I don’t really know where to start.
Ok, let’s start with a book series. Oxford Very Short Introduction series. What is it about? It is a collection of slim, small books, each of which introduces a field (or a person, an idea) in an easy-read manner. Is it really an easy read? Well, it depends on the book, I think. If I remember it correctly, the first book of that series that I finished is Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction. But that’s a few years ago.
And then there’s an app. A friend of mine, someone I came to know when I was 18 (that is 8 years ago; we were volunteering in the same group) that happened to cross paths with me recently (we were coworkers), asked if I wanted to subscribe to the National Library of Singapore. I said yes. So she subscribed. The app is Libby. If you have a library card, the app lets you access the digital collection of that library. The National Library of Singapore happens to have a vast digital collection of Oxford Very Short Introductions.
And then I was in the mood for some science. I didn’t recall why. After the Linguistics book, I knew where to come if I wanted some nice intros. Introduction, in general, is important. It decides whether a person’s path will take a turn. I checked out from Libby 3 Very Short Introduction books on Japan, China, and Korea. At that time I must have been in a mood for history. But after too much social studies, maybe I felt the need for some science. A particular book was promising: Magnetism: A Very Short Introduction. I thought about the iron filing experiment back in junior high school. How it didn’t make sense. I thought about magnets. What exactly is a magnetic field? And then I remembered some electricity from the bits and pieces of the memory of the high school physics lectures. What the heck is a charge? Why is it called positive? And what does negative mean? Just as how I couldn’t picture a negative weight, I cannot picture a negative charge. So let’s read some magnetism.
The author explains a certain experiment. What is its name? I don’t remember. I only remember that it was hard as hell to imagine the experiment with words. It’s like you’re reading a script and playing a movie inside your head. If it is some superhero movie then I guess it’s fine. But if it is Interstellar then good luck. So I searched on YouTube to watch the experiment – instead of reading it. Reading vs. watching – two different processes. Reading exercises your imaginative muscles. Watching doesn’t. Sometimes the easy way is worth a try. And that was the beginning of my habit of looking on YouTube for an explanation (or should I say, a visualization?) of something.
At some point in the book, the author discusses Maxwell’s equations, and the word ‘divergence’ pops up. I couldn’t imagine what divergence is. It seemed to be a mathematical quantity, but math should reflect something in reality, right? So I searched on YouTube for divergence. A video by a channel with some weird name, 3blue1brown, showed up in the first result page. And it had a very high view count (2.2 million views). Woah. How could such a science explanation video have such a high view count? The video didn’t fail me. It was so good, and Grant Sanderson (3blue1brown) became my 2nd hero (after Haruki Murakami), and probably the 4th person who has influenced me so much.
(The other 3 include my father, Haruki Murakami, and professor Zach Hawley. When I was a kid, my father gave me a walking quota (3 large loops around the neighborhood, or 6 small loops around the block); I was scared of his wrath so I tried to fulfill my quota and thus learned to be disciplined. Haruki Murakami led me to discover my love for fiction and (partly) nudged me into running. Zach’s awesome Intro to Microecon (Honors) converted me into an Economics major.)
3blue1brown has a playlist on linear algebra. His approach focuses on the visual intuition behind linear transformations, not the actual computation. People are visual creatures. Images and animations make us rely less on our imagination muscles, so we don’t have to work so hard to absorb the message behind them. The message, once embedded in our minds, condenses to be some kind of an intuition. Though nebular, it is there. Through future practice and reflection, that cloudy mess may give rise to a more concrete form, and that is when one truly masters a piece of knowledge.
Anyway, I decided to take Linear Algebra for Machine Learning on Coursera. I had tried that course in the past and had not gone past the first 2 weeks because it was mostly about calculations. Now armed with 3blue1brown’s videos, I was confident I would bulldoze through the course with a new weapon: the intuitions built via visualization.
Then YouTube’s recommendation algorithms kicked in. People who watch 3blue1brown also watch another channel, Veritasium. I believe I had watched a Veritasium’s video when I was reading Magnetism: A Very Short Introduction as well. The video is about the connection between relativity and magnetism.
Since then I have been into mathematics and sometimes physics. I did finish the linear algebra course and have been working on its sequel, the multivariate calculus course. Along the way the instructor discussed Taylor series for approximations, and again I watched 3blue1brown’s explanation of Taylor series to help build an intuition. On the right of the screen, YouTube had been recommending a video by Veritasium with an outrageous name: ‘This equation will change how you see the world (…)’ It was mind-blowing (please watch it yourself; in fact, all videos I include here deserve a watch).
I was supposed to write this prompt (‘A wisdom, or a quote you want to live by’) yesterday (23 June 2021) and couldn’t come up with any quote I wanted to write about. I browsed my Keep notes, where I keep a collection of good quotes I encountered while reading, but found no one good enough to live by. Some possible candidates:
It’s good to have small goals that can be easily attained. (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale)
[…] you can’t tell anything from photographs. They’re just a shadow. The real me is far away. That won’t show up in a picture. (Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun)
The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything. (Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes)
Oh, well. No place has everything you need. (Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)
Where there’s guts there’s curiosity, and where there’s curiosity there’s guts. (Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)
Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is ocean, and all we can see of it with the naked eye is the surface: the skin. We hardly know anything about what’s underneath the skin. (Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)
“People don’t always send messages in order to communicate the truth, Mr. Okada. […] just as people don’t always meet others in order to reveal their true selves.” (Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)
Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely. (Haruki Murakami, 1Q84)
Time and freedom: those are the most important things that people can buy with money. (Haruki Murakami, 1Q84)
I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning. (Haruki Murakami, 1Q84)
Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent. (Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running)
You can’t hate something so violently unless a part of you also loves it. (Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy)
“Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask.”
“But you’re the Answerers!”
“You don’t get it yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?”
“No–“
“To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”
(Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness)
(You see, Haruki Murakami is endlessly quotable.)
I decided to choose none of the quotes above. I scrolled to read through the comments on the Veritasium’s video ‘This equation will change how you see the world (…)’ and saw one I particularly like:
“A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace”
I googled it and it seemed the Internet agrees the quote is from Confucius. I decided this is the quote I want to live by.
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