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Dr. Lee's ClinicOnly the Paranoid Survive 11月26日 Prime Rib, the new recipe
Preparing the Prime Rib 11月5日 The Audacity of HopeI participated in and witnessed the most transformational moment in the history of US politics --- Barack Obama was elected as the 44th, and the first African-American President of the United States last night. As he put it in his victory speech in front of around 125,000 people gathered in Chicago's Grant park, "If there is anyone out there who doubts that America is a place where
anything is possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is
alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer." I have never seen America be so alive, full of new hope on TV for my last 16 years here. The cheering, the feat, the exuberating atmosphere I saw on TV last night, I have only seen it once in the ending scene of the blockbuster movie "Independence Day" when earth defeated aliens. New York Times with triple bold font title declared "Racial Barriers Fall as Voters Embrace Changes." Several TV commentators wept, General Colin Powell wept. Among the crowd in Chicago, there is Rev. Jesse Jackson whose eyes glared with tear. He had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in those civil right action days during the 60s. Obama's victory is only 45 years after Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech, which inspired me a bunch when I read it the first time in 1987 from my English course in Taiwan. While Dr. King's hope in that historical speech was modest (but unthinkable in his times), which he wished "my four little children will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of
their character," he would probably never imagine that a black President is to be elected by this nation in a democratic way receiving unprecedented support from the mainstream and it happens only less than half-a-century from the time when black was still segregated in certain Southern states. It is beyond description to watch and witness this great day's coming and marking the history. After the glory, it will soon come the reality for him to solve all the financial, diplomatic, social messes at this difficult time. The final quesiton is: will Barack Obama become one of the greatest Presidents in the US history? Indeed, he has the opportunity to become one as the greatest Presidents always emerged in the most difficult time in history. I strongly believe in the new President's (and our own) audacity of hope to reclaim many of us' American dreams. 6月2日 Fashion cityTo say Seoul is Milan in the east is definitely not an overstatement. I have never seen more shining men's suits on the street anywhere else. (So I decided to put on my suit jacket and forget about buying a cheap zipper jacket for the cool climate the first few days I just arrived.) Drop-dead gorgeous ladies were steadily running on their high heels inside the subway. Today, in a fast food restaurant called Lotterie in Jongno 3-ga, I almost cracked up into loud laughters when I saw a 30-ish young man carrying a Louis Vuitton (LV) purse. He was alone so I am sure he is not carrying it for his girlfriend. Well, his outfit does not look as stylish as his purse though. When I was wondering what he may have in that smaller-than-a-notebook-PC purse (cellphone, mirror, lipstick?), then what popped my eyes was that another man in the late 20s just walked in and, yes, he carried a different style of LV purse, stopping at the counter and ordering his food. Again, he is alone. The thickness of his purse cannot even hold a master thesis. Wow, in less than 5 minutes, I saw 2 men carrying LV (more women style) purses in a fast food restaurant. I must be in a different world. Then ... just merely 2 minutes later, I almost dropped off from my seat: a third man carried a slightly bigger LV purse coming in with a girl. Hmm, now I think LV is really popular here. Although I could not tell if the ones they were carrying were from those street vendors, asking like 10 to 20 bucks each. But I bet if you walk on the street with a T-shirt untucked in and jeans on Seoul's street, most likely you are either a college student or will be considered a bum. I got to figure out how to upload the picture I took from my cellphone. 5月22日 (Un)familiar cities"How far is it to Beijing, China?" I asked. Just like the line "How far
is it, my lord, to Berkeley now?" in Shakespeare's Richard II. After
being called a Chinese for nearly my entire life, I finally got my
China visitor visa, it was an ordeal to get the China visa these days
after the recent Tibetan riot and all the protests going on in the
States and else where. Many foreign friends of mine often popped their
eyes and stunned to hear that, I, look like a Chinese, had never set
foot in China soil (including Hong Kong and Macau). They probably
always think I should have been visiting China more than my trips to
Disney. Well, this is unfortunately not true even though I am somehow
proud of my knowledge in Chinese history or geography, which I did
reasonably well in my high school years. I am really exciting and
looking forward to my first visit to the place I was so familiar with
but also so distant from over my entire life. Well, the city Seoul herself is too much like Taipei; I have no particular feeling after living here for almost 2 weeks. I sincerely hope China will be largely different. Similar to most of the westerners, I feel China was covered with a veil and many parts of the country seem mysterious enough to me. Feel exactly like the name of a recent movie -- A Forbidden Kingdom. Even Seoul is no strange place to me, however, there were some certain Koreans' behavior I still don't understand. For one thing, they shoved me from behind when I was walking on the street or in the subway station. I mean, literally, touched and pushed you away without saying anything when they bypassed you. This almost happens to me everyday. An Indian lady complains the same to me that she was pushed by a man (in front of her), which is probably unthinkable. Well, this behavior I could sort of accept. But the most weird happened this morning. When I was withdrawing some cash from an ATM machine on KU campus, there was this young man in his 20's, moving closer and then standing right next to me shoulder to shoulder, watching the same ATM display together with me right before I punched in my password. I stopped, raised my head, sort of looked at his face. He also looked back, and it seemed something has struck him, then he silently walked away. 5月21日 2D spellingKorean is the only language I know that spells their letters (Hangul) in two dimension (maybe Arabic too?). Even though I can recognize their 24 letters, to spell them out promptly, however, is a slow going challenge. I strongly suspect it is the 2D spelling that retards my thought process. Unlike English or Japanese which is either left-to-right or top-down, I will spin around the same character even with merely 3 letters for a few seconds to get it right. You may wonder how about Chinese, well, it is totally different, there is no letter but only building blocks. The pronunciation symbols, nonetheless, are still arranged in 1D. You do want to give credit to whoever invented the assembly method of Korean phonemic alphabets, though. One interesting thing I just found out was that many Korean nouns pronounced exactly the same way as Taiwanese or Fu Kien dialect in Singapore. To name a few, my first name if pronounced in Korean using the Chinese characters will sound just like the way Taiwanese pronounced. Hsien will not pronounce with an 'S' at the beginning but 'H', i.e. Heon in Korean and Hen in Taiwanese. There are many other examples I found during last week. For example, "old" (舊) pronounced "Gu", or "world"(世界) pronounced "Se Guy", one version of last name "柳" pronounced "Lyoo." For these, Taiwanese will be pronounced closer to (or exactly the same as) Korean than Mandarin Chinese. Amazing. Don't know if someone has investigated the etymology or history of these nouns. It was speculated by a school of thoughts that Taiwanese or the dialect used in the southern Fukien province was actually the official language of Tang dynasty of China more than a millennium ago. And Tang dynasty indeed maintained a very constructive relationship with Korea or Goguryeo (高句麗). Nevertheless, I still can barely communicate and survive living at Seoul. I ordered at a Starbucks the other day right inside the Somerset Palace hotel building, supposedly, they deal with lots of English speakers. I ordered a "Mocha Frappuccino," the lady nodded her head. When they nodded their head, I am not so sure. So I paid attention to the receipt she printed out for me. Jesus Christ, she had "Mango Passionfruit"! I guess in Korean Mocha does sound like Mango, and the second word probably is not important to her once her pattern matching algorithm has a first hit. I spent the next 3 minutes to explain what my order is until she made it right. At the beginning, she was still repeating "Mango" with her nodding head. Speaking of ordering foreign foods, I sincerely do not suggest to order something like Fukien Chow fun (friend rice) from New York Chinatown. From what I was told, the province name does not spell very deliciously, which suggests the cook may fry the rice in a pretty bad mood. How to spell that, hey use your imagination. 5月10日 Somerset Palace at Seoul
The first night at Seoul for the summer KU-Georgia Tech program. Welcome to the Somerset Palace. Well, this is not the first time I am in Seoul. But this time will be much different since I will spend the next 6 weeks in a place everyone looks like me but can probably not communicate at all. We will see. I am still trying to figure out what is the difference betwee ㅕ (Yeo) and ㅛ (Yo), which are 1/pi difference. 5月5日 Spyware, Trojan, Rootkits will do just fineAs CMOS scaling is approaching the limit of physics, instead
of pursuing ever higher performance, a school of researchers start to become
more paranoid than ever about reliability. (nothing else to do? Even my proposal contains this word.) For those who are acquainted with me
know, I am not a believer of the so-called logic soft errors, much less am I a
believer of implementing wear-out management for integrated circuits. I understand that we need
error correction code (ECC) in a variety of memory structures to protect them
from bit-flipping, the memory type soft errors, caused by neutrons in the cosmic
rays or alpha particle emission from package materials. Nonetheless, anything
more than that, I consider it overkill. Anyway there's so much machine
downtime caused by buggy software or (known) loop-holes in the OS, why do you
care about bit-flipping during a fraction of moment in the logic switching that almost never happens and
the eventual wear-out of a mortal piece of hardware? At the same time, processor architects continue to worry about the slowdown of upgrading computers due to not-so-staggering performance improvement over the recent years. That is why they now turn to adding new feature sets to spark upgrade. Well, here, I’m offering a simple but seemingly insane solution: Do ----> nothing. Or, in other words, deliver unreliable machines to improve the odds of machine upgrades. When machines start to fail, people will choose to upgrade. After machines wore out, people will rush to buy new ones. Isn’t this simply how the business of other industries works? As such, processor designers do not need to pull their hair off to enhance reliability or the lifetime of a system with anyway less reliable transistors. What do we learn from this “vision” then? Well, it means spyware, Trojan horses,
rootkits, worms, viruses, are all very welcome from the standpoint of a
processor vendor. Oftentimes my computer-unsavvy friends would ask me ---
“my computer has become very slow lately, should I buy a new system?” Their naïve
presumption is that, newer software requires more horse power to run. But if I
have to give them my honest professional suggestion, I would first ask them to
pay, install, and run Spy Sweeper or virus scanner to detect and eradicate any
potential unwanted processes/programs running on their system before giving it another
thought. Well, under the “no-sweat vision” of future computer designs, maybe
they should indeed shell out big bucks to buy the latest multi-core processor systems
offered by Dell.
7月28日 ConversionI converted! It is a big decision to convert from a Windows user to a Mac user. It can be like converting one's religion from one to the other. Well, even though I use Linux and Solaris professionally, the use of Microsoft Windows is inevitable in making presentations and playing some games. I am not really new to Mac. My Minix hacking experiences went all the way back to 1992 on MacIntosh and later PowerMac machines. However, for the gradually successful evanglising effort by Intel and partly by AMD, we all became Windows users. Only until recently, Apple started to use Intel Core processor for their machine (what a smart move), I decided to give it a try for a MacBook Pro running on Intel Core Duo 2.
Thus far I am far more than satisfied with everything on this machine, I am startling impressed. Mac OS is truly amazing, all the interface looks so sleek. I particularly like the Widgets. With the reach of a single shortcut key, you get Wikipedia, thesaraus, weather, stock market, or even all the US airline schedules in real-time surfacing on top of your faded desktop. While it is similar to Google Desktop, this is far more powerful with a much nicer user interface in my opinions. The brightness of the LCD panel is self-adaptive with the ambient lighting, which made my jaw dropped when the first time I discovered it when dimming my dinging light. Since Mac OS X is UNIX-based, using X11 is a piece of cake. The installation of all Unix/Linux open source packages is simply a simple command fink.
Running VMware's Fusion (beta version that I am using), you can also emulate the MS Windows on Mac OS X. In fact, with Intel's VT support, it is not quite emulation as the underlying machine is an x86, the MS stuff are just simply tunneled through and executed on the machine natively. The speed of virtual machine is astonishing. I can even watch Netflix real-time play feature watching movies through the virtual layer, writing OpenGL programs and rendering the Utah teapot with almost no feeling of slowdown. I guess it is even faster than a fully-loaded or infected native Windows machine. I am actually writing this blog using the Windows virtual machine. The only missing feature I really wanted in the Mac machine is the stylus or graffiti found in a Tablet PC. That is a knockout feature especially for teaching and grading, and sometimes MSN messenging. So I was able to grade all my remote students' exam papers without even printing anything out to save a few trees every year. I had been wondering why Apple, whose CEO Steve Jobs claimed himself a huge fan of touch screen, had not put in this feature to a MacBook. Hopefully with the new buzz on iPhone, it will come soon to liberate me from Microsoft completely.
Windows Vista since its inception has shied enough Windows' users away. Some simply refused to jump on this new bandwagon for its many annoying "features", few others like me would opt for an alternative and convert to Mac OS. A few weeks after I started using my new toy, I dumped half of the Microsoft stocks I owned for obvious reasons. Given Apple's Leopard's coming, an interesting war is imminent. 4月24日 The future of advanced educationI recently attended a very good talk given by Dr. Tingye Li, a highly respectable researcher in laser and optical communication and a long time member of both the US National Academy of Engineering and the Academia Sinica. At the end of his talk, he said he had worked for AT&T Bell Labs for 41 years, who would predict Bell Labs will eventually dissolve in just a few years 40 years ago? He then concluded that industry companies come and go, but colleges like Georgia Tech will surely stay for the next 100 years. Then I stuck my neck out and boldly challenged him "are you sure?" If Jesus Christ is still alive today, has his Bible lecture recorded in Macromedia Flash, and uploads it to youtube.com, the question is that do we need priests at all? Let me put it in a more realistic way: in most of the undergraduate classes, one can always find a "bible textbook." (For example, in computer architecture, the two books by John Hennessy and David Patterson.) If we have these bible books' authors record their lectures, upload them to youtube.com (or password-protected them somewhere and give you the password when you buy their books), do we need some lousy professors to babble to students in class? It is probably true that no one can do a better job than the bible authors themselves to interpret what they were trying to say in their books. Look at what MIT is doing, they are globalizing almost all of their class materials via Internet with a project called OpenCourseWare, PowerPoint slides now, I guess videotaped lectures soon. Lots of the developing countries from the other side of the globe are restlessly translating these MIT materials into different languages. Pretty soon, the people of these countries will receive close-enough education from one of the most prestigious schools in the world so they will no longer rely too much on their own lagging-much-behind education system. This, is a serious question, and we do not know what eventually it will turn out. Attending colleges may eventually become a ritual to get a printed diploma without any warrantee that you are more knowledgeable or capable than someone from a fishing village with an Internet access in Myanmar. With today's technology, knowledge is spread and shared in an exponential rate, nothing can slow this down. As a result, it gives me a second thought about my job security. Going back to Dr. Li's talk, I felt I learned a lot from his 2-hour seminar. Especially, the last slide he showed this quote "Be dilettante in phantomics research and religious vision." (to mock some surreal, far-fetching research in photonics.) He said "dilettante" is the word one Bell Labs VP liked to use on their employees for not spending too much time in chasing the ghosts. But reading this quote in another way, one has to be truly darned serious when researching a real problem and finding a solution. Maybe this is the cornerstone for the reason why Bell Labs could incubate so many world-class researchers in the last half century. 3月26日 2007, a year of no significanceA book "1587, A Year of No Significance" (萬曆十五年) written by a world-renowned historian Ray Ren-Yu Huang was quite popular (at least in my room) during my college years in the late 80s. My college roommate who seldom read books outside textbooks considers this is the best book ever written. In fact, this was the only book which is not an EE textbook he had on his bookshelf. After reading this book, I bought almost all the books written by Prof. Huang. This is one of Huang's books that advocate his concept of "macro history." This book was also used as a textbook in many US colleges. Macro history basically studies how a list of small, seemingly insignificant events can eventually generate a huge impact to a country or even the world. (In the case of this book, the Ming Dynasty.) We are in year 2007, exactly 420 years after 1587, the Emperor Wan-Li Year 15, and exactly seven Chinese zodiac cycles, each 60 years. I was always under the impression (according to Wassenaar Arrangement) that a 300mm fab would never be built in a so-called controlled country restrained by the US government. Today, to my surprise, Intel officially announced its plan, after much speculation, to build its 3rd outside-US 300mm fab in Dalian, China in addition to the other two in Ireland and Israel. Although the new fab won't manufacture microprocessors (only chipsets for now) and won't be operational until 2010, nonetheless, it is still a stunning news. Moreover, Intel's CEO Paul Otellini hinted that the fab may eventually make microprocessors. Many years ago, there were such talks that China's semiconductor business, in particular, design services, would never catch up foundry companies like TSMC or UMC of Taiwan within 20 years due to the fact that the US government would never approve any sale of the semiconductor manufacturing equipments to China. Back then, the speculators expected eventually Chinese will get these equipments from Japan, whose economy has been trapped in tar pit for more than a decade. Now, these analysts may have to think again if Intel is making such a bold move. When I was working at Agere/Motorola, designing the next generation DSP of StarCore's SC-140, one of the most powerful DSP processors in the world a few years back, the export control policy of the US government practically banned the SC140 chips to be sold to controlled countries like China. Intel's announcement is somewhat shocking. It basically opened the Pandora's box for Chinese high-tech business. The aftermath and impact to other US high-tech behemoths in the business will be interesting and remain to be seen. Intel's move, if blessed by the US government, will have a long term impact. I watched a movie called The Last Mimzy during the spring break. It is a science fiction movie aiming for kids, but from which you can see what role does Intel play in a layman's eyes. What amused me was in a scene in which the scientists broke up the "energy generator" the kids found on the beach nearby their vacation home, and placed one shard under an electron microscope for examination. They zoomed in the "chip shard" about 10 times, like peeling an onion, and found this "Intel" logo embedded deep inside the chip, assembled atom-by-atom. Then an Intel employee showed up and was interrogated by the FBI. He swore he worked for Intel for more than 20 years and Intel's nanotechnology was not even close to what this chip is capable of. On the other hand, those FBI interrogators did not look convincing at all and thought Intel is conspiring something. I feel lucky to have worked for such a high-profile, high-tech company, so high-tech and start becoming "mystic" to others. 1月3日 www.chacha.com, yet another amazing search engine on earthI read an article from New York Times today regarding a new wave of seach engine startups. The NY Times listed a few top contenders (e.g. Powerset, chacha, and snap) who are backed with tens of millions of dollars by venture capitalists. To differentiate themselves from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, these new breeds of search engine companies mostly focus on techniques based on a decade-old research topic in AI --- natural language processing. Out of curiosty and try to understand how much progress has been made in this area since my first encoutner with natural language processing in 1988, I tried www.chacha.com. The portal design has a similar look to Google, with a logo much ensembled Coca-cola's. There is a distinguished button called "search with guide," I then first tried a query in natural language semantics: "My Scooba is broken, how do I fix it?" and clicked the "search with guide" button. It generated a "Guide session" on the left, similar to a Google chat or any kind of chat box, and said "connected to a guide ... DarrellC." Subsequently, it came out with some results which look sort of relevant with the chatbox showing "what else can I do for you?" I thought, umm, this search engine does understand my plain English. Then, I tried another wilder search. I typed "Please find me the hottest girl at Atlanta" and waited to see what would come up. Then what I saw completely blew me away. The Guide returned the following "LOL, I don't think I know the answer for sure." Wonderful, I thought, this computer or AI program is really smart! Not only know how to handle an inappropirate query, but also know how to use Internet Lingo such as Laugh Out Loud ! Sweet! But then, I became suspicious and thought --- maybe there is a real person behind this so-called "natural language processor." Boldly, I typed in the chatbox "are you being paid by chacha.com to handle my search question?" Followed my query is a humanly reply: "Yes, we are being paid by cha cha to guide your request." Bingo, a real person (maybe from India again) is behind this, no wonder, my questions, sometimes in mis-spelled English, were all handled quite intelligently. Then I started to think, maybe it is more economical to hire these "guides" from India or China then to develop a real, human-like natural language processor, and it will be faster, too, if anyone tries to take down Google immediately. After their candid answer, the "search guide" continues the conversation and asked me if I want to continue my search, he could help me to connect to eHarmony.com or places like that. I said, no thanks, I was just mocking you (or your computer as I thought to begin with.) Later before I went to bed, I tried chacha.com again. This time I was more serious. The last few days, I've been trying to find a really small easel for supporting my award plaque frames but could not find any in Officemax or Home Depot. I sent the query to chacha.com, a KimM was connected as the guide. I typed "find the support or easel for picture frame" and then type more specifically with "I want a small easel (not those poster kind)" since I know there is a real person on the other side. Within one minute, KimM solved my problem and located real nice picture frame size easels for me, and even told me where to find them at Atlanta local stores. Now I am convinced that this can be an extremely useful search engine, especially for people who are not keyword savvy (mostly seniors I guess) or lazy enough even though the whole searching process is by no means "high-tech." Nonetheless, the caveat is that since the function of this search engine resembles a chat room very much, maybe these paid "search guides" will quickly be taken up by online yahoos or goofballs who have no better things to do, once chacha.com becomes popular. Pretty soon, a new fad like "Did you cha cha today?" might be equivalent to"did you dupe some innocent search guides lately?" 11月7日 Yellow Squash BisqueFor those who do not want to shell out 10 bucks for a small cup of squash bisque in upscale, dress-code-enforced restaurants, here is one way to prepare it with less than 4 dollars.
Yellow Squash soup
-----------------------
Serve 4 bowls
3 yellow squash (sliced)
1 large onion (chopped)
1 small carrot (optional)
2 to 3 cloves of garlic (crushed)
2 teaspoons butter
2 cans of chicken broth
1 cup of milk (0.7 cup whole milk, 0.3 cup of half-half)
Steps:
-------
1. Saute chopped Onion and crushed garlic in a fry pan with the butter until the onion turned golden color.
2. Add sliced squash into the pan and stir fry it till it becomes soft, move them to a cooking pot.
3. Add the 2 cans of chicken broth and about 3 cans of water. (You can add more water if you prefer a less saulty flavor.)
4. Cook with medium heat for about 20 minutes.
5. Turn off the gas and leave it till it cools down.
6. Pour the soup into a blender and blend them.
7. Puree the soup mixture until it becomes smooth.
8. Pour the soup back to the pot.
9. Add milk and start heating with medium heat.
10. Once heated, ready to serve.
10月11日 Spaghetti CarbonaraThe most memorable experience I had in Vienna is neither the music nor the free concerts for Mozart's 250th birth anniversary, but this --- Spaghetti Carbonara in Melk, a remote little fairytale like town about 50 minutes downstream by Donau River from Vienna. I have to admit that I never liked Italian food, yet this dish totally changed my view about Italian cuisine. When I came back to Atlanta, I scoured the web and found an Italian restaurant which offers this dish on their dinner menu. Went there, tasted awful, just like all other Americanized Italian restaurants--- unimpressive. To recreate the taste of Melk’s Carbonara, I started doing some research about the secrecy of the recipe. At the second attempt, I did cook up something that came close to the dish I had in Melk. Here is my Spaghetti Carbonara. The picture on the right is the one I got at Melk, Austria, while the one on the left is mine. Enjoy. Spaghetti Carbonara -------------------- Serve: 2 Spaghetti: ~7 ounces Virgin olive oil: 2 tablespoons Bacon bits Ham: about 2 round pieces Garlic: 2 or 3 cloves, minced Green onions: 3 tablespoons Parsley: minced, 5 tablespoons Milk: 2 cups Butter: 3 tablespoons Flour: 3 tablespoons Parmesan Cheese: freshly grated Steps: ------ 1. Boil "spaghetti" till ready 2. Put "butter" into microwave oven, heat 2 minutes till melt 3. Put "flour" and "milk" into melt butter and stir, this is the sauce 4. Chop ham and green onions. Mince parsely and garlic. 5. Heat "virgin olive oil," cook "ham," "bacon bits," "garlic," and "green onions," blend well in a fry pan 6. Add the cooked "spaghetti" and "parsley" into the pan and stir evenly 7. Add the "sauce" made from 2. and 3. into the pan, stir for 1 to 2 min. 8. Sprinkle grated Parmesan cheese on top. Ready to serve. 10月9日 The shining city''Astounding !'' said by the MLB game commentator during the broadcast and I was with him. In the same week, I watched 2 Major League Baseball games, NY Yankee vs. Detroit Tiger and LA Dodgers vs. NY Mets. Coincidentally, the starter pitchers --- Yankee’s Chien-Ming Wang and Dodgers’ Hong-Chih Kuo, both were from my hometown, Tainan city, Taiwan, the fact the commentator was awing about. What is the odds two starter pitchers in play-off games grew up and graduated from the same high school? More interestingly, I watched twice in the same week on Fox channel, a full-screen geographical map of the no-so-big town where I also grew up. Tainan city was once the capitol city of Taiwan in the dynasty era of the Middle-Kingdom, China before Taiwan was ceded to and colonized by Japan in 1895. For the last decade, many born and raised in my ancient hometown have become international celebrity including these 2 MLB starter pitchers and the recent Oscar-winning Director Ang Lee. Domestic celebrity such as the President of Taiwan and the President of National Taiwan University (NTU) were also nurtured in my alma mater high school in this city. Speaking of both sports and intellectual achievements, I must bring up the incumbent Dean of College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the National Tsinghua University in Taiwan, Prof. Cheng-Wen Wu. Professor Wu is not only an internationally recognized researcher for his VLSI testing work, but also was the primary pitcher of the team that won the championship of the 1971 Little League Baseball World Series, plus he was from Tainan city too. Now you probably get some idea about the level of my pitching skill. 10月3日 Nobody's FaultTo pick science or technology as a career route, one has to love or embrace either colossal matters (Class A), or very small, tiny things (Class B). Copernicus, Newton, Galileo, Hoyle, Hubble, Sagan, etc. belong to the Class A, while Rutherford, Planck, Bohr, Dirac, Pauli, Noyce, Pasteur, Salk are representatives of the Class B. Einstein probably did a little bit former, and a little bit latter. If you don't like to see a thing with physical dimension at all when you think, maybe you can become a good mathematician. I once argued in Michigan that we (computer architecture) should be given an "art" degree (like a BA, MA) in lieu of a "science" degree (BS, MS). What we do, in fact, can barely qualify as "science". Science is full of discoveries, hidden in the nature while most of our research outcomes are creation, not discovery. I think during that argument, several people could not agree with me more. For my own research papers as examples, if I came up with the ideas in the works, most of the times they came about when I was taking a shower or when I was lying in bed, falling into asleep. At no time, the ideas came from busying writing codes or sitting before my desk in thinking mode. I highly suspect Tungsten was found that way by Thomas Edison. When I was in my teenage years, for no apparent reason, I became a super buff of astronomy and my parents showed their unconditionally support for my passion in 1986 when the Halley's Comet returned to earth for her once-every-76-year visit. 1986 was a critical year to the careers of those who were born in 1968. It was the year that my fellow peers and I were supposed to study pretending there is no tomorrow to prepare and show our best in the non-sense joint college entrance exam, which, would put a stick to our future. The country (Taiwan) where I was born and most of her neighbor countries still do this your-life-depend-on-one-exam thing and continue to screw up young people's lives. Instead of burning my midnight oil in front of my desk in 1986, I was indulged and fooling around for most of the nights with my 6-in Newtonian telescope, tracing the heavenly body the first time in my life --- in graveyards. As I knew more about research, I gradually found my true passion probably lies more in the little thing inside a living body, which I was never given a chance to study, or study well. In retrospect, there was this grumpy old teacher, my first biology teacher in high school, who pretty much nailed my destiny in what I am doing now. Swei Chang is his name. I thought about him every year since I graduated from high school for his influence that became the major part of my life. Oddly enough, whenever I think about him, "cavemen" always comes into my mind. Swei, in Mandarin Chinese, happens to be synonymous to the first caveman (Chinese version) who invented how to make fire. Swei, in Taiwanese or Cantonese' pronunciation, also means "extremely bad luck." I had enough bad luck to have had him to completely disillusion me from the subject of biology when I was barely 15 year-old. Speaking of the magnitude of the influence from a teacher to one's life, I cannot think of a larger negative one. Interestingly, the issue has nothing to do with his teaching skill, yet the issue is that understood absolutely nothing coming out from his mouth. He speaks Mandarin Chinese with an esoteric, indistinguishable accent, probably from some rural Chinese province that I could imagine. Worse yet, he gave about 5 quizzes in each semester, and the quizzes, in multi-choice format, were given by him "reading" the questions! I still remember vividly, I was always guessing A, B, C, D without any whatsoever clue of his questions. Even though my current talking starts to sound a lot like Holden Caufield's tone in the "Catcher in the Rye," unfortunately, I indeed have to "live," as a result of this accent, for my entire career. Immediately, I gave up biology once and for all. In our system, you can enter engineering schools by not taking biology exam in the joint entrance exam, and here I am. For many years, I keep wondering, if my biology was not screwed up in such a stupid way, would I love the warmer small matters (Class B) inside a living body more than the senseless electrons. Many of you would also sometimes feel sorrowful and keep asking yourself, if I did not flunk the interview, will my life be very different? The irrevocable fact is, every moment of our lives is full of choices, when you come to a (multi-dimensional) fork in the road, don't you just "take it"? 9月23日 Fields MedalWhen the Fields Medal was announced last month, it puts an end to my long anticipation of that my high school classmate, a math prodigy will win it one day. In case you don't know the significance of this award, it is considered the Nobel Prize for rising stars in Mathematics. But the award is only tougher under 2 conditions: (1) it is awarded every 4 years, (2) the awardees must be under 40 years old to be considered. John Nash, the Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics and the protagonist in the novel and movie -- "A Beautiful Mind," wanted this award eagerly when he was young and sane, although he failed to receive it. (instead, his colleague Prof. John Milnor won it in 1962.) I have to say my high school classmate, let me call him YJK, is one and only one true genius I ever met in my life. He represented Taiwan and won 3 times (2 First Prize) in the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search contest (now Intel Science Talent Search) in mathematics in the mid-80s. Later, he received a PhD in Math from Harvard University 7 years earlier than the PhD I got, and taught at Princeton, Maryland and Purdue. All the stunt he pulled in high school, I still remember many of them. I was convinced that there indeed exists a human flesh Xerox machine after I watched him flipping through a textbook and memorizing all of them by heart almost word-by-word. When he received his PhD from Harvard, many believed that he will be the most probably second person with an Asian lineage to win the Fields Medal after Shing-Tung Yau of Harvard. Although YJK did not make it and never will (he will be 42 for the next Fields Medal), one of this year's Fields Medal awardees is an Asian Australian --- Prof. Terence Tao from UCLA for his contribution in number theory. More amazingly, Tao is 7 years younger than us, and still has 8 years (i.e. 2 more chances) to receive the award if he did not win it this year. One also interesting anecdote is that one of the awardees, Griori Perelman who helped solving the famous Poincare conjecture, one of the 7 Millennium Prize Problems for which a USD1,000,000 prize is provided for a correct solution, declined to accept the Fields Medal. How many people in the world can decline an award with such magnitude and respect? In history, I could not think of anyone rejecting a Nobel Prize or other top prizes. The only similar scenarios I can think of is Marlon Brando rejected his Academy Award for his performance in Godfather and Ving Rhames insisted to give his Golden Globe to Jack Lemmon on stage in front of billions of eyes. Most of the greatest researchers in the world are impatiently waiting for some of these types of awards and will feel deep regret to be passed by by the award committee . For that, I feel sorry for my high schoolmate. 8月15日 The "Daily 10% More" PrincipleI recently read some theoretical formula by a young physicist about his secret sauce of being more successful than his peers. I found it somewhat intriguing. Even though being a computer engineer myself, the non-polynomial effect is no stranger to me, nonetheless, it still surprises me how and why an eager beaver can easily stand out among the others. Here I present the secret formula to share with other readers. Well, the secret is --- working 10% more than your peers everyday. So what? Isn't this some kind of a bullshit? Isn't this crystal clear? I guess the intriguing part only comes after you scrape up that daily 10%. According to the convincing explanation of that physicist, so long as you do 10% more everyday than your peers, after N days, you will be (1.1)^N more productive than your competitors (supposed the result is synergistic, not simply additive). Let's see... Given you (only) work 5 days a week, 1.1^5 = 1.61, a 61% improvement. If this does not impress you, then let's assume 4 weeks a month, i.e. 20 days a month, then 1.1^20 = 6.73, a 573% better ! If an automobile company can squeeze 10% more productivity everyday, it can produce new cars 6 times more. If this is still not good enough, how about the impact one year later --- for 52 weeks, 5 days a week, that 10% daily improvement will be translated into 1.1^260 = 57,822,669,934, 57 billion times... are you kidding me? Of course, if you work more than 5 days a week with no Thanksgiving and Christmas, the astronomical number will keep expanding exponentially. No wonder, semiconductor foundries, automobile assembly lines and the alike would never shut down their production lines in order to keep a fully-occupied operation. Now, we roughly get a feeling with regard to how a successful company or how a productive researcher churns out so much more works and profits. MediaTek, the Taiwanese company that makes their every employee a multi-millionaire must know this secret sauce. According to some of my friends, this company sort of mandatorily asks all their employees to work for a schedule from 8:30am to 11pm, 6-day a week. A practical joke about a new high-tech rising star called MorningStar is that the company name is for the fact that their employees would (or should) work till seeing the morning stars. So my friend, turn on your lamp, and start to expect seeing the morning stars more often. But of course, you cannot miss the sunrise either. 7月19日 Guanxi (the art of relationships)I wandered into the Business book section at Barnes and Noble for spending my 15% coupon atop my 10% membership discount before the coupon expires. I was actually looking for Harvard B-school professor, Clayton Christensen's book "The Innovator's Dilemma" which I always wanted to read for almost 10 years but never got a chance too. I couldn't find it but instead the title of this book caught my eyes -- Guanxi (The Art of Relationships): Microsoft, China and Bill Gates' Plan to Win the Road Ahead by Robert Buderi and Gregory T. Huang. I flipped through the book and immediately took it to the counter and spent the coupon.
The only reason I bought the book without a second thought was that: the name of my undergrad classmate who is currently a research manager at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) appeared in the book so many times by looking at the index. I knew he was on media (mainly in China and Taiwan) big times being tagged as the secret weapon of Bill Gates to battle the search war with Google. But I have not expected he will be a star big to be mentioned a lot in a book written by American authors, which also makes me feel bad for my not so shining, publicized career thus far.
It turns out I have a hard time to put down this book once I started reading it. For two nights, I could not till almost 4 am. Although the authors (implicitly) suggested here and there also in the title of the book that, to prevail in doing business in China, one needs to establish good relationships and strong ties with local government officials with a humble, sincere and respectful attitude. (The xenophobia of Chinese stemmed from a sequence of unfortunate historical events during late 19 and early 20 centuries when China lost several wars to Westerners.) Nonetheless, the main theme the authors took in this book is about how Microsoft hired the "right" people (starting from Kai-Fu Lee and Ya-Qin Zhang) and established a new research lab, defying all the pessimism and becoming a new mecca for several computer science research areas. In many paragraphs, my heart felt the same when the authors talked about how Apple allured away Kai-Fu Lee from his professor job at Carnegie Mellon to join industry. In the description, Lee was basically doing "fighting research grants, recruiting grad students, and volunteering committee meetings" --- exactly the same thing that took most of my time (with very little real research work done). And the recruiter used the same pitch that Steve Jobs used to recruit John Sculley, "do you want to cloister in this academic ivory tower, or you want to go out, join Apple and change the world?" This is a bomb to me, giving me much thought about what I am doing now.
Initially I was skeptical about the book's hail on MSRA's success, and thought the authors might have exaggerated MSRA's achievement in their research work on 3D graphics, which I used to involve during my tenure at Intel designing Pentium III but had not followed too closely since 2000. So I went on to google search the programs of the latest SIGGRAPHs, the most prestigious conference in Computer Graphics, and to my much surprise, MSRA (Beijing lab) have 5 papers last year and more than 6 this year, representing a large portion of the entire conference program. Also, there were many papers from Tsinghua, Zhejiang University, a fruit for MSRA's strong tie with Chinese top-notch colleges. I am very very surprised.I am intrigued as a matter of fact. Maybe because I never see any Chinese paper in my main research area computer architecture. Kai-Fu Lee's initial seed at Microsoft has prospered. (Now he is doing the same thing at Google as the President of Google China for an alleged 10 million dollars deal.) The implication is that if the Chinese can do it in one of the most competitive research areas dominated by the US academe and industry, they probably can pull it off in other areas as well if they can find the "right" Kai-Fu Lee and Ya-Qin Zhang to lead similar effort in other research domains. This is surely exciting, but scary too. Given their 1.3 billion people and a country that produces the most computer science majors in the world every year, we can look forward to a cutthroat, fierce, competition is imminent if we US researchers do not wake up and work harder than ever.
7月12日 It's very Bill Gates of you!Pretty soon, you might hear people say "That is very Bill Gates of you !" or "You are so Warren Buffet !" An article from USA Today quoted. Well, yes, using real person's name as an adjective. However, don't misunderstand it. When people say so, they probably don't mean you are filthy rich, nor you are an evil. On the contrary, they are praising you for your generosity. A few weeks ago, the second richest person on the planet, Warren Buffet, announced that he will give away 85% of his self-made fortune to Gates Foundation. With this additional 37 billion dollars, Gates Foundation total with more than 60 billion dollars, will become the invincible number 1 super rich charity organization in human history, drawfed the number 2 --- Ford Foundation by almost 6 folds. How large this astronomical number is? Let me draw an analogy. Let a person make 1 US dollar for each second. That person has to be as old as Jesus Christ before he makes up to 60 billion dollars in 2006. Or, in other words, if one person can make about 90,000 dollars a day, he has to make 2000 years before accumulating more than 60 billion dollars. If you still don't understand the magnitude, here is another example for spenders. If you have 60 billion dollars, you can afford to buy a brand new Porsche 911 every single day for the next 2000 years, and still have balance in your account after that. Bill Gates, in the first half of his life, was tagged as a relentless businessman. Anti-Microsoft folks often accused him of killing innovation and selling broken software. Some feel ashamed of using their products in any way, including some of my PhD students who stated clearly that their dissertation never involved any Microsoft products. Anyway, using the yardstick for the world of capitalism, Bill Gates is without doubt, successful, very successful. Beginning from the day he dropped out from Harvard in his freshmen year, he was destined to become one of the most successful businessmen and the business legend in modern history. He also recently announced his transition plan from Microsoft and will be working part-time at Microsoft starting in 2008, i.e. when he is merely 52 years old. He then will devote most of his time to the Gates Foundation, following his belief --- "Great wealth comes with a great responsibility, the responsibility to give back to society and make sure those resources are given back in the best possible way, to those in need." Bill Gates (and his wife Melinda) is already one of the greatest philanthropies of all time. With more than 60 billion dollars at his disposal, the second half of his life is certainly going to be more exciting and carry more profound impact than his first half. When the world's richest people start to give away their fortune, hopes, indeed can be anticipated. 6月9日 An Inconvenient TruthIf in 6 years ago, the news tells you that Arnold Schwarzenegger travels around the country giving speeches to promote his political agenda and Al Gore is busy touring around the world to promote his latest movie, you must think the reporters had messed up the news big time. However, this is America, even the most improbable would become possible. Today, the news is right. Arnold is seeking his re-election of the Californian Governor, while Al Gore, the former US Vice President is signing his book “an inconvenient truth” and promoting his first movie of the same title.
Amazing, isn’t it? If Florida did not make those butterfly style ballots, Gore might be sitting in the White House now for his second term. Unfortunately, just like the nature’s ΄butterfly effect‘, he is now a different kind of movie star. Some people arguably said Gore probably is the best Vice President in US history; while Jay Leno in his Tonight show joked around that Gore is the best Vice President simply because he replaced one who cannot even spell potato and was succeeded by another one who shot some civilian in a hunting trip.
I have not watched Gore’s new movie, but it apparently has successfully created enough buzz and was one of the top 10 flicks in the box office last week. The movie is about global warming, and Gore advocates, especially US, to pay attention to take immediate actions before it is too late. I always have doubt about the reality of global warming, even though we do have hotter summers and later springs every year. But I still think it is the effect of concentrated population issue, rather than any real global warming. Take Tokyo, New York City or even Atlanta as examples, these increasingly highly populated cities definitely will become warmer due to many different factors, higher population density, more pollution due to again more people and more automobiles emitting more CO2, more high-rise buildings using air conditioning, etc. In his bestseller ΄State of Fear,‘ Michael Crighton sort of mixed reality data collected by NASA into this fiction thriller. Many graphs using data collected over more than 100-year period do not suggest a looming global warming emergency on earth in general. Of course, it might be Crighton’s personal interpretation of these data he researched and then presented in his novel in his way. Or it is Crighton’s political agenda to finger-point and attribute the whole global warming issue to the government’s conspiracy so that the govenment can gain a social control on their fellow citizens. Well, oftentimes, when science clashes with politics, politics appears to always stand on the upper wind. There were way too many examples in history as well as in recent events --- from the astronomer Nicholaus Copernicus to the Education Minister in Taiwan, Du Cheng-Shen. I would have to read and watch Gore’s new work before I can make any objective judgment. For now, I sincerely hope Al Gore won’t do a nude scene in his next movie. 6月2日 Run-flat tiresI was always proud of how fast I can change the spare tire whenever I got a flat tire. I have done this not only for my own cars, I
did it for many friends' too. (Whenever I saw a car broke down on the highway due to a flat tire, oftentimes I had the passion to pull over my car to help out the helpless stranger.) I've also done it for a variety of
cars including Minivan. I actually just did it twice last month. One scary occasion happned last week. I parked my car in my garage and walked out to pick up my mails. Then I heard a big explosion from the house. I freaked out, and my dog freaked out too. Then I went into the garage and found a flat tire in the front driver's side. When I sent it off to have it repaired, the mechanics told me he never encountered this kind of odd explosive case before. The only tires I cannot manage probably are those moving trucks', which are apparently too heavy to handle by one person. I once bragged about my tire-changing skill to my much younger sister that once I got a flat tire on one completely dark section of highway 880 in East San Jose bay area and how I managed to change my spare tire without any light by fumbling through the darkness. She looked leery when I first described to her the story. Coincidentally, just a couple of days later after I told her the story when we drove out for lunch, I got a chance to show her I am no BS. One tire got flat by running over a nail, worst yet, the weather was not cooperating, it was drizzling. I stopped the car in a subdivision, then started doing the reality show. After 20 minutes, we were on the road again. Now she believes her brother. Well, now the show is no more after I purchased my minted new car. Even though I consider myself a technologist, I nonetheless asked a stupid question in the dealership: "Is the spare tire in the trunk?" (Well, the reason I asked is because some spare tire actually is screwed underneath the chassis and you need to scroll a aluminum string counterclockwise in order to release the spare tire.) The salesman told me "no need for a spare tire, they are high tech tires. You keep driving even after it goes flat." He then opened the trunk to show me there is definitely no spare. I came back to google search for this design, and found "run-flat tires." According to the specification, you can keep driving for another 150 miles after you have a flat tire. Sure, only if I cannot find a tire store within 150 miles, otherwise, I will never get a chance to show off my change-tire skill when I drive my car. This makes me feel like the scenario that after I have mastered the operation of a 50-lb vacuum cleaner skillfully and effortlessly, my wife orders a Roomba from iRobot. (In fact, I am so happy with my Roomba and Scooba.) Another interesting feature I found in this new car is the sensor-ed windshield wiper. You don't need to accelerate or decelerate the wiper's speed, according to the sales, you leave it alone. The sensor will self detect how heavy the rainfall is and self-adjust the wiper's speed. (Again, I made a fool of myself. I later heard most of the new cars have this feature.) How amazing this is! Technology, wow! 5月3日 Hey, Mr. Sean WoodsonMany Asians americanize their names, in particular, their first names, due in part to their flabbergasting spellings to the westerners. If you think Chinese names are hard, try Thai’s. Of course, 99% of us do not americanize our last names at all. Recently, I had a conversation with one of my students who explained impeccably how his last name is written in Chinese character without even writing it down. Some interesting ideas struck me after that: why we never try to americanize our last names? The main differences between oriental names (especially, Chinese and Korean) and westerners’ names are the fact that we have more common last names but less common first names, while it is exactly the opposite in the westerners’ names. When oriental folks americanize their first names, their names become even more common, or in science terms, the entropy is substantially reduced. (Try to think about how many Peter Chen, or Michael Wang you came across.) Several years ago when I was at Intel, we were interviewing someone whose name on his resume is “Steven Stone.” Of course, we all expected the candidate is either a Caucasian or African American. To our much surprise, an Asian guy turned up. From his authentic Taiwanese-accented English, I am pretty sure he was not adopted by an American family. One of the interviewers was curious about how comes “Stone” is a Chinese surname? Doesn’t Chinese last name always contain one syllable? The guy simply answered --- he changed it. In US, when you naturalized to become a US citizen, you get this once in a lifetime opportunity to change your last name to whatever you want. So he did. But why “Stone”? It is very simple, because his Chinese surname was “Shi2”, which in direct translation into English is “Stone”. How hilarious! After that, we started to joke around that maybe I should change my name to “Sean Plum” or my friend should have his name changed to Perry King (Wang2 in Chinese = King). Then I gave more thought after my conversation with my student, I think maybe it is an even more ass-kicking idea to americanize my last time to “Woodson” since “Plum” sounds sour. In case you do not read, write Chinese, Lee3--- one of the most common surnames on earth is written as “Wood” on top and “Son” on bottom. Woodson sounds pretty good to me. Sean Woodson cannot sound more americanized. In fact, Chinese is phonetics-based, thus the same “Lee” can be pronounced by several Chinese characters including at least 2 other surnames I know – Force, or Dawn. Simply spell them into “Lee” loses much entropy in the information content. To give another example, all the “Lu”s to those who do not know Chinese appear to be the same 2 letters. But when someone’s last name is Lu, it can be at least 6 different surnames as far as I am concerned. For example, it can be “Twin mouths,” it can be “Road”, it can be “Land”, it can be “Deer”, it can be “Earthenware Vessel,” it can be “Rude”, “Redneck” or “Fish-sun“ if you like. If we can americanize them individually, then these names will not be simply “Lu” but become more distinguishable. Other examples for common Chinese surnames are “Chen” to “Eareast,” “Chang” or “Zhang” to “Archlong" (a common one) or "Standearly" (like Zhang Ziyi's); “Lin” to “Twinwood” or "Grassdoorbird," “Hwu” or “Hu” to “Ancientmoon,” “Wu” to “Talkingheaven” or "Martial," “Yang” to “Woodeasy” etc. Of course, it is not always easy to break each Chinese character into an americanized word without making it too long. For instance, “Liu2” a rather complex Chinese word would become like “Opendoorgoldknife,” which does not sound sexy at all. It is interesting to see how far people would go when it comes to americanize their names. If the incumbent Vice President of Taiwan changed her name to Annette Twinmouths, that probably suits her personality and unpredictable behavior even closer. At the meanwhile, President Chen really wants to have his “ear” turning “east” when the Vice President bawls to the west tacklessly. 4月22日 Bring your pillowRecently, I found a hilarious but useful website called RateMyProfessor.com. The site itself is not supposed to be hilarious, yet the contents filled in by (supposedly) college students are. The purpose of this website is well intended, that is, to provide a space for students to evaluate the teaching effectiveness of their college professors. It includes most of the 4-year colleges in the United States, as well as many schools in the UK. Many comments are amusing and hilarious. For example, some student criticised their professor has personal hygiene problem, probably a legitimate excuse that he or she skipped a lot of the lectures. Some praised (or mocked) a professor in some funny way like "No matter what time of the day or the weather outside, this guy can still orate a lecture." The one really made me burst into unstoppable laughters is this one, "bring a pillow to class, this professor's voice will make you sleep like a baby." If I were a student again, I definitely will play this prank. Due probably in part to the high cost of college education, college students (from what I observed in the US) would rather come to the class to sleep (well) than missing any lecture, each can cost them or their parents as much as a couple hundred dollars. Reading all these also reminds me of the reviews we wrote for our professors in my college more than 17 years ago. For example, in our electromagnetics (EM) course, many of us simply put down three word --- "Change the Professor." The best ever was from an article my ex-roommate publihsed in our annual EE department journal, which became a phenomena and created quite a turmoil and tension among students and professors. My roommate basically wrote the sophomore class review in a parody way as writing stock performance review. In the article, he drew the analogy of a professor teaching a class to a CEO who runs a company. The "stock price" in the article indicates the average number of students attending the lectures. High prices imply good teachers, and you know what 2 dollars a share (= a lecture) means. A legendary "stock", again, is the EM "stock". Which, when EM stock was IPO-ed (the first lecture), the trading price soared all the way up to the top at 120 dollars (i.e. 120 students). Mysteriously, it took a free fall down to 20 dollars after 50 minutes (because 100 students could not take the professor's poor teaching style and had left after the break.) My roommate gave a warning in the article that "Allegedly, the EM stock price will top 120 dollars six times during this semester, Investors should watch out and definitely NOT want to miss them." (because there were 6 quiz during the semester.) The article made a huge impact to our class in the next 2 years. One time, our quantum physics professor was calling the class roll; my roommate (whose academic standing ranked #2 in my class) missed the first part of the class. Then, during the break, he showed up and went to the professor, explaining to him that he had some errands to run so he was late for the class. Then the professor stared at him and said "huh, I know you, you are a big shareholder, aren't you? I was just wondering during last hour that why you did not enter the market and trade today." 3月19日 The differences of my job and Director Lee'sAng Lee's latest and also the biggest trophy -- Best Director of
the 78th Academy award for his masterpiece "Borkeback Mountain" creates
quite a buzz, one can claim the subject of this movie is now a
worldwide phenomena. Plus, the film's miss of the Best Picture creates
even more buzz, lots of film critics started to blame the Academy for
their stiff conservativeness on the homoesexual issue.
Speaking of the differences between a career as a college
professor and a career as a filmmaker, in fact, writing papers and
directing movies are not so different after all. There may be some
subtlety between the job of a college professor and a cinema director,
but both are about how to invest our effort and passion (if any at
all), and present our work to the world when the work is completed. To
be successful, both jobs require an extraordinarily good storyteller
with great graphical contents for obtaining the approval from the
readers and the audience. Both need motivation and some clues to lead
the audience into their story. Both, at the end, should contain some
expected outcome, such as some certain improvement of your new
techniques, or the good guys always win at the finale of a movie. But
of course, you would agree that the flexibility of the outcome is
expected to be higher in a movie than in a technical paper.
Nonetheless, the rewarding systems for them are unfortunately (to me)
very different, which leads me to wonder if we (or I) have wisely
chosen our (my) career path. First of all, making a movie, no matter
how bad your materials are, regardless how worse the frames were cut
and edited, you will anyhow have a movie as a final product. Remember a
blockbuster movie called "The Blair Witch Project"? The ultra-low
budget film ($30k?) made a big splash and a stunning success on the
market. Some folks even thought the shaky footage, a completely
turn-off to me and making me vomit, is a refreshing, ingenious way to
present materials. (Shaking because the Hi8 video camera was held by
hands without a tripod throughout the entire movie.)
On the other hand, writing a scentific or technical paper is
wholly different from talking fictions. Well, if the moive is not a
piece of crap, then it either makes millions, even billions bucks, or
it sweeps a streak of awards across different continents. Brokeback
Mountain has done the latter, and did it in a big time, at the same
time the box office keeps accumulating. In my recollection, no film
would simultaneously won a grand award from one of the major European
film festivals (Venice, Cannes or Berlin) and then also went ahead and
won the major awards from Oscar and major US film critics. Brokeback
mountain has achieved such an unusual success. Coming back to my job, a
technial paper cannot even be submitted to two conferences which is
considered unethical, let alone to win more than one Best Paper award
from the multiple conferences. Worst yet, once the paper's key idea is
published, most of the times it becomes a public knowledge with no
intellectual property protection, meaning, whoever reads the paper will
be able to make big bucks from my idea. Of course, like most of the
junky movies, a million dollars idea only come once in a long while. By
the way, recently, I realized one major similarity between making a
good movie and writing a good paper with impact. Those who can churn
out 1 paper per month (or even per week) probably are like those San
Bernardino Valley guys who can make a porno movie each afternoon. In
other words, no quality and no real brain work at all. If one wants to
really make a movie like Brokeback Mountain or write a groundbreaking
paper that lasts for decades, it takes a long time to ponder, to plan,
and to carry it out.
After pondering through these comparisons, I start to wonder, if
Ang Lee's father Sheng Lee, my old principal from Tainan First Senior
High School, should have really been bothered by Ang's decision to
pursue his career in cinematography? I certainly can feel how
disappointed and how upset Principal Sheng Lee was back then when his
eldest son failed twice in the Joint College Entrance exam, and later
decided to embark his career in filmmaking. It is simply not acceptable
by his father who came from a scholarly tradition and had been the
principal of a school that produced so many accomplished political
celebrity and scholars such as the President of Taiwan, and the
President of National Taiwan University.
However, in the hindsight, who has been smarter? Ang Lee? who
failed twice in the college joint entrance exam; Or many of us who
studied like there is no tomorrow in order to get to top colleges and
later thank God after we became engineers and (fake) doctors, and are
still excruciatingly struggling in what-we-thought an elite's job ? It
is really a tough, billion dollars question to answer. 3月6日 Tainan First Senior High SchoolHere are a few pictures of my Alma Mater Tainan First Sr. High School, to
join my sincere congratulations to our now-the-most-famous alumni,
Director Ang Lee (probably more renowned than the incumbent President
of Taiwan, another alumni) for receiving the Best Director of the 78th
Academy Award. |
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