Above the Salton Sea

  

Palm Desert is a galore of retired old people and palm trees. 

During the day you see wrinkled old couples driving golf carts everywhere along with the swaying branches of Arecaceae (a.k.a Palm Trees) scattered throughout the 69.97 Km^2 waste land. 

During the night it looks like this: 

 

And no that is not the Sun. 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Honey, I think our Cat ate the Iguana’

Being an owner of three dogs, two iguanas and a dinosaur (budgie), I wouldn’t be surprised if anyone stared at us as we consider getting a feline to add into the beautiful and chaotic family with mixed feelings.

Personally I have never had a cat in my entire life. Neither does my best friend Dan who’s living with me at the moment. We are both dog people and have always grown up with the joke ‘Cats basically want to kill you when you’re asleep’ – it’s just sarcasm, there are exceptions (Emphasis on the ‘are’)

 

The only cats I’ve had in contact with were the ones my old neighbor Sue owned. There was grey tabby Baxter, bright orange-striped mixed Leo, and the wonderful, pleasant Bengal Charlie.  When I meant pleasant, means he actually came up to his furless friend to say hello.

 

I remember coming home from school and as I walked toward the gate of the garden leading to the back of the house, I would see the same cat named Baxter sitting behind the cylinders from the inside, staring at me intently with big yellow eyes. And whenever I approached her with care out of curiosity, the reaction I would get from him was nothing, he just stayed there watching my like a hawk.

Whenever you look into any of your dog’s eyes, assuming you maintain your owner position and is the dominant one, the dog, being submissive, would look away after a while.

When I look into any cat’s eyes, I could not fixate on it for over a few minutes without looking away. Partly because I thought it was just wasting time when I could go and play fetch with my dog or knock on my neighbor’s door with the intention to play with theirs.

These happened when I was around six to eight, so cats never played a huge part in my life.

 

But one thing did make me reconsider my feelings towards cats – encountering one at a shelter.

It was a dark orange Bengal with bright blue eyes, as I strolled around the cages surrounding by anxious, excited barks with my friend Dan, we saw a cat who leaped from level to level of his ‘furnished’ enclosure. At first I was not inclined to even walk toward it to greet it, but Dan disregarded my urge to keep moving and went in front of the cage.

Surprisingly the cat stood still on the stool around waste high, looked up at Dan and reached toward Dan’s arm toward himself, trying to paw at him.

The interaction was joyful,  Dan whispered me to look as he put his finger upon the cage where the cat could see it (it was on ground level at that time) and moved it down so the view of the finger from the cat vanished, being a predator, he instinctively leaped up to ‘capture’ Dan’s finger.  

 

Not only that, the beautiful Bengal purred and rubbed his cheek and the side of his body against the bars to show fondness. The way he walked showed great gracefulness;  tip toeing from corner to corner, the ways his shoulders took turns moving.

That was when I realized I always had a misconception toward cats all this time and would like to know more about such wonderful creatures.

So the debate began, whether we should get one or not.  And the debate remained undebated, unsolved while we were distracted by work and studies.

 

Regardless of whether I will get one in the future or not, I will never forget one of the forms of beauty nature and evolution showed me. Especially the one which I kept overlooking.

Postcrossing

     

 One of my closest friends told me about this system that binds people via the power of postcards and happily pulled a dozen or so postcards from above her computer desk, where her printer was placed. 

They were images of exotic places. From Russia to Taiwan. Some of them were scenery, some of them were hand-made, others were inspirational quotes. I nodded briefly and resumed my art project – making a house out of toothpicks. I’ve always been fond of crafting, I felt at that time, that my passion and the satisfaction I get from gluing thin wooden sticks together with my face as close to it without getting blurry vision was more of a priority than sending and receiving postcards from random people around the world.

That was nearly ten years ago. 

Then I moved back to New Zealand after that (I was in Taiwan studying) and that close friend became a friend who I missed dearly, and which gradually became a person whom I once unerstood over time. She is now in uni as well as I, and according to facebook newsfeed, a beloved friend and a successful musician.

Then I met a genuine person on chess.com, who became my opponent, a friend, to someone who understands me as well as my mother, if my mother was still alive. 

I went overseas to meet him for the first time face to face in Los Angelos earlier this year around January. As I stepped into Dan’s big shed-like room (Seriously, he has no room, he has a shed which was connected to the main house), I caught glimpse of a stack of ‘things’. As I walked towards it out of curiosity after plopping my things on the ground beside his bunk bed, he told me he postcrossed for more than a year and reminded me that he already suggested me doing it but it probably was left somewhere behind my brain since I was needed a reminding of it. 

This time the cards received offered more diversity – he got postcards with Astronomy on it, physics, scenery and funny quotes. I could see the effort he put into it as the people who kept on exchanging postcards with him has already established a good solid friendship, by the looks of how comfortable the person was sharing his/her life events and thoughts with him. 

Being a hoarder I am, I started having mental images of what it would look and feel like if I had stacks and stacks of postcards sitting around in my room, how fulfilled I would be. 

Then I brushed the thought off of my mind as my brain required more memory capacity to fill in the events and activity during the trip, and somehow managed to push it out of my system, again. 

A month after my liver transplant surgery’s failure he quit his job in LA and came to live with me in Taiwan, hoping to offer the company, both mental and physical assistance I need as I spend the remaining days doing the things I never had free time to do due to studies and work. He brought the postcards he needed to reply to (the ones from Taiwan) and put them in a drawer I provided for his use. 

After that I felt a strong urge to create an account on the site and start sending and receiving postcards, I was lonely and mostly confused, lost of how my future will end up like. 

Fortunately, I acted accordingly this time. I’ve sent a few now, and received a few, as you’re only allowed to send five at first and the Taiwanese postal system is slow as a snail, so I’m currently only able to send five at a time. 

It’s one of the things I regret doing sooner, but at least I’m alive now and can do something about that. 

 

 

Ps. If you’d like to receive a postcard from me, send me your name, the address you’d like me to send and what you like the most at sarena6436@hotmail.co.nz, I’ll try my hardest to find a card that has an image of what you love. Hopefully to put a smile on your face and give me a relaxing thing to do throughout my days. 🙂

Essay On Mars

 

Mars is the outermost of the terrestrial planets and, of all of the bodies in our solar system, geologically and climatically the most earthlike. It is smaller and significantly farther from the sun than Earth, but like Earth, its surface morphology has been shaped by seasonal influences, volcanism, and erosion by atmospheric winds and, formerly, liquid water.

Mars’s diameter is about half the size of Earth’s, such that its total surface area is about the same as Earth’s total land area. But it is significantly less dense, with a surface gravity only about 3/8 as strong as Earth’s. Like Earth, Mars underwent differentiation early in its history, resulting in a dense, partially liquid core of iron, nickel, and sulfur, surrounded by a rocky mantle and a thick solid crust. Polarization of surface rocks suggests that circulation of the core liquid was sufficient to support a planet-wide magnetic field until about four billion years ago. This has important implications for the surface conditions, as the atmosphere would have been shielded from the erosive effects of the solar wind.

In the absence of such a magnetic field, the current state of Mars’s atmosphere is drastically different. Eons of bombardment by the solar wind have thinned its outer layers considerably. The average surface pressure is only 0.6% Earth’s, of which approximately 96% is composed of carbon dioxide. In fact, the atmosphere is so tenuous that even at the proper surface temperature, water could only exist in liquid form in the lowest elevations. But the atmosphere cannot hold much heat and is not thick enough to distribute it efficiently, so daytime and nighttime surface temperatures vary wildly. Another significant component of the atmosphere is dust. The amount of dust in the atmosphere is so concentrated that it is the dominating factor determining the color of the sky, which appears orange or light brown from the surface. Dust storms are a frequent occurrence, and grow to be much larger and more powerful than their corresponding Earth analogues. They are most common when Mars is closest in its orbit to the Sun: solar heating warms the atmosphere, causing winds that pick up settled dust off the ground. The largest dust storms sweep the entirety of the planet’s subpolar latitudes and can last for several days, with wind speeds exceeding 160 km/h.

Mars’s geography is dominated by a sharp contrast between the rugged, heavily cratered highlands in the south and the sparsely cratered northern basin, which covers about a third of the planet’s surface. The geological differences between these are striking: the basin lies between 1 and 3 kilometers in elevation below the highlands, and its smoothness suggests that its surface has been subjected to much less cratering than the highlands and must therefore be much younger. It is hypothesized that this may be the result of an impact by a Pluto-sized body about four billion years ago.

Around this same time, another geological process was shaping Mars’s surface in other ways: volcanism. A vast volcanic continent known as the Tharsis bulge formed over a “hot spot”, a persistent column of rising magma in the mantle. This upwelling fed the formation of some of the most conspicuous features of Martian topography: a chain of three extremely large volcanoes, each around 400 km wide and 15 km tall. More recently in Mars’s history, this region also saw the formation of a yet larger volcano: Olympus Mons, with a width of 600 km and a towering height of 22 km, is by far the largest mountain on any planet in the solar system.

Readily noticeable in any photograph of Mars are the two permanent polar ice caps. These consist primarily of water ice, although during each hemisphere’s winter, surface temperatures plunge to as low as -140 degrees, causing a significant fraction of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to deposit onto the surface in the form of dry ice. During the subsequent spring, sublimation of the frozen carbon dioxide causes winds that sweep away from the poles at up to 400 km/h, transporting vast quantities of dust and water vapor around the planet. Enough water ice remains locked in the ice caps year-round to cover the surface of the entire planet in water to a depth of 35 meters.

Today, the surface of Mars is a barren, foreboding desert. At its distance from the Sun, Mars receives only about 43% as much sunlight as Earth, equatorial surface temperatures in the height of summer rarely exceed 30 degrees, and the atmospheric pressure is far to low for water to remain in liquid form. But historically, the climate conditions were probably much more favorable, and river valleys and other such features indicate that water did flow on the surface at some point. In fact, there is ample evidence for glaciers and even an ancient ocean that may have covered as much as two thirds of the northern hemisphere. Historical conditions preserved in Mars’s geologic record provide valuable insight into the global evolution of an ancient climate that was very earthlike indeed.

Essay On Black Holes

 

Essay on Black Holes    

 

General relativity predicts the theoretical existence of regions of spacetime filled with concentrations of mass of such extreme density that they are curved to such an extent that nothing, not even light, can escape from inside of them: black holes. With their extreme concentration of mass-energy and distortion of spacetime, black holes provide one of the prime environments of study in attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity.

The phenomenon of black holes arises as a consequence of the speed of light’s role in relativity as an absolute limit which no particle can exceed (and which no massive particle can attain). Any body of matter attracts all other matter to it via gravity, and from its mass and size, a corresponding “escape speed” can be derived below which a particle in its vicinity will have insufficient kinetic energy to become gravitationally unbound. If a given volume of space is filled with enough mass, anything trying to escape the region would need to go faster than light to do so. The critical surface at which the escape speed equals the speed of light is called the “event horizon” because it constitutes the causal boundary between the black hole and the rest of the universe; nothing falling through it can subsequently leave it, and no event occurring inside of it can be observed from the outside. Thus, according to relativity, a black hole is an ideal thermodynamic black body, absorbing all incident radiation and reflecting none, hence the name. Furthermore, in the classical formulation, black holes are therefore exceedingly simple physical objects: each is uniquely described by its mass, angular momentum, and electric charge, and any two black holes that are equal in these three respects are effectively identical.

However, a strictly classical treatment of the black hole’s interior implies a central “singularity” of vanishing volume and infinite density, and other such absurdities. Indeed, the extreme warping of spacetime within the event horizon strongly suggests the significance of quantum effects, and surprising behavior emerges from black holes when viewed from a quantum mechanical perspective, almost literally: in 1974, Stephen Hawking was the first to predict that thermal radiation, in a perfect black body spectrum no less, is emitted in the form of particles escaping to infinity from the immediate vicinity of the event horizon. The characteristic temperature of this “Hawking radiation” is proportional to the black hole’s surface gravity and inversely proportional to its mass, such that smaller black holes will be observed to be “hotter” than larger ones, as it were; since this radiation carries energy away, it follows that sufficiently small black holes should in fact “evaporate” over time. While these effects have been subsequently corroborated by many other theoreticians, direct observational evidence is infeasible due to the minuteness of the effective temperature of any black hole of sufficient mass as to enable observation, to wit, the order of a fraction of a microkelvin in the case of stellar mass black holes, which are therefore vastly overwhelmed by the 2.7 K cosmic microwave background radiation. In fact, any black hole large enough to be cooler than the cosmic microwave background will absorb more energy than it loses in Hawking radiation, and will thus grow (and cool further as its increasing size dilutes the strength of its surface gravity); the critical mass beneath which emission exceeds absorption is about half the mass of the moon, which corresponds to an event horizon of radius roughly a tenth of a millimeter. Even so, the amount of time a black hole any heavier than a small mountain requires to completely evaporate handily exceeds the current age of the universe. Experimental efforts aimed at observing these small-mass “primordial black holes” continue to provide useful constraints on the as yet poorly resolved interplay between the seemingly incompatible predictions of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

The person who has influenced me the most

 

  Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary. – Oscar Wilde

 

When the teacher assigned this project for me to write, I did not have an obvious person in mind whom I wanted to write about or dedicate the article to. After pondering the reason that rendered my mind unable to be specific enough to come up with a subject, it dawned on me that everyone – or mostly the ones which I had enough contact in order to get to know to a good degree, resulting in us discussing deep topics such as philosophy, political affairs, economics, or the fields in which I’m truly interested, science-based subjects – influences me in some way or other. There’s no such thing as “most” or “least”, as the people whom I find influencing compensate each other in pretty much every way. Thus, I come to the conclusion of mentioning the people who did come to mind; as a result, this article would probably be longer than it should, but hopefully not inappropriately so.

The first person that came across my mind and stomped on the other sixty or so nominees, lifting a huge “WRITE ABOUT ME” sign, was Lee, Tom Lee. I was uncertain as to where I should begin describing him or even talk about such a person. Judging by what he talks about and the events we discuss, it’s not difficult to safely assume he’s a laid-back character, intellectual and comfortable with people. Although not many know, this was not the case even a few years ago. It’s usually either knowing the Tom before or the Tom now. But his close friend, or best friend, would understand enough to appreciate the transformation, and the friendship and love that brought it about.

We met in class when we were both nearly teenagers. I would often head to the library that stood ten meters from the school after class. I would always see him in those student-sized cubicles, reading about random stuff. He seemed lonely since the day I met him. Little did I know that he was a victim of bullying that took place in his class. Realizing our similarities, I decided to go over to chat him up, and gradually he went from a kid who cares about nothing but computer games to the top student in his junior high. The process was not simple, nor was it easy to make him more open-minded. It took eight years of company, consisting the weeks when we would prepare for exams at the very same library from opening to closing, on weekends during school terms and daily during holidays, as well as everything from swimming to exchanging thoughts on the Euro crisis.

After junior high, we took our high school entrance exams. He was accepted by 建中, while I, despite my confidence and being truthfully verified by modeling exams, got into a school which I thought I would never cross paths with. That was the period of time when I needed help and support the most. Nearly giving myself up out of despair, he helped me in every way he could. He gave me study materials and resources, and at the same time, he was a joker and a listener. His attitude toward knowledge and life was, and still is, greatly admirable, and we taught each other ways of leading a fulfilling life, as well as the importance of having a friend you trust.

The second I think worth mentioning equips several virtues, including modesty. He doesn’t even want anyone to write anything about him. Sometimes I think he doesn’t give himself enough credit. Both of us strive to help people; he gives so much of himself unconditionally to the people dear to him. Like Tom, he’s an academic. I had a friend who went to Oxford University and another friend of mine asked me what I thought of this close friend of mine. I told her: ten of the Oxford student added together wouldn’t even be close to what knowledge this friend of mine holds. His name is Dan, last name McCandless. He prefers people calling him Dan since the feeling of it gives others the impression of being easy-going, not that he is not. It’s one of the details that reveal how lonely he really is inside, and how he craves for an understanding friendship no more than intellectual conversation in order to fill the hole of sadness under his kind figure that former experiences have left him.

Double-majoring in physics and linguistics, born with an amazing talent in jazz music, being an athlete of marathons, not to mention receiving numerous awards for various reasons, all gives him enough reason to brag about himself. He isn’t just a scholar, he’s a musician; he can literally go up to the piano and play something spontaneous on it without a second thought. And as he would play, his audience would be a combination from random people passing by to serious jazz appreciators. Even jazz music CD producers would feel confusion, wondering why he isn’t well known, while being in awe for how beautiful he makes my under-tuned piano sound.

Similar to Tom, deep down he is more than an all-around. There is one fact about him that makes him unique: he loves others more than he loves himself. It happens to be his strength as well as his weakness. When Dan fails to help someone or gets down, he tends to forget that he is loved and adored by family and friends. This and his character are how he taught me to love someone back unconditionally, to seek for no feedback when you give. Many of the ways of saying a person has achieved success in life are actually all the same – strolling on the right path while seeking your own meaning of life.

Last and not least, but rather foremost, is my grandfather. To be honest, this is my first time writing about him in an article I’m going to present. The reason for the lack of mention of him is partially that I’m afraid. I was afraid that words would not be enough to do his being justice. Now, having this subject come across, he is a must. Without him, this article would be like a book with no spine.

He taught me how to sketch, how to learn to play the piano, not on a piano but on a wooden ruler with piano keys painted on. He brought back little animals to take care of, including heaps of stray dogs and small turtles that fit inside the pocket of his suit. I was the only girl in the family out of six cousins; my mother was also the only girl among three brothers. I guess that’s partially the reason why he loved me so much. But don’t get me wrong, he’s the fairest man I’ve ever met and will ever meet. He asked me what I wanted or liked to eat the most once over the phone while I was living overseas. The immediate answer was steak, of course, but it left me puzzled as to why he would ask such a question. The next month, on my birthday, I received a plate of food made from rubber that you see at food markets – the fake food models. He wrote: “The steak you’ll never finish.”

I don’t think I can write much about him at the moment. In other words, I’d like to keep from making this essay larger than it should be, as I feel that if I wanted to write about him, I might as well just write a book. But even then, after finishing the book and publishing it to the world, letting them know that the kind of person he is existed once, I would still feel hollow when I write about him. I really don’t know how to describe him; the most honest thing I could say and make people understand or empathize with is that he is the very person that you would not be able to describe both verbally and literally.

There isn’t a lot that I want to say to conclude this article. I’ve pretty much said everything I want for the time being. Readers probably have had their fair share of who influences me, a small shining star out of many in the universe as well.

I tried to describe each of these three to the best of my ability, but it still doesn’t do any of them justice. There’s really no need for me to blab about what kind of people influence me; everyone will know what I’m talking about or trying to say when they meet them. It’s also not hard to find those people: they’re all around you, and as long as you slow down your pace in life, you will be overwhelmed by the things they’re teaching you.

Memories from childhood

When I was younger (younger = more time), I used to capture images from my head via pencil and paper, the beauties of motion, mainly.

One of the most eccentric beauties that exists are motions of a flying object. While everything and everyone else are bound to gravity, these are the ones who can defy that law by choice.

Birds are one of a kind, anything that has wings and are able to fly (ruling out kiwi birds now) are utterly amazing and intrigues me.

 

Here are some sketches I’d like to share:

 

New Puppy

I recently adopted a new puppy, she’s a four month old German Shepherd puppy named Luna (we were arguing about what name to give her, as I liked physics-based names ie. entropy or photon).
Adding another member to the household, including a husky, an eight year old German water dog (poodle), two iguanas and a male bird named Carly (I had no idea what sex it was when I first got him, thus the female name).

Missy the Husky absolutely adores the new member of which she sees as a playmate and best friend. They eat, sleep and play together all the time.

Autumn

I’m in somewhere foreign, in the process of missing out autumn at the south hemisphere. Yet I recall previous years’ experience and draw them down.

Undisturbed

My husky pup asleep in a frying pan during my shopping session back in a crowded hardware store. Taipei, Taiwan.

Being surrounded with lifeless objects, accompanied by the sound of exotic language formed by the human tongue, men’s best friend sleeps undisturbed and peacefully.