Category: Blog

I sat in my Senior English class in high school.  Our classroom opens into the hallway; movable panels separate our classroom from the next.  This particular classroom sits on the end of our hallway.  I spent a fair number of my afternoon hours in this room that year.  One afternoon, I got into a discussion with a classmate, he was popular and the class president, if memory serves.  During this discussion he calls me a ‘sumo wrestler’.  I am both Chinese (not Japanese) and overweight.

It was a derogatory reference to both my race and my weight.  Having dealt with interactions like this often, I understood that while I need not escalate, I did need to respond.  In my mind, I searched for a proportional response.  I called him a ‘spook’; yes, he was black.  I knew it was derogatory and racist, and I still did it.

Continue reading “How much do we really value life?” →

I grew up Chinese (unyieldingly rational?) and have a natural inclination for engineering problems.  No, these are not correlated.  Some allege that I have artistic tendencies too.  Many years ago, I got a Wacom tablet to draw on my computer.  However, it worked great except for one thing, I naturally use my right hand for everything.  Allow me to elaborate; I had both a mouse and drawing tablet to the right of my keyboard and in order to use them both interchangeably I needed to move the mouse pad and tablet back and forth.  My engineering mind decided that I could fix this with a very simple adjustment…  I’d move one left of the keyboard and start to use it with my left hand.

Continue reading “Who we are and who we love aren’t ‘choices’” →

I have a confession to make, I’m a bit of a traditionalist.  Many of my tastes lean towards the retrospective; I won’t apologize for it.  It’s not quite the “kids get off my lawn” sentiment, but still I may sound like that crochety old man at times.  I speculate that it’s a function of a couple of forces.  First, I have good memory and knowing precisely how something works and behaves brings great comfort.  Second, I’m a sentimentalist.

Continue reading “There’s nothing wrong with retro” →

I was a freshman in college at the University of Miami and lived in Pearson Hall.  One afternoon, I came back from classes to find a note left by Guy, my suitemate.  It read that someone broke into my car, a 1966 Mustang, and I should contact campus security.  They broke my small triangular window and took my stereo and battery; the latter was especially petty.  My family got a new battery and drove it down; I got a replacement window from a second hand shop; I didn’t replace the stereo.

Continue reading “You only get what you literally pay for” →

This occurred sometime after I arrived here in Washington state.  Some local citizens were fascinated by the story of a local black teen, DeShawn Johnson.  Truthfully, he fascinated some and irked others.

Over the years he broke into businesses after hours simply to feed and amuse himself.  Occasionally, he broke into people’s homes while they were unoccupied, staying there like Goldilocks; this entailed eating food from their refrigerators and soaking in hot baths.  He preferred to stay on the run, so he stole vehicles…  a lot of them.  In fact, he lived here but ‘travelled’ all over the country precisely this way; he maintained this for two years.

Continue reading “The history of a local teen” →

Imagine this hypothetical, you and I make plans to play tennis.  Initially, we meet at your home and we travel to a tennis court.  I have a bag slung over my shoulder and carry a tennis racquet in my hand.  We get along well but haven’t seen each other for months.  As we walk towards the tennis courts and pass many people, I reach back with my racquet smack someone squarely on the face and continue walking as if nothing occurred.  This stuns you.  You are shocked; you know me to be a reasonable person.  This is not anything you can comprehend.  I still have the racquet in my hand, so you’re reluctant to say anything.  We continue walking.

As we make our way to the courts, we pass many more people.  However, you’re still in stunned by the event that transpired.  As your mind is racing and contemplating what you should do, I again reach back and this time I strike someone squarely on the knee.  They collapse on the ground and cower in fear.  You are still in shock and continue to walk but put more distance between us.  This continues.

Continue reading “Establishing hate crime by probability” →

This is an embarrassing story, but I’ll tell it for two reasons.  First, one of my aspirations when writing this blog is to be honest, even if that doesn’t necessarily paint me in a good light.  Second, it illustrates a subtle point that many of us don’t think about much but is important to mention.

Few years ago, I wandered down to the cafeteria to get lunch like most afternoons.  Our cafeteria is in a cluster of four buildings, serves hundreds of people, and has many different stations.  I came down right around noon, so it was busy.  As I stood in one line to get my food, my mind wandered, and I people watched.  I took note of a young woman several feet in front of me on the next station; she was facing away.  She was sharply dressed and had long flowing hair.  For a brief moment, I thought to myself, “She’s cute.  I wonder what she looks like.”

Continue reading “Is this chrysoprase or seafoam?” →

This is probably not a great surprise to many of you, but I thoroughly enjoy watching MythBusters.  In many ways, it is a test engineer’s dream.  You start with a premise, in our case the myth, and then you go through different means to try to either prove or disprove that myth.  One of my favorite episodes is the one where they blow up a cement truck with a shocking, at least to me, outcome; I heard it’s one of the most popular clips.

The element that I find equally appealing about watching the show is the meticulous way by which they describe each scenario and what kinds of approaches they have to each problem.  Some inevitably fail, as you might expect.  Every great once in a while, they encounter an unexpected condition for which they did not account.  The vast majority of the time, their approaches are meticulously well thought out.

Continue reading “The sheer joy of blowing things up” →

Many mornings we have strawberries for breakfast.  I wash them for both of us and slice them.  One morning I came upon a moldy strawberry.  This, in and of itself, is not that uncommon.  Naturally, I try to minimize the instances of  this happening to our strawberries because I hate to be wasteful.  I blame myself; this should not have happened.  That is, I either picked ones that were moldy (or close to it) or waited too long to eat them.  I curse and toss it in the compostable bin.

Continue reading “What if there’s more to mold?” →

I started watching The Walking Dead a number of years ago.  Without giving away too much of the plot, it is a television series about the zombie apocalypse; it’s certainly an interesting genre.  I got emotionally vested in the characters, so I continued to watch.  Being an engineer, I elect to selectively forget and give artistic license to how zombies continue to move even if they don’t necessarily fuel up, as in consume ‘food’, though I still have the ‘conservation of energy’ voice screaming in my head.

Apart from that, another element that tickles my fancy is the engineering logistics to surviving.  This part of it is not unique to the zombie apocalypse, but also applies to apocalypse in general.  You’ll often see elements of this if you were to watch doomsday prepper shows.  I have a friend who has aptly labeled TWD as ‘misery porn’.

Continue reading “Safety and the zombie apocalypse” →