James

If you could sit down and have dinner with anyone, who would it be?

If Mark Twain happened to be asked this question, his answer is most likely to be Percival Everett. Or vice versa.

Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. I have enjoyed his new novel James, in which he re-invented Mark Twain's novel along the Mississippi River. You will never look at The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the same way again after reading James. The latter is a story told from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave and companion of Huck. 

You can call him Jim or James. You can hear Jim speak in nigger's way and in correct English. In private, Jim speaks and writes in perfect, formal English. In front of a white person, he speaks as every enslaved person does. 

Everett showed us the bilingual fluency of Jim who had reminded his daughter, "The only ones who suffer when the whites are made to feel inferior is us (blacks)."

Here is a perfect example of Jim's situational translations: While a slave is walking down the street and see that a white neighbour's kitchen is on fire. The neighbour is standing in her yard, her back to her house, unaware. How should a slave tell the white neighbour?

"Fire, fire." That might have been what you suggest.

"Direct. And that's almost correct," Jim would correct you. The real answer should be "Lawdy, missum! Looky dere."

Why? Jim reminded us, "Because the whites need to know everything before niggers. Because they need to name everything."

    

Ursula

Improbable as it would have seemed to almost all biologists and animal behaviourists, a young king penguin named Ursula ventured into the open Atlantic Ocean in 2007 and launched a three-month journey toward an area off Antarctica. Statistically, one out of three would have died in the predator-dense danger zone where Ursula took the leap. 

I heard the story of Ursula on the first page of the book Wildhood co-authored by an evolutionary biologist and a science journalist. 

Ursula's story is legendary. Picture those massive jaws of leopard seals lurking offshore: they are lined with teeth like a tiger's. Visualise the hydrodynamic half-ton of explosive muscle, with action and precision like a missile's. You won't believe Ursula made the leap and swam ten kilometres a day – alive. 

Ursula wasn't the first penguin to jump or dive into the icy water. Many others wait at the water's edge, watching and learning from more experienced peers. They learn a great deal from what we call social learning. We all do. We can learn a lot from what our peers do right, and even from what they mess up. Watching bad things happen to one's cohorts provides a fish, bird, or mammal with lessons one can't get anywhere else. 

To the list of fish, bird, or mammal, I would add the rank of doctors. We doctors don't call that social learning; we call it shadowing, or assistant internship if you like. This happens every July.

Ruler

Summer time medical shadowing is one way for high school students to venture in the area of practicing doctors. This gives students a better idea what the career of a medical doctor is like. 

After a busy clinic with high school students sitting next to me today, I had a far less hard-pressed dinner time with them. We started off talking about dermatology specialty. And then the conversation moved on and they asked me about if and how artificial intelligence is going to eventually phase out the medical doctors. 

I don't know the answer but their questions remind us that the virtual brains are hitherto the size of a worm's. That means artificial intelligence works well with one narrow task at a time.  Deep convolutional neural networks, for example, can be trained by a dataset of hundreds of thousands of clinical images to achieve performance on par with board-certified dermatologists. That's a way to use artificial intelligence to tell the difference between healthy skin and skin cancer. So promising are those algorithms that even the scientific journal Nature published a proof-of-concept study on this topic.   

Wait a minute, you might be thinking. Did the pea-sized virtual brain make mistake? 

Yup. Sometimes, they did. One day the research team noticed something odd about the results: the machine was inadvertently trained to be a ruler detector instead. The rules-based algorithm was "smart" enough to find out skin cancer in the training data had been frequently photographed next to rulers for scale. 

Alas, the program turned out to call out loud "cancer" whenever there is a ruler.  

Butterfly

The suggestion that "don't judge a book by its cover" is not necessarily sage. Many a time a book's title draws readers in and gives us the first impression. 

The great thing about an intriguing book title is that it leaves us clue like Hansel's bread crumbs for Gretel. Recently, I had been unable to unlock the meaning of a book's title after reading more than four hundreds pages. That is a memoir from Evanna Lynch, best known for her casting as Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter film series. Evanna is courageous enough to tell her bumpy and dark journey with eating disorder in her publication The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting. As she acknowledges, it's very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple anorexia from self-hate.

The thing is, I didn't quite understand what Evanna's life has to do with butterfly. So, I kept reading. One chapter after another, there is no mention of the winged insect. Not even a moth.

I thought for the thousandth time how Evanna's body could have looked like a butterfly. 

And then, in the final chapter, I saw the symbolic meaning of her transformation. That life cycle is a legacy of awe-inspiring transformation from a teeny caterpillar out of a neat cluster of shiny, dandelion-yellow eggs. A magical transformation from an egg the size of a pinhead to crusty little cocoon, followed by a dancing butterfly with stunning beauty. 

How had I not noticed the similarity to the recovery of Evanna Lynch from her darkness in wrestling with an eating disorder?

All On the Board

Go to any Tube station across London and your eyes will move away from your smart device. Chances are, you have noticed minimal mobile signal coverage on the London Underground. 

That could have been the reason for two customer service assistants, Ian Redpath and Jeremy Chopra, to be able to catch the attention of passengers after posting a poem on the customer information board seven years ago. Everyone seemed to love the duo, and stopped to take selfies next to them.

Their quotes, poems, and inspiring words have reached more London commuters than any advertisement could have achieved. They have even published two books compiling their reflections, mostly on mental well-being. One good example is their wake-up call to our smart phones. 

"If your phone needs to be recharged, then so do you," they advised us. "Your phone is smart, but you're far smarter. Check yourself as much as you check your phone."

Euro 2024

What does "summer vacation" mean to you? To us, it means activities to indulge in with family and friends. Take a cue from each of them and we know what to do.

While we can't cater to everyone's wishes, we know the way to squeeze an extra stop or suggestion to make great times.

During our stay with my sister-in-law's family in a small city Coventry, we headed to Shakespeare's birthplace and flower fields when their boys were at school. (Hands up if you have boys who are fans of lavender fields or rose gardens. Any one?) After the kids came back from school, we took them to the country park but brought two footballs. Oh, and one more thing. In the country that invented the football game, the best way to spend our evening is, of course, to watch the quarter-finals of Euro 2024.

The way France captain Kylian Mbappé improvised his face mask to make it like Batman's, after a broken nose in the Austria game, reminds us how to make fun out of everything on the road.

Less

A few pounds overweight and about to turn fifty, Arthur Less is an American novelist who travelled to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India, and Japan. He appears in the fiction written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Andrew Sean Greer. 

That’s an entertaining story for my Greece trip. Arthur Less felt strange to be almost fifty. It’s like, to quote his words, the last day in a foreign country. “You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won’t ever be back.” 

Few metaphors can match the beauty of such comparison. What better ways to see how we face the stage of going-to-be-fifty?

On second thought, this isn’t a must to be so when we turn fifty. Or to leave a county, for that matter. For Arthur Less, he found his flight to be overbooked, and was happy to be volunteer to accept a flight later. 

It so happens that I was leaving Greece today. We remember the suggestion by The Rough Guide to Greece: “to go where Greeks go, often less obvious backstreet places that might not look much from outside but deliver the real deal.” Our family have been graced with the best travel companions who are from Greece. We ended up knowing the best ways to eat and drink at Athens and Chios ever since day one. 

We simply are wired to enjoy the country at its best.

Chios

Oliver Jeffers' picture books are remarkable – stunning, really. One of my favorites (and that of my daughter's) is The Day the Crayons Quit.

We all giggled when we read the colourful story of Duncan opening a box of crayons. One after another, Duncan's crayons protested and shouted aloud.

Imagine myself as the kid Duncan bringing the box of crayons to Greece, and I can immediately tell which crayon is going to be the most short-lived. And no prizes for guessing the blue crayon. That's right. The indigo blue water of the Aegean Sea, juxtaposed with clear sky of the vibrant summer in Greece.

My blue-coloured crayon is going to quit if I keep staying in the lovely Greek island of Chios.