Ming’s Wisdom

A lot of us have taken medicines in the form of a pill. However, most of us probably have never thought about the distinct sequence of motions that produce the action of swallowing a pill. I’ve found that more often than not, a successful pill-swallowing involves the following:

1. Put pill in mouth, on top of tongue.
2. Gulp a small mouthful of water, but do not swallow.
3. Pill floats in mouthful of water near center of mouth.
4. Swallowing pulls pill with water.

This sequence prevents mishaps such as when swallowed too fast, only the water goes down while the pill is stuck on the tongue. The key is that the pill floats to the middle of the mouth so that it follows the flow of the water. Sure, most people already know how to swallow a pill, but this could be good knowledge in case you need to teach a kid or younger sibling, who often have trouble with it.

Next is a tip on keeping your laundry wrinkle-free. I’ve long used washers and dryers, but clothes would come out wrinkly, even if I thrash the clothes around to shake out the wrinkles after taking them out of the dryer. This usually involved quick heavy movements of the hands while holding the clothes, pulling the clothes up, then quickly pulling back down, to cause a wave movement in the clothes and lots of pulling force to pull the wrinkles to become straighter. Well doing this after taking clothes out of the dryer works okay, but doing this after taking clothes out of the washer and before putting into the dryer works great. If you do it between the washer and dryer, your clothes will come out with much fewer wrinkles.

This next tip most people already know about, but it’s useful enough to put out there again. Get your gas at night or early morning when the temperature is colder. Gas stations measure how much you pump using volume, not mass. “Pounds” or “grams” are measurements of mass, while “gallons” and “liters” are measurements of volume. Mass measures how much you really get, volume measures how much space it takes. And because fuel expands in heat, the same amount of fuel takes up more space (gallons) when it’s hotter, and more gallons means you’re paying more for the same amount of fuel if the temperature is hotter. So, pump gas in the coolest time of the day and you’ll save a little bit of money on gas.

This is an focused study of a recent event that reveals multiple failure points in our society and institutions. This case specifically studies recent activities in Humboldt squid movement and the commotion that followed.

The Humboldt squid is a large squid commonly found in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, around 200 to 700 meters in below the surface. In recent years their habitual territory has apparently expanded north to California through Alaska, from their original location off the coast of South America. This fact, paired with anecdotal evidence from aboard fishing boats about their aggressive behavior, quickly spiraled into sensational stories of alien-like creatures of the deep with massive tentacles invading the lives of humans everywhere. Before reading on, watch this excerpt from PBS on the subject: http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/the-fierce-humboldt-squid.

Go back and watch the linked video if you haven’t yet. Some of the following will pull information from that clip. I will break down the rest of the article into the different aspects of our society that have fundamentally gone wrong to make these recent events possible.

First of all, there’s been a failure of both the general public and the scientific community to sit quietly and observe all that the world has to offer. There have been dozens of documentaries (airing frequently in recent years) produced by widely-respected television channels such as Discovery and PBS that claim the squid are instinctively aggressive and cannibalistic, to the point of eating anything they come across. Almost all of these documentaries draw off observations from squid-fishing boats, where the squid are found in a fight-or-die stressful situation with many of its neighbors being hooked to their death by people. Observing squid while your boat-mate is actively participating in slaughtering the squid’s partners would not lead to the same results as observing them in their natural habitat.

Worst part is, this is coming from professors from leading research universities. In the video, a Stanford professor says, “This squid, only thinks about two things, one is eating and one is reproducing. Even though they have big brains, I don’t think they spend a lot of time philosophizing”, and assumes that during times when he cannot observe the squid, that they are probably feeding. This would not be an unexpected comment from a non-scientist, but for a professor who has been studying marine biology for 30 years, a summarization of an agile and highly developed animal species to have only two types of thought processes paints a grim picture of the state of education in our society, especially considering that this professor probably teaches a lot of soon-to-be misinformed students. In addition, he studies the squid behavior hitched on a fishing boat, from a vantage point at the water’s surface, while dozens of lures with sharp hooks attract squid to their death while other squid watch. It also brings up the question, what exactly, are the qualifications that an individual must have, in order to become a Stanford professor?

And on top of that the whole commotion reveals a huge lack of responsibility, both for the environment and for accurate portrayal of facts in the media. These documentaries simply state that we are facing a huge problem of squid invading the territory of fisheries and are causing fishery economic numbers to go down. They do cite climate change as a cause for the mass migration, but most people’s solution is to hunt and eat more squid, instead of fixing the root problem of what we’ve done to this earth to cause that climate change. This is all aired on our most trusted channels for learning on television, Discovery channel and PBS. The clip linked to in this article is from PBS, from a northern California public broadcasting channel that claims it “provides consistently high quality public media that informs, educates, entertains and engages… reflect the value we place on human dignity, lifelong learning and the power of ideas, and on the importance of community service and civic participation”. Yet their summary of the show which aired last year, says “Packs of fierce Humboldt Squid attack nearly everything they see, from fish to scuba divers”, having no proven case of Humboldt predation on humans. All the while, northern California is actually considered one of the most educated areas in the country, yet no one decided to dig deeper into the story. Discovery channel is no better, airing repeated series of shows such as “Squid Attack” without giving viewers full background information so that the viewer at least has the opportunity to ponder the possibility that the squid are not vicious creatures invading “our” territory. Again, they have access to some of the best minds in the world, yet most shows on the Humboldt squid have been accounts of their cannibalistic behavior, and no one decided to question it.

The human reaction to the whole series of squid migrations also brings up a question of how much compassion do we really have for our fellow species. Our views (as a society) on many of the issues we face are of “us” versus “them”. The squid are not one of “us”, and therefore they can be thought of as creatures without emotion, without logical thinking, without communal bond. In fact Humboldt squid have the biggest nerve fiber of any creature on earth (this includes humans) and a large, complex brain structure. They live in communities of up to a thousand, and hunt cooperatively to gather small fish and krill. Yet when scientists saw one particular behavior, they reacted with one common explanation. In the particular circumstance when squid were being pulled out of the water with hooks by fishermen, other squid immediately came up to the hooked squid, and grabbed them with their tentacles. Scientists concluded that they must be extremely aggressive creatures and are seizing the opportunity to eat their friends while they are weak. As an intelligent creature that lives and hunts cooperatively in large communities, in a situation where food is not scarce, eating each other would not seem to be the logical action to take when a predator is near, making this somewhat of an odd explanation to offer. Other scientists cite that they have found pieces of Humboldt squid in others’ stomachs, though this still does not prove that they are habitual cannibals, as even the nicest of humans has resorted to cannibalism when faced with scarce food/life or death situations as in extreme after-plane crash survival cases. I have yet to see any scientist offer up evidence in attempt to prove that the observed behavior under fishing boats is indeed an act of opportunistic eating instead of trying to pull a friend back from a vicious human predator. Almost everyone listens to the scientists (after all, they are the scientists), and happily offer to hunt down the squid and eat them. This same type of thinking of “them” as all cold-blooded creatures incapable of intelligence and bonding, has created many of the problems we have faced as a society. Stereotypes and racism both stem from an intrinsic distrust of “them” with an arbitrary boundary drawn not based on individual personality but on skin color or other attribute. Religions intolerant of the style of thinking of “them” have caused division among people, and even wars. In fact it was a view that “they” are not as intelligent, that “they” have no emotions, that justified slavery for hundreds of years.

The world has improved over the years and some have become more tolerant of others, but there’s a lot more to improve on, and the small incident of our perception of Humboldt squid are only a peek into how people’s collective minds can lack a compassion for the others that share our earth. Overall, even a piece of news that hasn’t gotten much attention on CNN or the world news, can show us so much about the current state of affairs. If you’ve read to this point, you’re probably a very intelligent and educated person who cares a lot about the world, and you might never have realized that even in this day certain segments of the world (*ahem* well known universities) are probably not quite as compassionate and environmentally responsible as you thought, that education and media truthfulness are still in a sad state, and even the most respected “experts” cannot always be trusted.

Squid brains: 1, Human intelligence: 0.

A little snapshot of us in action!

It amazed me when I opened up this site and looked at my last article, it was a whole month ago! Life has definitely changed in the past couple months now that I look back on it. My decision to leave the corporate world and enter a world of new possibilities almost 3 months ago was definitely the right choice to make. Looking back, these are the things that have changed:

1. There is no longer anyone to tell me what to do. The only things that determine what I do now are what makes sense to me and what inspires me.
2. Work becomes fun. I’ve had moments where I just didn’t want to leave the work I was doing that day, and didn’t want to go to sleep because I wanted to keep working, and jump up at 8am to do work before breakfast.
3. Life becomes a fast-paced craziness. Starting the moment I wake up, ending around 1am, every day is extreme productivity. Not the kind of productivity where you simply get stuff done. It’s the kind of productivity where you make decisions that will affect you for the next two years, on top of getting stuff done. This comes with a side-effect of forgetting what day of the week it is, and sometimes what month it is.
4. I see a future. It feels like the past 4 years of working for others can be summarized as this: neglecting my own development. Moving up in the corporation really doesn’t count as developing your own abilities, it’s just doing more to develop a group of people that has already taken the time to develop themselves. Unlike earning a salary, everything done now to create income sources builds up, where every action taken multiplies your previous effectiveness by some multiplier.

So it’s really crazy how in the past whole month I have not had 20 minutes to update this site. You must be wondering what I’ve been up to. Well I’ve taken a lot of time working with Johnny to improve our ticket-selling automation code, with good results. We’ve sold some tickets already through the new code (e.g. with less manual work), and we’re super excited.

There’s something else up my sleeve though, done in a slightly larger team, that’s going to be exciting for a lot of you. It’s still in the works, so stay tuned for our release announcement in the near future =).

Today we’re launching the Beta of TicketWatchr.com, our first project since I’ve quit Apple. It’s an online store where you can search for and buy event tickets (sporting events, concerts, theater, etc). We have a feature called Watch It that we think is pretty intriguing, so that you can keep track of ticket prices on our site, so that if you think a ticket’s current price is too high, you can keep a watch on it to get notifications if that price drops.

Johnny and I have been working hard on this site for a while now, so we’d love for you all to check it out, and tell us what you want and what you think can be improved. And since the site is fully functional, if you need some tickets, you can use it to buy the tickets to your local concert or game. =)

It’s been two weeks since the last time I’ve written, so what have I been up to in this time? I’ve been reading The 4-hour Workweek. It’s quickly become my favorite book of all time. I feel that the focus of the book is not solely on reducing the amount of work you do, instead this book is a philosophy to live by in order to become more effective in life, in a fun way. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who would like to become very successful in any aspect of life. If you’ve ever wondered why some people are so gifted, and are always more successful at school without much studying, can have more friends than people you’ve met in your life, run a huge corporation while still having time to hang out on the weekends, this book explains exactly how it’s done.

Some examples of techniques described in the book:

• 95% of what you’re doing currently probably doesn’t contribute to your ultimate goals, so stop doing them
• you have more stuff than you need (every one of you). they take up valuable time and mind-space, so get rid of them
• do enough to get the results you need, and stop stressing about the diminishing returns that require 5x the effort
• time is a measurement of wealth just as important as money
• giving others the power to make decisions, so that you don’t need to waste time making them

Many of the ideas introduced take much more involved explanation that I won’t go into here. I felt that some of the concepts have really shown me a new way of thinking. I recommend that everyone read the book and at least give its ideas a chance, and possibility get much more in return.

Let me know if you read it and what you thought of it!

It’s been around 2 months now since I’ve started this site (technically 8 months, with the first 6 months having no time to write in it), and it’s been a pretty good success for being 2 months old, at least to the standards of what I was expecting. I wanted to let everyone see the current state of my site.

Money spent:

• 19.90 domain
• 22.90 hosting

Money earned:

• 0.00

Unfortunately Google hasn’t seemed smart enough to find interesting enough ads to captivate my lovely readers.

But here’s some more encouraging news:

You can see here that in the two months that I started actively writing for the site, the number of page visits has increased to 55 in July, and 124 in August. Since I don’t have data for January through June, an accurate depiction is to just imagine a flat line at zero from January all the way to June, since there was no content on the site yet. I think this is a pretty good growth, especially considering August isn’t even over yet, and already has double the visits of July.

Another achievement I’m pretty proud of is getting bots to crawl the site. Google crawled the site once in May, and it would be another two months before it crawled again in early July. Now, with multiple pages available and updated content every so often, Google comes several times a day, and I also get other sites like AskJeeves, Yahoo, and some blog search bots. It definitely feels like a sense of accomplishment.

To view the site from a different perspective, here’s a map of the world, color-coded for visitors (only readers, bots are not included) to this site:

To my pleasant surprise, I’ve gotten visitors from several countries. The bulk is still in the U.S, but there’s one from Canada, China, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and Netherlands. That’s very cool. In the U.S, I’ve gotten visits from Florida, Michigan, Georgia, and California. Now drilling down into more detail about the biggest cluster of readers:

There’s 7 visits from San Jose, 7 from Sunnyvale, 8 from Berkeley, 6 from Emeryville, 1 from San Francisco, etc, around the ratio I expected. However, the big surprise here is the big orange dot down south. Orange County apparently is the one largest concentration of readers of this site to date, and they come back repeatedly and stay for enough time to read a few articles. And the interesting thing is, I don’t know of anyone that knows about this site who is currently in Southern California, so I’m very intrigued who the mystery reader(s) are =).

The comparative speed of different components in a computer system is often a source of confusion. For example, a programmer could attempt to optimize their program by reducing the number of processor cycles needed to get something done, in exchange for needing one extra hard drive access, thinking that reducing their loop to one-tenth of its original size would surely provide more speed benefit than the hard drive access takes away.

To put things in perspective, I’ve assigned a number to each process available in a computer, to show their relative speed. (If something has a number of 13, that means in the time it can be performed once, something else with number 1 can be performed 13 times).

• 1                                                             processor instruction (1/3 billionth of a second)
• 2                                                             cache access
• 30                                                           memory access
• 75,000                                                   solid state drive          (1/40,000th of a second (1) )
• 36,000,000                                           hard drive access      (1/100th of a second)
• 480,000,000                                         dvd drive access
• 50,000,000 to 1,500,000,000            internet access          (1/3rd of a second (2) )

This should really put things into perspective. A billion instructions worth of program can be executed before the first communication can be established with another computer on the internet across the globe. Of course, these are just rough numbers representing times to first access, but it should give you an idea how vast these differences are.

What this means for non-programmers is several things (these astounding numbers are the reason behind these common suggestions):

1. if you backup all your pictures and documents to a hard drive or solid state drive, you’ll be able to access it much faster than if you make DVDs or use a backup website.
2. copying commonly used items from cd onto a hard drive will make them open much faster
3. if your computer feels like it’s slow, and you hear lots of hard drive access noises, buy more memory so that programs don’t need to resort to saving overflow from memory to hard disk.
4. if you often work with games or Photoshop, or other programs that might need to access lots of files often, then a solid state drive could make your life a lot easier.

What this means for programmers is that, in the vast majority of programs, being even a little smart about not accessing drive storage or the internet can have more speed benefit than even the most clever hacks to speed up other program code. For example, instead of asking for the same information twice from the internet, save it to memory to re-use later, it will speed up a small portion of your program by at least one hundred million percent .

Notes:

1) solid state drives are much faster at getting to files than hard drives, but sustained copying speed is similar.

2) internet access speeds vary depending on distance to the remote computer, and the quality of the link between the two computers. in general, you never know how long it will take.

People are the most angry at their loved ones. Sometimes, you wonder why your family is always so polite to strangers, while so frustrated at home.

I’ve always been unhappy about this fact, but as I grow up I’ve realized that I can’t seem to escape it either. I would get very angry at my sister for not having good habits to keep her eyes, teeth, and sleeping schedule healthy. Frankly if other people decided to eat candy and not brush their teeth, I wouldn’t say anything, or might mention in passing, not because I’m more polite to the outside, but because I don’t really care about them as much. In the end, the more love and care is involved, the higher the stake involved; that means more hurt when you see that things don’t go as well as they could. And that can cause you to become more angry. And that sucks, for everyone.

I really apologize if you fell victim to me being angry. Sure, I can make the excuse of it’s because I care (and it really is because I care ), but really I think I need to work on not doing this. Anyone has had similar experiences?

I’ve been asked a lot by my friends how I feel about the recent Foxconn iPhone incident, where a Foxconn employee committed suicide after being accused of stealing an iPhone prototype. Having worked at Apple on the iPhone 3G and 3GS, spending almost half my time on Foxconn grounds and working with Foxconn employees in Southern China, I feel obligated to make a few observations.

First of all, I don’t know very much about this incident other than the details revealed by the press, so I can’t draw any conclusions about whether any stealing was going on or whether either company did anything wrong. However, both having seen the front lines of Apple and Foxconn employee relations, and being Chinese American, I can draw a few conclusions from my knowledge of the culture of both.

Apple is, in summary, American. People work hard on a product, driven by consumer demand and holiday shopping. High stress levels and long working hours are what employees have chosen through their own free will, and in return they get salaries, stocks, and the rush of developing the next big thing. People are willing to negotiate and yell at each other over what’s best for the product, and in the end the best solutions are chosen. Foxconn however, as expected, is much more engrained in a Chinese culture. There is a high regard for elders, both age-wise and in company position. Chinese people are very accommodating, to the point of sacrificing themselves. People work hard as well, not so much driven by satisfying shopping seasons, but by the need to please bosses and customers. The customers, in this case, are Apple.

The moment I landed in China I was put into a big VIP van with chauffeur carrying my luggage, given a gigantic VIP badge to hang around my neck, and guards stood up to salute when I walked by. And what did I do to deserve this? I worked for Apple. To this day I’ve felt the VIP badge to be a huge oversized eyesore that brought unnecessary hierarchy to what otherwise could have been a much healthier relationship. We solved engineering problems together, as expected. We worked hard together, as expected. We sat in boring meetings between lots of people from both companies, as expected. But what alarmed me, was where the yelling in those meetings was coming from, and to whom it was going to. Apple people yelled at each other, that was fine, whoever got yelled at, yelled back. But Foxconn never yelled back. The mega-monster VIP card breathed a massive force field to block any criticism aimed at Apple.

Well, to be clear, Foxconn was the one to require those VIP badges. Now why would a group of people choose to limit themselves as NOT EQUAL to another group? I think the Chinese culture of being accommodating and respecting status plays a role in this, and the long history of more hierarchy as well. I’ve definitely seen much less pride in Foxconn employees and more humbleness, which seems to fit my general gut feeling from meeting people in Southern China. One other factor is that Apple is in China, doing work speaking ENGLISH. Everyone at Foxconn needs to speak in their second language to communicate, and this automatically gives an impression that the Apple people are “better”. If you reverse that and Apple people had to learn Chinese, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Apple employees were more often the ones who look dazed and slightly confused, and the raising of the voices would come more from the Foxconn side.

Two experiences of mine really highlight how the two company cultures could come together to cause havoc, despite no one party intending any harm. On a Sunday afternoon, two Apple employees, Byron and I, were at the factory. As we worked, a man wearing a mask sprayed a mystery substance all around the area. We were pretty scared, and emailed some people to find out what it was, and why the guards outside were only provided small masks inadequate to protect from the spray. The two of us were some of few people from both companies who made good friends with the guards, and did not treat them as “subordinates”. To our surprise, the response we got from Foxconn was that Apple employees would be notified when the next spraying would occur. Where was the respect for your own health, for the health of our friends who have to work as guards on Sundays? Do they deserve more deadly bug spray than higher ranking managers? To be frank, they probably deserve much less. Later as I recall, was a comment from an Apple employee about how the bathrooms smelled. Foxconn then closed the bathroom to its own workers and made it “VIP Only”. Despite being a polite gesture to solve a problem of bathroom overcrowding, by coincidence it ended up being rich predominantly white Americans being able to use the bathroom, while all the Chinese kids working for low wages weren’t able to access their own bathroom. I was not willing to tolerate any of this. I emailed a huge group of people, included directors and HR, and caused a huge ruckus. And I loved it, since it sent a bunch of people scrambling, and fixed the situation immediately.

In both the experiences, no one from either Apple or Foxconn intended to do any harm, though the end result wasn’t too good. To apply to the current situation where the Foxconn employee committed suicide, I see these factors at work to cause problems out of something very small. Foxconn tends to treat anything Apple as the most important thing it’s ever touched. And Apple tends to be very anal about keeping track of iPhones so that no information leaks. So a combined culture of a one-sided subordinate relationship between Apple and Foxconn, and the worship of the iPhone’s secrecy as the most important aspect of the job, quickly spirals into what happened recently. My guess is that he didn’t steal the phone, and that it was a simple accident of the phone gone missing. After all, working in our offices in Cupertino phones would often go missing for days when coworkers take them to work on in their own offices. In this way Apple employees and Foxconn employees definitely get different treatment. My personal opinion is that no consumer product should be worth a person’s life, no matter how much money that product launch can make. The two companies will really need to figure out these cultural differences to make their relationship more level. I really don’t think Apple did anything to cause this incident, but I’m not saying that Apple has done too much to make sure they are treating their factories in the most respectful manner either.