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Saturday, Dec 04, 2010 - 14:08 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Mixed Roundup

So... that's the semester's modules finally done with (to be discussed in the near future), some sports apparel bought on the cheap yesterday on a shopping trip with my cousin (with running shoes still on the list), and a basketball session in a few hours.

Onto my Chrome bookmark list clear-up. About the same time as Google unveiling their driverless car (which actually didn't have too much of a wow factor for me, since one of my profs clued us in on universities doing it some years ago), somebody managed to print one to rather less fanfare. Yes, print a car. Print. a. car. Meanwhile, electric cars are still expensive and short-ranged. Can't have it all.

Narrowing focus to the smoking category of cars, the government staged car pre-bombings at various regions around the island a few weeks ago, and found that only about 4% of people even appeared to notice the belching fumes, while only 1% (fifty-two of some 7200) called the police immediately.

This may be another demonstration of the bystander effect, but thinking a little more deeply, not responding en masse has its merits - thousands of calls in a matter of minutes would likely overwhelm the response system, and any calls after the first few would have no additional value.

More specifically, if one supposes that P people have seen the incident, one might then generate a uniformly-distributed value from 0 to 1, and then report it if one's value is below 1/P; if a higher likelihood is required, this may be modified with some M > 1 such that the chance is M/P, which would produce an average of M reports in total. The (ever-present but infinitely minimizable) chance of a failure to report under this protocol is left as an exercise to the reader.

Of course, this isn't what most people are thinking when deciding whether to respond (note the above analysis disregards any possible costs), but they seem to make passable approximations... or do they (more next time)?



On to computer graphics, the lines between reality and artificiality are more blurred than ever, if they even exist (see above video - it's all fake!) for inanimate objects. Moving humans, though, are another matter (The Spirits Within a decade ago came close, especially for stills, but not quite).

Then there's Microsoft's creative 2D into a-sort-of-3D Photosynth. People have been doing panoramas for a long time, and this takes it one dimension further. Not as out of the world as some think it is, but worth a try nonetheless. As might be predicted, it doesn't do too well with repeated patterns.

The recent US diplomatic cable leak feels kind of fair, as since individuals have next to no privacy anyway, it's nice to have governments get a taste of their own medicine. By the way, I am shocked, shocked at the revelation that diplomats spy on their host nations, and that politicians are mean. Shocked, I tell you (for the severely sarcasm-impaired, this sentence and the previous sentence are sarcastic).

Thankfully, Singapore's exposure appears limited to MM Lee calling Kim Jong Il "a flabby old chap... who prances around stadiums seeking adulation", and I have to say that the Minister Mentor speaks a lot of sense. Two thumbs up.

And perhaps the most incredible of all: NASA discovers a new type of life, which incorporates arsenic as part of its DNA. Life is indeed miraculous (if not always intelligent).

Eh wait, stop the presses; Qatar won the bid to host the 2022 World Cup. Just a few stats: population of 1.7 million, forty degrees Celsius in summer, a team barely better than Singapore's, and tons of sand?

Oh, but they have a ton of money to go with all that sand, and are going to give away the bloody stadiums to developing nations after the event. Well, after a Chinese firm built a hotel in six days, this doesn't even seem all that hard.

Slowly catching up at P$1067/P$1250, after a couple of draws came through. Let's try it again.

P$50 on Manchester City to draw Bolton (at 3.70) - Bolton are decent nowadays
P$50 on Liverpool to draw Aston Villa (at 3.60) - not too outlandish



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Next: Roundup Part Two


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