Just to prove that this blog isn’t quite dead yet, here are a couple of articles for last month. The first of these is a popular story that has been passing around the net a lot recently. It’s about a scientist’s efforts to make meat fit for human consumption from human feces. The other one is a detailed look by Babbage of The Economist at how Bitcoin works. It’s a new virtual currency that been attracted the attention of economists around the world.
The first article is from Digital Trends and introduces us to Mitsuyuki Ikeda of Japan who has managed to develop steaks that are made from proteins that come from human excrement. Many commentators described the process as eating shit but that isn’t really correct. What the scientists have done instead is to use sewage mud as a base on which to grow bacteria. These bacteria turn out to have high protein content, which can be extracted and processed into an artificial steak. It supposedly tastes like beef.
Knowing that we’d have a lot of free time on our hands while we get settled back in West Malaysia, we’d arranged a couple of hard disks worth of stuff to watch. For the curious, this includes all three seasons of the highly acclaimed Deadwood series and the first season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a show that I’d missed out on watching as I was studying in France when it originally aired. Among the films we have are all three installments of the Back to the Future trilogy, a selection that was prompted by an off-hand comment from Deimos Tel`Arin of Flash Games Download. It took me a while to remember that I’ve never actually gotten around to watching the third film of the series.
Part I
Like every guy who grew up in the 1980s, the original Back to the Future film has a special place in my heart as part of a pantheon that also includes other cult classics like The Goonies, Stand by Me and Some Kind of Wonderful. Even watching it today, the scenes are so familiar that I can almost recite the dialogue word for word. I can still perfectly recall the frisson of excitement at the first sight of the DeLorean time machine, the envy-inducing stylish ease with which Michael J. Fox handles his skateboard, the madcap craziness of pretending to be a space alien to scare someone from the 1950s, the infectious power of the Johnny B. Goode performance and so on. There is zero doubt that the original film still holds up and deserves every single one of the many accolades it has received.
For better or worse, I’ve developed a habit of writing some notes after each of my holiday trips. I probably have less to say about this particular trip than usual and I’m been so busy at work handing over my job to the new hire that I’ve only been able to work on this in fits and starts, but I’ll do my best anyway:
This was a family trip. The original plan was to travel together with Shan’s parents, sort of as a filial gesture I guess. But then Shan’s mother started invited her friends along from her choir group, all elderly women. That made us a group totaling eight people. Some of the most amusing things about the trip involved interactions with these friends, but it would be rude to recount them in a public blog. Suffice to say that contrary to my fears, they were more pleasant company than expected and Shan and I were largely left to our own devices.
Shan was in charge of organizing the trip and had found us a driver / tour guide through a travel forum. We basically hired him to drive us around the northern part of Taiwan for four days, leaving the last two days for us to wander around Tapei on our own. This made the first part of our stay more of an extended road trip and was a bit too sedentary for my tastes, but given the company we had, it couldn’t be helped.
I’m leaving on holiday to Taiwan soon and will be leaving my job after that. This means that this blog will probably be updated only intermittently while I’m a in transition phase. In the meantime, here are a few links to some of the most interesting things I’ve read recently.
As everyone knows by now, the Rapture did not in fact arrive on schedule. Or perhaps it did but no one, including the folks from Family Radio International who so hyped up the event, was judged worthy. The station’s owner and preacher Harold Camping has since come out with a statement claiming that he’d made a mistake. May 21st was merely the spiritual Judgment Day during which God evaluated everyone’s souls. But the judgment will actually be executed only on October 21st, five months from now, triggering the end of the world.
Thankfully Malaysian high schools are nothing like the hellholes that public US high schools seem to be but thanks to American shows and movies, we have a decent idea of what they’re like. One aspect of the US high school experience is how students are segregated into different groups that are organized into a hierarchy that revolves around popularity. This extended essay examines why nerds in school, who are consistently found to be smarter than their peers, are consistently among the least popular students and comes up with some interesting insights.
Many vegetarians don’t eat meat because of the perceived moral issues involved in killing an animal for food. What if meat no longer had to obtained by butchering animals? What if you could simply grow the meat in a test-tube? This article looks at how meat could be grown by immersing stem cell samples in nutrient-filled petri dishes, and then moving them into scaffolding platforms to get them to grow into muscle tissue. If this gets off the ground, not only will it dispense with the moral issue of eating animals, it will also be a far cheaper and more environmentally friendly way to farm the meat that we so crave.
When I mentioned on QT3 that Ted Chiang had never published a novel, a fellow fan was quick to correct me. Actually, it’s more like a novella than a novel, but you can judge for yourself since The Lifecycle of Software Objects is now freely available to be read online. To be honest I find it to be the weakest of Chiang’s works I’ve read and it’s really more of an essay presenting many different insights and ideas about conscious software as pets and children than a novel. The central thesis is that you can’t create an artificial intelligence by writing an algorithm and running it iteratively until it reaches sentience. Instead, you need to nurture it just as you would a pet or a child, patiently teaching it and allowing it to have a variety of different life experiences to enable it to grow.
Finally, just for Malaysians, here is a link to the latest report on house price indices for Malaysia, updated for the first quarter of 2011. Some very tentative conclusions are that overall house prices in Malaysia are still increasing and especially prices for terrace houses in the Klang Valley are still holding up. But prices for high-rises in the Klang Valley is stagnant and has dropped for Malaysia as a whole. Condo prices in Penang in particular seem to be dropped significantly and the index has dropped to 2009 levels. This is especially illuminating since I’ve heard many people complain about very low occupation rates for condos in Penang despite the high prices. As always, a single quarter’s worth of data is not proof of a developing trend and should be taken with the usual grain of salt.
Near the end of The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg is worried that the legal proceedings are making him look like the bad guy. So the young lawyer played by Rashida Dati (whom my wife and I have come to know from watching the US version of The Office) assures him that whenever emotional testimony is involved in a case, she automatically assumes that 85% of it is exaggerated and 15% of it is pure perjury. As strange as it seems, all clues point to the writer deliberately inserting this phrase to refer to the film itself.
I’d put off watching this for a very long time even after reading numerous favorable reviews of it. I kept thinking, “It’s a movie about a kid in college building a gigantic social networking website. How entertaining could it be?” I was wrong because this turned out to be one of the most riveting and entertaining films I’ve watched in recent memory. But a quick check on Wikipedia suffices to reveal that it achieves this by the simple expedient of taking tons of liberties with the facts. Even its writer Aaron Sorkin admits that he wanted to tell an interesting story first and foremost and this film isn’t meant to be a historically accurate documentary.
Please take this entire post with a huge grain of salt. I am not an experienced investor and I have no special knowledge of the local market. Plus I can and have been spectacularly wrong. So this is all just amateurish speculative musing. Also, this is mostly written from the perspective of a property investor. If you’re buying something to stay in yourself, you can rarely go wrong so long as you’re happy with what you’re buying.
The talk of the town lately is the ongoing boom in residential property in the Klang Valley. No one in KL could possibly have avoided noticing that double-storey terrace houses in desirable areas are now in the RM700k to RM800k range. That is up from around RM500k just two to three years ago. And prices are still going up with no end in sight. Despite recent moves by Bank Negara to curtail lending for property purchases by limiting loan amounts to 70% of the value of the third property and above, lending has actually increased in the first quarter of the year.
Three articles this month and all of them are from the softer side of science. One is about how doctors choose treatments for patients. The next one is a groundbreaking new study on the origins of language. The last one is a study confirming the widespread hunch that more education leads to less religion.
The first article covers a recent survey by researchers from Duke University which asked doctors how they would choose treatments for themselves and compared the results against what the doctors would choose for other patients. The survey found that when choosing treatments for other people, doctors tried to minimize the risk of death as much as possible, even if the treatment involved the risk of long-term complications. When it came to themselves however, doctors were much more willing to risk death if it meant avoiding medications with side-effects.
