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Tuesday, December 26, 2006 Inuka, the first polar bear born in the tropics, celebrates his 16th birthday today. The zoo is phasing out polar bears, so he will eventually leave Singapore when his mother Sheba passes away. In the meantime, let's hope they enjoy their stay with us. -- permalink -- Yiheng made 9:18 PM 0 Comments:
Saturday, December 23, 2006 The full set of Zoo photos are online here. -- permalink -- Yiheng made 12:28 PM 0 Comments:
Friday, December 22, 2006 I visited the Zoo today as part of the department's Christmas celebration. It seems a little different from the way I remembered. You can get closer to some animals now. Perhaps the cool weather encouraged the animals to come out into the open instead of hiding in a corner. What irony. When the sunlight is good for photographs, the animals hide in the shadows to cool off. When it's gloomy and the lighting is poor, the animals come out to play. Still, the current designs of many enclosures are very friendly to photographers. Look at what I've got with just a digital camera. Jaguar chillaxing on a log. Really large Iguana having afternoon snack. Penguins having fun. This crowned pigeon shares the walkway with tourists. I didn't know butterfly eat fruits. Ring-tailed lemurs eating and jumping around. One of them nearly landed on my camera while I was taking a picture of one of its comrades. Mouse deer were supposed to be really timid. This one just sat there the whole time I was taking its picture. This giraffe seems to be able to communicate with the zookeeper. It lowered its head to the lady at one time. -- permalink -- Yiheng made 11:31 PM 0 Comments:
Monday, December 18, 2006 I've always felt that Lucy is a name that should be reserved for a Black Hole but apparently, some scientists named a white dwarf Lucy. -- permalink -- Yiheng made 10:04 PM 1 Comments:
Must be from personal experiences...
Saturday, December 16, 2006
"There was a time between the waning age of enchantment and the dawning age of logic when dragons flew the skies, free and unencumbered." The Flight of Dragons is a 1982 animated movie produced by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr. and very loosely based on the speculative natural history book of the same name by Peter Dickinson and the novel The Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson. I have read the book The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson some years back. It contains some interesting hypothesis about the nature of dragons and many beautiful illustrations by Wayne Anderson. As for the novel, I did not manage to get hold of it. Even the National Library had only one or two copies in some obscure branch back then. They are probably sold in a book sale by now. Why am I writing about an animated movie almost as old as I am? Because when I was a child, this was my favourite animated movie. I watched it over and over again until the video tape got mouldy. And now, I finally found a digital version on Google video, whoohoo! (Actually I had a low resolution copy before but the stupid CD got corrupted.) The Eighties was the age of Transformers, Care Bears, Smurfs, Ninja Turtles, Macross and Disney movies. While the appeal in these start to fade as I grew up, The Flight of Dragon always maintained a hold on me. I guess part of the reason was that it was a good movie on many levels. For the young, there was the fascinating enchanted world. I mean, which kid didn't like dragons? When I first fell in love with the show, I didn't even understand the dialogue. As I got older, I started to appreciate the complexity of the plot, the theme of magic versus science and then later on, understand the pseudo-scientific explanation of the folkloric habits of dragons. A plot summary can be found at Wikipedia. The link to Google video is at the bottom of the page. Since I watched it so many times before, I can honestly say that there are many memorable lines, mostly uttered by James Earl Jones, a.k.a. voice of Vader, as the bad guy of course. I highly recommend watching this film. If only they would release it on DVD as they did The Last Unicorn, the other famous Rankin/Bass production. -- permalink -- Yiheng made 10:50 PM 2 Comments:
So many characters died in this show. How could you let children watch this?
What do you mean many? Only one good guy died. And most of the bad guys who died are monsters who didn't speak a single line.
Saturday, December 09, 2006 I recently saw the trailer for a movie called "The Number 23". Here's the synopsis: A man whose life unravels after he comes into contact with an obscure book titled The Number 23. As he reads the book, he becomes increasingly convinced that it is based on his own life. His obsession with the number 23 starts to consume him, and he begins to realize the book forecasts far graver consequences for his life than he could have ever imagined.It feels strange coming across a movie like that because I've always subconsciously looked out for occurrences of 23 around me. Fortunately, I'm not so obsessed as to forcefully extract patterns from everything. Some people do that. It's actually quite amazing how if you really wanted to, you can find 23 in topics like sports, scientific facts, history, etc. For example, W is the 23rd letter in the alphabet and the symbol for W is two points down and three points up. You know these people are hard core when they can find a pattern like that. However, I'm pretty sure you can find other numbers everywhere too, numbers such as 42. The number 23 does hold a certain degree of personal significance for me though. It's got nothing to do with UFOs, numerology or that fake science called Astrology. And it's not because I was born on Feb 3rd or served NS at 23SA. I just like prime numbers, in particular, 2, 3, 23 (7 and 17, to a lesser extent) when written in base ten. 2 is the only even prime and 3 is the smallest odd prime. But 23, not only is it the smallest prime composed of a prime number of prime digits, those two digits also happen to be my other two favourite prime numbers! Now, how can one not like a number like that? -- permalink -- Yiheng made 9:44 AM 1 Comments:
hey thats micheal jordan`s number hahahah
Saturday, December 02, 2006
This is AI Escargot, supposedly the hardest Sudoku puzzle in the world to date. It does not have the least number of numbers provided but its creator, Finnish mathematician Arto Inkala designed it in such a way that requires player to consider "8 casual relationships simultaneously", whatever that means. Being the ambitious guy that I am in such matters, I decided to give it a try. After an hour, my puzzle was covered with so many cancellations that I had to start over on a clean sheet. I have clearly underestimated its difficulty. This puzzle is driving me insane. I took a 5 minutes break and started again. The only puzzles I have ever done are those in newspapers, which are really quite easy, so I don't know any techniques for handling multiple possibilities. I decided to try the branch-when-stuck-and-test-systematically approach. As you can see in my workings, I had to go 4 levels deep, that's pretty hard core for me. Due to a combination of luck and intelligent guessing, I only met 3 dead ends and didn't have to backtrack too far up. All these took another 1.5 hours. And that's how I wasted a good Saturday afternoon. -- permalink -- Yiheng made 6:53 PM 9 Comments:
Hardcore man. But at least you managed to solve it. I'm impressed.
I solved it in 17 minutes. I've had harder.
Waw, that's great that you could solve it dude.. two thumbs up for you :)
Well, apparently you worked it out the way my php script did it. My program also had to guess 4 levels deep.
I discovered this puzzle when I did a google search “most difficult sudoku,” the search returned an article about AI Escargot. So I copied it down and solved it in about 20 minutes or so. Disappointed at how easy it was, I was relieved to discover it wasn’t the real AI Escargot, so I found the real one.
Also http://www.sudokubrain.net/ solves it in a fraction of a second.
There is a difference between guessing a solution, and proving that the solution you have is unique.
Result:
Troll
STB plans to develop Southern Islands into tourist attraction Why can't they just leave the islands alone?! What's with this obsession of turning any natural environment into an artificial natural environment? I like my beaches covered with rocks, crabs, baby lobsters and other strange marine lifeforms. Not the sterile shit they have at Sentosa made with homogeneous imported sand. I like my forests to be teeming with life, strange insects and colourful birds. Not the synthetic greenery surrounding spas and air-conditioned hotel rooms or labeled plants that come with audio commentary. When future generations read about the legend of how two inseparable sisters turned into a pair of islands or the tale of how a giant turtle saved the lives of a Chinese and Malay fisherman, they will be totally lost because the islands in the stories will no longer exist. Instead, we will have one big Southern Island. The Chinese temple and Malay shrine will be nothing more than tourist checkpoints. And people wonder why Singapore has no natural or cultural heritage. I grew up catching crabs on Kusu and fishing on its breakwaters. The existence of places like these is one of the few reasons I tolerate some of the crap this country has to offer. I'm glad the British sold Christmas Island to Australia because if it were governed by Singapore, it probably wouldn't survive our habit of exploiting Nature for profit. -- permalink -- Yiheng made 11:54 AM 2 Comments:
Yes I totally agree. It is disturbing that we are exchanging the last vestiges of unspoilt nature for artificial commericial kitsche. What seems even wrong to me is the fact that given the mandate to market the southern islands as a getaway for tourists, the attractions (much like the IRs) will be catered towards the opulent lifestyles and alienating the local citizens.
I just went past Tang Dynasty last week. It looks so weathered that it's actually starting to look authentic.
Friday, December 01, 2006 Ok, here's my next target: Titoudao. Who wants to watch? Email me quick! I don't wanna miss the early bird discount. What's it about? Read this: Synopsis Sistic Link -- permalink -- Yiheng made 10:36 PM 0 Comments:
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Swing Along 2009 -vvv Current Read Last Three Books
The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Mythology Those Before
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