Went sarge's house on tuesday. Pretty fun.

When we reached his house, sarge's mother commented "Xiong wei grow bigger already ah?" lol.

One of the noticeable things in his house is his dog, which apparently can't climb stairs. Sarge's father challenged "if you can get him to climb down I'll give you a big angpow" then people started to taunt it from downstairs...

In his first hall there is a ba1 bao3 he2(a candy box with 8 compartments) which is actually a music box! It plays the "gong xi gong xi gong xi ni" song when you spin it. However, like all music boxes, the music slows down after a while, so you end up with a sad sounding version of "gong xi gong xi gong xi ni"... quite amusing.

So we played bridge, then ate pizza and sushi. Seliyan came at the right time to play zhong1 ji2 mi4 ma3, with wasabi as the forfeit. Each player gets to put a bit in the middle, and the loser has to eat them all. Kenneth seemed quite immune to wasabi, so he put a hell lot, then end up Shi Jie kena. It was rather... painful to watch him eat it. Shi Jie swore to take revenge; he forgo-ed the chance to be the one setting the number, and volunteered to play so that he can dump lots of wasabi in the middle. The amount of wasabi in the middle scared the shit out of everyone, except Kenneth, who was undaunted, and put some more. End up Kenneth tio! He had to eat all the wasabi in the middle, but he eat the wasabi like nothing liddat, except the last part, when he had to drink some water. Manly.

Then we went to sarge's room to do some stuff. I also dunno what we did in his room. Some random stuff like attempting to taupok taru, and watching yan an and kenneth rehearse a short film. Kenneth's narration has a high WTH factor to it, and it's pretty funny.

Then we played taru's xbox360, and he had two games, one of them is some first person shooter game with a mission, the other is DOA 4. In the meantime, was playing international chess. lost to kenneth, but beat seliyan, so I didn't feel too bad :P

Later, they went to sarge's room to shoot the film, but they couldn't have too much laughter in the background, so being the considerable boy I am, I opted to play DOA4 outside with hongrui, kin wai and yida. Was learning the moves of one character so that I can win with her, but later everyone agreed to all random for fun. Hongrui seems pretty talented at DOA4.

When the short flim was done, shijie played doom95 on xbox360 (quote taru: doom95 in full HD glory), then we watched saw 3! jigsaw <333 !

Pretty nice. Yan an cringed at the brain operation part. Everyone cringed at the Rack. At the scene that had a naked woman being sprayed with freezing water, Sarge stood near the corridor to block the tv in case his parents saw it.

After saw3, the guys photowhored in sarge's bedroom, in some weird poses. Not say *very* weird, but not too standard either.

Then to my delight, we had dinner at lot 1, which is 2 mins from where I live. Feels good to be a di4 tou2 she2 for once, when most other times I have to depend on other people to get around in orchard. But not much to be proud of lah; lot 1 is small. Then we went shopping for gifts in lot1 (the idea of shopping in lot1 never occurred to me, despite having lived here even before lot1 was built). We did manage to find something suitable for chinese new year.

Whee. Pretty nice, and since the final destination was a 2 min walk from home, this time there isn't the big contrast between a class outing and the journey home alone, which feels damn sian.

They say an idle mind is a devil's workshop. Since I don't really say angelic things here, from the fact that I've blogged 3 times in the span of 3 days you could conclude that my mind has really been quite idle for the past 3 days. Aiee.

I had a convo with yy, and he asked me to type in CAPS. Strangely, typing in caps has a hypnotic effect of making me less polite than usual. I've discovered a side of myself that I hadn't unleashed in a long time. Typing in caps feels like shouting, and it doesn't make sense to be polite when shouting. I mean, compare

"May I take your order please?"

with

"MAY I TAKE YOUR ORDER PLEASE?"

You get the point, I hope.

I learn that when I angst I should not blog in caps. Because people may read things that I otherwise wouldn't say in real life.

Hmm, if typing in caps makes people more angst, then perhaps we could explore other fonts or styles, and the effect they have on the author. Perhaps, typing in pink might sound more gay, like ooh, I like that. Whee.

Or typing in small italics sound like whispering: just kidding *chuckles*

The fact that typing is simply a matter of pressing buttons make imitation very simple. Talking like a girl when you are not has never been easier. Not to say that I can pull it off. Just that it's much harder to pull it off on the phone than it would be to do it on irc or msn.

WBAHAHAHA. bwahahahaha. bwahahahaha.

Today I went to uncle's house for reunion dinner.

One of the chinese new year songs played was sung to the tune of "jingle bells". It was amusing, to say the least.

Random thoughts:

You'd wonder why many people like to sing, even though they can't really sing. It's quite strange actually, because people who are not good in math wouldn't like math, and people who have poor stamina wouldn't like running. Perhaps, it's because of mirror neurons? Like when you hear someone sing you can feel yourself singing too, even though you know full well you can't reach all the notes, and somehow you get a kick out of listening to really good vocal pieces. Well, for me that's the case.

Perhaps, that's also the reason why people like to watch wrestling or read superhero comics; it gives them the kick of beating enemies up with the help of their mirror neurons.

That still leaves me to wonder why we don't get endorphins rushing in our body when we watch people sweat out. Oh wait, guys do watch women's volleyball... but I doubt it's for the endorphins...

Do people with faulty mirror neurons sing even though they can't? If they do then my hypothesis must be wrong.

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One of my cousins is getting married, and he has already taken wedding photos with his fiancee in advance. Then the uncles and aunties were recounting the times when they took their wedding photos, and lamenting about the wonders of modern technology: how they can tweak the features, how they can remove the bright patches, how they can save and delete many many pictures, how they can change the background... As they spoke it sounded more and more like neoprints to me....

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Played teletake on take5, but didn't do well. I was quite surprised at "preparedness" coming out for charades. Although it saw it in posters around RJ, I refused to believe such a word actually exists. So when someone finally guessed it i was like w00t!!!!

The message to pass was "We must completely eliminate all fences in order to achieve total defence." It was rather weird. The chinese version also quite cheem, "Wei le qu de quan mian fang wei, wo men bi xu che di cui suo you de li ba." Like, 6 words are secondary school vocab lor! I can't imagine how siao the tamil would be.

The weird thing is, what's the problem with fences? RJ is surrounded by them. Anyway, the way this message is phrased sound like something out of a GP essay question, like:

"We must completely eliminate all fences in order to achieve total defence." Do you agree? Explain your answer."

roflness. I can't imagine a chinese version of this.

Random note: I've been using more semicolons since SAT, as zhengrong told me how semicolons should be used. I've realized that a lot of commas I've used in the past were supposed to be semicolons. It's not like there is no difference between a comma and semicolon; I've noticed that appropriate usage of semicolons does enable more effective communication in text, even without knowing how they should be used.

I remember watching a chemistry tape. A teacher put an object in a sealed cardboard box, and passed it to some students to let them guess what it was. The students described the object to be "heavy", "not round", and "makes a sound". Although there was nothing disturbing about this scene, it did make me feel rather sad because it shows that we can't really understand the world. With a lot of shaking and perhaps measuring, all we can find out about the object in the box is how it responds to shaking. Thus, our knowledge of that object in the box can be completely described using a function, with it input being the ways the box can be shaken, the output being the observations. In the real world, even the inputs and outputs are objects in sealed boxes. Whenever we measure something, we base our readings on something we aren't completely sure of.

Consider a stapler. All you know about staplers is based on correspondence of how you interact with it and how it responds. How do you know how you interact with it? By pressing on it "hard", there is a degree of uncertainty about how hard we press it. How does it respond? We could measure how fast the staple comes out, but this is also based on our imperfect instruments. Like, how do you know that this pencil isn't exactly 10cm long? You need to know what 10 cm is, right? Okay, so it's a fraction of the distance traveled by light in a fixed amount of time. What is this fixed amount of time? A multiple of the period of a certain EM wave from a Cesium atom. Exciting. How would you measure the period? You can find count the number of cycles, but its so fast that the you need scaling factor, which may not be precisely determined. Or you could measure the wavelength using diffraction patterns, but length is not defined either. What is 10 cm? I have no idea.

Okay. So you've measured the pencil, but you're not sure if the ruler is accurate. You are also not sure if your senses are accurate. What is accurate anyway? Correspondence to the "true" value? Then what is the "true" value? How do you know what is false without even knowing what is true?

In my opinion, there is "knowledge" only because we are imperfect. There is scientific knowledge only because we don't know what is going to happen, so we have to predict. There is mathematical knowledge only because we can't count properly, so we need to use some abstractions and simplifications. There is historical knowledge only because we don't know what happened in the past, so we have to recall, refer and infer. Nature isn't constrained by any laws; it's just like that, and there is nothing to "know" or not "know" about it.

As humans, we have come thus far, with the help some good guesses about Nature. In ourselves we strive towards happiness and abhor suffering, and what we've managed to do with this drive was to propagate and prosper. In a sense, it is like an electronic circuit driven by electrons' affinity towards a high electric potential, and what it manages to do is to perform logical operations for us. Most of the electrons that have been pushed wouldn't reach the region of high potential, but it has done its job.

Some find joy in food. Some find joy in getting good grades. Some find joy in sports. Some find joy in making fun of others. Some fear the prospect of going to hell. Let's join in the fun, and see what they manage to pull off.

Hohoho the GP people have been discussing gender issues. Like, how cool is that? 6D is a class with ultimate imba sex ratio. Even if you take out shaosheng and I, it is still 17 guys to 7 girls. The balance may seem obviously tipped in favour of the guys, until you put in gayle, who, based on what I've heard, is quite strongly feminist. (Somehow reminds me of this. Note the protagonist's hairstyle too.) And to this already violent concoction, add in Shi Jie with his graphical descriptions and examples, man, GP would be totally exciting.

And while all these action was taking place, I was stoning in KI class while people check their IS proposal...

Speaking of it, I wouldn't want a discussion of gender issues in my KI class. Bear in mind that 6D GP class is usually quite stone. If my KI class can get into a heated debate about epistemology, I can't even begin to imagine the sound level if we were to discuss gender issues. Incidentally, my KI classmates consist of guys and girls with voices of a large range of frequencies. Just consider Alwyn to Suzhang, Balpreet to Zilin. It would be an epic musical if not for the absence of tune.

Yay I solved a math problem without using brute force! I'm so proud of myself.

Random thought: If you go back to Greece 2000 years ago, and someone tells you "know thyself", would you suspect that he's actually telling you to beat off?

The syllabus cut isn't reducing stress. When a good grade is easier to attain, agencies seek alternative ways to sieve out talents, and students seek to distinguish themselves from the rest. You see people doing research projects, giving science fair presentations, winning engineering awards, doing overseas attachments, taking leadership positions, representing the country in sports, getting insane scores for SAT... and coupled with the fact that at least 20% of the people that you see around you are going to get 4 As, you start to wonder if it is really a good idea to focus on studies.

The system demands this much from students, and students are willing to push themselves this hard. Unless the employment scene changes drastically, the government can't really do much about students' stressing themselves out. The fact remains that some students are more talented than others, and regardless of whether the official benchmarks are raised or lowered, people are going to compare with each other.

But then again, who ever said that the syllabus cut is meant to reduce stress?