Pygmy Hippo

A rare bit of good news from the third country I call home ... the pygmy hippo has been sighted in the wild in Liberia. Even though I never actually saw one, it was very much a part of my childhood. The hippo was one of the ways that we kids in the tiny coastal town of Cape Palmas would gross each other out.
When someone from the interior came around trying to sell a piece of mystery meat, we'd venture that the meat was either that of a monkey or of a hippo. The thought of a lovable pygmy hippo or capuchin killed for meat was enough to gross out any eight-year old.

Now that I think about it ... piglets, fawns and bunnies play similarly cute and lovable parts in American and European childrens' tales. I'm surprised that their meat doesn't gross out more children. Maybe that's just an African thing, to find it distasteful to eat adorable animals? Maybe Anglo-Saxon kids grow up more pragmatic.

Happiness and wealth of nations

This graph on mean life satisfaction vs. per capita GDP is one of the most interesting poll results I've seen.

I don't think any of us needs Gallup to tell us that someone from Chad (a land-locked Central African country bordering Darfur) is likely to be less happy with his lot than a Dane. So, in that sense, yes, people in richer countries are happier than those in poor countries. But the relationship is by no means linear.

For example: Venezuelans, Saudis, Brits and Americans are all approximately equally happy with their lives, even though the average American is five times wealthier than a Venezuelan and twice as wealthy as the average Saudi.

Meanwhile, even though China, India and Pakistan all have approximately the same level of wealth, Pakistanis are much happier than Indians who in turn are much happier than the Chinese.

My hunch is that is also cultural. Islamic societies seem to be happier and Eastern European countries more dour than their incomes would suggest. Pacific Rim countries are happier the richer they are -- a nearly linear relationship holds amongst countries such as Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

The multicultural cricket field

We were at a party Friday evening. There was one other Indian there and somehow the conversation got to university clubs. He told me a story that is simply too good to not share.

A few years ago, the University (OU) demolished a rundown apartment complex and built newer condominiums. Apparently, at the back of the apartment complex was a field that graduate students from former British colonies used to play cricket in. The university cricket club appealed and OU, being a nice and multicultural campus, offered to build the students a proper cricket pitch that they could use. The students leaped at the offer and explained the dimensions of the pitch, etc. to the construction folks.

The construction folks went away and a few weeks later, invited the students over to take a look at their new pitch. It was lovely, perfect length and width. Except that it was on one corner of the field and one side of the pitch was raised a bit.

NOTE: For those of you who don't get this, this is what a cricket field looks like. The brown strip in the middle is the pitch. This is what a baseball diamond looks like -- that's what got constructed, except that the pitcher would stand the length of a cricket pitch away!

Portrait of Dad, the monster

S1 (the six-year-old) has been going to an art class for the past few weeks. This is a picture he drew with oil pastels when learning how to draw a face:
A couple of folks have, unprompted, asked if it was me. So, he now claims it is a picture of me, mustache, glasses and all. Even the green hair could be arranged, I suppose.

This one is one of my favorites. S1 says it's a picture of some monsters fighting: His pictures all have monsters in them. I have the sneaking suspicion that he must have started out his portrait aiming to draw a monster, only it turned out to look like me!

Vanity publishing

I just put the finishing touches on a paper on storm identification and submitted it to J. Tech.

The American Meteorological Society has a new procedure in place, where you have to click through an estimate of page charges before you can submit the paper.  The page charge for my opus? A whopping $2380.  My employer pays, but still ... it is interesting that we have just opened up quite a bit of intellectual property but it is worth so little that we have to pay for the privilege of publishing it.

I should probably just say that I have sent in a paper to a vanity press.

Capital of the world

One of the interesting things to me, when I travel, is to see how much the world defines itself by what we do.  Thus, the slightly disappointment on switching on Canadian TV and seeing that the news-cycle-of-the-day is all about some Georgia girl who fled her own wedding.  But ... that's Canada. We share thousands of miles of peaceful border.  I remember being in Stockholm and finding American sitcoms on the TV in the hotel room and talk of George Bush and Rumsfeld and torture in the hotel bar.  On sitting in a Norwich pub and being subjected to a heated discussion on why Bible-thumping maniacs were the cause of all the world's environmental problems.

This is a post on India's most popular blog:

Who would have thought that Hillary Clinton would be battling for survival when Ohio and Texas went to the polls? How on earth did Barack Obama get so far ... And then there's NAFTAgate. Obama's senior economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, allegedly told some Canadian officials that Obama's anti-NAFTA talk was just part of his pandering to Midwestern voters, and that he didn't really believe in his own protectionist rhetoric. Obama's campaign has been unconvincing in its denials ... If Obama and Clinton keep fighting like this for another few weeks, it won't matter who McCain faces: Both Obama and Clinton will find it hard to mobilise the base, much of which opposed them bitterly while the primaries were on.

Notice how effortlessly familiar the author is with the ins and out of the Democratic primary. The primary. And the expectation that his readers are equally familiar with it all.  The surprising thing is that he is probably right.

Puppy love

We were talking to the mother of a girl who is also in S1's kindergarten class.

"Do you know what A. told me about school?," she asked.

Our six-year old generally doesn't tell us much about what goes on in school.  So, we were interested.

"Well, apparently there are three couples in their class. There are these kids who always play together."

"Oh, sure," I said, "if you're going to call that being couples.".

"And two of them got a yellow card," she continued, "for kissing.

My jaw fell to the floor and my eyes were up in the ceiling.  Where they still are, a few hours later.