Earth Hour 2011

And so, it was Earth Hour 2011 on Saturday where buildings and businesses were encouraged to turn off lights for an hour to ease electricity consumption - the outcome was an 8.9% decrease of electricity on the powergrid. It was pretty cool to see the Toronto downtown core dimming down for this event despite there were still some offices here and there that was still being lighted. One of the events that was opened for the public during this hour included the U of T telescopes since the light pollution is lower during this period of time.
After my friend and I finished a superb grilled sea-bream for dinner, we headed towards 60 St.George Street of where the telescopes were housed, and found ourselves stumbling inside pitch black rooms filled with huge crowds of people lining up for the event. We saw the Beehive cluster, and Saturn which was pretty cool with its' rings and an orbiting moon clearly visibly in the dark crisp skies. One of the ladies suggested that we were quite lucky to see this since she was here past 3 yrs but was unable to make out the Beehive cluster - guess the goddess of Saturns likes us ;) lol

Human Nature

Al Jazeera has great coverage of breaking news, documentaries, to even small reports like this. This short clip depicts that Japan is working hard in surviving the disaster of the 2011 earthquake, hopefully the nuclear crisis will be controlled soon. The education levels in Japan is also very impressive and people helps each other. At difficult times, survivors line up for food instead of being like Haiti/India/China where people breaks into stores and steps on each other for food. The survivors in the hard hit cities also only buys what they need from the supermarket shelves, and an elderly says 'we only take what we need to survive and leave the rest for others who needs them more'. This is a stark contrast against the ridiculously ugly human nature as listed in recent newspaper where where people in China/HongKong hog iodine salt (they hear Iodine safeguards against radiation) and merchants driving up the prices because of their greediness to earn a few more bucks during this crisis. Quite a huge difference in mentality for cities that are so close to each other eh?

Japan Earthquake/Tsunami Relief Fund

Corporation that I work in will match any fulltime engineer's donation up to 3000$ for the Japanese earthquake/tsunami relief fund from this website here. Please let me know before this Friday if you would like to join in for this as I will be making spreadsheet tracking all donations towards this cause and will scan all participants a receipt once avail. Thank you.

Condolences to Japan Quake Victims

There's nothing more terrible than to see a country with leading edge technology, strict building laws, and proud country values lie in shambles. My heartfelt condolences goes to Japans' quake victims, and their families. I don't think any other country will be able to handle the situation as well as Japan. And certainly that douche from China stating 'our nuclear reactors in Shenzhen will not leak and we have the utmost preparations for earthquakes' was an insensitive/inappropriate comment for someone who cannot back their talk - it always better to stay quiet than talk nonsense. Here is an aerial view of before and after, and hopefully Japan will be able to recuperate soon from this incident.