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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
....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.
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.
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
This is the result of my first try:
| http://www.myheritage.com |
| http://www.myheritage.com |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
Mikomiko Dance (Idolmaster)
Kamisama no Birthday (Idolmaster)
Cute ^^
I'm still looking for the version without text in the front.
