ryz.

As early as the sixth century BC, the Greek Xenophanes had cynically observed that the gods of Ethiopian were inevitably black with flat noses while those of the Thracians were blond with blue eyes. So, too, many centuries later both Giambattista Vico and David Hume had argued that it was a universal tendency among humans to explain unknown events in terms of other beings like themselves.

Van A. Harvey, Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion

A result of short musings after reading Dawkin’s The Blind Watchmaker at my dorm’s library. It does not immediately clear to me that other than the very strong link between me and the cultural aspects of the religion that has been taught to me all this years, this is more personal.

People grow. When we’re still kids at the elementary school, where religion was heavily biased towards its communal qualities (I grew up in a religious school), we were being dictated with the fact that there is no universal, definite visual representation of God. Even our prophet is frequently depicted as a glowing orb of light in our story book, and it seems no publisher dared to put God.jpg in their publishing software.

Of course, being a religious school, it was accompanied by frequent mocking by the teacher towards the vivid, long-bearded white man, humanistic God of the other religion. Being good students, we laughed. Some of us still laughed at that kind of bizarre punch. What, we’re laughing because other people visualize their God, and we’re proud because we don’t? 

The bigger question is, don’t we?

I don’t want to postulate for I never actually asked people around me about this. When I was praying as a kid, it’s impossible for me not to imagine. Being restricted by the limitation of “hey, God is invisible, you know“, I imagined that me and my praying rug were floating in the space surrounded by stars, where each of the stars is as distant as others. Possible train of thoughts: “okay, people told me that God is invisible, I think He’s somewhere in the space, but because He’s invisible I can only see the stars beyond Him.”

Of course, now that I’ve learned college-grade physics and astronomy, it seems silly. Being growing up, I (along with others around me) constantly updates that image. I encountered new ideas on how am I supposed to imagine God and ideas that basically told me imagining God isn’t essential on the first place. Conflicting, yet exciting at the same time. However, it seems that (self-labeled religious) society subscribes to the notion that being religious means showing communal activities and generally frowns upon personal discovery. Point taken.

But that’s me. I don’t suppose the majority of people in my home country imagine that in their praying state. Some may think other scenes, such as all-white, The Matrix Reloaded-ish room. Some who frequently come to the mosque may imagine that very place, minus the people around them.  Some, I dare say, can’t really handle whimsical or otherworldly scenery might actually visualize Him as a person.

Which, considering my ethnic background, I doubt would be a blue-eyed, blonde twenty-something guy.

Yes, it’s about the Instagram acquisition. No, it’s not about why or why not.

One billion dollar is indeed a lot of money, and whether its perceived value is appropriate is remain to be seen for now. Facebook connects us with 800 million other people in this planet, while Instagram is popular because its name is memorable.

What I’m worried is, I don’t see any world-changing benefits from this.

Don’t get me wrong, of course it’s naive to expect a company to change the world. Nowadays they spent hundreds of million dollars to buy defensive patents and pouring gold into “promising” startups. It is encouraging to see new jobs are being created, the tech sector booming, and being a millionaire is cool. It is, after all, simply business. Business address demands. The only thing that a company need to do to succeed is simply  by changing the business world.

But then, I would argue that Facebook does more than that. It has a lot of benefits for humanity as the side effect of its business processes. It transforms the interaction between people on the internet, which itself transformed the world for the last two decades. It is, by hundreds of metrics, world-changing.

And they just spent 1 billion of their money on a photo sharing infrastructure and 25 million users, without innovating. Their engineers are among the best any company can have; they can easily create a better Instagram. Is Instagram the only way to generate more than a billion dollar of revenue? I doubt it.

Where’s the innovation? With that money you can launch a satellite to connect remote part of the world cheaply. You can instantly make people care a lot more towards the rest of the world. That’s what you’re really good at, aren’t you? Connecting people. You’re the telephone for 21st century.

Instagram might be a good buy, but to change the world they way you once did (and still do): there might be better things to put 1 billion dollar on.

Getting reports that my website isn’t accessible and returning (mostly) 504 Gateway Timeout error. I suspect Tumblr has problems for its custom domain service system. Moving back to WordPress in Webfaction (fantastic hosting service!).

As Li alludes to, China’s culture of mimicry is another possible source of plagiarism. For the civil service examination that functioned from 1000 to 1900, potential government officials were chosen based on their ability to memorize and regurgitate quotes and passages in their essays. Confucius, the preeminent philosopher who has influenced the Chinese mindset and way of thinking for centuries, always argued that he wasn’t creating anything, but merely transmitting the insights of sages from earlier days.

Unraveling Plagiarism in China, by Jasmine Ako of US-China Today

Note that this phenomena happens where there is emphasis on quantity over quality.Apart from the rampart thesis and final year project plagiarism, I think things are quite a lot better in Indonesia. Even the habitual cheaters will end their streak when they encounter a strict environment (which comes natural as they progressed to a better academic level). For the lower tier, however, academic dishonesty is prevalent. Do you know what you’ll get in Google’s first page search result of the word “skripsi”? 

Thomas Barker (NUS) summarizes the term “film nasional” much better than every other article I’ve read so far. I’m quite taken aback upon learning how the term that was used so many times in the media for the last couple of year actually has such a long history.Notable reaction from Nia Dinata (director of “Petualangan Sherina”):

Almost a decade earlier, producer Mira Lesmana attended a discussion at the national film development council (BP2N) following the box-office success ofPetualangan Sherina (Sherina’s Adventure 1999). When she arrived, a large banner greeted her ‘Filem Indonesia Sudah Bangkit! Selamat Datang’ (Indonesian Film Has Returned! Welcome!).“And I’m like what is this? We are then beginning to learn about all the politics, all the people, all the different interests that they have. And I thought my god it is messy, it is very, very messy.”

TL;DR: “Film nasional” is actually a subset of “Film Indonesia”, and Indonesia’s movie politics is crazy.