Month: July 2006

Cane toad bioinvasion

Over lunch time, I watched a Landline feature story on cane toads. Cane toads were introduced to Australia in 1935 to reduce the population of cane beetles. They’re now out of control: “The population is increasing at a rate of about 25% a year.” We’ve watched on in apprehension for years and they have finally invaded Kakadu National Park. They are now poised on the border of Western Australia.

The Landline story interviewed some Northern Territory residents who have banded together to fight the cane toad invasion on their community. On the outskirts of town, someone has set up a ‘detention centre‘. Each time a resident captures a toad, he or she drives to the detention centre and deposits the toad into the cage.

The detention centre manager comes along regularly to pour all the toads into a big clear plastic bag. As the toads wriggle over each other and frantically try to leap above their fellow detainees, the man inserts a short green tube and seals the bag around it. The bag quickly fills with a colourless gas. As the the bag expands, the toads gradually stop moving.

I thought it was hysterical.

Also hilarious is that staple of environmental sciences course, Cane Toads, the movie. It’s very funny and very Australian. My favourite bit is the scene with the swerving four-wheel drive. Go see it!

Updated 1:24 PM
This short animated film looks interesting. I haven’t seen it yet but I will download it — St Kilda Festival Best Comedy 2003, Cane Toad: What happened to Baz?

I’m getting better at it

For my homework, I had to complete a ‘personal conflict style inventory’. You can do yours as well by clicking Adult Personal Conflict Style Inventory.

My preferred styles of managing conflict are:

 

Calm – Response when issues/conflicts first arise.

Storm – Response after the issues/conflicts have been unresolved and have grown in intensity.

1.

Collaborating

Accommodating

2.

Avoiding

Avoiding

3.

Accommodating

Compromising

4.

Comprimising

Collaborating or Forcing

My homework sheet asked, How accurate a description do you think this is for you?

I think the results are very accurate. I feel uncomfortable when people argue and will usually avoid conflicts. I feel very anxious whenever I know I have to have a difficult conversation with someone. In fact, I found conflict so upsetting, that I enrolled in this conflict resolution program to learn how to deal with it.

Scroggin

As others will attest, when you sit at a desk all day (possibly bored), you end up snacking. This has a double whammy: because you’re sitting, you don’t get exercise, and because you’re snacking, you get fat.

I’ve struggled to find a sustainable eating regime. I’ve tried a bunch of things. Fruit is a good option when I want something sweet. I usually go through three pieces of fruit during the work day. The savoury snack question, however, has been harder to answer.

For about a week, I happily munched on cashews. Mum had bought raw cashews and roasted and salted them at home. I thought, “This is perfect! Cashews are tasty and nuts are good for you!”

Then, on Friday lunch time while web surfing, I discovered this: energy content of food.

Cashews

11 000 – 12 000 J/g

(2.5 – 2.9 Cal/g)

Marshmallows

4 200 – 5 800 J/g

(1.0 – 1.4 Cal/g)

What the — ??!! Cashews have twice the energy content of marshmallows? You mean, I could be stuffing myself with double the weight of marshmallows instead of my ‘healthy’ cashews? And look how light marshmallows are! At this rate, I could be pouring two packets of marshmallows down my throat every day.

I stopped eating cashews straight away.

For those of you who are interested, the way I’ve settled this is by eating five meals a day instead of three. I have First Lunch at around 10:30 AM (basically, whenever I feel hungry), Second Lunch at the normal lunch time and Third Lunch at about 3 PM. I eat quite a bit less and feel full the whole day to the point that I often don’t feel like eating Third Lunch.

If you’re wondering about the title of this post, I was introduced to scroggin at Grade 5 camp. It was delicious (at this camp, I also ate my first taco). I can’t remember the exact trail mix but the folklore says scroggin is made up of:

  • Sultanas
  • Chocolate
  • Raisins
  • Orange peels (candied)
  • Ginger (crystallised)
  • Glucose (generic candy, such as barley sugars)
  • Improvisation or imagination (i.e. the chef is supposed to add a favorite ingredient)
  • Nuts (any kind, so long as they are not salted)

P.S. Here’s an interesting cultural highlight from Wikipedia — Australian snack food.

P.P.S. Hey! This is even more interesting! Wikipedia describes the origin of the dim sim. It was created by celebrity chef Elizabeth Chong’s father. It was invented! Wow. I had assumed some Australian fish-and-chip shop owner mangled a Chinese yum cha delicacy by deep frying it and mangled its name again by calling it ‘dim sim’!

P.P.P.S. Haha…! Tim Tam Slam. This article is as silly as Iron Chef. I like this line: “The thicker chocolate coating on the Double Coat Tim Tam offers a more stable exoskeleten to help ensure the biscuit does not collapse prematurely.”

The limits of self-reflection

I’m in Melbourne most of this week and bits of next week. I’m doing my final subject in my conflict resolution studies. This is the subject I agonised over a few weeks ago, if you remember.

Guess what?

I’ve learned a lot about myself in the past two months.

Two months ago, I thought I had a pretty good idea of who I was, the things that made me Joan. Why did I think this? Because I do so much self-reflection.

But there’s a limit to how much you can learn through self-reflection. The things I’ve learned recently are things that other people have had to tell me about me.

Has that ever happened to you? People say, “You know, you’re really X, Y, Z.”

And you think, “…”

And then, “…”

And then, “Yeah. I guess so. Yeah! Wow! Really? You mean, not everyone’s like that?” I needed other people, people who look like me on the outside but are very different on the inside, to identify the intrinsically-Joan characteristics that I never thought to articulate.

I can count six revelations that other people have thrust upon me in the past two months. Six revelations. I think you’re lucky if you get one revelation a year.

It’s kind of like thinking you’ve mapped out the whole world and then discovering new continents. I understood the reality that even when your world is mapped out, you should expect the landmasses to shift in the future. But this is different, this bit about discovering more to map in the world as it stands today.

Imagine what I’ll learn when I have to live in another country for a year!

I’m not going to talk about what I’ve learned because it’s not meaningful or interesting to anyone but me. I just thought I should warn you, if you don’t know it yet, that even if you are the most self-aware of people, there are probably still things you can learn about yourself — especially if you’re still young.

Learning from a 7 year old

My mum is working hard to learn how to type Chinese using pinyin. When I’m at home, she asks me things like, “How do you spell cē? What’s the difference between guàn and kuàn?”

When I’m in Shepparton, though, mum has no one to help her — until this week, that is, when she realised she could ask some of the students she helps at school.

When I came home this weekend, mum pounced on me. “Joan, do you know how to type nü in the computer?”

The word nü is Chinese Mandarin for ‘woman’.

I knew the answer to this one. “Um, nü is spelled n and u with the two dots at the top. It’s a special character for the ‘yu’ sound. If you used a normal u, it would sound like nu, as in ‘effort’. The only other word I know that uses ü is lü, as in ‘green’. You can’t type nÇš on the keyboard. You have to type ‘nv’ instead.”

“How did you know that!” mum exclaimed.

“Someone taught me, I guess,” I replied.

“I asked one of my students. He’s a little seven year old and he said, ‘I think you type ‘nv’. Now every time he sees me, he grins and shouts, ‘Did you find it, teacher? Did you find nü in the computer? It was ‘nv’, right?’ Told you so!

“The next day, I asked him how to spell another word.” Mum wrote out the word fÄ“n, which means a ‘part’ or ‘portion’.

“The little boy looked at the word and shook his head. He said, ‘Um. I don’t… I’m not sure… But you can ask him.’ He pointed to one of his fellow classmates. ‘He’ll know! He’s got to Grade 5!’ “

Update 10:47 PM 31 July
For some reason, if you look at the Wikipedia article on pinyin, you can see the ü character with the caron accent (third tone in Chinese). When I copy and paste it into my blog entry, it doesn’t work in most browsers, even browsers where the Wikipedia article displays correctly. Can your browser see this or are they boxes? nÇ” nÇš lÇœ

The words display correctly on my desktop but not this laptop I’m using now or computers at work.

Trivia champions

We won! We won! We won the company’s yearly trivia competition. There were ten teams of ten. We were Feng Shui Consulting, and the karma was good. It was a team effort — Jamie was Lord of Geography, Peter dragged music facts from the recesses of his audio memory, Simone was ’80s Queen, Garrick nailed the air guitar, Rob led the charge on sport… I contributed the following small facts.

Question:Who are the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council?
Answer: USA, UK, Russia, China and France

I knew this because the same question recently showed up in the Herald Sun Quiz Master so I knew that Japan wasn’t one of the permanent members. My fellow team mates were perplexed by it as I had been. “How did France get on it?” they asked. “Probably because it keeps getting invaded by other countries,” was the answer.

Question: How many unique words does Dr. Seuss use in ‘Green Eggs and Ham?’
Answer: 49

I said 50 but they accepted it. According to Wikipedia, I was right.

Question: What is the largest freshwater body of water in the world?
Answer: Lake Superior

Tara, a Candian, said, “It’s not fresh! It’s contaminated!” There was some controversy about if ‘largest’ was by surface area or by volume. Jamie argued the answer could have been Lake Baikal, which is the deepest and largest freshwater lake by volume.

Question: Is a zebra white with black stripes or black with white stripes?
Answer: White with black stripes

This is one of the Odd Spots that features on Libra feminine hygiene products.

Question: Name Santa’s eight reindeer.
Answer: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen

As a kid, I memorised The Night Before Christmas. It was a song on my favourite and only Christmas carol CD. There was more controversy — people protested that Rudolph, an obvious answer, had not been included. In his confusion, our MC Jeremy allowed Ruldolph to be included but then overturned his decision after it was revealed that Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer was not one of the original eight reindeer, but rather a modern addition to Santa’s fleet.

Question: What decade was the Eiffel Tower constructed?
Answer: The 1880s

Haha… I got this one because when I was at the Eiffel Tower only three months ago, I tried to read every one of the 100 interpretive signs that were put up in 1988 to celebrate the centenary of the Eiffel Tower.

Question: Which was the first national park to be established in the world?
Answer: Yellowstone National Park

I’ve been to the other Y Park (Yosemite). Yellowstone would probably be the place I want to visit the most in the world.

Question: What does ‘etemology’ mean?
Answer: Study of word origins.

When Jeremy asked this one, a couple of us immediately said, “Study of insects.” Clair scribbled it down but then I had a thought. “Hey, wait. Did he say ‘entemology’ or ‘etemology’?” When people shrugged, I called out, “Hey, Jeremy! ‘Ent’ or ‘et’? Was it entemology or etemology?” He spelled it out. Ah ha! I turned to Clair. “Ooh, I know this one! It’s words, the origins of words. I have etemological discussions with friends.”

Question: In what country would you find the Mojave Desert?
Answer: USA (California).

My family drove across the Mojave Desert in 2004. It’s the flattest place I have ever seen. I saw tumbleweed roll across the highway, just like in the cartoons.

I remember one time, Jason was driving and we had all fallen asleep. I was the first to wake up and I glaced at the speedo. I read 110 mph. “Jason!” I gasped, as a quick mental calcuation came up with almost 180 km/h. He gave me a guilty, sheepish, disappointed look and eased back on the accelerator.

The MC also played the opening bars of a number of songs. I named Pump It by the Black Eyed Peas.

The team that came last was made up of the guys from IT support. I suspect they didn’t do so well because there were so many sports questions and no technology ones. I would have liked some science questions but the trivia master focused on sports, geography, pop culture and music.

I’m not complaining, though. We each ended up with a $25 voucher from JB Hifi, hurrah!

First time gym goer

I joined the gym and so far have done two sessions of weight training.

It seems like my legs are stronger than my arms (relative to other people). I have little trouble stacking on the weights for exercises that require me to push or lift with my legs. But the best I can do with my arms is about 20 pounds. Heck, when I use my shoulders, I use zero weights!

I’ve been sore for the past two days. It’s not so bad now.

As a first time gym-goer, this is what I have found. I felt intimidated by all these gym regulars (mostly men) walking around but once someone explained to me how to use the machines, I concentrated on what I was doing rather than what other people were doing. Then I kind of noticed all the bad gym technique (lack of control of the weights) from some of the gym regulars and I felt better.

I really like carrying around my written program of exercises and ticking off the weights, reps and sets as I do them. I’ve always liked filling in boxes and ticking things off.

Doing strength training feels different to a cardio workout, like running or aerobics. You don’t feel puffed out at the end, as you would for cardio work. Instead, you feel weak. After my first session, my arms felt weak and strangely springy and tight. I didn’t know what they were doing, which made lifting pots and pans after coming home to cook more hazardous than usual!

Go, the trams!

Goodness. I often compare Melbourne’s public transport system to that of other cities. I’ve seen Taipei’s Mass Rapid Transport, the London Tube and Paris’s brilliant Metro system. “Come on, Melbourne,” I’d complain. “Lift your game! We need some real leadership on public transport here.”

This is a first, though: a resident of another city wants to follow Melbourne’s lead! Ian from Toronto writes about ‘How the TTC could learn some lessons from Down Under‘.

Go, the trams!