Today I received a surprise present from another enthusiast of Steve Job’s Stanford speech. It’s the back cover of the last issue of the “Whole Earth” magazine Steve Jobs referred to in his speech.
WOW!
I will revamp the speech audio download site soon to include the full size picture of the cover along with other helpful details.
The text is a bit hard to read. It says “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” A special thank you is extended to Dave Williams for sending me this picture.
A couple of years ago, former U.S. president Bill Clinton delivered an excellent speech at The University of Texas at Austin.
The elegance and sophistication of his speech makes him by far the best public speaker I have seen. Steve Jobs does give great presentations from time to him. But he’s a salesman and that’s what he does best. However, people who attend his presentations usually walk away with reality distortion field affect. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, nails his points with impeccable logics and concisely worded reasons. I can’t see how anybody can debate with him and win.
I tried recording the live streaming of the speech but failed. I am so worried that someday it may not be accessible anymore. But in the meantime, his speech can be accessed from Apple’s site here.
I’d also visit the William J. Clinton Foundation website for transcripts and videos from his other speeches. Very inspirational.
I realize something crazy like this is going to happen sooner or later, but I am completely unprepared for this news reported by Wired (Giving Genetic Disease the Finger):
Scientists are closing in on techniques that could let them safely repair almost any defective gene in a patient, opening the door for the first time to treatments for a range of genetic disorders that are now considered incurable.
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“This doesn’t just deliver a foreign gene into the cell,” said Nobel Prize winner and CalTech President David Baltimore, who with a Sangamo paper co-author Mathew Porteus proposed this method to cure genetic diseases. “It actually deletes the miscoded portion and fixes the problem.”
Modern science has prolonged life, now it’s going to extend life beyond the scope of human’s natural normality to live. But then, it’s not all happy news. Scientists caught some side-affects early on:
One trial that did succeed, but then ended in tragedy, was a 2002 French X-linked SCID trial that used retroviruses to deliver a new gene into the patients. The new gene cured the disease in 12 patients, but went on to cause leukemia in three of them. It turned out the foreign gene, in addition to producing the protein that vanquishes X-linked SCID, had the unexpected side effect of sometimes turning on a cancer-causing gene.
But the latest technique from CalTech supposedly fixed that problem. Long term effects are never easy to assess: Who knows what this new method will cause over a person’s life time, or worst, passing the problematic gene in question to the future generations. Talk about home-made genetic mutations!
Found this poem a few weeks ago while going through my “inspiration chest”. Before it gets pushed to the back of my consciousness again, I thought posting it on my blog would be a good reminder for myself.
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too nearyour slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first roseor if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands— e.e. cummings
Read more about E.E. Cummings here.
Grace and I are convinced cats are definitely much more self-concious than many anti-cat people project them to be. They KNOW what’s going on.
Grace and I are convinced cats are definitely much more self-concious than many anti-cat people project them to be. They KNOW what’s going on.
Our cats are good examples, particularly Baobao.
Babao understands quite a lot of vocabularies from Grace and I. She knows when Grace asks her to get her cat salad every morning; and she understands to meow and sit before I’d let her outside (and she knows it when I become annoyed at her repeated begging at 2AM sometimes). These could be viewed as training through habbits. But we think it’s more than just that.
Both Baobao and Wawa know their names very well. Wawa always turns her head and looks into your eyes when you call on her. Baobao comes to you when you call her name (after a few times). And the funny thing is, sometimes Baobao pretends she doesn’t hear you when she sleeps. But you know it’s a dead give-away when her tail wags as soon as her name is called. If you keep calling, she’d open her eyes, roll and go back to sleep. What a bum.
We think Baobao has a better grasp of human technologies than Wawa. She understands that when it’s cold, cuddling inside blankets keeps her warm — and two layers are better than one. During the winter, if you can’t find Baobao anywhere else in the house, try under the blanket. Baobao is also a fan of, well, fan. Not equipped with a central air, our new apartment gets pretty warm in the summer. Baobao has discovered that, if she sleeps at Grace’s spot on our bed, she gets the maximum coverage to the wind from the fan. Grace even observed Baobao experimenting with walking around different spots of the bed to make sure that her spot was the coolest. What the hell!
Wawa is not quite as alert as Baobao at times, however. But she did demonstrate her loyalty to Grace in an incident.
As mentioned earlier, our house gets a lot of cat visitors. One of the cats usually comes by once a day to check out our cats. But one time she was unpleasantly surprised by Grace’s sudden appearance in the kitchen when the alley cat obviously wanted to be alone with Wawa. Aggregated, she hissed at Grace. Surprisingly, Wawa immediately hissed back at the alley cat to show her loyalty with Grace. The message got through; the alley cat quietly accepted the challenge and she never hissed at Grace again.
Some hard core Christians once told me that only humans have souls. The rest of the animal kingdom is simply accessories to men. Other animals have no souls or feelings. This is what really ticked me off about certain clans of the Christian religion. How can they be so self-righteous and proclaim to be above all else in nature? How can they reject signs of intelligence exhibited by species other than humans? This kind of stupidity is what will put an end to men’s misery when we destroy ourselves with pollution and irreversable destruction of the Earth.
Even animals have feelings. Unfortunately I can’t say the same about some humans.
Last night I accidentally discovered a mother cat with two tiny kittens by our front door. Fearing that I might harm her babies, the mother instinctively hissed at me continuously and refused to abandon her kittens. I opened the door to take a closer look at the kittens (must be around 5 weeks old), one kitten followed the mother and dashed towards the garage (back of the house).
What happened to the other kitten?
I looked around the front lawn and found her hiding in a ditch used to collect the water hose. Thinking she’s trapped, I tried to grab her with my right hand, but of course, animals don’t need pathetic human’s help. At 5 weeks old, she leaped upwards, with her claws barely hanging on to the side of the relatively deep ditch, and helped herself out of the hole in a hurry (but unusually calm manner). As my eyes followed her “escape” towards the garage, I realized that her mother and sibling had not abandoned her after all. They were waiting anxiously for me to disappear so that they could return to find their kin.
Even animals, cats in this case, have the instinct to stay behind to make sure their troubled kin would be fine, I wonder why some humans run the opposite direction as soon as they smell trouble with their friends or relatives. Worse, Grace and I are disappointed there are those who would do all they can to STOP others from helping those in need.
What kind of sick human nature is that?
Stupid human beings.