Awesome website, awesome stuff

Not sure if I'm slow, I just discovered this awesome site called Quora. It provides a platform for people to discuss their topics of interest, much like reddit. I think I must be slow to discover it because I already have two friends in my google contacts there! Some of the questions the users posted are really interesting. Here I'm going to share an interesting paradox I stumbled upon:

A  baby girl is mysteriously dropped off at an orphanage in Cleveland in  1945. "Jane" grows up lonely and dejected, not knowing who her parents  are, until one day in 1963 she is strangely attracted to a drifter. She  falls in love with him. But just when things are finally looking up for  Jane, a series of disasters strike. First, she becomes pregnant by the  drifter, who then disappears. Second, during the complicated delivery,  doctors find that Jane has both sets of sex organs, and to save her  life, they are forced to surgically convert "her" to a "him." Finally, a  mysterious stranger kidnaps her baby from the delivery room.

Reeling  from these disasters, rejected by society, scorned by fate, "he"  becomes a drunkard and drifter. Not only has Jane lost her parents and  her lover, but he has lost his only child as well. Years later, in 1970,  he stumbles into a lonely bar, called Pop's Place, and spills out his  pathetic story to an elderly bartender. The sympathetic bartender offers  the drifter the chance to avenge the stranger who left her pregnant and  abandoned, on the condition that he join the "time travelers corps."  Both of them enter a time machine, and the bartender drops off the  drifter in 1963. The drifter is strangely attracted to a young orphan  woman, who subsequently becomes pregnant.

The bartender then goes  forward 9 months, kidnaps the baby girl from the hospital, and drops  off the baby in an orphanage back in 1945. Then the bartender drops off  the thoroughly confused drifter in 1985, to enlist in the time travelers  corps. The drifter eventually gets his life together, becomes a  respected and elderly member of the time travelers corps, and then  disguises himself as a bartender and has his most difficult mission: a  date with destiny, meeting a certain drifter at Pop's Place in 1970.

The  question is: Who is Jane's mother, father, grandfather, grand mother,  son, daughter, granddaughter, and grandson? The girl, the drifter, and  the bartender, of course, are all the same person. These paradoxes can  make your head spin, especially if you try to untangle Jane's twisted  parentage. If we draw Jane's family tree, we find that all the branches  are curled inward back on themselves, as in a circle. We come to the  astonishing conclusion that she is her own mother and father! She is an  entire family tree unto herself.

That is why, time travel must not be made possible, not within the same universe at least.

Took the test again...

As I've mentioned in my previous post, I was bored. I was so bored I started to scroll through my previous posts and stumbled across this one: http://rainbowishsmiley.blogspot.sg/2013/11/i-have-come-to-conclusion-that-my-life.html

Curious, I took the test again to see how I'll score now. Bleh, not much  difference.

http://www.okcupid.com/results/the-sublime-philosophical-crap-test/?var_Metaphysics=8&var_Ethics=4&var_Epistemology=3&fromCGI=1

Too much maths so I shall post instead

Yeah I was doing some maths at khan academy because I'm genuinely bored. That's not to say I have nothing to do. I have loads of things to do but they will just make me more bored, like filing my stuff and cleaning my room etc. I was doing implicit differentiation and almost committed suicide because it's just so easy to make mistakes and one small mistake kills it all, furthermore I have to get 5 correct in a row. So I gave up and did some boring quadratics, then I decided to come here instead.



So yesterday I had a fun time simulating a conversation with a fictional teacher in my brain. In my mind I was a innocent and naive person (on purpose) and I was sleeping in a teacher's class (the teacher is someone I don't know, just a dummy taking the role). The teacher spotted me and shouted to wake me up. I rise my head and opened my buggy eyes, only to see the teacher's angry face. I was made to stand.

"Do you know what you just did?" The teacher shouted.
"I slept in your class."
"Why would you do so?"
"Because your lessons are really boring."
The teacher got really angry and raised his/her voice.
"Do you know how rude you are?"
"And you are equally rude to me." I replied.
"Stand for the rest of the lesson and see me after this." The teacher snapped.
"Why should I stand?" I became confused.
"You were extremely disrespectful!" The teacher shouted at the top of his/her lungs.
"But you are not respecting me either. I believe respect is to be earned. Now, we respect you because you are a teacher, hence you are expected to be wiser and more knowledgeable than us. But now, you seem to be abusing your authority, which makes me doubt whether you are worth of the respect."
"What do you say? To the principal's office, now!"

And so I went to the principal whom is of no importance because he/she is a more sensible person and allow this matter to be resolved personally by me apologising to the teacher.

After the incident the naive me in character thought that things ought to improve. Therefore, I sent an email to the teacher, firstly apologising again. Then I wrote "I believe that to prevent further unhappy incidents of this kind, we must resolve the root of the matter..." and then a long essay on how his/her lessons can be made less boring. In the end, signing off I smiled to myself, thinking how I can survive through the lessons more easily after the changes are made.

Yeah that totally doesn't happen in real life. Everything is created in my brain and I don't even act like that in reality. I'm experienced enough to know that people will be angry and not all people are willing to take criticisms. Still I wonder what happens if I really do this. This is what I mean, when I said that sometimes I'll create little scenarios in my mind to amuse myself.

Really, sleeping in class is bad. Don't do it. And the teacher I created here is a not so nice one. I believe most teachers are nice people, although most teachers don't like their authority to be challenged.

I'm really bored. Do other people also get bored this easily?

Merry Christmas Everyone!!!

Yo people merry Christmas! Although I'm not a Christian I still like the atmosphere during Christmas time.

Still, I'm not going to change my blog background (the nightmare before christmas) for Christmas. I still like halloween more and I didn't get any nightmares yesterday.

Anyway, merry Christmas!!!

This is a flash I did during sec 2 (I think) for my ICT project. I was obsessed with angry birds back then.

Urg how do you insert flash into the webpage...

Oh yay!

Just rambling

I'm using my phone to blog again. Sadly I can only write in html so I have to manually insert paragraphing. I've just returned to sg. To be honest the trip isn't very interesting. As with all group tours to China, we were brought around to many sponsored shops for shopping and the attractions are so commercialised it sort of ruined the experience a bit. But the main point I want to make is not really about the trip but rather how I find myself to be a socially awkward person.

People relations have always been a hard thing to grasp and thus a troublesome thing for me. I'm really uncomfortable initiating a conversation with strangers and with acquaintances it will be even more awkward. What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to say? Will I say something inappropriate? Will I form a bad impression? With these thoughts gushing into my mind, I stay silent, and awkward silence it is. These thoughts are least welcomed into my mind but they just pop out inevitably and refuse to go away. It is not that serious when I'm with people whom I couldn't care less. The problem comes when I actually want to talk with someone but dare not to. Secretly I'm hoping that someone will ask me some questions so that I can answer and hopefully start the conversation. However of course in reality it seldom works out. I'm much more at ease when the person I want to speak to is proactive, extroverted and friendly such that we may have talked to each other before I realised that I want to talk to him/her.

*edit: now I'm using comp because typing on the phone late at night on the bed is really exhausting*

Okay carry on, although I forgot mostly what I was about to say because it's a new day.

Anyway, people relation can get very awkward for me. Sometimes the reason is that I tend to think too much, way too much. These unnecessary thoughts makes me very uneasy and thus acting unnatural. It's like me becoming not me any more, at least not the spontaneous and laid-back me, and I cannot do or say whatever that comes to my mind. It has to go through a system of rigid filtering and careful modification before coming out. This is very energy draining. As a result, I get tired very easily when I have to interact with unfamiliar people. Also due to this, it will usually take me a long time to establish a friendship with people whom I interact on a regular basis. Unless, under one scenario, in which the person has many similarities with me, but that usually will not happen.

Therefore, in the long 10 days of the trip, I still hardly know anyone by the time we bid goodbye. It is kind of a sad thing. On the taxi back from airport to home I did some thorough reflection to figure out why it's hard for me to interact with people. Strangely this reflection did not occur during the trip at all although I was getting increasingly uncomfortable with my relations to other people in the trip. I guess sometimes I just need time to be alone to think and process what's going on.

There's a quote I once saw on a poster in Google/Microsoft (can't remember which) which says, "All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret." I fully agree to that. There's some things so private that even this blog-which-no-one-ever-reads cannot contain. Apologies to my phantom readers. Also sorry for this awkward insertion because this just came to my mind yesterday but I was lazy to write it down.

As a result this blog entry becomes so fragmented sigh...

Anyway, I'm just an awkward person. Sometimes I find myself abnormal. During the trip I was reading a book "The Elegant Universe" when I got bored. My mom says I look very out-of-the-world when I carry a book around. But what then am I supposed to do when I'm bored? Last time when I get bored my mind will be filled with interesting imaginings to keep myself entertained, but now they just don't come as easily. I involuntarily become more aware of my surroundings although there are no interesting things going on around and I just cannot relax and allow random thoughts to roam free in my mind.

I just think too much, and think too much about thinking too much. I'm now having a love-hate relationship with thinking. Thinking is fun and rewarding, but in some occasions when thinking is not required over-thinking becomes a burden. But I can't stop thinking, for I'll get bored easily. Why do I get bored so easily? Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

Never mind I'm rambling nonsensical things now. I guess I just have to do something with my life.

Is there more to life than survival?

Edit: Originally I was about to stop here but I realised I have a lot of things not added in. Apparently this post isn't long enough so I shall make it longer (sarcasm intended).

Just two things to add in: First, I think I care too much about how others view me. This is obviously not very good because it makes me act unnaturally. But I can't help. People say you should just live your own life. Easy said than done. I bet a little piece of everyone's heart secretly wishes himself/herself to be noticed and liked. Maybe I shall try to train myself to take less notice of how others view me so that I can live my life truly the way I want it to be.

Second, the part on social awkwardness is trainable. I realise that one reason of me not knowing how to interact socially is due to an incomplete knowledge of social convention. Social conventions have always baffled me because they are not meant to have much sense but people follow them anyway. There's a lot to be learnt. But will learning these things and acting according to convention make me not original anymore? Of course I can just follow every rule society pose on me, and at the end of the day I'll become a dull and ordinary person. That's something I want to avoid. Maybe there's a way to interact with people naturally without changing myself too much. I shall try to seek this way.