Life's Persistent Questions

Larry David delievers, again.

I never realized what a genius Larry David is until I got HBO and started watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. Now comes this epic rant. Beautiful.

posted by hedgehog @ 4:35 PM 0 comments

Champ or chump?

One more thing about the NBA draft. I don't believe Andrew Bogut is the answer to the next great center in the traditional sense. From everything I have heard, he is slow, both in speed and agility. From the few clips on ESPN I saw, he is always throwing layup after layup even though he always got great positions and was wide open under the baskets. You cannot dominate the paint in today's NBA if you don't destroy the basket with dunks anytime you are near the basket in college. Lack of foot speed and agility will make him a defensive liability, whether it's guarding a Garnett or Stoudamire, or helping out from the weakside against a Bibby or Kobe. Comparison to Divac may be accurate, but that's not No.1 pick pedigree now is it?

posted by hedgehog @ 1:58 PM 0 comments

NBA draft.

I was trying to follow the NBA draft. I've been reading ESPN's analysis of the draft picks. My brain tells me that these are all non-sense, just wait 6 months, and we will know which picks were smart and which not. But we don't always follow our brains do we? I eat these arm-chair instant quarterback analysis up. After reading though I will have to say I'm disturbed by the cliches I've read. I think Bill Simmons of Sports Guy put it best in his article about Tremondous Upside Potential. I would like to add one more thing. The analysis is almost pornographic. There was numerous mention of "how long" a player is. The adjective "bouncy" was used more than once. And don't get me started on how often the word "penetrating" is followed by "instincts." Is this the NBA draft or the annual AVN awards?

posted by hedgehog @ 12:47 PM 0 comments

Beating the pros.

I have a collection of EA Sports' games, namely Madden Football, MVP Baseball, and NBA Live. Love them all, but I am not that good. But I figure I could probably beat 90% of actually players in these three sports on their respective games.

Why the arrogance? Well, I have an deep suspicion that when faced with the possibility of controlling their own virtual counterpart in a fantasy computer game, the Travis Knights, the Eric Miltons, and the Rob Johnsons of the sports world would inevitablly give themselves the ball rather than using superior players, in computer world and reality, such as Kobe, Pedro and Mannings. Even for the star players, I suspect that they will try to single-handedly control the game with their own representation. Seriously, how many shots do you think cyber Kobe gave cyber Shaq the last season they were together? How many millisecond did Travis Henry stayed on the Buffalo Bills roster on Willie McGahee's X-Box? And that is their collective weakness, which I will be able to exploit. Of course, that's if one of them don't beat the crap out of me after I throw a 90 yard touchdown on him.

posted by hedgehog @ 12:30 PM 0 comments

Last throes?

Blame it on Joe Namath. Americans have a tendency of declaring victory prematurally, whether it's "Mission Accomplished" or "last throes." Here is my take on why the Iraq situation is strenuous, why this should have been expected (regardless of pre-war planning) and why democracy building there could be a historical achievement.

My question to the critics and supporters of nation building in Iraq is simply, how could one build a democratic government painlessly in a country lacking no only the tradition of democratic rule, but also the tradition of being one unified nation? Iraq, in its present state, has only existed for about 85 years as the wet dream of some British map maker after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Its boundary was drawn and held together with intimidation and coercion to contain the relgious and ethnic tensions the country has experienced ever since.

Off the top of my head, I made of list of recent democracy that had experienced some violence or military conflict in its conception and has comparable size to Iraq. Japan traces its mythical origin back millinia, but the beginning of modern Japan can be confidently pinpointed to Meiji Restoration in 1860's. Korea also had thousands of years of history, and a unified Korea kingdom had existed for more than 500 years before the Korean War. Modern Germany can find its root in the German Federation from the early 1800's. All of these nations had a much longer history as a unified nation state than Iraq before they took on the task of democratic governance under the supervision of some form of foreign military presence. Furthermore, I don't need to point out that Japan, Korea and Germany are much more homogenous in terms of ethnicity and religion than Iraq.

So why should a democratic Iraq be easy work? This has nothing to do with the fact it is a Muslim country and the supposed conflicts between Islam and democracy. To build a unified Iraq while overcome these internal divisions is no small task. To have a democratic government that respect and embrace the diversity of tradition and ideas would be even more remarkable. Perhaps too ambitious, but that decision was made for us 3 years ago.

posted by hedgehog @ 10:09 AM 0 comments

Say what?

A caller to the NPR radio show today recounted the story of himself growing up with learning disability. He ended up going into Army Rangers instead of college after high school. Somehow, he learned to compensate for his dyslexia by honing his auditary memory and went through UCSD and just recently finished Johns Hopkins Medical School, all without the ability to take organized written notes. An amazing story of course. It really made me rethink about my attitude toward people with learning disabilities. Learning disability has only recently been recognized as a real problem in substantial proportions of the general population, and this is in America, where "no child is left behind." And in China, where I was growing up, no such recognition existed--teachers simple taught as much as they could, and the students that were left scratching their heads were simply "dumb." Now is such insensitivity "smart?"

By now we should all realize that students of all grades could be destined for success. Just look at the two presidential candidates from 2004. Certainly, a C-plus average from Yale forty years ago is nothing to laugh at, but nor would the label "best and the brightest" fit. Furthermore, I, like others, really wonder if George W. Bush has some form of learning disability. Sure he is not the most articulate, and has been known to "dissasemble" the English language. A man rising to the height of human political power is not stupid. So aren't those signs of dyslexia? It would really serve as an inspirational example for people who suffer from the same problem to know the American President also struggles with learning disability.

Just as one would not dismiss any non-Anglican researcher at a scientific meeting because of her broken terse English, I really should be careful about my bias toward people who may be dyslexic or have otherwise struggled with school.

P.S. I think what needs to be recognized is the truly extraordinary responsibility we place on and the great service done by teachers in every society. They are especially important where it comes to help children who have learning disabilities. It is too bad that no one has an easy answer as to how societies can better reward these wonderful people. But I like what Williams College does. Tom Friedman from NYT has more.

posted by hedgehog @ 9:07 PM 0 comments

Silly us.

Some people, including myself, probably had over-reacted over the "Ten most harmful books" list. Harmful could mean a lot of things: dangerous, hurtful, and influential. All of the books on the list are arguably influential, and a few include ideas that when implemented into action have been proven by history to be dangerous. But that is not to say harmful idea and books should be banned. And I don't think the humaneventsonline.com ever claimed that was its intention. So until people start to push legislation to ban these books, I would give the benefit of the doubt to them and believe their intention was to merely to sell books.

On the other hand, I found it troubling that people who criticized the list were so quick to jump to the argument that these books "should not be banned" and people who want to ban books are stupid/bad. It's one thing to debate whether an idea is harmful, but an entirely different debate to decide what to do with harmful ideas. Let's be clear here, a book can carry harmful ideas, but no book should be banned merely for the words on its page. If one concedes that there are truly harmful ideas worthy of banning, what would be left of the liberal left's ideal that speech should be free?

posted by hedgehog @ 9:34 AM 0 comments

What to read?

I was browsing a bargain book store the other day, and been the cheapo that I am, spent near an hour deciding on a book for my afternoon coffee shop reading material. Too bad that I didn't see the list complied by Human Events Online, "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries":

1. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
2. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong
4. The Kinsey Report by Alfred Kinsey
5. Democracy and Education by John Dewey
6. Das Kapital by Karl Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte
9. Beyond Good and Evil by Frederich Nietzsche
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keyes

Many bloggers have commented on the transparency of today's social conservatives. People they hate: atheists, feminists and scientists. Ideas they abhor: secularism, communism, and scientific methods. Don't worry, for you Intelligent Design'ers, Darwin's books got (dis)Honorable Mention (along with John Stuart Mills' "On liberty") Don't know what the point of this list is. Surely, their conservative panelists have read most of them. Most "liberals" have too. The list only makes someone who believes in free exchange of ideas and open-mindedness, like me, want to read them. Are they trying to protect the precious children with their "weak and corruptible" minds from these terrible ideas? Surely, no one wants to ban books in America. On wait.

On the flip side, someone pointed out the true nature of this list. For each book on their website, there is a link to Amazon.com. So they think these books are terrible, but not terrible enough to profit from. This is the reason I'm not linking to the humaneventsonline.com page. In the end, just like the VH-1 shows of counting down 100 worst songs ever, these lists are merely tools to generate interest and money. Though unlikely, I would more than happy watch an hour-long show on C-SPAN watching pundits fighting over the merits/dangers of these books.

The point? My nagging problem of find books to read is over.

P.S. the book I did buy was excellent.
War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet by Eric Margolis

posted by hedgehog @ 3:25 PM 0 comments