Random

Music: Wilco - Hell is Chrome
Book: Matt Ridley - The Agile Gene

I caught a bit of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within on the TV because my dinner table is near the TV, and noted that while yes, the graphics are commendable it just renders the whole thing emotionless to the viewer. When those 2 fellows died to some pretty, translucent monster I felt nothing, and it wasnt because I missed the earlier parts but because they look so fake. The way the move, their flawless looks, their seamless figures, the fact that they did not sweat, everything.

And then the advertisments came on, and some actress came on, and she said, in pretty much a contrived voice, how Slim Fit enhanced her breasts and how felt more attractive and confident as a result, and I felt a bit sick at that and decided to leave my dinner.

The kind of things you get on TV. Hey girl, if Slim Fit is your way of gaining confidence in life then I reckon there isnt anything in your life that is worth being confident about.

The holidays have come. 4 weeks of not seeing certain people, but thats not the point. Im going to die for midyears. Thats because I've got a 5-day camp. Lets do a breakdown analysis, the kind of things that people should be doing but no one bothers to do. The camp means I've got 3 weeks left, 21 days. Cancel 1 day off for slacking. Which means 5 days left for each subject. That's pathetic btw, the battle is half lost already.

I have just 2 strengths, if they could be counted as strengths at all. 1) I can take on maths as well as literature--not necessarily meaning I do well in both, but at least Im not significantly disinclined to either. 2) I tend to have high returns to scale for econs. Again, not necessarily meaning I will do well in it; it just means for the effort I put in I tend to get a positively disproportionate result. 1) doesnt matter because theres little time for all subjects. 2) is temporarily (at least, I hope) invalid because my macroecnomics has gotten rather sluggish. Which means where previously I could adopt a strategy of transfering time from econs to other subjects (maximising allocative efficiency, if you like) I cant do it now because the deadweight loss is now more significant. In fact it's so significant I might have to spend the full 5 days on it just so i wouldnt be worse off.

Ignoring one subject is a possibility--history would be the victim if this is the case, because it has, for me, the lowest returns to scale out of the 4. But nah Im not so desperate as yet.

I'll take them on and see what comes.

The camp is 1 of the few things I actually find myself looking forward to in college life so far. Im praying hard for a compatible roommate. Roommates, incidentally, are for me the key determinant of how well any stayover experience is going to be. Take last year's history field trip to London and paris for example. The times my other two roommates and I would gay about, unpack our stuffs, snack away, wait for our turn to bathe, arrive late for breakfast because we invariably could not wake up on time even with the morning calls, crash the girls' rooms before returning back to our room dead beat--these memories strike more emotions in me than those visits to the tourist attractions.

I hope my roommate is a normal person. Like me.

Anyway, i took some gin and tonic earlier on, the first time I touched alcohol in some time now. Took it because I wanted to go on an emotional hiatus, to travel somewhere else alone, because Final Fantasy and Slim Fit made me sick, because I detest some of my classmates, because I want to purge the existentialist angst within me (it seems to enhance it though, which suits me just as well), because I feel betrayed, because my room is in a mess, because my college life is a total waste of my time, because I miss the history field trip; because Wilco's Hell is Chrome is the kind of songs that make you feel like drinking, because Im sick of taking the intitiative, because Im going to do badly for midyrs, because I wonder why havent I got more fun siblings (did you know my mum had a miscarriage on her first child--a girl, before she had me; meaning I could have very well have an older sis right now) because I wonder why cant I be more normal, because I cant wait to get out of school, because Aldous Huxley lies on my bed untouchable because Ive got to study, because I cant get Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, because the weather is so hot these days, because Im so handsome.

The rush is good.

Hope is a choice, they say, but not all choices are available to you at all times.

Somewhat ironical man fights best when he has nothing to lose the same way he could lose the will to fight when there is nothing to fight for. You are truly dead when there is nothing in life you can look forward to, at least not in the discernible future.

Grr

There are two times when man fights at his strongest. One, when he fights for honour. Two, when he fights against death, for his life. I dont know if the sum effect is greater than its parts but something tells me Im going to find out in the not too distant future.

A BEAUTIFUL MIND

Reminds me of Forrest Gump for several reasons.

And I need the OST.

Hunter or Hunted

Music: Coldplay - Speed of Sound
Book: Antony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange

I felt a wave of calmness after I completed a history test today, and wondered if it was the result of, like a hunter who just arrowed a deer with one fluid precise motion, and who has consequently an invisible smile on his face, the notion of a good kill; or if it came about because, like the injured wolf who has just survived his hundredth duel and can now look forward to licking his wounds in a safe corner, I can now, at long last, take a 2-week breather.

It is apparent that satisfaction is a prerequisite to tranquility, the same way battle is a prerequisite to peace or rather, the appreciation of it.

In any case it should be noted there is never a clear division between the hunter and hunted; one can be either, one can be both, in which case it implies there is a higher order of categories, since they turn out to be allied components of some larger thing.

Boring jungle.

Elsewhere, my literature tutor and a classmate of mine claim to be able to see angels and demons. I have my doubts not because I am highly cynical of all such things (in fact I wouldnt immediately scoff at them) but because they described them as out-of-perceptible-physical-properties coloured forms, in which case I wonder how one could know which is the angel and which is the demon, or since these are mere human constructs, how those things they saw are anything we can classify. The fundamental premises are wrong, or at best, inert to proper clarification and untill they could be properly established I wouldnt believe in the conventional supernatural.

Damnit when you're in this world just live in this world. My personal belief is that there is only one world, one large linear world, and I hope you know Im not referring to physical space here. A pity this belief has to break down as life tends towards non-life ie the afterlife.

Anyway I think wolves are very cute.

Death's Door

The rhythm of my footsteps crossing flood lands to your door
Melodious ring of travel increasing.
Pitter patter it goes, in painless pleasure
The way is long and it does not matter.

Forward regression

Music: 邰正宵- 一千零一夜
Book: Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange

I skipped school again, this time for more practical reasons. No point going to a sch event when you're dont feel like a part of the school.

Ive fallen in love with peaceful mornings where you wake at 9 and listen to some random music and close your eyes and lie on the bed. A good read might follow. Or some thinking. It is very important to lie on the bed and think about things, anything, your life, the universe. Or if you feel energetic enough, a morning swim would be lovely, or a jog. Or maybe both.

I cant wait for the June holidays to come.

I just finished Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Real good read if you skip the more intense scientific conecpts (and there are surprinsingly few for a book of this sort, which makes it all the better; he managed to encapsulate, or rather, simplify things to accessible quotients) Here's an excerpt to prod the interested-but-lazy number of you in the right direction.


If the universe is indeed spatially infinite, or if there are infinitely many universes, there would probably be large regions somewhere that started out in a smooth and uniform manner. It is a bit like the well-known horde of monkeys hammering away on typewriters--most of what they writer will be garbage, but very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare's sonnets. Similarly, in the case of the universe, could it be that we are living in a region that just happens by chance to be smooth and uniform? At first sight this might seem improbable, because such smooth regions would be heavily outnumbered by chaotic and irregular regions. However, suppose that only in the smooth regions were galaxies and stars formed and were conditions right for the development of complicated self-replicating organisms like ourselves who were capable of asking the question: Why is the universe so smooth? This is an example of the application of what is known as the anthropic principle, which can be paraphhrased as "We see the universe the way it is because we exist".

There are two versions of the anthropic principle, the weak and the strong. The weak antrhopic principle states that in a universe that is large or infinite in space and/or time, the conditions necessary for the development of intelligent life will be met only in certain regions that are limited in space and time. The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighbourhood not seeing any poverty...

Few people would quarrel with the validity or utility of the weak antrhopic principle. Some, however, go much further and propose a strong version of the principle. According to this theory, there are either many different universes or many different regions of a single universe, each with its own initial configuration and perhaps, with its own set of laws of science. In most of these universes the conditions would not be right for the development of complicated organismsl only in few universes that are like ours would intelligent beings develop and ask the question:"Why is the universe the way we see it?" The answwer is then simple: If it had been different, we would not be here!

The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the elctron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the elctron...The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. For example if the electric charge of the electron had been only slightly different, stars would either have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium...

In the hot big bang model described above, there was not enough time for heat have flowed from one region to another. This means that the initial state of the universe would have to have had exactly the same temperature in every direction in order to account for the fact that the microwave background has the same temperature in every direction we look. The initial rate of exapnsion also would have had to be chosen very precisely for the rate of expansion still to be so close to the critical rate needed to avoid recollapse. This means that the initial state of the universe must have been very carefully chosen indeed if the hot big bang model was correct right back to the beginning of time. It should be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.

-Hawking

The almost-reflexive questions that come after would include Why did God (or whatever higher scientific power there is) create us? What is mankind's mission? Does He (or She, or It) have the power to un-create us anytime he likes?

Or consider this: Your death would impact your family members, your friends etc the same way their deaths would impact you. What if you remove both you and your family then--nobody would die, nobody would get impacted. Expand this to this planet--if it were removed, if we had never any consciousness in the first place, --so what? Why are we here, so what if we weren't?

Or consider this: 1.3 million earths can fit into the sun, and the sun is just one of 400 billion of stars out in our milky way, a galaxy which spans for a hundred thousand light-years, a galaxy which is one of a hundred billion galaxies detected (and thats not the final number). Have you any idea how pathetic our existence is?

I hope we're getting some answers when death comes. Or actually if not all answers can be provided I would just like (please?) to view the complete map of the universe. Or maybe experience what it'd be like to be in a black hole, that'd be fine too.

You know, everytime I read and think about the vastness of space out there, everytime I picture the big bang, or god, or that alien spaceship that is going to come out of a wormhole and say hi to us anytime now (imagine an infinite number of alternative realities); and then look at the things around me, tables chairs this computer books, and then think of all these people out there whose lives revolve around Gucci and Prada and their boyfriends and their jobs and their kids and the scoreline of the next football match and the time left to A levels, I feel a sense of pity. A sense of pity because on one hand I am unable to fully integrate with such space-relative materialistic concerns and on the other, short of dying right now, I am unable to immerse myself into space.

Oh well.

The stars await

Music: Death Cab for Cutie - Transatlanticism
Book: Stephen W. Hawking - A Brief History of Time

It appears that when you can see through everything you see nothing. This is because your sight would penetrate everything on earth, including earth itself, to the exosphere--and beyond. You'd see through it, you'd see through the stars, through the planets right to the end of the universe. But you'll see through it too, and so we're back to the end of the end of the end of (etc, to infinity, and infinity to the power of infinity, and etc etc again) universe thing (You MUST have considered it when you were young), where there can be no end at all, none that our human minds can grapple with anyway.

I tried to bring this down a different course by suggesting that instead of seeing through all these physical entities when you "see through everything", what you'd be seeing is 'through' the light waves instead. And of course such lines of thoughts tend to collapse on itself simply because, again, they are based on things that are beyond human imagination.

I yearn for that one moment in life where you would receive the ultimate epiphany, that one moment in life where you see through everything, where you get all the answers you ever sought. That moment, of course, is the moment before total, complete death.

I notice that the people I get along well with are the people I cant handle.

Such conceptual musings aside, I've already booked a one-way flight to pluto.

That hyena...

If ever you have one hour of your life to spare, get down to your school library, or a community one, find any collection of ernest hemingway's short stories and read The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

Transatlanticism

Music: Death Cab for Cutie - Transatlanticism
Book: Ernest Hemingway - Short Stories

The person who sent me the song above commented that the music world is very strange because good music is never upfront, never in the Main Stream. Wonder why.

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The human psyche overworks itself. Let's say Problem A comes into play. And Problem A is big, and Problem A is painful, and Problem A is something you can't handle. So what do you do? You shelve it. Not only that. You divert your attention to Problem C, subconsciously forcing a link between the two problems- a link that no matter how radical, how nonsensical, would still be accepted, internalised and then understood as a logical connection between A and C. You then bring up Character C, transient being in your life who probably doesbnt know, nor care, you've got Problems A and C in your life.


And then you mould Problem A around Character C. And you think you're in the right because you know Character C IS responsible for Problem C-- and Problem C is no doubt another significant problem in your life. But you've got to realise that he/she is NOT the appropriate involvement when it comes to Problem A. You can't draw Problem A with Character C on the basis that Character C is the root of Problem C, thats really rubbish.

What's laughable is that by flaking away at Character C you are, whether you know it or not, making him/her your anaesthesia for Problem A, whats even more laughable is that you dont even realise Problem A exists. Character A responsible for Problem A, in the meantime, slinks away from responsibility, and the ultimate joke is that Character A is none other than your own self.

That incomprehensible instant where you see yourself in the person in front of you, where you feel like his/her character is so similar to yours he/she might as well be YOU, therefore leading to a self-reflexive notion that the very person you are is the very person he/she is, that point of infinite singularity where you know he/she is thinking of the same thing (and therefore looking at you and seeing him/herself even while knowing YOU are seeing him/her own self as if he was seeing you....etc etc), is what I will consider as a spiritual connection. When was the last time you felt an affinity with someone.