"Maggie"

Everyone here in Magnetic Island call the Island "Maggie". I don't know why so far and i hope i'll figure it out before i leave tomorrow.
Unfortunately, i did not find any sun or beach or reef for today's trip because of the heavy rain. In my Lonely Planet, it said that September is the driest month in the Island and the average rainfall for this month is only 11 mm. So, i think we are so unlucky(or lucky?) that we met the rain during our time here.
By the way, we still have quite a lot of fun by doing some bushing walking in the rain. Some experience i haven't have too much and walking in the rain made me felt quite good. We still could spot some wildlife, such as Koala and rock wallabies, during our walk.
Tomorrow we'll leave this lovely island and head back to Cairns for the Great Barrie Reef and tropical rainforest.

Mei's Blog: Backpacking

Message from Queensland

I'm having a trip (with my friend Mei) in Queensland for about two weeks. The major things for this tour would be the sun, beaches, underwater world in the Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree Rainforest in Northern Queensland.
Today is the second day of my tour. I am in Magnetic Island at the moment. We took 6 hours bus from Carins down south to Townsville, and then 20 minutes to the Island. So far we haven't see much things yet as we spent too many time on transpotation and other stuffs. But i think things must be better tomorrow as we will have enought time to explore the beauty of the Island and spend some time in the ocean.

CO2 is good?

Another interesting video which is filmed to lobby against naming carbon dioxide as pollutant. Noted that the video clip is produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in the US which is partly funded by Exxon.

View: Global Warming and "Energy"

Two Movie Clips about Global Warming

Two movie clips to share:




(1) Futurama: Global Warming

This one is from my favorite animation Futurama. It uses a funny way to explain global warming. Al Gore also replays this clip in his movie An Inconvenience Truth.

(2) A message from Al Gore

It is an conversation between Al Gore and Blender about Gore's movie. Blender is the main character of Futurama.

False Sense of Eco-Satisfaction

Source: John Fewings Cartoon

There are heaps of “environmentally friendly” or “eco-friendly” products/services in the market. However, using these kinds of products/services doesn’t mean that we are doing something good to our environment. One most common example is the use of biodegradable plastic bags.

Recently, I had an interesting discussion with a man in a liquor store about plastic bag alternative. The liquor man is quite conscious about environmental issues and he is already using different alternative to reduce his business’s plastic bag consumption. He chooses to use bio-degradable plastic bags as alternative as he thought other alternative such as paper or cardboard need to chop a lot of trees and it is not good to our environment, while bio-degradable is made from starch and other degradable material which won’t harm our environmental like normal plastic bags. He wants the Australian government to substitute billions of shopping bags with biodegradable bags to solve the environmental problems created by plastic bags.

To certain extent, he is correct. But there are still lots of issues related to biodegradable bags. First of all, many of them are not 100% degradable. Than, what kind of chemicals they release when they break down in water, sun and in landfill is still uncertain, and the leftover pieces could be just as harmful as normal plastic bags. There is also an issue of the short term harmful effect to wildlife: until biodegradable products actually break down they still pose the same danger as non-biodegradable plastic bags. What more important is using biodegradable shopping bags may promote littering as people think the bags will break down in the environment no matter how they are disposed of.

Having such false sense of eco-satisfaction is very dangerous as people are not able to recognize what is being wrong and fail to figure out further improvement. The other similar example is the use of green energy. Shifting to renewable energy is good to our environment but if our energy consumption behaviors do not change, our environment won’t be benefited too much by the shift. The root cause of most of environmental problems is all about our consumptive life style.

“Doing good to environment” and “doing less harm to our environment” are fundamentally different. People should not mix these two things together or our environmental progress will remain no change or even stepping backward. Indeed, we should do both things together. We also need to be more conscious about how “green” of those "environmentally friendly" products/services are as well as being more critical about how “green” of our consumption pattern of using these kinds of products/services.

Today's Cartoon

Source: John Fewings Cartoon

Mice Hate Cheese

Caption: “No cheese please!” (Source: Sky News)

The popular legend is that mice like cheese, but this legend is false. According to a new scientific study, mice don't like cheese after all as they would reject something as strong in smell and rich in taste as cheese. They would rather have food with high sugar content such as chocolate or fruit.

I was quite surprised when I saw this news. Since I was a child, I have a strong belief, like millions of children, that the best way to catch a mouse is to entice it into a trap with a tasty chunk of cheese. I never doubt that. Now clearly the supposition of mice liking cheese is just a popular premise.

Well, I have no idea when and who started this myth. But for those who started this lie should have some sort of punishment as they'd created such a big lie!

News: Mice hate cheese, new study reveals

Cryonics: Freezing for the future?

“Cryonics (often mistakenly called "cryogenics") is the practice of cryo-preserving humans or animals that can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine until resuscitation may be possible in the future. The process is not currently reversible, and by law can only be performed on humans after legal death in anticipation that the early stages of clinical death may be reversible in the future”
– Wikipedia Definition

Recently, I heard a story from the TV about an American lady decided to “cryonics” herself before she finished her last breath. Put it into simple, Cryonics is the term for freezing humans to prolong life. People who chose to have Cryonic has a common belief that future medicine will enable molecular-level repair and regeneration their body, disease and aging are also assumed to be reversible after decades or a century. The program also said that people can have different options when doing a cryonics process: for entire body frozen is AUD$160,000, or just have the head preserved at the cut rate of AUD$80,000. The rationales of those who choose the head-only option are hoping that when they are brought back to life, science will give them new bodies as people don't want to bring someone 99.5 years old back in a 99.5-year-old body. The “company” Alcor who provides cryonics services claimed itself is a non-profit organization (located in Scottsdale and Arizona).

Similar to most of the experts and scientists, I am very skeptical about the reversibility of the processes. Although science already have shown that a frozen rabbit kidney can be defrosted and successfully reimplanted it in the living animal, restoring a frozen kidney to an animal in a lab is still a very long way from bringing back to life a human being. No-one has been able to capture the vast complexity of thoughts, memory and personality that makes us what we are. So, for me it is also ethically unacceptable.

Science fiction now is becoming science fact on a daily basis. It is just like what happens in the animation Futurama. Well I would like to live as long as I can, but definitely I don’t want to “prolong” my life for decades or centuries by this kind of freezing process.

Links:
News story: Back from the dead
If you want to bet on the future medicine: Cryonics Institute