I think it was when Mi-chan was three or four months old. She and I started a “ritual” every evening. The ritual is called “Yuusuzu Mi-chan” – “Yuusuzumi” means going outdoors in the summer evening and enjoy the cool air after a hot day. For ten to twenty minutes between dinner and Mi-chan’s bath, I […]
These days, on every college campus in the US, you will find an army of Asian international students whose English is so poor that you can hardly communicate with them. Or perhaps, you would not have a chance to communicate with them anyway, since they always hang out with friends in the same ethnic […]
Today, on April 1, 2016, it was announced that my newborn daughter, Mi-chan, was selected as one of the first “babynauts” or infant astronauts, and will fly in space this November. Her mission will be a part of the Extraterrestrial Reproduction and Development Program (ERDP), which investigates if humans can be born and grow normally […]
We have known the name of the newborn princess since about five years ago. I do not remember when it was exactly. It was between the wedding and the honeymoon, so somewhere in March or April. I was a PhD student at MIT, living in a messy three-bedroom apartment facing Charles River, shared with two […]
There is a surge of interest in artificial intelligence (AI), which is my area of research, thanks to the recent victory of the Alpha GO algorithm over a human champion. Arguably the most famous AI in fictional universes, at least for space geeks like myself or movie lovers, would be HAL 9000 in 2001 Space […]