Fuel Air Explosives (and the irony of protection)

I've known of this class of bomb since I was around 8 : that's how hardcore a military spec fan I was. So indulge me. Also known as thermobaric weapons. But such weapons of mass destruction are very rarely used. Off the top of my head : used by the Russians against Chechnya, by the US against targets in Afghanistan more recently. Perhaps during the first Gulf War.

This bomb kills by overpressure effects, and also incineration. It contains a two stage fuze : first the canister explodes, distributing a mist of highly volatile particles into the air around the target, then the second fuze ignites.

Such flash ignitions occur catastrophically in civilian installations as well. The explosion is far more powerful than usual because of the high degree of pre-mixing of the fuel and oxygen. Milk powder factory explosions (in India) and grain silo explosions (in Canada and America) come to mind, as well as coal dust explosions in mines : anywhere where fine combustible particles are suspended in the air.

But done deliberately in a bomb : well. Upon ignition, overpressure reaches roughly 400 pounds per square inch, with the blastwave travelling at three kilometers per second. After that, the pressure drops far below normal, creating a vacuum and sucking everything back towards the blast zone. The massive overpressure and underpressure effects force unburnt fuel air mixture into every nook and cranny, incinerating everything at a temperature of 3000 degrees.

This effect is further magnified in confined spaces. Hence the use of FAE bombs against buildings, soldiers hiding in basements and caves, crew in non airtight vehicles - anywhere that the extreme high pressure air can force itself into. The more enclosed the area, the more devastating the effects. Ironically the best chance of survival for a soldier is to be standing in the open wearing no body armour (even the enclosed space between the armour you are wearing and your body magnifies the overpressure and acts as a space where the fuel-air mixture will penetrate).

This strange irony is also seen in the case of land mines. A soldier walking around barefoot that steps on a land mine might escape just losing a toe or two. If he's wearing steel jacketed boots it has been known for a land mine to slice off his leg mid calf where the boots end. In this case explosive force follows the path of least resistance, see.

another random girl

Take a peek at fullsized image first then click on comments for the rest of my post. =p

more on : fight or flight response

For those still skeptical about the idea that much of our brain's intelligence and cognitive ability comes from our ability to discard information.

Consider the stress "fight or flight" reflex. As our heartrate and adrenaline levels ramp up, among the filters we experience : first we lose peripheral vision (getting just tunnel vision) then our sense of hearing is impaired. We feel reduced or even no pain or discomfort. In fact our brain even stops recording memories of that situation, leading to severely impaired short term memory unless you consciously and deliberately choose to imprint what happened in your mind.

Fine motor control is impaired : but gross motor reflex is enhanced.

So the brain does have limitions on what we can focus on. The fight or flight response can be interpreted as the brain deliberately filtering out information it considers unnecessary. Shuts down some functions (recording of memory) it considers not immediately critical to survival. The benefit : enhanced attention and reflexes, total focus on the threat at hand.

I can attest to these physiological effects firsthand (but that would be another story). No sensation of pain whatsoever. Reduced awareness of sound. Tunnel vision. A host of other effects, but those are physiological not mental so they're not covered here. You could argue that these are just physiological effects that have side effects affecting the brain function : well they are interlinked, but I believe my interpretation is a reasonable one.

I would like this to mean that our brain is in fact extremely limited in what we can focus on : and the definition of focus is the act of discarding unnecessary information.

And yeah : if you are faced with a threatening situation (being mugged) etc be aware that these stress responses WILL occur, there is nothing you can do about it. But try to keep a cool head, commit every detail to memory so you will have an accurate report to give to the police (if you're still alive hehe). The best case outcome for the mugger is to steal your possessions with the minimum of fuss and zero injury (if you're injured, the police will be hunting them down twice as hard and fast for a much increased jailterm).

And don't stress ya =p

ever rejected a hug?

She's the only person I have ever refused a hug from - and more than once at that. You can tell if someone wants to hug you, the slight shifting of balance, the way she looks at you. It's also possible to signal rejection through body language alone, the way you hold yourself, the non receptive position of your arms. Once was when we touched down at the airport together in front of her family - what her intention was I still do not know. The second time, was in front of another guy that we both knew was desperately after her. Both times obviously desiring to use me to prove a point.

I'm acting cool to her because maybe I'm a little jealous. I want to spite her. You think you're so hot. But I deny you what you want sometimes to remind you that you cannot have everyone.

Man, how calculative am I... I'm just as bad as she is, and I know she is very very bad =p

dammit snipergirl!

Apparently I'm the number 1 search result for the search term "pedo-land" in some localized MSN search engines. And even the standard international one.

SNIPER THIS IS YOUR FREAKING FAULT

If I stop updating this blog you will all know that I have been taken away into life imprisonment in a maximum security facility and that you should blame Snipergirl for this. As my last will and testament I leave my computer to Flamebreaker since his computer is currently so crap.

Rawr.

Perception of time (as an evolved trait?)

Yes Jerng, it's all about the cognitive limitations, and I believe to some extent that these cognitive limitations are self imposed.

What makes humans able to have coherent thought? What gives us self awareness and consciousness that a machine does not? In fact, this applies even in animals : what gives them consciousness?

I believe one big factor is the ability to slice infinitely small sets of data from the huge datastream we are constantly receiving through our data inputs, filtering what is important and discarding the rest.

Imagine if you could not. You would receive sensations from millions of nerve endings, all competing for attention.

Ditto for our perception of time if we experienced time "all at once" we would be unable to handle it the same way we would be unable to handle simultaneously being aware of every single response our nerves are firing at us. We would become catatonic and die.

Our brain has evolved to discard unnecessary information and only process the 0.1% that actually matters. Evolution and survival of the fittest. The idea is that species that evolve to experience time sequentially, in the "present" as needed, would have the best chance of survival.

Any mutation which had brain function experiencing time with a 1 minute lag or 1 minute precognition of the future would be doomed to failure. A rabbit would not be able to escape a predator : a predator would not be able to catch his prey. This would be such a hardwired function that virtually every lifeform on this world would have this characteristic of experiencing time sequentially in the present tense, the same way we expect "almost" every life form to be carbon based.

In theory it is possible that some brain mutation might cause a person to experience time simultaneously now and some time in advance (or past) : but with the superposition of two different realities onto the same sensorium, being unable to divide both datastreams, the world would be so confusing that it is unlikely he will be able to make any sense of the world and progress much beyond the mental age of a 4 year old, for example. This draws parallels with some forms of mental disability where the victims show an inability to focus or concentrate on tasks : yet nonetheless display a high degree of intelligence.

What? Turn the other cheek?

Turning the other cheek was always one of those lines from the Bible that was kinda... strange.

Well it just got a whole new meaning. The author could be reading more into it than Jesus meant but nonetheless it makes a whole lot of sense.

Just shows that just not only in science but also in religion should we be unafraid to question why some things are the way they are.

Fermat's Principle (just because it's cool)

The black line represents a familiar ray trace that we should know from high school science : a ray of light travelling from point A hits the glass block, then refracts and changes direction and reaches point B. Fermat's Principle of Least Time explains it this way : the path taken (black line) is the fastest route available.

Btw : speed of light through glass is slower than through air.

If the light had decided to take the direct path (the dotted blue line) it would spend a larger proportion of time travelling through the glass, and arrive at destination B slower. If the light ray decided to take the path that minimized its slow travel through the glass (the dotted red line) it would also arrive slower at destinaton B because the detour would have been too great to justify the smaller distanced traversed through the glass.

We previously understood this as the ray of light traveling in a straight path from A until it hits the glass block, then according to Snell's Law it gets refracted and changes direction until it reaches destination B. Action reaction principle.

But really, where did Snell's Law come from? In fact it is derived from Fermat's Principle of Least time. Fermat's Principle of Least Time is not a happy coincidence that happens to occur because known optics laws make it so : this principle was the one that built up our understand of optics and laws in the first place. This is a "purposeful" interpretation of light path rather than a helpless "action reaction" interpretation we are familiar with, the version we obtain from secondary school education.

The idea of a ray of light knowing "in advance" all the variables is seems kind of illogical. (remember the light has to know all the variables of the materials and path, and even changes in the positions after it starts moving). I guess this hints at some larger explanation : that time does not flow sequentially, and that all events have been laid out from the past to the future. (general relativity and space time continuum ideas lend some credence to this at least).

And perhaps that our experience of time is merely an evolutionary advantage of our brains. (it would be counterproductive to experience time with a lag / in advance / all at once).

Casimir Effect (and duality of perspective)

Random interest article in this months New Scientist, basically saying the conclusions drawn from the Casimir experiments are unjustified.

The Casimir Effect is quite intriguing. First predicted in 1948 (by Hendrick BG Casimir), that placing two metallic plates close together in a vacuum will produce an attractive force between them. This effect was finally measured in 1997, not sure how many of you guys read the news about it then. =p Quick update now in 2005.

The traditionally accepted explanation and theory is that this force is caused by zero point quantum fluctuations. Virtual particle-antiparticle pairs continually form out of nothing and then vanish back into nothing. (energy and mass still conserved). The tiny space between the two plates restricts the range of wavelengths possible for these virtual particles : so there's lower energy density between the plates, creating a pressure difference compared to the outside that pushes both plates together.

The Casimir Effect is generally taken to be proof evidence of zero point energy, and hence leading the way to explaining dark energy and universe expansion.

Particle physicist Robert Jaffe published a paper recently essentially saying that we need not invoke vacuum fluctuations to explain the Casimir Force. He calls for a simpler explanation - the attractions between the particles making up the metal sheets.

Both methods differ in perspective : but they give the same answer. Both give mathematically close enough values for the expected force between the two metal plates.

The really ironic thing he points out is that the electron charge e is absent from Casimir's formula because he assumed perfect electrical conductance : but everyone convenient forgot this assumption... and when the experiments in 1997 confirmed Casimir's formula and theory, scientists assumed the Casimir Effect came out from the vacuum because there was no reference to metallic properties.

Robert Jaffe's doesn't disprove the existence of zero point energy in vacuum, but it does cast doubt over the use of the Casimir Effect to prove as evidence of zero point energy.

The trouble is, he suggests, physicists can't agree on what it means for something to be real - and Susskind has a radical solution in mind. "I would ban the word real from the physicist's vocabulary," he says.

My own thoughts triggered from this development :

It's all a matter of perspective. It's the same experiment, but two different schools of thought predict the same outcome. I've always assumed this is so in social science (where two people can predict two different motivations for a person to act) but for this to turn up in hard science is... slightly disturbing.

This is roughly similar to Fermat's Principle of Least Time : which I will not explain fully at this time, but basically it is used in optics. There are two ways of looking at optical refraction : the standard view most of us have (taught in high school science), of the action / reaction principle -> the light beam enters the glass block and is refracted to change direction.

Fermats Principle of Least Time dictates that the light ray always travels in a path that minimizes the time it takes to reach its destination. He states that optical path length is always extremal - either maximizing or minimizing the time taken.

This will mean that before the ray of light leaves the source, it has to know in advance its final destination and all the varying materials between it and its destination. Rather than an action/reaction type interpretation of light, this is a "purposeful" interpretation of light, where the light beam actively attempts to minimize its total path time.

My point : the same natural phenomenon can sometimes be explained by two completely valid theories, and that you can't really say which one is "real" or the "truth" : whether you're trying to explain attraction between two conductive plates or rays of light. Even in so called hard science there's a lot of subjectivity involved.

*edit* in case you think Fermat's principle of least time is some fanciful theory that doesn't really hold water, it's used to derive Snell's Law and is the basis of most optics calculations. there are quite a few extremal mathematical principles out there.

Reaction Time Test

A rather crude reaction time test and some game musings.

Spells and skills in Guild Wars can be interrupted by utilizing a whole range of interrupt attacks, knockdowns and counterspells. Based on my playing I would rate my "simple" reaction time to be 200 miliseconds (or 0.2 seconds). Decided to read up a bit more about it. (I scored 183ms consistently on the crude simple reaction test above)

*skip to the end if you wish : what follows is some technical data which I find interesting*

There are 3 types of reaction times : Simple, Recognition, and Choice : Simple Reaction is where there is one stimuli and one response. Recognition Reaction is where you are only supposed to respond to one type of stimuli, and discard the rest. Choice Reaction is where different stimuli demand different responses.

Accepted figures for mean reaction times for college age individuals is around 190ms for light stimuli and 160ms for sound stimuli. (Brebner and Welford 1980). Auditory stimulus takes roughly 10ms to reach the brain compared to roughly 30ms for visual. (Marshall et al. 1943). These figures are for simple reaction : for recognition reaction the figure is higher, around 360ms (Laming 1968) and for choice recognition reaction time increases with number of possible responses.

Jerng says this proves that sound travels faster than light

State of Arousal : state of attention, concentration or tension - reaction time is fastest with an intermediate level of arousal, deteriorating when subject is too relaxed or tense (Welford 1980). makes sense - we play best when our mind is finely balanced and relaxed, neither too tense nor too apathetic.

Age : Reaction time peaks at the late 20s and then declines, with sharp deterioration after a person reaches his 70s. (Rose et al. 2002).

Gender : at all age groups males have faster reaction time than females and disadvantage not reduced by practice (Noble et al. 1964) this disadvantage is roughly 20ms. under gradual dehydration females had lengthened choice reaction time but males have shortened choice reaction time (Szinnai et al. 2005)

Fatigue : reaction time is slower when subject is fatigued but this only applies to mental fatigue and muscular fatigue has no effects on reaction time (Kroll 1973)

Fasting : three days without food does not affect reaction time (Gutierrez et al. 2001)

Alcohol Impairment : subjects taking an impairing dose of alcohol reacted faster when they were warned that this would slow their reaction time while unwarned subjects suffered more decreased reaction times. subjects who were given nonalcoholic beverages and then falsely warned about alcohol impairment also reacted faster than unwarned subjects who drank the same beverage (Fillmore and Blackburn 2002)

Intelligence : negligable effect (Deary et al. 2001)

*ugh much random data*

Uh.. ok... I guess I'm the only guy who found this interesting =p In any case, it's kind of interesting how certain games are pushing the limits of what humans can do with our bodies. Reaction times are limited by not how fast or how much practice we have, but limited solely by the hardware our bodies have.

Just like my illustration of a defense / attack scenario in foosball, where a defenders reaction time of 0.3 seconds at best is always insufficient to defeat the attackers attack time of 0.2 seconds because the defender has to factor in the recognition time and then move to block.

Guess where ^_^

This is one of the iconic pictures of Melbourne... taken inside Melbourne Central. There was a tower here which could not be destroyed due to historical reasons : and so the architects had to design a cone to fit around it.

If I remember correctly this tower was used to produce bullets. Uh. Something like dropping molten lead from the top of the tower, while falling through the air the lead would form into perfect spheres (surface tension?) and cool, then drop into a tub of water at the bottom where they would solidify. Pretty ingenius idea : how else would you mass produce bullets in the late 1800s...

and now it makes sense

why my Sony Digital Reference headset sounds so good compared to anything else I have. I checked up the current list price and came up with USD75 as the cheapest. o_o Imagine how much it must have cost 8 years ago.

Man, this ancient headset used to be really leet. So baby, I'm sorry for all the times you lay abandoned in the bottom of my dusty packing box, and for the times when I briefly considered throwing you away. I shall treat you with more respect now, even though you're all ratty and old. =p It's been around 8 years already and it's about time I realised how leet you really are.

random spite

I beat someone at foosball. (not my fault he challenged me)

1. he was someone I dislike
2. beating a lesser player is boring. BUT. there is satisfaction, sometimes, in utterly crushing somebody. it is almost artistic. you give them a glimmer of hope at first and then smash it to little kibbles. i think that's the best part, the false hope.

Of course I was merciful and in the second game I fired my shots at 1/20th my usual speed and he still couldn't block them. Yes you noob even 5% of normal speed is too fast for you.

(haha fear my spite)

i haven't felt this way...

for a long time. A deep seated sense of calm, peace, and restedness. My breathing is deeper, slower. Contentment. I have the mental concentration to study for hours, I have the peace of mind to rest and go to sleep now should I wish.

It's all chemicals in the brain. That's all it is.

(there were pills I took before that would immediately induce this state of mind for hours. but such times are rare indeed now)

I'd forgotten what it feels like.

It feels like...

candycoatedwaterdrops

Good album by Plumb : I really like Stranded and Here With Me. It's Christian Rock, aurally interesting with haunting lyrics. It was interesting to discover that Jennifer Paige performed Stranded as a cover song on her own album, Positively Somewhere. I think Jennifer's rendition is the better one, for that theme, pop suits better than rock =p.

Some musings on sound quality : at the moment I have an aging Altec Lansing speaker setup, some Panasonic earbuds, a Sony Digital Reference headset, and a new Ovann headset. The speakers lack "punch" and the earbuds are just plain bad, distorting on the lower ranges at higher volumes. Only good one seems to be the Sony : gives me the higher fidelity than the Ovanns, but perhaps overly so, making some songs sound slightly hollow. Nothing that can't be fixed with postprocess effects, but you can't work in the opposite direction I guess.

Trying to cobble together a decent sound reproduction is interesting. Identifying the bottlenecks : the original sound quality (original CD or compressed format?) the digital / analog converter (crappy soundcard unable to keep up the voltage output to unpowered headset? power leakage from nearby electronics causing distortion?) and the sound output device (what gives best fidelity? full aural range without distortion, and what what power output?). Even then : last year mixing sound outputs for a performance for example is quite subjective, personal bias and what you're accustomed to as to "how it should sound" is inevitable. There's always a benchmark of sorts, it should always be compared to the "live" version. But even the "live" version is affected by what the singers sound engineers decide it to be. I guess then you can only really judge off "unmodified" sounds like, if you've played the drums a lot, you know what a really good smack on a tom or rimshot sounds like. The ultimate test in sound reproduction really is playback of famous orchestral pieces = ) Once you hear a good live rendition of the Vivaldi Four Seasons no speaker system ever comes close, but it's a good benchmark =p

Drowning at 13,500 feet

I have climbed 10 hours already today : then a short and fitful sleep, before waking up again at 2am to continue the race up the mountain.

This final stretch is not easy : climbing this high, my alveolar oxygen intake drops to roughly 50% of what I get at sea level. This is a fair bit above the limit of where humans should operate without supplemental oxygen. For an idea what it's like, try halving your breaths per minute. What about climbing 50 flights of stairs?. First to go is your night vision : then your mental acuity and judgement : then your hand eye coordination.

My mind plays tricks on me : haven't I passed this rock formation before? Once? Twice? The rope I cling on to for dear life feels unreal and intangible to my numbed fingers, the obsidian rocks instantly sucking the heat from my hands should I be so foolish to touch them. Above all, being afraid to look down, into the inky blackness below.

The icy air is crystal clear. This high above the earth there are no clouds, nothing between me and the black velvet sky filled with pinprick stars and hazy galaxies. And absolute desolation as far as I can see, just miles of tortured rock, all lit in the ghostly monochrome of a fading moon. Waves of lava frozen in time millions of years ago, insane rock formations bursting from the ground. The trail seems to go on forever, I lose track of time, the only thing that matters is putting one foot ahead of me at a time, inhaling one breath at a time, because I am drowning with no way to catch my breath.

PS : Picture taken by my friend. A roughly 1 hour exposure shot of the peak : what you are seeing is the stars appearing to move due to the earth's rotation. What you are reading is a diary entry from several years ago.

daily dose of : gratituous violence

Space Marine Dreadnaught performing a particularly brutal synch kill on an Eldar Banshee : grab, crush, and fire up those flamethrowers. Die xeno scum! =p Anyone willing to play DoW with me??? I lack gaming partners =p

Pedophilia

Sniper : *sees MSN name*
Sniper : hillary duff !!!!?
Vesper : ZOMG I FAIL
Vesper : i accidentally left my MSN music plugin on...
Vesper : prepare to watch me cycle her whole album...
Sniper : omg
Sniper : but the real question is...
Sniper : where did you get this stuff!?!
Sniper : was it the complimentary background music on a paedo site?

Which does beg the question, and I do believe that that is precisely the target audience of these products.

go burn down your house

To explain : I'm content with what I've seen and done, gained and lost : like a painter looking a finished picture, I want to stop and rest for good.

There was once a science fiction story where the premise was that technology had advanced to the point where humans existed in computers, and could live immortal lives. Memories could be edited at will, since all memory was just computer information. And then they discovered that it was undesirable to do so.

The solution they came up with was interesting : when the time was right, (they didn't tell anyone) they would burn down their virtual house, and move away, and take on a new name, identity and face, and start anew. This is a universe of trillion and trillions of other people, where people live for thousands of years, where every conceivable research and achievement has already been accomplished...

Don't worry : I'm good. It's interesting : I didn't quite mean my last post to be so morose, but I do a fair bit of thinking, and my sense of logic is quite different from most. So yes : you might say there's so much more I have to achieve and do. *shrug* I don't see any point in it, and there's nothing in this world that can really convince me why I should.

But please accept my hypothesis : if humans could technically life forever, there would be a point where you would decide to end your life : and more likely a point where you would like to start over, as the accumulated weight of experiences and memories become too heavy for a single mind to bear. And that this point is reached at different times for different individuals. If you disagree with this, then post =p

Am currently reading Purpose Driven Life : a common theme is that purpose is only found through God : and thinking about it for a week has convinced that this is so. There really is no convincing argument why life should continue : and thanks to Ash for reminding me about the Talents.

It's not that my painting is so bad that I want to start over : It's really good, I'm really happy, but there's already too much density =p

confusion

I'm hopeless.

I look back and I see so many mistakes and regrets.

Tonight I realised that I am an overwhelmingly unhappy person. This is my natural state of being. But this is counterbalanced by the fact that so very many things make me happy. You might think I'm perpetually happy but that's to your credit : you make me happy.

Even the worst experiences in my life have led to some positive impact to my life. Perhaps much later, perhaps very tiny in comparison, but they do exist if you look hard enough.

A fairy godmother pops up and asks you a question : I can erase a painful memory, but you have a sacrifice one happy memory for me. Would you trade 1 sad memory for a 1 happy memory? I think I would not trade even 5 sad memories in exchange for 1 happy memory. If you forget something, for all practical purposes, it never happened. I never want to forget.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sounding like Chise. But perhaps she's not sorry for what she's done : she's given up taking responsibility, because she's a victim just as much as everyone else is : she's sorry for what others have to go through. Sorry that she exists.

I'm not afraid of anything anymore. Not even if I die tomorrow.

*edit* omg i just realised how depressive this sounds =p this is what happens when i post late at night. i MEANT this to be positive post! honest! =p dunno what happened along the way and multiple edits before posting and going to bed. i'm afraid of very little, and regret almost nothing.

Strange Encounters

Plugging Xenobiologista tonight just because I feel like it. Not kept in touch for awhile there, hey.

Look familiar?

If you're not happy, there's always photoshop... well... from this we get this girl. Credit goes to Ash =p My own list of changes I wanted was slightly different. I guess we all have our own idea of what's pretty and what's not. = ) Ash is the best artist I know among my friends, his drawings and sense of style and beauty are absolutely spot on. More of his stuff.

No disrepect meant of course. I'm just having some fun. ^_^ I think I'll give her a name.

vesper : omg this is amazing, she's so pretty
vesper : i think i'm in love
ash : too bad she doesn't exist
vesper : T_T

Most of us have roughly the same idea of what's beautiful and what's not. Is the concept of beauty something innate or genetic, or is it a conditioned response to what we see idolized in society? As always the answer is probably somewhere in between. For the first time I'm truly appreciating the dilemmas that artists face. As I stare at her my impressions and feelings change : but the picture isn't changing, it's me that's changing in response to the picture.

What is beauty anyway. A perfect proportion of height or width. Perfect curves and smooth skin. We might as well be computers or robots if we judge based on such criteria. I only know what I like : apparently, I like thinner faces, perhaps indicative of slim girls in general (?) : and then I stop as I realise how stereotypical my concept of beauty is.

One of the final stories in Ted Chiang's SF anthology is regarding the concept of beauty as a defect. In that story, there is an implant people can get to turn off their sense of human beauty. But it's optional : and society is then split into two, with people on both sides of the divide wondering what it's like on the other side. Would society truly be a better place if we removed the idea that some people are born more attractive than others? And if you were born without the capability to discern what is beautiful and what is ugly, you'd be curious too, just like Adam and Eve wanting the knowledge of good and evil.

*edit* Side by Side comparison

making fugly things, less fugly

Is how I would describe the job I am doing right now. I officially take the title of Research Assistant. In general terms I do data analysis and extraction. But really, it's about making fugly things less fugly so other people can actually use it.

For example, performing complex calculations and sorting of information from a 2.6 million line data set. Or, the latest project, asks me to match 4 databases together and find certain types of inconsistencies between them and classify them.

It's basically problem solving. It's always something simple. First do this, then that, if this is the case, then something, if not, do another thing, and then you should get this output and then perform some more calculations on them. Ok. Now do it a few hundred thousand times. The trick is producing a system that is robust enough to handle all possible contingencies, and that can inform you if inconsistencies occur. What if the company re-registers under a different name. What about list and delist dates close to end of financial year. Some companies get delisted for a few years before being relisted, leaving a gap, but actually are the same company before and after.

It's always a two way tradeoff. The more time you spend on planning an efficient system or program, the less time is spent on its execution. But there is always a point of diminishing returns, where marginal increases in program efficiency take too long to dream up.

Certain problems are unsolvable. They are merely reducible. There will always be some element of manual labour in handling data. There is the point where trying to figure out an automated method of data extraction (just selected bits) takes longer than just doing it by hand.

My brain feels like it's stretching, or at least close to running out of RAM. Keeping several spreadsheets open at one time, and trying to keep the relationships between them in my mind as I think about the best way to do things, leaves no room for anything else. I feel like if I let my mind wander for a second everything will come crashing down like a house of cards and I will forget everything. My fear is I will look at all the hours of work, and everything ceases to make sense. It feels like standing on a tightrope, the feeling of perfect balance, afraid to look left or right, and just moving forward an inch at at time.

Such a lowly job. But so interesting. Enjoyable, not really.

Dawn of War : Winter Assault

Winter Assault (expansion) for Dawn of War is out. I gave the game a whirl again, it's been a long time.

This is the most graphically gorgeous strategy game ever made. Spectacular is the word I would use. I love this screenshot I took : shows the Avatar of Khaine (the Eldar demonic embodiment of war) impaling a poor Imperial Guard soldier on his sword, as the Eldar Fire Dragons and Warp Spiders overrun the Imperial Base.

The game designers wanted this to be above all a game with a huge visceral impact. They took cues from movies such as, Braveheart, Lord of the Rings, movies with large scale combat scenes. It gives this game a look unlike any other : large masses of troops charge at each other firing weapons and then draw melee weapons for close combat. The projectile density in this game is very high, which gives it a far more realistic feel : most RTS games, like Warcraft, have projectiles which fire every 1.5 seconds or so. Most handheld weapons in DoW fire twice per second, and some fast firing Shuriken Weapons achieve fire rates of 10 shots per second. The air is literally alive with bullets and energy beams. And the hand to hand combat -> very cool attack and defense moves, and lots of synch kills -> fancy finishing moves that units perform on an almost dead opponent. Like this sword impalement move by the Avatar of Khaine. OMG and the persistent bodies : when units die, they leave their model behind on the ground for long periods of time, and gives the battlefield a very scarred and apocalyptic feel.

A screenshot really doesn't do this game any justice. So much of the graphical excellence comes from the very natural way the soldiers run and fight : the way a tank visibly rocks when hit by a rocket : seeing the Eldar Farseer casually bat aside some Imperial Guard soldiers and knock them flat out on the ground : watching as the Avatar punches a soldier so hard that he flies across the battlefield and slams into a cliff, his broken body tumbling back down to earth. Yes. This game has RAG DOLL PHYSICS. So overkill.

Voice acting is top notch : you can really get into the mood hearing a Fire Prism operater signing in : "this battle calls for massive firepower". The evil characters sound truly evil : like they would kill you, and then eat your children out of spite. Even the different characters within the same army are personified so well : the Tzeentech sorceror's voice is smooth, deep, seductive, dangerous, confident, and above all, dripping with power. Randomized sounds ensure that units randomly yell inspiring shouts or insults as they fight.

I guess in some sense, the DoW developers had it all laid out for them : they were drawing from the Warhammer 40k universe, which has an exceptionally strong and engaging backdrop and story. They've managed to more or less remain true to the characters and ideals from Warhammer, and produce a great game in the meantime.

Cho Chang

Katie Leung has been casted as Cho Chang for the Goblet of Fire. She has a very "girl next door" look - so many of my friends are prettier than this. Uhm. Thought that according to the books she's supposed to be super hot and pretty and all that. Ah well. It's not like Lupin, Sirius, or Snape looked like how I thought they would look like in the movies. She's pictured here with an owl (huh?) and she's wearing her Hogwarts blazer, with a crappy Ravenclaw crest / badge no less hehe.

On the other hand I'm curious as to what Fleur will look like.

More on colors =p

I feel female sometimes. I'm not kidding. I blame society.

Kinda stupid for a guy who grew up with no sisters and went to an all guys school.

But if I was a girl I already know which guys I want. (haha beware)

Once I was with a bunch of girls (the only guy) and afterwards one of them said to me it's the first time they could have a good girltalk conversation with a guy participating. It's almost as if I wasn't a real guy. She's always honest with me, if anything, overly critical : she probably means it as an insult. Yet.

I chose a pink colored MP3 player because I honestly thought it was best color. But why should colors be gender specific? It has to be social conditioning, there is absolutely NO reason why certain colors should be associated with certain genders. WTF right?

I'm acting probably, say, 90% male. But is it because of what society has made me, or because of what I choose to be, or because of how I'm born? It's sheer conceit to think that I am fully in control of what I am, yet that's the answer I'm going to be running with for the moment.

Yet I know that, when I sit here, and think : if I was a girl tomorrow : it doesn't really bother me, in fact it would be interesting. Think about it. I have the same urges and desires as pretty much anyone does I think, male or female, so yay I am normal. I think. You just work with what you have and what you are.

So yes. I blame society for making pink a female colour. I blame society for dictating that girls should act a certain way and that guys should act another way. The differences between guys and girls are much smaller than people make them out to be. This difference is just magnified out of proportion : you can say that guys are more aggressive because of increased testosterone but really how much of it is simply society's expection of how genders should behave? Guys are supposed to like only girls but how much of it is biological and how much of it is again, social pressure.

FLCL revisited

Rewatched parts of FLCL recently. FLCL is a 6 episode OVA and it's really really offbeat. The first time you watch it you'll just go "huh" and be totally confused but it's really just... layered thick with symbolism and recurring themes. There's the whole theme with talking about swinging the bat and playing the guitar which quite clearly points towards, uhm, having sex. Really, the whole show is about Naota's sexual awakening. There's the whole recurring theme about Naota rejecting sour drinks, spicy food : supposedly "grown up" foods according to Mamimi, as he's rejecting and repressing his inevitable sexual maturity.

Ok. EVEN if you never got any of this veiled referenced dialogue the first time round, like me, FLCL was an incredibly enjoyable show taken at face value. I really liked the emotive content in Naota's relationship with Mamimi and Haruko. The music tracks are awesome rocking Jpop beats, and the action scenes are really good. I guess that even if you never got any of the references and allegory, enough of the emotive content seeps through the story to give to a hint as to what's going on.

The first scene was amazing. (which is the screenshot I put up here). Mamimi is molesting Naota, haha. The dynamics of Naota's relationships are intriguing : Mamimi wants a toy, a replacement for her previous love (Naota's older brother, who's left for overseas) : and when Naota takes steps to make the relationship more equal, she pulls back. Haruko seems bent on teaching "things" to Naota, which he initially rejects, but slowly develops very real feelings towards her towards the end.

Much of this is accomplished through side on language and play with guitars and baseball bats. In fact I think FLCL has my favourite dialogue of any show I've ever seen before : favourite scene is when Haruko returns after a short disappearance and asks if Naota is willing to throw everything away and come with her : he's obviously not ready, and he breaks down sobbing and buries his head in her chest, and goes, "where did you go? you didn't even say anything". And how she responds : she's always been trying (metaphorically) to get him to sleep with her, but here she just responds with tenderness and comfort, which is exactly right I feel. And in the foreground you see their two guitars lying on the floor, crossed over each other.

Ahaha, now it all makes sense, that scene where Haruko is teaching Naota how to swing a bat. And why Haruko is so good at baseball =p

Ok enough raving : go watch this if you can =p Or, if you were blur like me, rewatch it.

Spirit

This is a picture of a B2-Spirit Stealth Bomber : the most expensive aircraft in the world. Ugly? This is what 2.2 billion US dollars looks like. This project was begun by the US in the 1980s to combat an enemy that now no longer exists (Third world war? Communist Soviet Union?), but I guess that if you had such a weapon your enemies would be fools to consider fighting you, and ultimately that achieves your objective anyway.

This bomber has seen action in three conflicts so far : Kosovo, Iraq, and recently in Afghanistan. The B2 has the longest reach of any aircraft in the world -> the bombing raids on Iraq were launched from US bases itself, the aircrew flying for anywhere between 40 to 50 hours... literally a trip around the world.

Weapons capability? Well this bomber has a range of roughly 11,000 miles with a single mid air refueling, and can carry 8 nuclear tipped cruise missiles with a range of 1,500 miles each. A single B2 bomber could literally get to any country in the world in hours and wipe out 8 of their largest cities in a single blow. Scary. The US originally planned to build 120 of these bombers, but right now production has stopped at 21. (wow that's alot of money)

And of course, this is a Stealth Bomber so it's unlikely to be even detected until the bombs start exploding. Stealth technology was first demonstrated in the Iraq-Kuwait conflict, as the first generation stealth aircraft (F117s) were used to penetrate the french designed KARI air defense network used by Saddam. The primary method of detecting aircraft is by radar - measuring the radar pulse echoes returned from the airframe -> and a measure of radar visibility is the Radar Cross Section (RCS). Older aircraft such as the F-15 Eagle have a RCS of about 400 square meters. Newer generation fighters such as the F-16 Falcons have RCS of 5 square meters, as designers realise the importance of detection and stealth. In contrast, a dedicated stealth aircraft like the B2 Spirit bomber has an estimated RCS of 0.0015 square meters... which really, lies in the realm of non detectability. A bird has an RCS of 0.01 square meters and large insects have RCS of 0.001 square meters.

Overkill? Yes. And also useless. Instead of nuclear tipped warheads it carries 40,000 pounds of bombs to dump on targets in defenseless Afghanistan, which any aircraft could have easily done. But no one can predict how history would have turned out had the US not embarked on such an ambitious set of military technologies. But still, there's the deadly beauty in building the best, most advanced, most capable machine, and I'm sure the engineers are proud of themselves.

Colours...

The Philosphy of the Nature of Colours was a really interesting post by my friend, Ash, quite some time back. Nice colour chart by the way. And I am apparently Black / Blue. =p

I've been thinking about it a lot more recently though. I act pretty different around different people -> you really wouldn't know me sometimes. Really.

I think that, crazy as it sounds, I am all things. I may seem good, but really, I may also have evil desires that would shock you. I may seem like I look out for others, but really given the right moment I would betray everyone for my own sake. I may not look artistic but sometimes I surprise myself. I know I can be all these things if I wanted to. Life is about control then. Or should I say, life is about Choice.

I'm confusing myself further. Let's say that sad circumstances surround my life at this point in time. What if I am able to turn my mind away from these things, and wham, suddenly I'm perfectly happy. Is there a difference between genuine happiness and this?

We've already established (or I hope you know) that happiness is a relative concept. You cannot know happiness without knowing sadness. Just like how brightness has no meaning without darkness. So in that case, anyone in almost any situation CAN have a valid reason to be happy.

If so, then it follows that perhaps happiness is a choice as well. Since the current circumstances don't actually matter... at any point, you could be happy or sad depending on how you got there (sliding down from a position of "higher" happiness or climbing upwards from a position of "lower" happiness)... and if you could mislead yourself into feeling happy, well that would be ideal.

I would say then that happiness is a matter of choice, and control over your own life. Just like how the character colors we show to other people are also perhaps, a matter of choice. My friend has said I am black/blue : so I am selfish, self serving, relentless in pursuit of knowledge and excellence. Brutality to survive? Perhaps. Cold impassionate logic? Holy shit yes, that's what this whole post is about. I'm being brutal to those who pity themselves, because I know I used to do that before, and it doesn't do any good.

Blogging here on the internet, far outside the confines of normal social conduct, allows me to reveal other aspects of me that perhaps you wouldn't suspect had we just lived our lives out there in the real world. I know my post about the hot girl attracted some attention from my regular (lurker) readers from years back. Well, screw that : this is my online identity and I can be as honest or as fake as I want to be. I write these things down because it amuses me to do so, nothing more and nothing less. There are parts of me that likes to stare at pretty girls as they walk by in Uni and there are parts of me that couldn't care less about a pretty face. Those of you who know me, you'll know the real me without having to rely on this blog.

Phew. And about the picture : it's a picture taken in Crown Casino, with no photo editing done to it. Very cool colours.

Best thing I've heard today

Overheard on Ventrilo while playing Guild Wars : there is a hex called Imagined Burden which slows an opponent's movement, and someone on our team called out "Wait, he's not going anywhere, I'm imagining his ass."

There was a short period of stunned silence, before he said "Uh... I'm guessing that sounded really bad."

Seeing double... no...

I love these pictures, I drag them out occasionally to have a stare. I may have blogged about them before. Allows you to resolve a 3D image from 2 seperate images : the left image is for your right eyen and right image for your left eye. Convince them to lock on, and with some coaxing a single image will appear for you : and it does feel strikingly like a 3D image, with actual depth perception, and you'll find that you'll need to focus differently on nearer and farther objects in the picture just like in real life.

I drank a fair bit the other night. Not the first time my friends commented that I act exactly the same no matter how much I have had to drink. I must have been up to my eyeballs in alcohol. Sure. Some theorize that a person's true nature reveals itself when they've lost their inhibitions. The convenient explantion is a person who doesn't change behaviour acts completely true to himself all the time, but it's gotta be more complicated than that. Perhaps inhibitions run deeper with some people. This is the place where physiology crosses over into the unknown territory of social science... but my personal feelings on the matter is : I feel exactly the same, and therefore I act exactly the same. Oh, let me mention, perhaps I feel happier. Just a little bit. Maybe more daring, more affectionate. And yet after a certain point my fine motor skills are shot completely to hell, can barely pour a cup of water without spilling some, or walk past chairs and tables without bumping into them. Bah. Other learned motor skills are retained : I walked past one of the best foosball players I know (he goes to competitions) and I gave him a good run for his money : I played as well as I always do, catching quick passes and firing off several fast accurate shots that I normally don't get even on my good days. And he even complimented the sharpness of my playing. He didn't guess what I was doing at the time.

But. I. Cannot. Pour. A. Glass. Of. Water. BAH.