Watching the Winter Olympics opening ceremonies. Is it my imagination or has there been no progress in Asian politics?
South and North Korea marched separately, Hong Kong had one freaking athelete who decided to walk under a Hong Kong flag as if she’s a country by herself. so… 1997 to 2010, that’s 13 years, after “reunification” and she decides to walk under Hong Kong’s flag? What kind of reunification was this?
And Taiwan is now known as Taipei? and walks separately?
Sigh….
Sometimes, one thinks that countries competes for influence–and some times, even if the influence is negative.
Recently, (early 2009) there had been many days of stock market declines, and usually, the news headline notes “China tightens control on lending, market drops”(for instance, wsj article here)… or something to that effect. (mixed in with repeated reports of more and more bad products from the PRC, dry wall, toys, food, pet food…)
Not to be pushed out of the limelight, Japan’s Toyota today announced that it extends it’s gas-paddle recall to include asking the dealership to not sell several models.(Sydney Morning Herald, wsj article)
Since these quality problems has been reported many times in previous years, and since no action were taken then, one can only surmise that the recent decisions to not only recall sold cars, but also to recall unsold cars (as opposed to paying for pre-market patches), seems like a reactive motion to join the “ruinner of economy and consumer confidence” club.
oh…, and stock market crasher.
There seem to have been two Ponzi schemes in the news recently. Recently, the perpetrator of one of them, Danny Pang, committed suicide. The other one, Bernard Madoff, is in jail.
Most modern people, those I work with, those I’m friends with, my parents even, probably will say a person like Madoff is better. He made more money with the a scam and lives. For many, we may even suspect that he is just a red herring for something else, and actually a saviour of sane world as we know.
Where as Danny Pang, having killed himself, made certain that he is not a red herring and just lost the battle to stay filthy rich in a world that allows it.
Assuming, superficially, that their offences were equally evil, but differ only in the quantity of money and the number of victims in question. (according to wiki, $65b vs. $4b)
As a person who is involved in absolutely zero devious schemes, I would like to say that I prefer a business man who have a conscience and is so shamed, that he kills himself. I would prefer a person who feel compelled by conscience than a person who is not compelled by conscience. Not because I like to see people die when they make mistake, but that the fact of morality is… extra safety measure.
BUT, having said that, everybody says to me that thick skin like Madoff is better for me. EVERYONE!!
so………, I am left wondering… in principle, in mouth, we will ultimately agree we want moral persons,…, err, I guess the expression is… professional ethics… an ethical professional is what we want, not an unethical professional. But in practice, we are encouraged to tolerate professionally unethical behavior (both in ourselves and in others we’re teamed with)
so… in practice, ethics is just something to make others do and not to do ourselves?
because I have to, absolutely must admit, I like the fact (if all is as seems, that he did intentionally do bad things to old people who put their savings into an account with him) that he felt the shame and ultimately relieved himself of the shame…. (without going into western religious things about how he is actually not cleared of any sins by suicide but added to it…) that ethics was a force in his system of workings…
Where as in Madoff’s system, he is happily in jail…. or unhappily, but still wills to live.
Yeah… now that I type it out, I do prefer Madoff, in that he lives…
I feel so guilty for feeling this way.
(Being as it would appear not involved in any unethical money making scams)
Today, I felt like ice cream. I went to safeway and bought some ice cream. The Asian girl, Alice, servicing two check-out stations decided to not come and bag for me when I have completed my check-out. The cashier felt embarrassed, and said… Alice, come and help me bag…, and she ignored him.
Sometimes, I feel the same way. For some reason, something inside makes me want to be strict and mean to Chinese people. Especially the girls, when I see that spark in their eyes from seeing a cute white guy passing by, I feel some how it is up to me to let her follow that spark. In fact, this thing in me make me feel like I ought to encourage her to follow that dream, instead of completing the sentence she is in the middle of speaking to me.
The force of adaptation is at work. The Bagger at the Safeway, being Asian, decided to stay away from me because she felt that bagging for me would show me preferential treatment. Just as I felt I would be unfair to the girl if I forced her to complete her conversation with me before getting distracted by a white guy. Becuase that’s what she wants to do, and because of that, she did not bag for me, as she should have under any normally acceptable circumstances.
The prevailing thought here in California is that genetic mixture is a superior form of life both in principle and in practice.
The principle is idealistic: People of all races, living without genetic or cultural borders. Intermarrying, happily, working, without racism.
The practice is one of reality: Many children of parents from mixed race are smart, rich, or very very exotically beautiful.
Maybe that is the only way out… Maybe that is the only way for me to get my grocery bagged… Maybe then, I won’t have to deal with these huge tsunamis of annoyance when all she wants to do is to stare at that white guy’s dick as he walks by…
Smart Bugs
Well, we’re back at this problem again. During the day, my browser and eclipse/terminal programs consistently crash just as I am about to complete something complex and time consuming.
Then, today, when this happened to me, I suddenly realized. Maybe the super-bug that was hypothesized several years ago is actually real. For all I can tell, there is a bug in either the operating system or browser that has evolved to a point where I am made to believe that it is smart enough to detect when I’m just about to complete a complicated task. I mean, it takes quite a bit of comprehension of java code, sql code, english language, email exchanges, and IM conversations to understand why at a crash at those exact moments would cause me the most annoyance.
Sometimes, I wonder if all these bug squishing tools, automatic bug detecting programs, firewalls, and human “safe-browsing” habits has given the bugs a special challenge. And in fact the efforts we put into squishing the bugs has incentivized and facilitated an accelerated the evolution of super smart bugs that has passed the Turing test?
Debugging Ability
I’ve found that I have relatively poor debugging skills compared to my co-workers. I wonder if it is because I never write buggy code. Because I’d stare at the stupidest bug in the world, and not recognize it has a bug. But of course, if I wrote the program, I would never have done something like that!
But this points to some of my weaknesses. For one thing, I have obviously not experienced working with bad programmers enough, or have been responsible for other people’s bad programming enough. Certainly, the senior leadership in the engineering organization, who’s been in engineering leadership roles for extended period of time, clearly is able to detect the bugs much quicker.
Sigh… so much for trying for management/lead positions…
I frequently fall asleep in movie theatres among the times that I watch movies there.
I hope these are due to some psychological disorder that I have and not due secret agents knocking me out with chemicals or other mechanisms. Some times I just dont comprehend it. I can pinch myself and hold my head up and breath really hard and drink water but I just could not keep myself awake… I have to think why this is happening to me when I visit public venues?
My best guess today are either there is some kind of synthnol–no smell, no hangover, but instant drunkardness when sprayed. Skin or eye absorbs it (or it was applied to the seats before I arrived)
Another possibility is the sonic screw driver. One gets screwed by some thing hat affects the aural cavity that knocks the person out.
It’s not EM imho, but I could be wrong. I just need to figure out a defense against these dark arts, so I can enjoy my God given right to watch these movies…….
Could be hypnotizing message in the movie? It happens probably by section/chapter 2-3 of each movie, within 10 minutes my head is slumped down… sigh
As a data miner and machine learning practitioner who do not work at Google, I often wonder when, if ever, I will be able to make this claim that Googlers often make:
We cannot sample when applying data mining and machine learning algorithms because we’ve discovered that using all the data makes a difference.
Some day…
I just saw National Treasure again. Wow!!!! I really think there is a deeper allegory than 5 floors below some church…
The spirit embedded in the Declaration of Independence is our map to treasures beyond our wildest imagination!! That all men are created equal. This, when seen through glasses of blue and red glasses, give rise to a treacherous path down to the depth of the earth… But in the end, we will find a huge room filled with gold and culture collected from all of the world.
And the guy who wants to share the world’s riches to the whole world gets the girl.
Hey!!! I want to share the riches of America with the world!
Now can I get the girl?
Ivanka Trump is married. doh!
but congrads!!!
Though there wasn’t much news on this before hand… one wonders about pregnancy…
But she is a pretty girl… progressively more beautiful… when she initially started her appearance on trump’s show, she looked like spoiled bratty girl, who don’t know what to do… But later, she grew more sure of her self, more mature than Donald junior…
but alas, she is not available any more.
sigh.
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