Sunday, January 11, 2009

Scattered Pit Stop Thoughts

It's been the most positive and productive starts to a new year as far as I can remember. Which isn't necessarily saying much since stock in my memory aren't exactly selling at blue-chip levels. The final stage of soundpost setting arrived with the acquisition of a setter today, which means that the next time thunder roars, you may hear me screaming, "IGOR! It's... ALIVE!"

One must be careful with momentum though - with the intensity of university applications, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra project, finishing American Gods and moving the Mozart biography and getting back to practicing, sometimes it's good to take a bit of a pit stop break before I fall over. (Which I've been suspecting is where I've been headed in the past couple of days, in a slight overdrive to make sure I don't stagnate while waiting for the next stage.) Time to breathe.

While we're breathing, here behold are some scattered thoughts.

1. We used to worry so much about the magnetism of mobile phones. An old friend (thanks to Facebook, just reconnected after 12 years), used to pick up coins with her phone, and reassured her classmates that, "I switch from one ear to the next, to ensure that I fry my brain evenly." If magnetism really is so bad, it makes me wonder why we stick magnets all over our fridge... where we store the stuff we later stuff into our mouths.

2. OK the Maxis ads are really cute. The ones with the paper cut-outs. What I don't get is the line, "and you get to surf the whole Internet!" I mean, are there really deals where you only surf half the internet? (No seriously, coz in Thailand there used to be Internet cafes which would only get Thai websites, much like an intra-net.)

3. I noted with some interest Oprah's "Best Life Week" which was apparently based on her current weight crisis. Being overweight is an issue yes, but when someone who is as accomplished as Oprah - her own personal stardom and success not only financially but in breaking the race barrier, starting that school in South Africa, helping get her candidate elected President - places her weight problem on that level... I don't know if that's the best thing for a role model to do. I get a feeling there's a fat kid somewhere who is a great person to others and brilliant in all sorts of ways, who would be better off knowing that yes, he'd like to lose a couple of pounds, but while he's still on the path and on the treadmill he'd like not to let it entirely determine his self-esteem and run his life. That's my opinion anyway.

2 comments:

~tengman.k.~ said...

Responses to 1 and 2:

1) The issue with phones is that they don't have the same permanent and static magnetism as fridge magnets do. That sort of magnetic field doesn't transfer energy or anything like that. Phones, on the other hand, are emitting radiation of fairly low frequencies - but it's there, and occasionally of substantial intensity. The effects of low-frequency radiation on people aren't too clearly understood, since they're less dramatic than say, UV or gamma rays. But there's some uncertainty there. You can't cook an egg with phones, though.

2) The 'whole internet' thing is related to iPhone ads that promised 'the whole internet'. The point is that the iPhone's Safari browser renders webpages in full, rather than as a collection of text like on some Blackberries and many other phone browsers. There was criticism of Apple (and a lawsuit?) for 'false advertising' since the iPhone make of Safari couldn't handle Flash and Java. So Maxis is trying to bank in on that idea. Yet again... Apple has a concept, and other companies have to jump on the bandwagon. Even if it got Apple sued.

AF said...

Hmmm... Interesting. Thanks!