Circular 180-degree rotational symmetry...

... is totally awesome. Wheeee!! And the crater-lake blue, ohhhh. Puurrrrrrr... I heart the rotational symmetry! Like a Julia set. Shiny.

What unspeakables happened to Douglas Coupland...

... that compelled him to write with such a giant psychedelic squirming teratoma of disdain for contemporary society? (Okay, I empathize)

He's a master of spinning absurdist scenarios into a coherent and dark lore of what is dysfunctional in the modern world. His metaphors are almost, dare I say, Picasso-like? I think that's the most refreshing aspect of his writing. It speaks to my stretched-over-the-elastic-limit pseudo-intellectual ethos. I can read his books when I'm anywhere from 30% to 80% awake, preferably in a shroud of disillusionment.


I read Player One, Generation A, and JPod (reverse chronological order of when he published them) In all three books, the story would center around a quintet or sextet of characters thrust into an epic adventure against their will. Despite seemingly very different from one another (different walks of life, different parts of the world, different upbringings), they are united first by their bizarre circumstances and gradually come to the realization that they are more alike than they have thought. That they are all equally screwed over, but somehow things work out. More or less.


There's a stronger autobiographical presence in JPod than in Player One or Generation A in that there is one main narrator and more of the characters are connected to him than others. Later in JPod, however, the narrator's work life and home life become unwittingly stirred into a peanut butter and wasabi mix. Perhaps Coupland has felt like that at some point in his life. I can only speculate...

There's also a lot of stream-of-consciousness in JPod which many other readers have found distracting, not to mention random typographical feats like the word "ramen" in size-7 (?) Helvetica repeated for one whole page, or the first ~50,000 digits of pi, or random Chinese characters. I personally loved the "ramen" page. Hit rather close to home.

Perhaps these are meant to be subliminal bombardment of modern culture? Or the author got lazy? In any event, I found this somewhat amusing. The digits of pi though is rather overdone and a waste of ink. ~200 digits would be adequate. :-P

I might give his earlier books a read, although I have gotten a pretty good idea what to expect. He seems to alternate between rambling stream-of-consciousness (JPod) and intricate story weaving (Player One) and somewhere in between (Generation A). I can empathize too, even though the longest (fan)fiction I've ever written is barely 6,000 words. Or was it less than that? Oh well. So I understand that everyone has more inspired days than others. I'm still a fan.

(Unsubmitted) questions to Tina Fey on "Ask Tina"

- - -
(1) As a writer (i.e. content generator), where do you find inspirations, or how do you get inspired? Especially during down times like an epic writer's block?

(2) (Not a question) I totally dig the shout-out to grad students in your 30 Rock episode with the adoption agent.






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Gin no Saji (銀の匙, Silver Spoon, a manga series by Arakawa Hiromu, with reference to Dan Pink's Drive)

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It certainly feels refreshing to see a manga series that doesn't have the usual medley of gratuitous violence, complicated and/or explicit romantic entanglements, and/or (psychotic/delusional) characters either with or without magical powers. On some level, I identify with Hachiken, the main lead of Gin no Saji, who is from the city and therefore an outsider at an agricultural trade high school. He's also somewhat adrift on the sea of life without a landmark of destination in sight.

All of Hachiken's classmates seem pretty set in life. They have decided to follow a specific trade in some type of farming or animal husbandry, often take over the family farm. A subset of them dream of playing professional sports in order to make more money and support the family business. On the one hand, these youngsters are following a tradition in what they are born into, what they are familiar with. On the other hand, these trades demand a lot of physical and mental stamina, as well as a strong intrinsic motivation. Like Hachiken before he enrolls at the school, I really have no idea what it actually takes to wake up before dawn and clean the stables and milk the cows and harvest the eggs and... butcher the animals.

Hachiken gets asked many times that all-encompassing inevitable question, "What do you want to be? What is your dream?" To which he would reply, "I... don't really... have one..." He very likely has followed a prescribed path that supposedly leads to a contrived and canned definition of success. Like a perverse version of E.T. following a trail of Hershey's.

Ahh, the artificial construct of being number-one. When people are conditioned in an environment filled with numerical differentiators and zero-sum games, their intrinsic motivation soon withers and dies. (Read Dan Pink's Drive for more elaboration on this idea.)

Over the course of the seasons, Hachiken's experience at the agricultural school has opened his eyes in ways that a regular city high school would not. Perhaps he will eventually find some kind of purpose in life.

Speaking for myself, a perversely conventional definition of an educational "success" story. Is it a success story if I don't feel much like one?






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Ship of Fool by William Trowbridge

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Wonder what drew me to pick up this little anthology from the myriad of lineups on the library bookshelves. Was it the white-on-black text on the book's spine? The petite size? The ohh-so-shiny gloss suggestive of a published year coincident with the current calendar year? I'd go with all three. After all, the mind draws from a lifetime of associations when making split-second choices. Like what books to read over the next few weeks... The intriguing intro on the back cover merely confirmed my intuition that this would be a good read by my dictionary. 

(The title is not to be confused with the ship of fools, which is an allegory of civilization. Although the concepts are loosely related.)

This is a collection of poems about the fool archetype. Imagine a combination of Yiddish comic characters "schlemiel" and "schlimazel", where the former is "a bungler who's always accidentally breaking and spilling things on people", while the latter is "a sad sack who's always getting his stuff broken and spilled on him". Trowbridge's Fool is both.

Reminds me of comic characters whom Robin Williams and Jim Carrey played in movies. Or Forrest Gump. And perhaps the Fool is not so foolish after all.

After all, Cupid's fool of a peon calls himself "a flyboy from the infantry of love".

I mean, everyone has been a fool at some point. Perhaps the Fool speaks to that primal curiosity, the (blind?) courage to believe that the world is still beautiful, or the (naïve?) earnestness to try and make it so.

Despite being (seen as) perpetually awkward. Nevertheless, he deserves some applause for trying. To help. To live. To love.

To be.






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Once upon a random research meeting

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I opened the door to the small conference room.

Jokester Grad Student: Speaking of women.

[Chuckles from the group]

Me: Huh? What's going on... Can you recap please?

Jokester: We were talking about how there aren't enough women at Cal Tech.

Me: Oh really. [Facetiously] Like 10%?

[More chuckles]

Male REU Student: 10% [ROFL]

Jokester: More like 28%... I mean, how was it for you?

Me: So the overall is half and half. But some majors are 25%, 15%, and others are like 80%. You can probably guess which ones...

Postdoc: Women's studies?

Jokester: Biology?

Me: Yeah.

Jokester: It's those fuzzy mice.

Me: [Raised eyebrows] And killing them.

[Loud laughter from the group]

Jokester: What does this say about women?!

Me: [Deadpan] Don't mess with them.

[More laughter]

Female REU Student: Well-played.

Me: Har har har.






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Flesch-Kincaid readability test HACK

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I recently enabled this option inside MS Word's spelling and grammar check. It's an amusing metric that measures the approximately minimal reading comprehension ability needed to understand a certain passage of text.

So my entry about Copenhagen the play has an index of about 11, which means that an average 11th grader (high school junior) should be able to understand it. This somewhat abstruse entry from Fractal Ontology has an index of about 19. That probably requires one of those liberal arts college education hmm (and a real Ph.D., i.e. in philosophy while at it)

I think one example where this test wouldn't be accurate might be something like "The dog barks arf-arf-arf-arf-arf-arf-arf-arf-arf-arf-arf-arf-arf-arf-arf-arf and the cat goes meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow." This has a score of 38 according to this calculator. Which would mean that one needs to complete 38 years of schooling to understand that, oops. Perhaps a heuristic that breaks up hyphenated words might be helpful here.






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Once-in-a-blue-moon relatively-pleasant dream

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I was wandering around the Stata Center, which looked different from the real one. It was internally circular and the rooms were bigger. There was also one giant general purpose room...

I saw people I know from high school & undergrad whom I don't think know each other. They were engaged in a strange team-building activity inside the general purpose room, building Rube-Goldberg type devices. There were about 5 or 6 competing teams, and I saw them trying to hold down a spring (looked like it had a high spring constant k) hanging from each of the ceiling lights... for perhaps about 30 seconds. The mayhem that ensued was somewhat ridiculous. Screams and cheers and people piling on each other in awkward positions.

Meanwhile, I was circling around the food areas and came across an ice cream dispenser with 5 flavors: green tea, vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, and mint. (Seriously I think I must secretly want all ice cream dispensers to have those flavors...) I had a green tea one, strawberry mixed with vanilla, mint mixed with vanilla.

And then a current labmate was commenting amusedly on my mixing the flavors.

At least I know where the ice cream dispenser came about... I was at a food truck festival the night before and was watching one of my friend's friends eat a tall stack of ice cream balls on a cone. I was already full, but that cone sure looked tasty...

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The disadvantages of an elite education

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This article by William Deresiewicz has probably been cited N = too many times ad nauseum. But that's only because many people read it and resonated with the message.

Number and label games are much easier to play than the nebulous and mystical exercise of self-reflection. Like jamming round pegs into square holes. In my case, it's an amorphous peg.

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.

Oh is that ever so true. In my case, also add to the overwhelming inhibition factor of making small talk in general. Some days are better than others, but still. I can only imagine how I'd fare trying to talk to someone who doesn't have a scholarly background in some type of science or engineering or art or music. Like how I was at a loud bar trying to make conversation with a law school student. Utter and complete disaster that was. At least I was in a large group.

The second disadvantage is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.

Hahahaha... for me that only lasted until end of high school. I did not have a traditional Ivy education during undergrad, but it was definitely very elite. And demanded a lot of self-initiative, which was pretty dead in me for reasons too complicated to go into right now. I froze in the headlights when I was in place where I really had to ponder concepts long and hard and work things out and struggle through dead ends in order to properly learn. I did not learn how to fail gracefully.

If you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual.

Deresiewicz means that the system discourages self-motivated inquiries about the world. In that sense, I feel like perhaps I still retain some of that ability. I devour books and media about subjects that relate to my "job" to various degrees, from closely related to barely so. Even seemingly completely unrelated. I don't know whether this will help my earning potential in any significant way. With the world the way it is now, most likely not...

But I'll keep feeding my brain because it's one of the very few things that actually alleviates my ever-persistent existential crisis.






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Revealing water’s secrets - MIT News Office

Revealing water’s secrets - MIT News Office

Water is an interesting substance indeed - I mean, ice floats in water... what other material's solid form floats in its liquid form?






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Existential meetings in space and time

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me: how're things?

friend: Hi,
Things are.
I'm trying to write a paper.

me: Things are indeed

friend: How are things there?
Are-ing, too?

me: yes
just realized I have a 9am meeting
which I thought was at 10
oy.

friend: That's sad.
Even if people are well up and out by 9:00, nothing should be scheduled until 10:00 or later.
The French seem to abide by that.
Still, if you are working then, you don't have to schedule meetings then.

me: the nanofab people seem to be... early
actually, they start early and often end late
It's a "fab user" meeting

friend: A user meeting?!?!

me: If I schedule something, it's almost always 1pm or 2pm or 3pm.

friend: Those should not happen at least until 3:00.
Exactly.
There's just something about building invisible things that makes one immune to time.

me: yes
astrophysicists
mathematicians
philosophers

friend: Yes.
I suspect that if you get used to not being able to perceive three spatial dimensions, then you also become numb to the fourth dimension.

me: ahahaha






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