In Star Wars the Force is never explained (in the movies that count), but we accept that it works because the characters behave in a clear, believable manner

Aaron Diaz, in Batman the Least Believable Superhero [dresdencodak.tumblr.com].

…And not so much in the movies that don’t count.

Basically the parking spaces in Singapore parking lots are not paved with asphalt or concrete — they are paved with bricks, holey bricks at that:

So why would this be a good idea: less run off, less sewers-backing-up floods, more plants (questionable at best). I’m sure there would be a host of issues to be solved, like how much oil/gas is leaking into the ground because of this (cars in Singapore tend to be new, well maintained due to the exorbitant cost of owning them and various other government rules, while cars in the US run a wide gamut, old and new, lots of oil and gas leaking rust-on-wheels.), not to mentions the cost of the bricks and laying them compared to the cost of asphalt. Also grass grows like a weed here in the tropics not so much in parts of the US so it might just be dirt in the holes. But really it just looks so much nicer.

The good news is that someone still wants to spy on us. The bad news is that it’s the Russians … If you had told me that 11 Singaporeans were arrested spying on how our government works, then I’d really have felt good — since Singapore has one of the cleanest, well-run bureaucracies in the world and pays its cabinet ministers $1 million-plus a year.

Thomas L. Friedman, in “The Spies Who Loved Us” [nytimes.com], New York Times [nytimes.com] Op-ed Column, July 13, 2010.

I ran across this quote in the local Singapore papers… unfortunately they fast and loose with the quote, they cut out the part where I have the ellipsis (…) where Friedman speaks about how good he would feel if the Finns sent spies to keep and eye on US schools. No problem, I cut it out too right? Yea but I used and ellipsis to indicate that I had skipped over part of the original quote.

That’s a minor thing, even if my high school English teachers would have marked me down liberally for misleading my readers. No the more telling bit of creative editing by the locals was the leaving out of the “and pays it’s cabinet ministers $1 million-plus a year.” They just put the period after “in the world.” That great salary for ministers is a sore point for a lot of locals, even if they won’t publicly say anything, but it is a big reticulum in a country where the average wage for the first quarter of 2010 was SG$4,310 a month (by their own numbers [mom.gov.sg].)

I don’t think an TV-as-game-console (and a lot more) would dethrone Sony and Microsoft from the hardcore gamer world it would put a lot more pressure on Nintendo in the casual gamer market. It’s no wonder that Nintendo sees Apple as their biggest future competitor.

Currently the TV is cheaper than the cheapest iPad, bundle it with two iPod Touch and it’s still not as much as the high end iPad. So that crazy iPad Scrabble game would be a bit less silly and you could play it on your TV.

“Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.”

G.K. Chesterton

“Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has… enumerated and identified… more than 13,600 diagnoses — 13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies… But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.”

Atul Gawande, Stanford School of Medicine 2010 commencement speech

Read the whole thing on The New Yorker [newyorker.com].

I used to spend every other summer vacation on that beach. My grandfather had a house on the lagoon at Gulf Shores… that is until Hurricane Ivan destroyed it in 2004 [confusion.cc].

I haven’t been back in some time. I guess it’s a good think I got some photos of the clean Gulf water.

And the beautiful beaches at sunset.

It’s hard to appreciate the scope and devastation of the Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe from halfway around the world. Though the news talks about it everyday, there is no 24-by-7 discussion of it. Even though Singapore had a smaller oil spill just a short time ago [nytimes.com]. Seeing pictures of birds and turtles covered in oil make me feel bad. But seeing photos of the beaches I played on as a kid covered in oil bring it home in a much more personal way.

Mud Crab at Chek Jawa [wikipedia.org] on Pulau Ubin [wikipedia.org] in Singapore. Click on the photo for the full photoset [flickr.com] on Flickr.