This comic from Abstruse Goose scared the hell out of me. For those who do not know,

• GoPro is a company that sells sturdy high definition digital cameras that many people have been using to capture extreme sports.
• Occulus Rift is a company that sells virtual reality goggles. The company has recently been bought by Facebook.
• Drones or quadcopters are very stable VTOL capable helicopters powered by 4 rotors. There are many companies that sell these drones.

It occurred to me that combining these three readily available off the shelf products and you can essentially build a small and quiet, remotely driven aircraft that military organizations all over the world has been using for remote surveillance or worse, as a remotely operated weapons platform.

Which means that anyone with two to three thousand dollars to spare can now easily purchase the parts necessary to build a remotely controlled, highly stable VTOL capable craft that can be equipped with some kind of weapon. This is a really, really bad idea that's just turned in to a practical reality.

I was trying to describe a chinese delicacy, called 小籠包, to an american friend but I didn't know its English name. So I went and searched around and I discovered people just call it steamed pork dumplings, What an unsexy name for one of the yummiest things on this Earth. I feel that the name Steamed pork dumplings just don't do justice to the dish. 

It then occurred. The romanized name for 小籠包 is Xiao Long Bao. What if we retained the acronym, XLB, and instead called them eXtra Little Buns? Just one of my spur of the moment crazy ideas. ha ha.

I only just learnt that John Langford and Yann LeCun has recently just gave a class on Big Data and Large Scale Machine Learning at NYU. Not only that, they have opened the entire course to the web, for free. I have seen a couple of the lectures and I think they're very interesting.

I just found out that one of my favorite undiscovered singer, Amy Whitcomb, has auditioned for The Voice Season 4 and from the promos it seems she has done very well. Congratulations, Amy. I hope you'll be the winner of The Voice season 4! Befitting the occasion, I thought I will showcase her growth as a singer over the years.

2009

This is earliest Youtube video I can find of Amy. Back then she was part of Brigham Young University's all female A Capella group, Noteworthy.

This is her with spikey hair singing Think as lead-singer for Noteworthy when they participated in season 1 of The Sing-Off.

2011

Fast forward 2 years. This is her singing her version of Bruno Mar's Grenade. I have also included her group, Delilah's version of the same song which they sung in The Sing-Off season 3.

2012

Here are two of my favorite songs she has uploaded to Youtube in 2012, Bruno Mar's It Will Rain and Beyonce's Love On Top.

By now, you know I'm a hard core fan of the up and coming a capella group, Pentatonix. Up till now, I thought their cover of Dog Days Are Over by Florence and the Machines was their best work. Not anymore. Early this month the group went to the Los Angeles Acapella Festival (LAAF) and met up with Ben Brams. Ben is an arranger for The Sing-Off and he has helped many Sing-Off groups polish up their competition pieces. Anyway in just a few days Ben Brams and Pentatonix came up with a cover of Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know.

This has quickly became my new favorite song from Pentatonix.