"Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish"

This is a talk of Steve Jobs at Stanford Commencement,2005.

His third story reminds me me about a chapter in the book "The 7 habits of highly effective people", by Stephen Covey. They both advice us to "begin with the end in mind". Think about "death" to live with all our love, our passion today, but I prefer the word "the end" than "death".

With "the end", I can apply this idea on many contexts. At night, I can ask my self what I want to be done by tomorrow? Usually, many plans come up for this answer, many sometimes mean "more than enough for a day". But in those plans, there is nothing like "1 hour sitting and thinking of nothing", "1 hour lazy and not wanting to do anything on a half day",... In a context of a year, do I have have any plan? Yes, I do. How about 10 years, 20 years? Yes and yes!

I find it surprising here when I use the word "plan". I have a "plan" for today; but what about in 5 years or ten years or longer. Not much specific, but just think about "what I want to have or to be". I do not have any clear "plan" to achieve those goals. How can I get my destination if I don't have a map, and don't "plan" which roads I should take and which directions I should turn?

This talk prompts me to think about the connection between: "the end"+"plan". Nice talk! Especially love his idea "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

Optimization books

Here is the good reference for optimization books.

I should read the following books now:
1. Convex Optimization
Stephen Boyd and Lieven Vandenberghe
Lecture slides and videos for this book can be found here.
2. Nonlinear programming
by Dimitri P. Bertsekas

CHOCOLATE FRUIT DIP

From: cooks.com


2/3 c. corn syrup (light or dark) (32 Tea Spoon)
1/2 c. whipping cream (24 Tea Spoon)
1 (8 oz.) pkg. Baker's semi-sweet chocolate (or 4 oz. semi-sweet & 4 oz. sweet chocolate)
Assorted fresh fruit: apple, strawberry, banana, pineapple, orange, kiwi, peach, pear

In medium saucepan, stir corn syrup and cream. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Remove from heat and add chocolate. Stir until completely melted. Serve warm with fresh fruit. Makes 1 1/2 cups.

Sublinear Time Algorithms

I am reading "Approximating the minimum spanning tree weight in sublinear time" by Chazelle, Robinfeld, and Trevisan. So far, we try to approximate problems NP. In this paper, I come to know it's very interesting to approximate polynomial time algorithms as data sets are really BIG nowadays. This raises a lot of open problems. Here is a useful page of Ronitt Rubinfeld for a starting point in this area.