In the Beginning... Was the Command Line

Remember sometime ago I posted that I will read this book called "At the Beginning... Was the Command Line"? Well, apparently it is a long essay that was originally published online and got printed because it is popular. You can get it here:
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

If you want to know the author, Mr Neal Stephenson, a little better, you can read his Slashdot interview (he sounds like a cool guy):
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/20/1518217

Another little story is about another book in my want-to-read list, Neuromancer. I was moody Friday evening and didn't feel like going home directly from work but too moody to go to crowded place. So I went to a second-hand bookstore near my home. As I was browsing the SF section, I saw "Neuromancer". Wow! I quickly fished out the book... and saw a fantasy-like cover, which forced me to read the title more carefully. It was actually "Necromancer". Geh.

(Edited on 5 March 2015)

The Other Side of Life

Last week (and today) is an interesting experience for me. Two people that I know, even though not so closely in one case and only through music in the other, passed away in a young age. One is Pierre, the other is Reuben Kee.

Respective blogs and articles are here:

1. For Pierre: http://www.inmemoryofpicant.blogspot.com/ (blog); http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/22506 (article)
   
2. For Reuben Kee: http://www.vgfrequency.com/?p=341 (blog); http://www.straitstimes.com/Latest%2BNews/Singapore/STIStory_180302.html (article)

The scary thing about last week's experience is that I do not know how to react to the news. Certainly there is shock, mainly because I have a connection to these people. I want to somehow show my appreciation to these connections; and reality hits hard that there is only limited way for me to do so. The Internet does connect people, but somehow it feels lacking for such news.

I do not know much about Pierre, so I can only offer my condolences to his family and friends.
For Reuben, I do know some of his music and I like some of them. I can only let the world know what his music:

• OC Remix: http://www.ocremix.org/remixer/reubenkee/
• Anime Remix: http://www.animeremix.org/remixer/23/

And the communities's tribute to him:

• OC Remix: http://www.ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=13286
  
• Anime Remix: http://www.animeremix.org/animix_forums/viewtopic.php?id=1956
  

Rest in Peace, Pierre and Reuben.

Book Titles

There is a thread in Reddit to list book titles. Here is what I choose in a very biased manner:

• A Clockwork Orange
• Brave New World
• Enders Game
• The Selfish Gene
• Epic of Gilgamesh
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Neuromancer
• In the Beginning...was the Command Line

Other than that, guess I'd mention these to hint what is influencing me at the moment:

• Cry Engine demo was out early this week. Very demanding about GPU; but gorgeous graphics... Lovely tropical island look & amazing sea water.
• There will be stage building feature in Super Smash Bros Brawl (let's abbrev. it as SSB Brawl). Apparently there were earlier SSB 64 and SSB Melee. Some early pro gamer impression from the payable demo is that Brawl is completely different from Melee. (Sonic's in Brawl, btw.)
• Drawing can be seen as an organized activity to put what I see in my mind onto paper. Sometimes I feel it can almost be mechanized (put into a deterministic algorithm); but then even scratching a pencil line is ambiguous. Why 65.2937492873498237498 degrees instead of, say 65.33948290482340234980 degrees? Why 23.2348982309480 mm line instead of 25.2349239048209 mm one?
• Painting is somewhat similar. Only I can think in terms of patches instead of "blocks".
• Some people with too much time in their hands actually wrote a compiler for LOLcode. Sure LOLcats are fun; but writing a compiler for LOLcode seems rather extreme, no?
• Whoever says Perl scripting is dead needs to experience moar Perl. Many, many extensions on CPAN; some with really helpful manual.
• I found an evidence today that people do seem to agree that wisdom and intelligence/genius are mutually exclusive after certain threshold. Example: Kurt Godel is a genius, but he is certainly not wise. My colleague, Ian, told me a quotation from ADnD (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons): "When it rains, intelligence tells you that it is water falling from the sky; wisdom tells you to take cover."

(Edited on 5 March 2015)
From the book list, I have read these:

• A Clockwork Orange
• Enders Game (highly recommended; also "Now a Major Motion Picture!")
• Neuromancer
• In the Beginning...was the Command Line

"With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility"

I have made fun of this quotation a lot. It sounds so cheesy.

The first time I read it, I did not understand it. A first enlightenment came while (out of all things) learning Object-Oriented (OO) programming. (In OO programming, the more "power" you have to access the attributes of an object, the more you have to be responsible/careful in using them.) Only two weeks ago, I had a second enlightenment. This time, it's as real-world a scenario as it gets.

Google vs. Evil: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/google_pr.html

It is an old article in Wired.com; but still an interesting read. Google's is a unique story that resembles a superhero beginning/origin/year one story. Two university students with the ambition to do good for mankind by providing a usable, fair search engine. And then they got a super power. Real super power. I cannot even begin to imagine how it feels to have such power that countries feel the need to talk to you, a mere individual. Even more, you have the power to impact so many people's life.

Anyway, with such a slogan as "Don't be Evil", I wonder why it took me so long to link a comic book quotation to Google.

Films

These days I feel like thinking somewhat coherently on whether or not I like a film and why.

Let's start with the film I just saw, Hulk (2003).
I don't like this film; it is a bad good film I think. My reasons:

• I don't relate to Bruce Banner, the main character, at all. I usually relate to characters because they have their problems (or some interesting trait, ability, or charm) and I appreciate this problem (or trait or ability or charm). Sure Bruce had an unhappy childhood; but he doesn't seem to mind that at all, so that doesn't seem to be a problem. Sure he has difficulty in progressing with his research; but again, this is not shown to bother him at all. (Compare this with how we are presented with Peter Parker's multiple problems in Spider-man films.)
• I don't see a natural confrontation; all conflicts seem to be forced to me. Examples:
• Why did David Banner blew up the military lab? Sure he is angry, but do angry scientists have the heart to blow up his own lab (even if it is actually owned by some other, uncaring entity)?
• What was the point of Hulk fighting the 3 dogs? (More specifically, if you send 3 assassins to terminate a target, would you go about calling people and tell them that you just sent 3 assassins?)
• Why was Bruce so angry when he found out about his genetics that he turned into Hulk for the first time? He didn't seem to be bothered about anything at all thus far (he was even happy after the gamma radiation accident), why finding out that his genetics were altered bothered him so much?
  
• The final conflict between David and Bruce (which was probably intended to be the climax) is simply rubbish. I don't understand why David Banner turned to be so evil and I certainly don't understand why they decided to make him into some elemental being (even in a Marvel universe, there is such a thing as absurdity).
• (This final point is the result of reading Wikipedia.) There is no humor at all; the film takes itself too seriously.

To me, the best moments of the film is when Hulk fought the military in the desert. It was a classic Hulk moment of being misunderstood and abused. People are afraid of him so they treat him like a monster; which only feeds his anger and in turn increases the people's fear and so on and on the spiral goes.
They should have written the script to make that moment to be the climax of the film.

(Edited on 5 March 2015)

Getting busy

Right now is probably one of the best times in my life. I have all the opportunity to do what I like.

Now, the difficult thing is that I still have many things I want to do and I definitely cannot do all of them at the same time. For example, I want to:

• create a Dev ID for my deviantArt page;
• work on another short comic for Hamthology vol. 2;
• try making a 2D animation (Tsunami Channel OP that I've delayed since the time when dinosaurs still walk on earth (around the time Jurrasic Park was popular, I mean (maybe)));
• continue working on my Joan of Arc 3D model;
• colour the WIB poster I started working on some time ago;
• work on a simple 3D scene engine.

The order reflects the likelihood of my starting each work.
A little interesting to note that the short comic on point #2 has "choices" as the theme :)

Besides that, I'm still reading books, of course. I'm currently on The Transparent Society by David Brin. It's an interesting read about how the Internet opens up whole new possibilities and problems. Even more amazing is the fact that the book was published in 1998. That means, what, he started writing it around 1996? When the Internet was just starting (and Netscape was still fighting the Browser War against IE)?

Anyway, time to get busy :)

(Edited on 5 March 2015)

Happiness and Publication

I just read the book "Ten Philosophical Mistakes" by Mortimer J. Adler. One of its chapters is about Happiness. My impression (which could be wrong) about the chapter is that it is important to distinguish contentment and happiness (I did not have the chance to read the chapter in full because I had to return the book to the library). What I understand from my partially reading the chapter is that we are content when we get what we want; but this is not happiness. Happiness is achieved when we know we live responsibly according to our moral values.

This sounds just like Dan Gilbert's point in his TED Talk. Gilbert says that statistically, a person who fails an exam now will be just as happy in 3 months as another person who wins a lottery now. His point is similar to (if not the same as) Adler's: when you get what you want, you are not necessarily happy. Gilbert went further by saying that we can synthesize happiness; that accepting what is happening to us will bring us a happiness as real as that we got from winning a lottery.

---
The second part of this post is about the question I automatically asked when I realized this: "So did Dan Gilbert actually say nothing new in his talk? How can he justify his talk?"

Then I realized that we are not living in an academic world (and Gilbert did have an additional point after all; though I'm sure someone else has come up with it). It is not necessary for all talks, books, and articles to contain a completely new idea (one thing constantly demanded in an academic publication; even a survey paper has to have a new way to structure past ideas). In real world, getting a concept popular is one serious business.
There is definitely a benefit in redundancy. Different writing styles suit different kind of people; the more writings there are on a subject, the more likely it is for that subject to be known. The more people know about a concept, the more likely it is for the concept to be useful.

This is one thing that I do not like about the current state of academic world: there is little motivation for its members to make new concepts popular, especially in computer science. Performance is usually measured by number of papers published, weighted by the importance of conference/journal in which it appears. Book chapters might actually be weighted less than a paper in a first-tier conference even though a chapter takes more time to prepare. Note that this is a chapter for a technical book that is more or less regarded as "important" or "prestigious". What is the chance that an academic is willing to take the time to write a book accessible to the public?
To me personally, it seems that the generally accepted "solution" is letting the public know about new discoveries when they in the form of a product. Even then, the explanation is usually vague, something like "the computer software will try to process the recording to understand what the speaker is saying." Sounds simple enough, so why did it take speech processing research so long and still not solve the problem of robust speech recognition? True, writing a full-fledged technical details on stochastic methods used to solve the problem will probably turn readers off; but is there not a way to reveal just enough technicality for the public to appreciate the difficulty (and frustrations) in such a research problem?

I am especially concerned about this because personally I am reading books that lightly touches on foreign topics I have never learned before, like philosophy (I studied computer science). I do not want to read philosophy text books; they will take too much of my time just to know what philosophy is. What I want is a book that I can read in around 2 weeks and will give me a reasonable overview. It does not matter that it is not deep enough, I will read more on topics I find interesting. It does not matter that it is not completely correct nor completely complete; I only want a reasonable overview.

And remember, readers who are interested enough about a subject are willing to endure a reasonable amount of unfamiliar technicality. It is alright to include a few equations in your book.

(Edited on 5 March 2015)

Starch and varlings

I had a misconception about starch. I used to think that starch makes people stupid. It's a long story that started in my childhood. I grew up in a somewhat stagnant society in which people do not mind committing little sins for a little profit. Or just to stay alive. (It's not as bad as I'm making it perhaps.)

Schools were (and probably still are) popular places for snack sellers to open their "mobile" stalls. The reason was hundreds of kids running out to buy snacks 3 times a day (during the 2 breaks and at the end of school). As tasty as these snacks used to be, sellers substituted expensive ingredients with cheaper ones. For example, meatballs no longer contained meat but mostly starch and some compound that simulate the bouncy/chewy texture; more starch added to make "syrup candies" more "syrupy"; and especially colourful food colouring was added to make snacks look more attractive.
My parents told me not to buy these snacks. They cited the reason above: cheap ingredients were added to substitute costly ones partly or even completely, with starch being mentioned as a prime example. These snacks made me stupid, so I was told. Somehow, I made the connection that this means starch made me (and people in general) stupid.

Now I understand that it is the lack of protein (because starch substitutes meat) is the real culprit.

Another misconception is related to this snack seller example. Food hawkers on side streets also did this substitution trick. Note that such business was usually handed down from parents to their children. Inflation and globalization only made things worse. In short, ingredients were getting more expensive but sellers needed to keep the price low to be affordable. And there was more competition from Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's.
I can understand that the hawkers were more or less forced to substitute costly ingredients, give less sauce, and other tricks to keep cost low in order to survive. The price was that with each trick, the taste inevitably degrades. Many such stalls finally stopped selling because customers no longer come because the food was no longer nice.

Somehow, I made another link of reasoning and concluded that things only got worse as generations pass. All talks about "good old days" only reinforced this conclusion. How my city used to have vast paddy fields when my Dad was in elementary school. How the temperature used to be much cooler. How the roads used to be much more peaceful with few motored vehicles.

Thank goodness for writers like David Brin, who wrote novel I am currently reading, Glory Season. His writing is one major influence in freeing my mind from these misconceptions. That human can get better. That we should look to the future, think about what we can do, instead of fretting about the good old days, the lost golden age in the past.

A novel cannot be interesting without a central character. She was Maia, a varling (see explanation below) like all of us. She was born in a maternal society in which human could breed via sexual mating and self-cloning (apparently organisms as complex as insects and even lizards are blessed with this ability). What is more, self-cloning was preferred to form clans. Children born from mating were called varlings and automatically became second class citizens. Thus, Maia's story easily attracts my sympathy.
One theme (among so many in the novel) that strikes me at this particular stage of my life is, quoting the afterword, "no plan, no system or stereotype, can suppress an individual who is boldly determined to be different."

Back to misconceptions, on our eyes it is obvious that isolated society into which Maia is born cannot be sustained for long. Sooner or later people will want openness. To Maia and other women in this society though, this concept is far from obvious. It is almost heretical.
It pushes me more than I like (or comfortable with) to re-evaluating what I learned from my parents. It is an obvious necessity to other people, but it is almost heretical to me.


Other novels by David Brin that I enjoyed reading are Kiln People and Earth.
You can check his official website here: http://www.davidbrin.com

(Edited on 5 March 2015)

Nooooooo....

Melinda is out from American Idol? How can quantum mechanics and probability theory explain this?

(Disclaimer: This is some trashy impulsive post.)

The Third Installment

I looked forward to Spider-Man 3 really badly. I was skeptical on the first and second films, and was proven wrong both times. So I thought the third one must be just as good or even better. Unfortunately, I was proven wrong again.

Spidey 3 is not a bad film. It looks as good as the first two; but I did not feel the same resonance as I did with the first two. There was even moments that I thought, "I hate this Peter Parker." I could not identify what exactly the film lacks compared to the other two. Execution, perhaps?

Probably the main reason is too many things going on in one film. I suspect the writers added Venom because a lot of fans wrote that they wanted to see Venom in the third film all over teh Intarweb. I wonder if the film would be better had the villain been only Sandman. That way, more time is available to explore "the battle within"--promised by the film's tag line--Peter and Harry (and, to certain extent, MJ).

(Warning: possible spoilers after this.)

Moments I dislike in the film:

• The way Harry changed his mind by his butler. I was expecting the change to be some thing like "my father went that way, I won't; I am a different man from him." What I got was a (somewhat) immature change of mind just because an older person says so.
• WTH did Harry jumped in front of Peter in the climax fight? How could he change that far in the span of (probably) a few minutes?
• The resolution between Marko and Peter. Ugh, just by "I forgive you" everything is alright? What about the things Marko did so far? The Spidey I know would have said "I understand your situation and everything, but I still gotta put you behind bars."

I do like the tension built up between Peter and MJ. I think their problem happens everywhere. After all, is it not more difficult to tell our negative stories (e.g. being fired from a play) to the closest person than to (more-or-less) strangers?

Good film, but could have been incredible.

Tag line

True to MediaCorp tradition, they are airing Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 on Channel 5. It is the ad for Spider-Man 2 that makes me cringe. It shows some moody emotional close ups of MJ and Peter. And they add text that goes more or less like this:
"You can never escape from a relationship with Spider-Man..."
"... because he is the only one who sticks around."
I'm not sure if this is an attempt at humor or a straight-no-joke stuff; I just find it unbearably bad.

The other night, though, there is such ad for another (much lower budget) program, Lifeline, I think. It's a local drama about civil defense officers. The ad is a collection of shots from the show; but the audio is replaced with siren. With the audio/video goes the text that goes something like:
"Siren sound..."
"... is it a sign of trouble..."
"... or is it a sign of hope?"

For some reason that tag line sticks to my mind even though I saw it only once.

I guess the statement gets into me because recently I experienced first-hand such double-meaning things. Things that can be interpreted in different ways depending on where you were when it happened. For accident victims, siren sound may mean hope. For by-standers,
siren sound may be an annoyance or even a sign of trouble.

I cannot help but thinking that emotion is a function of physical position (how close I am to the siren to be annoyed), social position (if I am with friends I am more likely to be concerned about what happened than if I am alone), and "role" (I cannot find a better word; this means whether I am an accident victim or a by-stander).

I'm sure there are more dimensions to human to fully define the function that explains human emotions; but I was happy to find myself thinking in this somewhat analytic mode. The reason is that I'm currently reading Computer Science: Reflections on the Field, Reflections from the Field. It is a somewhat easy to read book about different areas in Computer Science (CS).

Reading the book is almost like re-living the moments I spent with a friend/more-than-friend who is no longer with me; replacing the emotional pain with intellectual & egoistical pains. The book reminds me of the wonders and excitements I experienced when studying CS during undergrad time. One plus about the book is that it is narrative than technical; I learned quite a number of historical accounts on how the CS concepts I learnt was developed.
Here is a number just for a taste: database (a small joke: what do you mean people are still doing research on database?), algorithm, computability, P and NP, machine translation, NLP, statistical methods, Gaussian classifier, Alan Turing, game playing, Claude Shannon, Noam Chomsky, different levels of grammars, lambda calculus, relational calculus...


(Edited on 5 March 2015)

Breach

I saw Breach on Sunday without planning. I did make a kind of appointment with Tomi to see a film on Sunday and he offered 2 titles. Breach looked tamer for our mood (we were pretty beat up after the 3-hour bike ride on Saturday afternoon (at least I was beat up)), so we picked it.

I was a little skeptical about the film, but a little into the film and I was hooked. I especially liked the briefing when Agent Linney said "You will tell her 'I've got a new boss, his name is Cooper.'" and the screen is overlayed with him getting into his house, saying the exact same word to his wife. From that point on, I decided that I'd like the film.

Well, I do like the film. There is a hollow aftertaste, though. It was exciting and everything, but somehow the whole story feels too simple. No doubt the plot has been simplified to fit years of work into 2 hours of relatively exciting series of events; but probably another reason for the simplistic feeling is the fact that work is hard because we have to face it everyday. Over and over and over... every single day. In a film, two long, torturing weeks can pass is 2 seconds.

I think the skipping of 2 weeks before Cooper's final "drop" was one of the transition that I instantaneously disliked.

Eric's personal doubt about whether or not to go on with work when it messes up his (married) life so much is a good hook for the audience. In the least, it resonated with me.

All in all, Breach was a good film for last weekend's occasion. I don't think it is "all time" good, though. I still can't get over the hollow aftertaste.


Finally, let me say my condolences to the family and friends of the victims in the Virginia Tech shooting.

(Edited on 5 March 2015)

Extra, extra

I forgot to mention yesterday about what I think "Pursuit of Happyness" did not capture enough. It's sustained self-discipline. It is very difficult to do. The film did capture it somewhat by showing Will Smith reading while standing because his room does not have a light, the black lines under his eyes when he is in the office, and Smith did mention in one of his narrations "away from my self-discipline thing".
But I thought it should have captured it more. Yesterday I saw monetary difficulty dominates pretty much enerything else.

Anyway, here are things I found from Reddit today.

First is Iran photos: http://www.pbase.com/k_amj/throughout_iran&page=all
Shoot me, but I never know that Iran has ski resort(s). Sure photos tend to show only the good side of a place, but at least they revealed new things to me. There is a marching band on the streets of Aashura, there is that seemingly tranquil Valasht Lake, and there is a scenic spot in Tehran.

And a little reading on Spartan culture: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=441339&in_page_id=1879
The cause is, of course, the film 300. In my opinion, this only confirms my belief that pop art is powerful. Who in Singapore cares about how Spartan lives? Well, now there are quite a few, thanks to a film.

Somebody should do the same to computer science so that people know that computer science students do *NOT* fix computers.

"Pursuit of Happyness" versus "What Could He Be Thinking?"

With this post, I command you to read the book What Could He Be Thinking? by Michael Gurian as a tie-in for the film Pursuit of Happyness.

However, this post will not discuss the film nor the book in depth. It will mention some points from the film, but it is more about the themes I found in the film, not about the film itself. Of course there will be chances of spoilers and what not. Do not read on if you do not want to know what happens before watching the film.

Instead, this post will tell you that as I was walking out from the cinema, I felt kind of numb. What Could He Be Thinking? enabled me to see that Chris Gardner, Will Smith's character, struggled for more than just meeting end's meet and being good to his son. I think his most difficult struggle is keeping his self-worth. It *was* mentioned in the film, as Smith narrated that he felt under appreciated and used because he was the one singled out to get coffee, donuts, and move a car. Also when he blurted out to his son about never to let anyone tell him that cannot do something.

All these struggles, in my opinion, ultimately leads in how Gardner must keep himself up; convincing himself that he is not worthless; finding out his self worth; whether he is being a good father like he wants to be. And the scene in "the cave" showed that he is scared. The door banging kind of confirms his fear that he is so worthless that his son must sleep in that condition.

Had I not read the book, probably I thought the film was just okay.

Another interesting thing is that long after the film ended, around an hour or so, as I walked out the bathroom, I realized the meaning of one of Smith's lines. He said something like "Why did Jefferson word it pursuit of happiness? Maybe he knew that we cannot get happiness and can only pursue it."
What I realized is something as simple as this. Smith really meant "Why not word it simply as happiness? Why add the word pursuit?". Simple point, but once I realize it, it is kind of weird. "Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness". Why not "life, liberty, and happiness"?
Well, the actual reason was more historical than thoughtful. Read it from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_liberty_and_the_pursuit_of_happiness

Anyway, for one reason or another, that walking out of the cinema also happened to mark what I hope to be the end of a phase in my personal life. A lot of realizations dawned on me. They are simple and probably cliche, but they feel different when I appreciate their meaning instead of reading them as words:

• Why keep being involved in something not working?
• Why must I be nice to others on my expense?
• If it must be done, why can't I be not nice to another person?
• Why is it that by "not being nice", I think of "being nasty"? Isn't there a neutral ground in the middle?
• Why is it so bad to lose a friend whom I (now realize that I) don't even know?
• Why is it so bad to say "I don't want to do this anymore" and quit?

I think Gardner's wife (at least the way the film portrayed her) was practicing "intimate separateness". She gave him space to prove his self-worth by allowing him to keep his son.
But then again, maybe I am looking for symbols so I see them everywhere.

Ah, one final thing: if you enjoy watching animations, do see Howl's Moving Castle. The story is weird, but the animation fully redeems it. I do admit that some characters (especially Howl himself) change look now and then, probably due to different animators' work; but the scenery animation and blending of 2D and 3D animations are... simply amazing.

(Edited on 5 March 2015)

Dreams Come True

The title is not exactly what's happening to my life, but I'd like to quote some lines from the wacky Remix by Star Salzman over at OverClocked Remix:

Remember it's not the end of the world when
You lose all your continues
You can start all over again

Of course an incident happened in my life which makes these lines more meaningful than it was intended. Something in the line of "you'll find pattern everywhere if you look hard enough."
I don't really feel like telling it, so I'll stop here.

Check the remix (music and lyrics) here: http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR01149/

Quotations

If you go to my LibraryThing catalog, you'll see that I read a lot (too much?) of comic books. A recent read is a hard cover compilation volume titled "The World's Greatest Super-Heroes". Probably not an inviting title for people who read classics and technical books, but you should see the artwork. It's done by Alex Ross (remember this name). He always render his pages in gouache painting and make these victional characters look alive. (Perhaps he tries too hard to preserve the conventional look of the characters, but his rendering more than makes up for it, I think.)
But it is not the only strength of this volume.

Let me introduce another name: Paul Dini. He did the text; and this entry is a list of quotations from the text. The book is a compilation of a number of stories:

• Superman: Peace on Earth
• The Batman: War on Crime
• Shazam: Power of Hope
• Wonder Woman: Spirit of Truth
• Justice League of America: Secret Origins
• Liberty and Justice

Again, probably the titles of individual stories turn off people even more. Admittedly, they do sound so typically ignorant and cheesy. So I'd better get into the good stuff--the quotations.
They come up slowly to take the food and then move back, pale and silent as ghosts.
Only one little boy speaks. He looks at what I've given him, then at me, and asks, "Will you come back tomorrow?"
I look away.
This is a narration by the superhero who started it all: Superman. Even with his god-like powers, he cannot solve all problems in the world on his own. I think this is an important realization for every person toward maturity. As Stephen Covey puts it, first we become independent. The next step is realizing that we are all inter-dependent and embrace this concept.
Similar narrations:

• I can't overcome their generations of fear any more than I can force them to accept what I've brought.
• In other countries I am reviled as a political activist, a usurper, or a fraud. They don't want me there regardless of what I'm bringing or whom it could help.
• It was never my intention to turn human beings into a desperate, unthinking mob.
• My mission ends here, incomplete and in failure.

Next is the Batman.

• What kind of man would I have become if things had been different?If, instead of using my fortune as a means to fight crime, I allowed myself to be ruled by it and all its temptations.
  If I truly became what I appeared to be to others [as Bruce Wayne]?
• I try to imagine what my life would have been like as a poor child on the street, my family gone, no one to look after me.
  Stripped of those sources, would I still have tried to fight crime however Icould, or would I have turned my anger back on society as so many others have done?

I'm no billionaire, but there are times that I think of these questions myself. "What if I were born on 'the other side'?" I think it is crucial to understand our "self" better than anyone else can tell/teach us.

Finally, there is this quotation that I really like. It was written at the beginning of Superman's story and repeated at the end. The important point is that in the beginning, it was his Pa's belief; in the end, it was his.

• He knew not every seed would make it, but Pa wanted to give each one the chance to grow.
• I tell them not every seed will make it--
  --but all of them deserve the chance to grow.

I grew up in a society in which a definition of success is more or less dictated from parents to children. Further, kids are expected to succeed. Any less, it is a shame for your parents. Of course I'm lucky enough that my parents are understanding, but undeniably there was a time in which I felt the most worthlessest kid because I found myself to at the long tail of kids. That I didn't deserve a good life because I failed.
But somehow I slowly figured that because I'm alive, I deserve to live and am responsible to live.
The "seed" in that last quotation symbolizes so many things in life that I strangely attracted to it even though it is probably so straightforward and meaningless to others.
Anyway, I'm not good at explaining things and right now I'm not sure if I understand why I like this quotation, so I'll stop here. Let me finish with a wish.
Often times, I overhear people saying more-or-less in the tone of "super hero stories are for kids". Even the word "super hero" itself seems to be... "not for grown-ups". Well, this is true for the older versions of super hero stories. But writings always blow up a theme, a concept larger than life. Recent super hero stories do this to individuals. They blow up individuals to tell our struggle to fit in, our conflict (internal and external).
Well, there are stories that really are for kids; but it's unfair to label a large class using a label of a smaller subclass.
Guess what I wish is like anyone else's wish in this ever niche-going society: please show a little more appreciation to my little niche interest.

Kamen Rider for Computer Science

I just thought of a crazy idea. To begin, let us trace back to why it crossed my mind in the first place.

I liked Kamen Rider Black. It is a show "for kids" that people probably will say similar to Power Rangers. I think I can accept this in terms of casual public's thinking: action figure tie-ins, heroes fighting monsters with enough time to pose to the camera, etc. But as a fan, I disagree quite strongly. While there are excellent Power Ranger series (Ninja Storm and Space Patrol Delta come to mind), Kamen Rider series usually have a much darker background story, complete with conspiracy theory paranoia (and, of course, Kamen Riders no longer pose that much Edit: this is no longer true with "modern" Kamen Riders. They now pose as often, if not more often, than Power Rangers.).

Well, anyway, note the "Black" sub-title. It was rather long ago (long, long ago, 20th century--if you get the reference, heh). These days, Kamen Riders are getting weirder (and sometimes childish).
Take Kamen Rider 555 for example. A person needs to wear the belt (Kamen Rider trade mark equipment/morpher), dial "555" on a mobile phone, put the mobile onto the belt, and he transforms into Kamen Rider Faiz. Silly, huh? (But I love Faiz, the action sequences and gimmicks somehow got into me.)
Another recent example is Kamen Rider Blade. Of course the main Rider uses a sword.

Now, extrapolating, what if we were to design a Kamen Rider series to get kids into computer science? (As a part of our grand scheme to take over the world peacefully.) Kamen Rider EM came to my mind. EM stands for Expectation Maximization (Google it, there are a lot of tutorials out there). Well, one of the uses of EM algorithm is to estimate Gaussian mixture distribution, so probably we can represent each monster as points on high-dimensional space. The Rider will pose dramatically as he tried to estimate parameters needed to fit the monster's points. Once he can fit the points using a Gaussian distribution, that's when he delivers the final, destructive blow. A punch maybe. Or a kick. Gaussian Kick?
Then, as the series progresses, he will of course meet stronger monsters. Even ones he clearly cannot defeat. So he will need an upgrade. He needs a better mathematical model to defeat the monsters.

Well, a monster does not usually follow the same fighting pattern all the time. So, a better model is to assume that the monster assumes a certain fighting state at a point in time. Each fighting state can be modeled by a Gaussian mixture; while the change from one fighting state to another can be modeled by transition probabilities.
Kamen Rider EM evolves into Kamen Rider HMM. Now he has new weapons: Ergodic shield and, uhm, Left-to-right Sword.

Another Rider to accompany EM in the series can be other classes of computation. Instead of statistical powers, this Rider prefers deterministic powers. Kamen Rider Algo perhaps? Not sure yet how he fights and what weapons he has.

Some thoughts for another day when I re-visit algorithms perhaps.
(Yes, I got this crazy idea while re-reading about EM algorithms.)

And that's enough fantasy for one day.

(Edited on 5 March 2015)

Chinese Restaurant

Channel News Asia currently airs a show called Chinese Restaurant on Sunday afternoons. To explain why it resonated with me, let us start with the premise of the show. At each episode, the host (who we never really see but whose voice we always hear) will travel to a place and look for a Chinese restaurant at the place. He will see the restaurant owner(s) and asks him/her/them how they got there.

At almost every episode I found myself relate to the story surprisingly easily. The story of the people who actually traveled to the new place from China is probably similar in taste as my grandparents'. As bitter-sweet as they are, what touched close to my heart was the question the host asked to their children/grand children: Do they consider themselves Chinese or, say in my case, Indonesian?

In the episode shown today, however, the story was a little different. The restaurant owner this time was "Noisy Jim". He was 16 year-old when his family moved from China to Canada. The difference this time was that we heard the story from him, not his parents.
(Another different aspect was that Jim's restaurant did NOT sell Chinese food. He sold western food like bacon and eggs for breakfast; pork chop for lunch; pie for dinner.)
What Jim had to say when the host asked his question was this: "I am me. (pause) That's how I think of it. I am me. Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, it doesn't matter. That's why my thinking never changes."

I wish I could answer the same question as confidently as Jim did. I cannot. My answer is still a shaky "A part of me thinks I am 100% Chinese, but another part of me is undeniably Indonesian." I see myself as both. And it is tough when both sides "clash". It is never fun to be stuck in the middle.

Sometimes I wonder if I am denying my origin by never bothering to re-learn the Mandarin language (I learnt it when I was in elementary and soon forgot it because I never used it). Sometimes I wonder why I am now more comfortable speaking about things that matter to me in English.

On the one hand, surely this cannot be wrong? After all, this is me.
On the other hand, what about my origin? Doesn't it matter at all to me?

Maybe I'm thinking about this in an improper angle. Maybe I should not see them as clashing or whatever. Now I understand that this apparent contradiction is natural and common in life. I can embrace it instead of fight it.

The episode ended in a rather bitter taste because Jim passed away two months after the host saw him.

All in all, I recommend this show to any fellow overseas Chinese out there. I think it captures our stories well (not too much sugar coating nor simplification).

(Edited on 5 March 2015)