Mosby, Karajan, and Mutter

After the last post, I’ve been feeling unfinished. This sitcom touched me so much that can not be simply interrupted by the lecture it gave me. Just like the first time I heard The Four Seasons by Mutter and Karajan, I can never forget the feeling of vividness. I felt unbelievably peaceful after finished season 9.

So, I wondered, and wondered, and wondered these days. Why? I asked myself every single day.

I went to Aranya last year. This is a place calms me down. I felt nothing but peace when longing on the beach. I seem to tend to put myself into isolation. It is because I love being alone by nature or I can just avoid the possibility of being wrong.

Getting into a university is really a huge step for me. It’s a well-known acknowledgement that responsibility is the price of freedom. When I was in high school, of course, I desperately want freedom. And if the devil offers me the chance to grown into my 20s, even if I understand I have to take responsibility, I will take the offer without thinking. But responsibility is an experience good: only after taking the responsibility, you can find what it means. Then I started to run away from responsibilities while kept some of my imaginations. Which leads to endless picturing in mind but hardly put into action.

This sitcom satisfied the curiosities of my imaginations. There’re all kinds of characters: Barney, the playboy; Ted, the loser; Robin, the deserter; Lily and Marshall, the couple. You laugh with the character, you cry with the character, and you sincerely bless them at the wedding. For a sitcom, without double, it’s successful. But most importantly, for the first time, I can experience my imaginations without taking any responsibilities. It even revealed the possibility of life that I didn’t imagine before.

I guess that why it touched me so much.

Auld Lang Syne

I watched How I Met Your Mother long ago but didn’t finish it at that time. Due to the outbreak, finally, I got the time to revisit it.

I do believe this is an excellent relationship tutorial for kids and teenagers. It’s about not just the relationship between couples, but also friendship, the relationship between children and parent, and the relationship between you and yourself. And it’s its comprehensiveness makes it legen, wait for it…, dary!

Thanks to Ted’s nature of OCD, he experienced all kinds of love before he met Tracy. And of course, he’s always around Robin. It’s hard to tell whether this is a blessing or a curse.

But kids, there’s one important take away for me: so-called marriage, or the one, is never the destination. It’s not even qualified to a milestone. It’s just a bonus. The point is to be happy with your friends, be loyal to your hobbies, and enjoy yourself.

Just like the blue french horn, or the yellow umbrella, there might be some icons glowing in your life. But more importantly, is to live those ordinary days vividly.

Notes on “Wearing T-shirt and Listening to Classical Music – Era of Great Masters”

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Puccini, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Satie and Chopin. So many masters listed here with so many masterworks. What’s the meaning of life? Some say: the meaning of life is to express so that the next generation will take in your thoughts and live on and on. Live long and prosper, isn’t it? In this point of view, composers do are the luckiest man. For they work for themselves. Writers and directors express thoughts by stories. And in stories, there are so many other factors: social background, name of characters and so on. But in music, the only distraction is the instruments. Thoughts and spirits live there alone and undisturbed.

I took a course named The Enjoyment of Music this term. And the final exam is to analysis La Valse by Ravel. I have to say that impressionism is really hard to follow. BolĂ©ro played at Summer Night Concert Schönbrunn 2016 is well known as a giant raise up. But in La Valse, there is just simply nothing to capture. The lecturer of The Enjoyment of Music, Prof. Bi Minghui once said “La Valse is the best dance music ever. It concentrates all the essence of three-beat music.” But I can really not appreciate La Valse for now. And maybe I never will. 

Brahms once embedded “AGADHE”, the name of one of his girlfriends, into his String Sextet No. 2. How lucky he is to master the ability to express. How lucky is Tian Yimiao to actually feel the most of great passion passed by those masterpieces.

[iPadOS App of 2019] LiquidText

If your work involves any PDF reading stuff, this is the app you are looking for. I tried MarginNote, GoodNotes, Notability, Notes Writer, OneNote, but this one, I tell you if the app you are looking for to read PDFs. The writing is not as good as GoodNotes, but LiquidText let you organize PDF pages in an amazing way you’ve always wanted.

Notes on “What’s Science” and “Origin of Greek Science Spirit”

The lecture Origin of Greek Science Spirit is a lecture given by Professor Wu Guosheng on Nov. 7, 2019, at Peking University. And the book What’s Science is also Prof. Wu.

To begin our discussion, let’s define science first. The science we discuss in this note is a system styled with two features: deductive and falsifiable. In addition, science is different from technology: technology is not deductive but more productive.

Some say science is one kind of faith. Yes. Modern science is a replacement of Christian. As for China, from the 1800s to 1920s, the traditional value system went corrupted, people need something to believe in. That’s why the Chinese are so fascinating about modern science.

There are two phases of Science: Greek Science and Modern Science. Greek Science is the base of modern science. Modern Science introduced the spirit of will to power, thus modern science has greatly improved productivity.

Greek Science: do science deductively for science

There are two bases of Greek Science: free and independent. Free means people do science for no certain practice purpose. People do science for science. Independent means science relay on the deduction to develop itself.

Why “free” is important? The progress from static electricity to electric cars is not and can not be powered by practical demand. Free represents unlimited potential.

Why “independency” is important? Independence ensured that no is no. Let’s take Chinese astronomy as an example: when the astronomical phenomenon is highly related to politics, misprediction lead to fables instead of correction of theories.

And Greek philosophy contribute a lot to Greek science. They invented nature. This world can not be described in math, but concepts can be. Thus, we work on nature instead of this world. This is one of the bases of Greek Science.

Modern Science: the will to power

Christian accepted the nature science proposed by Aristotle. They understand the Bible is not about science. Moreover, the proposal of Nominalism in scholasticism replace God with the human. Nominalism proposes that God is unpredictable so pray will not save you. The only way to save yourself is positively manipulating nature. They released the will to power.

Greek science did not interact with nature, the representative is Stoicheia. For modern science nature is neither holy nor cheap, science began to interfere with nature. The representative is Almagest, which is the bridge between Greek science and modern science.

And I’ve got a new understanding of how philosophy leads to the development of science. Science is very much the same as agriculture. You can not make plans for science, all you can do is to provide the right environment, which is what philosophy does. Here’s a specific example: philosopher Henry More proposed that space might be infinite, which is the direct base of Newton’s first law of motion.

Eastern Science?

The highest pursuit of Chinese philosophy is benevolence which Greek philosophy peruse free science. And Chinese philosophers believed that people are part of the world, nature worked not in its own way but a complicated way which encountered human wishes and gods’ wishes. What’s why there’s no eastern science.

From a religious point of view, our culture did not stand for one’s own will. Buddhism proposed that publicity is the source of suffering. Therefore, there’s no place for nominalism.

However, eastern technology was greatly advanced. Why advanced technology didn’t lead to science? Let’s take Chinese astronomy as an example: Chinese astronomy served Li instead of discovering nature rules. Secondly, misprediction didn’t falsify the theory: we made stories to explain misprediction.

Worth mention that science is just one kind of ideology, not the best one. Confucianism kept China prosper for thousands of years while European suffered from Dark Ages. The competition between Chinese philosophy and Greek philosophy is very much the same as the competition between Magic and Mechanism.

Notes on “Renaissance Story 01: What is the Renaissance”

In a word, Renaissance is a burst of desires. People started to wonder. They gradually had the wish to see, to know, to understand things. The outcome is tons of fascinating works distributed in various fields of humanity.

Why there’s a burst? There are three reasons: 1. Christian suppresses people’s desire to stay in power. But Christian started to become inclusive started from Francis of Assisi. 2. The development of printing greatly reduced the cost to obtain knowledge, Christianity can no longer hold the knowledge to themselves. 3. European economy went prosper, people were no longer satisfied with sufficient food.

There were crises. Idealism once prevailed. Salvation in Christianity went all the way up when the plague swept Europe. History finally chose the current direction.