It is getting cold

    Tomorrow, It rained. After that, it's getting cold. I guess it's only in between 10 to 20 Celsius degree. What worries  me is that I don't have any clothes for winter. All the clothes I have other than short pants and T-shirts are a  a pair of jeans and a light jacket. I am afraid of being cold to death when it snows so I have to buy some heavy jackets and snow shoes  as soon as possible.

Trip in Chicago

    I had a trip in Chicago. However, not today, not yesterday, it's on Labor's Day, which is about one month ago. I had been too busy to write about that since I got back. Now, I have sometime because one of my course is over. On the other hand, I would feel sorry for Chicago if I don't write something about it. No matter how, I did write one trip article about Indianapolis, why not Chicago?

    Getting straight, I love Chicago.

     

    Those days, I visited two museum, Art institute of Chicago and Field museum. Those two museums are both excellent ones. Collections there hold a great quantity and quality. I like Art institute of Chicago even more. Although fascinated, after one hour looking around I felt sleepy  and extremely needed a cup of coffee even though the museum itself, as I said, was undoubtedly awesome. I guess next time I visiting these museums I would have to change my strategy. Firstly, have a cup of coffee before entering the museum. Secondly, take note when appreciating collections so that I can keep concentrated. 

    Along the Michigan Lake shore, there are a lot of huge parks. Among them, Millennium Park is the most famous  one. The design of the park is indeed eye-attracting. Northern to Chicago downtown, there is a zoo in Lincoln Park. Actually, it's my favorite of this trip. It's free. It's nice and it's open everyday. The one that impressed me most is two north-pole bears. It is designed so good that visitors can watch bears swim directly to them. One thing interesting is that when I was thinking about the reason pole-bears swim to visitors back-and-forth again and again is out of having fun with visitors, a little boy asked his mother whether bears were trying to scare people away.

    Night in Chicago is also fun. We watched fireworks in Navy Pier on Sat. night. On Sunday night, I attended Jazz festival. Just lying down on grass casually with jazz around you. I really enjoyed it. I hope I can come again next year.

The corrosion course is over

    Finally, one of my course, corrosion, is over today. We had final test this afternoon. It's an open book test but I still didn't do very well. But I guess I would at least get a B. 

    Honestly, I am a little bit disappointed about myself. I was used to be smart and confident, at least in my imaginary. Now I can't even pretend it to be.  People around seems to be able to handle things easily. This just made me recall what professor Ming Lee ever told one of his student who was about to study in MIT. "Are you ready to become stupid?" Now, I felt so stupid of myself. 

    Sometimes, I would think about what if I were still studying in NTHU in Taiwan. Would life be easier? The life I used to. The language I used to. The way making myself feel confident I used to. Anyway, it doesn't help by imagine things that are not going to happen.

    Whenever I feel struggled, I know that's good for me. It means that I am learning. Pain, but effective. So, don't worry, I will get over it. Just be happy.

This week

It's another busy week. 

It's only the third week of the semester but I got to do homework all the time. If I were in Taiwan, it should still be a leisure time. As a matter of fact, the most difficulty remains arising from my English deficiency. For instance, one of the lecturer teaching my corrosion course is from Italy. It's really not easy to understand his accent. On the other hand, I am very weak on chemistry and electro-chemistry is so related to corrosion so it's indeed tough to me.

Another lecturer teaching the course, "Interaction of radiation with matter", is a gentleman on his age of  80. The way he talk is really a murmuring to me. So all that I can do is to take notes. Even though he is so old, I am sure that he is still clear-headed. When he started teaching, he just wrote down what he murmured immediately without taking a glance at his note. In conclusion, he is good. By the way, I heard that he is the first Nuclear Engineering PhD in the world. If true, that's pretty cool.

Conversely the situation is quite different in Taiwan. A professor is forced to retire around age of 65. Sometimes they would like to retire as soon as possible. I think the professor who insist on teaching and research whole life is really respectable. 

My fashion preference

Check out this website

http://omg.yahoo.com/photos/best-and-worst-dressed-at-the-vmas/2266?nc#id=1

It's a set of photos in VMAs(actually I don't know what it is). There is a comment about the star's dress under each photo. It could be a best or a worst. Of course, it's writer's personal preference. Interested, I made my own comment on each photo before reading writer's comments. And it turned out to be that whenever I think one to be a best, it's a worst and vice versa. I am always opposite to writer's opinion. Ha~ 

Four promising chiefs

    It has been about 2 weeks since we four roommates started cooking together by ourself at home. Surprisingly,  we really made a lot progress in cooking these days. We look more and more like a professional chief now.

    When I just arrived at this place, they cooked only for themselves as well as me. Because I only cooked for myself, I just made things like noodles soup with and vegetables in it. One day, I tried to fried some green vegetable( sorry I still don't know its name, I bought it only because it seemed easy to cook.) and overcooked it. Meanwhile, the living room was smoked. This historical dish looks like the following photo.

    The room just downstair to ours is also lived by Taiwanese. When it comes to cooking, they have a good system. They bought every thing like rice, vegetables, meat all together in Wal-mart or meijer every one or two weeks. And then they take charge of each meal in turns individually. However, they don't use a list to decide whom to make which dish beforehand. Conversely, they use a blank list with calendar so that the one who make the meal some day can sign on it. It's a way to have elasticity as well as responsibility.

    So, we followed them.

    In the beginning, everyone took vast amount of time to prepare for a meal, like two hours. Even with a volunteer's help, it still took two hours. The resulting dishes is usually normal( or just simple). But after two weeks, as I said, one can finish a meal in one hour on his own. Meanwhile, the property is better. Today, Adrian made the dinner. He cooked one more dish by mistake(we usually have three dishes and one soup) so it turned out to be a especially plentiful dinner. It looks like the following.

    In conclusion, I believe that the four of us will become more and more like professional chiefs. 

Amazing brain

    Last night I had a dream where a girl was reciting a Chinese poem. The poem is of the form in Tang Dynasty in China and is very long. What so weird is that the poem is so real that it can not be made up by myself. After I woke up, I found it's impossible for me to recall that poem. 

    So, what's it about? The main point is that I do ever memorized that poem when I was a child. I knew that. But I can't recall that poem at all now. Actually, the poems I can recite now are only a few and are all very short. The poem in my dream, however,  is very long so I am assured that it's not the kind of poems I can recite when I am awake.

    It's pretty interesting that I find my brain working in such a strange way that I remember more things when I am asleep than I am awake. It seems that my brain locked some of my memory somewhere in daytime and release them having party in my dream at night.

    My friends Matt told me that it's actually how our brains work. In fact, our brains remember much more things than we are aware of.  That's why we can construct such a vivid scene in our dream because our brain already memorize a lot of details in advance for us. Brains just save them somewhere and lock them.

    The question is why brains do that locking thing. In my opinion, it's because that brain would work more efficiently that way. Just imagine our brains as computers with a data base. If we don't lock some not-so-important data, the data base would be so large that it would cost vast amount of time to search files. I think our brian will lock some memory from use especially for the memory that is not used for a long time. In this way, our brain can keep the system working faster and faster.