A Piece of Cake

I brought my parents handmade fist-sized snowy mooncakes this Mid-Autumn Festival.

For those of you, my mum included, who have no inkling of how to make mooncakes, you must swallow hard and believe that I learn the ropes of making mooncakes.

But - and I'm sure you expected a "but" - the true story is that we can't judge how difficult it is to create a product simply from how intricate it looks. Think about the diapers my daughter wears. It's hard to get excited about the diapers. Hard, that is, when I've thrown away several thousands of them since the birth of Jasmine.

After having the mooncakes at my mum's home, I caught sight of an old Fortune magazine article about diapers. Illustration of the article showed three awfully amicable babies wearing the same brand of diaper as Jasmine. One of them is dark-haired with dark skin; the other wearing a big smile; the third with an attractive face and short curly blond hair. Picture three naked creatures walking and crawling around. You won't be surprised to know that their diapers could be filling up faster than a Tokyo train in the rush hour.

As I went on reading the story, I was amazed at the exemplary efforts of the diaper research team. They started off hand making diapers of varying dimensions to try out on real babies. There are now baby manikins to check for leaking at their laboratories; their legs and tummies vary in size, just like real babies. With time, the researchers generated enormous databases after bringing babies in and literally scanning them head to toe. The computer models then simulate virtual diapers to fit silhouette of babies from different parts of the world. They even measure the amount of pressure the virtual diaper is applying to the skin at every spot, with red (Ouch! Too tight and discomfort), blue (No-no, too loose, and possible leaking), yellow, and green splotches distributed like a Doppler weather map. They can literally see the pressure points. I can feel it.