Self-improvement: Life is a Banquet

While driving a friend home, he brought up the question that I asked him a while ago: "If your life is a movie, will people want to watch it?" He told me that if the last six years of his life is the same level of excitement as most people's entire lives, he can see why they all think that their life movie is too boring to watch.

He had told me a number of interesting stories in his life that I would definitely pay to watch if it was a movie. Yet, what's sad is that many people think that he's making things up. Those things coulnd't possibly have happened in his life! He couldn't possibly have had the grandest time in Hong Kong just because he knocked out a guy at a bar to save a girl's honor. He couldn't possibly have grabbed a gun away from an idiot rich guy in front of a club and later won a sham court case for his amazing restraint in not beating the guy up. He couldn't possibly have dressed up as a black guy and walked down some ghetto neighborhoods to see what would happen.

I have stories as well but many of the more interesting ones may give me a bad reputation so I'll refrain from telling them here. The bottom line is many people's lives are apparently so boring that they'll rather believe that such tales can only happen in movies. Yet, they watch adapted movies which show ordinary people encountering interesting situations and they believe those stories. I find it funny that many people will rather believe in a story that's probably edited and dramatized for TV production rather than someone who's telling them face-to-face a segment of his or her life.

There's a quote from a character called Aunte Mame in a movie:

"Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death."

My question to you is if you're at a banquet hall with a table full of action, new characters, and plot twists, why are you starving in a corner instead of taking your seat at the table?

Sociology: Double Standards of Virginity

Recently, I was reading an article on Lolo Jones, the track and field athlete who has won a number of awards including the Olympics, which quickly led to reading on her comments on her virginity when she's past 29. I shall quote her lines here from her HBO interview earlier this year:

"If there's virgins out there, I'm going to let them know, it's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life — harder than training for the Olympics, harder than graduating from college, has been to stay a virgin before marriage."

She and others like her who believe in this idealism are following a flawed path without even realizing it. Religion or extreme conservative moral compass has blinded them to logic and truth. The logical reason that you make a vow in adolescence to not sleep with your partner is to prevent the long-term consequences which at that age you're very ill-equipped to deal with. At some point, moving forward by taking the jump into sexuality is a step to do to acquire greater social maturity. By not moving forward, the woman chooses to remain forever at the age of adolescence with her lack of experience. The growth of sexual maturity is one facet in the growth of emotional maturity for an individual.

Consider this scenario. When I encounter a man older than 35 who tells me that he's still a virgin, my first reaction is not of awe or admiration but rather of suspicion. I start wondering whether he's lying or whether he's socially retarded. If he is socially retarded but not overly creepy, I'll feel deeply sorry and offer to hook him up with someone I know. My reaction is not atypical; a man who has not followed his biological drive by that age is considered a deviant.

Clearly, a double standard exists. When a man is past a certain age and still a virgin, you either find him creepy or you feel sorry for him. Yet, when a woman in the same situation is somehow considered "good to have standards". This is especially prevalent among the conservative religious ladies who attempt to model themselves after perfection. They genuinely believe that they should wait out for a prince charming to explore their virgin territory.

Our lives are meant to be filled with experiences which enrich us and enable to to understand ourselves and others better. Choosing not to have certain experiences due to limits placed by an antiquidated social model is severely damaging to proper function in the modern society. Not all sexual experiences lead to stronger emotional bonds but many do. Instead of congratulating the woman for holding out, we should be instead feeling sorry for her level of sadly stunted romanticism.

Research: Proposed Aerospace Papers

Predicting the Fate of Humanity for the Next Century
Much has been said about the Fermi paradox, the paradox on why if there’s supposed to be intelligent civilizations out there, we humans have not observed any sign of life. One depressing but possibly true answer to this paradox is that almost all intelligent civilizations eventually discover weapons of mass destruction and end up destroying themselves before expanding via spaceflight. In Michio Kaku’s book Hyperspace a while ago, the physicist made the statement that the next 150 years will be a pivotal stage of whether humanity will expand into the stars or revert itself to the stone age or become extinct. In this paper, a prediction following the spirit of Drake equation is proposed. This equation is called the Shen equation, i.e. Global Calamity Equation, and it predicts the probability that human civilization will terminate within a given amount of time:

P(civilization termination) = P(Nuclear War)*P(Global Epidemic)*P(Asteroid Impact)*P(Ecological Collapse)

The probability for each calamity is based on best estimates from literary reviews in their respective fields.

Modeling Galactic Civilization Expansion and Encounters
Though alien life has not yet been confirmed, it is interesting to speculate on the state of galactic affairs in the universe. How has galactic civilization evolved over the eons? Does contact between different civilizations necessitate growth or decay? If human civilization provides any indication, contact between human civilizations has seen the imminent collapse of less technologically advanced civilizations when confronting more advanced civilizations. However, this has not always been the case and sometimes both civilizations benefit.

In this model, the galaxy is modeled as a distribution of possibly habitable systems on a three-dimensional grid following the best estimates of recent exo-solar planet discoveries. With the passage of the first time step, i.e. a millennium, each galactic civilization expands by ten light years from its home star system. With the passage of the second time step, i.e. a millennium again, each galactic civilization expands by one hundred light years (to take into account technology advancement). This exponential rise continues indefinitely. Each star system encountered is settled thus unless already settled by another galactic civilization. Upon civilization encounter, a random number is generated which decides whether the star system changes hands between civilizations, remains the same, or is annihilated. The entire simulation is run for 1000 time steps or until the galaxy is thoroughly colonized.

On Piezoelectric Power Generation from Space Debris
With the inevitable rise of space debris in the near future, protection from hypervelocity impacts has become an important issue for any spacecraft launched. Given the high kinetic energy yield of such impacts, an idea is proposed to capture such kinetic energy through piezoelectric materials incorporated into current Whipple Shield designs. Capturing such energy can be used to power components such as onboard batteries. A model and design of such a space power shield is proposed here based on experimental and theoretical models from NASA’s ORDEM2K.

Self-improvement: The Lunge or Leap of Faith

There are times when you realize that you're caught up in the doldrums of daily depressing repetition that you feel utterly chained to its worthless mediocrity. You can find yourself doing the same tedious work, talking to the same people entertaining the same thoughts, and doing the same things before you fall asleep every night. As these mostly irrelevant moments of your life pile upon each other like layers of snow, your embers of life is slowly buried in this frosty entombment.

At this moment, you may realize your sad life and in desperation you go for the lunge. The lunge is the last ditch effort to free yourself from the snow of repetitive nothingness that has buried your embers of life. (Heavens forbid if you find yourself so deeply buried in snow that you can't even move your feet.) A close relative of the leap of faith, the lunge is distinguished from its cousin since it is an act of desperation whereas the leap of faith is an act of free choice.

A few days ago before I flew back to the states, I encountered on the same day two occasions two girls who decided to travel spontaneously. One has taken a lunge whereas the other has taken an act of faith. The girl who chooses to quit her bartending job and travel for months in Europe since she wants to escape the daily mediocrity of her work and life is taking the desperate lunge. The girl who chooses to quit her teaching job and travel for months in Europe to gain experience in her life before she returns to a teaching lifestyle is taking a leap of faith.

If we can take a leap of faith to refresh our lives, that will be ideal. However, that is the ideal world and sometimes in this real world, the lunge, despite its nature of desperation, is the only way to radically rejuvenate ourselves and discover once more why we choose to live. The alternative is to let ourselves atrophy in a sad cocoon of reality where without outside intervention (unlikely), our accumulated apathy towards our own lives leads us to the end of our lives, either literally or figuratively. What do you choose to do?

Self-improvement: Reinventing Yourself

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about re-inventing yourself. Then, today I randomly meet this 38-year-old martial artist/jewelry businessman/pre-med student/father who has been doing it all his life. Reinventing yourself is something that we can all learn to do. Let me give you a short synopsis of his.

Growing up in the states, he never went to high school or even middle school. Instead, he shuffled back and forth between Asia and the states learning martial arts from a Korean monk who was like a second father to him. Later, he joined the army. Then, he got involved in the diamonds business where dirty business is common. Eight times he was followed after leaving the bank with the diamonds. He always carried a gun with him to protect himself from the Korean underworld, Columbian mobsters, etc. that attempted to take the goods from him. Though it was dangerous, it was also lucrative. He managed to earn enough money to buy a nice house in the middle of nowhere in Alaska. That was great but his wife left him and departed with his daughter still in the womb. He followed her to Texas and somehow got custody of the child. Now, he has decided to be a good father and get a college education so he can become a doctor.

Clearly, this guy is very good at continually reinventing himself to have fun and to survive in this world. This is a key life skill which I think many of us never develop, especially for those of us who come from stable families. I can tell you that my personal story so far has been the singular linear path of school. My ignorance of this world is so profound that it's startling.

There's many people, perhaps including yourself, which has followed a similar linear path and have not yet seen how limited your view of the world truly is. You may very well continue the linear path of school to work with a few weeks of vacation every year to retirement without even thinking. Now, I'm not saying that you should go crazy and go rob a bank or overdose yourself with drugs, but I am saying that you should find a way to continually transform what you do since how else can you broaden your view of the world and truly say that you're living life?

To give you an idea, currently, I'm discarding my student entity and reinventing yourself as an entrepreneur but that is just one stage. What's next? I don't know when I'll do all this but I know it will happen in the next few years:

1. Reinvent myself as a world traveler and travel writer/photorapher. I will spend at least a year traveling the world keeping a journal of my days. At the end of my travels, I will hop around different cafes around Europe and compile the book to be published.

2. Reinvent myself as a film director. I really enjoy watching films and I have attempted to write a few screenplays. To film one myself will be awesome. I will spend a year or two interning to learn the basics of film production before going into directing one myself.

3. Reinvent myself as a psychologist or counselor. Many people have told me that I'm very good at helping them see what their issues are. I can go to school, get a degree, and then open my own practice. People can be fascinating and to understand different types of people is quite rewarding. I have decided that I'll do this when I'm old and (hopefully) well-respected.

So ask yourself this:

How will you reinvent yourself in your life?