Standby Buster

The next time I am back in Singapore, I think it would be brilliant to bring a couple of these. I've been recently obsessed about saving electricity/the environment/water/money/the world and these fit right into that ethos.

Standby Busters are remote controlled electrical sockets that you can plug into as a conduit between the mains (usually tucked behind a shelf and hard to reach) and the multiplug electrical board that powers everything in the house.

You now get to turn off the electricity at the mains with the touch of a radio controlled remote controller.

Lower Cost Arbitrages

I don't normally think about it in anything other than an economic sense, but spending some time in Shanghai is really making me feel the stark difference between a high cost market and a lower cost one.

In the first place, I exchanged a ridiculous amount of money before coming to Shanghai, which put into sharp relief what I had expected to spend in a week. But the prices here for food, accommodation and general shopping has just been absolutely ridiculous. It almost made me want to go crazy shopping. Almost.

• Good quality Chinese tea (tiekuanyin) for RMB 100 - £7
• All my snacks for RMB 39. That's about £2.70
• Good quality Chinese mushrooms for RMB 33. That's £2.30

It really takes some thinking about it to get a sense of perspective around what we get for our money anywhere in the world.

And that's not always easy when prices are rising, Shanghai is getting more expensive than Tokyo, and Singapore is probably slightly more expensive than Shanghai because of import limitations.

It didn't strike me fully until now that what we call a fair price is really subjective. We live in the places we live in, and take our purchasing power, after some time, for granted.

This probably helps explains why the fair trade movement is so much more apparent in first world countries which are high cost markets. Our ideas being in a high cost market of what a fair price is, is influenced to a high degree by our perceptions of what a £1 or a $1 can buy in our own countries and markets, not others.

Not that I'm against fair trade, mind. I fully support paying non-exploitative, fair market rates for the goods we buy. But I would also like to call to mind the use of the marketing campaigns like: "This man earns $1.50 per week for his coffee" and look at marketing campaigns for donations and grants in the same vein: "$1.50 per week from you... can help feed his family for a week".

I think I realize now the "multiplier" power our money can make in the markets that we buy in. While in the short run it makes me almost tempted not to bargain as hard as I otherwise would to, it puts into perspective that the small things we give up, can mean big things to people who receive them.

What stops them from actually receiving the full benefit, is a series of financial, logistic and socio-economic barriers that prevents us as consumers from buying the cheapest coffee in the world directly, and instead buying them from Starbucks or Tesco.

It makes me really want to find a way to overcome these barriers, and to exploit this arbitrage in a non-profit situation.

On Why Plates are Round

I probably have blogged this before, but honestly, as the years wear on, grow and extend, the single sole achievement of my life in terms of intellectual thinking has been, is, and probably will still be to have figured out why plates are round.

It's sad but true. And to be brutally and coldly honest, it probably is the one piece of truly independent thinking that I have ever done. Independent in the sense that it wasn't a thought that anyone else has ever thought of before - at least that I had come across so far. It really probably is because nobody else was bored to such a degree to have thought of it, but still - I am proud of this.

So, why are plates round? Or bowls and dishes for that matter? Surely because sinks are rectangular, and tables are rectangular (some are round, but most are rectangular) and the cupboards that we keep our plates in are rectangular, it would only make sense to have square or rectangular plates that would fit everything else in our world that we have? Why do plates mostly occur in a round form?

Several sensible suggestions have been offered.

• The industrial - Round plates are easier to manufacture [Not sure I bought this one, surely it's easier nowadays to cut several square plates from one big sheet]
• The anthropological - Squares/shapes with straight lines are artificial shapes and do not occur naturally. Our forefathers who first shaped equipment had followed the shapes of nature. [This has some merit]
• The practical - It's much easier to fashion a reasonably round shape than a perfect square/rectangle with straight lines [What if you cut wood?]
• The relativist - Well, spoons are round, so why not plates? [That's because square spoons poke uncomfortably into your mouth when you eat...]
• The child - The better to drink soup straight from the edge, my dear... [Perhaps the sole reason why most plates are round is because of the general lack of manners all round...]

Interestingly, I note (and the shrewd would point out) that not all plates are round. Most plates are, but there exist, for fashion, design features, and in some cultures, rectangular plates. So whatever the reason, it must apply to validate why most plates are round, but also validate why some plates are acceptably rectangular.

The reason I thought of, *drum rolls and cymbals clang* is a scientific one.

Surface tension.

Surface tension, as Wikipedia tells me, is the property of a liquid to behave like an elastic sheet. More relevantly, it is surface tension that causes any liquid to adopt a spherical shape, because a sphere has the smallest possible surface area to volume ratio.

Well, well, I see the similarities. But what has this got to do with plates being round, you might ask.

Most plates are made to contain food that while not entirely liquid, may contain some liquids (gravy, sauces) or items that potentially spill over when picked up (rice, mashed potatoes). While it's not culturally sensitive to assume we all eat gravy, sauces, rice and mashed potatoes, some combination of round-plate cultures typically use plates to contain a wide variety of potentially spillable foods.

The round plate is the most mathematically efficient shape for containing spillable food, because surface tension ensures that the roundness tucks away any sharp edges that threaten to break the surface tension and cause a spill. Since any curvature also maximizes area, it is also the shape that can contain the most bits of tiny objects or liquids, and makes sense for a plate and, definitely also a bowl.

More proof, the Japanese have commonly used wooden flat rectangular "plates" made out of wood. It's used to serve sushi, which are served set in pieces on the plate. Sushi is a self-contained serving of food, and does not contain liquids or objects which may spill over when picked up.

Why are plates round? The short answer is, "So that we can heap more food on it." The scientific gastronomical answer.

Did our forefathers somehow know this before Eular, Lagrange, Young, Laplace, physics and hydrodynamics? Were we somehow born with an inner sense that allows us to live and learn about our environment outside of the 5 senses?

It always struck me how nobody really needs to consciously learn that Gravity exists. All we actually really learn in school is which scientist named it, and by what name it's known. But a baby that rolls over and falls out of bed knows gravity exists, surely and definitely.

By deep thought, accident or conscious design, the longest lasting structures that we have built and designed have its roots in scientific efficiency. It makes me wonder whether aesthetics, at its core, is Man's way of validating scientific soundness without extensive calculations. I wonder if we have evolved with a skill to assess the success of science that was essential to our survival as a species, because it is the most efficient way to exploit the intrinsic mathematics of the world around us. After all, there is no resisting the laws of nature.

Call it taste, call it aesthetics, call it that preference that babies have for symmetrical faces. I wonder if we are each born with that intrinsic ability to validate this scientific soundness without being a scientist. It would certainly explain why the greatest of mathematicians sense a beauty in their discoveries, and why we can link certain numbers to art.

Somehow, there is a strange sense of comfort that we're all born knowing what we need to know, whether we study it or not. There's a strange sense of faith in the idea that we do have everything we need, whether we know it or not.