As requested, I made another name change to my blog links to protect anonymity. Good luck in avoiding Google, Mr. S. 
BTW, for the environmentally conscious and coincident with the unprecedented debate on climate change by the UNSC, allow me to draw your attention to the think tank Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) report titled “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change”
Good day!
Here’s something to jolt you out of whatever you were busy thinking on for a moment.
First, take a look at this:
If you see Albert Einstein, pat yourself on the back for not being visually handicapped. 
Now, turn around and walk about 5 meters away from your screen, turn around and have a look again (if you’re in a confined space such as a PGP room, try zooming out of this webpage as a substitute). For a hint, hover your cursor over the picture.
Spooky isn’t it? If you still see Albert Einstein, you need to move away from the screen further (or zoom out more).
Here’s another one:
Now that your brain is cued, you might be able to spot the tiger and cheetah right away. Just view it at different distances to tease out the two different images.
All right, one last one:
Bicycle first, then zoom out and you get a motorcycle!
Intrigued?
This is basically how they do it.
Can’t do much elaborating except posting those images because I’m still busy working on many other stuff, but if you want more answers, you can go here for starters (note that this is a premium article). And no, it’s not part of the ‘chim’ stuff we do in USP. It’s just my personal readings.
Have a nice day!
Our newspaper, The Star covered a piece of reporting by Reuters on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s first visit to Iraq. Here’s what happened.
During the joint press conference with the Prime Minister of Iraq, after commending PM al-Maliki on his "good leadership", he announces that "As we see the improved situation on the ground, I am considering to increase the presence of the United Nations." (the UN pulled out of Iraq in Aug 2003 because of a truck bombing on its Baghdad HQ that killed its envoy) Just right after he said "This is one of the subjects which I have discussed and I will consider on the basis of my assessment for this visit," (I presume this was following from the statement on bringing UN back into Iraq) a Katyusha rocket landed ~50m from the building where the press conference was held.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon reacts to the noise from a loud explosion during a news conference with Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad in this March 22, 2007 image taken from video footage. REUTERS/Iraqi TV
Judging from his instant reaction to the rocket attack (in the Green Zone, mind you), I’d say the assessment is no longer as optimistic. I guess the insurgents still want the UN out. Had they not made the meeting a secret (another irony, VIPs scoot into Iraq to visit, not arrive pompously), the insurgents might have more time to target their rocket more accurately or we might be seeing a more grim coincidence.
Want to watch the video? Here you go. I must say that I admire the Iraqis, since their reaction is rather minimal (by conditioning) when compared to our UN Secretary General (unfortunately, that made him look like a coward).
You gotta admit that this is a wonderful piece of irony.
I think I’ll still eat my fries rather than experiment with them.
And on a related note, I found this tale of the Marlboro Man quite entertaining (Beware, I still go through my blog links! :P)
This is a laboratory safety notice to all of you guys working in labs out there.
Last week, the standard radiation hazard symbol, also known as a trefoil has been given a makeover by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Apparently, some people did not think much of the warning symbol, necessitating a change. Obviously, they didn’t play Supreme Commander. See, whenever you launch a nuclear missile ingame, the trefoil symbol shows up on the map till they land on Ground Zero. And I should also add, their nukes capture more of the fearsome majesty these devices have in real life than any RTS game I’ve seen so far (animation is cool and damage radius is BIG, but not that terribly realistic still :P). All in all, it’s been fun conducting ‘nuclear testing’ in SupCom.
Back on topic, this is now the outdated symbol for those who still don’t know.
This ain’t harmless guys, remember that
And so, with a new red triangular background and skull and crossbones to go with it, you get the new radiation warning symbol.
If this still looks harmless to you, you need to see a shrink
Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia.org
There’s nothing like this to ruin Valentine’s (it’s long over anyway). Click on image for a bigger version.
Courtesy of pbfcomics.com
Welcome to my first post this month. We’re at the halfway point through Yr 1 Sem 2, yet 2006 already feels like half a lifetime ago.
Now, obviously I haven’t been blogging lately. Hopefully, I can reduce the frequency to a post every 2 months or something. After all, I have enough writing commitments to keep me busy for quite some time (and so, the things I would like to share stay unshared). Been trying to manage time like a miser lately. Nevertheless, with some scheduling foul-ups with the occasional miscommunication there and here I should be able to make it until my PDA gets repaired. Many thanks to all who helped fill me in on some of my blank sheets. Yeah, my time management sucks, so please bear with me and my absences.
Now on with something more interesting.
While using GMail this week (Outlook wouldn’t access my NUS myMail out of campus somehow), I saw this link to videos of GMail engineers. Out of curiosity I went to have a look. You know what? I envy Google employees. They get to spend their time doing creative stuff (which would probably be translated as unproductive time wasting here :P). That includes making cheesy (but entertaining) ‘theater productions’ like this
While following the link, it led me to another video. Larry Page, the cofounder of Google gave a plenary lecture at the AAAS Annual Meeting. FYI, AAAS stands for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I only had the condensed summary on CNN the other day, which made this discovery a pleasant surprise. After all, when a Silicon Valley celebrity comes to tell the world’s largest general scientific society on what he thinks they should be focusing on, you’d want to be listening too.
What was amazing is the size of the video, 68 MINUTES!!! The bummer was that this video was probably made by a Google worshipper, who ever so faithfully trained the camera on Larry Page, and missed the presentation slides! I guess it’s a compensation for having this video in one complete piece.
What was really interesting is that he wants S&T to go more closely with entrepreneurship. Interestingly, that makes me wonder why he hasn’t made a stop here at NUS yet. Their fundamental philosophy is the same don’t you think? The key points of the lecture are on better teaching methods, AI, commercial spaceflight, climate change, developing the Third World and the US making more friends (not sure if they are in chronological order). I have a few interesting thoughts from his lecture, but that’s for another time.
P.S.: If you watched the video and was wondering what equation was talked about in the Q&A session, it’s called a Mandelbrot Set.
Ever since I heard about the crackdown on blogs back home, I’ve been considering the possibility of moving this blog elsewhere. Blogging here doesn’t seem very safe anymore. Notwithstanding the link to my Friendster profile providing people an easy way to zero in on my identity (and suing me), there’s simply not enough lawyers who I can solicit their service for reduced fee charges (hopefully, that’s how law students treat their friends in need).
Like I said before, I stayed here because Friendster updates people whenever I post a new post. That way, I don’t have to waste my breath telling people I’ve blogged. Since MSN provides a good way to inform any potential readers that I’ve actually updated without having their inboxes spammed with Friendster updates, there’s not much reason in staying here (apologies for those who own a Facebook account who might still get spammed :P).
However, one problem is TIME! Since I have one day dedicated for every module I take (it’s usually not enough), that leaves Sunday free. This leaves me with little to no free time at all, since I am a relatively slow learner (and I think too slowly). And Sunday is the day for assignments and finishing assigned readings. Any spare time left in between is spent on reading entertaining blog posts (eg. THE siew pau story), news updates on the outside world (it’s terribly easy to become ignorant about the outside world here in NUS), running about on BF2142 servers and of course, writing blog posts that has absolutely no contribution to my CAP.
So there’s obviously no time to start a blog migration process. Maybe during vacation…
A bunch of engineering researchers at the University of Florida published a study that shows the microwave’s effectiveness in sterilising sponges this week. What they did was soaking sponges and scrubbing pads in raw wastewater and then putting the sponge into the microwave and heated it at full power. The found out that live bacteria expires in two minutes, spores within four to ten minutes.
Sounds good for those hyginene-maniacs right? Not exactly. See, after it was reported in the media complaints came in to the news agencies. Attempts repeated at home didn’t turn out as expected. What went wrong?
Basically, one dry sponge went into the microwave, smoke and fire came out. This was a particularly humourous response
"Just wanted you to know that your article on microwaving sponges and scrubbers aroused my interest. However, when I put my sponge/scrubber into the microwave, it caught fire, smoked up the house, ruined my microwave, and pissed me off," one correspondent wrote in an e-mail to Reuters.(CNN)
If you’ve read carefully till now, you would understand the screwup. If you didn’t catch on yet here’s the description ad verbatim from CNN. (I tried to clue you in right from the very start at the second sentence of this post)
Writing in the Journal of Environmental Health, Bitton and colleagues said they soaked sponges and scrubbing pads in raw wastewater containing fecal bacteria such as E. coli, viruses, protozoan parasites and bacterial spores. (emphasis added)
In the end, the university issued the following advisory to be safe.
The university issued the following advisory: "To guard against the risk of fire, people who wish to sterilize their sponges at home must ensure the sponge is completely wet. Two minutes of microwaving is sufficient for most sterilization. Sponges should also have no metallic content. Last, people should be careful when removing the sponge from the microwave as it will be hot." (CNN)
Hope this reaches you before any more sponges goes on fire! And a more general reminder: Read the methodology used thoroughly and understand it before trying to repeat something!
