http://stargrads.net/blogs/davinci everything is an experiment Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:11:48 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 fa This post will not mean very much to anyone other than myself. Albert Kwok-Wai Yeung 「楊國偉」 and Agnes Yuk-Lan Yu 「余玉蘭」 are child abusers. I just wanted to post this fact on the Internet so that it can be recorded for posterity. The nature of child abuse is such that it ... http://stargrads.net/blogs/davinci/2010/03/albert-kwok-wai-yeung-and-agnes-yuk-lan-yu-are-child-abusers/ The previous post advertising the Perimeter Institute's Master's program reminded me of this book, which continues my series “a life in books”. The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss is geared more towards Star Trek fans than towards physicists. I remember thinking that it needed some equations, although ... http://stargrads.net/blogs/davinci/2009/12/the-physics-of-star-trek-by-lawrence-m-krauss/ Reposted from my Facebook: This is a poster for a Christmas Party hosted by Campus for Christ which is found all over UW campus. The problem with it is that the Arabic writing at the top is wrong. As anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the Arabic script knows, the ... http://stargrads.net/blogs/davinci/2009/12/glyph-shaping-poster-fail/ I was asked to pass this information along to anyone who might be interested: Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI), in partnership with the University of Waterloo, welcomes applications to the Masters level course, Perimeter Scholars International (PSI). Exceptional students with an undergraduate honours degree in Physics, Math, Engineering or ... http://stargrads.net/blogs/davinci/2009/11/perimeter-scholars-international-masters-program-in-theoretical-physics/ I don't quite remember where I saw this problem, but I'm sure it's appeared in a number of places. Given two strings \(s\) and \(t\), determine whether a string \(u\) is formed by interweaving \(s\) and \(t\). That is, determine whether \(u\) can be formed by taking the ... http://stargrads.net/blogs/davinci/2009/11/programming-exercise-interweaved-strings/ I've been practising coding on the whiteboard for job interviews. This is very different than coding in front of a computer which has a keyboard, a monitor, and a nice editing program that allows you to correct your mistakes and type repetitive text very quickly. I'm trying to ... http://stargrads.net/blogs/davinci/2009/11/programming-exercise-red-white-blue-sorting/ I recently got a new smart phone -- an Android-powered HTC Dream. As I wrote in a previous post, one of the first applications that I always look for is a multilingual dictionary, or at the very least a way to enter input in languages other than English. It took ... http://stargrads.net/blogs/davinci/2009/11/persian-soft-keyboard-and-applications-for-android/ I've collected a number of web sites with lists of programming exercises, which I'm going through for practice. In no particular order, these are: Project Euler (a spin-off of MathsChallenge.net) Sphere Online Judge TopCoder Code Kata The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest -- Past Problems Valladolid Online Judge The following are language-specific: C/C++ Programming Challenge Problems About.com C/C++/C# Programming Challenges Python ... http://stargrads.net/blogs/davinci/2009/10/lists-of-programming-exercises/ I happened upon this passage in a book called The Chinese Language: Its History and Current Usage by Daniel Kane, in a section on loanwords from Sanskrit: In some words, only one part of the original has survived: the ní in 尼姑 ní​gū​ "Buddhist nun" is the last syllable of the ... http://stargrads.net/blogs/davinci/2009/10/its-what-the-nuns-wear-when-they-go-swimming/ It's been a while since I've made a post in the series “a life in books”. This textbook was a gift from Dr. John Percy, professor of astronomy at the University of Toronto. I did some research on Be stars with Dr. Percy while I was in high school, and ... http://stargrads.net/blogs/davinci/2009/10/horizons-exploring-the-universe-by-michael-a-seeds/