Party!

Botch and Bob celebrated their birthdays with pizza, spaghetti, fried chicken, and soda. What a nice time to end the day. :) Happy Birthday Botch and Bob.

Dream probabilities

RIP: Raymundo Punongbayan, PHIVOLCS

From Inq7.net:

Former Phivolcs head Raymundo Punongbayan was with four Phivolcs staff, two pilots, and two crewmembers, when their US-made Bell UH-1H helicopter crashed near Gabaldon town. (breaking story here)

I remember former director Punongbayan predicted the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991. During that time, only a few took heed from his warnings. It was only when Mt. Pinatubo erupted on July 1991 that everyone started believing what he says.

Ranking Game

The hokies are ranked 6th by Stewart Mandel of S.I. There are lots of expectations now on this Vick-led squad.

Learning to Levitate

We were able to catch the last part of David Blaine's street magic where he performs the Balducci Levitation. All of us watching the show went agaga on how Blaine could have possibly pulled it off. Bob showed us a trick and all of us (Botch, Roy, and Matt) went practicing.

What stumped us however is the part where David Blaine's feet were shown to be "really" floating. Roy however quickly used Google to find out the details of the trick ( everything can be explained!) and found this site. It turned out that the producers of the show did post-editing (we should have figured that out earlier!). :)

Funny Pinoy Business Names

I found this link to funny names of real pinoy business joints. Examples are Caintacky Fried Chicken (restaurant in Cainta) and Susan's Roses (flower shop).

Drafted Hokies

Eric Green is the 11th pick (75th overall) in the 3rd round and will play with the Arizona Cardinals. Vincent Fuller is 7th pick (108th overall) in the 4th round and will play with the Tennessee Titans. Jon Dunn is the 3rd pick (217th overall) in the 7th round and will play with the Cleveland Browns.

Bryan Randall didn't make it in the 7 rounds.

Care Bears

It seems that the Care Bears are becoming popular in the Philippines. My son who is fond of bears wants one. I bought him "King Funshine Bear" for his birthday.

Tin-tin and the Alph-Art

I didn't know that when Herge died in 1983, he was actually working on a new adventure of Tin-tin and snowy. I love the Tin-tin adventures and I now have an almost complete collection of the comic books. I ordered from amazon the first 2 adventures of Tin-tin and snowy: "Tin-tin in the land of Soviets" and "Tin-tin in Congo," to complete my collection. Now that I know that Casterman published the uninked version of the "Tin-tin and the Alph Art", I am now seriously thinking if I would like to buy it (not cheap though).

This article from Washington Post details the contents of the unfinished comic book.

Whiz from Cavite

When you have the talent and brains, opportunity pours. Paul Leopando graduated on top of his class at Manila IS, got high marks in SAT, and perfected 5 placement exams given by a US testing center. To boot, he is offered scholarships at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and -ehem- UP. He is reported to be seriously considering Harvard (see the Philstar.com story).

Relativity as explained by Einstein himself

"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity." -- Albert Einstein

My University Physics Professor didn't taught relativity that way. :)

CNN.com has this interesting article about Einstein.

Pope Benedict XVI

Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger no more. He becomes Pope Benedict XVI today -- our 265th Pope.

Vick to lead the Hokies in 2005

The spring game last saturday magnified the thin offensive lineup of the Hokies. Marcus Vick outperformed Sean Glennon. Frank Beamer announced that Marcus will be the Hokies starting QB come September. Story is here.

Cookie monster on diet

In order to promote healthy lifestyle, the new Sesame Street episodes will emphasize healthy food and healthy habits. There goes the sweets for Cookie monster. Can you imagine Cookie Monster not eating lots of cookies? :)

CNN.com has the story.

APO's early roots re-released!

I'll buy these CDs when I get back home. :) The press release is here.

Tax Day!

One of the sure things in life.

Free and Open Access Academic Journals

There's a growing number of free and open access academic journals. Check out the (DOAJ) Directory of Open Access Journals and (PLoS) Public Library of Science.

Acceptance of nonsense

SCIgen is a program that generates a random Computer Science paper complete with citations, references, figures, and graphs. The authors (Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn, and Dan Aguayo) of this amusing program sent two randomly generated papers to the WMSCI 2005 (9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics). -- one of their gibberish papers got accepted! Read the nonsense paper here and the acceptance letter here. Better yet, check out the SCIgen website.

Btw, to boot, the authors are raising money to fund their travel to Florida to give a randomly generated talk. :)

Now that the authors made fun of this conference, I wonder how the organizers of the conference would react once they realized they accepted a totally nonsense paper.

Dali! ang bato

GMA 7 started a Darna TV series. Angel Locsin stars as Narda/Darna. There are a couple of interesting videos in iGMA.tv website.

Spring Football at Tech

Intra-squad football football kick-off at Tech is scheduled at 2pm on Saturday. Details are here.

Real-life Matrix

Inq7.net posts about Sony filing the first step to patent in implementing a real-life Matrix. I'm not sure if we should be excited or scared.

Meat on sticks day!

Let's see how we fare at the Street Fair. Meat on sticks, anyone?

Of pipes, dups, and forks

It has been a long time since I used pipes, I/O duplication, and process forking in a C program. However, I need to remember how it is done. The UNIX command ls | wc is implemented this way in C.

pipe(p);

if ((pid1 = fork()) == 0) {
close(p[1]);
dup2(p[0],0);
close(p[0]);
execl("wc","wc",(char *)0);
exit(1);
}
if ((pid1 = fork()) == 0) {
close(p[0]);
dup2(p[1],1);
close(p[1]);
execl("ls","ls",(char *)0);
exit(1);
}
close(p[0]);
close(p[1]);

while(wait(&status) != pid1);

Jess' Famous Marinade

We just prepared the marinade for the BBQ we are selling on saturday. With the small number of graduate students members of FSA, we are scaling down BBQ production this year.

Three laws of graduation

Jorge Cham forged the following three laws of graduation, ala Newton:

FIRST LAW
A graduate student in procrastination tends to stay in procrastination unless an external force is applied to it.

SECOND LAW
The age, a, of a doctoral process is directly proportional to the flexibility, f, given by the advisor and inversely proportional to the student's motivation, m.

Mathematically, this is a = f/m or f = m a

THIRD LAW
For every action towards graduation, there is an equal and opposite distraction.

Just follow the link to the actual comic -- Boy, this guy's a genius! :)

Pagsi

Dr. Onofre Pagsanjan graced the commencement exercises at Ateneo de Naga recently. Part of his speech follows:

Noong ika'y musmos pa, tinangnan ng iyong ina nag iyong kamay at winika niya, “Close … open. Close … open.”

Sa paglipad natin sa ating kabataan , close tayo nang close kadalasan. Sunggab nang sunggab sa pakikinabangan. May dahilan. Hungkag na sarili'y dapat munang sidlan. Ngunit mula sa ating pagtatapos, sa ating paglapag sa kalakhan ng buhay, dapat ay open na nang open , bigay na nang bigay, hanggang sa unti-unti nating paglapit sa hukay, unti-unti rin nating naibubukas ang ating mga bisig at kamay, at unti-unti rin tayong natutulad kay Hesus na sa krus nakabayubay, bigay todo, pati buhay.

I have heard or read this part of his speech before. It sounds very Pagsi. I find it corny -- but it is poetic and true.

The QED Manifesto

QUOD erat demonstrandum (QED): meaning "which was to be shown" has been used to end a formal proof of a mathematical proposition. Some mathematicians use a black square instead of QED. In UP, there's a professor (I forgot his name), who uses T.N. instead. T.N. means "tapos na". :)

The QED manifesto describes a project that aims to automate doing formal proofs using a computer. The four-color problem is the most famous theorem proved using a computer generated proof. I'm not quite sure how feasible this project is -- proving that a program has no bugs is in fact difficult.

Now, how can you prove that a computer program P which proves a theorem to be true has no bugs? Write another program Q that proves P has no bugs? I'm now confused. :)

Baby blue rocks!

The fighting illini kept it close but the tar heels are the 2005 champs!

RIP Our Beloved Pope John Paul II

Pope John Paul II
Karol Józef Wojtyła
18 May 1920 - 2 April 2005
Elected as 264th Pope, 16 October 1978

Final Four

My take:

Cardinals win over the Fighting Illini.
Tar heels win over the Spartans.

Pope near death

The health of Pope John Paul II has deteriorated to the point that Vatican officials already concede that his life may come to end soon. Continuing story is here.

UPDATE:
Pope John Paul II died 2 April 2005, Saturday, 9:37PM Rome Time (3:37 AM Sunday, Manila time).