Sharkwater

the movie

hearing like a dolphin

It is well known that cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises) hear with their lower jawbone. More specifically, the fat-filled lower jawbone conducts sound waves through the jaw to bones in the middle ears. With that in mind.. doesn't this look familiar?

"User can hear voice of caller only by contacting the bone conduction speaker on his/her head…to solve problem of communication in noisy place and for old people and people with auditory handicap." - Pantech

Talk about biomimicry. haha.

'Greening' my diet

One of my new year resolutions is to be vegetarian at least once a week. In fact.. the long term (ideal) plan is to go full-fledged vegetarian in 5 years.

Thinking of gg vegetarian not only for vanity reasons. some interesting well-referenced facts from govegan.com :

• 2006 UN report: Raising animals for food, the report said, is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems"
• more than 70 percent of the grains and cereals we grow go to farmed animals
• fish on fish farms must be fed 5 pounds of wild-caught fish to produce one pound of farmed fish flesh
• An area of rainforest the size of seven football fields is destroyed every minute to make room for grazing cattle, but each vegetarian saves 1 acre of trees every year
  
• You save more water by not eating pound a beef than you do by not showering for an entire year

Of course, the biggest reason for me to go vegetarian is that the world is running out of fish. then you may ask why don't I just stop eating seafood and continue guzzling meat. well, for the simple and not very well known reason (proven by the exclamation on my brother's face) that the use of fish meal in animal feed is one of the contributing factors of overfishing.

I'm sure there are people like me who know how bad meat eating is for the environment and want to change their diet, but we just can't bear to give it up.. I have to admit that even though I'm not a big fan of meat, its been hard for me even to go vegetarian once a week - especially when I meet friends to eat out at least once a day. Reminder to self: don't go to Adam Road Food Market on my veg-day. No vegetarian options AT ALL. Well, alternatively I can opt to eat meats and fish that have been farmed in a environmentally friendly manner. but.. seriously in Singapore the consumer awareness is just not there. and when pple don't demand for such information, no one bothers to advertise it.

Guess I'll just have to stick to the vegetarian diet.

Baby steps man.. baby steps.

Story of Stuff

Great video on the world's consumption patterns.

buy buy buy.. definitely singaporean too.

*back blogged* read up on Buy Nothing Day here.

Tips for being Green in Singapore

Christmas at CJ

Had a special christmas this year helping Koksheng with his Chek Jawa mortality and recruitment project. Here's us toasting champagne on the intertidal. A memorable first for me. Glad kenny had the chance to see CJ for the first time too. Before this I haven't been to Ubin for the longest time, so even though I was told the diversity of CJ critters has gone down due to lower salinity, the variety of stuff I saw was still exciting - to me la.

We (Liana, me, Kenny, Shuyi) had a fun time surveying peacock anemones, with Liana being the head peacock molester. Other great sightings include a cake seastar, gazillion common seastars and sand stars, flowercrabs - and more that I couldn't take photos of coz I stupidly brought a full SD card. grrr.. anyhow.. will upload pix when dear JUAN has time to pass me photos. :) meanwhile, check out KS's collage of the day's survey here and Shuyi's photos here.

P.S.: anyone wanna go Penggarang to cycle? :)

Dreaming of a Green Christmas

*back blogged*

VideoJug: How To Have A Green Christmas

Christmas time.. time to share our love.. *in the tune of cheesy Backstreetboys song* - yes la.. that was my era.

Tis the season for the retail pple to hear the cash registers ring with big spenders buying all kinds of unnecessary gifts and way too much christmas food. While squeezing my way through the throngs of last minute gift shoppers (all who think SG has way too many pple say 'ay!'. AYYY!!!) in vivocity this weekend, couldn't help but wonder how many Singaporeans think about the amount of wastage we create every christmas. ehem, do remember that Singapore is the ONLY country in the world that dedicates an entire island just for waste disposal.

I guess for me personally it's easy to pull out the 'green' card coz my family and even among friend I don't really have the whole big gift exchange thing gg on. It also helps that I like making/ baking (gingerbreadman!) my own gifts and my family has started getting conscious about not buying too much food for this years christmas dinner - for example, leave out the weird tasting varieties of ham that no one touched last year and get only the family favourite. But hey I don't think it's THAT hard to make a little effort in making your holiday season a little more Earth-friendly.. Read some green christmas ideas here and here.

Think the underlying principle should be this.. 'want not, waste not.'

Merry yuletide.. and in the words of my aussie friends.. stay greeen!