A Brief Account of Recent things: Sub-Mullae 2012, The Patriotic Cabby, and the Geology of Singapore

July 5, 2012

Debbie Ding

From left to right: Khai, Heewoo, Annabelle, and Mulim

This week is the start of the first phase of a collaboration between me and Korean artist Jeong Heewoo. Heewoo is a meticulous artist who also works with mapping and I’m excited to be showing her around and working with her! We are working from the The Substation Random Room where we have a kind of open studio from around 11 to 6pm each day (when we are in, if we are not in, then it means we are outside seeing things).

The only problem is that my schedule has also suddenly exploded! It has become ridiculously hectic this week, along with my usual overwhelming commercial design work, preparation for talks and abstracts and journals, and on top of that: my Postcode Postcard receiving a lot of good but unexpected attention, including being mentioned in a presentation at the World Cities Summit Expo Forum 2012, and fielding some interviews. Despite the superbusyness, I find that it has been very fruitful to have worked on that project as I have met many amazing people working in data visualisation / data mining / programming as a result of participating in that data hackathon… and I am always keen to meet more people who are interested in this area or actually work in this area.

I have posted some things about the last few days: our trip to the WCS Summit, going to the Marina Bay City Gallery, and going to the URA Resource Centre & City Gallery.

Here are links to our new blog and wiki for the Sub-mullae project:

Blog: http://sub-mullae-2012.blogspot.sg/
Wiki: http://map.wwgou.org

A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF OTHER RECENT THINGS

Patriotic Cabby

THE PATRIOTIC CABBIE

I was taking a Taxi back home one day when I met a cab driver who was fiercely patriotic and he told me of his secret plan to buy 10000 singapore flags and to festoon his entire HDB block with them, overnight, in order to remind Singaporeans that they should love Singapore and not behave ungraciously. “I will hang a Singapore flag from every single ledge! i will plant one flag in their pots of plants! I will put one flag in every single pot of plant that I have! I will also get some bunting and go around the estate with the Singapore flag! When everyone wakes up they will be shocked! But then, I will be quiet and not let anyone know it was me.” I hope he gets to do it! He even had a design that he had made by himself – he let me take a picture of this design that he had also pasted on his own taxi. I love the idea and I hope he manages to accomplish it, whereever he might be right now…

THE GEOLOGY OF SINGAPORE

I was reading a book by the Public Works Department about the geology of Singapore and it tabulates all the geological faults in Singapore (no matter how tiny and almost non-existent).

Few faults are actually exposed in Singapore, and the only ones that can be dated are the Murai Fault, Nanyang Fault, and Pasir Laba Faults which are thrust faults with other associated tear faults around them. Basically if Singapore was a big slab of rock, what happened was that there was probably some horizontal stress from the south-west and this mass of material kinda over-rode on top of the usually north-west trending sediments that were from the older Triassic period. A fault means there was either a thrust fault or tear fault where the rock was compressed/pushed together or pulled apart by the plate tectonics. I find this mindboggling since we aren’t used to thinking of the very creation of the land of Singapore, tracing it all the way back to a period where dinosaurs might have even existed. To think that Singapore was here all along, this silly little spot of an island in the world!

So basically if we had to make a list of geological faults in singapore, they would be: Murai Fault, Pasir Laba Fault, Nanyang Fault, Henderson Road Fault, Tanjong Lokos Fault, Pepys Road Fault, Nee Soon Fault, Seletar Fault. Did i miss out anything?

LTA ROAD DETAIL GUIDE

I recently found a road detail guide released by the LTA which is like a detailed design guide to everything to do with road construction and road signage. Yes, they have a detailed guide for that.

ESRI and GIS

I read a ESRI magazine which publishes a selection of outstanding GIS projects each month, from . I have been trying to teach myself about GIS and bought a number of books to learn more about how to get started with ArcGIS (in some brief flashes of madness i even think that I might do a surveyor course here, because I enjoy the idea of doing meaningful urban spatial analysis so much. (I often think I am slowly shifting towards wanting to do my Masters in something like Advanced Spatial Analysis as a starting point to a further PhD in this area, so that I can combine my love for data visualization with my interest in urban built environments, architecture, and geography…)

Debbie's Process Blog

A Brief Account of Recent things: Sub-Mullae 2012, The Patriotic Cabby, and the Geology of Singapore