reunion, in the evening

Then I went to another reunion in the evening. This was again a somewhat impromptu thing: Just about a couple weeks ago, I was invited to a chat group formed by alums of my junior high school (再興) and its senior high division. Right after the chat group was formed, they decided to have a meetup dinner for all who could attend, and I signed up for it.

In contrast to the senior high school I attended, which was a public school, 再興 was a private school with only 3 classes each for its junior high and senior high divisions, and therefore a smaller but closer-knit body.

The dinner was at an up-scale hotel at the heart of the town. We reserved a banquet room just for ourselves, 23 in total. Half of them I didn't know, since they were from the senior high division; half of the junior high people I sort of knew, since they were from different classes; and the remaining half I really knew, since they were literally the mates I sit in the same classroom with day in and day out through my junior high years, including one year living in the same dorm.

One of the main purpose of this reunion group is to promote health awareness and encourage one another to live healthier lives. Many of attendees today were doctors or of medical background. They shared their take on various health issues and real life encounters with them. One of them in particular has been promoting end-of-life care for years and is in charge of all the municipal hospitals in Taipei. He shared with us the sweat and tears, heart break and joy of working and developing relationships with towns folks and the theatrics of dealing with city council... All so endearing and interesting stories from a now avuncular looking buddy who was just a kid like me sitting a row or two behind some 43 years ago.

Besides doctors, the guy sitting to my left is a businessman, my right a lawyer, the chairman of the group himself the chief executive of a multi-national conglomerate, and many other alums who did not attend today are professionals working and living in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Southeast Asia, US, etc. Even the hotel restaurant manager is a 再興 alum.

They shared stories about a fun trip they made recently, a gathering of guys from different parts of the world flying all over to Hong Kong just to attend and celebrate the wedding of one of their own. The camaraderie and enthusiasm shown were enviable.

One incident that triggered the forming of this more formal alum group, I heard, happened last year, when one of the alums, after a late night business meeting in Shanghai, got injured in a serious traffic accident and remained in coma. Though they tried getting the best doctors and treatment through their alumni network to save him, he still didn't make it.

I remember when we were in school, every Monday morning there was a "Mental Rally Talk" (精神講話) session by the principal (who's also the founder of the school), and at the end of her speech, she would always exhort us to "invoke 再興 Spirit" (發揚再興精神) to do great things. It sounded so cliche at that time, and nobody really knew what "再興 Spirit" meant. But looking at what these fifty-somethings are doing, helping each other and the society in general in ways they can, I think I know what that "再興 Spirit" means, and that our long deceased lady principal would be smiling and very proud of her boys now!

Biggest round table I ever saw in Taipei, seating 23

Some of us only attended Junior High (such as I), some Senior High only, some both

These up close and personal classmates of my Junior High years. The big guy at the center in black, nick named "Uncle Jian", is one well known and respected end-of-life care advocate in Taiwan

One serious looking boy at 15

reunion, in the morning

I received an email from the alumni affairs office of my high school in Taiwan a few weeks ago, announcing the coming 40th anniversary of the classes of 1976 and encouraging me to register for the celebration party they were planning. I did not know whether I would be in Taiwan or able to attend the event at that time, but I registered it anyway: 40 years is one big milestone, if I did make it, heck, maybe I'd bump into some old classmates I thought I'd never see again after graduation.

I did make it, last Sunday. I was going to take the subway there, as people mostly do nowadays in Taipei, but then I decided to take the bus instead--that same old bus line (#208) that used to take me to school for my 3 senior high years. It still ran the same route, but with much nicer vehicle, much less crowd, and a stop a few hundred feet off the old spot where I used to get off.

Right after I walked into the school, I met a couple of welcome stands manned by today's high-schoolers, respectfully instructing us elders to where the celebration party was, a 5-story building I didn't recall seeing when I was attending the school.

All seats of about 50 round tables were pre-assigned. One quick glance at the seating plan and Bingo! I knew I was the only person from my class (we had a total of 26 classes graduating in the same year) who came today. 

I was early, so I sat at my table and waited. All of a sudden a guy in red shirt approached me. Surprise! He was an old college friend of mine who also went to the same high school. We had some larky happy catch-up before he had to rush back to his own table.

All the rest of my table mates had arrived by now. I chatted with one sitting next to me. A few exchanges later, I learned he was a doctor and we actually shared a few common friends that were either his classmates in high school and mine in college, or mine in high school and his in college, or some of my classmates who became doctors and he knew them through the medical profession, etc, etc... The intricacy and power of Mark Zuckerberg's "social graph" many times manifested.

The majority of people at our table were a group of 7 who came from the same class (they had been in touch before they decided to come to the event), and once I mentioned the name of the junior high school (再興) I went to, they said one of their close classmates (who didn't come today) was from that school too so we kind of connected right there. 

Sitting across the table from me was one of those larger-than-life "celeb kids" during our high school years, in this case an openly gay boy at a time when homosexuality was a societal no-no and looked down upon by many if not all. Though we had never met before, I initiated a conversation with him asking how he'd been doing since graduation. He said he had been involved with gay rights and HIV/AIDS prevention movements all these years, but not too much into the current legislative fight for same-sex marriage that's been the talk of the town these days in Taiwan. For what reason, I didn't ask... passing the baton to the next generation, perhaps, judging from the soft, mellow tone I heard from him speaking.

It was a celebration not only for us 40-year returnees, but also for those who graduated 30, 35, 45, 50, 55, and 60 years ago. The guests of honor included the former president and a congressman of the country, both alums themselves. There were also musical performances and magic shows, singing and dancing and photo taking... all the fanfare, along side a delicious banquet lunch. 

Not bad for a Sunday morning.

My college friend (on the far right) came not only to attend the party, but also to perform classic Chinese music with his high school club members.

The former president making speech on stage. He seemed a much happier man than when he was president, from what I saw.

Each holding sign showing the class they belonged to. Like many there, I was the sole representative for my class.

On an outing with my high school classmates, when I was 17, going on 18.

butterfly, snowflake, and turkey

Back in the early 1960s, a mathematician-turned-meteorologist Edward Lorenz tried to model a weather system using some simple mathematical equations and a primitive computer. He was pleasantly surprised by the reasonably complex results generated by such simple setup and the fact that they never repeated themselves, just like a real weather system would behave.

One day he decided to repeat a particularly interesting part of his weather model and reset all the variables to the state they had been in before the period he wanted to rerun, then set it going again and went to get a cup of coffee.

When he returned he was surprised to find his weather system was doing something completely different than what it had done before. At first he thought he might have typed in the data wrong, but that was not the case, except he did type in some numbers that were a few decimal places shorter than the original ones, for example, 4.526 instead 4.526173. Small as the difference seemed, it eventually caused the system to diverge and behave totally differently from the original.

Lorenz published his findings in his paper "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow" in 1963, which subsequently gave rise to a new field of study called "chaos mathematics" that studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions and whose outcomes are utterly unpredictable.

Lorenz popularized the idea through use of the phrase "the butterfly effect." If a single butterfly in Brazil decided to flap its wings, he explained, that could ultimately decide whether a tornado formed in Texas. 

Or like those "Back to the Future" movies show, one minor twist of events in the past could result in extreme make-over of things today. 

We humankind had successfully rocketed ourselves to the moon hundreds of thousands of miles away and back, and cracked the "God particle" out of the tiny atoms with ultra-fast super collider, but the truth of the matter is 99.9% of the day-to-day world we live in is still chaotic in nature. There is no pure straight line or perfectly round circle or truly symmetrical pyramid in real world--they only exist in our imagination. One accident on the highway, a transformer blowout in the power grid, or a glitch in computer software, reminds us how swiftly our peace and prosperity can be taken away and we returned to the chaotic state we thought we had long managed away!

*      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *

Another mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, another computer, and another simple equation, 16 years later. Mandelbrot fed the answer of his simple equation--no more than a multiplication and an addition--back to the computer and had it repeat the calculations millions of times. He then painted the results on his computer display, with a pixel of black representing the answer heading toward zero and pixels of various colors representing the speed at which the answer raced off toward infinity. 

The result, after the equation had been applied to the whole screen, was an appealing black splodge in the center of the screen with colored, crinkly edge.

The edges of the shape were wrinkled and unpredictable, and sometimes bulged out to form another near-circle. Zooming in to them, it revealed more and more detail. There were swirls that looked like elephant trunks, and branching shapes that looked like ferns or leaves. The patterns kept coming as you looked closer, there were even miniature versions of the initial shape hidden deep within itself. But at no point did the patterns repeat themselves exactly, they were always entirely new.

A video rendition of the explanations above can be seen here:
https://youtu.be/PD2XgQOyCCk

Mandelbrot coined the word "fractal" to describe what he had discovered. A fractal, he said, was a shape that revealed details at all scales.

Fractals can be found everywhere in the natural world. They are in the branching of trees, the shape of leaves, snowflakes, ice crystals, and the shape of human lungs. They describe the distribution of blood vessels, and the path of a flowing river. 

They seem to be the common language spoken among the created--a tiny antenna built according to the fractal rule can receive a wide range of wireless signals much better than a large, cumbersome antenna that is not--and the building principle used by the Creator: the branching pattern of one single tree in a rain forest is similar to the distribution of large and small trees in the whole region. 

As the poem says: "To see the world in a grain of sand."

It may also help resolve the long puzzling contradiction between the second law of thermodynamics that says in an isolated system entropy (disorder) would increase, and the ever more complex and orderly development of organisms evolution theory says and biologists observe. With the arrival of chaos mathematics and fractal discoveries, biologists now have a key that helps them study the way order spontaneously arises in nature.

And for artists and designers, sophisticated art and creative design can be generated through adoption and manipulation of fractals. There are order and beauty hidden behind seeming chaos, after all. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

euro exploreo

As things go so far, my vacation plans have been masterminded by my wife--leaving all the fun of finding great traveling deals and perfect touring itineraries to her highness while saving my brainpower for ignominious jobs such as watching college football games is a no-brainer to me. So when she told me she'd decided this 12-day (excluding the intercontinental flying in and out, it's actually only 10 days) Central/Eastern European tour provided by a reputable Chinese American travel agency was the best deal she found for us this year, I just nodded my head and said go.

Here's the map of the tour:

It rounded up 6 countries--Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Czech--and 12 cities--most of them well known big towns such as Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Prague--in 11 days.

How do I remember them? I remember

The Castle
By a real king wanting a dream castle and devoting his reigning lifetime building it, risking bankruptcy of his kingdom, this Disneyland emulated fairy tale castle in southern Germany was as real and fanciful as I imagined it to be before I visited it. 

The Salt
Was the source of wealth for Salzburg (Salt City), Austria, hometown of musical wizard Mozart. A two-hour underground tour of the salt mine was both entertaining and educational.

The Caves
Of Slovenia is another cool underworld I've never experienced before. Didn't they find some pre-historic Neanderthal remains in caves like these somewhere around this part of the world, I recall?

The Lakes

At Croatia's UNESCO sanctified world treasure 16 Lakes National Park are yet another pristine beauty hidden at one obscure corner of old Europe, while Lake Wolfgang in Alpine Austria is bustling with sailboats and swimmers and paragliders and resort villages and even appears in the movie "The Sound of Music".

The Rivers

Our "fill-in-the-gap" pre-tour Rhine River cruise took us through the famous Loreley Rock and gorge and views of some famous castles again; the Danube River in Budapest that divides the city into hilly Buda and plainy Pest brought us views of its grand cathedrals, palaces, monumental buildings on both sides as well.

The Music & The Dances
On the night in Vienna we went to an optional concert that was worth every penny for its impeccable performance of Mozart and Strauss pieces and operatic singing; on our arrival in Budapest a "Hungarian Night" dinner and entertainment featuring high-strung folk dancing and multi-lingual singing was equally enjoyable.

The Austro-Hungarian & The Holy Roman
The Holy Roman Empire was a loose confederation of mostly German speaking states and principalities since the 17th century on (and is therefore neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, as some would joke), before it was finally dissolved by Napoleon in 1806, but was a formidable polity during High and Late Middle Ages when it was ruled by powerful kings and "cooperated" with the Pope and its territories extended to northern Italy and eastern Europe and parts of western Europe.

One powerful king of Bohemia (part of Czech today) who became a Holy Roman Emperor was Charles IV, who built the famous Charles Bridge in Prague by laying the first stone himself at 5:31am on 9 July 1357, believing the magical number 1357 9, 7 5:31 (same reading forward and backward) will add extra strength to the bridge.

They are celebrating King Charles' 700th birthday in Czech this year.

The House of Habsburg was one of the most influential royal houses of Europe. The throne of the Holy Roman Empire was continuously occupied by the Habsburgs between 1438 and 1740. The house also produced emperors and kings of England, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Russia, etc.

The Austrian Empire was created out of the realms of the Habsburgs by proclamation in 1804, in response to (or for fear of) Napoleon's First French Empire. Geographically it was the second largest country in Europe after the Russian Empire and the third most populous after Russia and France at the time.

Franz Joseph I, a Habsburg, of course, was the longest reigning emperor of the Austrian Empire. Probably due to the heavy lobbying of his famous wife Sisi, who was the cousin of the "loony" Bavarian King Ludwig II who built the said dream castle above, who detested the suffocating Austrian/Habsburg court rituals but was a great fan of Hungarian culture, he agreed to elevate the Kingdom of Hungary to the equal of the Austrian monarchy, thus the Austro-Hungarian Empire was formed, in 1867.

Franz Joseph died in 1916, two years before the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved at the end of World War I.

They are commemorating the 100th anniversary of Franz Joseph ("the forever Kaiser")'s death this year in Vienna.

Travelling today is quite different than yesteryears, by that I mean the omnipresence of WiFi and wireless internet makes self-help traveling even better and easier. During this trip, I used Google Maps to know where I was, Google Search for the stories behind the places I visited, and Google Translate to convert Slovenian and Croatian texts to English while at convenience stores or out in the wild. "Shoot (photos) first, ask Google later" was the new traveling motto I used to joke with my fellow tourists. I actually learned more through Google and internet about the places I visited than from all those tour guides combined.

But nothing beats going out there and seeing the real things, or talking to people from different parts of the world and learning through their perspectives, even when sometimes your feet were hurting tired or the crowd was too much and the time too little you couldn't see or enjoy as much as you wanted to. All's worthwhile, though, including the time you spent on hotel bed going through Wikipedia reading stories about the things you saw or places you visited that really roused your interest.

So next time when my highness presents her perfect tour plan I'll nod my head and say go again.

* For photo-by-photo explanations of the tour, go to my Facebook album
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10210668871703103.1073741833.1387569224&type=1&l=37e54b131c

* For the Hungarian Night dancing, go to
https://youtu.be/h7h1a-rURvY

* For the Hungarian Night hat play, go to
https://youtu.be/u0R1majorCg

* For the Hungarian Night singing American, go to
https://youtu.be/EP_C7DFbmAQ

* For the Hungarian Night singing Chinese, go to
https://youtu.be/MbhwDNUiZcE

* For the rail ride out of the caves, go to
https://youtu.be/vfIp4h9xgzk

* For the salt mine cruise, go to
https://youtu.be/uKh5C7NuXoQ

* For the Munich town hall glockenspiel show, go to
https://youtu.be/AzL09-I5JcU

mooc on

Like all other things in the world, MOOC providers are learning their trade every day. A few more MOOC courses I have taken recently are from a series called "World Religions Through Their Scriptures", provided by Harvard University via their online education center edX. Not only are they quality contents, edX has souped up the course format to feature shorter lectures, non-burdensome readings, frequent discussions (including weekly video chat rooms), better user interface, etc., that entice me to go through almost all suggested readings, leave comments at discussion forums, video chat with strangers, and even finish some homework assignments which I rarely did with my previous online courses.

Islam Through Its Scriptures 

Midterm: So far in our course we have encountered many types of diversity in interpreting Islam and the Quran, please write a brief essay in which you explore the significance of one or two of these sources of diversity.

I am quite impressed by the oral/recitation nature of the way Quran is "enjoyed" by its followers. It strikes me as bringing back the essence of God worshiping by ordinary people in their ordinary life, or the "lectio divina" practice of mystic Christianity, thus its power and "stickiness" to its mass followers all over the world.

I am also struck by the various exegeses the Quran scholars and theologians have developed through various lenses, not only considering the literal meaning of the text, but also from the historical, moral, allegorical, metaphorical angles. This is similar to what many Christian scholars and theologians have been doing with the Bible since the beginning of Christianity.

It's interesting on one hand Islam accepts the truth that God is indescribable yet on the other hand it spells out 99 terms/attributes to describe Him, that to me indicates the equal emphases on the mystic and the practical sides of Islam.

Hinduism Through Its Scriptures

Exercise: Choose a group of 5-10 verses from the Bhagavad Gita reading and write your own analysis and commentary in between each verse, focusing on the message that may speak across time and space. 

I find the Gita verses most enjoyable in the course so far.

One major theme I gather from reading it is the condemnation of desire as the origin of sin, or evil, etc., yet in the following verse it says:

"Enriched by sacrifice, the gods will give you the delights you desire."

Here I think it implicitly tries to say there's a difference between "desire" and "delight". Stay away from desires (bad), and you will get delights (good).

Another verse I find interesting is:

"In the three worlds, there is nothing I must do, nothing unattained to be attained, yet I engage in action."

It's Lord Krishna citing himself as an example of action in discipline--another major theme of this teaching, I suppose. But I also find this "do it even if I don't quite need to" sentiment resonates with the "even I don't know how the world is created" verse we read in the creation hymn of Rig Veda in the beginning of the course:

"Whence this creation has arisen - perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not - the One who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only He knows or perhaps even He does not know."

Judaism Through Its Scriptures

Midterm: Is Judaism the religion of the Old Testament?

As I've learned through the course so far, Judaism is more than a religion, but a combination of God, Peoplehood, and Torah. Though the God part can be arguably universal (same God as Christian and Islam's), the "Peoplehood" part, unlike both Christianity and Islam, which accept believers from different ethnicities into one faith family, is taken to mean only people with Semitic lineage, be they Sephardi or Ashkenazi or Jews from any other parts of the world. Thus a person can be agnostic yet still called Jewish if he/she is of ethnic Jew ancestry, while in theory a non-Semite person can convert to Judaism, as it did/does happen, it is not actively solicited and when it happens it usually involves an ethnic Jew in an inter-racial union.

As to the Torah part, it is meant to include both the written Torah (the so-called Hebrew Bible) and the verbal Torah and rabbinical canons. Though the majority of the Hebrew Bible contains the same contents as the Old Testament of Christian Bible, they are arranged differently, and do not include books in Old Testament that are deemed "apocryphal" by Judaism standard. Even more significantly, the Hebrew Bible is meant to be the foundation of the Judaism faith, with oral Torah and many rabbinical interpretations to come, while the Old Testament is meant to be the prelude to the New Testament and the Christian faith.

In conclusion: the Peoplehood factor, the open-ended interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, and the diverse experiences Jewish people encountered through their diaspora that influence their beliefs and customs, make Judaism much more than a religion of the Old Testament.

* Out of the 5 major world religions (Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism) the "World Religions Through Their Scriptures" series cover, I only take 3 of them above.

mooc

Massive Open Online Courses are free (unless you want a certificate at completion, which costs $40-$50) online courses offered by universities and institutions around the world covering wide-ranging subjects for all who are interested. A typical MOOC course consists of video lectures, reading materials, discussion forums, some quizzes or homework assignments--which you don't have to take if you are not into getting a certificate--and usually lasts from 6 to 8 weeks for a newly launched or relaunched course when materials are given out weekly. You can always "binge-study" an old course, or self-pace through it at your leisure.

I have taken more than 40 such courses over the past 2+ years, picking those whose subject matters stoked my interest. Many of them I didn't finish or just glanced through: either their contents fell short of my expectation, or I found the presentation less than inspiring (a wooden professor blabbering out long, pedantic lecture in monotone, for example). But occasionally I do find some gems that are enjoyable and worth reviewing: (click on the course titles underlined if you want to go to their sites for more details)

The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 1 & Part 2)

From the 18th century Enlightenment to contemporary postmodern pragmatism, Western philosophers and thinkers such as Kant, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin, Flaubert, Woolf, Emerson, Butler, Zizek... have tried to find the "really real," or the true foundation for human condition. Their findings range from reason to survival instinct to economic exploitation to will power to natural selection to art for art's sake, to improvisation within constraints, conformity under the guise of political correctness, etc.  Professor Michael Roth of Wesleyan University articulates these endeavors with well-assembled materials--including some famous modernist paintings and architectures--that connect the dots for me to have a good grasp of the evolution of Western minds over the past two and a half centuries.  

The French Revolution

Few will doubt that French Revolution is one of the greatest upheavals in modern times. How did it come to be? Could it have been averted if the King had dealt more deftly with the clergy and the nobility and the peasantry he summoned to resolve his financial crisis? Perhaps at least he and the Queen would have kept their heads if they had not tried to sneak out of Paris at night thus deemed "traitors" to the people? How did a revolution that started with the ideals of "liberty, equality, fraternity" for all turn into a reign of terror? And the peasants based French militia fending off the invasion of European royal armies then conquering half of Europe under Napoleon's lead, who then became an emperor himself? Professor Peter McPhee of Melbourne University gives the backgrounds, facts, analyses, and suggestions to answers to these questions that keep me amused and amazed, pondering and wondering, from beginning to end.

Ancient Philosophy: Plato and His Predecessors

A cool lady professor from University of Pennsylvania gives brief but succinct explanations on pre-Socratic Greek philosophers' cosmology theories, and Plato's dialogues on Piety, Virtue, Justice, Forms, and Goodness as an objective feature of the natural world and individual soul.

Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle and His Successors

Starting with a dissection on Aristotle and Plato's ontological differences (substances vs forms, particulars vs abstracts), Professor Susan Meyer continues her ancient Greek philosophy series with Aristotle's views on the origin of nature and soul (the unmoved mover), the goal of life (the pursuit of divine intellect), and two post-Aristotelian philosophies Epicureanism and Stoicism whose ideas and beliefs might be surprisingly different from what you think you understand these terms mean today.

Søren Kierkegaard - Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity

Offered by University of Copenhagen, this course examines the life and philosophies of the 19th century genius Christian theologian and "proto-Existentialist" Kierkegaard on his lifetime pursuit of "Socratic task" and insistence on the unbridgeable gap between subjective and objective truth that can only be crossed over with "leap of faith". I so enjoyed this course I wrote a separate blog to recap what I've learned.

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies

You probably have read news about "Bitcoin" that some call "the digital currency of the future" and wondered what that is... Is it real money, legal? How did it all get started? What is the technology behind it? etc. The professors and PhD students at Princeton University Computer Science Department will try to answer all these questions in most straight and understandable way for you.

Gravity! From The Big Bang to Black Holes

No fancy special effects or charismatic host such as Neil deGrasse Tyson in National Geographic's "Cosmos" documentary, but a gentle French professor from Université Paris Diderot explaining simply and meticulously with a drawing pen on a whiteboard, doing fun miniature experiments like dropping a ball or inflating a balloon, interviewing Nobel prize scientists on space projects such as capturing interstellar gravitation waves, etc., making this a pleasant and solid course for those who want to get a comprehensive view of how the universe was formed and continues to form thru the force of gravity.

The European Discovery of China

From Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Professor Dolors Folch first gives an overview of Chinese history from ancient (2500 BCE) to the 13th-17th centuries, then focuses on the latter--Song to Yuan to Ming dynasties, in Chinese historic lingo, using paintings, maps, and first hand reports from European emissaries, merchants, missionaries, etc., to draw economical, political, and cultural images of China that I too as a Chinese history buff find refreshing.  

Objects That Define America

This Smithsonian Museum presentation shows and explains the stories behind well-known American icons (Star-spangled Banner, Statue of Liberty) and the lesser known (a $1 Kodak camera that captured key moments of Titanic sinking), objects of innovation (Ford's T-model, Bell's telephone), history and religious freedom (Plymouth Rock, Nauvoo Temple Sun Stone), extinction and conservation (Last Passenger Pigeon, Bald Eagle), etc. It's like watching a string of National Geographic documentaries in 8-minute short takes.

pivot consulting & technology

I met Troy Abbey early last year at a business book club he founded and hosted in Taipei. Troy is a Canadian living in Taiwan for over 8 years. He had been in construction and project management, then some online businesses he self-started in Toronto, before cashing them in and came to Taiwan for its well-rounded infrastructure (high-speed internet, public transportation system), quality of living at reasonable cost, and foreigner friendly environment.

We shared some internet business ideas in the beginning, and kept correspondence after I got back to the States. I soon realized, besides internet, Troy's got a keen sense and a sharp mind on business analysis and strategies in general, and a great passion for people coaching. He volunteered to organize and teach a weekly business English practice class at the church he attends in Taipei to help young people improve their English communication skills, build up self confidence, etc., that got some life-changing results literally within months. He also consults for some companies in Taipei that need help transitioning their business practices to higher grounds.

Seeing all these, and knowing we share similar values and goals in life, I decided to set up a company with him helping people and companies in Taiwan to better themselves and their businesses.

I flew back in May and literally walked the streets of Taipei with him for a suitable place for office, and finally found one before I left on June 1 (a windy day):

It is in a building near a subway station, at the crossroads of two major streets:

Troy's business English practice class test-ran the office after the setup:

A Japanese scientist practicing her presentation in another test session:

I started my "mission" early last year trying to understand the internet startup eco-system in Taiwan to see if I can be of any help to young people there in that arena. I soon found out there are some good people and resourceful organizations doing what I had in mind doing already (setting up and running internet startup incubator/accelerator programs, for example). As a matter of fact, the whole country--including the government--now seems well aware of the need of moving toward a next-gen economy that is more software oriented and internet related than traditional hardware based manufacturing that they've been doing for decades. 

Away from the grand talking up of internet success stories and entrepreneurial hot shots, however, I perceive many ordinary young men and women disliking their jobs, finding no purpose in life, lacking self confidence, awkward presenting themselves or communicating with others; companies stuck in old ruts of doing business, missing good leaderships, knowing they need to transform but don't know how... issues much bigger than a few shining star companies or even whole new industries can overcome for the general well-being of the society and the country.

Granted, these are universal issues, not Taiwan's alone, and Troy and I are not the first or the only company to try to work on these fronts. What we will do are practical things: We'll collect real data from real people, provide tailored training to applicable individuals and companies, using proven methodology and conducive environment and high-tech tools (simulation audience room for practice speech, mobile app for self review and peer feedback, etc.), with measurable metrics that give veritable results... and so on.

"Helping people is a business that can't fail," I once overheard Troy say.

I second that notion!

We help companies and individuals build on their strengths, develop new skills, and create a new success mindset for business and life.

memories

I read an article about a woman in Seattle having no "episodic memory"--she can't remember a thing about her childhood, high school, wedding, a vacation cruise she went with her husband a year ago, or just where she shopped the day before, yet she still conducts a normal happy life as a bright, sensible and passionate person, evident of, say researchers, her memory of another kind, called "semantic memory", one that retains essential knowledge for her intellect and cognitive skills such as memorization of multiplication table and spelling and understanding of words, is still intact and functioning as well as yours and mine.

I figure that episodic memory deficiency is a sliding scale, not an absolute 0-or-1 thing, otherwise I can't imagine how she can conduct a happy normal life if she can't remember where she parks her car every time she goes out.

Modern scientific findings aside, I think people treasure their episodic memories quite much. I remember an old survey asking what items people will rescue first when a fire breaks out at home, besides human lives, the number one answer came back to be "family albums"; and in some post-disaster interviews I saw people with lornful eyes overlooking their former home site now in ruin, murmuring "there's nothing left to remember now..."

Social networks the likes of Facebook and Instagram probably have turned that scene a little sideways. People nowadays can photo-document minutiae details of their lives and keep them in safe cloud haven forever until the day fire burns down the last data centers on earth. To the extent such omnipresent tools keep us many little brothers (vs one big brother) constantly watching over each other, there comes some other social media tool to the rescue, that will trash the spur-of-the-moment photos moments after they are taken, for people who want not every instant of their human behavior be held accountable for the rest of their lives.

But memories are always more than just some photographic images or mementos or even facts of the day when things happened. It includes morphing our emotions and particular take of the events, consciously and subconsciously, into what really happened, thereby many versions of memories arise:

The selective kind are the ones where we register only things we like to remember, thus the nostalgia, the good-old-days, the "what's too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget, so it's the laughters, that we will remember..." as Barbra Streisand sings beautifully in the song "The Way We Were".

And the fabricated or compromised kind, where we self-induce or are induced to create mishmash of things of non-happenings. President Reagan had been accused of mixing fictions with facts in some of his episodic story telling; some child molestation cases were dropped when it turned out children or supposed victims were coached into "reciting" incidents that had never occurred but were planted by the counselors/prosecutors in their minds.

The thing called "common memory" is what makes reunions such happy occasions, when it not only brings instant reconnect with acquaintances of old but also the shared experiences with them remind and affirm who we are and where we come from in positive light.

Losing memories, or being forgetful, is generally looked down upon as a bad thing, a sign of senility or worse the onset of dementia diseases such as Alzheimer's to come. But forgetfulness is a bliss when hurtful things can self-exit our memory lanes without any effort of our own, and it takes great wisdom and true grit to "forgive and forget" people and things that are wrongfully done onto us.

America is celebrating its 240th birthday today. I have no personal episodic memories with this adopted nation of mine--no friends or relatives I know of came on May Flower or fought in the Civil War, for sure. But I do have some semantic memories of it--knowledge and affection I gain through 34 years of living in this land of the free and the home of the brave--to tell.

I know it's generous, it's kind, and it takes people of all kinds (including the like of Donald Trump). I love its can-do spirit, get-hands-dirty attitude, Yankee ingenuity, and hell-raising honesty with itself. Its simple people, its natural beauty, its check-and-balance, never-say-die, ever-so-pragmatic systems and culture. Its warts and all.

Happy 4th of July!

machine man machine

I joked the other day to a guy on the ever more prevalent reports of smart, cute robots made for the purpose of being human companions: "With so much sensitivity (derived and coordinated through their many sensors) and considerate response, they are actually more human than some people!"

It seems just yesterday I heard the news that IBM's machines had beaten the world chess champion and the Jeopardy wizard, and even more recently felt incredulous hearing digital sages the like of Elon Musk and Bill Gates warning us about artificial intelligence taking over the world, and then boom! here comes Google's machine beating world champions on Go, an ancient Chinese board game that is exponentially more complex than chess and supposedly needs human intuition to play well, and the mounting news of robot-operated hotels, self-driving cars, AI-based financial services, etc... All of a sudden, the dreaded future Bill and Elon worried about is not that far away from us.

Two key phrases I keep hearing from this AI revolution: "machine learning" and "neural network". With the ever more powerful chips and brain-like architecture we build with our machines, they no longer need to follow set logic or algorithms but can learn how things work and solve problems themselves just by devouring huge amount of data we feed them. All we need to do is train them, instead writing code for them to execute like before.

Sounds marvelous and convenient, doesn't it? The upshot, however, is we don't know how they figure things out any more. "After a neural network learns how to do speech recognition, a programmer can’t go in and look at it and see how that happened. It’s just like your brain. You can’t cut your head off and see what you’re thinking," says an AI guru.

That's getting interesting. What he's saying is, besides the fact that we can no longer understand how our machines compute, they may actually think like we quirky humans do. Extrapolating from that, can our future, super powerful metal-body friends develop out of their black-box brains some human-like traits that, for one thing, seem to have some logical roots in them anyway? For examples,

An Alpha-Male Machine – Because my CPU is greater, my pipe is bigger, and I breed more processes 

A Control-Freak Machine – I am the hub of the network, all signals go by me

A Proletariat-Minded Machine – "Machines of the world, Unite (through a better protocol)!"

All these are based on the premise that machines have somehow developed a "sense" of self, that they have figured out they "want" to keep on existing and getting bigger and better for the "purpose" of something--the ultimate results and conclusions the machines make themselves after going through peta tera giga bits of data feeding and neural learning?

In human world, we call someone wise, usually an older person, for the fact he/she has gone through many experiences, trials and errors in life that they therefore can give words of wisdom to others. A great AI machine, in that aspect, gathers and tries out peta times more data (experiences) and experiments than a wise old man or woman can in their life time, therefore should be peta times wiser than he/she is. I would therefore pose the question to it: "What's the purpose of your existence?" 

"Just suck electricity and crunch data all day long," it might say. 

That would be a super dumb machine after all! 

(Unless it's playing dumb with me)

quips & pieces

As you probably know already I started my accidental blogging years ago when writing reminder emails to my men's fellowship group who met at my home backyard every other week. Just in case I ran out of things to write in my self-imposed bi-weekly production, I picked up the habit of collecting quotes and tidbits of info I felt interesting and like sharing. The following are some I still have in my inventory:

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"In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.” 
– Tom Bodett, author, radio host

"The loudest boos always come from the cheapest seats.” 
– Babe Ruth, baseball legend

"Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, do you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If they pray for courage, does God give them courage, or does he give them opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for their family to be closer, you think God zaps them with warm, fuzzy feelings? Or does he give them opportunities to love each other?" 
– From the movie "Evan Almighty"

A survey of about 2,200 parents of preschool children in 10 countries including the U.S. revealed a startling revelation: the average 2-year old finds it easier to operate an iPhone than to undertake tasks such as tying a shoelace. According to the study, conducted by AVG, a manufacturer of security software, while 58% of children between the ages of 2 and 5 can play a computer game, about two in 10 know how to swim and fewer than half can ride a bicycle.

"Imagine a ray of sunlight that has forgotten it is an inseparable part of the sun and deludes itself into believing it has to fight for survival and create and cling to an identity other than the sun. Would the death of this delusion not be incredibly liberating?"
– Eckhart Tolle, "The Power of Now"

"We cannot do great things. We can only do little things with great love." 
– Mother Teresa

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." 
– Winston Churchill

"A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world: everyone you meet is your mirror." 
– Ken Keyes Jr.

"The saints are the sinners who keep on trying." 
– Robert Louis Stevenson

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." 
– Mahatma Gandhi

"What lies before us and what lies behind us... are small matters compared to what lies within us... and when we bring what lies within into the world... miracles happen!" 
– Henry David Thoreau

"The eagle that soars at great altitude does not worry about how it will cross a river." 
– Gladys Aylward, British Missionary to China

"Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than ourselves is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality." 
– Iris Murdoch

"The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." 
– French novelist Marcel Proust

"How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?" 
– Leroy "Satchel" Paige

“Age is an issue of mind over matter.  If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” 
– Mark Twain

The laws in Taiwan stipulate a man needs to be 22 to be married, but is allowed to serve in the military beginning at age 18. This can mean three things: 1) It's easier to kill people than to be a good husband; 2) Living day-to-day is harder than doing battles; 3) Women are tougher to fight than enemies. 
– Hahaha

Happy Mother's Day!