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I'll be switching my primary browser mail with physicsforums/Windows Live service to Google Mail. The major reason being the major glitches with Windows Live while using Firefox (it doesn't fetch the previous message when replying/forwarding - mysteriously, it always works with IE), slow loading times, inconveniences (drafting, attaching, searching etc. feel just that slightly better with Google).

[Edit: Wonder why I wrote 'major' twice in a sentence like that.. Oh well.]

Can't think of a nice email address to complete ...@ephedyn.com for now.

As I'm writing a philosophy lecture now, I feel like sharing a very important principle. One of the precepts that I've always adhered to is to present an argument that you must accept to be true, and not one which you are convinced to be true. I don't see what's the point of a lecture where I expect the audience to take what I say to be true simply because I'm the lecturer - a few half-truths may evade scrutiny, and I might as well talk about the Pachinko (パチンコ) aliens' conspiracy to conquer the world, because that carries just as much clout. Instead, I like to present things from the position of someone who's only just as qualified as anyone else in the audience, but weave my presentation like an argument structure.

This is especially the case in law or ethics, where the ideal sentence is one which we must accept, whether or not we sympathize with one party. I feel that the same goes with competitions where we feel like the judging was unfair (I did feel unfairly judged at a science fair, but I believe that it's my fault that I didn't rob him of any chance to be unfair towards me.)

Van Cilburn was one excellent example. Younger people like me might not know about him, hence for their benefit, let me quote the Wikipedia article on him:

Harvey Lavan "Van" Cliburn Jr. (born July 12, 1934), is an American pianist who achieved worldwide recognition in 1958, when at age 23, he won the first quadrennial International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, at the height of the Cold War. 

It was his recognition in Moscow that propelled Cliburn to international fame. The first International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 was an event designed to demonstrate Soviet cultural superiority during the Cold War, on the heels of their technological victory with the Sputnik launch in October 1957. Cliburn's performance at the competition finale of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 earned him a standing ovation lasting eight minutes. When it was time to announce a winner, the judges were obliged to ask permission of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to give first prize to an American. "Is he the best?" Khrushchev asked. "Then give him the prize!" Cliburn returned home to a ticker-tape parade in New York City, the only time the honor has been accorded a classical musician. His cover story in Time proclaimed him "The Texan Who Conquered Russia."

And I truly think that he played Rachmaninoff's 3rd piano concerto beautifully on that day.

I rate this the second best performance of it ever, behind Horowitz (Rachmaninoff, himself, regarded Horowitz's performance of it so highly that he said that the piece "belong[ed] to Horowitz" and never performed his composition in public ever again).