I don't know anything

12:04 AM (of Monday, August 26th 2024)

Today is Sunday, August 25th 2024 and the more I learn, the more I realize how little I actually know. Less than an hour ago, I learned of the 24 Solar Terms. It's basically this concept similar to the four seasons in the Gregorian calendar which is the standardized calendar used worldwide. Different civilizations worldwide already chronicled of the four seasons, including China. However, in addition to the four seasons, the Chinese split up the year into 24 parts known as the 24 solar terms.

Sort of like how the four seasons aren't officially part of the Gregorian calendar, the 24 solar terms are an informal part of the Chinese calendar. So they have their 12 months like we do (in leap years they have 13 months), but their years are also split into 24 solar terms, again similar to how we split up a year into 4 seasons. Like I mentioned before, they also do understand and use the four seasons concepts of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, but in addition, they split it up into 24 parts.

That's pretty insane to learn of. Everything is more complicated in China. Traditional Chinese has a character for every single word. The average Chinese person knows 6000 characters, and there are more than 100,000 characters. It is no wonder then, that in the video "are Chinese people good at math?" when the interviewer asked random people on the street, everyone answered "what's the square root of 289?" correctly. That is pretty crazy. And several of the people answered with "I'm not very good at math" or "I haven't done any math since I was in school." The standards and educational competition in China must be insane.

They created and use the 24 solar terms to dictate their farming practices. During one period is when "insects awaken" and you are supposed to do so-and-so for farming. Another period is "white dew" where so-and-so happens, and you are supposed to do so-and-so. I use "so-and-so" because I'm not sure what happens and I don't know what they are supposed to do per solar term, but they learn of those things culturally. There's traditions with each one too, such as drinking white wine made from rice to celebrate the start of the white dew solar term.

The problem with being a westerner is that we only learn things from the west. Ancient Greek history, Ancient Roman history, American History, Christian history. I love and appreciate these cultures and their histories as each one also had prominent vegan/vegetarians in their respective time periods, such as Pythagoras of the Pythagorean theorem and Zeno the founder of stoicism, and a few others. The problem is, we learn of Isaac Newton and Leibniz and their creation of Calculus, but the Chinese have their Isaac Newton equivalents who used math similar to Calculus, thousands of years ago.

There's a book called The Nine Chapters on Mathematical Art (that's the Chinese to English translation of the book), published in 2nd century BCE. Pythagorean Theorem did come first, as it was discovered around 6 BCE, but the 9 chapters has their own independent discovery of the Pythagorean theorem. It also had a very close approximation of Pi that the west wouldn't match until 16th century CE (I'm just taking this stuff from the Wikipedia). It also has the concept of calculating by using infinite smaller parts, similar to calculus, in that book. The book has a bunch of different mathematical concepts on geometry, arithmetic, linear problems, and so on, organized in a way differently from the West.

It is interesting that we learn of math in roughly this order: Arithmetic, units (fractions, decimals, etc), pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, algebra 2, pre-calculus, calculus, and so on. After calculus then you can choose to do calculus 2 or discrete math or statistics or some other math, at the same time or at different times. I actually thought the Chinese organized and taught their math differently, but I asked ChatGPT, and it says that it is similar in China, except it is also slightly different, as they also learn of statistics and probability in middle school along with geometry.

Anyway, worldwide we use the Arabic numeral system of 0 to 9 digits, every culture in the world uses it. We also use the Gregorian calendar worldwide, everyone uses it. English is the standard language worldwide, practically everyone knows it and those that don't understand at least a little of it. The thing is, along with these standards, the Chinese also have their own traditional number system that we never learn of. They have their own traditional calendar that we never learn of. They have their own language that we never learn of. But, they learn English too.

If you speak English to a Chinese person who claims "they don't speak English" you can still communicate with them. They will know all the basics such as hello, yes, no, some basic verbs like go, eat, drink, some basic nouns like building or person, and basic pronouns like him or her. If you go to an English person who claims "they don't speak Chinese" they literally might not any words such as the basic ni hao (hello), shi (yes), bu or bu shi (no), or any basic verbs like qu (go) or lai (come). There would be no communication possible.

I think this is a major weakness of the west. The East understands all of Western culture. The West understands little of Eastern culture. They know George Washington, Alexander the Great, Isaac Newton, Pythagoras. We don't know any of their George Washington equivalents (I'd say it's the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang), Alexander the Great equivalents (I'd say also probably the first emperor of China because we don't know about him, but maybe Genghis Khan would be), Isaac Newton equivalents and Pythagoras equivalents.

The east definitely have their own famous ancient mathematicians too who discovered a lot of mathematical concepts that the west does not popularly give them credit for discovering, even if they discovered that concept earlier. I read some of their Wikipedia pages but I don't remember any of their names. Chinese names are just hard to remember. I had to look up Qin Shi Huang even though I've already seen and read his name a bunch, I actually know of his history, how he ruled Qin and conquered all the other Chinese states, and he's mentioned in a lot of anime.

I read an article that in academics, there are far more significant papers published in China than in the west. Novel discoveries and ideas, published in Chinese publications that the west has little access to, because we can't read Chinese. The Eastern academics often read publications done in the west, any new novel ideas or discoveries or concepts that the West publishes, the East will pick up on right away, because they can read it. Anything new that they discover, we don't really pick up on until later.

It could be that they publish a way to reduce electrical usage of something by 50% and everyone in China starts using it. Then it takes the west like months to catch up and understand the concepts, because it references 30 other Chinese studies who reference 200 other Chinese studies and so on, on some concept they are only studying in China but the West never picked up on. A basic example of a concept the West won't pick up on but the east has multitudes of studies on, is Chinese calligraphy for example. Although I wouldn't know what they were, I'm sure there are some computer or electrical or AI related topics that only the Chinese are studying, but the West has no idea it even exists.

ff the West were studying some concept, the East would know about it. Re-using that basic example above, the western equivalent would be English cursive, the Chinese study it and know it, most of them can probably read it, and they have studies on it too. I'm actually sure there are actually some niche studies on Chinese calligraphy from the west, but most of us don't know or understand any of it.

Even though I have the appearance of an Easterner, I am a Westerner. All my culture and language, the history I grew up learning, is from the west. I consider myself fully American. So, I don't know anything about the East basically.

Someone from the East could be reading this entire entry and understand all of it. If they wrote some reply to it in Chinese, I wouldn't understand it. I wouldn't even know it existed, and I would probably never know nor find out if it did.

The world is actually so much more complicated than we think. Even though it's there every night, most of us don't look at the stars or moon nor understand the astronomy or moon phases. The Chinese calendar is based on the moon cycles, with each month spanning one full moon cycle.

My specialty is computers. I know a lot about them, I know how to program, how websites operate and run, I know how to make apps and websites. I know about their intricacies of servers, domains, TLDs, frontend, backend, databases, Internet protocol layers (TCP, IP, TLS/SSL), i know UI/UX, several programming languages and their intricacies (data structures, control flow, etc). That's my profession, specialty, and what I do for work. I kinda listed a top level view of things, but I know so many intricacies of each, like I know several frontend frameworks, several backend frameworks, several databases (MySQL, Postgres, NoSQL, MongoDB, etc). I also know security, automation, hacking related subjects, like I really specialize in this subject and area of computers.

These subjects are actually difficult to learn and most people don't know about them. On our drive to a gas station today, because my mom wanted to fill up the car (because she normally has my dad do it and she doesn't have much experience in filling up the car, so she asked my dad to take her and I volunteered to go along too, so we all went on a trip to a gas station so she could fill it up). Anyway, on that drive, I asked my parents some basic-to-me questions, like what is the "www.website.com" format called? (domain). What is the ".com, .org, .net, etc" called? (top level domain). I asked them how to display a website, how a website even operates, how to display text on a website, etc, and they couldn't answer any of them, or they did, but incorrectly.

It is interesting that it is basic knowledge to me but they don't know it. I actually need to refresh a lot of this knowledge. I have to take a course on app development again because it's been a while. I noticed today that three of my websites were down and I didn't even realize it. The credit card for them for some reason stopped working, so their hosting renewal didn't work.

People use websites and apps every day of their lives but they don't know how it operates. One thing I don't know anything about how it operates is the GPS. Yeah they use satellites and local wi-fi networks to triangulate where we are, but the calculations and the drawing of the maps, and calculating the optimal route, and notifying if there's traffic, and so on, that stuff must be insanely hard. I don't know any of it. I am surprised companies just provide this service for free, when something this complicated, I'm sure they could charge $50 a month for.

If GPS didn't exist, and we had to travel places by using book maps, would most people pay $50 a month to have the GPS? What about $100 a month? I'm sure most would still say yes. So that's why I'm surprised GPS is free.

Computers are really cheap too for what they do. Same with phones. I'm surprised phones aren't $10,000 each for the value that they provide and the insane technology within them. Being able to call or message anyone anywhere? The ability to look up any information anytime anywhere? That's insane value. Someone in the 1500s would call this wizardry or witchcraft. I'm surprised computers aren't $100,000 each considering how powerful they are, and how computers like the Eniac the 1950s were millions of dollars in today's rate, and they perform a billionth slower than today's laptops.

If laptops today were transported to 1950, they would be worth quadrillions of dollars for the value they provide. Even displaying a single pixel on a screen, in color, was an extreme luxury, let alone the millions of pixels on our monitors today, plus the ability to play music, and so on. I wouldn't be able to make a laptop from scratch even if I spent 100 years on it I think. It's way too complicated a subject. Making the processor, the hard drive, the power unit, everything from scratch. Plus the operating system and everything that it runs on. I think it takes several lifetimes to learn the knowledge and discipline from all these fields. We take it all for granted, and it's so cheap.

It's so cheap that working a minimum wage job just putting items on a shelf, with a few weeks worth of work, is enough to purchase these marvels of technology that would take lifetimes to recreate. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That's what we have today. Technology that is indistinguishable from magic, and yet all of us, the masses, just take it for granted. It is not gatekeeped, everyone has access to it, and I am surprised everyone has access to it. If an "elite" class truly existed, they would not allow everyone to have access to the same things they do, that's how we know they don't exist.

Anyway, I can't really say I did much productive things today. The most productive thing was probably going to the gym and exercising, though I think I off-set that by eating too much.

I noticed that today I no longer had my blue checkmark on X, so now my posts are now getting significantly less views. Prior, I would get a lot of views because I had that blue checkmark. I subscribed to their premium service when X first came out with it, and then I unsubscribed after a few months. For some reason, they never took away the blue checkmark, so I just had it and its privileges for like two years, until just a few days ago. I need to subscribe again if I want my posts to be viewed more again. I try to make some vegan activism post daily to get people to consider stopping torturing and killing animals, and I think it helps.

From a self-fulfillment perspective, I do feel like my life has more of a purpose when I am advocating against oppression. I think most people feel purposeless when they think everything is well with the world and that there are no social causes to advocate for.

Anyway, that was my day today.