It's Showtime!... After These Messages.

The slaughtering has already begun, but I won't have to face the exams until the next weekend:

PC4242 Electrodynamics
030508 0900

PC4245 Particle Physics
060508 1700

MA3264 Mathematical Modelling
070508 1300

Phew! Only three exams, but the first one is much to be feared.

Okay, time to start mugging the hell out of Maxwell's equations and Larmor's formulae.

A Disappointing Report on Mas Selamat's Escape

A few comments about the recent report on Mas Selamat's escape.

The Day of Reckoning

I'm pretty much slacking my life away these few days. In my defence, the end of last week was a bit of a stretch, though it required little effort on my part: Friday was the physics honours year project presentations, and I was hopping from venue to venue trying to catch as many as possible the entire day (Yen Kheng was right in saying that it's like a movie marathon). Saturday was SPS Congress, where I sat through another five hours of presentations. So I was pretty much worn out by then.

Beyond that the tsunami a.k.a. exams are looming near the horizon. This is my most relaxing semester in NUS (of course disregarding last semester at the ANU): 5 modules this semester, and 2 are non-examinable (though doing the presentations was quite some hell to go through; I was thoroughly grilled to death in one of them).

I haven't really gotten down to proper revision yet, but to be honest, it's still a bit too early. My first paper is the 030508, quite nearly halfway into the exam periods. One more on the sixth, and another on the following day, and I'm done for the semester. But the first paper (PC4242 Electrodynamics) is a super killer, and I anticipate that I'd be spending nearly all my time studying for it. Considering that I got 30 for the first test and 54 for the second, there is a dire need for me to get prepared.

Well, I suppose I only have myself to blame to take a module with the super-geniuses of the higher batch and my batch combined.

The Last Superhero of Physics

John Archibald Wheeler passed away on Sunday morning in the US. He is one of the last of the heroes from the Golden Age of physics, which has seen giants like Einstein, Heisenberg and Feynman advancing our knowledge of Nature by leaps.

Wheeler is responsible for popularising concepts of general relativity, as well as introducing the terms "black hole" and "wormhole" to the scientific community. While he himself has not won a Nobel Prize (though he did get a Wolf Prize not too long ago), he has supervised Feynman on his approach to quantum electrodynamics which lead to the 1965 Nobel Prize for Feynman. Other than Feynman, other well-known students of his are Kip Thorne, Jacob Bekenstein (who contributed significantly to black hole thermodynamics) and Hugh Everett (famous for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics).

I think it cannot be denied that with his passing, it symbolised the end of the Golden Age. What comes next... who shall be the next superhero... it shall remain to be seen.

A Lawsuit to Save the World

This is a little old news, but it turns out that, as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) gears for activation, someone is filing a lawsuit to stop it from operation.

Yes, that's like when billions of dollars and years of preparation has went into it. Pretty last minute, if you ask me. And if LHC gets delayed again, these guys are probably gonna be the number one enemy of millions of scientists: the LHC was already delayed once from November last year to the middle of this year.

Apparently, they are worried that the LHC will spawn something that gobbles up the Universe, or at least Earth. It is not impossible, of course, but in that case we might as well ban the upcoming Olympics. You'll never know if some athlete runs so fast, he breaks some sort of human-light interaction barrier and create a time vortex that converts everyone into cockroaches.

It's not impossible, you know...

OSA in the Firing Line

Just went to the NUSSU/OSA dialogue session. At the start, OSA released some numbers. It turns out that the increase in number of applicants wasn't a lot... maybe 200 more, as I can recall from memory. But apparently, that was enough to drive the CCA cutoff points from 38 to 45. And until University Town is up and running in 2010, there's very little OSA can do.

In any case, the questioners can mainly be divided into two classes: those who point out flaws in the hostel system, and those who accuse OSA of doing a poor job. A couple of suggestions were made, some reminiscent of the recent NTU threesome episode, but most comments and questions fall largely into the two category, including one person who kept hogging the microphone and debating with the OSA people (and interrupting another person asking a question as well).

Well, judging from the kind of responses of the audience and the questioners, I think most people did not get what they want, which is probably one of the following two things. One, for OSA to pull some new hostel rooms out of their pockets; two, for OSA to say that they've screwed up so bad it's worse than letting Mas Selamat escape.

However, it appears to me as if these people have pretty much ruled out the possibility of renting an apartment outside. I don't really know why, to be honest...

The NUS Hostel Crisis

Everyone has probably heard about the dire hostel situation in NUS this year, and probably also the small protest outside the OSA office yesterday. With the CCA cutoff point at a ridiculous 45 points, many people were unable to secure a hostel application, and this of course includes many foreigners.

Actually, it's a rather sad situation, for one to work hard to collect sufficient CCA points to qualify for hostels, and yet find out that all that effort and the time spent are going to waste. But then again, with limited hostels, what other choices does OSA have? CCA points were designed to give a good measure of the level of activeness of a student, yet it can easily be abused.

In addition, I have no idea what NUS can do. I do know that NUS owns a number of blocks/apartments outside campus, but they're largely reserved for graduate students (but the situation for them is worse) and visitors. NUSSU has organised a dialogue session with OSA (which I'm probably gonna join in and kay poh), but really, how much can it do?

Even before the hostel application for the next academic year, I have already considered renting a flat outside. Now with so many of my friends all potentially homeless, I now have seven people who are looking to share a room. But it's no way that it'll get better: with so many people not able to secure a hostel, the rents of accommodations outside campus will soar. Already, I heard it's $2500 a month for a two-room flat...

And to think I heard, a while ago when NUS raised its hostel fees, some people complain that hostel fees are way too high.


EDIT: the $2500 figure is probably erroneous, since it can't have risen so much from ~$1500 half a year ago. Probably faulty source.