Category: School

You’ve probably heard from tons of people about this incident by now. I was first notified of this unfortunate event by MsticAzn: Video Shows UCLA Police Using Stun Gun On Student At first, I felt sorry for the student, but after reading the entire article, I felt he somehow deserved it. I agree it might’ve been a bit too extreme, but the student was being extremely uncooperative given the fact it was the student’s fault to begin with.

I quote for the article:

“This is a longstanding library policy to ensure the safety of students during the late-night hours,” Greenstein said. “The CSO made an announcement that he would be checking for university identification. When a person, who was later identified as … Tabatabainejad, refused to provide any identification, the CSO told him that if he refused to do so, he would have to leave the library.

“Since, after repeated requests, he would neither leave nor show identification, the CSO notified UCPD officers, who responded and asked Tabatabainejad to leave the premises multiple times. He continued to refuse. As the officers attempted to escort him out, he went limp and continued to refuse to cooperate with officers or leave the building.

Honestly, that last paragraph needs to be completely bolded. Also, if you didn’t know CSO = community service officers Chief Security Officer.

So this is how the events rolled out in my head:

1. CSO announces that they’ll be checking IDs
2. CSO comes and requests to see Tabatabainejad’s ID
3. Tabatabainejad either forgot it or refuses to show his ID
4. CSO asks Tabatabainejad to leave (repeat several times)
5. Tabatabainejad continues to ignore CSO’s request, so CSO calls UCPD
6. UCPD also requests Tabatabainejad to leave (repeat several times)
7. Tabatabainejad continues to ignore
8. UCPD has no other option to escort him out
9. UCPD officers put their hands on Tabatabainejad and escorts him out
10. Tabatabainejad either shakes or throws their hands off and screams, “Don’t touch me!”
11. At this point, the officers user their taser on him (a weaker version which only stuns)
12. Tabatabainejad either falls to the floor or fakes it
13. Tabatabainejad begins to scream about justice and law and Patriot Act and tries to rally for supporters
14. Police officers ask him to stand up, but he doesn’t
15. They taser him again.
16. Tabatabainejad screams that he’ll leave, but makes no attempt to stand up or do so
17. (repeat the last 2 steps several times)

Do note, that the taser has 2 settings, and the one used was known as a drive stun, which is a much weaker version, and shouldn’t affect the student’s ability to move. Plus if he can be screaming that loud, I’d expect he wasn’t that stunned at all.

So I’ve been getting event invites from a Berkeley student I have no idea who he is, but somehow he was on my list of friends in FaceBook. Anyway, after I rejected my 1st invite, he re-invites me again saying I should at least watch the video. I really wanted to message him and tell him my opinion, but given he’s the leader of this rally he’s putting together in front of Sproul Hall, I don’t think anything I’d say would get through to him, so I reject him again. He goes on and sends a 3rd request at which point I reject him and remove him from my friend’s list.

Decathanerd sent me this video: Iranian-American Student Abused By UCLA UCPD With Tazer GUN, which is an unedited version of it. If this was the only video I saw, I’d feel sorry for the poor guy. But by only watching this video which started rolling when he started screaming, you miss the bigger story of how it got to this point.

A person at that incident has posted his comments on a thread: The UCLA beat-down: We have a witness and his feeling is just the same as mine, which somewhat confirms my instinct of what really happened:

Okay kids, I’m here!

Yes, I was indeed at Powell Library at approximately 11:30 on Tuesday night, and yes I did see the entire event as it went down.

Let me start off by saying that the guy DEFINITELY was asking to get his ass kicked. He was being extremely rude with the campus patrol guys (who are college students…this was before the real UCPD got called in). He was not complying with their requests to leave the premises, and he was definitely itching for a fight. I actually know the guy and a few of his friends, and I can tell you that he’s the kind of guy that loves to make trouble.

Just as a little backstory, one of the quotes the guy has on his facebook (which he now has taken down) was “I like to find the most difficult solutions to the simplest of problems”.

He definitely taunted the UCPD into behaving the way they did with him.

Edit: Many people have questioned the fact that the cops tazed him and asked him to get up, and tazed him again even though he shouldn’t have the capability to get up. This was not the case here to my knowledge, because the cops were using their “drive-stun” method which administers less of a jolt than normal. I believe this because anyone who can ramble on about this being the patriot act and yell at the top of his lungs should have the capability of getting up.

No, that’s not a new smiley face of mine. So Xyon and I had a discussion today on what 0^0 (zero to the power of zero) equaled. I had always learnt that was undefined/undeterminate, but he learnt that it could equal either 0 or 1, and user gets to choose.

For me,

limit of x^0 as x approaches 0 = 1
limit of 0^x as x approaches 0 = 0

These 2 lines never intersect and therefore the limit of x^y as x and y approaches 0 = UNDEFINED (as I recalled in my calculus book).

However, we were looking a number sequences and they defined that 0^0 = 1, which started this whole debate in the 1st place.

We punched it into Google and got: 0^0 = 1.
We then tried to punch it into Maple and got the same answer.

Xyon then brought up a good point on how exponents are defined. Although this may not be the correct definition, it’s what has persisted it appears: x^y = 1 * (x multipled y times), therefore 1 * (any number multiplied 0 times) will always = 1.

However, from Math Forum:

According to some Calculus textbooks, 0^0 is an “indeterminate form.” What mathematicians mean by “indeterminate form” is that in some cases we think about it as having one value, and in other cases we think about it as having another.

The following is a list of reasons why 0^0 should be 1.

Rotando & Korn show that if f and g are real functions that vanish at the origin and are analytic at 0 (infinitely differentiable is not sufficient), then f(x)^g(x) approaches 1 as x approaches 0 from the right.

From Concrete Mathematics p.162 (R. Graham, D. Knuth, O. Patashnik):

Some textbooks leave the quantity 0^0 undefined, because the functions 0^x and x^0 have different limiting values when x decreases to 0. But this is a mistake. We must define x^0=1 for all x , if the binomial theorem is to be valid when x=0 , y=0 , and/or x=-y . The theorem is too important to be arbitrarily restricted! By contrast, the function 0^x is quite unimportant.

Published by Addison-Wesley, 2nd printing Dec, 1988.

As a rule of thumb, one can say that 0^0 = 1 , but 0.0^(0.0) is undefined, meaning that when approaching from a different direction there is no clearly predetermined value to assign to 0.0^(0.0) ; but Kahan has argued that 0.0^(0.0) should be 1, because if f(x), g(x) –> 0 as x approaches some limit, and f(x) and g(x) are analytic functions, then f(x)^g(x) –> 1 .

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Random Crap:

Jeopardy – What’s a Ho(e) (from MS newsgroup) – A rather old video, but is always funny and should give you a few chuckles. Alex Trebeck asks, “This term for a long-handled gardening tool can also mean an immoral pleasure seeker” and Ken Jennings replies with, “What’s a ho(e).” It took Alex a moment before realizing the pun. Looking at the scores, Ken Jennings was dominating.

India Traffic (from MS newsgroup) – video proof that traffic lights are not needed!

Is Your Mechanic Cheating? (mirror) (from MS newsgroup) – Joel Grover reports on his investigation into Jiffy Lube shots in the Southland. That’s why you should never get your car tuned at a Jiffy Lube, especially if you’re in southern California. I can’t believe how organized this cheating was! It seems to be directly ordered from the district manager.

PS3 controller spelling mistake (from MsticAzn) – Sony mistakenly spells ‘Select’ ‘Serect’ on their new PS3 controller. It’s common for Japanese to mix up Ls and Rs since they make the same sound in Japanese.

Could coffee protect your liver against alcohol? – Drinking coffee may shield the liver from the worst ravages of alcohol, a study of more than 125,000 people suggests. The risk of developing alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver dropped with each cup of coffee they drank per day. “Consuming coffee seems to have some protective benefits against alcoholic cirrhosis, and the more coffee a person consumes the less risk they seem to have of being hospitalised or dying of alcoholic cirrhosis,” says Arthur Klatsky at Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Programme in Oakland, California, US, who led the study. Haha, there’s no more need to worry about your liver since you can fix it by drinking coffee. I always find it interesting people are always trying to find good health benefits from food that are generally bad for health.

So now that I’m looking for a house, I’ve also been checking out school rankings (since the same house in Monterey Park or San Gabriel would be worth a lot more in Arcadia or San Marino). I just can’t believe there’s so many top ranking schools in Bellevue. It’s actually pretty shocking.

I’ve posted the 2004 rankings last year in May, but it appears there’s an updated 2005 list out now.

The pages are always hard to go through, so I made Excel spreadsheets of all 3 years:
2003 List – The Top High Schools
2004 The Complete List of the 1,000 Top U.S. Schools
2005 The Complete List of the 1,000 Top U.S. Schools

How the score is determined is by this formula:
Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests taken by all students at a school in 2004 divided by the number of graduating seniors.

Obviously that formula can be better, but it does a decent job I think. I also went through an interesting website (from my Buying Agent): The Seattle Times: School Guide, which lists all the public schools in the greater Seattle area and tells what percent graduated, what their average SAT score is, how many took the AP tests, how many passed, how many went to a 4 year college, how many went to a 2 year college, etc. I wonder if there’s a site similar to this for LA.

Here’s the few interesting ones I picked out.

2003:

• Rank | School Name | City | State | Score
• 14 | Bellevue | Bellevue | Wash. | 3.755
• 17 | International | Bellevue | Wash. | 3.643
• 19 | Newport | Bellevue | Wash. | 3.625
• 56 | University | Irvine | Calif. | 2.772
• 79 | Torrey Pines | San Diego | Calif. | 2.541
• 98 | Troy* | Fullerton | Calif. | 2.407
• 141 | Sammamish | Bellevue | Wash. | 2.155
• 162 | San Marino | San Marino | Calif. | 2.082
• 202 | Garfield | Seattle | Wash. | 1.924
• 235 | Arcadia | Arcadia | Calif. | 1.831
• 412 | Diamond Bar | Diamond Bar | Calif. | 1.41
• 429 | Mark Keppel | Alhambra | Calif. | 1.393
• 465 | Interlake* | Bellevue | Wash. | 1.355
• 646 | South Pasadena | South Pasadena | Calif. | 1.154
• 712 | Alhambra | Alhambra | Calif. | 1.079

2004:

• Rank | School | Location | State | Index | Subsidiezed lunches**
• 21 | Troy* | Fullerton | Calif. | 4.165 | 1
• 24 | Interlake* | Bellevue | Wash. | 4.018 | 31
• 32 | Newport | Bellevue | Wash. | 3.809 | 6
• 41 | Bellevue | Bellevue | Wash. | 3.551 | 6
• 82 | Torrey Pines | San Diego | Calif. | 2.929 | 1
• 117 | University | Irvine | Calif. | 2.614 | 1
• 151 | San Marino | San Marino | Calif. | 2.494 | 0
• 160 | International School | Bellevue | Wash. | 2.451 | 5
• 225 | Sammamish | Bellevue | Wash. | 2.182 | 30
• 278 | Diamond Bar* | Diamond Bar | Calif. | 2.029 | 5
• 301 | Arcadia | Arcadia | Calif. | 1.951 | 6.4
• 431 | Garfield | Seattle | Wash. | 1.693 | 30
• 451 | Mark Keppel | Alhambra | Calif. | 1.657 | 59.2
• 609 | Alhambra | Alhambra | Calif. | 1.424 | 61.7
• 718 | South Pasadena| South Pasadena| Calif.| 1.312 |12
• 830 | Redmond | Redmond | Wash. | 1.211 | 1
• 881 | Gabrielino (tie) | San Gabriel | Calif. | 1.157 | 60
• 971 | Issaquah | Issaquah | Wash. | 1.078 | 5.9

2005:

• Rank | School | Location | State | Index | Subsidized lunches
• 21 | Troy* | Fullerton | Calif. | 4.165 | 1
• 24 | Interlake* | Bellevue | Wash. | 4.018 | 31
• 32 | Newport | Bellevue | Wash. | 3.809 | 6
• 41 | Bellevue | Bellevue | Wash. | 3.551 | 6
• 81 | Torrey Pines | San Diego | Calif. | 2.929 | 1
• 118 | University | Irvine | Calif. | 2.614 | 1
• 152 | San Marino | San Marino | Calif. | 2.494 | 0
• 161 | International School | Bellevue | Wash. | 2.451 | 5
• 199 | Santa Monica | Santa Monica | Calif. | 2.299 | 20.5
• 227 | Sammamish | Bellevue | Wash. | 2.182 | 30
• 280 | Diamond Bar* | Diamond Bar | Calif. | 2.029 | 5
• 303 | Arcadia | Arcadia | Calif. | 1.951 | 6.4
• 437 | Garfield | Seattle | Wash. | 1.693 | 30
• 457 | Mark Keppel | Alhambra | Calif. | 1.657 | 59.2
• 622 | Alhambra | Alhambra | Calif. | 1.424 | 61.7
• 731 | South Pasadena | South Pasadena | Calif. | 1.312 | 12
• 848 | Redmond | Redmond | Wash. | 1.211 | 1
• 903 | Gabrielino (tie) | San Gabriel | Calif. | 1.157 | 60
• 993 | Issaquah | Issaquah | Wash. | 1.078 | 5.9

Sources:
2003 List: The Top High Schools
2004 – The Complete List of the 1,000 Top U.S. Schools
2005 – The Complete List of the 1,000 Top U.S. Schools

** A PUBLIC NOTICE SPONSORED BY OHFUEE **

Send a short email to mkhs2001 AT hotmail DOT com (replace italicized words with the corresponding symbols) just telling them your name and email. Supposedly this is where they’re going to coordinate the 10 year reunion. It’s only been 5 years if you’re wondering which year we’re on already. Yes, I forgot how many years it has been too and Ohfuee reminded me.

Anyway, it’s shocking that someone is still checking that email after so many years. I wonder who it is. Apparently Ohfuee was the 1st to send a email according to the reply.

** TRANMISSION HAS ENDED **

thought of the day: ever got so meticulous with your music library that every single info on file has to be correct. the artist, the published date, the song title, the album title, the cover art, the composer? ever had it get so bad that when you couldn’t find out the song’s title or artist, you’d rather delete it from your library than keep it in there even though it sounds good?

i was studying for my psych midterm tomorrow and came across this fact: Harsh parental discipline predicts increase in children’s RS over a year. rejection sensitivity is described as a tendency to anticipate with dread and emotionally overreact to social rejection. i was just thinking, the 1st statement applies to probably 99% of them asian population. i wonder if all asians are high in rejection sensitivity. you can take the test here and score yourself: Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire (RSQ). after thinking about this for awhile, i realize that maybe we are high rejection sensitivity, but we’re so good at avoiding it, we don’t really see the symptoms. u know the humbleness factor in asian cultures? well, to be humble avoids conflicts and by avoiding conflicts, you avoid rejection. those asians, a lot smarter than we originally thought. now they can apply strict discipline to their children, and avoid having messed up children when they grow up! now to tie this all up, for those that know me, i hate making decisions on where to eat and probably any suggestion anyone makes, i’d agree to. does that make me high on rejection sensitivity? i had initially thought girls were just better decision makers, but i find that to be untrue. i was talking to a friend awhile ago and said that if i was alone, i’d have no problem making a decision on where to go eat, but when i went out with a bunch of friends, it’d become so hard! he would tell me that everyday at lunch, his programming group at work would spend half an hour trying to decide where to eat standing in the lobby. i only know 3 of the people in that group and all of the are asians. but does this type of personality spread to other cultures?

so i started studying @ 9pm. it’s not 4am and i think i got about 1hr of studying done. been taking way too much breaks.

thanks to ungsunghero for donating this article: The Complete List of the 1,000 Top U.S. Schools. it’s just high schools, so there’s no confusion. here’s a list of interesting high schools i’ve picked out:

• Rank | School | Location | State | Index | Subsidiezed lunches**
• 21 | Troy* | Fullerton | Calif. | 4.165 | 1
• 82 | Torrey Pines | San Diego | Calif. | 2.929 | 1
• 117 | University | Irvine | Calif. | 2.614 | 1
• 151 | San Marino | San Marino | Calif. | 2.494 | 0
• 278 | Diamond Bar* | Diamond Bar | Calif. | 2.029 | 5
• 301 | Arcadia | Arcadia | Calif. | 1.951 | 6.4
• 451 | Mark Keppel | Alhambra | Calif. | 1.657 | 59.2
• 609 | Alhambra | Alhambra | Calif. | 1.424 | 61.7
• 718 | South Pasadena| South Pasadena| Calif.| 1.312 |12
• 881 | Gabrielino (tie) | San Gabriel | Calif. | 1.157 | 60

* Gave IB tests. AP and IB participation rates are indicators of a school’s efforts to get students to excel and prepare for college. newsweek excluded schools with strict academic admissions criteria that prohibit motivated, average students from attending.
**Percent of student body that is eligible for free and reduced lunches, an indicator of socio-economic status. A number of 40 percent generally signifies a high concentration of children in poverty.

Mark Keppel actually dropped from 429 in 2003 to 451 this year. shucks. makes me wonder what we were ranked back in 2001 when we graduated.

forgot to mention i watched Saw a few days ago. pretty good movie. the ending was indeed shocking. and if you don’t think so, then that just means you haven’t seen the ending yet.

went online to get my weekly itunes freebies and notice gorillaz had a free sampler. have been so long since i’ve heard of them. so i went off on a tangent from studying to find out more info about that song i used to like. remember that music video? turns out the song was called Clint Eastwood. watch the music video here: Gorillaz ‘Clint Eastwood’. itunes only had the “clean” version of this song, so i decided against purchasing it.

got this link from /. : In-depth investigation of the “Cabir-in-Cars” myth. pretty good experimentation where they took a toyota prius underground and tried to hack the bluetooth system.

got these from pya!:

• img: スゴイ透明度 – Amazing Transparency – looks like the boat is floating above the water
• vid: ハートに火をつけて – Making fire from the heart – the power of car bass speakers – stuff animals having sex *NOT WORK SAFE*

thought of the day: i always had a feeling that if you double your bet every time you lost, you’re gaurantee to win. meaning, if i lost $1 on my 1st bet, i’d bet $2. if i lost that, i’d bet $4 and etc meaning if i won, i’d be actually ahead. i always thought this as a failsafe plan, but always wondered why not many people followed it. as liam points out, the expected # of rounds before you win is infinity. if you havent taken a course on probability, it basically means you’re expected to play an infinite amount of games before winning. and by starting @ $1, after 20 rounds of lost, you’re already @ the $1 million mark.

spring break’s finally over. drove up today with decathanerd, cari, mechy, ohfuee, and dng. pretty tired. think i’m going to hit the sack soon, so short entry today.

so artemyst brought up an ancient riddle where you have 9 coins and 1 of them is a counterfeit. you have a scale which you can only use 2x (load up left and right side and it’ll tell you which side is heavier of if both sides are balanced) and the counterfeit coin is heaver. how do u find the counterfeit coin? really easy to solve. shouldn’t take you so long. then now i present the super uper duper hard riddle which took me a week to solve. think i finally solved it in one of my dreams back in high school. same scenario, but variables are a bit different. you have 13 coins. there is 1 counterfeit coin which you just know has a different weight (not sure if it’s heavier or lighter). you can only use the scale 3x. how do you do it? if you need hints, feel free to im me.

sorry about yesterday. was SOOOOOOOOO tired. didn’t sleep @ all the nite before. was awake for 27hrs. needed to get into keppel to do something for my parents. so when i saw the time was 6am, if i went to bed now, i wouldn’t be able to wake myself up in 2hrs. got into keppel but then i was trapped. i was a prisoner till 3pm.

during my visit @ keppel, i visited many of my old teachers. kimura’s doing pretty good. she in fact is teaching AB this year. supposedly there was an overflow of students wanting to take AB, so the 2 teachers (Dultz and Villanueva) wasn’t able to take them all. Parents were very concern about their kids not being able to take Calculus and once again Kimura was requested to teach part of AB. her calculus class(es) are going pretty well this year. BC is a bit behind tho from what she told me. she hasn’t even gotten into series and it’s Winter Packet time (remember how fun those were? ^_^x). this year her TA’s and special people got dwarfs from “the Disney Store”. i then went to visit Ms. McIntyre who was as sunbeamy (word does exist in m-w.com) as ever. then i visited Mrs. Breen. she’s retiring this january and needs to find a replacement fast (for those of you who took her class, might wanna go see her for the last time). supposedly if she retires this year she gets the most benefits. + her husband is really old and they plan to do some traveling before they “get too old to walk”. we chatted for awhile while her class took a quiz. (so cruel on the last day before winter break huh?) anyway, i noticed she had that christmas carol sheet on her desk. remember the pictures in boxes where you’re suppose to guess which christmas carol it was referring to and remember that roasted chestnut over the fire that we were never able to guess. hehe. she directed me to the back where all her Polaroids were. since she was retiring, she decided to return these Polaroids to anyone that wants them. i took a couple pictures of them but was unable find any that were mine! apparently both my siblings have mrs. breen and already took it for me. they only found 2 tho. i think i was suppose to have 4. oh well. the pictures have been posted below. i then went to visit mr farr. before i talk about him, lets backtrack. as you know mrs mango recently left because her husbands was diagnosed with cancer. it really was someone i missed seeing this trip back to keppel. maybe i should stop calling her mango and mangerino outta respect… anyway, kimura says mr farr is a lot happier these days. u know that door that connects to the science office to mr farr’s room. he finally unlocked it so now u can go to mango’s old classroom through the science office. he was always afraid that mango would pop into check on him. the new science head is mrs. tong who will soon be leaving and it’s most likely that mrs. hake will take over. i helped farr set up his lab for his Physic’s class. in this lab they were trying to find the specific heat of lead (Pb) by boiling the lead to 103°C (due to the brown water causing a higher boiling point) and immersing the lead into water @ room temperature to see how much heat was transfered. but he forgot to warning anyone that the lead was poisonous and on the plastic baggy itself, it says: after usage, please wash hands before sticking it in mouth. hehe. anyway, i met tons of ppl’s little siblings who are now seniors (crabyaple’s brother, sueon’s brother, amonkeyj’s brother, daizie’s brother – whom i almost didnt recognize). then there were other seniors who i knew about. pretty fun day i’ve gotta say, especially when i was feeling drunk due to lack of sleep.

Polariods from Mrs. Breen’s Room:
(Warning: Pictures 1-8 are > 2megs)

gomen gomen if i didn’t include your name.

after keppel, i went home and took a nap for 3hrs before my dad dragged me up to goto his company’s christmas dinner. got back @ 8pm and dropped dead on the bed till 9am this morning.

lilpebbles and selena dropped by today. lilpebbles needed her computer to get fixed. apparently her temp location was set incorrectly so nothing was able to be installed. easily fixed. they were discussing how guys and girls were equal in intelligence in strength while Selena’s brother argue guys were more superior. well, since it was 2 girls against 1 guy me. i kept my mouth shut. reason for argument was that girls want all these fancy jewelry that has no function. they argued that they have fancy jewelry and make-up to attract guys just like guys with nice clothes and cars. well her brother’s argument was that a car and clothing were actually practical, something required, while attracting girls could be a 2ndary reason. then lilpebbles chimes in that she learnt that girls are actually much better at handling emotions better than guys, supposedly that’s the reason girls give these 30 minute stories before getting to the point. have no idea why they correlate; in fact i see nothing wrong with getting straight to the point. ;p

thanks to ungsunghero for directing me to this awesome story. really good detective work i’ve gotta say. sounds like one of those Law and Order stories. (without the murder that is hehe) ^_^x