January 1, 2025　　# New Year Greeting

Wishing everyone a happy and prosperous 2025

January 2, 2025　　# On Moore's Law

It was around the beginning of the 21st century that I began to enjoy the financial freedom of buying PCs of my choice, and Moore's law was a blessing in that matter. Although I never bought any cutting-edge PCs exactly because of Moore's law, which means a cutting-edge PC is merely a year ahead of a PC at one-third the price, and I never felt the desire to triple my spending for that. As time went by, however, Moore's law, though hasn't been declared over, has gradually diminished from a 1-year doubling time to 18 months, and then 2 years... Recently, I bought a new external hard drive and noticed in my purchase history that I had bought a 2TB external hard drive in 2019 at $59.99. More than 5 years later, as we are now, 2TB remains a common option for an external hard drive, and with the same price, one can, unlike in the era when Moore's law was at its full power, hardly buy anything better. Moore's law in the area of external hard drives seems practically over. [Notes (My reply to a comment): Sorry for not being clear about the difference between Moore's law and other technological trends that are sometimes called "Moore's law of ..." or, as Wikipedia put it, "strongly linked to Moore's law". I always try to limit each topic to a thread of no more than 2 posts (thus no more than 1,000 characters), and often end up cutting corners because of that. 😅]

January 9, 2025　　# "Don't forget to like this video"?

Is it just me, that feel odd to see the phrase "Don't forget to click the subscribe button and like this video" commonly used by YouTubers? One can't "forget" or "remember" to "like" something. One way to make sense of it is to extend the meaning of "like" to mean "click the like button", but then "click the subscribe button" becomes an ironic redundancy since "subscribe" alone would be sufficient. It's far better and much more consistent to say "Don't forget to click the like button and subscribe to this channel". :-)

January 16, 2025　　# Los Angeles Area Wildfires

The wind-driven Los Angeles area wildfires have destroyed thousands of structures. From time to time, however, a house almost undamaged can be seen surrounded by numerous structures that were burned down. Some news reporters attributed that to a luck factor: wind-driven wildfires sometimes skip a house. While luck factor may occasionally play a role, it is far more likely that fire-resilient design is both the true savior and the major controllable hope for the future. The reason wind-driven wildfires are particularly devastating is because embers can fly faster and further. For a given house, in the typical duration it takes for its neighborhood to burn down, the chance that no ember happens to hit it is extremely small. On the other hand, as long as the roof and outer surface of the house can sustain the much shorter duration of the embers burning here and there without being ignited, the house will most likely survive.

It is unfortunate, though, that even in areas where wildfires are a known threat, and even among million-dollar properties, only a very small percentage of the structures are sufficiently fire-resilient.

January 17, 2025　　# On Spam

A crude and yet effective criterion of spam: Any email that starts with "Congratulations!" is spam, and so is any letter with "Congratulations!" on the envelope. Spammy as it has become, "Congratulations!" is nevertheless still a popular bait, because people's childish fondness for good surprises is as stubborn as ever, even when the surprises are from unsolicited sources. :-)

January 23, 2025　　# Translation and Copyright

I know asking a question on an account where almost no posts have more than 100 views is naïve to say the least. But writing is more about expressing, and it’s not a big deal to phrase a curiosity without an answer. So here is the question anyway: Suppose a book in language A has passed its copyright period, but a translation of the book in language B is still copyrighted. Now suppose someone tries to translate that book into language C. While translating from the version in language A is fine, translating from the version in language B would be a copyright infringement. But it would be difficult to tell, even more so to prove, which version has been used in the translation. Is it just up to the translator's self-discipline not to translate from the version in language B?

January 30, 2025　　# The Obscurest Epoch Is Today

「History is much decried; it is a tissue of errors, we are told, no doubt correctly; and rival historians ex­pose each other’s blunders with gratification. Yet the worst histo­rian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is today...」

—— Robert Louis Stevenson ("The Day After Tomorrow", 1887)

For however different an era that might be from ours, and regardless of the thoughts originally behind it, those lines are nevertheless quite valid even today ‒ perhaps especially today, when partisanship, irrationality, misinformation, conspiracies... that can obscure people's view are far more corrosive than they ever were, thanks to the technologies that are far more effective in spreading cheap propaganda than rational thought.

February 5, 2025　　# Novelists and AI Training

There was a time, not too long ago as I remember, when a large group of novelists urged AI companies to stop using their works in AI training. I'm not a fan of AI writing, especially in the area of novels, in which the joy of reading is, at least for me, largely because the authors are fellow human beings whose experience, intention, and emotion I feel able to resonate with. That said, I nevertheless don't think novelists had a valid point against AI companies. AI training, so far as I know, is correlation-based and involves an amount of material far larger than any human writer could possibly read. As a result, any particular piece of work used in AI training has negligible influence in forming AI writing style, far less than a book read by a human writer might contribute to his/her writing style. Since we don't consider the latter to be a problem, I see no reason to limit AI training in the way those novelists wished.

February 19, 2025　　# Misinformation and Illiterate Politician

Came across the back cover of D. J. Helfand's book A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age, and saw in the recommendation by Neil deGrasse Tyson a sharply relevant sentence: "Given the state of the world today, in which scientifically underinformed voters elect scientifically illiterate politicians... Read it now. The future of our civilization may depend on it." ‒ It was written eight years ago, and how unfortunate it is to have the same (who may have become even more) illiterate politician elected again.

February 20, 2025　　# Pitfalls of Robot/AI Movies

Following the "heat wave" of AI, I recently watched M3GAN and Companion, both of which are robot/AI related movies. In both movies, companion robots designed for the most gentle and innocent purposes turned into ferocious killing machines. While robots, due to their self-learning capabilities, may admittedly develop behavior in unexpected directions, it is nevertheless highly arguable that they should be so unnecessarily powerful even if they develop the "will" to kill. It is common sense that all machines have power settings consistent with usage. You will not, for instance, have an iRobot that is capable of damaging furniture, not because it will never behave abnormally and bump into furniture, but because it does not have the unnecessary power to cause damage. I don't see a reason (other than to make more marketable movies) to build companion robots as recklessly powerful as those demonstrated in the robot/AI movies.

February 27, 2025　　# A Complaint about YouTube Videos

As a "practitioner in technology"*, I have had a relatively close look at most of the major social platforms. YouTube is one that I tried and felt least hopeful to catch up with as a content producer, because I have seen so many professional-looking videos that, although not mysterious to me in terms of how to make them, seem require unbearably tedious editing (in my understanding) that I would not have the time or interest for. With that said, there is, however, one complaint I still have about those professional-looking videos made by (I assume) amateurs. That is: Those videos often cannibalize clips that do not match the content. For instance, when talking about European high-speed trains, clips of Japanese or Chinese high-speed trains are often used without any notes. Having recognized many such issues (which surely only account for a small fraction of all such issues), I have inevitably become rather skeptical about the trustworthiness of the clips used by most YouTubers.

* "practitioner in technology" was quoted from my Threads profile intro: Ph.D in physics, practitioner in technology, observer in society.

March 12, 2025　　# Silliness of Religious Heavens

「I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.」—— Jorge Luis Borges

It is both a surprise and an expected silliness that an idea as trivially ordinary as the above one was beyond the imagination of all major religions. Isaac Asimov once commented in his memoir I. Asimov that "... Heaven is usually pictured as a place where everyone has wings and plunks a harp in order to sing unending hymns of praise to God. What human being with a modicum of intelligence could stand any of such Heavens, or the others that people have invented, for very long? Where is there a Heaven with an opportunity for reading, for writing, for exploring, for interesting conversation, for scientific investigation? I never heard of one." It is a surprise that, after so many years, billions still consider idiotic monotony and permanent boredom to be a Heaven, and yet it is also a fully expected silliness since a library, or any intelligence in that matter, is of no use if everything boils down to ONE book ‒ the ONE that was deemed to be the Bible.

March 17, 2025　　# Blocking Malicious Internet Traffic

Internet is a turbulent place. As a senior "netizen" with a website of my own for more than a quarter of a century, I have witnessed and sometimes fought back numerous waves of malicious activities. My most recent encounter was with a sudden tenfold increase in internet traffic to my website, which unfortunately was everything but an increase in popularity. When the traffic anomaly continued for several consecutive days and showed no sign of going away, I analyzed the raw access log and found out that the increased traffic was all in the pattern of "GET /index.php/community/*", where index.php is the valid index file of my website, but "/community/articles/*" ("*" represents other folders and/or file names) appended to it makes no sense ‒ but the web server will still return index.php as opposed to rejecting it. With the pattern known, however, all I need to do is add the following lines to the .htaccess file. All maliciously increased traffic is thus blocked, at least for now.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/index.php/community/articles/* [NC]
RewriteRule (.*)$ - [F,L]

March 17, 2025　　# Stupidity and Conservatism

「I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party.」—— John Stuart Mill's quote is still so true about stupidity and conservatism, and so true about their utmost power which is blatantly obvious in today's US politics.

April 7, 2025　　# On Anthropic Principle

The anthropic principle is a "principle" which explains some of the seemingly fine-tuned physical properties of the universe (such as the cosmological constant) by claiming that those properties retain their values because otherwise we wouldn't be here to ponder them. Some physicists are strongly against the anthropic principle, due to its lack of predictive power and falsifiability. I am, however, firmly standing with those who consider the anthropic principle a possible answer, as long as a viable multiverse theory exists that makes it as natural an explanation as the Sun-Earth distance was explained by the habitability of the Earth that our own existence requires. There is no a priori reason that a physical property must be explained from first principles or by a theory with predictive power, just like no first principle or theory with predictive power could have predicted the Sun-Earth distance. [Notes (A comment from @davethecanuck): You're absolutely right, but it still feels like a cheat/cop-out (even though it isn't). It's intellectually dissatisfying, but potentially correct or even inevitable.]

April 10, 2025　　# Polchinski's Memoir

Renowned string theorist Joseph Polchinski wrote a memoir after he was diagnosed with brain cancer, which deprived him of the capability of doing physics and eventually claimed his life (in 2018 at the age of 63). I had an early glance at his memoir when it was released as a preprint in 2017, and was amused (sorry for the lightness of the tone, as both he and his readers were still hopeful about his recovery at that time) by a typo that misspelled "brain cancer" as "brane cancer" ("brane" was a major contribution of his to string theory). The memoir was eventually published as a book (Memories of a Theoretical Physicist, in 2022), which I'm now reading. The book was foreworded by his longtime friend and colleague Andrew Strominger who mentioned, among other anecdotes, that Polchinski's textbook String Theory "sold many times more copies than there are string theorists on the planet", and I felt a little proud that I had contributed a copy to the "many times more" part.

April 11, 2025　　# My X Account Repurposed

Announcement: My X account, which I created in May 2012, started using in July 2021, and largely abandoned since November 2024, will from now on be repurposed as a platform for pure English posts, just like my Threads account. [Notes (supplimented on April 14, 2025): BTW, due to the severe ‒ in fact the most severe among all major microblogs ‒ character limit of X (140 for a free account), most English posts will be in the form of an introductory line followed by a picture that contains the full text.]

April 12, 2025　　# Film: Drop

Watched the film Drop, found the bad guy's strategy rather foolish. The film is about Richard, the bad guy, tried to use "Digi-Drops" technology to force Violet, a widowed mother who was on her first date, to steal and destroy a memory card from Henry, her date who owns evidence against Richard's boss, and then poison Henry. The foolishnesses of the strategy are: 1. Most people would turn off "Digi-Drops" during a date, it is foolish to rely on that to dictate a crime. 2. The date between Violet and Henry was merely one day before Henry's planned submission of the evidence, and such date may be rescheduled for all kinds of reasons, it is foolish to rely on such an event to execute a crime that has a deadline. 3. It takes spy skill to steal and destroy someone's memory card, and then poison that person, it is foolish to assume Violet could do that. 4. Richard sent a partner to Violet's home, taking her sister and son as hostages (and eventually tried to kill them), under a security camera (in order to show Violet), to force Violet follow his order. This is a foolishly big crime footprint which, even if everything else went as planned, could expose them during the investigation that will surely happen following Henry's death.

April 15, 2025　　# Polchinski's Memoir

Polchinski's undergraduate school was Caltech, and Richard Feynman, having already pocketed his Nobel Prize, was a star professor there. Polchinski's recollections about Feynman, however, were mixed. He considered Feynman's famous lectures on physics as lacking examples and calculations, and he sort of blamed Feynman's offhand remark that one doesn't need to know much math for his not having learned much math. I'm not surprised that Polchinski should have mixed recollections about Feynman, since they were two very different types of physicists ‒ almost contrary to each other in most aspects: Feynman's physics was very down-to-earth in the sense that it was deeply entangled with phenomena; Polchinski's physics, however, was highly abstract. In terms of math, Feynman's was classical and analytical, while Polchinski's was modern and more geometrical. But I don't know whether it's because they were different types of physicists, so Polchinski's feelings about Feynman were retrospectively mixed; or because he had mixed feelings about Feynman, so he became what he is rather than a "next Feynman", which some of his classmates once proclaimed him to be.

April 16, 2025　　# Film: The Door into Summer

Watched the film The Door into Summer on Netflix. This is a Japanese Sci-Fi film that combined the elements of time travel, artificial hibernation and humanoid robots. The plot was fascinating (as most time travel stories are), though not immune to logic questioning (after all, our logic about the physical world is based on causality, which time travel more or less breaks). This film was released in 2021, and the story is focused on the years 1985 and 2025 (with forward and backward travels between the years facilitated by artificial hibernation and time travel, respectively). Since we are now in 2025 (which makes my delayed watch coincidentally appropriate), I can sadly say that the film's imagination of 2025 was way too optimistic. Even the humanoid robots, by far the easiest among the imagined technologies, are far ahead of reality. Another thing that can be sadly said in regard to the timeframe (though a little bit off the track) is: Japan was the leading country in robotics in 1985, but is unfortunately not any more in 2025, although robots can be more useful to Japan than to most other countries due to the demographic problems that Japan is more urgently facing. Anyway, I like Japanese films (and anime, TV series, etc.) in general, and this film didn't disappoint me.

April 17, 2025　　# Polchinski's Memoir

Polchinski's graduate study was at Berkeley, with Stanley Mandelstam being his doctoral advisor. In Polchinski's recollections, Mandelstam seems to be a thinker far deeper than a partial outsider such as myself used to know. For instance, a problem he assigned to Polchinski somewhat foresaw a research direction 25 years ahead of its time, and he talked about 11-dimensional supergravity in relation to QCD confinement long before string theory made it a popular topic. None of these were mentioned on Mandelstam's Wikipedia page, so I suppose it's not just me as a partial outsider who was ignorant. Another interesting recollection in relation to Mandelstam was: Edward Witten, the later "king of string theory" but then a mere postdoc, once asked Polchinski about Mandelstam's work, and Polchinski shockingly noticed that Witten's understanding of Mandelstam exceeded his own, despite his years of study under Mandelstam. :-)

April 23, 2025　　# Polchinski's Memoir

Polchinski's second postdoctoral position was at Harvard, with Sidney Coleman being his advisor. Reading this part of his memoir brought me a rare feeling of nostalgia, since it was almost a showcase of the so-called "small-world phenomenon" between Polchinski and none other than myself. The showcase has three layers: 1. my secondary doctoral advisor, Erick Weinberg, was a doctoral student of Coleman; 2. my primary doctoral advisor, Kimyeong Lee, was Erick's doctoral student (therefore a "grandson" of Coleman in academic genealogy); 3. I once worked (unfruitfully though) on a topic called "Q-ball" for which Coleman was a major pioneer, and Polchinski was the one who suggested the name "Q-ball" to Coleman.

April 25, 2025　　# Film: Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

Watched the 20th Anniversary Re-Release of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. This film, also known as Episode III, is, in my opinion, by far the best among all Star Wars films and TV series. It has the most epic story, and yet the world-shaking (or might I say galaxy-shaking) grandness of the story doesn't overshadow the "microscopic" theme of Anakin Skywalker's character transformation, and some of the sunset scenes that perhaps metaphorize the fatal transformation of Anakin Skywalker were melancholily beautiful, and I was deeply impressed each time I watched. BTW, Isaac Asimov once said in The Hugo Winners, a Sci-Fi collection for which he was the editor, that the editor must be, among numerous other merits, "devilishly handsome". While I wholeheartedly agree that Asimov has all other merits, the "devilishly handsome" part, however, I know only one person: Hayden Christensen in his portrayal of Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Another notable thing I would like to say about this film is: the Dark Lord's rise to control resembles current US politics in a startling way.