Gattaca

Science tells us what to believe and what not to believe. But perhaps even the highly unlikely 1% is worth pursuing. After all life is full of contingency and indeterminacy. If we do not allow any room for chances and flukes in addition to demonstrable scientific evidence, we are only fooling ourselves.

The film explores the ethical questions about the limit of genetic predilection and the consequences when we allow genetics to dictate our belief and social organization. Jerome Morrow has the perfect genetic makeups but he's crippled in real life whereas Vincent has congenital heart problems but he works very hard to maximize his potentials towards realizing his dream of joining the space mission program "Gattaca". The non-negotiable policy of only allowing the best genetic composition to join the space mission motivates Vincent to assume the identity of Jerome. He realized his dream in the end but only as an impostor. The problem rests with the blind belief in extreme genetic superiority, excluding any consideration of epigenetic factors such as accidents (Jerome's 'perfect' genome cannot predict traffic accident), and miracles (Vincent's 'defective'' genome cannot stop his strong will power).

No wonder Lou likes this so much, Vincent and Jerome in the movie are modeled after the same genetic line. The two individuals with drastically different genes, upbringings, appearances, aspirations pretend to live under the cloak of the same set of genetic materials. In a sense, they are fraudulent identical twins. They fell in love with the same woman: Irene, and the same sport: swimming. Other than that, the genetic shell they carry over did not determine their different outlooks in life. One of the take-home messages is that people who share or pretend to share the same genetic materials are not prisoners of their genes. Life is not just a bundle of genes. Jane put it wonderfully in her award-winning book Whose View of Life? , "But the genome is nothing without the organisms. DNA maybe interchangeable from one organism to another, or even from a laboratory dish, but DNA is just the beginning."

This film was produced in 1997, a nice reflection of the "century of the gene" as the twentieth century is characterized. That century is over, and gone too is the simplistic emphasis on the gene and on genomics as the path to truth and life. Jane said "we are moving into a century of the organism, an era in which we will embrace the complexities of interactions."

PHI 3XX

This morning I had my first experience to walk in a lecture theatre jam-packed with students at ASU. I am sitting on the sixth row, sandwiched by two blond hulks. There are at least 200 heads in the room. Boy, I haven't had this experience for a LONG LONG time. The feeling of sitting at the back of the row, catching a glimpse of the lecturer's head only through the gaps of the heads before me is........I don't know, so undergraduate. The most unbearable element of this class is the way the material is presented: course requirement, assessment scheme, grading criteria. There are no topical themes on the syllabus, nor the due date of readings for each class meeting. I was navigating Nathan Sivin's articles the entire time this guy was talking. Nothing showed up when I googled his name (John Devlin), apparently his page was re-directed to some guy named Gerald Marsh who got a MA from ASU in 2006. I don't know how much credential Devlin got. Should I call him a "Dr."?

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against teaching staff without doctoral agrees, but all he did throughout the 50 min is nothing but BSing. He even showed the average mean differentials on GRE, GMAT and LSAT tests from 1977-1982 and showed that philosophy majors scored the best in these standard tests. I wonder what happened with the scores after 1982, and I was born after 1982, I don't see the significance of this statistic reports. I finally walked out of the classroom.

I almost forgot, this is a 300 level Philosophy class. Can you imagine what it's like for a 100 level class?

500 Days of Summer

"You cannot ascribe cosmic significance to simple earthly matters. That's all everything ever is. Nothing more than coincidence. It took a long time, but Tom had finally learned. There are no miracles. There is no such thing as fate. Nothing is meant to be. He knew. He was pretty sure."

My favorite line from this 2009 movie. Like the amassed reviews at rottentomatoes, it is a movie with which most people can resonate in their romantic lives. On many levels I relate myself with both Summer and Tom. The non-linear depiction of the ups and downs in a relationship; the juxtaposed snapshots between expectations and reality; the emotional hopping from infatuation to desperation, from affection to desolation, from deep belief to light relief, the film is filled with novel presentation techniques. If only life can be neatly broken down into these categories, or if relationships and feelings can be demystified at all, perhaps life wouldn't be as complicated as we know it.

I think the most powerful theme covered in this movie is the uncertainty in relationships, and to certain extents, life in general. The Chinese sages used the concept "fate" to help people make sense of the happenstance in our life paths; the French counterpart is something like "je ne sais quoi". But it is the tendency for people, esp. people in modernity in which great success have been harnessed from investing in science and technology to grab something more tangible, more explainable, more predictable. In the end, it is a battle between man vs. unknown world. Relationships are full of surprises, fickleness, sometimes with thorny pick, sometimes blessed with infinite mercy. We don't really know.

What is certain is that nothing is certain. Pretty lame hah? So Summer is married to someone else. The movie doesn't focus on Summer's emotional path but can she be certain that she is married to "the one"? Well, no one knows. There can only be hopes and prays, which is why I like the ending of the movie when the cycle begins as Tom picked up the nerve to ask the woman at the interview lounge out. The truth is, the cycle of uncertainty never stops running. Einstein once said "life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep pedaling."

Here is my favorite soundtrack. "Hero" by Regina Spektor:

The Hidden Blade

This evening is blessed by the pleasant surprise of "The Hidden Blade", a Japanese movie on samurai's culture. Here is the trailer from YouTube.

The Hidden Blade is the second movie in Yamada Yoji's samurai trilogy. It came out in 2004 after the highly successful "Samurai Twilight". The story depicted the confusion and struggle a samurai hero went through in choosing between friendship and fulfilling his duty to his senior squire. Women appear as domestic house-makers, geishas and sexualized object in HB, as in most samurai's movies (the adorable Takako Matsu was the leading actress in this movie !) But there is an extraordinary sense of femininity exhibited in these women's day-to-day activities. They were born worthless in Tokugawa feudalism, but they are hard-working, demure,virtuous, and above all, simply stunning in their Kimonos with zori. In retrospect, the beautiful skin textures shared by these women who belong to the lower castes ( for example, Takako was the daughter of a farmer and a bondservant to Katagiri's family) seem unrealistic and phony. But the tempting presentation of these female figures is very irresistible even to a woman like me.

The movie also explores the identity struggle during the transitional period among the Bakufu samurais. The introduction of western science and the technology left took place in the castles where established samurais were required to learn how to operate cannons and gunpowders. The cultural clash between Western military science and samurai tradition is amplified in the plot where Hazama–Katagiri's best friend–was killed not by a blade, but a rifle. Katagiri's condolence before Hazama's corpse sums up everything: "as a samurai, I know you would rather die under a blade than a gun."

Ritual suicides in the form of harakiri (disembowelment) are documented and mocked in Kobayashi's timeless work, but this movie adds another dimension into the overall framework of death honor. The highest form of death honor a samurai can receive is through harakiri, if not, at least he should die under a blade, the traditional form of weapon inherited in the Japanese samurai culture. To be killed by a foreign weapon destroys a samurai. The intrusion of Western science desecrates the system of death honor for samurai. My guess is that ritual suicides is rendered incomprehensible and irrational under a foreign eye, established through the use of weapons and tools. Interestingly, there is not a trace of "foreigners" throughout the movie and the foreign invasion of the Japanese samurai culture was embodied by technology. In a limited sense, Western technology obliterates ritual suicides through military conduit. This is a core theme circulated in the film.

Also read the first half of "River Town" by Peter Hessler. Review is forthcoming.

Google and China: civil rights or business espionage?

I've been following for a while the groundbreaking news of the possibility for Google to withdraw their business in China. According to this post from Google's official blog site, Google is considering of leaving because the gmail accounts of some human right activists were hacked by the Chinese government. Google claimed that the infringement of intellectual property and civil liberty by the Chinese authority undermined their founding beliefs in promoting free access of information to the cyber community.

If you look into some of the claims and evidence supplied by Google in their official document, you'd be clueless and wonder "what is G complaining?" Media censorship? Infringement of property rights? Violation of human rights? For the first variable, GFW and censorship has been there ever since Google made the inroad into the Chinese market in 2006, and G is well aware of the filtered search engine they introduced to China from the beginning, so why now? On the second level, if breaching their servers is the concern here, why didn't other companies with their systems hacked complain? Were they threatened? What is the comparative scope of damage? The comparative POV is important because G could be making an exaggerated accusation by over-victimizing itself. So far I found the third claim simply groundless. On what ground does G catalogue the political engagement of their users? How does G distinguish what email accounts belong to "advocates of human rights"? Even if the accounts belong to prominent social activists, were the exact emails being accessed contain human rights-related topics? If not, then it's at best a privacy and internet security problem. Why drag human rights into this discussion? I understand that China has a horrible record when it comes to media censorship and encroachment of civil right, but I don't see how G can back up their arguments in this incident. For example, not sufficient evidence is supplied by G on the intended target and motivations of the email hacks. If the email strip-search affects many more companies, what gives G the right to claim that human rights related topic is the outstanding reason for the hacks? Why doesn't G grant the Chinese authority the benefits of the doubts?

The point here is not internet censorship in China in general, but this specific event. Based on this text and other blog articles, I don't see how the limited evidence G provided support their argument that "the primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activist", or so as they maintained.

If you were a human right activist, would you put "human right activist" as your name? Your occupation? Your interest? Your affiliated group when you sign up for the Gmail accounts? When I sign up mine, I didn't put my Chinese name in my gmail account, do you know how many "Christine Luk" are there in HK alone? I left my date of birth open too. The point is, it seems very unlikely G can deduce the political engagement of its email users from the mere account information provided at the time of signing up. These info. are circumferential at best. I understand that G needs to protect the privacy of its users, but it should disclose the sources of evidence by which they employed to back up their claim. Moreover, G said the information being assessed is only limited to the subject line and the account activity rather than the content of the emails. So how does what appeared to be an internet security problem (which is a separate but important issue) to a human right-related issue?

Apparently I am not the only one who questioned Google's decision. This blog article provided a possible (and plausible) explanation of the Google's farce. I don't have valid evidence to verify this story, but at least the situation is skeptical and dubious enough to attract counter-arguments from the netizens. If there were indeed an engineering spy from the CPC, the divulge of the account information of the human rights activists appeared to be more precisely and concretely demonstrated rather than some vague grounds that "anything is possible on the net" as my FB friend threw out. It also explained the unofficial announcement of this consequential decision. But there is no evidence so far lending support to this anecdotes.

Also, Shanghai Scrap gave a critical account of the "cowardice" of Google by pulling all out from the Sinosphere instead of hanging in there and make a difference in the long run.