1963 June 11. Police was trying to prevent us from pouring onto the intersection, then, Le v Duyet & Phan D Phung. The circle of chanting monks had formed when we got there acting upon a rumor that a monk would burn himself in protest against regime’s religious oppression. Bang. On our quickest feet to…

Plant, animal and human grow organically. Human invention, the machine, grows exponentially. Mould vs math. Maslow scale vs machine scale. Slowly, we proceed up the steps, from food, clothing and shelter, onto Bill-Gates type of self-actualizing. Machine model proceeds at physical layer, then transmission, then network and application one. After the initial Y2K chasm, IT…

Medieval Europe saw the invention of technology ( agrarian) as means for man to finally be divorced from and rise above nature: tilting, harnessing, plowing, cultivating and having “dominion over the land and seas”. God-man-nature. Then man got all the wiser (having listened to the serpent): why not tilting, extracting and prospering without bound i.e.…

Every once in a while, we see a re-run of the Outsiders, the Misfits etc… good ole Wild West. But in closer scrutiny, we find that each of us is unique, with various strands of genome, not as homogeneous as our school uniforms might like to suggest. Hence, we all are Unfits. No need to…

Some people are born to do certain things. You can say they are mere instruments for pro- creation. They might do it laying down ( Michelangelo) or in a car (Jewel). I respect them, adore them, emulate them. Be authentic, be true to your calling and vocation. It’s better to be a mask-maker (or costumes…

“like a long lost friend”, “been a long and lonely winter”…. We suppress unwanted memories, until they resurface. Then we dismiss them as unimportant or not-applicable, we “park” them as cold cases, to look at them with new lenses; without the original and emotional attachment. Our culture urges us to re-invent ourselves, to get with…

“It says here….” ” perhaps you might like this too”….”the machine doesn’t recognize your name, face and voice.” Machine is good when it narrows down choices.  Machine is not good when it skews the results with inherently- bias recommendations. Which coders wouldn’t carry around his/her grandfather’s and father’s built-in bias or side comments at dinner…

How can one bridge a 4 1/2-decades gap? A lot went under and if anything survived, it would be unrecognizable or undesirable ( with the exception of Jane Fonda, once a sex-symbol, then Hanoi Jane, then 80’s aerobics actress marrying Ted Turner, and now every Friday- per her vow, a Climate Change activist). Back in…

Ever since “Me Too” went viral, people who were squeezed, groped, raped etc…started to come out. At recent all-boys re-union (definitely not Penn State – Sandusky was already in jail), I was told it’s the other way: it had been our head-master – the Evil one – that was groped (our class-room’s wall got plenty…

et les filles, de mon age….. Before going to the Re-union of my all-boys school, I made sure everything was set for the long weekend: foods in fritz and floor vacuumed. Whatever happened at Re-union stayed at Re-union, I thought. I just gonna press Reset and back to my routine: kid off to school, bills…