Danny's Weblog

2006 Oct 16 [ Mon ]

The "Uncanny Valley" for expats

An article on Slashdot led me to the following article on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley] The "Uncanny Valley" is a theoretical phenomenon which has been discussed extensively in connection with the advances in computer animation: although *perfect* emulation of human appearance would be no problem, slight imperfections in emulation cause the animation to appear much more disturbing than *major* imperfections.

The article goes on to make an analogy with human migrants. As they adapt to the local culture, they become more and more acceptable, but perhaps when they get *close* to native behavior any small errors become much more offensive. That seems quite possibly true to me.

If I make some error in pronunciation at the stage where I am clearly struggling with the language the hearer can certainly write it off as an error. But I am at the stage where I can sometimes produce an entire sentence of Cambodian which is immediately understandable, so a minor error might not be detected – for instance between "kan" for hold and "khaan" for fail. Or jomnorng for knot and jomnong for enjoyment!

When I tell the maid how to put out the laundry she might think I am warning her not to expect me to help her orgasm... You know, she *does* look at me strangely sometimes.

2006 Apr 26 [ Wed ]

Acclimatization and heat stroke

Victims of heat stroke tend to be people who are already used to hot temperatures, which seems strange. However my theory of acclimatization provides an explanation for this and other observations.

As I've said before, the body adapts to a hot, humid climate by slowly changing the type of sweat produced, from a greasy, viscous variety intended to maintain moisture levels in the skin despite low humidity in heated homes in a western winter, to a much more volatile formula which evaporates fast even in high humidity at temperatures close to body heat.

In my view, Western heatstroke victims have already achieved this adaptation. However, they have not yet become familiar with the *sensation* of heatstroke in their acclimatized state.

Heatstroke does not provide the victim with clear warning signs. Although they are conscious of malaise, they will not connect it with heatstroke because they are *not sweating*. And they are not sweating because they have *used up* their sweat supply. This can hardly happen to an unacclimatized person: their sweat does not evaporate, so they can easily feel that they are overheated, and the effort of producing high-viscosity sweat is easily recognizable. Thus, before they even get close to heat stroke, they can lie down, drink etc.

But for the acclimatized victim, the sensation is only general malaise. They have become used to managing in the heat, and to continuing to function despite some overheating. They do not connect their symptoms – particularly the cessation of sweating – with heatstroke.

I think a contributing factor is the effect of fans used at high ambient temperatures. The fan motor itself gets quite hot, causing the stream of air to be actually *several degrees* above ambient. If ambient is already 96 F, that's a big problem. I believe the heatstroke victim may often park himself in front of a big fan set on max, without realizing that the fan is actually *heating* him.

2005 Jun 19 [ Sun ]

Are motorbike helmets practical?

While I have never been in favor of laws making the wearing of safety belts, helmets etc *compulsory*, I have certainly viewed them as indispensable. Recently however I have been wondering if helmets are actually practical in SE Asia.

1. Very clearly they are horribly hot to wear. As far as I know they have no provision for ventilation (quite possibly any slots would seriously weaken the shell). Surely something could be arranged: for instance some kind of holder for a wet towel to provide evaporative cooling, plus a heat pipe to something or other in the helmet.

2. But that would worsen what I now see as an even more serious problem: both the weight *and the angular inertia* of the helmet. I remember wearing a flak helmet when I was playing soldiers. At the time I was young and fit, but I rapidly realized that if you turned your head carelessly while wearing the helmet you could strain your neck instantaneously. Indeed, this would happen about every time I had to wear one for an extended period, so I had to hold my head even more still.

3. And of course riding a motorbike in SE Asia, like manning an opcent in the Fulda Gap, is a multiple-threat environment. The moto driver has to check *all* directions, not just the legal ones. And he usually has to turn his head when he does it, because the visor restricts his side view so badly.

4. It seems to me this is the *real* reason why so many preposterously flimsy helmets are sold: not their *weight* but their *rotational inertia*.

2005 Mar 31 [ Thu ]

Hints and cautions on buying a bar in Asia

Many people come to Asia, hang out in a bar, conclude this is money for old rope, buy a bar and find out they have made a big mistake. Or, more probably, several big mistakes. I have never considered operating a bar myself, simply because I don't want to be *in* one more than a couple of hours per day. But I think anyone who is considering this step should take a look at the points below (arranged in the order I thought of them). I hope people don't invert this list to get ideas for cheating naive buyers.

1. Have you ever operated a bar *outside* Asia? You should already be familiar with universal aspects of a bar: dealing with drunks; dealing with police; making sure you don't get shorted on deliveries; etc etc. And simple things like not knowing how kegs work can destroy your respect from the employees in an instant. Do you know what it's like to be offered eight drinks a day by customers, and you still have to be in charge when something goes wrong?

2. Do you have the business skills to evaluate the bar you're considering buying (even assuming the numbers are true)? The seller has no reason to explain inconvenient details to you. Even without lying, he can misrepresent the situation in major ways. For instance, he may have heard that a local politician is about to seize the building to build a shopping centre, making your lease worthless. But even if the numbers are *real*, do you understand them? Do you understand concepts like the time value of money? Can you see whether annual payments have been pushed into the previous year?

3. Are you familiar with the legal system in the country? Ie, do you have any idea what to do if the seller fails to meet some item in the contract? Do you even know how to check the contract? It probably has to be in the local language to be enforceable in local courts. Yow!

4. What is the actual *value* of what the seller is selling? Why not start an entirely *new* bar? Are you sure that when you "buy the bar" you are actually buying his relationships with the staff, suppliers, police etc? What do you do if all the staff leave to work in the seller's new bar, the suppliers jack up prices by 40%, and the police tell you you don't have sufficient fire exits and you have to close immediately? And the customers all go to the seller's new bar?

5. If the sale includes furnishings, do you have a list? Hint: the *seller* should provide one, and you should check it against what's present *before and after* the sale. What happens if something's missing?

6. When the seller offers at a price of X, what makes you think the value is nearly X? Suppose it's 25% of X? Or 5% of X? Or – if the bar is getting sued – X - 20,000 USD?

7. Where is the bar owner *going* after the sale? Can you pursue a case against him if he moves to Costa Rica? (Ideally you might offer to pay him only 20% upfront, and the remainder if everything is kosher after three months, but he is much wiser than you and will probably wait for a naive buyer. Conceivably, also, he may grab the 20% and vanish.)

8. The owner *must* give you *all* his contact info. Staff phone numbers and addresses; suppliers; tradesmen; employment agencies – *plus* honest and in-depth evaluations of them: "hard worker but steals", "slow deliveries but never a problem with the paperwork"; "never hire this idiot again" etc. Likewise, does he have a file system? You need *all* his files, plus a *thorough* guide to them.

9. You may well consider that the price of the bar is so low compared with something comparable in the West that it is play money. Do not forget that in order to operate the bar *you have to do a full-time job*. You also expose yourself to various risks from operating in the country at all: blackmail by an employee, coercion by the police, slipshod medical services etc. Do you have any friends in the country? Anyone who cares if you're in jail or hospital? Have you considered just doing a *job* in the country? (Maybe you should try that for a year or two *before* looking at a bar.)

10. It may feel very nice initially to be the boss of multiple sloe-eyed lovelies, but every one of them is jealous and possessive. Once you sleep with SEL #1, she will make it clear to SELs #2, 3 and 4 that she will scratch their eyes out. All of a sudden, you will find that there is only one SEL left in the bar, growing fatter and crabbier by the day. She needs expensive maintenance. The replacements – selected by SEL #1 – will be surprisingly plain and old. Your clientele evaporates.

11. Do not forget seasonal variations. Most people, obviously, visit when there are a lot of tourists in town. The bar is full of customers and the cash register is going pleasantly ka-ching. The seller says "I made 3000 USD last month alone!" You buy and the next month you lose 500 USD. The month after that you lose 1000 USD. Your staff, making four dollars a month in tips, leave to help their mom to pick up buffalo dung.

12. You probably look at the bar and think "This looks kind of worn and messy, and the glasses aren't clean, and the coffee machine is out of whack. I can fix all this and I'll get a lot more customers!" What you don't realize is that the previous buyer probably thought *exactly the same thing*. What you see is what he managed to achieve, after a lot of work, and after desperately tarting the place up for a quick sale. Why do you think you can do any better?

13. Ask around. How many of the bar owners have been there for more than ten years? Looking at that from the opposite point of view: do you really want to grow old as a bar owner? 65? 75?

14. Has the seller really given you everything he uses? For instance, you have the paper menus, but do you have the Microsoft Word files they were printed from? Do you know how to use the fonts for the local language? Do you have the lists of ingredients, and where to buy them? And the prices he negotiated? And the knowledge of how to check the items when you buy them? Did he give you the receipts and manuals for the stereo and TVs? Does that universal remote really do everything you need on the video system? Where can you get the coffee machine serviced?

15. Do you know that the person you talk to actually *owns* the bar? Maybe he's just managing it for the primary investor. How can you check? And maybe the primary investor is *in on* the scam.

2004 Dec 16 [ Thu ]

The Lonely Planet S-E Asia forum

thorntree.lonelyplanet.com [http://thorntree.lonelyplanet.com/categories.cfm?catid=24]

Somebody recommended this as a place to check for Sihanoukville experiences. Regrettably the LP doesn't have a Cambodia-only forum, but the quality of the msgs seems very high and wading through msgs relating to Vietnam, Burma etc is not too much of a chore.

Note that Thailand has a separate forum: thorntree.lonelyplanet.com [http://thorntree.lonelyplanet.com/categories.cfm?catid=51]

2004 Aug 18 [ Wed ]

Humidity in Asia and airplanes

I have always used a temperature and humidity meter to check conditions in my liivng space, but recently I used it while I was travelling between Bangkok and Phom Penh by air.

My humidity meter is just a standard little domestic model with an LCD display, so its absolute accuracy may not be wonderful. Still, it seems to work.

I didn't check the humidity in Bangkopk properly: I was in an air-conditioned taxi most of the time, and then had to handle the baggage, so I can only estimate the humidity as being the same as it was in Pattaya: about 75%, about 85 F in the shade. (Incidentally, when a place does not list humidity in the newspaper, it's probably not a good sign.)

In the plane I did not track it until the flight levelled off, as I had absent-mindedly left the meter in my bag in the overhead compartment, so I couldn't reach it till the seatbelt sign was turned off. When I did so the humidity was around 45%. At the start of the descent it was 28% and it fell just slightly to 27% before rising again.

In Phnom Penh, the humidity in my hotel room – when I came back in after leaving the ac off all day – was 60%.

Conclusions? Well, it fell more or less continuously during the flight, until we started the descent. I'm guessing a longer flight (it's only about an hour) would drive the humidity even lower. 27% is already unhealthy: how low can it go?

Also: maybe the humidity really is lower in PP. I definitely seem to feel less affected by the heat there than Thailand.

2004 Aug 16 [ Mon ]

Asians give priority to people occupying a place, even if they're in the way

Everyone complains about the fact that the sidewalk is always blocked in Phnom Penh. I've even seen reports of official sweeps now and then by the police, where they fine shopowners who occupy the sidewalk.

I'm starting to think however that this represents a more fundamental difference between Asian and Western thinking.

For hundreds of years Western police have aggessively enforced the law against "obstruction" – not of justice, but of the highway. "Move along, move along." "You can't do that 'ere." "'Op it, you." "If you don't get a move on I'm taking you down the nick."

As a result it's part of the Western psyche that we instinctively get out of the way of people who need to pass. If we need to pass, and somebody is standing there who does not get out of the way, we feel aggrieved. But I've been in PP long enough to feel that when people casually standing in the street stare at me quizzically when I plod up to them, they are not trying to be irritating: they are under the impression they are perfectly polite.

I think it's another reflection of the old idea in Cambodia and Thailand that if you farmed the land, you owned it: maybe you had to pay some kind of tax or rent on it, but nobody elese could take it away from you. So these people just *occupy* the sidewalk (and can do this so instantaneously that you almost bump into their backs), and now it's *theirs*.

2004 Mar 31 [ Wed ]

Different ageing patterns in Asians and Westerners

The consensus of opinion among expat barstool occupants is that Asians age faster than Westerners. I want to summarize my own observations here.

1. Asian skin epidermis is a lot thinner than Western. That means that skin damage has a much more visible effect in Asians than Westerners. That's why Asian men and women wear long cotton gloves when they have to work in the sun.

2. Because of many cultural differences, Asians lie about their age in very different ways from foreigners. In particular, because even slightly older people tend to take a dominant role, Asian girls tend to give an accurate age up till the end of their twenties (the urge to lie to appear younger is balanced by the urge to occupy the dominant role with other girls).

On the other hand, middle-aged and older people in the West have tended to give their ages relatively accurately since the sixties. In Asia, at any rate Thailand and Cambodia, people over thirty tend to lie like a rug about it. So you may think that thirty-five-year-old businessman looks old for his age, but in fact he's fifty-five, wearing hair die and a corset. (Hair die was commonplace in the West until the sixties: basically people growing up since then have used it only as a stage effect. Do you remember how businessmen were always illustrated in 50s advertising with black hair and grey at the temples and sideburns? That's where died hair shows grey, that's all. It's very striking that most politicians these days – since Reagan, who was derided mercilessly for using hair die – leave their hair grey.)

3. Because of poverty, old people in Asia often have to continue physically demanding occupations till they die. Of course this is a physical strain, but on the other hand it means their bodies are not exposed to the risks of lack of exercise which almost everyone in the West is.

4. I am starting to think more and more that hot climates like Thailand and Cambodia make it *physically difficult* to get fat. Maybe that's why plumpness is still viewed positively in Cambodian society: it correlates strongly with physical health, rather than ill health as it does in the West.

It also makes it hard for a Westerner to estimate age for people in their twenties and thirties. Most Westerners are never slim again after their teenage years, and basically get fatter and fatter through their twenties and thirties. But in Asia, I can't count the number of times I've been walking behind an attractively slim girl, only to find when I pass her and see her face that she may well be forty years old. A Westerner with her build would have scarcely graduated from college.

2004 Mar 27 [ Sat ]

Don't trust your hotel fridge

I have vaguely noticed on many occasions that the contents of the fridge in my hotel room seemed quite warm when I returned. I didn't worry about it too much: I figured there'd been a power cut in the afternoon, or maybe the fridge didn't work very well.

This week I actually checked, and the fridge is *on the same circuit as all the other devices* – ie the *power cuts off when I pull the room key out of the slot*! I had never been too happy about that blasted roomkey switch: I figure when you *come back to* the room is when you *really need* the AC to be already on – you shouldn't have to swelter for half an hour before the AC can cool the room down to street temperature. But I had assumed (yeah, yeah, laugh at me) that the hotel wouldn't do something as *lethal* as turn off the power to the fridge. I've had milk in there, chocolate, yoghurt... yecch!

And now I come to think of it I guess I noticed warm fridges in *every* hotel room I've been in in Asia.

So I strongly suggest you check *your* room.

Open the fridge door. After a while the thermostat should kick in. Your fridge may or may not have a door light, but you should be able to hear the sound of the compressor. (You may want to shut off the AC so you can hear better.)

Then pull the key out of the keyswitch and wait for the room lights to cut out. If the fridge cuts off at the same moment, it's diarrhea on the hoof.

2004 Mar 25 [ Thu ]

How do Asians stand the heat?

I don't know anyone with a lower view of the medical profession than I have.

One reason for this is the absence of information which is both useful and scientifically-based about very practical matters, like: if you move to a country with a different climate, what do you need to do to acclimatize most effectively?

It's certainly possible to try to live in air conditioning as much as you can, and indeed that's more or less what I did for two years, because I could hardly bear to live in the heat! Over the last few months I've finally become used enough to the Asian climate to experiment with eschewing AC when sleeping – because what I *want* is to be able to live and work in SE Asia as comfortably as the indigenes.

I'd like to make the point that acclimatization does not encompass merely the metabolic load of higher temperature. It also covers hygiene. What does it mean, for instance, that the Thais take four showers per day? It would make sense that that allows them to avoid yeast infections, but in that case why aren't the Burmese and the Cambodians riddled with them? There's some sort of "public bathhouse" on St 19 in PP which is literally just a shopfront with a hose. I have frequently seen as I passed by middle-aged men and women bathing themselves *wearing a sarong*. How can they possibly wash their crotch like that, standing dripping on the sidewalk? How can they *dry* it, with a towel which I assume was used by ten other bathers already that day? How can they possibly survive without a succession of horrible infections? I imagine these are the cyclo-driver class, who I often see sleeping at night in their cyclo seats, wearing their trousers of course, their butts pressed all night against the glossy vinyl of the seat with no ventilation at all. Aargh!

I don't have to pedal a cyclo – yet – but I do find myself sitting in an internet cafe for three hours or more sitting on a plastic seat with no ventilation for my crotch at all. It would catch fire if it wasn't wringing wet.

You can probably imagine the kind of health problems *I* have been battling in Asia. With no practical *strategic* assistance from the medical profession other than "oh your skin is too damp. Keep it dry" – followed rapidly by "oh your skin is too dry. Keep it moist" – aargh!

One also wonders what happens to the infants. In Thailand, despite mostly adequate heath care, a significant fraction of infants still dies basically of diarrhea – in other words, the fraction of the genotype that can't cope with Thai hygiene is weeded out, quietly and with little weeping, as opposed to the complaints and grumbles of the expats, a similar fraction of whom get invalided out after a few months. (I just saw a comparison of Thai and Cambodian infant death rates, and the Thai rate, despite the much higher standard of living, is almost as bad.)

My guess is that the mother has a chance to analyze carefully her infant's response to humidity, foods etc and somehow in most cases reaches a modus vivendi that suits her child. I have a strong feeling however that this modus vivendi relies on the total gestalt of adaptations, and for an expat to attempt to follow any one, or limited combination, of them is liable to be disastrous.

For instance, it is very clear to me that Thais of all ages and sexes (well, I actually have no data points for katoeys – I hope) automatically wear pajamas for sleep. It seems amazing that this is not absolutely disastrous for yeast infections, but surely it must be part of their adaptation gestalt. I have never yet dared emulate them!

Likewise, it astonishes me that Cambodians see nothing wrong in drying their clothes at pavement level. A single walk along the street leaves a distinct layer of primordial grime on my skin: several hours must render their freshly-washed clothes a toxic dump of two-stroke emissions, doggy doodoo, rotting somlor...

Another thing I wonder about is precisely what *happens* when you do acclimatize. I've noticed that Cambodians don't *seem* to sweat any more than the rawest Westerner (if at all, to the eye!), except when they're doing heavy manual labor which would cause sweating in temperate weather too. But humans all have the same body temperature, so you would think that they would need to exude the same amount of sweat to achieve the same amount of cooling.

My guess is that the sweat of acclimatized people, like the Cambodians, is a different composition than it is for unacclimatized people. In temperate countries the humidity level – certainly the *absolute* humidity, if not the relative humidity – is much lower, so the sweat needs to serve the purpose of lubrication as well as cooling. (We are warned, are we not, to apply skin moisturizer when we take a plane trip, because the humidity level is so low.) I imagine, therefore, that the body of an unacclimatized human in Cambodia dutifully continues to produce a much more viscous quality of sweat than that of an acclimatized person, with several unfortunate results:

1. The sweat evaporates much less readily, making a greater quantity of sweat necessary for cooling

2. The many oils and salts in unacclimatized sweat are much more stressful for the body to produce (btw, I have been wondering about going back to the old suggestion of salt tablets)

3. The residue of unacclimatized sweat is much more likely to provide a breeding ground for skin infections

When you see a Cambodian apparently unconcerned and cool on a hot day, when you are sweating heavily and close to death, I am guessing that if you could look closely at his skin you would see it is generating just as much cooling as you are – but by producing practically clean sweat which evaporates invisibly without a trace. And he can sleep in yesterday's pants because they contain a tiny fraction of the oils, minerals and assorted fungus food that has already collected in yours.

Where can I get a pill so *I* can work as a cyclo driver too?

2004 Jan 23 [ Fri ]

Maybe bathrooms are unsafe everywhere, not just Asia

I have observed many instances where the installations or practices in Asia were unsafe. Certainly hotel bathrooms offered many such examples. (In my hotel in Cambodia, the water heater was above the tub, and retained to the wall by a single piece of scruffy-looking wire which appeared to be a coathanger.)

Today I read the following article however, in which many safety lapses are listed in hotel bathrooms in the (super-litigious) USA: www.nytimes.com [http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/travel/18prac.html?pagewanted=print&position=]

Some of the problems listed are ones which I thought were particular to Asia – providing bathroom surfaces which gleam even if they are therefore slippery, for instance. It's funny, I don't remember such things in the US, or Europe for that matter. Maybe they're the *exception* in the USA; they certainly seem to be *the rule* in Thailand and Cambodia.

2004 Jan 03 [ Sat ]

Using ATM cards in Asia

I have been thinking about posting a page with hints on what people should do before visiting Asia, and one of them was going to be setting up a *separate* atm card linked to a *separate* account, so that if it was stolen/compromised you could limit your losses to that account.

Now however a Slashdot posting suggests that the banks have figured out a way around that issue so that they can continue to make your entire deposits vulnerable to crooks:

Re:eCommerce Failure (Score:4, Interesting) by Detritus (11846) on Friday January 02, @07:05PM (#7864273) (slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/)]

Check with your bank on their policies for overdrawn accounts before you rely on separate accounts. When a check was presented that was far in excess of my checking account balance (due to MICR data entry error), my ex-bank just took the money from another account that had sufficient funds to cover the check. I didn't find out about it until I got my monthly statement. As far as I can tell, no human was involved in making the decision. The bank runs on autopilot for routine decisions. I eventually got all of my money back and the service charges refunded, but it was a pain in the butt.

2003 Dec 15 [ Mon ]

Phrasebooks and your *own* cuisine

I've been noticing that phrasebooks seem to give words only for the cuisine of the foreign country, not for the cuisine of one's *own* country.

I know we are supposed to go to a country to experiment with their cuisine, not weakly crawl back to the comfort of the foods one already knows. On the other hand, I personally would like to have some sort of guide to English/American dishes in phrasebooks for That and Khmer.

For instance, what is "medium" and "well done"? Also, British "medium" corresponds more or less to American "well done", so what does a Thai think "medium" is?

And what do people think you mean when you say "toast"? Is it a cooking problem or a linguistic problem when what you get is warm limp bread?

2003 Dec 08 [ Mon ]

Why is the fan always on in my hotel room?

I grumbled at my current hotel for days that I couldn't turn off the fan with the switch in the bathroom. Eventually they figured out what I meant and said "no, no, that switch doesn't do anything: the fan switch is in the bedroom next to the ac".

After checking this out and uttering many choice words about Cambodian building standards, it occurred to me that this might be a perfectly good idea. The issue is that if the bathroom fan is on, it's venting air out of the hotel room quite rapidly: possibly it's losing cold air faster than the ac can produce it. So it makes sense to locate the fan switch next to the ac, so that you are reminded to turn off the fan every time you go over to the ac wondering why the room is still so damn hot. (In fact I just did that very thing a minute ago.)

Of course it would be preferable to have a switch both in the bathroom and at the ac, with an indicator at the ac.

How do poor people leave home?

We're used to the idea that there is a historical inevitability about the drift of rural farming populations into the cities and manufacturing.

One interesting question is: why doesn't it happen instantaneously?

One possible answer is that in real developing countries, the city itself is poorly designed. In a modern metropolis, full of skilled designers, the city develops a system like the famous maps of the London Underground; arbitrarily simplifying the reality of the actual geographical layout of the stations, it succeeds in encapsulating necessary information in an easy-to-grasp, easy-to-reproduce way, allowing everyone to navigate more easily, whether to a job interview or a new pub. Such systems of order, whether they involve policing, sound currency, or food manufactured without impurities, allow the recent immigrant to a *modern* city rapidly to seize most the advantages that its long-term residents have.

Now think of a city like Delhi. A morass of ethnic and caste rivalries, lethal food, brutal and ignorant police, it can be safely navigated by no-one; even long-term residents barely survive.

In Phnom Penh, it now seems to me, the taxi drivers neither know the streets nor can read the maps. They operate, if at all, by asking a succession of passersby. For me, a rich visitor, this is merely an irritation. What happens to a poor person?

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