We call her Thai cafe lady because she runs a take-out Thai restaurant known as “the window.” It’s a window on the basement of the Psych building. There is no sign, no table, no chair, and during the hours when the window is close, there is nothing to show that behind this window is the most feared woman at Stanford.
Continue reading “[Day 8] Who exactly is the Thai cafe lady?”
Recently, I have been thinking about death. How can we understand life if we don’t know about death? I try to understand what is going on in the mind of people who know that they will be dying soon? So I looked up stories about death-row inmates. Below are some of what I found. Warning: this is morbid and somewhat creepy. Proceed at your own risk. Continue reading “[Day 7] What to say on the death row”
I first met Linh Tran Hai seven years ago when I was still an antsy teenager. At that time, Linh was 23 and the CEO of Lenovo Vietnam. I met him once, added him on Facebook and we went our separate ways. What would the youngest CEO in the country want to do with me anyway?
A few days ago, Linh messaged me saying he’s in Bay Area and would love to catch up. I jumped at the invitation. We had dinner, and I got to learn about his incredible journey from an unemployed college undergrad to a country manager at 23. Continue reading “[Day 5] How to become a CEO at 23”
Last weekend, we drove to Half Moon Bay because my idiot of a friend suddenly had that burning desire to see a big body of water. Down at the harbor, we chatted up two fishermen. The captain was a tall, blond, skinny man in his early twenties. He was the youngest captain around so people called him Captain Kid. He was a sweetheart, smiled an I-made-it smile and walked on shore with the same instability he would have on water. Half way into the conversation, we realized he was stoned out of his mind. “Marijuana oil from Oregon guys, the best,” he told us. Continue reading “[Day 4] Why Stanford students are embarrassed of the school they go to”
I’m taking a writing workshop with Professor Elizabeth Tallent–a fascinating writer and a great teacher. As is often the case with writing workshops, we get to talk about a lot of interesting topics and today we got around to our favorite/least favorite punctuations. Yep, you read it right: punctuations. How can you not get excited? And yep, some people do have very strong feelings for those tiny little things that most of us ignore while texting anyway. Continue reading “[Day 2] Exclamation marks in emails, yes or nah?”
Hi there,
I’m Chip. I’m a student looking for healthy distraction from homework. I want to learn something new every day and, hopefully, blog about it. It can be anything, ranging from maths, psychology, philosophy, technologies to random conversations I have with interesting strangers.
If there is something you want me to learn and write about, you can put a comment here or reach me at: 
Wish me luck!
Today my Math class had a guest lecturer: the one and only Don Knuth. He’s considered to be “father of the analysis of algorithms” (quote Wikipedia). He’s known to often reenact his first lecture in 1969, and it’s rumored that he still wears the same clothes he wore in that lecture. Continue reading “Don Knuth’s thoughts on Bitcoin”
When I got my first Mac 5 years ago, my programmer friends almost disowned me for being such a disgrace to the local nerd community. At that time, there was a prevailing sentiment that real coders used Windows or Linux. Macs were for the fuzzy, the uninitiated, the sparkling nincompoop in the realm of marketing.
Continue reading “Since when programmers prefer Macs over Windows”
When I first studied graphics programming, I was traumatized that the coordinate system on a computer’s screen is upside down. The positive x-axis starts on the far left and points to the right as normal coordinates should do, but the y-axis has its 0 at the top of the screen and nosedives straight down to hell from there. Imagine that you have all your graphics worked out beautifully on paper, and then when you try to program it in a computer, you have to flip all the figures and re-calculate all the coordinates. Why can’t computer scientists be normal for once and respect the centuries-old Math? Cartesian coordinates were invented in the 17th century, while the first electronic general-purpose computer (ENIAC) didn’t come out until 1946.
Continue reading “Why computer coordinates start from the upper left corner”
I learned about Evil Hangman a while ago when I was reading my professor’s blog (Don’t judge me. I’m sure you googled your professors too. The Onion wrote about it.). I never got around to write this game until today when I woke up and decided that I should do something with my life.
Evil Hangman is like normal Hangman — players try to guess a secret word by entering different letters. But in Evil Hangman, players are (almost) guaranteed to lose. I said “almost” because Evil Hangman is a program with a deterministic algorithm. If a player knows how it works, they can guess the letters in a way to maximize their chance of winning.
Learn365Project 