After this post, I shall probably take a few days' of break to allow the mystery guest blogger time to prepare some stuff to talk about, after which our guest blogger shall post some interesting thoughts. But for now, it's still your favourite me down here .... cheers! So what am i gonna talk about now? Something important i gather ... so for all those aspiring scientists who love coming up with new laws and wat not, so they can etch their names in the annals of science folklore, well listen up.
Those who have studied physics have probably encountered numerous conservation laws, one of which is the conservation of momentum, in which the momentum before and after a collision is the same, provided no external force acts on the colliding particles. Well, I have also come up with something similar, tho less subject to physical demonstration. It's what I call the law of conservation of motivation. This is how it works.
The total amount of motivation in the world is conserved, ie. whenever someone feels deflated, there is always someone else there who feels elated. For simplicity, I shall prove this law using me as an example. So on Monday, I had my physics midterm. Now I thought it was a tougher test than the first midterm, and naturally I stayed through the entire duration to ponder over this one question which I believe I might have screwed up on. Well, now that I think of it, I'm sure I screwed up that problem; I just hope I get sufficient partial credit. So naturally, I feel bad after leaving the exam hall, so my motivation level decreases. Now where does this motivation go to? Perhaps to those cocks who think they might have breezed through the test (tho I hope there is no such person out there, since it will only contribute to a further decrease in my motivation levels), or more likely to the professor who set the questions, who's probably sitting there thinking "these people think they so smart, esp that singaporeans who's always sleeping through my class. now let's see who's boss".
However, my law isn't that simple, as to only revolve around different individuals at 1 particular event at 1 particular moment in time. It can also involve the same individual at 2 unrelated events at different instances of time. Here's how it works.
On Monday afternoon, I went to help my friend with some survey for her thesis. Her thesis is basically that Asians are better in mathematics and problem solving than Americans. Well, I would like to narrow that down to Singaporeans being better than the rest, but I digress. So I was given 3 math questions to solve. The questions are as follows: 1) there is a 2-digit number. By adding another digit between these 2 digits, you get a 3-digit number. What is the largest integral value of k, such that the 3-digit number is k times larger than the 2-digit number? 2) some stupid 16 square box. Put a number into each box, such that the 4 boxes in each column, row and diagonal sums up to 1000. Then what is the sum of the 4 numbers which lie in the middle 4 squares? 3) prove that the probability that at least 2 ppl having the same birthday, within a random sample size of 50, is greater than 95%
Well, I ended up being the first person among the 27 ppl she has surveyed who got all 3 questions correct. Now of course my motivation level increases. The positive change in motivation in this case might not equal the negative change earlier in the day, but several such changes averaged out over several instances will produce a net change of 0.
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