58bits - Other

At dinner with friends last night - and one of my friends gave the quintessential Occam's Razor answer to why marriages fail. Occam's Razor...

"One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything".

And the reason? Well... we live longer. In the past, life expectancy was what... about 35, 40 years? Get married at 19 and you only have between 16 to 21 years to slog it out. Today, in the developed world - average life expectancy is around 74. Get married at 28 and you may end up with your significant other for a whopping 46 years! :-)

Having spotted a tweet on Pandora.com - and then of course discovering that Pandora.com is not available outside the U.S., I was inspired to take a proper look at Last.fm. Incredible. Download the desktop app, and the appropriate plug-in for your media player - and Last.fm will "scrobble" whatever you listen to, building up a recommended playlist; similar artists, genres etc. I wonder how Peter Gabriel's venture over at We7 will fare in the same space.

This made me laugh. You know a product has long since reached the 'tipping point' when even your cleaning lady tries to sell it to you. I was sitting here minding my own.. when my cleaning lady asked me if I would like to by some of the of the V word (I don't dare write it in full - since I suspect I'll be cast down into spammer hell if I do). Actually at first I didn't know whether to laugh or be worried. Do I look like I need it? Apparently her younger sister has a nice little sideline in 'other market' pharmaceuticals. Lol.

This is scary - U.S. School District to Begin Microchipping Students - as Karen Lawrence Öqvist"s points out as well.

I remember reading about high schools offering parents access to the school's Intranet to see whether or not their sons or daughters were actually at school or not, and I thought that was worrying at the time.

Another example of the continuing cycle of media and government generated fear being used to reduce civil rights in the name of 'security'?

Reading The Catcher in the Rye , or Nineteen Eighty-Four and students today might wonder why it is that they are able to easily identify with Holden Caulfied, or wonder perhaps whether or not they are actually living in 1984; while their freedom to make decisions (and accept responsibility for their actions) is being steadily reduced.

I remember some of the things I did in high-school. The choices I made weren't always the right ones - but they were an important part of growing up for me.

Teenage years are a complicated time. We're struggling to find the balance between life at home, life at school, our need to be accepted by our peers and even our need to be able to begin to form intimate relationships with others. What happens when a teenager suffers his or her first heart-break and is too embarrassed to tell their parents about it - and can't face going to school that day; just wanting a little down-time in order to try and resolve their feelings before facing the world again. Where does their freedom to choose to do that go?

Employees are protected from surveillance at work under various regulations (Lawful Business Practice Regulations in the UK). Surely our teenagers deserve equivalent protection from surveillance at school; where they deserve the right to prove they are responsible and trustworthy before losing their freedom to choose.

On my way back to Bangkok after a long weekend in Hong Kong.

Was very lucky with the weather and had a great trip. Saw most of the major site - including the The Big Buddha,  a trip up the tram to the peak, a visit to Stanley Market and Repulse Bay plus plenty of shopping and other sites. I was really impressed.

Hard to tell from just a weekend but I'd rank HK as a pretty good place to live. Pics are here...

If I could design the future of social networking it would look like this...

I'd have a platform... some kind of service or software platform, from within which I could blog, twitter, chat and link to the people I know. I'd be able to choose exactly what information I wished to publish and when, and whether that information was published to just my friends, or to the world.

I'd be able to host the platform anywhere I choose. I could pay for it, or it might be free. If I paid for it - I'd want total control over where and how any advertising was allowed from within or outside the platform.

Imagine taking the best of LinkedIn, a decent blogging engine, something twitterish, a good chat client, a good media sharing platform for photos and videos. Add a pinch of social bookmarking - and wrapping all of that up into a very cool platform that I can use to represent me and those I choose to interact with in the online world. A sort of Bittorrent-ish, Groove-ish application for society. Goodbye MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Skype, goodbye to all of the walled garden social networking sites - and hello to my own little neighborhood in cyberspace.

The end of walled gardens like Facebook and other social networking sites is actively being discussed. What's missing is the glue in standards and software to bring together an alternative. The big guys like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo want to try and grab on to this and hold on to it for its obvious potential in targeted marketing and advertising revenue.

I hope that doesn't happen. I hope we're each able to grab on to it, to control it and to use it to build new communities and socially meaningful ways of communicating with the world.

If you've never lived in a tropical climate before - there are a few things people need to warn you about. Firstly, I live in a small apartment (well the apartment is large - but it's a small building) and the landlord and us tenants don't really like to spray insecticides. We prefer to try and keep the place clean in order to keep the invertebrate population down.

It adds a new dimension to 'snacking' and keeping the place tidy. Drop just a few crumbs of that chocolate chunk cookie on the floor - and you're in big trouble. The main offenders are small red ants. When they show I know it because a bite from one of those tiny buggers gives me a lump the size of a golf ball. I remember once in Phuket - they were in the hotel I was staying in - or to be more precise - in the walls of the hotel - and crawling out from behind the towel rack in the bathroom. I grabbed a towel (as you do) after a shower and started to dry myself off and ouch. I won't go into any more details except to say I was pretty worried for about 24 hours.

And then there's the cute little gecko house lizards. These are actually good guys to have around since they eat bugs and insects; except when they crawl into the back of your computer and die. The smell is awful. Took me ages to figure out where it was coming from :-)

Ok - I admit it - I love Doritos - especially cheese flavored Doritos. I know they don't exactly fall into the category of health food - but I could eat a bag a day no problem.

There's a trick to getting Doritos here though (here in Bangkok). Local supermarkets do sell Doritos - but they seem to come in batches - and then disappear for a few weeks. So... I buy a LOT of them when they're here - enough to last until the next wave arrive. I was sort of hopping that some clever stock or inventory management system of the bigger supermarkets would have figured this out - and order more Doritos (ala Walmart), but it hasn't worked, and I'm sure when I hit the Dorito jackpot - there are a lot of unhappy Dorrito lovers here trying to work out where all the Doritos have gone.

I've been wanting to blog about this one for a while now.

Like a lot of Canadians that aren't from Quebec (i.e. any of the other nine provinces and two territories), we're all taught French at primary school; for me at least from grade five to eight. Of course the entire country prints all its product labels in French and English and all the road signs and government communication are bilingual as well. Why? Well that's a whole 'nother thing. The main thing however is that there's really no practical reason for speaking French in Canada, unless you live in Quebec. So unless you're from one of those families that either a) really encourages their kids to learn another language because they believe it will enrich their lives, or b) they're snobs - and dropping a little French in polite company is the best way to confirm their snob standing - then you will forget your French - if you actually remembered any in the first place - the minute you stop studying.

Then I moved to the UK. Ok I wasn't 'exactly' forced to learn another language. But I was in for a surprise. The subtleties (or perhaps better described as the brutality) of English slang, idiom and the vernacular took some getting used to. I began to see the important connection between language and culture. For the most part though - the main visual queues that I'd grown up with still worked. If someone smiled it probably meant they were happy. If they frowned or grimaced - something was up.

Then I moved to SE Asia spending most of my time in Thailand (although frequently visiting most of the other countries in the region including China). And this is when it started to get interesting. Not only did it take a long time to figure out the basics - but the subtleties took even longer.

Thai is part of the Tai-Kadai family of languages (formerly classified as part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages). It's mono-syllabic and tonal - which means if I write the word - 'kaow' (phonetically) but pronounce it with five different tones (high, mid, low, rising, falling) - I get five different words (rice, enter, news, white and hill). Tones are a great vocabulary multiplier when you're running out of monosyllabic words. Once you can hear (and speak) the tones - within even a modest vocabulary - things start to open up. If you're lucky enough to be in the right environment, or around long enough to move on from the basics - then it gets really interesting. (Picture above: Talking to the monks at Wat Yai Chaimongkon in Ayuttahya.)

Thai is a language rich in character attributes. You can describe someone's nature, behavior, and habits - in just a few words - and those around you will either nod in agreement - or disagree and exchange their own short character describing phrases. Thai is an incredibly polite language - with degrees of politeness to suit many different situations, typically based on the authority, seniority, or age of the person you are communicating with.

I couldn't sum up Thai society in a blog post (even assuming I was qualified) - however what has really amazed me is the way in which their language and culture seem to match perfectly (which I doubt will surprise any social anthropologists, or experts on Thai custom and culture). Thais are witty and humorous, and not being overly serious matters a lot.

When you've begun to master a language in another culture (especially as different as those are from West and East) - and are able to start pushing back a little and probe more, you begin to understand what people mean, what's important to them, and what they are thinking. And that's just amazing. It gives you a totally new frame of reference from which to compare where you've come from, to where you are now.

Ok - second attempt, this time from Dabs.com. What an amazing camera; built-in neutral density filter if you want a wide aperture in bright light settings, auto ISO settings, image stabilizer, fully manual including focus and a great macro setting. 12.1 million pixels and overall picture quality that's pretty darn close to a professional SLR all from a camera that you can still attach to your belt. I'm a happy camper...