Nostalgic Days...

Back to Singapore soon.

So, I decided to go and play Wing Commander 1 again... even though its an old game, its still really fun. Spent about 5 hours non-stop on it, to win the game. Won every mission in three or less tries - including McAuliffe 3 (most took 1 try) - except Kurasawa 2, which is !@#$!$#ing impossible (done it before, but not willing to spend 50 tries on this mission).

I think I restarted the most on the easy missions, actually, cos I wanted to get all the kills in those :P

GUESS WHERE?

I haven't done enough classes the last 3 years. Clearly too stupid to do more :(

So what happened to you on V's day?

Despite its blatant commercialism (especially in the US - the home of capitalism and marketing), for a good proportion of people V's day is still an occasion to share with special others. People receive gifts - Flowers, Chocolates, cards, etc. - from other people.

So what did I receive on V day? A cold, from god-knows-who-or-where. That was a few days ago... still sniffling. It's passed from the sniffling stage to the sore throat stage to the dollops of yellow/green phlegm stage to the nonstop sneezing and runny nose stage, so given my usual history of colds, it should be over within the next three days.

This semester I'm doing less classes... supposedly to have more time for research, but apparently I'm spending that extra time sleeping and playing way too much DDR. On DDR Extreme, I have one more 9 footer left to AA (Curse you, Burning Heat), and I'm not sure if I want to go and practice the 10 footers (other than Sakura and Bag), since there's a long way to go for them (since I haven't even passed all of them yet!).

On simplicity

If you come right down to it, there are very few human needs that are really very essential. Love perhaps, companionship, beauty, religion and job enjoyment for that extra joi d'vrie.

Clothes, restaurants, etc have artificially created demand among consumers - it's no coincidence that Google makes billions a year from ad revenue. Half the economy is probably spent convincing us to purchase the other half. To quote, "we work in jobs we don't want to buy shit we don't need."

Now and then I feel the urge to simplify life to the bare essentials. Instant messaging, telephony, etc the illusion of instant contactivity becomes an unbearable burden. Even blogging.

Well, perhaps not blogging. There is still the fundamental human need to communicate, and the need to be understood.

More DDR

Created a DDR Recall account about two weeks back and then spent most of the two weeks replaying all my AAs, and getting a few new ones as well.

30 songs to go to AA for DDR Extreme, and I don't think any of them are easy :( Oh well, I suck.

Here's my current profile.

You know, I haven't written much in here, except about DDR. As you can see, I'm not really fond of publicly writing about the important things in my life.

Anyway, AA #200: Drop Out Challenge (I'm at 202 AAs now).

It's interesting how as you become better at DDR (and ITG, I suppose, although there are some differences), it seems that you un-learn some stuff you go learnt earlier. I think this claim is generally incorrect, but just follow the following discussion, which is generally correct but "shows" the above flawed claim to be superficially somewhat true (see the last paragraph of the following):

This is how most people learn DDR -

Beginner to Basic: Keep your feet away from the center, that is, don't follow what the guy on the video screen does! Try to step on beat.

Basic to Standard: Start alternating your feet, except for arrows on the same key. Start sight-reading better and faster. Get more comfortable with the location of your feet on the pad. Start doing more frequent jumps and 8th notes.

Standard to Easy Heavy: Even better sight-reading - more frequent chaos steps, long streams of 8ths in faster songs. Learn to cross-over as far as possible, allowing your body to face perpendicular to rather than directly at the screen. Avoid too much double-stepping as this tends to get off-beat for someone at this level.

Medium-to-hard heavy and beyond: Speed mods - reaction times and sight reading is fast enough to allow faster scroll speeds for greater accuracy. Bar raping to ensure even faster reaction times and balance maintenance. Start keeping feet as close as possible to the center to minimize feet movement; ultimately your aim is to bracket rape. Minimize crossovers, double-step as far as possible to maintain good timing and try to avoid turning your body too much, except for really fast crossovers.

End of term

...
barring a few finals and papers.

Which also means I have more time for DDR, which I still suck at.

AA Count: 180

Today's all-AA&FC 9 footer 3-song set: Stoic, Sweet Sweet <3 Magic, Irresistablement (sorry, I needed a guaranteed AA for the last song...). ES was Afronova Primeval, unfortunately I can't read backwards very well, but it was a FC high A.

There goes October 2007

The busiest month of my life so far. And that's saying a lot. Even had to drop a class (for the first time ever - horror of horrors!) and am dangerously close to screwing up a few other classes.

Probably wasted a ton of time following baseball; at least the Red Sox won the world series this time.

Happy birthday!

S - Dr has generalized wkness and fatigue.
- headache ? 2o to stress
- says he hasn't seen sunlight in one week
- discharge issues - we cant get him out of the wards (Refer MSW)

O - GCS 10 on downtrend x 1/52, impending unconsciousness

A - House Officership 2o to S$400,000 bond.

P - There is no known cure.

Running into Yaowei (by sheer coincidence) at 4am on the NYC subway was kind of cool in a way... which suggests the question: What was I doing at 4am on the NYC subway?

Simultaneous high scores for Lit, Engineering and Maths, zero for medicine.

ROFL.

Engineering		92%
Mathematics		92%
English		92%
Psychology		75%
Linguistics		67%
Philosophy		67%
Biology		58%
Anthropology		50%
Chemistry		50%
Journalism		50%
Art		42%
Theater		33%
Dance		17%
Sociology		8%

What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3)
created with QuizFarm.com

Brainstumpers

I got a idea for a genius-level timewasting device - Sudoku + Rubik's cube = Sudokube, right?

Seems like some turd already made the leap of disbelief and patented this idea.


On hindsight - it seems this puzzle is even easier to solve than the original rubik's cube. You get more solution hints from the 9 numbers than from 6 colors alone, and if all else fails the alignment of the numbers helps you literally which way is up.

And if all that still doesn't help you, the non-tessellating black background means that you can simply solve the puzzle by aligning all that kanji. Talk about selling out.

I decided to up the complexity level a little - the GOSUdoKUBE.



It'll hit production soon as I figure out how to cantilever 729 moving parts into a coherent mesh that will resist attempts to bash your skull against it.

The Joy of Teaching
(In support of Alfian Sa'at)

Intelligent Design is anything but

Evolutionists and Intelligent-designers do agree on several things - that organisms are constantly morphing into new organisms, and that genomic change is the main engine of speciation.

What they disagree upon is on the exact mechanism of genomic change - evolutionary theory believes that genetic mutations are truly random, while creationists believe that these mutations are purposeful, with the intent of conferring survival advantages. Herein lies the deadlock - how does one know, for example, whether a mutation that gives fruitflies color vision is "purposeful" or "random"? Intelligent design and evolution are both non-falsifiable theories - when faced with a million monkeys bashing on a 4-letter keyboard ("A C G T") coming up with the complete human genome, is this "purposeful" or pure random chance?

Random genetic change confers both good and bad survival edges, while intelligent design only allows genetic change which is beneficial. Essentially the equation is:

Random Evolutionary Change = Intelligent Design (ID) + Pretty Stupid Design (PSD)

Now in the course of my medical career, I've seen some Pretty Stupid Designs. A leaky pump is a pretty dumb design, and I've seen enough hole-in-the-heart syndromes to know that sometimes, just sometimes, our Designer was looking the other way, or maybe He was surfing Youtube when he ought to be busting His ass on our blueprints.

Another Pretty Stupid Design is achondroplasia. Our Supreme Engineer hits a base pair in chromosome 4, resulting in a Creation that is stunted because of inappropriate cartilage and skeletal growth, facing a lifetime of respiratory and spinal cord problems. Hardly the kind of ubermensch material our Designer is used to turning out.

My last example is cancer. Now it is hideously difficult to get cancer - one needs to accumulate mutations in seven different genes before a tumor is even visible on the most sophisticated radiological scans (this is partly why young people don't get cancer; you have to live long enough before you collect all seven mutations). Yet cancer is diagnosed in 20 million patients every year, and is responsible for 25% of deaths in the developed world. As far as Designs go, a biological time bomb is a Pretty Stupid Design element to include in something hyped as the acme and pinnacle of All Creation. I don't know about you, but if I were dying of cancer, I'd prefer it because I was unlucky for seven straight times - when the alternative is a malevolent Intelligent Genetic Engineer who spends his lab time knocking off my c-myc, FAP, Ras, p53, pRB et al genes.

To conclude, well, yes it IS a pretty unlikely feat that the "irreducible complexity" of the eye was formed by random chance mutations in the retina, the lens mechanism and the pupillary aperture. I'd like to add that it is pretty unlikely too that your typical perfectly healthy human walks the earth for seventy years and accumulates enough random mutations to give him cancer. Well, SHIT HAPPENS. We know now that cancer too has "irreducible complexity", and any single mutation in the absence of others will not result in the life-draining disease we've come to know and love. There are far too many Pretty Stupid Designs floating around in my medical wards to allow me to listen to an Intelligent Designer with a straight face. From one who has seen the dark side of the genetic lottery that is human reproduction, it's hard to believe that our genetic and evolutionary future is guided by anything other than the Million Monkey Typewriting Brigade.

A bit old, but...

Read this. Satire? Parody? Or just plain right-wing religious nut dumbass-ness?

AAAs on all the DDR 10 footers up to 8th mix on Stepmania (keyboard, C500 so I don't have irritating slowdowns to worry about).

(No PSMH here; just showed the PSMO picture).


























































For Supernova, I don't have AAAs on FELMO, FAXX-H, and FAXX-O (Chaos was C500, so that's kind of cheating, but well...). It looks like I'll never get FELMO, as there's one part I can NEVER even FC. Oh, and here''s are some quad As just for fun.

Why screw around with DDR?

presenting... DANCE DANCE IMMOLATION

(guess what happens when you don't get a triple A?)

The usual arrogant self-promoting post

My grades. Usual caveat, removed in one month.