Epic!

Finding epic/war kind of music. I find it kinda uplifting. I’m also checking out the soundtracks for Tron Legacy (heehee), which includes a blend of orchestra and the duo Daft Punk’s signature  electronic beats. And the soundtrack for City Hunter too, which kinda reminds me of the soundtrack for Inception, the movie.

Finished Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Although it was meant to be like a discussion of how and why some achieved more than others, the last two chapters of the book touched deeply into my heart. Rice paddies and math tests reminded me of how we had achieved our own kind of success, and why our parents reminded us of the need to be merticulous and work hard. It’s part of our cultural legacy, the asian cultural legacy.

I’m halfway through A Short History Of Nearly Everything which and I kinda regretted to have not read it during my time in VJ. It’s interesting in that it discusses in much depth the history of our natural world, without classifying the knowledge of the world we know today into things like oh, Geography/Chemistry and all.

I quote:

In 1869, at the age of 35, he began to toy with a way to arrange the elements. At the time, elements were normally grouped in two ways – either by atomic weight (using Avogadro’s Principle) or by common properties (whether they were metals or gases, for instance). Mendeleyev’s breakthrough was to see that the two could be combined into a single table.

As it was often the way in science, the principle had actually been anticipated three years previously by an amateur chemist in England named John Newlands. He suggested that when elements were arranged by weight, they appeared to repeat certain properties – in a sense to harmonize – at every eight place along the scale. Slightly unwisely, for this was an idea whose time had not quite yet come. Newlands called it the Law Of Octaves and likened the arrangement to the octaves on a piano keyboard. Perhaps there was something in Newlands’ manner of presentation, but the idea was considered fundamentally preposterous and widely mocked. At gatherings, droller members of the audience would sometimes ask him if he could get his elements to play them a little tune. Discouraged, Newlands gave up pushing the idea and soon dropped out of sight altogether.

Mendeleev used a slightly different approach, placing his elements into groups of seven, but employed fundamentally the same premise. Suddenly, the idea seemed brilliant and wondrously perceptive. Because the properties repeated themselves periodically, the invention became known as the periodic table.

Mendeleyve was said to have been inspired by the card game as Solitaire…

Yes, classification is necessary for easy identification of facts. But I hate when understand it becomes extremely confusing, because I know I can’t deal well with unfamiliar situations. Maybe I’m not trying hard enough, maybe I can do better. Maybe that’s one reason why I like and treasure the free time I have asides from having to serve a nation, because it gives me the time and space I need to improve.

And I’m also reading The Invisible Gorilla: Ways Our Intuition Decieves Us, because A Short History Of Nearly Everything was too bulky to bring to camp so I had to content with that and Outliers.

I haven’t started on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated but I will start soon. Looks like I need to renew some books.

I also feel like borrowing Libba Bray’s Going Bovine from the library to read or something.

Urgh. So many things to do.

Not including the 16 more episodes of City Hunter to watch too.