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The eggs glued to the tummy of the above shrimp are hatching today, a few at a time. I’ve made a few attempts at raising the larvae with no success. No one seems to have any idea what species it is, or what conditions the zoes need, or even where they come from in the first place. So… I spent most of my evening taking plankton photos. These are using a toy digital microscope:

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And these using the macro lense on my tiny camera:

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I’m enjoying fussing with the gadgets, but I don’t think I’m going to learn much. My photos look the same as those of a different species here, and these of a different genus here. Too bad they don’t make $100 child-friendly DNA sequencers.

Anyway, in my increasingly silly attempts to keep the zoes alive, I’ve set up an array of tiny tanks with varying salinity, all in a great big tank to maintain a constant temperature.

Plankton tanks
Details as events warrant.

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I went to an Apple Store with Jeremy last week to watch him hawk our product.  I feel strangely validated to see an actual physical product sitting on the actual shelf of an actual brick-and-mortar store.

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Very 20th century.

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One last thought about Singapore politics

A train I rode on towards the end of my stay was full of these door-hangers recruiting for the prison service.

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My first reaction was to be terrified that Singapore has a ‘compelling vision’ about incarceration.

But… at least they’re claiming that their prisons are good for their prisoners.  I don’t think I’ve heard the word ‘rehabilitation’ used in that context in the US since the 1970’s.  Which is more evil — prisons as tools of reform, or prisons as tools of punishment?

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Portrait of my house, courtesy of my 4-year-old niece

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Craft is what we get better at as we get older.  Art is what we get worse at as we get older.

At the moment, I can think of no exceptions to this.

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Odds and ends

Apparently I haven’t emptied my camera since I got back from Singapore. For a while I thought it was broken but it turns out that the battery was just dead.

Anyway, I was trying to upload some photos that I took this morning (still to come) and found these photos of the last meal that I ate while whiling away my accidental extra day in Little India.

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Delicious! But, I don’t think I was supposed to eat it all myself.

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We are trying our best!

My previous blogging system has been stuck in an un-editable state for many months. Just now, the best minds of my generation (that is to say, Newman and my brother) spent several precious hours getting redirection set up in order to bring you urgent toast-related information.

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Toast

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Yesterday I took Mom and Dad to Ya Kun Kaya Toast, but for some reason the chain bans photography in its shops. (Check out the link — they have great ads.) So today I went to Ah Mei Cafe by my old apartment to take some pictures. The toastress there seemed happy to be photographed.

Toastmaking is an elaborate process. Kaya and slices of chilled butter are spread inside a single grilled slice of bread. There are toast shops everywhere in town with nearly identical menus. A few low-brow places use an actual toaster.

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And… here’s the final product:,‘Set A’: Tea, 3-minute eggs with soy sauce, and kaya toast.

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Anthropomorphized beans

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Blurry New Years photos

Back in Singapore, we went back to Chinatown to check out the lights and crowds of the Lunar New Years celebration.

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