think i've been on a reading craze recently, and been reading books which I tot I would never read. best-selling non-fictional books by 'self-claimed' gurus. just finished two books by edward de bono, well known for his lateral thinking and his campaigns for changing thinking. And just now I bought malcom gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”.

Had always been cynical towards these gurus. Had the view that they are just picking out concepts that researchers and academics had worked on, and repacking these concepts into a book that is marketable to the masses. Well, loss of important details may occur, but I think these gurus do the favour of bringing deep ideas to the masses.

Also, had the view that these gurus are just restating things that are happening around us and putting it in a fanciful and fashionable and popular manner. Well, in some sense, the statement is true. But these ppl do a good job in crystallizing everyday phenomena. De bono clearly elucidates the pitfalls and mechanisms of human thinking and even proposes simple and yet effective means to fully utilize the brain.

lastly, had the view that if these ideas are good, they’ll be v popular. So popular that u dun need to read the book to find out more. Somehow somewhere the ideas will be implemented. Unfortunately, not so. In de bono’s book, ‘teaching thinking’ , 1976, he pointed out the inadequacies of ‘content-based’ subjects in ‘developing thinking’. He further proposed specific tools (v simple tools) to help ‘teach thinking’. Well, apparently, his ideas never made it to our education system. Perhaps MOE feels that the ideas are inappropriate. But my feel is that: his tools will work more effectively than things like project work, etc.

1. an interesting quote from de bono’s ‘simplicity’:

“The simplest things are often the hardest to understand – because our minds keep racing off in the wrong directions.”

This is probably one reason why ppl cannot understand mathematics, or even science. Ppl have complex frameworks in their minds and when there is a simple explanation for things, they are unable to accept it. Take for example, the imaginary/complex number i . the general perception is that anything to do with i is v complicated and unnatural, cos the square of any number cannot be negative. Hmmm. I cannot argue against that, but the introduction of i was to deal with this “exceptional case”. So that squares can be negative. The interesting thing is that i is used in many areas in engineering and modern science, of which I am yet unable to describe. But in mathematics, the choice of using i has been quite ingenious. Because now, there are “no more exceptional cases”. What I mean is that, suppose you give me a complicated equation (a polynomial, in technical terms), I no longer need to introduce a “new number” to solve it. i is already sufficient to describe the answer! And this can be proven. That is the simplicity of i.

This leads me to give another quote,

“In order to make something simple, you have to know your subject very well indeed.”

2. This is a super long post, which was never intended for. I just started reading ‘the tipping point’ by gladwell. There’s an interesting excerpt, which is simply interesting and amusing. Nothing deep or thought-provoking. I’ll just quote verbatim.

“A world that follows the rules of epidemics is a very different world from the world we thinking we live in now. Think, for a moment, about the concept of contagiousness. If I say that word to you, you think of colds and the flu or perhaps something very dangerous like HIV or Ebola. We have, in our minds, a very specific, biological notion about what contagiousness means. But if there can be epidemics of crime or epidemics of fashion, there must be all kinds of things just as contagious as viruses. Have you ever thought of yawning, for instance? Yawning is a surprisingly powerful act. Just because you read the word “yawning” in the previous two sentences – and the two additional “yawns” in this sentence – a good number of you will probably yawn within the next few minutes. Even as I’m writing this, I’ve yawned twice. If you’re in a public place, and you’ve just yawned, chances are that a good proportion of everyone who saw you yawn is now yawning too, and a good proportion of the people watching the people who watched you yawn are now yawning as well, and on and on, in an ever-widening yawning circle.”

Ok, I yawned when I read this in the book and typed this onto the blog. Did you yawn too? (You probably had yawned many times before when reading this post.)

3. yeah. on the even lighter side of things, i was doing up a brochure on kuantan for my ship crew. yet again, i decided to practise my "artistic" talent in drawing a turtle. for those who dunno, my ship is called KATONG. for those who dunno (more of you i guess), KATONG is the malay name for a certain type of turtle.

kuantan seems like a boring place. probably, i'll blog even more!