Sometimes it's the smallest one that gives us the most. Difficult to grasp as it might seem, my recent experience of Italy is a case in point.
When I attended the World Nephrology Congress in Milan, I stayed in a big hotel that comes with the name "Executive." As its name indicates, this hotel must be a grand one, being occupied by over thousands of executives, if not hundreds of thousands. Ah, that's the point, and I ended up paying 10 euros just for the sake of using the wireless net service for 60 minutes.
After the congress, I traveled with my wife and stayed at a two-star hotel above a family-run restaurant in Stresa (a location in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, in case you're interested). This small hotel is not a grand one. Obviously not, I know. Yet, the friendly family shared with me their password of the Wi-Fi, without charging me a buck. And, in a way, it didn't matter very much that this small hotel doesn't have rooms at the top end. When I next moved to Menaggio's youth hostel, the room was even smaller – and cheaper. Lest I begin to sound like mean old Scrooge, however, let me say that it is this youth hostel that offered me the most pleasant lakeside view throughout my trip.
Size rarely matters. Content does.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
Neat
Confession time again. When I don't have time (that is, most of the time), I tend to turn my desk into a haven of messy work space. One desk, no filing cabinet, and countless documents, letters, and manuscripts bumping together, frantic as atoms. On many days, I simply pull books out of a jumble of messy documents. Well, my reputation of being a messy guy grows in proportion to the height of the piles on and around my desk. Usually, three days is about all it takes for the piles to grow big enough to block my view of the computer screen, at which point another pile will sprout elsewhere.
Dealing with the mess on my desk is as much fun as visiting the dentist; no one will ever want to share this private bit with others. Conjure up an image of taking showers in the seventh- or eighth-grade gym. It's really about opening the insides in front of everyone, who could see your everything or your lack of everything.
As is often true with embarrassing story in our life, we will grow out of it eventually. For heaven's sake, I'm getting less and less guilt-ridden about the way I tolerate mess. Albert Einstein put it this way: "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk?"
Truth be told, I have been lately reading A Perfect Mess, a book that inspires me to learn that our bedroom is a pretty good place to maintain a mess. For those of you who think otherwise and struggle to keep a perfectly neat bedroom, I see no reason why you should miss this book. As the book captures the heart of it, making a bed when you get up in the morning is like tying a shoe after you've taken it off.
Dealing with the mess on my desk is as much fun as visiting the dentist; no one will ever want to share this private bit with others. Conjure up an image of taking showers in the seventh- or eighth-grade gym. It's really about opening the insides in front of everyone, who could see your everything or your lack of everything.
As is often true with embarrassing story in our life, we will grow out of it eventually. For heaven's sake, I'm getting less and less guilt-ridden about the way I tolerate mess. Albert Einstein put it this way: "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk?"
Truth be told, I have been lately reading A Perfect Mess, a book that inspires me to learn that our bedroom is a pretty good place to maintain a mess. For those of you who think otherwise and struggle to keep a perfectly neat bedroom, I see no reason why you should miss this book. As the book captures the heart of it, making a bed when you get up in the morning is like tying a shoe after you've taken it off.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Scary
"I want to go to Hong Kong," my nephew Ethan says firmly. "There is so much fun."
Why the high praise? In the eyes of a seven-year-old second grader brought up in the United States, everything here unleashes his creative process. New things sparkle. Synapses sizzle. That alone is enough to let his creative juices run like spilled ink; Ethan wrote a funny article for his school newspaper after visiting Hong Kong. (https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/echow/www/newspaper2009.pdf)
No matter how many times I read it, I always chuckle when I read the wonderful piece about how eerie our elementary school sounds.
"They have no play structure and grass on their playground, imagine… isn’t it scary?! They don't have snack time and "show and tell", imagine… Isn't it scary?! We can wear anything to school but they have to wear uniforms, too bad."
Among the details Ethan chose to capture was this gem describing the stifling education bureaucracy here. Which is a pretty exact description of the educational system among Asian countries in general.
We dare not tell Ethan, for instance, that the Japanese education ministry had strict requirement to stipulate the exact height of school desks, which has been adjusted upward four times since World War II as students' average height has increased. The detail is specific – it's amazing, actually.
Ahem, sure enough, the way we teach our students matter-of-factly is even more amazing. Our first lesson in strict format came the hard way. Think about the arithmetic lesson at elementary school. The very first thing we learned was the sacred rite to draw a vertical line at seven spaces from the right side. This area, seven spaces in width, is meant to be the box for students to think and work out the arithmetic answer. Boys and girls have been taught to toe the line. Seven spaces, no more and no less. Period.
When it dawns on me that this rule of seven burned indelibly into my mind after so many years, I can't help but shudder.
Why the high praise? In the eyes of a seven-year-old second grader brought up in the United States, everything here unleashes his creative process. New things sparkle. Synapses sizzle. That alone is enough to let his creative juices run like spilled ink; Ethan wrote a funny article for his school newspaper after visiting Hong Kong. (https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/echow/www/newspaper2009.pdf)
No matter how many times I read it, I always chuckle when I read the wonderful piece about how eerie our elementary school sounds.
"They have no play structure and grass on their playground, imagine… isn’t it scary?! They don't have snack time and "show and tell", imagine… Isn't it scary?! We can wear anything to school but they have to wear uniforms, too bad."
Among the details Ethan chose to capture was this gem describing the stifling education bureaucracy here. Which is a pretty exact description of the educational system among Asian countries in general.
We dare not tell Ethan, for instance, that the Japanese education ministry had strict requirement to stipulate the exact height of school desks, which has been adjusted upward four times since World War II as students' average height has increased. The detail is specific – it's amazing, actually.
Ahem, sure enough, the way we teach our students matter-of-factly is even more amazing. Our first lesson in strict format came the hard way. Think about the arithmetic lesson at elementary school. The very first thing we learned was the sacred rite to draw a vertical line at seven spaces from the right side. This area, seven spaces in width, is meant to be the box for students to think and work out the arithmetic answer. Boys and girls have been taught to toe the line. Seven spaces, no more and no less. Period.
When it dawns on me that this rule of seven burned indelibly into my mind after so many years, I can't help but shudder.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Contagion
How often, when you visited the hospital over the past two weeks, were you asked to take temperature and wear mask? The answer, of course, is often, when everyone seems to be on high alert for human swine flu. If you still aren't convinced about the panic, go and read the posters put up in the hospital elevators: they are now teaching us the recipe - if there is one - which is called cough etiquette.
Regardless of the controversy over the need to quarantine people, most of us are afraid of anything that can spread like a bat out of hell. Swine flu, mad cow disease, severe acute respiratory syndrome, Hansen's disease... Omigod! The list of contagious possibilities is lengthy and, yes, horrifying.
Well, our tendency always is to get overly serious and paranoid, I must say. You're probably thinking that everything that spreads is bad, but it isn't. In fact, I have come across quite a number of good examples recently.
Investigators at Harvard Medical School, for instance, had documented in a part of the Framingham Health Study just how the smoking cessation by a friend or coworker spreads through close and distant social ties. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study highlighted the network phenomena whereby groups of interconnected people stop smoking in concert.
This study dovetails with another "offspring cohort" of the Framingham Health Study, this time published in the British Medical Journal, reporting that happiness is contagious. When the scientists analysed the data looking for happiness trends, they found that happy people passed on their cheer to connected people they didn't personally know - and this transferred happiness lasted for up to a year.
To look for clusters of happy people in the social network, the same group of researchers are now studying happiness contagion in Facebook. Believe it or not, they noticed that people who smiled in their Facebook profile pictures tended to have other friends who smiled.
If you don't believe me, think about the old adage, "Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry alone."
Regardless of the controversy over the need to quarantine people, most of us are afraid of anything that can spread like a bat out of hell. Swine flu, mad cow disease, severe acute respiratory syndrome, Hansen's disease... Omigod! The list of contagious possibilities is lengthy and, yes, horrifying.
Well, our tendency always is to get overly serious and paranoid, I must say. You're probably thinking that everything that spreads is bad, but it isn't. In fact, I have come across quite a number of good examples recently.
Investigators at Harvard Medical School, for instance, had documented in a part of the Framingham Health Study just how the smoking cessation by a friend or coworker spreads through close and distant social ties. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study highlighted the network phenomena whereby groups of interconnected people stop smoking in concert.
This study dovetails with another "offspring cohort" of the Framingham Health Study, this time published in the British Medical Journal, reporting that happiness is contagious. When the scientists analysed the data looking for happiness trends, they found that happy people passed on their cheer to connected people they didn't personally know - and this transferred happiness lasted for up to a year.
To look for clusters of happy people in the social network, the same group of researchers are now studying happiness contagion in Facebook. Believe it or not, they noticed that people who smiled in their Facebook profile pictures tended to have other friends who smiled.
If you don't believe me, think about the old adage, "Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry alone."
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Final Examination
It is no accident that my friends talked about the medical school examination in their blogs recently. The fourth week of April had passed, and the year-end examination is looming large on the horizon.
Mention final examination, and most of us envisage a medical ward flooded with medical students at every corner, making every effort to see – and touch, if lucky enough – their patients. Like it or not, a grizzled man with artificial heart valves becomes a popular Hollywood movie star, and the hospital is virtually awash with his fans.
This is a race final year medical students have wrestled with for years. And it is symptomatic of all the pressures put together, after five years of medical education.
It would seem to be a truism that a medical student must do well in the final examination in order to be a great doctor. However, I believe that reality is not quite clear. The ability to feel a skin-deep spleen in the examination can earn you good marks or even get on the dean's list. So what? The sense of professionalism is never palpable in the examination setting. As it turns out, there is really not much we can correlate with a student's task of being a professional.
Which brings me to the numerous studies performed at Harvard Business School: those studies were designed to figure out which factors are correlated with a student's future achievement. They've looked at courses taken, marks earned, and all manner of other variables, including height. Unfortunately, there seems to be no relationship at all between the grades a student receives, and his or her later degree of accomplishment. Short-term correlations, yes; long-term, none at all.
Mention final examination, and most of us envisage a medical ward flooded with medical students at every corner, making every effort to see – and touch, if lucky enough – their patients. Like it or not, a grizzled man with artificial heart valves becomes a popular Hollywood movie star, and the hospital is virtually awash with his fans.
This is a race final year medical students have wrestled with for years. And it is symptomatic of all the pressures put together, after five years of medical education.
It would seem to be a truism that a medical student must do well in the final examination in order to be a great doctor. However, I believe that reality is not quite clear. The ability to feel a skin-deep spleen in the examination can earn you good marks or even get on the dean's list. So what? The sense of professionalism is never palpable in the examination setting. As it turns out, there is really not much we can correlate with a student's task of being a professional.
Which brings me to the numerous studies performed at Harvard Business School: those studies were designed to figure out which factors are correlated with a student's future achievement. They've looked at courses taken, marks earned, and all manner of other variables, including height. Unfortunately, there seems to be no relationship at all between the grades a student receives, and his or her later degree of accomplishment. Short-term correlations, yes; long-term, none at all.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Taste
My elder brother came to visit us recently, after working in the United States for more than ten years.
One afternoon I took his family to a food kiosk selling the local street snack "eggettes." That's real Hong Kong style mini-pancake made from special frying pan and served hot. I didn't realize that it is my brother's son, but not his father, who loves these eggettes the most.
Thinking about the changing taste with age, I am often reminded of my experience with cotton candy. As a boy I had not much chance to have cotton candy. I grew up with the belief that cotton candy is one of the most amazing foods in this planet. You'll never know how big a loss that was for me to get a chance to try, and then disappointed by, cotton candy in a carnival many years later at Edmonton. That doesn't mean the cotton candy wasn't sweet. It was. The candy went down sweet, but once done, little substance remained, and even that vanished quickly.
The message is: You can't – and, in fact, you're not supposed to – know exactly what your taste looks like when you get older.
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott offers a great lesson about olive: "It's an acquired taste. It is not easy to pop that round odd thing into your mouth. But as you grow up, some things you didn't like, because they're strong, become absolutely delicious."
One afternoon I took his family to a food kiosk selling the local street snack "eggettes." That's real Hong Kong style mini-pancake made from special frying pan and served hot. I didn't realize that it is my brother's son, but not his father, who loves these eggettes the most.
Thinking about the changing taste with age, I am often reminded of my experience with cotton candy. As a boy I had not much chance to have cotton candy. I grew up with the belief that cotton candy is one of the most amazing foods in this planet. You'll never know how big a loss that was for me to get a chance to try, and then disappointed by, cotton candy in a carnival many years later at Edmonton. That doesn't mean the cotton candy wasn't sweet. It was. The candy went down sweet, but once done, little substance remained, and even that vanished quickly.
The message is: You can't – and, in fact, you're not supposed to – know exactly what your taste looks like when you get older.
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott offers a great lesson about olive: "It's an acquired taste. It is not easy to pop that round odd thing into your mouth. But as you grow up, some things you didn't like, because they're strong, become absolutely delicious."
Monday, April 6, 2009
Grandpa
My father asked me to go with him paying respect to our grandpa this Ching Ming Festival. His eyes were hopeful, his face eager. His son was ambivalent.
I'm sentimental about many things concerning my grandpa: the memory of going out with him when I was young, the time when I went to his home every day to have wound dressing for his foot ulcer, the night I accompanied him to have foot amputation at the operation theatre, the scene of buying him beer (alas, by the doctor of a patient with diabetes mellitus) in the hospital. But grave-sweeping eight years after his death leaves me cold. It's a festival that has not an iota of idea of what it’s really about. Or at least whom it is dedicated for.
In the interests of domestic harmony, I visited my grandpa's grave with my dad, and observed thousands of people climbing the slope to burn the paper offerings. There's nothing wrong, of course, with spending money on the gold and silver offering paper. Love or passion, apparently, can sometimes be measured in physical quantities. A grandson might measure it in gallons of beer he brought his grandpa; and the grave-sweepers in terms of the height of the stack of paper offerings awaiting to be burnt. For many of us, though, there is confusion between genuine belief of this folk ritual and pretended dialogue with our ancestors – or worse still, with the peers.
I'm sentimental about many things concerning my grandpa: the memory of going out with him when I was young, the time when I went to his home every day to have wound dressing for his foot ulcer, the night I accompanied him to have foot amputation at the operation theatre, the scene of buying him beer (alas, by the doctor of a patient with diabetes mellitus) in the hospital. But grave-sweeping eight years after his death leaves me cold. It's a festival that has not an iota of idea of what it’s really about. Or at least whom it is dedicated for.
In the interests of domestic harmony, I visited my grandpa's grave with my dad, and observed thousands of people climbing the slope to burn the paper offerings. There's nothing wrong, of course, with spending money on the gold and silver offering paper. Love or passion, apparently, can sometimes be measured in physical quantities. A grandson might measure it in gallons of beer he brought his grandpa; and the grave-sweepers in terms of the height of the stack of paper offerings awaiting to be burnt. For many of us, though, there is confusion between genuine belief of this folk ritual and pretended dialogue with our ancestors – or worse still, with the peers.
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