Eye of the Tiger moment

Last Wednesday at work, my computer was running the third batch of simulations. Since it was gonna take at least two days to finish and the GPU was used full time at full capacity for the simulations, my computer became too laggy to work on. So I thought it was the best time "back to the drawing board" to work on a problem left aside for quite some time. The problem was basically like this : two different approaches, two different sets of formulas, to solve the same equation. At first glance, both were expected to give slightly different results. But surprisingly they gave the same result. And when compared to the results of experiments, they all fits perfectly. It was good news. It meant both approaches were valid. However that was still the question : how come? There must be some kind of link in between them but what was the link? 

I called on my supervisor and another researcher familiar with the domain to figure out the answer together. After listing out formulas of both approaches, we were staring at the white board, very little discussion, mostly silence. This was probably my first "Eye of the Tiger" moment. It wasn't the first time I stared at a bunch of equations for an extended period of time. But this was the first time I was in a group staring at equations on a white board together for a long time. For those who don't get what I mean by the "Eye of the Tiger" moment, it is originated from the episode 4 of season 3 of The Big Bang Theory. It was pretty cool came to think about it. I felt like a real scientist. Hahahahaha! 

mindblown !

The joy of solving maths problem is so gratifying. Although it wasn't me who made the critical step to find the link between the two approaches, I was so happy to see the answer unfolded with my own eyes. The critical step always seems so trivial once you know about it. It is like finding a bug in thousands lines of code but more. The elegance of the solution of a maths problem never ceases to amaze me. After we checked every steps, mindblown moment ensued. I so wanted to jump for joy but I told myself : act cool, just smile and act cool. I didn't want to feel like an idiot. 

the trifactor of college life

The elegance quality of maths is exactly why I love maths. I was lucky to have discovered through reading a lot more than the maths taught in primary and secondary school, to be able to see a bigger picture throughout my early school life. Maths problem solving is just like any other skill, it can be trained. The "Eye of the Tiger" moment in the lab reminds me of my time in la prépa, aka Classe Préparatoire aux Grandes Ecoles (CPGE) in France. There is a pseudo-theory about the triangle of choices (social life, good grades, and enough sleep) of life in college floating around on the internet. Well I had chosen good grades and enough sleep. Seriously, I was a freak during that time. Study, eat, and sleep, nothing else. I admit I should have gone out more and balanced the triangle better. The upside of this unhealthy lifestyle is, my maths problem solving skill was trained to its peak.

In prépa, especially prépa scientifique, I had to study unreasonable amount of maths and the maths were unlike anything I had learnt back in Malaysia. During primary and secondary school, it was all about memorizing some established formulas and applying them appropriately. But in prépa, it was all about axioms, conjectures, hypothesis, demonstrations, and theorems after theorems, basically maths in its pure form. The paradigm shift was hard. But once I got through the beginning of the learning curve and tonnes of effort afterwards, a whole new world was opened to me. I was so on point in maths, my maths sense was so sharp like a tiger. Intuition and ideas just kept flowing in like Niagara falls, abundantly and rapidly. Whenever other students in prépa started a conversation about their hate on maths, honestly I couldn't join them. I genuinely enjoy the process of maths problem solving.

Just like a knife, every skill needs training to stay sharp. Now no longer am I a study freak, so sometimes I am quite sloppy with my maths. But I still love maths. The time in prépa not only cemented my love for maths, but also let me understand the essence of maths. I saw a comment in a reddit post summing it up quite well. To quote : "Maths is invented and has nothing to do with the outside universe. It is a playground of human abstraction and critical thinking, and is at best inspired by the things we see around us." In maths, we can invent any concept as long as it stays consistent and doesn't create contradiction. Vsauce in his video : How to count past infinity, explains this process very well.

During the first class on complex numbers, I once asked the teacher what are the uses of complex numbers. He paused for a moment and then answered with his heavy French accent : "Just for fun !" The whole class burst out laughing. After that in a more serious tone, he explained a few examples of application. But now come to think about it, "just for fun" is actually the correct answer. The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences may just be a coincidence, says Eugene Wigner. Maths is a playground of human mind and logic. So let's do maths just for fun !

Namewee's Amoi²

Amoi² aims to be the next famous female pop group in the Asia-Pacific area. Started as a small project between RedPeople and Namewee, set up to create a Malaysian version (Amoi² - Little Apple) of the Chinese song "Little Apple" (筷子兄弟 - 小苹果). The Malaysian version has gained quite some popularity and also some criticisms from the internet like "apple is not a local fruit of Malaysia" and "Malaysia is a tropical country and the season spring is nonexistent". Here I just would like to remind Namewee that he himself had also made the same criticism on Malaysian Chinese New Year (CNY) songs which keep cheering for the arrival of spring (2010 CNY song by Namewee).  And I quote : "...什么冬天春天，你把我当作 kongkam？! 这里除了下雨，我每天热到 bueh tahan。你还来跟我乱乱唱，我听了西北赌懒!" (...What winter what spring, you think I'm an idiot?! Except some occasional rain, I just can't stand the everyday heat. And here you still sing about this bullshit, it just makes me so furious!). 

I know that those criticisms are just some trolls and not constructive. Personally, I like all the songs made and sang by Namewee himself, but I have mixed feelings about the songs he made for RedPeople and Amoi²'s Little Apple is one of them. Perhaps RedPeople to me just seem like a bunch of teenagers looking for fame. At the same time, fame may just be a word so demonized by today's society. May be the search for fame is just a part of human nature as Tessa Violet put it. Anyway, based on the popularity of the song, they decided to add new members into the group through a series of selections of participants from both Malaysia and Taiwan. And now, it has developed into sort of a TV reality show (Amoi² Contest). With a bit of scandal and drama, it is not bad at all as a reality show, I only wish each episode could be longer. 

Talking about pop groups, nobody in the world can beat the South Koreans right now. They are producing groups and pumping out songs faster than a factory can produce cars. I already long lost count of the K-pop groups after Super Juniors and Girls' Generation. Before them, I only knew that the Koreans were god-like in StarCraft and they had Samsung. After the K-pop boom since 2009/10, especially after the Gangnam Style, K-pop has become an unstoppable force.

But why it has to be groups and not individuals? And why the groups have to be so large? The first thing that comes into mind is Barney's Cheerleader effect. In the TV series How I Met Your Mother, the character Barney Stinson came up with this term which says we might find the individuals more attractive when they are in a group. What surprises me is that there are actually experts like Walker-Vul 2014 and Yuko Ojiro 2015, doing scientific studies on the subject but so far they show no convincing results. Seriously though, I never take any studies in the field of psychology seriously. The so called the "half life of knowledge" in psychology is only five years. It always seems to me so easy to publish scientific papers in psychology, to a point that it is just unfair. The titles of papers in psychology already have the edge. If I publish a paper entitled "The approximate resolution of the radiative transfer equation in a multi-layered diffusive biological medium", only a selective niche of scientists would be interested. But a paper with a title "Cheerleader effect" and quotes Barney Stinson in the introduction, whoever has watched HIMYM is instantly hooked and already know what the paper is all about.

Of course, it is not only the cheerleader effect that comes into play. On the same line with cheerleader effect, some say that the group also serves to cover up the general lack of talent of its members (Quora : Why are K-pop groups so large?). Some also say every member has his or her own unique personality and beauty that attracts different group of audience and so in a group, they can engross a bigger number of audience. That I tend to agree. When I was the right age as the target audience of female teenage groups, I use to follow the Taiwanese group Hey Girl. The group was the result of the TV show, Blackie's Teenage Club. I can't say I like the group or their songs per se, and honestly, I found some members of the group quite annoying. But still I used to watch the show quite often. The reason got to be to see one of its member - Xiao Xun (小薰) on screen. I used to find myself skipping through most of the runtime of the show but sat down attentively whenever she got the screentime.

Nowadays, I am not even sure whether the argument of uniqueness of each member still applies to the female K-pop groups. Often with the rumour of plastic surgery involved, their looks are as derivative as their songs. Westerners sometimes have problem telling Asian faces apart, just as Asians have problem telling Western faces apart, it is not racist, it is totally normal. But seriously though, even I as an Asian am having trouble telling each member in a K-pop group apart. And finally, of course, there is also the criticism of using not-so-subtle sex appeal among K-pop groups nowadays. But that I guess is just a technique that seems to work so well in any pop music. The most recent examples have to be Kanye West's Famous and Nicki Minaj's Anaconda.

Finally, there is the question why Namewee is interested in creating a female pop group. Even though Namewee can now be considered a pop singer and pop songs producer, his songs still preserve either the sarcastic and humourous quality, or close-to-heart emotions. His songs are considered as pop songs but I would say they are out-of-norm type of popular. That's why I like his songs. But now he wants to create a pop group full of cliché of a pop group? Plus since the market is so saturated by the Koreans, even I have serious doubt on the success of the emerging group, and he is still putting effort into it? My guess is, it is one of his experiments, in order to become a well rounded music producer.

The hipster part of me kinda looks down on his choice to create a typical female pop group. Hipsters have always being known to complain about anything mainstream and popular. The same goes for pop songs. They have been criticized to be too similar to one another. It seems as if music producers are getting lazy and giving up at creating diversity. I especially like how Vsauce in the episode Juvenoia explains why it has becoming the case : "Perhaps pop music producers are simply getting better at scratching the specific itch they are challenged to scratch." It may seem like there is a fixed formula to create pop songs, and may be there is also a fixed formula to create a pop group. I know Namewee can be quirky and defiant in his music, that I have no doubt. But to be well rounded, he needs to prove he can follow the norm too. I think Namewee is doing exact that. He is learning and practicing to scratch the itch.   

AI has a bad rap

I seriously think that we are not far away from the creation of a true artificial intelligence (AI). The success of Alphago had sparked my interest in the subject of AI. I have been watching many videos and reading books related to the topic. The most recent and the most hyped method to implement a general purpose AI is machine learning. Personally, my knowledge on machine learning is limited to what I had learned in school and knowledge is not understanding. But from what I understand from Deepmind's explanation on Alphago, it seems really promising to me. With that said, there is the question : should we be worry about AI?

Nowadays, we can all agree that there is no lacking of fear of an evil AI overthrowing the human race. Ever since Hal 9000 in 2001 : A Space Odyssey, AI has been equivalent to evil in the mindset of many people. Plus the popularity of the Terminator saga, it has done nothing but further damaging AI's reputation. Back in March this year when Alphago beat Lee Sedol, almost every news article written about it, started with a mention of the Skynet or T-800 robot. In fact, I myself had done the same in my entry on the subject matter. It is silly. At the same time, it also says so much about how the general public perceives AI.  

Not only Terminator, in fact there is a long list of Hollywood movies in which the AI becomes the antagonist (spoiler!). Alien, Prometheus, Matrix, I. Robot, Age of Ultron, Resident Evil, ..., the list just goes on and on. Personally, the idea of AI being evil is so deep in my subconscious that it sometimes ruins my movie-going experience. Watching movies with an AI character, such as Interstellar and Moon, I just keep waiting for the AI to turn the table. Even though they are not evil until the end, I still suspect a secret plan or something malicious that I miss out.

On the other hand, it doesn't mean that we can be fully optimistic about AI either. Any technology is a two-edged sword. Nick Bostrom compares true AI with nuclear energy (What happens when our computers get smarter than we are). Nuclear energy is used to power our world but it can also destroy it in a blink of an eye. In some sense, a true AI can be more dangerous than nuclear energy since it can become way more powerful than we could imagine. Elon Musk even said AI researches were like summoning the demon. Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking also more or less share the same view. They are not against the AI. What they say is we should be extremely careful (Elon Musk and Bill Gates on AI).

Following the same logic, I would prefer to compare the creation of a true AI to fire, one of the first technologies of human race. Fire had propelled the human progress but it is also a dangerous tool. The saying of "playing with fire" is there for a reason. I believe true AI will bring the same level of paradigm shift as fire, in terms of the contribution to human progress. Regarding AI, we shouldn't be overly worry to the level of hysteria. Like ColdFusion (DeepMind Explained), we should be cautiously optimistic.

Many Ironman but there will be only a few Alpsman

Ironman, not Robert Downey Jr. Ironman. Ironman is a distance. 3.8km swim, 180km bike, and a 42km marathon. Ever since I got into the sport of triathlon, completing an Ironman has been one of the goals in my list. As the sport gets more and more famous, unfortunately Ironman has also become a brand. There are many Ironman-branded triathlons all around the world but the participation fee of anyone of them is so expensive. Even you don't mind the price, getting a ticket is still so difficult simply because Ironman is so famous and many people want a piece of it. The two Ironman triathlons nearest to me are the one in Nice and Zurich. Two years ago, I had tried to register for the one in Nice. Even though it was still November and the race would be in June the next year, the race was sold out! 

That little incident of Ironman Nice had me realized just how mainstream the Ironman has become. It is a good thing that more and more people are doing triathlon but I myself am a bit hipster-ish. I tend to avoid anything mainstream. If more and more people are becoming Ironman, then no one is. I want something unique. Unable to register for Ironman Nice, I was forced to search for other non Ironman-branded triathlons. It was the year I did Triathlon Alpe d'Huez. 

In fact, there are some little known, non Ironman-branded, Ironman-distance triathlons. Norseman, Swissman, Embrunman, etc, all these races are way harder than most Ironman branded triathlons. They are called extreme triathlons for many reasons. Norseman got the coldest water to swim in and it finishes off with a footrace to a mountain summit. And it is an unsupported race, that means participants got to have their own support team for food and refill along the course. Swissman is deep in the Alps where the weather can change so quickly, passing by some mountain passes where sometimes there will be snow, and also a summit finish marathon. Embrunman is also characterized by its super hard bike route passing by Col d'Izoard. A Norseman participant commented on Ironman-branded triathlons quite harshly, saying : "... where as an Ironman is just a parade where people are just cheering and clapping." (Isklar Norseman 2014)

I tend to agree too. I would even argue that Triathlon Alpe d'Huez is already at the same level of difficulty as an ordinary Ironman. Watching NBC coverage of Ironman World Championship of Kona now, it does give me the impression of a lot of cheering and clapping. They used to inspire me but now, sadly but honestly, I kinda despise these exaggerated documentaries. Retrospectively, I know I have grown and I no longer see an Ironman as a challenge. My goal has changed. My goal is turning towards an extreme triathlon.

The reason that I haven't done a triathlon since Alpe d'Huez is because all the extreme triathlons I mentioned just now are quite far away from where I stay. Ever since Alpe d'Huez, I have been working towards another goal in my list -- completing an ultra trail, Ut4M more specifically. In August this year, I will give a try again. May be it is the cliche destiny. By chance, there will be a new extreme triathlon called Alpsman coming up this year October (Alpsman -Teaser). It will be held in Lake Annecy, a lake in my neighborhood and it is also the place where I did my very first triathlon. I would say the course is quite similar to Norseman with the swim starts off by jumping off the boat into the middle of the lake and summit finish marathon. Alpsman is calling out to me and I answer the call! 

Preparing for ultra trail gives me more than enough mental strength to do Alpsman. Plus I will have a full month of free time in September to train. While I am still not so sure about completing Ut4M, my confidence is very high with Alpsman. It feels so good to go back to triathlon again. With the Ut4M, I am so damn excited for the coming months.  

  

Critical thinking

John Oliver does it again ! I have always been a fan of the Last Week Tonight show, a show that uses humour to bring people's attention on important and yet neglected issues. Sometimes the show can be quite boring for people outside of the States though because the issue discussed is about some problems in the States and the inside jokes just won't work. However the latest episode (Scientific studies) is certainly about something I think everyone needs to know and it is an issue that I experienced first hand very recently : the validity of scientific studies.

About a month ago, I was trying validate my Monte Carlo simulations with an analytic resolution of the equation of radiative transfer proposed by a scientific paper. I simulated some of the cases studied in the paper and tried to recreate some experiments, but I never got what it was stated in the paper. During two weeks I tried and tried, kept thinking that there must be something wrong in my model. That was the most frustrated two weeks of my life. In the end, I presented everything that was not working and my supervisor told me to forget about it, deciding that the results of the paper might be a fluke. That was seriously a wake up call for me. Not even published scientific papers are reliable enough to be taken as truth, not at least they have gone through multiple replication studies.

I am frustrated because it wasted two weeks of my time. On the other hand, I also feel I am so fortunate to have initiated the building of a critical mindset towards scientific studies. With a standardized structure in PDF format, a title jammed with complicated words, multiple graphs, and a long list of references to other papers, each with again, a title jammed with complicated words, it is just not in an untrained person's common sense to be skeptical about the scientific papers. 

me watching TV news

Critical thinking and skepticism are really important in doing science. In fact, it is also an important attitude regarding information circulating on the internet and news broadcasted by the mass media. I rarely watch TV. But during the February of this year, I was back in Malaysia and I had watched some TV news. The lack of accuracy, emotional manipulative title, and the lack of integrity, what is deemed news-worthy just make me facepalm. The same can also be said with the stuff shared on the social media. Like click-baits and top 10 lists, TV news is also under the pressure of viewership. What is wrong about the news is already been said and said again by many people like IHE (I hate the news) and the School of Life (Craziness of the daily news).

By knowing the pressure they are under, sometimes I do empathize with the news shows. But as the viewers, it is our responsibility to filter the information they tell us. When it comes to be critical, I think nobody can beat the French people. In the land where it gave us Voltaire and René Descartes with his famous quote : "I think therefore I am", critical thinking is embedded in their culture. I might be wrong, but in my circle of connections, it does feel like it is true. They even have a news network named Gorafi pumping out fake news everyday, to serve as a satirical look at the state of news broadcasting in general. 

False news is just rumour, and rumour can catch on like wild fire if we are not careful. One example is the Summer of the Shark in 2001 before the 911 attack. What this event teaches us is, what the media chooses to focus on can have a serious influence on our view of the world. I have to admit that it is difficult to filter the information fed to us. I personally wasn't as skeptical to the news as me now. The Kony 2012 was the turning point for me. Ever since I have been trying my best, to be critical towards news and some random "facts" found on the internet.

Just like CGP Grey said : "It's your brain, be hygienic with it."  (This video will make your angry)