End of War

The end of the Iraqi war is finally here. This is an excellent news coverage.

So our nation is tricked into war for Weapons of Mass Destruction. And the guy who says that just get away with that? Imagine this, I say FIRE and call 911 but there isn't fire. I probably will get charged for this misdemeanor, right?

For Americans, the ceremony on Thursday marked an uneasy moment of closure, with no clear sense of what has been won and lost. As of last Friday, the war had claimed 4,487 American lives, with another 32,226 Americans wounded in action, according to Pentagon statistics.

It was wrong to go to this war. Wrong for the thousands of Americans to lose their lives, and wrong for the many more civilians who lost their lives too. It is billions of dollars lost too.

This war ended in confusion: there is no clear sense of what has been won and lost.

Towers of Hanoi

News says, there are fires in some office tower of Hanoi. Details here.

I hope everyone is ok... I wonder if the news reporter has a computer science background. Why not simply call it office building?

The Towers of Hanoi is a famous mathematics/computer puzzle that every computer science student should know about.

Start with 3 pegs and a bunch of disks of various size. The goal is to move them from peg 1 to peg 3. The rules are simple: you can only one disk at a time and you cannot put a big disk on top of a small disk.

Now, write a program to solve this.

This can be solved ultra elegantly with recursion (and other methods), and I've seen that in high school.

If you interview an "architect" and he has no clue what it is immediately show him the door.

Book Donation

Yesterday I donated a big box of old books to a dropbox outside of the supermarket. They cost hundreds of dollars. Some are computer books for some obsolete technology. Some are college textbooks that are no longer useful.

Donating them is better than tossing them to the garbage. Some people may still find interesting stuff in there. The dropbox says if nobody wants them they will be recycled.

Recycle that paper! That is the #1 landfill item that can be recycled. I hope my books' next reincarnation will be a best seller.

Computer books used to be big business. Alas things are changing so fast. By the time a book is made it is already outdated. Perhaps a subscription service is a great idea.

I even tossed a draft copy of my book to it. Hope someone will find it interesting.

Kung Fu pays off

A robber got beaten up bad by a martial art expert. See story here.

That's exactly the purpose of martial art: to fend off villains.

However, I don't recommend martial art experts try to fight someone with a gun.

Of course, someone will misuse martial arts to be villains themselves, and perhaps kill his own master, and the good big brother must revenge in tears. Now that's a classic kung fu story scheme. This storyline I never get tired of.

Earth 2.0

This is exciting discovery... an earth-like planet. See here.

Ooh it sounds like a warm weather, roomy place: "2.4 times the size of Earth, and has a temperature of about 22C."

However, it is 600 lightyears away.

I am not even sure if human can ever get on Mars, our neighbor planet (and it is ok not to go there, that $ has better use on earth).

We aren't going nowhere. It is merely science fiction to migrate to the Moon or Mars. It is too harsh to live there, and too far to go even if you find a new place lightyears away... unless you got some sort of warp engine (which is just science fiction).

We are grounded on earth. Please love the Earth. Recycle that can. Make less waste. Don't play with nuclear weapons.