Projects Day

Finally! My group has (not yet, but we're very near to it) secured a mentor! We just have to decide whether we want to focus on heavy metals or chemicals that leach out from plastics dumped in water.
Our mentor will help us find out if the SRC has the equipment to carry out the experiment.

Chinese HW

Last Thursday I forgot to do my chinese homework so my teacher made me copy妈妈的心from the textbook 3 times! I was not free until after dinner to copy it and each copy was 3.1 pages long:(. I stayed up till 2330 to do it and couldn't do any other homework and had to complete the rest of my homework during recess on Friday.

Wushu practice etc.

In case I haven't told anybody yet, my CCA is wushu. I learnt some already when I was in P4 but not on the school team. I have a grade 8 in violin from Trinity Guildhall, and I'm trying to get a grade 8 from ABRSM. I heard that the school orchestra has really long hours so I decided not to join. However, wushu only ends at 7 so it also has pretty long hours -_-. Too bad.

I just had my 2.4km run last week and I managed to pass in (about) 15:48 :).

Result of poll

The result of my poll "What is the best Secondary school in Singapore":

1. Hwa Chong Inst.
2. ACS(Independant)
3. RI

Why nobody vote for NUS?

The Indignities of Secondary School

Hi everybody.
Well, a very, erm, "interesting" event that happened at school last week. What happened was that I walked into the classroom during recess and... I can't really remember what happened, but I do remember that the class monitor Bao Huei was trying to freeze my classmate Bryce's poem(click here to see it on my classmate's blog. You really should.) on the visualiser. So Bryce got really angry at Bao and tried to murder him(and nearly did). I don't know how he could have the heart to murder someone as cute as Bao T_T.
So anyway, if you looked at Bryce's poem, you'll probably understand what was going on. Ah, yes. The indignities of Secondary school(and onwards) life.

Binary

On Friday we learnt binary at school. I learnt conversion of decimals(as in numbers of base 10) to binary before on my own from a book, but never really understood the system until now. At school, they taught us to break the decimal into powers of 2 to convert. The method I learnt earlier was to subtract the largest possible power of 2 from the decimal. If that was possible, it was represented by 1. If not, it would be represented by 0.

Example:
15 - 8 = 7 ==> 1
7 - 4 = 3 ==> 1
3 - 2 = 1 ==> 1
1 - 1 = 0 ==> 1

Therefore 15 = 1111 in binary or base 2

17 - 16 = 1 ==> 1
1 is too large to subtract 8 ==> 0
1 is too large to subtract 4 ==> 0
1 is too large to subract 2 ==> 0
1 - 1 = 0 ==> 1

Therefore 17 = 10001 base 2.
Then, of course, I noticed 16, 8, 4, 2, 1 are all powers of 2(1 = 2 power of 0).
I must really be a bit of a Charlie Gordon to have not noticed this earlier.

Projects Day 2009

Hi everybody.
Well, for the ex-plasmids project, my group couldn't find a mentor so we switched to a project on analysing water samples from drains, canals, the sea etc. It's getting along okay, we just have to check whether my school's Science Research Centre has the equipment for us to do our research. I hope we won't reply too late to our prospective mentor.

Tests, tests, and more tests

Hi everybody.
For the last few posts I've only been talking about global or general issues, and only realised yesterday that I haven't written anything about myself. Sorry about that.
Well, life in Secondary school is stressful. What would I expect? However, it seems a bit daunting that I will have to adapt to all this. I mean, I know that I will in the future, but that seems a little... completely impossible.
Today I had a Science and a Geography test. Last week I had a History test. The school is spamming tests like crazy!(or at least the teachers) I really support the idea of a fellow schoolmate that was brought up last week: that the school should devise an online test booking system on a importance basis so pupils will only have one test a day maximum. If that day was already booked for a test, other teachers will have to book their tests on other days. If a test is very important and can't wait, the teachers involved can work out a comprimise.
It just amazes me what fellow schoolmates can think up. ^_^

Current Affairs

At school we have this thing called "Current Affairs" held every Friday which is a sort of debate in either English or Chinese(not Malay though) between anywhere from 4-7 panellists. Besides them, a host, 2 student observers and the whole class is involved. Each panellist will play a role set by the teacher concerning the issue at hand. After the debate, the class will then participate in providing their views on the matter. After the whole thing has ended, the student observers will give feedback on each panelist.

So, anyway, I was one of the panellists last Friday but the worksheet telling us what our roles were was only given out on Thursday. What's more, I left the worksheet and my notes at school! So when the CA session started ... well, let's just say that I was pretty unprepared, even though that's an understatement. Worse still, I realised that I was supposed to play the role of some sort of Dean for Student Care, advocating a policy that students should only wear black-rimmed specs! If I was a student or parent opposing this rule, at least that would've been okay but...

Luckily or not, I was the third speaker so I managed to get my speech in order by the time it was my turn to speak. Strangely enough, Wei Zhi, the big hairdo guy, was the last speaker but only managed to say one sentence because he was unprepared too.

I hope I get to be a panellist again. Not because of the harrowing experience but because if I get it right I might be able to get quite a lot of ACE points(sort of like credits).

Human society

Why do people with many things in common, such as similar background or identical goals, simply don't get along with each other while others get along very well?

The answer is in personalities, interests and maturity.

We are all humans(or at least people I know). All of us have flaws, and some have more flaws than others. Usually societies are cohesive and the people that make up this society are cooperative. However, when we begin to focus on other's flaws instead of their strengths, problems arise. What usually happens after that is pretty hard to clean up. People will overeact, and become angry. This is a major turning point. Anybody heard "Anger is the justifying emotion" before? When anger arises, it causes people to feel that they are the one who is right. This was important in ancient warfare because fighters had to feel that their nation was correct in destroying the enemy. Otherwise, soldiers would not be able to stand the suffering of their enemies and the carnage when fighting or killing them. So, when people become angry, it is virtually impossible to turn around and clean up the mess that has started. After that, everything pretty much goes haywire. If there are equal "forces" in the society in which the "battle" is being fought, usually all that's left in the end is a pile of rubble. No survivors. It's suprising how much humans fight one another to destruction for ridiculous reasons. If there is an imbalance in the "forces", usually one party is kicked out of the society by the stronger one. If it's one person sgainst the multitudes, then that one person may be ostracised or left in isolation for the rest of his life.

I really hope that human beings can shape up and finally get along as one community.

Click this link for hope. Watch the whole thing.

Plasmids

For my school's Projects Day 2009, two friends, Wang Fan and Philmann(click here to view his blog) and I will possibly be doing a projects on plasmids. Plasmids occur naturally as double strands of DNA that are coiled up in the topographic shape of a torus(simulate this by twisting an adapter tightly and then plugging it into itself). Plasmids and viruses have many things in common.

1. Both act independantly from their host.
2. They are not living things.
3. They are packets of DNA without any organelles.

However, they are also very different.

1. Viruses destroy the host and propagate, whereas plasmids travel within the host and only destroy the host when the plasmid has been replicated and passed on to one of the host's daughter cells. Some plasmids don't destroy the host at all.
2. Viruses' method of propagation involves rupturing the cell and destroying it after an incubation period when the virus replicates while plasmids act as "upgrades", with different plasmids acting in different ways, e.g. providing resistance to antibiotics, increasing rate of reproduction.
3. Plasmids also only replicate when they are about to passed on.

Please correct me if any of my data is wrong. I will write more as my project progresses.

By the way, if you see any "Ah Phui"s on any other blogs, they refer to Philmann.

The impact of the Three Gorges Dam

The Three Gorges Dam construction project in China will change the future. There are many advantages to this construction project. However, the dam also has its disadvantages. Its advantages, are that, firstly, the dam will produce a huge amount of electricity, in fact over 100 terawatts(1 terawatt = 1,000,000,000,000 watts). This will also reduce lot of coal consumption by 31 million tonnes, and decrease China's environmental damage. The emission of 100 million tonnes of greenhouse gas, millions of tonnes of dust, 1 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide, 370 thousand tonnes of nitric oxide, 10 thousand tonnes of carbon monoxide and a significant amount of mercury will be cut.



However, the construction of the dam means that huge areas behind the dam will be flooded, not only displacing 1.13m people from their homes, but destroying undiscovered cultural artifacts and artifacts that cannot be moved into museums or safe places, such as the hanging coffins. Relocation of displaced residents(or important items) in the area adds to the costs of the dam. Also, sedimentation is a problem. Sedimentation building up behind the dam is not really considered as a problem because there are more dams behind the Three Gorges Dam that will prevent that. Sediment not moving past the dam is the problem. Shanghai is down river from the dam and rests on a bed of silt. So long as silt has been carried downstream, Shanghai has been safe from flooding. However, if the net increase of sediment to the bed of silt becomes negative, Shanghai will become vulnerable to inundation.

I hope that the Chinese government will be able to solve these problem so that the dam will be an overall success. If the problems that the dam causes are solved, this will be a great achievement. It will help China reduce its dependency on coal and other non-renewable, environmentally-unfriendly sources of energy.

Three Gorges Dam: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam