Tuesday, October 30, 2007

權威字典解錯英文

唔記得邊度睇番黎:



我都唔知香港幾時開始變成咁樣。點解用 press for 咁客氣? 施壓有乜唔啱?我十分贊成的。杯葛也冇咩大不了... 其實施壓,促請,游說,實際上都冇乜分別,不外乎都係威迫與利誘而已... 唔通真係「曉以大義」咩?

Monday, October 22, 2007

Snooker grand prix 2007

Congratulations to Marco Fu for his (finally) first ranking tournament title!

Still, his playing can at times be rather embarassing to watch. Last year someone in the audience shouted "it's like watching paint dry" when both players keep on missing balls. It's not too different from that in the semi-final two days ago, against a rather unheard-of opponent. Yesterday's match with O'Sullivan was completely different. It looks like he really need to play against the top players to play well...

And this completes the football - rugby - racing - snooker disaster week for British sports.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Ig, Excel and Ricoh

The Ig nobel prize is out again. (So it's another year already!) Bizzare things seem to happen more often around this time, from Excel believing 65535 = 100000 to quantum mechanics in a printer ad...

The Excel issue is rather puzzling to me. We all know about 65535 but why would it become a nice number in base 10? Btw, you would expect people who post on the MSDN blog know what they are saying, but there are a few who apparently do not know what floating point numbers are...

The quantum mechanics ad is even more weird. Ok you like some deep-science-sounding stuff, but that particular quotation, or anything remotely similar to it, is not something you can find in a common quantum mechanics textbook. Do the ad producers actually know about Scott Aaronson and his lectures?

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Scheduling algorithms for procrastinators

This is the exact wording of the first paragraph of a journal paper:
We are writing this sentence two days before the deadline. Unfortunately that sentence (and this one) are among the first that we have written. How could we have delayed so much when we have known about this deadline for months? The purpose of this paper is to explain why we have waited until the last moment to write this paper.


Thursday, October 04, 2007

各位同學,你地交左學費未?

我唔係校長,暫時也未光頭,更加冇燒臘鋪,但唔知點解我呢幾日問左好多次...