Seminar on Sustainability

Today while I was sitting in a seminar I remembered Kedrick's request for food pictures. I made a mental note to myself to take a picture. Unfortunately mental notes are likely to fail - when the time came I completely forgot. A normal buffet lunch for a seminar is an insulated container of rice and a steam table line up of two or three three proteins, one or two vegetables and a dessert. For tea (around 11:00) we had mee, curry puffs, and some sweet gelatin thing (it wasn't bad - sorry that I am such a poor describer) I see similar set ups all over campus, especially on weekends; an event without food is unimaginable. Eventually I will attach a picture for readers who are interested in the day-to-day visuals. The buffet pictures will not satisfy those who want to savor and imagine the taste. For now you will have to settle for a picture of a hyacinth - outside the guest house - and a rambutan tree (a photo from Sunday's outing)

The seminar was on sustainability. It will go for 2.5 days; I am only attending a few sessions - today energy, tomorrow sustainable urban environments. The two points from this morning that seemed worth passing on are (1) solutions to the energy crisis are local first and solutions to the environmental problems are global first, (2) "it is immoral to use arid able land to grow bio-fuels instead of food." The session opened with an estimate of the conferences carbon foot print (as far as I could tell it was only based on participant travel) - to atone the campus planted 39 trees (which does not cover the whole footprint). No information on the trees and their potential contributions to the environment.

There were also random comments about a "new government" - high hopes for election session (the next round is on the Penang mainland on 26 August) and various government failures. Nothing sounded totally unfamiliar.

The last odd fact - I sat with two women. One had been trained in biology and is working on remote sensing. The other in urban planning and is working on environmental spaces. They are in the Department of Geography which is located in the School of -- HUMANITIES! They talked about the culture shock both with colleagues and students. The other departments are English, Foreign Languages, Philosophy and other things that we all associate with arts & humanities.