Just back from bridge session at SCBA with xl. I tot we did quite badly this time with my 2 declaring errors causing us bottom boards, 2NT-1 and 3NT-1, surprisingly we still did relatively okay and ended up 3rd out of 10 pairs. Wats unstated is that 2nd is like 6MPs away which is like 3 more top boards than us.

Indifference.

On the MRT 3 days ago returning from the concert, a man tht is not at all well-dressed started cursing the air. Okae, i dun knoe who's he cursing, perhaps its not the air. The all famous 4 letter vulgarity starting with "f" was used and its equally famed 7-letter counterpart starting with "b" was not spared either. THe whole point is tht it came out of the blue, this guy sitting there just started cursing for no reason, and to add that it's at night as well, on a weekend when there were quite a number of kids around. However, his attention-seeking antics drew only apathy from most of us in the same carriage. In totally ironic sense, there were two wedded couples with a baby each sitting opposite him. The couples were seated on the MRT seats whereas the babies were in prams facing each other. The two babies, out of obvious curiosity of seeing another of their kind, started pointing at each other and communicate using "baby talk". Their parents were obviously amused and tried to join in the "baby talk". Oh! I forgot to add that the couples didn't knoe each other, one couple was Malay while the other was Chinese. The six of them were so in their own world and totally oblivious of this guy who was in fact cursing straight in their direction. The guy finally gave up in the end and alighted at Simei i think. lol, the power of indifference?


In the book Outsiders, one of the main themes the author tried to bring through was for ppl to "stay gold" as in within Robert Frost's poem, "Nothing gold can stay" U see the irony already. The author uses the word "hardened" to describe a person who has lost his "gold", I shall replace with de-sensitised as i think it gives a more accurate description. The theme has nothing wrong, just tht in real life, circumstances dictate how we feel. As we move along in life and experience more things, we tend to become less and less receptive in terms of emotion to the surroundings and become more "analytical and scientific" so to say. Every event now would trigger a socially-accepted response from each and everyone of us. Moving towards a more refined society might just be hyprocrisy after all for u ain't supposed to feel tht much when u're refined.
Socs and greasers. Socs feel too little, greasers feel too much, quote Ponyboy in the book. and no matter how much we may try, greasers would never beat socs. In a way it's sort of true, feeling too much tends to being too much consequences and complications. I'll try to analyse tht using econs, forgive me for feeling too little.

If for say we look at a 2-player non-cooperative game, which quite self-explanatory, we have player A and B. there are 2 options which both players must pick 1. The two options now are to feel and not to feel. Next we look at the gains and losses, note tht this is not a zero-sum game, losses of opponent not equals ur gain. So when both players chooses to feel, they each gain a +2. If one of them chooses to feel whereas the other chooses not to, the one tht does not feel gets +3 and the one that feels get -1. If both player chooses not to feel, they each gain +1.
Lookiing at the above, common sense logic would tell u tht players A and B would be locked in a deadlock of both choosing not to feel. Assuming the players are rationale, who would in fact be so stupid to choose to feel and risk a -1 loss. The above concept is known as Nash-equilibrium founded by John Nash in his equilibrium theoreom which he came up with during his graduate studies. For a situation to be classified as Nash-equilibrium, both players must change their strategies until there is no more potential gain, considering that the other party does not change his strategy. Oh! back to the point, you should by now noticed the loss of +2 when both players chooses to not to feel as compared to if both of them chooses to feel. lol, even economic theory shows the exact same thing- tht it is rationale to not to feel.

For those who managed to come through all these and is sharp enough, the above problem is a adaptation of the famous Prisoner's Dilemma problem which u can find easily on the web. The solution to the problem by me: note that i assumed it's a non-cooperative game means that there is no binding agreement btw the players and each player does not know the other players' strategy. Therefore, i can offer u one solution, tht is to break the non-cooperative assumption-that is Player A must know that Player B would choose to feel and vice-versa, in tht case, both players would get the maximum gain. But would someone teach me how to do that in real life relations?