Changhai Lu's Homepage

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My Latest Post on Threads (November 20, 2024):     

Over the past several years, I have watched, alone or with kids, films that involved genius imagination of the afterlife (Coco, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and Ghost Cat, to name a few). There are two features I noticed that are pretty much common in all such films: 1. The appearance of those in the afterlife mimics their appearance around the time of death. 2. Everyone (living or dead), when met in the afterlife, has an appearance roughly consistent with their relations (e.g., grandma looks older than mom, and mom looks older than daughter). These features are important to the stories (otherwise, how could living people find their afterlife relatives in a timely manner, as required by almost all such films?), but would conflict each other in most cases (for instance, what if the mom died at an age older than the grandma, or the daughter entered afterlife when she herself was old?). Such thinking is certainly too much for films, but would be necessary for those who hope for an afterlife and try to comfort themselves with a consistent picture. :-)

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THE PERSON

I was born in Hangzhou ‒ a tourist city in east China ‒ and had my early educations there. I went to Shanghai for college study in 1991. After then, I entered the Physics Department of Columbia University and obtained a Ph.D degree in May 2000.

THE PAGE

This is the 4.0 version of my homepage, it works with all major browsers that support CSS, JavaScript and UTF-8 character encoding.

Those who are curious about previous versions can take a look at some dynamic screenshots from version 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. Among those old versions, 1.0 and 2.0 are IE oriented, you will need a version of IE (5.0+) to view some of the VBScript and page transition effects.

THE ROADMAP

This website is written mainly in Chinese. If you know Chinese, there's no need to follow the roadmap here, you won't miss anything navigating through the main menu on the top. If you don't know Chinese or just want to collectively check out all the English or language neutral contents on this site, however, follow the links below.

• My posts on Threads:
  2023.08 - 2023.12   2024.01 - 2024.04   2024.05 - 2024.08   2024.09 - 2024.12
• A Star Trek Captain's Memoir is a collection of thoughts and comments about Patrick Stewart's recent book: Making It So ‒ A Memoir.
• Roger Penrose and Black Holes is an introduction to the history of black hole research (especially the works Penrose did that won half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020). This article, which I wrote for the journal AAPPS Bulletin, is the first English article I published in a journal since graduation (about 20 years ago).
• A collection of photos I took during various trips can be found here (the titles and captions are all in Chinese, but the images themselves ‒ as you know ‒ are language neutral).
• The research works I did at Columbia University are briefly described here. Read it at your own risk though, and be prepared to fall to sleep ...
• If you would like to see a more chronological description of a segment of my life, here is something to read. It is the non-technical (char* non-technical = "no formula";) part of a technical diary I wrote in 1997. Depending on your experience at the previous stop, feel free to skip this one.
• Online Sudoku Solver is a little web tool I wrote for solving Sudoku.
• Simple Arithmetic Web Quiz is a web page I wrote for kids (my 7 year old daughter in particular) to practice simple arithmetics. If you have kids in similar age, or ‒ in the almost impossible senario ‒ if you yourself are a kid, feel free to use it.
• OpenGL Tutorial 1, 2, 3 and 4 are the first four articles in a tutorial series I plan to write. The reason I wrote my own tutorials is to overcome a problem I saw on existing textbooks/tutorials: examples (sample code) are often unnecessarily complicated. In many cases, ridiculously long examples are used to demonstrate trivially simple concepts. Such an over-complication is, in my opinion, not only distracting, but may drive beginners away from the tutorials (or even worse, from the whole subject).
• Sometimes I spend part of my spare time writing little programs. EasyAddress is one such toy, it is a unicode-based address book program, easy and intuitive to use. EasyAddress stores data in XML format for interoperability and comes with an HTML export utility.
• In the very rare case if you are a Tcl/Tk programmer, please check out another program I wrote: Tcl2Html. This is an HTML converter for Tcl/Tk, and is probably the only such utility in the world that comes with a graphical user interface (at least by the time I wrote it). You are also welcome to check out an article I wrote: Selected Topics in Tcl/Tk.
• I have also done websites other than my own homepage, here is an example: a website designed for GlobalTalk LLC (internal links disabled).

https://www.changhai.org/