Me 2012 with cousin Scott trying to feed cows grass in a field full of grass

Deleting more files and storing them somewhere

Japan 19th lunchtime Jan 2014

Still cleaning my computer. More memories of the family skiing trip in Japan

Molly

I needed to clear some files from my computer and I found this gem. Love you Santoh.

A refugee's story

One of my flatmates, Mees, volunteers at a refugee center in Rotterdam. I've heard many stories about refugees second hand from him, but until recently I hadn't heard a first hand account of what it's like to be Syrian refugee crossing into Europe. This is a story told to me in a bar by Mohammad, a Syrian refugee and civil Engineer, who spent about a year trying to make it into Western Europe.

1) He did not travel with his family. He made the journey by himself to cross the boarder into Turkey. He found smugglers who were willing to show weak points in the boarder where there was either no wall, or a very easily climbable wall. He made large parts of the journey by car, but near the boarder he had to walk for long distances and hide behind bushes whenever he would see Turkish boarder patrol. 

2) On his first attempt, he got caught by the police crossing the boarder into Turkey. Since he was not a smuggler there was no punishment or fine. The Turkish police simply put all the refugees in a bus and dropped them back on the Syrian side of the boarder.

3) He then tried crossing again (duh) and succeeded without getting caught. He got a lift all the way to Istanbul and stayed there for several months. He didn't like it there because there was no work and a large anti-Syrian aura about the city. 

4) He then decided to make the crossing into Greece. He hired a smuggler to personally escort him and a friend into Athens. Along the Greece boarder, an undercover cop tried to pull them over. The smuggler knew that if he got caught he would have to face 10+ years in jail, so left the car running in neutral and barrel rolled out of the car and into the nearby bushes. The police didn't chase the smuggler and instead tried to stop the moving car with Mohammad and his friend inside. Amazingly, since Mohammad had already crossed the boarder, they took him to Athens instead of dropping him back in Turkey. 

5) Mohammad described Athens as city destroyed by drug addiction and vacant homes everywhere. He was keen to get out to another part of Western Europe. He payed someone to create a fake passport for him so he could fly to a country in Western Europe. After being rejected on 9 separate occasions at the airport with 9 fake passports, one of his fake Dutch passports finally fooled immigration. 

6) On arrival in Amsterdam, Mohammad immediately went to the police station and honestly admitted he was an illegal immigrant with a fake Dutch passport. Rather than deport him, they took his passport and sent him to the refugee center in Rotterdam where he gets free housing, and learns Dutch culture. 

Mah Few Char part 1

This blog has been a long time coming. I have approximately 5 months left of my thesis, and it's time to start organizing myself for post graduation. All of my friends at Tu Delft are super optimistic and passionate about their post graduate life - they're looking way ahead and deciding what path they want to travel. I'm a bit different. So far my tactic of walking through life by staring at my feet has worked ok - I've walked a pretty chaotic path, falling down slopes and rising up others, but at least I've never had to tilt my head up 90 degrees to look at the ominous horizon filled with question marks.

Tu Delft has been a crazy challenging and amazing experience for me. I've learned a lot of theoretical concepts and I've created a base of some really good friends here. I have no regrets whatsoever. But if I'm honest with myself, I think part of the reason I applied to Tu Delft 2 years ago was so that I could delay the choice of which door to open. Coming out of my crippling failure at AECOM, I could see many doors begin to close around me; one door was going back into the industry, another was entrepreneurship, and the last one was academia. In the end, I chose to keep the academia door ajar with my foot. 

Wow, I just realized my metaphors in this post are pretty detailed. I hope anyone reading this can understand what I'm talking about...

Where was I? Oh yeah, I'm leaving Delft soon. Even though I've had a blast here and have learned a lot, I still consider myself no more prepared for the industry than when I started. It's kinda like I'm a caterpillar that has cocooned itself for 2 years expecting to burst out as a beautiful butterfly, but in the end, I disappointingly ooze out as the same caterpillar.  

This problem is compounded with my current long distance relationship. It's been exactly 2 years and 2 days since I started dating Karen Algeo (you may know her by "Kafu" or "Kaz"). She's the first woman I can say I love, and it pains me that my style of living, which is essentially no different to a jellyfish being pushed along by the current, is going to cause some severe problems for her. She's anchored to Australia with 2 dogs, a lease, a job and a solid network of friends and family. Even though she has bravely said she'd move countries for me (and even surrender the dogs!!!!), I'm still scared. Even if we both find a job in some country somewhere, I'm still very concerned that I'll be either blatantly incompetent at my job or hate it in some way. From my past experiences, absorbing failure isn't easy, but it's always been manageable - I could simply move countries and start again. Now the stakes are higher. If I fail again, I'll be transferring all those problems to Kaz and replacing them with a whopping hit of guilt. So, what's the best way a jellyfish and an anchor can coexist? The most obvious answer is to move back to Australia and stay there for a while until I learn to life better.

Stay tuned! No doubt I'll be writing more about this in the months to come. 

Cultural fluidity

Did ya see the title of this blog? You know it's going to be another rant about philosophical shit when it has smart sounding title like that, eh?

I don't think religions invent the moral messages embedded in their holy books, I think they preserve the moral views felt by the population at the time they were written. For example, I don't think Islam invented misogyny or crimes for apostasy, instead I suspect these were strongly held, non controversial views that were held by many people at the time.

The claim that religions help preserve culture is useful to an historian because it means a religion can act as a time machine to view a past culture. Even though religions evolve over time, they don't evolve fast enough to match the pace of technology now.

Religions are only a symptom of our flawed psychology, not the cause of it. So unsurprisingly, there are many other cultural norms that also cling us to certain ways of behaving. Our simple notions of justice, privacy, and property are also largely products of cultural norms that are preventing us from adapting to the speed of technology. The best example that illustrates this is music on YouTube. The law is a complicated mess of rules stating when you can upload a song, edit a song to make it a parody, or just upload a snippet of a song. In this case capitalism is the religion that has preserved our way of thinking.

I previously thought that the internet would be a facilitator in breaking down these cultural barriers. I thought the arbitrary worship of stereotypes, gender roles, traditions and even the nature of the 9-5 working week would all be highlighted and challenged by a new generation of people empowered and informed by the internet. I now have a much more pessimistic view. I think the internet can also be used as a echo chamber that pumps confirmation bias with 21st century efficiency. Sadly this means that cultural barriers can be reinforced with a thick layer of emotion. I can easily imagine a child growing up believing whole heatedly that she has the right to privacy in every meaning of the word, preventing her from rationally embracing the problems and benefits associated with data mining.

It's worth mentioning that in the book I'm reading now "homo deos", the author mentions that cultures are intrinsically turbulent. Meaning that they don't change just due to environmental effects, but also change due to inevitable self contradictions. While I think this is definitely true and very useful, I still think this form of natural cultural change can be counter balanced by the power of the internet, and can leave us stuck in some sub optimal condition.

The best case scenario is to have complete cultural fluidity. Where the traditions of one generation are quickly and easily broken down and replaced with other cultural norms of the following generation that are more in sync with the technology of the time.