The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively.
— Bob Marley
LomoAmigo MONSTER CAT Shoots with the La Sardina
Lomography and FILTER Magazine teamed up to present a special collaboration! We provided several artists from the Culture Collide festival in Los Angeles some Lomography cameras and here is our fifth LomoAmigo from our Culture Collide LomoAmigo series!
Mr. Allen has often said that he does not want or expect his own work to survive, but as modest and lighthearted as Midnight in Paris is, it suggests otherwise: Not an ambition toward immortality so much as a willingness to leave something behind – a bit of memorabilia, or art, if you like that word better – that catches the attention and solicits the admiration of lonely wanderers in some future time.
— A.O. Scott, The New York Times.
Wherever I go in the world people ask me “Do aliens exist?” It’s a good question because it cuts to the heart of how we see our place in the Universe. Are we alone in our small round blue ball? I think probably not, because of one fact: The Universe is BIG.. Really big. Our planet is just one of eight in orbit around our sun, which itself is hardly special being one of about 200 billion stars in a vast spiral, our galaxy the Milky Way. So big sometimes I find it hard to comprehend, but even the Milky Way is just a tiny drop in the Cosmic ocean. Just one of 100 billion galaxies, formed into an enormous web stretching away in all directions. At this scale, each point of light is an entire galaxy, which not only puts our little world in perspective but also makes it difficult to believe we really are alone. So to my mathematical brain.. the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational
— Stephen Hawking - “Into The Universe” (via ikenbot)
Employee Spotlight
Have you ever pondered about the questions of the universe? I once came across a motivational quote, urging on people in their twenties (yours truly included) to think about questions of the universe. What really resonated with me about this advice was; it didn’t matter whether you have arrived at the answers or not, because it is different for everyone. I’d like to tell you how I came to know some of mine.
Having survived a quarter-life-crisis, I became much more aware of the endless permutations of outcomes of how one’s life can be. The amount of things for us to learn and to pursue are just vast. Eventually, I coped with the indecision and decided I was OK with being a BD guy in a law firm. But every now and then I’d think of the ‘what if’s. One such ‘what if’s was pursuing the path of a scientist, or physicist to be precise. I enjoyed A-level Physics immensely, but could never have possibly decide to commit my life to it at that time.
So instead, it became something on the side for me to be as good as laymen can be in Physics. For a long time, the holy grail of that side ambition of mine is to get a good grasp on the Theory of Relativity. It was hopeless because if Wikipedia can’t make me understand, what else can?
Time lapsed, until I rediscovered Stephen Hawking. I remember I was in primary 3 when my English teacher told the class about the smartest living person on earth. When I finally picked up his book that was published in 1988 (I was 3), A Brief History of Time, I was engulfed by an overwhelming sense of ordinary. Such was the profoundness of Stephen Hawking’s mind, and the other great scientists or theoretical physicists whose work he had built upon for that matter, to take on the kind of thinking that most people leave to God. In the chapter where he was describing how the elementary particles called quarks have different colors, this sentence stuck with me, “It should be emphasized that these terms are just labels, quarks are much smaller than the wavelength of visible light and so do not have any color in the normal sense.”
I do not proclaim to have even understood 20% of what was written in the book, but much to my delight, there was a chapter dedicated to the theory of relativity. Which was the only bit that I could vaguely come to terms with. It wasn’t exactly easy to digest either, but I’d like to take a stab at simplifying it based on my understanding. Essentially, it means everything is relative, and the only absolute was the speed of light, C ( approx. 3 x 10e8 m/s). Say, a ball traveling at 10 m/s westward, a static observer positioned at the south of the ball would observe the ball traveling west. But if the static observer is positioned to the west of the ball, it would have appeared to the observer that the ball wasn’t moving, although it would appear to be getting bigger as it approaches him/her (trying to be gender neutral here). Applying the same logic, you may think that the static observers are, well, static, but to another observer in outer space, they’re moving at 107000km/h, that is the speed of earth orbiting the sun, relative to…uhm… Moving on!
That’s just one of the many parts that make up the theory of relativity. The other part that I know of deals with how space time continuum is actually curved. We all know, earth is spherical, but when an aircraft is flying from Asia to Europe for example, it need not fly in a spherical trajectory. All it did was to set the course for the direction of the destination and flew in that heading. Again, applying the same logic, the moon, whom we have come to known as revolving around the earth, isn’t really revolving the earth, it is in fact, moving at a velocity in a constant direction, but because of the space-time continuum is bent by earth’s gravity, it comes around to roughly the same point in space every month.
It is overwhelming, these questions of the universe. I actually dabblled with more of them, like attempting to understand beyond the 3rd dimension, what lies outside of the universe, the string theory, parallel universes and a whole host of other things that you can lose your mind in. To make sense of it all, no man could have done better other than the man that conquered some of it. “A human being is a part of a whole, called by us “universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” - Albert Einstein.
Did you know Einstein was a patent officer in Bern, Switzerland when he published his papers on the Theory of Relativity? That he was also a Jewish rights activist? A dude who wrote love letters to his girlfriend? I had the opportunity to visit the Einstein museum, and I find a strange comfort in knowing, he too had been a regular man, with a job. That he had been normal before. So, the answers to my set of questions of the universe are these; make the most out of our existence. Pick our battles and challenges well, and our compromises and sacrifices better. Be awesome, relatively, and appreciate more of everything. Don’t get too caught up in the details. Be open to try things for the first time. Speaking of which, I recently got into rock climbing, anyone interested in becoming my climbing buddy?
Sorry I have digressed. As most of you may have noticed, I’m the new business development & marketing executive. I’m really happy to be part of the Wong & Partners family. I play music, run marathons, and enjoyed Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia a lot. I look forward to grow with the firm and I hope you haven’t found me a complete waste of time, yet.
