Alpha Asian

Argh! Not a good finish for Tammy and Victor last night. My wife and I were watching them do the synchronized diving, and we thought to ourselves, "Why aren't they counting?" Well according to Victor both them and Jen and Kisha were counting before they dove. I guess synchronized diving is a lot harder than it looks. Anyway, I have no sympathy for Kisha and Jen for coming in last, considering they made some racist comments about how the Chinese have dumb looks on their faces and all look alike. They should have drowned.

Yes, I'm hitting 39. I know people always gripe about getting older. I always hate it when some douche says, "Oh I can't believe I'm 30. I FEEL SO OLD." You know why people hate getting older? Aside from the fact that your skin starts to sag and your hair starts to gray, getting older reminds you that you have a limited amount of time on this Earth and that you may want to get crackin' on whatever goals you have in life. Every birthday is like a nagging mom that asks, "So you're X years old now... what the hell have you accomplished so far?" I guess this is why I like time travel stories. I like scifi in general, but time travel stories are my favorite genre within the genre. Something about altering the course of history has always appealed to me: "Hey James? Hi I'm you from the future. Just a heads up buddy: Look both ways when you cross the street tomorrow. Get a job at a company called Google, dude. Trust me. Oh...

So the Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology hits the shelves next week on April 15. Here's a reading of one of the stories in the book: "In the story By the Time I Get to Arizona , a young man named Mason Wong learns that his father has been incarcerated and accused of spying on the United States. His father, Dr. Benjamin Wong, was a research scientist that helped develop a series of nanotechnology prototypes that gave people superhuman abilities. Mason is sent on a quest by his fathers partner, Dr. Malcolm Eady, to retrieve a weapon before it gets into the wrong hands. "Peril was partially inspired by the real life case against Dr. Wen Ho Lee . In 1999, Lee, a Chinese American scientist who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory was indicted on 59 counts of espionage, jailed in solitary confinement for several months, and released on time served after the government failed to prove its case against him. He was ultimately charged with one count...

So I'm back from London and Paris. It was the first time my wife and I visited Europe. It's always interesting to see how people live in other parts of the world. London has a very distinct look with its neighborhood streets and buildings. Here's the street of the hotel where my wife and I stayed at: A lot of the London streets aren't straight and tend to curve slightly, which gives it an interesting perspective. Not only that, but you know you're in London when you see the red double decker buses, red telephone boothes and retro style taxi cabs. The subway or "the Tube" is kind of crazy, but leave it to the British to have very orderly, but rapid streams of people walking briskly through the stations and on to the trains. In contrast, the Paris subway has less people, but more chaos. I thought London streets were distinct, but Paris streets are even more distinct and have a very Old World look to them. Perhaps we walked through the bad...

SOURCE: New Scientist Chinese and American people see the world differently - literally. While Americans focus on the central objects of photographs, Chinese individuals pay more attention to the image as a whole, according to psychologists at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, US. "There is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that Western and East Asian people have contrasting world-views," explains Richard Nisbett, who carried out the study. "Americans break things down analytically, focusing on putting objects into categories and working out what rules they should obey," he says. By contrast, East Asians have a more holistic philosophy, looking at objects in relation to the whole. "Figuratively, Americans see things in black and white, while East Asians see more shades of grey," says Nisbett. "We wanted to devise an experiment to see if that translated to a literal difference in what they actually see." The researchers tracked th...

My wife and I will be flying to London, so this blog won't be updated for about a week. In the meantime, I wanted to share a little bit of the Alpha Asian philosophy. Sometimes people ask me, "Alpha Asian? What's that mean?"  And I respond, "Being an Alpha Asian means you live a life based on self-determination and duty to your Asian American community."   I'm sure longtime readers have noticed certain themes pop up when I blog:  Don't look for a leader. Be one. If you develop yourself and accomplish things, then share your expertise with the community. Improving the Asian American community is best done from bottom up, not top down. Most people think that change comes around when the government intervenes or when a non-profit organization goes on a campaign to improve the community. It's a very top-down mentality that is very condescending: "We lead. You follow." But it is much better when idea viruses spread and individu...