The catchy expression Crisis = Danger + Opportunity as an interpretation of Chinese characters has become a pervasive opening slide for motivational speakers and therapists around the world. A casual online search turns up more than a million references to the proverb and makes it almost as popular as another “ubiquitous eastern philosophy” - Sun Zi’s Art of War. The inspiration comes from the 2 words:
危机(Weiji) - crisis
机会( Jihui) - opportunity
Both words have character 机 in common and make it easy from the first glance be convinced about the sameness of the two. 机 stands for machine and can be encountered in words like an airplane (飞机) and cell phone (手机).
Professor Victor H. Mair wrote a wonderful essay on debunking this wrongful interpretation of Chinese characters to cater to convenient motivational theories. “A wēijī in Chinese is every bit as fearsome as a crisis in English. A jīhuì in Chinese is just as welcome as an opportunity to most folks in America. To confuse a wēijī with a jīhuì is as foolish as to insist that a crisis is the best time to go looking for benefits.”
There is probably no subject on earth concerning which more misinformation is purveyed and more misunderstandings circulated than Chinese characters or sinograms.”* —Victor Mair
* he would be surprised in the light of what is going on in media currently in regards to COVID-19
I don’t know why it took me such a long time to research Google Easter Eggs, but I have finally discovered an amazing list of hidden Google’s portals: The Complete Google Easter Eggs List That Will Make You Go Wow. Some of personal favorites are:
* Conway’s Game of Life
* Blechley Park
* Atari Breakout
* “once in a blue moon” ** This is one of the amazing Google easter eggs. If you search “once in a Blue Moon”, Google will guide you to the mathematical equation for the occurrence of a blue moon.
* Loch Ness Monster
* Askew
* Roll a die
Doomsday Algorithm: The Doomsday rule is an algorithm of determination of the day of the week for a given date. The algorithm for mental calculation was devised by John Conway in 1973, drawing inspiration from Lewis Caroll’s perpetual calendar algorithm. It takes advantage of each year having a certain day of the week, called the /doomsday/, upon which certain easy-to-remember dates fall; for example, 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12, and the last day of February all occur on the same day of the week in any year.
Here is a nice explanation in Scientific American
I have recently finished “Enlightenment Now” by Seven Pinker. The professor makes a point that the Enlightenment helped us escape from superstition and ignorance. It increased our understanding of ourselves through science. The Enlightenment helped to abolish cruel punishments and slavery. Also, Humanism helped bring about an increase in peace. It seems odd to require a defense of reason, science, humanism and progress, but we suffer if we do not understand how far humanity has come by application of these principles.
I was inspired by the book and decided to build a REST-style service. The API was inspired by Steven Pinker’s book “Enlightenment Now” and aims to make knowledge and opinions shared in the book accessible in small, but inspiring fragments. I coded the draft today in a couple of hours and have the first request:
`https://enlightenment-api.herokuapp.com/chart`
that returns a .jpeg image of charts used in the book.
This is work in progress and the project as always open to the public and is on GitHub and was a good way to refresh API building and deploy public APIs with Heroku on Sunday morning.
