Robbie Williams Rock DJ

31 Oct 2018 Hong Kong Park 1 - Free afternoon at the Park

Fresh back from a trip to visit some factories in Shenzhen and Dongguan, I extended 1 more day to stay in Hong Kong, and catch up with an old friend in the evening.I chanced upon this gem of a park, it is off Queensway, road, just behind the Hong Kong High Courts and at the start of the Mid Levels. Starting from my hotel along Waterfront road, it took me about 20 minutes along first Harcourt, then into Fenwick Street, Hennessy Road, and then Queensway. For a change, I did not indulge in any high end shopping and I was rewarded with a nice little free afternoon mingling amongst orchids,cacti, man made waterfalls, an aviary and even chanced upon a bridal shower taking place !     

Hong Kong is best covered by walking, and yesterday's weather was slightly overcast and a cool 23 deg C with some winds. I thoroughly enjoyed the free entry to the floral and fauna consevatory which housed plants grown in arid and semi arid deserts, tropical plants and some temperate plants. The fact that it was free in free wheeling Hong Kong made it all the more surprising to me, so the best things in life after all ARE free. 

Air, the warmth of a stranger's nod or smile acknowledging your presence, people being courteous and the helping hand of a stranger makes my day. I too, give back in return my fair share of the material and non-material presents to make the day more sane or palatable for many who have to toil much harder than me.

The waterfall cascades down 10 meters or so.

The park is on uneven ground, so there is a fair bit of climbing and walking up and down of steps. I take this as my daily 10,000 step health workout, so its all in all good for the body and the soul. I also did the 105 steps to the top of the lookout point to get some vantage view and a sliver of a view of the world famous Hong Kong harbour ("Fragrant Harbour' literally translated from Chinese Xiang Hang).

I still do have some relatives who live in Hong Kong, Aunt Betty and Grand Aunt are HK residents who migrated to Ireland but routinely come back as they have a home at the Peak.

So, the park has several highlights. 1.Clock Tower - it looks more like a Cenotaph where the war dead are remembered. 2. Tea Museum 3. Fountain and Waterfall area 4. Registry of Marriages 5. Conservatory for plants 6. Aviary (it is closed till Feb 2019) 7. Tai Chi Garden where the busts of several of the SARS heroes, the healthcare professionals who died trying to contain the horrible 2003 epidemic. 8. Lookout point - 105 steps, I counted ! 

Contentment 

In my next post, I will put up some pictures of the SARS 'fighters', the healthcare professionals who gave their lives on the frontlines during the SARS epidemic of 2003. It shook the world over and thankfully was contained in a matter of 6 months.

May we never make the same mistakes of the past, by eating things which are not meant to be eaten in the first place. People seldom learn and retain, as shown by history.  

8 years and 8 kgs ago 2010 Marathon

My Best Ever Running Route near my House

              This route distance is roughly 4km all in all, should be able to finish it within 25  
                                                         minutes (my speed)


This is one of my 2 FAV running routes near my house. It is roughly 5 minutes by car, and the start and end points are as shown above. I have another one just parallel to it, along the Dalvey Estate road, that route is 5 km and I must have done hundreds of laps since I first started taking running seriously.

Park the car at the opposite end of the start point, which is the entrance to Nassim Road from Evans Road. Today there is a side entrance to the Botanic Gardens, and there are several car parks beside it. I favour the one just next to the Evans Road.

I will leave my bottled isotonic drinks by the roadside (at 5.30 am now one really cares) and then start my loop. Up the slight slope with the embassy to your right, turn right at Lermit Road, run past Lermit Lodge and turn back at the junction, then at Nassim Road, turn right and run all the way to Orchard Road exit. Make a U turn and back the same route with a slight detour into Lermit road again and finally back to the start point. That is roughly 4 km.

So I will do 2 x 4 km or 1 x 4 km and 1 x 5 km with the adjoining roads next to it being the 5 km road. The reward is the views, and the fresh air, absence of any vehicle traffic (at 5.30am) and no nearby schools to clog up the carriageway. The avenue is wide (dual carriageway) and I ALWAYS run against the flow of traffic, so I can see if any motorist is coming towards me. If he is too close, I indicate for him to back away, else there should be enough time for me to jump into the monsoon drain !! 

Seize the Day.  

Pencil, Eraser, Ruler and Paper - Will be Relevant for a Long Time Yet.

In this fast paced, user friendly, mobile App dependent world. There are millions, no, billions of people surfing and using the Internet to buy, sell, post their lives, pretend to be someone else, practically living their lives on a second parallel universe called the social media. 
Think Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for English speakers, for the Chinese it is WeiBo, Wei Xin, QQ, Thai, Japenese and Korean prefer Line and the list is endless based on geographical region, ethinicity, cultural influence and even political leanings.   

I for one, am only halfway convinced that the use of digital applications are so useful for everyday life. Here are the reasons why I think the old school stationary are still and will still be relavent for a long time to come yet.

1. You can plan, erase, draw, postulate and just doodle on scraps of paper. There is NO PERMANENCE in drawing a plan, or an idea, and erasing or taking out the excess lines, thoughts and question marks just by using an eraser. True, you can use the electronic Paint software and save some trees, but the feeling of CONTROL at my fingertips is better with a pencil compared to a mouse or a stylus.

Maybe its a generation thing :) 

I was born and played with real kids from the neighbourhood, had real dogs,cats and a parrot REAL animals as pets, caught and fought our spiders, reared fighting fish, song birds, catching longkang fishes (that was a massive thrill there), digging for worms and using them as fish bait, the REAL DEAL. 

None of this imaginery stuff of Pokemon monsters, virtual cafes and Wechat zapped over and received monies. Modern day kids are so deprived nowadays 

2.  Paper, eraser and pencil do not need electricity of depend on your phone battery life. Need I say more ? 

3. The feeling of accomplishment that your picture, your work, your creative doodling, can be framed and you and only you have the satisfaction of holding, smelling the acrylic oils and canvas which the electronic paintboard does and will never have.

4. Finally, the feeling of crushing something is SO SATISFYING when you have completed it, I normally take the Sunday Sudoku out from the papers (much to my wife's irritation sometimes) and spend about 30 minutes to an hour to finish the most demanding (they call it Extreme Sudoku, the Daily Telegraph guys) and when I am done, I have GREAT JOY in crushing that small piece of newspaper implicitly saying :

" THERE, I HAVE OVERCOME ! " (small victory but nonetheless an accomplishment !) 

Again, perhaps its my nature and the fact that I was born in the generation of physical things and being in the real world, reading real paperback books and using pen, paper,pencil, eraser and all these stationery shops have to offer.

True the information and knowledge has never been easier, at the touch or swipe of our smartphones, and we have knowledge of practically anything. They say knowledge is power, well I say the use and the application of that knowledge is the REAL POWER.

Back at the local stationery shop, I must be their dream Gold Class Customer !!! 

Theory of Relativity and the Speed of Light

Lets recall a time from our elementary secondary physics class shall we ?  If you can recall the simple 3 variables relating to speed (velocity as a vector), distance and time  

                    Speed = Distance / Time       or       Speed x Time  = Distance 

Einstein theorised that an absolute number, called the speed of light, or the speed at which light travels is a finite number, 3 x 10 to the power of 8 metres per second. This speed is absolute (fixed). Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. 

Say you take a spacecraft and aim to fly to Mars. We have managed with our high technology to build a spacecraft which can fly to anywhere and can attain speed of light.

If you are in that rocket ship and as the speed of that craft increases so much that it hits the speed of light, for the same distance (observed from say the Earth), time ultimately slows down since the Distance is a constant (Euclidean geometrics).

Refer to the picture above ;  (reference : Relativity for Dummies ;  just to let you know I am not a genius !)

Therefore for someone to shine a laser beam inside the spacecraft and get it reflected from the mirror at the top of that spacecraft and caught in a laser receiver, the time taken for that to happen is t ; which is basically 2 d divided by c (speed of light or laser) ; that time taken INSIDE the spacecraft. Lets call this time t  

For an observer who sees this event from somewhere outside the spacecraft, he / she would have to take into the account the speed of that spacecraft, which is c (assuming it approaches the speed of light). So for the actual distance is 2 D which accumuates the speed x time of that spacecraft (see picture).

As can be seen from the drawing above, then the total distance travelled is 2D ; 2D divided by c (speed of light) will give you T  which in the observer's world is larger than t. 

Hence, the only summary I can conclude is that t is smaller than T, or hence the t in the spacecraft moves slower than the T in the observer's world.

Hmm.... 

You will age in Earth years but if you were inside that rocket ship, you will not feel that time has actually slowed down, it is time as it happens.

This I believe is the concept of general relativity which Einstein postulated in the early 1920s. 



   

Does Time as we know it, move in a Linear, Exponential, or Random Manner ?

This is another postulation which I have. Bizarre as it may sound, the events leading to the missing (so far) aircraft MH 370 which has thrown up so many conspiracy theories that I thought of my own wacky theory.

See, the concept of time as we know it. While we experience it to be moving in a linear and one directional manner, meaning, only going forward and to us, it appears that it is moving daily and measured and calibrated according to the watches and based on Greenich Mean Time,which in previous millenia, was based on the time taken for the Earth to make 1 revolution around the Sun. I believe Copernicus came to that theory and the Arabs then make Sun dials also so as to get a grasp of this 'dimension'. 

Anyway, coming back to the missing plane theory. What happens if the plane had been taking a path in time, and while for the rest of the world, time moved into an elliptical manner due to some event, but the plane continued in a straight path somehow moving but no one noticing that time had indeed slowed down inside the plane, so for all intents and purposes the plane is still moving along its flight path but in another dimension totally removed from the time as we know it. 

  

So the rest of the world's time is on the elliptical pathway and the plane is on a 'straight' pathway. So that would mean that somewhere in the future, the plane MAY meet with the current time as we know it. Did something make the plane fly at the speed of light ? 

No one inside would be none the wiser. But the rest of the world would react with astonishment. Einstein postulated that as any object approaches the speed of light, time slows down, the stuff of science fiction movies past and present, that the spacemen and women would come back only having felt they were away 2 months in space but the time on earth would be in decades.

Just my overworked wacky brain on overdrive.