One Year Blogging

16 April 2011 - It's official: in a few days I will be one year blogging away. It has been relatively easy to find the inspiration or source for the daily blogs, but overall I enjoy sharing my snippets with the world. The world seems to enjoy my blog as well, because in one year I had 11,892 pageviews. That is almost 1,000 per month! The top three visited postings were 1) 'Whole Lotta Bowing' (22 July), 2) 'Sanlitun SoHo' (7 Sep) and 3) 'Sexy Trunks' (26 Nov). The anonymous googling reader may be somewhat disappointed about the content of the 'Sexy Trunks' article, because it is not about what one thinks it is about. I am very pleased having a worldwide audience. The highest number of visitors is from the USA, but there is also a good representation from Europe and of course from Asia (including Hong Kong and Malaysia). I still cannot explain the mysterious surge in clicks from the USA in January 2011, but welcome! My blog is blocked in China, propbably because I talk about some of the 'sensitive' topics, such as Tiananmen Square and Ai Wei Wei. It is always exciting to see that people from the most exotic places find my blog too - there were clicks from Uzbekistan, Chili, Fiji, Rwanda and so on. I can only commit that I will try to keep it up - and hope that the readers will keep coming. Cheers!

Cheap Wine?

15 April 2011 - Wine costing less than £5 a bottle can have the same effect on the palate as those priced up to six times as much, a psychological taste challenge suggests. The blind test at the Edinburgh Science Festival saw 578 members of the public correctly identify the "cheap" or "expensive" wines only 50% of the time. They tasted a range of red and white wines including merlot and chardonnay. University of Hertfordshire researchers say their findings indicate many people may just be paying for a label. Two champagnes costing £17.61 and £29.99 were compared, alongside the bottles costing less than £5 and vintages priced between £10 and £30. The other varieties tasted were shiraz, rioja, claret, pinot grigio and sauvignon blanc. The participants were asked to say which they thought were cheap and which were expensive. By the laws of chance, they should have been able to make a correct guess 50% of the time - and that was the exact level of accuracy seen. The findings demonstrate the volunteers cannot distinguish between wines by taste alone, the organisers of the test say.

Dyed Buns

14 April 2011 - Some things never change. Shanghai authorities have seized more than 6,000 steamed buns and the Chinese city's mayor has ordered a probe after they were found to have been dyed, expired or filled with unidentified chemicals. The allegations are the latest in a string of food safety scares to rattle consumers in China, which was rocked three years ago by a tainted milk scandal that left at least six infants dead and sickened 300,000. Mayor Han Zheng said in a statement issued late Tuesday that anyone found guilty of tampering with the popular Chinese snack would be prosecuted and pledged that the investigation results would be released to the public. "Illegal manufacturers should be punished severely according to law," the government-run Shanghai Daily quoted Han as saying. The investigation was prompted after state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) aired a report on Monday detailing the allegations and singling out buns made by Shanghai Shenglu Food Co. Shenglu's "corn buns" appeared to have been dyed yellow and others sold as "black rice buns" had been dyed grey, the reports said. Old buns were also allegedly being recycled as new and chemicals were added in random amounts but not listed on the packaging as required by law, the reports said.

Little Red Riding Hood

13 April 2011 - Along with the usual sequels and spin-offs, Hollywood is about to bombard cinemas with new takes on old fairy-tales - starting with Red Riding Hood. If Red Riding Hood, with its pale teenage heroine torn between two admirers, looks a bit like Twilight, it's because it is. The live action fairy-tale is directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who launched the Twilight film franchise in 2008. Red Riding Hood sees Hardwicke plunder the earliest versions of the story - before it was re-told by the Brothers Grimm - and make the hairy antagonist a werewolf. Her film is also a "whodunnit" aimed squarely at the teen market. It is set in a medieval village called Daggerhorn, where even the poorest woodcutter wears hair gel and Freudian symbolism lurks behind every tree. "The red cape can represent many things," says Hardwicke, whose other films include a big-screen re-telling of The Nativity Story in 2006.  "Power, sexuality, sensuality, loss of virginity - artists over the last four centuries have been inspired by it. "Japanese anime artists show it in tatters, with Red Riding Hood holding an axe with blood dripping down it."

Male Wolf Spiders

12 April 2011 - Male wolf spiders cannibalise older females, scientists in Uruguay have discovered. In several species, female spiders are known to eat males, but this is the first time biologists have seen the roles reversed in the wild. The male spiders were observed mating with virgins and eating older, less reproductively successful females. Researchers suggest that harsh habitats force males to prey on females for food. Their findings were published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. The species in question, Allocosa brasiliensis, is a nocturnal wolf spider found in South America's sand dunes along riverbanks and the Atlantic Ocean coast. The researchers were studying the species because its status is considered an indicator of the health of coastal habitats. After observing a male spider eating a female in the wild, Dr Anita Aisenberg and her team from the Clemente Estable Institute of Biological Research, Montevideo, set out to find an explanation for the behaviour.
"In spiders in general, females are larger than males and they are the selective sex, while males are small rovers that go out and look for potential sexual partners," explained Dr Aisenberg.

Driving in Malaysia

11 April 2011 - Recently there has been a lot of debate about the driving skills of Malaysians. Statistics reveal that men in Malaysia were 2.4 times more accident-prone than their female counterparts, The Star, a Malaysian paper, reported. That bit of information was provided by the Malaysian Institute of Road Safety Research (Miros). Women, however, have been increasingly involved in accidents since 2006. The amount of women in road accidents jumped by almost 100% from 2006 to 2009. Miros director-general Dr. Ahmad Farhan Mohd Sadullah said that men generally possess superior psychomotor skills - this causes some of them to be sometimes excessively confident on the road. "As a result, men have the general tendency to drive at high speeds, to take chances and be a greater risk on the road," he explained. Nonetheless, Dr. Farhan said that both genders were equally at risk for being in an accident. He recommended proper risk management, driving competency and prioritisation of safety as essentials in reducing the risk of accidents.

Sinking New York

10 April 2011 - New York is a major loser and Reykjavik a winner from new forecasts of sea level rise in different regions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in 2007 that sea levels would rise at least 28cm (1ft) by the year 2100. But this is a global average; and now a Dutch team has made what appears to be the first attempt to model all the factors leading to regional variations. Other researchers say the IPCC's figure is likely to be a huge under-estimate. Whatever the global figure turns out to be, there will be regional differences. Ocean currents and differences in the temperature and salinity of seawater are among the factors that mean sea level currently varies by up a metre across the oceans - this does not include short-term changes due to tides or winds. So if currents change with global warming, which is expected - and if regions such as the Arctic Ocean become less saline as ice sheets discharge their contents into the sea - the regional patterns of peaks and troughs will also change.