Cats Rule

I had to post these after the cat chases bear up tree post. I found these two videos on Youtube. One of them shows a jaguar fighting an anaconda, and another one shows a jaguar fighting a pirarucu, which is a giant freshwater fish.





Cats RULE. That's all there is to it.

While I am on the topic of fighting animals, let me share this one of a shark being eaten by a... just watch and see.

Truly Freaky Robot

It's amazing what Japan keeps on coming up with where robots are concerned. The most recent one is the CB2 child robot.

Youtube won't allow me to embed this into my blog, so you gotta click here to watch that thing in motion. And you ought to. This is really truly scary.

Beware of the Cat

Take a close look at that picture. Up that tree is a bear. At the foot of that tree is a cat. Yep, the cat chased the bear up the tree.

The full story was reported on National Geographic, which reported that the cat was about 7 kilos, and was also declawed.

Impressive!

Three-toed Sloth

Doesn't this thing look like a nightmare? I think that if I ever came across something like this at night, I'd freak myself out thinking it was some sort of a deformed human being or something like that.

It's a three-toed sloth. I fell asleep on the couch tonight with the TV on while taking a short break from writing that proposal, and woke up with a start to see the face of one of those things staring out at me from the TV. Not fun.

But those things are cool. I didn't realize that one of these things is an entire ecosystem in and of itself. It's got specialized symbiotic algae that live in its fur (yes, in its fur). And these algae grow nowhere else. And of course, there're specialized insects that live in its fur and eat the algae.

Ugh. Sounds like a bad case of fleas. But isn't God's earth amazing?

Okay, back to work :-).

Stoning in Iraq

The following CNN video is pretty graphic. It depicts a young woman in Iraq being stoned to death for falling in love with a boy.




The amazing thing is that this was done in a very public scene. The film shows the young woman being dragged out from her home, into a public area where lots of men then take part in stoning her to death. Nobody ventures to help, but apparently lots of people are happy to film this on their cell phone cameras. The youtube film itself was filmed on one of these cameras and is therefore (thankfully!) very shaky and of very poor quality.

On the same day that I saw this video, one of our students came by my office to whine about how bad her life was, because of exams and projects. And how she was "almost dying" (in her words).

I didn't slap her or snap at her, but it took an effort.

Achievement... for what?

I read this article in the New York Times the other day titled For girls, it's be yourself, and be perfect, too, about a group of overachieving girls in the US. These girls were successful in everything -- in academics, in community service, in creativity -- literally everything. They got perfect scores in their SATs, and perfect GPAs.

And yet, a bunch of them did not make it into their first-choice colleges.

Reading this, I wonder what the world is going to be like for the next generation. Remembering my own portfolio when I went to college, I would seriously doubt if I could get into the same schools today, with the same achievements. I hear stories from friends with young children -- toddlers, even -- who are already going to after-school tutoring classes five, seven times a week. I see my friends and colleagues, who are already stressed out beyond belief from work. And then I see some of those people who are less successful and achieved, and are having difficulty making ends meet.

Is this what the coming world is going to be like? That if you aren't in first place, a superachiever, you can't survive? And if that's the case... many of my friends keep themselves going with a cocktail of vitamins and supplements. That's keeping them going now, but how much abuse can the body take before it collapses? And what does that mean for our children and their generation?

It's a sobering thought.

Sometimes I really hate computers

I am usually not one who's down on IT and computers as a rule (maybe I'm still young and naive, but I'm usually left being the one who defends IT and engineering when my older, more experienced peers start talking about how unattractive the field is), but sometimes, I really, really, really hate this day and age when everything is automatic and relies on computers.

I was trying to submit my journal paper this afternoon. Like most of the CS journals out there nowadays, the entire process is automatic -- you fill in forms with the title, abstract, contact author etc, then upload your cover letter and paper in Word format (why in the world would ANYBODY use Word -- but that's for another post, another day), and then it coverts it to HTML and pdf formats automatically.

And that's when the problem started. My document has both English and Chinese in it, and apparently there are some conversion problems with the Chinese characters. They kept on coming out as weird symbols, no matter what font I changed them to. More frustratingly, only some of those characters would get changed, but those that "didn't work" varied from trial to trial, and I couldn't not find any consistency between trials. And on occasion, I would get this "Conversion failed" message from the server, for no reason at all that I could discern.

I ended up fighting with that silly site for 3 hours, after which I just gave up and emailed the editors with a message telling them not to look at the PDF document. Sigh. You'd think that a COMPUTER SCIENCE journal could somehow get this correct, but alas, no.