Friday, October 29

Woke up at 10, then slept till 11am. A cookie for breakfast, coffee. 

Some shallow errands in the morning, tis and tat, and it's time for lunch.

3-5:30pm working on NLG project at Mama's cafe. Improving my annotation tool for an hour, then trying to annotate some references. Jeez, I read in papers that annotation is costly, but in reality I should remember how tedious it is. Good that I just need a few dozens of entities for measuring performance. Unsupervised learning to the rescue. 

6-8:30pm watched "Decision to Leave" by Park Chan-wook. It is an alright movie, but I first got confused, then I got bored unable to follow what that all means. A murder story with unusual cuts, jumps in time, and often unexplainable but intriguing actions by the characters – all didn't make into a picture for me by the end. Also, whatever was going on in my mind didn't let me focus on the movie. Later I read that the murder investigation is an allegory to the process of falling in love: "Both are an attempt to understand the motivations behind another person’s actions". Maybe if I read it before the movie I would understand it better.

Dozed off around 10pm then woke up at 11 and couldn't sleep after. I read half of Twitter about the Deez algorithm invented by Ruhal Ligma, and the like news. Putler's yesterday speech about neo-colonialism and today's combat mosquitoes accusations in the UN – I'm afraid it is all targeting developing countries to spread conspiracies and confusion. It reminded me 2012 Putler's articles about democracy – reading them shows him as a pretty reasonable stateman dedicated to democratic principles. Back then he needed to calm down the liberal-leaning (but confused) public after he announced his running for the third term (a sort of today's Xi moment). He told them what they wanted to hear: how democracy is great, how there's no alternative, and, by the way, Roosevelt served three terms too; before he completely cracked down on democratic institutions in the following years. So it often that he speaks reasonable things, but he's actions are opposite of what he says. I hope other countries can see this disconnect between his speeches and his actions, and how whatever he speaks about these days is unrelated to his war crimes. 

Perhaps I should count math when I have insomnia, instead of reading Twitter. 

Then I read "Sowing Crisis" by Rashid Khalidi (who's our professor for the Middle East class). Many things in the book about the Middle East during the Cold War; many things I didn't know. But his main argument appears to be that the Soviets were not as influential in the region as the US, the role of ideological confrontation in the region is exaggerated (Arabs were anti-communists, but rather allied with power). Consequentially, the US is responsible for what's going on in the region more than the Americans like to think (e.g. radical Islam arising from American support). I'll keep reading.

Bed by 4am, sleeping light and waking up often.