Staying Afloat

Bye

2026-03-27T00:00:00Z

I want you to know, that you make me not just question your ability, but the validity of your whole profession.
What you have said is not even sufficiently incorrect as to be wrong.
Your response and suggestions are so textbook, it’s not just not helpful but laughable.

This was what I sent to my therapist before I fired him.

Arcade conferences

2025-08-08T00:00:00Z

At some point, after I have gone on so many trips to so many different cities, airports become places of familiarity. The stress gets taken away and replaced by a sense of knowing. I arrive at the border control, I go through the security, I step with my socks on that disgusting mat, and I walk to the gate. I board the plane and sit. It’s the same routine every time. I have long stopped trying to press different buttons on the screen, on the armrest, or flip through the in flight magazines.

The sense of familiarity doesn’t make flying enjoyable by any means, it makes it less exciting. In the same way that going to the same bus stop every morning doesn’t really excite anybody. It’s just a thing to do to get you from point A to point B. The bus sqeeches to a stop. You get on and sit down. That’s about it. I board the plane, I get into my seat, and so it goes.

Walking into a Starbucks. Whether in Rome, Italy or in Annapolis, MD, USA, I’d get the same flat white, and it’d probably taste exactly the same. It’s the buildup of tolerance as if traveling is a drug.

It’s the same places too. Of the conferences I planned to go to this year. Two of them are in Georgia Tech and two are in Anaheim, CA. To be honest, I don’t really know why. They are just… there.

I walk into the hotel. The Hilton is literally built the same everywhere.

Conferences are the same. When I was a PhD student. I remember in the first 3 months, I wrote three conference papers. These papers embarrass me greatly when I look at them now, they really were not the best. But I wanted to go on conferences so much that I wrote all of them, and they all got accepted. and so I went. Those times, I really didn’t get much out of conferences. I would worry about presenting and not spend enough time actually appreciating what conferences have to offer.

As a Covid post-doc, I literally had a conference cancel on me the day I was suppose to fly there. That was APS March meeting.

It wasn’t until I became a professor that I started understanding what conferences are meant for. i mean, as a post-doc, i thought the remote conferences were perfectly good. I got to enjoy the talks at my own leisure, I could listen to two talks that were happening at the same time. Now I go to 5 to 7 conferences a year on average. I was diligent at first, finding the talks i would be interested in and attending them.

Fast forward 4 years, and here i am now. If i go to five talks at a conference, in addition to my own session, i’d consider that a win. Maybe i need to find new conferences to go to. Now i am using conferences as a venue to meet with my collaborators and my commiserator. We discuss ideas and ideas become proposals, and proposals get funded so there will be more research to be presented at future conferences.

As I get to know people in the community, I start participating in more mini-symposium organization. I suppose these things all happen in stages, and it’s inevitable to a degree.

filial piety is a load of horse shit

2025-07-16T00:00:00Z

It is horribly unethical if parents have kids with the expectation that these kids will one day take care of them. Because the kids had no say in the matter to be born. If the kid was not born, it would have no notion of any of this.

It is like making an unborn kid sign a social contract that it has no awareness of. Then hammer the kid on a daily basis of this social contract. Guilt the kid into obeying.

Use it as a cudgel every time something does not go the way the parents want. Saying how much effort it was to raise the kid, and how ungrateful the kid is for not doing things the way the parents want.

Having a kid is a guilty pleasure.

Having a kid is a genetic nudge.

Having a kid is a social obligation.

The parents love their kid. Would you subject someone you love to this?

Societally, it is beneficial. It is clearly beneficial to the parents.

The kid should be given the choice, and have that choice be available at all times (when they become adults) whether to exercise filial piety.

Any inherent expectation is unethical.

Wednesday Night Skate (2025-02-25)

2025-02-25T00:00:00Z

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Car

2025-01-21T00:00:00Z

I bought a Honda accord new back in nov 2021. It was not my first choice, but back then it didn’t really matter what I wanted. There was such a shortage of everything that the dealers would email me saying they had several cars coming in and ask if I wanted one. It was totally a sellers’ market except they have no inventory. Compounding that, I had no American drivers license so Carmax wouldn’t sell me a car.

Accords are reliable, low cost to maintain and relatively not ugly. so I thought I made a good choice. But I’ve come to realize that I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, the car is those things. But those aren’t the things I really cared about. but I guess I had to have owned a car to realize what I wanted a car. I could say the same about buying a house. Or for that matter, running a lab at a university.

The most sensible thing may not be the best choice. The notion of mediocrity is not that sexy.

Reminiscence

2024-12-15T00:00:00Z

Being a post-doc was the most fun period in my professional life so far. That statement seems to be true only in retrospect, and it is only true because I found the next job that an academic is “supposed to” find. For the post-docs who are on the job market, as I was last year, life was misery itself, and that may be due to the transitory nature of a post-doc position. It is a stepping stone that one goes through to become a faculty member at some institution. There must be some well-thought out theory on life events that fall into that category.

There has been an increasing revolt against the notion that going to industry is an admission of failure. we used to talk about going to industry as a path not so much chosen, but as a path of last resort. This ties into the larger narrative that universities are designed to educate future academics. Back then, one did not go to university to obtain practical knowledge that could be useful. University-educated scholars whom by definition aren’t suppose to be good for anything practical. Science was done by “gentlemen” as a leisure activity.

But now, of course universities have become a pathway towards upper mobility, towards finding a career that pays better. This has been true for a bachelor’s degree, and is becoming increasingly true for a masters too. That is where it stopped, should stop. I find it improbable that a person enters a doctoral school (to earn a PhD for example) without at least entertaining the notion that they may someday become an academic. Conversely, very few career paths actually need the candidate to have a PhD in a specific discipline, in a specific topic. Spending 4 years at an R and D department surely trains a better researcher (generating more revenue for a company) in that particular domain than a PhD program.

Case to point, almost no one needs to have a PhD in engineering to be an engineer. Consequently, there must be an ulterior motive for a person to do a doctorate in engineering.

Second, the increased admission of PhDs. There is never enough faculty positions for the amount of PhDs that come out every day. For that would require each faculty member to train exactly one PhD throughout their lifetime (adjusting for population growth). Yet we, in engineering, are advised to hire one new phd per year. given a career of 30 years, i will have trained 30 phds. yet i will only be replaced by one person.

I am come to think long and hard about my chosen career.

I also thought a great deal about the notion that I chose my career. To what degree does a person truly choose what they do?

Just because the world has gotten more complex and jobs more specialized, doesn’t mean that the knowledge is somehow more suited in a university setting. A university’s job is to teach students how to think, how to solve problems, and how to behave as a person. These are abstract concepts that theoretically should be applicable to any jobs the student may have in the future.

That time in Chile

2024-12-15T00:00:00Z

I am writing this after reading an article on the NYTimes about Sopaipillas. Memories are like that, aren’t they? Something random pulls at a thread, and you just keep on pulling.

I was there in Chile between 2011 and 2012. I don’t remember much of my time in Chile, a country that is so narrow and long that it would take days to traverse vertically, yet only an hour or two to get across from the sea to the Andes.

Whenever I think back at it, it feels just like everything else in my distant memory; a bunch of spotty events interlaced with a general feeling of pervasive sadness. I am glad to have been there, but I would not go back there to live. If I were to choose again, I would not have gone. It’s not worth it.Regardless, here are some of the moments that I can recall.

The first memory was of us walking along the river in the evening with our suitcases and trying to find dinner. It was warm. I was unsettled.

Us touring the apartment we ended up renting for about 400 dollars a month. We living in that apartment, it had either a red and white checkerboard curtain or table cloth. There was an ikea lounge chair. A balcony upon which we witness a bank robbery. The bedroom door slid.

The job hunt, where we walked from one English teaching institution to another, looking for positions to teach english. We walked and walked under an intense and unrelenting sun. We walked past the parliament building. Why do all South American countries build them like that?

Us studying for the GRE at an air conditioned public library. It must have been a publicly funded project, the small building was nicely designed, the interior had light colored wood with many desks and chairs.

Getting tear-gassed at a university student led protest against tuition hikes. I was coming back from buying tofu. We were vegetarians then. An armored truck rammed down the boulevard like a nascar car and made a 180 degree turn. Smoke and gas everywhere.

Going to an American style mall and getting a donut shaped like a U with spikes. I suppose I lived in the city center of Santiago. The mall is a bit on the out-skirts. We didn’t have any money. We went there as a vacation, to be showered by capitalism.

Eating sopaipillas that we bought from a street vendor. I would pass by the same stand many times, getting off the subway after work, and resisting the urge to buy some. They are basically fried dough with spicy sauce on top. It was the most delicious thing.

New year’s eve having grapes on a balcony with the landlord and other people. There were fireworks.

Cashing our cheques and hiking the money in the freezer in a zip lock bag. Later, we were woken by a loud clash and went on to the balcony to see that bank branch getting robbed by a bunch of quite clumsy men in black hoods.

There was an earthquake. We were woken up in the middle of the night. We left the flat and went out onto the street. We went back in and slept. Next day we went to work.

I took my class of teenagers up onto the roof of the building, I didn’t tell anyone. I taught a Jewish man at work place. I taught a children’s class where one kid tore down the curtains of the classroom. I taught an adult class.

Dive bars

2024-11-10T00:00:00Z

I write a lot at dive bars, but I don’t write a lot about dive bars. I’m going to write about dive bars. I’m not in one right now. But as I write this, I feel like I’m sitting in one.

Dive bars are airport gates. They are not the club lounges, or the overpriced restaurants trying to pass off fast food as airport gourmet. Dive bars are where you sit because you are not sitting anywhere else. Not that you can’t or can’t afford to, but just aren’t. Dive bars are sticky, musky, and dim.

Dive bars are cozy. The same way a car seat is. Sometimes, it is too much, to sit in a cafe. It’s too much to sit in my office. Sometimes I need a cocoon. Maybe I’ve always wanted this. When I was three, I remember having an “office” under the stairs. I had my little chair and a desk the size of a large book. I felt content and safe.

It makes me shiver thinking about this.

Alcohol warms me, and it envelopes me.

When it gets too much, I want that cocoon of anonymity. When I sit in a dive bar, no one will see me. They won’t notice me, and next morning they won’t remember me. I won’t remember me either.

Anything I write or jot down won’t have any consequences. They don’t matter. Napkins with blue ink, in the bin. I cannot fuck up.

A visit to China, a story of constrained renaissance

2024-09-28T00:00:00Z

It was supposed to be an experience for me as a former Chinese national to witness China’s transformation. The last time I visited Shanghai was back in 2005. I was 17 at the time. The time before that was my birth back in 1987. My family and I left Shanghai in 2001 when I was 13 and I really don’t remember much of it. This time, I was 36 years old, and I visited China to attend a conference, and I suppose, with slightly more money.

If negativity annoys you, please skip forward to the second part of this post.

China regularly touts its economic development over the last decades and uses Shanghai as a prima facie example. To me though, at least given the limited time I was here (slightly over a week), the city isn’t so different from 20 years ago. It may be because I really don’t remember what it was like 20 years ago so it is hard to compare and contrast. The bits and pieces that got stuck in my memory were the stuff that didn’t change at all. The architecture on the bund and the view across the river, the parks I used to play with my parents. Those didn’t change. I suppose there are several more skyscrapers across the bund river but the pearl tower remains the singular landmark that remains unmoved.

Economic development had been tremendous. But then again, Shanghai had always been an economic powerhouse way before the 1949 liberation. People living in Shanghai were always more well off than the rest of the country. Historians remark that the tolerance for autocracy increases when the people are well off. This is certainly true here, whether for the locals or the Chinese visiting from other cities or foreigners to China. Given this prosperity, the overwhelming obsessions of the masses seem to be shopping and eating.

What remains stagnate is the culture. Post liberation, it seems that the culture stopped evolving. This is most evident when I went to the China Art Museum. Aside from a large temporary exhibit on contemporary art (which I will describe at length later), the art I saw fell into three categories. First, there were many ancient works of calligraphy and watercolor from the various dynasties. Second, paintings by pre-liberation artists who were clearly trained in foreign schools. These refreshing works depicted people’s lives in colonial Shanghai in wonderful details. Lastly, a bunch of the garbage pieces extorting the virtues of the party or fictitious depictions of the revolutionary war. These were produced after the liberation and, are of no artistic value.

There is a lot of copying. The society seems lost and drifting, and it clings onto whatever it could. In the museum, there are literally replicas of Van Gogh, Monet and other European masters; the famous pieces, of course, for people to admire and take photos of.
On the high street, we see Hermes and Gucci, Nike and Shake Shack, occupying way more space than they ought to, funneling billions out of China. On Chinese digital apps and on the streets, a cacophony of nauseating visual imagery bombards one’s senses at every turn with cartoon characters only slightly modified from Japanese productions. And without that fundamental history of the origin, these impulses grow without constraint and metastasize into something grotesque and disturbing.

One can argue, and I agree, that bringing the population out of abject poverty and starvation is fundamentally more important than evolving the culture of the society. At some point however, it becomes no longer an option to separate the two.
Despite the financial security, what remains unchanged are the people. Notably wealthier, their brusque mannerisms, impatient demeanor, loud voices, damp smells, down to how they hack up and spit phlegm, remain the same. I have even seen one guy who took a shit in a dark corner on the bund in the evening while surrounded by thousands of pedestrians.

Perhaps seen as inefficient given the mutually unintelligible nature between mandarin and the Shanghai dialect, the latter had all but disappeared, so much so that I spoke to exactly one person using the dialect after hearing her speaking it to another worker.
I thought alcohol wasn’t a large part of the culture until I checked out the “locals” hangout near the French Concession. Young locals intermingling with expats, drinking and smoking pipes. It is strangely reminiscent of the pre-revolution times… Almost a split image, 75 years later.

On the academic front (my bread and butter), university students are extremely sheltered. They live on campus, eat all their meals in canteens, and are given an allowance from their parents. They are actually given a bank account in the form of a QR code on WeChat whose expense they cannot check. Practically, this worries me when I try to recruit them as grad students. As I discussed in another post, moving to the US is not easy. It takes a lot of self-determination to wade through the gauntlet of seemingly impossible and ridiculously stupid requirements just to settle down and start doing research. The ability to hack things is a skill that Chinese students don’t seem to need.

By-and-large, the students are not taught to think. They are trained for the pressing challenges of today, without giving much thought to the more fundamental and more complex challenges of tomorrow. The brightest kids in the best universities are taught to how to fix cars (literally). Not to say that, that skill isn’t important, but doesn’t it remind us of when Mao made everyone build a iron furnace in their backyard (土法炼钢, literal meaning: primitive steelmaking)? Look how that turned out.

Research funding is an interesting thing. It kind of evolved from the US system. There is a NSF type mechanism, though their funding is limited. Receiving such funding is more an approval of one’s technical ability (to write good proposals I suppose) than any monetary gain. In all funding, student salary is not a part of the budget. Industries funded a majority of the projects I saw, these ranged from mag-lev train to earthquake resilient infrastructure. The research is applied, and universities provide this as a service.

The research infrastructure is impressive. Brand new rows of 3D printers, lathes, laser cutter and so on. Yet, they remain brand-new and under-utilized. It reminded me of that contrasting picture of the interior of the international space station and the Chinese counterpart. More offensively, it looked a lot like what Richard Feynmann termed cargo-cult science. These things are made to look like science without actually being science.

I am not a very polite person sometimes, not that I am trying to be rude, but I don’t really have a filter, I just say things. I often ask questions that may be considered inappropriate or rude. I asked them why Chinese students still want to pursue education abroad. The above was basically a subjective (my) summary of their answers.

Positivity starts, kind of

It is not that the Chinese culture lacks material. It has thousands of years of culture heritage and identity to be inspired from and evolved upon. Chinese culture cannot be solely a mimicry of the past (cheap Qipaos as costumes) nor a collection of ancient relics, but something that indisputably recognizable as Chinese. For example, while constantly evolving, anime is clearly Japanese. From what I saw, I would discuss this in terms of art, academia, and industry.

In the same China Art Museum that I mentioned above, there was a temporary exhibit (lasting only a month?!) on contemporary Chinese art from the past 5 years. There I witnessed pieces so powerful that I shivered looking at them. I saw many contemporary pieces that were so adept at threading the line between subversion and freedom of expression. I will write about this more later, but some works were almost subliminal. Maybe I am just seeing the things that I am looking for. As if artists are really trying to find ways to break through, while at the same time, without running the risk of being censored.

I visited several top Chinese universities in Shanghai. Rather, guided by my colleagues in China, I visited their engineering departments. I can see that the students are being seriously taught a lot of useful knowledge. There isn’t the sense of faffing around anymore like before. The educational facilities and equipment is modern to a fault, and far exceeds the available resources in a typical US university. The teaching staff is well educated and dedicated towards student success.

Chinese university students are extremely talented, or at least good at studying for exams. By one account, only 50 out of 100000 students can get into Tongji University, and they only recruit about 4000 undergrads per year in total across all programs out of millions of Chinese applicants. This kind of odds defy reason yet it appears mostly objective and free from serious trickery. Admissions are purely dictated by the results of one set of standardized tests across the nation. Of course, people game these tests, and as a result, the student population in good universities are generally wealthier than the population given the amount of money poured into review sessions. But by-and-large, they get in because they are smart and hardworking. The system is designed to cramp even more knowledge into these students by the time they graduate.

Only recently (again, the last 5 years), they began hiring professors with the expectation of a tenure evaluation based on research (papers). Though, their mention of ESI (?) journals make me question things. With an increased hiring of foreign scholars or returning scholars, and the change of the system to place emphasis on international publications, they will be more linked to the international academic community.

Technologically, the private enterprises have demonstrated incredible innovations. Wechat and its associated infrastructure can be seen as a technological version of working-with or working-through the system. By decoupling completely with the western credit based infrastructure, they developed something unique in the past half decade that works equally as well. But bowing down to the reality that foreigners literally do not have a way to pay for things, they started allowing credit cards to be used through the app.

This whole article may seem like a critic of the Chinese society from someone who has left. Though I am ultimately hopeful. They can fight through this thing, they certainly got the genes for it.

Abortion to the extreme

2024-01-28T00:00:00Z

When in a debate or an argument, I find myself often resorting to extrapolation. I point out the flaw in the other person’s train of thought by taking what they say to the extreme. Needlessly to say, this is a cheap trick that I play, and it is logically flawed in many situations. Having said that, I will apply the same reasoning to the abortion debate. I discount arguments that cannot be quantified, e.g. a person’s conviction that abortion is not allowed by the dictates of the spaghetti monster, and focus solely on the rational arguments put forth by both the pro-choice and pro-life side. Note that since the Supreme Court ruling of Dobbs v. Jackson, things have changed quite a bit, for the worse.

Life starts at conception. Wikipedia states that a living thing must demonstrate the ability to signal, and the ability to self-sustain. Given that living cells can always signal, we look at if, and at what stage can an embryo self-sustain. It is obvious that an infant can’t be self-sustainable, we reduce that requirement to viability. If, by the miracle of science, an embryo is viable immediately after conception, then should all termination be barred? Should women be allowed to abort, and have that viable embryo reach maturity in a futuristic incubation chamber? What if the cost of this procedure is prohibitive? Will there be a “recreational” use of it, where the woman wants a child but doesn’t want to go through the pregnancy? While this may satisfy the fundamentalists since no babies will be killed, it would place a huge burden on the society, to care for basically all these orphans.

Foreign faculty on-boarding to US universities

2024-01-28T00:00:00Z

As the next cohort of newly minted assistant professors draft plans to uproot their lives (yet again) to a distant land, I hope to shed some lights on this opaque and intentionally difficult process. I suppose my own journey was unique, but then again, by the point a person becomes a faculty member, their journeys are probably no less unique. What follows are the experiences of a Chinese-born Canadian national emigrating to the US from Switzerland, to take up a post in a publicly funded institution of higher learning.

As I was going through (a couple of years ago), I noticed that somehow, even when everyone had to go through the exact same thing, no one bothered to write them down. So I started to write them down. There were a lot of things that needed to be done. These were not really hard things, but the bureaucracy made them difficult. This difficulty increased exponentially as 1) I wasn’t physically in the US, and 2) covid was raging on.

As I was going through this process, I realized that my situation was unique. Most academics by this point have already had US-based something. As such, none of the staff members in my department knew anything about what I needed to do.

Cash reserve One advice is to have a boat load of cash reserve. I am not being flippant about this, and I know amassing about 20k is not easy by any means but that was approximately how much I spent. Much of it I eventually recuperated but life would have been much harder without the ability to pay for things myself and get reimbursed later.

Moving + cleaning the old apartment cost about $8,000. The plane ticket and the airbnb stay for 2 weeks cost about $2,000. The initial deposit for an apartment cost 2 months rent (since I didn’t have a SSN number), which was $4,000 (including utilities and so on). Rest of the fund was spent on 1) renting a car for a month, 2) down payment of my own car, 3) furnishing my apartment and my office, 4) buying lab supplies to do the first experiments for the projects I was still involved with, and 5) miscellaneous things. I was fortunate that the Swiss government returned all my retirement funds when I notified them that I was leaving the country. They couldn’t wait to get rid of me!

Moving The moving companies recommended by my university (UH) did not know how to move internationally. The moving company I hired in Switzerland (where I did my post-doc) could not figure out how to fill out the byzantine “foreign vendor” forms of the US. I ended up paying the entire moving cost myself. When I eventually got the money back, it was taxed heavily as added income. This was eventually returned in the next tax cycle. The movers were quite professional. As they were a Swiss company, they contracted a US counter-part to move the stuff from some container ships to my new flat about 3 months later.

Getting paid As a foreign person, it was difficult to get my pay directly transferred to my bank account since I did not have a US-based bank account. They offered to cut me a cheque (fun fact, cheques are not a thing in Europe anymore) that I cannot actually deposit without a US bank account. My workaround, and this is pretty cool, was to get an international bank account (Wise). Such an account gives me an American bank branch address along with the routing number and account number for ACH. I am still using Wise as my bank account, and I did not intend to change that. Update, I had to get a Chase account because I could not deposit cash to Wise.

Cellphone This was not too difficult. I got my plan from Mint, they deliver e-sims so it took 5 minutes to get it activated on my phone.

Tax exemption This should apply to everything we order for work, from anywhere / anyone in Texas. I asked the finance department for a tax exempt notice, and I brought the notice with me everytime I bought anything for work, either physically in a shop, or online. Major retailers (Bestbuy, Home Depot and Amazon) had a system which allowed me to upload the form and get a tax exemption ID that I can tell the cashiers. Apple looked at my exemption form and removed the tax. Professional online stores expect such a form. Amazon had a portal where I could upload the form, and it took about 3 days for them to verify. If by some reason a retailer refuse to remove the tax, document this and then the accounting department will reimburse the full amount. Failure to show this documentation and I would have to pay the tax myself.

Getting SSN number This was one of the most headachy process I have ever gone through. Compounded by COVID, and the process made me want to quit before I was 2 months in. To compound the pain, I was informed that I couldn’t be paid without a SSN. This turned out not to be true.

Entering the country With a Canadian passport, the I-797 was sufficient for entry. Photocopies of the I-797 along with the I-94 (which I print out from the website) was sufficient for re-entry. Note, as a Canadian, no visa is needed.

Apartment Without an SSN number or credit history, I was asked to pay 2 months rent as a deposit that I will get back at the end of my tenancy. To pay the deposit, I needed to enable ACH transfer from Wise, so they deposited two small amounts (less than a dollar) to my account to verify that it was indeed my account. Then I could just authorize them to take the money.

Renter insurance This came with the apartment (minimum 300k). I paid about 15 a month for it. I was automatically enrolled.

Electricity This needed to be ordered separately, and was around 10c per kWh. Fix rate was necessary in case a vast over-demand occurs (for example, during a storm).

Driver’s license A Texas driver’s license was trivial to get as I had a Canadian driver’s license. No tests were needed, I just had to pay a small fee and received the temporary license immediately. They officially took away my Canadian license, but I ordered a replacement right away. Now I have driver’s licenses from three countries.

Getting a car The car market was very strange back in those days. In Houston, I needed a car to get just about anywhere. The online shops such as Carmax and Carvana wouldn’t sell a car to me without a Texas driver’s license, and I couldn’t get a license without a Social Security Number.

Gender equality

2024-01-28T00:00:00Z

The benefits of proposing an explicit gender balance outweighs the negatives. I would state it as a “at minimum, X% of the governing body must be from either genders.” with X being somewhere in the 30% to 40% range. I assume that in a functioning society, there should be no lack of qualified candidates from all socio-economic backgrounds. However, it will probably take more time to find these candidates from more disenfranchised or marginalized groups, at least for the time being. This is true for all positions, public or private, NGOs or start-ups. So, unless the argument is “we admit that we do not have the resources to dig around, and we will simply hire the first person coming out of Harvard” (which is a valid but not very palatable one), there is no reason to stop looking. Once this becomes the accepted norm, then we will reap all the benefits without all the inane quibble over fairness.

Moving back across the pond

2024-01-28T00:00:00Z

The first time I flew, I went from Shanghai to Toronto back in August 2001. I didn’t (still don’t) even know which airline I took, or where the stop over was (I remember there being one, where we had to unload and reload our luggage), or even which ocean we crossed (I suspect it was the Atlantic). I was 13 back then. I didn’t know much, but I knew China was not for me.

Nearly a decade later, I flew across the Atlantic to experience that European life that North Americans kept going on about. And August 2021, I flew back. With every move, every border crossing, I leave some parts of me behind. And at every new place I arrive, they take a bit away from me.

One can gauge how much they want you there by their reception of you. When I arrived in the Netherlands, I was enrolled as a master student and I was paying tuition. We were told to report to a hall at a certain date and time with all the necessary documents. All of us engineering students went through a sort of speed dating with all the services. The banks, the health insurance, the government, dorms, cellphone and internet providers and so on, set up booths in neat rows to process us right there and then. They had already figured out our unique situation (for example, needing a bank account without having a Dutch address) and the process went so smoothly that I felt almost rushed.

When I arrived in Switzerland as a PhD student, things got a bit more complicated as I was actually going to get paid as an employee. But at every stage, whenever I was told “no you need this first”, the person sitting across the desk were unfailingly knowledgable about exactly what I needed and where I needed to go to get what I needed. And they had to endure me starting every conversation with “Do you speak English?” in English.

Neither of these two countries were heavy with immigrants coming from outside of the EU. They simply weren’t immigrant-based countries like the US or Canada. I went to the US to work once before. It was a summer stint at Caltech. The processing was so last minute that I didn’t know whether I would make it at all. This experience is shared with every “alien” I know that tried to get into the US to do research. It is also shared with all the international students I am hiring.

Now comes my most recent move to the US, another decade has since passed. Now given that I had made it before, and people I know also experienced the exact same situation every time, I knew we would most likely make it. But we forget the stress and the mental toll this takes everytime, how the process (intentionally or not) scars and nearly breaks us.

Moving to the US this time has been the single most painful experience in recent memory. At every turn, it seemed that obstacles were erected just to spite me, and mis-informations spread just to confuse me. Essentially someone or something out there was making it as hard as possible for me to feel welcome. I know that sounded like some tin-foil hat conspiracy, so it must be that people were just so indifferent to it all, so perfunctory. At points I wanted to give up and just leave but I do what I do now just to show them that resistance is futile, and that I will prevail in emerging from this cesspool of metaphorical shit. I will surely prevail, but just as surely, I will have a bad taste left in my mouth of everyone and everything in this process. I know this will have a long term effect on my psyche. It is hard not to be cynical or bitter, it is hard to be hopeful and optimistic. It’s hard to be emphatic to others’ plight and their misfortune. It’s hard to have that capacity, after really having to internalize it all. We can do better, we can be more welcoming. We can improve.

The trouble started with getting a visa to enter. My employing institution and its staff members were not sure if I actually needed a visa, or what the differences were between a visa and the H1B status. As a consequence, I was in my hotel room (during a much-needed vacation between my post-doc and my new post) calling the embassy trying to schedule an urgent visa interview appointment. After paying for it, I found out that as a Canadian, I didn’t need the visa.

After arriving in the States, getting paid proved impossible without a Social Security Number (this it turned out, not to even be true). As to how to actually go about getting such a number, no one could tell me. On campus, I was sent around in a literal 3 way circle before I gave up and went directly to the Social Security office. I was told things that simply weren’t true. I was assisted by helpful people who did not know the answer or didn’t even know why I had the question I had. I interacted with people who did not appear the least bit bothered by my plight, and those who paid lip service after the fact. I talked to straight-out xenophobes who expressed delight at making my life as miserable as possible.

I did this not once, but twice, going to an appointment to apply for a very important piece of document (SSN number, drivers license), only to be told that I am missing something (digital copies clearly do not count). I had to then go to a random print shop to print it out (by walking for half an hour under the 30 degree sun), and returning with the document they needed. They were always surprised that I actually went back and did so that quickly.

There were some knowledgeable people, a small minority of them. They were invariably the most friendly, accommodating and efficient. The majority though, were pencil-pushers being indignant when being pointed out that they cannot even push pencils.

In retrospect, it would be quite easy for me to advice another European person coming here exactly what to do. But maybe, they would still go through the gut-wrenching pain regardless. Like the migrants arriving at Ellis Island, this is not supposed to be easy. The privilege of being in the US has to be earned, and every step of the way, this privilege can be easily taken away.

Writing this has been cathartic.

Students

2024-01-28T00:00:00Z

I made several mistakes spending the discretionary fund. At the start of my time here, I didn’t have a PhD student. To get the ball rolling, I hired a number of undergrads and graduate students to start on some of the projects I envisioned. It was immediately obvious that there was a large mismatch in what I expect, and what they are capable of doing. I still have not fully figured out why that is. From my side, I expected the students to appreciate the problem that we try to tackle, and think independently on ways to solve such a problem. From interacting with a number of students, I learnt somethings. Among the student body, there is a general lack of basic knowledge on how to function as a professional employee. Things ranging from 1) showing up to work on time, 2) making and sticking to appointments, 3) being responsible, 4) answering questions, 5) knowing what is acceptable behavior and what isn’t.

I have started becoming more explicit in asking for what I want, and I phrase these in very direct terms. Come to think of it, I was the same in my undergrad, there just wasn’t much independent thinking going on. To know that a 40 hour work week means that one is expected to be present for that time, and to take a leave of absence requires some permission. I feel silly even writing this. As I write this, I started drafting a handbook for my lab. The whole idea of seeing handbook to tell someone how to do their job seems wrong somehow but here I am, looking up examples of how other labs run.

With the new batch of undergrads I have hired, things have gotten a lot more effective. One change in recruitment policy I made was, that I only hired students who were at the top of my class. I mean, top 5 out of 100.

Reckless purchasing of a house – Part II

2022-07-09T00:00:00Z

This is part II of the “how not to buy a house in a week” trilogy. Read part I first.

Day 8

The morning of, we wrote down a detailed list of things that needed fixing, the approximate cost of fixing these things, provided references for each items. Feeling pretty confident with the number, we went and met our agent in his apartment to go through the list and draft an email to the sellers asking for money.

There are several items that were clearcut, things like 1) the water boiler is long expired (5 years beyond the intended 10 years usage) and needs to be replaced, 2) some ceiling insulation is missing (as shown on a infrared camera), 3) wall outlets that do not have a ground-fault circuit interrupter (GFCI) near the kitchen / bathroom / garage. There were other things that were hazardous, 1) the wooden canopy on the terrace is rotting away, 2) the fence in the driveway is about to fall down, 3) the faucet in the master bathtub output brown water. Then there are things that are questionable, hairline cracks, incorrect electrical box arrangement, and so on.

We added up the items that we thought were necessary, and asked for around $15k. Later that day, we got a passive aggressive email that threw our list of demand into the bin. We went back and forth a bit and got around $3k in reimbursements. Looking back at it, I do not know how we could have extracted more.

Day 9

The inspector suggested that someone trim the hedge around the electric box where the main power supply line from the street goes into the house so he could see the wiring without being electrocuted. The owners relented after some grumbling. Somehow, the husband fell when he was doing this, and had to get stitches on his face. That stopped the trimming, but the inspector was kind enough to visit the property again to check out that box.

Day 10

We engaged two different mortgage lenders to get quotes and rates. Since I had, at that point, lived in the States for less than 2 years, nothing worked. The lenders asked for every single minuscule detail of my financial background. Fortunately, my credit rating was just sufficient to get something. And with the promise of a massive (36%) down payment, they agreed to extend me a loan for the remainder (~$300,000) at a rate of 4.875% over 15 years.

This rate was already about 2% higher than January, a mere 4 months ago, and now (July) it’s around 5.25%.

Day 12

With that, the get-out-the-deal time period elapsed and we were in it for good.

Day 14

My aunt, through my dad, asked me if we needed money. The answer was, clearly, yes we needed money. She was willing to lend us a supplementary amount (~$230,000) at a 4% rate over 15 years. The actual operation of money transfer took some tricky banking operations and a trip back to Canada.

Day 16

I hadn’t been back to Canada since January of 2019. 2 and three years later, after a brief stint in the States, I’ve come to appreciate how nice Canada was. After landing at Toronto Pearson, I went directly to the bank. This was an extra-ordinary behavior on my part, since I always make a bee-line to a near by Tim Hortons. I needed this wire transfer to go through, and banks get very difficult when such a large amount is transferred internationally.

Day 18

As a part of the mortgage lending process. The appraisal came back with a number lower than our offer. This was a disappointment, since we wanted to see the house being more worthy than the amount we are offering. Though, it did seem like a blessing in disguise since now the mortgage lender could potentially back out of the deal, and we then would have no choice but to back out of the offer. We were within the 21 days and there would be no penalty (except the options fee). Armed with this we asked the sellers to reduce the total by $5,661, surprisingly they obliged. This was interesting, because this is one of the few opportunities we get to back out of the deal after the options period. We may have been able to ask for more, since this far in, the sellers are invested in making it through.

Day 36

The mortgage calculation (U.S. specific) follows a simple set of equations. The calculation ensures that the lenders pays the exact same amount every month in the entire loan period. The payment per month c can be calculated using the following equation, note that this will be the monthly payment through the entire loan period.

Where P is the principle (the amount of loan we got), r is the annual interest rate, n is the number of payments per year (in our case, it is 12), and t is the loan terms in years. The available terms are 5 years, 10 years, 15 years and 30 years. The yearly rate is largely dictated by the federal treasury or the federal reserve, or the federal bank, or some other people. In Excel, this function is called “PMT”. It calculates the payment for a loan based on constant payments and a constant interest rate. The derivation is given in Wikipedia, and it includes a nifty use of geometric series.

Given c, we can calculate the total balance at the beginning of each month, which is simply the previously balance minus c. With that total balance, we can calculate the monthly interest, by multiplying the total balance by r / n. If we subtract c by this monthly interest, we will see how much of the principle we are actually paying off. There are many excel sheets online that you can download to do this calculation for you, but it is always instructive to know how these numbers are gotten. This should be, and was, the exact same amount as what we were given in the Closing Disclosure (CD).

For some historical reasons (i.e. the recession of 2008), the U.S. mortgage market became quite heavily regulated. The background checks are quite stringent and the lender has quite some leverage. Things like 15 or 30 year fixed rates are unheard-of in Canada for example. The ability to overpay as much as one wants without penalty is also a benefit that significantly cuts down the total interest payments as we will see below.

The first two plots show our actual loan calculation for a 15 year term without any added monthly payments. In the plot below to the left, the initial payments mostly directed towards the incurred interests, and the latter payments mostly into the principle loan amount. Note that in the first months. half of the monthly payments go towards interest. The plot on the right shows the decrease of the principle amount w.r.t. time, and the incurred total interest.

Now, if we pay $52,500 in the first month instead of the actual monthly bill of ~$2,500, we cut down the total interest payment (by the conclusion of the loan) by $42,000. We also reduce the total loan term by about 5 years. The following two plots show this.

Day 37

The Closing Disclosure (CD) was a document that the mortgage lender sent us many times over. They generated a new one every time numbers change, and force us to sign them online again and again. It was another one of those documents with a simple set of calculations (adding and subtracting) that was made out to be super complex. We made an excel sheet to ensure their calculations were correct. The lender did make mistakes, and it took my multiple harassing emails and calls to ensure they got the numbers right. I don’t know if that was the normal practice and they were just slowly converging to the right numbers, or they were actually incompetent. It was critical to ensure whatever was on the offer letter gets translated to this document, down to the last dollar.

The first page contained all the important quantities including the loan amount (P), the interest rate (r), the monthly payment (c), the projected payments including property taxes, homeowner’s insurance, and HOA dues. I was asked if I wanted to engage with an escrow to pay these projected payments on my behalf. I assume that the mortgage lender would charge me to maintain this escrow, and didn’t find any sense in that. The first page also contained the closing costs and cash to close. The first number contains all the fees the various agencies charged the buyer (us), the second was the amount we had to pay at closing. For our CD, the following items were non-standard and had to be rectified at one point.

The actual amount of down-payment. This, and not the percentage, matters.
Title insurance was to be paid by the seller
Home insurance was paid in advance (for a year) separately
Seller gave a credit
Appraisal was pre-paid
The actual earnest money that was pre-paid

Day 39

This was the original date of closing on the offer letter. The mortgage lender had major difficulties with verifying my income from EPFL. We had to reschedule. We were at risk of losing the earnest money, which amounted to about $25,000. A lot of anxious and panic ridden calls to all parties and haranguing them to get their act together.

Day 40

I drove to the title company and signed a stack of documents. That ended this process, and the house was officially ours. It felt anticlimactic since we didn’t physically receive anything. This may not be of much practical value, but I don’t know what we actually bought. I don’t know how much of the “worth” of the house is that plot of land, or the structure on top of that land. I don’t if there can be challenges to the ownership of the land.

I would say that, just like everything else in US bureaucracy or in bureaucracy in general, any deviations from the standard operating procedure created a huge amount of headache. While it would seem that the stack of documents 100 pages thick would be complicated, but the opposite was true. 90% of that could pertain to the purchase of literally any house at all.

Day >40

With the purchase of this house, we automatically became landlords to the tenants currently living in our house. With that the trilogy of two parts end.

Reckless purchasing of a house – Part I

2022-05-30T00:00:00Z

This occurred between April 16, 2022 and May 20, 2022. In a span of one month and 4 days, we went from seeing the house on Zillow to signing the closing documents. The following is an account of what transpired between those two dates. It goes without saying that the experience is anecdotal and has no statistical relevance. This was a week after my lab got furnished.

Day 0

We were on a FaceTime call, and causally browsing through real estate properties currently available on the market. This being the digital age, she was looking at Houston properties on Zillow while being physically in London. We were sending links to places we liked back and forth. These properties ranged from shacks that cost next to nothing, to mansions that we cannot afford in a million years. We were just spitballing on a lazy Saturday afternoon as people do. There was no firm budget in mind (somewhere south of $600,000 would have been acceptable, we thought), and we had no idea how much mortgage we were able to get. We didn’t even think we wanted to buy a place. Even worse, we didn’t even know if Houston was the city we should be buying a property. I was just as much eying properties on rightmove.co.uk for 1 bedroom apartments in London that cost as much as a whole Houstonian house.

This went on for several rounds before we somehow converged on a red house. It was a detached house built with a townhouse style. Located in north midtown with 3 floors and a terrace facing the cityscape of Houston. For whatever reason, the stucco façade of the place was painted a burgundy color. In a sea of gently colored palette of the neighborhood, this house stood out from a mile away. The interior seemed lovely and spacious to a fault. The ceiling of the second floor was so high it looked as if someone did non-uniform scaling to the place only in the z-direction. So we thought, okay, let’s go see the place. I entered the little bits of information on Zillow, and sure enough, I got a call minutes later by a buyer’s agent asking if I wanted a tour. “Sure! How’s Monday?” I replied thinking, what’s the worst that can happen?

Day 2

I drove to the place during work for a tour. After parking the car, I walked up to the property and immediately realized how massive of a building it was. This will make me sound like an awful engineer, but I never thought to visualize the height of a building until I stood at its foundation. I had to strain my neck to look up at its terrace, which seemed like it was 5 storeys up. It was physically imposing! I had to collect my emotions of “who am I to entertain owning a place like this?!” and pretend I am a smart guy who has been viewing houses for a while. Armed with my non-existing knowledge, and no pre-approval of mortgage of any kind, I shook hands with the agent and walked through the front door. He was a pleasant enough guy who seemed very laid back and chill. He let me walk up and down, and answered any questions I had. It was a beautiful place, and very cutely decorated. Then again, I have literally zero reference points to compare with. This was the only house I viewed.

Day 3

We talked, and talked, and seriously considered putting in an offer. At the same time, a mortgage lender contacted me through Zillow and offered to calculate a mortgage pre-approval for us. Since we had no idea what our financial status was, and my credit score was close to abysmal, we said yes to a 20% downpayment, to roughly a 5% fixed interest rate over a 30 year term. This took no time, and we received the pre-approval the same day. At this point, I felt like I was on auto-pilot, watching the process play out like a disinterested party. The numbers seemed abstract, and the house seemed like a problem set that I had to do.

In retrospect, this pre-approval was almost entirely artificial. The numbers on it meant next to nothing and could (and did) change drastically. Just like the mass-mailed pre-approvals to credit cards, this mortgage pre-approval was little more than an advertisement.

At the urging of the agent, we put an offer down. According to the seller’s agent, there were multiple offers on the table (2 to be exact, one being a cash offer). He was pressuring my agent, whom in turn pressured me to put in an offer that evening. We added $15,000 to the listing price in the offer. In addition, we wrote a personal letter to the sellers, trying to appeal to their humanity. We increased our earnest money to $24,100 (from $0), and the options fee to $500 (from $100). Lastly, we reduced the options period to 7 days (from 10). The earnest money was to show that we were serious about this offer, and we would lose this amount if we cancelled our offer without cause between 7 days and closing. The options fee was the fee to have the option of cancelling the offer within the first 7 days.

In retrospect, this urgency was likely artificial. While it may be true that they may have gone for the other offers, from a dispassionate perspective, there are other fishes in the sea. The chance that any particular house is significantly undervalued is next to none.

I note that increasing the earnest money was easy (and doesn’t change anything) if everything goes smoothly, and if we have that money. The options fee should have been kept lower if we were putting multiple offers simultaneously. The options period of 7 days was not too big of an issue.

Day 4

While the seller’s agent promised to make a decision by the morning, they were radio silent until late night. From our end, we re-toured the place, partly over FaceTime. Late evening of that day, the seller’s agent asked my agent a cryptic question. My agent sent me a screenshot of the conversation, which said “Are you all resubmitting”.

Now, I understand that the seller’s agent’s only job was to get the sellers as much money as possible, but this was just pure evil. Given that there was no reason why they would not have accepted a higher bid already, logically there were two possibilities,

The other offers were lower, but the sellers want to squeeze more money out of us.
The other offers were comparable and they asked the same questions to all parties.

This was then that having a precise budget in mind would have helped. But since we didn’t, we added $2,000 based on pure heuristics. In retrospect, I believe the other offers were lower.

Day 5

My agent called me up asking “do you have a backup house you want to look at?” to which I answer “no”. Being a cheeky guy he was, he said “great, you got the house.” This was when I thought all hell would break loose. We had a 7 day window to either back out of the offer or the house was ours.

I contacted a title company, which as far as I can tell, does two things. One, they provide the title insurance and two they act as an escrow. In the capacity as an escrow, they hold all the money until everything is settled, then distribute that money. Following the acceptance of our offer, we transferred the options fee + the earnest money to the title company. Yes, we needed to gather about $25,000 dollars on the spot.

I contacted a home inspector to evaluate the house and to note down any deficiencies. This guy cost around 550 dollars for about 3 to 4 hours of work.

Day 6

My partner came to Houston, I practically broke down. One never realize the amount of stress that had been accumulating until there’s an outlet.

Day 7

We met with the inspector at the property, and patiently walked with him throughout the house. It took 3 to 4 hours in total. I trailed his steps and noted down as much as I could. He started in the kitchen and did it floor by floor. He even had a drone to inspect the metal roof. Later that day I received a long and detailed report that noted all the things that may or may not be wrong with the house. Because there was no destructive testing, we can’t really ever know. So what it amounted to were two things,

He was reasonably sure that nothing was majorly wrong with the house. As in, nothing was so bad that we should back out of the offer.
He gave us enough ammunition to demand money for things that may or may not need fixing. These items were buried under veils of code violations.

Building a lab

2022-05-21T00:00:00Z

The lab spaces I was given when I started here reminded me of countless horror movies, where the protagonist wakes up chained to the u-bent of a toilet in a damp derelict engine room. He would strain his legs to push himself upright, only to have his feet slip under him on the greasy linoleum floor. He eyes his new surrounding with the dawning realization that he is about to die there, and maybe in 10 years or so, his bare ankle may eventually be able to slip out of the shackle. (This is how I imagine David Sedaris would write “Saw” the movie).

Over the course of several month and many helpful staff members, we managed to empty the rooms and put in some equipment that weren’t used in the war effort. There was a certain sense of second-hand nostalgia. Going through the dusted pages in a forgotten binder, seeing the specimens whose labels have faded long ago, I imagined how the actual researcher who worked on these imagined they would end up. At the end of the day, the answer was invariably indiscriminate and wholesale dumping. With some empty space available, I begin to fill them with the equipment I needed for the projects I was working on right then. This wasn’t so much a long term plan as I needed things to work on to keep my sane.

This mode of putting in the equipment and immediately using them went on for about a month or two. Then I started planning the lab furniture. In my naiveté, with the abstraction of a digital floorplan and the ease of clicking buttons to select the pieces I want, I never thought about how physically massive everything was when combined. The lab furniture that I ordered totaled around 10000 lbs (a number that had no physical meaning to me). The deliverer came with a semi-truck, that was the first indication that I went way over my head. With a bit of luck, I managed to track down the owner of a car that was inconveniently parked right in front of the loading dock (with every permission to do so). She graciously moved her SUV and the driver did about 20 back and forth to park the rear end of the semi flush with the dock. The front of the semi was undocked and parked nearby.

By this point, I was not looking forward to seeing what was inside the container… With an air of formality, I cut the plastic tag that locked the container and saw a near-endless rows of what looked like coffins (those were the cabinets facing down). There was no delivery or installation contract but the driver was nice enough to help me and my students move all the packed pieces onto the loading dock. As one does when facing such things, we moved them one at a time, and soon enough the entire docking lock was full. Covered in dirt and grease, and a couple of cuts on my arms, I went and taught a lecture on truss optimization.

Me and my very very helpful research assistants spent part of every day of this week moving things from the loading dock into the lab spaces. With the help of two pallet jacks, and a lot of muscle power, we spent the first day physically moving as much as we can into the rooms. These lab benches were monstrously heavy. The second day, we moved the rest in, and righted the vertical cabinets. The third day we unpacked everything and righted all the tables. Moved most into their correct position. The last day, we set everything right. I then spent the next week putting up the shelves and electric outlets. The lab was coming together, and I started to do experiments to get some data for the proposals I was writing.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired those days. Not the time I pulled an all-nighter then another one, not the time I hiked up a Swiss mountain for 10 hours straight, not when I interviewed for a position until 2am in the morning. Because of shear coincidence and stupidity, we were also trying to buy our first house at the same time. (MacOS’s photo app conveniently reminded me that I went on a house viewing the week after the above.) I was so tired that I broke down and cried out of spontaneity. That was a first in my recent memory. This story could serve as a metaphor, for better or worse. Things may seem insurmountable but with some help, we can get them done. The mental stress accumulated bit by bit.

Fairness vs justice

2022-04-05T00:00:00Z

I aim to address this weighty competition between two concepts from an engineer’s perspective. And before we discuss further, we note that neither fairness nor justice are inherently “good” or “bad”, they are just some moral arguments people make when they have too much time on their hands. We further assume that we subscribe to egalitarianism, the notion that each human should have exactly equal rights. Here is one definition of these two concepts in two sentences by people more learnt than I am,

In evaluating any moral decision, we must ask whether our actions treat all persons equally. If not, we must determine whether the difference in treatment is justified.

Velasquez, M., et al., Justice and Fairness, Ethics, V3 N2, 1990.

While seemingly trivial, we will see that it is infeasible to quantify this “equality” in a manner acceptable to all. We are humans with limited brain capacity, and we tend to consider only a snapshot of the current state of affairs when we are tasked to make policy / personal decisions that require us to consider fairness. We implicitly adopt a Markov-like decision process, whereas to be truly fair, we must take into account all that has happened in the past. As a thought experiment, I propose that if we are able to account for all the past injustices and retribute in someway to these past injustices when making our decisions, we are allowed to consider fairness as the only criteria.

Clearly this is infeasible since we forget things, and we probably cannot agree on how to account for these past events. What we do know is, what has happened in the past hasn’t been entirely fair. In fact, it has been very unfair. So we come up with the notion of justice, to lump these historical unfairness and try to even the playing field in some way. These retributive policies may be unfair but are just.

Put it in other words, a human is born with innate unfairness ingrained in them. This is partly from historical injustices, and partly from their genetic lottery. Further unfairness are put upon them during their life time, be it winning a lottery (in the extreme case), or losing a job because of economic downturns or a deadly pandemic. Simply, there are many factors that we cannot predict or control, so we can only attribute them to forms of luck, be it good or bad. Because these lucks are not consequences of our own actions, it would be justified that we be compensated for their impact. To summarize, we use the justice and/or fairness argument as rationales to determine our response to the element of “luck”.

The Covid19 is a good example of bad luck. We collectively as a society has suffered hardship that we did not cause. Justifiably, we are monetarily assisted by the government should we be laid off or temporarily furloughed. Is it fair? Not at all. Can we quantify the personal element that led to one person being laid off and the other not? No chance. Conversely, the elites with investments have done surprisingly well over these past two years, often seeing their portfolio doubling. Is it fair that they benefit without any recourse? Yes, it is. It would be impossible to quantify their involvement in causing Covid19, but it is safe to say, minimally. It is justifiable they they get to keep this added wealth? Probably not, but we have no mechanism of taking it away.

Using progressive tax as another example. It is a type of taxation in which the tax rate increases as the taxable amount increases. One could argue that this is not fair, or that a more fair type of policy may be to tax everyone an equal percentage. At the other extreme, a notion of justice may be to set the tax rate at one’s deviation from the median net worth. So the ones making more than the median would be taxed until they reach the median, and the ones making less would get a tax refund to that exact amount. (We will need to ensure that this system is over damped so there is no oscillation of course). The intended consequence being to equalize everyone’s monetary worth as per egalitarian ideal. We don’t have a definitive answer to the question “How come person A has more money than person B”, though we can reasonably claim that it is partly due to their inherited advantage, and partly due to their ability and hardwork. We make this claim because we have counter-examples. We hear of princes and princesses of wealthy kings and queens who end up in penury. We also know self-made millionaires who legitimately started with absolutely nothing. Note that even in such cases, we cannot quantify the factor luck plays into their ascent to wealth. We probably agree that it would be unfair and unjust to “penalize” the ones who made their fortune by working hard with a higher taxation. Conversely, it would be fair and just to tax that “luck factor”. The progressive tax may be one way to do that.

I just finished reading the “The Genetic Lottery” by Kathlyn Harden. She basically summarizes a series of papers that show that there is a genetic component to intelligence, just as there are genetic components that dictate one’s height, weight, color, etc. This book caused a great uproar mostly in the liberal circles, for reasons that I think are mostly self-serving and facetious. She states that

No one earned his or her DNA sequence, yet some of us are benefiting enormously from it.

Harden, K., Why Progressives Should Embrace the Genetics of Education, NYTimes, 2018

We often move gifted kids to advanced classes and devote more resources to accelerate their success. We also agree that at a young age, this “giftedness” is largely by luck (of their DNA). By doing this, we effectively neglect the less gifted students, even through neither groups have done a thing to deserve such treatments. This tactic is neither fair nor just, yet it is something we routinely do. It would be more fair to have all kids receive the same education. It would be more just to devote more resources to the less gifted one so they can be at the same level field.

I personally have benefited from being lucky at all stages of my life, starting with being born in a large city, to emigrating to Canada which led to more opportunities. At age 12 and being quite unremarkable, I certainly did not have a hdand in applying for a visa! I possess so many innate advantages that I cannot possibly quantify. What I can do is to be more just in my decisions, and in my support of progressive policies.

Audio transcript

Writing

2022-03-12T00:00:00Z

Audio transcript

I was never good at writing, and I am still barely passable after many decades of trying to get words on papers. My performance in language classes, be it Chinese, English, French, Dutch or German, left teachers cringing and me annoyed. My grades were laughable, and often landed me in remedial classes. While my other grades improved in the later years of high school, English always remained somewhat of an Achilles’ heel for me.

By that point, having lived in Canada for almost 4 years, scoring high on the TOFEL test wasn’t much of a problem, as it was more or less a pattern matching exercise. I was pretty good at memorization, I was younger… Though, writing in particular, has always been terrifying. When we were asked to compose essays in China, we basically copied and pasted from random textbooks we could find and that the teachers didn’t know about. As soon as we hit the required word limit, we called it a day. This tradition more or less got carried over into my English classes in Canada. I never wrote voluntarily. I never had much that I wanted to say on paper, nor did I have the ability to express those thoughts. It felt like drawing for me, what I imagine in my head is never what I manage to draw on paper.

Many students (me included) went into engineering as a subject of study precisely because we were terrified of English or anything that required essay writing as a means of evaluation. We could do some maths and science, and we masked our insecurity with boastful claims that we were gonna get rich, especially when compared to the liberal arts folks. A few friends I made while at the University of Toronto did enjoy writing, and would spend what little time we had after school writing. Some would even go on publish what they wrote (on some inchoate version of WordPress). I read those, and I admired those people. By extension I secretly admired the English majors who actually seemed to enjoy what they were being taught. Their general hygiene and high social functionality also proved attractive… (Engineering as a discipline for the most part did not make me go starry eyed at that point.)

Years past, and I was pretty much still a half literate person. It was not until studying for my GRE that I finally started appreciating reading and writing. Two of the instructions on how to study for the GRE were literally 1) memorizing the dictionary, and 2) reading the New York Times. I tried both, but it was the reading of the paper that stuck. The Times was, at the time, not behind a paywall. Like Wikipedia, I would go on reading one article after another in a never ending rabbit hole. These articles were long, and I quickly came to realize I did not know many of the words they were using. That was a shock, to think after speaking English for more than a decade, I should have a decent vocabulary! GRE came and gone without making too much of a fuss, though I was pretty proud of getting a 162 on the verbal! (Given this bias, I do look at the verbal score more than the quantitative when evaluating potential PhD students, hint hint.)

I read, and kept reading, having maintained an active NYTimes subscription ever since overcoming the paywall became too tedious, and I thought these guys more than deserve my money… Over time, I began appreciating the writing styles of the different columnists on the Times’ staff. The underlying passion of Blow’s pieces is unmistakable. Douthat is so fancy in his writing, I still don’t understand him some times. Krugman I don’t really understand as well, especially his more wonky articles, but for an entirely different reason. Swisher I recently started listening to and enjoying. And I lament the departure of Kristof (and upset at their ridiculous treatment of his political aspirations in Oregon).

I don’t know if an appreciation of writing makes me a better writer. By my profession, I write academic papers. There is a certain style of writing that goes into such articles that I haven’t entirely deciphered. Yet I do subconsciously observe that some papers are well written and others not. I also notice that for some papers, some parts may be very coherent, and later parts felt tacked on (possibly because they had to address some reviewers’ comments). I enjoy writing, and re-writing. I derive pleasure from making sure that the words and the sentences do means what I want them to mean, and that there is a structure to it all. I read what I write out loud so I know it flows in a laminar sort of way. I smooth out kinks. I polish.

First semester

2022-03-08T00:00:00Z

I can be seen around campus walking in my ripped jeans, with a dopy grin on my face, and a notebook and pen in my hand. I try tricking students into thinking I am a student. They make memes of me, it’s great fun. Here are some memes that a student in solid mechanics, Mr. Acosta, made.

This is a post that may help aspiring assistant professors to evaluate whether they actually want this job or not. Keep in mind that I joined a large state school in a big city so my experience may differ vastly from other types of institutions. My department of mechanical engineering has about 25 faculty members (8 assistant, 6 associate, 13 full professors, as well as 4 instructional faculty members). We have around 1000 undergraduate students, and an increasing number of master and PhD students. We on average teach one course per semester (Fall and Spring), alternating between undergrad and graduate levels. Almost all potential PhD applications come from aboard.

One of the first things the department chair told me was that we are all colleagues, and that we don’t report to anyone. Further, we all sit in one physical together, in one wing of the building, so we (me and a National Academy of Engineering person) are all neighbors. This is very different from the Swiss system where each group is run like a start-up with completely separate spaces. I don’t know what is better or worse yet. The experience does feel like running a start up (my lab) with some initial capital (start up funding) in more ways than one. Extending that analogy, my (future) tenure committee members and by extension, the department, the college, and the university are my shareholders who want to see if my return on investment is adequate.

It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

I was given many advices, and I picked up a few things along the way in my career. I was told to say no to as many things as I possibly can. To ask for advice before saying yes to anything. To remind myself that my time is finite (there are only 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week), and to delegate as much as I can. The second thing, I kind of figured this out on my own, is summarized in the above quote (she is a four star general!). I follow it religiously and I have pissed people off doing it. Though, I think overall it is something I will keep doing. This is further reinforced by something I learnt. If it is an easy problem, everyone would be in agreement. If the thing for which I am asking permission is ambiguous to me, it is likely ambiguous to everyone because no one really knows the answers to many (non-scientific) questions (they just pretend, as I do). Besides, what’s the worst that can happen? Consequences be damned, if I get told off, I apologize. The last piece of advice, is to do a piece of work that I actually enjoy, at least for part of the week. This may be doing some experiments instead of writing proposals.

There are several things that I needed to do immediately and concurrently, 1) order things (I’ve got two years to spend the start-up funding.), 2) hire students, 3) start writing the first proposal, 4) figure out teaching, 5) make friends.

For any starting faculty members (experimentalist especially), staff members are my life line. They can make my life miserable, frustrating, and depressing, or they can smooth most kinks out. As there are usually only one or two people with purchasing power in a department, and I literally need to order hundreds of items, it is no easy task. The best way, if possible, is to get the department’s credit card info. Short of that (since they apparently don’t trust me), as I had some Swiss money, I bought everything large and small myself, and got reimbursed. It is critical to apply for tax exemption immediately for all the major consumer retailers (e.g. Amazon, Best Buy, Home Depot and others). They all have a standard procedure but not the procedure is not immediate. Professional suppliers already expect the tax exemption notice. It is difficult to get the tax reimbursed… This strategy lasted for about 3 months before I bottomed out and began 1) to fill out purchase requests, 2) to get purchase order forms, 3) to actually place the orders. So… there is an optimal level of annoyance one should be to staff members, be nice and courteous; bug, but not too much. There also seems to be a line in the sand that suggests distance.

In terms of teaching, I started by giving a lecture on solid mechanics to a room full of junior level students (~110 in all), in the first semi-post-covid semester. I was working out of a conference room because I didn’t yet have my own office. Lecture notes from previous iterations of the course were graciously shared with me. For the first half of the semester, I can fairly say that I was barely staying afloat. I didn’t have the bandwidth to think about a teaching philosophy for this particular course. There was no guidance, with the assumption being if I don’t ask for help, all is fine. When I do ask for advice, the faculty members were extremely helpful without any exception. The first couple of classes were particularly nerve wrecking. My expectations of what they should know coming into the course vastly mismatched with what they actually knew. The lack of physical demonstrations hindered my delivery, or their understanding. As the weeks went on, I got a bit less stilted. I bought a meter stick from Amazon, and used it every class to explain the different ways one can torture a 1D beam. I started actually looking forward to teaching. I learnt several things that were quite effective, 1) Use the online discussion board, there were actually over 1500 posts over one semester, 2) giving bonus points to students who complete the course evaluation.

95% of the applicants I received are from aboard. The vast majority of them came from Iran, India and Bangladesh. I got one Chinese application and one from the UK (that I solicited), they both turned me down despite my begging. It is almost impossible to evaluate a candidate over zoom, I also don’t have a base line to evaluate candidates with. The ones I eventually decide to extend an offer, have all found greener pasture elsewhere. I will extend this section in a year’s time.

From what I see, grant proposals are a mix bag. I have put together proposals in a weekend to have some accepted. Then I realized I didn’t really want to do that work… I will write more on this when I know more.

Making friends with my colleagues. As a post-doc in EPFL, we were all around the same age, the interactions felt unforced. Now, the faculty body ranges from people my age to those who are close to retirement. The vast majority though are adults with young children. They have large houses in idyllic suburbia with great public schools. They drive 30 minutes or an hour to work every day. The ones I interact with are unfailingly courteous, encouraging, friendly and honest. They are also overworked. From what I hear, this is a lucky situation. I go out with the younger folks on a semi-regular basis. The department chair organizes happy hours once or twice a semester. I take VIPs (invited speakers and faculty candidates) to lunch and dinner.

To conclude, I am tired. It takes energy to constantly switch my brain between drastically different topics on an hour basis. It is equally hard to focus on one thing at a time without being distracted by those other topics that are swimming in the back of my brain.