Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

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)

As a PhD student, I took a class in animal behaviour. I didn’t work very hard and have forgotten most of it. However, since I became a father, I have been thinking more about this class. One of the papers I read was the classic “The social function of the intellect” by Nicholas Humphrey, first published in 1976. The paper is packed with insightful analogies. For example, Humphrey offered an interesting interpretation of Robinson Crusoe. According to him, Crusoe’s life on the island was a relatively simple and easy one, which he managed without too much trouble. His life only became challenging after the arrival of Friday. What he meant was that it’s the complexity of society, rather than the challenges of survival that drive the evolution of intelligence. I can see this in my daughter. Her life before 4yo was quite easy and carefree. When she started to have friends and social relationships in the childcare, that’s when things became complicated.