Oh well, I am not very good at keeping up a current affairs blog. Hopefully I get better at it? anyway, these are posts edited from a homework assignment I had on sustainable chemistry, hope you find it interesting.

the following is a brief review of five different articles;

( click here to read reviews )

thereafter I also reviewed, in slightly greater length, the idea of Earthships. They are are among a class of carbon-neutral buildings that, in our urbanising and urbanised world, represent the intersection of architecture, ecology, biology and environmental awareness. Each earthship is typically self-sufficient in electricity, lighting, water and sewage, among others. Some can even be self-sufficient in food, depending on much-used water and processed sewage for fertilisation; others can host internet connections and be otherwise indistinguishable from regular houses. Heating-wise the earthship maintains temperatures by alternating between the deeper earth crust (58 deg C) and the more rapidly changing surface.

Good grief, we're all ants crawling on orange peel. (I was looking at a globe.) Anyway this is how it works:



I think the concept of the earthship is well-designed and especially suitable for our modernised lifestyles; unlike the usual pastoralist back-to-nature demands of many environmentalists, the earthship reuses trash to create a whole new livable and self-sustaining structure. Mike Reynolds, the pioneer behind this affair, ran up against walls of bureaucratic limitations that didn’t know how to deal with houses made of trash. Many traditional houses – like those made of reeds, or dug underground, or made from sand and stone in Mali or whatever – have the same carbon-neutrality but one cannot argue they fit well into modern life.

( more about earthships... )

I end off with a quote from the movie "Wall Street- Money Never Sleeps" - "green is the new bubble". But will this bubble last or will the evolutionary one pop first?

Galumphing along the Internet I came across this article by the BBC about Animal Ethics and Eating Meat;

Essentially,

• Is it wrong in principle to raise and kill animals so that human beings can eat meat and fish?
• Does it stop being wrong if the processes involved are carried out humanely?

( article under cut, please read original at BBC because this is only for archival purposes! )

Finally, an article that dissects the ethics of eating meat in a cogent philosophical manner. Not preaching, merely providing a mental exercise that had led me to stop eating meat altogether. All the best :)

Today's class elicited a web of complicated confusion in me, not least about how one loan and one paper-documented promise of money can be abstracted into like six layers of financial products. More on that later, first I must launch into what will look like a non sequitur anecdote.

So I was ambling home and reading the news on my phone, and one article in the New York Times caught my eye. The New York city mayor, Messr Michael Bloomberg, has declared that food stamps cannot be used to buy sodas and other sugary drinks. That might actually seem commonsensical, since if you're a taxpayer you won't really enjoy the idea of having your money go into giving someone else diabetes, which would use more of your money to fund Social Security to subsidise said welfare recipient's medical bills.

I quote,


Amazing man. I want a non-smoking law to cover my entire residential area!  (Don't forget the concrete dust from all the incessant rebuilding, symptoms of Singapore's city dysmorphic disorder-.-)

Amidst my fantasies of a smoke-free, meat-free happy island, what struck me most was Mayor Bloomberg's keen interest in public health, in making decisions that aren't probably very immediately popular but have longer term net benefits. The niceties are great, no doubt - though the fact that I call his justifications and explanations that nobody will be banned from buying sodas a 'nicety' says something about my own social views - I do wish Singaporean politicans and policymakers would at least work a bit more towards the idea that the people's sentiments are important and right at least some of the time, if not all of the time, and not only right before election times.

( more rambling under cut )

Here I end my rather disjointed post that actually just says I have a lot more to learn about economics. Which is itself strikingly fascinating, even if the study of it should not divorced from other fields...

It pains me that I don't have as much time as I like to blog (who am I kidding, everything is free to be chosen from) but this article really struck me. Commentary alternated.


What -is- democracy? The ideas everyone has vary, from the most basic rituals of elections to the elusive goals of Greek democracy, where every individual participated in the decisionmaking process.
( Read more... )

/edit: Sorry, this was supposed to be put up quite a while ago. Einstein's quote comes to mind;

( photos )

Replied them in a snarky handwritten note stuck into their "YES" letter, all stickers blazing intact. They send puerile crap then wonder why people stop subscribing?!

so this is only my second post upon launching a public blog, after surfing the blogosphere for at least one and a half years, Here goes nothing-

Mathia Lee's article about tapping different schools of wisdom quite struck me when I read it on my phone; I quote a particular segment.

"With one group of Christian friends, we’ve come together to discuss what Christianity really entails, what’s the parts that are adulterated by culture, politics, economics etc etc...........With another group of friends, these Buddhists, we’ve come together to discuss what various concepts of Buddhism really mean in a tangible fashion, eg ‘does Non-Attachment make one less involved in things that others claim we should be passionate about? How does Non-Attachment work in relationships? What do anything if everything is impermanent?’ It’s all fascinating! With the Singapore Humanism Meetup group, it’s yet another bunch of friends discussing how to live an ethical life, or other topics like education, sexual ethics, death etc from a humanistic, atheistic point of view."

( hmm. )
I suppose I must disclaim that I did not grow up in a religious environment, and as such do not find religious paradigms particularly instinctive. But if pursuing substantial multireligious knowledge can help inform my worldview, whyever not?

Being entrenched in one paradigm, or even one family of paradigms (the Abrahamic religions), can distance you from people who don't understand. (Case in point: I never quite grasped how Dante Alighieri can be so tremendously preoccupied with the idea of hellfire, in his book Inferno. What a masochistic mental torment!)

I am optimistic :) here is a checklist on the religions I plan to find out more about! Any suggestions?

1. Islam
2. Buddhism
3. Hinduism
4. Shintoism (I find it oddly interesting.)

Not including Christianity in there, because Christian websites and books and eager friends are in the plenty. common ground common ground common ground

-mumbles and fades into the background-

 

this letter was sent to Dr Tan Bee Geok, Deputy Director of the Gifted Education Branch, via email, on the 21st of September 2010, at approximately midnight.

---

( my letter )

/edit:

Apologies for the late update, as I had been busy. She replied the very morning, at around 11am;

Dear -,

Thank you for your interest and concern.  Good to know you've benefited
from your study in the GEP.

Identification into the GEP is based on merit and not gender.  There is no
stipulated gender ratio for entry into the GEP and all pupils are
identified based purely on their performance in the GEP selection tests.

You are correct in pointing out that there are more boys than girls in the
GEP. This is not a unique phenomenon. Research has shown that there is
greater variability in the scores of boys in tests assessing cognitive
ability,  with more males at the 2 tails of a score distribution.  As there
are more top male scorers in the selection tests, more males are identified
for the GEP.

Regards.

Dr Tan Bee Geok

after which I replied, which are under cuts to preserve length :) she replied to my reply too, and it ended there.

( my response )

( and her reply. )

I am fairly happy that she took the time to reply me, though I suppose the GEP natural distribution thing really can't be helped; maybe the kind of opportunities GEPers receive should be more spread out throughout the maybe top 20% of the educational cohort?

Meritocracy, meritocracy. Not easy but worthwhile...