Life of Pi

If you're an animal lover, you might love this movie.

The movie chronicles the remarkable journey of an Indian teenager who is trapped on a lifeboat with a Bengal Tiger.

Image: imdb.com

The plot of the movie doesn't follow the typical Freytag's pyramid. In fact I think the actual climax of the movie was when the ship sunk. And it doesn't end the typical hollywood way--no fireworks, no exuberant celebration. For me the ending could only inspire a sigh of relieve, and I think that's good. I've had enough hollywood endings I think it's time for me to try other flavors.

Happy Birthday: Three Years Old

This blog is three years old today. 

What began as a event-recording-hideout is now a blog with a steady output of at least seven posts per month. While the blog covers a wide range of topics; politics, traveling, food, personal experience, history, goof, sports, and even music, it has been loyal to science. As of 28th of November 2012, this blog has already published 419 posts. Not a bad number considering the fact that most of my peers have published less than a hundred posts in three years.
So, what's next?

I realized that shortly after I began blogging, the number of articles I read every week has doubled, and maybe even tripled. Now I've added TIME and Discover Magazine to my vault, apart from the daily feed from Ed Yong's blog, Dr Phil Plait's blog, Jesse Bering's blog, and various other sources. Of course I can't possibly remember all the facts. But I think that repeated reading is a form of brain exercise that can help to improve my brain power, and that is to me more important than memorizing all the stats. If you think I am pretty dumb now, that's because I was dumber before I started blogging.

If you want to improve, read more.
But if you want to improve further, read more and start writing.


Malcolm

Scientists Aren't Smarter

Scientists are not special bunch of people. They defecate, eat, sleep, and have sex like everyone else.

Very often, the reaction I get when telling people that I'm a research student in Physics "Wow! Physics!"

Image: scienceworld.wolfram.com

No boy, that doesn't help.

现代天才，古代天才

我一直都有个问题；古代的天才和现代的天才，谁比较强？比如拿 Da Vinci, Plato 等人和 Stephen Hawkings 和 Roger Penrose 等人来比较，谁比较聪明？如果有时光机，我们把古时代的天才（牛顿，孔子，华佗等）带到现代，他们能够学习用手机吗？如果我们把现代人带回古代，我们真的能变成当代最聪明的人吗？那如果牛顿出生于2012 年而不是 1643 年，在这科技发达的时代他还能脱颖而出吗？

这问题我想了很久。牛顿等人毕竟脑力过人，观察力强，学习能力一定很强，那学习用手机应该没问题吧？

牛顿。Image: ultimateuniverse.net

首先，请不要认为这问题是不切实际。因为这关系到我们如何看待其他人。我相信如果给于足够的时间，所有人都可以变得一样聪明，只是一些人知识吸收的比较快，一些人比较慢。

You're Not Stupid. Nobody Is

The recently announced Nobel Prize winner in medicine, Sir John Gurdon was considered "too stupid" by his science teacher during his days at Eton College.

He ranked last out of the 250 boys in his school at biology when he was 15, and didn't do well in other science subjects either. He still has the school report from his master sit on his desk at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge.

Underwater Mysterious Circles Made by, ahem, An Animal

Modern crop circles are a popular thing among UFO enthusiasts. These man-made marvels (yes, man-made) began with the original 1970's hoaxes by Bower and Chorley, and they are surprisingly easy to make. Forget all those messages-from-aliens theories, crop circles are just, well, pranks.

There are mysterious circles in the sea too, though they are made from sand and not crops. And the prankster here is not human--underwater circles are the work of the male puffer fish.

The Truth About Spiderman

The creator of Spiderman was a horrible observer. 

There is no similarity between Spiderman and normal spiders other than the ability to climb walls and produce silk. Even that silk part was emulated inappropriately.