User:Zt5

Random facts about me

I hail from the sunny island of Singapore, and I have to fill in the same answer to forms in the areas of nationality, country, state and county.

I am 21 this year, and I have served for two years in the army. I have fired guns with calibers from single to triple digits before.

I love snow, and I wish that Duke has more snow in winter.

I used to kayak competitively for my high school team, and I love my K1.

DOTA kinda defined my life for a period of time in the past year, and I once had a 30-2 streak against 9 other human players with a triple triple kill under my belt. (Guess which hero I used).

Random facts about Singapore

Singapore IS NOT a part of CHINA. Singapore was founded by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819.
Singapore has two seasons - humid & hot and rainy & hot.
Singapore has over 3000km of road squeezed into 682 square kilometers of land. Stretched end to end, they can cover the distance from Singapore to Hong Kong.
Singapore is counted amongst the 20 smallest countries of the world. However, it is the second most densely populated country in the world, after Monaco, with 6,430 people per square kilometre.
Singapore is made up of one main island and 63 other tiny islands. Most of the islands of the country are uninhabited.

Singapore is the largest exporter of ornamental fish (25% of the world market)
The Merlion, a half-fish, half-lion beast, is a fitting symbol of Singapore. The "Singa" or lion represents the animal that a Sumatran prince saw which resembled a lion, and the fish is a tribute to Singapore's history as "Temasek", the ancient sea town.
The highest man-made waterfall of the world, 30 m high, is located at the Jurong Bird Park of Singapore.
The largest fountain of the world is located at Suntec City in Singapore.
The Bukit Timah Nature Reserve in Singapore contains more species of trees than the entire North American continent.
The Great Singapore Duck Race, an annual event that raises funds for charity, set a new world record in 2002 when more than 123,000 toy ducks took to the Singapore River.

The chewing gum ban in Singapore was enacted in 1992 and revised in 2004. It bans the import and sale of chewing gum in Singapore. Since 2004, only chewing gum of therapeutic value is allowed into Singapore following the United States-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (USS-FTA).
The first population census taken in 1824 revealed that the total population was 10,683. The 2000 census showed that the population of Singapore is 4.2 million.
In 2006, there were more tourists visiting Singapore than our population. About 7.8 million tourists visited Singapore in 2006, close to 3 million more than our population.
Singlish, a Singaporean patois mixing English with the odd phrase of Chinese, Malay and even Tamil, has two entries - lah and sinseh - in the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Around 80 percent of the people in Singapore own cell phones. As per the records, the telecom companies in the country issue around 30,000 to 40,000 new numbers every month.
Though there is no scientific explanation for it, it has been seen that more Singaporeans are born in the month of October than any other month of the year.
Around 90 percent of the people in Singapore live in public housing flats (contrary to popular belief, the quality of our public housing is comparable to that of a private apartment - it is not low-quality housing, it is just government built and subsidized)

Articles of interest

An article arguing that the cost of carbon sequestration should be tagged to cost of petrol because it will only raise the price by 1-2%. Abstract: It's simple to mop carbon dioxide out of the air, but it could cost a lot of money. In the second of three features on the carbon challenge, Nicola Jones talks with the scientists pursuing this strategy.

Climate crunch: Sucking it up, Nicola Jones, Nature, 16 June 2009, 11 Sep 2009 (Carbon Sequestration)

An article on a recent research discovery that converts carbon dioxide to methanol, giving the potential for carbon sequestration to be even cheaper because the fuel created from it can be sold.

Conversion of Carbon Dioxide into Methanol with Silanes over N-Heterocyclic Carbene Catalysts, (Yugen Zhang, Dr and Jackie Y.Ying, Prof), Wiley InterScience, 31 Mar 2009, 11 Sep 2009 (Carbon Sequestration)