My Little WTF Moment

Update 09/08/07: Here.

Today is quite like other AMS working days, but unlike other peaceful times, today was marked by a little dose of WTF moment.

The story goes like this: Our supervisor wanted us to shadow (= tag along) an anaesthetist, and after some arrangement he decided to take me to an anaesthetist (call him Z) who's doing anaesthesia for endoscopy procedure. While the supervisor was bringing me to the procedure room, we met Z who's leaving the endoscopy area. My supervisor asked Z whether it's alright if I shadow him, and he said fine, and he would be back soon. The supervisor told me to wait at the procedure area, as Z will be back in a second.

So I waited there. Standing has become a routine for me for the past few weeks. I stand most of the time when I am in hospital watching surgeries and other stuff. At times I feel stupid as I can't do much in the hospital. We do so much waiting all the time, most of the time waiting for someone to come back while we are left hanging around, not being told what to do or expect, simply being useless. While I am waiting, I could just stare at a blank space, or sometimes I take out my PDA to do some brief reading.

After 5 to 10 minutes of waiting, he's not back and I had a call from nature (which happens quite often to my for some reasons). So I went to the washroom, quickly finished my business, and went back to wait. After some 5 to 10 minutes again, I decided that it was too long a wait, and I did what everyone would do - I asked a doctor at the receptionist area. The doctor told me that Z is already in the procedure room, and I can just go in there.

Me: Dr. Z?

Z: Oh hi! *walk towards him, who's prepping up the patient for the endoscopy*

Me: Is there anything I could help?

Z: You are late.

Me: I waited for you outside but you weren't back. Then I went to the toilet and waited again. You might have come back when I was in the toilet. (Can't really remember whether I said sorry at this point, but I did say sorry once at one point in this conversation)

Z: No I do not accept this excuse. This is a really bad excuse.

Me: Really I was outside... (I might have said sorry at this point. Again I am not sure)

Z: You could have come in and looked for me. Really if you don't want to be here you don't have to.

Me: I want to be here.

(Can't really remember what we said after that. The conversation stopped around that point.)

And he almost ignored me throughout the whole 2-hour session. He just talked to me twice.

I realize that I was partly at fault for being late, as when I came out from the toilet I should have just gone to the reception and asked about Z's whereabout, instead of assuming that he wouldn't have gone in within the 2 minutes I spent in the toilet. It's my judgmental error and I should really have done better than that.

However, I couldn't stomach the judgmental attitude he cast upon me. The way he looked at me ludicrously and almost sneered at me when he replied to my excuse, showed that he thought I was telling a very bad lie, or some sort of bad jokes. The remark "you don't have to come if you don't want to" was put in an extremely bad taste too. Just imagine, having stood and waited patiently for someone for almost half an hour, and all you get in return was a mean remark of "you don't have to come if you don't want to". Let's talk about intention and outcome, eh? We need more communication, doc.

Sigh. It's lucky that the majority of the doctors I deal with aren't that grumpy. Many of them are willing to share their knowledge enthusiastically and patiently. I won't keep this in mind for long, but I just hope that there will be less judgemental people in the world. Getting worked up for an innocent misdoing, and being judgemental towards people, is bad for oneself and for other people.

Update: After some considerations and some inputs from friends, I do think that I might have been responsible for the whole episode. Despite being innocuous, what I should have done was to say sorry when he first said "You are late" (which I didn't say until the second or third verbal exchange). I didn't say sorry at first because I didn't assess it as something requiring apology when he worded it, and also because of my recently acquired defiance of not apologizing when I reckoned something was not done intentionally. And that defiance has misfired badly, despite my apologizing later when he was already frowning upon me. For Z, I could have seemed like a delinquent student who's not apologetic despite being late, and hence deserved a good reprimand. And it's my fault for not showing my sincere, innocent, lovely facade. :P I shoulder the responsibility, admit my error, and would learn to say sorry in the future.

Image credit: 2point Portfolio

Brain Teasers

I like brain teasers. I discovered a site with a few fun questions yesterday, and here are some of the questions:

A train leaves New York for Boston. Five minutes later another train leaves Boston for New York, at double the speed. Which train will be closer to New York when they encounter?

If I go halfway to the town (which is 60 km away) at the speed of 30 km/hour, how fast do I have to go for the rest of the way to have the average speed of the entire way 60 km/hour?

These are the conditions in a town:

1. No two inhabitants have the same number of hairs on their head.
2. No inhabitant has exactly 518 hairs.
3. There are more inhabitants than any inhabitant's hair in the town.

What is the highest possible number of inhabitants?

An Arab sheikh tells his two sons to race their camels to a distant city to see who will inherit his fortune. The one whose camel is slower will win. The brothers, after wandering aimlessly for days, ask a wise man for advice. After hearing the advice they jump on the camels and race as fast as they can to the city.

What does the wise man say?

Three masters of logic wanted to find out who was the wisest one. So they invited the grand master, who took them into a dark room and said: "I will paint each one of you a red or a blue dot on your forehead. When you walk out and you see at least one red point, raise your hands. The one who says what colour is the dot on his own forehead first, wins." Then he painted only red dots on every one. When they went out everybody had their hands up and after a while one of them said: "I have a red dot on my head."

How could he be so sure?

Imagine you are in a room with 3 switches. In an adjacent room there are 3 bulbs (all are off at the moment), each switch belongs to one bulb. It is impossible to see from one room to another. How can you find out which switch belongs to which bulb, if you may enter the room with the bulbs only once?

Check out the solutions in the puzzle page! :) Sharpening our mind sometimes helps it works better.

Travel Notes - Photo Slideshow

27/07/07 - Slideshow Status: 50% done.

Note: This post will be placed above other posts as I continue to update my travel notes. My other posts will be found below.

This is the slideshow of the photos taken during the winter trip to Great Ocean Road and South Australia. I am continually processing the pictures and uploading them, so stay tuned as more pictures become available here.

You can also view all the pictures in their original flickr set page here. Full screen slideshow is available as well. To make a comment on an individual picture, visit the "photo link" in the slideshow.

Hope you enjoy the pics!

Some Interesting Harry Potter Endings

J.K. Rowling once said that the last word in the last HP book would be "scar" (which was no longer true in the end). Based on this assumption, some HP fans wrote their own versions of HP ending...

Neville gazed down upon the lifeless form of Harry and saw that the scar that once had stood so vividly on his forehead, had disappeared. He turned away and was unaware that on his forehead, was his own scar.

His thoughts were distracted by the distant voices of Hermione and Ron. They were running towards him with mixed looks of shock and relief. Hugging Harry they began to question him thoroughly. "Are you alright? Are you okay Harry?" Hermione yelled. "Blimely Harry you've done it, Voldemorts dead." Ron added. As if it went by in flashes, suddenly Hermione and Ron were on the ground, both pale and motionless, dead. Harry stood over them, laughing coldly with content. All it took was a twinge in his scar.

Harry had done it... Voldemort was dead it seemed... but there were only five horcruxes that had been destroyed. Ron raised his head from the ground and said, "Good work, Harry, I knew we could do it..." Harry smiled to Neville while scratching his itching scar.

More endings here.

I am wondering how different the story would be if it ended like above... :)

An Intriguing Game

Unfortunately the world works just like this game. Sometimes we imagine, if everyone obeys traffic rules, the traffic congestion would be dramatically reduced. But people break the rules. If every country in the world destroys their nuclear weapons, this will be a much safer world. But we will never live to see a day with a nuclear-free world. If everyone unites and strive for the greater good, this will be a much better world. But human won't unite. The reason? The same as in this game. As long as there are competitions, there will be "good" and "bad" people who assume their own niches in the equilibrium of the complex net of interactions. Game theory dictates it.

Game theory is fascinating. Since I first learnt about it some years ago, I have been absolutely enchanted by how it seems to apply to everything in this world - including, but not restricted to animal behaviours (including human's), evolution, cultural revolution, economics, politics, nuclear warfare, global warming treaties etc. The implications of game theory just seem to pop up everywhere.

What is game theory?

Game theory is just what it says - the theory of games. Examples of theory of games could range from anything as simple as how to tackle tic-tac-toe, to what happens when two players play checkers perfectly (which was solved just recently). However, in its modern word usage, game theory is not about winning and losing in a table-top game (which is in the field of combinatorial game theory) - it's more about everything that involves competition, everything that involves different parties aspiring to maximize their own return (among others). Basically this covers almost every organic interaction. Games, in the context of game theory, are played between countries and populations.

Consider this interesting game:

An investment game is played in a group of 4. In each round of the game, each player will make a choice of investing 10 dollars or investing nothing. At the end of each round, the sum of the investment by the four players is pooled together, and each player (regardless of the amount he has invested) will get 40% of the sum in the pool. For example, if everyone invests 10 dollars, then there will be 40 dollars in the pool, and therefore everyone will get 16 dollars at the end which means a 6-dollar profit.

By doing some analysis, the outcomes of the game can be described as follows:
4 x 10 dollars: Everyone earns 6 dollars - a total profit of 24 dollars.
3 x 10 dollars: 3 player who invested will earn 2 dollars, the person who didn't invest earns 12 dollars. A total profit of -6 dollars.
2 x 10 dollars: The 2 investing players LOSE 2 dollars, the 2 non-investing players earn 8 dollars each. A total profit of 12 dollars.
1 x 10 dollars: The investing player LOSES 6 dollars, the 3 non-investing players earn 4 dollars each. Total profit of 12 dollars.
0 x 10 dollars: Nobody invests, nobody earns or loses anything. Total profit is zero.

At the first glance of the game, it seems that it would be ideal if everyone just keeps on investing in every round - that would be the best outcome, everyone earns and the total profit is the highest. However, a few rounds into the game, someone might realize - hey wait, if the other three players continue to invest and I stop, I will earn 12 dollars, more than the previous scenario! And hence some people will stop investing. Then some other player may stop investing as well, and now the two non-investors get 8 dollars, at the expense of the investors' loss! In some rounds everyone might get selfish, and it ends up as the 0 x 10 dollar case - at this point some people realize that someone has got to invest to keep it going. So in the end the game will bounce somewhere between all the scenarios, but it will not stay at the 4 x 10 dollars, the supposedly best option for everyone.

Unfortunately the world works just like this game. Sometimes we imagine, if everyone obeys traffic rules, the traffic congestion would be dramatically reduced. But people break the rules. If every country in the world destroys their nuclear weapons, this will be a much safer world. But we will never live to see a day with a nuclear-free world. If everyone unites and strive for the greater good, this will be a much better world. But human won't unite. The reason? The same as in this game. In this page, you can see how the theory behind this game applies to real-life scenarios, ranging from political science, economics to athletic competitions.

As long as there are competitions, there will be "good" and "bad" people who assume their own niches in the equilibrium of the complex net of interactions. Game theory dictates it.

p/s: Yes, this game is a variation of the prisoner's dilemma.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - A Haiku

Warning: The following text contains spoilers (indirect but VERY decipherable). It has been hidden by scripts and would be revealed when it's clicked on. However, the hiding mechanism doesn't work on RSS reader, so if you are reading this on RSS subscription and if you do not wish to read it, STOP. Thanks.

Show my haiku!

Perched between two worlds
A forgotten, burdened soul
The evil hero.

- Dedicated to Severus Snape who didn't get the salute he deserved in the very end.

Travel Notes (2) - Great Ocean Road

I've been processing the pictures from the road trip, but I found it rather difficult to reproduce the whole journey on my blog if I were to do a stop-by-stop descriptions. So I guess I would start with a few pictures here.

Xuan Ni and I at Gibson's Steps, with the backdrop of Twelve Apostles.

The glory "apostles" at the Twelve Apostles. It's my third time there but it invigorates me all the same.

Yong Chin, Freda, Xuan Ni and I at Gibson's Steps.
Facial expression: "What's in stock for the future?"