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Saturday, June 22, 2013 - 17:11 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

雾锁南洋


雾起在南方，雾落在南方，重重迷雾锁南洋... 浓雾中何处是家乡?




View from inside bus at NUS
[N.B. A chance to apply algorithms in practice!]


As if there was any other choice for topic of the week - the Pollution Standard Index shattered the 1997 high of merely 226, which seems plainly meh by now - it's already breached 400 for a couple of hours on Friday, and as I'm typing this, the three-hour average has yet to go below 130 for a full day.

The first indication I got that something was not quite right was when I noticed that the entire Central Forum was blanketed in smoke one evening, accompanied by a burning smell. Originally, I suspected a campus fire, but as it turned out the cause lay quite some distance away.

Reassuringly, our courageous netizens have retained their composure and sense of humour in the face of smoggy ruination, plastering Facebook and messageboards with creative expressions making light of our amorphous foe. Desperate for fair tidings, some have held out hope that the nationwide fogging-up might at least suppress the ongoing dengue epidemic, but this bit of good cheer was however cruelly put down by the NEA in due time.

We might yet be getting some privacy, at least.


When even Vegeta is worked up...
(Original source: newgrounds.com)


Meanwhile, the million-dollar response, other than belatedly handing out face masks, is... to set up an (yet another) inter-ministerial committee to admit that they basically can't do anything. Actually, they did point out that it's not so bad because the 24-hour PSI is like merely in the very unhealthy instead of hazardous range, and urged a stiff upper lip, prefably unseen, instead of giving in to the enemy. Our southern (and eastern, and western) neighbours are not exactly moving with the greatest urgency, but then it is hard to blame them given our history of needs-based relations.

The usual online malcontents have suggested that more concrete action be taken, certainly a gross overreaction. In any case, our armed forces have partially shut down for the duration, and morale could do with some boosting here.

They have also unsportingly mused as to why those in charge didn't simply move the goalposts to a monthly PSI average, but they may have something of a point given that the effect of short-term exposure is not proven to be insignificant, but simply unknown. Studies have shown that health is adversely affected by less than an hour's exposure (as might be expected), but were apparently discounted because they were mainly held in temperate regions, and the GDP needs to grow.

By the way, for all the hoohah over the PSI, much less attention has been placed on the 24-hour Particulate Matter (PM)2.5 values, which have tended to hover at and above 250 μg/m3. Apparently, for the USA, the 24-hour standard at the 98th percentile is less than 35μg/m3, with 250 and above unequivocally considered hazardous, but I suppose it's not an issue since they are mostly temperate, so it doesn't apply.

Now, to be fair, one could imagine that a stop-work order could well be immensely disruptive for little benefit, at least in some sectors - in fact, a white-collar worker could possibly enjoy a better environment in his air-conditioned office than at home. Of course, this is still not a good place to be in, and actual solutions seem slow in coming, with the root causes possibly occuring embarassingly closer to home. Certainly, the companies involved have all been quick to plead their innocence, but some doubt might plausibly be retained.

But for now, it's a matter of waiting for "浓雾散尽见我新家乡"...


One Cent Cash, One Cent Goods

The uglier side of the haze has been the profiteering on N95 masks, with stalls now hawking them for S$10, up from their usual price of about S$2. One might say that they are within their rights, and that controlling prices when there is real demand simply pushes profits to resellers, but there's still something not quite right when it involves medical necessities. [N.B. I'm boycotting the Sub-Zero look for now]

On this page, in need of a razor, I decided to pick up a two-dollar one (hey, it had a kung-fu grip!), only to nick myself twice on first usage. Would up getting a four-blade specimen further up the line, which has been far more comfortable - or maybe I'm just clumsy. Sometimes, however, the cheapest laughs are the best (backstory, past reference).


But not too cheap, or they might get insulted
(Source: Hardwarezone Forums)


Sadly, the wall clock that I've been depending on since time immemorial has finally given out. If I'm not mistaken, it came from one of my uncles' shop classes, and judging from how it now buzzes and is unresponsive to button input, the circuit board is failing. A replacement just wouldn't be the same...


Or I could just build it better?


Couldn't resist shelling out for a hard copy at last - there's something oddly comforting about holding dead trees:


Almost exactly one year later



GPU Woes

Development slowed precipitously when I discovered that executing the very same OpenCL program on my school and home computers yielded subtly different results. A lot of sweat was shed before I discovered the cause - when a kernel refers to an invalid memory location on an NVIDIA card, it fails silently for all other instances in that workgroup, whereas the AMD card simply ignores illegal writes where they occur.

Of course, given the general state of OpenCL programming (you can't even ascertain which card you're using across programs), this might or might not be "fixed" in future driver updates (not helped by the fact that the designers themselves don't even believe that coding for GPUs will get popular). I can see the attraction of both approaches, actually - the trouble comes when there's no consistency.

Well, back to it.



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