Magic
We've got a grand piano in KE hall that people can use. It's tucked behind the stage, unlocked, and turning on the light involves a walk of faith in the absolute dark backstage. I've been playing with it, and it's the closest to ephemera I've ever been. With each press of the keys, I shimmer into being, and dissolve almost as quickly.
If I didn't have a being, I might be deluded into thinking I were God. Because in the dark, sound is energy.
If sound is energy, then the piano must be magic.
Is the piano magic? How does a metal and wooden frame with strings move the dark?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is magic. No one would have figured out that we didn't need physical media for music anymore. If we showed Edison an iPod, he'd wonder, where exactly do you put the record in the thing? If you told him, it is recorded on this metal disk that spins around at 4800rpm, his mind would boggle and his eyes would fall out, as records spin at 33rpm/45rpm during his time, and would be hand cranked. And even if you gave him a microscope, he could not see the magnetic bits written on the hard disk platter, as in his time, they were analogue physical grooves.
Even the MP3 would have been magic. In his time, each note corresponded to a physical groove on a record. But with MP3 compression, the bits do not represent any note, but the whole song in it's totality, which has to be expanded by a software mechanism. Suddenly, 48 megabytes of music can be compressed into 3 megabytes or so, and we don't even think about it.
The expansion of DNA makes a human out of a 3.2 billion base paired molecule. Over 9 months, a complete functioning human being is formed from that single DNA molecule. This is a direct expansion(decompression) of the DNA molecule, as a baby in its mother's womb does not yet experience the external world. Compared to MP3 compression, which is roughly tenfold, a DNA molecule must have been expanded a millionfold. How did the human body develop that? It must have been magic.
In Biology, we are as Edison was. Any sufficiently complex develoment by millions of years of evolution would appear like magic to us. But that cannot be a justification for belief in God. I don't know how you might prove the existence of God, but we live in a sufficiently complex world that to the best of our abilities, we do not understand. The existence of magic is not proof of existence of God.
I can't sleep and I want a hug.
I don't want to know you.
I can't.
Because if I did, I might like you.
And if I liked you, you might like me too.
And if you liked me, you might get to know me.
And since I like you, I'd tell you every thing you ever wanted to know.
About me. About us. About this world we live in.
And I would take the light from your eyes.
I would hold the hope in your heart with my hands,
And I would crush it.
A flower blooms and yearns for the sun.
Only to rise closer and closer and wither away.
I don't want to know you.
Because if I did, I might like you.
Better for me to shine my light on you
In the inky dark of space,
2.7 Kelvin, 92 Million miles away.
Wii and wiiings
So my mum has agreed in principle to get a Wii. She was watching the news and people were having fun with the Wii at launch and so she thinks it's time we bought a video game. My mum is the hippest mum ever.
I don't really talk about my life much on my blog, but recently, I've been having a great hall life even through the busy exam period. I really love staying with friends, and I made a few that I think I can depend on in the future. It's really nice, even though I haven't been putting much effort into my friendships.
I've been studying and working on my Biochemistry. Things are starting to fall into place, medicine wise, and I'm no longer as upset as I was before. It starts to make sense to me once I have a framework about things, and I think the next few years of medical school will go swimmingly. I'm starting to get back into "the zone" as well, which is something I really miss.
I've made friends with the little bird outside my door. He perches on my clothes rack, and he sings his songs to whichever girl might be hearing in the afternoons. I see him fluff his chest out and lift his chin, and he catches my eye, and turns around to see me better. I look warily to see if he's sitting on my clothes, but we have an understanding about that. He only perches on metal poles, and not clothes. Still, after two weeks of singing he's still alone on my balcony. I'd love to give him tips on dating, but I don't think birds have any cinemas to go to, or things to do besides singing and flying and grooming themselves. Still, there's a young female that's built her nest in the aircon vent of the hall person living below me. Maybe they'd meet one day and make lots of children.
It's strange hiding in a room by myself. The days seem to pass really quickly, and I seem to be watching the rest of humanity from my perch on the internet. I sing to myself, like the bird outside my door, but we're really from two different worlds.
He has wings and he can fly. I have brains, and I dream.
His life is grounded in the reality. My life is aloft with the possibilities.
Aging.
I want to put this into words, because that is the only way I can remind myself of things nowadays.
Perhaps I've always been arrogant. I mean, I've never failed in accomplishing what I set out to do. Life to me is more than school, more than a syllabus or a path that I have to tread. I always saw myself as the captain of my own boat, the man at the helm of my own life, and no matter which schools I choose to go to, or which programmes chose me, I always make the final decisions.
I'm now questioning my own wisdom. Why did I think that everything would always be easy and possible? Or have I always been looking for the exception to the rule, and now that I've found the exception, I'm at a loss at what to do.
I hate talent. I hate talent because it makes people arrogant and unsympathetic. I think I have some talents, talents that I've not earned through my own hard labour, but through the random segregation and recombination of alleles, and I hate that. I hate situations that are unfair, that did not arise through my own hard labour. I hate myself for being me, because I am not the reason for who I am.
But looking at my latest gamble, I think it is either arrogance or folly. I've done medicine for two years now. That's 75% of the way to a basic degree, 50% to a masters. I could have started on a subject that I've prior experience with, like the people who did medicamp before me, I could have done something like computing or engineering, where I have at least a 3 year headstart on my fellow colleagues. I could have written and read, things which come naturally to me, things which were once my passion, until I found them elitist, and ultimately unsatisfying, because I could never share the world with people who weren't like me. The words and their meanings can only be shared with people with the same knowledge and definitions.
So here I am now, with nothing, the lowest of the low in my field. No talent whatsoever, no prior training, no prior experience. And now it's all fair. And then I now know how hard it is, and how other people must have felt when they saw me speeding ahead, and how tired I feel now, trying, always trying to keep up. I am mortal now, I am Clarke Kent, and not Superman. I don't have wings no more, but feel the leaden weight of stress, fatigue and doubt on my back. Will I make it? The doubt is like a stone weighing me down. The uncertainty of my uncertain memory.
I have no talents to fall back on now. All I have is hard work, and an uncertain future, working towards an uncertain result I may or may not want.
Never felt more hopeless. Part of the experience.
Commitment to Studying
I'm learning to commit to studying. It's really strange, but somehow studying is the thing i look most forward to these days. It's not just any type of studying, the studying with friends over a cup of coffee and loads of eyecandy. It's the serious no interruptions allowed sort, where the mind is free to roam over the words and imagine how they came about. Pictures, diagrams, words.
I wonder how people learned in the past without books, without the Internet. Are we stil the same? We with all our technological tools. And what people had in the past was just paper and a memory.
I'm trying to learn with just a memory. Can it be done?
Week Review
I thought I'd better do a week review before I forget loads of things. Hmm, but it's disjointed as always, and terribly compressed, so it all goes through this filter of significant things, and you'll miss out on the transitional parts of this.
Well, I love improving musically. I thought last week was a really good week music wise. I'm better acquainted with my guitar and playing scales all over the fretboard. Fingers just instinctively know where to go now, and my ears can differentiate between semitone and tone differences in my scale. Listening to my old songs again and hearing all the parts with greater clarity and seperation, especially the basslines, so I'm rejuvenated and inspired to work harder now. Realized I prefer the sound of my old nylon guitar over the electric sound of my electric guitar. It's so much more resonant and sweet sounding. Played my acoustic guitar, and the bass notes just sound wrong, so I'm looking around for a new acoustic guitar again.
Medically, I've been redoing my biology. I printed out the index from Molecular Biology of the Cell, and reading it to get a better understanding of the processes occuring within the cell. The cell is really amazing. Each time I reread my basic biology, I find out so much more about the makeup of my own body. It is exciting to know my cell biology better, because it has so much to do with emergent behaviour of simple rules, and it's just so similar to structures produced in the game of life, or the ant program. Perhaps simple rules in the DNA are expressed in each cell at different times, and that's how we get our complex biological structures. The compressed information is expanded by mathematical evolution.
Really, now that you think about it, the basis of evolution depends on reproducibility and stability. Code has to be compressed into a form which can be expanded accurately. The expansion of the code itself has to depend on an environment that reacts predictably. Thus, mathematics is the ideal environment to build the machinery upon, as mathematics is constant. Mathematical expansion is more constant than chemical expansion.
What does this have to do with medicine? Nothing.
Well, I went with Jinsheng to get a new phone the other day, and he got a Nokia 6280. It was really interesting going to the M1 shop at Paragon, as it was very organized and specialized. I think the service wasn't bad, and every person there knew their job well, even though it may have been repetitive or stressful. It's very different from the Toyota showroom, which was similar to a marketplace. But both places had receptionists, and helpful sales staff. I thought the receptionist was the most important person in the shop, in order to set the right tone. The new face of business depends on a bunch of things. Business needs to have a system for customers. THey need to know how to behave and conform to your company's workflow. The receptionist helps by providing unambiguous directions to customers, and to set them in a pleasant mood while waiting to be served.
Put customers in queues with number tags, but not have them queue up in a visible line in order to reduce frustrations in waiting. Use the surroundings to your company's benefit. We waited an hour to see the officer, but it didn't feel as long as we spent the time shopping outside the store.
Once we see the officer, make sure the counter staff is knowledgable, and efficient. Train them to be polite, and minimize movements between officers. Make sure all documentation is prepared for the customer in advance, and they only have to sign or fill up relevant documents.
What the new face of business is, is about workflow and customer satisfaction. Software is also being increasingly seen as a service, and it should be structured the same way. Mac OS X gets it. It gives me the same feeling as an organized shop, where I just enter and do my thing, and leave the technical details to someone else. Windows still gives me the feeling that I have to do so many things to get my system working. I don't want to set up a business to serve myself. I want someone to set up things for me to use.
My view on life has changed. I used to want to build everything myself, in order to save money, but that was inefficient and unpleasant. The new future is a place where I focus on earning money, and people help me accomplish what I want to do. They are more efficient in doing certain tasks than me, thus, I save time in contracting their services, and they profit from their expertise in doing certain tasks.
This makes life so much easier for everyone involved, and business should focus on providing this value-added service to people.
