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Malaysia in color

August 24, 2005 04:45 PM

Here are some color shots from Malaysia. The lady in the first and last photos of this post is a friend from my class in Sweden who let me stay at her home in Kuala Lumpur. I also got to see a little bit of the work she does for the Malaysian Timber Counsel. On my last day I visited a commodities exhibition at which she had prepared a display about the rain forest and biodiversity. Between her display and the other booths where I learned about the palm oil, cocoa, rubber, and tobacco industries, much of what I had seen over the week and a half started making sense. I wish I had had an opportunity to learn all that before I cris-crossed the country side so that I would have known more about what it was I was seeing.

I wish I could take all of these photos back and re-edit them. I am learning some really cool (all be it basic) stuff about how to use Photoshop. I feel a little guilty spending so much time watching the Total Training videos instead of looking for a job, but on the other hand, "learn how to use photoshop better" has been on my list of things to do for several years now. For some reason or other, I never really progressed much in that area.

Some other things that have been on my list for a while and I am finally finding time to do include reading a biology textbook. It has been a long time since high-school bio class, where the focus was less on concepts and more on memorizing terminology. Another thing that I now find disturbing about my high-school bio class is that there was never any mention of why it is important to know the stuff. There was no talk about how humans are a part of a very complex system, and that without that system we can not survive, and how almost everything we do now is degrading that system. There was no one to say "Hey, the reason it is important to know this stuff is not so that you can recite the names of all the cell parts, rather, it is important because if you don't know how the system works, there is a much greater chance that you will make stupid choices in your lifestyle that destroys rather than fits with the system."

Granted, even if someone had said something like that back then, there is a good chance I would not have paid any more attention, but at least there would have been some chance.

Even though I didn't really pay much attention in high school, a lot of it is "review", which I remember hearing something about at some point in the past, but reading it now with a framework for how to understand it, and knowing where this information fits within my life makes it much more interesting and sometimes I can't even put the book down... it's better than any thriller I have ever read.