Categories
ranting

Tweets by Device

Someone has produced an interactive map of all the geotagged tweets since 2011 [mapbox.com]… You can see how iPhone addicted Singapore is, while Malaysia and Indonesia are still dominated by Blackberry:

Image showing tweets by device, outline of singapore clearly visible, dominated by the color for iPhone

I suspect that today Singapore would be more balanced between iPhone and Android but a few years ago the penetration rate for iPhone was crazy here.

Categories
ranting

Hazy Days

The view from my office today…

Today

Compare the typical view…

Typical Day

Welcome to BeijingSingapore!

All of this is caused by fires in Indonesia, slash-and-burn farming to replenish the fields or create new fields. Indonesia claims that many of the fires are started on Palm Oil plantations that are owned by Singaporean or Malaysian companies but then refuses to name the companies. The diplomatic tit-for-tat is all getting quite childish.

You can see the fires:

Fire location map of South Malaysia, Singapore and North Sumatra
Sumatran fires bring Singaporean haze

A few minutes outside in this is enough to give you a crappy feeling in your stomach all day. The government publishes numbers of the Pollutant Standards Index (PSI) [wikipedia.org], but their site only shows today’s numbers [nea.gov.sg]. Wikipedia has the relevant historic numbers, it’s ugly this month:

June 2013 PSI for Singapore

This happened back in 2006 [wikipedia.org] and way back in ’97 [wikipedia.org].

To summarize; it’s fucking nasty outside… and actually dangerous.