In the relative time scale, a 24-hour coding session is more like sprint than marathon.
January 29, 2018
January 28, 2018
The last one to watch the last Jedi?
I finally watched the latest Star Wars movie on Sunday night. Avoiding spoilers is a good practice in discipline.
The movie is highly entertaining and has this tinge of smacking the tradition. But I still prefer the original series and even the prequels which are telling the background story of Darth Vader, the most important character of the entire Star Wars universe. The Force Awakens is refreshing, but I am not sure what The Last Jedi is trying to achieve in terms of the story line.
January 26, 2018
January 21, 2018
Symmetric confusion
A few days ago a lens was knocked out of my eye glasses.
After carefully putting the lens back and ensuring that everything is in shape, the glasses still produced weird optical distortion.
Finally, I realized that the lens is symmetric in boundary shape but asymmetric in optical axis, and I have put it upside down.
January 17, 2018
Horrible haiku
Git merge party
In which we feel less lonely
During deadline crunch.
👹— Li-Yi Wei (@liyiwei) January 18, 2018
January 15, 2018
溫故知新
I heard this teaching about life-long learning from Confucius when I was a little kid, but it took time to appreciate what it really means. Instead of assuming we will continue to master what (we think) we already know, constant reviewing what is already there in our heads and help learning what is new in the future.
January 3, 2018
Transformation (not sure good or bad)
What I told students prior to a major deadline:
10 years ago: you should work hard as there is little time left.
1 month ago: go for the Kobe Bryant jersey retirement if that is important for you (later – BTW I am glad that Kevin Durant made that game winning shot).
January 1, 2018
Bean-counting
This has been a widely discussed topic, but when it comes to academic publishing, focus on quality over quantity.
Take my PhD adviser as an example. At this moment, he has “only” 27 journal papers and 40 conference papers according to dblp, but nearly 40000 citations, including 10+ papers with 1000+ citations, according to Google scholar.
In comparison, there are people around his seniority and in our fields (for calibration) with roughly 10-times publications but only one-tenth of citations.
(Citation is one of the mostly commonly used measure for quality/impact, but others are possible, such as products.)
He once told me that the best timing to publish papers is when people beg us to do so (using Brain Curless’ first SIGGRAPH paper as an example). That is probably too extreme, but publishing low quality papers not only wastes our time (it is better to go out and play) but also dilutes our reputation.