Curiosity

Adam and Eve

I’ve been thinking about what “Curiosity” is — What am I curious about? Does it make me who I am? What does this mean? Generally speaking, I realized my interest is two fold — things I can learn about and things I can do.

It’s counter-constructive to explain ‘doing’ in words, so I decided to compromise and attempt to compile a list of subjects/things/people I’ve been interested in over the years… Few of the topics I’ve obsessed about and still do, some subjects I used to be more interested but not as much any more, some subjects I don’t know much but I’d like to know more about. So here it is:

Philosophy/Way of thinking/Religion/Mythology

Pre-socratic Greek Philosophy, Heraclitus and his fragments, Plato and the metaphor of the Cave, Aristotle, Socrates his arguments, The Death of Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations, David Ricardo and Political Economies, Karl Marx and The Communist Manifesto, Jean-Jacque Rousseau and the Social Contract, Thomas Kuhn and structural revolutions, Jean Piaget and Child Psychology, Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, Camus and The Stranger, Sartre and The Wall, Baudrillard and “Simulacra & Simulacrum”, Existentialism, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein and Logical Postivism, Ferdinand de Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Structuralism, Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology, George Bataille and The Accursed Share, Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Barthes, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and Semiotics, Hagakure, Book of Five Rings, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Critique of Reason and Noumenon, thing-in-of-itself ( Ding an sich ) Spinoza, Japanese Zen Buddhism, Calvinism, Gnosticism, The Knights Templars, The Crusades, Catholicism, Martin Luther and the Reformation, The Counter reformation, The Spanish Inquisition, Islam, Judaism, Book of Ecclesiastes, The Pauline epistles, The Dead Sea Scrolls, The First Council of Nicea, The Establishment of the Nicene Creed, The Bhaghavadgita, Greek Mythology, Ovid and The Metamorphoses, Norse Mythology, Japanese Mythology, Bushido.

Fiction/Literature/General discourse

The Greek Tragedies, Oedipus, Tolstoy, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Dostoevsky: Brother Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Kafka short stories like “In the Penal Colony”, Memoirs of Hadrian, Homer’s Odyssey, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Joyce’s Short story: “The Dead”, Issac Asimov and “I, Robot”, Bucky Fuller and his novellas, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” and other Phillip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem’s “Solaris”, Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories “Spring in Fialta” and Lolita, T.S. Eliot and The Four Quartets, Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, E.E. Cummings, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw and his plays, W.B. Yeats and The Second Coming, Gabriel Rafael Marquez and the 100 years of Solitude, Herman Hesse – Narcissus and Goldmund, Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hesse’s Siddartha, Pablo Neruda, Kawabata Yasunari, Kenji Miyazawa, Yukio Mishima, Ernest Hemingway short stories, Hills Like White Elephants, William Faulkner, Faust and Goethe, Schiller, Thomas Mann and Death in Venice, Walter Benjamin and “Aura”, Eugene O’Neill, Machiavelli and The Prince, Discourses on Livy, Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol and the Overcoat, Anton Chekov short stories, Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and the Margarita, Victor Hugo – Les MIserables, Arthur C. Clarke, George Orwell -1984, Catch 22, Anthony Burgess, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, J.D. Salinger.

Non-fiction/Politics/History

Meiji Restoration, Innovation taking place on a massive scale during the events leading up to the Meiji Ishin/Restoration, The Edo Period, The English-Satsuma War, The English-Choshu War, The Boshin War, The Meiji Revolution, The Japanese-Russo War, The Peloponnesian War, The French Revolution, The American Revolution, The Federalist Papers, The Declaration of Independence, The Bolshevik Revolution, World War I, World War II, Industrial Revolution, Napoleon and 1812, the sack of constantinople, Umayyad conquest of Hispania, Genghis Kahn, Mongol Empire, The Holy Roman Empire (Byzantine), British Empire, Colonization of Africa, Colonization of East Asia, the Battle of Waterloo, the history of capitalism, the history of corporation, the history of insurance, the history of marine insurance, history of corporations, the history of Christianity, the history of Israel, the history of the British Isles, the history of the Silk Road, the history of the Balkans & Kosovo, the history of Mount Everest and Sir Edmund Hilary, the Watergate scandal, Bob Woodward, JFK, Martin Luther King Jr and the Civil Rights movement, the history of the Iraq War, the history of the First Gulf War, Events leading up to the Iraq War, Wars, Robert Baer’s “See No Evil”, The Porter Hypothesis, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Tesla, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Exergy flows, Spare Crude Capacity and Oil price dynamics, global oil market, green investment strategies, biofuel strategies and trajectories, unconventional oil, Orinoco Oil Belt and Alberta Tar Sands, Climate Change, global security consequences of U.S. oil dependency, Creative Commons, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig, Renewable energy especially in the Transportation sector, The Consequences of Resource wars, the history of space exploration, Apollo, Gemini, Mercury projects, STS projects, NASA, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, history of Innovation, history of technology, history of technological innovation and Kuhnian paradigm shifts, history of the internet, history of the future.

Math/Science

Maxwell and electromagnetism, Kirchoff and the circuit laws, Boltzmann and his statistical interpretation of The Second law of Thermodynamics, Thermodynamics, Max Planck and black body radiation — Planck’s constant, The advent of Quantum Mechanics, Einstein and the Special and General Theory of Relativity, Niels Bohr and the Atomic Model, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Schrödinger’s Cat and the Schrödinger’s equation, Enrico Fermi and the discovery of the Neutrino, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and Networks, CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, SLAC, quantum computing, biotechnology, structural biology, synthetic biology, protein structures, polymers, amino acids, van der Waals forces, X-ray crystallography, DNA computing, quantum computing, cognitive science, wet-hacks, cloning, reverse engineering the brain, augmented brain computing, cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, strong AI, robotics, study of mechanics and reconstruction of human biomaterials, uniting artificial computing and body parts together to work in unison, astronomy, astrophysics, biophysics and Goldilock planets, interplanetary travel, propulsion and trajectory physics, Gödel-Escher-Bach, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, statistics, Linear Algebra, Algebraic Topology, Brain-in-a-vat theory, Euclidean and non-euclidean geometry, vector calculus, discrete mathematics.

EE/CS Hardware/Software

Embedded devices, Embedded systems, operating systems, real-time operating systems, virtual machines, virtual machine monitors, I/O bus latency issues, cache structures, CPUs, GPUs, GPGPUs, System-on-a-chip, hypervisor-based security architectures, chip design and architecture, the future of multi-core and many-core computing, vision based gesture recognition and computer vision, gestural user interfaces, natural and spatial user interfaces, high performance computing and parallel/cluster computing, data centers as computers, Beowulf, managing distributed L2 caches on multi-core processors, network virtualization, server virtualization, OS virtualization, heterogeneous computing, iOS, Android, OpenCL, CUDA, instruction set architectures and instruction-level parallelism, java virtual machines, application service frameworks, ABIs, device drivers, controllers and hardware functionality, user interface design, FPGAs, multi-threaded light weight kernels, web infrastructure, SaaS and single instance multi-tenant architectures.

Art/Artists/Architects

Rembrandt and his paintings of Saskia, Rembrandt’s painting of light – Aristotle, Vermeer and the view of Delft, The girl with the pearl earring, The Milkmaid, Jan Steen’s paintings of everyday life, Jacob van Ruijsdaal’s landscapes, Picasso’s women, Rubens’ women, Renoir and his bathing women, Da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, St. Peter’s Basilica, Hagia Sophia, Sistine Chapel, Le Corbusier and the Domino, Mies Van Der Rohe and The Seagrams building, Seurat and Pointillism, Monet and his landscapes, Manet, Chagall, Rothko, Serra, Paul Cezanne, Boesch, Matisse, Van Gogh, Paul Klee, Frans Hals, Rodin and his sculptures, Salvador Dali, Rem Koolhaas, OMA and their literature, Santiago Calatrava and his bridges, Tadao Ando and his museums, Peter Zumthor and his bath house, Peter Eisenman – The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture, Colin Rowe – Mathematics of an Ideal Villa, Robert Venturi – Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Giuseppe Terragni – Transformations, Decompositions Critiques, Rem Koolhaas – Delirious New York, Nike of Samothrace, Eugene Delacroix, Caravaggio, Bernini, van Dyck, Velazquez, Nicolas Poussin, Ingres.

Movie Directors

Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Pixar Movies, Francis Ford-Coppola, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Christopher Nolan, Ghost in a Shell, Stanley Kubrick, Luis Bunuel, David Lynch, John Lasseter, Hideaki Anno, Takashi Miike, Beat Takeshi, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, Luc Besson, Guy Ritchie, Steven Soderbergh, Stephen Gaghan, Alan J. Pakula, Won Kar Wai, Ridley Scott, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Matthieu Kassovitz, Sergio Leone, Edgar Wright, Tom Tykwer, Fritz Lang, Michael Mann, Matthew Vaughn, Wachowski brothers, John Woo, Richard Linklater, Lars von Trier, Hayao Miyazaki, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean-Luc Godard, Roman Polanski, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Paul Thomas Anderson, Francois Truffant, Howard Hawks.

Still, I’m curious, how do people gather information? Why do people want knowledge? Why am I curious to know more? What am I doing? Why?