On Power

Answers.com:power-sociology

an interesting book

here

Romans 5

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.

- relationship with God is absolutely secure.

Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.

suffering -> perserverence -> character -> hope.
- suffering is purposeful.

And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

- role of Holy Spirit is to give an experience of God's love, by teaching us the cross.


just some notes from focus tonight... really like the picture illustrating the first point.

Pursuits

Some stuff to look over when i'm back:

History of QFT
Maths QFT notes
Physics Gauge field theory
a Hyperphysics page
Central field approximation

also, an interesting blog entry

and...

Westlife

Hm... chanced upon a televised performance by westlife in the B&B while in the lake district, and found that I really like their songs. Have been watching their clips on youtube...



guess it's because their songs remind me of my jc days...

Recall my class theme song, an excerpt of the lyrics:

Day after day I hear myself say
I'll do my tutorials another day...

but if I let you go I will never know
what my life will be without trigonometry
will I ever see an 'A' for chemistry
how will I know

Are there other nice bands out there? Found watching these performances a good way to destress :)

Nice animations from my computational project =)

hm... doesnt animate so well... click on it and force reload(ctrl-f5) to watch =P

Animation program written in fortran, animated with gnuplot... and stitched with a certain 'Animation Shop 3'...

:)

The story of Joseph

Going through the story of joseph on sundays now...

Just a quick thought - in the days of joseph, people were plagued by famine, as they had no control over nature... These days, technology has advanced to the point that we are able to produce the food we need almost without being affected by the problems posed by nature, yet we are plagued by problems that seem equally beyond our control - our modern day famines take the form of economic crises.

Are we any better off than in joseph's time?


And they were playing songs from "Joseph and the amazing technicolour dream coat" after the service... Miss the songs! Does anyone have it??

Midway through term - that was fast!

Wow, and half the term just sped by like that!

Just survived my first wave of heavy days... Had a full day on tuesday - spent 9 hours at the cavendish, 9am to 6pm, for 3 lectures, an example class, and a supervision. Another supervision today which ended with another natsci cookout - the kind organised by second years to welcome first years.

Working backwards, AFF on sunday was good... ah, cant really remember much before that...

Half the term's been quite good.... meeting people who would help me understand work... A lot of catching up to do, but there's hope that it'll go well...

Next two days will be busy too - preparing for temasek's dinner and discussion tmr, computational project and gotta come back and prepare food for cg on friday, then there's reading up for literature review...

CG: working through the book of matthew now, beginning from the beattitudes, and working through the parables...

The story of joseph on sundays, and romans at focus...

Term might go well, please keep praying for me...

Oooo... Ratatouille - Behind the scenes.

The science behind chopping scenes in Raratoullie.

Stumbled on it while searching for ways to handle scalar fields for my computing project.

Update

Ok a quick update on what's been going on...

Been busy... in part with this, as well as school work, which is been piling...

But before i forget, Houseparty's confirmed to be held on 3-6 December (Monday til Thursday), so daddy, can plan your trip around this date. Also, cant find my usb stick when i arraived; and realised that i dont have vit c with me, have been fluish for a while... can help me bring these items from home? Thanks.

Happenings:
It's been two weeks and a bit into school... trying to keep up with work. Had a few cookouts so far - 1 natsci, 1 with cumsa kids.

And had lunch at Lye Chong's place (a grad student at HH) on Sunday... He has a year old son, and he had a church friend from singapore visiting cambridge, whom he invited for lunch too...
Had children's christian music playing in the house, and other children's items like books and toys strewn around the house, bringing back to me recollections of the atmosphere during my own childhood... Met his son a couple of times before, but after playing with him during lunch last sunday, I'm beginning to feel a little attachment with him... oh no...

This term's snack is prob going to be Danish Butter Cookies... They are on offer (99 pences) at sainsburrys for the regular tin, it's usual price is 1.50 pounds. I think it's rather cheap... dunno how much they cost back in sg... Anyhow, it's better than 4 bars of basics chocolate, which i havent touched since i arrived.

And this term's meal would be chicken rice... very cheap and hassle free - usually marinate 3 chicken wings a meal (a pack of around 8 basics chicken wings cost under 1.50 pounds, so 3 chicken wings works out to 50p), then throw it in the rice cooker (with lettuce sometimes), and forget about it til i'm hungry... if i'm cooking with lettuce, would usually take it out afte about 10 mins. Blogging over a bowl of chicken rice now :P

Also i'm doing laundry manually this year, since they raised the price of using the washing machine to 1.40 pounds... It's quite therapeutic actually, good to do after getting bored with work.

Ok, a rather abrupt end to a disjoint post... it's two AM in the morning, and tomorrow's going to be a hactic day, with 5 hours at the cavendish... later...

A Third Time

The clothes I'm bringing. From top left to bottom right:
1) Outing shirts (x5) - two collared shirts, one white long sleeves woollen shirt, one white striped shirt for formals, one white shirt.
2) Home clothes - 4 tops, 2 bottoms.
3) Outing t-shirts (x5)
4) Pants - 5 out door pants, 1 track pants, one berm
5) Towels - 2 bath, 2 face.

Just feel like keeping track of my clothes.

Should have more clothes over in cam... dont know why i'm bringing so many clothes also.

Here's my flight info in case anyone's interested... Who's arriving at LHR at 0550 too?

Singapore (SIN)
Thu, 27 Sep 2007 23:20

London (LHR)
Fri, 28 Sep 2007 05:50

Seat: 53A

Here we go again... Flying alone this time...
Bracing myself for another Cambridge year... *deep breath*

Physics Forums

Just found this:

http://www.physicsforums.com/

might be a solution...

g ~ π2

Here's the answer to an interesting observation I made a while back.

Turns out that there is indeed an explanation for the apparent coincidence.

Go apple! Go orange! GO BANANA!

In case anyone was wondering, here's the origin of the above timeless quote that appears on my msn nick.
Occurs 5 minutes into the clip.



Enjoy!

Catching up on blogging after a long haitus

Wrapped up my attachment on friday with the End of Attachment Presentation...

The 9 weeks on the job was colossally enriching!

Wrote an entire package in Matlab, concorting meshing algorithms, solving underlying problems mathematically, and implementing their solutions computationally. Learned to handle geometric models with nodes, lines, surfaces and elements.

Also read up on the topic "Computations with discrete forms". Some terms used in the topic for future search reference: Barycentric Coordinates, Whitney Forms, Hodge Star, deRham Complex - chain & cochain complexes, a primal and its dual, (discrete) forms.
Set of two Caltech lecture ppts on the topic: Calculus on Meshes 1, Calculus on Meshes 2

Met another intern studying at Stanford who is interested in exactly the same physics as me - QFT and it's likes. Managed to learn up some solid state physics together. It's such a joy to have just one other person with the same mind. Having one other person to affirm concepts at crucial points in a topic can help accelerate the learning process very substancially, something which my situation in Cambridge has left me sorely deficient. Hope it gets better next year.

Today
Spent Saturday, the day after my internship ended, spring cleaning my computer.

Sorted out the documents and programs I have, as well as my music files... itunes duplicates my music each time it reindexes them when i reformat the computer, and it's quite irritating for a song to be played 4 times in a row.

Installed some programing utilities during this round of laptop spring cleaning:
Created a seperate account to code in so that the files can be managed more neatly,
and quite interested in the recent developments at google, in particular the introduction of Google Code, the release of Google Web Toolkit, and Google Calander API. Can now port over the reliability of the google calander to php webpages!

Also keeping an eye out on the developments of Octave, the open source equiv of Matlab. Looks like there is quite a concerted effort in making it run as well as Matlab. Waiting for the version 3 release. Found an editor, SciTE that works for quite a good number of languages - php and matlab among them. And re-exploring java programming along with the previously mentioned gwt.

Looking to next year
Also bearing in mind the course requirements for next year, including the computational component in fortran, as well as all the other topics. Need to translate what I have into gains on my grades! Really hope to find next year's course engaging and its requirements enjoyable to fulfill. Cant see how it's going to come about given the previous two years... Still, hope dies hard.

Optimisation

Just implemented an optimisation code to minimise the lengths of the lines joining the points...

And here's my optimised star!

Some nice images from my internship

Just finished writing a 2D meshing algorithm in Matlab. Here are some visually appealing results generated from the code:

Reckon that these images look rather mundane to most people.

Beauty indeed lies in the eye of the beholder :)

Update

ok, here's an update of hols...

been quite busy, with a day job, and trying to keep in touch with everyone in the evenings and weekends, as well as catching up on last year's work while the luxury of home lasts... Hence the lack of blogging.

have uploaded some pics of eastern europe, but it's still not very presentable yet, need captioning, or at least sort them out in some kind of logical order. but have yet to find the time to do all of those.

upcoming happenings include visiting SAJC on 15 Aug 1430 to help with the UK talk... Anyone interested to come, please call!

work's been good... picking up loads. worked on my linux box remotely from work for a while, installing the simulation program, and running some simulations on it. now utilising programs like matlab, gid, to try to set the problem up - generating the geometry of the problem, as well as the finite element meshing. Supervisor's also really nice, working together on a kinda equal footing to solve problems. Have been communicating with him in chinese, and i'm finding myself thinking in chinese whenever i subconsciously run through the problems! :S like "de2 dao4 le4 zhou1 wei2 de4 nodes yi3 hou4 jiu4 ke2 yi3 qiu2 geometry de4 ping2 jun1" and "magnetisation hui4 chong2 zheng4 de4 bian4 dao4 fu4 de4".

managed to meet up with many people this holiday too!

• Sec sch classmates at Jonathan's send off just days after I returned - alvin, daniel, shawn foo were there.
  
• JC classmates, on a couple of occasions. Jimmy, Chintee, Izz, hanes. Board gamed, and had prata at bukit timah.
  
• Scouts, on a few occasions too. Shamir, varun, tsang, for a board gaming session; plus juniors Wilson, yiming, gerald, austin, sherman, during shamir's send off.
  
• Everyone in church! during the r-age 10th anniversary the day after touch down.
  
• CF people - daniel, lish, ben, lauren, charles, during the bbq and a dinner.
  

Also walked the length of orchard after confluence, to see the ferris wheel, and popped by the newly refurbished museum. They have quite an interesting exhibit on singapore food, complete with a sample of the smells! Watched the simpsons too! but wasnt very good. As jon puts it, it has too much storyline for a simpsons cartoon.

so on the whole, hols have so far been quite fulfilling. would be quite busy still, making the most of the time in sg, as well as accomplishing other things like temasek website and updating links on this blog. blogging might also continue to be sparse.

signing off...

Fedora for the home PC!

Just installed linux on my pc at home. Thanks to HCH for helping me with the installation and orientating me to the interface. Intending to use it mainly as a server for me to back my data up.

Gotta equip it with and test out the following:
LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, to provide the web serving capabilities, mainly to provide nice interfaces for the data I'd be backing up (e.g gallery2 for pictures)...

Ftp Server (filezilla maybe) - to upload my data for backing up.

Telnet perhaps, so that I can execute commands on the computer remotely.

The kind of data I intend to back up fall mainly under into the following categories:
1) Pictures + clips.
2) Music.
3) Movies + games.
4) other files, like word/excel/pdf documents.
5) Installers - I'll back up the installation files of all the programs that I find reliable on my home computer, so that whenever I reformat my computer, I'll have a one-stop location to download the installers I need. Gotta make a list of programs that serve well. Currently looking for a gif animator, and it's been quite difficult to find a good one, I need flash! Also, just found a good Audio File Converter Program, Switch and wavepad.

Have been using them to work on the webpages I'm mastering... Which has been occupying me since I returned.

CCCF website: changed the banner, added a little icon, changed the music, and now I'm hoping to create a little flash applet to synchronize changing pictures with the music. Did a little javascripting on it.

Temasek website: Touched up the look of the 'latest articles' and 'latest comments' panels, and hoping to touch up on the banner, and the aesthetics of the page in general. Did some MySQLing on it.

Back!

Just returned in the morning after 2 weeks of traveling... loads to consolidate - pictures, the trips, my belongings, my work, the internship.

Airport experience was interesting. Checked in rather late, though still within the stipulated time, but was held back by immigration due to an increased alert level (perhaps because of the bomb scare in London). Queued for immigration till past the flight timing of 12, and was given an "advance to go card" soon after 12pm.

Thankfully was able to check in my slightly over the weight limit baggage, perhaps because the airport staff was concerned with the above stated more pressing matters. Upon check in, we were instructed to go straight through security and immigration, and not to loiter in the shops.

K, lots to do now. Trip pics to be up soon (hopefully).