On fatalism

One of my previously written post titled "destined fortune" states that the prominent naval minister of Qhing Dynasty put this remark on his tomb stone "belief in destined fortune and not in the acquired knowledge". My personal perception about his statement carved on his tomb stone is apparently telling the world that we have nothing to be proud of because anything profound that you think you have achieved is actually the result of your destined fortune. And so I have taken Mr. Zeng as my comrade in terms of the same view point about life -- fatalism.

To me, fatalism means a belief that whatever you do to prevent something from happening, or to make something to be materialized, whatever is resulted is the one you have to just accept no matter whether you really want or hate it.

There are many popular sayings we are familiar with in our everyday living, such as, "whatever will be will be"; all these sayings reflect the mindset is ruled by the belief of fatalism.

But you should never raise this topic in any discussion group and simply allege that you believe in fatalism lest you will be despised as a coward, not manly, useless guy. And whoever criticizes you always has powerful and magnificent theory to support them, and all these critics will humiliate you. The reason is simply because you are not as successful, prominent and high up there as Mr. Zeng.

But my advice does not apply to Mr. Zeng, because he was so successful; He was in the top ranking in the country being a naval minister. Many people say that Mr. Zeng was only showing his humble manner to the world by saying "believe in destined fortune and not in the acquired knowledge", and they believe all of his accomplishment Mr. Zeng has achieved are the result of his effort. And I believe just differently from this because if the reason he said so was just because of his humbleness, then he didn't have to carve it on the tomb stone. Anything that is carved on the tomb stone is a serious belief the dead deeply believed during his lifetime.

Although I believe in fatalism, I still work hard and live every of my days seriously, and not indulge myself in anything that and corrupts me. Because I have a belief extension, causality.

From the appearance, causality is somewhat in conflict with fatalism. Because the causality believes that everything and anything does not happen from nowhere; they believe whatever has emerged can be traced back to the very origin of the cause, just like the simile of "harvest cucumber because the cucumber seeds are buried; harvest bean because bean seeds are planted

Learning Google spreadsheet part 2

There is a saying that life means uninterrupted learning. As far as my personal learning experience is concerned, besides my learning activities during my schooling time, the one I have learned wholeheartedly and persistently is Google spreadsheet.

I have written a post previously about how I got involved in the learning of this application provided by Google for free to the mass public. As of the time I am writing this post as the part two of this series, I feel that my passion for a further learning of this subject is still very high. It is so high that since I have started learning and practicing on this software eight months ago, the time and energy I spend on the learning, contemplating and experimenting of an actual system I made from scratch for my son to use on his music teaching business is still increasing. Sometimes I think that I have taken it as an entertainment. Sometimes I feel that I have become addicted to the learning process of this application. What has made me become so deeply absorbed?

My perception of the software that is called spreadsheet is that it is a very powerful information managing tool. With this tool you can tailor-make all of the formulas suitable to your peculiar need and insert them in any specified array of cells, and it will sort out all the data in the corresponding columns and rows. To learn some basic formulas such as the combination of the Google code, we have to be very patient at the beginning stage of the learning. Take the system I constructed for Chenny as an example. At first, I aimed to make a timetable that shows all the classes in a week; a student profile that records all the contact details, their class time, fee to charge; and a class log for him to enter the payment, lesson delivered, and the account balance. First of all I have to work out a formula which is able to import data from the timetable Chenny is using every day. The student name on Chenny's timetable will go to the student sheet to look for the name of a peculiar student, once it is located, the weekday and lessen time allocated to that student on Chenny's timetable will be displayed in the right columns and rows.

It sounds very easy and simple, but you have to learn to use the language that Google spreadsheet can understand, and then you have to be able to write a correct formula and embed it in the target cell. When these two conditions are met, the data supposed to fill up that cell will pop on when you press the 'enter' key. Once you have all these done, the program will automatically fill up the timetable with the student names on each of the correct positions.

The longest the I have ever written could be this one:

=iferror(FILTER(transpose(TimeTable!$A$1:$H$1),search($B49,transpose(TimeTable!$A$2:$H$2&

TimeTable!$A$3:$H$3&TimeTable!$A$4:$H$4&TimeTable!$A$5:$H$5&TimeTable!$A$6:$H$6&

TimeTable!$A$7:$H$7&TimeTable!$A$8:$H$8&TimeTable!$A$9:$H$9&TimeTable!$A$10:$H$10&

TimeTable!$A$11:$H$11&TimeTable!$A$12:$H$12&TimeTable!$A$13:$H$13&TimeTable!$A$14:$H$14&

TimeTable!$A$15:$H$15&TimeTable!$A$16:$H$16&TimeTable!$A$17:$H$17&TimeTable!$A$18:$H$18&

TimeTable!$A$19:$H$19&TimeTable!$A$20:$H$20&TimeTable!$A$21:$H$21&TimeTable!$A$22:$H$22&

TimeTable!$A$23:$H$23&TimeTable!$A$24:$H$24&TimeTable!$A$25:$H$25&TimeTable!$A$26:$H$26&

TimeTable!$A$27:$H$27&TimeTable!$A$28:$H$28))),"")

And a few short ones:

=SUM(E4:P4)

=$J14*2

=query(index(ARRAYFORMULA('Lesson log'!$A$1:$M1)), "select Col1, Col2, Col3, Col4, Col5, Col6, Col7, Col8, Col9, Col10, Col12")

With all of these formulas working together, they produced reports and graphs like the screenshots shown above:

I said that I seem to have become addicted to writing formulas, and it is quite true. Because during this eight months of time, besides the fixed daily activities such as having a tea break; time for meals; sitting meditation and spiritual practice, every bit of the free time I have are spent in the contemplating, writing, modifying and fixing the formulas.

Fellow Buddhists I know advised me quite often that people of my age should be concentrated in the spiritual practice so as to achieve a peaceful and blissful ending of our life. Engaging in the worldly pursuit may end up with our stronger sticking to our sensual pleasure and is a great obstacle to the most important life objective – Nivana. This is true. And so, I have promised to make some adjustment of my daily living schedule from next week.