Posts

Back to School, Part-time!

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Finally! After all these years, I have resumed school starting with a Masters psychology course on nurturing the gifted and talented.  This rare subject is close to my heart and I can only find it in one tertiary institution in all of Hong Kong.  As this is my first university experience in my hometown, it means so much more.  COVID-19 and resorting to online classes however have taken some of the shine off, but I am still ecstatic!  Ready to rock the semester.  Bring it on! - PTS

Book Review: Outgrowing God

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The year 2020 will certainly go down as a memorable one,  given our struggles to cope with a global pandemic.  When not out and about -- which was often -- I managed to pick up a great habit of reading at least 30 minutes every day.  This practice has given me relaxation, along with the joy of continually learning and gaining new insights to life.  Of numerous reads this year, I felt compelled to write a review on Outgrowing God , by Richard Dawkins.  If memory serves, I wrote a review on his earlier work, The God Delusion , back in 2009.  Indeed the two books have many similarities and it feels a bit deja vu to read his latest e-book.  Since taking a more leisurely stride in reading, no notes were taken along the way.  Relying on raw memory, Dawkins' key reasoning on why we do not need a god was:  Assuming the biblical recordings of Abrahamic God (in Judaism, Christianity and Islam) were largely accurate, and that itself is a big "if", the Almighty is simply too cruel,

Monty Hall Problem from a Movie

Time flies and it has been two years since my last post.  Somehow this important pastime has not seen much investment of my time in Hong Kong. I was watching the movie 21 the other night, which was about a team of MIT students breaking bank at Vegas casinos.  The movie was entertaining as it has (some) action, romance, a twist, and most importantly, math, packed into two hours of lights-out.  I learnt how to improve your odds at Blackjack, by working in a team and assigning a count to a table based on the number of dealt high and low cards.  The part that really caught my attention however, was when professor Rosa was teaching the Monty Hall problem through his interaction with his A-student and soon-to-be recruit, Ben Campbell.  This problem is often depicted in the form of a game show.  The grand prize, a car, is waiting behind one of three closed doors.  When the contestant picks Door A, the game show host, who knows exactly which door the car is behind, opens a door that is e

Book Review: Out of the Maze

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It has been five years since my last post.  The 9 to 5 and life in generally have taken my attention elsewhere.  However, I still do my best to pick up the pen from time to time.  Although time is a luxury, I recently managed to squeeze in a quick read called Out of the Maze , by the famous author Spencer Johnson, who co-penned the bestseller  Who Moved My Cheese  some years ago. If Who Moved My Cheese challenges us to embrace change, then Out of the Maze tells us just how to do it.  While it is easier said than done for most people, the ideas preached are surprisingly easy to grasp. Some points may seem overly obvious but perhaps this is why so many overlook them.  The story of the mice, Hem and Haw, continue to take center stage in this sequel. A new star, Hope, joins the mix and becomes Hem's new companion in their quest to finding a new food supply.  The underlying message is to challenge our beliefs, especially those that are so deeply entrenched as facts in our mind.  We

Quote of the Day

It is better to aim high and fail than to aim low and succeed.  -PTS

Quote of the Day

Television often depicts people living perfect lives without any imperfections.  I simply strive to live an imperfect life to perfection.  -PTS

A Very Real Life Application of the Stable Marriage Problem

I recently stumbled upon a mathematical problem known as the  Stable Marriage Problem (SMP).  Per Wikipedia, the problem is commonly stated as: Given N men and N women, where each person has ranked all members of the opposite sex with a unique number between 1 and n in order of preference, marry the men and women together such that there are no two people of opposite sex who would both rather have each other than their current partners. If there are no such people, all the marriages are "stable". The SMP has real-life applications to any problem requiring stable pairing of two sets of equal size. In fact, this problem is always solvable using the Gale-Shapley algorithm . There is a rather big catch however.  While the marriages are always stable, they may not be ideal from the vantage point of an individual.  To illustrate this, imagine three men A,B,C and three women X,Y,Z. Here are their ranked preferences for members of the other group: A: YXZ B: ZYX C: XZY X