Yan's speaking from top of his head, bottom of his heart

this is my theory of human nature, businesses which are successful are the ones capable of capitalising on various aspects of the theory regardless of the nature of the business.
in fact, there are only two aspects of human nature that can be capitalised on:

• Competitiveness
• Nosiness

the more competitive you are, the more nosy you are too, since you need to find out how much more other people are making, how much faster the others can run, how much sexier others' partners are etc in order to be able to compare.

however, nosy people are not necessarily competitive, therefore it is possible to capture just nosiness and be successful.

the way to tell whether a nosy person is competitive or not is by examining the things they are nosy about, competitive people are nosy about things that are measurable such as wages, speed, and more complicated properties which do not have absolute values but have certain established norms among a culture such as beauty.

those who are nosy but not competitive tend to be more interested in, or are not picky on what they are nosy about, they will be satisfied to know whether you like orange juice or apple juice, orange juice with bits or without, a cat-person or a dog-person etc.

facebook can satisfy all of the nosy people, but it is not capable of capitalising on people's competitiveness.

to create a site that will both capture people's nosiness and competitiveness is therefore my goal:)

If I do leave the UK, these are the things I will miss...

I've just finished dinner, sitting down and about to continue building my web site. but then all of a suddden I feel like writing this.
I will be at risk of losing my job next monday officially, I will have to reapply (to a different post). of course there's a chance that I won't get a job at all at the end of all this, and that will mean not only losing my job, but losing my right to stay in the UK as well after ten years of studying and working here.
without ordering these in any way, I think I'll miss a lot of these if I have to go back to Hong Kong:
1. BLT, or just the expectation of having BLT in any sandwich shop, anywhere that sells sandwiches at all. also smook salmon and cream cheese.
2. travelling on trains, not the delay, not the price, but I actually quite like travelling on trains sometimes, chatting to random nice people and all that.
3. having my own place, no matter how small my room is, having to share the bathroom, kitchen etc, I have my own place and I can shut the door and talk to no one if I feel like it.
4. the occasional sunshine, which makes it precious. the summer chirping birds (which we don't really have in hong kong unless you go to the mountains to look for them). the rain, which is fun to get annoyed with.
5. the minority of people who have studied and are actually civilised and educated, their endless stimulating conversations, their dreams, their ideals, their political thinking.
6. the bbc, watching news 24 online, iplayer. listening to radio 4, the today program every single morning, john humphrey's questioning of politicians. the comedies at 6:30 in the evening. the satire, endless documentaries, countless stories.
7. the various accent from various part of the UK.
8. this may sound strange, but some of the food:) the occasional dose of fish and chips, and nice rare piece of steak, lamb, the big portabello mushroom, all kinds of starter, dessert, all these just taste and feel different to have in hong kong. and curry, the weird chinese food, eatting it while thinking about how they should taste like. dim sum, which I don't tend to have with friends in hong kong.
9. shopping online. it's not big in hong kong because hong kong is too small.
10. being close to europe, the holidays, the european languages. absolutely endless fun. the history, the complexity of it, the development of ideas. travelling to places knowing that great events or people have happened there which affected the whole world.
11. random cats on the streets, love cats. girlfriend and I always play with them whenever we see them.
12. girlfriend. and a lot of people, I am not going to name any of them.
*sigh*

punishing a machine gun

Thursday frontpages had a lot of coverage on the Luton protest to the regiment that just came back from Iraq. if you look carefully at the protest, there is only one thing that essentially differentiate that protest from a lot of the others that had gone on - the fact that these are muslims protesting. forget about the placards and shouting of "butchers, war criminals, murderers" etc, I do not believe that these guys invented the usage of these words to describe the people - whether they be politicians or soldiers - who are involved in this war.
what made this protest to the head line, apparently, is that it generated divide between the british and the muslim comunity, because the way the protest was conducted was "offensive."
what was the war for? why did the soldiers go to iraq? in the past, the public sees the soldiers as brave and glorious after a war because they have defended their country, they sacrifice their life for their country, or sometimes the soldiers had conquered other parts of the world and the public sees it as ligitimate. in the current case, none of these applies. the war on iraq is not a glory, it's a shame on the countries involved, it is illigitimate. above all, the war has been offensive to the muslims everywere.
offensive, firstly because the british (I dare not to say aout the general public but at least the government) is in effect discriminating muslims, my previous housemate was in fact a subject of that discrimination - he was arrested because he downloaded materials from the american government web site on al qaida for research in university, he was detained for over 20 days, interogated about the cartoons he drew, books he read etc and of course nothing came out of it. who has generated the divide between the british and the muslim comunity?
secondly, people fail to understand that (correct me if I'm wrong), muslims really do see their remote people as brothers. if your brothers are killed, will you go call the guys who killed them murderers? I'm sure that the british soldiers tried their best to avoid killing civilians but the fact is that they did. and since the war is illigitimate in the first place, accidental killing of civilians is just unjustifiable.

there is one aspect that the protest should have been done better however, which is that the protest should really be directed more tot eh politicians, not to the soldiers. after all, you do not punnish a machine gun after it has been used to kill someone. you punish the person who used the machine gun. soldiers are like machines n a way, but they are of course also individuals with feelings.

Slumdog Millionaire

I watched the film on saturday, it's quite a nice movie but I find the film a bit strange - I mean the setting and the plot.
people watch the show "Who wants to be a millionaire" presumably because they find it exciting even though it is the contenstent not themselves on the show, there's a great deal of suspense, there is a fair amount of twist because one can potentially lose so much after winning so much. it's fun to watch people being too greedy, it's great to sit at home and laugh at other's misery or to utter in a jealous tone "I know all of those answers too but I wouldn't be picked to be on the show because they know that I will get all the money."
In slumdog millionaire however, the very title tells you that he is going to get every single question right! even when Latika cannot tell him the answer right at the end, he will for sure get it right anyway. you know also that the police is going to release him so that he can get on to the last question, you know that he is going to meet up with latika in the train station as well (whenever there's the line "I'll wait for you at a certain time at the train station until you come", you know for sure that the guy and the girl will meet...
all in all there's just no twist in the film...which is just strange for an oscar film.

capital punishment

On the BBC Today program this morning, it said that last year there were some 65 cases of people after being released from prison reoffended murder or rape. I don't know what the total number of murder and rape convicts there are each year roughly, but I imagine this 65 is a small percentage. some people then talked of having capital punishment back in place because these reoffenders just need to be stopped and the system is not working (as in rehabilitation is not working).
After learning much about the argument for abolishing capital punishment, and some of the injustices carried out in the USA because a dead person can never really get his life back even though he is subsequently proved to be not guilty, I think it is right to give even the convicted a chance just in case the jury, the judges, the experts who provide the evidence, made mistakes (and of course they do because they are just like us).
however, I wonder whether any research has been done on a system in which capital punishment cannot be applied on first conviction, but it can be on re-offenders?

sleepless night reading

I couldn't sleep last night, so I naturally went online to kill time. I went on facebook and almost for the time time I found myself reading my friends' notes...over three pages of them. it was very interesting I have to say.
there was the usual comments on current affairs, political stuff, there were a couple of poems, there was actually no boring pieces like "I had two eggs and a sausage for breakfast, the tomato squirted into my friend's face when I stabbed it with my fork......". the most recurring theme, at least at the time of reading, is around telling the world about yourself. I found two categories, one is "answer these questions TRUTHFULLY", and the other is "25 random things about you that others might not know". I suppose what makes these nice to read is that they help make the connection between friends, you begin to realise that there is more in common between yourself and the friend. or, you learn more about your friend so that you have a much better profile of what he/she is like, which boils down to gaining a greater understanding of the friendship.
well I like reading philosophy or theoretical stuff, I very rarely read a fiction. I love knowing about development of ideas etc. but still, 3 o'clock in the morning there's just nothing better than reading what my friends are like! on top of that, surely profiling someone isn't really easy, deducing what their character is like from a few facts is just not simple yet I guess we all enjoy doing it, unlike deducing say facts from philosophical or mathematical theories which only a few of us like to do. I reccon that we are simply soooo good at profiling and understanding people that we manage to find so much satisfaction in processing it so that we don't mind doing that kind of tasks even 3 o'clock AM.

fairy tales original

I just want to share this. "in our time" on radio 4 this morning was talking about the origin of the popular fairy tales, they were collected by the Grimm brothers. I have found an archive online which has quite a few of the stories.

they are not lovely happy stories as we know them today, most are quite horrible and cruel though with a somewhat happy ending.
"enjoy"!

conclusion

more than 1300 dead, more have not actually been identified because they were simply burried in rubble. buildings destroyed, infrastructure destroyed, Gaza is simply not functioning. these 1300 and more people are not individuals, they have fathers, they have mothers, they have sons, daughters, cousins, wives, husbands and so on. the buildings are not just rooms, they are people's houses, their home. all these are gone, and what the european leaders are saying to the people left behind is basically this:

there is anguish, there are tears, but just don't take revenge, and there will be peace. however, if there are signs of revenge, we will, just like what we have been doing, keep a blind eye on the dogs. the solution for lasting peace is simple, israel will have all the arms they want, you palestinians will have none so that it's just not possible to have a war, just invasions, blockade etc that's all.

isn't this amazing? presumably all these leaders are clever people and they believe in these? or rather, they blatantly don't believe in these, they are just so good at lieing. forget about all these for now, what has israel actually achieved?

in israel's words, they have achieved all their goals, which were never defined. Hamas still has the capability to fire rockets, more are probably going to join hamas, it's going to take another 100/200/400 years before history makes this event fade away if ever, which means that the anger is going to linger for as long as this event is still in people's memory. charities are going to go in, lots of money willl be spent to rebuild the infrastructure that the bombs destroyed, the homes that were destroyed. lots of people will also have to go in, to help look after the children who have become orphens. the biggest thing israel has achieved, though, has to be the destruction of any sign of peace.

can I find a CHARATY that accepts donation for the destruction of a large part of israel? that might actually be more effective than sending money and people in to rebuild again and again. after all, curing the disease is better than the symtoms.

the lesson is this. if you want to kill, occupy or to do any such things, provoke your enemy for the slightest attack, then kill, not just one or two, but in thousands, and their families as well.

funny music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WPMKH95M1M
Remember that some time ago I wrote a little post about what makes it the case that one can make humour from speech, from visual elements, but hardly anything else such as taste or sound. well thanks to Caz this piece is very close.
these two guys cleverly mix pieces of music that you wouldn't normally associate with one another, which creates a kind of irony. the ending is particularly humourous because they takes just about all the different kinds of endings from classical music and make you think that the music is going to end but it never does.

THAT prison

If everything works out, after a person commited a crime, he goes to court, he is convicted, he goes to jail regretting what he has done, and he comes out of jail. at that point it's up to the society and the system to keep him away from reoffending, from perhaps his old friends etc.

Obama is going to be the president very soon, in nine days I believe. one of his first priorities is to shut down Guantanamo bay. he mentioned that there might be very dangerous people in there that haven't been tried, and that needs to be taken care of and the process isn't that easy.

the process could actually be very easy, only if the people in there are really very dangerous and all of them have commited evil crime that made them deserve what they have endured. because, since they have all commited serious crime they will be tried publically, then there will simply be a transfer for all those prisoners from Guantanamo to somewhere else. if this is the logic, there actually isn't much point in shutting the place down.
what is going to take a long time, and what makes the process long and difficult, is that some of the people in Guantanamo are simply not dangerous at all, and they are perfectly normal citizens of another countries who have been caught by the police for exchange of money etc. firstly, if these people were not very dangerous before, after being subjected to such crime as torture in guantanamo, they become very dangerous both perhaps militarily and public-relationally. militarily because if they are ever sent back to their own countries, they are full of resentment, they spread their stories, they have to start looking for jobs, money or something to support them where the world has changed a lot compared with what they knew; they become the most eager to take revenge on what they have suffered.
pr wise, the ones who are proved to have done nothing wrong but have subjected to torture are going to tell their stories, I believe that many many stories will be revealed if these people really are going to be released, and this of course is an even bigger problem for the US than the military one.
given what we know about American policies, I am highly skeptical that they will be happy to deliver this what is to them a painful justice.
if Obama is going to prove me wrong, I will be delighted.