confusionThe Vibease project on Indiegogo [indiegogo.com] deserves to be funded on principle. Utilitarian principles if nothing else; they obviously wish to increase the total amount of happiness in the world…
As of now they are more than 400% funded with 17 days to go.
Old school jokes aside… I question the value of this flash card.
I assure you I was not on my way to Lagos. But during my 8 hour flight back to Singapore from Sydney the plane appears to have been stuck at 0 Longitude, 0 Latitude. But somehow I still got to Singapore.
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:
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.
The view from my office today…
Compare the typical view…
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:
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:
This happened back in 2006 [wikipedia.org] and way back in ’97 [wikipedia.org].
To summarize; it’s fucking nasty outside… and actually dangerous.