Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

I’ve been reading two books about hacking. Interestingly, both books make references to the novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. The first book is Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley. In an interview of Ron Rosenbaum, whose article Secrets of the Little Blue Box (published in Esquire Magazine in 1971) brought phone phreaking into the awareness of the public, Rosenbaum said that his vision of the phone phreaks of the 60’s and the 70’s was influenced by the underground communication networks described in the novel. When I started to read the book, I didn’t associate phone phreaking with Pynchon. But of course, Pynchon loves secret communication. The second chapter of Lapsley’s book on the birth of Bell System and AT&T, he cited optical telegraphs of the 18th century as an early form of long-distance communication network. Incidentally, optical telegraphy is one of the main themes of Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon.

Many years ago, I got myself Bill Frisell: An Anthology - a collection of music written by guitarist Bill Frisell. I can’t really read music, so to me, it had been a coded book, which I keep in my collection as an object of curiosity. But there is something fascinating about it that even a non-musician can feel. It just seems … profound. What amazes me about Bill Frisell’s written music is that each piece is just a couple of pages of simple notes and chords. Many of them are so basic that they look like they belong in a children’s piano book. I have a couple of other books of sheet music, but this is the only one that doesn’t look scary. But somehow, the pages in this book can be interpreted into extraordinary music. I get the sense that to Bill Frisell, the essence of a great piece of music is in the form of a folk song that anyone can sing and enjoy. It’s the sense of zenful childlike innocence that I find so inspiring.

In Chapter 64 of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon, there is a humorous telling of a story about ancient Chinese astronomy. In this story, two imperial astronomers, Hsi and Ho, embarrassed the Emperor by failing to predict a solar eclipse. For this neglience, they almost got themselves executed. A quick Google search found several western references to this story. The Pynchon wiki, for example, cites a French source. So Pynchon didn’t make it up. But I was still not satisfied. Where can I find this pair of unfortunate astronomers in a Chinese document? I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about Chinese history to figure it out, but a friend quickly pointed me to《尚書》(also known as Book of Documents in English). Interestingly, this book of ancient Chinese history is sometimes claimed to be one of the earliest written records of solar eclipses in human history (specifically, the eclipse in the year 2134 BC, during the reign of Emperor Chung K’ang). However, parts of the book have been found to be fabricated in the 3rd century AD, so that claim might be questionable. I personally don’t trust any history about the semi-mystical Xia Dynasty.

This is an illustration of the “Brain Sea”. I found it near the end of a comic book by the Taiwanese artist Push. What is the Brain Sea? In Mandarin Chinese, “Brain Sea” (腦海) is a common expression that refers to the mind. This is the end scene of the “Nine Lives Man” saga, where the protagonist (who has been reincarnated into countless life forms in the 3-volume Sci-Fi series) asks the ultimate question: What is the point of all this? The answer is that it’s all in the brain sea of Push, the comic book author. The next page shows the author finishing the final panel, and he thinks to himself: “What a crappy ending! Who will buy this very serious but also very silly book?”

In the 70’s, it was fashionable for intellectuals to abuse the term “grammar” to refer to any underlying principles. In one of his essays, Italo Calvino used the term “the grammar of tree” to refer to…. essentially developmental plant biology. I thought that was pretentious. But heh, in R programming, people are talking about the grammar of graphics and grammar of data manipulation again. It’s fashionable to call functions “verbs” again. Hello, structuralism! (PS: A philosopher friend informed me that this abuse of the word grammar started with Wittgenstein)