Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo#Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.
The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren#Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.
After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold#medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored#guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal#Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.
Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G#technology now being rolled out all over the world.
Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.
As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.
Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.
ERDAL ARIKAN WAS born in 1958 and grew up in Western Turkey, the son of a doctor and a homemaker.
He loved science.
When he was a teenager, his father remarked that, in his profession, two plus two did not always equal four.
This fuzziness disturbed young Erdal; he decided against a career in medicine. He found comfort in engineering and the certainty of its mathematical outcomes.
“I like things that have some precision,” he says. “You do calculations and things turn out as you calculate it.”
Arıkan entered the electrical engineering program at Middle East Technical University. But in 1977, partway through his first year, the country was gripped by political violence, and students boycotted the university.
Arıkan wanted to study, and because of his excellent test scores he managed to transfer to #CalTech, one of the world's top science-oriented institutions, in Pasadena, California.
He found the US to be a strange and wonderful country. Within his first few days, he was in an orientation session addressed by legendary physicist #Richard#Feynman. It was like being blessed by a saint.
The field was still young, launched in 1948 by #Claude#Shannon, who wrote its seminal paper while he was at Bell Labs;
he would later become a revered MIT professor.
Shannon's achievement was to understand how the hitherto fuzzy concept of information could be quantified, creating a discipline that expanded the view of communication and data storage.
By publishing a general mathematical theory of information
—almost as if Einstein had invented physics and come up with relativity in one swoop
—Shannon set a foundation for the internet, mobile communications, and everything else in the digital age.
The subject fascinated Arıkan, who chose #MIT for graduate studies.
There was one reason: “#Bob#Gallager was there,” he says.
Robert Gallager had written the textbook on information theory. He had also been mentored by Shannon's successor.
In the metrics of the field, that put him two steps from God.
“So I said, if I am going to do information theory,” Arıkan says, “MIT is the place to go.”
By the time Arıkan arrived at MIT, in 1981, Gallager had shifted his focus and was concentrating on how data networks operated.
Arıkan was trembling when he went to Gallager's office for the first time. The professor gave him a paper about packet radio networks.
“I was pushing him to move from strict information theory to looking at network problems,” Gallager says.
“It was becoming very obvious to everyone that sending data from one place to another was not the whole story
—you really had to have a system.”
The Queen of Denmark abdicated, Japan earthquake, Coastal troubles in California, Europe wins the Passport Index, Opiod Settlements, and Are you hungover?
Even when development started in summer '79 it took twice as long as Apple expected, not only because they had to get rid of Jobs first. So LISA wasn't launched earlier than 1983 with 1Mb RAM for almost U$D 10K. The project was a $50 million investment for Apple Inc., and kept losses low since it sold almost 5K units annually. After 27 months it was in-house competition that buried the Lisa computers, litterally. In the end it was a zero sum game for Apple, but a huge step for modern graphic user-interfaces and more personal computers.
I am so proud of my daughter who today has just completed her childcare diploma & passed. My daughter lacked confidence as a child growing up for various reasons, but I always knew what she could do. When she left school she went into the supermarkets as many do, then into hospitality but was never really happy & often not treated well by her employers. She was taken advantage of due to lacking in confidence & her gentle sensitive nature. I always told her she had the empathy & sensitivity to work with the elderly or children & once she had her own children she came to realise it herself.
She decided to find a job in childcare & in an industry crying out for workers was taken on. It is the best thing she’s ever done. She has blossomed & has confidence in herself finally - I’m so proud I have tears.
Best of all - she absolutely loves her job. She gets invited to her charges birthday parties even 😄. #ProudMum#Daughter#BestDay
I forgot that I had been reposting old #Halloween art since tis the season, so here's another entry from 2012! It's baby Tanare with her mother Dahlia :ChikaSmile:
This is still one of my favorite pieces. I even sell/sold it as a postcard, though never really selling well...Which often surprises me, I would have thought it'd be a best seller. I think it's pretty cute even years later!
Family -- we are the first, best, and always teachers. We are not paid by the corporations, nor honored by the world of media, but we pass on our values to the next generation by living them ourselves.
My 19 month old just woke me up screaming at midnight... This is something she almost never does; she has slept through the night for over a year now. Usually she only wakes us up if she's managed to soak herself. (This little girl is like a faucet at times). She even manages to calm herself to sleep without us when she's...
A Journal Entry from Seven Years Ago When My Daughter Was Just Under Two
My 19 month old just woke me up screaming at midnight... This is something she almost never does; she has slept through the night for over a year now. Usually she only wakes us up if she's managed to soak herself. (This little girl is like a faucet at times). She even manages to calm herself to sleep without us when she's...