multi-way replication is surely as trustworthy as God

Yesterday, Tom and I were talking about advanced medical directives. In my living trust, Tom holds power of attorney in case I cannot make my own medical decisions.

Me: "Do you still have the email I sent you?" (When I set up the living trust, the lawyer explained that Tom would likely experience guilt if the situation transpired. He said it would ease my brother's burden if I explicitly state my wishes beforehand, which I did so in email.)

Tom: "Oh, I've definitely kept that email."

Me: [nodding]

Tom: "Do you also have it printed out and stored somewhere?"

Me: "No. It only exists in email."

Tom: "That's the only copy?"

Me: "Yes. In Gmail I trust."

i realize the system is flawed if dinner involves eating pig knuckles

I woke up this morning at 7:45am and couldn't sleep, so I'm going to write about a predicament.

Chinese culture has various protocols. For example, let's say you're eating dinner at a restaurant with others.

Host: "Try this duck. It's great!"

One typical response is to demur out of courtesy.

You: "That's all right, you go ahead."

The problem is that people will say this even when they actually secretly want to eat the duck. Therefore, the expected response is for the host to redouble his efforts.

Host: "Really, taste the duck! [picking up a piece of duck, and leaning over to place it into your bowl]

You: [covering bowl with one hand] "Don't worry about me! You just take care of yourself. I'll be fine."

Host: "I insist!" [forcibly wedging duck past your hand into your bowl]

Now, the problem here is that even if you legitimately don't want the duck, there is no way to communicate this. Any refusal will be taken as courtesy.

You: "Oh my fucking God, please stop shoving this piece of duck into my bowl! Can you respect my free will!"

Host: "Why are you being so polite?" (Unfortunately this is not sarcastic.)

You could come up with an excuse, e.g. "I'm allergic to duck", "I just ate duck for lunch", "I'm vegetarian". But this wastes time, and would also be dishonest. Clearly the script needs to be amended.

What we need is a safe word. Something like "pig knuckles". Then you can distinguish situations where you genuinely want to say no.

You: "Can we put my backpack in your car trunk?"

Host: "Sure! [opens trunk which is packed full, starts rearranging items]"

You: "I didn't realize you had so much stuff in there. I'll just hold it on my lap."

Host: "No, that would be uncomfortable for you! Let me make this more compact. [folding clothes, collapsing boxes]"

You: "I changed my mind! I just want to go, okay?"

Host: "It'll only be another couple -- "

You: "Pig knuckles."

Host: [closes trunk, gets into driver's seat, starts engine]

...

Ah, that would be magical.

nostalgic Romulan story from growing up

My parents are in town. Last night we had dinner with my brother and some of my friends.

Tom told a story. When he was three and I was ten, we put on little plays for ourselves. Because there were only two of us, we each acted multiple roles. Tom was very cute as a toddler as tall as my knee.

One day, the theme was Star Trek. On the make-belief bridge of our starship:

Me: "Lieutenant."

Tom: [saluting]

Me: "We have a Romulan spy onboard. Go and scan decks 1 through 10 for the intruder."

Tom: [mimes shooting me with a phaser]

Me: "Did you just shoot me?"

Tom: [giggling] "Yeah."

Me: "No, the game is -- Why did you do that?"

Tom: [collapsing on the couch in giggles] "I'm the Romulan spy."

After I recovered from shock, I did a suitable death scene.

WTF Palo Alto

Don't I hear about how Palo Alto is the center of Silicon Valley? The hub of high-tech innovation? The leading edge of technology? The frontier of the information superhighway?

Why then did I have to go to three cafes along University Ave to find wireless internet?

Especially misleading was the fact that the first two cafes were filled with people on laptops. Apparently they were tweaking spreadsheets and writing papers offline.

Stock photos of the offending cafes:





Finally I went to a trusty standby (stock photo below). See if you can guess which cafe this is.

let there be light, and towels

In the latest wave of domesticity, I gave up my San Francisco crash pad.

Instead I'm buying new linens and towels for my Mountain View townhouse. It's bringing me incredible joy. I think I shall write a poem called "Ode to Two Thyme-Colored Towels".


The only thing stopping me is the knowledge that it can't measure up to my previous poem.

Tonight I found this beautiful light fixture for my master-bedroom ceiling:


It comes with this disclaimer.

Attention California residents: This product contains lead, a chemical known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

Why are the cancerous effects of lead only known to the state of California? Does our state government exercise more caution about our health? Or are residents of California are more likely to lick the light fixture, ingesting the lead chemicals?

Comments from other buyers say the stained glass dampens the light, dimming the room. That could be depressing. Perhaps I will use higher-wattage bulbs than the recommendation.

Maybe that is the type of state-of-California thinking that leads to electrical fires and lead poisoning.

you gotta have your standards ... mine's H.264

Dan: "Yeah, wait until you're standing at a press conference next to your philandering man, with a tear in your eye."

Me: "I will NOT be standing next to him with a tear in my eye. I will wear sunglasses."

Dan: "Oh?"

Me: "No, actually I would be making a youtube video of me destroying all of his belongings."

Dan: [chuckling]

Me: "Now in higher definition."

Chinese parents need to stop forcing their kids to play the piano/violin

A few years ago, the news reported a spate of Chinese children cutting off their own pinky finger, so that their parents would stop forcing them to play the piano. These kids detested the piano, but their parents wouldn't listen, so they mutilated themselves as a desperate measure.

Today I will write about why it's bad to force your kids to play the piano over their continuous objections.

(This also applies to the violin or trombone or any musical instrument.)

I am not talking about the case where little Jimmy likes the piano and occasionally gets stuck, and his dad delivers a pep talk that gets Jimmy over the hump and back to happy-land. I'm also not talking about the case where the kid vacillates between liking and disliking the piano, and his mom encourages him to stick with it long enough to give it a fair chance.

I'm talking about the situation where a kid has played the piano long enough to know whether he likes it (let's say a year), and then consistently states his dislike of it, over the course of many months. In that case, the parent should let him quit. Alas, many do not. Many parents, especially Chinese ones, resort to years of threats, cajoling, bribery, shouting to force their child to continue.

This harms the child much more than the benefit he gets from playing the piano.

The merits of learning a musical instrument are oft repeated by the well-intentioned parent:
- learning discipline
- enjoyment later in life
- Mozart makes you smarter

Rarely have I heard anyone discuss the damage done by forcing the kid. I can state it in one sentence:


By thwarting the child's natural inclinations, day in and day out, you teach him to stifle his intuition.


There is a popular book Now, Discover Your Strengths, which is lauded amongst many Fortune 500 companies. Its premise is that people achieve maximum success (and enjoyment) by channeling their time into activities that they enjoy and excel at, and minimize time spent on tasks they dislike or struggle with.



As an example, let's say an executive loves coming up with new product strategy, and hates public speaking. Instead of getting a speaking coach to do hours of remedial training, the executive would focus his time on strategy and hire a representative to give talks on his behalf.

Of the people I've met over the years, the most successful ones followed this philosophy.

Another thing they do is follow their intuition. They trust their gut, and then learn from the outcome, which hones those instincts. Over a lifetime, their intuition becomes attuned to coming up with the next innovative idea, or the smartest strategy.

This is the very thing that takes a blow when the parent insists that the child ignore his passionate biases. It may be good for raising a drone -- a slightly smarter than average drone if we believe the Mozart effect. But if you want to foster creativity and that precious spark of innovation? Trust your kid to know their own mind.


When I was 13:

Me: "I want to quit the piano."

My mom: "No."

[many variations on this]

My mom: "When you grow up and become an adult, you'll thank me."

Me: "I will not."

...

I was right.

i miss Tom

Tom and I have both been busy, so I haven't seen him much over the past two months, except for my dad's birthday.

I miss his goofiness.

My friend "Fred" told me yesterday that his brother is moving to a different city. He wasn't too affected. This mindset of not being close to your siblings is foreign to me.

Some photos of the funniest times with Tom:



Provoking an innocent camel.



Eating.

I accidentally forgot my camera at the restaurant, after taking this photo. When I went back the next day to retrieve it, the employees had looked through all my photos, and were especially amused at this one.



LOLing.



LOLing while eating.

the point of life?

I've been thinking again about what the ultimate purpose of life is.

For example, one purpose could be to maximize the value you contribute to the world. An alternative would be to build deep bonds with your family. Or to savor each moment to the fullest.

Or, if you are into cop-out answers, it could be a blended approach that merges all of the above, because no one metric is the right answer, and you need balance, blah blah.

Last Sunday, at the Wynn Casino buffet with my family, I posed the question to my mother.

Me: "What do you think is the most important quality to strive for?"

My mother: "Integrity. It is not merely the most important. It's the only quality that matters."

Me: "Oh really. So let's say I had failed out of school and couldn't hold down a job, but I have the same level of integrity as I do now. You'd be equally happy with me?"

My mother: "Yes."

Me: [to my dad] "What do you think?"

My dad: [smiling] "That is so not true."

...

Recently I'm leaning toward using the metric of "doing things which are intrinsically enjoyable".

This goes against my chinese upbringing. When I was young, and my mother wanted me to stop doing enjoyable things (reading sci-fi) and waste the time on unenjoyable things (playing the piano), she quoted the chinese saying "先苦后甜" ("first bitter, then sweet"). The idea is that taking your bitter medicine will help make your future life sweet.

This reminds me that I need to write a blog post about how Chinese mothers need to stop forcing their kids to play the fucking piano/violin.

Anyway, this metric has clear flaws. Putting gas into my car is not intrinstically enjoyable. But I should do it to avoid running out of fuel on the highway and having to walk two miles in the dark to the nearest gas station.

I could amend it to "doing things that are intrinsically enjoyable, or that will save me from much worse things in the future".

ambulance post

Today's entry from the well-known blog of a UK ambulance driver;

I'm driving on this particular shift, my crewmate is in the back dealing with the patient.

I'm grinding my teeth at the waste.

The patient is almost certainly going to die - he's taken an overdose. The tablets he's taken, and the way he's taken them, mean that parts of his body will start to fail over the next few days. His immediate future is hospital bed, then an ITU bed, then either waiting for a transplant or death. It's too late for any treatment to work on him.

He's not in any pain, he doesn't feel weak, he has no symptoms.

...

Read the full post.

photos of food and castle

Mocha from Coupa Cafe. The cream was originally in a star shape (imagine the top half mirrored onto the bottom half).

I drank a sip, and it became an owl.

Naturally, preservation of the owl became key. The next ten minutes saw me crouching over the cup in strange contortions each time I wanted to take a sip.


I promised to take Megan to a vegan restaurant to celebrate her birthday. She chose Cafe Gratitude, in San Francisco. I braced myself for unsatisfying raw vegetables.

How wrong I was!

The menu items are phrased as affirmations. My mint chocolate chip milkshake is "I am Cool". Our appetizer of crackers and hummus was called "We are Bountiful". I rather enjoyed ordering:

Waitress: "What can I get for you?"

Megan: "I am Elated, and I am Honored. We are Bountiful. My friend here wants 'I am Cool'. Oh, also, I am Extra Green."

To my shock, the food was actually tasty. It's much better than the majority of non-vegan food.



The inside of the cafe. My stomach is not used to the food, so by the time we left, I actually felt a little like vomiting. Nonetheless, I went back again the following night.

The tables carry a fun card game, with questions like "Name three things you love about the other players."

The best one was a multi-part card. Part one was "Who do you hold a grudge against?" We wracked our brains and described people from our distant past who wronged us. The next part read, "Pretend the other player is the person you hold a grudge against. Now apologize for holding a grudge for so long."

That card owned us good!


Hearst Castle.


View from the castle.

The tour talked about how Hearst lived with his wife for twenty-odd years, and she bore him five sons.

Then he fell in love with Marion Davies, his "true love match", who lived with him for 40+ years until his death. His wife was very amicable. She lived across the country in New York, and would telegraph before arrival so that Marion Davies could duck out during her stay.

Upon Hearst's death, he left his property and a significant chunk of stock to Marion Davies. She sold it to his widow for a penny, because she said, "I was with him for love, not money."

Meanwhile, Mrs. Hearst performed a number of charitable deeds in Manhattan. Bluebirds sang, and ponies ran happily in the meadow.

Then I came home, and read on wikipedia how it's commonly believed that Mrs. Hearst was a prostitute when Hearst met her. Also, Hearst was terribly jealous of Marion Davies and is suspected to have murdered a man during a jealous rage on a sailboat. Allegedly he used his money and influence to shush up the shooting. Finally, Marion Davies married someone else a week after Hearst's death.

Funny how they didn't mention any of that on the tour.


A pretty walkway.


The outdoor pool.

Hearst often changed his mind after a portion of the house was completed, and would order it torn down and rebuilt. This pool was recreated three times before he was satisfied.

The architect, Julie Morgan, worked on the house for 28 years. I wonder if she found it fulfilling to design a lavish castle (rather than yet another square office building), or whether it was frustrating to have Hearst switching his mind all the time.

i can cook

Tom and I are at my parents' house in Vegas, for my dad's 65th birthday.

We pressured my mother to cook a birthday dinner. She got totally into it, and this is the result:


My mother decided ten years ago that I do not know how to cook. Despite years of protests from me, culminating in my cooking a dinner that she ate and said was good, she still maintains that I cannot cook. I've given up. Now I go along with it.

During dinner tonight:

Me: "This stewed eggplant is better than at restaurants! And the chives in the dumplings are amazing."

My mother: "It's nice when people don't know how to cook, like Niniane. You can make any sort of food, and they appreciate it."

Me: [sighing]

...

(later)

Me: "What happens to kids whose moms don't know how to cook? Do they just suffer eating terrible food their whole childhood?"

My mother: "There are no mothers who cannot cook!"

Me: "All right, let me put the question a different way. What's going to happen to my kids?"

My mother: [laughing] "That's a good point. But... no! There are no mothers who can't cook!"

Tom: "Niniane, that means Mom thinks you'll never have kids."

Me:

hee hee obama

I don't like lolcat, but I do like lolcat parodies.

silicon valley humor

X showed me Y2Combinator:

Y2 Combinator is a new kind of firm: a company that starts companies that starts companies. We help company-starting companies through what is for many the hardest step, copying the Y Combinator site without making silly mistakes.

lol.

rating everyone

My dear friend Reza has a wonderful idea. Every one of us should receive a rating and reviews.

Imagine a world where people could easily point their cell phone at you and give you a plus or a minus vote. If you let someone merge in, the other driver can give you a small star. If you stop and help someone with a flat tire, you might get lots of stars. If you cut people off or cheat on the carpool lane, you get bad karma. That's similar to PageRank. We all look at reviews for movies, restaurants, books, hotels, etc. And we look at the star rating on youtube, netflix, etc. Why not have it for people?

You can read his full post here. It's like DontDateHimGirl.com expanded to all areas of life.

I endorse this idea!

It may make sense to separate the ratings along different axes: career, friendship, relationship. That way, a workaholic who ignores their significant other could have 5 stars on one axis and 0 stars along the other, as opposed to a confusing average of 2.5 stars.

To protect against spamming, you would enter a secret question for each category. Only people who are qualified to rate you would know the answer. For example, the work one could be "What is my desk location number?" so only your real coworkers could rate you.

Potential romance secret questions are left as an exercise to the reader.

This way, when my profile is posted, I won't immediately be voted down to 0 stars by thousands of angry Asian men.

More stats on the world. (updated)

It would be lovely if there was easy access to more fine-grained statistics about the world. It would help in making risk assessments.

For example, I enjoy creative writing. I'd like to estimate my chances of ever getting published. If it's low, e.g. 1%, I just won't bother sending out manuscripts. Instead I'll write solely for enjoyment.

A panel of authors once said that 10% of aspiring writers get published. This number is not helpful. The pertinent data would be a set of writing samples at various levels of ability. For each, it would aggregate the percentage of authors who eventually got published.

Burgeoning writers can then look for a level similar to their own (or ask friends to rate them) and get the associated probability.

Another example is marriage and divorce. Supposedly there are well-known factors that influence the probability of staying together. The well-touted 50% divorce rate is skewed by shotgun weddings, according to a story I heard. If you're not marrying due to unexpected pregnancy, your divorce probability falls below 50%. But it rises if you live together first. Your marriage also has a much better chance if the ratio of positive to negative interactions exceeds 5:1.

It would be nice if there exists a service where people could pay money to fill out a bunch of information about them and their significant other, and get a customized probability score. They might decide to ignore it, but at least curious people can get an assessment.

Another example is startups. 90% of startups fail. Are these startups with great founders and innovative product ideas? Or is it skewed by people who caught entrepeneur fever, without accompanying skills?

Stats are good. More detailed stats would be better.

---

Update

Some comments are along the lines of "I'm sure if J. K. Rowling knew her chances of getting published were very low , maybe she'd would have never written Harry Potter."

This completely misses the point of the spectrum-odds. J. K. Rowling is an amazing writer. She is a master of suspense. She weaves a spellbinding world. If she used the spectrum system I talked about, she would probably find that while overall odds of publishing are very low, the J.K. Rowling-specific odds are actually high.

Dan's comment captures this well:

Many of the comments are supporting ignorance. "You probably won't succeed, so it's best that you don't know the odds." Ridiculous: if the overall odds are against you, all the more reason to know the conditional odds.

Another set of comments imply "Don't give up writing just because the odds of publishing are low." Who said anything about giving up writing? If you actually read my post above, I said:

I'd like to estimate my chances of ever getting published. If it's low, e.g. 1%, I just won't bother sending out manuscripts. Instead I'll write solely for enjoyment.

The time spent on printing out manuscripts, binding them, and mailing them could be spent on doing more writing.

Why do we promote making blind decisions? Instead of saying, "The odds are low, so you should avoid discovering what they are." we should be saying, "The odds are low, and you should find out exactly what they are, so you can make a rational choice on whether you will try anyway."

Quantum Hoops!

Last night I went to see the documentary "Quantum Hoops" in Berkeley.



It follows the Caltech basketball history, focusing on the team's losing streak between 1985 through 2006 (the year the film was made). During all those decades, the Caltech basketball team did not win a single game.

I bought movie tickets online, for fear the showing would sell out. My companions laughed at this. They were right about the audience turnout. But we did run into a number of Techers in the theatre.

The documentary had a number of clips with the current coach:



He's so awesome.

He talks about how Caltech players put academics first, and the entire team has only six students who played high school varsity. They compete against colleges that offer basketball scholarships, where most players were starters on their high school varsity team.

Coach: Yeah, Caltech doesn't win championships the way UCLA does, or USC. [pause] But we have a few more Nobel prizes.

My favorite line in the film came when he talked about reducing the point spread from 60 points every game (in 2003) down to only 10 points (in 2006).

Coach: [very proudly] We're only losing by ten points this season. Winning has gone from impossible to improbable!

girltalk

At a big group dinner with Laura and Katherine, two Googlers that I see occasionally.

Katherine: These new "Sex in the City" ripoffs are so lame. Like the one with Lucy Liu. The characters are not believable.

Laura: The three of us need to make one.

Me: Where should it be set?

Katherine: Not here. Or NYC. Oh, it should be set in Rome.

Me: [appraising her] You could pass for being Italian.

Katherine: I AM Italian.

...

Me: Our show needs some kind of drama. Like, my character meets an Italian guy, and he's really cute. But it turns out he has chest hair.

Laura: Yeah! So much chest hair. But he's very sweet to you.

Me: Right, so my character is torn.

Laura: [offhandedly, while eating salad] The hair is on his back too.

Me: [recoiling]

Laura: He cooks dinner for you.

airport brainstorming

At SJC airport this afternoon, waiting to fly to LA for Google's company trip to Disneyland.

Me: "My last couple of blog posts were probably only funny to Googlers."

Dan: "No, they weren't funny even to me."

Me: "What the hell!"

Dan: [shrugging]

...

Five of us sat around a table at California Pizza Kitchen at the airport.

Jim: "XXX broke up after getting engaged."

Me: "Oh, why? He's such a nice guy!"

Jim: "I don't know the story. I just know he broke up."

Me: "If only there was some service that collates people's breakup stories. I want to know the details."

Bob: "This can be a Google product. Organizing the world's breakup information and making it universally accessible and useful."

Me: [laughing]

Dan: "Every day when you log into Gmail, there can be a text entry box, 'Did anything embarrassing happen last night?'"

funny streetview video

X showed me this video yesterday. I laughed so hard.