In the future, everyone will be herbivores and living in dams

I read this very enlightening article on newscientist about the 4degrees rise in global temperature and its catastrophic effect. the writer is Gaia Vince and after reading the article on NS i went on to his blog to see what else he has to say. he wrote a blog entry (on my birthday!) about it and called for suggestions, no matter how wild and crazy to deal with our future housing and food crisis as a result of climate change. this is what i wrote as a response:

hi

i read your article in newscientist and it has been truly enlightening. thank you very much.

i agree with the notion of a future massive- scale vegetarianism. we all need to change our mindsets, status quo and policies in order to survive the drastic climate changes of the future so why not start with the simplest thing: changing the way we eat. our lands, oceans and resources cannot sustain the rearing of livestock and marine ecosystem is bearing the heavy burden of our fishing industry with unfortunate corollaries to sea inhabitants that are not captured for food. it makes sense that if we were to stop the consumption of animals: it will stop the demand for fishing and the clearing of land to feed cattle etc hence will make way for regeneration of forests and aquatic life. there has been countless scientific evidence of the health benefits of a vegetarian/ vegan diet as well so to me it really is a win- win situation in todays' context if we were to become voluntary herbivores. this may no longer be an option in the future if we dont start now and continue eating, as you put it, anything that moves to extinction...including, perish the thought, lonesome george!

the idea of growing crops on marshlands and floating platforms captivates me. perhaps rice could be genetically modified to grow on salinated water so they could be planted on artificial paddy platforms in the sea. or these platforms could be equipped with a desalination system for the paddy plants.

living in high rise apartments seem to be inevitable. recently, architects have been thinking about the idea of preventing urban sprawl and building homes on traditionally non- domestic existing structures as alternatives to skyscraper homes and to increase densities in cities to avoid encroaching on green areas. here are some ideas that could be feasible in the future:

Quarries: Atkin's architecture group proposed a resort built on the slopes of a water filled quarry in china. Building materials are sourced from the quarry itself and the artificial lake is used for recreation. given the sheer surface area and water retention possibilities of quarries this could provide a potential solution for our impending housing crisis. there are of course several issues to solve such as landslides, safety, toxic surfaces, structure and drainage.

Dams: they are another option that can be considered. given the size and strength of dams, its not difficult to imagine attaching capsule apartments like kisho kurokawa's capsule tower in tokyo to them for housing. or, hollow dams could be lived in with windows and ventilation on the downstream face. The top of the dams can be utilised for viewing decks, recreation and community gardens and diversion dams can be used to irrigate a large scale hydrophonic farms. Dams are also built to withstand natural disasters and extremely high structural integrity so they could provide the foundations of a sustainable housing project. Potential problems could be sound abatement, safety, and evacuation logistics in the event of structural failure or enemy attack.

bridges: Habitable bridges are not a new concept. The Ponte Vecchio and the old London Bridge did sustain domestic life and the Walter Taylor bridge in Brisbane has a few habitable units in its towers. Lightweight, slim and detachable housing units can be attached to the platform, piers , trusses and towers and traffic has to be regulated for increased padestrian activity. Granted, the design of the structures of existing bridges has to be evaluated to add more mass onto the structure...

Artificial islands: Given that a massive amount of land will be sumberged, living on artificial islands could provide housing for displaced cities. We currently have the palm jumeirah in dubai, exclusive real estates built on reclaimed land. but this is a small scale venture. it doesnt seem feasible at the time being to reclaim land currently used for human habitation to build another mumbai floating in the middle of the sea. furthermore, we cannot demolish tiny surrounding island for building materials like what was done to build kansai international airports' artificial island.

what if, the floating islands were to be build from garbage? there are billions of tonnes of discarded metal, rubber and plastic in our landfills and the can be detoxified and put on floating platforms, also built from reused garbage and covered with habitable waterproof surface material. given the size these islands need to be, we would be living in something akin to an iceberg. a garbage iceberg with only a portion of its mass visible on the surface, held in place by giant anchors imbedded deep in the sea bed. we wont be able to build skyscrapers and underground tunnels on them and everyone will have to travel on high speed trevelators, bicycles, roller skates and skateboards.
some marine parks use sunken ships for fish breeding ground and new york city has sunk their retired subway cars to attract fish to revitalise its barren waters so washing machines, construction left overs, car and train skeletons could be sumberged to attract fish and promote the breeding of corals and revitalise marine life of our oceans.

well thats all ive got...

I hope you liked it

milk!

we were bobbing in the water happily...


when Aiman decided to be a river whale

and all hell broke loose



or


ladies' room conference





or



aww moment between children and dolphin

damn, i love comment wars!

idiots fighting with another idiots about issues that may or may not be significant, and their heated cyber wars ultimately wont change anything in the real world. its a battle that no one win and will ebb away after a few weeks, but every single comment will be treated like a deadly assault to one's opinions and intellect. everything someone on the opposite end of the argument says will be dissected into microscopic pieces, scrutinised for its truth, political correctness, sarcasm, grammar, spelling, etc and criticised..nay, counter- attacked with a mouthful of blog post script full of spite and malice. the great battle of the opinionated morons is immensely fun to witness.

maybe its an addictive need to feel indignant, arrogant and superior about one's own firmly held believes. maybe its just arseholes who like to make others feel inadequate and stupid if they dont know one side of an issue as comprehensively as they do. or maybe its just a passion to make someone loose their cool and become angry. it could be all of them.

people who respond aggressively on blogs, forums, articles, youtube, whatever are ugly. and yet very entertaining at the same time. they incite anger and use coarse words to try to cement their believes and have the final, authoritative word while at the same time managing to look like incredibly narrow minded retards. these people have no integrity, tolerance, or brains. or they might have them in real life but because they dont have to observe social decorum online, they choose to abandon them and switch to their uncivilised brains instead.

ill give you a recent example: there is a malaysian miniseries posted on youtube (this by the way is an infringement of copyright but thats a whole different story) called kami which, according to my friend is a portrayal of malaysian teenagers, loves and music. it promotes a lively indie music scene and according to reviews is a good effort on behalf of writers, producers, actors etc etc. at least its not the same tired storyline about some promiscuous overly dressed and made up mak datin while her rich, handsome but incredibly cold and arrogant husband is away in london for a business trip. no..kami explores a different side to the malaysian social fabric, one that everyone knows about but are too apathetic, conservative or strapped to their status quo to have a decent, intelligent, open and honest discussion about it. understandably, the more narrow minded and conservative among us would have their qualms about it and the more intelligent ones would craft out an eloquent objection letter to the media but since keyboard- armed, half- educated monkeys with embarrassing command of language, malay and english alike can only let their voices heard on unregulated mediums such as youtube, let the comment wars commence!

for all the hot action, click: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEs__38j84A&feature=PlayList&p=2CEB9559207A3CBD&index=10

someone hates the series, he claims that it portrays too much western culture and will affect malaysia's and more importantly to him, the malay's image in the eyes of the world. and this guy goes out of his way to scream bloody murder for the series and will fight anyone who says the love it. more embarrassingly, when someone asked him why he hates it so much, he could only manage this: tak best lah. semua tak best. boikot! boikot! (in english: its bad, everything about it is bad. boycott!)

anyway, this guy is hilarious in his inability to express his hatred in a format that is clear and concise. the rage is however, is quite well pronounced. but no one knows why hes so pissed off. i think the only malaysian image that we should be worried about is the obvious ones like bad roads, bad management, corruption, litter, illegal logging, pollution etc etc. to be honest, the rest of the world doesnt care how 'malay' we are. they just think were all malaysians. plus i highly doubt that malays as a race have an 'image' in global terms. seriously. think about it. malays pride themselves for being courteous blah blah blah, but then again, thats common courtesy isnt it? and why do people think malays should be invincible against so called western social corruption? wake up and take a look at the world. that kind of youth disease that theyre so afraid of happens EVERY-BLOODY-WHERE so stop feeling indignant towards 'bangsa penjajah' (colonisers) for allegedly corrupting our young and impressionable. kids are adventurous and curious. they make mistakes and learn from it when they get older. some dont, thats tragic but thats not my point. as if no one's never felt the glorious seduction of the unknown and forbidden when they were younger. pfft.

anyway, this one is a loser supporter:

ApuKutan (1 year ago)

kpd peminat cerita kami..
ada sorang budak nie..
zakwanghani..
dier x paham..
sebab otak lembab cam lembu..
bodohhh..
ptt la dier x pham

translation: to fans of kami... there is this kid, zakwanghani...he doesnt understand because his brain is slow, like a cow. stupid. its no wonder he doesnt understand

he probably thought by instigating this, all the fans of kami will gang up against the poor cow brained boy and slaughter him. good god. the language used is awful. goes to show how smart apukutan really is.

another one:

hgkd94 (2 months ago)

dala boink ciot..aq fuqk ctew niew,..
xcun,.xcute..
gelabah bjet rmj up la sgtt

soldiersk8 (2 months ago)

eh, kau kalau tak nak tengok, tak suka, senyap je la . nak fuck fuck cita ni pulak . fuck mak kau la weyh !

these two losers crack me up! gosh. check out the spelling!
. i know it was done because its cool to bastardise language. but this is too much man.

din7291 (4 months ago)

cam kimak jek..

translation: like mother's vagina.
i would love to run this guy down with a tank.

oh yes. people, if you simply MUST swear, please refrain from swearing on your mothers! this is atrocious. implying copulation with your or someone else's mother is disgusting (that MF word) and calling something mother's vagina (the malay PM word) is insulting. mothers are the best and i find it so disturbing that so many people who love their moms would swear on them. i hate anyone who does that and if i had a shotgun, you would have a gaping hole in your stupid head for saying such terrible things.
and no, im not a hypocrite for pasting that crap here and im not being a silent associate of mother-swearing by doing it either. its verbatim of what was written on youtube and i dont believe in media censorship.

online media are so more fun to experience because of the comment wars. long live idiots!