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- by Changhai Lu -
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I'm a regular LIRR (Long Island Rail Road) rider, and while I considered reading to be the primary benefit of using public transit, I did, more than occasionally, also have the interest of watching the outside world sliding backwards. It is in this secondary interest that I had my biggest complaint (and bewilderment) about LIRR: it has the least transparent windows I have ever seen on public transit. Some of the windows are so uniformly dirty-looking that it is as if they were made of frosted glass. I saw people saying that it was because LIRR trains run east-west, and therefore the south side of the windows is always under sunlight, which eventually degraded the glass. Not sure whether that was insider's knowledge or mere guesswork, and not sure what kind of glass (certainly not the type I have at home) could have undergone such degradation under sunlight (yes I know I'm a physics Ph.D., but that doesn't mean my knowledge covers every corner of the physical world. :-), but even if that's the case, I would still consider it poor management (or a poor choice of material), unless it's universal to all east-west running trains, which I highly doubt.
May 11, 2025 # Ducks in 9/11 Memorial Pools
Saw two ducks in one of the 9/11 Memorial Pools at the World Trade Center complex. Quite a jump/fall to have landed there, and seemed not too far from another one!
May 14, 2025 # Automation and Future
When I was a child, the future that both I and many of the future-telling books imagined was, judged with hindsight, childishly optimistic. Robots, for instance, were imagined to be universal helpers, through which people would be relieved from boring housekeeping tasks and live much more entertaining lives. It never came to my mind (at that time), or to the much-more-matured minds of those who wrote the future-telling books, that AI and automation technologies, of which robots are merely an example, while still quite far from being able to relieve people from housekeeping tasks, might nevertheless seize people's salary-earning jobs first, leaving the affected with no purchasing power for "more entertaining lives". This is, of course, just one example of failed social imagination, and I suppose it raises an immediate follow-up challenge to social imagination, namely (to quote from a video): If we automate everybody's job, who is going to buy all our sh*t?
May 22, 2025 # On Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem
There is a mathematical theorem called the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem, which states that no single-winner voting system exists that satisfies the following so-called fairness conditions (rephrased from Dan Gusfield's Proven Impossible):
1. A candidate that is every voter's top pick must be the winner.
2. No dictator exists whose top pick is automatically the winner.
3. If candidate X is the winner of election A, then he/she must be the winner of election B as long as on
each and every voter's picklist, no candidate below X in election A moves to be above X in election B.
This fancy-looking theorem is not difficult to prove, but as soon as I saw condition 3, I lost interest, because that condition, also called the consistency condition, is by no means "fair". A candidate Y can be right above X on picklists of voters {v} and far below X on picklists of voters {w} in election A, which makes it reasonable to lose to X in an overall sense. Now, without violating the presumption of condition 3, Y can become far above X for {v} and right below X for {w} in election B, pretty much reversing the advantage X enjoyed over Y in election A, and yet condition 3 requires Y to always lose to X. That doesn't look fair at all, and largely negates the value of such theorem whose fanciness, in my opinion, mainly lies in the contrast between real-world intuitiveness and mathematical rigor.
May 29, 2025 # Movie: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Watched the movie Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. It is the latest installment in the Mission: Impossible series, and perhaps the most "impossible" one, as the mission depends on an exceptionally big series of skirmishes/mini-quests, each of which, even alone, seems quite "impossible" to accomplish, and the good guys narrowly come out alive at the last minute, the last second, and even (literally) the last 0.1 second – a very typical Hollywood pattern. Considering that, as another typical Hollywood pattern, the fate of the whole human race is at stake, and relies on the infinitesimal probability that is basically the product of the tiny probabilities of the good guys surviving each of the skirmishes/mini-quests, it requires a truly big and strong heart not to lose hope. A complaint I had about this movie was that some of the skirmishes were pushed, perhaps for the sake of demonstrating how "impossible" the mission was, to a level of evenness that was ridiculous. For instance, it is completely unreasonable that a mere submarine soldier would be able to fight a very even battle with Tom Cruise (i.e. Ethan Hunt in the movie), a super-hero whose skills (of pretty much everything) are supposed to be the best of the best. Such ridiculous evenness of the skirmishes made the movie, though fast-paced in general, sometimes seem slow, tedious, repetitive, and even dull.
Watched the movie Wicked, with which I had made two awkward mistakes: 1. Had mistaken Hocus Pocus for it and gone to the theater one month prior to its release; 2. Missed the actual release due to both busyness and carelessness. But luckily, a theater I frequently visit somehow has been re-showing it, and I, of course, didn't let it escape my attention again. Now that although I already know that this movie was largely popular, positively reviewed, and performed extremely well at the box office, I myself, however, can only rank it as mediocre, largely due to its plot being simplistic and unconvincing. For instance, in a world where animals can be professors (though in the process of being oppressed), I don't see a place for green-skin-phobia. For instance, it is too childish, in fact too foolish, that Madame Morrible and The Wizard, two figures of highest rank, should let Elphaba gain insuppressible power before knowing what kind of person she is...
BTW, is it just me who feels some similarity between The Wizard in this movie and the one in the 2013 movie Oz the Great and Powerful? Both are ordinary men utilizing some steampunk technologies. Of course, one seems like a bad man and the other is good, so I suppose they are not meant to be the same. :-)
June 11, 2025 # Solution to a Word Annoyance
Microsoft Word is the tool I use for generating PDF files, and all my (own) E-Books are generated this way. Recently, however, I noticed that many images that were originally on my computer, later embedded into a Word doc, and through which landed in a PDF file, carry their original file paths as the default image tooltips. Needless to say, such tooltips, which inadvertently disclose the folder structures of the computer on which the PDF file was created, are both ugly and annoying. How to clear them (for all existing images)? I did some searching and found some solutions. But all except one need to be applied to images one by one, and therefore are unfeasibly tedious if the number of images is large. The only one that stands out is the one that I'm writing this post to share. It uses the following Macro (can be created through View → Macro → Create, and set "RemoveImageTooltips" as the Macro name):
Sub RemoveImageTooltips()
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Dim Rng As Range, Shp As Shape, iShp As InlineShape
With ActiveDocument
For Each Rng In .StoryRanges
With Rng
For Each Shp In .ShapeRange
Shp.AlternativeText = ""
Next
For Each iShp In .InlineShapes
iShp.AlternativeText = ""
Next
End With
Next
End With
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
MsgBox "All Image Tooltips Removed", vbOKOnly
End Sub
June 12, 2025 # Movie: Ballerina
Watched the movie Ballerina. If, as I claimed in a previous post, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has the most "impossible" mission, then Ballerina probably has the most exaggerated killer. In a mere 12 years, in addition to being trained as a professional ballerina, the female killer that is the heroine of this movie mastered all the skills needed to be a super-killer. Through numerous ferocious battles, many of which were creatively bloody, this "ballerina", in revenge for the death of her father, almost single-handedly destroyed a whole village of militarized cultists. During the battles, no hit or wound – by fist, foot, knife or gun, and however severe it seemed – had the slightest impact on her capability to continue fighting. It reminded me of the time, many years ago, when I played first-person shooting games such as Doom 2 and Half-Life. Even after I had completely gotten used to the virtual reality of those games, I still considered the medkit-heals-every-wound feature to be the most unrealistic. Well, in Ballerina, not even a medkit is needed!
June 20, 2025 # An Amusing Lyrics Article
There is a type of writing called "lipogram", which deliberately leaves out certain letter(s). A famous example was Ernest Vincent Wright's 50,000-word 1939 novel Gadsby, in which the most frequently used English letter "e" was left out. Recently I came across a piece of writing of a different type, but requires equally careful planning and is equally amusing, that I felt was worth sharing. It is a physics essay, written by a (rumored) high school student, in which the first word of each line forms the lyrics of the 3rd period of Rick Astley's song Never Gonna Give You Up (with a minor variation "gonna" → "going to"):
Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry, never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
It might not be too difficult to write something in which a certain list of words is used sequentially, but what makes the essay amusing is: 1. It is a fine essay in its own right. 2. The first word of each line was from natural wrapping ‒ with smartly chosen width for sure, but nothing more than that.
June 22, 2025 # Movie: Materialists
Watched the movie Materialists. The dialogues are witty, intelligent, and well-plotted. The story, in which Lucy the matchmaker, a materialist by profession, made a decision that turned out to be the exact opposite a materialist would do, is warmhearted, touching, and enjoyable, but, sorry to be materialistic rather than idealistic in comment, very very unrealistic. :-)
June 26, 2025 # Novelists and AI Training
In a previous post regarding novelists urging AI companies to stop using their works in AI training, I said I don't think novelists had a valid point. While I still hold the main argument (which is from a credit or copyright point of view, and boils down to the fact that AI training learns much less from any particular piece of human work than a human writer might do), I would like to add that I do sympathize with what those novelists urged. In fact, just as I'm not a fan of AI writing because (as I said in that same post) I can only resonate with fellow human beings, the same is true for me as an author: only fellow human beings can possibly resonate with me, therefore I only care about human readers and feel honored only when human readers learn from my work (plus, human readers, unlike AI, may feel appreciation, which is a source of joy for authors).
July 3, 2025 # Movie: M3GAN 2.0
Watched M3GAN 2.0, a much more action-packed sequel to M3GAN. It is generally enjoyable with amusing (sometimes sarcastic) dialogues. The plot, however, is a little bit loose and arbitrary. It is fine (and actually appreciated, from the standpoint of a movie audience) that M3GAN survived the 1.0 ending by backing up her mind in Gemma's smart home, but building an underground bunker during this hiding phase? Even more far-fetched is a 1980s motherboard with the machine learning capability of that time (surely primitive, if existed at all) becoming a super AI that can control any technology. As for the character side, I found Gemma to be increasingly annoying, always holding the moral high ground (often with destructive consequences) and having practically stopped doing technology. Ironically, Christian (the bad guy), while already having pretty much everything under his control, had the silliness of valuing too highly Gemma’s technological skill, which ultimately led to his defeat.
July 8, 2025 # A Huckleberry Finn Illustration
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was one of the numerous literature classics I never read, and never thought I would read. But yesterday, when aimlessly wandering around in a Barnes & Noble (the one thing I never mind "wasting" time on), I came across an illustration on the back cover of a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of that book, and was immediately struck by a sense of tranquility and nostalgia (the latter was for the "looking up at the stars" part). Of course, I don't really know whether "tranquility" makes sense in the part of the story from which the text in the illustration was quoted, but that flash of an impression is perhaps sufficient to kindle the interest in me to eventually read that novel. :-)
July 13, 2025 # In Front of Science Shelves
Though it might be wiser to conceal it, I'm actually an impatient person ‒ at least to some, hopefully minor, degree. In the past, for instance, if I visited a bookstore, and if there was a person in front of the shelves I most frequently stop by (that is, the shelves in the science section), the almost instinctive thought that would occur in my mind would be: too bad I have to wait. But nowadays, perhaps since I became more aware of the widespreadness of anti-intellectualism in the US, my sentiment in such a situation has completely changed. It now becomes: wow, I wish there were more people in front of these shelves...
July 17, 2025 # Movie: Superman
Watched the movie Superman. Although I always considered superhero movies to be more or less childish, this one still surprised me with its idiocies in almost all aspects. Superman's heroism, for instance, was elevated to the level that even a squirrel was masterfully rescued ‒ while dozens of cars (with human drivers, I suppose) were smashed at about the same time. The defiance of physical laws was also elevated to a new level in which swimming in an anti-proton river is just one example. A less exotic but equally impossible scene was that Superman, in order to rescue a person, temporarily blocked a collapsing skyscraper with a hand-push, as if a skyscraper were a magnified version of a Lego building (no, material strength doesn't scale that way). The last-but-not-least part of the idiocies was the general public, portrayed as being super-easily manipulated by media, and able to super-brainlessly cheer, during an apocalyptical disaster that was unfolding right in front of their eyes, for however petty an action Superman was performing (as if they were mere movie audiences like me)... though this might be the only part of the movie that metaphorically matches our own unfortunate reality.
August 6, 2025 # Amazon and Barnes & Noble
Amazon might have a book collection larger than that of any bookstore, the way it packages books is nevertheless amateurish, and doesn't differentiate much from packaging other merchandise. Barnes & Noble, on the other hand, knows how to package books much better. It feels warm to see that a bookstore is, after all, a bookstore.
August 7, 2025 # A Minor English Issue
It was since I began to write English blogs that I started to pay attention to some of the truly minor features of the (written) English language. For instance, there is one feature I always considered to be, I dare say, logically wrong. That is, when I say, for instance:
... a weekly gathering dubbed the "family meeting".
I always place the period at the very end, and I consider it to be the only logically correct way. But in reality, the period is almost always placed inside the quotation marks, namely:
... a weekly gathering dubbed the "family meeting."
This looks so wrong to me that I, up to this date, have stubbornly insisted on my own way ‒ of course, only in inconsequential places such as this murmuring blog. Why do I think the common way is logically wrong? Two reasons: 1. This is a plain statement, and a period, not a half-quotation mark, is, by definition, what one uses to end such a statement. 2. The quotation in this sentence is to mark a jargon "family meeting", and a period is NOT part of the jargon, therefore should NOT be placed inside the quotation.
[Notes (A comment from @nick.picard): You will be glad to know that your preferred style is the "official" style in the UK and much of the world. Always putting the full stop inside the closing quotes is mostly an America/Canada thing.]
August 14, 2025 # Movie: Freakier Friday
Watched Freakier Friday, a comedy movie that, I’m glad to say, exceeded my expectations. It was about two single parent families (one with a grandma, a single mom, and a teenage daughter, the other with a single dad and a teenage daughter), that were about to merge (by a marriage between the single mom and the single dad), under daily (if not hourly or minutely) near-breaking super-messy conflicts between all the parent-child pairs, as well as between the two teenage daughters (who, to add an extra arena for conflicts, happen to be classmates). The fun part began when, thanks to some mysterious magic of a psychic, the grandma and the single mom switched bodies with the two teenage daughters. Eventually, and that is the part that exceeded my expectations, through a very humorous and masterful plot, all conflicts were disentangled in a relatively natural and sometimes touching way... At the end, of course, the bodies switched back, and, to quote the popular fairy tale ending, "they all lived happily ever after". :-)
August 18, 2025 # Movie: Shin Godzilla
Watched Shin Godzilla, a 2016 Japanese movie that somehow made its way to some of the US theaters recently. It is a typical monster movie in which the monster was a product of the radiation-can-create-anything syndrome that was quite common among Sci-Fi writers. The movie only had one statement that was scientifically sober, by a scientist in the movie, namely such a monster will collapse under its own weight if comes ashore, and it was slammed by "reality" in the movie, doubling down on the radiation-can-create-anything syndrome. [Notes (Part of my reply to a comment): I feel that too many movies attribute too much to radiation. Radiation might speed up some mutations (not necessarily make a species more powerful), but won't be to the scale depicted in those movies, even less in the time frame imagined in those movies. :-)]
August 22, 2025 # About This Blog & Movie: The Fantastic Four
Watched the movie The Fantastic Four: First Steps. But before talking about the movie, let me say a few words about this blog.
My writings vary across a broad spectrum in terms of seriousness, from the most serious (books and research papers) to the most casual, and most posts (not all, though) on this blog, which is by far my least-read social account, are at the very edge of the latter. So please treat them as what they are: casual thoughts. With this said, I'm in no habit of writing anything carelessly, in the sense that I will always try to record my thoughts as accurately as a reasonable post length allows.
Now back to the movie. I don't have much to say about the logic or science in this movie (since there was none worth commenting on), just want to record two successful guesses I had as I was watching the story unfold: 1. I guessed that Shalla-Bal would give Galactus a final blow (to give one more credit to Johnny's attempt to understand her, if not for anything else); 2. I guessed that baby Franklin would bring Sue back to life (as an early indication of his power).
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posted on September 8, 2025
https://www.changhai.org/