Math for an MBA, Part 2

The first part of the story is here, along with the questions that took about an hour to consider and another hour to conceptualize. After some deliberation, I settled on four areas that seemed to fit into the "MBA Entrance Exam" mold: Percentages, Averages, Multiple-Variable problems, and Logical Reasoning.

Percentages are simple problems involving percentage calculations: "What is 75% of 40?" belongs in this mold. They have a very practical real-life application in bank lending and interest rates, occasionally make guest appearances in Accounting problems, and tend to show up on project status reports. As a result, I felt that a refresher on these would not be amiss.

Averages are similarly easy, although I wanted to approach them from a roundabout direction. Most problems in this area involve calculating the average of a set of values; I wanted to turn this on its head and ask a question where you needed to get a specific value in a series, given the average as one of your clues.

Multiple-variable problems, on the other hand, were certainties. I had given a friend some help on one of these for her MBA class before, so if there were any problems that were likely to show up, it would be these. You've probably seen them before; these are the tedious word problems where you have to figure out the values of more than one item.

Logical reasoning is harder to describe. This is not a subset of problems, mind you, as much as it is the ability to organize given information, identify an unknown value, and then use one to work towards the other. It's obviously used extensively in business, although in a less mathematical sense. But I'm convinced that it's the mathematical training that helps us apply it to non-math outlets.

Given this outline, all that I had left to do was to write the questions:

1. Three chickens can lay three eggs in three days. In how many days can you expect 18 chickens to lay 18 eggs?

This was a question of logical reasoning, plain and simple. I see it appear in a lot of IQ tests and other cognitive exams, and I've seen some very smart people give some very wrong answers as well. Most people, in fact, will trust in their faulty pattern-recognition senses and say "18 days!" right off the bat.

The answer is a lot more mundane. If three chickens lay three eggs, with all other factors being equal, then it stands to reason that each chicken laid one egg. If these three chickens laid those three eggs in a matter of three days, then it follows that each chicken needs three days to lay one egg. Therefore eighteen chickens would come up with eighteen eggs in those same three days.

2. You have exactly Php 35,000.00 in a bank account that gains 2% compound interest per annum. Assuming that you neither deposit nor withdraw any money from that account, how much will the account contain after two years?

I wanted to throw in at least question that implied a real-world application of a mathematical principle, and this was that question. The easy way to solve this is to just get ((35,000 x 102%) x 102%) for a total of Php 36,414.00. That said, I only realized afterwards that banks hardly use the term "compound interest" anymore, which puts up the wall between theory and practice again.

3. I need an average score of 93 among my exams in order to pass one of my courses. So far, the grades that I got in five earlier exams were 90, 97, 87, 100, and 86. What is the minimum grade that I should get on the sixth (and final) exam in order to pass?

This is a reverse-average problem that is commonly known as "the Student's Dillemma", and I'm sure that a lot of people out there learned to put these calculations together at some point in their academic lives. I won't cover the answer here, as it's really just a throwback to what we were all probably doing around our final exam weeks.

4. A bicyclist travels at a steady rate of 8 kilometers per hour. She leaves her house at 2:00pm and rides her bike to the supermarket. Halfway there, she realizes that she's forgotten her shopping list and returns home to get it, then sets out for the supermarket again. She arrives there at 4:30pm. What is the distance from her house to the supermarket?

I put this problem here for one basic purpose: It encourages the solver to draw a chart. I feel that visualization is an important part of logical reasoning — if you can envision the cyclist's journey in your mind, then so much the better, but if not, you can just doodle something that lets you conclude that she travelled a total of twice her original intended distance from 2:00 to 4:30. That means that she normally travels the path to the supermarket in 75 minutes at 8 km/h... which makes the distance 10 kilometers.

5. A 200-liter mixture is comprised of 20% water, 30% salt, 10% sugar, 15% sand, and 25% gold. This mixture is left out in the sun for a few hours, after which all the water is found to have evaporated. What percentage of the resulting mixture is made up of gold?

And now the problems get a whole lot harder. I set up this percentage problem to illustrate the fact that percentages are non-constant values, and that they change with the introduction or removal of new factors. The easiest way to get the answer here is to realize that you're just looking for an equivalent of 25 parts out of the remaining 80 units, which makes 31.25%.

One interesting quirk about this problem was the fact that you technically don't need the volume of the original mixture to solve it. In fact, you can give the original mixture and quantity you want and the answer will still be the same... but I wasn't about to introduce that to people who had spent years away from their high school math classes.

6. A motorboat needs three hours to travel upstream, but it only needs one hour to travel downstream. When there is no current, the motorboat moves at a constant four kilometers per hour. What is the rate at which the river's current flows?

This took things a little further; It's actually rather difficult to solve if you slept through most of your math classes. In fact, it's another problem that encourages you to draw... although a chart instead of a diagram is needed in this case.

Rate-Time-Distance problems like these usually need a bit of background. You need to know that Rate x Time = Distance, of course, but you also need to know that an opposing force will lower an object's effective rate of travel (and vice-versa). Ergo, the river will slow you down by its own rate when you go upstream, but it'll make you go faster by the same rate when you go downstream.

Assuming that the river's rate is R, we get:

(4 + R) x 1 = distance travelled downstream = distance travelled upstream = (4 - R) x 3

From there, it just boils down to:

(4 + R) = (4 - R) x 3
4 + R = 12 - 3R
4R = 8
R = 2 km/h

7. Three bowling balls and four frying pans weigh 54 pounds in total. Four bowling balls and one telephone weigh 54 pounds in total. Three telephones and eight frying pans also weigh 54 pounds in total. What is the total weight of one bowling ball, one frying pan, and one telephone?

This is the classic three-variable problem: Three unknown quantities, and three equations. I chose the objects completely at random only because I like choosing objects completely at random.

The interesting part is that I deliberately screwed around with the numbers here — while a bowling ball weighs 12 pounds and a telephone weighs 6 pounds, a frying pan weighs 4.5 pounds. I find that some solvers normally get thrown off by the decimal value for some reason, perhaps because it makes them think that they're on the wrong track.

8. Anthony, Beatrice and Charles win the lottery on a single ticket. They decide that they will each take 30% of the total, and then set aside the remaining 10% for future needs. After the money is deposited in their bank, however, each of the three friends arrives separately to claim their share. Anthony arrives first and withdraws 30% of the money. Beatrice arrives a few hours later, and withdraws 30% of what's left. Finally, Charles arrives some time later and withdraws 30% of what's left. At this point, only Php 205,800.00 is left in the account. How much did the three friends originally win in the lottery?

This is actually a problem that gets featured in a lot of puzzle books. While it's possible to solve this by means of basic algebra, the circumstances of the problem tend to leave people confused on where to start. Yes, this actually centers more on logical reasoning than percentages. Yes, I threw the two of them together to try and confuse my solvers further.

Problems like these encourage logical thinking — they force the solver to stop, think, and determine their battle plan before trying to tackle the problem. In this case, the way the logic should go is that that 205,800 represents 70% of the money that Charles saw (before he took his 30%). This amount represents 70% of the money that Beatrice originally found in the account, which is 70% of the money that Anthony found in the unblemished account. Therefore:

205,800 is 70% of the money that Charles saw...
— Charles originally saw 294,000 in the account.

294,400 is 70% of the money that Beatrice saw...
— Beatrice originally saw 420,000 in the account.

420,000 is 70% of the money that Anthony saw...
— Anthony originally saw 600,000 in the account.

*

And now I must admit that it all turned out to be for nothing, because we both ended up so busy the night before the exam that we never got around to the problems. I managed to fire off a quick question about chickens and eggs (which my friend got wrong), but we otherwise weren't able to go through the eight items above.

The next morning, my friend called to tell me that the exam was much easier than he expected, and that math only played a very small role in this regard. There were plenty of real-world logical scenarios and a few questions of general knowledge, but nothing beyond the simplified "What is 75% of 40?" percentage problems that I mentioned at the start of this article.

I suppose it's too much to ask. Math is more a tool for mental stimulation in schools, something that acts as a precursor to the logical thought that we use when we're older. You can't expect business professionals to maintain passion (much less practical use) for these theoretical concepts... especially when it comes to a post-graduate program that concentrates on cooperation and networking.

The test still sits on my desk, however, waiting for the next time that another MBA applicant asks for my assistance. On top of that, I have more word problems where that came from. It's only a matter of time before somebody asks me for another favor...

Math for an MBA, Part 1

A few days ago, someone asked me to give him a hand with the MBA entrance exam he was taking on Saturday morning. "You still remember what we learned in Math class," he told me, "and you obviously practice it a lot."

"Yeah, well... the math in an MBA course isn't that tough. I've helped out at least one other person with his MBA homework, and it didn't go any farther than algebra and number theory. It's high school stuff."

"I don't remember most of what we studied in high school. And it's the entrance exam... who knows what questions will come out? You know this better than I do, so give me a hand here."

I admit that I couldn't deny him the favor, and I suppose that part of me was itching to do some heavy-duty tutoring, so I said yes. Since we only had about one night's worth of time to go through the basics (us being working stiffs and all), I needed to gather my thoughts and imagine what kind of math was likely to come out in a bunch of MBA classes.

Eventually I came up with a list of eight questions for discussion, which I'll post here. I've come up with Math tests before (mostly for my siblings when they were in school), but this is the first time I've come up with a series of questions for an MBA applicant. If there was any point to this entire exercise, it lay in the matter of what was likely to come out, and what was not.

I eliminated such irritants as Calculus and Trigonometry right off the bat, for example. I felt that these were highly unlikely to come up in a Business Administration course, because they obviously require a lot of theoretical background and advanced thinking. Geometry was the next to go, because as basic as the math is, the concepts didn't apply to management principles. Probability and Combinatorics remained by the wayside as well, although those were among my favorites to explore.

After an hour's worth of thought, I had pared down my ideas into a limited set of concepts that felt as though they belonged in an MBA environment, and were fundamental enough to appear in an entrance exam. From these, I pulled together eight questions that my friend and I could discuss, and I now post them below for your viewing pleasure:

1. Three chickens can lay three eggs in three days. In how many days can you expect 18 chickens to lay 18 eggs?

2. You have exactly Php 35,000.00 in a bank account that gains 2% compound interest per annum. Assuming that you neither deposit nor withdraw any money from that account, how much will the account contain after two years?

3. I need an average score of 93 among my exams in order to pass one of my courses. So far, the grades that I got in five earlier exams were 90, 97, 87, 100, and 86. What is the minimum grade that I should get on the sixth (and final) exam in order to pass?

4. A bicyclist travels at a steady rate of 8 kilometers per hour. She leaves her house at 2:00pm and rides her bike to the supermarket. Halfway there, she realizes that she's forgotten her shopping list and returns home to get it, then sets out for the supermarket again. She arrives there at 4:30pm. What is the distance from her house to the supermarket?

5. A 200-liter mixture is comprised of 20% water, 30% salt, 10% sugar, 15% sand, and 25% gold. This mixture is left out in the sun for a few hours, after which all the water is found to have evaporated. What percentage of the resulting mixture is made up of gold?

6. A motorboat needs three hours to travel upstream, but it only needs one hour to travel downstream. When there is no current, the motorboat moves at a constant four kilometers per hour. What is the rate at which the river's current flows?

7. Three bowling balls and four frying pans weigh 54 pounds in total. Four bowling balls and one telephone weigh 54 pounds in total. Three telephones and eight frying pans also weigh 54 pounds in total. What is the total weight of one bowling ball, one frying pan, and one telephone?

8. Anthony, Beatrice and Charles win the lottery on a single ticket. They decide that they will each take 30% of the total, and then set aside the remaining 10% for future needs. After the money is deposited in their bank, however, each of the three friends arrives separately to claim their share. Anthony arrives first and withdraws 30% of the money. Beatrice arrives a few hours later, and withdraws 30% of what's left. Finally, Charles arrives some time later and withdraws 30% of what's left. At this point, only Php 205,800.00 is left in the account. How much did the three friends originally win in the lottery?

While it would be easy for me to just put up the answers to each of these and call it a day, that wouldn't be enough for a second article on this subject. I feel that there's a specific reason why I prepared each one of these questions... and that these reasons are worthwhile to discuss.

That said, those words will have to wait till tomorrow, I think. It's almost two in the morning at this time, and in the intervening hours, you're welcome to have a crack at these. I know that it's no Sudoku, but wouldn't you be interested to see how much you remember from your high school math?

Export to Hard Drive

I spent a few minutes doing a backup of this blog a little while ago, based on Dominique's revelation that Blogger now has an Export feature. That's not to say that I'm paranoid and constantly afraid that Big Brother is going to delete all my records one day, but I have had a lot of words posted here for the past four or five years.

To be honest, the Multiply site that I set up some months ago already acts as a backup — that is, whenever it's picking up my posts properly. However, I feel more comfortable knowing that there's a method that allows me to be responsible for making my own archives, as opposed to worrying about a point in time when I might lose everything.

That, and I've just realized that all of my posts since 2004, all of the code and comments and image links, comes to a mere 7.1mb on my hard drive. I feel so inadequate.

Then I mused on the fact that I have a lot of words posted here, so I opened up the XML file in a browser window, then took advantage of the clipboard in order to copy and paste the resulting mishmash into a Word document. The whole operation took me ten whole minutes at my current level of memory (and thirty more minutes because MS Word insists on annotating every single spelling and grammatical error in its documents), but I eventually got the numbers: The backup file contained about 3.6 million characters in 640,000 words. Given a conservative estimate that I wrote about 70% of those words, that puts my total so far at about 450,000 words scattered throughout this blog. I'm no slouch there, at least.

That also implies that I write an average of five or six letters per word. This is a surprise, considering my habit at wordiness.

I'm now working on exactly what kind of backup schedule and procedure I should use. I mean, I'm not sure if it's a smart move to produce archives only when I feel like doing so, not in an age where our government is debating legal standards for open reporting. Pushing a seven-megabyte file each time I post something new, however, will just eat my time in front of the modern boob tube.

Or I could just forget about my budding paranoia and just post more often. But then that would discourage me from playing with all the lovely numbers.

Ah well.

A Man's Psychology Can Be Inferred by His Choice of Street Fighter

Ryu. You are an intensely competitive person. You exercise yourself both mentally and physically before an endeavor; you don't like walking into situations unprepared. You are incapable of thinking outside of the box, and instead resort to tried-and-tested methods in order to achieve your goals. You use these methods for a reason, mainly the fact that they work... and on top of that, you know exactly how to implement them to the best of your advantage.

Ken. As above, except that you're far more flashy and charismatic. You've got the mad skills — but some time ago, you realized that Number One happens to be a lonely place. You've played the field and are comfortable in the knowledge that you know how to deal with things... enough to go about them with a casual attitude and a sardonic smile on your face. You're really not as good as you think you are, but you're not going to lose as long as people think otherwise.

Chun-Li. You think on your feet. You're a guarded, cautious person who prepares a strategy beforehand and fully expects it to fall apart... which means that you have plenty of practice making last-minute changes. Reaction is almost instinctual in you, and life for you can be reduced to a series of moves and countermoves against the people you play with. You know when to push and you know when to wait; it's all part of the same game.

Guile. It's not about how well you do in the world, really. Instead, you feel that it's all about how you can take advantage of the opportunities that you observe. You are constantly on the lookout for openings — weak spots where you can drive your point home, or at least areas where you can push your own agenda. You're not into self-improvement as much as you are into using your strengths: If someone breaks one of your arms in a fight, you're just going to hit them with the other one. The only way people can get past you is if you let them through.

Blanka. You like to get up close and personal; the best way to solve a problem is to throw yourself into the solution. You have a lot of scars from experiences gone wrong, and often your misadventures outnumber your achievements... but your successes are held in high enough esteem that people don't consider you a slouch. You may not be strong or smart enough to hang with the best of them the first time, but eventually you'll get there. Just expect to get a lot of pain for all your trouble.

E. Honda. People don't expect much from you, and that's where the secret lies. You like being the underdog, the person who doesn't seem to hold much promise until you snatch success out from under everybody's nose. You're not as fast as them — but you're fast enough. You're not as skilled as them — but you're skilled enough. Your plan is to let them settle into their preconceived notions for as long as possible... then pull the gloves off and show them how you really roll.

Zangief. You hit things to make them work. You don't pretend to have an understanding of the basic nature of things like all the others claim to have, and that's because you don't. Why bother gathering every bit of information you can, when you just have to know what to do? That's the way the world works: You just need to point yourself in the right direction and pull the trigger. Everything else is just an irritating buzzing noise in your ears.

Dhalsim. You like surprising people, especially when you can defy their expectations so completely. If they expect you to go left, then you go right. People are at their worst when they're extremely predictable, and that's how you discovered the wonder of creativity and random choice. No one can ever figure out exactly what you're doing until the last moment, and that's when they find out that your eye has been on the prize for a long time. They may be ready, but they certainly won't be ready for you.



* No, this is not a serious psychological study or profile. This is a completely random article with no academic basis whatsoever, so lay off any accusations that I've favored one character over another. Street Fighter™ is the property of Capcom Co. Ltd., and I assure them that this post was written for parodical purposes (more as a curiosity than anything else). Don't sue me, or else I'll go all M. Bison on you. Psycho Crusher!

Six-Word Stories

Here's a few six-word stories for Bahay Talinhaga's Independence Day effort. Because I like challenges, I've tried to do one for each of various genres. Because I have masochistic tendencies, I based these off of the ones available in the Talecraft storytelling game. And because I'm borderline suicidal, I've tried to place all of these in a contemporary Philippine context, something that I usually don't do in the course of my regular writing.

One conclusion I've developed, mind you, is that I'm too wordy to squeeze all of my ideas into a mere six words. That said, that probably just means that the items below are just the tip of the iceberg that happens to be my warped little mind.

Here you go, Mr. Chikiamco. Hopefully these are of good enough quality for you.


Adventure: Intrepid archeologist seeks lost Kho videos.

Fantasy (Bangsian Fantasy): Demon runs day spa for celestials.

Fantasy (Contemporary Fantasy): Secret squatter society battles subdivision monsters.

Fantasy (Fairytale Fantasy): Princesses. Paedophilia. Politicians. Put something together.

Fantasy (High Fantasy): Spellcasting cop shakes down otherworldly citizens.

Gothic: Strange giggling noises in Manila Cathedral.

Historical: Ferdinand Magellan's last words: "Nice... sword..."

Horror: Balut vendors terrorized by giant duck.

Mystery: Imelda's three thousand shoes are missing!

Romance: Is that MMORPG girl really female?

Science Fiction: Solution to Abu Sayyaf: Giant Robots.

Thriller: Must... stop... president... from... running... again!

Sleep Experiment

Nope, this isn't really a post. At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

I just happened to remain in the office for about fifteen hours today — almost double the recommended daily allowance — because a critical web site went down at about five in the afternoon and we had to spend a good part of the evening trying to straighten it out.

And that leaves me tired. Dog tired, in fact.

I think that I have only a few minutes left before I doze off. To be honest, I'm only tapping away at the keyboard because I'm curious to see how long I can last before the dowsiness overwhelms me and I'm off to crawl under the blankets. Or even better, I can drop off with my face on the keyboard and go to work the next morning with QWERTY printed across my forehead.

My eyelids are drooping a bit. I imagine that I'll finally start nodding off when I begin hallucinating, and I'm surprised that I know exactly what it's like. Strangely enough, there's no single bit where your vision blurs — you just start seeing things right off the bat. After a while, it becomes easier to tell which items in your line of sight are real, and which ones are not... or at least, that's what the purple giraffe is telling me right now.

And then there's the alternating urge to speak both French and Latin, in that sequence. And then a period of awkward silence as I wonder why I would invest my time in such an effort when I could be speaking Swahili instead.

That mattress would be good right about now.

I sometimes worry about my teeth. I haven't been grinding them in my sleep for a while now, but I still worry. I haven't had any nightmares in a while, but suffice to say that the idea of waking up with nothing but nerves and gums ranks foremost among them.

Now I begin asking myself nonsensical questions, which is a clear indication that I'm in the home stretch. Are bananas funny, for example? Will magpies steal shiny items that aren't necessarily metal or bits of glass? What pieces of technology finally killed the tape recorder, and why does the LP yet survive? How many pieces of taffy does it take to change a bottle of Spanish vodka?

And now I begin swaying from side to side — literally — and backtracking throughout this post to edit the numerous spelling errors that I'm starting to make. Even when I'm sleepy, I'm an obsessive-compulsive proofreader.

And now I slowly nod off. The very air feels heavier now. The silence feels oppressive, enough to make me want to escape into the noise in my mind. There was a time when I would be using this time to write a thousand straight words in the span of a single hour, but that time is fairly distant. I've gotten old.

Soon it shall be a question of sleeping at eight in the evening and getting up at one in the afternoon. Exist but don't exist. Slumber bluff, they call it — to pull a fast one on the caterpillar and the Sandman. Fred Flintstone would be proud of the bowling ball.

The Enter button becomes the focal point for my existence, and I have this desire to begin listing down random dates off the top of my head. The kangaroo reaches the goal post, and wondrs aloud as to why I insist on counting sheep. They have a poker table set up in the next meadow, and the one on front is offering me two-to-one odds on a full house. In the corner, an octopus plays the saxophone.

Truth is a question of black and white, but Bogart calls them all shades of gray. Listen to me now, Humphrey... you should never have switched from scotch to martinis. No wonder the moon smiles; we are all its lunatics.

Disclaimer: June 2009

MANILA, PHILIPPINES — A sixteen-year-old amateur writer was injured this morning in what investigating politicians called "a brazen attack against a controversial Internet personality".

Internet writer Adaspera P. Astra emerged with a fractured wrist and a bruised superego after having been clubbed vehemently with confrontational comments and sharp rhetoric through her own weblog. The incident occurred at about 10:39am, after Astra had participated in an impromptu online debate the previous evening.

"I just turned on my blog and there were, like, three thousand comments there. Like, they wanted to crucify me!" the luckless writer declared.

Astra had previously been identified as the perpetrator of a number of plagiaristic attacks on the Internet, where she would obtain content from other weblogs and personal profiles and post it as her own original writing. The teenage blogger had raised ire for her derogatory responses to the accusations, particularly because the results were easily identified as incompatible with her personal speech patterns.

"It's, like, injust, you know?" Astra commented. "I just want to get, like, more readers kasi eh. How's Google Adsense supposed to, like, pay me money if people don't read my site, ha? It's not like information isn't free on the web."

Online behavioral analyst Sean Uy was among the first to respond to Astra's original statement. "What Astra does not realize," Uy said, "is that while information is often free to obtain on the Internet, this privilege does not exempt users from following standard copyright regulations. Every article has an author and originator regardless of where that article is published. While only some of those articles hold conditions as to how and when they can be used, it must be presumed that standard copyright law applies to all such articles."

The subject of at least three class-action suits, including one from the southwestern United States, Astra had no immediate response to the charges leveled against her. "I'm, like a celebrity!" she said in a UltraMegaPinoyChat forum twelve hours before the attack. "They don't know who I am! Why should they, like, care, ha?"

Uy, who runs a four-year-old blog, clarified the situation further. "Many authors don't like seeing their work used without permission. There is a real risk here — the risk that the author will not be recognized for a project in which he or she has invested some amount of effort, the risk that someone else will profit from the unwarranted theft of such effort, and the risk that the work will be twisted and interpreted out of context.

"I'm proud that I've written and originated all of the works on my blog," Uy said. "While I occasionally use the works of other authors, I try to leave them the correct acknowledgements so that their efforts are recognized. I even remain willing to open dialogues with other writers in case they feel that there's something wrong with my usage. Miss Astra, on the other hand, has originated no such works, has taken no measures to recognize others' efforts, and goes as far as to take offense against her infamy."

News of the incident was a matter of public record within government congressional hearings by late afternoon of the same day, during which Rep. Isagani Batongpuso denounced the incident as an addendum to his speech on Charter Change.

"It is vital to the safety and security of this country that the rights of even incredibly insignificant wrongdoers like Adaspera P. Astra are protected by the Constitution," Batongpuso noted. "It is with this consideration that we must move forward to establishing a constituent assembly before our opponents in the majority voting bloc decide to come back from their foreign junkets."

"Philippine Law holds allowance for copyright law as established even among digital publications," Uy mentioned, "although it is formative in the face of the Internet age. With that said, a lot of copyright disputes could be circumvented if people just asked for the use of articles. People can ask me for the use of my work, for example, and I'm usually willing to let them use it with little more than a byline or link to my site.

Uy also discussed the presence of several online organizations who had begun to help support and enforce authors' rights on the Internet. "I subscribe to a Creative Commons License myself," Uy said. "It's right on the lower area of the sidebar in my main web site."

On Astra's side, the controversial blogger is still unwilling to disclose exactly how she encountered her fractured wrist. "It could have come from, like, all the pangugulit that my enemies do," she said. "But we don't even have to be enemies. They can, like, just keep writing their stuff."

One responding doctor, who declined to be identifed, had a different opinion: "It looks like she just slammed her hand down on her keyboard in frustration," he said. "You can see the letters imprinted on her arm."

All Pretty Things Must Go to Hell

Every few months, I go over Blogger's administration area to see if there are any stray or incomplete posts that I can fix up. Normally I'm able to squeeze out a few more entries this way; sometimes a single idle thought can provide fodder for further insight on this little corner of the web.

Earlier tonight, I noted that I had an occasional trail of unfinished posts that went all the way back to late last year. And then, in the middle of my casual search, I noticed the following:


In case you can't pick out the title from the cacophony of articles, I've blown it up for you here:


Only three words were appropriate for me at that moment of discovery: What. the. Hell?

I know that I've written some strange titles before, but I'm fairly certain that I would have remembered writing this one. As it stands, however... I don't. That clearly makes this another one of my "lost works" — stuff that I put together at some point in the past, only for me to set them aside and forget about them in the face of additional projects. (There are probably five or six more of these things crawling around in the bowels of my CD archives somewhere.)

That said, it's a heck of a title, and I wondered what I must have been drinking to have written it. Whatever it was, it probably involved an unwholesome mixture of Mountain Dew, peach syrup, blue Gatorade, and gummi bears.

By this time I was extremely curious as to what the story was supposedly about, how long it ran until I decided not to finish it, and what it had done to deserve such a title. The first thing I noticed was that it was extremely short — perhaps only about 350 words or so — and certainly not enough for me to discern the original plot. The second thing I noticed was that it included descriptions like this:

Skin parted like water before stainless steel. There was a scraping sound as she reached the upper part of the chest where both halves of the ribcage met; she grunted once, and then pulled to sever the stubborn strands of muscle there. The tip of the blade would have punctured the heart by now; she shut her eyes, expecting the blood to start flowing any second.

Don't worry — the victim lives. To be quite honest, it looks like he's supposed to live — the next few paragraphs have him outwardly wondering why his female companion would do such a thing. It gets even more cryptic towards the end, with the male character revealing a set of wings and the female character expressing her thoughts through a ceramic mask... I can only conclude that I must have been really drunk the night I wrote this.

The weird part is that I'm not sure if I can salvage this. Normally I only retain those works that have a clear vision in mind, something like a visible thread that connects a beginning and an end to the story. This one feels as though I started somewhere in the middle, and I can't for the life of me remember what this story's original targets were. Under normal circumstances, I would probably cannibalize a few good lines, and then throw the rest of the article into the recycle bin.

But this has such an interesting title, darn it. You just can't lay eyes on that title and not wonder what the story's about.

That said, I laid eyes on the three hundred words in the story as well, and I'm still wondering what it's about.

I'll probably keep it, of course. If anything, it's at least earned its way into my personal slush pile by virtue of its strange title. Maybe someday I'll remember what it was that I was had in mind when I wrote, and maybe then I'll actually go much farther than three hundred words.

I suspect, however, that such a day will not come until I find a way to recreate that foreign mixture of iced tea, strained carrots, Egyptian honey, tonic water and motor oil.

Man, that must have been one rough night.

Move It, Buster

Last Friday was moving day in my office. This was supposed to be our last day in our current building — we were moving to a new place somewhere in the next municipality, for the simple reason of "more space, less rent". I didn't record everything that happened to me on this day, of course, because I'm a busy man... so the following narrative is an approximation.

9:30am I arrive at the office to find boxes all over the place; some people apparently came in early just so that they would have enough time to pack. I switch on my lifeline to one of my technical teams (conveniently located about one-fourths of the way around the world) and start getting the usual routine stuff out of the way.

10:00am I'm just finished musing on how I don't seem to have much work at the moment, when our accounts manager drops by. She tells me that our primary client just asked for an emergency change. I look over the requirements and tell her that there's no way we can get everything done by the end of the day. She tells me why we have to. I grudgingly agree.

11:00am I recover from my panic attack to find that I entered some requests for the technical team in the midst of the lucidity. I step over a few boxes to brief my other technical team (the ones who hang around here in Manila) of our sudden requirements, and together we bring things down to the bare-bones action steps.

11:30am My offsite technical team comes online. I tell my management counterpart about what we're expected to provide by today, and he laughs. I then tell him that no, it's not a joke, and I'm met with incredulous silence. After a while, we start negotiating what needs to be done.

12:00nn With development underway, I begin rooting through my stuff to see if I need to pack anything. Having been in the company for less than a month, all I have is a roll of tissue paper and a couple of paper clips. I leave the paper clips at the foot of my makeshift shrine to Bubu, god of swivel chairs and mislabeled timecards.

12:30pm I head to lunch. Seeing that it's the last day we're going to spend in our building, I want to pick out a good restaurant in the lower floors, someplace whose refined tastes I can keep with me, even after we're gone. Because of the crowds, I pick out the place that serves budget Mongolian rice, which gives me gas for the rest of the day.

1:30pm Our accounts manager asks if our technical team can deliver the requirements by today. I do a quick check of the project status and tell her that we've got about a 60% chance at the moment. Fittingly enough, I find that the technical team is asking if their other deliverables can be moved; I do a quick check of the deadlines and offer to move those due dates to mid-next week. There are cheers all around.

2:00pm The whole office shuttles downstairs for a pep talk from the company CEO. As I'm still in discussion with my technical team contact at this time, I spend the whole meeting with my laptop open. Inwardly, I wonder if I'm going to be seen as a dedicated employee, or as a loathsome ingrate.

3:00pm With the pep talk over, I return to our upstairs office to find that the ID card reader has been torn out of the wall, and everyone can now enter and exit as they please. Plus, the phones are offline — although the wireless Internet connection remains online by some miraculous quirk.

3:30pm The local technical team wraps up their work — mostly because they need to pull out of their room already. The other team looks like they're in QA phase, which prompts me to tell our account manager that we're 80% sure that we can make the client's delivery requirement. There are more cheers all around.

4:00pm I find out that the movers haven't packed up the water dispenser yet. I fill up my little plastic mug and thank Bubu, the god of status meetings and wireframe wastebaskets, for his small blessings.

4:30pm The technical team reports that their QA is finished. If Cousin Larry and Cousin Balky were here, they'd be doing the Dance of Joy at this moment.

5:00pm I approve the work and ask them to publish all changes to a live version. Our account manager is thrilled. I cover my chair when an ignorant janitor tries to swipe it out from under me.

5:30pm I confirm that all of our client's changes are completed and working fine.

6:00pm The client tells us that they've made a mistake and ask us to undo everything that we've done today.

6:30pm I come down from my second panic attack, stare at the remains of an office that's half-packed up for the move, and wonder if I'll be prosecuted for homicide if the victim really, really deserves it. Technical team does not take the news well, but they push forward regardless. I remind myself to write a nice thank-you note for them sometime.

7:00pm Just when the work has begun, the Internet connection finally blinks out. I spend the next two hours looking for an alternative connection that doesn't involve my spending money for overpriced coffee.

9:30pm The last requirement is packed up, and everything's been reverted back to what it was. I am amazed at the fact that we could be busy the whole day and go absolutely nowhere at all.

On the way home, I find a stray paper clip on the floor. Bubu, god of columnar notebooks and empty conference rooms, is probably amused.

Name that Toon?

I'm a little startled to find that my original post found few takers. Are these cartoons all that narrow or obscure? Am I the only person who remembers these? (The latter would be rather disconcerting, I'll have to say.)

Given that, I'll push the game a little further. Once again, I've noted each of the ten excerpts below; Each one is a single line from the opening theme of a cartoon series that was first released sometime from the early 80s to the mid-90s. They may not necessarily be popular cartoons, although I'm aware that they all came out on local TV at one time or another.

The difference this time is that I've posted some additional hints for each and every one of these shows. Much like the lyrics, these are elusive bits drawn from whatever facts and histories I've gathered for these. I reserve the option to give further hints in yet another post; otherwise I'll have the answers up in a couple of weeks.

And now...

1. ...And you know there's a long long way ahead of you...
— A lot of cartoon series had a single annoying little character whose purpose involved either comic relief or constant irritation (often both). This series had such a character; strangely enough, he wore armor.

2. ...But bad guys are out of luck...
— This was the most recent cartoon on the list to be released, and was created by Walt Disney Studios.

3. ...High in the mountains, or deep in the sea...
— The archenemy of this series was a man named Scarab, who led an extremely motley crew of villains.

4. ...Let's watch the clouds go far below...
— This series was the TV companion to a revolutionary toy for its time: A combination audio tape player / stuffed doll.

5. ...No one knows what lies behind the masquerade...
— The tagline for this series (and its corresponding toy line) was "Illusion is the Ultimate Weapon."

6. ...Powers of mind, strength, skill and speed...
— The setting for this series was a world where technology was rendered useless; the cause of the phenomenon was never explained in the show's short lifespan.

7. ...Soaring through the highway of the heavens in their flight...
— Two of the hero characters in this series happened to be fraternal twins.

8. ...The music's contagious...
— The three most distinctive antagonists in this series were named Phyllis Gabor, Roxanne Pelligrini, and Mary Philips.

9. ...Two times the fun, wrapped up and rolled into one...
— This show holds the dubious honor of being the shortest-running animated series ever created by its studio.

10. ...You're the only one who can scratch our wrists...
— Unlike most other cartoon shows, this series was spun-off from a live-action TV sitcom.

The Headline

My family normally subscribes to the Philippine Daily Inquirer as our newspaper of choice, although I'm not sure if it's really out of any personal preference. I like to think that it's because of the entertainment value — I feel that the Inquirer has a tendency to be too sensationalist sometimes, which fits my general view of the local news.

Every now and then, however, our paperboy will leave the wrong paper in our mailbox. This doesn't stop us from reading it, though, and occasions like these do give us an opportunity to see how the other publications are treating their news. There's been talk of shifting to either the Philippine Star (too religious), the Manila Bulletin (too wordy), or the Manila Times (too off base), but we've stayed with the Inquirer for the most part.

That said, today's issue of the Philippine Star amused me greatly. It happened to arrive in our mailbox in lieu of the Inquirer's Sunday edition, and we tore through it to see how it was treating its headlines nowadays.

The local buzz nowadays seems to center around the sex video controversy involving a certain young man, a young model with a history of revealing photoshoots, and a trail of unsuspecting lovers that includes a well-known cosmetic and dermatological surgeon. I'm certain that everyone out there has read about the issue from one source or another, so I won't go into the salacious details. It was an article about the controversy that caught my attention today, however, if only because it reduced me to hysterics.

It started innocently enough by noting that the aforementioned surgeon had been the target of extortion tries by an unknown party:

MANILA, Philippines - A lawyer representing cosmetic surgeon Vicki Belo yesterday revealed efforts to blackmail her and former lover Dr. Hayden Kho over another sex video.

According to Adel Tamano, a group is demanding P4 million from Belo and Kho for not releasing their sex video to the public.¹

It was a simple enough summary, and it does make sense. Assuming that a sex video between Kho and Belo does exist, it's likely that someone would try to get money from them under the threat of releasing the video the the general public.

Reading further, however, a few more details emerged:

In an interview with “Startalk” on GMA-7 television yesterday, Tamano suggested that the video was among those retrieved from Kho’s computer.¹

This filled a significant gap in my perception of the issue — I had been wondering how the original videos had been acquired and disseminated online. Given that the source apparently involves the young man's computer, it doesn't take a huge leap of logic to conclude that somebody must have gotten access to it, picked up the videos, and then put them up.

The article then proceeded to name a possible suspect, as identified by lawyers representing the unfortunate pair:

Kho’s lawyer, Lorna Kapunan, also accused [Eric Chua, a mutual friend of the two] of stealing the racy videos from Kho’s computer.

Kapunan alleged Chua had access to Kho’s laptop and made copies of the videos showing her client’s sexual escapades with Halili and several other women.¹

This laid out the entire sordid story for me: Young man takes videos. Young man stores videos in computer. Friend of young man accesses computer and finds videos. Friend of young man makes copies of videos. Hilarity and hijinks ensue.

The lawyers did their job perfectly up to that point, I think — they raised a complicating factor in the case, clarified something that was a likely origin for the videos, and identified a suspect. I assume, of course, that they mentioned all this in the relevant PR-legalese; You really couldn't ask for anything more.

But that's when it got surreal.

Kapunan said that Chua, known for his computer skills, was the person who allegedly uploaded the video on the Internet.¹

This statement puzzled me, because you obviously don't have to have above-average technical knowledge in order to upload videos to the Internet. Speaking as a writer, I felt that you could leave out all mention of the computer skills and simply state that the man was the one who uploaded the stuff. I'm not sure if this strange slip of the tongue could be attributed to Kapunan the lawyer or Clapano the reporter, but it struck me as out of place here.

Kapunan said when Kho and Belo broke up some two years ago, Belo asked Chua to get Kho’s computer and retrieve the videos from the hard drive.

Kapunan stressed Belo merely wanted to erase sexual encounters with Kho.¹

Wait, so he was asked to remove the videos from the guy's computer? That just... raises so many questions — such as, why didn't she just ask her (former) lover to remove the videos himself? (I mean, it was his computer, after all.) For that matter, does this imply that our erstwhile suspect knew where the videos were located? That's a bit... icky, no matter how you want to look at it.

But Belo, according to Kapunan, was told by Chua that he gave the task of retrieving the videos to another computer technician.

Kapunan also clarified that her client was not even aware that his computer was taken from his home.¹

And this made even far less sense. So a friend asks you to remove some very private and racy videos that are in your ex-lover and mutual acquaintance's computer. What do you do then? You remove it from the guy's home, take it to an anonymous technician outside, and get him to find the stuff. This is... brilliant, really. It's the only way I can possibly describe it.

It raised another question, though: Why on earth would you take the computer to an outside resource just to remove a bunch of videos that are inside? The last time I checked, you could just get in there yourself, find the files, punch the Delete button a few times, and then empty the Trash / Recycle Bin. I mean, we are assuming that the "expert" had access to the computer itself, or could at least find a way to get in.

I must also point out that Clapano cites Kapunan in virtually every line here — most likely this exchange was taken directly from the interview; the Star's reporter probably isn't injecting speculation at any point. That just makes things stranger, in my opinion.

Fortunately, Belo's lawyer had a ready explanation for that:

Kapunan said the files in Kho’s computer had a complicated encrypting system, making it difficult to access.

This prompted Belo to ask Chua, whom she trusted, to retrieve the files.¹

That bold text is most definitely mine. The computer had a complicated encrypting system? Really, now? Like what, a username-and-password requirement?

Visions of science fiction just swam through my head at that point, and I began to laugh. I imagined the young man organizing his videos into a single folder, then running some incredibly-complicated program that would do nothing but translate those videos into incomprehensible dots and bytes. The image didn't fit at all. The psychology didn't fit at all. And darn it, if I had software like that, I could probably make a financial killing on the international celebrity market.

I'm not sure as to who was the source of the unexpected comedy here: Either our noble dermatologist has no idea how a computer works, or our esteemed lawyer has no idea what she's talking about. Or maybe they were trying to simplify the explanation for greater public consumption — I don't know, but the result was an absurd summary in a serious news article, and I couldn't help but laugh at it.

I do also wonder if the mutual friend, the so-called "man with computer skills" who suddenly finds himself at the center of the issue, is still around. I wonder how he felt when he was asked to intervene in the middle of something that didn't demand his involvement. I wonder if he knows that he was asked to perform a relatively simple computer-related operation (Find videos. Delete videos. Have lunch.), and that he somehow screwed that up completely.

Above all, however, I wonder if the total explanation above makes sense as a whole. I mean, it starts out fine, but then it starts piling the blame on a Mr. Eric Chua and his l33t skillz to find an outside technician. It's no better than a wild story for me, fresh with little touches of speculation and exaggeration, and it entertained me greatly this morning.

After all, isn't that what the news is for?

Tamano, meanwhile, said Belo cannot be blamed for her effort to retrieve the racy videos.

“The biggest victim here is Dr. Belo. She and Hayden had a consensual agreement. The video was taken, but they agreed that after watching it they would delete it. I think she felt there is a breach of agreement,” Tamano said.¹

¹ Clapano, JR. (2009, May 24). Belo's lawyer bares P4-million extort try. The Philippine Star. Retrieved from http://www.philstar.com.

* I don't look to criticize the article in question, only to bring up some insights that came to mind after reading it. As you may surmise from the footnote above, I'd like to make the proper acknowledgements and attributions here. If you are connected with the Philippine Star, which is the proper owner of the original article for all intents and purposes, please contact me with regards to any issues you may find; This will allow me to improve my writing further. Cordial contact will, of course, get a better response. Don't sue me.

Argentum Metallica

I keep dreaming about machines.

These are not your father's machines, mind you. These are machines, constructs of the imagination with no specific purpose. They look like a cross-bred nightmare of Rube Goldberg's inventions and Hollywood special effects. Put them on the floor and they'll waddle around like drunken probes, tearing small squares off the carpet every now and then.

Sometimes I don't dream of the smaller machines. Sometimes I get a glimpse of the bigger ones, as though I were some astute observer trapped within their inner workings. These are not the cog-and-gear affairs of the local clock towers, but more of stout cables covered by steel tubing, all flexing and extending by means of spherical joints that could hypothetically guide their moves in any direction. In these dreams, the purpose of the greater machine is unknown; sometimes I feel as though it were only around to intimidate me.

This is not an uncommon sensation. I think of metal and machines from a conceptualist background, tempered with the occasional flashes of an IT-based upbringing. As a result, my literary perception of machines tends to focus on what's possible with them... and sometimes the potential applications scare me. The fact that I dream of machines that seem to have no inherent purpose other than as objects of observation is a very strange thing. It's as though my subconscious is trying to blow my mind, so to speak.

There is most likely a story in here somewhere. Strange concepts like this are fertile ground for such outlines. I just don't see any form, sense or structure in it yet... or perhaps I haven't thought about it enough in order to put some together. Time is short for me nowadays, after all.

What strikes me the most is the lack of a human element, I think. Normally I feel as though people can relate to science fiction (or any other genre that features technology in a prominent manner) because they can directly compare such aspects to a convenient human counterpart. With these dreams, however, there's not much of a human element apart from my anonymous presence... ergo, a situation where I cannot identify the purpose of the hunk of spare parts in question... ergo, a perfectly mystifying dream.

If I subscribed to metaphors in interpretation, I would immediately point out a link between the complexity of my mind-constructs and my everyday life. It's a terribly obvious link, however, and it doesn't offer anything of assistance. It's not a satisfactory explanation to me, so I'm doomed to think about it further and dream of more machines while I'm at it.

I'm fortunate that the only fear inherent in the dreams lies in the fact that I don't know what they stand for. I haven't encountered such things as spinning blades, tooth-filled compactors, or any similar industrial nightmares yet. That probably implies that whatever their significance is, it's not a manifest threat yet. It could be that that little voice in the back of my head, the one whose sardonic laughter I've suppressed over the years, has probably broken free of at least a few restraints and is now taunting me again.

Sometimes they're so close that I can hear them. The sound of metal scraping against metal chills my ears, perhaps accompanied by the twisting of steel and the pounding of iron pistons. A Techno-genre soundtrack would find a good home in there, more than anything else.

There are times when I wonder why I don't dream of things like grass and flowers and light puffy clouds like normal people do. But then again, if I ever did dream of those things, I'd probably curl up into a ball in the middle of the imaginary fields, wondering when the monsters would show up.

Neither Rain, nor Snow, nor Sleet, nor Wind, nor Errant Bike...

I think I've mentioned Dominique Cimafranca on this blog at least once before, and I suppose that one more time won't hurt.

Details seem to be sketchy at the moment, but it looks like Dominique was in a biking accident sometime on Monday this week. I'm not quite sure what happened, or how bad it was, but the pictures aren't pretty to look at.

Yes, I mentioned pictures. I don't know how he's doing it or who's holding the camera, but he's somehow giving us an in-depth look at his current condition right on his blog. And even if you have a slow connection or simply can't stomach the sight of broken skin, you can always follow his Plurk account — yes, he's maintaining that, too, despite how he looks right now.

His circumstances tear at me. Half of me wants to fly south and see how he is (despite the fact that my bosses would fire me if I took even a couple of days off, that I have no idea where he's confined right now, or that I can't even find Dumaguete on a map). On the other hand, my other half wants to sit here and marvel at just how hardcore a blogger he is to have continued his posts.

I'll be watching his progress online, and at the rate at which he's going, I'll probably start biting my nails the moment he fails to update for a few hours or so. That's the wonder of the modern world right there: You get to monitor a friend's convalescence even though you may be just a hundred miles away (although it doesn't do much for the concern after all).

Get yourself stitched back up, Dominique. We'll catch you as soon as we can, but hopefully you'll be on the mend well before we even get there.

Fiction: Engine

Slowly, Menar removed his tunic. It was cool, almost perfect inside the serene chamber, but underneath, his skin sweltered as though the young man had been placed under the gaze of the sacred floodlights.

There were three acolytes before him. One of them was female, and Menar found himself unnerved by her presence. He continued to strip down to his baser clothes, and when he stood before them in nothing but loincloth and breeches, he felt the first strings of embarrassment cross his face.

One of the elder acolytes noticed his discomfort, and placed an earthly hand on the younger man's shoulder. "Rest easy, my son," he said, "for here, we are all sanctified in the light of Sun."

Menar nodded, his apprehension melting away under the reassurance. At a nod from the elder acolyte, the other male began wrapping a loose chemise about Menar's waist. When that was done, the female garbed him in a loose gray undershirt, and then both the man and the woman slipped a pale brown cloak about his entire form.

The ceremonial robes were far more comfortable than Menar expected. For some reason he expected them to be rough and constrictive, perhaps indicative of his worldly impressions. Perhaps the great Sun had chosen this moment to enlighten the young man, perhaps free him of those human concerns that he still held, all the more so that his ascendance would be complete.

"Let the faithful behold the vessel of Sun," the elder acolyte intoned.

Together, the male and the female assistants bowed.

"Let the great Sun welcome his chosen Menar," the elder acolyte declared, "he who was deemed worthy to ascend by the grand college of peers, he who has passed the trials of wind and fire and mind, and he who has been garbed of man and woman under the light of the serene chamber."

"May the great Sun grant us life forever," Menar said.

"And now the rite is complete," the elder acolyte smiled. "How do you feel?"

"I'm all right," Menar said.

"No thoughts of regret?"

Menar held his head even higher. "I am the chosen of Sun, Essar Illus," he said. "To hold regret now would be a sin against His will."

Illus gave the young man a wide smile. At first the elder acolyte looked as though he was going to say something else, but then something caused the priest's attention to wander. Illus glanced up in surprise, then held his head a little to one side, as though he was listening to a voice that only he could hear.

"Yes," Illus said, his tone grave. "Yes. Yes, I am aware. We shall come soon enough. All thanks to the benevolent Sun."

He turned back to Menar, his expression softening at the sight of the young man. "It is time," he said.

*

Together they walked, and the floor changed with the distance. First it was the smooth granite floors of the serene chamber, then the rough stone floors of the outer corridors. From there the stone only became darker and more polished, until they reached the beginnings of the metal halls, where their feet padded down steel panels and titanium bracings. Every now and then they would meet a fellow acolyte in these corridors, perhaps a seminarian or a servant, and they all bowed respectfully as the two men passed.

"Your predecessor weakens," Illus said, after a while.

"Yes," Menar said. He had been preparing for the news for quite some time.

Illus nodded. "It does not come as a surprise, for the faithful would not have appointed you otherwise. Solaris Viya has been displaying signs of inconsistency for a week now. We have had to endure occasional failures in sectors three, seven and eighteen as a result."

"I know the signs, noble Essar."

"Sun has seen to your training," Illus said. "Bless him for providing your presence in our time of need. I fear that if we had waited but a week longer, then we may have had worse matters in hand."

Above them, the lights flickered. Both the older and the younger man stopped, aware of the implications that now stared them sharply in the face.

"I do not think we have much time," Illus said.

"No," Menar said.

The elder acolyte turned away once again, listening hard at the voice that Menar could not hear. All Essars, Illus foremost among them, had been granted the means to communicate with both Sun and their fellows, that they would be able to monitor the signs and portents as they came. Menar knew that such a blessing manifested as a voice in the mind, something that only Illus was destined to hear, and thus a message that spared his involvement.

Illus glanced at the younger man, now standing calm upon the floor's translucent surface. "We are almost there," the elder acolyte said, his face shifting between emotions, his eyes remaining in a constant stream of sorrow.

With a pause, Illus finally turned back to Menar. The younger man nodded, as though knowing exactly what had just happened.

"May Sun grant us wings," Illus said.

Both men hurried down the metal corridor, their feet moving faster with each step.

*

They arrived in the inner sanctum just as the decision was being made. The great Vault stood before them, its metal expanse filling the whole of the chamber and extending as far as the eye could see. No one present would doubt that it was a testament to the might and omnipotence of the great Sun.

Two Essars stood in front of the lone opening to the great Vault. Before them were three more acolytes — Salhi, by the looks of their robes — two of whom were performing the Rite of the Unsealed Gate.

The Essars took notice as Menar and Illus entered the chamber. None of them moved, although the taller of the two merely intoned the ritual greeting: "Who is this that entreats entry into the house of Sun?"

Menar genuflected. "It is Menar," he said, "a humble servant."

"Enter, Menar," the taller Essar said, "and behold His works."

Menar could see the rest of the chamber now. At the back of the chamber, raised a good two stories above the floor, was a platform sixty feet wide and perhaps a hundred feet long. Even now it thronged with Essars, all of whom had likely heard the same news that Illus had accepted, and all of whom were now moving to watch the chamber of the Vault.

Below and to the left of the platform was an enormous window. Behind it labored men and women of the Salhus colors, amongst the tools and equipment that had been provided to them by the divine Sun. As with the Essars on the metal platform, these Salhi now watched the proceedings with their expressions of constant readiness. Now that the vessel of Sun stood before the opening of the great Vault, the transitory rites could proceed in earnest.

Menar watched as the door to the Vault gave an audible groaning sound, and at that point a collective sigh went up from the gathering of Essars. Menar glanced at Illus then, and realized that a single drop of sweat had emerged from the priest's forehead and was now running down his temples.

"For disturbing your vessel's slumber," the taller Essar intoned, "we beg your forgiveness, great Sun."

Illus's expression became distant again, and Menar could almost hear the voices speaking. The last vessel had to be removed from the Sun chamber beyond, he knew, and it was for this purpose that the Salhi had been trained and prepared... just as he was for his own role.

Above him, the lights flickered. A second sigh went up from the assembled Essars.

Illus placed one gentle hand on the younger man's shoulder. "Come," Illus said, and began to walk.

There was no ritual when they reached the door to the Vault. The two Essars there merely nodded their greetings, and he responded in kind. They both looked impossibly old under the light of ancient metal and rivets — even Illus seemed incapable of supporting his own weight. The three Salhi had long entered through the open door and into the sacred room beyond; Menar could see the dark opening before him, and could hear the indiscriminate sounds that issued from it.

Then there was a flicker of movement, and the first of the Salhi emerged into the open air of the inner sanctum.

The man (or woman, as it turned out) bore the front end of a simple stretcher, lined in silk and silver carvings of the holy symbols of Sun. Behind it, bearing the other end of that same stretcher, came the second Salhus custodian.

Lying on the stretcher was the emaciated figure of a woman, gaunt and aged with the passing of years. Her skin was slate-gray and shot through with hundreds of veins and wires, and her breaths became more and more shallow with each passing second. Menar flinched unconsciously; she was wearing the same ceremonial robes as he was, only tattered and stained with the inexorable weight of time.

At the sight of her, a song went up from the assembled Essars, and Menar recognized it as the Ritual of Transition, the gathering of voices that sounded throughout the caverns whenever a new vessel of Sun would take the place of a predecessor. Behind their window, the Salhi continued to watch impassively, even as the forlorn old woman finally drew her last breath.

There was a moment of silence. Menar could not remember when or where the chambers had been so quiet.

"Solaris Menar," the taller Essar finally said, his words echoing throughout the Vault.

"I am here, revered one," Menar answered.

"Our divine Sun desires a new vessel, one who shall bring light and life to our world. Solaris Viya has given her life to continue the great Sun's residence among us, as have countless others before her. Will you now accept this task for which you have been chosen, by the grace of the Life-giver and the audience of His faith?"

"I do."

"Then enter the Sun chamber, Solaris Menar, and may He guide you for the rest of your days."

"May the great Sun grant us life forever," Menar said.

The Essars stood aside to let him past, and Menar slowly stepped into the Vault's darkened entrance. Illus remained beside him until the younger man had crossed the threshold; from there, the elder acolyte could only watch from beyond the doorway, even as the song of the gathered Essars swelled around them.

*

There, the third Salhus was waiting for him.

The inside of the Sun chamber smelled strange and musty, as though it had been sealed from the outside for many years. Before him lay banks upon banks of the metal equipment that resembled those of Salhi use, all switches and monitors and random colored lights. A chair sat among the jumble of metal components, and this one was also padded and fitted with all manner of items.

The Salhus bowed, and assisted Menar as he eased himself into the chair. At that moment, some of the nearby displays lighted up; Menar almost started at the strange reaction. The Salhus laid one hand on his shoulder, almost as Illus once did, in an effort to calm him down.

When Menar was comfortable, the Salhus strapped an odd-looking visor to Menar's head; numbers and codes began their readout displays almost immediately. One by one, Menar's hands and feet were fastened in place by stainless steel manacles; almost automatically, a number of wires snaked their way into predetermined openings and bloodlessly fastened themselves to his circulatory system.

Then the Salhus picked up a thick, coiled metal tube with a needle on its end, and shoved it through the back of the chair and directly into Menar's brain stem. The younger man's eyes opened, his pupils completely dilated, as the entirety of the life-support system was revealed to his consciousness.

Menar could see everything: the agriculture colonies, the filtration systems, the aquatic recycling vats that would supply clean water to his fellow inhabitants. He could see the turbine fusion generators, the sensory apparati, even slight twinges of the desolation aboveground. The only thing he could not see for his distraction was the lone Salhus custodian, who bowed once to the chosen vessel of Sun before exiting the chamber and sealing him inside.

Menar concentrated, lost in his newfound responsibilities. The great Sun had need of him now, and he was at the service of the divine.

Euler One

I first heard of the Project Euler web site a couple of months ago, and it remains obscure among a public that isn't receptive to math problems outside of the classroom. The site has no practical reason to exist, mind you, apart from providing some curious fodder among intellectuals: Simply put, it posts math problems on a regular basis, then challenges people to solve them.

My biggest issue with the site is that most of its problems require the use of some programming know-how. While I do have the appropriate background needed for this, it doesn't feel right for me, somehow. There are any number of things that I can do with a monitor, a keyboard, a hard drive and six feet of LAN cable... it's just that solving math problems is something that I normally associate with paper and pen.

Setting that aside, one of the things I noted was that the first problem on the site could at least be solved without having to go into Java or C++:

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.

Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

The problem brings up a cute story that I heard many years ago. You see, one day in the late 18th century, there was a math class being held at a primary school somewhere in Germany. There, the teacher gave his students an exercise: He asked them to write down all the numbers from 1 to 100, then add them up and give him the result.

Within seconds, one of the children stood up and gave him the correct answer — 5,050 — without having written anything on his paper. When the astonished teacher asked him how he was able to come up with the result so fast, the boy explained his method:

The problem involved adding up the numbers such that: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... + 97 + 98 + 99 + 100. However, the boy had realized that this series was basically the same as: (1+ 100) + (2 + 99) + (3 + 98) + (4 + 97) + ... and so forth — it was all just a matter of pairing them up. The result was, of course, (101) + (101) + (101) + (101) + ... and there were fifty such numbers. From there, the boy just needed to find the product of 50 and 101, which was 5,050.

The boy would grow up to become Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the most prominent contributors to modern mathematics, and the subject of a rather nice story. But for the purpose of this blog post, I think that his method can be applied to this problem from Project Euler.

For starters, we're obviously looking for a value, X, where:

X = A + B - C

And:

A = Sum of the multiples of 3 below 1000;

B = Sum of the multiples of 5 below 1000; and

C = Sum of the multiples of 15 below 1000.

We need to subtract C from the sum of A and B because any multiples of 15 (which would be divisible by both 3 and 5) would otherwise be counted twice in our total. Equation-wise:

A = 3 + 6 + 9 + 12 + ... + 999

B = 5 + 10 + 15 + 20 + ... + 995

C = 15 + 30 + 45 + 60 + ... + 990

Due to the nature of divisibles, each of the above three equations can be rephrased as follows:

A = 3 * (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... + 333)

B = 5 * (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... + 199)

C = 15 * (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... + 66)

Then, using the young Gauss's method on each one:

A = 3 * (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... + 333)
A = 3 * [(1 + 333) + (2 + 332) + (3 + 331) + ... + (166 + 168) + (167)]
A = 3 * [(334) + (334) + (334) + ... + (334) + (167)]
A = 3 * [(166 * 334) + (167)]
A = 3 * [(55444) + (167)]
A = 3 * (55611)
A = 166833

B = 5 * (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... + 199)
B = 5 * [(1 + 199) + (2 + 198) + (3 + 197) + ... + (99 + 101) + (100)]
B = 5 * [(200) + (200) + (200) + ... + (200) + (100)]
B = 5 * [(99 * 200) + (100)]
B = 5 * [(19800) + (100)]
B = 5 * (19900)
B = 99500

C = 15 * (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... + 66)
C = 15 * [(1 + 66) + (2 + 65) + (3 + 64) + ... + (33 + 34)]
C = 15 * [(67) + (67) + (67) + ... + (67)]
C = 15 * [(67 * 33)]
C = 15 * (2211)
C = 33165

Therefore, the sum of all multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000 is:

X = A + B - C

X = 166833 + 99500 - 33165

X = 233,168

I thank Carl Friedrich Gauss for his wonderful logic, of course.

Unfortunately, quite a few of the other problems posted on the Project Euler site involve prime numbers, or otherwise need a lot of trial-and-error attempts when done on paper. These are squarely within the bounds of programmers, although I'm still perusing the list for anything that catches my fancy. If I find anything that I feel is worth solving here, I'll solve it here.

But then again, most of the people reading this have probably gotten bored by the time. Maybe I should just get back to the sex, violence and politika.

:)

Signal Number Three

The story of the Great Book Blockade was probably revealed sometime within March and April of this year by writer Robin Hemley, and eventually picked up by a few sources (which included the everpresent Philippine Genre Stories) as an obvious affront to Filipino readers. The issue received some measure of journalistic coverage mere days afterwards, when Manuel L. Quezon III's recent column appeared in the pages of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

At the moment, things seem to be rapidly coming to a head. The fledgling Bahay Talinhaga web site has emerged as the primary source for non-biased information regarding the issue, and actually features the result of correspondences with some of the major government players. The Book Development Association of the Philippines has gone as far as to release a strongly-worded statement on its side of the matter, and Customs Undersecretary Espele Sales now finds herself slowly being drawn towards the center of what's starting to look like another nasty blogstorm. Given such previous examples as Malu Fernandez and DJ Montano, this is not one of the most eviable positions in the world.

As I've arrived rather late to the party, I won't cover the situation proper in this blog. If you want a summary of the entire issue, I strongly recommend that you drop by any or all of the links above. If you must read one, go for the Bahay Talinhaga link — it makes for an excellent few minutes. But suffice to say that it's all about the price of books, and how it's starting to seem as though Philippine Customs unwisely decided to grab a stick and starting poking at the hornet's nest. (Strangely enough, Stephanie Meyer is indirectly involved.)

Viral occurrences like this seem to sweep the local blogging community every few months or so, to the point where they should really be taken into account by the larger institutions. You may be the most respected organization on this side of the Pacific, or you may be the most unassuming individual among our seven-thousand-plus islands... but once online opinion becomes completely polarized against you, then you might as well get ready for the worst ride of your life.

Blogstorms are an interesting phenomenon. They combine the virality of Internet media with the force of public opinion, with a little bit of armchair activism in the mix. They're easy to underestimate, and can nonetheless hit you with the force of a Mack Semi. In some cases, they can herald incredible popularity. In other cases, they can ruin lives... at least until the next controversy comes along.

I suspect that blogstorms are indicative of a human mentality that we used to see only in the newspapers: The media brings up a public scandal of some sort, the public eats it up for as long as it remains on the front pages, and eventually we all get bored with the news and move on to the next one. If it's not a collapsing pre-need firm, it's a failed pyramid scheme. If it's not a case of political corruption, it's a case of government incompetency. If it's not a basketball rivalry, it's a boxing championship.

If there's any distinction that comes with the blogstorm, it's the fact that we don't need the media to whip us into a frenzy. All that we need is a substantial story, a ripe set of circumstances, and a well-written article to pull us in. From there, it becomes a question of how many people post comments, how many people write responses, and how many people Twitter about it to an audience of followers. Google placement usually goes through the roof after only the first hundred links or so... and all this can possibly happen within the first few days.

The strangest bit is that we probably don't know what sort of article can possibly trigger such a massive response. I'm fairly certain, for example, that Hemley didn't expect his post to start the domino effect. Any number of marketing agents have tried — and failed — to harness the power of online opinion, which only implies that this sort of thing needs further study. I mean, it's not like we can explain it as a mere meeting between warm and cold fronts.

Today, it's books. Yesterday, it was Gucci. Last week, it was OFWs. It's funny how our minds can flit from topic to topic, and open up the absurdities of human behavior in the meantime.

That said, this is the sort of thing that probably passes for entertainment in my side of the world. In a sense, this is why some people watch news programs with a reverence that borders on, say, the latest season of CSI. This is interesting stuff, no matter how uncomfortable Ms. Sales probably feels whenever she approaches a computer nowadays.

Now, don't get me wrong — the "Great Book Blockade", as McSweeneys.Net has so dramatically dubbed it, is a serious issue. After all, the reputation of our "respectable" government agencies is at stake, not to mention the future of our reading public (which turns out to be a very sizeable lobby).

But that doesn't mean that we can't watch how this controversy unfolds and apply its lessons to countless other blogstorms that we're likely to see. I mean... even writers have to be scholars sometimes.

Disclaimer: May 2009

No, I have not been on hiatus for the last week. Instead, the reason for my sparse postings is far more mundane: I've been having problems with my home internet connection. As I spend a good portion of each day at work (or outside), I usually have to write in the evenings... and coincidentially enough, this is about the same time that the connection is not working.

This is actually a rare bit of downtime for the issue, and I'm not sure when the internet's going to cut out again. As a result, I'm going to have to make this a quick post — I come in, lay my cards out on the table, and then leave. I mean, the last thing that I want is to write about two thousand words, and then realize that I can't commit them to the Blogger database.

Fortunately, this is supposed to be a disclaimer post, and after any number of months doing this sort of thing, I like to think that I have my terms down pat.

First of all, everything written on this blog is the product of my efforts. I suppose that there's not much of a distinction between the coolly rational and absolutely insane bits, but I've literally written each and every word here. If you're looking for a nice ballpark figure, my best estimate would be somewhere in the area of three hundred thousand words as of this post.

That said, I occasionally pick up stuff that was written or developed by other creators. It's inevitable, I think — sometimes these other works can emphasize a point better than I can. Whenever I use another author's work or works, I try to enclose the proper acknowledgements within the same post; in this way, I recognize that all rights to such works revert to these creators. In the event that I fail to do this, these creators are welcome to contact me so that I can rectify the issue. I reserve the right to negotiate for these works, and I assure you that I try not to bite.

I ask a similar favor from anyone who would use any of my works outlined here: Please ask me for permission before using anything that you see, read, save or download from this blog. While I am not the kind of person who usually asks for compensation (unless the work is being appropriated for commercial purposes), I'd like to make sure that my words are not reflected in anything aside from their proper context. I would rather see that these articles are left free from harmful misinterpretation, if you don't mind.

I've made various threats and blusters over the years for people who may violate my requests, pervert my standards, or even so much as grossly offend my sensibilities. I won't repeat them here, but I do keep a lawyer in mind for any such issues, and these things do have a habit of getting around. Let's just say that preparations have been made, and leave it at that.

And now I must leave you again. Maybe this post will actually... well, post, and I won't have to worry about saving this in Notepad until the next time I catch a working connection. I'm going to see this setup fixed someday, even if it means switching ISPs or tangling the cords together with my bare hands. Silence, after all, is a terrible thing to behold.

You all take care now. See you soon.

Name That Toon!

Last month Ailee put together an interesting quiz regarding a number of old sitcoms from the 80's and 90's: Given an excerpt of their opening theme lyrics, you had to name the sitcom... and for added points, you had to give the continuation of that set of lyrics.

I'm proud to say that I managed to peg ten out of her twenty selections, with an added bonus for remembering how the theme songs for Perfect Strangers and The Greatest American Hero went. That said, I also managed to remember almost the entire Baywatch theme, and I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.

The whole exercise did get me thinking, though. While I admit that I do have a soft spot for some of the sitcoms of my youth, I don't look back on these shows on a regular basis. The last time I checked, I'm a testosterone-laden, flea-bitten guy... which means that I'm also an immature young kid at heart. What that means is that, whenever I look back on all the TV that I've ever watched, it's the cartoons that I inevitably remember.

Of course, cartoons were different back when I was ten years old. Most of the animated stuff on TV existed solely for the purpose of selling as much merchandise as possible, and as bad as that may sound, they were effective enough to spawn a fringe collectibles industry. However, some of them also had remarkably adult-oriented plots and fully-realized characters; There are very few contemporary cartoons on the picture tube nowadays that I would have liked to have had when I was a kid.

We've seen minor revivals of some of the most popular of these cartoons recently. He-Man and Ghostbusters both came out with "modernized" treatments some years ago, for example, and we get stuff like Transformers and G.I. Joe in theaters. There are quite a few shows that don't get as much attention but are still remembered fondly by their fans, and you can still find the occasional DVD collection or discussion group out there.

Given all that, I went ahead and tracked down the lyrics to some of the opening themes that I remember. Then, because I don't like making this easy on people, I pared these down to some of the less popular (but hopefully familiar) series, and laid out excerpts of these lyrics below. The first of these came out in the early 80's, the latest came out in the mid-90's, and I now present this challenge to you: Given these pieces of their opening themes, name these shows.


1. ...And you know there's a long long way ahead of you...

2. ...But bad guys are out of luck...

3. ...High in the mountains, or deep in the sea...

4. ...Let's watch the clouds go far below...

5. ...No one knows what lies behind the masquerade...

6. ...Powers of mind, strength, skill and speed...

7. ...Soaring through the highway of the heavens in their flight...

8. ...The music's contagious...

9. ...Two times the fun, wrapped up and rolled into one...

10. ...You're the only one who can scratch our wrists...


I'll have the answers up in a couple of days or so, along with some commentary from my end.

Still Busy

Yes, it's been a while. I did mention that I would be occupied for at least a couple of weeks, after all.

The strange part is that, while I did expect work to take up a good amount of my daytime, it's also taken up a significant amount of my evenings and my weekends as well. This is a bad precedent; while I do think that the job is interesting, I don't want to get reduced to spending every waking moment fiddling around with job-related tasks.

I suppose that I should have noticed something wrong when I was told that I would get some regular vacation leaves after my six-month probation period... but that I wouldn't be able to use them for at least another year. I'm pretty sure that there's some law against that. It's not a question of indentured servitude as much as it is the prospect of working oneself to death.

That's a misconception, by the way. I don't think it's possible to work oneself to death. It is, however, quite possible to be a miserable human being who is practically working himself to death.

I haven't written any fiction for quite some time now (due to my hectic schedule), and it looks like I'll miss the Palanca Awards this year. I have too many things on my plate right now, I think, although I do have at least a couple of interesting plots in mind. Strangely enough, I'm thinking of horror stories on the verge of May, although that's probably my inner manager talking.

I'm not afraid of losing my touch. I did put down the pen for a couple of years before, I think, just before I picked it up again and started writing where I left off. That's another paradigm shift right there — you shed whatever insecurities you used to have, and fill the gap with all those things that you picked up over the last couple of years. Peel the first layer off the onion and you'll see that it's full of words.

Someone asked me what my motivation was the other day, and I did wonder about that for a few seconds. It's just strange, how things shift and turn at the drop of a hat nowadays. Maybe I'm in it just to see what lies around the next corner. Or maybe I'm just looking for material for my next pieces.

Either way, I'm still around.