Archive | March, 2012

<3 of the week: Light, Renewable Energy and More Light

29 Mar

  • For all the solar energy geeks out there, this GAISMA site will give you peak sun hours (or the amount of sunlight) for almost any location in the world.
  • While we’re on the topic of renewable energy, and light, my friend Ross is spending the month of March travelling across Mexico in a biofuel car. He’s promoting renewable energy and a government campaign to replace millions of inefficient light bulbs. And in true Ross style, he’s doing it in, well, style. You can check out videos of his adventures at his website, Finding Infinity.
  • From Paulo Coelho’s “The Warrior of the Light: A Manual” – well worth a read:

A warrior of light knows that certain moments repeat themselves. He often finds himself faced by the same problems and situations, and seeing these difficult situations return, he grows depressed, thinking that he is incapable of making any progress in life. ’I've been through all this before,’ he says to his heart. ’Yes, you have been through all this before,’ replies his heart. ‘But you have never been beyond it.’ Then the warrior realises that these repeated experiences have but one aim: to teach him what he does not want to learn.

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Image: Some rights reserved by tbone_sandwich

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My kind of art

26 Mar

The Chauvet Cave - 35,000 years old

You are minding your own business.

Maybe you are plugged into your iPod, going for a run. Maybe you are just passing time on a bus, making polite conversation.

But then, suddenly, the world stops.

Something manages to break through. Something manages to make you think, or laugh, or cry, or dream.

Maybe it’s a lyric, telling you what you’ve been thinking, better than you’ve been thinking it.

Maybe it’s a whole song, with a beat so surprising, you stop running and wait until its over, just so you can hear it again.

Maybe it’s a painting, so old, it makes you think that paint lasts a really long time, and maybe paintings are not so hard to understand after all.

Maybe it’s a manifesto which reminds you that you chose this life. You chose the muddier path. And it isn’t always the easier path, but that’s kinda why you chose it.

Maybe it’s something someone says, after which, clear as day, they are holding your heart in their hand. The heart they just saw, or touched, or ripped out.

That’s the moment.

The moment when the world stops, and everything changes.

That’s the moment where I’ve seen my kind of art.

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Image: Wikipedia Commons

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<3 of the week: Religion, more religion, and it has come to this.

22 Mar
  • I recently finish Sam Harris’ Letter’s to a Christian Nation. Of Richard Dawkins ilk, Harris is religiously atheist. He believes all religions are dangerous, and made me think twice when I recently heard a Christian call a Muslim a radical. In his words: “The truth, astonishingly enough, is this: in the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. Western secularists, liberals and moderates have been very slow to understand this. The cause of their confusion is simple: they don’t know what it is like to really believe in God.”
  • While we’re on the theme of religion, Alain de Botton wrote this piece on the decline of religion and what impacts it has had on community. He makes suggestions at what lessons could be drawn from religion in secular communities. I liked this: “Religions seem to know a great deal about our loneliness. Even if we believe very little of what they tell us about the afterlife or the supernatural origins of their doctrines, we can nevertheless admire their understanding of what separates us from strangers and their attempts to melt away one or two of the prejudices that normally prevent us from building connections with others.” 
  • I was reminded this week that not enough people read the web comic xkcd. Above is a recent favourite. After you’ve read it, you need to hover over the comic for the last line. And yes. It has come to this.

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Perhaps some things happen for a reason

19 Mar

I just spent a week in Kuching, Malaysia.

I was meant to spend my week in Kota Kinabaulu, to the north.

I was meant to be hanging out in cafes, night clubs, on beaches.

Instead I faced an airport sales agent who said “sorry, no flights” and a Starbucks.

I found a hostel near to the airport where it was “good to meet people”.

I was meant to have boundless energy on arrival.

I was meant to socialise and make new friends for my week-long holiday.

Instead I faced a body that was still half-lost in the jungle.

A body that was having trouble speaking, writing, concentrating.

The slow return.

Slowly, transitions were made.

There was the giggling man who wished me a good meal. The travel blogger who shared his disappointments with the online world – ‘only travel bloggers read travel blogs’. The Republican who thought the primaries this year were vicious, but that ‘people would forget’. The Canadian who spoke fluent Malayu with Australian-style sarcasm. The German biologist, who should have been Irish, who delighted in wild mushrooms and plants and beetles and bugs.

And then there was the Portlander. A self-described ‘international man of leee-sure’. Who quite literally bounded into my life. Who made me think and dream and laugh. Who opened my eyes to fixies (Kuching-style, where they seemed to be everywhere), life in Kiribati (really) and The Big Lebowski – a comedy film that has been following me around for quite some time.

There were no night clubs, no partying, no real beaches, no coffee shops.

But there were beers, good music, a national park – and a swim in a pool of red water where the sunlight danced around my head.

Oh yes, and then there was -

The bracelet.

Right before I arrived in Kuching I broke a bracelet which my cousin gave me before I left Sydney.

I found a new one.

Exactly the same as the old one.

In the first store I walked into on my mission to replace it.

A coloured world.

I just can’t get myself to believe  ”everything happens for a reason”.

I say this – and the Portlander responds that life is contextual. It isn’t black and white, it’s both.

“It isn’t ‘either, or’.

It is ‘and, also’.”

Perhaps some things don’t happen for a reason.

Perhaps some things do.

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<3 of the week: Homeschooling, Green Star ratings take a leap forward and the inspiration series from Brian Cretin

15 Mar
  • Penelope Trunk writes a lot of stuff that is out there, and sometimes scary. Like this Blueprint for a Women’s Life. I’ve been sitting on her homeschooling blog for awhile – a start up entrepreneur’s take to schooling her kids. This week Penelope took it to the next level by attacking Seth Godin’s recent book on education “Stop Stealing Dreams”, where he apparently claims that homeschooling is inefficient and unrealistic for most parents. “When I first saw this, I was stunned. Seth has built a career on telling people how to push past the status quo. So many parents say they’d homeschool if they had more resources. Seth shows us that resources are not the barrier. Seth’s book is the rationale that parents with unlimited income use for not homeschooling. It’s clear to me that the real reason Seth is not homeschooling is because he thinks he’d be bored doing it. He has bigger fish to fry. He thinks it’s inefficient to spend his days educating his kids when he has such big ideas, and such a big audience waiting to hear them.” 
  • This one is for the Green Building dorks among us. I was excited to read that the Green Building Council of Australia has put a time  limit on advertising a Green Star Design rating - a rating where the developers makes promises about the building they are going to build. Now they have to prove that they’ve actually built as they’ve promised to continue advertising their building as Green Star rated. This is something the industry has been lobbying for – and it is exciting to see it finally happen.

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Corruption – A receipt is not enough

13 Mar

There were signs all over Iloilo City when I was there – urging people to ask for receipts.

(Right next to those asking people to vote NO on the Reproductive Health Bill — making for an interesting political display of corruption and sex.)

Businesses had all sorts of clever incentives to encourage their customers to keep an eye out for their receipts — free goods, deductions from bills, or vouchers for subsequent purchases.

This is motivated by a desire to formalise the economy, reduce corruption — and ostensibly to increase city taxes.

Australia — model nation?

One thing I’ve discovered in my travels this year is that Australians are renowned for being uncorrupt, law-abiding citizens.

When I was in Ghana, a friend told me she wouldn’t move to Australia because “it would be too hard to do business.” In Greece I was told by a former Australian — with eyebrows suggestively raised — that it was “nice” to be able to negotiate directly with the person you are speaking to.

I guess this might be part of the reason I’m so oblivious to corruption. In Ghana I paid a bribe to a police officer without realising. The Philippines is renowned as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and yet, despite doing business there I did not witness to any “unusual” interactions. In Indonesia I baulked at the tax rate, before I was told it was only a “special tax”, applicable only in “special” situations.

I just don’t get it

I just don’t.

I keep having faith in the rules. I just think — well, if you keep following them, you’ll get where you need to get to, eventually. Even where corruption is pervasive. With patience you’ll jump through all the hoops, pass all the red tape.

Except of course, in all those situations when you can’t.

When I was in India, I was told of a dedicated NGO worker who was building schools for disadvantaged kids, and had to pay $2,000 in bribes to extend his visa..

In the Philippines, I was told of a development project which received around $2,000 in funds. But these funds would not be released by the local government, unless a $200 “processing charge” was paid.

When I was in Mauritius, I was told of a lucrative exclusive mobile phone contract which was awarded, after a “gift” of several very luxurious cars was received.

C.K. Prahalad in his book Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid recounts story after story of agricultural workers, who were routinely exploited by the only purchasers they were able to access — middlemen who “weighed products incorrectly” and shifted purchasing prices at a moment’s notice.

What would you do?

I’d like to think I’d be a pillar of society in the face of corruption, just like this inspiring Acumen Fund project who stood his ground and refused to pay any bribe to a local government for his local development project.

But the reality is probably very different.

Would I want to stop working on a school project I was utterly dedicated to? Would I want my development project to stop? Would I want to be responsible for slowing cheap connectivity to Mauritius?

A friend in Nepal related a situation in his engineering work where a contractor had put a significant amount of pressure on him to approve sub-par work. His manager told my friend that he had no choice, he had to sign it off. If he didn’t, he might lose his job.

This reminded me of difficult situations I’d seen the engineers at my former workplace in.

Except in this case, my Nepali friend got paid (a significant sum) to sign it off.

A receipt is not enough

My friend in Mexico told me that I had no idea about how difficult it was to evade corruption. In Mexico she was labelled an evangelical for imploring her friends to stop encouraging corruption. They would laugh at her.

In theory, we all are on the side of my Mexican friend. Corruption reduces access to information — making business and general everyday life trickier. It takes even more power out of the hands of those who can least afford it.

But what would you do if your boss told you you would lose your job if you didn’t approve a set of shoddy documents?

And I’d been thinking it was enough to ask for a receipt.

Image:  Some rights reserved by toastforbrekkie

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<3 of the week: Poverty has fallen, the Arab world’s first ladies and happiness in Indonesian

8 Mar

  • Smiles all round in Indonesia

    Poverty has fallen in every region of the world from 2005 – 2008, according to The Economist this week. “Half the long-term decline is attributable to China… but the main contribution to the recent turnaround is Africa.”

  • A rather sombre story to link to on today, International Women’s Day, is this piece from the Guardian on the Arab world’s first ladies. From Syria: “When we explained that this was the worst kind of tyrant, Sarkozy would say: ‘Bashar protects Christians, and with a wife as modern as his, he can’t be completely bad.’”. This is followed by descriptions of how the household is run on “wildly democratic principles”.
  • After spending some time here, I was not surprised to read that 61% Indonesians rate themselves as “very happy” – making Indonesia the happiest country in the world.  The place is just brimming with laughter.

Image credit: The awesome Deli.

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Simple questions to ask yourself everyday

5 Mar

Sunrise in Nepal

  1. Have you laughed way too much? Meditated and exercised? Eaten well?
  2. Have you shown someone the l-o-v-e?
  3. Have you worked at your art?
  4. Have you pushed the boundaries and done your hard thing for today?

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<3 of the week: Noah and the Whale, happiness as an investment banker and a credit union in Borneo

1 Mar
 

Noah and the Whale
  • I’ve been spending a heap of time in cars listening to NPR’s tiny desk concerts. This week I loved Noah and the Whale. Here is the 11 mins of joy.
  • Study Hacks has written a piece on Lifestyle-Centric Career Planning (“Can I be happy as an investment banker”). I’m a big fan of his philosophy, having seen a few people go through this kind of life change. He says - “The goal of my career philosophy is to craft a remarkable working life. A vision for a life well-lived tends to be broad and ambiguous — touching on major distinctions in lifestyle not specific industries or types of work. These are statements of values not commitments to economic sectors.”
  • And finally for those who want to learn a little about the Credit Union Keling Kumang that I am working with here in Borneo,  I have written about it here.

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Image: Some rights reserved by Ian and Helen

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