milkduds

How would you trans­late 缘分?
It’s such a deeply ingrained idea in Chi­nese cul­ture (from Bud­dhism?) but I just can’t think of the right word/phrase in Eng­lish. It’s not karma/destiny/fate exactly all of which I think of as neu­tral ie. could be either good or bad while I always think of 缘分 as some­thing pos­i­tive and to be val­ued.

I think that notion just doesn’t exist in West­ern thought — it’s a very pas­sive idea…

有人问隐士。隐士想了一会说：缘是命，命是缘。此人听的糊涂，去问高僧。高僧说：缘是前生的修炼。 这人不解自己的前生如何，就问佛祖。 佛不语，用手指天边的云。这人看去，云起云落，随风东西，于是顿悟：缘是不可求的，缘如风，风不定。云聚是缘，云散也是缘。

张爱玲对缘分有极妙的解释：在千百万人中，千百万年间，不早不晚，正好碰上了，然后轻轻地说一句：嗨，你也在这儿！然而这种缘分可能是需要经历几个轮回才能做得到的。

兩個人要是經常相遇，他倆的關係在中國傳統文化中也會被認為比不經常相遇的人的關係更有緣分。舉例說，即使只是旅途中同乘一船，也算是一種緣份。這種相遇並不僅限於有形的面對面相遇，也可引申至學術上的交流、情感的交換甚或作品意識形態上的相似。

An Arrest Sets Off a Dia­logue on Race

To the Edi­tor:

What has been lost sight of in the debate over whether Sgt. James Crowley’s arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. was racist is the more fun­da­men­tal prob­lem that a police offi­cer who does not like a person’s behav­ior feels jus­ti­fied in using the power of his badge to arrest the per­son on a dis­or­derly con­duct charge, which we in the crim­i­nal defense busi­ness know to be the “we’ll see who gets the last word, buddy” type of ticket.

The fact that the charge was quickly dis­missed by the Cam­bridge Police Depart­ment is telling as to its lack of legit­i­macy in the first place. In Amer­ica, a cit­i­zen is allowed to make dis­parag­ing com­ments to a police offi­cer, who is trained and expected to take it. Chal­leng­ing author­ity is itself not a crime in this coun­try.

Arrests should take place not as a form of social con­trol, but because the per­son (what­ever his or her skin color) is believed to have actu­ally com­mit­ted a crime.

Inga L. Par­sons
Mar­ble­head, Mass., July 24, 2009

The writer is a crim­i­nal defense lawyer and for­mer clin­i­cal law pro­fes­sor at New York Uni­ver­sity.

To the Edi­tor:

Sgt. James Crowley’s expla­na­tion of his arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. rings hol­low (“Sergeant Who Arrested Pro­fes­sor Defends Actions,” news arti­cle, July 24).

In Mass­a­chu­setts, as in most states, “dis­or­derly con­duct” requires the pres­ence of the pub­lic. It is a charge made against some­one who is dis­rupt­ing activ­ity of other mem­bers of the pub­lic or incit­ing other peo­ple to unlaw­ful action. Absent a bull­horn or another mech­a­nism to broad­cast speech, some­one can­not com­mit dis­or­derly con­duct while alone in his home with a police offi­cer.

More­over, if Mr. Gates was yelling at Sergeant Crow­ley about racial pro­fil­ing, that is polit­i­cal speech. Such speech is even more impor­tant to pro­tect against gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence, even if one does not agree with Mr. Gates.

I’m a black man and a for­mer res­i­dent of Cam­bridge, and I share Pro­fes­sor Gates’s belief that Sergeant Crowley’s actions were racially moti­vated. Regard­less of that, the arrest was mis­ap­pli­ca­tion of the law.

John For­rest Tom­lin­son
New York, July 24, 2009

This is exactly what I feel is the prob­lem, that a cop feels jus­ti­fied in arrest­ing some­one whose behav­ior he doesn’t like under inac­cu­rate charge of “dis­or­derly con­duct” which is not applic­a­ble for the sit­u­a­tion. If the charge had been some­thing like “not coop­er­at­ing with police inves­ti­ga­tion” because Gates may or may not have pro­duced iden­ti­fi­ca­tion on demand, that makes it more pos­si­ble that the arrest was jus­ti­fi­able. But the fact that he was arrested under the charge of “dis­or­derly con­duct” which was sum­mar­ily dis­missed makes me think that the offi­cer just felt that he can arrest any­one whose behav­ior he doesn’t like under that false charge. That amounts of abuse of police power.
The point is that police should not have spe­cial pow­ers other than the ones nec­es­sary to do his job. A nor­mal per­son does not have the right to arrest some­one or even call the cops to arrest some­one just because some­one was rude or dis­re­spect­ful to them (under rea­son­able cir­cum­stances, exclud­ing threats of phys­i­cal harm, stalk­ing, etc.), so a police offi­cer should not be able to either. Of course every­one should be treated with respect and dig­nity, but it doesn’t mean that peo­ple have the right to all actions (ie. arrest­ing the per­son, beat­ing them up) just because some­one was yelling at you on the street (or in front of their own home.)

I left early from work today and was able to have a very relax­ing afternoon/night, includ­ing read­ing about half of the book “out­liars,” which I bought in the kin­dle for­mat before I went to Japan in antic­i­pa­tion for read­ing while there. It turned out that I didn’t have any time while in Japan (although I did man­age to watch a travel TV show fea­tur­ing cool hot springs hotels in Japan and the Ter­mi­na­tor 2 movie, dubbed in Japan­ese.) Any­way I haven’t really had time until now to read it. I still don’t think that any of the books by Mal­colm Glad­well are deep, com­pli­cated books which really invite the read­ers to think deeply about some­thing and maybe leave con­clu­sions ambigu­ous, as you many times would have to when you’re deal­ing with com­pli­cated sub­jects. They are, how­ever, pretty insight­ful, inter­est­ing, easy to read and very mas­ter­fully written.He’s very good at tak­ing ideas and find­ing ways to nar­rate them using sto­ries, and weav­ing dif­fer­ent ideas together in the form or sto­ries to reach the con­clu­sions he wanted to explain. They are also the sort of books which affect the way you look at some gen­eral things (ie. human judge­ment and prej­u­dices, nature vs. nur­ture) Some­times though the log­i­cal infer­ences are a bit jumpy and I’m not entirely con­vinced by some of his argu­ments; I think that’s prob­a­bly what some peo­ple have prob­lems with for his books.

I’m very glad I spent a good chunk of time read­ing today. It helps keeps me sane…

Don’t Be So Square

Accord­ing to best esti­mates, the United States is now home to about 2,000 “mod­ern roundabouts” — more on that phrase in a moment — most of which were built in the last decade. As engi­neer Ken Sides noted in the ITE Jour­nal, how­ever, in 2008 Aus­tralia built its 8,000^th round­about; by Sides’ cal­cu­la­tion, the United States would need to build roughly 148,519 more round­abouts to match the Aus­tralian rate per capita. Inter­est­ingly, Aus­tralia — a coun­try whose traf­fic land­scape is rather sim­i­lar to ours — has, since 1980, cut its traffic-fatality rate to nearly half the U.S. fig­ure. The rise of round­abouts has no doubt played some part.

Round­abouts are pretty cool. When my team­mates and I were dri­ving around in Scot­land (in Gourock), they didn’t have any inter­sec­tions. Every­thing was a round­about. It was kinda cool. One thing I noticed is that they’re more effi­cient than inter­sec­tions and stop signs, mainly because no one really ever needs to stop. You might need to yield if if there are other cars around, but most times there arn’t cars around.

I installed the “Deep­est Sender” plu­gin for my fire­fox for word­press blogging…to facil­i­tate my blog­ging. You can select an text and select “send to deep­est sender” to start a post.

Test blog­ging from iPhone

which is appar­ently a php set­ting. I tried mod­i­fy­ing my php.ini file to allow big­ger uploads, but that didn’t work. I then tried over­rid­ing the con­fig in my word­press con­fig file, which then made word­press not work. Appar­ently this means that ocf doesn’t allow the upload limit to be overwritten…and I’m stuck with 2MB uploads. Which is fine except I’m too lazy to re-size my images before upload­ing them, so I want to upload my large file and use word­press plu­g­ins to re-size them. But I odn’t think there’s any way to get around that.

Down With Ver­dana!
Wanna try it out…I haven’t paid any atten­tion to the blog for a while. I really should update the Word­press ver­sion too so I can do cool things like blog from my iphone…

at the Narita air­port in Japan before leav­ing, from this chain cof­fee shop called “Doutor.” (My man­ager didn’t think too highly of their cof­fee, but she’s a Star­bucks fan). It’s this tiny plas­tic bag with a few branches with half-dried raisins still attached. It’s so good, and accord­ing to the pack­ag­ing on the back, appar­ently it’s imported from Amer­ica. Which makes me won­der, where in Amer­ica can you buy incred­i­bly good half-dried raisins still on the branch?

i love this com­mer­cial… It’s nicely shot too, like if you pause at a ran­dom moment, the com­po­si­tion would look nice enough to be its own photo.  i’m slightly puz­zled about the intended audi­ence though (= women?). It does gen­er­ate nice warm feel­ings of good­will towards SPDRs though, which is help­ful I guess.

Other com­mer­i­cal I love (so cute!). I love that puff of dust in the end.  There’s other cute GE com­mer­cials too but i can’t seem to find them now — I remem­ber see­ing a bunch of China themed ones dur­ing the Olympics.

We went apart­ment hunt­ing last week­end in New Haven, and while the city has a bad rep­u­ta­tion in gen­eral, there are sup­posed to be some good parts, like more res­i­den­tial areas near cam­pus. So the first place we liked was on a quiet street…too quiet almost, I know it’s the sum­mer and it was rain­ing a lit­tle, but I expected to see SOME peo­ple — isn’t there sum­mer school or some­thing?  The place was nice except while walk­ing from there to cam­pus we passed like three dif­fer­ent funeral par­lors, all on the same street… Why do you even need so many of them in the same city, and why do they have to all be on the same street?!!? Yeah the sec­ond place we saw was weirdly octa­gon shaped, because it had the kind of win­dow that juts out, you know what i mean — so accord­ing to my mom it’s awful feng shui (the shape i mean), like 大凶.  And then it had this mir­ror in the mid­dle of the wall, which isn’t good either since you’re not sup­posed to have a mir­ror fac­ing your bed, but i guess it’s hard not to if you have…an octa­gon shaped…studio. It’s like its very own 八卦阵, like all you need is the bed in the middle.  Such cre­atively bad feng shui.… in addi­tion to over­look­ing a garbage dump on a park­ing lot.……and being across the street from Planned Par­ent­hood.  It’s like a bad Chi­nese hor­ror movie — you’re really beg­ging for it.  I’m also not sure what Planned Par­ent­hood is doing in a res­i­den­tial area, but imag­ine hav­ing to pass by it every­day, how awful. Then there was another apart­ment which though beau­ti­ful inside was semi under­ground, like despite being on the first floor, it was half below ground level = bad feng shui again.  Another was on a street a real­tor nick­named ‘manslaugh­ter street’, since there was a recent hit and run that killed a kid, right out­side the apart­ment too, judg­ing by the flow­ers i saw.….  Any­way I know you can’t ask too much from an old city, but those kinds of places seem pretty unlive­able to me…