Time to Enjoy the Moon

(Portrait of Su Shi by Zhao Mengfu.  Yuan.  Source)

水調歌頭

Shui Diao Ge Tou

蘇軾

Su Shi

明月幾時有？把酒問青天。

When will the moon be bright?  I raise my wine to the blue sky.

不知天上宮闕，今夕是何年。

Not sure if the lunar palace, knows what year it is.

我欲乘風歸去，又恐瓊樓玉宇，高處不勝寒。

I wish to ascend with the wind to the top,  I also fear at the marble jade palace, its high and can't withstand the cold.

起舞弄清影，何似在人間。

I dance making a shadow, like you were in the mortal world.

轉朱閣，低綺戶，照無眠。

Orbiting through the red chambers, hanging low by the window, with brightness I cannot sleep.

不應有恨，何事長向別時圓？

You shouldn't respond with such hatred, why must you be full when people separate.

人有悲歡離合，月有陰晴圓缺，此事古難全。

Humans are sad, happy, seperated and together, the moon waxes and wanes. From old times it's hard to be complete.

但願人長久，千里共嬋娟。

But I long for people to live long, so from far away we can bask in your beauty.

Poor Su Shi, after living for years in exile you still pain to see you little brother. After 900 years, your longing for warmth and love still resonate today.

Regardless of whether you are enjoying mooncakes with tea and family, or contemplating your blessings in loneliness, just remember that with the vicissitudes of life, everyone has the yearning for love and belonging.  Feel the present, and count the people who love you.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

It Pays to Read: Reading is worth $960 an hour!

There's a story about a miser during the Victorian era who either kept a bond certificate or cash sitting in the bank for his entire life. When he withdrew his money, the buying power of his asset shrunk due to inflation. He ended up being poor at the end of his life.

What if you never read this story and lived this scenario? 43% of workers have less than $10000 for retire. Imagine how many more have no investment plan and are just shoving money into a savings account?

Reading allows you to relive the thought process of another human being. A good chapter book (no pictures) represents roughly a year to a thousands of years of human experience. If you read at a modest pace of 20 pages an hour, you could finish a 300 page book in 15 hours. Let's be modest and some author wrote a book in a year. Assuming that this writer was working 40 hours a week, for every one hour you read, you exchange 133 hours of the author's work!  If you assume that author is working at federal minimum wage, reading is worth $960/hr!

Let's say instead you read about ancient Rome. Let's exclude the author and count the total living hours of each Roman. On average there was roughly 50 million people living every year, and the Roman Empire was roughly 2000 years old. Let's say a book on the Roman Empire was 3000 pages. Assuming your 20 page reading rate, for every one hour of reading about Rome, you exchange roughly 76,000 man-YEARS of human experience! Instead of living and dying 1000 times, you can read for an hour!  If we assume the federal minimum wage again, that's $4.8 billion dollars an hour!  Take that quantitative easing!

I hope this is one reason to motivate you to read.

[caption id="attachment_389" align="aligncenter" width="300"] (My favorite book.  $15 USD) 

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The New Academic

(Drool.  Source.)

People would invest more in academia if people saw its value.

For the most of human history, historical artifacts and archives belonged to the rich and powerful. Today it's slightly better. I can walk into a natural history museum and look at prehistorical fossils, or extinct birds stuffed by taxidermists. But fossil are still sold like jackets on Rodeo Drive.

There were two valuable lessons that I learned from my classical Chinese class:

1) It's always tempting to impose your narrative about a subject, but be objective as possible or you lose truth.

2) Always know your source, or else anyone can impose their own narrative.

Science can recreate an experiment to examine if claims are true. If a word is smudged off a primary historical document, the word is lost to history, never to be seen again. Imagine if the word "people" was ripped out of the preamble of the US Constitution?

Data in the humanities is literally ink fading from old pieces of paper. It's inevitable that knowledge will be lost over time.

The internet is powerful enough store data through the ravages of time, but so far we've been poor at storing and disseminating academic work.

I don't want a PhD in the humanities because the process of getting one is prehistoric. For Chinese, I would have to study know English, Chinese and French/German. After 6 years of rigorous research, I would be in debt, unemployed knowing something that barely anyone can understand.

I don't want to belittle the work of graduate students. We need experts to be the gatekeepers of cultural knowledge, but this knowledge must be relevant to the public. The PhD in the humanities currently stores its knowledge in university libraries and locks academic work within paywalls. A person from the public can only access general factoids through Wikipedia and sift through disparate internet sources. There's no academic critique or analysis of cultural data that the public can ponder, and the general public has no medium to respond beyond the comment boards full of extremists and trolls.

I hope that the new generation of humanities PhD's finds a way to effectively distribute cultural data to everyone. I fear that if this doesn't happen, digital noise may drown the value of the humanities.

Until then I will keep blogging. Or as Haruki Murakami puts it:

“If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us -- create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)”