There're so many emotions at the end of the season, nobody likes to talk about it.

But one of them is fear. Fear that you've come this far, and it could all end. The dream, could die.

But me, I like the fear. It means I'm close. It means

I'm ready.

cool

That's what I am always jealous about athletes ---- there will always be a time they can wave their fists into wind and cry out: I WIN !!

That time may not always come, but when it comes, it is the sweetest thing one can ever taste in the world.

Lin Dan, the 1st ranking badminton player, won Olympic Gold medal in the final. He had won all badminton titles by then, which marked him as one of the greatest players in badminton history.

Known as a stoic person, he cried happy tear after the last score.

This just sounds like another Tibet issue to me. Poor yankees.

The eyes of the world are upon you!  :)

I have watched the Opening Ceremony of Beijing 2008 29th OG. It's great.

The CBC guys think the same way: unforgettable ... spectacular ... amazing ... breathtaking ... especially when Li Ning ignited the flame.

Li Ning was a very successful gymnast, and now is a very successful businessman. He has 17 world champion titles, so that he is listed as one of 25 greatest athletes in 20th century. He is known as gymnast prince to Chinese. His LI-NING Co Ltd, is now a world top 5 sportsware company.

He carried the Olympic torch as well as the spirit of China to the game.

The opening ceremony is August 8th 8:08 pm. It's close! However, according to my recent heavy workload and especially, the time difference, I cannot watch too much of it. Sleep is very important to me, so.

But still, there are some games/events I really like to watch. They are:

The opening ceremony. It is directied by the controversial director Zhang Yi Mou with unlimited budget. People say it will be phenomenal.

Basketball and the star Yao Ming.

The national hero of China, the tallest guy in NBA, will lead his team in the game. Unfortunately, his teammates are not as strong as him. It is acceptable if they could make it to the semi-final.

Badminton.

To many sports, Olympic is not the most important event. But for badminton, it is. OG gold medal means more than anything else to a badminton player. Everyone is trying to present their best in the game. Since I am a big fan of the sport, I am definitely going to track the whole tournament. China could win 3 golds out of 5, or maybe 5 of all. Who knows?

110m Hurdling

Another national hero, Liu Xiang. He is a living legend. The first Asian sprinter who make it to final, the first Asian sprinter who win gold, the first Asian who break the world record ... you name it. He is expected to at least win a medal in the game.

The tale: The three sieves of Socrates
 

"Hold up" Socrates interrupts him "About the story you're about to tell me, did you put it trough the three sieves?"

"Three sieves?" The man asks "What three sieves?"

"Let's try it" Socrates says.

"The first sieve is the one of truth, did you examine what you were about to tell me if it is true?" Socrates asks.

"Well no, I just overheard it" The man says.

"Ah, well then you have used the second sieve, the sieve of good?" Socrates asks "Is it something good what you're about to tell me?"

"Ehm no, on the contrary" the man answers.

"Hmmm" The wise man says "Let's use the third sieve then, is it necessary to tell me what you're so exited about?"

"No not necessary" the man says.

"Well" Socrates says with a smile "If the story you're about to tell me isn't true, good or necessary, just forget it and don't bother me with it."

OK, then. Let's try my master's thesis. My master's thesis is &*&#%$@, (some computer-science-related math problem), and the three questions from Socrates are:

Q1: Is that true?

No. It is not a real problem. I cannot image anyone would engage this problem in industry. It's fake.

Q2: Is that good?

No. It is not a good problem. It seems impossible to get solid result.

Q3: Is that necessary?

Not at all. I am supposed to be the only person in this world cares about this problem, even which is because, it's my thesis. Yes, it's trivial in contribution, but hard to solve.

Well, it's nothing to be shame of. That's 99.9% master's students do.

When I was working in Beijing, once I took my badminton stuff to office, and my boss asked me if I was going to play. At the first time, I didn't realize it was refering me. In my mind, badminton was a "physical exercise", not something to play. The word "play" to me was for video games or karaoke by then. Yes, I really did start playing badminton for health, (and pleasing my boss too.)

Some people say that life is about pursuing happiness, like what illustrated in the picture above. They say you should lower your pace down, "smell the rose". Why not? I mean we all want to be happy. However, there is no consensus on "what is happy".

To some people, enjoying leisure time is fun and happy while working hard is pain. I don't like hard working either, which is why it's called PAINstaking. But I do like the feeling of achieving goals and taking down adversaries. Those things give me extra happy, therefore neutralize the pain of work and even make it joyful. (If fact, there is no adversary in real life of mine. Living a ordinary life, having adveraries is considered as a social failure to me. That's why I like sports. It gives me a chance to beat others!)

After all, all livings are dying until reach their eternal death.

I didn't know I have that many fans in Shanghai. Who is visiting me from Shanghai?

Stat map of Lactose Intolerance from Wikepedia:

Where:

I have Lactose Intolerance, like other 1 billion Chinese people. I just realized that. It is most everybody in China, but no one pays attention to this problem. My housemate is a Chinese Canadian, and he told me he has Lactose Intolerance. Then I realized I have the same problem.

The symptom of Lactose Intolerance of differnt people varies. Some people get severe reaction when eat any milk product, like my housemate. My reaction is milder. A cup of milk in breakfast is OK to me, as well as yogurt before sleeping. But when I overdrink milk I still get digestion problem. If I drink like 700ml milk in once, I will definitely have a bad day. Other people, however, simply have no symptom at all. They just do not absorb the lactose.

There are several ways to avoid the problem:

First, you can use product with lower lactose. e.g., yogurt has relatively low lactose to milk.

Second, you can consume small quantities of dairy products several times a day instead of eating them together.

Third, use replacement like soy drink.

I cannot believe it. It's even hotter than Beijing.

This cartoon is about US. Canada is similar to US in many ways since they are English speaking countries located in North America and their universities both provide considerable scholarship supporting grad students. However, to Chinese student, Canada is an easier version of US.

First, tuition of Canada is cheaper than US, and second, so is scholarship. It is no doubt that the top students (and rich ones) aim to US, thus the competition in Canada is less. Third, US VISA is really hard to get, and the situation has been even worsened by foreign policy of Bush government. Canada as an immigrant country on the other hand, welcomes newcomers. Further more, GRE is required in all US universities, but only a handful of Canadian ones. To sum up, it is much easier to study in Canada than US, whether you are a undergrad or grad. (That's exactly why I'm here.)

Anyway, this cartoon still reflects some common realities when going study abroad. We have somehow all been though those procedures. I think it's interesting.

How Anglophones remember so many words? I never know. Well, it's their mother tongue. How many Chinese characters do I know? 3,000? 5,000? I don't know. My Chinese is above the average level I think. Those characters integrate each other and further form much more words. I bet there are hundreds of thousands of them.

I tested myself last year and I had ~8,000 vacabulary in English. It might be a little bit more now, but not much. I'm still working on it, getting progress, slowly. There are just too many English words beyond my knowledge. When I try to memorize new words, some old ones are forgotten. It's OK. I believe I am forgetting Chinese as well. All you need to do is outlearning forgetting by memorizing. I've read a paper said educated Anglophones know ~20,000 vacabulary, which is 2.5 times of mine. It's not bad, considering the words I don't know are basically rarely used ones like "brochure" something. (This word is randomly picked from my new word database.) They don't likely come up in daily conversation. What's really holding me back is the phrase. With simple words interacting with each other, they become new ones by which you cannot conclude the original meaning literally. For example, what does "swell time" mean? The specific expanding period? No, it means happy time. You see, that's the problem. The phrase "swell time" should be counted as a distinct word for me to learn. I guess the real vocabulary of Anglophones in this sense is at least 10 times bigger than me.

Something else, on another hand, is really easy to pick up, which is "swear word" and slangs. Swear words are the words used when expressing strong emotional feelings, while may offend others, like the F word. It's not hard to speak like a punk because those people have pretty limited vocabulary and repeat the same thing again and again. Their way of talking lacks diversity. Everybody can say something like "dude what's up dude". It is not my suggestion that a foreign speaker should take this.

First, it's offending. You never know whose feeling you are hurting. When you say "God" or "damn", you offend Christians. When you say "that's so gay", you offend real gays. Not to mention those sexual-related words which almost offend everyone.

Second, you can always find a replacement. My friend taught me a phrase the first week I came to Canada, "bad ass". He was referring a statuary of an angry-look first-nation hunter. I said does that mean "tough guy"? He said yes. This is a replacement. You don't have to mention the word "ass". I heard certain professor said these words in class tough. Well, some hearsay tells us that professors use swear words to win respect from undergrads, by giving them the own-kind-feeling. I cannot make sure the context is right if I'm the one using it. If I use other words wrongfully, that's fine. No big deal. But, if I use slangs in the wrong place, it could cause issues.

Last but not the least, use euphemism. For me I do believe swear words possess irreplaceable functions, like for exclamation. However, even if you really wanna use it and you are sure about the correctness, please do not say it directly. Certain euphemism makes it smoother, like:

hell --> heck
god --> gosh
shit --> shoot
damn --> darn

The words on the left are those you should never say.

Anyhow, speaking in a street way makes you being instinctively evaluated as undereducated. All I am doing is trying to talk like an educated people, gracefully and politely. It is not the best way of talking tough. It sounds hypocritical. I'm not doing this in Chinese. No talking like writing. I'm still doing my Beijing style dialect. Time to time, you gotta need the punch lines to perform your jokes, and academic language somewhat lacks the flexibility to do so. But in English, I'm just trying not to become a joke myself.

PS: Of course Christians use the word "God". IMO, they want the word to refer to THE God only, not for exclamation.

Slender as a badminton player?

 
(Bao Chunlai the top pro badminton man's single player.)

Or fat as a sumo player?

 
(Unknown sumo picture from interenet)

As tall as a basketball player?

 
(Yao Ming the NBA player, 226cm)

Or as short as a gymnast?

 
(This cutie is a gymnast in China national team, 151cm)

As weak as a pro-gamer? (People who play computer game for living.)

(Top world's pro-gamers, usually spend 12hours/day playing video game. And yes, they call themselves athletes.)

Or as crazy as a bodybuilder?

(Ronnie Coleman, looks like a giant frog.)

I know the word "athletic" here means strong. I just want to argue there is not an universal standard of being strong.

I have been programming and debugging a lot recently, from my course and research. I also debug junior undergrads' lab assignments in consultant office.

I have to say I am not a bad coder/debugger. I started writing program for fun when 13, that might help in experience. But I don't think that is the reason. After all, I wasn't heavily engaged by programming when in China ---- my major was not computer science by then.

As I believed, emotional quotient, or well known as EQ, has much stronger influence to people than they think. I have read a paper from Scientific American says that the patience is one significant factor to one's math ability, contrasting to the common sense that math ability is inborn and highly related to IQ. Also, programming is usually considered as an activity benefits from IQ. Well, I don't think that way. Programming is more hardworking in my opinion. I argue the most 2 quality for programming are belief and objectivism. I know I'm using funny words, but, wait me to explain.

Programming in some way, is like a religion, namely Christianism. I know quite some Christian here, because they are nice people and they provide free food. Kidding. Seriously, when I dig into the religion of Christianism, I find the most important concept is: believe. Certain country even puts "IN GOD WE BELIEVE" on their money. Christian think in this way: the God, the invisible but universally existed God, controls everything in the world. Everything ever happened, is happening and will happen is from the will of God. I'm not judging but this really doesn't make any sense to me. If there happened some terrible things, like an earthquake killing many people, they would explain like: Well, the God let it because he wants us to "learn things".

Oh my God, you must be the worst teacher ever.

In Christianism, God cannot be wrong, and no man can doubt God or challenge him. Anything happens because the invisible guy wants it to happen, in a good-will way. There is no such thing as bad luck. Anything goes wrong? This is all your fault, go self-questioning. Hitted by a meteorite? Again, go questioning yourself. OK, I really should stop joking about other people's religion. Speaking as an atheist, this isn't really the best attitude sometimes. Nonetheless, this attitude could be positive in other circumstances, when something is overwhelmingly ruling and absolutely correct. That is programming.

Programming is the thing completely logic that makes perfect sense. The compiler, the thing makes your code into a program, is extremely likely to be correct, if not entirely. Some 1st/2nd year kids have trouble with debugging. They complained to me: "Java/C doesn't make sense." Dude, it's not Java doesn't make sense. It is you are not making sense. Nothing wrong with Java if you put the right thing in. You cannot, even try to think the compiler is wrongfully working, like Christian cannot question God. If there is a mistake, it must be yours.

I call this belief as "always my fault". It divides the world in 2, inside and outside. Inside is what you can control or you can cast direct influence on. Outside on the other hand, is what can only be affected by an inside way. If you want to blame something, blame the inside factor, cuz that's what really matters. Examples: In programming, compiler is outside and my design and implement is inside. If there is something wrong, it must be the latters. In life, say, if your boyfriend/girlfriend is a "son of bitch"/"bitch" so that your relationship didn't work out, that's not his/her fault. There are millions bad people in this world, and their existence is an objective fact. It is you who made the bad decision and picked the wrong guy. People are responsible for their choices. All the faults are yours.

If Christianism provides an concept in this way, I would say it is a healthy one. However, as Laplace said, there is no necessity of the assumption of God. My suggestion is, keep the essence, and cut the rest away with the Ockham's Razor.