On Chivalry Part 1

On Chivalry

I would like to relate a couple of incidents that left an impression on me.

1.
Midweek evening. Crowded home-bound train. A nondescript journey, if not downright plebeian. The flow of humans ebbed and waned, packing into the metallic cabin following the mindless dictates of some spatial economics. A group of angmoh blokes sat in my immediate area, joking boisterously in sexy baritones.

An uncle: 50s, maybe 60s, stood in the center of the cabin. Stood in the center of the cabin: singing, he did. Hokkein words rattled off his tongue in a litany: trance-like, purposeful. He had a bundle of joss-sticks in his hands which he waved periodically, punctuating his lyrics with masterful strokes. Crazed intent glinted in his eyes. I caught a few intelligible words amidst all the flourish; pidgin translated roughly into a caricature of local politics and otherworldly esoteric.

We stared, naturally. The cabin felt electrified; the blokes were grinning to themselves as they watched in bemusement. The spectacle made for interesting entertainment no doubt and the moment was pregnant with violent possibilities.

An altercation ensued. As if driven by a karmic script, another man stepped onto the stage: tall, lanky, half-crazy. The permutations of human traffic that allowed for this one chance amalgamation of crazed personalities struck me, at that moment, as possibly divine.

Harsh, unintelligible words sparred. Everyone stared with disguised interest. I pretended not to notice, preferring the book-sanctuary of my alternate universes and galactic opera. Periodically, I locked gaze with one of the angmoh bloke and was greeted with a mischievous glint and a half-knowing smile, as if we were sharing in some salacious secret.

Events slowly crescendo-ed. Things started to get physical. The singing uncle started doing pull-ups on the horizontal bars, kungfu-esque hand-chops and hearty bellows. The other responded with middle fingers and glowering sneers. They stood a hair-breadth apart, facing each other down.



Cityhall station - the crowd thickened. The atmosphere was palatable. The newly initiated wave of humans felt the brewing disquiet and instinctively moved away to other parts of the train. It was like watching a train wreck : inherently tragic and yet perversely attractive to the senses - one could not afford to look away for fear of missing the dramatic punch or knife stab that will warrant a brief interlude on the evening news.

Out of the blue, literally, a lady in blue tudung (bless her heart), wedged herself between the two simmering dynamics. Whilst everyone stood away in trepidation and apathy, mimicking the indifferent air of superior nonchalance (myself included, unfortunately), this feisty lady broke the tension with stern and powerful words that etched like fire in my memory.

"You two! Stop acting like children! This is a train! Stop it right now and get out!"

Whether they were literate enough to understand english was non-essential. Like chastised puppies, they retreated, whimpering. They continued their tirade of course, but it was done in the fashion of soliloquies; whisperings of whisperings to their demons and gods. The Lady-In-Blue took off on the next station, and the Singing Uncle got off one station after her. With two adversaries removed, the Lanky Uncle started talking to himself, and the momentum of the moment slowly bleed away into the collective calm of the cabin.

But of course, we knew that the climax of the drama had been reached; a culmination achieved. All that was required of the universe at that moment was a gradual diminishing, until none but I remained to document that one little burp in the brilliant fabric of apathy.

I learnt a valuable lesson that day; of the power of intercession, of bravery, of social responsibility. While I cannot promise that I will do better, or even match the lady, I believe that I must at least try: for what can one lady do, that we cannot?

Part 2 to be continued

魔術先生

Mr Magician

One of Jay's song that I really adore. Very happy song with quirky lyrics! ^^

魔術先生

A midnight dally

A Midnight Thing

No traffic, human or otherwise touched this side of the night; the cityscape settled quietly, in colourless yawns as a soft drizzle danced on the tips of lonely streetlamps. Pools of poignant orange gathered where the streetlamps stood, diffused and sullen; beads of lingering warmth running down the length of an emptier street. 

He strolled along; an ambulatory gait devoid of direction. A wind stroked his jacket, danced in his hair, tugged at his sleeves, and went away into the folds of the city. A flickering green man turned blood red, uncaring of his presence; a single car left him behind in the dust. What the day presents, the night removes: no sense of purpose, no wistful colours.

The night; a thief, sneaks upon him. Carves his soul into little pieces. Dances like wild fire. A thousand shards of melancholy, and of it all: solitude he finds, most beguiling. 

Steve Jobs speaks at Standford Commencement.

Steve Jobs Speaks

Well worth a read.
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Steve Jobs Speaks at Stanford Commencement
Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

Does science make belief in God obsolete?

Does Science make belief in God obsolete?

Read the full transcript at http://www.templeton.org/belief/
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the department of psychology at Harvard University. He is the author of seven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate,and most recently, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.
Yes, if by...
"science" we mean the entire enterprise of secular reason and knowledge (including history and philosophy), not just people with test tubes and white lab coats.

Traditionally, a belief in God was attractive because it promised to explain the deepest puzzles about origins. Where did the world come from? What is the basis of life? How can the mind arise from the body? Why should anyone be moral?

Yet over the millennia, there has been an inexorable trend: the deeper we probe these questions, and the more we learn about the world in which we live, the less reason there is to believe in God.

Start with the origin of the world. Today no honest and informed person can maintain that the universe came into being a few thousand years ago and assumed its current form in six days (to say nothing of absurdities like day and night existing before the sun was created). Nor is there a more abstract role for God to play as the ultimate first cause. This trick simply replaces the puzzle of "Where did the universe come from?" with the equivalent puzzle "Where did God come from?"

What about the fantastic diversity of life and its ubiquitous signs of design? At one time it was understandable to appeal to a divine designer to explain it all. No longer. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace showed how the complexity of life could arise from the physical process of natural selection among replicators, and then Watson and Crick showed how replication itself could be understood in physical terms. Notwithstanding creationist propaganda, the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, including our DNA, the fossil record, the distribution of life on earth, and our own anatomy and physiology (such as the goose bumps that try to fluff up long-vanished fur).

For many people the human soul feels like a divine spark within us. But neuroscience has shown that our intelligence and emotions consist of intricate patterns of activity in the trillions of connections in our brain. True, scholars disagree on how to explain the existence of inner experience-some say it's a pseudo-problem, others believe it's just an open scientific problem, while still others think that it shows a limitation of human cognition (like our inability to visualize four-dimensional space-time). But even here, relabeling the problem with the word "soul" adds nothing to our understanding.

People used to think that biology could not explain why we have a conscience. But the human moral sense can be studied like any other mental faculty, such as thirst, color vision, or fear of heights. Evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience are showing how our moral intuitions work, why they evolved, and how they are implemented within the brain.

This leaves morality itself-the benchmarks that allow us to criticize and improve our moral intuitions. It is true that science in the narrow sense cannot show what is right or wrong. But neither can appeals to God. It's not just that the traditional Judeo-Christian God endorsed genocide, slavery, rape, and the death penalty for trivial insults. It's that morality cannot be grounded in divine decree, not even in principle. Why did God deem some acts moral and others immoral? If he had no reason but divine whim, why should we take his commandments seriously? If he did have reasons, then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

Those reasons are not to be found in empirical science, but they are to be found in the nature of rationality as it is exercised by any intelligent social species. The essence of morality is the interchangeability of perspectives: the fact that as soon as I appeal to you to treat me in a certain way (to help me when I am in need, or not to hurt me for no reason), I have to be willing to apply the same standards to how I treat you, if I want you to take me seriously. That is the only policy that is logically consistent and leaves both of us better off. And God plays no role in it.

For all these reasons, it's no coincidence that Western democracies have experienced three sweeping trends during the past few centuries: barbaric practices (such as slavery, sadistic criminal punishment, and the mistreatment of children) have decreased significantly; scientific and scholarly understanding has increased exponentially; and belief in God has waned. Science, in the broadest sense, is making belief in God obsolete, and we are the better for it.
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the department of psychology at Harvard University. He is the author of seven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and most recently, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, O.P., is a Dominican friar, the Archbishop of Vienna, Austria, a Member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for Education of the Roman Catholic Church, and was lead editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Yes and No.

No, as a matter of reason and truth. The knowledge we have gained through modern science makes belief in an Intelligence behind the cosmos more reasonable than ever.

Yes, as a matter of mood, sensibility, and sentiment. Not science itself but a reductive "scientific mentality" that often accompanies it, along with the power, control, comfort, and convenience provided by modern technology, has helped to push the concept of God into the hazy twilight of agnosticism. Superficially it may seem that the advances of science have made God obsolete by providing natural explanations for phenomena that were once thought to be the result of direct divine activity—the so-called "God of the gaps." But this advance has been the completion of a program of purification from superstition begun thousands of years ago by Athens and Jerusalem, by a handful of Greek sages and by the people of Israel, who "de-divinized" Nature to a degree unparalleled in the ancient world. Summarizing an established tradition 750 years ago, St. Thomas Aquinas taught that the wise governor ordinarily governs by delegation to competent subordinates. In the case of Nature, God's ordinary providence governs by means of the regularities ("laws") built into the natures of created things.

This theistic outlook has been fully vindicated. As the ancient Greek materialists recognized long ago, if we wish to explain the observed world in terms of Matter without reference to Mind, then it must be explained by things material, ultimate, and very simple all at the same time—by indivisible, notional "atoms" and a chance "swerve" that sets them in random motion. If the things of everyday experience are mere aggregates of these "atoms," and if the cosmos is infinitely old and infinitely large, then chance can do the rest. To be the complete explanation of material reality, these "atoms," and whatever natural regularities they exhibit, must be so simple that their existence as inexplicable "brute facts" is plausible.

Fast-forward to the present: Modern science has shown that Nature is ordered, complex, mathematically tractable, and intelligible "all the way down," as far as our instruments and techniques can discern. Instead of notional, perfectly simple "atoms," we have discovered the extraordinarily complex, beautiful, and mathematical "particle zoo" of the Standard Model of physics, hovering on the border of existence and intelligibility (as Aristotle predicted long ago with his doctrine of prime matter). And order, complexity, and intelligibility exist "all the way up" as well. We see a teleological hierarchy and chain of emergence from quantized physics, giving rise to stable chemistry, enabling the nearly miraculous properties of carbon and biochemistry, providing the material basis for the emergence of life with its own ontological hierarchy of metabolic (plant), sensitive (animal), and rational (human) existence. Beyond this astounding and unfailing order and intelligibility, our knowledge of which increases each day as science expands its scope, we now know of the precise fine-tuning of the physical laws and constants that make possible a life-supporting universe.

In short, the Nature we know from modern science embodies and reflects immaterial properties and a depth of intelligibility far beyond the wildest imaginings of the Greek philosophers. To view all these extremely complex, elegant, and intelligible laws, entities, properties, and relations in the evolution of the universe as "brute facts" in need of no further explanation is, in the words of the great John Paul II, "an abdication of human intelligence."

But the modern mood is an entirely different matter. In terms of modern sensibilities, the intellectual culture of the West is dominated by a scientific mentality that seeks to explain qualitative and holistic realities by quantitative and reductive descriptions of the workings of their parts. Although the scientific program that gives rise to this mentality has been quite successful in explaining the material basis for holistic realities, and in allowing us to manipulate natural things to our advantage by altering the configuration of their parts, it fails to grasp the reality of natural things themselves. The unlimited application of the "scientific mentality" is scientism, the philosophical claim that the scientific method and scientific explanations can grasp all of reality. For many, scientism is accompanied by agnosticism or atheism.

In terms of popular sentiment, however, scientism has not carried the day. Most people still intuitively cling to the notion that at least human nature and human experience are not reducible to what is scientifically knowable. But with no rational alternative to scientism, most people live in a “soft,” non-rational, and relativistic world of feelings, opinions, and personal values. The increase in leisure and health brought about by our increasing mastery over Nature has not resulted, as the ancient sages supposed, in an increase in wisdom and the contemplation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Instead, our technology-based leisure is more likely to result in quiet hedonism, consumerism, and mind-numbing mass entertainment. While many still claim belief in God, the course of their lives reflects de facto agnosticism in which the "God hypothesis" is far from everyday experiences and priorities.

In all our scientistic "knowledge" of the inner workings of things, and our technology-based comforts and distractions, there seems to be no place for the still, small voice of God. In that practical and existential sense, science and technology seem to have pushed belief in God toward obsolescence. Or have they?

In our innermost being, we moderns remain unsatisfied. Sooner or later we face an existential crisis, and recognize in our lives something broken, disordered, in need of redemption. The fact that we can recognize disorder, brokenness, and sin means that they occur within a larger framework of order, beauty, and goodness, or else in principle we could not recognize them as such. Yet brokenness and disorder are painfully present, and the human soul by its nature seeks something more, a deeper happiness, a lasting good. Consideration of the order and beauty in nature can lead us to a Something, the "god of the philosophers," but consideration of our incompleteness leads us beyond, in search of a Someone who is the Good of us all. Science will never make that quest obsolete.