I love short and smart instructions.

From D&AD Workout booket:
- Is your illustration sketchy?
- Are your writing skills textbook?
- Are your communication skills all talk?
- Is the left side of your brain always right?
- Is your type justified?

From an old sheet of editing tips:
- Don’t abbrev.
- Don’t use no double negatives.
- Avoid unnecessary redundancy.
- Avoid cliches like the plague.

From 6-word stories:
- For sale: baby shoes, never worn. (Hemingway)
- Longed for him. Got him. Shit. (Margaret Atwood)

Penicillin, transistor, assembly line. These great discoveries and inventions charted the progress of civilisation. I remember well the discoverers and inventors and their legacies.

Theology, Enlightenment, Communism. Concepts and theories make people do good and bad things. I can recall, too, their prophets and founders.

Parks, traffic light, shopping. Things which grease modern life, making it bearable or even enjoyable. A multitude of clever and stupid things surround me, but I hardly know the people who created them.

Every man-made object, space, and idea must have its originator. It would be an interesting exercise to trace back its “human history” — the people behind the artifacts.

I did not understand how that stupid show can be so popular, until I read this quote by David Foster Wallace in Chris Anderson’s book:

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

It is an illuminating thought, but I think there is more than that.

Things do not become popular automatically because they appeal to the vulgar instincts of the populace; nor do they become marginal just because they are refined.

An idea can be both noble and easy to understand. A story can be both entertaining and relevant to the human condition. They can be popular without being vulgar.

But why are most TV shows so vulgar and prurient these days?

Because their methods of ideation are extremely similar. No TV Show is ever produced without calculating risk and return, analysing marketing data, consulting previous formulas of success.

When popularity means profit, and stock price is proportional to earning growth, asking Howie Mandel to shout “Deal or No Deal” is a better deal than having a postmodern Hamlet to mutter “To Be or Not To Be”.

I toil, like many others in my generation, in a corporate world. There I seek illusory glory, and bear unnamable sufferings.

I suppose, if completely submitted to its culture, one could indeed be happy and successful and well-fed. But one would drift away from one’s true self, and interact in chary manner towards people with similar guises, and be a team player in a machinery that exists solely to profit its shareholders.

Yet it would be far-fetched to call this “suffering” when we consider the magnitude of upheavals in our era.

To those who were dying of hunger in China in 1960s, it would be a divine blessing to be working in a corporate world. But to those who studied Renaissance in college, it is only natural to regard Excel spreadsheets with contempt.

It is with this sense of ambivalence, an irresolution between feeling grateful and feeling entrapped, that I conduct my professional life.

To relieve my petty sufferings, I try to emulate the qualities of J Alfred Prufrock:

no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

At times, alas, I also bullshit.
(more…)

David Bohm has an interesting insight on order and complexity.

He gives the following example: A straight line is the simplest curve, in which each line segment differs in position and similar in direction. A circle gets a little more complex, in which each line segment differs in position and direction, but the angles between segments are the same. Then comes the spiral, when successive pairs of segments differ in that they define different planes, turning the curve into a third dimension.

It is interesting to note that the similarities that define a straight line is different to the similarities that define a circle. We can therefore say the circle has a higher order than the line. Brownian motion, the “chaotic” movements of particles, would then be tracing a curve of infinite order.

He believes that people assume that perceptions are subjective or private, when they are simply lacking the understanding or language to describe the true quality of the order they are perceiving.

Newspeak is the weird official language of English Socialism (Ingsoc) in George Orwell’s 1984. Its purpsose is “not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” It has three categories: A, B, and C vocabulary. A vocabulary are words used in everyday life, but stripped down and then recombined (knife, speedful, doublepluscold, undark). B vocabulary are words constructed for political purposes (goodsex, thinkpol, duckspeaker). C vocabulary are obscure technical terms without reference to any scientific thinking.

I think the New Newspeak, as we have today, is conceived so as not to diminish the range of thoughts, but to extend and obscure them. I am quite amused by these trendy words: copyleft, geek, hentai, organic, terrorist, hot, design… above all, I think the word “free” has presently acquired a bizarre Orwellian taste. Free as in free speech, free beer, or free range chicken?

Jacob Bronowski wrote a fine essay called “The Evolution and Power of Symbolic Language”. He believed that animal languages convey only instructions, while human language can convey information that is separable from the emotional charge and therefore allows more than one interpretation.

Bronowski quoted the work of N. I. Zhinkin, the Russian scientist who applied theory of algorithm to the study of animal speech. Zhinkin showed that baboons can say lots of things in a very small number of grunts, but they have only one way to say any one thing. So that, I guess, grunt-grunt-grunt means I love you.

Evolution from a poor baboon to a romantic Miss Elizabeth Barrett is very curious indeed. She used a great many grunts to say one thing (to Robert Browning) –

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height…

But it now becomes quite apparent that the human language is too inadequate to express the depth of humanity. We now apply “attraction” to an act of electron, use “your ass” for artistic emphasis, and seek short-lived happiness in “pr0n”.

Indeed, our language offers no word or grunt that means just one thing. There are so many ways to say one thing, and so little time to say it, that must have made Mr. Prufrock exclaimed: “It is impossible to say just what I mean!”

On this very special day, if you are to express your true feelings to a special person, what words will you choose, what music to play, what time and place? I like this intricate advice from Thomas Mann, though it is much less obvious than a fluffy teddy bear or a pink hallmark card –

A “clear word” and a benevolent, pointing out the better course, seems powerless today; world events pass all such over with brutal disregard. But let us hold fast to the anti-diabolic faith, that mankind has after all a “keen learning,” and that words born of one’s own striving may do it good and not perish from its heart.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Jean-Henri Fabre observes that a grasshopper will say goodbye to its fellow grasshoppers before hopping away. If it goes away without saying goodbye, such silence implies danger and will make all grasshoppers flee in silent panic.

Silence has a powerful voice. Press the start button and the microwave does nothing; the computer freezes; the sound system malfunctions in the middle of a movie; someone tells a bad joke; vivid dreams between the alarm clock’s snooze intervals; no one calls, not even telemarketers; a love letter sent, yet unreturned…

Alas, we the modern people can neither flee the noises nor the silence!

William Blake said, ‘To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower.’ It sounds much like an advance version of WinZip or StuffIt indeed. Is it possible to see the world in a grain of sand?

Find a grain of sand that weighs a very specific value, say 0.4374284729… gram. Then with a very accurate machine we measure its weight very very accurately. Then we read that specific value, position by position, and convert the value in each position to binary numbers. For example, from the value of 0.4374.. we will get, 0, 100, 11, 111, 100, etc. Appending the values one after the other, we will get a very long string of 1 and 0.

Now feed the string into a Turing Machine (computer), and generate all the digital sound and fury, that signify nothing, hidden in a grain of sand.

Imagine a big lump of protein grows hair all around itself, and asks you in a shrieking voice to comb its hairs so that it can be a pretty and smooth hairy ball, with no “parting” to be found.

This is a topology problem about “vector fields” on a sphere. The best one can do is to comb the hairs to make everywhere smooth except one point on the ball. Remarkably, the meteorologist then deduces from the hairy ball that there must be always a cyclone somewhere on earth.

Concepts of Modern Mathematics has a lively discussion on the hairy ball.