Papers record conclusions. They rarely record how you got there — the papers you misread first, the question you couldn’t phrase for three weeks, the afternoon a baseline broke and taught you more than the result you eventually reported.
This page is for that second record. Reading notes, research reflections, essays, and occasional non-academic writing about football, cards, and whatever else keeps a Ph.D. student intact.
Two rules I’m setting for myself:
- Write to think, not to perform. A note that is honest and unfinished is worth more than a post that sounds finished and says nothing.
- Publish before it’s polished. Otherwise nothing ever gets published.
Some pieces here were first written in Chinese for my WeChat official account — those are linked out rather than duplicated. Everything else lives on this site.