On Religion

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.

- Abraham Lincoln.

A Reflection - Melbourne and Its People

Reflection is never my piece of cake, so no, I am not going to write a reflection here. Instead, I would just like to direct you to a blog article I have just read, written by a Melburnian, on Melbourne and its people, in particular the immigrants.

A Few Hundred Meters - The Duality of Man

I have seen both people he described in the story, and reading his reflection conjures up the vision of walking on the streets by myself. It is a good perspective on Melbourne.

A Random Thought

Just wondering, when the day comes where it's feasible to transplant a brain, is there a practical value for this procedure? Who would want a brain transplant?

If someone wants to swab brain with you, would you like to try it? Would the whole brain-transplantation be banned? If it could be done, how would it transform the world?

Mind-body dichotomy, huh. Interesting.

Resource - Doctors and Medical Students

I often come across emails and chat messages which ask me things like: "Hey, please tell me about the medical course", "Can you tell me is it stressful to study medicine?" or "Is it good to study medicine in Melbourne?". Throughout the years, I always try to ascertain those questions to the best of my ability; however, sometimes it's just hard to do so, especially when I am busy or when things get excessively repetitive.

In the process of reading questions and writing responses, sometimes the irony strikes me - some people write to my email, saying that "Hey I found your email address through your blog, and I would like to ask you about the medical course."

The irony is that, I am expected to write about my life in brief in a single email, when they could have gotten all the info right away where they came from - my blog, the best place they could learn all about my life, the place where I pen down all my cheers and tears in the most minute detail and the most genuine expression. No amount of summary in an email is going to give them more details than what I have written in my blog throughout the years. Glimpsing through my previous posts, I have shared quite a fair amount of my life experience. Among others are my first encounter with dead bodies in anatomy class, our funny practical classes involving urine, some complaints about some dreadful aspects of my course, how I got deeply touched by some stories and so on. Nerdy as it seems, I even did some "post-exam reviews" after the previous two semester exams. Who knows, some people might find them useful.

Apart from my blog, there are countless blogs out there, written by real doctors and real medical students. Each of those blogs is a diary, where these people's personal lives are well chronicled in the cyberspace, waiting for you to discover. Instead of reading general e-mail responses like "doctors are generally busy and exhausted"; by reading real-life stories, you are able to understand why they are busy, why doctors enjoy or dislike their jobs, and by that you could decide whether or not you should choose this career.

Some people might find it hard to find medicine-related resources, so I decided that I would write this post as a sort of "portal" to people who would like to find more information about medicine, life as a medical student, or in particular, life as a medical student in Melbourne.

In my blog:

• Posts labelled "Medicine"
  - All medicine-related posts in my blog.
  
  
• Introduction to Medicine in Melbourne University
  - A general overview of my course, written in Chinese.
  
  
• "Learning to Become a Doctor"
  - One of the most touching articles I have read about medicine.

Some of my coursemates:

• Chong Chyn
• Jane
• Jian Wey
• Jing Yi
• Ka Lip
• Kimberly
• Li Chia
• Melissa
• Omega

Medical students in other universities:

• Wee Loon, Nooi Hoay (Monash University, Australia)
• Ru Hui (Adelaide University, Australia)
• Way Siong, Hai Xing (University of New South Wales, Australia)
  
• Patrick (Future student, Cambridge University, UK)
• Student blogroll in Malaysian Medical Resources - A long list of medical students' blogs.

Doctors:

• Doctor blogroll in Malaysian Medical Resources

Just a few words to wrap up this post: while this list is compiled for the convenience of people who want to read more about the life of people involved in the healthcare system, I would like to advise everyone to avoid e-mailing those people before you read their posts. If you really can't find what you are looking for in their posts, please write to them politely, and do include specific questions instead of vague open questions like "Tell me about your life as a medical student in Adelaide University". This kind of question is too hard to answer. And the bottom line of asking for help is, while it's reasonable to expect courtesy from people whom you write to, it's not their obligation to answer all your inquiries especially if you are not polite or sincere in the first place.


p/s: If your blog is listed here and you would like me to remove it for any reason , please write to me and I will delete the link immediately. I respect your privacy.

What is Wrong with ReCom?

As you guys might know, I am one of the so-called "moderators" of ReCom, the Worldwide Malaysian Student Network. Recently ReCom has been facing many troubles with the connections, and many people have been making many inquiries about the condition of ReCom.

Currently ReCom looks like this:

There seems to be a problem with the MySQL server, sorry for the inconvenience. We should be back shortly.

There has been a messy technical problem which can't be sorted out at the moment. We are facing a great deal of problem now, and after one week of intense troubleshooting by a few dedicated site-developers, everything is at a dead-end - they have already done their best, yet they can't find out what the hell is wrong with the site that caused the problem.

For a detailed explanation of the nature of ReCom's problem, please visit Jiin Joo's post here. If anyone is able to help out with the coding, please let us know. We need as much help as possible now.

Of Famous People and Their Quotations

I used to love quotations from famous people like Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr etc. Their words carry great weights, because they are the culmination of their lifetime achievement and insights that can only be seen with a keen eye. Time and over again, we stand on their shoulder so that we could look further. Like beacon, their words give us guidance and direction.

While quotations used to be my favourite collection items, as time goes by, I begin to have a mixed feeling about them. Eerm, actually not all quotations, but I start to doubt some quotations, especially those that are improvised, overused and abused in our society. In particular, I am talking about this quotation by the US ex-president John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address (video, full text):

Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country

I am sure most of us have heard of this immortal sentence somewhere. It's made its way into all quarters of our lives: history text books, politician's rhetoric speeches, organized brainwashing sessions, clubs and societies, or even fiery debates about the moral justification for someone to leave their homeland in search for a greener pasture.

And seriously, I hate it when people just throw out this sentence without second thought.

To begin with, I do not deny the aesthetic and the patriotic value in those words. In fact when I heard it, it did strike a chord in me deep inside, somewhere. It sounded nice when put in the original context, when John F. Kennedy was urging his countryman to build a brighter future by collective, selfless efforts, when the US is at the strange post world-war era and was waging a cold war with the Soviet Union.

However, underlying this line is an unspoken principle: when everyone works for a common goal, the common goal works for everyone. It's this reciprocal relationship that makes this line acceptable, when we come to terms with reality. In other words, elaborating the sentence, it might just mean:

"Ask not what your country can do for you - you should ask what you can do for the country instead. When everyone starts asking what they can do for the country, everyone will be actively playing an integral role in the country's development, and thence everyone actually benefits much more compared to the situation where everyone chooses to be on the recipient end. "

Of course one might argue that Kennedy didn't mean it that way at all, instead he's just saying it on the ground of "unconditional love" - a boundless affection, a love that one gives even if it could be unrequited. Unconditional love, while often held as the noblest of human virtue, is widely doubted to exist outside the framework of family ties and romantic affection. Even with the family and romance, we could very well argue that the love has a biological basis, but I'm not going into that right now. What I'm getting at is this:

What warrants an unconditional love? Is there an innate responsibility among us to love certain things unconditionally? Is that our country? Our culture? Or even our family?

How do people live up to their claims, when they say things like:

Chinese who love the Western culture but dislike Chinese culture are despicable bananas who don't deserve to be Chinese!

What says that every Chinese is born with immense moral responsibility to love a culture which they happen to be categorized in?

What about:

No matter what, you must love him, he's your dad after all!

What if your dad has been abusing you all the time, and he does not treat you well at all? Does he still deserve this unconditional daughterly love, just because "he's your dad after all"?

The last thing, and also the main thing I'm getting at, is this thing called "patriotism". Is patriotism an unconditional "love burden" that everyone must shoulder? Give a few minutes of thought into it.

I am not encouraging people to "betray" their country at their whims, no, not at all. Certainly patriotism, as with any other type of loves, is a virtue which deserves praise and acclamation. What irks me is, who are we to speak of patriotism as a nature-given responsibility, when to some people their country has not been worthy of love, just like the dad who's been abusing the daughter? I shudder.

Summing it up, this line by Kennedy is an idealistic statement, and taking it at the face value without considering the context, as many people do, does not make your point any stronger or your rhetoric more elegant. It just means that you have just abused another quotation without giving much thoughts. Today, whenever I see discussions surrounding decision, contribution and organization, regardless of the suitability, at some point someone will post up this line as some kind of veritable truth.

And I always flinch when I see it.

How Do You Stop an Addiction?

I have an addiction.

I need to stop homing in computers wherever I go, library, my house, Xuan Ni's house, computer lab, tutorial rooms.

I need to stop frequenting websites which has nothing to do with my studies. I check my Google Reader (An RSS reader) wherever I go so that I can see whether there are updates from my friends blogs, Digg (an "interesting news" website), Lifehacker (tech-related tips and tricks), Good Maths Bad Maths (to keep me mathematically literate), Pharyngula (biological stuff) and so on.

I learn stuff like how the Church of Scientology creepily prey on BBC reporters and look stupid in front of cameras, how a mirror would look like when you scan it with a scanner (it's surprising), how Carlton (the place I live in) used to have a train station, and how some states in US are against the law that makes HPV vaccine mandatory for young girls. Oh well, the last one might be slightly related to me, but then it's not going to be in the exams.

At the same time, I am not doing that much of work on this week's topic, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and also leukemia and lymphoma in general. Every night I tell myself "I'm going to start studying at 9", but I end up doing all sorts of stuff online and study for only half an hour before going to bed.

I visit ReCom to read and "patrol" the discussions because I am one of the moderators of the forum. When I got tired of the immature comments, I spend hours typing retorts and warning members when they go overboard. After three years of involvement there, to date my post count is 1836.

All that, and my exams are three weeks away. I should at least cut down Digg and ReCom in my daily addiction fix. They are killing my time, and probably my score too. Wish me good luck.


p/s: By the way, all the stuff I linked to above are strongly recommended websites and articles. If you think that the Internet is a boring place, have a look at those websites and you might have a second thought. :)