A picture is worth a thousand words. What about two? What if the two pictures were about the same landscape but separated in time by decades? What terms can be used to describe the thoughts and sentiments given rise by such juxtaposition of photographs?
Marcel Proust, author of Remembrance of Things Past, has said, ‘The new voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.’
The photographs we pair in ‘Then vs Now’ do more than just highlighting the changing faces of our beloved campus. They are testimony to our sentimental journey from one familiar corner of our campus to another, a voyage that has taken us from monochrome to multi, from material privation to cultural diversity, from the nostalgic four years of university to the pragmatic three and back to an ambitious four. Some stones are turned. Goal and resolve remain unwavered.
In this issue’s ‘In Plain View’, Prof. Irwin King talks about big data and social computing. In this digital age where large torrents of data come into being every day, data are described in terms of Terabyte (TB)1 or even Petabyte (PB)2. A photograph normally takes up a few Megabytes (MB)3 in storage. But the two photographs presented in ‘Then vs Now’ have between them the compressed memories and lives of successive CUHK generations. The TB and PB may come in handy in their digital processing.
Some plastic water bottles can be crumpled to help save the environment. At CUHK, no effort is spared in preserving our precious natural resources. Hence, we bid farewell to disposable plastic bottled waters and bring our own drinking utensils. A different landscape, to be sure, and a better one.
1 1 TB =1012 bytes
2 1 PB =1015 bytes
3 1 MB =106 bytes