Two very interesting things happened on the way to work today.

First, I thought I was witnessing a historical event in Singapore: the booking of a jaywalker. But under closer scrutiny, it appeared more like a tourist asking for information from a traffic police woman. Dang!

Then I became increasingly aware that in my peripheral vision, the guy sitting next to me appeared to be Mr Incredible. Okay, I know this is impossible but I thought I'd just enjoy the moment till the rude shock eventually hit me when I got up to alight the bus.

Ahh... the fun of cognizant delusions.

Birthdays. Thirty years ago, I greeted them with incoherent garbles of joy. Twenty years ago, I delighted in presents galore. Ten years ago I was basking in youthful excitement surrounded by friends, the world my oyster.

Somehow, this year, I've felt no such glee approaching my 32nd birthday. Alright, so people still drop their jaws in horror to find out I'm actually over 30. "No!" they exclaim, their mouths large with an O. So I hang out with younger folk and stay religiously out of the sun. I maintain my childhood playfulness, having not being repressed by endless classes and tuitions since the age of 2.

But there is an inherent tiredness that comes with being over 30: your stamina isn't so good anymore, 21 year old guys look like children, at midnight your eyelids involuntarily close a millimetre a minute, you forget things, your tolerance goes way down, and you start wondering what would give you meaning in life...

Oh hang on, that's just me.

I do things that mean more to me these days: I hang out with people I like and don't waste time on the people I don't, I spend more time with my cats and folks, I read more, I watch telly more, I shop more, I eat what I like more. I think I simply treasure what I love more and I most certainly cherish life more.

Last night my Dad and I went for a nice sushi dinner and then shopped for chocolates. I picked two metal dollhouses I liked while telling the smiling chocolate shop lady that the last time my Dad had bought me dollhouses was some 30 years ago. Dad insisted on paying for them. And then I say, hey give them to me for my birthday. He smiled. Maybe birthdays aren't so bad after all. I still have presents to look forward to. :D

It is heartening to know that the first stem cell transplant therapy centre has opened in Singapore. The Haematology and Stem Cell Transplant Centre can be found in Mount Elizabeth Hospital where it offers treatment for patients with advanced cancer and blood disorders.

As explained by its medical director, Dr Patrick Tan, "stem cells act like 'a Trojan horse' allowing the foreign white blood cells, which the body would otherwise reject, to help the body fight the cancer. This means that the patient needs less high-dose chemotherapy and recovers faster. The treatment improves the acute leukaemia cure rate in adults from 20 per cent to 80 per cent, and lowers the risk of death from treatment from 20 per cent to 5 per cent."

That's a vast improvement to existing forms of treatment, in my book.

On a impulse, I caught Alien Vs Predator with my Dad last night. We were supposed to go for dinner but an image of 'AvP Sneak Preview' popped into my head and we decided to go and check movie times at the cinema right next to the restaurant where we were going to eat at. And there it was, short queue, no kids, and AvP at 7.10pm, which was now.

We got a decent corner seat in the giant cinema, and the movie started. At the end of it, I was wowed, and so was Dad. It was very cool, and what a ending! Way better than Freddy Vs Jason. A great back story, good-looking cast members, and a nice twist. Definitely worth the ticket price. :D

I know the reviewer at MSNBC slammed it, along with Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat, which is a good indication of his taste. Nevertheless, I can't expect everyone to appreciate what we horror/sci-fi fans do: a rockin' cool cult movie.

Stephen Hawking has resolved the old conundrum about black holes sucking up material and them going into parallel universes. They don't.

Instead, they get spat out after the black holes die.

An excerpt:

"FAMED astrophysicist Stephen Hawking yesterday revealed his new theory that black holes, the mysterious massive vortexes formed from collapsed stars, do not destroy everything they consume but instead eventually fire out matter and energy in a mangled form.

Professor Hawking's radical new thinking was presented in a paper to the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin.

It capped his three-decade struggle to explain an elemental paradox in scientific thinking: How can black holes destroy all traces of consumed matter and energy, as Prof Hawking long believed, when subatomic theory says such elements must survive in some form?

Prof Hawking's answer is that the black holes hold their contents for eons but they themselves eventually deteriorate and die. As the black hole disintegrates, they send their transformed contents back out into the infinite universal horizons from whence they came.

Previously, Prof Hawking, 62, had held out the possibility that disappearing matter travels through the black hole to a new parallel universe - the very stuff of most visionary science fiction.

"There is no baby universe branching off, as I once thought. The information remains firmly in our universe," Prof Hawking said in a copy of his speech distributed just before he appeared at the conference.

"I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes," he said. "If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form, which contains the information about what you were like, but in an unrecognisable state.

It is great to solve a problem that has been troubling me for nearly 30 years, even though the answer is less exciting than the alternative I suggested."

See full story.