revisiting saint-saens

don't you ever wonder what kind of person he is? he must have been capable of such tender feelings. or how could he have written something like the swan? no matter how overplayed this piece is, it never fails to rouse the deepest awe in me.and he must have been a very interesting person, judging from the colourful aquarium. i want to know him in person! (sorry about sounding so cheezy)

there you have it, the difference between the two different kinds of creations, the sciences and the arts. the arts are so exposing. you have so much of you in it. (like wilde discussed). you only need to look at or listen to a piece to know the persona of its creator. it's like all the feelings channeled to you through broadband connection. but science. you can read so many papers by the researcher and not know who he's like. he would be this entity in your mind, without a face, without a character. the only thing you get to know after all is if he is clever. so different.

have to say this before i stop

i watched tokyo trial yesterday with my friends. we also discussed war in general as we watched the movie. history is written by the winners. trials are carried out by the winners. humans being humans, i guess it is hard to judge anything on purely moral grounds. maybe there need not be a moral theory. maybe the world can only be run on economic principles and their extensions - political theories.

anyways, i wiki-ed the trial and found the following:

Radhabinod Pal, the Indian justice at the IMTFE, argued in his dissenting opinion that Japan was innocent. He wrote, "If Japan is judged, the Allies should also be judged equally." However, his opinion was not shared by the majority of the justices at Tokyo.
-wikipedia

i wouldn't say that japan was innocent, but the quote is good food for thought, isn't it.

seems that it will be extremely difficult to maintain a normal lifestyle with the five classes and one thesis i'm taking upon myself, therefore, this blog is tentatively closed down until further notice.

also, it's hard to maintain any level of consciousness with my regular diet, therefore, a 200ml dose of 52µM caffeine has been added to my recommended daily value.

so do you also have the feeling that many people get cynical, jaded, tired, no longer excited about science after they have done a lot of it. some old phd students and postdocs from the many labs i've been in seem to be so. or maybe they are just stressed/exhausted at the point they make comments with such cynicism.

i'm raising this not because i recently discovered this cynicism and lethargy, but because of my discovery of enthusiasm in many scientists around me. things like science is boring but the findings are glorious and i'll be able to take the boredom are easier said than done. and only after you work and fail and struggle do you come to appreciate the enthusiasm that has somehow survived.

i passed out at 8pm after i came back from school. been a long day. when i woke up i could hardly figure out the time-space i was in. with the many projects on hand, i had to get up and resume work. but somehow i wound up at my old blog on livejournal. i was entirely surprised at how lucid and flowy my writing was. it seemed to be a more open-minded, inquisitive and less prejudiced me, with a greater and better and less cynical sense of humour, and many more thoughts. what has university education done to me? lol

but my lonertrip entries. i never failed to be moved when i read them again. and i'm so glad that i wrote all that experience down.

ctrl+tab

after the final and complete move from safari to firefox, i had to get used to many things. (the move took very long cos safari was really one good browser. but it was inevitable because safari started crashing like nobody's business some months ago.) i was googling for the shortcut keys for swapping between tabs in firefox, and encoutered this chap asking the same question in the firefox forum. some other guy replied that ctrl+tab will do and i got the answer i wanted. thing is, the guy with the question replied again to say that he knew about ctrl+tab but he wanted a one key access like F2 or F3. nobody replied further.

i don't quite agree with that guy. i'd rather use the keyboard than the mouse because i think the keyboard gets things done faster. i think the whole point of using keyboard access is to make things faster. and the whole point of most people using modifier keys such as shift ctrl alt fn and command is that we keep using them and their locations are like second nature to us. i might have to look to find the number 5, but i don't in the case of modifier keys. there also enough of them that the combination between these keys and a limited number of other keys could indeed excecute many many commands. therefore, even if it involves 2 keys instead of one, it's still faster.

How do you it's too much

after a full plate of indian food, two sodas and 4 talks later, i realised that the neurodinner is not quite the after work retreat i thought i was going into. maybe four talks in one go are a lot, even if they were straight from one lab. by the end of the whole thing i pretty much forgot everything except one or two problems i had with the data. and five minutes later, i could hardly remember them. there were about 100 questions raised, some were brilliant, but soon i found myself forgetting not only who asked the brilliant questions, but what they were. good for me. when you experience temporary brain death after a session like this, you know it's enough. it feels exactly like the day i took three bio finals.

some take home points though, out of the only residue memory i had of the talks.

1. everything really has to make biological sense. one of the speakers proposed options that were not biologically logical, and kept emphasising that those were merely "possibilities", or "extreme options". she reminded me of this quote i saw earlier today: "It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true". I thought the quote was duh when i read it in the morning, but now i see that there might be a point to it.

2. when you try to show a thing, you might want to use the most appropriate tool. for example, if a categorization of a population of cells is to be done based on genetic profile, an in situ might really be a better option than trying to record from them under different biochemical environments. so a colleague said, sometimes you are so in love with the technique you do that you forget the problems you're addressing. that, clearly should not be the case.

quote of the day:
If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it.
- Emerson Pugh

pugh assumes that the process of "understanding" definitely implies that the entity to understand is of higher order than the entity to be understood. therefore. isn't it also true that no matter how simple/complex the human brain is, no matter what it is, it can never understand itself?

during the precious hour break this morning i quickly went to sierra and ordered myself a delicious steamy plate of breakfast special. as i started simulating the orchestration of gustatory stimuli by the mixture of hashbrown and ketchup my taste receptors will receive soon, i discovered that the ketchup tub was empty. that is just the greatest dismay that can ever happen to me.

by the time the newbie in sierra replaced the ketchup bag i was halfway through the plate, cos as much as i love ketchup, i dislike cold food. as a result, i had half of my food without ketchup and the other half cold.

or, would you say that, at least i had half of my food hot, and the other half with ketchup?

maybe not that good after all. after drinking too much tea in order to keep myself awake on this early bird day, i could hardly hold my scalple steady for a second. sigh. :(

Conjunto Céspedes is fabulous. and john hall is fabulous. and facebooking at price center at 938am knowing that there's a day ahead is fabulous. ah life is good.

after taking the performance making class some observations have dawned on me (me being a slightly post-layman pre-amateur music lover). the modern music history, especially the emergence of "new music" is largely trying to liberate music from it's present "elitist" form, i.e. granting the access to a body of esoteric means and materials to only a handful of trained professional/affluent amateurs. new concepts have been introduced, new instruments and new ways to play them are added to the repertoire. housewives who make sounds on household itmes and toys are now considered serious musical groups. there are objections to the trend, of course. but the objection comes surprisingly, from laymen (of course, or extremely conservative musicians) more often than from a well-informed and trained musician. the concept of serious music as being elitist by definition is so deeply rooted in a layman that its abolition seems ridiculous. more than once have i heard such statements "this can't be considered music" or "it's like a license to doing anything on earth by calling the music modern" from laymen in reaction to a contempory piece. isn't it a little ironic when the laymen who would potentially benefit from the de-elitization of music object the most readily to this process? same goes to modern art, i have to add. the rate at which an art piece is dismissed without being scrutinized upon is astonishing.

maybe we have been tuned to a certain form of audio/visual stimuli, and it'll take us much longer than a few hundred years to start appreciating something new? maybe that just proves that the artists are always on the frontier of the society. i wonder.

ralph lauren has only 3 stores in california - sf, beverley hills and la jolla. what kind of place am i living in.

the link

ugh! love the internet.

i chanced upon a webpage with an article Shu Ting wrote about Gu Cheng. Both are comtemporary Chinese poets. The former is one of my favorite poets. The latter killed his wife and committed suicide afterwards. On that page, there was a scanned in newspaper cutting with pictures of Gu Cheng and his response in an interview. He said.
"Having your poetry read is like being a fish displayed frozen on a fishmonger's slab. People say it tastes good but no one would like to swim in the sea with it." (how true...)

i haven't read his stuff for ages, but one of his lines would always give me the shiver whenever i read it.

A Generation (Translation by Joseph R. Allen)

Even with these dark eyes, a gift of the dark night
I go to seek the shining light


一代人 (顾城)

黑夜給了我黑色的眼睛
我卻用它尋找光明

in this case i wouldn't translate the verse with "Even". I feel that the original poem has a sense of irony in it, which is lost in the translation(although it rhymes). and i hate the "shining" part. too much unnecessary ornamentations. make the poem lose its transparency. I think the translator would be better off just literally translating it. like,

the dark night gave me these dark eyes,
but with them, i go to seek the light.