1. As we know, the essence of a camera, is the optics, namely the lens or a lineup of lenses that is compatible with it. A couple of top brands in the industry manufacture quality lenses, to name a few, Leica, Zeiss, Nikon and Canon etc.. Each of them have some perfect designs in some particular focal length, but none of them are perfect at all types of lenses. For instance, the Leica Summilux 35mm f/1.4 is the best model in the ultra-fast standard lens class while Nikon is proud of the best 24mm f/1.4 auto focus lens ever made. Unfortunately, these top brands are extremely exclusive — a Leica M Mount lens, in most cases, can hardly be adapted to a Canon EF mount and vice versa. I personally want to use the best lens out there at each of the common focal lengths no matter what its brand is. A standard universal mount would therefore be ideal, which is obviously not going to be discussed by these hostile optical giants.

2. Experienced photographers know how to spend $2000 smartly: one would invest in lenses rather than in the body. For example, a “24-105mm L” on a EOS 600D always yields sharper images than a “18-135mm” on a 7D. In addition, as the sensor technology progresses, both 600D and 7D would be gone in a couple of years, the best example could be the Kodak Pro 14n, which was among the best DSLR body ever made in terms of pixel density, continuous shooting and durability by 2003 and therefore priced at about $5000, but now this body can hardly excel in any essential aspects, while any Nikon F mount lens purchased at that time for Pro 14n would still sell at the same price. However, when we replace a body with a new one, we not only throw away the outdated electronics and sensors but also the mechanics and metal frame which by the time of the retirement may still be in excellent condition, and the new body is meant to be abandoned with its mechanics and metal frame again once the next generation of sensor technology comes. So the rational way to minimize the wasted investment in body provided that we always want the newest technology, is to minimize whatever is replaced each time when we update our system.

Solution:

So my response to the aforementioned issues is to re-define a camera as photographic system, which is broken into modules more than two (lens + body).

Stage 1: Lens + sensor module (including the mount) + body module (including all the mechanics and electronics other than the sensor chip, such as the image processor, LCD, etc.). I thought this is a new idea, but the market has actually seen one example of this stage of modularization — the Ricoh GXR system. Although this novelty originally only comes with some “lens-and-sensor” modules and a “body module” without any sensor, recently Ricoh add a Leica M Mount module including just the CMOS and the mount ring , thus with which users can mount any Leica M mount – compatible lenses.

There is still much space left to improve the system concept according to our motivations aforementioned. To name a few, the current GXR M mount module only works for M mount lenses, and the robust body, which itself alone is priced as high as a high-end point-and-shoot camera, already appears outdated to some extent and therefore the expected system update will guarantee some waste.

Stage 2: Lens + mount adapter module + sensor module + body module (including all the mechanics and electronics other than the sensor chip such as the image processor, LCD, etc.). At this stage, we should be able to mount whatever lens we want by just purchasing the corresponding mount adapter module. So we should have already realized “motivation 1″ at this stage: when we want more pixels, we get a new sensor module; when we want to switch from Leica lenses to Nikon optics, we just screw a new mount adapter on. All the modules should be standardized, so that we expect at these stage, the entire CCD/CMOS industry, not only Sony and Canon etc but also some scientific CCD manufacturers, will provide specialized sensor modules for the photographic industry. The advantage of this design is obvious: some CCDs may specialize in extremely high quantum efficiency or extended linear range, or even great dynamical range which essentially make the popular auto HDR not necessary anymore.

Stage 3: similar to Stage 2, except that the body module is further spitted. Here is something really crazy: I expect the electric part and the mechanical part to be completed separated into two individual modules. Aiming at realizing “motivation 2″, we do not want to throw away the entire body when a new generation of image processors come or a larger screen size becomes a standard feature. This is because some body design, I mean the mechanical part, is really very classic: for instance, Leica M3 is still the best 135 camera ever made, and Nikon F60 is still one of the best DSLR body ever designed and copied again and again. So we want to always keep the good part and update just the electronics — the LCD, the image processor, the ROM, the I/Os etc..

The beauty lies in how to separate the electronics from the body. I am enlightened by Apple’s approach. Apple manufactures iPhone, which is already the most popular “camera” on Flickr. Behind this success, is the advantage of iPhone over all the other cameras — its much more superior CPU. I anticipate that an A5 chip for iPhone, or a NVIDIA Tegra 2 chip for Android, or a current TI chip for RIM, will still be faster in terms of image processing than whatever the generation of Digic “X” may be in two years. Simply speaking, an ordinary smartphone processor, once properly tuned by certain image processing algorithms, together with the superior ROM and cache of a smartphone, can be way more better than even a top specialized image processor invented by some optical giant which is not good at developing fast chips. So my way of designing the mechanical module of the body would be to just keep the classic design of some successful bodies except that we get rid of the complicated (sometimes not even compact) electronics inside, and expand the SD card slot into an adjustable smartphone slot, with the ~4-ish inch screen of the cellphone exposed at the back of the body. The slot should be adjustable in dimensions like a slide caliper (游标卡尺) and should be able to hold the cellphone safely and tightly. We can therefore make full use of the big touch screen, some times as large as 4.3 inches (much larger than the 3-inch LCD on most of the high-end interchangeable-lens cameras), to manually choose focus point or to enlarge apertures etc.. The cellphone talks with the other part of the camera system through its standardized fast I/Os (such as the 30-pin port of iPhone), which should already be fast enough to handle ~50MB/s data current nowadays.  The advantages of this design are countless — not to mention the superior processor, the much larger ROM and cache for faster continuous shooting, and the larger and nicer screen — the wifi function and GPS function are built in, so there is no need to buy eye-fi SD cards or to buy optional GPS modules for cameras such as Nikon D7000. Journalists can always directly upload their professional quality images to their news agencies wherever they are under 4G LTE coverage. I happen to find a similar idea in tablet industry: ASUS recently launched its “PadFone”, which is a “system tablet” with a removable self-consistent cellphone that can be put into the slot on the tablet’s screen module to be used as the heart of the tablet.

To summarize, a future cameras, shall be a re-defined photographic system with a series of specialized modules: lenses, mountings, sensors, a mechanical body with an adjustable cellphone slot, and a qualified cellphone. More competitions will thus be introduced into the photo industry; optical giants can focus on improving optics as; the technology on the cutting edge of the CPU industry can be utilized directly in cameras; all the best lenses out there can be used.

This is not crazy fiction. This can be a very good blueprint.

China doesn’t host any optical giant today, but if relevant companies can investigate into this blue print, I bet they can excel and revolutionize the photographic industry.

Instead, it should be:

The point is that we should always treat \nabla as an operator rather than a vector, i.e., when we are deriving a formula involving \nabla, we should always keep a function at the end of each step !!!

There is a bunch of papers which have included it in samples for a variety of purposes, but this is the first time it is put into the context of galaxy growth and the origin of compactness. Hopefully it will provide us some clues about the detailed internal structure and environment of not only itself but also its high-z counterparts.

This is from the award-winning documentary Inside Job, a retrospect of 2008 financial crisis. This enlightening comment reveals the true motivation of many Chinese students abroad, especially those science and engineering students who wrote in their misleading personal statements that they “want to be scientist since 9 years old”. I feel obliged to add some comments on this topic because many of my Chinese friends are working for financial giants or want to be financial engineers once they get their Ph.D. without realizing many other fruitful alternative careers. This phenomenon may be natural if we were born in a manhattan banker’s family, but the truth is that many of us were born in rural areas of China and all of us by no means had any access to systematic financial education as we major in science or technology. Many Chinese students here in the States are just for the purpose of being here, no matter what kind of program and what major they are in —  they just want a job in industry, especially in those wealthy and “generous” financial giants. The degrees they are working towards are nothing but stepping stone to success — they throw away their “beloved” science once it has served their purpose. Unfortunately for the westerners, Chinese students are always hard-working and intelligent so they actually take many occupations and some westerners consequently impute their high unemployment rate to Chinese and thus dislike anything Chinese. When I am abroad and feel offended by native people, I always tell myself to calm down —  ”there is nothing to be angry with, if I were them, I may even hate Chinese, who are everywhere and annoying.” Well, everything has a reason, not only the dislike from westerners but also the annoying Chinese stereotype. The short answer is that we can always attribute some Chinese people’s annoying aspects to China’s huge population and consequent limited resource per capita.

The documentary Inside Job implies that Goldman Sachs and a couple of its powerful former employees played subtle roles in the 2008 crisis. They had an influence on politics and academia, which correlate with each other not only to protect Goldman Sachs from being punished but also to maximize its controversial interest even during the crisis. The other banks are nothing but pots calling the kettle black — they also manipulated grading institutes to give almost the highest grades to their risky derivative products, namely CDOs, shortly before the crisis when all the CDOs turned out to be rubbish. Goldman Sachs seemed extremely powerful in that the government performed in its favor: the government forced the bailed-out insurance company AIG to pay the full amount of 14 billion to Goldman Sachs just because Goldman Sachs sold huge amount of toxic CDOs to investors and at the mean time bought AIG’s insurance products called Credit Default Swaps (CDS) to bet that the toxic CDOs will go bad!

Admittedly I have to say that the documentary is not objective — the interviewer is aggressive and the editors always quote conversations out of contexts, but no one can deny that the banks indeed got involved in some immoral transactions and some politicians and scholars were corrupted to some extent.

When I was in my second year of undergraduate study, I won a scholarship award called Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Program, in which we each got a $3000 check and a free trip to the Goldman Sachs headquarters (the green-glass building on the coast of Manhattan) and a short stay in a super luxury hotel in Beijing’s Xidan financial street. That was an overwhelmingly wonderful experience for us poor students — we secretly checked the rate of the room we were in and the price of the breakfast we had: it was about 3000RMBs per night and 2000RMBs per meal, far beyond our imagination. We were overwhelmingly grateful to Goldman Sachs because of its generosity. But now, realizing its great power and true face, I feel that it was just playing with us, some good students who may be used by it in the future. Frankly speaking, I regard the award as a great honour in that the award recognized my efforts to be a physicist but now I feel nausea because the award issuer might not be sincere at all — it played with the poor and ignorant students, just like the Japanese army played with those poor ignorant Chinese traitors in World War II to some extent.

I remember some time ago a friend and I read about how to transit from a physics student to a “quant”, but now we both know science is just what we want and making money should not be a purpose itself. However, China is so populated that resources are so limited that people seldom say no to opportunities, let alone easy and profitable alternatives. Imagine a peasant’s son working hard in a physics department after cracking many hard exams year after year — one day, he suddenly got to know that there is an occupation called quant and physicists are the best candidates for that position. Working for a large bank for just one year can free his father from heavy burdens in dirty fields, for just 2 years he can marry a good wife and 3 years he can buy a house. What will he do? Will he still want to climb the academic ladder step by step? Absolutely no! This simple reasoning explains why some Chinese intellectuals abroad appear earthy. I believe our western friends who get to know this principle will relieve some dislike towards Chinese stereotype.

Actually, Chinese ancient Confucianists did teach us “There is no fault to pursue wealth, but a noble person would not break moral laws in making profits.” This may be enlightening for both Chinese students who want to choose the easy alternatives and those greedy bankers. The same ancient sages also told us: “If you are poor, you should try to improve yourselves (instead of being corrupted).” This should be a maxim for Chinese peasants’ sons who happen to be scientists — when you are poor but you still stick to improving yourselves, you shall finally contribute more to the human race than bankers. I personally think, once most Chinese people learn how to turn down easy alternatives, shall we finally be considered a noble and strong people again.

By the way, some economists in office during the crisis and some key figures who had something to do with the crisis might not be corrupted, they probably just stuck to their ideology of free market too hard to realize that it can be wrong sometimes. Actually what I want to tell my friends in the western world is that not only freedom can sometimes be bad, but also democracy — the democracy that you like very much may turn out to be poison for poor nations and their poor benighted people.

总角盘桓数载，弹指星移斗转，却各自营营。[2]

空有《闻笛赋》，人未去竹林。[3]

千山素，新月照，散浮云；丰年瑞雪，书里卷外俱丹青。

纵有钻营鼠辈，民富国强可待，看天下归心。

造诣虽高远，不负满天星。[4]

自注：[1]用旧诗中“縠纹脉脉”以及“平湖一派水墨色”等句；[2]指儿时湖畔众伙伴；[3]去者，离弃也，这里说即便有忆旧之意，但忆旧人并没有失去旧时的志向，尚在竹林之中各自忙碌。[4]两重意思：一者，各人术业有专攻，但求不逊色于在国家大好形势下的不计其数的有为者；二者，指作者所学虽是高远之术，但求在满天星斗的大好形势中有所表率。