GAME RULES: Using only song names from ONE MUSIC ARTIST that means a lot to you, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on and tag me too. Try not to repeat a song title. It's a lot harder than you think. 

Battles @ Esplanade on 18 Mar!

Anyone wanna catch em? =)

Life is bewildering. There are so many things in my life that I don't know how to start writing about them; I was never good at writing in the concrete, and perhaps these months in the army has eroded my grasp of prose. I am adjusting to my new sergeant rank, new lifestyle, new faces, new unit, new job, etc. I'll get around to penning these down, once I can make sense of them!

I've been absent for too long. I miss people. I'll be spending my weekends getting in touch with old friends, and getting to know my new friends better.

Hey, Public Service Announcement for people interested in applying to Cornell:

1) There's a webchat with Cornell admissions staff and international students on Saturday (tomorrow), at 10 pm - midnight on local time (10 am - noon EST).

2) There's an information session on Monday, 7.30 - 9.30 pm, at Raffles Hotel. Doris Davis, Associate Provost for Admissions and Enrollment, will be there.

Yish and I just performed a Chrono Cross song for the President!!

Now I think I shall pass out from exhausion.

Shooting for the perfect record at prelims!

WHO'S WITH ME

Answers first!

1 - Libra. You believe what goes around, comes around. This makes it easy for you to shrug off failures and overcome setbacks. However, it also means you can be an ungrateful jerk.

2 - Aries. You're courageous, powerful, straightforward and incredibly egocentric. Everything's always about you, you, you. You'd make a good boxer.

3 - Aquarius. You are receptive, perceptive, and good at keeping your cool. Skilled with deals and compromises, your friends often rely on you to smooth things over -- until you decide you can sell them out for an advantage. Being willing to compromise everything often means you really stand for nothing.

4 - Capricorn. Versatile, partient, and subtle, you prefer to work slowly, adapting to changing circumstances but always building a power structure with yourself at the center. If someone crosses you today, you'll back down now and pay him back in a year. People of this type make good spymasters and better snitches.

5 - Gemini. You see both sides of every question and can quickly reach the facts. Unfortunately, you prefer Truth to facts -- so you spend a lot of time debating with yourself. People of your type are often philosophy professors or strung-out druggies.

6 - Scorpio. You're relentless. Your indomitable will scares people, but also fascinates them. People of your type are known as great lovers and cruel ex-lovers. They are the most effective poets, pimps, and telemarketers.

7 - Virgo. Wise, cautious and pure, you're efficient and hard to fool. Proving you're smarter is one of your favorite things in the whole world. People of your type would make good lawyers, drama critics, art critics, book critics... you get the picture.

8 - Pisces. Crisis brings out the best in you. because you're best at doing two things at once. In less stressful circumstances, this can make you look scatterbrained. You're good at any job that's 99% waiting and 1% sheer terror. Priests and hookers tend to be this type of people.

9 - Cancer. You're intuitive and sensitive, and your loyalty to the group is tremendous. This often sets you up for disappointment, if not outright betrayal. You'd be a swell mom, with a pack of sons who come by every weekend to check up on you.

10 - Saggitarius. You're more concerned with results than theories. You don't waste your time trying to control others, and you expect them to extend you the same courtesy. If you're not a drifter, you'll probably wind up as a freelance something or another.

11 - Taurus. You just keep plowing along without letting the setbacks get you down. You generally get the job done, but you rarely pause to ask if it's worth doing. You'd make a good receptionist or cop.

12 - Leo. Leadership and authority are your strengths. Arrogance and an insatiable hunger for approval are your weaknesses. You need people to do things to. You'd make a good CEO or cult leader.

Who?:	Was:	Chose:
chunhao	Aquarius	Gemini
doctorhoh	Aquarius	Virgo
ancal	Aquarius	Sagittarius
night_wraith	Pisces	Cancer
hongyu	Pisces	Cancer
vincente	Aries	Cancer
resiliang	Aries	Scorpio
kaiyang	Aries	Virgo
seng	Aries	Sagittarius
cjqsg	Taurus	Gemini
lowjh	Taurus	Taurus
pwan_madthingy	Taurus	Virgo
ahsirakh	Taurus	Cancer
dnwq	Gemini	Gemini
snowmoon89	Gemini	Gemini, Cancer
friedpiggy	Virgo	Virgo
neojr4	Scorpio	Virgo
lanyingjie	Scorpio	Leo
cybermuse	Sagittarius	Virgo

Three out of nineteen correct! lowjh, friedpiggy and dnwq got it right. dnwq was the most vehement skeptic of astrology, so it must be karmic! justice! that he turned out to match his sign. It would have been four out of nineteen if snowmoon89 didn't pick two choices (tsk... no cheating!) -- she got it right on her first try.

Three correct is still quite surprising! The expected number is 1.6 correct answers. Three is a pretty big number.

There are some interesting observations. We have a very uneven distribution of birthdates. I notice that a lot of you have the Aries and Taurus sign. On the other hand, Capricorn, Cancer, Leo and Libra didn't get any representation at all.

As for the choice of signs -- I told dnwq beforehand that I hang out with a lot of 5 (Gemini) types. My hunch was correct -- 5 (Gemini) was the most popular choice, tied with 7 (Virgo). Both of them are the intellectual-ish personality types. That explains why a lot of you chose this sign -- some of you are from the GEP, which likes brainy kids. Also, if you're reading this, then I guess you must be interested enough to actually pay attention. I know I get really geeky at times, like in this entry. Like attracts like.

The signs were similar enough in some places to cause problems. Many of you said that 5 (Gemini) and 7 (Virgo) were similar -- they're both people who like to think. I can also see some similarities between 3 (Aquarius), 4 (Capricorn), and 12 (Leo) -- ambitious and good with people -- and also 1 (Libra), 6 (Scorpio) and 11 (Taurus) -- determined and focused. That tells you a lot about how much confirmation bias fools people, as pwan_madthingy said. ("I'd pick almost any one of these.") If every sign fits you, then horoscopes would be too non-specific to be meaningful.

I realized that the writing was also pretty vague. These descriptions are in no means authoratative -- indeed, I doubt any source can claim to be authoritative! Each sign has a number of traits, and this writer chose to focus on certain ones. So this account is subjective. I didn't bother to cross-reference every single description I used, but those I checked matched up pretty well to the Wikipedia articles. So saying that you "fit your sign" is dependent to the writer's interpretation as well.

I was surprised to get so many responses! I never intended for this to be a serious scientific experiment -- I didn't use the proper methods or controls. But nineteen responses is enough data to play around with. So we do a significance test with the binomial distribution (I can hear a hundred math students collectively going: groooooaaaaan...) and four right out of nineteen gives a p-value of... 6.8%. That actually passes the test at the 10% significance level! In English that means, "Looks significant. Sorta. Not thaaat much, but still pretty much."

To me, that is... wow. Unexpected.

This does not, however, mean that the astrological sign is the cause of this effect! Still, it's unsettling enough to require some explanation. In a normal horoscope test, confirmation bias would be a contributing factor, but I didn't "suggest" any signs to you, so you wouldn't have any hypothesis to confirm! We can mostly rule that out.

I think a contributing factor is that many of you are somewhat familiar with the horoscopes, so that might give you hints on which one is yours. A probably contributing factor would be that if you did this test, you would have been born in the middle of the year -- factors favoring your parents having kids at a certain time of the year -- and also that if you did this test, you'd probably be 5 (Gemini) or 7 (Virgo) type -- otherwise you wouldn't even be interested in such theories. Sampling bias!

This was pretty fun, and I hope you got something out of it. =)

Quiz Time!!

I'm curious about astrology. It's a good conversation starter, and it's a nice serendipituous way to gain insights about yourself and about people. On the other hand, I don't take it as a serious fact-provding thing. But at least two of my big science influences (Kary Mullis, inventor of the PCR, and Leefy) are into it.

The common explanation says it works because of psychological reasons, but that seems too trivial. Some say they appeal by making you feel good, and some say they appeal to your self-disparaging sense. Some say they are insightful, and some say they are too generic to mean anything. Well, they can't all be simultaneously correct...

This calls for an experiment.

Here is a list of zodiac profiles. They're taken from the sourcebook of the Unknown Armies RPG (yeah, I know; I read sourcebooks in my spare time; I'm a geek) but they've been divorced from their signs and put in a random order. They're all written in a very unflattering tone. Don't worry about it. We'll still love you even if your profile says you're a jerk.

Read through them and pick the one that best describes you -- don't think too much about it, just go with whichever *feels* right. Then post a comment with the number and your birthday. No cheating! Googling is cheating. Looking at other people's comments for hints is cheating. Check back in a couple of days to find out if you chose your real sign.

Zodiac Signs

1 - You believe what goes around, comes around. This makes it easy for you to shrug off failures and overcome setbacks. However, it also means you can be an ungrateful jerk.

2 - You're courageous, powerful, straightforward and incredibly egocentric. Everything's always about you, you, you. You'd make a good boxer.

3 - You are receptive, perceptive, and good at keeping your cool. Skilled with deals and compromises, your friends often rely on you to smooth things over -- until you decide you can sell them out for an advantage. Being willing to compromise everything often means you really stand for nothing.

4 - Versatile, partient, and subtle, you prefer to work slowly, adapting to changing circumstances but always building a power structure with yourself at the center. If someone crosses you today, you'll back down now and pay him back in a year. People of this type make good spymasters and better snitches.

5 - You see both sides of every question and can quickly reacht he facts. Unfortunately, you prefer Truth to facts -- so you spend a lot of time debating with yourself. People of your type are often philosophy professors or strung-out druggies.

6 - You're relentless. Your indomitable will scares people, but also fascinates them. People of your type are known as great lovers and cruel ex-lovers. They are the most effective poets, pimps, and telemarketers.

7 - Wise, cautious and pure, you're efficient and hard to fool. Proving you're smarter is one of your favorite things in the whole world. People of your type would make good lawyers, drama critics, art critics, book critics... you get the picture.

8 - Crisis brings out the best in you. because you're best at doing two things at once. In less stressful circumstances, this can make you look scatterbrained. You're good at any job that's 99% waiting and 1% sheer terror. Priests and hookers tend to be this type of people.

9 - You're intuitive and sensitive, and your loyalty to the group is tremendous. This often sets you up for disappointment, if not outright betrayal. You'd be a swell mom, with a pack of sons who come by every weekend to check up on you.

10 - You're more concerned with results than theories. You don't waste your time trying to control others, and you expect them to extend you the same courtesy. If you're not a drifter, you'll probably wind up as a freelance something or another.

11 - You just keep plowing along without letting the setbacks get you down. You generally get the job done, but you rarely pause to ask if it's worth doing. You'd make a good receptionist or cop.

12 - Leadership and authority are your strengths. Arrogance and an insatiable hunger for approval are your weaknesses. You need people to do things to. You'd make a good CEO or cult leader.

I'm quite a hoarder. I was going through my old music collection, and I have waaay more music than I have space and time for. Some have got to go!

Does anyone want any of the CDs below? $14 each -- or make me an offer.

Franz Ferdinand Franz Ferdinand
Dire Straits The Best of Dire Straits & Mark Knopfler
Super Furry Animals Love Kraft
Ben Folds Songs for Silverman
Mew And The Glass Handed Kites
Cat Power The Greatest
Blur Think Thank
U2 Best of 1990-2000
Dream Theater Octavarium
Linkin Park Hybrid Theory
Vangelis Odyssey
Bond Shine
Maksim Variations

Anyone else watched this year's national day parade and thought, "By your powers combined, I am Captain Planet!!"?

Public Service Announcement for KI Students

Remember a while ago I was throwing out the idea of making an online KI portal? Well, we made it.

KIpedia is a wiki-based online resource for KI students. The "wiki-based" part means that anyone can post pages, edit pages, or make comments. It is, in a way, an experiment in student-directed learning -- we have a tremendous amount of student-generated material and discussion, and we're hoping that it will really thrive if we put it all together in one wiki. We hope that KIpedia will become an archive for sharing materials between classes and years, and for discussing ideas outside the classroom.

Go ahead and check it out -- it's at http://ki.stikipad.com

KIpedia is still a toddler, so we need help to make it grow. Lots of different kinds of help. Here is some of them:

1. Start discussions. Share some ideas from your research, or comment on essays.


2. Contribute stuff. If you have any materials that would be useful -- study notes, seminar notes, presentations, or essays -- do send it to us! More information can be found here.


3. Tell your friends about KIpedia. A wiki is nothing without a community. If you found KIpedia useful, do help pass on the link to other KI students so they can benefit it from it too!

Public service announcements: There's a US college fair at Suntec at 8.30am to 5pm at Suntec. I realize that I probably should have mentioned this earlier. The publicity for this event looks very patchy -- I only found out about it by word of mouth on Friday.

Also SAT registration for the next cycle of SAT (October 2007 to June 2008) in Singapore reopened recently. You can register online on the College Board website. The verb is "reopened" and not "opened" because the they registrations some time ago but the system crashed or they ran out of places or something. You could access the registration form but it would tell you that all Singaporean test centers were unavailable. I called their staff but they were vague about it. ("Due to overwhelming response...") Therefore it's probably a good idea to register early before all the places get taken up.

Pancake Cutting Puzzles

1. Suppose you have some pancakes -- two-dimensional areas that lie on a plane. The pancakes do not have to be nicely shaped -- they can be irregular, concave or even unconnected. Show that you can cut any pancake into two halves of equal area with just one straight cut. (The halves do not have to be of the same shape.)


2. Show that given any pancake and any orientation, you can cut a pancake into two halves of equal area with a single straight cut with the cut in that orientation. (For extra credit, show that if the pancake is connected, there is only one way to make the cut.)


3. Show that given any pancake and any point, you can cut a pancake into two halves of equal area with a single straight cut through that point.


4. Suppose a prankster has replaced your expensive kitchen knife with a joke knife that makes cuts that aren't straight -- they might be jagged, or curved. Show that you can still accomplish the above feats.


5. Suppose you have two pancakes, one stacked on top of the other. Show that you can cut each pancake into two halves of equal area with a single straight cut through both pancakes. (This is also possible with the joke knife.)


6. Show that you can cut any pancake into four pieces of equal area with two straight cuts at right angles to each other.


7. Extend the above to three-dimensional pancakes (i.e. three-dimensional volumes cut by two-dimentional planes). Then extend the above to n-dimensional pancakes. (The n-dimensional version of #5 is known as the Ham Sandwich Theorem, by the way.)

These puzzles are in ascending order of difficulty. Most only require common sense. The first four are really easy; the last three should only be attempted if you have a lot of free time! If you're not content with merely convincing yourself that the above are true, and want a more rigorous solution, you might make use of a ( simple theorem. )

My purpose in posting these problems is to dispel a popular misconception. High school math, being little more than a collection of childish anecdotes, deceive students into thinking that math consists of memorizing methods and learning to use them over and over again. You don't have to know why theorems and identities are true, they're just given. You only have to learn them by heart. You might think that if you come across a problem you can't solve, you just need to read more textbooks until you find the right method. Nothing could be further from the truth!

Math does not consist of mere regurgitation of facts. (In fact, no academic field does.) Real math -- as in math done by mathematicians -- is ultimately a problem solving process. One would start with a problem -- a gap in existing knowledge -- and work towards a solution by building upon known theorems. In fact, if you pick up a college textbook, you'll find that this often models the structure of the text -- it starts with basic premises, then shows how everything can be deduced from them. Without this process of problem solving, math would just stay stagnant -- nothing new would ever happen, ever.

Problem solving is not merely about knowing the tools -- it's also about knowing how to use them. The puzzles here require little more than common sense! But they can still be simple and fun for anyone to enjoy.

This is one of my secret projects I've been working on for the past couple of days. I mapped out all my second-degree friends in my Livejournal network (people in my friends' list are first-degree; people in my friends' friends' list are second-degree). Then I drew this huge graph, where every point represents someone, and every line represents a link between friends. All of my friends have an address somewhere on the map, and so do all of my friends'friends. It can be a little difficult to find where you are, of course, since the map is so big.

The locations of everyone on the map is determined by a phsyics-based model where every point repels every other, and every link behaves like a spring, pulling friends together. The idea is that people who share many friends, and are in the same clique, are found closer together. I was hoping to actually be able to visualize distinct networks of cliques, but all the links are too messy to see anything clearly. Evidently it still needs more work.

Here's the full map (PNG image). Warning: the file is gigantic! 4000 x 4000 pixels to be precise. It would be a good idea to right-click and "Save As".

I've just added my computer on to the World Community Grid distributed computing project. Folks who have never heard of this thing -- you should check it out. It lets your computer help fight cancer! So your computer can be productive even when you're not. It's like Progress Quest, except you get to change the world in a tiny way while playing.

World Community Grid lets you donate your computer's time to scientific research. The grid works on the basis of that home computers are rarely run at full capacity -- like when you use your Pentium 4 to run nothing but MSN Messenger. Putting hundreds of thousands of computers together gives you a system way more powerful than a supercomputer! This system is handy for researchers with difficult problems (protein folding, protein interactions, genome comparison) that require massive amounts of computing power to solve.

World Community Grid software works by downloading a small piece of the problem from the server, solving it, and uploading the result back. The effect on computer's performance is hardly noticable, and it won't run on laptop battery mode, but if that is too intrusive, it can work on screensaver mode only.

In short, it is pretty awesome. If you've got computing power to spare, you should go sign up!

Remember the eggdrop puzzle that we had last year? We were supposed to build a package that could protect an egg from smashing when being dropped three floors. It was fun -- but it could be made less nerve-wrecking by not counting it as part of the exam! This year also had a physics puzzle as part of the exam, but it was to build a bridge.

I discovered the other day that Make, has a podcast on Youtube. (Make is a magazine for geeks, like Wired, but it teaches you how to build cool DIY stuff like robots. I highly recommend it!) Make has solutions to both puzzles! Both came too late for us to plagurize sneakily, though.

How to save an egg from breaking in a fall:



How to make a bridge with ice cream sticks you can stand on:



Observation: Why is it that guys who are very clever at engineering often have hardly any formal training whatsoever? They eschew formal math and scientific theory! Somehow they've got a intuitive feel for the whole thing. The guys on Mythbusters are a good example. They can build jury-rigged contraptions like welding a rocket to the back of a car, but they still make hilariously basic errors when doing statistical hypothesis testing. The same thing goes for computing also -- you don't need a computer science degree to write cool software (e.g. Blake Ross, who made Firefox when he was a teenager).

Can you teach this kind of skill? It seems like a very liquid skill; one that comes with practice, rather than study. Whatever it is, I want it. I'm the reverse -- I can write fancy equations on paper, but I can't do anything practical. These folks make me jealous!

Went to PLAY! A Video Game Symphony on Friday. As a Final Fantasy music fan, I've been looking forward to this for a long time! Elsewhere in the world there are orchestras and music groups doing all sorts of cool things with video game music, like Dear Friends and More Friends and GC Concerts and 20020220 and The Black Mages, and when does Singapore get it's turn? Sometime soon please? So when Yish happened to visit the PLAY! website and found the Singapore dates, I knew we would be going.

The tickets were sold out. Lots of teenage geeks were in the audience. We got a nice student discount on it, so yay.

Short review:

ZOMG.

Long review:

Nobuo Uematsu's music sound freaking amazing on orchestra. And not only for the Final Fantasy stuff I'm familiar with - they played two themes from unreleased games that no one's heard before, and those were still great. Uematsu has a flair for writing powerful, dramatic pieces. Even when he's working with 16-bit synthesizers on the SNES - he still manages to infuse them with rich layered harmonies and powerful progressions and memorable motifs -- so it really sounds like he's telling a story with the music, like a opera. So when brought to orchestra it's incredibly moving.

They played two "final boss battle" pieces -- Dancing Mad from Final Fantasy VI and One-Winged Angel from Final Fantasy VII. Lots of drums and heavy bass and organ and omnious chorus. That is quite possibly the maximum density of badass possible. The orchestra still managed to pull it off brilliantly, considering that they are technically difficult pieces -- even the fast passages and atonal parts in One-Winged Angel was superb.

Yasunori Mitsuda's Chrono Trigger/Chrono Cross music was fantastic also; they played the theme from Chrono Trigger, which was grand. Also I liked that the arranger used some of Frog's Theme -- for the sole reason that it's the obligatory knight-in-shining-armor theme -- so of course it sounds great on orchestra. My only gripe is with Time's Scar -- 'cause that's one of my favorite songs. The violin lead part is supposed to be heroic with a tinge of wistful. The violinist got the wistful part perfectly, but he was struggling with the "heroic" part -- the rest of the orchestra was drowning him out.

There was a lot of material that I haven't heard of before -- I'm only familiar with the more famous RPG music composers, so I'm discovering new good video game music all the time. They played Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion which was dramatic and very remiscent of Lord of the Rings, and World of Warcraft which was mystic and surreal. After that was Shenmue -- a melodramatic movie-soundtrack-like piece -- and at the end of it, the composer, who was hiding in the audience, stood up to accept the applause. Then after the intermission he surprised us by appearing on stage with a Sonic plushie and demonstrating his ub34 l33t piano skills, performing Daytona USA solo. Then he threw his Sonic plushie into the crowd! Hilarious guy.

The only issue was the amount of technical errors made by the orchestra! (I am annoyed at this probably because I'm a pedantic geek.) Lack of groove seems to be a recurring problem -- like on Time's Scar, the fast part when the percussion comes in, the congo drums was out of sync with the triangle, which was out of sync with the rest of the strings. Also there's a part in Dancing Mad where the whole orchestra suddenly stops their doomy mashing and the organist plays a sweet Bach-prelude-style three-minute solo. The organist didn't look very familiar with the piece, even though he kept his cool throughout. I'm know how it's supposed to go, so I winced every time he fumbled.

But forget the quality of the orchestras. Video game music on orchestra grips you because it is fresh -- there's so much new things to do. A video game synthesizer poses many constraints on the composer -- expression is limited; the number of instruments playing at one time is limited; dynamic range is limited. Moving a piece to orchestra means tons of new freedom for expression. It's like any sort of arranging music from one instrument for another -- you have to take in consideration that what you can express with the orchestra is different. I can imagine what challenges the arranger would face!