Information Overlow

When there is demand, there will be supply.

This rule applies for everything under the sun, including information.

Our ancestors realized the importance of information long long time ago.

Chinese even has a legend that when Cang Jie (仓颉） first invented the chinese characters, the whole world was shocked, gods and ghosts cried and the sky just changed color, because they knew humans would be able to access the sacred knowledge from then on. Of course this was a myth, if you are curious, here is the related Wikipedia link (In Chinese). And yes, the picture there really shows this guy has four eyes, I am not sure why, maybe they (the ancient Chinese) believed he was so special that he shouldn't look normal.

No matter in the East or West, literacy was used to be confined to the selected elite few and written articles were considered sacrosanct. But as education becomes more and more ubiquitous, the literacy rate goes up significantly every generation.

Now we are facing information overflow. The Internet is a giant hose connected to an unfathomable deep reservoir of information. No matter what kind of information, you can get them in tonnes. How to address the influx of seemingly overwhelming volume of data is a challenge for everybody.

In fact, information has the same characteristics as the normal tangible items like table, car, chair in the sense they are hard to get rid of from one's house. This observation is easily verified during a house-cleaning, how many times you paused at an item that you seldom or never used and thought "Maybe this will be useful later"?

Sounds familiar? Paul Graham has a good article on stuff here.

MV Time

[Updated Jan 20, 2008]
The original link to youtube was broken. Fixed for you...

Shakira's Underneath your clothes. Nice song.

Weed-Out Courses

Every school has a weed-out course. Weed-out course is the modern equivalent of rite of passage in universities around the world, and their sole function is to screw the newly incoming students, hard. Once you survive, you are in the clan.

For the department of ECE in Purdue, legend has it that deep down the dark alley of EE building where the study room is located, swamps of souls of students died of nerve breakdown for uncompleted assignments wander around, all of them would whisper these same words "ECE 201, ECE 202". Most probably in their next lives they turn to the dark side by majoring in liberal arts like accounting or economics, and from then on have a lot of time on their hands and later even become my bosses. Shit.

I heard this is the weed-out course for MIT EECS: 6.001

Money Lost is Money Lost

I am referring to the recent CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation) fiasco that has sent the global stock markets to roller coaster rides. Even central governments have injected a lot of money to increase liquidity and Fed even went further one step by reducing the main interest rate.

Here is my take:

Imagine there is a hole in your pocket and you lose money as a result. How much will it help if I offer to lend you money with lower interest rate? Definitely it will help, but in the end of the day, there is still loss which affects the bottom line.

In other words, there will be definitely a bumpy ride ahead.

Old Pictures

When organizing my data folders, I found some pictures that I took back in my college days. Enjoy...

MSEE...

Hovde Hall

Hill Top Apartment

Cry

Got this from my friend's blog. Think about this. It's deep.

Price of Theoretical Feature

How much can you pay for undefined feature? Ask Nokia