红酒·绿茶 / Red Wine & Green Tea / Vin Rouge et Thé Vert

Over the years of my PhD study, I met a lot of interesting professors. I had entertained the idea of putting their memorable quotes in the beginning of my thesis chapters as one of my friends did. I finally gave it up but here are the ones I had in mind: "Some of my best friends are linguists." -- Fred Jelinek, using it as his LREC 2004 keynote speech title. "Engineering is advanced through two human natures: laziness and nastiness." -- Gerard G. L. Meyer, explaining how engineers, unlike scientists, always prefer simple ideas that work. "Mathematics is not a spectator's sport." -- James A. Fill, an avid Chicago sports fan, encouraging people to work out the details of the proofs he sketched in class.

Doctor of Philosophy , originally uploaded by nuance1979 , courtesy of Haolang. I just came back from my commencement. It was great. Unfortunately none of my family could come so I took a lot of pictures to share with them. (Click the photo above or here .) I like the forward-looking way of calling it "commencement", as opposed to "graduation", because I am certainly looking forward to the future and excited about the possibilities of life ahead.

When I found out that Gil Shaham was going to play Brahms Violin Concerto with Orchestre symphonique de Montréal , I thought it could be a perfect chance to savor my new hometown orchestra. The orchestra has a great place: Located right in the middle of downtown at the metro station of Place-des-Arts, the Salle Wilfrid Pelletier Hall is easily accessible. You don't even have to walk out of the metro station, which is a life-saver in winter, if you know what I mean. The music director, Kent Nagano, a Japanese American who have worked in Lyon for a long time, is fluent in French. He started the evening with a lengthy monologue, which I could not understand because of my limited knowledge of the language. Just before he appeared on stage, we were informed that the Schumann Second Symphony, the other main course of this evening, had been rescheduled to proceed the Brahms Concerto. I could understand this move because I bet what happened last night was many people simply left the conce...

If you live in the United States long enough and watch movies a lot, you would certainly be disappointed by the stupidity of the mainstream Hollywood flicks. With their enormous budgets and gigantic marketing machinery, unfortunately, stupid Hollywood flicks dominate the world, not to mention the States. That was why I loved The Charles , a cozy independent movie theatre which shows some fantastic films that falls into one of the following categories: low-budget, independent, foreign and art. I always felt my brain was working again after I saw a movie in The Charles. If you are a movie junkie in US, you would certainly want to live in one of the following two cities: New York and Los Angeles. Why? Because these are the places they put up some movies and decide whether they will show it nationally. As you can imagine, many good but not so popular movies never made it to the next step. Thanks to technological advance, they would be made into dvds so those who like it could see it eventu...