Stone mansion
Golden attire
Behind all these sleight of hands
Lay the naked men
With their naked truth
2011-01-06
Premonition of a first impression
2010-09-05
The monk and the riddle
This is such a good book that I wish I had read it earlier (but fortunately found it is not too late). The gist of the book is about the right mind set for starting up companies (it was published right before the dotcom bubble burst) but I believe the main points are equally applicable to other professions: (1) do what you want to do for the rest of your life and (2) be ambitious, aim for the very best, and do not settle for mediocrity.
Read the book to figure out what the riddle is about.
2010-08-12
Reviewing computer science papers
Computer theory: A hundred page proof that takes many very smart people weeks or even months to verify and (eventually) reject.
Computer graphics: A 4 to 8 page paper that takes one Joe Six Pack maybe just 3 seconds to reject because the teaser image does not look beautiful enough.
2010-08-07
Life as loan
Recently I read about an interesting point, in the context of usury and debt interest payments under the Catholic and Sharia laws, that life is a loan from God and thus (just like all loans) will have to be repaid one day.
I am not religious but I have found this an interesting mental exercise: if life is indeed a loan and one day we have to pay it back (to God) with principle plus interests, what the latter would be? In other words, what kinds of values do we have to add to our lives (for the sake of interest payments)? For simplicity, let us assume life is like a zero-coupon bond and everything is paid back in the end (of the life).
2010-07-21
Inception
**** spoiler alert ****
**** spoiler alert ****
**** spoiler alert ****
My one word movie review: tensor.
Explanation: Inception is a layered version of The Matrix.
Overall, Dark City, The Matrix, and Inception are my 3 most favorite movies in this category.
2010-07-20
Eucalyptus, a novel
By Murray Bail
This is an unorthodox love story weaved from sub-stories around individual gum trees. The writing can be as rough and patchy as the (author’s) Australian landscapes, but the book is short, sweet, and unique enough to worth reading.
2010-07-19
Birthday
To me, Chinese is more of an art than a language, and most Chinese literature, especially these classical ones, cannot be translated to another language without losing their original beauty and meaning.
Below is a modern short poem (fragment?) that I have found to be more or less translatable without being sacrilegious.
(Let me know if you have a better translation; I cannot even make it rhyme.)
母難日
The day Mother suffered
余光中的一段詩
A poem by Guan-Chun Yu
今生今世
In this life
我最忘情的哭聲有兩次
Twice I cried my heart out
一次在我生命的開始
Once at the beginning of my life
一次在妳生命的告終
The other at the end of yours
第一次我不會記得是聽妳說的
The first one I cannot remember but you told me so
第二次妳不會曉得我說也沒用
The second one you cannot know even if I tell you
但兩次哭聲的中間啊
But between these two cries
有無窮無盡的笑聲
Are endless laughs
一遍一遍又一遍
That has been going on and on
迴盪了整整三十年
For 30 years
2010-05-29
The girl with the dragon tattoo
The length of my to-read list for books and papers usually discourages my indulgence for long novels, but I picked up “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” for the following reasons: there is already a copy at my home (an impulse purchase by a family member who has not and maybe will never read it), I like detective novels in general, and most importantly, according to this Economist article, the main reasons why the Nordic detective novels are so popular include (1) a plain, simple, precise, and direct writing style and (2) realistic and yet distinctive portrayal of the main characters. I told myself: gee, these seem to be the kinds of desired writing styles for good research papers (after replacing *characters* by *algorithms*) so I went on to give the book a try.
This turns out to be one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I ever have. I highly recommend to anyone who wants to read a compelling story with engaging characters in a clean writing style. I also plan to read the two subsequent books of the same trilogy, “The Girl who Played with Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”.
2010-04-12
Accidental art
For some reason, the most beautiful images I have produced tend to be the buggy ones.
I guess this is a unique advantage of graphics research (compared to other CS fields): when we screw up, we might be able to claim the result as an art.
