Uhoh, people actually read this....
Apparently humans actually read this. I thought only bots did. I suppose this is where I should say that I better watch what I say, except that if I did, then I wouldn't say it.
No, that didn't make much sense to me either.
Mat and I played our last table tennis game today. Quite the occasion it was, with many tearful memories and speeches. Actually, there were a couple of guys already playing, and they were kind enough to let us play doubles with them.
I hate doubles table tennis. I always play much worse than in singles table tennis. At least that's been my experience since ... oh... 1992? The key thing to remember about doubles is that you and your partner are supposed to take turns hitting the ball, unlike tennis. My control has never been good enough to deal with this - I need the practice that hitting the ball repetitively gives you, otherwise I'm crap.
Until today. Apparently, my control - and Mat's - has improved greatly.
We won. Rather well, to the surprise of both of us. And we were diving for shots, and falling on the floor, and crashing into the bookshelf filled with old bound volumes of Physical Chemistry journals. (And need I say, actually making the shots in the process. And not just by luck, either.) And we missed a bunch of sitters, of course. Fortunately, they missed more than we did. And the net was nice to us, too.
It's funny how one can be a klutz about so many things and still have reasonably wicked control over a little round white (sometimes yellow) plastic sphere. Amazing how after making an impossible shot, actually picking up the ball to get it back in your hand can take several attempts.
How come I wasn't good at this game when I was in high school? Was it because I had to wear shoes? (I always play in socks now.) It would have been nice to have been good in just one sport, not to mention the destruction of my university academic career because I didn't do sports at high school.
That's it - I'm applying for a job with Microsoft China, for the sole purpose of improving my ping pong game.
Hmmm - I wrote that as a joke, but it may not be a bad idea...
Second things first. Find out if there's a Table Tennis club on campus.
Now for the first thing - research.
Didn't get much work done yesterday, or today. The usual downtime. (You don't want to know.) Just an hour or two of coding C. But HLT/NAACL and Speech Prosody deadlines are coming up, next Friday and the week after. Sheise! Got a note that YX is coming to Chicago - great! And he and his student have done the missing piece of work I needed to proceed, so that's even better (Insert evil grin here.)
Yesterday I would have got more work done, but the conversation that LC and XZ were having in the office - was too interesting to not join. What did we cover in the space of an hour? Let's see...
China's one-child policy (only came into effect around 1978 - I had thought earlier) and its varying degrees of enforcement, about who was in charge in most families ("the women of course, the only difference is whether the men know it or not...")
The South American participant in the conversation (not XZ - you can guess where he's from) protested that we should stop using the word "American" to mean "USA person". Fair enough, but what, I asked him, should we use instead? Gringo. Oh. Are we allowed to use that? Um, do you know what it stands for? "Green Go", he said, explaining it had to do with the propensity for green-uniformed USA armies to march into other countries. Oh. Really. He wasn't sure either, but it was a nice story, if over-simplistic.
Never mind - this was a nice segue into discussing army uniform colors (the Chinese Army wears green uniforms instead of Red)... then wars... then World War Two... then the hypothetical (hopefully) question of who would win if the Chinese and US armies fought in a fair battle... then about Stalin losing initial stages of World War Two because he'd killed off all his best generals... then a comparison of German and Japanese post-WW2 guilt (the former did a better job)... after some time, we were on the Han treatment of minorities in China - XZ said it was pretty good, I wasn't sure but didn't have enough unbiased information to check - various questions about "what is progress" came up.
Then XZ brought up the question of tolerance. Yes, tolerance is good thing. Then the Devil's Advocate (yours truly, although I prefer to dispense with the word Advocate in the title) asked "if a minority culture believes in certain things, such as a low status for women, should this be tolerated?" I said it shouldn't be, and neither XZ or LC could say anything, so that hope for an argument went nowhere. Dunno what the answer is, either - it's all about individual freedom vs a society's freedom. I still think the answer is no, but specific cases are often more complicated than binary questions.
Haven't got over the HP fanfic addiction yet.
Oops, one hour before the Ratner closes. Better hit that treadmill. And post that DVD to Frank tomorrow.
No, that didn't make much sense to me either.
Mat and I played our last table tennis game today. Quite the occasion it was, with many tearful memories and speeches. Actually, there were a couple of guys already playing, and they were kind enough to let us play doubles with them.
I hate doubles table tennis. I always play much worse than in singles table tennis. At least that's been my experience since ... oh... 1992? The key thing to remember about doubles is that you and your partner are supposed to take turns hitting the ball, unlike tennis. My control has never been good enough to deal with this - I need the practice that hitting the ball repetitively gives you, otherwise I'm crap.
Until today. Apparently, my control - and Mat's - has improved greatly.
We won. Rather well, to the surprise of both of us. And we were diving for shots, and falling on the floor, and crashing into the bookshelf filled with old bound volumes of Physical Chemistry journals. (And need I say, actually making the shots in the process. And not just by luck, either.) And we missed a bunch of sitters, of course. Fortunately, they missed more than we did. And the net was nice to us, too.
It's funny how one can be a klutz about so many things and still have reasonably wicked control over a little round white (sometimes yellow) plastic sphere. Amazing how after making an impossible shot, actually picking up the ball to get it back in your hand can take several attempts.
How come I wasn't good at this game when I was in high school? Was it because I had to wear shoes? (I always play in socks now.) It would have been nice to have been good in just one sport, not to mention the destruction of my university academic career because I didn't do sports at high school.
That's it - I'm applying for a job with Microsoft China, for the sole purpose of improving my ping pong game.
Hmmm - I wrote that as a joke, but it may not be a bad idea...
Second things first. Find out if there's a Table Tennis club on campus.
Now for the first thing - research.
Didn't get much work done yesterday, or today. The usual downtime. (You don't want to know.) Just an hour or two of coding C. But HLT/NAACL and Speech Prosody deadlines are coming up, next Friday and the week after. Sheise! Got a note that YX is coming to Chicago - great! And he and his student have done the missing piece of work I needed to proceed, so that's even better (Insert evil grin here.)
Yesterday I would have got more work done, but the conversation that LC and XZ were having in the office - was too interesting to not join. What did we cover in the space of an hour? Let's see...
China's one-child policy (only came into effect around 1978 - I had thought earlier) and its varying degrees of enforcement, about who was in charge in most families ("the women of course, the only difference is whether the men know it or not...")
The South American participant in the conversation (not XZ - you can guess where he's from) protested that we should stop using the word "American" to mean "USA person". Fair enough, but what, I asked him, should we use instead? Gringo. Oh. Are we allowed to use that? Um, do you know what it stands for? "Green Go", he said, explaining it had to do with the propensity for green-uniformed USA armies to march into other countries. Oh. Really. He wasn't sure either, but it was a nice story, if over-simplistic.
Never mind - this was a nice segue into discussing army uniform colors (the Chinese Army wears green uniforms instead of Red)... then wars... then World War Two... then the hypothetical (hopefully) question of who would win if the Chinese and US armies fought in a fair battle... then about Stalin losing initial stages of World War Two because he'd killed off all his best generals... then a comparison of German and Japanese post-WW2 guilt (the former did a better job)... after some time, we were on the Han treatment of minorities in China - XZ said it was pretty good, I wasn't sure but didn't have enough unbiased information to check - various questions about "what is progress" came up.
Then XZ brought up the question of tolerance. Yes, tolerance is good thing. Then the Devil's Advocate (yours truly, although I prefer to dispense with the word Advocate in the title) asked "if a minority culture believes in certain things, such as a low status for women, should this be tolerated?" I said it shouldn't be, and neither XZ or LC could say anything, so that hope for an argument went nowhere. Dunno what the answer is, either - it's all about individual freedom vs a society's freedom. I still think the answer is no, but specific cases are often more complicated than binary questions.
Haven't got over the HP fanfic addiction yet.
Oops, one hour before the Ratner closes. Better hit that treadmill. And post that DVD to Frank tomorrow.
posted by Dinoj | 18:22
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