hui-chun hat

It all started when I shared a photo of one of our college classmates celebrating his grand kid's one-year anniversary at our chat group:

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"Why did you wear a hat," some asked,

"Well, to cover up my graying hair, to be honest," said the new grandpa.

Some others chimed in: "Yeah, I have a similar issue, my head is getting bald, so I wear a hat most of the time..."

An idea clicked in my mind, and after tweaking and twisting some text and graphics I grabbed online, I came up with the following announcement:

"In line with our long held commitment to the upkeep of our fellow classmates' health and good looks, we at Hui-Chun-Yuan* have decided to provide "Hui-Chun Hats" that shall protect and prohibit all you guys' precious heads from age distorted look..."

"The following are two design concepts we have, one American, the other Chinese style, let us know which one you prefer:"

* Hui-Chun-Yuan (回春院, "Spring Again Garden", literally) is a fictitious gentlemen's club invented by some group member that promises to bring youth back to its members. For more stories about the club, check out this blog 

https://cdwong.blogspot.com/search?q=summer+fun 

and this one

https://cdwong.blogspot.com/2017/11/autumn-fun.html

Wisely, most people picked the Chinese version, with the character 春 right underneath a small circle inside a big circle, together forming the phrase 回春, the exact same name as the Hui-Chun ("Spring Again" meaning "Youth Reviving") Club. I concurred and explained:

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​回春院 =》回春園 =》回春圓，大圓包小圓，圓圓滿滿，源源不斷，淵源久遠，源遠流長 ...

  

I could well keep this Hui-Chun hat fictitious, as a butt of jokes, like what we've been doing with its namesake club. For example, the following "special edition" hat was awarded to people who were supposedly given the wrong "youth reviving pills" (回春藥) by the club as a token of apology and good wishes: 

Or used as a scare tactic tool to urge people to pay the fictitious membership fees when some mentioned there were coyotes rampaging through their neighborhood:

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But wouldn't it be even more fun if I made the hat a real thing?

So I started looking for some custom hat makers online, and was pleasantly surprised there were quite a few of them right in the US (they get their hats from overseas, then make the embroidering in the US). After some Q&A back and forth, I picked one company in Wisconsin, uploaded my design and placed order for 48 hats and got them in a couple of weeks:

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*The "NTUEE80" in the back designates our university/departmental names and year of the class

I made the announcement to the group and started distributing the hats. The original idea was to give them away to people who had become grand parents, as congratulation gifts for having accomplished a milestone in life (做人成公), but soon I changed my mind and gave them away to all who came to any reunion party, assuming and encouraging all to become grandparents one day:

​Then I arrived in Taiwan a couple months ago, bringing all the remaining hats I have with me, to give away to classmates in Taiwan. The idea was to distribute them at reunion gatherings like I did in the States, but some local classmates suggested I held some outdoor activities–such as hiking to some urban hills in Taipei–for distribution.

I thought that was a great idea. After all, the real purpose of the fictitious Hui-Chun Club is to encourage guys to do real "youth reviving" activities, and hiking is definitely one of them. So I made an announcement at the group, asking people to meet me at a landmark hill top of the city on two consecutive Saturday mornings to receive the hats:

​My hat and I made it to the hill top on the first Saturday:

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And the second:

My local classmates' attendance was less than spectacular, though, only two came to meet me at the hill top. Obviously, giving away free hats at feasting parties like we did in the States is much easier than asking people to climb up hill for an hour and a half on wintry days (though the first two Saturdays were of gorgeous weather)!

Undeterred, and for my own pumped-up curiosity to check out the many different trails to this famous landmark hill top of the city, I extended my "Self-Rejuvenating Excursion Series" to a third Saturday:

And a fourth, last Saturday of December, which also fell on the Christmas Day of the year:

It was a fun project all along!

Happy Hui-Chun Days to All!

the transcendentals

What constitutes beauty? How does art "bite" us? ... The sunset is beautiful when it shows a fabric of colorful clouds lacing the sky, Mozart's symphony brings us joy for its harmonic blend and swift trotting of sounds, Rembrandt's paintings seize us with arresting lighting contrast and context rich expressions.

But then again, some(times you) may prefer a bleak, wintry scene in a forlorn countryside, cacophonic jangle of heavy metal rock music, or a postmodern painting that looks nothing more than a mischievous combination of random shapes and colors.

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, you may well say. But I think a more accurate claim would be "Beauty (or art) is something that leads us to more than what our senses detect."

As Plato describes in his famous "allegory of the cave," we are like slaves tied up in a cave with our backs towards a fireplace at the far end where people and animals walk passing by. Not being able to move or turn our heads around, all we can see in our front are shadows of those people and animals passing by. Only on some rare occasions when we untie ourselves and turn do we see the real things.

​In Plato's ontological parlance, there are two worlds we live in: the world of Being and the world of Becoming. The world of Being corresponds to an invisible world of "Forms"–the real things; the world of Becoming corresponds to the visible world of Appearance–the shadows.

How does one go from seeing the world of appearance to the world of forms? Probably through a mystical movement of the heart (or "God given grace," in religious lingo), an "ascending imagination" that combines and goes beyond the perceptual (sensual) and the conceptual (cognitive) capabilities of Man.

It is not a passive act. Though it is the form itself that provokes and initiates, it takes the will or desire to know from the individuals to shape themselves into the right receptacles for the form's beauty. The form is an objective being, while the reception of it a subjective effort and experience.

Such subjective/objective duality can also be used to explain the answer to the question "what is truth?". Subjectively, truth is whatever we believe to be true–we do not find truth in searching for it as one would seek some object but in "the fixation of belief." But such beliefs must be caused by some external permanency–by something upon which our thinking has no effect, beliefs that lead to conceptions and practical acts into a whole whose reality can at the same time signify another's reality yet stand on its own. Truth is thus objective.

If beauty and truth are the ultimate goals for the world of appearance to pursue, ideas and acts that lead people closer to such ends are "good" ideas and "good" acts.

Being, besides being Beautiful and True, is also the ultimate Good.

Inspired by the book "The Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics" by Alejandro R. Garcia-Rivera:

​https://www.amazon.com/Community-Beautiful-Theological-Aesthetics-Theology-ebook/dp/B074MZ9WBP

science, art, etc.

"Science is amazing," I remember hearing my father chatting with a taxi driver once when I was a kid, "it takes control of nature, transforms human lives, makes great inventions..."

And when Dr. Fauci tries to convince people to wear masks and take vaccines, he says "We follow the science..."

Disregarding what science says or what science does, science, by definition, is the pursuit of knowledge through unbiased observations and systematic experimentation, an endless effort of evidence collection, logical analysis, proof and disproof, postulation and repostulation...

Doesn't sound too much fun, if that's all there is, but it ought not be.

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

True to his words, Einstein's Theory of Relativity started as a "thought experiment" running through his head for years. Likewise, many other important scientific discoveries have been made through imaginative cognition: James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, stumbling upon the double helix image for the DNA chain through his dream of a spiral staircase, and Archimedes, whose eureka moment occurred in his bathtub, discovering the law of buoyancy while imagining that his body was nothing but a gourd of water.

Artists, in turn, have their moments of tedium during their supposedly willy nilly production of creative artwork: painters scraping the paint from the canvas, writers redrafting the novel for the 10th time, composers rescoring the thematic musical material... 

Without scientists being shy of talking about imagination and artists about experiment, they could well be like-minded talents just going on different routes of pursuit. 

As science reaches the limitations of the observable and the experimentable, from black holes in the outer space to subatomic particles in the quantum world, all the unifying "String Theories" that try to be the be-all and end-all solutions to everything, are mathematical and imaginative in nature, with the possible winner being the one that looks most elegant and beautiful in the eyes of the scientific beholders. 

The pursuit of the true and the pursuit of the beautiful, (and hopefully the pursuit of the good), may finally become one and the same.

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You may have heard of machines emulating humans answering calls and coordinating appointments with near perfection, but do you know they can write darn good novels too?

Using a natural language processing engine at the back and a web or mobile app at the front, all it takes for you—the supposed author—is to feed a few lines of your own: a descriptive scene, a few characters, a simple plot, etc., and the machine will take over from there, generating a full fledged novel for you.

Reports from the field are that people are blown away by what they read in such "artificial novels", not only by the sophistication of the writing, but also the many creative developments of the story that are outside the realm of people's most far-fetched imagination.

Shocking? It shouldn't be. Similar to what any "deep learning" AI machine does nowadays, a natural language processing machine has inputted all the text on the internet and uses hundreds of billions of parameters to build grammatically correct, semantically meaningful, and emotionally soothing stories for human readers. To make it "creative", all it probably needs to do is make some little extra twists in its storytelling based on what it learns of the rules of engagement of human psyche to trigger the awe and ah that makes the story extraordinary!

Our brain is like a black box, nobody knows how it works, and may contain many hidden, outlandish ideas that are suppressed for various reasons. AI, whose inner workings are also like a black box, may help us air them out.

If machines can act as creative as humans, humans can, sadly, act as mechanical as machines too. I've always wondered that famous saying by ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius "There's such a fine line demarcating man from animal!" (人之所以異於禽獸者幾希) can very well be rephrased to "There's such a fine line demarcating man from machine!" today.

If by "artificial" we mean "man-made" or "make-believe", then we've been having many an artificial intelligence encounter long before the latest computer technologies arrive: theatrical play, magic show, fraud, fake news... Some of them we willingly take and enjoy, some of them not so much.

In the end, perhaps it doesn't really matter where "they" come from, but how we discern them, and how they affect us.

"Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."

In memory of a dear fine fellow, Mel Mothershead, 05/03/1932 – 08/28/2021

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!