Google: Human beings can finally change the weather as they wish

After aeons of dealing with the immense costs from the unpredictabilities of Nature, human beings finally mastered the skill to manipulate the weather as they would like to. Now, just google "weather", and you will see a control panel of your local weather:

But more power also calls for more responsibilities:

Unfortunately, this service of Google probably only lasts for today, so hurry up and make good use of it!

LaTeX Tips: Basics

LaTeX Tips: Basics

A nice and succinct article introducing the basic philosophy and typesetting rules of LaTeX.

What do economics doctoral students study?

Greg Mankiw's Blog: Home for the Holidays

To be discussed in my micro course. A video worth sharing.

Happiness, Fulfillment, and Meaning

I received an email from a sort-of pen pal a few days ago asking about living one's life and success.

I do not value short-term happiness very much. Happiness is good; but it is like the instantaneous utility function – whatever its magnitude, at every point in time it has only zero measure, and once past, it wouldn't mean anything anymore. What I pursue is fulfillment, or long-term happiness, which is only realized after a long period of fermentations and meditations. I think the process of achieving this fulfillment should feel like the experience Cal Newport describes in his blog post today. I am not implying that short-term happiness does not provide me with utility; it is that I only slightly discount happiness in future periods, that the joy at this moment wouldn't seem as significant as it may.

When I was a kid, I started thinking about the meaning of my own existence. The life time of a human being, a hundred and twenty years at most. There are so many people on this planet, and your own being would not mean much at all. The world is still the same whether you are here or you are not. Once you are gone, you are gone forever; even your descendants probably will not know your name two hundred years from now. Whatever you have accomplished, once you are passed, they wouldn't mean the slightest to you. The utility beyond the capital T is always null. I thought about death at this point, but still there was a little unwillingness, as if I was denying myself of my own conclusion, and trying to spend more time seeking the deeper meaning of life that I hadn't realized. If you will die one day certainly, and everything will be lighter than the clouds once you have passed, why not devote your life to work on something big, something larger than yourself. That was why I once resolved to become a writer. I think writers are a group of most influential people. Even when emperors and kings were forgotten, the names of writers still resound in people's languages. The legacies ancient writers and philosophers left us are still guiding the advancement of modern society. I chose my career in academia also because I wanted to leave something to mankind, and contribute a little bit to the advancement of our understanding of the world and of ourselves, and to leave my trace in my limited life.

Peace.

My Pursuit

The one thing I value most is intelligence. It is not academic excellence - as a doctoral student, academics is evidently one of my major pursuits; however it is not everything I am after. I do not mean cleverness either. Being clever is a genius, a gift, and it is certainly fortunate that one is quick in mind; but it is not essential. A very intelligent man can be without an exceptional quickness.

By intelligence, I mean the sharpness of mind, the sheer ability to accept information and make sense of it, the ability to see things that are not apparent by sight, and to make out the interior of what has happened, and generalize it to a grander subject, grander than our own humble beings.

Scholastic pursuits, as a major part of my life, is like an art to me. It is like practicing calligraphy, one of my longest-lasting pastimes: The greater you learn, the abler you become to appreciate the beauty of it, once your proficiency in the subject has reached a level that provides aesthetic value to what you do. Yes, academics is an art to me, an enjoyment, and a means to make a reasonably comfort living, in a life filled with the amusement of reading and thinking.

I hope at the age of sixty, when I will be freed from earthly obligations, I can spend a few years in a Daoist temple, to reflect on all my life’s happenings, and find the truth of Dao. Fangjing

Google Chrome: Page header and footer in print

Modify page header and footer when printing a page - Google Chrome Help

After all these years, Chrome finally supports headers and footers in print.

A joke on mathematicians

This was told by my optimization professor.

A physicist and a mathematician were asked to solve two problems. The first problem was that given a waterfall, an empty kettle, and a stove, to prepare hot water. The physicist collected water from the waterfall with the kettle, and then put it on the stove to boil it; the mathematician did the same. The second problem was to prepare hot water given a waterfall, a kettle, this time already filled with water, and a stove. The physicist directly put the kettle of water on the stove to boil; but the mathematician first poured away the water from the kettle, and then the second problem was reduced to the first problem, solving the second one.

Market for everything: Name your couple stars

International Star Registry: Name a Star for Someone Special | Unique Birthday Gift - Buy a Star Name Today - Couple's Star Group

Since 1979 International Star Registry has been offering the gift to name the stars and is now offering your chance to name two stars in honor of your favorite couple. Couple’s Stars are available for couples, loved ones and family members. Two stars from the same solar system. Residing in the sky. Together forever.

Thank Terri for the pointer.

Turning Stress into an Asset

Turning Stress into an Asset - Amy Gallo - Best Practices - Harvard Business Review

Thank Terri for the pointer.

Google+

For one thing, the people-finding algorithm of Facebook is a clumsy one. If Google+ can effectively develop a superior algorithm to match friends (which is one thing Google is insanely good at), it may be a game changer.

A useful tool for finding LaTeX symbols

Detexify LaTeX handwritten symbol recognition

You draw the symbol by hand, the app returns you the code.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

My supervisor lent this book to me for my reading. It seems an interesting book (definitely more so than Mas-Colell), mingling graphic design with quantitative analysis. Edward R. Tufte, the author, is a professor emeritus in statistics at Yale.

Battery life - Does constant charging harm my cellphone?

battery life - Does constant charging harm my cellphone? - Android - Stack Exchange

Merriam-Webster's Recently Popular Words

I found this most popular words ranking by M-W. It lists the most frequently searched for entries for the past 24 hours, 7 days, and 4 months. This could include vocabulary related to current happenings and can be an interesting and effective guide to vocab learners.

Eminem - Love The Way You Lie (Live) ft. Rihanna

Physicists and applied mathematicians earn more than economists

20 Best-Paying College Degrees in 2011. By college major. But at least we are doing better than the financiers. Overall engineers win. Here are also the worst-paying ones.

Pinyin Joe - Android smartphones Chinese support

Pinyin Joe - Android smartphones Chinese support

Got Chinese pinyin input on my Motorola Atrix 4G. Using Google Pinyin IME. Great app.

Google buys Motorola Mobility to 'supercharge' Android OS - USATODAY.com

Google buys Motorola Mobility to 'supercharge' Android OS - USATODAY.com

I think this is the most well-pointed major acquisition that Google has made in recent years.

Letter to my cousin

Congratulations on your admission to xxx High School!

I have been looking for this book for you, How to Become a High School Superstar by Cal Newport, since nearly two years ago, when it was first published, and now I can finally present it to you. Trust me: This is no ordinary high school study guide. I have read both other books by Cal, namely How to Become a Straight-A Student and How to Win at College; the prior for three times. They truly revolutionized my ideas about how to score straight As in college and get into top grad schools/find high-paying jobs. Without these insights, I don’t know if I could have made it, in an admission year as competitive as the one I have just experienced.

In a way, Cal is a lot like me, always eager to discover new methods and techniques to do things better by spending minimal effort as possible. Methods learned from here won’t be in the mouth of your high school counselors, nor will it be found in any conventional high school study guides.

Why I believe such methods exist? I have been a follower of such unorthodox teachings. In reminiscence, I think I have much enjoyed my high school life. Unlike many of my classmates, I maintain a balanced schedule, with at least one hour of physical exercise each day, a healthy diet, and even right before the Gaokao I hardly ever went to bed later than 10pm – even though due to the long distance between my home and school, I had to spend at least two hours each day in the traffic. I had a wide range of hobbies: I was the key member in the school choir; I practiced calligraphy intensively – in the summers I usually spent one to two hours each day writing; I wrote a blog regularly; I participated in school singing contests; I read comic books and watched many cartoons; I maintained wide social circles, and hung out with friends every now and then. However, this didn’t blur the fact that I have been a top student in high school all the way through. I discovered all these efficient working methods by trials and errors, but you don’t have to. With the help of this book, I am sure you will do much better than what I have accomplished.

I can still vividly remember how I managed to get myself into Beijing No.4 High School; and I am confident to say, had I just followed what my high school teachers told us to do, without putting into much of my own thought and experiments, I would have achieve merely what my other classmates have by following those simple-minded methods to grind and work hard. But remember, everyone knows you should work hard; and believe it or not, nowadays many high school students work really hard; and if you don’t have some unique skills and knowledge, in modern management science jargons, your competitive advantages, you will only be that boring and pathetic average hard-working student, which I bet you’d never want to.

Finally, if you would merely read and follow each and every method proposed in this book, the whole point of reading it would be lost. This book does not only teach you these methods per se; the most important is that you should develop methods that are unconventional and that work for you and not necessarily any other, if you want to achieve more than the average. If after reading this book, you would feel the passion for discovering and applying new methods to your studies, and constantly working on improving them, and forget about the worn-out clichés that those dignified high school counselors have been repeating for decades and childishly believe would work in today’s competitive world, that would suffice.

I hope this fresh start in high school will bring you six years of joy and reward, and that when you look back, you will feel the fulfillment that everything that can be done has been done, and you have achieve the most out of your natural talent. Don’t just be a star; be a superstar.

US Student Visa Interview

I finally received my US visa today. It has been more than two months since I indicated my acceptance of IU's offer. The I-20 form came quite late, and right after its arrival, I scheduled for an interview on this late Tuesday.

I got up at seven in the morning, and by eight forty-five, in full suit, I was already on my way to the Consulate. The Consulate was not far from the Central train station, yet the complexity of the transportation system on Hong Kong Island allowed my earlier pre-visit to the Consulate to pay off. It rained a little, and once I even had to seek shelter at the nearby St. John's Cathedral. Thankfully the rain soon faded, and I went up to the US Consulate.

Visitors need to enter at the gate upper on the Garden Road. The entrance hall is an open-space courtyard covered with a transparent plastic roof. Before you can line up to register, your belongings need to be searched through and examined. After that you can wait before the several windows for the officer to make a preliminary check of your visa documents. It was fast, and the lady collected my passport, visa application fee receipt, SEVIS fee receipt, DS-160 confirmation, and I-20, and gave me a slip with a queuing number on it. After disposing of the water in my bottle, I was allowed into the consulate building.

Here your belongings need to go through an X-ray machine, and yourself need to go passing an X-ray door. I deposited my phone and iPod, both powered off, before going through the X-ray. Like for most men, the door beeped when I went across it, and I was manually examined.

There were a few score people in the hall, and the interview windows as well as the post office windows are all located in this hall. There is a drinking fountain in case you feel thirsty. You will be beckoned first at Window 1 to take fingerprints. Then you can wait for the interview. During this time you may obtain a post office registered mail order and fill it out; this can be done right after the interview as well. I waited for around half an hour in total, then I was beckoned to Window 3, where a young Caucasian lady awaited.

We greeted each other, and she began with, "So you are going to do a PhD in the States?" "Yes." "And your major will be Economics?" "Yes." "I see you have been given a fellowship. Congratulations!" "Thank you!"

"So why did you choose Indiana University?" I have thought about this question before the interview, and answered, "My field of research is Macroeconomics, and IU is very strong in this field. That's why I picked IU over other programs." She seemed satisfied with my answer. "Have you been to the United States before?" "Not yet." "So this will be your first time in U.S.! Are you excited, or nervous?" "I think more excited, than nervous." I answered smilingly. She finally said, "Your visa's approved. Enjoy your trip to America!"

I said thank you for several times, and then brought the blue card with a number on it that the officer just gave me to the post office counter. It costs HKD25 for local registered delivery, and the post officer told me that I could expect to receive the visa by Friday. I cheerfully left the Consulate.

Throughout the process, the interview booking confirmation was not required. I am not sure if the officers checked that I have made the appointment in their database. Therefore I still advise visa applicants to make an appointment before visiting the Consulate to avoid unnecessary waste of time. The visa officer remained smiling during the process. As other students who were interviewed earlier told me, there were mostly yes/no questions only, and took only about a minute.