Quaver

2009-08-28T14:44:00.000+08:00

I think I have moved permanently. There are no ads there.

2009-08-24T14:03:00.000+08:00

Being incredibly bored and unwilling to study, I have created a Tumblr account.

http://partofthecure.tumblr.com/

-Joe

2009-08-19T18:56:00.000+08:00

Wow. Damn this interface and its brokenness.

The internet is breaking apart. This is rather unfortunate.

2009-08-02T14:51:00.000+08:00

Well. The interface here seems to be broken. I can't bold, italicise, underline, or cross out words. I can't switch between html and plain text. The draft button has mysteriously vanished. These have sort of discouraged me from writing anything for the past few days. Today, however, I realised that I had to study something incredibly boring and deal with some other things. The urge to procrastinate thus increased, and so here I am.

It has recently come to my attention that some of my ideas for handling the global warming problem weren't too far off from being plausible. If you think about it, it seems logical, anyway. The main theory that explains the great extinction at the end of the Triassic describes a rock hitting the earth, kicking up dust, and so blocking out the sun. A similar idea has been presented regarding the fate of the world considering the possibility North Korea deciding to expand their nuclear testing zone. What I'm trying to say is that all these things resulted in a drastic drop in temperature.

Before I illustrate my point, I think it would be prudent to clear up a number of things regarding global warming. Many people claim that the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases produced by mankind has so far been negligible in comparison to the amount produced by natural events. Looking at the numbers alone, this is actually true. Most people, however, do not go on to mention that the natural world has its own capacity to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Huge amounts of CO2 are released by volcanic eruptions and the like, but thankfully, our flora are capable of negating this. They are so capable, that they are even able to remove about half of the man-produced CO2 on top of the natural levels. It really is just this remaining portion that isn't being taken out of the air that is giving us the problem.

Now, with the increments in population and industry, among other things, greenhouse gas emissions have also been rising. This started showing significantly in the early 1900s... I believe. Global temperatures did rise, up until around the 1940s, where instead of a continued increase, a plateau was observed that lasted up till around 1970. This was a strange thing, as it wasn't as if there was a significant lack of progress in industrial expansion.

After some reading, I have learned that the greenhouse gas content of our atmosphere is obviously not the sole determining factor for global temperatures. Industries used to produce not just greenhouse gases, but also pollutants like CFCs, sulphides, and just regular old dust. These things actually have the property of blotting out the sun, reflecting heat back into space. A significant amount of weapons testing was going on at the time, and that undoubtedly would have kicked up a fair sum of dust and soot into the sky. These would all have contributed to a cooling effect.

By the 1970s, pollutants were recognised as being dangerous, and industries were revolutionised to become 'cleaner'. What this basically meant was that we were no longer churning out smog and dangerous aerosols. The incidence of lung cancer probably fell sharply at this point. If I am not wrong, people stopped doing above-ground nuclear tests, too. I don't really know about that, actually. However, the global temperatures began to rise once more.

So, back to what I was talking about earlier. We know that particles in the sky blot out the sun and reduce the heat transferred to our planet. I am sure there exists a substance that could be released into the sky in appropriate amounts, that could act as a sort of sun-screen for the Earth. Of course, we'll have to consider the nature of this substance. It'll have to be such that it won't harm the environment any more than our current activities are. It'll definitely have to be non-toxic; It would be a disaster if the entire world's population died while trying to rectify a mistake.

Rectify a mistake. That's what I see it as. In genes, an insertion mutation is reverted by a deletion. In living organisms, homeostatic systems exist to deal with change. The Earth has its own homeostatic system, but we'd all be dead by the time it has finished working.

Let's just hope that no one messes up and turns the world into post-Matrix Earth.

He looks kinda like A. Low.

-Joe

2009-07-27T16:24:00.001+08:00

Holy shit guys, C&C 4. This is my second reaction to the news. My first reaction was something along the lines of "Cool, more flying tanks". Now that I have read the preview, I have decided that C&C 4 deserves holy shit status. See, based on the screenshots, the graphics do not look significantly better than that of C&C 3. I figured it would have just been another cool game.

But. But, the preview revealed so much more. Essentially, fans of the series are finally going to find out what has been going on over the tiberium-infested earth. We'll find out who Kane is, what he has to do with the Scrin. We'll hopefully learn how he managed to survive being disintegrated by an ion laser, slain in battle, and blown up in a volatile liquid explosion.

I was surprised that EA Games would announce a sequel to Tiberium Wars so soon. In the past, people waited for years to receive news of a game sequel. It was always difficult to tell when a new game would be announced, and when it would be released. At least, that was how it was for me. I'm sure that plenty of gaming franchises prior to PC gaming were churning out cartridges faster than Agent Smith could pull a trigger(this is actually a rather interesting topic, which I may discuss later). I know that during the lifespan of a single console, such as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, many titles received sequels. My knowledge here is limited to the bad games, unfortunately.

Anyway, it seems that fans of the C&C series can expect a drastically modified RTS system when C&C 4 comes along. Previously, we had each faction possessing a few unique upgrades and being slightly better or worse than the others in different tactics. Now, it seems, the designers want to emphasise on that. In a melding of RPG and RTS, each faction will be divided into three classes that consist of entirely different units and structures. There will be classes dedicated to steamrolling, turtling, and support.

Also, an experience point system will supposedly be present, where things that you do in-game will add to an experience pool, that allows you to upgrade your faction classes as you see fit. This means that everyone starts out with only a small variety of units, which will be added to as the game is played.

It isn't really said whether or not each different class will have its own campaign. It's unlikely, though.

The best part is probably that C&C 4 will feature a co-op campaign, like in RA3. Now that the factions are far more specialised than before, co-op is likely to be a lot more dynamic and enjoyable. I have always enjoyed playing support, using air-strikes and naval bombardments to soften up an enemy before allowing my allies to mess around with their tanks.

There are, however, a few things that I am not particularly happy to learn. One, is that EA is planning on using an interface similar to C&C Generals, rather than the rest of the C&C series. Also, resource gathering will be such that refineries will be built on pre-determined locations. This may be annoying, because I really didn't like how I couldn't make my economy boom by having multiple miners working on a resource node. It was just too slow. So... I hope they make it more like Generals, where you could swarm a resource node with collectors to gain more money faster, but at the risk of running dry before you're done with the battle.

While the Scrin will not be playable, they are going to be featured, along with other factions such as the Forgotten. These guys were mutants from the second game in the C&C series

Overall, I'm somewhat excited. I certainly do want this game. However, it seems like it might come out at around the same time as Starcraft 2... That would be a problem.

Okay, here's what's interesting about Agent Smith pulling a trigger. Actually, here's what's interesting about the entire rooftop scene in The Matrix:

An agent(probably Brown. I don't remember their names.) fires bullets at Neo while he dodges them from about eight metres away. Given that the bullets fly at around 400m/s, and that the next bullet is fired as the first bullet passes Neo, the gun is firing at a rate of uh, one bullet every 0.02 seconds. That equates to 50 bullets per second. Even assault rifles don't fire that fast. We can allow the agent to be able to move his finger that quickly, because he's hacking the matrix and everything, but the gun? He picked that gun up.

The second interesting thing about that scene is that if Neo is really moving his entire upper body and turning his neck in the time that it takes for a bullet travelling at 400m/s to reach him, then his upper body was moving at a rate of around 800km/h. He then instantly brakes, going from that speed to zero.

The sheer power of not believing in the existence of physics. Also you have to be in the Matrix.

Oh, and I've just gotten the soundtrack to Wrath of the Lich King. There are some nice pieces in there.

-Joe

2009-07-23T22:43:00.003+08:00

How unfortunate. Total solar eclipses do not give people superpowers. It also now occurs to me that there is no way that both Hiro and the other guys could have seen the same eclipse.

It has not been a terribly enjoyable week. I seem now to be more fluent with cursing, although I seem to be going for "bullshit" a lot more than usual. There have just been a number of things that have come to light that I am really not happy about. That, plus the need to complete some very irritating project. Once again, I wonder what it would be like if I weren't here.

Motivation is running thin. Even my normal means of procrastination have lost their meaning. I would like nothing more than to sit back with a bag of chips and watch some TV. Perhaps read a book. Which reminds me. The third Dan Brown book to feature Robert Langdon, The Lost Symbol, is set for release this mid-September. Originally titled The Soloman Key, the book will be set in Washington D.C., and will once again involve the Freemasons.

I definitely do want to read this book, but the urge isn't quite so strong. Seeing as that I did not enjoy the Da Vinci Code as much as I did Angels & Demons, I'm afraid that the pictogram of focus here would not be as captivating as I'd like it to be.

On the other hand, I am looking forward to Pirate Latitudes, which will be published post-humously this November. Considered a spiritual successor to The Great Train Robbery, this book will detail the raiding of a Spanish galleon. I am far more excited about this book, as I enjoy how Crichton's novels tend to feature the products of substantial research. I can probably expect the same cinematic detail and thrill that his previous novels have provided.

Someone should make a move out of Prey. That would be great.

Or not. Now that I think about it, the monsters, which are intelligent swarms of nanomachines, would look pretty unimpressive on the screen. They start learning to mimic humans towards the climax of the story, so the move would probably suck unless this is executed with Joker-like creepiness.

-Joe

2009-07-11T12:10:00.002+08:00

So it seems like my previous... Hundred or so posts have been predominantly negative. I don't know why. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that I somehow become more eloquent when I am speaking unkind things. Or perhaps this eloquence was developed from my extensive practice in speaking unkind things. Either way, it usually gives me a lot more to write about than if I say good things about something. When I say good things, it usually just amounts to "woah, awesome".

The common tests are over. I have a bad feeling about them. These are not the droids you are looking for. I worry that my selective negligence in studying certain topics will result in me being disappointed in a couple of weeks time. On the bright side, even if I don't do as well as I hope, they don't count for that much in the final grade. On the downside, if I do well, they won't count for much in the final grade.

Yesterday, by amazing coincidence, I met Mark on my way home. This was an amazing coincidence, because I did a number of things that day that were required for such an event to occur. First, I stayed back for lunch in school, and then stayed back some more to look at a book about dogs. I definitely do not do that very much. Second, I decided to take the longer route past AJC to the bus stop, instead of the... other one. Third, I happened to be almost out of view of the gates when Mark saw me. Had I been slightly faster, or him slightly slower, we wouldn't have even known that the other was there.

So anyway, I feel bad for the AJ bio students.

Faced with a weekend of nothingness in terms of responsibility, I started reading Neil Gaiman's Stardust. It's not a very long book, and I finished it in about seven hours or so. I hadn't seen the movie, so I can't comment on what they should or shouldn't have left out.

The book was nice. Ingenious use of magic, flying ships... some classic fairytale stuff. It had been a really long while since I read a non-Tolkien fantasy, and there are some marked differences. Tolkien's stories are all pretty epic, while Stardust was much more personal. I won't spoil the story for anyone who intends to read it eventually, but I'll say that the eighty-first lord of Stormhold is a real jerk.

Awesome.

-Joe

2009-07-03T17:20:00.002+08:00

Marketing is the cruellest mental torture that a school could ever inflict on a student such as myself. Why does a molecular biologist need to study marketing? Maybe one day he might choose to go into business. That's what they say. What is probably really happening is that any molecular biology student who had such thoughts once is now resolutely steering clear of the business sector, now that he has seen marketing.

I can't decide if marketing concepts consist of the same thing repeated over and over again, or if they are a deadly concoction of mind-numbing buzzwords, pseudo-psychology, and pop-culture neurology. Every time I try to read something from these notes, I literally feel like someone is firing ion cannons through my cranium. The whole time I'm thinking "Kill me now. Kill me." This eventually evolves into "Kill them. Kill them." and I usually give up reading around here.

Today, I managed to cover everything that I need to know about it. By "cover", I mean that I glanced briefly through them without actually understanding anything. The reason for this is that not a lot of it makes sense. There are equations without quantities. There are names for things that are complete misnomers. I came across this exact sentence: They are just buying more for value items. What does that even mean? Are they buying more value for their items? Are they buying items that have more value? Are they buying value, that by some logical paradox contains more items?

This wouldn't have bothered me as much as the rest of the general stuff, but that sentence appeared twice.

Anyway, here is why we don't need to study marketing, and why there is absolutely nothing that warrants a second module of it next semester:

One. There are three major groups of people studying in this course. On the more positive end of the spectrum, there are those who hope to further their studies, and perhaps eventually get tenure at a university or join the industry as a researcher. Just next to these people are the ones who have a mild interest in the subject, but would rather be technical experts rather than intellectuals. Then, there are the people who have no future whatsoever in the field of science, and are going to attempt to get an arts degree once they graduate.

None of these people are going to benefit from a dry, morale-crushing module such as this. Information Technology, I can understand. We all use computers, and knowing the language of databases is actually a good thing. Communications skills, makes me want to stab myself. But at least there are a number of things that you can learn from there. Marketing does not have such obvious benefits. All that marketing does, is make people like me a lot more motivated to study the other modules in an effort at procrastinating from marketing.

I have decided not to give a damn about this module. I am fairly confident in my ability to come up with things that look and sound professional, when they are in fact disguising a rickety network of loosely-joined ideas. Thus, I will instead focus my efforts on science, which actually makes sense to me.

I really like how my science modules are beginning to overlap in content. It just shows how applicable these fields are to each other. Genetic engineering has uses that extend all the way from drug screening to improving the production of metabolites. The techniques used in cell culture are even more important. This is deeply satisfying. Another reason that I am liking this is that the actual time spent studying is greatly reduced.

Science all fits together. People usually just imagine science as a collection of great pillars, one for each major branch of science, and with minimal connections between them. This simply isn't true. Science is a paint, and mathematics is the canvas. The paintbrush, logic. Science is organic. Each field occupies a space, but this space is not always exclusive to one topic. Each pixel of information pulses and dilates, merging with other fields. Events that occur on one "end" of the painting set into motion waves and ripples, changing the face of knowledge.

This somehow reminds me of an episode of Numb3rs where there was a device that could recreate the images shown on an LCD screen based on the radiation patterns emitted. It sounds like it could be possible. All we'd need is a really high-resolution scanner, and some kind of algorithm to deal with the radiation that has already passed through the head of the person using the screen.

-Joe

2009-06-29T11:29:00.002+08:00

And so a third week of break lies ahead of me. Not so much a break as before though, as I now have various assignments to complete. I technically also had various assignments to complete before this, but I sort of put them off when I heard the news.

As such, I need to do three reports that were actually due... today. One of them is on blood pressure and respiratory rate. All we had to do for that experiment was get someone to run up and down a flight of stairs a few times, and then measure his blood pressure. So, the rest of us got to sit in the lab and play with sphygmomanometers.

That lesson was incredibly boring, so you really can't blame us for what we did. Of course we did the usual experiments, like finding the "blood pressure" of a water bottle, and trying on the sphygnomanometer in various configurations to see what difference there would be. Eventually, we decided to do an actual (but thoroughly non-rigorous) experiment. We tried to determine the effect of thinking different things on blood pressure.

So there were five of us. All male. Each of us measured our blood pressure in turn, while thinking about nothing, while doing a moderately challenging maths problem, and while thinking happy thoughts. Happy thoughts specifically being typical testosterone-fuelled stuff.

Now, you would probably expect the blood pressure readings to be highest for that last one. And it was, for the other four guys. For some reason, my blood pressure spiked while doing a differentiation problem, and it lowered significantly when I was thinking about...stuff.

I have a reasonable explanation for the maths problem. It has been so long since I tried doing any math beyond simple arithmetic that I probably panicked when the answers didn't come to me right away.

I don't know, I think I have developed some kind of weird parasympathetic response to sexual imagery. It's probably not a good idea to go into detail about this stuff here, so I'll just say that I hope it was an anomalous reading.

Enough about that. My baroreflex to fun stuff is none of any of your concerns. So on Saturday, I went to the science center with some of the KI circle. Not a lot of us could make it, probably because of the mid-years. We didn't stay very long either. Still, it was great. The only problems with the Da Vinci exhibition were that it wasn't very big, and all the flying machines seemed to have frames of solid wood.

That irked me somewhat, because I would've thought that some time between discovering the codices and recreating the inventions, someone would have decided to use a thinner and lighter frame. I mean, it's not like heavy teak was the only wood available during renaissance Italy. Venice was a center of trade, so one would expect plenty of other building materials to have been known, especially to artists and inventors. If I didn't know that those huge contraptions were supposed to be flying devices, I'd have thought that they were gigantic, ornate chairs.

Everything else was very cool. A bit hard to appreciate at first, because all the gear systems and force distribution devices are quite commonplace in the modern world. It was a bit like reading The Origin; one must first realise that these ideas were thought up long before horses were considered fancy.

-Joe

2009-06-25T23:20:00.002+08:00

Bacon. Beef. Cheese. Onion rings. More bacon.

I love burgers. Burgers are the best fastfoods ever. Even so, I slightly regret the food-related choices I made today.

In essence, it really wasn't the smartest thing ever when I had a full meal at Carl's Jr only about an hour after a movie. I had some nachos and an ice-blended coffee during the movie. I won't go into details, but this resulted in me throwing up into a ditch after a very long and nauseating bus ride home.

It wasn't that bad. I probably puked maybe one mouthful or so. I didn't really keep it in my mouth long enough to measure it. I was all pale and sweaty when I got home. Paler than usual, which is pretty pale. I still feel slightly ill, but it's no big deal. I'll be fine.

So, the movie. Transformers 2 had a lot of good points. It had several bad points, but I feel that the good points significantly outweigh the bad points. This is not a sentiment shared by the so-called professional movie critics. In general, the critics were really unhappy about how the movie was really long and there was no real plot depth. I personally don't care about that, because I watched Transformers 2 for two reasons: Giant robots destroying each other, and explosions.

There were plenty of sequences involving giant robots destroying each other. Optimus Prime has these cool new red-hot bladey weapons, which he used to fight off a whole bunch of decepticons. Ravage is a freaking missile that becomes a deadly one-eyed panther. A panther that vomits insectoid particles, which can assemble themselves into a robot. The panther also has a gattling gun and two missile launchers.

Ravage is the single coolest transformer in the entire movie. He doesn't even have lines. He probably can't even be referred to as "he". The only other transformer that is even measurably cool enough to stand next to Ravage is Prime himself. The way they animate Ravage's feline grace makes me want to have a little miniature Ravage pet. I would totally buy a Ravage action figure right now.

He eventually had his spine ripped out of his body and used as a whip by Bumblebee. Badass.

Yes, I'm not even going to say anything about Megan Fox. Robot cats that puke insects are simply so much better.

-Joe

2009-06-21T14:18:00.002+08:00

It has started to rain again. It has finally rained. Allow me to emphasise "finally". Finally. Also allow me to emphasise "rain". Rain, with wind and water. Rain, with rainclouds that blot out the sun. There is nothing bad about rain, not in this day and age, and especially not in this country.

If I had Storm's ability, the first thing I'd do is increase the local cloud density. The sun is evil. The sun warms the ground. Heat rises off the ground and warms the air. Warm air makes people sweat. Very rarely is that a good thing. The heat distracts a person from his work. The heat downplays the enjoyment one expects to receive from a game. Heat makes people use water, which we unfortunately have to pay for.

Water. The environmentalists lie to the general public. Water is not a non-renewable resource. It's not as if used water is magically ejected into space, never to be seen again except maybe by the Voyager probe. Water stays comfortably on Earth. Our waste water is flushed into the seas, which feed the rainclouds, which in turn fill our reservoirs.

The problem is not that we are running out of water, as many of them would have us believe. The problem is that there is too much demand for water. Unless someone, hint hint, develops weather-control abilities, we're not going to be able speed up the conversion of water. I have a few ideas, but they all involve Maxwell's demon being a real thing.

In that light, maybe it is not so bad that a large proportion of the population believes that we will eventually run out of useable water. People are hard to teach, so perhaps the use of fear to convince people not to treat the matter lightly is perfectly justifiable.

Of course, none of this will be a problem once... certain events have come to pass.

I have to complain about how bad the grammar is in my lecture slides. It stopped being funny after I found out that a lot of it doesn't make any sense, and that I need to understand the topics for the tests. It's not as if the slides are an extensive story about past, present, and future events. Bad grammar, horrible tenses. Nonuniform omission of connector words. Sometimes they even leave out "and"s. Totally changes the meaning.

I find it particularly infuriating that hardly anyone knows how to use the word "whereby". Very often I have find it being used in place of "where". This is just so wrong.

For future reference, learning English is a process whereby grammatical skills and vocabulary are acquired.

Oh but I've got a great joke:

Three neighbouring kingdoms were fighting over piece of land in between them. The first kingdom was extremely wealthy, and they sent twenty knights with three squires each. They spent they day before the battle cavorting around and having jousting matches.

The second kingdom was not quite so rich, so they could only muster up a force of ten knights with two squires each. Still fairly confident, they also spent the day before the battle having mock battles amongst each other.

The third kingdom had recently experienced a famine, and could only send one elderly knight and one inexperienced squire. The knight spent the day praying that he would somehow avoid the battle. The squire set up a pot hanging high on a noose above a fire to cook some food in.

When the dawn of the next day arrived, the knights of the first and second kingdom were too tired from all the activity from the day before. The knight of the third kingdom was nowhere to be seen. Thus, the squires decided to enter the battle themselves. After a long battle of squirey bloodshed, only one walked off the battlefield victorious. It was the squire from the third kingdom. How did he win?

I take that back. This isn't a great joke. In fact, it will probably make you quite sad.

The squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides.

-Joe

2009-06-18T12:51:00.002+08:00

And so I started my revision. I realise now that disease-related microbiology is not one of my main interests. Which is rather unfortunate, because the vast majority of microbiology is in the medical sector.

Food microbiology is incredibly boring. Foodborne pathogens seem to appear everywhere, in every food we eat. Staphylococcus aureus is also apparently a food pathogen. It should be a law for every last food handler to wear some very clean gloves. I've changed my mind. Food microbiology is not incredibly boring. It's only slightly boring, but it is also very bad for the appetite.

That doesn't really change the fact that trying to memorise a list of pathogens and the diseases they cause is as tedious and un-enjoyable as science could possibly get. This is a job for stiff muggers who don't have anything better to do. There is really nothing complicated here. No complex processes to understand. Makes it an uninteresting task.

Plus, it's difficult to know the actual pronunciation of the names. You can never really trust what you hear in a Singaporean lecture hall. This is sort of a problem, because I'm quite dependent on verbal quizzing.

Head hurts slightly.

The kind of "detail" that the lecture notes go into just seem rather unnecessary. When they started giving me examples of metallic food packaging, I wanted to scream and hurl stuff at the monitor. Why do they feel the need to tell us that aluminium cans exist? Or tin cans. They can't possibly be thinking of asking this stuff in the common test.

Oh and here's something interesting. The original spelling of "aluminum" is as such. It was named by a British chemist in the early 1800s, who was attempting to use electrolysis to extract the metal from its oxide. It was later changed to "aluminium" to make it uniform with the other elements. However, as usual, the Americans had a problem with that. In 1892, a man named Charles Hall started advertising a new electrolytic method of extracting aluminium. Whether it was a genuine mistake, or an attempt at ease of pronunciation(there is one less syllable in "aluminum"), the adverts featured the older spelling.

Hall happened to be one of the more dominant players in the metal industry, so the public had "aluminum" imprinted onto their minds.

And that is why Americans spell it differently from everyone else today.

-Joe

2009-06-13T00:06:00.002+08:00

So I just finished watching Gattaca. I had been wanting to see what this movie was like ever since the whole eugenics thing. In fact, it was a review of this very movie that prompted me to choose the topic so many months ago. So even though the point of Gattaca was to show that even a genetically imperfect human being could achieve his goals in an unfair world, what I got from the plot was just the background story.

In the near future, people have begun to select and engineer their offspring to remove any unwanted physical disabilities. Myopia, rather than afflicting nearly half of the population, is now a mark of weakness branded on the invalid population; that is, the people who were not engineered at birth.

I know a great deal more about genetics now than I did a year ago. I therefore now know that Gattaca is a huge stretch of the imagination. In the film, based on blood or urine samples alone, a person's risk of disease, intelligence, life expectancy, and even likelihood to become mentally unstable, can be determined. What technology could possibly predict these things from just the biochemical properties of a drop of blood, I cannot imagine. I suppose this is my version of being unable to suspend belief. When physicists watch a space opera, their conscious minds scream and yell during every space battle. Here, my own mind writhes uncomfortably at these seemingly magical properties of DNA.

It is much different here, a serious, dramatic story, than from a lighter piece of fiction such as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When I think of the DNA analysis in Gattaca, I also think of the Total Perspective Vortex, a machine that simulates the entire universe based on the properties of a piece of fairy cake.

Up until actually reading that book, I had no idea that the term "fairy cake" existed. Turns out that a fairy cake is a cupcake.

Cupcakes are to muffins like donuts are to bagels. Bagels are like donuts, but they're lopsided. They taste different. They don't often have a layer of sugar, or white chocolate, or mint cream on them. The bagel is really just a piece of bread that happened to take the form of a torus. There is no reason for the bagel to do so, as the torus conformation of the donut is simply to ensure the lowest amount of calories in its central region. Bagels, seeing as that they are composed mainly of bread, are not rich in calories. Thus, the hole in the middle is not only completely and utterly unnecessary, but also represents the gaping void that the bread overlords(these are real people) store our money in.

In the confectionariosphere, bagels probably share a common ancestor with donuts. However, they would have branched off quite early in their phylogenetic history, an observation supported by how different their biochemical properties are. More likely is the hypothesis that states that bagels evolved their torus shape as a means to keep their kind in existence by mimicking the donut, a far superior organism. I mean, food. This is akin to the way the harmless king snake has a similar coloration to the more magnificent and potent coral snake.

On a side note, I sometimes have dreams where I play Russian Roulette with snakes instead of bullets. It never really works very well. Snake guns just can't happen.

According to On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Flavoured Food Items in the Struggle to be Produced and Sold for Profit, which I will write eventually, all confectioneries share a common ancestor. It is not too much of a stretch to assume that the common ancestor is some sort of starch-water conglomerate. However, it is important to note the possibility that certain items may have arisen independently. For instance, the English scone is rather difficult to classify. It has a rather unique property of being unnaturally dense for a bread-type food product. The only other similarly dense food is the muffin, but the muffin clearly falls under the Desserya kingdom, while the scone is sort of a cross between a large wallnut and a stick of butter.

Another interesting grouping to take note of are the cakes. Cakes are traditionally defined by their spongey, sweetened bread-like masses held together by a matrix of coagulated egg protein. Over the centuries, cakes have evolved to become extremely diverse. Many modern-day cakes possess outer coverings of crystallised cane sugar, or fusions of churned milk fat and artifical sweetening agents. Commonly mistaken for cakes are gelatinous cheesecakes. The gelatinous cheesecake is in fact, not a cake, but rather an agar that rests upon a base of delicious cookie crumbs.

Yum.

I actually like the base a lot more than the "cake". I also sense that I should stop writing this now.

-Joe

2009-06-06T17:49:00.003+08:00

It has been so long since my last post that I have almost forgotten that I actually write in this thing. I visited earlier and thought, why the hell hasn't the guy updated yet? Stupid question.

A lot of stuff happened over the past few weeks. Some of the things were very enjoyable. Others not so much. In the end, the only reason I am posting now is that the World of Warcraft server is down and I can't get a new belt for my druid.

It really annoys me when things don't go according to plan. Which is funny (and rather hypocritical), actually, because more often than not my plans never fully unravel, but I am perfectly content with them. No, it's really more of when I have a very limited amount of time, and much of the plan depends on someone else. It's when the tension is palpable, when I know that every second counts. This is especially important when I have some stupid other thing to do that I have to work my plan around.

I'm really just complaining right now because I waited all week for some playtime. I had my weekend planned out, with time allocated for this particularly dastardly report. Identification of food pathogens. Thanks to cross-contamination and some other unknown errors, my range of hypothetical pathogens is so huge that I could probably determine their most recent common ancestor.

Also interestingly, our food samples appear to have been contaminated with various strains of salmonella, and some pneumonia-causing bacteria. Food from our canteen.

Also I'm having this problem with deciding what tense to use for another report, which is really not a report, but rather a reproduction of procedure. Has, had been, will be, is. Why couldn't I have had my consciousness manifest in a universe where all my lecturers have good grammar? Life might be too easy, maybe.

I don't think anyone is reading this. If you're reading this, send me an email saying "Ten animals I slam in a net". You'll get a prize.

And then, it was my birthday. Oh, that was a good day. It had been a long time since I felt that happy. My classmates surprised me with a couple of presents. The last time I got presents like that was when I was eight. Or seven. Maybe six. I can't even remember the last time.

Nope, server's still down.

I'll be settling for something else then. Maybe I'll get a movie, eat some chips. It will be tricky getting my family to not pester me about one thing or another. A job like this calls for finesse. Finesse being a lock, earphones, and loud music.

I am in severe need of intellectual stimulation.

-Joe

2009-05-14T21:08:00.002+08:00

Whoo. It's certainly been a while. Not a lot has happened lately, other than that this semester is significantly more enjoyable than the previous one. The reasons for that are threefold: One, all the annoying teachers that I didn't like are no longer in charge of my class. Two, the subject content is much deeper and more expansive. Two-point-five, none of the science modules have stupid or irrelevant projects. And three, most of the modules use passable grammar.

I myself have not changed much. I still spend lots of time procrastinating, and constantly feel torn between games and books. When I'm reading or working, I think about how I could be earning more gold with my druid. When I'm playing, I think about how I could finish that last bit in a few hours if I weren't so interested in killing things.

Alas, my work is catching up with me. Recreation is going to have to take a step back to make room for a different kind of fun. Knowing me, however, the subtle tide that is online games will rise again and smother whatever work ethic I might have come up with.

I recently had a new air-conditioning unit installed in my room. The old one had been giving me problems for months. Sometimes it wouldn't start. Other times, it would blow warm air out for no discernible reason. The malfunctioning got more frequent lately, and so now I have this cool sci-fi thing hanging on the wall.

I like to think of it as a high-tech but underused cryogenic system.

The materials science people need to invent a paper substitute that is maybe ten times less dense, but just as strong. I say this because textbooks are irritatingly heavy. I have borrowed a book on human anatomy and physiology to help me out in one of my modules, but it's such a hassle to carry around. It's huge, so I can't fit it into my bag. It's really heavy, so even if I could fit it into my bag, I wouldn't. It also happens to be soft and floppy, so it is difficult to carry it around without it spilling out of my arms and into the nether-world of underused textbooks.

I realise that I don't need everything that the book has, so I have opted to start summarising the required chapters into a notebook. This is all because of my conditioned aversion to NYP lecture notes. Even though the grammar is much better now, I still don't like them. They've got this aura...

I have not actually started this yet, but I intend to before long. I'm happy that most of the modules are now largely weighted in written tests, but this unfortunately means I need to spend less time pushing buttons and more time scribbling illegibly.

I can picture perfect biological diagrams, but when I draw them out they look like a bunch of circles and lines. Kind of what they'd look like if Picasso drew them, only worth a lot less money.

-Joe

2009-05-02T17:24:00.003+08:00

And so, I joined the band. On a side note, I hate ants even more now.

The first week of school felt slower than anything. There was almost nothing taught that I didn't already know. Also, there wasn't a lot of homework. So, I got through the week questing on my druid.

Second week, we began to touch on the more content-based hard science topics. To my great delight, I found out that pretty much all the modules that I am taking were weighed heavily in written tests. How fortunate for me, how unfortunate for almost everyone else. It is at times like this, that I truly appreciate the bell curve.

Today, Shaun and I went for our first band session. Insert usual complaints about the needlessness of orientation and icebreaking activities. And then, ants got into my bag. These were like the ants that were bothering me in my room, except bigger and faster. They were black ants on steroids. I must've placed my bag right on their trail. In my efforts to remove the ants from my bag, I also dislodged two years worth of junk that was up until now enjoying a lovely stay at the bottom of my bag.

Now, these ants were simply ferocious. I got bitten(or stung, I don't know. I didn't let them stay on me long enough to observe their methods of causing me terrible pain) maybe twenty-five times, and I somehow had an ant in my pants. You probably already know this, but do not let ants get into your pants.

Other than that, today was a nice day. Playing in a band makes me forget how people normally are.

I need to do some stupid report on the qualities of yogurt. Ygbbsdbbsbddghh.

-Joe

2009-04-18T14:03:00.002+08:00

Yesterday, I discovered this cool little game from an independent manufacturer. http://www.thepowerofpaint.com/.

It's a first-person shooter puzzle game, a lot like Portal. However, instead of portals, you use paint to get around levels. There are three paint colours: green, red, and blue. Green makes you jump, red makes you move faster, and blue lets you stick to surfaces.

You are given a paint gun that lets you colour the walls and floors, and the game makes you use the three colours in concert to solve the puzzles. It's not a very long game, nor does it have mind-blowing graphics, but I found it tremendously entertaining. Except maybe for those parts where you have to crawl on ceilings to get places. I felt a bit ill after that.

Given that it is a project made by game design students, I don't think that it's going to be spruced up and released into the market anytime soon. Although if they did decide to commercialise this, those guys are going to be rich.

I wonder if I can buy Portal, separate from the rest of The Orange Box.

Q: What what's red and smells like blue paint?

A: Red paint.

Recently, I've been reading up on homeopathy. Homeopathy is the practice of heavily diluting a substance believed to have curative effects, and having the effects still present in the solvent(usually water or alcohol). It is also based on the "like cures like" principle, where the substance that causes ill effects can be made to cure them when diluted properly.

Apparently, heavily diluting snake venom makes a snakebite cure.

Homeopathy is not to be confused with herbal remedies, like... well, herbs.

What astonishes me is the number of people who believe in and subscribe to homeopathic therapies. According to practitioners, the "active" ingredient somehow "imprints" itself onto water, such that the water is altered even when the amount of ingredient remaining is effectively zero. This simply makes no sense. For one, the relation between dosage and effect as demonstrated by regular medical practice is entirely thrown out of the window here.

Secondly, water molecules can't have their "vibration states"(this is what they call it, seriously) possibly altered by such minute concentrations of solute, and no amount of manual shaking and stirring is going to do anything special.

Besides, the entire principle of homeopathy seems to overlook something: Water molecules are fungible. In every glass of water you drink, there is a strong likelihood that at least one of the molecules in there has passed through the gut of Benjamin Franklin. Almost all of the water that you drink has at one point been in the ocean, inside organisms, in sewage systems, in the air... If water really retained any sort of property simply by being in contact with another substance, then every drop of tap water is a homeopathic remedy to everything.

Also, how do you pronounce "fungible"? What sound does the G make?

-Joe

2009-04-10T19:49:00.002+08:00

My writing has been way off for a really long time now. I haven't even tried to stay focused on one topic since those essay questions during the exams... But they don't count. I was writing for a grade then. It's probably all for nothing anyway. I doubt I'll get the top scorer award in microbiology.

So, recently I've been pretty bored. I picked up The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series -all five books- from the school library. A pleasant surprise, really. I had no idea that they had it there. I've been reading it on and off. Somehow, I'm just not that into reading any more. My eyes start to burn after a while and I need to take short breaks.

I also finally printed the music sheet for The Carnival of Venice that I got from Shaun. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the wrong variation. There's one by a guy named J.B. Arban, and there's another by Herbert L. Clarke. I much prefer Clarke's version, mainly because I can actually play it somewhat, but also that it sounds less "show-offy" and more like an actual solo.

In other news, my table has been invaded by Pharaoh ants... I think. Well, they certainly fit the description: small, black and goddamn annoying. Which is strange, really, since I haven't eaten anything up here for more than a month now. It's like the ants just suddenly stumbled across a few microscopic potato chip fragments and decided that there would be more. And so here they are, crawling around in that sick, sick manner that small black ants do. Watching a spider move is fun. Watching these midgets of the arthropod world mess around on my desk... very unfun.

Worst of all, I can't find any trail to follow. All I see is a few stray ants crawling over the wooden expanse. I've been squishing them, wiping my table down with isopropanol... but an hour later, I detect motion out of the corner of my eye. Augh. Sometimes, they'll get onto my arms and bite me at crucial moments, such as when I'm trying to execute a complicated coordinated assault on terrorist facilities. It doesn't hurt that much, but hell, seriously annoying.

I've read a little bit about Pharaoh ants. It turns out that they were initially indigenous to Indonesia and West Africa. But then, they hitched rides on boats and things and ended up pretty much all over the world. Kind of like rats, except that those things came from China. And are pretty big, so you can pretend to be Steve Irwin when you catch and kill them.

The black ants can have massive colonies, composed of multiple nests and multiple egg-laying queens. Adding to this freakish display of reproduction, they also produce individuals capable of sexual reproduction, unlike other ants. They're the sort of animal that all other animals want to kill.

Interestingly, instead of releasing evil queens-to-bes and drones when expanding, they "bud off". A queen(one of the many) among a small number of worker ants leave the colony, carrying immature larvae and eggs to another site to set up a new colony. I find this really fascinating, because this is just like fungi seeding. You cut off a piece of mold and put it somewhere else, and you get more mold. Ants have been recognised as superorganisms for quite some time now, but this budding thing is just a small step away from turning Pharaoh ants into real-life monsters.

(Plus they also have been known to eat shoe polish. It's like an unstoppable army of expendable cockroaches.)

I'm going for the insecticide.

-Joe

Oh oh and I'm going to get faster internet! WHOOOO

2009-04-04T20:17:00.002+08:00

Mm. Hm. It's been quite a while now.

I just feel like complaining about something that doesn't concern me in the slightest. If the globe continues to warm up at its current rate, in twenty years time the only polar bears we will see will be living in zoos. In other words, nothing will change.

Every year, thousands of Canadians and a variety of people from the northern Europe traipse up to the icy sheets and hunt seals. In my mind, they all wear T-shirts with "Club Baby Seals" and a cute sea puppy emblazoned on them. They kill seals for meat, blubber, and their pelts, because apparently seal fur is a nice material. This doesn't really bother me. What bothers me is the thousands of other people who take offense to seal clubbing for some reason.

They're mainly in the animal rights activist category. A number of them are fanatical vegans, who are at least consistent in their beliefs. However, the rest of them are just mindless drones who have had their emotions played upon by the vegans. It also helps that seals are generally considered adorable little critters. Show them a few pictures of those furry torpedoes having their skulls bashed in and they cry bloody murder.

Seals are wild animals. Before the advent of farming, humans ate wild animals. After farming was invented, we still ate animals. The only reason that people get so worked up about seal clubbing is that seals look nice. Sealing does not endanger the species. In fact, the most sought-after variety is still standing strong with a population three times that of most other seals.

I'll bet that if seals were giant arthropods with chitinous exoskeletons, no one would even care how many of them are killed. In fact, there'd probably be entire organisations promoting the extermination of such a hideous species. Meanwhile, I would be torn between suggesting awesome ways to kill these things, and trying to save them because a terrestrial arthropod the size of a dog would be pretty awesome.

Either way, I think that the people concerned in these battles are just getting a little too into it. Will it really matter if the seal population drops slightly? Will it really matter if another baby panda is born? Sure, each and every living creature is an expression of complexity, and the wonders of evolution, but the loss of one species allows another species to take its place. Things change. Great things can happen. I'm not sure what I'm saying now. I need to lie down.

I guess what I'd really like would be a way to preserve the genetic information for each and every species. That way, we could populate a habitat, Jurassic Park style. In the distant future, it would be like an extremely intricate form of gardening. Grow an ecosystem from a variety of flora and fauna. It would require intelligence, finesse, and a deep understanding of ecology. It would be Spore, but in real life.

I hope synthetic organs become a reality within my lifetime. I want to see the future.

-Joe

2009-03-21T18:27:00.002+08:00

I have seen The Watchmen.

I didn't actually plan to go watch it. Well, I did at first, but then I found out that it was rated M18. So I complained about it a bit and resolved to buy the DVD. Then, I went out yesterday to meet up with Leonard and Jeremy, and we ended up watching The Watchmen.

The first thing about The Watchmen that really strikes you is how Dr. Manhattan doesn't like wearing stuff, and walks around naked for pretty much the entire film. There are these scenes where where you can see his glowing blue genitals clearly in the middle of the screen. Usually they're not in a position that says that you are intended to focus on them, but come on. You see the naked torso of a guy on the screen, what do you do? Check to see if he's really naked. After the first scene of that, you spend the rest of the movie wondering when the quantum phallus is going to appear again.

Also, imagine the guys on the CGI effects team who did Dr. Manhattan's glow. In order to have achieved a uniform glowing effect, they would have had to edit the scenes frame by frame, adding textures. Dr. Manhattan walks(and sometimes hovers) onto the scene fully unclothed for maybe a minute or two in the whole movie. Take 50 frames per second, that works out to... a lot of penis to edit.

I'm probably missing the point of the whole movie. I don't have a lot to say, except that it was awesome. I have only read four out of twelve of the graphic novels, so I can see that the beginning of the film was extremely faithful to the comic. Of course, everyone else says that. All the reviews include some comment about the film being too restricted to the graphic novel. I don't think that that's really an issue; would you have changed the plot of The Passion of the Christ?

The fight scenes were great. I really liked the way the slow-motion effects were implemented. I guess I'm still a sucker for bullet time. It also kinda reminded me of that first battle in 300.

If anyone wants the full plot, I have the graphic novel in digital form. It's really cool in the way that unlike regular superhero comics, there is no clear enemy. No supervillains with infinite supplies of henchmen or armies of giant killer robots. Instead, the whole thing is really about the struggle that humanity faced during the Cold War. Also other things, but I'm not that interested in literature, and I don't want to spoil the story for those who don't know of it yet.

Air hockey is awesome.

-Joe

2009-03-13T12:30:00.002+08:00

Oh no. I have fallen ill. For the first time, however, I am able to identify what is wrong with me. As usual, it is most likely a rhinovirus. Okay, that didn't help much. All I can do is wait it out.

Probably contracted it from my brother.

This is so not fun.

What was fun, was the Singapore Science & Engineering Fair that I attended yesterday. I listened to people talk a lot about their projects, most of which I was quite unfamiliar with. The theoretical physics projects just blew over my head, and I could only struggle to understand the experimental physics projects. At a very basic level.

The biology ones I definitely did better at appreciating. I didn't have to replace any jargon with "thingy" and "stuff". Still, it made me realise how much more there is for me to discover. Made me realise how little I've actually learned so far, and how inarticulate I actually was with the biology terms when speaking. It's not like I don't know these words, it's just that I don't ever use them outside of writing.

Or maybe I just have a problem with public speaking.

Thankfully, the people eventually understood what I was trying to say, and I ended up even talking to one of the mentors regarding the stratification of the epidermis.

I should probably have gone and taken a look at more of the projects. Still, I'm glad that I went.

-Joe

2009-03-08T17:15:00.002+08:00

What's really funny, is that a game released about eight years ago, featuring gritty, 2D graphics, and built for processors that had their speed measured in megahertz, is still more fun than most recent works.

I've just about gotten bored of Titan Quest. It wasn't really bad, not in the way that some other games were totally horrible. The real problem with it was that while interesting at first, the novelty quickly wore off, leaving a homogeneous, repetitive grind. Okay, so the other games I play are also repetitive grinds, with little variation other than the style in which the grind is carried out. However, it is this very quality that determines whether or not the game eventually sells for $20 in the stores...

See, even though Titan Quest mirrors Diablo II very closely, it just lacks this feel to it that made the Diablo series fun to play. The first problem is that there's a large lack of impact effects. When you swing your axe at a monster, you want to hear the sound of a blade hitting dull flesh. Titan Quest just doesn't have that. It's the same for when monsters attack you. No sound worth listening to.

Also, music. Good games have lots of music. Good movies are famous for their music. The people at Ironlore must have been on a budget. I can run from Delphi to Athens, killing stuff all the way(a process that takes at least an hour), and I hear maybe a minute and a half of music. It's not even good music, either. The attempts at creating ambiance in this game are so weak that I get more fun out of playing some Weird Al and thinking about how horribly they go together.

The next problem is a gameplay issue. For no reason, your character doesn't respond instantaneously to your mouseclicks. There is always some delay between the commanding mouseclick, and the firing of your bow. This is generally very annoying. I thought that I would get used to this, but I ended up hoarding equipment that decreased the time needed to shoot stuff so that I wouldn't feel the delay. After less than a week of this, I booted up Diablo and marveled at how my Amazon warrior could do stuff without suffering from "real-world acceleration".

They had really better not screw this up in Diablo III. When I click something, I want lightning bolts to fly out and destroy it immediately.

On the upside, I did learn a few things about Greek mythology. For instance, one person I really would not want to be is Actaeon.

Actaeon was a hunter, who, long story short, stumbled upon Artemis bathing in the woods. Artemis, being a goddess, turned Actaeon into a stag out of anger. Actaeon was then killed by his own hunting dogs.

I mean, come on, seriously? You'd think that a god would know better than to bathe in the mortal realm where hunters were likely to come for a drink. She probably set the whole thing up because she was bored and wanted to practice her turning-people-into-animal skills and cruel irony.

Anyway, I'm going to start work soon. I kinda had to lie to my mother about where the stem cells came from. Oh well.

I will make this.

-Joe

2009-03-01T13:35:00.002+08:00

I have just purchased about $420 worth of gadgets and games. Well, mostly gadgets. In particular, a new set of audio equipment for my listening pleasure: a Sony Walkman mp3 player, and a set of earphones from Shure. Also a copy of Titan Quest.

As of now, I am very satisfied with the items I have bought. The media player has an 8GB storage space and isn't annoyingly large. I was a little worried about that, since I have been using this little pendrive-sized player from Samsung for about 3 years now. Overall, I feel that I have made a good choice this time, and I'm thankful that Sony realises the importance of tactile buttons and a slim chassis.

My new earphones are a tricky thing. I bought the Shure SE110, which happens to be in the lower range of earphones from Shure. Still, after using it, I have found that it is in fact superior to my old Audio Technica set. I had to do a bit of experimenting with the sleeves(the part that fits into your ear) before there was any noticeable improvement at all. It turned out that the foam sleeves, which are squishy and spongy like earplugs, worked the best. Excellent noise isolation. As I type now, I can't hear the sound of the keys clicking at all.

The Shure earphones are designed in a way that makes them a little inconvenient to put on, but I think I've gotten pretty good at at already. Now I wonder if I should have forked out an extra sixty dollars to get a higher-end pair of earphones. Still, I think that this was a worthwhile investment; if the reviews are to be believed, then I'll be using this pair for at least another couple of years. I'm going to deal with the difficult putting-on process, because now that I have tried these, my old earphones just seem to produce a tinnier sound.

Now, surprisingly, the game that I bought wasn't priced anywhere near any of the other ones. Usually I expect a game to cost about $60, give or take a few bucks. However, Titan Quest was only about $20. That was strange, because it is a fairly recent game(released in 2007), and it doesn't exactly have any major issues(like Hellgate: London). I have played through some of the first act of the game and I have found it relatively entertaining.

Titan Quest is based on ancient Greek mythology. Basically, the titans have broken free from their prisons and are wrecking havoc all over Greece. Naturally, it's up to the hero to single-handedly stop them and save the world. Whatever Zeus and the other Olympians are doing is beyond me.

Anyway, the whole Greek mythology thing makes the story pretty cool. I'll get to fight the Cyclops, Medusa, and a bunch of other big figures.

Even though I would consider this game a good Diablo clone, and a sufficiently entertaining action RPG, it does have one problem: There's no blood. It's like as if blood wasn't invented until after ancient Greece. I can hew horde after horde of Satyrs and not a single drop of the red goo falls to the ground. That's just kinda depressing.

Picture unrelated.

-Joe

2009-02-23T15:31:00.002+08:00

With four exams over, I only have one more to study for. The past week was rather uneventful. Exams aren't what they used to be. The only thing worth mention was probably that I forgot to study this one particular thing, and ended up spending fifteen minutes imagining cool shapes spinning around in space before I could answer the question.

Anyway, it has recently come to my attention that there is another version of Wikipedia, called the Simple English Wikipedia. It is directed to people who are learning English, or are not very good at the language. This is a good thing, there are many individuals who are attempting to learn the English Language, and receive an education at the same time.

However, there are a few things about the Simple English Wikipedia that I find... humorous. I feel bad when I laugh at it. I just can't help it.

Firstly, the URL is "simple.wikipedia.org". Now, what word comes to your mind when you hear "simple"? You think of "simpleton", and then an accompanying mental image of some Southern person with poor hygiene appears. You know, the kind that go fishing for catfish with their bare hands as a sport.

Big catfish, in muddy rivers... Let's just say that it's not exactly the safest activity ever.

Second of all, the articles are... Interesting. Here, have a look at an excerpt from the "magnetism" article:

"...then the north pole of the magnet will turn and point to the Earth's magnetic north pole (which is an big area of rock in Canada that contains a very big amount of iron in it)."

also, from the Big Bang Theory:

"...Because most things become colder when they become bigger, the universe must have been very hot when it started."

Hee hee hee.

I know, I'm a terrible person.

-Joe

2009-02-14T12:58:00.001+08:00

Well, two days after Darwin Day, we celebrate the execution of whom we know now as Saint Valentine. Don’t you think it’s funny that we celebrate his execution, rather than his birth? Or some other interesting thing that he did? Being killed for committing a crime doesn’t sound like the way the guy would want to be remembered.

We also celebrate the decision made by Hallmark to suck fourteen billion dollars out of the world every year, just for this occasion alone.

Anyway, this day brings to mind several things, including chocolates, heart-shaped objects, actual hearts, and prairie voles.

(Because, see, the prairie vole is the only other mammal that can celebrate Valentine’s Day)

While people go around giving each other sweets and plant reproductive organs and such, not many of them think of why they’re doing it. Ask any of them, and they’ll most likely respond with “for love”, or “for friendship”. That’s all good and well, I guess. The Valentine’s Day tradition dates back to even before Hallmark thought about it.

Back when the Roman Empire was still around, the Pagans celebrated a holiday on the fourteenth, in honour of Juno Fructifier, Queen of the Roman Gods. Incidentally, she was also the goddess of marriage. One of the rituals involved every eligible woman writing their names down onto a piece of paper, and casting it into a box, which would then be mixed around. The men would then be required to pick a piece of paper from it. The ritual dictates that the two would have to become a couple for the day, and if they are willing, for the rest of the year.

So it’s sort of like a hybrid between Lotto and a matchmaking service. I wouldn’t be surprised if they still did that today.

Oh, but that’s not all. On the very next day, they celebrated Lupercalia, in honour of Faunus, the god of fertility. Part of the ritual involved men wearing goat-skins and running around, trying to hit women with little flails. Apparently, this was supposed to ensure fertility.

It is not specified what these little flails really are.

Anyway, the story goes that after Saint Valentine (the first, as well as the second and third) did all the stuff we’ve heard in the tales, the emperor of 469AD decided to have February fourteenth become a celebration in honour of Valentine. This pretty much gave the Christians a foothold in how the celebrations were carried out, and it seems that they have reigned supreme on Valentine’s Day.

At least until it was commercialised in the 20th century.

Mmm, chocolate.

-Joe

2009-02-12T16:17:00.001+08:00

Well, hello everyone. Who still reads this.

Today is Darwin Day, the day that we commemorate the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth, as well as the sesquicentennial of the publishing of The Origin of Species. We all know about the theory of evolution by now, and it is probably thanks to that, that humanity’s knowledge of biology has advanced as far as it has now. After all, everything we have come up with regarding this wonderful field is based on this theory.

According to a National Geographic article I read recently, Darwin’s famous discoveries on the Galapagos Islands are merely the tip of a metaphorical iceberg that plunges much further into the depths of his journeys. The Galapagos Islands were in fact, near the very end of the HMS Beagle’s voyage.

Much longer before then, when Darwin could hardly have been considered a naturalist, the ship visited a variety of places along South America, where they encountered a number of fossil sites. Some of these, including a giant prehistoric armadillo and what could possibly have been a fearsome, eight-foot-tall sloth, were even named after Darwin himself. It was here that he noted some dissimilarities between different types of rhea(which were caught and eaten regularly by the crew) and possibly the time and place that some of his ideas of evolution-then called “transmutation”- began to take form.

Of course, never having really been a professional scientist of any kind, he could not have been able to make sense of what he saw. So he sent samples back to an ornithologist.

I’ve always found it funny that up until Watson and Crick, few of the major discoveries and revelations in biology have been made by actual scientists. Truth be told, I can only think of Fleming here. I’m sure there are more, but I’m not educated enough.

First we have Darwin, originally a clergyman, who finally put the theory of evolution into a book. Then, we have Mendel, who lived as a monk, who came up with the idea of “factors” that influenced an organism’s phenotype. I suppose all his free time and love for gardening were the main contributing factors to this discovery.

It’s too bad I’ll never discover any new genetic algorithms while playing video games.

Anyway, there is a surprising link between Charles Darwin and Francis Crick. Shortly before Darwin died, he was sent a sample of a tiny freshwater clam attached to a water beetle, and he actually wrote a short paper on it. The sender of the clam was named Walter Drawbridge Crick, who turns out to be Francis Crick’s grandfather.

The guy who dreamt up the structure of DNA while on LSD, was the grandson of a man who corroborated with Darwin. I found that to be quite an interesting coincidence.

-Joe

2009-02-08T14:59:00.002+08:00

If there's anything that modern computer and internet usage should have by now, it is common address book formats for different email clients.

Quite recently, I realised how much more efficient Google Mail was compared to Windows Live Mail, which I am using now. I didn't need all the fancy graphics and other stuff that Windows Live offered, and Gmail is directly compatible with Mozilla's own email client: Thunderbird.

Thunderbird looks very similar to the older versions of Microsoft Outlook. It's small, fast, and doesn't have unnecessary fancy stuff. Also, having both Firefox and Thunderbird on my computer makes me feel like some awesome Pokémon trainer.

However, Thunderbird was where all my troubles began.

First, I had some trouble configuring Thunderbird for my Hotmail account. After some internet research, I learned that only a paid Hotmail account can be used on Thunderbird. So I had to scrap that idea.

Then, I noticed that I could use Gmail on Thunderbird, without going out of my way to put in all the email data things. Since I already had a Gmail account, I decided to just use that. Unfortunately, I ran into yet another problem. Thunderbird didn't seem to be downloading messages from my Gmail account. Messages were there on the browser-based Gmail, but not on Thunderbird.

I found this most strange, as I could send emails perfectly fine using Thunderbird. I just couldn't receive any. Because of this, I spent roughly three hours scouring the Google and Mozilla forums looking for a solution. Eventually, I think I found one that worked, because somehow Thunderbird began to receive new emails.

So, problem one was solved. Problem two: Switching to Gmail.

The main issue here was letting everyone know that I was going to start using a new email address. In order to do this, I needed some way to inform everyone. I figured that the easiest way to carry this out was to transfer my contact list to Thunderbird, and then send out an email telling everyone that this was my new email address.

Sounds simple, right? Well, I certainly thought so. That was, until I realised that in order for me to import a contact list to Thunderbird, I needed Windows Live Mail to export a contact list to a file on my desktop. It was working fine, until I found out that somewhere during the export-import procedure, the contact information and the fields they were under somehow got totally mixed up. I ended up getting contact information with email addresses under the "name" field, and other crap.

So then, after tweaking the settings around a bit, I sort of managed to get the names and email addresses under the right fields. After which, I realised that only about a quarter of my contacts made it over to Thunderbird, for some reason.

I later concluded that this was because I was only exporting instant messaging contacts. I was wrong. The real problem lay in that the CSV file was having trouble, due to that a lot of my contact information wasn't filled in. Some people had no name, for example.

Now this was really annoying, so I turned to the browser-based Windows Live Mail, hoping that the export function there would work properly. As it turns out, it doesn't even work. I click "export", and I get sent to a blank screen. There's nothing there.

Now, this sort of defeated me. I couldn't think of any way to do this without manually editing everything. I decided to handle the problem of letting everyone know that I was changing my email address first.

This brought along an entire new set of problems. I couldn't find a function to mail everyone, so I stuck every contact into a mailing list. Then, when trying to mail to that list, Windows Live Mail told me that there were some contacts in there with no email addresses!

Naturally, this made me feel like kicking a puppy, and then lighting it on fire.

Fortunately(or unfortunately), I neither had a puppy nor a large volume of flammable substance nearby. As such, I gave up and decided to handle this another time.

Which is now.

-Joe

2009-02-05T14:20:00.002+08:00

I am the lord of Tetris! Tetrominos all bow at my feet. They cower in fear as I slot them into each other, regardless of their configuration. And then they go explodey, allowing me to slot yet more 4-blocks into their quivering piles.

Facebook Tetris is fun. The colours of the L pieces are different from what I am used to though.

I should probably not have been playing Tetris, given that I have not even come close to finishing my revision. I do have an entire week off next week though. Still, knowing myself, I won't use that week very well.

However, you can't fault me. I have reasons. First reason is that on the 12th, it is Darwin Day, when people commemorate the naturalist's bicentennial. I think. So, as a supporter of teaching evolution in schools, I am taking that day off to demonstrate natural selection. This will be done by slacking around and making myself appear to be a poor reproductive partner, thus lowering my chances of having progeny for the day.

Not that I have a very high chance of having progeny on regular days.

Or maybe, I will spend the day imagining how it would be like if I could segregate and breed humans in different manners, hopefully one day creating a race of super-human, who are smarter, faster, and are able to tell jokes without laughing uncontrollably themselves.

Hmm. Maybe those two activities could be performed at once.

Unfortunately, it is far more likely that I will spend the day lolling around in a metaphorical tar-pit of boredom. It is also likely that I will spend some time imagining what it would be like to be a wizard.

See, the whole problem with wizards in the movies is that they never use the full extent of their powers. Gandalf is a very good example of this. Gandalf, a Maiar of Valinor, possessing the ring of power Narya, is supposed to have god-like wisdom and magical prowess. He does slightly more magic in the novel, but the only key instance that I remember clearly was when he set a forest on fire to scare away some wolfy beast things.

You'd think that a wizard of such power could have done something else, less destructive and more useful. Like maybe make a dinner of wolf meat.

The problem lies in that an all-powerful, nigh invulnerable adventurer makes for an extremely dull story. It would be fun at first(at least for RPG mage fans) to watch a wizard blow stuff up with relative ease. But then he will just stroll along smiting bad guys and saves the day, without any proper climax or risk of an apocalyptic event coming to pass.

However, people like their heroes to be powerful. So, the story-writers try to fulfill this requirement without turning the plot into an ass-kissing tale about the protagonist. When your main character is an unstoppable force, your bad guy needs to be an immovable object. Enter Superman and kryptonite.

I have a theory. Lex Luthor is not the main villain of Superman. The villain is really kryptonite. Lex Luthor is just an enterprising businessman, who happened to see the value of the green meteor rock. The fact that he does villainy things like stealing cakes is irrelevant. You can say that the kryptonite business made him so rich that he was bored enough to do things like that.

My point is, that whenever Superman faces Lex Luthor, Lex just throws a glowing green rock at him and the actual fight happens between Superman and the kryptonite. They don't actually show it on the screen, but I'll bet that there is some intense mental battle between Clark Kent and the green crystal.

Ultimately, Superman always loses, until some other event occurs that breaks up the fight between him and kryptonite. Even though Superman loses, he never dies. Thus, it can be said that the battle between Superman and kryptonite is ultimately never resolved either. There you go: Unstoppable force and Immovable Object.

...man, what am I talking about?

-Joe

2009-01-29T20:03:00.003+08:00

Whoo. Hmm. Well. I finished reading the Death Note series.To be honest, it was really kind of dry reading after L died. L's successors were just either too uninvolved or had this dominating asshole aura. Also, the appearance of the new Shinigami felt a bit unneeded.

In fact, it actually started to get boring after the whole cat-and-mouse thing stopped.

So then, anyway, (surprise surprise) I've actually begun to do revision for the exams. It feels so strange to actually need to study now, after having basically been on holiday for the past year. But this time there are real, important modules that I'm taking, and within each of them contain essential knowledge for my advancement as a person.

There's organic chemistry, which no student should do without. There's biochemistry, which I definitely can't do without. Unfortunately, biochemistry is a denser subject than everything I've come across so far. That includes... Everything.

If I'm not wrong, the H2 biology syllabus covers some of the reactions we study in biochemistry. Mostly related to respiration. My module covers a bunch of other stuff, including photosynthesis, gluconeogenesis, amino acid synthesis, nucleic acid metabolism... cycles and other things. There are at least nine of them. And each of them contains as many reactions as nine chemistry lessons.

Well, maybe not, but it certainly feels like a lot. The troubling thing is that there are no little logic shortcuts that I can use. It's not like chemistry where I can view some reactions as analogous to others. Biochemistry is just plain memorisation. Enzymes, catalysts, super-long names. Not only that, but there are so many ways to name a biological molecule. Which gets pretty confusing, since different textbooks like to use different names.

Take for example glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate. Abbreviated as G3P. Then there's also 3-phosphogylceraldehyde. You would have to abbreviate it 3GP. Which, while is essentially the same as G3P, looks completely different to me.

On the bright side, I am beginning to see logical links in the naming systems... Discounting the various ways to name one molecule. Phosphatases are for removing phosphate groups. Kinases transfer phosphate groups from high energy molecules to lower energy molecules. Where there's a dehydrogenase, there'll be NADH/FADH2 molecules.

So, I'll be done with this in due course.

-Joe

2009-01-23T11:19:00.003+08:00

Jesus Christ.

You know, I'm all for letting the world know about science and how awesome it is, but sometimes those science journalist people really take things a little far. I get it, science magazines, like all other magazines, exist to be sold. But they represent a front, a face of Science itself. Sort of like how the Mouth of Sauron speaks for Big Eyeball Dude, except less evil.

I'm complaining in particular about a recent article, which was printed in the New Scientist publication. The article itself is informative and interesting, but the front cover of the magazine is gut-wrenchingly deceptive. It shows a kind of leafy tree- representing Darwin's idea of how all organisms were linked in a kind of "tree of life". On top of this tree, there are three huge words saying "Darwin was wrong".

Any discerning individual would probably read the article to figure out what exactly Darwin was wrong about. It turns out that it is simply that instead of pure, clean evolutionary trees as people used to think about, there is in fact an un-unravel-able web of genetic changes at the unicellular level. This is mainly due to many prokaryotes' ability to undergo horizontal gene transfers.

So that's what Darwin was wrong about. Because, you know, the concept of genes, let alone gene transfer between bacteria, was practically non-existent during his time.

But that's not what majority of the world is going to think. The laymen will look at the cover and think, oh, so I didn't actually evolve. The creationists would then tell the laymen, "Yeah, that's right. Science disproved itself." And suddenly we have a lot more people joining the Intelligent Design movement.

I guess it's a good thing that not everyone is that concerned about the debate. Most people wouldn't care whether they were told that they evolved from rats, or that a magical being made them from dirt.

-Joe

2009-01-19T18:44:00.002+08:00

Those Google ads can be really funny sometimes. Even when I don't mention anything risqué.

Anyway, I've finally gotten bored of World of Warcraft. There's really not much more to do now, other than go on raid after raid in an attempt to snatch a piece of better gear. Unfortunately, that process is not only time consuming, but it also destroys your faith in humanity. This is mainly because you get to see just how selfish and moronic a lot of people are, even when they're supposed to be on your side of the war.

The internet doesn't make people dumb. It makes their stupidity more accessible to you.

I wonder what will happen when earth finally makes contact with aliens. We'll assume that the aliens had a huge head-start in terms of evolution and technology, and that they are the ones who would be visiting us. Thus, they would be an ancient and knowledgeable race, possibly fine-tuned and engineered to the point that self-destructive behaviours would have been completely weeded out from their psyche.

When would this happen? It really depends. It could be tomorrow. It could be in millions of years time. If we were visited by hyper-intelligent and benign aliens tomorrow, how would the people of Earth respond? This is assuming that we are capable of response, and that some form of relatively easy communication system has been developed between us and the extra-terrestrials. Most science fiction portrays each planet as a united force. No matter the geographical aspects of a planet, the dominant sentient species always seems to follow one ruler. There is no great social divide between one section of Coruscant and another. There is a social hierarchy, but judgment based on where a person comes from is non-existent.

The explanation given is usually that with the exponentially-increasing rate of advancement of communications and transportation technology, these advanced civilisations have learned to put aside differences based on geography, and to unite under one flag. This could possibly have been the result of pressure placed upon the entire species, such as someone threatening to blow them up.

Futurama is set in the year 3000, and earth is now The United States of Earth. Obviously, the Americans are the higher-ups. Richard Nixon's preserved head is president. But the point is, that other countries still exist. The other races still exist. Chinese, Jamaican people for example. No where in the show is there any form of racism.

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that all of the well-known science fiction is like this. Sure, it's an ideal world, but can it really happen? The current situation suggests not. People have always had something to fight over. Land. Items. Shoving ideas down other peoples' throats. As Zapp Brannigan said, "Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a different language and a new way of looking at things, the human race has had a dream: to kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or his new way of looking at things."

So yeah.

If aliens show up tomorrow, we're probably screwed. Some asshole country will most likely try to convince the aliens to destroy their enemies. Then they would rise to power.

Or, the aliens would decide that humanity is a bunch of sniveling rats and turn Earth into a barbecue pit.

Heh heh.
-Joe

2009-01-12T21:02:00.003+08:00

So then, I've just been surfing Snopes.com, and I noticed a few things. One of them was that people made up a lot of bull. Another is that people are also really gullible.

There are a lot of listed urban legends, and hardly any of them have any evidence whatsoever to support their veracity. What there's a lot more of, is the number of completely stupid beliefs that have existed(and still exist, in some cases). Things like "swimmers are killed when stumbling upon nest of snakes at bottom of lake". Now, this is just dumb. Firstly, snakes do not make nests. Even if snakes did make nests, they wouldn't do it at the bottom of a lake. Snakes need to breathe, after all.

Also, this brings another thing to mind. Can a snake even move twigs and debris to form a nest? Its body is clearly not adapted to building things. I mean, have a look at those limbs. Cough.

Then, there are other things, such as "potted plants suck the air out of terminal patients' rooms". This just reflects on our education system. If this were true, a lot of us would be dead by now after being in buildings that contain indoor gardens.

And then there's an entire list of myths surrounding menstruation. For some reason, the people of olden times believed that women were these embodiments of evil. Menstruating females were not allowed to pretty much do anything, for fear that they would somehow spoil wines, cause dental fillings to fall out, prevent milk from curdling into cheese, and various other things that sound like witchcraft. It's almost as if they got the inspiration from Aura of Corruption kind of magic spells in RPGs.

I suppose, it is our imagination that fuels these absurd stories. Without that same trait, books and games would be so much less interesting. Still, I feel that everyone ought to exercise their own judgment when coming across new information. It is difficult not to feel hypocritical when saying this, for I was probably guilty of believing without seeing many times in the past.

In any case, did you know that while Thomas Edison actually had this idea of using a DC power system, instead of the AC system that we use today? Edison, with all his genius with the lightbulb, not only thought that it would've been practical, but also fought fiercely to have his plans realised. Now, it probably didn't occur to him back then, but his system would have required power generators every two hundred metres or so, for domestic houses to receive enough electricity. So we should really be grateful that Edison wasn't the only electricity guy back then.

-Joe

2009-01-11T18:26:00.004+08:00

And so! Under my fingers there is a true masterpiece of input-device technology: The scissor-switch keyboard. It does the same thing as all the other keyboards, but unlike the keyboards that most of you use for your desktop computers, this one feels just like the one on your notebook computer!

I now have... Four keyboards in total.

Writing reports and other random stuff will be a lot more better now, since I get to use my nice 4x3 monitor instead of a widescreen. It's like having spliced the keyboard off my laptop PC to use here. Also, I told my parents that it was a gift. So if they ever ask you guys, play along. Heh.

I have sort of been... not writing, because I was waiting for this keyboard. I got a haircut(finally). I have a new pair of oculi- that means, spectacles. They currently feel strange though, as they feel much sturdier than my old pair. Also, I'm taking a while to adjust to the new degree. The optometrist guy said that it might take a few days. I sure hope that that happens before I have to do any heavy reading.

I went back to AJ during their open house last Friday. My own school was having an open house, but it was noisy. So, I went across the road to visit my friends. It was a strange feeling, knowing that I was pretty much considered an outsider there.

Anyway, video footage of a venomous mammal has been taken somewhere in Haiti. Haiti is this place in Caribbean where everyone speaks French. Anyway, the interesting thing about this whole thing is that modern mammals are not known to have venom. Some mammals do produce toxins that function to some degree as poisons, but this rodent has fully-functional dental venom delivery system, just like a snake. The only other mammal that has a venom delivery system is the platypus. But we're not counting the platypus because it's such a freak.

In any case, this rodent, called Hispaniolan solenodon, is believed to be something of a living fossil. One of the hypotheses put forth by the people who are studying this thing, is that venom might have been a common trait to primitive mammals, and modern mammals have since evolved to become poison-less. What this means for Hispaniolan is that it is most likely the evolutionary descendant of a completely different branch of mammals.

Although currently classified as endangered, it was a relief to ecologists to discover this creature as it was previously feared to be extinct due to extensive logging, and the introduction of new predators into the area. We're not really sure what we're going to do with this animal, but the first step is to find out more about it.

Then, we'll decide whether or not to take venomous forest rat off the menu.

-Joe

2009-01-07T09:59:00.001+08:00

So. Hm. I’m tired. More tired than usual. I haven’t been sleeping that well lately. I have dreams of strange and unpleasant scenarios. Other times, I just can’t get to sleep, and I end up reading a book.

I’ve recently begun reading a manga, Death Note. Online. The translated version, of course. I was pretty bored. It is not bad, pretty interesting. The only problem is that now I have one extra thing to procrastinate with. Heheh.

Anyway, Sze Chuan highlighted to me that a 17-year-old ought to have at least 8.25 hours of sleep every day, to remain healthy. I do not know of the veracity of this information, but let’s assume for argument’s sake that it is true.

If a person my age really needs eight and a quarter hours of sleep daily, then we are all most likely sleep-deprived. People have to wake up any time between 5am and 6.30am in order to reach their schools in time. For the sake of ease, we’ll use 6am as the standard. 8.25 hours before 6am is 9.45pm of the previous day. Now, who sleeps at 9.45pm? Many of us consider “any time before midnight” to be turning in early.

Clearly, our work schedules and lifestyle choices do not permit us to have the sufficient sleep that we need. It’s not that we can’t perform on less sleep than we should be having. Our daily activities are testament to that. We work late into the night, and wake long before the sun rises, and yet we are able to learn, to lead, to think.

I came up with a shell of a theory about what might happen in the long run. There are two ways humanity can go, in regard to sleep. One, is that we slow our pace of life and take more time to enjoy sufficient hours of our daily comatose. Productivity might decrease somewhat. Technological innovation may appear less frequently. This shouldn’t be a problem, unless sometime in the distant future we’re going to be attacked by aliens.

The other way it would go is that we don’t change our lifestyle. Our health will be slowly eroded over the long term, and thus, we end up producing lower-quality offspring. The upside to this is that the few people who are genetically coded to require less sleep than others will be favoured. Not by much, but they will hold an ever so slight advantage over the rest of the population. Requiring less sleep means that they can hold up their daily activities while suffering negligible health effects. This leaves more time and energy for reproduction. Over many, many years, natural selection will enable these people and their offspring to populate the world. Humanity will require less and less sleep as time goes by.

Of course, by that time, we’d all be dead.

So, here’s a thought. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were some kind of drug, or neural modification, that allowed you to achieve the benefits of eight hours of sleep in a much shorter time? You could pop a pill, go to sleep for three hours, and then wake up feeling as if you’d had a good night’s sleep. Of course, the other things that sleep does would need to be included in the effects of this drug. I’m just saying “what if”.

Anyway, I’d take this thing, if it worked.

-Joe

2009-01-01T14:02:00.002+08:00

That probably was not the most awe-inspiring post I've written. And hardly fitting for the new year, too. So instead, today I bring a list of the best of last year.

Good things:

The KI Circle
Never had I dreamed that one day I would stumble upon a group such as this. It, of course, began when I decided that I was good enough to handle the intellectual demands of Knowledge & Inquiry. I suppose I just wanted to know if I could be considered a cut above the rest. So I took the test, went for the interview. It was probably one of the better decisions I had made the entire year. If I had not chosen to step up, I'd have taken GP and dealt with boring news articles and mundane topics, never meeting this group of wonderful people that I now miss very much.

Also, if it were not for KI, I might never have discovered the concept of eugenics. At least, not for some time. And donuts. I probably would not have come to enjoy donuts as much if it were not for that one night.

Come to that, I'd never have attended a choir concert if it weren't for the KI circle. In short, I'd have missed out on a lot.

My O'Level Results
My results were basically a permission slip to go just about anywhere I wanted. Like a Wild Card in a game of Uno. Like an infinite improbability drive. I could have done anything. Well, except maybe a few things, but I ignored those options, and I am still choosing to ignore them now. Chinese, my bane.

Games With my Friends
Could there be anything more enjoyable? We played card games, we went bowling. In June, we played Halo 2 throughout the night at a chalet. We set stuff on fire. We scraped the potassium nitrate oxidiser off sparklers and made a nice little bomb.

On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle of Life
Yes, when I got my hands on this book, I was happy. Everyone taking biology should read this one. It's simple enough, doesn't contain too much jargon. The layman could read it with some effort. It can be a bit dry, seeing as that there are no explosions or end of the world plots. It's a scientific journal, so you can expect it to be slow reading.

Another book, Guns, Germs and Steel. I hadn't even heard of this one until Hongjie told me about it.

Diablo III Announced
A day of cheer and joy for all fans of the series, including I. I've long stated that the best dungeon-crawler has always been Diablo II. Few other games of the genre can compare to its addictiveness. So I'm waiting for the next installment of the series...

Oh, another cool thing is that I probably watched my first live streaming of anything on the internet. I watched a good section of the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in Paris. Live. That was pretty cool all in itself.

Comic Book Movies
Iron Man, The Dark Knight. To some extent, The Incredible Hulk. It is rare that a new work of fiction is really good, so for now, I am content with these live-action remakes of old pieces of fiction.

Spore
All hail Will Wright! With Spore, we can now smite our enemies before they evolve! And we can bring our own little creatures to colonise the universe. You can be The Ellimist, or you can be Crayak. Or you can be a little of both, saving one planet with one hand, while using the other to crush someone else.

Sure, I got kinda bored of Spore after a while. I suppose the main reason for that was that at the highest stage of the game, you control a spacecraft with many functions. As opposed to being an actual galactic god.

Has the LHC destroyed the world?
lol

And more.

-Joe

2009-01-01T00:23:00.002+08:00

Um, happy new year!

It's 2009. Sheesh. That means that I need to get used to writing new dates. Even now, after more than an entire year since I've been in Montfort, I still get the urge to write a (15) after my name. In fact, if you want to take a look at my recent work, you'll find little blotches next to my name indicating that I accidentally wrote my old index number.

I feel like I could have had a better 2008. I know now that I can't do anything about it, and that all I can do is hope I do something right this year. The new year's message is always the same. Resolve to be fitter, smarter, and more productive. Become a better wheel, a solid cog turning in the machine that is society. Remove your old rust and re-oil your joints. A new year is a chance for a new start.

Also, it means we're all one year closer to the decay of our fleshy bodies.

So, I urge anyone who is doing engineering to start looking into biomechanical technology.

I feel like I just haven't left my past behind. I still yearn to somehow go back and relive those moments. I don't suppose I'm unique in that aspect; after all, what are memories good for if they are not cherished? What are we, but a collection of thoughts and experiences, melded through the amazing biochemistry of the brain into a conscious, thinking individual? Without our memories, we would function on instinct alone. We would be savages, not thinking ahead, not learning from the past. About as intellectual as the common cockroach, and far less sturdy.

As of late I feel as if I have diminished somehow. The confidence that I had in the past is waning. I used to be confident bordering on arrogance. Now I feel that my complacency was misplaced. Could I really have messed up so badly? Have I really grown so slack and mentally incapable that my work did not appear satisfactory in the eyes of the examiners? Perhaps I have lost my advantage.

Perhaps not. I still refuse to believe that my mental prowess is lesser to that of such a large number of people. If I am truly the one who has been declining, then why am I constantly sought after for answers? Surely, I know what I am doing. I'm the one who finds the answers. I'm the one who sees the right questions. I am Yoda. I am Gandalf. People call me the Genius. The Wise One.

And what now?

I see no light.

-Joe

2008-12-28T00:46:00.002+08:00

Yeah, I know, I completely ignored Christmas this round.

I already made a post last Christmas about its pagan roots and several things about Norse-man sex. So I figured that anything I wrote this year would just pale in comparison. Also I was lazy to do any more internet research. And I didn't know what I would be saying, anyway.

Yeah you can check the archives if you want. I think I included a few pictures, as well.

It wasn't a bad Christmas. It seemed rather short. Both gatherings seemed to just go by without me really doing much. I slept late. I woke up late. I got $30 for my Christmas present. I ate turkey. The turkey was good, but I didn't like the ham. I've never liked the ham. It just wasn't hammy enough. I like breakfast ham, the thin pink slices of finely ground pork that go really well with mayonnaise and white bread. Dinner ham is different. It's not as refined as breakfast ham, and so it is less smooth on the tongue. Also, for some reason, people like to cook it with some icky sweet stuff on the outside. A mixture of honey and mustard. It tastes like acid-treated plastic to me.

I guess I wasn't really in the Christmas spirit to begin with.

And now the New Year approaches. I'm not entirely excited over this either, seeing as that it falls in a school week for me. That's just cruel.

It looks like I'll probably be using that day to catch up on late work, or to plan ahead for the coming weeks. Forget resolutions.

Earlier, I watched a movie with my parents. It was some early 1990's film, that was supposed to be a comedy. Well, maybe it was hilarious back then, but the comedy of today has certainly evolved a great deal. The entire film was laden with things that I could tell were supposed to be funny. But they weren't. It was like watching a child attempt to play the piano; you could sort of tell what song he was playing, but it was jerky and fragmented. It would need much refining. Like a clumsy hatchling learning to use its legs.

Also, the film had lots of little filler scenes, scenes that had no relevance whatsoever to the plot, but apparently were intended to hold comedic value, or perhaps character development. Character development itself was rather limited. The dialogue was tolerable, at best. The villains of the show weren't even named, and simply existed to be taken down by the main protagonists.

All in all, I'd rather have used the time to read.

...

It's been really long since I've gotten together with my friends, for something other than schoolwork. I thought that I'd use these two weeks to do something, but nothing really got off the ground. And now I have to go back to school, that hive of idiocy. Of all the polytechnics, why this one? If what I hear is true, the other institutions don't employ morons, and the students who attend lessons there aren't a totally unmotivated bunch.

I miss my old school, where group work was actually fun, because I had people to rely on. People that I could trust to pull their weight and pitch in good ideas. People who actually knew what they were doing most of the time. People who I didn't have to explain every little thing to.

Not anymore. Now I struggle. Now I strain. It's frustrating, and I'm going back to school in little more than thirty hours.

Regret is not a nice feeling.

All I have left is to hope. That maybe this is just another phase. That soon enough I will find my place, and realise that things will work themselves out. And so, for now, I need strength.

On a lighter note, I'm buying myself a Christmas present, that should arrive in slightly over a week. A new keyboard for my desktop, with scissor-switch key technology. Now, I need to think of how to explain it to my parents when a keyboard arrives in the mail. They're not exactly open to the idea of an unemployed teenager spending money on luxuries like that.

I'll probably have to lie about the price.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net
-Joe

2008-12-23T15:11:00.002+08:00

Whoohoo, Echoes of War!

Blizzard has released its first music CD, featuring 15 tracks of ancient horror, medieval glory, and futuristic war. I don't actually know when it came out, but I have recently gotten my hands on it. I think it's completely splendid.

The music of the Warcraft universe is the grandest and most spectacular. Hm, "spectacular" is derived from "spectacle", hence it has a notion of sight. You can't see music. Can you even use "spectacular" to describe music? Anyway, it's basically all that nice brassy fanfare and base drums, intermingled with serene sequences and rough rhythms that make me think of the loading screen.

Seeing as that I have never played Starcraft, the music from there was all unfamiliar. Still, I think that they are very good, though a bit strange in several parts.

Diablo music is what I am most familiar with, and now it's the same creepy music, only in epic orchestral style. The oboe was created for Diablo. There can be no other reason for its existence.

The soundtracks were always a big part of the fiction I enjoy. I even have the soundtracks of certain games that I have never played. The books may always be better than the movies, but books don't have soundtracks. Movies do.

Speaking of movies, Tom Hanks will be returning to play Robert Langdon, in the film adaptation of Angels & Demons. This is good news, I suppose. Now I have a reason to go to the theatre and eat an entire bag of potato chips.

I've always thought that Angels & Demons had a better story than The Da Vinci Code. The only reason that the latter novel was more popular was because of the whole controversy with the Christian community. Because of that, Angels & Demons became "the other book that Dan Brown wrote", instead of "the Dan Brown book that you should read".

I'm not expecting the film to be much. But with films come movie memorabilia. And in this case, that means ambigrams.

I will watch it, though. It's been a while since I've heard about a movie and wanted to see it. This past year has been all about superheroes. The previous year it was pirates.

Actually, the only reason I wrote this post was that I wanted an excuse to share this awesome comic with everyone, without looking too lazy.

Ah, but I think scientists should unite against the common enemy before training man-killing squids.

-Joe

2008-12-18T22:10:00.002+08:00

This is blasphemy, I say! What kind of an organisation schedules a vacation to end before the New Year? What ever happened to the pointless-yet-fun activity of using the New Year as an excuse to give yourself a makeover? Okay, not that I'd do that. I can't be bothered. But the point is, I was kind of planning to go back to school after 2009 had begun. You know, like I used to.

Instead, I shall be going back on the Monday of that week, and the Tuesday... And the Wednesday. Then I get Thursday off. Seriously, what good is Thursday off? There's no point. Maybe with a slightly different set of rules it might matter, but my school has this annoying habit of not planning ahead. They see a public holiday and go "Hey, look, we can't have lessons on that day. Let's add to our student's agony by scheduling make-up lessons on another day, preferably when they have something important to do. Oh, and while we're at that, let's feed them with wrong information and bad calculations." Why can't they be like other schools and plan around public holidays?

Also, why can't they just give us proper assignments that are actually interesting, and put more weight into assessments, rather than presentations. The thing about presentations is that you're basically forced to boil down whatever you learned into a simple summary tailored for lesser minds. Explain too much, and it gets boring. Explain too little, and the intellectuals will cringe in agony. Not that that's a real problem around here.

It'd be nice if the presentation topic had anything to do with our syllabus.

I challenge my readers to find out how the body responds to a lowered serotonin level on a cellular level.

...

I need to do something. Also, I'm hungry.

I can see my log of recently uploaded pictures. Too few.

-Joe

2008-12-14T16:11:00.003+08:00

Holy crap, a Star Wars MMO.

I mean, another one. That isn't Star Wars Galaxies.

Bioware and LucasArts are teaming up to create Star Wars: The Old Republic, which they hope will become the World of Warcraft of the Sci-Fi universe. Right now, we don't really know much about it, so all I can go on with is that the graphics look amazing for an MMO.

The game will be set about 3500 years before the rise of Darth Vader, so we're not going to be seeing any of the characters we already know. Except maybe the ancient Sith Lords. I'm not sure if they're canon though, as they mostly appeared in the games.

Anyway, thus begins my two-week break after the common tests. Ah, the common tests. I really should have stayed at AJ. I presume that they don't ask for history in biology tests there.

This is going to be a short two weeks. I look forward to spending my time re-watching my favourite movies and television series. Hm. "Series" is a bad word. It doesn't have a plural form. That's misleading. I expect that I will waste countless hours waiting for bad-mannered players to gather online to kill a boss in WoW, and then scream and bitch about people "not healing them enough". Seriously, in the time that it takes for any given group of people to gather for an activity in that game, I can read a book.

And I have. I've been re-reading the Animorphs series. Not the actual paper books, because that would be expensive. Besides, I don't think they even sell them anymore. Instead, I have settled for reading them online, in an electronic book format. Sometimes there are small typographical mistakes and there are almost always issues with paragraph spacing. Still, I find them good enough, and the errors do not impair the entertaining quality that the books have always had.

This doesn't mean that I won't buy the lot if I can. One day, I will have them.

The snow on this blog is finally not out of place again. Yeah, we added the snow last Christmas for the festive feel, but we never bothered to take it out. We probably won't be changing the tunes either, since iMeem did this whole thing that prevented anyone but the uploader from hearing more than the first 30 seconds of the songs. Some DRM thing.

And I'm off now, as my parents require my input on what computer they should buy to replace that piece of junk downstairs.

-Joe

2008-12-03T20:39:00.002+08:00

Four primitive hominid skulls have been found in the Republic of Georgia, Dmanisi. The working theory is that these skulls belong to a transitional species of hominid, possibly a direct ancestor of Homo erectus. Leg bones unearthed indicate that this hominid walked on two legs, and upper-body fragments suggest that it had the upper-limb anatomy similar to Australopithicus. Which is awesome news, really. These finds provide yet another piece to the evolutionary puzzle, filling in a gap between our ancestors and us.

Anyway, I did this little thought experiment today. Suppose we would like to see evolution in action. In humans. Now, the major problem here is that for evolution to occur, you need your subjects to reproduce. At best, we could observe three or four generations before our own demise. Now, three or four generations, by regular odds, is not going to yield any significant change in genetic structure(although I would be inclined to argue that each subsequent generation is magnitudes of order dumber than the previous). We would thus need to be able to observe these specimens over hundreds of thousands of generations, and in different conditions to our own.

So now, to overcome our problem of dying, and therefore being unable to observe our results. We'll assume that no human rights people burn our houses down, and that we'll die of natural causes*. We'll need to somehow extend our lives beyond the natural limit. I've thought of a few ways we could achieve this. One would be to exploit this nifty phenomenon known as time dilation. The principle is basically that when something moves faster, time slows down for that object, in reference to the rest of the universe. So here's what we'll need: A vehicle of some sort that can travel near lightspeed, and for extended periods of time. Also, there will have to be toilets on it. Next, we'll just need to find a suitable location to set this vehicle in motion. Outer space sounds like a good idea, so long as we stay clear of little meteoroids that'll blow holes in the machine.

We start off by gathering a few human beings, preferably has genetically average as possible. For a fair test, we'll have to wipe their memories of modern civilisation. They'll be set into a large enclosure, with environmental conditions similar to that of the Triassic. The oxygen level would be about 80% that of our current conditions, so they might... Not die. For flora and fauna, I really don't know yet. I figure that by the time I embark on this experiment, mankind will probably have the technology to clone any animal or plant, allowing us to place whatever beast or flower we like into the enclosure.

Now, assuming that our test subjects have not died from eating poisonous plants or being killed by Tyrannosaurus Rexes that weren't supposed to be there, us jolly scientists would then get into the aforementioned spacecraft, and fly around a bit. Relativity will help us to predict how much time would have passed in the universe around us, per unit time spent in the spacecraft. After some time, we'll stop, get out of the spacecraft, and look at our subjects.

Assuming that we have been moving fast enough, the world would have changed dramatically. Our test subjects would have gone through multiple generations. Basically, we just need to stay in our superspeed spacecraft until say... Five hundred thousand generations have been reached in our subjects. Hopefully this would not take more than several years on board our spacecraft.

So, then we just get off and see what our population has turned into. They probably wouldn't have changed dramatically, but there are bound to be differences. What differences, I don't know. It would depend on what conditions we set for them initially, and how these conditions changed over time.

Also, everyone else we knew would be dead, so maybe this isn't that good of an experiment.

Then, again, everyone we knew and didn't like would be dead.

Mumble mumble.

Okay... So that's the experiment. Alternatively, we could somehow make cryogenic sleep not destroy us.

-Joe

2008-11-30T18:08:00.002+08:00

If there is anything that annoys me in role-playing games, simply by existing, it is the Bard.

A bard should never, ever, be a playable character. Ever. I'll explain why. A bard is an artist who uses his voice, language, and music, to send a message, tell a story, or simply to entertain. Shakespeare could be considered a bard. Wikipedia defines "bard" as :

In Celtic society, a bard was a professional poet, paid by a monarch to praise the sovereign's activities.

In other words, a bard is a human advertising system.

Now, I ask, how did the bard become a playable character class in a medieval RPGs? Who decided that it would be a great idea to slap a sword onto a violinist and turn him into a demon-slaying, dragon-riding hero? It's nonsense I say.

In Dungeons & Dragons, the bard is a versatile fighter, capable in both melee combat and certain kinds of magic. Now, what is the point of having him around? Does he even do anything bard-ish? No, no he doesn't. His attacks all have rather corny names, and they generally involve using music and dance to ail his enemies in some way.

That is just... uncool. If you command such magic, why channel it in such a roundabout way, when you could just be a frickin' mage and do things without looking completely retarded to other players? It's like telling an archer to shoot tennis balls from his bow, just because he can.

The bard is an unnecessary class. All of the archetypes have already been filled. The embodiments of strength, wit, agility, nature, darkness, and divinity. What is a bard? The embodiment of homeless people on the street busking for money.

I would never play a bard. The entire concept of the bard being a playable character seems like an idea squeezed from an exhausted team of designers with an urgent quota to meet.

"Hey, I got a great idea! How about, we take the wizard, hash it together together with a martial artist, and call it a new class?"
"Yeah, and let's make him use.... music or something, so that it doesn't look too much like an obvious copy."

I wonder how a bard would work in real life (well sort of like real life, except that there is magic). A warrior would simply overpower his opponents with sheer strength and fighting ability. A wizard would call upon the elements and rain ice and fire on his enemies. A bard would... Fake-Cough to get the demons' attention, then perform a tapdance, simultaneously reciting Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day, thus causing the demons to writhe in pain.

Not cool.

Hey diddle diddle,
the cat and the fiddle.
The cow jumped over the moon!
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
and the dish ran away with the spoon.

He ran from his conviction,
to feed his addiction,
as the dish heated the spoon.
The spoon begged to go,
but the dish shouted "No!"
"The heroin will be ready soon."*

-Joe

*Not my composition.

2008-11-16T23:57:00.003+08:00

Hello again... Seems like I haven't been posting.

Wonder why.

Maybe it's because I feel that if I do post about something that's going on with me, it would look entirely like a rehash of the things I talked about several months ago. Certain teacher is an idiot. Frustrating to explain simple things to certain people. Not a lot of direction in life. Not feeling well. Sleep cycle screwed up. Horrible grammatical errrors in study material. Own grammar appears to be deteriorating. Pronunciation getting more slack than usual. Procrastinating even more. Frustration, anger, exhaustion, insomnia.

For some while I actually managed to get back into a good sleep/wake cycle. Sure, I was kinda drowsy in the mornings and I was too tired to practice my euphonium at night... But at least I could sleep when it was dark and wake up like a normal human being. Still don't really understand why humans don't just become nocturnal. The amount of DNA damage that we could avoid by reducing our exposure to harmful ultraviolet radiation. What good does sunlight do for us anyway? I mean, directly. It's not like we need sunlight to photosynthesise or anything.

Although I once had this idea where we would implant chloroplasts into our skin cells, and modify them to produce ethanol in the same way that certain bacteria do. That way, we could go stand in the sun and get drunk at the same time.

We'd also probably die, but hey, one problem at a time.

I have this nagging fear that I was never really intelligent, just lucky. I'm not as creative as I might appear at certain times. Most of my ideas are merely innovations of existing ideas. As Einstein once said, the secret the creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. I don't hide my sources. I just make sure that the people I'm with aren't aware of my sources. Oh you know, this part here was just some random bullshit that came to my mind. Ignore.

Anyway, I have recently acquired a new game, Red Alert 3. The Red Alert series has always been the lighter, funnier counterpart to the more serious Tiberium saga by the same creators, but RA3 is the trippiest, most laugh-out-loud RTS I have ever played. The units must've been dreamt up by someone on drugs. Boat that sprouts legs and shoots electricity? Check. Giant robot thing that was totally taken out from that Gundam anime? Check. Psychic schoolgirl that rips tanks apart? Check. Oh, and there's even this tank that fires people out of a cannon.

The main reason that I bought the game, however, was for the co-op campaign. It's not like Red Alert 3 is the first ever RTS with a co-op mode; the highly rated World in Conflict featured (according to reviews) an immersive and realistic co-op mode, where each player would command either the army, the navy, or the airforce. The thing is, that World in Conflict had fairly high PC requirements and so the plan made among my friends to buy the game never came to pass. I, however, am a fan of the Red Alert series, and so I was going to buy it whether or not my friends did. Unfortunately, Hongjie's computer seems to have contracted virtual HIV, so playing online with him is out of the question for some time.

And it's 12.20am. What am I doing? I said I would go to sleep two hours ago. But no, instead I had to mention how stupid one of my instructors was being to my parents, thus causing them to be concerned. And so, like and logical and level-headed person, I explained my story in great detail. That took some time. Then they asked questions. And gave advice. I also used several synonyms of "idiot", that I have become very accostomed to using ever since I came to the conclusion that most people were imbeciles. Unfortunately, far from helping the situation, I only got more upset and frustrated, and got into bed imagining how fun it would be to unleash a deadly biological weapon into the atmosphere.

Nah, I'm not serious. They don't let people who have psychotic tendencies into higher education.

Or maybe they do. How do you explain Virginia Tech?

The answer is not video games.

...

I love this keyboard. The keyboards on notebook computers are so soft and silent. They require so little effort to depress and they feel so good on the fingers. I've been looking for a keyboard for my desktop that has a similar texture to that of a notebook computer. Some time ago at an IT fair I purchased a $10 Logitech keyboard that had softer, nicer keys than my old keyboard. At the time, the diference was marvelous and it really felt great. Now, however, I'm beginning to feel the depth of each keystroke, beginning to cringe as I hear the loud clack of the keys. It's just not silent enough, not soft enough. I'm beginning to think that the only proper softkey types of keyboards are gaming keyboards. Those, unfortunately, are extremely pricey.

Seeing as that I am not using my desktop, where all my pictures are stored, I do not have anything for today. Instead, here's a recent comic from Cyanide & Happiness:

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

~Joe~

2008-11-06T23:45:00.002+08:00

So... It's been quite a while.

I seem to have lost my need to write, to communicate with those beyond my immediate surroundings. I am writing now mainly because of the lengthy silence that has befallen this website. In the recent days, I simply have not chanced upon any blog-appropriate ideas or stories that I could share with you guys. Perhaps I have, but forgot them moments after.

I was almost ready to give in to despair when I came to the conclusion that there were a dozen or so unnamed people in my course who scored a better Grade Point Average than me for last semester's examinations. But then today I received new information, and realised that my earlier conclusion was based on insufficient evidence. As such, I revised my decision to become depressed and violent.

It's not exactly a long story, but it's a painful one. From my perspective, anyway. See, when Shaun told me that he wasn't in the top 15% of the cohort, I concluded that I would have been in the lower portion of the 15th percentile. His GPA was only 0.04 lower than mine. At the time, it appeared that I was one of the last people to get into this category. That was saddening. Then, I learned that he simply had not received the certificate yet, and it was not the case that he was ineligible for the award.

See, this is why I need psychic powers. Verbal communication is fuzzy and has the capacity for many errors.

Nevertheless, this episode has prompted me to do all in my power to prevent a failure such as this from happening in the future. The impact has been softened greatly by the correction of facts, but even so, there are more obstacles to overcome. Certain people.

I really do think that I have a superiority complex. I've always believed in greater people having bragging rights. I've also always hated it when other people had bragging rights. Whether or not they exercise this privilege, is irrelevant. You could say that I just hate to lose, in things that I feel are important.

Another thing. Things that I feel are important are usually the only things I am good at. I wonder whether I became good at them because I thought they were necessary, or that I came to understand their importance through sheer chance of being talented in those areas. Either way, the fact remains that if I am not good at something compared to the general population, then I am useless. I am not an all-rounder. I don't have very many talents to fall back on, should my current pursuits fail. It's like being an RPG character who has invested all his stat points into one aspect, leaving the others nearly useless at any level that counts.

So there, that's why I can't stand to lose. I don't have the luxury of saying "yeah well, I can do other things too." I need to work harder.

...

And so, Lando Calrissian wins the US presidential elections. I didn't follow the debates, the speeches, the rallies, or any of the elections. The only things I knew about Barack Obama was that people enjoyed likening him to Brock... You know, from Pokémon. Yeeaah.

In other news, JC students are breaking free from the entangling grasp of Project Work. This is good news, although it means I will also stop to whine about the discrepancy between polytechnic vacation time and JC vacation time.

/whine

Anyway, congratulations, guys. I don't know if I'd have been able to do PW without setting several buildings on fire.

-Joe

2008-10-28T14:59:00.002+08:00

Stay your blade from the flesh of innocents.

Always remain subtle.

Never compromise the brotherhood.

The three tenants of the Assassin's Creed. It's really a wonderful game. Few other titles offer such immersive graphics together with such amazing gameplay. The goal of a game has always been to provide a challenge, yet not so difficult that it stops anyone from playing it. In today's world, that translates to being able to make your in-game avatars perform the fanciest of actions with just a few keystrokes. Assassin's Creed does that very well.

As the name suggests, you play as a member in an order of assassins(pronounced many different ways, including the original word hashashin). Your enemies are the Knights Templar, and a large purpose of your existence is to keep bringing new blood into the ranks of city guards. Mostly by killing people on duty.

Naturally, you have to go around killing certain people. Your targets, usually big figures and rich guys. After they have become acquainted with your hidden wrist-blade, you have to make your escape. In my opinion, this is the best part of the game.

Thanks to this feature they call Free Running, it appears as if you have been endowed with the abilities of a Jedi Knight. You can scale walls with relative ease, and run and jump from rooftop to rooftop, over rickety beams and gazebos. All the while, guards on the ground yell at you while trying to follow you. The chase ends when you have broken the line of sight of any pursuing guards, and found a place to hide. It seems as if the guards are really underpaid, or just extremely lazy, since they'll just give up the hunt moments after losing sight of you.

One of my favourite things to do would probably be pushing an archer off his post, onto the ground below. After which, chaos ensues and I can slip into the citadels without detection.

The controls are a little different from what I am used to, mainly because the game was ported from the Xbox. Still, I think it works well.

-Joe

2008-10-24T17:08:00.004+08:00

Bad things this week:

Bizarro was removed from the daily comics

And replaced by some unfunny crap. I don't even remember the name of it. I just think that it's totally weak, and boring, and disappointing. Seriously, why? Bizarro was an awesome comic.

Blizzard devs say that Diablo 3 "has a long way to go"

Shit. By the time it comes out, I'll have been conscripted. Either way, if it doesn't come out by next December, I'll basically not have any time to play it.

I have fallen ill

I seem to have caught a bug from one of my classmates. I'm having a sore throat and my nose is just being a bitch. I didn't go to school today. I woke up at eight, decided that I didn't need to attend any lessons today, and then slept till five. Which is about now. I still feel like I've been run over by a truck. Way to go, evolution.

Good things this week:

I have Assassin's Creed installed on my PC

Thanks, Shaun. (You asshole, you could have just said it was Simon.)

I am not dead yet

Whoohoo. See, it's rather difficult to achieve world domination if you die before you begin trying.

-Joe

2008-10-19T20:30:00.002+08:00

Ugh. Pointlessness and pointlessness. Today, Daniel, Shaun, Jia Hao, and I went for some Urban Challenge thing. It's sort of like the Amazing Race, only a lot less amazing. Also, today was just a dry run. We were supposed to be station masters, not participants, but for some godforsaken reason, the organisers wanted us to play out the part of a team of participants. That basically resulted in us going around Singapore on what was a very warm, humid morning, which turned later into a horribly wet afternoon.

Oh, did I mention that the whole thing was based on the Chinese culture?

So anyway, at some point, I ended up in the Haw Par Villa(or however you spell that) looking for some sculpture of a pig, running low on energy... I don't know how people can survive without a full breakfast. I had a little bun for my morning meal, and by noon I was literally about to collapse from exhaustion.

It was also about that time that we got to witness first-hand the horrible drainage system over there. During our futile search for the pig thing, it began pouring. By the time we were ready to leave, the staircases had turned into mini rapids and the sloping path was a raging river of rainwater. Needless to say, my shoes got wet, and I spent the rest of the day sloshing around in sodden shoes, having my very hydrated socks do bad things to my feet.

Things took an upturn around lunchtime, when we went to Ikea for Meatballs. We pretty much dilly-dallied around there for a while before unconvincingly telling the organisers that we were lost... And somehow found our way into the Swedish furniture store.

If it weren't for the wet feet and worrying about smelling horrible (after sweating...and sweating...), I think that the day would really have been saved by meatballs and sauce.

Meatballs...mmm...

So anyway, I've just discovered that I have an organic chemistry tutorial to do by tomorrow, and that I have no scheduled breaks before that period. This means that I have to do it now, instead of getting to lvl63. Just 10% away... =(

-Joe

2008-10-18T14:26:00.003+08:00

So then... I just went down for lunch, and I got Rick-Rolled.

For those unfamiliar with the term... Well, it's sort of hard to explain. One day on the internet, someone decided that Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up was the most annoying song in all of history. He also felt that he ought to spread it to the rest of the world by tricking them into listening to it, or watching the music video. Eventually, it caught on, and due to the fact that most people using the internet are total pricks, thousands of other internet users were soon bamboozled into clicking a disguised link, and were then subjected to Astley's music. They would then be greeted with a message saying "Rick-Rolled", usually with spelling errors or letters replaced by numbers.There were several variations to that, and even some malicious ones, where the user was forced to listen to the entire song(through the means of an uncloseable window).

...So yeah. The radio was playing, tuned in to some oldies channel. Right as I was about to deliver a spoonful of delicious battered fish into my mouth, that familiar tune floated out from the speakers.

It was just really unexpected. It's quite amazing, really, how these things wind up like this on the internet. Sometimes I wonder if Rick Astley knows that his music is being used as a weapon in online psychological warfare.

So, anyway. Mandatory donuts.

-Joe

2008-10-11T23:12:00.002+08:00

Man, my legs are sore. Well, not so much my legs, but my feet. The ends of my feet where my toes come out of. Walking around. And around. And around some more.

It turns out that Plaza Singapura has had its top floor revamped. In a very good way. Just tonight, we went there and discovered that there's now a Simply Toys store, as well as that weapon replica place... I forgot the name. I just remember it as That Place With The Really Cool Swords. Same ones that were in Suntec City.

Oh, and a couple of game shops. We didn't go in, though, so I don't know how wide their selections are, nor their price ranges. I suppose I'll have to go down one day in the near future to have a look...

...Or not. I really can't tell how much time I will need to invest in schoolwork starting Monday. Even the less sciency subjects seem to be more complex and much deeper than anything I'd seen in the previous semester. At a glance, I seem to be finally going onward to acquiring the skills that I will need in my (hopeful) career as a scientist.

I'd say that I've had a rather enjoyable weekend. Even the thing with the mentally challenged people was fun in its own way. Mostly due to that idea of getting a bunch of people to wear alternating colours, and then walking past each other so as to induce seizures in epileptic patients.

After which, I went to NJC for some... thing. It wasn't the sort of thing I'd go for normally, but it ended up being pretty fun. Although not in the way that it was probably intended. While waiting for Mark, Hongjie and I were chatting up on this ledge where the school crest was...

"Well at least your school is... symmetrical..."
"Yeah, that means it's equally bad on both sides!"

Heh.

And then we went into a school hall to have our ears murdered for a while. I read somewhere that music of a certain volume or higher stimulates the pleasure centres of the brain.

Aaand I seem to have lost my train of thought. G'night everyone.

-Joe

2008-10-08T20:47:00.002+08:00

So, I have received my new timetable for the next semester. The hours are longer than I had previously expected. There are still a few holes here and there, but it's starting to look more like a school timetable. It's a big jump from my previous timetable. I'm not entirely happy about the 9am to 7.30pm thing on Tuesdays, though.

I suppose that this is sort of what I had wished for during the first semester. Something a little more intensive, where there is a slight amount of pressure... Not too obvious, but not so little that it felt like a holiday. Without frequent stimulation, one grows weak and incapable of performing well. This philosophy can be used in several other areas of life. Heh.

I am looking forward to starting school again. Mostly, anyway. On the plus side, it seems like I'll be taking a lot more interesting modules. At least, the names are fancy enough. They're pretty much all science and technology-related, so I'm not very worried.

On the unplus, my teachers are going to be... Urgh, gosh. One of them is going to be the same person that caused... all my rants during the first semester. You know, all that stuff about incompetency. It's unbelievable. Once upon a time, school was a place where you were wrong, and the teacher corrected you. Now, school is a place where you double-check your teacher's work to see if there's anything horribly misleading in it.

Oh, and the explaining stuff to your classmates bit is the most horrifying. Sometimes, they let you go on and on for fifteen minutes, before saying "wha?".

...

Well, at least I don't really hate them now.

-Joe

2008-10-01T12:25:00.002+08:00

Oh wow. It's October.

It feels weird, really. It's like I have wasted this entire year. The massive blocks of vacation, amongst various other things, have made me feel rather useless. Sometimes I regret being afraid at the start. Had I been more confident, I'd probably not be feeling this way now.

Adding to the weirdness, I will be going back to school in roughly a week and a half. It'll just be strange, writing dates that contain November and December. Since this semester extends till next February or so, New Year's Day just isn't going to be the same. You can't have a fresh start right after coming back from your CT break.

Well, not that you can't, it's just that you shouldn't.

Also, this entire 6 week break, I have done almost nothing but play World of Warcraft. Sure, I may have gone out now and then to buy some stuff... But all that stuff was mostly so that my computer would run better.

I guess you could say that I was waiting. Waiting for the promos to end so that I would finally be able to meet up with my friends from the various JCs. That seems to be working out well for the KI circle. Unfortunately, CJC decided to hold its promotional exams two weeks later... So Leonard is still doing his promos now. The really annoying thing is that by the time he's finished, those of us in polytechnics will no longer have a huge amount of free time anymore.

There's still the weekends, though. I wonder whether next semester will be much more intensive than the first. I sure hope that the difficulty level is raised somewhat. When everyone scores well, no one scores well.

... Sigh. I don't actually want to go back to school just yet. I feel as if I haven't done what I wanted this holiday.

But a week and a half is an entire ten days. I still have time...

-Joe

2008-09-24T20:44:00.002+08:00

I will be hesitant to leave my house for several weeks.

I hate haircuts. Nine out of ten of them are horrible. I've also noticed a trend, in that the ones where I specifically ask for an extremely short trim are the best. You see, those hair-cutting people seem all to have this microchip built into their brains, that automatically multiplies length by a factor of 1.5 or so. Well, the factor varies for different people. Sometimes they're not really all that off. Other people seem to have a randomising unit as well. One time they get it wrong, the other time the get it really wrong.

And there are the people who do that thing that involves pushing your fringe down so that it hangs in front of your eyes. What happens is that they also push a bunch of hair that is never in the front of your face together with your fringe. After which, SNIP, and there's a goddamn hole in the hair that should normally cover your temple.

... I really hate my hair right now. It's going to take weeks for it to grow back out again. I should never have gotten a haircut. Next time, I'm going to fork out cash so that there'll be a smaller chance of getting a crappy haircut.

Or maybe I'll just grow it really long and only cut it when it's absolutely impossible to turn it into a horrible secondary school cut.

...

Aaand everyone seems to be not very happy with their promos. I can identify, seeing as that I go through almost every examination the same way. However, when people talk to me about it, I can't really say anything, since I can only guess at what kind of demonic questions were asked.

Come to think of it, even when I have taken the paper/studied the same content, I am almost never a good person to discuss exam papers with. It usually goes something like this:

"Man, what the hell? The metabolism section made no sense at all!"
"Metabolism, difficult? There could not have been a more straightforward essay..."

On other occasions, I would be interrogating everyone about a question that I did not quite understand, usually with the intention of confirming my suspicion about the question being botched up. Of course, this does not go well for me all the time. Every so often, I realise my mistake halfway through aggressively explaining what was "wrong" with the question. Ah, the memories.

...

In other news, Heroes is back, and it's turning into Bioshock: The Television Series.

"...plasmids changed everything. they destroyed our bodies, our minds... we couldn't handle it. Best friends butchering one another, babies strangled in cribs, the whole city went to hell..."

Okay, not really, but they've decided to implement a plot element that involves being able to give yourself powers by injecting certain stuffs into your blood. So I guess the theory about Mohinder having the ability to bestow powers on others wasn't quite so off.

-Joe

2008-09-18T22:03:00.002+08:00

Hi, so... I know I haven't been updating in a short while. That is largely due to those never ending adventures in Azeroth, and the exploration and colonisation of the universe in Spore.

Some time ago, I thought that I had lost all interest in RPGs. As it turned out, that was merely due to the fact that I had not found an ideal role-playing-game. My recent experiences prior to that period of time were likely to be to blame. Reason being, people are idiots. Also that game had close to zero role-play potential. It just was not immersive.

So I gave up on RPGs for a while... Thinking that I'd probably never play another one ever again. And now here I am, spending a large amount of my waking hours running around on grassy plains and fighting dangerous beasts and demons. It is probably the most fun I have had with a game for more than a week since Diablo 2.

I think a big part of it is the lore. I was never a fan of the Warcraft universe, but given its popularity, it is probably no surprise that I have picked up a bit of knowledge of it. The point is that it is really, really extensive. It has a proper backstory, and scores of history. Relationships between races and their roles in the world. Why they're there, how they got there, and why they love killing each other so much.

And I suppose the classes are somehow easier to get into. I'm playing a paladin, a warrior of the light. So I go around healing and protecting members of the Alliance, while speaking old English whenever possible.

"Have at, foul demon! Feel the bite of mine blade!"

Unfortunately, members of the Horde play their part a little too well. Ruthlessly killing lone travellers and raiding villages. Those guys are a pain in the ass.

...

Dadadada...

-Joe

2008-09-12T15:02:00.002+08:00

Has the world been destroyed by the Large Hadron Collider colliding things yet? How do we know that, as we slept, the world had not been sucked (literally) like a string of spaghetti into a black hole yet? Experts discuss, has the Earth been destroyed by CERN's LHC?

-Joe

2008-09-11T11:21:00.002+08:00

Having been in a (albeit less militaristic) uniform group in the past for roughly four years, I have come to be familiar with the phrase "all for one, and one for all". All those damn camps played a big part in that, too.

At its conception, the phrase was probably intended to build a sense of unity and belonging among individual groups. The ideas of "taking one for the team" and "your mate's in deep shit. Help him." were condensed into a single phrase that also sounded pretty catchy. And so just about every society that involved the need for each participant to be highly cooperative eventually incorporated the phrase into their list of cliché sayings.

However, despite the obvious benefits of an unbroken team and a nice ring to it, the phrase does come with a few rather annoying things. As examples, I will use my own experiences. Oftentimes, a member of the band would break a rule, and not own up to it. That would be for several reasons, such as not wanting to pay a fine, or that he was going to leave soon and didn't give a damn about what happened there. Naturally, a leader or a teacher would eventually gather the lot, and interrogate them.

Assuming that the rule-breaker in question is hard set on not taking the fall, and that the teacher is unable to identify to culprit, the teacher would then turn to that "all for one, one for all" philosophy. This translates directly to punishing the entire group for one person's misdeeds. The purpose of this is to cause that person to feel guilty about having gotten his group into trouble.

Depending on the person, it might work.

But knowing people, the success rate of such a process would be equivalent to that of a Stormtrooper landing a hit on a protagonist.

In the end, the culprit would have essentially avoided any real consequences for his actions. He would have never been identified, and would therefore look no worse in the eyes of the authorities. His group-mates, using the philosophy themselves, would forgive him, seeing as that none of them had to have to deal with anything much, and that they still consider him as part of the team.

So, the purpose of the teacher using the philosophy is that he is unable to single out the rule-breaking individual, and thus resorts to casting an Area of Effect spell. (Sorry, couldn't think of any other way to put it.). It's sort of the equivalent of nuking a city because of one escaped criminal, only on a smaller scale. But then, the group is also doing this, in reverse, by not surrendering their teammate.

The final products of these interactions are: a lot of wasted time, and an unsolved mystery.

Personally, I dislike the saying. It's like tying radio-linked explosives to the back of your heads. When one of your teammates dies, all of your explosives go boom. It's also usually an excuse to make people do things that they don't want to.

...

Well, I get the feeling that I stopped making sense about halfway through that. I can't really tell.

In other news, the LHC has been operational for... Some hours! Awesome. Already, some people have committed suicide, thinking that the LHC would bring about the end of the world. Which, is kind of stupid, seeing as that you'd might as well go out with a bang, instead of killing yourself in some emo fashion.

Guy A: Hey how'd you die? I shot myself.

Guy B: Toaster and bathtub.

Guy C: I got sucked into a freakin' black hole. Beat that.

Anyway, +score for Darwin.

-Joe

2008-09-08T20:36:00.002+08:00

So it wasn't a raptor-cake.

It began as a cell, that interestingly, already had eyes. You know, fully formed mammalian eyes. It came from outer space, brought to my planet, Cakeulon-74 by an icy meteor. It was carnivorous, and quickly rose in the food chain and proliferated.

Throughout my creature's evolution, it simply destroyed everything that it didn't like. As a semi-intelligent creature, it made a few attempts at forming relationships with other animals, but most of them were failures. Thus, I decided that my race need not suck up to other animals in order to survive in the world. I gave them large skulls and sharp teeth, as well as long bladed claws. I took their social features away and turned them into killing machines. From then on, they went on a path of destruction, driving eight viable species to extinction.

After denying each species' any form of genetic heritage, my own species evolved to become faster and deadlier, and even more intelligent. Soon, they developed a primitive language and formed simple hunter-gatherer settlements. At this phase of their history, they were simply able to articulate their violent message in a more sophisticated form, with spears and fire.

Soon enough, my species became the dominant sentient life-form on the planet. They constructed cities from reinforced minerals and aggressively advanced to become a militaristic civilisation. History repeated itself, only this time with nuclear weapons.

That was pretty cool, nuking those rival cities. Especially the religious ones.

So then I sat back and admired my creation, what amazing and destructive creatures they had become. Who knows what else they will do, now that they have unlocked the secret of intergalactic travel? (I do. Kill more stuff.)

Spore is now the king of Sandboxes. Nothing is more fun than flying a spaceship around, abducting people and plants. And then bringing them to an uninhabitable planet and releasing them. I spent about an hour doing that, just to see if they would freeze, fry, or explode because of decompression.

If you aren't so keen on that, you can just fry them with your laser. It's awesome.

I have yet to unlock most of the intergalactic functions, so I don't know how much more there is in store for me. I'll probably find more user-generated content and decimate them, though. So, it's a great god game.

However, I do wish that they had randomised the colour of blood, among certain other things. It seems like every creature in the universe has red blood. Why would every creature in the universe use haemoglobin as an oxygen transporter? Even on Earth, there are creatures that have blue blood, such as horseshoe crabs. Also, sexual dimorphism seems to be impossible in this world. That kinda took something out for me, because I was anticipating something a bit more lifelike.

Also why no larvae? I wanted to make a race of intelligent insects, with exoskeletons and all. However, there's just no way to do that. My little baby insects would look exactly like the adult insects. Maybe in the next version...

Anyway, it's time to explore the universe. Gotta go!

-Joe

2008-09-07T19:51:00.002+08:00

And behold! The great lord, the mighty and all-powerful Joseph looked at an empty universe, and decided that he could really use a hobby. Thus, he said "Let there be freaky little monsters that defy the laws of physics!", and the raptor-cakes were born.

SPORE. SPORE. SPORE. SPORE. SPORE.

Can't stay for long. I must create.

2008-09-04T18:27:00.002+08:00

Why Google created Chrome, I do not know. It may only be in its beta stage, but it is really not that different from Firefox.

Sure as hell is a huge step-up from Internet Explorer 7 though.

I downloaded Google Chrome to see what all the hype was about. As it turns out, nothing much. The window is similar to that of Opera, and it is definitely not slow or clunky. Instead of tabs being below the address bar, they're right at the top. Why they would do that I do not know. I have not had any issues with the tabs being below my bookmark and address bar.

The bookmark bar itself works in a way similar to Firefox's. Except that you can't click-and-drag icons into it. Which is a pity, but and easily remedied problem. Hitting ctrl+d will add we

The entire thing is designed to have a futuristic, clean look. That is certainly not a bad thing. Also, the slim address bar is non-obtrusive, and there is nothing separating the taskbar of your desktop from the browser itself, giving Chrome a full-screen appearance. That in itself is not a bad thing, either, but it's really up to personal preference.

Google Chrome took a leaf out of Opera's book, having a home page that contains big, friendly bookmark buttons, that also have a little screenshot of the webpage that they link to. Very similar to Opera's "speed-dial" function.

A nice thing about Chrome is the intelligent address bar, where it gives you web address suggestions when you type stuff in. This is... Quite cool, I suppose, but I don't think that it is going to make much of a difference. The address bar only does searches based on what you have typed in, and the corresponding website addresses with names containing those key words. And therein lies the problem. As an example, I will use the Panda's Thumb, a nice website for news on the evolution/(un)intelligent design debate. Nothing about the topic that you type into the address bar is going to get you there.

All in all, not a bad browser, but it does not offer much more than what Firefox users have already been experiencing. So basically, get Firefox. Wait until Chrome comes out in its full version(it's in beta now) before switching over.

-Joe

2008-09-03T23:39:00.002+08:00

Oh, my eyes. Guess what, people? I've recently got sucked into another MMORPG. You know, when I thought that I would never play another MMORPG again.

This one, is none other than one of the most popular MMOs out there: World of Warcraft. As luck would have it, I managed to get an account and I have been playing as a Night Elf priest, with a classmate of mine, who is playing a druid.

It was quite a big leap. I had sworn off MMORPGs for their various flaws and time-eating prowess. However, as I found myself in a period of way-too-much-time, I agreed to play. I was sort of curious about how WoW worked, anyway. That was important, because gameplay mechanics are a large factor in deciding whether or not to play a game. I did not want to play another MMORPG with clunky fighting and "sandwich-ness".

What exactly is sandwich-ness, you ask? Well, there's really no good way to describe it. Basically, sandwich combat is a system that binds your character to the target he/she is attacking. Instead of leaving you free to blast at everything(and nothing, sometimes), the game only allows you to use skills and shoot stuff when there is an opponent nearby. And also the bindy-ness. They stick you into combat and make you unable to run away, or at least, not easily.

This makes using ranged weapons a real pain, because you can't employ hit and run tactics. Instead, you shoot your target until he gets close enough to you to whack you, then you shoot him in the face at point blank range, hoping that your weak fabric armour saves your life.

The best comparison I can make for RPGs is... Diablo 2- Not sandwich. Hell, even Diablo 1 doesn't have sandwich-ness. Just about every MMORPG- Sandwich.

I get the feeling that no one really understood that. I probably would not understand it, either.

Fun fact! Sandwich-ness plagues every MMORPG out there, that isn't a two-dimensional sidescroller.

The closest I have ever gotten to a non-sandwich, 3D game, is probably Priston Tale. Which, unfortunately, is a money-guzzling grindfest that just takes too much effort to be rewarding. You would agree with me if you spent over a hundred hours to get to level 15, and then realised that you would need three times that amount of time to start using some mildly interesting skills.

I digress. World of Warcraft, while not being a classic sandwich game, still falls under my definition of sandwich. So the combat can only be described with "meh". The world, on the other hand, is amazing.

It is huge. Amazingly large. The starting island of the Night Elves is what appears to be this giant tree stump. I can't really tell. The edges of the island are all planty and root-like. About the edges... You can actually fall off the branches. I fell off, landed in the sea(died) and when I respawned, I swam over to the mainland.

That in it self was really cool to me. Being able to swim from one island to another. Basically, World of Warcraft breaks away from one of the issues that older MMORPGs had, which was that the world was cut up into a series of maps that had a portal/opening that lead to the next map. In more graphically intensive games, there would be a loading screen. WoW doesn't do any of that. Instead, it boasts a seamless world. Even the caves and dungeons don't have annoying little loading screens before you get into them.

So basically, you can run from one end of an island to another, and not stop to load.

Another great thing about the world is that it actually makes use of the 3D engine it runs on. In the past, the most 3D you had was characters and buildings made out of polygons, not sprites, and having slightly different ground levels. World of Warcraft decided that it was going to use the third dimension a little more. We now have buildings that reach up into the sky, being beautiful (albeit troublesome) skyskrapers that elevate the statuses of various NPCs.

You know, if elves are so magical and all, why don't they invent some kind of elevator? Or do they enjoy running up immense flights of stairs, laden with weapons and heavy armour, just to visit some old kook who'll charge you money to talk to him?

Oh, and not to mention jumping down. That was hilarious.

In a nutshell, great World, great Warcraft. Not enough war.

This is one of those games that is going to help me wait Diablo 3 out. I downloaded the gameplay video, so that I could watch it in full screen.

I watch that thing at least twice a week.

(Read it from the bottom up. Also, a Dark One is a low-leveled cannon fodder kind of monster.)

-Joe

2008-09-02T10:43:00.002+08:00

In the 1800's, a brave Scottish man sailed from the Mosquito Coast over to England. When he returned, he brought splendid news, that a native king had bequeathed unto him over thirty thousand square kilometres of fertile land. A democratic social system had already been set up, and the place was rich and beautiful; one could not walk off the road without tripping on gold nuggets. The man promised wealth and happiness to the American people, and many of them left their old lives to sail to this wonderful land.

It turned out that this magnificent tale was as spun as a gyroscope. Instead of friendly natives and a pleasant climate, the migrants who had given up their old lives in America found nothing but enormous expanses of dense jungle, laden with poisonous animals and tropical diseases. There was no native king, nor was there anything remotely like a civilisation present. Of the 240 travellers, 180 died, either from the hostile environment, or by their own hand. Many committed suicide upon realising that they had practically plunged themselves into Hades.

That was probably one of the greatest hoaxes in all of Western history. I can't say much about Eastern history, because I know little to nothing about it. In my defence, Chinese history is mixed in way too much with gods and magical beings. Seriously, there isn't a piece of Chinese history that I know of, that does not include people defying the laws of physics or having inhuman cunning. Anyway, this was the fictional nation of Poyais, created by the evil mind of a man with a horrible name.

His name was Gregor MacGregor. Seriously, what kind of parents name their child Gregor MacGregor? It's basically the same as calling your kid "Dick Dickinson" or "Dingle Berry". What the hell were they thinking? I can imagine why he wanted to become a soldier. In the military, I don't think they referred to you by your first name, so MacGregor was spared the embarrassment.

I would've had my name changed. Wouldn't you?

The best part about the Poyasian scam was that it didn't end there. I would expect that due to the massive death rate and inaccessibility at the time, the news that Poyais did not really exist never reached the mainland. So MacGregor went on to sell land and property(that obviously, was non-existent) to more and more people desperate for a better life. Real-estate agents(or their equivalent of the era) began investing in Poyais. It became so profitable, that other people began opening rival Poyasian Offices to lease land.

...

I have probably gotten a bunch of facts wrong here, but the gist is there. Gregor MacGregor scammed a lot of people.

Which sort of brings me to a second point. People are really gullible. Not that those poor souls in the 1800's could have done anything about it. But people of today really have no excuse when it comes to certain things. Take those Nigerian scams for example. People basically get an email from a guy that is about to get a lot of inheritance, or receive a large sum of money in one way or another, and that he will split some of it with you. But, there's aways a catch. Often, the guy will say that he needs some money for some purpose before he can be entitled to his inheritance.

Basically, it goes like this: I'm going to inherit a million dollars. If you help me, I'll give you 20% of the sum. But I'll need $8000 first.

So basically, the victim of the email scam thinks that, oh well, eight thousand is hardly anything compared to what I will get after that. And so, he pays this deposit, only to never hear from the scammer again.

Now, you'd think, what kind of an idiot would fall for something like that? Why would anyone literate enough to use a computer, be unable to see through the obvious lies(guy from Nigeria asking a complete stranger in a different country to share his inheritance?)? It is just, really difficult to believe that financially responsible adults with $8000 to spare can get tricked in such a way.

But then again, why am I so surprised? I go to internet forums, those hives of idiocy and breeding grounds for retards.

The point is, that no one would be talking about Nigerian Scams if they did not happen, and Nigerian Scams would not be happening unless they are still effective. They are most definitely still working, which means that there are most definitely people getting scammed out of their savings.

Oh, and don't even get me started on chain letters.

-Joe

2008-08-31T21:09:00.003+08:00

Oh man, the Spore Creature Creator is so unbelievably cool.

I only have the trial version(because I did not want to spend $10 on the full version), but it's still amazing.

Though perhaps not in the way that it was intended to be. Given the few types of body parts available in the trial version, I have been "forced" to create some very freaky and one-sided creatures.

I started out making a few regular, normal looking creatures, such as the Genericosuarus mongoliensis. Eventually, I began turning to works of fiction for inspiration, making some very pokemon-like things. The bee thing actually turned out pretty nice.

But then, as I became more aware of the effects that various body parts added, I began to create mutilated monsters with six mouths, eleven pairs of wings, and so on. Limbs began taking on more than three joints, creating freaky muscle-spiders. Spider goat, spider goat, does whatever a spider goat does...

I do have a few less hideous monsters though. I attempted to reconstruct the Taxxons and Hork-Bajir warriors from the Animorphs series. I think I did alright with the Hork-Bajir, considering my limited resources. Sure, the beak was sideways and he looked a bit too cute, but a fan of the series could probably identify it. The Taxxon, on the other hand... Well, he looks like turd.

The freedom that the Spore Creature Creator gives you to manipulate limbs, delete parts and combine others, is such that even without a large variety of different types of limbs available, some really cool things can be achieved.

Now, imagine an entire planet of those. Better yet, imagine them getting onto spacecrafts and colonising the universe.

The Spore Creature Creator is the sandbox of the future. From a simple lump of clay, of a very limited size, one can produce so many interesting and hilarious creatures.

And this, all before the actual game is out.

-Joe

2008-08-29T20:35:00.003+08:00

So then! Today, is Teacher's Day, and the bunch of us went back to Montfort to say "hi" to our old teachers. That was great and all, and it was sure nice to see the people who literally educated us while we were growing up.

After which, I headed down to Comex. Initially, I thought that only Daniel and I would be going, but it turned out that more people were feeling like wasting some time down in the city. So the five of us met up (eventually) at Suntec City and spent some time getting squashed and being suffocated inside the convention halls.

I had a pretty good time today. I tried Clank out at the Sony Playstation booth, and played a little bit of Unreal Tournament with a Razer mouse and keyboard. So probably the best exhibition I've been to in a while.

I intended on buying some more RAM for my PC, but it turned out that I forgot what type of RAM my PC needed. I thus failed in my mission to buy RAM, and instead had to opt for a secondary objective.

(It turns out that I should get DDR2 RAM. Bleh. I'll need to remember that next time.)

Which was to purchase a new keyboard, just because I wanted one.

Well, among other things. I found my old keyboard a little too noisy. It's fun to hear the TACK TACK TACK when you type sometimes, but other times, it doesn't seem like a good idea. Such as when you really do not want people to hear you typing furiously away at something, in my case, hearing me push a few keys repeatedly over and over again to drink more potions.

And well, this new keyboard is nice. I'm typing on it right now. It's not quite the "laptop feel" that I enjoy so very much, but it's much closer to it than my archaic old keyboard. And it was only ten bucks! Whoo.

A few days ago, when I made my decision to indulge myself in a new keyboard, I googled up some very interesting looking ones. Here are a few:

The Eclipse Keyboard

Ain't that just beautiful? Lovely keyboard with a cool blue backlight emanating from within... Drool.

Archaic, much?

Probably not something I'd use, but hell, I'd get one just for the sheer coolness factor.

Custom Keyboard

Uber Thin Keyboard

The Optimus Maximus

I just had to put that one in there. Even though the LEDs would eventually get smudgy from all the typing, what isn't cool about having a keyboard totally out of a Sci-Fi?

And so on a completely unrelated note,

-Joe

2008-08-26T14:13:00.003+08:00

So then. The Olympic Games have come to a close. I think. Seriously, I really don't know. But I assume that it has ended by now.

Clearly, I have not been following the Games, save for a few things that simply could not have escaped my attention. One being Michael Phelps, the first Olympic swimmer to win eight gold medals, and Usain Bolt, who seems to be going down the evolutionary path which will eventually lead to The Flash.

Maybe if he's not dead by the time I start working, I can get him to donate some of his DNA.

And of course, our own women's table-tennis team. Of which the star players were, ironically, from China. Still, it doesn't really matter where they come from, as long as they've got our flag on their T-shirts.

I can probably assume that the closing ceremony was as spectacular as the opening ceremony(which I did not watch) and that everyone was pretty happy and all. Now we can sit back for a couple of years and wait for the Winter Olympics to begin.

China has received quite a lot of flak this round, first with the air pollution problem, then with the faked bits of the opening ceremony. Their gymnasts have also been accused of being underage, and many people have been crying foul about that. For a good reason, too. Younger gymnasts, supposedly have an advantage due to their smaller stature and greater flexibility. I don't know how much of that is true, seeing as that I am neither a gymnast nor a physiologist . But even if it did give them an advantage, it probably wasn't the best idea to put underage competitors into the Olympics.

Well, I don't know whether their age has been verified or not yet. Neither does it really matter to me.

Although I would like to point out how annoying people who discuss this subject can get. People on the side of "No, underage competitors should definitely not be allowed" constantly get jabbed at with "You're just sore because your country lost to a few little girls". Oh well, it's the Internet, I guess. People are going to be idiots. Even more so now that they have anonymity.

Which kinda makes me a little wary of what I am going to do when I start playing Diablo 3. Initially, I hoped that the morons who played Diablo 2 would be all grown up and mature by now. From the state of the forums, however, it is clear that they are not.

Anyway, according to some sources, pistol duelling was once an Olympic sport! You know, the kind where people say "I challenge you to a duel!" and then they meet in some open field at sunrise on the next morning. They would stand back to back, take ten paces, pirouette, and then fire like a madman.

Of course, in the past, Olympic pistol duelling was done with target dummies rather than real people. I suppose they hadn't invented paintball at the time. Wouldn't it be cool if the Duelling Pistols returned as a sport? I might actually be interested in watching it.

-Joe

2008-08-22T21:37:00.002+08:00

Aaaaand it's the weekend! Unfortunately, most people seem to be not looking forward to enjoying it.

Even I, while having a severe lack of proper responsibilities, will not enjoy this particular weekend either. Or maybe I will. I don't know yet. It really depends on how I wake up tomorrow.

Anyway, I have recently found a little news video report about Russian diners that create what they call "Latte Art".

By pouring milk in just the right way, they can create nice little patterns and such on the surface of the coffee. Wouldn't that just be nice?

This does face that usual problem of food that looks really good... Which is that once you start eating it, it stops looking nice. If this becomes popular in the rest of the world, I can imagine myself in some years time going "Hahahaha now I will imbibe your soul into my being, little bunny!" every morning.

Also, can anyone identify what is being drawn on the coffee at about 33-34 seconds into the video? I have looked at it from every angle my head would turn and it still looks like either 1) A mouse with a really big brain tumour or 2) Male genitalia.

-Joe

2008-08-20T12:33:00.004+08:00

I was digging up my old chemistry stuff today, and here's what I found!

No, it's not every Eclipse can I've ever eaten my way through. There are still a few more that I threw away initially, before I got too lazy to begin disposing of them.

Still, if you just take this lot... It works out to about $52 at the current price.

Gosh.

Of course, there were those periods when these mints were only about $2.50 per can. Even so, this lot would be the equivalent of at least $40 out of my pocket.

...

And no, I'm not going to stop buying these things. They're infinitely better than other mints, and the cans make great souvenirs.

On a different note, I'm really not happy with LucasArts making The Force Unleashed for every console other than PC. Hell, they even have a DS version.

It's making me consider buying a PSP just so that I can play The Force Unleashed. But that's exactly what they're trying to make me do. Buy a console so that I can play awesome Star Wars games.

I don't see why they would not make a PC version. PCs are still the best gaming machines out there. There are already so many modifications for the PC, that you can even play games on it using the Xbox controllers. So "You can't use a gamepad" is a completely stupid argument against PC gaming.

And whatever people say, there are so many things you can do on a PC that you can't do on an Xbox 360 or a PS3. For example, type with a keyboard and do stuff with a mouse. They may have invented some gamepad-keyboard hybrid that basically adds a tumour with a keyboard on it to your controller. In the end, you're still typing with your thumbs, making it no different, nor less frustrating, than those tiny keyboards on PDAs.

Plus, the PC has a plus in the privacy and multitasking side. Can you alt+tab out of a game on a PS3 or Xbox? Can you Windows+D to minimise everything? Can you run a music player to listen to something else instead of the same music that you hear every single time you play a game?

Until the Xbox becomes a PC with a different name, it just isn't going to be better than a PC.

Of course, the game developers are trying to change that. You know, by forcing people to play their games on anything but PCs. I personally don't see any advantage for that, that PC doesn't have an answer for.

What's wrong with the old WASD-Spacebar control system for FPS? Why replace it with a D-pad that only lets you use your thumbs? On a keyboard, it's much less frustrating to pull off a quick combo, or to say, run diagonally. Another upside of using your fingers to do stuff instead of just your thumbs, is that in the rare occasion that you break your thumbs, it would only become more difficult to jump.

I had a nightmare a few nights ago. It started out okay. In fact, it was pretty cool. I was playing Diablo 3 in that dream.

And then after a while I realised that I was not at my computer, and that there was a controller in my hands.

This sequence of events was eventually concluded with some very dramatic fist-shaking, accompanied by a Luke Skywalker-esque "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

There are those times that I wished my dreams were prophetic. Right now, I am really hoping that they are not.

-Joe

2008-08-18T14:06:00.002+08:00

Idiocracy has to be one of the scariest films I have seen in the past few years.

Instead of the usual horrors of ghosts, zombies, and various other supernatural beings, Idiocracy presents a far more frightening situation. Basically, in the year 2505, dysgenics has seen to the devolving of human intelligence such that even the most average of people in today's world will be Einstein-like geniuses, comparatively.

The entire movie pretty much covers my reasons for wanting some sort of eugenics program. Five hundred years into the future, mankind has degenerated into a society of dirty, illiterate, and promiscuous morons. The basis of this atrocity is that since modern humans(of the present) have no natural predators, there is nothing to thin our herds. So instead of the brightest and strongest being favoured, it is simply the ones that reproduce the fastest.

i.e. People who have no responsibilities whatsoever and pass time by engaging in coitus.

So then, over time, the average IQ of the world drops to the point where part of receiving a medical diagnosis involves inserting three unlabeled pins into three of your bodily orifices. Two of which being the anus and the mouth. In this future, people who speak today's normal, ordinary English are considered to be pompous homosexuals and are generally hated by the rest of society.

This film is scary, because I really think that what we see in it has a considerably high possibility of becoming a reality. I have reasons for that.

Like COME ON, SERIOUSLY.

The worst part is, that she can't be the only person in the world to think like that.

Let's have a look at this one:

It's from Atheist Experience, and some guy tries to call in and talk about... How we should die when the sun goes down because we get our energy from the sun.

So really. Is there another solution for saving humanity from the snare of stupidity? Or are we going to pretend that everything is just fine and dandy (while complaining about idiots at work all day). I feel that a lot of people just don't want to believe that the world isn't quite as intelligent as they want to think.

Oh, and if you feel like seeing more instances of human idiocy, just go read the Youtube comments for that video. In fact, go and read the comments on any YouTube video. They really make you believe that one day, Starbucks is going to run a prostitution chain.

-Joe

2008-08-15T19:35:00.001+08:00

It isn't quite as tasty as a real cake, but when your consciousness is assimilated into the Matrix, there won't be a difference.

-Joe

2008-08-14T20:00:00.003+08:00

You know what would be cool? If life had its own sound effects.

In movies, and on television, just about everything that happens is accompanied by music. During a typical slasher flick, when the last remaining survivor is playing a game of cat and mouse with the killer, there's that ominous kind of music. In every(yes, every) show that has a part where two lovers embrace each other and do other things, a swelling score emerges in a dramatic crescendo. When someone discovers something amazing and grand, or when someone does something stupidly brave, there are always those magnificent and majestic melodies that seem to give the scene so much depth. They have become part and parcel of visual media.

Indiana Jones comes to mind.

Visual media happens to mimic real life, in some aspects. Because there are, you know, humans, in TV shows. And the old saying "Life Imitates Art" holds true, as far as I can tell, given the number of morons who decided to jump off a building thinking that they could fly. (In truth, I do not believe that anyone has done this. Still, according to Einstein, human stupidity is infinite.) On a more realistic level, I believe that the words still apply.

Let's not deny it: Our generation was raised on the wonders of television and computers, both of which put the visual and audio experience together flawlessly. Ergo, it is difficult to say that we do not relate our own lives to our entertainment, at some point or another. It has become such that people expect to see in reality, what they see on film. This is not quite so much an issue, as, as stated above, life imitates art. The way people act and speak is most definitely influenced a great deal by entertainment. It's really not so much different from watching real people in real situations, and learning from them.

However, while people may be perfectly enabled to alter their speech patterns or change their dress code such that they can more easily relate to television personae, you cannot give yourself a theme song. When you win a race, there will be no brassy tune playing out of nowhere(unless you arranged for it) to emphasise your triumph. Life will not also suddenly go into slow-motion so that people can see you jumping up and down...in slow motion.

Of course you can video tape the thing and watch it in slow-mo another day.

My point, is that life could be so much more exciting with sound effects. Need romantic music on your date? Across the Stars, from Star Wars would be a good choice. About to have a fight to the death with your archenemy? A number of themes come to mind. Comforting a loved one? I'm pretty sure there's something out there.

It is probably not the most practical idea out there... Given current technology. You'd need an assistant to play the right tracks for moments in your life. That would involve having someone follow you around 24/7 just so that you have sound effects. Even if we could somehow do without this, the effect that spontaneous sound effects might produce would probably not be what was originally intended.

Because, you know, it'd probably be pretty damn funny when music starts playing out of nowhere.

So maybe, not such a good idea. As fancy as having your own theme song may sound, it probably would not work out so well.

What a shame. How cool would it be to run away from a giant stone ball and then hear trumpets...

And... No related pictures that I can find. Also, this may be a repost. I don't know. It's been getting difficult to remember what pictures I've used.

-Joe

2008-08-12T18:53:00.002+08:00

Aaaah. Not many people think of Russia, without also having the Soviet Union come to mind. After all, they were a large player in the... wars... Also, their insignia is awesome.

An important part of Russian history that many people miss, is the invention of Tetris. Created by Alexey Pajitnov of the Academy of Science of the USSR, this simple puzzle game has made its way into just about every electronic device that also has a screen. The name is a combination of "tetra", because, each falling piece is made out of four squares, and "tennis", which just happens to be Alexey's favourite sport.

Funny, I always thought that the name was an allusion to a kind of lattice structure.

Tetris has been around for something like twenty-three years, which, while younger than Pong, is still a considerably old game. From the very beginning, it has been named as one of the best games of all time, taking over all those primitive consoles that people used to play on. It really shows how far we've come. People used to buy entire machines to play one game. Now, we can play a multitude of far larger ones, on smaller devices.

Recently, I have found myself playing Tetris a lot more than I used to. I suppose I just needed a change from what I have been doing. Tetris is really addictive. I have been considering getting people to call me instead of IM-ing me, so that I can play Tetris uninterrupted.

I should really get back to my maths.

As it turns out, I have no Tetris-related images. So here's a completely unrelated one!

-Joe

2008-08-09T13:02:00.002+08:00

Depth perception.

You know how pirates, pirate-ninjas, pirate-doctors, and certain characters from Street Fighter enjoy wearing an eyepatch? During our younger days, we were brought to believe that it was because they somehow sustained some form of damage in one eye. Or, perhaps, they were suffering from lazy-eye. Sometime recently, Mythbusters kindly demonstrated that wearing an eyepatch for extended periods of time could enhance a person's ability to see in the dark.

I would say that happens because having one eye continually in darkness tricks the brain into making your eyes produce more visual purple, the pigment that helps you see in low-light conditions.

While we're at it, think of the number of characters and personalities we know that only see through one eye. There's Leela from Futurama, who only has one eye. There's that weird tentacle beast from the trash compactor in Star Wars.

We all (probably) know that stereoscopic vision(the ability to see in three dimensions) is only possible if we have more than one eye angled in a slightly different position. Only then, can our brain interpret the two (or more) images to produce a three-dimensional image.

So. The question now is, how do pirates aim? How do they even pour themselves a cup of tea? Wouldn't their complete lack of proper depth perception basically give them the visual prowess of half a cow? And wouldn't this, naturally, make it pretty impossible for them to fight anything that knows how to step backwards every so often?

On a side note, I've been watching The Big Bang Theory. It really is very entertaining.

On an even sidier note, happy National Day.

Inside each of those missiles. there is candy! And patriotism, of course.

-Joe

2008-08-06T16:06:00.001+08:00

Is it possible to actually drown in heat? Because it really feels that way.

-Joe

2008-08-05T13:33:00.003+08:00

Oh noes! Oh noes!

Well, it's finally happened. Some dickwad decided to murder someone and then blame GTA IV on it.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUKBKK22888820080804

I can't imagine how many times Jack Thompson has pleasured himself to that article by now.

I hate that guy(in the article) for what he did. I mean, there are SO MANY WAYS you can see if the game mirrors real life. You know, like seeing if eating a pizza can cure gunshot wounds to the chest. I really wish more people would try that.

So basically what's happening now, is that anyone who is not already a gamer, is going to have their "videogames are bad" concept firmly implanted into their brains. After every murder committed by a teenager, who happens to enjoy videogames, the fault is immediately pinned on the games themselves.

People must realise that those who commit violent crimes because of videogames are completely assed in the head anyway. If there was any real relation between violent games and violent crimes, many more people would be dead.

I wonder what people used to blame crimes on, before immersive videogames, television, and radio. Probably possession by demonic entities or something.

Next, when someone bludgeons another guy on the head with a rectangular piece of wood, they're going to blame it on Pong. Because rectangular objects look exactly like Pong paddles.

-Joe

2008-08-03T15:05:00.002+08:00

Holy tamales. It's August.

Where did the first two thirds of the year go? It's just seemed so quick. And to think that in about a month, I'll be having a 6-week school vacation. It just seems weird.

Recently, I've been getting into those rhythm games. You know, the ones where they play a catchy instrumental in the background, while sending coordinated coloured blocks at you. They are... Addictive, to say the least.

It is funny, really. A year or so ago, when these games were basically the more popular genre, I had close to zero interest in them. After all, they did not require the player to - for lack of a better expression- kill things. I would watch my classmates and peers play these games and wonder why anyone would enjoy simply pushing buttons in sync with falling coloured bars. It reminded me of those experiments where octopi were tested for their learning abilities, albeit with none of the music.

Same goes for DDR. It should be a crime for certain people to play DDR.

Although some people should really be encouraged to play it more, and preferably in more open areas.

The story is basically that one night, I could not fall asleep, so I got onto my computer to poke around at stuff. I remembered seeing a couple of people playing a rhythm game hosted on Newgrounds, so I decided to check it out. As it turned out, it was really quite fun. Fun enough to keep me playing for a couple of hours(even though there were only about 5 modes to try).

I see why the Guitar Hero series is so popular now. You do not need an actual background in music, nor do you require any expertise at all, for you to play a music game. In fact, even people with training in musical instruments would find these keyboard-wrecking marvels to be fresh and enjoyable. All one needs is to be open to alternative forms of music, and have a want to rack up combos and points.

That last one is actually a prerequisite for almost any game. But I think everyone has that desire, either already being expressed, or not yet discovered.

These games basically give you the idea that you are achieving something. It is like reaching level 40 on Pacman, or getting three perfect victories in a row in any fighting game. Of course, nothing is happening for you(other than dehydration or kidney issues), but the point is that it just feels really nice. It's like being flattered, literally, when you get 35 "PERFECT!"s in a row. You see a nice flashy word appear on the screen that tells you how awesome you are.

From a distance, it all seems very trivial. I suppose it is. But they're just so captivating. You know, I think that black holes are a nice analogy here. When you are too far away, you can't see anything. Just the things around it. However, when you get closer, you cross this boundary called the event horizon. Once you've gotten past it, you'll be able to experience the black hole in all its wonder and glory.

...Given in a different context, that probably isn't such a good analogy. Heck, even in this context it sounds a lot like drugs.

Speaking of which, yes, all hamster products will have a dose of LSD in them. Hamster hotdogs, hamster salami, hamster pepperoni, hamster nuggets... You know, the nuggets at the south canteen are kinda soft and not really natural tasting. I wonder if anyone has already capitalised on my idea.

-Joe

2008-07-28T19:46:00.002+08:00

The panda population in China has risen by a whole FOUR PANDAS! A couple of them would probably die in the next month or so, but whatever. Meh.

You know, I've always wondered whether our ancestors thought of the consequences of putting "giant" behind an animal's name. Sure, it may look big, but it probably wasn't always that big. I mean, you'd think that they would've realised that eventually, they would stumble upon the baby of this animal, and realise that putting "giant" in front of the name wasn't such a good idea. Giant panda babies. Panda babies, that are gigantic.

In any case, are pandas really so important? I mean, what do they even do? Can they make honey? Can they make flour? Can we synthesise plastic from their fur? Do their eyeballs contain the magic elixir that makes Diablo III come faster? Are they anything other than a slow-moving bear, that happens to have cute black-and-white fur? And seriously, the things just sit around all day, eating. They're the inspiration for Snorlax.

And what are we trying to do? We're trying to save these buggering animals. Yes, the whole world wants to save these things. These un-fascinating creatures that roam around bamboo forests, spend more than half their lives sleeping, and have slightly less effective cognitive function than a goldfish. Come on, even geckos are more interesting than that. Aside from being uninteresting, they're also probably a lot less important, comparatively. Look at it this way: Pandas number in the thousands now, much less than when they started out. I don't see The Day After Tomorrow happening in China because of that. There are other animals, like bats, whose populations are being decimated and no one gives a rats ass about them. And they're important, actually doing things that help us. You know, like eating those swarms of insects so that we don't get moths raining on our houses, or even pollinating certain plants.

Plus, vampire bats did a service to us by reminding us that there are things out there that suck our blood. Things that are actually sort of big and don't splatter when you clap your hands.

No, the reason that people want to save the boring bears of the East, is that they're cute. I mean, that's probably the only upside to their existence. They're nice to put on postcards and they are indeed very Chinese-like, since they're always photographed with bamboo in the background. Why they are cute is a mystery indeed. Why would a panda need to evolve to be cute? I would normally like to say that it was probably because cute animals are less likely to be killed for food,.Unfortunately, cute animals are also more likely to be turned into fur coats, thus counterbalancing the argument. I also happen to believe that pandas evolved their cuteness before humans were around to kill them.

It's Survival of the Cutest. No one cares about the microbe whose absence will devastate the Earth's ecosystem. It's not cute enough. No one cares about the worms and molluscs. They're not cute enough. (Although I happen to stand very strongly against such an opinion! Squids are like, the cutest invertebrates ever.) So instead of supporting the saving of important creatures, the world at large just goes "ooh, a panda! We can't let it die!" while remaining willfully ignorant of the number of other things they kill on a daily basis.

I blame this mindset on all those movies that involve a Chinese family pushing through forty-foot deep snow to save a stuffed panda.

I think people should stop worrying about the pandas, and focus on the amount of bamboo they could harvest if they didn't have to worry about pandas. Bamboo is something like the fastest growing woody plant on Earth, and is actually supposed to be a popular choice amongst tree-huggers who refuse to buy teak furniture.

From what I've read, bamboo flooring and roofing actually make nice house materials. They're supposedly able to keep the interior temperature at a comfortable range. I'm not really bothered to look this up, but does that really matter? I mean, it's wood. It wouldn't be all that much worse from another wood.

-Joe

2008-07-26T14:14:00.002+08:00

Well whoopededoo. That was one week that I contemplated committing suicide to get out of. I am currently preparing for another. I suppose the German oral examination went alright, and I shouldn't do too badly for Communications Skills. I really am not that bad at making up believable bullshit.

Unfortunately it would be clear that I did not study at all, because it turns out that many of my answers actually have terms attributed to them, which are in the textbooks. Which I did not read.

But really, this week was not really so bad. At least, in comparison to what I will have to deal with next week. Over this weekend, I will have to botch up a presentation, edit a whole bunch of English(ie. deleting everything and re-writing it) and um... Do a chemistry report that, once again, has been screwed up by the teacher.

You know what would be a really cool superpower to have? The ability to fall into a coma whenever you liked. I mean, think of how many things you could just avoid by falling into a coma at will. Pointless presentation? Coma! Assed-up lab report? Coma! Really unpleasant meeting with someone you can't kill? Coma! Honestly, there are just so many things that I would rather not do, but am forced to. Which is very sad and ironic, because I figured that I would finally be doing what I wanted to do.

One more week. One more week, until I am free from boring and unnecessary obligations. One more week till I can sit down in a chair and pretend to study. No more messed-up lab reports, no more unfun presentations.

On a side note, yesterday's IMB lecture was probably the best one we've had so far. Reason being that a certain person wasn't present. Also, the lecturer for that day was a lot firmer than any of the others have been. This guy was actually willing to put his foot down when idiots in the hall were talking unnecessarily. All he needs is to accept a proposal that I will be writing in the near future to install trapdoors under auditorium seats.

...Which I will also have access to.

Oh, did I mention that below the trapdoors, there'll be a Neuter-Bot, designed by... Someone, that is capable of removing one's reproductive organs in a most painful and sadistic manner. That includes females. They will, however, have to pay a fee, because it's sort of difficult to remove internal organs.

I guess the best thing about that lecture was that instead of just saying "don't write that you got your information from Wikipedia", he also offered an alternative. Unlike every other lecturer at the school.

So, wootcakes. First sign of competence. I sure hope that I'll get to see more of that next semester.

-Joe

2008-07-23T20:12:00.003+08:00

The most properly terrifying performance I have ever seen. Normally, I associate the word "terrifying" with things such as children's television programs. I was never serious about the "terrifying" part, but I was always serious about the mental trauma part. Today, I witnessed a piece of art. Art, in the most unlikely of places.

A comic book adaptation.

(Not that comics aren't art.)

In an early part of the movie, we see Batman using guns. I was like, wait, since when did Batman use guns?

The Joker, as portrayed by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, is a true embodiment of fear. Not that he looks really scared in the movie, but rather that he's simply the most frightening thing on screen at any one time. It is not so much the garish makeup, or the blood-red scars, or the straggly green hair. No, those are actually pretty funny-looking most of the time. Instead, its his mannerisms, his speech, and his ability to laugh in the face of everything, that scares me.

And impresses me. I think I've found a new role model.

The Scarecrow was based on instilling fear in his enemies. He did that with hallucinogenic chemicals. While I am pretty sure that these experiences must have been pretty terrifying for the poor citizens of Gotham, it took a lot of imagination to be empathic. The Joker, on the other hand, brings the fear right to the audience, with all that freaky lip-licking and maniacal laughter.

When the villain is based entirely around misleading and manipulating people, it just makes an awesome movie for me. The way The Joker so confidently toys with the emotions of people, making them choose between impossible options... Dressing up hostages like thugs to trick the police, and all the little tricks and traps along the way. I suppose it is the little things that make the film enjoyable. Things like the sheer irony of having firetrucks going up in flames, The Joker sanitising his hands while at a hospital, prior to blowing it up spectacularly. And other stuff, like when he tells everyone a different story about how he got his scars, just like in the comics.

Okay, that's just wrong. This movie is just so different from the other superhero movies. Most of the time, we're given a clear indication of who to root for. Not that there isn't the whole "good guy, bad guy" divide here, but there's just something about The Joker that makes you enjoy seeing him succeed in his plans. Seriously. I was grinning the whole time he was pulling off a little "social experiment". The Dark Knight portrays The Joker as such a badass character in his own way, in contrast to those piece-of-crap villains from other stories, like Stane from Iron Man. I suppose I just really like those mind games.

The other villain, unfortunately, did not get much screen time, as a villain. However, the backstory was certainly satisfying enough. Harvey Twoface and his awesome coin-flipping skills. It makes me want to learn how to make that plingy sound when I toss my coins. Given that I am a huge advocate of coin-tossing(after all, it is the most reliable method of decision-making known to Man), it sure would be nice to make it look and sound more impressive!

Bruce Wayne is still Bruce Wayne. His gadgets are cool and all, but he was not really the main focus of the movie. He's a ninja. He can apparently punch so fast that he creates a sonic boom or something with every blow. Seriously. Every time he swung his fist at a crook, there was this immense "POW!" sound. I'm guessing that they did because they weren't allowed to actually print the word "POW!" on screen.

So basically, probably the best superhero movie of the year. I'm probably going to be quoting lines from The Joker for the next couple of weeks or so.

Yarly.
-Joe

2008-07-22T20:48:00.002+08:00

This week, and the next, I will find that two very amazing things exist. They are Someone Else's Problem, and Oh Crud I Have Stuff To Do. Because see, these two weeks have been filled with very annoying things that I generally put under "irrelevant bullshit". This Friday, I have my German Oral test. Next week, I need to have both my presentation, and my microbiology website ready for grading. After that, I will have to sit for the German written paper.

That covers the Oh Crud I Have To Do Stuff part of the coming fortnight. Thankfully, much of the issues at hand also happen to be group work. This effectively makes some of the work Someone Else's Problem.

Now, this would be really awesome, if it really were SEP. Unfortunately, nothing is SEP in this place. Reason being that it's pretty impossible to trust anyone to make good on an assignment. And so I shall step in as Editor in Chief, Cleanser of the Unholy scourge of Bad Grammar. Ironic, because I already feel that I have made several past/present/continuous tense errors in this post. It is rather difficult to write in the appropriate tenses, when one mentions both the future and the present, as well as the not-future.

I'm not making any sense.

On the bright side, after next Friday I probably won't feel like killing everyone! Because by then it'll all be revision for the semestral exam. "Semestral" isn't even a word.

-Joe

2008-07-20T17:34:00.003+08:00

And thus ends a very relaxing and enjoyable week. Well, that's how it appears to me at this moment. I guess the "relaxing" part didn't start until Tuesday, when I decided to say "F this, I don't give a shit." After that, everything was just plain awesome.

Screw chemistry reports. The person who marks them doesn't live up to his word. This person has no consistency in his standards. There's just no pleasing him. You'd think that after someone said "Just use the results you obtain, even if they're wrong. The important thing is that your calculation methods are correct. Just explain the errors in your discussion.", he'd actually read the damn page-long discussion you give him about why the results are off. Instead of just circling my data and asking stupid questions like "why is this negative?", you'd think that he would probably realise that my reports tend to extend beyond the ignorant slapping down of stupid data.

But noooo, it doesn't work that way. Every single report(after the first one which I had no idea what to do) I have submitted has contained detailed explanation and exposition about the experiment in question. I have tried my best to figure out what was looked out for in technical reports(since we weren't given an example to refer to) and all I found out was that the reports were subject to every whim and impulse of the marker. Those of you who know me, tell me, am I good at following protocol? I may take short-cuts around certain things, but not with work. I have never been (entirely) lazy about work while also expecting good results.

So yeah, after I got back my most recent report, I said "F this." and decided that this moron wasn't worth my time, or my frustration. After all, there was no way that I could pull an A-average for reports now, not after the string of sub-par grades given to me for no good reason.
On top of that, no more microbiology practicals, and I still have yet to receive any more reports back for it. Brilliant. Just brilliant.

So, the hell with it. I don't care. There's nothing I can do about it for now anyway.

Today, during lunch, I had a lot of time to let my mind wander, and I chanced upon that horrible, horrible topic of "What is life?". Immediately, I realised the answer.

There is no "life". "Life" does not exist. "Life" was just a term made up by people because they wanted to believe that things that can move around and eat were special. Unfortunately, nothing is special. You see, the question "What is life?" is a stupid question, for it brings about more questions, such as "where do we draw the line between living and non-living things?" There is no line.

Stuff(being everything) is made up of atoms. It doesn't matter what goes beyond that. When many atoms come together, they become stuff. Rocks are made up of billions of silicon dioxide molecules. Cheese is made up of billions of cheesium atoms.

"Living things", as we know them, are essentially made up of many kinds of Stuff. They are much more complex than a piece of cheese, but it can be said that they are simply many different pieces of cheese existing together. A simple animal has Brain Stuff, Digestive System Stuff, and Various Other Stuff. Each of these Stuffs are made out of cells, which are basically made up of more Stuff. The carbon atom in your body is no different from the carbon atom on the other side of the galaxy(not counting isotopes). So nothing about the individual Stuffs in your body are actually special.

The Stuff Mindset says that no matter how awesomely the Stuff in your body react with each other, enabling themselves to turn other Stuff into Stuff that they want, they're all still made of Stuff. And since every atom an element is pretty much the same(still not counting isotopes), our Stuff is the same as other Stuff. It's just placed differently.

The reason why I like Stuff, is that we no longer have to answer the question "what is life?". There will no longer be a need to draw any line between "living" and "non-living" things. No more wondering about whether a virus is a living thing or not. The answer is, it's not a living thing. It's made out of proteins and genetic material, which are made out of atoms. The fact that they can do things is irrelevant. Human beings are also not living things. They're made out of carbohydrates and proteins and various other Stuff, and the fact that they can do things is also irrelevant.

A human being is a swarm of swarms. It's a swarm of organs, and the organs are swarms of specialised cells. The cells themselves are made out of several swarms, and these organelles are also made out of swarms. What you see on the outside is the result of the infinitely complex reactions between these swarms. And the fact that these swarms are "swarming" is a product of chance. So there you have it: You are not alive. You are the result of chemistry working on Stuff.

So the next time anyone asks me whether or not a virus is a living thing, I will remove his brain-swarm and donate it to the Biofuel plant. The fact that I can turn someone's body into regular stuff shows that he's basically just Stuff in a very ordered position.

Yes, of course, this is a gross overgeneralisation of how complex "living" organisms are. But seriously, we're not that much different from the first self-replicating molecules that formed in Primordial Soup back then. It's just that the random nature of the universe, coupled with natural selection, has allowed those molecules to change beyond their original states to become what most people call "life". Take it as that humans are macro-viruses, and that the Earth is a "life-form". It has its own systems, cycles which have to work in a certain way, or the earth would become messed up, just like how animals and plants get diseases. The earth has a human infection. Humans are messing up the earth, just like how viruses mess up humans. So is the planet alive? I don't think anyone has ever answered that.

-Joe

2008-07-17T21:52:00.004+08:00

Guys, this is amazing! They're making those Orbital Strike shells from C&C3 for real. Seriously. You know those urban legends about people getting killed when something falls out of a plane onto them, or off a really tall building? Well, the guys at the Pentagon must have been thinking of that when they dreamt up the Hypervelocity Rod Bundles, or as they have aptly nicknamed, Rods from God.

Although in a completely different context, that isn't really such a good name.

In short, they're making a satellite that houses telephone pole-long tungsten rods, and is able to drop them down to earth whenever someone wants to see what it looks like when a telephone pole is dropped from orbit. The tungsten shell, is propelled only by gravity itself, with some minor stuffies on it for slight course adjustment. The shell would basically accelerate to several thousand kilometres per second, hitting the ground like when Superman couldn't fix his radio and slammed his desk in rage. Because it really matters that you hit the cat instead of allowing the resulting shockwave to decimate everything in about a kilometer from the point of impact.

Yes, because the Orbital Strike System(I'm just making that up, because I think it's better than Rods from God) effectively delivers a nuclear blast, only with zero radiation issues. Unless you aimed it at a nuke. Which, ironically, is probably what this thing is being designed for: To use against countries that are in violation of those nuclear treaty stuffs.

They're man-made meteors, and they can be launched at anything, from anywhere. If you plan on updating your bomb shelter, make sure that you have some sort of missile deflection system. I really doubt that even the thickest shelters can withstand a frickin' meteor strike. A meteor that happens to be made of really hard metal.

By the looks of it, the real life Orbital Strike is going to be a whole lot more impressive than GDI's support power. It's going to become the ion cannon of our age. I can already imagine the time when there will be an entire system of these things floating around, ready to smite all who oppose... The people who own the things.

I'm totally going to buy one just so that I can make a Zeeky Boogy Doog joke.

-Joe

2008-07-15T02:48:00.000+08:00

Gee. It’s two in the morning.

I have recently gotten my hands on the soundtrack from Spirited Away. Finally. I don’t know why it took me that long to get it.

Simply put, the soundtrack is brilliant. There are beautiful pieces. There are the atmosphere-giving pieces. There are the more sound-effect based pieces. Music makes a movie.

It has probably occurred to most of us before; that without a soundtrack, most, if not all movies, would be extremely dull. Imagine Mission Impossible without that theme. Imagine Indiana Jones without its themesong. Or Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings. It’s just simply not possible to have a nice movie without nice music behind it. It’d be like watching them on mute. Except that you can still hear the dialogue.

Without those swelling scores to accentuate moments of great happiness, or sadness, it just doesn’t feel right. When you watch the Makings of any movie, and they give you a short clip of the cast acting out a scene, you’ll notice that there isn’t any music being played for them. You’ll also notice a distinct lack of emotion and ironically, realness. It ends up looking a lot more like acting.

Now, there is one problem with getting the soundtracks to all the movies you love. After you listen to them a few times, you’d pretty much have them memorised to some degree. Take for example The Return of the King for me. After having had the soundtrack for several weeks, I decided to watch the movie again. During the movie, I could recognise each and every one of the scores being played. While it is rather cool to realise “Hey, that’s _____!”, I found that it sort of made the movie experience less immersive. Instead of being part of the atmosphere, the soundtrack became detached from the movie, like a counter-melody being played a little too far away from the band. I could still hear it and enjoy it, but it and the movie became two separate things.

This issue only really arises for movies which I have obtained almost the entire soundtrack to. For others, where all I have is the main theme, it’s completely different. For some reason, I have yet to procure the Jurassic Park soundtrack, and the movie is still great. I love it when the main theme plays. Bb F- C G, G A Bb Bb A F G.

Soundtracks that include vocals are something else entirely. In the classic, Phantom of the Opera, knowing the soundtrack makes the movie experience considerably more enjoyable. Because this time, instead of just listening to the voices, you can see the singer, and the context the songs are sung in. Better still, you’ll be able to hear all the words, since you’ve already been acquainted with them.

They need to make an instrumental medley of Sweeney Todd songs.

Doh. What am I doing posting at this hour.

-Joe

*Sorry guys, no picture yet. Using my laptop.

2008-07-10T23:01:00.002+08:00

Well, sheezwizzles. I get the feeling that debate was never really one of my natural talents. It's always the problem with the most logical decision, and ethics. I always toyed with the idea of joining a debate team. I figured that my argumentation skills were up to scratch. What I did not realise, was that all I have ever argued for involved the annihilation of one or many persons.

But what can I do? I'll just pretend that I care about politics and such for a while... Until the competition is over. It's not like I have much of a choice. Either I ditch them and leave them twisting in the wind, while also denying myself resumé glitter, or I can grit my teeth and sit through it for the sake of having something to write about. What happens during the debate itself is entirely different.

The entire atmosphere is simply not very welcoming. Not exactly encouraging, but it's too early to tell. Although it would have been nice if the other SCL team showed up.

In any case, I've been watching the first season of Smallville over the past week, and something happens every episode: Clark loses his power. This is usually due to one of two things. One, the monster of the episode is infused with kryptonite, and so Clark is weakened when he gets near them. Either that, or the location where the events take place happens to have kryptonite lying around on the ground.

I get it, the only way that Superman can ever be considered a legitimate character is to give him weaknesses. However, the creators of Superman also made it really difficult for themselves by making Clark Kent have God Mode, and every other thing that would get him labeled as a hacker. If the guy is naturally invulnerable, so invulnerable that when he's engulfed in flames, he comes out of it with his hair on, then the only way to actually make it look like the baddies stand a chance is to invent a plot device that deprives him of his powers.

Come on, think about it. No other fight in the superhero universe is more one-sided than Clark Kent versus Random Monster Thing. The only thing that stops Clarky from just pulverising everything that stands in his way is his lack of use of firearms. If exposure to green crystals makes you feel ill and lowers your sperm count, then how about trying to shoot the bugger? I mean, that seems like a possible idea.

Oh, while we're at it... Batman could do with a gun. Bat-shurikens are hardly guns.

At least seven episodes after Clark realises that green meteor rocks make him weak, he's still barging head-on into fights. You'd think that he'd have realised, after being told so many times, that the reason why his enemies have their powers was because of kryptonite in the first place.

This effectively makes the Green Arrow more useful, on average, than Superman. Mind you, the Green Arrow doesn't even have any superpowers, unless you count being able to win gold medals in the archery Olympics a superpower. Plus, he dresses like Robin Hood. Doctor Doom also dresses like Robin Hood. Why do you think that is?

I sure hope they don't make a Green Arrow movie. That would be somewhat like The Punisher, except that there would be less pointless blowing-up of things. That doesn't make it any better, though.

-Joe

Ah, and I don't know what happened to the tagbox. I came home Wednesday night and it was filled with dots. I refreshed the page again and everything was gone, with a message from Shaun saying that he cleared the spam. Where the spam came from, I have no idea.

2008-07-08T21:39:00.003+08:00

Well hmm. I realise that I have a lot of notebooks. I have something like five notebooks lying around my room. I carry two of them around, and the other three are just sort of there whenever I feel the need to write anything. One of my notebooks has been tainted by homework, and the other has too many random doodles. Both are testament to my handwriting.

For the first time in really long, I actually had a nap! For the past... At least six months, I never had a wink of sleep from dawn to dusk. As in, I didn't even try to go to sleep before it was actually bedtime. I thus have rediscovered the awesomeness of taking a power-nap. I woke up early this morning intending to do some stuff, but after I got that stuff done, I felt really tired. Too tired even to read the morning comics. That was odd. I even made a conscious decision to go to sleep. I said "ah, I've got an hour. I'm going to have a nap."

And so I went and plopped myself down on the sofa and slept. I awoke twenty-something minutes later to a phonecall from some dude at the school. It turns out that I'm being nominated to represent the School of Life Science in some inter-school debate.

So, what the heck, right? I'm giving it a shot. It turns out that I've been put into a team with a couple of Year 2 people. I have no idea what this'll turn into.

Moo.

-Joe

2008-07-04T21:26:00.002+08:00

Unbelievable! People are actually signing a petition against Diablo III's new colour scheme and graphics style. We've always expected the best from Blizzard, but seriously, what's wrong with the colour scheme now?

The previous two games in the Diablo franchise were famous for their dark, brooding atmosphere. In the first Diablo, the game was played pretty much entirely in darkness. It was always night, and other times you were deep in the catacombs. After which it got slightly brighter, but only because you were in Hell and there was glowing lava everywhere. Diablo II did showcase a few more brightly-lit and very... Anomalous places, but the theme generally made you feel like you were actually in a time of darkness. You could be in a blazing hot desert, but the way you could get swarmed by mutated lightning-spewing scarab beetles made the game awesome in ways that dim lighting could never achieve.

So then, if we've seen how utterly cool Diablo II could be, even in brightly lit and mind-distorting areas, then why all the fuss about Diablo III? The gameplay video showed a total of TWO areas. One was a dungeon(which was really, really awesome) and the other was this beautiful forested area with rivers and grassy canyons and waterfalls. With zombies. It was really like a wonderland. And then this pristine, Rivendell-esque has hordes of zombies and skeletons rising out of the ground to smite our heroes into the soil. So that they can become zombies too. But the point is that it really seems to give a feel of an invasion of the undead. Which, is actually probably the effect that they were going for.

Because, see, I think that the actual timeline that the story is set in must be known before any comments can be made about "atmosphere". If it's a fresh, new attack of demons, you'd expect that your trees would still be green and buildings still shining ivory. Unless it's like in the previous two games, where you begin your journey sometime into the scourge, when Hell has already, literally, broken loose.

So people should just hold their horses and not accuse Blizzard of messing things up after seeing a tiny, tiny fraction of the whole game. Which will be made even smaller after the inevitable expansion pack(s). In any case, if they can render a forest and a mausoleum in such detail, I can't wait to see what the new Hell is going to look like.

Keeping with today's theme, I'm going to wonder about zombies and skeletons. In much medieval lore, zombies are reanimated corpses that hunger for living flesh. They've got nothing really keeping them together, and are essentially corpses being pulled by invisible strings. Skeletons, on the other hand, are the bones of fallen warriors, reanimated either by the repossession by a new spirit, or a magicky spell.

According to most accounts, zombies are slow, lumbering monsters that can be easily avoided by increasing the length of your stride slightly. Skeleton tend to be portrayed as fast moving, intelligent undead creatures, capable of wielding weapons and armour. By this contrast, skeletons are clearly the superior undead creature.

However, since zombies are not preserved in any way, their flesh would eventually rot off and they would fall to pieces. After some time, all there would be left are bones. And bones make skeletons! Assuming that there are always plenty of mages around to animate skeletons, all zombies would eventually be "upgraded", so to speak.

Oh and then there's that other issue with mummies. If mummies hardly decompose, then they'll never become skeletons.

Augh why am I even talking about this.

Anyway, I figure that skeletons would probably be the most difficult undead creature to fight, assuming that none of us have any knowledge on how to exorcise spirits inside bones. I mean, there isn't any flesh to attack. You can't poke a skeleton in the eye, or kick one in the crotch. You could do your best saber-lunge at a skeleton and all you'd get is your sword poking through an already hollow ribcage. No, the only way to destroy a skeleton would be to disintegrate it completely.

Which is why someone will need to build Planetary Annihilators. So that we can destroy skeletons, in case they ever start attacking us. By the way, that's also a good reason to learn how to drive. Because, you know, there might be a zombie apocalypse anytime during our lifetimes, and so it'd be good to learn how to use a motorised vehicle.

Of course, we'll be hoping that the zombies are the Diablo II types, and not the Resident Evil types. Really slow.

Very cool xkcd comic.

-Joe

2008-07-02T21:49:00.002+08:00

According to Wikipedia...

Procrastination is a type of behavior which is characterized by deferment of actions or tasks to a later time. Psychologists often cite procrastination as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision. ^[1] For an individual, procrastination may result in stress, a sense of guilt, the loss of personal productivity, the creation of crisis and the disapproval of others for not fulfilling one's responsibilities or commitments. These combined feelings can promote further procrastination.

I also seem to have found an actual piece of mathematics regarding procrastination.

I'm not really sure if that's considered a real law, but it's something studied in psychology. In case you were too lazy to read that, the Matching Law basically says that people tend to do things more, when they it's psychologically reinforcing. It's really not that different(after being boiled down to really simple terms) from a chemical addiction. People pretty much become addicted to their own brain chemicals.

Procrastination is a strange thing. Generally, in order to procrastinate from something, you need to do something else. However, when you try to do that other thing, you might end up procrastinating from that too. That happens to me a lot.

I've realised something new. I can procrastinate by simply not doing anything useful. This is basically when my procrastination activity is a very passive activity, and invokes emotions often identical to that of being bored. There was a time when procrastination actually helped me to get other things done. This was good, because I was usually supposed to do those things anyway. It seems now, though, that I seem to be running out of useful things that I can put in the "other things" category.

... I suppose I could um, rearrange my 1 piece of furniture.

But really, why would I want to reshape my room, when I could just get on the computer and go typety typety, and "explain" the dynamics of procrastination to people? Yes, this is in fact a form of procrastination.

Procrastination is usually linked to having either a very interesting "other thing" to do, or when the "thing" that you're supposed to do is just really unappealing. This type of thing is usually of little to no point to a person, or has something about it that is just unpleasant to deal with. They're usually those things for which the "ah, the hell with that" philosophy just doesn't work for. Really unfortunate.

Of course, these things, however obscure, usually have some kind of a point. Okay, not really, but I... Think that doing what appear to be useless and menial activities may be beneficial anyway.

This would certainly not be true for people who have actual, useful "other things" to do. For people like me, however, who do not really have that many useful "other things" that they'd like to do, and end up doing nothing as their procrastination activity, these sorts of situations are just productivity killers.

It's like there's a flowchart in my brain. You have pointless chemistry homework! Do you want to do them? Y/N

N

Do nothing! Cool/whatever

Cool

*leaves rustling*

Yeah, so basically, I end up doing nothing way too much. I would blame my environment, but that just isn't really wise.

As quoted from Wikipedia:
Procrastinators are also thought to have a higher-than-normal level of conscientiousness, more based on the "dreams and wishes" of perfection or achievement in contrast to a realistic appreciation of their obligations and potential.

...Maybe. I haven't been doing all that much thinking recently. Or maybe I have, but I've just been forgetting it all.

I suspect that the source of my procrastination is really that Wikipedia is just that much more informative than school. And I suspect that my procrastination from using Wikipedia has to do with that playing Hedgehog Launch is really that entertaining.

Does playing puzzle games count as a useful activity? Does solving puzzles really train the mind? Does it increase brainpower? Cubing certainly doesn't count. The only advantages that can be derived from that are stronger, nimbler fingers, and slightly better colour recognition. But what about puzzles that don't have any particular methods and rely on sheer intellect?

I'd conduct an experiment on myself, but I suspect that it would end up in similar ways to my other experiments. I procrastinated from them and switched to a new experiment.

Ugh. I've been drawing cartoon personas of myself lately.

And thus ends this rather meaningless post. I'm not even sure how I started it. I've forgotten.

In Soviet Russia, post makes YOU!!!

-Joe

2008-07-01T20:01:00.002+08:00

And so, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is just about getting ready to go sometime this August. Supposedly able to achieve temperatures as low as 2 Kelvins, the LHC is theorised to be able to shed light on several things, such as whether or not liquid cake will ever be made, and to allow scientists to figure out how elementary particles can possess mass.

It's that big.

Now, I'm not exactly an expert on supercolliders, but if there's one thing I know, it's that a supercollider that's larger than the previous one isn't going to end the world. It's amazing, really. There actually are people who have the impression that the world is going to end when the LHC goes online. I mean, judging from the wording, they believe that the universe will spontaneously turn itself into the shape of Jar Jar Binks. Which would be really bad. I don't think anyone could stand the thought of being part of anything to do with Jar Jar Binks.

Now, the thing is, it's not actually known whether the Large Hadron Collider is going to be able to produce micro-black holes. For one, it's not really that easy to tell if they came into existence in the first place, given that they supposedly evaporate via Hawking radiation. And this whole thing about magnetic monopoles- If my memory serves me, the LHC shouldn't even be able to make monopoles that do anything wacky. Such as turning the universe into a cake.

In any case, maybe I should get started on Fabric of the Cosmos, now that I'm just about done with Origin. Origin was really just a huge illustration of stuff that we already knew. For the modern reader, On the Origin of Species is but an affirmation to the model of evolution. Enlightening in some aspects, as there are just certain things that you cannot find on Wikipedia, and also wonderful, when you realise that Darwin lived over a century ago. You know, around the time when leading physicists would burn you at the stake for witchcraft if you showed them a cellphone.

Zeeky boogy doog.

If they make the Zeeky. H Bomb out of the LHC, I'm going to convert to a new religion.

Today just felt like a bad day. It is likely that this has much to do with tomorrow, when I will lose my afternoon to something that involves helping the first batch of biofuel. I also feel like I have signed away my weekends for a few months sometime in the future.

And I've never had such unappealing homework, ever.

-Joe

2008-06-29T21:14:00.002+08:00

Well, Diablo 3 has finally been announced. Phew. Really, I was quite happy last night. I mean, I've waited for Diablo 3 for at least five years now. I'll just be waiting another one or so more, before the game is actually released. In the meantime, I'll have various other games to keep me entertained. Kane's Wrath is still fun, despite the sad realisation that the AI is a bloody cheater. Spore will be out soon, and so will the Red Alert 3 beta. Which I will most definitely dip into.

The convention today was quite a disappointment, really. Normally I expect conventions to be 1) Fun, 2) Full of stuff to look at, 3)Containing buyable items, 4) Crowded.

I only got number 4 today. Seriously, there was nothing to see. Except a couple of professional speedcubers. That was about it, really. Sure, there were a few LotR figurines, and some dudes in Imperial uniforms playing Wii Sports, but it was still really, really tame. I'd have enjoyed myself more at the Science Centre, even though I've basically seen everything worth noting there.

It only occupied one convention hall. It was small, and filled with uninteresting nothings. The lego sculptures were hardly impressive, and the lightsabers were no different from the ones on display at the actual toy stores.

In other words, we'd probably have gotten a better experience from going to a PopcornPop or SimplyToys store. Quite a waste of time, really. Thus, we decided to escape the oxygen-less swamp of the convention hall and head off to Funan.

Yes, really. The convention was so crummy that we decided to scoot off to a regular IT mall. Which isn't really an IT mall any more. It sucks, period. Where are the games? Where, are the games? In other countries, there are entire stores dedicated to selling games. Entire stores, being places with a ground area the size of swimming pools, selling nothing but games and game systems. Over there, going to buy a video game can actually be considered as "shopping". Over here, buying a video game is "locating a small shop squashed between countless cake shops/hair saloons/jewelers to buy a video game that came out last month."

Some IT mall. They really ought to change their name.

In any case, it seems that it's back to lessons as usual tomorrow. I'm not really anxious to get back to that, although it's certainly not something I'm dreading either. Lab coats! Playing with fire! These are cool things. Then there are the very uncool things, such as the NE project that we're supposedly going to have to do soon.

... Honestly. There's no way that they can make an NE project cool, in any way. Slave labour up North doesn't count. And there's nothing about ice in this one, because it seems that it's about some biofuel people... As usual.

It's week 12 this week. Only 5 more weeks of lessons, then a week for revision. After that, the end-of-semester exams. And then no more German, no more Communications Skills, no more bloody IMB, and more microbiology to look forward to! Yes, despite what I say about it, it's actually quite interesting. The most interesting module so far, in fact. It also really helps with the whole sounding smart thing, because you can rattle off various names of common bacteria and fungi, and explain to people how their intestines are full of them.

For now, I'll just have to do my best. Less procrastination, more action. More trying not to procrastinate, basically, so it doesn't really translate into more action. Still, it'll make me feel better about myself! In theory.

-Joe

2008-06-28T19:06:00.002+08:00

AND THE HEAVENS SHALL TREMBLE.

Today has really been one of my better days. Got through a report at peak efficiency, had hamburgers for dinner, and...

DIABLO THREE.

DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABBLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO THREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

IN YOUR FACE, EVERYONE WHO EVER SAID THAT DIABLO THREE WOULD NEVER COME OUT. IN YOUR FACE, VERY, VERY IN YOUR FACE.

Also, IN YOUR FACE! HAH.

Diablo wins. Your point is thus invalid.

Gee, I sure hope a random meteor doesn't crash into earth anytime soon.

-Joe

DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III 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DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III DIABLO III 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2008-06-25T19:17:00.002+08:00

People! I have news. Which I forgot. So I'll just jump straight to my next point.

Now, procrastinating in my usual manner, but without the distractive aid of the internet, I found myself asking "What would you rather give up, salt and pepper, or instant communication?" This was in contrast to my usual "Would you rather have a lungful of hydrogen ignited, or have an image of Dora the Explorer permanently imprinted on your retinas?" and various other painful scenarios.

Oh, wait. There isn't really that much of a contrast. Losing salt and pepper would make food amazingly bland, or all sweet. When everything is either tasteless(ie. natural) or sweet, the craving for chips would probably become overwhelming. Losing mobile phones and the internet, on the other hand, would also be amazingly excruciating, albeit different ways.

In this age, information is expected to travel almost instantaneously. After all, we have things like Wi-Fi, copper transmission cables, and radio waves. While technically taking considerably more than a jiffy to traverse regular distances, your email usually gets to its destination long before you could walk to your kitchen for a snack. However, the rate at which information is really transmitted around the world is notably lower, due to several factors that I have managed to come up with off the top of my head.

There could be a mathematical equation for this. The speed at which information reaches any individual, measured in megabytes per second, is proportional to the actual transmission rates, multiplied by the inverse of the magnitude of procrastination on the part of the sender, the desire to receive information on the part of the receiver, "unforeseen" circumstance, and of general idiocy. See, much of the time spent transferring information around is wasted before the information is sent. Often, the information is right there, waiting to be brutally compressed into a .zip file, but the person who has been charged with delivering it usually has Other Things To Do.

Yes, that shall be an acronym now. OTTD, along with Someone Else's Problem, and And Your Point Is?

The solution to this is to turn everyone into cyborgs, where they would lose any ability to make a decision regarding the sending of information, and instead be controlled by an automated system that makes them send an email when they are told to. This would be exceptionally useful for people in charge of the dissemination of various things, such as personalised spam, and advertisements promoting the enlargement of certain organs.

The other part of the problem, is on the receiver's end. Many people assume that once information is sent, the other party will receive it. This is simply not true, as anyone who has ever tried using this invention known as Short Message Service could tell you. For one, the receiver may not have felt the telltale vibrations in his pants upon the reception of his message. This probably counts into the equation detailing this side of the transfer.

Unsurprisingly, the solution I am offering also involves invoking the loss of people's ability to make decisions. Also, since most often we are alerted to information by sensory input, and that much of this sensory input goes unnoticed(vibrating pants), it is natural to look for a solution that bypasses this limitation. One way to do it would be to raise the chances of one becoming aware of incoming information. This would be done in ways such as having mechanised trousers that amplify the vibrations of one's mobile phone. This approach, however, is expensive and very uncool. The alternative, while no less expensive, is very much lacking in the uncoolness department. Instead of making the signals of information more obvious to the receiver, this method entirely bypasses the need for sensory input.

Naturally, this would involve sending information directly into one's brain. This would also involve turning people into cyborgs, as the brain doesn't store information like a computer chip. Also built in with the memory device, will have to be something that forces people to look at the information. To make sure that they understand it, the device will have to put the person's thought processes through some algorithms, and perhaps force the person to acquire the necessary knowledge required for understanding the subject information.

This could backfire in that people might abuse the system to make other people mess up the schedules during the mandatory knowledge-acquirement periods. Undoubtedly, there would be ways to prevent this, but that would sound way too technical. Even I can't discuss something like that here.

And I still can't remember any announcement that I was planning to make. Maybe there wasn't one, and that I just thought that starting a post with "People!" was amusing.

Hmm.

Oh, and by the way, the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't disallow evolution in any way. Just saying.

-Joe

2008-06-24T15:38:00.002+08:00

Hmm, yeah. Well, nothing has made me feel like killing anything or anyone in particular since that last episode. I guess nothing can compare to hearing news about a certain person and that this certain person is going to teach the chapters on cell biology next semester. This is so screwy.

Ironically, I've played more video games over the past couple of days than I have for over two weeks. For some reason, right in the middle of the common tests, I am finding myself with a desire to blow things up. And it's really got nothing to do with the stress, either. It's not the "argh I'm so pissed that I want to level a city" type of desire. It's the "man, this is so fun. I'm just going to do it again! And again. And again" type.

That is probably not really a good sign. I should be focusing on my tests, because I don't want to get penalised for anything that, under normal circumstances, would have been entirely passable. At least I haven't started trying to find the value of Pi during an exam again. I'm never going to do that again. Ever.

... And I wasn't really finding the value of Pi. I was just dividing random numbers, and sticking them to the back of 3.142.

Hm. So, anyway. Recently, I came across this video on I-am-Bored of supposed open source experts claiming that the internet as we know it is coming to an end. They were basically saying that by 2013 or so, all the major internet service providers are going to change the way the internet works, entirely. Right now, we can basically access any site on the internet that is not restricted by the authorities. After the change, however, this would be no more.

Supposedly, they are going to turn the internet into a more subscription-based kind of thing, similar to television programs. We would be given a default set of websites that we can access as part of a basic package, such as... BBC News and various other commonly-visited sites. If we want something more than what is given, we would need to pay to subscribe to them, like subscribing to Animal Planet.

Well, that would be a real bugger. It would pretty much kill every small site that was run for interest or simply for people to have "personal spaces" on the internet.

Naturally, I called bullshit on this. It just does not make any sense. Firstly, it would render just about every search engine ever created entirely useless. When all you have online is the equivalent of Channel 5(which would probably be something like Photobucket on the internet) and a small variety of mainstream websites, there would be practically zero need to search entire databases for "reproductive cycle of mycorrhizal symbionts".

So then, Google will no longer be famous for being a useful search engine, but rather "just another annoying spamvertiser". I'm not sure if that's in their company goals.

You'd think that if all the "major internet service providers" are going to screw over just about the entire internet generation, they might inform them. Because, you know, people just aren't going to conform to a new standard that easily, even if you give them free donuts as an incentive. It just can't work.

Also those video-makers decided to put a half-second long flash of a well-endowed lady wearing a low-cut blousething, right in the middle of the clip. Now, when you upload a video onto Youtube, Youtube will pick the very frame in the middle of your clip to be that preview image. She was supposedly interviewing the "open source people". Clearly, the entire point of that was to attract viewers. There was absolutely no point in that split-second scene being in the middle of the video clip, other than that.

These people are probably just making these "messages to the public" as part of their own little thrill-rides. Lying to gullible people is fun, I guess.

And gullible people are everywhere. Check your inbox.

-Joe

2008-06-20T18:22:00.002+08:00

Augh, this is total, goddamn, bullshit.

I really, really, cannot trust NYP to give me accurate information. I hoped that the first few times I complained about this, that they were simply anomalies, random occurrences that were overlooked due to a natural amount of human negligence. I looked at is as bad luck, because, you know, it might have been. Maybe the people who created the lecture notes and such were just tired, and the editors were just bad at English(not that this is excusable in any way).

Okay so fine. During the quiz they state completely wrong things. In the lectures, they make up entirely non-existent facts and give them to us! WHAT. Okay, so maybe they're just outdated. Fine, that would be fine, completely fine, if they would bloody listen to me when I tell them! But what? Noooo, instead, they attribute their complete incompetence to ambiguity of information! So I say, why not explain the ambiguity? And then they make a completely unrelated and unhelpful remark, snubbing me, shutting me off. Ignoring my complaints.

And now what? I've encountered "ambiguity" number seven or so. Titration curves. The image presented to me in the chemistry lab manual, issued by NYP, is entirely different from ALL of the ones that I have found on the net. And guess what? ALL of the ones on the net are the SAME. Tells you something, doesn't it?

And I have to answer a question about it! How nice! First, they gave me a wrong graph, and asked me a question. At that point of time, I was completely unaware of how wrong the graph was. Also, given that the question was sort of new to me, they suggested that I looked it up on the web. And so I DID. And then I found that the entire dicking thing was wrong, making it pretty damn difficult to answer the question.

And so I've been trying to decide what to do. Use their botched up information, or the information I find elsewhere? Normally, I'd choose the latter, but this counts into my grade. Which is seriously the most screwed up thing, ever.

There is no way, absolutely no way, that all of these huge, massive errors, were simply in here because of normal human mistakes. No one(that matters) makes this many errors. These people are supposed to be scientists, FFS.

This would not peeve me so much, if I had any form of consolation. Someone tell me that my batch was just so damn unlucky that we got material from all the wrong people. Someone show me, that there is a way that a bloody school can fall into this level of incompetence. I would not care about all of the errors so far, if they were not going to affect me. But they are.

There is a reason for ambiguity. It's that people do not want to know things. They just accept everything given to them. Once in a while, someone decides that he want to know more, and does this really easy thing called cross referencing. And so, he discovers that there are differences! A normal, good, efficient organisation would listen to this dude, and conduct their own investigations.

And, you know, maybe update the goddamn textbook.

I know, not everything is known yet. But why is it so damn hard to add "Some scientists believe..." in front of ambiguous statements? Why is it so damn hard to add "However, some disagree with this..." so that an alternative hypothesis can be introduced? There's a reason that we invented the words "theory", "postulate", and "speculation".

This is utter bullshit. Seriously.

Oh, and someone tell me, when does methyl red turn pink or colourless?

Rgghh. I hate this. I hate them, and their pitiful excuses. They should really stop saying "You can't trust everything on the web". They should bloody go online and have a look around. I believe that real scientists use the internet, to publish texts and the like. You would think that some of them would have a look at Wikipedia, and out of that some of them, notice errors and correct them? And also, Wikipedia puts heavy emphasis on things like citations? You can't just make up anything and put it up there, unless there are supporting sources elsewhere.

So, for general information to be wrong on Wikipedia, you would need to go through a number of things. Firstly, you would need other sources to be wrong. As in, four out of five prominent, reliable sources, to be wrong. For this to even happen, you need entire intellectual bodies, universities, research centres, to have made the same mistakes, in order to have uniformly wrong information. Because only when the sources agree with each other, can they normally be thought of as "correct". So, after this, a person would use his natural logic and use information from these wrong sources to create the entry. After some time, it is really more likely that other organisations will perform their procedures correctly, and thus prove that the wikipedia entry is in fact, wrong. So then someone, now enlightened, will fix the entry.

It's not fail-proof, but honestly, you would think that general, simple things would be correct. It's not like we're discussing a Wikipedia entry that attempts to explain a mathematical proof. This is biology. Biology is concrete. Either it's there, or it's not. You don't worry about wave properties of matter when you look at an enzyme. Biology is applied chemistry, and chemistry is applied physics. There is an entire science separating biology from quantum mechanics.

So people should really stop saying "you can't trust the internet". Before the internet, did people say "You can't trust the library", and even before that "Don't trust anything"?

This is detrimental and an impediment to the growth and locomotion of knowledge. This very attitude is killing the quest for knowledge. Eventually, the human race is going to wallow around saying "could be." instead of "yes" or "no".

And if that time comes during my lifetime, I really wouldn't mind killing a lot of people. At all.

-Joe

2008-06-17T11:47:00.003+08:00

Yes, it is a curling iron. I would trust a girl to know her hair products, I guess =)

So anyway, here, as promised, I give you the internet!

Although why it has such a suggestive shape is beyond me. There are brilliant, brilliant, engineers, that could make a curling iron look more like a hair implement than another kind of implement.

... And that is all for today. For now. I may come back and lengthen this post later.

And I am back. It took me that long to get through 2 reports and part of a German assignment. I blame it mostly on the fact that I totally owned myself this morning.

So there I was, loading wet clothes into the drier, when I rammed my thumb straight into a chunk of very hard stuff. Like metal. Immediately, I recoiled in pain, falling to the floor. It was only my thumb, but really, I hit that chunk of metal really fast. I was bleeding under my fingernail. I think I was bleeding, or maybe it was just some very fast bruise formation. The upper half of my thumbnail turned a dark mix of red and blue, and mind you, it hurt. A lot.

So anyway, after a few minutes of groaning, I got up and uh, tested, my injury. It seemed fine. Some bleeding, apparently, but no broken nail, nothing shoved where there shouldn't be anything. Still, I am unable to apply pressure to my thumb in any way that presses the fleshy part of it against the nail. At least, without it hurting excruciatingly.

Which basically renders me incapable of writing with a pen. This is the most screwy thing ever. I can't write. And not being able to write sucks, especially when you planned to do some writing. With a pen.

Not that it matters, of course because I seem to have lost my pen. Curses! First my entire pencil case, and now this? Arrgghhhh. That pen brought me through the O' Levels. And I had it with me my entire stay at AJ. And I used it a lot. To write, to draw... I have entire, A4 page-sized doodles drawn with that pen. Okay, so it was a different ink, but the pen. The rubber grip on that pen was so exceptionally nice and soft, and smooth. When I use other people's G2s they all just feel wrong.

Sigh. I will start anew tomorrow, then. Hopefully I'll be able to write by then.

-Joe

2008-06-17T00:54:00.003+08:00

Oh sheez, it's already one in the morning. I said that I would sleep early tonight, but I ended up playing Hexic with Rachel. Because she seems to have discovered Windows Live or something. I figure that if I don't post tonight, I'll post tomorrow, and procrastinate. I don't want to procrastinate any more, because it is really important that I get through these CTs(however simple or disappointing they might turn out to be) with awesome, kick-ass grades.

Anyway, I've just spent four days in KL, Malaysia, during which I did a few things. I followed people around drearily, while they shopped. I tried teaching my cousin how to cube. It turns out that she's not really supportive when it comes to classifying 85% of the world as Biofuel. I followed people around shopping malls some more, dropped off to Borders a couple of times, during which I managed to read some of Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchet's Good Omens. I must say, it really is a delightful text. Pity that I hardly got anywhere with it, because I did not have a lot of time to read.

(Ironically, because I remember trudging around with my family for hours and hours, making up fight scenes in my head)

Sort of like that, but with people having superpowers instead.

Anyway, the nights were spent watching DVDs that my dad bought. For some reason, we ended up seeing three movies over the course of four days, that all had similar themes, and lots of kissing scenes. It was probably because we were avoiding the other genre that my father bought, being horror.

By the way, Pulse is a horrible movie.

In any case, it seems like romance flicks are just filled, packed, with subplots and subplots of subplots. And the thing is that none of the subplots really connect with one another other than that they all stem from the main plot. Which doesn't really exist. It's more of a main plot device. This, is particularly irksome as the movies just tend to drag rather long, without coming to a satisfying or enjoyable conclusion.

And then we got donuts for our fathers.

Using their money. Argh.

I hardly made any headway with either of the books that I brought along. I don't suppose that I can hope to finish Origin before next week. Cursed tests. So that means that Guns, Germs, and Steel(Thank you, Hongjie) will have to wait for later.

So then. I have a message to all my friends in the same course as I am, or have Microbiology modules. I am on a mission to compile the entire syllabus into an easy to read and grammatically correct... Book. Or rather, a text file, for now. This, supposedly, is going to help us to study more effectively, and feel like we're actually learning things from a text, rather than from the words of someone's mouth. I figure that I cannot do this on my own, not before our common test next week, so I seek your help. As of now, I have covered the biochemical tests, the various other methods of identification, and the prokaryotic cell wall. I am not asking anyone to actually create anything. Rather, I just want to let you know, so that I may obtain feedback on what I have done so far. To fill in missing information, or to correct inaccuracies. I am not infallible, so yeah.

And, that is pretty much all. Time to get to bed, so that I may be sufficiently rested to design electromagnet-pants.

I mean, to study and finish up those buggering chemistry reports.

I ask you, what is this? I saw it in a shop.

Person who gets it right wins the internet.

-Joe

2008-06-12T15:21:00.003+08:00

And then there are those nights where you just can't sleep, and play video games instead. Those can be pretty fun. What is more fun, is when you're not the only one shooting aliens in the dark. Being allowed to use excessive amounts of expletives and various creative ways of cursing people certainly adds a lot to the experience.

Yep, so I'm back from our class gathering. While the sanitation may not have been entirely up to my standards, or that the barbecue pit was pathetically small, I certainly had quite a bit of fun the past couple of days. In any case, it was rather eventful.

Upon locating our food vendor, I discovered that food can be amazingly dense. When densely packed. Ahead of me was a three hundred metre walk or so, carrying very heavy food in bags whose straps seemed to have been designed to give me rope burn. The straps, were literally ropes. Thin, hard ropes that dug into my palms and the bases of my fingers the entire way back, until Shaun so kindly offered to switch loads with me. Yeah, he was carrying a tray of dry noodles, while I was lugging a bunch of what could have been inside the Witch King's mace.

At least the chicken wings were nice.

Later that night, Hongjie arrived, and we immediately got to setting stuff on fire. I convinced my classmates that we were doing an experiment. Which was true. How well does leaf litter burn? As it turns out, not very well. It took us several attempts to get an appreciable fire going, and even then it did not last very long. We tried several things, including adding butter to some leaves, to see what would happen. Eventually, I decided that corn is a fun thing to burn.

So we stuck part of a small cob into our leaf-litter flame. Nothing really interesting happened for a while, until the relative quiet of the night was pierced by a loud popping noise. Yes, we had succeeded in making popcorn. One piece of popcorn, to be exact. Spurred by this, we continued to try to keep the fire going, in hope of achieving a greater volume of popcorn. This popcorn, while probably inedible(given that we were making it on the floor) would serve as an interesting item.

Unfortunately, three sparse pops later, the smoke was getting a bit too thick. We abandoned the idea and left to purchase some sparklers.

Fwoom.

I had not expected to be part of a pyrotechnic showcase that night. Fire fire fire fire fire.

Out of sheer devotion to creating a sign in the floor, using sparklers, I forgot to get food for Hongjie. I was about to reserve some satay for him, but then the skies... Did not darken. They couldn't get darker. It was night. Anyway, it rained. A lot. On our way out to Burger King, we ended up going in circles because neither of us could see ten metres in front of us. This was made worse by the fact that our spectacles, becoming splattered with rain, made it just about impossible to see anything that wasn't a pair of rain-splattered spectacles. One inside-out umbrella, and a couple of pairs of sodden shoes later, we managed to get out of the area so that he could go home.

The next day was spent slacking off. In a very conventional manner. We watched the extended version of Return of the King for the entirety of the afternoon. Stuff happened. There isn't really a lot to say here other than that there were a lot of things said, that could mean very different things in separate contexts.

Which was pretty much the best thing about the gathering. It was nice, to be able to get back with my old classmates and joke about the things we used to entertain ourselves in class. I ended up playing Halo 2 co-op with Leonard and Daniel, and there was a lot of damning each other to having the Teletubbies being imprinted on each other's retinas. No, seriously, what other form of psychological attack could be more deadly? Progress through the game, however, was slow, because a certain person kept killing me for fun. And then another certain person would get into a tank and blast the first certain person in the face. For fun. Each action was accompanied by liberal usage of "****!You *******!" with a deeply satisfying amount of laughter.

All in all, a very fun time. Just need to work out the bills. That'll have to be done next week, since tomorrow I'm off to Malaysia! Where I have no idea what to do. What does a guy like me do in KL?

Argh. I really should get to my notes. Whilst battling the urge to fire up some C&C3, or playing Bloxxors on Albino Blacksheep. But before that, a meme. Okay, so here are ten random facts about myself.

1. Each blogger starts with ten random facts/habits about themselves.
2. Bloggers that are tagged need to write on their own blog about their ten things and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose ten people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read yours.

1. I have a whole bunch of stuffed animals stashed in a variety of places all over my room. I used to play with them, in ways such as using them as targets for improvised paper-ball shooters. Those of them who have white eyes with painted-on black pupils look really freaky now, because they don't have pupils anymore.

2. I have 553 unread email messages. I ignore everything that isn't news. Because I have something deeply against those people who spread those "There is a kid with no arms, legs, liver, brain, and llamas. If you do not spread this email around, he will spontaneously mutate into a bear that shoots laser-beams out of its nipples, and then proceed to kill you" types. I also hate the ones that give very obviously false information like "drinking iced water will freeze the fats in your digestive system, causing it to clog up and fail."

3. In other words, I have a large dislike for bullshit.

4. In corridors where the light from the ceiling lamps is reflected off the concrete floor, I tend to watch the closest "bubble" of light on the floor, observe how it seems to grow and magically swoosh under my feet as I walk over it. At the same time, I would stare at the my shadows as they shrink, becoming smaller, but also darker, as I near each lamp. It's like watching someone get compressed.

5. In church, or anywhere else that I am similarly and inevitably bored, I imagine epic battles between various, nameless people. Through this, I have come up with some very interesting ways to destroy someone who has phasing abilities. I figure that if you stick a spike through his head while he is phased, and then kick him in the crotch, he would lose control over his phasing and unphase - with a spear still in his head.

6. I will clean my desk tomorrow. Oh wait, I'll be overseas tomorrow. So I'll clean it when I come back. When I come back, I will clean it the day after.

7. I truly believe that very abstract art is rubbish. You know, stuff that can be appropriately titled "Bunch of Lines", "Irregular Shapes", and "Little Kid's Vomit". And to think that people actually buy those things.

8. I have two voices in my head. They are both my voice, but slightly different. One of them always takes the side that brings me the most enjoyment in any situation. The other tries his best to come up with reasons why I should not do something. I generally listen to the first voice. However, when the second voice is more reasonable than the first, he suddenly changes his voice. Or maybe it's the other way round.

9. I want to learn how to add vibrato to my voice. Sometimes it seems to work, sometimes it doesn't. Usually it's more "wavy" than "vibrating".

10. Chocolate. I feel like eating chocolate, right now. Not the fancy, expensive kind. I mean the cheapo, probably-not-even-chocolate kind. Or maybe it's hazelnut cream that I am thinking of. But I'm pretty sure it's chocolate.

And so now, I am tagging Jeremy, Daniel, Sze Chuan, and Shaun. Write something. Here, look, you don't even need a topic for this one.

Oh, and why isn't "blog" considered a real English word yet? Or is it just that my Firefox dictionary is outdated?

*GAH PHOTOBUCKET ISN'T WORKING.

-Joe

2008-06-08T21:09:00.002+08:00

Drop down, increase speed, and reverse direction!

That is probably the only command that the aliens from Space Invaders know. Space Invaders, as the name suggests, involves invaders. That are from space. You are some kind of weird tank-like vehicle, that has a barrel pointing directly upwards, as if it were designed specifically to shoot down targets from the sky. Also, your shells travel pretty slowly, and probably have their own propulsion devices. There's no other way that they can keep traveling against gravity at a constant speed.

The nice thing about Space Invaders is that it is simple enough to play for a while, before inevitably losing. A bunch of aliens/spaceships in a grid pattern magically appears above the Earth, moving left and right in a two-dimensional world, and dropping down slightly every time they hit walls that wouldn't be there in real life. They then start to move left or right faster, accompanied by a quickening of that repetitive electronic music. For each wave of Invaders that you fight of, you get one extra anti-air tank thing. If you are careful enough not to get hit by what appear to be identical cannon shells, and bolts of lightning, the number of extra lives you can accumulate is rather high. However, each successive wave spawns one step lower to the ground. And is also accordingly faster.

Your cannon, is a peculiar thing. For some reason, you can only fire another round when your current shell has disappeared from the screen, either from hitting an Invader, or when it reaches the limit of the sky. This puts pressure on you to aim your shots right, or you would end up waiting the entire duration needed for your cannon shell to reach the end of the universe, leaving you unable to fight the ever descending Invaders. Thankfully, it is not too hard to gauge your shots, as the problem of distance is solved with the slow and constant speed of the Invaders' motion, while high speeds are solved by having a shorter distance.

Granted to you are a few armoured shields, which also happen to probably be like big blocks of concrete. The Invaders, being haters of big blocks of concrete, will tend to not care about your current location, and still shoot at the shields. They do not get repaired after each wave. This sucks, because they tend to help you to survive longer.

You fight and destroy wave after wave of weird looking aliens, that crap lightning bolts and other strange objects. The alien-dudes in the alien command centre realise that they should spawn their next fleet even closer to the ground. Eventually, they start out so close to the ground that you only have one chance to take out the first line.

Which I have yet to do. Instead, the aliens manage to land. As soon as that happens, you are automatically assimilated/disintegrated. No matter how many reserve tanks you had accumulated, they all turn to dust, and you lose the game. Makes you wonder why they didn't just add a laterally-oriented barrel to the tank.

But I guess that's what Metal Slug had in mind.

Anyway, today was awesome. We went book shopping, and spent many minutes looking through books on physics, biology, origami, astrology, and many more. I eventually located the book that I sought: The Origin of Species. It was about fifteen dollars, and Hongjie offered to pay for it, as a birthday present. Thanks again! Along with that, I also obtained a nice purple notebook, with a fancy velvet cover. All I need now is to learn how to write in proper cursive and I'm on my way to creating my own scientific journal.

With substantially more irrelevant doodles, of course, but those'll just be to keep it light.

After leaving Borders, we ended up in Sunny Bookstore, a little bookshop in a corner of Far East Plaza. There were really a lot of books. And a lot of fiction, and titles that I recognised. Much to Hongjie's delight, he was able to find Brave New World, and the Hitchhiker's series, which I spotted at the last moment before we paid up.

Man, I really should have used conditioner tonight. Hair is pricking my neck.

And it's time to stop procrastinating, because I am going to be very not free this holiday. Time to start compiling.

-Joe

2008-06-07T20:24:00.002+08:00

Woot. Weekend. Also, term break! Sort of, anyway.

There just isn't much difference between school term and break now, anyway. During school term I get to slack around, meet my friends, wake up late in the morning, wonder whether I should wear dark blue jeans or slightly-less-than-dark blue jeans. After which I realise that my jeans are too tight/loose and I spend the day complaining about an uncomfortable feeling in my crotch.

Then I wonder, does my size really vary that much? All my jeans seemed to fit perfectly when I bought them. Granted, I wasn't really happy during the buying process(because it basically involved me being dragged out shopping) so it is likely that I was not fully aware of what I was buying. So now the contents of my pockets vary according to how tight my jeans are.

The funny thing is, I feel that I've got a lot more things to do this break. Sure, they're not all school-related, but I finally feel like I could have a busy week. There's the chalet, and then there's the vacation to Malaysia, and then there's the bunch of reports that I have to do, and also the studying that needs to be done for the upcoming common tests. After which, hopefully, a gathering of the KI circle before everyone goes back to school.

Now, that common test thing is really an issue, because it's difficult to gauge the exact depth and complexity of information that is expected of us. I could go memorise intricate and detailed processes relating to carbohydrate transfer, citing examples and listing the appropriate enzymes, when all they could be asking for is "And then something happens!" Honestly, it's quite likely that they'll do that.

Not that it matters. I'm going to write everything I know. They can't penalise me. I won't be wrong.

Term break. Okay.

Writer's block. Tired.

So here's how we're going to end the world.

Now, first, we need a large amount of black stuff. Like soot, or paint. Paint probably isn't quite a good idea. It's heavy. And we need a lot of it. Enough to cover the entirety of the poles. Right now, the whiteness of our happy icecaps seems to be reflecting much of the sun's energy off them. It's something that comes with being white. So, currently, a large proportion of energy is bounced right back into space. Given that the atmosphere...might... Be thinner at the poles, global warming due to the greenhouse gas effect is on a lower scale.

So then, we cover Penguin Land and Santa's real-estate with black. Tell them that it's an experiment. So then what happens here, is that our newly-blackened poles stop reflecting radiation, and start absorbing it, thus greatly increasing the rate at which the temperature rises. Ice, as we know, happens to turn into water after warming up. Given that much of the ice is above sea-level, we can expect the ocean to go "Hey, I'm bigger now!"

Which then kills Venice.

Along with every other isolated, low-lying piece of land. Oh, and the whole rise-in-temperature thing is going to screw up that big belt of water and air and stuff that transfers energy around the seas. I completely forgot what it was called. It might have the word "Atlantic" in it. I'm not really sure what would happen to the global climate after this happens, but it's probably not going to be very nice.

Unless of course the only effect is a slight drop in temperature in isolated spots that I happen to live in. That would be really cool. Pun intended.

Alternatively, I'd like to know what would happen if for some reason, sea-levels fell. Maybe a bored trillionaire decided to eject the Indian Ocean into outer space. Or aliens came and decided that they needed a Pacific of water. Yes, they measure volume in "Pacifics". So, if the seas suddenly shrank, what would that mean? Would the global climate get messed up?

Assuming that nothing really bad happens, we might get more land to use. Me, not being a geologist or anything, cannot really say much about how current offshore soil would do for any form of construction.

Although we could just put steel under it.

-Joe

2008-06-04T21:58:00.004+08:00

Ha-appy birthday to me.

So anyway, I just watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The thing is SPOILER ALERT there's this particular problem with the way the aliens look entirely like those Close Encounters of the Third Kind types. Except that they're made of crystal. Which doesn't make a lot of sense. Of course, you should never expect sense from an Indiana Jones movie. I mean, what with the magic and all. Still, aliens are just one thing that Indy should never encounter. I'm totally fine with big boxes that make people's faces melt off, magical invisible bridges, cups that grant people immortality.

And surviving a nuclear blast from inside a fridge. I don't care how thick the lead shielding was on that fridge. Also we're lead to believe that Indiana Jones has some sort of anti-getting-bashed-around-inside-a-lead-box shield.

In any case, Indy 4 was a very entertaining movie. Everything was so classic. At everything, I couldn't help but go "Hey, that was just like in Raiders/Crusade/Temple!" The stunts, the whip, the snide comments... Also the impossible absurdity of certain things was just brilliant.

The idea of aliens was fine. But the way the aliens were portrayed was just wrong. Oh well. I guess Spielberg wanted to pay homage to E.T.

Will buy soundtrack. Eventually.

Anyway, my grandmother gave me $20 bucks for my birthday. Awesome. I'm going to use it to buy The Origin of Species. The full name of the book was once On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle of Life. Quite a mouthful, do you not think?

Jeremy's just sent me Music of the Night. Version by some dude I've never heard of. Point is, that I now feeling like collecting all the original Phantom songs. All the versions I have now are instrumental compositions. So I've never actually known what was in the lyrics, other than a very bare recollection from the film that they let us watch in secondary school.

There is a slight problem though. The original versions are rather long, and difficult to memorise, because they don't have mind-sticking lyrics like Weird Al's songs. Still, this will not impede me, for I am a musician, and no song is too long to fit into my brain. Except the ones that are. But really, length is not the only factor. My ability to compress a song is affected by a combination of how interesting the song is, whether or not it sounds like it is composed by an idiot, and my other motivations for learning a song.

Hm. Oh well. I am now older, wiser, and more mature.

Well, at least, I am older. That has to count for something. (Yeah, one year closer to the inevitable decay of my meaty vessel).

-Joe

2008-06-03T20:41:00.004+08:00

Aggh. I feel slightly ill. I don't know why.

Maybe I at too much. Or too little. Either way, I've been procrastinating. Again. As usual.

Anyway, I'd like to make a point here, which is that people are sheep. Figurative sheep, of course, or I would have an over-abundance of lamb chops. They are sheep. They are herd animals. Human society is just comprised of many herds of sheep, all connected to the sheepternet. Sheepyvision, sheepdio, and sheepmail are the only reason that humans appear to be an organised, modern civilisation. The magnitude of the sheepiness of people is so large, so exsheeply sheepy, that the only thing that really separates humans from real sheep is that humans happen to eat real sheep.

I am, of course, trying to say that most people seem to lack the ability to form opinions that matter. Seventy percent of the people in an average lecture theatre do not have opinions that stretch beyond themselves and their own narrow existence. Instead, they are waiting for someone else, someone influential(disregarding the fact that he is a sheep) to come along and give them an opinion. What the opinion pertains to, is not important. Rather, the way it is presented and how well it fits into their sheepy minds without conflicting with other, previously formed(but no less sheepy) opinions.

It matters not that one opinion makes more sense than the other. All it matters is that they share the opinion of the majority. Like a hive mind, only less efficient and more herd-like, than hive-like. As the complexity of each unit increases, so should the entire body. Not in this case, as clearly, a point is eventually reached when each individual unit becomes so complex, that the hive mentality breaks down, turning a complex and efficient social body, into a bunch of sheep.

Thus, we find that while zero opinions contributes to buzzing competency and efficaciousness of a community, a pool of some relevant opinion merely turns it into a goddamn herd of cows. Or sheep. A raised level of awareness, however, allows the productivity of a community to rise inexorably, while still allowing people to retain their sense of individuality.

Until, of course, they form a department where they ask each other "Hey, have you ever wondered if we're all just hallucinating?"

Unfortunately, even people of such raised levels of awareness are still bound by the sheep-laws of biology. We're all part of a massive herd, and are therefore inclined to follow the majority. Try as we might, it is not entirely possible to be of completely independent thought, without being radical. Therefore, it is probably not such a good idea to try to turn the human race into a species of highly aware, thinking individuals. Instead, we should settle for a more energy efficient process; abandoning all sense of self, and working together towards a common goal.

The solution, to turn everyone into cyborgs. If we can't make people not-sheep, then we shall sift out those who are not afflicted with sheeptosis, and make them help the sheep to achieve a higher level of sheepiness. By removing their free will.

I probably shouldn't rule the world. Or should I?

In any case, it's going to happen. One way or another. Prepare to be assimilated.

-Joe

2008-06-02T18:25:00.002+08:00

Ugh. Okay. I am just annoyed. Because my mom just doesn't ever stop. When she wants an argument, she just keeps going and going and going. And then she stops for a while. And then she continues. And I just shut up. Saying things has never helped.

So then she goes on and on and on. Eventually she accuses me of being angry at her. Typical. Yes, now I'm angry. If there's one thing that makes me angry, it's being accused of doing something that I did not. But I don't say anything. Talking to people who will refuse to listen never helped. Ever.

My mom happens to be someone who falls under that category. Whenever she has some pointless dispute amongst her... Group people? I don't even know what they're called. She would rant and rant in the car, constantly, annoyingly. Okay, I know, it's not like I don't rant either, but at least I also notice that at the end of it everyone is smiling and laughing. Not with my mom though. When she's mad she wants to make everyone around her feel miserable.

When my brother is in some conflict, she would lecture him about how he should avoid offending other people, and to forgive, and to compromise, and that he shouldn't go pick fights. And to avoid arguments. It's so hypocritical, it's frustrating. When she is annoyed, she lashes out, and constantly asks antagonising questions. Questions that cannot be answered other than with "It so happened that I was at this location at this particular moment of time. It also happened that something else happened at that particular moment of time." And so she won't be satisfied, because she's trying to put some blame on someone.

She just keeps at it, until her victim finally explodes in frustration. Then she accuses him of overreacting. When her victim does not explode, she then pretends that she was the one who was being victimised in the first place. Oh, and then she'll go tell other people(who, incidentally, usually don't give a damn anyway) and tries to get them to agree with her, that her victim is the one who is being unreasonable.

It's unbelievable. But what can I do? Nothing. That is why I do nothing. I don't talk, or respond, agree, or disagree.

I don't get it. What is wrong with people like her? Why, is it that when I have disagreements with other people, we just act angry at each other for a while, don't talk, but then completely forget about everything the next day? Maybe it's because we don't pursue the subject. Maybe it's because we aren't continually trying to place the blame on someone else, and that we are, in fact, willing to accept each other's faults and compromise. While avoiding conflict is impossible, it is in fact, very possible to stop the conflict from getting totally botched up. Something that my mom fails to do, every time.

Over the smallest of things.

There are reasons why I don't often have an opinion at home. It's because I know that there are people who will be intolerant of my ideas. People who act all high and mighty when discussing other people's shortcomings, while unknowingly falling into the same abyss during their times of trial. After you lick an electric fence once or twice, you probably wouldn't want to go near it again.

Hence the reason for my silence. And also explaining why I lack showmanship at home.

See? This is why people need video games. People inevitably get frustrated at one another. But people with video games get to vent their frustration on little men, burning them, while cackling maniacally. People who do not have a way to vent their frustration turn it adhesive. Latching on to other people. Pulling them down, into that crevice without a floor. All the while trying to appear to be in the light, to be the correct one.

I, however, have video games. So the spread of assholic-ness ends here.

Still, there really ought to be a way to stop being on the receiving end of this kind of attitude. A less violent alternative to my own ideas, Pastafarianism is a good way to begin.

It basically advocates not being an asshole.

Something which goes against the principles of many other religions.

His noodly appendage awaits.

-Joe