Do They Really Think The Swan Ugly

Eden Lake, located in the suburb of North Lakes, is a place my family often visits. It is a beautiful lake in a quiet area. 

We are used to leaning on the fence in front of a café and admiring the view that stretches to the distant mountains and forests. There is a lot of water-based wildlife, including ducks, tortoises, fish, and the most outstanding ones — swans. 

"Look! Swans! See the beautiful black swans!" Many children were cheering and bouncing on the lookout platform when they saw the swans. 

Suddenly I saw a few lonely, grey, duck-like animals following a big black swan in the water. 

"Ah, I see! They're baby swans!" I pointed to them and waved to my sons. "Look! We can see baby swans!" 

Then I expanded on the topic and said, "Do you know that once upon a time there was a baby swan hatched by a mother duck?" 

"Yes. That's the story of The Ugly Duckling," my son said. 

"But I think they're nice," I said. 

"Yes, they're cute," my elder son said. 

"So cute!" my younger son said.

I suddenly fell into contemplation. Why, in the story of The Ugly Duckling, did everyone say the little swan was ugly? Was he really ugly? Did they really believe he was ugly? 

The other little ducklings didn't know him to be a swan, which is quite understandable. However, hadn't the mother and the other grown-ups known he was a swan?

What is the definition of "ugly"? What is "beautiful"? 

These are the two most subjective terms. We only know what we think, but we can't really know what others think. We know what others say, but we can't know if they're telling the truth.

I think what happened on the farm was a bullying event. The Mother Duck should have already known the ugly duckling was not her child, and that was probably why she couldn't protect him. Or maybe she was unwilling to do so. She wanted to get rid of him but pretended to be nice. 

In that story, those animals who called the little swan ugly might not have really thought he was ugly. Some might have just followed others to bully him. Some might have thought he didn't belong to their group. Some thought he threatened their interests. What's more, some may have even envied him for being a swan.

I raised my head to look into the distance. A gleam of sunshine was reflecting on the lake. The group of swans had swum away, leaving the ducks playing near the edge. 

A black swan suddenly flew to the bank and stood near me, as if he was greeting me. 

"Thank you!" I said to him. 

People might be astonished if they heard what I said. But no one knows that I understood a lot through the swans — about the fairy tale, and about life!

Modern Literati Arts

Literati arts are very significant in China’s art history. From Tang Dynasty’s Wang Wei, literati paintings have gradually become the mainstream in China’s painting history. The techniques are still strongly influencing today’s painting practice in China. However, in today’s Chinese paintings, we can merely see the technical influence of historical literati paintings, but the spirit has been lost. This is similar for music. Folk instruments such as the guzheng and dizi have flourished with quite a number of modern repertoires, whereas instruments for literati music, mainly the guqin and dongxiao, have lost attention.

There are many reasons contributing to this. The influence of Western culture, of course, accounts for it to a great extent. However, the more direct reason is the way of modern life. Today literati are no longer a group that focuses on literature and social science. They also include scholars, academics, engineers, and officers from a large number of disciplines. Meanwhile, paintings and music are conducted by professional painters and musicians rather than literati who are not professional artists. They can easily inherit the techniques, but it is hard to inherit the inner spirit. 

This drives me to think of new approaches for literati arts. 

Yesterday, I painted a picture about an ibis eating crumbs on a dining table. The ibis was rendered with traditional Chinese expression painting skills, whereas other objects and the background were painted with Western watercolor skills. This combined approach to painting is my early attempt at modern literati painting.

Dream of Red Chamber and Its Author

 Yesterday, I played the music Frown in Vain, which was the theme song for Dream of the Red Chamber, on a xiao.

Dream of the Red Chamber is a great novel written by Cao Xueqin during the Qing dynasty. In the 20th century, some scholars argued that the last 40 chapters were written by someone else because the quality was not as good as the first 80 chapters. However, I cannot agree with them.

Just take a look at the title. "Dream of the Red Chamber" is much better than "The Story of a Stone," which was originally used. In addition, the poem at the end of the book matches the one at the start well, indicating that the writer of the ending must be at least as excellent as the writer of the beginning.

The scholars who said the last 40 chapters were written by another author also claimed that this second writer modified the end of the story, which had been set by the first writer. How ridiculous! For a great novel, the writer will not let readers know the ending just by reading the first few chapters, as they will try to attract them to keep reading.

The Beauty of Engineering

Recently, a Chinese mathematician, Hong Wang, was awarded the prestigious Fields Medal. Since then, an article entitled "The Beauty of Mathematics," which is said to have been written by her when she was sixteen, has become popular on the internet. This has driven me to write this article to express the beauty of engineering.

Engineering is how we solve practical problems, and thus engineers have to consider everything for the solution to be applied in the real world. It is strongly influenced by the developments of mathematics and natural science, but it has its own characteristics too. Any breakthrough in natural science can trigger significant changes in engineering, driving engineers to learn for life.  A typical example is that since the invention of optical fibre, theories and techniques in telecommunications engineering have been reshaped. 

Many engineering problems are complicated in scale. Engineers typically have to gain a broad knowledge to understand the whole system and its components. Since a lot of problems require repeatedly solving the same issue, reusability must be considered. In software engineering, this means separating functionalities into different functions, classes, or software components. Reusability is sometimes implemented by allowing configurations on a large component template. For example, C-YAWL, a component that I developed at QUT for the open-source YAWL project, provides a way to create simpler business process models through configurations of a large one.

Different from mathematics, where everything can be rigorously proved, an engineering problem can't be proved thoroughly, even though mathematics is often used as an approach to analyse it. 

Compressive sensing is a topic in signal processing which has strong mathematical foundations. Renowned mathematicians such as Terence Tao have made significant contributions. Theories have been proved that, under some conditions, an algorithm can be used to recover signals in a probability close to one, through random sensing. However, in practice it is still impossible to examine how closely the real signal sources fit the assumptions, while these assumptions will never be fully met. The result will be better if the input signals have characteristics closer to satisfying the conditions.

The approach to an engineering problem is very different from rigorous mathematical proofs. Sometimes we have to observe carefully and even use some imagination. I still remember that in a lecture on electronic circuits, the teacher presented his proof. In one step, the math function looked too complicated. Then he said, "It is impossible to solve this nonlinear function. But let me draw it." 

He then drew a curve on the blackboard, and said, "Just look at the curve of the function. If we only focus on this little region, the curve is smooth and we can approximate this part as a straight line. Thus, we can approximate it as a linear function like this, and then..." 

I am sure this type of approximation would never be allowed in pure maths but it is popular in every domain of engineering.

A engineering solution has to consider human behaviours too. For example, a software engineer has to keep in mind that there is some hacker wanting to break into the system they are developing.

Since not everything can be proved with maths or natural science laws, experimental evaluation is the only way to evaluate the performance of a method in engineering. 

I remember that one day I met a professor who was the director of a research group for speech, audio, image and video technologies. I told him that I had encountered a problem when training the Gaussian Mixture model. 

"The covariance matrix becomes singular after some iterations," I said. “Yes. This is a known issue for GMMs," he said. "Do you have an idea to solve it?"

I then explained what I wanted to do. "Do you think my method will work?" I asked. He smiled and said, "You can try and experiment. If it works, then you know it works. Otherwise, you will know it doesn’t.” 

Personality Of Art

 There are many times that I have seen people commenting on bamboo flute performances, saying things like "the pitch is not accurate." My understanding is that the pitch does not need to be accurate. In a lot of cases, this inaccuracy is intended, depending on the music that one is playing. We have all known that when you press a key on a piano, the pitch is unique. You can adjust the way you press the key to get different sound characteristics, but you can't get another pitch. To some extent, this is the piano's limitation. For bamboo flutes, we can always get a different pitch by adjusting either our embouchure or fingering, so that a special characteristic can be achieved.

Any instrument has its own strengths and weaknesses, and thus we can't use a single standard to rate them. The same applies to any musician or artist.

A few days ago, I told my wife that I would be successful in the arts eventually. My wife asked, "How do you know?" I explained, "Because I have a very special personality, which allows me to see everything with a special viewpoint." I then continued, "For example, if you want to write an article, and your viewpoint fits the majority of people, and your structures and languages fit standard aesthetical criteria—yes, you can get a good mark in exams. But this can't be considered an artwork in literature. A form of art will die once a set of standard criteria has been set."

A CLUSTER OF FLOWERS

 Yesterday, I finished painting a watercolour picture titled "A Cluster of Flowers". It features a cluster of yellow flowers that I saw in the City Botanic Gardens of Brisbane.

I used watercolour pencils to draw the outlines and applied the colours inside using pan-based watercolour pigments. However, I soon regretted using an orange pencil to draw the petals. I thought I could make them much lighter by wiping them with a brush dipped in clean water. Unfortunately, the result is that the edges are still too dark. I should have used a yellow pencil instead.

Overall, I am quite satisfied with the flowers. The different layers of colours and green leaves are vivid. However, I am not happy with the background, meaning the soil on the ground and the bush in the far field. The light conditions of the background are also not well painted. I think in my next picture, I will try to apply just a single layer of very light, smooth colour for the background. A looser style will be better to make the foreground objects stand out.

Rest Yourself

 I was supervising my son practising the piano in the evening. He was playing a new song that he had just learned from his last lesson. At the beginning, he felt frustrated, but he continued to progress until he could play the whole song with few errors.

"Hooray!" I cheered with him.

He looked at me and asked, "Is it really good?"

I nodded my head. He then merrily rushed to the bedroom to tell his mum. His mum encouraged him to play it again.

However, he made some silly mistakes. Then he tried again, and then again and again. It was a pity that he couldn't play it as well as before.

"Why not take a rest?" I suggested. He then went to play with his toy cars for a little while.

"You've practised enough," I said to him. "Maybe you can try again tomorrow."

But he didn't listen to me and quickly sat on the piano bench. He tried to play the music, and it was even better than all his previous attempts. He then tried again, and it was almost perfect to my ears.

"Yeah, when you encounter a puzzle that you can't solve immediately, please take a rest and then try again. Resting is as important as practising. A good way to rest is to switch your focus to other activities," I told him.