xylem || phloem

The Pool is Indifferent to My Mortality:

2012-01-24T13:13:00.001+08:00

It occurred to me twice, first when my chest tightened out of nowhere,
second when I was One with the chlorine water,
having waded interminable laps on the way to two hundred,
the Enlightenment.
The pool would utter, if it can think aloud like the lake in Narcissus, with the royal plural pronoun:
You don't have a set of gills, yet you dare treading in our watery realm?
(But then, in retrospect, fishes, or other possessors of gills, would die in chlorinated water)
You could almost hear this voice resonating in the back-and-forth lapping of the surface,
guided by gentle breeze of the rain prelude.
Mind suspended in contemplation, body suspended in this sort of reverse amniotic fluid
(it doesn't give birth; it kills)
I studied my almost still shadow on the pool floor,
tangled in strands of light, enmeshed
with what looks like the very fabric of Nature itself,
Yes, in the beginning was Let there be light, wasn't it?
And I wondered if I was being brought to the beginning or the end,
the amniotic fluid or the formaldehyde,
kindled or extinguished.

Did You Know It's Christmas?

2011-12-25T00:01:00.000+08:00

When I was on the way home from the Christmas Eve service, I heard this song again:

Someone in the car then remarked that it makes him a little uncomfortable, asking Mary repeatedly did-you-know because she did know, albeit partially, about these things.

Well, I think that's a-little-too-matter-of-fact way of looking at it. The way I look at it:

First, I believe the questions are somewhat rhetorical -- indeed Mary knew; the angels told her some things, even though most likely she knew not the full implications of what was about to happen to her. Which brings me to the second: the tone of the question is not interrogative but jubilant. Like the chorus in a play, we are called to sing along the heavenly hosts, eager to share our own excitement, the generations down the line who have been blessed, saying Amen to Mary's Magnificat: I shall be called blessed (Luke 1:46-55). In effect, the lyricist also calls us to put ourselves in Mary's shoes, sharing her joys of being chosen as an instrument of God. In fact, moments into the song, the word that immediately occurred to me was vicarious -- in other words, we are called to take part in the Magnificat, transcending the timeline gap and experience what Mary experienced, particularly her joy, vicariously. This perspective (heavenly host singalong) is certainly unusual and as there is a dash of dramatic irony too, since we already know what is going to happen, Mary didn't. All in all, it makes you think. Literary spices are useless if the ingredients are stale in the first place.

So ponder. Sing. Don't eat too much. Did you know you are going to have a blessed Christmas?

Caesius

2011-12-05T18:04:00.001+08:00

Unfortunately I haven't had many chances to answer 'caesius' when asked what my favourite colour is. What I would like to tell foremost is the reason why it is my favourite. It's a soft colour and pairs quite well with any other, sure, but it is a little bit more than the mere visual quality -- it's rather synaesthetical. Caesius is foremost the colour of emission spectrum line of caesium, the alkali metal that is its namesake. It invokes the alchemist, the transformer of things. Secondly, well, it is the colour of the sky and the sea, the two great expanses that we are sandwiched between. There is a poetic quality to it -- it evokes Genesis' "the waters above and the waters under". One poet expressed this quality like this: "The dolphins that stitch the sky to the sea", and yet another. It reminds us that we are part of the firmament that stitches the sky to the sea. That we are the waters between, our hearts sky-blue expanses, transparent and vast.

Sidetracked

2011-12-03T23:26:00.001+08:00

Treading on the dampened track, heavy fatigue-laden steps, soft whisper of night breeze, the night sky awash with moonshine, rivulets of sweat streaming down, breath punctuated by wheezes, vast expanse of track neatly divided by white bold lines, bad timing of 14:02, roughness of the track on bare feet, cars and buses gliding almost noiselessly outside, the orchestra of crickets, low constant buzzing and intermittent sounds by tiny fiddlers, mate-calling, peering into a puddle, looking for moon's ghost, submerged mirrory watery city found instead.

An Open Letter to A Friend Whose Friend Has Just Taken Her Own Dear Life

2011-11-28T22:15:00.001+08:00

Dear J

I'm sorry your friend has just committed suicide. I know you had just talked to her a few months back and I know you blame yourself for not talking her out of her suicidal tendencies. I cannot claim to understand your sorrow, since it has never happened to me, though a loss, a death is something that plucks the same string in all of us, playing the same rueful tune, rippling to the very core of our souls, so let me try a few words.

The first time you told me, I referred you to an article where a father struggled with the death of his son. Let me repeat a particular sentence, as it has stubbornly repeated itself in my mind:

It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.

I know you are sick of people telling you to get over it, so I'm not going to tell you to. But you must. However long it will take, you must. And do not lash at those people. If they bothered to tell you, they care for you. Listen, J, as I have told you before, it takes a strong character like yours to be able to wear one's heart on one's sleeve, but an exposed heart gets cut more. Victor Frankl said that the sun needs to endure burning to give out light. You have a big, healthy heart, J, that's why you are bothered about this in the first place.

Channelling your grief into something else might work. I see that you have started running again after recovering from your injury. I swim, or write silly letters like this. The obliterated place is literally 'against the letter', so I would use words to construct the obliterated back. Remember the ankle injury that cripples you, forcing you to wear ankle guard like a clumsy Robocop? It has healed, hasn't it? The big gash in your heart will someday close, too, and you will be able to run again, be it on the field-track or the life-track.

I believe in a proper closure. That's why we have funerals, to mark the closing of a life. We have New Year's Eve celebration, to mark the closing of the year. I don't know what is your version of closure, but I hope you will find it. Attend her funeral, talk to her parents, write her a letter, write her family a letter, let go of a helium balloon to the vast sky, take a night walk in remembrance of her; do what you can do. Mark it as a closure to a chapter in your life -- a bitter chapter indeed -- and start a new chapter. Take your time, but do not dwell so long -- grief is like quagmire, the longer you stay, the longer you will get stuck.

Remember your big heart, J, the one with gashing wound and has to endure nuclear fusion to shine?
Glow for all to see.

Yours

Revisitation

2011-11-20T00:22:00.001+08:00

I've come to realise that a part of growing up is to revisit childhood memories. You see, as a child we tend to be fascinated by every little thing, and our memories are glossed over, filtered through the rose-tinted spectacles. When you have grown up then, to those fond memories do revisitations, or as Kierkegaard put it, Repetition.
I'll give you an example. My mother makes really mean croquettes, and as far the child me was concerned, Mom's croquette was the damnedest thing ever to touch his palate. My father used to work out of town and occasionally brought a durian or two home. Again to the child me it was the most delectable thing ever. And I can tell you, the croquettes or durians I have since devoured can never compare to those I had, simply because I have associated Mom's croquette as the mark of a happy ocassion and Dad's durian as a sign of his coming home.

What I'm saying is you may need to peel off the extraneous layers of gloss on your memories, but then again maybe not -- why bother with that which has become the ideal, the unattainable? Maybe if factual information is important to glean, then you need to. But at least you need to recognise them as they are, and when you revisit the memories again, no need to suffer unnecessarily because the scenery isn't as magnificent as you remembered, the food isn't as delicious, the people aren't as kind, and so on; and chase after that which have become etched shadows in your mind. Because growing up includes an acknowledgement that you will never catch them.

Little Words

2011-11-19T00:05:00.000+08:00

A little while ago, someone asked me to retract a comment I have made. I did what I was told, but behind my one-word compliance and the act of deleting that comment, was a torrent of daggers. Of pejoratives, of expletives. Like a cartoonish scene where it is calm and warm by the fireplace, but by the window the droplets incessantly knock the glass like bullets from a submachine gun. Up to this moment I still wonder why I am so bitter -- understatement -- about the little incident; after all it was just one sentence, one line. A dim, flickering light in the midst of high-flux spotlights, making no difference in or out of existence.

If I want to be brief about it though, perhaps the reason goes something like this: As someone who aspires to use words to make a living, I produce every line with careful consideration, and this one was no exception. Wordsmiths take pride in their creations, and when those flickering children die, the wordsmith die a little. The issue was what I said can be interpreted as libellous, somewhat. But exactly that was what I took pride in in that statement -- it can be interpreted as praise or scorn. For those in the know, the interpretation can mean that the person in consideration is lenient, lenient to a fault perhaps, but nothing scornful. For those not in the know, this nuance would be absent. Thus I was playing the classical ambiguous statement -- crusing along the fence -- here. It explains the situation quite nicely with a veiled nuance, without giving too much away. "Witty enough," said the self-editor in me.

Let me digress. Words and mouth are quite intertwined. The mouth, being the producer of the spoken language, is subject to a lot of metaphors. Needless to say, they are related to speaking and eating. But: speaking produces, eating consumes; isn't that antonymic? But there is an excellent example which manages to unite the above ostensible opposites:

Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"
-- Matthew 4:4

And how interesting indeed that the one who spoke of these things is also known as the Word, or Logos in the original Greek. The mouth is then a point of reconciliation. Words are bread. Words nourish us. Indeed these are true for the words from the Scripture. But we bear semblances to the Word, after all we are in his image. Thus the words we produce indeed nourish sometimes, though at most other times they destroy.

In this way our words are powerful, our tongues are tongues of fire dancing a dance of destruction. And I'm reminded of this everytime I recall that little incident.

It doesn't help to abate the internal pouring torrent of expletives, though.

How Zeus Unites All There Is

2011-11-04T01:09:00.002+08:00

[Ms. Freedman / Sophomore English / Period 5 / Journaling prompt: Write a one-page story in which your favourite mystical creature resolves the greatest sociopolitical problem of our time.]

I can't exactly say what the greatest sociopolitical problem of our time is. And that's befitting of the title 'the greatest', it refuses to be captured in a few words. But I will try to explain it as I understand it. It probably can be summed up in one word: fragmentation, but give me the luxury to elaborate, if you please.

I would start with countries. Countries are strange -- people need to be segregated, given different identities, possessing different cultures. Ms. Freedman, I came from a third-world country. My great-grandmother travelled the rough seas to settle down there. Wars had been fought, blood had been spilled, our land had been occupied, our people had been slaves, because -- because of our exotic spices? Mr. Duma, our economic teacher, said that countries specialise and trade is beneficial. Tell that to our plundered land, to our raped women, to our children forced into labour. Tell them! Just because you happen to be born on one side and we on the other; no, it doesn't give right to you or I to treat the other side like trash. Countries need not be separated like this.

The very fabric of our economy is in shambles. I don't know about stocks and forex, probably you do, Ms. Freedman, because it seems like nowadays everybody's uncle is dabbling in stocks and forex. I am always bewildered at how people can make money based on changes in stock price and currency exchange rate. Where does it come from? Someone's gotta pay for it all: a man's fortune is another's misery. The feeling is somewhat like when how I sweat at the thought of air-conditioning -- where would the heat go? The law of equivalent exchange -- we will pay for our cool air somehow, maybe we are. Is this thing called economic structure a big Ponzi's scheme like the one cooked up by that Madoff guy? Would our children or theirs pay for the price eventually? Seriously, Ms. Freedman, how does one sleep with these thoughts?

My mystical creature would be able solve this. I choose Zeus. Alright, Ms. Freedman I know it's cheating -- 'mythical' is not exactly 'mystical' but fussing over minor differences may be someone else's greatest sociopolitical problem ever, you know. Anyway, Zeus. As in Zeus the ruler of the gods. The one in the presence of whom all heads, mortals and gods alike, must bow. The one who wield the thunder bolts. The one causing static tingling in the electronics section... OK, that must be a different god, but I digress.

Having reigned over naughty immortals (who acted suspiciously similar to adolescents, mortal ones), he should know how to reign over us mortals. He would establish good governance, unified every country into a federation, set up a sensible economic system, etc., etc. No, he won't be a communist leader, nor will he be a fully democratic one. Before Aristotle was, he is; so I would presume he knows something about moderation.

Having said that, I would advise not to rely on him completely. After all, we are mortals and he isn't. The word devil may have its root in the Greek word diábolos, slanderer, but I am more persuaded to believe that it goes back to the Sanskrit word deva, god. It reminds us that the angels can fall, the Morning Star banished to the depths of Hades. Which fits wonderfully to Milton's Paradise Lost, where the Greek gods are cast as the fallen angels. See? I did my summer reading, Ms. Freedman.
Alright, Ms. Freedman, can we drop this farce already? I've told you how my favourite mystical creature resolves the problem. Well, the problem is still there, and it's not going to mystically resolve itself. So we've got you and me and a bunch of other people. Not mystical in any way, but that's the point.

Freedom

2011-10-30T22:56:00.001+08:00

[2011 'O' Level English Language Paper 1 Section 1 prompt.]

She was running away. What from, that, she would have to get back to you later -- there was too much adrenaline coursing through her veins, confounding her thoughts, like an overcast black cloud with few flashes of lightnings of recollections. She sensed the cool wetness of grass under her feet, the twinges of pain from the cuts and bruises on her limbs, metallic smell from slight lacerations near her thighs, chilly breeze coming from gaps through her torn skirt and blouse; all dampened from adrenalinic numbness. The undergrowth was thinning and she came upon a clearing; she picked up her pace even more, until the sky is covered again with lush green foliage. The open sky somehow instilled a deep fear inside her, as if she were a furry little rodent keeping out of the sight of the flying talons who rule the sky. Her body felt mechanical: her bare feet trod the muddy ground hard, her arms flailed with reckless rhythm, her breathing heavy and puffed; she was not in control of any of these -- her body had executed the self-preservation programme that seated her conscious mind in the backseat.
Sometime earlier, she was packing her bag. Passport, bank savings passbook, a few sets of clothes. She was prepared to leave for good. Her father might have gone easy with his beatings, but his demeaning words singed hotter than cigarette burns. She was going to another city across the country; putting hundreds of kilometers between her and him was a start -- it won't make those bruises on her back heal faster but maybe it will for those on her heart and soul. She was walking slowly to the bus station, burdened by luggage, doubts and uncertainties, when her father called her and beg her to at least meet him one more time for him to apologise. She stopped on her tracks and stomped hard on the ground -- she was going to say no, but in the end she relented. She should have known something was amiss when he asked her to meet not at their own home -- not that she thought of it as home anyway.

When she woke up, her father was standing over her, her savings in his clutch. Two men were holding her down. When her father walked away, the men started to grope and undress her. She tried to summon her strength, though whatever drug they gave her had sapped her force and will. The lump in her throat blocked her voice. Her memories were in bits and pieces after this. She remembered struggling, a few well-placed punches and kicks to the crotches, scratches to the faces, dental and jaw finger-grinding; she somehow managed to elude them. She ran to the woods.

Once during his usual belt-whipping, her father had asked her, Who do you think you are? Thwack. Who are you? Thwack. Thwack, thwack, thwack. Who is she? The question was ringing in her ears. She didn't raise her voice, but her answers flashed loud and clear in her mind. A girl. An 18-year-old. A high school recent graduate. A ..., a daughter? She said her name. But this was wrong, too, because the thwacks did not stop. They were getting louder.

Exhaustion started to catch up to her, the clouds in her mind parted a little. Now she could tell you what she was running away from: her father, her rapists, herself, or rather the labels pasted on her masquerading as herself.

Up ahead, she saw the highway. The road was long and it extended beyond the horizon. Her father was not there, neither were her attackers, neither was her passport. She fell to her knees, looked up to the vastness of the sky, letting out a sobbing wail, finally freed from it all.

(637 words)

The Tale of a Fallen Angel

2011-10-29T21:09:00.001+08:00

[Six-word story challenge.]
Overeaten, she fell with mighty-loud thud.

The Natural Philosopher's Guide to Science

2011-10-14T01:14:00.002+08:00

I think chemistry so be a sub-discipline of physics and be called "valence shell dynamics".
It doesn't deserve a separate Nobel prize category any more. It is largely predictable by theory as this current prize was. Yes, the experimental discovery should be awarded too
-- A comment

You could almost hear it. The collective sigh of chemists all over the world, I mean, over similar sentiments as above. Of course as a chemist-in-training I should say something in apologia. Though as soon as I said that, I realised that the epistemological perspective of the field is nowhere found in my training. So treat this piece as what I thought I knew about chemistry at the meta-knowledge level, and why I found the aforementioned comment distasteful, to say the least.
I will begin with definitions, like all good epistemological pieces should. To be sure, physics is the study of physical things and how they behave, in other words, the physical laws. Technically then, chemistry is certainly a subsidiary of physics, but so is biology, geology, climatology and every other subject studying the tangible, because the tangible obey physical laws. Such classification then becomes useless, the field too bloated, which defeats the purpose of classification in the first place.
As such, we must recognise the two kinds of classifications here: the technical one and the utilitarian one. So, an attempt to unify chemistry under the grand umbrella of physics is technically proper but not useful. Utilitarianism here is of course anthropocentric -- Man is the measure of all things, said Pythagoras. The study of behaviours of valence electrons has implications in the chemical industries -- from paints, fertilisers, cosmetics, foodstuff, to drugs -- that are paramount to our lives that they need a separate category. This is even truer for the engineering fields, the direct spawns of physics, that the industry would benefit from clear distinctions. As important is the utility to the academic learning. The massive amount of knowledge has to be compartmentalised -- the size of the field should be roughly learnable within a four-year bachelor's degree. Imagine if a physics degree also requires you to learn chemistry to the level of the current chemistry degree -- how long would that take, and how useful is that for the learner who doesn't intend to go to grad school? And the utility values to the industry and academia are intertwined. The training during the four-year bachelor's should be at least enough for the learner to have a basic grasp of the field to start out in the industry (or his curiosity piqued enough that he would choose to go to grad school, but that's another story).
Sure, the divisive line blurs when one talks about physical chemistry for example. Does thermodynamics belong to the realm of physics or chemistry? Sticking to utilitarian value, one should resist classification then, and embrace both labels, because, why not? The separate classification of chemistry should serve to make clear; when it does not serve this purpose and potentially misleads instead, then the classification has ceased to have any utility.
In a talk I attended where Aaron Ciechanover, 2004 Nobel laurate in Chemistry, was the speaker, someone, evidently an organic chemist grad student, asked about the role of synthetic chemist in increasingly biological approach in drug industry. He gently rebuked the questioner regarding the absurdity of such division. In short, he lamented the current state of affairs where science departments are so isolatedly fragmented they are not communicating and collaborating with each other. When I think of these things, strangely enough I am reminded of Victor Frankenstein, whom Shelley described as a 'natural philosopher' if my memory serves right, and his creature. That there was a time when the hard sciences are united on a front called natural philosophy, before it has inflated to the the sewing of appendages that barely fit each other, the chimeric monstrosity it is today.
--
Recapitulation so far: It is of utility value to have chemistry as a separate field from physics. This argument may not apply to other fields, so I'm going to offer another argument that applies in all cases. First, if you haven't seen the xkcd's Purity spectrum, go see. Hoewever, as you might suspect, chemistry is not just applied physics, biology is not just applied chemistry and so on. You see, at some point, neuronal connections (biology), neurotransmitters (chemistry), and a bunch of other stuff, as a system, gains enough complexity to become your mind, your consciousness -- picture gestalt, that which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You can't go from physical laws to understanding schizophrenia because the interactions involved have become intricately, impossibly complex to unravel. Such property of complex systems is called emergence, and fields are systems of knowledge. Consequently, while you can say how pure your field is compared to to others, it doesn't make one field any more complex than the others, thus any more worthy of study compared to others.
Bottom line is: dividing sentiments are not useful. There is no point in arguing whose field is more significant. What the scientist must do is make distinctions when necessary and useful, and not make them when unnecessary and useless. Carry on that spark of lightning that keeps a burning fire inside Frankenstein's creature's heart; that keeps him alive, that leads him to search himself, that pushes him to wrestle with his creator, that makes sewn appendages move as one.

Wordsmith

2011-08-27T22:57:00.003+08:00

One of the tasks of a writer is: to give forms to the formless, perhaps even primal, instincts, urges, train of thought, notion, that lurk behind the curtain of the unconscious, at the back of one's mind. Good writers make you go: "Wow, my thoughts exactly." Deep inside, the reader already knows and the writer simply crystallises the knowledge into cluster of words. It sounds Jungian, but I do believe the collective unconscious exists, in one form or another.

Unfortunately, this talent to crystallise comes at a cost. Almost all writers are afflicted with some sort of mental problem; think of poets and their associated tragedies. This is not suprising: literature verily reflects humanity, and the curator of the knowledge of humanity, the writer, stands in the midst of it all, the vortex of which may corrode the soul. I said 'may', because there is another possibility which is the very opposite: it may temper the soul. Wilfred Owen drank from his bitter cup -- his experience of war -- that's the source of his art. There were other writers who got drunk from their own tragedies and took their own lives. But there are also those who swallowed the poison and rose up stronger. To the writer, the act of writing may be itself therapeutic, redemptive even. Their darkness precipitated from the hearts to the pages. The grief percolating between the lines.

But they are they; and it remains to be seen what will become of the rest of us, each a writer of our own lives. Will we join the ranks of the tragic or otherwise? Yes, each of us should consider himself a wordsmith; it's not the matter of being a professional or a dilletante, but simply being one is part of being human. Your words will outlast you, outlive you, and I do mean 'outlive' you in terms of vivacity:

I asked the servant Leo why it was that artists sometimes appeared to be only half-alive, while their creations seemed so irrefutably alive. Leo looked at me, surprised at my question. Then he released the poodle he was holding in his arms and said: "It is just the same with mothers. When they have borne their children and given them their milk and beauty and strength, they themselves become invisible, and no one asks about them anymore."
-- Hermann Hesse, The Journey to The East

So, back to writing, shall we?

On Kierkegaard's Repetition

2011-05-23T10:23:00.003+08:00

So once again the girl was not an actuality but a reflexion of motions within him and an incitement of them. The girl has enormous importance, and he will never be able to forget her, but her importance lies not in herself but in her relation to him. She is to him, so to speak, the border of his being, but such a relation is not erotic. From a religious point of view, one could say it as if God used this girl to capture him, and yet the girl herself is not an actuality but is like the lace-winged fly with which a hook is baited. I am completely convinced that he does not know the girl at all, although he has been attached to her and she probably has never been out of his thoughts since then. She is the girl—period. Whether, more concretely, she is this or that, the loveliness, the loveableness, the faithfullness, the sacrificial love for whose sake one risks everything and sets heaven and earth in motion—that never enters his head.
...
He bit the chain that bound him, but the more his passion seethed, the more ecstatic his song, the more tender his talk, the tighter the chain. It was impossible for him to create a real relationship out of this misunderstanding; it would, in fact, leave her at the mercy of a perpetual fraud. To explain this confusing error to her, that she was merely the visible form, while his thoughts, his soul, sought something else that he attributed to her—this would hurt her so deeply that his pride rose up in mutiny against it. It is contemptible to delude and seduce a girl, but it is even more contemptible to forsake her in such a way that one does not even become a scoundrel but makes a brilliant retreat by palming her off with the explanation that she was not the ideal and by comforting her with the idea that she was one’s muse.
-- Repetition, S.A. Kierkegaard

The above extract is the crux of Repetition. It tells of a young man who is in love, yet agonises over it. But why? Yes, initially he fell in love with the girl, but thereafter he realised that the girl is a trigger of sorts, that awakened the 'motions within him', or what Constantin called it later, 'poetic awakening'. You can say that he fell in love with Love itself, namely the embodiment of all the poetic qualities of erotic love: the thrill and palpitations, the devotion, the sacrificial.

No one is ever safe from being in the young man's shoes. In fact, Repetition itself was written autobiographically to some extent. Be wary, then, of falling in love with love; it will only bring you agony.

Falling in love with love is falling for make-believe
Falling in love with love is playing the fool
-- Falling in Love with Love; Lorentz Hart, Richard Rodgers; sung by Frank Sinatra

Murakami on the Poolside

2011-04-23T21:39:00.003+08:00

That day I woke up a little late. My head still cloudy from excess of sleep, I showered, then made a cup of double-dose coffee (somehow one packet of instant coffee wasn’t enough nowadays). I sat at the lounge, absorbing caffeine and morning news. I sorted out the plan for the day: I would go to the campus sports complex for a swim. I mulled over this a little while. I was having doubts whether since the previous day had been a public holiday, so the pool might not be open. I decided I should still go, carrying some books so I could go to the library to study – that’s the contingency plan, and in any case exams were pretty near.
So I started out. It was an hour before noon but the sun was not out. It looked like it was going to rain, but my mind was already made up. On the hour-long journey, I read the book I was currently reading: a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami. I had just finished one novel by Murakami and decided to read his other works. In no time I reached the sports complex.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the pool was open. My usual routine when I swim alone was to swim 60 lengths for endurance training. For club training, there were more sprints which can quickly exhaust you. With leisurely pace, I could usually do it under one and a half hour. As I stretched, I prepared myself mentally. The length itself was not a problem – usually the first few tens of laps feel draining all right but after that you will not feel anything much – you would even feel time is standing still, a taste of eternity, if you will. The problem was that usually my mind tends to wander and I don’t want to think about depressing things in the middle of a swim.
At the end of fourteenth lap I heard the lifeguard’s whistle. Oh no, I thought, must be lightning alert. A thunder growled far away to confirm my suspicion. I sat at a bench near the lockers and the water cooler, not sure whether to call off the swim altogether or to wait. I decided I would wait. The droplets of water started to come down. It was not particularly a heavy downpour, but it was steady and the sky was particularly dark with thunder clouds. After a few tens of minutes some of the swimmers gave up and went to shower. I waited until I was more or less dry and then picked up Murakami from the locker to read.
Murakami’s works are quite unusual, though perhaps it is that very novelty that appeals to people. Some of his works have no moral of the story. It was just an episode of someone’s life, with nothing particularly interesting that the reader should learn about or philosophical questions to think about. They rarely have conspicuous conflicts, followed by steep rising climaxes and resolve – most of the time it was flat. As someone trained in literature, I found his works refreshing.
The slices of life Murakami describe themselves may not be very interesting but his style of writing has the no-pretense, honest quality to it, his meanings not buried in complex metaphors, which only adds to its realism, the impression that the happenings may very well happen right then at someplace.
There is also quite often-recurring motif of existentialism, like you feel the you you see in the mirror is not the real you. I suppose everyone feels a little bit like that sometimes, and the way he describes it flows fluently. I do feel like that sometimes. In a swimming event, for example, I would psyche myself that the one swimming is no longer the limited I but someone else. Then the I that observes the other I will feel distant like a faraway echo of ages past.
After sometime, I arrived at Firefly. After few sentences I realised that that short story must have been the one expanded to the novel Norwegian Wood, which was the one I had read before. I hesitated for a second whether to skip the short story but I read on. As I said, Murakami’s powers lie not in the plot but in his descriptions. I re-tasted being in Watanabe Toru, though somehow this Toru felt a little different. After a while I realised that all the names of the characters were missing, as if they were still rough sketches blurred at the edges. I recalled the particular scene about the firefly, though I felt it had no real significance in the novel. In the short story, though, the firefly scene was in the spotlight and a little carried away by the story, I was swept with a wave of loneliness.
Right before the very last paragraph, I happened to look up and saw a swimmer in the pool. Apparently there was no more lightning. I replaced the bookmark and stored away the book. When I walked away from the lockers, the sky cleared up and the sun came out from its hiding place. I plunged into the water. As I glided, I saw at the bottom of the pool my own shadow tangled with brilliant strands of light.

And time stood still.

Deliverance

2010-12-25T12:58:00.000+08:00

Among the many Christmas songs, this particular line leaves a deep impression on me:

Mary did you know?
...
This child that you've delivered
will soon deliver you.
-- Mark Lowry, Mary Did You Know?

So, let us remember amidst all these Christmas celebrations -- we always think that the world delivered Jesus, when it's really the other way around: Jesus once delivered the world into existence and He will deliver the world once again into salvation.

So, let me deliver the Christmas greetings to fellow Christians:

Jesus was once delivered in a stable,
of uncomfort, of uncleanness
But this year
May He be delivered in your heart
Knowing that He will deliver you someday

When it breaks

2010-10-22T22:46:00.000+08:00

When it breaks,
Appropriately in the dead of the night
When things come to a close

Where it breaks,
Appropriately within a similar, much bigger symbolism as itself

Who breaks it,
Appropriately oneself, for whom it represents

Something of glory, a faraway dream-like past;
(A jar pickling the totality of youth, passion, ambitions, aspirations,
Identity -- or prototype thereof)

A bystander, or participant, of the scene -- depends on how you see it --
Appropriately the youth just like oneself was
Before breaking

When it breaks,
Cracks appear on my heart, it too almost breaks
Invisible fragments bursting, a firework of entropy
But when it breaks,
Something was set free

Sink your head underwater

2010-09-26T12:34:00.001+08:00

On a summer's day in the empty pool
Swing your arms and legs and all
Wonder at the sea of sparkling ripples
beneath and above

Sink your head underwater
Cast aside those goggles
Close your eyes, your eyelids little dams of tears,
Hear the whispers of the waves beckoning:
Come, flow with us

Hoist your head up
Look at the sky

Sink your head in the blue expanse
below, above;
in the blue expanse that is
yourself.

Uncountability

2010-09-20T00:07:00.000+08:00

"I don't have much friends," a friend remarked sometime ago on Facebook. The grammar Nazi in me almost jumped at the incorrect quantifier, but I held back and pondered a little.

When you think about it, his quantifier there makes very much sense. Friends are uncountable. You value some like treasures; some are just plain bad company.

And this is especially true in the context of social networking. It doesn't matter how many Facebook friends you have; it does matter how much.

Toxic

2010-09-19T00:38:00.000+08:00

If you think the only people who care about metaphorical-to-literal transcendence are pedantic linguists like yours truly, then you are mistaken.

It is important to be aware that metaphors are woven to the very fabric of language itself, and affect its dynamism.

Take toxin, a relatively modern concept due to the advance in medicine. If you trace the etymology, it comes from Ancient Greek word toxikos (τοξικός), which "[pertains] to arrows or archery". The concept of toxin being deadly and fast-acting is then borrowed from arrows: toxin is a metaphor.

Consider how toxin now has transcended its metaphorical husk, flapping wings, gliding gracefully on the literal plane, landing on the minds unaware that it is a denizen of the otherworld.

Literally

2010-09-19T00:17:00.000+08:00

There has been some commotion regarding the use 'literally' a general intensifier, basically just a substitute of 'very'. Language Log has a post with links to older posts and xkcd, here.

My initial reaction was, you guess it, lamenting of the disrepaired state of ignorance concerning semantics nowadays, and left it at that.

Recently when I came across another usage, I reconsidered my stand. Perhaps 'literally' here could just be another case of metaphorical-to-literal transcendence. The purpose of this device is, I repeat, to confuse the literal and metaphorical planes; one is transcended to the other, so as to deliver impact. Very similar to the effect of hyperbole: we know it's just an exaggeration, yet the impact is still there.

Put in another way, 'literally' here is to be interpreted metaphorically, so that the act of transcending the metaphorical plane to the literal plane, the act itself exists on another metaphorical plane altogether.

So there you have it. You may employ 'literally' as a general intensifier. It's just, if you don't think about why you may, that is pure ignorance.

God and Personification (Addendum)

2010-08-22T14:19:00.000+08:00

Just a bit of juxtaposition. Divine simplicity says that God is simple. On the other hand, Man is a composite, which is nicely captured in this excerpt:

The phenomenon called 'I'
Is a single green illumination
Of a presupposed organic
alternating current lamp
(a composite body of each
and every transparent spectre)
The single illumination
Of karma's alternating current lamp
Remains alight without fail
Flickering unceasingly, restlessly
Together with the sights of the land and all else
(the light is preserved... the lamp itself is lost)
(the totality flickers in time with me
sensing all that I sense coincidentally)
For these twenty-two months
Brought together in paper and mineral ink
Passage by passage of light and shade
They are truths as they are drawings of the spirit
-- Kenji Miyazawa, Spring and Asura

Apologia pro semita meo

2010-08-22T14:07:00.005+08:00

Or defense for my (university) course. Or something like that.

Looking at my writing alone, one probably cannot tell that I am actually a chemist-in-training.

I have been told for ever that I belong to the science stream. I suppose I do. I always excel in the sciences, my maths is not so bad, and am mostly a creature of logic. Nevertheless I have always suspected that I have some penchant for the Arts, if only an inkling of it. Take my linguistic pedantry; it's been there since I was at junior high level.

A former teacher said that a person should not be pigeon-holed. That is something I'll always remember, since it confirms my aforementioned suspicion. To label a person as science person or humanities person is just shallow thinking, Of course, it is alright to categorise for certain purposes, say, for education streaming or screening potential employees, for example. But many cannot see the underlying complexities beneath the labels, and end up seeing people as caricatures of sorts; inadvertently oversimplifying and degrading them.

So, despite my proficiencies in seemingly mutually exclusive areas, I ended up in the science. Why? Because, as those who have gone through it can tell you, you can only choose a narrow area. I should digress a little bit to describe my education philosophy. One of my students asked me before, why he has to do English, or Maths, or other subjects, for that matter. I answered, because a person has to be equipped with all areas of knowledge until certain level. At least junior high level, or if you can, high school level, in my opinion. This level is arguable, but I think the paramount criteria are: 1) It is enough to get by in life, 2) It gives enough glimpses of the area in consideration to stimulate interested students to specialise in it. You have to specialise, simply because the amount of human knowledge is too enormous that one cannot know everything in-depth. This vantage view of education is illustrated nicely here.

Next question, why science not other things? (Note that I do not differentiate between physics, chemistry, or biology here, simply because just as you should not pigeon-hole people, you should not compartmentalise science, if you can afford not to). Take a look at my process of elimination. Take into account my nature: I am quite pragmatic, but not shallow; and most of all, am a pursuer of knowledge. I crossed off the humanities, since I doubt I can make a decent living out of it; besides I have greater talents for science. I crossed off business since I do not want to end up as money-making machine. I have read accounts of people feeling empty despite having great wealth (more like, from literary works. Literature is a lens on humanity, more on that next time). I thought to myself, why wasting time learning about laws that can change. Perhaps such is the nature of the said emptiness, the accomplishment of nothing. Another reason that I can put up quite eloquently, if I may say so myself, is that the financial and economic systems are just creations of man, that is, artificial and transient. The laws of nature that science seeks after, on the other hand, are enduring, and will be there as long as this world as we know it exists. To this, a friend countered: but money makes the world goes round. To that, I quipped: perhaps, but I know angular momentum sure does.

Why not engineering? I have already revealed a little that I am interested in the inner working of the universe, more so than applying it into design, to produce technology. I am more interested to be at the frontiers of knowledge, and make a little dent on the current boundary. But the very fundamentals are also not for me. In science and engineering tree, maths is the root; physics, lower stem; chemistry, upper stem; biology, branches; engineering, fruits. I chose chemistry because of its centrality; there is balance between the fundamentals and the applications.

Academia, then. First, I enjoy teaching. Second, as I said, I want to be at the frontiers of knowledge, so I have to do research. I have to admit that the prestige of professorship is also quite alluring. But a darker reason is that I am just plain dastardly. I want to deal with the world from the the lofty ivory tower, dealing with living indirectly, cocooned by the scientific bubble. Say what you may, but I am of the opinion that there is a need for scientists to be separated from the 'world' at large, even though the separation is artificial. In The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse depicts a world where this separation is even made geographical. Castalia is the central of academia, much like Vatican is the central of Catholicism. Castalia is called 'aristocracy of the spirit', which has an inkling of elitist connotation. Yes, the separation is unnatural, nevertheless necessary, to protect the scholars from 'money, fame, rank'. Not for everyone, but I feel that it is for me. Deep down, I am just fragile: I don't have the ruggedness to take on the world by its horns; it will break my spirit.

Ultimately, whatever field you are pursuing, keep in mind your purpose. Mine is the pursuit of knowledge, truths that are everlasting. Then to pass on this knowledge for generations to come.

That you are here — that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
-- Walt Whitman

God and Personification

2010-08-22T00:29:00.002+08:00

I used to wonder why we Christians say that 'God is love', not 'God is loving'. 'God is loving' is fine, because 'loving' is an adjective, so it is a modifier, explaining the attribute of God being full of love (it seems that the linguist has always been dormant in me). Well, now that I am a student of literature, I found that it is just a personification, a literary technique. A quick recapitulation, as I wrote before:

When the first letter of a word is capitalised, it is like a name of a person, so we say that the word is personified. Other notable examples would be 'Mother Nature' and 'Death'. Think of those two words carefully -- if you are imaginative maybe you will conjure images of benevolent mother and grim reaper. So you see, personification firstly changes the status of the intangible to the tangible. Fear, nature, death -- those are abstract concepts and are difficult to picture. What personification does is giving them bodies -- embodying them in real objects, bringing them from imaginary to real plane. What's more, they are not just tangible objects, but persons. With personalities, with emotions, with will, with mind; it's a Being.

Then it makes sense. God is, then, not only loving, but the very embodiment of love. Seen in this light, John 1:1 also makes a lot of sense:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
-- Jn. 1:1

'The Word' is translated from the Greek word logos [λόγος], from which we derive logic and all our -logies; basically, knowledge. Here we can see also that God is also the embodiment of knowledge itself.
But it should be noted that this is not, and should not be regarded as, simple personification.
First, as the name suggests, personification seeks to make a person out of something, to the level that other persons, that is, we, can relate to. We borrow the attributes of 'Mother', for example, to describe Nature; something we can easily conjure images from. Sometimes, personification also borrows infallibility of humans, subject to passions and other things. This, of course, cannot be true for God, since an infallible God is not God.
Second, personification is a subset of metaphor, a literary technique. But when we say 'God is love', or 'the Word was God', we don't mean metaphorically, but literally: God is the very embodiment of all His attributes. In other words, the Being God is, is identical to His attributes, literally. When Moses asked God for His name, God replied: "I am who I am" (Exodus 3:14). God just is.
For these two reasons, this concept is, to be sure, not just simple personification. This concept can be summed up as divine simplicity, originating from Thomas Aquinas, or, some may argue, the ancient Greek philosophers.
I will leave the more theological and philosophical discussions to the Wikipedia page and the references therein. Be warned that divine simplicity, despite its name, is not simple. Goes without saying.

Paradoxes of Omnipotence and Freedom II

2010-08-02T00:30:00.005+08:00

...in serving be free.
-- Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, p.74

Freedom, then.

I held out writing this one to finish reading Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. One of their major themes is freedom, or more accurately, the paradox thereof.

Let's put aside free will aside for a moment. Let's deal with the more general concept of freedom first. The paradox, in Christian context, is this: We often speak of being liberated from the slavery of sin. But Paul called himself the slave (doulos) of Christ (Rom. 1:1). Certainly, no man can serve two masters (Mt. 6:24). Though the latter's context is about serving God or Mammon, we can see that we are under the slavery of sin or God, never neither. Some questions: Is there, then, true freedom? If the said true freedom means being free from sin and God, does that mean necessarily a good thing? Do we really want such true freedom?

What does freedom really mean? I find it necessary to quote at length (emphasis mine):

After the principal's address, while everyone was on the way to the bravely bedecked dining hall, Knecht approached the Master with a question, "The principal," he said, "told us how things are outside of Castalia, in the ordinary schools and colleges. He said that the students at the universities study for 'free' professions. If I understood him rightly, these are professions we do not even have here in Castalia. What is the meaning of that? Why are just those professions called 'free'? And why should we Castalians be excluded from them?"
The Magister Musicae drew the young man aside and stood with him under one of the giant trees. An almost sly smile puckered the skin around his eyes into little wrinkles as he replied: "Your name is Knecht, my friend, and perhaps for that reason the word 'free' is so alluring for you. But do not take it too seriously in this case. When the non-Castalians speak of the free professions, the word may sound very serious and even inspiring. But when we use it, we intend it ironically. Freedom exists in those professions only to the extent that the student chooses the profession himself. That produces an appearance of freedom, although in most cases the choice is made less by the student than by his family, and many a father would sooner bite off his tongue than really allow his son free choice. But perhaps that is a slander; let us drop this objection. Let us say that the freedom exists, but it is limited to the one unique act of choosing the profession. Afterward all freedom is over. When he begins his studies at the university, the doctor, lawyer, or engineer is forced into an extremely rigid curriculum which ends with a series of examinations. If he passes them, he receives his license and can thereafter pursue his profession in seeming freedom. But in doing so he becomes the slave of base powers; he is dependent on success, on money, on his ambition, his hunger for fame, on whether or not people like him. He must submit to elections, must earn money, must take part in the ruthless competition of castes, families, political parties, newspapers. In return he has the freedom to become successful and well-to-do, and to be hated by the unsuccessful, or vice versa. For the elite pupil and later member of the Order, everything is the other way around. He does not 'choose' any profession. He does not imagine that he is a better judge of his own talents than are his teachers. He accepts the place and the function within the hierarchy that his superiors choose for him–if, that is, the matter is not reversed and the qualities, gifts and faults of the pupil compel the teachers to send him to one place or another. In the midst of this seeming unfreedom every electus enjoys the greates imaginable freedom after his early courses. Whereas the man in the 'free' professions must submit to a narrow and rigid course of studies with rigid examinations in order to train for his future career, the electus, as soon as he begins studying independently, enjoys so much freedom that there are many who all their lives choose the most abstruse and frequently almost foolish studies, and may continue without hindrance as long as their conduct does not degenerate, The natural teacher is employed as teacher, the natural educator as educator, the natural translator as translator; each, as if of his own accord, finds his way to the place in which he can serve, and in serving be free. Moreover, for the rest of his life he is saved from that 'freedom' of career which means such terrible slavery. He knows nothing of the struggle for money, fame, rank; he recognizes no parties, no dichotomy, between the individual and the office, between what is private and what is public; he feels no dependence upon success. Now do you see, my son, that when we speak of the free professions, the word 'free' is meant rather humorously."
-- Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, pp.73-74

Leverkühn suffers from the excessive freedom of post-Romantic subjectivity, which paradoxically has at this stage in musical history itself become an oppressive convention; and from a hyper-intelligent technical grasp which allows him instantly to see through every musical trick used by other composers – or hinself. What he craves is a compelling new order that will lift the paradoxical burden of freedom, and a new primitive simplicity that will be a refuge from his own sophistication.
-- T. J. Reed, Introduction, Doctor Faustus, p.ix

Germany is free, in so far as one may apply to a land prostrate and proscribed.
-- Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, p.518

You can't miss the unmistakably contemptuous and Aristotelian-golden-mean tone everytime freedom is mentioned. Too much freedom can't be good. Freedom may just be an illusion of it.

The first passage may sound socialistic. Let's not go into that, but you can watch this TEDTalk instead where the speaker talks, among other things, of freedom of choice in once-socialist countries.

I should just conclude this post in thoughtful tone with my opinion on free will and predestination:

Some might argue that predestination precludes free will; it is deteministic. This is not necessarily the case. It just happens that God has free will, too. You are free to choose, so is He. Men try all the time to turn the tides of history; if God chooses to dip His finger in the flow of Time, how would you argue that He can't?

Paradoxes of Omnipotence and Freedom I

2010-05-30T23:36:00.001+08:00

Listverse has just released a list of paradoxes. They are excellent sources of philosophical discussion, but alas, when it involves religion, the paradox in question has to be resolved, or at least has its illusory contradiction laid bare.

There are two paradoxes which may confuse the Christian. The first being the paradox of omnipotence, which is the first item on Listverse's list. The other being the paradox of freedom, not on the list.

I shall try to touch on them at length.

Of omnipotence:

A classical problem:

Can God create a rock so heavy He can't lift it?

Answering yes or no would imply incapability of either creating or lifting the stone, and assuming omnipotence is the "capability to do all things", this is a paradox.

As Utahraptor said here, this can be generalised like thus:

If you can do anything, then you can do things that prevent you from doing other things, and therefore, you can't do anything.

In simpler terms: if you have the powers to do everything, you would have the power to strip yourself of all powers included, then you don't have any power. Clearly, this has to mean that there is a fundamental error in our notion of omnipotence, because if we follow the logic of the paradox, omnipotence itself may lead to impotence.

Omnipotence, then, has to be redefined so as the definition is such that it excludes contradictions to itself, unlike our definition above. In turn, we have to narrow down the list of the powers of the omnipotent. This may sound absurd if we relate back that the omnipotent Being is God. This has to mean that God has limitations of what He can do.

Fair enough, but it is even absurder if you don't limit on what God can do, for instance: God can sin. Well, no, of course not. Does that mean God is not all-powerful? Quite the opposite.

God cannot sin. If we generalise this, we can say: God cannot contradict himself. That would solve the rock problem. The answer is a simple 'no', simply because God cannot contradict himself.

Thus, the source of the paradox is on the inherently contradictory definition of omnipotence itself. The definition cannot be all-encompassing, because some powers would contradict others.

Paradox of freedom, in due course.

Lexical Order

2010-05-20T23:50:00.002+08:00

If you have shelved your thermodynamics at the back of your mind, go retrieve it. Done?

Δ_fH^O

According to the order of appearance: change, formation, enthalpy, standard.

But lo and behold, you are supposed to read that as: standard enthalpy change of formation. How can that be?

This is because English language adopts lexical order which does not really follow natural thinking process. First off, languages can be divided into two according to the lexical order: modifier-modified and modified-modifier. English belongs to the former, since the modifier precedes the modified. Consider the phrase:

beautiful girl

girl is the noun, the modified, while beautiful is an adjective, so it is an attribute, a modifier.

In Swahili, the same phrase would be (courtesy of Google Translate):

msichana mzuri (literally, girl beautiful, preserving the lexical order)

Note that now the modified precedes the modifier.

As English speakers we probably do not realise how unnatural is the English lexical order. If you think about it, the main idea must be the modified, while modifiers are just attributes. If we are talking about a 'beautiful girl', we are talking about a girl, not a beautiful.

Our mind is usually concerned with the bigger picture first, i.e. the modified; while details, the modifiers, can be filled later. Is there evidence that this is the natural way of thinking? We write symbols that way. Again, look at the same symbol of 'standard enthalpy of formation':

Δ_fH^O

Note that the modified is change. The main modifier is enthalpy. Thus it is a change -- what kind of change? Enthalpy change.

Other modifiers, formation and standard, appear as subscript or superscript. f subscript is appended after change because formation specifies the type of change. (Digressing a little bit: This is the new IUPAC convention. Last time, the f subscript used to be placed after the thermodynamic state function. This is not very accurate since, as mentioned, formation is the attribute of change rather than that of enthalpy. IUPAC actually pays attention to proper lexical order!). Nought superscript is more like the modifier to the whole thing, like thus: (Δ_fH)^O.

Having said all that though, it languages do have ways to reverse lexical order. English uses 'of' to place modifier after the modified:

girl of unworldy beauty

While Japanese uses the familiar 'no' (の), which performs very similar functions to 'of'. This though, one must admit, is kind of unwieldy. The rendering of our symbol if the order of appearance is to be followed would be:

Change (of formation) of enthalpy, in standard conditions

There is an alternative argument to the 'unnatural' argument, which is to say that the modifier-modified languages put more importance, then, in the details rather than the big picture. Language and culture are intertwined, as I wrote quite lengthily before. Language is the frame on which thoughts are built upon, so its structure will influence the product of thoughts, i.e. culture, in some ways. We can extrapolate, say, that users of modified-modifier languages are more individualistic than they are socialistic, because they are more concerned with details. This conclusion is, of course, far-fetched. However, you may be surprised that there is actually correlation of sorts: A lot of Western languages are actually modifier-modified and the Western culture tends to be more individualistic.

But then again, as I pointed out before, you have to be aware that indeed language influences culture, but the other way is also true; the two are intricately intertwined. Like nature and nurture. Ouroboros-like.

Metaphorical-to-Literal Transcendence

2010-05-11T00:06:00.012+08:00

And what the heck is that, you might ask. It just sounds fancy but it is actually very simple.

To appreciate this literary technique fully, however, one needs to understand the technicalities of metaphor first.

So, what is a metaphor? A good start is the TEDTalk titled Metaphorically Speaking by James Geary:

I would like to modify a bit:

Geary talked about

X=Y (equal)

Let us change it to

X//Y (parallel)

instead.

So for "Juliet is the sun":

Instead of Juliet=sun, we have Juliet//sun. The importance of which will be clear later.

In my working definition here, a metaphor draws a parallel from the literal plane to the metaphorical plane.

"Juliet is the sun"

"The sun" is on the literal plane. Juliet is on the metaphorical plane, having all the sunny qualities Shakespeare intended for her to have. Maybe she is warm, but nothing to do with temperature. Maybe she is radiant, but nothing to with how many lux she emits.

When we draw parallels, it is important to recognise that nothing is ever equal to something except itself.

So X can never be equal to Y, but there are some aspects of Y that in X we can find similarities to. Juliet is warm, yes, radiant, yes, ball of nuclear fusion,... wait a minute. There are only so many that you can draw parallels, but never all aspects exhaustive.

On the other hand, how many parallels one can possibly draw attests to the genius of the metaphorist. Wikipedia offers Shakespeare's As You Like It passage as a fine example of extended metaphor. I couldn't agree more:

All the world's a stage

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.-- Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7

Breaking down:

World//stage, men and women//actors, birth//entrance, death//exit, profession//role, periods of life//acts

This is the power of extended metaphor, to amaze by the many parallels and somehow all of them are coherent, unified in a certain manner or theme.

Now, there is a reason to segregate the two planes and keep them separate. Simply because it can get quite confusing otherwise. But of course rules are meant to be broken right?

Don't judge a book by its cover. But a car is not a book.
-- Seen outside a car showroom

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx

These are what I call metaphorical-to-literal transcendence. It simply means that the metaphorical has been transcended to the literal.

Let's dissect the first one first: car//book, outer appearance of a car//book cover

So far so good. The metaphor is implied through the cliché and the context that the writing is on a banner outside a car showroom. The second sentence then promptly destroys the parallel and transcends the car from metaphorical to literal plane. A car is not a book. Of course! They exist in different planes in the first place. The ruination of the metaphor is a clever ploy, since it forces one's mind to consider the literal car, not simply a generalised consumable that is not to be judged by its outer appearance alone.

Second one -- easier to use equality model of metaphor here: outside of a dog=other than a dog, inside of a dog=dog innards

It is quite clear that the first sentence, 'outside' is meant metaphorically, but in the second 'inside', defying the logical pattern, is meant literally.

Bottom line, what does this literary technique serve?

It should be noted that the obfuscation of metaphorical and literal planes is, as I mentioned, exception rather than the rule, so it has the novelty, defiance-tinged kind of impact, but it has to be used sparingly.

Last thing. If you notice, I have explained metaphorical-to-literal transcendence using 'planes', which is itself a metaphor. That just means that the whole article itself is metaphorical-to-literal transcendence, no?

The first thing that dissolves in alcohol is dignity.
-- Anon

Monotheism and Causa Prima

2010-05-10T18:25:00.002+08:00

If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.
-- Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

When a friend ask me a while back: "Why can there be only one God?", I was taken aback a little. Sure, I am a Christian, believing in monotheism, but it had never crossed my mind why it is so. This was not ignorance but more like in my mind the inescapable conclusion is that God can only be one.

The argument I thus offered my friend was the causa prima argument:

Look at the world as a series of causes and effects with innumerable branches. An event is preceded by a cause, which is in turn preceded by another cause, and so on. Up the branches, we inevitably have to come to a point where there is a single cause that itself is not caused. This cause, or entity if you like, is called Causa Prima, the first cause.

To me, the extrapolation until every event is reduced to singularity of cause is inevitable. Animals cannot extrapolate far enough. An old dog-and-cat joke: If a dog is taken care of, it would deem the one taking care of him the Master. If a cat is taken care of, it would deem itself the Master.

Humans are then a little better. We see something greater than ourselves, then we extrapolate upwards to find God at the zenith of infinity. If we ever go along the way of arrogance of the cat, our rationale would tell us that a lot of things are beyond our control, therefore we ourselves cannot be gods.

By the way, the causa prima argument provides answer to chicken-and-egg question:

A chicken originates from an egg; an egg, a chicken; and so on. Sounds awfully familiar to cause-and-effect picture? This obviously has to stop somewhere up the origination branches. Simply: God creates the first pair of chickens. If you cringe at the word 'God', fine, you can replace the causa prima as anything else that causes the first pair of chickens. Evolution from another species, for instance. You should note however, that this causa prima is not the Causa Prima. It only is as far as existence of chickens is concerned. Regarding the existence of everything, subsuming chickens, the Causa Prima can only be a Supreme Being, with intelligence and consciousness.

You may realise that our extrapolation to find God is quite feeble. We have the concept of 'infinity' but it so taxes our mind when we try to rationalise it. The picture of God is then a fuzzy one, One whose personage we can only deduce from the ramifications down the branches of cause-and-effect. Religions then, can be seen as the attempt to illuminate on the identity and motives of this fuzzy God. This definition may not apply to some religions, like Buddhism where there is no God. Again, it depends on what religion means. Some people do not classify Buddhism as religion, but merely a way of living. If you look at the world's religions, monotheistic ones are surprisingly scarce: Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Some might even group the latter three as Abrahamic religions collectively.

I should highlight that most religions view this attempt to uncover who God is anthropocentrally. Do good deeds, accumulate enough points to gain the entry to Salvation. In Christianity the picture is a little different: God understands that Man's picture of Him is fuzzy, so He went and revealed Himself, his personage, purposes, and ultimately His authorship of Salvation in Jesus Christ.

If you say doing good is enough for salvation, you have gone the path of arrogance of the cat. Who are we to say that our moral standard is good enough, that our 'good' is truly good? The Bible mentions several discrepancies between our own moral standard and that of God. If someone slap you in the cheek, you would be entitled to retaliate with another slap, an eye for an eye, right? No, Jesus said, give him your other cheek. You are entitled to love your friend and hate your enemy, right? No, Jesus said, love your enemy. That illustrates how Man finds himself deep in the mud of corruption, even his own moral is already corrupted; he cannot hoist himself to the higher ground. The only salvation is to reach the outstretched Hand coming down from above.

Doing good then is not the requirement of salvation, rather it is the consequence of it.

Fuzzy?

Dear the Personification of Exams

2010-04-20T12:20:00.000+08:00

You have finally come around
Should I treat you like best friend or archenemy?
Your arrival is always accompanied by ambivalence.

Perhaps an elderly, fatherly figure?
The mischievous author putting his protagonist
into yet another rite of passage,
to colour the whole bildungsroman
blacker, redder, whiter?

Or a warden.
You lurk in my calendar grid
Imprison me behind the bolded bars
Will I ever see again the light of day?

Well, yes, I know I will
But around you the fabric of Time twists into a loop
A moment with you can be gruellingly interminable:
Eternity in three weeks.

So here I am paying tribute to your existence
When I should be doing something else.

You are the very calmness of my soul

2010-04-17T23:31:00.002+08:00

No, not You, God, I'm sorry;
Not at the moment.
(But since You are the causa prima,
You also account for it in one way or another,
but I digress)

Notice how
I circumvent the Law of cause and effect
It's not:
"You cause the calmness in my soul."
That's because --
The mechanism, the invisible gears
are unbeknownst to me
The cascade: emotional, physiological, psychological, chemical
-- take your pick --
is too mysterious.
So, laziness, literary effect, or otherwise:
You yourself might as well be the calmness itself personified.

Your face
is not one that can launch a thousand ships
but one that can drown a thousand troubles

Let's transcend the metaphor
or the Law of cause and effect, or whatever:
You are the very calmness of my soul.

The Captain and the Ship Analogy

2010-04-08T22:16:00.002+08:00

When explaining about why emission spectrometry is more sensitive than absorption spectrometry, my professor shared this analogy:

Imagine a ship and its captain. If we were to measure the weight of the captain, how would we go about doing that?
Well, we can weigh the ship with the captain onboard. Then weigh the ship sans the captain. Substract.
Otherwise, we can just extract the captain from his ship, then weigh him.

Silly as it sounds, the former is actually what we are doing in absorption spectrometry. Shine light onto sample. Measure the light coming out. Subtract to get the amount absorbed by the sample. This results in a lot of background noise because the difference between what comes in and out is very little, like the weight of the captain.

In emission spectrometry, the source of photons is essentially the sample itself, so background noise is essentially zero. (Not exactly zero, because there may be scattering of the incident light used to excite the sample, e.g. fluorospectrometry. If excitation is by high energy electrons, then noise is probably zero, but there may be other factors)

I think this analogy does not only apply to analytical chemistry but also a lot of other things. There is a concept of big and small here. The ship is big, the captain is small. The presence of the big distorts the measurement of the small. Big and small is kind of a motif in chemistry. You see that in HSAB theory and of course, in regioselectivity explanation of Diels-Alder reaction in terms of coefficients.

Also, relativeness. The ship with or without the captain weigh roughly the same. So the weight of the captain is only negligible because it is being juxtaposed with the weight of the ship.

Chemistry being one perspective on the inner workings of the universe, you can expect the same principle to be applicable in real life. The other day another lecturer found that the computer in the lecture hall has problem with connection to the projector. His solution? Switch to another hall. While he can just borrow a laptop, from a student or the IT office down the corridor, to connect to the projector.

It's like being aboard on a ship, finding that the captain not unable to do this job, then you proceed to find another set of ship and captain. Why not just replace the captain?

Morarity

2010-03-31T09:41:00.005+08:00

Why hasn't someone filled the gap? Quick, quick, someone define 'morarity'!

(On an interesting note, MORARITY is an anagram of MORIARTY, the archenemy of Sherlock Holmes. Also, I would reckon a Japanese speaker of English would have a hard time distinguishing the four since romanisation of all four would be the same.)

No such thing as free lunch

2010-03-29T22:42:00.006+08:00

Was I really seeking good
Or just seeking attention?
Is that all good deeds are
When looked at with an ice-cold eye?
-- Elphaba in Wicked (No Good Deed)

This clichéd line reveals a question that always bogs the knower: Is there true altruism?

Put simply, every altruistic act may arguably be traced to selfish motive(s). You volunteer to feel good about yourself or to satisfy your superiority complex; you help a friend to invest in a future return of favour; you donate to make yourself look good; you treat the person you love well so that he/she will requite your love; you treat someone for lunch to curry favour; and the list goes on.

A friend of mine commented that, well, since an altruistic act is performed by self, it can never be separated from self. The self is always entangled with the act: they can never be separated, so one can never be truly altruistic.

I nodded to that at the time, but then it turns out it may not be that simple.

Victor Frankl wrote about 'transcendent quality of conscience' in Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning. In essence, it means that the self can transcends itself and considers itself objectively. This is so deeply embedded in the language that we tend to overlook it: consider the reflexive pronouns (the 'selves') – say, myself. "I consider myself": 'I' is the subject and 'myself' is the object, right? Following that, we can argue that the transcendent self may then be fully removed from its selfish desires and be truly altruistic. This is what makes a person a person. The etymology of 'person' is per-sonat, literally: sounding through. Frankl goes on to point that what sounds through is the voice of transcendence.

Personally though, and I think most people would agree, that it does not matter whether one is truly altruistic or not. Is it so bad to love yourself? Jesus said, quoting the Law: "Love your neighbour as yourself." (Mark 12:31). It's true that you have to put others before yourself (and of course God before all), but the 'self' element is still there. Here we see another entanglement, albeit a slightly different one. 'Others' is always entangled with 'self', so there is no need to remove 'self' from the picture.

On a darker note, you just have to realise that people always have ulterior motives in things that they do, consciously or otherwise. You yourself also have selfish motives in everything that you do. When we play it out in the arena, we just have to be aware of those often invisible conflicts of motives and wade cautiously. Well, to be pragmatic: use and be used, needless to say, tactfully.

There goes my free lunch.
Update: Regarding loving for the hope of requital, there's a song blatantly saying exactly that.

The Colour of the Bear

2010-03-09T23:12:00.005+08:00

One of my favourite mathematical riddles:

An explorer travelled 5 km South from his camp, then 5 km East, then 5 km North. He found himself back in his camp and saw a bear rummaging through his food supplies. What is the colour of the bear?

Don't cheat! Answer is below -- you need to highlight it to see.

The explorer's path forms an equilateral triangle with all the angles equal to 90°. Obviously we cannot assume a Euclidean plane here, but curved plane like our very Earth. The only possible situation for the stipulated directions and path is when the camp is exactly at the geographical North Pole. So the bear was a polar bear.

It was white.

The neat thing about this riddle is that it does not seem mathematical at all, what's with the question seemingly not related to the clues given. The additional deduction (North Pole --> polar bear) is witty, to say the least.

Johari Window and Epistemology

2010-03-09T20:08:00.011+08:00

Johari Window belongs to the field of psychology and the 'rooms' categorise aspects of personality as shown above. However, we can modify a little and apply this to the issue of knowledge, like thus:

                             Awareness         Unawareness
                        ---------------------------------------
Knowledge possessed     |        1        |         2         |
                        ---------------------------------------
Knowledge not possessed |        3        |         4         |
                        ---------------------------------------

Shall we dub this Epistemological Window? Now, this is going to get a little bit confusing, so read closely:

1. Things that you know you know

The body of your cognitive knowledge. Facts that you have learned, conscious reasoning, conscious perceptions from the senses.

2. Things that you don't know you know

I believe that the thing we call intuition is the sum of subconscious reasoning. Somehow the vibes and nuances are too subtle, too weak to be picked up by the conscious, so it sinks underwater to the lower part of the iceberg. It stays there until somehow it floats up again changed, as an inexplicable feeling. Intuition, gut feeling, sixth sense, whatever you call it, I believe that belongs to this category. My sense of direction is not, though.

3. Things that you know you don't know

Gaps in your body of knowledge. Of course you don't really know in literal sense what the gap is, because that's missing. What I mean here is that you recognise from the context, or the surrounding information, that there is a missing part. Being aware of this niche is what I mean by 'knowing' it.

4. Things that you don't know you don't know

Ignorance, basically.
Joking aside, these also include things for which the framework of knowledge around them has not been established (you cannot be aware of the gaps because there is a gaping abyss there).
These may also include things beyond the limits of our mind itself, like God. Sure, there are some things we know about Him, but there are things that we don't obviously. And for some of those, we don't even know that we don't.

Like the psychological Johari Window, classifying our knowledge and unknowledge helps to understand ourselves better. We are recalling and acquiring #1 and discovering #2 everyday. Scientists strive to fill in on #3 and uncover #4.

How is your Epistemological Window?

Nothing matters except knowing nothing matters.
-- Fiyero in Wicked (Dancing Through Life)

Wisdom is knowledge plus: knowledge -- and the knowledge of its own limits.
-- Victor E. Frankl

Solution

2010-03-07T00:50:00.001+08:00

Cleavage

2010-03-07T00:36:00.000+08:00

Bed of Roses

2010-02-14T00:01:00.001+08:00

Inorganic Chemists' Farewell

2010-02-12T23:17:00.003+08:00

Your name

2010-02-12T17:17:00.000+08:00

is a mint pastille melting in my mouth.
Stuck right at the tip of the tongue:
flavour diffusing, taste buds tingling.
Uttered repeatedly, voicelessly, scurrying
Like an unfinished mantra,
wishing to conjure you up
right here, right now.
Like you,
your name is illusive,
minty cold, but temperature's the same.
Excuse me, the aftertaste's disappearing;
I'm going to need another helping.

Utopia (again)

2010-01-22T23:19:00.004+08:00

Utopia should be this place of impeccability, of manifested ideals. Based on previous argument, where I said that dystopias lack something, then utopia must be this place of completeness, all things in a harmonious gestalt. But what is 'complete', really? Gandhi said that "[t]here is enough for every man's need but not greed". We always desire for something more. And there's another question: after the state of completeness is attained, what next?

Let's answer the latter first. Atwood has this to say:

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's now way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
-- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Her view is a morbid one. After we are in paradisum, that's it. The story stops. This is difficult for me to imagine. After all, they always say that the only thing that is constant is change. Or maybe there is another kind of perfectness where it is more dynamic, changing from perfection to perfection? I imagine it to be so because by definition, there is no such thing as 'boring' in a utopia, isn't there? So are we doomed to never reach there?

Moving on: What is 'complete'?

My picture of 'completeness' would be the Oneness that the Hindus are trying to find paths of enlightenment to. And that wouldn't be too far-off -- we can relate spiritual enlightenment here to the utopian state of perfection. This idea of Oneness as the highest state has also pervaded sci-fi. I have encountered a few stories whereby there is a running thread: the highest state of evolution is where we would abandon our physical bodies and spiritually become one single consciousness.

Summing up: Will we ever reach 'completeness' then?

Let's reword 'completeness' as 'fullness' here. In Avatar, Mo'at, Neytiri's mother and the shaman of the Omaticaya, mentioned a metaphor about empty and full cups. I'm borrowing that metaphor here: a cup fully filled is our 'completeness'. To be full, then, the cup has to be emptied first. And you can see how this fits very nicely with what Khalil Gibran said:

The deeper that sorrow carves onto your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
-- Khalil Gibran

And William Blake echoes:

And when this we rightly know
Thro' the World we safely go.
Joy & Woe are woven fine,
A Clothing for the Soul divine;
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine
-- Auguries of Innocence, William Blake

I talked about this before under Dualism Paradox, so read the details there. So the first way to achieve utopia: suffer through dystopia first. Like Pandora's box, Hope tends to come the last, after the evils.

The second way -- and I have already dropped the hints -- is to follow the Hindus. Now, topos in Greek means 'place'. It doesn't mean that we've got to take it literally. Then we can interpret a utopia not as a place but a state instead. The Eastern spirituality seeks inward journey (compared to outward one in Western spirituality). So it's change-your-paradigm thing. Again I invoke William Blake, from the same poem no less:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
-- Auguries of Innocence, William Blake

The journey inward, besides exploring the Self, also includes exploring other Beings. To see the perfections in the imperfections.

Final thought: If you see the Wikipedia entry on utopia, you would find an uncited reference to the humorous coinage of the word 'utopia' (probably factual, albeit uncited, since one of TED speakers mentioned that, too). It goes something like this: the etymology of 'utopia' is from Greek, as I already mentioned. This presumably comes from eu (good) + topos (place). But there is another Greek prefix which in English transliterates to the same spelling: ou (no) + topos (place). It is said that the coiner intentionally keeps the ambiguity as a joke. Good place; no place.

In conclusion: I think it is really your choice to attain 'the good place' or 'the no place'. We can strive towards the 'goodness', not necessarily perfection, or at least not the idealised one, by looking inwards and getting up stronger every time we fall down. Or we can keep it as an ideal, intellectual projection that can never be.

Merry X'mas!

2009-12-25T00:01:00.001+08:00

By the way, ever wondered how on earth 'Christ' is abbreviated to 'X'?

Well, I myself used to think that 'X' kind of looks like a cross, doesn't it? And Christ was nailed on a cross...

That's nice and well, but 'X' here is actually the Greek letter 'chi'. 'Christ' in Greek is Χριστός (Christos). So, 'chi' in X'mas is actually Christ's initial.

On another note, a church I used to attend actually had Χρ inscribed on the pulpit. Another had IHS (iota-eta-sigma). I didn't realise that they are actually Christograms until quite recently. Some Christian I am.

Well, you learn something new everyday. Merry Christmas!

Buff(er)

2009-11-11T18:24:00.001+08:00

Chrysalis [ 09. Amnion ]

2009-09-25T23:38:00.001+08:00

[See entire]

It was all darkness.

But it wasn't unsettling. Sometimes, blinding brightness can keep us in the dark -- like when the stars can't be seen for the sun -- similarly, darkness sometimes illuminates.

In the far off, I thought I heard gentle sounds of water burbling, like when you are underwater. Maybe I was. But I knew I wasn't, because somehow, I wasn't suffocating. Also, there was no water around, or, I couldn't feel it. It was like waving about in empty space. Yet somehow the darkness itself had resistance, giving that wrap-around, warm feeling. Velvety darkness.

I tried to move about, but there was no up or down, no left or right. I was a suspended point in space.

I remembered one time I had sneaked in late at night to a nearby pool. I didn't swim; I just waded through the water to the middle and flailed about so that I floated on my back. I stared at the sky, at the black cloud curtains behind which the moon and the stars had shied away.

It felt great to be suspended by the water below. When I try to look at the sky while standing up, I feel so overwhelmed and along comes the spell of dizziness that makes me feel like toppling over. If I lie on my back and look up, I would feel vulnerable, as if the vastness of the sky itself will come crushing down and hammer me to the ground at any moment. Floating on water, I was able to take in the greatness of sky: sans the dizziness, sans the vulnerableness. To contain that infinite stretch into the finite frame of my mind.

It is reassuring to feel water resistance. In the dark, there were none of those fascinating dynamic brilliance of the silvery liquid the water has turned into during a sunny day. There were no ripples of light moving lazily along the bottom of the pool, like a huge net made up of strands of light has been cast, like a graceful, giant, transparent jellyfish. Yet you can feel it: the smooth friction as it slides along your skin and slips away between your fingers, the chill as it evaporates and leaves your body carrying your body heat away, the heaviness when you shove it around, the buoyancy on your back, the urge to dance.

That was the feeling of this liquid darkness surrounding me.

If this were a dream, maybe I should wake up; if this were illusion, maybe I should seek the reality; if this were death, maybe I should be reborn. It's just,

What if I got those all wrong? That this is actually awake; that this is reality; that this is life?
I felt like Zhuangzi's butterfly, flapping about between two realms, not even sure whether I should be flapping, or even whether I was a butterfly to begin with.

Acid-Base Exchange

2009-09-17T21:40:00.002+08:00

Greetings

2009-09-17T17:52:00.001+08:00

Points of View

2009-09-06T00:53:00.007+08:00

Note: I recommend reading the previous post first. It's alright if you don't follow the story, you can ignore the plot and glean the literary ideas discussed instead.

How often you see the second-person point of view in a narrative? Very seldom. Almost every narrative puts you in the seat of either a first-person or a third-person observer. This is understandable -- if you have read some of second-person narrated works, you get this peculiar feeling, which is very different from those evoked by the other two points of view. My former English teacher assured me that we would not get a second-person narrative in our unseen prose -- it is an indication that the literary effect is quite special and takes up much discussion by itself.

Let's recapitulate the other points of view first.

First, it's important to point out the existence of the narrator, the voice that tells the story. This sounds trivial and obvious, but sometimes the narrator and the character may get very difficult to distinguish.

In first-person narrative, the reader is inside the main character's head. We see, hear, taste, smell, feel -- through the character's senses. His thoughts and feelings are accessible to us. The narrator and the character can be said as one and the same person. You can see some ramifications of a person inside another: you may not agree with what the character is thinking; given what the character sees, you may understand more what's happening. The example of the latter is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck is a naïve narrator; he is still a child. The mature reader would understand more than Huck does. This disparity in knowledge creates dramatic irony -- in which one of the effects is that we feel for Huck because of his innocent ways of thinking.

On the other hand, if you are inside somebody's head, you can understand him or her better. The author may choose to reveal the logic, the train of thoughts that leads to certain consequences, which are, more likely than not, disastrous ones. But the reader sympathises and laments along with the character because he is the character himself -- the writer's persona and the reader's persona are melded together, if you will. Such is the power of the word 'I': the reader is invited to take a seat, to snug himself in someone else's shoes (sometimes without realising), to enjoy the ride.

In third-person narrative, the main character is referred to as 'he' or 'she'. This creates some distance between the reader and the character. The narrator may be a character himself, which means there are limits to what he can see and hear, which in turn limits the reader's perceptions of the main character. The narrator may also be omniscient, having a bird's-eye view, free to look inside a person's heart or mind. You can see that there are certain advantages and disadvantages over the first-person narrative. Distance may sound problematic but some authors can use this to their advantages. Surely there are some characters who do not need to be sympathised; and you can see that a first-person point of view may disclose too much information to the reader. In certain genres like horror, mystery, detective, third-person point of view may be more suitable to employ, to maintain that aura of tension and secrecy. Of course, by no means this is a rule written on stones. An example of an exception would be having an unreliable first-person narrator. This means that the narrator may divulge wrong information or not tell the whole truth; he is unreliable. Let's say there is murder later in the story; how about if our narrator is actually the murderer, but this is only apparent near the end? Our normal expectations of a protagonist (hero versus antihero) will not be fulfilled. Done correctly, this has quite an impact on the reader.

Distance may also be useful for other purposes. More distance usually translates to more objectivity on the part of the reader. If the reader is inside the character's head, he is more easily swayed by the character's thoughts and feelings and tend to resonate with the latter; as most authors most likely will design such a character: evoking pity, sympathy, resonance -- now he is already biased and tends to side with the character. Third-person omniscient narration is usually devoid of emotions and thoughts, aside from those of the author's persona. It tends to be more objective. For this reason historical accounts are in third-person.

An epic usually tells of heroic feats performed by the character. It is necessary to put some distance in order to put the character on the pedestal to admire, in order to hide certain aspects that may crumble the heroicity. Some writers actually make use of this aspect: that if the reader is put deep down in the recesses of the heart and the mind of the character, the character's fragile humanity is exposed -- again, this creates intimacy, connection, sympathy, between a human and another. For this reason fairytales are narrated in third-person. Fairytales must remain distant since they are not real; the only connection is the omniscient Being who somehow witnessed the story in another dimension and narrates it to us so that we can learn the truths inside, the moral of the story.

Finally, the second-person narrative. There are at least two styles of a second-person narrative, each to achieve different effects.

The first invokes a lot of common stereotypes so that the reader feels familiar, so that, like in the first-person narration, the reader can relate to the character and is comfortable in the character's skin. This is useful when you are writing something that applies to anyone, or you are implying that it does. If you use first-person, the experiences, thoughts and feelings of the character are localised to the character himself. If you use third-person, it feels too distant, and the connection is lost. Second-person would be best to convey this: the narrator thrusts the mould, which does, or can, fit anyone. A good example would be this description of the afterlife:

You walk into the country where the light is slanted and soft. Brown leaves dance on the ground as raindrops fall on them. The northern lights blaze in the sky. You have come so far north that it is always night. You walk on water, feeling the pulse of waves beneath your feet. You walk on bare stones, on ice glowing blue in the starlight. There are others now ahead of you, around you, drawn from other longitudes.
-- Bruce Holland Rogers, I'm Not Saying It Happens Like This,

The Sun Magazine, Feb. 2009, Issue 398

In this case, because no one knows what it feels like in afterlife, this experience can fit anyone. So, again: experiences that are either familiar (fit anyone) or totally unknown (can fit anyone).

The second is the opposite: the character is an atypical person who has a unique way of thinking about and seeing the world. The previous post, of course, belongs to the second. Alphonse is not your average person and his opinions are quite radical. The reader, 'you', is supposed to feel uncomfortable because 'you' doesn't fit into Alphonse's mould. This is unlike the first-person narrative which, in most cases, fits the reader snugly into the character's shoes. But, you also feel for Alphonse's emotional rant, understand that he is a being distinguishable from yourself, having different thoughts and feelings, yet on par with yourself, with the same fragile humanity and whatnot. You can see that the second style here requires delicate balance between the character's idiosyncrasies and familiar stereotypes.

It is important to note that in both second-person narrative styles, it's like you are following a set of instructions from the narrator. It's like a role-playing game. You are to do this and that, which sounds almost like the imperatives. You are constantly reminded that you are 'you', a different entity from the character himself. Contrast this with the first-person narrative where, if the author is good, you may resonate a bit too well with the character and may get a bit carried away and become the character himself (happens to me sometimes). The second-person maintains closeness between the character and you -- since you are to do what the character is doing, see what he is seeing, think what he is thinking, feel what he is feeling -- but at the same time maintains that separateness of entities. One but two, a paradox that adds to literary complexities, as you can imagine it does.

It's also worth noting that second-person narration, which is all about forcing a mould on the reader ending up in identity paradox, is most fitting fir the previous post because Alphonse himself is having an identity crisis, if you notice. Also note that in the last few lines the narrator is slowly taking Alphonse's mould off the reader, addressing the reader directly, "Who are you?" You who have been fitted with Alphonse's mould for the last few paragraphs, who are you?
This is actually the effect I intended to have on the reader: that identity is a curious thing and you better hold it closely while you still can. It invites the reader to rethink about his own identity, just like Alphonse is questioning his own identity.
Now, knowing all this context I have so painstakingly built, re-read the previous post and answer it properly if you haven't:
Who are you?

Chrysalis [ 08. It's Still Raining Inside ]

2009-09-03T23:05:00.009+08:00

[See entire]

You are Alphonse.

You are sitting at the piano stool, fingers still standing rigid on the piano keys, tingling from swift and complicated manoeuvres. The smell of rain is in the air, but the rain itself is letting up.

You have just finished playing a song, which promptly slips out of your mind, already forgotten. You don't know what possessed you -- a while ago you were sitting by the window staring and listening to the rain, the next you plunged into a kind of trance. But you do remember an emotional outburst. The body remembers; and it's as if the melancholy is echoing still, resonating in the air, in the strings, buzzing about your ears like the insect's singing on a summer's day, in the strings of your own heart. A twang of pain deep in the chest.

Like angina pectoris, the heart is lacking oxygen. Your heart is lacking something.

You try to think about other things to distract yourself. Let's see. You find it peculiar that sometimes it feels like there are different entities inside you. The you playing piano just now, who was it? The you talking to your parents not often enough, the you giving up your seat to an old lady this morning, the you thinking those suicidal thoughts, the you crying too often when you flip the newspapers, the you in the eyes of others, the you (you think) in the eyes of others, the you still buried deep in the iceberg under the sea level, the façade of you, the awkward you in front of the person you like, the scheming you, the simple-minded you, the you who loves to crack jokes: these are all you.

You know that there is something called author's persona. This means that the writer projects himself on paper. This projection, however close to the author himself, deliberate or otherwise, is a separate entity from the author. The persona is, in other words, a 'façade'. The opinion on the paper is not the author's opinion, but the persona's. The 'I' on the paper is not the author, but the persona. This is why you get that strange feeling sometimes: the moment you put down "I" then it stops being yourself, it's another person, though it is infused with your person. Like a part of yourself is pulled out like a dough, estranged, alienated, transformed to something else. That is a persona.

On the other hand, a persona is also a 'shadow' because at the same time, the persona takes after the author himself: his opinions, his thoughts, his emotions, his idiosyncrasies. From the pool of all the different you's, you choose. You recall that Yeats once said that "[t]he creations of a great writer are little more than moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk on the earth." You think: how true.

Carrying the monologue further, you ask yourself, so there must be something like reader's persona? But of course. Again, a front -- you may not agree with the author's opinion (or his persona's for that matter), but at least you can understand, you can see it from that perspective, you are willing to make space, some allowance. This is your front as a reader, your persona.
A market is the meeting of buyers and sellers but a book is the meeting of the author's and the reader's respective personae. In this respect human beings are dastardly beings, unable to take it up properly vis-à-vis, you think? The thing is, humanity is so fragile a thing that you need to build the hardy outer shell, lest it is weathered out and breaks down.

But you digress. So what does it mean? That 'you' comprises many different you's, with possibly more unawakened?

You are tired of thinking all this. You are closing your eyes. As the rain is fading away, your consciousness is also whittled little by little, fading.

A pitch black tunnel.

You are Alphonse.

Are you?

No?

Then who are you?

Chrysalis [ 07. The Rain Dazes ]

2009-08-30T13:28:00.011+08:00

[See entire]

I must have fallen asleep. While rubbing my eyes sleepily, I noticed the rain was letting up a bit, even though it was still there, the constant pitter-patter rhythm like a lullaby persuading me to go back to slumber.
But my mind was already awake, though not fully -- you know, like a trance, dazed, between reality and imagination, the state which you can tip over to either side.
I love rain because it's like curtains. Curtains separate. Sometimes you need your privacy.
I also love that smell of dampness of earth that precedes a downpour. Those organic gases, released from the soil because the atmospheric pressure is lower. To me it's like a promise, a certain sign that a bucket is about to tumble, up there in the heavens. People usually forget this, that something begins; you always remember when it ends, the rainbow appears. When do we all start? When the sperm meets the ovum? When you start emitting brainwave? A beginning is so hard to define.
I also love writing. You know how writing, or a painting, or any piece of art for that matter, has this timeless quality? Time freezes, you can read or view or feel or hear that particular part over and over again. The essence has been captured. The description in a paragraph, the scenery in a painting, the arrangement of sounds in a song, the scene of war on a frieze, the shapes in a sculpture. That frame, or several of them, has been fixed, becoming something that withstands Time itself.
But writing doesn't limit oneself to the freezing of Time, but also the stretching and compressing of it. In Ulysses, James Joyce stretched one day to 265,000 words. I remember my first time seeing the book -- I thought it was an encyclopaedia or something; no, it's a novel. Compression of time is even simpler: "A child was born, grew up until ripe old age, died". In fact, a writer has more mastery over Time than other artists do; a time travel at the flick of the wand: "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive".
This manipulation of Time is intoxicating. Perhaps in a few hours the rain would have stopped, but you can go back a few paragraphs, and it was still raining. Every time you come back on this page to this little universe, it is still raining. And it won't ever stop. It's like you've made a rip in the space-time continuum, taking a glimpse of eternity. Isn't it maddening? Isn't it like getting drunk?
A cool breeze gently passed and it calmed me somehow. I sighed. It must have been my daze talking.
I thought I can hear faint sounds of piano -- I think I'm tipping over to dreamland -- no one normally plays at this hour.
Back to sleep.

Milton, Free Expression and A Bibiliophile

2009-08-29T22:53:00.008+08:00

As a bibliophile, I was delighted to find this passage in Milton's Areopagitica:

...For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up for purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolution of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.
-- John Milton, Areopagitica

Areopagitica is subtitled "A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England". It is easy to see that the context here is that Milton wanted to loosen censorship in England, lest some "vials... of living intellect" went unnoticed. In my opinion, I would go as far as saying that not only those who destroy or censure a good book are "killers of reason", but also those who don't read are.
Regarding Milton himself, let's just say that I want to join Woodsworth in saying: "Milton! Thou should'st be living at this hour:"

Chrysalis [ 06. The Sound of Rain ]

2009-08-12T22:29:00.004+08:00

[See entire]

The Piano

The grand piano stood out prominently. Against the background noise of pouring rain, it is silent. Like how silence can be deafening, being still can convey much.
The piano can be compared to an old man, who has grown old gracefully, retaining the knowledge of the experienced, exuding charisma of seniority, of the one who knows the way of the world.
A piano, nonetheless, is a tool not a person. A piano, like any instrument, is a mirror to the soul. It absorbs emotions and thoughts from the fingertips, transcribing it into hammering of the strings, which translates it to a language we call music.
Music is a language. From rhythm, from tempo, from arrangement of melody, from discordant and harmonious chords -- that's the whole phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatism -- a language.
Countless people have played it. It shared their joys and griefs, and every emotion in between and beyond. In the story of Narcissus, the Lake cries because it can no longer see its beauty reflected in Narcissus' eyes. The piano is the same: it feeds on the language it was transmitting to hear its own beautiful sounds.
Now here come its Narcissus, sitting by the window, watching the deluge forlornly, but now was making his way towards it, fingertips ready to dance, a Creation is about to begin. Let there be light. It is said that when Haydn's oratorio Die Schöpfung (The Creation) is performed, when Chaos ends and the first movement is about to begin, when the orchestra burst into fortissimo on 'Licht', so great it was that the audience can see light flashing. Something like that, creating something out of nothing.
As soon as its Narcissus started to play, a lightning bolt struck. It has begun.

Shakespeare: All World's A Stage

2009-08-11T23:53:00.005+08:00

So let's see, let's see. To tell this story we need appropriate
actors, plot, prop, script -- Ah! What kind?
I'd pick a musical. Not the tragic, nor the comedy. One too morbid, the other too insouciant.
I'd rather
be stabbed at the back, only to burst out singing about the agony.
The beginning is a little hard.
A moment of silence please -
How about the epic: grand story about royal lineage, the beings before the being
the beings that are background of being, culmination being the being?
No.
It should be in medias res -- in the middle of something --
so that the audience is plunged straight to the middle of something, where the real beginning was over and long gone.
Since, isn't it that way we are plunged into being, cast into the light of existence,
the beginning remains something distant, that should not be pried open, lest the evils leak out and Hope is found never at the bottom all along.
After that, the mundane seven ages of Man; oh, the chorus of sighs!
Let's skip the infant and the school-boy;
Jump to the lover, for love is a source of sorrow, and love is a lot to sing about.
Very simple -- plot is usually about love or the lack of it. Done!
Then comes the soldier and the justice. The ages of paradox.
Look at Justitia and her blindfold.¹
The impartial, yet unaimed swing of a sword; the balanced, but unsighted scales.
It is really no wonder that Man,
torn apart between contradictions of his own making,
shifts to the sixth stage, the pantaloon.
Conflict escalated, climax reached, then running out of steam.
Ready to be catapulted back to the beginning that was not really there?
The seventh stage, the oblivion - wait
(Could we please invoke deus ex machina?)

¹Miller, William. Eye for an Eye, page 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Chrysalis [ 05. It's Raining Contradictions ]

2009-08-06T22:43:00.002+08:00

[See entire]

Alphonse
Usually on rainy days like this I prefer to take advantage of the coolness and sleep. Grab a blanket, go into foetal position, and go into the darkness of slumber. Like a cocoon. Waking up, I would have sprouted wings to fly in the freshness of the new day.
Today, however, I felt like going to the common room where the piano is. I didn't plan to play it; to me, the rain sounds like an orchestra in itself, a harmonious cacophony. That is an oxymoron, but it is not to me. Somehow I can accept that order can arise from chaos. That something can arise from nothing.
So there was I, sitting by the large window, listening to the pitter-patter melody, daydreaming. If no two drops of rain are alike then no two sounds are alike. The strumming of a guitar, the hammer hitting the piano string, the plucking of the harp, the vibration of the violin string: say, all are playing A, that is frequency of 440 Hertz, do they sound the same? Obviously not. That is because they don't produce a singular peak at 440, but each is a sum of several frequencies, peaking at 440. So timbre is like the uniqueness of a sound. Like a name. Splash sound, trickling sound, pouring sound, gurgling sound.
Jake can make the tremolo sound using the piano (which I cannot produce). His nimble finger would fall in quick succession one after another. The notes then become overlapped over one another; coming out as a trill. It sounds like a gentle rain. Warm in certain way. Cool in another way.
I remember my teacher who taught about oxymoron and paradox. "Contradictory but not contradictory -- oxymoron and paradox are paradoxes in themselves." His saying of this stuck. Oxymoron is an exhibitionist. It blatantly display its contrasting words. Paradox is shy. It hides its contradiction under layers of words. Perhaps it is 'sly'; well, it is only one-letter difference. In any case, those contrasting words or ideas are not really contradictory, because they belong to different contexts. Imagine that they belong to different planes -- we can find a common plane where they can co-exist, where they are co-planar.
But I digress. Contradictory. Aren't we all?
We are full of contradictions. Some are obscene like oxymorons, or morons, that will do also; some are discreet like paradoxes.

Chrysalis [ 04. It's Raining Outside -- and Inside ]

2009-07-31T00:53:00.014+08:00

[See entire]

Alphonse is a ghost.
He appears and disappears as he likes. Come to think about it, I've never seen him in the university grounds. Sometimes it's as if he's transparent. There, but not there.
Sometimes I would not see him for a few weeks. "Where did you go?" I would ask, but in response he would mumble something inaudible. Transparent words. I never press the issue, but somehow I could sense the change in him after such disappearances. He is more talkative. But the kind of talkative that is sadder; like a cover, a distraction from the cause of the sadness itself. This repeated quite frequently.
Repetition.
I don't like the sound of it; its meaning, either. Rinse, lather, repeat. Like you are stuck in a vicious cycle, a never-ending loop, a snake eating its own tail, a downward spiral into oblivion.
This happened to me quite a few times: sometimes you consider a word, repeat it several times, say it aloud, spell it out on a paper, dissecting the syllables. Suddenly the word loses its meaning; suddenly the word becomes foreign; suddenly it is disjointed from the rest of the knowledge inside the head.
Isn't it ironic? Maybe you intend to repeat the word endlessly, its variations, visiting every possible meaning, considering every nuance, like Edgar and his bastardy soliloquy. But in the end the meaning is exhausted, the meaning is thrown into nothingness -- after that, nihil ex nihilo fit, nothing comes out of nothing, my fair Cordelia, so speak it again, again, again, spiralling to the selfsame nought.
Like a droplet of rain, coming down, coming up, stuck in the eternal cycle. "But, Jake," Alphonse would say, in a manner that always tries to neutralise my dour philosophy, "Every droplet of water is different, just like every snowflake is."
"As a big drop of rainwater condenses from the cloud, it plunges down. When air resistance is so great due to downward acceleration, the drop bursts into numerous droplets. The explosion of this water bomb goes to every which way. Jake, the water may be stuck into an eternal cycle. But it's not grumbling. Once in a while it goes parachuting. It must be feeling really happy."
I chuckled. As usual, I'm no match for Alphonse.
As I'm looking out of the window, it started to rain lightly. A runner ran past, droplets off his back, like a choreographed slow motion; like a dancer, gracefully, solemnly.
A boy and an old lady on a bench. A fountain nearby. The lady put down her newspaper and took off her glasses; something must have been caught in her eyes. The boy had his cheeks on his knees, shivering? The downpour was getting heavier. But the pair on the bench stayed, perhaps, it was not very clear, my vision obscured by layers of rainwater curtains.
I closed my windows.

Physics Limericks

2009-07-30T14:28:00.006+08:00

Space
Seven steps each ten million to one
Describe the whole space dimension
The Atom, Cell’s girth
Our bodies, the Earth
Sun’s System, our Galaxy – done!

Time
The Creator, seen as Army Sergeant Major, barks out his order for the week.
First thing on Monday morning, Bang!, Light
Sun and Earth, form up, Friday night
At a minute to twelve
Eve spin, Adam delve
In the last millisecond, You, right?

Speed
A child cycles ‘round the schoolyard
Which lies on the Earth turning hard
The Earth rounds the Sun
As Sol does “the ton”
And our Galaxy flies – Gee! I’m tired

– Tim Rowett, Three Limericks – On Space, Time and Speed

Note:
Space
10⁻¹⁴ m : Atomic nucleus
10⁻⁷ m : Cellular nucleus
10⁰ m : Human body
10⁷ m : Earth's diameter
10¹⁴ m : outer Solar System
10²¹ m : Galaxy's diameter
10²⁸ m : Universe, and a bit more
Time
A week is 7 days,
Each day 2 billion years
A minute is 2 million years
A millisecond is 23 years
Speed
7 mph : A child cyclist
700 mph : Earth's rotation speed
70,000 mph : Earth's revolution speed
700,000 mph : Galaxy's turning speed
1,400,000 mph : Galaxy's speed through debris of Big Bang

I think it's really amazing that if you downscale the age of the Universe to one week, then we humans would only occupy the last minute of it (and of course Earth itself only formed on "Friday night").
Such displays of logarithmic leaps never cease to amaze. And of course, if we are talking about space dimension, the classic documentary Powers of Ten (directed by Ray and Charles Eames) comes to mind. Even though it was produced back in 1977, it is still a wonderful sight to behold. This is so famous that one of The Simpsons' episodes featured a parody of it. Sadly, it has already been removed from YouTube because of copyright issue.

Again, we are reminded of the very long scale of space, time and speed; and our tiny, insignificant place in it.

"Facts"

2009-07-28T23:07:00.001+08:00

Connections

2009-07-22T14:39:00.004+08:00

Since words are containers of meaning, it is not difficult to imagine that some containers are bigger than others and some containers are small enough to fit inside others. That's right, in other words, some words are subsets of others. This hierarchy is usually referred to as hypernymy/hyponymy. For example; maroon, vermillion, crimson, scarlet, magenta are hyponyms of 'red'. Conversely, 'red' is a hypernym to them. Moving up the hierarchy, 'red' is a hyponym of 'colour'. Note that hypernym/hyponym doesn't mean anything if a word is not viewed relative to another.
Now, imagine this colossal tree of word hierarchy, its branches numerous, branching to finer branches still down and below. I always wonder, what is at the top of this tree? In other words, the ultimate hypernym, the word that include every possible meaning?
The answer is probably different for every person, but to me almost everything can be summarised as 'connections' and 'information':
Language is a means of transmitting information, connecting a person with another.
Science is the study of the laws governing observed systems. Information gathering; connecting hypotheses and observations.
( Basically all -ologies are all about 'information' or more appropriately, knowledge, since the etymology itself suggests logos [λόγος] )
Philosophy is literally 'love of wisdom', which means it is about, again, 'information'. It goes without saying that epistemology, which is a subset of philosophy, is also all about 'information' or knowledge.
Love is all about relationships, people say. Love itself is already a massive hypernym, considering its vast meaning. But then, 'connections' is still a bigger one.
Metaphors are all about drawing parallels; making connections. More about that here.
If you think about it, it is only natural for everything to be distilled into knowledge and relationships. Our brains themselves are networks of information, linked in numerous permutations. Our memory is triggered by things associated to that particular memory.
The worldwide web itself has garnered the current level of success because it's all about connections and information, acting like a global brain, each of us its neuron. Note all the hyperlinks on this page, enabling you to view related pages with a click.
Update: There is a really nice diagram to see: The Internet. It is also good to depict the aforementioned colossal tree of the word hierarchy.
And now, when the world is more interconnected than ever, it is important to make use of it. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown talked about confronting "the challenges of poverty, security, climate change and the economy" in the recent TEDGlobal2009. Watch it; and be aware of what we can do that was impossible only several years back.

Spirit of the Law

2009-07-22T00:40:00.003+08:00

Think about it this way. Language is conveyor of information, but it is, of course, imperfect. You have ambiguities, misinterpretation, definition issues, and so on. For this reason, rules are also imperfectly conveyed. You can try writing down every single restriction and define every word, but this is impractical. The consequence of this imperfection is that people can always find loopholes in the written law, questioning proper definitions of ambiguous words and make use of them to get around the law.
For this reason we differentiate between the letter and the spirit of the law. To follow the law "to the letter" means obeying it according to the literal interpretation; while following the spirit of the law is obeying it according to its intent, which may not be identical with the literal interpretation.
Example? Now that's difficult because formal laws are worded as such that loopholes are very difficult to find. Let's talk about grammars instead.
"You can't begin your sentence with a conjunction."
"But, I don't understand, Sir."
"Mr. Finn, you just begin your sentence with a conjunction. Stand outside."
I remember red markings on my English composition papers highlighting the offending conjunction-initiated sentences. But, of course you know that this rule is broken all the time in all kinds of writing. Why so? This is because conjunctions are supposed to conjunct clauses in a sentence. And then, why is it alright to break this rule? Remember that we are concerned with the spirit of the law. The purpose of grammars is ultimately clarity.
Compare

I remember red markings on my English composition papers highlighting the offending conjunction-initiated sentences but of course you know that this rule is broken all the time in all kinds of writing.

and

I remember red markings on my English composition papers highlighting the offending conjunction-initiated sentences. But, of course you know that this rule is broken all the time in all kinds of writing.

The first sentence is too long and this obfuscates the meaning. It is better to put a period to give the reader a break. The use of conjunction to precede the sentence indicates that the sentence that follows it still continues the idea from the sentence before. A good writer does this: giving the reader bite-sized information and not confusing him/her with long-winded sentences; he prioritises brevity and clarity.
You can see how are letter and spirit of the law different. Otherwise you can see it as the rule of clarity overrides this rule.
If you know a little bit of jazz, you may know that jazz is a genre that doesn't obey the rules. Before jazz came about, there are certain ways melodies sequence and group together. In jazz, however, improvisation is imperative. This means there is no one fixed way to play a piece: a performer is free to interpret and tweak melodies, harmonies and time signatures. The spirit of the law? To produce nice sound; it's that simple.
In forensics, there is a principle called corpus delicti, which is translated as 'body of crime'. A British serial killer, 'Acid Bath' Haigh, infamously mistook this principle. He thought that he could not be convicted with murder without the bodies of the victims, so he dissolved their corpses in acid bath. But of course corpus delicti is not to be taken literally. It refers to evidence that the crime has taken place. Corpus delicti is not even necessarily tangible. Circumstantial evidence is often enough to convict. This is not really about the spirit of the law, but it illustrates how laws should be understood clearly.
Lastly, there is a reason to break rules. In the grammar example, you have to be clear about the big picture. That grammars exist as a guide, and occasionally breaking them for the sake of clarity is alright. In the same way, if you encounter rules that don't make sense, stop and think about what the spirit is; see the big picture.
I recommend reading How to Break All the Rules by Dustin Wax down at Stepcase Lifehack:

There's a scene in Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard that sums up perfectly this approach to the rules. Rabo Karabekian, an artist reknowned for his giant canvases covered with single colors of household latex paint applied with a roller, is talking with his friend Slazinger in his studio:

"Tell me, Rabo," said Slazinger, "if I put on that same paint with the same roller, would the picture still be a Karabekian?"
"Absolutely," I said, "provided you have in reserve what Karabekian has in reserve."
"Like what?" he said.
"Like this," I said. There was dust in a pothole in the floor, and I picked up some of it on the balls of both my thumbs. Working both thumbs simultaneously, I sketched a caricature of Slazinger's face on the canvas in thirty seconds.
"Jesus!" he said. "I had no idea you could draw like that!"
"You're looking at a man who has options," I said.

For the "wild child" who just can't be bothered to learn the rules, because they were meant to be broken anyway and because his or her creative spirit is too strong to be held down by rules, man, there are no options. There is only a string of broken rules and all the misunderstanding, chaos, and incoherence that goes along with them. The master, though, knows that the rules are not only options, but usually the best options. And when they aren't, s/he knows. S/he has in reserve what Karabekian has in reserve: true mastery.

Culture and Language

2009-07-14T23:19:00.005+08:00

There is no doubt that culture and language are somehow, but how exactly? Of course the answer isn't going to be very simple. For me, I think it is perhaps as complicated as nature and nurture.
Most will find this familiar: phenotypes, or expressed traits, are usually attributed to genotypes, that is, genetic make-up. So, if you are tall, people might say that you inherit that trait from your tall parents (nature). Or they may say that as a child, you were given excellent nutrition and you are a swimmer (nurture). So far, so good. Nature and nurture appear to be independent forces that both influence particular traits of a person, so the combination of the two somehow causes that particular trait to be expressed, right? Well, not quite. There are several reasons for this. First, the journey from genotype to phenotype is not as straightforward as it appears to be. Genes are transcribed to proteins. The proteins are involved in cascades of biological pathways which can be very complex. For this reason geneticists talks about having certain genes pre-dispose one to have certain disease with certain level of probability, since having those genes does not mean that you definitely will get the disease. Exceptions to this, among others, are diseases caused directly by protein defects, like sickle-cell anaemia. Second, nature and nurture are not mutually exclusive, as people tend to think. Certain genes are expressed in response to environmental signals.
So, language and culture. The detour above is necessary to picture the complexity in more concrete notions.
If you think about it, language can be seen as a subset of culture. But this is getting complicated if you consider that language is the only medium of communication. Consider language as categorising things under different labels, then perhaps you will wonder: perhaps the way people categorise things influence culture in some way? In fact, linguists have something along this line: linguistic relativity, a.k.a. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that language affects cognition. A famous example of this is the large number of words that the Inuit have for snow. It has been suggested that since the Inuit, a subset of the Eskimos, live in the Arctic, somehow they need more terms to describe different kinds of snow that an average English speaker doesn't need. Sadly, this example is not factual, but it gives you some kind of idea on what linguistic relativity means.
Update: Language Log highlighted the a lot of occurrences of this here and here. The latter links to here, here, here and here.
In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party is enforcing a language called Newspeak. As Winston realised, the vocabulary of Newspeak is getting narrower instead of otherwise. This aims to limit. Rebellion against the Party would be ultimately impossible since the words are not enough to convey the idea. By controlling language, the Party controls thoughts. This is the very idea of linguistic relativity.
If you remember, the Greeks have at least 4 different terms for love. I am not going to say that the Greeks have more expertise in the area of love, but it seems that they have thought about it a little deeper. It is really difficult in concluding based on whether there are too many or lack of certain words, as discussed at length here. So give it a little thought yourself.
Speaking about the Greeks, you have probably heard that Greek has numerous number of tenses, a lot more than English. This suggests that their notion of time is very different. Indeed, you will be surprised to know that the time element is secondary in their tenses. The primary consideration is 'kind of action' (aktionsart). Not to say that time is not important to them. They have two distinct terms for time: chronos (quantitative) and kairos (qualitative). And don't get me started on their philosophical embellishments.
On the other hand, Malay/Indonesian and Mandarin languages do not really have proper tenses. On a related note, do you know that English does not have a future tense? No, no, will is a present-tense modal, my friend.
Another big thing that I notice is English pronouns. Why does 'I' has to be capitalised? How come there is only 'you' for both singular and plural second-person pronoun?
(By the way, there used to be a singular second-person pronoun. That would be 'thou'.)
I have a certain crazy hypothesis for these pronoun phenomena, i.e. the West tips more towards individualism than socialism. Well: singular first-person is capitalised; third-person pronouns are distinguished based on genders (note that they aren't in some languages); second-person pronouns no longer need to be differentiated (presumably because outside 'I', it doesn't matter whether whether it is plural or singular). To put some contrast, in Malay/Indonesian language, there are two kinds of 'we'. Consider there are three people in a room: A, B, C. A is talking to B. When referring to himself and C, A would use 'kami'. But when referring to all of them, A would use 'kita'. Both would be translated to 'we' in English. Sticking to my hypothesis, the East values togetherness much more that different collectives need to be differentiated.
Finally, I'm taking example from another language that I'm familiar with: Javanese. This language is really unique because it also has something like English verb irregulars. As you know, irregular English verbs typically have 3 distinct forms: infinitive, past and past participle (eat, ate, eaten). But in Javanese, it is not only the verbs, but almost all words have 3 forms, categorised under different levels of politeness (of course this is a nightmare for any linguist, since you have to learn thrice as many vocabularies -- only the language syntax is the same, thank goodness for that). It is very easy to see what culture the Javanese has, isn't it? Obviously, the Javanese hold societal hierarchy in high esteem, just like the Japanese, which manifests in their extensive usage of honorifics. As if that's not enough, the Javanese also has different words for fruits, their trees and their seeds. There are also another set for animals and their offspring. For example: mango, mango tree, mango seed, right? The Javanese would call them: pelem, mangkono, pelok, respectively. This one is also easy to understand why. Agriculture and raising livestock are vey much part of their livelihood, thus their need to have very specific terms.
Certainly, if you know more than one languages, you would also have noticed that language and culture are indeed intertwined. So don't take idiosyncrasies of a language for granted.
Notice them. Ask why.

Stirling Engine

2009-07-14T22:34:00.005+08:00

Stirling engine is a heat engine. In other words, it converts heat to mechanical energy. So you can see in the above that it converts heat from my coffee to rotational motion of the discs.
The principle is very simple. First, let's take a look at the components. There is a shallow cylinder directly above the cup enclosed by two black metal plates at top and bottom. There is a big opaque piston inside the cylinder, connected to the front pedal. At the back of the disc, there is a back pedal, which is connected to a diaphragm, which looks like a membrane.
The cylinder is airtight. As heat is transferred to the bottom plate, the air expands and pushes the piston up. This sudden increase in pressure also forces the diaphragm, which in turn raises the back pedal. Since the disc, back and front pedals are connected rigidly, when back pedal moves up, front pedal moves down, which in turn, push down the piston. Repeat.
The front and back pedals are 90 degrees out of phase so that the up and down movements mimic legs pedalling a bicycle.
So, how is that more interesting than, say, a steam engine, you ask?
The physics mechanism described above works as long as there is a temperature gradient. So it works using ice as well, as you can see below:

I'd say my spending a weekend to work on this is totally worth it.
Cool! Literally.

Correlation

2009-07-08T23:46:00.007+08:00

Consciousness and (again) dimensions

2009-07-07T13:27:00.009+08:00

Reading this comment, I recall a very good description of pure consciousness that is independent of any platform.

"Look yonder," said my Guide, "in Flatland thou hast lived; of Lineland thou hast received a vision; thou hast soared with me to the heights of Spaceland; now, in order to complete the range of thy experience, I conduct thee downward to the lowest depth of existence, even to the realm of Pointland, the Abyss of No dimensions.
"Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the on-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality; for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn his lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy. Now listen."
He ceased; and there arose from the little buzzing creature a tiny, low, monotonous, but distinct tinkling, as from one of your Spaceland phonographs, from which I caught these words, "Infinite beatitude of existence! It is; and there is nothing else beside It." "What," said I, "does the puny creature mean by 'it'?" "He means himself," said the Sphere: "have you not noticed before now, that babies and babyish people who cannot distinguish themselves from the world, speak of themselves in the Third Person? But hush!"
"It fills all Space," continued the little soliloquizing Creature, "and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness, ah, the happiness of Being!"
"Can you not startle the little thing out of its complacency?" said I. "Tell it what it really is, as you told me; reveal to it the narrow limitations of Pointland, and lead it up to something higher." "That is no easy task," said my Master; "try you."
Hereon, raising by voice to the uttermost, I addressed the Point as follows:
"Silence, silence, contemptible Creature. You call yourself the All in All, but you are the Nothing: your so-called Universe is a mere speck in a Line, and a Line is a mere shadow as compared with —" "Hush, hush, you have said enough," interrupted the Sphere, "now listen, and mark the effect of your harangue on the King of Pointland."
The lustre of the Monarch, who beamed more brightly than ever upon hearing my words, shewed clearly that he retained his complacency; and I had hardly ceased when he took up his strain again. "Ah, the joy, ah, the joy of Thought! What can It not achieve by thinking! Its own Thought coming to Itself, suggestive of its disparagement, thereby to enhance Its happiness! Sweet rebellion stirred up to result in triumph! Ah, the divine creative power of the All in One! Ah, the joy, the joy of Being!"
"You see," said my Teacher, "how little your words have done. So far as the Monarch understand them at all, he accepts them as his own — for he cannot conceive of any other except himself — and plumes himself upon the variety of 'Its Thought' as an instance of creative Power. Let us leave this God of Pointland to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and omniscience: nothing that you or I can do can rescue him from his self-satisfaction."
-- Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott was published back in 1884, so it is available at public domain because the property rights have expired. I mentioned it a few times, here and here, when discussing about dimensions.
This was written because Abbott wanted to introduce the concept of higher dimensions, more than three, but of course we as the denizens of Spaceland (3-D world) find it difficult to imagine. So what he did was to go down one dimension and took the point of view from a being in Flatland (2-D world), a Square. Later in the story, Square is visited by Lord Sphere, a 3-D being from Spaceland. Of course, at first he is skeptical about Sphere and dismissed him as simply a Circle, but in the end he realises that his world is simply a flat plane. To make his point, Sphere actually brings Square to Pointland, which is 2 dimensions less, that is, no dimension. Sphere then asked Square to convince the God of Pointland that the world is not zero dimension. So that's the part in the excerpt above.
And why are higher dimensions important, you ask? Perhaps Abbott already foresaw a future research in Physics. You would have heard all the buzz of superstring theory by now, what is it all about? It is a promising Theory of Everything, but there's a catch: the equations only work out if we have 10 dimensions of space. So we imagine that our world may actually have extra dimensions, albeit tucked inside the fabric of space-time, curling and intertwining upon them themselves. Physicist Brian Greene offers the analogy of the power cables to make sense of these extra dimensions. Cables, from afar, look like they only have one dimension, i.e. length. But if you go down the scale as an ant, you would notice that the cables have thickness; an existing dimension, but often too small to observe. Similarly, our world may have 7 extra dimensions that are too ultra-microscopic to observe. This is why the concept of higher dimensions is very important.
This is also one of the purposes of the Large Hadron Collider: to detect the extra dimensions. When particles collide in certain manners, some of the energy may be ejected to the hidden dimensions. We can measure the energy of the particles before collision and compare it to the energy after. If there is energy loss, we may be able to conclude the existence of the extra dimensions.
I highly recommend watching the TEDTalk by Brian Greene on superstring theory (2005), embedded below:

The Question of Identity

2009-07-05T23:15:00.004+08:00

When I researched about The Recursive, I came across Ship of Theseus, thanks to Wikipedia effect, as aptly summarised by xkcd's Randall Munroe here. To be fair, they are not entirely unrelated.
Basically it's like this:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

— Plutarch, Theseus

The question is, if the ship is recursively fixed until all parts have been replaced, is it still the same ship?
This reminds me of the famous notion about a man stepping into a river. The second time the man steps into the river, the river is not the same river; the man is not the same man. I always thought that this was said by a Chinese philosopher, but apparently it is Heraclitus.
Which brings us to the question: what defines identity?
Perhaps I should reiterate here how Heraclitus' man is not the same man. While the river is obvious for not being the same because of the continuous water flow, it's less obvious for the man. From biological point of view, some of the man's cells have died and have been replaced with new ones. He also has new memories, perhaps new ideas. And so on and so forth. In fact if we modify it a little, it can become close to the Theseus' paradox: if every one of a man's cells are replaced with a new one, is he the same man? Cloning debate.
The Wikipedia article poses a few solutions to the question, and to be honest, some of the solutions make my head spin. But in essence, we usually define what "the same" mean first. Aristotle differentiates between four causes: formal, material, final, efficient. Now the question is how identity is defined. According to design (formal, efficient) and purpose (final)? Yes, it is the same ship. But if the definition of identity includes material cause, then it is not the same ship. Perhaps the Japanese culturally exclude material cause as part of identity, since they can see no paradox in Ship of Theseus, as pointed out by the article.
I will skip "qualitative-numerical differences" and "four-dimensionalism" explanations. You can read them in the article. To me, those explanations are too pedantic to the point of being not useful. I prefer Aristotle's simple solution.
Perhaps by now you will have thought "What has identity of a ship got to do with me?". Then read on:

A: Who are you?
B: Huh? You mean my name?
A: See? Your eyes immediately turned right, using "the conscious side" to answer...I want you to answer what you feel. Who are you?
B: I don't want to say my name.
A: Not your name. I'm not asking the title your parents gave you, to distinguish you from other people. I mean, who, are you? Who?
B: A high school student.
A: Tsk, tsk, tsk. When you remove the status of "high school student", who are you?
B: A 17-year old... girl...
A: Not the labels of age or gender...Those are the labels that surround you yourself. Who?
B: A... human
A: And when all the labels are removed?
B: ... People, are all... labels.
A: If all the labels are removed from people like layers of an onion... Does that mean they disappear in the end? If you take off all the labels that surround your front with... Is there nothing left in the middle? Are you something that was created and molded...by your parents, society, the world?
B: No...
A: Then who are you?
B: I am...
-- Yamamoto Hideo, Homunculus v.4

So indeed, who are you? Remove all those layers of the proverbial onion, who are you at the naked core?
As for the girl's answer, you have to read the manga for yourself.
As for my own answer, I'm afraid that my own core at the middle is nothing much. I have to say that those labels imposed on us or otherwise, are undeniably a part of us, like our own limbs. But of course we are unique. We all have our own idiosyncrasies not found in other people. But that alone doesn't define who we are. It's like we need a foundation for it, like truth that cannot exist outside context. I'm human, I'm a student -- I need those labels otherwise my quirkiness means nothing.
Your answer?

Dualism Paradox

2009-07-05T22:12:00.008+08:00

The deeper that sorrow carves onto your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
-- Khalil Gibran

"If we want have an utopia, we have to have a dystopia first". This thought occurred to me in passing although I didn't pursue it further. To my knowledge, this kind of notion doesn't have a name, so let's call it dualism paradox for convenience.

It is a paradox because the ideas are contradictory; and it is dualism (not Plato's dualism) because, well, it involves binary oppositions. Enough with the difficult words. I think Jason Mraz sings it quite succinctly:

It takes some good to make it hurt
It takes some bad for satisfaction

It takes a night to make it dawn
And it takes a day to make you yawn, brother
And it takes some old to make you young
It takes some cold to know the sun
It takes the one to have the other

And it takes no time to fall in love
But it takes you years to know what love is
And it takes some fears before I trust
It takes those tears to make it rust
It takes the rust to have it polished

Ah la la la la la life is wonderful
Ah la la la la la life goes full circle
Ah la la la la la life is wonderful
Ah la la la la

It takes some silence to make sound
And it takes a loss before you found it
And it takes a road to go nowhere
It takes a toll to show you care
It takes a hole to see a mountain

-- Jason Mraz, Life is Wonderful (abridged)

I think not many people understand this blatant thing: it takes pain to gain; it takes hardship to know happiness; and so forth. This is what I mean by "there is no utopia without dystopia". You have to know what are lacking, what are corrupt, what needs to be rectified, to build a utopia -- dystopia is the means to the utopian end.

Of course, picking from the vast expanse on the meaning of love, tough love is a good example. This is the kind of love that is strict and disciplined, which may not appear as loving, but is ultimately for the good of the person being loved.

It is really no wonder that Pandora found Hope at the bottom of the jar. It takes all those evils to have hope, doesn't it?
Update: In retrospect, antonymic paradox sounds more awesome.

The number system is like human life

2009-07-03T18:55:00.007+08:00

"The foundation of mathematics is numbers. If anyone asked me what makes me truly happy, I would say: numbers. Snow and ice and numbers. And do you know why?"
He splits the claws with a nutcracker and pulls out the meat with curved tweezers.
"Because the number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of the small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers longing, and do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing?"
He adds cream and some drops of orange juice to the soup.
"The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something. And human consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child discovers the in-between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the stones, between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads to? It leads to fractions. Whole numbers plus fractions produce the rational numbers. And human consciousness doesn't stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers."
He warms French bread in the oven and fills the pepper mill.
"It's a form of madness. Because the irrational numbers are infinite. They can't be written down. They force human consciousness out beyond limits. And by adding irrational numbers to rational numbers, you get real numbers."
I've stepped into the middle of the room to have more space. It's rare that you have a chance to explain yourself to a fellow human being. Usually you have to fight for the floor. And this is important to me.
"It doesn't stop. It never stops. Because now, on the spot, we expand real numbers with the imaginary ones, square roots of negative numbers. These are numbers we can't picture, numbers that normal human consciousness cannot comprehend. And when we add the imaginary numbers to the real numbers, we have the complex number system. The first number system in which it's possible to explain satisfactorily the crystal formation of ice. It's like a vast, open landscape. The horizons. You head towards them and they keep receding. That is Greenland, and that's what I can't be without! That's why i don't want to be locked up."
I wind up standing in front of him.
"Smilla," he says, "Can I kiss you?"
-- Peter Høeg, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, pp. 101-102

After hearing that kind of that beautiful metaphor, I think I want to kiss her also. The excerpt is my favourite among others in the TOK textbook. It's a very good example of an allegory, an extended metaphor.
Why post this now? Because I just finished the book and the movie. The former is highly recommended, the latter not at all.
Despite that, this is the scene from the movie, although it is significantly different from the book:

Chrysalis [ 03. Chrysalis ]

2009-07-02T15:17:00.008+08:00

[See entire]

"Jake," he said, eyes fixated on his dancing fingers across the black and white ivory keys. Even I was amazed by how much progress he had made. Innate talent, which I didn't really have. Soon he would surpass me.
"Jake," he repeated. "Do you know how a caterpillar morphs into a butterfly?" His hands stopped moving. He stood up and gave up the seat. My turn to play.
A non sequitur. Of course I know. I studied a fair bit of biochemistry in my course. But as I saw his eyes growing larger with enthusiasm, I knew he wanted to answer it for himself, so I let him.
"Metamorphosis is really a trickery of nature. The term itself is a misnomer because there is really no transformation occurring. The pupa simply has another set of embryonic cells in its body cavity, remaining dormant throughout the larval stages. Inside the chrysalis, everything disintegrates except those embryonic discs. They consume the nutrients surrounding them to develop into a new structure altogether. New organs, new exoskeleton, which are vastly different from larval stages."
"I detest the butterfly." I interrupted. "It is a parasite inside the pupa, waiting to consume it from within." I stared at the ceiling, my fingers on the sombre, black keys.
"I prefer to see it as being born again. The pupa and the would-be butterfly are the same organism, carrying the same genetic code. They are not separate entities. Think about it, the pupa has chance to be reborn again. To change its appearance. To gain the ability to fly."
I felt as if something inside me was disintegrating. Would it develop into something that can flutter its way up to the blue sky as well?
"Alphonse," I stood up. "It's a pretty picture, but as you said, it's still a trickery." I walked away.
"We'd like to think that we have been deceived. But in fact, nature has always been that way from the start. Humans were the ones who decided that the pupa must somehow have transformed into the butterfly when the butterfly struggle to get out its wings to break free from the chrysalis."
Alphonse's words echoed in the common room. I felt it echoing many times in my mind, too.

The Recursive

2009-06-26T23:14:00.014+08:00

Repetitive words or ideas are indeed one of a writer's and a philosopher's favourite toys. But why would you want to repeat what you have just said? There are many reasons:

1. To make clear
This is quite obvious. When someone you talk to don't understand, you will repeat your statement. On a related note, in literature there is something we call motifs, which are recurring elements in a literary work that help to develop themes. This is more intangible, since motifs can be anything from prop, setting, words, sentences, ideas, characters, etc. Human minds always look for patterns to make sense of a coherent whole. One of the reasons we can't stand randomness.
(Notably, the Hindus chant their mantras repetitively over and over. Since their purpose is to attain enlightenment, I see it as they savour the meaning of a statement over and over. Every possible meaning, every possible nuances, until every possible essence is considered and eventually the teachings become clear to them. So I put this under this section.)

2. To emphasise
Related to #1 but goes a step further. Rather than making unclear things clear, we are making things already clear clearer. A rather clear example is this very statement and the one before -- clear?

3. To deliver impact
Still related to #1 and #2. My favourite is a line from Churchill's speech:

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.
-- Winston Churchill

Note the emphasis on we and fight. Try to remove the repetition and you will see that the impact is much lesser. By repeating the active voice, Churchill infused sense of belonging and raised the morale of the British in the war against the Germans.

Another example is by Wilfred Owen in Disabled:

Germans he scarcely thought of; all their guilt,
And Austria's, did not move him. And no fears
Of Fear came yet. He drought of jewelled hills
For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;
And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;
Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits.
And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers.
-- Wilfred Owen, Disabled, lines 30-36

Although the syntax is deceptively similar to #6 (later in the post), 'fears of Fear' doesn't indicate the superlative 'fear'. Rather, the repetition enhances the effect of the personification 'Fear'. Let me explain:
When the first letter of a word is capitalised, it is like a name of a person, so we say that the word is personified. Other notable examples would be 'Mother Nature' and 'Death'. Think of those two words carefully -- if you are imaginative maybe you will conjure images of benevolent mother and grim reaper. So you see, personification firstly changes the status of the intangible to the tangible. Fear, nature, death -- those are abstract concepts and are difficult to picture. What personification does is giving them bodies -- embodying them in real objects, bringing them from imaginary to real plane. What's more, they are not just tangible objects, but persons. With personalities, with emotions, with will, with mind; it's a Being. So, personification, when used appropriately (like what Owen did), is a very powerful tool.
Owen refers to the ultimate form of fear in the battlefield. This is perhaps one of the things that people who never experience war, including myself, understand. But if you read Owen, you would somewhat get a glimpse of it: the graphic enormity of war. The soldier in Disabled didn't understand this also, until it was too late. The ultimate Fear, which should be feared for your own good.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
-- Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est, lines 17-24

There is another way of making impact: make a monotony first so that a sudden break from it would be blatant. It is indeed a dualism paradox where something exciting requires something boring first.

4. To indicate recursive property
What do you call your grandfather's father? Great-grandfather? How about moving up a hundred generations? Easy: Great-(101x)grandfather.
What do you call a square of a number? A zenzic. What do you call a square of a square of a square of a number? Zenzizenzizenzic. I'm not pulling your leg -- it's the word which has the most z's in English.
On a similar note, speed is the rate of change of distance, acceleration is the rate of change of speed. So acceleration is the rate of change of rate of change of distance (one of my students was very amused by this). It's a pity the physicists didn't have the sense of humour like the mathematicians to coin a similarly recursive term for acceleration.

Let's take a detour and see about other languages:
5. To express plurality
Certain languages, instead of modifying their nouns, prefer to repeat them to indicate amount of more than one. For example, in the Malay/Indonesian language, the word 'person' would be translated 'orang' while 'people' would be 'orang-orang'. A very regularised modification, unlike a certain language in which the modification follows a rule but not always consistent.

6. To indicate the superlative
This should be quite a known fact to Christians. In the Hebrew language, it is one way to express superlative as such: X of Xs. So for instance 'the wine of wines' means the wine superior to any other wines. This syntax may seem logical when we say 'king of kings' and 'lord of lords' but befuddling when we say 'people of peoples'. This is because nouns like 'king' and 'lord' already imply superlativity in their meanings, so this Hebrew syntax works when such nouns are used but otherwise sounds strange in English.

Now, for the reasons less obvious:
7. To confuse
'Huh? Isn't this contrary to #1?' you ask. Actually to be more exact, it is to prompt people to ponder about things but sometimes if you think too much you get confused. A fine line between philosophical musings and clueless rants indeed.

Since this is an area of philosophy, let's have Plato:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
-- Juvenal

Plato questioned Socrates "who will watch the watchmen?" in The Republic. This is a very common question when we are talking about society structure, morality and laws. This invites us to think: those who ensure adherence to the law -- who will make sure they themselves adhere to the law?

Moving on to epistemology. Look at the following dialogue:

A: Some people don't know what they don't know.
B: But if something is unknown, how can you possibly know it?
A: What I mean is, you know certain things -- those form the body of your knowledge, correct? You should realise that there are gaps missing here and there in your body of knowledge. Those are those that, when you learn of them, you would know that they will fit the gaps.
It is like a game of jigsaw puzzle. When you almost finish it, you don't know what the missing pieces look like, but at least you know their shapes. And when the pieces fit snugly in the gaps, you know that those are the missing pieces.
B: Ah, so you mean that there are people don't even realise that there are gaps in their understanding?
A: Precisely. That's why the quest for knowledge is neverending. The gaps are always there, getting finer and finer, too microscopic to the untrained eyes. But I hope someday our understanding will be complete, not even a sliver of truth excluded.

Makes you think twice, doesn't it? Perhaps another one?

In the above dialogue, B knows that A knows that B knows that A knows...that B already knows what A means.

Confused enough?
There's a poem titled 'thinking I think I think' by Charles Bernstein. Before you click the link, brace yourselves, for the poem is discombobulating as the title is ungrammatical.
Bordering on that delicate tipsy tightrope walk between, how about:

And the biggest self of self is, indeed, self; that sin is, in fact, grounded in this notion of what is it that I want as opposed to somebody else?
-- Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, addressing his extramarital affair on June 24, 2009, as transcribed by Federal News Service. (Source)

And what is that supposed to mean? I'm as clueless as the next guy.
Next, reverse psychology. In one passage I read, a villain is having a monologue: "What can you do to make a person doubt a truth?" He answered himself, "Simply tell the truth."
Essentially, this is reverse psychology. The villain is perceived as someone who is not likely to tell the truth, thus his words are doubted. But this kind of assumption is utilised by the villain.
To complicate matters, there is reverse-reverse psychology, where the hero is as clever as the villain and expects the villain to use reverse psychology. In this case the villain may try to speak as such that he sounds like using reverse psychology, while in fact he is not. He simply lies.
Taking the mind game further -- the pattern should be clear by now -- there is reverse-reverse-reverse psychology and so on, but alas, I'm getting recursive.
8. To entertain
While repetition is a proper rhetoric device, linguists are wary of redundancy. To what extent is a repetition redundant? I'm not answering that question, instead I will mention repetitions that are clearly redundant but funny.
Put up your hands: Who among you are guilty of using redundant 'ATM machine' and 'PIN number' in daily conversations? Oh my, we are all suffering from RAS syndrome. As you can read in the Wikipedia article, RAS syndrome is a mockingly funny, yet most suitable, name for the phenomenon.

9. To make a pun
Homonymic pun is a perfect excuse for repetition; words that don't mean the same thing but look the same or at least similar. So at the heart of it, it's not really repetition per se, since the meanings of the words are different. See comment section for example.

Finally, if you're still not clear on recursiveness, click here.

Tear-stained

2009-06-22T22:58:00.008+08:00

That day on a still park
Near a fountain, I was sitting on a bench next to an old lady
Gazing at the statue at the centre of the fountain
Of a woman -- covered at appropriate places -- gazing back at me
The old lady was reading the morning paper
Everything about her was grey
Grey attire, grey paper, grey much like the greyish-blue sky
and the grey clouds, behind which the sun was hiding
I curled, lifting my knees to touch my cheeks, about to doze off
The old lady took out a handkerchief to wipe her tears, the paper still on her lap
A long sniffle.

I needn't to ask her why -- I read it
Another brutality, another atrocity, another crack at the Dam of tears
A baby thrown away down the garbage chute, its orifices teeming with ants
A young suicide bomber blasting off in the middle of town
A girl finally succumbing to death seven hours after her last wish was granted
A rape of a woman; a rape of a nation
Body parts scattered in the Atlantic
It makes the heart of everyone who has it
bleeds

The handkerchief can soak up her tears
-- How about
the blood shed
the innocence snatched
the scar incurred
on the body and the soul --
What can?

A chill drizzle comes
though it feels warm like tears
steadily gaining momentum
I look at the tear-stained paper:
creased and crumpled
drop by drop the paper is getting wet.
I look at the tear-stained face:
weathered by time, creased and crumpled
by sorrow and anguish
drop by drop the face is getting wet.
Even the statue is weeping:
Something flows beneath its eyes
pigeonshit and rainwater mingling
Everything is crying --
the lady, the heaven, the statue
How can I not be?

The Art of Kissing

2009-06-07T23:28:00.007+08:00

Do you ever wonder why we kiss? What is it that causes us to pucker and lock lips, exchange saliva (and colonies of bacteria), and intertwine tongues (sometimes).
A little search in the Net reveals a few hypotheses: social conditioning, instinct -- remnant from when mothers feed chewed food to the young, pheromone sensing, etc.
Social conditioning means that the behaviour passes from generation to generation. Considering that there are indigenous tribes not known to have kissing culture, this may be true. But then again, kissing may be too private to talk about or to be observed -- so it is not final that the behaviour is non-existent. Also, some animals, specifically primates, are also known to exhibit osculation (that's the technical term for kissing).
The pheromone sensing is an interesting theory. When we are talking about pheromone in humans, usually we don't mean it literally, since there is no specific hormone in us attracting the opposite sex to mate -- unlike insects, where pheromones mean just that. Some research papers suggest that somehow women can distinguish men with better genes. From the evolution point of view, this of course means that the offspring is more likely to be fit. Now, this obscure sensing may be the sum of the experience -- the man's height, his symmetrical face, his way of talking reflecting good education, his toned muscles -- the sum of it all may be the said metaphorical pheromone, the attraction, physically or otherwise. I believe that intuition can be reasoned out in a similar way. There are numerous little circumstances that you consider subconsciously -- the sum of it all, the conclusion, is what we call intuition. But I digress.
Since we are talking about "sensing the good genes" here, it is worth-noting that kissing involves a great deal of our senses. All our five senses -- visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory -- are hosted on our heads, so isn't it logical that we keep our heads close to each other when decrypting each other's pheromone signalling?
Why the lips, though? Well, if you have ever seen the picture of a sensory homunculus, it is obvious that a lot of sensory nerve endings are located on the lips and the tongue (about 21%). A significant portion is also located, of course, on the fingertips.
Indeed "why the mouth?" is a good question. Consider that a lot of metaphors of copulation are related to eating -- consummation, devour, eat you up. Also consider why cunnilingus and fellatio and a plethora of similar activities are practised.
To answer this question we have to consider symbolic significance of the mouth. The mouth is a passage to let something in; that something will be a part of the self. Considering this, it is not that far-fetched to describe kissing as letting the other party have a taste of ourselves, making a little of ourselves to be a part of somebody else's. This is a little bit different from copulation, since here, both parties are equal in the give-and-take.
So: a kiss is a complex exchange of information. Even enlightenment can be transmitted.
Deep.

Pun 101

2009-06-05T22:46:00.010+08:00

When talking about context, I couldn't help but think of puns. Let me start off by saying that there are a lot of theories about why funny things are funny. What I'm focusing here is puns, which is just a subset of all things funny (or lame -- depends) and what role context plays. Again, language and philosophy hand-in-hand.
Puns basically makes use of ambiguity. This is where context comes into play. If you remember about ambiguity between lambda and rù (λ), you will see that we need to choose the right context to ascertain meaning. What makes puns humorous is the confusion of this choice of contexts. let's have an example:

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

Now, the quote says exactly what it says: if you don't understand binary, you won't get the joke; the joke is on you. Of course, the first time reading this you will establish a context, like it or not (since we already argued earlier that for something to have a meaning, it has to rest on a context plane). Well, the context that we established is that "10" is ten, in base ten, as is commonly the case. The pun here confuses the context of base ten and to understand the quote we have to change our context to base two, as hinted ("binary"). Ah, now it makes sense -- "10" is actually two if we convert it to base ten.
Most theorists agree that this unsuspecting element is one of the core elements of all things funny. So: several contexts exist, we chose the most likely one, but oh no, actually it is the other context. This "oh no" part is the surprise element, the unexpected, making connections between contexts that are previously not usually thought to be connected. Daniel Dennet argued that as a reward for making this connection, we fall into fit of laughter. This is certainly an interesting theory since laughter has been proven to have physiological benefits, so it is not far-fetched to call it a reward. I would like very much to address the many theories of humour, but that is another story.
Let's have another pun:

When Mozart passed away, he was buried in a churchyard. A couple days later, the town drunk was walking through the cemetery and heard some strange noise coming from the area where Mozart was buried.
Terrified, the drunk ran and got the town magistrate to come and listen to it.
When the magistrate arrived, he bent his ear to the grave, listened for a moment, and said, "Ah, yes, that's Mozart's Ninth Symphony, being played backwards."
He listened a while longer, and said, "There's the Eighth Symphony, and it's backwards, too. Most puzzling."
So the magistrate kept listening; "There's the Seventh... the Sixth... the Fifth..." Suddenly the realization of what was happening dawned on the magistrate; he stood up and announced to the crowd that had gathered in the cemetery, "My fellow citizens, there's nothing to worry about. It's just Mozart decomposing."

You can immediately see that the punchline is the two meanings of "decomposing": rotting away and the opposite of composing a symphony. It should be noted that the contexts surrounding the two meanings are not really confused -- more like they are fused. Of course the correct course of nature is for a human to rot away in a grave, but a strange phenomenon happened: the backward playing of Mozart's works; both ultimately point to the word "decomposing".
In this light, you can see that rebus puzzles are a kind of pun, too.
Here are few examples (source):Mouseover for answers. Again, there are two meanings, those represented by the arrangement of the visual cues on the puzzle and the other is a common phrase/sentence -- both should point to the same phrase/sentence. Do you see it?
Now, let's talk about categorisation. Language is not only spoken, but written; so it should be no surprise that besides homonymic puns, there are homophonic ones. Homonyms are words with the same spelling but different meanings, like "decomposing". Homophones are words that sound the same but are spelt differently. Example for a homophonic pun:

A: What is the difference between a prince and a ball?
B: A prince is heir to the throne; a ball is thrown to the air.

Needless to say, this is about the similar pronunciations between "heir" and "air" as well as between"throne" and "thrown". There are several other categorisation, such as the rebus puzzle case, in which the arrangement of the visual cues are not really "words", so it cannot be categorised under homonymic -- but in principle, puns revolve around ambiguity of meanings -- this can arise from the same spelling, the same sound, etc.
On a related note, there is a category of homophonic puns called mondegreens. Perhaps they should not be called puns, because mostly, they are not intended. Basically a mondegreen is a misinterpretation of a line because it sounds similar to something else. Sylvia Wright proposed this term because as a child she hear a poem which has a line "And laid him on the green" but she misinterpreted it as "And Lady Mondegreen". So you can see that Mondegreen itself is a mondegreen (this is kind of recursive, isn't it?). I can recall a recent example, which perhaps should be called reverse mondegreen or intended mondegreen. In other words, it's a genuine pun. Language Log dubbed it the worst pun of all time, even. Here it is:

Lastly, let's have puns about puns that I shamelessly plagiarise from Wikipedia:

"The pun is mightier than the word." — original source unknown
(Pun and word: plays on "pen" and "sword", in the saying "The pen is mightier than the sword".)
"A pun is its own reword." — Dance Drier, British comedian
(Reword: pun on "reward", from the saying "Virtue is its own reward".)
"Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted." — Fred Allen
(Quoted: pun on "quartered", an old form of capital punishment.)
"Immanuel doesn't pun; he Kant." — Oscar Wilde
(Kant: play on "can't", in the name of philosopher Immanuel Kant)

So punny.

Love is a loaded word

2009-06-01T01:10:00.008+08:00

L is for the way you look at me
O is for the only one I see
V is very, very extraordinary
E is even more than anyone that you adore
-- L-O-V-E, Milt Gabler

"Love is a loaded word". This particular statement from a show is really unforgettable. Perhaps because it reminds me of something I read before about the Greeks, who have four different words for love. A concept so difficult to grasp, to the extent that some people may never find what it really is in their lifetime; unfathomably deep and wide like an ocean, crammed inside a four-letter word?
'Loaded' is an understatement.
Let us digress a bit and talk about epistemological view of language, especially words. We often overlook the fact that words are actually containers of meaning, not the meanings themselves. That a word is not identical to the thing it signifies may seem obvious, but give it a little more thought. Let's have a quote, then, appropriately from a play with a theme of love:

Juliet:
What's in a name? That which we call a rose(45)
By any other name would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,(50)
Take all myself.
Romeo and Juliet (II, ii)

The word 'rose' is a label, which the speakers of English agree to call the flower as such. And of course Juliet is in love with the person Romeo, not caring about his family name Montague.
With this in mind, imagine the thing which we label 'love'.
Not easy, isn't it? I, a non-native English speaker myself, often wonder about why the word is so short when the meaning it encompasses is really vast. And why the lack of alternative expressions. Sure we have some: infatuation, concupiscence, amorousness, even artificial term like limerence. Yet those can be considered not of equal magnitude compared to 'love'. Moreover, the low frequency of usage of those in daily conversation alone should be enough evidence of that.
The Greeks themselves are well-known for having four words for love, thanks to C.S. Lewis. These are: eros, storge, philia and agape. Roughly, eros is physical attraction; storge, affection; philia, liking; agape, unconditional love. It should be noted that the word philia occurs in philosophy (love for wisdom), hydrophilic (affinity to water), etc. You can see that philia itself is also an umbrella term for general 'liking'. It goes without saying that 'erotic' comes from eros (C.S. Lewis asserts that eros is not necessarily sexual, though). As for agape, let's take a look at one of the most famous verses in the Bible:

¹⁶For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
-- John 3:16, KJV

The Greek word that John uses here is agape. So agape is the ultimate form of love, unconditional and sacrificial; the love of God. The greatest love of all, if you may.
The Japanese also have at least three expressions for love: ai (愛), koi (恋) and suki (好き). 'Suki' actually pretty much means 'like', but this is actually the expression used when you intend to date a person. This may seem strange, but this is the culture. In Japanese language, straightforwardness is discouraged. Intentions are revealed in subtle manner. This is also generally true for most Asian cultures. I also read that aishiteru (愛してる) is only said when the couple is at the stage serious enough to marry (perhaps this one is outdated though. It was quite a few years back). From my research, it appears that 'ai' may cover philia and agape -- love in general, while 'koi' is closer to eros or limerence.
I won't bother you with the problem of 'liebe' in German, though, since I don't dabble in German that much (here, and here if you are interested). Most people know 'ich liebe dich' -- wait, do you really?
So there you have it. This crazy little thing called love is certainly not little in any way -- 'love' is loaded, literally. I think it is really underhanded whenever you say 'I love you', since that word covers almost everything anyway, swept clean under the rug.
Pause and think about which love, and don't make the wrong choice.

Six Degrees of Separation

2009-05-20T13:38:00.009+08:00

I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find that extremely comforting, that we're so close, but I also find it like Chinese water torture that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the connection. It's not just big names—it's anyone. A native in a rain forest, a Tierra del Fuegan, an Eskimo. I am bound—you are bound—to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It's a profound thought: how Paul found us; how to find the man whose son he claims to be, or perhaps is, although I doubt it. How everyone is a new door, opening into other worlds.
-- John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation

I'm just a single voice
What can I do to erase

All this misunderstanding
All this anarchy
Six degrees of separation
Sometimes it's so hard to see
That we are not alone in this
-- Corrinne May, Free

"Six Degrees of Separation" is a concept that everyone in the world is linked to at most six degrees. As the Wikipedia article mentions, Frigyes Karinthy proposed this notion back in 1929.
When I ponder on why people find this concept appealing, I think it can be summarised concisely as thus: the notion of shrinking 6.5 odd billion people to 6 degrees -- what a dwindle! Our enormous globe, suddenly implodes to network of no more than six connections between the nodes. This big shrink, this oversimplification can be understood without taxing the minds. There is no need to imagine how do billions of people crowded together look like, like the spell of dizziness when you look up at the vast expanse of the sky, whose boundaries you cannot fathom.
However, while offering a concept even a child can understand, it is also almost impossible to prove or disprove this notion.
Let's scrutinise this concept closely:
As of 2006, the estimate for the global population stands at 6.53 billion. Now, let us assume one-way network. This means we zoom at one person and view the network of acquaintances around him. If we let average numbers of a person's acquaintances to be n, then
n^6 = 6.53 x 10^9
Solving for n, we get roughly 43. So, on average, a person only needs to know 43 people for the whole world to be interconnected. So few?
We have to take a look at some assumptions:
Firstly, this assumes that there is no social barriers. Anybody is free to mix around with anybody. With the current globalisation era, the reality is becoming closer to the assumption. Still, special circumstances like cultural isolation, geographical restraint, language barriers, etc. may come into play here.
Secondly, society is dynamic. Relationships are broken, created, renewed; and we are always moving about, geographically or otherwise, as in births and deaths. The figure 6.53 billion is a frame freeze, which vacillates across space and time. While it is true that statistically speaking population size doesn't vary that much, we are talking about the dynamism of the exchanges of communication, which cannot be easily included in the equation.
Thirdly, we assume that all relationships are on acquaintance level. In actuality, we have stronger and weaker relationships than that. You see, if we have strong relationship, say family, we tend to stick more to the stronger relationships, while the assumption suggests that you stroll in the park and make acquaintances to strangers along your way.
Fourthly, we assume that on average we have the same amiability level. In truth, there are introverts and extroverts and the spectrum in between. And this is of course related to the previous assumption. Our personalities influence on the combinations of strong or weak relationships that we have.
...
In the end, even with the assumptions laid bare, it is still impossible to see whether the fact that everyone is separated by at most 5 people in between, is true. In the end it is just romanticisation, an idealisation, like a pretty gift wrapped in fancy ribbons, but without utility whatsoever.
I believe what the world unity can not only be achieved by merely an ideal. When we get right down to it, we have to eliminate prejudice, promote equality, educate the people, help one another in need, play a joke on each other a little,
while keeping in mind that we are all tightly connected, every two of us having no more than five people in between.
Update: How about taking a look at the Internet itself to picture the complexity of connections? Wait patiently for it to load...

Context is all

2009-05-18T01:11:00.009+08:00

“Context is all” (Margaret Atwood). Does this mean that there is no such thing as truth?
The above question is one of the ten prescribed topics for TOK essay, IB Nov '07 session.
I don't know why but I have since regretted not picking this question for my TOK essay. It is one of the shortest -- it gives a lot of space of interpretation. That's the tantalising part. And the difficult part, too.
Enough wallowing in regret, then; let me try to tackle this, without the restriction of the mark scheme.

To comprehend such a statement, it is only appropriate for us to be acquainted with the context surrounding this statement.
This statement appears more than once in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Set in dystopian post-nuclear age , the novel gives a glimpse through the eyes of Offred, a handmaid. For Offred, what utterance of "context is all" could mean? I believe for the bulk of it, she demanded context to make sense of her surroundings. You see, Republic of Gilead where Offred lived in, was still in the midst of transforming to a dystopia. Offred could recall her life before in (presumably) the United States. The sudden change in situations confused her. Life didn't used to be like this, so what now? That is the state of mind Offred is in. When her old life, her 'context', has been snatched away, she needs a new one.
But, what exactly is context? We have the vague idea of it. A bigger picture, a larger body of knowledge, the plane on which we define things. Let's extend the metaphor about the picture a bit more. Say you have a jigsaw puzzle. Take a piece. Describe. Well, it has interesting shape and fancy colours, but otherwise it is a piece of crap. Assemble the whole thing and tadaa...! You've got yourself a clear picture (Disclaimer: depends on your jigsaw puzzle picture. If you bought an abstract picture then not my fault). Same thing with pixels: A pixel means nothing but with other pixels on the screen, then you have some meaning to it.
One way to look at it is to differentiate between two things that may make up a context: the laws and the facts (or truths, if you like, but that word is so philosophically loaded that one is reluctant to use). For example, let's look at Euclidean geometry. The "laws" are the five axioms postulated by Euclid. Those are the rules of the game. Now, restricted by these rules we can construct infinite geometrical shapes -- these are the "facts". So you see that the laws provide the plane of existence (pun on Euclidean plane geometry intended) on which it supported the existence of the objects, the facts. You could immediately see how this explanation makes perfect sense to mathematicians and scientists: Yes. Precisely because they deal with laws and objects governed by those.
Another way to look at what context really is, is back to our jigsaw puzzles. Coherence is the keyword. Mismatched jigsaw pieces can only mean that there are other pieces form other set contaminating yours (of course there alternatives like your or the manufacturer's stupidity, but well you don't want to consider them, do you?). This approach is clearly different from the previous one. Some facts that agree with each other can make up a larger body of knowledge. For instance, two facts: "A attended Dr. X's class yesterday" and "There was Dr. X's class yesterday". Coherent, isn't it? Let's say we change the second statement to "Dr. X's class was cancelled yesterday", then the first statement must be false; a mismatched jigsaw piece, or something else entirely.
To unify the above two approaches, picture it this way: there are laws which are the foundations of all truths. But these truths are interconnected in intricate way with one another, like a mesh; they are not beads neatly arranged on a plane; picture the beads in a kind of neural-level-intricacy network. Now, for convenience, sometimes it is easier to take a look at a bead by zooming at few beads surrounding the one being viewed. This is our jigsaw puzzle. Or look at the more fundamental, in the truest sense of the word: the laws. (To complicate matters, these laws are actually are layered cakes also. For example, in Euclidean geometry we have 5 axioms, then we still derive a whole lot of theorems, which in a sense, are also laws.)
It is worth reiterating here that contexts come in different sizes. You choose how big or small it is according to practicality. Actually, we can classify people according to how they use the above two approaches. Natural scientists look at the physical laws that govern physical bodies. Human scientists limit their scope of context to society and history. Psychologists restrict it even more to human minds and interactions. Mathematicians also look at the fundamentals like natural scientists; but then they go and create their own contexts (e.g: imaginary plane).
By now you should have already understood that the word 'context' also carries hefty epistemological weight.
So: context is all. Without context, independent "truth" cannot be considered truth. There must be a framework surrounding it, supporting it, then the "truth" is construed. Here is a good example:

What is this? (Warning: trick question)
The answer? You've guessed it. Depends on the context.
To Greeks and physicists, it is clearly a lambda, as in λόγος 【logos】 isn't it?
But my Chinese friends beg to differ. It's rù as in 进入【jìnrù】 (enter; get into).
Who is correct? Both are correct in their respective contexts, aren't they?
Lastly, let's address that old philosophical question:
If a tree in the woods fells and no one is around, does it make a sound?
Assessing from utility and usefulness point of view, the answer is: it doesn't. Or more precisely: I don't give a damn, because it makes no difference whether it does -- there is no added value whatsoever. This sounds like a jest, but anthropocentric view like this is actually more common than what most people think. To simply limit one's context to what are useful to humans is certainly practical, but it is dangerous when one is unaware of it.
To a physicist, the answer is quite clear: it does. Sound waves travel through the medium of air. Our ears are just detectors of these sound waves. If there are no human ears around, then just use other kind of detectors to confirm the vibration in the air that is the sound wave.
Do you see how the above example make use of the different scopes of contexts?
Back to our heroine Offred. She desperately needed context: to construe things around her; to glean truths from lies.
I believe we also desperately do.

2009-05-04T14:59:00.003+08:00

My version of dystopia
is the world without you.

Farther/Further

2009-05-03T23:31:00.005+08:00

Note: this post is meant for my student; pardon me for mentioning the obvious

'Farther' and 'further' are comparative terms -- how to choose which comparative form of 'far' to use?
First, it is very important to distinguish between literal and figurative meanings. Literal meaning refers to the dictionary definition, while figurative meaning refers to similar idea found in the literal meaning, but the meaning is applied somewhat differently. Let's have an example: 'box'. Dictionary meaning? In 3-D it usually refers to containers having six sides of rectangles or squares perpendicular to each other, or in 2-D, simply a square or a rectangle. Figurative use? 'Think out of the box'. Here we do not have a physical object or drawing of a 'box' as defined above. Here we are merely borrowing the idea: a box is usually rigid and containing/limiting something. Now apply this idea of rigidness and limitedness to the mind/thought: 'Think out of the box' simply means that one has to set no limit to imagination and be flexible; in other words, be creative. See how convenient it is to borrow meanings to apply in another situation? This technique is commonly called 'figures of speech', which we use heavily, consciously or otherwise, everyday. This makes language not only dynamic, but also interconnected.
Now let's see what are the literal and figurative meaning of 'far'?
Literally, 'farness' refers to the state of physical distance that is deemed great. Used figuratively, it can refer to other distances that are not physical, for instance, "How far is your revision?". In other words, it can refer to: extent, time, degree, stage, etc. You get the picture.
'Farther' is used when the farness is literal, while 'further' is used when the farness is figurative. That's all? Yes, that's all!
One final note though, be aware that 'further' is much more heavily used than 'farther'. Remember that figurative meaning borrows idea, so the meaning is more flexible and broader than literal meaning. Consequently, 'further' applies to broader set of situations due to its flexibility. For example, we always say 'further down the road'. You may ask: Isn't this clearly physical distance? Why isn't 'farther' used? Now, this is because the degree of 'down the road' can be either in distance or in time, or even both! So here we are not sure whether it is literal distance or otherwise, so more likely than not it is 'further'.
Nowadays, 'farther' is rarely used. From above, you have seen that even literal farness can be conveniently grouped under 'further'. Usually 'farther' is only used when you want to emphasise that the distance is literal distance.
So, when in doubt, use 'further'.

A World Without X

2009-05-03T22:44:00.003+08:00

I have been reading novels of dystopian genre recently (unintentionally): Orwell's 1984 and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. A dystopia is the opposite of an utopia. So instead of fairy-tale paradise that society aspires to be in, novels of this genre take place in alternate world, in the future or otherwise, where things have taken turn for the worse.
Well, then suddenly it occurred to me: What exactly is a dystopia? How bad things should be to qualify as a dystopia? This train of thought came when I recalled about a short piece of work whose title I can't remember. The plot is very simple. But the setting is unforgettable -- it's a world where the sky is ash-gray and not blue and birds no longer exist.
For the two protagonists, who set on a journey without clear destination, there no longer exists the metaphor of flapping one's wings with the vast blue sky as one's backdrop. They don't have wings and even if they fly, it is suffocating to fly in dull gray sky, forever longing for the blue sky.
So now, what is dystopia? Without birds, can you still survive? Yes you can. It's not like humanity will die out or something. But you see, for these two characters, the absence of birds symbolises the absence of their own freedom. Free as a bird -- free as a what? A something that no longer exists.
So I'm concluding that everyone has his/her own version of dystopia. And one way to look at it is that a dystopia is lacking something. Something is absent; perchance a thing that we usually take for granted. In 1984, the language itself is eroded -- truths and thoughts are bent to the Party's will. In Handmaid's Tale, the ability to reproduce is reduced. But the thing is, to the people that are not the protagonists, these kinds of situation may not be dystopian. Winston realises how the Party is manipulating historical records and so conflict arises. Had he mastered doublethink (as he did at the end, unfortunately), then he would have accepted the situation as it is. Then there is no dystopia. Offred, one of few women still able to bear children, is exploited as a baby-making machine; she is barely treated as human being. Had she been the Commander or the Wife, she would be in a more favourable position. Then there is no dystopia. But there is no story to write about of course.
A world without something, of course, is an oversimplification of a dystopia. But isn't it an eye opener to know that taking something seemingly insignificant away can cause so much misery?

L is for Language

2009-05-03T22:02:00.006+08:00

Death Note, anyone?
I'm not going to talk about death gods and their notebooks, but instead I going to talk about a name; that is, the name of the mysterious detective, L.
If you know a bit of the Japanese language, or an avid manga reader (like yours truly), then you may have known that the consonant L doesn't exist in Japanese. So how do the Japanese pronounce 'L'? That's easy: with 'R' sound instead.
You can quickly see some difficulties that the Japanese face when speaking English. Oh yes, firstly, they will tend to say 'Engrish'. Beside these, there are a wide range of possibilities for puns also.
Death Note contains some of the most amazing uses, or perhaps exploitations would be a better term, of this non-existence of 'L' consonant.
Firstly, the name of the protagonist is? Yamato Raito.
/raɪto/ is how most Japanese would pronounce both 'right' and 'light'. This is significant. One of the recurring themes is justice and fairness. Yamato Raito claimed that his act of killing people was justice; is he 'right'? Moreover, after his murder spree escalated to international level some people saw him as the 'light' that guides the world to be a better place, after the criminals are disposed of. Is he?
Now let's go back to our elusive detective, L. With that kind of elaborate consideration for a protagonist's name, don't you think the mangaka would choose a name with equally hefty significance? This one is pretty obvious, isn't it? 'L' is a consonant that doesn't exist. Isn't it the most appropriate name for a detective who always telecommunicates with changed voice without showing his face? Whose existence itself is doubted?
Considering all these, the most brilliant thing is of course later in the story Raito killed L and assumed L's role as world-renowned detective bent on capturing Kira. The self-righteous Light behind the mask of L, what more could you ask?

You Dancing in The Rain

2009-01-15T23:44:00.006+08:00

That afternoon, the smell of rain hang in the air. It was like the damp smell of soil, as if already wet from anticipation. Soon enough it rained; drizzle at first, but quickly gaining momentum, racing down to the ground. The splatters were getting louder.
I peered through the narrow window while in front the continuous beads of water trickled down, forming a kind of screen. I was in a daze. The downpour never failed to amaze. Like sheets of some strange fabric being rolled down from the sky. Every droplet is different, but somehow they are connected, united in purpose.
Then you appeared. Running in the middle of the incessant watery air strike, arms flailing, head held up high. You were also in another kind of race. If the droplets' goal is the ground, what was yours? I wanted to ask you that. To capture as many droplets as possible? To savour the sensations of the pricks on and trickles of the droplets on your skin?
You tossed the beads of water up with your hands. In mysterious gestures, the beads danced, shone like pearls, bobbing up and down around you. No, you were the dancer, the beads merely followed along, as if enthralled by the beauty of your movement, defying gravity, coming under your bidding.
You suddenly stopped. Arms stretched out, head facing up the sky. You let the shower come upon you, trickling down your bodily nooks and crannies. Your eyes were closed, as if meditating, tracing the trail of water, the lingering sensation of the vestiges, quickly renewed, the coolness seeped again, soaking you with ever-continuing freshness.
Such performance, such grace. You started running again. Going out of view. The rain still struck with the same ferocity. Suddenly the wind was blowing gentler. The curtains of water were closing off. Curtain call.

To My Unborn Brother/Sister

2009-01-15T22:10:00.004+08:00

Hi.
First of all, sorry that I've been oblivious to your existence for 20-odd years. You, you always exist in our parents' mind. Of course your existence is independent of my awareness of it. It's not like: "I am thought, therefore I am", isn't it? Still, somehow I feel the need to apologise. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is ignorance.
You who didn't have a face, you who might have only been a clump of cells beating with life and were never beyond,
You know, eyes are formed before the brain is. Then slowly the complex optic nerves grow, visual cortex and the rest of the brain follow. Did you have your eyes? Even when all you could see was darkness all around. Even when you didn't have the synapses and neural network to comprehend that darkness. No, you didn't have a chance to; you were fumbling in that darkness, only to be abruptly cast away in another kind of darkness: the abyss of non-existence.
Our parents told me that when mother was aware of my intrusion to the world, they had planned to wash me away. Well you can always see a baby as a threat or otherwise. But then I was a little beyond a clump of cells, too big to remove without risk. So here I am. But when I am pondering about you, my little brother/sister, the short period you spent on Earth, I am wistful about my own. I just live a little beyond, that's all. Eventually I will be cast away into that same darkness, the path you had treaded.
No, I am not angry with our parents. It is something they had to do, given the circumstances. And I beg of you, don't resent them for it. Parenting must be one of the most difficult jobs on Earth. You are supposed to be responsible to shape another human being's life -- not only morally or educationally like what teachers do, but in every literal sense, genetically, financially -- think about it. The word 'responsibility' is bloated, forced to take on every meaning available to it. It's big, it's heavy -- conjure the image of Atlas carrying the world on his shoulder. This burden is so great that one may be understood, if not forgiven, for choosing not to bear it.
Potential. That is what you were. Seed that didn't grow, even though it has the potential to. Potent, but not yet. Possible to be. The power is hidden, latent. Usually I would remark that there is no use talking about possibility of becoming something if in the end it doesn't become something. But here I am willing to dwell in the realm of the hypothetical for a while. In you, there are possibilities sprucing up like branches of an overgrown tree. It's not only in you, but in everyone else, in the surroundings. Imagine how complex this system is when everything comes into contact. Had you been around a little longer, you will tread your tree, choosing which branch to climb next, and the same with others. You may end up high up there, you may fall -- I don't know because I myself am still struggling making my way up. Now, when you ceased to be, well, the branches got cut off. There's no way up; there's no tree to climb; there's no you to climb.
As I said, even though you ceased to exist in this world, you live in our memories, you live in my writing, even if it merely a shadow of your existence. But don't forget that you came into contact with this world; with your own set of possibilities, rippling, affecting others, even until now.

Love.

The Piano

2008-11-21T16:19:00.005+08:00

There was a grand piano at an abandoned old building near the place where he lived. An old Steinway -- slightly out of tune but playable nonetheless. He would go there sometimes -- the doors were all locked but there are other openings. He would play songs. Simple songs, or tunes that he made up, or melodies that he figured out after repeated listening.
He liked how the sound echoed throughout the empty building; how it bounced off the walls and amplified the original sound in slightly out-of-phase manner. Because it indicated the emptiness. He liked the emptiness, the absence of people -- just the piano and he, together. It didn't matter that the dance of the melodies in the air, the beauty of it was never seen by others. If a tree falls in the woods with nobody around, does it make a sound? No. To others the piano and he didn't exist. He liked it. The idea of isolation, the separation, the privacy of his very own world.
The piano was a faithful companion. Every musician knows that an instrument can reflect the musician. He felt that way, too. He was naked when he played; his soul, his emotions, his thoughts are laid bare -- they are dancing in the air, out from his fingertips to the keys to the hammer to the vibrating strings then choreographed in the air, performing complicated dance, bobbing up and down, bouncing off the walls, filling the empty space. Narcissus saw his reflection on the lake, the lake saw its reflection in Narcissus' eyes. The piano was as vast as the lake, it is large enough to accommodate the most detailed of reflections. The piano, too, feeds on its pianist. The lake can see its own beauty from Narcissus' eyes, the hollow piano consumed the overwhelming being of the pianist, filling up its hollowness and transformed it into choreographed movements of melodies gliding in the air.
The piano knows him well. When he was sad, when he was overjoyed, when he was aggravated. The numerous and complex ingredients of emotion were there in the air. The room was a vat, a cauldron and inside the cacophonic potion is bubbling, frothing. Troubles of the heart sometimes surfaced, or were they bubbles of happiness? Stirring up, stirring up, the ingredients reshuffled like a pack of cards. One could pick up the subtlest emotion here, although with all the cards flying you need the luck of a poker player.
When he was running out of songs and energy, the noise died down. The dance ended without encore, the potion is ready. Then the mirror of the soul was closed, ready to be reopened.

2008-11-02T14:24:00.002+08:00

If there was ever anything excluded from Aristotelian "Everything in moderation", that would be temperature of my morning coffee.

Metaphors in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

2008-10-27T14:15:00.009+08:00

Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately thus makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on.
pp.71-72

All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate...implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; to solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent...it is a also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake.
pp.179-180

It won't do any justice to judge a book by its cover; nor does it do any better to judge a book by its metaphors alone. However my purpose here is not to judge, but to remark on the extraordinary complexity these metaphors display.
Let me begin with a disclaimer: by metaphors I mean metaphors and company; analogy, parable, metonymy, synaecdoche -- all those that compare, parrallelise. Such is the power of good literary authorship, in this case Rushdie's, that the technique refuses to be pigeon-holed into a category. I can only safely say it is a comparison. However it is not a simple one- or two-way comparison; it is beyond that.
Take a look at the two bulky quotes above. They do not employ the same complexity. The complexities arise from different aspects of a metaphor. Let's try to unravel them.
The first parallel: "family history" and food in the context of Islamic "dietary laws".
The ultimate purpose of comparing a thing to another is to invoke aspects not immediately apparent, but are obvious in juxtaposition.
The simplest, and most commonly encountered, effect is to make concrete. Suppose you have an abstract concept -- compare it to a physical body, then suddenly the abstractness disappears, the concept becomes possible to be sensed. In essence, rather than having the concept high in the clouds, a make-concrete metaphor transforms it to be a part of empirical experience. In literary works, it is not uncommon to see Death and Nature, initials of both capitalised. Why? The only category of nouns whose initials are capitalised even when they do not begin a sentence is the proper nouns. People's names, cities', countries'. There are physical entities behind those names; the names are just labels, for convenience of reference. Likewise, if you are talking about Death and Nature, you are not talking about bodiless concepts. Rather it suggests that there are physical entities who embody those names. Usually the more anthropomorphic the 'bodies' are, the metaphors are even more powerful. Imagine an Angel of Death or Mother Nature, for example.
The first quote: there is no difference here. Family history is quite abstract while food is concrete. To swallow the food is to understand the history. To complicate matter, Rushdie inserts the halal law here so that the food can only be consumed in certain manners conforming to the law. Certain parts are not supposed to be swallowed, to be understood: the "redness", the "blood". Following this, the halal law on the metaphorical plane must also have a parallel on the reality plane: the taboo of uncovering family's shameful, painful past. It is no easy matter to formulate an allegory, an extended metaphor like this, in which several aspects of body A are parallelised to several those of body B. It is of course much easier to just compare an aspect of body A to another in body B. Then move on, another aspect of body A to another in body C, and so on. Of course the impact will be diminished because the metaphors become disjointed instead of interlinked. Consistency and coherence give more than the sum of the separate metaphors. This coherent collection of metaphors is termed an allegory. Depending on the author, how far a metaphor can be extended varies -- but the extent is his imagination alone.
Second quote: I will skip the bring explanation as it is quite clear that ups and downs in life can be compared to snakes and ladders. The extraordinary thing that is impossible to capture by quotes is that this metaphor will be invoked several more times. Not only as mere metaphors but there are episodes involving real snakes and ladders. For example, Saleem was cured by snake venom when he was about to die of his illness -- "climbing up the snake". In this way the metaphor transcends the separation between metaphorical and literal planes. Rushdie switches between the two with ease.
There are other good examples in this book, but let me choose one that befits the title of the best. It is becoming so clear as you progress through the pages that the book itself is one helluva big allegory. The birth of Saleem at midnight of Independence ties him with India the nation. Saleem, the protagonist, himself parallels India.
If a book can be so astounding by one aspect alone, imagine about the others. It is really no wonder that it won a Booker Prize (1981), then Booker of Bookers Prize (1993), and most recently Best of the Bookers (2008). A standard text in university syllabus, it is really a highly recommended read.

Thousand Masks

2008-10-26T15:15:00.005+08:00

I live in a castle of a thousand masks
where there are guests swarming all the time
cruising the halls and corridors
in-out-in-out
I greet them one by one
each time donning a different mask
yes, a different one. Each time
.based on what you ask?
on how I am related to the person in question
a dinner-mate kind--
a casual-hi kind--
a sipping-tea-with-silence kind--
an I-want-to embrace-you kind--
an I-want-to-punch-your-annoying-face kind--
all sorts of people
likewise all sorts of masks
real simple

The masks?
Oh there's a serious one
there's a joker one
there's an emo one
a sulking one, a smiling one, an innocent one
well there's one covering only part of my face
like the-phantom-of-the-opera kind?
There's even one that's near transparent

But no matter how transparent
no matter how similar the mask to my real face
(some masks are like mirrors,
unfortunately many are distorted ones,
the kind that makes you look fatter than you actually are --
like that)
So yeah
A mask's a mask
there's always a
gap, barrier, filter, shield, screen
something standing in between
you can never see what I truly am

I live in a castle of a thousand masks
We all do.

The Curious Case of Infinity

2008-10-17T23:18:00.005+08:00

I remember in high school when the teacher didn't allow us to write '1/0=...' . I protested. Isn't the answer infinity? No, there is no answer, you cannot even put the equal sign there, because it is undefined.
OK, that's an exaggerated version, but looking back in retrospect, it is now easy to see why. Calculus provides the answer. '1/0' is undefined, but the limit of 1/x as x goes to 0 is indeed, infinity. Conversely, the limit of 1/x as x goes to infinity is zero. I felt cheated, but it is brilliant cheating nonetheless.
What is this 'infinity ' anyway? Well, the younger and less wise me thought that it was intuitive that if some number is divided endlessly, in the end it must be zero, and conversely so. That magic denominator is infinity.
As things go by, it is clearer (or less so) that zero and infinity are problems.
Why zero you ask? "I understand that infinity is pushing the limit of human mind, but why zero?" Ah, if you consider that the earliest numeral system did not include zero, isn't that proof that zero is so elusive a concept? Let's see. The Greeks even rejected the idea of nothingness and adopt 'zero' thanks to the adoption of Arabic numeral system. The Arabs got it from the Indians. So the Arabs got nothing from the Indians (If you are not laughing, then you miss the joke, sad case). Well, enough of that, 'zero' is another story. For now let's consider infinity.
Let's do a warm-up: what's infinity minus infinity?
If you answered 'zero' with a great deal of suspicion, yes, you are correct, the answer is not that straightforward. Let me try to retell Dave Hilbert's Paradox of the Grand Hotel without sounding boring:

Suppose that there is this famous Grand Hotel. Why is it famous? Because it has infinite number of rooms, aha! On weekend you want to see this hotel for yourself. You go to the receptionist to check in but unfortunately the rooms are all full. The manager came out and tell you not to worry. He told you he would move the guest in Room 1 to Room 2, the guest in Room 2 to Room 3, and so forth. You got to stay in Room 1.
Satisfied with the hotel's excellent service, the following weekend you brought an infinite number of friends to the hotel. Again, the hotel was full. But the manager was unfazed. He moved the guest in Room 1 to Room 2, the guest in Room 2 to Room 4, the guest in Room 3 to Room 6 and so forth. Since there is infinite number of even-numbered rooms, all the guests are accounted for. The manager then put you and your retinue in the infinite number of odd-numbered rooms. Everyone is happy.
Room service is still excellent though. You know, they've got infinite number of employees.

This illustrates how normal mathematical operations don't usually work when infinity is involved. Have yourself a set of infinite integers. Take away the infinite set of odd numbers and you are left with the infinite set of even numbers. Infinity minus infinity can be infinity.
Very curious, isn't it?

Mathematical Tragedy

2008-10-17T23:02:00.006+08:00

As lines, so love's oblique, may well
Themselves in every angle greet :
But ours, so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet
-- Andrew Marvell in Definition of Love

Oh my, that's a clever one. I never see Euclidean fifth postulate in such romantic (albeit tragical) way.

a strange feeling

2008-10-07T22:07:00.001+08:00

fingers touching ivory keys
white, white, white
a few blacks
here and there
interplay of speed, pressure, precision

fingers are like puppets on strings
they dance
bending to the puppeteer's will
the intricate steps
left, right, front, back
a little bit faster
a little more pressure
now release the crescendo
slow down to adagio

you cannot hear all these communication
but you can hear the melodies
they are right there
the heart of the puppeteer
his will, his energy, his emotions
his everything

but
sometimes the puppeteer is distracted
his mind is blank for a split-second
but (again)
the puppets never miss a single step
in fact, they are steps
that the puppeteer
has been dreaming of
to perfect the harmony
the steps fit the gap
completing the flow

it's
a strange feeling
it's as if the puppets move on their own
tugging the strings connected to their limbs and joints
"here, here. and here."
it's as if they understand
the beauty of their dance

then the show is over
but the images of the dance
are etched in his mind
the strange feeling
stays

Orbitals

2008-10-07T21:53:00.006+08:00

Bimolecular Nucleophilic Substitution

2008-10-04T02:24:00.002+08:00

Hybridisation

2008-10-02T22:22:00.012+08:00

Strains

2008-10-02T21:44:00.015+08:00

Broken

2008-10-02T21:23:00.002+08:00

It was another rainy day. Sluggishly I climbed the stairs. I could hear the couple in the second storey fighting again. Lately it had not been only verbal but with a layering cacophony – dull thud, the sound of glass crashing to the floor -- like a song with a bad arrangement, like an orchestra missing all its cues. The landlady had left a note again in front of my door. You haven't paid for this month's rent.
I shed my drenched clothes and took a hot shower. A tune was playing in the next room. What A Wonderful World. At that moment the world did seem wonderful. The spray of hot water against the skin was wonderful. In that cramped shower cubicle I often crouched – the feeling of curling up, of making oneself smaller is relieving. I'm so small against the world -- Sometimes we need to accept that to move on, to make changes, to become big. Paradoxical as it may be, there I was, feeling every droplet splash against my skin, rivulets down the ridges, trying to find its way down. I stayed still. How I wished for the time to stay still as well – Does time even exist?
By the time I awoke from the philosophical discourse, the rain had stopped, the tune had died down, the night is still. I walked back to my room in a daze. The room was in similar confused state with my mind – a mess: unmade bed, clothes and books strewn all over and a broken PC on the desk, sitting there like an usurped king refused to give up his throne. There’s a literary term for it I remember. Macrocosm and microcosm? Big world and small world. Like when King Lear was out in the storm, a storm was raging in his heart, too – But in this case while my room was like a shipwreck, my mind was more like the aftermath of a tsunami.
Earlier that morning I was on my way to college. The train was very cramped, as usual; an old lady was catching her breath, coming in just in time before the doors closed – no one was giving her a seat. Probably someone did offer her but she declined it. Probably the young man sitting in front of her has knee injury. Probably her stop is near, so she does not need to sit. Probably, probably. Even though I was not sitting myself, I felt embarrassed and conjuring up those excuses in my mind offered distraction.
Sitting on my bed, I pondered about why I felt embarrassed earlier. After all, it was not me. After all, I could not do anything. Whom I felt embarrassed for? The word ‘humanity’ passed through my mind but I quickly dismissed it. Embarrassed for humanity? Probably. But blaming humanity on the whole doesn’t help much. Sounds very noble, lamenting for humanity, but then what? Probably felt guilty as part of the younger generation? That’s still too abstract. Then I realized that I was feeling for myself. For not being able to lash out at the people sitting to give their seats to the poor breathless lady. For being ignorant. For not even offering kind words to her.
Embarrassing. It was kind of that also when I considered calling my parents for help. I was in financial pit. I had barely enough to pay rent and college fee. I imagined the faces of my parents. The blank and cold space between them on bed was more than that. Emotionally, the chasm was already impossible to shut. I couldn’t stand the sight – my father drowning in beers and my mother in her tears. I was relieved I had to go to college, a perfect excuse to get away from it all. I didn’t really want to chime in again, creating more problems for my parents as if there aren’t already any.
Earlier that day after the morning classes, I went to search for work but to no avail. It was sweltering hot – no wonder it rained in the evening, the heat was the precursor. I tried to get a friend to take a look at my PC. “Your baby is dead. Give it up, buy a new one,” he said, after just a peek inside the CPU. He didn’t even switch it on. Well, I knew it wouldn’t switch on anyway but how he knew I just couldn’t figure.
In the afternoon, the rain started to pour. I was waiting for a bus. There in the bus stop I saw a girl around my age. She was leaning to the advertisement board at the bus stop. I didn’t pay much attention, except for her slightly awkward standing position. The bus came. The seats were all occupied. At the front was a young woman in business suit. Behind her was an elderly lady. Then I noticed the girl from earlier. She boarded the same bus. She was walking very slowly, knees bent, grabbing support along the way. The old lady quickly stood up and gestured her to sit. It all seemed to happen in a flash. I was still stunned even when the girl uttered a weak thank-you to the old lady. I felt different feelings from that morning. Maybe I no longer felt embarrassed for humanity? Sure I still felt funny about the businesswoman who was nearer to the girl but failed to stand up, but I felt that there was kindness, there was warmth left in humanity. Perhaps somehow my parents would go back together, stitching up their broken relationship. Perhaps somehow I would go back to my room finding a new PC sent from a stranger. But that’s not very likely, I guess.

Free

2008-10-01T00:33:00.007+08:00

I sluggishly got out of the bed and went to the kitchen. My head was still hurting. The alcohol from the previous night was a little over the top, but then, it had always been that way. After quenching my parched throat, my body failed to move again. No it was more like the sense of balance is turned off and there was I, in constant vertigo. I was addicted to this intoxication, the feeling of being liberated from having to be conscious about moving – about doing, about being. Only during this moment I don't care about who I am, who I was, who I will be. Time didn't exist, neither did space; do I myself exist? Around this point of philosophical discourse, usually, the body would send the signals – the signals that re-establish the boundaries of reality, the freedom was just an illusion. The unbearable migraine, the pangs of hunger, the extreme thirst.
Of course, I also enjoyed the release of the alter-ego when the alcohol kicked in. When self-restraints are sent flying out of the window; when the inner, truer self breaks free. People always tell me how astonished they are when they witness what a drastic turn my personality takes when flooded by alcohol. I'm sure the sight of the timid man who always keeps to his own cubicle spouting vulgarities to strangers is really shocking. When asked which is my true personality, I honestly don't know. On one hand, abiding to the common code of civil conducts is fine, but sometimes there are things or people that try your patience. In a sense, it is indeed freedom, since the things are manifestation of what cannot be said or conducted within boundaries of self-control.
But I didn't think of these things when I was slithering on the cold marble floor, clutching my head as the throbs of pains struck like a thousand needles – the price to pay for transient liberation. My hand reached out to the kitchen top. The glass fell and made a crashing sound; individual droplets scattering in all directions in slow motion. The sight of my wife at the door, shaking her head, already desensitised by the sight, thinking that there was I again, wallowing in self-created, illusionary freedom. But to me the freedom was real, as real as all these things. Why would you need to break free from being free?

Physics Lecture

2008-09-28T23:53:00.006+08:00

I had this lecture sometime ago and I spotted two interesting things.
1) The lecturer was explaining about science and how it is about the cycle of hypothesis, theory and experiment. That was all fine and well, but then the example he gave really made me straighten up in my seat. You see, he was giving an example about hypothesis:
"So, let's say we have hypothesis about speed; that it is distance over time. We test it, and the experiment agrees, so we have a theory that speed is distance over time."
The fatal mistake here is that speed is a concept that we devised to substantiate the notion of rate of change of distance. Speed is by definition distance over time; it is self-contained truth that is indisputable.
To be fair, the lecturer has that 'things that I regret almost as soon as I said it' look. He realised his fatal mistake but went on without rectifying it to avoid confusion.
2) The lecturer has this interesting quiz: "Is this true or false: an object with non-zero acceleration can never stop and stay stopped."
Again, the key lies with definition. Since the object's movement is already defined as non-stationary (non-zero acceleration), of course it can never stop, neither can it stay stopped. So is there a point of asking the question, unless it is epistemology class and/or the absurdity is intended?

Oh well.

person, persons, people, peoples

2008-09-08T21:51:00.005+08:00

"I saw three person," said he, pointing at the picture.
My student was describing a picture. A cooking class.
"Three people, you mean," I interrupted.
"Oh yeah, three people," he corrected himself.
"Well should you have said 'three persons' it may not be so fatal an error," I mutterred.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
Oh well, we can use a little detour.
"There are such things as 'persons' and 'peoples'." I sipped my coffee.
His eyes grew wider and confusion was there, peeping from the corner, staring.
"But that doesn't makes sense," he protested.
Every English teacher is, of course, well-aware of such statements. After all, we used to wonder about that too -- How language doesn't make sense, but apparently we have come to accept it. Language is like a slithering snake. It is constantly moving. It is stubborn in having its own way. It cannot be contained by rigid rules.
So with the smile of the enlightened I replied, "It's like that."
"Let's start with 'peoples'. There is another meaning of 'people'. It is referring to the citizens in a nation collectively. A nation has a land and a people." And perhaps a corrupt government, too, I added inaudibly. Citizenry is a good synonym, but let's leave it at that.
"I see. But what about 'persons'?"
"Well, it is the plural form of 'person'," I smirked, anticipating the bewilderment that is now visible.
"'People'," I continued before he uttered a word. "is a collective term. It emphasises on the group as a whole. 'Persons' is not used very often. Well, it is a plural form, but here we emphasise on the individuality of each member of this group we are talking about."
I let out a pause for impact.
"A good example would be the Trinity," I continued. "We usually say Three Persons of Trinity. We want to emphasise that there are three entities we are talking about."
Of course, only one noun has this special case. Which other nouns have to be emphasised on their individuality? Which other nouns resist grouping as a whole and insist separateness? Which other nouns are so selfish, revolving around themselves? Anthropocentrism does invade every area of knowledge, sadly.
"Teacher, can I continue my description?"
I awoke from my mental discourse.
"Yes, please."

To You Under The Blanket

2008-08-25T23:03:00.002+08:00

As you close your eyes and drift to slumber
our bodies conjoined together
naked skin emitting warmth
trapped in the locks of limbs
your head on my chest
Do you feel the rhythm --
of my heartbeat?
Do you feel my caress
leaving no parts
untouched?
Do you feel my tongue swirling
in your mouth
eager to savour every taste
of you?

Darkness lets me see you clearly
your shape
the silkiness your hair
every contour
the ridges, the valleys, the mountains
the stream of life running

You will stir
aware of the intrusions
yes, be conscious!
feel every sensation
jolts of impulse firing

You will retaliate
snuggling until
there is no distance between us
in the brief moment
two become one

You will
We will
Only if
If only
you are not
the hollow space under the blanket

From The Inside of Shell of Taciturnity

2007-08-24T00:16:00.001+08:00

A face, many faces
Voices, noises
animated conversations
Holding silence, clasping hands
closing mouth and heart
Feeling cold, rubbing hands

You sat beside me
saying nothing
Passive that I am
waiting for initiation
that never came
I thought about
Me exuding frigidity
You needing help no more
You being pressurised
Now sitting there in obligation

The shell almost cracked
but it didn't break

When will I ever hatch?

The Construction Site

2007-08-23T23:34:00.000+08:00

Morning devotion:
About nearby construction site
slowly towering, gaining height, growing under the crane
been years
But it stopped.
The crane stopped moving, the construction halted
The monument standing in glory and silence
Is the fund not enough -
Are the workers on strike -
The contractor went bankrupt -
Ought to be, ought to be.
Apathy, slightly disdain-tinged
(Waste of resources, poor-planned...)
- Wait -
What if the progress continues inside?
No manifestation outside
but developing nonetheless

People judge by appearance
not heart
People see Goliath
not David
The magnificence of one's heart
is not readily at sight
obscured by the outside
Judging a book by its cover
is not getting very far
For it is the heart
that matters most.

Refrigerator

2007-07-08T12:38:00.001+08:00

[hmmm...]Sitting down
[hmmm...]seeking a night breeze
[hmmm...]here
[hmmm...]was a sweaty night
[hmmm...]with stuffy feeling in the air
[hmmm...]though not bad the quietness
[hmmm...]taking out a cold drink
[hmmm...]the sensation rushed in
[hmmm...]on the parched throat
[hmmm...]river flows on the Sahara
[hmmm...]Mind still
[hmmm...]being sorted out
[hmmm...]Considering
[hmmm...]Like those sudden moments
[hmmm...]when you are wondering
[hmmm...]why?
[hmmm...]what?
[hmmm...]who?
[hmmm...]am I here. am I doing. Am I really.
[hmmm...]no answer -as usual-
[hmmm...]like a spiral without end
[hmmm...]the train of thought
[hmmm...]continued nonetheless
[hmmm...]On and on
[hmmm...]and on
[hmmm...]for a while
[hmmm...]
[hmmm...]drowning --
[hmmm...]in the sea of thought
[hmmm...]
[hmmm...]
[Stop.] At that moment
I realise
that the silence is an illusion
The constant humming
had been there all along
droning in a monotone
now it's resting
till it repeats its chorus again

Has my life
been a drone?
Is the picture
a monochrome?
And would stop occasionally
to repeat the same monotony-
again and again and again?

Or is life
a take-for-granted?
that when it will have stopped
then the loss
will come rushing in
seep into hearts
of family, friends
acquaintances even
perhaps
depends on the life led itself
was it a good one
was it a bad one-

Whichever it is
I learn something
My life
would not be a repetition
not a monochrome nor a monotony
So that when
I stop humming
there would be no regrets

...

The peace now
seems real
though there may be
other hummings
I'm still oblivious of

A sweaty night, a stuffy air
Now back to sleep

Dream

2007-07-01T14:33:00.001+08:00

Hero king warrior --
fantasticality.
Airy-fairy kind
or The same --
ordinaricality.
Alternate world
maybe Strangeness of circumstances --
Freudian symbolicality.
Interpretation please
Nevertheless It's
Surreality, phantasmagoricality
-- At-the-moment Reality
Then the alarm rings, congeniality
Thoughts come rushing in
Rationality, reasonability
Welcome back to reality

Likening

2007-06-05T00:17:00.000+08:00

Association, parallelism, metaphor, analogy, parable.
I guess the appropriate hypernym would be 'likening'.
(Even the concept of hypernymity can also be considered as one, but never mind.)
I always wonder at the sheer number of literary devices that uses 'likening'. Perhaps the keyword here is 'connection'. Human brains like to connect, to associate. Conditioned reflex, for example, associate a certain stimulus with a certain response.
Other examples. Visual learning associate images with concepts and this actually makes recalling more effective. Others may find it easier to memorise a song than a paragraph of the same length. On physical level, intelligence is said to rely upon the number of connections that neurones make. Is it not evident that the brain makes connection?
Association can be made on more or less equal level or different ones.
Generalisation, for instance, is associating a certain common characteristics of a member of a body with that body itself. Contextualisation can also be seen as one since a concept resides in larger body called the context. Of course these two sound more distant than association of things at more or less equal level.
Parallelism juxtaposes a certain event with another event, for instance.
But actually the degree of equality of the levels of things being likened does not matter.
The impact does.
Take Personification which likens dead objects to living things. The matter lies in the impact on the mind. If a pencil is said to dance on the paper, the mind recalls not only writing but also the concept of beauty, of grace, of efficiency, of nimbleness.
Metaphors achieve similar impact. When time is likened to a river, the mind recalls the quality of a river and try to attach it to time. How it is a flow, how it is continuous series of events, and so on.
There is also another kind of impact. Understanding. Take analogies. Analogies may not be full representations of the concepts being analogised but they help in understanding the concepts. The concept of the Trinity, for example, can be analogised to a triangle. The mind recalls the understanding that a triangle is not a triangle without three sides. So the concept of Three-but-One can somewhat be better understood. The metaphor example above also shows that time that is abstract can be partly explained using river that is non-abstract, thus is understood better.
Isn't it interesting? We all are familiar about this, aren't we, since the brain is all about connections anyway, so this knowledge is at the back of our minds but not really thought or spoken deliberately. It is kind of learning epistemology. When I first learned about the knowledge of knowledge, I feel familiar and I had thought about it or kept it at the back of my mind before but now it has form. It is written in words, it is conveyed in language. I feel overjoyed.