Dear the Personification of Exams

You have finally come around
Should I treat you like best friend or archenemy?
Your arrival is always accompanied by ambivalence.

Perhaps an elderly, fatherly figure?
The mischievous author putting his protagonist
into yet another rite of passage,
to colour the whole bildungsroman
blacker, redder, whiter?

Or a warden.
You lurk in my calendar grid
Imprison me behind the bolded bars
Will I ever see again the light of day?

Well, yes, I know I will
But around you the fabric of Time twists into a loop
A moment with you can be gruellingly interminable:
Eternity in three weeks.

So here I am paying tribute to your existence
When I should be doing something else.

You are the very calmness of my soul

No, not You, God, I'm sorry;
Not at the moment.
(But since You are the causa prima,
You also account for it in one way or another,
but I digress)

Notice how
I circumvent the Law of cause and effect
It's not:
"You cause the calmness in my soul."
That's because --
The mechanism, the invisible gears
are unbeknownst to me
The cascade: emotional, physiological, psychological, chemical
-- take your pick --
is too mysterious.
So, laziness, literary effect, or otherwise:
You yourself might as well be the calmness itself personified.

Your face
is not one that can launch a thousand ships
but one that can drown a thousand troubles

Let's transcend the metaphor
or the Law of cause and effect, or whatever:
You are the very calmness of my soul.

The Captain and the Ship Analogy

When explaining about why emission spectrometry is more sensitive than absorption spectrometry, my professor shared this analogy:

Imagine a ship and its captain. If we were to measure the weight of the captain, how would we go about doing that?
Well, we can weigh the ship with the captain onboard. Then weigh the ship sans the captain. Substract.
Otherwise, we can just extract the captain from his ship, then weigh him.

Silly as it sounds, the former is actually what we are doing in absorption spectrometry. Shine light onto sample. Measure the light coming out. Subtract to get the amount absorbed by the sample. This results in a lot of background noise because the difference between what comes in and out is very little, like the weight of the captain.

In emission spectrometry, the source of photons is essentially the sample itself, so background noise is essentially zero. (Not exactly zero, because there may be scattering of the incident light used to excite the sample, e.g. fluorospectrometry. If excitation is by high energy electrons, then noise is probably zero, but there may be other factors)

I think this analogy does not only apply to analytical chemistry but also a lot of other things. There is a concept of big and small here. The ship is big, the captain is small. The presence of the big distorts the measurement of the small. Big and small is kind of a motif in chemistry. You see that in HSAB theory and of course, in regioselectivity explanation of Diels-Alder reaction in terms of coefficients.

Also, relativeness. The ship with or without the captain weigh roughly the same. So the weight of the captain is only negligible because it is being juxtaposed with the weight of the ship.

Chemistry being one perspective on the inner workings of the universe, you can expect the same principle to be applicable in real life. The other day another lecturer found that the computer in the lecture hall has problem with connection to the projector. His solution? Switch to another hall. While he can just borrow a laptop, from a student or the IT office down the corridor, to connect to the projector.

It's like being aboard on a ship, finding that the captain not unable to do this job, then you proceed to find another set of ship and captain. Why not just replace the captain?

Morarity

Just pointing out:

             L                  R
   ---------------------------------------
L  |      MOLALITY     |     MOLARITY    | 
   --------------------------------------- 
R  |      MORALITY     |     MORARITY?   |
   ---------------------------------------

Why hasn't someone filled the gap? Quick, quick, someone define 'morarity'!

(On an interesting note, MORARITY is an anagram of MORIARTY, the archenemy of Sherlock Holmes. Also, I would reckon a Japanese speaker of English would have a hard time distinguishing the four since romanisation of all four would be the same.)

No such thing as free lunch

Was I really seeking good
Or just seeking attention?
Is that all good deeds are
When looked at with an ice-cold eye?
-- Elphaba in Wicked (No Good Deed)

This clichéd line reveals a question that always bogs the knower: Is there true altruism?

Put simply, every altruistic act may arguably be traced to selfish motive(s). You volunteer to feel good about yourself or to satisfy your superiority complex; you help a friend to invest in a future return of favour; you donate to make yourself look good; you treat the person you love well so that he/she will requite your love; you treat someone for lunch to curry favour; and the list goes on.

A friend of mine commented that, well, since an altruistic act is performed by self, it can never be separated from self. The self is always entangled with the act: they can never be separated, so one can never be truly altruistic.

I nodded to that at the time, but then it turns out it may not be that simple.

Victor Frankl wrote about 'transcendent quality of conscience' in Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning. In essence, it means that the self can transcends itself and considers itself objectively. This is so deeply embedded in the language that we tend to overlook it: consider the reflexive pronouns (the 'selves') – say, myself. "I consider myself": 'I' is the subject and 'myself' is the object, right? Following that, we can argue that the transcendent self may then be fully removed from its selfish desires and be truly altruistic. This is what makes a person a person. The etymology of 'person' is per-sonat, literally: sounding through. Frankl goes on to point that what sounds through is the voice of transcendence.

Personally though, and I think most people would agree, that it does not matter whether one is truly altruistic or not. Is it so bad to love yourself? Jesus said, quoting the Law: "Love your neighbour as yourself." (Mark 12:31). It's true that you have to put others before yourself (and of course God before all), but the 'self' element is still there. Here we see another entanglement, albeit a slightly different one. 'Others' is always entangled with 'self', so there is no need to remove 'self' from the picture.

On a darker note, you just have to realise that people always have ulterior motives in things that they do, consciously or otherwise. You yourself also have selfish motives in everything that you do. When we play it out in the arena, we just have to be aware of those often invisible conflicts of motives and wade cautiously. Well, to be pragmatic: use and be used, needless to say, tactfully.

There goes my free lunch.
Update: Regarding loving for the hope of requital, there's a song blatantly saying exactly that.