19 things I don’t understand
My recent Medium stories/posts/articles/whatever you call them are not getting any recommends lately. If you see an article of mine with only one recommend, the sad loner who recommended is probably me. I am not even recommending my latest post anymore because it might look even more depressing if I do.
Despite the lack of recommends, Medium notifications keep coming because I have been getting followers on Medium this week. I don’t understand what’s happening. I get it if someone read my article, recommend me, then follow me. This would signify that someone like what I wrote and wanted more from me. But now a bunch of people seem to have found me and decided to follow me here. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know where they’re from. They just keep coming. I don’t understand.
To make the best out of this situation, I decided to pen down 19 things that I also don’t understand:
- Why people use forks to eat rice. This is not a Western-specific phenomenon. This happens in Hong Kong as well. I have dined with local Hong Kong people who opt for a fork to spoon their rice from a dish given that a wide selection of utensils is available. Doesn’t the gaps in between the tines of a fork make it inefficient to transport a large number of small entities, a.k.a grains of rice difficult? Isn’t a spoon obviously deemed more useful for such a task? Not to mention a spoon can also be used to scrape the remaining few grains of rice at the bottom of the bowl.
Writing this paragraph led me to this particular Google search, which is pretty fascinating for an English language learner like me. - How Wi-Fi and microwave transmit data. All of my high school physics books simply stated that they transmit data. I understand that all information can be encoded into zeroes and ones, and how the zeros and ones can be represented by ons and offs in electrical signals through copper cables and in lights through optical fibres. But what represents the zeros and ones in wireless communications? My laptop is currently working on Wi-Fi, and I have absolutely no idea.
And how do mobile networks work? Signal towers send and receive signals from all the nearby mobile phones. How the hell do they identify the phones from each other? How does microwave, which is used to heat food up, also used to communicate with handheld devices (phones) so that the phone speaker knows how it should vibrate to produce the exact sound from the other end? And all of these happen instantaneously.
Other than phone calls, mobile networks now also need to handle the Internet. How. How is the transmission of accurate information done with the microwaves, a.k.a little vibrations in air particles? Or does microwave work that way? I have no idea even though I have spent 4 years of my life studying Physics. The data companies often call their different Internet services 2G, 3G, and 4G. I have been told my ICT teacher that G stands for generation, and the latest generation provides the fastest communication speed. So I kept imagining a bunch of mailmen on the tracks of a sports ground, each holding an envelope of information and running their fastest to deliver the envelopes. And because rich people have paid more, their mailmen can run on tracks with boosters and deliver cat pictures faster.
I think people familiar with the workings of the Internet are laughing at me fervently after reading this. - Job interview timings. Should job interviews be in office hours or out of the hours? If an interviewee takes leave from their current job to meet with interviewers during office hours, wouldn’t the interviewee looks irresponsible? I mean, now you can’t rule out the possibility that the same interviewee will take leave during their next job to interview for another job.
I once changed the time of a teaching job interview for three times because I didn’t want to be an irresponsible teacher in the teaching program which I am currently a part of. The school didn’t seem to understand and asked me to go to their interview at 2 pm. Did they want an irresponsible individual working as a teacher in their school? - When and how allergy started occurring in humans. Doctors said that allergies are caused by the immune system mis-recognising normal stuff as their target. Some people said that the immune system started going bonkers because the modern world is too clean and the immune system needs something to attack. But would my allergies be cured if I am put in a dust-ridden alleyway? No. My immune system would not stop being a little bitch and start attacking things that matter. Instead it would overreact and straight up kill me.
It is probably a matter of inheritance and genes. - How AI learns. If AI learns by randomizing something then “strengthening the connection” to the right choices, doesn’t that mean that they are only generating random results, limiting the results to the right ones, then generating again? My professor kept saying it doesn’t work that way, and that the machine is “learning” instead. I don’t get it.
- Why our clothing affects people’s judgement. Some pretentious fashion-savvy people once said that the T-shirt you wear represents a message you want to send. Meanwhile, I am wearing a tee with ten or so roses forming a big red heart on my chest. I am neither particularly romantic nor a fan of love. My mum bought the tee for herself and insisted that I wear it today as it is hot outside and this is the thinnest shirt. So now I am wearing this tee and hating myself. After a while I found it silly that I was hating myself for this trivial reason. With that thought in mind I typed up this paragraph.
- Why fast food restaurants come up with any sales tactics other than refining their available food items. They keep coming up with new food products. Just stick to improving your original hamburgers, fried chicken, beef rice or whatever you sell and customers will come. Why bother coming up with new dishes?
- Traditional Chinese medicine. The whole discipline is based on trial and error of the effects of different herbs. The “father” of Chinese medicine isn’t someone from verifiable history; it was a guy with a transparent stomach from ancient legends. The discipline is also based on a model of the human body which involves balancing yin-yang and chi and these concepts make no sense in modern science. If I tell anyone, in English, that I am going to heal a patient by balancing their spiritual energy and restoring a certain wholeness in their bodies, they will immediately dismiss me a scammer. But somehow the “Chinese medicine knowledge” is treated as ancient wisdom.
Because of some common “Chinese medicine knowledge”, my mum told me to not eat beef, seafood, duck, goose, mushrooms, eggs, and any fried food in order to stop my eczema from further deteriorating. Now all I can consume is water and sadness. - How people become food critics. Fine dining restaurant owners are scared shitless when food critics walk in, but how did they start their career? As journalists? Who are they to judge? Do they spend their own money on food? Do they just start eating and writing until somebody reads their articles and agrees with what they write?
- Why people buy brand name products. Most of the bags and clothes are not particularly useful or classy. I understand it when people opt for brand name sport shoes as these brands stress on how their product design can help boost sport performance. Nothing is worse than wearing an uncomfortable shoe. I also understand why uneducated rag-to-riches buy brand name products because buying an expensive bag or watch to show people is the most direct way to declare that they are rich. What I don’t get is why my high school’s Discipline Master, who is a degree holder of not just any degree, but a B.A. in English, giddly participates in brand name company promotional events, purchases handbags from said brands, and shares the experience on Facebook. I thought any sane person can see through these company’s marketing ploy.
- Why sense of achievement is considered a legitimate motivation for students in the education field. Sense of achievement can be easily gained from any other sources of entertainment. The only thing that pushed me to learn is wonder, the desire to explain the unknown, the desire to just know. “Students will be more willing to do the tasks and learn if they get a sense of achievement,” my current teaching director said. If the same thing pushes them to play pointless computer games, it shouldn’t be considered as a worthy thing.
- Why my student can’t capitalise English words properly.
The same student also doesn’t know how to spell the word “die”. - Why the Hong Kong Education Bureau requires teachers to undergo a chest x-ray to prove that they are healthy. I am told by the elementary school who employed me that the government requires all personnel in elementary schools to get a chest x-ray. Out of all the body checks, how and why did they decide on a chest x-ray? X-ray is radioactive and should be avoided at all cost. If someone has a medical condition and cannot get the X-ray scans, does that mean they are not healthy enough to teach? What kinds of medical conditions can you hide with other forms of medical checks, but can’t be hidden with a chest X-ray? If they are trying to prevent contagious diseases from spreading, based on the same logic, shouldn’t teachers be banned from school if they have a flu? Shouldn’t teachers’ bowels also be checked just in case they have cholera.
- Why self-motivation and long-term commitment is so effing difficult. I am just trying to create something instead of consuming, but my asshole brain doesn’t like it.
- Why this man decided to write songs like this one for a living.
- Why people think being a teacher is a relaxing job. They need to work during summer holidays, need to fill in forms to get fundings for school operations, need to attend boring meetings and pretend to improve the school, and, the most soul-sucking of all, they need to arrive school at 7:30am every weekday, while pretending to be fully functioning adult in front of their students.
- Why when an office worker support a football team and stay up to do so, it is normal; but when I spend time playing an online game where I also get to meet other players in real life, I am withdrawn, delusional, and “staring at a screen all the damn time like other useless millennials”.
Ok, playing that online game is pointless; but so is watching football matches at 4 am while drinking beer and eating Doritos. - Why Gmail auto-sends the email you are typing when you press “tab”. No sane email service providers would include a shortcut key for sending an email. I learnt about this the hard way.
- How birthday works if you are born in a foreign country. Two people, born at the same time, can have different birthdays simply because of time differences in different countries. I was born in 30 Nov 1995 in Canada, but I am raised and currently living in Hong Kong. So should my birthday be celebrated on 1 Dec in Hong Kong? My mum said if I was born in December, I would have spent my school life with kids born in 1996 and I might have an advantage. Does it even matter? Time and time differences just confuse me in general.
(94/100)
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