time

Time is a most definite and fungible thing. If I ask "do you have the time", you can tell me what time of day it is down to the exact second; if I ask "do you have time", you might answer "yes" or "no" depending on what you imagine I am going to ask you to do.

That's because time is one common commodity everyone thinks they own for free but in turn gives a value point when asked to "spend" it for some reason. Lawyers/consultants charging hourly rates for one thing, you and I saying "I don't want to waste my time on that" for another.

It is a shapeless idea made flesh by concrete events. Imagine being stationed in outer space where nothing moves and you will soon lose the sense of time. Also imagine no error ever occurs when cells in your body duplicate themselves per their DNA instructions, nor any changes (deteriorations) ever occur in your cells, that means at any given moment you are a perfect duplicate of your previous self, a timeless being you have become... Or you might as well be dead already.

Putting down time as a straight line (dimensional axis) in a geometrical diagram is in some people's opinion one crucial abstraction for the development of Western technologies. There is no concept of linear time in China but only shi (時), which means "occasions" or "moments" that people pay attention to to manage their lives around. The notion of time as interval only reached China in the 19th century, following the adoption of the Japanese translation of time as "between-moments"— (時間).

We superimpose spatial concepts onto time and create a calendar system with precise "dateline" that registers the exact point in time an event occurs, but in our human mind everything that happened in the past seemed—like a crumpled house of pancakes—to have happened "just like yesterday". Our holistic experiences of the continuous flow of the past seem to give way to ever fewer still images as our memory recedes.

A "lived time" feels drastically different from the "mechanic time" our watch says. The hour you spend at a doctor's waiting room goes much slower than the one you do at a party. A "flowing" mind loses track of time in its utter enjoyment of doing what it does best, same as the one in "transcendental meditation" that does nothing.

Time waits for no one. Only in an artificial setup—such as a ball game—or a metaphoric speech, can one call a "time-out" to suspend the pre-set event from continuing or gain a semblance of control in their mind. No one can time the stock market to make fortunes all the time, a man-made setup as stock market is, though. 

We might not live to see the end of time, but the beginning of it is seeable already. Astronomers with their telescopes can detect the first light formed after the Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago—called the "cosmic microwave background" (CMB)—that scattered all around the universe today.

Like seeing the world in a grain of sand, we can live eternity in every moment of the present. The kingdom of heaven is in our heart.

https://youtu.be/pDo4kvip-cQ

self

What would you say when people ask you to introduce yourself?

"My name is David, I live in South Orange County, I work in the IT industry..."

That's a macroscopic description of a self, a broad stroke. What's the microscopic version of it? David Hume (Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, 1711-1776) had this reflection: "When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure... a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement..." — An ephemeral, transient entity orienting and changing from moment to moment, yet always identifiable as the same by the outside world, through exterior markers such as looks, gender, age, profession, cultural background, social groupings, consuming habits, etc.

Sometimes the outside world uses these identifiables to exert their efforts on you, like Google or Facebook showing ads for things they think "people like you" will buy, Netflix giving you a list of movies and series they think you'll like to watch based on what they know you have watched. Sometimes you pick these identifiables yourself for your own purpose, to join a social club, to get a senior discount, to play identity politics, for example.

But you are more than these shallow labels of identities say who you are, aren't you? What is my "true self," you ask.

According to Freud's personality theory, there are three parts of self: the id is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories, the super-ego operates as a moral conscience, and the ego is the realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego. These three amigos–the impulsive, the ideal, and the rational–together work and form your psychological self, says the Master.

Kierkegaard, the Danish Christian "proto-Existentialist'', sees it differently. To him, there are only two parts of self: the one you are (physically, emotionally, socially, culturally...) at any given point in time, and the one you can or should be. It is up to us to exercise our freewill to work from the former–the finite, the temporal, to the latter–the infinite, the eternal–that is our true self, submitting to and enlisting help from the divine along the way.

American education system places great emphasis on developing a sense of self-esteem in children, and ours is surely one of the most–if not the most–capitalist driven individualistic countries in the world. Yet we are no less trend following, group mentality people than the rest of the world. The interesting text-book example of "everyone in a party worries about how others see them that no one actually sees anyone else but themselves" exposes one simple truth about human nature, that no matter how much self-worthy feel we have built up around ourselves, we still crave for other people's recognition and appreciation deep down. 

And even though we all understand and accept the fact that people are selfish, no one likes to be called that name. Given the opportunity and the wherewithal, people all want to do good for others, sometimes at the risk of sacrificing their own lives even. Altruism might have snuck into our "selfish gene" eons ago when no one noticed.

Yes I know my body and mind have changed many folds since I was a kid, and there are a thousand things running through my mind at any instant of time, but somehow I still feel I am that same 7-year-old boy lying on the ground watching over the skies wondering what the world was all about decades ago. I like Netflix giving me a list of movie recommendations as they are usually not off the mark too much, but I dislike the idea that filters like what they use to do so have the potential of molding me into a one-dimensional person I hate to be. And yes I know I am unique and I am special, but I still think I am way more the same as the fellow next to me than we are different from each other as human beings. Self-esteem is over-hyped.

la grande chaumière violette, merlin

"La Grande Chaumière Violette" (紫色大稻埕) is a 22 episode, single season Taiwanese TV series I recently finished watching on Netflix.

Set in the historical background of Taiwan between the early 1920's and the end of 1940's, it's a coming-of-age story between two young men, one from a well-to-do tea merchant family the other from poverty, of their mutual love of painting, friends and families, intertwined with the cultural and political upheavals of colonial Taiwan when it was under Japanese rule and shortly after World War II when it was reverted back to Nationalist China. 

What hooked me on watching this "epochal soap opera" for weeks on end may sound silly, but I think it's the nicety of people and the genteel atmosphere of the historical period it portrays that I feel very much akin to, most likely because they were people of my kind, places I came from, and times I can relate to–times my mom and dad grew up in, that a "double nostalgia" came on me to miss both them and the classy, serene times of theirs, even if only in my imaginations.

"Merlin" is another Netflix series I watched while watching "La Grande Chaumière Violette". It is a 5 season, 65 episode long series that also took me weeks to finish (I refrain from binge watching when I can).

It's based on the legendary King Arthur/Camelot epic with particular angles: First off, King Arthur was not the center of the story, Merlin was; Secondly, an evil queen-wannabe and a ruthless king-that-be made up most of the story's backdrop; Finally, in the end, King Arthur did not ride triumphantly with Merlin into the sunset, nor rule Camelot with his kind and wise queen happily ever after...

Each 50 minute episode was a short tale of love and betrayal, fate and destiny, magic and sorcery, a simple plot with enough drama to keep you amused and not feeling cheated, sword-and-buckler fighting and peck-on-the-lips romances with no gory blood shed or lurid sexual encounters. A G-rated entertainment you can feel comfortable watching alone or with company, anytime of the day, with a bowl of popcorn at your hand perhaps.

With pandemic virus running rampant out on the streets, I suspect we all do a little more comfy at-home video watching than usual. What movies or series have you watched lately, that you might like to share with me about? 

f = ma

That's the first thing my high school physics teacher did drawing on the blackboard to start our study on Newton's Laws of Motion in class.

"'f' equals 'force', 'm' means 'mass', and 'a' is 'acceleration', force is the product (mathematical multiplication) of mass and acceleration." 

He went on to draw more definitions (1 Newton = 1 kg • m/s², a "Newton force" is the amount of force required to give a 1-kg mass an acceleration of 1 m/s² speed gain...) and formulae (Vf = Vi + a • t, final velocity is the initial velocity plus the product of time and acceleration...), then lots of "real world applications" where he showcased the many ingenious ways math and these formulae could be used to solve the problems...

I was baffled, not much by the parlay of formulae and math and their clever applications, but more by the very first definition of the law. So, this thing we called "force" in the universe, something I thought I knew–a punch on my face, a tow truck pulling stuff on the road, or, even more dubiously, something I didn't know yet, was product of two numbers, one representing mass (what is that anyway), the other acceleration (that I could comprehend)... Where did all this come from?

Humankind have been trying to understand the world they live in since the day they first gazed at the stars above and looked at the rocks and trees around and wondered what they were and how they came about. At first they assigned spirits or anthropomorphic beings to them so perhaps they could share some emotional binding with them, or they conjectured an "ultimate cause" that gave meaning and purpose to all things existing and happening so they all made sense.

Then came the Enlightenment, when new "natural philosophers" such as Galileo and Descartes established a new way of understanding the physical world by replacing purposive strivings (what Aristotle had called "final" causes) with mathematically formulated laws framed exclusively in terms of mechanical, "efficient" causation. That effort culminated in Newton's Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) where he laid out his laws of motion that formed the foundation of classical mechanics that high school kids like me were required to learn.

But it is just one beautiful, elegant mathematical model that tries to explain the world in an intelligible way, not anything magical or mystical, that my poor puberty head couldn't wrap itself around at that time.

We thought we understood the world pretty well with Newtonian Mechanics then, until we delved into the sub-atomic world where Newtonian laws don't apply any more. So we invented another physical-mathematical model–Quantum Mechanics–to explain what we observe (or cannot observe) there. But then who really understands a world that's made of "quantum entanglement" (spooky action at a distance), "uncertainty principle" (now you see me, now you don't), and particle-wave duality? We are now again awaiting another beautiful, elegant, hopefully "unifying" physical-mathematical model that will explain both macro and micro worlds in words we can understand, if that's possible.

Other than math and logic and geometry, are there ways to understand the world?

Yes, say the theologians/spiritualists: Read the Scriptures, meditate on His words, and the Truth will be revealed to you. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

Yes, say the artists: Look at the beauty in the world, and the secret lies right before you. Ask not "what is the meaning of the world" but "where can I find beauty in the world?"

Yes, say the phenomenologists: We are self-manifesting beings, what we see is manifest to ourselves and our seeing it can be manifest to us. Intellectuality and intelligibility are one and the same, when I view a spider, my mind takes on a new type of being that has the intelligibility of the spider in it, for example.

Is understanding the world such an important thing?

Nah, say the lovers in love to each other: "You are the world to me, that's all I need to know!"

Nah, says Confucius: "Better liking it than knowing it, even better loving it than liking it!" (知之者不如好知者， 好之者不如樂知者). A twisted interpretation, mind you, but you don't need to understand how an internal combustion engine (or Tesla's electric motor) works in order to drive a car or enjoy the ride, do you?

Nah, say I, time to go to bed, a good night's sleep is more important than anything else in the whole wide world, I heard!

and three social enterprises

For this discussion forum titled "Who's Afraid of Citizen Society'' I didn't mess up with the location or the room, as it was held at the one and only conference room in the basement of a well marked building (a university extension) in mid-town Taipei that's just a few minutes' walk away from the subway station I got off.

As I signed in and entered the room, a young lady was standing at center stage explaining how her organization uses a two-prong approach to help farmers in Taiwan: Setting up farmer's markets and online stores to sell farm products, and a news medium devoted to protecting and promoting farmers' rights that are constantly being violated and ignored by various interest groups in the island.

​Some ironies she observed and shared with the audience in reviewing her work through the years since she started the organization in 2011: Political allies that used to fight with them turned into enemies once their party got elected and became in charge of government agricultural policies; the gravest threat to farmers today comes from the green energy industry, whose cause she supports, but who, with the help of the government, is fast taking over and converting precious farmlands into solar fields that wreak havoc on the environment.

The next presentation was from a young man who went back to his hometown at the far-flung corner of metro Taipei and has built a self sustaining micro village that includes a folksy restaurant, an organic tofu factory, a travel service, art studios, a tutoring house, and a job training school over a ten-year period.

​"Education is the key: Many young people today return to their hometown with great dreams and passion to transform the community, only to find they can't even survive there themselves, while local youth continue to leave town because they can't find worthy jobs to keep them there."

"Our tutoring house, job training school, and art studios combine to provide year-round care and develop practical skills for the underprivileged children that prevent them from falling through the cracks, while helping to preserve local artisan traditions such as woodcrafting and metalworking for the community."

​​

The third presentation was from an even younger man whose non-profit organization is dedicated to helping migrant workers–there are over 700,000 of them from Southeast Asia currently in Taiwan–adapt and advance their lives and livelihoods in Taiwan and beyond. They provide Sunday schools and online teaching for language, communication, and even business skills so migrants can start sustainable businesses when they return to their home countries, cultural events to facilitate mutual understanding between migrants and local people, and legal counsel and public advocacy for migrants' rights.

"Migrants help build our infrastructure, give care to our elders, and provide comfortable living to many in Taiwan. They are not just laborers, but also individuals who live in Taiwan alongside us."

"Social progress depends on how we engage people with different ethnicities, languages, cultures, and backgrounds. Let's make every migrant's journey worthy and inspiring in Taiwan!"

​

Aren't you proud of these young men and women and what they are doing?! 

* Taiwan has been the second time in a row ranked the top performer among 18 Asian economies in providing enabling environment for philanthropy and private social investment by the Centre for Asian Philanthropy and Society, an independent non-profit research organization based in Hong Kong that promotes positive system change in the social investment sector across Asia, in their biennial "Doing Good Index" report:

two and a half philosophies

It was one of those rare sunny days in Taipei, I took the subway to a suburban university that I'd been to a few times before for some philosophical topical discussion forum that I signed up a couple weeks ago but now didn't have the faintest idea what it was except for the location and the fact that I was already half an hour late. 

I rushed into the library-classroom where the event was supposed to be, where an old gentleman was talking with a dozen young people listening and found a side chair to settle in. Everyone turned their eyes on me, and the old gentleman stopped his talk, and asked:
 
"What are you doing here?"
"I am just here for listening, may I?" (True, I always start my attendance to any topical discussion with pure listening)
"It's the end of the semester already, isn't it a bit too late for that?"

Now I realized this was not the forum I was going to but a regular classroom session and after some students realized my situation they told me the venue for that discussion forum had been changed to a different location and suggested I find the new one at the department office.

I apologized for the disruption and left the room and started looking for the department office, but then saw a lit room with a young man speaking in, with text projection on the board and a couple people listening. Quite a small crowd, I thought... could it be the one I was after? But after peeking and listening at the door for a couple minutes I decided to move in and participate for whatever it's worth anyway.

It was a study on some German sounding author's book "System of Ethics", and though the writing was a bit dry and drab, the ruminations were elaborate and repetitive I got the gist of it (that human feelings and drive for self-interest are natural and subjective but the will and freedom to act morally are self-determined and objective) and even asked the speaker some question of my own after listening for about half an hour.

Then came the break, the speaker left the room and I chatted with the three young men sitting close to me.

"You guys are students from the Philosophy Department, I suppose?"
"Oh no, we are from the Law Department," one of the young men said,
"I am here because I signed up for some philosophical seminar a couple weeks ago," I kind of explained myself, in case my appearance here seemed odd to them.
"Oh you mean that seminar on Phenomenology? This is not it, it's the one downstairs at the end of the hallway."

Oops, wrong room again! I bid them farewell and went downstairs to the end of the hallway, and there it was, a big easeled poster at the door of a packed room with the title of the discussion forum that I knew was exactly the one I signed up for two weeks ago!

I slipped in after checking my name at the registration table, and was immediately pleased by what I heard: a clear, succinct talk by a young woman (an associate professor from another university, I learned later) of the thoughts of a famous French philosopher (Henri Bergson) on time, movement, intuition, art, etc. A couple of key points I took from her presentation:

"While Intellect provides access to what is already known through symbolic systems like language and mathematics, Intuition is the mode of perception that can directly know what exceeds the current grasp of our language and is more important for creativity and human development in general."

"Reason, reasoning on its powers, will never succeed in extending them. Thousands and thousands of variations on the theme of walking will never yield a rule for swimming: come, enter the water, and when you know how to swim, you will understand how the mechanism of swimming is connected with that of walking."

After the lunch break (yes, free lunch for all who attended), another interesting topic presented by another scholar, titled "vague essence and material essence". To speed you through such "philosophese" wonderland I'll use an example:

Imagine doing carpentry work with a handsaw (or dissecting a cow with a carving knife, like the famous 庖丁解牛 story in Zhuangzi's): your hand movement, along with the saw, and the wood it cuts through, form a "material essence" that flows through a "vector stream" (or call it "force field" if you like) toward an end production that is never to be of "ideal" shape or form, but a "vague essence" that is created by the material essence of this world.

One may then postulate, that all our geometrical theorems come from the doables and imaginables–the material essence–of our perceived world. For example, to prove that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is 180 degrees, we imagine a line passing the top of the triangle in parallel with the bottom line of the triangle, as below:

We have ∠DBA≅∠A because they are alternate interior angles and alternate interior angles are congruent when lines are parallel. Therefore, m∠DBA=m∠A. Similarly, ∠EBC≅∠C because they are also alternate interior angles, and so m∠EBC=m∠C. m∠DBA+m∠ABC+m∠EBC=180° because these three angles form a straight line. By substitution, m∠A+m∠ABC+m∠C=180°.

Such proof is possible because we can imagine and actually draw the line crossing point B in parallel to line AC, and see the shape and the angles, on a two dimensional paper.

Imagine, then, in a three dimensional world, you start walking from the North Pole of the Earth, straight to the Equator, turn 90 degrees right (west), walk one quarter of the Equator line, turn 90 degrees right (north), going all the way back to the North Pole where you started. You have just created a triangle whose sum of the interior angles is 90+90+90=270 degrees, not 180!

I would like to continue attending the remaining sessions of the day and its final discussion, but decided not to, because there was another discussion forum I had registered and liked to attend somewhere else, so off I left.

-----  to be continued ----- 

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