Here are my Dad and Mom in Switzerland in 1994. They look funny like this most of the time. Click the picture to enlarge.

This is me when I was about one year old. Compare my Dad and Mom with the above picture :-)

Here are my Dad, my youngest sister Kik, my younger sister Kay, me, and my Mom. This picture was taken a few years back. Now my hair line has receded considerably :-) I look very similar to my dad now.

This picture include my late Grandfather also. This must be at least five years ago because everyone looks thinner and I still had a lot of hair!

This is my sister Kik when she was young.

This is my favorite Pumpkin :-)

For a hilarious piece of primatological study, click on the chimp picture.

The Best Movies Ever

I love movies. I watch them in theaters, on videos, on laserdiscs, on VCDs, on TV, on cable, and no doubt on DVD in the future. Some of my friends say that I'm an easy critic because I will try to find excuses for flaws in the movies I saw. I guess I'm probably am. Somehow, the Idea of the film matters much more to me than its execution. If I like the Idea, it doesn't matter so much that the actors can't act or the effects look phony, I will imagine a better execution for the director automatically. So I guess I'm one of those super-uncritical critics that all movie makers love. Anyway, here are the movies I like and watch them over and over again:

1. Terminator 2: Judgment Day: I love the story, I love the effects, I love the actions and I love the extra info on the special edition laserdiscs. I must have seen it more than 20 times already. Mr. James Cameron rules!!! (There is, however, a contrary opinion that paints T2 as an example of F/X Porn at http://www.smallbytes.net/~bobkat/waterstone.html.)
   
2. Beauty and the Beast: This is the first animated movie to be nominated for the Best Picture at Oscar. The animation looks gorgeous, the songs very beautiful. The story is sappy but I like them sappy! I have three versions of the laserdiscs (Work in Progress, CLV, CAV) and two VHS tapes!!!
3. Aliens: I saw it for the first time in 1986 right after I went to the US to study. I love the look of the weapons in the movies. They look mean and technologically plausible. None of those laser beam stuffs. The idea about Alien biology similar to hive-insect appeals to me very much. Hey, it could happen from convergent evolution.
4. The Godfather Part 1&2: They are great. I like the story and the acting. It's scary how family-oriented the Mafia is in these movies :-) When I was at Caltech, I usually watched them back to back after I finished my take home exams around 2 am and finished in time for breakfast.
5. Terminator: Yep. This is my introduction to Mr. Cameron's work. This is the most action-packed love story ever. The story and time-travel paradox gave me something to think about while the action kept my heart pounding. The effects look cheesy by today standard but the idea kept it alive.
6. Schindler's List: I only watch it four times because it is so darn depressing. Nonetheless, a great movie. Amazing how human can be so cruel.
7. Titanic: This is a gorgeous movie, but you probably know that already. Once again, Mr. Cameron shows us how a great movie is made. Only four times in Theater so far. I eagerly await laserdisc and probably DVD in the future.

You can find a lot of information about these movies and others at The Internet Movie Database. Check it out. You can see my impressions with other movies here.

My Favorite Performing Artists

Penn & Teller, of course :-) Check out their site. They have a semi-permanent gig at Bally's, Las Vegas. When I am in LV, I usually try to go see them. They also authored three very entertaining books about pranks and magic. They are Penn & Teller's Cruel Tricks For Dear Friends, Penn & Teller's How To Play With Your Food, and Penn & Teller's How To Play In Traffic. Read them and laugh.

Books, Books, Books 

I also love reading although my time for reading has decreased considerably. Here is the list of books that I enjoy the most.

Here are some books that I think everyone should have a chance to read. The ideas in the books change how I view the world. Maybe they will do the same for you:

1. Feynman's Lectures on Physics (Vol. 1, 2, & 3) by the late Richard P. Feynmann: These are the best books about physics that physics students (and educated laymen) can read. Feynmann's mastery and love of the subject shine through so brightly. I read the first chapters during the summer after my 10-th grade and got hooked ever since. I must have at least three sets of these books. :-) Dr. Feynmann also wrote two books about his adventures. They are Surely, You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann and What Do You Care What Other People Think? They are also very entertaining books. Read them if you have a chance.
2. The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins: This book showed me a glimpse of what evolutionary processes can offer to us. The title alludes to an argument that if we came across a complex machinery like a watch, there must be a watchmaker and that because living things are complex, the must be a thoughtful, very powerful Designer. However, this book argues that the "Designer" in this case can be just evolutionary processes without any forethoughts. That, to me, sounds very pretty and powerful. Got me started into thinking about evolution.
3. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins: I came back for more Dawkins here. This book came out before The Blind Watchmaker, but I missed it when it came out. Anyway, I'm glad I read it. The idea in this book that we are optimized to propagate the information in our genes around make me more humble :-) Not as much fun to read as The Blind Watchmaker, but very worthwhile reading.
4. The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod: I was stuck with a moral dilemma for a long time since I was a kid. Since I was born in a Buddhist country, I was bombarded with the concept of Karma which basically says that if I do something good, some other good thing will happen to me and if I do something bad, BAD THINGS will happen to me. Now, when I was around 10 years old, I believed (and still do) that the detailed Karma accounting machinery needed in Buddhism that was taught to me is very unlikely to exist so there was no point of doing anything good. :-) The simple experiments in this book about Iterated Prisoner Dilemma showed me a way out. It pays to be a good guy after all. Our fellow men and women will do accounting for us. No galactic quantum computers in hyperspace is needed to do Karma accounting. It's more fulfilling for me that altruism is actually a good and useful thing that everyone should practice. Did you do good things today? :-)
5. The Red Queen by Matt Ridley: It is subtitled "Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature." Right on! The book basically boils down to why sex is good and its consequence to us human beings. Mr. Ridley surveyed the ideas of professional researchers in the field and gave us this wonderful, fun-filled little (well, 400 pages) book to us laymen. The chapter about how parasites and germs make sex pay off give us an example of how a simple ecology can drive innovative evolution. Something to try on computers for people who are interested in artificial life.
6. Hidden Order by John Holland: This is from the father of genetic algorithm himself. Beautiful, small but packed with outrageous and probably very powerful ideas. He tried to pin down the bare essential properties that any Complex Adaptive System must have. I don't know yet how right he is. Time will tell.
7. Journey to the Ants by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson. This is a very beautiful book. It has a lot of fascinating pictures of our tiny distant cousin, the Ant. You will find a picture of the smallest ants and the largest ants compared -- the small one's nest can fit in the large one's HEAD. Ant's warfare. Ant's chemical language. A picture of a sectioned slice of an ant's brain. Ant's farming of aphids and fungi. Ant's deception and many other amazing facts previously unknown to me about ants. After I finished this book, I rushed out and bought the encyclopedic treatise The Ants by the same authors for more. Alas, that big book is aimed for people who are more specialized in the field. Still, it also contains a lot of great pictures. (And it is probably physically the largest Pulitzer Prize winner.) I hope we can create something that is as alive as an ant nest before I die. I really love to see it.
8. How Nature Works by Per Bak. This book explains the idea of self-organized criticality to laymen. Basically, people have observed a wide range of natural phenomena that exhibit complex behaviors caused by relatively simple interactions among their constituents. The dynamics of the phenomena are such that the systems tend to be in critical states by themselves without any fine tuning from external agents. Now, the interesting thing is that the examples in this book include such things as sandpiles and landscape formation, earthquakes, life, mass extinctions, punctuated equilibria, brains, economics, and traffic jams. There seems to be a general principle underlying all these behaviors after all. We are still at an early stage of this scientific development. I hope to live to see how it turns out. (Perhaps something to say about psychohistory?)

Here are computer-related books:

1. The Art of Computer Programming Vol. 1, 2, & 3 by Donald Knuth. This series is not an easy read for me. But there are so many beautiful pearls in there that I kept coming back for more. This is the definite source for data structures and algorithms up to 1970 or so. Try it, you might like it too. Dr. Knuth also releases the new edition of this series in 1997, but I don't have a chance to read them yet.
2. Algorithms in C by Robert Sedgewick. I learn a lot about data structures and algorithms from this book too. Although I taught myself to program in Basic on an Atari 400 (with 8 kb of RAM!), I only had exactly one formal course about programming in all my life since I was officially a physics student so this book filled a lot of gaps for me. A lot easier to digest than Knuth's books but still very informative and very useful.
3. Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley. This is a collection of essays from the author's "Programming Pearls" column in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. Here is an example of truth in advertising--they are really programming pearls. Anyone who programs computers should have a chance to read this book. Vastly entertaining and informative.
4. More Programming Pearls also by Jon Bentley. More programming pearls from Mr. Bentley. Too bad there are only two collections. I wish there are more collections like these two.
5. Numerical Recipes in C, Second Edition by Press, Teukolsky, Vetterling, and Flannery. I learned C when I saw the first edition of this book. Great for someone who need to do computational physics on computers. It also contains a lot of pointers to other numerical analysis sources.
6. Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning by David Goldberg. This is a very accessible introduction to genetic algorithm and its applications to some practical problems. I read it in about 3 sitting--only because I went away to program my computer to do some simple simulations. If this book was a novel, I'm sure I would have finished it in only one sitting :-)

Here are fictions that I love, by which I mean I read them multiple times and still feel the stories to be as spellbinding as the first reading:

1. The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov: Great tales of galactic colonization by human. His psychohistory drove me in 11-th grade to learn more about statistical mechanics. Alas, given the new information about how events on a large scale depend critically on many smallest details, psychohistory in principle is probably impossible. Maybe we will know that something will definitely happen, just not when it will happen.
2. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. This is a poignant story about a boy bred to be a leader in Earth's war against an alien race with "hive mind" Great story. You owe it to yourself to read it.
3. Speakers for the Dead also by Orson Scott Card. This is the sequel to Ender's Game More fascinating tale about the boy who is now grown up. More sentient extra-terrestrials.
4. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman: This is about our interstellar warfare with an alien race that last thousands of years because all involved travel relativistically (close to speed of light) fast. Relativistic effects abound. I read it the first time when I was a kid in Thailand. The book was translated into Thai. I had a chance a few years after that to actually read the original English edition. Lots of outrageous actions that is also bounded by the law of physics. It is also a love story :-)

Since I don't have much time to read science fictions anymore, I try to keep up by reading The Year's Best Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois every year.

There are a great many other books that I find very good and interesting but these are my favorites. See my Book Reviews section to see more books that I read.