Piston spudgun

under construction

Newton hawkers overcharging

This is one of the few times that such a case like makes it to the newspapers.

Of course, we know that this sort of things is pretty rife here: Sim Lim square, car workshops making false insurance claims, various shops all over the place, etc.

People may compare and ask why the authorities only seem to respond to tourists getting ripped off and not locals, but enough has been said on that on the blogosphere.

If this continues unabated, sooner or later Singapore is going to go down.

Why do most people trust Japanese or Swiss products and are willing to pay more for them over Chinese products? Simple. Trust. They trust that the product is built to quality standards and works. And to gain people's trust, one needs honesty. Like not substituting inferior parts or defective goods.

The same things apply to just about any other sector, and as a country even more so for Singapore. We have no resources, relatively little history, and definitely no large market like China that might attract the rest of the world. This means that the only thing that we have to justify paying more than any other regional country is in these soft values - honesty, clean government, stability and such.

Plenty of tourists come here because they want to see somewhere without the corruption and traps normally seen elsewhere around the region.

If we Singaporeans are perceived to be dishonest cheats trying to rip people off, we can soon expect us as a whole - and not just our tourist industry - to be hit big time.

The Budget

This year's Budget comes amid a time of great recession. Never before has the growth forecast been revised TWICE in rapid succession before a budget announcement.

Despite that, I'm impressed by the measures put up by the Government in this year's Budget.

The Government's focus on saving jobs is a lot better than welfare schemes: it at gives people something productive to do, and more importantly, gives them a guaranteed income that they have control over. When people are on welfare, they don't spend so much, simply because they don't feel that they have the control over their cashflow. Of course, something has to be done to help those already retrenched, but schemes to help them like workplace training & allowances have already been in place for some time, so it's not worth mentioning them here.

However, it's not very clear whether this would apply to contract workers: they are the most vulnerable to job cuts, since they aren't even permanent staff. Hopefully something can be done to help them.

It's also good that the Government is also looking at the long term issues. Historically, recessions were the best times to make investment, since everything is going at pretty cheap prices.

Once the construction contracts from the boom time are completed and the construction industry gets idle, it would be a good time for the Government to use to make Singapore's infrastructure more elderly friendly.

However, I'm not so sure about having a blanket property tax rebate. Giving the rebate to landlords and encouraging them to pass it on to tenants is essentially giving the landlords money: it's highly unlikely that greedy landlords will pass the savings on, and this was pretty much the case the last few times that this was done.

As it is now, some greedy landlords are still trying to increase prices. Given this, probably a better method might be to put up some sort of rental price control - in principle restricting rental prices to a reasonable price. Landlords would have no choice but to rent out anyway, since the building can't be moved and they still have to maintain and pay property tax for the property.

Anyway, hope that this Budget helps Singapore tide over the recession.

Sri Lanka and the LTTE

This destructive and unnecessary entire multi-decade long civil war is the sad result of racist discrimination and the vicious cycle that occurred after that. Sri Lanka is a lot worse off than before the crisis.

With all sorts of institutionalized discrimination against Tamils being set up by the new Sinhalese majority government upon independence, it's no surprise that the Tamils started forming political groups, which eventually formed a coalition to oppose all these changes.

When a minority is unable to get their rights through the legislative processes, they will resort to armed struggle, and that is precisely what is happening here. With nothing being gained from negotiations, a lot of Tamils have given up on politics and resorted to armed struggle. To make things worse, Vellupilai Prabkharan's LTTE took control of this by ruthlessly destroying the other groups and killing their leaders.

For a long time, it used to be like this: Sri Lankan military mounts campaign, gains back territory, then a internationally brokered ceasefire which the LTTE regroups, then one side would break the ceasefire and the LTTE would come back and conquer the territories, and then the cycle restarted. In short, a never ending vicious cycle.

From a military standpoint, the LTTE is a formidable foe for the Sri Lankan military. Having advanced weapons like thermobaric weapons and mini submersibles, and the use of unethical / unlawful tactics and methods, like hijacking commercial ships, it is no surprise that they are very capable indeed.

However, like quite a lot of other terrorist groups around, Prabkharan is playing his cards wrong. No matter what equipment they have or they carry out, there's no way that the LTTE can win militarily - it can't match the Sri Lankan armed forces if they really decide to fight them out. To add to that, the LTTE’s various atrocities against Tamil people, like killing other Tamil politicians, simply exposes him as a power hungry murderer, not a freedom fighter for the Tamil people.

The LTTE’s idea of peace negotiations as a rearming time might seem smart in the short term, but in the long term people realize that they don’t want peace and will go crush them totally at the next opportunity, like what is going on now.

The best effect that the LTTE can achieve has already been achieved: drawing the Sri Lankan government into a long drawn out guerrilla war like the Viet Cong did in the Vietnam War. However, nobody benefits anyway: it only makes Sri Lankans, regardless of race, suffer. The only person probably benefiting out of this is Prabkharan himself, relying on the bloodshed for power.

For the Sri Lankan government, they must realize that military might alone cannot solve the problem by itself, like as in previous campaigns. To end it once and for all, they must solve the root cause of the whole problem – the discrimination that the Tamils face and their poverty from all these years of violence. To do that, they would have to remove all these barriers as well as allow Tamils more participation in politics, to actually show them that politics is more effective than armed struggle. This would deprive the LTTE of whatever legitimacy it might have as freedom fighters. However, it is easier said than done.

With that, hopefully the Sri Lankan government can end this vicious cycle once and for all.

Israel, Hamas and Palestine

Conflict has flared up once again along the Gaza Strip.

On one side, airstrikes. On the other side, militants and rockets.

It's pretty obvious that a lot of this is politically motivated by Israeli leaders trying to pander to the right wing vote, but votes or not, bombing Gaza on such a scale is quite a dumb move.

As I wrote about China and Tibet, brute force isn’t very effective in a counter insurgency campaign.

Even if you ignore military complications (that is another topic altogether), it's not very smart to try to totally obliterate Hamas. Hamas isn’t exactly very competent; the fact that the Israelis managed to kill so many their leaders suggests that they have penetrated their network. However, as the root cause of Hamas' existence - hate of Israeli - and the will to achieve that is still there, new groups will spring up even if Hamas is gone.

Given that, Israel should have tried to maintain the status quo. It's essentially playing mole with Hamas: wherever Hamas pops up, whack it down, but never totally kill them off. The occasional irritation that Hamas might cause this way is a lot more manageable than having some new, more competent outfit (think: another Hezbollah) spring up.

Unlike China in Tibet, Israel can’t shut off the Western media by threatening boycotts or having gangs of worked up nationalistic students cause trouble in foreign capitals, so mass media cannot be avoided.

Nothing draws reporters and works us up more than seeing innocent helpless civilians suffer. And Hamas, like any other terrorist group, loves to use innocent civilians as human shields, and get journalists to come watch them get killed in the crossfire so as to turn international opinion against their enemy.

However, even if Israel can’t use this tactic (as if they want to), they can use the media too. They should have publicized the carnage of every rocket attack and suicide bombing in the international press so as to work up international opinion, and justify having such a campaign. Even if they can’t get something as emotion wrenching as 911, Beslan or Mumbai, the subconscious effect of seeing suicide bombing / rocket victims everyday on an international audience is extremely powerful.

Sanctions of essential needs should never have been implemented. Other than driving the Palestinians into poverty, which they would naturally hate Israel for, it's impossible for Israel to regulate the smuggling - it's not possible to see from an airplane whether food or weapons is passing through a tunnel.

History has shown that when people are deprived of the opportunity to make a decent living, they get desperate enough to get into wars and revolutions - like the French, Russian, Chinese and plenty of others. What they should have done is to allow trade with the outside world - and only ban the weapons. It is well known that if people have the opportunities to earn a decent living, most of them would rather live decently in peace than go fight for whatever cause. If the Israelis would do that, the extremists would lose their "trying to help oppressed Muslims" image and be exposed as irrational warmongers.

It’s time for the Israeli right wingers to learn that overpowering response doesn’t necessarily generate the best results.

Gift giving

Now, as Christmas draws near, we see the usual barrage of gift giving and crazed shopping. As retailers love to advertise, giving gifts to people are a sign of how much you value them.

But is it really necessary to give gifts to friends?

We always value the intangible things of friendship more than the tangible - a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on, a helping hand in their times of trouble. These are unique things about friendship that cannot be found anywhere else. If not, then it wouldn't be friendship anymore, but rather a parasitic relationship.

Opportunity cost also factors in here. Will giving an expensive gift make the person happier? Usually not, particularly in our consumer society. And for us students, should we be spending our parents' hard earned money so easily?

Given that, I don't think I'll be giving the retailers much business this Christmas.

Spudgun #1: The First Step

What is a spudgun?

Essentially, a spudgun is a homemade cannon, made from readily available materials. Like just about all firearms, its purpose is accelerate a projectile down the barrel and shoot it some distance.

The Spudfiles wiki has a pretty good writeup about the different types of spudguns: http://www.spudfiles.com/spud_wiki/index.php?title=What_is_a_spudgun%3F

Here, the focus is on pneumatic spudguns, since I only build pneumatics. Reason is simple: combustions need fuel, which means paying for every shot. A pneumatic can easily use a bicycle pump and muscle power, which doesn't cost money.

While obviously much less powerful than a real gun of equivalent size, a spudgun is much more versatile: pretty much anything can be a projectile, so long as it can go down the barrel.

Of course, like all guns, spudguns can be dangerous. Like real firearms, they can also explode, not to mention the obvious danger of someone getting shot. So, safety must be observed.

The First Step

Basically, all pneumatics can be split into 3 parts: the chamber to store compressed gas, the valve, and the barrel. Most of the improvements in spudguns are in the valve anyway.

This is my first spudgun, made in May 2008. It is extremely simple, utilizing a simple ball valve. While highly inefficient, the ball valve needs no modifications, is simple to assemble and is extremely reliable. It took 15 minutes to build and about S$10.

Here is a picture of the gun:

Most of the gun was constructed from PVC plumbing fittings. It is cheap, lightweight, and easy to obtain in various sizes, making it ideal. However, due to the high pressures involved here, only high pressure rated pipe can be used. It must also be solvent welded properly. Improper construction or insufficiently pressure rated pipe runs the risk of an explosion, which can injure or even kill.

The chamber is a used 500ml PET Coke bottle. The threads used for capping the bottle were filed off and the bottle neck epoxied into the 3/4” end of a 3/4”-1/2” PVC reducer fitting. A hole was drilled at the back of the bottle and a Schrader valve attached into the hole.

The Schrader valve was taken off a used bicycle tyre and the rubber removed from it. This is because epoxy does not bond to rubber, and it would thus leak with the rubber on.

There are no aiming sights fitted because ammo and firing pressure is never constant, and thus calibrating it is pointless.

Total cost: $15. Time spent building: $15.

Pressure testing (underwater) has shown that the Coke bottle chamber can withstand at least 160 psi, according to my bicycle pump gauge. Nevertheless, as PVC will degrade in sunlight, the gun must be stored out of sunlight.

Performance wise, it wasn't very efficient, but the sheer chamber volume gave it a lot of power: an AA battery shot at 120 psi at an angle of around 80 degrees can easily go over 5 storeys, as shown in the video.

The Next Step: PVC chambers

The first spudgun, though powerful, had one problem: the bottle wasn’t specifically designed for such high pressures and I had no idea how long it could last at the high pressures that I was using at. Not worth the risk anyway.

Hence, the next step was to simply switch PVC pipe instead of a Coke bottle for a chamber.

2 such guns were made: 1 with a chamber about the same volume as the coke bottle, and another with a very small chamber.

The first one had little difference from the original, while the underpowered gun was used for teaching purposes: with such low power, there was little risk of damage if someone used it wrongly.

The coke bottle ones were then decommissioned and given to Mr Jason Chan as a teaching aid for teaching the general gas law. It essentially allows students to see for themselves what happens at high pressures.