I used to think that I am always in control of my life wherever I am. But this has changed lately, first with the time I fainted on the street in the summer, and then with locking myself out of the apt today. I realized that, there are some moments in life, that even when you think you're in control, you don't need others help, you don't know that when the next moment comes, it just comes down so quickly like when you lose your consciousness or when you shut the door with the key in the apt. It just one moment and you totally lose control and you can't do anything about it but to ask for help. I guess that is one thing you learn as you grow up--as Sheldon Cooper used to say, we are primates who depend on others to live out own lives. On the other hand, don't always trust yourself to much, and don't assume that you can be always in control without no apparent reasons. Do examine your reasons and backup solutions before you do things. And always be prepared of emergency situation. That is good. Even it doesn't happen most of the times. Because when it does, you only have hundreds of a second to handle it. Are you prepared?
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Saw this film at the Cervantis Institute in Beijing this Saturday afternoon. Very European. French girl goes to Spain to search for his biological father, and ended up spending some heart-warming family time with a lonely old man who is the current owner of his father's previous apartment. No big drama, big action. Sometimes, the joy of life is in the most simple and small things. Learn to enjoy "DOING NOTHING">. Days after Steve Jobs' death while we're still mourning, we hear the death of another computer giants, the creator of the influential UNIX system and C which led to so many other wonderful things such as linux and Mac OS/2: (from MSN.COM)The tech industry has lost another esteemed pioneer. Word is spreading that Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C-programming language and the UNIX operating system has died. As Mashable states, UNIX is the base for Linux and Apple’s OS X operating system. Ritchie’s other paramount achievement, the C language, is “one of the most widely used and influential languages today.” Although the computer scientist died on October 8, the news is just now making its way on social networks and blogs. While Ritchie might not be a figure in the mainstream media, he is certainly well-regarded by those who know their history. @Nick_Crackers calls Ritchie “…One of the most unknown yet hugely influential IT pioneers.” @scalawag states that Ritchie belongs in “#TechnologyMtRushmore.“ A family genealogy map I found for unix/derived systems: I was born to be a spontaneous person. I have to admit that by now. I can plan; but I don't like to do it a lot of times. My happiest zone is to act completely spontaneously, and enjoy the unexpected life, places, and people, full of surprise. I think that is in my personality-born that way.
Even when I compose music I do not compose by writing notes on a score. I most of the time would prefer to improvise. As a result, I am not able to reproduce most of my compositions-luckily most of them are recorded computer music. So you can hear my mind at the time but I can't perform for you. But why suddenly I am an advocate of organization and planning? Well it's not I don't like them. Actually the reason I want them more in my life is because I felt I like them better and better now. First of all, being an adult means more responsibility and planning and organization is necessary for that. Second, I'm not an artist but a scholar. Third, I am not by myself so my other half would not tolerate my total spontaneous actions. But recently I realized a more important reason--being in order is one of the biggest challenges in life, yet human beings need that for evolutionary reasons--humans developed for hundreds of thousands of years, becoming more and more intelligent, systematic, organizational, sophisticated, etc., only able to reach where we are today. Without these attributes, human beings could not, as of today, live a more than ever exciting life with numerous possibilities shining in the light of the future. Everyone knows it is easier to be chaotic yet being organized is the challenge. Science and technology are certainly the result of these attributes, and they are the driving force of our history. If we evolve in a different direction and listen only to our biological needs(food,survival,sex,etc), we would be like animals with lower intelligence (not that there is anything wrong with that). But being 98% champ ourselves, we do have biological needs, but sometimes it's better to resist them--such as having a big mac or beef cheese burger everyday-they may be delicious and you crave them, but in the end you know self-discipline is good for you. Second, I find being organized actually has a lot of benefit for our mood, productivity, health, and physical well being overall. When I am very chaotic and spontaneous, I may sleep very irregularly, eat a lot of junk food, sit on the couch watching tv for long hours, not going out for a day, not interacting with other people--all of those made me feel miserable and my health deteriorating--that is when I often get a uneasy feeling of my heartbeat. But just for two weeks I switched my lifestyle--go to bed before 11pm and get up before 7am everyday, it completely changed. I felt much more energetic (even though I slept less but I actually am less sleepy during the day), eager to do things, being productive, wanting to interact with people--all of these things, including my diet habits become incredibly systematic and I couldn't feel better. Being unorganized can be happy at the moment but later I always come to regret it and it caused me more pain; being organized, it felt always so good. Well, it's just the matter of not to sink into that hell again-i have to regulate myself too. Third, speaking from a physics point of view, spontaneously, the world is going more and more unsystematic, unorganized, and chaotic. This is the theory of entropy。 Without control, the tendency of the universe is to get more and more chaotic, and it requires energy to actually turn them into systematic. German scientist Rudolf Clausius is credited with the first formulation of the second law, now known as the Clausius statement: No process is possible whose sole result is the transfer of heat from a body of lower temperature to a body of higher temperature. Spontaneously, heat cannot flow from cold regions to hot regions without external work being performed on the system, which is evident from ordinary experience of refrigeration, for example. In a refrigerator, heat flows from cold to hot, but only when forced by an external agent, a compressor. Lord Kelvin expressed the second law in another form. The Kelvin statement expresses it as follows: No process is possible in which the sole result is the absorption of heat from a reservoir and its complete conversion into work. A change in the entropy (S) of a system is the infinitesimal transfer of heat (Q) to a closed system driving a reversible process, divided by the equilibrium temperature (T) of the system. dS = \frac{\delta Q}{T} \! Actually a long time ago when I was in high school, in a paper that we wrote for a science contest, called "Resolving Energy Crisis on Earth", I remember we stated at the out front of the paper, that the energy crisis on earth does not mean that the amount of energy on earth is getting reduced; rather, according to the law of energy conservation, the total amount of energy is constant, whereas there are less and less energy available for human use--to convert them into work, so to speak.The key here is that according to the second law of thermodynamics, as the entropy increases, more and more energy becomes obsolete and cannot be re-organized for use again. Thus,to sum up, why not become more organized? Saw them at the French Culture Center Beijing. Full of sentiment and surprise. Review comes later. Lovely posters:
An up-to-date research on the neural basis of reading comprehension.Also introduces basic brain imaging and neural scientific methodology on neurolinguistic research.Website: http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/index.htm
Modern science sometimes tells us that it doesn’t necessarily conflict with religion. There are still many things we can’t explain using science, and religion can pick up where science left off and help with the speculation. Now one attitude I always have toward things like supernatural phenomena, god, or aliens, is that, just because we can’t understand doesn’t mean it does not exist. Yes. A lot of these things, such as the existence of a god beyond human beings, is mysteious because we can’t experience them directly and with all of our brain potentials, we think, and we can’t think of a way that would work. Like how would a god created the lives. “It isn’t easy”, says Mr.Scientist, “that if you think about it, it took millions and millions of years for the evolution and eventually we human came into existence”, which is contarary to the ‘easier’ version where the human beings were created by god(s). Now when I say you shouldn’t deny the existence of things you don’t understand, here is what it really means: think about science fiction and the contemporary technological innovations. When have ever in history, had we human beings believed that things like ipad and automatic facial recognition would come into our daily life? Exactly. People may have read those in science fiction and they believed that was where it belonged. But the reality is more magical. My point is, as limitless and creative as our brains are, most of us human beings have very limited understandings and intellectual powers toward our world, especially when we speak individually. However, what history has taught us is that, even in today’s real world, we have come across tons of real things in life that we don’t even begin to conceive or to understand (such as, can you come up with how a computer works? can you build one? can you conceive how on earth it is possible to put something in the blood vessels of a patient with heart diseases without cutting open any part of near his chest, and at the same time cure the patient?) Thought so. The world is going faster and it’s beyond our cognitive ability to understand how everything in our real world works. Then, we have no reason to absolutely deny the existence of something that is so much larger than us, just because we can’t concieve thing like that.
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