Does any one ever wonder if the Statue of Liberty was really a secret spying device sent to spy America? Perhaps there is a secret compartment within which generations of French agents have bred and watched Americans and transmitted their collection of American secrets to France ! I mean, do they have to change the hands to make a big “L” gesture on the forehead or print on her crown the words “Trojan”?

But honestly, I’m having trouble producing thoughts other than these xenophobic conspiracy theories. For all the mean things president Trump says, he really has set my mind into a spiral of despair. What if America loses this trade war with China in Q3 of 2019? What if the measure to block use of Huawei equipment actually fails and America and it’s Allies end up buying a lot of Huawei equipment? This is a horrifying outcome. I hope Trump has a good technical advisor. This telecom technology is pretty esoteric, not every person walking on the street has the proper intuition to reason about them.

Of course, without cheap Chinese alternatives, American companies can charge a lot more money for their routers and firewalls and phones and tablets. But that’s only a secondary side effect that next president can deal with when ever he arrives in the Whitehouse.

I binged The Good Doctor season 2 to get my mind off of the stock market crash and fear of spies. It is wonderful to see a show about Californian hospital. Honestly, the problems addressed in season two are very real problems… Honestly, this had to be one of the most successful and diverse cast. Even more so than Trek Discovery. The other medical residents working beside Shaun, their attending, get a lot of screen time ! It’s like, the good doctor has his special place among a lot of special people and everyone is special in this hospital and yet it gels.

Let’s see, they found a Chinese-American Actress to play Dr. Lim and she actually has a dialogue in fluent Mandarin with a hospital in Beijing, very very nice! Thank goodness we are finally past that older generation of Supposedly Chinese-American actors that neither speak Mandarin nor English, and I’m really not sure about their Cantonese. I mean c’mon! Seriously? You can’t find a single fluent speaker of either language until 2019??! I can’t wait until Melendez breaks into rapid fire Spanglish with a Mexican doctor! Let this mosaic of culture speak proudly! (But for dramatic effect, perhaps they’ll have Lim do Spanish too)

The show put on display some things America, at least Californians face every day. A Chinese women shows up with a pump for heart. Said heart is Made in China™ and also installed there. In the real world, Either due to law or funding or politics or racism or general imbalance of talent, Asia often have us beat on the good stuff like making a heart that pumps blood with no beat, or, for a more real example, genetically modifying babies to be disease resistant. The show does it in a very smooth and apolitical way, intertwining it into the story, no shame and no envy, slight bit of curiosity, it’s just a problem to be solved. Just a reality to be faced. Just another 3rd world problem thrusted upon America.

I have blogged here some sentiments similar to those of dr. Han’s–he actually says it straight out: shouldn’t keep Shaun for Diversity sake if he jeopardizes patients and family management. He is not really an independent doctor with high rate of communication success like Hans expects. Moving Shaun to diagnostics (Dr. House’s department?) seems the sensible thing to do.

But the trouble is this: nobody is an independent person in the hospital system. They work as a team. If Shaun needs a team to function as an effective surgeon, then he is no different from other doctors all of whom also needs a team to fully function.

The rational thinker will quickly start upon the cost-benefit analysis and conclude that Murphy is more cost than benefit. The show clearly dismissed that believe and insist that Shaun is more benefit than cost. So given that premises, Shaun is a keeper. In real life, you don’t always get a clear cut definition. And there are a lot of people of lesser talent than portrayed Shaun who must also survive the same trials.

I am conflicted regarding this matter. On the one hand, Schaun was obviously a good decision. On the other hand, it seems more likely that the disproportionately abnormal character in question can be artificially propped up as a diversity puppet. Mindless drone controlled by puppeteer Glassman. Sometimes the diversity puppet even has to act out of her real personality in order to fit the profile of the puppet required for the situation.

And, as always, I do hereby disclaim that I judged or caused any real life situation similar or identical to what I describe.

But the saving grace of the show is that we are made to believe the other doctors who risk their careers to do “the right things” and to “help patients” and to “do no harm”, do these things in genuine sincerity, that they wouldn’t all take bull crap together. None of these very professional people have ever question his diagnostics and surgical skills. It also seems his success rate is very high–not as reported by his mentor and potential puppeteer, but as measured by alive and healthy bodies walking out of the hospital.

Which brings us back to the fact that his peers have all objected to and acquiesced to him being a doctor with underdeveloped social and emotional maturity.

Those facts being clarified, it seems the decision to fire Han to keep intact an excellently functioning team was a justifiable decision.

With the one possible objection that it was indeed the job of the president to lead Han and convince him of the matter presenting evidence and balancing liability in a reasonable way. It shouldn’t be stuffed in his face like that.

A disturbing image of Trump and Liu shaking under the table from WSJ front page article. Is there something going on that we don’t know about? What’s happening under the table?

Interestingly here’s the candidates for the EU election of EU Parliament for the Eastern Region… all that’s fun and joyous in politics today:

A couple of hours before the 25% tariff on all Chinese goods goes into effect… The flags yet wave by the highway 101 in silicone valley. (Above that Infiniti dealership)

Full steam ahead, whatever may come.

It’s been roughly a year since I published my Bias-Variance Decomposition of Human Inequality. I hope it has been enough time for others to have thought of it. If not, then surely these high-tech companies or their foreign counterparts will have hacked my notes and found out more about it.

For companies who believe the decomposition, actions can be taken in light of new thought.

For example, the companies that used to distribute information about disparity of average compensation between equality qualified but differently raced employees, they should now supplement that data with the Bias-Variance decomposed version of the disparity.

There is a lot that I can think of in terms of using this approach to inspect and indeed modify the monitoring of equal opportunity employment. But to start we must have transparency.

The one troubling concern is this: Most of the people who can produce this decomposition are actually very well paid and respected member of our scoiety. Those who are able to understand it are also on their payroll. I mean not to disparage minorities and the excluded population. But really, I don’t think most that suffer from variance-induced inequality understand it. I mean for pete’s sake, I daren’t do more than to blog about it in an obscure blog that nobody reads, since I may be called on to seek employment again someday to provide for my family. I fear retaliation by all who benefit from the inequality, including my own future self.

The reduction of intra-group variance in an effort to reduce uncertainty means the well-off become less well-off and the less well-off become better off. Increasing correlation has similar effect of worsening the well-off’s dispositions.

Alas, I write as I believe it, that Americans should treat Americans equally; American companies should provide equal opportunity for American employees, in the highest and best sense that we understand.

May the root be with us! May root save us all!

I made an idle observation to a friend recently. It had appeared to me that there are a lot of Canadians in the Bay Area. I wonder if it is a matter of convenience and economic disparity, or if it was intentional selection.

On the one hand, Canadian culture and education are very similar. Most Canadians would even argue with you that they have better schools and universities than America. They also speak English. This means it is very easy to replace an American worker with a Canadian one with zero loss of efficiency.

On the other hand, since they are so similar to Americans in culture and training, there is no real value in bringing a large number of them here. Why give an opportunity to a Canadian when a equally experienced American exist to take the job?

I believe American schools are still very good and still very competitive. But the graduates cannot really exercise their pursuit of happiness if it is overshadowed by political agenda to integrate more Canadian educated persons… Hypothetically speaking, that is, in the case there is an over representation of Canadians in our immigrant pool.

Does that make sense?

If there is merit in the argument that diversity begets synergy beyond that of an undiversified work force, then Canadian immigrants are least bang for the buck in terms of synergy synthesis due to their cultural and political proximity to the US. They… do not add to our distinctiveness, not worthy of assimilation… to apply an aphorism from American culture.

And admittedly there are a lot of talented and accomplished Canadians in the US. Not all Canadian imports take opportunity unfairly from Americans. The trouble is that there are also a lot of talented Americans, and we should give ample chance to our own, even if another suitable talent can be cheaply imported, we have an obligation to our own people. We should strive despite our fear of isolation. If there is an aspect of American schools or culture that is less than other countries, let that be improved. Let that be our salvation and not the fact that we can always just buy a cheap imported replacement.

A related question then arises. Although we have an obligation to our own people, we also have obligation to humanity. What if we didn’t import that one Canadian who single handedly changed the course of humanity for the much better? Add the brassy presumption that if US didn’t admit him then our humanity would not be much better improved at all.

The answer to that is really subtle. It really takes some introspection of the reader. It also depends on who you are and how you think. Inspect that question and try to write an answer.

Ps a few weeks after writimg this, years before publication, the FAM blog receives a large volume of readers from Canada(and only from canada). I wonder if scheduled publication some how leaked the content out? Am I being watched by some kind of secret Canadian police now? Whats going on here?

It looks like Palo Alto is about to approve Yamamoto as a name for one of its middle schools to replace their name sakes and eugenics proponents Jordan and Terman .

One have to consider the alternatives, let’s just say it

* Adolf or Hitler school of art. (I’ve certainly known an Adolfo walking around and succeeding in the Bay Area in his own way)

* Jesus middle school (a common name, especially in Latin America.)

* Stalin elementary

* Mussolini Middle School, a language model of a single layered artificial neural network without nonlinearities could concievably think it is equally suitable for a school name as Cipriani Elementary or Capuchino High School.

* Castro elementary.

* Guevara charter school (of Che fame.)

What’s wrong with those names? There is ample opportunity for Americans of those names to succeed here that they can be name sake of a middle school in Palo Alto. Why were they not chosen? Would they be approved over significant objection of the city’s residents?

But that’s not so bad. Imagine if there was a successful Chinese-American worthy of this designation with Mao as last name. What would all of you say then? Probably something like “I don’t want my son to be chairman of the Mao middle school student council”

The main problem is probably because Chinese Americans all live under rocks like me. We don’t really care about politics until we’re stung in the eye and ear with this kind of Nonsense.

We should avoid naming schools using very distinctive war criminal names. For god’s sake, you have kids whose grandpa’s were bayoneted and mother raped or bombed by troops under command by a certain Admiral Yamamoto. And I don’t mean just Chinese kids. There are so many people who suffered due to the machinations of the evil axial powers during WW II. Let’s have some human decency to be sensitive to others’ sufferings in our school choices. Let’s not use a recent war criminal name for this otherwise desirable school.

What in the name of all that is good and holy were you thinking? Shame on you who decided to use this name.

…

But after fussing a bit. I guess it’s pretty well known that Chinese have been encroaching on Palo Altan real estate. This is probably an antagonizer intended to reduce foreign Chinese investments in those houses. Anyway… I guess this saying is true: all’s fair in politics and capitalism. It’s just sad that it has to be a criminal from a crime against humanities.

(Okay, he wasn’t a convicted war criminal, but only because he was shot down by American due to him being an enemy of the country. But that he is killed by Americans is not an excuse for what he caused to happen. That name still stirs fear and disgust in many many Asian countries. What he did was unusually cruel and wrong. The suffering people have memories, even if history books are selective… We remember.)

I am very frustrated with Google Android’s 8.1.0 on the pixel 2. In particular, TalkBack has some serious bugs. In this version of Android, on my pixel 2, I cannot activate screen reading at all. The volume control drop-down sticks to the screen constantly after activating TalkBack. And all it reads is the volume control drop down. Click, double click, inside, outside the box all changes volume instead of making the drop down disappear. Has a proud and profitable tech giant really let slip so check a huge bug? I mean what the f? Who are you who help to put this feature out?

I don’t get it. Like, this is so easy on the iPhone with a three-fingered swipe. What does one have to do in this town to get some hands-free information?

But again, this goes to Software Engineers being at mercy of Business folk. There is no self respecting QA or SE who would write such a piece highly visible bug. This must be some kind of coordinated protest by Google against the Trump government: is it immigrants again that I’m suffering for? Is it a show of strength of Silicon Valley solidarity united against net non-neutrality? You screw with our streaming rights and we will f* your screen reader up! Is this kind of degradation of service really necessary?

What has this valley come to? And where will it go?

The Disney Villains collection from USPS is awesome for the season.

The civil safe world around me and my family seems to dissolve further. My mom’s car gets two screws in it within the span of a week. Same wheel each time. Then two weeks later, my car gets a flat.

Driving on 101 is also dangerous now. I’ve never in my almost decade and half of stay in the SF Bay Area encounter a dangerous driver on 101 in Palo Alto. But today, one tried to merge into my lane just before embacadero on South 101. He almost pushed me and my whole family into the center divide.

I am seriously concerned for my family’s safety. I don’t care if we are been harrased for talking about forming Unions for software engineers or if we are being harrased for driving to Palo Alto to celebrate Chinese New year’s. I don’t care if it’s some Chinese generational econo-political faction that I’ve upset. I don’t care if the real cause is the large number of immigrants, who are new drivers, into this area from elsewhere in the USA or from elsewhere in the world.

What ever the reason this is happening to me, each occurrence and the latency between the incidents are very very disturbing.

Is it really falling apart? I’m going to have to verify if it was fake news that Trump applauded a change to unending presidency in China–both of them. That is a really troubling sign for anyone to want to be in power for ever, much worse for a democracy to vote that into law. What the fuck? Are they for real? Ach! Let me not over react, it’s probably fake news, even if it showed up in Google Android’s news feed. (And that’s also a huge sign of things falling apart if Google now suffers from fake news too)

This Absurdity is all in good fun until someone loses a human right or two…

But honestly though. I don’t know if any American citizens, or any of their beloved immigrant aliens, legal or otherwise, has really understood to a full extent of the miracle that is being worked here! The checks and balances kicked in when judges ruled some executive orders unconstitutional. Sure, the Hill had to approve the Tax cut and Jobs act. But that had also experienced due process. Why are we protesting and unhappy when there is no plenty of evidence that it’s all working?

The big problem here is not that America is being ruined. The big problem is that the leader of the free world also leads the rest of the world. And the rest of the world does not have a population as politically sophisticated as Americans and they do not have a time tested government as USA. His antics might very well mislead them into very dark alleys of humanity with generations of negative impact.

Immho, this is the most fearful aspect. The world may be ruined and come to hate America for not preventing these things. And in the meantime it is getting less safe to live in SF Bay Area 😦

P.s. oh God please stop playing tricks on me. That guy who ran into my right side with a shopping cart at the Whole Foods 6 hours after I wrote this blog. He says: “oh, that’s okay,” in a thick Germanish/Russian/French European accent. He hit my arm with his shopping cart. In what culture or law does the responsible party of this collision declare that “it is okay?”

Is this funny to you? Who are you who causes these happenings? Ares? Satan? Lex Luthor? You just have to drive home the point that these immigrants are here and will endlessly make my life miserable in all traffic big and small?! Wtf!? Was that really necessary? Wtf?! What is this really about? Wtf?!

Consider the replacement of square in QIM with the log function. This equality metric is useful in modeling realistic expectations.

When I compare the inequality of my networth with those very rich people, I am actually not very hurt by that fact. They are distant to me and I could care less if they owned a moon, as long as they don’t drop it on me, I’m fine with it.

But if you compare your networth with those of my college freshman classmates, or those of graduate school classmates, of with those of my coworkers, then suddenly, even a difference of $100 could put me in very bad mood. The underlying cause of my bias is unknown to me. But if my feeling were a guide to what is truly unequal, I am able to write it, approximately, as

It is quite noticeable that this curve, for the LIM, has very different shape than the QIM. But perhaps because my k-nearest-neighbors occupy more attainable positions. It is likely that I can get an equally large size of cow guts as the señor at the next table. It is unlikely that I can wrestle Micro$oft to the mat by writing a new operating system. In fact one could almost imagine

With the infinity at complete equality set to zero. The Inverse Inequality Metric (IIM), along with its partner the LIM can perhaps be most useful in personal servicee effort to gain equality. For example, I can try smiling a bit more at the cashier and waitress in my neighborhood restaurant while I order cow tounge in Spanish. A little respect will impact my little, while it may lead to increased and consequently a larger piece of the cow().