Feeling down recently.....

....that's why I draw her in the first place. If you know Japanese, you'll probably notice that her name has a meaning.

I got rejected yet again by another school. That's not the very reason though, since I already have somewhere to go. The real problem is that my thesis doesn't seem to go anywhere. Is the problem even possible? The deadline is May 9th, so I still have two full month to finish everything. Haha....

German class has become better now. There are lots of stuff to read. but I'm catching on. I guess this is the best way for me to learn a language.

Well, I guess I can still write something saying that the task is very difficult, for reason A and B and C and D. But that's kind of lame. I guess I'll do some crazy brainstorming this weekend.

By the way, the eye is kind of strange....

ps. I don't know who the creator is for this character, but it seems that there are some connections with Hatsune Miku.

Fairy of question mark

I did some search and found out that she is the "fairy of question mark" (はてな ようせい), appearing in a educational-for-first-grader animation. Her cuteness made her famous. And all this means that even with a cute character in it, I won't want to spend my time on it. Somebody will probably upload a summary version of scenes with her on Youtube or Niconico very soon.

I wonder how long this upsurge will last. What comes fast also goes fast, and she comes all of a sudden. Unlike Hatsune Miku, there isn't really too much going on except the animation (in which she's just a supporting character).

By the way, she should look like 6 or 7-age child, so in my drawing she is definitely too old. I wasn't aware of her age when I started drawing, but now I think of it, I like it this way better. I'm not a pedophile.

(ah...where are the gloves....oops)

Some mysterious character with sudden popularity...

Half-finished version:

My apologies if the title sounds confusing. I don't know what the proper word is for this situation. I would say it's popular, but in a temporal sense, not in a spatial sense. This is more confusing I think. Anyways, this character suddenly appear on lots of blogs out of nowhere (or somewhere I haven't noticed). I don't even know who she is. She is cute, so I decide to follow the trend. If you're curious, the front side can be seen here for example. (The hat is missing. I forgot things again >___<.)

Yesterday I got my first German vocabulary exam back. There are lots of small grammar mistakes scattering around. The total score is 60, and I got -9. Cool. ...Ehh? Negative? Then I checked again. There is another number, 53, written just below the -9. I'm totally confused. What could this mean? Well, whatever. Things won't change if I continue to figure this out. I have to pass this class to graduate anyways.

Finished!!!!

Before I noticed it, I invested 3 hours to draw the picture. Oops. You might find some trace of laziness in the picture, don't worry about it. I do not intend to revise it anyways.

I think I found another problem with my coloring scheme. Let's try something new next time.

Surprise!

Somehow I passed the Japanese exam. (Level 1 is the hardest level of JLPT) I didn't expect this, as you can tell my grammar sucks. (Grammar probably contributes only 5X in the 15X in reading/grammar section.) I didn't attend traditional Japanese language classes, so I have no idea what I missed.

Another surprise come from the Graduate office. So I got the fellowship offer from a second school. I didn't expect this as my GPA is only 3.3/4.0, and my GRE score isn't at any means great, only (V540+Q800+A4.5). One never knows what their standard is in choosing students. I guess I'll write more once I made my choice.

Oh Yes, and this is the updated picture. I still don't have time to draw in more detail, but you get the idea. I wish I had 48 hours per day.....

Working....

Clothes come tomorrow. Don't think too much, this is a pretty normal thing to do in drawing.

I have been working all-time again and am out of breath already. Plus I just got the rejection letter from Princeton, and I don't really want to do anything. And there's three hours of solid German reading in front of me. I didn't expect German IV to have THIS much work. I'm glad that now I can do something more meaningful (eg. practicing to draw or to compose) instead of playing games forever like in my freshman and sophomore years. One really feels empty after playing 9 hours of game in a row almost everyday.

OK, back to work.

Miku clock added

It's in the right column.

It's quite cute. If you click on her, she'll wake up and tell you the time (in Japanese). And if the note floating around to the left is clicked, a short song will be sang.

New toy :p

I just downloaded a bunch of free VSTi's, and it's quite fun to play with. So I spent some short amount of time and randomly created a short piece XD. (mp3)



And also I think I found a faster (though not necessary better) way to compose. It could, however, be just beginner's luck. We'll see in a couple of days when I try again to put together another one.

I've been trying to compose music in the past several months, but I got stuck most of the time. The image is simply not strong enough. I want my music to have "something" in it. Some special element/feeling. Writing music, to the current myself, is much more difficult than other types of creation work, like, say, drawing. Sketching outline on a canvas is much easier than "sketching" the "outline" of the music. Once a melody is written down, the feeling is more or less fixed, and it is often hard to fix it. It's like if you're drawing two straight lines with an 1 degree difference on top of each other without using a ruler. The second one will tend to stick with the first line around the overlapping region. I hope you can understand what I'm talking about.

Another problem is that the melody or feeling often goes away before I can jot it down in full. So as a consequence, the second half, or a little bit of the last part, of the music I've written down isn't quite right about the feeling. About how to write lyrics for a piece or make a piece of music to go along with some existing lyrics is yet another problem, but I don't really want to think of it now. :p I have no idea how to do that at all. For now I'll just stick with lyric-less music.

The law regarding entropy in thermodynamics

The stated law: entropy of a system will always go up. It will never go down by itself.

Isn't that strange? I wonder how many people actually questioned this. It's true empirically in systems we encounter everyday, but apparently it is wrong microscopically. Say, you have ten balls rolling in a rectangular box. Let's count the number of balls in the left half the of box. The "maximum entropy" corresponds to a count of five balls in the left side. But does that mean that there will always be five in one side? Of course not. I won't be surprised if I see only three in that half-box. It's true that the "maximum entropy" situation is statistically most likely though, but the "average entropy" (over all possible situations) is definitely not maximum. In other words, if the entropy is low, it will have a high tendency to go up; but as it approaches the average value, it fluctuates around the average.

Now I'm curious about macroscopic cases. What is the ratio of average entropy to maximum entropy? Again, in a two-side box setting. The result is as follows..... the x axis is the number of balls, and y axis the ratio:


So in machines or systems that we can see (10²⁰ or more atoms), the entropy will "always" tend to go up. The rule is not exact. It is instead a bit fuzzy: if you don't examine it in great detail it is true.

And what will happen if the entropy of the universe reaches maximum value? Good question. Probably nothing special.

---

ps. I guess I won't have time to start a "physics intuition" webpage or blog, so I'll dump them here for the time being. It's for things that are easy or trivial but sometimes hard to explicitly realize by oneself. ex. the ground surface speed from earth rotation at equator is faster than the speed of sound in air.

ps2. I really should go and do work on my thesis. What am I doing here?

Random drawing...

Life is too stressful, so we need some "distractors" :p

Text: "I want red wine, not grape juice!" On the left: "12 years old"

I still don't know how to draw hands >__<. She wears a dress (in my head) which is full of lace, and out of laziness I drew a table to block it. I plan to color it over the weekend.

(clothes: lavender; dress: black; lace: white)

Mascot girl? (Candidate #1)

It'll be kind of cool to have one (original!) for my website/blogs/etc. Something like, for example, this site, this site, etc.

Well, I have to have some candidates first....

It happened that I didn't want to do anything due to the large amount of work waiting in from of me, so I spend some time (2.5 hours?) and drew a first version of the first candidate.


The background is kind of random and coarse because I don't have time :p. Plus I don't know what to put outside of the door so I left it white :p :p. I'll make a better version of the same character later when I have more "real" time (...most likely different picture composition though, it's boring to redo similar work). Let's leave it as it is for now.

Speaking of coloring, this is my first time drawing something with back-light. I hope it looks so.... Hmm. Probably not dark enough?

Anyways. Time to go back to work.

Busy >________<; Pressure >________<

Now I can probably graduate ^^" It was close.

On the registration day, my advisor told me that I have to submit a thesis proposal on that Friday. I didn't realize that. Phew. Fine, so I setup a meeting with my thesis advisor, reported my progress, and drafted a proposal (about 1 page long, which is not difficult). After revision, I submitted it.....

Physics department: "The deadline was the add date of last semester! How can you not know that?"

Uh-oh.

The kind lady: "But I'll take it. Be more careful next time!"

Oh thanks.

Otherwise I won't be able to graduate on time ^^". But really, there's not much written on the website. It is there, but I somehow didn't think about what it meant. I suggest they put a deadline section there to prevent other student making the same mistake as me. Anyways. One obstacle cleared.

Now I only have to find some nice electrons and write my thesis up.

The German class is not as bad as I thought a week before, but it still take a lot of time. Well, it cannot be helped. Other classes are just snacks :p

End of vacation

Begin of the last semester in my university life.

The last semester will not be an easy one for me. I have to take German IV, an almost forgotten language (for me), and finish my senior thesis which I'm still not sure what the exact title will be. During the last few months the electrons turned out to be much harder to find than initially expected.

Still I want to take quantum field theory, and one more class for my neuroscience minor. Not vital for my graduation though. I'll have to see how things go.

I wonder how much time I would be able to spare for other activities, like drawing, like composing, like writing a script for my game. And also constructing my website and blogging. And some other stuff.

I'm sure for the official stuff thing will straighten itself, but sacrificing too much is undesirable.