iknothing

[iknothing]

What has happened was bound to happen. There's nothing I can do to prevent it. There's nothing I can do to make it better. Life won't necessarily be better without it.

[iknothing]

Look your pieces are scattered on the floor

Go pick them up

Put them back together

Apply glue if necessary

Wait till it dries

Then carry on

[iknothing]

#YouLookDisgusting Blogger Em Ford Responds To Internet Haters: ‘Perfection Isn’t Real’

The Internet can be a very cruel place, especially when you’re revealing a side that’s rarely seen. Beauty blogger Em Ford experienced this first-hand after posting photos of herself without makeup on Instagram. The harsh reactions to Ford’s bare face inspired her to produce a video that highlights the online abuse and harassment women are subjected to for not looking “flawless." 

Watch the full video for more honest and raw accounts that will teach Internet haters a lesson or two and change society’s perception of what it means to be beautiful.

[iknothing]

Marc Chagall, born today in 1887, painted this work upon moving to Paris from rural Russia. The geometries of I and the Village are inspired by the broken planes of Cubism, but where Cubism was mainly an art of urban avant-garde society, I and the Village is nostalgic and magical, a rural fairy tale: objects jumble together, scale shifts abruptly, and a woman and two houses, at the painting’s top, stand upside-down.

[Marc Chagall. I and the Village. 1911. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris]

[iknothing]

The Gods Themselves - science blab

Note: Spoiler alert. And I would like to write about the non-science part of the book but we’ll see if I get it done...

The Gods Themselves is an excellent book. Not perfect, but certainly one of the most interesting hardcore sci-fi stories. It consists of three parts, connected by one single idea of exchanging matter between parallel universe. What’s great about sci-fi is that, by building up different technology or scientific settings, the author can discuss personal, interpersonal or broader social issues, altered, accentuated or driven by more interesting factors. I have to say hard-core techy sci-fi discussing serious personal or social issues is my favorite.

The three parts are themed differently. The first part would be particularly interesting to researchers, though without exaggeration and drama. The second part is simply beautiful, and notably involves queer issues in a pretty unusual manner. The third part, in my point of view, is a bit crude and clearly written in an attempt to wrap up, which might give a decent ending for the entire book but makes itself less consistent. Asimov was considerate to give us a happy ending. If it were me I would happily see the sun explode - because against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain [citation needed]. But instead we have a balanced universe and even the possibility to produce a new lively one. That is just too good and too against 2nd law of thermodynamics.

=======Science Blab Alert=======

When talking about interaction between parallel universes, it’s difficult to say which physical laws still hold. The story breaks the first two laws of thermodynamic in a blink - the two laws stopping us from building a better world, if not a crazier one. The first part of the story has laid down the foundation of the technology employed through out the book. Exchanging matter, radioactive decay of elements, diffusion of physical law. A lot of things can go wrong in these three steps, but let’s think about how it can actually work.

First if we still want first law to be true, energy cannot be produced endlessly. Therefore to give huge amount of energy, the process of producing it - the transfer of matter - may be even more energy consuming. But let’s just say this is like photosynthesis where sunlight turns into carbohydrate, only a way to utilize energy in a less efficient but easier way. Nothing too fancy in principle, some unknown source of energy transferred into the form of radioactive energy with the price of dissipation to some extent.

I know too little about assumptions of parallel universe, the only plausible matter exchanging process I can think of is to distort the time-space in some way so that two universe can be in contact. Like making two sheets of paper touch, transferring a bit of paint from one to another without entirely collapsing the two, we need to gently bend one or both. And how do we bend time-space? The easiest answer would be gravity. That actually explains why electron pumps cannot be built on the moon - it may not be in the most curved point of the time-space and therefore not in contact with the para-universe.

Asimov talked about possible shortcomings of the electron pump. The electrostatic equilibrium issue actually does not exist: decaying plutonium gives positrons which combines with electrons from the plutonium atom itself, therefore the entire process is constant in charge. This loophole does no influence the plot at all. The diffusion of physical laws sound like a more serious problem though. This has more indications than it appears to be - spreading of a different set of physical laws suggest an inhomogeneity of the time-space, also requiring something to carry the laws, like air carrying sound waves. An alternative would be the physical laws themselves are matter instead of just constants in equations. That might as well overthrow the contemporary classical and quantum physics and re-establish the existence of the so-called ether. Which is another pretty interesting sci-fi idea actually. Someone please tell me if such stories already exist.

The more concerning thing about diffusive physical law is that this is a entropy increasing process. The story tried pretty hard to override the 2nd law but the fundamental mechanism behind our new source of energy is still entropy. That’s pretty interesting - no matter how hard we try, we may never be able to envision a world where you shake a box of Lego pieces and produce an x-wing - it’s simply too counter-intuitive. And we all know the 2nd law leads to a dead end for an isolated system. Just that now it’s not the dead end of one universe but an infinity number of universes where eventually the physical constants are evenly distributed. The infinity number of universes may save us - or not - because an infinite series can be either divergent or convergent, the latter less likely to give us endless number of new universes. 

What I believe Asimov has missed is the fact that radioactive decay is actually a process of turning matter into energy. The still mass of the atom is smaller after decay than before. The circulation between plutonium and tungsten cannot go on forever. At some point the neutron will be too light that it stops being a neutron and a proton no longer is a proton - and I cannot think of what would happen after that. Could be some other type of radio chemistry, but certainly no longer plutonium or tungsten. I don’t know if there is a reason it has to be limited to these two elements - apparently not according to part three - but the reduction of mass is likely a more serious problem than the physical laws.

[iknothing]

It is interesting that Research results will influence how people think and activitists on the other hand use research results to support their opinions. I mean, if you have even the slightest faith in free will, the lifestyle would be a personal choice and should not be interfered by any social stereotype or the physical entity you reside in.

[iknothing]

So we have marriage equality now

It’s great to wake up with new rights as some twitter user pointed out.

My community is relatively more conservative since I’m from China. I have met quite some great LGBTQ friends since I’ve been to US and starting from Friday, my FB page has been overflooded with rainbow messages, 10% of them coming from myself.

Which is good. Fantastic. Can’t imagine that at all in China.

I’ve seen some interesting reaction too. No one I know has been blatantly complaining about it, no one is idiotic enough to declare to move to Canada either.  But here are some comments that call for a bit of attention from me.

The first is a friend of mine asking me, why are you guys all making a fuss about this. He said America is far from the first one to legalize same sex marriage, why is this so important. I answered I’m a LGBT community member living in US, of course I’m concerned. Then he asked what is LGBT, sorry about being ignorant but I hardly cares enough to know the jargon.

I was honestly shocked. I couldn’t imagine anyone caring so little about the whole queer community that he didn’t even know the umbrella term LGBT, despite the fact that it is all over the mass media. It’s amazing, I’m torn between complaining about and celebrating such indifference. On one hand I wish for visibility. I hope people are aware of the issues we are having and take our sufferings seriously. On the other hand I believe nonchalance is the best attitude because if people genuinely don’t care about whether you are queer or not, they won’t make a fuss about it - either curse you or aggressively declare they’re all in for treating LGBT equally, which is also kind of awkward. Like this acquaintance of mine who just lost it and typed a long passage to the guy above which basically equals yelling on SNS. What he said can be roughly translated as follows.

“You should not judge people by their sexual orientation. There are a lot of great men and women among the queer community. Sexuality is only a very small part of a person.“

What’s so awkward and bothered me so much about this is, if we ARE to judge people by sexual orientation, then homosexuality will be judged against heterosexuality according to his words.

Screw you, I’m proud to be gay.

Another comment, which bothered me even more, is from my mother. She said, “There are three females in the supreme court who are on the pro-gay-marriage side. I wonder why women should be on this side.“

Seriously mom, why should women not be on this side? I asked her and she stopped talking to me. So I haven’t figured out the logic behind mother’s words yet. One of the possible deductions going on might be this:

Gay marriage -> Men marrying men -> Less men out there for women

Where so many loopholes exist that If this is the case, I don’t want her to be my mother anymore. Come on that’s so misogynistic, you’ve got to be better than that mom!

My mother is certainly conservative as most of the senior Chinese ladies are. I came out to her a month ago. She’s been trying to talk me into dating guys until I got drunk one day and text her, saying I felt genuinely happy the first time in my life after I started dating girls. Then she stopped nagging me. Now that I think about it this is the only good thing happened after I got drunk. Still, I might want to osmosis her a bit more about LGBT. And we may not be able to understand each other after all. But the mere fact that she’s trying to understand is encouraging enough.

My code is finally running and we have marriage equality, this is the best time ever!

[iknothing]

A few things I might be able to write about recently: science in The Gods Themselves; My first year in US; A gruesome dissect of my own personality.

[iknothing]

I wish that’s what actually happened.

[iknothing]

The queer fandom on Tumblr

I’m a huge fan of some genres of Japanese anime. The whole industry is not liberal at all - it could be quite the contrary of liberals. But interestingly enough, the LGBTQ community on Tumblr starts to grab pieces from various anime and refer to them as representations. I’ve been tracking the transbikes tag (Yowapeda fandom) for some time and saw a lot of fantastic fanarts and head canons. People are talking about characters being queer - Maki being trans female or agender, Izumida being a trans male body builder, Yuuto being almost canon trans girl. And they - I might as well say we - have good reasons. Please see the following  screen shots.

Here’s Makishima san.

Here’s Izumida kun.

And Yuuto chan is at least gender neutral trust me.

I don’t think the mere possibility of Shinkai Yuuto in Yowapeda is a trans girl will turn this anime into a queer themed work. I did some research in the Chinese fandom and Japanese fandom (not without difficulties), and I believe a better translation of the author’s message would be[citation needed]:

Shinkai Yuuto has a dream of being young girls.

And mind you, this is not so straightforward a declaration of gender identity in a Japanese context.

And as a matter of fact, gender neutral characters were originally set in favor of young female audience. They appear gender neutral but in fact quite cis in canon. Because most Japanese female audience will gladly date a girlish boy but not quite a transgender girl, unfortunately. Now that I think about it, it’s almost pathetic to look for queer representations in such works. We need properly portrayed queer heroes and non-kinky queer romantic plots. In the current anime industry such plots are rarely found, and the remotely queer things are more fan service than representation. What is fan service? Fan service is something not canon in principle, the author does not really want to acknowledge it, but it appears anyways because the fans like to see it. So are we gonna live on these guilty-pleasure-like, 2 minutes per episode plots?

I would say the the re-invention from the queer fandom are more the community itself than the original work. The charming thing about fanfiction and fanart is that you can retell the story in your own way. And people have already accept the characters because of the original work, they may also relate to the re-interpreted story. It’s positive for the queer community; perhaps not quite for the original work because it may be misinterpreted in the process. But who cares?

Personally I love the yowapeda queer fandom, or any queer fandom in general. Some of the authors/artists are trying to portray queer characters and queer relationship in a non-fetish way. The yaoi culture, which is often presented together with homosexual tolerance or feminism, is telling too many stories of “I love you despite the fact that you are a boy and I’m also a boy”, the core of which is love overriding gender and sexuality convention. 

But what we need is “I love you and you happen to be a boy/girl/non-binary”. 

[iknothing]

So I decide to keep a blog

I just feel the need to keep a blog for myself. Talking to myself keeps me sane and keeps me occupied. More importantly this could be a mind palace. Like amateur gardeners working with rose bushes; like high school kids in anime resting on the rooftop. What matters is having such a place I can visit. Even virtually. And I’ve always loved Tumblr.

I’m a cis female, demisexual, homoromantic, Asian. First year grad student in chemistry, first year in US. 4 years Tumblr user though.

One of the intriguing things about Tumblr is, people always state their gender identity and sexual orientation in their self introduction. Even if they’re not queer at all, they still go, cis female, heterosexual, etc. This is fascinating in that being cis and being straight are no longer the DEFAULT. It is becoming a thing to present the preferred pronouns before everything not only for queer people, but LGBTQ friendly people in general. It is neither more special nor more ordinary to be cis and straight than queer. Just simple as that, but it’s fantastic.

I started to feel awkwardly different about the whole sexual orientation thing when puberty hit me. But I did not  identify as lesbian until the later part of college for various reasons. Even then I still cannot go out and look for girls like me - I was anxious. Lonely and desperate for love, but way too anxious to do anything about it.

Then I’m in US. I went to see a psychiatrist and was diagnosed with major depression and social anxiety disorder.

My mother believed life in US is too stressful for me. I believe it would only be worse back home. I’ve literally been living with social anxiety for years, only that I never realize it was a mental illness. My plan was live my life to the fullest, and commit suicide at age of 40. I tried pretty hard but cannot convince myself that life has a meaning or any type of purpose. Then what’s point in living when youth has passed and the physical form I reside in starts to malfunction? Not that I believed I have a soul, but I just really really hate the fact that I have to physically exist to be able to do stuff.

Not until very recently did I realised that the cause of my state of mind may be my lifelong attempt to escape. Could be that I’m so eager to run away, that the last thing I need to escape from is my physical form. I was raised in a fairly conservative culture - misogynistic and homophobic. I was born in a small town. I didn’t feel recognised. I didn’t feel accepted. I was desperate for more sensible mentors and more understanding company. I wanted more. As Jeannette Winterson has pointed out we cannot choose where we were born. We can, however, pack and leave. So I did.

Thank contemporary culture and mass media, I found Hollywood movies. Thank Hollywood movies, I found Tumblr - yes, I came to Tumblr for the fandom. And thank Tumblr, I found the diversity and liberalism that I’ve always needed.

Though I started as a fangirl and I’ll always be a fangirl, I want to make this blog serious (sort of). I track the modern art feeds and social science feeds on my personal blog, might reblog here. I’m interested in feminism topics in general. I’m intrigued by the way western society interprets East Asian culture so I may blab about this from time to time. I’m in the LGBT community so I’m definitely gonna flood the dashboard with related discussions, especially gender identity issues since I’m fascinated by the idea of gender neutral, both aesthetically and social-construction-wise. Last but not least, I’m a grad student in the big big world of physical science, so for links about research from my feeds when they are interesting enough to be brought up but not so related as having a place in my evernote folder (aka oral prep. materials), this is the perfect place for them.