g0v

 In 2012, four "civic hackers"–that is, politically minded computer programmers with an activist ethos–in Taiwan built a citizen auditing system for the government's annual budget. They made data from the Accounting and Statistics Office accessible, easy to understand and interactive. The public could rate and comment on every item in the budget. This became the foundation of the g0v (“gov-zero”) movement, which is now one of the world’s most active civic-tech communities.

On March 18, 2014, hundreds of young activists, most of them college students, occupied Taiwan’s legislature to express their profound opposition to a new trade pact with Beijing then under consideration, as well as the secretive manner in which it was being pushed through Parliament by the Kuomintang, the ruling party. Shocked by such unprecedented, spontaneous eruption of anti-government sentiment by young people–which came to be known as the Sunflower Student Movement–the government came to g0v for cooperation. Several contributors from g0v responded by partnering with the government to start the vTaiwan platform in 2015. vTaiwan (which stands for "virtual Taiwan'') brings together representatives from the public, private and social sectors to debate policy solutions to problems primarily related to the digital economy. Since it began, vTaiwan has tackled 30 issues, relying on a mix of online debate and face-to-face discussions with stakeholders.

All told, there are currently over 600 projects on g0v platforms under discussion, modification, and being executed. Some exemplary cases this year alone include:

* Map systems showing mask availability in pharmacies over the country
* An agricultural land protection and factory pollution reporting site
* Dictionaries for Taiwanese dialects and aborigine languages
* A fact checker app and website  
        ...

Besides online events, g0v hosts bimonthly "hackathon" workshops that are open to all to come to share ideas or look for partners for their projects in person. g0v also works with businesses and government agencies to evaluate and award funding for projects deemed most impactful and sustainable for society.
 
All these are run by a group of less than ten young men and women, all but two of them on volunteer basis. I went to one of their weekly meetings the other day, and met Isabel, a cheerful lady in her late 30's whose career as a lawyer specializing in innovation and intellectual property started with the involvement of the open source movement in the early 2000's; Ronny, a software engineer who once obtained political donors information from the government and published them all–tens of thousands of names and numbers and links–in one day through the code he wrote that "outsourced" the data punching work to the public; Chewei, a spatial designer who coordinated with the City of Taipei to build a website listing all the vacant lands the city government owns for the public to inquire and make usage suggestions about; Sean, another software engineer with artistic and environmental design background, was creator of the "Watch Our Rivers" campaign that visualizes and publishes river cleanup contracts the government doles out to contractors for all to access and monitor; Bess, a young woman with nearly 10 year experience working with non-profit and cross-domain organizations, and Ichieh, another young lady in her mid 20's who joined the team right off school, were the only two full-timers there.

They started their meeting by each sharing one impressionable thing that came to their mind in the past week... Ichieh said she saw news of a new video hosting site that won't arbitrarily suspend access to videos people upload that she thought might be worth considering as a backup site for g0v's videos; Chewei mentioned an idea he heard that in some countries corporations are required to plant trees to compensate for the carbons they create when they hold physical conferencing events; Sean shared an aha moment he got while sitting in traffic on how to solve traffic problems with strategies he uses in one of the video games he plays... They bantered, they joked, they laughed... then they moved on to discuss the coming hackathon event in January, a tutorial workshop at the end of this month (December), people to invite, places to set up, software to fix, projects to coordinate, etc., etc.  Again, good naturedly, they riffed off each other's ideas, threw in witty remarks, made light-hearted complaints... No hardship looks on their faces, they were having a good time doing what they chose to do.

"g0v is not anti-government, just anti-cynics," (g0v不是反政府，而是反酸民) "Don't complain there's nobody doing anything, admit you are that nobody," (別再抱怨沒有人做，因為你就是“沒有人”)... are remarks seen on g0v's website and literature. Indeed g0v is a decentralized, grass root movement that puts together ordinary people who want to do good for society with innovative but practical ideas and digital technologies, and has affected tangible changes in societies over the past eight years. I hope and have pledged my support for it to go many more years and do much more good for Taiwan and the world. I hope many will do the same too.

​g0v manifesto:
We come from everywhere
We are a polycentric community of self-organized contributors
We are citizens collaborating to bring about change
We live open-source
We have fun and want to change the status quo
We are you

g0v 宣言：

我們來自四方
我們多中心運作、打造自主貢獻文化
我們實踐公民參與，創造改變
我們成果開放，取之開源，用之開源
我們很歡樂，也想改變現狀
我們就是你

Related news articles:

Wired Magazine:

Taiwan is making democracy work again. It's time we paid attention

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania: 

Taiwan’s Tech-savvy Citizens Helped Flatten Its COVID-19 Curve

quarantine

Because of Covid-19, all visitors to Taiwan are required to self-quarantine in designated hotels or secluded residence for 14 days. This is how we went through it Oct 14 - Oct 28.

A certificate was sent to our phone to be shown to the Immigration officers after we filled out a health questionnaire 48 hours before arriving in Taipei:

A "home quarantine pack" that included thermometers, masks, trash bags--we got two sets of each for two people--was hand-delivered to us after we arrived at our apartment in Taipei:

and two bundles of cookies, cereal, peanuts...

crackers, candies, drinks, cup noodles, etc.

We were instructed not to step outside our apartment (they could track us through our phones' GPS), so my sister, who lived in the same building as we, brought us meals every day. This is some dim-sum she bought:

Bento sets:

Sushi & roast fish:

View of the world outside from my study:

The “Neighborhood Watch Officer" (里幹事) sent daily "how are you doing" (are you healthy?) greetings to us, one in the morning, one in the afternoon/evening:

So did the Taiwan CDC, texting us every morning:

They would arrange garbage pickup for us too:

Our quarantine ended on the same day Dodgers won the World Series; I kept my weight in check, gaining only 0.2 pound through 14 days of delicious food and no workout. The secret: skip the dinners:

We went for a walk in the park, a hot soy milk breakfast and fresh sandwiches on our first day out:

And a real dinner at a nice restaurant the second day:

As of end of October, Taiwan (pop. 23 million) has reported no new Covid-19 cases for more than 200 consecutive days since April 12.

sunny

Sunny and I were elementary school classmates from grade three through grade six. He was a typical bouncy perky kid of his age, if a little more on the wild side, with a mother who's a bit on the over-worried side, that a well behaving, good grade earning kid like me became a "role model" she wanted her son to "hang out" with, in today's term, which he did, as he genuinely liked and admired me, even though he later confessed in our adult years that there were times he told his mother that he's with me just so she wouldn't worry when he's actually out somewhere else playing.

We went to different high schools and universities, but stayed in touch as occasions kept us to. One such occasion was when I asked him to be my courtesy door-knocker before I started dating my future wife who happened to go to the same department/university as he. He did it and would be forever claiming credit for the pivotal role he played in the successful union between me and my wife!

He came to the US about the same time I did, went back to Taiwan after finishing his study, then back to the US again a few years later and settled down not too far from where I lived in South Orange County. He told me he was doing well working for one of those up-and-coming furniture companies in Taiwan until he realized there were irreconcilable differences in business thinking between him and his boss/owner of the company that he decided to come to the USA to strike out on his own .

Strike out did he! From a humble home office with phones and fax machines pre internet times, he built a multi-million dollar business empire that owns factories and offices in China and Vietnam, Taiwan and US, in a short couple decades right in front of my eyes!
 
He's not your typical Fortune 500 slick talking CEO, but an old fashioned head-of-the-family boss that took care of his workers and they in return stayed loyal to him. The lady secretary he hired when he started his home office is still with the company, so are managers of the factories he took over decades ago.

Once he overheard a customer talking abusively to one of his employees and he grabbed the phone and told the customer if he continued to talk like that they didn't want their businesses.

He had a trademark sunny smile that lit up the room and charmed the people he met, and a pair of sparkling eyes that seemed to reveal where his artistic furniture design ideas and business smarts came from.

He spent almost half his time overseas, but we managed to stay in touch throughout the years: Winter mountain outing with his wife and kids when they were little, birthday/Christmas parties, golf rounds, country club dinners, or just some happy hour drinks at his office when he had long stay in Southern California.   

He was diagnosed with terminal stage brain cancer about five years ago. Though it came as a shock initially, with the extraordinary care of his super wife and top notch surgeon doctors, and their strong Christian faith, he made it through two major surgeries, various therapies and treatments, and had a miraculous recovery when doctors projected he had only three months to live after his second surgery more than four years ago.

He'd lived a healthy, functional life for the past four years. Even though in a wheelchair, he traveled to his factories in Vietnam for year-end celebration banquets, his son's graduation in San Francisco, and daughter's wedding in Italy.

He donated more money and sponsored more Christian ministries, including setting up summer camps in his factories in China and Vietnam for his employees and their families to spread the Gospel and be its witness.

I got to meet him more often, at the monthly women's ministry his wife organized and my wife helped out at his office in Irvine, and functional/fundraiser meetings for the ministry we both sponsored.

His smile was as sunny as ever, if not warmer and gentler, with an avuncular ring to it.

His cancer relapsed early this year, and he passed away just last week here in Taipei.

Farewell Sunny, my dear childhood friend forever... You've become the role model for many... See you on the other side.

free will

Do we have free will or it's all just an illusion? Modern sciences would like to tell us it's the latter. Your body and mind are just one big complex machine that acts according to the laws of physics, the neurons in your brain were fired up long (nanoseconds) before you think of an idea or make a move, the end result of a long chain of events that trace back all the way to the day the universe started.

But like the behavior of flowy water cannot be described by the particle-like movements of its atomic components, and deterministic events in microcosm do not transpire to deterministic outcome in a "chaotic", complex system (having full knowledge of all the meteorological parameters does not guarantee accurate predictions of the weather, for example), such reductionist deconstruction of human psyche is fallacious and even unscientific.
 
The philosophical determinism and religious predestination theory, on the other hand, are more about fancy thought-play and mystical after-the-fact statements than honest reporting of human state of mind as it happens.

Free will, in common sense term that you and I can understand and experience, is the capacity to weigh different options and make decisions without coercion (such as someone holding a gun to your head), to do things we desire.

A sovereignty that some may prefer not to have, for some reason. In a psychological experiment, one group of people were asked to read a passage arguing that free will was an illusion, and another group to read a passage that was neutral on the topic. Then both groups were subject to a variety of temptations and observed their behavior. What researchers found was, with the opportunity to cheat being equal, the former group took more illicit peeks at answers during a math test and took more money than they should from an envelope of $1 coins than the latter.

  

So, if you are free, what will you do?

President Eisenhower once quoted a Stoic-ish statement in one of his State of the Union addresses that "Freedom is the opportunity to do the right thing;" ancient Greek philosophers--Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle--believe that seeking truth is the same as seeking good, helping people becoming virtuous in the process. 

And devout believers seek God's will to replace their own; contemplative "deep silence" prayers try to will nothing but hold an implicit intent to be in union with God during meditation; naturalists think they see the Creator's will everywhere or nowhere in the world.

Flipping the coin to the other side, free will could be hijacked by the basest of human instincts--aggression, possessiveness, self-aggrandization--to an abysmal end as deep as their superego would take them. All the ruthless rulers and mad men in history...

Free will may be overrated, after all. As relational creatures living in an interconnected world, none of us has absolute freedom but all depend on the freedom of others and the complex makings of a fragile world for our well-beings. Instead of insisting "my way or highway," "your wish is my command" may be a wiser approach to harmonious living.

Your good will will always trump my free will, that is.

    

a hectic fall

It was a Monday evening, I just started off my home on my way to Mel & Jo's for our recently resumed weekly meditation meetup. This was the third week in a row I bicycled instead of driving to my meditation friend's home. Evelyn's and Annie's were both in San Clemente, Mel & Jo's was in San Juan Capistrano, closer to my neck of the woods but the route I chose for this bike ride had some up and down, wind-around road challenges I felt a bit anxious to check out.

Maybe too anxious, I forgot the steep slope that led down our community exit that I always needed to maneuver through first, and careless, for I had been riding down this slope so many times before, I didn't apply much brake, and instead of rolling over the speed bump I swerved to its side to bypass it... next thing I knew I saw my wheels hit the seam between the curb and the pavement and start to rattle and wobble and I reckoned I was losing control of my bike and decided to let go the handlebars and fell to the ground...

When I came to, there were a couple of people sitting beside me by the roadside (some Good Samaritan neighbors happened to drive by and saw the accident), a man and a woman, I thought. The woman asked kindly how I felt, I said I was all right, "what day is today," she continued, and I felt funny, because I couldn't answer that question, nor could I figure out why I was there and where I was headed...

They called the ambulance for me and minutes later I was in the Emergency Room of Mission Hospital. They took an X-ray on my left shoulder and a CT-scan on my head and left me resting there for a few hours before returning with the result: A broken collarbone on my left shoulder and a minor concussion on my head. Neither was too serious and should heal themselves in days, they said. They then gave me a prescription for pain-killer medicine and a sling for shoulder support and dispatched me home.

I had a couple nights of very bad sleep not only due to the broken shoulder but also the left wrist and fingers that were red hot swollen and excruciatingly painful. I also experienced morning headaches and dizziness and nausea at times.

But these gradually let up in the following days, to the point when I visited my primary care doctor a week later for followup check, as suggested by the ER staff, I spent about equal time catching up with him (he's been our family doctor for decades and we don't get to see each other except on "special occasions" like this) as talking about the accident and its after-effect on me.

My sense of recovery and well being got even stronger a few days later when I visited an orthopedist referred by my primary care doctor. As a precaution, and to know exactly how my injury was and had been healing, he ordered another X-ray on my shoulder, as well as an MRI on my wrist.

He called me the next day with a somewhat alarming tone: The X-ray report he just saw showed the fracture of my collarbone was much worse than he originally thought, the bone was split far apart and out of alignment, a situation that called for immediate surgery the sooner the better.

I was surprised to hear that and started looking for second opinions on whether I should do surgery or not. After talking to a couple of fellow cyclists who had similar accidents and injuries and had gone through surgeries, a regenerative (non-surgical) medical doctor, and another orthopedist, I concluded I should do the surgery and set up for it the following week, a little more than three weeks from the day the accident happened.

It was a minor surgery--as the doctors liked to say, comparing it to knee replacement or open heart surgeries, I suppose. I was put under general anesthesia, though, and slept through the two-hour operation. What the doctor did was put in a metal plate, drill holes on my bones, fasten the plate and bridge the bones together again.

The post-surgery recovery was quite manageable, the inconveniences I had to live through came from needing to avoid wetting the bandaged surgical cut on my shoulder when taking a bath, and the restricted movement of my left arm and hand that forced me to wash my face with one hand, like a cat, for example.

All these were lifted after I paid my post-op visit to the surgery doctor last Friday. They removed the bandage and stitches from the wound, and said I could start moving my arm and hand around like normal again... no swimming until a couple weeks later, though. 

Neither bicycling, I suppose.

* How to fall off a bike the right way? Believe it or not, I've been cycling off and on for over 8 years, including a 9-day round-the-island tour in Taiwan a couple years ago, and this was the first time I ever fell off a bike. Here is the belated tip I learn from online: 

When sensing an imminent fall, tuck your chin to your chest, keep your hands on the bars or as close to your body as possible, roll when you hit the ground to spread the forces of the impact across a larger surface area, so to reduce your chances of a fracture.

One thing I certainly did not do was holding on to the handlebars, but instead letting it go so easily, maybe subliminally thinking about or trying to apply the fall-down skills I learned from Judo or snow skiing practices, when what's waiting for me down there was not a tatami mat or a soft pile of snow, but hard rugged ground of asphalt pavement!

* Many thanks to those who came to my aid after the accident: From Christine who picked me up at the ER, to Richard who took me to the many doctor visits and the surgery, to Dr. James who referred me a fine orthopedic specialist and gave valuable after-surgery advices, to my across-street neighbors who sent me comfort foods, to my meditation group and book group friends and all others who expressed condolences and good wishes after hearing the accident. Your acts of love and kindness, good thoughts and prayers are more powerful and spread wider than whatever pandemic virus out there is and could!

relationship

No one is an island. We are born attached, literally, umbilically, to our mother, and father, and siblings, genetically and emotionally. We then go out and create our own ties, making friends, joining organizations, forming families, weaving a social web work that comes to define who we are, or at least how people perceive we are. On the day we die, many would feel the greatest regret of their life is the failure to reconcile some of these relationships they have with others.

A Utopian Confucian society is one based on all the "proper" relationships–father and son, man and wife, ruler and subject, the old and the young–properly performed by all its members, facilitated by rites and rituals, motivated by everyone's original good heart of love and kindness. Easier said than done. When the original good doesn't come out original or good enough, society becomes disingenuous, rites and rituals turn into "man-eating decorum" (吃人的禮教), civilization loses luster. 

A smack of intimacy is detected in the word relationship, versus the word relation. That's probably why nations have "Foreign Relations" Department not "Foreign Relationship" Department, and she says she has "sexual relationship" with him while he says he does not have any "sexual relations" with that woman.

Essential as emotional attachment seems to be, some wiser guys choose to keep as little of it as possible. "The gentlemen's friendship is as bland as water (君子之交淡如水)," says Confucius. Some, like the hermits or the monks, go further, severing all ties with the world, their only remaining one being with nature or God. That's keeping it very simple, smart! I don't go extreme, but I think sometimes a proper break from a long stalemated relationship helps you see things clearer and move on better.

Perhaps the most precious, sought after relationship is the one prefixed with the adjective "personal". It is a relational super highway that cuts through all the hierarchical byways to get wherever you want–a special treatment, undivided attention, etc.–fast. Shouldn't/can't we make all relationships personal, then?

How you see your relationship with another tells how you know them and how they affect you. When Jesus asked his disciples "Who do you think I am," Peter hit the jackpot ("You are the Messiah!") and got the key to the gate to heaven, while others–like many still today–consider him just a prophet, a sage, or a great teacher, and don't get the magic a Savior endows the saved ones with.
 
Much has been said about virtual relationships in today's info-media world: Facebook friends, Twitter followers, celebrity groupies... But I say all relationships are virtual, for the simple fact that no two persons can be physically close by 24/7, so we all have to rely on thoughts and prayers, memories and imaginations, to keep the connection going in our mind, with all those we cross paths with in life, short or long, near or far, dead or alive.

That's why relationship never dies.

a home project

The side yard door we had since the house was built some 8 years ago had been sagging on one side and the wood panel deteriorating with age, I decided to replace it.

​

I ordered a metal gate online and got it in a week. Assembling was not too hard, except they sent wrong screws for some parts I had to figure out and get the right ones from a local hardware store.

​

Dismantling the old door was not too hard either.

​

But I had to get rid of those big long bolts sticking out from the concrete block columns after the old wooden posts were removed.

A little hacksaw blade could do the big job of sawing off the bolt, given time; but I didn't really need to saw it all the way down, just about one third of the way, then knocked it off with a hammer.

​

Now came the hard part: carving out a seam between the concrete block column and the ground for my new metal post's base to tuck in.

I made my own “improvised cutting device” after learning it from a YouTube video by attaching a disc blade to a drill gun. 

​

It worked for a while, giving me some headway into the hard solid block column I wanted. 

​

But then it kept breaking down: the rickety home-made device just not sturdy enough to stand the constant jerking and shaking my forceful cutting action created.

After some online research, a couple visits to the local hardware store, and advice from a kindly store helper, I bought this power oscillating tool, along with a diamond grit concrete cutting blade to attach to it.

​

That did the job, cutting a seam about 5 inches wide, 2 inches deep, at the base of the column.

​

So I could tuck the metal post in.

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Along with the gate.

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The only problem now was my opening was just about one inch too narrow for the door handle and its backstop to "kiss" and close properly. 

​

So I detached and reattached the backstop plate to the other cheek of the post, and now the door handle and its backstop clap flawlessly together.

​

Welcome to my yard!

​

why fish don't exist (4)

In David's own estimate, out of the 12,000–13,000 species of fish known to humans in his day, he and his students had discovered over 2,500 of them. One out of every five in the world, that was.

What drove him to such monumental tasks, to persist and persevere while catastrophes struck, again and again?

He had “a terrifying capacity for convincing himself that what he wanted was right,” writes scholar Luther Spoehr, “His ability to crush those in his path multiplied even as he became convinced that his path was the one of righteousness which led to progress.”

A belief system likely seeded by his youth time idol, the naturalist Louis Agassiz (whose statue stands outside the marine research building commissioned by David at Stanford), whose summer camp inspired David to the field of Ichthyology study.

Agassiz believed there were objective measures about organisms, such as “the complication or simplicity of their structure” or “the character of their relations to the surrounding world,” that could be used to rank organisms in their proper order. Lizards, for example, would score higher than fish because they “bestow greater care upon their offspring.” Parasites, meanwhile, were clear lowlifes, the lot of them. Just look at how they earned their living: they mooched and deceived and freeloaded.

He believed there is a ladder built into nature. A divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that points objectively toward better. The highest of creatures could fall from their rungs if they weren’t careful, that bad habits could somehow cause a species to physically and cognitively decline.

When Darwin's evolution theory became the zeitgeist of late 19th century, David mashed it with Agassiz’s foggy idea of “degeneration” and ran with it. In a scientific paper, David proposed that the sea squirt, a sedentary sac of a filter feeder, had once been a higher fish but had “degraded” into its current form due to a combination of “idleness, inactivity and dependence.”

David was one of the first to bring Eugenics ideas that started in England to America. As early as the 1880s, decades before most American eugenicists got the fever, David had begun to tuck these ideas into his lectures at Indiana University, informing students that traits like “pauperism” and “degeneracy” were heritable and thus could be “exterminated just as swamps are drained.”

He published his first pro-eugenics article in 1898 and followed it with a flurry of books advocating for the cleansing of the gene pool. He made stops at churches and almshouses, where he’d warn the devoted staffs about the dangers of their work fomenting, as he claimed it did, “the survival of the unfit.”

In 1907, a few of his friends from Bloomington successfully legalized forced eugenic sterilization in Indiana—the first such law not just in the country but in the world. Two years later, David helped get it passed in California. His commitment to the cause apparent, he was asked to chair the Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders Association. He eagerly accepted.

Now back to the fish story, and a bit evolutionary mumbo jumbo.

How do evolutionary biologists classify creatures found on earth? Starting in 1990s, "cladistic" method is the most common one used. What does cladistic method do? Simply put, it categorizes organisms in groups ("clades") based on the most recent common ancestor.

For example, if you want to talk about group "vertebrates", that includes all creatures with a backbone, then snakes are in, worms are out. Group "mammals"? It must include every single descendant of that first creature able to make milk. Cats, dogs, whales, all good. No reptiles allowed!

Quiz: A cow. A salmon. A lungfish. Which of these things is not like the other?

If you could, for a moment, allow yourself not be blinded by the outer look of these creatures (such as the scales of the salmon and the lungfish) but focus on their shared evolutionary traits, then you would begin to notice: the lungfish and the cow both have lung-like organs that allow them to breathe air while the salmon does not; the lungfish and the cow both have an epiglottis (a small flap of skin that covers the windpipe) while the salmon is epiglottis-less; and the lungfish’s heart is structured more like a cow’s than a salmon’s, etc., etc., etc. All leading to the conclusion that the lungfish is more closely related to the cow than to the salmon.

Using method like this, taxonomists conclude that fish, as a legitimate category of creature, do not exist.

We human mind intuitively and summarily groups all creatures living in water with scaled skin, swinging fins, sleek body as one kind and call them fish, but by that same logic, we should treat all creatures living in mountains, for example, mountain goats, mountain toads, mountain eagles, and mountain men, as one kind and call them one same name, but we don't.

To conclude the story, let's give some equal opportunity time to Darwin:

Contrary to David and Agassiz's assertion of a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that points objectively toward better, Darwin sees no ladder in nature. Nature doesn’t jump, he says. Species—and indeed all those fussy ranks taxonomists believed to be immutable in nature (genus, family, order, class, etc.)—were human inventions. Useful but arbitrary lines we draw around an ever-evolving flow of life for our convenience. Nature has no edges, no hard lines. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the “whole machinery of life.”

And what does Darwin say is the best way of building a strong species? Variation. In nearly every chapter of "Origin of Species," Darwin hails the power of “Variation.” He marvels over how diverse gene pools are healthier and stronger, how inter-crossing between different types of individuals gives more “vigor and fertility” to their offspring, how even worms and plants that can produce perfect replicas of themselves are equipped for sex, for introducing variety back into the gene pool.

And maybe every little interaction between creatures, sentient ones in particular—the affection, good will, compassion..., makes life bind closer, jell better, evolve higher, proves that we exist, with or without label, categorizable or not!

* This 4-part write-up is based on the book "Why Fish Don't Exist" by Lulu Miller I recently finished reading. Hope it gives you enough distraction from the lockdown and endless bombardment of the corona virus news we are all facing now. Cheers!

why fish don't exist (3)

Upon learning that Jane Stanford's death would likely be ruled a poisoning, David set sail for Hawaii.

Though he told the New York Times his visit had “nothing whatever to do with the investigation which the police of San Francisco and Honolulu are conducting,” that he was there only to escort Jane’s body home, records show he hired a new doctor and paid him the hefty sum of $350—about $10,000 today—to reexamine the case.

The man David selected, Ernest Waterhouse, had only been practicing medicine for a couple of years. Without examining the body or any of the evidence, and after a skim of a book on poisoning, conversations with a couple of the witnesses, and a series of meetings with David, in his hands the explanation of Jane’s death took an acrobatic turn.

In a typed memo to David (which David had instructed he prepare for him), Dr. Waterhouse declared that he was “decidedly not” convinced that Jane Stanford had been poisoned. Though concerned by the amount of strychnine found in her belly and bottle, he wasn’t sure it was enough to have killed her. So how to explain the violent convulsions, the lockjaw, the whole rapid death thing? Gingerbread!

Now Bertha — Jane's personal assistant — said that the gingerbread prepared by the hotel for Jane's picnic had not been freshly cooked, as she had originally testified to the police (and the hotel continued to claim), but under-cooked. And not only did Jane inhaled gob after gob of the sloppy, eggy dough, she also sucked down eight sandwiches, filled with thick slabs of beef tongue and Swiss cheese, multiple cups of cold coffee, and over a dozen French candies.

So, as David informed the New York Times, that he was “wholly convinced” that Jane's death was due to heart failure triggered by a combination of overexertion (from a leisurely picnic outing?) and consuming “a surfeit of unsuitable food.”

When the statement went public, the Hawaii doctors were horrified. They banded together and immediately released a counter-statement, which read:

"She did not die of angina pectoris because neither the symptoms of the attack nor the condition of the heart confirms that diagnosis. It is imbecile to think that a woman of Mrs. Stanford’s age and known mental characteristics might have died of an hysterical seizure in half an hour.… No Board of Health in existence could allow a certificate based on such a cause of death to go unchallenged."

David retorted by calling the key medical witness, Dr. Humphris, “a man without professional or personal standing.” When the Hawaii doctors rushed to Humphris’ defense, David accused them all of colluding in a conspiracy—fabricating the diagnosis of murder as a way of getting money to perform the autopsy and coroner’s inquest.

A ludicrous accusation. No matter. Because of David's prestige, his power, and probably a nation's disregard for its outlier islands (Hawaii was not yet a state at that time), the Hawaii doctors’ account of what happened never really took hold on the mainland.

Until almost a hundred years later.

Robert Cutler, a Stanford neurologist, stumbled across an old newspaper article about an investigation into the poisoning of Jane Stanford while researching another project. Robert was shocked. He was a history buff and a proud Stanford man. Why had he never heard that the founding mother had potentially been poisoned? So he began digging.

With the help of his wife, Maggie, and a flock of archivists from Honolulu to San Francisco to Washington, DC, he gathered the coroner’s report, the eyewitness testimonies, the court transcripts... all the evidence, laid out as clearly as possible, with long quotations from the primary sources themselves. Then he published the book "The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford" in 2003 before he died.

In his book, Robert Cutler, a medical doctor for more than three decades, is clear: given Jane’s symptoms and the discovery of strychnine in both her belly and medicine bottle, he believes she was poisoned. And after tracing David’s actions in the wake of her death, he believes it’s hard not to conclude that David was trying to cover up the poisoning. Why? Perhaps to protect the university from scandal. Perhaps for other reasons. Robert Cutler won’t wager a guess.

Other scholars go further. Bliss Carnochan, a Stanford English professor who studied the letters between Jane and her spy, thought the timing of the murder was fishy. He wrote that David, as a means of protecting his presidency, “had the motive.”

Richard White, a Stanford historian, began teaching a class called "Who Killed Jane Stanford?" to try to uncover more clues. Each semester, he unleashes a dozen students or so on the archives to find new information. White’s current guess is that Bertha did it (for the will money), but he remarks that the timing of Jane’s death was remarkably “lucky” for David. He feels increasingly confident that, no matter who did it, David covered up the poisoning.

In one of David's fish-collecting manuals, "A Guide to the Study of Fishes," that advises readers how to find fish anywhere in the world, under the section called “How to Secure Fishes,” he divulges a secret to his readers, his favorite trick for catching the peskiest of fish, the ones that evade capture by darting into the cracks of tide pools? Poison. And the particular variety he recommends? A dangerous and powerful substance, one he once described as “the bitterest thing in the world.” Strychnine.

why fish don't exist (2)

Just a year into David’s presidency, Leland Stanford had died and left Jane in charge of affairs. And it was turning out that Jane was not such a fan of the swashbuckling giant after all. She expressed concern about the amount of time and money David was devoting to fish. She wanted the university to expand in other directions, such as, say… the scientific study of spiritualism, where they might find some newfangled technologies that lead to breakthroughs in contacting the dead, such as Jane and Leland's son who died at 15, in whose memory the university was founded. She was also concerned over David’s hiring practices, accused him of nepotism, calling the men he hired in his science departments his "pets."

Her concerns about David's leadership grew to the point where she appointed a spy to keep tabs on him. The spy was a professor in the German department who, after a few years of watching, caught David doing something that didn’t look great. It was not David himself, but a long time student-turned friend of his, who as head of zoology department and a married man, had an affair with a young Stanford woman and were discovered one day by a librarian, who came to David demanding that he be fired for such impropriety. But David did not want to lose this “brilliant taxonomic mind" friend of his, so, thinking on his feet, he threatened the librarian with “incarceration in the insane asylum for sexual perversity” (often code for homosexuality) if he breathed a word of it to anyone else. That succeeded in shutting the librarian up—he quit Stanford, left town. But somehow Jane’s spy got wind of the whole saga, and typed it up in a formal letter to Jane.

In it, he accused David of “whitewashing” a sex scandal to protect a friend, and he claimed that this was far from a lone incident. According to the spy, David ran the university like a “gang,” with faculty members afraid of disagreeing with him for fear of “risking their heads.”

Jane wrote via signed letter to the senior trustee of the school that David’s moral shortcomings had “been painfully evident to me for a long time.” By the end of 1904, rumors abounded that Mrs. Stanford planned to replace David.

Then Jane died, unexpectedly one night in early 1905 while traveling in Hawaii.

On that fatal, sunny day, Jane took a carriage with her entourage to a seaside lookout for a scenic picnic, spending hours sitting in shade, enjoying ocean view, snacking, reading.

In the late afternoon, they returned to the hotel, rested for a bit, and had a light dinner of soup. Then, as Jane was readying herself for bed, she asked one of her assistants, Bertha, to leave out her medications—baking soda and herbal cascara capsules to help with digestion. Bertha left out a spoonful of baking soda and one cascara capsule, and around 9:00 p.m. she and another assistant May retired to their room across the hall.

At approximately 11:15, Jane’s assistants were awakened by cries coming from across the hall. “Bertha! May!” Jane called. “I am so sick!” They hurried to Jane’s room, opened the door, and found Jane keeled over. She was having trouble opening her mouth, her jaw muscles beginning to clamp down against her will. Through widened eyes and barricaded teeth, Jane bleated, “I have no control of my body. I think I have been poisoned again.”

By that point, the man staying next door, having heard the commotion, had rushed over to help. He ran for a doctor. A few minutes later, a sleepy, doe-eyed Dr. Francis Humphris arrived, medicine bag in hand. He sat with Jane, gently palpating her jaw, trying to coax her muscles into relaxing, and finally yanking out her dentures so he could give her some mustard water to induce vomiting. But it was no use. Jane looked at Dr. Humphris with eyes wide as her body began to contort in stranger and stranger ways. Her toes pigeoned inward, her fists clenched into rocks, and her legs splayed open into an unseemly spread-eagle. Helpless, horrified, she stared at something, somewhere just beyond or within her, and pleaded through toothless gums, “Oh God, forgive me my sins.” She was dead, only fifteen minutes after it had all begun, by 11:30.

Two more doctors arrived a few minutes later. One with a stomach pump dangling uselessly from his hand. All three doctors tasted the baking soda remaining in the bottle and noted a foreign, bitter taste. The sheriff arrived and wrapped the spoon and glass in paper and sent them to the toxicologist’s office, and sent Jane’s body to the morgue.

The toxicologists got to work examining the contents of the bottle of baking soda and the contents of Jane’s intestines. They found traces of strychnine in both.

A jury of six citizens was convened. It took them two minutes to settle on a verdict. Jane Stanford, they decided, had died from “strychnine having been introduced into a bottle of bicarbonate of soda with felonious intent by some person or persons to this jury unknown.”

Now you had heard Jane say before her death that she thought she was poisoned again. Why did she say that?

Just about 6 weeks ago, on January 14, 1905, she was at home in her San Francisco town house, getting ready for bed, when she took a big swig of water poured from her usual source, the tank of Poland Spring water in her kitchen. She tasted something so alarming and astringent that she immediately stuck her fingers down her throat to force vomiting.

She summoned her assistants, Bertha and Elizabeth, to help. After calming her, they both tasted the water and, noting a “queer” and “bitter” taste, took the tank to a nearby chemist, who analyzed it and found it contained lethal amounts of strychnine.

Jane survived but was understandably shaken. A detective turned up no leads; the investigation had focused solely on her household staff—the maid, the cook, the secretary, the ex-butler—and ended up clearing everybody.

Knowing there was someone out there who wanted her dead, but not knowing who, Jane set sail for Hawaii, hoping that a few weeks in the tropics would calm her nerves.

That did not pan out, alas.

why fish don't exist (1)

David Starr Jordan was born on an apple orchard in upstate New York in 1851. As a boy he was fascinated by the stars and curious about the name and significance of the celestial bodies. When he was about eight, he got an atlas of astronomical charts and began comparing what he saw on the page to what he saw above his head. In five years he got his curiosity satisfied.

He then turned to the terrestrial. In between the chores his parents assigned him to do, and with the help of his big brother Rufus, he drew maps of his family's orchard, his walk to school, then copied charts of distant townships, states, countries, continents, all the way to every corner of the globe his hungry little fingers could crawl over.

Such eagerness worried his mother. One day she threw away piles of his son's creased, sweat stained maps and told him to find something “more relevant” to do with his time.

He obeyed and stopped making maps, but picked up the habit of picking wild flowers and plants he saw in his countryside surroundings to learn their names and locations in the biological map.

After graduating from Cornell University with both a Bachelor's degree in Science and a Master's in Botany in three years, he landed a job in Illinois teaching science at a small Christian university. But after attending a summer camp in Penikese Island, Massachusetts, organized by then famous naturalist Louis Agassiz to train young scholars for explorative collection of marine and botanical life, he decided to set his sights on the water. “The literature of Ichthyology (study of fishes) was inexact and incomplete,” he wrote, “with few comparative studies, so that the field seemed wide open, as indeed it was.”

As he jumped from teaching job to teaching job at schools all over the Midwest, he set himself the goal of discovering every freshwater fish in North America, while taking a job from the US Census Bureau in 1880 to catalog the fish species that lived along the Pacific coast.

He then journeyed back to Bloomington, Indiana, where he had finally secured a permanent job as a professor of science at Indiana University. Six years later, when he was 34, the board of trustees asked him to become president of the institution. He accepted, making him the youngest university president in the entire country.

He now led a crew of burly, bespectacled taxonomists discovering fish faster than they could name them. They were preserving them in jars of ethanol and stacking them on shelves inside David’s secluded lab on the top floor of the science building. Thousands of mysterious creatures being piled higher and higher, awaiting their sacred naming ceremony.

Late one night in July of 1883, the lab caught fire. Jars exploded, fish vaporized, every last specimen was destroyed, and more: a secret document that David had been working for years, that mapped the connections of never-before-seen branches of tree of life, completely torched. “The flames of an hour had near undone his life work,” a reporter wrote on the local newspaper.

But David refused to be stalled by the catastrophe. He dusted up the ashes, and headed right back out to the nation’s bodies of water to retrieve what he had lost. He claimed to have learned only one lesson from the whole ordeal: “To publish at once,” he wrote.

Just two years later, another disaster struck. His wife, Susan, came down with a cough. Days later, she was dead. Killed, as their daughter Edith explains, by a bout of pneumonia the “rural town doctors were unable to cure.”

Again, David moved quickly. He held a simple but ceremonial funeral and then, as he had with the fish, headed right back out to the nation’s wilds, to retrieve what he had lost. Less than two years after Susan’s death, he had caught himself a new wife. A college sophomore named Jessie Knight, who's youthful, energetic, and enjoy traveling with him.

In time, a wealthy California couple heard about David—this cheerful, swashbuckling giant with hundreds of notches of scientific discovery on his belt. Their names were Leland and Jane Stanford, and one day in 1890, they traveled all the way to Bloomington to ask if he would become the first president of their little academic experiment in the farmlands of Palo Alto.

In 1891, he was sworn in as the founding president of Stanford University. He had just turned forty years old.

He immediately built a shiny new marine research facility on the tip of the Monterey Peninsula, the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory, modeled after Agassiz’s summer camp on Penikese Island.

Unhindered by financial constraints, at Stanford David commissioned fish-collecting expeditions to the places he had only been able to dream of, and map, as a boy. To Samoa he went, and to Russia, Cuba, Hawaii, Albania, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Greece, and beyond. Overall they collected and gave names to around one thousand new fish species, and many more piling higher and higher inside the lab at Stanford.

And then at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, the San Francisco earthquake struck. In just forty-seven seconds, decades of David's work got eliminated. Eels severed by shelves. Blowfish popped by shards of glass. For many of those specimens left intact, hundreds of them, nearly a thousand, their holy name tags had scattered all over the laboratory floor, his meticulously named fish had become an amorphous unknown again.

So what did David do?

To prevent the piles of fish from decaying, he had his crew water-hose them day and night before the ethanol he ordered arrived.

Then he sorted out the fish he could recognize, and sewed their name tag directly to their body. To its throat. To its tail. To its eyeball. So they would never get separated again.

David served Stanford as president until 1913 and then chancellor until his retirement in 1916. He died at his home on the Stanford campus after suffering a series of strokes over two years on September 19, 1931.

authenticity

In the fifties and early sixties, American TV shows idealized traditional families and suburban life so much people had an undercurrent fear that they might become a cookie cutter human being defined by the externals.

Today, with selfies, social media branding, and managing your profile on LinkedIn and Facebook, everyone seems to have become their own unabashed promoter. The new social mantra "Follow your passions. Do what you love" enjoins everyone to have some dream about their life and you are authentic to the extent that you doggedly pursue that vision as though it were your essence.

What does authenticity mean, and what does it mean to live authentically?  

  

In Camus' novel "The Stranger", the protagonist commits a senseless murder but, in the end, is sentenced to death largely because he refuses to tell the officials and others what they want to hear, namely that he is sorry, which he isn't. 

"In order to be, never try to seem," that seems to be one stern advise Camus wants to tell us through the story. 

Is there, however, more to authenticity than just "don't pretend"? Though Sartre tries, he can find no precise distinction between sincerity and authenticity as one might differentiate between tables and chairs, nor is it possible to generate an unambiguous criterion for deciding whether or not we are leading authentic lives. Perhaps like all ingredients of inner life, authenticity is something you just can't put on a scale and tell how much it weighs.

Etymologically speaking, both in Latin and in German, the idea of authenticity comes from the notion of making something your own. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, many 19- and 20-year-olds, many of them first-generation college students whose parents had to dig deeply to send them to college, boarded buses southbound to help register voters and fight racism, knowing full well the maelstrom of violence they were driving into. That was authenticity on two counts. They were not taking marching orders from their parents or society in general, and they were acting on their own conviction.

"Be true to yourself", then, sounds like one great simple way to be authentic. The trick, and the trap to avoid, though, is how not to become a narcissist or self-righteous bigot following such easily turned self-serving moral guideline. After all, it could be argued that there were millions of Nazis who did just that, and hundreds of thousands of Americans who gave their last breath defending slavery.

"If authenticity is being true to ourselves ... then perhaps we can only achieve it integrally if we recognize that this sentiment connects us to a wider whole," says contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor in his book "The Ethics of Authenticity".

Relational creatures as we humans are, it could be that becoming our own person is only possible via strong bonds to something outside of ourselves. For Kierkegaard it is God, while Taylor submits this connection can take the form of binding yourself to a "political cause or tending to the earth."

Maybe we have taken this all wrong. Authenticity is not something we can work at, all we can do is to make efforts to avoid inauthenticity. So, for example, being vulnerable makes you closer to authenticity, while "faking it until you make it" makes you less so. 

Or maybe authenticity is something we were born with, that got lost/buried under layers of layers of pseudo knowledge as we got "educated" by culture, society and lots of our own "self-help" efforts. The task then is to shake off the chaff and shackles and get back to the original, "返璞歸真," as the Taoists would say. 

Or follow a plan that is there from the start, to become who you truly are in God, as Kierkegaard would say.

* This writing is based on Chapter "Authenticity" of the book "The Existentialist's Survival Guide".

faith

I was out of town when the Philosophy Club group discussed the chapter "Faith" from the book "The Existentialist's Survival Guide" a few months ago. Now I've re-read it, my take is as follows:

The chapter started with the author--a non-practicing Catholic--recalling one accidental visit to a church one late afternoon when his original intent was to a bar, and could not work up a single candle at the chapel to light up for his long deceased father. As he left the church, feeling silly with such non-serendipitous event, a question nevertheless popped up in his head: Do we lose our faith or we push it away?

It's easy for a modern man to revolt against a faith whose truths are based on the "indisputable facts" of virgin birth and bodily resurrection. The argument that "God is beyond human understanding" sounds hollow and apologetic. Religion as a category could well be written off as an antiquated invention by humans for humans, their needs for assurance and protection at basic, and meaning and purpose at higher up psycho-emotional-spiritual levels.

For existentialists such as Camus, the conflict between our need for meaning and a meaningless world is the absurd. His prescription is that we accept the futility of our innermost desires and remain faithful to that recognition of the absurd.

Kierkegaard disagrees. In his book "Fear and Trembling" he writes:

"If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? ... If a generation passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as wind through the desert, an unthinking and unproductive performance, if an eternal oblivion, perpetually hungry, lurked for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrench that away from it--how empty and devoid of consolation life would be!"

"But precisely for that reason it is not so," Kierkegaard adds. That is, there is a God who watches over us and therefore life is good.

For Kierkegaard, the need for God does not reveal a lack. Just because our belief in God stems from a need for God, it doesn't follow that God does not exist. Or, as C. S. Lewis puts it: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Faith then, according to Kierkegaard, is:

A private affair between the individual and God, whose edict may create a "teleological suspension of the ethical," such as the story of Abraham binding his son Isaac on the altar shows.

An offense to the understanding. Jesus was not a sage with a message about teaching us to love one another, but a rebel whose words and acts offended the religious orders of the day.

The right framework for true self-knowledge. True-self is a particular, always in flux, always in becoming. Without God in the picture, it can easily lose hold of itself.

Not standard answers or sure-handed practices. Where there is certainty, there is no risk, and where there is no risk, there is no faith.

In the end, faith is trust. When reality slams the door on our fingers, we either wince and try to sustain trust in God, or we let go of him, as though God were a friend who betrayed us, when in truth it is we who push him away.

love

The Philosophy Club meetup group I've been attending since last year has focused their discussions on topics from the book "The Existentialist's Survival Guide" by Gordon Marino in the past few months. Due to the on-going pandemic, the meetup was canceled this week but we were encouraged to continue sharing our thoughts in alternative ways possible. So I wrote and shared with the group my take on the chapter titled "Love":

As usual, Mr. Marino meanders through thoughts of various existentialist writers, along with his personal episodic moments-of-truth stories to touch on many aspects of the subject: What is love (in layman's terms and in categories: erotic, brotherly, selfless), are we capable of love (or we can only love ourselves), guilt feelings (that seem unresolvable in a world where forgiveness is no longer possible), are we as different as we appear (or really the same deep down), does true love exist (maybe once in a few centuries?), the emotional side of love (the tenderness of “open wound”), etc.

The main idea he then spent the latter third of the chapter, using Dostoyevsky's “Underground Man” story to explain, is that one has to deem oneself lovable before they can accept others' love and be capable of loving others as well.

Two issues on making thyself lovable: how to get rid of those self loathing feelings (guilt, shame, unworthiness, inadequacy, etc.), and how to avoid becoming a narcissist on the way to achieving self-love?

The answer to the first can be theological: a third party (God, religion) that can absolve the guilt/shame/unworthiness complex one has; or rational: by realizing all humans are equal, comparison is unnecessary, none is superior nor inferior to any other, therefore self loathing is unnecessary .

As to how not to become a narcissist while trying to love thyself, the book doesn't give a direct answer, but seems to indicate a non-human reference, an out-of-this-world role model is needed, so one can turn their egotistic eyes away from other human beings who they treat as mirrors of their own reflections anyway, and stop the endless struggle to establish themselves as a subject among others trying to do the same who are as flawed as they are in the first place.

And how can/does one love another person? Again a theological answer coming from Kierkegaard, is through the “command” of God, that asks His believers to "presuppose there is love in others" and do “love works” to uncover it; while a secular, existentialistic, but also Kierkegaardian answer, in my opinion, is treat it as a mystical goal that's unachievable but needs to be pursued anyway, all the way, by faith.