ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

1. Logo is correct but name on side says Morante 1. A Bluebird taxi or a fake? Windscreen says Bluebird Group but logo on side is different 2. The Bluebird logo 3. A fake Bluebird 5. A Silverbird taxi Any new visitor to Indonesia would very soon be familiar with Bluebird Taxis. The Bluebird Group’s ( http://www.bluebirdgroup.com/ ) blue taxis are as iconic as the yellow cabs of New York. But more than their appearance they are also an icon for reliability, honesty, security and cleanliness. In an industry where rip-offs, smelly rickety cabs, dangerous driving, bad attitudes and robberies are common, Bluebird stands out as being very different from its peers. When a visitor arrives at Jakarta airport, taxi touts swarm around like flies. But if you keep your cool and walk unswervingly to the Bluebird stand, you know you are in safe hands. So great is its reputation that Blue Bird is an unshakeable brand, and its peers in the industry have had to adopt unusual business strategies to ...

1. Soup with cabbage, carrots, fungus strips of rice flour and quail's egg 2. Flat bread with mutton, capsicum, carrot and onion gravy as topping 3. Stretching dough for the handmade noodles 4. Grilling mutton kebabs over a charcoal fire There are about 27 million Muslims in China-more than the population of Malaysia, Taiwan or Australia. The Uighur, Tartar, Uzbek, Tajik and Hui live mostly in the provinces that border Central Asia and Tibet, in the provinces of Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningsia and Qinghai. Except for the Hui they are distinguishable from the real Chinese, the Han; having a more Mongolian look with deeply slanted eyes and a more stocky body. Their food is different too, and mutton forms a large part of their diet- a testimony to their nomadic past on the steppes. In Shanghai, I found a small Muslim eatery next to my hotel, and it was a 24-hour joint, the Uighur family that owned it working in two shifts. The clear soup above was flavored with bits of mutton, and was a r...

1. My Besta 636 language computer: Chinese, English, and 10 other languages. 1. A Perankan lady dressed in their traditional Sarong Kebaya 3. An early Peranakan house in Katong district preserved as a heritage building .Note the ornate tiles and motifs 4. A plate of Kueh Lapis a Peranakan cake with colors of the rainbow, each color a dye derived from natural ingredients such as flowers and leaves. The Beauty of the Chinese Language I am a Singaporean classified as being of Chinese ethnicity in the official personal documents I hold. However, the truth is, I could not speak Chinese [Mandarin] fluently until the last few months, when I did some serious self-study using a Besta language computer. [see picture above] Now, as to why I was not able to speak Chinese, part of it lies in the fact that during my schooling years, Singapore was a British colony, and of course we learned English in school. But the main reason for my poor command of the Chinese language is a confluence of histori...

1. The Hindustan Motors Ambassador based on 1957 British Morris Oxford 2. Charing Cross Road in the hill resort town of Ooty [how quaintly English] 3. Young Indian women clad in colorful Saris 4. The nut and chickpea vendor 5.The Nilgiri hills of western Tamil Nadu 6. Decrepit railway coaches at a decrepit railway station 7. The Tea plantations of Ooty. Recently I visited the hill resort town of Ooty, in the extreme west of the Indian State of Tamil Nadu, about 2700 meters above sea-level I found many relics of the time when the British planters,soldiers and missionaries were here. A town with a name like Wellington, a road called Charing Cross, and a bookstore called Higginbottom's are a reminder of the days when the pallid English retired to the hills to escape the stuporific heat of the Indian summer. But more than the ghost of its ex-colonial status, I found in India many disturbing signs that make me doubt whether it should be put in the same league as China when we talk ...

1. Artificial Life Forms generated by a computer program 2. Tom Ray's Tierra Artificial Life and World -less graphical but no less revealing 3. Conway's Game of Life-cellular automata, Life created on a Grid A ONE-PAGE DEFINITION OF LIFE Prologue Until a few decades ago, most people thought they knew what it meant to say that something was alive. Breathing, eating, the ability to reproduce, having a shape, existing in a time-space dimension etc were some of the characteristics which defined Life. Until the advent of computers and programmers who wrote code that could also perform most of the things which living things do. And that has led people [like me] to re-evaluate the meaning of saying that you are a living thing. It was John von Neumann, who first thought of self-reproducing cellular automata, and inspired John Conway, Chris Langton, Tom Ray, and Stephen Wolfram, John Holland and countless others to institute the study and creation of entities that exhibited life-like be...

1. Selling Shanghai Hairy Crabs and River Shrimp In The Waiting Room of Suzhou Railway Station 2. A Popular Pastime Among Chinese Babyboomers: Card Games At The Park 3. Aplate of Jellied Shark Meat. 4. An Autumnal Hot Pot Dish: Frog Legs, Lotus Roots, Leek, Garlic, Pine Nuts etc 4. The Ancient Back Gate to City of Suzhou, 5. View From One of the Many Bridges in this Venice of the East. Om my last trip to Shanghai, I took a 30 minute train ride to Suzhou, in Jiangsu province ,one of the most beautiful cities in China-sometimes called the Venice of the East, because of the number of canals and bridges that criss-cross the city. Being on the lower reaches of the Yangtze river, Suzhou has always been an important city for commerce, having been in existence for at least 2500 years. But it's also known for its scenic bridges, pagodas, shophouses with verandahs and wood- carved windows. Though only about 80 kilometers from metropolitan Shanghai it has a distinctly rural ambience. W...

The British have their bacon and eggs, the French their croissants, and the Japanese their porridge and pickles. The Americans have their McDonald's and their Dunking Donuts and the food that they serve in Diners and Truck Stops. The popular Singapore breakfast food above is fried Rice Noodles [more accurately, Vermicelli]. In the local Hokkien dialect it is called Bee Hoon which literally translates as "powdered rice". Its relative blandness goes well with the fried fish, slice of luncheon meat [what you call Spam], and fried egg. Cut red chilies, and Chinese parsley are garnishes which complete the dish. The fried fish is especially tasty because it has been marinaded in a blend of soya sauce and Tamarind, a sourish fruit. Singapore Bee Hoon is a light, healthy and tasty breakfast and costs about US$2.30 even for this Deluxe version with all the trimmings. Some people have just the plain noodles which costs 70 cents. But that's not all. My breakfast is always accomp...