They say the memory capacity of human being is not really different with that of gold fish. That explains why I can only list four good things occured in my life within 2005: Getting married, buy a house, the trip to New York, and Janji Joni. See? It wasn't all about me :)

Yes, I've listed new year's resolutions, like always. But on the top of the list is my sincere hope that no more people I care die in the coming year(s). I know it's not my decision, let alone it fits as a new year's resolution. But let's just give it a try.

I hope I don't lose another family member. If my sister wanted to breed, I'd let her be, as long as she's healthy and alive. I'd let parents be parents, cause they're, you know, parents.
And I hope all my friends would be just fine. After all, they are my family too.

As with the rest of the resolutions, I don't wanna say. I don't wanna jinx it :)
So, Happy New Year, everyone.
And everybody sings!:

Its time now to sing out though the story never ends..
lets celebrate remember a year in the life of friends

Seasons of Love..

Posted by hera at 11:55 AM | Permalinks | Comments   

Sri Sadeli Kuhns (1938 - 2005)

Posted by hera at 3:45 PM | Permalinks | Comments   

A good friend, a business journalist, popped up at Yahoo Messenger this morning and asked "How much is 0.00775? Is it the same as 7.7 percent? Or can we say less than 1 percent?".

As an engineering graduate, I'm often asked to solve numeric problems encountered by my fellow journalists while covering stories, mostly business coverage. Nothing complicated, mostly are percentage, conversion rate and so on. It's basic math, indeed, but I totally understand that not everyone is good with numbers and math. That include my little brother, who really sucks at math that it becomes my weapon everytime he makes fun of my cooking ability (or inability). (Sexist and immature Bro: "You can't even make sambel and you call yourself a woman?". Me:"Hey, but I can count!").

However, as the cry-for-help is quite frequent, I begin to wonder why it is so hard for my friends to solve such basic math problem. Because all of them are really smart, and some are even brilliant. I mean, IQ sure is not a question here.

It's probably the way of teaching math in school. Educational system in this country basically sucks. But math teaching in particular is awful, with countless stories of 'killer' teachers who turned the class into a military camp, complete with physical torture, seriously. No wonder people hate it so much. So, unless you get good teachers or take personal interest in math, you will most likely end up like my colleagues, which is very unfortunate.

I was lucky I always got good math teachers, or at least not strict. It's different with physics, though, which I never liked. Although, I regretted it at college because civil engineering faculty, which I didn't apply for because it has lots of physics classes, was packed with cute guys! :)

Anyway, I actually love to help solving my friends' math problem. No, I don't take pride in it, it's just simple math. It's just that I love math, and there has been moments when I miss it so much after I graduated.
I don't miss college at all. But I never regret picking engineering over social science, although the latter is more in line with my job now. But so is science, especially when covering health.
In hindsight, I wish I wasn't such a slacker in college (blame it on teenage angst :P) and worked harder to get better GPA.

Now, if I really miss math ... No, I don't grab my college books and do the problems (because I left all of the books in Bandung hehe). I just bought Intisari magazine, filled out the figjig and solved the teka-teki that requires math solution (perkalian silang, persamaan kuadrat and all that) to solve it.

I still keep my formerly sophisticated calculator, which I bought only for Rp 200,000 but cost over Rp 1 million when I graduated 5 years back. I just wanna keep it as a memorabilia of working on problems of not just math, but physics, thermodynamics and so on; of those long nights spent in the labs, and of that dream of getting filthy rich working at a big oil company hehe. I even thought of passing it to my niece/nephews or maybe children. But by then, that calculator would be totally obsolete.

I love what I do now. But , I sometimes wonder what would happen had I chose the other path.

Posted by hera at 1:13 PM | Permalinks | Comments