Agronesia

When I was having a walk yesterday morning, I found this praying mantis:

She didn’t try to run when I took him up. Closer examination revealed that both of her eyes seemed to be damaged. She was injured and probably blind. A disease? Poor little thing.

So, rather than let her have a tragic face of being crushed by mechanical whatnots, I took her home. I just let her stand on my hands along the way. After photographing her, I put her on a bush on my back yard.

Following the recent meme on Planet Ubuntu (like this post), I’ll tell you what my laptop’s name is: agro-314159

Obvious one part is my name, and the random numbers are actually something you can eat.

IIRC, my old desktop’s name is agro-271828 which has the digits of e. What’s so special about e? Well, I like the fact that the derivative of e^x is itself.

Let’s spread this meme out of the planet. Make a similar post on your blog, and link back to this post (or any such planet post).

Steve Pavlina mentions on his various blog posts about batching. (There was actually one post specifically discussing it, but I couldn’t find it) Basically, it’s grouping related tasks and doing it in one session instead of spreading it the whole day.

For example, lets talk about checking emails. People who are always connected to the Internet usually have a compulsion to check their email at random intervals. That is a productivity loss, because most probably you are actually in the process of doing something else important. With batching, you say to yourself: “OK, I’ll just check all new emails every morning. Other emails arriving throught the day can be checked the next morning”.

I’m now in the process of applying it. Other than emails, there are RSS reader and various SNS that I use which can really waste time if you get into the habit of checking them periodically. Batching gives me extra time which is a luxury in our 24-hour day.

I read Steve Pavlina’s article Overclock Your Audio Learning a while back. Basically, he advocates playing audio materials at a faster-than-usual speed.

This can be accomplished by players such as Windows Media Player. In version 11, you can change the speed from View - Enhancements - Play Speed Settings. By clicking Fast, the speed will be brought to 1.4x. You can start from there and increase it gradually until you can’t handle anything faster.

I myself listen to the podcast japanesepod101.com. For the Japanese dialogue on the beginning, I still use normal speed. However for the English explanations, I apply this method.

It works! At 1.4x, I can still comprehend the talk very much. Of course I was first uncomfortable hearing Peter and others speak at an unnatural speed, but after some while I didn’t really mind.

If you listen to podcasts, try to use this listening technique. You can really save time if you’ve mastered the high speeds.

I found this card game Xeco with ecosystem as its background topic, so you’ll have real animals instead of made up monsters. If you know Yu-Gi-Oh!, then yeah, the basic idea is to fight with our card, but the gameplay is different.

Somehow they have an Indonesian mission (a pack of cards?):

Go Indonesia!

(but why in the earth do they put ™ to the right of the word “Indonesia”? It’s my country’s name dammit!)

But we have to buy it, either in a USA real shop or online. It would be great if they provide the files for us to print ourselves :P.

What if you tried your best in this world, but your sins still outweigh your good deeds and you got thrown into hell? Worry not, my friend, for Google Maps has it’s answer!

According to Google, the journey from hell to heaven is only about 4 hours and 19 minutes! And how amusing it is that both hell and heaven are in the USA!

But anyway, it’s an amazing piece of technology. It can even schedule your JR trips!

If you need an Indonesian word list, probably for language processing, a starting point to make your uber dictionary, or others, here it is:

indonesian_word_list.zip (103 KB, 36203 entries)

The data is from the Indonesian dictionary for OpenOffice.org, kindly provided by Benitius Brevoort. I searched for it a long time ago for my program WordFinder which is used to find suitable words for mnemonics. For English words, I could just use the regex in Stardict.

I hope you find it useful.

I dare say this Mr. 588011503136145672 is an elliptical galaxy

I found this website named Galaxy Zoo. After we register there and pass the test (yes, there’s a test!) we can start help them classify galaxies! Another great way to spend your time when you’re bored.

Although there are only 6 categories to choose there, apparently asking for human help is better than making a program to classify it. If you don’t know anything about galaxy shapes (like me), don’t worry because there’s a very visitor-friendly tutorial.

From the 15-question test, I answered 12 correctly and passed:

Thanks to the tutorial, I now know some stuffs about galaxy classification. First we have the boring elliptical ones and the more interesting spiral ones. The spiral galaxies can be further classified based on their twirling direction, clockwise or counter clockwise. Then we also have image of merging galaxies and anomalous image caused by stars or satellites.

Most of the stuffs I encountered there were low quality blobs so far, but I’m hoping to discover a conical galaxy one day.

By Anonymous coward on Slashdot, with some modifications:

Teacher: “Did you write this whole thing yourself?”
Student: “Yes, of course!”
Teacher: “Are you sure”
Student: “Yes, 100%”
Teacher: “Well, a huge chunk of your report is straight from Wikipedia. I already checked it.”
Student: “Um, yeah, well, um I wrote that Wikipedia page.”

Luckily in Wikipedia we have complete log of edits, so that claims like that can be checked :).

You surely must have seen the logo above lots of times, right? The characters in the puzzle pieces there represent scripts from different parts of the world. Each Script should show the letter that most closely resembles “wi”, the starting syllable of Wikipedia.

However, let us look at the katakana inside it:

See anything wrong?

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