One Last Dance - Cha Mo

A kind of sad story of an assassin. This is the intro, the music is by Pakk Hui, it can be found on youtube as "Broken Orange". I saw this on the way home from China on the airplane. It is kind of dangerous to allow emotions enter your decisions if you are an assassin. Consequences soon follow... and yet... what's there without them?! suits my present mood perfectly...

Beauty In Art And Science

This is a little segment from a documentary about Nobel price winning physicist, Richard Feynman in which they discuss the notion of beauty in arts and sciences. To me, beauty seems to be the most important and most elusive universal concept. The greatest motivating force, the thing that captures our interests and as we chase it we discover newer and newer parts of the world around or inside us, which otherwise we would not have bothered to do. The thing that is beyond basic instincts to survive, and yet it can become more important than those. To admire it makes our lives worth living. And yet... there are many ways one appreciates beauty, some seem mutually exclusive, as one listens to this conversation. We could also say that while Feynman discusses the beauty in details, an analytic approach, his artist friend rather appreciates the whole. Anybody who ever did some science can appreciate what Feynman says about the beauty in details, and how those details fit together. And yet I also feel that science often fails to see that the imminent, spontaneous beauty of things do not survive if they are taken apart, as perhaps some artists cannot see beauty beyond their own scope of perception. So perhaps the questions raised could be put as follows, for the scientist "What does the knowledge of the details add to the whole if the whole is destroyed in the process?", and to the artisit "How can you say you know beauty, if you know nothing about the intricate details that make it possible?". I think the important thing to realize is we always have a choice what view we take for a specific occasion (or experiment with more than one even if they seem exclusive...). I mean it seems unlikely that even scientists would run havoc mutilating all flowers on a field of roses, or cutting up breasts for that matter, for the merits of details, for example... A scientific training is not a lifelong obligation to analyze, nor is an artist only capable of seeing only one dimension of beauty, despite the fact that people who exclusively insist on being one or the other (perhaps the majority, unfortunately) give you that feeling...

Einstein's Brain

One of the drawbacks of being a well-publicised genius is that the guy who does your autopsy may think it better to remove your brain in the name of science, and that your eyeballs would be a suitable present for your eye doctor. So at least it happened with Einstein despite his wish to be cremated and scattered. A man called Thomas Harvey, who did the autopsy, thought it was without question that the brain should be used for research and managed later to persuade Einstein's relatives. He than later took the brain as his personal possession and gave a piece to the occasional visitor who happened to have a good enough reason. In the video above, Harvey slices off a piece of brain with an elegant movement using a butcher's knife on the kitchen table for a Japanese Einstein fan, who wishes to use it for educational purposes... The video is part of the documentary "Einstein's Brain"; you may watch the whole thing on youtube. There seems to be very little other findings of scientific value at the moment.