ON AN ISLAND, PART 3: ROCK ROCK ROCK

From Tap Mun, we sailed on to Tung Ping Chau, located in the northeast corner of Hong Kong in Mirs Bay, close to the border with Guangdong Province in mainland China. In fact, some of those beach shots yr about to see? That’s mainland China on the opposite shore.



Notice the siltstone formations. Tung Ping Chau is basically made of sedimentary rock and, I'm told, is the only HK island that is (the others are made of igneous rock from volcanos – isn’t that interesting?). That tall rock on the lower-left corner is one half of the “Drum Rocks”. That lower-right pic is just something I shot on the 90-minute ferry ride back home.

Not much to add, except I focused a bit more on the buildings because one of them may or may not be the house where the bridal unit grew up. KT doesn’t remember (she was three when she left, after all) and neither does her mom (who is over 80 and trying to remember a place she left almost 40 years ago).

Anyway, it was interesting walking around and trying to imagine the place circa 1969, and what it was like to live there. That said, at that time the island’s population was already dwindling, and the only people moving there were mainland Chinese trying to swim there to escape the Cultural Revolution. So it might not have been as idyllic as it looks.

So yes, that was my weekend.

Normal bloggery resumes.

On the rocks,

This is dF

STAY HUNGRY, MY FRIENDS

ITEM [via Def Agent lorilori ]: State Rep. Cynthia Davis (R-MO) gives her thoughts on the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services’ summer food program, which provides “food during the summer for thousands of low-income Missouri children who rely on the school cafeteria for free or reduced-price meals during the regular school year.”

She’s against it, basically. And here's one reason why:

“Anyone under 18 can be eligible? Can’t they get a job during the summer by the time they are 16? Hunger can be a positive motivator. What is wrong with the idea of getting a job so you can get better meals? Tip: If you work for McDonald’s, they will feed you for free during your break.”

Classy.

She also trots out the usual Repub arguments of how Big Govt programs are dehumanizing and wasteful. Which may or may not be true, but it’s worth pointing out that what she’s essentially saying is that it’s better for kids to starve (which builds character) than for the govt to spend a dime to help them.

I’m just saying.

Feed me,

This is dF

MATH: PROVES ELECTION FRAUD

I haven’t had much to say about the post-election furor in Iran, if only because what’s going on there isn’t all that radically different from elections we’ve seen in Kenya, Zimbabwe, East Timor, Cambodia, Florida and other countries where either the results are suspicious or the opposition refuses to accept the idea that they lost, because that’s Simply Not Possible. And no one really cared about those (except possibly Florida), though granted, we didn’t have Twitter then.

Anyway, that’s not to say that the Iranian election results aren’t suspicious. But when it’s yr word against the Guardian Council, how do you prove that votes were rigged?

With statistical mathematics!

According to a couple of PhD candidates at Columbia U, the biggest clue of election fraud in Iran is the official vote counts from different provinces – specifically, the last two digits of each result.

At the root of this is the fact that humans are generally bad at making up numbers.

Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others ....

Psychologists have also found that humans have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to 23) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers.

Which means that when you crunch the statistical likelihood of vote counts arriving at the exact numbers they did, the results better fit the pattern of someone making up numbers.

DISCLAIMER: I barely passed algebra in high school. So don’t ask me if any of it’s true. But it’s an interesting idea.

Add it up,

This is dF

MATH: ALSO FIXES TRAFFIC JAMS

ITEM: Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematicians create a model to describe “phantom” traffic jams – i.e. traffic jams that occur for no apparent reason.

The mathematics of such traffic jams are strikingly similar to the equations that describe detonation waves produced by explosions, said Aslan Kasimov, a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Mathematics. Realizing this allowed the reseachers to solve traffic jam equations that were first theorized in the 1950s. [...] The equations MIT came up with are similar to those used to describe fluid mechanics, and they model traffic jams as a self-sustaining wave.

Like so.

MIT hopes this model could help engineers design build better roads to minimize the odds of phantom jams happening.

We could certainly use it in HK.

Personally, when it comes to solving traffic congestion, I’m still holding out for my Blade Runner flying car.



Up and away,

This is dF