Irony of global warming

Lately the weather has been very hot in sunny Sillypore - and it's not helping that our island is SUPER humid! Well, we can all attribute it to global warming. And it is a well known fact that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the primary contributor to global warming.

Well the irony of it, hot weather -> turn on air conditioning -> carbon dioxide emission -> globe gets hotter -> turn down the thermostat further -> more carbon dioxide emitted -> you get the picture

Turning up your thermostat by just two degrees saves 6 percent of heating-related CO2 emissions. That's a reduction of 190 kg of CO2 per year for a typical HDB!

As the world gets more growth, urbanised, we will have more carbon dioxide emission.
My next post will be on growth and prosperity - Another irony. Watch for it.

Cycles

It is said that in everything, there exists a cycle. Like we humans belong to a life cycle of birth, growth, reproduction and ultimately death. It is said that a fruit fly has the shortest life cycle which spans only a week. While us humans have evolved to having a life cycle of about 70-80 years.

We humans also belong to a bigger ecological cycle where our very actions have incurred the wrath of Mother Nature, depleting ozone layers resulting in the phenomenon Global Warming which we are all familar with nowadays. You observe the very cold winters in Europe and Russia and the droughts all over the world. Even in just one continent of Australia, we see bush fires down south and floodings up north. I once read that a 4 degrees celcius rise in global temperatures will melt enough polar ice caps to raise the sea levels which will engulf Singapore.

I believe we all belong in this ecological cycle where there is a feedback loop and slowly but surely, planet Earth will heal itself. But at what severe consequences, given the fact how much of Earth we have already savaged and plundered? And will it be within my lifetime, I can only wait. We all heard about the great floods and ice age and watch them in the movies - 'The Day After Tomorrow' starring Dennis Quaid struck a chord with me as a possible doomsday scenario we might have coming.

I've recently went to the Vivocity National Geographic Store and have set my eyes on the Solio Chargers which look fabulous! And are quite a steal at about S$99 only, with all the handphone/gadget chargers there is on the market but the only problem, it has a limited life span on the batteries of only one year.



They fold into a nice compact mode when not in use.


Still deciding if I should spend my limited GST credits on them to reduce my carbon footprint, and charge my mobile and PSP from it.

As I usually love to digress and remain incoherent in my posts for this is not a GP essay but a personal blog. I return to my topic of being in a cycle.

We humans are also in a cycle where the last 10 years we have seen many of the brightest and elite students around the world scrambling to emulate the success of high paying successful Wall Street bankers, financiers, traders etc. The financial world has indeed welcomed the brain drain from many other industries.

20 years prior to the the brain drain, we saw a technology spurt where Bill Gates (Microsoft), Len Bosack (Cisco), William Hewlett and David Packard (HP), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Ross Freeman (Xilinx), Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Morris Chang (TSMC) and more recently Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google) create communication platforms, software enablers, knowledge/data transfers and exchange, chips and wafers which gave the masses handphones, laptops, gadgets which enable everyone access to knowledge on the internet, communication devices, satellite access maps to see the world. These engineers, school drop-outs did it for the love of creating value from photo/video sharing to VoIP calls which help the world become closer, bridge the gap of information access between countries.

While the recent spurt of greed in the financial world to offer questionable CDOs and loans which lead to the subprime crisis can only come from scumbags who are driven by monetary gains of millions of dollars of salaries and bonuses year after year based on potential future gains which never realised. Do we really need to pay so much to have these top brains before they can work and actually create value?

Akin to me walking into a bank and finding a relationship manager or a personal finance consultant, whom I have paid out fees to have them sell me funds, investment portfolios which might have tanked after a couple of years. Can I blame them? I paid money to someone to take care of it for me. If I had kept it in a biscuit tin at home, the money might have lost out to inflation, currency fluctuations, but at least I have only myself to blame. That being so, I guess I won't be mock for keeping them in biscuit tins, because it can't be as bad as the 30-40% losses Singapore's brightest and most brillant have lost in 8 months and so far demonstrated that buying biscuit tins instead of banks might have been the best investment move these days.

So will all banks around the world soon be nationalised? Will capping salaries at US$500k result in non-competitive, slack culture in the financial world? I guess there will be a cycle to regenerate the financial systems. I believe there will be good people willing to take the job despite the monetary rewards being limited. Have we forgotten the fact that some people do create things for the love of creating value. Perhaps we need to re-define what constitutes good - greed is obviously not the way to go.

With each meltdown or crisis, a new technology/industrial revolution will often begin - Agriculture, Motoring, Steel/Metals, Semiconductors, Dot-com era, Oil Production.

So which cycle will soon follow?

I hope it will be eco-green-bio-related, so that I won't see Mother Nature's wrath in Singapore during my lifetime as many others around the world have seen lately.


Lastly a cycle I hope will not be foregone in the next election - goes out to the greater mortals whom we have entrusted our forefathers' billions. They have painted a wonderful analogy that if we pay peanuts we get monkeys. Right now million dollar peanuts seems to still get monkeys racking up $100 billion losses, I am glad we did not really feed them peanuts, we might all end up moving to other countries being maids and foreign workers. Oh wait, maybe that's why we are now given the option to shift our aged to Malaysia. I hope a cycle will soon come to regenerate our political system. I believe there will be many good Sillyporeans out there who can do a better job than the self-absorbed monkeys we have currently in place and perhaps cost less!


A quote that I really love:

“I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.” - Socrates (Ancient Greek Philosopher, 470 BC-399 BC).

Forget Oil, Solar, Hydrogen, Nuclear

Seeing Kel's latest gadget of a personal solar powered charger which is used to charge probably his mobile, MP3 player and PSP and possibly in future even our bikes.




This is truly an amazing breakthrough for the future - using chemical reaction through a membrane electrode system, a Japanese company called Genepax created a water powered car which can go an hour at 80kmh on a litre of water - using sea, rain or even normal drinking water. - Read more on Engadget.

I hear the oil prices and those cut throat oil producing companies' stock prices dropping soon.



In the meantime solar energy should be the way to go to reduce our carbon footprint- a small traveling fold up solar power pack which could possibly power up a laptop and perhaps Kel's future expansion plans.

You are what you drive? - Cycling is the way to go!

Akin to you are what you eat, I guess taking care of your ride shows the personality of the driver? I beg to differ. Driving a car you desire over what you can afford is probably the deciding factor instead of the specs under the hood or aesthetic reasons. Especially in Singapore where the cost of driving any vehicle is ridiculously more expensive than most parts of the world...which leads to a totally unrelated piece of serious information.

Increasing fuel prices have driven many to alternative fuels such as CNG or biofuels. And the rush to biofuels which in turn have driven prices of commodities like grain up. George Bush wants 15 per cent of American cars to run on biofuels by 2017, which will mean trebling maize production. Europe has a set a transport fuels target of 5.75 per cent from biofuels by 2010. As a result, the price of corn has begun to track that of oil quite closely. And because cattle and chickens are fed on corn – it takes 8kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef – the price has risen as well for meat. So riots are occurring all over the world as most vulnerable people are facing starvation as food shortages grow and cereal prices soar. It threatens to become the biggest crisis of the 21st century. All because of the need to drive.

How did a simple question of are you what you drive lead to such a serious topic of increasing food costs and possible worldwide famine? Well, I guess what led me to this serious post was that I wanted to indicate that my car is getting dirty, 2 weeks of neglect from being too busy and traveling, and the sunny days of May are here, it is covered with dirt and bird poo. And indeed if the car represents the driver, I am indeed a dirty boy! :P But what's more important is to drive safe and to drive less.

Which leads to the fact that Singapore should build more bicycle tracks for alternative mode of transportation other than for recreation - which will then show that the government is understanding and serious about world peace. As the Singapore government has so declared back in 1971 at the Commonwealth meeting.

The Declaration of Commonwealth Principles, 1971

Issued at the Heads of Government Meeting in Singapore on 22 January 1971

1. The Commonwealth of Nations is a voluntary association of independent sovereign states, each responsible for its own policies, consulting and co-operating in the common interests of their peoples and in the promotion of international understanding and world peace.

So effectively by allowing alternative modes of transportation, we will cut down usage of petrol and the dependence of oil which will lower the need for biofuel which will then drive the price down...blah blah..which will lead to world peace.

So gahmen - DO YOUR PART!

Equiping your cars with energy convertors!

Based on my previous entry on killing mother earth with our eagerness to drive fast. All oil guzzlers have to control their usage especially with the rising fuel costs. But what recent studies reveal, will change all that. Coming in the near future! All hail engineers!

In hope of being more earth friendly and energy efficient, researchers have recently came to know that heat makes photons too. Previously the vast majority of photovoltaic ,or solar cells as it is commonly known, capture only photons emitted by the sun, but there many other sources of electromagnetic radiation exist. Since combustion of any kind emits photons in the infra-red (IR) portion of the spectrum, the waste heat produced by generators, combustion engines, etc offers a potential source of radiation for solar cells with the appropriate bandgap.

So effectively, we can place solar cells in close proximity to a combustion heat source and harness that energy. Well won't go into further engineering technical details.

Let's just hope they can find cheap ways of creating thermophotovoltaic devices with low-bandgap materials to exploit low energy, long wavelength IR photons which my car engine emits and the control of excess heat just in case I rev above 7500rpm.

Going for much needed vacation soon...here's my fav Dilbert comic strip for the moment.



Let's end the tough engineering work week I had with a self poking engineer joke - especially about my low pay..man we try to save the world, but we get paid peanuts, in Singapore that is and no I do not mean golden peanuts which charity organisations get over here.

At the end of a job interview, a young Engineer fresh out of NTU was asked, "And what starting salary were you looking for?"
The Engineer replied, "In the neighborhood of $100,000 a year, depending on the benefits package."
The interviewer said, "Well, what would you say to a package of 5-weeks vacation, 14 paid holidays, full medical and dental, company matching retirement fund to 50% of salary, and a company car leased every 2 years - say, a red RX-8?"
The Engineer sat up straight and said, "Wow! Are you kidding?"
And the interviewer replied, "Yeah, but you started it.