But I’ve got rainbows planned for tomorrow

[austin_dern]

I spent the morning at a talk, held at Biopolis, a little education/industry enclave near Buona Vista MRT. The talk was in Theatrette 3, ``Creation'', in the Matrix building, 4th floor, which is the fifth floor up from the ground level. There's a floor 2 and a 2M. (The other theatrettes on the floor include ``Development'' and ``Breakthrough''.) The security guard said I had to take the escalators up, though the elevators run to that floor just fine. The escalators run ordinarily at low speed, which they triple when someone steps on, I think to amplify the fears of anyone with escalator phobias. There's a double-helix motif that runs through the building, including as the holder for signs giving vague directions to the talks.

The buildings in the Biopolis complex are named: Genome; Proteus; Matrix; Centros; Chromos; Nanos; and Helios. One of the things I love about Singapore is the lingering suspicion that I'm in an un-self-consciously cheery high-class science fiction setting, only with rock music instead of spotty theramin and aimlessly drifting French horn soundtracks. In the Nanos (The Hands of Fate) 7-Eleven (of course there's a 7-Eleven in the Biopolis complex) I got, with my snack, a free Hello Kitty: Thirty Years of Cute fridge magnet. This commemorates three decades of Hello Kitty and increases the Sanrio memorabilia collection the community seems eager to give me. The bag is marked ``Not for sale'' but has a UPC bar code on it, which the cashier didn't scan.

Trivia: The United States produced 3,000 bales of cotton in 1790, and 178,000 bales in 1810. Source: The Antebellum Period, James M Volo, Dorothy Denneen Volo.

Currently Reading: Time's Pendulum: The Quest to Capture Time -- From Sundials to Atomic Clocks, Jo Ellen Barnett.