Stuff you must read today (Sat, 7 Aug 2010)

On culture.

Eight Plays by Huzir Sulaiman.

Found the bit that I like the most:

It angers me when after hundred years of importing aspects of other people’s culture some politician in a 4,000-ringgit Italian suit complains about Western values and such-and-such a thing is not from our culture. Our culture is everybody else’s culture. We’ve never had our own. You can’t arbitrarily draw a line to freeze its change and growth. And it angers me when people like Thomas Thomas expect me to be original, when in fact to be Malaysian is to be derivative. Deal with it and grow up. Would you like some coffee? No? It’s Colombian.

    — Huzir Sulaiman. “Notes on Life and Love and Painting.” Eight Plays. Kuala Lumpur: Silverfish Books, 2002. 135.

Stuff you must read today (Sat, 31 Jul 2010)

  • The real science of dream research.
  • You’ll like this if you watched Inception and liked Inception like how you like this.

  • A Theory of Authority
  • “Managers looking to strengthen their authority are wise not to hire overqualified workers … An overqualified person may be difficult to maintain authority over. They can have a bad attitude that’s infectious.”

  • The Secret Lives of Cats
  • I never knew they cared so much.

  • Natural learning
  • “I think that the manicured walks mirror our schooling system. We have a centrally planned curriculum that … relies largely on the model of decontextualized delivery. It is efficient and predictable. But it is so embedded in our culture that most teachers, parents and students know no other way.”

  • The Web Means the End of Forgetting
  • The dangers of posting TMI on the Web.

  • Startup Country
  • Now if only Malaysia could loan us Johor for a bit…