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Ming-Feng Ho

LCTP Fellow for Astrophysics/Cosmology

Others

Digital humanity, cello, philosophy & literature, dessert making.

One of my hobbies is text mining. I was working with a classical Chinese literature researcher, Zeb Raft, on making digital edition of classical literature, including Han-Ji - a history book and Wen-Xuan - a book of poems. It was quite a fun time working with humanity people. I also sometimes play around with web scraped texts, see below:

Digital humanity: Han-ji fetcher [Github repo]
ML topics in astro-ph [Github repo]
Neuroscience topics in biorxiv [Github repo]

Besides coding, I like playing cello, (writing) literature, philosophy, making wagashi, cooking, and hiking. I had stopped playing cello after my undergrad graduation, but COVID gave me lots of time to stay with my cello so I started practising again. Also, I am very interested in making wagashi (Japanese bean paste desserts). The photo below is the result of my 2 weeks of practising.

wagashi

And below I made famous Suzhou Mooncakes.

mooncake

I thought I would be a philosophy or literature undergrad, but my literature teacher persuaded me to do science (probably she knew I can't live with my writings). I wrote essays during my spare time and received a few pure literature/philosophy awards before. During my undergrad at National Taiwan University, I was a campus newsletter writer and have written a few articles regarding public issues. I also re-created the departmental newsletter in Physics with my good friends, Shan-Chang Lin (Dartmouth College), Yu-Ching Shen (Rice University), Li-Hong Wang (Acer), Po-Ya Yang (IMPRS).

English is not my native language, so I am still trying to practice how to write better in English. Very recently, I also started to think about the problem of morality and the sources of normativity. And how western philosophers like Kant answers this question differently from Confucianism philosophers like Mencius and Xunzi. I also care about grad student issues (e.g., rent burden and NRST) and higher education in general.

Picture of me in Palm Spring, photoed by Yueying.