On my way to a public education event this afternoon, I was reading Mitch Albom's story of ten people on a lifeboat. Imagine them making an inventory of their rations after a yacht explosion: half can of water, three protein bars from the ditch bag, four bags of cookies, two boxes of cornflakes, three apples, and few peanut butter crackers. Wait a minute, one more: one seasickness pill, and that’s all.

On my way home, I delved into another book, Humankind

We've all been programmed - at all levels including school, work and socal - to think, act, and live in a virtual world under various restrictions. We have Google Classroom; we attend virtual scientific conferences; we watch Netflix movies.

With time, the good news is that we are now gravitating toward out-of-home activities after relaxed social distancing. Who in their right mind would choose not to go out?

Going to live concert by the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra last night has been one of

Language is a rich tapestry of what we feel, what we see and what we record. Think of language as our lens to perceive the world. Chances are, as what exactly Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states, you will be led to believe that the language we speak influences how we think.

Odd as the counterargument would sound to you, the relationship between language and culture can be the opposite way round. That means our language we speak doesn't shape the way we percieve the world. Quite the opposite -

I genuinely believe that credibility of recruiting interviews is overblown. To put it more starkly, as explained by the authors of Noise , they are often useless.

Job interveiw sounds robust and effective, but turns out to be as predictive - or unpredictive, for that matter - as any information source from marketing.

What's missing is the awareness of cognitive bias: an illusion of interviewers who think they can make sense of information collected from an interview. The same is true in our imaging a shape in the contours of

Read up about heart attack in medical textbooks and, chances are, you will learn about the plaque that clogs the arteries, the lipid-rich core of vulnerable plaque covered by a thin fibrous cap - as thin as half of our hair diameter. Think of it as a trash bin secured barely with a foil instead of a sturdy lid: when things has gone haywire (as they always did), that fibrous cap or foil breaks suddenly and erupts like the deadliest volcano, with all the junk suddenly bursting like lava

Let me be the first to confess that I've been having unbridled antipathy towards patients coming to hospital, sick with the virus but without vaccination. I'd describe myself as having difficulty with being neutral to antivaccination folks, even I know pretty well a doctor shouldn't be.

The terrifyng rage moment of seeing the unvaccinated status, every time I admitted such patients, would set off a curse inside my head. God forbid, I know how a doctor should have behaved otherwise. But still.

Enter Bren

Of all my rituals after waking up, making coffee appears to be the most highly consistent. I crave coffee every morning. We all do. It is little wonder, then, that it's disconcerting for me when my coffee machine didn't work two days ago.

People used to think that it can be dangerous for heavy drinkers to suddenly stop alcohol. Alcohol withdrawal actually kills. Not infrequently, I think this applies to coffee, too. I was, of course, trying hard to troubleshoot by googling

After a month, I have almost finished Liane Moriarty's novel Apples Never Fall .

The first chapter of the novel starts in a far corner of a café where four siblings leaned over a round table, their foreheads almost touched. At the last few chapters, the tables and chairs were piled up on top of each other gathering dust in the corner; they were only doing takeaway coffees. No more table service.

Well, that's exactly what we'd found our life turns out to be recently