Tag: things i think about

Making things clear

I was in the fifth floor kitchenette at work, watching Dave fill up his plastic cup of water. When he finished he turned to me, expectant and uncertain. Clearly, he sensed the ‘I want to say something to you’ vibe of my loitering.

Indeed, there was something I wanted to ask. I have spent the past year watching people fill up plastic cups of water in the kitchen. People would take a plastic cup, fill it, drink from it, then very conscientiously place it into the plastic recycling bin. Meanwhile, two shelves of perfectly reusable ceramic mugs hovered above the filtered water tap.

My company is full of environmentally friendly people, yet despite recurring requests, the stacked column of plastic cups continues to be replenished.

I wanted to ask someone about this. Today was my lucky day because Dave is a nice Englishman and probably wouldn’t be offended.

‘Dave,’ I said. ‘Is there some reason you use a plastic cup instead of a mug? Is it…’ I paused, ‘…a cultural thing?’

Dave looked surprised, then lifted up his cup of water and gazed at it for five seconds.

‘I don’t know,’ he began. ‘I guess I wouldn’t drink water from a mug. I never thought about it.’

So he thought about it. ‘I think it is a cultural thing. I feel like I need to drink water from a clear cup.’

Now this was something that hadn’t occurred to me! I had speculated to myself that there was something wrong with having a handle on the cup, or that mugs were too big for water.

‘Oh! Thank you for that,’ I said.

Later, I tried to corroborate my findings with Chris, another Englishman.

‘I use a mug for water,’ Chris said. ‘But I can see why others might not want to. I think it’s because mugs are sometimes stained. When you have tea or coffee, then you don’t mind because you can’t see. But because water is transparent, the staining probably puts people off.’

Lettuce capture and storage

Recently at work, we put in a bid to do a life cycle assessment of a head of lettuce. This is a serious issue. Lettuce wastage rates are very high. We’ve all experienced having to throw out lettuce because we couldn’t use it all up in time, or because the fridge had frozen it. Now, multiply that wastage to retail and agricultural scale, adding in the risks of fluctuating consumer demand, cold snaps, and malfunctions in storage, transport and retail refrigeration.

During our research, we discovered that there is a ‘voice of the salad industry’ — the British Leafy Salad Association. Who would have thought? You would not be surprised, probably, that while working on this bid I would spontaneously start giggling at my desk.

As I constantly extolled to my team mates, all the wastage problems could be solved by installing ‘lettuce capture and storage’ systems alongside farms and major grocery stores.

Excess lettuce would be stored in the less perishable ‘rabbit’ form. Later, rabbit would be harvested and the useful lettuce nutrients would be returned to the global food cycle.

Payslip excitement

Every month, Jane brings around our payslips. I usually ignore it for half an hour. When I take a break from work, I carefully tear away left side of the slip, then the right side, then the top. Once it is open, I immediately look at the net payment.

It’s always a bit exciting to open the payslip. I don’t know what I expect, though, because the number is always the same.

Sometimes I think I would like that number to change. For it to go up is obviously the ideal situation but, you know, I don’t think I would mind if it went up and down so that it averages out to what I get paid now. Little fluctuations like that would justify the flutter of excitement I get when I open that payslip.

Blown over

I went outside for lunch and was almost blown over by the wind. I really had to struggle through the air to get to the pedestrian crossing. I think, in fact, I leaned forward at an angle that would normally result in me falling on my face, but the wind held me up.

As only a nerd would, as I battled against the forces of nature, I thought how this could be represented as a free body diagram.


This doesn’t seem right to me. I feel like Fwind was actually horizontal and that a component of my weight force was horizontal in the other direction. Can that be right? For this diagram, I’ve drawn that the horizontal wind force is opposed by the ground reaction force (GRF). I am almost sure this is wrong because the GRF should actually be opposing the force of the foot on the ground.

I did lots of web searching to find a free body diagram of something toppling over and I couldn’t find it. Is it something to do with torque around the centre of gravity?

Sigh. I really should know how to do this. I’m an engineer.

Any help would be appreciated!

Free range chicken

I am a tender hearted person, really. I blink back tears when reading sad stories, watching advertisements designed to tug at the heartstrings, and go to great lengths to avoid maybe possibly slightly hurting someone’s feelings.

On the phone, my mum was telling me about this show she had been watching. ‘Jamie’s Fowl Dinners‘ had arrived in Australia.

I don’t like watching or hearing about animals suffering on their journeys to become food. You might say that I am wilfully ignorant. But there was no way I could ignore it this time because it was my mum telling me.

She said, ‘Did you know that chickens only grow for 42 days before they’re killed to be eaten? They grow up in cages and there’s not enough room for them to stand up. Because they don’t stand, they never grown bones properly. Their bones can’t even carry their own weight!’

‘EEEE, stop it, waaah!’ Tears were practically flowing down my face as I imagined the poor chickens, too fat and weak to stand up in the crowd.

‘Isn’t that interesting?’ mum marvelled. ‘I never knew!’

‘I wish they could grow chickens without brains,’ I lamented. ‘Just chicken bits that aren’t connected to feelings.’ Perhaps for some people, a chicken-sized brain is small enough to not worry about the chicken’s feelings.

Chicken is my favourite meat but I could no longer plead ignorance. From now on, I will only buy free range chicken. I already buy free range eggs.

Last week, I was proud of myself because to make sauteed chicken breasts with olive and caper sauce, I went straight to the fridge cabinet with the free range chickens. I didn’t even glance at the standard chickens.

I am lucky that I like leg pieces (thigh and drumstick) more than chicken breast. Chicken breast is very, very expensive. The free range variety is around £10 for two pieces. I used to buy chicken around once a month. To manage the extra cost, I will probably continue buying at the same frequency but smaller amounts.

Being Chinese

From my photo, you can tell that I am ethnically Chinese. Being Chinese is not something I think about too much. I moved from Taiwan to Australia when I was three years old. I don’t usually affiliate myself with the Chinese culture except that I love the cuisine and I’ve had done some years of Chinese language classes.

I could write a lot about why this is, how I’ve met lots of non-Chinese people who are fascinated with China and how this perplexes me.

But.

I won’t.

Not now, anyway. I feel something similar to shame on this topic, which I need to analyse before I can explain myself.

I do, however, have three Chinese-related thoughts I’d like to share now, on the cusp of the Beijing Olympics.

Firstly, as I’ve explained to a few people recently, the only time I’ve been harassed in my ‘dangerous‘ neighbourhood was when two black kids, a little girl and a little boy, started shouting ‘Ching chong! Ching chong!’ at me as I walked home. To which I could shouted back, ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying!’

Secondly, I was struck by a lightning bolt of understanding a few months ago. I like accents. I like hearing English spoken by people from South Africa, France, Germany, America… Yet, I cringe a little when I hear Chinese spoken with an accent. I couldn’t figure out why I have this double standard. My mum once said to me I spoke Chinese with an Australian accent — and this was not a good thing.

Finally, I figured it out. Chinese is a tonal language. Each syllable can be said in four ways, so even small variations in pitch changes the meaning of a word. Speaking Chinese with accent sounds ‘wāi wāi’ （歪歪）, which means ‘wonky’.

Vietnamese has five tones and Cantonese has six tones!

My final Chinese thought — I have just watched a Chinese man, Ming Yun, pitch for a cash investment on the TV show, Dragon’s Den. Inside me, I really wanted him to do well. For some reason, even though I am not very Chinese and I don’t know many very Chinese people, I identify with them more strongly than I think I should. When I read about Chinese people who can’t afford to buy the right spectacles, I feel like crying. When I see a Chinese baby, I smile. A few months ago, I watched a film in which a father and mother in China were used and neglected by their children, who wanted to live Western lives in the city. It was very distressing and, of course, made me cry.

I think it’s because I can imagine Chinese people as my parents, my brother, my grandparents, my aunts and my uncles. Therefore, I am very vulnerable to tears when I hear about the suffering of a Chinese person.

Litter or gift?

Here’s something I’ve thought about in relation to free newspapers. Some people get annoyed when they see free newspapers left on the train and the platform. I used to disapprove of littering of this kind too.

However, I once heard someone on the train complaining about the selfish people who took their newspapers away with them. ‘Why don’t they leave them behind so that others can read them too?’ they grumped.

Now that I’ve taken the train after rush hour and have felt the disappointment of not finding any newspapers, I too appreciate the amenity of ‘littered’ newspapers.

I wonder if people leave their papers because they’re lazy or out of thoughtfulness? I suspect it’s laziness in most cases.

Stair climber

I am an escalator climber. Ninety-nine per cent of the time*, I will take the climbing lane (which in London is the left lane, odd because on the roads they overtake on the right).

When I get off my Tube train, there is usually two train-fulls of commuters shuffling to get on the escalator. I immediately migrate to the left of the crowd to get into the climbing lane. This is an imaginary lane — it’s not until you get to the escalator that the climbing and standing lanes are defined.

It can be a teeny bit frustrating when I stand behind someone who turns out to be an escalator stander. It means either I haven’t moved far enough to the left or some stander has cheated by illegally using the faster climbing lane to get into prime position.

So every morning I play a game where I try to stand behind people who look like climbers. It’s trickier than it should be. Sometimes, perfectly healthy looking men in suits and flat shoes turn out to be lazy standers. Then you have women with dangerously high heels who turn out to be climbers. One trend that is clear, though, is the fatter the person, the more likely that they are standers.

This makes me think of positive (self-reinforcing) feedback loops.


In related news, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and resolved to take the stairs to the fifth floor, where my desk is at work. I did it every day last week. I hope I can keep it up.

Five floors is not a lot. It takes me about two minutes, which is about the same time as it takes to wait for a lift and stop at all the floors in between (which is what happens at rush hour). I’ve avoided taking the stairs because (I know this sounds weird) I felt embarrassed walking past the crowd waiting for the lift. I felt especially embarrassed if someone in that crowd knows I work on the fifth floor because they, too, work on the fifth floor. In that context, being a shown to be a stair climber seems self-righteous and snobbish.

So now I breeze past the lift crowd, (a) avoiding eye contact with anyone I might know, and (b) pretending I only need to go to the first floor.

(If someone gets in the lift on the ground floor and gets off on the first floor, I have nothing but ridicule for them. Unless they have a disability, like a limp.)

The main reason I climb stairs and escalators is to build up my chocolate consumption credit. Also, as someone told Damjan, who told me, there will come a time in my life when I physically don’t have the option to climb stairs (and, of course, climbing stairs now can delay that future deterioration of my body).

*I stand on escalators when I’m with someone else and I want to continue a conversation and in case they don’t want to climb.

Angry at no one and everyone

For much of yesterday, I was tense. It all started with FedEx delivering my long-awaited UK work permit. When I opened up the package, I discovered that I still couldn’t go back to the UK, even with this permit. I had to apply for an additional ‘entry clearance certificate’ from the British High Commission in Canberra. It would take another two+ weeks and A$500.

I spent the rest of the day rebooking air tickets, deferring accommodation, renegotiating my work start date, photocopying letters, passports and degree certificates, getting passport photos printed, filling in and printing out online forms…

Little things that I would normally shrug off made me snap and glare. I was angry at no one and everyone. My poor family!

It was a strange feeling, being that angry and, at the same time, knowing how useless and irrational my anger was. I couldn’t blame anyone for anything. I was just generally frustrated with the world.

This made me think about a man I saw on the Dr Phil show last week. He had spent the last sixteen years of his life, angry at the world. The littlest things would trigger him off, like cars driving too close to him, or waiters taking too long, or people disagreeing with him.

Now, I have a faint idea of what it must be to live like him. It’s not nice, being constantly and pointlessly frustrated. It’s also difficult to let the frustration go. I can imagine that if you are like that for a very long time, you wouldn’t know how to be any different even when you want to be. I wonder if Dr Phil understood that?

The value of idealism in the real world

I really like this short opinion article — The power of ideas.

This reflects a philosophy that I’ve learned this year at Cambridge. It is a philosophy that I have not only learned but have come to believe in my core. Essentially, for me to be effective, authentic, persuasive and steadfast in the real world, I need a deep understanding of the ideal state. It is not enough to build on what’s already been done, seeing a few feet or five years ahead in the fog. Fundamental change happens when you know what you are aiming for over the next ten, twenty, fifty years, and there are a critical mass of people who believe in the same vision.

You can be idealistic and realistic at the same time. In fact, to be a change agent, you have to be.

This year has given me vision and that has been more valuable than any technical or business skills one might learn.