Category: Blog

Earlier this year, at a Gordon conference, I listened to a talk by Prof. George Whitesides on soft robotics. In his introduction, he talked about Pasteur’s quadrant. The idea is that one can categorize research works into four quadrants: one axis is the scale of immediate usefulness, and the other axis is the scale of fundamental understanding. On this chart, Thomas Edison’s work is high on immediate usefulness but low on fundamental understanding, whereas Niels Bohr’s work is high on fundamental understanding but low on immediate usefulness. Pasteur’s work is considered high on both scales. Many of R1 university research, Prof. Whitesides pointed out, lie in the empty 3rd quadrant. He urged the young people in the audience to do research in Pasteur’s quadrant.

In a slightly more relaxed setting, he has said similar things. He advised scientists who just began their careers to consider selecting topics that other people care about, “like death” (overheard, no exaggeration).  The question of “who cares” needs justification other than the researcher’s own curiosity.

I jotted down a list of research topics that interest me: morphogenesis and pattern formation, 3D printing, the origin of life, artificial intelligence, water, and energy. Each will be examined in due course.

“In his letters Van Gogh often gave extensive reports on his working methods, and so we are well informed about the practical side of his craftsmanship: from the way he experimented with colour and chose his materials to his use of all sorts of tools. From his letters and technical investigation it also emerges that Van Gogh worked in a highly systematic and well-considered manner: every drawing and every painting was a conscious attempt to make headway. This is contrary to the prevalent image of Van Gogh as an impulsive and purely emotional artist” – Description from Van Gogh Museum

Among many other things, Van Gogh is famous for his energetic brush strokes, with thick paint and short strokes, a technique called impasto. He was seeking a new technique to express emotions, not by facial expressions or anything else traditionally used in academic painting, but by brush strokes. This search for a new technique started in Paris in 1886-1887, and the progression manifests in the sketches he made in his letters over the years (the collage, all taken from vangoghletters.org).

In his own words (Letter to Theo van Gogh, 23 or 24 Aug 1888.): “And I must tell you that these days I’m making a great effort to find a way of using the brush without stippling or anything else, nothing but a varied brushstroke. But you’ll see, one day.”

His innovative use of brushstroke was described as “fiery, very powerful and full of tension”, and his style as “vigorous, exalted, brutal, intense”, in an article by Albert Aurier in 1890. “In his article Aurier praises Van Gogh’s ‘strange, intense and feverish work’ (oeuvres étranges, intensives et fiévreuses) and calls him a worthy successor to the seventeenth-century Dutch masters.”

To this praise, van Gogh wrote:

“But when I read the article it made me almost sad as I thought: should be like this and I feel so inferior. And pride intoxicates like drink, when one is praised and has drunk one becomes sad, or anyway I don’t know how to say how I feel it, but it seems to me that the best work one could do would be that carried out in the family home without self-praise. And then among artists, people’s friendly dispositions aren’t always enough. Either someone’s qualities are exaggerated or he’s over-neglected. However, I very much want to believe that basically Justice is in better health than it appears to be. ” – Letter to his sister Willemiem van Gogh, 19 Feb 1890

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.” – Oscar Wilde

So, I have been watching the film over and over again. It is one of those films that I found fascinating but couldn’t really figure out why they are so fascinating. It is dark, and not as grotesque as some of other Tim Burton’s movies. As a critic said, “the director is holding back, though, perhaps concerned that audiences might baulk at an overdose of odd”.

There are plot inconsistencies. But after watching it for the fourth time, I came to realize that most people who watch this film in the cinema wouldn’t really care why a box of animal hearts preserved in glass bottles of reddish embalming fluids could survive the bombing of an air raid. After all, if one can tolerate the fact that a few millimeter of aluminum can withhold the gravitational squeeze of a black hole in Interstellar, who would mind a little mismatch of mechanical strength here and there?

The same goes for time travel, I think. To quote another movie review, “Some of the film’s rules are definitely of the ‘I’m not going to put too much mental energy to make sure this all checks out…'”

Plot inconsistencies aside, the movie is so interesting perhaps because of the world it reveals. And it is only a small part of the world, on an island, in Wales. There are so many potentials to fill in individual stories that one almost demands a sequel immediately.

What’s more, there is – what other say is Tim Burton at his best – the epic battle of skeleton army vs. invisible monsters, in a children’s amusement park, with spectators, and fought with oars, buckets, fishing lines, and kitchen knives. Sanity is overrated anyway. It is good entertainment.

The feature image is from here.

Being a Man United fan for the past three years hasn’t been easy. So many things have been missing. Champions league games, premier league titles, last-minute goals, and last-minute goals. Now with six league wins in a row, Mourinho’s team starts to show some resemblance of the old Man United team in the late 1990s, even though they are currently still 10 points behind the leader Chelsea.

What’s more encouraging is the manner in which they achieve the wins. One goal down, six minutes to go, and then two goals in two minutes to come back and win against Middlesbrough on new year’s eve was perhaps the latest example of a true resurgence.

Now it is about managing expectations. It is unlikely that they will win the league title this year, but a champions league spot should be within reach, well within reach.

Then again, stranger things have happened (a.k.a, Leicester city). So who knows.

I watched the semi-final of Euro between Portugal and Wales in a conference hotel bar in Berlin. A couple sitting in front of me joked before the game that they really don’t like the “superstar” Cristiano Ronaldo. They left bar before the game was finished, unsurprisingly, after CR scored from a header and assisted another.

In the final, when CR was carried off the field on a stretch, the Guardian minute-by-minute live update posted the following message:

“CR7 has the will of Keyser Soze, but he can’t lose the limp at the end,” says Matt Dony. “ I’m genuinely heartbroken for him. I really like Ronaldo, I have no problem with his on-field cockiness, because it’s backed up by supreme talent and a ridiculous amount of hard work. He’s a magnificent, too-often-maligned footballer, and deserves better than this in a game of this magnitude.” It’s fascinating how often sport is downright sadistic towards its greats. There are very few happy endings, unless you’re Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath.

I guess for people who watch football just for excitement or for celebrity, CR is not likable. His lack of humility is probably the reason why Messi is more universally loved by the general public than he is.

But the vast majority of professional footballers – from the former Arsenal/Barcelona player/now BBC commentator Thiery Henry to CR’s Portugal teammate Nani to his former Real Madrid teammate Di Maria – will tell you that they respect him. Being liked or not is not an issue. Their respect comes from the admiration of his skills and his dedication. Just as the Guardian commentator said, “it’s backed up by supreme talent and a ridiculous amount of hard work”.

It is an attitude not just limited to football pitches. Obama said something similar about basketball players:

By the time I reached high school, I was playing on Punahou’s teams, and could take my game to the university courts, where a handful of black men, mostly gym rats and has-beens, would teach me an attitude that didn’t just have to do with the sport. That respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn’t back it up. That you didn’t let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions – like hurt or fear – you didn’t want them to see.

A part of sportsmanship, I think.

Image source here.

I didn’t even get a good view of Van Gogh museum when I visited it last August, because it was under renovation. But it didn’t disappoint.

Out of all the marvelous paintings and curious personal artifacts, one letter written by Nicole Krauss has kept coming back to my mind. It was literally printed on three pieces of A4-sized paper, and these black and white pages seemed quite out of place with the rest colorful exhibits. This letter is in response to a letter van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1884. One hundred thirty one years later, Krauss wrote her letter to van Gogh in 2015.

The letter begins by talking about artist’s fear, the fear of a blank canvass, and then it delves into the origin of the fear, and says that it is within one’s power to break preconditioned or perceived “nature” of ourselves, fear included, and chose to do something, to break the loop of “nature”, and make a mark on that canvass.

Van Gogh’s original letter can be found here; Krauss’s letter here.

PS. Photos are not good. I was not supposed to take photos in the museum…

PPS. Vincent van Gogh page from Artsy. Thank Diana C from Artsy for reaching out.

For a year that began in Rome and ended in Barcelona, it sounded like a lot of travel. And it did, 2015. I watched the Pope delivering new year mass in Rome on Jan 1, and a few days later strolled the gallery of Uffizi in Florence. With the three extra days on my Europass, I made three day-trips to Cologne, Zurich, and Geneva in late January and February.

On the four-day Easter break, I joined three friends for a trip to the wine region in Beaujolais, north of Lyon.

Summer officially started with a solo trip in June in Greece (before the whole refugee crisis became full-blown), and I looked into a few well-positioned old stones on Acropolis in Athens and in the Temple of Apollo in Delphi.

A month later, joining again three friends, I had a hiking trip in Trolltunga, Norway, and tasted treasures of the sea in Bergen and saw a Mermaid in Copenhagen along the way.

August saw the full swing. Three weekends, three countries/cities: the World Expo in Milan, Van Gogh and biking in Amsterdam, and Kafka and Don Giovanni in Prague.

Then the fall passed without much relocation (man needs rest and research is fun).

And finally Spain in the winter break. Picasso, Barca, Gaudi, Real Madrid, Royal Palace, Gaudi again, Barca again, and Dali.

Not sure if there will be another year like this again. Restless souls and endless roads. Never say never.

I used to dislike reading novels, because they are not real, and because reading them takes too much time. Last year, however, I started reading novels again. What gets me back into it was Harry Porter series. It is delightful to know Hogwartz, the Gryffindors, the house ghosts, the quidditch cup, the leaky cauldron, and most of all Harry Porter and his friends and enemies. But I have to confess that I am one of those people whom serious readers despise: I watched the movies first and then decided to read the novels. I am a slow reader, and knowing that it will take me a long time to finish a book,  I choose very “carefully”.

Fantasies like Harry Porter series and science fictions like Ender’s Game interest me the most because they inspire wonder and imagination, but like realism dramas, they all offer insights into human natures. On this, Orson Scott Card, the author of Ender’s Game, wrote:

Why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody’s dazzling language – or at least I hope that’s not our reason. I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not “true” because we’re hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself.

The flip side of the question of “why reading novels” is “why writing novels”? I believe most writers write because they want to or need to tell something. J.K. Rowling said in her interview with Oprah that it is necessary for her mental health to continue writing, and that through writing, she makes clear to herself what she wanted to tell. For example, why she detests Dolores Umbridge is the sense of self-righteousness that justifies self-interests, or that she lets Molly Weasley be the person to kill Bellatrix Lestrange tells something about her views on feminism. Apart from social and political connotations or opinions of human nature, there is this most remarkable effect of a good story: to make the readers love their own lives.  And I quote Leo Tolstoy on this:

The goal of the artist is not to solve a question irrefutably, but to force people to love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations. If I were told I could write a novel in which I would set forth the seemingly correct attitudes towards all social questions, I would not devote even two hours of work to such a novel, but if I were told that what I write will be read in twenty years by children of today and that they will weep and smile over it and will fall in love with life, I would devote all my life and all my strength to it.

 

On Athletic High

Gladiators were trained professional. They had training schools, and there were huge amount of money and effort involved in gladiatorial games. In a sense, they are like modern day soccer (or football, correctly called) players. Both play in big arenas; both have limited time period for professional lives (either being slain or retired); and both perform for entertainment. The key difference, I think, is that the former is more cruel and involves blood spilling and finishing your opponent for good, whereas the latter is comparatively more civilized and sustainable way of competing. But perhaps I am judging the ancient activity with the wrong morality; perhaps in Roman times, slaying in Colosseum is a perfect sport that affords the highest level of entertainment. If the core of human nature is forged over million years of evolution, 2000 years of modern history is too brief to make any significant change to that somewhat raw and savage core, and maybe some part of the human nature has and will always have something to do with blood. And yet if modern day football have indeed some roots in the ancient gladiator games, its existence and popularity tell us that the expression of the same core human nature can be disciplined and can grow into more refined forms, while still keeping adrenaline flowing.

On Sportsmanship

But sports are much more than just adrenaline, or athletic high. There are discipline in training, team work in playing, and fairness in competing. It is often said that one can tell a person’s character directly from the way he plays soccer, such as whether he plays for himself or for the team, whether he plays for the sole purpose of winning or for the love of the game,  and whether he understands the subtle but crucial difference between sportsmanship and gamesmanship.

On Match Fitness
Often hear that in order to recover from injury or long vacation, a soccer player need to train for an extended period of time until he reaches match fitness before he can play in competitive games. The idea of match fitness goes beyond just being fit or without illness. It perhaps involves a certain level of fatigue from disciplined training that builds endurance. If match fitness represents a higher form of physical fitness, there could be analogous ideas in the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual domains. The sharpness of the brain and the strength of the heart may also need constant training in order to achieve higher and higher levels of fitness.

On Sports as An Art Form

A while ago, I read the following quote in the Guardian about the 2014 Bayern Munich team:

“It’s a football that the Bundesliga has never experienced in 50 years; so delicate and precise, so playful and determined, so sophisticated and improved, so inspiring and exciting. No one has come this close to art with football in this land as Pep Guardiola.”

Strategies, tactics, and game plans aside, once a team has the physical skills and mental strength, what comes out of every game at the highest level of competition can be beauty and elegance. This blending of sport and art blurs the boundary of the savage and the refined and is perhaps the finest expression of human nature.