Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Put Fire to Your Feet!

What if you had plenty of fire in your feet, what might you do?

Think fast - rapid-fire thinking can boost energy and mood.

Play hard - By scheduling play that's fun, you'll actually get more work done.

Stay cool under pressure - Move quickly to perform tasks you can do well, such as teeing up and hitting your golf ball or taking an exam in a subject you know well. If you think too much, you take your focus away from what you already know and do well.

Play a video game - Fast-paced video games can improve your mental dexterity, boost hand-eye coordination, depth perception and problem solving.

Dance with fervor - Move your emotions into motion to boost your vitality!

So what will you do with more fire in your feet today?

Tarot Deck 2: The Minor Arcana


In my personal studies of the Tarot, I have found the Minor Arcana to be the hardest to translate into meaningful interpretations. The symbolism is complex and vague all at the same time. The Rider-Waite deck is the hardest for me to translate as most decks give a one word summary of the meaning and the Rider-Waite uses only pictures. What I believe Waite was trying to accomplish (though I have not read his Tarot research), was to use certain scenes from daily life, medieval times, and mythology to describe the broad meanings of the card based on a specific formula. Anyone who owns other esoteric decks such as Crowley’s Thoth Deck or The Golden Dawn Magickal Tarot will notice that the cards of the Minor Arcana contain astrological symbols. These symbols may even confuse the reader as they do not always seem to correspond with the written interpretations of the card. I have written on this subject previously in my blog but I will go through all the symbol systems involved to clarify.

The Minor Arcana is the second deck of the Tarot, the court royal cards being a separate deck all together. There are 40 cards in the deck all together. The number 40 has a long history of symbolism found throughout the Bible and ancient cultures. The great flood was accompanied by 40 days and nights of rain, Jesus walked the desert for 40 days and nights, and the Israelites wandered the desert for 40 years. According to Ernest Busenbark in his book, Sex, Symbols and the Stars, the number 40 may had been attributed to turmoil and hardships followed by a renewal as it coincides with the cycle of human gestation being 40 weeks or 10 twenty eight day months (18).


The tetragrammaton is the four lettered name kept sacred to Judaism and paganism across the world and is encrypted into various components of the Tarot. This ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ name has often been described as a representation of the four elements. The four fold nature of being, as articulated by Carl Jung’s quaternary, are intellect, intuition, emotion, and sensation (http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=1722). This can be seen as we think thoughts, feel emotions, use instinctive decision making combining thought and emotion, and sense the world around us. The four suits of the Tarot, the four elements (fire, water, air, earth), and the four fold nature of being are all symbolically equal. The Tarot in conjunction with Kabala, describes each of these natures further by inscribing the Tree of Life in each of the four worlds. The Tarot is graphically and symbolically describing what the written tradition of Kabala has been teaching at least since the 10th century.



The symbolism is completely holographic with the existence of each of the four worlds in each separate world:




This allows for many levels of information to be encoded into the symbolism as we apply Kabala to Tarot, as it was meant to be. There are other symbolic relationships engrained into the tree itself, such as pillars, triangles, paths, etc. Any understanding of these will further advance your study of Tarot and your ability to draw information from the spreads.

SYMBOL KEYS

Each card of the Minor Arcana contains a NUMBER that represents the SPHERE on the Tree and a SUIT which represents the mode of being or ELEMENT. There is one more system of information added to the Minor Arcana that is not easily perceived. It contains the entire Zodiac, though in a different format than the Major Arcana.


Each house of the Zodiac contains 3 sub houses called decans or decantes. Decan means ‘division or ruler of ten’ as the whole Zodiac is 360 degrees and each decan is 10 degrees making 36 decans. Extracting the 4 aces from the 40 cards gives us 36 (40-4=36). The ace of each suit is not represented in the wheel because the ace is considered to be the pure emanation of that element. For example: the ace of cups can be seen as the pure emanation of emotion (water) in its highest form; love. It is rather simple. As we move into the 2 or Chockmah, the card takes on the symbols of the decan and house.

Venus in Cancer with Chockmah in Briah is a very balanced energy. It is the love that we can understand as we live in a dualistic reality. Venus represents love, art, the mother, and the divine feminine. We know that Cancer is a water sign, making it compatible with Venus (love, female, water). Cancer is a motherly, protective shell as illustrated by the crab. Chockmah is the first split off of Kether, and it still holds stability of divine energy. Combining all of these concepts, love is weighed as a balanced force, not like the duality of good and evil but the idea of active and passive.

THE FORUMULA

For you math majors:
(Decan + House) + (Element + Modality) = Minor Arcana

A great site to get to initiate an understanding the role Kabala plays in Tarot is:
Raven’s Tarot Site
http://www.corax.com/tarot/

I believe this book is essential to beginning Tarot studies, especially to those people serious about studying Crowley’s Thoth Deck:
Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot
By Lon Milo Duquette

The Book of Thoth
By Aleister Crowley

Good Reading:
http://www.alphaorion.com/MinorArcana.pdf




My quick online game


User-generated, social, casual game made by myself and shared on my blog

The head is really mine in this game ( real life picture ). The goal of the game: Shoot me down and collect points. It is made out of ''SuperMe'' game template and powered by PlayMyGame.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Pamela Hits Her Funny Bone

Last Friday was one topsy-turvy day. Steve felt like he was coming down with our cold that morning. He planned on running to sweat out the toxins, or die trying. Instead of leaving at six in the morning to appease the boss (Pamela), Steve managed to stall for an hour and a half. Pamela was concerned, but much milder than we saw last Friday. Whenever she started to lose control, she began thinking of that silly woman at the Hong Kong airport and end up giggling and laughing in spite of herself.

Steve came back from the run, debating whether or not to go to work. He decided to gas up the car but could not find his wallet. After a careful search, he called his office and found out the wallet pulled an over-nighter at work. Rather than bring up the ugly topic of Steve staying home, I excitedly let Pamela know that she and I were going on a road trip all the way to Charleston to run errands. She was game for the drive and ended up not minding that WE went to Charleston, while STEVE stayed home.

The upshot of it all is that Pamela survived her topsy-turvy day by tickling her funny bone. To encode her resilience into episodic memory, we talked about how well she did later that night. You can see her laughing at the Chinese woman near the end of the clip.


Pamela hit her funny bone really hard yesterday. She rocked herself and cried out in pain. I said sympathetically, "Oh, you hit your funny bone! That hurts! I'm sorry." Pamela looked like she was ready to start melting down and suddenly she laughed and said, "The Chinese lady!" She again giggled her way out of a storm.

A gift from a friend

Leo Ku (古巨基) has always been a favourite chinese singer of mine, has produced a few nice songs in different music albums. Coincidently, one of my best buddy, Ting-Ting, told me that she love these songs (especially that song name "Nobita", well, because i really love that guy from the Doraemon series). She even played those songs by-ear on the piano as a gift for me (playing by ear is something very special for me, since talented people like her only need to listen to the song for few times before playing it on the piano). I am feeling so glad that she allowed me to post those songs here. She said she is shy to include herself in the videos. Anway, not important (forgive me Ting, i am just joking, lol !).


Caption: Ting-Ting and I

Since I do not really know all the titles of songs sang by Leo, therefore I will only name it as "Leo" in the caption. Anyway, here are the video links (click on the play button to play the video).


Caption: Leo (1)


Caption: Monica


Caption: Nobita


Caption: Leo (2)



Caption: Leo (3)

A more indepth understanding of cancer (tumor)

Understanding human brain is sometimes a very complicated task. Definitely, picturing the human brain is interesting if some expert is willing to explain to you in depth. Here is the picture (or structure) of a brain.


Caption: The three main section of a human brain

I am sure everyone who have studied science will know the three sections (in brief) of a human brain. The biggest section of the brain is the cerebrum (the larger brain, most of my cognitive psychology work is based on the cerebrum), followed by the cerebellum (the smaller brain) and the mendulla (attached to the spinal cord) which controls human reflexes. My research focuses somewhere near the occipital, parietal and tempral lobes. Anwyay, I will try not to turn this blog to a book :) lol, or it will definitely be boring.

My conversation with Dr. Rui has once again broaden my knowledge. He brought me new understanding, such as tumor (cancer disease) in a human's body. According to him, few really important human organs that will most likely cause death when a tumor is found in it, such as the liver and the brain. Dr. Rui is a very patience person, and willing to scribbled a whole piece of A4 paper (both sides) to just explain to me the existance of tumor in a person's body. So let me explain based on what I can recall from the paper that we have scribbled.

Let me start explaining from the oesophagus, a tube in the body which takes food from the mouth to the stomach. I think this is important since this organ is really important since it has some relation to my mom. From my understanding, if a doctor telling you that they found some disease in your oesophagus and at a very critical stage, then you should expect that to be a tumor. A basic understanding of the occurence of the oesophagus disease in a person's body is that they smokes too much, or normally drinking too much alcohol. The other reason of having this disease is that the person drink too much hot water, let says for a long term period, i.e. 20 years. My mom often drink hot tea and coffees. The moment the water is boiled, she will pour the 'hot' water into the mug and drink it immediately! Dr. Rui said that this will damage most oesophagus cells, and in a long term basis, when most of the cells were damaged, the person will start feeling itch in their oesophagus. That is the very early symptom of the oesophagus cancer. Try not to drink warm water beyond the temperature of '40 degree celcius' to prevent such disease.


Caption: A tumor found in the oesophagus

Normally, a person's understanding of cancer (or tumor) is that an incurable disease. That is what people keeps telling us, as long as the disease is incurable, that is a cancer. We can only put that as a basic understanding of the cancer disease. To be more precise, the occurence of a cancer disease is when a tumor called "carcinoma" were found in our body (I will explain what carcinoma is in the latter section of this post). Three normal ways to have cancer disease; (1) genetic: from anyone within the three generations in your family tree to have such disease, (2) food: the lack of vitamins from food, mainly vitamin A, C, and E, and (3) habbits: try avoiding bad habbits such as smoking, drinking alcohols, hot water, taking drugs, etc.

Tumors can be categorized into two; the first is a normal tumor and the second is the "carcinoma". The difference between these 2 tumors is that the first type will only grow at a specific place in your body. So if the doctor successfully removed that tumor from your body, then you will be fine because it will not grow anymore except for different circumstances. If the tumor in a person's body is a "carcinoma", then that person will most probably die at any time. The reason is that this "carcinoma" tumor will infect other body organs in a very short term period. For example, if a "carcinoma" tumor is found in a person's liver, and he discovered it very early, then went for an operation. Even if the tumor is successfully removed from the liver, but it will still infect other organs in our body. Many people said that the lack of protien in our body will cause "carcinoma" to grow in a person's body. That is not true since currently, no evidence have proved that the lack of protien will cause cancer disease to spread in a person's body.


Caption: A picture of the "carcinoma" tumor

Let's go back to the human brain. I always think that the brain is the most important organ in a person's body. Actually, every organ in our body are equally important. The only difference is that once the brain is affected by different disease, causing it to die, then a person will die. Unlike our kidney, if one of the kidney is damaged, we still have another kidney to support us to continue living.


Caption: the internal section of a human's brain

The above is a depiction of a human's brain. You may see something like this if you split a person's brain into 2 :) lol. Anyway, i will explain how the operation in the brain works! Usually, a doctor will has no choice to operate the person's brain when they found a tumor in the brain. From my understand, brain are jello's. Dr. Rui gave me a more specific term to explain a brain. He said, "it looks something like those white soft thing, what is that called, hmm, oh yah, tofu" lol.


Caption: A picture of a tumor found in a person's brain

I took this picture from some webpages. According to Dr. Rui who had operated more than 100 people's head to save their lives from different disease, only around 10% of a person's brain is important, that is also the section of the brain that controls a person's sensory and perception. As long as this 10% of the brain is not damaged by anything, then you may still have a chance to survive from brain injuries. I remember a news a year ago, saying that a person survived from death when his head got shot. The bullet went through his head, deep into his brain and comes out from another part of his head. It means that the bullet actually went through his brain. Surprisingly, he still survived. Since the 10% of the brain plays the most important role in a brain, then I would not feel surprise of why is he still survived by now. He is probably the luckiest person in the world where the 10% of his brain was not shot.


Caption: the 10% of the brain highlighted in the central executive

If a tumor is found outside the 10% of the brain, then brain specialist would be able to operate his head and remove that tumor. Even if the tumor found in the brain is a spreading tumor like the "carcinoma", the doctor will still suggest to remove it. The reason is to prevent his patient from suffering the pain in his head. A tumor is divided into 2 sections, (a) liquid and (b) the solid cells.


Caption: an operation in the brain

I have tried looking all over the internet for a picture similar like this, in a more cartoonist version, and glad i found this. A picture of a real operation in the head will be really gross. Let me explain how the operation of the brain works. I will skip all those thorough understanding of how to detect tumor and disease in the brain with x-ray and ultrasound technologies.

Firstly, the person has to shave off his hair before the operation. In the operation room, the doctor will apply anticeptic to the patient, and will start removing the skin when he is unconcious (i think xray will determine where is the tumor and where to operate) with a normal knife. The person's head skull should be visible by then. Then, the doctor will use a special device, that looks like a driller to drill 4 holes on the skull to highlight that section where they going to operate later (I found this part very disgusting. Imagine someone is drilling my head). The doctor will then use a special knife (no pictures available) that will operate the skull. Since the 4 holes will outcome in a rectangular shape, the doctor will use this special knife to cut the skull and make it in rectangular shape (looks something like the picture in the above). According to Dr. Rui, the sharpened knife will move automatically, be able to cut the skull from one end to another in less than few seconds. The knife will automatically stop moving if it detected that the knife is going to reach to somewhere else. He will then remove the skull very slowly.

A person's brain is wrapped by three different layers, that is the membrane layer. The first layer is very thick, followed by the second and third layer. It gets thinner in the second and third layer. Do you know those silicon casing that we usually buy to protect our mobile phones? Yes! The first membrane layer will look so similar to that lol. Anyway, the doctor will cut the three membrane layers and form a cross shape (+). Then, the real brain operation of removing the tumor will begin.

Dr. Rui said that they usually use some kind of device, which looks like a long needle. This needle will act as a vacuum cleaner. The reason of using this needle is to remove the liquid section of the tumor. Because the tumor is visible, the doctor can remove the tumor entirely. After removing the liquid of the tumor with the needle, they will start removing the solid part of the tumor by operating the brain (removing the jello's). If you recall what I have included in the above, as long as the tumor is not affecting the 10% of the brain (in the central executive), then the doctor will still be able to remove the tumor. There is another alternative methods to remove a "casinoma" tumor than just operating the brain; that is to drill one little hole in the head (after applying anticeptic to the patient), and put a very tiny needle to vacuum the liquid in the brain. However, this method will not remove the tumor entirely since the brain is not operated, and that is why the exact location of the tumor is not visible. I think the reason is that a patient infected by this "casinoma" tumor in his brain will normally die at any time and since operating the brain is such a big operation, normally the doctor will not take such risk for the patient.

When the operation is over, the doctors will apply stitch to the first membrane layer (that looks as tough as silicon mobile phone casing lol). Once the second and third membrane layer is broke, there will be no way to refixing them. The doctor will then produce some tiny holes in the skull so they can stitch the skull the same way as stitching the membrane layer. Finally, they will stitch the skin again.


Caption: internal organs in a human's body

Besides just discussing about a human's brain, we did speak of the liver. I just realized that one of the liver's function is that to produce protien based on the amount of water that we consume, reacting with the acid animo contained in our body (something like that). The liver is something very fragile, and it only rely on the ribs to lift it in our body. It will be a long story anyway, so I am keeping it for different posts in the future.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Pasta: A Cooking Guide

Tracy is an old friend of mine, who can really cook delicious foods of any kind, has agreed to let me post her "secret receipe" of cooking a nice bowl of pasta :) I will post it here when the cooking guide is ready. Hopefully she will continue providing me some information of cooking other nice foods, and perhaps some photos of foods to make this blog much more interesting :P


Caption: White sauce pasta with mince chicken, and a variety of pasta noodles

Here is "Tracy's secret receipe for baking white sauce pasta".

She cooked many times for me in the past, and I think it tastes extremely delicious. Many friends who have gone through her cooking guide will normally success in producing something nice. I tried using the same method to cook for my brother, but it taste quite awful, lol. I can never be a good chef, and that's for sure.


Caption: Me in a chefs outfit, a picture taken in the KBU college studio to promote a new course

According to Tracy, you have 2 main steps. The overall cooking will take approximately 45 minutes.

Step 1: Buy a packet of pasta noodle (you may want to buy the shape of the pasta that you prefer - spirals, macaroni, penne, tagliatelle, and etc., and estimate the amount that you wanted to cook. Usually a big packet is enaugh for 4 people with big appetites. Cook the pasta noodles by filling it into a small wok (make sure the wok is filled with boiling water). Fill some oil (I strongly recommend to fill in some oil in the boiling water so the noodles will not sticked to the wok) and salt into the small wok, and make sure the noodle is not too soft when it is cooked. Before removing the pasta noodles from the hot small wok, fill some cold/warm water into the small wok for approximately 10 seconds (Tracy believes that the noodle is alot nicer to chew that way) before removing the water entirely from the wok. Make sure you have a "pyrex" container, or something equivalent to it on hand. Fill the cooked pasta into the container, add some butter and mixed it with the noodles (Tracy thinks that the melted butter will make the pasta taste better) and leave it somewhere.

Step 2: This is a step to produce the gravy (sauce). You need to prepare a box of mince meat (chicken / pork / beef). Tracy suggests around 400-500g for 4 person's meal, and 200-300g for 2 people. You also need some 'white' mushrooms (you can get them easily from grocery stores), some sliced onions, a bottle os pasta (white in colour, usually by "Dolmio"), black / white pepper powder, some salt, some sugar, and cheese (cheddar / mozarella, or etc.).

To cook the gravy, you must heat the sauce pan, and fill in some butter (she said that this is the same theory as if you were trying to fry some vegetables, you must have some oil in the pan). When the butter is melted (looks watery), fill the sauce pan with some sliced onions (and / or some garlic) and fry them well. Then, put the minced meat in the sauce pan and cook it. Add some salt and pepper, and perhaps with some sugar while cooking the meat (so the meat will taste better). Cook the sliced mushroom by mixing it with the other ingredients in the sauce pan. When the mushroom is around 85% cooked, add the pasta sauce into the pan. Then, add some grated cheese into the pan and cook it for a while. To make your pasta taste better, add some mixed herbs. Tracy believes that the more cheese you add into the gravy, the better taste it will produce.

Finally, pour the gravy very slowly onto the pasta on the "pyrex" container, grate some cheese on the top of the pasta and bake the pasta for at least 20 minutes (with 150-170 degree celcius in the oven). When you notice the cheese starts to turn a little brownish, immediately turn off the oven and remove the "pyrex" container.

The pasta is now ready, enjoy!