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Tuesday 30 December 2014

A Simulation of Exponential Growth and Decay of Population of Lilies in a Pond

http://beatricebernardo.url.ph/gallery/LilyPond_v06_red/

The following link simulates the population growth and decay of three organisms. Try to make a system where all three organisms could live in a harmony without interference.

Monday 22 December 2014

Life, a progress game

Extra Credits - Idle Games - How Games Scratch Yo…: http://youtu.be/g-LziX2HynI

There is this game called idle games, but it is also known by another name, which I prefer: progress game. I came to know this game from a coworker of mine and I found the idea hilarious and amusing. Months passes by without such game cross my consciousness. Then comes this extra credit episode, one of the YouTube channel I'm subscribed to. In the mean time, I have been mediating the book of Solomon called Ecclesiastes.

Through all these I came to a conclusion. The same conclusion of many that Solomon reached. But I would phrase it in way that resonate more to me than the archaic phrase 'chasing after the wind'. Life is a progress game.

We are just hardwired to see numbers go up. We just came up with more sophisticated bar. Success, money, honor, glory, sex, offspring, power, love, fame. For some reason, I looked down at those metrics and told my self. I'm beyond that. My metrics are more sophisticated. My bars are less easily quantifiable, and less likely to be recognized as goals. I derived haught and snob from my sense of uniqueness and exclusivity. I value legacy. For legacy are stories, which I value too, written with my life as a pen and my decisions as it's ink. How profound I though to myself. But it is, like any other thing, just a bar.

So life is just a progress game. We live our life to see some obscure set of quantities goes up. But that's just it. We just like to see numbers go up. But if one had the slightest illusion like mine, that a legacy could remain, an impact might last, consider the words of the teacher: "I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether that person will be wise or foolish? Yet they will have control over all the fruit of my toil into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun. This too is meaningless. So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun." NIV

Thursday 18 December 2014

Repurposed

I took this picture in a sharehouse where I live during the weekdays. In the guest few weeks, it escaped me. Then I realized, there is a hole on the left side of the sink. Only after few seconds I realized. It is meant for a hot water tap.
Now put this in context. This happens in Indonesia, a place with only two seasons: wet summer and dry summer. Hot water system is not a necessity. Even middle up houses lack that. When a house have the luxury of heated water, most often it is only installed as an isolated system attached only to showers and nothing else. There is only an infinitesimal amount of reason to have a heated tap, which then begs the question: How could this basin be installed here in the first place?
It takes a very long series of unlikeliness, from having such item being chosen for purchase, up until the availability of it in stores in the first place. It is these oddities that never cease to amuse me in this country of mine.