Powered by glolg
Display Preferences Most Recent Entries Chatterbox Blog Links Site Statistics Category Tags About Me, Myself and Gilbert XML RSS Feed
Sunday, Dec 04, 2011 - 00:30 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Pieces From The Past

"I saw him hug his wife on stage and was touched. I thought, 'This man is a good guy. I want to be like him'.'"

- victim of MLM/Ponzi firm Sunshine Empire on why he decided to invest over $100k in them.
Clue: external displays of affection have little to do with competence, or indeed character. Wait, there's more...

"The office was very grand and shiny.
There were golden, glittery things everywhere, candles and powerful pictures of lions."

- hopefully he has learnt to be wary of impressive-looking halls with scattered flames, replete with symbols of authority, and filled with overly-friendly smartly-suited underlings promising unrealistic bargains for unwavering faith.


He did write a (soon-to-be-released) book about his experiences, which should be a good start.


Cain or Cant

"This individual's going to accuse me of an affair for an extended period of time. I don't want to specify because I don't know what's in the story."
- Herman Cain


And who says public figures have to be nice to their significant others? Mr. Herman Cain, who was the star of a recent post, is about ready to push the responsibility for his dropping out of the race to his wife. This, of course, has nothing at all to do with having to preemptively deny yet another extramarital affair.

Paraphrased from another context, one of these may be unfortunate or plain vindictive, but fifteen (or five) begins to look slightly careless. Consolation is that even Republicans are beginning to ditch him, and are now moving over to a guy who knows how to keep his wife happy - otherwise, how would he have managed to get three of them? ... wait, what?


Wonders of Science

Having long since given up on discovering whether eggs are good or bad for my health, which appears to depend heavily on which research group is in need of a paper, science has upped its ante by declaring that smoking may be beneficial to long-distance running. Oh, the author was trying to make a point about (not-so-good) scientists being able to support questionable hypotheses by picking only data that suits them. Fine by me.

This may have flown over the heads of bureaucrats at the European Union, who have solemnly declared that water doesn't help to prevent dehydration. I suppose this could be true, in the same way falling off a cliff might not cause broken limbs, because they were already broken. Remember, these are the same guys who admitted Greece to the Euro. That's political science for you.

It is almost refreshing at this point to read about theories that one feels comfortable admitting that one does not understand, such as macroscopic quantum entanglement and microscopic space worms (the spice will soon flow!). Not to be outdone, NTU has begun work on tractor beams - just a few orders of magnitudes from the finished product now...

It seems too that Anders Behring Breivik is criminally insane. No shit, Sherlock. Kicker is, if this assessment is accepted, he can't be sentenced to prison, though as mentioned, that doesn't even sound like a bad deal. I'll be waiting for them to discover just why Gary Speed, fantasy football legend and all-around nice guy, took his own life, especially since Wales had been doing swimmingly well under his management.


The Amazing Shrinking Flat

Accompanied my cousin to a showflat viewing for Trivelis, a DBSS project in Clementi. The included fittings were tastefully modern and of top quality, the strategically-placed mirrors spotless, but there was something that I couldn't quite get a handle on - and then it struck me.

Dang, the rooms are small.

As my cousin confirmed by lying down (when no one was looking), the secondary bedroom was just about wide enough for a single bed. By itself, this isn't so bad, but it was also just about long enough for a single bed. One of them included a nice-looking preinstalled cabinet by the door, and a table-ledge along another wall (thank goodness for LCD technology, no way a CRT monitor is going to fit on that) - and as there was no way a proper bed could go in after that, they cleverly stuck in a very comfortable reclining sofa.

I was initially skeptical about the hoo-hah over shrinking flat sizes, especially given that hard data* appears to indicate no huge changes, but it really has to be seen to be believed. Fine, maybe nobody needs a large kitchen nowadays (new capacity: one stove, one fridge), we can just eat out. And frankly, when an occupant is using the table, he isn't using the bed, so it could be wasteful to have both available at the same time. Personally, I would miss not having a desk by my bed.

The ceiling hasn't been lowered as far as I can tell, so those in the family way might consider multi-level bunk beds for their kids, and then conversion to a capsule hotel once the time comes to upgrade and rent the flat out.

Maybe it's all a matter of creativity:



Though, about falling birth rates, it does beg the question of whether flat sizes are being reduced to cater for smaller families or the other way around...

My cousin remarked that while great, the internal fittings could probably be replicated by a contractor, meaning that quite a bit of the DBSS premium goes towards the brand name (so important for the middle class)

At this, I wondered if it would be practical to simply let current HDB dwellers vote on the names of their estates and/or create aliases, much like on the Internet. It's not like they don't change each time general elections come along anyway - my nearest community club is now named Jurong Spring, for instance, despite there being no (non-metallic) springs nearby, and the surrounding electoral area not even being Jurong.

It wouldn't even be too hard, creates extra jobs for the Singapore Post, among other firms, and would allow satisfied citizens to let slip to their relatives that they are now ensconced in 1 Albemarle Heights, or 9 Berkeley Concourse, instead of something utterly unmemorable like Block 123 Boon Dock Street 45 #06-78. What's not to like?

Speaking of brand-name prices, the SDP has recently released a report suggesting that ministerial salaries should be pegged to that of Members of Parliament, which in turn are pegged to the mean wage of the bottom 20th percentile (by the way, what's taking the official panel so long?). Myself, I'm sticking to the 20% discount prediction.

[*Note: Balconies and air-con ledges included in floor area]


Two Dollah Eighty Cent

My budget still hurting after the MP3-playing sunglasses, I happened upon Daiso, and was again dumbstruck at what two bucks can buy - not one, but two perfectly-serviceable badminton rackets, with plastic shuttlecock included.

I settled on a resistance band, a Rubik's cube (never got around to mastering them), and some much-needed hamster deodorant. The buggers can count themselves lucky I didn't get electronic pest control.


They could begin by providing a useful service

This too after having my hair cut for eighty cents - how do they share the takings after that? I can still remember my old barbershop having a wooden slab on which they would hang tokens representing the number of heads shorn, back in the days when eight-to-ten dollar cuts were still commonplace.

Competition everywhere must be really fierce - even Groupon clones are feeling the heat. Fast food's perhaps the last bastion, with nearly three hundred thousand coupons for 50% off five Big Macs and Large Fries purchased in Chicago (N.B. that's 1.75 billion calories!).


From The Lab Of Robo

Mr. Robo: "After the success of Roborovhunt, I have set my sights on the DARPA Shredder Challenge!"

Me: "Well, as long as you're out of my way. So what's it about?"

Mr. Robo: "It's about reconstructing shredded documents, so that their secrets can be recovered."

Me: "Isn't there a saying that gentlemen don't read each other's mail?"

Mr. Robo: "They *are* U.S. Department of Defence spooks..."

Me: "Point taken."

Mr. Robo: "...who *are* in the business of Protecting The Free World. Most of the time, anyway. C'mon, it's not like you have any privacy left to guard any longer. The idea is that you take something like this:"


Alas, poor document


"...and fit the itty-bitty fragments together such that they become readable again."

Me: "Hmm."

Mr. Robo: "It isn't as bad as it looks. For instance, in the first puzzle, I determined that only 109 fragments were useful (i.e. were reasonably large, and contained some data in black ink) through some simple image processing. These fragments can then be extracted and aligned, as shown:"


Greenscreened fragments


Mr. Robo: "The question now is to figure out how best to place these fragments together. In this case, there are about five thousand combinations of fragment pairs, and four ways that each pair can come together (since the fragments are not guaranteed to be right side up). Certainly, this is possible manually."

"Being a lazy computer science hamster and all, however, it is natural to wonder if there is a better way, and there is an obvious method:"


The equivalent of taking an online quiz to determine how compatible you are with some hot chick


"Intuitively, some fragments fit together much better than others. Therefore, we can consider the long edges of each fragment, and compare them with the corresponding edge of another fragment; if they were originally side-by-side, we would expect their pixel values to be similar across the board. In this particular case, the lines pose additional restrictions, such that fragments can only fit at a few offsets (where all their lines match)"

"We can slide one fragment along the other to determine all positions they can plausibly match, and then rank all such matches by goodness depending on whether the location of their ink lines up too. If our goodness function is good enough, then even greedily sticking fragments together (as in DNA assembly) should produce some results."

Me: "But it didn't happen."

Mr. Robo: "Well, not quite, not yet."

Me: "One obvious issue with this approach is that it assumes that strokes cross fragment boundaries approximately horizontally; if the strokes are not that thick, and they cross near-vertically, they may not match well."

"Furthermore, the input is somewhat noisy, with some discolouration/degradation common along the edges, which you should keep in mind. Warping, by several pixels at least, should also be expected. Finally, as stated in the contest guidelines, fragments may even be missing."

Mr. Robo: "Oh." *crestfallen*

Me: "But don't be disheartened. Your method should at least drastically reduce the number of possible pairings, which should reduce the workload on human (and hamster) workers tremendously; instead of considering all 108 possible, for example, they can instead concentrate on distinguishing between the few best matches, as computed this way."

Mr. Robo: "Yes! Yes! That fifty grand in prize money is mine!"

Me: "Erm, wait. DARPA's challenge is only open to permanent residents or citizens of the United States."

Mr. Robo: "What the... wait, think, Mr. Robo, think... I can probably get Mr. Ham to submit it for me... but he'll likely demand a fifty-percent cut... I suppose it can't be helped..."

Me: "Mr. Ham is a Hamerican citizen, not American! And anyway, the deadline's over."

Mr. Robo: "What?! Surely they will extend it?!"

Me: "This isn't an academic conference. And anyway, a team has won it, using a combination of automated preprocessing and human input, as suggested."

Mr. Robo: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"

Me: *pats Mr. Robo condescendingly* "It was a good effort."

Mr. Robo: *sniffles* "I'll never make it big at this rate."

Me: "You need not worry about that. I don't consider you a code monkey."

Mr. Robo: "Sewiously?"

Me: "Yep. You're currently a code hamster. If you work hard, you're on track to be a code bunny, and if you keep your nose clean, perhaps you'll get promoted to code monkey in ten years."


Mr. Ham Wins A Bet

It had to happen. Fulham drew with Arsenal, and Mr. Ham was so giddy about it he... I'd better not mention what happened.

Mr. Ham (390/1200 seeds): Who's Da Ham? Who's Da Ham?

FAKEBERT (1294/1200 seeds): As I am still over 900 seeds ahead of you, I would say me.

Mr. Ham (ignores FAKEBERT): 100 seeds on Fulham to beat Liverpool (at 3.35)

FAKEBERT: 100 seeds on Arsenal (-1.5) vs. Wigan (at 2.20)



comments (0) - email - share - print - direct link
trackbacks (0) - trackback url


Next: What Have I Been Doing


Related Posts:
The Huntster Awakens
It Was A Honest Mistake
Project Aftermath
Notes From A Cult Leader
Passings
Back to top

Copyright © 2006-2025 GLYS. All Rights Reserved.