Sort By:
With effect from Jan 1, 2008, the ever more paranoid US government will be enforcing a new rule banning the packing of “loose” lithium batteries in checked luggage, apparently over concerns that such batteries may catch fire. Instead, one must pack new batteries still in the original packaging, or otherwise keep them in a ziplock ...
From my class on scientific visualization, on a presentation of various optical illusions1:“You should let me know if you don’t see the optical illusion. I’m not going to diagnose any illnesses, like you have a brain embolism or something, but not everyone realizes they are seeing one.”Personally, I have the hardest time seeing random dot ...
Elia Diodati posted a photo:The fire alarm went off yesterday at the local chemistry lab. Turned out the sprinkler mains water pipe had exploded due to a failure in the water heater.
After reading a comment on Mr Wang’s post The Silent Singaporean referencing my earlier post on the nonexistence of singaporekini.com, it suddenly dawned on me that I had entirely omitted the issue of literacy from the discussion of why Singaporeans don’t blog more. In retrospect, it’s so obvious! The typical Singaporean has only a functional ...
Life is weird, as summarized in the following syllogism:Social events for graduate students are rare events.Independently distributed1 rare events obey Poissonian statistics.Events obeying Poissonian statistics tend to exhibit what is known as Poisson clumping.2Therefore, social events for graduate students inevitably tend to exhibit temporal coincidence, i.e. I have long …
The lab has been abuzz with the latest discovery of a silly cell formatting bug in Excel 2007. (Apparently this does not happen in earlier versions of Excel; it certainly doesn’t exist in Excel 2004.)Here it is: if you enter “=65535*1″ as a cell formula, you do not get the expected result of 65535 as ...
10 Minute MailGet email addresses that expire in only ten minutes! Gr8 for sites that need some place to send you a confirmation email
After Mr Wang’s post on why Singapore schools don’t touch Cyril Wong’s literature, I encountered this meme circulating amongst quite a few academic blogs out there:“Why do you teach and why is academic freedom critical to that effort?”Here are some of the more notable responses in response to the latter question (bold in original, italics ...
This week’s Youtube Monday comes from my offline friend meowmoo81, who is easily the best pianist I have had the privilege to know personally.Back in high school, meowmoo81 and another friend would occasionally hold charity music concerts featuring just the two of them, and it was always a sellout crowd. Having lost track of him ...
This goes out to blogging heavyweight Kevin Lim, who is a finalist for a blogging scholarship. Having made it to the final round of the selection process, the sponsor (CollegeScholarships.org) has mysteriously decided to decide the final winner solely by populist voting. This means, of course, that it’s an all out fanwhoring popularity contest battle ...
This morning’s International Herald Tribune runs parts of an interview with Lee Kuan Yew. It’s always illuminating to hear from LKY, because no one can deny his integral influence in the past and current trajectory of Singapore.And quite an insightful interview, it is. Full of survivalist bravado, as are many of his interviews, but here ...
And now, ladies and gentlemen, the amazing cross-dressing pest-control man!
Elia Diodati posted a photo:The fire alarm went off yesterday at the local chemistry lab. Within 2 minutes, 3 fire engines had already showed up.
“People in the industrialised world don’t know very much about Singapore other than the trivial and the silly stuff like the banning of chewing gum and your homosexual laws” - Peter Schwartz, Chairman, Global Business NetworkTODAY ran a very interesting article about Singapore’s image problem from Peter Schwartz, co-founder of the Global Business …
Filed for possible amusement value: Yo mama’s like an overlap integral: she so fat, she overlap a ground-water well!ReferenceEric Feezell, Science Creative Quaterly, Iss. 3.
The amazing BBC Documentary Archive has made a documentary about maids available online. I highly recommend it, considering the very substantial coverage of maids in Singapore and their human rights abuses around the world.The statistic that struck me most was how human rights organizations have documented over 147 cases of maids plunging to their deaths ...
Elia Diodati posted a photo:A visualization of the data from the recent Readers' Digest survey of the probability that one might recover a lost cell phone (out of 30 phones). References:www.rd.com/content/excuse-me-is-this-your-phonemaps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&m...
Yesterday I had a revelation during the La Scala Philharmonic’s performance: I really like Wagner, I just had never heard it performed well. SSO, you suck. CUS, you suck. Compared to the bad boys at La Scala, all the other Wagner recitals I’ve heard resemble draggy and badly tuned cats in heat stuck in a ...
…