Abyss of esoteric reconditeness

faye wong

2009-12-06T18:21:00.002-05:00

九岁至今，只听王菲；
如无王菲，便无今我。
天王喉音，独一无二；
刚中带柔，巧妙细腻；
壮如长江，细如溪流；
丝毫不滞，潇洒如风；
音势非凡，与世不同；
操七情绪，控六欲望；
此喉此音，唯独天有；
平凡人间，能几回闻？
我宁无目，不可无耳；
千山万水，只求菲曲；
为聆其声，愿死万次；
如不得聆，何等痛苦？

Corrupted Chapter 1 Unfinished

2009-08-26T03:40:00.005-04:00

Angel Under the Moon-lit Sky

2009-02-15T22:45:00.000-05:00

Girl Stops Plane

2009-02-09T13:12:00.001-05:00

You Can't Haz Touchdown!

2009-02-06T15:22:00.001-05:00

Winter Dinner

2009-02-01T09:44:00.002-05:00

Bak Kut Teh

Curry Chicken

Modernist

2009-01-16T02:17:00.002-05:00

Jacques-Louis David, a prominent French painter who painted in the style of Neoclassicism, exhibited qualities of civic virtues and patriotism characteristic of his times in many of his paintings. However, I find a peculiar commonality amongst a few of his drawings, particularly those produced in the 1780s. In particular, each of his painting in that period conveyed a certain quality of virtue, but they are either depicted in negative manners, or had a sad background. The paintings in question are Belisarius Begging Alms (1781); Socrates at the Moment of Grasping the Hemlock (1787); and Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789).

The Belisarius Begging Alms (1781) depicted an old, blind Belisarius seated in front of a governmental edifice begging for alms from an unknown, passing-by lady. An old soldier showed a surprised yet saddened expression upon recognizing the begger as the once great General Belisarius. Belisarius was shown to be still wearing his armor, as if indicating his ever-readiness to serve again, even though he was dispossessed by the Emperor for a falsely claimed crime of treason. In this manner, David showed the great extent of loyalty a patriotic person could possess. However, David chose to depict the moment when Belisarius was at the lowest point in his life, never to rise again. This is done, perhaps, to convey a greater impact and stress on the virtues of patriotism, and what it entails.

The Socrates at the Moment of Grasping the Hemlock (1787) was another painting by David that depicts a (negative, in my perspective) consequence of holding true to one's philosophies, principles and virtues. Supposedly, Socrates was condemned to death by drinking hemlock for corrupting the young souls of Athens with his worship of strange gods. Even as Socrates neared his death, he tried to calm his followers and casually reached out for the hemlock given to him by a saddened young fellow. Even though this painting was commissioned by a wealthy young jurist, David's acceptance of the commission might provide insight into his disposition to portray virtues in a melancholic tone. The somber atmosphere surrounding Socrates which he painted showed his mastery of dejected and despairing emotions.

The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789) portrayed a tragedy that befell the founder of the Roman Republic, Junius Brutus. Brutus toppled the previous ruler, Caesar and brought in a new political order. However, his two male heirs colluded with their mother (who was related to Caesar) to restore the monarchy. However, Brutus had to execute them for death sentence was mandatory for a crime of this gravity. While similar to the Socrates in that both subject matters depicted death as the consequence for staying true to one's principles (and the resulting emotional turbulence), nevertheless the focus of both paintings were not the same. The Brutus sought to portray the inner turmoil of Brutus, for his bond with his heirs clashed with his principles and he had no choice but to execute them as exemplary warning to the citizens. The Socrates, on the other hand, showed Socrates willingly subdued by death, as if it is a form of emancipation and of transcendence.

The lugubrious tone that David so readily exhibit in his paintings was perhaps not just a reflection of his predilections, but also of his outlook of life in the era he lived in, which was characterized by change of political order and inherent instability, to say the least.

Goya's works were truly exemplars of a new paradigm in painting style, differing in visibly many aspects from those of David and Girodet, true champions of neoclassical paintings. These departures collectively made the characteristic qualities that define Romanticism.

The first quality in question was the brush strokes. They were almost invisible in neoclassical paintings; thus giving the paintings a very uniform and smooth spread of colors. However, upon closer inspection, one could see the very minute strokes the artist made to form the lines and textures. With such small brush strokes, the artist must have good control of the brush and abundance of patience. With Romanticism, however, the artist could streak the painting in a seemingly careless and unrefined fashion, as if breaking free from years of austere teachings and becoming bolder than ever. The end result was a discovery of a new, distinctive style of painting. The Knife Grinder (1808-12) by Goya showed the artist's mastery of such bold strokes at a high level. The white brush strokes on the knife grinder's sleeves seemed as if painted carelessly without any orientation and fully covering the base; however, this gave rise to a texture-like appearance to the shirt. The coarseness of that texture seemingly tells us the unrefined, plebeian nature of the knife grinder, but also the sweat, time, and effort he devoted so much to his profession.

The second notable quality was the vague, unclear backgrounds. During David's times, consideration given into background was just as much as the subject matter in the foreground. For example, in David's paintings, they were often well defined and stretched away from the viewer, giving a sense of perspective. When buildings and interiors were involved, they were drawn with utmost geometric precision and realism. However, when it came to Goya's times, such obsession with background accuracy and clarity was no longer valued as much. In The 28th of July: Liberty Leading the People (1830) by Goya, the background was very much just a cloudy white fog against the blue sky, with some edifices visible but unclear on the middle right side. It might be an intended consequence of using large bold strokes, however, doing so gave all the more focus to the foreground subject matter: Liberty. Actually drawing well-defined, faraway background edifices and objects might in fact drown out Liberty herself, seeing how the painting would start getting crowded and cluttered.

The discussed characteristics above are the two of which I find most prevalent in paintings of the Romantic movement. There are several other defining characteristics of Romanticism which I have noticed but not discussed, namely the freely used gamut of colors, lack of anatomical correctness, less stress on lighting and shadow accuracy, and less focus on draperies and clothe wrinkles. Together, they make up a very stylistic characterization of Romanticism paintings, as if foretelling the very dynamic and free form of paintings of the modern era that we enjoy so much today.

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was a Realist painter who unflinchingly partook in a political war in order to regain social and political equality for the common peasants and workers. His paintings (and his trilogy paintings, especially) depicted the suffering of the lower class and also a sense of ambiguity that only served to suggest the clash between social class. As I observe each painting closely, I notice some common, recurring characteristics of the paintings themselves and the subject matter therein.

Most notably, a lack of emotion can be seen on the people Courbet painted. This is very noticeable in the After Dinner at Ornans (1849), as well as in the trilogy paintings. In these paintings, some have their gaze hidden, and some show a lack of concern for their surroundings. While we can hardly deduce that they are unhappy, it was most certainly not the case that they are ecstatic either. They just look bored, as if waiting for the seemingly eternal time to pass. Whatever they are engaging, they would repeat it again some time later, as if there is no greater purpose in life that they can look forward to. However, in a way, I perceive calmness amidst the absence of emotions in the paintings, for the boredom and lack of concern seem to say 'All is well, just like yesterday, and the days before.'

Another recurrent feature would be the disconnectedness amongst the people (or groups of people) in Courbet's paintings. An absence of interaction amongst the people, coupled with their lack of emotion showed a sense of uncanny aloofness. Each one (or each group) of them are minding their own business, not reacting much to their surroundings. In A Burial at Ornans (1849), most of the funeral attendees are not looking at the dug grave, nor the coffin being carried in. The crying women are not interacting with the clergyman group, nor to the workers carrying the coffin. In my perspective, perhaps this disconnectedness was also an effort by the artist to show the social and political antagonism; each class, with their own political hopes and motives, is not willing to give in to the others.

In my view, these features do not only serve to amplify the ordinariness of the subject matter portrayed; as Realist paintings, they show the reality as they were. While ordinary, these elements of the ordinary are perhaps what make the paintings extraordinary for they make a break from portraying the elite and also the idealized features inherent in neoclassical paintings. By doing so, they garner a wider audience, many of which were the subject matter of the paintings, and thus the audience were able to identify with the portrayals.

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was an impressionist artist whose work largely revolved around the affinity between a mother and a child. Perhaps unsurprising given her gender, that the subject matter in her paintings were mostly female. The book provided some discussion on the issue of gender with respect to her paintings; I, however, find a slightly different interpretation equally plausible.

First, the gaze. In Cassatt's Woman in Black at the Opera (1880), a woman in black is in an opera balcony, with one fan in her hand and an opera-glass in the other, peeking intensely at what seems to be an opera performance. At a distance, a man can be seen doing the same (sans the fan), but is looking at the woman. While this can be interpreted as a modern woman asserting herself, reversing her role from the seen to the seer, and that the woman is not bothered in the least by the man's gaze (and thus appear independent), I find something as much can be said about the man, or about the artist, to be more precise. Allegorically, perhaps, the woman represents the artist, while the man represents the male critics. In this way, the man's gaze at the woman may well mean their scrutiny of her and her work, while the woman's aggressive manner (as seen from the popping vein on her right wrist) with which she looks signifies the intense effort the artist is putting in her painting career. The woman's using an opera-glass that is typically used by male may mean that she is stepping into a career domain (painting) that is predominated by male painters.

Second, the preoccupation with female subject matter. In many of Cassatt's paintings, the subject matters are either a female, or a mother with her child. Critics interpreted this as female equivalent of modern heroism. Perhaps Cassatt was really trying to assert the role of females in a modern society, but the recurrent theme of motherhood (in many of her later works) might seem to be an obsessive preoccupation of Cassatt. Cassatt was never married, for she felt it is not appropriate for her career as a painter. Perhaps Cassatt's maternal sense was tingling, her child caring vocation was calling. Her inability to do so (as she was not married and had no children) was perhaps what heightened her sensitivity towards mothers with children, and compelled her to paint them as a source of relief. After all, if Cassatt was really trying to portray female equivalent of modern heroism, surely there were other female occupations in her times which she could portray.

Understandably, Cassatt was indeed trying hard to seek recognition in a field predominated by men. Might it not seem plausible then, that her aspirations and regrets (as a result of choosing the field of painting) had crept into her paintings as well?

As a student with immense interest in theoretical physics and cosmology, as well as training in the schools of engineering, I could not help but to draw analogies between Impressionism and other esoteric subjects I had learned as I delve deeper into the qualities and ideologies of Impressionism. These parallels, as I see it, seem to lend credence and justification to the evolution of painting from old movements to Impressionism.

Before Impressionism, there were Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Realism. These movements, as different as they are, nevertheless place great emphasis on lines and contours. Neoclassicism especially have a long painting conventions of chiaroscuro, modeling and perspective. They give not just forms but solid forms to figures and objects. These rules which academy painters followed with great austerity, are nevertheless just mere tools with which the painters use to reproduce reality. They are not in any way an accurate description of nature nor that which are contained therein. More so is the disposition of the academy painters to idealize their subject matters, to extend them to such perfection as to be beyond reality. When the transition is made to Impressionism, this perfection is loathed, replaced instead by the impression of the visual sensations. In a way, those conventions and rules practiced in the old movements are like the great three Newton laws which govern the motions of the celestial entities as well as terrestrial objects. At a certain scale, these laws work perfectly. Their linear simplicity (for example, an object with velocity 10 m/s, when given a push in the same direction such that it attains an additional 5 m/s, its final velocity would be 10 + 5 = 15 m/s) seems too perfect, as is evident in their predictive ability of celestial motions. However, beyond a certain scale, say, an object approaching the speed of light, the Newton laws crumble and fail ignominiously. The linear perfection is gone, just like the idealistic perfection so desired in Neoclassicism. It succumbs to the theory of relativity (where the linear simplicity may no longer hold, and physical measurements are relative), which in some sense is a metaphor to the subjectivity inherent in Impressionism.

A more convincing analogy, however, is that of between Impressionism and String Theory. As noted earlier, the old movements rely on such helpful constructs as lines, contours, perspective, and modelings to give sense to the subject matter depicted, just like how we prefer to think of objects in our world as the sum of smaller constituents (building made of bricks, hold together by wooden and steel frames). In Impressionism, however, the focus shifts to the many little unmixed but adjacent dabs of colors. Lines and forms and shapes is nothing but the optical mixture of juxtaposed complementary colors. This is very much akin to the many tiny vibrating strings so posited in String Theory. They are the very fundamental entities whose vibrations give rise to mass. These vibrations at an unimaginably minute scale (magnitudes smaller than the smallest particle in the universe), like the optical mixture, work cooperatively to produce a macro effect, akin to the final visual sensations rendered on the retina.

These parallels, as much a coincidence as they are, nevertheless allows one to speculate if such trends can be extrapolated, and permits him or her to prognosticate the direction of future movements of art shall take.

From the times of romanticism in the 1830's to the early twentieth century of modern art, one can readily see the gradual evolution and integration of oriental elements into western paintings. A chance encounter or a deliberate one, whichever it was when the early painters stumble upon oriental elements (either the people or the culture), certainly piqued the interest and curiosity of the painters. After all, globalism was at its infancy (people were able to travel between continents, albeit with much difficulty and limitations), and these painters were just starting to discover cultures beyond the boundaries of their land. As if having seen something alien (skin color and culture) yet so similar to themselves (as member of mankind), curiosity and fascination of these painters turned into unrestrained imagination, releasing a thousand fantasies. They had fallen in love with the exotic.

At the very first stage of that integration of oriental elements into paintings, the depiction was very much just on the surface. There were oriental elements, but the subject matter was perhaps mere wild imagination of the painters, as is evident in Delacroix's Women of Algiers (1834). The smoking instrument, the clothings, the carpet, and the black female servant are all clear indications of orientalism, yet the other female figures (which are actually concubines in a harem) are seen indolently lounging around and enjoying themselves. This provocative sexual connotation shows the common sexual association painters made with oriental people. Well into the 1860's, black females were still suggestive of animal sexuality, or bestiality to the painters and art critics. Like prostitutes at that time, they were thought to have congenitally malformed genitals, which resulted in hypersexuality. This association can be seen in Manet's Olympia (1863), where a nude prostitute is seen reclining with a black female servant holding a bouquet of flowers. A more significant progress in Orientalism could be seen in the era of Post-Impressionism. We see Vincent Van Gogh, a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who's so fascinated by Japanese wood block prints that he tirelessly devoted his time to understanding and mimicking them, trying to integrate them into his paintings.

And then, Etienne Dinet came along. He was one of a few painters of his times who would assimilate themselves into oriental cultures. They hold dear to the tenet that to paint a subject is to understand the subject. Dinet's paintings clearly show his mastery and erudition of Arabian culture. One can readily see this in his The Son of a Holy M'rabeth, a subject I believe was hard for the common artists who wished to just incorporate orientalism into their paintings in a superficial manner. It entails deep understanding of the atmosphere, the clothing, the culture, and the values of Arab life. The average artist might not understand the significance of a person kissing the shoe of a holy figure (as depicted in the painting), or why the people surrounding the central holy figure hold out their hands in the manner portrayed. And then there's also Mohammed Racim, a native of Algiers who, needless to say, possessed understanding and knowledge of the motifs and values of Muslim society as well as Muslim history. His paintings Dancer (Old Agiers) (ca. 1932) and Barbarossa's Fleet (undated) are a testimonial to this.

As we have seen, orientalism has progressed from mere decoration, to a serious subject matter involving deeper understanding of the non-western cultures.

The Cubist artists in the early twentieth century represent a new breed of painters who were at the forefront of art, who abandoned the centuries long conventions of art making, and who embraced a new form of art expression that was as revolutionary as the scientific and technological progress that was taking place at the same time. Arguably simplistic compared to the art form that preceded it, Cubism nevertheless represents an ambition that is far more monumental than before. It seeks to cast its subject matter in a completely different point of view (by means of taking the subject matter apart and reconstructing it), not bounded by the conventional rules of the world (by portraying multiple simultaneous perspectives from different angles), and thus forcing the viewers to restructure the final piece in their own terms.

From my perspective, the most ambitious part of the Cubism plan is the attempt to portray a physical object from multiple point of views. It is not certain when multiple facets of a part is depicted, how do their various lines and points connect to facets of another part. In Robert Delaunay's La Tour aux rideaux (Eiffel Tower) (1910), the Eiffel Tower is seen through a window flanked by curtains on both sides; yet despite this single point of view, we are able to see different sides of the Tower simultaneously. Nevertheless, the artist seem to have elided over the connecting points of the many facets of the Tower, giving a slight sense of ambiguity. The lines just faded out into the surrounding and are not connected to other parts, giving the sense of fractured-ness that is inherent in almost all Cubist art works.

However, (still on the topic of disconnection amongst the different facets) I see this as a futile attempt on the Cubists' part to portray the true depiction of multiple point of views. When studying dimensions of space and time, we have come to understand that when one observes from a particular dimensional space (say, three dimensional space), he or she is able to observe physical objects existing in lower dimensions in its entirety. However, one would not be able to observe the objects in higher dimensions, much less multiple facets of it. With this in mind, when we look at Cubist artists who for the most part were relying on a two dimensional medium (three dimensions in some cases), yet sought to portray the different perspectives one could look at a three dimensional object simultaneously, one could not help but think of this as, like I said, a futile attempt. It is just like a humble ant who wishes to see things from the point of view of the high flying bird. We may suspend the ant in mid air, but it will never for its entire life be able to comprehend the breadth and depth of a three dimensional world. To take in several facets of a subject matter and synthesize it into a coherent, comprehensible view is in my opinion an ideal (or rather, a limitation) that can never be overcome by our mind, for we are shackled in a three dimensional world, and will remain so for a long time.

With an understanding of this limitation right from the beginning, the Cubist artists, I gather, had relinquished all effort to achieve that impossible ideal, and through these “pseudo-depiction” of multiple perspectives, sought to make us aware that there are many forms with which an object could take, and with which we could look at the object. The critic Maurice Raynal summed this up neatly: “Conception makes us aware of the object in all its forms, and even makes us aware of objects we would not be able to see.”

Surrealism, an art movement characterized by the irrational, sometimes fantastical, subject matter, aims to probe, unlock, and liberate the unconscious human mind. Its practitioners attempt to achieve this by several means, like automatism, and cadavre exquis ('exquisite corpse'). Much of these methods, needless to say, are based upon Freud's conceptions of how the unconscious (id) might break the barrier imposed by the conscious (ego) and manifest themselves in non-obvious ways, like dreaming and slips of tongue. While the art produced by these techniques were later discredited somewhat by Freud himself as nothing more than just work of the ego (instead of the unconscious), Freud's theorization of the interplay between the conscious and unconscious psyche (which serve as the bedrock foundation of surrealism) itself suffered through a barrage of critics, most of which claimed it to be unscientific, unfalsifiable, and untestable. While this may not necessarily mean surrealism is unfounded, for the many art works of this movement do pique the thinking and curious mind, I have my own personal take at the two methods stated earlier, namely automatism and cadavre exquis.

Freud theorized about how the unconscious may momentarily break through the consciousness barrier and manifest themselves as dreams and slips of the tongue, and automatism was perhaps bore out of this conception of the unconscious psyche. Automatic drawing, which was used by Andre Masson, a surrealist artist, is an example of automatism. The technique itself, however, rely only on the crucial assumption that when one let the pen run free, it does not involve the conscious mind, and hence the unconscious must necessarily be at play. By the unconscious' definition (in Freudian psychoanalytic theory), the unconscious do not manifest themselves so easily. If they can be summoned at whim, it would defeat the very meaning of the unconscious. I'd say, perhaps, this is a misguided assumption on the artist's part and he might have unknowingly ignored the possibility that the free running of his hand holding the pen is controlled by his conscious mind.

Cadavre exquis refers to the method of producing a composite drawing collectively without each person knowing what the others have drawn. While a collective effort, this method may provide a glimpse into a person's mind (but not necessarily the unconscious), for he upon seeing the clues (the slightly visible overshot lines from the folded, invisible part of the paper), imagined what it might be and how to connect his drawing to it. The final product is most probably not coherent, and in my view, should not be treated as such (I.e. that there is an underlying meaning to the composite image). The individual parts may say something about each person, but as a whole they do not convey any meaning, much less provide a glimpse into the unconscious. Searching for meaning (as humans always do amidst random and chaos) is a futile attempt. It, however, provides an interesting subject to ponder upon, for the final product is most certainly not a coherent composite that exists in the world.

While it's incoherent and irrational, it is these qualities, I believe, that give surrealism its appeal: a combination of things that no one have ever thought of, and when connected in certain ways, leads one to an endless stream of what-if thoughts, of an imagined landscape full of possibilities.

Feudal Japan

2008-12-29T17:25:00.001-05:00

PageRank in different contexts

2008-12-01T23:01:00.004-05:00

Since the Internet’s inception, it has been going through an explosive growth. Its repertoire of information grows unbounded as more users join the network, bringing with them new information from diverse fields. With such voluminous amount of information, we require a means to organize them, and also to allow us to effectively find what we desire. Google, a leading search engine in the world, uses an algorithm called PageRank to rank a page’s relevance to a query based on the link structure of the web page graph. As Google’s success is a testimony to PageRank’s effectiveness, it is also fitting to ask ourselves how might PageRank can be utilized in other kinds of networks. After all, PageRank does not make any assumption about the nature of the nodes. What new insight can we possibly gain from a PageRank run on a different kind of graph, say, a social graph? In this paper, I will first explain how PageRank works, and then present a qualitative analysis of PageRank run on several different types of social graphs. Lastly, I will also provide what insights we can gather from the analysis of each type of social graph.

PageRank, as its name implies, ranks pages by assigning them scores (Wikipedia). It does so by exploiting implicit information contained in hyperlinks connecting web pages in a directed graph. While it is not obvious to us that a page’s relevance to a query has anything to do with the incoming links to that page, we do agree that page A linking to page B implies that page A’s content has some connections with page B’s. Thus if a page C has incoming links from many pages, it is reasonable to assume that these pages are content-wise connected in some ways and collectively form a domain of information. If we see each of these links as a vote, then within a domain or subgraph, the page receiving the most votes is deemed as relevant by most number of pages. We can then safely assume that, when a user queries a topic, the page with most number of votes has a high probability of being relevant to what the user intends to find. The PageRank algorithm is then a numerical means of determining the relevance of a page by examining its incoming links. When such a popular page is established as an authority on a topic by the algorithm, the pages it points to are also deemed to have high relevance, and thus the popular page’s outgoing links must also possess a greater weight in asserting the pointed pages’ relevance. The popular page’s score is passed on to the pointed pages, so to speak. As PageRank runs iteratively on these pages, each page’s score eventually converges to a stable value that reflects its relevance.

Now armed with knowledge of PageRank, we can question what might happen when PageRank is run on a social graph. A social graph is a graph representation of social connections between individuals in a particular population. Two individuals who know each other have an edge between them. Their edge may also carry a weight, perhaps to denote how intimate two individuals’ relationship is. Because social graph is undirected, that is, the edges have no associated directions, we can trivially convert each of the edges into two oppositely directed edges, so that PageRank can run on it. In a social graph, individuals who are well connected possess many incoming edges as well as outgoing edges. It is not hard to see that these individuals have very high PageRank scores. However, an individual with very few neighbors does not necessarily have very low PageRank score. If its few neighbors are those who possess high scores, then it would have high score as well. Knowing this, we now look at several qualitatively different social graphs. In the course of my analysis on several different types of graphs, I found the results rather startling. The first one is a social graph with a tree-like hierarchy. This is commonly seen in such community as employees of a company, or soldiers of different ranks. The second one, though rare, is a chain-like graph. The third one is a T shaped graph.

We first examine the simplest type of graph, the chain-like graph. An example of such a graph is shown below:

Figure 1: 3-Node Chain Graph

Most social graphs are decentralized, and appear like multiple subgraphs joined by a bridge. In what social settings might the graph depicted in figure 1 appear? If we think about it, it looks very much like an exchange network, where participants negotiate about how to share an amount of money. According to Network Exchange Theory, B has the most powerful position, while A and C have equal but less powerful positions (Easley, p. 115). A and C, in negotiating a share, do not have any other options aside from B. B, on the other hand, has a choice between A and C. B is then able to drive down A and C’s shares until one of them is willing to take the smallest share. Because only one of A and C may split an amount of money with B, they both have to compete with each other for B’s attention. Coincidentally, the converged PageRank scores for every individual reflect such a situation. A and C have equal PageRank scores (0.257), but the scores are lower than B’s (0.486). Seeing this, we may postulate that converged PageRank scores reflect an individual’s positional power in negotiating for a share with others. To see if this is the case, we look at some more examples of network exchange graphs:

Figure 2: 4-Node Chain Graph

Figure 3: 5-Node Chain Graph

A 4-Node Chain Graph is depicted in figure 2. Network Exchange Theory predicts that individuals A and D would have equal but the least negotiation power, while individuals B and C would have equal but the greatest negotiation power (Easley, p. 116). Again, the PageRank scores for each individual reflect such a situation. Individual A and D have equal but lesser scores (0.175), while individual B and C have equal but greater scores (0.325). We now look at figure 3. In this 5-Node Chain Graph, individual A and E have equal but the least PageRank scores (0.135). Both individual B and D have the greatest score (0.246). Individual C has a score (0.239) that is greater than A and E’s, but less than B and D’s. If we use these PageRank scores to predict each individual’s negotiation power, we would see that A and E are the least powerful, B and D are the most powerful, while C is in between. Again, this is just as predicted by the Network Exchange Theory (Easley, p. 116). Nevertheless, Network Exchange Theory does not work solely on just chain-like graphs. We now move on to a slightly more complicated graph, a T-shaped graph:

Figure 4: A 5-Node T-shaped graph

Network Exchange Theory predicts that individual B would have the greatest power, followed by D. A, C and E would have the least power since they do not have any other options (Easley, p. 113). Again, their PageRank scores fully reflect this situation. What is even more startling is that E’s PageRank score, despite low, is slightly better than A and C. What could this possibly mean in Network Exchange Theory’s terms? According to the theory, E should have a slight advantage over A and C, despite having only one option. If we think about it, D, despite having two options, is dealing with B. B can always choose A or C and abandon D, so D cannot threaten B very much. This indirectly confers E a slight advantage, which is reflected in its PageRank score.

Seeing how well PageRank scores correspond with predictions of Network Exchange Theory, how might we relate PageRank’s mechanics to Network Exchange Theory? PageRank views each directed edge as a vote, so to speak, and the PageRank scores are a quantitative measure of a page’s relevance. In discussing PageRank, we can think of PageRank scores as a kind of “fluid” that circulates throughout the network (Easley, p.144). We can thus view this “fluid” as negotiation power in Network Exchange Theory. The “fluid” accumulates in whichever nodes that occupy a powerful position. This position is in turn determined by a node’s connection with other nodes. Having a great number of connections means one have many options in negotiating the best split of money. To account for the situation of node C depicted in figure 3, we observe that even though individual B, C and D have the same number of edges, C’s “fluid” flows out to B and D, who in turn also direct some of C’s “fluid” to A and E respectively. Individuals A and E, on the other hand, can only direct their “fluid” to B and D. The consequence is that B and D obtain the greatest amount of “fluid”. As for the situation of node E in figure 4, this can again be explained using the notion of “fluid”. Individual B obviously gets the greatest amount of “fluid” by virtue of its many edges, where the “fluid” are contributed by A, C and D. A and C do not get much “fluid” since they each have only one edge. E, however, despite having only one edge, gets its “fluid” from D, and also a small amount from B indirectly (given through D). This explains E’s slight advantage over A and C.

Now that we are convinced that PageRank scores reflect one’s positional power, we look at another kind of social graph: a tree-like social graph. An example of such a graph is shown below:

Figure 5: Tree-like graph

The graph shown in figure 5 is slightly different from an actual tree graph in that the lower nodes have an edge to all higher nodes. To give a real world example of such a graph, we can imagine such a graph as army ranks, where individual A is the General, B and C are Lieutenants, and D, E, F and G are Privates. A directed edge from an individual P to Q means P obeys orders from Q. Earlier we have postulated that PageRank scores indicate positional power. Once again, the PageRank scores for this special form of tree graph corroborate our hypothesis. Given any pair of individuals, whoever has the higher PageRank scores, has the greater power.

From the few examples shown above, we have seen how running PageRank on a social network gives us new insights. We have also seen how well PageRank scores correspond with Network Exchange Theory predictions, and also the rankings within a military community. PageRank algorithm is thus not just a link analysis method, but also an invaluable tool to Network theorists who wish to understand social order or power structure within a network.

References:

1. “PageRank”. Wikipedia. Retrieved on May 01, 2008.

2. Easley, David and Jon Kleinberg. Networks. Cornell University: The Cornell Store, 2008.

I Am Avril Lavigne

2008-11-12T15:18:00.001-05:00

Why should I care what other people think of me? I am who I am. And who I wanna be.

Sexier Than

2008-10-28T10:37:00.001-04:00

Wall-E Eve Contactless joints / Contactless limbs

2008-10-19T00:15:00.004-04:00

After watching Wall-E, I become very intrigued by a number of technologies portrayed in the movie. In particular, I find those contactless joints or contactless limbs of EVE, a character in the movie, fascinating. EVE is an elongated-egg-shaped robot whose arms and head are not physically joined to her body. Nevertheless, there appears to be an invisible force that binds her limbs and her body together. She is also able to move them around without physical contact. This raises some questions:

1) Is there an existing effort to create such a technology?
2) If there is, what is it called, and how is it done?
3) If there isn't, can it be feasibly developed using existing means (never mind if extra research is needed)?
4) If it can be developed, what does it entail?
5) If it can't be developed, what are the reasons, and what conceivable but as-yet-unattainable technologies are needed?

To create a contactless joint/limb, we need to solve several problems:
1) Make the limb float.
2) Make the limb attracted to the body.
3) Move the limb without physical contact with the body.

Of course, in all 3 cases, we must ensure the forces are always in a stable equilibrium. If stability is not possible, then we should look at feedback control systems.

My puny mind, as far as its imagination can be stretched, gives me several ideas.
1) acoustic pressure.
2) electromagnet array/matrix.
3) ionized air and electromagnets.

1) Acoustic pressure. We can use ultrasound transducers to create a pressure field, so to speak, that provides counter-act forces to the limb's weight. This solves problem 1. To solve problem 2, we again use acoustic pressure to push the limb towards the body. We must balance the limb based on its center of mass. To solve problem 3, we vary the energy density of the ultrasound waves to give varying forces along the limb. At places where the force of the transducers exceed the gravitational force at that point, it gets pushed up. We get the opposite effect if we reduce the energy density.

2) Electromagnet matrix. Along the limb is a matrix of electromagnets. On the matrix are small magnetic cells. We can use Halbach arrays to change the magnetization vector of each cell. We vary the magnetic force to ensure the limb stays at one position, or move to whatever position we want. If done correctly, we can solve all 3 problems at once.

3) Ionized air and electromagnets. We use UV rays to ionize the air surrounding the limb. We set up a potential through the ionized air, so that there is a current, and hence magnetic field. The limb itself controls it electromagnets' direction and magnitude to balance itself within this column of air. Again it solves all 3 problems at once. Note this is not unlike the technology we believe will be used in future hover-boards.

All the above solutions require tremendous amount of energy just to balance the limb. For example, by my rough estimated calculations, an ultrasound transducer used in solution 1 must have output upwards of 34 kilowatts. Unless we can create a stable equilibrium force, the above solutions might not seem viable.

Squirrel Punchbag

2008-10-07T11:03:00.000-04:00

Mr. Nice Guy Chapter 1 unfinished

2008-09-25T08:26:00.013-04:00

walking to school in a morning drizzle

2008-08-29T00:11:00.000-04:00

Girl Stops Truck

2008-08-14T19:06:00.000-04:00

WWII

2008-08-14T19:05:00.000-04:00

Grace and Harry

2008-08-05T23:24:00.001-04:00

T3h P14n157

2008-07-16T21:00:00.001-04:00

Like Poetry

2008-06-30T23:13:00.001-04:00

Illusion of Time

2008-06-17T11:02:00.001-04:00

For as long as we humans have been able to utilize our psyche to ponder on the mysteries of nature, universe, and reality, we have a predisposition to describe objects and processes in terms of our sensory perceptions, which for all purposes are bounded by the very space time construct in which we exist. Time, being a dimension, cannot be perceived directly, but only inferred from the changes we observe around us. When the second hand on the clock moves, we conclude that a moment of certain length has passed. Must time exist? Does time mean anything, or does it affect anything at all if there are no sentient beings to observe the changes it seemingly brings about? Must one state logically flow from one to the other in a linear progression, of which the governing rules is the Thermodynamic laws? Can we not view these state changes as such, but rather as chaotic transitions with no recognizable patterns or forms? When we take on this perspective, must it necessarily contradict our everyday experience of things progressing from new to old, from ordered to chaotic, from low entropy to high entropy, from the past to the present, and henceforth to the future, and so on? No. For if our memory, our consciousness, our awareness, and their collective complexity are a result of these changes, then they are no longer subject to this illusionary construct we call time. Imagine, if you will, that you are holding a cup of coffee, and you are about to fall. Now, the reality is the microstates that portray the entire universe, which invariably also includes those of you and the macrocosm you reside in. For now we presume the existence of time, which we always have. The next logical progression of the scenario described earlier would be that you fall onto the floor and the coffee cup break into pieces. Now we turn off the imaginary switch that gives rise to time, and suppose that this second set of microstates exist side by side with the earlier set. Now if the second set of microstates had jumped to the first set of microstates, we would say time runs backward. However, this is not the case, for your memory and your consciousness is also part of these microstates, and they do not exist in another realm (this is yet another assumption we assert as correct). While we were in the second set of microstates, we must also have perceived the occurrence portrayed in the first set of microstates. The illusion of time moving forward is just then by virtue of our perception in a particular set of microstates. If we have described the universe this way, then there is no need for time, for time does not exist. One may argue, however, in the earlier explanation, that I have mentioned that one particular set of microstates jumping into another must necessarily imply the existence of two snapshots of time. I hereby claim that this is not the case. If you desire proof, do reply.

Of Science and Extra-terrestial Civilization

2008-03-31T01:20:00.000-04:00

Mankind has flourished ever since it escaped from the Dark Ages, ages where ignorance once ruled the fools, and superstitions were laws and norms. We start to think for ourselves. We start to reason about the nature, the environment, the celestial bodies. Regularities beget curiosity. Why is nature the way it is? A question whose answer will always approach the absolute truth, but never attain the truth. We live in a world of empiricism. We observe. We reason. That which explains in the clearest and simplest manner of the observations we made, are accorded the stature of facts. Facts, a body of assertions backed by assertions, and ultimately by axioms, are always never guaranteed to be the absolute truth. With this in mind, we question the validity of the methods by which we accrue facts. Can we not suppose that there is a highly advanced extra-terrestrial civilization, whose capabilities are so advanced it appears God-like, interfering with the very World and reality in which we live? For pure thought experiment, we put off our reservations aside, and recall the many cosmology observations of Galaxies and Clusters of them. They are measured to be moving faster than their mass could account for. Dark matters are presumed to be the missing factor. Many of the present generation of particle physicists devote their life to the search of dark matter. What if it never existed? What if other advanced civilizations were playing tricks on us? What if they set the laws of nature which we observe? What if world in which we reside was just mere creation? A purposeful creation? I do not, by this questioning, suggest the existence of God, for it is equally plausible to me that there exist a civilization so advanced it is able to create worlds, tweak laws of nature, and alter reality. What hope do we have of preventing such a thing? Before that, can we even hope to verify such a possibility of someone or something else sustaining or altering our reality? The brain-in-a-vat experiment should give us enough of an answer to this.

May Power

2008-03-29T00:34:00.000-04:00

May Vivian Lily

2008-03-27T01:02:00.001-04:00

pi day

2008-03-14T23:14:00.001-04:00

The Civilization Without History

2008-02-23T00:51:00.005-05:00

Everette's many worlds interpretation of the mathematic constructs of Quantum Mechanics may have shocked the world of physicists in the mid 20th century. Some might have even called it blasphemous. Such un-Copenhagen view of the real world is really derailing itself from reality, or is it? In Quantum Mechanics, existence of matter at any locality is described by its wave function, essentially assigning probabilities to various points in space, probabilities of the matter existing at particular points. How unrealistic a description it is of the macroscopic world we reside in. Are we not, in actuality, existing at the very point where we are existing right now? I do not see the Eiffel tower and the Nil river at the same time, nor do I see one, then instantly the next. In Copenhagenists' term, the wave function has collapsed. Collapsed by observation. The chair on which you sit, may have been on the Moon, or on Alpha Centauri; but because your sensory has come to observe it, its wave function is instantly collapsed, resulting in it appearing with 100% probability right where it is, right now. We do not observe the chair in many places at the same time. However, in the microscopic world, this phenomena is very real, and even more than ever present. Why, Everette thought, should this ever be the case? Why should there be a need of "collapsing" wave functions? Why should there be a demarcation between the macroscopic and the microscopic world? Where does this imaginary boundary lie? Is it a necessary part of Quantum Mechanics? Or is it just an illusion, a case of ignorance, demonstrating the fact that we do not fully comprehend what does this peculiar behavior mean in our own world, in our own terms? Why can't they all exist at once, albeit in their very own reality, unaffected by the other? If this is true, then, what is the implication? Many different worlds, indubitably. Each one branching off a fork amongst many other forks in an ever growing tree of realities. No collapsing needed. No unnecessary boundaries between the macroscopic and the microscopic. All is well.

If so, could we not imagine, in a universe, something, of some form, appearing out of nowhere for no reason, and with no trace of its origins? After all, given the unlimited bounds of space and time dimensions, that which is probable, however slightly, comes to transpire, sooner or later. Suppose, for the purpose of dramatization, an entire civilization, which is more than sufficiently advanced, appears out of nowhere. This civilization possess the knowledge of the intricacies and mechanisms by which the universe, or rather, the multiverse contains, and runs. They possess the mastery of matter and non-matter, and also of life and mortality. They are so powerful relative to the present stage of Mankind, that they are effectively God-like. Their motives, rationale, moral, ethics, consciousness, thought process, so different, so highly evolved, that they are no longer comprehensible to us mere mortals. These properties, when carefully mulled over, are really not all that hard to attain. Humankind, at its ever increasing rate of progress and advancement, shall come to a point in time where it becomes transhuman, and thus no different than the fictional civilization I proposed, capability-wise. This point is called The Singularity. The point thereafter humans are imbued with capabilities incomprehensible to our present mind. However, there still remain one thing that sets us apart from the said fictitious civilization. They do not have a history. They appear out of nowhere, for better or worse, all thanks to the quirks of Quantum Mechanics.

Pure Speculations

2008-02-15T16:48:00.002-05:00

Well, provided we don't bomb ourselves out of existence, and everything's good, here's what will transpire:
2008: touch screen cellphones picking up.
2009: touch screen becomes main stream.
2010: followed up by multi-touch in screen based UI.
2011: transparent screen commercialized.
2013: Hybrid cars picking up momentum.
2014: transparent screen becomes pervasive. 3D fab@home becoming popular.
2015: optics-based microprocessor demonstrated. Data clouds becoming popular.
2016: First practical Quantum computer demonstrated; not suitable for normal use.
2017: Breakthrough in prosthetics. Data clouds become mainstream.
2018: gasoline cars phasing out in the US. Taken over by hybrid cars.
2019: maglev trains appear in major cities/airports. 3D fab@home goes mainstream.
2020: breakthrough in information processing. space travel becomes affordable to the rich.
2021: breakthrough in organ cloning. Scientists teleport molecule. East Asia rises to top.
2022: Electromagnetic plasma based mid-air Hovering technology demonstrated. First space lift built.
2023: first practical and truly safe urban driverless vehicle demonstrated. Sinosphere still nascent.
2024: UAVs become more sophisticated. US sets up moon base. Competition ensues.
2025: solar energy become one of major energy sources. Scientists teleport molecule chains.
2026: cabs are made driverless. Organ shortage solved. Nanotech goes mainstream.
2027: Robots appear at home. Simple chores. Sinosphere goes mainstream.
2028: US's 30% of airforce based on UAVs. Severe finance cut back.
2030: Human mind-Computer Interface adapted in certain fields. Satellite wireless energy beaming.
2031: Miniature nanotech Sattelites sent to Jupiter's moons.
2032: Hovering technology used in rapid transportation of products.
2033: Maglev for vehicles commercialized. Major routes designed for maglev.
2035: First breakthrough for AI. Not necessarily human-like.
2036: Antiparticles harvesting breakthrough. Nuclear energy goes mainstream.
2037: Manned landing on Mars. Competition ensues. Breakthrough in teleportation tech.
2040: More powerful particle accelerators. Teleportation of nano devices demonstrated.
2041: Human mind-Computer Interface widely adapted to telecommunications.
2042: Polymorphic buildings demonstrated. Breakthrough in Matter-Antimatter propulsion.
2043: Most homes have robots. Can do sufficiently sophisticated tasks.
2044: Second breakthrough for AI. Human-like. Small scale terraforming of Mars.
2045: Maglev vehicles become pervasive.
2046: space travel becomes affordable to the mid-incomes.
2047: Teleportation works for everyday sized objects. True Virtual Reality era takes off.
2049: Matter-antimatter propelled space vehicle demonstrated.
2050: Solves theory of everything. More questions posed.
2051: Artificial sentient beings created.
2052: Matter-antimatter propulsion goes mainstream.
2053: Megastructures go mainstream. City on ocean. Tall towers.
2054: Breakthrough in artificial creativity. Explosion of novel solutions.
2056: Attempts to test theories related to warp drives.
2058: Robots become pervasive and sophisticated.
2059: City-scale terraforming of Mars. First martian born.
2060: Polymorphic structures in major cities.
2063: Builds outpost on Jupiter's moons.
2065: Overpopulation taking its toll on resources. Young people outnumbered.
2068: Migration to more extreme climates.
2070: Warp drive breakthrough. 1C achieved.
2073: Faster-than-light (FTL) travel achieved.
2075: Unmanned interstellar exploration begins.
2080: First contact with Alpha Centauri.
2083: Mass exodus to Mars.
2095: Manned interstellar exploration begins. Destination: Pluto.
2100: Mankind celebrates 2nd century of technology era.
2105: City-scale terraforming of Pluto. Pluto fifth outpost in space (after moon, mars and a couple moons around Jupiter)
22nd century: Solar/Nuclear energy is primary source. Starts considering larger scale energy production.
23rd century: Mankind attains Type I civilization. Able to control planet-scale energy.
30th century: Transhuman era.
31st century: Mankind attains Type II civilization. Able to control Star-scale energy.
50th century: Mankind spreads to a significant fraction of the Milky Way galaxy.
90th century: Mankind attains Type III civilization. Able to control Galaxy-scale energy.
100th century: Mankind able to manipulate subspace dimensions.

桂纶镁

2008-01-26T02:18:00.000-05:00

Avril Lavigne 01

2008-01-19T20:48:00.000-05:00

曾愷玹

2007-12-14T17:37:00.000-05:00

May Hover

2007-12-14T02:29:00.000-05:00

Pentalingual

May Hovering

0.999...

2007-12-08T01:19:00.000-05:00

Anyone who does not yet accept the veracity of this fact:

0.999... = 1

does not understand the concept of limit and shall thus be banished to calculus 101 for near eternal time frame so long that even entropy increase shall come to its end and the space time fabric stretched to a thickness a mere fraction of planck scale, whence thy only hope is to wait for quantum scale fluctuations create yet another universe, by then the cycle shall repeat itself again, idiots abound and never ends.

Strong May

2007-11-16T23:05:00.000-05:00

man...this is crappy...i should really reflect on myself. my techniques are so bad.

May

an elegant girl...if it ever looks like it.

Preamble to the Computer Vision Problem

2007-11-01T14:52:00.000-04:00

It's perhaps too immature to think that there's an easy way to solve the computer vision problem, i.e. creating a vision system that analyzes as human eyes and visual cortex do, and doing so at a computationally affordable level. What kind of techniques do we have, and what are their limitations? Surprisingly, notwithstanding computer science being a relatively nascent field, especially artificial intelligence, with vision systems even more so, it has been decades since the inception of the foundations of the respective fields, and yet we have not progressed to a technologically satisfactory point. For starters, here are the tools that are at our disposal.

* Differencing
* Thresholding
* Connected Components Analysis
* Optical Flow
* Gaussian/Mean Blur (For noise reduction)
* Shape recognition
* Edge detection

There are more, but we need not concern ourselves with the other more sophisticated ones, since they are very likely to be computationally expensive. Most computing systems are discrete in nature, this may be an advantage or disadvantage, depending on your point of view. Analog vision systems, if they ever do exist, must very likely be incomprehensibly sophisticated and hard to quantify (think of how you are going to represent an image abstractly, and how you are going to translate that into a physical representation). With discrete systems, we can build an image by means of pixels, basic individual units upon which we shall compute. While this simplifies the math, this also means we are severely incapacitated, in that we can only look at a pixel at a time, so to speak. With enormous processing speed and parallel processing, this may deceive our perception enough to deceive us.

So I talk about an easy way to solve the computer vision problem. No, don't get excited yet. I do not promise anything; however, it would be good to list out the kind of ideas I have, no matter how puerile they seem to be. Before we move on to that, let's talk a little bit about the visual cortex, and the various regions of it.

So basically, the visual cortex is separated into regions which we call V1, V2, V3, V4, and V5. Each of these regions is responsible for processing various aspects of the incoming visual stimulus. Such processings include, but not limited to motion, shape, depth, edge, color, orientation, to more complicated things like object recognition, facial recognition, and spatiotemporal features like speed and direction.

Let's not be ambitious here, after all, complex fourier transforms of signals at high bandwidth and what not on primitive computer chips are as its name suggests, complex and complicated, not to mention impractical. We aim to produce a relatively simple processing system that is a concoction of several filters mentioned earlier, coupled with simplified assumptions about the scenery perceived by the system. My belief is that there is a simple way to approximate primate visual processing capabilities very closely, or good enough for practical purposes, without resorting to insane mathematical model.

First off, we need to list out the kind of information we can obtain from a stream of visual stimulus. What are they? Patterns. Shapes. Edges. Motion. Orientation. Direction. Depth. Texture. Color. Some of these may be of a higher level in a hierarchy of signal processing, with each layer receiving information from the bottom layers and integrating them, effectively compressing into less data but with only pertinent visual information. Also, research evidence shows that the processing is not necessarily one way. Information from the top also affects the bottom. We may see this as some kind of a feedback loop.

Since the visual cortex is highly modularized, I believe we should do the same. Take the motion processing out, and the subject sees only discontinuous images without fluidic motion. Take the shape processing out, and the subject wouldn't be able to tell a sphere from a cube. So it seems there are many modules here, and we can't afford to lose even one of them. But the average computer can only do so much. What are our options here?

Perhaps we should review our priorities. Let's think for a second what do we intend to get out of this system. I think it suffice for a system to be able to differentiate objects and track them reliably. Also, as the object's visual stimulus transforms (either due to lighting, shadow, motion, or rotation), the inner representation of the object must not change, i.e. we should know this is the same blob we saw even when it looks different. So, obviously, we need to be able to perceive motion and individual objects. What kinds of simple processing do we need here?

Let's focus on recognizing individual objects first. How do we differentiate one object from the other? Or rather, how do we classify a blob of pixels as a particular distinct object? Usually, we make the distinction base on edges, textures, and colors. once we identify a particular object, despite the changes it goes through in the next moment, we should still be able to identify it and the pixels associated with it.

Edges and textures seem to be the more important ones here, since a color blind person can still perceive individual objects. Edge defines a boundary in which an object resides in, and textures identify that object and separate it from the other objects. There's also the issue of overlapping objects. Nevertheless, let's not get ahead of ourselves. We should review the most basic cases first.

Finding edges is simple since we have good algorithms for it. What's more important is, given a simple high contrast image of shape outlines, how do we make out which line belongs to which shape, and exactly what shapes can we infer out of it? Psychology has provided us with some good ideas. What we intend to do here is grouping, essentially bringing order and form to the sensations we perceive. They are grouped using several rules. Proximity. Similarity. Continuity. Connectedness. Closure. They may be more, but we'll focus on these.

So we have an image outline, with only lines and nothing else. This can be obtained from a Sobel filter and then pruning/thinning it. Some of the interesting features are curves/lines, joints, crosses, separation points, angle, closed loops, etc. How do we find these out, and how do we encode them into useable units? There's also the issue of very messy interconnected lines, like a web, which can basically take many forms of interpretations. Detecting this many features definitely requires a lot of processing. Perhaps it'd be wise to cut down on the number of features we want to detect. What are the minimum features that can still reliably describe an image? Let's discuss these features one by one.

TO BE CONTINUED

Know thyself

2007-10-26T12:50:00.000-04:00

one of the reasons I can think of why consciousness has alluded most research scientists (psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers alike) and so insistently defy clear and simple definition and explanation is the fact that we have made wrong assumptions about our consciousness, and that has led us to look in the wrong direction.

I hate to do this, but very often trying to operationally define consciousness in the scientific sense almost always lead us back to the many fundamental philosophical questions: what is thought specifically in the physical sense? Less relevant, but even more extreme: je pense donc je suis? do I even really exist? Does the thoughts I have really belong to me? I shall go with the flow instead of defying it. Again, the question, what is thought. Saying it's just a bunch of conscious brain processes does not explain anything but just beg the question again.

You, whatever idea you have of yourself, no matter how alive you feel, are nevertheless a conglomerate of lifeless bunch of stuffs (which I believe we all agree, as far as our perception brings us). Senses are perception from stimulus. Ideas are perception without stimulus. Or rather, stimulus from the memory, and also the current thoughts/ideas that lead to it. Connections, we may call such things. They can be reliably replicated both in physical way and in an abstract sense. I can make a machine, or a computer program that does this. What then, distinguish them from us?

Perhaps it's high time we give up the seemingly undeniable idea that we are in CONTROL of our consciousness, of our thought processes, of our volition. Research evidence increasingly points to the conclusion that much of what one does is not entirely controlled by the person; yet, we are often led to think and feel and experience that our behavior is determined by ourself, by our volition. Well. Can you assume that volition belongs to you? Can it not be your behavior is determined by other things and you are made to feel that you are in control? That other thing, whatever it is, may very well be the thing that controls your thoughts. A projection of whatever you have in mind on your mind, and your mind attributes itself to the creation of such thoughts, and even this attribution is made by that projection of that thing. I shall call such a thing a mind runner. No matter what do I label it as, we have not come to a definite conclusion of what and how the mind and the consciousness works. This remains my speculation and I do not see it any time soon being proved to be the case.

Like-wise, if we generalize this idea to the whole world, can we say that the world is a virtual world, a fake world, a non-existing world in the physical sense, much like how we think of worlds in computer games? This analogy I give is a recurring idea in many literature, to the point of it becoming jaded. But we still have not have an answer. Will we ever do?

Not 4 t3h f8ful

2007-10-14T11:32:00.000-04:00

"So this thing that purports to bring good and all must create a set A by itself within the universal set, setting shackling rules and constricting boundaries. that, as long as A does not equal to the universal set, continues to bring enmity (not by themselves, but by their own definitions) between the A and A', because by its very definition A and A' are opposites. To make it worse, there's not just A. There's also B, and then there's also C..."

"It's like a remote control. The one who had it no longer exists, and now and then, every one wants to have it. All the others, either they like the channel currently viewed by the one who has it, or they dislike it. To make it worse, there's 2000+ channels and they are growing."

"Trying to convince everyone that nobody can know or reason with absolute certainty if the big guy does exist is just as hard as NP complete problems, if not harder. To make it worse, they find the same feeling of you. I give up and move on and so should you."

"Matter constituents right down to the subatomic level invariably reorganize themselves from chaotic to uniform, no matter what the initial state is. This reverberates throughout the hierarchy, and there is no reason why a form, an object, a matter that perpetuates themselves through space and time should not have an organized form, and this includes the ill defined life forms. For a thing to be chaotic is to lose its original state and jump to another state with no apparent order, thus its identity shall not survive. This is a very basic principle and no one has to be responsible for that. Apologies for invoking the anthropic principle, but had this not hold true for a universe with a certain properties like that of ours, no one observer shall exist to ruminate on that, for no matter of certain narrow properties (that which we call the Goldilocks's zone) can create enough complexity to sustain it. We have no reason to ascribe such ordinary yet incredibly grand existence and the interactions therein to an entity whose origins can not be comprehended, for nothing can be determined with certitude should we decide to wend on this path. Everyone can say whatever they want, hence the existence of sets A,B,C... as explicated above. And therefore by Occam's Razor, it shall be discarded."

"The invocation of the Anthropic Principle requires no watchmaker if there is a watch. For time and space arises out of complex interactions of geometry and dimensions at incomprehensibly grand scale. At such scale, a multitude of events not comprehensible in the usual space-time sense are happening, and one of them leads to our universe, and irrevocably to our existence. Is there a control? No there is not. Our enormous desire to simplify such chaotic scene into one of patterns and forms has nevertheless deviates us from the correct reasoning, if we are never able to and decide to push all such incomprehensible matters to a single entity whom we form in the image of us, yet whose capability is extended to such infinite scale as to justify its ability to handle the matters of which responsibility we gladly give to."

小松鼠

2007-10-04T15:29:00.000-04:00

小松鼠小松鼠
蹦蹦跳跳找食物
见大鸟快点跑
可惜被抓了

小松鼠小松鼠
被大鹰抓回去煮
吃心脏丢大肠
吃得乐心房

小松鼠小松鼠
你的头骨在何处
找到骨却掉眼珠
在沟渠上浮

无间音乐之最后一张FORM

2007-09-14T21:51:00.000-04:00

So basically this is what my friends and I has conjured over the summer. The context is somewhat unclear to the general viewer, because we did this for a singing competition organized by a certain organization. Enjoy the show, and leave comments or what you have.

TAFFI

2007-08-23T01:40:00.000-04:00

So, this TAFFI thing is pretty simple, actually. It stands for Thumb And Fore Finger Interface, a new gestural input method developed by Andrew D. Wilson, a Microsoft Researcher. So basically, the algorithm is able to detect the pinching gesture when you bring your thumb and fore finger together, and gives you its coordinates, headings, size, etc. The amazing thing about it is that it doesn't use any fancy hand recognition method, instead, it uses a very smart exploit, giving it the unprecedented accuracy and speed. Before I started doing this, I had came across a video clip on Wilson's TAFFI demo. The moment he said '...exploits the topology of the image...when you (pinch your fingers), you're creating a new shape...' suddenly gave me a HUGE clue on how he accomplished it.

So basically, you run a threshold on the image. Then do a connected components analysis. You then obtain the component(s) which do not reside on the image borders. You can safely assume that these components are that of the hole created when you pinch your fingers, under the conditions of good thresholding. You can then easily calculate the centroid, the number of pixels, and also the orientation if you first obtain its convex hull (and then get its major axis), or do ellipse fitting.

first image: input image from webcam.
second image: connected component analysis result of the input image. Basically, all pixels which are neighbors to each other are assigned a common label.
third image: convex hull of the shape(s) we find in the connected component analysis. we only perform convex hull on shape(s) not on the boundary of the image.

What's a convex hull, you ask? A convex hull is the smallest convex polygon that fits all data nodes. Convex polygon is a polygon whose inner angles never go beyond 180 degrees. A better definition is all points on a line between any two points in the polygon are always in the polygon, not the outside.

Why do we need convex hull? If you can obtain two points on the convex hull's edge whose line is longest, you can use that, coupled with easy trigonometry to obtain the major angle (minor angle is omitted here). I, however, take the major angle as the orientation of the blob formed by the pinching gesture.

A better way is to use ellipse fitting. This fits an ellipse, instead of a convex hull, on all the data nodes. The major axis of the ellipse can be taken as the orientation.

Alternatively, we could've performed ellipse fitting as well, to stabilize the orientation.

I programmed this in VB.NET. Amazingly, it runs at 13 fps (compiled) on a lowly laptop with Pentium M 730 (2MB L2 cache, 1.6GHz, 533 MHz FSB) and 1.2GB DDR2 RAM. I believe it can be optimized further. If we want to accept gestural input as a means of input, it must reach at least 133 fps. So for now, hardware speed is a problem. Now you see why Minority Report style touch screen or any fancy gestural input never really took off the past few decades.

2007-08-16T13:09:00.000-04:00

Okay as per requests for essay assistance, here are direct links to some of the essays you guys wanna read. saves you time from going through the junks on my blag.

Discrimination Against Asian Immigrants
Descartes P'wned
We Can Never Know Whether God Does Exist
The Lame Factor
Zero Innovation
The Ultimate Cause
Humanity vs Mankind
There is No Spoon
Thy Pulchritude and Panache art 1.618...
Please Christine, just drag me to the recycle bin!
I Love You...
Be Aware that We are Aware of What We are Aware of
Modern Regression

The Not so good ones
Digital Cognition and Conation
Of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Chaos and Universe

Untitled 9

2007-08-02T08:05:00.000-04:00

Untitled 8

2007-07-18T11:00:00.000-04:00

Untitled 7

2007-06-20T01:55:00.000-04:00

Discrimination against Asian Immigrants

2007-06-17T06:07:00.000-04:00

Throughout much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the influx of immigrants into America has created uneasiness amongst Americans. Such uneasiness has led to the discrimination against immigrants, specifically, Asian immigrants. As portrayed in novels such as To Kill a Mockingbird, the discrimination is often based on skin color difference. In recent times, such discrimination still exists; however, the motivation behind has progressed from skin color difference to more complicated factors, ranging from economy to education. Economically, a remarkable portion of Asian immigrants are better off than their average American counterparts. Such difference in financial power prompted some Americans, usually the unemployed, to retaliate. Education-wise, Asian immigrants are also generally acknowledged to perform better than the average Americans. Worried that this trend might displace other Americans educationally, some schools actually place a quota on the admission of Asian Americans, who are usually first or second generation immigrants. Discrimination by ethnicity or race still exists, and this is especially heightened up following the September 11 incident. A Sikh man was killed because of the similarity of his appearance to Middle Eastern people. To motivate my argument, I will first provide the background knowledge on the aforementioned factors, and then elucidate how it leads to discrimination against immigrants. Finally, I will also demonstrate examples of such discrimination to buttress my argument.

Economically, the Asian immigrants are largely more successful than the Americans. While this at first does not seem to be a problem to the immigrants, the disparity has nevertheless led to backlash from the Americans. Many of the Asian immigrants come from poor countries; as such, they are more willing to work harder and to grab any job opportunities they can get, including lowly jobs. “These jobs represent a tremendous opportunity for workers from abroad who want to work and to fulfill their duties as a husband or a wife, a son or a daughter," (CNN.com) Even though the immigrants and the Americans are on a level playing field, the immigrants are more motivated. They are willing to work more for less. To put themselves in better positions, the Asian immigrants involve themselves in technology jobs. “They are pigeonholed in technology jobs, and are not deemed to have many non-technical abilities.” (O’Connor, T.) Such qualities are what the mass producing industries demand, hence their preference for Asian workers. Unemployed Americans claim that job opportunities are dwindling due to the influx of Asian immigrants. (Blank, R.) This may be disputable, as President Bush aptly put: “…some of the jobs being generated in America’s growing economy are jobs American citizens are not filling.” Thus, the discrimination against immigrants Asians are largely baseless, and in fact, the immigrants are helping the American economy.

At any rate, such sentiments against Asian immigrants are shared by many unemployed Americans; and it may build up to an unfavorable climax. In 1982, a Chinese American was beaten to death for a reason he was not responsible for. Vincent Chin, a 27 year old industrial draftsman, was having his bachelor party when a white autoworker, Ronald Ebens instigated him by declaring that “It’s because of you [people] that we’re out of work.” Ebens was referring to the lost of US automobile manufacturing jobs to Japan. A fight ensued and ended with Ebens brutally bludgeoning his head with a baseball bat, killing him soon after. The discrimination did not stop there; when Ebens and his step-son, Michael Nitz (who was also involved in the murder) were charged in the court, they were only sentenced to fines and probation. (Wikipedia) Judge Charles Kaufman, who convicted them, justified his sentence by saying that his responsibility does not just fit the punishment to the crime, but also to the perpetrators. (Le, C.) One of the witnesses, Morris Cotton said, “Ebens was holding the bat as if he was trying to hit a home run.” (Ho, C.) It was evident that Ebens did it intentionally, yet the Judge gave only light sentences, which was unfair in view of the seriousness of the crime. Such incidents should not have happened, considering how much the United States had progressed in the treatment of the minorities and also in the revamp of immigrant policies over the past few decades.

Education-wise, it is thought that Asian immigrants on average perform better than the average Americans. (Le, C.) This may stem from the widespread Confucius values amongst Asians, which places great importance on filial piety. (Wikipedia) Immigrants carry the heavy responsibility of providing for their families, and also not to let them down. Young Asian immigrants are conditioned to think that failing in studies brings embarrassment to the family. This is one of the primary reasons why Asians do better than the Americans. Nevertheless, this tips the balance for the Americans. The Asian immigrants’ better performance raises the bar for what it means to be excellent. As a result, many Americans find it hard to compete against the Asian immigrants, especially in admission to colleges. This has prompted several schools to employ a quota system on admissions. Notable schools that are accused of doing so include Princeton University, Harvard University, University of California at Berkeley (UCB), and University of California at Los Angeles. (Le, C) In 1989, an Asian American woman who applied to UCB received a letter stating that she was on the Asian waiting list. After running an internal investigation, Chancellor Heyman of UCB admitted “it is clear that decisions made in the admissions process indisputably had a disproportionate impact on Asians.” (Heldman, Dan C.) In other words, the University admitted to have discriminated Asians. Through an internal memo, the Director of Admissions at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) had also expressed their intentions of curbing the decline in admitted Caucasians by limiting the number of admitted Asian American students. (Johnson, H.) She received a letter from UCB informing her that she was on the Asian waiting list. (Johnson, H.) Arresting the decline of one particular group is a different matter than imposing quota on the number of another group. Being denied admission because of one’s greater drive for excellence is a step back from the freedom of social mobility which so many Americans enjoy.

In 2006, Jian Li, an immigrant from China, had filed a federal civil rights complaint against Princeton University for racial discrimination in considering applications for admission. (Kimberly, C. and Wang, J.) He claimed that his application was rejected by the University because he is Asian. Even though the civil rights agency is using only Jian Li’s SAT score and GPA grade as evidence (Jian Li obtained 2400 on SAT and 2390 on SAT II), Jian Li based his case on “a study of admission processes published by three Princeton researchers in 2004.” According to the study, “…while elite universities gave African-American applicants an advantage equivalent to 230 extra SAT points and Hispanic applicants 185 points while making admissions decisions, the schools placed Asian-Americans at a disadvantage equal to a loss of 50 SAT points.” (Kimberly, C. and Wang, J.) This is obviously a discrimination against Asians. Nevertheless, such discrimination is motivated more by the stereotypical image of Asians being smart than by ethnicity. The researchers had also conducted a study on “disaffirmative action”, and found out that if the factor of race was taken out, admissions of Asians to elite schools would increase significantly. This indicates that race is a factor in admission consideration. This is an ironic situation, as the Asians are disadvantaged because of their better performance than the others. In Jian Li’s case, he did not ask for compensation (Kimberly, C. and Wang, J.), but he filed the complaint with the intention of bringing to light the issue of discrimination (Kate, C.), which the universities deny so adamantly.

Asian immigrants also suffer discrimination due to their ethnicity and race. Ethnicity is defined as a cultural group who distinguish themselves as a whole based on “genetics, language, or other cultural manifestations.” (Answers.com) Race, on the other hand, describes groups of people based on physical characteristics and common ancestries. (Wikipedia) However, these traits set the immigrants apart from the majority of Americans, which are white Caucasians. Throughout history, there has been much violence where such differences are the prime motivating factor. The Yellow Peril in the late 19th and mid 20th century is one exemplifying example. The Chinese and Japanese who immigrated to the United States were discriminated against due to their skin color and also the belief that their mass immigration presents a threat to the whites (hence the term Yellow Peril). (Wikipedia) Another example is the Chinese Massacre of 1871. On October 24 of that year, Los Angeles’ Chinatown saw a massacre of Chinese by a mob of over 500 Caucasians. The event was triggered by the killing of a Caucasian man in a gang war. (Thomison, D.) In this ruthless massacre, the Chinese were singled out. This incident shows how earlier Asian immigrants lived a risky life for no other reason than the fact that they were Asians.

Despite the fact that Asian immigrants originate from many different places and that each one possesses classifiable physical traits, Americans are generally oblivious to such differences (O’Connor, T.); and view all Asians as a single humongous ethnic group. Thus, their sentiments, good or bad, are generally directed to all Asians as a whole. On September 15, 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh immigrant from India, was shot to death outside his convenience store in Mesa, Arizona. The perpetrator, Frank Roque, apparently did it in response to the September 11 attack, which was attributed to Middle Eastern extremists. However, the only connection Balbir had with the attack, if any, was that his appearance (his clothes, his turban, and his beard) resembled a person of Middle Eastern ethnicity. (Wikipedia) The September 11 attack had unpleasant repercussions, as Sikhs, Muslims and Arab Americans face regular discrimination. They were always stared at in the airport and in grocery stores. (Martin, N.) The case of Vincent Chin, quoted earlier in this paper, is also an example of indiscriminating violence against all Asians. Ronald Ebens was frustrated by the lost of the jobs to Japan, but vented his anger at Vincent Chin instead, a Chinese. In fact, Vincent Chin’s murder can be seen as a continuation of the Yellow Peril sentiment of the mid twentieth century. From these cases, we can see clearly that the perpetrators picked their victims based on race and ethnicity.

Although at present the situation is much better than decades ago, Asian immigrants still have a reason to feel worried about their rights and security. To date, discrimination against Asians is still very real, as is evident in the relatively recent discrimination cases quoted above. We may have the means to cross the barrier imposed by national borders and cultural differences; however, if we are not prepared mentally to deal with the rich diversity in our own global community, discrimination will always happen. It may take a while before diversity is recognized as a quality of humanity, not differences therein.

References:

1. Wikipedia. “Filial Piety” (May, 2007) Retrieved May 13, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_piety

2. Heldman, Dan C. “Ending College Admission Quotas Against Asian-Americans” (1989, June) Retrieved May 13, 2007, from http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/EM240.cfm

3. CNN.com “Bush Calls for changes on illegal workers.” (2004, January) Retrieved May 13, 2007, from http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/07/bush.immigration/

4. Kimberly, C. and Wang, J. “Anti-Asian bias Alleged.” (2006, November) Retrieved May 13, 2007, from http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/18978?badlink=1

5. Kate, C. “Rejected applicant alleges bias against Asians” (2006) DailyPrincetonian.com. Princeton University. Retrieved May 13, 2007, from http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2006/11/13/news/16544.shtml

6. Johnson, H. “Model victims – discrimination against Asian students in California’s public universities” (1992, July). National Review West. Retrieved May 13, 2007 from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n14_v44/ai_12504486

7. Le, C. “A Closer Look at Asian Americans and Education” (2001, September) New Horizons for Learning. Retrieved May 13, 2007 from http://www.newhorizons.org/strategies/multicultural/le.htm

8. O’Connor, T. “Understanding Discrimination Against Asian-Americans” (2004, June) Retrieved May 13, 2007 from http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/soc/355lect10.htm

9. Blank, R. “Declining Wages, Not Lack of Jobs, Plague Low-Skilled Workers in the U.S.” Smart Library on Urban Poverty. Retrieved May 13, 2007 from http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:O5XyF0WX_mAJ:www.poverty.smartlibrary.org/NewInterface/
segment.cfm%3Fsegment%3D1739+american+claim+job+declining+due+to+immigrant&hl
=en&amp;ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us&client=firefox-a

10. Le, C. “Anti-Asian Racism & Violence” (2001) Asian-Nation.org. Retrieved May 13, 2007 from http://www.asian-nation.org/racism.shtml

11. Ho, C. “The Model Minority Awakened” (1996) USAsians.net. Retrieved May 13, 2007 from http://us_asians.tripod.com/articles-vincentchin3.html

12. Wikipedia. “Vincent Chin” (2007) Retrieved May 13, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Chin

13. Answers.com “Ethnicity” Retrieved May 13, 2007 from http://www.answers.com/ethnicity&r=67

14. Wikipedia. “Race” (May, 2007) Retrieved May 13, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race

15. Wikipedia. “Yellow Peril” (May, 2007) Retrieved May 13, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_peril

16. Thomison, D. “Chinese Massacre of 1871” (June, 2002) USC Archives. Retrieved May 13, 2007 from http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/la/scandals/chinese_riots.html

17. Wikipedia “Balbir Singh Sodhi” (April, 2007) Retrieved May 13, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balbir_Singh_Sodhi

18. Martin, N. “Sikhs still living in shadow of Sept. 11” (September, 2005) East Valley Tribune. Retrieved May 13, 2007 from http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/48149

Untitled 6

2007-06-11T06:33:00.000-04:00

Untitled 5

2007-04-11T18:34:00.000-04:00

Untitled 4

2007-03-22T14:08:00.000-04:00

well, no one cares?

Untitled 3

2007-03-20T12:58:00.000-04:00

Guys, I need a title.

Untitled 2

2007-03-18T17:50:00.000-04:00

untitled

2007-03-17T16:04:00.000-04:00

i feel like doing school kids related story, esp. with Malaysian setting. So here's the first page.
No title yet. Will publish in Chinese and English.
Please click on the image to read the English version.

Pledge to Mankind

2007-03-15T15:46:00.000-04:00

We are men and women.
We are all colors.
We recognize not our dichotomy, but our diversity.
We see bright future in our children.
We sacrifice for preservation of humanity.
We abandon no one.
We cry in honor of the valor of great men and women.
We never walk alone, physically or spiritually.
We cry with tears of joy in the face of achievement.
We atone failure with greater effort.
We cannot give up.
We trust without conditions.
We bind ourselves with love.
We ruminate the past.
We cherish the present.
We create the future.

Tears cherishing the fallen great men and women are ocean to the tears consoling personal agony.

When you are willing to look at me and talk with me, you will find out deep inside we are not that different. We happen to be very alike, with similar thoughts, similar passions, and similar troubling difficulties. You will soon realize, for half of your life you have been creating borders, and regret all the joy and tears and warmth of a genuine smile you would have shared with us. I await the moment the fence is taken down. The moment you run to us with fiery effervescence. The moment we laugh and walk towards the sunset together.

The Agony of a Human

2007-02-19T18:10:00.000-05:00

Mozart - Moonlight Sonata 1st Movement

You pride yourself for being a rational thinker. You pride yourself for free of partiality. Remote from emotional affliction, emancipated from relational attachment, for the macrocosm in your perspective has been reduced to pure concept and reason, connected with each other by mere strings of causality. Clairvoyant as you may be, yet you have lost the personal touch to the very thing that makes a human a human. You have lost irrationality, the indubitably quintessential yet ostensibly improbable constituent of volition. Your love is logical. Your love is quantitative. What is owed must be returned; what is superfluous must be given. Your love is never unrestrained nor undying. Your love is never unconditional nor profound. Your psyche supports logic, yet your existence defies it. Your external veneer may be close to others, yet your inner soul is secluded and separated by infinite demarcation. Subconscious is suppressed. Eyes are blinded. Instinct is overridden. To you, hope is an illusion, emotion is a burden, feeling is a chemical reaction. You see yourself as mere complicated jumble of molecules. You think of nihilism. You believe in existentialism. You indulge in solipsism. You believe not in the existence of God, nor the non-existence of God. Absolute truth cannot be sought...

(The piano stops)

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Repeat as rap song.

Ethelene - 004

2007-02-02T17:51:00.000-05:00

Ethelene - 003

2007-01-30T21:31:00.000-05:00

Ethelene - 002

2007-01-28T16:31:00.000-05:00

Ethelene - 001

2007-01-27T18:08:00.000-05:00

this comic is hence tentatively named 'ethelene', after a friend of mine.

Heroine

2007-01-23T21:34:00.000-05:00

There, our first heroine.

Edit: A comic-ish version.

edited: P/S: I value comments.

Multi touch screen display

2007-01-21T14:56:00.000-05:00

Here are some video clips which demonstrate the capabilities and possibilities you can achieved with a multi touch screen display, currently one of the most active research pursued by computer scientists involved in haptic interface research.

This one is created by Jefferson Han, who apparently drop out from his senior year in Cornell University to join a startup company. He's now a research scientist in NYU. This piece of technology is based upon frustrated total internal reflection, an optical phenomena he took advantage of.

here's another version, with a transparent screen. It's called Touchlight. This one is created by Andy Wilson, who's part of Microsoft Research. He got BA in CS from Cornell University, and his PhD from MIT Media Labs.

Here's another one which Wilson made. It's called PlayAnywhere.

I'd have to say Jeff's gives faster response time, which is very crucial in creating an input device. Wilson's touchlight is good and novel because it uses a transparent screen, but as we can see from the demo, there's not much applications which exploit such features. Jeff's gives lots of demos and really open up the many possibilities of taking advantage of this novel and new form of human computer interaction.

One thing I should insist that, all these technologies have existed for some time, but due to many factors including market acceptance and technology maturity, they're often delayed years and even decades.

So my point is, at this point of time, many futuristic technologies are already available, waiting to be crafted into novel applications, or to be perfected.

Allow me to digress. In the 60s, we possess the theoretical technology to allow us to travel up to nearly 0.1c. This is very impressive, considering the difference from the speed of light is just a single order of magnitude. Nevertheless, that technology made use of nuclear warheads, and that means possible pollution and hazardous radiation to lives on earth as the rocket makes its way to the space. The technology has since been abandoned, and we still rely on chemical energy, an energy form we've been using since we started off as boiling proteins and nucleic acids in some random unknown warm pool during primordial times. Now that it's 21st century, I expect we should've reached the point of making good use of nuclear energy and of course, finding novel and safe ways to dispose off the radioactive fuel rods. But alas, our progression to type I civilization is halted. Despite the potential danger to environment, I still believe it's up to technological advancement and a leap of faith to make that transition into an advanced yet peaceful and safe civilization.

Motion Detect

2007-01-21T14:30:00.000-05:00

Here's a snapshot of the things I played to investigate motion detection. I was sort of hoping to find some invariance in shapes or my hand, but alas, not a single one that is reliable enough is found. I hope to be able to control things on my screen by just waving my hand infront of the webcam. I've several ideas, each one is different, depending on how I want to design the interaction. If I just want a really simple back/forward instruction, I can look for blobs at the bottom and on the sides of screen. First I find difference of two successive frames, filter off the noise or lone pixel changes (I want to look for big changes), then find biggest Connected Component either by means of DFS or BFS, and find the major/minor axis using very simple approximation, and probably get the centroid as well. So we've a matrix of biggest motion here, along with the mean positions. Then within the interval 0.6 plus minus 0.2 seconds, I'll look for another calculated mean position that differ from the previous one by a fixed percentage, and still another mean position that's roughly the same as the first one. This approximates to a hand lifting from the bottom (the first motion matrix), to the side (the second motion matrix), and then to bottom again (the third motion matrix). Of course, to avoid other motions, such as body/head and people walking by, we've to make some assumptions here. The user will not move too much. The hand movement is usually from the bottom then to the side and then to the bottom again (if we only look for such patterns, it should reduce lots of false positives), it will generate the largest motion, and set a threshold for pixel change between frames for that biggest connected component.

There's also another idea, which basically try to identify which pixels amongst all are foreground/background. This will ensure only objects close enough to the webcam will be able to affect the on screen objects. This has the added benefit of not constraining the hand shape/movement, in addition to using other objects to control on screen objects, simply by waving it near to the webcam. This is hard, however, because we're approximating objects' distance from a single monocular frame, and within such a short interval, about 0 to roughly 1 feet.

Another one is to use Vonoroi diagrams. However, differing lighting conditions, reflections, different skin color, user possibly wearing gloves/long sleeves, and the proximity of the hand's skin color to the head's and body's mean this method is inaccurate, if it works at all.

Another method is to detect edges, then connect regions with small color difference. Of all the regions, look for one that closely approximates the shape of a hand. The processing needed is quite a lot, and this impose a shape restriction to the hand, which after some time, the hand will not be very comfortable.

MF267

2007-01-21T13:56:00.000-05:00

Pilot: Flight MF267 on approach. Requesting permission to land.
ATC: Roger flight MF267. Clearing runway 13. Please remain airbourne at 2000 feet.
Pilot: Roger that. Fuel's running very low. Please be quick.
ATC: We got that. Please wait for another 2 minutes.
Pilot: Roger control tower. Approaching traffic circuit.
ATC: Roger flight MF267. Remain at 2000 feet. Traffic circuit is congested.
Pilot: Roger that.
ATC: Runway cleared. Flight MF267, you are cleared to land.
Pilot: Roger that. I'm off the runway. Joining the traffic circuit.
ATC: Roger flight MF267. We sense a crosswind at 43 degrees relative to runway, about 50 knots.
Pilot: Roger that. Control's a bit hard here. Joining downwind.
ATC: We got you.
Decreasing engine power. Deploying 2nd level flaps. Now deploying gear.

Pilot: Control tower, my right gear is stuck. Please advise.
ATC: Roger that. You are too low now. Regain altitude and knock off the gear.
Pilot: Roger control tower. Leaving traffic circuit.
Pilot: Control Tower! My gear is still stuck. Fuel is running out. Please advise!
ATC: Roger that. Please remain calm.
Pilot: Control Tower! Right engine losing power! Can't control!
ATC: Roger that. Retract your flaps. Lose some altitude to regain airspeed.
Pilot: Roger Control Tower! Flaps retracted. Regaining control! Gear still stuck! In Base now! Checkerboard in sight! Can't risk crash and burn! Control tower please advise!
ATC: Please remain calm. You have to land with single gear.
Pilot: Roger that! Crosswind is strong. Right engine will hit the ground!
Pilot: Engine shut down! Losing power, all systems down!
ATC: Roger that. Turbine can't generate enough power at current airspeed. Your plane is fly-by-wire. You will lose control in a moment.

Aligning at 45 degrees off the runway. Deploying 2nd level flaps. 70 feet. 50 feet. Pulling ailerons. Re-aligning with runway. 20 feet. 10 feet.
Pilot: Control tower! Right engine hit the ground! I repeat! Right engine hit the ground!
ATC: Roger pilot. We see that. Deploying fire bridgades, and..
ATC Officer: Oh my gosh...he's going to tilt over!
Pilot: Control Tower...help!! we

Deafening boom staggers the control room. Glasses shattered into pieces. All the screens went black.

Descartes p'wned

2006-11-20T22:40:00.000-05:00

Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, was once baffled as to why, given God’s perfect nature, humans, who were created by God, erred. God, as a perfect being, did not endow humans with faculties that make mistakes. But as experience showed, Descartes made countless errors. Descartes explained that it was free choice of the will that led him to err. Despite being a perfect faculty, the will extended beyond the intellect. When the will judged things that were not well understood, it erred. However, despite the proofs he laid out, I’d like to avow my conviction that Descartes’ use of free will to explain his errors is flawed by dubious and unproven claims. In his construct, Descartes did not explain some of his claims clearly. Several of his claims also contradict each other. I shall first delineate in steps his arguments which lead to his aforementioned conclusion. I shall also draw some parallels and distinctions between Descartes’ view of error and Augustine’s view of sin. Finally, I shall expound on his dubious claims and on how his construct is flawed by such claims.

Descartes starts off by getting rid of the possibility of a deceiving God. He recognizes that God can never deceive him for one simple reason. “…the will to deceive undoubtedly attests to maliciousness or weakness. Accordingly, deception is incompatible with God (¶ 2, Meditation 4).” Since the will to deceive indicates maliciousness, which is a kind of weakness or imperfection, God, who is perfect, does not therefore deceive. Next, he states that the faculties by which he judges things are given by God (¶ 3), for God is the creator of everything (¶ 22, Meditation 3). As he has shown that God does not deceive him, it follows that God does not give him a faculty that makes mistakes (¶ 3, Meditation 4). But it does not necessarily mean he could never make a mistake, for experience shows that he is subject to countless errors (¶ 4). Knowing that God does not make him err, he attempts to find the cause of his errors. As he contemplates on the idea of God, a supremely perfect being, he also comes to notice a negative notion of nothingness, the farthest deviation from perfection. Having perfect faculties but erring and lacking many things, he sees himself as in the middle of these two extremes. With that in mind, he thus comes to understand that such error does not depend on God, but is “merely a defect (¶ 4).” In other words, error is just a privation of knowledge caused by a finite faculty (¶ 4). With the knowledge he ought to have he would not have erred. But this still does not explain why God allows such a defect. Descartes inquires further into the nature of his errors. He sees that his errors depend on simultaneous concurrence of his intellect and his will (¶ 8). Through the intellect he perceives ideas which he can judge about; and the intellect does not err in this manner (¶ 8). Nevertheless, there are some ideas which the intellect does not perceive. Descartes does not believe he is deprived of those ideas, but rather he lacks them. In other words, he believes God does not deprive him of what he ought to have, for the sole reason that he cannot reason why God ought to have endowed him with a greater faculty of knowing than he (God) did (¶ 8).

Notwithstanding that, Descartes states “Nor…can I complain that the will or free choice I have received from God is insufficiently ample or perfect, since I experience that it (free will) is limited by no boundaries whatever (¶ 8).” The only faculty that Descartes experiences no boundaries is the will. Descartes reasons that willing is just a matter of deciding to do or not do the same thing. When the intellect proposes something that requires the will’s decision, we do not sense the will being coerced by any external force (¶ 8). In other words, it is a spontaneous process when we will something. Concordantly, being free does not necessitate being able to be moved in each direction (¶ 8). Conversely, the more one inclines toward one direction, the more freely one chooses that direction (¶ 8). Descartes further states that natural knowledge increases one’s freedom, because the more he understands the good aspects in it, the more he is inclined to that direction (¶ 8). Nevertheless, Descartes also states the implication of this reasoning. “However, the indifference that I experience when there is no reason moving me more in one direction than in another is the lowest grade of freedom, but rather of a defect, that is, a certain negation in knowledge (¶ 8).” It thus follows that the indifference felt when there is no reason to budge in any direction indicates a lack of knowledge. With these in mind, Descartes shows what causes the errors. It is true that the faculty of willing given by God is most perfect per se, and thus is not the cause of errors (¶ 9). It is also true that the faculty of understanding given by God, if understands, understands rightly, and cannot be deceived (¶ 9). However, being boundless, the will extends further than the intellect, and is not contained within the same boundary (¶ 9). When the will extends to things not understood, it has no inclination towards the good direction since it is indifferent to such matters (¶ 9). As a direct corollary, the will easily turns away from the good and true, and in this manner it succumbs to deception (¶ 9). To corroborate this further, Descartes states that privation, a defining characteristic of wrong-doings and falsehoods, is not caused by God, since it is not a thing (¶ 15). Thus it is not imperfect of God to have allowed him to will in instances without clear and distinct perception in the intellect (¶ 15). To stave off the argument that God could have made it such that he never makes a mistake, Descartes posits a possibility that there may somehow be a greater perfection in the universe as a whole if only some of the constituents are imperfect rather than all being similar (¶ 15).

Interestingly, Descartes’ view of error is both similar to and different from Augustine’s view of sin in several ways. In Descartes’ view of error, God is perfect, creates everything and not malicious. Like-wise, Augustine postulates that God is omnipotent, creator of everything, but does not create evil. While Augustine’s remain a postulation throughout his argument, Descartes takes steps to prove his view of God by his principle of causality in Meditations 3. Nevertheless, both utilize a similar notion of God to motivate their argument. While Descartes’ view concerns error and Augustine’s concerns sin, both seemingly disparate subjects have similar definitions. According to Descartes, error is just a privation of knowledge caused by a finite faculty (¶ 4). Augustine, in addressing sin, states that it is due to a mind that fails to rule (Section 19, Book I). Both arguments, despite of different subject, actually resemble each other. Knowledge, in Descartes’ view, can be seen as the ideas necessary to will rightly. Had he possessed and perceived the knowledge clearly and distinctly, he would not have erred (¶ 4). Wisdom, in Augustine’s view, is what the mind uses to govern and hence act rightly (Section 20, Book I). Without wisdom, the mind allows itself to be empowered by something subordinate to it, namely lust. The privation of knowledge and wisdom in their respective context causes one to deviate from the good and true. Besides that, Descartes and Augustine also share the same central focus in their respective arguments, namely free choice of the will. Augustine identifies free will as the cause of sins (Section 34, Book I). And while Descartes has a similar idea, his idea is more subtle and refined than Augustine’s. Descartes believes that free will does not cause error per se, but when it extends beyond the intellect, it errs (¶ 9). Nevertheless, both arguments state that free will is endowed by God, and they both take extreme measures in not implicating God.

Despite Descartes’ utmost effort to unify the notions of imperfect beings and a perfect God, many of his claims are dubious and unproven. His use of free will to explain his errors is flawed in this regard. Firstly, his definition of perfect, especially pertaining to that of his, as an imperfect being, is vague at best, and contradictory at worst. “…What can that supreme creator of all things make that is not perfect in all respects? (¶ 5)” He states rhetorically that everything that God creates is perfect. Perfect, in this sense, means complete and without weaknesses. In attempting to explain his imperfections, Descartes thinks that God may have unfathomable reasons for letting him to err (and hence making him imperfect), so that the universe as a whole can be perfect (¶ 7, ¶ 15). Essentially, Descartes is saying constituents can be imperfect per se, but in a way such that the sum is perfect. This effectively undermines the earlier posits that his faculties (constituents of the universe) have to be perfect because they are given by God. This brings the question: on what criteria that Descartes judges something to be perfect? Descartes does not clarify this. Secondly, in showing how free will leads to errors, Descartes states that the free will faculty is perfect and boundless, but errs when he extends it beyond the intellect (¶ 9). Since free will is the faculty that wills and decides, what decides that it should extend beyond the intellect? Invariably, it is the will itself. Does this not indicate imperfection in the will itself to have led itself to err? Descartes makes the same dubious claims when he says “...he (God) assuredly has not given me the sort of faculty with which I could ever make a mistake, when I use it properly.” Again, who or what determines if he should use the faculty properly? It is the will itself. Descartes’ notion of free will being perfect is thus flawed.

Thirdly, Descartes undermines his earlier arguments when he states that God agrees with him in eliciting acts of the wills in which he (Descartes) is mistaken (¶ 15). He explains this by saying that there is greater perfection in him “in being able to elicit those acts than in not being able to do so (¶ 15).” Undoubtedly, different beings are mistaken to varying degrees. Does a person who deviates greatly from the good still contain greater perfection than a person who is just being indifferent? In other words, is it always better to take an action, regardless of how bad it is, than taking no action? In some cases, taking action exacerbates the situation further than not taking any action; and that brings further imperfections. Thus, Descartes is wrong in saying it is more perfect to be able to elicit those acts than not being able to. Descartes clarifies this by explaining privation, and this is my fourth point on his dubious claims. Privation, according to Descartes, is the defining characteristic of falsehood and wrong-doing (¶ 15). Descartes also mentions that privation needs no God’s concurrence, since privation is not a thing. In other words, God is not cause of privation. This does not make sense, since God, being the ultimate cause, is the one who decides if he should or should not bring about the existence of things. Accordingly, God is the one who will the privation. If privation characterizes falsehood and God wills the privation, does it not follow then that God allows falsehood, which indicates imperfection on God’s part? This effectively renders Descartes’ point that God is supremely perfect flawed.

Fifthly, Descartes’ argument on why God does not deprive him of what he ought to have lacks strength. “For although perhaps there may exist countless things about which I have no idea, nevertheless it must not be said that, strictly speaking, I am deprived of these ideas but only that I lack them in a negative sense. This is because I cannot adduce an argument to prove that God ought to have given me a greater faculty of knowing than he did (¶ 8).” As I have mentioned earlier, Descartes believes God does not deprive him of what he ought to have, for the sole reason that he cannot reason why God ought to have endowed him with a greater faculty of knowing than he (God) did. It is possible (and also stated by Descartes himself) that his faculty of understanding is limited, and hence he is not capable of adducing the proof, when there may be a proof. In other words, it is not certain whether there is such a proof. His reason is not cogent, and therefore there is no reason why Descartes ought to believe that God does not deprive him of what he ought to have. Nevertheless, Descartes makes up for this by explaining privation. But as explained and objected in my fourth point, God is the one who wills the privation. Descartes’ arguments rest on his faculties being perfect per se, yet it is uncertain whether God does deprive what he (Descartes) ought to have. Concordantly, it is also not certain whether his faculties are perfect. Thus Descartes’ entire construct is flawed by this feeble claim.

To sum it up, Descartes makes several dubious claims which effectively undermine his construct of free will as the cause of his errors. Descartes, despite his prodigious effort, is not very successful in his attempt to solve the problem.

Euphoric Agony

2006-05-27T12:32:00.000-04:00

I am playing Silent Hill 4: The Room right now, in the middle of the night. If I blast the speakers strong enough, the eerie sound wave might just be strong enough to punch a big portal hole into the other world.

PICTURES
http://jian2587.multiply.com/photos/album/1

I entered a portal hole somewhere and came out here in the ladies' toilet. As you can see, a mannequin with bloody hands is sitting in a toilet.

Allow me to introduce you to the sniffers. I beat them up with the steel pipe, sending bits of brain matter flying around.

Now, here I am, in front of vast darkness, fear of the unknown totally squeezing all my adrenaline out. I walked through the darkness, and found my way to the subway stairs. I descended into the execrable abyss. Sounds of ghosts calling out were in my ears.

Ha, there they were. Observe how they move. They're floating in mid-air with flexible joints that of a gymnast. Their feet were limp and lame, but they're able to move with celerity, chasing after you. They thrust forward by pushing their feet gently against the floor, sort of like in the water. Their heads went up and down, whilst opening their mouth and eyes wide (and no pupil! all white!). Most of the time they're looking downwards. Observe their drooping heads. The last frame shows a ghost bringing himself up from a fall. They constantly make a low pitch but deeply sonorous sound, yearning for fresh meat and blood. Once they got hold of you, they'd plunge their head onto your chest and eat your heart out.

There's another ghost, but I didn't display it here. She's a totally clueless, seemingly innocuous and amicable, but utterly dangerous grandma with an outfit of the 1930s. She wears a hat but no glasses. When she comes near you, she waggles her head from left to right with 90 degrees tilt. Just beat her up with the steel pipe.

The other ghost who fell was in euphoric agony as I stepped on his chest. He pulled his head up out of reflex, and open his mouth wide screaming for help. Do observe his countenance.

Here, after I beat up that ghost, he fell down gently. I stepped on his groin, trying to put him out of my misery (no pun intended). They wouldn't die, and never would, but I was trying to buy more time here.

We can never know whether God does exist

2006-04-17T23:21:00.000-04:00

Since eons ago, when humans started to employ reasoning based on what was observed and perceived, they attempted to make sense of the macrocosm they resided in. With some sense of curiosity (and ignorance), humans tried to explain the many natural phenomena, which, at times contradict their pre-conceived notions (best reasoning based on what is known at that time) of the world. Observing no conspicuous cause, humans naturally presumed the causality1 of all things to be effected by a superior being. Inevitably, it evolved into religion. With it, we induce certainty by comforting ourselves with a belief framework (that is supposedly divine) which attempt to explicate the conundrums of the existence of nature and us, that is, God created us. Unbeknownst to most people, regardless of what they believe (including science), regardless of how they bolster their belief (even by means of empirical study), that belief remains an inconclusive interpretation of this world. Saying God does exist, or saying God does not exist, implies concession of absolute truth, but since absolute truth can never be found (a posit I shall explicate later), we can never know whether God does exist.

An article entitled “A Help In Understanding What God Is” gives the following argument to support God’s existence. An inhabitant who lives in a two dimensional world can only perceive length and width, but not thickness. A sphere which goes through that world will be perceived as a dot that appears out of nowhere and grows to be a circle, and then vanishes. That inhabitant has just observed a violation of a physics law stating that matter can not be created nor destroyed. The article concludes by saying “God is so superior to us, he exists in such a higher dimension than do we that what is natural and ordinary to him is miraculous to us.” Put it simply, the article implies that God exists, but in higher realms to which we have no access in any way.

The article “A Practical Man’s Proof of God” maintains that the atheists are wrong in saying that the cosmos has no beginning, and hence, God’s concept and existence are redundant. The article bases its logical argument on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which simply states that entropy2 increases as time passes, which is also why the universe is expanding. If we rewind the time back, we shall see a time where the cosmos is just a point of singularity, which is the beginning. Ultimately, if there is a beginning, there has to be its cause. And this ultimate cause, which conforms to most mainstream religions’ assertion, is what theists term as ‘God’.

Atheists, though appear anti-theistic, also implicitly state that they have found absolute truth by explicitly saying that God does not exist. One notable reasoning raised is that every religion, especially mainstream ones, asserts that their God(s) is the only God, and that they offer absolute truth of nature and our existence. Assuming that religion offers absolute truth, therefore their assertion aforementioned must be true. But if their assertion is true, then their assertion can not be true, for if one’s God is the only God, then it can’t be that all other’s Gods (which are starkly different) is the only God. The quote “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”(Roberts, S.F., 2001) is apt in describing this situation. Since all the religions are contradicting each other (and therefore their conviction is flawed), atheists conclude that God does not exist.

The arguments put forth by both theists and atheists ostensibly support their tenets, but in actuality they prove otherwise. The first argument, which utilizes a thought experiment to explain the nature of God, already assumes God’s existence. Assuming that God already exists to prove that God exists and to subsequently explain God’s nature is circular3 at worst, and a homunculus argument4 at best. It proves nothing and is thus fallacious. The second argument, interestingly, employs scientific theories to account for God’s existence. One scientific article, however, conjectures that the universal constant, which determines the laws of physics, may have varied gradually as time passes. (Webb, J., 2003) Put it simply, the Second law of thermodynamics only applies to the present, not the past where the laws of physics may be different. As for the atheists, their argument of theists’ contradictory premises is also flawed. In “The Presumption of Atheism”, Bertrand Russell is quoted as saying “I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God…The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.” It’s not that all the religions are absolutely wrong, it’s just that we can’t determine their veracity. Ergo, we do not know for sure if God exists.

René Descartes (1596-1650), a famous French philosopher and mathematician, showed that there were many uncertainties in philosophy (Humphrey, C., n.d.). He attempted to establish philosophy as a priori with full certitude and found that the only thing he was most certain of was that he was thinking. That was the essence of his famous quote, “Cogito Ergo Sum” (I think, therefore I am). In his “automata” theory, Descartes also implied that there exist uncertainties in our perception of the world. While such uncertainties can be eliminated by empirical means, empiricism can only be as accurate as our perception allows. Thus how can we be sure of the world which we resides in? To make this clearer, consider the Virtual Reality technology. It’s possible to utilize technologies to impose an artificial world upon our perception, thereby effectively blanketing our perception of the real world. The Matrix trilogy, a film about a simulated world run by sentient machines, exemplifies this. At any time, we will never know what is real and what is not, and that includes the reality we are in now. Therefore we can never determine if everything is real, and so is the existence of God.

While it is shown that even empiricism does not offer definite conclusion, religion does not necessarily offer absolute truth, too. Galileo Galilei, for instance, was punished by the Roman Catholic because he maintained that earth revolved around the sun (Galileo Galilei 1564-1642). Yet, we now know that Galileo is right. Being in a modern era does not make things any better. Holy manuscripts are misconstrued to create concordance with scientific evidence. Take, for instance, a Pakistani scientist who misinterpret a holy manuscript verse to calculate the velocity with which the heaven is receding from earth (Mckanzie, D., 2005) Yet, we don’t even know if heaven exists in the first place. Truth in religion is therefore subject to multiple interpretations and not absolute. People have differing views on a matter, including religion. And the view can only be corroborated as much as our perception and logic allows. Yet, as aforementioned, our perception can be artificial and flawed. Uncertainty arises. Therefore we can not know the absolute truth.

Unintelligibility, one of the argument posed by theists, holds that our understanding of God is limited, which is why we can’t find proof of God’s existence. This is conspicuously similar to the first argument mentioned earlier by theists, but likewise, it also supports the notion that God’s existence can not be determined. Blaise Pascal once said “If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is. This being so, who will dare to undertake the decision of the question? Not we, who have no affinity to Him.” (Holt T., 2006). Clearly, it explains that if God is truly incomprehensible, then how can we affirm either theism or atheism? We can therefore conclude that, given God’s nature of being incomprehensible (assuming God exist), we shall also come to the conclusion that we can not determine God’s existence.

To sum everything up, our reasoning can only be substantiated as far as our perception will allow, and if our perception is susceptible to manipulation without us knowing it, then we can never find absolute truth. But our knowledge of whether our perception is manipulated is again determined by our reasoning and perception. By this circular corollary, we have come to the conclusion that we can never be sure of whether God does exist. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Terminologies:

1. Causality (OALD): the relationship between something that happens and the reason for it happening; the principle that nothing can happen without a cause.
2. Entropy (OALD): (technical) a way of measuring the lack of order that exists in a system
3. Circular (OALD): (of an argument or a theory) using an idea or a statement to prove something which is then used to prove the idea or statement at the beginning
4. Homunculus argument (wikipedia): accounts for a phenomenon in terms of the very phenomenon that it is supposed to explain. Homunculus arguments are always fallacious.

*OALD: Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary

References:

1. Webb, J. (2003). Are the laws of nature changing with time? [Electronic Version] Physics World. Retrieved April 16, 2006, from http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/16/4/9/4

2. Mckanzie, D. (2005, October) End of Enlightenment. [Electronic Version] New Scientist., issue 2520. Retrieved April 16, 2006, from http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18825201.200

3. A Practical Man’s Proof of God. (n.d.) Retrieved April 2, 2006, fromhttp://www.doesgodexist.org/Phamplets/Mansproof.html

4. A help in understanding what God is. (n.d.) Retrieved April 2, 2006, from http://www.doesgodexist.org/Phamplets/Flatland.html

5. Cogito Ergo Sum. (March 26, 2006) Retrieved April 2, 2006, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum

6. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). (n.d.) Retrieved April 16, 2006, from http://www.zephyrus.co.uk/galileogalilei.html

7. Humphrey C. (n.d.) I think, Therefore I am…NOT! Retrieved April 2, 2006, from http://teachanimalobjectivity.homestead.com/files/return2.htm

8. Roberts S.F. (2001) Brief History of the Quote. Retrieved April 16, 2006, from http://freelink.wildlink.com/quote_history.htm

9. Holt T. (2006) The Argument from Unintelligibility. Retrieved April 2, 2006, from http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/unintelligibility.html

10. Holt T. (2006) The Presumption of Atheism. Retrieved April 16, 2006, from http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/presumption.html

Enigmatic Conundrum

2006-04-08T14:24:00.000-04:00

Incongruous Quasiparticles
Lagrange 2
Ostensible Confession
Viscera Galore
Euphonous Cackle
Monumental Abjection
Innocuously Bizzarre
Marinated Cattus
Intel Inside

therein lies a statement.

Zero Innovation

2006-03-26T10:56:00.000-05:00

Of late, a contentious issue is being debated vociferously. Human innovations, the very foundation of which our civilization rest upon, are dwindling in numbers. This is substantiated by the statistics of patent applications submitted in the past decade, which show dismal innovations.

Recalling the mid 19th century, it was indeed a progressive era of innovations and inventions. Combustion engines, telegram, telephone, radio, camera, vinyl records, video recorder, cathode ray tubes, synchrotron, particle accelerator, wireless transmitter and countless number of other devices were just some of the creative inventions that our forefathers had created. Advancement in medicine and surgery had also been helped by such life-saving inventions as vaccines and heart defibrillators. This diverse array of inventions that were so radically different from each other, with each one representing one of its kind in terms of creativity and breakthrough, signified an unprecedented milestone in the history of sciences and mankind. It reminds us of the distinctive characteristic that set us apart from other species, that is the ability to create and utilize tools with our bare hands.

When we have progressed so far and arrive at the dawn of 21st century, despite the rapid advancements we had gone through for the past centuries, it is rather disheartening to see how dismal and abject the human’s innovation has come to. One cardinal instance that exemplifies this would be the ‘One Click Purchase System’ patented by the biggest online book retailer, Amazon Inc. It entails no sophistication nor complexity. To put it simply, it is nothing state of the art, apart from the rather dubious notion of “You can buy anything by merely tapping your finger on the mouse instead of driving your car all the way to the bookstore” that Amazon is trying to tell its customers. Clicking the mouse is just a generic method of accomplishing something, and it’s certainly no genius in this ever-connected computing era. Impractical solutions are also being patented without control. Some good (or bad, depending on your personal viewpoint) examples are a swing that swings sideways (patented by a lawyer under his child’s name and a burglar capturing device that entails massive modification to a yard (that it becomes impractical, not to mention that it is also too conspicuous for the burglars).

Ironically, the incompetence in innovation is a result of competence in this dog-eat-dog commercialism macro-sphere. In order to stay ahead of the rest, companies must have a list of patents under their belt, just to give them an extra edge over the others. In a world where time is more precious than gold, companies have a predisposition to turn out both incomprehensible and impractical innovations, sometimes just to shun out their rivals. Conspicuously, they are taking advantage of ignorant consumers. They will be easily impressed by long list of abstruse features that makes no sense to them. This is evident in the ‘One Click Purchase System’ patent by Amazon Inc. aforementioned (so the others have to resort to two or three clicks Purchase System). If this trend continues on into the distant future, we will reach a point of zero innovation.

It is argued that the present world advances evolutionally and not revolutionarily, as the mid 19th century world did. Nevertheless, the statistics manifest such lack of innovation and are alarming enough. We must continuously produce practical innovations with out-of-the-box thinking as these were the very thing that fuels mankind’s progress.

Withered Age

2006-03-21T06:07:00.000-05:00

快马奔杨州
路见枯萎林
惊觉如我鬓
叹问为谁辛？

with swift horse I head to the Yang state
across the vast forest, that is withered and dead
surprise I am, for it's like the beard on my face
for whom I had worked so hard till I'm hackneyed?

8 lives left...

2006-03-20T09:46:00.001-05:00

It sure was an unfortunate day today. Right after ethics class, I went straight to the bus. I laid my bottom on one of the few remaining seats and flipped 'Cognition', a nice book I borrowed from the library. People were exchanging meanderings and jokes, totally unaware of my presence. The bus started to move. I longed to stretch my body like a cat on my lovely bed back at the hostel after a day long's class.

ONE MAN SEARCH PARTY
After I dumped my ever-heavy bag on the hard concrete floor, I was about to go out for dinner when I suddenly realized my handphone was gone! My mind didn't go blank, as you may not have expected. I remained very calm and scrutinized every square femto meter of the room. No. No sign of it. Asking my friend to miss call me didn't help either. It must have wondered else where. My cerebral cortex surmised it must have dropped either in the class room or in the bus. My prefrontal cortex engaged in a 3 miliseconds long conation process, which at the same time actively searched through the hippocampus for any short-term visual memory register of my phone falling off from my pocket, which was probably too brief for my conscious mind to notice. No. No sign of it. A walk down my memory lane didn't return any useful clues. Then my kidneys' cortex secrete voluminous amount of adrenaline hormone. Pulmonary activities and respiratory rate increased in exponential manner. Muscles become overly active and agile. Eye pupils become dilated. I began to transform.

TRANSFORMATION
My mind must have shut down during that brief transmogrification. I didn't realize that the bus couldn't get in today because of the night market. I ran with celerity and got a bus outside of this small neighborhood. My perception of time slowed down. The engine roared like a lionish tiger, but it moved at paramecium's pace. I got to campus anyway. I searched through the classroom and all the buses. Nope. No sign of my handphone. There's one bus gone. I have to wait for that one. I then sat on the bench at the campus bus stand. I perspired profusely as I reverted back to my meek self.

NICE KITTEN
A small bus was idling infront of me. Some students boarded it and the bus driver stepped on the accelerator. The bus whisked off. But as the rear tyre rotates around its shaft's axis, I saw something fell off from it. Then a bone crushing noise was heard. Not loud, but crisp and clear. After the trailing exhaust of the bus diffused away, a filthy but nice-looking kitten was lying in front of me, eagle-sprawled. The head faced down, but its ventral burst open and all the brain matter and innard visceral and entrails came out. They all meshed together. The eyeballs were squeezed out of the crushed eye socket and looking straight at me. My, what a nice glass crystal-esque meatball. Whoa. the tiny blob of blood and flesh was still pumping. Was it the lung? No. Was it the tongue? No. Seemed like its heart. I went forward and squat down. Pandemonium arose amongst firing neurons in my gray matter. Hmm. The heart had its own VA signal trigger, but it also receive electroimpulse from the brain. Might it not be that part of the brain still functions? But it's all meshed up, like the dressed meat I poke with my barbeque stick in a party years ago.

PHILOSOPHICAL
Well, just what if the brain still functioned? It still retained some primitive cognitive abilities? What the kitten was thinking? Unable to move, its head faced down, but the eyes can see up above and my face. All it knew was that it must keep on breathing. The heart must keep on pumping. All the pain no longer mattered. It wasn't a kitten anymore. It was a bunch of convoluted meat. Hmm. Should I administer CPR? But I couldn't find the mouth. Should I flipped it over so the heart can pump better? Uh...no stick in my vicinity. Sorry little kitten, looks like you've used up one life. 8 more to go.

CONCLUSION
So what's the moral of this story? Kittens, you must not play on vehicles' tyres. Cats, you must look after your kitties. Someone ought to run an awareness campaign to remind these ignorant cats of the perils on the tyre. When the engine starts, get off! You won't get a free ride with that!

When the winter comes...

2006-03-19T12:19:00.003-05:00

昏黄染山红
大雁群飞散
落叶如飘雪
冬季何时来？

dusk covers the mighty mountain in red
as flock of geese flies in unison and then fade
withering leaves flutter and drop like snow flakes
o when will the winter come before it's too late?

The Ultimate Cause

2006-03-18T09:45:00.000-05:00

When we identify ourselves with a faction, a cult, a guild, an organization, or any group for that matter, we commit ourselves to that group. As a constituent of that group, we conform to that group. Ideologies are converted. Practices are transmuted. We comply with a normative set of rules. Ultimately, we avow trenchantly to work towards the group’s loftiest aspiration, and work it as part of a personal goal.

Like a symbiotic relationship between lichens and mycorrhizae, the group as a whole promise something in return to its members. A mega-corporation, for instance, grows strong when its fellow members work hard to bring its vision to realization. The members, in return, acquire financial stability and security from the organization. Gradually, members grow dependant on that organization, and vice-versa. And to secure the constituents, which are an invaluable component of the organization, the organization or its leader drafts up normative laws and regulations which circumscribe its constituents’ behaviors.

Not surprisingly, it happens to cults and religions, too. As a religion expands and reaches out to the masses, there are bound to be chaos and disorders amidst multifarious members. The need to shackle its members grows to such a magnitude that its original visions no longer pertain. Trammeled members believe that they are committing a good cause which contributes to the religion’s visions, where unbeknownst to them, they are incarcerated in a prison mind by those normative laws aforementioned. But the real world is pluralistic in nature, harboring many cults, faiths and beliefs under one roof. Such a mind incarceration creates a thick wall amongst disparate groups. Without tolerance, discrimination transpires. Each group attempts to impose their beliefs upon the others, and interpret the world in their own context. They vow to bring their own groups’ ideologies and visions to realization, while subjugating the others who dissent.

But to me, the ultimate cause, the highest cause of it all, is neither my religion, nor my beliefs, but world peace. My inspiration comes from a story set in ancient China that depicts the horrendous wars between several nations which brought nothing but blood and losses. China was split into multiple nations at that time, and the strongest country of them all, the Qin nation, battled ferociously to unite all nations under a single ruler. The protagonist, an avid sword and calligraphy lover, was determined to take the despotic Qin ruler’s life to avenge his countrymen who lost their lives to the Qin army. As he sought for the highest realization in calligraphy, a revelation came to him. He then abandoned his assassination plan, even after he had arduously fought through the thick walls of army and finally stood right in front of the Qin ruler. “All under heaven”. If the Qin ruler succeed in uniting all nations, there would not be wars in the future. The Qin ruler was surprised to realize that the person who understood his aspiration most was the person he feared most. In order to pacify the enraging ministers, the Qin ruler had no choice but to take the assassin’s life. The assassin willingly accepted his imminent death, all in the name of world peace. Soon, the Qin nation succeeded in uniting all nations, and peace prevailed for as long as it could be.

Perhaps, if we are not too attached to a group, but instead identify humanity as the uniting factor that braces us all, war would not have happened, and peace shall flourish.

Humanity vs Mankind

2006-03-12T08:43:00.000-05:00

Since last year, NASA has been berated rather acrimoniously for their shifting of focus to manned space programs from the unmanned ones. The harangue NASA is facing is not without grounds: its action can bring about many ramifications.

With financial constraints, NASA has been trying very hard to cut down on expenditures. Unfortunately, this entails the withdrawal of many present and future pivotal space programs that otherwise will have contributed significantly to science. In line with President Bush’s policy and objective of sending humans back to the moon since Neil Armstrong last stepped on the moon’s soil, and eventually, colonizing Mars, NASA has put unmanned space programs on hold, some indefinitely, just to pave way for manned space programs. Many of the promising unmanned space programs have thus never make it through the drawing board.

With tight budget, it is utterly inconceivable as to why NASA do so. After all, manned space programs are costlier than the unmanned ones. They have so many shortcomings that their sole raison d'être is the pride of sending humans to space. NASA justifies it by saying humans have the cognitive abilities necessary to facilitate space exploration which in many ways are much better than remote control. In other words, it would have been better to have a human on Mars making decisions on the spot rather than relaying instructions to and fro between Mars and Earth, which could take twenty minutes altogether, even at the speed of light. Competition is also one of the factor, notably China’s success in its Shen Jou rockets and numerous other space programs. China has thus exerted an invisible pressure on NASA to keep up with the space race. NASA can not afford to lose out as it was the pioneer in sending humans to the moon.

Manned space programs have numerous severe circumscriptions. Like fish being constricted to living in water, humans could not live nor move freely in space. Such physical limitation means only a limited number of research and experiments can be done. To overcome those circumscriptions, voluminous funds have to be allocated to design new life support systems, space suits (new fabrics and materials), and not to mention space food and waste recycling systems. At the cost of 100,000 pounds per kg, the fuel also entails a gargantuan bill. Contrary to manned space programs, unmanned space programs are not bound by such constrictions. The Viking satellite, which has been in space for 26 years, has just wended its way out of the boundary of our solar system. Traveling at velocity close to 100,000 kilometers per hour, the satellite is currently the farthest any man-made object has ever been to. Despite having completed its primary tasks and objectives, it could provide valuable information pertaining to the Oort Cloud structure and system as well as the macrocosm outside of our solar system. As no humans are involved, the satellite can continue to run for as long as its plutonium power source can allow. Funds for creating human support system can thus be channeled to create better space instruments.

To sum it up, it is impolitic for NASA to withdraw the many unmanned space programs that promise valuable results for the sake of glorifying humans’ endeavor through such unproductive manned space programs. Even using the funds to buy each and every starving African child a cup of instant noodle would have been way better than to imprint a boot print on Mars soil.

Soliloquy Part 1

2006-03-04T13:08:00.000-05:00

Blanketed in solitude?
Yes, I love it.
Tsk tsk tsk. Good. You ask for it. So love it.
Spare your circumlocution. What is your point?
Are you blissfully happy?
Yes, I am. More than euphoric!
Do you have friends?
I do not h…need friends. I can very well take care of myself.
Do you feel lonely then?
I… No! Who are you to question me?
I speak for you and I, for you and I are only I and no one else. I would like to help you, inasmuch as you are me and I am you.
Help yourself then. I am through with your mindless meanderings.
I am here to help you.
I am more than capable to help myself and a thousand others. Now leave me alone!
If only you would stop.
Stop what!?
Secluding yourself.
Utterly farcical!
Stop your egregiously pompous tone.
Preposterously ludicrous!
I shall not condone your supercilious conduct.
Asinine! I am indeed more superior than you all! I am peerless!
You are asphyxiating me with your ignorant rants.
You envy me!
Yes I might have, but you are nothing more than meretricious.
I refute!
You leave me no choice.
I have neither give nor deprive you of any choice!
Then be altruistic. Allow me to change you.
I am immaculate! I am flawless! I need no change for as long as eternal endures!
Then I shall destroy you.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Nay! You can’t do that! You are me and I am you!
Then I shall abnegate myself.
What?

There is no spoon...

2006-03-04T13:07:00.000-05:00

Underneath my Buddhist veneer is an agnostic. For as far back in time as I can recall, I was made to worship the venerable Buddha and was taught the Buddhist metaphysics. Like Buddha said, I should not believe blindly, not least utterly succumbing to any particular ideology, which includes Buddhism itself. The more I read, the more I doubt the existence of God. But I can never be sure, and thus shall never be bias. Instead of turning atheistic, I take the position of an agnostic instead.

When I was still small, I was afraid of darkness. At night, in my comforter, I could listen to repeating tapping sounds coming from the dark corner. I could see the big dark swaying figure outside the window, and as the lightning brightened up the sky for split-seconds, the silhouette became even more apparent and sharply defined. Thought of ghosts came to my mind and frightened the daylights out of me. Apparently that tapping sound came from the malfunctioned washing machine, and the swaying figure was a big coat hanging outside my window. I then realized the ghosts and all had existed only in my mind. I can imagine the same thing happening to the ignorant people of the past. Gradually, such fear of supernatural beings evolved into religions.

For my entire life, I grow to doubt even more the existence of God, but never entirely, for the reason mentioned earlier: there is no absolute truth. One of my reasoning is as follows. Every religion claims that there is one and only one God in this universe, yet that God differs vastly from one religion to another. If the former premise is true, then there can never be different Gods, and vice-versa. Either way, the very foundation where these religions are built upon has collapsed by this simple reasoning. Despite their moralistic principles, the entire faith construct is mere myth and nothing more.

Saying that God does not necessarily exist may cause fundamentalists to take umbrage. They believe in their religion so firmly that it becomes their own comfortable cocoon. They will do anything and everything to protect their belief, and even coerce others to follow suit. Such a belief, in its extremities, could overwhelm reasoning and override logic. But as a freethinker I have an equal right to believe the opposite, not least when there is no absolute truth.

I say there is no absolute truth because no matter what a religion says about the creator of the universe, it cannot be corroborated. Ergo, unless God appears before our eyes (and not mere fantasy), every notion of a God remains a fallacious claim. There are instances where people claim they have seen Demons and Angels. The public believe it even more when the media propagates it. We have not experienced it ourselves, and yet we blindly concede its veracity. It is possible that under stressful conditions or psychotic medication, the brain hallucinates. As a line from one movie aptly puts it, it (drug) is the only way to fly. We do not know the complete picture (of what happened to that person that made that claim), and thus should not jump abruptly into the conclusion that God exists.

A quote from a famous French philosopher, Rene Descartes, have convinced me even more (though I still take a neutral stand) that absolute truth can not be found, and thus we can never be sure of the existence of God. “Cogito Ergo Sum”, meaning “I think, therefore I am”, simply states that the veracity of every thing in this world can not be determined with certitude (there is a possibility that they are made to deceive us), except for our thoughts. The Matrix trilogy has expressed this viewpoint with utmost clarity. In this trilogy, humans were incarcerated in a prison for their mind while their bodies are exploited as machines’ power source. Blissfully living in a computer simulated world, the humans had no idea that they were being exploited.

Under the mathematical framework that scientists had fastidiously constructed, we came to the conclusion that the universe came into existence after an ultra-massive explosion from a point of singularity that released inconceivable amount of energy. The laws of physics were kick-started, and the space-time continuum came into being. Yet, we have not the slightest idea of what happened before that (because the space-time continuum did not exist before that) and subsequently what started the explosion. As logical and scientific as one person could be, he or she will be tempted to conclude that a superior being was behind of it all. Allow me to present a scenario to counter such uncorroborated conclusion. Assuming that we could travel back time, we give a pre-historic human an electronic board. For the rest of his life, he would never figure out how it worked. Like-wise, we will never understand things of such immense complexity, not least when we do not even have the foundation necessary to comprehend it.

I doubt religion could provide us with the truth, for two reasons. Firstly, like I mentioned, there is no absolute truth (because it cannot be determined with certitude). Secondly, history had taught us of all the blunders that religious people made. The most famous of it all would be the Orthodox Church. Galileo Galilei, the astronomer who discovered that the earth revolved around the Sun, was punished for dissenting from the Orthodoxy. While such ignorance seemed to pose no danger (if only you did not publicly express your heresies), it became alarming when they use science to corroborate their stance. Fundamentalists often misconstrue the contents of the holy manuscripts to reflect its concordance with scientific evidence. It does not come across to me as serendipitous discoveries, but rather as misguided interpretation which is heavily biased.

Ultimately, the point of it all is not that God does not exist, but that there is no absolute truth. The fact that people clinging on to pluralistic view of this world, either consciously or unconsciously, is evident enough that religion is not the ultimate truth; but rather a belief that comforts our fragile heart amidst seas of uncertainties.

Thy pulchritude and panache art 1.618...

2006-03-04T13:05:00.000-05:00

I can’t say all, but quite a largish number of species in the Animalia kingdom select their mates based on a single distinct feature. Such traits include strength, color, sound and many other easily identifiable characteristics. But homo sapiens seem more sophisticated in their taste. Humans are attracted to beautiful-looking individuals.

Whether such partiality for facial pulchritude evolves out of civilization or is pre-wired in our brain, I honestly can’t say with certitude. People say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. While I do not repudiate this age-old adage, I certainly notice that such a statement is uttered only when a not-too-pretty person is concerned. Ugly people aside, we all have common opinion when it comes to really charming and gorgeous looking people. No one would deny that Angelina Jolie or Orlando Blooms is charming, though we have varying judgments on how pulchritudinous a person is.

That brings us to query what is beauty. Why do we know a person is beautiful when that person is beautiful? Unlike those easily discernible qualities mentioned above, beauty cannot be judged quantitatively, or so it seems. There exists many kinds of beauty, spanning the entire gamut of cultures and origins, with each having very distinct facial features. Yet, Hispanics or Orientals, Whites or Blacks, if one is pretty, we all agree that he or she is pretty. Intuitively, it suggests to us that there must be something in common amongst all these pretty people, even if they have vastly different facial characteristics.

Surprisingly, the answer to that question lies in the field of mathematics. The answer is 1.618. 1.618 is an approximate ratio of two successive numbers in a Fibonacci series. It is commonly referred to as the Golden number. But what does this Golden number has in relation with human’s facial beauty? Apparently, it does not matter what facial attributes a person possesses. The salient factor is that the ratio of size or distance between facial features must be approximately 1.618. This number also applies to the size ratio between body parts. People with facial feature proportions of this number are therefore good-looking, theoretically. The beauty of a person is effectively encapsulated in this golden number.

Reproduction is the pivotal key to survival. Therefore we can logically deduce that individuals of a species are attracted to those with features most suited for survival. Yet it does not make sense when humans are attracted to each other based upon physical beauty. This is one of the reasons why we suspect that attraction to facial beauty evolves out of the progression of civilization. Civilization is the cardinal manifestation that humans have begun to acquire reasoning, which then gradually overrides their natural instincts and tendencies. For instance, apart from facial features, certain tribes in Africa actually take corpulence as beauty. This seems to corroborate the fact that beauty is subjective, and therefore our attraction to facial beauty can’t possibly be pre-wired as natural tendencies.

Then, is beauty an objective or subjective matter? The golden number seems to support the former, but the African tribes mentioned above bolster the latter. Notwithstanding that, they actually do not contradict with each other. Golden number remains the universal beauty constant; but the other standards are complementary to it. Beauty is thus both objective and subjective.

Please Christine, just drag me to the recycle bin!

2006-03-04T13:03:00.000-05:00

“If there can be love between a human and her pet, why can’t I have mine for my father?!”
“Because, my dear, your father is not real.”

As a person who’s intrigued by the conundrum behind the human cognition, I can’t help but envisage the many repercussions effected by the development in this field. Computational cognitive science, an area of scientific knowledge that attempts to replicate the human cognition in algorithmic form, is paving the way to the first digital mind. Mentally and spiritually, it is no more different than a man in the form of a dog or a cat. In effect, it is a real human. The only demarcation lies in the form which it takes. Yet the thing that intrigues me even more is the interaction between an artificial human and a real human. What happens when a human is emotionally attached to another human who was considered as a non-living object? The brief fictitious story below will serve to delineate my point clearly.

In a quiet neighborhood in a suburb, there lived a brilliant scientist together with his only daughter, a cheerful teenager. A serendipitous discovery led to his creation - a human mind replicating machine. In order to test it, he transcribed his mind into digital form. While the device was performing a long post-processing on his replicated mind, he received a call and went out of his home. He never came back to home ever since, for he had suddenly died in a mysterious accident. His daughter, knowing that she would never be able to see her father anymore, broke down into tears and turned into an eccentric introvert. One day, the daughter accidentally discovered the mind replicating machine along with her father’s replicated mind, which was stored in it. A sense of hope kindled in her as she attempted to bring her father’s mind back to life. The digital replica was identical to her father down to the minutest detail. It was, in effect, her father, but in a digital form. For the first time after her father’s death, she smiled. She was glad to be with her father again. Her resurrected father consciously knew that he was dead, and that he was residing in a machine. Yet there was not the slightest melancholy in his countenance, for he knew nothing was more important than being with his only daughter.

Such a wonderful time lasted for three years, when suddenly, the daughter found out that her real father was still alive. Yet, for that entire three years, she was deeply attached to her digital father and was bonded with him emotionally. There came the ironic feeling. She could not have both her fathers. She was forced to choose only one. Paradoxically, there had always been only one father (to emphasize the fact that the real father and the replicated father were totally the same), which was why she found it hard to decide. She had almost collapsed emotionally, yet her digital father was more than understanding. He was willing to delete himself away from her life. But she would not allow. To complicate matters even further, her real-life father, ever since that accident, had fallen into persistent vegetative state (alive, but no sign of brain activity). Metaphorically, his mind was in a state of emptiness, and what was left of him was only an empty shell. On one hand, she had a blood-and-flesh real father, but without cognitive abilities. On the other hand, she had a perfectly conscious father which was not corporeal. They were both her father. She could commit herself to only one, and who would it be?

I love you...

2006-03-04T13:02:00.000-05:00

I gaze into the void without a focal point and smirk stupidly as sweet memories overwhelm my mind. I can almost see her running around me, while beaming with the gayest smile. Back then, we used to play hide-and-seek, and often it’s I who started it first. I just liked to observe her scuttling and hoping around, and how jubilantly she stuck her tongue out at me when she found me.

But the others didn’t like her. They hated her just as much as I loved her. The sight of her would raise the inner anger in them, exasperate the composure in them. Yet they would not speak out; they would just walk away. She could not have comprehended what had happened, or why they had treated her that way. As much as I felt upset over their hostility towards her, I tried to keep it in my heart and calmed her little ruffled heart.

Later, there came the day when I had to leave her and my hometown. I had a dream of mine to catch. I had to further my studies in a place far away. She was oblivious of it, and there was no way I could tell her about it. I felt very sorry that I had to leave her, and I could not imagine how I would go through the long period without her beaming smile. And what about the others who hold grudges against her? As I looked into her eyes, bitterness twisted my heart. A song, barely inaudible at first, slowly reverberated within my mind:

May it be, an evening star shines down upon you…
May it be, when darkness comes, your heart will be true…
You walk a lonely road, oh how far you are from home…

I reminded myself, from time to time, that the wait would be as fleeting as the twilight dusk, and that I would come back very soon. I would miss her as much as I miss my family: to me, she had become part of my family. Yet, fate, it seemed, was not without a sense of ironic. Hectic life and passage of time had changed the inner me. Whatever memory I had of her, they were tuck far away in the corner of my memory lane. Alas, I did not feel the bond anymore. She was as distant as the farthest constellation that the naked eye could see.

I have finally come back, and tonight is as dark as it was before. Chilling breeze waggled the dim orange lamps above my head, causing the fuzzy shadows to sway in a playful manner. I stood beside the kennel, staring into her eyes. She sits in front of me, staring into my eyes, too, but in genuflection. I gently stroke her head, and suddenly, that familiar warmth gradually infuses my body. That special bond, once lost, is now reconnected once more. She can’t say anything, but already I can tell how much she misses me.

I stop my stroke. Her tail wags with vigor. I kneel down and put my arms around her thickly furred brownish neck. I hold on to her tightly, as though I’d lose her. As I pat her, I whisper to her: Mimi, you are the best friend that I can ever wish for!

Be aware that we are aware of what we are aware of!

2006-03-04T13:01:00.000-05:00

Egoistic we had become, when after centuries upon centuries of accruement of human cognizance, we realized the dichotomy that set us apart from the beasts. We can think: the single most important quality that bestowed upon us the privilege and prerogative to rule over the others. As we utilize our psyche, we can’t help but think how our thinking comes into existence. We are a synthesis of corporeal particles, but intangibly we display such spiritual characteristics. From the brain, the cerebrum, the gray matter, the neurons, the synapses, down to the molecules, each and every one of them is incapable of thinking on its own, but collectively they display intelligent behavior. But what is even more astounding is that they, as a single entity, are aware of their own existence.

We are aware of ourselves. We are aware of our environment. We are mindfully aware that we are aware of what we are aware of. And such meta-thinking shall go on ad infinitum. If we are our own awareness, then what constitutes that awareness? That awareness, uniquely our own, had not existed before we were born, but germinated progressively thereafter. ‘I’ popped into existence, just like that. We began to question what ‘I’ is. If we probe into the earliest juncture of our lives that we can recall, it seems that our awareness started at that point (we are not aware of what happened before that). If our awareness is circumscribed by our memory or knowledge of what occurs around us, does that mean awareness is knowledge and vice-versa?

Nay. Computers can store mountainous amount of data, but that doesn’t make them any more enlightened. Apropos, a brain that can store voluminous amount of knowledge doesn’t make it any more intelligent. To be enlightened, some thing has to be able to make sense of that knowledge. Some thing has to be able to observe. That is the ‘I’ in me. And ‘I’ am my own awareness, and vice-versa. Ultimately, that still hasn’t answered our question of what constitutes awareness. If we try to dissect the process we go through as we realize something, we will still not be able to find the thing that realizes the information. We still come back to ‘I’, yet not knowing what ‘I’ consists of.

Then, can machines think? Ostensibly the answer is no. But as we scrutinize our body anatomically, we find that many of its mechanisms can be emulated by its mechanical counter-parts. Obviously, our nanotechnology is still in its infancy; and even if that isn’t the case, it’s hard to orchestrate billions of miniature artificial devices fit together, not to mention to prognosticate their unpredictable collective behavior. Thus, the only viable method is by means of computational simulation. But even a simulation requires profound comprehension of the modus operandi of a human psyche, which is still too unfathomable an enigma.

Such fastidious introspection as mentioned earlier had not paved much a road as an insight into transcribing our mind computationally. The more we question what constitutes ‘I’, the more we get entangled in this circular catechism. Abjectly desperate, we may resort to panpsychism: every thing in this universe has a mind of its own. The fact that a rock can’t move on its own or that it has too simple a structure doesn’t entitle us to assume that it is not aware of its existence. Incidentally, it suggests to me that there are shades of awareness. We are on the extreme right, fully aware of the demarcation between the macrocosm and our inner microcosm. Animals may have their level of awareness somewhere in the middle, while rocks are on the extreme left, virtually unaware of itself. If this is the case, then there is no definite mechanism for self-awareness. Everything is self-aware, but at different levels.

Modern Regression

2006-03-04T13:00:00.000-05:00

We envision a world of digital paradise, a direct consequence of modernity and secularism, which germinated from the Age of Enlightenment that came after the Dark ages in the western European continent. While we actively seek to remove religion’s influence over our lives through secularization, the advancement of the digital age in the dawn of the third millennium has, ironically, created a cult of faith towards modernity. It is ironic in a sense that, while secularism disapproves faith without base, secularism has gradually turned into faith itself.

We may or may not realize that, through thousands of years of perfection of every facet of our civilization, we have deliberately and completely redefined, if not altered, some of human’s natural characteristics and cultural perception. Yet, we are still bound by the genetic sequence that defines both our anatomy and existence. Soon enough, we would revert back to simplicity that is originally part of our characteristics. Thousands of years of civilization would collapse in the face of millions of years of evolution. Thus, such transmogrification into modernity has created an imbalance that will ultimately topple such faith of modernism, eventually resulting in regression. Apropos, this becomes more pertinent in a world where identities are shifting and collapsing, resulting in uncertainties.

Amidst flood of modernization that threatens our values and faith, we have the predisposition to retreat into fundamentalism. Vis-à-vis of the uncertainties and the tendency to revert to simplicity mentioned earlier, men are psychologically pre-wired to fulfill their need for certainties and reassurance. Such uncertainties are characteristics of a pluralistic view of the world brought about by modernity, and faith provides the certainty they need. People are confused and scared of a materialistic world without God, without divinity. Complexity and sophistication of modernism had not dwindled the importance of religions, as most early scholars had suggested, but had taken a toll on secularism itself and thus fueled the expansion of fundamentalist religion, some even the extremities.

Secularism is bolstered by empiricism, which explicates its conspicuously stark dichotomy with religion, which is based solely on faith. Yet, of late, proponents of fundamentalism, in order to gain an upper hand, have resorted to empiricist methods. In the U.S, some of the fundamentalist Christians, which prefer the label ‘Evangelical’ instead, supported Intelligent Design in lieu of Darwinism and Evolution. Intelligent Design, which is creationism in disguise, simply stated that the complexity of all living things could not possibly be the result of seemingly random interaction of amino acids. It based its view on a weak postulate that the probabilities of such interactions leading to conspicuously sophisticated biological anatomies are simply too small, if not zero. Such a trend of using science to corroborate fundamentalism is alarming as it is harming science itself.

As one proponent of secularism aptly puts it, we must not oppose to publicly held view; the more we attack it, the more defensive it becomes. Thus secularists, in facing fundamentalism, should cling onto the Enlightenment values – reason, pluralism, democracy and freedom of thought, yet must comprehend the fundamentalists psyche at the same time. Only then will they reciprocate, and thus co-exist peacefully with secularism.

Digital Cognition and Conation

2005-12-03T07:41:00.000-05:00

ME = KNOWLEDGE OF ME
Cognition is the process of formation of a thought, and intangibly our self-awareness emerge. Self-awareness is the knowledge of your own existence, your senses, the boundaries between what constitutes you and the outer world. So who is in possession of this knowledge if your inner-self is the knowledge itself? Having say that, we unconsciously presume knowledge has to be possessed, or has to be possessed by somebody.

WHO POSSESSES IT?
Obviously there isn't any somebody here, so does that mean it's "something" that possesses the knowledge (inner-self)? Who/what is thinking what is being thought? What is feeling what is being felt through the sensory perceptions which are no more than electrical impulses wading its way through the interconnected neural network? At first glance the answer seems conspicuously obvious: The brain.

THE ROCK
We find it so enigmatic about how one's self-awareness develops. We can feel it, in fact we are it, so what makes it so abstruse to comprehend? We find it hard because we thought we understand how does it feel to be an object that doesn't exhibit intelligent behavior, e.g. a rock. No one knows how does it feel to be a rock because no one has ever been one. If he's one, he can't describe because being a rock is like in a different world: a world made up of numbness, nothingness, or not even the nothingness itself. So how does this relate to our self-awareness's conundrum? Because in fact, we are made up of molecules and particles just like the aforementioned rock. The fact that both us and the rock are the same thing, yet only we have self-awareness, and we don't have a verb to describe the self-awareness's process.

KNOWLEDGE AND ONLY KNOWLEDGE
To make things clearer, let's disregard the previous explications. If self-awareness is an agglomeration of knowledge perceived through the senses (and some chemical reactions that enacts our emotion), and our inner-self is self-awareness itself, then we are nothing more than a knowledge possessed by nobody (but contained within the brain). But knowledge is relative, multi-point of view, therefore it can't exist in this space as absolute and definite matter. To illustrate that knowledge is relative and infinite, consider the number '1'. Is it really '1'? No, it's not. It's defined to be somewhere on a point on a linear graph. The linear graph itself is also relative, it could've been a wavy line, or an odd shape. Does 1 + 1 has to be 2? No, again, we define it to be so. It's not absolute. Everything is just a symbol, and every symbol can be any symbol. So everything can be anything. But even the very symbol has to be acknowledged through some form of symbol. So it's sort of an endless loop.

ANOTHER REALM
The knowledge cannot exist in our 4D world that's bound by laws of physics due to its out-of-this-world nature. So let's put it this way: It's out-of-this-world.

Preamble of Digital Cognition and Conation

2005-09-03T04:10:00.000-04:00

We identify free-will as one of the distinctive features that sets us homo sapiens apart from the other organisms. No, it's not. It is the awareness of our conation that makes us unique. But again, that's a veracity, too. We've no free-will as a matter of fact. Whatever we choose, whatever we do, is ultimately the result of past experience, governed by the causality of nature. What you think now is the inevitable result of past thinking and experience, and in turn that was the result of even earlier thoughts...so free-will belies the real mind trammeling.

The conclusion above serves as the preamble to my explication of digital cognition and conation, of which I shall post shortly.

Current Technology Report Updates...

2005-09-01T03:46:00.001-04:00

I've recently read a rather thick book on philosophy, with various philosophy papers by numerous authors like Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, etc. Topics include relation between language and mind, the famous conversation between Socrates and Euthyoprus, Religion, God's existence, Self-Awareness, Can Machine thinks, etc. A nice book, but leaves you headache in the end. I figure it won't interest you all, so let's talk about the most current technological achievements.
GENETICS
Scientists discovered a plant's ability to summon the gene of its ancestors to replace its mutated gene. That really violates Mendel's laws. Scientists believed that ability to store genetic information of its grandparents(but not parents)' genetic information is due to the RNA's special double cylindrical structure. The plant, whose petals are fused due to mutated Hothead genes, had some of its offsprings returned to normal, which is rather surprising. Scientists hypotheised that such ability allows an organism to experiment with new genetic designs without permanently altering its original genetic information.
ENERGY
So we know the future of energy lies in the little couple of proton and electron, or Hydrogen. We derive its energy by combining it with Oxygen and with a clean by-product, that is Water. But the main concern here lies in the storage. We can't pack enough hydrogen into a tank which is practical enough and comparable to today's gasoline's capacity. We need more volume to produce the same energy capacity of gasoline-powered vehicles. For years scientists were frustated by such limitation, until recently two companies achieve a breakthrough in hydrogen storage technology. The first one would be by cooling Hydrogen down to -196 degrees celcius and then compressed to 1000 psi. This makes Hydrogen more easily adsorbed into a material made up of Carbon and possibly other polymers. This is what we call Cryoadsorption. Another one would involve adding silicon into complex hydride system, e.g Lithium Borohydride. That makes the breaking of bond between the metal and hydrogen easier, and thus a lower temperature can be used.
NEUROSCIENCE
Scientists has initated a mega project called the Blue Brain project. Using supercomputers composed of about 8000 parrallelly running microprocessors built by IBM, scientists attempts to simulate a part of a mammalian brain right down to the molecules and expressive genes. The patterns and data gathered from this experiment will be invaluable to both neuroscientists and computer scientists who are frustrated by the hurdles faced in engineering artificial intelligence due to the immerse and enourmous complexity of the brain and hence the more abstract part of it, namely the mind.
ASTRONOMY
NASA's deep impact project will see a coffee table-sized impactor plunged into the Tempel 1 comet with relative velocity of up to 37,000 km per hour. That'll effectively create a crater of about the size of a football field. Particles and pristine materials shall fly up and analyzed by another satellite that's trailing 500km behind. Fortunately, such an impact will not change the course of the comet to such a dramatic extend that it'll collide with our dear Earth. The impact will at most change the comet's velocity by 0.04cm per hour. Another big news would be the bright magnetar flare that occurs on 27 December, 2004. Nasa's Swift Satellite's B.A.T(Burst Alert Telescope) was simply completely overwhelmed by the sudden burst of gamma rays that the intelligent software system onboard took it as anomaly in data and almost discarded it. That burst was touted to be the brightest throughout history. It's created by a near-by star, which experienced star quake, resulting in dramatic change of Magnetic field. Nevertheless, gamma ray burst could be due to two supermassive spinning neutron stars colliding into each other. The burst described has thus helped scientists solve some of the mystery of the universe. For more accurate info, surf to www.nasa.gov.

Software Agents

2005-09-01T03:45:00.000-04:00

I'm very much into this A.I thing these days. Cornell University has had a successful demonstration test of its self-replicating robot. Nothing intelligent there, still, it follows some seemingly simple rules that required people of IQ not less than 146 to design.
With A.I, something else also come into picture: Software Agents. They, being an agent that do some minor stuffs on behalf of us, like getting the best bargains, booking a flight, accomodation, planning a meeting, etc, do require some intelligence to make decisions on behalf of us. Thus, Software Agents have to learn our habits of doing things, our likings and dislikings, our preferences and finally able to predict what we have in mind should we be in its situation and thus act accordingly.
Software Agents possess such qualities as Self-Learning, Collaborating, Autonomous, Proactive, Reactive, etc. My idea of a software agent is a piece of software that has a personality, much like a virtual secretary or receptionist. That will serve as the interface or bridge or medium between us human and the machine. It has to translate our goals and desires and facts from Natural Language into a goal table and eventually end up as bits and bytes of executable codes. Having scrapped away the free-will and emotion part (atleast for now, as they're not considered to be vital components of the software agent), I actually don't think it'll work pretty much the way we envisioned it to be, instead it'll still behave as an ordinary machine, only with some common sense and getting input from voice and facial expression instead of keyboards and mices. It'll serve as the complement of our secretaries. For example, a real secretary would have known that you're happy for some reasons and decided to add some surprises to your business meeting.
I've actually drafted a primitive flow chart of how should a software agent works. Since I don't have that much expertise in A.I, I decided to start from Learning and Automation. The idea is this: It sits there quietly while learning the way you use the computer and slowly, as the frequency of certain repeatative actions exceeded a threshold, it'll automate things for you. Eventually, we can try to add some simple natural language processing. It'll parse simple voice commands, and with some common sense learned from the past, decide what's best for me.
I don't quite like the way A.I is being developed now. I actually think A.I can never progress to that of a real A.I. It'll of course exhibit some very convincing intelligent behaviours that we'll have no qualms of taking it as good as human's but still it's just a bunch of silicones and metal scraps and electrons that roam freely around the circuits. I'm talking about free-will, self-awareness, cognitive abilities, etc. These are the very fundamental components, of which coupled with basic instincts, will create a creature that could adapt to any surrounding its body is permitted.

Of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Chaos and Universe

2005-09-01T03:44:00.000-04:00

Thus far US and Japan are the leading countries in terms of Robot engineering, and I believe the latter is more commercially successful than technologically advanced compared to the US.
Japan has created a lot of commercial robots, ready to serve mankind. There's this mecha receptionist, which spot some of the most advanced technologies like voice recognition, facial recognition, emotion simulation, comprehension engine, etc. In other words, it can understand you. Not that it really understands you, but it is made in such a way that it convinces you of its genuinility as "human". It tries to decieve you.
Without proper instructions to guide them, they can't work. When we've finally moved out of that menial heavy industry era, so to speak (because most of the jobs are specific and repeatitous), we talk about smarter machines. The need for smarter machines arises because when they stumble upon simple obstructions, they can't analyze the situation and make a plan to go around it. Such, again menial jobs, still need the intervention of Human beings.
That's part of the reason we try to create Artificial Intelligence. Another reason would be that it's a delicious challenge, as there are no other entity in this universe that is capable of creating existence and intelligence except the all-mighty god, as some of you may believe. To actually create the underlying mathematical formulae that'll power this articial intelligence is not of without difficulties. Humans, for the very first time, started to be humble.
For centuries human takes pride of themselves for the ability to understand and solve the most complex problems ever conceived (or is it human themselves that complicate matters? Heck they can even create the math formula that draw out a fern's image. But can you see how simple a fern is? It's just a plant!) So why do we still stuck with this artificial intelligence? That's because we never understand ourselves.
Artificial Intelligence may or may not requires cognitive abilities, consciousness, self-awareness and free-will ability. Thus far it is only mathematical models. That means such product of it is always predictable. we can blurt out random stuffs easily, but not with machines. Machines are logical devices, so they can never produce true random numbers. Ironic, it seems, that patterns always arise from chaos and randomness (the chaos theory?). So does that mean that if we're given enough physical information of the earliest times of the universe, we'll be able to predict pathways of particles and waves, space and time, which eventually leads to prediction of events, or even tracking back particles' journey and from there we can paint a picture of what had happened before? No, it seems, for the uncertainty principle dictates so. We can't observe the velocity and exact position of a particle at the same time. Observing one will most likely affect the other. Because we're using the very materials that fabricate this universe to peek into the graininess of the universe. The photons or any minute particles may interfere with the particle that we're observing.
When I come to think that we humans are merely carbons, hydrogens, oxygens, nitrogens and all sorts of elements and particles got stucked together that collectively create the correctly ordered hierarchy of organels, cells, tissues, organs, systems and finally a complete body, it struck me that we humans are also robots, only that we are not made of metal. We, or our body, including the neurons that depicts our consciousness, may work based on a mathemetical formula, that ultimately, only God knows (it also occur to me that we may be computer simulations in a lab by aliens, to study the complex social structures amongst the homo sapiens species itself). So if we as robotic organisms can understand the meaning of existence and possess cognitive abilities and most importantly, freewill, might it not that one day we can achieve that too, albeit with bolts and nuts?

My first experience with creating a programming language

2005-09-01T03:43:00.000-04:00

Creating a programming language is not as hard as it sounds. First, you define your programming syntax, then the basic keywords, the conversion from high-level to low-level(or to obj files first, then linked with libraries, finally executables, thus your concern includes which OS it runs on).
I don't have to learn the EXE Image format(is it PSP or something? I forgot), because I'm directly translating high-level to asm codes. That's right, assembly codes. I don't have time to think up a new syntax, so I take BASIC's, because it's so "basic" and easy. I'm trying to inject new capabilities to the BASIC language, which includes very very advanced functions as accessing the hardware and memory directly, as well as manipulating them. Data types will be as fundamental and simple as is possible. The string may be just like an array of chars, instead of a long train with a string descriptor in front.
Most importantly, I put in the OOP capability into this ancient language. Hardware, memory, Video memory, Library APIs, etc blah blah will all be created and used that way, that is OOP. So I actually have to define an object's structure, and how could it serve as the base that accomodate to all kinds of objects, not to mention interface inheritance and polymorphism, all of which I've to take in account.
And yes, though it's a variant of Basic, I don't call it Basic. I call it S language. S for small, smooth, swift... and the list goes on.
Finally, after much talking, I actually had only done the data declaration and math expression parsing part. Math expression is done using the stack data structure, which is a FILO or LIFO structure. First I convert them from infix to postfix, and then rearrange them according to the operator's precedence level. When that's done, I convert them to asm codes using a table.
Guess what? It actually work! I can use this parser thing to convert complex math formula into fast and small asm codes! Then I can inject them into VB or any slow language for that matter. Too bad I don't know how to use the math co-processor, otherwise I could do floating points :)

Philosophy

2005-09-01T03:42:00.000-04:00

This is real simple. I know a lot of people at some point have given some thought at it. Even my 10 year old bro ponders on it. So it's like this: The world, as you preceive it, is not real. There's no known trusted method that can determine if the world is real. The reality is defined by the electric impulses from your sensories and perceived by your brain. As in the matrix triology, let's say your sensory pathways are tapped half-way, with false sensory information being sent to your brain. So whatever you do, you're confined to this artificial perception or artificial world of yours. Therefore you can never determine if the world is real.
Rene Descartes(1596-1650), a mathematician and philosopher, had this idea too, and he has his own theories, of which we call the automata theory. Based on his theory, even dogs and cats may be robotic devices that were designed to convince you that they're flesh and alive real-world organisms.(It doesn't have to be robotic, it can be anything(nanotechs,neurostimulation,etc), but it goes to show how Rene's ideas are confined by the technology at that time, yet he's way ahead of his time).
More coming up on theology, multiple-level of consciousness, self-awareness, cognitive ability, artificial intelligence, neural networks, etc.
And feel free to post your comments.

Share my thoughts and discuss it

2005-09-01T03:40:00.000-04:00

The topics I'm interested in are Philosophy, Computing, Programming, Physical Chemistry, Physics, Theoretical Physics, Meta Physics, Advanced Mathematics, Robotics, Graphics Design, Fashion Design, Drawing/Sketching, Basketball, Astronomy, DirectX, TCP/IP layered Protocols, etc. Once I've new thoughts, I'll post them here. Anyone would like to ask questions and discuss about it, don't hesitate to post it here. I'll be more than eager to help anyone who needs it. Just shoot.