pai dui’…” 😀

Yet we made it to school on time that morning ONLY because this long line of work warriors let us cut in. First, to the potential wrath of everyone else along the queue, the two guys right in front who must’ve already been waiting for very long were all “No, no, you can have it”. (I have actually encountered that Wrath Of Other Queue-ers when considering letting a mum-with-stroller into a queue in Wan Chai before… lemme tell you, that wrath is REAL (and thankfully misdirected because she then realised she was in the wrong place to get to Mong Kok). So Gentlemen At Front Of Queue were performing no mean feat letting us in.) Second, the entire queue which I, in my knee-jerk gratefulness had a death wish with DARED to make eye contact with…. turned out to be incredibly supportive. The kid had Class Assembly! TAKE that taxi! 

BLESS these people, ok. I hope they get awesome bonuses/ the markets move in their favour/ their own kids come home with awesome report cards/ they win the lottery over the weekend and don’t need to be at that taxi queue on Monday/ all of the above. 

Started reading Big Data (and eventually Small Data), then went on a real galloping tangent…. 

Big Data likes messy. Like the proverbial Impressionist painting, countless “messy” strokes ultimately come together to present a picture, tell a story, of such depth and breadth and colour. As a student I had a love-hate with systems that weighted 3 hour exams too heavily, because while you can hack them, you also have to make sure that by hook or by crook you perform for 3 hours. Life and ability is so much more than 3 hours. (Yet a considerable amount of time and effort is spent preparing to perform in a 3 hour spurt instead of say, a proverbial distance run…) And so we’ve both exploited* and been run over by the proverbial 3 hour essay systems that carry 90% of your grade.

*Kings used to pull historical exam questions and prepare essays word for word – his set answers were still happily circulating years after he’d left; I used to work the early Saturday morning library shifts no one else wanted because then I could see what books the teachers reserved… and skim the restricted ones we couldn’t check out… But the one we learned too late was to look wayy forward: pull the exam time table for next term and pick courses for the semester based on how spaced apart the exams would be at the end. Lemme tell you, 5 essay papers back-to-back every other day vs 1 paper every 5-7 days makes a huge difference to your cramming ability.

Point is, there are a lot of ways one can erm, enhance seeming abilities when there is virtually no way “everything” can be tested. Improvements in technology however, are then supposed to provide the tools for you to be able to do just that – “test everything”. We couldn’t see the alien patterns in the cornfields if we didn’t invent flight and could look at them from an aerial view.

This… (pic from theimaginativeconservative.com)

Or some leaves and freaked out Mel Gibson 😀 (pic from theimaginativeconservative.com)

Q: What’s a huge data source that tells people all kinds of things about you?

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From Girl With A Dragon Tattoo – original Lisbeth Salander cosplay pic from deviantart.com

Title character Salander’s appointed guardian exploits his position to exert power over her, whereupon she retaliates by tasing him and tattooing his crime on his chest. To make sure he doesn’t do anything else to her, she then also tracks his browsing history and warns him that if he tries to get the tattoo removed she’s re-tattooing it… on his forehead (HUGE CAVEAT – NOT a kiddie movie)

The image however is powerful: Ever thought how much Google can tell about us, via our search history? Knowing what a person (really) wants to know tells you a tremendous amount about them. (At the other end of the search function btw, Google’s real search engine criteria is… secret. Simply because if you could hack that criteria in the same way you could a 3 hour exam and show up tops on Google searches, that’s advertising gold that others pay big bucks for.)

Googled data however isn’t just a goldmine for marketers. It can pick up the next H1N1 outbreak much faster than say, Center for Disease Control or various other governing bodies trying to contain an outbreak. Google has stuff on you that opinion polls don’t. How? Because when you have a problem you don’t want to tell even your therapist, say you did something bad and it got tattoo-ed on your chest, you’d Google tattoo removal sites first. Someday, Google’s taking over the world and there’s nuthin’ anyone can do about it.

The first thing you do if you think you’re coming down with something is to Google your symptoms. (Google, btw – known to be a savvy investor in Biotech.)

By the time people make it to the doctor, they’ve probably been knocking symptoms about for couple days, maybe a week. When that doesn’t work, they give up on OTC or home remedies and go to the clinic. Doc picks up on something, sends samples for testing, the clinic maybe asks for a second opinion or checks the test again if massive panic is likely to ensue (ironically if massive panic is likely to ensue then it’s probably IMPORTANT and time sensitive), FINALLY reports the case a.k.a the cows will be home before the cat is out of the bag about an outbreak. See how much faster a search engine might pick up on that?

Smallpox, for eg, is the one devastating viral disease that appears to have been eradicated off the face of the earth. After a few decades however, we’ve got so many other bugs to worry about, we don’t innoculate for the ones that no longer exist, right? No one should be searching those symptoms anymore, right? So one hypochondriac, two, might go to the doc. The doc might say “you’re paranoid/ a fruitcake/ you actually have chicken pox etc etc” (a friend’s baby somehow came down with chicken pox despite vaccinations available, while another pregnant friend who apparently already had chicken pox, but in the States when she was growing up, appeared to have contracted a strain in HK that was so different she didn’t have immunity to it.)

Let’s Google search for apocalypses… If a sudden surge in smallpox symptoms being Googled appears, someone might need to trip an alarm bell somewhere.

Moving on: So all this stuff about you is technically available. Should individual volition trump data, even if statistics argue otherwise? Should we bring in the Thought Police? Do we put people in jail before a crime, if we can “prove beyond a shadow of a doubt,” that they were going to commit it? To some extent people are already convicted on search histories for chemicals to make bombs, etc etc… But crime is alive and well anyway, because the dark net knows how to conceal its searches. Crime, because of the money element, like water, finds any crack and crevice. You need to change gravity conditions. 

Bearing in mind God only really knows whether people committed a crime or not (regardless what they claim, regardless what a jury and everyone else who reads the papers thinks) and we put people away or let ’em go free in some part on how a case is argued in court, isn’t it Same Difference? Like, there’s another apocalypse right. There.

Algorithms that crunch massive amounts of data will predict the likelihood of:

1) heart attacks (very important for insurance companies to know what to charge)

2) mortgage defaults (my personal favourite – no more irresponsible mis-sells)

3) violent crime (arrest and incarcerate before the murder!)

Not too long ago, computers, like aliens, were a novelty, to be written about in sci-fis of the Evil Computer Takes Over The World sort. (Still looking for How To Avoid Being Captured By Aliens, y’all – it includes pearls of wisdom like Not Standing In Cornfields). Then came the internet and smart phones and……… future crime (Your Cellphone Knows What You Are Going To Do Next Summer) and apocalypses (Zombies Have Smartphones Too!).

Yet none of this is new. What we create is limited only by our imagination. Here’s proof we haven’t really evolved: George Orwell’s 1984 (about the government, (or “gah-mun” – if you didn’t get that, it wasn’t meant for you) knowing everything you do) was written in 1944 before Singapore existed ;D , and Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (I like to call this The Thought Police Movie – written in 1965, made into a movie only in 2002).

War of the Worlds is my personal favourite: First written in 1897 by Wells, then made into a radio program so realistic in 1938 that it apparently caused mass panic because people thought aliens were really taking over the world…

Then made into this 2005 movie… (pic from Wikipedia)

Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg like old books for new movies (:))

pic from wikipedia – Sci Fi novel of olde, featuring original version of Tom Cruise’s Minority Report

The Thought Police Movie came almost 40 years later:

pic from moviesandamic.wordpress.com

In this movie, the technology of the PreCrime department hinges on – not Big Data crunching, but the abilities of psychic children to predict violent crimes before they happen.

Just 2 setbacks: 1) interpreting the visions is open to manipulation (and btw so is virtually ANY data – the one time I enjoyed my accounting degree was in my final year thesis – the effects of financial statement releases on stock market trading) and 2) said children with psychic ability are kept locked up in the lab so nothing like erm, having a life, interferes with their visions.

(Btw, if you ever wondered how much plain ole’ financial statement reporting (a.k.a. “The Facts”) have to do with predicting future market movements, lemme tell you – you might stand an even-to-better chance using the psychic children 😀 )

The senior vanilla stock traders (of which I’ve never been one) used to love to say that if you put a monkey there to hit “buy” and “sell” randomly you couldn’t go tha-at far wrong. That’s because they were secure in the knowledge that their abilities cannot be replicated by algorithms or trained simians – see, the best traders and playmakers were often older, with a very good memory for how people the market behaved, last time there were similar conditions. (See? Almost psychic 🙂 Last time Greenspan scratched his nose, what did my counterparts do? Last time a massive stop-loss was triggered, how had the other major players on the other side of my trade reacted?)

“The real revolution is not in the machines used to calculate the data, but in how we use the information…” – summary of Big Data, Kim Hartman

We have cooler stuff today, but that also increases the risk that we get so caught up, bogged down in learning about it – so many studies out there, so many gadgets, so many apps, so many programs – that it becomes easier to lose sight of what we employ the stuff for in the first place. (That’s the real way technology takes over the world. By befuddling it 😀 ) You cannot easily improve on Orwell’s 1984 or Wells’ War of the Worlds, but you can make increasingly better entertainment from the same ideas…. First, radio shows. Then, movies. Then – oh look how much fun Sir Anthony Hopkins had with a Transformers movie.

Deep Blue could beat a human because it was chess. The program was up against a brilliant adult human who sat down to play based on specified terms, a database of chess strategies and rules… Any little kid however, could…. cover the chess board with Cocoa Puffs. If there was any one thing that made me inexplicably better at not sure what I’m doing here it was experiencing the incredible, at times illogical, randomness of our two children being children.

Think that’s fluff I “have” to come up with because Imma “parenting blog”? How did Alexander the Great untie the Gordian knot? Whether you buy the version where he took it apart with the single stroke of a sword, or else slid it off its pole pin, he basically poured cornflakes on the chess problem. “Changed gravity” in order to solve it. No one said in the real world outside chess you had to stick to the chess rules. But we see things with definite biases. For eg, if you were given a candle, a match and 2 rings, and tasked with attaching the rings together, would you melt wax over the rings, or would you get at the candle wick and use the string to tie the rings?

Living things find all kinds of out-of-the-box ways, all the time. It’s called Evolution.

It was Pablo Picasso who said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up”

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