As I think more about our (i.e., the mankind’s) “role” in this universe, I am beginning to think that the term (or the concept), “artificial” is arbitrary when it comes to a bigger scale of things. I am not saying that, in the “micro”-level of our ordinary lives, it seems quite obvious to us [...]
In the middle of the October 2004 issue of Communications of the ACM, there was a peculiar-looking insert titled “GLAT: Google Labs Aptitude Test”. It had a very official looking format and was a fairly well-made mock-up test.
It was fun and all that, but it somehow reminded me of what Microsoft used to do [...]
Should I write my name as Younghong Cho or Cho Younghong?
There is something I’ve been noticing recently about how some Koreans write their names in Roman alphabets. Some of them started writing Korean names with their family name first without a comma. This seems to be more common for the names of Koreans in [...]
For the past three days (Monday through Wednesday), I’ve been reporting for my first jury duty at the Superior Court of Santa Clara. Well, it was just for jury selection for a civil case regarding a disability insurance claim dispute, but it was quite an interesting and, I must say, educational experience.
The jury selection [...]
(I guess this would be one of many “unproven” theories of Hong’s…)
Quite a few of my friends, by now, are married and most of them have children. One thing I noticed was that a lot of those children were girls. One would think that the ratio of the sexes should be about equal [...]
On a message board I frequent, someone mentioned about “loneliness” and how to deal with it. Here is something I wrote in response although it seems a bit too obvious…
It’s a feeling that you get when you have nothing to occupy your mind and realized that there is no one, physically or emotionally, next [...]
I was going to say something, but I don’t think it’s that interesting. :p I guess I will just note that it’s an order of magnitude more difficult for me to flirt in English than in Korean. Since I grew up on Korean, it’s definitely my emotional language, where English was learned and mostly used [...]
Okay, let’s get back to a more metaphysical analogy rubbish by yours truly… I like analogies, good ones I mean. Although they might not be the real things, they definitely help understand them.
This is a concept that I’ve been bouncing around in my head for a while. As with any other ideas I have here, [...]
Thinking about the recent tragedy and other violent incidents in the world, I came back once again to a previous subject.
The element of violence in human society (actually, any biological system) is inevitable. It is intrinsic to us, and the only difference is the varying degrees.
The real questions come up when it is of an [...]
…between having an opinion and being dogmatic…
In the past, I’d been occasionally complimented (?) by some people that I didn’t impose my own tastes onto others (meaning, not having strong preferences, which kind of prompted me to to write this). But in reality, I do have opinions on a lot of stuff (maybe not as [...]