Thursday, October 28, 2004

A: "麥兜波蘿油王子"好唔好睇?
B: 唔好! 都唔好笑,悶死!

* * *

當學生問及周星馳拍了那麼多喜劇,有沒有想過要創作悲劇,周星馳用他特有的幽默方式回答說,“我以為我拍了很多悲劇,可是拍出來你們都覺得那是喜劇,”引得全場爆笑。

* * *

所以這首歌[k歌之王]是寫唱者有心聽者無意,寫大好明月照溝渠,寫熱面孔貼冷屁股,寫良心當狗肺,寫寫寫,寫到吐血被誤會為濫情嘔吐,除了自嘲,再沒有更準確的語氣寫這種不被Q了解的孤獨。而最諷刺的誤會是,有人把k歌之王解讀為一首諷刺流行芭樂k情歌的自省之作。真是自作孽。

林夕

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Check your collaboration distance with...

MathSciNet has added the functionality to search the collaboration distance between any two authors! Now you can search your distance with Erdos, Einstein, ... easily.

http://www.ams.org/msnmain/cgd/index.html

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

燒車的風采

From 太陽報:

...三數秒間全車被烈燄吞噬,並傳出多響爆炸聲。當時不少路過的駕駛人士及巴士乘客目睹事發經過,看見車主為曾鈺成,爭睹他的風采,...

Sunday, October 17, 2004

Mutually Exclusive Thoughts

For some reason, students tend to think that certain things are mutually exclusive when they are not:

1. They think that "deterministic finite automata" and "nondeterministic finite automata" are disjoint sets, thus feel puzzled when someone says "a deterministic FA is also a nondeterministic FA". This is probably not their fault; the names really sound like they are opposites.

2. Then we have students who think that a strongly-connected graph is not a weakly-connected graph, even though the definition clearly shows that it is. OK, strong and weak are opposites...

3. Now we have students who think that there are 3 types of functions: injective, surjective, and bijective, and a function must belong to exactly one type. I dunno how they can get this impression.

I am waiting some students to say "a tree is not a graph", or something like that.

Thursday, October 14, 2004

This is year 2046. Two computer science professors at MIT is chatting.

Young Prof A: The standard of students is really too bad. Today I see a grad student from Hong Kong. He said he's never heard of the principle of inclusion-exclusion.

Old Prof B: This is not too bad. You don't know the effort required to clear their wrong understanding about the congruence modulo symbol in my cryptography class.

A: Worst still, he doesn't know what are floors and ceilings!

B: This happens all the time. Some 40 years ago I met a grad student from Hong Kong. He complained exactly the same thing you just said, and mentioned the interesting thing that students can do dynamic programming of matrix chain multiplication without knowing how to multiply two matrices together.

A: Oh really?

B: He also regretted that his teachers didn't teach enough basic stuff, like elementary graph algorithms, generating functions, pumping lemma, and so on.

A: Er - sorry - did you say "pumping lemma"? What's it?

Friday, October 08, 2004

愛國...

沙田區某愛國愛港組織(?), 在香港文化博物館附近, 掛出極具"文化 x x x "氣息的這些東西. 至於為何下半旗, 就...
http://hk.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/spyfung/my_photos

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

I have never seen anything as "sensible" as this before:

To ensure that your published works are easily retrievable and identifiable by the widest possible readership, I wish to remind all staff to give the address of this University i.e. "The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam" in their publications.

The addition of "Pokfulam" after the University's name is very important because an online search for the "University of Hong Kong", "Hong Kong University", or a similar variant will show up other tertiary institutions in Hong Kong due to the "generic" nature of our name. The inclusion of "Pokfulam" in the University's address will therefore ensure that searches are confined to outputs published by this University.

University of California, Berkeley? So what are the other campuses of HKU, huh?

新世界(17)旗下之移動雪櫃(970)表示, 雖然近期油價高企, 但該公司不會節約能源, 仍會維持車廂超低温.
移動雪櫃(970)主要經營西九龍至港島南區之急涷肉類運輸業務.