Title

A comparison of internet speeds (ranked from fastest to slowest):

1. At home
2. NUS Central Library
3. Free wifi at random restaurant
4. NUSHS canteen
5. NUSHS hostel, if you stay on or below the 3rd floor and/or you camp near your boarding counsellor’s room to scavenge the remnants of signals from there.

NUSHS internet: A monument to inefficiency. Toiled through it today when convo rehearsal ended 2 hours (?!) early. Apparently reluctant to see me leave, NUSHS internet made sure to sear its amazing inertia into my mind as a graduation present.

Still coming to terms with the fact that my foreign friends will be departing (likely forever from my life, though not from my Facebook) soon. Someone I met for 15 minutes told me that we spend our entire lives moving from one set of friends to the next. Much as I would like NOT to believe that friendship is ephemeral, I have yet to see a convincing counterexample.

Why is it that good writers are not always good orators?

To cheer myself up let me recommend you a wonderful game: GIRP (http://www.foddy.net/GIRP.html) It is totally unrealistic but seems burdened by a sense of realism – and if you concentrate hard enough it will soon have you in its girp. Yes, that was an intentional misspelling.

I have not started playing it intensively yet but I think I’ve figured out a strategy~

What I will do after the exams

My life now is dominated by two activities:

1. FYP. This accursed assessment has soaked up large tracts of my time. Continually editing, commenting, sending back and forth emails, chasing people for their parts, incorporating new stuff into what’s already been done – certainly not butterflies and dandelions. Having said that, I do understand the English department’s motivations and maintain that the skills that FYP was meant to cultivate are useful and applicable.

Only I wish it were individual instead. I fail to see the point of a group essay when the work will be asymmetrically distributed anyway – unless perhaps FYP is socialist in origin and intended to promote mark redistribution?

2. Uni apps. Every time this subject crops up, my palms break into a sweat. Nightmarish visions of me receiving rejection letter after rej – okay, okay, I think my id really needs to learn to shut up.

My life after the exams (hopefully):

1. Study for EG1108 exams -.- Hopefully this will not be too much of a chore because we already learnt some of the stuff under Ricardo

2. Shop for a prom dress. I do not have high hopes for this, however. Why? Suffice to say that if my parents had run the US economy, the 2008 financial crisis might have been averted and the country would right now be rolling in its exponentially growing reserves.

3. Finish off Griffiths’ QM. Griffiths is an awesome troll!

4. Bid sayonara to Chemistry! Perhaps I will write an epitaph for it here someday ^^ Expect lots of crocodile tears. 别了, 别了, 别了~

5. Actually read the books on my bookshelf. Books I possess but have not read (but hope to read):

The Unconsoled  by Kazuo Ishiguro
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

And perhaps I’ll leave The Color Purple for some other time, I can’t abide the slang in it Also, I should really find out what all the hype is about sci-fi.

Books I do not possess and have not read but hope to read:

Dune by Frank Herbert
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Anything by Kurt Vonnegut/Phillip K. Dick/Arthur C. Clarke that I can get my hands on!

By the way, I’m reading The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht now and it’s very masterfully written. I love it!

6. Watch City Hunter! *Min-ho yum!* Desmond we can have another tea party at your house and watch City Hunter at the same time!

7. Learn Korean/German. I think if I’ll learn German in Uni if I get the chance to take up a 3rd Lang! I have immense respect for the German people – their culture with its ingrained reverence for Science and Technology is so remarkable.

Will add stuff to this list as we go along!

A thought: I am constantly amazed by how much I enjoy Bio. I have the utmost respect for people who LOVE Bio and do well in it (I certainly don’t fall into either category) because a) They seem to have some innate understanding that I lack and b) innovations in Bio are key to improving our quality of life. The world needs such people, just as it needs Physicists and … Chemists.

BTW, if you are wondering where the links went in my new blog layout, they’re all the way down below. I’ve linked a few interesting pages!

A finite simple group of order two

This video is underappreciated!

Presidential elections tomorrow – I hope Dr Tony Tan/Tan Cheng Bock wins! Dr Tan’s Chinese is incomprehensible, but I find it admirable that he actually made the effort to try. He could just have taken the easy way out and opted to have his speech dubbed, like Tan Cheng Bock.

# Here lay a long unwieldy paragraph on the Presidential election that was deleted for viewing pleasure#

Rambling thoughts

Today, I shall categorise and number my thoughts, starting with

1. Math!

An ode to Math that I devised on the spot! Technically it’s a haiku but stylistically it isn’t …

Abstract Algebra
is one of the reasons why
I still go to school

The concepts taught are interesting and non-obvious (okay perhaps if you’re Ryan Chan/Ang Yan Sheng they’re kindergarten standard), though a mild headache is a frequent after-effect. And although an A+, or even an A, isn’t guaranteed, I still do look forward to the revelations of Abstract Algebra. Call it the one irregular, exciting activity in an otherwise predictable school regimen.

(Also, after looking through Ryan Goh’s notes the other day, I felt an urge to stamp on myself for not taking Graph Theory. I never thought I’d second my father’s views on the merits of signing up for every module in sight, but in this case he was probably right. I do think I’m overly cautious sometimes.)

Naomi and I were talking the other day and we agreed that Complex No.s should have been taught alongside Polar Coords in Year 4- firstly, because at that time we wouldn’t have had forgotten most of the Trigo needed for both modules, and secondly because their standards are comparable.

2. Increase in transport fares

I feel that Singaporeans are making a needless fuss about this latest development. In an era of ballooning inflation (and now another impending financial crisis -goodness-), I find it neither surprising nor remarkable. At most it seems a symptom of larger economic problems. IMHO, the complaints about the quantum of the raise do not really merit consideration (because 2 extra cents for every adult trip –> an additional 0.02*2*5 weekdays+0.20 if you go on an Amazing Race around Singapore every weekend = $0.40/week, is really going to burn a hole in our pockets).

If people are objecting to the stagnation of service standards or the poor timing of the fare increase, then (while I don’t concur) I can put it down to a difference in opinion/experiences. I am quite a skeptical person, yet I must admit that these days even Bus 97 no longer arrives grossly late, and peak hour overcrowding on the North East Line seems to have been alleviated by more frequent train services. (But perhaps my experiences are anomalous – maybe more seasoned commuters know better that there has been zero improvement in public transport services.)

I don’t see why people expect that the fare increase should translate to better service if the motivations behind the fare increase have already been expressly stated to be otherwise. Yes, we have a right to demand better service, but this demand should not have been exacerbated by news of fare increases,which are unrelated. If the transport operators say, we want more money from you because we need to finance training programmes for our staff, but later commuters find that there has been no corresponding improvement in service standards – then complaining is justified. But no one has made any pretensions that the additional fare will be channeled towards raising service standards, so I don’t think commuters have a right to complain that service standards have not improved in line with fare increases.

I could go on about this…

RECAC

In summary: apart from the last debate and the speech by the GOH, largely a waste of time.

And yes, relegating it to the ‘waste of time’ category is the best prognosis I can give – despite all my attempts to be charitable. Unfortunately the very obvious lack of organisation (did they even have a dry run?) and the languor of the emcees only reinforced this impression.

1. Lack of organisation – no rigorous system to decide winners, or even the challenging team during the Jeopardy round. Rules were not enforced, either. No system to ensure that the teams in the finals didn’t access information on their iPhones during lunch, while preparing for the debate. (As a subsidiary point, lunch was not provided)

2. Uninspiring emcees – the male emcee mumbled, and the female emcee stumbled. Neither seemed particularly thrilled to have been shaken out of bed so early on a Saturday — and guess what — the participants weren’t either!

3. Lack of consistency in question standards. The jeopardy round – some questions were so easy, others diabolically hard. One of the easy questions showed a photo of the destruction in Norway and required the group to name Anders Behring Breivik. But the hard questions were things like ‘What is the Brazilian government going to build in the middle of [name] forest that has aroused much controversy?’

Perhaps our definition of ‘current affairs’ differed from RECAS’ – we expected that a sizeable number of questions would be about events that happened this year. Unfortunately a third of the questions concerned events that occured in 2010. These included the Diaoyu trawler dispute that occurred in Sept of last year, the BP oil spill that occured in May, the North Korean bombing of Yeonpyeong island, the German foreign affairs chief who was fired in Dec after a Wikileaks expose, the state of emergency in Thailand etc.

Also, there was, for some reason, a skewed emphasis on property markets – about 1/6th of the questions were on the property markets of Singapore and China. There were almost no questions on South America – hey just because it isn’t our neighbour doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, yo.

Having complained so much about RECAC, I must add that the people who ultimately won it were really deserving of their titles – our juniors are good at debate, and one of them has a seemingly limitless cache of current [AND, IT MUST BE ADDED, PAST] affairs knowledge in his head.

Bibliophilia

I am very very happy right now because I have recently inherited a large number of books from my wonderful cousin and uncle! ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ <— me bouncing up and down rapidly. It is with great pleasure that I snub my future Uni coursemates (and do the League of Thrifty Aunties, better known as LTA, proud) by announcing that:

I WILL NEVER NEED TO BUY GRIFFITHS ELECTRODYNAMICS, WHEE!

Moving on to less exciting matters, as preparation for a particular competition, I have been randomly surfing sites for current affairs quizzes. If anyone feels that their ego needs to be put on a rapid weight-loss plan, I’d be happy to assist by recommending this particular one:

http://www.economist.com/diversions/quiz/

Sample question from the quiz:

To whom or what does Ecuador’s new constitution confer “the inalienable right to exist, flourish and evolve”?

- indigenous cultures
- Galapagos turtles
- all political parties
- ecosystems

The correct answer, by the way, is ecosystems.

Oh my. My general knowledge is pathetic!

Wavelets

I shall treat this as a Twitter status update because I do not have a Twitter account. Twittering, you see, is very damaging to a duck’s vocal cords. However, if someone decides to open a competing website known as Quack, I will be the first to sign up.

So the only remotely intellectual thing I’ve been doing lately is to read up on stuff for my ARP. I am rather intrigued by the cuteness of the name ‘wavelets‘, which belies their rather dry nature. Wavelets sound like the cherubic offspring of waves, do they not.

Oh look, we have a visitor. I believe this one is a Daubechies wavelet.

This is what a wavelet looks like

Here is a plausible sentence that can be constructed using the term ‘wavelets’:
1. She was too dejected to wave goodbye, so she gave us a wavelet instead.

This interpretation is taken further when one realises that there exist such things as ‘mother wavelets’ and ‘wavelet families’. The association is as such: upon scaling and translating the mother wavelet, one gets a whole basis of wavelets, known as a wavelet family. However, it is rather puzzling that these daughter wavelets are not known as ‘waveletlets’.