It has been five years since my last posting in this forum. I don't normally write and post anything that my friends can find in Google search and read about. This trip is unique and this incarceration is voluntary in some way. I am writing a short journal entry each day in isolation. It is probably worth writing and sharing, and thus the restart of my blogpost.
I am in Taipei, Taiwan right now and I am in a quarantine hotel. The purpose of the quarantine is to isolate me and see if any Covid-19 viruses will manifest themselves in this period. I do feel like I am a human Petri Dish during this pandemic.
Click for Part 1/3 here. Click for Part 2/3 here.
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Day 10 - Monday, January 31, 2022
I did my third and last antigen self-test this morning. It was negative. And this coming Friday I would have to do an actual PCR test at a mobile van outside of the quarantine hotel. That's one day before my departure on Saturday.
I finally finished my reading and study on "Le Petit Prince" today. I liked this book and its message. I added this book to the collection of my favorite books, including "Of Mice and Men" and "Animal Farm." There are many good quotes from the book. One of my favorites is below. It resonates with me well. This is how I see relationships, including love, between friends and between family members. This voluntary taming act can create a lasting and wonderful relationship. But, if, for some reason, there is pain and burden in this, then I would say that is self-inflicted and we should also accept that voluntarily.
"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed." -- Chapter XXI
It is interesting to find out that there is a wikiquote website in addition to my favorite wikipedia. I should send in my support annually for this effort.
Day 11 - Tuesday, February 1, 2022
Today is the Chinese New Year of the Tiger. I can relate quite nicely to this tiger caricature shown here. He is old, but calm, and is sipping some liquor appropriate to the holiday season. Normally, it is an occasion to be with family and friends. Being locked up in a hotel room is definitely a first for me.
Only recently I noticed that the Chinese lunar New Year is celebrated in California only by Chinese and Vietnamese among Asian populations in California. For example, none of my Japanese colleagues ever got excited about the lunar New Year in my recollection. The following is the result of my research,
In 1893, five years after the Meiji Restoration, Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar and the first day of January became the official and cultural New Year's Day in Japan. Some of the remnant celebrations related to the lunar New Year existed here and there, but nothing official. After more than one hundred years, the old tradition gradually faded away.
After Japan annexed Korea in the early part of the 20th century, the celebration of the lunar New Year was prohibited. The Japanese rulers set the official Korean New Year to the first day of the Gregorian calendar, following the Japanese New Year convention. Korea was liberated in 1945 and the celebrations of the lunar New Year were then possible. It was not until in the 1980s that the old lunar New Year was designated as both the official Korean New Year and a national holiday.
New Year celebration is an important part of cultural manifestations. It is closely linked to ethnical, cultural, and even national identities. Lunar calendars are used by many cultures throughout history with certain variations. Lunar calendars can vary on how the calendar is adjusted to align with seasonal patterns (that is solar based), and most notably the geological meridian of the nation. This so-called New Year can change and can have different implications. For example, celebrating the Chinese New Year carries a different implication from that of celebrating the lunar New Year.
Day 12 - Wednesday, February 2, 2022
Pandemic brings many problems to modern society including burnout, lack of focus, exhaustion, irritability, and sometimes withdrawal. The unrest and protests around the world reflect this anxiety in our society. It calls for resourcefulness and resilience for every individual. If you have to go through quarantine, then that requirement of those qualities is even more pronounced.
I am thankful to the BBC World Service programming to accompany me in this locked-up state. The bento boxes everyday from the hotel are reasonable and filling. Though, I am grateful to my friends who send me fruit baskets shown here as they are life-savers in this environment. They allow you to remember the good taste and bites of the fruits that suddenly disappear from your daily intake.
In lieu of physical exercises, I resort to stretching daily, simulating my front crawl strokes. Physical exercises are necessary to keep us sane. No wonder that there are basketball courts in prison settings.
The end of quarantine is near now. I plan to pick a few things to wrap up. I have the habit of creating Google documents for all my activities. The actual writing re-enforces my learning and enjoyment although there is a good possibility that I shall not read them ever again :-). It is good to reach clear-cut milestones between major switches of daily routines.
The two neural networks lectures in my machine learning thread were very informative. It put the calculus, the gradient descent based optimization technique, and the statistical modeling all in one pot (architecture). The neurons and how they relate to each other through layers and through the so-called parameters are somewhat fuzzy. The key to driving its usefulness and success, I think, is the supervised learning model over lots of data. The availability of a large dataset can compensate for the hodgepodge set of parameters.
The next thing is to finish my "water" calligraphy practice on "The Heart Sutra." One should do the brush stroke firmly and slowly, remembering where and when to turn and twist while focusing on the down and up motions. I cannot do too much practice every day. One can only appreciate so much during each practice session as there is learning fatigue with diminishing returns.
Day 14 - Friday, February 4, 2022
A PCR test for this human petri dish was carried out this morning. A negative test will be required to end the quarantine. No news is good news, and I am prepared to leave this hotel tomorrow morning after breakfast.
In the last installment of this quarantine journal, I will reflect on the current trend of various social media platforms, in which one can express his/her own opinions and in most cases follow the opinions of the celebrities. People wish to express their thoughts and scream for others to hear them, but they are often unwilling and unable to listen to others. Most people just read the headlines and click-click-forward :-(. They barely read the content and ponder on the issues. They are excited to forward the pieces that agree with their point-of-views and feel disgusted with the pieces that are not in agreement with their own.
Personally, I definitely read original pieces or commentaries that are written by my acquaintances. I read articles from reputable sources. If someone won't jot down a reason or two on why they forward to me, I won't bother opening the message. I especially resent those habitual forwarders who never speak of their own mind. A robotic avatar can probably do that job better.
If this craze and attitude continues, the society will eventually spiral out of control and break down. Some form of autocracy might replace unrestrained democracy. Individual freedom will suffer, but some might be happy to see collective orderliness for a change. Unfortunately, autocracy has a natural tendency to perpetuate itself through other means at the expense of personal freedom. This might be a fact of like that things do swing between extremes.
In light of the recent political showdown between Russia and the West over Ukraine sovereignty, this is specially relevant to me. I am quite pessimistic that democracies might lose out, in some not-so-distant future, to autocracies if we don't have the sensibility to correct and behave ourselves.
References:
- The Gay Genius - Biography of Su Tungpo 蘇東坡, by Lin Yutang
- EYArt 意外艺术 on Youtube - about 蘇東坡
- Stanford CS229 Autumn 2018 by Andrew Ng [20 lectures] - college-level calculus and probability/statistics required
- Le Petit Prince - French version, English translation, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The Heart Sutra 心經 - dated since 661 CE, the famous 色即是空，空即是色 This Body itself is Emptiness and Emptiness itself is This Body
- Thich Nhat Hanh's English translation of The Heart Sutra
- Quotes from Le Petit Prince https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince
- Japanese New Year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_New_Year
- Korean New Year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_New_Year
