The Need to Create

“Here is to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They are not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing…

Reading the book is an inspiring experience. Among many things about Jobs that fascinate me, four of them made me think the most: motivation, innovation, being at the intersection of liberal arts and technology, and building a team of A-players. On Motivation: Personal ambition certainly was one factor: in his twenties, “Jobs confided in Sculley…

Spaepen covered six parts in his class Solids: Structure and Defects: 1) type of bonding, 2) formal description of structure, 3) diffraction, 4) phase equilibria, 5) structure and stability of metallic phases, and 6) defects. In doing so, he managed to combine related topics in crystallography, X-ray diffraction, thermodynamics, and metallurgy in a single course.…

I was expecting courses of the highest quality when I started looking for courses to audit last fall. After two semesters, I am supremely satisfied. The two courses I audited in fall were Introduction to Solid State Physics by Federico Capasso and Solids: Structures and Defects by Frans Spaepen. Two in the spring were Introduction…

Being a restless person, I always feel the need to do something.  I recently read a quote by Abraham Lincoln:  “And in the end it’s not the years in your life that count. It is the life in your years.” It sort of provides a nice rationale (or excuse) for my restlessness. But like all…

I am not a Mac user, nor am I a particular fan of any other Apple products. In fact, the only Apple device I have is a iPod shuffle I bought about four years ago. I am among the group who are not willing to pay for an extra 50% for something that Windows can…

Finally reach an age when I need to count “accepted rejections and rejected acceptance” with both hands. It seems to be the time to reflect and learn something about myself. But when I do, I find that my thoughts do not amount to much, so I have to borrow some of my experience with friends…

These are the numbers of papers published in the journals that I skimmed/read last year. Data (of the year 2010) are taken from Journal Citation Report. Nature: 862 Science: 862 Nature Chemistry: 143 Nature Nanotechnology: 130 Nature Materials: 137 Nature Physics: 158 Nature Photonics: 105 Nature Communication: 149 Chemistry Review: 188 Angewandte Chemie International Edition:…

Type Talk At Work is the last one in the series of books on Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) that I have read. The first book Gifts Differing, by Myers, is  my favorite among the three. The other two, both by Broeger and Thuesen, contain more description, more application, and less theory than the book by…