Three minutes of fame

I've enjoyed three minutes of fame today, that is the short talk I've gave. Having to make a choice out of four topics, I've chosen what I thought was probably gonna be the most common topic - three tips to safe motorcycle driving. Therefore to make it stand out from the rest, I've decided that my content will be different, easy to remember, and easy to relate to. Spending days and nights, thinking all the possible ways that I can present my materials. In the end, I've decided to go with something unconventional.

I'm actually quite proud of myself that I actually dared to present the speech this way as the audience are all tertiary students and one tutor. The speech was, well, very easy to understand and nothing much except that I mixed a lot of interesting imaginative visuals, and actually might be good if I were to be talking to primary school children. The disappointing part is still that my delivery skill is still not there despite all the trainings I've had, and I've made the talk sounds silly but at least it's good that the audience enjoyed my talk, I hoped..

Belief

Do you believe in the existence of God? While surfing around wikipedia, I came across this article on Pascal's Wager. It is the application by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal decision theory to the belief in God.

With going to heaven as the ultimate prize, the argument is based on the fact that there is nothing to lose and everything to gain from believing the existence of God. If you do not believe in God, and they really exist, then you will not be able to go to heaven. If you believe in God and they exist, you will be able to go to heaven. If you believe in God and they don't exist, or if you don't believe in God while they do exist, you will go to heaven. Therefore it's pretty obvious to choose to believe, since you can't do worse than not believing.

In the Atheist's Wager, the idea that the God does not reward their believer but for the good things that one has done was taken into the consideration, then it should not matter whether you believe in God and you will still be rewarded.

Furthermore, with so many religions, which one should one believe in? A simple solution for this one is to believe in all, but it's not an acceptable solution. This brings us to the 'Avoiding the Wrong Hell' problem where it's generally more possible that you will worship the wrong God and be sent to Hell as a result of that.

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To me, I am an atheist. It seems more rational to be an atheist, as if there exist a Benevolent God, I would believe that he would give credit to people based on their merit and not whether these people believed in him.

If God really exists, he would be the people around you, who care about you. i.e. Family, friends. Friends, as in true friends, not fair-weather friends.

People pray to God for safety. I believe it is family and friends that keeps people safe and sound. Through the care and concern showered upon you, you are kept safe and stay safe through your everyday life. People pray to God for riches. Family and friends are themselves riches. People pray to God when they're down and out. Family and friends give you the support you need. Therefore it's equivalent to saying your family and friends are your Gods.

This thinking might seem naive in many ways, but to me, it's my principle, my way of life, my belief.


References
Pascal's Wager on Wikipedia
http://www.abarnett.demon.co.uk/atheism/wager.html

Snubbed

To me, nothing is better than friendship, but then my discrete mathematics lecturer will say $1 is better than nothing, therefore $1 is better than friendship.

I used to make friends easily, because I'll be friendly to anyone who is friendly to me. I do yearn to make new friends, but I don't seem to get to know new people in university. I seemed to always find people walking in groups, while I'm usually alone. Sometimes I just wonder if it's because I walked too fast that no one can keep pace with me.

Without new friends, I also find communicating with current friends difficult. I speak in computing languages while most of my friends are engineers and scientists, each of them forming their own groups, and speaking in their own languages which is so foreign to me. I feel left out when they start talking about their homework which I totally have no idea what it is about. Talk about games, I'm not an avid gamer. Talk about politics, I'm really not interested. Talk about NBA, I'm really lost. Talk about other things, I just blurt whatever that comes to my mind, while others seemed to have gone through deep thoughts about the topic. This effectively left me with nothing to talk to them about.

I even think that I should just uninstall my Live Messenger. While many have people initiating chats with them, I basically just see people signing in, for some reason the same person will sign in again, then again, and he's blocked. Apart from the IP chat window, only one of the contacts in my whole list of contacts will occasionally initiate a chat. The rest of the chats are usually initiated by me, and time after time, I'll be ignored. Making me think if I'm more of a nuisance than a friend.

Maybe it's time I stuck my heads into the pile of books and hide in them so that no one can find me, and no one will bother anyway. I think I try hard to liven up my friends who may seem sad, but I supposed I'm even sadder compared to them, so why should I even try if I can't be happy myself.

After going through the Inter-Cultural Communication lecture two weeks back, I think I should start making plans to go to countries where people are more individualistic; you get credit for yourself when you done well; you get the full blame for something that you have done wrong; live for yourself, die for yourself. I don't think I can survive well in this collectivist society.

Giving Talks

Today I've had a very interesting lecture on Oral Presentation. Even though it was the third lecture, I would usually half-asleep by then. However, I was wide awake and enjoying every minute of the lecture.

I shan't bore you with every detail of the lecture, but the most captivating part is the time when he showed videos of introductions to a few presentations. Introduction is an important part of the presentation as you need to capture your audience right from the start. In one of the videos, this guy tried cracking a joke, but no one catch that, how embarassing it would be if I were the presentor. Another guy started his presentation with a right hand right leg march to the screen, must've been too nervous.

Of course, there are good examples too. One of them started the presentation with a rhetorical question, then added herself as one of the answer as a joke. It worked well, and captured the audiences' attention.

The lecture was fun alright, but after the lecture, I had an afterthought. What I've just seen were videos of students from past cohort taking the module, and what I'll be doing. What if the lecturer decided to take my presentation and show it during lecture for future batches? Will it be shown as a good example or a bad example? What funny things will I do during the presentation?

Whatever uncertainties I have about this presentation doesn't matter now that I've already chosen to be forced to take this module. What must be done shall be done. Let's hope the topic given wouldn't be too tough.

24 mins 24 secs

Public transportation is really expensive. The first bus costs 67 cents, transferring to the MRT cost another 88 cents, and the next bus cost 42 cents. That amount to a single trip of $1.97, thus making a return trip cost $3.94. Twenty one days cost $82.74.

With a bus concession, each month costs a flat $52.50, and if taking the MRT instead of the time-consuming bus-only trip, it will be $1.05 *2 *21 = $44.10, resulting in a grand total of $96.60. Usually I take the MRT only on trip to school, so the month cost is $74.55.

With a train concession, it will be $45 + 0.67 * 4 * 21 = S101.28 with the bus-train-bus. Something puzzling here is after second bus trip is not counted as a transfer from other transportation, therefore making me pay extra 25 cents each time i take a second bus. The only way to avoid this is to stop taking a second bus altogether.

A typical walk from CCK mrt to home takes about 15-20 mins. And today, since I'm really free, I decided to see if taking bus 96 from Clementi MRT to school is justifiable.

The walk to school was timed from the moment I climbed down the stairs from the main street till the time i reached the Faculty of Engineering. Here's the route I take:

Walking straight from the stairs until I see this sign

Turn Right, and walk till the end of the road.

On the left you will see Nan Hua High School,

and on the right is NUS High School.

At the end of the road, just turn right into Clementi Road, then by following the road, and crossing a bridge,

View from the bridge

I reached my destination. Total time = 24 minutes 24 seconds.