I just finished SNW s2e2. It is titled Ad Astra per Aspera—to the stars through hardship— coming from pre-federation StarFleet motto.

I am very used to seeing black civil rights lawyers win cases in American court dramas. I felt deeply touched by Una Chin-Riley’s testimony regarding the degradation of her life and civil liberty living in a federation planets when citizens took liberties with a minority race when the letter of the law discriminates against them. She couldn’t go to hospital from broken leg…

I feel like I’m not a genetically modified person in a world where genetically modified person is not allowed. My race has not experienced persistent, in person, racially based attacks as much as several other races. But her fear of going to a doctor’s office … or even her experience of not being served in a store… I mean, I feel like I have not exactly been refused service in a store. And I have not exactly suffered a disease/injury that I could not get treated .

But if I am honest, I definitely have, until recent years, always felt the fear of visiting Dr. Office—its always “that’s completely normal”. I definitely have thought about never visiting a certain Whole Foods or some tobacco shop or several car garages, some preschools,… Because I felt like I was essentially refused service. Oh, and of course there’s that first round software engineering interview I failed at Palantir after studying CS at CMU and working in the industry for more than a decade… due to, literally stated to me, “lack of fit”.

But I am not Illyrian, or African-American, nor Jewish, nor Ukrainian, nor Uyghur, nor Muslim, nor Christian……..

Are my perceptions and interpretations of my experiences valid? Are they real? Or am I impersonating one of these other races pr groups in my mind to cover the real fallacy of me?

Sure, Star Trek SNW is trying very hard to lead us onward, give us that aspiration to make this functional Federation of diversity. And sure, it is really awesome that it is starting to work out for the Illyrian.

But I am neither and nor. Who am I? What am I? Where am I going?

An awesome episode of Star Trek stirs deep deep dark dark mantle of me. $FAMx0.5$ It deserves to be watched again and savored, for it taps so deep… so so so very deep into the soul of it all…

I have somewhat renewed my faith in that whole “fighting for what’s right” thing. In my American-media-influenced youth, I definitely felt that spirit of fighting for “that which is right—equality with rights and freedom” a little bit renewed…

I need to stop reading real world news to make this all more interesting. Since I knew Una’s a main character and signed on for the seasons I knew she’d win…. Since I knew the episodes, I kinda knew pike wouldn’t be de-captained… the suspense, the fear, the anxiety, is lacking. Although it does express a certain degree of confidence—that things always workout for the Federation, perhaps unsaid, because of its righteousness. Back in the days of yesteryear, I googled for what happened when a character died or moved on… after I experienced the loss from the show… ugh now I am complaining. Am I a real Trekkie? Do I really support these ideals?

Man. I feel so fake.

I feel so fake for complaining that Una Chin-Riley sounds like a descendent of an Asian, but she couldn’t be a proper Asian, since 😭Asian names like Chang are reserved for Klingons. 🤮

I shouldn’t really complain. A star fleet officer would have to look beyond these and perform his duties for the greater good… no matter what the name.

I am no star fleet officer, or any thing, nothing nothing I am nothing!!!

I recently realized that the fact Chinese-Americans (any and all of us from various original locations in the world) have trouble dealing with the disparagement of anything “Chinese” might be because we really cannot separate ourselves from that concept.

While shopping for stuff from the Peoples Republic of China (Alibaba) I requested the word China be printed on the products. I was met with significant resistance. It would appear that the nation-state of Peoples Republic of China considers the word “China” it’s own trademark. One cannot besmirch the mark in its presence. In fact, I am not even allowed to associate with it. I cannot use the word “China” or “Chinese” in the engraving of items I purchase.

Chinese people probably have some builtin cultural barrier that regards “Chinese” as a highly treasured culture mark. We associate it because it (effectively) means civility, might, affluence and nobility. Indeed for much of Chinese history this might have been factually true. Just that in recent centuries we have fallen in these considerations.

Consequently, it is very challenging for a Chinese person (of any sorts) to stand up in broad daylight and say out loud: “I am not Chinese and I am not China.” We cannot imagine “We the people of XXX…” where XXX is not “China” or a notable subset of “China”. Even as I write this, the most I can consider is to refer to myself as Chinese-American. I am not just American and certainly I am NOT not Chinese.

(Case in point, Taiwan, is still China, according to their official doctrine, and NOT an independent entity that broke away from Peoples Republic of China. My opinion has been, like many around me, that Taiwan really oughta do it for real, be America and declare independence. Then win back China if it wants to, by peaceful means if possible. Or just live merrily in the bliss of freedom as Americans do. Why be Chinese at all?)

The political and emotional consequence is that we continue to suffer (reasonably or not) for actions of an entity that we neither control nor influence. We are taxed (punished) by a nation with no representation and participation from us.

I have not done it. I am not free for China, perhaps I never will be.

But this distinct connection needs to be recognized when we consider the plight of Chinese-American in America. While we are free and bound as Americans, we seem to nonetheless be bound as Chinese as well. As much as we are hated for it, we are still all indelibly Chinese!

Somebody recently told me that in early 2023, legislations were proposed and passed in several states of USA to exclude Chinese people from buying properties.

It’s a holy shit, deja vu moment. Sure sure you can read the news and tell me that it targets Chinese nationals working on behalf of the people’s republic of China. Whatever! That’s just not what a Chinese person (or any other American) hears when they hear “exclude Chinese from buying property” everyone knows exactly what it means: being Chinese is undesirable and we must rid of them.

But I do wonder, like, what is so great about my Chinese-hood? Why can I not dissociate myself from the “Chinese” in the legislations and news that report them? Why Chinese ? Why do Chinese culture and people need to exist at all? Why is desirable in any way shape or form?

The majority of people who identify with the Chinese are raised and grown in the PRC. For better or for worse, they do have significant indoctrination about why everything from its historic culture to modern governance are all just the best of the best of the best ever ever and for ever and ever and ever. This type of indoctrination is neither irrational nor unfair in any sense of those words. Most Americans, myself included, will quickly belittle that pride in that culture citing irrational fiction indoctrination. This disparaging proclivity is not necessarily supported by facts or events that we personally experienced. (Meaning it is at least in part caused by irrational fiction indoctrination of our own)

So, in all honesty, why do I not want China and Chinese to have negative meaning? Why do I think it deserves to have a better meaning to every single person who speaks or thinks these words? Why do I care about what hidden neurons these tokens activate in the human neural network? Why should China and Chinese mean anything but what we think and feel they mean right now?

This is an open question to the whole world.

I will jot down some first impressions as I settle my mind into this question:

• Functional
  • Alive—it is a surviving culture.
  • Communication—The Chinese language runs a very big country and feeds many mouths.
  • Productive—The country have always produced much in many good ways.
  • Adaptive—Can you imagine the constitution of Communist PRC having clause guaranteeing religious freedom of its citizens as a human right?? Check that out!! Chinese people and culture can seem rigid and inept, but some times they are surprisingly accepting of foreign ideas. I mean com’n does anybody remember the adoption of national population control from foreign “scientists”?
  • Optimizing
  • Efficient—Check out Ancient Chinese language, it is “highly compressed“ in terms of number of characters used to communicate. For god’s sake, they don’t even type space, you have to infer word boundaries while you read Chinese!! The “Strong concepts” section below is a single character per bullet point when mentioned in historical texts.
• Complex—the complexity and diversity of the culture hints at its beauty and value that has yet to manifest. This may seem silly, but I believe reverence for complexity is something that we generally accept as humans.
• Strong innate concepts of
  • Honesty—the words have immediate association with the concept of honesty to Chinese people. Honesty is a strong and innate concept to the culture
  • Piety—here one mostly think of Gilliam piety, but certainly there are, and have been, a lot of Chinese who are pious to other subjects.
  • Loyalty
  • Compassion
  • Charity
  • Social Order—Although Chinese scholars debate what’s right, the need for structured social order pervades Chinese history.
  • Career—Although this is traditionally asked of men, the idea having a life-long career is a must is very Chinese.
  • Aspiration—the idea that people should have grand aspiration or to be devoted to a cause. Possibly more than life-long endeavor.
  • Hardship—huge thing for Chinese, lots of stuff about how to deal with hardship of all kinds.
  • Striving—We believe in hard work. What ever that means to Chinese people.
  • Teacher—has a very special place in the heart of Chinese people.
  • Duality—most often Yin and Yang, but other dualities too.
  • Collective good—Chinese people and culture have this concept and frequently discourse regarding it.
  • Love—modern Chinese focus on parental love and patriotic love. But from the amount of historical text addressing the subject in a negative way, and the population, we can gather that Chinese people and culture experiences and value a lot of love of many kind.

What else?

Seems there’s another bill making it’s way through the congress to ban transgender women from participating in female sports. I think I feel as conflicted as everyone else about this.

On the one hand, it is neither politically incorrect nor factually wrong to say that women tend to be less athletic than men. Because sports generally promotes health and physical fitness, we definitely want to encourage females to participate—for their own good as it is for our male’s own good. The biology is such that females may lack in strength but become more useful in other matter using their bodies. The enhancement of their peak or mean physical performance has traditionally not had the highest priority in our society.

Today we find that young women, when properly motivated are quite capable in modern society: anything from politics to business to science to art, they can do all that just fine. This happened not because they ran a mile and beat a man, this happened because society made room for them to grow into those fields. As our civilization advance, we find that we redefined the role of gender to less correlate with role in society.

However, as biology would have it, the gender does still correlate strongly with role in family and reproduction. And I see absolutely no reason to change that. Gay men/women can try hard to reproduce homosexually and eventually succeed, thus advancing out humanity. But that seems so low priority as trying to fly to Mars, IMHO.

But transgender people are people too, and deserve the same motivation to strive for physical fitness as anyone else. So they definitely should be included.

How about this: why don’t we have competition organizations be separate from rewards organizations. The competition organization run sports competitions in a unified manor, completely ignoring sex. There will be one 800m medley for any composition of teams. (Each country may choose to send several teams of their own design). All that qualified compete until a fair ranking can be determined.

The awards organizations, of which there may be several, will then award medal based on results of the competition. Maybe “The Original Olympic Medal” is one awards organization, and “Free Identity Medal” is another organization. They aggregate the performances (seeing as how data science is so well understood now days) and determine to whom their gold, silver bronze, or maybe other material medals will be awarded to.

So, for example you could have a private award organization that awards only to transgenders. Another that recognize self-identified gender. One that only awards to natural born dwarves, etc. etc. many ways to slice and dice the data. The ultimate goal, here, is for money and prestige to have more distinguishing expressions. To empower these inbuilt mechanisms to advance our society.

I found some news articles about dilbert being dropped by many news papers and magazines due to its creator expressing intolerance of black people because he perceived that black people expressed intolerance of “being white is ok”. Apparently that phrase in quotes is considered racist.

I fear that I am too far removed from the core of this conversation to express any meaningful concern about liberal use of our shared languages. Everyone should feel comfortable in their own skin if we just read the words of the blog.

But honestly, I do think white humans are humans too. In all senses of the world. Recently, I discovered that my child’s teacher in elementary school had been giving them very liberal materials as reading material—to practice reading on. This particular fact is not terribly disturbing. What is disturbing is that this one particular assignment is doubled up so that both page of the magazine article fits on one side of 11.5/8” paper. I finally noticed these reading assignments because my child had slight deficiency in her reading skills. I put down a few rulers and measured the size of the characters. They were very small. Sub-millimeter letters most certainly.

I contacted the teacher without thinking and she responded very supportively and promise to print this assignment larger. Of course all these transpired before the context—where and when—of this happening came into focus for me. This is post first peak of Black Lives Matter movement. Senses are raw.

The text harped on the damages caused by white settlers’ disregard for human and environment. It talked about white people keeping black people from schools and procreation… I think if I were a normal human being and I read about my ancestors systematically harming some people—for Chinese men there’s the foot binding of Chinese women. If my wife and daughter spoke to me daily or even once weekly about how bad men were to women. I don’t think I would be very happy about it. I mean I can hardly stand them talking about one single unwashed dishes.

I would print that assignment in small print too. I don’t want to be reminded of bad acts. I don’t want to be placed into a role or a category or the profile of bad people. I don’t want people to suspect me because of an unchangeable attribute that I came to the world with.

So…. It is understandable even if her teacher small-printed the reading assignment on purpose. It could also be that where I am in NorCal there are really a whole school district full of closest conservatives. I can’t believe I would be the only parent out of a class of 30 to notice this particular assignment being small print every week. Maybe other families doesn’t really care about past wrongs in civil liberty ?

This is not to say I don’t want to prevent discrimination or holocaust in the future. Never again should they occur. But our world must really come to a resolution of this matter in all honesty instead of a billion layer pancake of all kinds of separate but largely equal slices…

Ps I am presently reading the first part of the book Palo Alto. It is hard to imagine being white and being so bitter about one’s past. A past that one’s ancestors took great pride in. A small glimmer of insanity still flashes through my mind ones a while. Visiting the library today, I suddenly experienced a hard ringing in my right ear so much so that I stopped mid-stride and covered my ears. Is it outrageous for me to suspect that white people installed machines in library so that they can blast people they don’t like with Sonic rays to chase them out? Or maybe they’ll put a tumor in my head for blogging about this to dispel my misgivings as cancerous brain farts. Is it exceedingly imaginative of me to think this? I don’t think so after reading Palo Alto. Minorities have demonstrated that a few of them are outstanding and contribute greatly to the world. But really, I don’t know if everyone is convinced that minority is necessary. I seem to believe that people white Starr and Terman’s believes in eugenics, racial purity etc. are still quite real and quite in power today. So much so that I sometimes look for the sonic projectors and imagine that they’re inside steel beams… sigh. Is it selfish to wish it is not a tumor that causes my world?

While explaining some silly things to my kids recently, I finally realized that the age old puzzle of which came first can be answered firmly. We just have to back out of the creationist thinking framework and consider decision framework.

Whether a creature is living or human is simply a predicate that can be evaluated when presented with the physical item. This seems a minimally required capability before one can ask the question.

Then therefore, there are at least two versions: genotypical chicken/egg or phenotypical chicken/egg. With my limited knowledge, I can imagine phenotypical chicken far before genotypical chicken. There seems to be a lot of other birds with eggs that look like chicken eggs. Genotypical egg most likely came to be due to sexual reproduction’s crossing-over stage mutation, or otherwise a spontaneous mutation shortly before or after the first division of the egg. Shortly around that time because the after that it becomes very unlikely for the organism to have enough cells of the “chicken cell”. So even now, it’s not a sure thing which happened first? A single cell of chicken egg or a multicellular chicken embryo.

However, considering sexual reproduction, even if there is a first genotypical chicken or egg, it is possible it’s child was not a genotypical chicken. It had to crossover with non-chicken cells. so if we look at the ancestry tree of chickens. We see spots of occupancies of genotypical chicken or egg, but they phase in and out of existence over many generations until there are enough genotypical chicken can sexually reproduce with each other.

Geneticist and biologist can probably give a better probability on which came first in this decision theoretic framework—was it a chicken egg or a multi-cellular chick embryo?

Ps I am really glad I can come up with this while answering my children’s questions. But I would love to have the reasoning skills to come up with this kind of thinking earlier in life. It’s not like I don’t know the biology. I just never put all the pieces together… Hope my kids can be smarter than me.

Okay, I can’t stand not saying something about the Trek Prodigy Vau N’Akat people’s saying:

There is no barrier we cannot overcome—for we are Vau N’Akat

Vau N’Akat motto

This is one of those Trek things… I know I’ve written in agreement with the 32nd century Ni’Var(Vulcan/Romulan planet) president’s stance that a civilization cannot be run on proverbs and Idioms.

But I have to say, I’m 21st century, this Vau N’Akat motto joins a rare few utterances that precedes it:

The good of many outweigh the good of one

Vulcan

Live long and prosper!🖖

Vulcan

To boldly go where no one has gone before.

Federation mission statement, one of

Infinite diversity in infinite combination.

Vulcan

It would be a glorious death! Today IS a good day to die!!

Klingon exclamative

Engage!

Federation Imperative

Your biological distinctiveness will be assimilated, resistance is futile!

Borg greeting

I have been and always shall be your friend.

Vulcan Human

Beam me up, Scotty

Federation

I cannot change the laws of physics!

Federation Engineering Assessment.

How many lights are there?

Cardassian enhanced interrogative

There are four lights.

Human final answer.

Nothing unreal exists

Vulcan declarative

Superior ability breeds superior ambition.

Vulcan Human

The past is written, but the future is left for us to write, and we have powerful tools: openness, optimism, and the spirit of curiosity. All they have is secrecy and fear. And fear is the great destroyer.

Human

The line must be drawn here, this far, no further!

Human

Things are only impossible until they’re not

Human

I am not a naughty ungrateful twat, But I’d really like to wish that popculture social influencing media producer and publishers use more exciting and meaningful English(and other languages) in then coming years.

“This is so satisfying…” Says kids to just about every unexpected entropy-altering event. But there are many other more meaningful words: mesmerizing, rare, remarkable, hypnotic, novel, monotonous, soothing, pleasing, special, comforting, inimitable, unique, surprising, unlikely, eccentric, peculiar, idiosyncratic, surprising, repetitive, peculiar, uniform, irregular, random, right, wrong, sick, awesome, phat, hot, cool, …

Okay, okay So I too suffer the same influenced language from my youth, but can we please just use some more words? It would be very satisfying to know my kids learn things from mass social influencers.

The blog post has been so edifying to me, …, and satisfying—hopefully to you as well.

Merry Christmas!

Heheee…

For those who know both computer science and art history, you might chance upon an observation that early decades of 21st century computer programming has developed to the art of rococo period.

It’s hard for me to hold a chuckle as I learn more about rococo period art and recall the amount of literal decorators my code was required to have at a, possibly fictional, job that I once may have had or heard about. (Obviously, there’s often more decorators than code.)

If you know, you know.

Beyond the formalized linguistic decorations used by the code base, there are also implicit requirements about documentation, formatting of documentation, linkage to code, spelling, grammar, flow and search-ability, ease of maintenance of documentation to correspond to code… Here I interpret the documentation as decorative additions to code which does not require documentation to run.

Sure, today we still feel that code documentation is essential to correctness of code. But I bet most baroque and rococo artists also felt that decorative extravagance is necessary to produce art.

And last but certainly not the least, every machine learning paper is obligated to have open source code and theorems proved in math proof language. Although they often in the appendix and footnote, they tend to be quite more substantial than the paper itself. I’ve even come to discard papers that do not include them. We consider proofs and implementation essential to peer reviewed academic papers. Can these extravagantly implemented extras be like the decorative aspects of art from rococo period?

Will we discard these? Decorators and natural language documentation in code, and paper source code and proofs? Will we collectively be able to develop to an intellectual level where these things are integrated and homogenized together? Will we realize larger artistic structural patterns, forms, themes, etc.

Perhaps we will arrive at a day of “neoclassic computer age” during which we reject and explicitly discard some of the elements we think to be essential today. Can you imagine a paper that works very hard to not include mathematical proof? @paperswithoutcode #provablyprooflesss #illogical #programvariance #BIGOMEGA anyone?

Or a piece of code striving to be without documentation? or perhaps we would even write code deliberately and systematically incorporating what we consider software bugs today like they’ve done with dissonance and atonality last century. Proofs with the most subtle errors anyone ?

The code without doc actually seem quite feasible, even using just the technologies we have today. But my mind’s mind dissipates like fog in the sun when I think of the others…

🧐

🤔

P.s. a child is preparing for a California Music Teacher Association Certificate of Merit test (level 1) I have the opportunity to learn more about these periods that I’ve known since Mr. Wilkerson’s world history class late last century. Very late and slow learner I am… but I learn, nonetheless. ✌️