Earlier this year, at a Gordon conference, I listened to a talk by Prof. George Whitesides on soft robotics. In his introduction, he talked about Pasteur’s quadrant. The idea is that one can categorize research works into four quadrants: one axis is the scale of immediate usefulness, and the other axis is the scale of fundamental understanding. On…

“In his letters Van Gogh often gave extensive reports on his working methods, and so we are well informed about the practical side of his craftsmanship: from the way he experimented with colour and chose his materials to his use of all sorts of tools. From his letters and technical investigation it also emerges that…

So, I have been watching the film over and over again. It is one of those films that I found fascinating but couldn’t really figure out why they are so fascinating. It is dark, and not as grotesque as some of other Tim Burton’s movies. As a critic said, “the director is holding back, though,…

Being a Man United fan for the past three years hasn’t been easy. So many things have been missing. Champions league games, premier league titles, last-minute goals, and last-minute goals. Now with six league wins in a row, Mourinho’s team starts to show some resemblance of the old Man United team in the late 1990s, even…

I watched the semi-final of Euro between Portugal and Wales in a conference hotel bar in Berlin. A couple sitting in front of me joked before the game that they really don’t like the “superstar” Cristiano Ronaldo. They left bar before the game was finished, unsurprisingly, after CR scored from a header and assisted another. In…

I didn’t even get a good view of Van Gogh museum when I visited it last August, because it was under renovation. But it didn’t disappoint. Out of all the marvelous paintings and curious personal artifacts, one letter written by Nicole Krauss has kept coming back to my mind. It was literally printed on three…

For a year that began in Rome and ended in Barcelona, it sounded like a lot of travel. And it did, 2015. I watched the Pope delivering new year mass in Rome on Jan 1, and a few days later strolled the gallery of Uffizi in Florence. With the three extra days on my Europass,…

I used to dislike reading novels, because they are not real, and because reading them takes too much time. Last year, however, I started reading novels again. What gets me back into it was Harry Porter series. It is delightful to know Hogwartz, the Gryffindors, the house ghosts, the quidditch cup, the leaky cauldron, and most of…

On Athletic High Gladiators were trained professional. They had training schools, and there were huge amount of money and effort involved in gladiatorial games. In a sense, they are like modern day soccer (or football, correctly called) players. Both play in big arenas; both have limited time period for professional lives (either being slain or…