12/5-12/11 Stats, Xmas, Coconut, eyes

Stats

I use the blogger interface provided by google to enter the posts of this blog. At one time, I thought the interface allowed me to enter a table, but I can't find that option now. Here is a table I extracted from the CIA's world factbook of country profiles.
these are estimates for 2012. (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/).  If you ever want a good summary about any country this is the place to go. Here is what I selected from 3 countries in the factbook.

                                 China        USA        Taiwan
Population                1,343K        313K        23K
Population growth(%)     .48              .9          .29
Sex ratio at birth(M/F)    1.3          1.05        1.08
Per Capita GDP ($)        8.4K      48.3K     37.7K
Life Expectancy Male    72.8        76.05      75.66
Life Expectancy Female  71.1       81.05      81.53
Median Age                     35.9        37.1         38.1
Infant Mortality             15.9            6             4.6
Literacy (%)                   92.2           99          96.1

(Infant mortality is in deaths per 1000 in 1st year)
Notes:
1. Look at the effect of the "one child policy" in China on male/femail ratio.
2. Why US infant mortality worse than Taiwan's?
3. US population growth is about a quarter from  immigration, China and Taiwan have very little immigration. 

Xmas

According to the CIA World Factbook, only 4.5% of Taiwanese are Christian. But there seems to be tons of Christmas trees, lights and decorations in Taipei. Along Chang An Street in Taipei, there are several stores selling Xmas decorations exclusively, mostly lights(LED) and trees(artificial).

 But this provides a good background for a group picture.

 Eating on the Streets

There are plenty of food options in Taiwan. Unless you are into something special like organic or extremely cheap, there's little reason to cook at home. Young people in the US today rarely know how to cook, in Taiwan it's probably the same.

I can't cook better food than what I can buy from the street vendors in Taipei. But once in awhile I get a surprise. Today a bought what I thought was a meat bun but it turned out to be a bun with coconut paste inside(at least I didn't pick the bun with sweet red beans inside!)

This reminded me of a story. In the 1950's, when I was less than 10 years old, I was a "good eater", meaning that I wasn't a "picky eater". When parents scolded their children for not cleaning their plate, I was not one of then. Parents use to admonish their children that to waste food was a sin and that we should all consider how lucky we were because we weren't starving like the poor children in China and Korea.(Taiwanese often use to tell children that if they don't clean their rice bowl of every grain of rice then they will marry someone who has had smallpox and whose face will look like their dirty rice bowl.)  

Anyway, even though I was a good eater, I saw that some of my siblings, who were not good eaters, were getting a lot of attention because they were picky. So I chose coconut as the food I disliked so that I too could get that attention. I didn't have anything against coconut and we rarely had it, I just didn't what to be perfect. 

My Eyes

On Thursday I had another appointment, the left eye got more laser treatment and the doctor says it is good. The right eye detachment is not improving on its own so I had surgery on Friday to inject gas into the eye to push the detached flap against the back of the eyeball. The surgery used only local anathesia and I was sent home afterwards.  That went well and now I am scheduled for a check up on this coming Thursday and might start laser treatments on the right eye then. I have to lie down  lie facedown for a few days to get the gas treatment to work. Everything is going well.