The worst thing ever to happen to a man, is that he would think less of himself and also is easily vulnerable. Think outside the box, depressions are there because you cause it yourself, or if you didn't cause it, you allowed it to take effect. Depression never takes effects if you won't allow them to.

Broaden life in ways you wanted to as an adult, and leave people's opinions against you  behind if they are really personal. If you care too much about others, you will be drowned in the swamp.

Happiness doesn't come to you no matter how successful you are; you choose to feel it whenever you want.

The project should really be treated as my baby -- only that way can I have to passion to push it day by day. Fighting the slackness really is painful, but that is the essence of growth. Come ON!

Ever since I entered college I have been learning so many different things. I changed my major in college once, and yet again when attending graduate school. Like all career would have a tough start, you know, as a layman to the field yet having to compete with peers already majored in it for years, I enjoyed trying not to be the good student, but the free style one. To be, as four years of college had made me sick of the GPA game, I started enjoying not having the pressure of GPA since the first day of graduate school. It in fact ended my years of misery in learning, turning my confrontation with any new fields into exciting adventures. Gee, I love this way!

In the world we live in, our very existence will make a difference. This gives a meaning to our lives. Think of each day as assigned to you to complete a mission, much as those you saw in movies. Real life is full of missions, you get lost if you can't define your objective. I've been lost for days, slacking off at first then lost as a consequences, seeking for the push to drag me back to reality, one that vitalizes the content of my days.

Sometimes I do feel lonely. It was a horrible feeling. I felt much like I had been isolated from the rest of the world, that no one understood what was torturing me. It is the lack of understanding, lack of communication at depth, and lack of such opportunities that have thrown me in such abyss.

An ordinary trick, for which I still can not think of a replacement, is to make calls to phone numbers my old acquaintances used to possess. Most of them are disconnected, but more of them I am not willing to dial. I fear, for indescribable reasons, that I may reach some one who I totally do not talk to, i.e. who does not really match my expectations for an attractive stranger.

Time flows regardless what I think. It is as simple as that. I see the world circles in an orbit. It starts at some point and comes back very much the same as it started. It is the tiny bit of change that we call evolution that faithfully recorded the progress (change), but unfortunately, we, as those who defined the fancy term evolution, do not have the vision to discern the difference, not to mention without dreams, none of us will live long enough to witness for ourselves the change.

Feeling alone, then lonely, I sometimes may feel even helpless. Talking to anyone I know won't help. It didn't help. Including my parents, who many of my friends suggested would be the most helpful of all. Unfortunately, the gap between us, both in terms of understanding and perception of things, is so huge, and our reluctance to try to bring our minds together grows bigger day by day, this seemingly good way looked not promising to me at all.

Then, what is my way out, I wonder. If I could ever get one? I do not know. I prefer to leave the future unknown. Unknown means there is hope, it means any thing, good or bad, can happen. It means, I have something to live for.

Stay in a project for a long time and constantly thinking about it helps me to get into a mode of focus. Doing overnight programming makes me feel that effect strongly. So dedication in one thing at least for a certain period of time is really a good way at the least for me to learn things and actually to achieve something.

I figured if I focus on something for a long time, like I did when I programmed overnight just to get ready for the meeting, I switch my mode of working or thinking to a long attention span. Knowing this is actually good in optimally direct my energy. I am not good at quick thinking but hopefully will be as good as others in terms of depth of thinking. I prefer take homes and lots of time spent on those projects.

• aim not too high for now I am learning stuff - or learning research
• keep on doing one thing till reaching some depth

If life emerged as a mathematical necessity, then subjected to natural selection on individual basis, would the life in particular for a person, be a predesigned event?

Quests for the mystery of organization have been endless. My quest for tantalizing but dangling laws of nature, witnessed daily yet escaped all but invariably, at all levels of observation, has been shuttling between passion and utter frustrations. Like most molting worms, people renew themselves both in body and mind. Inevitably, I felt very much the same way as I head alone for a life of my own on my own, facing ambiguity and uncertainty, making hard choices. One of the things, as you grow of age, is the easily elicited flash-backs when the proper triggers are pulled. Mental incentives, either as aucoustic notes or visual stimuli, come as harder strikes with the increment of age. The turbulence of earthly events pushed people to seek for the peace of mind, the Eden of free thoughts and complete release of intellectual power.

It is foolish to put career and family into separate boxes, but as a transit phase of social and cultural evolution, are we 1980's the ready for the new or the prepared for the old? It sounded as if this decade is destined to take a leap of faith a the forken road. Those heading for the unknown, convinced that they are capable of moulding the landscape, and thereby choosing their destiny at the mercy their own hands. The fearless 1980's. I'd embrace this idea, since I am avidly one of them, that instead of knowing where you are heading, the excitement came from what you can create. The impetus is the stimulating memories, positively modified or even tailored to the imaginary, springs ultimate force of marching, and the dare to chart the thorned lands. Belief in infinity gives birth to the creation of ultima, and the faith that an edge never is the edge, that inceasible power of mind and self-activating motives will perpetually drive the locamotion of the capable.

Back on a practical note, sometimes I thought if I could ever live my path all over again, should I be endorsing history or rather create yet another trajectory looked more plausible in my current eyes. Thoughts on that, more often than not, have gone with the wind, with the ecstasy that we are at home in the universe, capable of all creation.

With a constant bewildering of redefining meaning of existence, as socially collapsed entities, with individuality so much readily distinguished as inherent character craves, I, descendant of ancient spirits for my clan, have sought for more than years of knowledge to even getting started to addressing this question. Sitting, or more often standing in the niche of the universe as it is currently defined, probed and depicted, the question extend to more than earthly concerns would have ever come to contact with.

Recent effort, much less perhaps, but more of an attempt to uncover partly what my inheritance come from, I had been engaged in a lot of conversations with people I never thought I would care to know, if I were the old me, that is. It turns out more than surprising that I almost surely found a girl that resembles me in every respect except for gender. The genetic comparison has yet to be made, but the resonance of mind reminds me of belong to something bigger than the organization of the biosphere than it may have seem to be.

The cosmic waves may not just be peculiar to the void of outer space; we also emit them. The interference of those waves may have resulted in many things that currently escapes a lot of the scientists' notice. In an effort to try to find my other part, I am starting to realize that there are questions, seriously independent of what I initially set out to look for, that solicits my attention, so much that I even started to ignore the temptation of getting what I sought for. The very existence of such phenomena begs an explanation, an answer which by itself will unveil serendipities that go far beyond the cortex power of our limited minds.

Upon that note, I almost embedded myself in the thinking, less specific to myself but to the larger landscape, the endless chain of inquisitions would have been ejected, should it being unleashed in another way. Herein, lies what inevitably would emerge for the progress of our understanding - heresy at first as it may seem - but more excitement, elevated to the highland of spiritual realm, that would likely point to the elucidation of the big whys on our very existence.

I don't know why, but they just do not give progeny. Something is wrong with the genetic background, b/c I couldn't have possibly screwed up all the injections. The worms looked fine after injection, and they move properly. I hope RNAi by feeding or the next repeated injection on this strain will yield either better results or confirm what I have said as truth of the story.

I thought, but not. Why?
Thoughts flow without threads, and started aimless Brownian motion. Stochastic processes => chaos? No.
I know time has been incorrectly imposed. The wrong time. Two years.
The trajectory of my life so far may also have been ill-posed. Things don' t feel right. Looks as if everything is wrong.
I said, go, Xianrui.
You should go, ahead, not backwards. I know you well, Xianrui; you are never scared of physical torment, it is full of your life ever since you were born.
But I know you will get burned out by mental torment. The feel of incorrectness instead of a defeating fiasco that would set you on fire.
There are many why's. Unfortunately you are not permitted to have full access to their answers.

In your career, you did what you need to get to where you are. And you are where you are.
In your life, you are at the mercy of fate, with your mental strength exercised by brutal torture of betrayal, confinement of power, and the ultimate pain of seeing, chained, what you connected with you life taken away in front of your eyes.

This is a recursive call of the program. It does not have a converging point. Each time it does something different, but invariably brings you pain. The pain wears your mind, to the very core that once exposed will separate you from the rest of the world. Lights and spirits, answer your calls, leaving you in the peace that drives all your earthly traits to extinction.

I heard your cry for salvation. I trembled when you send your pain that is tearing you asunder. Remember the Teresa of the faint smile and Clair? You were born to undergo all the pain, their purpose is to wear you out till you show your true self, the strongest, maybe ruthless self. Loneliness is the payment for being you, suffering is the vaccine of your daemonic power.

This guy is REALLY cool and funny.

After days of depression I was finally able to find my passion for science back from the talk... Any truly great discovery in science starts with the interest in the question you asked itself. So for the seminal discoveries in biology, lots of important things are found simply because of the passion in the biological question itself - and that drives the passion to learn mathematical and computational tools to explain and explore the questions. So in this sense, the scientists in this field are biologists at the core - but also versatile on the surface. Devotion of passion to one subject at a time and get motivated that way is a good way to make discoveries; that way your life is much less likely to be miserable. Also, as serendipity, that might well sparkle inspirations as discoveries in your field moves on to the ecstasy of elucidation. Comes with the joy is the interest in other tools or logic that inherently underlie the phenomena, and the abstract nature of the phenotype we observe.

Graphical illustrations adapted from NASA and from news.nationalgeographic.com , 2007.
The eclipse will take place at around 3am on 28th Aug., and observable in Western United States.

I made a wish to the full moon.