X: I’m really eager to see what the SIGGRAPH reviewers have in store for us this time… The suspense is killing me. =o
Li-Yi: I just assume they will screw me, and I am never disappointed. 🙂
X: Yes, that’s what I do as well, but I’m always amazed about how they always find ways to complain about the stuff you don’t expect. 😮
Li-Yi: If I can expect what others will think, I will be like some sort of x-men or superman. 🙂
“You can observe a lot by just watching” – Yogi Berra
Sometimes some very little things can reveal a lot of useful information. Just watch carefully.
Once, when I was around 9 or 10, I was visiting my aunt’s place.
One of the cousins, X, and I were standing near the swimming pool. The family cat walked by. Cousin X and I got into the discussion about whether cats can swim. I have seen a few dogs and at least one horse swam, so I was pretty sure the answer is yes (cats seem more agile). Cousin X disagreed (he is older but not necessarily smarter), so we decided to have a bet.
Clearly, the only way to settle the bet is to experiment, so I grabbed the cat and threw it into the pool.
(That was before the age of YouTube and Google, BTW.)
What followed was amazing, and happened like within a few milliseconds. The cat sprang on the water surface like a trampoline, and immediate landed back near my feet. It was dripping, so it clearly fell into the water, but I had no idea how it managed to jump back. Meanwhile, our debate remained unsettled.
I am trying to come up with a very concrete way to tell a new PhD student how to decide whether someone is suitable for (scientific) research. So here is my try. Let me know if you have better ideas.
Do you like to ask questions that seem interesting at least to you (e.g. whether cats can swim)?
Do you enjoy finding the answers yourself through investigations and experiments (e.g. grab the cat and throw it into the pool, and observe what happens)?
Are you very comfortable with the consequences, regardless of the outcomes of the experiments (e.g. the cat neither swam nor sank and my aunt beat me up)?
Can you do this continuously as a career? Imagine it is Friday lunch time, and all the works you have done this week have turned out to be failures (e.g. no other ways you have tried can tell you whether cats can swim).
You have no idea what is going to happen this afternoon when you try your 101th experiment with that cat.
If you hesitate for any of these questions or you think I am crazy, you are probably not suitable for research. At least, you will not be happy or successful.
Talent and personality are important; you have to be sufficiently smart and tough for research. But passion is even more important; the only way to be truly happy and productive is to do what you really like.
I chose engineering over medicine as my college major, mainly because the engineers understand their systems much better than the biologists.
(Ever since as a kid I can sense that the doctors do not know what is really going on inside my body, so I try to fix myself as much as possible before my parents can drag me to a hospital. The most complex software system pales in comparison to the human bodies.)
But that is before I touched economics, which turned out to be even hackier. As Soros said, social systems are reflexive.
🙂
The Jedi recruit those who are good enough.
They learn how to collaborate early on.
They graduate after passing tests, and let go otherwise.
They keep the universe in order most of the time.
The Sith recruits one (and only) who is the best.
He learns how to survive alone.
He graduates by defeating the master, or getting killed otherwise.
He remains low most of the time but eventually eliminates the entire Jedi order and conquers the whole universe.
The ratio of collective over my knowledge is growing at an exponential rate. It feels like drowning.
Human evolution is too slow for and has yet to benefit from our recent technology advance. Some cybernetic or genetic intervention may save us.
It is the 21st century. Please, send me electronic instead of paper documents.
Meanwhile, I wonder if there is a way to automatically bounce all incoming physical mails back to the original senders.
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