Bear's Blog New Zealand (Beta)

Phoenix Spacecraft sucessfully landed on Mars

Phoenix is quite different than Opportunity or Spirit Rover landed in 2004.

It's not a rover and cannot move. It landed in the Mar's north polar region, where scientists thought to be relatively uniform and has no need to move around. I don't quite agree with this though - you never know what you would see out there.

The mission object is quite clear, dig up the soil there to see if any form of water, either solid or liquid, is present.

Quite excited to see what kind of stuffs Phoenix would find.

More on NASA's project site or Wikipedia.

By the way, Spirit and Opportunity Rover, both launched in 2004, exceeded far beyond their expected 90 sol days functional period, and still working quite well at the moment.

Mourning

In case that you have wondered what's happened to my blog, this blog is currently observing the three day mourning period (19-21 may) to the victims of Earthquake in Sichuan Province, China. Most of the coloured bits on this blog have been changed to black and white.(expired)

The current death toll is 30,000+.

Your help is urgently needed.

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.

Earthquake in China

As you may know, a powerful earthquake measured 7.8 on richter scale hit Sichuan, south-western province of China early yesterday. The earthquake was felt from Beijing to as far as Pakistan’s northland region and Bangkok, Thailand.

The latest death toll is at least 10,000 people are feared dead.

I have some close relatives and many friends in the Chengdu City, provincial capital of Sichuan Province and surrounding regions. The city is just located about 100 km away from the epicentre. I’m still unable to contact most of them at the moment due to heavy destruction of telecommunication equipment in the area.

The city government has confirmed that at least 300 people have died. From the ones I’m able to contact, I understand that most of 5 million+ Chengdu people in the city were too afraid to go home, they have spent last night on the street, with occasional heavy rains.

In towns close to the epicentre, which I have visited most of them before, thousands of people have died. In one county alone, up to 5,000 people are feared dead.

And the authority is still struggling to reach the epicentre, towns in Wenchuan County. I’ve been to the region before, I still remember clearly that during my visit I have to be on the car for a whole day to travel just 450km in this mountainous region .

There are at least 60,000 people live just right on the epicentre and we still know nothing about their situation because all the road are blocked and the heavy rain prevented helicopters to reach the region.

I pray for the god to show mercy on those people.

A new look for this blog... and other stuff

I was bit tired with the old theme, the colour suited my taste, but I just simply did too many changes on it, especially on my Chinese Blog , if i don't totally overhaul it and restart again that theme would just become totally unworkable. Read more »

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.