Tsumego

I just finished doing some tsumego with my new go board. It's definitely more fun since I can try out different moves on the board and it's easier to see where the weaknesses of my shapes are. 

Tsumego are problems about life and death. It's an interesting turn of phrase; life here meaning that your stones do not get captured ("killed"). I've been reading up using online resources and it seems like Go is about gaining territory through expanding and strengthening your structure. It's like putting up walls against an  invading army. The worst thing that could happen is if your territory gets undercut, isolating your stones. In the martial arts, the one thing we must not do is to lose the integration within our body that allows us to dissipate and deliver force. Tsumego trains the mind to always seek out a stable formation that is invulnerable to attack, or renders the other side vulnerable.

Subtraction

I've always admired carvers. They see the potential in the shapeless hunk of material in front of them and by efficiently removing what is extraneous, they are able to bring out great beauty or utility. It's an implementation of the principle of subtractive design.

I'm also a fan of small things, of amateurs doing things that they feel passionate about. I feel these two preferences come together quite elegantly in whittling. It's a rather quaint hobby that isn't as popular now as, maybe, fifty years ago, but look at this, this, and this - and tell me that that isn't cool.

Make Good Art! - or in this case, Wallpaper!

I'm posting two pieces I made using the free FlamePainter application. These works are covered by the license posted on the right-hand side of the blog page. After moldering in my hard drive for so long I think these deserve an audience, no matter how small.

Quarterly.co is a pretty innovative concept: subscribe to get cool stuff that cool people find cool. I learned about it through BoingBoing.net, another excellent site for news and ideas and novelty. I'd written about introducing randomness into one's life as an enrichment exercise, and these sites are worthy options to executing that strategy. I would have liked to get the Opinel knife Mr. Felix Salmon sent out, but alas, I missed the deadline for subscription. Don't make the same mistake.

Butterfly Swords and Boxing

This is a cool article, please give it a read.

Butterfly Swords and Boxing: Exploring a Lost Southern Chinese Martial Arts Training Manual. 

POSTED BY BENJUDKINS ⋅ JANUARY 30, 2013 

The Importance of the “Foreign Language Literature” in Chinese Martial Studies

It is very hard to pierce the veil of the mid-19^th century and to understand what exactly was happening in the development of the popular martial arts between about 1820 and 1880.  This is particularly true in areas that suffered a great deal of social disturbance during the 19^th century like Guangdong (and many other places as well).  The wall of silence is all the more disconcerting as it seems that lots of interesting stuff was happening.  If you go back as far as the late 18^th century only a few of the modern Chinese martial arts styles existed in a recognizable form.  Yet by the late 19^th century, exactly 100 years later, the groundwork was fully in place for the modern martial arts explosion that would happen in the 20^th century.  So what exactly happened in this critical 100 year period? We just don’t have all the answers.

Failure

It's unfortunate, but it seems like I'll have to give up on my Programming Languages course. The difficulty level increased with the past two lessons, and there's a lot of concepts I'm not familiar with. I thought I could handle the programming exercises, but... *sigh*

It's depressing when I get confronted with my lack of mastery. Then again, I suppose it's to be expected. I didn't study programming languages in college, and I should be thankful I can even code using the object-oriented paradigm. However, that's the only skill I've got, and I was hoping that learning the fundamentals would make me more prepared to handle other programming paradigms. Figures that I'd still need more fundamentals to work on the fundamentals. :(

I'm not giving up though, I'll try to get some references and get myself situated in the programming languages being used in the course. I won't be able to make the deadlines for the exercises anymore, but there's always the next time when they offer the lessons. I'm shifting focus from getting that certificate to learning the concepts. On the bright side, it gives me more time to train my martial arts and study Go.

I got my baduk equipment today.  It took most of the day, getting it out of Customs. The stones came from South Korea while the board was shipped from Japan. Clicking on the previous two links will lead one to the sites where I purchased them.

I went to a weekend baduk camp only once before, and it was really a fun experience. Unfortunately, that was the last time I got into contact with them; another one of my regrets. But now that I have the gear to practice with at home, I'll be able to study and hopefully within the year I'll be able to come back to them.

Baduk is a fun game, though it does need a lot of time to really get the hang of. I got to wanting to play it because of the manga "Hikaru no Go." The thing with the game is that it's so abstract, that it can represent anything - a war for territory between two armies, a duel between two individuals, a debate between two commentators, in fact anything with an interplay between two opposites. There is a connection between Baduk and martial arts, particularly in the Japanese tradition.

I hope the world learns more about this wonderful game. It's virtually unknown in my country, but in South Korea there are TV programs devoted to it.

This link will lead one to another of Marc MacYoung's excellent projects. The information contained there is highly practical and is applicable to all sorts of situations - in fact, any time that you need to interact with people.

Everyone always touts the new technology as the definitive answer, neglecting how much keeping safe is an application of the mind. As was more eloquently stated in this blog post, we tend to base our present judgements on what happened in the immediate past. Robert Greene would call this fighting the last war. Nicholas Nassim Taleb calls it the trap of the path-dependent outcome. To really get to the heart of the solution, fix your sight upon yourself; then on the conditions of the situation, then its history; and finally, TEST.  Test everything, never take even the smallest piece of so-called "wisdom" for granted. Mr. MacYoung's knowledge is hard-earned, and appeals to me because of its simplicity and practicality. I have personally tried to live my life according to many of his principles and I've found in many instances inspiration, solace, and guidance.

I am, however, still unable to hold a candle to the master. :)

On Death Ground

I have a fictional character that I really like. It's from a manga by the name of "Hunter x Hunter." It's by Yoshihiro Togashi. Unfortunately, it's currently on hiatus, which is a shame - it's easily one of the best pieces of literature I've read. It's very intelligently plotted and deconstructs many tropes of the shounen genre.

My favorite character there is Aizak Netero. He's the leader of the eponymous Hunter organization, formerly the strongest in the world and all-around figure of reverence. He's a monster of a warrior and is the pinnacle of that world's martial art. He got that way because of initially doing ten thousand punches a day, everyday, for four years. That kind of determination alone is something I would love to have, but where Netero gets awesome is that he started this when he was forty-six years old. It's like he started this because of a mid-life crisis; obviously for him his life was just starting at that age.

He's the kind of guy I wish to become when I reach old age. The characters in the manga say he's a twisted personality, and I do have to agree he's strange. He's not averse to obstacles and challenges; in fact, sometimes he deliberately sets it up so that the going goes more difficult for him. I can understand that he wanted to find someone he can feel desperate fighting against, someone who was stronger than him; but he also enabled Pariston Hill to be his traitorous right hand. Was he a death seeker? It's alien to me, how he relishes and encourages situations that are against him. Any ordinary person would endeavor to make a comfortable life for himself, or at the least avoid getting into trouble. Is it a learning experience for him? With his stats, something tells me no. What is it then?

After his death a character implied that he doesn't think about winning or losing. He's playing around. Playing around. He was playing around, while fighting against the King of Ants - who wanted to put humanity in ghettoes. I suppose he was addicted to the struggle, of being on death ground. Like Ging Freecs, he enjoys the journey/the struggle. I still need work to reach that level, of being grateful for everything, including the setbacks.

UPDATE: Just a new insight to the character. He didn't actually need to sacrifice himself fighting the King; he could have just led the latter to a trap where the bomb was. Netero could have arranged to have the King distracted when he detonated the explosive. There were other combination of tactics that would have resulted in him surviving. But he didn't choose them; he chose to kill the King with a suicide, and only after fighting - when he could have just done it from the outset. I think he did not want to underestimate his opponent, and he was willing to sacrifice his life for a definitive end to the problem. Yet, since he was going to die anyway, he wanted to play around a bit more. The things we do for no reason at all save that we want to, which do not net us any benefit or reward, could be said to be our entertainment. And trying to understand what is entertaining to someone would involve understanding the length and breadth of his very self - something beyond my powers. So I suppose I'll just settle with knowing that Netero is devoted to what he considers fun, and leave it at that.

Removing the spacing between events in FullCalendar and Viewmore

I'd earlier wrote about using FullCalendar and Viewmore in an application here. It turns out that the plug-ins render individual events with a space in between; it's quite hard to find a way to remove it and I was tasked with making some events have specific background colors. The requirement was to remove those spaces and present the colored spaces as one "block" of colors.

The code below was the solution for the FullCalendar situation, the code modifies the renderDaySegs function in the code:

The Viewmore code is a bit special; it clones the individual event elements that would have been displayed in the FullCalendar, then puts them in an unordered list. This list is what gets displayed when one clicks the "View More" button. The code is below:

The code at line 277 above is pretty interesting, you need it to make sure that there is no whitespace at he bottom of the Viewmore panel. It limits the height of the unordered list, and the panel sort of automatically resizes to fit that list.

UPDATE: Apparently my fix for the Viewmore functionality doesn't work for IE or Firefox. It looks like the two browsers render the pixel count differently and so the panel comes up short.

Sending Data from View to Controller to Another View Back to Controller

I faced another interesting  coding challenge today. It was a challenge for me, since I've only had nine months of project experience so far in .NET; with MVC3 I sort of had to wing it for the past five months. We had a View page that consisted of a form and a table; inside the form were two dropdown lists that got dynamically filled based on the returned data from the db call. The table had a column that featured ActionLinks to a detail page providing more information. Inside the detail page was a Back link that when clicked is supposed to return you to the original page with the form and table, but the catch was the original information being displayed (for example, if you changed the selected values in the dropdown lists) should be retained. This was important for usability so that the people who would be making use of the module don't have to repeatedly choose the same settings for the dropdown lists if they need to do work with a particular configuration.

The table and form submission were already taken care of by a separate jquery file. It might have been a better idea if the details page had been made into a modal window or a partial view, but that wasn't what was done and redoing the code would have been a headache. As always, I did what in my opinion amounts to a patch job. It's not ideal, but it required minimal modification of code and at my current level I think it's better not to screw up.

For convenience, let's call one dropdown the name dropdown list and the other, the status dropdown list. The original page and the detail page being separate views that display different information, they have their own models. The GET method for the original page took an instance of the page's model class as an argument, while the detail page's GET method took the id of the row on the table that was clicked as an argument. The information that displays on the table in the original page is changed when the selected value in the dropdown lists change. I only needed to change the selected values following clicking the Back link in the detail page, as that hyperlink already went to the original page anyway. To do that, I needed somehow to send the current form configuration through two views and the Controller twice.

I did this by making sure both models of the original and detail pages had selectedName and selectedStatus properties. The model for the original page already had this, so I just modified the model for the detail page. In the section of the code for the original page's view that looped in order to fill up the table, I added the selectedName and selectedStatus values like so:


                         @Html.ActionLink(item.Code, "controllerGetMethodForDetails",
                          "controllerName", new {
                             id = item.Id,
                             selectedName = @Model.SelectedName,
                             selectedStatus = @Model.SelectedStatus                                  
                         }, null)

I added the two strings to the detail page's GET method's arguments. For the Back hyperlink, I used this code:

@Html.ActionLink("Back", "controllerGetMethodForOriginal", new {
                       selectedName = @Model.Name,
                       selectedStatus = @Model.Status
}, new AjaxOptions { HttpMethod = "POST" })

The surprising thing was that somehow the system already knew that these values I am passing with the hyperlink were supposed to correlate with the properties in the original page's Model. I did not know that and I felt a little proud of myself for a few minutes for discovering it. It's stuff like this that keeps me from getting bored as a software engineer.

Values Dissonance

Swastika on Minoan pottery from Crete, from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kretominoisches_Hakenkreuz_asb_2004_PICT3431.JPG

For a fun afternoon, try reading this TvTropes article about how evolving perspectives can lead to hilarious misunderstandings. I recommend the part where several institutions refused to change their names/remove their iconography because of one unfortunate ideology appropriating its likeness. I personally espouse the opinion that we need to study these kinds of situations in order to show respect to the people we are interacting with, but aside from that (and the comedy that results from failing to observe this), they really have no use. So people everywhere should learn to lighten up.

I'm suddenly struck with nostalgia. It's telling that I don't remember much from my childhood, but the little I do remember has to do with books. I really like to read a lot. My first books are gone now, but I still do fondly remember those times when I read them.

I'm revealing my age talking about these books. Then again, it's a shame some of these titles don't get the love they deserve, so hopefully by listing them here I could get others to read them.

Here they are, in no particular order:

The Supersmart Superpuzzle Book by Abbie Salny - was the first book I owned, it was a Christmas gift. Never could solve any of the problems though T_T

The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynn Reid Banks - very good series, I remember crying over some of the events in the series. I didn't take the deaths of the characters in the books very well.

Sherlock Holmes stories - I remember starting with "The Hound of the Baskervilles," then I eventually got a pocketbook with more stories. The pocketbook had an introduction by Ellery Queen, very cool. I was so into the books I tried to develop Sherlock Scanning... I was a weird kid, I know :)

Exit Sherlock Holmes by Robert Lee Hall - I at first thought that this was an authentic Conan-Doyle work I had somehow missed, but it turned out to be so good I cried multiple times during as well as after the reading of it.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - I didn't really get the book's plot at first; I loved the part where Atticus Finch showed how much of a badass he was.

Encyclopedia Brown by Donald J. Sobol - I never did get to solve the cases consistently, then I later found out that Mr. Brown's methodology wasn't completely sound...

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg - this book taught me the power secrets have. It was also fun imagining myself in the lead character's place.

A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L'Engle - very original works, highly recommended.

Loss

It was a good thing that it turned out that the Mali rebels weren't able to burn the texts in Timbuktu. Those books are unique artifacts, penned by the faithful for the faithful (and perhaps the faithful-to-be).They are the achievements of lives dedicated to an ideal. While the individuals have turned to dust their works still endure by some miracle, and that alone would more than qualify these relics to be saved.

We don't seem to have much respect for the ancient past. The mindset is to wipe away and start again from a "clean slate." The ancients were wrong or ignorant or irrelevant; only the current dogma is supreme. It's odd because some of the people before them probably thought the same thing.

When these things are gone they may be gone forever; the precise set of circumstances that birthed them will never be repeated again. Their loss is marked by the world becoming more mediocre. It's like we can't have nice things at all, despite knowing this there's still people going for book burnings.

In this article about Southern Boxing, notice at the end how it says the lineage holders in Hong Kong are getting fewer. Even Bruce Lee's hold is diminishing, and his heyday was just some decades ago. Worse still is what's happening to Nüshu; this is especially painful because Nüshu script was used by females hundreds of years ago to write as they were not taught the same standard as the males.

I really wish Planetary were real.

Embracing Randomness

This is a picture of my pack of I Ching cards. I found it in a bookstore years ago and have played with it off and on over the years. The cards are interesting as they incorporate Biblical passages to help explain the divination. I don't really believe in it, but it's fun because it  provides a system by which I can get myself out of my usual habits. For example, at the beginning of the month I might do a divination; whatever the cards say, and invariably they are of a constructive/positive nature, I do. I find that it introduces novelty to my day-to-day existence, and it also encourages me to find out things that I would not have discovered if I had remained stuck inside myself.

It turns out randomness can be a lot more beneficial than we think. Randomness interpreted to mean uncertainty over the outcome is one of the most fundamental concepts of Game Theory - that of the mixed strategy equilibrium. What I'm doing with the cards is randomizing between multiple outcomes with positive outcomes for me, like how a husband and wife would flip a coin between the movies each one wants to see. Randomness interpreted as unpredictability is very important in the martial arts. Without random events, we wouldn't have improvisation. And playing around randomly with concepts and structures is the only way to achieve true mastery or make discoveries.

Let's all try to get more of the positive randomness in our lives. Here is a good start :)

Re: "Factory Girls"

The picture above is of Minami Minegishi, of AKB48 - she of the shaved head I saw some weeks ago. This article talks about the issue some more, and I find myself agreeing despite myself. I say despite myself because ordinarily I have no problem with sexuality in media - the more of it the better, I say. I'm not opposed to ogling hot young things; I love fanservice. But, well... after reading the article and then watching the video below...

I can't help but see the point.

It feels forced and cheap. I'm not indicting anyone's culture here, I'm just saying what came to mind as I was watching this; I guess the illusion didn't take hold in me. These are people who work hard even though they might not have great exposure compared to other groups (or even fellow members), who perform for reasons important to them. And I agree - just because they are caught being human they shouldn't have to choose to debase themselves in order to ensure their survival.

I can't help but think that the fans in no small way share the blame for this. The members of these groups try to make a connection with us, or at least catch our fancy. To maintain our adoration they have to be "faithful" to us, like a virgin betrothed to some pagan god. In return, we give them income, we protect them against more malign, "hater" spirits. When they "mess up" they have to propitiate our anger, like some weird spirit whose favor determines their temporary success. I'm slightly horrified that  I might have unknowingly become part of this system.

An article from the New Yorker had a title that I find pretty apt for the phenomenon: "Factory Girls." The author was writing about K-pop groups but I think it applies to similar cultural technology. I don't see T-ARA as factory girls, and I would like it if their agencies didn't see them that way either. The New Yorker article said that idols usually had a life of five years in the business if they're lucky, it's almost like one were describing a successful TV show. In light of the fact that these groups provide so much enjoyment to people and that they contribute so much to their countries' revenue, not to mention that they represent those countries to foreigners, I believe they are entitled to be treated better.

On Failure

I did pretty badly on a programming assignment for the online course I'm taking right now. It's frustrating to me since I've been striving to do good but the concepts were just too beyond the current me. I suppose it's part of getting better, tracing the limit of your ability and somehow overcoming that... but failing still sucks.

Here's another thing that flies right over my head: Doom 3 Source Code Review. C was my first language, and I spent months studying C and then C++. I did a lot of programming; it was the first language I learned and grew to enjoy. When I saw this link I jumped at the chance to learn something more about coding - and the discussion just completely made no sense T_T

I was checking out some of the books I have stowed away at home and found this gem: "Vote for Caesar: How the Ancient Greeks and Romans Solved the Problems of Today." It's full of references to events in the UK which were current at the time of the book's release, but it's understandable regardless. The author distinguishes the differences in the mindset of the ancient Romans and Greeks from that of ours. It's surprising how different they can be.

For example, did you know that the even America would have been considered undemocratic by the Greeks? At best, the fairest out of all of our modern governments could be said to be a meritocracy or elective oligarchy. If they were a true democracy, not only should the citizens be in charge (the closest to this would be Switzerland, which as per the author has its people vote on almost all important matters by a show of hands), but also appointments should be made by lottery. It's the only way to guarantee that age, race, sex, creed, etc do not play a part at all.

There's a lot of things to think about with this book, I cannot recommend it enough. I really liked the part where it talked about the ancient perspective on death; I'd been reading this article lately on what members of the medical profession do to prepare for the end of their lives, and I can't help but see a fortuitous connection. Mr. Nicholas Nassim Taleb also wrote about some of the philosophers who were mentioned in the book, so now I'll have my work cut out for me finding works by Seneca while reading Marcus Aurelius' monumental "Meditations."

I am blundering along with my martial arts training. There's just so many drills I have to do, and apart from that I have other personal projects, hobbies, and promises to get back to that I find I am coming up short.

The feeling is like throwing all sorts of things, memories, knowledge, experiences, etc at me and seeing what sticks over a decent period of time. It's a bit overwhelming, especially since I was such a lazy child. However, I am not a kid any longer, and if I want to achieve something for myself I need to hustle.

I'm doing ball-rolling exercises right now for two hours everyday. I'm using a medicine ball on a table that's a near-replica of what my teacher has. The training has been surprisingly soothing; controlling the ball requires more attention than is apparent at first glance. I noticed the challenge is in keeping your whole hand in contact with the ball while moving it in a circle, which means letting the ball roll under your hand a little. Just the right amount of stickiness is needed - otherwise the eight-pound ball stops moving in a nice little circle and goes off to break things.

I'm also doing a number of leg drills. The idea is to work on the coordination between my upper and lower body. The ultimate goal is to rewire the body into the ideal of my particular branch of kung fu. But it feels a lot like toiling in the valley, training for a situation that I may never experience. It's not like I go around provoking fights with people; I also firmly believe in only doing what is congruent with my aims. But my teacher said that we train in this everyday, for that one moment that we will need it. That situation we'll need "it" in doesn't have to be a fight, but the point is to have this skill to enrich ourselves and to extend what we can do.  

Not cool.

This is so much like Malèna it's not even funny.

Wow

Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_atlas_of_identified_Pirate_Parties.svg#file

This is something I'm quite excited about. The above map shows all the regions in the world that have a Pirate Party of some kind. The black-coloured areas have Pirate Parties officially registered in Pirate Parties International, while the blue ones are active but unregistered. The red areas seem to have groups that share objectives with the party.

This link shows the full reach of the PPI; it shows the member countries and those that could be said are loosely affiliated with them.We have this big group dedicated to civil rights, democracy, free information, etc. We even have the Electronic Frontier Foundation; and we are currently living in a world where crowd funding is possible, along with individuals being able to collectively contribute logistics (for example, like in the sites Airbnb and SwapRight). And there is a system for distributed computing that helps scientists find ways to cure diseases.

People, we already have the foundations for an outfit similar to Global Frequency or Planetary! Even our cellphones are capable of so much more than what was shown in the comics. The tech is there; hopefully we'll see things coalesce within our lifetimes.

Four things I'm liking right now

First, a study on shifting morality: Morality shifting in the context of intergroup violence

Then, a Kotaku article on bullying and its relationship to class and gender roles: Geeks Don’t Get Bullied Simply For Being Geeks. There’s More To It Than That.

If you're not busy, try some of the courses here: Coursera

For a break, try this game: Composition J