Steve Jobs

"Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart
people," Jobs told Businessweek in 2004. "But ultimately, there
needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all
together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of technology all
floating around the universe."                                                           

"The quintessential differentiator between Steve Jobs and
everyone else is the sheer tenacity and commitment to perfection
-- the willingness to move mountains to get the right thing,"
said Gadi Amit, founder of NewDealDesign, an industrial design
firm in San Francisco.

Hear, See, and Do

When you hear something, you forget it.
When you see something, you remember it.
But not until you do something will you understand it. 

Pecking Order of Academics

1. Psychologist wants to be social scientist. 
2. Social scientist wants to be economist. 
3. Economist wants to be chemist.
4. Chemist wants to be physicist.
5. Physicist wants to be mathematician. 
6. Mathematician wants to be God. 

Freedom

"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual toward freedom."

–Albert Einstein

Flaws of Stock Chart Reading (Stock Technical Analysis)

Quoted from the book "Security Analysis" (1951, third version) by Benjamin Graham, et al. On page 653, he remarked about the Chart Reading (Market Analysis):

... Security analysis and market analysis are alike, therefore, in the fact that they deal with data that are not conclusive as to the future. The difference, as we shall point out, is that the security analyst can protect himself by a margin of safety that is denied to the market analyst. [margin of safety refers to buying way below the intrinsic business value of the stock]

.. human impatience plus the exigencies of the chart reader's profession impel him to draw more frequent conclusions from less convincing data.

... The stock speculator does suffer, in fact, from a well-nigh incurable ailment. The cure he seeks, however, is not abstinence from speculation but profits. Despite all experience , he persuades himself that these can be made and retained; he grasps greedily and uncritically at every plausible means to this end.

The plausibility of chart reading, in our opinion, derives largely from its insistence on the sound gambling maxim that losses should be cut short and profits allowed to run. ... But in this conclusion there lurks a double fallacy. Many players at roulette follow a similar system, which limits their losses at any one session and permits them at times to realize a substantial gain. But in the end they always find the aggregate of small losses exceeds the few large profits. (This must be so, since the mathematical odds against them are inexorable over a period of time). The same is true of the stock trader, who will find that the expense of trading weights the dice heavily against him.
...

Excepts from the Book "A new kind of science" by Stephen Wolfram

In the end the Principle of Computational Equivalence encapsulates both the ultimate power and the ultimate weakness of science. For it implies that all the wonders of our universe can in effect be captured by simple rules, yet it shows that there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules, except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold.

Free Will: What makes us think there is freedom in what a system does? In practice the main criterion seems to be that we cannot readily make predictions about the behavior of the system. It seems likely that the individual steps in each train of thought follow quite definite underlying rules. And the crucial point is then that I suspect that the computation performed by applying these rule is often sophisticated enough to be computationally irreducible -- with the result that it must intrinsically produce behavior that seems to us free of obvious laws.

Second Law of Thermodynamics: No reasonable experiment can ever involve setting up the kind of initial conditions that will lead to decreases in randomness, and that therefore all practical experiments will tend to show only increases in randomness. But it may not be universally valid, some celluar automata can exhibit self organization.

Ultimate mode of universe: I strongly suspect that the vast majority of physical laws discovered so far are not truly fundamental, but are instead merely emergent features of the large-scale behavior of some ultimate underlying rule. Could it be that underneath all the complex phenomena we see in physics there lies some simple program which , if run long enough, would reproduce our universe in every detail?

Data compression: all the compression methods can be thought of as corresponding to fairly simple programs.

Cryptography: using celluar automaton to generate encryption key.

Quotes from An Ancient Book

<<长短经>>

养失而泰，乐失而淫，礼失而彩，教失而伪。

察于刀笔之迹者，既不知理乱之本；
习于行阵之事者，既不知庙胜之权。

儒以文乱法，侠以武犯禁。

兵胜于外，义强于内。

欲不可纵，志不可满。

式于政，不式于勇；
式于廊庙之内，不式于四境之外。