The Need to Create

Curious thing is a person’s memory. Stuff that one never paid any attention to in childhood just keeps coming back when one gets older. 人之初，性本善，性相近，习相远。 Men at their birth are naturally good. Their natures are much the same; their habits become widely different. Translation shamelessly copied from here. 子曰：学而时习之，不亦说乎？有朋自远方来，不亦乐乎？人不知而不愠，不亦君子乎？ Confucius said, “To learn and to…

“We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!” – Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit The flight to DC was late. Even worse, I got to the airport an hour earlier than usual, so I ended up reading the first two chapters of the…

To Fellow NFLSers, I have always been skeptical about those who come to our school and share their experiences about their success. To claim to be successful seem to say one has finished his or her business in life, a very dire notion to me. For only 10 years have I graduated from NFLS, and…

Consider the cost of a textbook and the amount of information I get from a textbook. Then consider the amount of information I get from Wikipedia. Do the maths. I realize how much I owe Wikipedia and how little I actually pay for it. PS. The letter from Wikipedia always has a personal touch to…

Michelangelo: Precedents, Innovations, Influence is a choice out of pure curiosity. I was just back from my first trip to France and Germany. Things I saw there pointed me to Italy. Since I know nothing about Italian arts except for the names, so I figured I’d better do my homework before the visit. When I…

Ian Morrison has a very simple goal for his class. He wishes his students find a good question, whose answer wins a student a Nobel Prize, and who mentions “this instructor”. As I am in the process of searching for a worthy research question for my independent career, his emphasis on finding a good question…

Jobs applied only to Reed College, a liberal arts school in Oregon. He got in, but then dropped out after a year. He learned typography there, which was among many dots he connected in designing the Mac. He went to India and stayed there for seven months to practice Zen, and had kept his practice…