Endless Mindnumbing Prattle

My last point of call in India was Chennai (or Madras as it used to be known), down in Tamil Nadu in the South East of India. We got into Chennai first thing in the morning after the third successive day of 6am flights (have these people not heard of evening flights???), met with our distributor and went straight for breakfast (our priorities for the entire trip have been food first, then business).

We pulled up outside this unassuming looking place called Saravana Bhavan and went inside, I’d later find out that this place is a local institution which now has around 55 restaurants around the world (including 2 in London), here’s the link to the website.

I let them take care of ordering for me and ended up with two dishes, both of which were pretty much the best food I had on the trip.

The first was idly, kind of bread balls with a couple of pots of samber to dip it in (I looked greedy apparently), oh there’s a spicy coconut chutney off to the side:

I actually wasn’t too fussed about the idly, the samber and the dips were delicious but I’d rather have had them with naan than the idly, I’d probably be stabbed to death for saying this in Chennai…

Anyway, next up was Dosa. Now, it’s difficult to understand the scale of this thing, it was enormous, delicious though, it was quite thin, crispy on one side and soft on the other, not unlike a pancake I guess. It came with 4 dips, one pot of samber, one spicy coconut salsa and two variants with tomato and mint. I was already feeling full after the idly but still wolfed the lot down.

After dinner I had a coffee, which sounds uneventful but it was served in an unusual way. I figured the waiter had been clumsy and spilt coffee into the very deep stainless steel saucer when he brought the coffee over. But no, it’s like this on purpose, the coffee in the saucer is mixed with sugar, you pour it into the main cup to suit your taste

The others opted for chai masala (spicy tea), served in a beer mug..

I made a fuss about the meal being the best I’d had the whole week and that was it, we were coming back for lunch! Read More »

I went for dinner with my colleague last night and opted for a relatively simple chicken tikka with a butter naan (i’m still a dit delicate after going crazy on my first day).

Despite my repeated protests my colleague insisted on getting the waiter to spoon a big portion of his dal and rice on my plate, which is ok, I’m used to this in China. I tried it, it was ok but I was already feeling full so I didn’t finish what he’d put on my plate. He began by telling me that it’s very rude not to eat what I put on my plate, I pointed out that I had eaten everything I’d put on the plate, it was the bit someone else put there which I hadn’t eaten. I was then treated to a lecture on how poor some people are in India and once something is put on the plate it cannot be given to someone else etc etc..

I’ve got a flight with him this morning, apparently one of his friends sent him a ppt file as an email entitled “What Poverty Means”, he’s going to show me on the plane, he promises it will touch my heart.. I can’t wait… I’m tempted to sellotape my eyes shut just to spite him..

Anyway, here’s some cake I ate yesterday (take THAT poor people!), it’s Gujarat spicy cake, with mashed up chillis inside (rather good actually), it’s served with whole chillis and mashed up chilli, proper dead good it were!!!!.

Marc invited me to a party the other day, it’s on Saturday night which is a bit of a downer for me because I’m flying to India the next day but I’ll probably still go over. I hate it when there are too many people at these things though, everyone’s talking over the top of everyone else and you can’t hear what anyone’s saying, I needed some way of making sure the party wasn’t going to be like that.

Fortunately I remembered reading about some research that would be useful, by a chap called William Maclean, he derived a formula to predict the maximum amount of people, or “well mannered guests” as he puts it (this was the 1950’s) are compatible with a quiet party, beyond this number of guests the result is a noisy party, and who wants that?? The whole thing is based around a phenomenon known as positive feedback, basically once a party reaches a critical size people start having to talk louder to be heard in their small groups, then the next group has to increase their volume, etc etc until before you know it you’re bending over shouting words and spit into the ear of the guy next to you who still hasn’t got a clue what you’re going on about.

Anyway, here’s Maclean’s equation, perfect for a lunchtime calculation:

Where (with assumptions):

• N0 is the maximum number of attendees for a “quiet party”
• K is the average number of guests per conversational group – I assumed 5
• a is the sound absorption coefficient of the room – found a handy table here, assumed Marc’s lounge to be a standard room with a value of 0.15
• V is the room volume – see h below, I assumed 180m³.
• h is the properly weighted mean free path of a ray of sound through the room – I found a reference from Sabine (statistical room acoustics) which calculates this with the relationship a=4(V/S), where V and S are the room volume and the room total volume, respectively. Assuming Marc’s lounge to be around 10mx6mx3m this gives V=180m³ and S=216m³ and a value of a = 3.33.
• d0 is the mininum conventional distance between talkers – assumed 0.5m
• Sm is the minimum signal to noise ratio required for intelligible conversation – difficult one, but luckily the US government sets criteria for the minimum signal to noise ratio required for classrooms and we can steal their numbers. They recommend a minimum of 15dB, but at a party I think we can afford to go a lot lower, let’s say 10dB

So, I plugged all the numbers into the equation and the maximum number of people Marc should invite to his party is………………… 5.17 people…. tits….

Something’s gone wrong somewhere, maybe I’m using the wrong units for one of the parameters or something, unfortunately without the original paper I can’t tell exactly what (later I remembered that I was using metric figures and Maclean would have been working in feet and inches, even converting to that only increased to 7 people though).

Anyway, luckily I found another way of calculating it, outlined here, which calculates things a little differently and introduces a reverb time factor, “T”, into the equation (typically between 0.5 and 3.0 seconds, I opted bang in the middle at 1.5 seconds).

The new formula:

N = 2 + 8 x D/d^2

where:

• D = a x S/50
• a = 1 – 10^(-V/(14 x S x T))

I plugged in the numbers and VOILA, we get 14.07 people.

“Great” I thought, that sounds more reasonable, I’ll just give Marc a bell and check how many people he’s invited before deciding whether or not to go. Well, that would WOULD have been a good plan except Marc got wasted the other night and invited half the bar, he can’t remember how many and how many of them will actually turn up. I’m just going to have to chance it and be prepared for a speedy exit.

Actually, in all seriousnous it should be fun, the last party he had ended up with a China Eastern airline pilot (according to him) dropping a full glass of red wine on Marc’s new deep shag rug and then stumbling into his spare room to piss over a pile of stuff, I’d better take my camera!!

If you’ve been in China a few years one thing you need to be careful about is the five year rule for tax. Basically after five full years in China you’ll start to be taxed on any earnings abroad (leasing out your old apartment in the UK, interest, dividends, capital gains etc), there are ways around it though. I got clarification from my financial advisor. here’s the situation:

If a foreign national has stayed in China for five full years consecutively you’ll be subject to pay tax on your worldwide income from the sixth year onwards.

A “full year” is defined as a year where the individual has lived on mainland China and has not left mainland China for either 30 days consecutively or 90 days cumulatively. Note, the day of arrival and departure from China are counted as days in China (i.e. if you fly to Korea on Monday morning, first thing and return on the Wednesday very late, that still only counts as one day outside China), so if you’re like me and you make a lot of short business trips to other countries they’re not worth anywhere near as much as you’d think.

Here’s the bitch, once you’ve been in China for five full consecutive years then you pay tax on your worldwide earnings, you can’t break this until you basically spend a full year outside China (less than 90 days on the mainland in a calendar year) at which the five year count starts again.

So, if you’re going to be here for a long time make sure that within the five years you’re either spending 90 full days outside China or one long trip of 30 full days outside China to reset your five year count!

OMG I ate ALL my sweeties from the UK so now I’m down to wearing the candy necklaces and nibbling them while I’m watching DVDZ on the TV OMG LOL!!?!??>??!?>

I LUV CANDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE???!!!!!?!??!?!!???:

I’LL BBEEE SOO FAAT LA. WAAAH SOB SOB!!!!!!!#$$???!!!?!?!?!?