dsng.net - the daryl sng blog: September 2004

Space pens are useful

I really hate the hooey that makes up urban legends. Something about people's credulity when it comes to these overly pat stories really aggravates me. I especially hate it when a supposedly distinguished speaker goes up on stage, gets paid thousands of dollars, and delivers a completely false story to illustrate his or her point. If you're that smart, why don't you check out your anecdotes? So Snopes.com has been a godsend, and it's nice to check in from time to time to debunk whatever makes the rounds on e-mails. (Coke doesn't dissolve teeth, for one.) Was thinking about this because someone mentioned the "NASA spent $1.5 million to develop a pen that would work in space, while the Russians used a pencil" story. Sounded like complete bullplop to me, so I checked it up, and it was nice to have it affirmed that in real life what happened was the other way around. Both Americans and Russians were using pencils, but pencil lead could cause a host of problems in space, so an enterprising guy developed (at his own expense) a pen that would eliminate these problems:

... leads sometimes broke and became a hazard by floating in the [capsule's] atmosphere where there was no gravity. They could float into an eye or nose or cause a short in an electrical device. In addition, both the lead and the wood of the pencil could burn rapidly in the pure oxygen atmosphere. Paul Fisher realized the astronauts needed a safer and more dependable writing instrument, so in July 1965 he developed the pressurised ball pen ... (Link)

Sure, this version of the story doesn't teach you any "moral" about trying too hard to be high-tech instead of going for the simplest solution. But it's the truth. Life isn't about morals, it isn't neat - it just is.

More pictures of my dog, just because

Coconut and his friend Bogart. I like Coconut's somewhat indignant look in this pic.

Status Anxiety

"I was sad because I had no on-board fax until I saw a man who had no mobile phone" - New Yorker cartoon

I'm presently reading Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety, about one of the fundamental paradoxes of modern capitalism and meritocracy: by making it possible (or at least trying) for anyone to succeed in a society, the corollary must be that those who don't succeed somehow brought it upon themselves. It's the troubling flip side of opportunity, perhaps because of the fundamental attribution error: people tend to discount the role of luck and fortune in judging success, and so create these assumptions of morality associated with success.

De Botton comes from a philosophy background (he wrote How Proust Can Change Your Life), but there are lots of strands of thought that parallel the economist Juliet Schor (whom I had the privilege of taking a class under). What I think is interesting is how their solutions to status comparisons tend to suggest individual action, either leaving society or becoming conscious of status comparisons in order to reject it (in The Overspent American, Schor suggests that as consumers we should be "conscious of the process (of being forced into consumption) and the insidious ways it ensnares us"). But is it possible to live in the modern world without some sense of anxiety, of "lack", of desire? What if envy is a natural psychological reaction? The natural solution to envy, in the immortal words of William Devaughn, may be to be thankful for what you got. Easier said than done, I think.

Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I'm gonna eat some worms

It's Banned Books Week in the US, and here's the American Library Association's list of the 100 most frequently challenged books. I can understand people's objections to certain themes (Madonna's "Sex", #19), but I can't see what's objectionable about Thomas Rockwell's "How to Eat Fried Worms" (#98).

Bovine intervention

Apparently Malaysia is home to the world's only wild cattle. I didn't know that. But then, as the Register informs me, scientists are being paid to go there and see if there are lesbian cows in the wild.

Mother-in-Law / Woman Hitler

If you're not prudish, here's a bunch of rude anagrams. The one for "the menstrual cycle" is unprintable here, but made me laugh.

Suburbia in the Developing World

"Let's take a ride, run with the dogs tonight, in suburbia" - Pet Shop Boys, "Suburbia"

Dynamist Blog touches on a process that looks ultimately like suburbanisation in China and Brazil. Instinctively, this Crabgrass Frontier reader dislikes suburbia, but thinks it's inevitable in those two countries - the awful conditions of the urban areas there are a good parallel to the awful conditions of 19th-century American cities.

Voting - It's What's For Dinner

Old friend/editor Alan Wirzbicki writes in the New Republic Online on the futility of those "voting is cool" drives to encourage youth voting in the US. Makes a good point:

... as non-partisan groups, these outfits all promote voting for voting's sake, and stay away from endorsing candidates or anything but the most vague causes ("change," "justice").

Maybe I travel in cynical circles, but I have never met anyone who votes solely out of an abstract sense of civic responsibility.

Makes sense to me. Never quite understood how "rock the vote" or "choose or lose" worked without any appeal to the value of the political process to the would-be voter. I suppose campaigns can make voting cool (debatable), but ultimately it has to motivate someone to drag her butt down to the polling station.

Edit: Apparently, according to James Wolcott, in so linking, I've just perpetuated the "Harvard Crimson-Washington Monthly-New Republic brain trust".

Singaporean Film

Just joined sgfilm.com, an online forum for Singaporean film buffs and filmmakers. (I just lurk, really - haven't said a word yet.) Found this interesting piece on "why cinema is important to Singapore", which carries the reminder that this used to be a thriving film centre back in the 1960s. Here's the sgfilm blog.

Speaking of online forums, one day I'd like to study the sociological relationship between the rise of the Internet and the corresponding expression of the passions of Singaporeans... seems like a lot of people with previously obscure hobbies (always a problem in a country with just 4 million people) can coalesce much better with the Net.

Timeless Blogging

One summer, one of my housemates worked in a lab where he conducted sleep-related experiments. He'd keep people up for ridiculous periods of time, and not allow them any way of telling what time it was (hence: no watches or timepieces, no TV, VCR clocks presumably all unset with that annoying blinking "00:00" timestamp). Freaky. I would feel so unanchored without any sense of time.

Having said all that, I thought the timestamps on the blog posts were messy, which is why I got rid of them. Blogger sets the timestamp based on when you first create the post, not publication time, and since my style is to leave about a half-dozen posts hanging in draft format before I get around to tuning them up, the time was hardly accurate.

Linksapalooza

Okay, I'm slow, but I just found the blog of Biz Stone, the Blogger exec who literally wrote the book on blogging. Two links from his site: 1. Yhis blog will be deleted by tomorrow. Because I love that it opens with a Kierkegaard quote. and 2. The guys who created Am I Hot or Not? have created Vote or Not, giving away $100,000 to an American who registers on their site and votes in the Presidential election on 2 November. Man, it would be fun to have money to spend organising random lotteries for various causes.

Scissor Sisters

The Guardian has a long profile of Scissor Sisters. Just thought I'd share because "Comfortably Numb" is a kickass song.

Recycling in Singapore

I consume way more Pepsi and Coke than is good for me. So anyway, on my way to the post office today I passed by a wizened old man who was collecting soda cans from a trash can presumably to exchange for cash. Using my very halting faculty in the Hokkien language, I indicated to him I had all these cans upstairs in my apartment and asked him to wait. Came down with 3 bags of soda cans. Boy was he happy. So I didn't have to carry all those cans to the recycling bins (no recycling collection in my apartment, annoyingly), and this man has a good day at the office. I think that's a fair deal.

Lantern Festival

Tonight marked the Lantern Festival, and stupidly I went downstairs to watch the fireworks on the Singapore River without bringing my camera. But it was great stuff - rockets, maroons, that sort of thing. Lately there've been loads of firework displays on the river, which makes for a magnificent sight against the backdrop of the skyscrapers. (What if you were working late in one of those skyscrapers? Isn't it bizarre to look out and see a plume of coloured flame rising up?)

They've set up a huge 3939-ft. dragon lantern running alongside the bank of the river near Parliament House, and I did bring down my camera for this one.

Get in the ring

All those years of listening to Guns N' Roses (standard adolescent fare), and I only just realised what "Axl Rose" is an anagram of. Oh, and he's had awful plastic surgery.

You better shop around

From A Capital Idea, I learnt that the Christian Science Monitor has a language blog, Verbal Energy, by Ruth Walker. Here's an excerpt from a piece on the morphed transitive form of verbs like "graduate":

An official in Washington holding forth on education policy told National Public Radio the other day, "What's important is that young people graduate high school college-ready."

Well, if they want to graduate with honors, they might want to consider "graduating from high school," I sniffed.

I'm enough of a linguist not to stand in the way of linguistic change: as Walker points out, a generation ago proper usage was to say a school graduates a student e.g. "Tom was graduated from Harvard". But I can still say I dislike certain changes on purely aesthetic grounds. For one, I can't stand the parallel development of a transitive form with the verb "shop": I guess I still believe you shop at a store, not shop a store. (Example of the latter: "Shop Amazon.com for... new and used textbooks") I suppose the possible confusion with the @ sign - i.e. thinking the speaker meant "shop@amazon.com" - may have contributed to this development, but it's still annoys me.

Thoughts upon reading the Style Issue of the New Yorker

One day, I'd like a photo of myself taken by Richard Avedon.

Nursery Rhymes

Over at John and Belle Have a Blog, proud mum Belle Waring notes her kid's predilection for rocking out to the Shins. Very cool I thought, for a mother to play music like that. Made me think of what my parents sang to me growing up. My memories of the songs sung are mostly older tunes -"Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?", "Walk Like a Man", "Wake Up Little Susie" - although I do remember hearing a lot of Barbra Streisand's "Woman in Love".

If you think these aren't the usual songs Singaporean parents sang to their kids in the 70s, you'd be right. At least judging by the looks some of my friends gave me when I tell them the songs of my youth. Don't ask me what hearing "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" did for my psyche.

Britney, Defender of Tradition

The Smoking Gun has the official, deeply cynical documents on Britney's sham marriage. Britney's recent spate of publicity desperation reminds me of the Simpsons episode ("Treehouse of Horror VI", if you want to be precise, and yes, I've watched way too much of that show) where giant advertising statues come to life and the only way they can be stopped is if people don't pay them attention. Just don't look. But I can't avert my eyes from a trainwreck!

Cod Linguistics

A quote highlighted in my weekly e-mail from the Plain English Campaign:

"If you sat at home spouting cod scientific terminology, management-blah and corporate catchphrases, your partner would soon slap you or ask you to leave. And you would really have issues around that."

Not a win-win situation, then?

In any case, I highlighted the sentence not just because it's a funny thought, but because it uses the very British word "cod" to mean "faux"/"bogus". As in, "I couldn't stand the cod philosophy in the Matrix" (and neither could the Scotsman, apparently).

Phallic buildings

I guess this is what they mean when they talking about erecting buildings.

Axe to Grind

Jammed for a bit with two friends yesterday. Right now we have two guitarists (I play rhythm) and one singer/guitarist, but we're just starting out so we don't even have a name, just building up our repertoire. Two things learnt: I apparently have latent talent as a bassist, and the E to G#m7 transition in the verse of the Beatles' "You're Gonna Lose That Girl" is deceptively simple, but sonically very effective.

Thoughts: why are there so many women bassists in rock bands? Melissa Auf Der Mar of Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins. Kim Deal of the Breeders. D'Arcy Wretzky, formerly of the Smashing Pumpkins. And of course, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, probably the mother of them all.

Westies rule!

Coconut explores

It's quite scary how much love one can feel for one's dog (click for more pictures of Coconut). Funny too how loyal one becomes to the breed one owns. Can't imagine having a sedate dog after getting used to the hyperactivity of a Westie.

Britain and Third World Debt

Apparently, Britain is going to offer to pay off 10% of Third World debt to international agencies like the World Bank (New York Times and Guardian stories). Text of Gordon Brown's intended words to the Trade Justice Movement, based on those stories:

"Because the poor cannot wait, we intend to lead by example by paying our share of their payments to the World Bank and the African Development Bank... We do this alone today, but we urge you to use your moral authority to urge other countries to follow suit so that poor countries can look forward to a future free from the shackles of debt."

The debt forgiveness movement has really come a long way. Spending money on aid is hardly a vote-winning measure (Brown says so as much in his interview with the Guardian), and it's nice to see the Chancellor putting money where his mouth is. Even if the money comes from already-budgeted funds, it still seems a powerful symbolic gesture.

Lots of movement on the debt forgiveness front, actually: World Bank / IMF meeting coming up on 1-3 October, with the likely chance that the US will introduce 100% debt cancellation for the poorest countries. Good idea (although there are caveats to the cancellation that people may disagree with), methinks. There's something wrong about the circularity of foreign aid being given out to the poorest countries just so that they have money to pay debts they owe the richer countries.

The L Word

Cynthia Nixon is in a relationship with a woman now, a la Samantha in Sex and the City.

"My private life is private. But at the same time, I have nothing to hide. So what I will say is that I am very happy."

Good for her. I suppose you could say she now falls into the stereotype of "lefty activist lesbian", but I think you take love where you find it.

Speaking of stereotypes, the Girlfriend reports that on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, there was a male figure skater who was trying to learn to show more love to his wife, which I thought nicely goes against the stereotype of the gay male figure skater. After all, it's not like the Queer Eye guys themselves are doing very much to shatter stereotypes...

Rosabeth Moss Kanter on Confidence

The New York Times has an article on Rosabeth Moss Kanter, business guru, on the topic of confidence. I really like her definition of confidence as "a belief that persistence and hard work will yield results": it's certainly not self-deception, and it's certainly achievable.

She believes that self-confidence is less important than confidence that things will work out, and that the most lasting form of confidence is often not self-generated, but nurtured by others. She posits that sports teams win because coaches instill a belief that they will, and that children succeed when parents and schools create an environment that encourages them to do their best.

I really do believe that expectations of success breed success, and expectations of failure breed failure. In a way, Kanter's thoughts reminded me of Martin Seligman's work on learned optimism. It's not the same as mindless rah-rah "positive thinking" - learning optimism is utterly realistic about setbacks, but it deals with setbacks by training you not to view them as permanent or as personal. (Here's an interesting test to measure your optimism. I came out as "moderately optimistic" - good about not letting bad things get to me, about average in my response to good things. Sounds about right.)

Another interesting point was the final conclusion of the article, that classic psychoanalysis does not work as well as behavioral therapy in restoring confidence (Kanter: "Understanding your deep psychic structure isn't what's important in breaking a self-destructive cycle"). Makes you wonder. On the one hand, there is much to be said about the innate value of introspection and the examined life. But if the goal is to break out, perhaps it's better to take advantage of the human mind's wiring: the hedonic treadmill means that your highs aren't too high, but it also ensures your lows aren't too low.

Tales of the City: Naked Yoga

If you ever feel inclined to adopt the Naked Downward Facing Dog pose, San Francisco is your place. Flowers in your hair optional.

Blogger - Categories?

Every time I think about moving this blog over to Movable Type, the folks over at Blogger add stuff that I like, use, and incorporate... the WYSIWYG editor, individual post pages, well-designed templates (well, only for my reviews page), convenient picture uploading, commenting. I'm not a very demanding blogger, really. I know my PHP and my URL rewrites, but I'm not really at the stage where I need to switch. I don't care that the commenting facility is kind of strange and should really show the previous comments. Okay, I do care, but not that much. But I would like one thing: categories. Please.

A quick search shows I'm not the only one. Oldcola has a workaround, but that's a stopgap.

Firefox 1.0 PR

As anyone who knows me knows, I try scrupulously to avoid using Microsoft products, as an aesthetic choice. (WordPerfect 11 user, checking in.) So I've used Firefox since the days it was Firebird, and was very pleased to see its growing success. Freaked out a bit when I downloaded Firefox 1.0 Preview Release because the extensions link didn't seem to have Tabbrowser Extensions, which I depend on (I link to open all bookmarks & all history in new tabs), but a quick Google search fixed that. The thing about tabbed browsing is, once you've used it, how could you ever go back to Internet Explorer and its multiple windows clogging up the taskbar?

Anyway, Firefox things I learnt today: Ctrl-0 resizes all text back to original. Nifty.

Hurricane season

Hurricane Ivan hit my Jamaican relatives a few weeks back. What's scary is that that same storm is forming again. Went north, came back. Speaking of hurricanes, this is so, so wrong. Or at least prone to alternate interpretations. (Incidentally, Hurricane Ivan also destroyed Hell.)

Impact on Driving: Drinking and Cellphones

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution discusses a study comparing cellphone users and drunk drivers that found:

When controlling for driving conditions and time on task, cell-phone drivers exhibited greater impairment than intoxicated drivers.

Two possible conclusions: 1. cellphone usage affects driving or 2. legal definitions of intoxication are at levels too low to affect driving. The first conclusion is similar to those studies that show that sleep deprivation is like drunk driving. (I personally can't talk and drive at the same time, even with a hands-free set; just takes too much to focus on either.) On the second conclusion, the paper finds that legal intoxication limits don't affect driving much:

When participants were legally intoxicated, neither accident rates, nor reaction time to vehicles braking in front of the particpant, nor recovery of lost speed following braking differed significantly from baseline.

This can hardly be said to be politically correct, and I'm not sure why Tabarrok thinks this conclusion is spin in the p.c. direction. However, A Stitch in Haste questions the study's methodology, and warns of the danger of writing off laws against driving under the influence. On reason I like the blogosphere - the speed of accumulation of knowledge, of arguments and counterarguments astounds me somtimes.

Riff Braff

Zach Braff, of "Scrubs" and Garden State fame, is now blogging too. But under the Fox Searchlight website, so goodness knows how long it'll last. Can't wait till Garden State comes to Singapore. If ever.

Travel Diaries

My old friend Alice DuBois writes in the New York Times about rediscovering a diary she once wrote of a trip to Uffizi. Made me want to dig up all my notes from my stints writing for Let's Go. I'll see if I can find any choice bits.

The Godfather horse head pillow

Ah, don't you love recreating classic movie scenes? Just when you thought you got out, they pull you back in.

Microsoft Optical Mouse by Philippe Starck

I admit it, I'm a design junkie. Bought the Philippe Starck optical mouse today. Complements the Alessi juicer I have. Early verdict: I love the way it looks, of course, and the tactile response of the buttons is really solid for a left-handed mouse user - satisfying click, not too much bounce. I especially like the big buttons which let you click not just with your fingertips, but with your whole hand. Even the packaging looks good. The only complaint I have really is that I now need a better-looking mouse pad to go with the mouse. Best Microsoft product I've owned, although that's not saying much.

Engadget has its opinion of the mouse.

Site design news

Yes, the blog's been redesigned and flipped so that the sidebar's on the right, so that when it loads at least you get to read the text of my posts first. Some other optimisation stuff went on too, so the page should load faster.

Eight Reasons I Never Got Around To Making That Second Hit Song

No Rain
Waiting for a Star to Fall
(Love Changes) Everything
I Love the Nightlife
Dancing in the Moonlight
I Kissed a Girl
She Blinded Me With Science
I'm Too Sexy

More of the World's Cutest Dog

Bleah! (More photos of Coconut)

Fly boys

You know, maybe I am the Lindbergh baby.

The skinny on diets

You know, there's something offensive about the number of ads for slimming centres in the Singaporean newspapers. I mean, I wouldn't criminalise it, but it's just a sad reflection of the mad quest for skinniness in this society. Big White Guy, writing from Hong Kong, notes a similar phenomenon in his city of residence, quoting a South China Morning Post article on a dancer's diet:

Just sit in a bathtub with ice and water. The frigidness will burn up your natural fat to keep warm. At this time, you’re actually shrinking.

Ugh. BWG makes the very valid point that "torturing themselves in ice water will make sense to some women, but no man I know would be willing to try it". Although perhaps that may be due to the male gender's averson to shrinkage...