Day 3: I to Zoo Experiences

TheyExperience

Today's programme was to be more relaxed than yesterday's. This was reflected in the start time, which allowed a breakfast as late as 8:30. Too late for me, apparently, for my body decided to wake up at 7:30, leaving my brain no choice but to follow. Understandably, there was no one else at breakfast. I took advantage of the time to get some blog writing done (though not nearly enough).

Wating before entering IExperience: It's been a hard day's night...

A good moment to explain the buddy system, as promised. Every student is assigned two others to watch out for. When the call "buddy check" goes out, you put up your hand, to lower it again only if and when you have located your two buddies. Any hand that remains in the air points to an absentee, whom you then know by name. A nice, distributed algorithm. Its effectiveness depends on the predefined buddy connections, which I think should constitute a fully 2-connected graph for maximal fault tolerance. That is, you should avoid unconnected clusters: for instance, if Aede has buddies Mart and Marnix (say), while Mart has buddies Aede and Marnix and Marnix has Aede and Mart, then these three could go missing together without anyone noticing. A graph is fully connected if everyone is connected to everyone else through a sequence of buddy links; it is 2-connected if it remains connected even after you take an arbitrary person out. Though a simple fully connected graph (everyone has a single buddy, and they are linked up in a cycle) would be sufficient to ensure no-one stays behind, it is not robust against inattentiveness: what if someone is lazy and lowers his hand too quickly? With two buddies you can double-check one another. The only shortcoming in the system is that Luís and myself do not have buddies, though we are on someone's buddy list. I believe this means that the buddy graph cannot be fully 2-connected. Plus, I don't know whether the person who put it together was a graph theorist. But so far it worked!

Education on the Smart Nation of Singapore

Our only company visit of today was to another exhibition, called IExperience. Quoting from the web site: "The interactive and engaging exhibits are designed to provide visitors with hands-on experience and educate them on the possibilities, including possible Smart Nation services leveraging Smart Infrastructure such as networks of sensors, Smart Nation Platform, Heterogenous Network, that will make our lives more convenient". Operative word: educate. From the mouth of government, this is equivalent to "propaganda"; and so it turned out in this case. With obviously very little money spared we were shown a sequence of idyllic scenarios where ICT was a key enabler, from home appliances to infrastructure and health services. Sensors of all kinds were involved; the only time the word "privacy" fell was when we were told that the microphones installed in the park benches and traffic lights would only record the noise level and not the actual conversations. Yeah, right...

Intelligent street lighting

Both the exhibition itself and the guide were technically a lot less informative than the ones at A-star yesterday. To me, the interest of this visit lay not in the content but in the context: what does it mean that such a show is put up taking a lot of prime office space, how does it address visitors, what message does it convey? Once more concern for the aging, who have deserved a "fulfilled life". Family life unabashedly depicted as working Dad (travelling through green parks in his self-driving car while happily connecting to the world all the while), child-caring Mom (shopping from home because she is pregnant of her third) and bright, smiling kids (fascinated by this brave new world). No doubt but that this is a paternalistic, planning society.

Skeptical, me? What gave you that idea?

OK, things are never black-and-white. An enlightened dictatorship is sometimes said to be as the most beneficial form of government, I believe: it combines decisiveness, rationality, consistency, and long-term planning. A drawback is that you have to get your citizens to subscribe to your enlightened vision (which they are working at very hard, hence IExperience) but more seriously and ultimately damning, that it isn't stable. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and history shows that even the most enlightened dictator is eventually succeeded by a repressive one.

Actually, the comparison may not even be fair. At least nominally, Singapore has a democracy; but then, so do Russia and Turkey, and I have no idea which flavour they have here.

Leaving the zoo hand in hand

We were done at IExperience pretty quickly. Questions were neither invited nor volunteered; I think it was clear to the guide that many of the group were less than fascinated (a largish subgroup broke off to play a Wii-type game meant to keep the elderly physically fit), and to all of the study tour participants that questions would not get a proper answer anyway. It was better this way: we now had time to get back to the hotel, change into casual wear (casual casual) and get some lunch before heading to the afternoon+evening destination: the Singapore Zoo!

Again a bus ride. This may be a small country, but it has a surprising amount of terrain nevertheless, which is not at all completely covered by skyscrapers as I always imagined it to be. To the zoo it was almost an hour's ride, mostly through green and wooded areas. The zoo itself also covers an extensive outdoor area, with a lake that may double as fresh water supply - it did look somewhat artificial, or at the very least well-kept. There is actually not one zoo but three: there are separate areas called River Safari and Night Safari; however, it was to the zoo proper that we first went.

Elephant show

Alligator turtle

Chimpansee feeding time

Stingray, before dinner time

The mythical firefox

A panda gathering points

I associate zoos with childhood, partly because they all feel they have an educational mission and the level at which they pursue this is typically primary-school. The Singapore zoo was certainly no exception: warnings about animals going extinct, the many ways in which humanity negatively impacts the ecology of our planet, poaching and illegal ivory sales, shrinking habitats all around us. It's all true, and used to make me feel vaguely guilty - still does, in fact - but I now know I will never be that saviour of wildlife that I might have imagined myself to become when I was at primary-school age; so I have hardened myself against that message by a shield of boredom. It's still nice to look at the animals though, and here they had an extensive collection of mammals and reptiles large and small, spread out rather widely in a properly tropical green setting. Feeding times and shows were also programmed and kept us walking with some purpose. It was not very busy: as usual in amusement-type parks, the paths were laid out artfully to maximise the capacity without giving the place a crowded feel, but here it was positively quiet at the time of our visit. The month (low holiday season), day of the week (Thursday) and time of the day (second half afternoon) probably helped.

An hour before the scheduled end of our visit, I remembered that there were these other areas as well. The plan was that we would visit the Night Safari later, but the River Safari was not on our plan, whereas our ticket stated that we had access there as well. With a small subgroup we hastened there and just had time to make a tour, which complemented the vertebrates we had seen so far with (mostly) fishes, lots of them, in rather enormous aquaria. To our surprise and delight, moreover, the River Safari also included some panda bears: red pandas (also known as firefox, I thought the browser was called after a mythical animal, but here it was!) and even more surprisingly a couple of giant pandas. Though we were in a bit of a hurry, we just had time to catch a glimpse of one of them moping among the trees. Those of the readers who know what panda points are might be interested to learn that pictures of these iconic animals drew a lot of comments on the group app, directed especially towards one of the students who is approaching Panda of the Year status (but whom I will respectfully leave unnamed).

We were back exactly in time to join the rest of the group in going towards the final item on today's program, the Night Safari. This included dinner (a quite reasonable buffet at the Ulu Ulu restaurant), a Creatures of the Night show (owls, and other nocturnal animals), and a train ride across another large spread of land where many of the same animals we had already seen were on display, but this time in subtly lighted enclosures throughout the now completely dark forest, and observed from the relative comfort of our train seats. Well done, all in all. Being in a large group and having reservations to the restaurant was a serious advantage, as seats were reserved for us in both these follow-up activities: we did quite some sanctioned queue-jumping.

The funniest thing though was Wybren Kortstra being picked as a volunteer to "catch" a snake during the Creatures of the Night show: he is 2,05 meters tall (nomen non est omen, in this case) and so attracts quite some stares anyway, but having him on stage towering over the presenters of the show was really a laugh.

Wybren as a snake charmer

I think I heard some snores on the way back to the hotel. Every morning I have to catch up with a lot of group app comments and fascinating pictures and film fragments, continuing until very deep into the night; so there was definitely a lot of lost sleep to be caught up on, and what better time for that than a bus ride?