Measuring

"The world is driven by forces that cannot be measured," the market analyst Morgan Housel once wrote.

This applies to so many things.

Imagine a world where every decision is made on a spreadsheet, where we simply add up the numbers and get the answer. That's never going to happen, simply because that’s not how the world works.

Ask the British physiologist Archibald Hill, and he will tell you this is indeed not the case. Hill, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1922 for his work in understanding body mechanics, ran every morning at 7:15. He was a keen runner. Hill believed that maximum running performance is a function of an athlete's muscles –  overwhelmingly their heart. A stronger heart pump more blood to transport oxygen to running muscle. That seems logical and straightforward. 

In the real world, Hill's calculations had almost zero ability to predict Olympic sprints or marathon race winners. 

With time, Hill realised there is more in athletics than sheer chemistry. He discovered that human bodies aren't machines. Human have feelings, emotions, and fears, all of which are very hard to measure. 

In other words, the world is not one big spreadsheet whose outputs can be computed. We'd never get anywhere if everyone view the world as a clean set of numbers to be computed.

Always been the case, always will be.

Touching

It's not a common order: a movie comes first and then the book is written. So begins the novelization of the screenplay or movie named Five Feet Apart. The story is a testament to the power of human touch. 

I happened to follow the same order this weekend, watching the movie with my daughter and finishing the novel the next day. 

Two teenagers, Stella and Will, met in a hospital where they received treatment for a genetic disorder of cystic fibrosis. A genetic defect in the protein called ion channel, spanning the cell membrane lining the lungs, causes thickened mucus. Through thick and thin, children and young adults with cystic fibrosis struggle to move air in and out of their lungs.

There turned out to be an extraordinary bond between these two teenagers with cystic fibrosis, one of them not eligible for lung transplant after harbouring a hardy bacterium Burkholderia cepacia. The other one, Stella, knew very well B. cepacia thrives best in saliva or phlegm. A cough travels six feet. That means Stella should keep a distance of five, if not six, feet from Will to keep herself clean and eligible for lung transplant. No saliva also means no kissing.

The "six-feet-at-all-times" rule reminds us the brutal social distancing as a result of the coronavirus not too long ago. That's simply defying the deepest connection of human touch. 

Rhino

Ask anyone what their favourite animal is and chances are it won't be rhino. White rhino population is shrinking. And fast. It's now endangered. 

Ask poachers and aphrodisiac black market customers and they will tell you rhinoceros horn is the most precious Viagra.

The maths is hard to ignore. Having been decimated by poaching, the northern white rhino population is now down to two individual females. After the death of Suni and Sudan, the world's last two male northern white rhino in 2014 and 2018 respectively, scientists have been working incredibly hard to achieve in vitro fertilisation rhino pregnancy.

First things first, why are people in China so obsessed with the sex symbol of male rhino? Their lightning bolt penis, I mean. Thanks to (or perhaps because of) the two-and-a-half-foot long penis of the rhino male, rhinos have been erroneously believed – at least by some stupid guys – to be the king of sex.

A long time ago, people have witnessed the typical two and a half hours of rhino mating. My goodness, that sounds like extremely impressive sexual prowess of the male rhinos. Except that it isn't.

Ask any evolutionary scientists and they will tell us that rhinos are terrible at reproducing themselves. Rhinos take long to complete copulation – but not in the way you might think. The true story is that a female rhino has a very convoluted vagina that the rhino male has difficulty in delivering their sperms. So much so that the rhino males have evolved a long penis and taken a clumsy difficult time to make the darn things work. That explains the two and a half hours error-prone mating. 

When we know more about the reproductive disadvantage, it is not hard to see why the rhinos need IVF. There's nothing wrong (and plenty right) with stopping the horrible trade of rhino horn. Which, as we know, does nothing but to make people impotent and sterile.

Disaster

At a dinner once, with friends who included a reporter, our conversation turned into a Burmese joke. 

A man with toothache goes overseas to see a dentist. "Don't you have dentists back in Burma?" the dentist asks. 

"Of course," the man replies, "We're just not allowed to open our mouths."

It's no secret that today many of us feel that it's harder to open our mouths and to foster a supportive environment when we need it most. 

This month, I heard a dentist story that I'll never forget. That's from Rebecca Makkai's novel The Great Believers. A page turner about the early AIDS crisis in the mid-80s. 

At that time, there was no effective medication except a palliative drug known as AZT for the group of gay men who were grappling with the deadly disease in Chicago. One by one, they died when the doctor had no choice but to start hospice, taking off the medication like pentamidine and amphoterrible. One day, a man named Julian was packing for his flight to Puerto Rico, after being tested and told his positive ELISA results. Devastated, Julian picked up a white trapezoidal dental floss container and held it in his palm. He said, "Why do I have this? No, really, why did I pack this? I'm never flossing again."

"Sure you are," Julian's friend hoped to encourage him.

"I'm telling you that I have decided not to. Like, right now. I've hated it my whole life, and what's gonna happen to my gums in the next six months?"

"You've got much longer than that."

"You think any dentist is even treating me again? I've got no dentist to yell at me! I'm never going in for another cleaning!"

I will never forget this sad story about Julian. Few things are harder than defining the word stigma, and few things are easier than spotting stigmatisation when it has happened. 

Xiamen

Deciding between running and photography in a foreign city is never easy for me. In fact, I love both, and passionately believe that either activity is the logical choice during good weather.

Before I visited Xiamen this week, I grabbed a Lonely Planet guide to learn more about the city. This seaside city is the crown jewel of Fujian province. One of the highlights is the prestigious Xiamen International Marathon held annually along the coast offering breathtaking views. With its Elite Platinum Label rating by World Athletics, the route has become known as one of the most scenic and most sought-after marathon courses. 

That appears to be an attractive route for me to build more mileage. Well, sure, but that doesn't fit with my tight conference schedule – which is why I could at most run around my hotel for less than an hour. To make sure I can hit the mark with ample time to dry my sweaty running socks and clothes, I knew it would be wise not to run on the day of departure. 

Running on the pavements, on the other hand, can be a challenge. Much of this has to do with tackling the traffic, or for that matter, traffic lights. As I ran randomly outside my hotel this morning, I found a perfect trail stretching 23 kilometres, with most of the path on a bridge. That means I could run easily on a signposted foot bridge. As designed by Danish architecture firm Dissing+Weitling, the elevated track has been blessed with lookout platforms, fitness stations and restrooms alongside. Forget the gym treadmill – there’s enough here to keep a runner entertained for as long as one wishes.

Bats

What will be your reaction to bats?

The most common one is an involuntary shudder, as what a friend of mine had during our stroll near Adelaide Zoo. That's where a camp of grey-headed flying foxes is found. As we looked up, we saw many noisy creatures hanging upside down like what humans did from a chin-up bar but without falling  – and her heart started racing. She almost had a heart attack.

Beliefs about bats are entangled with mixed reactions, from that of vampires and Count Dracula to the symbol of long life and happiness. 

The success story of bats happens to be the theme of recent August issue of National Geographic. The article will change your impression of this creepy mammal. Among them, one of evolution's success stories is bats' adaptation, evolving from tree gliders to the only mammals that fly. Bat flight is a prime example of engineering design. They don't consciously make every split-second decision to navigate in a small dark cave. The soft tissue of bat wings simply deforms and reshapes in response to air pressure without need to bother their brain's air traffic control centre. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi will call that flow, and engineers call that passive dynamics. 

Another superpower of bats is their extreme longevity. As one of the smallest mammals, bats actually live up to 10 times longer than expected for their body size. How can that be? They are able to shut down their metabolism when at rest. The most amazing achievement of bats, if you ask doctors, is their immunity against a host of viruses. Ebola is one. Marburg virus is another. Their exceptional ability to live with the pathogens without falling sick or showing symptoms, according to most scientists, is an evolutionary advantage when bats live in extremely dense populations.