sounds of nature

So anyway, the heater in my bathroom broke down, so it leaked and was dripping the whole night. So, for one night, the semi-annoying semi-soothing sound of water falling and hitting the ground. A waterfall, a fountain, a defunct heater tank.

"Rant against pants". Without pockets. Just thought of that phrase today while waiting for the bus, I think.

This other day I was watching TV (but I watch TV a lot nowadays anyway), and it was a fascinating show on the animal kingdom. Dogs hunting in packs, compared with wolves hunting in packs, and versus hyenas hunting in packs. Each got their own styles and targets and strategies dependent on their level of socialization and their physical abilities.

Wolves are powerful and fierce and would kill each other, so that's why they have an alpha-male alpha-female system so that everyone accepts the hierarchy and there aren't excessive fights amongst each other. There's only one wolf eating the carcass at one time. Contrast this with dogs, I think, which have no problems sharing.

Then a school of fish, fleeing from being eaten, swimming together in choreographed motions, swinging in one direction and then abruptedly in another arc, the light shimmering off their aligned bodies and confusing the predator(s). The thing is that both prey and predator are generally weaker when split from others. A strategy of many predators is to chase in such a way that eventually the weakest member of the prey pack breaks away and is thus subsequently quite screwed.

Then got this animal so cute one, the one in Ice Age the cartoon movie I think, was it called a mere cat or something? The group has a sentry on rotation, and then the squirrels also "subscribe" to this lookout service, getting warnings of danger for free.

And the tiny monkeys are so cute, they have so much fun, swinging from vines and stuff, and they got a word for snake also, and another one for eagle, so when they make sound all of them know whether to lookout for snake on the ground or take cover to hide from eagle overhead.

Anyway, it's amazing the organized behavior of groups of animals. The fishy reflex and rhythm must be built into their muscles for them to do synchronized swimming. Practice makes perfect, and I guess there's nothing like knowing you'll be eaten that gets you going.

Been really busy, coding in Visual Basic for Applications (the MS Office version of VB), but what I'm supposed to do is quite involved, so the plan now is to just copy. No more macros, just worksheet functions, a working template of which has already been developed by other departments. So I just need to fiddle and faddle a bit with it to modify it for our needs.

Boston Public, a show about a public school, is so touching. Stuff about students, teaching, that kind of thing, school being understaffed, students eager to learn but shortchanged by the system that wants to see "results", young men and women challenging themselves to do more than others think possible...

There was this suggestion in the show to make all schools private, funded by skimming 1% of all future salary of all alumni of the school. A social security type "tax". Definitely sounds like a good idea because if it's left to the government they'd sooner create another nuclear bomb than set aside more funds for education.

So, lots of people are actually working in MINDEF. Daniel Huei, Adrian Foo, and still more others I don't know the names of (but I recognize their faces lah). I should probably go sleep soon; need to get a lot done tomorrow with Excel... hopefully it's not too much work, and it shouldn't be, since I can mostly copy and paste spreadsheets.