Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: It started with interchangeable parts in a gun factory, then “re-engineering” in the auto-assembly plant to full automation (former Secretary of Labor Reich said that if workers lose their sense of optimism, then there is no replacement). In NY, the manufacturing sector employs 40% a century ago, now it…

Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: In business parlance, we call them “entrenchment” and “creative destruction”. Find a niche, dig in. By the time you crossed “valley of death”, someone had already elbowed in to eat your lunch. As Venture Capitalists scour the globe looking for “the” deal, they find new energy and risk-taking in places like Rwanda, Indonesia…

Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: That summer in Jr High, I experienced a setback: Hapkido went wild, leaving me with a broken arm. The Kung Fu Hall already had my parents’ release, so even if it had been the fault of the visiting Red-Belt Master (who held up the brick, but moved it unexpectedly…

Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: What if you had a third eye in the back of your head? (one of the Creativity Test questions). Or how would it turn out if Earth goes without 0xygen for 5 seconds? If you were a car, what would that be? Gone are the days of “you can have…

Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: Load balancing, redundancy, follow-the-sun operation centers etc.. to be topped up by cloud. We did that with business phones (Centrex), and mainframes. More than a third of North American phones are now smart phones, with computational power not unlike earlier version of our desktops. When Turing and Shannon conceived a  “thinking…

Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: NYT‘s David Brooks zoomed out to reveal the evolution of our social philosophy, from care for the Soul, to Personality then eventually to Decision-making (data deluge). This is the age of the intelligent machine. Massaging data. Algorithm and Analytic. No wonder, machine language also creeps into our daily speech. Let’s try to…

Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: The paper announced “a A student committed suicide for not passing Vietnam‘s first IBM-graded SAT“. So, my classmates showed up at my house the next morning for condolences. True story. Not having seen the column the day before, I was completely taken aback. Hence, my first exposure to bad…

Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: “We are ‘creatures of information’”, “in the library of Babel, seeking information past and future”, says James Gleick in the Information. We might look in hardback and paperback, print books and e-books, newspaper and news broadcast, but we are still after the information. It reminds me of a line by…

Originally posted on Thang Nguyen 555: 38 years ago I ate those three items not in one day, not in one vessel, and not in one country. Instant noodles out in International Waters under firing rockets, oranges aboard a USS vessel and finally, a sandwich in Subic Bay, Philippines. After that hellish trip, plane foods, hotel…