Risking it

It's hard, being vulnerable. Especially the first time, to an unknown entity, in an chartered situation. One knows not where the wind will blow. Letting go, waiting to see if it is safe to take another step out. Feels like standing at the edge of a cliff. Giving another the power to push you over, or pull you in. No guts, no glory...

Who can fathom it?

I was just talking with django about moissanite, or rather he was talking to me about it -- small but important distinction :p  Moissanite? What's that? I had to look it up on google. Turns out it's a man-made diamond, or rather an synthetic diamond. Isn't language interesting? I could just as well have said 'fake diamond' but 'synthetic' sounds so much better!

What caught my interest was reading that this rock (crystal? gem?) is more sparkly than a diamond. An article I read said moissanite possesses a higher refractive index or brilliance (the sparkle) than a diamond at 2.65 to the diamond's 2.42... and also more fire or dispersion (the flashes) with .104 next to the diamond's measly .044. Plus it's almost as hard as the diamond, a 9.24 to the diamond's 10 on the Mohs relative hardness scale -- the second hardest jewel on the planet.

Amazing the things man can conjure up and create, don't you think? I wonder how many people look at the world around them and realise that in the modern world, nearly everything around us is created by human minds and hands. To me it's a miracle that we can work in offices 20 stories off the ground, drive around in what amounts to a metal box on wheels powered by some complex system (hey, it's complex to me!) -- things we take for granted every day. I wonder if architects ever get a sense of awe when they're drawing up plans for a house or office building... if engineers ever marvel when they're involved in setting up overhead train tracks for the inner-city train system. It's like creating something so much bigger than yourself, just sort of pulling it out of your mind or putting it together with your tools. Poof! You have this fantastic creation sitting on acres of land, being used by thousands of people.

That we have gone from swaths of land filled with jungle to vast regions covered by modern-day cities with skyscrapers and highways is... quite unbelievable. It's almost as if all this was created from nothing and sprang out of nowhere. Yes, I know we're building on hundreds, if not thousands of years of discovery, experimentation and study. It didn't really come from nowhere, nor did it appear overnight. But what I mean is, we're constantly discovering things we didn't even know were there to discover, going ever deeper into levels of complexity that no one could have imagined were even there to explore. I doubt we've even scraped the surface of what we can do, know, think, imagine.

If this is what we are capable of, what must God's mind be like? That really, really, really boggles mine.

On love

I love what this lady has to say about love. You really need to read the whole piece, but this is the part I love best:
 

I'm going to say that if we're lucky, no, [love] doesn't grow. It is always just itself, even if it thrives. But if properly nourished, it does thrive. And the way it does that, the way it repays us for the feeding, is that it learns to clothe itself. Everything around it, love throws around its shoulders and wraps around its spidery hands. Time. Children. Money. Homes. Memory. Death. Sex. Language. Fear. Things that a couple can share like wine, they can be that rich and that heady. What we consume, love assumes. It puts all this on, layer upon layer, and protects itself like that.

 
 

For the fun of it ;)

(Click image for larger view)
 
 

School ain't education

RedSheep tweeted the recent speech delivered by Erica Goldson, valedictorian for the 2010 graduating class of Coxsackie-Athens High School, New York:

Some of you may be thinking, "Well, if you pass a test, or become valedictorian, didn't you learn something? Well, yes, you learned something, but not all that you could have. Perhaps, you only learned how to memorize names, places, and dates to later on forget in order to clear your mind for the next test. School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible... [I]n retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system... I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning.

Sounds eerily like something one could say of our Malaysian education system, which is arguably a whole lot more steeped in rote-learning than the American one. I'd have echoed her words 15 years ago, except I wasn't top of my class. Because I didn't care enough to be. Which, even now, irks my father: "If you had studied harder, you could have done so much better," he says. But, I point out, I did proceed to university, I did graduate, I'm in a job I love, I'm a productive human being. Nobody cares now if I had 4As or 10As on the high school exit exam... why should it matter?

Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, "My education was interrupted only by my schooling," which is exactly how I felt for the 11 years I was in school. I couldn't wait to leave. I felt stifled, stuffed in a box. I didn't believe I was truly learning anything, and I scorned the idea that As were indicators of intelligence. They were only signs that one knew how to "work the system", as Erica says, and had memorised all the right things.

I'm not up-to-date with all the changes that have taken place in our education system since I left high school, but I doubt the basic framework has changed much. To this day I'm not sure how I passed Physics when I never understood it!

And now, to inject a little humour...

Discovered: Cartoonists Doug Savage (creator of "Savage Chickens") and Bill Greenhead (aka Stik, creator of "World of Cow").
 
 

Image source: WoC 797, by Stik
 
 

Image source: Brainstorming, by Dan Savage
 
I've had sessions like that!
 
 

Thinking aloud

I've always thought that, where a personal website is concerned, it's good to have a blog as a homepage because that brings people back to your page again and again. What's the point of having a site that people only visit once? No, you want to lure people in, and you do that by constantly offering new (and good quality!) content. That means when they come back, they're back for that new content, so you might as well give it to them first thing, rather than making them click through from the homepage to the blog.

On the other hand, a blog is a blog is a blog and instantly recognisable these days. So if a person visits your site for the first time, and sees "Oh, it's just a blog", they might not take the time to explore other areas of your website (remember, it's a personal website, so it has other stuff like photos, recipes, poems, your portfolio, etc. -- all neatly filed into other sections). It also doesn't look very professional, and as your website is meant to represent you in virtual space... well. If a prospective employer were to look you up on the Web, you'd want them to see something impressive.

As a result of these rather confused thoughts, I'm not sure now which is best practice. I'm not even talking about SEO (search engine optimisation), just from a design and user-friendly point of view. Maybe one way would be to have the front page excerpt part of the latest blog post or display only the latest blog post. Make it look more... "website-like" rather than "blog-like".

Yes, changes are afoot. Not to WilfulSunflower, though. This will stay as it is ;)