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MiniCooperS1275
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Name: Mark
Country: Malaysia
Metro: Petaling Jaya
Interests: Mini-Cooper's (and I mean the classic 1960's ones!), hiking/rock-climbing, gym, martial arts, jazz (long live Bill Evans and David Benoit!), mathematics, obscure Chinese dialects, writing.
Expertise: Restoring my 1962 Mini-Cooper (with a helluva lot of help!), lugging my 96kg self up Mt. Kinabalu twice, solving 2nd order differential equations and performing square roots with an abacus, composing 7-page casual e-mails, discovering Chinese characters long abandoned since God-knows-what dynasty.
Occupation: Consulting
Industry: Engineering
Message: message me
Member Since:
4/12/2005
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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| In spite of his fame as a movie soundtrack composer, John Williams
deserves a lot more recognition than he has now for his music in
itself, and not as supporting props for movies. The music he wrote for
the movie "Sabrina" is simply divine. The "Sabrina" main theme, "In The
Moonlight" (performed by Sting) and "How Can I Remember?" are perfect
romantic pieces.
It is a pity that the piano scores are not so readily available. I had
to procure "Moonlight" in softcopy from Sheet Music Plus, as Hal
Leonard has stopped printing it. I have been working on it for a while.
The harmomics in the 2nd subject are pretty complex, and the fact that
it is in Ab Major makes it all the more difficult. Still, it is a
highly satisfying piece to learn, and an especially nice departure from
the standard jazz pieces. | | |
| Hung Gar (洪家) and Hsing I (形意) - two styles of Chinese martial arts I
would give just about anything to learn. One external (Hung Gar), the
other internal (Hsing I). One characterised by its power, the other by
its swiftness.
It is a pity there aren't many qualified Hung Gar instructors left in
Malaysia, and probably even fewer for Hsing I (the only one I know of
is Master Png Chye Khim in Penang). Even rarer (and most likely
non-existent in Malaysia) is the Six Harmonies version of Hsing I
(心意六合拳) - the more common one is the Five Elements (五行) Hsing I. Until
early this century, the Six Harmonies was practised only among China's
Muslim minority in Henan. | | |
| Okay, I think I have got the definition and proof of the value of the natural base e = 2.71828...
down pat - thanks to good old Dr. Math's MathForum
(http://mathforum.org/dr.math/). Without going into the boring details
(which will probably kill our less mathematically-inclined readers), it
goes roughly as follows:
1. Start off with Euler's work on compounding interests, i.e. define:
A = P(1 + r)^t
where A = amount
P = principal
r = rate (expressed in decimals, not
percentage)
t = time (if the rate r is per annum, t is normalised to years)
2. Putting in a few substitutions, and letting n approach infinity, you get the expression
(1 + 1/n)^(1/n)
3. Expanding using the Binomial Theorem, you get
(1 + 1/n)^n = 1 + 1 + 1/2! + 1/3! + ... which converges to 2.71828... i.e. e.
4. Equating the above sequence to e^x, we get
e^x = (1 + 1/n)^nx = 1 + x + (1/2!)x^2 + (1/3!)x^3 + ...
5/ Diffentiating the above with respect to x, we get
d(e^x)/dx = 0 + 1 + x + x^2/2! + ... = e^x
... which completes the derivation. | | |
| I am anti-Mandarin. Yet, I support the rich heritage of the Chinese
language. Now, this may sound like quite a paradox, but puritan
Sinologists will know where I am coming from.
I cringe whenever I hear people equating the ability to read Chinese to
the ability to speak Mandarin. I cringe even more whenever I used to
hear my Singaporean peers refer to Mandarin as Chinese, and anything
else as (rather condescendingly) dialects. And I do not blame them, for
theirs is the by-product of a political re-arrangement (I cannot find a
better replacement for 'brain-washing').
The fact is this: Mandarin, as the spoken language we know of today, is
really a politically-contrived evolution of the Northern court dialect
of Peking, and turned into the 'standard spoken language'. Prior to
1919, Chinese language education and the reading of Chinese texts were
conducted using the respective local dialects, not Mandarin. Our
fore-fathers could write Chinese with such standards as to put our
so-called Mandarin-speaking peers to shame, yet they spoke no Mandarin.
While it is sad that Singapore has effectively managed to eradicate the
use of Southern dialects in favour of Mandarin, Malaysia has been
gifted with having retained a rich heritage of so many Chinese
dialects. I am proud to be a Malaysian citizen, but at the same time I
think it does no injustice to my nationalism to say that I am also
proud of where my fore-fathers came from... Southern, and (then)
non-Mandarin China. Today, I speak Mandarin as a matter of
practicality. But in my heart, Mandarin stands on equal footing as the
ancestral Southern Chinese dialects of the Malaysian Chinese
fore-fathers. And in stubborn defiance, I continue to read Chinese
using Cantonese pronuncation, as I was taught by my ancestors!
For a peek into my little world of dialects, do check out my few
nuggets in the Chinese Language Forum at
http://www.chineselanguage.org/forums (under the Hokkien forum). 
To give fair homage to my Malaysian Indian friends, I was pleasantly
surprised to discover that Tamil has a very rich literary heritage, and
has also been classified as one of the 'classical languages' of the
world. As the majority of Malaysian Indians are of Tamilian heritage, I
strongly believe this is also a cultural heritage that must never be
left to die. The same goes for Malayalam and Hindustani, which I
believe are the other two large dialect groups. Like Mandarin in China,
I think Hindi in India is enjoying a healthy status as a national
language. Let's preserve what we have over here.
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| Classical Chinese (wenyan) and Latin... the linguistic hallmarks of the
Eastern and Western civilisations. Each uniting the literati of their
worlds amidst the babel of local vulgar parlance. Each binding the
disparate literary class together for centuries. It is a shame that
both languages have fallen out of use as written languages in favour of
written forms closer to the vernacular.
As much practicality ultimately favours the evolution of languages
(even if lingusitic evolution means a loss of refinement), I look
forward to the day when Classical Chinese and Latin can be restored to
their former glory as THE written languages of the world. | | |
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