Which musical was transformed into a movie that has been screening in theaters non-stop since 1975 and has a box office revenue of well over $140 million dollars?

Answer: The Rocky Horror Picture Show

It was fresher week in Manchester University when I was first introduced to The Rocky Horror Picture Show complete with live props and impromptu singing. My new English friends could not believe that I had never seen this show before and really "encouraged" me to watch it. I must say, my jaws must have dropped to the floor but the show was indeed an eye opener and I had never, ever seen anything like it in my life. And this was made in 1975, when Susan Sarandon is a young hot babe! It was a side of western culture that I had never even imagine existed, and yet once I saw it so many things about western culture clicked into place. Benny Hill, Monty Python, Black Adder, Mr. Bean, Little Britain, oh my!

For me, I'm comfortable enough in my sexuality that I can watch it for what it is, a fun and tongue firmly in cheek show that's meant to be laughed with and at. Just enjoy the ride and be entertained. My first impressions of Rocky Horror was that its quirky, wierd, strangely interesting, and that if my mum ever saw it, she would decry it as a prime example of depravity in western society and immediately suffer a heart attack.

Indeed, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a western world cultural icon that most Asians probably have never heard or even seen. Or, maybe not...




Anyway, with Glee's special "Rocky Horror" Halloween episode, I'm sure many young Asian kids will go out to the web and discover "RHPS" for themselves. I have to wonder, what would they make of it?

Microsoft has been trying very hard to restore its status as king of browsers. So has it worked? Would I switch to using Internet Explorer 9?

Not at this moment. Even today I still suffer from what I call IE-itis. Whenever I create a webpage, I need to test it on four browsers.

• Firefox (or Google Chrome or Apple's Safari or Opera)
• Internet Explorer 8
• Internet Explorer 7
• Internet Explorer 6

99% of the time, if my webpage renders correctly on Firefox, it also renders correctly on Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera. I can be sure that most of the time, it all works even without strenuous testing.

99% of the time, my webpage still DOES NOT render correctly on ANY version of Internet Explorer. Worse still, my webpage appears different on IE6, IE7 and IE8. I essentially have to treat each version of Internet Explorer as a different browser and test against every single version. It slows down my work.

Until Internet Explorer fixes all its rendering bugs and most of the world stops using IE6, IE7 and IE8, I won't ever trust IE enough to use it for my daily web surfing.

These days it is common to see a video game based on a Hollywood movie or find novels based on popular television series. Except for teenagers and the most ardent of fans, I doubt many people actually pay much attention to such tie-ins and gimmickry.

One television show, however, has taken this gimmick to a whole new level. And its actually attracted my interest. The television show is non other than Castle. Castle is a comedy-crime series starring Nathon Fillion (Firefly, Doctor Horrible's Singalong Blog) as Richard Castle, a famous mystery novelist who has found inspiration for his next great book in NYPD detective Kate Beckett, played by Stana Katic. In the television series, we follow Richard Castle and Kate Beckett as they jointly solve murders while Castle writes his next book, "Heat Wave" with Beckett as the inspiration behind lead character, "Nikki Heat".

During the hiatus between seasons 1 and 2, Richard Castle's the mystery thriller novel, Heat Wave has been published in the real world. Yes, you can actually get the novel from Amazon, Borders or any local bookstore. Yes, the author is supposedly Richard Castle and according to book reviews I have read, Heat Wave feels very much as if it had been written by Richard Castle. While the novel's plot is new, it incorporates many elements from in the television series, as if Richard Castle had really drawn inspiration from his time with detective Beckett.


This is all nice and fine, but the producers of Castle went one step further. Season 2 of Castle starts with the launch of Heat Wave. In one episode, Castle's character mentioned that the novel has a sex scene on page 105. There really is a sex scene starting on page 105 in Heat Wave. In the latest episode, a serial killer obsessed with Heat Wave's lead character Nikki Heat and her muse Kate Beckett, used a number code that had to be decoded using words in the novel itself. I'm pretty sure that some avid watcher will soon verify that the numbers on the television screen will actually match words in the novel.

All this has piqued my interest in Heat Wave and I will probably be dropping by a bookstore sometime soon. I am sure Castle fans would be pouring over the book too, what a great way to get people reading again!

Unless you've been bunkered down in a hole without an internet connection, you've probably heard that Apple has announced its latest revolutionary product, the iPad tablet.

Personally, I think this product is indeed revolutionary and that many businesses would quickly adopt the iPad. The key reason isn't the iPad itself. Its because Apple re-wrote their iWork productivity suite to work on the iPad. iPad and iWork together makes a very compelling combination for businesses who have lots of traveling white collar workforce.

I can see lots of salesmen giving slick presentations using iWork's Keynote app with just a flick of their finger. Likewise, insurance agents will be easily filling in customer data using Number's data form on the iPad. Such businesses will be buying hundreds if not thousands of iPads. Needless to say, I think Apple has created another hot product that will be flying off the shelves.

Hurray for Apple, but that is not the point of this blog post. The reason is that I see the future of computers in the iPad. More specifically, the future of how we interact with computers. Apple has taken the simplified user interface developed for the iPhone and shown that it can not only works on a much bigger screen, but also showed that it enhances applications by making them much easier to use than conventional window-based applications. This can clearly be seen in the re-written iPad iWork suite, which is much easier to use and is still able to incorporate a lot of the same functionality contained in the full fledged Mac OS X iWork suite.

Apple has brought the old WYSIWYG paradigm to a whole new level of simplicity.

I foresee the end of applications being housed in resizable windows. Instead, applications will now fill the entire screen. You will directly touch and alter things on the screen with your fingers instead of having to plow through multiple levels of menu bars. Indeed, the simplicity over complexity and rich features that few people use would be the key to future applications.

I would not be surprised if Apple brought not only touch sensitive screens, but also this new user interface to their Macbooks and their Mac software in the near future.

A recently published paper on arXiv has caused a slight commotion within the Physics community. Let me first say that Physicists have to do a lot more in-depth study to confirm this, but we could potentially be seeing Gravity from a totally new perspective.

Let me take a step back and give a brief overview of our current understanding of Gravity - Einsten's Theory of General Relativity. General Relativity is incredibly accurate and it tells us that space-time is warped by the attraction of masses. This warping of space-time is what we call Gravity. While Einstein's theory is incredibly accurate in calculating the degree of warping, it does not explain why the warping of space-time occurs in the first place.

All that has changed with this paper, which if I understand correctly, suggests that what we know as Gravity is really the physical manifestation of Entropy in the universe. Entropy tells us that everything in the universe goes from an high energy state to a lower energy state. Iron rusts, fuel gets burnt, cars slow down due to friction, suns burn out. The whole universe is slowly descending into chaotic randomness.

Another way to look at Entropy is through Shannon's Information Theory, which allow Computer Scientists and Electronics Engineers to calculate the absolute minimum amount of data (bits) that needs to be transmitted in order to overcome Entropy. That's right, everything in Information Theory is measured in Entropy.

This brings us back to the arXiv paper. If I understood it correctly, it is saying that in order for Entropy to work in the universe, the universe needs to "transmit" the mass information of every object to every other object. And Information Theory allows us to calculate the minimum amount of bits required in this "transmission". The author of this paper did this derivation and discovered that the minimum amount of data resolves to a short formula, and that formula is exactly Newton's law of Gravity. The author has not had time to take relativity into consideration in his derivation, but it is anticipated that the solution would indeed be Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.

I'm probably not explaining it clearly, but if you're interested in knowing more please visit The Hammock Physicist's blog on the paper.