Mgccl's blog - I'm the standard deviAsian.

FeelingFly and my ideas

Mgccl — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:37:01 +0000

李烁, English name Duestin, who commonly seen with nickname FeelingFly.
He is currently an graduate student in philosophy in Shandong University. He studied biology in his undergraduate years.

I have meet him few years ago when I'm still in China. Talking with him proves to be very interesting part of my life because I could say(scientific) things that turn most people away but he can still listen and offer constructive responses. For example I talk to him about the idea--mass production of meat products though use of cancer cells, which most people showed an disgusted response and changed the topic.
He is the reason I can think of many good ideas.
Idea 1:
Speaking of cancer cells.
Cancer cells can grow at a really fast pace compare to other cells. If we get a huge booth and put in one cancer cell and allow it to divide uncontrollably, it will soon consume all the nutrition and gain a huge mass. Which is in fact great for food consider it taste the same as normal meat, have the same nutrition as the normal meat.

Idea 2:
Cancer humans!
A human composed of only cancer cells, so the human would not die.
With implementation of nanobots, when ever there is too much cells, the nanobots kills some, preventing the person from becoming a huge blob of meat.

Idea 3:
I think people already had this.
Cancer weapon, something(virus?) that turns on the cancerous gene in every single human, can be used as a massive genocide weapon that goes undetected for years.

Questions:
Can human transform into something else and transform back?
How much information need to be known about a person, so it's possible to reconstruct an identical human?
How much information are required if we don't require 100% accuracy?
Are there lossless compression that compress a state of human and stores them and then can unzip them back?

Talking with FeelingFly really provoke my thoughts.
Love philosophy major.
Thank you for dealing with my crap for years while even my parents chose not to.
Do I sound high? I'm not.

Burn of the year

Mgccl — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:04:56 +0000

2008 is almost over, I shall post what I consider the *burn* of my year.
Scott Aaronson had an idea for summer research. I made a constructive comment.

Epic dismissal.

I learned the lesson: Never make a simple program harder than it should be by formalizing everything.

Coincidence? Karma?

Mgccl — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:13:43 +0000

3AM in the morning, in a QQ Olympiad math chatroom, a person is requesting someone to translate an linear algebra text, particularly this sentence:

Third, that we can diagonalize the resulting matrix A --- or, more
conveniently, the square matrix of A' order M*N whose order-(M*N/2)
blocks are 0,A;A-transpose,0 , whence det(A') = +-(det(A))^2.

I tried to translate it. But fail to even understand what it means. It should be express in some simpler manner. I appreciate anyone who attempts to do this.

Then we talked, ranging from math to philosophy.
He mentioned he has a friend in US, who also likes math. Soon revealed she also joined ARML this year and she is in Nassau, our neighbor county.

Insane.
A person I met randomly, who is in China, knows someone who live so close to me and have so much hobby in common with me.
That guy also know a person who done each and everyone of Project Euler problem in his school.

Ramsey theory.

I was WINtroduced to his friend and even got a partial deal of getting a lift to Princeton Math Competition, thus solved my transportation problem :)
But she also does Intel STS. Humm... a competitor...

It's karma. I did so many good things, something nice should happen to me once in a while.

While talking with the guy, we created a math joke.
"How to know a girl's bra size?"
"Integrate her curves and you will find the volume, duh!"

Contribute to vdash

Mgccl — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 01:53:31 +0000

Contribute to vdash!
What is vdash?
To put it simply.
A wikipedia mathematical portal with only true statements.
Love Cameron Freer who come up with the idea. Which I thought about too, but have to little resource to do something like that.

It will be an aggregation of mathematical proof and knowledge by formalizing math. YEAH.

Failed attempt:
QED Project
Nice attempt but too small and only for professionals:
Mizar System
Good attempt but too little people can contribute:
Metamath Proof Explorer

I have high hope on this and I will do my best to support it.
I hope it can also have APIs and stuff. I wonder how it create a database of proofs if it's a wiki.

Immortal

Mgccl — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:42:50 +0000

I have received my immortality ring this afternoon and officially become one of the immortals.

My ID is 163.
It is engraved with both the id and the the message of choice--"communtative", a pun on commutative ring

MUHAHAHAHAHA
Immortality. Chao fist.

Problem. I think I measured my ring size wrong. It's easy to put on and take effort to take it off. Can't complain about the first jewelery I own.
What's next? Matrix ring?

What kind of machine are people running recently more iTest update

Mgccl — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 23:42:58 +0000

An instant message + email checking + social network status checking program Digsby was running on my computer and generated an shocking statistic.

Congratulations Digsby, you are the first program I know of that's not math/science/studio/benchmark related software to surpass the CPU/Memory usage of Firefox 3.0.1 running Gmail, Google reader and Google calendar.
How is your code constructed?

 main() {
        while(get_system_load()<1){
               generate_garbage();
               //code start
        }
 }

Non of my computers at home can handle it, so the developer must be running a 64 core 1024 bit 3.6 THz CPU with 32TB 1033GHz DDRe^π RAM.

iTest video contest has ended.
People's solutions are amazingly similar. Maybe because these are the standard way to answer?
For problem 21, I didn't even remember there was a British flag theorem and end up proving it myself. Those iTest people are really educated.
This fast talking guy is the only person posted an answer for problem #82.
Certainly. Use the number of possible edges minus edges contained in largest possible triangle-free graph. But proving the size of the largest triangle-free graphs is not easy to be done in 60 seconds.

Second math contest of this school year complete.

Microwaved Totino's pizza and iTest video contest update

Mgccl — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:10:14 +0000

Totino's Pizza Taste Great.
I know what's my college food now.
I also heard Shin Ramyun is also food of choice for lazy college people who like Korean food.

Can't wait till college.
Currently I am restricted to consume product like that. Not because of financial issue, but family issue. I can't stand days of unrest arguments about "eat healthy, live healthy" for every 10.2 oz of pizza I consume.

I'm a simple person with simple desires. A job of $30K is enough. No med school, no law school and no actuarial science. I want to eat pizza everyday.
Yet, such a simple desire requires so much work, it's shocking how complex the human society has become.

I have made a solution video for iTest problem #88. Hopefully I get the $200. Maybe I can even win the 3 overall prize in total of $950. Extra point are offered for videos with reference for southern company.

There was no competition, I was the only one submitted the video and the only one who can win.
Now another team have posted a video.

It was by maree900...
Looks like have a bit more creative than mine
But I guess I'm better in solving the problem and presentation.
I hope I still have a chance. The contest ends in 11 hours the time this is posted.
I liked this one they made for problem #21... LOLed at random act of violence.

This is the best one so far in my opinion

well there is nothing to graph the 6th dimension, you can't steal my prize! Muhahahahaha
Check out the playlist I made for iTest for all videos.
Reality: I don't care about the prize at all, participation is the key.

Enlighten me?

Mgccl — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 03:11:18 +0000

I don't get this.

I know what Legendre Polynomial is, but what does that have anything to do with hamster?

The 2008 iTest ended

Mgccl — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:35:03 +0000

Meh, we got 83. Most team on MathLinks has 90 or above.
Not a good start for the first decent size math contest this year.

The cumulative plot of number of wrong against problem number.

The parabola of best fit: y = 0.621651- 0.0902025 x + 0.00240685 x^2

At least we beat Syosset.
I should have joined team SWR with Syosset to form another team, then we might get something in the 90s.
My brain don't functions currently.

OMG $200 is gone.
Well at least I won an calculator (TI-Nspire) for doing Monday Math Madness.
Joining the iTest video contest. Thinking of ideas.
I'm glad, I have learned a lot and #88 was a great breakthrough for me. At first I thought there is no way to solve it with my current knowledge, I must have study higher dimension geometry first. Then I think about why did they provide a coordinate and realize it become a combinatorics problem(which I also suck at.)

#100 is impossible. That shows I have a lot more to learn.
Must do more problems!

The philosophical ideas behind Open Source Boob Project

Mgccl — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 03:31:39 +0000

Ok, the title is just like news headlines, to get you start reading. There isn't much about breasts.
Open Source Boob Project was an project started in April 2008. At first I saw the title of the project and the description I laughed, thinking about how these days people come up with such weird ideas. But then when I read this part.

This should be a better world, A more honest one, where sex isn't shameful or degrading. I wish this was the kind of world where say, "Wow, I'd like to touch your breasts," and people would understand that it's not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful.

I'm not here to say is it right or wrong. But the underlying idea is what's important.
no, not "the i'd like to touch your breast" but the world should be an honest place.
The real title for this article is: Honesty.

I can't think of anyone in this world who had never lied before. I admit, I also lie. Small lies but yet, still lies. I evaluate myself as somewhere in the 90th percentile on the honest scale.(humm... how do you know this is not an lie...?) I don't cheat on tests, tell someone about "your hair looks nice" if her hair doesn't, say something I believe it's not true1.
But there are always a few exceptions.
I remember the time I have write an letter to my aunt with things I would never say, but has created a win win situation for everyone.
For one dollar(Australian dollar), I called someone things I did not mean. Hurting a person but earn something for myself and the person who paid me.
These happened when I was young, I haven't lied by destroy someone else's benefit for a few years.
I cross the street when the lights clearly tell me not to, but there is no cars around.
I see people cheat and I don't tell because it will create problems between me and those people.
In these cases I chose to be dishonest and never create loss loss situation. and I always win.
If I'm gaining benefits, then why is wrong to be dishonest?
The word benefit are used in the material and social sense. Dishonest doesn't benefit the moral mind and can create guilt, that are not considered in the discussion. Even if it is, when tell lies become a habit, the guilt will die out too.

The question:
Is it beneficial for a individual person to be always honest?
For my entire life, no school in the world doesn't teach the importance of honesty. My study in the world shows there is no universal moral principle but honesty is pretty close.
Then why am I losing benefits when I'm honest?
For one example, I canceled a plane ticket, no refunds. It is not hard to fake a headache and receive a note from the doctor and get full refunds. As my parents strongly encourage me to do it, only to know I refuse even if it means I will lose $1000.
My view is that I am not losing the $1000. In the beginning, the money was never mine. I knew there is no refund and I still brought the ticket. I have the full consent and the company did not deceive me. Why should I deceive the company for my own benefit?
As my parent says, "because you can". I should make w/e choice giving me the most social and material benefit. Clearly, socially nobody would know and I'm still in my good standing and materially, it's good sum of money.
Then I ask, if I can deceive my parents to get material benefit for me, should I do it?
My parents clearly object the idea and tell me they should not be deceived.
How paradoxical. One can deceive anyone else but strongly offended when other deceive him. Or is it how the world suppose to be?

People who cheat on tests have higher test grade than I do, then why don't I do it? There are a small chance of get caught. But is it really the risk that prevent most people not to cheat, or is because of their values on honesty? If from now on, cheating can NEVER be caught, would anyone who never cheat start to cheat?

People who copy homework have higher average grade than I do, then why don't I do it?
The risk is much less and almost effortless. I do sometime copy homework but I will make sure I don't get higher grades by not hand in the homework I finished in the future. I copy homework discretely so I don't have to seem like a person who really, never does his homework. I benefited myself but not endanger anyone, I hope.

A tan(x)...
I remember once in AP bio, my grade was wrong, I got a half homework grade, so I told the teacher and get that grade deducted. I remember the dialogue.

Me: why is there a 2.5 points here?
T: Well you get half homework grade when you hand in the homework 1 day late.
Me: But I never hand in homework.
T: oh, that's right, let me change it.

tan(x) ends here.

If you want to be 100% honest, prepare to pay. A lot.

My mom teaches me to cheat. "Always do w/e most beneficial, cheat if must." I'm still above her influence, but I understand she believe honesty are just something created by the management(government, HR and stuff) to control the people under them.
Chinese government is functioned as an great deceiver. Propaganda is everywhere and still demands citizens to be honest, because when citizen is honest, the dishonest people gets everything the honest people loses.

I declare it is really not beneficial materially or socially to be an very honest person.

The comic created by onebean.
Why be honest?
When everyone in the world is very honest, it is most beneficial assumes that everyone want the world to be fair and square and happy about having things only if he deserves it.
The honesty is the same as Prisoner's dilemma, if everyone make the choice best for themselves, it screws everyone up. If everyone make the decision to be honest, the Nash's equilibrium will be achieved.
A company hire illegal immigrants have benefits, but it will ruin everyone else. In the whole US perspective, it's doing more harm to US than helping it.
Will I still be honest? You bet.
Will there be time I'm not going to be honest? Yes. When the seduction of materials are strong enough. $1,000,000 isn't going to cut it.
Will I ask people "Can I touch your breast?" Yes but not to strangers. Not because I'm not honest, it's about respect. Honesty doesn't mean I have to say everything in my mind.
What's in my mind now? Math.

1. Global warming exist but not created by humans