It is such a beautiful night tonight.
The rain has stopped
And the trees are rustling over a new gossip in the wind.
From my balcony
I can hear leaves being dragged along the ground by the breeze
Dancing to the mood, though not the rhythm
Of the crickets' incessant calls.
One has to wonder
Whose work it is that the crickets manage to so bring to life
Breathing a tranquility that is not silence into the night sky
Still tinted with a hint of pink.

Further away, I hear cars driving by
Not the roar of rush hour
But rather like the song of the crickets
Whose voices, each singing a very short counter-melody,
Weave together a complex polyphony that is at the same time intriguing and quiet.
It must be the eighteenth day of the lunar calendar;
It's strange to see a moon halfway to a half moon
Look so beautiful against an uncertain blue.
I am tempted to think it impolite to stare at a moon
Changing out of her ceremonial robes, but she sits unmoving, brighter at one edge,
Like a raw tear-shaped gem, back lit,
Adorning the Autumn sky.

There is something about the song of the crickets
It's the loudest thing I can hear tonight
Except when it is interrupted by the occasional hum of vehicles a distance away.
Yet, unlike the soft but insistent mumbling of the rotating electrical fan next door,
The more I try to follow the most identifiable melody and put myself into its sound
The more my ears tell me that I don't hear anything at all.
I was taught to identify instruments when listening to an orchestral work
But this night is full of sounds I don't know how to identify
But I suspect this is what a twenty-four bar rest really sounds like.
I can hear my neighbor packing something into a bag,
And it brings to me memories
of Grandma, packing things on a night
Just days before the Lunar New Year.
Like a nostalgic scent
Reconstructing in my mind a memory I did not see with my eyes
For a moment, part of me, is not quite here.
From time to time, the wind would be strong enough
To make the wind chime ring
Once, Twice, like a clock
Announcing the passing of an hour
As irregular as our memories that mark the years.

Autumn is just an idea
not so much of a season
as it is a period of change between Summer and Winter
which anchor the chain of fleeting moments that just happen to lie in between
just as how Life happens between the two perennial mountains of Birth and Death.
we always use the four seasons as an analogy for Life,
and choose Death to be its opposite.
But if Birth were to be the opposite of Death,
Life would be one single season of change
the next season would seem convincingly its purpose and destination
we forget that all four seasons
inextricably must happen at the same instant, somewhere out there
somewhere out there
someone is born
someone dies
and someone arrives
without having to try

i think one amazing thing about the body is that it was built to live, and built to die. That in the same body was a full package that included what was needed to do cell division, organ formation, puberty, recovery from sickness, reproduction, aging, and death - and every single function is a wonder. every function brings with it not just a biological process, but also a psychological process. the way our bodies change directly affects the way we think, and therefore the way be see the world and make decisions.

i think that this is nature's kindest invention. so that in our youth we will go out and do all sorts of reckless things and push our limits, and when our strength slows down, we change and desire different things. it helps us live our age. i think being able to live one's age is a great gift, because no matter how fast our brains can work, we take time to adjust emotionally. Living our age allows us to adjust bit by bit as our bodies change through its seasons.

simple, isn't it? the toddle ready to walk, the youth ready to run, the adult ready to fly, the wise ready to teach, the aged ready to encourage, and those at the end of the road - ready to die.

Yet one whole lifetime, is sometimes not enough for some of us to learn.

contentment<-reconciliation<-issue<-QUESTION->seeking->answer->satisfaction

Capitalism is beautiful in that it sums up all organizational objectives into the optimization of one single variable - profit.

Profit can be affected by costs, access to supply and availability of demand. Demand drives the demand for demand - and causes marketing and advertising to stimulate, as well as create demand. This causes a lot of people to want things they don't need. This excessive consumption is what causes a strain on the natural balance of things around us - the main one being the Environment.

I think stimulated demands are not healthy. Neither for the planet, nor on a personal level. People end up spending their lives chasing things that they don't really want. I think it is fair to win over a competitor's market, or to open up a new market with a new product that answers an undiscovered need. But to create a desire for a good where there is no real need, is plainly profiting on the goodness of the earth.

There is just so much resources on earth. If someone needs to get really rich, someone's gotta give. And now Nature's giving, and giving too much.

in the game of life,
nobody, has too much too lose.
that's what the floods and earthquakes,
wars and diseases,
recessions and loss,
remind us - that we are mere nothings
putting our everything against a constantly changing world
to stay alive.

Where does the Wind come from?
Where does he go?
He picked up momentum for a little while
and I felt his coming.
When he dies down,
Is he dead?
Is the Wind now, and the Wind later
the same Wind?
How can I tell?
You point to the leaves that were moving in him,
But they're not moving now.
I call to memory of his scent in my mind -
the smell of grass, of the sea, of wood, of pastry -
I can almost smell it now, but I cannot hold him in my hand -
Neither now that he is gone, nor then when he was here.
He comes, he goes, and I let him pass,
Like the shadow of a cloud crossing a river.
How do I begin to explain to you that he was here?
He is only as real as
the experience of that moment
I felt him near.

To err is human.

Not just humans, actually, all life err,
because mutation and evolution results in fiercer genes.
Error tolerance is a fantastic feature of our DNA.
But perhaps rather than saying that we were built FOR error, maybe it is more accurate to say that we were built WITH error.

It is not so much an effort or "correctness" that led to success - but rather, whatever happened to happen, happened because it is the inevitable. Whatever didn't happen, didn't happen because it not happening is also an inevitable.

Between the happening inevitable and the non-happening inevitable, we have enough life forms and variables to go around. This richness is the very essence of our world.

Our survival is simply proof of our diversity, because in diversity we create enough randomness to ensure that something survives.

The only time the word "normal" can mean any sense at all,
is when it is referring to the Gaussian distribution.

Being "normal" under the non-mathematical definition only means that you have inherited a more proven set of genes.

Which means that you are not going to push any frontiers.

Which also means you are largely unnecessary for the process of evolution.

Why are we so obsessed about being "normal"?

It is our weakness that makes us so.

We like to think about a model being that defines what "normal" is.

And we like to put everything else either "above" or "below" the "normal".

We admire those who are not normal, only when they happen to be in the "above" group.

When some choose lifestyles that belong to the "below" group, we look at them with disgust and fear.

The Gaussian Normal on the other hand, is incomplete without the full distribution.

It would not be Normal otherwise.

Yes, it means that the people "above" and the people "below" are part of what makes everybody Normal.

G/R/R/A/A/C/C/E/S/S is a color only when you put yourself in the center of the world.

Come to terms with it.

Diversity is the new Normal.

Grab youtube media

#!/bin/perl 

$0 =~ s:.*/::g;
while ($ARGV[0] =~ /^-/) {
        if (($ARGV[0] eq "-h") || ($ARGV[0] eq "--help")) {
                print "Usage: $0 URL ... \n";
                print "Grab youtube media\n";
                exit;
        } else {
                $0 =~ s/.*\///; 
                $ARGV[0] =~ s/^-*//;
                print "$0: invalid option -- $ARGV[0]\n";
                exit;
        }
}

use File::Spec::Functions qw(rel2abs);
use File::Basename;

use lib dirname(rel2abs($0))."/lib";

use LWP::UserAgent;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $u;
while (@ARGV) {
        $_=shift;
        ($i) = /v=(.+)/;
        $content = $ua->get($_)->content;
        ($title) = $content =~ m/<title>(.*)<\/title>/s;
        $title =~ s/[\r\n \t][\r\n \t]*/ /sg;
        $title =~ s/^\s*|\s*$//g;
        $title =~ s/ /_/g;
        for ($content =~ m/l_map": .+(?:%2C)?5\|(.+?)\|/) {
                $u = $_;
                $u =~ s/%(..)/chr(hex($1))/ge;
                $u =~ s/\\\//\//g;
        };
        print "Getting ${title}_$i.flv...\n";
        $ua->get($u, ":content_file" => "${title}_$i.flv");
}

Imagine, if we could really resize media.

We can decide to watch it as a 2-hour movie, or get it automatically set into a short story. Or we could resize the short story into a photograph with a short caption. Or translate it into a poetry in another language. We can decide how many words, how many photographs, how many videos, how many minutes, how many stanzas, the media should be presented with. Resize-able media relieves a message from having to be restricted to one single form.

I think it is important to be able to communicate what we have to say. But even when we are ready to tell, the world is full of people who are not ready to know. But if resize-able media were possible, then they could choose the version of the story they are ready to hear, and take it with them, until they are ready to see the whole thing. We don't really see people for who they are too much of the time. Not because people don't tell, but because we don't want to know. The people we think we know, may turn out to be not who they are altogether. Resize-able media would, at least, remove the confrontation from the honesty. I hate the idea of living a lie, but I can't come to terms with telling people what they do not prepare themselves to hear.

Things would be so much simpler if people could just have an open mind and always choose to face reality.

Unless we manage to survive on supplements and eat only portion of plants that can grow back, eating more often than not involves us taking a life to stay alive.

That's one way of looking at it.

In the food chain, plants make food and animals eat plants, sometimes plants digest or make use of animals - but whatever is at the top of the food chain finally dies and its body decomposes, giving itself back to the soil. Plants then absorb the nutrients from the soil. At each state of the process, different life-forms act as stewards of the "material" on which life runs. What we call "life" could be just a perceived manifestation of the continuous cycle than runs through the whole food chain. Just like a jar of soil and water when shaken settles into layers - neither the soil nor the water need to "think" about what to do; it happens because the soil, the water, the jar and the Earth all agree that that is the way of things that rises out of natural ease.

That is, until the modern man comes into the picture. The modern eats everything, but in the end when he dies, his body is burnt up and put into a container, so that nothing returns to the soil. "Natural" is hardly an apt description for the modern man.

[fork 1]
Some decide that they should not eat at the expense of another life. Some define for themselves whatever they think is "natural". For me, I think the only things that are "natural" are natural selection and random mutation. In the modern context, this natural selection and random mutation is best seen in the way language evolves. Maybe that could imply that one single person can never be "natural". "Natural" is whatever that happens to happen, when viewed from the collective consciousness of the entire species, food chain, or ecosystem. Man's "un-natural-ness" becomes "natural" when taken into the context of the Earth's history.

[fork 2]
"Natural" and "artificial" in this case could be an analogy for "analogue" and "digital", for "being" and "doing", for "feeling(receptive)" and "thinking(creative)". Modern man prefers "digital", "doing" and "thinking". I would like to think that sufficiently advanced "digital" technology approaches the analogue, an identity based solely on "doing" is also a way of "being", that there is a way of thinking that is indifferentiable from feeling, and that the artificial when taken far enough, approaches the natural.

[fork 3]
Now say, is it possible to create a machine, that can absorb minerals and synthesize sugars, amino acids then proteins, and go all the way until it becomes flesh-like substance that can form a diet that sustains human life, all through made-created autonomous processes? Would the medium of such processes be subject to man's own discourses and receive objections because it could be called "life"?

[wait]

Which is why when I eat, I give thanks, eat my meat, and shut up.

If who you perceive yourself to be is who you physically are, then you are just too lucky. Be happy, but be thankful. You would be a sunshine for those who are struggling.

If you can align who you perceive yourself to be with your physical self, then you have done well. You would be an example to those who are trying.

But if you can't change who you perceive yourself to be, move on - you don't have forever. If you spend your whole life trying to change how your perceive yourself, you're not going to have any time left to achieve anything. Some people decide to change their physical selfs to match how they perceive themselves. They took a stand in life, and stepped forward. It is great courage, and they will be an inspiration.

Whoever you are, move on and come to terms with yourself. If you have been through the struggle and finally come back home to yourself, you would have learned the gifts forgiving and accepting. You would be a great encourager and healer.

If you can't come to terms with who you perceive yourself to be - whatever you achieve in life, at the end of the day, could come to mean nothing to you. Perhaps you would be a hero. Perhaps the world would know you - but what would it mean, if at the end of a whole lifetime, you never got the chance to get to know yourself?

Pattern 25

Pattern 24

Pattern 23 

Pattern 22

Pattern 21

Pattern 20

If we could choose the life we'd live
Like a book from a library of shelves
Categorized by genre, complete with commentaries and reviews
So we could better decide if it would be worth our energies and emotions,
I would suggest you choose to be
An accidental hero.
You would not need to strive
But you will bathe in the glory and smell of fame,
Having been born at the right place and time.
Your very existence would be a landmark in the history
Of an eternity of souls regretting their turns.
I'm not sure if you can call that
A life worth living,
But it would be easy, and that's what you'd want.
I know, because I have always noticed you
Picking out biographices of those who have been through the pain
But in life you would always choose the Safe Way Out.
You always tell me how your heart bleeds when you enter their world
But honestly, I cannot grasp the shape and weight of your heart
When you say these things.
Perhaps one day you will prove me wrong.
And I hope you do - and perhaps one day
We can finally sit down and talk
And you would weep me warm tears
When I bare to you
My pains that have no speakable name.

Pattern 19
山


水