Sympathy

Planes are falling like flies lately. MH370 was lost to the watery deep, MH17 met a fiery end and today another Taiwanese plane was crushed by stormy weather. The whole world is a bit more sullen today.

The question is, why do we feel such sympathy when planes go down? After all tens of thousands of people die every day in the poor countries, from starvation and disease and war. These corpses dwarf those that perish in the skies by far.

I suppose the reason is that we simply cannot identify with them - these people are just fundamentally different from our middle-class existence, unlike air travelers who could be you or me or a family member. The more someone is like us, the more we sympathize with them. That is why terrorist attacks shock us so much, as people who were a moment ago enjoying their comfortable urban existence are suddenly injured or dead, to their great surprise. People who die in war zones, well it is a tragedy, but that is somehow only to be expected, right?

A ton of people doing research on AIDS died on MH17. I could not help but think that if someone who suffered from AIDS was on board too, many would feel far more sympathy for his death than if it had been from the disease, because "AIDS wouldn't happen to me, only to druggies/gays". That's just human nature.

The next stage in the evolution of handphones

The interesting thing about the progress of handphones is the growth curve in size. A long long time back the standard handphone was this rather enormous thing, rectangular and thick, made of solid black plastic with huge buttons and a prominent antenna on the top. This slowly shrank down to the still solid but smaller Nokia 3310, the venerable dreadnought of the phone world, with toughness comparable to Wolverine's claws. It then got even smaller, before swinging up the opposite way and becoming rather large - if you've seen one of those Samsung Galaxy whatevers you will know they can really double as a table tennis racket. So what is the next stage in handphone evolution?

Some have bet that it will trend back down in size, giving us the Samsung Gear, a wearable smartwatch. Others have chosen to continue increasing it in size, as we can see from the inexorable growing iPhones. I, on the other hand, believe that the next paradigm leap in phones should be the ability to impose its power on the surroundings. Imagine a phone capable of projection:

You could use it to watch Godzilla, unhampered by the size of the screen. Another use for it would be to send a signal to the skies in a crowded area to summon your friends to gather:

I firmly believe that this would add vastly to user experience, thus cementing the next step of progress for humanity's usage of small electronic devices.

On the difficulties of falling asleep

All my life I have been plagued by an inability to fall asleep when I should be doing so, coupled with a great ability to fall asleep when I should not be doing so. This has caused me numerous vexations over the years. Why when I was once in a small and stuffy room attending a long and boring meeting I nearly fell asleep while standing, which would have caused me to fall on my manager and disrupt the whole proceedings. Luckily I only leaned forward 10 degrees or so before I corrected my fall, but it was a rather close shave indeed. No matter, if I had really fallen I would just pretend that I had fainted, then everyone would take pity on me and rush me to hospital.

But this deficiency can still be corrected by willpower; the truly frustrating one is the former. When I want to sleep at night, and do feel very tired, often I am just unable to enter a state of blissful sleep. Now after careful recollection, I remember that during college I could always sleep well, largely due to the fact that I never had anything important that I had to wake up for.

The funny thing is that when I don't HAVE to wake up at a fixed time, I can sleep easily due to a complete lack of stress. The trouble arises when I know I have to wake up for something such as work - then it becomes rather difficult to fall asleep as I keep thinking "oh I have to sleep" which produces a rather contradictory effect. This is very annoying.

When I was flying overseas for a business trip, on the way out I had to fly overnight, so I kept trying to sleep so that I would be rested for work in the morning. Needless to say this effort was unproductive and I had a very sleepy day. On the other hand when I fly back through Saturday afternoon I could fall asleep without trying hard, as I did not HAVE to sleep. Such is life.

I once read that dolphins can operate the two hemispheres of their brains independently, so that when one side is sleeping the other can control the body. Oh for such a skill I would be willing to pay dearly, as most of the time I can get along with half a brain anyway. Especially in meetings.