New Zealand Economic View
On BBC’s World Business Report (10 Mar 2011), discussing the rate cut announced by the RBNZ, and New Zealand’s prospects following last month’s earthquake.
Revolutionizing Renewable Energy and Fashion
I went to the Earth Awards last week, and got to see some innovative ‘green’ solutions.. And, got to blog about it at the paper..
David Wendell wants to revolutionize renewable energy by taking a page out of nature’s book, and improving it. His new technology captures carbon and transforms it into sugar — something that plants do naturally — more efficiently using artificial photosynthetic foam. The foam developed by Mr. Wendell and his colleague Carlo Montemagno, both professors at the University of Cincinnati, was one of six finalists at the Earth Awards 2010 held yesterday in London, eventually winning the $50,000 prize.
Read the full post here
Life is..
I make plans, dream little dreams, dream bigger ones.
Think of how I’ll be when I finally grow up.. Of all the things I want to do, places I want to see, people I want to be.
But life? Life doesn’t care so much about the five year plans and long-term goals.
Life is chilly Thursday evenings spent watching a week’s worth of House episodes.
Life is searching for a particular song on a Saturday afternoon and then listening to it all weekend.
Life is dirty dishes piling up in a tiny kitchen and finding one purple-mauve sock and never figuring out where the other one went.
Life is Sunday afternoons spent with friends and home cooked meals and taking back leftovers in Tupperware boxes.
As the man said,
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans
- John Lennon
Ten Years Ago
- I did not own a mobile phone. This was probably a good thing, since mobile phones were the size of a ham radio – not including the extendable antenna
- The computer I used had a CRT monitor, as did my television
- There was no Facebook
- There was also no broadband. You could fire up the computer, go make a cup of tea, catch the headlines on the 10pm news, and it would just about be ready for browsing.
- We caught the news once a day – at 10pm, and Breaking News really meant breaking news – not what Rakhee Sawant wore to a party last night
- Reality TV meant Candid Camera
- I was in high school, and had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up (The latter still holds true)
I wonder what the next ten years will bring!
Review : Sam’s Story by Elmo Jayawardena
Earlier this month, Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times about the price of war, and why it continues to be easy to wage
The reason it is so easy for the U.S. to declare wars, and to continue fighting year after year after year, is because so few Americans feel the actual pain of those wars. We’ve been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan longer than we fought in World Wars I and II combined. If voters had to choose right now between instituting a draft or exiting Afghanistan and Iraq, the troops would be out of those two countries in a heartbeat.
War everywhere exacts a disproportionate toll on the poor, and Sri Lanka is no exception. In this brilliant and nuanced debut novel, Elmo Jayawardena tells the story of the civil war that has raged for decades, and its impact on everyday life. Set in the turn of the century, it paints a nuanced and moving portrait of Sam, a simpleton who comes to ‘River House’ to work as a houseboy, and the world as he perceives it. A compact and powerful novella, it succeeds in converting a politicized conflict of ‘One’ vs the ‘Other’ into a personal, intimate one. As the protagonist says towards the end of the story,
..the fighting and the war had become very personal… It had crossed all the barriers that divided us and had come life a thief to our River House
One of the most absorbing books I’ve read all year!
