CenteredLight

[CenteredLight @Center3dLight]

@Nobody___666 @Sophia_Sophi01 You sir are the ragebait king :)) gg

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

Swans have one of the coolest landing techniques in the world.

[Fr. James A (Faith-Chat Platform) @frjamesa]

Did anyone else notice this about the movie “Home Alone”?

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This strange square 👇 is undoubtedly the most extraordinary work of literature in human history. Yet, unfortunately, barely anyone in the West has ever heard of it.

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐，
貞志篤終誓穹蒼，
欽所感想��淫荒，
心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心，
荒淫妄想感所欽，
蒼穹誓終篤志貞，
唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (https://t.co/4exP9zpqbc), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (https://t.co/yW7aR73MPc).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

[Darshan 🦖 @darshan]

Your brain has been fooling you your entire life.

This Nobel Prize winner spent 40 years proving it.

Here are the 10 mental traps controlling every decision you make: 🧵

[Gabriel Moncha @gabimoncha]

🌟 The 2023 JavaScript Rising Stars list by @michaelrambeau has been released! The list features 13 categories, with each category comparing the number of stars given to open-source projects over the past year. Below is a list showcasing the top library from each category 👀

[Dominik Sobe ツ @sobedominik]

For every 10 likes this gets, I will ask ChatGPT to make this cat work harder.

[History Unraveled @luca6290]

@Culture_Crit It's obviously this...

[Gabriel Moncha @gabimoncha]

Stop losing users at onboarding! With over 12,000 hours of crafting mobile app UX/UI, I've noticed where apps like @joinsuperlocal succeed or fail. Discover how to captivate your users from the very first interaction 🚀 0/7

[Hasan Toor @hasantoxr]

Harvard University is offering free online courses.

No application or fee required.

Here are 10 FREE courses you don't want to miss:

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

A Brief Introduction to Gothic Architecture:

[CenteredLight @Center3dLight]

@elonmusk Bodhicitta. Om mani padme hum.

[CenteredLight @Center3dLight]

@Medicus40241898 @0x49fa98 Thank you for this answer. I was almost on the point to write an aggressive response to this, but your reply just brought peace to my heart and the clarity of reason in it dispelled my aggression and restored my faith in humanity.
May peace be with you always, brother!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Please encourage more citizen journalism! You can do live video easily from your phone.

More on-the-ground reporting from regular citizens will change the world.

[Robin Delta @heyrobinai]

10 insane websites you probably didn't know existed (until now):

[DR22 Ω 🪬🎭 @DejaRu22]

Lesson in aura

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Triboulet was a jester for Louis XII, the King of France from 1498 to 1515. He is perhaps most famous for slapping the king on the butt. This act greatly angered the king, and he threatened to have Triboulet executed. After taking a moment to calm down, the king decided to spare Triboulet's life if he could think of an apology that was more offensive than what he had just done to the king.

Triboulet went on to say, "I'm so sorry, your majesty, that I didn't recognize you! I mistook you for the Queen!" While Triboulet's response was clever and indeed more offensive, it broke an order that prohibited anyone from making fun of the queen. The king decided to proceed with the execution but allowed Triboulet to choose how he would die. With his life on the line, Triboulet replied, "Good sire, for Saint Nitouche's and Saint Pansard's sake, patrons of insanity, I choose to die from old age."

The speechless king could do nothing but laugh. He canceled the execution and decided to banish Triboulet.

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

The 5th tallest statue in the world, Sendai Daikannon in Japan. The city of Sendai (pop. 1 million) in the Töhoku region of Japan has an instantly recognizable skyline, thanks to the massive Sendai Daikannon statue that stands on a hill to the north of the city center. Daikannon is the representation of the Japanese Buddhist Bodhisattva, the Goddess of Mercy, and it is large. Towering 328 feet or 100 meters into the heavens, the statue was the largest in the world when it was completed in 1991. It was replaced at the top spot by another Japanese statue, the Ushiku Daibutsu in 1993. An elevator takes visitors to the top of Sendai Daikannon, where a series of windows offer stunning views across the city. Apart from the views, the statue is also a place of worship and reflection. Though currently ranked 5th tallest in the world, it is still the tallest statue of a Goddess in Japan.