Notes

cycling is at the same time the most useful and useless skill i picked up in the past year

Li, Yiyun. The Book of Goose. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2022).

America and fame: they are equally useful if you want freedom from your mother.

美国和名气：如果你想摆脱你的母亲、获得自由，这两者均有用。

The secrets inside me have not left much space for a fetus to grow.

我内心的秘密让可供胎儿成长的空间所剩无几。

If dead people had no choice but to become ghosts, Fabienne’s ghost would only scoff at the usual tricks that other ghosts take pride in. Her ghost would do something entirely different.

如果死去的人别无选择，仅可变成鬼魂，法比耶娜的鬼魂只会嘲笑这些其他鬼魂引以为傲的寻常把戏。她的鬼魂会做出一些截然不同的事。

Well-proportioned children are a rare happenstance. War guarantees disproportion, but during peacetime other things go wrong. I have not met a child who is not lopsided in some way. And when children grow up, they become lopsided adults.

身心均衡的儿童是难得的。由于战争，失衡成为必然，可在和平时期，其他方面出现问题。我没见过一个一切正常、没有偏差的小孩。而当小孩长大后，他们变成畸形的大人。

We were almost one person. I do not imagine that the half of an orange facing south would have to tell the other half how warm the sunlight is.

我们简直等于一个人。我猜，朝南的半个橙子无须告诉另外一半阳光有多暖和。

Most adults struck us as peripheral, some more annoying than others. But we liked the ceremony, the grave of a recently dead woman strewn with the more recently dead flowers.

大多数成年人在我们眼里无关大局，有些比其他更讨厌，但我们喜欢这仪式，把才刚死去的花铺在一位刚死去不久的妇人的坟上。

How do I measure Fabienne’s presence in my life—by the years we were together, or by the years we have been apart, her shadow elongating as time goes by, always touching me?

我怎么计量法比耶娜在我人生中的存在——用我们在一起的岁月，或用我们分开的岁月？在分开的岁月里，她的影子随时光的流逝而拉长，始终触及我。

Fabienne believed that we must always test the limits of our bodies. Not drinking until thirst scratched our throats like sand. Not eating until our heads were lightened by hunger.

法比耶娜认为，我们应该时时测试我们身体的极限。渴到喉咙像被沙子擦痛时才喝水。饿得头晕眼花才吃东西。

Time corrupts. And we pay a price for everything corruptible: food, roof beams, souls.

时间使东西变质。我们为一切易变质的东西付出代价：食物、顶梁、灵魂。

“Sad people don’t often know that they are sad and bored.”

“悲伤的人常常不知道他们既悲伤又空虚无聊。”

I did not speak with my parents unless I had to. I did all my chores without their bidding because I hated to give them an opportunity to disturb the blanket of quiet mystery I carried around myself at home. I was not a child who could bring comfort to anyone, and I had no such desire.

除非迫不得已，我不跟我的父母讲话。无需他们吩咐，我主动做所有我分内的家务，因为我不想让他们有机会搅乱我在家时给自己披上的沉默、神秘的外衣。我不是一个能让谁获得慰藉的孩子，我也不渴望成为这样的孩子。

When she—no, the woman she was speaking for—asked god why he had sent her baby to the earth only for him to die, I stopped writing. “That’s a funny question the woman is asking,” I said.

“What’s so funny?”

“All people are sent to the earth to die,” I said. “God even sent his own son to the earth to die.”

当她——不，是那个借她之口在讲话的女子——问上帝为什么把她的宝宝送到人间却不让他活下去时，我停下笔。“这女人问的问题未免可笑。”我说。

“哪里如此可笑？”

“每个被送到世间来的人都是来送死的，“我说，“上帝甚至把他自己的儿子送到人间来送死。”

What’s the difference between knowing a story and writing it out? But the questions I should have asked, which I did not know how when we were younger, were: Isn’t it enough just to know a story? Why take the time to write it out?

I now have the answer, for her and for myself. The world has no use for who we are and what we know. A story has to be written out. How else do we get our revenge?

知道一个故事和把它写下来有什么区别？我该问的其实不是这个……而是：光知道一个故事不够吗？为何要花时间把它写下来？

现在我有了答案，既是给她也是给我自己的。世人不把我们是谁、我们知道什么当一回事。一个故事必须写下来。否则我们怎么替自己报仇雪耻？

It was not that I had any moral issue with lying, but lying to someone would only make that person important to me.

不是因为我觉得撒谎有违道德，而是因为对某人撒谎，只会使那人在我心目中的地位变得重要。

Perhaps that was my intuition, acting sensibly and disarmingly baffled, as though the world were a mystery beyond my capacity, which I had accepted without protest, along with the fact that I, too, was part of that mystery, defying my own understanding.

直觉体现在那方面，装傻时装得合情合理，教人消除疑窦，仿佛这世界是一个超出我理解能力的谜，我心甘情愿地接受，连同接受事实上我也是那个谜的一部分，拒绝让自己搞懂自己。

We forgive many people for what they cannot do for us, but not our mothers; we protect our mothers more than we protect others, too. Sometimes I think it may be just as well that I cannot have my own children: I can count more things I would not be able to do for them than what I could; and I would rather march through life without the futile protection from my children. People often forget that it is always a gamble to be a mother; I am not a gambler.

我们原谅许多人，原谅他们不能为我们做的事，但我们不原谅我们的母亲；我们也保护我们的母亲胜过我们保护其他人。有时，我觉得我不能有我自己的孩子反倒是件好事：我能数出我无法为他们做的事多于我可以做的；我宁愿潇洒地走完人生，不要我的孩子来徒劳地保护我。人们时常忘记，当母亲永远是一场赌博；我不是赌徒。

People close to you at one moment may disappear the next moment, but the sky is always there, whether you have a roof over your head or not.

这一刻与你亲近的人，下一刻也许消失不见，但天空始终在那儿，不管你的头顶有没有一片遮风挡雨的屋檐都一样。

Two people who are constantly seeking experience rarely settle for each other.

Two people enduring experience rarely meet in life.

That’s why Fabienne and I were meant for each other. We were the perfect pair, one seeking all that the other could experience.

两个不断追求生活经历的人很难迁就彼此。

两个背负着经历的人很难在生活中相遇。

正因为如此，法比耶娜和我是天作之合。我们是完美的一对，一方追求另一方可能经历的所有事。

Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one’s neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one’s hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.

快乐，我会告诉她，是度过每一天时不用引颈盼着明天、次月、来年，不用伸出手阻止每一天变成昨日。

Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who know what they want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.

活得最不易的人知道他们想要什么，也知道是什么阻挠他们得到他们想要的东西。同样活得不易但并非最不易的，是知道他们想要什么却还未意识到他们将永远无法如愿的人。对不知道自己想要什么的人来说，生活一点不难。

Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.

我时常把活着想象成一个石头剪子布的游戏：命运击败希望，希望击败无知，无知击败命运。或者换一个让我念念不忘的版本：听天由命的人吸引满怀希望的人，满怀希望的人吸引蒙昧无知的人，蒙昧无知的人吸引听天由命的人。

It baffles me that often songs and poems are written about love at first sight: those who claim to experience the phenomena have preened themselves, ready for love. There is nothing extraordinary about that. Childhood friendship, much more fatal, simply happens.

我不懂歌曲和诗为何常常描写一见钟情的爱：那些声称体验过这奇迹的人，事先精心打扮自己，为迎接爱做好准备。那样的一见钟情没什么大不了了。儿时的友谊含有更多命中注定的成分，说来就来。

“Is there an hour that is neither day nor night?” she said. “No. So you see, you and I together, we cover all the time, we have everything between us.”

“有没有一个时间点，既不属于白天也不属于黑夜？”她说，“没有。所以你瞧，你和我合在一起，我们涵盖全部的时间，我们相依为伴等于拥有一切。”

I felt like the country rat in the La Fontaine fable we had read at school. How immense the world is, the rat exclaims when he sets out for an adventure, congratulating himself that he is no longer a country rat but a creature of sophistication. And when he sees an oyster on the beach, he tells himself that a worldly eater will enjoy an oyster, so he sticks his head between the open shells. Like the rat, I was caught. I was doomed.

我觉得自己好像我们上学时读的《拉封丹寓言》里那只乡下的老鼠。这世界多么辽阔，当那只老鼠出发要去探险时，它高喊，庆贺自己不再是一只乡下的老鼠，而是一个精明老练的家伙。它看到沙滩上有一只牡蛎，它对自己说，见过世面的食客会懂得品尝牡蛎，于是它把头伸进打开的壳里。和那只老鼠一样，我被夹住。我完蛋了。

(By half—that expression, which I had learned from listening to the girls, has become one of my favorite phrases. By half, by half of that half—even now, I like to repeat it to myself when I am in a dividing mood. Halve life’s pain, and we are not pain-free. Halve life’s joy, there is still joy enough to be halved. Truly life can be a funny business, too prodigal by half, also too stingy by half. I have a habit of speaking to my geese as though to myself: You’re too silly by half. You’re too proud by half.)

（加倍——我通过谛听那些女生讲话，学来了上述表达，现已成为我最爱的短语之一。加倍、再加倍——即使到今天，我仍喜欢在处于做算术的心情时对自己重复这个短语。把人生的快乐加倍，不会抵消我们的痛苦。把快乐减半，依然还有足可减半的快乐。的确，人生有时是一场恶作剧，加倍挥霍又加倍吝啬。我有个习惯，和我的鹅讲话像在跟我自己讲话似的：你们加倍可笑。你们加倍自豪。）

I arranged my nightdress with the scalloped hem on the bed, spreading it out to mark the shape of my body and folding the two sleeves in front of the chest like an angel’s. It was so soft and so pretty, but I knew that if I made an exception for it, soon I would make exceptions for the rest. No, I would not take anything from the school but only what truly belonged to me.

我把我带荷叶边的睡袍放到床上摊开，铺成我身体的样子，然后将两个衣袖折叠于胸前，摆出类似天使的姿势。那睡袍如此柔软、如此美丽，但我知道，倘若我破例把它装进行李，很快我会破例把剩下的全装走。不，我不会从学校拿走一点东西，我将只拿真正属于我的。

Of all the people in the world, how many of them, looking into their own conscience, can say with unwavering certainty that they have never betrayed someone in their lives—ten, five, none? If so, why do we often make a fuss about betrayal? So many movies and books, so many broken marriages and torn friendships. The knives we stick into one another’s backs—perhaps those knives have their own wills. They take a grand tour, finding a hand here and a back there. We cannot blame the hands, just as we cannot sympathize with the backs. They are equally recruited for the knives’ entertainment. The world is never short of knives.

全世界的人里，有多少人扪心自问，能够斩钉截铁地说他们这辈子从未背叛过谁——十个、五个、一个也没有？倘若如此，我们为什么经常对背叛小题大做？这么多电影和书，这么多破碎的婚姻和决裂的友谊。我们互相在背后捅刀子——也许这些刀子有它们自己的意志。它们巡游四方，在各地觅得一只手、一个背。我们无法责备那些手，诚如我们无法同情那些背。它们是同样被招募来供那些刀子取乐的。这个世界绝不缺少刀子。

The past few months felt like a trance. No one stays in a trance forever, true, but no one, shaken awake, lives on without feeling a void inside. A trance is a displacement. A trance is a wound.

过去几个月感觉像一场催眠。诚然，没有人永远停留在催眠状态里，但被摇醒后，没有人不会在继续生活下去时感到一种内心的空虚。催眠是一次脱位。催眠是一个伤口。

Fabienne pressed her hands hard on my ears. I stayed still, and then heard her shriek, not through the air, but through our bodies. Even with my ears muffled I knew the shriek was terrifying, more animal than human. If a child cried for help, someone would hear it, but no help would come for us now, because Fabienne was no more than an injured animal. Somewhere in a house a baby would be awakened from sleep and cry. A dog wandering in the alley would be running home, frightened, with its tail tucked in.

Fabienne shrieked once more, and then pulled her hands away from my ears. In a voice nearly inaudible, she said, “It’s going to be pain and pain and pain and pain from now on, don’t you see it, Agnès?”

法比耶娜把她的双手紧贴在我的耳朵上。我一动不动，接着我听见她的尖叫，不是通过空气而是通过我们的身体传来。即使我的耳朵被捂住，我也知道那叫声吓人，更像动物而不是人发出的。如果一个小孩大哭求助，有人会听见，但此刻没有人来救助我们，因为法比耶娜不过是一头受伤的动物。在某处的一间屋子里，有个睡着的婴儿会被惊醒，大哭。一条在巷子里游荡的狗会惊恐地夹着尾巴跑回家。

法比耶娜义尖叫了一声，然后松开捂着我耳朵的手。她用近乎不可闻的声音说：“从今往后将是痛、痛、痛、痛，你行不出来吗，阿涅丝?”

I now know that so much of our story began with Fabienne’s exultation and despair, both out of my reach. For as long as I could be the outlet of her exultation and her despair, life was bearable, even interesting, to her. I was the whetstone that sharpened her mind’s blade; I was the orange that she cut into effortlessly. All the same, I could not save us. It was not boredom that defeated us, it was not defeat that made us drift apart. Not every child is born with an untamable force within her. It is the world’s job to avert its eyes, writing that force off as childish tantrum, as immaturity. It is a child’s job to forbear that force until she, too, can write it off and sail into a safer adulthood. Fabienne had no words to describe her exultation and despair, and I had no way to grasp them, but she was not alone in her extremes. The lucky ones have waited out the storms. The really lucky ones who have learned a few tricks to tame the untamable—however momentarily—have made their names. I am not sophisticated enough to claim that I understand those geniuses, but I know what they have put in their symphonies and concertos, what they have put on their canvases or in their books, is what made Fabienne shriek in the cemetery. Through her hands I had heard her pain: there was something immense in her, bigger, sharper, more permanent, than the life we lived. She could neither find nor make a world to accommodate that immense being.

我现在明白，我们的故事在很大程度上始于法比耶娜的狂喜与绝望，两者我都达不到。只要我可以让她通过我来发泄她的狂喜和绝望，生活对她来说就可以忍受，甚至有意思。我是磨刀石，我把她刀子般的心磨得锋利；我是那颗她毫不费力切开的橙子。尽管如此，我照样救不了我们。击败我们的不是无聊，使我们分道扬镇的不是落败。不是每个小孩生来骨子里都有一股难以驯服的力晕。世人的职责是不要正视，把那股力最当作小孩子闹脾气，当作不成熟而勾销。儿童的职责是克制那股力量，直至能把它扼杀，昂首成为大人，让自己更加安全。法比耶娜找不到语言描述她的狂喜和绝望，我没有办法理解她的狂喜和绝望，但活在这极端中的人不只她一个。其中幸运的人等待风暴过去。真正幸运的人学会几招技巧，驯服这不可驯服的力量——无论多么昙花一现——扬名天下。我不够老练世故，无法声称我理解那些天才，但我知道，他们在交响乐和协奏曲里所表达的，他们在画布上或书里所呈现的，正是使法比耶娜在墓园发出尖叫的东西。隔着她的手，我听见她的痛：她的心中有个庞然大物，比我们实际的人生更大、更鲜明、更永恒。她既找不到也创造不出一片能容纳那庞然大物的天地。

“Why you need your whole body – from head to toes – to think”:

But why are we so reluctant to consider the brain as just another part of the body? There’s no evidence that the brain is made of a different kind of ‘physical stuff’ from the rest of the body.

We need to start with the cells that compose our humble toes before zooming into the mystery of the brain. Why? Because our cells solve the biggest and most urgent problem of this great and mysterious adventure called life without a brain, and before we had a brain: how to stay alive.

[B]ecause our body is a living system governed by the basic law of self-preservation, this means that all our experiences are necessarily embodied self-experiences. In perceiving and experiencing the world, we ‘smuggle in’ our own fundamental self-survival goals.

A growing body of evidence from neurobiology and biochemistry suggests that cognitive categories such as ‘sensing’, ‘memory’ and ‘learning’ can be applied non-metaphorically to the behaviour of simple organisms such as bacteria.

[A]ll bodily cells and their complex interconnections [are] fundamental for cognition, not just neurons. Among our cells, the immune system plays a very special role, working in tandem with the neural system to help us build the ‘self’.

To put it bluntly: one can experience without thinking, but one cannot think without experiencing. Experiences come to the surface of being through the body, and not through the minds, or some sort of homunculus sitting in our heads, trying to ‘make sense’ of a world he doesn’t see, because the world is hidden in the black box of the scalp. We don’t perceive the world through some sort of inner solitary lens situated in our heads. We perceive the world through every single cell of our body.

Interestingly, that famous Rodin sculpture was supposed to represent not a philosopher, but a poet – Dante, the author of The Divine Comedy. The artist represented the poet sitting at the door of the Inferno and other worlds, contemplating the space in between, the border, the passage between life and death. Perhaps what Rodin was trying to show us was that the meaning of all this lies not hidden inside one’s head, but in what lies in between us, the world, and others.

“A Tale of Two College Towns”:

For Wikipedia, the college town is one where an institution of higher learning “pervades” the life of the place. Good enough. I like this verb, “pervade.” In cities or towns that have enough other things going on—places we wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, call “college towns”—it’s rather the place that pervades the school.

At its best, the small college in a small college town functions this way for the nonstudent residents, as a slightly mysterious world within the world that, while pursuing its own ends, expands everyone’s sense of what is possible.

For this to happen at all, the college has to be its own distinct place, present and familiar but in some ways opaque.

The otherworldly character of the liberal-arts college’s mission is obvious enough here: young Puritan theocrats studying, among others, older Puritan theocrats so that they can responsibly govern a Puritan theocracy. We are talking about shining cities on hills here. The SLAC makes up one component in a uniquely American fusion of utopianism as a tool of social reform, education as a tool of social mobility, and free real estate.

Horowitz rather diplomatically describes the reaction of the “college men” to this incursion:

They have perceived the especially diligent student as the “grind” and the student seeking faculty friendship as the “fisherman” or “brownnose.” Such terms of derogation have been necessary because college life has always had to contend with a significant number of students who have wanted no part of it—the outsiders. To the early colleges came some men for whom higher education was intended, those studying for the ministry.

Liberal education was for a very long time reserved to an elite—whence the word “liberal,” befitting free men—who were a small minority in Western societies. Gradually, except by the standards of the world at large, Americans began democratizing privilege.

Another way to put it is that America tried, for a brief moment, to build a welfare state—which is to say, a democratic civilization—and we did a lot of it through our schools. When the tide of opinion turned against welfare states, the school-based parts of our system were the only parts that were widely enough used to survive.

People expect a relatively small, selective, and liberal-arts-focused school to be a little weird. But the land-grant college or public university offers itself up as a public service, and is judged, probably unfairly, by different rules; meanwhile, it also crosses into more people’s daily lives more often and more dramatically, and thus offers itself up to be judged. Anthropologists have a useful term, “schismogenesis,” for that tendency of human beings to define ourselves by exaggerating and accentuating our differences from a nearby “other,” often two-thirds imaginary.

It baffles and enrages me that so much talent and earnestness comes together to create a student culture full of harried young people who let ChatGPT do all their homework for them because they don’t think they have time to get the education they pay for, but who also cut themselves or spiral into depression because they fail a test. It takes more than human ingenuity to make so little of so much. One is tempted to resort to demonology to explain it.

“Earnest dilettantism.” “Patience for everything.” “Gargantuan” and “quixotic” projects done “with total seriousness and dedication.” When a college town lives up to its potential, these are its hallmarks.

In any case, the biggest source of tension between the University of Michigan and its surrounding town is housing, [which] in fact [] pits out-of-town corporate landlords against local landlords. It amuses me that this conflict involves the very trait in which this particular town and this particular gown most resemble each other: the shared desire to appear liberal and public-spirited without bearing the costs and inconveniences of liberality and public-spiritedness.

[T]he liberal-arts college, small or huge, is an essentially humanist enterprise, and that too many of the people who run them have been cowards about admitting it.

Briefly, anyone who offers an account of human knowing and being in which we are not comparable in some ways to but actually reducible to machines is not a humanist. Nor is anyone who denies our potential for good, whether by adopting a Schopenhauerian disgust with people as such or by denying the meaningfulness of the distinction between good and evil themselves. Liberal education doesn’t absolutely require political liberalism, but it requires that you think there is such a thing as “freedom,” that it is a thing people rightly aspire to, and that you acknowledge the existence of “people.”

To hate the mind, to assign curiosity or disinterested love of a subject no place in one’s account of human motivation, to see every sign of particularity or individuality as “pretentiousness” or “elitism”: All of this is finally anti-human.

“Everything Is Not Fine in the Art World”:

Auction houses rely on this sleight of hand. Their job is not to measure value. Their job is to perform it. Sarah Thornton wrote about this clearly in Seven Days in the Art World (2009), where she describes auctions as rituals rather than markets, spaces where belief is manufactured through choreography. Reading her work changed how I saw these rooms. The scripts, the coded gestures, the artificial suspense, the carefully timed applause, the way the room breathes in unison. None of it reflects the truth of what art is worth or what artists need. It reflects the truth of what the ritual requires. In that sense, last week’s evening sales looked exactly the way they meant to look: The paddles, the rhythm, the polished certainty. Everything was arranged to reassure the public that the system still works, that art still circulates as a luxury investment, cultural currency, and global status symbol.

Scarcity, visibility, community, and narrative are all tools that shape value. Artists do not need to mimic these strategies. They only need to understand how these tools are used and how they circulate.

《大埔火災，用「誤殺罪」追責的侷限》：

樓宇火災鮮少是單一失誤引發的「意外」，而更常是多重系統性故障的惡性連鎖，可能是設計的先天隱患，亦可能是日常維護的疏漏，以至緊急應變的失效。這些環節往往橫跨企業的層層部門與多位人員，難以鎖定單一「元兇」。這種分散性不僅模糊了因果鏈條，更讓傳統的個人化追責模式顯得力不從心。

一些法律觀點曾探索「聚合模式（aggregation approach）」的可能，即透過彙集多名員工的個別作為或疏忽，累積形成公司的整體犯罪意圖與行為。這一模式旨在捕捉公司失能的分散本質：單一員工的疏忽或許微不足道，但多重瑣碎失誤的疊加，可能構成系統性嚴重疏忽。然而，這創新想法在 R v HM Coroner for East Kent, ex parte Spooner (1989) 88 Cr App R 10 一案中遭明確否定。法院堅持，誤殺罪的證明要素必須針對「被告本人」獨立成立，而不能透過「拼湊」多人的零散證據來「合成」公司罪責。

此中諷刺，正如法律學者 James Gobert 於 1994 年《公司犯罪性：四種過錯模式》（Corporate Criminality: Four Models of Fault）一文所論，「人格化原則」正於無需要之處發揮最佳效用：在小型企業中，高管通常親身參與營運，輕易滿足該原則的要件，但此時他們自身已可能承擔個人刑事責任，對公司層面的追究則顯得多餘，所以阻嚇功能反而微弱。反之，於最需追責之巨型企業，高層往往透過遙距指揮、鮮少親涉基層日常運作，導致該原則難以適用，從而使公司整體的系統性失責得以逍遙法外。

為更有效回應現代公司治理的複雜性與多維度挑戰，香港或可借鏡英國於 2007 年生效的專門立法——《公司誤殺罪及公司過失致死法（Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007）》。

它明確將機構或公司在特定業務領域（如建築業）的安全謹慎責任轉化成法定管理義務，變相強調企業必須履行預防性義務，主動設計並實施全面的安全管理系統，以確保施工現場等高風險環境的安全。企業無法再簡單以「個別員工疏忽」作為推諉藉口逃避整體問責；相反，法律要求其檢視任何結構性缺失，例如管理流程的設計、資源分配的不足，或安全協議的執行不力。

《公司殺人罪及公司過失致死法》另一項創新體現於第 8 條，並罕見地將傳統上由審判法官在引導陪審團時口頭闡述的責任標準，直接以立法形式明文化。

第 8 條還提醒陪審團「可以」進一步考慮機構的內部文化與慣例，以捕捉更深層的組織動態 […]

《被推上火線的竹棚：大埔火災後的資訊失真和焦點錯位》：

作為一項古老技藝，竹棚在其他地區越來越少見。近年來大陸多數城市已禁止用竹棚，2021 年住建部要求全面淘汰竹腳手架，香港和澳門成為為數不多讓竹棚存續的陣地。但今年 3 月，香港政府以安全為由，要求 50% 以上的公共項目必須使用金屬棚架，同時表示未打算完全淘汰竹棚，對此民間反對和支持聲並存。

香港建築業界使用大量竹棚有其重要理由。香港樓間距小、巷道窄，相比標準化的金屬架，竹棚能更靈活地適應不同施工環境。何炳德解釋，香港有許多樓齡超過 50 年的老樓，若搭建金屬棚架，需採取螺絲磚牆等更多設備、材料，住戶未必能接受。相較之下，竹枝重量輕，搭棚工人用「一把刀仔」就能工作，搭建速度快也靈活，作業空間需求小。

另有業內文章指出，面對香港常見的強風天氣，品質好的毛竹具有彈性但不易斷裂，這讓竹棚在大風中能適度搖擺而不塌，金屬棚架雖剛性強，但可能因局部失效而整體傾覆。在酷暑天，竹棚也不如金屬容易導熱發燙。

通常來說，建新樓或拆樓時用金屬棚架更好， 若是在舊樓中維修冷氣機等情況，使用竹的懸空棚架更為合理，兩者可以是互相補充而非取代的關係。

竹棚一邊組成大陸網民對「香港已經落後」的敘事想象，另一邊承載港人對身份認同焦慮的投射。大陸知名經濟評論人「西西弗評論」就指出，爭論的本質在於「這次災難是因為香港不像大陸導致的，還是因為香港變得更像大陸導致的」。

令許多人擔憂、憤怒之處在於，竹棚或在變成轉移焦點的「替罪羊」。

“How Good Engineers Write Bad Code at Big Companies”:

To pure engineers - engineers working on self-contained technical projects, like a programming language - the only explanation for bad code is incompetence. But impure engineers operate more like plumbers or electricians. They’re working to deadlines on projects that are relatively new to them, and even if their technical fundamentals are impeccable, there’s always something about the particular setup of this situation that’s awkward or surprising. To impure engineers, bad code is inevitable. As long as the overall system works well enough, the project is a success.

[I]t’s a mistake to attribute primary responsibility to the engineers at those companies. If you could wave a magic wand and make every engineer twice as strong, you would still have bad code, because almost nobody can come into a brand new codebase and quickly make changes with zero mistakes. The root cause is that most big company engineers are forced to do most of their work in unfamiliar codebases.

A pretty high percentage of code changes are made by “beginners”: people who have onboarded to the company, the codebase, or even the programming language in the past six months.

[The big companies are] giving up some amount of expertise and software quality in order to gain the ability to rapidly deploy skilled engineers onto whatever the problem-of-the-month is.

“Bringing Sexy Back”:

But the pushback against #MeToo reveals a certain peril to storytelling as politics, not only in the retraumatization evident in the practice of revealing one’s most intimate harms before an infinite online audience, which could always include those listening in bad faith. But also, a discursive market opened up in which trauma became a kind of currency of authenticity, resulting in a doubled exploitation. This idea, while not very nice, lingers in the use of harm as an authoritative form of rhetorical defense. The problem here is not what is said, but how it is used. A friction has since emerged between an awareness of weaponization of harm and emotion and the continued need to express oneself as vulnerably as possible in order to come off as sincere. This friction is unresolved.

Punishing strangers for their perceived perversion is a form of compensation for a process that is already completed: the erosion of erotic and emotional privacy through internet-driven surveillance practices, practices we have since turned inward on ourselves. In short, we have become our own panopticons.

When it became desirable and permissible to transform our own lives into content, it didn’t take long before a sense of entitlement emerged that extended that transformation to people we know and to strangers.

Such unproductive and antisocial behavior [of submitting screenshots, notes, videos, and photos with calls for collective judgement] is justified as a step toward liberation from predation, misogyny, or any number of other harms. But the punitive mindset we’ve developed towards relationships is indicative of an inability to imagine a future of gendered or sexual relations without subjugation. To couch that in the language of harm reduction and trauma delegitimizes both.

However, it is always too easy to blame the young [for sexlessness]. It was my generation that failed to instill the social norms necessary to prevent a situation where fear of strangers on the internet has successfully replaced the disciplinary apparatus more commonly held by religious or conservative doctrine.

I could not let the natural processes of erotic discovery take their course, so caught up was I in judging myself from the perspective of strangers to whom I owed nothing.

There wasn’t some deterministic quality in myself that made me like this. My desire was not fixed in nature. My sexual qualities were transient and not inborn. What aroused me was wonderfully, entirely situational.

A situational eroticism is what is needed now, in our literalist times. It’s exhausting, how everything is so readily defined by types, acts, traumas, kinks, fetishes, pathology, and aesthetics. To me, our predilection for determinism is an expected psychological response to excessive surveillance. A situational eroticism decouples sensation from narrative and typology. It allows us to feel without excuse and to relate our feelings to our immediate embodied moment, grounded in a fundamental sense of personal privacy. While it is admirable to try and understand ourselves and important to protect ourselves from harm and investigate critically the ways in which what we want may put us at risk of that harm — or at risk of doing harm to others — sometimes desires just are, and they are not that way for long. Arousal is a matter of the self, which takes place within the body, a space no one can see into. It is often a mystery, a surprise, a discovery. It can happen at a small scale, say, the frisson of two sets of fingers in one’s hair at once. It is beautiful, unplanned and does not judge itself because it is an inert sensation, unimbued with premeditated meaning. This should liberate rather than frighten us. Maybe what it means doesn’t matter. Maybe we don’t have to justify it even to ourselves.

“The Claims of Close Reading”:

In our work, we assumed—before anything else, before any evidence—that there was meaning, and that we were rational, and we decided that we treat texts, ourselves, and each other this way.

On the first day of each new class, I tell my students about the philosopher Donald Davidson’s idea of radical interpretation. To make sense of a foreign language, or indeed any language, Davidson argues, a listener must begin with a stance of good faith by assuming that the person they’re listening to has rational beliefs and is making meaning. This must happen before the listener can begin to interpret what that meaning is and whether she agrees with it.

“The Fatal Flaw in Using Bitcoin as a Currency”:

The value of any currency never depends on rigid control of money supply. The most basic economics textbook will tell you that any value depends on the balance of supply and demand. To ignore money demand is to court disaster — because the demand for money is not stable.

The original issuers of paper currency understood the importance of money demand. In 10th century China, paper currency was introduced with a simultaneous legal requirement that taxes to the government be paid in paper. This immediately created a demand for paper currency alongside its supply, which gave it value. As long as the supply of and demand for paper money were balanced, value was maintained. When demand for the new paper currency fell short of what the government chose to supply, inflation and hyperinflation were the inevitable result.

This lack of an automatic demand for crypto is a problem, but not the fatal flaw which prevents crypto acting as a currency. The flaw is that bitcoin supply can only rise, not fall.

this must be the funniest thing i’ve ever typed

“The Invention of the Modern Self”:

The history of modern selfhood […] centers on the inescapable and ultimately unresolvable tension between a desire for uniqueness, accompanied by a belief in the power of self-transformation, and the recognition of how deeply we are shaped by our biology and social origins.

[T]he modern self, at least in its European and North American varieties, [is] a kind of paradox. On the one hand, in the 18th century, as the mental grip of religion weakened, “the idea spread that ordinary people had the potential for autonomy and were capable of exerting their liberty, whether in the choice of spouse, occupation, religious beliefs, or governing bodies.” But at the very same time, “individuals came to be viewed as creatures shaped by social conditioning…. Original sin lost its hold, but seeping into its place [came] the idea that our identities are formed by class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, profession, and marital status.”

“The existential struggle between being a ‘we’ and an ‘us’”:

In extending the existential and phenomenological importance of ‘the Look’ to collective (rather than individual) experience, Sartre draws a distinction between the ‘we-subject’ (le nous-sujet) and the ‘we-object’ (le nous-objet). Since nous in French is used for the first-person plural, in English we could translate Sartre (as his American translator Hazel Barnes did) as drawing a distinction between the ‘we’ and the ‘us’. Sartre himself was wary of deriving theoretical insights from mere grammatical categories, especially when many languages do not even use or differentiate between a first-person plural pronoun. But, as the philosopher Sarah Pawlett-Jackson argues in The Phenomenology of the Second-Person Plural (2025), pronouns came into use precisely in order to capture a particular form of lived experience, a particular phenomenological standpoint.

In order to experience the world from a ‘we-perspective’, certain basic criteria need to be met. First of all, there must be a plurality of subjects who are undergoing the experience. If I am the only person enjoying the sunset, my enjoyment is felt by me as an individual subject, rather than by we as a plural subject. Secondly, the subjects must be unified in some sense. If a stranger sitting near me is enjoying the same sunset, it would be presumptuous to say that we experienced it together unless our enjoyment has been communicated to one another. We haven’t created the necessary unity.

[W]hereas a we-experience can take place between a dyad, an us-experience is necessarily triadic in its structure. A felt sense of ‘us-ness’ can arise only in relation to an external Third element.

With us-experiences, one can speak of a plural or collective double-consciousness. The members of the ‘we’ are no longer singularly conscious of a shared object of experience, but are doubly conscious of themselves as an object of experience. In this sense, an us-experience arises because of a collective relation to an external Third.

[U]s-experiences can be less harmonious, consensual and self-endorsed than we-experiences since their constitution hinges on these external impositions.

Yet the ‘us’ is not simply the dark and depressing side of the ‘we’. As Sartre went on to show in his later work of existentialist Marxism, it is often from the alienated, marked and stereotyped ‘us’ that collective struggle, political action, and a coordinated and resistant ‘we’ emerges. In becoming conscious of one’s position in the social world, you, and others like you, can prompt a response of resistance to dismantle and overcome the social constraints that one collectively faces with others. An emancipatory transition from an ‘us’ to a ‘we’ takes place when the external Third loses salience in lieu of an internal unification and organisation that comes about to reclaim agency over ‘them’.

Henrik Karlsson:

I notice two kinds of happiness in the diary: a soft joy, which makes me ease up and feel more like myself, and a hard one that again and again leads me into shame.

The soft one is private—I struggle to share it with others—whereas the one that drives me into misery is social.

[The hard one is a] happiness I have to share. I want to force it upon people. I’m ashamed but I can’t stop myself: the excitement, it seems, comes from being seen as the sort of person that this or that person desires.

It was a strange mix of relief and discomfort to meet a person who loved me in the Erich Fromm sense (“I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.”) A relief because it was like decompression to let go of all of the fear and insecurity that made me shape myself for approval, and to feel my own sense of curiosity and value unfold. But discomfort because it put me on a collision course with the life I had been living and many of the people I interacted with. When I understood my values, I had to confront the pain of looking stupid and having people get angry at me when they disagreed with my decisions; I had to let go of the safety of social status and the coping mechanisms I had relied on.

The Witness on the newcomer injunctions in Hong Kong:

高等法院在 2019 至 2020 年間，先後應機場管理局、港鐵、律政司及警務處申請，批出共 6 項臨時禁制令，分別針對阻礙機場及港鐵站運作、阻礙或破壞紀律部隊宿舍、「起底」及滋擾警務人員及家人、在網上發布煽動暴力言論，以及於 2020 年底應律政司申請，頒令禁止「起底」及滋擾司法人員及家人。

翻查資料，當時高院原訟庭頒發此 6 項臨時禁制令，均是應原告方單方面申請（ex parte application）批准。被告一方多數列為「非法及故意作出申索書中…所禁止的任何行為的人」 （persons unlawfully and wilfully conducting themselves in the acts prohibited… of the indorsement of claim），沒有確切身分。

上述 6 項禁令頒發時，均屬臨時禁制令（interim injunction），並於獲頒臨時禁制令同年，獲法院批准延長「至正式審訊或另作命令（until trial or further order）」。

臨時禁制令（interim injunction）與永久禁制令（permanent injunction）的分別，在於後者一般都是在官司完結後頒布，例如在誹謗案件中，如原告一方勝訴，他可要求法庭頒布永久禁制令，禁止被告一方繼續發布誹謗言論。

而臨時禁制令，則通常是在審訊未完結、甚至未開始之前，原告可基於情況緊急、若不立即禁制被告行為會造成無法彌補的損失為由，以及向法庭證明案件牽涉重要而須審訊的議題（serious question to be tried），向法庭單方面申請批出臨時禁制令。

在一般民事案件中，法庭頒令臨時禁制令生效「至正式審訊或另作命令」，是常見做法，由於原告及被告雙方均有利益，一般會積極推動審訊進行。

但上述 2019 至 2020 年間申請的幾項禁制令，被告人均是「無名氏」，因禁制令並非針對確切身分人士，而是任何作出受禁行為的人。

如沒有被告或其他人介入審訊，除非原告，即律政司及警方主動撤銷禁制令，否則目前禁制令不會自動失效，「所以依家臨時禁制令，變相係永久禁制令。」

英國近年亦有不少針對非特定被告人的禁制令，以打擊近年常見的「流水式示威」。惟英國最高法院在 2023 年一宗案例中訂明，此類針對任何後來干犯受禁行為的禁制令（newcomer injunction），其有效地域、時間須有嚴格限制，以免萬一沒有人挑戰，禁制令會永遠生效。

法院確實有酌情權頒布此類禁制令，惟申請人須證明頒布禁制令，是為了保障其他公民權利、制止反社會行為，或為達致其他法定目標的迫切需要（compelling needs）。 判詞又指，除非真的沒有其他替代方法以達致相同目標，而相關禁制令只會維持一段短時間，並會於短期內審訊，以讓雙方能正式就理據作爭辯，否則一般不應頒布此類禁制令。

英判詞指，這種禁制令應被視為特殊的措施，且須符合相稱性，故必須訂明嚴格時間及地域限制，「以使它們無法超越其所依賴的迫切情況（that they neither outflank or outlast the compelling circumstances relied upon）」。最高法院又認為，除非有人申請延長，並提供理據延續禁制令，否則此類禁制令應在一年後失效。

坐了夺命（literally）小巴，但是遇上一个只开 80 出头的佛系司机，太子到落马洲开了 35 分钟，命保住了。

“The growing problem with China’s unreliable numbers”:

Rather than one single number, statisticians usually produce three. The expenditure approach to GDP — which many countries consider the best way to capture activity in a modern economy — measures consumption, investment and net exports.

The production approach instead tries to capture companies’ output minus their inputs. The income approach estimates what individuals and businesses earn and pay in tax. In theory, the three different approaches should equal each other.

Until 1993, China went a fourth way. Its material product scheme, the offspring of an approach pioneered in the Soviet Union, counted commodities and goods produced across state-run factories.

Eager to understand its own growth as it reopened to global trade, and under pressure to improve its data, Beijing drew on international guidance. Canada’s national statistical agency launched a partnership with the NBS in the 1990s.

All other large economies publish quarterly breakdowns of the expenditure approach to GDP, including investment, consumption and net exports. They also publish subcomponents of those broad categories, which can provide useful insights into what is driving the headline figures. […]

China does not publish this data. Emerging Advisors, a consultancy, says that across 40 emerging economies it tracks, only four others do not publish such quarterly data, and they are countries with economies based on hydrocarbons. “We can’t stress enough how abnormal this is for an economy of any significant size,” noted economist Jonathan Anderson in a report this year.

Instead, China publishes quarterly data based on the production approach, which is harder to analyse. The expenditure GDP data is only published in nominal terms for the whole year.

Indeed, its contribution to annual growth has remained positive throughout the property slowdown and implying some significant source of new investment.

Logan Wright, who leads the China research team at Rhodium, argues that the NBS has not “as far as we know” explained this “offset”.

Given the greater detail that is available, economists rely heavily on the fixed asset investment data to reconstruct the missing GDP data that they would get from other countries.

A recent study by the Reserve Bank of Australia, which cited the significance of Chinese demand for iron ore, used it as part of a series of calculations to estimate quarter-on-quarter expenditure breakdowns. A Brookings paper on provincial growth targets published in March also used it to derive infrastructure investment as a proportion of GDP.

In a 2020 paper, Holz, the Hong Kong academic, identified a “pattern” whereby “the NBS removes data from publication that reveal the poor quality of PRC statistics” at times when the figures “should show significant slowdowns”. Subsequent discontinuations have included the loss of a land sales data series in 2023 and the temporary suspension of youth unemployment data in the same year.

China’s data is “low credibility” but people will not “throw . . . [it] out the window”, says Rosen, pointing to the need for “reference points” for trillions of dollars of existing foreign direct investment in China.

There is evidence that the NBS has for years adjusted the data it receives from local governments, often downwards, to counteract regional over-reporting. Hsieh and his co-authors in 2019 estimated that these adjustments averaged 5 per cent of total GDP each year from the mid-2000s, but were still insufficient to counter such over-reporting.

What counts as an “architecture” in discussions on Linux architecture support:

For example, Linux supports the User Mode Linux “architecture”, which lets the kernel run as an unprivileged process inside an existing kernel for testing purposes. By most normal definitions, User Mode Linux isn’t really a CPU architecture, even if the code for it lives alongside the kernel’s other architecture support code. On the other hand, the kernel considers all PowerPC CPUs to be one architecture, regardless of whether they’re running in big-endian or little-endian mode; most distributions count those as two architectures because software compiled for different endiannesses must be packaged separately. Even without architecture-wide incompatibilities like that, several architectures also offer different “levels” or optional extensions that make describing a piece of software’s requirements a bit difficult. RISC-V has, at the time of writing, 48 different standards adding a larger number of extensions.

“The Ozempic Era Should Change How We Think About Self-Control”:

Someone who is overweight may have just as much willpower as a thinner person but need to deploy this willpower against stronger desires for food. In effect, thinner individuals might be getting credit for winning a battle that they never had to fight.

We can get clearer about the effects of GLP-1 drugs on self-control by drawing on a distinction between two different ways of acting moderately, which traces back to Aristotle. The first kind of moderate action lines up with how most people think of self-control: effortfully resisting doing something that you believe you shouldn’t do. The ancient Greek word for this form of moderation is enkrateia, which is usually translated into English as ‘continence’ (despite its contemporary associations with bladder control).

As we’ve seen, Ozempic does not seem to make those who take it more continent; it doesn’t help them resist strong temptations to eat more than they think they should. Rather, taking GLP-1 drugs brings people closer to the other form of moderation: sophrosyne, which is usually translated as ‘temperance’. While the continent person experiences many tempting desires and successfully resists them, the temperate person doesn’t face temptations in the first place.

[B]eing a highly self-controlled person seems mainly to involve using proactive strategies to avoid and manage temptations, rather than being good at directly and effortfully resisting them through sheer willpower.

Frankly, I still don’t feel totally comfortable with the idea of Ozempic for both the lack of evidence of its long-term side effects and, more importantly, the feeling that it risks eroding agency. Is the anesthesia of the appetite true “temperance,” or just a mimicry of the virtue?

noir^3

now i’m really having difficulty dealing with good weather

“Review: Leah Libresco Sargeant’s ‘Dignity of Dependence’”:

Sexism has two pillars: the insistence that female biology is moral destiny, and the insistence that female moral destiny is inferior.

What is at stake is nothing less than affording women access to the tumult of total humanity. To propose that a woman’s biology consigns her to a single corner of the moral universe is to force her to undergo a violent truncation — a shrinkage of the sort that always attends the indignity of specialization.

Nothing innovative here, but the phrase the tumult of total humanity is so majestic that I can’t help gazing at it.

“An Ant Is Drowning: Here’s How to Decide if You Should Save It”:

Queries like ‘Do individual ants deserve moral concern?’ risk conflating the scientific question of whether ants are sentient, the ethical question of whether only sentient beings deserve moral concern, and the practical question of whether a policy of caring for ants in a particular way is achievable or sustainable.

Scientifically, we can assess how likely particular beings are to possess capacities like sentience, by evaluating the available evidence. Ethically, we can assess how likely these capacities are to matter morally, by evaluating the available arguments. Practically, we can then put it all together to assess how likely these beings are to matter – and how to factor this into the way we live our lives.