A Window Washer

Half an hour ago, I was having my well-deserved afternoon nap in my room, high above on the ninth (top) floor of College Square. But now I am wide awake, and it's all the fault of two guys.

I was living happily ever after in my little slumber land, when some noises mischievously bombarded my eardrum, knocked out all my ossicles and stirred up all the hair cells in my cochlea, firing all those unnecessary action potentials to my auditory centre in my brain at the superior temporal lobe. It sounded like one of my neighbours was trying to plug in the electric cable into the socket. Since College Square is made of plywood, such occurrence was kinda a norm here and so I decided to ignore it and try to continue sleeping.

But something was amiss.

The sound wouldn't go away, as if my neighbour couldn't find the right holes and plug it in right away. He or she kept knocking the wall all over and making all those stupid noises. That was when I got really vexed and decided to give up sleeping to find out who the hell that was.

I came to my favourite spot - my table next to the window, where I put my laptop on. As I looked around the house, I couldn't find anything wrong at all. Nobody was at home, and Melbourne city was clearly not under missile attack. But there were something - two unidentified ropes were hanging outside my window. Just when I was starting to wonder about the origin of the rope, a guy descended rather awkwardly from above, planting his feet on the window and grasping the windows bar for support. He smiled to me and waved to me with his wiper.

He was the window washer.

The window washer outside my room.

The feeling was so eerie when he came down - he smiled at me and I almost closed the blinds immediately if I wasn't refrained by some "decency". After all, it's not so polite to close the window when someone just smiled at you, right? But then, seriously... you really need to be in my shoes to experience the feeling... He and I were only two feet away separated by a window, and I felt so watched. It's not like I was not wearing clothes or doing something indecent when he descended. It's just... I felt like a victim of voyeurism.

He proceeded to wash my window duly and left after a minute. I pretended to be busy online all the while. When another guy descended on my neighbour's window, I decided to take a picture which was the one you saw above.

This little incident was actually quite unremarkable, except for a chilling thought that I had soon after - this is the perfect form of voyeurism. On any other day, there may be someone who hangs outside the window of your building, watching what you are up to in your private space.

Just imagine what if someone is sleeping naked in the room or having sexual acts. I foresee a dramatic rise of the number of window-washer applicants in the future.

Just A Random Question

I was reading one of the latest issues of New Scientist when I encountered an interesting question by a reader:

We all have two parents, four greatparents, eight great-greatgrandparents, sixteen great-great-greadgrandparents and so on and so forth. So if I want to draw a family tree up to 10 generations, I would have 1024 ancestors above me. Now, if I reseach my family tree for up to 40 generations, I would have 2⁴⁰ (which is about 10¹²) ancestors out there. This is clearly more than all the human being that have ever lived on Earth (approximately 10¹¹). Of course, I wouldn't have more ancestors than all the people that have ever lived, but what is wrong with my reasoning? Doesn't everyone have two parents?

p/s: The question is paraphrased to avoid copyright infringement.

This is something to ponder about. To be frank I haven't really figured it out thoroughly, but I will work hard this weekend. :)


Update: Haha, got it when I was on the way back from school (posted this one in the school computer lab). But obviously Shou Farn beat me to it, and his explanation is great!

*** Spoiler ***

Actually, the flaw in the argument is that, not all of our ancestors are unique / different. In other words, as you draw the family tree up many generations, you will eventually realize that some of the people will play many different roles in the family tree. For example, your mother's mother's father's mother's mother's father may be the same person as your father's mother's father's father's mother's father.

In fact, following the same line of thought, we can see that inbreeding must be happening in some way among human beings. By inbreeding I don't mean one person mating with his or her siblings (that would be disgusting). Instead, inbreeding can be understood as "the reunion of gene as it is passed down through different routes of family tree".

Let's just set up an example... Let's say Kenny is my daughter's son's son's son's daughter's son, and Maria is my son's son's daughter's daughter's daughter. Next, suppose I have this hypothetical, unique gene AB which is always passed down from one generation to another generation. Firstly, note that if no inbreeding has occured, the unique gene AB is only found in my direct offsprings. My daughter will have AB, my son will have AB, Kenny would have AB, Maria would have AB too. If a random person does not have AB, then he is not my offspring. However, AB is also remarkable in that it is a "marker" for the occurence of inbreeding - in a mating couple, if both persons have gene AB in their DNA, both of them must be my offsprings. In the case of Kenny and Maria, if they fall in love with each other and mate together, they are considered inbreeding. Or to use my earlier definition, the union of Kenny and Maria is the union of my AB gene.

Hope that I haven't bored you to death. :) But to me, this kind of thing is more interesting than the neural system.

Can You Hear It?

Do you know that as we grow older, the highest frequency of the sound we could hear actually decreases? We are always told that human can hear sounds from 20Hz to 25kHz, but the upper limit and the lower limit are not constant, and it changes throughout one's life.

Find out your hearing limit now! :)

* This website makes me feel good. I am still "young".

You are a dog

Or maybe you are a mosquito, you certainly can't be human. The highest pitched ultrasonic mosquito ringtone that I can hear is 21.1kHz

Find out which ringtones you can hear!

How [Un]Malaysian are You?

The following quiz is for fellow Malaysians, and probably, Singaporeans. If you come from anywhere else in the world, you may not understand a single word in the quiz.

Congratulations Chang Yang, you are 13% not Malaysian.

That means you're as Malaysian as...


Abdullah Badawi !

How Un-Malaysian Are You?

I am quite a Malaysian!

Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

This is the video clip of John Carpenter, trying to answer his one million question in 1999. As a matter of fact, he became the first ever person in the world to win the one million in "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" game show. And what so spectacular was, discounting his joke call to his father, he breezed through 15 questions without a single life line! No 50:50, no audience help, and no phone call. Fantastic.

By the way, the way he called his father struck many as arrogant. Haha, what says you?

What's with the Doctors' Handwriting?

I guess we all have seen doctors' handwriting at one time in the past. Doctor's handwriting is sacred. You would know it, if you have ever had the chance to revere the prescription notes. Those curly, wriggly words which hardly resemble Latin alphabets, dancing around on a brownish note, staring at you as if yelling "Hey you can't recognize me!" - they are unforgettable.

In all my life, I have always wondered how in the world pharmacists manage to recognize those doctors' handwriting. You see, if they are just normal people like you and me, how do they do it? After years of searching and exploring in futile, this question has since been included in my list of all-time greatest mystery of the world. However, today, I finally know the answer... According to some of my friends, recognizing doctor's handwriting is actually part of the pharmacy course. Now that's the reason. No wonder why pharmacy is such a hard course.

I think that you, me and pharmacists would agree that doctor's crappy handwriting is kinda a universal, cultural thing. It turned out that most doctors' handwriting is crappy, regardless of the race, country or the university in which one studied medicine in. I have not much idea why a doctor has to write crappily, maybe they are just plain too lazy to write, after examining billions of patients throughout the day. Or perhaps, the handwriting just kinda manifests the identification of the profession, like how doctors like to pretend they are smart by using all those jargons and Latin phrases.

*** Off-topic rambling ***

Talking about Latin phrases, it's seriously the biggest enemy of medical students. Why would those people coin a cool name like "Internal Globus Pallidus", when it just really is the Latin word for "the inner part of that pale globe"? Or "Magnocellular", which means "regarding to big cells"? Did they have any idea how the cumbersome nomenclature has delayed the progress of science for more than 400 years, almost prevented discovery of Pluto and the landing of Apollo, and caused death of more than 2.3 million patients? *Oops, too much for my exaggeration* Haha, actually not so bad, but at least it turned me away from remembering a lot of details that I need to. Just because those names are professional looking. Or because Latin is the universal professional language.

*** End of off-topic rambling ***

Back to the handwriting... When we talk about doctors' handwriting, a thought that naturally follows is that what if something goes wrong? What if a doctor screwed up a drug's name and killed a patient? That was one of the questions posted by a ReCommer today:

One of my lecturers once told us that, sometimes doctors can just scribble away when they dont know the spelling for those drugs, disease, or parasites name .

So, hows that?

I was pretty amazed by my ability to come up with an explanation in my attempt to save the medical institution from disgrace. But I did include a story to make it sound, errr, you know, "fair".

Eerm, it's not as bad as you think, I guess. I understand what you mean, but it's not that a doctor would forget the name of your cough mixture and will simply scribble down things like "amelioraugmentin". More likely, say the doctor is supposed to prescribe Nifedipine (one of the drugs indicated for hypertension or angina patients)... The doctor may not be able to recall exactly whether it's nifedipine, nefidinpin, nefindiping etc; so in this case, he or she will tend to write thing like "N ..*jiggling*.. fid ..*zig-zags*.. pine" or something like that.

In any case, it's right to say that doing this may lead to disastrous consequences. In fact a few days ago, our tutor told us that there was one case, a nurse was supposed to inject a particular amount of a particular drug, and the amount written by a doctor / nurse (can't remember) was like this:



What do you think that is? 99? 44? 77? 49?

The nurse injected 44 units of drug into the patient, and the patient died. It turned out it was supposedly 4u, or 4 unit of drugs. Having been given 11 times therapeutic dose of drug, the patient was literally killed by the doctor, or whoever who came up with that crappy handwriting.

Perhaps this could show us just how important handwriting is to the healthcare profession. But luckily such mishap is rare, and perhaps will be even less likely to happen in the future following the implementation of electrical records.

Hail to the doctors' handwriting! Let's practice writing today!

Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast [Video]

I went to the world-famous Gold Coast when I was in Brisbane. This is a short video that I took in Surfer's Paradise - notice how the whole beach is lined with hundreds of high-rise building and flooded with thousands of sunbathers throughout the endless span. And the sand was so fine, you could literally feel the miniscule particles trickling between your feet.

Note: I am testing out YouTube video feature. It's fun! And the best thing is, while I can't download a lot of videos due to the exorbitant Internet price (AUD 30 / 500 MB), the upload bandwidth is not counted towards the Internet credit. :P Enjoy!!

Note 2: I have already uploaded some of my Brisbane pictures in my flickr account. It's still in progress, so stay tuned ya!

Note 3: The photo album is completed! If you haven't been there, quick! :P