A man who looked like he was in his early 60s pushed his mother into my surgical clinic. The mother, who was in her 80s, was frail and her hair was not combed properly. What struck me was that the son looked as tired as the mother. There was a certain anxiety that surrounded this man, and it was evident to me that he was sincere in searching for answers.
A short but ground-breaking video may have slipped under the radar during the 2024 National Day Parade: A social worker shared about losing a friend to suicide during his school days. It moved him to work in the mental health field to save others.
Back in 2013, fashionable people started wearing glasses with a small but inevitably conspicuous built-in heads-up display and camera. These fashionistas were unusually distracted even for a distracted age – losing the threads of conversation, staring off into space, tilting their heads in odd ways, muttering strange commands (“take a picture”, “record a video”) and every now and again reciting impressive, if irrelevant, lists of facts magicked up from the pages of Wikipedia. The glasses were called “Google Glass”, the unfortunate creatures who wore them “Glass Explorers”. The “Glass Explorers” were soon dubbed “Glassholes”, the fad faded, and the glasses are no longer available.
In an essay for The Spectator in 1965, the enchantingly droll British food writer Elizabeth David related the travails of a Paris restaurant at the end of the 19th century that went out of its way to make the English dishes already on its menu even more
There is such a thing as an unimportant US presidential election. Had Mr Bill Clinton lost to Mr Bob Dole in 1996, or Mr George W. Bush to Mr John Kerry the other side of the millennium, there is no reason to believe we would now inhabit a greatly different world.
Given the proliferation of applications of all forms and functions these days, it may be timely to consider developing apps that can help those with special needs prepare for visits to the doctor or for medical procedures.