Caterpillar

Caterpillars are ugly and gross. 

Or are they?

Other than Erie Carle's hungry caterpillar and that of Absalom from Alice in Wonderland, most caterpillars are. They've been viewed as voracious eating machines at best and crop-destroying pests at worst. 

Since my recent reading on butterfly's metamorphosis, I have better understood these fascinating creatures. In my opinion, they should have won as many awards as the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Look closely enough, and you will find these animals cleverer than what we thought. They aren't just overeating chocolate cake, pickle, cupcake, watermelon, and get stomachache. 

Caterpillars are pretty strategic. Some can produce sweet scretion to bribe ants. In exchange, the ants do not attack them. Others, such as caterpillars of pipervine swallowtail and common rose butterfly, feed on certain plants to sequester aristolocholic acid. That would be highly toxic to repel predators. 

They are smart. 

Wildlife

Can you recall the joys or spirits before school field trip? 

You're too excited to fall asleep. Your dreams are brilliant bursts of colour, rather than monochrome. And yet. Next morning, you're up early ahead of the alarm clock. 

Don't think this beautiful experience is for kindergarten students only. Whether you're five years old or fifty years old, field trip often makes us feel good. 

Believe me, I just have had one such happy moment. Imagine my enthusiasm when I got the chance to join an outdoor photography field session led by Robert Ferguson, an international award winning photographer. Every local nature lover could have bought his guide book, Wildcreatures of Hong Kong, and followed his blog with the same name.   

A morning walk with Robert Ferguson is the best way to connect with nature. Animals and photography are two of his life's greatest pleasures. A perfect combination. I am thrilled to join him spotting dragonfly or damselfly, watching intricate animals like lantern bug. There is no better way to learn photography from this guy who never says to himself, "Just put the camera down, Robert." 

Game

Mention tennis or backgammon, and the term "zero-sum game" will come to our mind. That means a situation when I win, you lose; if you win, I lose. 

But that's not the rule in the novel The Wishing Game, in which four contestants compete against each other in a one-of-a-kind competition on a fantastical island. They are working hard to win the only copy of a new book written by a reclusive bestselling author. To win the book that is supposed to sell more than one hundred thousand dollars, a contestant must score ten points. And if no one scores the requisite ten points, the book will go to the publisher. 

That's somewhat like a competition of Rubik's Cube. Everyone is competing against the clock. If nobody can beat the clock, that's it. The end.

Don't think that you can go online and search for a YouTube tutorial. If the contestants are caught using the landlines, smartphones, computers, or any internet-connected device on the island, they will be immediately disqualified.

If we have more games like this in the real world, that would be a true meritocracy.

Departure

Fiction becomes autobiography. Fiction is true. Confusing at first. Then powerful.

Julian Barnes finished his last fiction Departure(s) at the age of 80. That's a story within a story. Around fifteen years ago, he wrote about death in Nothing to be Frightened Of. The new book – the last one – explicitly talks about a man who lost his wife to brain tumour and is living with an incurable yet manageable form of blood cancer. And by "manageable", his doctor meant "unless there is another mutation, of which there is a five per cent chance."

Julian Barnes doesn't believe in cryonics. He isn't optimistic about reversing the process of ageing. He doesn't think the way out of death's trap is to extend the length of human life. Not that it matters. The tide would wash when time is due, like a terminus at the end of a journey according to Julian Barnes.

When Julian Barnes was younger, one of his rules was write each book as if it will be his last. It could have been the reason that his final one is the best.

Hanafubuki

Japan has a reputation of owning unique words, often untranslatable and with deep meaning.

Among them, the older and beautiful ones include shinrinyoku (literally forest bathing) and komorebi (reminding us the picture of sunlight filtering through the trees, dappling the forest floor). Fast forward to modern era and you'll find buzzwords like insuta-bae, referring to something that look good on Instagram.

What about hanafubuki? I learn this magical word about flower snowstorm during my Fukuoka trip. Picture it: the cherry blossom or sakura petals are blown through the air like snow shower. Set adrift in the wonderfully wild breeze, the petals feel like floating fairies. For all the poets and artists, grace and surreality are expressed here.

That's a mesmerising image captured by a word found nowhere else.

Uncertainty

Why are millennials called the "new lost generation"? One reason is the need to navigate a uniquely volatile era of radical uncertainty. They include three major economic recessions including the Great Depression, once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic – you name it.

A look back at older generation, on the other hand, seems to give us déjà vu and a long history of recurrent uncertainty. I recently borrowed a beautiful book Air-Borne, in which Carl Zimmer chronicles a gripping account of airborne infection. History simply repeats itself. Scientists were often completely wrong, until human suffering has been turned into final discovery that many threats are indeed caused by airborne contagious diseases. Measles, tuberculosis, SARS-CoV – you name it.

Zimmer's superb writing is filled with stories of the United States Presidents. John F. Kennedy launched mass immunisation campaign in 1965 to include measles. Even Charles Schulz helped rally children and their parents, dedicating a week of his Peanuts comic strip to the story of Linus getting vaccinated.

"Who ever worries about measles? What's a little 'rosela' among friends?" Linus asked his sister for the reason of getting a measles shot.

"Your stupidity is appalling!" Lucy snapped.

"Most stupidity is," Linus acknowledged with reluctance.

It is.

Physics

Teaching physics to someone who doesn't know mathematics, according to the Nobel Prize winner Richard P. Feynman, is like explaining music to someone who is deaf.

Unlike Feynman, I have forgotten most of what I'd learnt about the laws of thermodynamics, SUVAT equations, or African drums. Well, I don't really know whether I've ever understood any one of them at all. 

We all know that physicists are one of the cleverest humans. Think about Feynman who gathered with physicists from other universities in the early seventies. Somehow they got the idea that the physicists needed more culture. To bring some culture to their conversations and lectures, Feynman thought about Mayan mathematics. He deciphered the bars and dots after getting a copy of the oldest Maya books, the Dresden Codex. 

Feynman figured out the bars and dots always carried at twenty the first time, then at eighteen the second time (making cycles of 360). He noticed certain numbers appear more often: the number 584 was particularly prominent. This 584 was divided into periods of 236, 90, 250, and 8. It didn't take him long to find that 583.92 days is the period of Venus as it appears from the earth. Then the 236, 90, 250, 8 became apparent to Feynman: it must be the phases that Venus goes through. Out of the table that had periods of 11,959 days, he further worked out the meaning of the funny number: the number to predict lunar eclipses. 

Geez.