Saturday, March 28, 2015

Escape from Dogmatism

Escape from Dogmatism
 

In this world of uncertainty, it is very easy for a dogma to creep in imperceptibly.

Religion is one of them.
It promises heaven and hell or man’s emancipation or salvation but nothing in this life and in between.
 

Politics is another.
 

It promises good governance and delivers corruption.

The science in another.
It promises the moon and mars exploration, knowing very well they are not habitable.


Education promises prosperity but at least half of them are without jobs but the half who have got jobs are doing menial jobs not what they are trained for or looking for.


The list can be endless but there is no attempt at getting rid of the dogmatism. 


In actual fact, there is no escape from dogmatism.

Friday, March 27, 2015

The Elephant Corridor, A Myth

The Elephant Corridor. A Myth
The Elephant Corridor in Sri-Lanka is a myth.
Yala, Wagamuwa, Wilpattu and Uda Walawe are not connected by a corridor for the elephants to move freely, since the rest of the land is densely populated and there is not even a hypothetical corridor.
My calculation is that not even one percent of the land is reserved for the elephants.
If I assume 10% (ten) of the land is allocated in a hypothetical space on this island  as a zoological garden and all the elephants are relocated inside it for the people to see them as exhibits, and only 0.1% of the total population come to this putative zoological garden, to see them on one go (again hypothetical), there will be one man or woman standing every 10 feet (3.3 meters) of the perimeter and no elephant can move out without touching a human being.
If we get 1% to visit this zoo, one can stand and won’t be able to stretch the hands without pushing or shoving.
Elephant will have to trample 10 of them to get out of the perimeter and see the man’s world, which is fully developed.
One may wonder, why I used 10% which is high land mass in commercial concepts.
It is very simple.
My estimate is that there should be at least 35%  of total land mass of the island to be reserved for rain forest, if we are to maintain at least 10% of our perennial rivers.
So take another 5% of for lakes, rivers and water bodies, we can assume that, we have 30% for the rain forest, the wild elephants should take major share of it, at least one third of it, which would be my target 10% of land reserve for elephants.
Please note that we have only about 1% occupying, water bodies equivalent to  870 km² of water or 400 square miles.
It is not enormous by any stretch of imagination, and can decline rapidly, if the rain fails for a prolong period.
That is another reason for elephant migration, looking for water bodies not only for foraging.
Currently, it is less than 25% may be touching 20% (we will be like Dubai in about another 50 years with the current development heist) and I say, not even 1% of the land is dedicated and left solely for our elephants.
So, the elephants have to, and they have no choice left, but to migrate through the developed land and we call it the encroachment and in actual fact it is the man who has encroached upon its habitat.
This is mainly due to our population explosion in relation to decline in elephant population.
So, by this unnatural selection, it will be only 500 elephants that will survive in the this land, and it is really an endangered species.
Stating that we have 5000 elephants in the forest is a mythical figure concocted by our Mega Media Men (M.M.M) to satisfy the politicians.
I think each elephant is counted ten (10) times in making that mythical figure, sometimes by reputed NGO's.
Development of the man’s world is also a big myth in the same stretch of imagination, since only a very few with patronage will be able to enjoy it.
I have made this calculation confusing and difficult so that politicians won’t be able to understand my logic of it but the figures are below for one to work out.
Human Population density in Sril-Lanka averaged out but in reality it is much more than that because people congregate on socio-economic reasons.
The population density in Gamphaha is more than Decca and Calcatta.
Kandy has 10 times the population density of Gaza Strip.
Beauty is that nobody talks about population control.
I have used the total population projected in another 10 to 50 years for my calculation since total square miles is roughly 25,000.
1000 in a square mile
400 in a Square Kilometer
400 x 2.4 =1000
Reserve only 10% 2500 Sq Miles (6500 Sq. Meters)
0.1 of population 250,000
Every 10 feet or 3.3 meters there is a man or woman standing.
Location   Indian Ocean     Coordinates   7°N 81°E
Area       65,610 km2 (25,332 sq miles)
Area rank     25th
Coastline   1,340 km (833 miles)
Highest elevation  2,524.13 m (8,281.27 ft)
Highest point    Pidurutalagala
Water bodies     870 km² of water = 400 square miles and that is only about 1% of the land surface.
(If Water body  is 1.5 % it equals to 1000 Km).
Population density   1000 / sq miles
Population density  400 / km
Hypothetical Elephants   population is 1000 and it is exaggerated to 5000 by local media giants.
The biggest lie in this country.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Zebra Experiment

this is a chapter in my next book, Reflection, will be out soon.

Zebra Fish
I have reason to believe there is unhealthy practices of Fish Breeding.
I may have briefly mentioned this sometime in the past. I cannot trace the piece of writing.
In any case there seems to be new developments.
There is a guy who breeds albino zebras.
He has now introduced a pink strain.
I have an obsession on the topic of pigmentation, especially in regard to Guppy fish.
I wished as a kid, I could see a Guppy black like a black molly.
A guy in Thibirigasya, actually accomplished it.
He deserves a Nobel Prize.
I do not know how he accomplished it but to see a Guppy with band of black is common now.
These Guppies are robust, healthy and of reasonable size.
But all the variants of Zebras are tiny.
They do not grow to adult size in spite of proper feeding.
They do not mix in the shoal with normally colored zebras.
In other words thy are unhealthy.
Toady, I received a batch of albino tetras free of charge from a dealer, whom I knew for two decades.
The idea was for me to look after them (confirmed disabled) sympathetically until they die.
One of them died on transit due to shock.
Rest went into panic state the moment, I introduced them to my main tank.
I sat there and watched their agony for half an hour.
Only two recovered in half an hour.
Most of them were partially blind or an eye was totally missing.
One was totally blind and took the longest to recover.
After one hour all of them could balance and swim in a comical manner.
They had two problems.
One was blindness.
The other was balancing.
I believe these strains are poisoned in their breeding.
They must be using very toxic material.
There is unsupervised breeding programs in this country.
These chemical are hazardous to humans and other animals and are slowly percolating into our ground water.
Who is allowing these materials to be imported?
That is my big question.

Zebra Experiment

I bought the zebra fish with an intention of crossbreeding them. They are easy to breed but one need an elaborate tanks to separate the eggs from the parents and also have adequate quantity of infusoria.

Infusoria

Infusoria grows naturally in most tanks, particularly those with live plants. However, there may not be sufficient quantities to sustain a full hatching of fry.
The term infusoria is an old one that has changed in meaning over the years. At one time it referred to just about any microscopic, or nearly microscopic, organism that lived in fresh water. That use of that word long ago became outdated in the scientific community.
However, the term infusoria is still used by many within the aquarium community, even by younger fish enthusiasts. To aquarium enthusiasts infusoria refers to many small organisms in water that tiny fry can feed up upon.
Although it's not feasible to name every organism that could be in an infusoria culture, some of the primary ones include, algae (volvox), amoebae, euglena, paramecium, rotifers, stentor and vorticella.
Therefore, it is helpful to culture your own infusoria to ensure having an adequate amount.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Knoppix-7.5-Booting With A Flash Drive

The latest 7.5.2 was out few days ago.

Knoppix-7.5
I just booted (Old IBM)Knoppix 7.5that came with the Linux Magazine.
Currently preparing a bootable USB with overlay facility.
It needs about 4.5 GiB for the distribution and the rest for my data.
I am using  8 GiB Flash Drive. 
It gives the option of encrypting the data, which I declined.
I am not paranoid,yet.
It has a small image of 12 MiB for bootable CD but I could not find it.
That is for a computer that cannot be booted by a Flash Drive.
One boots with the CD and then write the image to the Flash Drive.
If you have an old computer with a BIOS that does not support USB booting,
With two combination, Mini CD and Flash Drive now you can boot from a Flash Drive.
It is currently available with Linux Magazine ONLY.
It has IceWeasle, Fire Fox and Chrome as browsers.
I use Iceweasle since it has security options built in.
Please excuse if there are typos.

My old computer's audio is not configured with almost all the current Linux Distributions that I have tried BUT Knoppix configures it very well.
So if I need to Listen to something on the Web, I am going to boot with the Flash Drive.
Why use Flash Drive? 
It is faster than the DVD.
Thanks guys/Girls of Knopix.
Yes it is the best Live DVD.
But hope you will continue to have the CD version, too.
I finally found the small iso in th Knoppix folder, but I could not get the K3B to burn the image booted with the USB stick with DVD writer available for writing.
I copied the image to my Linux download folder and currently writing it to a CD.
There is something I always do.
Copy the DVD image to another DVD and place the original DVD in my archive and only use the second copy for my demonstrations.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Elephants (The Good Governance)

Elephants (The Good Governance)
 
The elephant the biggest mammal is threatened. 

The big mammoth went into extinction due to two reasons. One is it was considered to be food for the prehistoric man. They were hunted down to extinction. The second more probable reason is they acquired a variant of human disease, the killer tuberculosis. It was not due to deforestation.
The story about the Sri-Lankan elephant is no different.
They were hunted for ivory.
They were domesticated by kings for the war machines.
Then it was the symbol of a party.
It was the prized possession of the wealthy and was their hired heavy labour.
Latest was the merchandise of ill repute.
Politicians with power started dealing with illegal capture and transfer of baby elephants.
By selective genetic extermination by the Sri-Lankan hunters, the percentage of tusked animals went below five percent.
So they went in for the real kill.
Kill the mother (she) elephant and hunt the baby elephant as a merchandise. This went on in broad day light after the war.
Even, LTTE never mixed up their politics with elephant trade.
The end of the war came and the political masters without the terrorist threat went for the bounty.
Sri-Lankan media it was ‘moms the word’ since rulers and the political henchmen were in this big business.
Then added to this deforestation and location of sugar cane and banana plantation in their migration path way.
From 1960s (CP. De Silvas time) for politicians elephant was a merchandise and they used the bogus claim of damage to poor farmers plots. They were not poor farmer but hashish (ganja) growers and some politicians were involved in this hashish trade. They in fact come to the parliament to protect their illegal trading interests.
Parallel with these development their is a ‘Flora and Fauna Act’ with a director to oversee the enactment of these laws.
But he becomes part of the problem and the elephant register disappears and duplicate registers are introduced.
He is paid a salary and a pension for all of his inaction.
None of these were elephant friendly actions.
Their population has gone down to 2000 and the official figured are ‘cooked up’ figures.
Who believes their statistics when our children’s malnutrition is reported as 20% percent when actual ground level malnutrition is double of it nearing 40%, especially in the war torn areas.
Would you expect our forest officers to go to the forest and count them every day.
Most of them are in their homes and go to the base to collect the monthly salary.
Pure nonsense.
They are only targeting which one is their next prized kill.
This is how we achieved our miracle progress.