Posted in Education, Science & technology on October 29th, 2012 3 Comments »
I am partial to an education system which has the English language as its medium of instruction. That is because I am most comfortable where English is the primary and the common language. While the Malay language is my mother tongue, I mostly use English to run both my private and professional life. For a [...]
Posted in Economics, Science & technology on October 25th, 2012 2 Comments »
I was running some regressions at work just now and I realized my overdependence on computers had made me forgotten how to calculate certain statistics manually. Modern regression softwares automatically calculate various statistics less than a second and I hardly think of what happens in that virtual blackbox. But just now, I was following up [...]
Posted in Books & printed materials, History & heritage, Science & technology, Society on January 26th, 2012 No Comments »
Fun-quotation-that-has-something-to-do-with-Australia: …he had confessed to repeated intercourse with sheep on a recent visit to the family farm; perhaps that was how he had contracted the mysterious microbe. This incident sounds bizarrely one-of-a-kind and of no possible broader significance. In fact, it illustrates an enormous subject of great importance: human diseases of animal origin. Very few [...]
Posted in Books & printed materials, Economics, History & heritage, Science & technology, Society on December 25th, 2011 No Comments »
From those precursors of food production already practiced by hunter-gatherers, it developed stepwise. Not all the necessary techniques were developed within a short time, and not all the wild plants and animals that were eventually domesticated in a given area were domesticated simultaneously. Even in the cases of most rapid independent development of food production [...]
Posted in Science & technology, Society on October 6th, 2011 1 Comment »
I am not an Apple fanboy. I was anti-Apple even. I remember the first Apple computer I used long ago. Wikipedia tells me that it was Macintosh Classic. Its screen had only two colors: green and black. I was happy of playing Karate-Ka on it, and other games that for the life of me, I cannot [...]
Posted in Liberty, Science & technology, Society on June 8th, 2011 No Comments »
There are several reasons why organic decision-making is better than central planning. The complexity of the world is one. By complexity, it means nobody has the ability to absorb all relevant information in a timely manner to react effectively. In some ways, this is the economic calculation problem. It is an argument against the communist [...]
Posted in Science & technology, Society on December 29th, 2009 3 Comments »
The dawn of the 21st century disappoints the part of me growing up reading works of science fiction. Here we are living in a much too glorified new century and there are still no flying cars crisscrossing the sky, no aliens from outer space walking our streets and no human bases across the solar system. We [...]
Posted in Science & technology, Society on August 30th, 2009 1 Comment »
Last week in Kuala Lumpur, I was at the Plaza Rakyat LRT station when a family lugging wheelie suitcases asked me whether they were at the right platform to get to KL Sentral. Being from out of town myself, I said I did not know, but continued to watch them because the two teenage daughters [...]
Posted in Entertainment, Science & technology on August 16th, 2009 5 Comments »
Spending an evening at the Opera House to Hadyn and Bruckner’s is a priceless experience. I admit, the music was slow that at multiple points of time, I found that I wanted the clock to run faster but at other times, it was exciting listening to fast-paced classical evoking a sense of joy, danger or [...]
Posted in Politics & government, Science & technology on May 12th, 2009 No Comments »
Away from the chaos on the streets of Ipoh and within the hall of Perak state assembly, a storm of short messages kept coming in, flashing and distributing the latest developments faster and wider than anything imaginable in the past. Enter Twitter. This is yet another sign of evolution within the already hyperactive Malaysian Internet [...]
The name is Hafiz Noor Shams.
For more about me, please go here.