• What Ever Happened To Waterbeds?
  I’m old enough to know about them, but not old enough to have owned one. Maybe I tried one in a store at some point. But now, I know why they aren’t popular anymore.

  Here’s the thing about waterbeds, though: They were high maintenance. Installing one meant running a hose into your bedroom and filling the mattress up with hundreds of gallons of H2O—a precarious process that held the potential for a water-soaked bedroom. Waterbeds were also really, really heavy. In addition to the filled mattress, the frame—which had to support all that water weight—could be a back-breaker. When the mattress needed to be drained, an electric pump or some other nifty siphoning tricks were required. Waterbeds could also spring leaks (as Edward Scissorhands showed), which could be patched but, again, added to the cost and hassle.

• The married couples in Hong Kong who live apart
  Housing is so expensive in HK that married couples often live separately, with their parents. Apparently 1 in 10 couples are in this situation!

  Lok, 31, lives with her parents in North Point, in Hong Kong Island’s Eastern District. It is more than an hour away from the island of Tsing Yi, where 35-year-old Chau lives with his parents. Their three-year-old daughter, Yu, spends Monday to Thursday with Lok and the weekend at Chau’s. They can’t move in together in one of their family homes, Lok says, because the bedroom space is simply too small for two adults and a child.

• Physics Explains Why Time Passes Faster As You Age
  It’s not just psychological, time actually does past faster when you’re older.

  time as we experience it represents perceived changes in mental stimuli. It’s related to what we see. As physical mental-image processing time and the rapidity of images we take in changes, so does our perception of time. And in some sense, each of us has our own “mind time” unrelated to the passing of hours, days, and years on clocks and calendars, which is affected by the amount of rest we get and other factors.

• Here Comes the Bride. And the Bride. And the Bride. Mass Weddings Boom in Lebanon.
  The western world is focused on individualism and nothing more so then a wedding. It’s about THE couple. But in other cultures, it’s beneficial to “the state” as well as the participants to have group weddings.

  Ali Ala’ideen, a groom whose hair was slicked back like Elvis’s, said that he and his new wife could not afford a honeymoon, but that he was grateful to be married.

  “If it wasn’t a group wedding,” he said, “we wouldn’t have been able.”

• How I Learned to Cycle Like a Dutchman
  The story of how cycling works in the Netherlands. When bikes rule the road, things are different.

  For cyclists used to being second-class citizens, watching bikes navigate the Netherlands is revelatory. It’s not just that Dutch train stations all house massive underground bicycle garages, with thousands of bicycles, or fietsen, locked up on tiered racks. It’s not just that every busy street has a handsome bike lane, paved in dark-red brick. It’s that on Dutch streets, bikes rule the road. They take priority in design and traffic flow. Traffic circles are laid out so that cyclists need never stop for cars. Busy intersections often have overpasses or underpasses, so that cyclists never have to slow down.

  Most important, drivers look out for cyclists, cede the right of way, and are rarely surprised by them. After all, nearly all those drivers are cyclists themselves.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: hongkong, pocket