Happy 51st Birthday to Singapore!

It's SG51! The parade was great, here are my disjointed impressions:

• I love military bands in general! The four-cornered interlocking move was somewhat terrifying to watch, I kept expecting someone to bump into something.
• Bani Hidir has a voice like dark chocolate. His brief rendition of Xiao Ren Wu De Xin Sheng was amazing, would love to hear a full-length version.
• I can't believe they left out the bit where Badang gets his powers from eating the ghost's vomit.
• The cannons used for the 21-gun salute looked very shiny this year. I can't remember if they've always looked that good?
• No mobile column. :'(
• The costumes of Badang's opponents were all fantastic. Love the shield-wielders' armour design.
• THEN THE FIRE NATION ATTACKED
• Oh man, the costumes for the Four Civilisations. So beautiful and intricate. I would love to cosplay as any of them (minus the eight-metre-tall skirts).
• The unicorn was pretty impressive. I wasn't expecting to be impressed, but I was.
• Hey, this looks like Tron.
• OMG DAFT PUNK
• OMG TAKE ON ME
• The Sky City segment was gorgeous, really great airborne prop, beautiful music, all just wonderful.
• Apropos of nothing, What a Wonderful World is a lovely song. 
• I suppose if they were going to teach us to sign any song with only minutes to practice, Count on Me Singapore was a good choice purely because of the repetitive lyrics. No, but seriously, that was a great idea, I had a lot of fun learning the signs.
• Singing Majulah Singapura at the end—without backing music initially, just the sound of everyone's voices all together—gave me genuine chills.

I think this may be the first National Day Parade I'd actually want to watch again. Really, really superb effort by everyone.

In any case, happy birthday to Singapore!

Recipe: Ice Cubes

Ice cubes are essential, especially since the local weather has been so hot lately. This ice cube recipe is pretty much perfect. The only drawback is the 7.5 mg of sodium per serving, so I suggest distilling the tap water first.

(The ratings and reviews are the best part of this "recipe", but the photos come a close second.)

Leptospira interrogans

After another long absence... Spirochaetes.

Leptospira interrogans is somewhat hard to draw, on account of being helical and having hooked ends. These MSPaint sketches were the result of trying to get a feel for this bacterium's unique topology. (It still isn't quite right - I neglected to include the periplasmic flagella - but we progress.)

Parallel Parking

Too precious!

 

Update XXXI: Beef...Stew

It's a Homestar Runner reference.

To update since the last time (and also to fill in the gaps between entries a little), I have several new recipes which I'll write up eventually. Things are progressing at work, and naturally leading to more work. I have a new appreciation for yoghurt. Also, Magnum Infinity.

Everyone should know about Gangnam Style by now, so I'm not going to comment on it beyond the fact that there's a shop about forty minutes up the road which carries those wedge-heeled canvas shoes.

Meanwhile, Stephen Fry!

(Lazy) Recipe: Cream of Whatever Soup

My father likes to make something he calls "Stone Soup." Much like the story, it consists of "whatever we found in our refrigerator/storeroom". (Unless it's largely potatoes, then it's Irish Stew.) Although he did take exception once when I poured in a quarter-cupful of grated parmesan.

Anyway, this recipe is largely to get rid of sour cream leftover from making other stuff, since I hate it and never know how to deal with it. Also, this should show you what kind of ingredients I routinely keep in my kitchen.

Cream of Whatever Soup
I made this up myself.

Ingredients
1 potato
1 small onion, chopped
Chicken, bacon or any other meat, cut into small pieces
Broccoli or cauliflower (or both), cut into small florets
1/2 cup hot water
Chicken stock cube
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 tsp mustard powder
1/2 tsp chilli powder
Salt and pepper, to taste
Cornflakes

Prick the potato with a fork. Place on a plate, cover with a sheet of paper towel and microwave on medium-high for 5 minutes. Turn over and microwave on medium-low for another five minutes. Allow to cool, then peel and mash.

In a medium saucepan, heat up a little oil or butter over moderate heat. Fry onions until lightly browned. Add meat and fry until just cooked, about five to ten minutes. Lower heat and add potato mash and vegetables. Stir around for a bit for about two minutes.

Separately, dissolve the stock cube in the hot water. Mix in the sour cream. Pour mixture into the saucepan. Add mustard powder, chilli powder, salt and pepper; cover and simmer over low heat for about 15 min, or until the vegetables are soft. Stir occasionally.

Take soup off the heat. Crush the cornflakes with the back of a spoon and sprinkle on top. Serve warm.

Western Blot (The Movie)

Haha oh my goodness.



Gilsons are indeed the workhorse pipette. Not as comfortable as an Eppendorf or as simple as a Finnpipette, but they're rugged and they get the job done. Just what a mercenary needs. (Incidentally, the multichannel shown in the video was a Finnpipette F2.)

I also just noticed the dry ice on the floor, for dramatic effect when Vitto steps into the lab. These chaps sure were having fun!

Obvious Thing I Missed

The TvTropes logo has a lampshade hanging on it.

When did that get there?!

(It's always had it.)

Blue Ball Machine

It's sorta like a Rube Goldberg machine, only insane.

But check out all those details! Those hypnotising, hypnotising details.

11-11-11

It's full of ones!

Monolith Action Figure Part III

Yessss....

A baby monolith! And it's mine. All mine. Muahahahaha...

(If you would like to adopt one for yourself, they can be obtained from the Moon, Olduvai Gorge, or Europa.)

G-T-C-A

BioRad did it again.



So...catchy!

Death Pad

I laughed so hard, I think I'm going to be sick. (To get all the jokes, you will need to be familiar with Death Note.)

Numbers and Letters

I came across an interesting little factoid recently: the number four is the only number which has the same number of letters in its spelling as its definition. This may be true, but that sparked off another idea. How about equations?

The first I thought of was THREE TIMES FIVE. Fourteen characters without counting spaces - so close! I went higher - SEVENTY-TWO DIVIDED BY THREE. Twenty-five - again, off by one. If I didn't count the hyphen, it would be correct, but "seventy two" is so ungrammatical. My grammar sensibilities did allow "SEVENTY-TWO DIVIDE BY THREE", which had the correct number of characters.

In this vein, I found several more.

SIXTY-SIX DIVIDE BY THREE
SIXTY-NINE DIVIDE BY THREE
FIVE MULTIPLIED BY FOUR
TWENTY MINUS FIVE
TWELVE PLUS THREE
THIRTY-FOUR MINUS TWELVE
THIRTY TIMES TEN TO THE POWER OF ZERO


Okay, I admit I cheated a little with the last one.

New one! π ROUNDED TO THE TENTH PLACE TIMES TEN

Vocabulary

"So why do you suppose it's Dark of the Moon?"

"Because there's a major plot point about the..."

"No, I mean why not Dark Side of the Moon? It's like there's a word missing."

"Maybe because Dark Side of the Moon was copyrighted by Pink Floyd."

"That's ridiculous. It's just a description. Of a real thing."

"Maybe they should have called it Transformers 3: The Part of the Moon We Never See."

"...I'd watch that for the title."

Geek Graffiti

Dear Esther is a gripping Half Life 2 mod which is really more akin to a film which you can walk through. If you don't have Half Life 2, I recommend, at the very least, watching a playthrough video on Youtube. It takes away some of the subtle horror when watching someone else play it, but you do get a feel of the atmosphere.

What I'm really here to talk about, however, is the cave graffiti. Specifically, the one that appears at 7:52 on this video, and which is visible at multiple areas.

It is probably a bad thing that I immediately recognised it as this image of a Helicobacter pylori cell.

Yup, I'm doomed.

One-Armed Zombie Scientist

No, I didn't die, get resurrected, etc. I did take part in the Zombie Shuffle earlier today (more photos can be seen here). I went as a zombie doctor (one-armed, of course) in a labcoat liberally coated in some very realistic and gory-looking fake blood, and joined the shuffling crowds at the Carlton Gardens. It was a lot of fun! Some people had really spent a lot of time on their costumes. We saw a zombie smurf, a zombie Ronald McDonald, a zombie Statue of Liberty, a zombie samurai, a zombie television (you read that right), a zombie Domo-kun... Heaps of creativity!  A lot of the "zombies" got into character, sniffing around, leering at passing cars, clawing signposts or even crawling across the floor. One chap even staggered around dustbins, took out random pieces of garbage and gnawed on them. Admittedly, that was perhaps a little too in-character.

Anyway, it was a ton of fun, and if I can I'll go again next year. Pretending to be mindless is fun!

Meme: Gift Thingy

Got this off Eud:

The first five people to respond to this post will get something from me. It will be about or tailored to those five lucky "victims". The catch? Oh, the catch is that you have to put this in your journal as well, if you expect me to do something for you! (or facebook, or something.)

This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:

1. I make no guarantees that you will like what I give you!

2. What I create will be just for you.

3. It'll be done this year.

4. You have no clue what it's going to be. It may be fic. It may be poetry. I may draw or paint something. I may bake you something and mail it to you. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure!

5. I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.

Now post away! We love making presents, yes we do...

Update XX: Cool, Useful or Plain Funny

So, one of my friends recently picked up a 1 terabyte hard drive for about $200. That's 20 cents per gigabyte, people. And to think that a few years ago, a 1GB hard drive would have cost $100. Meanwhile, Seagate promises over thirty thousand times that capacity in a mere two years.
Computers are moving altogether too fast these days.

I've been trying to figure out for some time what makes things funny...It's sometimes incomprehensible, how some things make us go "ha-ha" while others get nothing more than a bored stare...
Anyway, today's xkcd was undeniably funny, though if it was because of the entirely everyday manner in which the character failed to escape, or because of the subversion of what I expected would happen, I cannot say.

Something which does seem to be almost universally funny are mistakes. Other people's mistakes. CakeWrecks is dedicated to the professionally-made cakes which follow instructions too closely, are incredibly creepy, do not look remotely edible, or are simply... beyond words.
I spent a few days browsing the archives. I don't think I've laughed so many times in my life.

This amused me. Not the vehicles themselves - they are clearly M3G mobile bridges - but rather the various suggestions concerning Decepticons (that one navy gunboat was getting lonely, apparently), Allied Troop Carriers, Universal Soldiers, aliens...

It's been a while since I found a nice time-waster... Cursor10 is a neat little game. You have 650... well, they're clearly not seconds, so I'll call them "units of time." You have 650 time-units to reach the sixteenth floor, and ten cursors to help you accomplish this. If you run out of time, you control the next cursor out of your ten while the previous one simultaneously copies every single action you made it do when you had control of it. In essence, you have to "programme" the ten cursors to reach the end. A very original idea for a game, and fun to play too.

Trapped 5 is a vastly superior puzzle game to its predecessors, and well-crafted. The best part is that it is not possible to get a Game Over, which removes a lot of potential frustration. Other puzzle-game creators, take note.

And finally, something useful. If you've never checked that your desktop clock was synchronising correctly with an Internet time server, it may not actually have been doing so... Recently, I checked mine and found, to my utter horror, that it was four minutes slow. To think I had considered it accurate.
Anyway, I was unable to fix the synchronisation by changing the server or opening a port through my firewall, so I got hold of this nifty piece of software. It's a very small program, and can be set to automatically synchronise the desktop clock with any Internet time server. Worth the minuscule bandwidth cost required to download it.

And now, have a pretty picture. Ta and later.

(Edited on 21 October 2008 for a broken link.)

Meme: Books

Happy new month!

So I stole this meme from Eud's LJ... Anyway, the idea is to:

- look at the list and
- bold what you've read
- italicise what you're going to read
- underline what you love

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible (Only parts of it...)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (Read about half, then skipped to the ending. Aheh...)
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (I don't really like Hardy's books...)
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (I've been searching for this for ages!)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (Read some of them.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings was so much better.)
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (Saw parts of the movie.)
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (Also saw parts of the movie. Depressing story.)
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Another book I badly want to read.)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (I liked Through the Looking Glass better though.)
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (One of the first books I ever read. Loved it.)
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen (My mother loves this book too.)
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell (Depressingly truthful book.)
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (Fascinating story.)
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (Read parts of it.)
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte's Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I've read every single Sherlock Holmes story and loved all of them.)
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (Wow, that was...so long ago.)
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur, l'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux...)
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (I liked the 1948 film better than the book, to be honest...It was so funny.)
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (Only watched the 1935 movie.)

That's, what...36? 36 books? Agh, no wonder my eyes are as bad as they are. I also realise there's lots more books which I want to read and never got to... Probably should work on those sometime.