August 18, 2023　　# Hello!

Hi, everyone, this is Changhai, extending my online existence to yet another platform ‒ this time in English though. I'm notoriously slow and lazy in cellphone typing, therefore am waiting for the web version of Threads Mr. Zuckerberg promised (or is rumored to have promised) to provide in the near future. Just want to say "Hi" first to whoever emerges from the vacuum, more to come soon...

August 19, 2023　　# Weinberg on Universe

August 20, 2023　　# Weinberg on Universe (My Interpretation)

For any omnipotent superbeing(s) ‒ aka God(s) ‒ that is supposed to be the creator of us, it is silly to create so vast and so old a universe in which we can emerge from sheer randomness. The universe as we gradually come to comprehend doesn't indicate a purpose to harbor us, even less an intelligent plan as often attributed to God(s). This, in my opinion, is the meaning of "the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless".

August 23, 2023　　# Einstein on Lenin and Engels

「Outside Russia, Lenin and Engels are of course not valued as scientific thinkers and no one would be interested in refuting them as such. The same might also be the case in Russia, except there one doesn't dare say so.」

—— Albert Einstein, 1932

Even more so in later totalitarian countries, in which a supreme leader (often a lesser person than Lenin and Engels) is valued as thinker/designer/architect (you name it) in ALL areas... and not only one doesn't dare doubt, but many voluntarily help suppress doubts.

August 25, 2023　　# On Threads

Threads, it seems to me, was a rush attempt to harvest refugees from Elon Musk's Twitter empire (in which silly decisions were never in short supply). As a consequence, key features such as text search and hashtag were missing. The only thing searchable seems to be the account, which led to a "chicken-and-egg" dilemma: one has to be sufficiently well known to lure anyone into searching one's account, but one who is not already well known relies on the (then useless) search to gain visibility…

September 1, 2023　　# On Threads

The web version of Threads that I have been waiting for since day 1 (far prior to the creation of my own account) is finally here. Hard to understand why it took so long and why it still lacks of an emogi panel though.

Linus Torvalds, if I remember correctly, once said "how hard can it be" when talking about writing his own OS – i.e. Linux. Far less skillful though I am as a developer, "how hard can it be" I dare ask about the delay and lack of feature of the web version.

But still cheers! :-)

September 5, 2023　　# Science and Computer Code as Literature

Richard Dawkins once said (actually said more than once) that good science writing should be treated as literature, and should be made eligible to win Nobel Prize in Literature. Legendary computer game designer Sid Meier seems had a view intrinsically similar to that of Dawkins' (though in a different field – which in a sense added even more to the point): He named his company MicroProse "because it seemed to me that computer code was just as elegant as any literary prose".

August 31, 2023　　# Krauss on Supernova

September 8, 2023　　# Krauss on Supernova (Lecture vs Book)

It was from Krauss' 2009 lecture A Universe From Nothing. But I first heard of it in 2016, from a Richard Dawkins video in which he quoted a fraction of it while announcing Krauss as the recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award of that year. I was a little bit disappointed though, when I later noticed Krauss' 2012 book A Universe From Nothing lacked the "forget Jesus..." part which in my opinion is not only witty but – due to its abstract similarity to the Bible – paradoxically poetic even to Christians as long as they consider the Bible poetic.

September 12, 2023　　# Asimov on Belief

「So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe.」—— Isaac Asimov

Unfortunately, "believers" (we know what that means) usually don't care about the universe, what many of them have interest and full desire for is ideological dominance in the society which to them is the universe, and they rarely hesitate to rearrange that "universe" to fit their beliefs.

September 14, 2023　　# Hedy Lamarr on the World

Watched a documentary film Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. Hedy Lamarr was a rare and legendary beauty with dual identities: as both an actress and an inventor of a frequency hopping communication system. The documentary doesn't have much novelty to me in terms of basic information (afterall, I'm long aware of her both identities), but the ending scene is truly memorable, in which Lamarr, after a turbulent life and in an apparently aged voice, stated the following:

「People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered. Love them anyway; If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish alternative motives. Do good anyway; The biggest people with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest people with the smallest minds. Think big anyway; What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway; Give the world the best you have and you'll be kicked into the teeth. Give the world the best you've got anyway.」

September 17, 2023　　# A William Blake Poem

A few weeks ago, my daughter and I had a casual conversation on poems during which I showed her a few lines of a poem I saw quoted by a physicist in a book I happened to come across on that day. Recently, I wanted to write about that poem but it turned out I can no longer recall the title or author of that book, nor can I remember the poem itself to a Googleable degree. Luckily, my daughter's memory is much more "poetic" than mine and thus successfully recovered the poem for me:

「To see a World in a Grain of Sand
　And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
　Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
　And Eternity in an hour」

These are the first 4 lines of "Auguries of Innocence", written by English poet William Blake (presumably in 1803), and they bear remarkable similarities with a view American physicist Richard Feynman once expressed, namely a glass of wine or a flower or anything however macroscopically insignificant, if looked deeply enough, will reflect all physical principles, and through which reflect the whole world. Did Blake have something similar in mind? I know not. But deeply impressed I am.

September 24, 2023　　# Carl Sagan on Science Writing

Carl Sagan is a great science popularizer, and the fame came with it brought him doubts and negativities among colleagues. "It was Carl Sagan's idea" is almost a synonym for not to be taken academically or seriously. In his last published interview, Sagan said something that can be considered an answer to this stubbornly biased attitude: "When you're in love, you want to tell the world. I've been in love with science, so it seems the most natural thing in the world to tell people about it."

September 30, 2023　　# Carl Sagan on Cannibalistic Aliens

There was a time (started in the 1960s and spanned a few decades) when communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence was an attempt attracted great attentions, and Carl Sagan was a major advocate. Not surprisingly, there were doubts and criticisms ‒ among which a serious worry that extraterrestrial intelligence might turn out to be cannibalistic and treat us as food. To that, Sagan fired a humorous reply: "Even if human beings were a famous interstellar delicacy, the freightage would be prohibitively high."

October 5, 2023　　# Two Talk Show Quotes

#From Last Night's Talk Show

「Only the republicans will consider giving the job of speaker to someone who is under a gag order.」 (by Seth Meyers, on some republicans' proposal of having Donald Trump, who is currently under a gag order, to fill the House Speaker position that was left vacant due to the ouster of Kevin McCarthy.)

「Zombies eat brains, so none of you guys have anything to worry about.」 (by Jimmy Kimmel, on conspiracists who claimed 5G signal will turn vaccinated people into zombies.)

October 19, 2023　　# On Password Rules

Among all password rules, the most annoying and silliest is the one to force periodic change of password. Poll (yes, hackers do poll as well) indicated hackers seldomly spend more than a day to break password, much too quick for periodic change to pose any barrier. What about making compromised password obsolete? No luck on that either: when periodic change is forced, most people will come up with sufficiently similar new password to avoid forgetting, which makes new breaking a no-brainer task.

To make things even worse: when periodic changes are forced on multiple passwords, each with its own period, many people, in order to remember those out-of-sync passwords, will choose to write them all down on a piece of paper or in a file ‒ the latter is almost never encrypted (encryption requires yet one more password, negating the purpose of the file). And that is considered ‒ and is indeed ‒ a bad practice and a security risk.

October 23, 2023　　# A Walk in Cunningham Park

Had a walk in Cunningham Park yesterday. This was the park I frequented when lived in the neighborhood. Nostalgic memory of myself sitting in a camp chair doing casual reading and my daughter cheerfully playing around is still vivid, and yet more than 10 years have passed...

November 6, 2023　　# On Threads

Two features I would like to see on Threads: 1. Show view counts ‒ though unlike my other social accounts in which view counts are far more encouraging, I can only expect to see tiny numbers here in foreseeable future, but my interest in number is almost an "occupational disease" therefore I still want it; 2. Timeline should default to "following" rather than "for you" or at least default to whatever user last selected ‒ this is actually more of a fixing than a feature, since it is ridiculous not to have.

November 8, 2023　　# A Bookstore Visit

Visited "The Next Chapter" ‒ a used book store in Long Island. They newly opened a large room with a decent collection of extremely cheap books. If time rolls back five years, it would be unthinkable for me to leave without a few heavily loaded bags. But I have since become old enough to finally realize "There Is Such Thing As Too Many Books" (yes, I know the original quote has a "No" in it), and have been battling (with progressive success) the urge of buying books I know I have no time to read. Thus the unthinkable happened...

November 12, 2023　　# On Spacetime Warp

I recently finished watching a German Sci-Fi TV series called Dark that features time travel through a cave or time machines of sizes ranging from that of a small ball to a big room. Is such time travel possible in physics? The answer, unfortunately, is a pretty certain "No". One might argue that time travel is near the edge of physics or even in the domain of unknown (which is quite true), and as such, it should be impossible to say anything reasonably certain about it. But that's actually not the case.

Because we are pretty certain about two things: 1. Spacetime is very hard to warp ‒ the gravity of the whole Earth can only warp it into a radius of a light year; 2. The smaller the radius is, the inversely proportionally stronger the gravity must be. Now for time travel to happen as in Dark, spacetime must warp into a radius comparable to the size of the cave or the time machines, which is about one-quadrillionth of a light year, thus the gravity must be about a quadrillion times stronger than that of the Earth! That is most certainly lethal ‒ not only to time travelers, but to the whole Earth.

November 26, 2023　　# My New (English) Article

[ New Article: A Star Trek Captain's Memoir ] This is a slightly expanded collection of my posts on Threads, all about English actor Patrick Stewart's Making It So ‒ A Memoir. To be more specific, it's exclusively about the part of the Memoir I'm interested most and have read, about Stewart as a Star Trek Captain ‒ as Jean-Luc Picard.

November 25, 2023　　# Two Witty Philosophical Answers

November 27, 2023　　# Two Witty Philosophical Answers (My Comments)

A few words in regards to the above "witty answers":

The 1st answer is an obvious variant of René Descartes's "I think, therefore I am". Witty though it is, Descartes was overly confident in constructing a world theory this way, since he blindly believed such argument to be a gift from God therefore can't be deceptive. His theory turned out to be ridiculously wrong and was well commented by Steven Weinberg: "It is odd that Descartes thought that a God who allowed earthquakes and plagues would not allow a philosopher to be deceived."

The 2nd answer is remarkable in pinpointing a blind spot of theisms, especially monotheisms: namely most theisms ‒ and especially ALL monotheisms ‒ deny other religion's God(s) as firmly as atheism does, and often much more feverishly and violently. Among 1,000 Gods that various religions worship, atheism rejects 1,000, each monotheism rejects 999 ‒ much more atheistic than most people realize.

November 30, 2023　　# Minkowski and Einstein

Two science anecdotes:

In 1883, English math professor Henry Smith posthumously won the Grand Prix des Sciences Mathématiques of the Paris Academy of Science, together with an 18-year-old boy. Uneasy with the fact that a professor (though dead) is to share a prize with a mere boy, Smith's lawyers tried to ouster the boy, but failed. In the end, however, being able to share a prize with that boy turned out to be a fame booster of Smith. Because that boy, Hermann Minkowski, turned out to be a far greater mathematician.

This anecdote happened to have a sequel ‒ and equally dramatic: When Minkowski himself became a math professor, he encountered a student whom he labelled "lazy dog" and whom ‒ so he complained ‒ "never bothered about mathematics at all". In the end, however, being able to contribute to a theory that student developed turned out to be a fame booster of the already great Minkowski. Because that student, Albert Einstein, turned out to be even greater.

December 3, 2023　　# On P vs. NP

Watched "P vs. NP - The Greatest Unsolved Problem in Computer Science" ‒ a Youtube video from Quanta Magazine, saw some misleading statements that worth pointing out. P vs. NP is, as the video title correctly described, an unsolved problem, and if its answer turns out to be P=NP, it would mean a vast class of seemingly intractable problems are in principle manageable. But it's very misleading to claim, as the video recklessly did, that "AI would become smarter overnight" and "all current methods for strong encryption ... would instantly become obsolete". Such claims have mistaken potentials for reality. It is true that if P=NP, AI could in principle become smarter, and strong encryption could in principle become obsolete, but far from effortlessly, definitely not "overnight" or "instantly". It is just like we can in principle travel at any subluminal speed, but having a real rocket to achieve a high speed is a different story, let alone "overnight" or "instantly".

December 7, 2023　　# Google's Anti-AdBlocker Campaign

Google's ongoing anti-AdBlocker campaign on Youtube is, to a large extent, a novel battle between the tech giant with highly paid talents and the highly diverse open source community with (among others) basement gurus. As of today and much to my joy, the latter seems (at least temporarily) having the upper hand: I'm again able to view Youtube videos (using Chrome with AdBlock extension) the way I used to do and the way I wanted ‒ that is, without ads and without extra tricks.

But of course the battle is far from over, and Google (so I heard), taking full advantage of its ownership of Chrome, is planning an "Empire Strikes Back": it is on course of taking a controversial and risky step of changing the extension API from "Manifest V2" to "Manifest V3", which will severely limit extension development, and will be in a sense pulling the rug from under adBlocker's feet. Whether there will be a "Return of the Jedi" after that, only time can tell.

December 12, 2023　　# Related Quotes from Doyle, Asimov and Tyson

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, through his greatest creation Sherlock Holmes, quoted a saying in the story of A Study in Scarlet: "A fool can always find a greater fool to admire him"; Isaac Asimov, in an essay "Worlds in Confusion" collected in the book The Stars in Their Courses, expressed a meaning similar but more accurately: "There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death".

"Why is it so?" One might ask. A 2015 tweet by Neil deGrasse Tyson happens to provide an answer: "The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree". It is exactly because of the foolishness or the lack of evidence, which although inevitably deters many, will nevertheless attract many a "greater fool" who has nothing but the attitude (sometimes action) of "defend it to the death" at their disposal.

December 14, 2023　　# Poincaré on Conscious Thought

#Most poetic sentences by scientists:

「Life is only a short episode between two eternities of death, and that, even in this episode, conscious thought has lasted and will last only a moment. Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night. But it is this gleam which is everything.」

—— The Value of Science (By Henri Poincaré)

Coincidently echoed Poincaré's view was the Hungarian scientist John von Neumann who, according to his colleague and fellow Hungarian scientist Eugene Wigner, was deeply saddened in his last days when he knew he was dying, because "it was impossible for him to imagine that he would stop thinking".

Poincaré, von Neumann and Wigner are all great scientists, with Wigner probably being the least known ‒ as a mere Nobel laureate in physics. :-)

December 20, 2023　　# On Finiteness of Speed of Light

Modern telescopes (James Webb Space Telescope for instance) are constantly breaking the record of looking back through time and discovering the earliest objects in the universe. Many of those objects (earliest stars for instance) are actually long gone (they are massive and they burn down very quickly). The fact that we can still see them owes to the fact that speed of light, though the fastest in the universe, is nevertheless finite.

The finiteness of speed of light is a barrier for space exploration, but a blessing for time exploration ‒ because it means the further an object we are looking at, the longer it took for light to travel from it to us, and therefore the further back through time we are exploring. Even if the object from which the light originated was long gone, by analyzing the light, we literally still see the object live ‒ in essentially the same sense a live television is live.

December 25, 2023　　# On Two Peter Mayle Books

Bought two Peter Mayle books from The Next Chapter: A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence. I have read Mayle's Acquired Tastes several years ago and enjoyed his witty style very much ‒ so much in fact that I did some quick "research" (i.e. search) on him and learned that his fame had a sharp rising with A Year in Provence (to the extent that pretty much all his later books bear the "Author of A Year in Provence" label on the cover). I also learned that his fame once reached a level beyond his endurance, and he (temporarily) exiled himself all the way from France to Long Island (my neighborhood!). Too bad he didn't write a book about Long Island though.