picture in my mind

Leong Hon Wai had a sharing session for our CS projects this past friday; it was supposed to be for fun -- no grading or assessment, and we had lunch. We wanted to order Oishii Pizza (I didn't know it was halal!!!) but they took too long to deliver, so we tried Dominoes (which was, unbeknown to me, also halal!). But then Dominoes has a super restricted delivery area which did not include NUS -- so at last, we resorted to the regular Pizza Hut. So anyway, it was an interesting sharing session, and I am reminded once again why I think computer science is fascinating. It should be taught as a compulsory subject in secondary school! Like taught properly as concepts (like recurrence and abstraction); not the completely forgettable lessons we had about Flash or Photoshop.

Snapshots of our My Gene-y application produced on the graphical programming interface, Scratch (download Scratch here)! I thought that maybe the project file could be exported as mpeg or flash or stg upload-able on blogger, but I couldn't find anything that worked... so too bad.

Basically, My Gene-y predicts how the child would look like using simple molecular genetics, given info about the parents:

One of the groups made a Love Relationship Predictor, that made everyone highly amused. It's based on differential equations applied to romance and emotion, and was actually published as a paper by this physicist called Stephen Strogatz, called Romeo and Juliet Mathematics. There's a funny New York Times article here (the comments are funny to read too, haha) and some explanation about how the equations work here. The group that did the program made very interesting graphs of feelings against time, and man feelings against woman feelings -- and apparently, there are a few situations where couples will keep spiraling between mutual love, unrequited love (on both parts!) and mutual hatred. XD Drama, please!

"I never could understand differential equations and I never could understand women. Oh well."


Also, here's the website for USP UIT2201 module, Computer Science and the IT Revolution. One of those rare modules I won't ever forget about, yay.