1. If anything can go wrong, Fix It!!! (To hell with Murphy!)
2. When given a choice – Take Both!!
3. Multiple projects lead to multiple successes.
4. Start at the top then work your way up.
5. Do it by the book…but be the author!
6. When forced to compromise, ask for more.
7. If you can’t beat them, join them, then beat them.
8. If it’s worth doing, it’s got to be done right now.
9. If you can’t win, change the rules.
10. If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them.
11. Perfection is not optional
12. When faced without a challenge, make one.
13. “No” simply means begin again at one level higher.
14. Don’t walk when you can run.
15. Bureaucracy is a challenge to be conquered with a righteous attitude, a tolerance for stupidity, and a bulldozer when necessary.
16. When in doubt: THINK!
17. Patience is a virtue, but persistence to the point of success is a blessing.
18. The squeaky wheel gets replaced.
19. The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live.
20. The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself!

Peter's Laws, The Creed of the Sociopathic Obsessive Compulsive (by Peter Diamandis)

Posted from Lambeth, England, United Kingdom.

Arc Attack Performing Dr Who

Came across Arc Attack several years back, and thought their music completely exciting despite it simply being an electric arc hooked to a midi table.

But then found that they had a show featuring ADAM SAVAGE from the mythbusters.

Now, considering that the Mythbusters is one of my favourit-est shows, therefore A Mythbuster Dancing + 1 Million Volts + Arc Attack + Music + Dr. Who is too geek not to post in the middle of exams.

It’s almost nerdy…

(evil laughter)

*For the second video, the suit’s homemade (always wondered if the slightest bit of resistance at 1 X 10^6 Volts would cause enough heat to injure…)

via YouTube – Maker Faire 2011 – Arc Attack – Adam Savage – Dr. Who.

via YouTube – Tesla Coils – Arc Attack – Doctor Who Theme Song – Makers Faire 2010 – San Mateo – No. 1.

Posted from Lambeth, England, United Kingdom.

Pa. teacher strikes nerve with lazy whiners blog – Yahoo! News.

A teacher everyone's had.

Oh yeah. Tough love is not just good. It’s necessary.

Honestly, i don’t see how her comments are out of place. There are a shocking number of students like that. It’s an honest blog and not borne of acrimony. The honest, concerned frustration is palpable.

It is completely unreasonable for a school to expect a teacher (or any other superhuman) to deal with say, 4 classes with 30 difficult students each. Even if you could motivate these ‘lazy whiners’, splitting a 6 hour day into 120 parts of one-on-one time is simply impossible. Even in world leading China, Taiwan and Singapore, educators are becoming aware that it is mathematically unfeasible for teachers to provide the quality time that parents are increasingly shirking, and then expecting teachers to deliver.

And bloody hell. Parents, be parents, not just friends. Bringing yourself down to the child’s maturity to connect is fine, but doing that all the time and giving in constantly is a recipe for a blind-leading-the-blind relationship. Everyone loses.

Raffles Institution

Source: http://www.facebook.com/mcpeanuts/posts/184581534908068?notif_t=share_reply

Heyy. Quick scan and quick reply before i head off for fencing training.

Well, the fact that a large number of our old teachers left because they did not get to teach GEP classes exclusively (let’s not quote names) suggests a noticeable difference in the teacher-student interaction. I doubt there will ever be a conceivable metric of demonstrating this intellectual buzz to the ministry, but having been in it for seven years, it was huge pain to be removed from such an environment and thrown into RJ.

Post RJ, i spent time teaching a decent number of students (typically 15/year). Among the RI boys, i can usually tell within the first hour which boys are the GEPers. Even outside the raffles family, there is something different and tastefully weird about the GEPer. Quite often it’s typified by a relentless question and inquisitivity and a quicker ability to parse knowledge from disparate parcels of information in an academic setting. I often end up teaching GEPers in a very different way. Less rote (drilling is still important), but both teacher and student end up very much more satisfied when we are, say, able to relate post-transcriptional modification with molecular structure and its extracirricular implications in Polio.

Same thing with locum teaching. The boys in the GEP classes demanded more of me intellectually. And i do mean demand.

As for myself, i remember a debate in lit we had on the significance of the Hobbesian social contract (that in turn from philo) in Shakespearean society. And the fact that Boon Huat tried to shove erasers and quantum physics down our throats, with ourselves gladly choking on that.

Just because we cannot put our finger on it means it doesn’t exist. That fact GEPers often talk about the GEP in experiential terms would suggest its positive effects are much wider than we would dare suggest. This is a system that possibly does not exist anywhere else in the world, and us lucky 150 have a responsibility to cultivate that elsewhere even if it might not produce any of the stereotypical tangible results such as results. And thank god raffles understands that the IB will always be a poor copy of the quality of its GEP programme.

Here at Imperial and beyond, i doubt i will ever see that buzz of intellect ever again. I sorely regret that.

RA – nah i doubt RA will ever be a substitute for a daily atmosphere of learning and flying erasers and Rosie Smith. You simply cannot replace a culture with discrete science projects.

Posted from London, England, United Kingdom.

White kid, yellow kid.

I am a product of that culture. A culture where 2,000 math questions a night is a manageable endeavour. Ask an Asian parent, and she’ll say ‘Thank God it’s only math’. Propagating that oft-true stereotype, I’ll add that US arithmetic questions as a simple as it gets. But admittedly, i hated that tearing and hard work, but I am immensely grateful for it.

What i don’t understand is that why can’t we have both asian precision with western creativity?

I use the word ‘precision’ only because it does not evoke an emotive response – it is but an outcome. Possibly an outcome of labour and ‘focused attention’ as Mr Brooks will have it. No matter, let’s head off on a tangent…

Currently, I see the Rafflesians I grew up with in school as the best ‘outcome’. Not perfect, but I still haven’t found a credible alternative. These are people who will top their course at MIT and Stanford, yet will be equally great as buddies, national sportsmen and dedicated as social givers. Why haven’t i seen these in London? Three classmates are deemed to end up, possibly, as heads of the respective branches of the Singaporean army. Nearly all of us are still actively engaged in giving back to society. Others are on the path to fulfilling their ambitions. I don’t quite know if that comparison between a Junior College, deemed as the gateway to the Ivy League by Forbes, and a Global Top 10 University is fair, but as I grow older, it’s odd how much I’m left craving a simple, intellectual conversation.

I confess frustration, because I know i’m not of sufficient intellectual calibre (not stuffing humility into this), but somehow, as I feel the years go by, I’m just left wanting that inquisitive spark we had back in secondary school. We could never leave the social contract between Jane Austen and Hobbes alone, yet completely forget the relativity between 15 years of age and quantum physics. It’s a hunger, made painful by the army, that I’m just only contemplating feeding.

I can go and on about this, and prolly will, because it matters to me, my students and my future children. I will love them, but I know I won’t spoil them. As of now, I want them to be wrought and tempered in Singapore, but ornamented by the a fascinating wider world.

To conclude, we never had the adolescent, whinging phase. Whether that be good or bad, I cannot say. I am just the man I am today.

Amy Chua Is a Wimp – NYTimes.com.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Amy Chua Is a Wimp

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: January 17, 2011

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Sometime early last week, a large slice of educated America decided that Amy Chua is a menace to society. Chua, as you probably know, is the Yale professor who has written a bracing critique of what she considers the weak, cuddling American parenting style.

Josh Haner/The New York Times

David Brooks

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Chua didn’t let her own girls go out on play dates or sleepovers. She didn’t let them watch TV or play video games or take part in garbage activities like crafts. Once, one of her daughters came in second to a Korean kid in a math competition, so Chua made the girl do 2,000 math problems a night until she regained her supremacy. Once, her daughters gave her birthday cards of insufficient quality. Chua rejected them and demanded new cards. Once, she threatened to burn all of one of her daughter’s stuffed animals unless she played a piece of music perfectly.

As a result, Chua’s daughters get straight As and have won a series of musical competitions.

In her book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” Chua delivers a broadside against American parenting even as she mocks herself for her own extreme “Chinese” style. She says American parents lack authority and produce entitled children who aren’t forced to live up to their abilities.

The furious denunciations began flooding my in-box a week ago. Chua plays into America’s fear of national decline. Here’s a Chinese parent working really hard (and, by the way, there are a billion more of her) and her kids are going to crush ours. Furthermore (and this Chua doesn’t appreciate), she is not really rebelling against American-style parenting; she is the logical extension of the prevailing elite practices. She does everything over-pressuring upper-middle-class parents are doing. She’s just hard core.

Her critics echoed the familiar themes. Her kids can’t possibly be happy or truly creative. They’ll grow up skilled and compliant but without the audacity to be great. She’s destroying their love for music. There’s a reason Asian-American women between the ages of 15 and 24 have such high suicide rates.

I have the opposite problem with Chua. I believe she’s coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t.

Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.

Yet mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement. Most people work in groups. We do this because groups are much more efficient at solving problems than individuals (swimmers are often motivated to have their best times as part of relay teams, not in individual events). Moreover, the performance of a group does not correlate well with the average I.Q. of the group or even with the I.Q.’s of the smartest members.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon have found that groups have a high collective intelligence when members of a group are good at reading each others’ emotions — when they take turns speaking, when the inputs from each member are managed fluidly, when they detect each others’ inclinations and strengths.

Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together.

This skill set is not taught formally, but it is imparted through arduous experiences. These are exactly the kinds of difficult experiences Chua shelters her children from by making them rush home to hit the homework table.

Chua would do better to see the classroom as a cognitive break from the truly arduous tests of childhood. Where do they learn how to manage people? Where do they learn to construct and manipulate metaphors? Where do they learn to perceive details of a scene the way a hunter reads a landscape? Where do they learn how to detect their own shortcomings? Where do they learn how to put themselves in others’ minds and anticipate others’ reactions?

These and a million other skills are imparted by the informal maturity process and are not developed if formal learning monopolizes a child’s time.

So I’m not against the way Chua pushes her daughters. And I loved her book as a courageous and thought-provoking read. It’s also more supple than her critics let on. I just wish she wasn’t so soft and indulgent. I wish she recognized that in some important ways the school cafeteria is more intellectually demanding than the library. And I hope her daughters grow up to write their own books, and maybe learn the skills to better anticipate how theirs will be received.

Source: Apple  - Antenna Design and Test Labs

Oh my goodness – this raises my respect for apple a thousand-fold, despite all that antenna talk. Thank goodness i’m on the right bandwagon, at least for the time being.

Yes, we could dismiss all this as pointless PR spin, given how the testing process still produced a faulty product, but still…

I’m sure other handphone manufacturers might have the very same facilities, but when you’re producing tons of different designs a year, i wonder whether each can be tested to such a degree. Besides, companies with many models can spread their risk rather evenly.

More crucially, i’d reckon that Apple’s corporate culture means it doesn’t do what it says, in a good way – it cracks its skull in delivering industry leading products, yet keeps absolutely mum on developments. Above all else, i respect their Apple’s corporate pride, which i doubt every gets close to the arrogance that naysayers seem to enjoy accusing it of. It’s amazing how an entire organisation thinks like one, behaves like one, in a most coherent manner, yet still remains organically creative. That’s some miracle.

If you notice the Stargate-esque ring in the bottom-most photo, i think i’ve seen it before from a company named Satimo.

You can have a look at their products here: Satimo – Fast Antenna Measurement, Radome Test and Scanners Systems

According to Apple:

Advanced facilities.
Apple never releases a product without thoroughly testing it first. To do this, we built our multimillion-dollar antenna design and test labs. These labs feature 17 different antenna characterization chambers (or anechoic chambers) designed to accurately measure antenna and wireless performance.

Testing performance in the lab.
Our anechoic chambers are connected to sophisticated equipment that simulates cellular base stations, Wi-Fi networks, Bluetooth devices — even GPS satellites. These chambers measure performance in free space, in the presence of materials simulating human tissue (“phantom” heads and hands, for example), and in use by human subjects. Over a one- to two-year development cycle, Apple engineers spend thousands of hours performing antenna and wireless testing in the lab.

Testing performance in the field.
Apple engineers tested iPhone 4 in a variety of scenarios, environments, and conditions in order to gauge performance. They spent thousands of hours in cities in the U.S. and throughout the world testing iPhone 4 call quality, dropped-call performance, call origination and termination, and in-service time. They tested iPhone 4 while stationary, at high and low speeds, and in urban, dense urban, and highway environments. In low-coverage areas and good-coverage areas, during peak and off-peak hours — iPhone 4 was field-tested in nearly every possible coverage scenario across different vendor and carrier equipment all over the world.

Apple Antenna Design and Test Labs - Tapered Chamber

Apple Antenna Design and Test Labs - Large Anechoic Chamber

Apple Antenna Design and Test Labs - 'Stargate'

Went down for the second time to Jaben Audio at the Adelphi.

Basically I’m looking to purchase a nice pair of headphones and a suitable amplifier for my university tenure.

Having come from a very decent speaker set up (Bowers and Wilkins 803S), i do not, and probably cannot expect to be able to replicate that familiar musicality and enjoyment in a pair of headphones.

For me, i enjoy having a wide soundstage and neutral presentation, but with a balanced, accurate reproduction, hence my choice of the Bowers and Wilkins. I cannot for the love of God place myself in the shoes of an MRT basshead or a casual listener, knowing full well what i am missing out on.

Anyways, here’s a list of the circumaural headphones i’ve tried out in the first two days i’ve been to Jaben. Included are prices that i have hopefully remembered correctly. However, Jaben offers wonderful bundles that shave a significant portion off the sticker price than if the components were purchased separately. By the way, the staff at Jaben Audio are very friendly, and very accomodating – which headphone shop allows customers to try on in-ear earphones?

• Denon AH-D7000 (approximately $1450)
• Denon AH-D5000 (approximately $900)
• Denon AH-D2000 (approximately $450)
• Alessandro Music Series Pro (approximately $1200)
• Beyerdynamic DT 880 (approximately $430, including EDGE X1 amplifier)
• Sennehiser HD 600 (didn’t enquire about the price)
• Audio Technica Something – can’t recall the model

I didn’t try the Grados as the Alessadros were their less forward sounding sisters and designed with classical music in mind.

And pity Jaben did not have a Sennheiser HD 800 on demo! Had to make do with the intimate yet full-bodied Denon AH-D7000. The latter gave a good performance on everything from Bryan Adam’s Summer of ’69 to Yo-Yo Ma’s Cellist of Sarajevo.

Don’t quite have the time to review each one, but i’m doing my best to like the Beyerdynamic DT 880. Unlike the high-end speaker market, each audiophile headphone is significantly different from the other. For speakers, their clarity and neutrality converge as price goes up, whereas for headphones, it seems each has a unique character. For almost all headphones i tried, each character was flawed in some way, for example, the Sennheiser HD 600 and Denon AH-D2000 and AH-D5000 were inaccurately, if no messily, bass-y. None of them could elicit the love i have for a proper speaker set up, but for twenty to thirty times less the price, why not?

Anyways, i think the Beyers have the best value for money and are more than a competent challenger for headphones twice or thrice as dear. I just hope to be able to have those hair standing moments in complete isolation that i am familiar with in floorstanders.

Without going into my opinions of each, here are the photos i managed to snap that day. :)

Beyerdynamic DT 880, Alessandro Music Series Pro, Denon AH-D5000, Hifiman EF2A Amplifier, Edge X1 Amplifier @ Jaben Audio

Beyerdynamic DT 880, Alessandro Music Series Pro, Beyerdynamic A1 Amplifier, Hifiman EF2A Second @ Jaben Audio

Hifiman EF2A Tube Amplifier with DAC @ Jaben AudioAlessandro Music Series Pro @ Jaben Audio

Alessandro Music Series Pro @ Jaben Audio

Posted from Lambeth, England, United Kingdom.

Just had a random thought:

Opportunity knocks.

Karma hunts you down.

(Therefore girlfriends are opportunities and wives, karma)

“Login” is not a verb.

This site graciously explains a grammatical error we commonly encounter nowadays knowingly or not!

Despite what many people –mostly in the computer field– think, “login” is not a verb. It’s simply not. Whether or not “login” is a word at all may spark a debate in some circles, but assuming it is then it may act as many parts of speech, but not as a verb.

I will repeat the important part for clarity: “login” is not a verb. It’s simply not.

This site is dedicated to educating people about the common misuses of words like “login.” It is meant for both non-native speakers who may not know any better, and for native speakers who should know better but don’t. It is in no way a substitute for a real education. Poor grammar is an excellent way to make any presentation sound stupid –or program look sloppy– so if you intend to use this language much then it behooves you to learn it properly.

So please, as we Singaporeans would have it, ‘email to’ all your friends now.

If we only could have a site like the above to cater to each and every one of our grammatical failings!

Engrish - Racist Park in China

I think when people get really really sick, doctors have to really really upsize their medication.

So instead of prescribing tablets, tables are given.

And here’s an adorable picture to illustrate the point.

Cute Baby Nomming The Table

If this truly is an ‘autopay system’, then why do we need to pay at the ‘autopay station’ or ‘payment counter’?

FAIL

One letter is obviously missing, ostensibly lost to the hotpot.

That’s quite some way to get one’s blood going! ^_^

Moral of the story – speak good english! Though not necessarily proper…

How real men drink soy milk – in a jug and with an SOG multitool.

(actually, real men don’t drink soy milk)

Just kidding anyways! :D

As twitted 1705010

‘Lord, bless me with a bucket so that i might learn to bail.’

Saw this on the web yesterday evening while surfing on my phone.

What an inglorious FAIL for Porsche… :P

A dead tadpole is a dipole.

Foolhardy me has just exceeded evernote premium’s 500MB quota.

Posted from Singapore.

I’ve come round to really appreciating Twitter; It’s been a great replacement for my blog. I reckon it is simply the singular most appropriate activity to have graced the adage ‘penny for your thoughts’.

Anyways given it’s popularity and the deluge of both tweets and twits, I’m just wondering then – can a 140-character twit ever be verbose?

Penny for your thoughts! :P

Posted from Singapore.

I’m sitting here at a park (check out the geotagging data attached to this post for more information) taking several moments to enjoy this peace and quiet, waiting for the afternoon shower to happen upon me.

Not had this much quiet time since the start of the year.

Sometimes I wonder how much I’ve been missing out on…

Besides, I’ve always found the smell of moisture in the air delectable.

Blogged from my iPhone