Enjoy~
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For some reason I'm having quite some trouble concentrating on my lovely immunology notes, so I shall blog first! Hurhur.
Okay. The weekend. I finally had some time on Friday night to read the Sept issue of National Geographic (yes I know its already mid Sept - wait, OMG I only have 1 month more for UROPS ARGHHHHHHHH I'M FAR FROM DONE. Okay.) and I must say that I did enjoy myself very much - so much so that I toyed with the idea of switching over to biology and spending the rest of my life studying animals and their quirks. Like elephants! Female elephants live together, with the matriarch teaching the herd how to do things from her decades of experience, while male elephants must live alone once they reach maturity unless they ally with other young bulls - but they could still come back to visit the family. Oh, and the females in a herd do interfere with matings - like how a particular mating attempt by one bull was spoilt by his potential mate's mother who later allowed her daughter to mate with a younger and smaller bull. Not to mention that the pictures of the many elephants are just so cute! Hee. Its a female-dominated world!
Awwwwwwwwww...The other big article was on soil... and that was truly... I don't know, both eye opening and sobering at the same time. Soil erosion is such a big, serious issue, but people don't really take note of it because, well, soil's... dirt. Or maybe in sg, we import everything, and so we don't SEE the problem, we only feel it when it hits our pockets. But if you take a look at the map of the world's fertile regions, or lack of it - that's when it gets a little scary. The article says that 8.3 billion people will walk the Earth by 2030, which means produce will have to increase by 30% - but the growing problem of soil erosion clearly decreases the amount of arable land left. There isn't a quick solution to this problem - in fact, like so many of our environmental problems, suggested solutions take time to make their presence felt, and effort has to be made at the governmental level too.
And then I turned the last page of that article and came to this picture:
The caption says that those plates you see are cakes of clay, salt and shortening - a traditional dietary supplement for pregnant women but now treated as regular food by poor Haitians who cannot afford imported food.Now, I don't know about you, but I cannot imagine putting clay into my mouth. And at that time, I couldn't help but wish that I could actually do something... more... for the many unfed, unclothed and unsheltered people in the world. Shouldn't the purpose of education be for the betterment of humankind in general - which would most certainly include acquisition and use of knowledge to ameliorate the conditions of the truly desperate. What do I have to share?
Too many thoughts through the head and not enough language abilities to express them all so I shall stop here.
