It's Singapore Fashion Week, which takes ten days, which is the sort of thing you get a generation or two after you let the geophysicists measure the year to be 18 months. But it is a chance for the country to finally do something about the risk of a shortage of attractive women in skimpy clothing.
Among the intended Fashion Week attractions is the ``Cinderella Bra,'' which is made of glass and crystals, with beads sewn in the sides, straps, and panels, with angels etched onto the cups. It's also to be shown with something they call a ``Pearl bra,'' which for all I know may be a bra actually made of pearls. I imagine that's rather exciting to the people who find breasts and their supporting garments to be objects of interest. I keep getting hung up on the impracticality of glass as a bra-making material, even though I know they're really trying for art, or at least publicity.
There's a little temporary building set up outside Ngee Ann City, about where this sort of thing usually gets set up -- it's the same spot where back in November the Subaru Fondling Tournament was held -- so that you won't get to see examples of fashion except by watching the evening news unless you get in the queue. As the line was shockingly long when I went past, my slight curiosity about what was going on was completely wiped out. It's just as easy to see unfashionable people without waiting.
Meanwhile I've determined that my students have absolutely no idea what to make of srand(1). This is the C command to seed a random number generator, and this guarantees that the program will use the same sequence of random numbers each time it's run, a fact which makes debugging easier and grading much easier. They do not like this one bit. I've run out of analogies to use in explaining it, and I've said, ``you only need to have the command, srand(1); by itself, on a line up top of the main function. It only has to be there once. You don't have to do anything except have this one line in here, once, at the start of your program'' in many times an in many variants. While writing this entry I got two more questions about what they were supposed to do, and what the command did, and how to use it.
Trivia: Venice had a trade agent resident in Siam by 1390. Source:A History of Venice, John Julius Norwich.
Currently Reading: Engineering in History, Richard Shelton Kirby, Sidney Withington, Arthur Burr Darling, Frederic Gridley Kilgour.