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From Dec 2023 to Jan 2024, I spent two months full-time writing. I want to remember this wonderful time of intellectual sparkle and passionate intensity by a poem.  My semicolon, myself With my pen and my mind, I have intruded everywhere,Who said I can do that? But my pen is a tender green sprout,I cannot define, a many-valued […]

“Push your front thigh backwards while lifting your heels in the direction of the hip,” said Elmo, an experienced Iyengar-yoga instructor, while closely observing my pose from behind a screen. Noting that I missed her point, she made another attempt, “Imagine now I am holding your heels and pushing them against the wall.” Beads of

Dear Ye: When I think of you, I’m reminded of the village green, and the soft wind that blew the golden barley on a sultry June afternoon. The air was always thick with heat and humidity. Adults in the village were toiling and moiling for the summer harvest. We used to sit in leafy meadows,

Last day in Helsinki. The past week was like a grand party. But the party is never really over as long as you have a good story and someone to tell it to. I am grateful to everyone I met and every story I was told. What is the point of meeting people? I figured,

I want to write about the movie Barbie. Though I do not want to write it as a movie review because in that case, this blog would only contain criticisms and personal judgements—I think the discussion of gender conflicts and equality in this movie is superficial, lacks of details, and is confined to sermons. Two scenes

The lure of a good story has run through human history. Before the writing system was developed, sagas were handed down from one generation of storytellers to another; in the modern society of lush education resources, fables play a vital role in teaching preschool kids to tell right from wrong. But when it comes to

It was a warm, pleasant Wednesday afternoon. After a few hours of concentrated research work, I felt a little hungry. Thinking that there was still abundant food in the fridge, I decided to go home for a simple dinner—I had the privilege of a ten-minute commute time since I moved to the city centre two

Thick cloud has cleared, and the moon bathes the Zurich city in a soft light. I often stop to gaze at the moon in the middle of reading the novel 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Besides the fact that I am more perceptive to the world around me while I try to capture something written in words, it

The alarm woke me at five thirty. I got up from bed and slid the window open. My cat jumped to the windowsill, cock his head to sniff the fresh early morning air. To wake my body and mind from deep sleep, I went to the kitchen, boiled water, and made some coffee. At six

How, you may wonder, could wire-twined machines act as mathematicians? I am not referring to those precise mechanical robots commanded by people, but the field of Machine Learning, where humans train a machine to actively discover on its own how to perform a variety of complex tasks without explicit programming. The more general umbrella term is Artificial