Cocktail Party In The Ocean

Our planet is getting noisier by the day.

Everyday, we are blasted by human- or machine-created sound that disturbs the much needed tranquility for human and animals.

The etymology of the word 'noise' is 'nausea' meaning 'seasickness' in Latin, suggesting that noise makes you sick. Its root could also possibly be traced from another Latin word 'noxia' which brings the meaning closer to 'hurting, injury and damage'.

The origin the word seems to suggest: Noise is not good. Indeed.

Of all the contributors, noise pollution from motor vehicles tops my hate list. I am rather sensitive to sudden surge of loud noise and tend to be affected by protracted drowning in noise.

In a dense city like Singapore, buildings are shooting higher to accommodate the bigger population. There is a general preference to live on higher floors presumably to enjoy the panoramic view from a greater height.


The problem is that, noise is known to travel upwards and this means dwellers on higher floors tend to receive a collection of noise from the surrounding areas. The constant humming noise from the ground level can, over a prolonged period, damage physiological and psychological health.

Noise pollution affects the human beings as well as animals, who are usually more sensitive to sound than us. Noise pollution affects animals on land as well as those in the sea.


The ocean is big and yet the sea creatures are not spared from noise pollution. They are constantly drown in noise pollution which disrupts their normal communication.

Roaring engine noise from commercial shipping constantly breaks the serenity of the ocean. Military sonar is another main cause for noise pollution in the ocean where sound is used to communicate and detect vessels.


When noise level increases in the ocean, the sea animals would need to 'raise their voice' to 'talk'. Think of it like you are in a noisy party and you try to talk louder so that you can be heard. When everyone does that, the noise level will eventually be so high that no-one can hear each other anymore.

Scientists have noticed that whales 'talk' louder in the presence of submarine detector which uses sound. These whales need to raise their voice so that they can continue to communicate with the other whales.

When one species speaks louder, it will mask the the other species' voice, causing the whole eco-system to eventually speak louder too.

Imagine this: Sea creatures in the ocean are constantly living is a noisy underwater cocktail party and they have no where else to go!


There has been a growing number of stranding of whales and dolphins and scientists believe that it could be linked to sound pollution. In some cases, damaged tissues were found on these sea mammals which are caused when they surface too quickly. They could have been startled by military sonar or seismic testing and surfaced beyond what they can physically manage.

In a study, it was found that the distance over which blue whales can communicate has been cut by 90% as a result of higher noise levels over the last 40 years. Put this in our lingo, the whales are getting deafer!


It is less apparent to us when the ocean is suffering from noise pollution. Unfortunately, the ocean community is part of the entire eco-system on the planet. Noise can have a detrimental effect on animals causing them to suffer in many ways.

They stand to lose the delicate balance in predator/prey detection and avoidance and that in turn leads to disturbance of the food chain.

Noise pollution also gets in the way in animal communication and causing interference in reproduction and navigation. Animals also get stressed and thus increasing the risk of mortality.


The Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) is an inter-government treaty. It was concluded under a United Nation program and it is concerned with the conservation of wildlife and habitats on a global scale.

There are now more than 100 representatives from Africa, Central and South America, Asia and Europe with the CMS. Incidentally, Singapore is not part of it (yet?).


The CMS is considering issuing a resolution that would oblige countries to reduce sound pollution. It is probably not so easy to remove or reduce the sources of noise pollution in the ocean within a short time. However, this is a good start, nonetheless.

I hope nothing has become irreversible.

Imagine...28 Years Later

28 years ago on 8 Dec 1980, a cultural icon was murdered.

Former Beatle John Lennon was shot dead by a deranged gunman, Mark Chapman, who opened fire outside the musician's New York apartment.

Lennon was with his wife, Yoko Ono, on that fateful night. Since then, Yoko, who was a Japanese artist, has worked tirelessly to maintain his image as a music icon and peace campaigner.

Nearly three decades later, the impact of Lennon's death is still being felt by many people today.

The Beatles (1960-1970) are one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed bands in the history of popular music, selling over one billion records internationally. Musicians from many parts of the world still regularly pay homage to the band.

Japan is one country where John Lennon's memory is kept very much alive. Beatlemania has never really died.

Every night in Tokyo, bands dressed as John, Paul, George and Ringo faithfully reproduce their sound. Even though many of the musicians would struggle to hold a conversation in English, they know every word of the entire Beatles songbook.

After his marriage with Yoko in 1969, Lennon became a frequent visitor to Japan and even tried to learn their language. 28 years after his death, his widow, now at the age of 75, is back in Japan for an anniversary concert at the same venue where the Beatles played their legendary shows in 1966.


Mark Chapman took Lennon away from many who loved him till today. For that, we was put behind bar for life. In 2000, his first parole bid failed. He tried again in 2002, 2004 and 2006 and did not succeed.

In August this year, his bid failed for the fifth time. Chapman had a history of mental illness before he committed the murder. The panel which refused his parole is concerned that his release may not be in the best interests of the community. He will be allowed to apply again in 2010.

Looks like Chapman will remain behind bars for at least another two years, while the world remembers the great star, perhaps with one of his best songs, Imagine ....

Enjoy the video.

The Isolated People

Sometimes, the feeling of total solitude may suddenly hit me even though I am surrounded by people I know. It is an unexplainable feeling which is usually transient.

I try to imagine living a life which is isolated from modern civilization over a prolonged period. It must be hard.

I cringe at the thought that I have to stay away from mobile phone, Internet, television and MP3 player. That sounds bad enough. If books, newspapers and the like are also taken away, what would I do?

That sounds like a severe punishment to me until I read about the 'uncontacted people'.


Heard of them? These are not missing people whose photos are pasted all over town. Rather, they are people who live in isolated jungles in places such as Amazon, New Guinea and Peru, and they do not have significant contact with modern civilization.

No one knows for sure how many such people there are in the world. It is believed that there are over one hundred such tribes who choose to reject contact with the outside world.


Many of them are living on the run, fleeing invasions of their land by loggers, oil crews and cattle ranchers. They have often seen their friends and families die in the hands of outsiders in unreported massacres.

Being isolated, they are also very vulnerable to diseases as they lack immunity to common diseases. Intruders who try to make contact with them inevitably carry with them minor diseases, like common cold, which can be fatal enough to wipe out a big part of the community.


More than half of the uncontacted tribes live in remote reaches of the Amazon rainforest. The Brazilian government have had knowledge of these isolated tribes in the Amazon jungle for many decades but did not make the information public until May this year and aerial photos taken were published. There has been increased pressure from advocates for improved awareness of the danger that these isolated groups are facing.


Some of these groups are truly uncontacted, having no direct knowledge of the outside world. Other groups are actively choosing to live in isolation. They know the outside world exists but and they want nothing to do with it.

These people have the ability to hunt, fish and are fairly self sufficient. In fact, they are the descendants of the survivors of the rubber boom at the end of the 19th Century which, wiping out 90% of the Indian population through a wave of horrific brutality.

In one infamous incident in 1960s, the head of a rubber company had found the Indians to be in the way of his commercial activities and planned a massacre. He hired a plane to hurl explosive into the village and sent killers on foot to finish off the survivors.

He justified his horrific acts and said that "these Indians are parasites, they are shameful. It's time to finish them off, it's time to eliminate these pests. Let's liquidate these vagabonds." Later during the trial, he added that "it's good to kill Indians - they are lazy and treacherous."

It is totally disturbing to see such lack of appreciation for human life.

Many years on, the situation is not getting much better. Today, rights groups are pushing for a movement to set aside lands where the isolated peoples are believed to exist, protecting them from the intrusion of developers looking to reap riches from the natural resources of the Amazon.

At the moment, it seems that the Brazilian government is committed to extend some protection. Time will tell if they will remain strong to resist pressure to open up the reserved lands for commercial reasons.


Back to the world I am familiar with... there is so much to do here that I have no time to live a solitary life. Time to move on.

Please Speak English

I think I am experiencing some melancholic moments. After my 'Potty Blues' I am ready to rant on my 'Geeky Blues'.

This article is best read by lay people who are not in the IT profession.

At work and at play, I am virtually glued to geeky stuff. It is not as if I am in love with these things but that is how life is nowadays.

I can go on ranting about the frustration I experienced in keeping up with the 'geek train' but I guess I just want to growl about, at the moment, the 'geek language'.

Technical people and specialists use lots of jargon and there is no exception for people in the IT industry. The only problem is that, lay people like me, who work closely with IT people, need to talk to them very often. Inevitably, we get entangled in very confusing and frustrating communication.

I have, time and again, begged IT co-workers to 'speak English' to me but I guess as far as they are concerned, they are already doing so. Grrr...how can I explain my exasperation? These people refer to me as 'A User'. What they probably are not aware is that I refer to them as 'AB Users'. Get it?

IT people adulterated many everyday words and make them theirs. They expect the poor lay people to accept that henceforth, those words shall take on the predominant meanings, their way.

My geography teacher taught me that 'Java' is a place in Indonesia. I later also fondly associate the word with my favorite beverage: coffee. Somehow, if you google 'java' today, you will be told first that it is a programming language.

I grew up watching Sesame Streets and knew perfectly well what 'cookies' meant in 'cookie monster'. Today, I have to be mindful that some cookies are not meant to be eaten. To the geeks, cookies are data being sent to and fro between the web server and your browser. Why must they call it cookie just to confuse me?


I don't really enjoy circuses but I admire the guts of the acrobats (perhaps due to my own fear for heights). Somehow, 'acrobat' has been mutated into a computer program that is used as a way to present information with a fixed layout similar to a paper publication. Does "PDF" ring a bell to you?

I learnt in school that 'ram' is the papa sheep but my IT colleagues told me that RAM is 'Random Access Memory'. When I went 'Huh? Excuse me?" they helpfully explained that it is 'the computer memory for running programs and temporary storage of data which you can access at random order.'

I could not fault them for any wrong usage of words or grammatical error but errr ... can someone please help me... I swear I did not hear them in English!

There are many other similar encounters that sent me off pulling my hair.

Once I met a guy at a business seminar and he introduced himself in his slightly accented English, "I am dealing with doors and windows..." Throughout our short conversation, I was under the impression that he was in the building industry. I was utterly confused when our conversation did not seem to converge in any way. My brief meeting with him ended up with some embarrassment when I finally realized that he was dealing with 'DOS and WINDOWS". Oh, man, I hate those techno babbles!

Besides those strange terms, there are gazillions other disorienting acronyms.

How many of these make some sense to you? BIOS, ISDN, OEM, PIM, SIM, UPS, URL, Wi-Fi, GSM, CPU, JPG.....

Most of us vaguely understand some of these terms and are still struggling with many more. If you are not an IT personnel and you fully comprehend these terms, it is time to get a life! You are a certified geekhead!


There are many terminologies that I would need to find some time to read up. Each time I attempt to learn one, I have to fight my inertia. I find myself learning each new concept like a cat learning how to swim. (Cats can swim it's just that they hate it)

Even dealing with computer hardware can be mind boggling. Once I was trying to connect two cables and was seeking help from a helpdesk technician. He asked me in an 'as-a-matter-of-fact' manner, "are you having a male or female part?" and had me stunned for a moment. The fact is, it is common for a pair of electrical connectors to be assigned a gender and the IT people are fairly used to it.

Which side is female and which side is male? I leave it to you to figure out.

I guess the IT people are not having any easier time with their lay users. It is not uncommon to hear some hilarious moments they encounter in their profession.

I think I could just share some geek humor before I sign off to heal my blues...

A Dell customer called to say he couldn't get his computer to fax anything. After 40 minutes of trouble-shooting, the technician discovered the man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it
in front of the monitor screen and hitting the "send" key.

Another customer called Compaq tech support to say her brand-new computer wouldn't work. She said she unpacked the unit, plugged it
in, and sat there for 20 minutes waiting for something to happen. When asked what happened when she pressed the power switch, she asked "What power switch?"

An exasperated caller to Dell Computer Tech Support couldn't get her new Dell Computer to turn on. After ensuring the computer was plugged in, the technician asked her what happened when she pushed the power button. Her response, "I pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happens." The "foot pedal" turned out to be the computer's mouse.

The Mysterious Beached Whales

Beached whales never fail to baffle me.

Every year, hundreds of whales are found stranded on the beach and hence making them, well... beached whales. Beaching is often fatal for the whales as they become dehydrated or drown when tide water covers their blowholes.

Since at any one time, some whales must die due to old age or illness, I can understand why we do find single whales become stranded. These whales are either already dead or very ill and most inevitably end in death.


What I cannot comprehend is mass stranding. I was always under the impression that, for some strange reasons, whales find it 'fashionable' to organize suicidal pact. I was just being dumb.

Many scientists have come up with various hypotheses but none of these has been proven conclusively. Some think that beached whales get confused signals in shallow water and misjudge their bearing. Another possible reason could be due to the change in the Earth's magnetic field just before an earthquake leading to this strange behavior of mass stranding.


Some believe mass stranding can be explained by the strong social cohesion amongst the whales. If one whale gets into trouble, its distress calls may prompt the other whales to follow and become beached themselves. It has been observed that in a mass stranding, stranded whales which are successfully led back into water tend to restrand themselves again, possibly because of their concern and attachment to the others who are still stranded.


It is not uncommon to find beached whales in coastal areas. Just last month, a group of 150 whales that became stranded on a remote coastline in southern Australia were battered to death on rocks before rescuers could save them.

Nearer to home, a whale was found stranded in shallow water at the Kuala Nenasi, in Pekan, Malaysia in October. The local fisheries department pulled the whale to the sea with a few marine boats and only to be shocked by its return in the next morning. The whale was beached again at a spot about 500 m from the earlier spot. The villagers did what they could to save the whale but it died.


Beached whales pose a practical problem when it comes to 'disposal'. Due to their sheer size, it is usually very challenging to remove them from the shore. In one incident back in the 70s in Oregon, USA, the local authorities decided to remove a beached whale as if it was a boulder. They used half a ton of explosives hoping to disintegrate the carcass in a single blow. What they did not expect was a rain of blubber earning them a messy lesson on what not to do. Today, most dead carcasses are burned and buried or towed to the high sea.


Not too long ago in 2004, another whale explosion happened in Taiwan. This time, no one used any explosives. Rather, a spontaneous explosion took place when there was a gas buildup in the decomposing whale while it was being transported for a post-mortem examination. I can imagine the stinking mess it created to the curious onlookers around it. Eww!


I fancy the idea of whale watching but I doubt I would like to witness a beached whale, dead or dying. It must be a really saddening sight which I won't miss.

My Potty Blues

I hesitated but then I figured it is not all that bad to talk about the throne, err..., I mean the loo.

Each time I visit a public lavatory, I would secretly pray that I would be greeted with decent and working facilities. When I say 'decent', I mean the absence of visible trash or 'remains' and 'working' simply means a flush that flushes.

Is that too much to ask for? Perhaps.


The average condition of public lavatories in shopping malls and office buildings are acceptable. When you come to those at hawker centers and some eating outlets, you wish you have not just eaten.

If I were to ask aloud: "Who is responsible for the mess?", the usual opposing voices can be heard.

Toilet users have been blaming building owners for the lack of upkeep. On the other hand, building owners would complain about irresponsible use of public facilities. The parties would go on giving graphic descriptions on the unacceptable state of the facilities and user behaviors. For your sake, no details will be discussed as it can get quite puke-inducing. Just use your imagination.


Perhaps this problem faced by many has prompted the set up of the WTO in 2001.

No, I am not referring to the 'World Trade Organisation'. In case you are not aware, Singapore has its very own WTO or 'World Toilet Organisation'. It is a non-profit organization committed to improve toilet and sanitary conditions worldwide.


The WTO has organized several World Toilet Summits and World Toilet Expo and Forum in several cities around the world. I am convinced that the WTO is committed to spread the right message. The question is: why are our public lavatories still in a rather horrendous state?

The Singapore government is fully aware of the issue. The National Environment Agency (NEA) started the 'Singapore's OK' campaign in 2003 when the nation was deeply troubled by the SARS outbreak.


Under this campaign, public toilets that meet minimum requirements set by the NEA will be able to display the 'Singapore's OK' label. Presumably, building owners would be proud to show such public display of commitment and support.

Ironically, it is not uncommon to find public lavatories with the 'Singapore's OK' label which are far from being OK.

~Sigh~


When it comes to lavatories, Japan is a step ahead of the rest of the world. They obviously take the matter really seriously as can be seen in the general standards maintained in their lavatories. Cleanliness is assumed and features rarely seen outside Asia are to be expected.


The modern toilets in Japan come with a dazzling array of features such as:

- heated seats which are particularly comforting during winter;
- automatic lid equipped with proximity sensor which opens and closes based on the location of the user;
- music player to relax the user;
- ozone deodorant system that can quickly eliminate smells; and
- medical sensor to measure blood sugar, pulse, blood pressure and body fat.


I like this best: Some toilets are equipped with a sensor which attempt to guess the gender of the user. It will then decide if the lid is to be lifted or not. Well, pretty smart and intrusive too.

Looks like Singapore has quite a bit to learn from Japan. Much more can be done to ensure that our white plastic thrones are less off-putting.


In 2005, the WTO started the world's first World Toilet College (WTC) providing training in, among other things, toilet maintenance. So far, the WTC has conducted some relevant courses but judging from the state of our public lavatories, I think there are many potential students lurking out there.

I hope we can soon come to a state where toilet visits are so pleasant that we can all hum the tune of 'loo loo skip to the loo'.