In the 1930s (before the first computer was constructed), one Alonzo Church introduced Lambda Calculus to the field of mathematics. In short, this obscure field of math introduced a structured way to substitute symbols.

Imagine you can give a set of symbols a shorthand and can selectively replace part of the symbols with something else. For example, you can call a complicated construction of fabric and other materials “shirt.” Then you can substitute the color of the “shirt” with “blue.” Voila, you have a blue shirt.

λ-calculus also defined a way to reduce a long set of symbols into a much shorter one; such as the set of symbols “3 + 2″ can be “reduced” to “5.”

This sound too geeky to you? Sorry, but computers are dumber than you think. With symbol substitution and reduction, all computation can be performed mechanically — the mathematical theory behind computation. Without λ-calculus, there would be no mechanical computation, without that, there will be no computers, without that, there will be no iPad, cell phones, or MP3 players.

A separate thread of developments was also going on at the hardware side of the computer science. Cut to the chase, one Alan Turing (founder of computer science) invented the Turing Machine that can execute λ-calculus. Then one John von Neumann turned that into a real computer, from which ENIAC was built, in the 50s.

When it came to how to program that machine, the world quickly divided into two camps: one to program it as closely as how the machine was built, and the other based on λ-calculus. The first camp invented Fortran and COBOL. Both were terrible. Then they kept on tweaking and changing until the world had C/C++, Java, Python, PHP, etc. The λ-calculus camp came up with a language called Lisp. Lisp has pretty much stayed the same since the 50s and has had very few variations. (Scheme is my favorite.)

Lisp had its glory in the 80s as the premiere choice for artificial intelligence. It has pretty much retreated into academia as a teaching tool. In my opinion, all programmers should begin their training with Lisp that gives the solid foundation of λ-calculus. They will become much better software engineers with this foundation. Many shared this belief and therefore many schools insisted on a heavy dosage of Scheme for all computer science freshmen.

John McCarthy, inventor of Lisp, died at 84 on Oct 24, 2011. From The New York Times, “Dr. McCarthy, who taught briefly at Stanford in the early 1950s, returned there in 1962 and in 1964 became the founding director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or SAIL. Its optimistic, space-age goal, with financial backing from the Pentagon, was to create a working artificial intelligence system within a decade. Dr. McCarthy had begun inviting the Homebrew Computer Club, a Silicon Valley hobbyist group, to meet at the Stanford lab. Among its growing membership were Steven P. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, who would go on to found Apple. Mr. Wozniak designed his first personal computer prototype, the Apple 1, to share with his Homebrew friends.”

奇怪. 曹操一世奸雄,才以少勝多,贏了袁紹. 回頭來大兵打劉備,孫權,卻又被他們少勝多打敗. 三國中,赤壁是最精彩的一段鬥智.

首先孔明”舌戰群雄”. 反面,曹操下個”檄文”,逼腦了孫權. 一來一回,促成孫劉聯盟.

第二是中了周瑜計,錯殺了蔡瑁,張允. 曹兵中沒了水戰人才. 這點是他準備不週,要打東吳,怎能沒水將呢? 沒帶一個來,也得練個出來啊.

第三是又中了周瑜的”打黃蓋”苦肉計,加上龐統的”連環計”把船綁在一起,墊下日後被火攻的種子. 這點倒不能怪曹操,冬天不該有東南風,東吳不該有火攻的可能.

所有的成敗,都是一連串的事件,一步步演出來的. 曹操連錯三步,但有十倍兵力. 應該還是穩操勝算的. 赤壁的最後決勝,在孔明的”借東風”. 小說裏寫成如鬼似神. 不論如何,這是決定的關鍵. 但是曹操再意料不到,他為什麼連提防都沒呢? 在江上要滅火應該不難,鐵環連鎖,也應該能解. 但兩步都沒準備.

一語道之,驕兵大意.

Life is relatively simple if you distill it down to just three basic questions.

• What do you expect of yourself? Do you want to be a billionaire, happy hippie, Olympian, world-renowned artist, movie star, family person, corporate tycoon, or what? By the time you reach 30 years old, you should already know yourself enough.
• What are you willing to sacrifice to reach that goal? Look at anyone that has been there. All of them sacrificed beyond normal: complete devotion to work for decades, zero social life, years of tremendous stress, risking all personal fortune in a gambit, moved to far away places, etc.
• What do you have that is unique, or differentiating enough from your competitors? Yes, that’s everyone in the same race you are trying to win. If you are not trying to win, or deny that you are in any race, read no more. Since your answer to first question was the end of the this quest.

All competitions are now on a global scale. It is no longer interesting to be more productive among your peers. You must be more productive than all those who will take your job in the world. I learned that after the Civil War of the US, the southern states were poor and suffered low wages for decades. Then the northern states moved their factories south to take advantage of the low labor costs. Today, workers in Beijing, ShangHai, and Bangalore see their jobs moved to ChengDu and Hyderabad; maybe tomorrow to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. It feels daunting to face such fierce competition. We all expect things to get cheaper and better every year. Would that come without competition?

You have 6 to 10 years after college to exit from “basic training” in which you first learn how things are done normally, then the politics of the organization. Who has power, how many parties are competing, how are wars waged, how to choose sides or mentors, how not to be a casualty of those wars? Don’t do politics first. That will kill you. Now you have acquired the basics. Answer those three questions.

Find a mentor or coach. Keep in mind that your competitors have also emerged from the same “basic training.” The game only begins now.

The table of contents aims to rouse curiosity. It promises to reveal the prices of life, happiness, and even women! Further, it goes into areas that make you very curious. What’s the price for “free?” Isn’t the answer obviously zero? Eduardo Porter used the word price and cost interchangeably and the answer is therefore anything but.

Eduardo Porter was never going to reveal the prices of those. This is yet another new behavior economy books popularized by Freaknomics. The book tried to explain society through the lens of economy: money, incentive, and returns. Further, Eduardo had a social agenda and, like everyone who has one, he couldn’t get off the soap box either.

There are gems that are just entertaining or controversial:

Robert Kennedy’s 1968 speech:

Gross national product counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic squall. … It counts Whitman’s rifles and Speck’s Knifes and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play; it does not include the beauty of our poetry of the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate for the integrity of our public officials. … It measures everything in short except that which makes life worth while. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

On the price of women, Eduardo essentially examined traditional social roles and how working has changed everything. When working demands less physical strength and more intelligence, women no longer need man to provide means of lives. The traditional “sex and kids in exchange for foods and shelter” deal broke down, since working women can provide foods and shelter as easily as men, as long as they are equally educated and trained. Working women therefore bear less children. The chic of working also changed the definition of beauty. The body type that favors reproduction capability is now less desirable. This means advanced societies, that value working women instead of baby factories, are less proliferating.

Then there is the Quiverfull movement that women have the “biblically mandated role of as bearers of children and workers in the home under the authority of a husband.”

Psalm 127:3-5:

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD:
and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man;
so are children of the youth.
Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:
they shall not be ashamed,
but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

For this belief, many Quiverfull followers practice polygamy that tend to maximize population growth. This parallels another controversial biblical passage (that every rational and reasonably educated modern persons, including Michelle Bachmann, must disagree):

Ephesians 5:22-24:

Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Can you imagine the make up of earth population if these trends continue? The world will breed themselves back to the traditional roles, since new working-women-style societies are disadvantaged at natural selection.

There is an interesting passage on intellectual property. When the US first passed its copyright law in 1790, it protected only American authors. The US printing industry, then, simply pirated books published by British authors. This continued until 1986! For all the accusations that the US software companies made against piracy in Asia, the US, after ripping off others for several hundred years, just does not like others to return the same favor. Well, no one ever accused Americans of playing fair.

Really? It came out?

January of 2005, yes, more than six years ago, I saw Solaris 10 released to the world. I was so proud to be associated with that release. I loved Solaris 10. Every machines that call itself a server should run this OS. I was also very proud of its Trusted Extension. I can talk about it all day and bore everyone to death on the fine points of multi-level security.

We vowed never to commit to a release number again, so we called the next version of Solaris “Nevada.” (Austin Yeats, I believe, should get the credit for that code name.) Soon, Nevada became the source for OpenSolaris. I loved OpenSolaris. I believed that it will change the world and tried to be one of the helpers. I made many friends in that cult and was sad to see its demise.

Many of the Solaris heavy hitters left Oracle. I read the press release and felt sadly removed; that was such a big part of my life then that it almost defined me. I have fully converted into the Microsoft land. Everyday, I outlook email and Excel spreadsheets, like many of the corporate drones. I am at peace with this, since I no longer think the choice of desktop OS, or applications, defines individuality.

It is simply nostalgia to see Fowler on stage. I miss ERI and MPK, but they are no more.

This is not class warfare. It’s math. — Obama, Sep 19, 2011

These few days, a group of people are occupying Seattle by camping in the busy Westlake Park. They claim that they represent the 99%. The general idea is that 1% of the population control all the societal resources. The rest — the 99% — must take it back.

Let’s see. We have divided the society into two halves: us and them. We are the 99% and they are the 1% (therefore we are the majority and must be right). They are evil (and they always are) and we are unfairly disadvantaged (and we always are). We have been wronged (and we always have been) by them. We had it! And this is the time to take action. Whatever action, as long as it takes from them and gives to us.

This sure sounds like class warfare to me.

Class warfare are always — sad, sad, sad — internal: brethren against brethren. Class warfare redistribute resources or wealth. They destroy value in the process. They don’t produce new values or increase the net assets within the society. At the end of the class warfare, the society ends up poorer. Most of the time, the poor remain poor, or even poorer. Only the rich change from one group to another.

It turns out “Occupy Seattle” is part of a bigger movement called “Occupy Wall Street.” It is “workers against corporate and wall street.” The Guardian said, “Millions of Americans lost their jobs, their homes and their life savings because of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of Wall Street.” Really?! Because of? If I waive a magic wand and the entire Wall Street disappears, would the problem go away?

This movement is pitting “99% of the population” against an abstract concept, not a specific group of people or a social or legal structure. Do they propose to exile Bill Gates and confiscate his money? Or they want a new constitution that do away with the congress? Maybe new tax laws that turns the rich into poverty? I have learned, long time ago, that the word “fair” has no meaning. It is always not fair against us, whatever the definition of us happens to be.

These people will smash some windows and feel good about it. For the society to change, occupying Seattle or Wall Street is not going to cut it.

幾年前就聽人說這是台北最棒的豆漿.

小時住永和,有事沒事就去吃中正橋豆漿,24小時營業,豆漿,燒餅油條,飯糰,都是便宜東西. 吃吃走路,從來不覺得有什麼大不了. 長大了搬去台北,常想起中正橋豆漿,但嫌路遠,不常去. 後來到處都是”永和豆漿大王”,心裏常納悶,一樣嗎? 我們吃的是”四海豆漿”啊.可是沒幾年,中正橋的豆漿也都沒了. 想豆漿變成了個遺憾事.

來美國後,找燒餅油條成了個嗜好. 聽說哪裡有,就得長途去試試. 驚聞Mountain View有家推出了油條,一早開車去,等上一小時,這是什麼油條啊,簡直是炸麵棍.難怪英文叫Chinese Donut. 過了好些年,慢慢有幾家做的像些了.但是總是差上那一點,最常的就是冷了.燒餅油條,冷了就只是油味,吃不下去了.

所以每次回台北,必找家燒餅油條店解解鄉愁.街角的都行,每一家都地道. 久了朋友就開始推薦了.這家如何,那家怎樣,我們變成了品燒餅. 吃來吃去,就是這家阜杭沒吃了. 這次來,反正有時差,一早起來,直奔華山市場(善導寺對面),跟著人潮(六點半!)到了這間燒餅油條店.

厚燒餅是用老式泥爐一張張貼上烤出來的,皮脆裏軟,蔥香有咬勁. 其實不該夾油條,空口吃最過癮. 鹹豆漿花結的剛好,料剛夠沒太多,清的部分有鮮味,結的部分像豆花. 蟹殼黃(焦糖燒餅)皮脆糖甜芝麻香. 我覺得飯團太鬆,蘿蔔絲絣味道太重. 聽說薄燒餅也好吃,但我們實在吃不下了.

七點多吃完,看隊排了十來人.據聞九點時能排到樓下去. 台北人真瘋. 想當年信步走到橋頭,坐下就吃的閒興. 回憶嘍.

Yep, day dreaming…

Gatemage is someone who can create a portal that consumes no energy. Any object that enter the mouth will appear instantaneously at the exit, no matter how long the distance. A gatemage can create or close such gates at will and at any location. He or she can also move the mouth and the exit (gates are uni-directional) of an existing gate wherever they wish. Now, this is a very cool skill, or “ability” as they say in X-Men. Let’s see…

• Obviously, commute to work will be super easy. Create a gate from the door to door. Step out of the house and step into the office. Very easy.
• Travel, to anywhere in the world, will be a snap. Pack the bags, reserve the hotel, enter gate, and you are there. Wait, no need to reserve the hotel, since you can come back home to sleep. Come to think of it, there is no need to pack the bags either. How about a day trip to Mt. Everett? No problem.
• FedEx will be out of the business. I can deliver packages instantaneous and guaranteed. Neither the client or myself need to even leave home. The package can be swallowed by the gate mouth and then appears at the exit, the doorstep of the destination, just like that. I wonder how much I can charge for this service.
• That took care of money. I don’t need to work. I can be the best delivery service in the world and charge very high prices.
• If I make a gate to capture a falling object and make the exit above the mouth. The falling object will exit on top of the mouth and create a suspension in the air. Although the object actually enters the mouth and comes out of the exit repetitively; it appears to be suspended in the air to an observer. If I apply this to myself, I can essentially defy gravity. Wow. How cool would that be?
• Wait. Then I essentially created an infinitive energy source. Let a heavy object fall into the mouth and exit from above. As it falls, I harvest the energy.
• What can I do if I have infinitive supply of free energy? Hmm… The possibilities seem endless. That’s a different blog. But is there a problem by having too much energy? Things usually explode.
• Wait! Is it possible to have infinitive energy source? No! But SciFi must adhere to the laws of physics. OK, that makes Lost Gate a fantasy instead.

New York Times reported something that’s hardly a news: China now dominates world’s solar cell production. Geez, can someone name anything that China does not?

The sensation of the report is on the high-technology nature of the product. This is no clothing, toy, car parts, MP3 players, or cell phones that the US either do not care about or, by action, had no interest of trying to win. This is green technology. Something the Obama government emphasized and pour money into subsidizing. This industry is the innovation, the future, the jobs, the game the US wanted to win.

Why does Solyndra bankrupt and its Chinese counter-parts thrive? One reason quoted is that Chinese government gives the industry subsidy grants for companies to buy from China companies. I don’t know if Obama’s job bill included any such subsidy.

It also seemed to me that the US companies focused too much on the innovation part of the business and missed the rest of the business execution: budgeting, schedule, cost control, distribution, selling, etc. They focused a lot on the creation of great technologies, instead of trying to make money from such creation. They make something that is very cool, but ended up losing money in the process. Once in a long while, we have an Apple that makes cool and profitable products. Don’t forget that Steve Job’s NeXT was a commercial disaster and ended up only as a footnote in the computer history book.

Good old Chinese pragmatism. Can we put that in Obama’s job bill?