Cold winter day
Sitting on a warm hood
December 25, 2013
December 23, 2013
Dear Asian students
Not having to observe Western holidays is your competitive advantage. Don’t squander it.
December 22, 2013
Two recent movies
Every computer scientist’s wet dream:
Every computer scientist’s nightmare:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzV6mXIOVl4
December 16, 2013
Arctic desert
While flying over north east Russia I saw a bizarrely beautiful landscape: some form of arctic desert rendered from the combination of desert wave geometry, icy sand material, and midnight moon lighting.
The scene cannot be captured by my camera, and also cannot be found through image or map search.
I was thinking how romantic, and yet lethal, to horse ride through that terrain.
December 9, 2013
President Obama calls on every American to learn code
On one hand, like math, coding provides some fundamental training that should definitely be learned by everyone.
On the other hand, it is a design problem if everyone has to learn coding just to build or use software tools.
In the current state of computer science, it remains unclear (at least to me) which parts are fundamental materials and which parts are design artifacts. The former can be distilled into general teaching curriculum while the latter should be fixed.
Ideally, an entrepreneur with core knowledge in math and programming should be able to create his or her own applications without having to write a single line of code.
This is already happening in certain domains such as mobile app development.