Seattle Day 1

seattle's version of the wet market, with the exception that everything's more hygenic and the stuff sold look much nicer and fresher. but we arrived pretty late, so the market was closed.

The Fisherman Restaurant at Pier 57.

We decided on getting the "Feast" Dinner, two crab meals, two prawn meals. Yeah it was a feast indeed, considering the price tag of a whooping 40 USD per pax.

Stage 1: Bread and Clammmmmm Chowder. Wah. The Clam Chowder is DA Clam Chowder man. The best that I've ever tasted so far. Thick soup, with clams swimming in it.

Stage 2 : 2 buckets of clams and mussels. slurp. the juice was fantastic. shel

Yeah the four of us. Jon, Joel, CK and me.

Stage 3: Giant Snow Crab, Alaskan Crab and Dungeon Crab. The other platter was full of prawns, breaded, fresh, steamed, skewered, saladed. e.t.c. I forgot to mention, the grapes were damn sweet.

Yeah the legs were that big.

Two jedi knights with their red Crabsabers. Well. too busy eating, so too lazy to take photos already.

Carousel at the amusement park. -_-. Nothing fascinating.

Seattle > Vancouver. Period. More life. More crowded. Good seafood. The sun was out everyday, despite the horrendous fog, which only cleared at about noon.

Hmm. I can't believed I S/U a module which i got A-. Report B, Project D. Study day before. Still can get A-. smlj. lol. Woohoo, now got 2 more S/Us. No need to do special sem liao.

Ok time for crap. (COPYRIGHT, I CREATED THE BELOW MENTIONED MYSELF)
You know you are a mathematician when:
1) You REALLY know why 1 + 1 = 2
2) You like to tell people that 1 + 1 = 0 and occasionally, 2 + 1 = 0
3) You know the difference between lemma and llama
4) You puzzle people when you say Z is countable but infinite.
5) You remember the values of sqrt(2), sqrt(3), pi and exp(1)
6) You can't tally a normal restaurant bill in your head when you need to find out how much each person has to pay
7) When you've drunk 1/4 of a bottle of Chivas Regal, and you can still reply the answer to 99x99 within 2 seconds.
8) You know who Cauchy is.
9) You know all the functions on a scientific calculator.
10) You're reading this and you're laughing.

Yawn.

Week 9 Day 4

haha i created this from my astronomy tutorial today. idea is... if u're close to a blackhole, you'll get sucked faster at the bottom than at the top, resulting.. in... you become mr fantastic for a short moment, before getting stretched into pieces.

which means... if one of the high mass stars nearby stops burning and dies, it will implode and generate a blackhole which will.. well.. suck us in. wow. can u imagine the earth getting stretched? haha.

Week 9 Day 3

Overdue photos from the Museum of Anthropology which is like a 5 minute walk from where I stay.

some sinister looking fat dog. but it's quite amazing considering that the natives carved it out by hand

shrug. dunnoe how to appreciate.

golem. wood golem. reminds me of heroes 2 or heroes 3. cheap and easy to die.

boo. masks. quite freaky man. not sure why they would wear this.

hmmm did V pass by here? looks pretty worn out. remember remember the fifth of november. coming soon leh.

yeah this figure is on the 20 dollar canadian note

but well the highlight of the trip was the ceremics portion. i spent about 1.5 hours in that small room drooling over the artefacts.

ceremic figurines. glitters in the light.

O.o. Adam and Eve, eating from the tree of knowledge. Oh for starters, all these stuff were created between the 15th and 16th Century. Yeah the serpent's slithering on the tree.

Hmmm if all these were made like 400 years ago, and they still look so good...., wow i can't imagine the people back then, how skilled they were.


Ceremic stove. I'm surprised they used this as an oven last time.












Hmm. Looks like the jack from the poker cards.

Wah the ceramic pieces are absolutely brilliant. I would like to own some of them in future man if possible.

Ok. After today's complex lecture, I remembered Mich's theory of knowledge.

There are four kinds of viewpoints from which you know or don't know something.

You know what you know
You know what you don't know
You don't know what you know
You don't know what you don't know.

Today's complex lecture was horrendous. a simple integration of the following function

int (1/sqrt(x(1-x))) dx from 0 to 1

involved the following
1) Residue Theorem for Exterior Domains
2) Residue Theorem at Infinity
3) Analytic Continuation
4) Funny branch cuts taken along many Logz
5) Define gamma epilson, phi epilson and using ML inequality to shrink certain integrations along certain paths to 0 as e --> 0. It's like you're not exploding radius to infinity. you're shrinking the contour to 0. zzzzzzzz. the absolute reverse.

So I concluded the following.
I know what I don't know.
And bloody honestly, I don't know what I don't know.

Hhahaha. It's damn cock lo. And it doesn't help when the NUS Advanced Complex Lecture is so freaking different from the one I'm taking in UBC.
But never mind la. SEP mentality should be able to take me through. I hope?

I like complex numbers, but the lecture material has been so distasteful, it's like eating ben and jerry's mixed with paracetemol, cough mixture and mucus mixed with vegetables.

But ironically enough, I think abstract algebra is quite fun. And it all makes sense when you use abstract algebra to explain linear algebra.

Ok the post so far has been a whole bunch of mathematical jargon. So too bad if you don't understand. hahaha.


Anyway, I think denzel washington and tom hank movies are fantastic. I'm watching Cast Away now. Can't wait for American Gangster to come out.

Week 9 Day 2

Wow. The sun is out. I'm definitely going to run later. Haven't exercised in ages.

Anyway my dad's new office. My mom seems to be looking more like the towkay.



Ok. Read geog a bit. Skip too many lectures already.

Week 9 Day 1

Yeah. Did cheesecake today. Didn't turn out too bad. In fact it was quite yummy, but of course girlfriend one definitely much better. Haha. maybe i should cook more.

sorry anyway no pictures. i was too lazy to take my camera along to snap snap and snap. nothing much to update. no cheem thoughts swimming in my brain, desperately waiting to be oozed out onto this blog.

Week 8 Part 2

Yumyum nice dim sum lunch today. Never expected to be able to eat chee cheong fun you tiao in Vancouver honestly. heh. Apparently, Vancouver is nicknamed Kongkouver for the number of Hongkongers. Evidently so.

Ok flight booked. I'm only back on the 10th of January next year. Spending xmas and new year all in LA or San Fran. kinda cool eh.

i'm a bit hooked to facebook's texas holdem. zzz.

Week 8 Day 1

"Why do you have to be so cute,
It's impossible to ignore you....."

Gosh her voice is awesome. Though I think Imogen Heap isn't exactly mainstream. I think my tastes are starting to steer towards Brit alternative. Hmm. Hinting me to go Europe right. haha.

O.o. I'm here for close to 50 over days already. And I'm starting to get bored of Vancouver already. Maybe cos I've explored most of the places till there's nothing much left to do.

Well anyway, if you shrunk Earth to the size of a grape, you'll turn Earth into a super massive black hole? Yeah things that astronomy teaches you. Plus I have a test tomorrow. And I intend to only study for an hour. haha. SEPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

But if all the facts amounting to the universe are true, considering that we all came from nothing, evolving from big bang and supernovas, then something clearly is in contradiction with the first few verse of Genesis.

Unless the only way to marry the Bible and the existence of the Universe together is by establishing the following universal truths, which in any case, cannot be proved by Godel's Incompleteness Theorem (of course I'm crapping again):

1) Perhaps the concept of time in Genesis is different from the kind of time that we experience.

You see. One normal Earth day at this present moment in time consists of 24 hours. As I've learnt from the Space Centre, a normal Earth day some time ago only had 23 hours. See where I'm pointing at? So by working backwards via some Geometric Progression, a normal Earth day might be only worth 15 hours
and by extending it further backwards, the 7 days where God spent creating Earth might only be approximately worth 1 minute of our present Earth time.

So by saying that the Universe existed for billions of present day Earth time isn't exactly wrong, considering that time in the early ages was "crushed" and shrunk so as to fit the Bible's claim that Earth was created approximately 10000 years ago?

A little warped, but if you think about Einstein's Theory of Relativity, maybe this theory can substantiate since masses in the galaxy have the ability to curve and extend time or slow time, then I don't see why God might have inadvertently created this effect in his big game plan of the universe.

2) The definition of Earth and the Heavens

Earth being the focal point of all things, and perhaps the Heavens (note the plural form) being the consolidation of Heaven, the galaxies, stars, other planets, e.t.c. Well this actually corroborates the physical phenomenon that we actually see, if we take the English in the Bible literally.

Dunno man. Random thoughts that I wished it were true though. So finally once and for all, there's scientific evidence behind the beginnings of God's work.




Oh. I'm surprised my blog is being read so much. I busted my daily allowance for mp3 downloads, so the song doesn't automatically play. hmmm. huh? haha.

Eh?

Places that I'm intending to go in November
1) Northwest of Edmonton to see the Aurora Borelis. Wow the aurora formations in the sky are spectacular. Worth skipping 1 or 2 lectures.
2) Toronto and New York. Niagara Falls of course. New York for the hustle and bustle. Washington DC for the White House.
3) Alaska. Well.. last priority. Not sure whether it makes sense to go there. But I can get to see more Auroras and perhaps ride on wolf sleighs and find some igloos.

Places that I'm intending to go in December
1) LA (take a look at Berkeley, find the HOLLYWOOD sign)
2) San Fran
3) Sin City (Las Vegas)
4) Mexico, if it's feasble.

After all this, then left to conquer Europe next year. Heh.

Anyway, thank goodness that I'm taking algebra over here. I tried to reference the NUS algebra notes and the material was much harder. In terms of the way the proofs are done, a lot of steps somehow are missing. And well.. since we are talking about groups, i found it strange that properties of groups was taught much later, compared to over here, where it was taught right from the start. Helps to have a powerful PRC friend. Haha. Okok. I shall stop slamming them. There really are nice ones around.

Sigh. I think I'm going to spend quite a lot of $$$. But for fact that I'm still young, I think it makes perfect sense. Before I'm too old and I can't take the travelling.

Anyway, Rockies Day 4 pictures nothing much la. Just some vineyards and wines. Good wines definitely. And dirt cheap. Well, if you are darn rich, you most probably can buy bottles of wine to shower yourseif in.

wow. gordon's picture of the swiss alps. damn. looks much better than some of the rockies attractions. ok la. i think comparable, considering that I managed to walk on it and found some crevices and ice stalagmites and stalactites.

hmmm maybe should consider summer exchange hor. haha. yeah right. no $$$ liao.

Intermission

Oh hao lian a bit.
I got 80/80 for my Complex assignment.

And most of the questions involved concepts which I have no bloody idea about.
Boundary la. Pompeii's Theorem (nono not the volcano). Meromorphic. Maximal Modulus. Schwarz's Lemma. Stereographic projection. Conformal mapping. Mobius Transform.

Yet. I still got full marks. You know what I did? I just used the theorem and anyhow whack. Guess what. I didn't know C is compact, with infinity as it's boundary under the Riemann sphere. I wrote that and I got full marks. wtf man. lol.

maybe... i'm complex la. that's why. ok enuf crap. more movie watching.

i know i'm going LA.
now i dunnoe whether want to fly to Toronto and go to New York during November. Hmmmmmm.

Rockies Day 3

the morning sky from my hotel. u know why it's such a red sunrise? because of 2 effects called Rayleigh scattering and Mie scattering. due to the low lying nature of the sun, the path of the sun rays pases through a longer distance through the atmosphere. the short wave radiation (i.e. the blue spectrum€) hits aerosols and water droplets in the atmopshere, scattering light in all directions. and the long wave radiation (i.e the red spectrum) flies through into our eyes, hence the blue sky and super red sunset.

ok am i boring anyone with my newfound geog knowledge?


Calgary Tower. Zzzz. boring shit. Macau tower so much nicer. Waste 13 CAD for nothing.

Woohoo. View from the top of Sulphur Mountain.

Look at those clouds, produced by orographic lift. That's why the trip was a freaking geog lesson to me.

The cable car that I took up.

View from the cabin. It's a long drop down man. Was slightly traumatic. haha.

The logo on the garbage bin. Don't you think...... there's something wrong with the picture?

Everything on. Cold. And the wind is so strong I can't even walk straight.

Wah. Looks like painting right. But it's the real deal man.



Yeah. Really sulphur siah. Nono. that's not orange juice.




Chipmunk. or squirrel. Looks more like a chip to me.

I'm like the Arrancar from Bleach. Number 6. Anyway. Lake Louise. There's a glacier in the middle of the 2 valleys.



Wow. Look at the reflection on the water surface. Surreal huh.


Ah the best waterfall that I went. The barriers had a bit of loopholes, so we went past them and went to the edge of the falls. Well, for this formation, apparently the waterfall had eroded the rock and receded, leaving behind this natural looking bridge that spans from the left side to the right. Yeah you can walk over it, at your own risk that is.

That's me. Slip and no more Hansel liao. But really ah. Damn shiok. I was actually about 5away from the falls. Had to get a real firm grip. If you notice carefully of the rock structure, they are all stratified. So the remaining rocks had line protrusions that ran forever. Dunnoe whether is it calcium carbonate or limestone. Ah damn. I can't remember what's the other rock type that's stratified.




Remnants of river hydraulic action. Large boulders left behind in deposition, because river speed is down to a trickle at the banks. The ground was so compacted that I tot it was sand. But when i tried to scoop the ground, it was rock hard. Gosh. Amazing.

my astro prof is talking about spacetime curvature and the nature of blackholes.
4 dimensional spacetime, with x,y,z being the usual dimensions that we work with
and T being the fourth dimension or coordinate.
woohoo. linear algebra baby. R^4 field.

Sorry. more about blackholes in future, if I understand them that is.