Our only real economic security lies in our power to meet human needs.
So the worse conditions become, the more evident human needs become.
Our security does not lie in our organizations or our jobs; disruptive technologies may simply make them irrelevant.
— The 8th Habit
— Stephen Covey
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2008.03.25 Tuesday
To learn to think, you need two things: large blocks of time, and as much one-on-one interaction as you can get with someone who thinks more clearly than you do.
— Stephen C. Stearns, Ph.D.
2008.03.25 Tuesday
3.5 Time messenger
A time messenger is someone who can send and receive letters to and from the past and to and from the future.
You are a time messenger.
3.5.1 send messages to your past self
You cannot send messages into the past. Even if you can, you cannot receive it, for you have already become your now-self. Only your past-self can receive the message, your now-self cannot.
3.5.2 receive messages from your future self 接收來自未來的訊息
You can receive the message sent by your future self because you are your now-self now.
What if your future self did not send the message you want to receive?
That is nonsense. You are always creating your own future-self. Your future-self is under your control.
How to receive messages from your-future-self?
Vision: 先知先覺 洞悉先機
To receive messages from your future-self, you need vision.
Vision is a function of common sense. Common sense is a function of vast knowledge and creativity.
How to get such knowledge and creativity?
1. Read
2. Observe
3. Experience
4. Create
Then imagine yourself as your ten-year-later self. If you are yourself-in-ten-year-later, what would you want to tell your now-self?
2008.03.20 Thursday
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
— Arthur C. Clarke
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2008.03.17 Monday
I’ve found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.
— Paul Graham
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2008.03.13 Thursday
3.4 Living in now-here, eliminate the passage of time
If you have always unleashed all the potential of time, you will not fear the passage of time. Since rather than being gone, time is transformed to something more valuable.
Just like when you have bought something that deserves much more than its cost, you would not feel that you have lost the money.
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2008.03.11 Tuesday
3.3 You are nowhere but nowhere
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People always have an escape-character.
We often think that the past is better than now (good-old-days thinking); or the future will be better than now (procrastination).
Thinking in either way is not useful, for you are always here, you are always in now.
You are in nowhere but now-here.
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2008.03.10 Monday
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
— Robert Frost
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Explanation and interpretations
The poem, especially its last lines, where the narrator declares that taking the road “one less traveled by” “made all the difference,” can be seen as a declaration of the importance of independence and personal freedom. However, Frost likely intended the poem as a gentle jab at his great friend and fellow poet Edward Thomas, and seemed amused at this slightly “mischievous” misinterpretation. The Road Not Taken seems to illustrate that once one takes a certain road, there’s no turning back, although one might change paths later on, they still can’t change the past.
— Wikipedia
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2008.03.05 Wednesday
3.2 Now is the past of the future, the future of the past
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To get a feeling of traveling into the past, imagine you are a 22nd century person and enjoy the present technologies.
To get a feeling of traveling into the future, imagine you are a 19th century person and enjoy the present technologies.
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2008.03.04 Tuesday
For Michelangelo, the job of the sculptor was to free the forms that were already inside the stone.
He believed that every stone had a sculpture within it, and that the work of sculpting was simply a matter of chipping away all that was not a part of the statue.
— Wikipedia
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2008.03.01 Saturday
Storyline 1 … to be a time traveler …
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3.1 In the beginning, …
Time traveling means traveling through time to different eras in history.
To the best knowledge of the known physical laws, time traveling is not feasible.
I was really disappointed until I started to realize that …
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3.1.1 in a sense, we are all time travellers
We are travelling into the future now.
If you want to preserve your coordinates, 
However, even if you want to preserve your time coordinate, 
You are always moving from the past, through now, into the future.
The 
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2008.02.26 Tuesday
The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting — no more — and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth.
Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind.
— On Listening to Lectures
— Mestrius Plutarchos
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2008.02.25 Monday
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T. S. Eliot
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2008.02.24 Sunday
* Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
— Ray Bradbury
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2008.02.20 Wednesday
* Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
— Ray Bradbury
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2008.02.18 Monday
* Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.
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* If we listened to our intellect we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go in business because we’d be cynical: “It’s gonna go wrong.” Or “She’s going to hurt me.” Or,”I’ve had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . .” Well, that’s nonsense. You’re going to miss life. You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.
— Ray Bradbury
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2008.02.17 Sunday
盡其在我
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2008.02.14 Thursday
Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. (He is also a fool.)
— Robert A. Heinlein
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2008.02.12 Tuesday
Pascal’s Pensees:
Words differently arranged have a different meaning,
and meanings differently arranged have different effects.
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In an A.Maths lesson (2006): I said,
係理論上, 理論上同實際上係無乜分別o既;
但係實際上, 理論上同實際上係有好大分別o既.
(1)
The next day, in a G.Maths lesson, a student said she would collect my words to construct a quotation book.
As a joke, I said,
I am going to publish an autobiography.
Its name will be “我與A.Maths 爭鬥三十年“.
(2)
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Footnotes:
(1) Written Chinese and English versions:
在理論上, 理論上和實際上是沒有什麼分別的;
但是在實際上, 理論上和實際上是有很大分別的.
The difference between theory and practice is small in theory but big in practice.
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The original quotation is “The difference between theory and practice tends to be very small in theory, but in practice it is very large indeed.” — Anonymous
I discovered this quotation from the book Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution in 2002.
(2) A Thirty-year War against Additional Mathematics.
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2008.02.08 Friday
Physics Town 
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