Hunger

Came across this news article (in Chinese) just now. Basically, it's saying that a 31-year old man died from hunger in his apartment in Taiwan because he's a "宅男" (someone who is not very good at interacting with people). It's sad but at the same time, it's amazing to see a 31-year old man dying from hunger in a pretty developed country.

Salary & Spouse

Came across this news a few days ago. Basically, about 1/3 of couples in HK don't tell their spouse the exact income they are making. Thought it's interesting to share.

Peace

Most of you have probably read the news about President Obama getting the Nobel Price Peace award. As with a lot of people around the world, I am not sure why he got the award. Regardless, I think Obama is now forced into a somewhat difficult situation. For example, regarding Afghanistan, should he send in more troops to control the violence there? Sending more troops isn't exactly a peaceful thing but then if he doesn't send more troops, Afghan may get even messier. It'll be interesting to watch.

Egg Hatchery

A radio show talked about this clip (viewer discretion is advised) yesterday. Apparently, that's industry standard. I wonder if I should stop eating eggs. Well, I like to eat too much so I doubt I could do that. Now imagine, once we can use Artificial insemination for reproduction purposes, males will be completely useless and we could be treated the same way. Hmm...

Population Control

The population is increasing rapidly and the world would be out of resources sooner or later. What can people do to solve or at least slow down the problem? It's either making people die faster or making people born slower (or somehow find another planet in the galaxy). Given that we are getting more and more advanced in medicine, it's unlikely that we can make people die faster (unless there is a huge natural disaster or a massive war among many nations). The only solution is really to make people born slower.

According to Wikipedia[1], the two most populous countries are China (1.33 billion) and India(1.15 billion); they account for almost 40% of the world population. In order to slow down the rapid population growth, China introduced the one-child policy in 1979[2]. Under this policy, each family can only have one child or they will have to pay a heft fine. Since a majority of families in China are poor, this policy really forced them to have only one kid, which really helps in slowing down the population growth in China. Of course, this policy caused a bunch of other problems, e.g. family would kill their newborns if they don't get the gender they want (mostly boys), but I am not going to talk about them today.

As for India, they don't really have any drastic policy like the one China has (please correct me if I am wrong) and analysts are saying that India will become the most populous country within 50 years (overtaking China) if the Indian government doesn't do anything. Well, the Indian government listens and they are actually doing something. So what is it? "Bring electricity to every Indian village so that people would watch television until late at night and therefore be too tired to make babies." [3]. Not sure if it'll really work but it's an interesting idea. If you look at some very busy countries/cities, the birth rate is so much lower. So I suppose if you can get people busy enough, they will really slow down in producing babies.

Source:
[1]: Wikipedia: World Population
[2]: Wikipedia: One-child policy
[3]: CNN International