Outdoor research lab

Enroute from Dunedin to Queensland, we passed by a research institute with some pretty cool labs. The institution does research on animal husbandry, and one of their projects is seeing what sort of grass gives the best weight gain rate for sheep. So their labs consist of fenced-off areas, each with its own bit of grass and its own flock of sheep. I suppose that at the end of the test period, you weigh each one and see what the average is.

Since *our* labs require that we be stuck inside a building all day long, that sounds kind of fun.
"What do you need to do today?"
"Oh, I need to go and weigh some sheep."
Baaaa...

Not having been fast enough to take a picture of the labs, here's a picture of two very happy sheepdogs to make up for it :-). Yes, that dog is actually leaning on the sheep. I kid you not.

The Smoking Land

This picture was taken from my hotel room window in Rotorua, New Zealand. The smoke is coming out from fissures in the ground: Rotorua lies in a seismically-active area and hot springs and geysers are common; kind of like a mini version of Yellowstone National Park.

It was neat to see the smoke coming from so close. Of course, having to smell the sulphur for the entire time that we were there wasn't quite so nice...

Ctrl-Alt-Del... the plane

This is a picture of the seat-back TV on the flight to New Zealand. Apparently somebody decided to go and reset the computer that controls the DVD movies and games. Thank goodness, though, that this did not occur till after we landed. Think of how scary it would have been if this had happened mid-flight...

Got People Sit One

I came across this banner in a Singaporean high school during this CNY trip. The above is in "Singlish", a patois of Chinese, English and Malay that serves as lingua franca for many Singaporeans, and the bottom is in correct English, which the government is trying to encourage people to use.

Being the weirdo linguist that I am, I have to admit to more than a little affection for Singlish. It's "language in evolution", as I like to call it. It's also amazing how adaptable English is as a language. Try doing Chinese with English grammar and sentence structure.

Disorder, or Discipline?

I came across this NY Times article titled "About that mean streak of yours: psychiatry can only do so much". It talked about how illnesses termed as "personality disorders" were increasingly being used to cover behavior that really should simply be classified as "he's just not a nice person".

We don't see that so much here in Hong Kong, but what we do have here (and I daresay that the US has too) is an increase in diagnoses of the so-called "Attention Deficit Disorder". Not being a psychiatrist, I hesitate to make a judgment on whether these are truly disorders or not. However, I do often wonder how many of these could be cured with just simply firm parental discipline rather than through medication.

Games for Education...

... or for raising social consciousness.

Games for Education, or Edutainment, is the new buzz-word nowadays. Everybody and their brother seems to be wanting to get in on it.

Most of the time, the games that are produced as a result are not much more than thin multimedia layers over textbook material. I guess teachers aren't usually creative types by nature, and the design-y types don't really care too much for learning, so there's very little cross-fertilization.

However, every now and then, there comes a game which is creative, fun, and still manages to convey a message or deliver some content. I came across one of these recently: Darfur is Dying, a game designed to raise social consciousness about the atrocities in the Sudan.

It was strangely addictive, frustrating and heartbreaking. The sight of the Flash Janjaweed warriors thundering across the plain set my heart racing. The cacophony of the virtual refugee camp grated heavily on my nerves but at least I could turn it down!

If edutainment is to take off, we need more games like this.

Tennessee Fainting Goats

Say what you want to about humans interfering with nature, if we weren't that meddlesome, some things just wouldn't be. My own personal favorite: the famous Tennessee Fainting Goats.

These are a very special breed of goat. When they are startled, or excited, all their muscles lock up, and then they collapse in a heap. Like in this video:



Apparently, the reason why this gene didn't just get eliminated through the process of natural selection was that herders used to insert a few of these goats into a flock of more valuable sheep. The reason? Well, think of what happens when a predator starts chasing the flock, and you get the idea.

So they had their value to man, and thus the gene survived, to give us funny videos nowadays.

Ways to make a difference

Wanting to be a "do-gooder", but lacking the guts to completely step out of my comfy-zone and really do something, I am always inspired by stories of ordinary people, living ordinary lives within ordinary means, who manage to do something extraordinary.

Today I ran across an article in the NYTimes titled Building a Memorial to a Son, One Child at a Time. It's about two ordinary parents, whom, trying to create a legacy for their son, ended up helping several African children who had essentially been sold into servitude.

As Lance's song at church goes, "Take my ordinary days, move them in extraordinary ways".

Too cool not to share

I stumbled across this video some time ago, and it's just too good not to share:



That stuff in the pool is oobleck -- a mix of cornstarch and water. Being the skeptical one as usual, I tried making up my own mixture at home, and it certainly works as advertised -- solid when it was hit (or impacted with a sudden force) and liquid otherwise. Though, given how it was almost impossible for me to yank my spoon out of the mixing bowl, I wonder how much trouble it took them to get those two guys out of the pool at the end...