Planeswalker

The most important thing is time, the one uses time more efficiently wins.

换了个服务器,所以好久不能访问了.
还是独立的地方方便, 15$/year

昔孟子少时，父早丧，母仉氏守节。居住之所近于墓，孟子学为丧葬，躄,踊痛哭之事。母曰：“此非所以居子也。”乃去，舍市，近于屠，孟子学为买卖屠杀之事。母又曰：“亦非所以居子也。”继而迁于学宫之旁。每月朔望，官员入文庙，行礼跪拜，揖让进退，孟子见了，一一习记。孟母曰：“此真可以居子也。”遂居于此。

It is a long time since I last wrote. It was really a terrible time since two weeks ago. Anyway, finally it is completed, so I can change my attention to more interesting staffs.

I was involved again in NOI this time — not as a contestant, but an (likely) observer. Due to the community service requirement of Tsinghua on issuing PhD degrees, I went to Mianyang, Sichuan this summer. Put aside the numerous critics on keeping this requirement since ‘77, I was “teaching” the high school kids something for NOI. I quote the “teaching” part because for olympic students, the usual way is to learn by themselves. But it seems that this school is different from the others, since the teacher here decides most of the process. Actually I think it is quite a bad idea, because the olympic problems change every year, and I am sure that none of the high school teacher has a PhD degree in CS, so who will expect one that does not understand why regular expression is equivalent to DFA to catch up?

Another thing impressed me is the problem is becoming harder and harder. Not in the sense they bring more ideas and sights into the contest, but they are trying to push technical parts further. I don’t like the idea of discussing whether being technical or conceptual, but I think being technical too much just make the contestants to recite algorithms, which was clearly a sign of “bad contest”.

Fortunately this year’s NOI is better than the last two years, which is focused on some simple ideas. But they are still kind of “dirty” if compared to this year’s CEOI problems. I was very astonished to see Mihai was on the committee of deciding the problems of CEOI. Generally speaking, CEOI has more neat problems. Paraphrasing from the teacher, “you will know what you are going to do when you see the problems”. I admit that the problem sets in China are more or less more on modeling part, but not on the algorithm part. And I think it was intentional because if they are too obvious, then some of the kids will spend their time sleeping in the contest . It is very easy to get problems everyone knows how to solve, or the problems that no one knows how to solve. But for the problems good for a contest, it is kind of hard to make. I have to say CEOI is better than NOI on this point, for they are trying to increase the internal difficulty of the problems, and we are trying to make the problem more obscure. Although they also suffer from the problem of getting too much complexity on formulated optimizations (like this), but more problems are good even for talking after dinner (like this).

By the way, this year’s IOI is in progress, which is located in Bulgaria.

can it be

有的时候完全不懂，做的事情到底是为了什么，并不理解应该所做的事情的意义，但是总有些事情在逼迫着自己，依然很迷茫。

一般来说,看起来越正常的人,总有点不正常的事情.
但是,我最近发现接触的事情都是不正常的.
这实在是太要人崩溃了.
我觉得我应该好好的忏悔一下行事的方式!

The last travel, and the one which is only for traveling, is the trip to the Changbai Mt. For people living in the northeast, it is a legendary mountain. For the Tianchi, also for the massive underground rivers and ginseng inside.

Before I went to the mountain, I went to Dandong first for stupid rules in the train system. It is also on the boarder of China and North Korea. Someone said the contrast on the border is very clear in the night. Because North Korea doesn’t have enough power to light in the night, so it is like black and white.

On the way to the Changbai Mt I met a couple of locals on the train. They are very hospitable. They even invite me for the lunch on the arriving day. Anyway the ones ran the businesses there are not so kind.

On the mountain there were cold and snow. It is like always. The Tianchi (Heaven Lake) is just a pile of frozen ice with a lot of snow covering the top.

You can hardly see any plants there. It is tundra.

After that one of us is sick immediately. So I have to visit most of the rest places with sunnymonkey alone. And what we saw most… is snow. There are snows everywhere. If you die in the snow, no one will discover you.

And the underground river.

Frozen waterfalls.

Hot springs. Some birds will wash themselves in the hot spring!

And the frozen tunnel. It is under the snow.

Outside the tunnel… you can see how thick the snow is.

The larger waterfall, also frozen.

We are on the way to the underground forest, which grows after the eruption of the volcano movement.

Who knows what are the red spots?

The underground forest. It is in the valley. But the snow was heavy, so no good photos.

After that sunnymonkey and purplesnow left for the airport. But I still spent some time around. Like the lumber mill.

Also some time inside a pine forest. It is a special kind of pinus sylvestris.

This is the end of my travel in winter. And it is the end of the series. I am hoping I can get some more in the summer.

The way back to Shenyang is hard. The planes delayed a lot. So I stayed one night at the Beijing airport. And the plane back to Shenyang will stop once in the middle. In a very small airport with single lane.

This “carefully slide” sign is interesting.

And traditional chinese things on the plane, quite localized.

I didn’t stay home for long. sunnymonkey in the second week. We went to the cast museum.

There were no one there except us… it is lucky that’s in the day.

I thought I met a lot of these things when I was little. But not too much now. There are no such kind of things in the city of Shenyang now.

MIT and Harvard are the very places you need to visit in Boston. It is my base of staying in the US. Although I found that I still unfamiliar with it at last. In the middle of the Harvard bridge there is painted “Half way to hell”, where the hell is MIT. You can google this by yourself.

MIT is a typical engineer school. There are liquid nitrogen bottles everywhere. Not to mention the accelerator, nuclear reactor and the wind tunnel not far from my office.

I was astonished that there is a painting about the “Blind Men and Elephant” story. For you want to check it out, it should be on the way to the Hayden Library.

Harvard, it is said to be. And some others say it isn’t. But who cares? Only his foot matters.

MIT Museum is an interesting place, with a lot of weird art works and non-art works.

Stata Center more serves as a landmark in MIT.

And inside are nerds…

They also have other weird buildings like the green building. I really can’t appreciate the designer.

Harvard looks much nicer, especially in the fall.

From the main street, I often go to the Royal East, for supper.

The view form my office is like this. Anyway, it is far away…