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Wednesday, Nov 22, 2006 - 21:27 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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Long Goodbye

Proposition A: I need to mug as much as I can.

Proposition B: Creating new content takes time away from mugging.

Conclusion: No more, until the 4th of December sees off my Philosophy paper.

Exception: Will still chip in a punt on the mouth-watering Man U vs Chelski game.

Mystification: On how the exceptional Cristano Ronaldo can deliver pinpoint crosses by kicking around his standing foot, while missing the proverbial barn wall from five yards. At least Man U were ahead, so they could have a good laugh about it - must be the miss of the season, though not of all time. Good reminder that it happens to the best of us.

Cognition: Another theme explored by two modules (Problem Solving in Computing and Introduction to Psychology). Watch this video (~ 7 MB) and count the number of passes made by the team in white.

How many passes were made by them?

This was the 2004 winner for the Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology, though hardly the most distinguished, considering the sheer quality of some of the honoured achievements. Outsourcing prayers (2004 Economics Prize), finding that chickens prefer beautiful humans (2003 Interdisciplinary Research Prize) and inventing a car alarm with built-in flamethrower (1999 Peace Prize) all surpass it in my opinion.

Singapore can be proud to have one of the earliest winners (check the list, Psychology Prize for 1994) - no winners for the real deal yet, but surely it's only a matter of time; We've attracted the Centennial Exhibition of the Nobel Prize to our fair shores (went for a quick look-see with tpk some time ago), and Albert Einstein accepted his 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics here!

Recognition (Optical Character): Ever come into possession of scanned documents in PDF format (such as past-year exam papers from the NUS Library Portal), and despaired over extracting the text in them? Here's a two-step process for quick and easy conversion.

First, download PDF Image Extraction Wizard (728 KB), a compact freeware utility that converts the PDF file into BMP images. It occasionally produces inverted images (white text on black base), which can either manually be fixed by inverting with MS Paint, or a Photoshop batch command).

Next, download SimpleOCR (9.28 MB), another freeware that happens to work great with the BMPs produced by the PDF Image Extraction Wizard. Add all the BMP images produced previously at one go, then convert them all and voila! Instant Word document!

Reproduction: Can't afford The Sims? Gene Pool with some imagination can serve as a cut-down version; the organisms simulated by it vary in size and shape, but share two characteristics - they want to mate, and they want food (for energy to mate more). They're only collections of little coloured rods, so there's not much to look at in this respect, but I still spent a free hour in the SoC comp lab managing their little world.

Digression: I was going crazy trying to find the name of a problem I encountered some time ago: Given a known, fixed number of applicants for a job, and that each of these applications can be uniquely ranked in relation to each other (so that after encountering each applicant, one can say whether he is better or worse than each application before him), and finally that the applicants are interviewed one by one, but has to be immediately accepted or rejected for ever, is there a good strategy to follow in hiring?

Obviously, if one accepts the first applicant no matter what, on average he would be just that - the average applicant. One could take a look at all the applicants, but then one would be forced to hire the last one, with the same result. It turns out that the problem is known as optimal stopping, and that there is a recognized solution. I like this sort of math.

Animation:



Teapotahedron (1987 SIGGRAPH image)

The last two labs of CS3241; Some fractal-inspired star thingy that was preconceived as a shell, and the famous Utah Teapot (a.k.a the sixth Platonic solid, as above), rendered with cubic Bezier curves.



Alteration:

changelog v1.04c
---------------
* Finally, metatags. Nobody uses them now, but let them be there.

* Blue bar for the minima in Site Statistics. Current day no longer counts for minima.

* Bunch of 80 x 15 buttons added unobstructively under the links section, including long-due credit to Imageshack. Hohoho.

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