I am a Human Petri Dish - Part 3/3

 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.

=====

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.

Day 13 - Thursday, February 3, 2022

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:

1. The Gay Genius - Biography of Su Tungpo 蘇東坡, by Lin Yutang 
2. EYArt 意外艺术 on Youtube - about 蘇東坡
3. Stanford CS229 Autumn 2018 by Andrew Ng [20 lectures] - college-level calculus and probability/statistics required
4. Le Petit Prince -  French version, English translation, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
5. 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
6. Thich Nhat Hanh's English translation of The Heart Sutra 
7. Quotes from Le Petit Prince https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince
8. Japanese New Year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_New_Year
9. Korean New Year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_New_Year 

I am a Human Petri Dish - Part 2/3

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.

=====

Day 5 - Wednesday, January 26, 2022

The international news was mostly on the imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine and the volatile US stock markets in the last few days.  The brinkmanship between NATO and Russia is truly unnerving. I don't know whether the imminent, when escalated to that level, invasion of China to Taiwan will trigger similar responses around the world. The NASDAQ is already in the correction phase from its recent high.  The wide swing between the initial big sell-off and the last-hour recovery during the trading day is truly remarkable.  Certainly there are still people trying to get in to this already overvalued equity market.  There is probably too much cash floating that needs a place to invest.

I continued my French reading today, that is, the book "Le Petit Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was not an easy book to read at my level, but I was about 80 percent complete.  I had three chapters left in my first French book.  I liked this book very much as there was much to appreciate and ponder through the observations and conversations between this alien little prince and the aviator author whose plane crashed in the Sahara desert. Why French again after almost 20 years hiatus? It is my wishful thinking that Michael and I would visit and drive around France in July this summer.  Given the way the omicron variant virus ravages the world now, this planning is very shaky to the least. 

Day 6 - Thursday, January 27, 2022

Ah, what a surprise last night! I woke up to the sound of water dripping.  It was not a dream. The water dripped from the ceiling near the bathroom.  I called the front desktop and they delivered a couple of towers. I was told that help from the maintenance crew would be early in the morning.  I told them to inform my upstairs room people to make sure that the source could be stopped just in case.  I suspected that the accumulation of water and steam in the shower stall could be the culprit.  It gradually stopped and fortunately I was able to continue my sleep.

The maintenance crew came in the morning, but need to open up more places to find the problems as obvious places appear to be dry.  The management team agrees to move me to another room so that the maintenance crew can do their exploratory fix.  In the meantime, the bedding and sheets are all replaced.  Crossing my fingers that there would be no more leaks tonight.

Day 7 - Friday, January 28, 2022

I did my second antigen self-test today. It was great to be in the negative. I was also moved to room 1109, which was next door and that made my "moving" fairly straightforward. The room is not bad and certainly I don't want to witness water leakage again.

I did the usual routines: Pokémon game refresh, Chinese culture and economy update in Youtube channels, machine learning lecture, and something new today, the Chinese water calligraphy on reusable cloth worksheets.

Chinese calligraphy was sort of a requirement in my middle and high school education when I grew up.  But few people took it seriously as long as the assignments were turned in and counted.  When I visited a friend in Taipei a few years back, I was inspired by his calligraphy work and I decided then to pick up this pursuit. Chinese calligraphy helped me to concentrate and focus. I enjoyed my own progress as well as improved artistic appreciation. 

I had the habit of understanding what I was writing about from those few famous templates. That forced me to read historical backgrounds and some classical literature pursuits.  That was intellectually satisfying.

The pandemic changed things.  I learned to read more online in current events, history, culture, geography, and travel.  And I also started regular swimming almost on a daily basis. Nevertheless, I reached a serious plateau on calligraphy.  I found excellent Youtube channels on learning Chinese calligraphy.  Somehow I was convinced that I would not progress much further and I should spend more time on language and culture learning for my planned road trips in Europe and Japan with my son Michael. I stopped ink brush practices a year ago. I needed to have a realistic and fulfilling exit strategy for my remaining time on earth :-).

Water calligraphy was an inspiration to me when I saw it.  It uses water, no ink, on reusable worksheets and it is environment friendly.  Some worksheets come with preprinted traces and one can really practice. It is not as realistic as the real ink, but for my level and for my purpose, this is a good compromise. Here you can see my practice results while some parts are drying.

Day 8 - Saturday, January 29, 2022

Today is my halfway milestone.  I will be out of quarantine next week this time.  I look forward to taking a walk in the park and checking out my favorite breakfast place.

I continued on my machine learning and neural networks online lecture and he was a good teacher as he knew where to pause and drill down in details to build up a good intuitive framework.  I enjoyed this very much.  

I spent some time combing through Pokémon storage space and enhancing my battling portfolio. The Pokémon game and games in general can be useful to learn life skills.  This is a collector's game. In a simulated environment, you manage your resources and goals.  This requires cognitive skill, good planning, multi-attribute evaluation, tradeoff, and optimization.  There are some social aspects also, and you have other players as your friends whom you trade goodies with, battle together or battle against each other. Just like everything else, one should not be addicted to the game and forget to live a balanced life with all things considered.

Day 9 - Sunday, January 30, 2022

I bought the water calligraphy work booklet shown here around this time last year from a street vendor in Taipei. It was a welcome change to practice against this real calligraphy piece instead of practicing the basic strokes on a big worksheet.  That happened to be the famous "Heart Sutra" totaling 260 words in Chinese.

The Heart Sutra is one of the most important sutras in Mahayana Buddhism. I could not help but to learn and understand the essence and importance of the sutra and its history. It is definitely a Zen piece with its cryptic teachings full of apparent contradiction and mysticism.  There is an English translation by the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. The translation is beautiful, but radical. There is also an excellent exegesis for the sutra to rationalize his translation.  The links are shown in the reference section.

Incidentally, from the BBC World Service news, Thich Nhat Hanh passed away a week ago on January 22 at the age of 95 in Vietnam. That's my quarantine Day 1. 

=====

References:

1. The Gay Genius - Biography of Su Tungpo 蘇東坡, by Lin Yutang 
2. Le Petit Prince -  French version, English translation, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
3. 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
4. Thich Nhat Hanh's English translation of The Heart Sutra 
5. 
   

I am a human Petri Dish - Part 1/3

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.

=====

Day 0 - Thursday, January 20, 2022 - Friday, January 21, 2022

Leaving for Taipei from San Francisco - UA871 - early arrival by one hour one Friday evening Taiwan time. First time ever that I had only one suitcase and one backpack.  I cheated a bit by having a sturdy handbag to hold vitamins/candies due to excess weight (53.6 pounds).

At SFO, quite a few people got stuck in filling out the required Health Declaration Form/Certificate at the web site https://hqhq.mohw.gov.tw/.  The interface was indeed confusing and I went through possibly all click combinations and it took me more than one hour.

On the inflight movie screen panel, I picked French as my language as part of my recent endeavor to learn the language. I watched "Mourir Peut Attendre" (No Time to Die) by Daniel Craig.  It was a good 007 movie. The breakfast on this flight was a warm sandwich bun with cheese and ham.  It was much better than anything they had to offer in my recollection.

On arrival, there was a fast PCR test for all arriving passengers.  It was completed within an hour.

From my quarantine hotel room (1111) on the 11th floor, there are poke stops nearby, but there are no Pokémon gyms reachable.

Day 1 - Saturday, January 22, 2022

Jet lag adjustment is the usual routine, and hopefully it can be done in one week.  I started to do some Pokémon clean-up work last year this time in Taiwan.

I also continued my French learning, i.e., finished up the dictation lesson on "Le secret de la robe rose" from my life-time Babbel membership. They recently don't allow you to do "copy-n-paste" on some screens.  I had to screenshot them into .png files and used a free OCR tool to convert to French. What a bummer.

Day 2 - Sunday, January 23, 2022

I was advised not to put my mobile phone (with my local number on Airplane Mode while it is powered on.  The authorities need the phone signal to track my location through the cell towers.  Someone might have tried to out-smart the authorities, and thus this special instruction was given by my daily contact.  My daily contact was the assistant to Li (里) chief. The Taiwanese government subdivides the city/county (市/縣) into District (區/鄉/鎮) and then Li (里) and then Lin (鄰).  The Li chief is actually a paid bureaucrat that manages his/her dominion related to public affairs.

The local TV channels include CNN and that is my source of international news.  I used the radio.net app to tune in to BBC World Service.

I started to read "The Gay Genius - Biography of Su Tungpo 蘇東坡" in Chinese.  I did not realize that this person I knew of was that talented, versatile, open-minded, and prolific in many fields.  He was indeed fascinating to me.  I got the idea from a Youtube channel called EYArt.

Day 3 - Monday, January 24, 2022

Waking up to my biological clock and grabbing my iPhone to see that it was 4:07 am.  It was not a surprise.  I should have been able to predict that :-).  I now practiced the morning shower routine that my children did when they grew up in the US.  Well, it was invigorating for sure.

I did my first antigen self-test today.  It was negative all right.  It was not too difficult to do, but it did require one to read the instructions carefully.  I think a basic exposure of high-school level biology/chemistry lab experience is required.  I was amazed at what is required of a modern-day functional citizen these days.

I missed the daily swim a lot. Not being able to do meaningful exercises in a hotel room is not good physically and mentally.

Day 4 - Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Finally, I decided to extend my quarantine hotel stay by another week.  Originally the plan called for my second 7-day quarantine to be in a home setting.  The auntie place has a second bedroom and a second shower stall, but the exact detail of the requirement is a "suite", that is, the shower/bath needs to be enclosed in a bedroom.  My buddy friend Donald had that setting, but I was not allowed to change the location after it was submitted a few days ago.

Now, with this in mind, I felt like more and more that I am a petri dish.  The purpose of this quarantine was to isolate me and see if any Covid-19 viruses would manifest themselves in this petri dish in 14 days. 

I did my first clothing wash last night since I could not hold out for two weeks without washing clothes, especially the underwear.

I continued my Youtube stanfordonline channel's machine learning lectures.  I kept this as part of my to-do list among other activities to keep busy and entertained.

=====

References:

1. The Gay Genius - Biography of Su Tungpo, by Lin Yutang 
2. 
   

=====

Taking Ferry from Xiamen, China to Kinmen, Taiwan

Xiamen Airport, July 1, 2014

You could not get from mainland China to Taiwan directly until 2008.  Going through Hong Kong as a stepping stone was a common practice.  The relationship between mainland China and Taiwan has improved so much in recent years that travel between Xiamen and Kinmen becomes possible.  The immigration formalities and procedures are streamlined enough that even foreign passport holders can travel between China and Taiwan through this interesting and often cheaper route.


Nowadays a ferry ride would take only 30 minutes from Xiamen to Kinmen.  There are regular domestic commercial air flights between Kinmen and major cities in Taiwan.  Domestic flights are considerably less expensive than cross-strait flights between Taiwan and mainland China.

Wutong Terminal from the ferry, July 3, 2014

After my business travel to Beijing this time, I flew from Beijing to Xiamen and took the ferry from the Wutong terminal to Kinmen.  The travel agent booked the ticket for me for 190 RMB (10 RMB service charge by the agent).  This is about 30 US dollars. There is a short taxi ride from the Xiamen airport to the Wutong terminal.  The ferry runs roughly hourly during the day.  The web link above is unfortunately only in Chinese.

Tulou Cluster, July 3, 2014

I took a side trip for two days to visit Tulou, west of Xiamen, which is about 3-hour driving distance.  You can see my future Tulou blog for that stint.

Wutong Ferry Terminal, July 3, 2014

The Wutong ferry terminal is fairly new and the immigration procedure is very streamlined and fast.  These days, new facilities like this all look alike with shiny floors, comfortable chairs and good lighting.

Ferry from Xiamen to Kinmen, July 3, 2014

On the day I traveled (July 3, 2014), the ferry was pretty empty, as you can see from the picture to the left.

Kinmen's Ferry Terminal, July 3, 2014

On the Kinmen side, the ferry terminal is also spiffy and fairly new.  The immigration formalities were quick and straightforward.  I have never been in Kinmen before, and this historical island is a place I always wanted to visit in person.

Kinmen Island map at the ferry terminal July 3, 2014

Kinmen and Matsu islands were the strongholds for Taiwan, which are only miles away from mainland China, during the intense confrontations between the Communist Chinese government and the KMT-led Taiwanese government.

One of the M5A1 Tanks that saved Kinmen in 1949

It is interesting to visit the Guningtou war museum that depicted the invasion that the Communist Chinese almost won in 1949 after the People's Republic of China was founded. The man-made underground tunnels that were built to move supplies through heavy bombardment also provide excellent perspectives on that period of time.
 

Area wise, Kinmen is only slightly smaller than urban Xiamen, which was also an island before the connecting bridges and tunnels were built in the last few decades.  Population wise, there is a huge difference.  Kinmen has about 100 thousand residents normally, while urban Xiamen is home for 2 million people.

Kinmen Airport, July 5, 2014

Shuttle to board plane from Kinmen to Tainan, July 5, 2014

My flight from Kinmen to Tainan took only 50 minutes at 20,000 feet.  Tainan was the historical capital of Taiwan before the Qing dynasty decided to modernize Taiwan.  My younger sister's family is in Tainan, which is an excellent excuse to visit.

The high speed rail (HSR) ride is less than 2 hours from Tainan to Taipei and covers about 250 kilometers.  Since early 2014, United Airlines has offered non-stop flights between Taipei and San Francisco.

July 2010 Taipei Stint

I stopped over in Taipei, Taiwan, on my way back to San Francisco in a recent business trip to Beijing.
I grew up in this metropolitan city until I graduated from college. Then I went "abroad" to study, which led eventually to my emigration to the United States. I remember that when the economy started to take off in Taiwan forty years ago, the traffic was a mess and people were crowding up everywhere with no waiting lines or signs of civility anywhere.

Things are different now. I was impressed by the Taipei subways a few years back when I attended the IDF conference. This time I took a few snapshots during this short visit.

To the left are photos of waiting lines for Taipei subways. Waiting lines are marked to avoid the out-going passengers. These two were the "before and after" pictures with people waiting for subway train to arrive.



Now, what ushered in the civility and good manners? Is chaos a necessary step on its way to civility? What are the necessary conditions to lead to this path? There are many places in the world today that have not gotten out of their chaos in recent memory. Why are they stuck?

Subway station signs now are in the PinYin romanization system instead of in the traditional Wade-Giles system used in the island. My name "Tzongyu Lee" would have been "Zongyu Li" in the new schema of things. But just as "Taipei" and "Tsinghua University" do not get converted to "Taibei" and "Qinghua University", my name is not going to change. The Pin-Yin system is only 50 years old, while the Wade-Giles has 150 years of history. Established names are not going to change for the sake of change and uniformity. Subway train announcements were in Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, English and sometimes even Hakka Chinese is heard.

Taipei scooters are popular. They offer something motorized and fast, and they are easy to park and can squeeze through the traffic.

There are many foreigners and laborers from abroad including overseas Chinese returning from North America. Foreigners are so common and often go unnoticed. Some of my friends told me that they enjoy this atmosphere of anonymity, and do not have to worry about being cheated one way or the other.


I took the opportunity to visit Danshui (Tamsui) via subway after I took care of some personal business.
Danshui is situated at the mouth of the Danshui River on the northwestern side of Taipei. I bought the ferry ticket pack to Bali (across the river) first, to Fisherman's Wharf next, and back to the old town for 120 Taiwan Dollars ($4 USD).


To the left is the Bali ferry terminal with Mount Goddess of GuanYin (Goddess of Mercy) in the background. I rented a bike for a short round-trip 6 miles ride to visit the ShiSanHang (Thirteen-Shops) Archeological Museum.
The distance is not far, but the scorching heat with stifling humidity was hard to bear.


The museum is right next to a waste water treatment plant. The plant is actually housed in 6 giant jars. I thought they were the ThirteenShop Archeological Musuem at first because of their artistic design ;-)








The museum was designed with Italy's leaning tower of Pisa in mind, from the look of its main building. It has some interesting artifacts and history. The material dated way back, much earlier than 1600's Dutch Formosa, which was quite interesting to me.















My last stop was the Danshui Fisherman's Wharf, which offered a nice boardwalk and a relaxing atmosphere. It was quite commercialized, though.










I learned to stay indoors next day because of the heat. I ended up finding a nice exhibition on the "Legends of Heroes - the Heritage of the Three Kingdoms Era" in Taipei's National Museum of History. This turned out to be a surprisingly nice visit. It had a good collection of paintings, crafts, artifacts, stone rubbings, and so on from many different museums in China.
I happen to be listening to the story-telling version of the MP3 "The Romance of Three Kingdoms" on and off during my travels in the last year or so. It was really a treat to me to see this exhibit in one place, with some level of analysis between history and legends.