Finally, the last installment of the Cambodia pictures



Cambodia Day 5 - Angkor Wat

Long time since I last posted any photos. Here's a recent batch of my favourite subject, kids.

Touching the bubble machine for the first time


Proof that when people laugh happily, you can't find his/her eyes


Wants to be high up to touch the bubbles


Young and Old

Level 6 - Masters
Live mahjong, eat mahjong and drink mahjong. To be a master in mahjong requires talent and lots of hard work (or hardcore fun). You need practice week in week out. You can be awarded the PhD in mahjong if there exists such a degree. They can make a healthy living by playing mahjong with amatuers like all professional gamblers. They usually have photographic memory.

Knowledge: Sun Tze's art of war, psychology, feng shui and any other fields that could proved useful to the game

Skill: They try every means and ways to hide their true intentions from skilled players and at the same time find out what they are doing. They know how to induce mistakes from skilled players by throwing "dummy" tiles to "cheat" them. They are the true masters of Mahjong.

Playing Style: Their stlye might seemed crazy. Like playing in the dark by covering their tiles and rely on memory and their sense of touch. It may seem irrational at times. Like keeping a useless tile or talking randomly to disturb your train of thought. But beware of a true master.

Self assessment: - NA -

Reaching this level: - NA - Synthesis/creating of revised Bloom's

*I have never met a true master in Mahjong so what I have written here is purely based on my imagination*

Level 5 - Expert
The distinction between an amatuer and an expert is very fine. But the expert is able to read the game better than an amatuer and on top of that, control the development of the game too. To the untrained eyes, they would not be able to tell the difference, to the intermediate and amatuer players, some of their moves does not make sense at all.

Knowledge: Know thyself and know your enemy and the battle is won. An expert game is about knowledge and he makes full use of it with his best of his abilities

Skill: An expert is able to predict the tiles that you want based on your game. He is able to dictate the flow of the game when possible to make it favourable to him. For example, he will play a short 1 fold game to foil your grand plans for a 8 fold set. He will starve you and delay your progress or even let you win a 2-3 fold game on purpose to avoid a 6 fold calamity.

Playing Style: Revolves around his own tiles and his next player's tiles. An expert would at least be able to study his next player in details and devised strategies to control the flow of the game. They may start to adopt some strategies to hide their game intentions from other players like messing up their tiles etc.

Self assessment: - I have yet to master this level - But according to my in-house expert, experts may find themselves losing to beginners and novice simply because they can't predict what they are doing! When they do win, they can win it big against lesser players and few could stand playing against experts unless they are one too.

Reaching this level: - I have yet to master this level - But I guess one has to play against experts and masters to really be one. This got to be the evaluation of revised Bloom's

Level 4 - Amatuer
Amatuers start to appreciate the mahjong game better and truly find it a fun and engaging game that is multidimensional. An amatuer starts to read the mahjong game better and is able to adjust his strategies depending on situation. Amatuers are slowly becoming experts in mahjong but ironically, it become easier for experts to predict their games as they become better.

Knowledge: An amatuer's knowledge of Mahjong would have gone beyond the rules and probability, into the realms of game theories. They appreciate that Mahjong is not an individual game but a game with group dynamics and starts to develop their knowledge in the group game.

Skill: An amatuer is able to read the game based on the tiles that appeared on table. He is able to tell if other players are going for "qing yi se" or "ping hu" when it is less obvious because he has the skill to read the game in general. He knows if this game is going to be a chance for him to strike it big or if this game is one where he needs to be on the defensive stance.

Playing Style: Flexi-logic. No one fixed playing style will win you every game and an amatuer will choose a style he finds most suited for him based on his logical deduction from reading the game.

Self assessment: You find your mahjong skills lacking, especially you feel lost in how to best react to things that you observe. You might be guessing other players intentions and get the "ah ha... I thought so" feeling every now and then

Reaching this level: One needs some form of enlightenment to reach this level. Either you are gifted and develop this aspect of the game yourself, or you have to study how experts play. Or better yet, listen to expert advice and think hard. You need to be observant and have plenty of practice too because you need to do more things at the same time now. This is analysis for revised Bloom's

Cambodia Day 4

Level 3 - Intermediate
Every mahjong game needs at least 1 of this player or better to proceed smoothly. He or she will be the provider of knowledge for the beginners and novices. An intermediate player is able to apply his knowledge of the game and gain an upper hand over beginners and novices most of the time. He is the kind of player who may insists on at least 1 fold (some even 2 folds) to game as such his presence may not be welcomed by novice and beginners but his knowledge is valuable to their further education in mahjong. Mahjong can be fun when intermediate players play against others with equal or lower skill level but it can be frustrating too if they pit themselves against better players.

Knowledge: Their knowledge of Mahjong includes the more obscure rules such as the game ends with 15 tiles undrawn and in what situations you have to "Bao" a player when you lose. They know many different game sets including high end sets like "Da San Yuan", "Si Xi" and even "Jiu Zhi Lian Huan".

Skill: Intermediate players start to look beyond luck and develop the probabilistic aspect of their game now. They know that having 6 and 8 bamboo is better than 8 and 9 bamboo. They are learning how to change their tiles to increase their chances of winning. Some might practice simple tricks like discarding 1 and 9 tiles first to reduce chances of losing. They start to read the tiles on the table for the purpose of calculating probabilities too. They are able to change their game strategies when it is obvious that they have little chance to overpower a player with a better suit of tiles.

Playing Stlye: Individualistic style. An intermediate player may have a few tricks in his sleeve but his style of playing revolves around his own tiles. He tries to increase his chances of winning and perhaps tries to hard to win big. Similarly, they may apply their probabilistic approach to reduce their chances of losing. Their style becomes very predictable to the expert's eyes even though they may seem like experts to others.

Self assessment: Your believe in Mahjong shifted from luck to probability and it seems to you that you have already maximised your chances of winning. But some how, when you played against better players, you always seem to be at the losing end. Experts give you the nickname "cannon" or "pao shou" if you are reckless because you are likely to be responsible for throwing the losing tile.

Reaching this level: You need more mahjong experience for this level and on top of that, understanding some basic probability would help you in achieving this level quickly. This is the application of probability in Mahjong, a game of chance. Application level for revised Bloom's obviously.

You know, when you attend some graduation ceremony, there will be photographers taking pictures of you collecting the prize and you have to pay an arm and a leg for just 2 5R photographs that will take them 2 months to process and mail it to you? Guess what, these photos are like 2 months old too.. and I left it in my harddisk after sorting and conveniently forgot about it.

Anyway, it's better to be late than never.. so here ya go... large size pics that you can print decent photos with it. You can only find your photos if and only if I happen to know you. Not going to put up those that I don't know but if you want yours, please let me know and send me a picture of yourself so I can find some time to look for it. Be prepared for a 2 months processing period.



Speech Day Prize Winners

Level 2 - Novice

The novice could operate largely independent of an advisor. It takes at most 15 minutes of mahjong to expose his novice style because he is still lacking in many areas. Novice players are those who pay school fees to play mahjong if they play against better skilled players.

Knowledge: They know some of the common game sets such as "Qing yi se", "ping hu" and of course "shi san yao". They have started to count folds ("tai" or "fan") too but may not be very proficient in it. Their knowledge of the rules are still incomplete but they would seem competent to some extent.

Skill: On the surface, they can play like an expert because they would have sufficient practice in stacking and drawing tiles. Other than that, their game depends more on faith and luck rather than logic and probability and they usually ignore the tiles that appeared on the table unless it affects them directly.

Playing Style: Mostly direct style. Depending on their personality, their styles would vary but on the whole its still direct. E.g. An emo person would play as their mood like, a cautious person will go for small but easy game sets, a boisterous one always try for big games.

Self assessment: If you believe in luck rather than skill in Mahjong, then you most likely fall into this category of players.

Reaching this level: Spend at least an hour to memorise the game sets and get a few rounds of mahjong in you. Getting to this level should be rather easy if you try. This is like the understanding level for revised Bloom's.

Level 1 - Beginner

The beginner almost always have an advisor behind him and the slowest player in the group. They can be easily spotted with their confused facial expressions and exaggerated movements of mahjong tiles and the bored faces of other players.

Knowledge: They basically learned 3 rules to play Mahjong. 1) Everybody have 13 Mahjong tiles. 2) One needs 4 sets of three tiles and 1 set of two tiles to win. 3) Sets of three comes in ordered sequences or similar tiles. In additional, you know about the bamboo, "tong" and "wanzi" and could tell the difference (most of the time) between 1 bamboo tile and a "flower" tile

Skill: Basic tile stacking skill. Could be seen stacking tiles with two fingers like those doll machines. They play strictly by the rules only.

Playing Style: Rojak style. Anything will do for you as long as you can game

Self assessment: If you need constant reminders on where to draw your next tile, wished you have a hotline on 24/7 standby to answer your 101 queries on Mahjong, spent more than 4 hours on one round of mahjong, don't understand what is one round of mahjong, then you are very likely to be in this category.

Reaching this level: All you need is 15 minutes of time, a mahjong book or any mahjong guru (level 2 and above) to go through the rules with you and show you the tiles. In revised Bloom's Taxonomy, this is strictly a remembering level skill. A crash course before filling in the role as the 4th Mahjong player.

Plus I have so many stuff that I wanted to blog about but just no time to sit down, relax and work on it... sigh... been too busy during the hols... one more week to go... got to rest... for the weekend.. yeah...

Sucre is happy today.. hee... I'm happy.. happy tired man.

For those who urgently wants to see some more pictures from Cambodia without captions whatsoever, look no further. Selected Day 1 and Day 2 pics are up...



Cambodia Day 1 Misc



Cambodia Day 2

Going to take a few days break from now onwards... sitemeter also down for 2 days already... mid way of the June holidays, CHAOS preparation coming up... 2 more weeks of preparation work to do before term reopens.... A whole list of work to do... Starcraft 2 coming soon... life is good.

Something old but still interesting nonetheless...


MTV version


Original version

Ever wondered why we study logarithms? What's the practical use of it and why the way we look at significant numbers is different when we consider logarithms? The answer lie in the slide rule. This is something random that I read from Scientific American.


A slide rule

A slide rule is the calculator of the past. This is an advanced equipment to do multiplication, division and square roots etc with relative ease. It is possible because multiplication and division is simply addition and subtraction in logarithm and powers become simple multiplication while roots are division. A check on the log table would give us a rather accurate estimate.

Read more about the slide rule from wikipedia...

A random lesson brought to you by mastermind.

Slowly but surely I'm going to upload photos taken in Cambodia into webshots... meanwhile, here's a caption less slide show of the royal palace.



Royal Palace, Phnom Penh

For some unknown reasons, I developed this rash that's driving me crazy since yesterday night... arrghhh... now it's concentrated on my left arm only. What did I eat/what bit me... crappy...

Will probably take years to sort out the pictures that I took. Still converting them from raw format using my pc and laptop. But here's THE photo that I like best taken at Angkor Wat, one of the great ancient wonders of the world.