Adapted from an article I wrote for The Tower, the PHS student newspaper.
The ocean is quite a poetic oxymoron. For hundreds of thousands of years, it has separated cultures with vast seas and treacherous storms, and yet it has also unified them in contemplating the same majestic waters. As they gazed, they thought of stories. What does the ocean hold, hidden beneath its seemingly endless waves?
more… (3 min)Taiwan, I hear you singing —
your wind from mountain
to sea, your skyscrapers
and rolling fields of rice, your air
of incense and motorcycle fumes,
your 7-Elevens and blistering sun
Taiwan, I hear you singing —
there’ve been too many
summers we’ve spent apart
but though we’ve changed
so much since we last met
still
you feel
like home
Written after a very frustrating debugging session
Absolutely screwed.
After analysing my situation in great detail and considering all possible courses of action, that is my informed conclusion. Utterly completely positively screwed.
more… (6 min)I see a mote of dust
whirling
. . on
. . . . im
per . .
. . cep
. . . . ti
. . . . . . . ble
. . . . currents
of air
| dangling
| on
| a
| thin
| stream
| of
| light
feeling nothing but the way the wind blows past its small cubic volume of space
drifting
(alone)
through emptiness
quarks, leptons, bosons ―
we are all
the same
inside
On the first day of school, bring a three-ring binder, a notebook with a marbled front cover, and exactly two-point-four ounces of snacks.
more… (3 min)hailing winds of words reverberate through
the house, condemning every move, every
breath ― storms of expectation relentlessly
screaming, trembling walls with tempest each hour ―
Death is awoken by a phone call.
“Fine,” he says. Glancing wearily at the time marked on the hands of his pocketwatch, he tumbles gracelessly out of his cramped apartment bed. The work doesn’t pay well.
more… (3 min)The reeds grow
so thick and tall
as they stand stiff
in the oppressive breeze
that you can’t see
which way is left and
which way is right
as the muck slushes
sickeningly below
you feel it seeping
into your boots
as it laps at your feet
a cloud of mosquitoes drone about
the sun beats down from above
and yet
You press on.
one spoonful:
a dusting of sugar;
a powder of chocolate ―
a creamy mascarpone,
a spongy layer of sweet biscuits,
and a foundation of bitter coffee
one spoonful:
sweet and bitter,
delight and pain ―
hope that inspires
desolation that strengthens:
a blend of love, of hate,
of chocolate harmony.
Adapted from an article I wrote for The Tower, the PHS student newspaper.
Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth, taken from a distance of six billion kilometers by the Voyager spacecraft. Described by Carl Sagan as “a mote of dust in a sunbeam,” our home planet barely takes up a pixel of the vast inky seas beyond. We think we have conquered Nature herself as we bend ecosystems to our will; we think we are masters of the laws of physics as we build spires that graze the sky. We have sailed the seven seas, we have summited the highest peaks, and we have mapped the farthest islands. But as that photograph shows, there is so much of the heavens we have yet to explore.
more… (5 min)We are terrible at understanding large numbers. It’s a cognitive limit, a remnant of the good old days when humans spent their lives foraging for berries and lived in small nomadic bands of at most a hundred people Hunter-gatherers never needed to comprehend the phrases “I found 2,140,201 pounds of blackberries this year” or “the tribe population increased to 1,200,305 inhabitants in the spring season.”
more… (5 min)The following is adapted from a lecture I gave to the PHS Math Team in February 2023
A combinatorial proof shows that $A$ and $B$ are the same thing by showing that they are solutions to the same counting problem. Usually induction or algebraic proofs can also be used to solve these problems, but combinatorial proofs are usually more insightful and elegant.
more… (3 min)The heat death of the universe is inevitable.
The stars will blink out of existence in spectacular fashion, each putting on a final fireworks show for an indifferent universe, and the heavens will settle into a self-satisfied soup of thermodynamic equilibrium: a perfect entropy, a uniform chaos.
more… (4 min)the songbirds are singing ―
piercing staccatos,
irritably cheerful tunes
it’s light outside ―
sunshine pours into my eyes
through the window blinds
i pull the covers over my head ―
the comfortable weight:
im fine im fine im fine
in the sweet pearl-white
buttermilk of sleep,
i drown my sorrows.
a.k.a. the most unrealistic action scene I could think of
Olivia Nishimoto fixed her piercing gaze upon the computer screen before her. On her desk, a Psyduck plushie and a row of neatly arranged mini cacti; on the wall, a poster of Metallica ― a reminder of halcyon days long past. She was truly an oxymoron of a character.
more… (5 min)The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second. On paper, that is incredibly fast. In a mere 1.3 seconds, a photon of light can travel the quarter-million miles from the Earth to its rock-hewn satellite. But the universe is mostly made of nothing. Through the round porthole window, Earth is but a pinprick in the inkblot sea of black.
more… (2 min)Each box had a story. That is, if you could even call them “stories.” Most were uncreative to begin with, and once you get through the first trillion star systems they become terribly repetitive as well.
more… (2 min)I’m hungry. It’s intrinsic, some sort of internal voracious insatiable unquenchable craving for food, sustenance, nourishment, whatever you want to call it. For some reason, there’s no shortage of it here ― but perhaps paradoxically there is never enough to eat. Probably a cruel joke, played by the same unknown malevolent entity that put me here as entertainment, as a plaything.
more… (3 min)The text contains four hundred fifty five characters and sixty seven words; it also has one semicolon. It is self-referential. There are forty two “t” characters in this text. It is introspective but serves no purpose, simultaneously detail-oriented and metaphysical, straying from practicality, only functioning to describe itself. Fundamentally, why do we seek to write such pointless self-referential texts? Such a question I leave to the philosophers.
Shoot for the moon.
If you miss
You’ll end up in a heliocentric orbit
With Earth just out of reach
As your ship’s oxygen slowly runs out.
The eternal winds blew forth a ceaseless rustle of sand and dust, slowly burying the last remnants of the lush, blue planet that it once was.
more… (2 min)The sky outside was the color of an inkspill, dotted by splotches of ominous, grey clouds. The white noise of a tremendous downpour roared outside, and waves of thunder crashed over the aerial landscape. Looking down at my ill-gotten gains as a stroke of lightning illuminated the sky, I could not resist a small, sly grin.
more… (4 min)