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I love my laptop.
I used iWeb to build up a website for our women secret society.
I used iMovie to make some awesome videos for my project.
I used Photo Booth to take self indulgent pictures.
I used Illustrator to turn an ugly photo to a nice one as follows (my friend took a very ugly picture of me and sent to me just to tease me)
I just love my laptop.

I was recently made fully aware of the fact that there are truly two kinds of people in the world. The ones who, given the initial camera position on Google Earth (see picture below), and using only the 3D controls (not the address field search facilities), can land on their house (or on their office building if they prefer); and the others.

If one day I am in a position to hire people to work for me, a part of the interview will be to demonstrate this basic ability. Failure to locate yourself in the world means no job!


(Thinking of it, this probably implies that only very few women will be working for me...)

Today was the annual ceremony of Chinese New Year in London. I went to China Town with some friends and took photos for the project we are doing. We joined a lunch and film function organised by a non-profit organisation that aims to promote Chinese culture in the UK. The food was fine but not very impressive, I enjoyed the guzheng performance most. In the late afternoon, we went to British Film Institute in Southbank to see the movie, Two Stage Sister. It is an old movie produced in Mainland China in 1964. I quite like the movie but my continuous coughing decreased my enjoyment.

I thought most audience (westerners) did not understand throughout because the English title is not good enough. Those songs and some text had no English translation. Most important is that the background history of China in 30s-50s may not be well known by westerners (even Chinese). But I think most people like the movie and this is an interesting experience.



Two guys handed two Chinese leaves outside their shop on second floor and let the dragon bite it. The British Police should arrest them because in the UK, we always talk about health and safety issue.


When I was squeezed among the crowd, I looked up the sky and found the balloons and blue sky.


Red lantern, red lantern and red lantern.


I was so excited to see this giant oyster sauce.


Hong Kong buildings


Night scenery in Southbank, one of the favourite places in London.

A Tee in Beijing

I think that our children will envy us to have gone through all this :-)
(or more likely they will call us "retards"....)

The way our education system works is very bad. We put students in rooms, spend time lecturing them, and then ask them to go to a written exam on a given day, and rank them on according of which proportion of the exam they managed to do right. This system makes little sense (if any).

An already better system is the way people are taught how to drive. They have a coach who spends time with them, analysing with them all the aspects of they driving and, one day, when both the student driver and the coach agree that it is time, the student driver goes to a person with the knowledge and authority to deliver the driving licence. That day, you do to not get a mark, you either get your license or you don't, but at least in this last case, you know that you can try again later. How would this be adapted to, say, university studies ?

First of all, when you arrive at university, when you start the first year of bachelor studies, you are given a partner, or you can choose your partner yourself if you already know a classmate that you like. Yourself and your partner are going to coach each other during the next three years. Of course, yourself and your partner know the basics of coaching, but that's something you were taught when you were much younger, even before high school, and that you had time to practice times and times again.

You are given lectures, but they are not the main thing. For each course, you are given some written lecture notes and/or a list of items you must learn. Your teachers can be found to answer your questions, but mainly you have to study with your partner (this means spending a lot of time studying by yourself in the Library and then catch up with your coach in the cafeteria). There is no time limit to learn (within reason, of course... The University could decide that after all they can kick you out after three years, if you have not completed your degree). When yourself and your partner both estimate that you are ready, you can take an appointment with a lecturer who is going to examine you.

The examination takes place in a room with the lecturer, sat on either side of a table, or the lecturer is sat down and you stand up next to a black board that you will be using to write some answers, or same thing but you are rather using a computer that you will use to perform the tasks, etc. In all cases it's a one to one examination. The idea of the examination is that the lecturer is basically going to try and fail you. He or she will ask you simple or more complex questions, for an indefinite amount of time, until he/she finds something important in the course (only from the official curriculum) that you didn't know or didn't understand and in that case you fail the examination, or until the lecturer has the certainty that there is nothing you didn't understand (or that what you didn't understand does not affect your overall perfect understanding of the course), and in that case he/she gives you your course certificate.

I think that this learning/examination setting is particularly suited for mathematics, for instance, and more generally for any scientific subject. But it can easily be adapted to about anything. Of course, one of the reasons it may seem unpractical is the fact that the lecturer test one student at a time (and only on student's requests). But this unpracticality can be overcome (for instance by asking PhD students to do some of the testing, etc., all those points are details....). You can also add rules, such as: "if you fail an examination you have to wait 30 days before being able to request another appointment", all kind of stuff... There can also be a rule about video taping the examinations. If you have good reason to believe that the lecturer unfairly failed you, you can ask a jury to watch the tape. But another time, all those are implementation details. Another implementation detail is that you can perfectly decide that you don't need a partner and keep studying on your own, if you wish so.

Given the way things are organised, the task of your partner is simple, prepare you for your examination, and in this case it is totally in the best interest of your partner to train you the best he can for your success, but it is also in your own interest to learn as well as you can. Note that you are also the coach of your partner, so as a coach you must do all you expect your partner to do when he/she coaches you. During your work with your partner, there should not be any stone left unturned. If for instance you have mastered 95% of a math course, but don't want to spend more time on the last 5%, first of all you are being stupid because you don't have any limit time, there is no target date for the examination, so why not spend few more days covering the last bits, but in addition, it is certain that the lecturer who is going to examine you will uncover your misunderstanding.

Right from the beginning, I have talked about a partner, but it is in the interest of all the students of a given class, to work together sometimes, to exchange ideas and stuff, even is a subject like mathematics. Also it might sometimes be required to change partners, for some reasons: affinity, working hours etc..

In order to segregate between students, one will not be looking at the marks, because there are none, but simply how many course certification they managed to get during their three years. It is in the best interest of every student to do as many as they can, but they are to remember that rushing won't help. Examinations are of very high standard. You must master the entire curriculum of a course in order to get your course certificate, and smiling to the lecturer/PhD student examining you won't help.

I believe that if we implement such system, not only at university but before that as well, the resulting level of people going out of school, either after high school or after university will be much higher than it currently is.


** ** **

The above is actually how I got my last Masters course in 2002. I was the only student of the course and the lecturer, a woman, told me to let her know when I was ready to be examined ; at which point she invited me in her office.

On the day, she was totally relax, her feet on the table, and just started to ask me some questions. Some time later she told me that she was willing to give me a high score for her course (I had not even noticed that the examination had started actually), but that she wanted to have a bit of fun and that, if I didn't mind, she would carry on asking me more questions (more difficult) and that my ability to answer them would not affect the final result. She eventually did manage to find things I could not answer, but apparently that was what she was looking for...


** ** **

I have been studying two courses over the last 10 days, and I was wondering when should I stop studying them and move to new ones. I suddenly realised that the best (and only) answer to this is that I must first get a certification. So I started to think of how to define such "certification" and came up with the above description of the way I think learning should be organised. The funny thing is that I don't have anybody to examine me, so I will perform my own examination.

I also realised that preparing for an examination is way easier if you have a studying partner. As I do not have a partner, I have to become my own partner and perform my own coaching. That part is bound to be funny: me alone at home or at work, talking loud to myself and answering to my own questions. The nice thing, though, is that I am extremely picky and demanding (*), even (and above all) with myself, that I am about the best coach I could ever have (^.^)

(*) I am the kind of person to convince myself that if I fail one of my own self examinations, then an innocent child, somewhere in the world, is going to die.

I am going to write 5 different things in 1 weblog entry.

1. I went to Amsterdam on last Friday evening. I worked on my laptop during the long journey in tube (from my office to Heathrow) and played with some funny things on my laptop when I waited to get on the plane in Starbucks at the airport. I just discovered that I could not live without my laptop now. My laptop is my best friend especially when I need to travel frequently.

2. When I got through the UK border this evening, I was trapped. For some reasons, I could not use my BNO passport (with proof of residency in the UK) but my HK passport. I travelled with HK passport between Amsterdam and the UK without any difficulty before, so I thought it would not be a problem this time. However, I was wrong. The old Indian female officer of UK Border asked me to wait because she said that my HK passport did not prove that I have a right to resident in the UK or travel to the UK (because I do not have an entry date from HK to the UK in this passport). So she needed to check my supporting documents for my residency in the UK (like the photocopy of my BNO passport, the original copy of a letter issued by Home Office, council tax bill etc). I had no objections for her to check my documents because this was her job but what I felt disappointed was her answer. She said "we checked your BNO passport and we don't have any record of it (which means that you don't have a right to live in the UK). Your supporting document did not work ........but I will let you go." I was so confused what she really meant. If she said the truth, why she let me go (She should arrest me, right?). Another possible truth is that she said something wrong at the beginning (like my HK passport and those supporting documents could not help me to enter the UK) but she did not want to admit that she was wrong and she did not want to admit that the system was crap (no record of my passport though she believed what I said was true).

Then she asked me some questions like "When did you come to the UK?" "When is your husband's birthday?" "What is the nationality of your husband" "What is your job in London?" etc. I answered patiently and calmly and she pretended to write all those information down but I am sure she will throw that paper in the bin afterwards. I did not know whether it was just a gesture to threaten people who want to enter to the UK illegally. But I did feel sorry about her (I think that she does not know what she is doing).

3. I finished editing a video during my journey from Heathrow to my home. The girl sitting next to me was impressed what I was doing.

4. I phoned my aunt in Australia this evening and talked to her for half an hour. She was over 80 and I promised her that I will visit her in the coming future.

5. I wish all my friends be happy and lucky in the year of Tiger!

I think that the day it became clear that I would become a mathematician was in 1993. I was then 16 years old, the year before the last high school year.

One day the math teacher, said (in French) "Let us consider x a real number". Before he could take his breath for the next sentence, I raised my hand and asked him why he always felt compelled to say that it was a real number. I would have understood that he made the precision had him wanted to choose among, say, the rational numbers, but that the precision was not needed for a real number, because they were all the numbers that were. He looked at me, hesitated one second (second during which, as I understood years later, he might have pondered if he would not be in trouble with Academic Inspection (*) in saying what he was about to say) and replied "because there are numbers outside the set of real numbers".

I was speechless, but I guess that what really stroke me was the complete natural with which he threw that at me, more than the underlying meaning (and the extraordinary consequences) of his sentence. The same thing happened several times during my university studies, every time about deeper and more complex ideas, but it has never been as emotionally strong as this one first time.

(*) A sub-section of the French ministry of Education, made of a bunch of psychopaths who decide what age should kids be told the truth about various things...

I noticed today something very strange in the way I write things down. I use completely dual parsing methods depending on whether I write by hand or use a computer.

Say that I want to write f(B(g(s),e))

If I write by hand on a paper I will write the following sequence
f
f B
f B g s
f B g(s)
f B g(s),e
f B (g(s),e)
f(B (g(s),e))
Meaning that I add the pair of parenthesis after having written the operators and their arguments, and always from the center outwards

But if I write using a keyboard I will write
f
f()
f(B())
f(B(g()))
f(B(g(s)))
f(B(g(s),e))


This said, thinking of it, this is not so surprising in fact. The first method (when writing by hand), ensures that parenthesis are written down only when all the arguments have been written (and probably mentally checked). While the second method ensures that the parenthesis are not forgotten. The second method is totally general with me; I always write opening and ending pair of symbols together, even if I then have to use my back button to reposition the cursor. I should also mention that the second method can only be used on a computer because with text editors it is possible to put characters between previously written characters (this is not possible on a piece of paper).

I have been doing this for years, but it only became so obvious today because I have been spending the last few hours writing down proofs on paper first and then entering them into LaTeX (usually I skip the first part...)

So now where does the Polish come from ? Well, turns out that both methods are probably more natural for me than they could be for other people (I actually know very few people using method one, and none using method two) because Reverse Polish Notation is very natural for me. I used to have an RPN calculator when I was in high school and still after all that time, I still instinctively re-parse every mathematical expression I see in RPN. This said, I am sure that when I think of the meaning of the expression, just like everybody else, I mentally apply Polishly.

I was there, minding my own business (trying to figure out something about LaTeX for a text I am writing), when I suddenly got an Adium pop up window on my screen with the following message





I should have thought either of
1. "Aubrey is not connected, so how could she have sent this to me. It must be some GTalk spam (since when does Google let this happen ?)"
2. "This is definitively not (as in 'there is no way she could ever talk like that, I mean she doesn't have half of the vocabulary required to write this sentence') Aubrey's writing style. It must be some GTalk spam (since when does Google let this happen ?)"

But instead I thought: "Hey ! Cool !! I have been trying to put my hands on those pictures for ever. I didn't know they can be found online. I should definitively check them out, and this will be an opportunity to see again the face (or whatever part of her body) of my ex girl-friend and that russian girl; who had such an amazing pussy that I don't even remember her name... Oh God, that was such a nice threesome.. Glad that we 'documented' it (^_^)"

Followed the link and found nothing (that's when I understood it was spam). *sigh*...

... I thought I was the only one asking myself the question that Aubrey asked in the previous entry "I don't understand".

Me, they ask the question when I leave (in this case asking where I go) and when I arrive. This is totally weird given that the information is already written on the boarding pass which they also get. A couple of times recently this has pissed me so much that I got angry at the border officers and told them things that could have justified them arresting me for the night.

I have few theories on why they cannot just check my passport and let me go and why they have to check the sound of my voice in a way or another, but I don't know which is the correct one. This said, I noticed that all the times they didn't ask me were when I said "hello" to them when I was handing my passport. This is statistically consistent with the idea that they need to hear the sound of your voice more than they actually want to know where you come from or where you are going. In my case maybe they simply want to check that I speak with a French accent, as if this would make my French passport less of a fake....

I decided that I would turn into my favorite pastime the activity of politely insulting Border Officers (when I travel) and Head Hunters (when I receive unsolicited emails from them about random "opportunities"), the two categories of people who annoy me the most in this moment.

I flew back to London Heathrow this evening. When I saw a long queue in the UK border counter, I told myself "ok, Aubrey, be patient, this is Heathrow airport, one of the busiest airport in this world. It may be a good time for you to read your book". When I eventually came to the counter, the guy of border agency asked me "where you came from?", I stopped for a second. The following answers came to my brain:

1.I came from Amsterdam. I just took a plane from Amsterdam to London.
2.I came from Hong Kong and started to live in the UK few years ago.
3.I came from my mother's abdomen.
4.I came from the earth.

According to my experience, the officials in border agency always asked where you took the plane and fly to London. So I went to the first answer and told him "Amsterdam". Then he smiled and went on asking some questions about my passport. I just don't understand why people ask this question. It is so obvious that you can find it on my ticket. If you want to check whether I am using a fake passport, you should ask other questions but not "where you came from". I just don't understand at all.