The Gene of Art

Imagine an island, inhabited by aborigines untouched by civilization, innocent of art. Imagine a plane crash on this island, and the cargo, the treasures of western art, miraculously survives the crash. Imagine the aborigines, coming to the site of the crash, find that for their grab are Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a canvas spoiled by Jackson Pollack, and, for their complete introduction to modern western art, Duchamp's signed urinal. Which piece of art will the aborigines vie for?

Such a hypothetical question has never been asked in reality. Surprising, considering the long debate throughout history about the meaning of art, and more specifically, whether we are innately conditioned to recognize certain objects as art. Simple experiments may help to answer this question. Art, like all things under the sun, can be dissected by methods of science. A recent paper, published in no less a journal than the most prestigious Nature, attempted to rationalize the structural harmony of a Japanese garden. A more famous example is the mathematical analysis of Pollack's paintings, which revealed that the fractal dimension in a true Pollack is consistently higher than the imitators. Such studies, few there may be, are more for scientists' self-amusement than for artists' enlightenment. They are usually scattered in scientific journals, and, as few artists read scientific journals, they are seldom heeded in the world of art, except sometimes as subjects of ridicule. The real artists prefer to debate the meaning of art based on subjective and metaphysical opinions, not on objective facts. Art, to the artists, is divine; to reduce art to its atomistic elements is preposterous and contemptible. In the world of art, science has no dominion.

Art, like Christianity, like science, is an institutionalized religion. The artists, art scholars and critics are its clergymen and evangelists. Like the evangelists of Christianity, the artists want to spread their influence. Art, they like to say, should be enjoyed by all men. Like the clergymen of Christianity, the artists try to keep some privileges to themselves. Art, they also say, can only be truly enjoyed by the initiated few. A layman can read the bible and follow the teachings of Jesus, but only the Church has the authority to interpret the Holy Script; anyone can go to the museum and contemplate the exhibition of art, but only the insiders of art can decide what to include in the collection. The doctrines of art are negotiated by the artists' Council of Nicene; there is no genuinely disinterested definition of art. The promoters of art, the critics, the scholars, and the dealers, do not share the same interests with the creators of art, the painters and the sculptors. The outcome of any debate of what makes art is a compromise among different interest groups, and it evolves with time.

By and large, art must be sold, to the elites of the society who can afford it. In the middle ages, art was sold to the nobilities, the Church, and the Venetian merchants. In modern days, it is sold to the industrialists, the financiers, and the Saudi princes. Among other reasons, the elites patronize art as a means of distinguishing themselves from the mass. The more the art can distinguish, the better. Yet the distinction must be subtle. The bourgeois should appreciate a decade later what the nobilities are enjoying now. The critics' job is to direct the Avant-Garde of art, so that the buyers of art are always a few years ahead of the commoners. When everyone is accustomed to Monet and Cezanne, they introduce Matisse. When Matisse becomes well received, they bring out Picasso. And so on, until a piece of warped metal appears in Christie's art auction.

Are we genetically predisposed to perceive certain combination of light and shadow, color and shape as art? Probably not. If art is beauty, and beauty is what attracts us biologically, we should see as the most beautiful a woman's vagina, or a man's penis, which of the two depending on, of course, the gender of the beholder. No, art is an acquired taste, and it needs a formal introduction. So much as a man unlearned in mathetmatics cannot see the beauty in a man cannot appreciate the wonderful play of space and color in Matisse's The Piano Lesson without first being familiar with the paintings of the classical masters. Art, in this sense, is what the artists tell us should be.

Back to the lucky aborigines who have the chance to choose between Da Vinci, Picasso, Pollack and Duchamp. Will they recognize the perfect symmetry and harmony in Mona Lisa, the grotesque beauty in Les Demoiselles, or the universal fabric hidden in Pollack's splashes of paint? Or will they marvel at the smooth, glossed surface of the urinal, its clean curves and solid construction, and see it as the acme of artistic creation? In all likelihood, the aborigines may scour through the wreckage and find a half-charred suitcase the most aesthetically appealing. But most probably each individual will have a different favorite and everyone will be happy with his share of the windfall. After all, in a world unspoiled by institutionalized art, everyone is entitled to an opinion.

Amazing Ronaldinho

This Nike commercial is making rounds on the internet. Ronaldinho, yet another Brazilian soccer genius, casually puts on a new pair of white Nike cleats, foot-juggles a football along the penalty line, and kicks the ball at the goal. Four times in a row, the ball hits the crossbar and bounces back, and Ronaldinho catches the ball with his foot and continues to juggle the ball. Incredible.

Is it real or fake? As much debate has surfaced on the web as that about whether Ben Affleck and J Lo were dating for real. Opinions range from total credulity to complete disbelief. One person thinks that the first two hits are real, while the other two are processed; another amusingly proposed that only the first hit is real, but it is unintentional and has inspired the following digitally-processed sequence.

When I first saw the video, I was so utterly amazed that I did not even consider the possibility of its being fake. Having recovered from my initial amazement, I now think that the video has been retouched. In fact, now I am amazed that there is even a debate regarding the video's authenticity. It is certainly impossible, ruling out that the gods were guiding the ball between him and the crossbar, that anyone, anyone, can kick the ball from 35 yards away, hit the crossbar four times in a row, have it bounce back each time precisely to himself, and catch it in mid-air with his foot. But many people think that the gods are indeed watching over Ronaldinho's shoulders. Many people think that Ronaldinho is indeed THAT good. Nike did not choose ANY soccer player for this video; they chose Ronaldinho to lend it credibility.

We all have this superhuman complex: we tend to believe that superhuman abilities exist, and that they must be found, if not in our mediocre selves, in other exceptional individuals. Don't we all love to tell the story of an extraordinary feat of some genius's doing? The vicarious accomplishment is truly, deeply satisfying.

Ill Formed URLs

Internet! There seemed to be a webpage for everything. And every webpage needs a URL. The most thoughtless, and easy-to-remember way of forming the URL is to concatenate all the words together. My apartment building, Ritz New York, has its own webpage: www.ritzny.com, and one AIDS coalition's website: www.walkforaids.org.

But this concatenation can misfire. The URL string can be parsed into completely different word combinations than originally intended. Just like the founders of the Super 8 Motel chain neglected to look up the meaning of suppurate, many advertisement men forgot to look out for the alternative and often compromising meaning of their web URL. This blog celebrates such negligence.

Go red for women, the new campaign of the American Heart Association, has its dedicated webpage. The URL is simply www.goredforwomen.org. Unfortunately, it also reads

www.gored for women.org

which, amusingly, may evoke similar visual images as the original slogan.

The O'Neill building in New York's Flatiron District, once a fashion emporium, is being converted into a new luxury condominium. It too, has its own URL for sales promotion: www.theoneillbuilding.com. Well, the potential buyers might want to think twice about purchasing a unit in

www.the one ill building.com

Chinks and Japs

Let me preface this writing by confessing that I know very little about Japanese -- their culture and their history. Excepting my acquaintance with a few Japanese scientists, my love of Sushi and eel over rice, and my fondness of Japanese anime, I have no knowledge of Japanese literature and art, or its customs and mores. I have not read a single Japanese literary masterpiece, or seen more than half a dozen Japanese paintings, or known its long history, or visited any Japanese city, or learnt hiragana, or spoken its language. Recently, this began to alarm me. Having lived and been educated for twenty three years in China, a strait away from Japan, I feel uncomfortable about my ignorance about my neighbor. What concerns me more, though, is Chinese's collective ignorance about Japan. Nothing is taught about Japan in Chinese schools except the bigoted notion that the Japanese culture is rooted in the Chinese culture, and that Japan invaded China in the 1930's and was driven out after eight years of bloody war. Few Chinese learn the Japanese language, and no Japanese book is included in the school syllabus. In contrast, most of my Japanese friends at least have some knowledge of the Chinese language and the Chinese literature.

Yet there is an ingrained hatred in many Chinese for the Japanese, a neighbor they barely know except that some of their great grandfathers have died fighting this neighbor in the eight-year war. This hatred may date further back to the end of the nineteenth century, where the Japanese Navy defeated the Chinese Beiyang Navy in a series of short and decisive battles. These two Chinese-Japanese wars should be reason enough for the Chinese to learn more about Japan. Instead, they fostered blind animosity.

Blind, and humorless too. The Brits and the French have fought each other for centuries, and even today they have a contempt for each other. But they express their nationalistic prejudice by laughing at their old foes. I recently listened to Monty Python's John Cleese in a speech. Being British, Mr. Cleese opened by making fun of the French:

"Why did the French have so many civil wars?"
"So that they can win one."

"How many Frenchman does it take to defend Paris?"
"Nobody knows, it has never been tried before."

I do not remember hearing a Chinese joke about the Japs, neither would I know if the Japanese ever joke about the Chinks. How do you make up a joke about something you barely know?

There is, however, a true story that is almost funny. My mother-in-law's college classmate in China has been a professor in Japan for twenty years. Recently he took a vacation in China. To his surprise, many of his Chinese friends sympathetically asked him if the Japanese ever harassed him because he was from China. "It must be difficult for a Chinese to live in Japan." his friends said to him. When he returned to Japan, he was again surprised. Many of his Japanese colleagues sympathetically asked him if the Chinese harassed him when he was traveling China. "It must be hard for a man from Japan to travel in China." his colleagues said to him. This is probably the closest to a joke that the Chinese and the Japanese can tell about each other.

Why I Am Not a Vegetarian

Nobody turns vegetarian for the taste. Mothers always tell their children to "eat your vegetables", apparently because we do not have an innate appetite for the green leaves or the red roots of domesticated plants. From day one of our existence in this world, we hunger for an animal product: milk. Evolutionarily, we are genetically wired to eat meat: our hunter-gatherer ancestors needed high protein and calorie food to support their energy-hungry brains. Culinarily, meat is more versatile than vegetables: beef is stewed, roasted, broiled, grilled (to different degrees of cookedness), pan fried, stir fried, seared, or served raw in steak tartare; lettuce and tomato are chopped and served in salad; lobsters are boiled, baked, stir fried, stuffed in ravioli, stuffed with shrimp and crab meat, and served with baked potatoes or French fries; potatoes are baked or made into French fries, and served as a side to lobsters and burgers. Vegetable is secondary to meat in the following cuisines: French, Italian, British, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian, Argentinean, Russian, Vietnamese, Thai, Ethiopian, and, if it counts as a cuisine, the American. Entrees in the menus of the above-mentioned cuisines usually feature meat: veal, pork, lamb, duck, chicken, turkey, and a variety of fishes, accompanied by a modicum of vegetables.

Yet more and more people forgo meat in their diet. Vegetarianism, an ancient form of dietary restriction practiced by the Hindus and the Buddhist monks, has gone secular. Of course, involuntary vegetarians are common all over the developing world: people do not eat meat simply because they cannot afford it. In Mozambique, the average meat consumption per capita per year in 2002 is 5.6 kilograms, roughly the beef in 50 Whoppers from Burger King. Even as I was growing up in China in the seventies and early eighties, meat was scarce and rationed, and I did not see meat in my meal every night, and I recollect many fights with my cousin over who got more meat in his plate when we did have it. For most of the world population, meat is still not plenty. But this may not appear so in the United States, where the average meat consumption per capita per year in 2002 was 124 kilograms: 3 Whoppers a day. In the United States, we are eating too much meat.

Hence the epidemic obesity, and the attendant health problems. Throughout millions of years of evolution, when no animal can be sure of its next meal, the storage of the surplus calories in the form of body fat is crucial for survival. But evolution could not have foreseen this century of calorie abundance. Our bodies continue to store the excess calories, although we no longer need them, and each day we have even more calories to spare, which turn into more fat, until one day, someone woke up astounded by the body mass of Americans and announced that the nation had become too fat.

Hence the blame on meat. Multiple studies have shown that vegetarians have lower risks of cardiovascular diseases, lower mortality, and longer life expectancy than the carnivorous. These studies, of course, have been interpreted by many as the evidence for the health benefit of vegetarianism, even though further studies show that there is no significant health advantage of vegetarian diet over a similar diet with moderate amount of meat. The problem is not the meat, but overeating it, as anything taken to the excess can be harmful. Nonetheless, meat, with its high cholesterol and its high calories that once made it the most desirable item in our ancestors' menu, is suddenly shunned as a health hazard by the health-conscious.

Further undermining the meat's position is a group of ultraliberal people going by the name People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA. Well, these people are the kindest of all people of the world. So kind, in fact, that they can not tolerate the slightest cruelty in this world. But this world is full of cruelties: the oppression in Iraq, the malnutritioned children in impoverished Africa, the genocide in Rwanda, the civil war in Bhutan. All this torments the kind people of PETA, but none of this troubles them so much as the cruelties that we commit to animals in this seemingly civilized country.

PETA first gained public attention in its fight for the animal rights in scientific labs, but it soon spread its interest to animal farming. PETA states that animals share same sufferings as you and me, and should be respected for their individual lives. Its propaganda vilifies the modern practice of meat industry. The animals, according to PETA, are raised in close quarters (like us in New York), overfed (like us in America), and cruelly slaughtered (like the folks in Iraq). They are also often mutilated to prevent internecine fights due to unbearable stress. They are bred for the sole purpose of being eaten. They have never experienced any joyous stimulus in their lives.

All PETA says is true. But the animal farmers are also kind and honest people. They also wish for world peace and like everyone to be happy, and they make everyone happy by making their meat cheap and plenty to everyone. They are also the simple people whose compassion usually do not extend beyond the order of primates. They can be kind to their chickens or cattles by having them living in spacious farms, but their families may not enjoy the diminished income.

Humans may be the only animal capable of compassion for its food. Of this, obviously, nobody can be certain. I will never know if the sharks had a pang of remorse when they tore off the legs of the hapless swimmers, or the wolves had a moment of hesitation when they carried off the human babies to feed their own calves. But they did it anyway. So maybe next time I eat my steak I will remember the cows' sufferings. But right now I am hungry, and I need to think whether I want beef, pork, lamb, chicken, or fish for dinner.

Chemistry in Haiku

Cis retinal sits,
Quietly, until the light hits.
Isomerize. See!

Today AMBER works,
Yesterday CHARMM does better,
Force Fields are like that.

The Burger Joint Club

On West 56th Street, just steps east of Carnegie Hall, stands the Le Parker Meridien Hotel. Walk into the lobby, past the reception desk, and turn left, you will find an obscure neon light sign in the shape of a steaming double cheese burger. For many hours around lunch time, everyday of the week, you will also find a long line of people waiting underneath the neon sign. They are waiting to have a taste of the highly acclaimed burgers from the legendary Burger Joint, a tiny burger restaurant hiding in a corner of a grandiose hotel, hiding, that is, aside from the neon sign and the queue that advertise its existence. Tiny, as it boasts no more than six tables and a short bar, and can sit no more than thirty people at a time. One cashier takes orders and money from the customers, and two cooks prepare the burgers and the milk shakes. The joint may serve greasy burgers, but it certainly has a lean staff.

I have eaten in Burger Joint twice. The first time my co-workers took me; the second time I took my wife. The burgers were juicy and flavorful, but they were also awfully small. At over five dollars a burger, Burger Joint was a rip-off. After all, burgers are but beef in a bun; there are bad burgers and good burgers, but I doubt there are spectacular burgers that deserve premium prices and far-reaching reputation. The Burger Joint burgers are good burgers, but just one of the many equally good burgers that I have tasted in my peregrination of America. Why has it become a Manhattan culinary attraction, one that one-time tourists and returning customers alike are willing to wait for thirty minutes to eat over-priced burgers in a vociferous crowd? What makes Burger Joint tick?

The Chinese proverb says that an inn with good wines should not worry about hiding in a deep alley. What it does not say is that the inn can actually benefit from hiding in a deep alley. Secrecy, once its existence is known, becomes an irresistible draw. Everyone wants to discover its what-about. Eating in a hard-to-find restaurant heightens the joy of discovery, discovery not only of the tongue but also of the feet. This possession of exclusive knowledge gives the delight of being among the privileged few who are “in-the-know”.

To Fire a Pistol

Congratulations on owning your new Browning Hi-Power 9mm pistol, a beautifully crafted, perfectly lethal firearm. Please read the following instructions before operating your pistol, as the firing procedure varies under different circumstances.

In a Western: Stand upright facing your opponent, arms casually dropped on the sides, with elbows slightly bent outwards. Gaze at your opponent intensely. As soon as your opponent breaks down under your gaze and attempts to draw his gun, reach for your pistol and yank it out of the dust-caked holster. Spin the pistol three times around your index finger, and fire. Your opponent will slowly collapse to the sandy ground with his gun in his hand. Blow the smoke from the barrel of your pistol, and bow to the fair lady with golden curls who has witnessed the incidence calmly on the nearby terrace. Spin the pistol three times around your index finger and in one unbroken motion thrust it back into the holster. Walk up to the lady and offer to buy her a drink.

In a Schwartzenegger movie: Grip the bad guy by his collar, cock the pistol and point it at his head. Ask who he works for and where the hostage is. Having obtained the information, say "Hasta la vista baby", release the bad guy and he will fall down to the street from the roof-top of a fifty-story building. Pocket the pistol and tidy up your suit.

In self-defense: Usually you will be panicking in face of the approaching assailant, so try best to steady your hands. Take the pistol out of your pocket, grope for the safety slide and push it downward to free the hammer. Should you drop the gun in the course of this action, pick it up and repeat. Should you complete this action before the assailant wrestles the gun away from you, point the gun at the assailant and continue pulling the trigger until the magazine is empty or the barrel is jammed, whichever comes first. Check if any of your bullets has disabled the assailant. If not, scream and run away as fast as you can.

In a paroxysm of anger: Take out the pistol, cock the hammer, and aim at your object of anger. Threaten the person and demand an apology. Your request may be denied, which will fuel your anger even more. If a rush of blood to your head impairs your judgment, that is, if you lose your head, pull the trigger. You have killed your victim. Say to yourself: the person is dead.

And repeat: the person is dead.

Pity She is a Whore

Why is prostitution illegal in most places? Moral decadence in the profession, exploitation of female body, transmission of diseases, and abomination in God’s eyes, these have been foisted as reasons for banning the sexual service. But these reasons confuse cause and effect. The question is: how come prostitution is associated with evil in the first place?

Only one condition can trigger the legal ban of a human activity: that activity must harm the interests of a group of people whose collective power can rewrite the law. For example, cocaine was banned because its use by black slaves has lead to aggravated assault on white people. In Prohibition, alcohol was declared illegal because the factory owners felt that their workers’ productivity had been negatively influenced by booze. In contemporary time, marijuana remains illegal because the tobacco companies feared its powerful competition against cigarettes.

Prostitution must have suffered a similar fate. At one time or another, it must have harmed the interests of a powerful group ruling the society. That conflict lead to a lopsided legal battle that resulted in the demise of prostitution as a legal profession.

So the real question is: who are harmed by prostitution, so much as to take the trouble to drive the prostitutes underground?

Or rather, who stands to benefit by having the prostitutes underground?

First, let’s take a look at the profession. A man pays a prostitute to have sex with her. In this act, the man gets sexual satisfaction, the woman enriches her finance, possibly also gets a bit of sexual pleasure. No one is a victim. Of course, before the introduction of condoms, there was the risk of sexually transmitted diseases. For a believer of the Bible, prostitution is an abomination. But prostitution became illegal after the advent of condoms. Also, prostitution has been an abominable occupation even before the knowledge of sexually transmitted diseases. Bible was written by men. What in prostitution offended the society?

Why was prostitution considered immoral in the first place? From time immemorial, men have patronized the brothels and the streetwalkers. If they had no qualms in the purchase, what motivated them to declare prostitution evil?

Here is an idea. Prostitution is profitable. If it were also respectable, what woman would not do it? In a male dominated society, prostitution could be a way to independence for women. Now that was a threat to men. To insure that they pass on their own genes, men need the fidelity of their wives. There is of course no surer way to do so than making the wives financially dependent on the husbands. So men are comfortable screwing around with prostitutes, but they vilify the whores so that their wives would not pursue a similar career and gain financial independence. That, more than anything else, is why prostitution got its bad name.

Nonetheless, in many places, prostitution had been legal for a long time, before it was declared illegal. What happened?

In China, prostitution has been sanctioned until the communist’s rule. Why did the communist government ban prostitution? Simple, it was part of a scheme to control people’s ideology. A sexually deprived mass is a lot easier to control than a sexually active population. When life is bleak, one might as well believe in anything. It is for the same reason that institutionalized religions condemn prostitution.

In New York City, prostitution had been a prosperous business in the famous, or should we say infamous, red light district next to the United Nations. Then Giuliani decided to drive all the prostitutes out. Why? Not because the sinful profession is a blemish on the city’s reputation. Oh, no. The real reason is that the real estate developers coveted the untapped neighborhood. It is far cheaper to drive all the sexual workers out of the city, than to organize the profession and detach it from the organized crime.

Should prostitution be legal after all? By all means I think the answer is yes. Transmission of disease? Condoms can stop that. Exploitation of women? This no longer applies in a society where there are many careers for women to financial independence. Vulnerable to organized crime? Well, how many casinos in Las Vegas are still run by mafia?

The remaining question is just: how much?

Dating, Audition, and Interview

Nicholas Metropolis, the co-inventor of the Monte Carlo method – indisputably the crown jewel of numerical computation, was once asked how he conceived such an ingenious idea. He answered:

“By working with the right people.”

The reply was toned in humility and humor. But the statement, taken out of context, sounds trite. “Working with the right people” is the well-known secret of all successes. Jim Collins, in his best-selling business book, Good to Great, made it a clear principle: First who, then what. The paramount task of a successful business is to get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and assign the right people to the right seat. Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron CEO, believed in this principle. He told reporters that the greatest asset of Enron was nothing else but its people. Consulting firms and investment banks can’t agree less. Each year, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and their competitor firms lavish millions of dollars on fresh graduates from top universities in the grand endeavor to recruit the next superstars. In the style of a Mastercard commercial, the recruitment effort can be justified as:

First-class flight from San Francisco to New York: $1500.

Five-star hotel near Time Square: $300.

Lunch at Four Seasons: $70

Finding the next business superstar: priceless.

Finding the right people, however, is easier said than done. Like all principles of life, there is no concrete guideline to implement it.

The firm where I work now is obsessed with recruiting. It even has a fancy name for its recruiting department: Strategic Growth. (I half-jokingly call it Star Gate, which shares the same acronym and has pertinent connotation.) Shortly after joining the firm, I realized that everyone in the firm works for SG, since everyone is at SG’s disposal to be put on the interview schedule. And SG uses us good: I have had at least one interview each week. Before long, I wondered: am I conducting sensible interviews and hiring the right people?

One central premise of all interviews, it seems, is that past achievement is the best indicator of future success. Hence the resume-based questions. How did the candidate overcome obstacles, deal with failures, work in a team, demonstrate leadership, etc.? These questions are so prevalent that tons of books have been written on how to answer them. Nowadays no job-seeker shows up in an interview without preparing for these standard questions. This, of course, diminishes the value of these questions, much as the cheat sheets diminish the value of an exam. So a short memo circulating in the firm encourages the interviewers to ask candidates surprise questions. Regretfully, the memo suggests no example of such questions.

Unimaginative of surprise resume-based questions, I looked elsewhere to find my own interview questions. I started an experiment: I would not look at the candidate’s resume before the interview. Instead, I would just chat with the candidate about something of our common interests. With one candidate, I asked him about his favorite movies; with another, I talked to her about humor writing. This way, not only did I put the candidate at ease, I also gained a good idea of his communication skill and style.

I would then outline a technical problem from my past work to the candidate, and ask him to work out a solution together with me. Of course, the choice of the problem is tricky. A good problem should require no specialized knowledge, and can be solved to different extent so that the candidates’ abilities can be differentiated. Due to obvious reasons, I cannot reveal here any specific examples.

So how did I do with my resume-free approach? I took a look at my colleagues’ recommendations on the candidates that I interviewed, and found that most of them agreed with my own. There were differences. In the case of a recent candidate, my hire recommendation was overruled by unanimous no-hires from my colleagues. But overall, I was not an outlier. My resume-free interview technique seems to be working.

Knowing now that my resume-free interview works reasonably well, I wonder: does it work better than the resume-based interviews? I have no data to answer that question. But two analogies come to my mind.

In dating, we also look for the right person. Imagine dating as a resume-based interview:

Man: So tell me about your last relationship.

Woman: Well, we got along really well, and had a very happy relationship.

Man: What made your relationship successful?

Woman: I had a good sense of humor, and he knew how to appreciate it.

Man: Why on earth did you break up then?

Woman: I had to relocate. Now tell me something about your last relationship.

Sure that is no way to date. Dating, we go to restaurants, movies, bowling alleys, and other fun places. The right person is the one who we enjoy the time with. Success of a past relationship seems irrelevant.

Take another example: audition of actors. In choosing the right actors, the foremost requisite is that they fit the roles. Audition ensures that by having the actors perform the intended roles. The best performance stands out clearly. In contrast, interrogating the actors about their past performances is useless. (Of course, past successes get them the audition. But the influence ends there.)

The interview is supposed to answer the question: is the candidate going to work well with us? So why beat about the bushes and half-guess the answer, when we can directly address that question by having the candidate work with us during the interview? Why not create a real working situation and have the candidate solve a problem with us? Why ask about past experiences when we can create a present one first hand?

McKinsey, the leading management consulting firm, interviews by case questions. The candidates are presented with real business situations and are required to collect relevant information from the interviewer and produce concrete recommendations to solve the problem at hand. The interviews are not different from a real work day of a consultant. Hardly can there be a better way to select future consultants.

It is time that we all follow the suit. Toss away the resume-based questions. The resumes tell what the candidates have done in the past, and get them in the door. Interviews are time to find out what they can do here and in the future. Forget the silly brain teasers. Being smart is nice, but are they willing and able to use that intelligence in real work? Just get up and walk to the whiteboard, sketch the problem, and say to the candidate:

“Here is a problem that we will be solving today. Any ideas?”

And let the candidate disappoint or delight us.

Us, Them

The world consists of two groups of people: us, and them.

On Tuesday morning I went to the Immigration and Naturalization Service Center in Flushing to get fingerprinted. The center is located on Rooselvelt Avenue, under the rails of the 7 train, inside a plain, grayish and old one-story building, adjoined by a 99-cent store on the right and a florist on the left. It has one glass door openning onto the street. Inside the glass door is a small foyer, where a large paper box contains a stack of application forms. Applicants are to fill out the form before admission, apparently to expedite the transactions.

My appointment was at 9 o'clock in the morning. I arrived twenty minutes early, and there was already a long line outside on the street. Every twenty minutes or so, a guard would open the front door and let in a group of people. I waited for a good hour and a half before moving close to the front of the line. As the guard let the next group in, I thought I was going in with them, but he gestured me to stop, without a word. The guard looked sulky, and used no words but only gestures to direct the visitors. I thought: either he did not speak English, or he assumed that all immigrants did not speak English, and either way there seemed to him no means of verbal communication.

Finally, the guard opened the door again, and gestured me to proceed into the office area. Behind a second glass door was a spacious lobby, furnished with a few dozens of chairs, with just handful of vistors inside. I was beckoned to the counter, where a Chinese woman, in Chinese, directed me to the back office to have my fingerprints taken.

Like all great things in life, the excitement is in the waiting. I waited for one hour and a half to be fingerprinted in less than five minutes. The Immigration Service certainly knows how to thrill the aspiring immigrants. My 9 o'clock appointment seemed to be for mere reference. Also, standing on the street probably heightened the sense of anticipation, an effect that would have been lost should the applicants have been allowed to wait sitting in the lobby. Sadly, I went on a sunny morning of early winter. Wait until the first snow storm hits New York, and that will give the immigrants a more awe-inspiring experience.

I could not help noticing that nearly all the workers in the Immigration Service Center, like in many other government agencies in New York, are immigrants themselves. Had they not gone through the same irrespectful treatment themselves? Why, sharing once our indignition, do they choose to repeat the same disrespect on us?

Because once they were us; but now they think of us as "them".

Fifteen years ago, when I was in high school in Chong Qing, every spring break, I would take the train to go to my parents' city. In those years, the transportation system in China was severely undercapacitied, and spring spelt disasterous congestion for home-goers. The train was completely packed. If all the passengers in the train had taken off their shoes and laid them side by side on the floor, there would not have been enough room. I stood for hours on the train, pressed from all sides by people who were in turn pressed from all sides. Yet more people tried to get on the train. The doors were closed. So people started to clamber through the windows. As the train approached the stations, passengers frantically closed the windows. A window left open would surely invite an attack from the platform.

Unfortunately one open window close to where I was standing was neglected. Before the train could come to a full stop, a desperate home-goer started to climb into the window. The passengers on the train fought back. Someone tried to pry the man's hands off the window, another pushed down the man's head. It looked like a struggle of life and death. Neither side was willing to give up. With incredible tenacity, the desperate home-goer managed to clamber into the car, despite extensive bruises inflicted by the passengers on the train. I expected a real fight to break out in the car.

What happened next, though, was utterly unbelievable. As soon as the man entered the car, instead of giving a good beating of the ones on the train who beat him so hard to keep him off the train, he turned outside and started to push the next window-climber off the train. The man, just a moment ago in alliance with the home-goers on the platform, had switched side.

Before the man got on the train, other men on the platform were "us"; once he was on the train, they became "them".

The pain, once it is no longer one's own, is simply gone.

I Made The Meat?

“Some of them say that you made them.”

“I made them?”

“Yes, that’s what some of them say.”

“Impossible. Do they not know what they are made of?”

“They know they are meat. They even know their molecular constitution – proteins, DNA, and all that.”

“And they say that I made the meat.”

“Well, they do not say that you made the meat. They say that you gave them the soul.”

“The what?”

“The soul, so that they can think and feel.”

“So they have not discovered the brain yet?”

“They know the brain all right. But they say you made them think, not the brain itself.”

“ Ludicrous. What about evolution?”

“One of them, Charles Darwin, has speculated evolution. But some of them still refuse to accept it.”

“What about the monkeys? Even a fool can see that they are related to the monkeys.”

“They say you also made the monkeys.”

“This is too much. What else do they think I made?”

“Everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything: the universe, the Sun, the Earth, the animals, the Man.”

“The universe. THAT is my proudest creation. Have they discovered the gravity and the space time invariance?”

“A man by the name Isaac Newton worked out the law of gravity. Another man, Albert Einstein, realized the space time invariance and called it the theory of relativity.”

“I am suitably impressed. At least some of them have a brain.”

“They all do. Just some of them do not use it.”

“Do they see the elegance in my creation? The symmetry and beauty in the physical laws?”

“A few of them do. The few that study physics.”

“And with all that knowledge of the elegance in my creation, they believe that I made the meat!”

“Some of them.”

“Then they should take a look at the proteins! Do they not see how ugly they are? A disorderly nondescript blob of atoms, obeying no rule but the rule of chance.”

“Max Perutz, the man who solved the first protein structure, made a similar remark.”

“They cannot believe that, having created a set of elegant physical laws, I went on to make something so ugly?”

“The ones that believe you made them apparently do not know how ugly the proteins look.”

“And the brain! It disgusts me to even think how messy the neurons are scrambled all over the place. If I were to make a thinking machine, I would make it nice and neat, using silicon and logic gates.”

“They made their own thinking machines using silicon and logic gates.”

“Remarkable. Who thought of such machines?”

“Von Neumann was credited as the father of these thinking machines. But it was Alan Turing, a homosexual, who proved a theorem showing that these machines were possible.”

“A homosexual?”

“A man who has sex with another man. Interestingly, the homosexuals are detested by the ones who believe that you made them.”

“Why is that?”

“Because they believe you see homosexuality as an abomination.”

“Whatever. They think that I had all the time to bother about a man’s sexual disposition?”

“They think you are omnipotent and omniscient.”

“I wish.”

Dude, Where Is My Car?

I have one thing to say and I will say it right here at the beginning:

Never, ever use American Auto Transport, or M & E Auto Transport, to ship your car.

To leave no doubt as to which companies I am referring to, here is a little more information:

American Auto Transport, website: www.american-autotransport.com, telephone: 888-402-7447, fax: 954-327-7109.

M & E Auto Transport: 10929 Firestone Blvd. #181, Norwalk, CA 90650, telephone: 800-690-1796.

If you read this before you ship your car, you are enviably lucky. I learned my lesson the hard way.

Two days before I moved from San Francisco to New York, my car embarked on its treacherous journey across the continent. My car must have been in tears when it saw the pick-up truck. It was literally a pickup truck. Its small deck could accommodate only one car, and a Saab had already occupied it. The driver looked as if he just came off a pirate ship. Big, fat, with unkempt graying beard and bloodshot eyes, he casually fastened my Corolla to the back of his truck with ropes and chains. I would not trust this man to carry my car from coast to coast. But he reassured me. He told me that he was only there to tow my car to a rendezvous point, where another truck with an anonymous driver would pick it up.

Something did not add up. This was not what Ivan Fernandez told me. Ivan Fernandez was a sales rep for American Auto Transport, who called me ten days before in answer to my quote request on a website. Ivan spoke fast.

“We are the standard of the industry.” Ivan told me.

He also told me that American Auto Transport had the genuine door-to door service.

“You got to be careful with other companies. Their door-to-door service usually means terminal door to terminal door.” Ivan eagerly explained to me the truly superior service that I would expect from American Auto Transport. “The same driver who picks up your car from you will drop off your car, ... in 7 to 10 days.”

“We are the standard of the industry.” Ivan repeated to me.

Ivan sounded good. Twenty months ago I moved from New York to San Francisco, and I used Dependable Auto Shippers, with whose service I was quite satisfied. American Auto Transport, in Ivan’s words, seemed to offer similarly good service. I decided to go ahead with it.

But after the pirate-looking driver towed my car away, worries invaded my mind. The driver left me a yellow sheet of lading bill. The company name on the bill was M & E Auto Transport. Handing me the bill, the driver informed me that M & E would be the actual carrier of my car. He scribbled a phone number on the bill.

“You can call this number to track your car.” He said with a suspicious sneer.

I called that number three times in the following week. I got only busy signal.

Four days after the pick-up, I called American Auto Transport. After some wait, the agent informed me that my car was in Colorado. She told me that the driver did not work over the weekend, so there was a slight delay. But the car would arrive early next week. I had nothing to worry.

On the next Wednesday, figuring that “early next week” had passed, I called American Auto Transport to get the status of my car. Again it was delayed, this time in Michigan. Some customers were late in payment, which held the driver up. But the car would arrive early next week.

Another week passed. On Friday, I called American Auto Transport again. Finally the truck was in Ohio, and would move into the North East early NEXT week. I should expect delivery by Tuesday, the agent reassured me.

Tuesday went by. Then bad news came on Wednesday. In the afternoon, I receive a call. A woman, in impatient voice, informed me that my car was in Long Island, but the truck had a hydraulic problem and could not move any more. She told me that I had to go to Long Island to get my car.

“What about the door-to-door service? Should I at least get a refund?” I asked.

She replied that it was not her business. The truck had a mechanical problem and there was nothing that she could do. “You need to go to Long Island and avoid any further delay in delivering your car. The driver would call you shortly to arrange a pick up.” She made it sound as if it was all for my good.

I called American Auto Transport and complained. A different woman unsympathetically told me that there was nothing that she could do either. There would be no refund. It was useless to speak with the manager. Other customers, she confidently assured me, had similar complaints and none had received a refund. But she suggested that perhaps I could reason with M & E. She gave me a phone number.

Receiving no call from the driver that day, I decided to call M & E early the next morning. Miraculously I got through to a live man. I complained about the situation. The man angrily said that it was the way it was, his contract said that M & E was only responsible to ship the car as close as possible to the destination, and I was not going to get any refund.

I asked if there was really a mechanical problem with the truck, or it was really a laziness problem with the driver.

“It sounds like you should go to a school to learn to trust people.” The man said to me indignantly.

I was speechless. I was out of moves. They had my car. I had to yield. I ended the call by asking him for the driver’s phone number. The man gave me the number and a surprise.

“Remember you owe a C.O.D. of 800 dollars.” The man reminded me.

On my contract the amount was $795. I protested. The man would not listen. He insisted that on his contract it was $800. He became very agitated, and cursed American Auto Transport.

“These contractors tell customers bullshit, and I have to deal with all these bullshit.” He shouted. That was the end of the call.

I called the driver later. He answered briefly, saying that he was assisting another customer and would call me back, and was gone. He never called me back.

The next day I called American Auto Transport again, and complained to yet another woman about my situation. She said M & E simply rounded $795 to the closest integer. She seemed not to realize that $795 was an integer itself, and that this convenient round-off allowed M & E to steal 5 extra bucks from my pocket. But she was kind enough to tell me that the driver had flown back to California, and she told me the auto repair shop in Long Island where I could pick up my car.

The auto repair shop had its own surprise for me when I called.

“Remember to bring $850 in cash.” said the man who answered my call.

That was the last straw. I was incredulous. The due just kept going up. I questioned him why he did not say it was 8 thousand dollars, since he seemed to name the price arbitrarily. The man did not budge:

“It is $8000 then. Look, I ain’t got the time to argue this with you on the phone. Bring $850 and pick up the car. We charge $50 per day after today.”

Outraged, I called American Auto Transport one more time. This time even the woman assisting me was sympathetic. She told me that she would let the auto repair shop know that I only owed them $800. I gave up correcting the amount to $795.

The next day, my fiancee’s uncle drove me for 40 minutes to the auto repair shop. The car was there. Nothing was missing, no visible damage, and the engine started without any problem. I put down $800 and drove my car away. It was a relief. It was awakening from a nightmare.

Where do you work?

I ran into this woman in the elevator in my apartment building. She looked to be in her thirties, was smartly dressed, and was checking messages on her cell phone when I stepped in. Summer was in full swing in New York, and the elevator felt like a preheating oven. The woman promptly piped up: "It's hot in here." She spoke without looking at me and in a tone of soliloquy, as if talking to a phantom in the air. But I knew better and chimed in. It turned out that we lived on the same floor. She complained how she never got to know any of her neighbors. I assured her that it was not her fault since I had just moved in and would soon move out. Just as we walked out of the elevator, she asked me:

"Where do you work?"

Never had I been asked this question by a total stranger after 30 seconds of conversation. I told her my employer and reciprocated: "How about you?"

"I am a partner in Deloitte Touche." She said.

Partner, according to my knowledge of consulting, is the second highest rank one can hold in a firm. Now I understand the true meaning of her question. In the fast-paced business world in New York, it translates into:

"Are you worthy of my company?"

Dinner in Color

On the second night in my new apartment in midtown Manhattan, I prepared dinner for myself. This is my signature dish: Steak with Asparagus and Mushroom, garnished with Strawberry. I may well be a chef disguised as a chemist.

Inspection and Introspection

I am better, am I not?

Today, I took E train from Queens to Manhattan. Across the aisle from me, a woman took out an eyelash curler and a small mirror and started shaping her eyelashes. She appeared to have made the effort to look pretty, for she wore heavy make-ups and seemed to be dressed in the best fashion that she could afford. She kept pulling and curling her eyelashes for twenty minutes. First the right eye, then the left, then back to the right, for she scrutinized herself in the mirror and felt unsatisfied with the result. We got off at the same stop. That’s when she stopped eyelash-sculpting.

I thought to myself. Hmm, she just wasted twenty minutes on her vanity. She could have read a book, or a newspaper, like the respectable-looking passengers did. She could have taken a nap, which would leave her refreshed when she got off the train. Or she could have been like me – I usually pick a scientific problem and turn it in my head when I am on public transportation. Instead, she spent twenty minutes curling her eyelashes.

Maybe that is why I am well-paid in a technology firm and live on the 36th floor in a full-service apartment building, whereas she is probably a cashier in a grocery store and live in some rent-controlled building in Brooklyn.

Then I thought to myself. Wait. I just spent twenty minutes WATCHING her curling her eyelashes! I was not reading or thinking. I just wasted twenty minutes watching a woman wasting the meantime on her vanity.

Last Sunday, I had dinner with a few friends in Le Colonial, a posh French-Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco. A man and a woman sat at an adjacent table. The woman was very pretty. The man, on the other hand, was plain looking and balding. Kings, one of my friends, made a joke when the woman and the man posed together for a picture. “That’s as close as the guy is going to get tonight.” He said. But he was wrong. When they stood up to leave, the woman kissed the man on the lips. I whispered to Kings, “Your prediction was wrong – by two miles!” My whisper was a little too loud. As soon as the couple vanished from our sight, we heard the man’s angry voice:

“Try to judge yourself, not others!”

That is exactly what I should do.

Encounter with Homo Soccerfanus

Tell me nothing; I don't want to know.

There are two subspecies of humans: the rest of us, and the soccer fans (homo soccerfanus). The latter resemble the former in appearance; but they can be identified by occasional peculiar behaviors, such as extreme emotions after the victory or loss of their teams, shouting and yelling at critical moments in a game, excessive consumption of beer during a match event, and, sometimes, animosity and violence toward the fans of the opposing teams.

Yu Chen is one homo soccerfanus. He roots for Liverpool, which just won the European Champions League after a dramatic comeback against AC Milan. We watched the final game in Kezar’s pub. It was not a live broadcast, but every one of us arrived without knowing the outcome. That evasion, however, was futile, for as soon as we walked in the pub the result was obvious. A group of Liverpool fans, all dressed in the red uniform, were celebrating on top of the tables. Simultaneously happy and disappointed, Yu Chen sat down to witness Liverpool’s path to triumph.

It was a game of climax and drama. Each team played one half. AC Milan scored three goals in the first half. All hope seemed to have vanished for Liverpool, then miracle happened. In the second half, within a span of five minutes, Liverpool scored three goals. Eventually, Liverpool won in the penalty shootout.

Unfortunately, this dramatic twist was lost amidst the premature celebration of the Liverpool fans in the bar. It was outrageous. Each time Milan scored, Liverpool fans cheered. When Liverpool was three goals behind, its fans danced and laughed and toasted to their team and gulped down their beers. Yu Chen talked to us in a slightly patronizing tone.

Exhibit 1. The Liverpool fans in the bar cheered when their team was 0:3 behind AC Milan.

I took my camera with me, hoping to capture Yu Chen’s reactions in the course of the game. There was, of course, no emotional reaction at all. No intense pleasure or sorrow can come from certainty. Only at one moment was Yu Chen surprised, when Liverpool scored its equalizer. It was a penalty shot. Yu Chen’s reactions were recorded in the following sequence of photos.

Exhibit 2. The penalty shot by Liverpool's Alonso was blocked by Milan's goal keeper Dida. Stefan, sitting next to Yu Chen, was a Milan fan.

Exhibit 3. The ball bounced off Dida. Alonso on the second attempt kicked the ball into the net.


Exhibit 4. Now the score was 3:3. The Liverpool fans would smile to the last.

Simply Free

It has everything, and nothing more.

Nike just introduced a new running shoe, Nike Free. I tried it on in Nike Town. It was the most comfortable running shoe my feet had worn.

Holding Free in the hands, one will immediately notice its light weight. The upper of the shoe is extremely thin. It also has numerous tiny slit openings to enhance ventilation. The sole is flexible, so flexible that the shoe can almost fold in half. Running in Free is an exhilarating experience. I did it on the treadmill in Nike Town. My feet felt light and free, just as the shoe’s name suggests.

I also watched the TV spot for the shoe in Nike Town. It must be one of the most effective commercials ever made. A group of runners, all wearing white T-shirts and shorts, run barefoot on a wet sand beach. Yet it is no ordinary beach. The runners step over a manhole; they zoom past by parking meters, fire escape ladders, newspaper venders, mailboxes, and fire hydrants. A yellow cab drives by. Pedestrians. Then a bus crosses the screen. When it is gone, the scene has changed to a street corner in New York City. Only one runner remains. The camera switches to his feet. He is wearing Nike Free. The scene blurs, and a message appears on the screen: “Run barefoot”.

The music used in the commercial? Chariots of Fire. The tune, repeated twice, imprints in anybody’s mind.

What makes a great product? Invariably, a great product is built around a simple concept. It is conceived with a clear vision of how it will be marketed. Run barefoot, run free. Nothing can be simpler than that. Everything about Free revolves around this simple concept, from the choice of fabric to the shape of the shoe. It has not an ounce of extra weight. It flexes to conform to the shape of the foot. It is probably the most plain-looking sneaker that Nike has ever made. Once the simple concept is established, no effort is spared to realize that concept in the product.

Apple also makes great products. iPod Shuffle, for instance, took the flash player market by storm. The simple concept here? Life is random, so give chance a chance. So goes the tiny LCD screens, so goes the cluttered buttons of controls. All the fat is stripped off the Shuffle, and the result is a lean flash player that the market has never seen.

The technology that goes into Nike Free or Ipod Shuffle must be enormous. Yet Nike and Apple mention none in their commercials. They sell the concept, not the technology. Ever watch the infomercials? “Our product is made of materials used in spacecraft.” Hello! Anybody interested in buying a spacecraft?

So what makes Nike Free, or iPod Shuffle, a great product? In short, it has everything, and nothing more.

Hand versus Penis

We humans are obsessed with sex. Whereas other animals copulate only when they come into heat, which happens once or twice in a year for most mammals, we humans screw all year round. We enjoy sex; we view it as a recreation as much as the means for procreation. We seek sex when we are not having any. We seek more sex when we are having some. The proverbial wisdom has it that a man thinks about sex every three seconds. A woman thinks about sex not much less, if we believe Sex and the City.

Sex sells. Most magazines in any newsstand have on their covers some beautiful women in revealing clothes and suggestive postures. Nudity and strong sexual contents boost box office for movies and promote ratings for cable TV programs. Viagra has annual sales in the billions and has prompted a number of me-too drugs from competitors. Experts tell us: sex is important for relationships, marriages, and health.

Just how important is sex to us? We may glean some idea from how much we value our sexual organs.

The following is an excerpt of the schedule that the state of Connecticut uses to compensate for work-related injuries, in descending order of value.

Lost or Damaged Body Part and Corresponding Compensated Weeks of Pay

Heart 520
Pancreas 416
Liver 347
Arm (master) 208
Arm (other) 194
Hand (master) 168
Eye 157
Hand (other) 155
Foot 125
Penis 35-104
Vagina 35-104
Thumb (master hand) 63
Thumb (other hand) 54
Finger (first) 36

The most valuable organs are apparently the vital organs. We cannot live without a heart, a pancreas or a liver. The second most valuable organs are the ones that we rely on in everyday life and work: master arm and hand, and eyes. But the surprise is that penis and vagina – our reproductive and pleasure organs – are valued much less than the subordinate hand and arm, and foot. Sometimes, they even rank below the thumbs and the first finger.

So maybe we do not value sex THAT much after all. As the Chinese saying goes, he who is fed and warm desires sex. Foremost we want our arms and hands intact to fend for ourselves. Sex is a thought after that.

Price Index

What do you measure money in?

Purchasing power is an important concept in macroeconomics. Defined loosely as how much goods a unit of currency can buy, it is a measure of the worth of money. The most careful analysis of purchasing power usually looks at the average price of a basket of essential goods. But there is a simplification. The price of Big Mac turns out to be a good indicator of the purchasing power; therefore the famous Big Mac index.

Also important in macroeconomics is the consumer's price index, which can reflect the living expenses in a region. It is again measured by the average price of many things. But I accidentally discovered a simpler way.

I was talking to Johannes the other day, who was complaining how expensive it was to live in Milan. Exactly how expensive? A pint of beer cost 10 Euros! "How much does a pint of beer cost in New York City?" Johannes wanted to know. That was how he assessed the living expenses in a city.

Of course, Johannes is German. So the living expense will be different for a French, an Italian, and a Chinese. We all have our own essentials in life, and we measure money accordingly.