It was a quite difficult period for me, I guess. Not only did I mourn for Ms. Xiaolin Tang, but I also prayed for New York and Sutherland Springs. It is in times like this that we need the help from God the most.

The good news for me is that once again God has solved all my problems, He has done His trial with me and passed His righteous sentence. I wasn’t even surprised, but He has such mysterious ways which are way beyond my comprehension.

On Conclusion and (the lack of) Forgiveness

I had always had certain benefit of doubt regarding my Exodus. A part of me knew the answer, but I found it hard to accept. Here is the truth.

This is what people publicly say about Xiaolin’s passing and I guess this is the right thing to say publicly:

And when I wrote to every member of the faculty (guess God forced my hands), this was the reply I got (guess God forced someone’s hands):

Remember, dear reader, this was taken out of the context. If you wish to know everything, you will have to contact Senator Orrin Hatch or Senator Mike Lee, if their interns haven’t tossed my facsimiles into waste bins. Now I am quite certain that the New York Times would not be interested by trivial matters like this, and it has something to do with the skin color. I might be able to get this professor on headline here in China, but I doubt this would be a very good idea. Let God, not me or mobs, be the judge, and I assure you that each one of us will be judged for our sins.

And I might just share the same view on friendship with this individual:

So who are my friends? I can’t actually tell you for it’s a matter of national security, not to mention professional obligations and privacy concerns. Cornell would ask for a million for the child of the CEO of Lenovo to enroll, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill would take the kid for free. Anyway, the CEO of Lenovo is neither my client nor my friend, and I hope he would not mind if I make a point here. I do not intend to reveal any unnecessary information, such as the gender or the name or the age or the standardized test scores or the GPA or the nationality of the child.

God knows that I am not good at forgiving people, so He simply showed me that I made a mistake by considering several non-friends as friends. I do not have to forgive anyone, but I would ask for people’s forgiveness instead. I am sorry that I really expected too much. We must all consider this as a business deal, and I secured the best one in my life so far with the help of God.

Don’t believe it? Let me run the numbers. My compiler would not sell beyond $20,000. I mean despite that Prof. Yanif could be a decent computer scientist in his own right, DBToaster is nothing like Hive. And the right severance package I should get is $1,800, which is my monthly wage at the time, times four for the four years I spent at JHU as a teaching/research assistant. So it’s $27,200 at most. The extra $37,800 is really God’s work, and now Johns Hopkins doesn’t even want a cent back. Hopefully I did not cheat anyone. I mean, my employees have all sorts of side jobs, I don’t recall paying them a cent extra for those when I decided to fire them.

Of course it is alright if I do not get my transcript. Even with a 3.78/4.0 GPA, it does not worth $37,800. And should I obtain my transcript, I would not hesitate to openly verify each discrepancy with my professors. Then I would challenge Mr. Bin Ren to confirm his GPA, or the physics department to disclose the average GPA of PhDs. It would be very, very bad for business. Why do I want to hurt the interest of my alma mater?

And now I truly wish I can take the sites off, for I am really making a big fool of myself. I am just so honor-bound to the extent that I can’t really expose others without exposing myself, and to begin with my wife wasn’t too happy learning my track record. After all, I am not King David who knew the Queen of Sheba, as none would name him a nigger-lover! And thank you, I would really love to be a gentleman, yet in reality I am anything but one.

You understand that after weighting pros and cons from the business perspective, I will continue paying for the sites, because defenders of academia like Mr. Bin Ren would ask questions, and I hope the sites have answered all of these. If my non-friends feel damaged, offended, or insulted in any way, you are welcomed to try to lay a finger on me or ask the Chinese Government or God to do the job for you. These are the situations when I would not hesitate to ask my friends for a favor or two, if I still stick to the professional code about not using hacker tricks on civilians. Of course, the other obvious option is to fuck Mr. Bin Ren and his friends to your hearts’ content. I will leave the choice to you, and no hard feelings, please, considering that I almost killed myself.

Other than that, I have a Christmas surprise for Professor Daniel H. Reich and his family, but it’s officially over.

And after my name getting spelled wrong, waiting for over two months for these hardworking staff to figure out that my case was too old to have any merit (which I most certainly agree), and now this, I think I am done with the Department of Education for good. Next time, which I hope it won’t happen, it would be my Caucasian male (Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, or Jewish, Jewish would be the best) lawyer who graduated from Harvard Law School and charges me at least $1,800 per hour. He will be the next best thing to God when dealing with situations like this:

On Suicide and (the lack of) Eternal Life

Ms. Xiaolin Tang is no friend of mine. I wept for her as I wept for myself before my Johns Hopkins negotiators. I take it as my own mission to benefit her despite the jealousy of my wife. (As a good wife and an MEd from the University of Toledo, OH, she checks my emails and reads English. She was happy again after I explained to her that I would do the same for her if her life ended in such a senseless way.)

I did what I could for Xiaolin to benefit her in this world. But I am afraid the poor family would not receive one cent for the loss of its beloved daughter.

I used to give myself the benefit of the doubt. When I negotiated the terms of my leaving, it was me or it was God? Now it is clear that it was God. I am sorry that I could not do much for Xiaolin. Without God’s help, I am nothing, utterly incompetent.

In the meantime, I also seek to benefit Xiaolin in her afterlife, and it has something to do with theology.

In general, we are all sinners. And murder, defined as “unlawful killing of another human being with malice aforethought,” is a great sin. But if you don’t already know it, suicide, or murdering oneself, is a worse sin. I mean back in the days I figured out various ways to kill myself: At first, I thought cutting veins in the bathtub of my Marylander studio would be cool, with distractions like Mozart’s Nachtmusik and a tub of hot water between 120 and 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Eventually, I settled with tampering the oven of my studio—I heard I would look nice when people found my body. Since I did not really have a car, death by carbon monoxide would be most convenient in this way.

Well, my point is, at least no Christian shall commit suicide. It violates the sixth Commandment and greatly displeases God and will most likely result in Excommunication (or in more mundane way of speaking, being barred from the Heavens). God sent each one of us on earth with His specific purposes, and generously gave us gifts large and small, the most precious one being our lives. By defying God’s purposes and forfeiting God’s gifts, we really do show our worst side. And let’s not forget, selfish beings as we are, we usually consider ourselves better and more important than our neighbors. That’s why suicide is worse than murder. And so-called “suicide by police” is even worse. Suicide by mass-murdering is the worst.

We all know God is good and very forgiving, so how could I earn Xiaolin’s forgiveness for her and make sure that she could enjoy her eternal life in the Heavens? I prayed and prayed and guess God was really bored by me so that He gave me the answer, too. So basically as the imperfect images of God, our trinity—body, soul, and spirit—is an imperfect imprint of the Divine Trinity. Jesus resurrected, but our physical bodies, according to Murphy’s law (everything that can go wrong will go wrong), are destined to become worm food. Our spirits (in Greek it is the same word as breath) were originated when God’s breath entered Adam’s nostrils (so animals and plants don’t have any spirit and can’t be Christians), and will find their way back to God and this is the law of conservation of energy. The tricky part is soul (in Greek it is the same word as psyche, in Hebrew it is the same word as life). Usually, God would preserve the souls of good Christians, too. Whenever I or you mention the phrase “good Christians,” any good Christian in the past or the future lives. I might not know him or her in person, but the two words more or less tell everything of the life. The words are life and are alive.

So what secret did I learn from God? We might assume body, soul, and spirit as isolated, localized items. But Christians already know that spirit is not localized—we have to mingle with the Spirit before we become good Christians. Any good physicist would tell you that body, according to Quantum Mechanics, is not quite localized. Being here and now is purely a matter of the wave function collapse. And I am telling you, soul is not localized. Your life is not about your own life, and is more or less the sum of your imprints on all other lives on earth. You can enjoy eternal life, because your soul carry on after the end of your physical form.

God showed me another girl, Jeanne Clery, whose soul has been living among us and protecting us. I doubt there would be a Xiaolin Act anytime soon, as there was not any Xin Act. I understand the circumstance of her death, based on public information and reliable channels. It was nothing like what people now try to paint. In fact, she was a true American heroine. But from a bystander’s viewpoint, I feel nothing but horror and pity. Personally I would like to disclose what I learned, but God forbids me. He did promise me that Xiaolin would live as long as I honor her in my heart, even when I become the last one on earth doing so.

On Easy Way and (the lack of) Justice

So why did Johns Hopkins pay me? Was it because I shed like 40 grams of tears? Or was it because I got an A+ in Electromagnetic Theory and eventually served as the teaching assistant of the course? Maybe not.

By the end of year 2010, I was quite occupied. I spent half of my time figuring out various “stylish, dignified, and relatively painless” ways to end my miserable life. My life was a joke because in cyberspace I was actually somebody thanks to my gift with computer and my fake American company brand. But in the real world, it seemed that I had issues keeping my $1,800 job—I had to beg people around to take me, and people did not even care. I spent the rest of my time praying to God halfheartedly. “O God. I am going to meet with the Department Chair. Pray make me say the right thing. This guy administrated my oral qualify and he actually praised me for its quality. I knew he could set things right for me.” I used to think the Biblical prophets as morons and madmen by speaking in languages they did not really know. Well, that usually happens before God really feels generous and gives one the exact same gift. And I assure you I could really use the gift, for in the eyes of the people around me, I was more or less like Jian-Yang here:

So when I met Professor Daniel H. Reich in a small room within the main office (guess it would be convenient for him to call for help in this way). He just said once sentence, that he’ll make me the teaching assistant of Electromagnetic Theory for one more semester, but I had to find my advisor. So for me, it should be a constructive and win-win discussion; for him, it was just an unpleasant menial announcement that was forced upon him and hopefully would not ruin his Christmas time with his family. And he thought he was doing me a favor by paying $1,800 a month. How many people in China could make $1,800 a month? $1,800/mo for five whole months! So if I wrote to everyone in the physics department, and people would not respond, I would be out of luck right? And it turned out that even a professor from the CS department responded, I would still be out of luck.

God did not let me pull out a nonexistent gun and shot the guy on the scene. Instead, I said:

I will arrange you a class-action suit.

And I stood up and left. To be honest, I had no idea what “class-action suit” meant just as I do not understand what “no provision for finally on behalf of a decedent.” But I guess it would be Okay if someone actually got the idea.

Although my memory had lapses here and there, now I usually believe that in a few hours of my life, God actually made me a American man of letters, the greatest the earth has ever seen. I could easily beat Emerson, Thoreau, London, Lovecraft, Hemingway, and Poe combined. But what did I do with such great power? I could have prevented the death of Xiaolin by then, yet all I thought about at the time was to “settle” the problem and to exploit the situation. So when I was offered the “Severance Agreement,” I really understood the content well and signed it without hesitation.

  • I am not going to reveal anything about the sum of the payment ($65,000), the terms of the agreement, or my experience: Why? I certainly don’t want to reveal the darkest chapter of my life, even to my own parents!
  • I am not going to appear on University properties or reapply or be admitted: Why? I do not go to Bloomberg unless my teaching duty calls. I am definitely going to spend the rest of my life in a psycho ward, living on my generous severance package.
  • My heirs don’t attend Johns Hopkins, either: Why? If I had the luck of getting married and being able to send my children to receive American education, Johns Hopkins would not be my first choice.
  • By paying me, the University did not assume any responsibility or liability: Why? I want to kill myself and I want to leave. The University has nothing to do with this.
  • I am not suing Johns Hopkins and its affiliates in US or China: Why? I really have no idea what “class-action suit” means.
  • I am not contacting anyone—This one I really hesitated a bit, for I wanted to properly say goodbye and thanks to my friends. Now it turns out I did not have many friends back then, so it’s cool. By the way, I thought it was darkness, but in fact it was so much light that it was blinding.

By the way, Professor Alexander S. Szalay, you have to understand that Johns Hopkins did not intentionally sell you or any professor out. It was not my poor negotiators’ intention to reveal anything that they were not supposed to divulge. However, a Hungarian girl was on the team. American English isn’t her mother tongue and she was really spooked by me… Of course, I was only 80% sure of you badmouthing behind my back, and I had to admit I did not know you quite well as I still do not. But I am 100% sure that you did not reply my email which Prof. Yanif asked me to compose, and later on Prof. Yanif explained that you was just too busy.

Wow, no wonder:

All seemed fine except one caveat. Per lex talionis, one has to offer something to God in order to receive His gifts. The offerings do not increase God in any way, but it indicates how big the faith is. And if one don’t have much faith, one is actively distancing himself or herself from God which is generally not a good thing. And God made it very clear that He does not want crops, as He wants lambs. By donating your hard-earned money to your local church, it certainly is an act of faith and recommended practice, and you are and will be adequately rewarded. In my case, I just sacrificed a small portion of my sanity for a rare gift and a second life which I find to be more enjoyable. And who needs $65,000 if one gets God at his back and is a millionaire? And you must know that God does not intend to drive me mad, it is just that human mind is not designed to suddenly possess the knowledge and skills which usually take years, if not decades, of rigorous preparation and training. I do not recommend you to follow suit, but it worked for me.

Let’s consider the sacrifices in the Bible. Animal sacrifices generally work well for Jews (and Chinese). And human sacrifices work even better for Jews (and Aztecs and Ancient Chinese, Shang people to be specific). Now Abraham wanted to sacrifice Issac before God timely intervened. Lot wanted to sacrifice his two daughters (in a different sense, but might actually be more effective) before God timely intervened. So what’s the greatest sacrifice in Bible? Of course, God sacrificed His own beloved Son for all Christians. And behold its effects!

Bible teaches us to follow the hard way, not the easy way. When Mr. Bin Ren wrote his email and I read his code published on GitHub, I was like, hell, I could be an astrophysicist! I mean consider the only “paper” (I know it is not a real paper, it is more like an arXiv paper) I published, you can see my name right there and actually it is a vanity credit. But what did I do to get that credit? You see, I was developing an image processing framework for one of my fake AADPS clients, and Dr. Wang wanted a program to automatically count the number of nanodiscs on a batch of SEM images. So I unethically commandeered the framework without obtaining explicit permission from my client, and got the result for him in ten minutes. It was all quite trivial and Dr. Wang was way too nice.

Mr. Bin Ren doesn’t want me to write to his collaborators, fine. I just spent an hour developing some code to automatically identify the collaborators of his collaborators, register them in a database, and email each one of them every week. With the right opportunity, I could get my paper published in no time, and it would be Prof. Yitang Zhang’s story all over again. No, I am not going to publish this piece of code on GitHub. Russians could refit it to make sure President Trump get his second term. I had dealt with my share of Russian hackers back in the day and I know how good these folks are. They have no better thing to do than hacking.

But after the code had contacted Stanford and UCLA on behalf of me, I killed the program for I realized I wanted to do this because it is the easy way for me. I could save half a million for NSF and NASA, and do-gooders will know better not to comment on my academic ability, but so what? People like Xiaolin are still going to kill themselves. Xiaolin sacrificed herself to God knows what, I have to make sure I am sacrificing to God, not some U.S. federal agencies, even if it means that I must pick the hard way.

From my own experience, I can tell you that being a hacker is like being a spy subtracting the girls.

However, a spy as good as Austin Powers would not win a war, and even the Grande Armee could be defeated in a campaign. A Panzerkorps it calls, a Panzerkorps it shall be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPzTGx96P6U

You would never realize that being an ex-hacker and an ex-tongues-speaker would mean that I am a de-facto computational linguist.

Yes, you are quite observant, I have two cellphones, one for friends and family and one for everybody else. Previously I more or less took this as a hobby, wasting tens of thousands of dollars on hardware (a private cloud!) and software (Go ask Prof. Mark Davies at Brigham Young University if you like, verify with him that after he refused to collaborate with me back in 2014 (a sensible decision, I might add), how much I handsomely paid him for just a copy of his data with all the usage restrictions he kindly reminded me. And he even got an update to sell!) and hundreds of hours of my limited free time. So far it makes a little more than $10 for me, and does not tell who the fuck Bing Crosby is so I had to google him…

So it’s really up to me then?

I wrote this because I did not believe I would ever be a billionaire.

But God, if You so wish to extend Your protection and justice to people in this fashion, please make me your vessel and tool. I know it is a thousand times harder to be a billionaire, but nothing is hard for you: I have befriended a couple billionaires myself, but I never expect to see another tongues-speaker in the rest of my days! For this, I dedicate my life. It feels like cheating, but I hope You can forgive me.

Yes, I’ll spend at least a million USD on each case, for Chinese nationals who study in a U.S. physics graduate program and end up killing themselves. Chinese national is defined a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, or a citizen of Hong Kong, Macau, or the Republic of China who openly claims that he or she is a citizen of the People’s Republic of China. Nowadays, people feel quite proud of being lesbians and gays (pedophiles are next in line, mayhaps?). So if it takes a freak to save some lives and souls, I am proud of being one.

So much for the not stealing part, I guess?