e pur si muove

Changed the text colors in the header to make it more legible, and made the tabs actually work when you click on them.

The tabs link directly into two broad categories. I’ve found that the vast majority of my blog readers who don’t know me personally come here mainly to read about one of two things, and they tend to get annoyed when I alternate between them (and others). So for those Gentle Readers, I’ve made an explicit division here, hopefully to keep people happy and myself sane about it. (Please, no more “I want only Singapore articles!!!” emails from now on!)

The kewl thing about Wordpress is that it lets people subscribe only to subsets of my posts, so you don’t have to trawl through my chronicles of mundania on campus to get to the bits and pieces about Meritocracy, even from your feed aggregator. The feature has always been there, but I just want to point it out to people who haven’t used this feature before.

1. The first tab links into my posts about Singapore society, politics and economics (Category: pol/ec/soc). Category feed: [rss]
2. The second links to all my science articles. Category feed: [rss]

Of course, if you don’t mind my usual mix, go ahead and keep things the way they were. And if you’re feeling particularly bored, you can subscribe to my comments on your newsreader too. [rss]

Lining up to get in, originally uploaded by Oldtasty.

Today is Unoffical St. Patrick’s Day, a fine example of how crass commercialism can conjure up a holiday out of thin air for the sake of better business. And perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s supposedly the campus’s most popular holiday.

It’s the one time in the year where literally half the people on campus wear various shades of green and get drunk before 10 on fresh brews of luminous green beer.

What am I doing about it? I’m just sticking to my watching Cirque Éloize tomorrow at Krannert. Any show billing itself as like rain in your eyes ought to be good. It will be the first time in a long while that I won’t be watching a show as a volunteer usher.

In class today, when talking about a compromise between accuracy in two asymptotic régimes

You might have expected this from the no free lunch principle. The no free lunch principle says that you don’t get a free lunch

(If you really want to know, it was about the dissociation catastrophe, i.e. Hartree-Fock calculations and the choice between a valence bond representation or a molecular orbital one.)

Some things are just painfully obvious. For example, this list of yet-to-do things:

• Convert my savings account (0.25% interest) to 12-month CDs (now on 4.25% special at a local bank.
• Pay municipal, city ordinance, property and income taxes.
• Return that bag I bought which split the day after I bought it at the Boxing Day sale.
• Clean up my desk, because i can’t see the plane surface anymore.
• Visit the optician and fix my glasses
• List books on Amazon that I had meant to sell off
• Actually send out my hard drive for repair, after getting cost estimates from seven companies.

Guess how many of them I’ve done. Uh-huh.

Instead, I spent the whole of last night making my 43 places map nice and colored all over.

I’ve been mildly depressed after the Jorge Cham talk, The Power of Procrastination. Despite the light tone of it all, and getting to talk to him one-on-one, it’s made me more acutely aware of the things I have to do.

And I don’t want to do them…

…at least, not now.

Oh, and maybe I should get round to writing the talk up too.

A Wikipedia article on Raffles Voices.