Dr. Lee's Clinic: May, 2008

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May 22

(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.

May 21

2D spelling

Korean 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.

May 10

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.

May 05

Spyware, Trojan, Rootkits will do just fine

As 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.