Gong Cheng's Blog

Today I watched a film titled Prime directed by Ben Younger.

 

This is a romantic comedy. A 37 year women Rafi falls in love with a 23 year old boy David Bloomberg. Although they crash on each other heavily, this age gap make them uncapable of keeping the relationship. In between, Rafi was continuously seeing a psychotherapist who accidentally be David’s mother. There are some funny scences because of the miscommunication. David’s family is Jewish. His mother have strong opinions about having his son a jewish wife. The culture and age difference create difficulty of this relationship. At the end, although they still love each other, they separated.

 

This is a good movie with many entertaining details, definitely worthy of time to watch. Besides the movie itself, several personnels in the movie are interesting. The first is Uma Thurman who present Rafi in the film. Uma’s most famous screen role was the killer’s character in Kill Bill. It is interesting to see that she could actually play such a sensual character. Besides her own career. Her family is also interesting. Her father Robert is a famous professor with special strong compassion of the religion of a certain part of China.

 

The other personnel is the director Ben Yonger whose undergrad major was politics and he had even worked as campaign manager at NY. It would be interesting to know how could he make such a radical change in his career.

最近开始从baidu下载很多老歌的mp3，一首一首的听过去

 

从蓝精灵，一休，希瑞，恐龙特级克塞号，张明敏，邓丽君，一直到张学友，刘德华，齐秦，周杰伦，大约有22小时的歌。

 

回忆起很多以前的往事。比如说，小学时候，有一次老师说，你们不应该看那么多电视，应该好好学习云云。我的同座位，她的名字叫顾曼西就站起来对老师说，老师，动画片希瑞最后每次都会讲一些人生的道理，所以也有教育意义。当时大家都觉得她说的很有道理。

 

现在想来，当时真的是很幼稚的，当时我们觉得看完动画片之后再听一小段说教就可以除掉看动画片的Guilty. 也许就是人的这种本能的负罪感起源了基督教吧。

 

 

只弄懂了8成，好在是group project所以不懂有人可以问。Team working是多么美好的一件事情。著文以记之。 科学和工程的区别就在这里，工程上的目标很明确，想明白问题是什么以后，只要脑子灵活就可以一把搞定。而科学上，往往要提出一个假设，然后证明这个假设成立，但是常常这个提出的假设就是不对的，虽然花了很多时间精力，全部白白浪费了. 当然，也有人拿到负面的结果之后，转念一想，反推出一个更加fancy的假设，再堆砌一点数据,折腾出另外一篇paper,这样的人在科学界也是高手，至少resume上有一堆paper,别人会认为他很productive。其实，这类人对于科学的贡献非常有限。

 

完成了Project,我洗了一个热水澡奖励自己一下。

It is interesting the weather is still so rainy. I am a kind of worried about tomorrow’s plan for the folklife festival.

Tonight, I went to IMA for jogging, when I come back from IMA to HSB, it was raining really hard. I was wondering why the world is this way.

Today, we went to watch the Movie Da Vinci Code which is a great one.

The story started as a mystery murder. The curator of Louve is murdered in the Palace. Before dead, he struggled to leave some message to the people of his clan. In fact, they are a group of people trying to hide a secret for thousands of years. The secret is that Jesus actually has a wife, and even a daughter. Sophie who at that time believe was the curator’s grand daughter together with Robert Langdon( Tom Hanks) eventually solved this mystery, more they found Sophie is actually the only one in the world who carries Jesus’ blood…

 

It sounds easy, in the movie,  to know this piece of information, they were put at life threatening situation multiple times… …

 

Overall, this movie is very good in terms of production, plot.

其实他们做的东西，讲的东西都有些陈旧，只是很多是大头，对我们晚辈来说就是一个掌握大头们动向的好机会。

 

虽然人很多，我注意力集中在一个叫做帕米拉希尔瓦的哈佛女教授身上，因为她的题目是合成生物学，很热的一个题目，主要她的工作是把几个不同的蛋白质合成一个融合蛋白，这样新的蛋白就会有组合出的新功能。在她的帮助下，建立了一个网站http://parts.mit.edu,就是把已知功能的各个生物元件进行归纳总结。蛮有意思的，有召一日，生命的每个部分都可以分解，并且可以组合成新的功能，会是多么令人兴奋的事情。

 

另外一个人引起我的注意的是麻绳技术学院（按照国内报纸的翻译方法）的罗伯特霍维兹，是个诺贝尔奖得主，他讲了通过线虫的遗传学分析，发现细胞凋亡的信号传导途径。其中几个重要的调控基因都是结合脱氧核糖核酸的锌指结构转录因子，看来锌指结构的蛋白质在从单细胞到多细胞生物的进化中一定起了很重要很重要的作用。有空的时候可以就这个题目做些统计写篇文章，不过，现在还是把我的大头文章搞定再说。

I ran to the Magnuson Park via the main gate. Pass the unleashed dog areas. I saw many dogs there. Running/walking back home, the whole run is about 1 hour.

 

This is the most beautiful time of Magnuson Park, there are sunshine, water, wild animals such as duck, it is amazing how much good things are free ……

无聊的美国人有一种作乐的方法叫做People watching…就是看人，其实就是和中国人赶庙会看人是一个原理。今天下午，我就去家旁边的马修beach 去people watching…

 

今天第一大收获是看到了很多比基尼美女。她们穿着五颜六色的泳装，有的在草地上晒太阳，有的在湖边戏水。她们年纪大约十来岁到二十来岁，正是身材最好的时候。有一个妈妈带着三个孩子，其中最小的一直在睡觉。另外一对父母带着一只狗过来，那条狗看见妈妈手中的咖啡杯，怎么也走不开。

 

树枝在随风飘扬，水面波光粼粼，湖对面是科克兰，如果说风景如画，那这里就是了……

I think I am busy with the figure 2 of my paper… …It looks like taking forever to make… …

Today, I also swimmed about 1000 M free style swim, I think my free style swimming is becoming better and better. When I stand on top of the swimming pool, I automatically start to distinguish who is a free-style pro who is newbie.

 In the meanwhile, I also watched a TV interview of the child movie stars. The common thing of them is that they all become famous when they when little. They got money, attention, everything when they were little, but not all of them live a happy life afterwards. Many of them later struggled with drug, addiction and emotional problems. Among all the people present in the show, two of them are especially impressive. One is Danica McKellar, I have actually never ever watched her movie. She caught my attention because she got a Math undergraduate degree from UCLA. I would not be surprised if she got a music or arts, even English degree, but she is actually a math geek. More, she even got a second author on peer review Journal. It is amazing that she could do so much different thing in so little time.  

 

The second star that caught my attention is Tracy who appeared as Carol Seavors in the TV show growing pains. I know her because I like the show that was translated into Chinese when I was little. She actually had eating disorder because filming her weight losing story before the camera. She is suffering from drug addiction right now. It is sad to see that.