fresh air at last

About two years ago, Ireland banned smoking in pubs. I immediately wrote in to the ST Forum and suggested that Singapore should ban smoking in pubs and clubs. After all, some of the world's most advanced cities like those in New York and California have already done it. And if the Irish Pub capital of the world can do so, why should our progressive society not be among the first to suit. This was prompted in part by my own experience at a smoke-free establishment in CA, which was most enjoyable and unforgettable.

The counter-argument would be that there is a tremendous cost to banning smoking. A cost both to the tobacco companies, to tax revenues, and worst of all to the owners of nightspots. Of course, these costs are currently borne by people like myself - the non-smokers. Unfortunately, ST did not publish my letter.

However, today I read this, and my heart is beating a little faster:

SINGAPORE will ban smoking in more public areas from July 2006 as part of a campaign to cut tobacco-related diseases here , Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, said on Sunday.

Dr Yaacob was quoted as saying on Singapore radio station, News Radio 93.8, that smokers would be allowed to light up only in designated smoking corners at open-air cafes and hawker centres.

'Come 1 July 2006, non-smokers will be insulated, and they can have makan at our hawker centres or the coffee shop without having to suffer secondary smoke,' he was quoted as saying on News Radio 93.8.

Smoking is currently banned in all air-conditioned buildings and establishments except bars.

Dr Yaacob said the ban will be extended from July 2007 to include indoor entertainment outlets such as air-conditioned karaoke lounges and pubs.

'This would give (owners) enough time to make adjustments to their outlets,'such as building smoking rooms with separate ventilation systems, he said.

This is wonderful news, nightspots will never be the same again.

Freakonomics

Following The Case For A Creator, I have just completed yet another extremely interesting non-fiction work. It is the highly recommended Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner.

There are already a ton of other rave reviews on the net, so I will settle for taking out my favourite quotation:

In the world of online dating, a headful of blond hair on a woman is worth about the same as having a college degree - and, with a $100 dye job versus a $100,000 tuition bill, an awful lot cheaper.

This is just one of the seemingly absurd statements the book makes, drawn from Levitt's economics research. And although the quantitative evidence is not provided in this book (probably too mathematical and boring), it does provide very convincing qualitative proofs and explanations on his methodology.

i'm reading a book

For the last two weeks, I've been reading Lee Strobel's The Case for a Creator. A friend's recent question made me realise how little I understood about resolving creation with Darwin, the Big Bang and other scientific findings. So I set out to find some answers.

The chapter I was reading yesterday was on the utter improbability of conditions being just right for life on earth. According to one physicist, the chances that everything could fall into place just so is about 10⁵³. (That's the square root of a google.) Things like pressure, temperature, gravity as well as the chemicals around us. For example, if atomic gravity were to change my some infinitely miniscule amount, the planet would not be able to support life any bigger than insects. And even then they'd have incredibly big legs, to deal with the planet's gravity which would increase a hundredfold. Of course the skeptic in my mind immediately asks, but that's life as we know it, why can't we all be insects? I'm still reading to see if he deals with this, but I'm secretly glad I'm not an insect.

And on my way home yesterday, it struck me how every other animal's life is a mere existence. While there I was speeding home at 120km/h with my subwoofer tuned up listening to good old Eminem, and living out a consumer lifestyle so far removed from basic subsistence. Why are we so lucky? And again I was really quite happy not to be one of the houseflies I used to feed my frogs.

I'm not even halfway through the book but there's already a line forming to get their hands on it. Better go buy your own copy and read it quick!

non-combat fatalities

In light of all the recent SAF training incidents (diving, running, free-falling, rappelling), I thought this report carried by the BBC yesterday gives some interesting food for thought. It is about the Russian military.

More than 500 servicemen have died off duty, about 25% as a result of suicide, Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said.
...
In the first nine months of this year, 148 were killed in Chechnya.

It's pretty bad to have this sudden spate of training incidents, but I guess if we look beyond our shores we will realise that things aren't really all that bad here.

population control advocacy

Today I would like to share one of my childhood hobbies: the art of shooting flies. I think that the pest population would be brought under much tighter control if every Singaporean would do their part to destroy this scourge.

I never had any intense dislike for flies. This is in spite of the fact that they spread disease and irritate me. Rather, this hobby was born out of the necessity to feed my pet frogs back when I was a kid. I used to spend a lot of effort catching the flies with butterfly nets, but some scientific enquiry soon led me to a superior solution.

To begin with, we need to understand the insect eye. Apart from looking like the Esplanade, the housefly can see 360 degrees and is most sensitive to motion and changes in air current. This is why you can almost never kill them with your bare hands. But a flying rubber band moves faster than the fly, and does not create much disturbance in the air. It is the perfect solution.

And you don't even need to be a superb marksman. You can get within 10-15 cm of the fly if you keep low and don't alarm it. At that range, it is really hard to miss. And as you get better, you can hit the big ones at ranges of 2-3 metres even. I once shot a giant flying ant in mid-air. Practise makes perfect.

I highly recommend this hobby to everyone. Not only will the NEA thank you, it is also highly therapeutic. There is nothing more satisfying than to see the body of a fly tossed through the air, with the head landing a metre further away. For hygiene purposes, please do not reuse the rubber bands.

MIA

Unfortunately due to work commitments, I was unable to attend Bloggers.SG although I would really have loved to. I did manage to drop by however, but sadly was not allowed in because I was clutching an ice-blended mocha from Mrs Fields. So while waiting for buddies to come out, I chatted up the friendly bouncer.

I asked him why DXO had decided to host such an event, because you can't deny that a nightclub is not the most conventional venue for a conference. Obviously the decision was not made by the bouncer, but he said it had to do with publicity because the club was new. And then it struck me what just a wonderful publicity stunt this was. Because all these bloggers are going to go home today and tell the rest of Singapore what a wonderful (or not) time they had at DXO. The club's profile is going to go through the roof, just like Hideout. No wonder they are giving away free drinks.

So on hindsight, any event to do with blogging in the future can probably leverage off this tremendous marketing power. Bloggers with thousands of daily readers can surely command a rate comparable to those silly cowtails. We've heard of the fourth estate; this must surely be the fifth. And it's going to be a rich one.

I vote New Asia Bar or Zouk for next year.

How to cancel your monthly NKF contribution

This is a step-by-step guide for DBS account holders. Something similar will probably apply for other banks as well.

1) Log into DBS Internet Banking
2) Click on Payment Services
3) Click on Delete Giro Arrangement
4) Select account from dropdown menu
5) Select the GIRO payment (Billing Organisation = "NKF")

On a more contemplative note, this episode just reminds us that anyone with the ambition to get rich should not work for
1) Charities
2) Religious Organisations
3) Government

shits and giggles

Since life is boring, and I have not been reading the news, I'm going to do something different and post page 217 of the autobiography that I have been writing in my spare time.

Yet another one of my most memorable experiences from secondary school is an incident which my secondary three class have fondly come to term “The Cockroach Bottle”. It all began with a biology experiment involving the dissection of cockroaches. We “oohhed” and “aaahed” as Miss P deftly clipped back the cockroaches’ wings with drawing pins, calmly exposing the mysteries of its insides. We applauded loudly as she named even the most minute parts of its anatomy. But she was most disappointed when we all coyly declined her offer to decapitate the next specimen. As a result, we had a number of the pests left over, which my friends J1 and J2 collected and stowed away in a jam jar.

I next saw the bottle several days later. Inside, the cockroaches had breathed their last, but their final slumber was cruelly disturbed when J1 began to shake the bottle. He shook it very, very hard. Several days, and many hard shakes later, the bottle had already passed through the hands of every member of the class. Inside, a soggy white paste, not unlike mayonnaise, was splattered around the sides of the glass, and it was still possible to recognise a head, and several pairs of extremities. It was indeed a most ghastly sight, and not a few remarks were made about the appropriateness of using a jam jar.

One week later, J2 decided to open the jar. In ten seconds flat, the class was empty. Like the survivors of a war, we gathered along the corridor outside, still reeling from this massive assault on our olfactory organs. Even at the end of lunch, when Miss P came for her biology lesson, we were all still hanging around the corridor, and absolutely refused to return. With ingenuity which would have done credit to any scientist in a crisis, she decided to move that lesson outdoors. However, I hardly heard a word she said that day. For me, the true lesson in biology had already been firmly imprinted in my memory – I had seen first hand the rate of diffusion of molecules in the air, and the speed was incredible. I had also learned that though it takes the molecule of an unpleasant odour an infinitesimally small amount of time to fill a classroom, it takes at least a week for these same particles to exit through the open window. Fortunately for us, that was the last lesson in our classroom for the day, and our teachers were not forced to make any more unscheduled changes to the timetable. But for the next few days, the air was filled with a surprisingly strong smell of cologne.

On hindsight, it was really fortunate that J2 had had the presence of mind to close the bottle before he joined in the general retreat. Had he dropped the bottle, the consequences would have been unthinkable. Whatever the case, this little seemingly insignificant event has left an indelible mark in my mind. It showed me the lighter side to science; more importantly, it showed me that one should think before one opens a bottle full of decomposed cockroaches.

I'm kidding of course. There is no autobiography and I have no spare time. This was actually a university application essay that I dug out of my archive. Note the malaise that has inflicted my command of the English language in the years since. Last time England damn powderful can ... now like shit.

nights out

Today, instead of thoughts and feelings, I shall blog about food and drink.

Someone commented that I know a lot of places. I never thought much about it but I guess since I trade hangouts with a lot of friends, I've amassed a fair bit of experience. So I shall list some of my all-time favourite lesser-known places here.

Food
Via Mare (Spanish) - Good tapas and cheap wine
Mai Vietnamese (Vietnamese) - Best Pho and lots of other stuff
Bottletree Village (Seafood) - Ok food, chill ambience
Pow Sing (Hainanese) - Just great food all round
Cafe Iguana (Mexican) - Great food and cheap margaritas

Drink
Wine Bos - Great wines at low prices
Hideout - Great ambience and music, occasional live acts
Morton's Bar - Delectable Mortinis and steak sandwiches at happy hour

Dance
Cocco Latte (Hip Hop) - Good music, not as claustrophobic as other such haunts
Insomnia (Top 40) - Great live acts, very casual crowd

"For God's Sake, Please Stop the Aid!"

After all the hype over the G8 summit, I found this very interesting article linked from Singapore Angle.

It's an interesting treatise on how Western aid has actually perpetueted the problems in Africa, by putting farmers and tailors our of business and encouraging a culture of dependency instead of industry. It's like globalising the welfare state! (If you can't beat them, make them join you.)

Must read for all aspiring developmental economists.

righteous indignation

I was surfind through Tomorrow.sg and came across this pretty interesting post on an unpleasant encounter with anti-social behaviour.

It brought to mind an unpleasant encounter of my own, more than a year ago. I'm pretty easy-going and forgetful, so the fact that I still remember this in vivid detail just goes to show how much impact it had on me.

I was in the (now-defunct) Chip Bee gardens carpark in Holland Village, waiting for a space. After about 15 minutes, a car directly in front of me left, and so of course I took up position to take his place. I stopped at the 45 degree angle just beyond the lot, but when I switch to reverse gear my reverse sensor went off immediate. Strange. There, directly behind me, a lady in a small SUV had purposefully pulled up right behind me, obstructing my way.

I wound down my window, she wound down hers. I started to ask her why she was snatching the lot, but she immediately began accusing me of cruising right by her and stealing her lot. Considering that I had been waiting there for at least 15 minutes, and the lot was right in front of me, this was absurd. Could it have been an honest mistake? I think she would have noticed me if I drove by, given the appearance of my car. I therefore concluded that she was a blatant liar.

Of course it took me sometime to process all the info to reach this conclusion, and in the meantime her ridiculous accusations left me speechless. I don't know if she took this for a sign of weakness, but when I protested that I had always been waiting there, she said, "Anyway I'm a lady, you should give up the lot to me." Whoa. I snapped. Well not really, but I told her in the most civil tone I could muster that she was a lady, and a most unreasonable one at that. And over my dead body would she take the lot. No I didn't really say that, but I meant it.

If she had tried any other approach, like appealing on behalf of her two kids in the back who were really hungry, maybe it might have worked. But first trying to muscle me out with blatant lies, then pulling a stupid female stunt, was not getting her anywhere near my good side. Even the female friend beside me, silent all this time, was appalled at this behaviour. What kind of example was she being for her kids.

Anyway, she finally left and I took the lot. I was half worried she'd come back and scratch my new car, but thankfully that was the end of the matter. Why do such pig-headed and selfish people exist in society. How on earth did she get married?

I have no stronger emotion that righteous indignation.

spiel

spiel ( P ) (spl, shpl) Informal n.
A lengthy or extravagant speech or argument usually intended to persuade.

I was looking up the spelling for this word when I discovered I've been using it wrong my whole life. I've always used it as a "short spiel" but from the definition, that's clearly an oxymoron.

The Da Vinci Code

Yesterday I attended a talk on The Da Vinci Code given by the dean of the Yale Divinity School. It's been more than a year since I read the book, but it left so many questions in my mind I couldn't pass up on this chance.

Over beer and finger food, he explained some of the glaring half-truths that Dan Brown had woven into his gripping plot. These dealt with his interpretation of art, historical facts and various theological arguments he borrowed. As a lay person with only a vague recollection of the book, most of this went over my head. Then he took questions.

So towards the end, when I was quite drunk, I posed him the question foremost in my mind.

According to Dan Brown, the books of the bible were chosen at the Council of Nicea in deferrence to political necessity to deify Jesus, who was alleged a mere mortal. This ridiculous fact is easily dismissed by basic research, but it did lead me to realise that there really was a council held to determine the cannonisation of the bible - i.e. the selection of the books in the New Testament was determined by a group of bible scholars somewhere in the 4th Century A.D. They were the ones who determined which texts form the bible as we know it today, and which were condemned to fade into history.

Having always been brought out with the belief that the bible was the gospel truth, and was entirely factual and historically coherent, the fact that the scriptures were actually edited by biblical scholars is disturbing to say the least. I already have some reservations with the fact that they were written by divinely-inspired people, but now apparently they were filtered by people as well. I hope they were equally inspired. So Dean, please comment on the authenticity of the New Testament, and it's reliability as a basis for our faith.

His answer was quite brief, but equally disturbing. He did not answer me directly, but instead commented that the bible cannot always be taken at face value because it does contain factual inconsistencies. For example, one apostle records Jesus' ministry as lasting for three years, while another only credits him with one. So we have to bear in mind that these books were written 4-5 decades after the event, and the memories of the authors were probably distorted by the passing of time.

I didn't find this particulary satisfying, but as I was the last question and he didn't seem to want to dwell on the topic, I let it go. Anyway, I was really quite intoxicated and I didn't want to make a fool of myself. But this does leave several additional questions in my mind:

1) It really disturbs me that a basic fact such as the length of Jesus' ministry can be in contention. How is it possible to forget that?
2) Even written 4-5 decades after the event, weren't the authors merely supposed to be mediums through which God communicated? Surely God would not forget.
3) If we cannot place 100% faith in the accuracy of the bible, is it still something we should live and die by?

I suppose the next time a theologian drops by, I will have the questions waiting.