Punting

All of a sudden (即興)... we went to punting... actually I did the punting... so many punts on the river today, but it was good....

BBC NEWS | Health | Scientists probe meditation secrets

An article from BBC titled Scientists probe meditation secrets
describes how meditation can affect states of mentality "scientifically", here a quote from the article

"... compared the brains of these experienced practitioners with people who had never meditated and found that there were differences in the thickness of certain areas of the brain's cortex, including areas involved in the processing of emotion."

Professor Williams from Oxford said: "All of these things are just thoughts. And, they will come up in meditation and learning to recognize what they are as thoughts, and let them go, can be enormously empowering for anybody."

I say science is still quite immature when used for reasoning about the human mind... so for the time being the best way for anyone in doubt is to try to understand it by getting some first hand experiences...

Biking together

Two photos of us on our bikes, having just got back from city centre. Note the bag of rice at the back of my bike.

En route to Vicky Arms

Desperate looking forward to my pint of Guiness, as Jeff and I were taking in turns to "punt" all of us to there!!

A weekend of nothing

Ha! After a busy week of conference (and subsequent nights out)... I finally made all the correction for my report and have actually had it printed off on last Friday!! Ye!! Now I am waiting for some "forming filling" to be done by my department and my college. So this weekend has been a bit of a slacker really... not been doing much at all!! However, I watched Live Earth on Saturday night and found KT Tunstall a very good singer and indeed although I was quite familiar with the music she played but I did not know they were hers!! (I could not find any good recordings of her at Live Earth from youtube and so I used this music video instead.)

Anyhow... back to work this coming week... no more slacking!!

Punting

An excerpt from Wikipedia

"Rather different traditions have grown up in Oxford and Cambridge: in Cambridge they stand on the till and punt with the open end forward, while in Oxford they stand inside the boat and punt with the till forward. The Oxford position is closer to the orthodox except that nearly everyone in Oxford punts left-handed. Since the rivers in both cities are narrow and often crowded, there is little opportunity for punting "at full pressure", so these variations in stance are of little importance. Nevertheless the traditions are often strongly held; students at Oxford and Cambridge frequently believe that theirs is the only correct style."

Anyhow umm... will need to see the difference for myself.

Rejection!!

Dear Peter Wong,

I'm sorry to inform you that your paper ... has not been accepted for presentation at ... the comments of the reviewers are ...

Crap!! Although a few comments are genuine, most of the comments were like

"...there are too many detailed formulas for a conference paper..."
"I found the paper dense and hard to read and unravel."

Bloody HELL!!!

On the way to lab

On the way to lab, originally uploaded by peterwong1228.

This one however remained stationary and kept staring at me...

On the way to lab

On the way to lab, originally uploaded by peterwong1228.

This little one came out and meowed a couple of times to greet me as soon as I arrived... but also almost spontaneously he (i think its a he) started to ignore me... did a bit of cleaning up... how peculiar..

Lollipops reduce late-night crime

According to statistics - Lollipops reduce late-night crime !! Unbelievable!!

Snowy Oxford

Wolfson College under snow!!

Blue Blood

"The boxing film is hit with a fierce uppercut in this clever documentary about the training regimen and sparring contests of Oxford University students who step out of the ivory tower and into the boxing ring. " -- Tribeca

This should be an interesting one...

Radcliffe Camera

I have been incorrectly thinking the Radcliffe Camera has anything to do with the two towers... it in fact resembles Sauron's temple to Morgoth on Numenor. God knows what that is (however if anyone knows then please let me know).