Gerdanken #1: The last man argument and the intrinsic value of nature

Imagine...

(1) You are the very last man left on Earth, and you will die in 1 min. After you die, the human race will be extinct; only wildlife will be left.

(2) A system of nuclear explosives, able to blow the whole Earth (with all its wildlife) up, has been set up.

(3) If you press the button and activate those explosives, it would blow the Earth up, but only after you die. Because there would be no more humans left on Earth, no humans would be killed, rather, only the Earth's nature and wildlife would be blown up forever.

Stop and think. Will you press the button? You would not kill any humans but only plants and animals. Does it even matter to you after you die? So would you press the button?

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Most people would not. A "no" answer lends credence to the intrinsic value of nature. It is an acknowledgement that nature and its wildlife does not only have a purely utilitarian value, but rather, also an intrinsic one i.e. nature does not exist purely to serve humans.

This has far-reaching implications on environmentalism and human responsibilities. Chew on it.

R ( I + P + A )

I don't like my progress report.

Progress report is quite a screwed up thing. Some subjects only count 1 or 2 pieces of work, so gg if you screw that up. And the "percentile" thing isn't very nice. Put them together and you have a molotov cocktail for unhappiness. Like chem the 1st TA i screwed up and got 17/25, that mark kena put in my progress report as a terrible-looking "test" mark even though it is only 5% of CA.

For RA subjects even worse. If they give percentile within RA class, class size < 15 how to draw bell curve and give percentiles? And besides some pple in RA class will get bottom 10%, which shouldn't be the case since those in RA class are already the top 10% of their batch for that subject. But if they compare RA marks to RP marks to report a percentile, it's quite unfair since RA subjects are harder and pple score lower.

Sudoku!

i added a new sudoku widget to the sidebar. Time out but don't get hooked! I generally find sudoku quite difficult to solve...

Btw anyone can suggest a good template with a space for me to put a standard size landscape photo, nice readable text, and tabs? Feel like changing template. This template a bit plain, and sidebar is very long.

I like sleeping. Drifting off to dreamland is rather much like a temporal opiate. But necessarily one that doesn't last. I especially like it if i only need to wake up past 10 - but that opportunity doesn't come by very often. With the crazy crazy RI life (mug-for-test-based academics + lots of additional performance tasks + heavy CCAs), i find i got to make do with 5-6 hours everyday.

Anyways, congrats to table tennis C div (won cat high today 3-1 in C div finals). But this year seems to be quite few golds. Academics so busy how to train until xiong? Honestly i was originally rather enticed by the idea of "project work" at first. I still agree with the idea of self-learning and research (except lower-sec nonsense "creative assignments", but it's quite heavy, especially if we're moving back to mug-for-test EOY system. Aiyah RP is trying to achieve too many things... need to focus. Raffles Academy the idea is damn good but the implementation needs to be tweaked.

Bah... national weather studies project presentation on thurs, NYP astro on fri...
I did say RI life is crazy. Too bad.


Btw i'm saving all the discussive posts on political, economics, and social issues for english portfolio (Philo posts does not fall under this category). Wait till week 9!

Costly epiphany

Ok now that i've aired my views, let's leave the past behind us and move on. Makes no sense to get all tensed and unhappy with what's done. Btw congrats to SC

Air masses in free fall

Here are the geog presentation slides, as requested. Pause as needed.

Tricellular model of global air circulation:


Case study - Russia: seasonal variations due to alternating ferrel and polar cells, and impact on human geography



The triceullar model one has quite a bit of physics, sorry bo pian lah. It takes some time to digest (especially the jet stream and rossby waves one).


And... we won ACJC geog quiz the other day. Yeah!

Crazy Chem Test aka CCT

Chem RA CCT was disturbingly reminiscent of Math RA CCTs/TAs... they bear the common stamps of "a killer test", namely, insufficient time to complete the paper, difficult or otherwise indirect questions... and everyone screaming (almost literally) after time's up (and we're forced to hand up, even if we haven't finished writing).

Crazy paper lah. Most of the question i just chiong though, start scribbling and punching calculator even before read finish question, no time to think - and dun talk about checking. Yeah it's fun (i'm not being sarcastic) and challenging, but hopefully can pass lah. Not enough time... (all the CCT also, since they cram into 45min... and btw the 50min periods also very rush, but it's sure better than canceling 1 class).

But nonetheless, chem is fun. Just ask my last year RE partner (his identity is probably an open secret) - who, during RE last year, while Mrs Neo and I were both not looking, accidentally stumbled on the 1001 reactions that can be performed with the bench chemicals (as well as some others we used in our experiments: i.e. bromine water, sodium thiosulfate [which can decolourise G2 ink!], diethyl ether etc.).

RISC should do more crazy demos for curious P6s during open house... like 16M sulfuric acid + water (for the uninitiated, this is a highly exothermic (read: explosive) reaction), or burning nitrocellulose... heehee

Argh... probably getting back the marks next week. Hopefully i don't get homolytically cleaved by hyperreactive free radicals (in the form of evil little red digits dancing in brownian motion on the top right of the exam script)... bleah i'm delirious again.