Posts

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Take It Back to Square One

After a long program like my recent REU where I hung out with a group of awesome people for such a long time that I forget the outside world, I reminisce about past groups. I think back to my MAO conventions where I flirted with love, jump back in time to the All-District concert with Dr. Green cheering us on during Maslanka… but I always feel sad afterwards that my memory of them is incomplete.

I wish I kept a consistent journal throughout my years to see how I developed. Sometimes when I clean my room in Tallahassee, I would find a little unicorn book where I wrote notes in third and fourth grade. Runescape notes dominated the pages (and a crush for a Megan Morris? … who is this girl?).

Hopefully I can start writing about my feelings/notes on daily life on here more. After all, I am spending a good amount to have this website and domain under my name.

Well. Back to square one.

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Fun with PIL

After installing Python(x,y), I’ve decided to play around with the various modules and applications packaged. The IDE that came with the package (Spyder) is surprisingly useful and feature-rich, which is helping me immensely with visualizing data from my work (in conjunction with the packaged matplotlib). Just yesterday, I’ve decided to dip my hands into the imaging library (PIL) and see what features it has by making a Adele-esque album cover.

I took an old photo of mine, cropped my face out, and placed it on a transparent background using Photoshop. Next, I cropped out Adele’s hand from the album and saved that as a separate image.

Now using PIL, I was able to copy my head and Adele’s hand onto a new image, rotate the said image, and add text to it. It was surprisingly… easy.

Code here.

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Why?

It has been almost 4 years since President Obama has been in office, and the birthers has mostly subsided. But this morning, WFSU reported some crazy Florida raising the issue once again.

According to WFSU:

Klayman [a conservative legal activist] said the president is not a natural-born citizen because his father was not a U.S. citizen.

I guess Mr. Klayman doesn’t believe that Thomas Jefferson is a US citizen seeing that his mother was born in London.

Why Mr. Klayman? Why?

 

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J. Crew

In my effort to be more well-dressed, I decided to go to J. Crew yesterday and spend some of my money. Thing is, there is no J. Crew in Tallahassee.

“No problem! I can just buy this stuff at Cornell. After all, all Ivy Leagues MUST have some sort of J. Crew by it!”

Apparently I am wrong. The closest J. Crew around Cornell is over an hour away. Lets compare that to the other Ivy Leagues (according to Google Maps):

  • Brown: 7 minutes away
  • Harvard: 10 minutes away
  • Princeton: right across the street. (“I have never seen so many J. Crew in my life” – Hellogoodbye)
  • UPenn: 10 minutes away
  • Yale: 6 minutes away
  • Columbia: 12 minutes

I hearby pronounce that Cornell and Dartmouth (~1 hour) officially not part of the Ivy League conference.

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The Great Leader’s Secret Plan

We all know that North Korea is pretty messed up. Plucked straight from a 50’s Cold War film, and dropped in the middle of the Korean Peninsula, the country is in shambles compared to its neighbors. It’s no surprise that the “UN’s representative in Pyongyang says about half the country’s children are stunted from malnutrition” (What is surprising though is Kim Jong-un admitting that fact).

What the world doesn’t know is that the North Koreans is preparing for the dark future; a future predicted by Lycerius. By starving its citizens now, the North Koreans has accelerated human evolution. Eventually, the North Koreans will all be more diminutive, and needing less food. In the future of the world covered by swampland, North Koreans will reign supreme in this new world. They have plenty of time to develop the technology, or just steal/share the technology from/with China.

It’s a perfect, cynical plan.

 

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Airplane Conversation

Me: so who are you going to Vegas with?
Him: actually funny story. My buddy just turned 21 and he bought tickets for his girlfriend and himself, but they broke up 2 days ago. So basically I got a free ticket here.
Me: haha, so you are a rebound brofriend?
Him: well, I am gay hahaha
Me: hahaha etc.

Uber-cool

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The Time Machine

One of the most memorable episodes of the Big Bang Theory that I saw was the one with the Time Machine. After reading the actual referenced book by H.G. Wells, two things particularly amazed me:

  1. When I started reading the book, I wasn’t expecting a commentary on the negative consequences of social classes.This brought up a little known opinion (that I heard from my professor) that Alice in Wonderland might be a criticism on the state of mathematics in the 19th century.From the MAA website:

    For a more focused example, take the chapter “Advice from a caterpillar.” Alice has fallen down the rabbit hole and eaten a cake that has shrunk her to a height of just 3 inches. The Caterpillar enters, smoking a hookah pipe, and shows Alice a mushroom that can restore her to her proper size. But one side of the mushroom stretches her neck, while another shrinks her torso, so she must eat exactly the right balance to regain her proper size and proportions. Bayley believes this expresses Dodgson’s view of the absurdity of symbolic algebra.

  2. While considered by Wikipedia to be a “Dying Earth” genre, a Google search suggestion pointed me towards a genre called “time travel romance.” This sheds a new light on time travelling. Instead of bringing back the cures to today’s diseases from tomorrow, imagine the endless possibilities for promiscuity time travel offers! If you’re into the multiple wives business, but your wife currently does not? Why not just switch the 4th dimension?
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Project Euler #1

Add all the natural numbers below one thousand that are multiples of 3 or 5.

Besides the obvious solution by looping from 1 to 1000 and considering each number, this problem can be solved with some simple PIE counting.

Sum up all multiple of 3’s and 5’s with an arithmetic sequence, then subtract the multiple of 15’s due to overcounting.

Hopefully these type of posts will be much more interesting (for me too) as the questions get tougher.