ET… Blob

With soaring oil prices, everyone suffer from the effects of inflation… Shopping in HK used to be very affordable. It’s still cheaper than shopping in Australia, but it’s nowhere as cheap as how it used to be. Nowadays when you go shopping in HK, you shop for the style and quality, rather than for the price. Need to remember that for the same price, you can get something a lot better in HK than what you can get here… and this is the same with shopping in Japan.

Hong Kong’s Inflation Outlook
(from HKTDC 25 July, 2008 Content provided by Hang Seng Bank)
The mounting inflationary pressure has changed the economic landscape significantly recently. Inflation in Hong Kong surged to 11-year highs, spreading beyond food to other consumer goods and services. Non-food inflation jumped from around 2% at the beginning of the year to 4.5% in June. What are the main culprits?

A softening currency exposes the highly import-dependent Hong Kong economy to imported inflation. Hong Kong’s trade weighted real effective exchange rate has depreciated 13.7% since November 2005. According to a government study, a 10% appreciation of the Hong Kong dollar may help push down inflation by 0.6%. In other words, the 13.7% depreciation is likely to have lifted Hong Kong inflation by less than 1%.

Inflation seems to stem more from soaring oil prices. At today’s prices, if adjusted for inflation, oil has already surpassed the 1980-peak. Similar pace of oil price rises was also seen in previous oil crises, in 1973/74, 1979/80 and 1999/2001. What does that mean for Hong Kong? History seems to suggest that Hong Kong’s inflation is poised to jump and the real GDP growth to decelerate! What matters more may be the magnitude of the downturn.
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Heart Attack: Fat Around the Heart May Increase Risk
(from MEDICA.de)

When it comes to risk for a heart attack, having excess fat around the heart may be worse than having a high body mass index or a thick waist, according to researchers.
30/07/2008

The study was among the first to explore whether there is a link between fat deposits around the heart, known as pericardial fat, and the development of hard, calcified plaque in the arteries. Calcified plaque itself is not considered risky, but it is associated with the presence of less stable fatty deposits that can lead to heart attack and stroke.

“The distribution of body fat may be as important as the amount of body fat in determining risk of heart attacks,” said Jingzhong Ding, M.D., lead author and an assistant professor of gerontology from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. “Even a thin person can have fat around the heart.” The researchers examined data from the Multi-ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), a $68 million study involving 6,800 participants nationwide, to explore their hypothesis that fat around the arteries in the heart contributes to inflammation and to increased risk of fatty deposits in the vessels.
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Why do autistic people do what they do? It can be explained scientifically:

Brain: Autism’s Social Struggle Explained
(from MEDICA.de)

According to a new study inefficient pathways for transmitting information between certain brain regions are to blame for the difficulties of people with autism to determine another person’s intentions in a social interaction.
24/07/2008

Picking up on innuendo and social cues is a central part of engaging in conversation, but people with autism often struggle to do so. The study sheds light on the neural mechanisms that are responsible for such social difficulties in autism.

The research implicates abnormalities in the brain’s inter-regional communication system. “The communication between the frontal and posterior areas of the social brain network is impaired in autism, making it difficult to understand the intentions of others” said the study’s senior author Marcel Just.
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今天很早就去上班了. 六點多開車果然已經很多車子在路上 - 不過不會塞車. 還沒中午的時候早退回家. 之後去… Gold Coast!! 參加弟弟的畢業典禮 太好了, 終於畢業了~ 恭喜!! 拍了很多照片, 正經的和白痴的都有拍. 他們畢業robe只能租用幾個小時, 所以拍照有點趕. 我畢業的時候可以借回家一個禮拜說.

典禮之後到casino逛逛~ 入場時還滿好笑的.
保安看見我弟就說: “我有看過你ㄚ. 進去吧.”
看見我弟的朋友說: “我上次也有看過你ㄚ.”
再看一下我們其他人: “你們也有來過嘛~ 全部進去吧.”
這是小弟第一次沒被 check ID. 大家進去之後, 朋友說: “我又沒來過, 他怎麼會看過我?” 誰知道… ~O~ Casino裡面燈光暗暗的, 讓人很想睡覺… 我和我媽累到去找sofa坐下. 真的很想睡…

晚餐到 Surfers 一家義大利料理餐廳~ 我和B上次也有來過. 依然很好吃. 晚餐後還去 Time Zone 玩了一個小時 XD 只記得小時候爸媽都有帶我們到那裡玩. 小時候玩遊戲會很在意分數和tickets. 現在長大了, 知道玩得高興就好. 真的是太好玩了!!

開車回家路上, 有點”釣魚”的感覺… 我一直和小弟聊天, 這樣才不會睡著. 不過我小弟還是睡著了, 剩我一個在那自言自語 =.=

嗯… 今天我的開車時間總共三個多小時. 累垮了… 今晚一定可以睡得很熟!

本來今晚是打算吃拉麵的. 可是到餐廳的時候… 眼鏡突然起霧, 可知室內跟外面的氣溫相差有多大! 看見很多人正在吃火鍋… 好像很好吃的樣子. 看完menu和價錢… 我們還是決定 join in! XD 兩個人加起來 $25 真的不貴. 份量剛剛好, 足夠我們兩個人吃飽飽~ 下次再吃拉麵好了

It’s really sad that cigarette companies are using whatever they can to make people addicted to smoking… all the harm just for the money they earn…

Menthol’s been used in cigarette for many years, but that doesn’t justify the reason for using it in cigarettes.

Tobacco: Menthol Used to Addict Youths
(from MEDICA.de)

Researchers explored menthol levels in specific tobacco brands and found a deliberate strategy to recruit and addict young smokers by adjusting menthol to create a milder experience for the first time smoker.
17/07/2008

Menthol masks the harshness and irritation of cigarettes, allowing delivery of an effective dose of nicotine, the addictive chemical in cigarettes. These milder products were then marketed to the youngest potential consumers.

The researchers reviewed internal tobacco industry documents on menthol product development, conducted laboratory tests to measure menthol content in U.S. brands, examined market research reports and drew data from the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an annual nationally representative survey among U.S. residents aged twelve years and older.
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Some people tend to skip meals during the day. It’s scientifically proven that this is very unhealthy.

A typical example would be for people in diets and for people who want to lose weight. People who eat two meals a day (usually skipping breakfast) gain more weight than people who eat three meals a day. This is because the time between meals is too long; the body then triggers a signal to tell the brain that it will be hungry for long periods of time, hence when you eat, most of the energy will be stored as fat (spare energy for times when you are hungry). Therefore, it is of utmost importance that we eat breakfast everyday, and that we eat our meals regularly.

Getting fat is one thing, but that’s not all! Diseases may develop if you’re not careful… :S See article below.

Health: Regular Meals Important
(from MEDICA.de)

It is obvious to most people that our health is affected by what we eat; now, however, scientists have shown that it is also a matter of how often we eat.
21/07/2008

People who eat at irregular times run a greater risk of developing insulin resistance and what is known as metabolic syndrome, according to a study from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet. Metabolic syndrome is a condition whereby multiple risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes accumulate in one and the same individual.
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