Life and Death

I used to think I treat this subject very lightly– after all, it is the natural process of being a human being or simply a being. And maybe, I thought, it is just the problem of being a scientist or engineer— we lack of the philosophical side of living in this earthly world. On the other hand, I also sort of believe reincarnation. Thus I often think, if it is so painstaking for this life, maybe I should welcome the idea of an early termination and embrace the adventure of my next life.

I learned a bad news from my younger sister over the phone today when I am sitting in front of the desk in the Victoria Hotel at Neihu, Taipei: my uncle passed away at the age of 83. A grief struck me and I carried it with me for the rest of the day. All the good old times we kids (with cousins) played in my uncle and aunt’s house and garden emerged from my subliminal memory. They lived in Kaohsiung while we were in Tainan. Even though it is only about 50km away, for kids, it is a field trip and a real vacation, a luxury we could only enjoy during our summer vacations.

My uncle K-C Chen  (husband of my mother’s younger sister) was originally from Hunan Province in China. I would call him a victim of China’s Civil War. He came to this Formosa island with KMT in 1949. Even after more than half a century, most of our relatives including myself still cannot fully understand his Mandarin Chinese (or I should say understand less than 50% of it) due to his strong accent. However, it did not place a barrier for us to talk. He spent his entire life (after discharged from the military) in the state-operated phone company in Taiwan as a technician, an exemplary government employee. We could hardly believe when he was diagnosed with liver cancer a few years ago given he never smokes and drinks. I went to visit him a few times for the last couple of years whenever I came back to Taiwan and time was permitted.

I think I have reached an age that we started to lose more and more good things, friends and people that we cherished. I have been preparing this moment for quite some time to suppress my sorrow. Unfortunately, today I found it is too hard. After all, we are sensitive animals with feeling.

Part of my heart died today after I learned his passing. Wish reincarnation exists for all of us, then all the sweet memories and connections can find their next stop.

Prime Rib, the new recipe

Preparing the Prime Rib
1. Wash the Prime Rib, then dry with paper towel
2. Melt Butter in Microwave Oven, then brush it on all sides of the Rib
3. Make about 20 incisions of the Rib. Stick in Rosemary and 1 to 2 slices of Garlic into each incision
4. Chopped Garlic, Rosemary (almost minced), then mixed with pepper and Kosher salt. Rub it for all sides of the Rib.  (As much Salt as appropriate.)
5. Pre-heat oven to 450F
6. When reaching 450F, put the Rib in, cook it for 10 minute
7.  Lower the temperature to 325F, stick in thermometer, continue to cook the Rib. 20 minutes for every pound of the rib.
8. Check early (e.g., 30 min before the due time) and see if the center temperature reaches 120F.
9. Once it is done (center temperature reaching 120F), pull it out. Put a Foil on top of the wait for 10 minutes to let the juice simmered inside.
10. Ready to cut and serve.

Preparing the Sauce (stir the following condiments)
1. one spoon of Horse radish
2. one spoon of Sour Cream
3. 2 spoons of Mayo
4. 1/2 spoon of Worchestershire sauce
5. optional: a squeeze of fresh lemon juice

The Audacity of Hope

I 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.

Fashion city

To 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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

Conversion

I 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. 

The future of advanced education

I 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.