the mystery about why people are so good..

seems very ironically,  I never find the good side of people surrounding me. I always spot them having fun or random chatting, however, when it comes to their research, I never pay attention to. Maybe also, I am not able to pay attention to.

Today, my friend gives me a perfect lesson on how to find the good side of others. I look at one of my very very familiar friend’s personal webpage, only find that he has achieved more than I had ever thought of .

I always assume he is just good at socializing, but never find actually he is also good at research. How stupid I am.

However, it is not only him, also other phd in the second floor, students of wisseman, two of them also got the best student paper award, and have GPA 4.2 above.. How incredible that is.

In retrospective, I seem to be just able to drink ,go to party, watch tv and random chatting.  what a difference here is in our department….

anyway, I need to keep up and now I have some motivation~~

science vs religion

recently, I watched a video about a debute between science and religion, which is named as science refute religion. four great thinkers  debute about whether there is still a room for God, whether we should still hold the religion view.

particles physics are definitely the kind of people should standing out on this kind of topic.

I always think that physics are the greatest people in the society, they always bear the responsibility to explore the world on behalf of all the human kinds. Along the history, physics help us understand how the earth works, so we don’t need to worship god of wind or god of sun. Physics are becoming the new philosophers in the nowadays world, helping us smooth fear.

Physics represent the wisdom of the society, as physics they have responsibility to address the problem, so obviously, as the greatest physics in 20th century, albert einstein has done that.

I read the article he published in new york times, here is some quotes

The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events – provided, of course, that he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously.

 

this words express his doubt of a God, which is some force interfering the causality of all the events

 

He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man’s actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God’s eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes. Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.

as scientists, we have fundamental belief about causality, and the reason and consequence is not about God.

A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.

 

obviously, scientist workers are working on some stuff so remote away from any reality. their motivation is what can be called religion

Also as others say, science and knowledge would replace our fear of unknown events, and psychology should replace the morality posed by the religion.

 

science can help us understand what is , but never can help us understand what should be , or the meaning the reason

 

boston bombing

yesterday’s biggest news is a tragedy, two sequencing bombing in Boston Marathon,

I found that news after a lunch with my chinese friend, during that lunch, we are just talking about the future of China and kind of agree on the point that China has a bright future than most of people think.

As a big country, it is really hard to manager and control, and including a lot of culture things, and people’s culture  behavior, but at least, china is in a stable state, no massive violence..

 

United states is constantly under attack by terrorists, I think they should reflect about that

However, I do strongly object killing innocent people, but we also need to know the world is still existing some evil people, try not to push them to hurt others.

IEEE —need some changes

one word to describe the graduate study vs the others would be apprentice.

Yes, Graduate students are apprentice to their professors, since that is the system supposed to be. The traditional way of doing research, though the world has changed much, the methodology is kind of stay the same. Reading literature, solving the problem, and publishing several papers and occasionally go to the conference sometime to present your work.

This is the only way the community is communicating with each other, and hopefully to get their ideas out. However, it shouldn’t be. I believe scholars are great people, they contribute to our society a lot. A lot of wonderful applications and ideas come from bunch of scholars and researchers all around the world.  But the way they get their ideas out is problematic. We should do more things. Media publishing is another way, using video is other ways to pass the message and get attention.

We all know that using words to educate is not efficient and not great. If the text books can solve the problem, why we still need teachers?  Teaching is quite skillful. So we should not just publish our work, we also need to get good communication ways to pass the ideas to others.
 talks are good ways but not many people have the privileged to attend the talk, we need to make a video on each published paper to make sure others get the ideas down, and We need interactive directly on the paper authors.

Then another thing is the whole package of the algorithms which are being used in one particular field.

We know that every field, researchers are working hard on the same problems or mostly the same ideas. So what if there is one organized package of algorithms that everyone can share to use?

then every time people need to add something, just add some library function to that particular libraries. In that sense, the redundant work can be reduced.

Anyway, the sad thing is I am not the chair of IEEE. So even I have millions of ideas, the field is still not actively working as I hope it would.

so work hard to gain fame and influence, then you can really achieve something

 

 

 

 

the myth of wanting it all

nowadays, people obviously set higher expectations for themselves. A lot of people instead of concentrating on something, becoming not contempt on their situations. They consistently want to improve, becoming better and learning more knowledges.

I used to watch a op-ed by stanford students, who basically say that , if you are not going to do something like internship, volunteering or research during the summer, people will think you are a failure.

Dating back, actually whatever the great people we acknowledged, they actually work less than we average do, Most of them take time off, leisurely playing cards, dancing, smoke or do anything they want , however,in our age, we push ourselves too much, way too much according to my observation.  But when it comes to thinking, few people have the desire to do this.

the pop culture is so superficial that it seduces people to think about materialism, about sex, about consumption and enjoying. However, is it really what makes people happy and fulfilled?

Instead of stepping down what people usually do, I would like take time and just enjoy the great work done by people along the generations. To push the human achievement one step further, that is my social responsibility. I don’t need to get some disruptive achievements, what I need to do maybe so dismal compared to the great achievement the whole human society has done, but I will be quite satisfied with it.

The meaning of life and the threat of death always wake me up during midnight, however, that is the true of life. When I am still young, I am so afraid of death that I refuse to think it any time.