More Book Reviews: Inferno

InfernoSet in present time, the book depicts the famous Robert Langdon character's adventure through the beautiful European city of Florence, Italy. Destined to meet a brilliant genetic germ-line manipulation professional who feels so righteously excusable to spread a plague to the whole world. As always, you can expect a full blown vivid description of the landscapes, and especially the arts. The writer looks like he did a very extensive research on everything, so much that i don't know which ones are fictitious. Maybe i can find out as easily as a google search, but why spoil the story? hahaha.. anyway, i googled enough of the tourist spots and made a mental note that someday i have to see them myself.

The most interesting part however, is how he manages to turn the evil antagonistic crime into some kind of justifiable deed in a gray area. The readers are somehow forced to think that the outcome is favorable for human kind regardless the method. Still, the even more surprising twist that keeps nagging in the back of my head is how true the problem is. I even looked for the graph and it is there on the WHO database.

====THERE MIGHT BE SPOILERS AFTER THIS====

So, i was saying that this book, as fictive as it is, opened my eyes to the reality of overpopulation, of how ill-handled the problem is. There is only so much that our earth can supply us with, if we keep multiplying at this frightening rate we may run out of time before even a century. How bad this next statement might sound to you, the advancement of medical technology that prolongs the life expectancy of human kind does not help to solve the problem, only adds to it. See? It doesn't sound right,hahaha..

As a moslem i then thought, do we have some kind of control over this problem in one of our rules? I mean, we don't really have a limit of the number of children we can have, some Arabian guys out there might have as many as 20 for all we know. After a couple of discussion with some friends we then concluded that the rule is written somewhere implicitly within the social rules of Islam, within the lines of social responsibilities that we have to bear for each individual we live with, including our families. The point is read and think carefully when you read the old Islamic proverb of 'with a lot of children comes greater fortunes'.

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Anyway, all in all it is a very good read. A real page turner if i may. I had planned to only read this book on my commuting time between home and school, but i couldn't. :))
Nonetheless, if you've read some of the writer's books before you might be able to predict some twists, but still, it's the climb, right? hehe
Another full recommendation! Try it..


Cheers,
Shiddiq.

Green Technology Needs Green People

Jadi ceritanya bulan lalu saya daftar lomba Great KL Challenge, berimingi hadiah internship, study trip ke Sweden dan ikut innovation class selama 10 minggu.

Syaratnya ‘cuma’ ikut 3 set quiz tentang sustainability energy dan diakhiri dengan case study. Karena kebetulan saya ada paper tentang green energy, jadi deh saya ambil sebagian kecil dari paper itu untuk dijadiin jawaban case study.

Seperti yang telah diprediksikan, saya ga menang (bukan pesimis, tapi realistis :p). Saya pikir ga adil juga kalau tulisan saya cuma dijadikan simpanan panitia. Jadi apa salahnya di-share di sini?

Oh ya, sebelumnya mau terima kasih kepada Giri Kuncoro, sang master Smart Grid yang tahun lalu udah membantu research saya ini (dapet full mark loh Gir..)

Green Technology needs Green People

Challenge and Problem

Making a self-sustaining area is one way to preserve limited resources, such as electricity. Electricity reliability and environmental impact have been influenced by the increased population and advancement technology. For example, in single home there might be multiple person, and each person might have multiple devices (PC, smartphone, Tablet, etc). All these make electricity become very important. Meanwhile people don’t realize that electricity is limited. Therefore, we need to develop and implement the alternative and renewable resources.

Solutions

In Kuala Lumpur where the sun shines brightly, it will be more suitable if we choose sun as the renewable energy. With the sunlight, we can construct smart electrical grid that can produce electric power. This smart grid can be defined as the technology that covers the advance power system, information technology system, and management technology system, where there is intelligent communication in between to link all the system connection.

To date, Smart Grid technology has not been implemented in Kuala Lumpur. Another reason why Smart Grid can be potentially implemented in KL is due to its stable weather and climate.

                     

By using smart grid, the environmental benefits could be energy savings, reduction of green house gas emissions, and self-management of house-hold electricity. Because smart grid gives impact for better environment, all the people who work and contribute to make this technology happens are considered as green collar worker.

You may know the terms of white collar and blue collar. But how many of you have heard about green collar?

Basically green collar worker is a person who do a job that can help to conserve and restore the environmental or ecosystem, reduce the high consumption of energy, material, and water, decarbonize the economy, and also minimize the pollution.

Why this relates to Smart Grid? Because renewable energy industry can create jobs which never exist before and this is called green job.

In Kuala Lumpur, there are many graduated and working people that can actually develop themselves to be a green worker. By adding knowledge about environment sustainability and nature protection, a person can simply be a green worker.

Many, many, and many green technology has been created, but sometimes the most important part is missing. It is people who must be well educated in using all these technology. They should be aware how to utilize all the features so that the functionality to save the environment can work. For example, if we are talking about Smart Grid, the people should know how to use it so that they can manage the house-hold electricity and save the energy.

It is true that by saving the energy and improving environment, it could be some reasons of the better quality of life. But, it may be pointless if we don’t have great green workers and well educated green user. In other words, both of them are the people. Both of them are us, people in Kuala Lumpur.

 

Fadhilah Hana Lestari

Tuesdays With Morrie: a review

Tuesdays With Morrie is a true story about a sport journalist, Mitch, who after 16 years of drowning his life in a fast paced career suddenly saw his old professor, Morrie, at one night in the television. The program told of how his teacher, who he used to be very close to, was dying from a disease called ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease and had decided to dedicate his remaining time to be what he called 'a human textbook' of dying to people around him. He didn't want to give up being a teacher until his last breath. Driven by remorse of breaking his promise to come visit after the graduation, Mitch flew to Boston to have a talk with him. He got more than a talk, he had lessons that changed his life.

Beautifully told, not unlike Morrie this book does not hold back scenes of emotional encounters. You'll find your eyes filled with tears from Morrie's forthright and honest notions. The book tells us how dying is a natural phase and should be less worrying than living unhappily. It also teaches us how we take precious things for granted because we think we will always have them, how we let time just passing by without really living the moments. I found some memorable lines that I think you might like too:

"love is the only rational act."

"what's wrong with being number two?"

"nothing haunts us like the things we don't say."

"learn how to die, and you learn how to live."

and many more, I don't want to spoil too much to you. :p

Another thing about this book is that it does not shove the lessons down your throat. Even though it falls under the category of 'self help' the book has a very subtle and simple way of narrating that it does not bore you. The other thing is that maybe it just shows us real conversations instead of formulating theories of how people should live their lives.

All in all, it is a very great book and I give it my full recommendation. A friendly reminder that as all of us know that we will eventually die, not as much really believe it. Do you?


cheers,
Shiddiq.