Per Ardua Ad Astra

Ever since I heard about the crackdown on blogs back home, I’ve been considering the possibility of moving this blog elsewhere. Blogging here doesn’t seem very safe anymore. Notwithstanding the link to my Friendster profile providing people an easy way to zero in on my identity (and suing me), there’s simply not enough lawyers who I can solicit their service for reduced fee charges (hopefully, that’s how law students treat their friends in need).

Like I said before, I stayed here because Friendster updates people whenever I post a new post. That way, I don’t have to waste my breath telling people I’ve blogged. Since MSN provides a good way to inform any potential readers that I’ve actually updated without having their inboxes spammed with Friendster updates, there’s not much reason in staying here (apologies for those who own a Facebook account who might still get spammed :P).

However, one problem is TIME! Since I have one day dedicated for every module I take (it’s usually not enough), that leaves Sunday free. This leaves me with little to no free time at all, since I am a relatively slow learner (and I think too slowly). And Sunday is the day for assignments and finishing assigned readings. Any spare time left in between is spent on reading entertaining blog posts (eg. THE siew pau story), news updates on the outside world (it’s terribly easy to become ignorant about the outside world here in NUS), running about on BF2142 servers and of course, writing blog posts that has absolutely no contribution to my CAP.

So there’s obviously no time to start a blog migration process. Maybe during vacation…

A bunch of engineering researchers at the University of Florida published a study that shows the microwave’s effectiveness in sterilising sponges this week. What they did was soaking sponges and scrubbing pads in raw wastewater and then putting the sponge into the microwave and heated it at full power. The found out that live bacteria expires in two minutes, spores within four to ten minutes.

Sounds good for those hyginene-maniacs right? Not exactly. See, after it was reported in the media complaints came in to the news agencies. Attempts repeated at home didn’t turn out as expected. What went wrong?

Basically, one dry sponge went into the microwave, smoke and fire came out. This was a particularly humourous response

"Just wanted you to know that your article on microwaving sponges and scrubbers aroused my interest. However, when I put my sponge/scrubber into the microwave, it caught fire, smoked up the house, ruined my microwave, and pissed me off," one correspondent wrote in an e-mail to Reuters.(CNN)

If you’ve read carefully till now, you would understand the screwup. If you didn’t catch on yet here’s the description ad verbatim from CNN. (I tried to clue you in right from the very start at the second sentence of this post)

Writing in the Journal of Environmental Health, Bitton and colleagues said they soaked sponges and scrubbing pads in raw wastewater containing fecal bacteria such as E. coli, viruses, protozoan parasites and bacterial spores. (emphasis added)

In the end, the university issued the following advisory to be safe.

The university issued the following advisory: "To guard against the risk of fire, people who wish to sterilize their sponges at home must ensure the sponge is completely wet. Two minutes of microwaving is sufficient for most sterilization. Sponges should also have no metallic content. Last, people should be careful when removing the sponge from the microwave as it will be hot." (CNN)

Hope this reaches you before any more sponges goes on fire! And a more general reminder: Read the methodology used thoroughly and understand it before trying to repeat something!

For some distraction, let’s see what’s on the news lately.

From New Scientist Environment: Special Report Earth article titled "2100: A world of wild weather", which documents a predictive model used to forecast climate impact around the world towards the year 2100, here’s an interesting tidbit from their sidebar titled "Where natural disasters now take their toll"

Climate change is not the same as climate impact, as changes in temperature and precipitation will affect people in some regions far more than others. For example, sub-Saharan Africa is a drought hotspot, while south and south-east Asia are vulnerable to storms and flooding. Any changes in climate here could affect people more severely than, say, those in Europe. (emphasis added)

Judging from what happened in Johor, maybe we should pay some heed to the model. Let’s see what we have recently: unusual heat wave in Europe then Katrina vs. New Orleans (a no-brainer challenge) and finally Cyril in Europe. Considering that the weather effects are starting to become more pronounced and bound to worsen due to heat buffering by the oceans, it might be wise to purchase flooding insurance for our M’sian homes by 2050 (if you’re still there that is).

Moving on, you would think the tution craze couldn’t get any crazier but the Honkies just proved it wrong. From CNN’s Education section, the article title "Sex appeal counts in Hong Kong’s tutoring business" is self explanatory. Looks like there’s no excuse sleeping in tuition classes anymore (at least for HK students).

Now, I’ve heard quite a few views on the results of a hypothetical military Malaysian-Singaporean conflict and almost all predicted that M’sia will be on the losing end. However, I still believe that Malaysia stands a very good chance of achieving stalemate (assuming that no other nations intervened). Here’s one extra news piece that helps my stand. If you’ve read The Star’s "Firearms worth RM900,000 seized in raid", you will find that our M’sian arms dealer can sell pretty high-tech arms made in Germany and Austria (the S’porean arms dealers probably can’t sell anything more harmful than air weapons anyway).

Now who says that M’sia has outdated equipment? As far as I am concerned, we don’t have any lack of equipment to defend ourselves with. With a few more ‘talented’ arms dealers like these, I’m sure we can have a high-calibre assault rifle for everyone in no time at all! Think about it…

Can’t really find time to blog nowadays, since there’s so many things I have to keep tabs on. However, I found this very interesting and since I shared it with my USP Human Relations class, why not share it with everyone else?

I can’t really explain much, so I’m copying and pasting the relevant section in my other forum thread here.

Scientific American’s blog, SciAm Observations recently posted a brief commentary on a prison simulation experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford in 1971 (who attended the same high school as Stanley Milgram). This experiment resurfaced after the Abu Ghraib fiasco came to light and SciAm posted the commentary in conjunction with somebody posting the documentary/educational film about the experiment on YouTube. The blog post link is at
http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=stanford_prison_experiment_videos_on_you&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
and the links to the YouTube videos can be found there. Hope you’ll find it useful!

Good day!
HM

P.S.: I must warn you, the video quality is not exactly crystal clear and there are some bad sections but overall it’s still watchable. I’ve also tried looking for videos on the Milgram experiment on YouTube and found nothing, so it’s back to the books if you want to read up on it.

Note to blog readers: As any psychology student would know Stanley Milgram conducted the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority at Yale back in 1963, to see how far people would obey authority to perform unethical tasks. It’s a funny experiment (with a huge dose of schadenfreude), when you know how the experiment is conducted (the poor subjects who’s supposed to administer the shock would definitely disagree on that). Go and check out the Wiki on Milgram experiment and you’ll see what I mean. IMHO, the accountant’s act must be impressive to leave such lasting impact on the subjects, too impressive perhaps.

Anyhow, as the U.S. Armed Forces learnt to its detriment, you cannot leave prisoners to untrained prison wardens (intentionally or otherwise) since it could lead so easily to sadism on the guards’ part. Indeed, as the video shows, once reality and fantasy/simulation blurs, trouble ensues.