Corona Diary

30/06/2020 Tuesday, Cloudy It's the end of June and the end of H1 of 2020. Sean had another fun day at school and he said it was the right decision to go back to school even though the risk of virus was still there. Sean had his first piano assessment and passed with distinction. Well done. Dr Faucy says US is failing the battle with COVID-19. Also according to WHO about 19% people are asymptomatic after infected with the virus. And those people account for 40% of the transmission. I'm the only one wearing a mask during school pickup and the distancing rule is virtually null. We probably won't let Sean go to school next week since the UK is going to ease the lockdown from the coming weekend. Johnson toughens Huawei rhetoric - talks of 'hostile state vendors'

29/06/2020 Monday, Cloudy Sean goes back to school for the first time since lockdown. He's had a happy day and wants to go back tomorrow. Talked to Gabriel's dad while waiting to collect Sean. It turns out Gabriel has been in school since it re-opened about 3 weeks ago. The whole family of 5 seem doing fine. This assures me a bit. A Reuters Special Report: Into the fog: How Britain lost track of the coronavirus Public Health England, NHS and Department of Health blame each other. All of them underestimated the danger of the virus. The system is very centralised and runs very slowly. There's clearly no leadership to drive it faster.

28/06/2020 Sunny & Windy Lili was really poorly yesterday. After lying in bed for a whole day, she finally feels better today. Too windy to play serious TT, but we manage to have some fun games. It's relaxing and Sean really enjoys it. Matches are quite intense for him, considering him deems the results very important.

28/06/2020 Saturday, Cloudy and shower Sean and I watched a film together. It's Sicario.

26/06/2020 Friday, Sunny with early morning shower LFC won the league title last night! First in 30 years. Klopp's winning style led to Liverpool transformation Simon Evans (Reuters) - Liverpool’s Premier League triumph will forever be associated with the charisma, drive and passion of their manager Juergen Klopp yet those individual qualities belie a style of management that shuns autocratic control. Klopp took over a club without a league title since 1990 and still shaken by the way they allowed what would have been a maiden Premier League crown slip out of their hands under Brendan Rodgers in 2014. The German’s instant impact was to inject much-needed confidence, belief and enthusiasm into the club. “Because it felt a little bit like a depression here, I think it made sense to be extremely lively,” he said. That was certainly evident from his early months in charge. “ Don’t act like you know everything and be ready to admit that. It’s not a real philosophy, it’s just m...

25/06/2020 Thursday, Very Sunny Council approves first phase of Huawei's £400m research site Members of the South Cambridgeshire District Council’s planning committee have approved the first phase of Huawei’s research and development site in Sawston. Councillors passed the decision by nine votes to one. Britain should side with U.S. over Huawei, former PM Blair says

24/06/2020 Wednesday, Sunny A very hot day today. And all Cambridge stuff have a online celebration of the Dragaon Boat Festival together. The HR girl JJ is pretty good at presenting the party.

23/06/2020 Tuesday, Sunny Mark this, 100 days of lockdown at home. Lili and I have a row on whether we should send Sean to school next week. To me, the risk of the virus is low while the risk of mental health problem is high. Sean gets stuck with us for 100 days now and barely talks with anybody else. And too much screen time. Starting from next week, only about 8 days of school time is left. After that it's 2 months of summer holiday! This is driving us insane if we continue to be locked down at home.

22/06/2020 Monday, Sunny Bit by bit, Sean seems to recover from a 2nd defeat and comes back at table tennis games. He was so nervous during the game yesterday that he lost to me. He broke down before finishing the game that he had been longing to for almost a week. He called it the "big game". And he crashed the match ball on purpose. Today he lost again, but I encourage him to come back. I asked him not to think about the errors he had made, but to think about how he succeeded in beating me in the past and to think about what he did best. I reminded him that the reason he lost is not because I become stronger but he becomes weaker instead. He needs to bring the best out of him. Apart from table tennis, we enjoyed watching science documentaries by Jim Al-Khalili. Everything and nothing: indeed something can be created out of nothing due to quantum fluctuation. Vacum doesnot mean nothing. Energy transforms to matter and anti-matter, and vice-visa. The 1st law of thermal dynami...

21/06/2020 Sunday, Sunny The First Cambridge International Young Scientists Forum (CIYSF 2020) is held online via Zoom today. My former boss Olivier gave a talk on Energy efficient machine intelligence, which is not his area of speciality. The keynote speaker, Prof Tian Xu from Westlake Uni is very impressive, both his achievements and his passion. Also the prof. from UCL is equally amazing. He talked about his journey from setting up the lab to making a ground-breaking discovery in quantum dot technology in silicon-based laser.

20/06/2020 Saturday, Sunny READING, England (Reuters) - A stabbing rampage in the southern English town of Reading in which three people were killed and three taken to hospital was an act of terrorism, police said on Sunday, calling the attack in a sunny park an atrocity. Knife crime remains a threat to civilians in England.

19/06/2020 Friday, shower Sean is really good at spin now. I struggle to return his serve and he can easily smash it with backhand. Maybe I should drop back a bit and couter his attack.

18/06/2020 Thursday, shower Maybe buy a flat in London is a good idea. If Sean goes to a university in London, it could be useful for him. It's 7 years until he finishes A-level. Not that far away.

17/06/2020 Wednesday, shower First first-aid meeting after lockdown. It seems we have a new facility manager. UC Berkeley History Professor’s Open Letter Against BLM, Police Brutality And Cultural Orthodoxy In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. <This is why the protest doesn't subdue but spread instead.> <At the end of the article, it indicates the author is black!> Background Check: Investigating George Floyd’s Criminal Record <Maybe Floyd has a despicable record, but he didn't really do anything wrong on the day and he didn't deserve to die like that.>

16/06/2020 Tuesday, cloudy & shower The US government changes the rules of entity list and allows US companies to fully engage with Huawei in standards work. It shows one doesn't have to have overwhelming power against competitors, but need to hold sufficiently high stakes in the shared interest. Standards work is all about competing and cooperating. One company or a few cannot do all the work on his/their own. U.S. posts rule allowing U.S. companies to work with Huawei on 5G and other standards Scientists hail dexamethasone as "major breakthrough" in treating COVID-19 LONDON (Reuters) - The number of people on British employers’ payrolls fell by more than 600,000 in April and May as the coronavirus lockdown hit the labour market, and vacancies plunged by the most on record, data showed on Tuesday. “Unemployment will get worse before it gets better,” Nye Cominetti, an economist at the Resolution Foundation think tank, said, pointing to the scheduled expiry of the...

15/06/2020 Monday, Sunny Shops in England reopen today. Good to see many wear face masks  while queuing outside the shops. BLM protests continue in London and other big cities. Yesterday from a old Phoenix TV talk show I learned that Prof Rao Yi proudly called himself "white left-wing". He claimed that the socialism movement in the 1920s was started by white left-wing and it is those people who advocate diversity and equality for minorities. However, left-wing doesn't have a good reputation in the history of cultural revolution in China. They were extreme and violent. Patrick Hutchinson, a protester, carries a suspected far-right counter-protester who was injured, to safety, near Waterloo station during a Black Lives Matter protest following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, in London, Britain, June 13, 2020. REUTERS/Dylan Martinez