Lim Yun Kai

Lim Yun Kai

A geek who enjoy problem solving, doing cool stuff and reads chinese wuxia novel on free time.

Quotes

These are some quotes that I like. Some of them are my personal philosophical thought.

Worth to note that most of the quotes below might be misattributed to their owner. The attribution of the quotes are based on the first few result of Google search.


If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. — Albert Einstein

This quote tell us that, to test whether you understand something well enough, explain it to your friend ! If you understand something well enough you should be able to explain it in a simple and correct way. (correct is important in this statement, see below) And usually, during the process of explaining you have to clear up and sort up your logic when explaining which help in enhance understanding.

Another case might happens when you try to explaining something to your friend, that is you might found your flaw in your understand. In this case, you can enhance your understanding by fixing the flaw and further sort up the logic of something. This method of explaining something to find the flaw is also used in programming debugging, known as rubber duck debugging, where in this case, you explain your code to a rubber duck.

This is also one of the reason why I decided to write this blog, I wish to enhance my understand by writing it out is a simple way so that the audience (especially non-technical people) could understand.

It is worth to note that, the inverse (If you can explain it simple, you do understand it well enough) of the statement is not true. For example, you mis-understand some concept and you can explain it simply but according to your mis-understanding. In this case, you actually did not understand it well enough.

Lastly, there are several variant of this quote can be seen on Internet

If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself. — Albert Einstein

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. — Albert Einstein


Learn to Do, Do to Learn

I came up with this which means that to effectively do and master something, you first need to learn the skill and technique (learn to do) and then keep practice and gain more experience in doing that thing (do to learn).

Usually I will use it in a more specific form (yes, you can practically replace do with anything else)

Learn to Solve, Solve to Learn

I quote that when giving a talk on mathematics olympiad to high school student. The idea is you learn some theorems and techniques to solve some math problems (learn to solve), but you have to constantly practice to solve more problems to gain experience and discover more ways, theorems, ideas and techniques to do problem solving (solve to learn).

This quote is actually inspired from the quote below

Hack to Learn and Not Learn to Hack

I saw this quote when I learning to do CTF (Capture the Flag, some sort of hacking competition). The original meaning of this quote is to tell people that you should hack to learn the structure, discover the vulnerability in a system and be an ethical hacker and not learn to hack facebook account, wifi and gain illegal access to others computer. Illegal hacking is a crime.


Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. — Edsger W. Dijkstra

Heard of Dijkstra’s algorithm right? Yes, the same Dijkstra. For those (non-CS guys) who don’t know Dijkstra’s algorithm, Dijkstra is a renowned computer scientist who develop the shortest path algorithm named after himself, Dijkstra’s algorithm (yes I know you don’t know Dijkstra’s algorithm, but trust me it is a very famous algorithm that every CS student should know).

Okay, back to the topic, the quote means that computer science is not about computers, like astronomy is not about telescopes. Telescope is a tool to do astronomy just as computer is a tool to do computer science. The quote wish to clear the misconception that computer science study about computers.

In fact, computer science is

the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. Computer scientists invent algorithmic processes that create, describe, and transform information and formulate suitable abstractions to model complex systems. — wikiquote

I don’t know how to explain computer science in word and hence I took it from Internet that seem to fit the most to my abstract understanding about computer science. My professor provide a more funny way in explaining what computer science is

You throw a group of electronic engineers and a group of mathematicians into a room, and you get computer science.

However, since now we are living in a digital world, and programming started to get a lot of attention, people started to think that computer science is all about programming. Hence, I usually quote this in another variant

Computer Science is no more about programming than astronomy is about telescopes.

Similar to the argument above, programming is just yet another tool to do computer science. It is a language, just as English is a language for doing literature.

Lastly, I would also like to extend this quote to a mathematics variant

Mathematics is no more about computation, calculation and formulas than astronomy is about telescopes.

I came up with this is because many people thinks that mathematics is all about computation and calculation. Or, if I am good in calculation and applying formula, I am good in mathematics. Or person who good in mathematics must be good in calculation. Hell no!

Mathematics is absolutely not about computation, calculation or applying formula. These are only the process or tools for doing mathematics. Sure, doing mathematics involve computation and calculation, but what computation and calculation does is transform a mathematical object into another form of mathematical object of equivalent in quantity.

It is hard to explain what mathematics is in text, you have to do mathematics to feel mathematics. When you can see the beauty in mathematics, and identify what is a nice solution or proof from what is not, then you might be able to start feeling the mathematics. Here is my opinion on mathematics

Mathematics is about logic, intuition oriented and beauty.


P.S. A google on this quote turns out that Dijkstra might not be the one who said this, but well, it is usually attributed to Dijkstra


If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail ! — Benjamin Franklin

The quote is nice but I feel like providing an extension to it

You plan your work, but fail to work your plan, you plan to fail

I always had this situation, I planned something, but usually not executed due to busy with something else or pure laziness.

Both variant emphasize that planning and analyzing the situation is important when doing any thing. Planning reduce uncertainly in anything, hence, before doing anything, if you have the time to spare, spend some time on planning.

For example, when doing a project or assignment, I always plan my progress by analyzing my capability to complete it before the deadline. Although the actual plan is to practically do everything in few days before deadline (yes, I am a last minute guy), but still planning tells me when to start the project or assignment.

Doing an examination, try to read all the question, outline a solution in your mind (or write down the outline), before writing down your solution. If you have a plan, you can check your progress against the time left in your examination and let you know whether you still have extra time, you can answer carefully or you do not have much time left, you need to speed up your answering speed.

Remember to allocate some fail safe and time to execute the fail safe when planning your schedule.

My weakness in planning is when there isn’t a specific deadline for something. For instant, my side project or personal project (like this blog, I actually planned to start it 2 years ago). In this case, the time frame to allocate your planning schedule is practically infinite, and thus, I fail to plan a schedule. I do, however, planned long to-do list but, fail to execute them because there isn’t a deadline each entry on them. I am trying to fix this weakness by allocating a (soft) deadline for those to-do list entry.


There isn’t anything I can’t do if I want to. — portfolio page, www.shuant.com

I saw this when I visited the site above and it immediately caught my eye. I like this as it is a show of confidence in what you are doing.

When you are good in a particular field and you are confident in it, you can confidently say this to the world.

Of course, in my opinion I feel that this quote carries more than one meaning (for example, I had provided three), depending on how you interpret it. You can interpret this as, There isn’t anything I can’t do if I want to, it is just a matter of time and quality. Of course, I am bad in drawing, but I can draw too, just I need to spend much much more time to draw a nice picture compare to those good drawer.

Another interpretation, despite a little negative, There isn’t anything I can’t do if I want to. Hence, if I don’t want, I can don’t do anything and this sentence still holds true. For example, I am a mobile app development. However, for some app that I don’t like to development, too complex to development, or beyond my capability to development, I can don’t want to develop, and yet the sentence holds true.

The above interpretation let you run away from what you are doing, it is negative, and I don’t like it. I like this quote because of the first interpretation, it is a show of confident, and this is my default interpretation to this quote.