psd files

I just discovered that psd files (Photoshop something file) can serve as a common file format for different painting softwares. Also there is a small bug in oC (openCanvas) that bothers me a lot. When one select large-sized pencil tool with pressure detection corresponding to pencil size, the sampling rate in oC is not high enough. So at some places the stroke will decompose into a series of small circles, which is kind of annoying. I certainly don't want my hair to be strands of circles. Which means that I'll stick with SAI for a while and save a psd file as a backup in case the development stopped.

Happy birthday!!

Not to me. My birthday is in May.


Happy birthday to Asakura Nemu!! I saw people did this a lot, but didn't actually sit down and draw a picture.

I've just started to make computer graphics very recently, as you can see there are a lot of eccentricities in the picture. Well, being afraid of erring won't get me anywhere, so here I start. This picture took me a whole day to make (though it looks simple), in total about 7 working hours. It looks kind of low-quality though I used more colors than normal anime-quality graphics. Well I guess it's a matter of practice. Or probably a larger canvas will do.

(ps. Her birthday is actually 12/28, but I don't think I will have time posting things tomorrow, so.... But, well, she's Japanese, so I'm not that much off :p)

Some comparison between computer-painting software

Hi everybody, I'm FHead.

The above sentence has nothing to do with this article.

Recently I'm interested in making computer graphics. I tried three so far....not enough to make advise or conclusion but figured I could as well jot them down here.

Corel Painter Essentials 3

+: Layer grouping, realistic air brush
-: There isn't an obvious way (if any) to me to mark and save some region selections of the canvas (ex. Adding shadow to the plates but not the table since the reflecting properties are different). There are the standard selection tools (rectangular, lasso, etc.), but you really don't want to reselect a complex shape to apply some small changes every time. Not optimal for my purpose....
=: Comes with Wacom tablet, so I have no idea how much this costs.


SAI

+: A lot of Japanese painter uses this program, and is proved to be capable of producing high quality graphics.
+: The "region-selecting" brush solves the selection problem.
-: Japanese-only interface
-: This program is currently free-ware, but once the developing group finishes the project, one need to buy it. It's in the $50 range, pretty acceptable. The problem is that it is under development. The distributed program is only valid for 30 days, and one has to download a newer version (or key?) from the official website every month. There is certain chance that the developers will drop the project, which means that within a month, all the program copies will become invalid. It's a potential threat to draw/paint using this program.


openCanvas 4.5 plus

+: One can lock (or protect) the transparent parts from change for each layer, so the problem of reselecting also goes away.
-: No layer grouping
=: About $75. (￥7800)
-: The interface is not perfectly tuned. For example, if you want to resize a window, the right side of the window won't let you drag. One has to use the top-right corner for horizontal rescaling. Not a big problem though.


Adobe OOOO:

=: I haven't had a chance to try it out. :p


Currently I'm using openCanvas 4.5 Plus.

Hyper-pressure: final madness

:) <== This is how I feel right now.
:'( <== This is how I feel earlier this week.

It begins with some sample AI final project writeup's posted by our professor. I have thought that the final project is just to play around with some model, and shouldn't be a too time-consuming task. I can as well spend 4 whole days to do it. That's 40 hours of work, and should be more than enough. But....the sample project reports are all large-scale projects. I really mean large-scale. Something that's ready to publish to conferences or even journals. Oops.

I also have one final exam which will take moderate-amount of time to prepare. Some 10 hours I estimated. Then I started to look into lecture notes. Then I'm surprised that my concentration power is fading away pretty fast. And so it take me more time than expected. Hmm.

There's also the personal stuff (in some sense more urgent than schoolwork) floating around and I have to spend time figuring out what to do.

It seems that things are being settled down.

The seemingly overwhelming AI final project now looks better (thanks to the fact that I'm undergraduate :p). For us, all we have to do is implement a model and play with it. Then write a report. For graduate students things are different. They have to conduct original research, and then write a conference paper length writeup. Until now I reimplemented a model and extended it a bit, so I'll be fine.

Now that the project is okay, I also have time to study for final.

The other problem also seems to be fine, though some necessary steps have to be done next week to ensure safety. The detail is too personal, so I won't put it here.

Daymare town

This is a escape-the-room type flash game, except that it's escaping a town, not a room. And with a creepy touch. It's very hard, but fun to play. This is a happy blog, and I don't want strange background music, so I put the link here instead of embedding the flash game in the blog:

Click me to play!

Quote the author of the game:
“sketchy outline-only drawings give more artsy look to the gameplay and create a bit of minimalist atmosphere. Add creepy sounds and twisted story and you get the picture. DMT is the harderst puzzle game I made so far. It’s really nasty, so be warned. It’s for advanced pnc gamers.”

What am I up to these days?

Well, too many things are happening at once, and I didn't have time to post anything (partly because of laziness).

The classes I took came with a wide variety. First there's the don't-know-what-to-expect music composition class. Now, after all the small "composing" projects, it was actually quite fun. And worth it. Then there's also the mysterious AI class. The whole Baysian thing (also Monte Carlo, PCA, etc.) is totally new to me. It's like a completely new way of approaching problem (as opposed to the algorithms I knew before). In simpler terms, I had a "cultural shock" :p. It prompts me to think about physics in some new aspects, but let's put those off until later if I feel like posting stuff. The other classes are more "normal" to me, but then, it's still a lot of work.

From Japanese Exam...

Last week I took the Japanese language proficiency test (level 1). In New York. This is the highest level, so hopefully this is the last time I take it. Spending a Sunday going to New York and do no work is really harmful. Thanks to the test, I'm busier than usual this week.

From Wacom Intuos3...

I bought a drawing pad (Wacom intuos3 6''x8''), so I started to practice sketching, in preparation for the DWS project. This is only the first step to drawing though. After I'm more familiar with sketching, I still have to practice coloring. And that's supposedly more time-consuming. (Which means that I still have a long way to go >__<... There is still the whole world with music and sound).

The character (Belle) in the below picture is from a game called Katahane. The company who created this excellent game seemed to be bankrupted soon after finishing this game, so I don't think it's that famous. It's a great game nevertheless. One can still buy it on the internet.

From Sketch practice

Then there is also the big fight against the ants. They seizured my scanner, so for some time I can only scan single-paged documents. This is a big barrier to my drawing practice. I then bought a used scanner on ebay, but I got a broken one. The refund time is 7 days within payment, but the shipping took more than a week. I still don't have an idea whether I should protest or not. The scanner is only 10 dollars, but that's also money. Right now I can still see some ants around....I wonder where they come from.

Fortunately the graduate application process is almost done. All I have to do is to wait (+remind) the professors to send the recommendation letters. My grades are not that great, and I hope things will work out.

I'm also trying to do some work in the lab side. Homeworks and games and animations have been keeping me busy. I really didn't have much time left, so I did a bit of work here and there. I guess I'll work on my senior thesis in the winter break or in the next semester.

Well, I still got two final projects in front of me; I'd better save some time now instead of writing posts.

Minor application

Somehow the undergraduate office messed up my minor application (filed last term), so I still haven't got a minor yet. It's not that big a deal since I'm taking the classes anyways, but I got a bit worried about the various deadlines and went to inquire about the application.

Student service center: "No, it's not us.... you can try the registrar's office"

Registrar's office: (Pointing to an desk within 5 meters distance) "Go ask the person in the corner." But there's nobody there. "OK, then you can probably try the department in which you're proposing to minor."

Luckily, it's the right place finally. I was really going to explode when I was kicked back and forth. Why is that nobody knows about minor application stuff?

Well, I should be set now. I think.

Cooking~

I tried to add curry block when I cook. I wasn't expecting too much because I haven't cooked with curry sauce (in a wok). I also accidentally added soy sauce to the meat beforehand which I don't think mixes well with curry. Wasting is not good, so I cook it nevertheless.

But......it turned out to be very delicious. It's good to be alive!

Too many things, too little time

There are too many things stuck together, as I'm also trying to do something for the lab. That's like a bottomless hole of time ^^". You can throw whatever amount of time in it. From the experience during summer, even 60 hours per week wouldn't be enough. Apparently I don't have 48 hours per day, so the progress on lab work is kind of slow....well I guess it couldn't be helped.

I almost had no time for anime and games during these several weeks. But to keep my Japanese blog alive, I have watched some anime sporadically. That's the most I've done in recreation. I even missed red sox games :( ...at least half of them. I kind of followed the game through gameday, but I really wanted to sit on a sofa and watch the game on TV, preferably with snacks :p.

Nice hack....

This appears on our tallest building on campus last night (when Red Sox is playing the Rockies). It miht be even visible from the Fenway park d:

I finally started to cook again...

I was busy all the time. Though I always wanted to cook, I couldn't find time. But that's only excuse. Time is always there if we wanted to squeeze it. Fortunately (?) I bought some food last weekend, and I have to finish it as soon as possible. Over the summer I've learned some better ways to cook, and the food looks better now. d:

World music room

I never knew that there is a world music room had I not taken the weird music composition class. The room is next to the museum, relatively far from main campus buildings. The room is full of strange musical instruments, and I can't name any of it other than the generic classification. Ex. drums. The railroad (?) model club is right next to the room, and I finally saw the famous building-large tetris. Well, it's only a small model. I hope somebody can realize it on the real thing.

Today we had a class about western Africa drumming. More precisely, music from Senegal. I'm not sure if it changes a log across the Africa continent, though I will assume so. So basically we drummed for the whole class. The music itself is pretty interesting, but the examples are a little bit.... well, whatever.

Firefox spelling auto-check

I just re-installed firefox with my primary language being Japanese (for gaming reasons). And now whenever I'm typing something in the browser, for example what I'm doing right now, more than 95% of the words will have little red line under it indicating spelling error. It doesn't really matter, but it's kind of annoying. So I tried to look into the settings.....and surprise! The language it assumed me using is Esperanto. No other language package installed. Is this a joke? Ahaha.

Something is not right

I woke up late today, and left my room in the afternoon. Well, since I hadn't have both breakfast and lunch, why don't I go to some better places to have a meal? So I went to the ramen shop about three stops away by subway. It's 5 o'clock, and I started to eat the big bowl of noodle.

After I was done, I bought some random stuff and went back on campus. I met my friends in the student center, and apparently one of them is going to treat all of us to dinner. Well, it's free. So I tagged along. And at about 7pm I had an another large hamburger.

The strange thing is that I don't feel full even after the second meal. Normally I would be extremely full after eating the noodle. There are a lot of strange things recently. I hope I will be alright.

Senior portrait~

It's the personal portrait to go into the yearbook (a yearly picture book published by some student group). So I signed up to take the picture today, but have totally forgotten until one hour before the photo-taking. I went to their website, and find out that all the sample pictures are somewhat crazy. Well, I only got one hour to prepare. That's way too less..... I wish I could reschedule it to some other day.... But, no, not an option.

So I grab whatever I could find....unusable DVD x1. That's not quite enough. Then I went to the supermarket and bought some green onion. If you're into Japanese game/animation then you'll know what it is. I did bring a neckband with small bell, but I forgot to put it on :(. The final pose is two strands of green onion in hand, plus a DVD worn on the hair. It turned out to be okay. And I also forgot to bind my hair.

After I was done with the classes today, I checked my email and saw the reminder email:

This is a reminder of your Senior Yearbook portrait
appointment at 3:10 on October 18.

We suggest formal business attire. A number of poses will be taken for your personal portrait purchase as well as for the Yearbook.

Oops. Formal? Oh well, whatever.

Twix peanut butter flavor

I think it is a failure. First of all, the melting temperature is just toooooo low. Even in room temperature (my room), it is half-melted. Maybe it is intended to be like this (or maybe not), but it makes eating it a lot harder. I have to prevent it from falling into pieces or drop onto something. There is already some peanut butter and chocolate sticking on the cover. And then the flavor is also not very special. Too sweet in my sense. Since I'm worrying about falling onto the ground the whole time, I didn't have the chance take notice about the flavor. I like the original one better.

Internet.....

Last evening I was planning to do some work for the lab after I went back. I was running the data for the whole evening on our computing service, and I have to check whether or not the result make sense.....but there was an internet outage >___<. So I didn't see the plots until today's meeting at 9am, and I also didn't have time to make the plots look better. The color scheme didn't really work on projectors. I hope it won't happen again....

Some thoughts about science

To me, physics is a science subject that tries to parameterize the world. By parameterize, I mean "to describe" what happened in a mathematical language. Since there is limitations to what we can observe, there is never a theory that can be said as "completely true" theory. One never could know what really would happen for regions out of our reach. In this sense, there is also never a "wrong" theory (provided that it described our world to certain degree of accuracy). It's just a problem of scaling. We all know that Newtonian mechanics is not completely right in the case of extremely high velocity. Yes, in a sense the theory is not "correct". But since it is good enough to describe everyday motion, we still use it. The same idea applies to the now-developing string theory. It is possible that the ideas behind string theory are proved to be insufficient to explain "all the things" in the world, but, at least, it provides us a new way of thinking about elementary particles to a certain accuracy.

Electromagnetism homework 4 vs. 5

I added the class last week, and encountered the first homework two days later. It caught me off-guard. It was a long fight, and I spent a total of more than 10 hours on it (record-breaking!!). So this week I prepared myself some snack and were ready for a long night......but then I finished them within two hours. I felt really empty after finishing..... What should I expect in the future then?

I hate the auto-restart funcionality of windows

As title. My cellphone ran out of battery last evening, so I set up my computer as alarm. After turning the volume to the loudest, I went to sleep. Then today I slept late. The only reason is that windows did an update to fix a "serious security problem", and then automatically restarted itself. It's really annoying. What if I am running some jobs that can not be interrupted? The system do ask before shutting down, but the engineers assumed a certain time (what? 5 minutes) without response means that the computer is not in use and is safe to restart. As a consequence I missed class. Fortunately it is a class that I can make up by studying by myself. But still, I wasn't not too happy when I learned about the time.

Music composition class

It has kind of becoming a introduction class about all kinds of music.

There is one weekend where we have to listen to European music selection from different parts of the history: from Josquin des Prez to Johann Sebastian Bach to Mozart to ...., etc. Then we had a guest lecture on European medieval music, mostly the chants in churches. Last weekend we had to attend some avant-garde music concert in which instruments from Japan, China and Korea are brought together in the same music pieces. Just now we had another guest lecture, and we're talking about Indian music.

I certainly wasn't expecting all these when I first signed up or when I found out that I had to stand in an elevator for half an hour doing nothing. It's been giving me surprises. And I also remember the professor saying something about pop music comparison. Well, we'll see how it goes.

(There is also a large portion of avant-garde music. The professor even performed John Cage's 4'33'' in the first class. Then we had lots of non-traditional music. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8C4HL2LyWU)

Not again....

I have to start paying more attention to my wallet. Recently I have forgotten it in various places including computer stations, restrooms and classrooms. I'm very fortunate that there are enough good people around. Nothing has lost yet, but I'm afraid that I might lose something in the future. Maybe I'll put only cash in my wallet, and keep my credit cards and ID's in a more safer place, my bag for example. Then the maximum damage is some cash which is much simpler than losing ID cards. But well, I have also forgotten my bag before (in the student center, for 5 hours)....hmm.... then where is safe to me?

I started a Japanese blog

...to put everything I want to write in Japanese, especially for anime/game related posts. The names sound strange no matter what in other language. There will be a lot of grammar mistakes, I think. Well, that's not the point so don't bother too much if you see one. d: But do let me know if something is ambiguous. http://fheadblogjp.blogspot.com

Last week

I have experienced a rather dramatic change in my classes. And that has been keeping me busy for quite some time.

First there was a tragedy happened on Monday, so I had to drop my Biology class. The add date is Friday, so I think I might as well add another class, or else I'll have too few units.... Not that I cannot graduate, but I feel that I should at least take a standard workload. The tuition is expensive, and I don't want to waste it.

So I chose to add the undergraduate version of electromagnetism. It shouldn't be too hard. If I added class earlier, I would have chosen a graduate level course. But right now with the one month worth of material, I don't think I can handle it without decreasing lots of sleep.

Then, there came the problem. I added it on Wednesday, and I have to turn in the problem set on Friday. The class itself is not hard, but the "one month" is a challenge. I basically looked at the problems, realized that I didn't remember most of electromagnetism, and start to lookup things from previous lecture notes and textbooks for every problem, It took me more than 10 hours to finish the 5 problems, which is so far the longest for me. There was the suggestion to ask the professor for a extended deadline, but I just didn't want to. Well, I did finish it after all.

Things keep piling up on me, and I hardly have time for other things. It will probably get better once the graduate application is done. Also at least my GREs are done already. (Most of people I know took the GRE subject on Saturday. I hope they all did well.)

Vocaloid Hatsune Miku

Please listen to the first version before reading the text below....



It's so awesome. Kind of hard to believe that the first one is computer voice-synchronized. If you know that it is not natural human voice, it may sound a bit mechanical, but it is still surprisingly natural. Especially the latter half.

Now the original version.

Calories from Coke

(By the way, the niconico experiment failed....sigh)

I did some simple calculation on my way back....

There are 240 kcal in a bottle of coke. How many Etagen should I climb to spend all the heat? Assuming one floor is about 3 meters, the potential energy for me difference is about 0.5 kcal. So I have to climb 480 floors. Oops.

Drinking water is better.

Test embedding niconico clips

Can I play it directly from the blog?

Die of moe-ness

Hiiragi Kamagi is so cute~

Theory of Solid State Physics class

I wrote in other post that I thought this wouldn't be a too difficult class. But now things have changed. Because it is "theory" class, a more mathematical approach has been used in the class, as opposed to the happy version (more intuitive!) I took before. The professor assumed that the students have certain knowledge about basic solid state physics, and skipped a lot of stuff. For now I'm still fine because of the prior semester. Things will be a lot more interesting later in the semester, when new stuff shows up.

The pace of the course is also pretty fast. I wonder how other students react to the speed of the course and to the fact that a lot of things are skipped.

GRE experience....part 3

Last Friday was probably my last contact with GRE general. The outcome is acceptable, unless my analytical writing suck for whatever reason.

Looking back, the most important sources/things which helped me a lot includes

1. The number 2 website: They have practice GRE (or SAT for high school students) exams with explanation. And it's free. I can say that those little tricks are more or less the same as those taught by preparatory school. There is also a vocabulary builder which really helped the lazy me to prepare for the exam.
2. GRE vocabulary book....I forgot which one at the moment. I'm too lazy to dig out the book from the mountain in my room.
3. (Accidentally,) the writing assignments from my humanities class this semester. The professor assigns one to two pages of writing every lecture, which is twice a week. One to two pages might not seem so much to native English speakers, but it is a lot to me. I think it somehow trains me to write small ideas into paragraphs.
4. Luck. I have to confess, that if I took the exam again couple of days after the test, I will probably not get an acceptable. There were a lot of problems in which I didn't recognize 80% of the vocabularies. Somehow I have guessed the right answer. The practice exams I did before the test showed that my grade will be in the 380~420 range, a lot lower that what I got in the real test.

okay, let's forget about it already~

GRE experience....part 2

Time has come that I have to face the reality.

I took the 9am morning train to Lowell. Right before 10 o'clock the I arrived the station. I wanted to leave myself some time to walk around and try to find the test center; although I did have the map(s) at hand, nobody knows what could happen. Lowell is a nice place where one can enjoy unpolluted air. There are trees all over the place and also some waterway. The test center is about 2km away from the station, and I had a nice little walk to the test center, enjoying the, uh, trees. And buildings of course. The buildings all look similar, but better than those in the university. Thanks to the map, I didn't get lost.

The test center is located in some kind of facility with a lot of rooms and little interactive space. I'm not sure what it is for. I thought originally that it is a university, but it didn't seem so. Well, whatever. I checked the test center from outside the door. It looked like a small classroom with computers. Maybe 20 sets of computers. Since it is still early, I bought a salad roll just next to the "test center" and ate it while walking around the building since I couldn't find a place to sit for an hour or two. I walked around the building one round, and I was kind of fed up with it. I wanted to have some rest before the exam..... Then I decided to wait inside the test center.

Walking through the door, there is a small area with a test supervisor. There is another not-so-big area with 4 computers in it. I almost can't believe my eyes. Four set of computers make up a test center!! Well, that's how it is. Probably because of the physical location of the test center the demand is not high. It was only noon when I walked in. The test supervisor, however, signed me in immediately and the next thing I know is that I sat in front of the computer ready for the test. So they allow us to start earlier and end earlier. I should've gone in even earlier. Good experience for the future. Well, I don't want to take GRE again in the future actually.

The first part is the analytical writing. There isn't too much to say about this. Everybody uses similar formulations for the essay, and the rest is just to full in your idea. I picked this one: "When research priorities are being set for science, education, or any other area, the most important question to consider is: How many people's lives will be improved if the results are successful?" (CP-ed from ets website directly) I believe it is fine to say so because it is from the pool of issue topics. For the argument I got "The surface of a section of Route 101, paved two years ago by McAdam Road Builders, is now badly cracked and marred by dangerous potholes. In another part of the state, a section of Route 66, paved by Appian Roadways more than four years ago, is still in good condition. Appian Roadways has recently purchased state-of-the-art paving machinery, and it has hired a new quality-control manager. Because of its superior work and commitment to quality, we should contract with Appian Roadways rather than McAdam Road Builders to construct the access roads for all our new shopping malls." (CP-ed from ets website directly). I almost used up my time for the argument. 30 minutes is kind of short if you want to add something which was not planned ahead.

The next part is the quantitative section. To me, this section is to relax and make sure your brain get some rest. I've used too much concentration power in the writing section, so I did it slowly to allow myself to recover. Bringing any drinks into the room is not allowed, so there isn't much I can do, for example, to consume some caffeine to maintain certain level of "awakeness". Anyways. I had some good time solving high school level problems. There are also some tricky problems, which I forgot already due to the shock of verbal section.

The verbal section is really a nightmare. You encounter a lot of unfamiliar words, and some of them cannot even be dissected into roots. To me, the hardest parts are the antonyms and the analogies: they depend only on vocabulary. It's just too hard for me. For the beginning 5 or so questions of these types, I still struggled to guess the meanings, but after a while, I gave up. Just choose one and go on. There's no point in struggling, since it won't make a difference. Also in computer based test every question has to be answered: no "blank answer" is allowed. Sentence completion and reading are relatively easier. Actually for reading I had an estimated percentile for number2 website of 77%, so I have quite some confidence on it. The readings are not long to me, as opposed to many people in Asia. I don't know why, but even since SAT times readings are easier compared to other sections. After the better parts, some analogy questions came again....and I was more or less knocked out by the intense attack.

It is because of the trauma from the last section, I didn't pay too much attention on the second quantitative part. I just respond by instinct and occasionally some easy calculation. I was very, very, very lucky that I still got a 800 in the quantitative part. But actually, after the verbal section I thought I will have to take the test again some time in October. I have no idea where my grade will end up to. Maybe three hundred something. After the second quantitative section, I prepared myself for another wave of verbal attack by counting from 1 to 100....

But miracle happened. The second wave didn't come. THE TEST HAS ENDED. Wow. Cool. Well, aren't there supposed to be two verbal sections? Whatever. Then I was given the option of viewing the grades, or cancel the test without viewing. Ding ding ding~ I chose to see the grades. It would be silly to cancel the grades after all the effort made to come to Lowell. And I got the right answer. My verbal grade is acceptable to me. Not high, but definitely not low. Something must have happened: maybe I was just too lucky to choose most of the right answers from the random unfamiliar words. Who knows? I'm fine as long as I have the grades. After I entered the four recipient schools to send scores, I was finally free from the GRE nightmare.

Before the test, I was planning to walk around in Lowell more after everything was done, but due to the big shock from the verbal section, I didn't really want to be a tourist. So I took the 4:15 train back to Boston.

One thing to mention is that it took only 3 hours and 15 minutes for me to complete the whole thing. Most of the time is saved from the quantitative section, I guess.

GRE experience....part I

Date: 2007 Sept. 20, one day before taking the exam.

So I figured that I should make sure where the exam is taking place beforehand. It should be somewhere in Boston, so at most I will have to find the exact location on Google map and print out the map with me as a safety precaution.

I opened the confirmation email, and find the address of the test center. Lowell? Let's check the map.....WTH. Why in the world would I choose a test center so far away from Boston? But, don't worry. This is where transportation comes in. So I checked the bus (greyhound, peterpan) schedule: once per day, afternoon from 1:30 or something. Nice. My test starts from 12:55, so this is not an option. Now let's check the train. It might be a bit expensive, but, well, why not? (Click click click) Cool. There is no station there. Cab? I'd rather schedule another exam, which might be cheaper, and allows me more time to prepare.

Knowing that I might not be able to attend the exam, I then tried to cancel the appointment. Going online, (click click) the online cancel option disappeared :( There is also a phone number listed for canceling or rescheduling the exam. So I called. It was automated response. I followed the instruction and finally, entered the "cancel or confirm exam" menu. Then I heard "you have successfully confirmed the exam." WTH. Where is the cancel option? Oh no...... What if the grade report of mine contains a pair of zeros? That would be cool. In some bad sense though.

Luckily, just before I gave up, William told me of the possibility of going there by commuter rail. This, really, saves my life. Actually I never imagined the commuter rail to go that far. It was sometimes drawn with the subway map, which made me think that it was not that wide-ranged. And also there is one train every hour or so. Yeah~ (or not?) I was also already relaxing because I thought I might not be able to take the exam. Back. I have to hurry to finish whatever schoolwork due on Friday.

So this was the first half of the story. It was in some sense an exciting day. I almost had a heart attack.

Updates on the music assignment last Wednesday

One of the classmate had to go to an office and listen to the sounds of office. It appears that somebody in that office got suspicious and send a letter to all music professors asking about this. lol.

Music class....

It keeps getting more strange. This time we did a soundwalk: follow a series of instructions and listen to specific sounds/music in various locations. That was the homework for today; everybody has to turn in one version of instructions. And we exchange instructions and perform during the class. Length: 30 minutes.

I did a pretty normal one. Pick some positions with strong wind, go through them and feel the wind and try to listen to the sound made by the wind. It could be a bit cold, but, oh well. It's sunny today anyways.

What I have to do is kind of strange though. Go into an elevator, stay there for thirty minutes. It was really funny when I first learned about the task I have to do. This seemed pretty easy at first, but it turned out to be exhausting. People will wondor why you're there, but most won't say anything. Some will ask what floor I'm going to, hmm, well....

Looking back on the two semester of lab classes

I guess time has played his old trick me again. Looking back, everything seemed so interesting. Starting from the not-good-looking first presentation whose appearance is mainly due to the strange latex-presentation tool advertised by the professor and TA. After that I throw the tool away and never use it again. Since it is latex, it's not that obvious how things will turn out, and it's also not obvious how to fine-tune things.

Then I had a crazy Compton scattering presentation. I did hours of math to calculate the energy correction from double scattering from scratch. Miraculously it worked pretty well.

What followed is the huge-uncertainty frank hertz experiment. The value drifts over time. So if we don't take data fast enough, it drifts away~ On the other hand we have to wait until it thermally equillibriate. So it's kind of a dilemma.

The spectroscopy is very easy. Just put in parameters to computer, press enter, and wait. There's also not much to analyze. In contrast the alpha decay is kind of hard. There are too much to calculate, and unfortunately we didn't get enough data. So at the end we settled it by presenting only some numbers we have, and add little decorations to make it look a lot in the presentation.

That concludes the first semester, which is more in chaos compared to the second.

The first experiment, Zeeman effect, is basically a fight with the interferometer. Once you get past the barrier, things are a lot easier. Also we measured 100 points or so instead of the 3 points suggested by the evil lab guide. The uncertainty is a lot smaller this way. Not too interesting about the presentation.

The superconductor experiment is kind of cool, since you can have the chance to play with liquid helium. But we can not actually see the liquid, which is kind of disappointing. This is a pretty easy experiment once you get past the mental barrier thinking that the liquid helium is dangerous....(because the TA's keep telling you that it might explode)

We also did the 21-cm spectroscopy experiment. But unfortunately the telescope was broken by the wind and snow and rain, and our experiment has to stop. We proceed to present half of our intended data. XD.

Finally as the last experiment, we did the Mossbauer effect. It's a fun experiment, because you can press the button, go eat lunch, and come back to press another button. Also because of one set of equipment is a bit malfunctioning, we did the experiment with another group, which made our life a lot easier. (Well, we had twice the data than usual.) I did a small experiment in my last presentation: instead of a standard 10~12 slice presentation, I made it about 60 pages with kind-sized texts. It's hard to tell from the TA's response whether it was good or not though. But it's quite a different experience, since the presenting mode was different. You press the button almost all the time to match your speech.

Thoughts on classes this term....

I'm taking this semester easy. Having it said, it is still normal load, which is 4 regular-unit classes. I don't want to kill myself in the final semester.

The first subject is solid state physics theory, which is a graduate-level class. The pace is pretty fast. If I hadn't taken the undergraduate solid state class, I probably would have a hard time follow. I also can't tell whether it is clear or not for beginners, since the materials are all like reviewing for me. I guess I'll embrace the wave later in the semester; let's hope it's after I finished applying graduate school, or, after I've done most of the things needed for applying.

The next class is artificial intellegence. The brain-and-cog subject name for it is "computational neuroscience." Therefore, really, I thought it was just a class introducing computational methods used in neuroscience research in general...until I saw the textbook couple of days before class. I wanted to take AI for a long time and were worried about not having time for it since I didn't notice there is a brain-and-cog portion of it and therefore can be used as a requirement, so it's like a pleasant surprise to me. But it also means that it will be a more time-consuming class than expected. There's even a final project/paper.

Also there's the humanities requirement. Through lottery I get the introduction to musical composition class. I was expecting something formal like the structure within a song, but from the two classes I've taken so far, it's quite different. The first activity is to observe breathing in groups. Let the vocal cord vibrate naturally. And this had continued I believed for at least twenty minutes. Or maybe half an hour. While it is certainly interesting in some way, it is still kind of weird. From what I understand, there will be no staff in this course. Instead we will invent our own notation for music. How exactly that will work out is still a mystery to me. But, well, if we can get more instinct to sound in general this way, why not? For now, I'm still observing how things will go. The reading and one-page written response per class are pretty heavy to me, and those, I believe, are also heavy to many other students as the number of students decreased almost three-fold between the first two classes.

Finally there is the freshman biology. This is supposed to be the easy subject that I don't have to spend too much time on. So actually it is not four full classes to me.

Back alive ^^

Yesterday noon I didn't eat much for lunch because of the jet-lag. I only had a small soup, and that's it. I thought I could have more for dinner. However, due to the jet-lag again, I fell asleep late afternoon.

So this morning when I woke up at 4 am, I was almost starved to death. I felt that I could corrupt at any moment. Then I found out that the stores in the student center didn't open until 8. The couple of waiting hours were so long.

And finally I got my sandwiches right at 8 o'clock. It's a lot better now....

fMRI class

They require students to turn in a written assignment at the first class....

Dear Prospective 9.71 Students-

If you would like to take 9.71 you must come to the first class, and you must turn in the written assignment at or before the beginning of the second class (Sept 13). Anyone who misses the first class or fails to turn in the written assignment on time will not be able to stay in the class. No exceptions.

The assignment itself hasn't been published, but I guess it's something time-consuming to me because I didn't take a few prerequisite classes. Should I take this class?

Back to Boston~~

With about twelve hours of flight & transfer, I'm finally back in Boston. I took Continental airlines, and luckily it only delayed for twenty minutes from Newark to Boston. Two weeks ago some other people from the same group took the exact same flight, and they are delayed for 6 to 8 hours I believe. My flights from Boston to Geneva two months ago were also heavily delayed and I had to change to plan completely and transferred once more. I don't think I would want to fly with Continental airlines again....

CMS visualization

Iguana is a CMS visualization tool. It's very cool. One can see the particle tracks and detectors in 3D. Animation is also doable. I took an electron shooter and fed the result into the program, and got a lot of nice-looking plots. I also plotted some standard proton-proton events. Some of the plots are uploaded to my album. The movie files unluckily are not uploaded due to technical problems. I tried before, but the quality became very low. Maybe I forgot to set something in picasa...

Oops, blog deserted already

I completely forgot about here for a long time ^^" Anyways.

Life here is too busy, and I was trying to accomplish at least some things in the last few weeks. I didn't want to come back from CERN and say that I haven't done anything except supporting others for their research. Luckily the heavy ion Z search went okay. I'm still not satisfied, but that's about it. I'm leaving on Wednesday, and there's no time left.

My web album has updated a lot in the mean time. I traveled to Paris and Lausanne. I wanted to go also to Rome, but unluckily I was fighting with the Z particle and didn't want to go away for a few days and do nothing.

The firework in Geneva festival was very nice. I was really moved. This is my first time watching a firework that has a theme. What makes things better is that they match firework with music. In this way a lot more can be expressed. The aura is also better. It's too bad that my camera ran out of memory very soon.

Maybe I'll have a summer review post some time soon.

Find the difference!

http://www.spotthedifference.com/explorer.asp

It might seem a bit stupid in the beginning, but the difficulty increases progressively. To me I found the inverted moving text the hardest. It took me about two hours to complete the whole thing, and I got 53 gold speed, 11 silver speed, and 14 bronze speed.


Then it says go for gold....lol. I don't think I have the endurance to continue. Probably I'll try some again tomorrow morning.

CMS Detector

I went to a trip visiting CMS detector on Friday. To see the real thing is a completely different story than working on a computer in some faraway place.

The detector itself is still being built, so we can see slices of the detector standing around. Actually this is the best time to visit it. Once the assembling is done, I don't think it will be interesting to see. It's just a huge cylinder with wires around it. The photos are uploaded in my web album.

The only strange feeling is that the material doesn't look like being able to detect particles. Of course there are lots of high-tech components in there, but the muon chambers looks like, uh, big pieces of metal. Well, it should work. I hope.

CERN environment

I updated my album: http://picasaweb.google.com/FHeadFHead

When I was in my college, I always complained about the food there. There are not too many choices on campus, and most of them don't taste good. There is a small "supermarket" in the student center, but stuff there is too expensive. The closest supermarket with a decent price is about 15 minutes away by foot.

Now I'm here, and things are worse. I just can't believe it. Of course the research here is good, but in terms of eating, it's the opposite. There is one cafeteria-like place where we can get breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The food itself is OK, but after a while I'm full with it. It's also too expensive. Last week I got a main dish, a small dish of salad and a small cake, and it cost me 17.85 Swiss Francs. The next day I went to the closest Calefour (15 minutes by bus) to get a lot of cheaper food.

Other than food, the scenery here is good in general. There aren't too many buildings around the CERN site, so it's basically green everywhere. I also heard that you can see sheep in the grasses. I would really like to see them. lol. I did see horses from time to time. Last time there was a person riding a horse passing by.

To buy stuff or go shopping one has to go to downtown Geneva, which is about 30 minutes away by bus. For this reason we normally don't go that far. It's just too time consuming.

Synaesthesia

Almost simultaneously, the neuroscience blogs on WordPress start to write about synaesthesia. Is this some kind of trend? Or maybe everybody just wrote what they saw, probably with some more detail. This kind of decreases the variety of surfing through blogs.

For those who don't know what synaesthesia is, it's the phenomena that senses associates with each other. A famous example is that some people see colored letters even though they are printed black. It's related to a increase in connection between brain areas, etc. For more detail please find them somewhere else.

Bon jour~

I've had a hard time communicate with local people since they don't speak English. Nor German. Only French.

"Bon jour~"
"Uh....hello, how are you?"
"????"

It's kind of weird since back in Zürich everybody speak in German. How could a country be so different? I was initially guessing that the people here will at least know a bit of German. There are German newspapers though. Luckily at CERN everybody speaks English.

CMS!

Today we had a whole-day meeting, from 9 in the morning until 7:30 in the evening. This is really ridiculous. No wonder people call CMS the continuously meeting society. We still have another all-day meeting tomorrow from 9 to 5-ish in the afternoon. It will probably run late again for an hour or so. (sigh)

Arrived at CERN~

The flight is kind of complicated and I arrived 4 hours later than expected. I still don't have internet access from my computer so I won't say much in this post.

Swiss consulate in NY

Despite the fact that I have to go there again in the near future which is a bit unpleasant, the space design is actually pretty good, unlike the French consulate in Boston.

New York is really special in design. The design itself is pretty simple, yet it is aesthetically pleasant. The big window makes the room bright with natural light, so it won't make people feel caged under the artificial lights as in most offices. The plus sign on their flag is also cleverly designed on a fake wall. The wall is red, and there is a hole shaped as the plus sign, and through the hole you can see to the other side. It's not something too complicated, but it gives me a very modern feeling.

I forgot to ask because of the bad news, but is photo allowed in there? I guess not, but it doesn't hurt to ask I think. I have to go there at least one more time anyways (sigh).

went to New York~

Although it seems that Swiss visa is not necessary needed to go to Geneva, I still went to New York to apply for one. The flow chart on CERN website states that one needs a Swiss visa instead of French visa to get there. Well this is probably just another excuse for taking a day off.

Today, unfortunately, I woke up late in the morning, and then I hurried there and hoped that I can still get in in time. Yes, I managed to arrive in time before the office closed, but I couldn't imagine at that time that it was the biggest mistake I made.

I prepared a lot of documents: medical insurance letter, letter of enrollment, letter from CERN, I-20, travel itinerary, letter of UROP funding, etc. Basically everything I can think of. The website doesn't tell us clearly what is needed, so it's safer to prepare more. It ended up that I prepared way too many things than needed. Ughuu. Well, whatever. At least I'm all set for the application.

There is a six hour time difference between here and Geneva. I originally thought that the letter from CERN is enough for me to get the visa, but apparently the consulate needs someone at CERN to actually respond and somehow prove that the letter is real. By the time I arrived, the office in Geneva closed already. Which means the response from Europe won't arrive until next morning their time. And it also means that I won't get my visa by today, and that I have to go to New York again either on Friday or next Monday. All because I slept two hours too many.

I planned to visit MoMA after I'm done with my visa, but I'm really not in a mood to go there. So I went back to Boston earlier than planned.

Snow

I saw it today flying in the air in front of the row of dorms....it was so beautiful. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me and couldn't take pictures of it. (Well my skill is probably not enough to capture that anyways. :p)

It will probably still be there tomorrow. Maybe I could try to take some photos.

Nice clip about Asperger's syndrome

A very good short educational clip about how people with Asperger's syndrome think and perceive.



More information: http://www.aspergers.com/

New poll~

Vote for your favorite fruit!

The vote count won't update until next hour, so don't worry if you don't see a change after you vote. The poll will continue for quite some time, so take your time and vote often. If you want to add some other options, comment on this post and I will add it to the list. There are still three slots left.

Video lectures online

The link is here: http://videolectures.net/. This site launched couple of months ago, and now it has more than 1000 lecture videos. For free. The presentations are recorded from seminars or work shops I suppose.

I just watched presentations on innovative fMRI technique (vortex pattern matching) and semantic web tutorial (two and a half hours long in total!), and I'm pretty happy with the content. Not all the presentations are about difficult stuff, there is also a tutorials section for people not familiar with the field(s).


One more thing to do during the summer = =+

Google map street view

Follow this link, and try out the new feature yourself. In addition to classical map and top views, street views are possible. So it is basically possible to "walk" in New York virtually on the computer. I wish they could add more cities soon, and that will be really cool.

New York Times online articles

The texts may look like plain html texts with no special functions, but there are more behind it. Accidentally, I double-clicked some of the words, and there came a new window with word definition and extra information in it. It is definitely better than before: while the writing style is good and worth reading, every now and then there will be hard vocabularies and disrupt the flow of reading a lot. I had to look up the word in a dictionary, and finding the word distracts a lot -- both paper version and online version. Now it is more readable and hopefully my English will benefit more out of it.

Moved out of my dorm~

I finally finished packing, and left with a travel suitcase, backpack and laptop. There is also a can of coins which was accumulated over the semester(s). After I store my stuff in a safe place and stupidly lock my key inside, I went to the supermarket with the coins. There is a coin counter. People can count their coin free of charge and get amazon discount with the same value. I do need to buy textbooks, so it appeared to be a good choice.

The coins are about 1.5 liters in size, and I have no idea as of how much that is. They definitely are heavy. Let's just count....

It turned out to be 1589 coins in total and worth 167.41 dollars. lol. I can't believe that is what accumulated over merely a couple of semesters.

Clean up my dorm

I've been working on this for the whole week already, yet I haven't finished all of it. It's about 98% done though, just one more small box and I'm done with this year.

Just a side note, during my lunch today I heard that somebody could pack in half an hour. That's just unfair. Or maybe it's just that I suck at cleaning my room. Oh well, whatever.

So I found a lot of duplicate things. Shampoo, socks, toothbrush, etc. Not too much food, luckily. All from my mother. She always does this. Whenever she thought of something that I might need, she'll get it and ship it to me. The problem is that she doesn't really keep track of what she shipped last time. As a result I have tons of shampoo. It is definitely better than before though, when the overly duplicated item was food. On top of that, all of them are close to expiration date. It was a nightmare to consume the food.

I tried a new tactics to put things into the storage room this year: use smaller units (backpacks or boxes) instead of large boxes. For some reason I have more than half a dozen of backpacks. You could guess why. The increased mobility is a great advantage when the storage room is densely packed. I can just find some gap and fill my stuff in. In this way I don't have to hurry to much to find bigger spots for larger boxes. It's also lighter and easier to carry. Boxes having bottoms larger than 1 square foot is extremely hard to carry. For me at least. Unfortunately (?) it turned out that the storage room is not nearly full. Hey, the corridor is still clear. That's unthinkable for the past two years. Thanks to this, I didn't get as much advantage as I thought I would.

Also coming out from my room are lots of old stuff. Things that I never imagined would appear. If you saw me on Thursday you would notice a strange thing around my neck. That's something I made couple of years ago, and it suddenly appeared in front of me earlier this week. A symptom of anime or game intoxication, I will say. (For those who are curious of what it is, take a look at....uh, aim/msn/skype me and I'll point you to the picture.) It's pretty fun to see random things popping up. XD

Last two finals

First I had string theory. Nobody finished the whole thing, period. It's not hard, but l~o~n~g: I still have one sub-problem to solve. If there were ten more minutes, I'll finish it. And there was no time to verify the correctness of my answers. But since everybody is in the same boat, I'll probably be fine. Ahaha.

In the afternoon, the 70% final came. The original schedule of the exam is in the morning, but that conflicts with the string theory. So I have to take the conflict exam. Not that it would make any difference though.

I'm guessing that I'm the only case to do physics + neuroscience, or else somebody has to conflict with some other finals and take the conflict exam with me. It turned out that I am the only one. Probably also because of this, I can have the privilege to take the exam in the headquarter of neuroscience department. It doesn't feel bad to use the conference room all by myself.

The problem itself is not hard though. If you remember it, you'll be able to answer it. Thinking is useless. It also requires a lot of writing. There are 14 pages in total, and we're expected to fill all of them with answers. I'm glad it's over. lol

oh no~

Nose bleed while I'm taking a shower. You know, normally we put a piece of paper tissue into the bleeding nostril, and that's what I tried to do at that time. However I forgot that my hands are wet, and it becomes kind of a mess. lol. Luckily it stopped few minutes ago.

The amount doesn't look normal though. Maybe I should go and see a doctor again later this week.

Be careful with wikipedia!

Although now most science-related articles are cited, that doesn't mean it is correct, especially with the ongoing fields. It at most means that it was correct at some point. I just found out that the information on wikipedia about FMRP which is related to the fragile x syndrome is just the opposite of what I was taught in lecture couple of weeks ago. Checking the citations, wikipedia: 19xx ~ 2001, lecture: 199x ~ 2006. So I decided to believe what the lecturer said.

feel much better now

....physically only. I just had the first exam this week, and it didn't go well. The effects of expectations are so ambiguous. Well, it's not like that I will do economy stuff in the future. What makes things a bit better is that this exam is not weighted more than the previous two mid-term quizzes, so the damage is not that big. There's nothing I can do to change grades anymore, so forget it already is probably the best choice. I still have two critical exams tomorrow.

sick....

Again just before the finals, I feel sick. I had a headache and can't really review materials. Maybe I'll try to get more sleep tonight and see if it gets better tomorrow.

The power of photoshop

Quite amazing....except maybe he/she can do something to the elbow using probably 10 more seconds. That's the one place I found a bit unnatural. lol

Celebrity look!

This is the result of my first try:

http://www.myheritage.com

All female? Let me try another photo...

http://www.myheritage.com

All female again >____< There must be something wrong with this face matching

Rice

I found myself eating a lot more than before....what a horrible thing....does this mean that I gained weight?

I made fried rice for dinner. Initially I thought that one and a half cup of rice should be enough, but now I'm still a bit hungry. Maybe two cups will do the job next time.

Latex expressions at wordpress

Blogs at wordpress allow users to use latex expressions, which makes writing things that need formulas a lot easier. It will be a pain to put formulas here at blogger.

Just out of curiosity, I tried to post an article using completely latex expressions. If everything worked fine, I will have a latex-formatted article. But this time I was out of luck. The latex engine doesn't process new lines, so my article is "compressed" into a picture of one line only. And in order for the whole thing to fit in the browser width, the font become unreadable. Too bad.

Maybe I can put hidden message this way though, ahaha.

Junior lab

I just turned in the last paper last night, finishing the two-semester long lab class. It was quite fun actually, and I learned a lot, but it was just too tiring. I'm glad that it ended.

Wordpress blog subscriber-counter

I started a blog last weekend on wordpress.com because it supports latex by default, and there are some neat functionalities like visitor count, subscriber count, etc. I haven't started to advertise the blog since there aren't much stuff on there yet, but suddenly the subscriber count just up to 12 people. That's just impossible. Who would subscribe to a blog with only 4 to 5 articles? Especially when you don't know the author. There must be some kind of mistake in the counter. Hey, the visitor count is even smaller than the subscriber count.

Feed address change!

The new feed address is http://feeds.feedburner.com/FheadsBlog. It looks fun. The old atom one will still be available though, but it is deprecated.

Old stuff

Some time last week I started to dig into the boxes of old stuff, which needs to be sorted. Then I found what looks like a vocabulary card box: a purple box full of cards. I thought it to be the Korean vocabulary cards initially, but...

those are cards with cheerful words, in Mercury notation (version 1).

Is that how I fought depression about a year ago? It's kind of fun to look back like this.

Singular

A software that comes with cygwin, and it is "capable of doing algebraic calculations." I need to calculate some polynomial coefficients and I don't have mathematica installed on my computer, so I figured I should at least give it a try.

The problem is to calculate the first five terms of 8 {[(1+x)(1+x^2)(1+x^3).....(1+x^n)]/[(1-x)(1-x^2)(1-x^3)......(1-x^n)]}^8. I only need the terms up to x^4, so I write out the terms up to x^4. For the denominator I used 1+x+x^2....=1/(1-x). Putting everything into the formula....

the first three terms comes out correctly, but the forth and fifth terms look suspicious. Expecially with the coefficient of x^4, which turns out to be negative. Looks like it overflew already.

Just for reference, the answer is 8 + 128 x + 1152 x^2 + 7680 x^3 + 42112 x^4. Does this mean that it uses 2-byte integer? lol.

String theory homework...

My string theory textbook is buried in the trunk room, so when I have to do the homework I always go to the library to either copy the problems or do it there using the library's copy. The problem set this week looks like this:

1. 13.6 <== (chapter 13, problem 6)
2. AAAA
3. BBBB
4. CCCC
5. DDDD
6. 14.1
7. 14.2
8. 14.3

I went there earlier today and copied 13.6, then printed out "chapter 14" from the net, which is a new chapter to be added to the book. Then I found in the chapter 14:

14.1 AAAA
14.2 BBBB
14.3 CCCC
14.4 DDDD

....they are the same? Wait, the version I printed out hasn't yet been in the book. Oops. One more trip to the library.

Topcoder

Again, because of the hot weather I didn't really want to do any work. So instead I found out that there is a single-round competition at Topcoder, so I decided to try it out. I've been practicing, for fun, on the practice area, and this is the first time I actually entered the competition.

The website has a rating system, and depend on how the user and everybody else performs the user's rating will go up or down. Each competition is divided in to two division, and division II is for lower rating programmers. First timers are also put in the lower division.

Well, so I faced two easy problems and a "semi-easy" problem. Not hard though, but if you haven't heard of dynamical programming then it will be difficult. Since they are easy problems, the outcome probably won't be discriminative. Maybe I have to stay in this division for a while then. Is this bad luck or good luck? Whatever.

I ended up spending 35 (out of 75) minutes to finish all the problems. To my surprise, the other contestants didn't do well. Most of them are struggling with the second problem.... Really, I would suggest them to practice at USACO at least.

It might seem that I'm boasting but, really, anyone who attend IOI would probably have a similar feeling. I ended up to be the leader of this division (yay~). My rating also goes up to 1874, about middle level of the top division. However it is still out of the greatest debut list of 25 people, which ends at 1900 points. If it was a list of the first 50, I'll probably be in it >__<

Next time I will be in the top division, and the problems should be more challenging. I'm looking forward to it. To me the most important thing is having fun though, coding is not my major anyways.

ps. this is a good place for people who want to prepare for programming competitions like ACM to practice before digging into the problem sets on ACM or RACM or whatever. The test cases are not too cunning, also the "challenge phase" allows people to find error on others code, so there will not be any "passed by luck" programs. Even if there is only one small case not considered, he/she will receive zero point for that problem. There are also forums to discuss with each other.

Weather

It's still a bit cool in the past few days, but today is as hot as summer. And whenever it's hot, I don't feel like doing anything (look at the pile of homework). If only I had a cooler in my room. I hope it's not too hot at CERN....

Busy

Last Friday I got a email from the lab, and then I went back to help. My life suddenly became very busy /__\. Luckily the string theory exam was last Wednesday, and there are no exams until finals week, which is around May 21st.

Ughuu....anime....game....

Oh well, whatever. At least I'm still able to do something.

UROP housing

The housing at CERN is finally out, and looks like I am able to go. The housing is from end of May to end of August, but I won't be there until mid-June. There should be some way to make it shorter.

I will live in a double, together with somebody else in the group.

I'm more concerned about Alex though, who received a housing starting one week after he arrived at Genova, and only to August 1st.

Big bet

I just chose to have a 70-percent-final-grade final exam. The other option is 30% paper due next week, and 40% final. The paper assignment is not available until recently, so they let us choose whether to do it or not.
Grade-wise speaking, either the final exam grade or the average of the two.

The length of the paper should be 8 to 10 pages, with a maximum of 3 figures and 20 citations (XD). Considering my level of writing I will probably be freaked out by the written assignment. Also I don't have confidence to get a better grade on the paper than final.

3D Animation

Mikomiko Dance (Idolmaster)




Kamisama no Birthday (Idolmaster)



Cute ^^

I'm still looking for the version without text in the front.

Playing with my hair

This time trying to tie them together...actually I wanted to have ponytail since I decided to have long hair couple of years ago. However I've been failing many times in the past simply because my hair was not long enough. Until earlier this week Lucky Star (anime) episode 3 comes out....

This is Tsukasa, one of the four main characters in this anime.
Note the length of her hair. It's shorter than mine!

Another main character, Konata. They were talking about
"the day of ponytail" in Japan. Somehow they decided to try it themselves

"Mini" ponytail. My hair is longer than hers,
so why not give it a try?

So off I go~

Just to give you an idea how long my hair is right now.

Luckily I have everything I need at hand.
No need to go out and buy the rubber band, ahaha.

After some kind of battle.
Is it just my delusion? Why is it so short?
My hair should be longer....

Ughuu, so there is only one conclusion: the anime somehow is not right. Well, at least I have the mini-version right now. Maybe I should wait another couple of months and try it again.

ps. this is so hard. I almost sprained my neck for this. It still hurts >__<

Braid

Sasha suggested that I could try that, so I've been trying.....

Man, this is hard

Is my hair too short or is it that I just need more practice? Ughuu, every time I tried, it fell apart from the bottom, making my hair look messy, as if I just tied them together roughly. Also how do you prevent stray hair from sticking out?

Neuroscience class

The oral presentation is canceled, simply because that there are too many students, and it would take too much time for everybody to do a 15-minute presentation. The poor graduate students still have to do it though, ahaha.

Instead there is an 8-10 page paper to write (in 20 days!). Could still be a hassle, but definitely better than oral presentation.

Telescope

The telescope broke again, it's been acting weird this week.
I want the galaxy.....

We do have a last resort, but I don't really want to use it: go outside, take the telescope off from the motor, hold the telescope (by hand) to point to the direction we want, and take data. That could be a pain. It is a parabolic dish with diameter 2.3 meters, and I expect it to be heavy.

Well, maybe it'll feel better tomorrow.

It's boring to wait...

...so I decided to post some random things.

When I get back to my dorm 6pm yesterday, I was quite surprised to hear a band practicing "God Knows." I thought initially that not too many people watched anime around here. If I had a "OBEY" printout at hand I would put it on the door secretly to give them a surprise :p


The umbrella I bought in La Crosse was broken by the wind! It went fine when I went out to the rain, then a strong wind came....nothing happened except an angle didn't look quite right. Five minutes later, without strong wind, the umbrella freaked out suddenly. It looks like trash now :( The other one I bought three years ago in Taiwan is much more better. The price is about the same, but it has special design that even if the surface of the umbrella bent to the opposite direction, it can be bent back unscathed. It has also much less weight, but not the cool button that can open/close the umbrella though. Well endurance is more important.

By the way, Dawsen I think I found your umbrella.

Experiment XD

I'm in the lab right now to observe Jupiter~ Probably a bit later would be better though, about 3am I think?

Next time for part of the galaxy is Tuesday morning at 6am XD

Konata + Haruhi

Found here: link

Original version

Wait....gif won't move by default? Oh well, click on the image to see it move.

pcsx2 new version

Surprise! Now the music works! Directly from the plug-in that comes with the install program. There is also no need to fiddle with the settings to get it work (like before). It's also getting much more fluent now and quite playable. It probably won't be long before the PS2 emulator is fully functional.


Speaking of this, about one year ago I played part of MO5 half-speed plus ad hoc music XD

GRE Physics

Test finally over ^^

Well I shouldn't 've used the word "finally", as I'm not too worry about this exam until Thursday evening. I'll probably get more than 900 out of 990, but how much exactly depends on my carefulness and luck.

I felt that this exam is kind of pointless though. There are 100 problems to do within the 170 minute limit. Once an exam becomes a test of quick-response, endurance (as in quantity of problems, not deepness) and carefulness, it's not anymore testing how good your (basic) physics is. We don't need to respond that quickly in actual research. The way of thinking should be more important. Maybe a decrease of problems and increase in depth would be better.

The "purple book" for GRE Physics

The same book as in the last post.

After doing the first practice exam in this book, I hated this book even more.

Put aside the printing mistakes, there are a lot of "calculation" problems which can be solved quickly if you have a calculator. But that's not allowed in a real exam.

There are also lots of weird laws and models that I don't think is needed: Richardson-Dushman law, the law of Dulong and Petit, Debye's law, Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin approximation, Kronig-Penney model, Mooseley's law, etc. I do encounter most of them in solid state class or more advanced quantum mechanics class (which is more advanced than the undergraduate quantum courses of other universities) though, but it's just wrong to put those in a practice exam. There are even problems which requires you to remember the formula.

Conclusion for anyone who wants to prepare for GRE physics: don't use this book as the main source.

GRE Physics prep book (REA)

Not a friendly book at all. There are a lot of unexplained terms and just given as granted. If you have remembered enough details the book could be used as a review list, otherwise don't use it.

For example, they talked about RL circuit, and immediately go to the formula. However the inductor (L) has not been introduced yet. The next line is the general solution, looking rather complex.

There are also some flashy formula throwing out at the reader without mentioning the core (basic) idea. Things could be a lot easier if those are used. I'm guessing that the author is too clever and thinks that everybody should learn the basic rules by heart. But, you know, I haven't touched some topics in a while.

If someone wants to use this book to cram themselves before the exam, it will be hell with 80 pages worth of formula to remember.

Photos Uploaded!

The photos from spring break is uploaded to my web album at http://picasaweb.google.com/FHeadFHead. I deleted some photos that would require prior permission from others. I might release that in the future XD. Facebook only allow 60 pictures to be uploaded at once, and it will be a hassle to put them there. There's no plan to upload the photos there.

I'm quite surprised that the whole thing took only about 50MB, much less than the quota 1GB, so I uploaded also the photos from last year when I went to Germany, which is another 60MB or so.

Sound on Windows vista

I finally managed to install sound on windows vista on my notebook computer. The speaker also works! The microphone doesn't seem to function yet. This consolidates my thought of making it an entertainment center. (The Japanese XP on this computer starts to crash last week though, gotta fix it or reinstall it)

On my other notebook things didn't go well. Although there is driver support for vista from the manufacturer, the system crashes whenever I tried to install it. Headphones worked before, but after I tried to install driver for the speaker, the computer became silent at once. It might not be a bad idea to leave it as it is though, if that's for work.

Fly (continued)

Well I think the fly is sleeping.

I started to work on my physics paper, and got a bit thirsty after a while. I've forgot about it already, so I took the bottle up and drink some water. Hey, the fly is sitting still. Why doesn't it escape? There's no cure to stupidity. Stay there for a couple more hours then.

* that sentence is a famous quote from stupidclown

Fly

This is the best flash movie I've seen in a while. The title is Shoo Fly, created by John Su (Mousekliks). Google him if you want, but I think this is the best (and most recent) one from this author.

By the way, the flies here are kind of dumb. I just captured one using the bottom of a bottle. Yes, it's bottom, not inside. So right now the bottle is standing on the table, with the fly in between XD. I'm still considering what to do with it. Probably just release it when I'm about to leave, ahaha.

velocity difference

I don't know what to post, so I decided to put something completely random. Here's a hypothesis of the velocity difference distribution (*) of two people walking by each other: the distribution will be a bell-shaped Gaussian curve with a minimum near zero. The gap will be bigger if the two know each other.

Assumption: the distribution of a person walking speed is Gaussian.

So the velocity difference between two different people will also be Gaussian distributed, which is the envelope of the curve. The hypothesis is then it's harder to pass other person with low relative speed, and it's even harder with familiar people. This causes the minimum around zero.

===footnote===
(*): defined only when they are passing each other




what's the point of this? I don't know..... I'm guessing that physics experiment analysis has made me weird.

Midterm

I'm really surprised at what I got for midterm exams. Maybe I was too lucky this time. I just hope I have enough luck left for the rest of the semester ^^"

In the neuroscience exam I fotgot which brain areas are involved in the mirror system, so I randomly guessed three numbers, and somehow I got it right. This is just wrong.... As for the string theory test, I couldn't figure out one of the problem, but somehow my weird guess turned out to be correct again. I still don't know why it is right. The problem is writing out the integral formula for the area on the surface, but....hey, the answer is not even reparameterization invariant, how could it be correct? I can use a different parameterization and get a different area value for the same surface. Something doesn't look right.

Back to life~

This blog is kind of deserted ^^"

Last week was our spring break, and I went to Minneapolis, la Crosse, Chicago and UIUC with my friends. Now I'm finally back to normal. My luggage arrived two days after my final flight, nothing lost. I'll post some travel diary articles after I'm done with the mountain of schoolwork which was left behind.

Neuroscience

There are surprises everywhere in this field. The mystery of how brain works will remain unsolved for at least another century, I think. Just when the theories look fine, usually an unexpected result shows up and changes everything. You never know what the brain has in store for you.

A lot of the past work related to brain was done by studying trained animals as subjects. But now brain plasticity has raised a big concern. The researchers then turn to untrained animals, and the same task can not be repeated for too many times since that would be considered training....this is getting interesting. A lot of past papers need to be checked again for wordings.

It's now too late for me to switch my major, but if I had taken some neuroscience course back when I was a freshman, my life would probably be completely different. Well, I don't really like the idea of sticking an electrode into an animal though. Poor monkeys. It's fine to read the papers, though I will give a second thought before I actually did that myself.

Experiment analysis....

Oops. It has been quite a while since I last post article here. I was busy last weekend....watching Strawberry Panic and Chocotto Sister, 50 eps. in total.

Now back to the subject. It costs me several hours to find out some stupid errors: I forgot a factor of 1/2 and messed up a length unit. I hate cgs units, to be honest. What makes things worse is that I started to be suspicious about the formula I derived. I worked in cgs units, as the base of the derivation comes from the lab guide and is in cgs system, and I were not sure if I have forgot some random constant. Guess I have to live with it.

Level up!!

...in terms of skill of this particular experiment. Normally when you tune the mirrors there is a coarse tune with a micrometer, and a fine tune with bias voltage, but now I can get the peaks with only coarse tune. It's just some experience thing. This makes the experiment setup so much easier, and doable by a single person. The fine tune definitely needs two people, or more than 4 times longer it will take to finish that step. Well, there are no more experiment sessions though. Next week we'll start on the superconductivity.

Fortunately we got the data yesterday, last 3-hour session of this experiment. The effort in the 5 sessions before are all in vain, if you don't count failure experience. This is the first time it is so dramatic. No data in more than 15 lab hours, and suddenly lots of data in the last 3 hours. Our presentation is next Friday, so there are only at most 8 hours (noon everyday) that we could use if there is something wrong in this batch of data. I believe we made it this time, but....we'll see. d:

A good way to prevent buying too much food

...is to buy some, put in the refrigerator outside the room. It applies to most edible stuff. This way one would think that there's still some left in the fridge and won't buy that much in the market. However, when he is in his room, he will be too lazy to go out and get the food from outside the room. And then consumption decreases.

Japanese Language Examination

The exam center took almost three months to grade those exams, which actually could take as short as one week. Just insert the answer sheet into the machine one by one.

Passed.....not surprised at all. I'll try to take the next level (which I should have been taken last year) this December. By that time all the grad school application should be done. There will also be no lab class to worry about. So it should be possible to go. We'll see.