Hokkaido often reminds us of winter visit and festivals, none more famous than the Sapporo Snow Festival.
That being said, summer vacation at Hokkaido can be equally, if not more, thrilling than winter time.
Teens, parents, and those who aren’t afraid to get their hands a little dirty should have agreed with our pick on the first day of our Hokkaido summer trip. We first experienced forest adventure by pulleys and carabiners. Zigzagging our way on the rope ladder near treetop, we made turn after turn until
It's hard to say whether technology has made our lives easier or harder.
Email is one of the conundrums. Why does such communication technology make Yuval Noah Harari, author of his megahit Sapiens , lament over the illusion of progress in humanity?
Hasn't email make our lives more relaxed?
"Sadly not," Yuval wrote.
Now that I'm packing before my departure for my summer vacation, I don't struggle with what to bring but whether I should set up an "out-of
There is no right or wrong way to catalogue the books we have read, or to keep a running list of books we'd like to read.
It's sort of like personal habit of organizing clothes in the closet. Some keep the book list in their heads. My daughter used to draw a bookshelf in her notebook, and add one book after another. That's her hieroglyph system of pictorial writing book spines - not the book covers.
Keeping future reading list of books, as I have learned
We can't recall bringing our daughter to watch dragon boat races in Sai Kung. Other than walking along Sai Kung's waterfront promenade, one of our family's favorite activities in Sai Kung is visiting the bookshop with a funny name Kidnapped. We did both today.
Bookstores, especially an English-language one, are hard to come by in Hong Kong. Not too long ago, one of Hong Kong's oldest bookshops, Swindon, shut its outlet in Tsim Sha Tsui towards the second year of
"Show them the league table."
I cringe recalling how many times I heard such advice intended to improve the grades or job performance. Am I supposed to advocate for creating pressure to conform? My brow furrowed and the crow's feet deepened as I struggled to understand any real good impact of such league table.
Curious if this might really do good, the award-winning behavioral scientist Katy Milkman analyzed reams of research, only to find the results otherwise. The league tables backfire more often than not.
Contrary
If you pick up a book on writing good plain English, you are going to be reminded the problem of starting a new paragraph using the word I .
It may not be particularly surprising to use words like I and me . But it's an accidental egocentric showing-off by using too much I . Too much I ends up looking like the Carmen Miranda song, I-I-I-I like you very much!
Here comes the example: I was going to get my flu shot when I bumped
Three years ago, a dear secondary school teacher of mine was struggling with his worn-out heart valve. A normal heart valve is a smooth, glistening, pliable surface that seals off and then opens to the chambers of the heart with every beat. Blood glides over the normal valve. My teacher's heart valve roughened with age, and became a kind of stiff squeaky door stuck with faulty handle. Over time, blood could hardly go through the door. Every time his blood squeezed through the narrow thoroughfare,
The coronavirus disease pandemic has demonstrated the unpredictability of medicine - and the extremely important chance to improvise teaching. The virus itself is a monster serial killer of elderly, many of them healthy and holding a test kit with two red lines one moment, crashing with breathlessness the next. Many vulnerable patients, mostly unvaccinated, oscillated between "okay" and downright critical, sometimes within an hour.
Throughout this crisis, I have witnessed a multitude of opportunities to "learn how to learn."
Blessed are those of us who have
Every now and then, conversations between doctors and patients boomerang between questions and medicalese. Not many of us nod, and even more of them struggle to make sense of doctors' words.
There is a cultural difference in play, too. Not for the first time, I encountered Chinese patients speaking in Chiuchow dialect or accent. "It seems like you're coming from Chiuchow," I enthused. It wouldn't take long for my patient to figure out I'm also from the same heritage.
But