Expect the unexpected

Recent two incidents in the world news made me aware of how little we know about the things especially how much we know about them. At least, as far as I am concerned.

I had no doubt about the biological breakthrough featured in the Nature magazine. I had never imagined that a large passenger jet could fly for several hours completely unnoticed.

This universe would not be clockwork, but more like dominos with countless paths are crisscrossing everywhere. Some pieces will miss the next ones and fail to relay but others will fall down themselves and start sequences unpredicted.

Let's put some pieces forward, anyway.

Don't mess with data, get down to earth

When I had started tinkering around personal computers more than three decades ago, those machines were viewed from ordinary people like oracles. Once I created a programme which produced output like this:


SUBJECT NAME 1 (FEMALE): JANE GREEN
SUBJECT NAME 2 (MALE): JONE SMITH

PROCESSING: ............................................................................ DONE

MATCHING INDEX: 89 OUT OF 100


The algorithm was quite shabby - just some kind of hash value calculator on the name strings but it was surprisingly persuasive to some of my friends.


I really amazed by recent news stories, such tricks - although by far sophisticated and I believe many of them have come from honest professional enthusiasms, basically along the same principle in the essence - have huge influences and implications.

However data acquisition and processing technologies might advance, they would not mean a thing without being supported by hard facts, which sometimes might be hard to swallow, too.

Don't mess with data, get down to earth.