Random Ideas

I have loads of random ideas. Every now and then, they’re interesting enough I share them with some friends. And even more rarely, I feel just telling them to my friends isn’t enough. So I wish I had a website I could post them to. And guess what. I DO have a website to post them to

Some of the following random thoughts are kind of serious, some are just random observations I find amusing. If I have more of them in the future, I might make this into a static page instead of just a blog post. Anyway, here’s the first batch of my random thoughts!

Infinite staircase

I love walking up long flights of stairs. One of my favorite tourist spots is the Eiffel tower, where I walked as far up as I could using the stairs (unfortunately the stairs don’t lead all the way to the top).

So I was thinking – why stop only as high as the Eiffel tower? Or Burj Dubai, or any other man-built staircase. How about making an INFINITE staircase, for a freak like me? (Or at least the illusion of an infinite staircase). Well, never a man to be stopped by logical impossibilities, here’s what I came up with:

Imagine a long escalator. Really long. No, not infinite, just long enough for this to work. Now imagine you go and start walking up the escalator. Let’s say it’s basically in a tunnel. Just the escalator, and nothing else. Then, the whole tunnel fills with mist, so it’s more mysterious, and you can also see only a few meters ahead.

A person will be watching you from a surveillance room, using hidden cameras. Then they will start the escalator into motion. Moving in the opposite direction than you’re walking. So if you’re walking up, this escalator would be going down. It would be built so that it gets moving VERY gently, so you don’t feel it. It would take a while to match your speed, but after that, you would be in one spot, just treading the stairs. In the mist. Maybe with some cool soundtrack playing. Walking for EVER. MUHAHAhahahahaaaa…

Laugh-out-loud funny indeed

The other day, I was walking down the street and saw a movie ad on the side of a bus. One thing that struck my eye was the reviewer quote on that ad. It said:

“Laugh-out-loud funny!”
- some reviewer

I, being a geek, of course immediately translated the quote into an abbreviation – “LOL funny!” and burst out laughing. Using the abbreviation literally transformed a serious reviewer quote into something that looked like a YouTube comment left by a 12-year old.

Splitting the maths teachers

I’ve been a university student for over a month now. I’ve noticed one thing – most maths lecturers suck. The thing is, maths teaching is composed of two bits – maths and teaching. Most maths lecturers are great at the maths bit, but crap at the teaching bit.

In high school, I had a very unique maths teacher for one year. He was so bad at teaching, stuff actually made LESS sense after he explained it! (No, seriously.) I haven’t met anyone quite like that since… until now. One of my lecturers is just like that. The stuff makes some sense, then the lecturer talks about it for an hour, and by the end you’re more confused than when you came into the lecture!

This got me thinking. To make a good maths teacher, you need both the maths and the teaching. Unfortunately, finding both in the same person is very rare. But hey, what if it didn’t have to be the same person…

What about having two lecturers in each lecture? One would be great at maths, the other would be great at teaching. The teacher would by default do most of the teaching, and the maths expert would be there to correct any mistakes, and answer the students’ questions if the teacher can’t cope with them. That way, the students get the best of both worlds. Good teaching with clear explanations, but also an experienced mathematician to answer any random questions they might have.

Six Random Things about me

I got recently got tagged by fairyhedgehog in the Six Random Things meme. It’s a blogging version of those annoying chain e-mails. You know, the ones that go “If you don’t send this on to 10 people, a zombie girl will come at midnight and eat your brains”. (I actually got an chain e-mail like that once. “Sweet!” I thought. Finally a chance to test this out! So I deliberately didn’t pass the e-mail on to anyone. All excited, I stayed up until midnight. I even left the window right next to me open, so the zombie girl would have an easy entry. Unfortunately, she never showed up. I guess someone she was visiting earlier that night had eaten a garlic sandwich or something. Sigh.)

So… I won’t be passing this on, since I’m not a fan of pointless chain e-mails (or chain blog posts, in this case). But since the idea of writing six random things about myself goes well with this post’s theme, I figured I might include them . Without further ado, here are six random things about me:

1. I can’t stay still while brushing my teeth. So I walk around, or browse the web, or whatever. Last week, I was reading a book in my bed. Suddenly I feel toothpaste trying to drop out of my mouth onto the bedsheets. I barely avoid it, and realize I still have my toothbrush in my mouth. It’s been there for at least 10 minutes, and I completely forgot about it. (the book was a Terry Prachett).
2. I once solved the Rubik’s cube with my feet.
3. I love walking barefoot through grass. I love it so much, at several points in my life, I went out in the middle of the night just to do it.
4. I spent more time pimping out my computer’s operating system than pimping out my room. Orders of magnitude more.
5. I once tried learning to count in hexadecimal. No, I mean really count in hexadecimal. I invented six new symbols for the extra digits (ABCDEF just wouldn’t cut it for me), and then spent days practicing basic addition and multiplication. I got bored before I could become proficient at it. But one of the symbols I invented made it into my “evil overlord sign”, and it’s now even part of my official signature.
6. I sometimes read books upside down. It makes me read about 5 times slower, so I can savour the book more. For example, I read the whole last book of the Harry Potter series upside down.