Monthly Archives: September 2011

Arctic ice

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Ice on the North arctic is melting even faster than the most audacious predictions. Why? Because humanity is emitting even more CO2 than we thought, global warming is happening even faster than we hoped and the arctic is a fragile system that may have reached its tipping point.

This is further indictment of our unsustainable lifestyle. There can be absolutely no more denying of the direct link between our energy consumption, our carbon footprint and global effects of warming that is fast impinging on the whole biosphere.

This is a good video to watch… easy to understand yet showing the range of expert opinion and the scientific data that underpin our understanding of why arctic ice is melting so fast. When will we have an ice free North Pole? Probably between 2020 and 2030!

Kiama-Jamberoo-Minnamurra-Nan Tien

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Kiama-Jamberoo-Minnamurra-Nan Tien

Finally managed to snatch some time and get away from the city with Chris.

We headed South to the Illawarra and stayed for two nights in the coastal town of Kiama.

On the Saturday we headed to Jamberoo and the surrounding national park that is the home of a gorgeous temperate rainforest. Because the weather was quite cold and windy there were few tourists around and we spent hours in the rainforest, then checked out the famous blowhole in Kiama.

On Sunday we headed up the coast back to Sydney, taking in smaller ocean roads, looking at Bombo Beach and the Cathedral Rocks at Minnamurra. Finally we dropped in to check out the Buddhist Nan Tien temple near Wollongong, looking at the shrines and gardens.

The weather was freezing and I got a bit of a cold, but we also re-charged and connected with nature.. you should have seen my smile when we arrived to the rainforest 🙂

Nook!

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Nook!

I recently acquired a Nook colour e-book. The verdict is that it’s really nifty to read on it 🙂

I didn’t want to go for the Kindle as I didn’t like the layout with the tiny keyboard. The iPad is not only way more expensive but it’s also not an e-book, it’s a tablet and I wanted something that’s not quite a tablet so I can truly just read books with no distraction.

The Nook colour is in-between these two: it has a touch screen with the usual movements of sliding/turning pages/opening, pinching/changing size etc. It’s easy to navigate, it reads many formats and although it is tied to Barnes and Noble to some extent, I can put books on it from elsewhere very easily.

They do not deliver to Australia still so there are some teething issues: you have to have a US company through whom the order goes (puts the price and waiting time up), you have to have a power adapter and you cannot use the B&N features for buying books. Quite a painful thing in some ways. However, it’s easy to 1) download torrents of books (many are legal as they are out of print/old) and 2) buy e-books on your PC and quickly transfer them onto your Nook via Calibre.

I’m currently reading the Southern Vampire Series, some Kurt Vonnegut and some new non-fiction. Would be awesome though for B&N to finally enter the Australian market so there’s both competition, choice and ease for Australian readers. I guess we aren’t big enough for them and publishers are struggling in the current economic climate with the added issues of re-structuring towards a different market. For now I’m pretty bloody happy with my Nook though, love curling up with it at night 🙂

Rumi… Only Breath

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Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam or Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.