ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

Singapore is a gourmet's paradise, for everyone and not just for the well-to-do. Despite the cost of living being generally higher than in the neighboring countries, one can still eat well for US$2 if one knows where to go. One such place, frequented by the working class and older workers is in the district of Jalan Besar. This shop opens round-the-clock, every day of the year [except for 2 or 3 days off during Chinese new year]. All day and all night you can see a queue that overflows into the street outside the shop, hungrily waiting for the Curry Rice. I took these pictures before I left Singapore in 2005, and the sight of a plate of curry rice makes me long to go back. Pictures from top left clockwise: (1) The Curry Rice in all it's splendor [see description below for what's in it. (2) A working-class Singaporean tucking heartily into his curry rice. (3) The sign outside the Curry Rice shop, reminding patrons of it's proud history. It may look like a mess, but one s...

From Top Left clockwise: (1)Pockets of sheer delight, Tofu cakes sliced open like a Bagel and filled with: duck meat, belly pork, fish cakes, chopped Chinese sausage, prawn fritters, pig's tongue, pig's ear's, duck liver, cucumber, boiled squid. (2) The Chili sauce that you dip the Tau Kwa Pau into: a spicy, piquant mixture of chili, vinegar, the gravy from braising the pig and duck, garlic, onion and green chili [peppers]. (3) The stall: you can see the whole braised duck hanging, and other parts in the trays below. Many years ago, a hawker in Katong [a district on the Eastern side of Simgapore sold braised duck, belly pork, pig's tongue, fish balls, Chinese sausage, fried prawn fritters, duck eggs and tofu cakes. This was eaten with cucumbers, and a fantastic sauce made of chilli, vinegar,sliced green chilli, and the brown gravy left fom the braising. On some days he couldn't finish selling all his food. So he came up with the ingenious idea of chopping up all the...

:-) Thank you to the University of Kansas, the Hexacoral project at http://www.kgs.ku.edu/Hexacoral/ for the use of the beautiful animated GIF which is a visualization of Principle Component Analysis . I copied it and I hope they don't mind. This animation shows how 12 clusters of data [the different colors] are reduced to 3 Principle Components. [the 3 orthogonal vectors (perpendicular to each other)] To see the animation, click on it to view it in a new window. In a world where so much information is available, we must learn to manage information overload. When we have several data feed on the same subject, chances are that much of the information overlaps i.e. is redundant. Overlap, meaning that mathematically speaking, if you could and did draw circles representing the true information content of the each data set, the circles would overlap. This is important when we are trying to use the data to model some aspect of the real world. For example, if we are trying to analyze a...

One of the joys of living in Singapore is the wide variety of food that is readily available because of our multiracial society. It is not at all extraordinary for one to have Roti Prata for breakfast [Indian pancake eaten by dipping into a curry of lentils, vegetables and potatoes]; Nasi Padang for lunch [Malay rice with an array of many small side-dishes of meat, fish, vegetables], Chinese Claypot Chicken for dinner [ chicken, Chinese sausages, salted fish, and mushrooms cooked together in a claypot]; and Frog congee [porridge] as a late night supper. But one of the rarer cuisines of Singapore is Peranakan cuisine Peranakan is the Malay word for " descendants". Peranakan Chinese are the descendants of Chinese immigrants to the Malay Peninsula and Singapore, who came without their wives, but eventually married the local Malay women, and partially adopted their customs, cuisine and dressing. The Peranakan , also known as Baba [male] Nonya [female] or Straits Chinese deve...