What If a Tree Fell in a Forest and No One Hears...

This is a classic philosophical puzzle: what if a tree fell in a forest and no one hears, did the tree fall? I take this essentially as a question on existence: does something exist if it does not register on anyone's mind? The tempted answer is yes followed by the further question "but how do you know that?" The difficulty lies in the confusion of the knowledge of existence and existence itself. In physics, quantum mechanics has provided an amazing distinction between the two and I shall explicate that in a later article.

My answer is simple. The event exists, i.e. the tree fell, and if you ask how I know it, I will respond: you just told me that. My point is that the knowledge of existence requires existence whereas the converse does not hold in general or there is no way to test such condition: in the example, you have to convey that to me in the question. Because for us to know that something exists, we must observe it, i.e. in daily experience, existence and our knowledge of it are bundled together. (That explains the common confusion of the two concepts.)

P.S. Existence is a deep issue in many disciplines and it fascinates me for long. I will try to remark on it from different perspectives in the future.

Anxiety over Options

I thought at length how to "allocate" my content on the web. Nowadays, in stark contrast to the past, there are many portals for hosting/presenting personal content: social network sites, blogs, video hosting sites, photo hosting sites, etc. Sometimes, this creates anxiety as where to share a specific piece of content: maybe LinkedIn for professional stuff, Facebook for fun, etc. And the ease-of-use offered does come with a price which is the uniqueness of representation, what many people long for. So I have come to these conclusions:

1. personal websites are definitely not dead yet and I think its niche lies in the radical pursuit of identity, e.g. it is cool to own the domain name same as your name.
2. there is inherent ambiguity in the intended use of web services, e.g. your mother just friended you on Facebook, using Google forms as database (I recently went to a business school workshop in which the speaker built his minimal viable product using free/very cheap web services), etc.

I think seeing all the web services as tools is helpful. Like what Marx once said, the discovery of functions of an object is history, as opposed to viewing functions of an object limited to its initial design. A good example is apple, i mean, a real apple, not Apple, Inc. Imagine that scientists discovered besides of being a delicious snack, some scientists discover its anti-cancer effect someday. It might be argued that the anti-cancer effect has always been a function of apples and my point is really about the human knowledge of functions. But that is crucial bit: even if the function is eternally associated with a certain object, it is useless without our discovering it (c.f. the question about existence). And in fact, I do not subscribe to the view of regarding functions as inherent properties of objects, but human constructs instead.

Okay, back to the question on personal content allocation, my solution is to use this blog really as a public log (the term blog came from web log) and will share most of my meaningful thoughts here for the ease to maintain (and then put the links onto other social sites) and build a very simple website as a portal for unique identity.

Polishing My Blog

As I have mentioned in a previous post, I stopped blogging for a while and I blogged when Wordpress did not exist (and Blogger was still Blogspot). The balance between ease to use and detailed customization is hard to achieve. Wordpress chose the radical strategy to provide its source code, thus the (almost) ultimate customizability while supporting an extensive set of add-ons (similar to blogspot's): I think the opensource aspect arguably popularized Wordpress and made its extensions more successful.

My experience with Wordpress comes from the building of a few websites for my friends and organizations: Moneythink China (http://www.moneythink.cn/) and CSSLC (the site I built was closed and this is the new site: http://csslc-focus.com/). Overall, I had a positive experience: there are some issues with add-on compatibility but it is not hard to fix it with some PHP knowledge.

I have played around with the new gadgets and customization Blogger provides over the weekend to polish my blog a bit. I started with a ready-made template by Awesome, Inc. for better browser compatibility (the dynamic template does not run on iPad) and adjusted some Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) code, added my own title background image (I guess I will call it Beyond Limits: it is a wooden fence common in Texas in the foreground) that suits the color theme of the template, drew my own favicon (and that was fun), etc. One complaint I have for Blogger is the long load time which is probably due to the amount of redundancy in CSS code:

the page is rendered 2.41s after GET request: I think that is quite slow considering that I have very little static assets on the page.

A cleanup of redundant CSS code is recommended by Google Chrome Developer Tools.

I am not surprised by the redundancy since the add-on's come with their CSS and the template will try to override them and then there is user customization but if a user is allowed to go in and have more control over how a page is rendered: in case of Wordpress, you can edit (almost) everything!

The other complaint I have is the customizability for the mobile template: the default page is usually clean and slick but the way how customized items from the web version are used in the mobile version is outside of user control and that might mess things up.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions about the look of my blog.