Gong Cheng's Blog

The boeing everet plant is the largest building in the world by volume with 13.3 million m^3. Boeing purchase airplane parts from different supplier, ship them to everett plant, assemble them, and sell them. For example, Boeing 737,747,777, 787 and 7e7 are all made here.

The tour took us about 1 hour. It started with a short film in the auditorium of the future of flight center. After the film, we get on a bus to the assembly plant. The bus stopped at the door of the service tunnel, which only have half of the lights on to save energy. We took elevator to the top of the boeing assembly plant. There, we can see planes at different stage of assembling. The last step is to add the engine which are acutally purchased from GE or Rolls-Royce. This is just another example of how specialized that American business is, even Boeing doesn’t create their own engine…

After the tour, we went to see the gallery in the future of flight tour center. Engine, the pilots’ cabinet are show separatedly in the gallery. The mechanism of the engine looks like quite simple, comparing with the biology, a engine just do not have too much parts there. Engines have 4 categories, the first category is the propellar which you often see in the old movies, the second category is the jet turbine engine, which are the most widely used engine in current air plane including 747,etc. The third category is ramjet engine which does not have moving part. This gives this kind of engine an avantage of efficiency. Ramjet are often used in supersonic airplanes. But ramjet engine cannot start it self, so they are often used in combination with small rocket engines. The fourth category of engine is rocket engine which you see on the rocket. This kind of engine do not use air as fuel. It carries all the fuel they need because they need to operate in the outer space with little air.

Today is a sunny day, I went to the south lake union park to ponder problems in my research. The ducks in the lake union seems do not care about the food I bring to them, maybe they just finished their lunch too. These ducks are quite different than their friends in the lake washington…Ducks in the lake washington will chase you if you feed them.  You know what that is the greatness about language. Because the ducks in the lake washington cannot communicate with the ducks in lake union about how good human foods are, the ducks in the lake union have to fish by themselves. Language is necessary for developing a culture however primity it is.

 Talking about duck, there are some half cooked ducks avaiable in Costco and Uwajimaya recently. Each duck is cut into 2 peices and packed in two separated plastic wraps. The re-heating process is very simple, just bake them in 375 degree oven for 20 minutes. The ducks are very delicious.

The story starts with a small puzzle. The male leader of the movie is Mattew. He is a digital media artist. He has girl friend, engaged, ready for marry. But, actually the girl he loves deeply inside his heart is Lisa. They met 2 years ago at Chicago while he was working there. When he was offered a job at NY, he was planning to move to NY with Lisa and get married. But Lisa mysteriously disappeared at that time. He tried to call her, no response, he had to move to NY by himself. The relationship just ended this way.

This time, Mattew comes back to Chicago again to meet some clients. When he was in a restaurant for dinner, he feel the girl in the phone cabinet was Lisa. but he doesn’t act fast enough to catch her. He decided to figure this out. After a lot of troubling, eventually he found Lisa’s apartment. Waiting in her room overnight, a girl comes in, but she is not the Lisa he was looking for. The new girl also call herself Lisa, although later we will learn her actual name is Alex.

The truth is Alex fell in love with Mattew at the first sight 2 years ago prior Mattew/Lisa relationship, she felt pretty low to see that her dream lover was in love with her best friend Lisa. She spontaneously prevent them to be together whenever there is a chance although she doesn’t expect Mattew could love her. The day Mattew made an appointment with Lisa, Lisa also got a chance to go eurpoe. Lisa asked Alex to deliver a message to Mattew to tell him that she is positive about moving to NYC together. Alex just erase all the traces of information. Both Lisa and Mattew feel the other one may not be interested in him/herself anymore(They do not seem to have too much self confidence either). They lost contact with each other.

Eventually, Mattew and Lisa figured this out after 2 years extrarelationship romance and a lot of efforts. They are happily ever after… This is a story of love at the first sight, both Mattew/Lisa, Mattew/Alex ‘s relationship fall into this category, it is a perfect movie for speed dating practioners.

He is a famous fairy writer. During the past 20 years, a month magazine
– The King of Fairy is completely supported by a single person.

His work focus on the children’s life, the most depressing population
in the world. Besides heavy competition to get to better school or
college, these kids received tremdous pressure from parents. His work
try to express opinions for the children’s positions in fairy stories,
and even kids like the person who speaks for them even if his words
doesn’t change too much reality. This differentiate his fairy tales
from Chinese traditional fairy stories or European ones.

For example, here are some famous quotes in his fairy.
Kids take toys as friends, adults take friends as toys.
To score 100 in the exam turn a boy into 100 year old man.
The fun part of being boss is not because of people listening to what
you are right about, it is people have to listen to you even if you are
wrong.
If the kids speak and behave as adults in a country,  the adults must be childish.
A dog cannot survive if he doesn’t know how to shake his tail, unless he is not a dog anymore.
Encouragement can turn a retard into a genius

His language style is close to the talk show in America. Stories are
told in relaxed context with a lot of witty quotas combining the
contemporary news. The content are very close to real life, we can see
that from the title. Red Sofa Music City which talks about Lu Xixi
found the sofa in her home actually has a music city within it. The two
main characters in his work are Pi Pilu and Lu Xixi. Pi Pilu is male,
Lu Xixi is female. Comparing with the fairy tales about palace life
hundreds years ago, stories with family and school as background are
more applealing to the dedicated kids.

Although his work is nonargurable entertaining, he is not explicitly
positive about hard working, advancement of science and engineering.
Those factors are critically important for the future of a better
modern society. He is also cynical about school education, he quoted
many times in his works and interviews that he only has 4 year primary
school formal education. Although there are many cases that people can
be successful without strict school education, but to improve people’s
quality in such a big country, improving public school education is one
very important way. But he is up about morals such as honesty.

In the later 90’s, he is criticized for mentioning too much sexual
appeals in the fairy tale. He argued that he wants to incorporate more
sex education material into his fairy in order to achieve better
education effects, but later he did recess from this behavior. Right
now, he is maintaining his blog at sina, within 1 month, it
achieves  1 million hits.
Here is the link, everything is in Chinese.

http://blog.sina.com.cn/m/zhyj

Here are a few options that also work in raining days.
The primary option is the IMA of UW. IMA of UW has almost all the
sports opitions avaiable until 10:30 pm on work days, 6:30 pm on
weekends. We can do swimming, badminton, squash, roller skating(Friday
night), archery( Friday night), basket ball, valley ball, etc. It is
also equipped with a Tully’s coffee shop serving simple food and drinks.

The cons of IMA is that parking/traffick for IMA is not convenient.
IMA has a parking lot with a fee, which graduate
students want to avoid at their best efforts. It will be best to plan ahead for
transportation if we want to play in IMA before 9:00 pm, but playing
sports late  is not good for early sleep. The best time to go
IMA is the break during the daily work time if I work on campus that day.

The other option is to exercise within the apartment. Our apartment has
a small exercise room with treadmill, bicycle, and weight lifting
facilities. The cons of the in apartment exercise is the limitation of
the options.

The last option will be to play Table tennis/Bowling/Pool inside the
HUB. This option has the same transportation problem as the IMA.

Overall, it really depends on the location, if I work at home, the most
convenient option would be exercise in the exercise room. If I work at
the South Lake Union, the best option would be IMA after 9:00 pm. If I
work at on campus, the best option would be HUB/IMA.

It will be good to exercise more…

The first is the temperature, comparing with the east coasts of both
America and Asia continent, pacific northwest has much higher
temperature in the winter season. It is rarely to be freezing. Of the
same latitude in east coast (of either America or Asia), this time,
there are already several feet snows. 

The second is the sports, I find that the number of sports choices is
highly correlated with my happiness. During the winter season, there is
almost no outdoor sports besides the winter run, it is not too much fun
to run in the cold air. I suspect it may be harmful for bones and could
easily cause sports injury. But here, there are many snow sports to
choose. Although snow sports are a little bit pricy for graduate
students to enjoy, at least we have that option.

Although it rains a lot in Seattle, this water is irrigating the trees
in the pacific northwest. These trees eventually represent the
landscape characteristics of washingtons state, the evergreen state.