HKUST and Research Obstacle

I love research, especially the physics which explain all these phenomena as simple and from a scale as tiny as it would be. Sometimes I love the maths, sometimes I don't, although usually I tend to love it more. 

Up until now, there are of course ups and downs that I went through during my career as a research student. I even fell into a long period of depression for as long as a year. However tough it was for me, I pulled myself together in the very end with the help from the love of my family, and particularly the ever-tolerating attitude of my supervisor. One of these days when I am working real hard, I come to think that one of these reasons that made me really upset all these years would be the ever-dragging university technicians. 

I admit it. A lot of them are top-notched, but some of them are worse than drunkards when it comes to working out the possibility of your new experimental design and refining it. I know the mentality that they're getting paid no matter you get the job done or not, since the research students are in such a position which we own no superiority nor the employer-employee relationship with them. But these situations, when occur more than three times a week, will really get frustrating when one or two of these really hard-to-go-with people decided to screw you up over, maybe, how you look on that particular day when you relay your idea to them.

I learned to go around them. To please them, with some of the hometown cookies. But seriously, they are the reasons which I loathe and put myself down at times when I am thinking of some new designs. Sometimes when you are doubting whether these new designs would work or not, because of these hurdles, you would tend to tell yourself, nay, maybe, some other day? 

And that day never comes.

Well, unless some of those days when you let in some lights during a meeting with your supervisor and he/she decided that it is such a good idea to try, then will it get revive and you toughen yourself up to fight with these people again.

I seriously think this is such a waste of time. In the end, university is the spring of creativity, of places where all things and ideas are tried out, whether they work or not.

In the end I decided enough is enough with the technicians. The only way I can minimize my frustration is to build my own lab, with my own people, and so far I got pretty satisfied about it, with everybody working as hard and crazily as I am.

I secretly promise to myself that when some day I land myself at a place in this university, like the Dean, then this would be the very first problem I would attend to. I would make sure the contract of the technicians who are reported by the students be put under renewable contract, half a year once. Maybe then, they would get serious with the all the vibes going about, trying out new things and getting new findings.

I am not so sure if other schools have this problem too. I refrain from making generalization, but there is in fact some things you can do:

1) Get your supervisor to help. Persuade the technician to get something done faster. Some supervisors are really helpful, they might even scold the technicians as I had heard, although I don't really like that to happen, since after the incident the worst victim would be the student. Soft persuasion is preferred, of all the others.

2) If you have a new idea, talk to people around you. If the feedback is good, or you have a great feeling that this is going to be the next big thing for you, just bang head-to-head with the technicians, and use (1) to solve things afterwards if they decide to 'snail', a.k.a. indefinitely prolong the working progress.

3) Sweet-talk them. Or buy them things, from time to time. Write them thank you cards. Surprise them! Play badminton with them. Go to the illegal afternoon tea sessions with them often enough to make them feel guilty! It works!

Well at the end of the day, if none of the above works for you, perhaps, you need a bit of luck!

Feynman, Death and Population Overgrowth

Tired and aching from the journey to China, I came home early to sleep but then on second whim I decided to stay awake. Not that I am much refreshed after shower, but rather that one of the articles in Richard Feynman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" coated me with inexplicable sadness. That kind which blankets you about an inch away from your skin, if you know what I mean. It is not deep within you, nor is it strongly felt. It's just, there.

In case you do not know who Feynman is, he is one of the finest treasures of the human race and he is one of the great scientists recruited in Manhattan Project, the creation of atomic bomb.

Feynman is great. For me he is much greater than Einstein, Bohr, von Neumann or any other of those famous physicists or mathematicians you heard of. The thing is that, Feynman lives life as if it is an experiment, and in it he poured all kinds of imaginable chemicals and stir them up to see if there's any spark coming out. More than his science is his treatment of love. Arlene, his first wife and him. My heart breaks when he wrote about how he found his wife dead on the hospital bed after 7 years of fighting with tuberculosis.

"Arlene died a few hours after I got there ... ... Then I looked at the clock I had given her seven years before, when she had first become sick with tuberculosis. It was something which in those days was very nice: a digital clock whose numbers would change by turning around mechanically. The clock was very delicate and often stopped for one reason or another - I had to repair it from time to time - but I kept it going for all those years. Now, it had stopped once more - at 9:22, the time on the death certificate!

...

I had obviously done something to myself psychologically: Reality was so important - I had to understand what really happened to Arlene, physiologically - that I didn't cry until a number of months later, when I was in Oak Bridge. I was walking past a department store with dresses in the window, and I thought Arlene would like one of them. That was too much for me."

Apparently it was shot into a movie too. And the ending was exactly that of the last sentence. I didn't know that. I should spend some time to watch it some other day when I was not that busy. It must heartbreaking to see that moment portrayed, especially if the actors are good, and that I don't really know.

And Arlene always probed Feynman: What do you care about what the others say?

That alone kept Feynman going against his critics, achieving great success in science, only to remind himself more of Arlene when he basked in the glory of Nobel Prize.

During the Trinity atomic bomb test, everyone was given a dark goggle to wear, to protect the viewers from the bright light. Feynman was given one too, but decided to not use it because he simply could not see anything at all. He knew that the only dangerous light would be UV light, so he hid himself behind a car's glass, because UV cannot penetrate glass, and watch the atomic bomb exploded with human eyes. And I think he is right: he is the first and only person to see the atomic bomb test exploded, real-time, with human eyes.

At first he was simple exhilarated to have achieved the success, and only to see Bob Wilson the physicist who recruited him to join the project sitting in the office chair, saying: "We had built ourselves a monster, a sin." which Feynman did not understand at first.

Only then after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were eradicated did Feynman realized the complication at heart. What if where he was sitting now, the cafe at New York 6th Street, was receiving a shock wave so powerful that all glasses were shattered, his body thrown away like a dust and when the rays of a thousand sun burning engulfs him, everything is lost forever?

Would life ever be the same again? Would he join the Manhattan Project cause again? He didn't have an answer too.

In fact these kind of situations were so hard that even the facts themselves made us crimped:

1) Population growth is simply draining our earth resources;

2) More oil reserves used means a much more destroyed planet which could not possibly be savored if we continue to burn them in the coming 25 years.

If you extrapolate that, lower birth rate is actually a good sign. Stalling economies mean that the world will be forced to spend less resources, thus preserve a good balance. What I know now is we are in such a desperate situation today, the world would do much better by cutting half of the total population. If you start to take a gun and shoot people on the street, human will punish you in jail or sentence you to death, but the Mother Nature in fact would probably be sighing in relief.

We celebrate life but we are disgusted and recoiled when we are told that death of a lot of human is actually necessary to preserve balance. Like what Isaac Asimov said, everything human builds, moral values and ethics and religious belief all in all, this will all simply crumble when human population exploded into uncontrollable scale which simply depletes all but a few resources on Earth.

When that moment arrives, there is no God. Or it's like in the Bible, the Heaven and Earth joins. We will all simply meet our ends at the same time after we single-handedly destroy our own ecosystem. That, would be the cruel Judgment Day.

Light up, light up

The first time I heard this song, I twitched. My face, my heart. Somehow I bought one of the compilation albums and there it appeared at track 7, with this deepened sadness lingering around the air. It was 2004, my Lower Six year.

Year after year, the lyrics rings a louder and louder tone of sadness. It is the rhythm of farewell, that kind which you barely could even look at any more in your life henceforth. The choice I made up myself to part way is what makes it even more heartbreaking, and as you look back, you could see a clear steer-off path which at that time you somehow could not decide whether the choice was going to be all right for anyone, at all. 

As if you have a choice.

Sometimes, I wonder why you could not just speak up. You could have just voiced your real feelings, and maybe, for that slight moment, we could have changed the course of our lives. Maybe you already did, maybe not. The choice has already been made, and the course already differs ever since.

Louder, louder
And we'll run for our lives
I can hardly speak, I understand
Why can't you raise your voice to say?


Even if you cannot hear my voice
I'll be right beside you dear

Maybe. As an old friend, from a far away place in alternate time.

everybody's life without this song is incomplete.
BAMFU80; Youtube comment.

Malaysia in Every Malaysian

Malaysia, our home, the place which always resides inside me, inspires me and provides me that kind of subtle exhilaration every time the plane touches down on her soil the air stewardess said: "...and Malaysians, welcome home!"

Because of all the political debacle, being a Malaysian is harsh. Unless your family is well-connected to a political figure, most probably you need to dye yourself with a little patch of black before you can make a dent in the industry you wanna set foot in. Or it requires extra, extra effort. Most of us opt to seek better and readily offered opportunities overseas.

Malaysians are always passionate inside, but not really aggressive. We choose peace instead of "I-gonna-hate-you-the-rest-of-my-life" stand-off, which is pretty different from the atmosphere here in Hong Kong. We do not take the stance of dissing each other for fun and past time activities. Instead we hike, picnic, seaside barbeque-ing (yes with a real fire!!!) and apartment stay! We value peace, relaxation and comfort. Especially comfort. The shorts and slippers and slightly gelled hair, sipping milo ais under an umbrella of mamak stall, isn't that wonderful?

When it's hot, we hide under umbrella. When night falls, we love the cool open air!

We might not have prettiest girl in the world, but we have the kindest and cordial girl in Asia. Most of them not super brand conscious, fun to chat with and love to eat all those delicious food readily available everywhere. Zee Avi touches my heart the most among all the Malaysian singers, which includes Fish Leung (梁靜茹), Penny Tai (戴佩妮) etc. I guess we all have an affinity for these comfortable voices, softening us up when we need to loosen a bone or two. Gentle, not truly a trouble-seeker and not too individualistically stubborn: and that writes the underlying personalities of most Malaysians I would say.

I love Malaysia. Every inch of the soil and the air. The friendly smiles on strangers when we greet each other. The good old days, the good old country, the good old people. It's a pity that we are driven into a corner today by corruption and havoc inducing politicians. No matter what, I want to change Malaysia, for a better future. This coming election, I am going back to vote for goddamn sure, so that one day whenever I have a successful business, I would want to base that in Malaysia. Such a beautiful place with such heart-warming culture!

Ask every Malaysian you know around you who are living and/or working abroad. No, we just do not renounce our nationality. In the heart of every Malaysian, we are still who we are. We are from Malaysia.

Home Office, the Bauhaus Way

A serene view: The tranquil bay decorated with preserved terrain of shrubs and trees

The breeze brushing past my cheek slowly, wakens me up to the beautiful sea view unfolded before my eyes. I am up pretty high in the sky, but I am not on a mountain. This photo is captured right out of the window of my home office.

The mesmerizing moment comes when the sun shines onto you in the early morning after waking up from a slumber for work. The monthly rent of HKD$8500 for 600 sq ft in Hong Kong is expensive, but if you got lucky and take your time with apartment hunting, you have a chance to grab one of these serene lots, and with the peace awakened within your soul when you breathe into the salty wind, it's just priceless. That's even more wondrously gratifying when you have to work from home.

We got two rooms, so we decided one of them to be used as the office. Rooms in Hong Kong when you are not well-off (fresh graduate) could be a little crampy, and after living in this metropolitan concrete jungle for over 5 years I somehow obtain the sense of making the most out of space, while securing private corners without sacrificing comfort. Steamrolling my engineering training and blending it with the bauhaus design concept, I mix and match furniture I need in my mind and from what's already available. The landlady lent us the lot along with a few traditional chinese wood furniture and we think it's best not to buy too many things of our own since we are going to move in the future anyway. The room is about 3.2 meters by width (the side with windows) and 3.5 meters by length. Extremely small, by Malaysian standard which is.

Spacious working table and comfortable sofa bed for reflection

We didn't get to this arrangement from the very start but I knew that we need to have a huge working table, which is able to lay across on top of itself a desktop and a laptop while leaving some extra space by the length of an arm for document processing. We got the table from IKEA for about HKD$300. 

The sofa is a later addition, which itself could be stretched out into a sofa bed, providing us a double function. I am very particular about sofa. Since childhood, I have always been working and studying on a sofa. The past 4 years have been excruciatingly painful for me because you simply could not add an extra stool in your university dormitory, let alone a sofa (the university dorm is very small). Plus, the Hong Kong universities in general are very bureaucratic and they will simply freak out when you told them you want to buy your own furniture and have theirs temporarily cast away in storeroom. I remained utterly unhappy for the rest of my undergraduate years, trying to make myself comfortable on public sofa in the library while ignoring all those assaying eyes on you when you take off your slippers and pull your feet underneath your butt.

When you equip your office with a desktop, inevitably you would have to deal with all the cables and wires. We shrewdly hide them behind the table and the computers, while not stashing them too far out of reach so that cleaning is made easier. On the right hand side of the table we make the landlady's pot rack into one where a printer stands on the top, and the rest of stationery holders, connecting cables, wireless radio etc. on the racks beneath, cleverly creating a clean workstation. The pot rack itself is hidden away from sight by a open wardrobe. An unused polo luggage is laid on the side of the hidden from view rack, serving the purpose of CPU stand and also a place for handy stationery.

Printer on pot rack, and Polo luggage turned into a small table

Book rack and mobile reading lamp

The book rack completes the home office, allowing organization of personal, office and research documents. Perhaps you had already caught sight of the reading lamp in Photo 2, and here it appears again in Photo 4. By plugging the reading lamp to an electric socket right behind the sofa, it becomes a mobile light which could be simply put on the book rack for a casual reading experience on the sofa and the table while serious work has to be tended to properly.

For me, workstation is almost meant to be refreshing, clean and comfortable. By putting a little bit more effort into making the most use out of a space which is to be tailored to your purpose and also aesthetics, you could achieve wonders too, bauhaus-wise.

偶語

不到幾個月，風起雲湧後，生活上幾乎全然面目全非。
習慣改了，運作模式改了，合作夥伴有趣了，生活也多姿多色。有悲有喜，有失去有反省中的澀果。

人生，就是有捨有得。