Morphed Mosquito

2012-02-17T11:41:00.000-08:00

I got the Lin-fever in the last few days, yes, Jeremy Lin. I searched a lot about him and watch and re-watched his games. There are still a lot more to be seen from him, whether he can keep up and continue his amazing rise. But based on what I see, here is my opinion and prediction of Lin.

The strongest quality of Lin is his confidence and focus on the game. Maybe being a devoted Christian helped, maybe it is just his personality and genes. After all, his dad has a PhD in engineering, which takes a lot of focus and hard work to get. This is not just from the game winning shot he made against the Raptors, but also evident from how he competed against stereotypes all his basketball life. No Division I scholarship out of high school, not drafted, waived twice, but keep on playing. If he wanted a mellow and ok life, he could get it from his Harvard economic degree. No need to play at the bottom of the NBA. He overcame all these because his confidence in himself and certain passion of the game. There is a Youtube Video of his high school coach saw him as the leader on the floor. That was after he joined Golden State. I don't think even him saw Lin becoming a starter for a NBA team in two years. But the fact in high school Lin was already the leader of the team, shows that this is not a fluke, not something he pretend to be. He really like to take charge, which is hard to find in today's NBA. The only other player had the confidence was Michael Jordan. I still remember how MJ was disappointed by the young players at Wizards. MJ said something like those 20 year old's showed less desire to win than this 40 year old. Sure, no one can be the same as MJ, but the lack of energy is evident in many NBA teams. There are many great players, just not a lot of people really want to win and want to lead the team to win. Koby wants to win, but just for himself. I watched a few games of LaBron James, he is good, probably equal to MJ in skills, but I did not see the spark that can ignite a whole team. This is where Lin is good at.

He is a smart player. He learns and understands what's going on. He does not let his emotion take over his brain. That's something rare. And this also helps with his confidence. With his intelligence and confidence, he make the team feel they can always find a way out no matter how back a game started.

I have to say, physical skill wise Lin is not close to the top players in NBA. He is ok and good. If he continue to play like this, he will be great. But he has his shortcomings and if cannot over come them, his skill probably put him around the middle range of players. May have a few good seasons but hard to see him lead the team into the final based on his skills. But he could overcome this by maximize his strong traits above, and lucky enough to stay in a good team.

What I see is that Lin is in a good team that fits him. From the few Nicks games I watched, I can see Amare and Melo are very strong players. They both want to win, but they lack what Lin had. Certainly, Lin plays a different position, but Lin can help the coach best use Amare and Melo. I think Amare and Melo are still going to be bigger stars, no matter how hot Lin is now, at the end of the day, he is not a flashy player. He is not going do things just to look good, but to win.

If Lin can be trusted by both the coach and players on the floor, he would be key to Nicks winning games. I don't know where Lin is going, but like someone on the NBA Tuesday show said, let's just enjoy what Lin's doing one game at a time. So far, he has been great.

Peter Diepenbrock, Jeremy's high school coach:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOdINo9PmOs

SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-19T20:44:00.001-08:00

SOPA and PIPA has created a pretty big reaction from the tech world.

I can see the media industry's frustration with people watching pirated movies and listening to pirated music. However, what make their position less admirable is the pile of money they sit on and the tactic they used. They basically took on the position that as long as they can best protect their wallet, they don't really care about anyone else. And they are slow to adapt new technologies.

The story just repeats itself, first when cassette tapes came out, music industry had a big problem, then VCR caused movie and TV industries to scream. Now they are at the internet. It bothers me that they never try to look at creating better product for their customer first, but always try to stop new technologies.

This reminded me of a movie I saw on how Chinese lost the advantage of movable type print to Korean after it was invented. Chinese official and business wanted to keep using the old way, even when the new method is much more efficient.

The biggest problem of the law is to give a government agency the power to block foreign sites. I think that is like the way how Chinese government would do it. Suprisingly some of the big mouth liberals supports SOPA, Al Franken, for example. I am glad Nanncy Palosie opposes it. It is actually evenly splited between on both sides, so this is not a partisan issue, rather this is about which representative gets support from the media industry.

Sent from my phone

Wukan protest

2011-12-21T10:01:00.001-08:00

The small fishing village in Guangdong has been protesting some government officials' illegal land sale and failure to compensate the villagers. It started as many other similar protests, where people organized on their own to get their rights. What's surprising is that people in Wukan is close to victory. Government has relented and released three organizers that were arrested. This is the most significant developement.

The protest and some of the government reactions were kind of expected. The government started blaming "outside" forces of trying to inflame the situation. At the same time they admitted that the requests from the villagers are reasonable.

I think there are two very positive things that came of this and definitely shows some progress of China's progress of self governing.

The first is the fact that protecters show great self control. There were some violence, but majority of the villager used peaceful protest to put pressure on the government. And they did not give up after government try to force them down. They expelled the government officials and setup road block. It is clearly the right way to fight for rights. It has the small similarity to what Dr. King's civil rights movement, although lacks a larger goal and leader.

The second is the government's relealization that simply using force is not going to resolve reasonable demands. They cannot just arrest a few people and try to scare the rest into submission.

Unfortunately, this story is unlikely to be reported by the Chinese media, which is really doing a disservice to the Chinese government, because this can help teach people not go to extremes and go violent. This shows people how to get justice in a more peaceful way. It also shows to local officials what they should not do, which is link a local event to "outside" force and try to fool people.

BTW, the city's Chinese is 乌坎.

Sent from my phone

Steve Jobs won again

2011-11-18T11:10:00.000-08:00

WE can declare Adobe Flash as dead now. Steve won again and must be smiling (maybe laughing) up there. I must say, Steve's claim Flash is slow and resource demanding has some merit. Although I still wants the option of using flash, but I also experienced crashes.Even on PC, Flash could cause problems.

My amazement of this is how Steve is always forward thinking and not compromise a product simply because Flash is popular today.And he is right again, although I don't like three results. Hope HTML 5 content will take over quickly so my cell phone can have less programs.

Sent from my phone

Steve the great

2011-11-12T09:00:00.001-08:00

I am almost done with Steve Jobs biography. The part about how people work under him had to bare his temper and reality distortion field, and at the same time have to be ready to voice opinions and stand up to his irrational decisions from time to time feels is like how people worked for great dictators. In fact Steve is a dictator, because he commanded his company with iron fists. He defensed his territory (Apple) using every method he can find. The purple who worked well under him, like Tim Cook, Ive, all acted as loyal ministers.

The life of Steve Jobs not only showed a great technologist of our time, but also give hints on how the past dictator able to lead. Genghis Khan used force to conquer the world, Steve used innovation and business tactic. But both must had charm that drew people to them and drive people to do things they didn't know they could do themselves.

Sent from my phone

2011-10-25T23:38:00.001-07:00

Both of them are very successful, but most of the people would say they can't be more different from each other. Jobs is the kind of person that believed as long as Apple can make the best products on the earth, it will make money. Gate of the type that believes as long as Microsoft can make money, it can make good products. Ultimately, both are right. There are people hate each of them, and there are people worship each of them, but I don't see someone can worship both of them at the same time.

There are many reasons why they are successful, it could be their personality, intelligence, interest, etc. But I think their persistence in their own ways made both of them successful.

Sent from my mobile

Steve Jobs died

2011-10-05T22:18:00.001-07:00

My first encounter with Apple computer was in the late 80's. I was in the middle school and learned Basic programming on an old Apple II.

My second encounter with Apple was in college learning C on an Mac. Apples hardware always impressed me. I loved the clickieness of the Mac keyboard.

I eventually became a PC person because I loved to play with computers and change things on them. But I always has to say Apple's design under steve was top notch.

It was almost unbelievable to see the iPod took over the mp3 player market, after so many company failed at attracting customers with all kinds of mp3 player designs. Similarly, do many PC companies tried tablet PCs, nobody could find the right combination of design, usability, content as iPad could.

I still don't own many Apple products, but many products I use were influenced by Apple.

Steve Jobs was the soul of Apple. It is hard to imagine Apple without Steve.

RIP Steve.

2011-08-20T10:01:00.000-07:00

This is the kind of the scenario that I do not want to see, HP discontinued all webOS devices, so I have no choice but to move on.

I got the Photon on Sprint, so I am a happy android user now. The hardware is a lot better than pre and android has many apps that I couldn't get on a Pre. The part that I still getting used to is the keyboard and navigating around the interface. A Pre 3 may fit me better, but the added features more.

Photon also has a very good camera and HDMI support.

I am still very disappointed at HP, because they premised much, and talked about doubling down on webOS. I think the top HP executives screwed up big time. They have known how hard it would be to compete against Apple and android,but somehow they just thought Palm working a before a little longer would solve all the problems.

2011-03-05T10:48:00.000-08:00

What should be the direction for Chinese democracy? Seeing the current cry for reform in the middle east, I cannot stop wondering where should China head to. I think at the top level of the Chinese government, there is a desire to implement some changes. However, the fear of chaos that may bring stopped any real progress. Certainly a large number of the government official would also be interested in keeping the communist party in power, but I see a lot of them are not really that loyal to the party, instead, they are more interested about the personal power they acquired through the communist party.

Many of the loud defenders of the CCP would probably quit the CCP when they the end is near. Just look at Russia today, a lot of their top people were ex-communists.

I am for gradual change in China, but at the same time I am worried about none existing progress in the area of political reform. There are some signs that the people's assembly proposed and discussed about new laws. That is good, at least not all ideas are from the top tier of the CCP leadership. But most of the issues they discussed were not really that important at the national level. I can't remember some of the examples, but there were some pretty crazy ideas out of some representatives. Definitely no one dared to propose a change in national policy.

But the other option is equally bad, which is a revolution end up with complete chaos. The difference between USSR and PRC is that China has many different local cultures and many rivalries between different places. This is even beyond the hot spots like Tibet and Xinjiang. Many provinces had been independent in some point of time in history, so some warlords or local strong man could take advantage of the chaos and declare an isolated state. Provincial power is good in a way to decentralize the government and put more power in the hands of people, but it would be even worse if a local dictator emerges. USSR is republics were more recent in history and Russia is by far the most dominate part of it. So even after the USSR broke apart, national identity is clear. Of course, the fighting in the Caucuses is worrisome, still, but majority of Russian is intact. If China broke apart, there is really no dominate part.

Democracy is such a beautiful goal, getting there without a big short term pain is very hard. On the other hand, if gradual change does not happen and the internal frictions increase without a way for people to release the frustration and feel some hope of change, the resulting revolution may be inevitable and more violent. Just compare British and French revolution in the 17th and 18th century, France held onto the feudalism longer than Britain, but at the end, it was a lot more bloody and took a much longer time to get true democracy.

In the meantime, people still have to live on and worry about day to day problems. I just hope when the change comes, fewer lives would be lost and China eventually can get a system that is more stable in the long term.

-- Sent from my phone

2011-01-24T13:00:00.001-08:00

I am probably not the first and won't be the last to point out that we are in a user interface revolution right now. It all started by the Nintendo Wii's wireless controller and followed by iPhone's inclusion of similar features. And most recently the Microsoft Kinect camera based controller.

The revolution is about the same as the first use of a mouse on a Mac computer. Of course, we know that people in Xerox invented the mouse and GUI interface, but Mac put it into consumer use and followed by DOS and Windows PC. The change was from pure keyboard inputs to a graphical based interface. How many people today still need to memorize the keyboard short cuts of MSWord?

The current revolution changes the 2D graphic input of mouse with a motion based 3D input system. And just like mice did not replace keyboards, I don't expect the motion controllers to replace mice and keyboard either. But clearly it makes some application much easier to use. Manipulate 3D models would be a lot easier and natural when you can use 3D motion.

And with accelerometer became ubiquitous, everyone include a 3 year old would be able to quickly learn how to use a computer. It lowers a the learning curve and further allows people never seen a computer to quickly get involved in computers.

Right now, these motion controller are primarily on game consoles and mobile devices, where mice and keyboards just done cut it. But ask the controllers get cheaper, and the more innovative ways of using them, PC will have such controllers. Wireless keyboards are already very common, so adding accelerometers and gyroscopes to them is not far fetched ideas any more. And when on screen keyboard can be typed using Kinect gestures, TV and PC can truly be merged.

I don't like revolutions, but I can see one coming.

-- Sent from my phone

Windows Phone 7

2010-02-17T16:31:00.001-08:00

The version looks very promising. The first impression is good. The look of phone and features are great. I am still interested to see how it does multitasking.

I use Palm Pre, so I am spoiled by the card system. It is hard to replace it and I am not going back to a non-multitasking phone.

With iPhone, Android, WebOS, Windows Phone 7 and also Blackberry, smart phone market is a very crowded place. It is obvious that mobile phone is the biggest battle for the high tech companies. I am siding with WebOS, but it is good to see all the new features.

2009-12-29T19:07:00.001-08:00

I am pretty concerned about the attempt to bomb a US airliner. However, the latest news about the Obama administration and Yeman trying to find a target to retaliate against Al Qaeda in Yeman concerns me, too.

This starts to feel like the bombings by the Clinton administration after the USS Cole attack. The bombing attacked a wrong target and even if it did work, it would not have done much against Al Qaeda by one bombing. It feels the administration is more concerned about the political consequences than trying to defeat our enemies.

I think the administration to focus on more to attack the root of the problem than this kind of retaliations.

Green energy

2009-12-29T10:16:00.000-08:00

China just passed a law to encourage renewable energy production and transmittion. I think many Democrats would start using this as a reason to pass laws in the US to do the same. However they failed to see the other side of the store. China is also working hard to acquire new oil resouces. The reason China wants renewable energy is quite different from what Democrat's. Democrats want to play nice and do the "right" thing. China wants to make sure she can get enough energy to power it's growing economy. So China is adding renewable energy on top of fossil fuel. So the Chinese priority is clear, economic development first and use everything to serve that, including renewable energy. If Democrat follow the same priority, then I have no problem. But the Democrat is to keep economy at the same level, or even lower it in order to use renewables.

Tweet or not Tweet

2009-10-01T10:07:00.001-07:00

I have been observing the rise of the Tweet world both ib main stream media and in the online world. It is quite amazing how fast it has grown in the last one or two years. There are already concerns that they don't have a good business model to make money and they still rely on private funding to operate, but no one can deny that it has become as a recognizable name as Blogging and Facebook.

I do not understand the popularity it get at all, regardless whether they can make money. A blog like this one that I am writing is a way to share ideas. Even if my writing is complete junk to the rest of the world, at least it severs as a journal for myself. Tweet is so short (I don't remember the exact limit, but it is in the range of a text message, 160 or 250 characters), nothing of significance can be communicated with it. In one way it is a reversed text messaging, which receivers select the senders instead of senders select receivers. Maybe that is the appeal to businesses, because it removes the the worry that people get pissed off of getting non-illicited ads. The good thing about such an subscribed ad. service is that it is more organized. A typical newsletter requires the receiver to hunt down the sender's webpage or send some special command back to the mailing list, but Tweet is centralized and user and easily see all the subscriptions and remove the ones they don't want. Maybe that's the business model they should go after.

-- Wen from phone

Pigeon feather sound

2009-09-07T19:52:00.000-07:00

A reseach about the different sounds that pigeons' feather make as they take off indicate if they are in danger. I think pigeons may learned to recognize the different sounds based on experience. Evolution may have allowed the birds that can produce different sounds have an advantage, because more of them can escape from danger. However, I don't think their is deliberate I also believe there are people who knew about this as a matter of survival skill. So, I think some of these reseaches are waste of money.

-- Wen from phone

WebOS 1.2

2009-09-06T09:31:00.001-07:00

Still using my Pre. I heard about the leaked WebOS 1.2 update. Looks like a few most desired features are add, e.g. true cut and paste from any where. There are also a lot of small changes.

This is one thing I really like about Palm. They listen to what people wants and get these things done. This reminds me of the early days of Treo, when frequent updates are there.

Of course Apple also listened to their customers, but they are not as responsive as Palm. Another thing I really hate about how Apple worked is they shamelessly make addin small basic features as some kind of big improvement. Yes, I am talking about cut and paste. Palm is good at quietly fixing some small deficiencies and let people have them soom.

Right now, we do not have the final 1.2 version, but from what we can see, it is a pretty big change.

-- Wen from phone

More thoughts on Pre

2009-09-05T12:11:00.000-07:00

Pre is a great phone and has a lot of features. However, it feels the less polished. A lot of people say that's because the phone is the first generation. I can understand this, but I don't think many users can. After all they don't follow the tech news as much, all they care about is a good phone.

Pre can get pretty slow at times due to a lot of programs are open. Some web pages suck a lot of resouces. Program start times is also pretty slow. However, this could be fixed by more optimized programs.

The other is the lack of apps. Apple has 30000 apps, even if just 10% of them of any good, that 3000 apps, which is 10 times the number in the official apps store.

The other part that I am worried about is the number of different smartphone brands can confuse the customers. Apple is the best in term of brand recognition, but Palm Andriod, Nokia really don't stand out from each other. Sprint just announced that they will carry a new model with Android. Then Nokia has the N900 that completely blows everyone await in terms is raw power and numer of features or capability.

-- Wen from phone

Google outage

2009-09-01T22:04:00.001-07:00

I saw the news about Gmail outage today. It made me think about the pros and cons of the centralization or monopolization of online services. All a lot of people really like Google as a company, including me. I liked their web search all the free tools that provide. However, the more dependent we are on a single company, the more likely that a catastrophic failure of it would pull the whole nation down.

Today, we still have thousands of companies that owns their own servers. If the majority of they move to Google or any single provider, today's event could cause real economical damage. The reason why it is just an annoyance now is that most of the Gmail users use it for personal reasons, not for business.

This also lead me to think why the less government controls the business the better. For example, people could argue that having so many different systems supported separately is really inefficient and therefore the government should mandate the businesses to use the same services. However, such a centralized system would be an excelllent target for terrorists or other enemies of the country. Although the health care system is not the same as internet services, it could face other problems of its own, like financial problem.

-- Wen from phone

First post with Palm Pre

2009-08-30T10:11:00.001-07:00

I finally got the Palm Pre. I have been looking at it for a long time. After my wife got her iPhone, I was wondering if should get iPhone 3Gs instead, because iPhone looks so good and it has excellent language support that Pre lacks. Pre can read Chinese, but cannot input Chinese. Finally, a post in precentral.net reminded of the low Sprint plan that I cannot live without.

So, here I am typing on Pre. So far it has been great. I have not run into all the issues people talked about on the web. But I only downloaded a few programs and have not tried the rooting or Homebrew apps.

The keyboard is great, because after I tried the iPhone on screen keyboard, it is clear it is not worrking well for me.

Multitasking is also as good as I expected. I never have to worry about saving the work for a quick check of things.

The biggest worry now is how well Pre will compete with iPhone. Palm can stay alive long enough, I clear see it ability of multitasking will win. However, the lack of Apps and some other problems associated with a new product has to be resolved quickly.

-- Wen (mobile)

Aircraft Carrier

2009-07-24T00:33:00.001-07:00

I think one thing the US government can save some money on is to have more missile destroyers than aircraft carriers. And missile defence system is the most important in the future.

- Wen
Sent from mobile phone

2009-07-21T01:23:00.000-07:00

Obama administration is going to miss its own deadline for Gitmo report on how to deal with prisoners there. I think after they looked at all the facts and talked to people, they finally realized that Gitmo is very hard to be closed. I think it is ok for him to miss the deadline, because closing it so soon is not realistic. Liberals are going to attack Obama, however, just like they have done many times before, they have no idea what they want to do.

Do liberals really believe the prisoners in Gitmo are innocent? Do they really want to take the responsibility if some of these guys were aquited by a civilian court, released and then killed more Americans? Are they going to pay for the trials? Can they convince any local people to allow these prisoner to stay in their local jails? What if other prisoners try to kill the Gitmo detainees? Are the liberals going to pay for the extra care we have to provide? What about security and jail breaking protection?

None of the liberal have a realistic solution and Obama finally found out the truth. At least I think Obama is doing a responsible thing by trying to meet an realistic deadline that's set out of thin air. Without any study and work done how could Obama and his team came up with a realistic date in the first place?

2009-07-10T18:46:00.000-07:00

I read that some researcher are moving semiconductors to use carbon instead of silicon. It makes sense, because both are in the same column of the periodic table, and do share some common properties.

But besides the more immediate benefit of faster circuit and smaller geometry, I think move to carbon opens the door to connect electronic to organic living world. Most of the living organisms are made from carbon based compounds. With hydrogen, oxygen, and some other elements, nature created this vast diversity of plants and animals. Once electronics starts moving towards carbon, I can see the next step is to use carbon based organic compounds in circuits. May be some more complicated logic can be more efficiently done by organic compounds than bits of electrons. There is already research on DNA based computing. And quite possible, eventually human can build organisms and eventually living things to do some basic work for us.

The other effort on this is from the biochemistry and biophysics side of science. There, people are looking at what are already made in the world and try to understand how organisms work. If we can understand more about how living things use chemistry reaction to achieve complicated actions, electronics can use the same principle to control the electronics.

Anyway, I wish some science fiction writers would take on this kind of thoughts and put this idea ahead of current technology. After all, a lot of Sci Fi ideas became real in the last century. Who could imagined that people can pull out a small device from their pocket, take picture, talk to other people, lookup information and get connected to millions back to the 19th century?

I am very hopeful that human can achieve creating lives, as long as human society does not collapse on its own. Wars and social unrest is really the real challenge of allow these innovation to become real.

2009-07-10T00:53:00.000-07:00

The latest riot in Xinjiang shows how hard it is to keep a harmonic society. I want to talk about two things.

The first thing is my thinking about Uyghur and Han relationship. I am of one that hate to use history to justify a country's claim of a land. To me it is ridiculous to say that because a Chinese dynasty 2000 years ago ruled Xinjiang, therefore it has to be forever be part of Chinese. And equally ridiculous is the notion that just because a region had be autonomous for a few years in the past century, therefore, they should be independent. I think politicians on both side, Chinese and Uyghur groups wants independence, exploit history and nit picking events to justify their hunger for power. So on independence, I am neither against nor support it. I think people live there today need to decide.

But I am against violence and wanting to know the truth. Again, I think both side are at fault on this. The riot was triggered by an incident in a Guangzhou factory, where some rumor about Uyghur workers raped a Chinese girl caused a fight between Chinese and Uyghur workers. 2 Uyghur workers were reported killed. I think people spread the rumor has to be punished. They have to take responsibility of what they have caused. Same to the people involved in the fight. However, such an incident does not justify rioting. Protesting is ok, but beating bystanders and women and children is simply evil. The wrong went from Chinese rumor spreaders to violent Uyghur rioters. Then the Chinese youth went into streets and looking for revenge, beating Uyghurs. Unfortunately, only peaceful people get beaten, Han or Uyghur. The cowards beating other people would have not way try to beat someone with a big stick.

I think it is important for majority of the people to understand violence cannot solve problems. I don't know what the Chinese government need to do, but some kind of dialog between community leaders of the two group would be nice. Trust has to be rebuild, otherwise it would be impossible for the peoples to live together.

The second part is my complaint to the non-Chinese medias. I think there are foreign governments wants to take the chance to weaken China. Western medias, especially US media, tends to root for the weaker side. However, it typically end up making things even worse, by viewed not being fair, it only hardens each group and build more resentments. I think the international community need to make sure a government does not over react, however, it is more important to be fair than to be haste. So far the US and western governments are dealing with the situation reasonably, but not the media. The Muslim media are even more biased towards Uyghurs. But one good thing is that they are not buying the lies the World Uyghur Congress spills out. They typically turns the issue for an ethic fueled riot into a fight against Chinese rule. I am fine if people want to discuss right of people, but using dead people, especially in this case Chinese dead as a political tool is disgusting.

2009-04-16T21:43:00.001-07:00

Like millions of others who watched her shocked the world and mesmerized us with her voice I am deeply moved by it. I watched the Youtube video at least twenty times now, still enjoy it.

She looks so real and normal. I did not pick on the part that she's not married and never been kissed, but her look is so plain. However, through the humor and her clam voice, there is a lot of confidence deep inside of her.

It is simply amazing. It makes everyone feel if we all just do the things we love to do, we could be as great.

And that is not an easy song, with a wide range of highs and lows. I can't wait to listen more.

Simon's expression is also very interesting, the raise of the eyebrow, the smile, the little sign, that's exactly how I feel. I think her voice has such a power to attract us.

The response of people on the Internet also shows how much people are in common. A good song, a good voice and a genuine nice person real brings people together.

Recession is over

2009-03-19T18:15:00.001-07:00

Playing psychic again.

Based on the public sentiments and how many bad news has happened, I think the recession is over. Of course, we will continue to see some bad news come, but with high unemployment, low interest rate and big government spending, the economy will be back soon. My prediction is the end of this year or early next year.

The hard part is to determine which sector will come back big. The energy and raw material businesses are sure to benefit from a strong economy, but I don't believe they can be the driving force. People are scared or at least cautious about housing industry, so no big news there. High tech is ok, but the tech bubble was not that long ago, so I don't expect any excitement there either.

2009-03-08T23:18:00.000-07:00

Here are a series of predictions I am going to make. I don't think I would be the next Nostradamus, and don't intend to be as vague a he is so anything can be mapped to what he wrote, but I think simple probability would allow me to get a few things write.

* The economic crisis is on everybody's mind, so I will start here. I am no economist, so my prediction is all based on God given power that I have, and I really can see the future. I predict the economy will stablize around mid this year. However, recovery and new growth would not happen until end 2010.
* Obama will win a second term. No matter how hard Republicans try, unless Obama does something completely stupid, which is very unlikely looking at his past, he will win. Also, GOP is still in a disarray, there is no clear leader.
* US troops will not be completely out of Iraq in 2011 as Obama stated. Because Obama puts more emphasize on Afganistan, it is likely Al Quada would shift back to Iraq. Something is going to happen for Obama to find an excuse. US troops completely out would be in 5 years. If Obama would be in a tight race in the next election, he may pull it to 4 years.
* The US will be in Afganistan for at least 10 more years, maybe 20. The likely good out come is that Taliban is sidelined in the region, much like FARC in columbia.

That's all for today.
- Wen
Sent from mobile phone

Dream after election

2008-11-05T23:43:00.000-08:00

Had an interesting coincident. I dreamed about being kidnapped by terrorists. But as I got a small chance of running free, I was struggling to decide if I should leave my friend behind. I woke up before I made any decision.

I think this could mean I am really worried about Obama would cause more terrorists to act, because Democrats are seen as weak towards them. The liberal thinking about some how we could convert evil people to be our friends is really worrisome.

- Wen
Sent from mobile phone

2008-10-29T05:23:00.000-07:00

Election is almost over. I already voted by mail. I picked McCain, but his chance of winnng Oregon and the whole election is pretty low. I like his fighting spirit, I guess that how he went through as a POW.

Obama is a smart person, and I do not worry about him being the next president. Even on the thing he said he was going to do, he can change. An example is the campain funding change. The problem with Obama is that I do not believe he care about the country as much as McCain. All of his career has been for himself. He has not done a single thing for others, outside of his job. He is a very calculated person, but not with a big heart. In fact, his path to the presidency has been so smooth, I am a little worried about how he would face some big challenges.

Another reason is that I do not like the democrats idea of government doing everything for the people. I have doubts that he can get his health plan implemented. The only way is to increase taxes. He can cleverly say the tax will be as high as before Bush tax cut, but the fact is tax will be higher. Also, I don't trust government can do anything better than the private sector. The only time government does something ok is when the job requires no improvements in quality, feature, and efficiency. Think about the big oil countries, nationalized train systems, banking, etc. I think the health industry has a lot space to grow and improve, and the government is not a good owner of change.

It is also very interesting when some of the media start showing victory dances of the Obama camp, polls still have McCain close in a statistical dead heat. Yes, Obama is ahead in a lot of states, but a lot of them are too close to call.

Sent from mobile phone

Music and drawing

2008-09-08T22:24:00.001-07:00

I listened to some classic music radio station today by accident. I found I kind of enjoy it. One thing I felt was that piano solo was kind of like drawing, compare to a full symphony. I guess a painting would be more like symphony.

Then I heard a violin solo, which made me feel piano is like a pencil drawing, and violin is more like charcoal.

Anyway, just felt it is interesting.

- Wen
Sent from mobile phone

2008-01-03T23:29:00.000-08:00

OLPC and Intel parted today. The main dispute is that OLPC does not want Intel to work with any other low cost laptop maker. CNet reported the following:

"Negroponte went on 60 Minutes in May and accused Intel of dumping Classmate PCs below cost in order to keep OLPCs out of the hands of needy children."

I don't follow his logic. If Intel is selling below cost, isn't it indirectly donating money to the poor kids? Why would OLPC care about Intel's profitability, when it is a none profit organization? I make it sounds like OLPC is not thinking about kids, but themselves.

Does it really matter who provides the poor kids affordable laptops? If OLPC really worry about kids, then let Intel provide the cheap alternative. If Intel try to drive up the price after it monopolizes the market, OLPC can jump in and provide the cheaper alternative.

It is even more suspecious when OLPC does not want Intel to work with any other low cost laptop maker, like Asus' Eee PC. It looks more like OLPC is trying to monopolize the low cost market.

2008-01-01T16:20:00.001-08:00

I am bad at spelling. Today I took some time to clean up some old posts' spelling and grammar errors. I don't think I got all of the errors, but at least the posts do not bother me when I read it.

2007-11-27T13:04:00.001-08:00

News report today say methamphetamine abuses cost the state $400 million a year due to property crime, fire and damages. I just thought the question, can we really save money if we get rid of meth problems completely. Those stupid people would end up doing other stupid things that would cost the rest of us big money.

Of course that thinking is too shallow, because some percentage of people may be able to find good things to do. This leads to another thought, instead of spending a lot of money to force people quit meth or avoid the young to pick up meth, it is probably more efficient to create other opportunities to attract people away from meth. It is like osmosis. Those people's mind is saturating the meth, open up their mind to new ideas, the new ideas will flow into their mind, and hopefully the meth idea flows out. The question is how to create such a space that has the same attraction but not addictive?

Global warming again

2007-11-11T20:19:00.000-08:00

Here are my positions:

* Yes, there is global warming.
* The cause of global warming is likely to be human, but not as conclusive as the existence of the phenomenon.
* The solution for global warming is not as simple as lowering green house gas and stop using fossil fuel. Every alternative has its negative.
* Global warming should not be solved as a political issue, before a clear solution is available. It should be looked at as a scientific problem longer and allow different oppinions and ideas to be considered.

Yahoo & Google

2007-11-10T07:39:00.001-08:00

I predict that in a few years, Yahoo and Google may merge. They provide the similar set of core features, and each has a very strong special area, Flickr for Yahoo and YouTube for Google.

2007-11-06T22:59:00.000-08:00

I am not sure if the children's health care is really needed. I think there are already programs for low incoming children's family to get health care. Sure, the receiver have to go through some checks to verify incoming. But that is necessary. Handing out something without any supervision is open to abuse.

Unless the state completely take over a children's custody, stupid parent will find a way to hurt their children. Instead of handing out freebies, I would rather have the state sponsored programs to help low income families raise children. Create free classes on how to decide when a parent should take a child to a doctor. State should only pay for the child birth cost and other benefit unless the guardian go through the class and pass.

Instead of think about how to enable people to be more self reliant, democrats wants the easy way out, which is just pay them money. This is no different from China's YuMin policy under the old monarchy/imperial rules. Democrats are the people think the government is smarter than normal folks. That why they use court to over rule popular measure.

Besides, the whole idea of selectively tax a small group of people just make me mad.

2007-11-06T22:45:00.001-08:00

Oregon voters just voted against tobacco tax to fun children's health care. And Governor Kulongoski said that the tobacco companies record spending on ad was to blame and they "bought" the votes. Well, he just insulted 60% of Oregonians' intelligence.

I voted against measure 50. But never bought any of tobacco companies arguments. My main reason against it is because it is an unfair tax on a small group of people. I am not even a smoker, but select a small group of people to pay for a general public program is wrong. I think if the measure was to increase incoming tax, I would consider it more.

We should only use tobacco tax money to fund tobacco incurred costs, like smoke prevention program and rehabs for smokers.

Sure, we have been taxing tobacco, alcohol more than other goods. Both smoking and drinking hurts health, and should pay higher tax to cover those cost to the public. But the tax should only limit to the related area. If the problem is already there today, we should try to fix it not to repeat the mistake.

If the public really think the children's health program is so important, then ask for an income tax increase. Children are not just smoker's responsibility.

Test spell checker

2007-11-04T18:19:00.000-08:00

I want so see how good the LexSpeller for Palm is. Especially the resident mode.

Comcast blocking of P2P traffic

2007-10-21T08:28:00.001-07:00

I read a report on Comcast stopping peer to peer traffic by detecting and send falsified packets to the end users. I think this is very alarming move and have a great impact the Internet for all users.

This brings up the net neutrality issue, where some political leaders believe that companies should set up preferential traffic flow for some user. Ted Kennedy voiced his support to net neutrality in his YouTube ad in the last election. I do not fully support net neutrality, because it limits companies ability to manage their resources. If someone wants to pay more to ISP to get better traffic his or her users, they should be able to. Net band width is no different than any other services, that you pay more and you should be able to get more. It should be up the ISP to decide what kind of pricing make sense to its customers needs.

However Comcast's action is bad because they do not openly state what kind of traffic they want filter, block. Another reason I am worried more about this is because I think P2P is a very promising technology. Today P2P programs like BitTorret are used primarily for sharing pirated media contents, such as copy righted movies and music. Also some the companies used unethical means to push ad to users, e.g. Gator. But all these are fault on the users of technology, not the fault of the technology itself. If ISPs follow Comcast's lead, they can kill a very promising technology.

The internet has millions of PC connected to it and vast amount of storage spaces from all of these PCs. All these make sense for P2P. Internet is build for interaction, so relying old method of broadcasting from a single source is not the best use of this resouce. If people like to use this method and Comcast see it increases the burden on its network, it should upgrade its network to meet with the customer needs.

There could be some efficiency issue with P2P when the same information is send directly between two parties. The IP protocol must have a broadcast mechanism, so I can see why ISP does not like P2P. But that means the burden is on individual provider, small content providers cannot compete.

If P2P is really more costly than IP broadcast, it does make sense for ISPs to charge more or restrict it. But I would like to see ISP providers to work on the technology to make it more efficient than just blocking it. There maybe applications only make sense from using P2P.

2007-10-21T00:49:00.000-07:00

I have been able to understand the feeling a painting or a drawing can bring to a viewer. But I had a hard time to under why do we associate feeling with music. Music can certainly mimic the sounds of the nature. However, most of the classic music have well passed mimicking bird, water sounds, yet it brings out more emotion than natural sounds can.

I watched a YouTube video made by Lasse Gjertsen, that he basic created a video from a few short segments of drum and piano play. Yet, the mix of such sequences is very compelling.

I lost my line of thought. I thought I see something in the video to explain about the power of music, but I now lost that. All I can think about the video is that this guy has a good feel of music, basically play out the sequence in his head.

Oh, I now remember, the idea was that our feeling of music depends how much we know about how the music is made. For example, Lasse's end product may not match the quality of a real band, but by watching what he used to put together the piece, we appreciate more about the work. This also why to understand music more one has to learn to play an instrument. And this is also why life concert always provides more to the listeners.

Pop music makes more sense to the mass because everyone can sing. The vocal cord is the music instrument everyone has and can appreciate more from other's voices.

DNA

2007-10-05T17:34:00.001-07:00

One area biochemists and genetists have not understood is how the same DNA sequence can produce so many different types of cells in our bodies. They know there are inhibitors that stops some genes in certain cells. By removing the inhibitors, the hope is that one can grow any other types of cells from any one cell in the body. The only way do that today is the embryonic cells or other cells get returned to the embryonic state. But how did the inhibitors get created in the first place? Especially think about the inhibitors has to be enabled in such an orderly fashion, that all fertilized eggs grows arms and legs in the exact same places.

So I think the DNA is actually a much complicated program, much harder to understand. It is great that we can decode all the DNAs in a human, but a single gene does not necessarily mean the same thing in different cells. At least the way I viewed about the genes is that they are like blue prints, that once a cell use a gene to create a protien, it always creates the same protiens. That may be true for a lot of genes, but the real key part of the genetic information is actually in the genes that can mean different things. Rather than viewing DNA as a blue print of an organism, I would view DNA as a program. Much like the separation between instructions and data in an computer architecture, DNAs are instructions. The cell is the machine, food and external inputs to the cell are data. What the organism behaves is the output. The key difference here is that computer does not grow. Maybe if we can understand more about how DNA works with raw material to grow an organism, we will also be
able to aplly it to a self constructing machine or computer.

What is missing is an environment that a computer can grow in. Maybe the environment has to start with a factory.

2007-10-03T23:24:00.001-07:00

Talking about moral make most of people think about religion. But I really think we should be able to understand moral by looking at action and consequence. The fundamental good and bad is what make the people live long and feel good. This feel good does not mean smoke some joints and get high for a few hours, but the long lasting feeling that we go back to in our memory. Also drugs shortens your life, which is bad and immoral. If someone argue live short is good, they ought to just kill themselves right away. I guess natural selection selected us this way, so for human live longer is better.

Everything is can be argued on top of these two goodnesses. Why is stealing from others is bad? Because it incites more stealing by others, eventual you would be the victim and feel bad about losing you position. Someone could argue that if I am so good with stealing, I would not get caught. The problem is that it is not possible. It is the one against the rest of the world game. Because people does like being stolen from, they will try to protect themselves. So one thief is to against all people's wisdom. So it is not god that punishes us, but rather human being's own nature punish the wrong doer.

I can try to explain a lot more cases, but I need some sleep.

2007-10-03T22:20:00.000-07:00

Saw a girl's nude and some more sexually explicit photos on a photo site. It looks like some guy she knew, maybe an ex, posted them there. The guy actually used the girl's real name and it was easy to find her myspace site. I warned her about the photos, and looks like the photos are finally gone.

She is just 20 years old and looks like have a pretty life, from her myspace site. I just think with the internet, it is a lot easy to dump this kind of personal stuff out these days. There has to be a way to protect people on the net against this kind of action. I am not that against pornography on the web, as long as the models and all parties are willing participants. However, taking someone's private photos and show them on the web must be against some kind of laws. If there are no existing laws, then there ought to be one.

When we see things like Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson sex tape on the web, it is easy to just view them as some celebrity craziness. However, people fail to know that this can happen to anyone. When money is not involved, it is even harder to get people doing this.

Also, this makes me to think that kids at 20 are too naive. I must say, I felt I knew everything when I was 20. I believed I could do anything and should be able to any I wanted. But it is very easy for some crazy person to ruin your day, if not your life. I think this incident is still a small thing. It is mostly embarrassing. She did not do anything wrong, or illegal. Other than allowing an untrustworthy person take the photo, you can't call it stupid. Most college kids have sex these days.

Another thing is that someone who pamper you with all the sweet talks and make you feel good and enjoy the time can really hurt you. I guess the girl learned a hard lesson. It also shows sometimes young girls get attracted by the wrong property of a man. Anyway, things to tell my daughter to avoid and be smart with.

2007-09-17T00:29:00.000-07:00

Obama lost my vote?

Related to Iraq that I have wrote about, the next election is all about Iraq. People can include other subjects into a debate, but all the nation cares about is to find a president to end the war. But the nation does not agree on how to end the war.

I respect Obama's stand against the war before it started. However, his plan does not mean much. There is nothing new and lack of specifics. If Bush's get the job done and then leave Iraq is not a plan, Obama's 5 point plan is not much better.

The following is Obama's 5 point plan:
(1) a reduction in the number of U.S. troops; (2) a time frame for a phased withdrawal; (3) the Iraqi government to make progress on forming a political solution; (4) improved reconstruction efforts to restore basic services in Iraq; and (5) engaging the international community, particularly key neighboring states and Arab nations, to become more involved in Iraq.

Problems with the plan:
* The goal of setting a time frame does not make sense when he also wants to engage international community. What if the Arab nations does not help to make a peaceful Iraq? A set time frame means if we cannot get the other nations to work together and help Iraq, we would leave Iraq anyway. In that case, how could we convince the other nations to stick around and help Iraq?
* The desire to get Iraqi government to develop an acceptable political solution is always there. Bush probably wants it more than anyone to see the Iraqi government successed. Obama failed to say how he would do differently than Bush in that aspect. Would tell them we will leave going to help convince them? I don't think so. Once a withdraw date is set, there is little chance true reconciliation can happen. If I was an Iraqi on one side of the negotiation, I would want to find peace also. But unless I have a very high hope that a reconciliation can happen and my side is not going to be screwed at the end, knowing a US withdraw date means I only have this much time to prepare for the worst, which is civil war. What should I do? Arm my political group and make sure we can fight back. Right now I doubt anyone can have high hope true reconciliation can happen in a year or so.

But to be fair, I have not heard any good plan from any presidential candidates.

2007-09-15T00:15:00.000-07:00

Rebut Bin Ladin

I was thinking about writing something about the Bin Ladin video tape before even seeing it. Finally, I got sometime.

Bin Ladin bragged about how 9/11 changed the US politic, and as if he has achieved his goal. Well, let's look at it. He wants to destroy the US, which obviously did not happen. He wants to convert more people to Islam, which did not happen. Quite contrary, 9/11 only made things worse for Islam. Any Muslim trying to do anything remotely to harm the US will be scrutinized. Some Islamic charities were closed, which are justified when they are connected to terrorist organizations. All in all, 9/11 only made the western world less acceptable to Islam, no matter how people try to put the Koran or Islam into the main stream.

It is also pretty pathetic for Bin Ladin to even comment on global warming, which has nothing to do with what he was fighting for. As horrific as 9/11, Bin Ladin at least showed some level of competence in trying to inspire successful terrorist attacks. After a number of times from different terrorist leaders to call for attack on the US soil, they have failed to do so after 9/11. Outside of Iraq and Afghanistan, there is virtually no attack on the US interests. In fact, the attack in Bali Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, all target fellow Muslims. I don't see that's a great persuasion for people to convert to Muslim. I don't want to compare religion here, because Christians has done its own share of killing fellow Christians, but at least that was the past. The only recent large violence between Christians is Northern Ireland.

Also, the Europeans are generally against Iraq war, yet they were the ones get attacked. The result is that Europeans are no longer tolerant towards Islamic fundamentalists. The imam that spreaded hatred against the western cultures for years in UK has been arrested and sent away. After the riot in France, French no longer want to deal with the extremist. If you look closely, all countries in the world pushed hard to drive out the fundamental Islamic groups, Thailand, Indonesia, Russia, India, etc. And many of these countries are traditional enemies, Russia is one and will still be competitive with the US in the future. But one thing Bin Ladin made clear to the world is that people cannot sit idle and think terrorism is other countries problems. So great job Bin Ladin.

The US may have a lot of troubles in Iraq, Al Quaeda has even more problems now. Locals are turning against them, and their animal behaviors is not even acceptable to American haters among Muslims.

Prediction

2007-09-07T02:05:00.001-07:00

Time for another prediction post.

Thompson will win the presidential race in 2008.

Steve Job is in trouble now with the price cut. Apple is not in trouble, Steve is. Steve is a new product kid of person. His sales pitch works for a new product, but for iPod and iPhone upgrade, it needs a more honest and straight forward marketing. There is no more revolutionary ideas in Steve Jobs. Maybe after someone else comes up with a good new product, he can take that and make it cool and easy to use, much like Xerox's mouse and MP3 players.

Outsourcing

2007-09-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

Just heard a news that an Indian company Wipro decided to open a development center in the US. It is an interesting change and should create some insights into the cost and gain on outsourcing.

But of all the reasons stayed by the report, they do not touch on one the, technical competence. There are a lot of smart people in India, China and other countries. However, software and the computng industry is relative new. There are a lot of expreienced engineer in the US has been in the industry for decades, while majority of peoples hired in India are junior engineers. That's why we see more successful electronic companies, because electronic fundamentals are well by all nations academic. Same is not true about software technologies, like OOP, Java, Internet, etc.

Innovative designs requires passion. I think lot of people in Asia got into engineering not because they love it, but because their parents think it is a good career for their future. Also in China, the pressure of the college entrance exam means the type of nerdy people good with programming often don't do well in exams. And the people can get high scores and get into the competitive program, do not real love writing codes. That is why we don't see a lot of free software developers in China and India. I do see a lot of passion in Chinese kids on internet and media related work, for example people making videos, cool Flash music videos, etc.

Compare Roman with the US

2007-08-30T21:46:00.001-07:00

I got to a real good web site that has a detailed yet easy to read history of Rome. I am sure a lot of people already done more study of the history and did comparison between Rome and the US, I am just to state what I see as interesting similarities.

It is pretty obvious that the western democracy is largely based on Rome's republic system. However, Rome lacked an executive branch and I am not sure if it had an separate judicial branch either. But the idea of a senate is clearly from Rome. But the frequent wars Rome had to fight clearly demanded some level of authortative control of the military. So the consulship and the temporary dictatorship was the logical solution.

In a way our president is like a solo consul vs. Rome's join consul. I think some people worry about our president to become a dictator is well warrented. However, for people to think Bush would be that dictator is completely wrong. It is very clear that both Caesar and Augustus were very popular with the people. Bush is not. Heck, Hitler had more popular support when he was elected as the consular. I think it is more likely for a popular president like Clinton to morph into a true dictator than poor Bush. To bad, Clinton had on opportunity to conquer other people or deal with a crisis. Maybe that is why some democrats thought it was bad luck that 911 did not happen Clinton was in the office.

Anyway, we are seeing power being transfered among a small elite group and family. Bush family had two presidents, and looks like Clinton may become the first woman president follow her husband.

Look back at Rome history when it slowly transformed from a republic into an empire, I think the change was unavoidable. The senators cannot solve the social problem because there are so much politic between the senate, consult and the tribune(?forgot the exact term). When a crisis arise, only a general would be able to deal with. When the crisis is long and the general is capable, well, dictator term is extended, rules were bend.

What if rules were not bend? It would mean Rome would not be able to fight back against the Gauls, the Germantic tribes or the celtics. Rome would be destoried. Just look at the war between Cathage and Rome, both had a senate system, if Rome was not brutal at destorying Cathage, I would probably comparing Cathage with the US.

Put Rome into the perpective of history, there was no doubt that Rome system was the best for the time. I think it was able to last for a long time, because it has transformed into an empire.

2007-02-19T11:24:00.000-08:00

Video and Movie Downloads

After iTune expanded into video downloads, including popular TV shows like "Lost," google also start offerring paid contents, like full length movie. However, there are good reasons they are not going to fly in the next 2 to 5 years.

Each episode of "South Park" costs $1.99. I think this price is based on the DVD they sell. However, this does not make sense, because the DVD has higher resolution and you get the dics. Sure everyone can burn downloads on DVD and DVD+/-R are very cheap now. However, it is not the price of the dics that cost us more for downloads, it is the effort. Customer softwares does not allow you automatically put downloads on DVDs in an orgnized fashion. Can a software automatically burn all my "South Park" downloads on DVDs, but not touch my other less interesting downloads? Can the software automatically organize the downloads by season?

I think the executive must have thought about this hard. Sure, they can set the price lower and attract more downloads and may even make more money. But they probably worry about the longer term effect of a lower price, which is when the problem of downloads are all solved, they could not increase the price. What they fail to see is that for a new technology to take hold, it has to be cheap, or if we interprete it in a different way, make more efficiently. DVD plays now cost less then VCRs, that's why it took off. It also provide better quality, so it is more efficient to get the same result. Video and movie downloads can be like DVD to video, but the difference is that for the people paying premium today, they are not getting a better quality video than DVDs. The hard to solve problem is due to video downloads depends more on infrustuactures than DVD and VCR. When DVD first came out, the only we have to do to take full advantage is to buy a DVD player. If you have a good stereo, it would be better, but that's not essential to experience the higher quality. To get better than DVD video downloads, people needs faster internet connection. Today DSL or cable cannot satisfy this need. And internet infrustucture take a long time to move forward. It has been years since Verizon announced their fibre optical offering and I still cannot get it in my home.

Here is my prediction on video downloads. The marketing guys needs to have a longer term plan. This means they have to cut the price now and leave enough reason behind in people's mind, that when the HD quality downloads are available, people has to pay higher price. In fact, with downloads, it is quite easy to offer different prices for downloads. My opinion is the starting price for video downloads should be about $0.50 per episode of TV show, and $2 per movie to view and $5 to own and $20 to allow people to use short footage to make home video for YouTube. What this leaves out is any HD or even DVD quality stuff. They can offer HD or DVD quality downloads for 3 or 2 times the price, depends on how soon HD will replace DVD.

Mobile broadband

2007-01-26T15:13:00.000-08:00

Mobile broadband will not gain popularity and it will eventually disappear. I would compare it with satellite phones, there is a small market reallu can benefit from it, but in the long run the market is to small to sustain a separate technology.

The reasons EV-DO or other broadband phone technology cannot be popular are the following:
* WiFi is wide spead with multipke cities providing free accesses.
* WiFi is free at home.
* Mobile broadband cannot replace wired broadband access at home.
- Wired technology is always going to be faster and cheaper than wireless, because it does not have to deal with interference.
- Since mobile broadband is tied with someone's mobile phone, you cannot just leave it home for other family member to use. And why should I pay for 2 mobile broadband services if I can share the wired at home. Of course, this can change, but since it is not here yet, less people would be willing to invest in the new wireless option.
* Web content on the phone is less graphic intensive. That can change, because part of the reason web ages target phones has less graphic is because current mobile data speed is low. But there is another reason that web for phone will never have as much graphic or content than PC. That is the small screen. Screen size and resolution can increase, but it will always be smaller than a PC monitor, much smaller.
- A mobile phone has to be small.
- fonts and graphics have to be large enough for people to see.

One application that is pushing the mobile broadband adoption is mobile TV, or watching TV on cell phones. I already explained in my last post that that is not going to catch on in the US.

Mobile TV

2007-01-18T11:42:00.000-08:00

Just read a report at CES on mobile TV by Junko Yoshida. She is getting skeptical about the future of mobile TV. She quoted some concern on carrier dependence, and change of heart on the technology behind.

I don't think mobile will ever strive in the US, not because technology or mobile carriers. It is because of life style. I still remembered the time when I first saw small hand held TVs in Radio shack. Before all the digital TV stuff and HD TV, the small 2 to 4 inch TVs looked cute and interesting. However, it never catches and large market. It is not because of the cost, because at that time cable TV is getting popular, and a lot of people still watches broadcast TV at home. The real reason is that Americans has no time to use the tiny TVs. Mobile TV is more popular in Asia and Europe because a lot of people use public transportation every day. In Japan, communter trains are essential part of the working class. Besides a few large cities on the east coast, most of Americans drive. You can't watch TV when driving. At home people are getting larger and larger TVs, no one is going to watch Mobile TV at home.

2007-01-05T13:26:00.000-08:00

Why is lying so hard?

There is always 2 parts of lying. One is the logical part. Any believalbe lies have to make sense. No one is going to believe I can eat a cow alive, because it is much larger than my body and won't fit in to me. The second part is the psychological part of the lie. This part can be exhibited in many ways. The most important is the human facial expression. The reason when people lie, they typically circle their eyes and not look directly at someone is because it is hard to control our expressions when we know what we say is a lie.

A good liar requires to master both parts and because different people are good at different part, it is very hard to find someone that are good at both. Bill Clinton is someone good at the logical part. Natually, he is a smart guy and certainly more analytical than most of the average people. He is also trained as a lawyer, which building a logical case is require for any legal debate. However, he sucks at psychological part. He was red faced the whole time when he stated that he did not have sex with that woman.

People who are good at psychological part of lying are typical viewed as believers of their lies. I don't think all of them are, but it takes quite a bit of twisting of someone's mind to believe in some lies. Examples of such people are con mens. I am also thinking about cult leaders or child molesting priests. These people typically find justifications for their lies and feel comfortable with lying. The justification could be wanting to make money, etc.

I must say, 99% of the liars can be spotted by confronting them with some evidence and they would break down psychologically. Few can lie in the face of clear evidence. What is hard to find the 1%. Many times, despite evidences known to the public, there is always doubts, maybe very little, but it is still there. OJ Simpson case is a very good example. Himself certainly knows if he did it or not. However, unless there is video showing OJ doing it, it was always possible somebody has done it.

Prediction

2007-01-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

I am going to make some prdictions in the new year. This is the time for me be a fortune teller.

In fifty years, we would see artificial limbs with all five fingers controled by the person's nerve. Human will be closer to become cyborg. But I don't think computer can reach human intellegence in the same time. There has to be a revolution in software development, before computers can get closer to human.

The iPod will disappear from the market in ten years. Replacing it is the iTune or likely service running on almost every cellphone.

In the video game world, all game consoles will have Wii type of motion sensing controls. There will be tons of accessaries using the Bluetooth connection to add special feel of game play to the consoles. And the game console will not replace DVD players and computers.

Hybrid cars will not replace gas engine cars. There will not be an oil shortage in ten years. There maybe short term shortage for one to a few months. But there will not be a general shortage of oil. Developing countries will rely more on nuclear power. And due to polical reasons, the US would not take advantage of it nuclear technology.

In one hundred years, there will be a serious backlash against liberal and progressive movement. The US will see another burst of growth, fueled by the push to use nuclear energy.

What's self 2nd

2006-11-25T22:30:00.000-08:00

Last post on the self asked a lot of questions. This time I want to talk about my theories. Of course my current think is very amateurish, but I think they can be true and further study would be interesting. Even if the study proves me wrong it is still very intereting to know.

It is pretty obvious that my body is not the same as my 'self'. However how much of my physical being is my self is not clear. Am I less of my self after lost a limb? A lot of people can do a lot of great things without arms or legs. The question is if had their limbs, would they archieve more? I think the answer would be a mix. Some would certainly do more, e.g. Athletes. But some may not. The lost of a limb could be an awakening of someone's hidden potential. Without the dramatic event the person might be settle in the ease of comfort in life and never dared to try new challenges. The example I think about are like Winston Churchil. Churchill was not very successfull, but after a few loses, he excelled as a war time leader. Similarly but in a bad way, Hitler failed to get into Vienna's art school, that led to his change of career. If Hitler was admitted into the art school, he might became and an artist.

Another way to look at this is after an artificial limb is attached to the person, does that mean all of a sudden the person's self is larger than before? Or we can even extend this to normal people using tools. Does by using tools, we are expand our selves beyond what it would other wise be? I am inclined to say that yes, we are extending our selves in those cases. And unfortunately losing a limb is losing part of our selves. However, we could make up the lost. Some people can make up more than they lost, some people may not. The reason I think this way is because I believe that our 'self's are not bound by our physical bodies.

But if each our's self is not limited to our body, where is the limit of self. Afterall we cannot all be parts of the same entity. If we were, then there is no self. But we can definitely feel the existence of self. If I die, my son would still be here in the world. If there is no self then I cannot I cannot separate from my son.

I think this means we need to separate two type of self. One self is our soul, which is much smaller than our physical being and it is each person's core. There is an extended self, which includes our body and things we can interactive. In fact by reading this, my self has extend to your extended self. Losing a limb just lost a part of the extended self. Death removes our core self from this world, buy will leave our extended self in this world. Some people leave a larger self, e.g. Einstine left the discovery of relativity behind. His extended self is much bigger than what I can ever be.

I am more interested in understanding of the core slef, or our soul. Where is it come from and where does it go at the end?

2006-11-23T09:17:00.000-08:00

Wii

On a lighter subject today. Like many people has said, Wii really stands out against the PS3 and Xbox360. I don't have one yet, but my heart tells me I will get one once I can find one.

I think most of the video games today has lost appeal to me because they focus too much on graphics than game play. Graphics is important, but without a solid game play behind it, it is just some pictures. One other problem with today's game graphics is too much 3D. I am old enough to play Doom when it first came out. It was a whole new experience at the time. I love 3D graphics. But a lot of people failed to see was the 3D graphics in Doom is strong related to the first person shooter game play behind it. It was innovative not just because of the graphics. The graphics only gave it a new level of realism. I do not understand why RPG games are in 3D. RPG is a fantacy game and it is not based on realism. Anyway, enough ranting on 3D graphics.

Wii's control opens a whole new demension for game play, especially in fighting games like Street Fighter 2 (did I say I am old). It is never intuitive to use combinations of button pressing to do a move. That never felt natural to me. I think the Wiimote will allow a new spread of such games.

I like innovation. I do not like people just repeat the same experience over and over again. This is pretty much what the video game industry has been doing. Few games has the fresh feel and even fewer of feel fresh are good. Where are the Simcity, Doom, Civilization, Ultima VI of the 21th century?

I hope Wii is a start for the gaming industry to look at new ways to change the gaming controls. Wii showed it can be simple and cheap to produce. With device miniturization allow motion sensing to be fits in such a small space, a lot of possibilities are out there.

2006-11-19T10:20:00.000-08:00

The famous saying of a philosopher:

"I think, therefore I am."

Or something like that. I think this is the base of the belief that once a computer is 'smart enough', it will have a soul and conscience. It will be able to understand 'self' from the rest of the environment. Or maybe the understanding of self is the beginning of true intelligence.

If we cannot separate ourselves from our environment, how can we learn anything from the environment. One can say that the knowledge of self is built into our brain. But if that is the case, that means a baby would be born knowing self. If that is the case, why would it be so hard for babies to learn to use the word 'I'? And even as adults we still think about who we are, thus this post. If we still don't know what self is, then knowing self cannot be part of intelligence, at least not the same level as human.

So what is the definition of self? First we need to answer the question 'is self indivisable?' Before I attempt to answer this I need to think about if it is important. I think it is important, because if self is not divisable, then our physical body cannot be self. We can lose an arm or leg and still be ourselves, or can we? How tightly our selves is connected to the physical features we have?

2006-10-18T23:42:00.000-07:00

When learning happens at the physically level, it has to be based on some very simple units. One thing I just thought about is gate arrays or FPGA devices. However, one shortcoming of existing programmable devices is that the programming is one way, not interactive. One way to solve this is to make the programming act as path finding. Once an input to output path has been established, an evaluation has to be done to determine if the result is good or bad. If the result is good, than the path is saved. Further improvement on this could be that the good and bad is based on a score system. If it is evaluated as a good path all the time, then it cannot be erased. If it is bad, the it can be replaced by a better path. I think this type of learning would be the same with the existing AI learning.

2006-09-12T22:14:00.000-07:00

As a comment to my last post on the different level of intellegence, i would like to point out that the classification is really just one dimension of human intellegence. It is just looking from behavior point of view. It is not about how we get the intellegence. I touched on the idea that the string theory has brought in, like what if our soul is from a different dimension?

I am also thinking about how to actually demonstrate the behaviors. I mentioned that DARPA race winner Stanley has some learning capability. However, what I would like to do is to demonstrate the behaviors at a lower level, less specific to an application. I am thinking about writing some programs to mimick the capability of a 'body' and then build a structure around it that can 'behave' and take input from the environment. If such a system can be built, then we can actually see how a program can learn.

Eventually, such learning capability has to be built into hardware to get the same performance as today's comptuer program, but I would think we can wait until we see learning program first to worry about different implementations.

2006-08-28T23:06:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on artificial intelligence

I thought about artificial intelligence and came up with some basic concepts. I think all these may have been discovered by many others, but I think I may have a slight different perspective due to my experience with computer architecture, software and biochemistry. This may not be new, but I may have an unique way to explaining it.

There are 4 levels of intelligence, instincts, reactive, simulate and imagination.

Instincts

This is hardly called a form of intelligence, but let’s put religion aside, there has to be instincts to allow the advance of intelligence. The examples of instincts are suckle as an infant, pull ones hand off a hot stove, parents love to their children, curiosity, the will to survive and many more.

Those who believe in religion can view these as God's creation. Those who do not believe in God can view these as part of nature, which is yet to be fully understood by human. But the simple fact is that we are born with these instincts. We do not make conscious decisions on these instincts and cannot lose these as long as they are physically part of our body.

In order to build AI into machines, a lot of these instincts has to be designed and created by human. This is no easy task. It involves a lot of technology in sensors, electrical and mechanical engineering, software designs, etc. Many of these has been solved individually. BigDog, which can stand and walk on its own, is a good example of how a lot of these problems are solved. It was built by Boston Dynamics (www.bdi.com).

Reactive

Starting from reactive, we get into what commonly viewed as AI. This is the learning ability. In human this is part of us that help us learn to walk and talk.

The concept of this type of learning is simple. We have memories and we try different ways to do things, if it works, we remember how to do it again, if it hurts us, we remember to not do it again. This is basic trial and error type of learning.

I have seen some projects that already achieved certain level of this learning skill. For example, the 2005 DARPA challenge winner Stanley has the ability to learn from human and itself. However, today's technology has not provided an economic way of mass-producing this ability into common applications. The two biggest obstacles are memory and time.

The basic elements of this learning are: a specific goal and a set of criteria’s, a set of options or capabilities to tryout, and a feedback mechanism to tell if the goal is reached, or if it is closer to the goal, does it hurt or feel good. The information path back is our instincts, e.g. pain means bad and not successful. Of course, there are more complicated learning when we had to overcome short term negative feedbacks to get to a higher goal. That is the part about human and it is related to simulation.

Simulation

This can be confusing, especially in my field. This is not logic simulation in IC design. There are similarities and that is why this term is used.

The most important element of simulation in our brain is abstraction. What every simulation we run in our brain is not reality. Whether it is a simple task of picking up a cup and get water or design an airplane, we run ideas through our brain. The ideas are based on representation of the reality in our brain. A cup in our brain is not a real cup. It is some electrical signature saved in our brain to represent a cup. And water is not real water in our brain, either. However, using the abstract representations, we could plan out how do we pick up the cup, put it under a water fountain and get water into the cup. After we simulate the actions in our brain, we have more confidence in our action and does not run into as many errors.

The second element is knowledge. This kind of knowledge is different from the memory in the trial and error type of learning. This is why I used term knowledge instead of memory. The memory for TAE is very specific. It directly maps to the criteria it uses to determine if the action is 'good' or 'bad'. The knowledge for simulation is more like a formula or method. We give the method some data and or assumption as input and the go through the simulation in our brain. The brain can then use TAE to find out which input yield good or best results.

Simulation saves us from risking ourselves and at the same time allows us to move forward.

Connection

Before I talk about creativity, we should also understand that these three types of intelligence are not completely separate. In fact, they help provide input and take output to and from each other. For example, the knowledge simulation is based on can be from simple trial and error. Imagination provides new targets for us to use simulation.

Another random thought is that to achieve the same level of human intelligence, we can use very simple memory logic blocks with dynamic wiring between them, instead of more complex CPUs and computers. The key is to be able to have a huge number of these basic units and enough space and material for the wiring.

With this, the advantage will be on the computers, because one can add a few complex processors to a self-learning and creative computer. Even an old 286 processor can do math calculations faster than human, so the overhead of adding processors is not hard. The hardest would be to find the correct interface to the huge network of the basic blocks and finding out how does the intelligent computer discover the complex processors and learn to use them. Once we solve that, we can also think about adding processors in human brains.

I don't think the above are new ideas. There are a lot SiFi stuff talking about these. But I think I actually can see it happening.

I think the basic blocks can be based on today's FPGAs.

Connection 2

One part of data collection to accumulate knowledge for simulation is abstraction. Abstraction is talked about in Object Oriented Programming a lot, because that's the foundation of classes and many related concepts. However, human creates software abstraction. In order to think like human, it means a machine has to be able to do abstraction.

My current view, which could be a lot simpler than what it really requires, is that abstraction is really just data analysis. I got this idea after I thought about how people deal with large amount of data. We first need to collect data. But almost at the same time, we start to look for similarities and difference between the data we have. How did a baby learn the concept of "people"? First we keep point to different people and tell the baby they are people. Inside of the baby, it starts to compare different objects we call "people." Eventually, they would notice that people all stand on legs, with 2 arms, a face with 2 eyes, a nose and a mouth. The abstract idea of people is gradually solidified after many positive enforcements and corrections. This type of abstraction or rather definition of concept is never ending in our mind.

The above also means that the abstraction depends on basic trial and error learning, because to get positive or negative feedback on an abstraction, we need to express our understanding (try) and then see what response we get.

What is intelligence?

After watching Nova's short series on the Sting theory and the multiple dimensions, I start to think that maybe intelligent is something on a different dimension.

The intelligent I talk about here is not the ability to calculate, but the creativity part or maybe people can call the soul. If it is coming from a different dimension, it maybe pointless to pursue true AI, unless we can communicate with the other dimension. Of cause, just having a soul is not going to solve problems, so the pursue for better computers is still needed.

The way I see this is that if physics laws using energy and matter can explain how a human being is created, where does intelligent come from. Can energy be converted into intelligence? If yes, then intelligence should cause an energy lost as part of human being development. If no, then intelligent cannot come from our 'world', because everything has to be from earth. Or if intelligent does not take anything to create, but that's hard to believe that something so important to define us as human is so cheap.

I am not able to use mathematics to prove intelligence actually can transform into energy or other forms of this physical world, but I think it is a possibility that something like the string can be used to prove it.

One thing in the string theory that I cannot understand is how they theorized the gravitons could move between membranes of dimensions. If that is the case, we should detect a lost in energy when that happens. They may have other explanations that are hard to explain in a TV series, but that's one of the odd things I cannot understand.

But to me this multiple dimension thing is a very possible answer to what soul is and how intelligence may come about. The TV show also clearly stated some physicist's skepticisms on the string theory, calling it a philosophy rather than physics, because the fundamentals of theory cannot be tested in a lab or observed by our instruments. But I am fine with it being a philosophy at this time. Eventual prove by experiment would be better, but a good or tight mathematical explanation is ok, as long as the logic is tight. God itself is a theory that no one can prove or disprove, because it is outside our four dimensional world. If string theory can point out the possibility of such a unified theory, maybe we are close to actually seeing God. But I maintain skeptical about the whole heaven and hell things that Bible or any formal religion teaches, because those are human interpretation of what God's worlds like, not God's own words. Same thing, the possibility of time travel, parallel universes and beginning of time and space is all human interpretation. That is why I am still interested to see experiment proving these theories.

Another possibility is that we got the whole thing wrong. We may interpret the world the wrong way. Yes, we can use Newton's law to predict motion, but the whole behavior can be explained in a totally different way, as precise and simple.

Creativity

Now let's talk about creativity. Before I watched the String theory TV show, I view creativity as some kind of random generation in the brain, maybe random wiring of different things. A lot of them may not be real or possible, but the few that came out to be true propelled us to the greatness. After the Nova program, I think it is quite possible creativity is not so random. One problem with my original thinking is that if everything were random, then there would be far more useless imaginations than useful ones. However, some thing keep steer us to the 'right' direction. This is the same problem with evolution, where the possibility of mutation to turn out horribly wrong is much higher than creating a new stable and elegant being. Personally I don't believe in the intelligent design theory. I think it is not science at all. I have not heard a single good argument for it, e.g. how does intelligent design explain the Newton's laws. If they really want to study, maybe they should consider using the string theory to show the possibility of a higher being from a different dimension.

My way of thinking is also shaped by the main concept behind Matrix. This is the concept that we may not be 'looking' at the reality the way it really is. Our problem is that each person only sees the world from our little window, which are our senses. Our body and mind may not necessary have to be together. I think this carries some thought from Buddhism, which enlightenment will bring us the reality we cannot see.

Move back to my original idea of how creativity would work in a computer like system. Creativity by itself is useless. Because there is so much randomness, most of the ideas would be wrong. Although we do not seem to deliberately rule out most of the bad ideas, it is very clear we use simulation to try out ideas in our minds before we go out do things. Most of the engineering projects require this type of simulation in our brain. We need to “imagine” what need to be done, what are the possible out comes, how do we plan to solve some of the problems, how do all the parts work together, etc. Today we have powerful computers to help us to do very focused simulation, so we can save our brain for more creative thinking. However, we still do a lot of simulation in our brain before any idea is recorded on paper or on disk drives.

2006-08-28T01:44:00.000-07:00

Welcome! This is my first post. I do not have time to write a lot now, so I just want to say that I hope to share some of my ideas here. I do not use this as a place as a personal journal.