The Smart Liar

Came across this comment by James Fallows in The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200611u/bush-smart

The amazing aspect was that this man sounded smart....But it also reflected a person who understood clearly the realities of his situation. And as delivered it was coherent, quick, and precise. Both "cumulative" and "nevertheless" flowed right off his tongue (as opposed to being shown off as trophy words, which the President is proud to have come up with) and were the right words for those moments. Each sentence is correctly formed.

Over six years we've become unbearably familiar with the tongue-tied George Bush of "the Google," of "is our children learning," of the anguished and humiliating pauses as he tries to fish out an appropriate word. After I described the startling contrast between the relatively glib Bush who governed Texas and the aphasic-seeming character who was our President, a number of readers wrote in to suggest that his increasingly-halting expression was in fact a sign of clinical mental deterioration, even of early-onset Alzheimer's disease.

Mental deterioration ? My conclusion today is the same as it was when Fallows wrote his first article about how articulate Bush was in the past.Bush's verbal mis-steps were an act all along. He is indeed very smart, and a very smart liar. His verbal gaffes are deliberate acts to ingratiate himself with his Republican base, and to induce his enemies to misunderestimate him.

Looking back at Fallows' 2004 article, I see an interesting observation

"There are some skills Bush can use with little or no effort; according to friends, he can quickly size people up and detect their vanities and weak points."

Sad to say, I can think of at least one Asian Elder Statesman that Bush managed to make very good use of.

Beware of cashcard

Like many other commuters, I keep my ez-link card inside my wallet and just touch the whole wallet on the card readers. That worked fine for me until a few weeks ago when I started getting read errors everytime I tried to board a bus or train. I would have to take the ez-link card out of my wallet and tap it directly on the reader to get it to work.I couldn't figure out the problem and had resigned myself to having to buy a new ez-link card at a loss of $5 (non-refundable card cost !).

Luckily, before I bought the card, my daughter told me that her school-mate had had the same problem but had deduced that the problem was caused by keeping a cashcard and ezlink card in the same wallet. That surprised me because I had been carrying a cashcard together with the ezlink card in my wallet for several years without any problem. Still, I tried the experiment and found that indeed, whenever I placed the cashcard together with the ezlink card, the ez-link card could not be read. When I took the cashcard out of my wallet, the ez-link card worked fine.

Coincidentaly, or not so coincidentally, I had bought the cashcard a few weeks back and when I examined the cashcard, I saw a new icon on the back of the card (arrowed above). Then I remembered that I had read somewhere that NETS was going to introduce a combination contact and contactless cashcard.

"From Supermarkets and food-stall operators to schools, everyone is encouraged to deploy CEPAS on their smartcards or even their mobile devices, and use them seamlessly and safely on all CEPAS enabled terminals.

“Today, we have the technology and the capability to deliver the next generation of payment solutions. We are enthusiastic and ready to offer a solution which enables users to make payments for road tolls under the ERP framework, pay for public transport or make retail purchases."

Obviously NETS had already introduced these combi-cashcards and the super-duper contactless cashcard was interfering with the ez-link card.In the long run, I suppose it will be more convenient to have a single card instead of two cards, but couldn't NETS at least have warned people about the interference ? It's entirely foreseeable that many people do have to carry both types of cards around and I'm sure I'm not the only one who is wondering why my ez-link card suddenly doesn't work properly.I wonder, though, whether we really will be better off with contactless cashcards ? Talk about virtual money - money just sucked out of your combi-cashcard without anyone even touching the cashcard. Scary thought.

From Repository of Knowledge to Black Hole

I must say I wasn't one of those who strongly decried the demolition of the former National Library building at Stamford Road. Mostly, this was because I am young enough that Toa Payoh Library had already been built by the time I could read, so my memories of TP are far stronger than that for the Stamford Road Central Library. If anything, my strongest memory of the Stamford Road site is that of the bees buzzing around the syrup at the ice kachang stall in the canteen. Still, I couldn't help but be taken aback by the sight of the tunnel that has replaced the former library bulding.



There is something faintly disturbing about seeing what used to be a repository of knowledge [1] converted into a black hole. Where does the tunnel lead ? Somewhere better than where we are today ? We've decided that we have to sacrifice the past, the memories tied to the old library and the (arguable) aesthetic value of the red brick building and its surroundings, in favour of the benefits of smoother traffic flow. Is the exchange worth it ? I don't know. All we see now is a void. Hidden for now behind a row of potted plants, but still essentially a hole in the ground. I hope the exchange was worth it, because we can't reverse it now.

I suppose one of the other goods that might have come out of the demolition of the National Library building was the recent widening of the URA's conservation guidelines to include "socially significant" sites that create a sense of attachment to Singapore and which help to root Singaporeans to their homeland. We'll never know whether the controversy over the demolition of the National Library was the catalyst for the change in the guidelines - even if it were, the URA would never admit it.

Still, if buildings in the former University of Malaya/Singapore/NIE/SMU campus at Bukit Timah can be preserved for their social, if not architectural, significance, the National Library building would have been an even stronger candidate for conservation.

On a more mundane note, doesn't the tunnel look just awful ? This is the only road tunnel in Singapore where the entrance is visble to pedestrians at road level, and I must say, it looks terrible. Every other tunnel I know of in Singapore is hidden out of sight below surface level, but this one is actually elevated slightly relative to Armenian Stree/Queen Street. Once the potted plants are removed, it's going to be impossble for anyone to miss it. Sigh. The Stamford/Bras Basah area has so much history and so much potential, but the tunnel is going to be another aesthetic monstrosity like its neighbour, Fortress SMRT.

[1] Apart from the public lending library and reference library, the site also used to house Singapore's Legal Depository. Under the law, publishers are required to deposit two copies of every book published in Singapore with the National Library.

Hello World

Way back when Mosaic was the standard browser and IE was the scrappy up-and-coming competitor, my hand-coded homepage was at http://web.mit.edu/~stngiam. This eventually became http://www.ngiam.net and now I've joined the blogging bandwagon. http://www.ngiam.net hasn't been updated for a while, but you're welcome to browse the old posts if you want.

If anyone has an archive of my old MIT homepage (http://web.mit.edu/~stngiam), I'd be eternally grateful if I could get a copy. My backups died of the dreaded click-of-death. How many people even remember Iomega Zip drives ?