There's a long history (I believe so) that Physics people couldn't mix with Mathematics people and Mathematics people couldn't stand Physics people because of the way we do mathematics. Honestly speaking, I can't stand Maths people who bring the rigour they have for Mathematics into reality because Mathematics is just not meant for the real world. (Mathematics here refer to pure Mathematics, the one with axioms and theorems, not the Mathematics in counting and multiplying, that's applied Maths)

Einstein once said this

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

At Least one side is black
A Mathematician, an engineer and a physicist were traveling through Scotland when they saw a black sheep through the window of the train.

"Aha", says the engineer, "I see that Scottish sheep are black."

"Hmm", says the physician, "You mean that some Scottish sheep are black".

"No", says the mathematician, "All we know is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland, and that at least one side of that one sheep is black!"

As far as all practical purposes
A mathematician and a physicist agree to a psychological experiment. The (hungry) mathematician is put in a chair in a large empty room and his favorite meal, perfectly prepared, is placed at the other end of the room.

The psychologist explains, "You are to remain in your chair. Every minute, I will move your chair to a position halfway between its current location and the meal."

The mathematician looks at the psychologist in disgust. "What? I'm not going to go through this. You know I'll never reach the food!" And he gets up and storms out.

The psychologist ushers the physicist in. He explains the situation, and the physicist's eyes light up and he starts drooling. The psychologist is a bit confused. "Don't you realize that you'll never reach the food?" The physicist smiles and replies: "Of course! But I'll get close enough for all practical purposes!"

There's more in life than living in all the minute details, that is to enjoy it while it lasts, now that's practical!

Update (29/3/06): I wish I could do this to those Maths people who are not meant for the real world and yet think so highly of themselves and are so condescending.

Spend a couple of hours figuring out how to package my own photographs... hope you will enjoy it. There's a couple of series to share today, first is of course our cute little xiaobudian.









Coming up next is the sunset series, though I only included one photo. Haha, plenty of single photo series today.



The artistic series



The flower series



Last but not least, the moon series





Oh boy.. did I had fun doing all these..

Tagged: singapore moon sunset cute flowers photoblog dsc h1

Don't you just love scams and scandals? The latest scandal in town is not about the cheerleader turned pr0n star Tammy of NYP but an alleged rafflesian, who goes by the nick of Roti Prata, lied.

What's the big deal with lying?

Well, the story goes like this. He posted photos on Clubsnap, a local photography enthusiaist forum, and claimed that he took those photos. The photo looks like the one below.



He claim that he managed to sit in the cockpit from a local flight to L.A. yada~~ and gladly cook up a cock and bull story on how he got into the cockpit, how he took those photos and stuff. Pretty impressive stuff.

Then some smart guy pointed out that the cockpit shows a bearing of 296, which in laymen terms means the wrong direction. So our rotiboy came out with another cock and bull story to cover his previous cock and bull story.

2 months later, after he earned the respect and admiration from countless of unsuspecting forum goers, his cock and bull story was exposed. It turned out that he did not take those pictures.

Then this roti prata boy created another account to apologise for his mistake, perhaps to cover his tracks or some reasons unknown to us, and later claim that he had problems with his original account. In less than 12 hours, this had attracted over 200 responses in clubsnap and the admin had to close the thread before it blows out of hand. But the admin did so by refuting claims of placing roti prata account in any restrictions thereby plunging roti prata's reputation to a new low.

Now it seems that his school principal got the wind out of it and asked for his explanation, especially now that the world know that he is a rafflesian (this got to rank just below the rjc teacher terror scandal couple years back).

Currently, members of clubsnap had put down their parang and opened their arms for the grand happy ending to this episode, just like our local drama serials. Who needs TCS drama when we get real life equivalent one online regularly.

Tagged: singapore RJC scam scandal tammy bukit batok rafflesian

Finally woke up early today to catch the morning sun with my camera. It's a shame that I didn't use a tripod otherwise I could have blended the images together for a higher dynamic range. Oh.. saw a pussy cat when I was helping out in washing car and took some photos of it too. Hope you will enjoy this series of photos.


Flaming sun, the clouds made the sun like it's on fire (yah, the sun is burning but this add more effects to the heat)


The two towers


The two towers demystified


Reflections from a washed car


Pussy cat under the car. I kinda like the effects out of this shot. The details of the whiskers and fur are pretty clear too.

All photos are straight out from camera without post-processing (only resize or cropped)

Tagged: singapore sunrise cat car hyundai getz dsc h1

Finally, with some good fortunes, I manage to capture some nice H1 sun. There was only a couple of minutes for me to take these shots before the sun disappears from the horizon. In fact, I even got a complimentary moon given that the moon is almost full tonight. On the west we have the setting sun, on the eat we have our rising moon. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.


The sun is much bigger than the moon of course and this is the cropped resized version.


Original uncropped resized version


Sunset @ Clementi 1


Sunset @ Clementi 2


Rising moon


Early moon. I did not do 100% crop as the early moon is more fuzzy perhaps due to the optical thickness/dust between the longer distance.

A note to self, vignetting seems serious especially at the last photo. Notice this problem during the evening time at full zoom.

Oh man, this had taken up too much of my time... back to lesson plans, soon...

Tagged: singapore sunset moonrise dsc h1

The moon shots that became a standard in the blog


The Indian religious ceremony? across the car park as seen from my house 12 stroeys high.


Birds in flight some distance away.

It's the school holidays. So more time to play with my toys.

Tagged: singapore moon birds dsc h1

The greatest flattery one could get is when others uses your lesson plan. I had not one but two experience teachers who expressed interest in one of my lesson plans. The one with the flowers shot I posted last time.

The lesson was about students going around schools trying to find the flowers and plants in the photos and search for the hint cards hidden in the area. The hint cards comprises a task for students to work on and they have to move on to the next plant after completing the task. It's like the amazing race - school edition. The students loved it, so did some teachers.

Just hope that the students did learn from it.

Tagged: singapore teacher education

Reading about all the speculations got me all excited about the successor to my H1... If it truely live up to it's hype, I guess the H5 could be a good buy even if it means that I will have 2 similar cameras. I mean, just look at all the improvements from H1 that Sony is slowly releasing according to both the official site and from respectable professional in forums...

1.) 7.1 mp versus 5.1 mp
2.) 3" LCD screen with 230, 000 pixels and new anti-glare coating for use in bright light versus 2.5" LCD with only 115, 000 pixels.
3.) SuperHAD CCD that allows larger photosites (supposedly less noise compared to H1)
4.) Effective ISO up to 1000 versus ISO up to 400 (sample photos are distinctively less noisy but is ISO1000 relatively clean? This is the key feature that will persuade me if I am going to get the H1 successor)
5.) 13 stops flash control versus 3 stops (no more tissue to manually tone down flash)
6.) Self Timer 2" and 10" versus 10" only (useful for tripod shots to reduce shake)
7.) Zooming in video mode versus can't zoom in video mode
8.) Manual Focus Bordering (a border drawn around objects in best focus making MF useful)
9.) Comes in classic black finish body.

What got me most excited is the prospects of a relatively clean ISO 800 for H5. Sony did well with ISO 1000 for one of the latest camera release and if they manage to do the same for H5, that will mean more than 2 full stops of usable sensitivity in H5 compared to H1. It means I could use the H5 for indoor shots reasonably well too. That's just about 1 stop below our average dSLR in the market that offers up to ISO1600 sensitivity.

Now the wait is for the production camera to come out and reviews on the image quality. If it proves to be a winner, I know what I want for the coming Christmas. Plus, I get to use my wide angle and teleconvertor lens on H5 too, and the spare AA batteries. Besides, Sucre had been complaining about my old P3 being very slow.. so maybe I could sell it off and finance a compact camera for her instead...

It's great that I could use photography to help in my lessons. In the short 3 weeks, I had use it in more than 2 occasions and I plan to use some of my photos in the next lesson too. At least this gives me another reason to spend it when I get my bonus... But that's still another 9 months away. Back to lesson plans..

Tagged: singapore dsc h5 dsc h1

No, this isn't an advertisement for Canon Powershot, these are some actions taken at the physoc staff and student games..



There's a couple more in flickr and a few more in my harddisk... Enjoy

Tagged: singapore tennis nus physics society dsc h1

The most convenient way to revisit some of my pictures taken was to point it downstairs for this fruit. (Second will be to wait for birds but the plants outside my house ain't flowering now).

Here's the 2 pic I got with different aperture used compared to without the teleconversion lens.


F = 3.7, the branches are slightly out of focus


F = 6.3, the branches are now sharper


Previously taken without the teleconversion lens

Plus, I managed to capture the karang guni man when he was horning for business 12 storeys down while standing in the shade casted by the opposite block in the afternoon.


Looks like our karang guni man spotted us taking a candid shot of him from at least 30m away

Should there be a fire downstairs and firemen came to my block, I know I could stay at home and capture all the action.

Tagged: singapore fruits dsc h1

Nice bright colours of the DSC H1.

Every now and then you take a photo to be pleasantly surprise with the H1. This shot was taken in the electronics shop when I was trying on the telephoto convertor today. I just raise my camera and took a random shot off the street. Boy when I got home to look at it, the colours in this shot is just amazing.. Yellow, green, blue and the multi colour fence.. Gotta love that colour curve in the H1... This shot is straight out of camera without any editing...

And yes.. I got that telephoto lens.. I was wondering if it is worth the money but when I dreamt of it yesterday night.. I knew I gotta buy it sooner or later... Wanted to get it with the close-up lens but it's out of stock.. what a shame. Of course, here's the complimentary moon shot with the tele-conversion lens on...


More details on the moon surface on this 100% crop.

Now I have a 25.2mm to 734.4mm equivalent coverage with my H1 and all at the price of ~1.2k only... Less than the price of R1! Of course, few years later, I will be looking forward to a R10 camera when I have the $$ to spare. A superb fixed lens digicam with matching capabilities, responsiveness and image quality of a SLR.

Tagged: singapore moon photos dsc h1

I was taking loads of photos in school today for my lower secondary science lesson next week and unexpectedly captured a nice shot of this flower. The rest were just average shots. Since I need to print like 2" by 1.5" in black and white for my handouts, I didn't take much effort but sometimes you do get a bit luckier with the camera.



Enjoy your day!

singapore flowers dsc h1

To take any meaningful photos of anything or crap about stuff...

Here's something as a filler to keep this site "updated", a view from NUS.



Tagged: singapore nus dsc h1