Non-Chinese at Chinese New Year

To get to the bus stop, I had to walk past a temple. Not particularly keen on the din from the lion dance within the temple compound, I picked up my pace.

Yet, a glance to my left made me stop. Here’s a photo opportunity, I said to myself, and the resulting picture is at left.

This was not the first time I have noticed it;. In fact, I wrote about it thirteen years ago in January 1999: Non-Chinese boys participating in the traditional lion dance. But this was the first time I had a camera with me.

Education system a high stakes board game

The other day, as I was waiting in line at an automated bank teller, I overheard several schoolgirls talk among themselves about their choice of subjects to major in. They were about 14 years old  and were probably at the point of being streamed into Science, Arts . . . and then I said myself: Gee, I really don’t know what streams there are or how our educational system is structured anymore.  It’s been decades since I left school.

So, I asked around a few people more knowledgeable than I, and I thought I might share with readers what I learnt (apologies if you already know all this).

Keep Clean campaign to return

The Ministry of Environment and Water Resources, bemoaning Singaporeans’ anti-social littering habits is “currently exploring some technological solutions,” reported the Straits Times, 17 January 2012.

I wonder what they’re thinking of. Perhaps more closed-circuit cameras located all over the city? Perhaps extensive deployment of face-recognition software?

But why resort to such costly solutions — beside the question of intrusiveness — when a simpler one is available?

Go see the animated scroll with barf bag in hand

If you have spare time this Chinese New Year, go see the digitally animated version of Qingming Shanghe Tu at the Singapore Expo (hall 3). It will be on until 6 February 2012. Admission for adults: $21; closes at 9 p.m.

However, do take a barf bag with you.

Cut in ministers’ pay is good, but detailed mechanisms matter

The revised ministerial salaries are probably at the upper end of Singaporeans’ tolerable range. While there have been the expected criticisms of the proposals issued by the Gerard Ee committee, the gross amounts being proposed are likely to take the sting out of this issue for the next general election.  The salary cuts of around 30% for cabinet ministers will assuage quite a lot of people.

It was never possible to arrive at a pay recommendation, or even a formula, that would leave everybody happy. The art of politics simply required that the government did enough to satisfy enough people, in order to reduce the penalty they have to pay at the next general election. My guess is that a 30% reduction is enough, but only time will tell.

Wage differential between low and high end vocations unusually high in Singapore

One of the most striking factoids I’ve heard in a while was this: In Singapore, a construction worker earns about 9 percent of what a doctor earns, compared to Hong Kong where such a worker earns about 25 percent of what a doctor does.

Ho Kwon Ping, executive chairman of Banyan Tree Holdings, highlighted this in a talk he gave Monday, 16 January 2012, at a seminar organised by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS). The institute had prepared the statistics for him.

Doctors in both cities earn about the same. Likewise, both Singapore and Hong Kong are open to foreign labour. Yet there is this disparity.

Share with public all data on bus service standards

Clementi is the worst place to start from when going downtown, as I recall from a news story a month or two ago. Tampines also figured in the hellish-commute stakes. A figure of 20 minutes was mentioned, increasing to a little over 30 minutes at peak hour, if my recollection’s any good.

The times sounded too good to be true — 30 minutes is hell? –  and I did a double-take. Only on re-reading the article did I realise it was about driving. The study did not refer to the proletariat that had to rely on public transport.

Starting the new year with race and religion

He had waited patiently to be served. Foreign workers from India have largely resigned themselves to be almost invisible to Singaporeans, unless when Singaporeans wish to make an issue of their (unwanted) visibility.

But today, he was alone, and not a threat to our beloved racial model. And so he was ignored even though he had actually come to the coffee counter before three other customers — construction supervisors who perhaps came from the same worksite as the Indian guy. The difference was that the supervisors were Chinese, with at least one of them from China, judging by his accent.

The three women behind the counter — Chinese Singaporean, middle-aged — engaged the men in banter as they prepared their orders. There was an easy familiarity, possibly because the men had become regular customers from working nearby.

Acts of silencing large and small

Let’s start with the small. Readers may have noticed a comment left by someone with the handle Yujuan, saying: “Sorry, Yawning Bread is not my cup of tea – too much obsession with homosexual issues. Would not log onto this website any more, but all the best anyway.” This was placed in the comment thread after Gay Malaysian in Irish civil union raises hackles.

It goes without saying that everybody is free to choose what he wishes to read. Every one of us would have come across sites that do not interest us, and we just go away. Going away is not the issue. Leaving a remark with a big harrumph is what is significant.

What is the subconscious that lies beneath the effort to pen such a comment?

Homo imitato

Edge.org has an article in which Mark Pagel (right) presents a fresh and intriguing view of human evolution. Like all scientific work, he also speculates, if not quite predicts, that humans have reached a point beyond which we are possibly going to get more stupid — thus the title Infinite Stupidity.

Readers are advised to first read it or view the video before returning here.

In a nutshell, Pagel argues that with the emergence of homo sapiens on this planet, a process of evolution through cultural selection of ideas has become the main driver of change, taking over from the antecedent evolution through natural selection of genes. He also argues that the former has many of the same characteristics as the latter.