Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

The Chowick seat

The new seat is actually named Botany, but it was proposed to name Howick before, and is bit fun to keep it this way. Read more

Emm....

Somebody just forwarded me this:

Bad guys really do get the most girls - New Scientist

However, there is a down side of it. Bad guys attract more girls, but it is very difficult to have a long term relationship.

Just little bit of my thoughts.

From evolutionary standpoint I think short relationship is a good thing. If you still remember your sixth form biology, you should be able to recall that all living organisms have only one sole purpose: to pass on the genes.

Short terms can produce a lot offspring.

However, that only applies to the prehistoric society.

In a modern society like the one we got here, more children means more responsibility to the father, thus requiring a lot of energy from the father side to raise those children. However, Men are pretty good at escaping from responsibilities, so that might be OK.

But if a father cannot invest enough resource to his children, they are more likely to fail in this very competitive society.

Now those children have two options: be evil just like their father did, or the genes cease to pass on from there.

I think the first scenario happens more in our society.

Compare with that, good guy  have enough energy and resource to invest on his children, make his children strong and can withstand the competition, thus has a higher chance to pass the genes on.

From genetic point of view, the competition between the good and bad guys is more like a tie, there's no right or wrong strategy for this. It's just a choice between produce very few offspring and help them survive, or many offspring but let the nature(society) to select who survive.

So be good or bad? Your choice.

But based on my common sense, I prefer the "good guy" strategy. Produce offspring requires a lot of energy too:), especially for the mother side, if only a very small fraction of offspring produced can survive, it is not sensible to produce them at a large quantity.

Nah, I haven't been touching my biology book for years, the comments above are just for fun, don't take it seriously.

Softly, softly

The wave of crimes happened in South Auckland ([1],[2],[3]) are, yes, very sad, especially when all three victims are ethnic minorities.

However, I have no reason to panic.

If my memory serves me right, the crime rate have been gradually decreasing since the abolishment of capital punishment. Read more

Please help China’s earthquake victims

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Sichuan Province, China has so far killed 20,000 people in the area, with millions affected.

This death toll is expected to reach 50,000 in near future as more bodies recovered from under the rubbles.

Those who survived are in urgent need of clean water, food, proper shelter and medicines or they may soon facing new disasters like starvation and diseases.

Sichuan is my home province. I have many friends and relatives live in the area. All of them survived, but for some, their houses, their possessions, everything they had have been lost. They are tramatised and don't know how to live through.

I cannot imagine the mental suffers people who lost their family members, their friends, their beloved ones are now having.

A lot of schools collapsed in the earthquake. Hundreds of students are still stranded under tons of rubbles. For one town, 80% of young generation might be lost in this disaster. I cannot imagine what enormous amount of courage would required to help those parents to live through this hard time.

Even a big country like China cannot cope a natural disaster in this scale. There is a shortage of tents, clean water, and transport equipment to get those aids to the people affected. Lightweight rescue tools such as hammer and jack are also in desperate shortage.

We have the power to help.

We may not have the ability to resurge those who passed away in this very unfortunate natural disaster, but we can help by reduce amount of the unneccessary death after the disaster simply just because there is lack of clean water or food.

With your donation, we can provide the people affected food and clean water to help them survive through possibly hardest time of their lives.

Most importantly, our help give them hope. They will know that they are not alone, people around the world care about them, and want help them to live on, to rebuild their home, their once a peaceful town in  beautiful mountain valleys.

This appeal is also very personal. I've been to many of the towns destoryed in this earthquake many times before: the region was my usual summer camp ground. Please take my word, the people there were the friendliest and kindest locals I've never seen in other parts of China and the World. I really don't know what they have done to deserve such a punishment.

Red Cross New Zealand and around the world are now taking donations. If you are reading this from New Zealand, please visit here to make a donation(select campaign "China Earthquake"). If you are reading in other parts of the World, please contact your local Red Cross, Red Crescent or Red Crystal to ask the details on how to make a donation to help china earthquake victims or visit their website.

There is a chinese proverb says something like "a picture's worth a thousand words".If all I said cannot persuade you to help them, I think you should have a look this photo (warning: shock picture)before you turn down my appeal.

the railway buyback

I'm quite surprised to see how many people are objecting the recent buy back of NZ's railway system.

I've been settled here for years now, and this is the first time that I see New Zealand Government actually knows how to plan ahead - with the oil price peaking everyday, even a fool should know that we will become more dependent on public transport system in the future.

If you are a policy maker or a planner, you'll know how difficult it is to get all the stuffs work together to maximise the benfit for NZers when the foreign ownership is involved or you don't have every thing in your control. Yes the government may willing to servicing the people, but all those private businesses are there to make profit, and the New Zealand people's benefit is not top of their agenda.

It is a fact that the passenger train service were dying in last tne years. The reason is simple - for private ownership, the passenger services make less profit, there is no incentive for private company to improve its services.

The way we travel will inevitably change. So soon or later, we'll have to buy our transport system back in order to provide a not for profit service. So it's better to buy it back now when the country is still generating revenue; and, also the later you buy, the more you'll pay.

Keep bear in mind that we are living in a business world with "realities". If we only react when the situation gets desperate, we sure open a huge opportunity for all the highway robbers out there.

State ownership is not a bad thing. The bad thing happens when the state isn't willing to invest the money into those services. That's the thing we should avoid, not the state ownership itself.

I wonder those people who are saying this buy back is another "labour vote buying strategy" lives in the same world with me: where the oil price is soaring, and the global warming is become a world wide issue. The world is not all about politics, it's about our ordinary people's ordinary daily life, and our future needs to be secured.

I was planning to vote National this year, but Mr Key's comment on this issue really makes me worried.

RSS Awareness Day

Apart from the May Day, some people suggested to make today also the "RSS Awareness Day"

If you don't know what "RSS" is and how to use it, this site does a much better explanation than I do. Have a read, I think you'll benefit from it.

It certainly benefited me. I subscribed tens of news sources and hundreds of blogs. It's just literally impossible to open each site and whether it has been updated.

Then the RSS come to rescure. Through an RSS reader, I can see all updates from all sites I subscribed in one place and only to read stuffs I'm interested in. If you subscribed an RSS document (we call it feed, which if you look up, you'll see a yellowish square icon at right hand end of your address bar) like mine, you don't even have to open my blog again - I output full text to my feed, so you can read them in your feed aggregator.

Most websites and blogs have that yellowish icon. If you click on it, you will get the RSS feed.

What I've found really surprising is that only 6% of world's internet users use RSS. I think the major barrier of introducing RSS to more people is that the whole thing is still bit too complex for some people (especially for those who type www.google.aol in their address bar), they don't understand how HTML works but they know how to visit a website. Well that's good enough for ordinary people, isn't it?

The same should apply to RSS. People don't have to know what RSS stands for, they don't have to know how it works, the only thing they need to know, is how to use it, in the simplest way, which requires quite an effort from major websites and communties and still has a long way to go.