Young Leaders Summer School (Day 14)

Day 14 (17th Dec) - Last day of lectures and we started with Marty Ross' Mathematics lecture on Henri Poincare's Conjecture which was much more 'cheem' and although I was kinda lost at certain parts it was still quite fascinating and some parts were quite entertaining and understandable. We learnt about how to "cheat" at "noughts and crosses" by imagining the playing area as a cylinder and hence generating other ways to win instead of a traditional 2-D board and he used that game as an introduction to various concepts in topology and from there we then learnt about the Mobius Strip and things like torus and the Klein bottle, amongst many other stuff...

One thing I really liked about his lectures so far is that he really has a lot of interesting videos and cartoons and while we do have chemistry videos, somehow it was just different looking at cartoon videos cos it gave a sense that the concepts were easy to understand and common place... Wonder if there are any cartoon series related to chemistry...

After that we went for the Science Trivia Quiz and we joined 3 of our students cos somehow they were split up from everyone else which had like 8 students and we were joint winners haha. Well, actually while we did manage to help with some of the things, many of it was just anybody's guess also but my greatest screw-up was getting "Who discovered penicillin?" wrong. I initially thought it was Louis Pasteur (fyi, he founded the science of microbiology and proved that most infectious diseases are caused by micro-organisms. This became known as the "germ theory" of disease. He was the inventor of the process of pasteurisation and also developed vaccines for several diseases including rabies), then when I saw the question again just before the answers were revealed I suddenly thought of the name Alexander Fleming and that was the correct one!

Anyway, it was quite funny cos after round 1 we had 9 points out of 18 and the kids were joking just before they submitted their scores it'll be funny if they were leading cos they called themselves "The Retards" and true enough, we really were leading with a measly 9 points! That was a real lol moment for us =p Then again the questions were really tough even for MCQ cos most were on inventors and their inventions, like who invented the air-conditioner and identifying from the portraits the inventors themselves... Round 2 was complete crap and we got 8 out of 20? Round 3 was better and it helped that I knew a bit about the Nobel Prize so yup the kids got themselves some chocolate for their efforts haha.

Had leadership presentations in the afternoon and some of the groups had topics that were too common with common solutions and nothing concrete. My favourite was actually one which had a refreshing topic of how Australia would react if the two Koreas go to war and the kids were dressed up professionally cos they did it in a form of skit and presentation and acted as the Prime Minister, Foreign Minster, Defence Ministers and other ministers. Our 4 kids also did well and overall the entire group showed the best teamwork with everyone knowing their parts well (no reference to script at all!), everyone participating without it sounding disjointed or certain parts feeling too short that it becomes disorienting, and doses of humour. There was another very good presentation on Eugenics though the topic kinda bored me but at least they were creative in changing song lyrics and had some funny skit and interesting and plausible solutions.

After that we had time to prepare for the valedictory dinner and I experienced one of the proudest moments in my life - ironing my clothes for the first time in my life without anyone teaching me! =P LOL, ok, maybe that's nothing much and perhaps it's surprising that during my 30 years of life I've never touched the iron before but still I managed to figure out what to do with the iron haha. I borrowed from one of the other teachers and was told that I could fill it with water because it's a steam iron and that already kinda stumped me but I didn't show my ignorance and just took it while I tried to tinker with it. I poured the water and as I lifted the iron up there was water leaking out and I was like, *! Hahaha, anyway I just carried on with the process and initially I tried to iron my shirt without the iron touching the shirt lol cos I was thinking that maybe the steam generated would do something (and also cos I have these scenes from shows where people's clothes get burnt due to ironing) but I noticed that it didn't help much so in the end I just started to carefully press the shirt with the iron and presto, I was done! Haha, for all my intelligence there are too many basic stuff that I don't know but I'm glad I figured it out just in time for the dinner!

Dinner was ok, just a simple entree (which was light and refreshing), main course (which wasn't very filling) and dessert (which was too sweet) and I liked one of the valedictorian's speech (there were 2 strangely) cos it seemed more personal and from the heart rather than feeling like a laboriously prepared speech but both spoke well and one of them was Ngee Ann Sec's Council President and she was such a diminutive figure but she was confident and it was a very good effort considering her age. I was utterly bored though cos I was sitting with people I weren't close to and I had a bad throat so I didn't want to initiate conversations so I was glad when it was all over...

Was reading some news on Yahoo and some of the more interesting bits:
(1) We have a 11-year old whiz kid that's written an application for iPhone that has almost a million downloads

(2) Apparently there are quite a few people walking around naked in public in Singapore these days, e.g. at a McDonald's outlet and on a SBS bus. In the first six months of the year, there have already been 105 such incidents!

(3) For the second consecutive year, the most irritating word in the English language is "whatever" and I usually hate people telling me that word also because as the article says, "It can be quite dismissive depending on how they are used." The way some people say it sometimes makes you just feel like giving them a solid punch if you were allowed to... Btw, "like" and "you know what I mean" are also very much disliked... =p

Ok, that's it for tonight! Starting to pack my bag - < 45 hours to our flight home!