My hat’s off to the noted David Pogue for his outstanding work, Macs for Dummies. I’ve both the original and his sequel, and it’s good for either refreshing what I’ve forgotten (I think I know more about the unbuilt stations in the Beijing-Tianjin Intercity HSR now, with over 40,000 km in the past three years or so, than about Mac stuff; rail’s actually BAD for ya in this vein), or being a place where I can have a heck of a good guffaw.

And that’s what I like about this thing. It makes me laugh. David Pogue has done something special: he’s informative and educational, and he does this while making folks laugh while making them smarter.

This is actually a little bit of rocket science. No, seriously. The thing is, whenever you’re on about something that’s full of jargon — especially if it involves tech stuff or academics — you’re too easily drawn into writing in either computerese or academese. Then you come out with stuff that even Einstein would have a heck of a time making sense of (provided he can “come back”; I’d wish the same for the late Great Leader His Jobsness).

Academese has ticked me off badly as of late. The other academic disease comes from those crazy PhDs — and I’m talking about the case of a few nutcases spoiling the party for everyone. A somewhat notorious “sensitive individual” in China recently made his way into jail for 11 years for being “too ideological”. On his indictment file (as I saw on the web): PhD, unemployed.

If these people aren’t ideologically insane, they’re at least grabbing every last microphone their claws can snatch — whereupon they come out with some crazy ideas. Such as cancelling China’s weeklong holidays, which are the only real chances for individuals to make their mark upon the national economy. The only real chance for high speed trains to run at über-capacity between Beijing and Shanghai (thus completely silencing those HSR critics). Or being “regular co-hosts” of programmes and damning every last thing they see. Given a political platform, I fear they might come out with something very scary for society at large to witness…

It’s the presence of these fill-in-the-blanks that made me very much opposed to completing my PhD course until as of late, when I, through an Act of God, made it through the qualification exams and became a PhD candidate, boom, bang, just like that. It’s crazy. It’s like as if the Sun came out in the west and stuff. But it happened, and I can’t quit now — I’m like on my last leg. Who’d give it up? I’d be insane myself to do that.

Indeed, I’m just one step away from my PhD diploma. Of being called Dr Feng, although I’d be all too happy to dump the “Dr” moniker (which basically means nothing and makes you look like a big fat old snob in society these days, where egalitarianism is the big order of the day). I’ve heard horror stories of people on their phone identifying them as: “Oh, hi, I’m Dr So-and-So”. All I want to say is that I wouldn’t go for stuff like that.

So — yeah — all I’ll need is hard work and probably another Act of God in order to get my PhD diploma. I have to come up with some new stuff in the meantime. I’ve an idea: let’s get this social media thing in order. Full anarchy and unfettered totalitarianism are ruining it for people. While I concoct my own — I hope plausible — “theory”, I hope that when I do become a PhD, I can use it for the good of society. Instead of a 2nd PhD degree, I’m probably going to use that PhD for the good of society. Like — for example, breaking down walls, getting rid of academese. Inventing books like, say, Habermas for Dummies instead of making people sift through clueless academicspeak. Make education and the academic world finally accessible to the guy stuck under a highway bridge who actually wants to learn stuff (never mind whether or not he can pay for education; he’s just hungry to get informed). Use the most accessible language in the universe to make the super-complicated dead easy. That would be something I would look forward to doing as a future Doctorate.

And by the way, I’m probably going to set my spam filters to nix any and all email with the “sensitive keywords” a la “Doctor Feng” in them. That’s because I don’t believe in academic supremacy, and I don’t do airs. At the most buck naked level, a primary school dropout and a multiple degree doctorate are all humans, regardless of skin colour, gender, and nationality, and stuff like that. Left to our own devices, we can all eat, drink, produce waste, take time off in the bed, and if we wanted our kids, we could all get a guy and a girl married and let nature take care of things. Now that’s an egalitarian society. We were all born as equals. Let’s not botch it up by introducing all-too-superficial academic titles and stuff like that.